Charlie Huston - The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death

– How'd you get that?

I hit my blinker and changed lanes to get out from behind a Pinto stuffed with the amassed possessions of its owner; boxes and bags heaped from the floorboards to the headliner and smashed against the windows, leaving just enough space for the driver, one of the rolling homeless of L.A. I glanced at him, talking endlessly to himself, as we passed.

I looked back at the road ahead.

– He kept saying your dad. I just assumed that meant you had different dads is all.

She looked back at the signs.

– Oooh, Detective Web at work. Did you suss out any more family secrets?

– Just that the black sheep of the family back there is also a fucking moron.

– Hardly a secret, that one.

– Yeah, he does rather wear it on his sleeve.

She began going through the pockets of her jacket, searching.

– He's actually kind of OK. Or he was, anyway. When we were kids. Just spoiled mostly. And starved for attention.

– Interesting combination.

She came up with a hair bungee from her pockets and began to pull her hair into a ponytail.

– Well, my mom is an interesting woman with strange abilities. Especially when it comes to screwing with her kids’ heads.

I adjusted the shoulder strap of my seatbelt where it snugged too tight across my neck.

– Yeah, moms are tricky that way.

She got her hair where she wanted it, a couple wild curls poking loose, and settled back into her seat.

– Our mom is a little more than tricky. Her special talent with Jaime was to give him anything and everything he asked for. This being the easiest way she knew to keep him occupied, and keep her from having to actually deal with him as, I don't know, a human being. Jaime's response was to ask for more and more extravagant toys, trips, parties, whatever he thought would force her to deal with him, I guess.

– How'd that work out for him?

– Well, I didn't witness much of it, not wanting to be around her myself, but the way I put it together, the more he asked for, the more she worked to make the money to see he got it, the more he got, the more he asked for, and the more she worked… and so on.

– Kind of a perpetual motion machine of familial alienation, then?

She slid her eyes at me.

– That was clever.

I rubbed my eyes.

– Yeah, clever, that's me, always doing clever stuff. That's why I'm in this van at the moment with a load of someone else's bloody sheets and all.

She went in her pockets again and came out with a pair of big black plastic film star sunglasses.

– I said it was clever, not smart.

– True.

She took off her regular narrow black-framed glasses and slid the sunglasses on.

– Anyway, Mom just worked and worked to get Jaime what he wanted, which meant she was never around to look at him, which is what she wanted. Until he turned eighteen.

– Then what?

– She kicked him out. Of course. If behavioral scientists had designed a scenario meant to create an adult utterly unequipped to provide for themselves and emotionally cope with the world, they could not have done a better job than my mom did with Jaime. And, to make it more interesting, when she set him loose, she did it in Hollywood.

The lights of a jumbo jet cruised over the freeway on approach to LAX. Inglewood sprawled low and wild to the east, endless stucco blocks of small houses with barred windows and dead lawns.

– It's a tough little town, ain't it.

She shrugged.

– It's designed to fuck the weak is all.

– And how'd you avoid the mommy treatment?

She leaned forward and adjusted the heater.

– Dad divorced her when I was three. Seeing as she didn't want to have the responsibilities of actually raising kids, it wasn't much of a challenge for him to get custody. And by then I'd already started loathing her pretty well. I mean, Dad didn't have to run her down at all to make me not want to see her. Not that he would have done that. Still, holidays, occasional weekends, he'd pack me up and drive me over to the valley. It sucked, but it got better when I was five and she had Jaime. He was cute. And fun.

– Till he grew up and turned into a prick.

– Like I said, he had help.

– We all get help, that doesn't mean we all end up cutting guys up in motel rooms after a drug deal turns sour.

She fingered her sunglasses lower on her nose and gave me a look over the tops of the lenses.

– My, how very hard-boiled of you.

– I'm just saying.

She pushed the sunglasses back into place.

– I know what you're saying. And you're mostly right. He's definitely defective. But he's my brother. So I. You know.

– Sure.

– Anyway, it wasn't a drug deal.

– No? Stocks then? Commodities futures?

– I don't know. I mean, he does deal some stuff. Weed and ecstasy mostly. Works craft services and deals to the P.A.s and the extras. That knife, he was on set for a John Woo movie, one of the prop guys traded the knife for a few hits of X. He loves that knife. Anyway, whatever he's up to, it's not drugs. Jaime always gets into something crazy. Usually it's something having to do with movies. I don't think so this time. But movies is what it usually is. He's going to get the rights to some Hungarian sci-fi movie. He's going to manage the movie career of a Balinese pop star who's the Madonna of Indonesia. He's going to negotiate U.S. distribution for a Canadian production company that specializes in remaking Paraguayan classics. That kind of thing. Movies. He got it from my mom.

I slid into the interchange lane for the 10 West, thinking about L.L. and the movie game, and what it does to people.

She pointed at the sign for the 10.

– Where are you going?

– Take the 10 out to the PCH and up to Malibu.

She sat up and reached toward the wheel.

– No, no, don't, just. Just go.

She grabbed the wheel and shoved it to the left, sending us veering in front of a barreling SUV.

I slapped her hand.

– Hey! Hey!

The SUV cut around us, horn sounding.

She took her hand from the wheel as the exit to the 10 slipped away behind us.

– Sorry.

She put her face in her hands.

– Sorry.

She took it out and looked at me.

– I don't want to go west right now. I don't want to go home. I want. Oh fuck.

Tears were leaking out from under the lenses of the sunglasses.

– Shit, Web. Shit. My dad.

I nodded.

– Yeah, no problem. Shit. I get it.

I stayed with the 405, looking ahead to where it would climb through the Santa Monicas and meet the 101 on the other side.

– I got a place to go.

She pushed her fingers up under her sunglasses and wiped her eyes.

– Thanks.

I drove, thinking about families. Not my favorite pastime, but one I seem incapable of avoiding. I glanced at her from time to time, black hair pulled back, light olive skin flushed, muscles of her long neck taut as she bent to lean her head against the window, the sky lightening beyond her above the rim of the San Gabriels. And all that shit.

I thought to distract her from her sadness, strike a chord of shared experience. You know, cheer a girl up.

– So. Your mom's in the biz? So's my dad. Or he was. Screenwriter. What's your mom do?

She rolled her head around, pointed the big lenses at me, rolled back against the glass.

– She was a porn star. So I guess we both have parents who were whores.

I drove some more. Choosing wisely, I think, not to talk anymore.

– I suppose it was naive of me to think you were going to take me to your place and tuck me into your bed while you slept protectively on the floor, wasn't it?

I watched her as she flipped through Po Sin's binder of before-and-after photos from various job sites, sunglasses still over her eyes.