Стивен Бойетт - Mortality Bridge

Two carriers on the way. Ten minutes at the most. Hurry. Breathe.

CLIMBING FROM THE San Fernando Valley on the San Diego Freeway the Black Taxi crests Mulholland Drive and starts the long descent across the pass and into orange city light. The big car passes through the Friday traffic and drifts right and exits on the Sunset ramp. Eastbound through Bel Aire and Westwood, through Beverly Hills and on the crowded Sunset Strip it eases forward unobserved. All without is crowded light. Massive lighted billboards, club marquees, hotels, and restaurants du jour. None of it reflecting from the metal shape that rolls among them.

ON THE FAR side of the Grecian courtyard with its Japanese rockgarden Niko opens the door to his little studio. Muted overhead light shines down on a quarter million dollars in recording gear. Framed foam wedges and thick gray carpet on the walls. Tiny vocal booth there. The phone booth Jemma called it. In the small control room Niko pauses as he looks through the window into the recording room.

They stand arrayed along one wall like dusty weapons in an ancient armory. Fender, Gibson, Ibañez. Sunburst, lacquer, mother of pearl. Sixstring, twelvestring, doubleneck, bass. Last in line the Dobro rests gleaming like a new dime. Polished steel distorts the studio around it, warps the reflection of Niko’s hand reaching past it to grab its hardshell case that leans against the wall behind it. The womanshape dull with dust.

Niko opens the case. Gray plush lining. He opens the little storage compartment. Metal slide, strap, picks and strings. He sets a hand against the plush as if in benediction. A moment only. Hurry.

He grabs the Dobro by the neck and fits it in the case and shuts the latches one two three.

IN THE LIVING room he leans the case against the black Italian couch. He sets a hand upon the case and glances up the stairs. The sense of Jemma up there still.

His thumbs jerk with sudden pricking.

Motor rumble coming up the lengthy driveway.

On his neck the locket burns.

The engine cuts off and a parking brake zips and a car door opens and then closes with a solid heavy sound. Don’t make em like that anymore.

Niko goes to stand behind the door.

Heavy footsteps up the cobbled walk.

He leans his cheek against the door and shuts his eyes. What waits on the other side. Deep breath. Don’t resist. Useless fighting here and now. This is just an errand boy, a messenger. It has no authority. Your true arena waits somewhere not any where at all.

Leaden knock of knucklebone on wood against his cheek. Niko jumps back and is about to open the door when a man in a tailored chauffeur’s uniform walks through it. Thin, pale, whitehaired, Nordic, nearly albino, smooth androgynous face bony as a Siamese cat. Niko backs up several steps. The driver touches the glossy bill of his cap with cold politeness. Its shadow falls across his eyes, always falls across his eyes.

Both men look upstairs.

From a jacket pocket the driver removes a small mason jar with a twopiece lid and a white jacquard silk kerchief. He glances at Niko and then glides past him. At the foot of the staircase he touches the vase on the newel in a lingering way that is somehow lewd. He grins a pale poisonbottle grin and glides up the carpeted stairs and down the hall.

Niko follows. At the top of the stairs the driver heads down the hallway and enters the bedroom without opening the door and Niko stops. What can he do? All this is writ and in its unfolding is a thing already done. Wait. Breathe. He clenches his fists and heads back down the stairs.

By the time he picks up the guitar case the driver is gliding back downstairs, obscuring with the kerchief a faintly glowing black-tipped feather now within the small glass jar. The driver wipes the jar mouth with his kerchief and returns it and the jar to his jacket pocket where it leaves no bulge.

Approaching Niko the driver looks from the guitar case to the depressed syringe on the glasstopped coffee table and grins insinuatingly and touches again the glossy bill of his cap and makes to go past Niko.

“Wait.” Niko grabs the driver’s arm and the driver stops and looks at Niko’s clutching hand. Jaundiced eyes narrow and every plant in the house withers and dies.

Their gazes meet and Niko feels the churning horror ever waiting past the cliff edge of cognition. Some day you will sail beyond that precipice, that gaze tells Niko, and I will be there when you do.

Niko drops his hand from the tailored sleeve in sudden vertigo. “You’re forgetting something.” He sets down the guitar case and pulls out his wallet and takes out his driver’s license and removes one of the three ancient coins taped to the back and holds it out.

The driver looks surprised. He holds his narrow hand palmup and Niko drops the coin into it, careful not to touch him this time. The driver holds the small bronze lepton to the light and grins a deathshead grin and flips the coin into the air, flicking it with a yellowed thumbnail to make it ring. The coin does not fall back down.

The driver touches his cap once more and leaves through the front door.

Heavy metal of car door closing, deep gargle of welltuned V-12 engine. Niko goes to the door to look at what sits idling in the circular drive. And shakes his head. Of course. In other times in other places it has been a reed boat, a palanquin, a chariot, a coach, a train.

Bugeyed headlamps glowing as it pulls out from the curb, polished glossy black but unmarred by reflections from the lighted drive, an immaculate 1933 Franklin Model 173 seven-passenger sedan with a gold-on-black California classic vanity plate reading 2L84U glides like a stalking jaguar around the marble fountain and passes among oblivious statues along the winding landscaped drive and slides like oil through the locked iron gate and out into the narcotic Hollywood night.

CLEAR YOUR THOUGHTS and make your preparations. The words you’ll need. Ordered arcane syllables to unlock, undo, unmask. Guttural doggerel in lost languages like choking nursery rhymes. Their phrases surface now like chants from preschool primers.

He has her oh the son of a bitch he took her. You goateyed bastard I will eat your heart and spit out the pits.

Niko quickly changes into hiking shoes and bluejeans and a black T-shirt. A light jacket for the cool Los Angeles night. Should he bring a daypack? Food? How long will he be gone? A day, a week, a month?

Niko shakes his head. How could he know? How could anyone?

His fingers find the locket warm against his chest. Okay, travel light. No backpack, no supplies. It takes a month or more to starve to death, and if you’re gone that long, well, starvation probably won’t be at the top of your worries. The Dobro’s gonna be a bitch in any case.

Weapons? Niko gives a disgusted laugh. Killing anything where he is bound would be redundant. Better to be hungry and wily, unarmed and afraid.

Something, he’s forgetting something. And remembers.

IN THE PANTRY Niko finds the old box of jumbo milkbones and opens it and takes one out. Algae-green and big as a crescent wrench. He slips it into the inner breast pocket of his light coat. Weapons come in many forms.

HEADLIGHTS SWEEP ACROSS the living room draperies and Niko glances out the window to see a car pull up to the distant gate. The intercom buzzes and Niko taps the button that opens the gate. He turns away from the window and surveys the room as a chuffing engine approaches outside.

Living room, staircase, bedroom door. Furnishings, mementos, objets d’art. Our life together. Who do you think you are? Where do you think you’re going?

That baleful bedroom door shut soundly, rising like a tombstone down the upstairs hall. How can you just leave her here?

But no. Jemma’s not in there. A feather in a mason jar.