Lee Goldberg: The Walk

Marty was afraid to say no, considering the guy literally had him by the balls. The situation wasn’t all that much different today, but Marty’s attitude certainly was. A year ago, his wife was sitting in the waiting room, and he could feel her yearning desperation through the walls. He needed the doctor happy. He needed his lopsided balls producing guided-missile sperm.

He didn’t need Buck.

“Look around you,” Marty told Buck. “We just survived the big one. Thousands of people are dead. The city is in ruins. Do you really think this is the best time to pitch a TV series to me?”

“Absolutely. We’re bonding. When this is all over, we’ll have a foundation to do some business together,” Buck replied. “What’s your name?”

“Martin Slack.”

“All the detectives on TV are pussies, Marty. Do-gooders who only care about helping people and don’t give a shit about getting paid. Everybody cares about getting paid, so that’s bullshit. How the fuck they make the payments on their sports cars and buy all those expensive suits if they don’t get paid? Tell me that.”

Marty was about to tell him about the last detective show he worked on, just this morning in fact, when he came down the other side of Bunker Hill, saw the Harbor Freeway, and forgot everything he was going to say. Hundreds of cars were tangled together, charred and aflame, strewn over six lanes of up-ended roadway and fallen overpasses, stretching on for miles. If there was anybody screaming or crying under it all, the forlorn wail of agonized automobiles drowned them out.

Los Angeles was nothing but the intersection of vast freeways, and Marty knew they must all look like this-a line of ants squirted with lighter fluid, set aflame, then smacked a few times with a brick.

The death toll was unthinkable. And help would never come. It was caught dead in traffic.

Marty pulled the dust mask over his nose and mouth and pondered his options. He could climb the embankment and cross the carnage on the freeway, or he could walk underneath it, where the 110 passed over 1st Street. The overpass was still standing, but who knew how stable it was? How fast could he run twenty yards? How lucky did he feel?

Buck made his choice, he was already striding under the overpass, yelling back at Marty to hurry the fuck up. Marty knew Buck didn’t give it any thought at all, he just moved forward with all the intellectual self-reflection of an amoeba.

Marty didn’t think he could wade through the mess on the freeway, but it was suicide to go under an overpass that had already been weakened by two earthquakes in one morning. So that left only one choice. Blunder on like Buck. Only a hell of a lot faster.

“Shit,” Marty muttered, than ran as fast as he could, using the ascent to give him some momentum into the overpass. He was half-way through the overpass when he tripped over a hunk of concrete.

Marty went sliding, as if trying to make first base. Lying flat on his stomach, nose to the asphalt, he heard the rumble and knew what was coming. Aftershock. He scrambled to his feet and started running again, knowing he was too late, knowing he’d be squished by tons of concrete in a second.

He ran screaming out from under the overpass, tripping again, rolling onto his back, turning in time to see a wave of fire sweeping across the top of the freeway, cars exploding like popcorn in its wake. The rumble he felt wasn’t an aftershock, it was a chain-reaction explosion rolling up the 110.

The fire moved like water, washing over the freeway and then dissipating like it never existed at all, a blistering figment of Marty’s over-worked imagination. But he knew it wasn’t. Just one more unbelievable sight in a day already too full of them.

Marty got to his feet and spotted Buck, his back to him, pissing against the cyclone fence of the half-finished, $150 million Belmont High School. If the bounty hunter saw the fire, it hadn’t made much of an impact on him, at least not one strong enough to ignore his bladder. He seemed much more interested in relieving himself on the most expensive high school in the world, its construction halted and abandoned mid-way through because somebody discovered it was built atop toxic waste. But at least the school was earthquake safe.

Buck zipped up his fly and turned to see Marty. “I got a few notes on your running. First, tie your fucking shoes.”

Marty looked down at his feet. Both shoes were untied. His glasses slid off his nose and shattered on the ground.

“Second, you run like a pansy-ass fag,” Buck said. “Are you a pansy-assed fag?”

“No,” Marty said, tying his shoes. “I’m married.”

“To a woman?”

“Yes, to a woman.”

“Was she always a woman?”

Marty glared at him, saw Buck’s gingivitis grin, and stomped on his glasses, grinding them into plastic crumbs.

“That’s where I’m going,” Marty said, “back home to her. Where are you going?”

“I’m going home, too.”

They started walking again, side by side, down the nearly deserted street. Where was everybody? After a moment, Marty asked Buck: “Where’s home?”

“Hollywood.”

“You got anybody waiting for you?”

Buck shook his head no.

“So what’s your hurry?”

Buck gave him a cold look. “Where the hell else would you go?”

Marty turned his gaze ahead, where 1st Street rose again, this time as an arched, concrete overpass that stretched across Glendale Boulevard. It seemed intact, with one car stalled at the crest, but Marty wasn’t going to press his luck. He’d walk around the overpass and rejoin 1st Street on the other side of Glendale Boulevard.

“What’s her name,” Buck asked.

“Beth.”

“What’s she do?”

“She was an actress but she gave it up.”

“Did I ever see her in anything?”

“No.”

“How the fuck would you know?” Buck snapped. “You know every show I’ve ever seen? Give me some titles.”

Marty listed a few by rote. “They Eat Their Own 2, Summer Wine, The Endless Spiral.” Not the most illustrious resume, Beth would be the first to agree. Her most lucrative gig was an antacid commercial that ran off and on for years.

“The Endless Spiral, was that the thing with Christopher Walken as the ghost assassin guy?”

“Yeah.”

“Was she the girl Christopher Walken finger-fucked in the taxi?”

Yes.

“No,” Marty replied. It was after sitting through that unbearable scene, Christopher Walken sitting right next to them in the screening, that Marty finally agreed to have a child, on the condition she’d give up acting for a while and become a stay-at-home Mom.

“I see a lot of bad fucking liars in my field,” Buck said, “and you are the fucking worst. How could you let some guy finger-fuck your wife?”

“It was Christopher Walken and they were acting.”

“That looked like a finger in her twat to me,” Buck said.

“It was a stunt twat,” Marty said. “Can we just drop it?”

Clearly Buck was enjoying himself too much to let it go, and he probably wouldn’t have, if it weren’t for the panic-stricken, Mexican man who ran up to them, babbling in Spanish. It was easy for Marty to just keep going and ignore him, but Buck stopped and answered the guy in what sounded remarkably like fluent Spanish. That stopped Marty for a moment, a moment he’d soon regret.

He understood a few of the words-Boy, Car, Trapped-and looked again at the overpass.

Marty saw now that the overpass wasn’t intact at all, it was split apart at the crest, a Toyota teetering over the jagged edge, tangled in the splintered rebar. The windshield was shattered, a body splattered on the street directly below the car.

The driver should have worn a seat belt.