Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

“I, uh, had it tuned,” Dan says. She turns to him and smiles, throwing the van into gear. It’s a funny smile, tight; it makes her eyes crinkle up. Her right eye is noticeably bigger than her left eye. She has regular features, drearily pretty. A weak chin. He imagines her naked on the carpet in the back.

“It’s real reliable,” Dan says. “I mean, sometimes I think I must be crazy for getting rid of it. It’s real handy. I mean, I use it for the team, to take equipment, stuff like that.”

“Team,” says the woman, considering the word. She looks at him again. “I should have known you were an athlete. You have the build.”

Dan blushes. “Baseball,” he says. “I pitch.” He considers the possibility that now might not be a bad time to point out the luxuriously carpeted back. The van is turning right, and he leans toward her involuntarily and smiles at her, and sensing his smile, she smiles back, without looking away from the road.

She says, “I was wondering.”

She says, “I have some friends who brought me here, and I was wondering.”

She says, “Would it be OK if they came along on the drive? They’re right over there.”

Dan looks and sees two people, a man and a girl, standing in the road. They wave. “Sure,” he says. “It’s OK with me.” He feels slightly stung by the request. But the girl in the road is sort of cute he guesses. The van pulls to a stop and he turns to unlock the sliding panel door behind him. But then his own door is opening and he’s a little confused and he looks around to see the man standing just outside, staring up at him. “Get in the back,” the man says. He gestures with the machine gun he’s carrying.

The machine gun he’s carrying.

Dan moves into the back, not quite sure what to do with his hands. At any rate, he can’t shift from the passenger seat to the floor in the rear with his hands above his head, so he takes his chances, moving to the back the way he normally would and then quickly sitting cross-legged, resting his hands on his knees. Hope that’s OK. It must be, because the girl and the man get in and then the man just closes the panel door and doesn’t kill him or anything.

“We’re the SLA, and we need your vehicle,” says the man.

Dan wants to ask what the SLA is but figures it’d be better if he didn’t.

“You don’t do anything stupid, you don’t get hurt,” explains the man.

“That’s fine with me,” says Dan. “Just as long as I don’t get shot.”

The man and the girl laugh, and the man, who’s squatting on the wheel cover, reaches out and pats his shoulder. The lurching of the van nearly sends him sprawling.

“Watch it, Yolanda,” he says to the woman. There is a faint, derisive sound from the front seat. The man ignores this and turns to Dan, gesturing toward the girl beside him. “You know who this is?”

Dan shakes his head.

“Tania. Tania Galton.”

Dan nods now and as he does he feels himself sighing involuntarily, like, huuuhhhhh. His recognition of at least one of the many things that all of a sudden seem to be happening to him yield this hugely physical expression of release, as he feels himself freed from at least some of his confusion. He fairly rocks as he nods, and the sighing comes from deep inside. The man and Tania are smiling and laughing, and at the sight of this Dan can’t help smiling and laughing too. In fact, he’s basically crying over his luck in encountering smiling faces here and now.

“Wow,” he says. “Wow.”

“You know what?” says the man. “We need to stop and get a fucking hacksaw.” He holds up his wrist to display the dangling handcuff. And they all laugh some more.

When he drove up he saw the two gals lying out on the grass he won’t bother to call a lawn because he may be a cheat but he’s no liar. It was the hard-looking one, Zoe or some such, and the fat old lady — looking one. The radio basically giving out a grave invitation to escape and they are not getting gone, they are sunbathing. He got out of his car and took their arms — some protest here, which he smirkled at a bit — and brought them to the door.

“What you doing on that lawn? I told you white folks got to stay out of sight around here.”

“It’s cool,” said DeFreeze.

“It’s cool . You listening to the news?”

“I say it’s cool, it’s cool,” said DeFreeze. “We reconnoited the perimeter.”

Prophet Jones stared at the man for a moment, his head moving with the slightest trace of a poor-fool shake.

“Where’s the radio at?”

“Ain’t no radio,” said DeFreeze.

“Come on here,” said Prophet Jones, and he waited while DeFreeze got himself a T-shirt, and then the two of them walked to ProphetJones’s car, parked at the curb. Which was good because the smell coming from the house was like pussy and okra and old piss and was upsetting to the stomach. DeFreeze climbed in the passenger side. Prophet Jones walked around the car slowly, looking at the yard, the jalopies crowding the driveway, back at the house and the cell of white faces clustered in the open door. He waved slightly, a dismissive gesture, and the cell withdrew inside and the door closed. After a moment’s hesitation he smoothly folded his large body and inserted it in the space of the open door, which he shut behind him.

Inside he gave the ignition key a half turn, and the radio came to life. Top of the hour, drive time, the news on every station the same: SLA in L.A., committing the daring daylight robbery of an Inglewood sporting goods store. Witnesses reported being fired upon by a young Caucasian woman, whose identity authorities were working to establish. The suspect vehicle, a VW van, had been recovered nearby. Prophet Jones folded his arms across the steering wheel and laid his face on them, peeping over to see how Field Marshal Cinque Mtume, the dumb motherfucker, reacted. His eyes widened, his lips ovaled, a comic wooooo-eee face. But there was nothing funny going on.

“The fuck they doing a holdup for?”

“Say your boy stole some socks.” Prophet Jones felt a deep pleasure resonating within as he emphasized the word socks . His dislike of the Field Marshal was intense at that moment. The word on Donald DeFreeze was that he was a common police informer, a weak man, a cuckold, a chump.

“Say what? Socks?”

“What they say.” Prophet Jones shrugged.

“Damn. We got to get out of here.”

“I advise it.”

“Not what I wanted to do.”

“Don’t matter what you wanted, Jim.”

“Damn. This plays havoc with our strategy.”

And who the fuck this fucking mutt think he fucking is, Bernard fucking Montgomery? Prophet Jones raised his head to look square at the Field Marshal. Why’d he bother coming here, is the major question. Because he didn’t want the house shot up: it’s not much, but it’s what he got. DeFreeze was processing the data, drumming nervously on his knees with his open palms, looking straight ahead through the windshield. As the warm evening drew near, the neighborhood settled into its torpid routine. Boys appeared on the streets, in growing numbers, in pairs and trios and half dozens, drawn like a magnet to the corners on the broad intersection at Vermont.

“You better go, Sin-Q Em-toom-ay.” Prophet Jones stretched the name beyond ridiculous. “Better go rally your troops.”

“Where I’m gonna go?”

“I don’t know. Go back to Frisco. Go back to your wife. She still around here, ain’t she?”

When DeFreeze turned to him, Prophet Jones could see that the man had been overwhelmed as if by a sudden shadow that covered the continuous succession of postures that substituted for his personality. He modeled a curious little boy expression on his face.