He said I had best not talk to him in the noontime traffic. I soon saw what he meant. We came whining down the Eastex Parkway at sixty-four miles an hour, because that was the average speed of the dense stampede in which we were enclosed. It is a fact of highway life that each heavily traveled road establishes its own cadence. The great pack of candy-colored compacts, pickups, vans, delivery trucks, taxicabs, and miscellaneous wheeled junk flowed in formation, inches apart, through the gleam, stink grinding roar, and squinty glitter of a July noontime, through a golden sunshine muted to brass by smog. What the traffic consultants seem unable to comprehend is that heavy traffic makes its own rules because nobody can nip in and pull anybody over to the side without setting up a shock wave that would scream tires and crumple fenders for a mile back down the road. California discovered this first. It is probably a more important discovery than est or redwood hot tubs.
In such traffic there are two kinds of maniacs. The first is the one who goes a legal 55 and becomes like a boulder in a swift stream. The stream has to part and go around, finding the spaces in the lanes on either side, getting impatient when they can’t find the spaces, finally cutting out somebody else and making them so cross that a few miles down the road they actually nudge another car. Hence the plague of car wars. At times I have had a fleeting sympathy for the fellow in Dallas who ran such a station wagon off onto the median strip, hopped out, dragged the offending driver out of his vehicle, and flipped him into the fast traffic. Murder by impulse. Rage unconfined.
The second maniac is the one who tries to go nine miles faster than the flow instead of nine miles slower. This type is often bombed out of his mind on booze, cannabis, crazy candy, or marital disagreements.
Once you have the concept of the pack making the law, driving the urban interstates is simplified. You maintain just that distance from the vehicle ahead which will give you braking room yet will not invite a car from a neighbor lane to cut in. You pick the center lanes because some of the clowns leaving the big road on the right will start to slow down far too soon. You avoid the left lane when practical because when they have big trouble over there on the other side of the median strip, the jackass who comes bounding over across the strip usually totals somebody in the left lane. When you come up the access strip onto the big road, you make certain that you have reached the average speed of all the traffic before you edge into it. Keep looking way way ahead for trouble, and when you see it put on your flashing emergency lights immediately so that the clown behind you will realize you are soon going to have to start slowing down.
Meyer did well, hunched forward, hands gripping the wheel at ten o’clock and two o’clock. We traversed the interchange onto the loop Interstate 610, heading west. The average speed moved up to a little above seventy. He took the first exit past the junction of Interstate 10, headed west again, turned south at a light, and after a couple of miles turned into the main entrance of Piney Village, a misnamed development of clusters of town houses and duplexes in stained wood with some stone facing, set at odd angles on curving asphalt to manufacture illusions of privacy. Berms added variety to flatness, and new trees struggled. The architect had been crazy about step roof pitches, a manifest insanity in the Houston climate. Meyer meandered left and right and left, pulled into a driveway barely longer than the orange Datsun, and parked with the front bumper inches from the closed overhead garage door, killed the motor, and exhaled audibly. “Very nervous traffic,” I said. “You did good.”
“Thank you. Lately I seem to get along better by focusing on just one thing at a time, pushing everything else out of my mind. Driving a car, shaving, cooking eggs. The other day I was adding figures on a pocket calculator and I suddenly lost track of what I was doing.” He frowned at me. “I was adrift all of a sudden, and I had to reinvent myself, find out who I was and where I was and what I was doing. Like waking from very deep sleep. Strange.”
He got out and I followed as he went to the door of D-3 and unlocked it. In the hallway, he pushed a sequence of numbers on a small panel, and a voice came out of the grill and said, “Identify please.”
“Meyer here. Two eight two seven five.”
“Thank you,” the grill said, after a short pause.
“Security,” Meyer explained. “All these places are hooked up to a central control. When we sign out, they’ll be listening for sounds of break-in or fire or whatever.”
It was a two-level town-house apartment, with two bedrooms and bath off a balcony, with kitchen, bath, and a studio-workroom under the bedroom portion. The two-story-high living room had a glass wall at one end, with sliding doors that opened onto a small garden surrounded on three sides by a seven-foot concrete wall, and a fireplace at the other end. The furniture was modern and looked comfortable without being bulky. The colors were mostly neutral, but with bright prints on the wall, bright jackets on the bookshelves. It had the look of being well-built, solid, efficient, and impersonal.
“Norma lived here alone before she got married, and Evan moved in with her. She was the first occupant after this unit was finished. She rented it on some complicated lease-purchase arrangement whereby she paid six hundred and twenty-five a month, and two hundred of that went into an escrow account against her decision to purchase for sixty-five thousand when her two-year lease was up. It will be up in October. These places are now going for ninety to a hundred, so I guess she made a good decision. There’s a big shopping mall about a mile away, and it’s close to a very direct route into the middle of the city.”
He said it would be easier if I stayed in the place, and he assigned me the bedroom on the left. I unpacked in about seventy-five seconds and went down, and he said we could eat at the mall. He checked out over the security intercom and locked up.
We drove to the metallic acres of mall parking lot. Meyer said it was going to get up to a hundred and five again by midafternoon. It was the fourth day of the heat wave. A lot of old people were dying, he said. They didn’t dare leave windows open because the feral children would climb in, terrorize them, and take anything hockable. Their windows were nailed shut. They sat in heat of a hundred and twenty with their bare feet in pans of water, fanning themselves, collapsing, dying. They couldn’t afford the cost of air conditioning or, in many cases, the cost of running an electric fan. From where they died, from anywhere in the city, the giant office towers of the seven sisters of the oil industry were invisible.
We walked through the cool shadowy passageways of the mall, lined with the brightly lighted shops. The tiled pedestrian avenues led to Sears, to Kmart, to JCPenney. There were fountains and benches and guide maps: “You are here.” Thousands shuffled through the mall in coolness, children racing back and forth, dripping ice cream. It is contemporary carnival, an entertainment of looking at shoe stores, summer clearance sales, of being blasted by the music coming out of Radio Shack of trying to remember the balance already committed on the credit card account. There was a public service display of security equipment devices, with uniformed officers answering questions. Uniformed guards stood in boredom in the jewelry stores. Young mothers with tired and ugly expressions whopped their young with a full-arm swing, eliciting bellows of heartbreak.
He led me to a narrow fast-food place with a German name, and we went to a table for two way in the back. He recommended the wurst, the kraut, and the dark draft. So be it.