Along with the cat carrier and duffel bag he’d left a note. Her name is Miss Dickinson. I can’t say she belonged to a friend of mine who just died, since cats don’t belong to anyone, but the two of them walked the same hard path, side by side, for a long time. She deserves to spend the last years of her life in some security. So do you. Please take care of Miss Dickinson, just as you did me, and please accept this money in the spirit it’s offered. I always felt bad about taking your car when I left. Never doubt that I appreciate what you did for me.
Chapter Thirty-three
Couldn’t have been easy for his father. Driver didn’t remember much about it, really, but even then, as a kid, dawn of the world, he’d known things weren’t right. She’d put eggs she forgot to hard-boil on the table, open cans of spaghetti and sardines and throw them together, serve up a platter of mayonnaise and onion sandwiches. For a time she’d been obsessed by insects. Whenever she found one crawling, she’d cover it with a water glass and leave it to die. Then (in his father’s words) she “took up with” a spider that established a web in one corner of the tiny half-bath where she retired each morning to apply the eyeliner, foundation, blush and cover providing the mask without which she would not launch herself into the world. She’d catch flies in her hand and throw them onto the web, prowl outside at night for crickets and moths and deliver those. First thing she’d do upon return, any time she left the apartment, was check on Fred. The spider even had a name.
Mostly, when she spoke to him at all, she just called him boy. Need any help with schoolwork, boy? Got enough clothes, boy? You like those little cans of tuna for lunch, right, boy? and crackers?
Never close to the ground, she drifted ever farther away from it, until he began to think of her as somehow exempt, not so much above this world as several steps to one side or the other of it.
Then that night at dinner with the old man spewing blood onto his plate. Ear there too, like a portion of meat. Driver’s sandwich of Spam and mint jelly on toast. As his mother so carefully set down butcher and bread knives, perfectly aligned, having no further need of them.
I’m sorry, son.
Could this be a real memory? And if so, why had it taken so long to emerge? Could his mother actually have said that? Spoken to him that way?
Imagination or memory, let it go on.
Please.
Probably I’ve only made your life more complicated. Not what I’d hoped for… Things get so tangled up.
“I’ll be okay. What’s going to happen to you, Mom?”
Nothing that hasn’t already. Time to come, you’ll understand.
Imagination. He’s pretty sure of that.
But now he finds himself wanting to tell her how, as time has gone by, he doesn’t understand.
How he never will.
Meanwhile he’d ridden his new buggy home to the latest of local habitations. Name: Blue Flamingo Motel. Weekly rates, nothing much else around and a generous expanse of parking lot, ready access to major arteries and interstates.
Settling in, he poured half a fist of Buchanan’s. Traffic sounds, TV from rooms close by. Spin, bang, slide and clatter of skateboards out on the parking lot, a favorite with neighborhood kids, apparently. Thwack of the occasional traffic or police helicopter overhead. Pipes banged in the walls whenever neighboring roomers roused and took to showers or toilets.
He picked up the phone on the first ring.
“I hear it’s done,” his caller said.
“Done as it’ll get.”
“His family?”
“All still asleep.”
“Yeah. Well, Nino never slept much himself. I told him it was a bad conscience working its bony fingers up into him. He claimed he didn’t have one.”
A moment’s silence.
“You didn’t ask how I knew where you were.”
“Tape across the bottom of the door. You replaced it, but it never quite re-adheres.”
“So you knew I’d be calling.”
“Sooner rather than later, I assumed-given the circumstances.”
“Kind of pitiful, aren’t we, the two of us? All this high technology swarming about us and here we are still relying on a piece of Scotch tape.”
“One tool’s much like another, long as it gets the job done.”
“Yeah, I know something about that. Been something of a tool myself, all my life.”
Driver said nothing.
“Fuck it. Your job’s done, right? Nino’s dead. What’s left on the plate? You see any reason this should go on?”
“It doesn’t have to.”
“Got plans for tonight?”
“Nothing I can’t ignore.”
“Okay. So here’s what I’m thinking. We get together, have a few drinks, maybe dinner after.”
“We could do that, sure.”
“You know Warszawa? Polish joint, corner of Santa Monica and Lincoln Boulevards?”
One of the ugliest streets in a city of many, many ugly streets.
“I can find it.”
“Unless you insist on pizza.”
“Funny.”
“Yeah. It was, actually. All those coupons. Place-Warszawa, you got that, right?-shares its parking lot with a carpet store, but no problem, there’s plenty of room. Around, what? Seven? Eight? What works for you?”
“Seven’s good.”
“It’s a small place, no bar or anything like that where you can wait. I’ll go on in, get us a table.”
“Sounds good.”
“Time we met.”
Putting the phone to rest, Driver poured another couple of inches of Buchanan’s. Close to noon now, he reckoned, most of the city’s good folk itching to bail on job and duty and escape to lunch or a stamp-size park somewhere. Call home, see how the kids are, place a bet with the bookie, set up a meet with the mistress. The motel was deserted. When housekeeping knocked at the door, he said he was fine, didn’t need service today.
He was remembering a time not long after he’d come to L.A. Many weeks of scrambling to stay off the streets, to stay out of harm’s way and that of cruising sharks, scavengers and cops, scrambling just to stay alive, stay afloat. All was anxiety. Where would he live? How would he support himself? Would Arizona authorities suddenly appear to haul him back? He lived, slept and ate in the Galaxie, gaze ratcheting from street to roofs and windows nearby, back to the street, to the rear view mirror, to shadows back in the alley.
Then a great peace came over him.
He opened his eyes one day and there it was, waiting, miraculous. A balloon in his heart. He got his usual double hit of coffee at the mom-and-pop convenience store nearby, took up squatting space on a low wall before hedges entangled with food wrappers and plastic carry bags, and realized he’d been sitting there for almost an hour without ever thinking once about… well, anything.
This is what people are talking about when they use words like grace.
That moment, that morning, came vividly back to him whenever he thought of it. But soon suspicion set in. He understood well enough that life by very definition is upset, movement, agitation. Whatever counters or denies this can’t be life, it has to be something else. Was he caught in some variant of that abstract, subatmospheric nonworld where his mother’s life had simmered away unnoticed? Luckily, this was about the time he met Manny Gilden.
And now, from a phone booth outside the mom-and-pop convenience store, just as he did that long-ago night, he calls Manny. Half an hour later they’re walking by the sea out Santa Monica way, a stone’s throw from Warszawa.
“Back when we first met,” Driver said, “and I was just a kid-”
“Looked in a mirror lately? You’re still just a fuckin’ kid.”
“-I told you how I was at peace, how it scared me. You remember that?”
A museum of American culture in miniature, a disemboweled time capsule-burger and taco sacks, soda and beer cans, tied-off condoms, magazine pages, articles of clothing-washed up on shore with each thrust of the waves.