At last the truck reached Windward; and when the traffic thinned, out past Main, it drove up Venice Boulevard to Lincoln, and then turned north, toward the Santa Monica Freeway.
ON THE freeways, there you feel free.
As the truck ascended the on-ramp, grinding with measured punctuation up through the gears, the purple-flowered oleanders along the shoulder waved their leafy branches in a sudden gust; and sunlight flashed in the rushing air where there was no chrome or glass reflecting it, as if the ghosts of dozens of angular old cars accompanied the laboring truck.
In the steamy dimness under the flapping tarpaulin the jaws of the dead coelacanth creaked open, and a shrill faint whistling piped out of the throat as reversed peristalsis drove gases out of the creature’s stomach. The whistling ran up and down the musical scale in a rough approximation of the first nine notes of “Begin the Beguine,” and then a tiny gray translucency wobbled out of the open mouth, past the teeth, like a baby jellyfish moving through clear water.
A puff of smoke that didn’t disperse at its edges, the thing climbed down over the plates of the fish’s lower jaw, clung for a moment to the shaking corrugated aluminum surface of the truck bed, then sprang up into the agitated dimness toward the close tent-roof of the tarpaulin. The wind sluicing along the sides of the dead fish caught the wisp and whirled it back and out under the flapping tarpaulin edge into the open air, where hot, rushing diesel updrafts lifted it above the roaring trucks and cars and vans to spin invisibly in the harsh sunlight.
Traffic behind the flatbed truck slowed then, for suddenly the truck appeared to be throwing off pieces of itself: a glimpsed rushing surface of metal here, a whirling black tire there, glitters of chrome appearing first on one side of the truck and then the other, as if some way-ultraviolet light were illuminating bits of otherwise invisible vehicles secretly sharing the freeway. Then windshields were darkened in a moment of shadow as a long-winged yellow biplane roared past overhead, low over the traffic, with the figure of a man dimly visible standing on the top wing.
After no more than two seconds the plane flickered and disappeared, but before winking out of visibility it had banked on the inland wind, as if headed northeast, toward Hollywood.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“But then,” thought Alice, “shall I never get any older than I am now? That’ll be a comfort, one way—never to he an old woman—hut then—always to have lessons to learn! Oh, I shouldn’t like that.”
—Lewis Carroll,
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
BACK in his Olive Street office after court, well in time for a healthful lunch, J. Francis Strube tossed his briefcase onto the long oak credenza and slumped his oversized frame into the padded leather McKie chair behind his desk.
He had an appointment this afternoon, some guy whose wife was divorcing him. The man had sounded almost apologetic on the phone, clearly reluctant to hire an attorney because he hoped his wife would abandon the divorce action and come back to him. Strube would sympathize during this first consultation, let the guy ramble and emote and probably weep; during later sessions Strube could begin to raise his eyebrows over the man’s willingness to let the wife take so much stuff. Strube would interject, Oh, she’ll need it because she’ll be doing a lot of entertaining, eh? delivered in a tone that would make Strube seem like a sympathetically angered friend. Well, if you want to let her have everything…
Eventually Strube could get a man to refuse to part with a vacuum cleaner that he might never have actually used, or possibly ever even seen.
It took more time, but Strube preferred nurturing rapacity in these timid clients to flattering the egos of the villains who just wanted to ditch the old wife and marry the twenty-year-old sex…pot. For the latter sort Strube would have to say, in tones of polite surprise, things like You’re fifty? Good Lord, you don’t look a day over forty. And, How did you put up with this for so long?
Anyway, the timid ones needed attorneys. What they initially wanted, like first-time Driving Under the Influence offenders, was to appear in court in humble proper, not realizing that judges had all been attorneys once, and planned to be again after they retired, and wanted to make of these fools examples of how badly unrepresented people fared.
In a courthouse hallway this morning another attorney had told Strube a riddle.
Question: What do a lawyer and a sperm cell have in common?
Strube pursed his lips and leaned forward to pick up the newspaper that Charlotte had left on the desk. The telephone rang, but Charlotte would get it. Strube made it a point never to answer the phone on spec.
He waited, but the intercom didn’t buzz. That was good, she was fielding whatever it was. He let himself start to read.
He saw that Ross Perot was claiming to have backed out of the presidential race only because of threats from the Bush-campaign people. He smiled. Strube never voted, but he liked to see things shaken up. “Time for a Change!” was a political slogan that always appealed to him. He was about to flip the front page when he noticed the box at the bottom.
FANS SEARCHING FOR “SPOOKY” FROM OLD SITCOM
Strube read the story quickly, peripherally aware that his heartbeat was speeding up. When he had finished it, he pushed a button on the intercom.
“Charlotte!” he squeaked. “Get in here and look at this.” No, he thought immediately, she might try to get the credit herself. “Wait, get me—” he began again, but she had already opened his office door and was staring in at him curiously.
She was wearing another of the anonymous dark jacket-and-skirt combinations to which she had been confining herself ever since he’d made a blundering pass at her six months ago. “Look at what?” she asked.
“Perot says Bush was going to wreck his daughter’s wedding,” he said absently, folding the paper and pushing it aside. “Did you read about that? Say, get me the telephone number of…” What had been the name of the damned snuff? Ouchie? “Goudie! Goudie Scottish Snuff, uh. Company. G-O-U-D-I-E. It’s in San Francisco.”
“Snuff?”
Strube raised the back of his pudgy hand to his nose and sniffed loudly. “Snuff. Like lords and ladies used to do. Powdered tobacco.”
“Do you want me to call them?”
“No, just get me the number.”
Charlotte nodded, mystified, and walked back out to the reception desk, closing his office door behind her.
If Nicky Bradshaw’s still alive, thought Strube excitedly, he’s gotta still be doing that snuff; and it’s a clue I’ll bet not a lot of people remember. And I’ll bet nobody but me remembers the actual brand name. God knows I ordered it often enough.