Yvonne and I climbed into the back and closed the doors. It was dark and smelled of moldy carpet squares. We huddled together on the ripped-out carseat against the far wall. Niki got in the front and Rena slammed the three-on-the-tree shift into place. "Find 'em, don't grind "em." Niki lit a Marlboro, coughed wetly and spat out the window.
"I quit smokin' for the baby, but what's the damn point," Yvonne said.
Rena found first, and we lurched into the stillness of Ripple Street. The orange streetlights illuminated the quiet neighborhood, the air perfumed caramel and vanilla by the night shift at the Dolly Madison bakery. I could hear the trucks pulling up to the loading bays as we ascended from the river bottom. A deep truck horn honked, and Rena fluffed her tangled black hair. Even at five in the morning, her shirt was already unbuttoned, her cleavage heightened severely by a Fredericks push-up bra. She sang along with the tape in her good alto voice, about how some girls give you diamonds, some girls Cadillacs. Her Jagger impersonation was impressive.
We turned left on Fletcher, past the Mazda repair and the Star Strip, our van rattling like cans in the moist darkness. We went under the 5 and crossed Riverside Drive, fragrant with hamburgers from Rick's. She turned left at the Astro coffee shop, its parking lot half-full of police cars. She spat three times out the window as we passed by.
Then we began to climb, up into a neighborhood of narrow streets, houses crowded along steep slopes wall to wall, stucco duplexes and nondescript boxes, occasionally an old Spanish-style. Stairs on the uphill side, carports on the downhill. I knelt between the captain's seats for the view. I could see the whole river valley from here — headlights of cars on the 5 and the 2, the sleeping hills of Glassell Park and Elysian Heights dotted with lights. Vacant lots full of wild fennel, ferny and licorice-smelling in the dewy darkness. The smell mingled with the mold of the van and cigarettes and the reek of leftover alcohol. Rena flicked her cigarette out the window.
Yvonne snapped on the interior light and flipped through a water-bloated Seventeen magazine. The blond girl on the cover smiled bravely, although clearly dismayed to have found herself in such circumstances. I looked at the magazine over her shoulder. I could never figure out where they found all those happy, pimpleless teens. Yvonne paused at a picture of a girl and a boy riding a fat horse bareback on the beach. "Did you ever ride a horse?"
"No. I went to the racetrack once." Medea's Pride at five-to-one. His hand on her waist. "You?"
"I been on the pony ride at Griffith Park," Yvonne said.
"Over there," Rena pointed.
A gray texturecoat house had black plastic bags plumped next to the trash. Rena stopped and Niki jumped out, cut the tab of one with a pocketknife. "Clothes." She and Yvonne handed the bags up to me in the back. They were heavier than I'd thought, must have had appliances in the bottom. Yvonne lifted them easily, she was strong as a man. Niki swung the bags, a practiced move.
"I'm so tired," Yvonne said, as we started off again. "I hate my life." She filled the coffee cup, gulped it down, filled it again and handed it to me. It was instant, hot and too strong.
Behind the wheel, Rena dragged on her cigarette, she held it like a pencil. "I told you get rid. What you need baby? Cow."
Rena Grushenka. Rock music and American slang both twenty years out of date, discount Stoli from Bargain Circus. She trained her black magpie eyes on the curb with its neatly arrayed trash cans and recycling bins. She could see in the dark with those eyes. This morning she wore a necklace of silver milagros, arms, hands, and legs. You were supposed to pin them to the velvet skirts of the Virgin to pray, but to Rena they were just pawned body parts.
"Hey, turnip people," she called out the window as we squeezed past an old Cadillac double-parked, a Mexican couple emptying somebody's recycling. Bagged cans and bottles crammed their trunk and backseat. "Dobro utro, kulaks." She laughed with her mouth wide open, her gold inlays glinting.
They stared at us without expression as we clattered by.
Rena sang along with Mick in her thick accent, tapping on the blue steering wheel with the inside of her ring, craning her neck in and out like a chicken. She had a deep voice, a good ear.
Niki yawned and stretched in the other captain's chair. "I need a ride back to work sometime to pick up my truck. Werner took me to his place last night." She grinned her lop-toothed smile.
Rena sipped from her Winchell's cup. "The knackwurst."
"Four times," Niki said. "I can hardly walk." Werner, supposedly a German rock promoter, came to the Bavarian Gardens, where Niki worked three nights a week, though she wasn't twenty-one. She had a fake ID from one of Rena's friends.
"You should bring knackwurst. I got to meet."
"Fat chance of that," Niki said. "He gets one look at you bitches, he'll be on the first plane back to Frankfurt."
"You're just afraid he '11 see you're a man," Yvonne said.
Their talk went on like this, ceaseless as waves. I leaned on my forearms against the oxidized blue console between the front seats. Before me lay a collage of debris, like a forest floor: empty black Sobranie packages, fliers in Spanish, a little brush full of black hair, a key ring with a blue rubber coin purse, the kind you squeeze on the sides and the mouth opens up. I played with it, making it sing along to the tape.
The sunrise was a pale rubbing along the eastern horizon, gray-white clouds like scumbled pastels, a sponge-painted sky. Gradually, the manmade features of the landscape receded — the train yards, freeway, houses, and roads — until all that remained was blue hills backlit by dawn light, red over the ridge-line. It was a set for a western movie. I could almost see the arms of giant saguaro, the scurry of coyote and kit fox. The Great Basin, Valley of Smoke. I held my breath. I wished it could always be like this, no people, no city, just rising sun and blue hills.
But the sun cleared the ridge, returning the 2 and the 5, early traffic moving downtown, truck drivers heading to Bakersfield, thinking about pancakes, and us in the van on garbage day.
We continued to sift the city's flotsam, rescuing a wine rack and a couple of broken cane-bottom chairs. We took on an aluminum walker, a box of musty books, and a full recycling bin of Rolling Rock empties that sharpened the mold smell in the back. I pocketed a book about Buddhism, and one called My Antonia.
I liked these winding streets and hillside spills of bougainvillea, the long flights of stairs. We drove by the house where Ana'is Nin lived, and I had no one to point it out to. My mother used to like to drive by the places famous writers lived in L.A. — Henry Miller, Thomas Mann, Isherwood, Huxley. I remembered this particular view of the lake, the Chinese mailbox. We had all her books. I liked their titles — Ladders to Fire, House of Incest — and her face on the covers, the false eyelashes, her storybook hair coiled and twisted. There was a picture of her with her head in a birdcage. But who was left to care?