“He’s a thief-a professional, he keeps telling me. Started off burglarizing homes when he was fourteen, fifteen, moved on from there. They got him taking down a savings and loan. Couple of local detectives happened to walk into the middle of it. They’d come to deposit their paychecks.”
Standard did indeed get out the following month. And despite all Irina’s protests that this would not happen, no way in godalmighty hell, he came home to roost. (What can I say? she said. He loves the boy. Where else is he gonna go?) She and Driver were hanging together a lot by then, which didn’t bother Standard at all. Most nights, long after Irina and Benicio had gone to bed, Driver and Standard would sit out in the front room watching TV. Lot of the good, old stuff you only caught then, late at night.
So once, along about one on a Tuesday night, Wednesday morning really, they’re sitting there watching a cop movie, Glass Ceiling, and a commercial comes on.
“Rina tells me you drive. For the movies?”
“Right.”
“Have to be pretty good.”
“I get by.”
“Not like a nine-to-five gig, huh?”
“One of the advantages.”
“You have anything on for tomorrow? Today now, I guess it is?”
“Nothing scheduled.”
Having found its way past a thicket of commercials for furniture dealers, bedding stores, cut-rate insurance, twenty-piece cooking sets and videocassettes of great moments in American history, the movie started up again.
“I’m thinking I can speak frankly with you,” Standard said.
Driver nodded.
“Rina trusts you, I figure I can too… You want another beer?”
“Usually.”
He went out to the kitchen and brought two back. Snapped the tab off one and handed it over.
“You know what I do, right?”
“More or less.”
Snapped the tab and took a swallow of his.
“Okay. So here’s the thing. I’ve got a job today, something that’s been on the burner a long time. But my driver’s been…well, detained.”
“Like this guy,” Driver said, nodding towards the TV, where a suspect was being interrogated. The front legs of the chair on which he sat had been cut down to make it as uncomfortable as possible.
“Good chance of it. What I’m wondering is, any chance you’d consider taking his place?”
“Driving?”
“Right. We go in early morning. It’s-”
Driver held up a hand.
“I don’t need to know, don’t want to know. I’ll drive for you. That’s all I’ll do.”
“Fair enough.”
Three or four more minutes of movie action, and commercials shouldered back in. Miracle stove-top grill. Commemorative plates. Greatest hits.
“I ever tell you how much Rina and Benicio depend on you?”
“I ever tell you what an asshole you are?”
“Nah,” Standard said. “But that’s okay, just about everybody else has.”
They both laughed.
Chapter Eleven
That first run, Driver netted close to three thousand.
“Anything up?” he asked Jimmie, his agent, the next day.
“Couple of calls about to go out.”
“Cattle calls, you’re saying.”
“Okay.”
“And for this I pay you fifteen percent?”
“Welcome to the promised land.”
“Locusts and all.”
But by day’s end he had two jobs lined up. Word was getting around, Jimmie told him. Not just that he could drive, the town was full of people who could drive, but word that he’d be there when they needed him, never watched the clock, never made waves, always delivered. They know you’re a pro, not some hardass or punk out to make a name for himself, Jimmie said, you’re who they’re gonna ask for.
First shoot didn’t pick up till next week, so Driver decided to head up Tucson way for a visit. He hadn’t seen his mom since they pried her out of the chair long years past. He’d been little more than a kid then.
Why now? Hell if he knew.
As he drove, in a series of shudders the landscape changed about him. First the haphazard, old-town streets of central L.A. slowly giving way to the city’s ever-incomprehensible network of ancillary cities and suburbs, then nothing much but interstate for a long time. Gas stations, Denny’s, Del Tacos, discount malls, lumber yards. Trees, walls and fences. By this time the Galaxie had been traded in on a vintage Chevy with a hood you could land aircraft on and a backseat big enough for a small family to live in.
He stopped for breakfast at a Union 76 and watched the truckers sitting in their special section over plates of steak and eggs, roast beef, meatloaf, fried chicken, chicken-fried steak. Great American road food. Truckers, the final embodiment of America’s enduring dream of absolute freedom, forever lighting out for the territory.
The building into whose parking lot he nosed the Chevy looked and smelled like the auxiliary buildings in which Sunday-School sessions had been held when he was a kid. Cheapest possible construction, dull white walls, unadorned cement floors.
“You’re here to see…?”
“Sandra Daley.”
The receptionist peered deeply into her screen. Fingers danced nimbly on a worn keyboard.
“I can’t seem to-oh, here she is. You are…?”
“Her son.”
She picked up her phone.
“Could you have a seat over there, sir? Someone will be with you shortly.”
Within minutes a young Eurasian woman wearing a starched white lab coat, jeans beneath, came through locked doors. Low wooden heels ticked on the concrete floors.
“You’re here to see Mrs. Daley?”
Driver nodded.
“And you’re her son?”
He nodded again.
“I’m sorry. Do please forgive our caution. But records show that, all these years, Mrs. Daley has never had a visitor. Could I ask to see some ID?”
Driver displayed his driver’s license. Those days he still had one that wasn’t a double or triple blind.
Almond eyes scanned it.
“Again,” she said, “I apologize.”
“Not a problem.”
Above almond eyes her eyebrows were natural, straight across with almost no arch, a bit unkempt. He always wondered why Latinas plucked theirs only to draw in thin arched substitutes. Change yourself, you change the world?
“I regret having to tell you this: your mother died last week. There were a number of other problems, but
