“Still a good plan. And your friend Wendell? What’s he going to do without you?”
“Oh, I suspect we’ll be getting together for coffee. Maybe a night on the town, though at our age it’ll be a short night. And I suspect he won’t be long finding someone else to badger.”
“It’s been good getting to know you, Bill. Walking beside you.”
“Right back at you, young man. One thing?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Go by and see my girl?”
Driver had tucked the Fairlane away on the middle level of a three-tier parking garage by an office building populated chiefly by doctors of the asthma, spinal injury, and cardiac sort. Lots of repeat business, lots of comings and goings, easy access and exit. As he emerged from the bare-bones stairwell, cement and featureless gray paint, a figure stepped from the shadow by his car.
“I thought I might come to you, this last time,” Beil said. “To thank you for your assistance. And to give you this.”
A business card embossed with only a phone number.
“Should you ever find yourself…at a total loss, let us say…call that number.”
Driver held up the card. “I did nothing to help you.”
“Ah, but you did, even if you are unable to see it. We so rarely understand what effects our actions have. Or will have. We in some strange power’s employ.”
A Ford F-150 swung up the ramp and too fast around the curve, braking just inches behind a Buick backing out. The Buick’s elderly driver also hit his brakes, and sat unmoving. The pickup’s horn blew.
“You’re a strange power?” Driver said.
“Not at all. Only one of many, indeed most, caught in between. Like you.” Beil stepped closer. “Ride lightly, as your friend Felix would say, and with an eye always to the mirror. Bennie’s tigers will not harm you. About the others, we can do nothing. For now.”
Driver nodded.
“And so, again,” Beil said, “you disappear. Though-” He held up a closed fist, turned it palm upward, opened it-“is that not, deep within yourself, down where the blind fish live, perhaps what you wanted all along?”
The pickup pulled into the space left vacant by the Buick. Its door opened, and first one crutch, then another, emerged. The driver hopped down between them, wearing yellow and purple running shoes.
Beil turned back. “My wife suffers from dementia. Nothing filigree and trendy such as Alzheimer’s, mind you, but plain old dementia. Each morning as I leave I go to kiss her and she tells me, I love you like butter, every morning for eleven, twelve years. This morning what she said, with no notion that something was wrong, something was different, was: I love you like rubber. Take the lesson from my wife. Love your life like butter. Like rubber.”
Driver walked to the edge and moments later watched Beil come out of the stairwell. Two black sedans pulled up immediately at curbside.
He got out of the Fairlane, walked around to the front of the garage. She straightened and leaned to look past the open hood of a ’57 Chevy Bel Air. The clamp floodlight on her bench was on. With the light behind her, he couldn’t see her face.
“You’ve come to say good-bye.”
Driver nodded.
“I saw you back there. Then you waited.” She reached behind to snap off the light, stepped to the car’s side. “Never gets easy, does it?”
“I’ve had practice.”
“You have, but I don’t mean saying good-bye. Making choices.”
She popped the top of the cooler under her bench, handed him a beer, got one herself.
“Our eyes bounce off surfaces, we can’t see far or deep. We make choices from the pitifully little we understand about who we are, held in place by that. Then we hold our breaths fully expecting the heavens to tear open at any minute. All of us do that, Eight. Not just you.”
Again he thought about Bernie, Time you’re ten, twelve years old, it’s pretty much set in you, what you’re going to be like, what your life’s going to be.
“Comforting,” he said.
“It is, in a way. Like this.” Billie held up her beer. “It’s all a storm, Eight. But we have these bright days, these calms.”
“You were one.”
She laughed. “You bet your ass I was. Now get out of here, I’ve got work to do-once I undo what all the heads that have been under this hood before did to the poor girl.”
They picked him up just outside Mesa, a Chrysler and a BMW. He cut off and back onto I-10, jumped an exit and feeder road to head back toward Phoenix, then clipped off again and on toward Tucson. Feared for a while that he might have lost them and pulled over. Sat at roadside, the Indian casino’s electronic billboard flashing against his windshield, semis whipping by, waiting. Till there they were. When the two cars drew within easy distance he peeled out ahead, braked and wheeled his way into a 180, drove behind and spun again, came up behind them and shot past.
In the rearview mirror he watched them moving toward him. He turned the radio on. He smiled.
He drove.
