as the Mustang raced towards him.
Then he hit the gas.
He was out for a minute or two, no more. An old stunt man’s trick: at the last moment, he’d thrown himself into the back seat and braced for the collision.
The cars struck head-on. Neither was going to leave on its own steam, but the Mustang, predictably, got the worst of it. Kicking his door open, Driver climbed out.
“You okay?” someone shouted from the window of a battered pickup idling at the bottom of the off ramp.
Then the long blare of a horn and a squeal of brakes as a Chevy van skidded to a stop, rocking, behind the pickup.
Driver stepped up to the Mustang. Sirens in the distance.
Gordon Ligocki’s ducktail would never look good again. His neck was broken. Internal damages too, judging from the blood around his mouth. Probably slammed into the steering wheel.
Driver still had the coupons for Nino’s Pizza.
He tucked one into Gordon Ligocki’s shirt pocket.
Chapter Twenty-four
He hitched a ride with the guy in the pickup, whose emergence with an aluminum baseball bat had sufficiently adjusted attitudes among the youthful crew of the van as to send them spinning away into traffic.
“What I’m guessing is you may have good reason not to be around once the Man arrives,” he said when Driver approached him. “Know more than a little about that myself. Get on up here.”
Driver climbed aboard.
“Name’s Jodie,” he said a mile or so down the road, “but nearabouts everyone calls me Sailor.” He pointed to a tattoo on his right bicep. “Supposed to be a bat wing. Looks like a mainsail.”
Professionally done tattoos-the bat, a woman in a grass skirt with coconut shells for breasts, an American flag, a dragon-covered his biceps. Hands on the steering wheel bore another sort of tattoo. Jailhouse tattoos, crudely done with ink and the end of a wire. Most times, that meant a guitar string.
“Where’re we headed?” Driver asked.
“Depends… Town not far up the road has a decent enough dinner. You hungry by any chance?”
“I could eat.”
“How did I know?”
It was a classic small-town noontime buffet, steam trays piled high with slices of meat loaf, shrimp, hot wings, beans and franks, home fries, roast beef. Sides of cottage cheese, three-layer Jell-O salad, green salad, pudding, carrot and celery sticks, green bean casserole. Clientele a mix of blue-collar workers, men and women from offices nearby in short-sleeve dress shirts and polyester dresses, blue-haired old ladies. These last came out in their tank-like cars around one o’clock each afternoon, Jodie told him, heads barely visible above steering wheel and dash. Everyone else knew to get off the streets then.
“You don’t have work you need to be tending to?” Driver asked.
“Nope, time’s my own. Have Nam to thank for that. I’m up for armed robbery, see, and the judge says he’ll give me a choice, I can enlist or I can go back to prison. Didn’t much care for it the first time round, didn’t have any notion it would have got much better. So I slide through basic, ship out, then along about three months in, I’m sitting there having the first of my usual breakfast beers when a sniper takes me down. Spilled the whole can. Fucker’s been up there all night waiting.
“They airlift me to Saigon, take out half of one lung and pack me back Stateside. Disability’s enough to get by on, long as I don’t develop a taste for much more than greasy hamburgers and cheap hootch.”
He threw back the rest of his coffee. The hula girl on his arm shimmied. Spare flesh like a turkey’s wattles swung beneath.
“Had the feeling you might have seen action yourself.”
Driver shook his head.
“Prison, then. You’ve been inside.”
“Not yet.”
“And here I’d of sworn…” He took another try at the coffee cup, registered surprise to find it empty. “What the hell do I know, anyway.”
“How’s the rest of your day look?” Driver said.
Like shit, apparently. And like usual. Jodie’s home was a trailer in Paradise Park back towards the interstate. Abandoned refrigerators, stacks of bald tires and tireless, decaying vehicles sat everywhere. Half a dozen dogs in the compound barked and snarled nonstop. Jodie’s kitchen sink would have been heaped with dishes if he’d had enough dishes to heap. Those few he had were in the sink, and looked to have been there for some time. Grease swam in the runnels of stove-top burners.
Jodie snapped on the TV when they first came in, rooted around in the sink, rinsed out a couple of glasses with tap water and filled them with bourbon. A scabrous dog of uncertain parentage made its way out of the back of the trailer to greet them, then, exhausted by the effort, collapsed at their feet.
“That’s General Westmoreland,” Jodie told him.
They sat watching an old Thin Man movie, then a Rockford Files, steadily downing bourbon. Three hours later, just before Driver rode off in his truck, leaving behind a note that read Thank you and a stack of fifty-dollar bills, Jodie collapsed, too. Just like the dog.
Chapter Twenty-five
It came in a box not much larger than one of the encyclopedias lined up on a shelf in the front room behind dusty figurines of fish and angels. How could such a thing fit in there? A table? Accent table, the ad said, crafted by one of America’s premier designers, assembly required.
It arrived around noon. His mother had been so excited. We’ll wait and open it after lunch, she said.
She’d ordered the table by mail. He remembered being amazed at this. Would the postman ring the bell and, when she opened the door, hand it through? Your table’s here, ma’am. You draw a circle, write a number on a piece of paper and enclose a check, a table shows up at your door. That’s magic enough. But it also comes in this tiny box?
Further memories of his mother, of his early life, drift up occasionally in pre-dawn hours. He wakes with them lodged in his head, but the moment he tries consciously to remember, or to express them, they’re gone.
He was, what?, nine or ten years old? Sitting at the kitchen table dawdling over a peanut butter sandwich while his mother drummed fingers on the counter.
Through? she said.
He wasn’t, there was still almost half a sandwich on his plate and he was hungry, but he nodded. Always agree. That was the first rule.
She swept his plate away, into a stack of others by the sink.
So let’s have a look. Stabbing a butcher knife into one end of the box to rip it open.
Lovingly she laid out components on the floor. What an impossible puzzle. Lengths of cheap contoured metal and tubing, wedges of rubber, baggies of screws and fittings.
His mother’s eyes kept returning to the instruction sheet as, moment by moment, piece by piece, she assembled the table. By the time feet had been fitted with rubber stoppers and the bottom half of legs were in place, the expression on her face, to which he was ever attentive, had gone from happy to puzzled. As she spliced on upper legs, cross-supports and screws, her expression turned sad. That prospect of sadness spread throughout her body, washed out into the room.
