“What the-”
“You all right, Shonda?” Bernie asked.
She nodded without meeting his eyes. At least it hadn’t gotten to the physical stage this time. Not yet.
“You can’t-”
Bernie clamped a hand on his neighbor’s throat.
“I’m a patient man, Lenny, not much for getting in other people’s way. What I figure is, we’ve all got our own lives, right? And the right to be left alone. So I sit over there for almost a year now listening to what goes down in here and I keep thinking, Hey, he’s a mensch, he’ll work it out. You gonna work it out, Lenny?”
Bernie rocked his hand at the wrist, causing his neighbor’s head to nod.
“Shonda’s a good woman. You’re lucky to have her, lucky she’s put up with you this long. Lucky I’ve put up with you. She has good reason: she loves you. I don’t have any reason at all.”
Well, that was stupid, Bernie thought as he returned to his own apartment and poured another scotch.
It was quiet next door. The swayback couch welcomed him, as it always did.
Had he left the TV on? He didn’t recall ever turning it on at all, but there it was, unspooling one of those court shows currently fashionable, Judge Somebody-or-another, judges reduced to caricature (brusque, sarcastic New Yorker, Texan with accent thick as cake icing), participants either so stupid they jumped at the chance to broadcast their stupidity nationwide or so oblivious they had no idea that’s what they were doing.
Yet another thing that made Bernie tired.
He didn’t know. Had he changed, or had the world changed around him? Some days he barely recognized it. Like he’d been dropped off in a spaceship and was only going through the motions, trying to fit in, doing his best imitation of someone who belonged down here. Everything had gone so cheap and gaudy and hollow. Buy a table these days, what you got was an eighth of an inch of pine pressed onto plywood. Spend $1200 for a chair, you couldn’t sit in the damn thing.
Bernie’d known his share of burnouts, guys who started wondering just what it was they were doing and why any of it mattered. Mostly they disappeared not long after. Got sent up for lifetime hauls, got sloppy and killed by someone they’d braced, got taken down by their own people. Bernie didn’t think he was a burnout. This driver for damn sure wasn’t.
Pizza. He hated fucking pizza.
Come right down to it, though, that was pretty funny, all those pizza ads stuck under his door.
Chapter Thirty
When Driver was a kid, every night for what seemed like a year he had this same dream. He’d be up on the side of the house with his toes on the molding, where the first floor was eight feet or so off the ground since the house was built into a hill, and there’d be a bear under him. The bear would go reaching for him, he’d pull up on a window casing, and after a while, frustrated, the bear would pick a tulip or iris from the bed of them at the base of the house and eat it. Then he’d go back to scrambling for Driver. Finally the bear would pick another tulip, look thoughtful, and offer it to Driver. Driver was always reaching for the tulip when he awoke.
This was back in Tucson, when he lived with the Smiths. His best friend then was Herb Danziger. Herb was a car nut, worked on cars in his backyard and made good money at it, challenging the pay both from his father’s job as security guard and his mother’s as a nurse’s aide. There’d always be a ’48 Ford or a ’55 Chevy sitting there with the hood up and half its innards laid out on a tarp on the ground nearby. Herb had one of those massive blue Chilton automobile repair manuals, but Driver never saw him look at it, not once in all those years.
Driver’s first and last fight at the new school happened when the local bully came up to him on the schoolyard and told Driver he shouldn’t be hanging around Jews. Driver had vaguely been aware that Herb was Jewish, but he was still more vague about why anyone would want to make something of that. This bully liked to flick people’s ears with his middle finger, shooting it off his thumb. When he tried it this time, Driver met his wrist halfway with one hand, stopping it cold. With the other hand he reached across and very carefully broke the boy’s thumb.
The other thing Herb did, was race cars at a track out in the desert between Tucson and Phoenix, in this truly weird landscape inhabited by ten-foot-high dust devils, cholla that looked like some kind of undersea plant gone astray, and grand saguaro cacti with limbs pointing to heaven like the fingers of people in old religious paintings, riddled with holes hosting generations of birds. The track had been built by a group of young hispanics who, rumor had it, controlled the marijuana traffic up from Nogales. Herb was an outsider, but welcome for his skills as driver and mechanic.
First few times Driver went along, Herb would send him out to run the track with cars he’d just worked up, wanting to watch their performance. But once he got a taste of it, Driver couldn’t hold himself back. He started pushing the cars, giving them their head, seeing what was in there. Soon it became clear he was a natural. Herb stopped driving and stayed in the pit after that. He tore the cars down and put them back together, same thing you do to build muscle; Driver took them out into the world.
It was also at the track that Driver met his only other good friend, Jorge. Just beginning to find the one thing he would ever be good at, Driver was astonished at someone like Jorge, who seemed so effortlessly good at everything. Played guitar and accordion in a local conjunto and wrote his own songs, drove competitively, was an honor student, sang solos in the church choir, worked with troubled juveniles at a shelter. If the boy owned a shirt besides the one he wore to church, Driver never saw it. He was always in one of those old-style ribbed undershirts, black jeans and gray nubbly cowboy boots. Jorge lived in South Tucson, in a shambling, much- amended house with three or four generations of family and an indeterminate number of children. Driver’d sit there chowing down on homemade tortillas, refried beans, burritos and pork stew with tomatillos surrounded by people babbling away in a language he couldn’t understand. But he was a friend of Jorge’s so he was family too, no question about it. Jorge’s ancient abuela was always the first to rush out onto the dirt driveway to greet him. She’d ferry him in, forearm clamped against hers as though they strolled the boardwalk, babbling away excitedly the whole time. Out back often as not there’d be drunken men with guitarrons, guitars and mandolins, violins, accordions, trumpets, the occasional tuba.
That’s where he learned about guns, too. Late evening, the men would get together and head out into the desert for target practice, both practice and target pretty much euphemism. Sipping at six packs of beer and bottles of Buchanan’s scotch, they blazed away at anything in sight. But for all their seeming carelessness over application, they took the instruments dead seriously. From them Driver learned how these small machines must be respected, how they had to be cleaned and set up, why certain handguns were preferred, their quirks and shortcomings. Some of the younger men were into other things, like knives, boxing and martial arts. Driver, always a watcher and a quick study, picked up a few things from them as well, just as, years later, he’d pick things up from stunt men and fighters in movies he worked on.
Chapter Thirty-one
He took Nino down at six a.m. on a Monday. Weather report said it would climb to a balmy 82-degree high, gentle clouds from the east, forty percent chance of light rain later in the week. In slippers and a thin seersucker bathrobe Isaiah Paolozzi came out the front door of his Brentwood home, his mission twofold. Pick up this morning’s L.A. Times from the drive. Fire up the sprinklers. Never mind that each burst from those sprinklers was water stolen from others. No other way you turned a desert into sculptured green lawns.
Never mind that Nino’s entire life was stolen from others.
As Nino bent to pick up the paper, Driver stepped out of the recess beside the front door. He was there when Nino turned.
Eye to eye, neither blinked.
“I know you?”
“We spoke once,” Driver said.
