folded pieces of paper directing the credulous to the homes of people who'd been dead for years. “Long as we're up here, we could drop in on Jane Fonda. She could tell me how to get down to half a ton.”
We were parked across the street and half a block up, still hoping for no cops. The Mountain was listing movie stars in no particular order, clearly disgruntled. He'd gotten to Leslie Nielsen, so it had been quite a while.
“Leslie
“That's Lloyd Bridges,” he said with infinite scorn. “His kids probably live up here too. There's all sorts of people live up here. What I want to know is, why the fuck are
“She's the one,” I said. “Just shut up and sit back. Work on your cellulite or something.” The air was ripe with Mountain's pong. “And roll down the window, if you don't mind.”
“Can I smoke?”
“You can light fire to your feet if you want to.” I hadn't known that the Mountain smoked. Now that I thought about it, it made sense. You didn't get to be his size without a lot of bad habits.
He pulled a crumpled pack of some unidentifiable off-brand cigarette out of his shirt pocket and lit up. Wreathed in smoke, he gave out a relatively comfortable sigh. “Why don't we just kick the door in?” he asked.
“They're not here,” I said, my nose twitching toward the smoke. Ancient yearnings arose within me. “It doesn't make any sense for them to be here. She gave them to Birdie.”
“Birdie?”
“Never mind,” I said. “Give me one of those.”
“You?” he said. “I didn't know-”
“Just give me the fucking thing.” He tossed me a cigarette and I let it dangle uselessly from my mouth. “What am I supposed to do?” I asked. “Rub my legs together to make a spark?”
“Jesus, you're touchy,” he said, handing me a book of matches. “Want me to kick you in the chest to get it going?” He coughed up a blubbery woof of laughter.
I lit the cigarette, my first in two years, and sucked in the smoke, feeling my uvula knocking in protest against the top of my tongue. The nicotine navigated my defenses without apparent effort and filled my lungs, and I got light-headed immediately. All the problems of the world fell away; it was a crossword puzzle and I was a dictionary. I was as definite as Noah Webster. “She'll come out,” I said, blowing smoke, “and we'll follow her, and then we're home.”
“So what's she doing in there?” the Mountain asked. “Lining up her shoes?”
“She's making calls,” I said with absolute certainty. Until that moment I hadn't known what she was doing. “She's freaking out, and she's getting the kids together so she can move them.”
“Move them where?”
“Out of L.A. She has no idea what's going on.”
“Me neither,” said the Mountain, lighting another one. He had apparently eaten the first. “Maybe you'd like to explain.”
I explained, finishing my cigarette and bumming a second in the process. I could quit later. In the meantime, nicotine seemed promising.
“Holy shit,” the Mountain said after five minutes of concentrated explanation. “Let's french-fry her.”
“What's the first thing you do when you make french fries?”
“Chop,” he said. “First you have to chop up the potato.”
“Dibs on that,” I said. “I get to chop. You get to drop the pieces into the fat.”
He exhaled enough smoke to guarantee chemotherapy to most of the Midwest. “So you're saying we wait.” He tried to cross his legs under Alice's dashboard and failed. “The world is too small for me,” he said. It was a statement of fact, not a complaint.
By the time she backed her car out of the driveway, it was almost nine. The sun was long gone, the moon was taking a nap behind the clouds, and the straight nine-tenths of the world was heading for bed. The little Mercedes scooted out backward and turned downhill toward Sunset.
I started Alice. “Told you,” I said. “She's got to go somewhere. And where she's going is where they are.”
“Hey,” he said, “if I didn't believe you, why would I be here? Shit, I could be having a great old time mopping tables at the Oki-Burger.”
“Thanks for Apple,” I said, thumping his knee. “Let's turn it around, okay? If I didn't believe
“So okay,” he said. “We're both champs. Just keep her in sight.”
In fact, I nearly lost her as she swung east onto Sunset. The light went yellow and I accelerated through it anyway, hoping she didn't have one eye on the rearview mirror. Some cowboy getting a jump on the red tooted a little Fiat's horn at us with a pipsqueak flatulent sound and swerved around us, making operatic Italian hand gestures out the window. I passed him on the left, hoping Mrs. Brussels hadn't heard the horn, and the Mountain leaned out of the passenger window, made clawing motions toward the guy's throat, and roared at him. The guy driving the Fiat took one look at the Mountain and braked abruptly, then made an immediate right to get out of his vicinity.
“Focus,” I said as Mrs. B. made a right down Doheny. “The enemy is up ahead.” I followed her, gunning Alice's engine to decrease the distance between us as the Mountain subsided into mutinous mutters in the passenger seat.
“Little wop cars,” he grumbled. ”Rinky-dinky little Tinkertoys. How come people don't buy American?”
Since the trade deficit was not the issue at hand, I concentrated on Mrs. Brussels. She drove fast and well, with an aristocratic disregard for lane lines and yellow lights. I'd had to run two more reds by the time she turned left onto Pico, heading east.
“My father works in Detroit,” the Mountain volunteered out of nowhere as we crossed La Cienega. “Thirty- year man. For thirty years he's been putting the same fucking fender on the same fucking car all day long. Then he goes home and drinks two six-packs of Stroh's and falls asleep on the couch with his shoes on. Where do you think she's going?”
“As I already said, where the kids are.” I braked to avoid a head-on as yet another Italian car, driven by someone whose driver's license probably noted that he'd had a pre-frontal lobotomy, turned left in front of me. “But, Jesus, don't let me interrupt your autobiography.”
“What I mainly remember about my mother,” the Mountain continued serenely, “is that she could get his shoes off without waking him up. I thought it was terrific. Now I think about it, I realize she probably could have amputated his legs without waking him up. How many kids you think they'll be?”
“Depends on how many are in L.A. They're selling them in about four states.” A spate of drizzle misted the windshield. Alice's wipers would only have made it worse, so I just locked on the red blurs of the Mercedes’ taillights and kept driving.
“She's turning,” he said.
And she was. She was making a right, turning south onto a little street with a name that might have meant something to the people who lived on it. There were more people on the sidewalks here, and more of the faces were black. The people gathered in front of immaculate four- and six-unit apartments and sat on the fenders of five-year-old cars and watched the world drive by.
“Heartbreak city,” the Mountain said, glancing out the window. “Nobody going noplace.”
“There's something to be said for staying home,” I said. The Mountain greeted this hand-stitched homily with the silence it deserved, and Mrs. Brussels made a left onto Jefferson Boulevard. She lost a little traction on the newly wet road, and her taillights did a brief shimmy. With one of those abrupt transitions that make L.A. the world's most schizophrenic city, we found ourselves in an industrial area.
Here there was no one on the sidewalks. In some blocks there were no sidewalks. The streetlamps layered the damp landscape with a bluish light that turned the Mountain's lips purple. It was not an improvement. Warehouses hunkered down, dark and featureless, behind chain-link fence topped with razor-wire. Behind the fences Dobermans roamed, snapping at moths and waiting for something bigger.
“Nice neighborhood,” the Mountain observed. “What happens when we get there?”
It was an extremely good question. “We park and wait and watch, and when we're sure that we can take the
