Crashed

Chevy leaped forward, plowed through a hedge, knocked over a mailbox, clipped the rear of Louie’s Firebird, sending it into a half-spin, and burned rubber into the night.

11

Candles

Louie and I left the scene within ninety seconds in the van. The Firebird wasn’t drivable, but there was nothing in it to trace it to Louie. Porch lights had been snapping on all the way around Westwind Circle, and I could hear sirens in the distance.

“I liked that car,” Louie said. “Put a lot of work into that engine.”

“Other engines will manifest,” I said poetically as I looked for flashing red lights. “Engines abound.”

“Fuck that noise,” Louie said. “Detroit iron, eight cylinders. That stuff don’t grow on trees.” He sucked on his teeth, then laughed. “They gotcha, didn’t they, with that ohmigod my car’s stuck routine.”

“Yes, Louie. If it helps to comfort you for the loss of the Firebird, they got me.” I cut the wheel sharply left to get us onto a through street.

“Who were they?”

“Mexican guys. Never saw them before.” I was not about to tell Louie that I’d been suckered, and his favorite car destroyed, by a couple of girls whose combined ages would barely let them buy a drink.

“Were they carrying?”

Colored pencils, maybe, I thought. A three-ring notebook or two, cocked and ready to fire. “If they were, they didn’t point it at me.”

“Didn’t have to. You did everything except offer them a push.”

We turned onto Sherman Way. “Sorry about the car,” I said.

“Aaaahhhhh,” Louie said. “It was almost worth it. You standing there with your hands up while they hit the booster rockets.” He laughed again. “Guy drove like a fuckin’ teenager,” he said.

I said, “Didn’t he.” I dug into my front pocket and brought my hand out with diamonds dripping from my fingers. “I figure this is worth thirty to forty, fenced. Take it, and we’ll call it even.”

Louie took the necklace and turned it over a couple of times, checking the backs of the settings. “That’s a lot better than even. I’d owe you. This good, you think?”

“Good enough to be all by itself in a wall safe.”

“Yeah?”

“You might want to fence it carefully.”

He turned to look at me, all the colored lights of the street blazing in the diamonds’ cold crystalline hearts as they hung from his hand. “Whose wall safe?”

“Well,” I said. “Rabbits Stennet’s. It belongs to his wife.”

“Holy shit,” Louie said, practically throwing the necklace at me. “Bunny’s? Get it away from me.” He rubbed his hands together as though to wipe off any traces of contact. “If I fenced that thing in Timbuktu, Rabbits would know.”

“Nice piece,” I said.

“I ain’t met her, but that’s what everybody says.”

“I meant the necklace.”

“Yeah, and it might as well be radioactive.”

I checked the mirror, just in case. They weren’t behind me, and I found I missed them. “So I’ll use it as a paperweight,” I said.

Just to be on the safe side, I checked into a Travelodge in Encino. I doubted that the girls, as I was coming to think of them, were likely to come around and kick in my door, but they knew where I’d been sleeping. I don’t usually let people know where I’m sleeping.

Not that I did much sleeping that night.

I’d seen a lot of lighted windows, on both sides of the streets we’d driven down, and glowing in the houses that looked onto Westwind Circle. Lighted windows aren’t my favorite thing, although I can usually deal with them. There’s something about those warm yellow rectangles, with the unavoidable implication that there are families inside, still whole and complete, safe and comfortable, living by the rules and loving each other. I know it’s not always that way, I know that terrible things can happen in a lighted window, but that’s not what I see. What I see is one of the candles that holds the world together. When the world seems to be running along as it should, which it is most of the time in the part of it I’m lucky enough to live in, I sometimes think of it as held together by millions of people just doing their best, looking out for each other, keeping their promises. Nothing heroic, nothing dramatic, just plain everyday goodness. And when I’m thinking this way I see the structure of the world as an enormous palace made of light, with the walls and floors and ceilings held in place by the energy from millions of candles, and all those candles are in the hands of people who are doing the things they should, the little tiny things they told each other they’d do. And I’m somewhere outside, looking for a dark window I can break in through.

Especially since the divorce.

Like I say, I can usually deal with it. But in the Travelodge’s king size bed that night, I had Thistle Downing on my mind, and it didn’t make me feel even a little bit like someone carrying a candle.

“Three Wishes,” Rodd Hull said, so proudly he might have thought of it himself. “Three films, one film for each of the wishes. Taken together,” he said, framing the rectangle of a motion picture screen with his thumbs and index fingers and panning the room with it, “taken together, they comprise a complete arc in the life of a modern-day woman. An arc that takes her from repression to empowerment.” He sat back, picked up a paper cup full of coffee with his pinky extended, and waited for people to fall out of their chairs.

I said, “Wow.”

“Get to basics,” Trey Annunziato said.

Rodd Hull looked disappointed. He wore a photographer’s vest with more pockets than a pool table, a meticulously wrinkled linen shirt, and jeans that had been pressed to a razor-sharp crease. Around his neck was a lanyard dangling one of those incredibly expensive little viewfinders that cameramen sometimes wear when they’re not sure everyone on the set knows how important they are. Rodd Hull, I had learned on Google the previous evening, had once received an Emmy nomination for daytime drama, which I guess meant soap operas. He was obviously determined to see this as a step up.

“Actually,” I said to Trey. “I’d like at least to get the framework. The main, um, story elements, the other characters, sort of who’s who. Might help me see the production’s weak spots, from a security perspective. Maybe anticipate problems.”

Trey looked at her watch for the fourth time in the ten minutes we’d been in the room. “It’s your morning,” she said. “Did you know that Rodd almost won an Emmy?”

I expressed suitable awe and amazement, and Rodd got to practice looking modest.

“What’s so thrilling,” Rodd said, only slightly grimly, “is that we’re using an entirely new modality to tell the story. Sex. When you think about the women’s movement, it’s obvious that it’s always been basically about sex. The great metaphor: Woman on the bottom. It applied to everything, but it began in the bedroom.”

“Not in my bedroom, it didn’t,” said Tatiana Himmelman. Tatiana, four feet tall, three feet wide, wearing a well-waxed flattop and jeans festooned with chains, was the production supervisor, the person responsible for making sure that everything necessary to the day’s filming was in place: performers, props, set elements, crew, everything. In other words, she did the actual work.

“Let’s not think about your bedroom, Tat,” Rodd Hull said. “It’s just too grim.”

“As opposed to yours, Rodd,” Tatiana said, “which uses the old set from Romper Room.”