But the fact was that most people had arrived at Tarot’s party on motorcycles, as Rudy himself had. And Tarot—who had started out life as James Carrow and was still known as Jim when not wearing his flameout stage makeup—wasn’t about to lend his custom Eldorado to anybody, no matter how few cases of beer were left.
Well, what the hell. Rudy shook back the long hair from his eyes and risked another glance at the unrelieved blackness of empty desert reflected in his rear-view mirror. Everybody up at that hundred-thousand-dollar hideaway in the canyons was so drunk by this tune that it was impossible to see what difference ten more cases of beer could make. If worst came to worst—which it looked like it was going to, from the sound of that engine—he could always find someplace in the hills to hole up in until morning and try to hitch a ride to the nearest phone then. There was a service road about ten miles farther on that he knew of, which would take him to a dilapidated shack in what remained of an old orange grove. Half-plastered as he was, he didn’t relish the idea of trying to do anything about the engine tonight, nor was the thought of sleeping by the road real appealing. Rudy took a drink from the half-empty bottle of wine propped on the seat beside him and drove on.
Rudy had been driving and dealing with cars and motorcycles half his life—not always with legal sanctions—but it took all his expertise to nurse the failing Chevy the mile or two from the last lighted billboard to the rutted track of the service road. The lag and jerk of the big V-8 engine as he maneuvered through potholes, gravel slides, and the ruinous washes of old stream beds made him wonder if the problem wasn’t simply a blocked line. He itched to climb out, raise the hood, and check—except that he had nothing resembling a light with him, and the odds were that, once stopped, nothing short of total rebuilding would get the stupid car started again. The feeble glare of the headlights picked out landmarks he knew from his motorcycle trips back this way: an oak tree twisted into the shape of a disapproving monk, gloomily damning the couples who came out here to park; a rock like a sleeping buffalo, silhouetted against the star-luminous sky. Rudy’s hobby of hunting with bow and arrow had given him a familiarity with half the wild country left in Southern California, a knowledge of these silent desert hills as casual as his knowledge of the inner workings of a V-8 engine or of the floor plan of his own sparsely furnished apartment. He was as much at home here as he was anywhere else.
Sometimes more so. Maybe the hunting was the reason, or maybe only the excuse. There were times when he simply took pleasure in being alone, a different pleasure from what was to be had from partying and raising hell, from horsing around with the guys at the body shop, from ratpack weekends in the desert. Never self-analytical, Rudy only understood that he needed the solitude, needed the touch of the empty land and the demand for slow skill and perfect accuracy. Perhaps it was this that had kept him on the edge of the biker crowd; he’d become acquainted with them at the body shop but never of them. Or perhaps it was simple cowardice.
Whatever his reasons, he was accepted for what he was; and though not part of any motorcycle gang, as an airbrush painter and pinstriper at Wild David’s body shop in Fontana, he was part of that world. Hence, he understood his inclusion in Tarot’s party—not that anybody in Southern California was excluded from Tarot’s party. Tarot’s local reputation included an apocryphal story about being a former member of the Hell’s Angels. But, thinking the matter over as he guided the thrombotic car deeper and deeper into the blackness of the hills, Rudy couldn’t imagine any gang admitting a member as essentially chickenhearted as Jim Carrow.
The car’s front wheels dropped suddenly into a twelve-inch water-cut in the road with a heart-rending scrape of oil pan against rock. Rudy tried the engine twice and got only a tired whirring in response. He opened the door and climbed cautiously out, boots slipping on the round stones of the dry stream bed. Two days of continuous partying didn’t help his footing much. He ascertained at once that pushing wouldn’t help matters, for the car was nose-down with its front bumper inches from the far bank of the gully. It might, he decided, kneeling in the soft sand, be possible to back out if the engine could be started, but it wasn’t something he’d want to try at one-thirty in the morning.
Disgusted, he straightened up.
Starlight showed him the shape and roll of the hills, the shallow valley opening out to his right, with a dark clustering of dry, black-leaved citrus trees. The shack—a cabin,
really—would be over there in the dense shadow of the hill, a hundred yards farther on.
Made it, he thought. Thank God for small favors.
It was surprising how silent the night was. There was little silence in the world; even away from people, there was usually street noise, airplanes, air conditioning. The cooling metal of the car’s engine ticked softly in the darkness; now and then, dried grass sighed at the memory of wind. Rudy’s eyes, adjusting to the wan glow of the Milky Way, slowly made out the edges of the cabin’s roof line, the shapes of long grass and twisted trees. His footfalls seemed very loud in that world of darkness.
Walking carefully, if not precisely staggering, he collected two six-packs of beer from the back seat and the remainder of his bottle of muscatel from the front. His head was beginning to ache. Just what I need. A busted fuel pump and a hangover to fix it with. They’ll probably figure I took the beer money and headed for Mexico.
He made his way up to the shack.
It stood solitary against the dark of the hills, the long grass around its peeling walls concealing the fossilized remains of dead farm equipment and broken bottles, the shabby asphalt tile of the roof sagging under the weight of accumulated leaves. He mounted the crazy front steps and set down his burdens on the narrow front porch, the mild chill of the sweet-scented night making him shiver as he stripped off his greasy denim jacket, wrapped it around his hand, and punched out a pane of the window beside the door to let himself in.
The lights worked, surprisingly. Hookup to the power tines in the grove, he decided, taking a quick look around the dingy kitchen. So did the sink, giving cold water but not hot. Well, you can’t have everything. In the cupboard under the sink he found three cans of pork and beans with prices stamped on them that were at least four years old, and a kerosene stove with half a can of kerosene.
Not bad, he reflected, if I had anything to cook. Further exploration revealed a minuscule bathroom and a cell-like bedroom at the end of a narrow hall, with a sagging cot whose threadbare mattress would have been thrown out of any jail in the state as cruel and unusual.
Nothing to write home about, he thought, returning to the kitchen and thence to the star-limned silence of the front porch. He donned his jacket, on which the faded blue denim was rather gaudily illuminated with a flaming skull with roses in its eyes, and settled back against the doorjamb to polish off the muscatel and watch the night in peace. As the dark quiet of the hills soaked into his soul, he decided that there was, after all, something to be said for the place, a perfection of solitude in many ways superior to all the beer busts thrown by all the rock stars of California.
After a long time of silence he returned inside to sleep.
He woke up wondering what he’d done to annoy the little man with the sledgehammer who lived inside his head. He rolled over, to his instant regret, and wondered if he was going to die.
The room was barely light. He lay for a time staring at the shadows of the dry, cobwebby rafters, memories of yesterday and last night leaking back to his protesting consciousness: Tarot’s party; the fact that it was Monday and he was supposed to be back at work at the body shop, painting flaming sunsets on custom vans; last night’s beer run to Barstow; and that pig of a Chevy. It might be just the fuel lines, he told himself, his mind backtracking creakily through the obstacle course of a splitting headache and assorted other symptoms of the immoderate consumption of muscatel. If that was the case, he could be under way in a few hours. If it was the pump, he was in for a long walk.