Doc glanced at the bills.
“What’s your name, boy?”
“Eric. Eric Guzman. Think of that as on-call pay.”
“You expecting to need medical care soon?”
“Nah, not me. I’m careful. Plan ahead.”
What the hell, maybe this kid’s whole life was a non sequitur. Beer couldn’t have hit him that hard. Not Bud, and not in the couple hours he’d been sucking at it. Doc looked up and saw the kid’s pinpoint pupils. Okay. Now it makes sense.
“Planning ahead’s what I’m doing. Something does happen, I’ll know where to come, right?”
Kid didn’t know shit. None of them did these days. Fancied themselves outlaws, every one of them. Up in society’s face, down for anything that went counter.
Doc suffered another half-hour of Eric Guzman before making excuses and hauling his own sorry ass off the barstool and back home. Long enough for Guzman to tell him about his sweet deal. They were taking out an electronics store on Central, but way out at city’s edge where the street kind of petered out, with mainly warehouses and the like around. Place was having a blow-out weekend sale, and Guzman figured by Sunday there was going to be one hell of a pile of money on hand. Security guards were all about a hundred and ten. Had his crew together, all they needed now was a driver.
Miss Dickinson was waiting for Doc, complaining, when he came up the driveway. She’d wandered in his door a year or so back when he’d had it open late one afternoon, and he’d been feeding her ever since. A mixed breed in which Russian Blue was most evident, she was missing half her left ear and two toes on the left front foot.
“How many meals is this today, Miss D?” he asked. There was a troubling regularity to her visits; he suspected she made rounds from house to house all over the neighborhood. But he opened a can of albacore tuna and set it in a corner where she could get to it and didn’t have to chase it all about the room, though she would anyway, long after it was empty.
He hadn’t cleaned up from the night before. Strips of blood-soaked cloth, four-by-fours, bowls of peroxide and Betadine. Bleach, stainless steel sewing needles, bottles of alcohol.
Good to be useful again.
Before he finished the clean-up, Miss Dickinson downed the tuna and came over to see what he was doing, wrinkling her nose at bleach and cleansers, steering wide of peroxide and Betadine, but showing great interest in blood-soaked cloth, cotton and gauze. She kept trying to paw these out of the serving bowls and plastic bins into which he’d tossed them.
His new patient was coming back for a check-up on Friday. Worried about infection, Doc had told him. Now he was wondering if infection was the lesser danger. He should warn his patient about Eric Guzman.
Chapter Eighteen
For a long time after Standard’s death he didn’t take on any more jobs. Not that he wasn’t approached. Word gets around. He watched a lot of TV with Benicio, cooked huge meals for and with Irina. “Learned out of self defense,” he’d said when she asked how he’d found his way to cooking. Then, as he grated fresh Parmesan, Italian sausages laid out on the cutting board to warm, he told her about his mother. They clicked glasses. A good, inexpensive sauvignon blanc.
Day or two a week, he’d go off to the studio, give them what they wanted, be back before Benicio got home from school. The checks Jimmie sent him each month grew. He could go on like this forever. Nothing gold can stay-he remembered that from a poem he’d read back in high school.
Not that in L.A. you could easily tell without consulting a calendar, but fall had arrived. Nights were cool and breezy. Each evening, light flattened itself against the horizon trying heroically to hold on, then was gone.
Home from her new job as ward clerk at the local ER, Irina refilled their wineglasses.
“Here’s to-”
He remembered the glass falling, shattering as it struck the floor.
He remembered the starburst of blood on her forehead, the snail of it down her cheek as she tried to spit out what was in there in the moment before she collapsed.
He remembered catching her as she fell-and then, for a long time, not much else.
Gang business, the police would tell him later. Some sort of territorial dispute, we think.
Irina died just after four a.m.
Driver having no legal rights, Benicio got shipped off to grandparents in Mexico City. For a year or more he’d write the boy every week, and Benicio would send back drawings. He’d put them up on the refrigerator of whatever apartment he was living in, if it had a refrigerator. For a while there he kept on the hop, moving cribs every month or two, old Hollywood to Echo Park to Silverlake, thinking that might help. Time went by, which is what time does, what it is. Then one day it came to him how long it had been since he’d heard from the boy. He tried calling, but the number was out of service.
Hating to be alone, to face empty apartments and the day’s gapping hours, Driver kept busy. Took everything that came his way and went looking for more. Even had a speaking part in one movie when, half an hour into the shoot, a bit player grew ill.
The director ran it down for him.
“You pull in and this guy’s standing there. You shake your head, like you’re feeling sorry for him, this poor sonofabitch, and you get out of the car, leaning back against the door. ‘Your call,’ you tell him. Got it?”
Driver nodded.
“That just goddamn dripped with menace,” the director said later when they broke for lunch. “Two words-just two fucking words! It was beautiful. You should think seriously about doing more.”
He did, but not the way the director meant.
Standard used to hang out a lot at a bar called Buffalo Diner just off Broadway in downtown L.A. Food hadn’t been served there since Nixon’s reign, but the name survived, as did, in patches, the chalk in which the last menu had been put up on a blackboard above the bar. So Driver started being there afternoons. Strike up conversations, stand a few drinks, mention he was a friend of Standard’s, ask if they knew anyone looking for a first-rate driver. By the second week he’d become a regular, knew the rest of them by name, and had more work than he could handle.
Meanwhile, as he began turning down shoots, and went on turning them down, offers declined.
“What am I supposed to tell these people?” Jimmie said the first few times.
Within weeks he shifted to: “They want the best. That’s what they keep telling me.” Even the Italian guy with all the forehead creases and warts had been calling, he said-in person, not just through some secretary or handler. In goddamn person.
“Look,” Jimmie’s penultimate message said. By this time Driver had stopped answering the phone. “I have to figure you’re alive but I’m starting not to give half a goddamn, if you know what I mean. What I’m telling people is I seem to have acquired a second asshole.”
His last message said: “Been fun, kid, but I just lost your number.”
Chapter Nineteen
From a phone booth Driver called the number on the coupons. The phone rang and rang at the other end-after all, it was still early. Whoever finally answered was adamant, as adamant as one could be in dodgy English, that Nino’s was not open and please he would have to call back after eleven please.
“I could do that,” Driver said, “but it’s possible your boss won’t be happy when he finds you’ve kept him waiting.”
Too big a mouthful, apparently.
“It’s also possible that you could pass me along to someone whose English is a tad better.”
A homeless man went by on the street outside pushing a shopping cart piled high. Driver thought again of Sammy and his mule cart laden with things no one wanted.
A new voice came on. “Can I be of service, sir?”
“I hope so. Seems I find myself in possession of something that’s not mine.”