Drive

Chapter Eleven

That first run, Driver netted close to three thousand.

“Anything up?” he asked Jimmie, his agent, the next day.

“Couple of calls about to go out.”

“Cattle calls, you’re saying.”

“Okay.”

“And for this I pay you fifteen percent?”

“Welcome to the promised land.”

“Locusts and all.”

But by day’s end he had two jobs lined up. Word was getting around, Jimmie told him. Not just that he could drive, the town was full of people who could drive, but word that he’d be there when they needed him, never watched the clock, never made waves, always delivered. They know you’re a pro, not some hardass or punk out to make a name for himself, Jimmie said, you’re who they’re gonna ask for.

First shoot didn’t pick up till next week, so Driver decided to head up Tucson way for a visit. He hadn’t seen his mom since they pried her out of the chair long years past. He’d been little more than a kid then.

Why now? Hell if he knew.

As he drove, in a series of shudders the landscape changed about him. First the haphazard, old-town streets of central L.A. slowly giving way to the city’s ever-incomprehensible network of ancillary cities and suburbs, then nothing much but interstate for a long time. Gas stations, Denny’s, Del Tacos, discount malls, lumber yards. Trees, walls and fences. By this time the Galaxie had been traded in on a vintage Chevy with a hood you could land aircraft on and a backseat big enough for a small family to live in.

He stopped for breakfast at a Union 76 and watched the truckers sitting in their special section over plates of steak and eggs, roast beef, meatloaf, fried chicken, chicken-fried steak. Great American road food. Truckers, the final embodiment of America’s enduring dream of absolute freedom, forever lighting out for the territory.

The building into whose parking lot he nosed the Chevy looked and smelled like the auxiliary buildings in which Sunday-School sessions had been held when he was a kid. Cheapest possible construction, dull white walls, unadorned cement floors.

“You’re here to see…?”

“Sandra Daley.”

The receptionist peered deeply into her screen. Fingers danced nimbly on a worn keyboard.

“I can’t seem to-oh, here she is. You are…?”

“Her son.”

She picked up her phone.

“Could you have a seat over there, sir? Someone will be with you shortly.”

Within minutes a young Eurasian woman wearing a starched white lab coat, jeans beneath, came through locked doors. Low wooden heels ticked on the concrete floors.

“You’re here to see Mrs. Daley?”

Driver nodded.

“And you’re her son?”

He nodded again.

“I’m sorry. Do please forgive our caution. But records show that, all these years, Mrs. Daley has never had a visitor. Could I ask to see some ID?”

Driver displayed his driver’s license. Those days he still had one that wasn’t a double or triple blind.

Almond eyes scanned it.

“Again,” she said, “I apologize.”

“Not a problem.”

Above almond eyes her eyebrows were natural, straight across with almost no arch, a bit unkempt. He always wondered why Latinas plucked theirs only to draw in thin arched substitutes. Change yourself, you change the world?

“I regret having to tell you this: your mother died last week. There were a number of other problems, but congestive heart failure is what finally took her. An alert nurse picked up the clinical change; within the hour we had her on a ventilator. But by then it was too late. It so often is.”

She touched his shoulder.

“I’m sorry. We did our best to get in touch. Apparently what contact numbers we had were long since invalid.” Her eyes swept his face, looking for cues. “Nothing I can say will be of much help, I’m afraid.”

“It’s okay, Doctor.”

Brought up on tonal languages, she caught the slight rise in pitch at sentence’s end. He hadn’t even known it was there.

“Park,” she said. “Doctor Park. Amy.”

They both turned to watch as a gurney came into view down the corridor. Barge on the river. African Queen. A nurse sat astride the patient, pumping at his chest. “Shit!” she said. “Just felt a rib crack.”

“I barely knew her. I just thought…”

“I really must go.”

In the parking lot he leaned against the Chevy, stood looking off towards the mountain ranges ringing Tucson. Catalinas to the north, Santa Rita to the south, Rincon east, Tucson west. The whole city was a compass. How could anyone ever have gotten so hopelessly lost here?