While Drowning in the Desert

Chapter 15

It was a stupid move.

All the more so because I knew better. Even if I hadn’t known that this sort of maneuver only works in the movies, I should have realized that a 1965 Mustang doing 80 mph on a dirt road does not respond well to life-and-death struggles between the driver and a passenger.

Anyway, I lunged between the seats and grabbed the pistol between Sami’s legs. Sami grabbed my wrist, squeezed his legs and pulled back. His eyes were bugging out because the gun barrel was now pointed right at his balls and he was trying to control the car-and doing a pretty good job of it until Nathan took his cigarette and poked him in the eye.

“Ayyyiiiaaaaaa!” Sami screamed, and Nathan apparently admired the effect so much that he did it again.

“Ayyyyiiaaaaaaaaaaaaa!”

So the next thing I knew the little car was doing 360s, Sami was screaming, Nathan was yelling, “How do you like that, you little Arab bastard?” and I was holding on to the gun handle in Sami’s crotch and praying that the car wouldn’t flip over and kill us all.

Which would have defeated the purpose of going for the gun in the first place.

I was pulling, Sami was screaming, Nathan was hollering, the car was spinning around, and then the gun went off.

Now Sami really screamed, because he thought his balls had been shot off. I screamed, too, because I thought the same thing. Then the gun went off again and we all screamed some more because the car plunged off the road. By the time it came to a landing, the gun ended up on the floor by Sami’s feet, Sami was trying to get his pants off, I was clutching the back of the driver’s seat, and Nathan was clutching his chest, gasping and coughing.

I lunged for the gun again but Sami had it in his hand and pointed it at my head. His hands were shaking like crazy but I figured that even he couldn’t miss at this range so I sat back and tried to catch my breath.

Sami got out of the car and looked down at his pants.

“They’re still there,” he said. But he was hopping up and down because he had some truly wicked powder burns.

“What, were you trying to kill me?!” Nathan yelled at me.

“You tried to kill me!” Sami screeched at me.

So it was all my fault, of course. Then I saw two big holes in the floor of the car and realized that I had just shot not Sami but a 1965 Mustang. Then I smelled the gasoline.

“Get out!” I yelled at Nathan.

But he was struggling with the seat belt.

I jumped out the driver’s side, ran around the back of the car and jerked the door open. These seat belts are perfectly simple when you’re getting out at the grocery store or something, but they’re another thing altogether when your hands are shaking, your legs are quivering, an old man is fumbling around with the latch, and the car is about to blow.

And the old man is smoking a cigarette.

I snatched the cigarette out of his mouth and tossed it. Then I got the latch unhooked, got my arms under Nathan’s shoulders and knees and carried him away from the car. Sami realized what was going on and stopped hopping up and down long enough to start running.

Just as the stupid thing blew up.

Sami was hopping up and down again like Rumpelstiltskin, not because of the powder burns on his balls apparently, because now he was screeching, “My car! My car!”

I laid Nathan down, checked him for injuries and then felt around my own back to see if there were any stray pieces of a 1965 Mustang embedded in it. There weren’t any, so it was with some relief that I sat down beside Nathan.

“My car, my car,” Sami whimpered.

“Stop whining,” I said. “You have insurance, don’t you?”

For some reason that made Sami really moan. But by this time I was more pissed off than I was scared so I said, “Your precious car, my ass. You know something, you dumb little jerk? I’m glad I shot your car.”

Sami pointed the gun at me. “I shoot you now!”

“You’re not going to shoot us now,” I said.

I looked around. On the other side of the road there was a smaller dirt road that led up behind a small knoll. It looked as if there were some deserted shacks up there. Maybe it was a deserted old mine. It would at least be some shelter for the night and some shade for the next day. If there was one.

I helped Nathan up and asked him if he was okay to walk. He said he was, so we started up the little road toward the shacks.

“I shoot you now!” Sami said as we headed out.

“No, you’re not,” I said. “Think for a second, Sami. If you shoot us now, you can’t get away from the scene of the crime. If you shoot us now, you’ll be a married man in San Quentin this time next year.”

Sami had a wonderfully blank expression on his face that I would have thought was funny if we hadn’t been marooned in the middle of the Mojave Desert with a not-overly-bright, incompetent criminal who still had the gun.

“Oh,” Sami said.

“Oh,” I answered.

“You’re right,” Sami said.

“This is probably a first for you,” Nathan said, so I figured he was basically intact.

We reached the old shack, which was in fact the remnants of a played-out mine of some sort. It was a one-room cabin with two busted-out windows with no glass, flanking a doorway with no door. Not only was there no glass and no door, there was no water, no food, no blankets, no nothing of anything that we could use.

But there was nowhere else to go and Nathan looked like he was out of gas.

“I’m staying here,” I said.

“Me too,” said Nathan.

Sami didn’t know what to do, so the next step was fairly predictable-he called Heinz.

“Mr. Silverstein,” I whispered while Sami was dialing, “would you mind telling me why these people want to kill you?”

Nathan shrugged, “Maybe they saw the beach movies.”

For some reason I thought he was being disingenuous.

Then again, I had seen the beach movies.

“Hello, Heinz?”

Nathan nudged me. “So this fella Hannigan had a schlong that a horse shouldn’t have. That an elephant shouldn’t have. They called him the One-Eyed Giant, and not because he was tall, either…”

“Sorry, Heinz, I forget, okay? I’m very upset… I can’t do that, Heinz… Because then I couldn’t get away from the scene of the crime…”

“One night we’re in a restaurant,” Nathan continued. “I’m having a nice piece of fish. Hannigan leans over the table to get the salt and his eye falls out. I go to cut my fish, think I’m looking at the fish-eye, but what I am looking at is Hannigan’s eye…”

“Can you come get me, Heinz? I’m sorry. I forget. Where am I? Hold on.” Sami looked around. “In the desert.”

“I start to cut into the fish,” Nathan continued, “and Hannigan looks at me with his one eye and says, ‘When did you ever see a fish with blue eyes?’ Well, he starts to laugh, I start to laugh, Paulette starts to laugh. ‘When did you ever see a fish with blue eyes?’

“Some old mine, or something…” Sami started to give him directions. “Then you go… Hello? Hello?”

“The battery’s dead,” I said.

“Shit.”

“You can recharge it in the car.”

Sami gave me the best dirty look he could with his one good eye.

“I shoot you,” he said.

“Not until Heinz gets here, you won’t.”

So I guess I told him.

“So Hannigan picks up his eye and goes into the washroom. I go with him. He starts to wash the eye under the tap when he loses his grip and the eye goes down the drain. We call the owner, Jack Donahue

…”

“Heinz is coming,” Sami said.

“Yippee.”

“… who was married to the former Dorothy DeLillo, whose sister was Marjorie DeLillo. Together they used to be the former DeLillo Sisters…”

So Heinz was coming. At least we’d get to meet the whole brain trust. Heinz was coming, and I didn’t expect Sami to try anything horrible until the boss got here. In the meantime there was a lot to do. It wouldn’t hurt to get a fire going, because desert nights can get very cold, especially for an old man.

So I gathered up some slats from the old shack, borrowed Nathan’s lighter, and got the fire going. Then I sat back on an old log, watched the fire, and the bright stars, which in the desert night looked like they were about ten feet away, and thought about old men and babies.

And lost chances.