Hip Cities and Lost Souls
Chapter ten
No sage brush blew out the open gate. But
Lance felt the emptiness as soon as he pulled the van in the yard. A ghost town
already after a single night. Little of Gil's magic remained in the wood and
stone to protect it against decay. The smell of desert was everywhere.
"Now isn't that queer," Dan said,
pushing up his hat with the tips of his fingers. He face looked ragged and
older.
"Where is everybody?" Sarah asked.
"Gone by the look of it," Lance
said, popping open the door. "But Mike, Marie and Chris should be
around."
"Unless, of course, someone helped them
leave," Dan said, glancing around the court yard suspiciously, the mark of
tires and oil visible in the dust.
"You mean the cops?" Lance asked.
"Them or our friends from last
night," Dan said. "The place doesn't feel right either. Like it's
being watched."
Lance felt that, too, and the after-battle
sense of quiet so prevalent in Vietnam. Though the scent of smoking guns and
rotting bodies was missing.
"I think we should scram," Dan said.
"Before we get caught up in something."
Lance nodded, staring at the empty place,
feeling the strain on the walls as if it would all tumble down.
"What about the others?" Sarah
asked.
"If they're not here now, they're not
coming," Dan said, engaging the gears as he twisted the wheel and backed
up through the gate. Lance stared into the passenger side mirror as the van
righted itself and caught movement: a figure running along the outside of the
house. But when he turned it had vanished.
"So what now?" Sarah asked sourly.
"We get out of town. Something's wrong
here."
"I agree," Lance said.
"I'm hungry and dirty," Sarah
objected. "I was figuring on getting cleaned up." She did look
ragged. Her clothing crinkled and torn from drug-induced passion.
"Not here," Dan said. "We'll
find a gas station on the highway."
"And eat candy bars for breakfast?"
Sarah growled. "I want real food."
"Food is a good idea," Lance said,
the long night had left him empty.
"All right, we'll find a diner," Dan
grumbled, but clearly didn't like the idea."
***********
The silver shell reminded Lance of home, of
the saturday morning breakfasts with his uncle as a boy, coffee and cross-buns
before the plunge into fishing. But this place sat on the edge of the desert
pickup trucks and tractor trailers around it like an island dock.
"You want to ear here?" Lance
asked.
"Not a lot of other places to choose
from," Dan said.
"We could go back into town," Sarah
suggested, eyeing the place doubtfully. "It's only a mile or..."
"No," Dan said. "It's here or
no place."
Lance tested his stomach. It wouldn't survive
hours of driving without something solid. He couldn't remember the last time
he'd eaten. Breakfast the previous day, maybe? God, he missed Gil's food
already.
"All right," Lance mumbled.
"But let's not drag it out. We eat and go."
Dan weaved the van to a vacant space between
two flatbed trucks loaded with farm equipment and parked. The scalding heat had
already started, promising a dismal day. They clamored out of the van and up
the steps. Inside, the air-conditioner hummed with little effect. The place
smelled of grease and sweat as hard-faced workmen looked up from their meals.
"I can see we're real popular,"
Lance whispered to Dan.
"Relax," he whispered back, then led
them to a booth where the dirty dishes still cluttered the table, remnants of
eggs and home fries an attractive torture. The waitress came, smiled
uncertainly, and cleared the dishes, returning quickly to take their order.
"We don't get many or your kind
here," she said, admiring Dan who grinned at her in his best L.A. grin.
"They don't know you're here,
darling," Dan said, going through the ritual of ordering without removing
his eyes from her. She blushed and retreated to the kitchen. Dan sat back and
lit a cigarette-- paying the price in a series of hacking coughs.
"Damn," he said, crushing the
cigarette out again. "Not a mile out of town and my goddamn lungs start
up. It's a plot... Hey, what's the matter with you?"
"There's someone staring at us,"
Lance said
Dan laughed. "They're all staring at us,
pal."
"Not like this fellow," Lance
whispered. Indeed, the figure seemed intent upon them while most of the others
had lost interest.
"All right, I bite," Dan mumbled,
twisting around on his side of the booth. "Which one is it?"
"The black man. At the counter. I think
he came in after we did."
"A black man?" Dan said, his face
growing pale under the brim of the hat. "In here?" He looked, then
turned quickly forward again. "Damn!"
"What is it?" Sarah asked.
"Trouble," Dan mumbled, easing
another cigarette to his lips. "Why don't we just leave before it
hits."
"But we haven't eaten?" Sarah said.
"You won't like the food we'll get served
if we stay," Dan said.
"Who is it?" Lance asked, looking
over again at the black man. But the figure had stopped staring. Facing forward
and ordering coffee, he looked little different from those around him. The same
jeans and t-shirt and boots. And yet Lance felt something odd. "Is he a
cop?"
"I'm not sure. But I have my
suspicions," Dan said, rising slowly. "Wait a minute, then follow me
out. I'll have the van running by the door."
He ambled down the aisle, taking a sharp left
out at the door. The black man didn't seem to notice, both hands gripping his
cup of coffee, staring at his own reflection in the mirror behind the pie case
and boxes of breakfast cereal.
An odd patience painted his face, a cool
self-collected nature mocked only by the pale scar down one cheek. Silent.
Careful. Deadly.
Sarah went next, looking nervous, but
innocent, like the mid-west girl Lance had found in the mountains, looking back
at him only once as she plunge out after Dan.
Lance rose and deposited three wrinkled
singles next to the empty plates, then turned to follow Dan and Sarah. He
almost reached the door when the black man's hand grabbed his arm.
"Not so fast, friend," the easy
voice said.
Lance turned, the cop's hand still on his arm,
tightening, the smell of spearmint gum spreading with the black man's smile.
"Huh?" Lance mumbled. "You got
a problem?"
"I would say you do," the cop said,
flashing identification. Lance caught the name "Demetre" before it
vanished again, and the sense of unease in the room as the truckers stared.
"Would you mind stepping outside with me for a moment?"
If Lance had a choice, it illuded him, the
firm grip propelled him through the door and down the steps, back into the
heated parking lot. A sea of police cars filled in the spaces between the
trucks, and around each, the tan uniforms of city cops bobbed up and down.
Suited men turned at Lance's appearance, bearing all the markings of undercover
cops. Dan and Sarah stood to one side, police around them, hands already
cuffed.
"Well, well," a sweating pudgy man
in a too-tight tie and collar said as Lance stumbled down the steps.
"Thought you'd get away from us, eh?" He flashed an FBI card in
Lance's face.
"I don't know what you're talking
about," Lance said, glancing at Dan who shook his head subtly from side to
side, telling him to say nothing.
Uniformed cops shoved Lance against a car and
cuffed him, too. But Demetre turned him around, overwhelming him with mint as he
pressed his face close. "Where are your friends?" the black cop
asked.
"Friends?" Lance asked, as another
cop patted him down.
"Don't get wise, punk," Demetre
growled. "You're in enough trouble as it is."
The cop searching him produced the bowie knife
from his belt. Lance stared at it, remembering how he had clung to it the night
before during the night. As protection against the Denver crowd? Or to silence
the love-making in the back? He wasn't sure. But it scared him.
"My friends are there," Lance said,
tilting his head towards Dan and Sarah.
"Not them," Demetre snapped.
"The others."
The cop seemed to know a lot.
"There are no others," Lance said.
"We picked up some hitch hikers along the road. But they're long gone. Now
it's just the three of us."
Demetre looked dissatisfied and lifted his
hand in some sort of signal. Uniformed city cops descended upon the van like an
invading army, plucking open all its doors at once. They cast out its contents,
packs, boxes, bags, blankets till everything lay on the gravel. Then, one by
one, they searched each item, tearing open sealed packages and dumping their
contents. Tampax. Cigarette tobacco. Cotton balls. Soap.
It became increasingly evident, they'd not
found what they'd expected. Officers grabbed Lance and the others and shoved
them into separate cars for the eventual ritual of interrogation. Dan again
signalled for Lance to remain silent. But he had been well taught from other
hassles.
Don't give the cops anything they can hang
you on.
Demetre looked on, his expression growing
darker as the search came to an end. He seemed angry and leaned against the
car, his gaze following each piece of baggage from the van. Initial enthusiasm
had died in the searchers. No drugs. No weapons. Just clothing, sleeping gear
and the odd memorabilia Sarah had collected along the way: souvenir ashtrays or
potholders to say where she'd been.
"Nothing," the pudgy FBI man spat,
his voice sharp and angry, drifting through the crack of window left open near
Lance. "You said we'd find the shipment here, Demetre."
"It should have been," Demetre
mumbled.
"That's twice Buckingham's fooled you
into moving too soon," the FBI man said, drawing a cigar from his inner
jacket pocket.
"Or too late. We dancing on egg shells
with him. We have to catch him with his hands on the drugs or it's no
good."
"And he's not one of this crowd?"
"Not likely," Demetre said, looking
away from the pile and towards the desert, as if expecting to see someone
there. "If one of them was Buckingham, we'd have found the drugs here.
Damn it!" His hand crashed down on the hood of the car. "If I'd moved
sooner this time, Gil would still be alive..."
Lance stiffened and leaned closer to the
window to catch the now-lowered voice."
"What are you worried about a drug dealer
for?" the FBI man said, puffing on the cigar. "He got what he
deserved."
"Maybe," Demetre admitted. "But
he was also a man with values, and helped as many in this town as he
hurt."
"A regular Robinhood, eh?" the FBI
man laughed through a cloud of smoke.
"No, but he had a conscience. Whoever
replaced him will hardly have his discretion."
"You're talking nonsense," the FBI
man said and spat out bits of tobacco onto the gravel.
"We'll see," Demetre said, looking
back at the pudgy man's face. "But this town's going to get a lot more
dangerous with Gil gone. Mark my words."
"Buckingham?"
"Maybe. If we don't catch him. Or some
other petty little drug lord who'll pop up with new connections..."
A uniformed cop interrupted Demetre and handed
him an envelope. Demetre nodded. The cop moved off. The FBI man removed the
cigar from his mouth.
"Well?"
"Nothing except a few seeds in the
ashtray."
"We can book them on those," the FBI
man said.
"But we wouldn't make it stick in
court."
"So what do you want to do? Let them
go? There are outstanding warrants on
two of them..."
Lance heard the jail door slam in his head. Warrants?
For him and Dan? It meant his phoney ID had failed.
"Larceny and non-payment of
alimony," Demetre grumbled. "It hardly seems worth all this."
"Just the same its a collar."
"But they could be of more use to us
free."
"You're crazy."
"I'm practical. It isn't as if we
couldn't find them again. We know where they're going after all."
The FBI man looked furious, glaring at Demetre
before tossing his cigar away. "All right. Do what you want. You're the
big man out here."
***********
The parking lot emptied quickly, dust swirling
up as police cars vanished first, then the truckers-- rednecks slipping out,
studiously avoiding the van and its occupants.
"Now isn't that a bitch!" Dan
growled, leaning against the van with his hat pulled back. Before them, their
things remained as the police had left them, piled into a single pyre waiting
for a flame, the sleeves of loose garments flapping out of the open mouths of
suitcases and back packs.
Lance said nothing about what he'd overheard.
They didn't need to know and he could feel the eyes of the law upon him, the
x-ray vision of justice that looked beyond his set of phony ID to the real him.
Now more than ever he needed to get back to L.A., find himself a job, get
himself north. Maybe he and Sarah could lose themselves in the woods, where
Demetre might overlook them like he had overlooked them here.
"I suppose we should clean it up,"
Sarah said softly, sounding as stunned by the whirl-wind experience as Lance
felt.
"I agree," Dan said and tossed away
another half-smoked cigarette. "But I damn well wish the others were here
to help." He bent and began to sort through the pile.
None chose to refold anything, but stuffed
clothing in any space that would fit it.
"We'll figure it out later," Dan
said. "The first thing is to get our asses out of here."
But half way through the procedure, Sarah
cried out.
"What is it?" Lance asked, leaping
up from his own project of pots and pans. Sarah leaned back from the metal box.
Twisted metal showed where the lock at been, a half dozen manilla envelops
strewn inside. All of them empty.
"Our money," Sarah said, looking up
at Lance with terrified eyes. "It's all gone."
***********
Lance sat in the front seat head pressed
against the glass, the van wobbling with its repacked load as it moved west
again. Stacked highway signs showed along the side of the road like tin totem
poles. Towns like Avondale and Liberty passed, part of the dust off-road vision
of flat-topped factories. Chincos lingered outside the doors of each in grey
work clothes, looking as miserable as Lance felt.
Dan's coughing increased as they rode, as did
his cigarette use. One dangled constantly from the corner of his mouth, as he
pressed the van's engine hard, pushing it faster than it wanted to go. Its
death-whine now part of the other road sounds.
"You see anything behind us?" Dan
asked for the tenth time since leaving the diner.
"No," Lance said without glancing
back. They were there. But he couldn't see them. Clinging to the van's bumper
like indian spirits.
The van rolled over bridges which spanned dry
creek beds. Some bore signs and names like Centennial or Hassayampa wash, or
the Gila Santa River. For a time, Lance wondered about them, but soon closed
his eyes afraid of them, too, as if a flash flood would seize them suddenly,
part of their overall ill luck.
The money had vanished and with it Lance's
grub stake. Job or no job, two thousand dollars meant a lot.
"Dan?"
"What?"
"How much you think we can get for the
van?"
Dan's dark eyes glanced over at Lance.
"Thinking about stopping for a roadside sale?"
"When we get back to L.A."
Dan shrugged. "Not much with the shape
it's in. Nobody'll pay extra for a dented side and bullet holes. A couple of
hundred if you're lucky."
"Oh."
"Don't let it get you down, boy,"
Dan said. "I'm sure the cop'll enjoy your money."
"If they're the ones who took it,"
Sarah said, seated in her usual spot between them, though her rosy expression
had vanished at the discovery.
"You have information we don't?" Dan
asked.
"No," she mumbled. "But God
knows anyone could have done it while it sat in that warehouse."
"So you think Gil took it?" Dan
asked with a laugh. "Maybe we should go back and ask him, eh?"
"NO!" Lance said with
surprising vehemence.
"And what's the matter with you?"
Dan asked, curious gaze studying Lance's face for a moment.
"I just want to keep going," Lance
said. "I don't want to ever see that town again."
"Not even for two grand?"
"No."
"Hey, look!" Sarah yelled, pointing
ahead on the highway. "Isn't that Chris?"
Dan slowed the van and squinted through the
dusty glass. A hippie chick with dark hair and a red bandanna sat on two
suitcases near the side of the road. She held a lazy thumb out in a
half-hearted attempt to snare a ride.
"Damn if it isn't," Dan laughed and
down shifted. The tires popped on the loose gravel as it pulled up to the
seated figure. Chris glanced up and grinned, then grabbed her suitcase and
lunged for the doors.
"Wow, people!" she said, diving into
the back, reminding Lance of soldiers hitching rides on choppers. "You're
the last thing I ever expected to see."
"We didn't exactly expect you
either," Dan said, starting the van forward again. "You were supposed
to meet us back at Gil's."
"I tried," Chris said, seating
herself behind Dan. She smelled of the desert and hot sun. "But things
happened, and by the time I got back the place was crawling with cops."
"Cops there, too?" Dan said.
"Did Gil get away in time?"
"You mean you don't know?"
"Know what?"
"Gil is dead."
***********
She knew little more than what Demetre had
revealed. But rumors ran wild in the downtown street. Small gangs had already
started vying for Gil's throne. Lance listened to it all, sickened by it,
feeling the same pangs he'd felt in the hospital after his tour in Nam. A kind
of shell-shock, as if he hadn't quite understood the significance of his
experience until after it had ended.
Death! Destruction!
But for the first time since the search in the
parking lot, Lance understood Demetre's reasoning for letting them go. The
threads of a new web clung to their heals as they headed west, a new trap
forming to catch the fly.
"What about Mike and Marie?" Chris
asked. "Any word on them?"
Dan shook his head. "But I'm not too
worried about him. If he senses trouble, he'll scoot."
"Yeah," Chris said, climbing back
towards the bed, her sagging shoulders suggesting she hadn't slept. "He's
good at that."
***********
Lance had read about the Mojave desert his
first time through it on the bus, a bit of tourist bullshit to keep his mind
occupied over the long miles. He remembered being shocked by some of its
information, about the short distances between the highest peaks and lowest
valleys. And while the van came no nearer death valley than the bus had, the
desert seemed terrible enough, stretching out on either side of the narrow
road. The growing dark gave no reprieve to its utter isolation, blackness as
bad as the heat had been as far as the eye could seen. There should have been
lights. Lance was used to lights, except for that year in Nam.
The brochure had talked about transforming the
desert, cattle ranches, fruit groves, grain farms tinting the land back to
green. But if anyone had started such a project, no sign showed, only the
occasional shack light glowing in isolated answer to the spread of uncountable
stars.
The little green Lance remembered had come
with the hob-nobbery of Palm Springs during the ride out, where the world's
wealthy teed off on golf course greens as the dust in the distance settled
around chicano laborers digging talc, boron and tungsten out of the mountains.
Now, Lance saw mostly what came and went with
the headlights, the mouths of dirt roads opening and closing at the side of the
highway, or other headlights rushing towards them. Signs passed claiming towns
right and left off the highway.
"Ghost towns," Dan said. "Some
of them are tourists traps. Most of them are old mining towns abandoned when
the mines went bust."
Lance closed his eyes, aching for the
undisguised obscenity of Los Angeles still many miles away.
***********
Civilization began again with the mountains.
Tokens of the previous pioneering spirit popped up along the road side in
shacks marked "Souvenirs." But higher up, and over the rise, housing
developments appeared, islands of house-groupings that looked odd as the van
climbed, as if whole segments of city had been plopped down in the desert.
Instead of gold, people came for the good life and fair weather. Lance envied
them-- though wondered about California itself and what made off-beat people
seek it.
He had come here as a fluke, staring out with
the idea of San Francisco only to be dissuaded by people on his bus saying it
had gotten bad there.
All junkies and perverts, the people
had said. Try L.A. They say it's still pretty cool there.
In the back of his head he had made plans to
build a little love nest. Sarah waited in the mountains of Colorado. He had
received love letters from here in Vietnam, telling him to come after he got
out of service.
But he'd felt so dismal after the army let him
go, empty and directionless. He had learned nothing the whole four years, and
nothing in the army had prepared him for the changes in America over that time.
The America of 1969 didn't even remotely resemble the one that had sent him off
four years earlier. Even the Beatles looked different, like hobos pretending to
play music.
And Lance had dreamed of being someone after
his discharge-- a full grown man. One prepared to face the world and survive in
it. Even his discharge pay seemed inadequate without a job to build on, and he
wandered for weeks the streets of New York, getting drunk and progressively
more desperate, looking for answers in prostitutes and dark bars.
Finally, nearly mad from his own excesses, he
snuck down into his uncle's shop late one night and wedged off the safe door
with a chisel, removing bundles of cash.
Ten thousand dollars worth of future, he
thought at the time, scurrying by cab to the Port Authority, then a series of
buses west, rehearsing the whole time the speech he would give Sarah.
I've got this little place...
But the bus let him off on skid row-- a long
dark street filled with vomit and piss, far worse than the Bowery in New York,
each of its residents eyeing him as he walked, as if each knew about the bundle
of cash in his pocket.
And there were cops, squat in parked squad
cars on each corner like lords of the street, watching him, frowning over him
as if his face told them everything.
For weeks he hid out like a forties movie
villain in a chicano rooming house in East L.A., afraid to do more than walk
from his room to the store and back, the talk of the neighborhood's housewives.
They speculated consistently about why a white boy would want to live in their
world.
And Sarah ate at him. Sweet Sarah
waiting for him in the mountains of Colorado. Waiting for him to come
and get her.
Not yet, he told himself. Not till
he had a place worthy of her.
Eventually, he came out of his cage and
discovered one unalterable fact: he hated Los Angeles. Not the Chicanos. Not
the blacks. Not even the lazy sprawl of hippiedom that had transformed whole
neighborhoods around Hollywood. But the bleached white suburbs that surrounded
those places, flat-topped houses stretching out from L.A.'s center like a paved
road, flattening everything they touched.
He should have felt at home. They echoed his
uncle's love of normality with green lawns stretching out in front of their
houses, with dogs and kids and two cars in the driveway. Yet it felt less like
a place to live than something built from a photograph, all the outer images
perfect without the least pretense at content-- like a movie set with nothing
more than the faces of the buildings.
And the loneliness had driven him insane. Over
and over he read Sarah's old letters as if just then receiving them, pretending
he could hold on here without her until he couldn't bear it.
Lance? she'd said upon hearing his
voice over the telephone. Where are you?
California, he whispered. Can I come
see you?
Of course you can come see me, you crazy
man! she'd said. And he went. And there seeing the Rocky's around him, fell
in love with them, thinking about them the whole time taking Sarah back to
L.A., plotting his return to them as if they were his lover.
And rolling over the dismal California
mountain and down into smog-stained L.A. now, he felt as if the cage door had
reopened, accepting them back into its zoo, the keepers grinning at him at the
rest stops, gas stations, and camp grounds-- all of them saying he should never
have gone. What other place wanted him? Only Los Angeles. And as the highway
turned into freeway, the overwhelming feeling came upon him that he might never
get a chance to escape again.