American Morons Page 15

  “Move your Fleckered ass, and let’s roll,” said Q, and Ferdinand went.

  Moments later, humming the “Macarena” to himself as Q downed yet another beer, Ferdinand led the way onto the cracked and weedy driveway to his 1974 Vega, shoved his key through the channel he’d made in the rust on the doorlock, and popped the doors.

  “Sweet Jesus, get the air on,” Q moaned as he settled onto the scalding, split vinyl.

  “Air?” Ferdinand grinned. “They make ‘em with air, now?” He jammed the key in the ignition and turned it.

  The car didn’t kick or even cough. It just sat. The grin stayed stuck to Ferdinand’s face. This was only right, after all. Only fair. Every year, usually by dark on the first night of Christmas break, he came down with the flu he’d held off all fall, and stayed sick most of the vacation. Like his body, the Vega had apparently known precisely when it was okay, at long last, to go ahead and give out.

  For a few seconds, Ferdinand sat and baked in the morning sunlight, stroking the cracking dashboard as though it were the muzzle of a horse. A dead horse. Then he said, “Think maybe we should take your car.”

  Q grunted. “Walked.”

  Ferdinand turned his head in surprise. “All the way from…” Where did Q live again? He knew, of course he knew, he’d gone there all the time when…

  “Wanted to see and hear people, you know? Felt weird getting up this morning, knowing no one’s waiting.”

  Ferdinand nodded.

  “Of course, L.A. being the great throbbing nowhere it has always been, I hardly saw anyone anyway.”

  “City of cars.”

  “Hardly even saw those. Had to trot onto a freeway overpass just to make sure everyone was still out there.”

  Sighing, Ferdinand waved a hand toward the window and the noise roaring up the 110. “Pretty sure they’re still out there.”

  “Yeah, but where the hell are they going? Not my neighborhood.”

  The air in the car seared Ferdinand’s lungs, seemed to seal his skin like paint. Nudging the door open, he climbed out, wanting to be away from Q for just a moment, and wandered to the edge of his driveway to stare at the row of stunted trees lining his street.

  This was the scariest thing about bad L.A., he thought. Not a single moving car in sight. No faces at windows, no summer vacation kids on bicycles. But with the sunlight pouring honey on the palm trees and carefully kept rooftops and porches, and the purple flowers on the jacarandas swinging like little bells in the morning breeze, and that dry, delicious heat seeping up from the desert sand still stirring under all that concrete, you could so easily trick yourself into mistaking this place for some seaside Spanish town at siesta.

  Just try not to notice the bars latticed over the miniature square windows of each stucco-and-cedar bungalow. Try not to acknowledge the way those bungalows hunch too close together on their tiny, ice-plant-choked lots like circled wagons. This particular low-income development had gone up in the 1940s, but despite its age, and like most southern California neighborhoods—rich or poor, grafted onto the hillsides or welded into the desert—the buildings all looked as though they could be coupled together and rolled off the landscape in a single afternoon.

  Even so, Q’s description of his morning walk nagged at Ferdinand. Had his neighborhood always been this quiet? Where were the earthquake tremors of hip-hop bass as the local teens threw open their car doors and sat on their driveways to smoke pot and stare at each other? Where were the women, older mostly, heads wrapped in scarves despite the heat, wheeling shopping carts to the convenience store, glaring their defiance at each passing gaggle of driveway boys?

  Behind him, Ferdinand heard a single, hollow thunk. For no reason, the sound horrified him, made him afraid to turn around. His sweaty hands clenched at his sides. With a grunt, he forced himself to look back.

  Q stood three steps out onto the square patch of dead, petrified grass that passed for Ferdinand’s front yard. In one huge fist, he was holding the handle of a yellow Wiffle bat. When he saw Ferdinand looking, he thunked the barrel again against the ground.

  “This a Wiffle bat in my hands, or am I just happy to see you?” Q said.

  Ferdinand realized his own hands had stayed clenched. And deep in his throat, something was squeezing.

  “Leave that,” he croaked.

  “What, here?”

  “Where you found it.”

  “Found it right here, what the hell’s the matter with you?”

  “Put it back.”

  Raising a single eyebrow, Q ran a hand through his scraggle of hair. Then, with exaggerated pomp, he knelt and laid the bat gently in the dead grass. As Ferdinand watched, the bat seemed to lift slightly, then settle, like a bottle with a message in it washing out to sea. Abruptly, he stepped forward and picked it up himself.

  The plastic had long since mottled and cracked, and a faint, fetid odor wafted out of a pinhole in the top. Ferdinand swung the bat once, in slow motion, and whatever it was in his throat constricted again. Milt. Not your real uncle. My, Q, what big hair you have….

  “Goddamn,” Q said. “Retirement’s gone and made you wack.”

  “Think it was you that did that,” Ferdinand mumbled.

  “Used to play a lot, you know. Wiffle.”

  “I know.”

  “You do?”

  Glancing up, Ferdinand was startled by the look on his friend’s face. Mouth puckered, eyes glazed, turned inward. Pretty much like his own look, he suspected. “We’ve known each other a long time,” he said, though he somehow thought he’d meant to say something else. He tapped the barrel into the grass.

  What was it about that sound? Maybe just that there wasn’t enough of it. It barely stirred the air, like footsteps on an unmiked soundstage. Silently, he cursed the Vega. He didn’t want to be home anymore. He felt invisible enough already.

  And then, all at once, as though someone had kicked a volume switch, noise poured into his ears. That permanent freeway roar, like the world’s largest summer fan except it ran all year and made everything hotter instead of cooler, less bearable instead of more, and was so omnipresent he’d stopped noticing it half the time. Turning to Q again, he felt at least a semblance of a smile creep back over his mouth.

  “Got an idea.”

  “This your first time?”

  “Transitway,” Ferdinand said.

  Slowly, as though awakening from a deep sleep, Q shivered and glanced toward the street. “What about it?”

  “Riding it, what do you think?” Ferdinand felt cramping in his fingers, then all the way up his arms. The sensation was painful, and also weirdly reassuring. He was still part of the world. Could go where people were, be a resident of the city, even if everyone in it had already forgotten he was there. “Thought you wanted to go to Clifton’s.”

  “Before I die,” Q said. “Thought maybe I’d put off my murder until just a few days after my retirement.”

  But Ferdinand could see, by the way Q was shifting his weight back and forth and shaking his head, that the idea intrigued him, too. “Aw, come on. You, the caller of everyone else’s bullshit. Who do you know who’s even ridden the Transitway?”

  “We are talking about the Transitway, as in the bus line that runs up the damn 110, right? As in right on the 110? The one where people finally just hurl themselves off the bus stop benches into traffic ‘cause they’re already deaf from cars screaming by and burnt to death ‘cause there ain’t no shade and they’ve stopped breathing anyway because the carbon monoxide ate their lungs. That Transitway?”

  “Again,” said Ferdinand, closing his weary eyes and feeling further from smiling than he usually did when Q started ranting. “Who do you know who’s ever ridden it?”

  “Whoever it was told me there are whole gangs shooting up together in the stairwells. Using the homeless people and anyone else they find down there as dinner tables.”

  “Hell, they’re probably using them as dinner,” Ferdinand said, and now he did s
tart to smile.

  “That’s somewhere south of funny.”

  Ferdinand had heard the stories, too. “Look, what I heard, there’s no one down there. City poured all that money into it, and people won’t even go on the thing. 10,000 riders a day, they were expecting. I saw an article not too long ago that said they get less than 500.”

  “Wonder if that’s because they built the stations right on the fucking freeway. We’ll be waiting—probably two hours, given traffic and the frequency of buses our neighborhoods have always been granted—on a concrete island in dead sunlight or under some overpass where only the passing cars can see us get our guts ripped out, if anyone who happens to be around is in a gut-ripping mood.”

  “Like you said, probably won’t be anyone around. So it’ll be nice and quiet.”

  Q snorted. “‘Cause we’ll be deaf ten seconds after we get down there.”

  “It’ll be an adventure. Kind of our own little mountain climbing expedition. All that carbon monoxide’ll probably even give us that brain buzz high-altitude guys are always raving about.”

  “Mountain climbers go up,” Q snapped. But by this time, they were already walking.

  Halfway down the block, Ferdinand quickened his pace, and Q matched him wordlessly. The Transitway, he thought, couldn’t be much emptier than the street where he lived. Heat hummed in his skin. His footsteps sounded hollow, the way the Wiffle bat had when Q bounced it off the ground. And he kept catching his own shadowed, blurry reflection beneath layers of grime in the windows of parked cars. It was like seeing a home movie of himself twenty years older, crouched forward, inching his way to market at that lurching pace only the ancient and sick could bear. Except there wouldn’t be any movies, because no one would take them. And who would watch?

  The roar intensified. Glancing up, Ferdinand saw the entrance to the Transitway station and stopped. Q stopped beside him.

  Flung upward from the sidewalk at a 45-degree angle, a giant wing of glinting steel loomed like the wedged-open lid of a tank, shading the escalator that dropped prospective passengers out of the neighborhood into the maelstrom of the 110. Several of the stations along the route bore similar architectural flourishes, apparently meant to signal the arrival of a new prosperity to even the most scarred and embarrassing sections of Los Angeles. Even if all they really marked were the exits.

  Shielding their eyes against the beams of glare shooting off the steel overhang, Ferdinand and Q crossed Adams against the light, neglecting even to check the traffic, since there wasn’t any. The cramping sensation crept all the way into Ferdinand’s shoulders, now, and his steps got even faster. The excitement he felt was oddly nostalgic. When had he last experienced anything like it? Years and years ago. Maybe when his mother took him on the one and only plane ride of his childhood…or that time—with Q—going on Space Mountain at Disneyland. On some Grad Night excursion as chaperones for the students, maybe. Had Florence-Normandie really taken students to Disneyland, once? They must have. Striding even faster, waving behind him at his friend, he passed into the shadows beneath the overhang, reached the top of the escalator, and his mouth fell open as the sound surged up the shaft to meet him.

  He’d been standing there several seconds, gaping, when he realized Q was tugging on his arm and turned.

  Q was staring down the escalator at the noise. Even Ferdinand’s hips were cramping, now. Standing in that spot really was like being atop the caldera of a volcano bubbling toward eruption. Under their feet, the whole planet seemed to shudder as millions of tons of metal and rubber and cargo and drivers crawled and snarled and fought their way home or away from home along the so-called freeways. Even up here, the din bored into their ears, and not only their ears. Ferdinand could feel it drilling into the corners of his eyes and the top of his skull and the cartilage of his rib cage.

  And then there was the exhaust, which he half-believed he could see rippling in the air at the bottom of the escalator. It didn’t exactly float, any more than smog on the horizon did. It lapped, instead. Here at last was the manmade reservoir the people of L.A. had always dreamed of building, deep and renewable enough to sustain life in this city where nothing but desert tortoises and creosote should live. As long as the new inhabitants could drink and breathe carbon monoxide instead of water.

  “Let’s do it,” he finally said. “Be like our own private limo once the bus comes.”

  “Got that right,” Q half-shouted. “Don’t see anyone else stupid enough to join us.”

  Ferdinand stepped onto the escalator, which whisked him silently down. He’d gone maybe fifty feet when the surging sound finally swept up and engulfed him. Jamming his palms against his ears, he half-turned, saw Q still poised at the top, not yet descending, and almost panicked. He didn’t want to be down here alone, and somewhere in the onslaught of traffic noise the tunnel caught and magnified there were other sounds. From inside his head? A small child’s laughter, and whistling—like a Wiffle curving as it caught the air?—and something else, too. Ferdinand lifted his right-hand palm a tiny bit away from his ear, just to check. Then he dropped his hands altogether.

  That last sound, anyway, had come from the walls. A voice? Not exactly. An articulated breath? A consonant in the burbling, snarling torrent.

  Dddd.

  Hands at his sides, whole head ringing, Ferdinand glided down, watching Q recede out of sight. He could taste carbon monoxide slithering between his clenched teeth and down his windpipe. Just as he reached the bottom, he began to bounce up and down on his heels and opened his mouth, wanting to warn Q, shriek for him to go back. Then he just stood still, listening.

  What he heard was roaring from the freeway, full of overtones, vibrating all the way down his bones. No laughter. No whistling. He was standing in a cylindrical concrete walkway, brightly lit. He couldn’t see any tagging anywhere, just bright, cheerful colors winking off the walls and ceiling. So the city had continued pouring funds into keeping these places bright and clean and usable, even if they were deafening. Or else even the gangs wouldn’t come down here.

  The walls and ceiling were actually chrome, Ferdinand realized. The colors came from reflected sunlight shooting off the hoods and roofs of the thousand cars and trucks passing every minute out there, twenty feet ahead, where the tunnel opened onto broad daylight and the shelterless island of the Transitway station.

  “My friend, the Sun—like all my friends

  Inconstant, lovely, far away…”

  Those were the words his father had used to propel himself north, through a silence all but unimaginable, now, to a promised land that had, in some ways, kept its promises. His father had never landed a job worthy of his education. But Ferdinand had. And now he stood here, using the same words just to propel himself onto a bus so he could go downtown. It was a mercy, he supposed, the way people’s capacity for adventure seemed to decrease along with their opportunities for it.

  “At least drowning’s supposedly quiet,” Q shouted as he stepped off the escalator and stood next to Ferdinand.

  “What?” Ferdinand shouted back.

  Instead of laughing, Q ducked, and Ferdinand did too, instinctively, as that hard Dddd he’d heard before erupted out of the ceiling like hail. When it stopped, both men straightened, glanced up the walls, and finally at each other. Ferdinand was surprised to find his hands at chest level, curled into fists, one on top of the other, as though cocking a bat. Milt. Julio. Milt. Playing Bond-and-Blofeld in the dark as the cookie flashed overhead, that’s what they’d called that splotch-asteroid that appeared right as they topped Space Mountain’s lone hill….

  Sticking out a hand to steady himself against the wall, Ferdinand shook himself hard, felt whatever he’d been thinking fly to pieces. His fingers seemed to sink into the concrete. When he stumbled forward a step, he seemed to pass through strands of carbon monoxide hanging in mid-air like cobwebbing.

  “You hear a dog?” Q yelled.

  Ferdinand turned slowly, eyeing his friend.r />
  Q shrugged. “For a second, swore I heard Benjamins.”

  “Listen hard enough down here, you’ll hear anything you want to,” Ferdinand said, but too quietly. Even he couldn’t hear himself. “Benjamins?”

  “My…” Q started. Then he just stood. Slowly, as though he were liquid, a shudder rippled over his still-massive shoulders.

  “Q. You don’t have a—”

  “Got to cut down on the pre-noon Coronas don’t I? Remind me, yeah?”

  Ferdinand began to nod, and the shudder caught him, too. Because of the way Q said the dog’s name. As though…

  Then he heard barking. Stiffening, Ferdinand glanced fast toward the walls, blinking away the blinding streaks of color. When his vision cleared, he was looking up at a shiny reflection of himself upside down. A paunchy wannabe-gringo in a button-up shirt two sizes too big, floating bewildered in a sea of pavement. Why wouldn’t there be dogs here? It was as good a place as any to shit and scavenge and wrestle for dominance with your friends and get run over and die.

  Q, he noticed, was not looking. He was staring straight ahead. Slowly, he put his hand out, turned it over, as though awaiting a lick. And at that moment, Ferdinand thought he felt it, too. A trace of warm wetness across his palm, heavy golden paws on his chest, but there was nothing, nothing, never had been….

  Yanking his hands up from his sides where they’d been dangling, Ferdinand realized that his ears were literally quivering against his head, trying to fold like evening primroses fleeing light. He jammed his palms to his temples again. What he’d heard wasn’t dogs, or Dddd, either. That was just the scrambled sense his brain was trying to make from the din.

  Benjamins, Bond-and-Blofeld, Milt and Julio, piñatas and Robin Hood bowls, Petra laughing….