Crashed (20 page)

Thistle remained bent forward.

“You okay?” I asked.

She said, “Uuuuhhhh.”

“Good,” I said. “Good to hear it. Let me know if there’s a turn for the worse.”

We picked up speed a little, heading for the onramp to the Hollywood Freeway.

“Here we go.” She put out a hand and pushed herself away from the dashboard. “Okay,” she said, sitting a little straighter. “Okay, okay, okay.”

“Something’s okay?” I asked.

“Here it comes,” she said. “
Whoooooooo
, that took a long time.” She shook her head sharply, opened her mouth as though she were going to yawn, and then changed her mind, brought both hands up, and massaged her face. “Did I bring my sunglasses?”

“I don’t know. Your purse is on the seat.”

“Boy, oh boy,” she said, making no move for the purse. “I didn’t know what to think.”

“About what?”

“That shot. It should have hit ten minutes ago. I didn’t know whether, whether—”

“Whether.”

“Whether he’d shot me with water, or whether I was dead.”

“You’re not dead,” I said. “No thanks to you.”

“Yeah, yeah. Must have been those pills. You know? The ones in the box.”

“How many did you take?”

“Six? Seven? Who knows. I was already loaded from what
Doc gave me. Oh my golly, here comes some more.” And she sat up straighter and looked over at me.

“I remember you now,” she said. Her eyes were darting back and forth between me and the road ahead, and her words were only slightly slurred. “You’re the one who talked about Claudette Colbert.”

We were on the freeway by now, but not moving so fast that it was dangerous for me to glance over at Thistle. Her transformation was nothing short of miraculous, even if it was pharmaceutically induced: a shot of amphetamine, a couple of Percocets, fifteen minutes for her system to re-tune itself, and she was a new woman. Chemically elevated, then sedated to give her enough mass to keep her from detaching and floating away, she looked fit, alert, and ready for the balance beam. Feeling my gaze, she gave me a wary look and reached into her purse, bringing out the biggest, blackest pair of shades I’d ever seen. They were so big it looked like they should have a nose and mustache attached to them. When she put them on, they dwarfed her face. She turned away from me, looking over her far shoulder at where we’d been.

“You like Claudette Colbert?” I asked. “I’m surprised you even know who she was.”

There was an interval, perhaps a good, slow count of five, during which I thought she wouldn’t answer. But then she looked back over at me. She lowered her shades with an index finger and continued to stare at me, long enough to make me uncomfortable. Then she pushed the sunglasses back up, turned back to the windshield, and cleared her throat. It didn’t sound like anything significant, just somebody getting her voice ready.

“I used to love her,” she said. “I watched all her movies. Her and Carole Lombard and Katharine Hepburn.”

“Pretty old for you.”

“Actresses,” she said. “I watched actresses. I used to be an actress.”

“I know,” I said.

“I wanted to be good,” she said. “So I watched good ones. Bette Davis, too, but she didn’t like to be funny. She believed she wasn’t beautiful is what I think, and she thought people only took her seriously when she was being dramatic, so she was afraid to be funny. I liked the ones who weren’t afraid to be funny.”

“You were good,” I said. “I’ve seen you.”

She waved the remark away. “That line you liked? About the hat? That was from
Midnight
. I saw that about fifty times. I used to be able to get anything I wanted, you know? When I was on the show, I mean.
Anything
. I’d just ask somebody for it and they’d get it for me. I didn’t even have to say please. So I asked one of those people, the ones who were always around then, for those old movies, and I got a lot of them. I used to watch them at night, when I got home, when I was through being Thistle.”

“What did you like about her? About Colbert, I mean.” We inched toward the onramp for the Hollywood Freeway.

She twisted a strand of the pulled-back hair to see how wet it was and then folded her hands in her lap. It was an odd posture, demure and too young for her. “She was having so much
fun
. More fun than anybody. Everybody else was working really hard, knitting their brows and clenching their jaws and trying to look like they were used to wearing their costumes and everything. You know, you can always tell when an actor feels silly in his costume, like they don’t know where their pockets are or they wish they were wearing socks. So everybody else is all wrapped up in a sheet and feeling dumb but pretending to be Julius Caesar or whoever, really putting their backs into it, you know? And she was thinking,
I’m a big movie star and this is just like fatally cool
. There was always this glee in her eyes. You know glee?”

“I have a nodding acquaintance with it.” The morning sun
was dazzling on the roofs of the cars, and I envied Thistle her sunglasses.

“People don’t talk about glee much any more. Why?” She turned to me, the hands still folded in her lap. It seemed to be a serious question. “Do you know? Do you know why are there so many more ways to say you’re unhappy than there are to say you’re happy? Maybe that’s why nobody’s happy any more.”

“What’s why?”

“The
language
” she said, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world. “You know,
English
. It doesn’t give happiness equal time, does it? It’s like the hundred words for snow everybody talks about with the Eskimos, except we’ve got it for
complaint
. We’ve got it for
misery
and
boredom
and
too cool to smile
. And so you’ve got all these drips dressed in black and imitating each other, talking about how beamed it is to be
down
all the time. Talking about
irony
and
black comedy
. Starting fan clubs for serial killers. Making fun of happy endings. Like the world is just cinders and tin cans and there’s nothing to be happy about.”

“Are you happy?”

She pushed past the question without a glance in its direction. “If there was no word for
sky
,” she said, “I wonder whether anybody would look up.”

“
Are
you happy?”

She had been facing me, but now she shifted to give me her profile and look through the windshield. She put her feet up on the dash so her knees were practically at her chest. Then, making herself even smaller, she crossed her arms. After a full minute, she said, “When I’ve got what I want.”

“And what do you want?”

“Who made you Mister Question Man?” Her voice had scaled up slightly into the thinner, more querulous register I’d heard when she was talking to Doc in the bathroom. “We were having a good time talking about, umm, Claudette Colbert, and all of a sudden I’m in therapy.”

“Sorry.”

“Jesus. I was feeling okay, too. Just drive the car, isn’t that your job?”

“You can feel good again.”

“Yeah?” It was a challenge. “You got anything?”

“You can feel good on your own.”

“Uh-oh. Quick, somebody. Make a poster.
You can feel good on your own
. With a picture of the Olsen Twins, maybe. Put it next to the one that says
I won’t come in your mouth
.” She started picking at the sore on her lower lip.

“Don’t do that. It’ll get infected.”

“Yeah, and it’ll swell up and then my head will fall off. Leave me alone.”

“My daughter says you were sad when you were a little girl.”

“She did, huh? Where’d she get
that
insight? Some blog about ragged-out former celebrities?
Snort.com
, or something?”

“She got it from watching you. The show. She watches you all the time.”

“She should go out and play. Stop watching junk. Do kids still go out and play? Did kids ever go out and play?”

“Was she right?”

“Oh, who knows?” She drummed her fingers on one of the jack-knifed legs. “She was watching Thistle, not me. Maybe she was sad some of the time. Seems like she was. If she’d been happy, she wouldn’t—” She broke off and looked out the passenger side window.

“Wouldn’t what?”

Her face was averted. “You got anything or not?”

“No.”

She shifted onto her right haunch, turned three-quarters away from me and touched her forehead to the window. “Then leave me alone.”

I said, “It’s a long drive.”

“Go away.”

“You want some music?”

“There’s no such thing as music.”

“Fine.”

The traffic had picked up its pace, especially in the left lanes, and Doc turned on his indicator. I prepared to follow.

“
He’s
got something,” Thistle said, looking forward again. “Get him to pull over and give it to me.”

“You’ve got a long day ahead of you.”

“Yeah, and I just can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to it. Honk your horn at him.”

“Forget it,” I said. And then she reached across me and leaned on the horn.

The car swerved and I grabbed her arm and threw it back at her, and she banged her elbow on something, maybe the central console. She let out a wordless wail, rubbing her elbow hard enough to polish it.

I said, “I’ll sympathize in a minute, after I change lanes.”

“You
hurt
me. I didn’t do anything to you, and you hurt me.”

“I’m sorry. But grabbing the horn was stupid.”

She didn’t respond. Then I heard a sniffle.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, stop it,” I said. “You weren’t hurt that badly.”

She stopped sniffling and went perfectly silent. I couldn’t even hear her inhale. Just as I was about to tell her to breathe, she made a choked sound, and it turned into a laugh. “They gave me a
cave man
,” she said. “They could have given me a Thistle fanatic who’d gush about how great she was and talk about shows I don’t even remember. They could have given me a sensitive poet in a beret, or a paranormal who would have looked into my soul. They could have sent a drug dealer, which would have shown some consideration. But they gave me a cave man. A Neanderthal therapist. Sensitive questions and clenched fists.” She laughed again. “Who
are
you, anyway?”

“I’m Junior Bender.”

“No. That’s what your parents named you, or some variation on it. Who are you? Who have you made yourself into in—what—thirty-eight years? Thirty-eight, thirty-nine, something like that?”

“Thirty-six.”

“Well, whoops. I over-guessed. Maybe it’s because your face looks like it was attacked by a cloud of parakeets. Wait, I remember, a chandelier. Look, if you’re having trouble telling me who you are, if this is, as you therapists like to say, a
difficult area
, let’s start with something easy. What do you do? When you’re not driving people like me, as though there were people like me, what do you do?”

“I’m a burglar.”

“Oh, go find somebody who’ll believe it. Try the bus station. Lots of dumb people come in every day on the bus.”

“It’s true. Like it or not, I’m a professional burglar.”

“You mean, like full-time?” She stretched the words out derisively.

“Well, you see, that’s one of the nice things about being a burglar. You only work a couple of times a month.”

“What do you do the rest of the time?”

“Read.”

“Yeah. A bookworm burglar who punches women and does therapy on the side. What’ll you say if I ask you tomorrow?”

“Same thing. I’m a crook with a book.”

“Then what are you reading?” She snapped her fingers. “Right now, and don’t take any time to think about it.”

“
Oracle Bones
by Peter Hessler.
The Dream of the Red Chamber
by Cao Xueqin—”

“Gesundheit.”

“
Waiting
, by Ha Jin, and
The Rape of Nanjing
by Iris Chang.”

“Huh,” she said. “Isn’t Nanjing a city or something?”

“Yes. ‘Rape’ is figurative. The Japanese killed maybe three
hundred thousand people when they were occupying it during World War Two.”

“So things could be worse, you’re saying, in your oblique booky-burglar-therapist fashion. We could be in Nanjing, getting killed by the Japanese. With swords, maybe.”

“Actually, I was answering your question. But things could always be worse.”

“Oh, listen to you,” she said. “What the fuck do you know about things being bad, or worse, or hopelessly, end-of-the-world, chew-a-hole-in-the-wall miserable? You’re a cave man who breaks into houses two nights a month and gets all sensitive with stoned women.”

“Don’t be a jerk.”

“Okay,” she said. “I won’t.” She straightened her legs out and extended her arms in front of her in a stretch. I glanced over and saw the clarity with which the long muscles of her arms were defined. She was far too thin; she’d burned away most of the subcutaneous fat. “You got any money?”

“Of course, I have money. I’m a burglar. When we run out of money, we steal more.”

“Give me some.”

“For what?”

“To buy a bus ticket to Omaha, what do you think? Dope costs, and I’m not willing to do what it takes to get it free. Not yet, anyway.” She put a hand on my arm. “How about it? Save me from that. It’s awful, what they make a girl do. Please, mister? I’m a good kid, really. Don’t make me … don’t make me—” She laughed. “This isn’t working, is it?”

“Nope.”

“Aww, come on. I don’t need much.”

“No.” Doc’s right-hand signal was on again, and I looked up and saw the offramp for Woodman Avenue coming up. I muscled in ahead of the car behind me and slowed slightly to let Doc move over in front of me, getting a nice long honk for my pains.

“Why not?”

“It’s a principle. I don’t fund drug habits.”

She removed her hand from my arm and punched me on the shoulder. “How fucking high-minded.”

“And how about you?” I asked. “The question you asked me. Who are you? Who have you turned yourself into in the past twenty-three years?”

“Oh, my God,” she said, bringing the back of her hand to her brow like Joan Crawford about to scream. “I’m so
ashamed
. You have no idea how much I’ve needed to hear that question.”