Necessity (2 page)

The desert has been carved into farms here, kept alive by the trickle of water at the bottom of tapered concrete canals; past the irrigated area there's nothing but scrub and sand and the heat against which the air conditioner struggles.

She has gone only a few miles and she's doing about seventy when the wheel begins to pull to the left and she hears the rapid flubbing tattoo of the collapsing tire. With more stoical resignation than anger she takes her foot off the gas and fights the wheel, hauling it to the right. Thank God for power steering. Prompted by a fragment of memory from her teen-age years she forces herself not to touch the brake pedal.

The car chitters all over the road. It feels as if it's ploughing through thick mud but in fact the speed is still high—fifty miles an hour now and only dropping slowly. She thinks: emergency brake? Does that operate on the back wheels or the front ones? But she's not sure; she knows only that if she does the wrong thing it may flip over, as her mother and father found out.

She lets it coast, weaving from lane to lane. She's very lucky there's no traffic.

Finally the momentum comes off the charging automobile and she is able to horse it onto the shoulder.

She steps out into the blast of heat and examines the damage.

The car droops over its flat tire.

She's no mechanic but she knows this much: drive any farther on it and the wheel rim will be destroyed.

All right then. What are the choices?

You're supposed to wait for help. She knows the procedure. Open the trunk and the hood; tie a scarf on the door handle and lock yourself inside the car.

In this sun with the engine idling and the air conditioner blasting—how long will it be before the old car overheats and dies?

And who wants to sit here for six hours expiring of dehydration before the next highway patrol cop drives by?

And do you really want to take the chance that a cop won't ask to see some identification?

Change the damn tire, then.

There must be tools in the trunk. She opens it and sees the spare and realizes she's never paid any attention to it before. Suppose it's flat?

Leaning in under the useless shade of the upraised trunk lid she unscrews the butterfly nut that secures the spare. Just this little effort drenches her in sweat. Now to lift the thing out and see if there are tools under it.

She hoists it over the bumper and lets it bounce when it hits the ground. What do they make these things out of—solid lead?

At least it bounces. Maybe it actually has air in it.

She sees a cluster of cars approaching as if afloat on watery mirages that hover above the highway. She pretends to busy herself in the trunk and does not look at the cars as they whoosh past. The last one seems to slow down and she glances that way as it goes by—an open convertible, young driver in a cowboy hat. He seems to be looking at her in his mirror but she doesn't try to flag him down and finally he guns it and the old Cadillac fishtails away with a loud pneumatic hiss of noise.

I wonder what he thinks he's proving?

She recognizes the jack and the tire iron with its socket-wrench end and its pry-bar end. These two—are they all the tools you need?

You changed a tire once, remember? Four o'clock in the morning after the homecoming game and the fraternity beer bust. Can't remember that boy's name. He was so stoned on grass he just lay back and laughed: “Far
out
!” And you changed the tire while he waved the flashlight around so that your work was illuminated as fitfully as a battlefield under artillery attack.

But I got it done, didn't I, and drove the worthless kid home and left him asleep in his car and walked half a mile to the bus stop.

She's thinking: how come you were so much smarter when you were eighteen?

Hard to breathe now: this air feels like sawblades in the throat.

Naturally it has to be the left front tire and this shoulder of sandy hardpan and gravel isn't really wide enough; to change the wheel she's going to have to get right out in the roadway with her hindquarters waving in the traffic.

What traffic? One pickup truck in the last two minutes. The hell with it.

The jack is an odd-looking device with a crank handle and at first she can't tell how it's supposed to work. She opens the door and gets into the car. It has become a furnace in here. She opens the windows before poking into the glove compartment, hoping to find an owner's manual that will have illustrations and instructions.

No such luck. Nothing in the glove box except the Pennsylvania registration and the maps she put there herself. Startling her, a drop of liquid falls onto her wrist—sweat from her own forehead.

A huge truck goes by: a semi at great speed. The blast of its wind nearly knocks her off her feet. As it gnashes away she's thinking about the likelihood of the truck driver's calling in on his CB radio to alert the world of her predicament—thinking no doubt that he's doing her a favor.

Must get out of here.

She studies the jack and the car. There's what looks like the open end of a pipe directly under the door post at the side of the car. Is the jack meant to fit into that? Why not give it a try.

It fits, a male member into a female receptacle. She turns the crank and is pleased enough to smile when the side of the car begins to rise.

Another cluster of traffic goes by. She doesn't ask for help; no one stops. After they're gone she puts her weight against the crank handle and soon both left wheels are off the ground. She locks the crank in place and pries the hubcap off.

One of the lug nuts is so stiff she has to stand on the handle of the tire iron to break it loose but finally she has all five nuts in the upturned hubcap and she horses the flat tire off the car. Her hands are filthy and she's ruined the damned dress.

She hears the crunch of gravel and looks up.

It pulls to a stop on the shoulder just behind her car: a Jeep or a Bronco, one of those outdoorsy four-wheel-drive vehicles—high and boxy, forest green. A man gets out of it.

His face is hidden inside a trim brown beard streaked with grey. He's chunky and muscular in faded jeans and an olive drab tee shirt.

“Need some help?” His voice is pleasant enough. At least he's not a cop.

She rises to her feet. She has the tire iron in her hand.

“I think I've got it licked. Thanks all the same.”

The man looks at the tire iron. He seems a little amused but she's not sure—it's hard to see what's going on under the beard.

He says, “I had a flat tire on one of these Interstates a couple years ago. Discovered I didn't have a jack. I waited seven hours for help and what I finally got was a ripoff artist in a tow truck, charged me fifty dollars just to borrow his jack and do the work myself. Ever since then, I see somebody broken down by the road, I see if I can do something.”

She's trying to look icy. “Thanks for stopping. I really don't need any help.”

He says, “I'm not a rapist, you know.”

“I hear you saying it.” She shifts the tire iron in her grasp: not an ostentatious movement but enough to remind him of it.

She says, “I appreciate the offer. It's very kind of you. But I'm sure you're on your way somewhere and I wouldn't want to delay you. I'm fine. I'm not in any trouble.”

He watches her. She keeps her voice calm. “Please go.”

He looks at the tire iron. “I guess these days there just isn't a whole lot of point trying to be a good Samaritan.” He turns with a reproachful snap of his shoulders and climbs back into his vehicle.

When he drives by he looks at her and she feels she can read his thoughts: independent liberated feminist bitch.

No good explaining it's not because you're a man and I'm a woman. It's not even because you're a stranger.

It's because I don't trust you. But you didn't need to, take it personally.

It's not you. It's me. I can't afford to trust anybody at all.

6
Los Angeles. A place for getting lost.
Is that a mistake? Why not Oregon or Idaho or Wyoming—somewhere miles from the beaten track?

The allure of somewhere rural and unpopulated is a valley of temptation; but on cooler second thought it would be much too easy for them to track her along those untrod paths. Newcomers never escape notice in such places, where gossip travels with the speed of a prairie fire.

Besides, she spent half her childhood in an Iowa plains village and they may expect her to return to such a setting.

Better to be swallowed amid the crowds. Better to leave one pair of footprints among the millions. Better to go to ground in the urban tangle with a thousand exit routes and ten thousand places to hide.

Hasn't she always made excuses not to go along on trips to the Coast? Hasn't she made a point of her contempt for Southern California? Citing at every opportunity Dorothy Parker's (or is it Fred Allen's?) line—“It's a great place to live. If you happen to be an orange.” And Woody Allen's dictum: “Los Angeles is a place where the chief cultural attraction is that you can make a right turn on a red light.” And the jokes she's overheard somewhere and adopted as her own:

“How many Californians does it take to change a light bulb? Eight. One to change the bulb and seven to share in the experience.”

And: “The difference between yogurt and Southern California?
One
of them has an active culture!”

A week ago she concluded that it will be safe for her in Los Angeles precisely because they all know how much she reviles and ridicules the place.

Besides, she needs the big city's facilities. There is so much to do and she has so little time. She's got a deadline and it looms alarmingly close. If she misses it—

Let's not think about that.

The city, then: Los Angeles. No further debate. Can't afford doubts.

Yet misgivings corrupt her. Will they know what she's planning? Are they one step ahead of her?

Quit it. Stop jumping at shadows. Get a grip on yourself.

Anyhow—face it, Jennifer-Dorothy. You turn up in East Tumbleweed, Utah, and you'll draw the stares of every drooling bumpkin in town.

She has examined this from every angle and she is persuaded it has been a cool decision, not swayed by vanity: it makes sense that if you're an unusually striking woman looking for a place to hide then you'd better seek out a place where there are a great many beauties, some of whose faces—like your own—have appeared in the ad pages of mass-circulation magazines.

7
The damnable wig has served well to disguise her on the road but it doesn't go with her coloring or with her grey blue eyes. It's hot and it itches.

Her hair is naturally sandy and usually shoulder length but she's worn it waved and blond for years; now she means to cut it short and let it hang straight and revert to color. At the moment the roots are showing and she's going to have to help the naturalization process along at first with a good beauty shop coloring job to cover up the yellow past. Meanwhile the damnable wig.

But changing the hair back to normal won't in itself effect much reduction in the possibility of chance recognition. Some other aspect of her appearance will have to change. Lose weight? No; any thinner and she'd look anorexic. Gain weight, then? No; she's too vain: she needs to go on liking herself.

For a day on the highway she entertained the idea of plastic surgery but discarded it because she wouldn't have time for the bruises to heal, and in any case it was a foolish idea and her life just now has quite enough melodrama in it without that.

Happily there's no town anywhere in the world where disguises can be obtained more readily than in Hollywood.

A few blocks from Vine Street, beginning to wilt in the heat, she finds a parking space two blocks from her destination. Hollywood Boulevard has gone to seed and she must thread a pedestrian traffic of hookers and dangerous-looking adolescents and ordinary people going about their ordinary business.

In the theatrical costume supply shop she tries on a pair of eyeglasses with plain clear lenses. She knows the lingo because some of the girls at the modeling agency in New York were always trying to make it as actresses. “I've got a callback for a workshop play—just a walk-on as a tough, no-nonsense secretary.”

The clerk, a tanned blond young man with the pretty face and resentful pout of an actor between jobs, knows exactly what she requires; he simpers helpfully and goes to a drawer.

The frames have uptilted corners and give her the severe look of a self-important office worker. She is very pleased by how markedly they change her appearance.

“And I think a dark red wig, don't you? Something I can do up in a tight bun at the back.”

He says, “I've got just the thing, dear.”

8
Studying the map, she sits in a booth over cottage cheese and a diet cola. The glass shakes in her hand but all the same there is a singular fascination in having the freedom to choose not only where to live but who to be.

She tries to recall what she learned about the area during her brief trips years ago. Not much comes to mind; but she's heard enough casual talk in her lifetime to recognize some of the place names on the map.

She knows, for example, that Malibu and Santa Monica are on the sea, that Bel Air and Brentwood are where the movie stars and million-dollar executives live, that the extravagant shops of Rodeo Drive are in the middle of Beverly Hills, that East Los Angeles is the barrio and that Marina Del Rey is where the boat people go—the sort of boat people who own 36-foot cabin cruisers and make an annual half-day voyage to Catalina Island and spend the rest of the year parked at the dock sitting on deck attired in tee shirts and shorts, swilling beer and watching ball games on color television.

Through sunglasses her eyes explore the map. Not downtown Los Angeles: too slummy. Not Orange County: too stifled. Not West Hollywood or Beverly Hills or Santa Monica: not much likelihood someone from the past might be in town long enough to recognize her, but no matter how long the odds it is a risk to be avoided.