The Last Tomorrow (8 page)

He had a little money saved. After eleven years of work in comics he had accumulated enough cash to keep himself out of the poorhouse for six months, assuming he was very careful, and if he
really committed himself to it he thought six months might give him enough time to write a novel.

He’d come out here from Kentucky to make it as a writer, to make it as a novelist, but had not yet written a single book. Not even a bad one. He’d written a few dozen short stories,
published six or seven of them, but he was still on page twenty-nine of the novel he’d begun in 1936. He wasn’t even sure where the manuscript might be. He hadn’t seen it since he
moved apartments in 1947.

His eleven years in comics now felt like they’d been wasted, like they’d distracted him from what he really should have been doing. He’d made no money and the art he produced,
if it could be considered art, ended up getting tossed into trashcans by bedroom-cleaning mothers and Sunday-school teachers. He could stay and continue to turn out tomorrow’s trash for
twenty dollars a page, or he could do what he should have been doing all along.

But he didn’t think he could do it in New York. He needed a change of environment, a change of scenery. He decided to go to Los Angeles. He liked the idea of getting as far from New York
as he could without first obtaining a passport. He would go to Los Angeles and he would live off his savings and he would write a novel. He would throw out his twenty-nine pages and start a new
novel in a new place. He’d sit on a sun-lit porch or on the verge of a hotel pool with a portable typewriter on his knees and write a novel while sipping rum cocktails. And he wouldn’t
go back to New York till it was finished.

That was his plan.

And a week later he stepped off a train in downtown Los Angeles, with a cardboard suitcase gripped in his fist and a small fold of cash in his pocket. He was in his new place and his future
seemed bright.

But things didn’t go according to plan.

In two and a half years he has written not a single word unless the paper it’s typed upon has been promptly crumpled into a tight ball and thrown into a trashcan.

He still pulls out his typewriter after work sometimes and rolls in a sheet of paper, especially when he’s been drinking. But then he simply sits and stares. The blank page is somehow
intimidating. He knows what he wants to put on it – it’s clear in his mind – but it won’t come. Something in him won’t let it out.

With comics it was easy. It didn’t feel like it mattered. He didn’t even sign most of his work. It was creative, sometimes he did something he was proud of, but in the back of his
mind he knew it didn’t mean anything. He’d never sent a comic book home to Kentucky as he had the short stories he’d published. He’d never even told his father he was
working in comics. Comics were disposable. No matter how good they were, they were trash. There was something creatively liberating about that. If what you do doesn’t matter, you can do
anything. But this matters. This is his dream. And he knows that as soon as he slams his fingers against those typewriter keys, as soon as he commits to certain words in a certain order, he will
have tarnished his dream.

He can’t bring himself to do that.

It’s better to wait.

Someday the right words will come and he’ll know they’re the right words because he’s been waiting on them for so long. When the time arrives he’ll sit down and write his
novel. He will do what he’s always said he’d do.

Until then, he’ll be a milkman.

3

He makes a right onto Wilshire, heading east. The street is empty but for him, and its emptiness makes it lonesome. Like a dry riverbed, it feels almost sad. This isn’t
how it was supposed to be. It was built for so much more. But he likes that feeling. He likes it because he knows it’s temporary.

This isn’t failure; it’s potential.

He rolls down the empty street, makes a few turns onto other empty streets, and finally pulls into an alleyway, driving along the backs of anonymous warehouses. Trash bins line the alleyway.
Tractor trailers parked at docks. Homeless men with newspaper blankets. Then he arrives, rolls past a steep ramp, slams the truck into reverse, and backs up the incline, ignoring the engine’s
high-pitched whine. He brings the truck to a stop, kills the engine, and steps out of it with a clipboard in hand.

The warehouse guys are sitting at a rickety table playing cards.

Once trailers are unloaded and product is inventoried and stocked, the warehouse crew merely wait around for milkmen like him to arrive so the day’s orders can be pulled and loaded. Then,
after all the trucks are on their way, they sweep, check inventory once more, and shut the place down. By eight o’clock they’re headed home to sleep, or to a bar to toss back a few.

‘Eugene,’ says the warehouse foreman, Darryl ‘Fingers’ Castor, looking up from a fan of cards. ‘How’s the novel coming along?’

‘Slow and steady. What about last night’s gig?’

‘It was sweet, man. You should’ve been there.’

Fingers drives down to 57th Street every Saturday night to play trumpet, the only speck of white in a six-piece Negro bebop band. Eugene’s gone out to see them several times now. He was
nervous, and got a few stares, the first time he showed up at the club where they play, but things loosened up once everyone realized he and Fingers were friends, and he ended up having a hell of a
good time. Now when he goes, rare as that is, the regulars know him by name. He even took a date once.

‘Next time.’

‘All right, I’m holding you to it. What’s your load like today?’

When Fingers isn’t blowing his horn he’s usually got something else going on. He knows everybody and has his fingers in everything, which is how he got the nick. People come to him
with goods they need to shift – one day it’ll be a truckload of Canadian cigarettes, the next a duffel bag full of heroin – and he gets a percentage if he can find a buyer.
Doesn’t matter what it is, he always finds one.

He’s asked Eugene to help him out once or twice, just need you to drive a truck to the corner of Slauson and Crenshaw, park it, and walk away, but Eugene doesn’t have the temperament
for criminal activity. Simply knowing he was driving stolen goods or illegal substances would make him sweat. One sideways glance from a cop and he’d crumble. The money’d be nice
– the only people who don’t seem to know the value of money are those who’ve always had it – but Eugene’s simply too square for that kind of work, and knows it. He
won’t even sell reefers off his truck, as some of the other milkmen do.

He glances down at his clipboard, looks over the orders.

‘Pretty full. You know Sundays. Everybody loading up for the week.’ He hands Fingers a carbon copy of today’s haul, written in his neat block lettering.

‘Dave, Gary,’ Fingers says, ‘help Eugene out.’

‘I’ll get the ice,’ Gary says, and heads off.

Divco manufactured a few hundred refrigerated trucks in 1940, but the Japanese ended production with Operation Z. After Pearl Harbor was bombed, Divco’s resources were instead diverted to
the war effort, and despite the war being over for seven years now, the company has yet to pick up where it left off, so they use ice to keep everything cold while en route. And occasionally Eugene
will chop off a small block for folks who don’t yet have refrigerators of their own. There are still a few people along his route who make do with their old ice boxes, setting their eggs and
milk on chicken-wire shelves so the cold can permeate.

‘What’s first on the list?’ Dave asks.

‘Two hundred and fourty-three quarts of milk.’

Dave nods, then grabs the pallet truck and pulls it behind him, like an uncooperative dog, toward the walk-ins. As he approaches them, a stainless-steel door swings open and Gary emerges from a
freezer with two large blocks of ice in a wheelbarrow. In just under fifteen minutes Eugene’s truck is loaded.

He thanks Dave and Gary, tells Fingers he’ll see him day after tomorrow, and gets into his truck. He starts the engine and rolls down the ramp, through the alley, and out to the street.
When he hits his route he’ll swivel the seat aside and drive standing up so he can hop on and off the truck more quickly, but for now he’ll take the cushion.

He heads east toward Boyle Heights where he delivers, rolling past stacks of newspapers sitting on street corners, waiting for newsboys to arrive. In front of him the early morning light is
creating a halo around the jagged urban horizon, the day finally beginning. It will be, he’s certain, a day like any other day. And he’s right.

Today will be a day to forget.

He’ll finish his route and grab lunch at a diner. He’ll sip coffee, smoke a cigarette, and read from a paperback novel while his food digests. Lunch will be followed by several
drinks at the bar on the first floor of the Galt Hotel. If he meets a woman, he’ll take her to dinner at the Brown Derby just a few doors down, then home to his place for one last drink. If
he doesn’t, he’ll simply stumble home, eat dinner from a can, and pull out his typewriter. He’ll stare at the blank page for a long time. He’ll probably even get a couple
sentences down. But when he reads over them he’ll see how clumsy they are, how clumsy and false, and he’ll wish he hadn’t expended the energy it took to bang them into existence.
He’ll tear the sheet of paper from his typewriter and throw it away.

A day like any other day. A day to forget.

We fall into patterns, boring and comfortable and predictable.

What he cannot predict is that by this time next week his life will be in turmoil.

While he slept two men were murdered, one with a gun and one with a knife, and each of those murders, like stones dropped into still water, sent ripples outward, and eventually those ripples
will reach him, rock the small boat that is his life, and send him overboard.

He won’t know it till this time next week, but this life he lives is already over.

1

Carl pulls his car to the curb in front of a diner on Broadway. He hasn’t had a meal since dinner, day before yesterday, and needs to eat. He isn’t hungry, nobody
would be after dealing with what he just dealt with, but that hardly matters. His body needs sustenance, so he’ll put food into his mouth, chew, and swallow.

As soon as the boy confessed to the murder, Captain Ellis made a call to the Juvenile Division, and their detectives came in, took the boy in for processing, and took over the case. Except for
Carl’s report and testimony come the trial, his part in it is finished. Yet somehow he was the one left explaining to the boy’s mother what was happening. The look on her face was
heartbreaking.

But that’s over. No point thinking about it.

The trick is to keep your soul winter-numb.

‘What do you want?’

‘Cheeseburger, I guess.’

Friedman nods, then steps out of the vehicle and walks across the pavement before disappearing through the diner’s smudged glass doors.

Carl looks through the windshield to the street ahead. He frowns at nothing. Against his own will he thinks of his wife. He misses her.

2

They found the tumor in her left breast two years ago. Her doctor recommended a relatively new treatment – nitrogen mustard via hypodermic injection. American soldiers
exposed to mustard gas during the war had experienced, as well as blisters on the skin and in the lungs, a noticeably lowered white-blood-cell count. Military doctors thought sulfur mustards might
have a similar effect on cancer cells and began a series of secret experiments in which they treated patients with them. After the war ended the experiments were declassified. The best results had
come from treating certain lymphomas with nitrogen mustard, but there’d been a noticeable effect on other cancers as well. Carl was hesitant, didn’t like the idea of injecting his wife
with a chemical weapon, but Naomi’s cancer was serious and she wanted every possible chance of survival, I’m not ready to die, Carl, so she did it. And started feeling better
immediately. The nitrogen mustard appeared to be killing the tumor.

But after a brief period of feeling well, she began to feel worse than she had before treatment. The nitrogen mustard was killing her white blood cells far more quickly than it was killing the
cancer cells. After a month they stopped the injections and Naomi had a mastectomy, followed by radium treatment.

She was depressed for a long time. He held her while she cried about the loss of her breast. He told her she was beautiful to him no matter what. And it was true. When he looked into her eyes
all he saw was the woman he loved, not the disease that had maimed her. And slowly she came out of her depression, and things began to feel normal again.

But nine months later the cancer returned. It had gone through the chest wall and infested her lungs.

He stayed by her side, he took care of her, he washed the dishes and did the ironing when it got so she couldn’t keep up with the housework. But something else happened as well. He felt
himself growing colder toward her in a way he hadn’t before the cancer returned, felt himself preparing for her death.

He hated what was happening but didn’t know how to stop it. Some part of him, some self-protecting instinct, simply went about walling off his heart, and his love, despite his wishes.

He remembered when they were dating, how being near her had caused his heart rate to increase. He remembered marrying her, how slipping that ring on her finger had been like walking through a
strange door ten thousand miles from anywhere you’ve been before – a strange door standing alone in the middle of the Arctic, say – and finding yourself, once on the other side,
miraculously, at home. He remembered the way her laugh could make him fall in love with her all over again. He remembered all this, but each day these things were more distant than the day before.
He became more and more removed from the emotions attached to these memories until they could play in his mind and he would feel nothing. It was like the memories were not his own. They were simply
stories he’d heard.

That was bad, but worse was looking at her and being unable to feel anything. He would stare into her eyes, search them, trying to reach the love he’d once felt, but could not. She
hadn’t changed, everything he loved about her was still there, as was his love, but that wall was built, separating him from this woman he was probably going to lose, and soon.