Drive (Drive #1)

by James Sallis

Much later, as he sat with his back against an inside wall of a Motel 6 just north of Phoenix, watching the pool of blood lap toward him, Driver would wonder whether he had made a terrible mistake.

Driver’s agent told him that Hollywood was composed almost entirely of C+ students from Ivy League universities.

One thing he could do, though, was drive. And he drove like a son of a bitch.

“I drive. That’s all I do. I don’t sit in while you’re planning the score or while you’re running it down. You tell me where we start, where we’re headed, where we’ll be going afterwards, what time of day. I don’t take part, I don’t know anyone, I don’t carry weapons. I drive.”

Maybe he should turn around. Go back and tell them that’s what life was, a long series of things that didn’t go down the way you thought they would. Hell with it. Either they’d figure it out or they wouldn’t. Most people never did.

He existed a step or two to one side of the common world, largely out of sight, a shadow, all but invisible. Whatever he owned, either he could hoist it on his back and lug it along or he could walk away from it. Anonymity was the thing he loved most about the city, being a part of it and apart from it at the same time.

Hips and rear end a marvel in her jeans. Growing ever smaller in the distance. Carrying that pain and sadness back with her to the lair where it, and she, lived.

Life sends us messages all the time—then sits around laughing over how we’re not gonna be able to figure them out.

“Tough audience.” “Audiences are. That’s their nature.”

Truckers the final embodiment of America’s enduring dream of absolute freedom, forever lighting out for the territory.

In the parking lot he leaned against the Chevy, stood looking off toward the mountain ranges ringing Tucson. Catalinas to the north, Santa Rita to the south, Rincon east, Tucson west. The whole city was a compass. How could anyone ever have gotten so hopelessly lost here?

“Hey, we’re the same. Sit on our butts all day guiding things towards disaster. Car or script goes over the edge, we start again.”

moviemaking. Unlike many of today’s parents, at least it provides for its own.”

This was in Scottsdale, back toward Phoenix proper, a high-end suburb where each community had its own system of walls, where malls teeter-tottered on a Neiman Marcus, Williams Sonoma axis.

What the hell, maybe this kid’s whole life was a non sequitur.

If in our lives we have one or two of those, one or two bright segments, Doc thought, we’re fortunate. Most don’t. And the rest wasn’t silence, like that opera, I Pagliacci, said. The rest was just noise.

Whatever he did, the Mustang hung there behind like a bad memory, history you can’t escape.

Jodie’s kitchen sink would have been heaped with dishes if he’d had enough dishes to heap. Those few he had were in the sink, and looked to have been there for some time. Grease swam in the runnels of stove-top burners.

Jodie’s former ride was a Ford F-150, graceless as a wheelbarrow, dependable as rust and taxes, indestructible as a tank.

Producers who couldn’t diagram a sentence to save their lives loved to talk about the “structure” of a script.

“Even if it does look,” Nino added—they were in Arizona by then—“like God squatted down here, farted, and lit a match to it.”

“Back in med school we always said you have six chest tubes, six IVs, it’s all over. You got to that point, all the rest’s just dancing.”

“Fine’s a town I don’t even visit anymore.”

Everything had gone so cheap and gaudy and hollow.

The other thing Herb did, was race cars at a track out in the desert between Tucson and Phoenix, in this truly weird landscape inhabited by ten-foot-high dust devils, chollas that looked like some kind of undersea plants gone astray, and grand saguaro cacti with limbs pointing to heaven like the fingers of people in old religious paintings, riddled with holes hosting generations of birds.

Never mind that each burst from those sprinklers was water stolen from others. No other way you turned a desert into sculptured green lawns.

“One tool’s much like another, long as it gets the job done.”

What you’ll find out is, only the lucky ones are able to forget.”

“Borges is writing about that great sense of adventure, of the Don’s riding out to save the world—” “Even if it’s only a few windmills.” “—and some pigs.” “Then he says: ‘The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.’”

never asked for any of it.” “We usually don’t. But it comes down on our heads regardless. Thing that matters is what you do with it.”

“Friend of mine claims the story of America is all about the advancing frontier. Push through to the end of it, he says, which is what we’ve done here at land’s end, there’s nothing left, the worm starts eating its own tail.”

“Think we choose our lives?” Bernie Rose said as they cruised into coffee and cognac. “No. But I don’t think they’re thrust upon us, either. What it feels like to me is, they’re forever seeping up under our feet.”

Looking into Bernie Rose’s failing eyes, he thought: This is what people mean when they use words like grace.