Further Out Than You Thought Page 8

  “How far you going?” she asked Brett.

  “Silver Lake,” Brett said, pulling the front of her hat down, ready for anything. “You?”

  “Miracle Mile.”

  Stevie leaned in to kiss her cheek, and Brett took her in her arms and pressed her tight. Stevie breathed her in—Brett’s chest and neck and hair, her smell. In Brett’s arms, she felt small and, for that instant, safe. If ever she could stop time, it would be now. This would be the moment she would choose, she thought.

  And then Brett let go. And they were in their separate cars. They were moving into the river of traffic, becoming two of many.

  Eleven

  THE 405 WAS moving—not fast, but it was moving. She passed Arbor, Hillcrest, Manchester. Her window rolled down, she felt the hot breeze messing with her hair. Maybe things weren’t as bad as Devotion had thought. Maybe she’d drive straight to Pico and pick Leo up and it’d be just like any other day, only they’d have time at home, together, like in the old days. Time to talk and play music and write. And if they had time, maybe she’d tell him.

  The freeway was moving, and then it wasn’t.

  In their cars, the people looked straight ahead. Sitting ducks, no one would risk interaction, the wrong sort of look that might draw the wrong sort of attention. They had their windows rolled up, air-conditioning on. White noise. And over it, Gwen imagined, their radios issued warnings—which routes not to take. How to play it safe. Sit tight, and everything would be fine. Everything would stay as it had been. No broken jaw and arms and ribs. No bricks bashed into your skull.

  South La Cienega was empty to her right, a few cars veering off the freeway down it. If she took it, she’d have further to drive up Pico to find Leo, but if it was moving, it was worth a try. She should check the radio, know what those helicopters flying low over her head knew—where the riots were in full swing, where you didn’t want to be. But her car didn’t have an antenna so the radio wasn’t an option.

  As far up the freeway as she could see the cars were inching. And the cloudless sky had darkened from absinthe to a dull gray-green in the time she’d sat in her car, deciding. She was creeping ahead, and in a minute she’d be past the exit. In a minute, she’d be stuck. If cars were taking South La Cienega, it couldn’t be that bad. The section of town it traversed wasn’t the best. She knew that much. It was run-down, and while prices were a few cents lower at the Arco she passed on a regular basis, she never felt comfortable stopping there for gas. The street—a thoroughfare, a freeway substitute—was a means of getting to and from. And it was open.

  Fuck it. It was worth a try.

  She pulled into the right-hand lane and put the gas pedal to the floor. She could smell smoke, and as if speed would help her escape it, she drove faster, down South La Cienega, past the hills and the metal oil pumps that always reminded her—with their long, slow necks rising and falling—of dinosaurs drinking water, what were they called, brachiosaurs? She drove past the fields of clover and mustard—fields—as if from another time, so green and yellow, so open. Past the cemetery, through green lights and into the outskirts of neighborhoods, past dollar stores, pawn and gun shops and places for payday loans, to where the river of traffic grew turgid, to where the smoke was thick and then thicker, the black smoke, and she was stopped, trapped, cars in front of her, cars behind her, and on the other side of the street, not two lanes away, the gas station was on fire. The Arco station she’d driven past a hundred times was sending its massive smoke signal to the sky. She could hear what sounded like distant screams.

  At first, she wasn’t sure what she was seeing. Hundreds of people were on a street where there should have been only cars. People were running across the street, between the stopped cars, toward the flames. It took her a moment to understand. Through the smoke, behind the gas station, was a Kmart. And the people running toward it were men—black men—in groups of five, six, seven. On the sidewalk, other men, white men, were walking with their video cameras that read NBC, ABC, CBS. They were recording everything—the looters, the flames, the traffic, the black air. This was news. People across the country—hell, all over the world—would want to watch this; with a bag of potato chips, they’d prop their feet on the coffee table, open a Coke and settle in.

  Here she was, in the middle of a full-blown riot. Her attempt to avoid it had landed her a front seat at the spectacle.

  She looked in the rearview mirror at the car behind her, an old blue Pontiac. Four black teenagers, looking ready to fight, filled it with the power of youth and rage. They were wearing muscle shirts and had the muscles to go with them. They were sweating, waiting for the perfect moment to jump from the car and join the action. The one in the passenger seat—who looked the youngest, all of sixteen—gripped a baseball bat.

  She rolled up her windows and locked her doors. She went to put the inside air on—her car had no air-conditioning, but at least she could keep the smoke out, or try to—and her hand was so shaky she turned the tape deck on, too, and Bing was singing. Would you rather be a fish? A fish won’t do anything but swim in a brook. He can’t write his name or read a book. To fool the people is his only thought. Yes. Without a doubt. She would rather be a fish. A pig. A monkey. Anything but a human.

  She turned it off. She had to concentrate.

  Where were the police? The fire engines?

  The line of cars ahead was backed up as far as she could see and the black smoke from the flaming gas station was a wave, an ocean she was under.

  And she’d never felt so white.

  Yet she was part Latina. One-fourth, to be exact, from her mother’s mother, Carlotta, from Globe, Arizona, a dancer with fire in her blood. But no one would ever guess Gwen’s ancestry. Her skin was pale, the majority of her ancestors having come from England, that cold, damp, dismal island, breeder of consumption, of whalers, and of slave traders.

  Her right foot shook as it pressed on the brake. Drinking the last from her bottle of water, she spilled most of it down her shirt.

  This, she realized, was anger. Manifested, en masse. She was surrounded by it, stuck inside it. Nothing to do but feel the heat, watch the flames spread and rise. Anger. It was the emotion Gwen had the hardest time feeling. Even when she’d acted, it had evaded her, like a memory just beyond her reach. She longed to feel it percolate inside her, to feel it seize her, as it did in her dreams, when it was Leo at whom her anger was aimed. Get a job. Make it happen—something, anything. Stop smoking so much goddamn pot. She longed to close her hand into a fist and punch. To bloody a nose, make a mouth swell. If she were angry right now, her leg wouldn’t be shaking. And if she were black, she’d be angry all right. She’d be indignant. Out to take the city, to take what had been denied.

  She wished her skin were black, and then she realized that not once had she wished this before. She remembered, as a child, having felt somehow fortunate, and also guilty, to have been born white, to have the world open to her, like the door to some invitation-only affair. And that was the seventies. Martin Luther King had triumphed. And there were those who, still alive, had transcended the oppression, the hate, and the fear and were beacons for all. The Jeffersons was on nighttime television, and there were the Jackson 5 and Donna Summer and the Pointer Sisters and all of those black ballplayers, but in that north-central section of Phoenix, the African Americans she’d met were waiters at the country club, they were maids or nannies. The kids she’d gone to grade school with were white. And in high school, when there was busing, the races hadn’t mixed. The races. As if they were real. As if we all weren’t a mix.

  She felt like she’d been punched in the gut. She felt sick. She wanted no part of it. America—home of the free. What a joke.

  The smoke billowed and, feeding on the gasoline, the flames reached high and wide, and still the traffic hadn’t budged. Her gas light blinked on. She’d had less fuel than she thought. She’d forgotten to check and now it was too late. She was sweating. With cars on all sides, she couldn�
��t breathe. The teenagers in the blue Pontiac opened the doors and jumped out. She wished she had a gun. A crowbar. A knife at least. They ran, scattering, and the young one with the bat stopped in front of her car. He looked at her. In his eyes, she recognized her own terror. And then she watched him turn and run past a flaming stream of gasoline.

  She had to get away. She nudged her car into the right-hand lane. Careful, so careful. Smiling her pretty-please. Praying not to offend. And then she heard a boom, an explosion. She felt her car shake. And the smoke was so thick she couldn’t see anything beyond the windows.

  This was it. The way her life ended, hers and the child inside her. In the chaos, she’d forgotten she was pregnant. Now she had two lives to save.

  She took to the shoulder of the road. If she hit someone, she hit someone. She had to get out. She had more life to live. What was she doing here anyway, in this city, living so close to so many people, fighting for her share of the air? Pressing down the gas pedal, her foot shook in the flimsy little flip-flop, and she thought of beaches. Boundless stretches of sand without humans. She thought of the ocean, and San Clemente, where she and Leo had driven one early morning last autumn to watch the sunrise, where they swam in icy waves and rode them to the shore, where they’d wrapped themselves in towels and eaten green apples. She wanted more. More dawn skies, more salt air, more apples. She gave the car more gas.

  Hell, yes. Thank God. Out of the jam, she could see again. She could breathe.

  And here was a street, a side street, the entrance to a neighborhood. She turned right, slowed as she realized: the street was awake. It was eyes and dark, glistening skin, everyone in front of their apartment buildings, their tiny houses with chipped paint, with small, sliding windows guarded by black iron bars. In their patchy, treeless lawns, women held children on their hips. One woman in a dress with pink and blue flowers, strangely vivid in the haze, was crying, screaming after a man as he ran from her, ran with the other men down the street, heading for the thick of it.

  She saw men and some women running the other way, too, back to the neighborhood, returning with their arms full of shoes, clothes, toys, with boxes on their shoulders. The big pack of Pampers. A microwave oven. The new TV for the family, the TV they’d never be able to afford. It was Christmas, without interest. A true miracle.

  Gwen thought she might turn around, go back where she came from. But what was there to go back to? Smoke and cars? There had to be a way out if she kept on driving.

  She drove—not too fast, not too slow—through the neighborhood that was not hers. She could have been driving down a street in any city. This was not the Los Angeles she knew. Though her drive past this neighborhood was routine, she’d always been in that world of her own making—of her own music and her own thoughts—sticking to the thoroughfare and seeing what she chose to see, driving with blinders on, mostly.

  She drove, and the people—a woman with a boy’s hand in hers, an old man leaning on his cane, a man carrying a box on his head—watched her in her dirty gray Nissan. They watched her and she watched them. Them. When had they become them? When had they gone from subject to object? When had they become the other? The they on which one can project one’s own darkness, one’s shadow. In order to bring it to light?

  What she felt was their anger, frightening and beautiful. And what did they see in her? Privilege? A girl who had gone to college on her daddy’s dime? A girl who floated over the engine of the city, who flitted where she liked, who lived where there were trees and shopped at boutiques? No, she reminded herself. She wasn’t one of those people. The rich ones with assistants and nannies and maids. She wasn’t driving a Porsche. She wasn’t driving a Jag. She was in a dirty, gray, falling-apart Nissan Sentra, for Christ’s sake. And anyhow, this was what she saw, looking through her interpretation of their view. It was all made up. How could she possibly know what they saw?

  They watched her and she watched them and the street was longer than she’d thought. The street curved to the left and then to the right, and now she was driving faster, and she turned left, because she could see a way out of the maze. And here she was, back on South La Cienega, a few blocks from where she had been stuck in the traffic and the smoke.

  This time she wasn’t going to wait in line. This time she drove on the shoulder, in the lane that wasn’t a lane—past one streetlight, past two, past the smoke and the blockade of cars—until she was free. Free on the open road. She rolled down her window, took a deep breath of the burned air.

  The rush of it flooded her veins. It filled her with a new kind of high. She was beyond thought, her every cell feeling for her next move. She floored the gas pedal, and her tin can of a car went a hundred in a thirty-five-mile-an-hour zone as she passed a fire on her left, a torched store, another and another. Inside the chaos, she was all animal, all instinct; alive to the pulse of her blood, to the prickling of her armpits; alive to each impression—the bitter smell of the smoke, her burning eyes and nose and throat, the flames and the empty streets. It felt like she was in a war zone, and it looked like what she had seen on the news and in movies. But from inside her car, the city seemed quiet, dreamlike and open, as if anything could happen.

  And here, inside the slow-motion silence, her stale life was so much ash on the wind. She was light. She was flying through a city of rubble.

  In this new space only survival mattered. She reached for the bottle of water. A few drops left. Christ. And she didn’t have another. A person could live three days without water, she told herself. At least a normal person could. She swallowed, tried to breathe through her nose.

  The gas dial was past empty, as low as she’d ever let it get. And here was a gas station without any line. She pulled up to a pump, looked around. The place was abandoned. She opened the door to the mini-mart: no one. And there were the glass refrigerators, the rows of cold bottled water. She couldn’t help herself. She ran and took just one, just what she needed. After all, she thought, shouldn’t water be free? Back outside she read the sign PAY BEFORE YOU PUMP, but if there wasn’t anyone to take her money, was she stealing? Maybe they’d run out of gas, she reasoned. She’d just see. She untwisted the gas cap, fit the nozzle into her tank and squeezed the handle. Gas poured out. She filled her tank. For survival, she told herself, getting back in her car and locking the door. She untwisted the lid to the water and gulped down half the bottle.

  She turned left onto Pico. There wasn’t a car in sight. It was an afternoon in spring and ash floated like snow under a dark sky. It was a dream of Los Angeles. A postapocalyptic future. The people were gone—the Los Angelenos with their BMWs and their Mercedeses, with their face-lifts and their silicone breasts and lips and cheeks, with their hair plugs, their hair dyes and gels, with their designer jeans and shoes and jewelry, with their millions of tiny plastic water bottles. The plague of people was finally over.

  She slowed down. Something was in the road, crossing the street.

  She stopped.

  Was it a long, very ugly dog? She didn’t recognize the breed. She inched her car closer, squinted at the animal.

  There, crossing Pico Boulevard, was a cat, a huge wild cat, a mountain lion, she realized, golden in the sepia light, right in front of her car. Where had it come from? Where was it going? It walked as if it owned the city and had decided to come out of its den and make that clear. And then it turned and looked at her. No, not at her, it looked through her. In its huge gold eyes, in her eyes—the eyes of the lioness—Gwen disappeared. In her eyes, there was no future and no past. There was only this moment—in which Gwen was awake, alive, her pulse beating now, now, now. The mountain lion stared at her, blessed her with that dismissive gaze in which Gwen was nothing after all, so she could be anything. Anyone. Right now.

  The lioness turned her head and walked to the other side of the street, where Gwen watched her disappear into the haze as if she had dreamed her.

  She started moving again, dazed, and drove on through the vacant town.
If only this were the end. How quickly the ivy would take over, snaking up through the concrete, through the pavement, breaking the sidewalks, the streets, and the parking lots into rocks and then into sand. The grass would move back in, along with the hawks and the owls, the foxes and the coyotes. The blue sky.

  Up ahead, a building was burning. A corner convenience store. Like Jin’s. In front of the store stood an Asian man and woman. He held her in his arms as she shook, her head buried in his shoulder.

  Gwen drove around a group of teenage boys running through the smoke, down the center of the street, with backpacks on their backs and in their arms—backpacks overflowing with who knew what stuff. In her rearview mirror she watched them turn into an alley. She drank her stolen water, passed a car going the other way and another burning building. She slowed down, unable to see more than ten feet in front of her.

  Through the smoke, Gwen could just make out a figure approaching. Unmistakable. The tricornered hat, the red coat with gold buttons, the knickers. Striding down the sidewalk, his head high, there he was. Revolutionary Man. His face smudged with soot, he was aglow, victorious, walking out of the battle with the British troops, unscathed. Instead of a musket, he held under his arm his shoe box of cassette tapes. And, spanning his chest, there was his Songs for the Road Home sign.

  She’d found him. Somehow, in the mayhem, here he was—intact, apparently unharmed.

  She pulled to the side of the road. He was running toward her and his eyes were teary. He’d been worried, or maybe it was just the smoke. He got in the car. “Tink,” he said, touching her face. “Thank God.”

  She put both hands on his head, as if to make sure he was real, and planted a hard kiss on his lips. “You’re alive,” she said, amazed at how good it felt to see him.

  She hung a U-turn in the middle of the road.

  Home. They were going home, she and Leo and—she remembered, again—the baby inside her, the baby he knew nothing about. A baby. How could she even entertain the thought? How did anyone bring a baby into this world?