The Price of the Ticket Read online

  Pauley had to yell the Toyota story to Horseknocker.

  “I’m not even going to get it towed! I haven’t mailed in the pink slip! Seam is still the registered owner! All we do is get the load off the back! Let the city tow it! The ticket for stopping on the freeway plus towing plus storage by the time he hears about it will eat him up! Especially,” he made his voice even louder, “especially after I get my six hundred bucks back!”

  “Will there be any violence?” yelled Horseknocker. “Can I help?”

  Max, still sitting on the other side of Horseknocker and now in advanced drunkenness, lurched over Horseknocker’s shoulder and said, “Yeah! Violynch! Recompenth!” He slapped his palm on the bar. “Verily the smokin fockin swath of human fockin hishtory!”

  “Ah, hishtory,” screamed Jingles, toasting Max across the vertex of the bar. “To quod the poet: ‘Hishtory, the posterior elixir’!”

  Max stood half erect on the rungs of his stool and raised his glass. “Violynch! Equals! Hishtory! They are the same!” He began to teeter backwards. Horseknocker caught Max before he could do himself injury, and eased him back into a sitting position, more or less erect, on his stool.

  Jingles, delicately guiding the brimming rim of his new beer to his lips, paused and frowned. “David Violynch? The director?”

  Max’s mouth gaped soundlessly. He stared at Jingles for a long moment before he said, “David Violynch, as you call him, for me, is God.”

  “First I gotta go get that load of torture racks,” Pauley yelled to Horseknocker. “Get them off the back of that Toyota, into another truck, out to Hunter’s Point. Then I gotta talk Affliction into paying like now, cause there’s bills due on the materials, and there’s rent tomorrow. Then I’m going to go find that twink and get my six hundred bucks back.”

  “Yeah,” said Horseknocker thickly. “Sell his butt in Polk Gulch six hundred times at a dollar a throw. Hey,” he added brightly, “did you hear the one about the gay whorehouse? There’s this new guy, see, and–”

  “Later, later,” said Pauley. Max’s head wobbled, turned ninety degrees, and his mouth, curiously out of synch with his voice, began to scold Horseknocker. “The drowned homophobic Merchant Marine in you,” he said, wagging a forefinger, “is always bobbing to the surface.”

  “Yeah,” agreed Jingles, with sloppy dignity. “Like the last crab-gnawed eyeball in the storm-tossed brine above yesterday’s Titanic.”

  “One mush act primly, always the egali- egali- tarian, regardlesh of the circumstaches,” agreed Max.

  “Okay, okay,” said Horseknocker. “Did you hear the one about the three gerbils? This gerbil comes into a bar, see–”

  “Wait, wait goddammit,” said Pauley, grabbing Horseknocker by the forearm. “Pay attention. The question is, where are we going to get another truck? Like now?”

  “‘S’here, s’here,” Max said.

  “My, my,” mumbled Jingles admiringly, blowing bubbles in his beer. “Slurred monosyllables.”

  Horseknocker snapped his fingers. “Hey,” he said brightly. “Whyn’t ya buy a used Toyota?”

  Pauley nodded sagely and yelled, “Try to be practical!”

  Horseknocker mused. “Practical, practical.…”

  “‘S’here.”

  “Rent one?”

  “That’ll take hours and rent one with what?”

  “‘S’here,” Max repeated.

  “With a stolen credit card.” Horseknocker turned on Max suddenly. “What am I,” he snarled, “a dog?”

  “Not you. S’him.” said Max. He extended a key past Horse-knocker’s nose toward Pauley. “‘S’hevy. Wide bed. S’hree-quarter ton. Will do? Round corner.” His voice was thick with saliva.

  “What’s heavy?” said Pauley.

  “He means ‘Chevy’,” said Jingles. “His truck.”

  “Hey,” said Pauley, looking from the key to Max. “You’re drunk. You don’t even know me.”

  “I designate you the driver,” Max nodded, dropping the key onto the bar. “These guys all know where I live, but they’re too fucked up to drive.” He swung his arm to indicate the rest of the bar, and knocked over an empty glass. Nobody around them noticed. It was a quarter till six and the place was teeming. “You drive. Theesh guys all know where I live.”

  Pauley picked up the key and looked at it. “Man,” he said, genuinely touched, “I’ll put some gas in it.”

  “Cool,” said Max, as his eyes closed involuntarily.

  “What’s your name?” Pauley asked.

  “Huh?” Max said. “Who me?” He opened his eyes. “Max.” He frowned and added, “I think.” His eyes closed as he extended his hand.

  Pauley took it. “Paulos. They call me Pauley.”

  “Pleeshed,” Max said, opening his eyes to inquisitive slits. They shook hands. “Paulos. That’s.… Greek?” Max swept the bar with his free hand, retaining Pauley’s in the grip of his other. “Ptheggometha thassson! Alla them! Ptheggometha thassson!” He looked at Pauley and squeezed his hand tenderly. “Comprende?”

  “I can’t hear you. No!”

  “It doesn’t make any difference!” Jingles shouted.

  “Drugged beasts!” Max shouted back, leaning over Horseknocker. He clung to Pauley’s hand and waved his other arm. “All a them!”

  “Maybe I could rent it from you? Or something?”

  “Fuck you,” said Max. He tickled the palm of Pauley’s hand with his middle finger. “I jus’ love Greeks.”

  “I’d prefer to pay money,” Pauley said primly. “I mean, I don’t care if you’re gay, but we have a strict company policy not to trade sex for transportation.”

  “It’s a very uptight outfit,” Horseknocker assured Max.

  “What kinda joint is this?” Max demanded, jerking his hand out of Pauley’s grip. He stood straight up on the rungs of his stool and screamed, “ONE LOUSY BLOWJOB AND THEY CALL YOU QUEER!”

  Horseknocker caught him before he fell to the floor.

  Chapter Nine

  THE TRUCK WAS A KNACKERED THREE-QUARTER TON ’65 CHEVY with a wide bed that would easily hold the load in the Toyota. Horseknocker dropped the transmission casing and the box of parts between the cab and the wheelwell, where maybe they wouldn’t slide around.

  The engine fired before it made a full revolution–a good thing, the battery barely turned it that far–and idled smoothly, despite a chuffing leak on the exhaust manifold and a metallic clicking from a broken piston ring.

  Pauley raised a pontifical forepaw. “If there is a muffler on this rig, it’s only because it hasn’t fallen off.”

  Horseknocker squinted. “That’s one a them Zen koans–right?”

  “A living death,” said Pauley. “An unmuffling muffler.”

  “‘I’d rather be an enantiomorph,’” Horseknocker countered uncertainly, pronouncing the last word syllable by syllable.

  “You sure about that?”

  “No.”

  Pauley made a fist around the knob at the top of the gear lever, which rose from a star-shaped hole in the floor toward the rectangular hole in the dash where the radio used to be, and stirred the gears, searching for reverse. “You memorized that word from a Stephen King novel–right?”

  Horseknocker loved to listen to taped Stephen King novels while he sat behind the wheel of his beached Econoline.

  “No, no, it’s here, on the dash.” Horseknocker pointed. The phrase was printed backwards, so it could be read in a mirror, on a tattered bumper-sticker glued diagonally across the lid of the glove compartment. “I gave up on him after Fire Starter,” he lied. “What the fuck’s a enantiamorph?”

  “Beats me.”

  “Maybe Captain Kirk got turned into one?”

  Pauley searched his memory of Celeste’s back.

  “Any truck that has a vocabulary bigger than mine makes me paranoid,” Horseknocker muttered darkly.

  “Maybe we should get out now. While we still can.”

  “How do you know this
thing’s going to let us get out of here, now that it’s got us in here? Have you tried to open your door? Huh? Have you?”

  “No, I, uh.…” His voice trailed into silence.

  Neither of them tried to open a door.

  “Let’s press ahead,” Pauley said finally. “If we make it back, we can look it up.”

  Horse looked at him suspiciously. “You own a dictionary?”

  The shift knob had begun life as a plastic Pièta. A pair of wires ran from its base through a spiral of black tape along the length of the shift lever, disappearing into the hole in the floorboard. Pauley found a switch on the dash and twisted it. Mother Mary glowed a dirty ochre.

  They stared at it a moment. The light throbbed as Pauley revved the engine. “No wonder the battery’s run down. Idolatry is a drain on everything around it.”

  “It’s not dark enough for headlights,” Horseknocker said.

  “So?”

  “California law requires full headlights even at dusk–never parking lights alone.”

  “The Mother of Jesus is worth getting arrested for.”

  “Hey,” said Horseknocker. “She let her own kid take a rap. Why wouldn’t she do the same for you?”

  “What are you so worried about?” Pauley looked at him. “How much dope are you carrying?”

  Horseknocker stared levelly back at him. “How many beers have you had?”

  Pauley thought about it. “You got a point.”

  “It’s a spacious grave, flouting the law.”

  “Enough futurism, already.” Pauley killed the lights and set about unparking the Chevy. The space was tight, the steering was heavy. The Chevy and the other vehicles in line with it were half on and half off the alley sidewalk–all of them parked illegally. Behind the truck a small tree, increasingly tilted toward a fatal angle by an infinite regression of parking automobiles, was blooming desperately. But a greater guarantee of clemency such a tree might never expect to find than the severely chopped Harley Davidson chained to its other side: a margin of sanctity reinforced by a brand new black BMW parked directly in front of the truck. Sweet Manichaean simplicity!

  “Hey,” Horseknocker said, spotting the motorcycle. “You know the difference between a vacuum cleaner and a Harley Davidson?”

  “I give up,” said Pauley.

  “The Harley’s got room for two dirt bags.” He held a pair of fingers aloft.

  “Pretty condescending, Horse.”

  “Yeah, I’m practicing.”

  A nuzzle from the intractable steel of the Chevy’s front bumper reduced one of the BMW’s taillight lenses to ruby fragments in the gutter. Naked and febrile in the waning daylight, the exposed bulbs of the taillight began to pulse on and off, synchronous with the car’s malignant klaxon, bleating for its owner. Its carphone antenna shivered like a twelve-year-old dressed in his mother’s lingerie.

  “Ah,” said Pauley, as they rumbled down the block. “Sabor y saber.”

  Horseknocker grunted. “I hear those taillight lenses cost about a hundred and a quarter apiece.”

  “Half an hour’s work for an uptown lawyer.”

  “Installation extra.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “So I hear. I ain’t exactly been to the BMW service entrance lately.”

  “I begin to feel sorry for BMW owners.” Pauley thumbed the worn face of the shift lever Madonna. “Mea culpa, baby.”

  “I ain’t been to nobody’s service entrance lately,” Horseknocker added morosely.

  Pauley raised the forestalling tridactyl. “Save it for confession, my son.”

  “S’okay,” said Horseknocker, eyeing an intersecting street to their right. “People don’t get laid in Stephen King novels, either.”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “That’s why I quit reading him,” Horseknocker lied again. “It was too realistic.”

  It was the shank of rush hour, about six o’clock, a bad time to be queuing up for the South Van Ness on-ramp. But the only other way to get to the 80/101 split was via Fell Street, at the opposite end of the skyway. Access from Fell Street would take twice as long. The skyway fed two of the four outbound freeways of San Francisco, and five days a week by four P.M. it was solid with cars and trucks, neatly enjambed like rows of varicolored beads on a Nigerian bracelet, four lanes across and a mile long.

  The South Van Ness ramp was solid with traffic too, as was the intersection with 13th Street at its base. Pauley pulled the shift lever back into second and merged into the welter of commuters.

  “As they say in L.A.,” he observed with a sigh, slouching against the seatback to give his clutch foot some leverage, “it’s moving.”

  “Deeply,” agreed Horseknocker.

  “If ‘The human body is the romantic landscape of the twentieth century’, what is a rush-hour freeway?”

  Without hesitation Horseknocker answered, “A non-alcoholic fern bar, where people go to see and be seen while they’re waiting to die.”

  “So the original romantic landscape, actual dirt itself, is now asphalted and teeming with contemporary landscapes–human bodies–wrapped in gaily colored sheet metal.”

  Horseknocker looked out the window. “Kind of an interesting idea. First you make love to it.…”

  “Then you make war on it.”

  “First you fuck it, then you really fuck it.”

  “O human, all too human.”

  A small delivery van cut violently in front of them. Pauley jerked the wheel. “Hey!”

  “Tell that guy you’re gonna make his dick a clitoris,” Horseknocker suggested. “Wait: Driver Carries No Cash, says the decal.”

  “A license to drive badly.”

  “Spare him.”

  They moved forward a truck length, stopped, moved a truck length, stopped, moved forward half a truck length, stopped. Two more cars merged between the Chevy and the delivery van. Gradually the tangle of vehicles resolved itself into single file, just above the mouth of the ramp.

  “Man,” grumbled Horseknocker. “This is slower than a busted lava lamp.”

  Where the two entry lanes merged into one, a man stood beside the ramp. He wore ragged coveralls, laceless leather work boots, and a down jacket beneath an overcoat–too many clothes, considering the mild weather. A long-haired dog lay in the straggling iceplant at his feet, its chin resting across a forepaw. The man stared straight ahead. A cardboard sign hung from a length of twine around his neck.

  VietNAM VeT

  WiLL WoRK

  FoR

  DoG FooD

  “Want me to take a cab back?” said Horseknocker.

  Pauley said nothing.

  A minute expired as the Chevy inched past the veteran. The veteran stared. The dog was asleep. Finally Horseknocker said, “I fucking can’t take this,” and dug a dollar out of his jeans. He held the bill out the window. “Hey–”

  The man remained static, motionless.

  “Yo dude, ten hut, right face, payday, incoming.”

  No reaction.

  From out of nowhere a Vietnamese kid wearing a canvas change bib ran up to the window. He pulled an afternoon Examiner from a stack under his arm and held it up in Horseknocker’s face.

  SCHOOL FUNDS EXHAUSTED STATEWIDE

  Why Lottery Isn’t Enough

  “Ain’tcha never heard of television?” Horseknocker barked, waving the kid away. He extended the dollar over the kid’s head.

  Still the vet stared as if sightless, straight out over his sign.

  “God damn it, brother.…”

  The man gave no indication of having seen or heard him.

  “What is this,” growled Horseknocker, “some kinda art project?”

  “Maybe it’s part of the Why Lottery.”

  “Jesus fucking.…” Horseknocker opened the door of the cab and stepped out onto the on-ramp, leaving the door open.

  Immediately a horn sounded behind them. Horseknocker ignored it, and within a few steps he was pushing the dolla
r bill into a pocket on the down vest. The dog snapped his head up, then pushed itself up on its forelegs, into a half-sitting position, and watched Horseknocker warily. A couple of feathers from the down vest drifted onto the dog’s head.

  The horn sounded impatiently.

  A gap of less than a car-length had opened between the Chevy and the car ahead. Pauley leaned out of the driver’s window and delivered himself of a string of obscenities relating to the ancestors of the driver behind the truck. Still the horn sounded.

  Pauley put one foot on the brake and popped the clutch. The truck bucked and stalled, its tailgate chains banging. He opened the door and dropped to the pavement.

  You know, said a calm little voice in his brain, the one that generally held all the money in his mental wagers, assault will get you exactly Nowhere, with bars on the one window. He can do the time, said another voice, the inveterate gambler. If they let you have a window, added the first voice. He can do the time repeated the second voice. Yeah, said the first voice, and I’m a little chest of treasure at the bottom of the deep blue sea.

  He heard Horseknocker’s voice too, as if from very far away, “Skip it! Hey, Pauley…!”

  The car was a late model Oldsmobile, dark brown with tinted windows, and it drifted downhill, backwards, as Pauley approached. But the Olds had to stop before it collided with the vehicle immediately to its rear, which now sounded its own horn. Pauley shot a hard glance at the windshield of this second vehicle and the horn stopped. He turned and put both hands on the roof of the Olds as if he were about to enter into a conversation with its driver about whether or not it might be a good time to be getting up the corn.

  The glass of the window slid down smoothly, drawn through its frame by an electric motor. Pauley’s pale reflection in the glass was gradually replaced by an unsmiling black face veiled by sunglasses. The face floated above an immaculately knotted red tie on a pink shirt in a charcoal suit with a thin maroon pinstripe. In its last inch of travel the withdrawing glass revealed the business end of a pistol, nestled in the weather-stripping on the window sill.

  It was an automatic pistol, bore at least .38, though they always look bigger than they really are.

  Pauley slowly straightened up and removed his hands from the roof of the car, bringing them slowly down to his sides, palms open, in plain sight.