Wild Child (4 page)

“I just wanted to say one thing,” she said, lifting her eyes now to look at Mr. Apodaca and only Mr. Apodaca, his dog’s eyes, his pleading soft baby-talking face, “just because, well, I wanted to say you’re wrong about my mother, because she is coming home—she told me so herself, on, on the phone—” She couldn’t help herself.

Her voice was cracking.

“Yes,” he said too quickly, a hiss of breath, “yes, I understand that, Angelle, but we need to establish … you need to answer the question.”

Oh, and now the silence went even deeper, the silence of the deep sea, of outer space, of the arctic night when you couldn’t hear the runners of the sled or the feet of the dogs bleeding into the snow, and her eyes jumped to her father’s then, the look on his face of hopefulness and fear and confusion, and she loved him in that moment more than she ever had.

“Angelle,” Mr. Apodaca was saying, murmuring. “Angelle?”

She turned her face back to him, blotting out the judge, the D.A., the woman in the plaid jacket who was probably a college student, probably cool, and waited for the question to drop.

“Who,” Mr. Apodaca repeated, slowing it down now,

“was”—slower, slower still—“driving?”

She lifted her chin then to look at the judge and heard the words coming out of her mouth as if they’d been planted there, telling the truth, the hurtful truth, the truth no one would have guessed because she was almost thirteen now, almost a teenager, and she let them know it. “I was,” she said, and the courtroom roared to life with so many people buzzing at once she thought at first they hadn’t heard her. So she said it again, said it louder, much louder, so loud she might have been shouting it to the man with the camera at the back of the long churchy room with its sweat-burnished pews and the flags and emblems and all the rest. And then she looked away from the judge, away from the spectators and the man with the camera and the court recorder and the bank of windows so brilliant with light you would have thought a bomb had gone off there, and looked directly at her father.

In my business, where you put something like forty to forty-five thousand miles a year on your vehicle and the sweet suck of the engine at 3,500 rpm is like another kind of breathing, you can’t afford distractions. Can’t afford to get tired or lazy or lift your eyes from the road to appreciate the way the fog reshapes the palms on Ocean Avenue or the light slips down the flanks of the mountains on that mind-blowing stretch of Highway 1 between Malibu and Oxnard. Get distracted and you could wind up meat. I know that.

The truckers know that. But just about everybody else—Honda drivers, especially, and I’m sorry—don’t even know they’re behind the wheel and conscious half the time. I’ve tried to analyze it, I have.

They want value, the Honda drivers, value and reliability, but they don’t want to pay for the real deal—German engineering is what I’m talking about here—and yet they still seem to think they’re part of some secret society that allows them to cut people off at will, to take advantage because they’re so in the know. So hip. So Honda. And yes, I carry a gun, a Glock 9 I keep in a special compartment I had built into the leather panel of the driver’s side door, but that doesn’t mean I want to use it. Or would use it again. Except in extremis.

The only time I did fire it, in fact, was during that rash of freeway shootings a few months back—a statistical bubble, the police called it—when people were getting popped at the rate of two a week in the greater L.A. area. I could never figure it, really. You see some jerk swerving in and out of traffic, tailgating, and maybe you give him the finger and maybe he comes up on you, but you’re awake, aren’t you? You’ve got an accelerator and a brake pedal, right?

But most people, I guess, don’t even know they’re alive in the world or that they’ve just made the driver charging up alongside them homicidal or that their engine is on fire or the road is dropping off into a crater the size of the Sea of Tranquility because they’ve got the cell clamped to the side of their head and they’re doing their nails or reading the paper. Don’t laugh. I’ve seen them watching TV, gobbling kung pao out of the carton, doing crossword puzzles and talking on two cells at once—and all at eighty miles an hour.

Anyway, I just fired two slugs—blip blip. Didn’t even know my finger was on the trigger. Plus, of course, I was aiming low—just trying to perforate his rocker panels or the idiotic big-dick off-road Super Avenger tires that had him sitting about twelve feet up off the ground. I’m not proud of it. And I probably shouldn’t have gone that far. But he cut me off—twice—and if he’d given me the finger it would have been one thing, but he didn’t even know it, didn’t even know he’d nearly run me into the median two times in the space of a minute.

On this particular day, though, everybody seemed to keep their distance. It was just past noon and raining, the ocean stretching out on my left like a big seething cauldron, the surface of the roadway slick beneath the wheels—so slick and soft and ill-defined I had to slow to seventy in places to keep from hydroplaning. But this wasn’t just rain. This was one cell in a string of storms that had stalled over the coast for the past week, sucking load after load of moisture up out of the sea and dropping it on the hills that had burned clear of vegetation the winter before. I was already running late because of a slide at Topanga Canyon, boulders the size of SUVs in the middle of the road, cops in slickers waving their flashlights, down to two lanes, then one, and finally—I heard this on the radio after I got through, feeling stressed for time, but lucky I guess—down to none. Road closed. All she wrote.

I didn’t like driving in the rain—it was just asking for disaster.

My fellow drivers, riding their brakes and clinging to the wheel as if it were some kind of voodoo fetish that would protect them against drunks, curves, potholes, errant coyotes and sheet metal carved into knives, went to pieces the minute the first drop hit the windshield.

As you might expect, the accident rate shot up something like three hundred percent every time it rained, and as I say, this wasn’t just rain in the ordinary sense. But I had a delivery to make in Santa Barbara, an urgent delivery, and if I couldn’t guarantee door-to-door faster than FedEx or Freddie Altamirano (my major competitor, who rode a ProStreet FXR and moved like a spirit raptured to heaven), then I was out of business. Plus, this wasn’t just the usual packet of bonds or stock certificates or the blockbuster screenplay passing from writer to director and back again, this was the kind of thing I handled maybe two or three times a month at most—and it never failed to give me a thrill. In the trunk, anchored firmly between two big blocks of Styrofoam, was a human liver packed in a bag of ice slurry inside a Bud Light Fun-in-the-Sun cooler, and if that sounds ridiculous, I’m sorry. That’s how it’s done. Simple fact. Ninety minutes earlier I’d picked it up at LAX because the S.B. airport was closed due to flooding, and if you want a definition of time sensitive, this was it. The recipient, a twenty-seven-year-old mother of three, was on life support at University Hospital, and I was running late and there wasn’t much I could do about it.

At any rate, I was coming up on La Conchita, a little town no bigger than a trailer court carved out of the hill where the freeway dips down to the ocean, rounding the big curve at Mussel Shoals and dropping down to fourth to blow past a U-Haul truck (the worst, the very worst, but that’s another story), when the hillside gave way.

There was a series of sharp cracks I at first took to be lightning hitting the hill, and then a deep reverberant concussion, as if all the air had been knocked out of the day. By this point I was shifting down, hyper-aware of the chain of brake lights flung up across the road in front of me and the U-Haul, piloted by a zombie on his way to Goleta or Lompoc with his zombie girlfriend at his side and their little white dog in her lap, bearing down on me from behind. I was able to stop. They weren’t. They barely had time to flash their brake lights before skidding past me and hammering the back end of a Mercedes with its panic lights on, lifting the whole shimmering orange-and-white truck up on two wheels before it crashed down on its side.

I’ll say right up front I’ve never been much in an emergency

—and when you’re behind the wheel as often as I am, you see plenty of emergencies, believe me. I don’t know CPR, don’t know how to stay calm or counsel anybody else to stay calm either and I’ve been lucky because it’s never been me wrapped around the telephone pole or nodding over the windshield and nobody I know has ever choked at the dinner table or clutched their heart or started hemorrhaging from the mouth and ears. I saw the dog lying there in the road like a heap of rags, saw the driver of the moving truck haul himself up out of the driver’s side window like a pearl diver coming up for air, saw the rain eclipse him. And the first thing I did—for my own sake and for the sake of whoever else might be tooling up behind me—was pull the car off the road, as far up on the shoulder as I could take it without fear of getting stuck. I was just reaching for my cell to dial 911, the road blocked, the day shot, my mind churning and the donor organ sitting there undelivered and unincorporated and getting staler by the minute, when things got worse, a whole lot worse.

I don’t know if the average person really has much of an idea of what a mudslide involves. I certainly didn’t—not before I started driving for a living, anyway. You’d see footage on the six o’clock news, telephone poles down, trees knocked askew, a car or two flattened and a garage staved in, but it didn’t seem like much. It wasn’t hot lava, wasn’t an earthquake or one of the firestorms that burned through this or that subdivision and incinerated a couple hundred homes every fall. Maybe it was the fault of the term itself—mudslide.

It sounded innocuous, almost cozy, as if it might be one of the new attractions at Magic Mountain, or vaguely sexy, like the mud-wrestling that was all the rage when I was in high school and too young to get in the door. But that was the thinking of a limited imagination. A mudslide, as I now know, is nothing short of an avalanche, but instead of snow you’ve got 400,000 tons of liquefied dirt bristling with rock and tree trunks coming at you with the force of a tsunami. And it moves fast, faster than you would think.

The sound I’d heard, even through the rolled-up windows and the ready voice of the narrator of the book-on-tape I’d checked out of the library because I never go anywhere without a good story to take my mind off the raging idiots all around me, was the sudden angry shriek of the bulkhead in back of La Conchita giving way.

Steel beams snapped like chicken bones, railroad ties went airborne.

Up ahead of me, beyond the overturned U-Haul, a few of the cars had got through, but now a vanguard of boulders came sluicing across the freeway, followed by a soupy river of mud. A rock the size of a cannonball thumped into the underside of the U-Haul truck and a fistful of pellets—gravel, I guess—sprayed the side of my car, and that was going to mean a new paint job, I knew it, maybe even bodywork. The rain quickened. The mud spread out across the pavement, seething round the tires and underneath the car and beyond, and soon dark tongues of it had pushed across the southbound lanes too.

What did I do? I got out of the car, the normal reaction, and immediately my shoes filled with sludge. The mud was no more than a foot or so deep, and here, at the far verge of the slide, it was the consistency of pancake batter. But darker. And it smelled of something long buried and dug up again, damp and raw as an open grave, and for a moment there I flashed on my father’s funeral, the squared-off edges of the hole with its fringe of roots, my mother trying to be stoic and my uncle putting an arm round my shoulders as if that could help. Let me say it wasn’t a pleasant smell and leave it at that.

Doors slammed. Somebody was shouting. I turned my head to look up the road and there was the driver of the U-Haul, pulling his wife or girlfriend or whoever she was up out of the cab even as she reacted to the sight of the dog lying there on a clean stretch of pavement, and the mud, working to its own logic, flowed around it.

Behind me were at least a hundred cars, bottled up and idling, their lights dully illuminating the scene, windshield wipers clapping in the way of a very tired audience. People were running up the street. A pickup just north of the overturned U-Haul began to float off, sustained on a wave of mud as if it were a dingy drifting away on the tide. My jacket was soaked through, the hair hanging in my face.

The liver wasn’t getting any fresher.

Suddenly, unaccountably, I found myself at the trunk of the car.

I inserted the key and flipped it open, and I don’t really know why—just to reassure myself, I guess. The lid of the cooler eased back and there it was, the liver, smooth and burnished, more pink than red—and it wasn’t like meat, not at all, more like something sculpted out of very soft stone. But it was okay, it was fine, I told myself, and I should just stay calm. I figured we had an hour, more or less, before things began to get critical. It was then that the woman with the dog—she was bent over it in the rain, wailing, and the water dripping from the end of her nose was pink with the blood leaching out of her scalp—looked up and shouted something to me.

She might have been asking if I knew anything about dogs. Or if she could use my cell to call the vet. Or if I had a knife, an oxygen mask, a GPS locater, a blanket. I don’t know what she said, actually. She wanted something, but I couldn’t hear her over the rattle of all those idling engines, the hiss of the rain, the shouts and curses, and in the next moment somebody else was there, some stranger, and he was taking care of it. I ducked back into the car, just to get out of the rain—mud everywhere, mud on the carpets, the doorframe, the console—and punched in the cell number of the assisting physician at the hospital.

“There’s a problem,” I said.

His voice came back at me in a thinly amplified yelp. “What do you mean? Where are you?”

“I’m maybe fifteen miles south, at La Conchita, that’s what I mean, but I can’t get through because there’s some kind of slide—it just happened—and it’s blocking the road. Totally.” For the first time I looked up at the mountain outside the window and saw the scar there and the trail of displaced earth and the crushed houses.

Everything was gray with the rain.

“How long before they clear it?”

“Actually? Could be a while.”

He was silent and I tried to picture him, nobody I knew, an intern maybe, glasses, short hair because it was easier to maintain when your life wasn’t your own, biting his lip and staring out the window into the pall of rain. “Is there any way I can get to you? I mean, if I jump in the car and—”

“Maybe,” I said, and I wanted this to work in the worst way because my reputation was on the line here and that woman needed her liver she’d been waiting for for Christ knew how long, somebody freshly dead in Phoenix and this was the best match and I’d walk it there if I could, no doubt about it, walk till my feet turned to stumps, but I had to be honest with him. “You got to realize the traffic’s already backed up in both directions,” I said, and I wasn’t calm, wasn’t calm at all. “I mean nothing’s going through, there’s an accident just in front of me and there’s mud and rocks all over the road. In both directions. Even if you leave now you’re not going to be able to get within five miles of here, so you tell me. Tell me what you want me to do. Tell me.”

Another silence. “All right,” he said finally. His voice was pinched. “You know how urgent this is. How crucial. We’ll get this done. We will. Just keep your cell on, all right? And don’t do anything till I get back to you.”

I must have sat there for five minutes at least, just staring out into the rain, the cell clutched in my hand. I was wet through and I’d begun to shiver, so I turned the engine over and got the heater going. The mud was still flowing, I could see that much, and the white dog had disappeared, along with the couple from the U-Haul.