TWENTY-TWO
A toxic stench ferreted into Sean's nostrils. He coughed twice and sat up on the couch. A smooth-faced TV preacher was shouting for brimstone to cleanse the world. Armageddon was not the source of the chemical reek. The poisonous fumes came from the inferno video tapes in the fireplace, which was fed by Che Chasta. She was in a tan raincoat and her blonde hair was fluffed from her head like a wilting Afro.
Each cassette ignited with a whoosh and acrid smoke furled over the mantle to billow upward to a surly cloud warning that the super-hot gases would soon reach a dangerous flashpoint. Sean jumped to his feet and pulled Che away from the fire, but she fought him off to throw another armful of videos into the fireplace.
"You got to stop."
"Not until they're all destroyed.” Che was completely out of her head. "That's the only way to get at him."
"You're going to burn the place down." Sean dragged away Che, as the flames crawled up the wall blistering the paint. The fire would soon be a killer and the scorched air spoke in a primordial tongue, tempting his very bones to stay and watch.
"Now we can go." Che handed him a heavy bag of videotapes and seized two smaller pieces of luggage.
He ran outside into a cold drizzle. A racking of coughs cleared the smoke from their lungs. Sean turned to the bungalow. Black smoke seeped from the windows. Dogs barked out warnings around the neighborhood, their ears alert to danger. Sean reached for the garden hose.
"Leave it." Che strode down the sidewalk to a dented lime-green Cadillac.
"You can't walk away.” Sean caught up with the blonde, as she threw the luggage into the back seat.
"Just watch me.” Che opened the Cadillac's door. "If you want to stick around and explain the fire to the Fire Department, be my guest, but the more distance between me and that shithole the better."
Several panes of glass cracked from the searing heat inside the bungalow. Che sat behind the wheel and started the engine.
"It's not my house and it's not yours." Her excuse made sense. No one was inside the house. A neighbor would soon call 911. The LAFD would extinguish the fire and the LAPD would ask who, what, when, where, and why over and over again, till the cops had a suspect on whom to pin the arson. The bass revving of a Motown engine forced Sean's hand and as soon as he jumped in the Cadillac, Che stamped on the gas . The big car swerved down the street, narrowly missing several parked vehicles. At Franklin Che braked impatiently and waited for an opening in the traffic before turning left.
"You burnt all those other tapes, why not these?” Sean pointed at the bag in the backseat.
"Those are the masters of the ones I liked. Somehow I felt, if I destroyed those, then I'd disappear."
"You mean like taking your picture might be stealing a part of your soul?” Sean didn't like his picture being taken, mostly because it told the truth not so much of your soul, but whether the picture-taker liked his subject. He hadn't had a good photo in years, although the Polaroid from Sherri wasn't bad.
"I don't have enough soul left for anyone to steal." Che threw back her head to shake loose the blonde mane. "Only what's left on these tapes."
"I understand that, but why'd you burn down the bungalow?"
"You have to ask? You saw the way he left me. It wasn't the first time he treated like a piece of meat, but it was the last.” The wide lanes of Franklin were devoid of traffic, which is the only sign of life in LA in the rain, but Che stayed well under the speed limit. "I could have killed him, but without those videos he'll never make another penny off me."
"Who are you talking about?” Sean expected the flashing lights of fire trucks to appear any second.
"You don't know, do you?” Che was far from the near-corpse of the morning. 911 had not erred in ignoring her call. She was alive with rage. Anger is a great pick-me-up.
"No.” The only face coming into his head was that of the old man in Vegas, but his being C he's persecutor was too great a coincidence, even for a city so wrapped up in the cinematic circumstances of normal lives.
"It doesn't matter now.” Che swung the wheel sharply and the rear tires skipped across the greasy pavement. She had obviously bought the car for surviving accidents, not handling. "I'm out of here for good now."
Sean had the feeling Che had said that last line too many times without ever leaving.
"Why don't you go to the police?"
"Don't play me for stupid. You weren't in any car crash in the desert. Someone tried to kill you. Someone a lot scarier than the police, so you ran and I’m running all the way to Johnson City, Texas. An old boyfriend has a ranch out there. He'll take care of me. Maybe even love me. Hey, if it's such a good idea now, why wasn't it back then?” Che Chasta was down to her last pages in the book of making it in LA. The Chapter called Leaving Town.
"Things change."
"Don't they?” She paused a second, then asked, "You watched those films this afternoon. All the men and women I did. You think it's too late to start all over?"
"Not as long as you never have to walk back across the bridge you just burned."
"I hope you take your own advice,” Che smirked with the satisfaction of turning a new leaf.
"Never."
"Me neither." Che jammed on the brakes and veered onto the southbound ramp of the Hollywood Freeway. The Cadillac scuttled to a stop on the crumbling shoulder and Che turned to him with a wrinkled nose "Is that you?"
"I haven't bathed in a couple of days." Sean smelled his armpits without detection a strong odor, then again women have better nose than men.
"That all." Che cracked the window. "Where you heading, stranger? I could use some company on the way out to Texas."
"Back to the Valley." Sean hoped she would offer him a ride, instead she shook her head like a lovelorn housewife on the prowl for some hitchhiking trash.
"I'm never going back that way again. Tell that to all the assholes over there. Just keep quiet about where I'm going, huh, stranger."
"Sure.” Sean scowled with his hand on the door.
"You angry at me for dumping you in the rain."
"I thought I might get a ride into Valley for saving your life."
"I wasn't dying." Che revved the engine. "And I'm not going into the Valley. No telling what might happen if I go over there. You understand? When you got to go, you got to go."
Che leaned across the seat and pulled him close, opening her mouth to kiss him. Her tongue pushed apart his lips. Their hot breaths mingled for several seconds, till Che broke away and said, "If you were coming to Texas, I could thank you properly."
"It's tempting." Sean screened a ride to Texas with Che inside his head. XXX road trip with only one possible ending. "Somehow I see myself in the middle of Texas and you driving away to be with your cowboy."
"He's not into menage-a-trois." Che smiled with the promise of the open road lying before the Cadillac. "All I can offer is a ride."
"Thanks but no thanks." Sean couldn't write a sequel to her deserting him in Texas and he opened the passenger door.
"You tell Sherri and Lena I love them. I really do."
"Anything else?" Sean wondered ho many years it had been since she had been home.
"Yeah, you, like every other guy I ever met, want to ask how a nice girl like me ended up doing films. The therapists were always blaming my mother or father, but nobody ever forced me into this. I was born wild. I liked being in adult films. I love sex and enjoyed being a star, but you men, you're all scum. From Adam on up. Take my word on that."
Any chance Sean had to defend his half of the species died, when Che gunned the engine and motioned for him to get out. As he stood on the wet pavement, she opened the raincoat and flashed a parting shot of her naked body.
"You're missing one hell of a ride."
Bald tires ripped up the mud and the car sped down the ramp to vanish into the Freeway's afternoon rush hour. The rain fell harder and a dirty flume of black smoke rose into the air over the trees from where they had come. He looked for a taxi, except LA is more like Queens than Manhattan. A bus rolled a block away and he dashed across the street, only to have a siren whoop and megaphonic voice ordered, "Stay where you are."
A LAPD cruiser pulled up to the curb and a uniformed officer got out of the patrol car, right hand on his holster.
Sean raised his hands thinking, "One of the neighbors called in my description. It's over. I'll tell them everything. About the fire, the attempted murder in Las Vegas, the wallets, deRocco and Driscoll, every crime I ever committed. I'll do time, but I'll come out of it clean and that's all I'm after, isn't it?"
The cop regarded Sean's beaten face and asked for ID, which was not SOP for a felony arrest. Sean handed over his Irish passport. "What'd I do, officer?"
"Jaywalking is against the law in California, Mr. Tempo,” the young cop made a face. His nose scrunched up in disgust.
Before the officer in dark blue could lecture Sean on pedestrian safety, three fire engines roared up Franklin with lights flashing and sirens blaring. The cop's shoulder radio squawked out an indecipherable message. Visibly disappointed at being unable to roust Sean, the cop handed back the passport.
"You have the luck of the Irish, Mr. Tempo. There's a fire up the street. Cross at the lights next time."
"Sure thing, officer." Sean could play good citizen with the best of them.
The cop retreated with his hand on his holster, just in case Sean tried anything, then got in the cruiser and chased the fire engines out of sight. Sean couldn't believe his good fortune. He ran over to the Freeway's northbound on-ramp and stuck out his thumb. It was the only way he was going to get out of here.
Standing by the FREEWAY ENTRANCE sign, Sean shivered in the cold rain and blew on his hands between surges of cars. Not many people hitchhike anymore and Sean soon found out why the old tradition was gone.
Each pair of motorists' eyes was locked on the road before them. Their backs were hunched over the wheel like they had evolved from turtles. He tried to look sympathetic, but every driver's faces with whom he attempted eye contact greeted him with scorn. Even those motorists in barely drivable wrecks deemed themselves worthier than the tramp they saw in Sean, for if there's anyone a driver in LA hates worst than another driver, it's a pedestrian, but he had to ask himself, "What could have put these people in such a shitty mood?"
The answer was too easy, for having to drive everywhere in LA had imprisoned most Angelenos within these steel machines, depriving them of any human contact, but while Sean regarded the car as the partnership between two Neanderthal inventions, fire and the wheel backed up by a little basic navigation, he would have given anything to be a driver now, but no one was going to pick up someone as roughed up as him. He was stuck here like a roadside museum piece and, when a van almost sideswiped him, and he swore, "Fuck Jack Kerouac."
He was ready to give up, but a Nissan Sentra pulled over to the shoulder ahead. Once inside, the car drove away and merged with traffic and Sean said, "Thanks a lot."
"Been out there long?” The middle-aged man in a brown suit sneaked a glimpse at Sean's crotch.
"Long enough,' Sean knew what was coming next.
"I'll turn up the heat. That should be better."
"Yeah, lots,” Sean replied, but stiffened as the driver finished talking about the weather by saying, "Have you been with a man?"
"Not since I was a young boy."
"I like your cologne. Is real musty." The driver eyed Sean with interest.
"I've been wearing only a couple of days." Jack Kerouac wrote in ON THE ROAD that the worst part of hitching was proving to the driver that they hadn't made a mistake stopping for the hitchhiker. The heavy skies opened up and the deluge obscured the Freeway. He could still be out there, so played along with the driver's come-on, grateful to be out of the rain.
Sean kept up the small talk, enticing the driver with tales of his youth in New York. Most of it was lies. Thirty minutes later Sean arrived at the complex in North Hollywood, damp, but not cold. He knocked on the door.
"I thought you had gone." Lena opened up with visible relief. She smiled at her lover. Obviously the older woman had been betting on his being gone for good. It was nice to be wanted and not wanted at the same time, although the first was better than the latter.
"I did." Sean pulled off his wet coat.
"Where?" Sherri was holding a video camera in her hands like she wanted to throw it at his head.
There was nothing to be gained from telling the truth and he didn't want to lie.
"I went over to Hollywood. Saw and old friend and came back." He picked up a towel and wiped his face. "She said I smelled like the dead."
"And did you take a shower?" Sherri eyed him as if he might have slept with this woman. Not with jealousy, but with disgust. She really hated men.
"No, I'm as dirty as a bucket of sludge."
"It's only going to get worse." Sherri had accepted his story.
"If you can live with then so can I." If she wanted him dirty, then he was going for it. He had seen her at her worse with Che. Sherri might be cleaner, but neither of them were saints. "Man, it was wet out there."
"It's supposed to clear up tomorrow,” Sherri countered and said, "We have a lot of work left before we leave in the morning. I suggest you get some sleep."
It was more an order and Sean went into the back bedroom without a single mention of her films with Che or even their fifteen seconds in an after-hour club in New York twenty years ago or his wanting her more than ever, despite her hating men. Why was a question he could not answer, but definitely not one he would ask Sherri any time soon. Not if he knew what was good for him.
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