Travels with Lizbeth Page 5

  But no. The threaded hole in the alternator was clean as could be; I could see through it. Evidently besides the hole itself being threaded, there had also been a nut on the far side. I asked who had replaced the fan belt the last time. Clearly Dallas had not done it himself.

  “A friend,” he said.

  I suspected then that the bolt had not sheared off, but had never been replaced when the friend changed the belt. That in itself was odd, because the bolt should never have been removed, needing only to be loosened to adjust the tension in the belt. Yet I could not think of another explanation.

  I sorted through Dallas’s hardware. Of course I could not find a bolt to match the threads of the hole of the alternator. But I found one that was narrower and long enough. Dallas had discovered that a corrugated-metal building across the road was in fact a machine shop—I would never have inquired, for I would never have expected such luck. He took the bolt that fit through the alternator to the machine shop and returned with several nuts that fit it. Several square nuts. This was jury-rigging, but there was nothing else to be done.

  “It will work now,” I told Dallas, “but I can’t say for how long.”

  I let Dallas replace the radiator. He seemed well-drilled in the procedure and I would have had to figure it out as I went along. Then Dallas waved his cables until someone stopped to give us a jump. We took to the interstate to build up a full charge in the battery. As we cruised the freeway we passed the West Covina exits several times, but I did not know that any one of them would have taken me to La Puente in short order.

  We returned to Fontana with the battery fully charged. There was no more difficulty restarting the engine.

  Dallas had no more to say about kidnapping children, his own or anyone else’s. He was trying to score—crack or speed, I never learned which. He simply could not remember where his connection lived. It had been many years. I doubted that after such a time the connection would be where Dallas remembered even if he could remember.

  At last Dallas thought he recognized something, either the house or the car. We stopped at a house we had passed many times before and Dallas went in. He was in the house a long time. It was not the place he was looking for, but he got an idea there of what to do instead. He began to try to set up a deal for the cigarettes. We rode around until it was dead dark. We went then to a number of sleazy places, including, I gather, a bordello. At one place he traded some cigarettes for a pint of whiskey, although there was cold duck aplenty on the floorboard behind the driver’s seat. We went to various pay phones. At some of them Dallas placed calls and at others he waited for calls.

  At last we went to the very dark parking lot of a very sleazy-looking beer joint somewhere in Fontana, not far from where we replaced the fan belt. People with guns and big flashlights came.

  Flashlights shined at me and Lizbeth in the car. Dallas discussed something in animated whispers with a man and a woman in the parking lot. He got more and more excited. They leveled their guns at him.

  Another man approached the car with a flashlight and a rifle or shotgun—I could not tell which because the light was in my eyes.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  Lizbeth yipped. “Just a hitchhiker,” I said.

  “What’s your connection with this guy?”

  “He picked me up outside Phoenix.”

  “Where did he leave the cigarettes?”

  “In the backseat,” I said. The cigarettes had been returned to the backseat from the trunk as soon as I got up and about that morning.

  The man shined his flashlight into the backseat. There was more than a case of cigarettes stacked up.

  “These are the cigarettes?”

  “That’s them.”

  “And you rode from Phoenix in this car with this guy?”

  “Yes. That’s all I know about this.”

  The man chuckled. He backed away from the car until he was in whispering range of the others. He whispered. The woman shrieked a sort of laugh.

  Dallas began talking quickly and earnestly. I could not quite make out what he was saying. The people with flashlights and guns backed away. Dallas kept after them, jabbering away. One of the men ordered Dallas to stay put. Dallas kept talking and did not entirely stay put. But the others backed away quickly, and when they were out of the parking lot and down the road in the shadows, the flashlights went out all at once.

  Where the flashlights had gone out a big engine fired up and a big truck without lights came down the road. The truck passed the parking lot on the fly and disappeared down the dark back road. It came out bit by bit. Dallas was quite intoxicated. He had set up a deal to trade cigarettes for whatever it was he wanted. But the people got the idea that Dallas had a truckload of cigarettes. Dallas tried to convince them to deal for the cigarettes he did have, but they were not interested in such a small quantity. I suspected the people did not have anything to trade, but would have ripped us off and possibly killed us if there had been a truckload of cigarettes.

  Dallas returned to the bordello and quickly disposed of a case of cigarettes for some small amount of cash. That left four or five cartons.

  As we pulled onto the interstate we passed a hitchhiker standing on the ramp far past the NO PEDESTRIANS sign. I saw the highway patrol car pull onto the ramp, and at first I thought they were going after the hitchhiker. I guess I had become used to Dallas’s driving, for I had not noticed his doing anything spectacular. He was drunk.

  The highway patrol pulled us over.

  I thought if Dallas really was the wanted man he had said he was, I would soon know it. I hoped this was nothing to do with the shoplifting. For some reason Dallas had stuffed the remaining cartons of cigarettes under the seat. The officers used their public address system to order Dallas out of the car. Lizbeth barked. She had never encountered police before, but she hated them—perhaps the uniforms remind her of letter carriers. Eventually one of the officers came around to check my ID.

  “You boys been drinking some beer?” He shined his light into Dallas’s car, but he could not see the open bottle of cold duck Dallas had slipped under my leg.

  “No, we haven’t been drinking any beer,” I said quite truthfully. I’d had a couple of swallows of cold duck for breakfast and nothing alcoholic to drink since. I never saw a sip of beer cross Dallas’s lips.

  We waited a long time. Dallas raved. At last a tow truck arrived. One of the officers said I could go. I did not have much gear, but it was scattered about in the backseat. I bundled up things haphazardly and got out of the car, holding Lizbeth’s leash firmly close to the collar. Dallas realized at last that he was not going to be arrested, but his car was. He tried to unload everything out of the car onto the road. He kept unloading even as the winch began lifting the car. The police ordered him to stop. Dallas seemed to think he would never see anything in the car again.

  We were on a narrow shoulder on a high ramp. I told Dallas I had a fear of heights. As he shouted after me I led Lizbeth down the ramp, across a bridge, and to a convenience store. I do have a fear of heights, but I suppress it by force of will when I must. I used it as an excuse. I wanted to get away to a phone. I used Billy’s credit card number to call Rufus’s benefactor Roy in La Puente.

  Roy knew who I was, I was sure of that. But being a friend of Rufus’s was not a sterling character recommendation. I had no idea how Roy would receive me or whether he would receive me at all.

  I described where I was and Roy said he knew the place and would come after us right away. This gave me the impression that Roy was close by. He was not. He knew where I was only because he has a remarkable knowledge of most of Los Angeles county.

  I had hoped otherwise, but Dallas arrived at the convenience store before Roy. One of the reasons I had wanted to leave was that I thought Dallas’s attempt to get everything out of the car was hopeless and the officers were becoming impatient with the effort. But Dallas had got a great deal of it.

  He considered my leaving as
desertion under fire. Moreover he had missed a carton of cigarettes when he went through the car and he supposed I had taken them. I had repacked my few things in anticipation of Roy’s arrival. I invited Dallas to look through them, for I knew I had not taken the cigarettes, not even inadvertently.

  I told Dallas that I had contacted my friends in La Puente and I reminded him that after all La Puente was where I was going. Dallas seemed deeply hurt at this news. I was sorry for that. I had found Dallas attractive, and he had been almost affectionate at times. But he had never said explicitly that he had any other thought than to drop me in La Puente when he had finished his business in Fontana, and if he had thought of me as anything more than his shotgun rider, he had not given me a hint. If I had got a hint, I think I would have stuck with him, in spite of his dangerous way of life.

  Dallas wanted to know if he could come to La Puente, too. That, I said, was out of the question.

  I tried to explain that I was to be the guest of a friend of a friend, I was already imposing to an unthinkable degree, and I certainly could not propose any additional houseguests.

  Dallas believed I could if I wanted to.

  At last a horn sounded and Roy waved to me from his car. He had recognized me by Lizbeth.

  Lizbeth leapt for the backseat of Roy’s car and stood on it, licking Roy’s face. I got in the car with our bundle of gear. I did not look back at Dallas.

  THREE

  Los Angeles: Pounding the Pavement

  Roy was a pleasant, avuncular man who loved dogs. He had a good income and no expensive habits except Rufus. I cannot think of our visit as anything but a great imposition on Roy, but at least it was no hardship.

  I spent several days on Roy’s sofa, making reconnoiter of his refrigerator as Sherman made of Georgia.

  Rufus had not yet been released from prison. He explained by telephone that he expected to be released at any time, but prisoners were not told much in advance of their precise release dates.

  My friend Aaron Travis sent me some money as a loan against payment for some short stories I did before I left Austin, and I bought a pair of jeans and few shirts so that I could look for work. With only one complete change of clothes, I managed to get into Los Angeles only a couple of times a week, but it did not take me long to exhaust all the possibilities that had occurred to me.

  I went to the office of the magazine that had advertised for editorial assistance. I was cordially received by the editor himself. He told me there was a glut of editorial workers in Los Angeles and he had not heard of an opening anywhere for years. I had not mentioned his own ad. Much later I learned that this magazine often advertised in its own pages and elsewhere for editorial help. Whatever the purpose of the advertisements, they never reflected a genuine vacancy.

  I visited the offices of similar publications. The prospects were much the same. The publications had no openings and expected none. Several editors told me they had adopted a policy of reducing staff through attrition and would not fill any vacancy that might occur.

  At the AIDS agencies things were different, but the prospects were no better. I was told they had many applicants, many of whom were better qualified than I. Yet they had money to fund many more positions and waiting lists of clients that might be served. The problem was facilities. City Councilmember Woo, at what was reckoned to be a great political risk, had just cut the ribbon on the first group home for people with AIDS to be opened in Los Angeles. Neighborhood groups opposed all such facilities. Several other projects had long been tied up in the process of obtaining the various approvals necessary. No one could say when another facility might begin operation.

  I was surprised to learn this, for several Texas cities that I thought of as backward in comparison to Los Angeles had long had an assortment of hospices, group homes, and assisted-living apartments for people with AIDS.

  I began to put in applications with other kinds of agencies. At the hospitals I discovered that California required licenses for many kinds of lower-level aides and attendants, and for that reason I was unqualified for positions like the mental-health worker and nurse’s aide jobs I had held for many years in Texas. The requirements for the licenses were not stringent, but they were beyond my means.

  I had exhausted all the possibilities I could think of by the time Rufus was released from prison. He returned to Roy’s only to get his car and several thousand dollars. Roy had agreed to finance a vacation for Rufus. I believe Rufus was supposed to travel around the country to consider what he might do with the rest of his life, and then to return to Roy’s or not, depending upon what Rufus decided he wanted to do. The aspects of consideration, reflection, and decision seemed only to exist in Roy’s hopes for the trip. Rufus had in mind a cross-country party and urged me to accompany him on his junket. But he was afraid Lizbeth would damage the upholstery in his car. He wanted me to have her destroyed. That put the matter out of the question, though having recently spent a few days riding around Southern California with Dallas Matsen, I was not, in any event, eager to ride around the country with Rufus.

  Roy remained perfectly gracious and never gave me the least sign that I was exhausting his hospitality. But once Rufus left, I could not justify continuing to impose on Roy. I had scheduled a couple of job interviews, and I resolved to leave Roy’s if nothing came of them, although I had no idea where I would go or what I would do.

  The third day after Rufus departed I received a call from Aaron Travis. One of the magazines Travis worked with reviewed adult videos. For that reason Travis had received a call from Jack Frost. Jack Frost was producing an adult video and, although the taping of the picture was complete, Frost felt it needed a voice-over script. He asked Travis to suggest a writer. Travis suggested me.

  I called Frost, who described the work he wanted as just a couple of paragraphs to set the scene for each of his sequences. Foolishly, I gave him a bid that was a fraction of what Travis had suggested. Frost was very pleased and gave me directions to his apartment in Hollywood.

  I had just replaced the phone in its cradle when the phone rang again.

  It was Rufus. He was very intoxicated. He was calling from a motel room, but he did not know which city he was in. All of the money Roy had given him was gone and so was his car. He said he would call back when Roy would be home from work.

  Since Rufus could call Roy at work if need be, I hurried off to Hollywood as fast as the Rapid Transit District buses would take me. I spent most of the next two weeks at Jack Frost’s apartment, which was also his office. In describing it to me, Frost had very seriously understated the amount of work his script required. Nonetheless I completed the script in a couple of days. After that, Frost found various small office tasks for me to do. He said he would like me to do the script for his next picture, which, he said, would pay far better. We spent many hours discussing what he wanted for that picture.

  The real reason Frost did not discharge me as soon as I had finished the voice-over script was he did not have the money to pay me. His picture was over budget and behind schedule. The distributors would not give him any more cash until he delivered the final cut of the video.

  We dined at trendy restaurants that would accept Frost’s credit cards, but we did not have enough cash to buy a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter. One morning at about 4:00 A.M. while we were at the postproduction studio, Frost decided he needed a particular sound-effects record. Much of the motion picture industry has moved out of Hollywood, but in Hollywood one can still find a record store that is open at 4:00 A.M. and that stocks bins of sound-effects records. Frost shook down me and his models for change to buy the record.

  Only later in the morning did I realize I had given Frost the bus fare I needed to attend the job interviews I had scheduled. I was disconsolate, but there was nothing to be done for it.

  I began to form a vague plan.

  Jack’s assistant Eugene had mentioned to me that many people camped in a fire zone only a few yards north of Jack�
�s apartment. I did not know what a fire zone was, and I did not even bother to look at the one that was at hand. But I perceived that shelter was not a strict necessity of life in Los Angeles. Rain was rare and things dried out quickly when it did rain. Although the mornings could be very brisk, the cold would not be life-threatening. I thought I might obtain a mail drop, which I would need to collect what was owed me for work I had done and work I might do, buy a portable typewriter, and camp in the fire zone until I completed the script for Jack Frost’s next picture.

  In the meantime I continued to pore over the want ads, and I found something promising in them.

  A private mental-health agency in West Hollywood had bought a new offset press. As the manufacturer of the press included training in the price of the machine, the agency was willing to hire someone without experience to operate it. The address was within walking distance of Jack Frost’s apartment. I put in an application with the agency. I called my references in Austin and several of them sent letters to the agency. Evidently the letters were quite good, for the executive director described them as impressive when he interviewed me for the job. The aspect of my application that most appealed to him, I think, was that with my experience I could handle calls to the agency’s crisis hotline. The hotline had to be answered at all hours, but late at night there were few calls. The press was supposed to be run late at night and if I ran it I could answer the occasional crisis call, saving the expense of having a crisis counselor on duty to stare at the phone.

  The position especially suited me because it would entail a small apartment in the attic of the building that housed the crisis center and Lizbeth would be welcome there. I would have to run errands in the agency’s van, so I would have to get a driver’s license and to do so I would have to obtain eyeglasses. But, the director said, if I could tell him at our next meeting how I planned to get a driver’s license, the job was as good as mine. Otherwise our next meeting would be a mere formality. I would be working with the art director—in West Hollywood a private mental-health agency can be expected to have an art director—and he would have to approve my appointment, but that could be taken for granted.