Still Life Las Vegas Read online

  Peggy Lee concurred, crooning “Fly Me to the Moon” from his headphones.

  Owen shook his head as if to rouse himself and jutted his chin forward, teeth gently clenched. It wasn’t true. He wouldn’t be like this forever. This was just an episode, that’s what they called it: a depressive episode. Completely understandable. From the Greek, epeisodion, that piece of action between choric songs in a Greek tragedy. There it was. He was having a bit of a depressive episode, waiting for the next song to arise. Where was that song?

  Let me know what spring is like on Jupiter and Mars …

  He was going to save his wife. Glorious action had begun. All would be well, finally, and that last, awful episode would be in the past.

  He thought of kissing Walt good-bye this morning. The boy didn’t even stir from sleep—how long had he been sick? Owen couldn’t even recall hearing his son’s voice in Vee’s house, these two weeks he had been sequestered away. Bad father. No, no. He had to go. Walt would be fine. Vee would look after him. With any luck, Walt wouldn’t even realize his father had left, and Owen would be back, Emmie at his side. If all went according to plan. That, of course, was the fuzzy part; he had no idea what was going to happen once he touched down in Vegas. Now, Emmie, Emmie would have had maps and books, itineraries and schedules on hand. Before arriving at her destination she would be able to tell you what the best way out of the airport was, which route went where fastest during what time of day, and what the average cab fare to that destination would be. Owen was just happy to have found the correct gate in time. But all was not lost. He knew Emmie, and if he could just figure out what she would do, maybe he could follow. He would get there in time. It would all work out, somehow.

  That is, if Emily was indeed heading for Vegas.

  She is heading for Vegas. Owen adjusted his headphones, settled back into his seat, and closed his eyes.

  Omnes viae Vegas ducunt. All roads lead to Vegas.

  WALTER

  SCHOOL

  LATER

  One Monday morning, my dad, at the age of seven, was in the backseat of the family Pacer, horsing around, while his mom drove him to school. He had woken up late and missed the bus. His mom, who was herself late for work, was going to be later still by driving three miles out of her way. Her hair was damp and in curlers, wrapped up in a scarf. A Salem menthol cigarette was dangling from her lips (for some reason, this fact was important to my dad). As I said, my dad was horsing around, singing the theme song to the Batman TV show at the top of his lungs. “Batman! Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da Batman! Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da—” he yelled endlessly, flopping up and down on the seat like a marionette. His mother, who had stopped at a red light, turned around and, clenching the Salem between her teeth, hissed at him: “You are going to be the death of me!” She was wearing her big, dark, tortoiseshell sunglasses. My father couldn’t see her eyes, but he could see his own reflection, twice, and, a moment later when she looked up, the reflection of the truck that was about to plow into them. Twice. The truck knocked the Pacer forward with a jolt, into the path of a station wagon moving too fast. It slammed into the Pacer, spinning it around forty-five degrees and into a traffic light pole. My father’s mother was propelled across the front seat into the passenger-side window. She died instantly.

  My father didn’t have much luck with cars.

  That he survived that accident was something of a miracle; after all, as he himself stressed with a disbelieving shake of his head, back then NO ONE wore seat belts. But in the telling, my father never saw it as a miracle. He believes that day was the start of some kind of lifelong curse, incited by his mother’s prophetic last words, which involved him and cars; one that would replay itself time and time again, with precise and deadly accuracy, over the years.

  Curses might sound a little too B-movie horror, but, given his history, it’s hard to argue with him. There is another explanation, though, I once pointed out. Maybe the curse began not with him but with his own father, Owen Sr., who was not killed in a vehicle but did die in one: an ambulance, to be exact. Owen Sr. tried to off himself (gun in the mouth, missed and shot out his throat) and had the good/bad luck to do it during rush hour: traffic was slow and he bled out on the way to the hospital. Who knows what dark karma was cast into the air before he gurgled his last? Two weeks later, baby Owen was born, three weeks premature. It doesn’t seem like the smartest idea to name a kid after his suicidal father, but maybe that’s just me.

  My dad liked this theory, but it never seemed to stick. “It doesn’t matter how it started,” my father said. “What matters is that it ends with you.”

  All this goes by way of explaining why we don’t own a car; why we know the public transportation system better than anyone in Clark County; why I’ve always tended to walk on the inside of sidewalks; and why, on this Monday afternoon in May, five weeks before my eighteenth birthday, I’m finally getting my ass into an automobile for a driving lesson.

  I’ve had to lie like a meth addict to prepare for this. I applied for my learner’s permit, shelled out the thirty-five bucks, forged my dad’s signature on the permission slip, and presented my papers to the DMV, along with a notarized medical exemption for my dad, courtesy of the Nevada Health and Disabilities Department. I’d taken, and passed, the driver’s ed class at school, along with all the pimply freshmen who barely reached my shoulder standing up. All of this was done with my father thinking I was at a series of staff meetings. If he ever found out I was even thinking about getting behind the wheel of a car after he’d successfully kept me out of them for almost all my life, well, it’s his worst nightmare. It’d kill him, literally. Then he’d be dead, I’d be responsible, and the curse would pass on to me. I know how this curse thing works.

  I sailed through the whole process without thinking too much about it. All I know is, it seems crazy not to have a license. Who doesn’t have a driver’s license? Whack-jobs, the legally blind, and me. Enough is enough; it’s time. So I’ll just ignore the SUV dangling on a thread over my head and get on with it. To be honest, driving seems more like a theoretical concept to me than a practical one; learning about traffic signs, stopping distances, and defensive maneuvers is like studying a language spoken in a country I’m not sure I’ll ever visit.

  It’s been almost half a year since I left Silverado High, and I have to say, looking up at its terra-cotta-colored bricks and windowless tower, I still hate it. The building has the personality of a parking garage merged with a penitentiary. I did three and a half years of hard labor here, time off for good behavior. The two-bus-ride commute every morning, the hallways with their particular smell of old sweat and marijuana, the daily doses of indifference and casual cruelty—there’s nothing about school that I miss. If they weren’t offering free Behind the Wheel classes I could have very easily never seen this place again, could have let the whole experience congeal into one big putrid mass and slip down the sinkhole.

  No one was sorry to see me leave early. My only friend here, Shifra Downey, she of the heavy eyeliner and vicious mouth, had disappeared at the beginning of the year. Her family moved to parts unknown; I’m guessing witness protection. That left me, one of those kids administrators are always profiling: antisocial misfit, intelligent but underachieving, a quiet loner, disdainful of team sports, always scribbling in a black notebook. I’ve got no Nazi manifesto Web page, but other than that, I was a classic case of someone who was going to walk in one day and shoot out the school cafeteria. Lucky for them, there’s no way I could have afforded the black trench coat.

  Today, I wear all black to the school anyway, just for the effect. I’ve got on an oversize hooded sweatshirt and a backpack that just might be concealing a semiautomatic rifle with two clips. I’ve got my best disgruntled face on. I’m back: this time, it’s revenge.

  But no one notices. No one scrambles for the intercom, locks the school doors, or calls security when I walk past the chain-link fence into the courtyard. Nothing’s changed: th
e same kids are bouncing out of the doors, the same kids are lounging on the concrete benches, sneaking tokes and swapping spit and constantly chattering, like the monkeys on the treetop canopy of The Mirage. Even my old tormentors can’t seem to be bothered. Two jocks who have been bouncing orange balls off my head since fifth grade come clumping down the stairs toward me. I brace for the inevitable insult (it’s reflexive), but they sail right past me without so much as a smirk or a sneer.

  I’m already a ghost to them.

  Around the back, at the rapidly emptying school parking lot, waits Mr. Handy. He’s by the car with a clipboard and a sky-blue folder tucked under his arm and a scowl on his face. “Mr. Stahl. You’re late,” he barks. “You want credit for the hour, you get here on the hour.” Mr. Handy thrusts the folder in my direction. “Driving log. Know what it’s for?” I’m taking a wild guess that it’s for logging my driving. He barrels on. “Keep it. Use it. Don’t lose it.”

  Mr. Handy teaches physics in the basement lab of the science wing, and only emerges from underground, like a bad-tempered groundhog blinking in the sunshine, to conduct Behind the Wheel training classes. He’s been doing this for as long as there have been cars, I think. I took physics with him sophomore year but I have no recollection of it. Vectors, triangles, sines and cosines, they all jumbled together into a kind of basso rumbling intoned by Mr. Handy way up there in the front of the class.

  “Today, the basics. Get in.” Mr. Handy opens the driver’s-side door.

  My father liked to recount the story of Phaeton, the boy who found out his father was the sun god Hyperion (or Helios, or Phoebus Apollo, depending on the version). To prove his parentage (no DNA tests back then) Hyperion says he’ll do anything the boy asks. Obviously the guy has never had dealings with a teenage boy, because of course the kid asks for a set of wheels: his father’s Sun Chariot, to be exact. This chariot has way too much horsepower, literally, for someone without even a driver’s permit, but the god has to say yes; he’s sworn an oath. Phaeton gets behind the wheel, cracks the whip, and everything quickly goes to hell. The chariot veers out of control, singeing the heavens, scorching the earth, turning Ethiopians black from the heat. The gods lament, Zeus zaps Phaeton with a thunderbolt, and down the boy tumbles from the sky, dead.

  I’m guessing there was some kind of message there.

  “Today, Mr. Stahl,” Mr. Handy says.

  I get in. The seat sags in the middle, the upholstery worn where thousands of students’ butts have been sliding in and over. The interior is bare-bones and stripped away, like it’s really the fossil of a car, in taupe. The top of my head almost grazes the roof of the car, my knees are jackknifed under the steering column. I take a deep breath. The space feels very small.

  Slam. Mr. Handy disappears, and an instant later jerks open the passenger side. He crowds in. Slam. I still haven’t touched the steering wheel.

  “Basics. Adjust your seat.”

  All of Mr. Handy’s face droops: his nose, his earlobes, the folds on the sides of his mouth. His sagging eyelids have tiny growths on them that seem to pull the lids down even farther.

  The next thing I know he’s grabbing my right knee and pushing it down. “Get your foot on the brake! Your foot on the brake!” My foot goes on the brake. “You’re too far in. Adjust!!” He’s now reaching forward between my legs and pulling up on a bar that slides my seat all the way back. “Push in! Push in!” Soon Mr. Handy’s practically crawling all over me, manipulating bars and levers until he’s got me in a position he’s happy with. “Remember that,” he growls, settling back onto his seat. He checks something off on his clipboard.

  “Mirror. Mirror. Mirror.” Mr. Handy stabs his pencil in three directions. “Use them. They can save your life.” He proceeds to tap his pencil at everything. “Temperature. Oil pressure. Fuel,” he rattles off. “Headlights. High beams. Turn lights. Warning lights. Got it?”

  My father had a sister, Kathleen, who was fourteen years older than he was. She kind of took him in when their mother died, and when she got married a couple of years later, he came along, too, her only dowry. She was killed eight years later in a hit-and-run. No warning lights for her. Just a curse. And then there was Georgia—

  Car keys are dangling in front of my face. “Let’s get her started,” Mr. Handy says.

  He’s handing over the reins. I’m Phaeton, feeling the leather straps pull against my hands. Steer the middle course, my son, neither too high nor too low. What kind of advice is that?

  Mr. Handy settles back into the seat, clipboard at the ready. “Key in the ignition.”

  There’s writing around the ignition: Lock. Acc. On. Start. Acc is right. Acc! Acc!

  “Go ahead.”

  I hesitate, because it feels like a really, really bad move. Putting the key in its slot, turning my wrist, it’s starting something I can’t take back. For what good reason? It seems, suddenly, like an incredibly stupid idea.

  There are tufts of gray hair growing out of Mr. Handy’s ears. They’re shooting out, like sparks. He moves closer. His breath is stale and smells like pepperoni. “Key. In the. Ignition.”

  Time slows. Mr. Handy’s skin is pouring down his face, puddling around his neck. He’s melting, that’s what it is. Sparks are coming out of his ears, and he’s melting. Mr. Handy’s on fire, there’s no air left to breathe, and we haven’t even taken off. There’s a woman walking on the sidewalk somewhere, about to step into the street. She doesn’t even think about it. Zeus is drawing back his thunderbolt—

  “Put the key in the ignition, Stahl!”

  And he’s grabbing my hand, trying to force it down toward the steering wheel column, but I’m way ahead of him. I’ve already thrown the keys to the ground and I shout, “I can understand English!” right into his melted face. He jerks back, eyes open wide, mouth gaping like a grounded carp, but before he can speak again I’ve opened the door and by the time he reaches for my arm I’m already out of the car and making my way onto the sidewalk. He’s yelling for me, “Stahl! Stahl!” but I’m up and over the stairs, through the chain-link fence, and away, hoping I’ll be in time to catch the 202 at 3:39.

  * * *

  The bus runs slow. It ambles from stop to stop, like a cow. An aged, injured cow. All of them are like this, even the express ones. You get used to it: the constant jerk, rumble, and halt as the bus sways down Charleston Boulevard. You don’t even give it a second thought when smoke pours out of the engine, again, and you have to wait on the side of the road for twenty minutes until another 202 creaks by. Nobody jiggles their legs impatiently or sighs heavily or looks down at their watches. The reason for this is simple: nobody who rides the 202 has anywhere they want to get to fast.

  It’s different up and down the Strip, of course: there the buses are electric (courtesy of the casinos) and have bright spangly videos of showgirls and acrobats playing from high-definition monitors. Those buses are mostly for tourists who can’t quite figure out how the monorail system works, but they also transport the Strip’s workers to the Downtown Station in Old Vegas, where they can connect to these wheezing, diesel dinosaurs that’ll take them home. It’s kinda like a reverse Oz here: the moment you leave the Technicolor land of the Strip, you step into a world the color of sand. My world. Reverse Oz-mosis.

  The bus lurches forward, prodding me toward the backpack at my feet. I take out my sketchbook and pen. Soon Mr. Handy’s face is staring up at me, pocked in black ink, with drooping skin and fireworks shooting out of his ears. He’s growling the words “Stahl! Stahl!”

  That’s my name, don’t wear it out. I draw the rest of him melting into a puddle on the car seat. There. That’ll show him.

  I turn the page and stare at a great big sheet of nothing.

  Who needs to drive, anyway? I live in Las Vegas. Where else do you need to go? Look, look what’s here. I scribble out Vegas Vicky, smiling her crooked, gap-toothed smile, and her big blond curls bounce down to her big bouncing breasts; she’s so full of Luck sh
e’s about to burst out of that white fringed midriff top. She’s kicking her white cowgirl boots high, sending the colossal air balloon of the Paris Hotel soaring—

  —over the Coney Island roller coaster of New York, New York, rushing around a giant goose in a cowboy hat, big as Godzilla. He sits on a pile of golden turds and waves a wing at—

  —Vegas Vic, with his tight pants and cigarette-ravaged face, who gives a wink and a leer at Vicky. He’s standing in the shadow of the Stratosphere, that giant prick looming over everything. Big dicks and big boobs. Las Vegas is the finest place on Earth.

  The bus rocks back and forth, rumbling comfort. You don’t need a driver’s license, it’s saying. Stay with me. This is my slow croon, my mechanical moo, my lullaby. Who else will rock you? The pen makes a little black trail snaking down to the bottom of the page. My head nods to the stopping and starting of motion. The wheels on the bus go round and round.

  At age five, life began.

  I’m lulling myself to sleep with my own bedtime story. Not the one my father used to tell, his Vegas Adventure, but the one of my first memory. The first memory I can remember. I see the details so clearly, it’s as if a light had switched on—flash—and a photo had been taken—me and my father at the ruins of the Venetian:

  * * *

  Walking in the dusty air, my hand clenched tight by the bigger one. His palm is sweaty.

  “It’s wet! It’s wet!” I say. I pull away; he wipes his hand on the side of his pants, then swallows up mine again.

  Sun in my eyes.