Free Drive by James Sallis

the heads-up on Guzman. I saw the news. All three of them went down at the scene.”
    “Figures. He was basically your purest brand of trouble.”
    “Not many that’d crew up with a one-armed driver. I was desperate, I’d have taken on just about anything at that point. You knew that.”
    But Doc had drifted off into his own world, as he did sometimes, and made no response.
    Miss Dickinson rushed up, front legs stiff and hitting ground together, then the back, like a rocking horse, as Driver was leaving. Doc had told him about her. He let her in and closed the door. Last he saw, she was sitting quietly at Doc’s feet, waiting.
    Doc was thinking about a story he’d read by Theodore Sturgeon. This guy, not playing with a full deck, lives in a garage apartment like his. He’s brutish, elemental; much of life escapes him. But he can fix anything. One day he finds a woman in the street. She’s been beaten, all but killed. He takes her back to the apartment and—Sturgeon goes into great detail about provisions for blood drainage, makeshift surgical instruments, the moment-to-moment practicalities—repairs her.
    What was it called?
    “Bright Segment”—that’s it.
    If in our lives we have one or two of those, one or two bright segments, Doc thought, we’re fortunate. Most don’t.
    And the rest wasn’t silence, like that opera, I Pagliacci, said.
    The rest was just noise.

Chapter Twenty-one
    Best job Driver ever had was a remake of Thunder Road. Hell, two-thirds of the movie was driving. That ’56 Chevy, with Driver inside, was the real star.
    The production was one of those things that just fell together out of nowhere, two guys sitting in a bar talking favorite movies. They were brothers, and had had a couple of minor money-makers aimed at the teen market. Both pretty much geeks, but good enough guys. The older one, George, was the front man, took care of the production end, finding money, all that. His younger brother, Junie, did most of the directing. They wrote the films together during all-nighters at various Denny’s in central L.A.
    They’d been running scenes and lines from Thunder Road for three or four minutes when they both got quiet at the same time.
    “We could do it,” George said.
    “We could for damn sure try.”
    By the next day’s end, with nothing on paper, no treatment, not a single word of script, nary a spreadsheet or projection in sight, they had it together. Contingent commitments from investors, a distributor, the whole nine yards. Their lawyer was looking into rights and permissions.
    What tipped it was, they approached the hottest young actor of the year, who turned out to be a huge fan of Robert Mitchum. “Man I wanted to be Bob Mitchum!” he said, and signed on. Driver had worked on the movie that made him a star. He was a little shit even then and hadn’t got any better. Lasted another year or two before he dropped off the face of the earth. You’d hear about him from time to time in the tabloids after that. He’d gone into rehab again, he was poised for a comeback, he was set for a guest spot on some lame sitcom. But right then he was hot property, and with him on board, everything else fell into place.
    What a lot of people don’t know about the original is how that Ford used in the crash scene had to be specially built. They put on cast-steel front bumpers, heavily reinforced the body and frame, modified the engine for maximum horsepower, then realized that no regular tires could handle the weight and speed and had to have those specially made as well, of solid sponge rubber. All the moonshiner cars in the movie were real. They’d been employed by moonshiners in the Asheville, North Carolina, area who sold them to the film company then used the money to buy newer, faster cars.
    Driver was principal on the film, with a young guy out of Gary, Indiana, Gordon Ligocki, doing most of the rest. He had a duck’s ass right out of the Fifties, wore an I.D. bracelet that had