Out Of The Frying Pan And Out Of Little Aleppo

You haven’t seen a town ’til you’ve seen it from the back of a police car, Big-Dicked Sheila thought. Everything was a short story from that vantage; the world had such literary potential. Liminal, she remembered. Madame Cazee had taught her that word: it meant the space where two different realities rub up against each other, which causes splinters and fissures and subplots. Liminal was where metal met flesh, or water smacked up against beach, or lark met consequence. That little bit where you used to be free and you haven’t yet been caged. Liminal.

It was full-blast night, neon signs and suspect pedestrians, in Los Angeles. The temperature had dipped enough to make jackets a consideration, and there were six stars in the sky (which is three more than usual). The Dodgers were playing on the radio. Cops in Los Angeles have buzzcuts and listen to the ball game on the radio. Mel Ditch was a cop in Los Angeles.

“Ms. Feliciano, you like baseball?”

“I like the players. The game itself always bored me,” Sheila answered.

She answered to that name because it was the one on her driver’s license, and it was the one on her driver’s license because Little Aleppo had a DMV and Sheila is supernaturally skilled at making friends. She had no interest at all in the name her parents had slapped on her, partially because it was for a boy and mostly because it was klunky. Furthermore, she figured, the Social Security number she had been given at birth was also that of a boy’s and therefore not hers, so she asked around and bought one nobody was using and voila: Josephine Feliciano was born, at least as far as the state of California was concerned. Sheila was both genderfluid and identityfluid.

“It doesn’t change. Three strikes, three outs, nine innings, nine men. Never changes.”

“Some people like that sort of consistency.”

“Some people, yeah,” the cop said. He looked in the rearview. “How about you? Baseball fan?”

He did not address Tiresias Richardson by name because she had left all her ID in the Lincoln Continental convertible still parked back on Gardner Street in front of Lynn Danube’s apartment building.

“No hablo ingles,” she said in a flat American accent.

The cop smiled. The face of his watch was on the inside of his wrist. Brown sport coat and white shirt, dulled from laundering.

“Hablo español con fluidez. ¿Cómo te llamas?”

“No hablo Spanish, either.”

He took his right hand off the pleather-covered wheel and waggled his finger at the rearview mirror.

“You are having some fun at my expense. I can tell from your tone.”

The three of them were in a Dodge. It was the Dodgiest Dodge that ever rolled off the line. It was so Dodgy that it was often mistaken for a Ford or a Chevy. Maybe a Plymouth. It was a color. Which color was up for debate, but the car was certainly a color. All the badging had been removed, too, so unless you were an absolute car nerd, your brain just dully noted an automobile and moved on with its day.

West onto Melrose Avenue. Shops for the spiffy and lean of hip. Off to the right was the store where Slash stole his hat, but Sheila and Tiresias didn’t know that, and there was a coffee shop the Russians ran spies out of, and a comic book shop where some of the spies kept up with Batman’s latest tomfoolery. Gas was expensive; drinks were cheap. The cop had his window open and he thrumped his fingers along the top of the side mirror.

“You’re a detective?”

“That’s what my paycheck says.”

“Which department?”

“Well, seeing as how there was a corpse back where I picked you up, maybe you can guess which department, huh?”

“Homicide?”

He made a sound like POP with his lips and tapped his nose with his index finger.

Tiresias was not crying, but only because she was a better actor than she believed herself to be. She did not believe that one needed to see the town from the back of a police car; she had never been in handcuffs before, not even recreationally. They passed a bar where Emilio Estevez liked to finger Asian women.

“Maybe you should ask for a promotion,” Sheila said.

“Why’s that?”

“Well, you got to the scene of the crime before the criminals did. That’s some top-notch detective work right there.”

He made the same sound POP, smiled, said nothing.

“You should go to the horse track, being able to tell the future like that. I bet you’d make way more money than being a cop.”

“You would be astonished at how lucrative law enforcement can be, Ms. Feliciano.”

Sheila had elegant hands. Much longer than they were wide. She hated them. Thought they looked like an orangutan’s hands, but she could have modeled watched in advertisements had it not been for the dozens of tiny scissor nicks all over them. But they were double-jointed, and rolled up lengthwise thumb to pinky, which made them skinnier than her wrists. Useful for getting her arm into clogged drains or lubed-up assholes. Even more useful for getting out of handcuffs.

And now he turned off of Melrose Avenue, where the storefronts were still lit up and the sidewalk still bustling (as much as any did in this driver’s paradise), onto Hayworth. Headed south. It was very dark and very quiet and there were no storefronts or bustle at all, just apartment building. They were set back twenty feet from the curb and hidden behind desert fan palms, which are stubby and have fronds like jazz hands; between the road and the walk were the big boys, the Mexican fan palms, which are thick and high and shaggy.

The cop looked all around, left and right and in all the mirrors, and now Sheila’s neck is burning. She thrusts her whole body over the front bench seat and elbows the cop right in his ear, hard and pointy, and she grabs the wheel and jerks it to the right BANG the car hits the thick and high and shaggy Mexican fan palm–a coconut drops on the hood–and his face bashes into the steering wheel. Nose shatters, blood everywhere, and Sheila is screaming at Tiresias as she is already over the front seat entirely and the passenger door open. She turns around and Tiresias is yelling WHAT THE FUCK but also forcing herself into the front of the car with her hands behind her; Sheila grabs her under the armpits and puuuuuulls and now they are out of the Dodge, but Sheila goes back for the Halliburton briefcase and her purse and also the bagged-up gun that Mel Ditch had killed Lynn Danube with and gotten their fingerprints all over.

When Rudyard Kipling wrote about keeping your wits about you, he might have been writing about Sheila.

Tiresias was still handcuffed behind her back, and her shoes were still in the cop’s car, so she sprint-waddled barefooted besides Sheila in her yellow Converse. Through a parking lot and south down the alley until they found a fenceless gap and they were in a backyard of a low-slung adobe cottage. There was a shed made from cheap aluminum. They hid behind it, knelt down, were silent for a moment.

“What the fuck, Sheel?”

“You did so good, Tirry. I love you.”

Sheila made a sound MWAH while she dug through her purse.

“Are we fugitives now?”

“Turn around,” Sheila said, holding up a small silver key. Tiresias wobbled until her back was to Sheila, click clack, and then she rubbed her wrists just like everyone does in the movies.

“Why do you have a handcuff key?”

“Because I needed one once and didn’t have one.”

“You’re so self-sufficient. Wait, your purse was in the front seat. How’d you get out of your cuffs?”

“I’m double-jointed. I’ve shown you.”

Sheila folded her hand in half, and Tiresias pretended to vomit.

“God, that’s disgusting.”

“We need to concentrate.”

“Right. Do we have any coke left?”

Sheila did not take Tiresias by her shoulders and shake her vigorously, but not from lack of desire.

“No, but I need a smoke.”

“Oh, yeah.”

Sheila dug around in her satchel-sized purse again, came up with the crumpled soft pack of Camels, fetched two. More digging. Plastic green lighter. Both smokes in her mouth. FFT. PHWOO. Tiresias snatched the one closest, and they both sat with their backs against the shed.

“Debonair.”

“I saw it in a movie.”

Crickets sang and bats plucked moths from the air.

“Why did you do that?”

“He was gonna shoot us,” Sheila said PHWOO and ashed her cigarette with a shaking hand.

“How do you know?”

She thought about telling Tiresias about her neck, about the burning that started before trouble, and then she didn’t. There’s two types of people in the world: those who have been punched very hard in the face, and those who haven’t.

“I just know. Trust me.”

“I trust you.”

“Good. Cuz we gotta get out of here,” Sheila said, and stubbed out her Camel. “Right the fuck now.”

“Should we get the car?”

“Absolutely not.”

“All my clothes are in the trunk.”

Sheila now took Tiresias by the shoulders and shook her vigorously.

“We need to get the fuck out of here, Tirry.”

CHIK-CHAK is the sound of a shotgun which is like the sound of a rattlesnake or a snapping twig outside the campfire’s light: instantly identifiable, primordial. A shotgun racking is a non-negotiable sound. Especially when it is right over your head, and amplified by the aluminum wall of the shed you are leaning against. On the other end of the barrel was a gangly fellow with sleepy eyes.

“Too late for that,” he said.

The women raised their arms above their heads in a backyard in Los Angeles, which is so far from Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.