Number Nine: Chapter 11

LAY OF THE LAND


FADE IN:

EXT. LONELY HIGHWAY – DAY

Jake is driving south on a two-lane road, top down, Ruby in the passenger seat.

The Beatles’ PIGGIES plays in the foreground.

Have you seen the little piggies
Crawling in the dirt
And for all the little piggies
Life is getting worse…

CLOSE UP of a man in a grey suit, slicked back hair, looking through binoculars. This is one of Guido Lazerri’s boys.

Have you seen the bigger piggies
In their starched white shirts
You will find the bigger piggies
Stirring up the dirt…

PAN OUT to Lazerri’s boys, two in suits, three in work shirts and khaki slacks, standing around a Monte Carlo and a Buick LaSabre. All are heavily armed.

CLOSE UP of Jake gliding to a stop in the middle of the road. Jake and Ruby look at each other.



Since Baby Blue was now ruby red, she was badly in need of a new name. Ruby came up with one when she flipped on the radio and heard an old rocker song she always loved. Since then, Baby Blue was re-christened Cinnamon Girl.

Ruby tossed Jake the keys as they neared the car. It was a first. Tony insisted on driving Blue as a power trip but she never volunteered. Not once. Her car was an extension of her soul. It was a private place where no one else was welcome and those who entered without an invitation were unwanted strangers, trespassers, thieves and occupiers. They deserved whatever cruel fate fell on them.

Jake was different. The whole world was different now and Ruby saw what the situation demanded. She had the eyes of the crow.

Jake didn’t ask why. He took the keys and drove away from the canyon with an unspoken promise to return when he had more time to listen. He never gave a promise he did not intend to keep. The canyon was his soul and he had never shared it with anyone before Ruby. He had never felt that anyone deserved or needed it more than she did.

One way in, one way out. They crossed the threshold and did not look back. They focused on the road ahead, knowing there was no place to hide – not for them or for those who wanted to corner them.

Jake slowed and stopped in the middle of the road. He saw Guido’s boys like ants on the wall and he knew they were looking back, waiting for the next move. Leaning forward, Ruby saw them, too. Jake looked at Ruby. Ruby looked at Jake.

“Let’s go,” she said.

Jake eased forward and leaned on the gas, full speed ahead. Guido’s boys scrambled, maneuvering their vehicles to block the road, taking positions behind the blockade and aiming their guns at the maniac speeding toward them.

A few hundred yards in front of the blockade, Jake hit the breaks, sending Cinnamon into a tailspin, her rear tires clipping the dirt and gravel on the side of the road, raising a cloud of dust that washed over Guido’s boys like rolling thunder.

“Watch out, mother fuckers!” yelled Ruby, standing in the car. “This is Jake Jones and Ruby Daulton! We don’t slow down for nobody! We’re mad, we’re bad and we’re on a mission, baby! So get out of the way or get ready to go down! ‘Cause my baby is one mean, lean warrior dog and I’m his sweet honey pie!”

The bullets began to fly as she let out a scream like a tribe of Apache women in a war party. Jake pulled her back to her seat and peeled out the way they came. Two miles down, he took a right on a miner’s excursion road, dirt and gravel, heading east.

Guido’s boys were in hot pursuit, like a pack of rabid hounds, too pissed to think straight and too stupid to care. Their cars were even more ill suited to a cross-country chase than Ruby’s Rambler but there were no more stops. They wanted to kill this skinhead bitch and her monkey boyfriend. They wanted to poke holes in his head and poke Ruby with something else until she begged for death. They no longer cared that Guido and Tony wanted her alive. They wanted to rip her heart out and eat it for lunch.

They knew every syllable Tony and Guido breathed were lies. They knew Tony was a hothead who would not hesitate to blow his own boys away if they made a move on his woman. After what happened in Vegas, they knew Tony set up one of his boys to take the rap so that Guido could deal with Ruby himself. It no longer mattered. Ruby and her man were playing them for fools. It pissed them off. It crossed the line.

Rage transforms smart men into fools and fools into blithering idiots.

Jake glided across the desert just fast enough to keep them in his trail of dust. He pelted them with sand and gravel as Ruby pelted them with words. Mile after mile, their world became a cloud of pounding dirt and sand, their eyes bulging, sweat stinging, hearts pounding, lungs choking, yelling and screaming, shooting at phantoms, too angry to slow down and too stupid to give up the chase.

They were like our soldiers in the sand storm of the Iraq war. Firepower did not matter when your enemy knew the layout. It was the like the Indian wars before the white man decided to kill the buffalo and starve them out. Poison blankets delivered in the form of charity, they cornered the people on reservations and watched them die. Genocide is the only way to win a war against the natives.

There would be no genocide today. Today there would be revenge.

Jake swerved, raising a cloud the size of a bunker buster, turned abruptly to the north, where he spun to a stop on an overhang and watched the two luxury sedans drive over a bluff straight into a gorge, one on top the other.

Ruby got out of the car to observe the carnage. When a couple of the boys emerged, stumbling, spitting and unable to keep their feet, Ruby caught their attention.

“Hey, mother fuckers! I got a message for Tony!”

She raised her fist in a gesture that meant “up yours!”

“I got one for Guido, too! Fuck you!”

She got back in the car, pulled out her purse, and plugged in a CD she got back in Phoenix.

“I love you, baby,” she said with a kiss.

They drove back to the highway the way they came in, another day and another miracle. Ruby was at the top of her world and Jake was at the top of his game. The CD sang a serenade to their glory and they sang along.

I wanna live with a cinnamon girl
I could be happy the rest of my life
With a cinnamon girl…


FADE IN:

EXT. DESERT HIGHWAY – ARIEL VIEW – DAY

Cinnamon kicks up a cloud of dust.

INSERT MONTAGE – WORLD OF CHAOS

NUMBER NINE plays in the foreground.

Guido’s boys stumbling around as the cars explode like bombs. Images of dust storms, tornados, hurricanes, bomb attacks, urban war, snipers, suicide bombs, cars burning, charred bodies, crying women and cursing, dark skinned men.

Fade out WORLD OF CHAOS. Fade Number Nine.

Fade in ARIEL VIEW of Jake and Ruby driving.

Fade in CINNAMON GIRL by Neil Young (After the Gold Rush).

Close up of Jake and Ruby singing.

A dreamer of pictures I run in the night
You see us together, chasing the moonlight,
My cinnamon girl…

Fade to black.