She handed me a Polaroid. In it, she was wearing a garter belt and mesh stockings with a black corset that laced up the front and squished her tits out of the top. Her hands and feet were bound up with cords and tied to the poles of an ornate brass bed. There was a pillow under her butt that thrust her naked sex out toward the camera. The whole thing had a look like a meal being presented.
I stared.
“You like it?”
I should have left or said something, but I couldn’t move or push anything out of my mouth. I was transfixed by the photo. I liked it alright, but I was uncomfortable with what it made me feel.
“You do like it, don’t you? I knew you were the type before I even sat down.” The red spots were bigger and the grin was wider and easier now. A bit of tongue showed beneath her upper lip. “Well, that’s done then,” she said.
She handed me a business card and scribbled a local address and phone number on the back and told me to drive there in twenty minutes where she’d be waiting for me—“in costume,” she said. I said I’d be sure to do that. After she left, I waited a few minutes until I was sure she had gone, paid my bill, and walked outside to a gray and drizzly night.
I was dizzy and a touch nauseous and it was an uphill battle to restrain myself from taking her up on the invitation. All the way home, that name pulsating through my skull and blood: Vera, Vera, Vera, Vera.
I smoked in the alcove of a Santa Rosa newsstand, killing the half hour before my bus was scheduled to depart. In my pocket was a form letter from Katz & Bardens, instructing me to appear at 3 p.m.; along with it was a handwritten note from Aragon, asking me to drop by his office afterward. And though I had my car, I’d always enjoyed the bus and figured on using the time to read.
When I walked into the depot, a flat voice announced, “The Greyhound bus eastbound to Reno is now receiving passengers for Kenwood, Boyes Hot Springs, Agua Caliente, Sonoma, Napa, Vallejo, Fairfield, Vacaville, Dixon, Davis, and Sagrada. Those passengers now holding tickets please proceed to Gate 3.”
I sat in one of the last three rows that used to be reserved for smokers and placed the magazines I’d bought at the newsstand on the seat next to me so as to ensure privacy. A couple of minutes later we were on the Sonoma highway and I was absorbed in a literary kiss-and-tell written by a former protégée of Faulkner. I turned on the light when we started climbing through the foothills, the skeletal limbs of oaks obscuring the light from a distant sun and occasionally plunging the bus into total darkness. The engine lugged as we downshifted through the sweeping turns, pulling us to the valley beyond. Every twenty minutes or so, we’d stop in another town where the gray coach would discharge some of the passengers while others boarded. At one of these stops, a voice addressed those of us in the back. “Alright, I know you guys are all comfortable back here but someone is going to have to shove over and give me a seat.”
I looked up at a girl in her early twenties, plainly dressed in t-shirt, jeans, and a down jacket. She was not beautiful, or even pretty, but she was not unattractive either, with lively hazel eyes and luxuriant wisps of long auburn hair that had been blown across her face by the fierce wind that shuddered outside.
The clear and assertive demand seemed somehow incongruous, as her voice itself was reedy and sweet. And while I continued to look at her, staring no doubt, she fidgeted a bit, seemingly embarrassed for having drawn such attention to herself. But she stood her ground firmly and looked from face to face with a resolved expression until it was me who acquiesced and, stacking the magazines on my lap, slid over to the window seat. As she stowed her belongings overhead, I returned to my place in the article, and when she sat, I crossed my inside leg across the other to demarcate the barrier between us. I looked out the window and the sign on the depot said, “Napa.” In front of it was a white station wagon with two men sitting on either side of a woman in a blue head-scarf. In front of the car, a dark youth with a scowling face looked through the bus at some point beyond it. As we pulled out, the woman next to me waved a tentative goodbye. I didn’t see anybody waving back.
“Do you mind?” she asked. “I mean my sitting here.”
“No, it’s alright.” I said.
“How far are you going?”
“Sagrada.”
“Is that where you’re from?”
“Not really,” I lied. “I have a doctor’s appointment there.”
“That’s a long way to go to see a doctor.”
“Doctors, really. They’re specialists I have to see.” I had said it with an air that was meant to convey it was something I’d rather not talk about, the specialists bit especially, meaning something incurable, like a cancer or rare blood disorder. But hearing myself saying it, I realized how harsh it sounded, and not wanting the silence I hoped would ensue to be one of hostility, I asked if she had friends there in Napa.
“My mother lives there.”
I was expecting her to say ‘my boyfriend’ or ‘my fiancé’ because she looked to me like the type I thought of as a fiancée, and I imagined that that was who the dark young man with the scowl was. As we traversed the cut through the last of the foothills before making the final decline into the valley I continued to read, but without my prior concentration as my attention was now divided between the clandestine affair between the bantam genius and his acolyte and the casual grace of the young girl beside me who was now involved in a meticulous arrangement of her tumbling hair. As we approached Vacaville and the turnoff which led to the palm-lined drive leading into Misericordia, where the former tenant had lingered for a year and a half, I closed the magazine and placed it along with the others now beside my feet. I gazed down the road with the nine-palm cluster at his head and said, “Mercy indeed.”
She nodded in concurrence. “I worked here once for a while.”
Inside or outside staff, I thought of saying but didn’t.
“How’d you like it?” I asked.
“I didn’t. I hated it. I worked in a convalescent hospital and it didn’t work out so well. God, those girls were tough.”
The last bit answered my first question. Misericordia was a men’s only prison.
“Which girls were those?”
“The ones I worked with. I nearly got in a fight with one of them.”
“Really? What was that all about?”
“I did better work than they did and they didn’t like it.”
“So what happened?”
“I quit and went back to Sonora. That’s where I’m from.”
“It’s pretty up there, in Sonora.”
“Yeah. But it’s a small town and I got bored with it. Sometimes, I wish I lived where there was more excitement.”
I laughed.
“What’s so funny? What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing. It’s just the opposite with me. I used to live where there was lots of excitement all the time, but I moved to a small town because I’d had my fill of it. There’s nothing much to do where I live either, but I don’t mind. I prefer it.”
“How old are you?” The question was blunt, and it took me off balance.
“How old do I look?”
“Oh, around fifty, I’d say.”
Usually people have difficulty guessing my age, for despite the ravages I’ve been subject to, my face doesn’t betray it, and to my eyes it’s the same face as the one in the high school graduation portrait. She hit it right on the nose, and after a moment of shock, I laughed lightly and shook my head.
“No? What then?”
“No, not that, it’s nothing. That’s exactly how old I am or will be on my next birthday. It’s just that I don’t feel that old. I feel brand new.”
We passed a few miles in silence, the bus rolling down the straight flat highway bordered on either side by fields of alfalfa, their green stalks flicking like whips in the gusting wind; alfalfa to the horizon, changing hue when the low clouds vaulted the ridge behind us and began hunching up over the great spread of green. It was change
able weather, rain, maybe, and if you were susceptible, you could almost swear you could hear the ions buzzing, even inside a bus. When we took the Dixon cutoff, she turned to me and said, “I’m intrigued. Why is it that you feel brand new?”
The bubbles of two different sentences formed at my lips. The first was a lie and the second was a windy preamble. Then I exhaled and told her so matter of fact that it shocked me.
“Because I am, I was in a mental institution for criminals where I had to erase my entire previous life in order to get better and survive.”
I didn’t know why I told her this as it was the whole truth as far as I was able to apprehend it. I think I felt that I could allow the transient intimacy that this knowledge might impart because I would only know her for another twenty miles. I guess that was it. And meanwhile, another part of me thought that this revelation might shock her into silence or revulsion, which this part thought was an okay thing. Instead, she looked at me with tenderness and an earnest expression of recognition, and then pressing me gently on the forearm, she bared herself to me. “I know what you mean. Not about the institutions, but about being brand new. I sort of feel the same way.”
I wasn’t expecting this coming from her. I’d already typed her as a kind of small town ingénue with boyfriends who squired her about in fast new cars and took her to drive-ins on Saturday nights, where they’d skirmish over the plains of flesh, striking a truce when the movie was over and then repairing to the A&W for a float before calling it a night with promises to renew the battle next week.
“How so? What happened?” I managed to squeak out.
She sighed twice before beginning, the first with longing, the second resolve.
“I got married at seventeen. Kidnapped really. He was a young Italian boy from down in the valley, but he was older than me. I married him because it seemed like the thing to do. I wanted to get out of my folks’ house and I liked him well enough. I told myself that I loved him, but now, I’m not so sure I did. How do you know when you’re seventeen? I think I was just open for it to happen, for something to happen. Anyway, I married him, and for five years, I felt like a prisoner. Each day was the same as the one before, only longer. And the months piled up and the years went by, and I felt, I don’t know, locked away from my life. I was just living… like a houseplant. I couldn’t stand staying but I couldn’t find the courage to leave either. I didn’t know where to go and didn’t want to exchange one misery I was at least familiar with for another one that I was blind to.”
The recitation took place between mile markers, and I felt as though I’d been through those years with her. For the past four or five years, I’d lived in the safe amniotic calm of isolation, never permitting anything remotely approaching the level of human communion now taking place between myself and a stranger, on a Greyhound bus that would shortly discharge me in the town where, Amsterdam notwithstanding, it really all began. And then I thought of Darrell, and Doug, and how that was the beginning of this and wondered what it was about me that was priest-like enough for total strangers to make total confession when, if anything, it was me who was in need of a priest.
I was thinking this and could feel the bus downloading. Outside, the wind had ceased its moaning and a tentative sun pierced a chink in the cloud bank’s armor. I was then aware of a sensation that lit up my spine with a flash as strong as electro but different somehow. My skin felt dry.
In Sagrada, we stood outside the bus in the noxious air of the terminal yard and said good-bye, exchanging addresses and phone numbers. I denied a welling desire to hold her and kiss her once on the cheek before sending her off to the placer hills with some sage advice which might help or protect her. I think I wanted to say something to her about survival. But I resisted that too because in the end, I felt she knew just as much about that as I did.
The follow-up at Fremont was pretty much what I expected—routine. I filled out the forms for Katz and Bardens, exchanged pleasantries with Stella Durang about how well we both were looking and chatted for a half hour with Aragon, telling him about the incidents on the river and the one with the woman with the snapshot. I didn’t tell him about the girl on the bus. It had not percolated all the way down yet and remained as yet a separate entity that I couldn’t quite assimilate into the reality I’d chiseled out of the firmament in the past six months. I didn’t tell Aragon, not because I wanted to hide it, but because I didn’t know what to call it.
The only patient I remembered was Ray. He sat in a recliner in the day room with a blanket over his legs, even though the sun was all the way out now and was pouring through the dayroom window. The quarter-sized pale spots were still visible on his temples, as this was Monday and his prescription for shock was always filled on Fridays. I lied and told him how good he was looking. He lied and told me he remembered me. Somebody came by and whispered to me that Ray was just waiting for the lights to go out. I was thinking that they already had. Somebody else came by and told me that Barry was back in Atascadero after another conviction for aggravated assault. I realized then how tenuously I hung suspended over the chasm and thought that it might have been something as whimsical or random as blind luck that delivered me and restored me back to a being which grew less fragile with the passing of each succeeding day.
I received her card two Fridays later and she’d written on the inside telling me that she enjoyed meeting me and extending me an invitation to come visit her if I was ever up that way. The final sentence read: “Hope you like the card (I turned back the leaf to a bold graphic of a rainbow). I especially liked the inscription on the back.” In the top left corner on the final leaf was the legend: “From ancient times, when man first saw the rainbow after rain, it has been a symbol of hope, wonder, and inspiration—a bridge to the heavens.”
Not long after the card from the girl arrived, the phone calls began. It was my brother Fran who was the first one to call and shatter the bubble I’d constructed of compartmentalized accommodation with my crime, and somehow, I knew during those few moments, when I allowed myself to think of a past, that he would be the first one to call.
It was a Sunday, and I’d just come in from raptor watching and watering my roses—a new pastime—when the phone rang. I picked it up and there was his voice, just as I remembered it, flat and singsongy with almost a hiccup in it. And it was him, too, in that way of his I remembered, that this is as awkward for me as it is for you but I’m gonna do it anyway because I think it’s the right thing to do. “Ram? Fran,” he said. I was speechless. “How are you anyway?” he finally said.
I told him that I was OK, and he wanted to know when I’d got out and what I’d been up to and why I didn’t call him, and a hundred other things. Work things, and what it was like where I lived and what I did with my spare time, but he didn’t ask about the rest of it, the places I’d been or what they were like. And that was Fran’s way too. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to know. It was that it was personal, and that I’d tell him about it only if I wanted to and only when I was ready.
And then finally, the conversation got around to small talk and old friends and what they were up to—Tor and Crash, and Doc and Bochs, and the others from Endymion who were still more or less intact. And the conversation went on like that for maybe a half hour or so before I could feel Fran sensing that it was getting me three things—reminiscent, overwhelmed, and uncomfortable—and when he sensed that he said he still had a lot to do today and that I should give him a call sometime and not be such a stranger now that I was back on my feet somewhat and that when I felt I was ready I should come down and visit him and it could be just him and me, I didn’t have to see Maria and Peter, because after all, I was still his brother.
So, without warning, began my journey back to the land of the living, which was also partly by definition the land of the dead. And though it was Fran who started the ball rolling it was Shaughn who kicked it into warp speed when he called and after asking me when I’d gotten sprung and all in his typical
smartass fashion, then asked if I remembered the story about the exploding toilet. At first I told him no, mostly because I didn’t want to go into the past, but partly because I didn’t recollect it clearly other than that it had happened. But Shaughn was persistent, as he always was, and he wouldn’t let me go until I’d been through the whole memory drill with him. Of how when we were fourteen and my Mom was away on a business trip, and Fran bought us beer before we went to the Stones show with Stew and Baldoni and Jaime and Shaughn in Stew’s dad’s Chevy Impala which Stew had hotwired. And how the show ended quickly when Keith Richard got electrocuted during The Last Time, and how afterward, we went back to my house where we still had a couple quarts of Busch left and how we drank them through straws and then how Stew and Jaime started wrestling in the bathroom and how one of them (Stew, Shaughn said, but now I remembered that it was Jaime although I didn’t say so) fell and crashed into the toilet at just the right angle so that it exploded, and then how we had to spend most of the rest of the night sopping up the water with towels and how we pretended we didn’t know what happened when my Mom came home early the next day and confronted us. And then how she lost it and told us that we were going to have to replace it and how to make sure we would, she then called Shaughn’s Mom and broke the news to her of her son, the toilet wrecker, and then how we—Shaughn, Earl, Stew, and myself—spent the rest of the weekend breaking into model homes and trying to steal a toilet because none of us had a job or money. And how we finally did get one and jammed off in Earl’s mom’s car just as someone was pulling up to the model home and how cracked up we were about that, laughing like crazy, imagining them inspecting the house and finding a bathroom missing a toilet but also because of how scared we were. “Remember?” he said. And though I told him, no, I didn’t, it was just like Doug’s deal with the ridge walking and all, only this time, it was personal and mine. It was history for want of a better word. At the other end of the line, Shaughn was laughing that goony laugh of his and I could almost see his face—harlequin-like with hooded bloodshot eyes, mirthful but grotesque, somehow—like Laughing Sal at the old Ocean Beach Funhouse in San Francisco, I connected. And it angered me, not so much his laughing, and it’s as usual at someone else’s expense, but because this stupid little sequence of the exploding toilet also sprung the locks on the vault I’d been barricading for what? Close to five years now? And inside the vault, all the reel cans of previously catalogued memory and time began crashing to the floor and spooling out, helter-skelter. And I knew in that moment, his idiot’s laugh echoing over the line, that there’d be no getting them back in again. The chaos in my memory vault was general, and it laid there before me, around my feet in snips and bits, inviting inspection and, most dreadfully, assembly.
Windwhistle Bone Page 9