“…Spaced. Just put these on my tab,” said Ram. He pulled out a hundred guilder note from his wallet.
“I don’t think you’re past forty, Ram.”
“Credit me for the rest. Give Mac, Phil, Tony, and Big John another round. Ian, too, but make his a light one.”
“You’ll be back later?”
“Don’t think so. Gonna go home and light a fire. Maybe read, maybe sleep a while before Achterhof. Danke well, Pete.”
The barman winked and gave a thumbs-up sip. “Asseblief, Ram. Ciao.”
He was nearly at the door when Mac stopped him. “Come up around midnight. We’ll smoke one and grab some takeaway on the way over.”
Mac had his hand out away from his body, palm opened and facing down.
“Deal,” said Ram, catching the descending palm with his own up sweeping one, exchanging the three-step bro’mine routine.
When they were through, Mac pointed. “So…” And they said in chorus: “Until then, we just be pimpin’ and jivin’ and high off them mothafuckin’ narcotics.”
When he was outside, standing on the street and buttoning up his jacket, Ram saw the black leather motorcycle jacket and regimental mustache.
At first, he thought he had blinked himself out of A’dam and back to Sagrada or Monterey. But it was unmistakably the present and only three meters away on the opposite sidewalk and a little bit past him where he was walking. The voice was as unmistakable as the face. “Neuer, Konrad Neuer,” Ram called out. The leather jacket turned around and there was that perfect SS officer’s face staring at him open-mouthed. Only then did the other two figures emerge from under the shadow of the eaves. The one next to Neuer was his girlfriend Janie, which didn’t surprise Ram. But the one along the wall on the inside did. There in the haloed streetlight, stood Ram’s brother, Fran.
It was six weeks between then and now remembered Ram in The Oporto, watching the snow getting heavier now, the flakes large as confetti and beginning to pile in drifts against the Taco Tree across the passageway. Two weeks of catching up with Fran, whom he hadn’t seen for two years, and four weeks to ruminate, brood really, over Fran’s suggestion: Come Back Home…
But was it really a question, or not? Or was it…?
“…Fran! Janie, Konrad. Sonofabitch, what are you doing here?”
They hugged and rejoiced in the narrow street until a car honked them apart, then they exchanged more greetings and each told Ram how wonderful he looked, and he, in turn, complimented them. “We thought you’d maybe OD’d or something,” said Neuer while Fran grinned woodenly, looking into his brother’s eyes for a sign he hoped not to find.
“Not a chance, Kon. I wouldn’t cash out without at least kicking your ass at chess one more time. Come on, let’s all go to my place. It’s just here. But first, let’s go grab some beers.”
Ram turned the group around and they headed back down Heerenstraat and across the bridge in the direction of Prinsengracht where there was a night store. Janie and Konrad joined arms. Ram drifted back a step or two to join his brother.
“Fran, oh man, it’s good to see you.”
“No, Ram. You don’t know how good it is to see you. You look great. You look really healthy.”
They paused under the streetlight at the far end of the bridge. Fran looked his brother in the eye. “You are clean, aren’t you, Ram?”
“As a fuckin’ whistle. Come on. Let’s catch up before they get lost. We’ll catch up on everything else later on.”
“…So anyway, I run into little Danny one night while I’m out with Elden and Big Al. And I mean, he looks like a mop—just hair, skin, and bones, skinny as a fuckin’ rake. So Big Al, you know, Mr. Ironic, he smiles at Danny and says, ‘Geez, Dan, how you been keepin’ yourself?’ And Danny’s got a load full on so he doesn’t get the tone, y’see? And Little Danny, he says, ‘Oh, man, pretty good. Me and Kara just got back from one of those health farms, put on ten pounds. How do I look?’ God, we’d a liked to died. We had to work to keep from fallin’ out.”
It was a classic Konrad Neuer story. He stood while the three others sat, and he stage directed the scene while he told it—mimicked gestures and voices intact—mostly at Ram, which meant that he fixed him with his eyes and would follow Ram’s whenever they tried to wander, which they were wont to, to Fran, the brother he hadn’t seen in over two years.
They sat on the overstuffed furniture around the large round table in front of the stone fireplace in Ram’s second-floor flat. The light from the flames danced on the walls and ceiling and on their faces. They drank liters of Heineken straight from the bottle and sipped Genever beste from tiny cordial glasses. A half-smoked joint lay in the large wooden ashtray, alongside the spent stub of the first.
“Little Danny’s still jonesing then?”
“Well, what would you say, Ram, from what I just told you?”
“Sounds good to me. And Big Al?”
“Off and on, mostly off, I think. You know how he likes to look good around me. Still, sometimes when he calls, I can hear the burr in his voice. He always denies it though, says he’s got the flu. ‘Yeah, the Chinese flu,’ I tell him.”
Ram sipped his beer and thought once, hesitated once, and finally asked, “So what about Jaime?”
The animation that had been on Kon Neuer’s face evaporated. He looked first to Janie, then to Fran, turned and walked to the fire and stood facing it. It was Fran who finally spoke, “He’s in Soledad, Ram. They were going to give him one year in the county jail—”
“—Six months,” corrected Neuer.
“—Okay, six months. Then, three weeks before he went up for sentencing, he got arrested for armed robbery of a pharmacy. They wound up giving him five years to life. Alan seems to think he’ll be getting out in three—”
“—If he doesn’t fuck up in the joint,” interjected Konrad again. “And you know with Jaime that’s a very big if. You didn’t hear about any of this, Ram?”
“The first bust, yes. But after that, no, and on purpose, too. I’m not all that surprised though. When he left here, he was more or less wasted all the time.”
“You know what’s funny, Ram?” said Janie, speaking up finally. “The funny thing is that whenever Konrad and I would see him, he’d say that being here with you and your friends was the best thing that ever happened to him. He was always talking about coming back to Europe and being with Ram, wasn’t he, honey?”
“Yeah, but that was heroin talking. He wasn’t ever gonna get out of Sagrada—not unless he took his connection with him.”
Ram walked to the fireplace and stood next to Neuer, warming his hands. Fran and Janie drifted over too and they all stood facing the flames. Ram flung the last of his gin into them and a short blue flame jumped off the log. “Well, I guess that’s that then. Least I know now.”
Fran put his arm around his younger brother’s shoulder and squeezed him. “Hey, there was nothing you or anybody else could’ve done to help Jaime, not really.”
“Yeah, I guess so. But I was just thinking that maybe I could’ve done more when he was here. And what if it was me? Is that what everybody would be saying, too? Nothing we could do?”
“Yeah, but it wasn’t you, Ram. That’s what you got to remember.”
“Save yourself, or save your brother…”
“Pretty much. What’s that from anyway?” asked Fran.
“The Band, The Shape I’m In. You should know, Fran. You turned me on to them.”
…It was Netty he was waiting for as he sat there in The Oporto, sipping his pills and waiting, too, for someone to come in and be directed by Hans the bar owner to ask old Johnny where he came from, to which Old Johnny would reply, “From my mutter…” Oporto humor, a running gag, like the fake fights at the Heeren followed by firecrackers in the bathroom after which a catsup-stained victim would stagger out and die, taking out a table on the way down and panicking irregulars… Netty had something she had to tell him, she said, when she’d tracked
Ram down that morning at the Egg Cream after Mac told her he would soon be leaving A’dam. “Something important,” Netty said.
It had been misty three hours before, when he boarded the glass-topped Museum Boat and took the long cruise around the canals and the old defense walls of Triple X, looping through the Jordaan, down to Leidseplein, up the Amstel and then out into the harbor, taking it in for the last time and wondering what Netty had to tell him, and wondering, too, what awaited him when he landed. Then, he drifted out of that and turned the page back a few weeks to when Fran was still here…
…For ten days they roamed and rambled the town—Fran, Kon, Janie, and Ram. They shopped the stores along Kalverstraat and Nieuwendijk, paid homage at the museums of Museumplein with afternoons in Vondelpark, visited the zoo and walked Oosterpark and the Red Light; picked through the flea market of Waterlooplein and took long meanders through the Jordaan, past the Westerkerk and back to Ram’s apartment on Keizersgracht or the Heeren round the corner. Mostly, they talked of casual things—future plans for work, or where the skiing was best in Switzerland, or motorcycles and cars—but once, on a Sunday afternoon at the Cafe de Prins, after a late brunch of uitsmijters and egg creams and fresh-squeezed orange juice, Fran asked Ram when was the last time he remembered seeing Jaime.
“Oh, I know the last time I saw him,” said Ram, “but that wasn’t a good time for either of us, not a good thing to remember.”
“Why? What was it?”
Ram shuddered at the recollection and his shoulders twitched as the memory shinnied up his spine; strong-arm of a poison shop on the Southside, followed by a balls to the wall car chase through suburban back alleys. He waved his hand back at his brother, shooing the fly of memory away.
“Best left alone, Fran. Suffice to say that it wasn’t pretty.”
His brother fell into silence and Ram was likewise mute, staring at the ground and still recoiling from the memory of this and many other such instances that all seemed to involve Jaime—one sort of scam or another. Then Ram finally lifted his eyes from the sidewalk and looked out on the Prinsengracht. Islands of light beams were dancing on the green water of the wind-stirred canal. Then Ram looked further upward, above the crazy gabled rooftops, to the cloud-smeared sky just starting to break up, and smiled.
“I’ll tell you what though, Fran. I do remember the last time I saw Jaime when things were good.”
“When was that? Ninth grade or something?” Neuer said.
Janie shot Neuer a look and Kon excused himself to go pee.
“So, Ram, when was it?” she asked.
Ram shook out a Caballero, lit it, leaned back, and closed his eyes.
“It was when we lived on Corona Road up in the Highlands, me and Kon and Dale in the Japanese house at the top of the road, and Fran and Carmella down below at the two-room cabin along the lane. I had just got back from Vancouver. You remember that, Fran? Those two little houses I found for us from that crazy Russian real estate lady down in Carmel Highlands?”
“Yeah, she was a strange one. But she liked you and those were pretty neat little places too. I remember that party, you…”
Janie now shot Fran a look. She had heard of that party too.
“Anyway,” said Ram, steering the attention back, “I don’t recall what the occasion was or why we were all there. But we were—you and Stella, and Kon and Dale, and me and Jaime, and a couple of Sagrada mamas up for the weekend. And I remember you had those neat little Dutch doors on your place, Fran, and that the top half was open and Carmella had something good baking, and the smell of it was coming out, and there was also the smell of something sweet and smoky, and whether it was incense or pot or what, I can’t really say. And I remember what was playing on the stereo, Paul Siebel, ‘Woodsmoke and Oranges’ and Kristofferson’s first—’Duvalier’s Dream,’ I remember that song especially—and we were all just sort of wandering around in that clearing off to the right of the dirt driveway, sharing a joint or something, and Jaime said, ‘Look, far out.’ And he walked over to that old redwood tree that had been topped-off eighty feet up. Then we followed his lead and all climbed up it and Jaime was first to reach the top, and he said, ‘Look out there, see that?’ And we all looked but none of us could, except for you and Jaime, Fran, because you guys had way better eyes than all of us. And so Kon yelled down to Carmella and the girls who were hanging out with her back in the kitchen. And Kon told her to bring some binoculars, and when she did, he shinnied back down to fetch ‘em and brought ’em back up so we all could see what you guys were seein’ and way far out there, ‘bout a quarter mile west of Point Lobos, which would’ve made it more than a half-mile away from where we were standin’ in that tree, there was a school of gray whales migrating south, spouting and frolicking… Man, that was something!”
Ram leaned forward again, opened his eyes, and dragged deeply off his cigarette. He was smiling broadly now. “That’s the way I remember Jaime, and that was what was most special about him.”
“How do you mean?” Fran asked.
“Well, Jaime Razz was the best I ever saw who could start you off on one out of the blue adventure which then led you somewhere else equally out of the blue that seemed totally by chance but was almost like a revelation.”
“You mean the tree that leads to the whales?” asked Neuer who had returned to the table at the end of Ram’s tale.
“Kinda, Kon. But more than that; more like the interrelatedness of the unrelated parts. The wandering around the clearing with nothing in mind, then the discovery of the tree that we’d all looked at a hundred times before and all ignored, then all of us climbing up it and seeing the whales. And not ninety seconds before that, we’re all wandering around that clearing, all with solo perspectives of thirty feet, not a collective one of half-a-mile out. We’re below the trees, then above them. We’re off to our own selves, then off into something greater and beyond us.”
Ram exhaled, drew one last drag off the Caballero and flicked it away onto the street cobbles. “He did that on a semi-regular basis, did Jaime,” Ram said. “Whenever he was okay, and that’s how I’ll remember him ’cause that’s how I want to remember him, not… not, well… Hey, you guys ready yet? Let’s move on,” Ram said.
Konrad Neuer paid the tab and they were gathering their belongings for the short trip back to Ram’s. The wind had picked up a bit and there was a cold fang in it.
“Let’s head over to the Heeren,” Ram said. “I could use a couple Genever.”
…The snow had stopped falling and the cover was starting to clear. An incipient sun threw a slim beam down The Zoutsteeg dissolving the fog to vapor. Steam was rising from the cobbles and Ram could tell that the day would be fine, at least for a while, and so decided to take a walk. He told Hans to tell Netty that he’d be back in an hour and headed out into the chill but warming air, walking up Keizersgracht, past the Lutheran church, and turning right on Brouwersgracht where the Hookah Tribe lived. He stopped at the barge flying a skull-and-crossbones above a marijuana leaf flag and called out to Red John who piped him aboard. Red John was rolling a honey oil joint when Ram arrived.
“Your timing couldn’t be better, Le Doir,” the furry round man said and handed the spliff over to Ram to start.
“It’s radar, Red John,” Ram said, and they both laughed.
“Heard you were heading back to the states.”
“Yeah, Mac tell you?”
“Musta been. How long you gonna be gone?”
“Don’t know, Six months or so. I’ll be back mid-summer, I think.”
“Any special reason?”
“Yeah, family.”
Ram told Red John the whole tale, of how he’d run into Fran by chance and how Fran had persuaded him to come back and give America another chance, that things were changing for the better, that Nixon was on his way out, a new day was dawning, that the rascals were on the run and the time of the weasels was just about done.
“You believe that, Ram?”
/> “I don’t know, Red John, guess I gotta see for myself.”
“Yeah, guess so,” said Red John, drawing deeply on the spliff and exhaling giant spumes of smoke through his nose. The smoke curled around his huge red Afro and chest-length beard. He excused himself for a minute and got up and headed into the forward cabin. When he returned, Red John pressed a small vial into Ram’s hand.
“Here,” he said, “for your mental health, our finest, that Rose of Sharon from two years ago that you liked so much.”
Ram was stunned, his mouth ajar. He tried to utter something, but only a gurgle came out.
“Ah, forget it, you’re a brother, Ram, and you’d do the same for me or any other brother. You’re an A’dammer, Le Doir, and don’t you ever forget that.”
After a mug of tea, they parted with a bear hug and Ram headed off toward Nieuwendijk looking for the crew from Alligator Leathers. The shop was closed, but when he passed The Spanish Rider on the way back to The Oporto, he saw Jimmy Ray and Vance inside, playing dice at the bar. Ram entered and took the stool next to them.
“Hey, Ram. How you doin’?”
“I’m fair, J.R., and you?”
“Pretty good. I’m just takin’ this Okie’s money.”
“Too true, you fuckin’ Texican,” Vance moaned. “Watch him, Ram, see if you can figure out how he’s cheatin’ me. Want a beer or something?”
“No, thanks. I’m gonna get breakfast at the Egg Cream.”
“Mac said you were goin’ back to the states. That true?”
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