The Ancestor

by Lee Matthew Goldberg

  “Didn’t believe.”

  Wyatt’s glummer than when they first met. Like a wet towel that’s been wrung and discarded on the floor. He’s a true crime show, making her own life seem better. She’s stayed up at night wondering what she really wants. Orphaned so young, raised by various members of her extended family if they felt like it that day. A childhood spent wandering. The settlement used to be bigger, filled with enough children to create fantasies.

  To swim in lakes during the summers, make snow angels in winter, stay out all night ex-perimenting: cigarettes, alcohol, sex, pot, cocaine, acid, whatever caused flight, got rid of unwanted babies, aged her dramatically. As a teenager, she’d already lived multiple lives.

  At twenty-three, she has no energy for any more.

  But she liked Wyatt because he was different. And caring when he wanted to be. Sex always the last thing on his mind. Being held was paramount. She’d never been the rock in the relationship. She’d never had a relationship. She had regulars but most were only silent partners.

  “Would you dye your hair red for me?” he asks.

  She knows where he’s going with this. His wife. She’s slipped into this role before, never fully comfortable in that woman’s shoes, his exalted idol.

  “I’d look trashy with red hair,” she says, stabbing out the cigarette. She doesn’t want to talk tonight. She wants pure silence, a lifetime where neither ever has to speak again.

  Two monks living in blissful unity, saying all they need to each other with their eyes.

  They hear a rustling coming from outside. She can tell from the patter of feet against snow who approaches. She has lived with Tohopka for too long.

  He bolts through the door, practically knocking it off its hinges. A whirling dervish oozing narcotics from his pours. Babbling in the devil’s tongue.

  “Move,” Tohopka declares, pushing them both to the side and dashing into his room.

  They follow with their eyes. His bedroom an explosion of junk, a soiled mattress its nucleus. He tosses it aside and rips up a floorboard.

  “Tohopka, I…”

  She’s aware of his hiding place that contains a Smurf lunchbox with a gun and a stack of bills. Wyatt had offered her some of the money he got from the gold but she refused.

  Told him she never wanted to feel beholden. She’d rather pilfer some bills from Tohopka’s stash, assuming he’s in enough trouble to stay away for a long time.

  The gun still remains, but the stack of bills dwindled since he last checked. About two hundred left in total, a far cry.

  “Where is the rest?” Tohopka says, quietly at first which scares Aylen even more.

  “WHERE IS THE REST?”

  He’s grabbing her by the shoulders, spitting in her face.

  “Get offa her,” Wyatt yells, leaping between them, holding Tohopka back while pushing Aylen toward her freedom. Tohopka cocks the gun. Sweats pours off him like it’s raining. His pupils dilated to cartoon levels.

  “I had almost a thousand dollars in that lunchbox—”

  “Six hundred,” Aylen replies, flipping her hair.

  “What did you do with it?”

  Aylen disappears and returns with a negligée, writing it off as a business investment.

  She throws the silk attire in Tohopka’s face.

  “Take it, you motherfucker!”

  They charge at each other, animals wanting blood. She scrapes Tohopka’s arm, he rips a chunk of her hair, she digs her teeth refusing to let go even after Tohopka cries out wounded. A bullet goes off, shooting out a light. Downpour of glass. Wyatt enters the arena, punching Tohopka in the face. The gun bobbing between them but Tohopka has a better hold.

  “And where are my dog tags?” Tohopka yells. “You took them, you sneaky bum.”

  “That’s right, I did.” Wyatt still fights for the gun with one hand while the other con-stricts Tohopka’s throat.

  “I was a solider, I was…I don’t have time, no time, no time,” Tohopka says.

  “I want you to leave here and never return.”

  Tohopka wrenches out of Wyatt’s grip, looking down at his frozen feet.

  “Give me your boots, you’ll never see me again,” Tohopka says.

  “I’m not giving you my—”

  “Wyatt,” Aylen says, so he sits up on the kitchen counter and chucks his boots at Tohopka whose feet are too small, but he’ll have to make do.

  “You’ll pay for what you did to her,” Wyatt says, snarling. “Retribution.”

  Tohopka weasels past him. “Fuck your retribution.”

  He bounds out of the door waving the gun mightily, running off into the night. Aylen inspects the chunk of hair her cousin ripped out.

  “He’s not allowed here anymore,” Wyatt says.

  She lights another cigarette, calming her nerves. After a few puffs, she realizes she’s not freaked out, only titillated, enamored by Wyatt at the moment, her hulking hero. No one has ever stood up for her like this before. She pulls him in her bedroom. The tiny TV

  replays a 48 Hours she’s already seen as she strips him down and climbs on top, in the middle of riding him when the sheriff pokes his head inside with the second gun trained on her for the day.

  Stu allows Aylen and Wyatt to put on some clothes while he inspects Tohopka’s room for any clues of where he may have gone. Once the lovebirds get themselves together, Aylen

  wears a negligée and Wyatt pants but no shirt. Stu can’t help but notice that Wyatt has the same build as he used to when he was younger. Before muscles started to sag and a gut sprouted in their place.

  “He was here about an hour ago,” Aylen says, filling some plastic cups with cheap whiskey. Stu declines.

  “Any idea where he might be?”

  Aylen shrugs. “Ain’t his keeper.”

  “He’s not welcome anymore,” Wyatt says, the first he’s spoken since Stu arrived. The voice catching Stu off guard. “Ripped out a chunk of her hair.” He nods to the ground where a black patch of hair appears like a ball of yarn.

  “Is he running drugs?” Stu asks her.

  Aylen shrugs again but then shakes her head. “I mean, to kids and stuff, but he’s not the supplier or nothing. Same thing most around here do.”

  “Not her,” Wyatt says.

  “I’m not after your girlfriend. Miss Oxendine, your cousin comes up in our database with a few priors but nothing too troubling. Yet I believe he’s connected to a bigger or-ganization. Does the name The Hand mean anything to you?”

  “The Hand?” She gulps a thick swallow of alcohol.

  “You say it as if there’s something familiar?”

  “Not with the name, but…” She looks out of a tiny open window, the wind creating a harmonica hum. “There’s a man living past the settlement. I know some drugs used to come from him, not sure if he’s at the top.”

  “It’s a start, Miss.”

  “He has a mangled hand, like a claw. Or more like a chicken’s foot. Gives me goose-bumps.”

  “You’ve seen him?”

  “Once, talking to Tohopka, but never again. He doesn’t leave his cabin. That was a few years ago when Tohopka got back from the Middle East, when he was just starting to slide. He’s not naturally bad. None of us coming from here stood a chance, ya know.”

  “Could you locate where this man lives?”

  “It’s far in the woods, but I heard Tohopka giving someone directions once. Some middleman. I think I’d remember enough.”

  Stu sucks in a sharp intake of breath, the sensation of being so close to what he’s sought for an eternity.

  “I’d have to be in the car,” Aylen says, dragging her toe across the floor. “Like, I wouldn’t be able to just tell you.”

  “I need to go right now.”

  “I don’t sleep,” Aylen says, and Stu wants to reply the same.

  “I don’t want to put you in any danger,” Stu says, flicking between her and Wyatt, gauging how both will reply.

  Wyatt strok
es his massive beard, holds both of their attention as if he requires the final say.

  “She ain’t going without me,” Wyatt says, already walking toward the front door that’s off its hinges.

  “Wyatt, you have no shoes.”

  “I’ve suffered worse.”

  “I’m gonna get his coat and one for myself,” Aylen says, as if this kind of reconnais-sance happens with them all the time.

  Stu reaches for her plastic cup with a ring of swill remaining. He knocks it back. Pours another gulp for the extra kick of bravado.

  47

  In the haze of an Alaska morning, all foggy, white, and contained, Callie scoops up a sleeping Eli and drags a suitcase to a called cab. There’s no sun, but she will get some soon. Two tickets booked to Los Angeles, a fortune last-minute but her parents promised to pay her back. When they found out she was coming without Travis, they would’ve spent anything.

  The Nome airport with only a few travelers. She has to steel herself for the bustle, having not been to California in years. When she had Eli, her parents visited for the second time after the wedding. They bumped into each other for a few days in their small house until Callie sent them away. Occasionally, she’d Skype with them, and so that’s how Eli knows of their existence. Two digitized images waving from his iPad.

  On the plane, Eli finally wakes up, complaining about his ears. She points out of the window and he watches as they sail through a cloud.

  “Wooooo,” he says. The stewardess comes by and asks what he wants. Emphatically, he tells her “apple juice” like it’s his coffee and he needs it to function.

  “Cute,” the stewardess says, through her smile. Callie notices a lipstick stain on the woman’s front tooth. She brushes a finger across her own, but the woman doesn’t catch on. Time for a break from simple Alaska.

  But L.A. proves too much too fast. Eli plugs his ears in the LAX terminals, his eyes wide enough to pop out. She hates herself for rendering him so helpless. She checks her messages and gets one from Travis. He got her note. He hopes they have a great time in California. The bank passed on the loan. Did she really need to know that? Travis, always the bearer of chagrin. She buys a cranberry muffin for her and Eli to share.

  Her parents, Ken and Patricia, not the type to pick her up at the airport. They’d pay for a cab so what’s the difference? She’d grown up in a giant house in Los Feliz that used to be owned by a silent movie star. The house gothic and filled with winding hallways and nooks, places a small child could create worlds. Without siblings, she spent her time fantasizing with imaginary friends. She longed to return to that house, but her parents had bought a bungalow in Venice Beach when she left for Alaska. Her mom taught yoga, her father dabbled in investments after retiring from being an entertainment lawyer. They became the true hippies they were destined to be who rubbed scented oils into their feet and talked of chakras. Always into crystals, but now Ken wore Zen beads and Patricia started a raw food diet. They liked to talk about detoxing as if everyone else should be ashamed of their poor choices. Except for marijuana, which they consumed with an outright vigilance.

  Callie finds them stoned and smiling on their front porch, away from the main strip of Venice Beach, and the sound of a drum circle forming.

  “Cal,” Patricia says, stretching her arms so her caftan flows like a parachute. She’s wearing sunglasses as big as her face and a statement necklace that makes her look like a warrior.

  Callie smells patchouli as they embrace briefly. Patricia never one for giving too much love.

  “And this one,” she says, with a bony hand on her hip. “My grandbaby. C’mere, handsome.”

  Eli’s tuckered out but folds into her. Ken greets him with a tough handshake.

  “Let me put him down for a nap,” Callie says, after a hug with her father that’s nothing more than pats on the back.

  In the guest room, a thin slice of space with two double beds and an overstuffed closet, she lies down to gather herself before she has to emerge.

  “Why are we here, Mama?” Eli asks by her side, nudging her cheek with his nose.

  “I don’t know,” she tells him. “But I’m gonna figure it out.”

  When Callie finally gets the confidence to greet her parents again, they’ve moved inside since the sun’s setting. Her father looks good, as usual. Trim and sockless in expensive shoes, a collared shirt opened at the neck. Her mother thinner and veinier than she remembered, poof of hair like a seventies starlet. Both still wearing sunglasses indoors.

  “So Travis didn’t want to come?” Patricia asks. The tone is sweet but the underlying implication palpable.

  “Mom, I…” Patricia’s foaming at the mouth, almost whispering the word divorce with delight. “We needed a break from Alaska.”

  “Well,” Patricia says, turning her nose, “I don’t know how you live in a dead-end like that. Look at your skin.”

  Callie wants to say, Look at your skin, you two are leathery like lizards, but she glances at her own hands that are ivory-colored and dry AF.

  “Lotion, darling,” Patricia says, whipping out a bottle from her caftan like a magician.

  She squirts some into Callie’s palms. “Rub it in good.”

  “Bug,” Ken says, “you can tell us what’s really going on.”

  “Everything’s fine,” Callie says, raising her voice. Her parents eye each other. “Everything’s wonderful. God, you haven’t seen Eli since he was born. Is it so crazy I wanted to come?”

  They both wait a beat and give a nod.

  “Sweetness, don’t stay in Alaska to spite us,” Patricia says.

  And Callie almost wants to leave right then and there. She grinds her teeth.

  “Can you watch Eli? I want to go for a walk. I want to be by myself.”

  “Of course,” Ken says, rotating the prayer beads on his wrist.

  She takes in the home décor, which she’s never seen beyond being background in a Skype call. They have so much clutter, paintings competing for space, coffee table books they’ll never read, tchotchkes from their travels, not because they loved the pieces when they were there, but so they can say to friends, “Yes, we got that in Marrakesh, I believe,”

  and then tell a longwinded story full of asides and misdirects until they arrive at procur-ing some stupid little statue on their mantle of an elephant with a fez hat.

  “Here,” her mother says, after Callie already stood. She slips a gummy bear into her hand. “The sunset will be beautifully enhanced.”

  “Eli will be up in two hours.”

  “Take longer,” Patricia says, pushing her out of the door. And now Callie loves both of them for noticing her stress and giving her a tart gummy that she gobbles, immediately feeling high once she swallows even though she knows that’s impossible. She takes long

  strides to the beach, wandering away from the dozens of vendors hawking their art, or tarot cards, or perfumes, and finds herself by the drum circle she spied from her parents’

  balcony. About fifty kids, ten years younger than her, still firmly kids without spouses, or children, or worries, stoned under the pink and purple setting sun, drumbeats accelerat-ing, all of them dancing, united. She tells herself the gummy has kicked in and flings her arms to the sky. It’s warm enough and she can’t recall the last time she’s been outside in short sleeves. Two teenage boys dance around her, their moves polished, their rhythm divine, and she dances like she’s auditioning for a spot in a troupe, smiling at her ability to still hang. The song continues because a drum circle never ends, its eternal beat glistening, wild thumps over and over until finally the sun sets and the California night comes in cool and sweet, the air smelling of salt and pretty sweat. She waves goodbye at the two teenagers, takes off her shoes and runs down to the tide that licks her toes, and after a good cry, scoops some salt water onto her face, and returns to the girl she left here years ago.

  Callie’s baked and being stoned alone proves no fun so she dials an old friend of hers, Madi
son, blond and tan and always up for getting wasted.

  “Cal?” Madison chirps, before Callie has a chance to say hi. “No way! OMG.”

  “Way. I’m in L.A.”

  “Alaska melted?” Madison asks, and then laughs.

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “I’m having a party right now in the Hills. I’ll text you the address.”

  “Okay!”

  “Hop in an Uber.”

  Callie doesn’t have that app on her phone but is too embarrassed to say it. “I’ll come over right now!”

  She beams, all exclamation points. Since she’s on the beach, there are plenty of cabs so she gets in one and tells them Madison’s address. On the way, she calls her parents who vaguely remember Madison because they never paid attention to her friends, but tell her it’s fine and to stay out as late as she wants.

  The cab climbs up Havenhurst Drive to a new construction in WeHo with a boutique collection of townhouses: modern, white against glass with views of the city and the sky.

  The party in full force on the deck filled with outdoor couches and a DJ with oversized headphones. Callie pictures Laner where neighbors gather around a television with canned beers that aren’t meant to be ironic. Talk of fishing, guns, and weather. Here house music plays, girls wear bikinis covered in glitter, guys with their pecs and abs out, everyone having just come from trainers. She locks her arms around her own stomach, abs a thing of her past.

  “Callie!” Squeal from a pig’s tail being pulled and there’s Madison, golden tan, blond hair with extensions down to her ass, righteous bod and angel wings protruding from her back. She has a tattoo of a fairy on her shoulder, her lipstick an unnatural pink. “What a blast!”

  “Hey, Mad,” Callie says, and the two hug. Madison steps back to get a good look.

  “What are you wearing?”

  Callie peers down, a T-shirt she got in an outlet mall, jeans that didn’t taper enough, a lavender crystal hanging from her neck. She looks like an uncool mom.

  “I just got off the plane,” Callie says.

  “Let’s get you a cocktail.”

  Callie instantly feels better with the cold drink glued to her hand. Something red, cloy-ingly sweet but also with a heavy pour of good vodka, not the cheap shit Travis picks up at the packy.