by Ben English
“That’s what horns are for in Idaho,” he said.
Travel north on 101 was hopeless. Strobe lights in all the primary colors marked an accident far ahead of them, and Mercedes took the exit.
“Plan B,” she announced, and Jack took his first ride on a subway. BART was pretty much what he expected: buy your ticket, slot yourself through a gate, wait on the platform with a great, vast mass of humanity, and shoehorn yourself into a metal box. The entire train bounced and swayed as it moved along, and as it barreled around corners the whole assemblage made a most terrific screech of rending metal.
Again, conversation was impossible. They’d become separated upon entry, and Jack stood when another man gave up his seat for Mercedes. At each stop along the BART route, Jack found himself alternately closer and farther from the girl as he rode the tide of humanity that ebbed and flowed around the wide door.
When they’d been underground an indeterminate time (Jack judged it was just under three weeks) she stood up and worked closer to him. Taking his hand, Mercedes pulled Jack near the exit and positioned them so they’d be safely disgorged onto the platform at someplace called Powell Street.
Out onto the platform, up an escalator through a series of tiled caverns, and eventually into some kind of mall. Jack spotted daylight at the same time he heard a recorded Tony Bennett song, and stepped out into some kind of large concrete pit in the middle of what was very much a city. They rode another escalator out of the pit, and Jack literally stopped breathing as he tried to keep up with the amount of unprocessed information his senses dumped at him.
The buildings just went up and up and up. Different styles, different shapes, all amazingly detailed. The parallel and zigzag lines of architecture—their sheer number—dizzied him, and he fought for a moment to mentally impose order on what he was seeing. He couldn’t find north-south; they were in a place where broad streets came together at angles he didn’t understand, and the sky still lacked a visible sun.
Mercedes beamed at him, enjoying the expression on his face. She was beautiful in the pale, pearly light. Incomparable. “Breathe, Jack,” she said. “You’re holding your breath. Don’t ‘tenere il vostro alito.’”
Someone near them made a surprised sound, and began speaking with Mercedes in fast Italian. Jack closed his eyes for a moment, inhaled deeply, and dared another look around.
Red bricks underfoot, worn smooth.
Straight ahead, the first thing he dared look at other than Mercedes, the corner of a gray building reminded him of a layered wedding cake, six stories up, with a serried edge carved at each level. He focused on that, examining the detailed masonry at a single point before daring to look elsewhere.
Everyone seemed in motion, everyone had an important place to go. Up the block, a dozen men in formal wear were in the middle of a pie fight. Bowler hats, handlebar mustaches, flinging great gobbets of whipped froth.
His brain was a smooth stone, skipping across a deep ocean of detail.
And there were trees here, thick green, leafy trees right in the middle of the city. Jack fixed his attention on the foliage, and felt better almost immediately. Something he was used to. Most of them lead up a hill, following metal tracks laid into the cobblestone, disappearing into the concrete canyons and power lines.
He noticed when the girl dropped his hand. She stepped away to buy tickets at some kind of booth, and Jack noticed a crowd, gathered purposefully in a semicircle (previous to this moment the street seemed so full of people they all registered as a mob). A wooden disk in the ground marked the edge of the metal tracks he noticed earlier, and the crowd looked like a line of some kind. Of course. They were going to ride a cable car.
A man standing near Jack nodded his way. “Welcome to the city,” he said with a grin. “It did a number on me the first time I came here, too.”
Jack nodded back. Eventually he said, “You stayed long?”
“Didn’t expect to, but I met a girl. You know how it is. San Francisco. The kind of place you can get homesick for without ever having actually been here. And once you’re here, hoo-boy.” He was dressed in a dingy sport coat, and wore a Giants baseball cap. “You’re a very fortunate young fellow. Your wife is a true beauty. Hang on to that one.”
Jack wasn’t sure how to take this, but the man seemed absolutely sincere. He smiled at Jack, and continued on his way. “Take care, now.”
It didn’t occur to him until the man was gone that he was homeless. It was turning into a day for reevaluation.
Mercedes joined him. “We could take a cab over the hill to North Beach, but since we’re already here we might as well do this right,” she said. “You can’t come to the city without riding a cable car.”
Once in line they watched the trolley make its way down the hill towards them. Jack felt himself relaxing into the rhythms around them. They stood next to another group of tourists, two families, both with small children. One of the men was either a native or fancied himself one; he kept up a steady monologue about the trolley system (ran on a constantly-moving underground cable), San Francisco inventions (Levi’s jeans, fortune cookies, but not sourdough bread—ancient Egyptians deserved that credit) and all sorts of odd historical bits about the founding of the area (California’s first millionaire, public school, newspaper, general store, and the discovery of gold) by Mormons. Jack found this last part hard to swallow, but he was the first to admit he didn’t know everything. The only thing he’d read about the Mormons was that they’d originally been thrown out of every state in which they tried to gather back East; it did sort of make sense that some of them would end up in San Francisco. It had always been the far left edge of the country in more ways than one.
The talker finally paused to slurp loudly from a Starbucks cup. “I’m not talking too much, am I? Clark, you’d say something if I was talking too much?”
“You’re on your own, Benny. Hey, what are those guys doing?”
Jack looked. The trolley arrived at the end of the track, directly over the wooden disk in the ground. It proved to be a turntable. Two men pushed on opposite corners of the car, and the entire base rotated until the car faced uphill again. The conductor rang a little bell, and the line surged forward at the speed of caffeinated tourism.
Jack took a standing position on the outside, where he could grip a handle, a polished white pole with brass fittings. He held out his hand for Mercedes.
She shook her head, and went for one of the rows of actual wooden seats, set in the interior of the car. He lost sight of her as the two young families boarded. The two men hung outside, like Jack, while the taller one—Clark—had a tough time convincing his tiny daughter to sit inside with her mom. She loudly and enthusiastically made a case for staying with her father and standing on the running board, but he made her settle for sitting on the nearest bench. She stuck out her tongue at Jack.
With a clattering jolt, the trolley started up the hill. Jack gave up trying to see Mercedes and looked out at the passing streets. The sun was beginning to break through in bits and pieces, and in less than a minute they rolled past a wide public square or park of some kind, right in the middle of the city. A statue of a woman danced on a tall spire in the center of the area. Jack thought it was an odd use of space in a city full of skyscrapers, and apparently the man next to him, Clark, agreed.
“Union Square,” said his friend. “See the monument in the middle? Put there after the Americans defeated the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay. President McKinley was assassinated somewhere around here, too.”
He had more to say, but just then Jack saw a spare, blond man in a flapping trenchcoat walking on the sidewalk, passing the trolley in the opposite direction. Something instantly familiar registered at the edge of Jack’s senses, and all the heads in the trolley turned as the man lifted his sunglasses and smiled.
“Enjoy the morning, folks.” Someone shouted a greeting, and Nicholas Cage waved back. “Is that you, Clark?”
The actor continued on hi
s way, and the man next to Jack studiously avoided all the eyes now directed at him. Bennie stared.
“What,” said Clark. “You want me to introduce you?”
Conversations resumed, and Jack found himself watching the little girl on the bench. She in turn kept her eyes on her father, who was by now caught up in another one of his friend’s rambling narrations. She slowly stood and slid her feet over bit by bit until she was standing at the edge, outside the line of sight of the grownups. Jack tried to look stern. “You’re going to get in trouble,” he warned. She was about the right age to start his swimming class, back home.
Again, she stuck out her tongue.
“That all you got?” asked Jack.
She crossed her eyes and sucked in her cheeks as well. How she did this and managed to keep her tongue so far out was a mystery to Jack, and he would have applauded if he wasn’t holding so tightly to the white pole. Which she was not, he noticed. It was too high for her to reach.
Her mother was on the far side of the cable car, deep in conversation with Bennie’s wife. Jack made eye contact with her as the trolley turned a corner and gave a little shudder-jerk. He looked back just as the little girl peeped and toppled over the edge.
Jack didn’t even think, just leaned out and snagged her tiny backpack straps, lifting her back bodily into the trolley. Her father swore, her mother screamed, and the conductor cranked the brake hard enough to make Jack bounce his face off the adjacent brass pole.
Eventually they got moving again, and there were a round of thank-you’s and slaps on the back. The little girl was wedged firmly between her mother and Bennie’s wife, each of whom took turns offering her all sorts of unsympathetic advice. Everyone fell back to talking about Nicolas Cage after a few moments, and when they finally stopped at the bottom of the hill, Mercedes decided Jack needed a reward.
He’d never seen Chinese writing on anything but a restaurant, and the shops fascinated him. She made him wait on the sidewalk while she vanished inside one, and Jack again found himself gawking at the window display. Gold (-colored!) everything, from statues of chubby Buddhas with the President’s face to sequined back-scratchers, a million gewgaws assaulted his vision in tightly-packed rows and shelves. Again his brain struggled to impose order, to recognize what he was looking at, and Jack grew dizzy.
He looked up and around at streetlights shaped like paper lanterns, at artfully peaked roofs and tile dragons on the ceiling. People here seemed to have a thing for the color red.
Jack smelled the ocean for the first time, though he couldn’t see it. Fog rode the water on the bay a few blocks away, marked by a mass of masts and sails.
And there were so many voices. Jack inhaled deeply, feeling himself relax into an audible river. He couldn’t pick out individual words, but he definitely heard at least two languages other than English. Amazing. One of them swelled abruptly in volume, and Jack turned just in time to be swallowed by a moving flock of young Asian women, all dressed identically in knit caps and hip hugger jeans.
They flowed around him indiscriminately, never breaking stride, giggling and laughing in the same beautifully inflected voice. Perhaps they were kids, but maybe they were his own age. He never could tell the age of anybody Asian.
One of them stopped and looked back, the only one not wearing a cap. Though her hair was jet black and she walked with the same stride as the others, this one had the freckles and interesting physical real estate of an American. Close enough for him to see her eyes change color, actually darken as he watched. She regarded him with a mixture of curiosity and frankness, and Jack felt himself redden. Her look said, You? What are you doing here?
One of her friends noticed and called back. The phrase lodged, like so many odds and ends, in Jack’s memory. “Uy, mukhang may souvenir si Biktorya, ah! Ang guwapo!” He heard their laughter long after they were gone into the crowd.
Mercedes emerged with a fist-sized bag. “You okay?”
“If that’s what it’s like to be mugged by Chinese girls, I’m great.”
She smiled, but only at the corners of her mouth. “Mugging feels different, Potato-boy. And those were Filipinas, not Chinese. The Bay Area is secretly run by Filipinos.”
“Filipinos?”
“And the Irish Mafia.”
He supposed she would know. “Did you grow up close by here?”
“Our apartment was a couple blocks over.”
She wouldn’t tell him what was in the bag. “I’ve got cousins here, on my Mom’s side. They’re waiting for me.” She led the way downhill, letting him follow.
“Which one is Alcatraz?”
She pointed.
“Are you sure? It’s awfully small.”
She made another hopeless sound, and Jack distinctly heard her stomach growl again.
A break in the line of t-shirt shops and camera supply stores was filled neatly by a line of fresh seafood counters, appropriately enough under a tall, crab-intensive sign round enough and shiny enough to act as a reliable tourist magnet.
Apparently any living thing harvested in the sea could be improved by exposure to a deep fryer. Mercedes was known here, and vendors shouted at her in Italian and English as she passed. At the third or fourth counter she suddenly embraced a thick, swarthy man in his late twenties with a live crab in each hand. He returned the hug (using mostly his elbows and chin) and tossed the crabs into a boiling pot on the other side of his stall. They spoke for a few minutes, and Mercedes handed him a small bag before switching back to English.
“Jack, this is my cousin Bela.” If it hadn’t been for the crab fat or clam grease or whatever on Bela’s hands, Jack might not have survived that bone-fusing grip. He kept his face under control during the slippery handshake, and even managed to greet the other man in tourist-book Italian.
Bela's eyebrows jumped at the language, but Jack could tell he wasn’t impressed. Maybe it was the leather jacket. He definitely didn’t like the jacket.
But Italians being what they were, he disemboweled a round loaf of sourdough bread, infused it with steaming clam chowder, and handed Jack the whole mess along with a spoon. The day suddenly improved.
Bela prepped a bread bowl for his cousin as well. She thanked him, squeezed a fresh lemon over Jack’s chowder, and whispered, “Let’s go where he won’t see us. I can’t eat this.”
They found a place to sit on one of the wooden jetties extending into the bay, safe from Bela’s view, and Mercedes set her food on a pier support, where it was immediately assaulted by seagulls. Jack started to eat his, then heard Mercedes’ stomach grumble again.
His bread bowl immediately joined hers.
This close, the bay was gorgeous. Jack simply had never conceived of so much water in one place. A group of swimmers moved past, less than a hundred yards out, all of them wearing bright orange caps. Much further out, an airplane on pontoons spun up and pulled itself into the sky. There were forested islands that looked explorable. The scarlet tips of the Golden Gate Bridge hung above the fog, but the ocean itself remained hidden. It felt good to have the city and the sun behind and all this open space in front. The water beckoned him, as it always had.
Clouds wheeled overhead, occasionally permitting thin fingers of light to stroke the bay.
They watched the gulls make short work of the bread, and when they were done Jack tried his line.
“I have an appointment tomorrow at the Avery Aquatics Center—”
“At Stanford?”
“With the head swim coach. He thinks my times are fast enough, but he wants to see me in the water. There’s a guy on the team this year who can swim a hundred-yard breaststroke in fifty-four seconds. If I can keep up with him tomorrow, and even get a little faster over the winter, I have a shot at joining the team next spring.” He glanced over. Her expression was unreadable. “Maybe even start working out with them this winter.”
She didn’t say anything.
“Mercedes, I can graduate by Christmas break. I’ve got
enough credits to be done with high school now if I want. Tuition is a problem, but there are four swimming scholarships coming up this year.”
“If Stanford is what you really want.”
“I don’t care about Stanford. This is where you are.”
Mercedes leaned forward. She traced her fingertips down his arm until she found his hand. “Here,” she said, handing him the bag from the curio shop.
It held a roundish statue, glass or crystal. Some kind of hunting bird, with its wings folded close but arched, as if about to take flight. It really wasn’t that great; the artist had more enthusiasm than talent, but it was pretty. Much more expensive than the glass globe he’d given her.
Mercedes pointed at the eyes. “I thought he looked fearless.” She took a deep breath. He felt her shudder a bit at the end.
“Jack, thank you for coming down here. I don’t want you to worry about me. My dad is worse now. There are some other . . . complicated things going on—I’m glad you came, you make me happy. But you need to go.”
“He’s going to get better,” Jack said. “Everything’s going to be all right.”
You’re going to be all right, he silently added. He felt a spike of frustration.
Why wouldn’t she tell him she was hurt? It didn’t make any sense. Why wasn’t she honest—didn’t she trust him? She was four hours away from major surgery; what the hell were they doing at Fisherman’s Wharf?
Leave it alone, Jack. Have a little faith.
Finally, some advice from the mental peanut gallery. He skimmed back through memory, thinking of every idiotic romantic movie he’d ever seen. Each one of them had a moment of conflict two-thirds of the way through. All the predictable problems and misunderstandings growing from a contrived moment of dishonesty—he hated it. He craved the real.
Truth right now is going to change your course with her. Add much pain. It was the most specific, yet cryptically useless advice he’d ever gotten from the dry voice. It even actually sounded concerned. Shut up, he thought back at it.