Catalina Eddy

by Daniel Pyne

  Judy can put everything she owns in a single suitcase. The flat smells of lavender and new paint. It’s nothing like he expected. It’s strangely warm and inviting, almost magical, lit up smoldering by the last issue of another gauzy muted sunset: hook rug, beveled mirror, matched blond bedroom set. There’s no small talk between them, they’ve both said pretty much all they intend to. If he expected more static, between the mechanical movements of folding and packing and the empty way she looks at him, it seems clear that the fight is gone from her, and all she needed was a nudge to make her go.

  Who’s gonna drop it?

  (Not me, not me!)

  Then why you even need it?

  (You got one! They got one!)

  The walk down is always easier; Lovely hefts her big scuffed Samsonite into the trunk of his car and they drive the eight minutes to Union Station, where, as travelers drift abustle, under the majestic vaulted ceiling, Judy gazes up at the departure board while Lovely buys her a one-way ticket to East Lansing on the California Zephyr.

  “I’m sorry it didn’t work out for you here,” Lovely says.

  “What?” She looks at him oddly. “Oh.” She thinks it through. “Well. I just lost one semester, right? My grams says when one door closes another one opens up, and you just walk through it to a better place.”

  Lovely nods. Lovely’s grandmother was a teetotaling evangelical eccentric who once had the back door of her house screwed shut so that “people” couldn’t get in and steal the pork chops from her icebox, raw cuts of which inevitably turned up, rotting, days later in her purse, where she had hidden and forgotten them.

  Isla’s grandmother was a runaway Mormon, who didn’t want to be a Provo bishop’s fourth wife.

  Lily’s grandmother was a slave.

  One door closes, another opens up.

  On the platform, he tips the porter who takes Judy’s bag. Without saying anything, without even looking at him, she starts to follow her suitcase onto the train, but abruptly comes back down the three metal steps, wraps her arms around Lovely and silently squeezes him, leaving two blotted tearstains on his jacket, and then just as quickly disappears inside the car.

  He walks away before her train pulls out.

  Thermonuclear

  electrostatic ’pulsion, baby

  lemme see your critical mass . . .

  [drum solo]

  He’s dodging taxicabs in the crosswalk on his way to the terminal’s public short-term parking when the dime drops and Ry Lovely understands fully what he saw without seeing.

  One door closes, another—

  He backtracks to the station.

  Finds a pay phone outside the entrance, dialing local:

  “DeSpain?”

  10

  LOVELY KNEELS and digs through the detritus with his bare hands. Flashlight clenched in his mouth. Searching.

  On the lip of the arroyo, an Aerojet Laboratories security Jeep has found, in the moonless Flintridge darkness, Lovely’s Morris nosed into the fire road brush again. Down below, a solitary trespasser picks through the remains of Barn Number 5, white shaft of a flashlight stabbing down.

  High beams coming fast up the access road pin Lovely to the rubble. He stands and shades his eyes as black federal sedans skid to a halt and agents hop out, lively with guns and rifles. The generation that just missed the war, Lovely notes: Buddiger, Johnson, Kapnik . . . and DeSpain, who was there and then some.

  “What’s buzzin’, cousin?”

  “Does it at all bother you,” Lovely says to him, “that some rocket scientist’s tall tale about stolen secret plans and the Red Menace gets everyone in Justice aquiver, and it’s you poor overworked G-men who have to make it hold water?”

  “Fidelity, bravery, integrity.”

  “Oh, uh-huh. And the G stands for gullibility.”

  DeSpain comes forward, his expression wary. “You don’t know when to say when, do you?”

  “I’ve got a thing about loose ends.”

  “Welp. Even though you called me, I can’t give you a pass for this one, Rylan. It’s a federal crime, your being here. Trespassing, secure facility. Not to mention poking through classified material.”

  Lovely is bemused. “This?” He aims his flashlight down at the shards of barn again, and resumes rummaging. There’s the chilling sound of bullets chambered, guns cocked—

  —and Kapnik screaming, “DO NOT MOVE!”

  DeSpain shrugs. “They want any excuse to shoot you.”

  Lovely keeps working. “All this extra light helps, thanks.”

  Kapnik, brittle: “Sir?”

  DeSpain waves them off and steps between his soldiers and Lovely, who grunts and yanks at something stuck in the ruins.

  “What are we looking for? I hope it’s that missing ten grand, I’m getting a lot of static from my section chief.”

  Lovely straightens and shakes his head. “A doorway.”

  “Literally, or figuratively?”

  “Literally.”

  DeSpain wades in to help—braces himself, gets a grip, and they both tug and Lovely’s find releases: the big, blasted wooden remainder of the barn’s faded green back door, still in its rectangular doorframe. Together they drag it free, lift, and Lovely stands it up, crooked. Backlit, it takes on the character of a strange gallows. Lovely fingers a couple of crooked twelvepenny nails still embedded along the jamb to prevent the shattered door from opening.

  “Your Paul Lamoureux’s a monster,” he says. “And a murderer.”

  “Mine? Funny. Pentagon, Joint Chiefs, Congress—Ike himself—think he’s one of the most important American scientific assets of the Cold War.”

  “More important than Strughold?” Lovely wonders darkly.

  “Okay right. Play the Nazi mad doctor trump card, go ahead, Lovely. Cheap shot.”

  “I didn’t say he wasn’t smart. Hell, he out-conned a con man sharp enough to start his own religion. Drummond. Convinced him to lure me to the barn and blow me up in a ‘lab accident.’ Walks me in the front and then intends to slip out the back”—Lovely bangs on the broken door; it won’t budge from the frame—“only the back way . . . was uncooperative. And God’s servant got to meet his maker.”

  Lovely lets it all clatter back into the jumble of barn remains.

  DeSpain stares at it. “Okay, you’ve convinced me. Big deal. We can’t touch him, Lovely”—he’s irritated—“goddamn it, why did you show me this? You think showing me this will change anything?”

  Lovely says, “A man can dream.”

  DeSpain fumes. “Who put the red S on your chest?! You can’t prove it was Lamoureux! You can’t prove a goddamn thing!” DeSpain’s voice echoes through the arroyo.

  “No, I can’t.” Lovely says it softly. “That is the bitch of it, Ed. Some men get blinded so others can see.”

  Nobody says anything for a while. Kapnik and the young Feds let their weapons sag and their boots scrape the gravel. On the horizon, Hollywood searchlights sweep black cotton skies as if trying to find the stars.

  DeSpain breaks the quiet, his voice bitter and sardonic. “Yeah, well. At least he’s our monster, huh? Like you said.”

  “Did I?”

  DeSpain sighs, jams his hands into his pockets, and starts to walk back to the cars, signaling for his men to follow, waving for the headlights to dim and give them all some measure of the comfort of shadows.

  —

  BEHIND HIS FARMER’S MARKET COUNTER, his apron smudged with doughnut jelly, Hal is surprisingly philosophical about the new H-bomb, once he’s read up on all the Operation Castle tests, Bravo to Koon. “Knowledge makes us more dangerous. Always has, always will. Rocks, spears, broadswords, crossbow, catapult, cannon, rifle, and so on and so forth. The closer we get to our Creator, the closer we risk his final embrace.” Lovely suspects Hal heard this on the radio
, from Arthur Godfrey or Norman Vincent Peale. “I’ve been doing quite a bit of research on underground shelters,” Hal admits. “There’s a company in Lancaster can do you one in the backyard, deluxe, soup to nuts, for about five hundred bucks.”

  The fact that Hal doesn’t have a backyard and lives in a Fairfax fourplex with his mother seems not to figure in. Two weeks have passed since Lovely found the door that Lamoureux used to murder Drummond. Summer has burned through the marine layer and sent it packing; bright, hot, rich blue cloudless skies as unreal as Technicolor. Fourth of July promises to be a scorcher.

  “With proper air filtration and food management, a family of four can survive not just the initial attack but also the aftermath: fallout and radiation. What they call a nuclear winter.”

  “Yeah, but doesn’t that last for, like, five hundred years?” From the other end of the counter a wag who Lovely has never seen before pipes up.

  “Scientists tend to exaggerate,” Hal says. “So they won’t be caught with their pants around their ankles come a doomsday scenario. Plus, it plumps their funding.”

  Lovely sorts through the new messages Johnny Leong has collected for him while he and Lily went south to sort themselves and their relationship in Ensenada: more possible studio gigs, a teenage runaway, this philandering housewife that he’s already caught in flagrante delicto once, and warned the poor forgiving spouse that she would be an unapologetic recidivist. A probate lawyer’s call looks promising, surely boring and procedural, which is something Lovely would be craving just now if he could just get the foul taste of Lamoureux out of his mouth.

  On the balcony of their Baja room at the Hotel Riviera del Pacífico, Lovely had shared Isla’s diary with Lily. She flipped through it as if disinterested, found the blank braille scrap right away and lingered. Lovely had assumed it was a love note from Buddy. Lily, running her fingers over the bumps, closing her eyes, said, after a while, “No, baby, I think it’s lyrics to a song.”

  There happened to be, in El Sauzal, a blind Mexican accordion player Lily had met when Django Reinhardt toured the States in the wake of the war. They brought him Isla’s journal and a bottle of reposado, and he recognized both immediately, by touch.

  “Ah. Brahms. Volkslieder,” he said, grinning, touching the braille after they’d sampled the tequila. “De un poema checo de filósofo Daumer.”

  German love song. A composition by Johannes Brahms, Lily explained. With lyrics from a poem by some philosopher.

  The Mexican sang:

  Nicht mehr zu dir zu gehen,

  Beschloß ich und beschwor ich,

  Und gehe jeden Abend,

  Denn jede Kraft und jeden Halt verlor ich.

  “To visit you no longer,” Lily translated, “did I resolve and swear. Yet I go to you each evening, for all strength and resolve have I lost.”

  Ich möchte nicht mehr leben,

  Möcht’ augenblicks verderben,

  Und möchte doch auch leben

  Für dich, mit dir, und nimmer, nimmer sterben.

  “I long to live no longer, I long to perish instantly. And yet I also long to live for you, with you, and never, never die.”

  The Mexican shut his sightless eyes and sang the final verse softly, his voice high, quavering:

  Ach, rede, sprich ein Wort nur,

  Ein einziges, ein klares;

  Gib Leben oder Tod mir,

  Nur dein Gefühl enthülle mir, dein wahres!

  And Lily half sang it, too, then, almost a whisper after he’d finished: “Ah, speak, say only one word, a single word, a clear one; give me life or death, only reveal your feelings to me—your true feelings!”

  Lovely’s throat grew thick, and his eyes were wet, and he didn’t have the strength to tell her that he understood the German just fine, or that it was Buddy who had introduced him to the lieder of Brahms.

  On the last night of their stay, with the lights of the harbored yachts shimmering on the sea swell and the rattle and thrum of bar-crawl traffic below them, they began to talk about the boy.

  Lovely’s point was that he couldn’t do it alone.

  Lily wondered if he was proposing.

  He wasn’t, in any conventional sense. “Where I’ve been the past ten years, what I’ve seen,” he said. “We fought a war to get rid of evil, but it had already leached out, and we were covered with it. The world we knew, the one brave men in Europe and the Pacific died to come back to, it’s gone, Lil. I’ve seen what’s coming. Not just the bomb.”

  Lily pointed out how a country that still prevented people of a darker skin tone from sharing drinking fountains with their pale brothers and sisters was splitting hairs, where Evil was concerned. And that Lovely couldn’t protect the world from itself, if that was what he was saying, she wasn’t quite sure. She said his intentions sounded frighteningly similar to the rationale Ike and the Dulles brothers were using to go around the planet making trouble in the name of Freedom and the American Way.

  He didn’t want to admit to her he’d been a part of that effort. “No,” he started to argue, then thought better of it. “Well, yeah. But maybe I can hold it off for just those around me. Friends, family. And people who come to me for help.”

  “And boys about to be orphaned.”

  Lovely allowed that it was probably a fool’s errand. But he was the perfect fool for it.

  Lily had laughed and kissed him and stretched out long and lovely on the balcony recliner. The sky held that same terra-cotta glow they’d left behind in Los Angeles; no stars, a veiled crescent moon.

  “What’s his name?” she asked finally.

  “Gilbert.”

  —

  “FOR YEARS the problems of burning high-energy fuels in rocket engines has stymied us. At stake, quite literally, was the future of mankind . . .”

  Blah blah blah. Standing, hatless, next to the chunky television news cameras aimed at a lectern under the replica Wright Brothers’ biplane that hangs from the great room rafters in the Natural History Museum in Exposition Park, Lovely—grim, jaded, and intractable—should be able to just let this go, but when he read in the Herald that Dr. Paul Lamoureux, noted rocket scientist, was due to receive the city’s Man of the Year Award, he couldn’t stay away.

  “. . . This new Aerojet Zip Fuel means that our ICBMs can soar farther and higher, and our glorious B-29s will have greater ability to rule the skies and protect this great nation and its allies with a thermonuclear arsenal second to none.”

  This kind of jingoistic blather always gets enthusiastic applause, and Lamoureux, flanked by shit-grinned company executives, a few USC senior faculty, the usual local government suspects, and some well-fed Pentagon brass, takes a professional pause to allow the tribute to settle on his deserving shoulders.

  “In the titanic clash with those who would enslave free men under the brute lies of socialism, it’s not just Science that leads the way, but Science in the service of defending our American Way of Life, in which every man is allowed to pursue his dreams.”

  Even if they include casual rape and murder, Lovely observes. It goes on for a while, and ends with a standing ovation, the rocket scientist flashing a winning smile; a general pats him on the back, the governor shakes his hand. Flashbulbs pop. A reporter’s shouted question: “Elis Mankiewicz of Caltech says this puts you on the short list for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Professor. Care to comment?”

  One of Aerojet’s PR flacks steps up, but Lamoureux is happy to respond. “I would never disagree with Dr. Mankiewicz on matters of pure scientific reasoning.”

  The admiring crowd laughs. A second ovation erupts and Lamoureux mimes “Thank you” and steps away from the lectern microphones. His federal escort materializes from the wings, DeSpain in a new pale summer-weight suit.

  Lamoureux posing: with the generals, with Aerojet executives, with the mayor, with a pretty girl who dra
pes a ceremonial medal around his neck while his hand drifts down to her ass.

  The whole entourage falls in behind as Lamoureux makes his exit like a king leaving court. DeSpain and his Feds clear an aisle through the lingering well-wishers pressing in. Touch of hands, vague smiles. A yellowing Tyrannosaurus fossil skeleton leers down at them.

  DeSpain doesn’t notice Lovely drift in and match stride, until he’s asking, sharply, “What’s the Zip Fuel death toll now, doc? Two? Three, if we count Sarah Blohm?”

  “No need to make a scene.” DeSpain slides between them.

  Lovely ignores the Fed and shrugs off Lamoureux’s glare. “Sarah Blohm, yeah—you remember her? Another one of your motor hotel trysts gone wrong.”

  DeSpain’s last warning: “Rylan—”

  Lovely feints, lags, slips back inside of the federal gauntlet, up against Lamoureux’s shoulder, low, intense. “It took me a while to figure, because I’m no rocket genius, but that’s what it was all about, right? Isla witnessed you recruiting from the ranks of Drummond’s Cosmic altar girls. One of the perks for you of being a church rainmaker. Pristine gash.”

  Lovely is pressing for a reaction, and sure enough, Lamoureux slows and turns his face, eyes like ebony buttons, lifeless and dark. “Go away.”

  “Saw,” Lovely continues, “Sarah Blohm pedaling around the drive-in. Then Isla saw her pictures in the papers: story of a murder-kidnap. And Isla, being smarter than me, puzzled it out a lot quicker. How’m I doing?”

  Lamoureux glares at Lovely, but says to DeSpain, “Make him leave.”

  DeSpain slips his arm through Lovely’s and finds the eyes of another Fed on perimeter detail and nods the man over. But Lovely keeps talking. “Isla hit you up for hush money. You told the Feds it was about secret documents, because the murder of a girl might be a hard pill for even them to swallow. No matter how many sweet bombs you build.”

  “Tall tales.”

  “Drummond helped you disappear Isla’s body. Just like the last time. Sarah Blohm.”

  DeSpain says, “C’mon, Rylan. You’ve said your piece. Let’s take a hike.”