by Craig Nova
Sara sat opposite me, her eyes on the glass in her fingers, although sometimes she looked up.
“And you just went off to Berkeley, that’s where it was, right, and never tried to find out what happened to me? Never looked me up, huh? Just damaged goods, I guess.”
“It wasn’t like that,” I said.
“Well, Jake, why don’t you tell me how it was.”
“I wrote to you,” I said. “My letters came back.”
“They bounced me around, you know. From center to center. Then I had to do more time. Disciplinary problems. Well, let me tell you, they had that right.”
“I wrote more than once. Same thing. They came back. I called, too. Confidential information about where you were. Who was I going to contact?”
“That’s sweet of you Jake,” she said, but with that tone that was pure Sara. Was she serious, sneering, or was her heart breaking? Maybe, for all I knew, all three were involved. It left a kind of buzz that made me lean toward her. “And then, I bet, some of those California girls started in on you. Huh?”
I lifted my glass. The bartender poured two more.
“Why, Jake, you’re blushing. Isn’t that the sweetest thing?”
She took the next shot as she had the first one. Bang.
“And when you came back here . . . ? Did you look for me then? It’s been a while, right?”
“I didn’t forget,” I said.
“Well, that’s a real consolation, Jake,” she said.
“I thought you were gone,” I said.
“Well, let me tell you something,” she said. “I went some places, but I didn’t get away. Not really.”
She lifted her glass.
“And I hear you’re an astronomer. Like official. Is that right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “A Nobel Prize winner tried to give me some trouble when I had to defend what I had written.”
“A Nobel Prize winner, no shit?” said Sara.
“It must have been those pictures we looked at in the library,” I said. “That got me through.”
“You mean I helped you?” she said.
“Say,” said the bartender. “Is that you two on TV?”
“Yes,” I said.
He brought over the two shots.
“On the house. Jesus. The way things are these days. You can’t even go out to buy a TV.”
Sara still took the cold vodka in the Russian style. Bang. Then she went back to staring at me.
“As though I didn’t have enough trouble, you’ve got to come back into my life, too. Bad luck isn’t spread out evenly. It comes in clusters. Like a cluster fuck. Right?”
“I guess,” I said. Clusters of stars. The distortion in gravity I knew was there. But how could you explain it?
“I don’t think there’s any guessing here,” she said.
“So what’s wrong?” I said.
“You really want to know?” she said. She looked down again. Then she wiped her face with the handkerchief. She rolled a shoulder, bit her lip.
“Yeah, well,” she said. “At least it’s something new.”
“So what’s the trouble?” I said.
She began to sweat and her fingers fluttered like moths around a light. The only thing that stopped them is when she held the shot glass, although she cried again, too, and used my handkerchief. Then she shrugged, a gesture of such resignation as to scare me, but it only lasted a minute and showed how she was on a high wire between panic and despair.
It took a while, but she went through it, right from the beginning, slowing down now and then, and then, when she was finished, she said, “Well, what do you think my chances are, Mr. Ph.D.? Huh? Would you bet on me? The truth now.”
“It’s hard to say,” I said.
“Now that’s the understatement of the year. Jesus. I’m running out of time, too. You know, sometimes you can figure things out, but that takes time. And that’s something I haven’t got.”
She took another drink. Bang.
“What do you do when you’re in trouble or scared?” she said.
“I go fishing with my father,” I said.
“Well, sometime I’ll go with you,” she said. “If I last that long. Write down your address and phone number. Mr. Ph.D. Astronomer. And where do you meet to go fishing? At your father’s house? Does he still live in the same place?”
“Yes,” I said.
Then she got up and walked out, into the sunshine.
MY FATHER HAD seen my picture on TV, and after I dumped the Samsung in my living room, I picked up my fishing things and drove to his house, where he already had his waders, fly rod, vest, and our sleeping bags in his car. A basic 4Runner from work. It looked institutional, that is, the color of the walls of a cheap hospital, a sort of jaundiced yellow, but it didn’t look like a cop would drive it. Responsibility without authority.
“Hey, Jake,” he said.
We drove along the strip with a bunch of AutoZones, McDonald’s, BP gas stations, and dollar stores, and a Radio Shack, too. In the distance, in the haze of the late afternoon, you could see the those green foothills, which looked liked enormous creatures with ridges on their backs, and they were lying side by side. Between them, of course, is where the rivers flowed, like silver in a foundry. Or sometimes the water spread into a pool, where the sky and the bank and sometimes even the flowers were reflected. Still, from here, the hills were just green and wrinkled, a little misty, ominous, and filled with promise.
Halfway there we pulled into the parking lot of a place called the Palm, which usually had nude dancers, but it was Monday and the place was closed, so we just sat there in the parking lot for a while.
The Palm was a long, cream-colored box, the wall that faced the parking lot covered with stucco. A hand-painted sign, in red letters on what looked like a bed sheet, said AMATEUR NIGHT THIS WEEK. It was inexpertly hung with a couple of pieces of rope from the roof of the building.
My father reached into the glove compartment and took out a box of Junior Mints.
“Here,” he said.
My fingers were shaking a little, but I picked one up and put it in my mouth. Sweet, cold. I started sweating, the film of it on my forehead.
“They’re not so bad,” he said. “Want another?”
“In a minute,” I said. “I think I’m going to get out and stand here in the parking lot.”
“You’re not going to get sick are you?” he said.
“Maybe not,” I said.
He got out, too, and we both looked at that homemade sign.
“You know what?” he said. “On TV I had the strangest feeling that the woman who was in the store was Sara. You remember her, your pal from high school? Lived in—what did she call it?—the Gulag.”
“I remember,” I said.
“So, was it her?” said my father.
“Yeah,” I said. “She’s in trouble.”
“It can’t be that bad,” he said.
I turned to those distant hills, which now more than ever looked like green monsters, prehistoric beasts.
“I wouldn’t bet on it,” I said.
“I had the strangest feeling over the last three or four years, since you’ve been back. The phone would ring and someone breathed there for a while. A woman’s breathing. Then she’d hang up.”
“Probably Sara,” I said.
“But why didn’t she speak?” said my father.
“She thinks she’s damaged goods,” I said.
“Well, that’s just silly,” said my father. “Say, you sure you’re not going to be sick?”
“That’s the funny thing about being scared,” I said. “It’s not in the moment. Everything is kind of bright then. But later, you know, the shadows start. That guy could have shot me and Sara, too. Just like that. Bang. And now the greens on that ridge don’t seem to be the same color. Darker.”
“Well, you must have done the right thing in the store,” said my father. “Because he didn’t do it.”
“Do it�
� was a stand-in for “getting shot.” But that was my father, who was polite.
“Maybe I just got lucky,” I said.
“You didn’t panic,” he said.
“No,” I said. “Not right out where you could see it.”
“So,” he said. “That’s enough. It got you through.”
“That’s all there is to things like that?” I said. “Just patience and keeping your mouth shut?”
He shrugged.
“I don’t know what to say. Here. Have a mint.”
I took another one and put it in my mouth. The sweetness lingered as I looked at that sign.
The door of the Palm opened and a man of about fifty came out, wearing a sports jacket that was double-vented and had a belt. Could have come from Yugoslavia, Budapest, someplace like that. His hair was brushed back and looked like an inexpensive hairpiece, but it was probably real. He came into the parking lot. A young woman was with him. She had short hair and was wearing blue jeans and a checked shirt. Glitter on her eyes, and dark mascara. High heels with the jeans.
The man looked at me and my father and said, “We’re closed. Come back tomorrow. Gonna be amateur night this week.”
I looked at the sign and at the young woman. The sweetness of the chocolate lingered on the tip of my tongue, although I could still hear the sound of that shot. My ears still rang, as though the knowledge of evil had a sound. I wondered if you could hear it in places where people had died for some stupid, ugly reason.
“Come back for amateur night,” the man said. “Going to be something.”
“We just stopped to rest for a moment,” said my father. “We’re going fishing.”
The woman with the glitter on her face looked at him and then at us.
“Say, weren’t you on TV?” she said to me.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Come on,” said my father. “Let’s go.”
We pulled back onto the highway, which was just two-lane blacktop.
“Come on,” said my father. “Let’s go fishing.”
Soon the stars would be out. That was the moment I lived for, when the sky came alive. What is more reassuring on a winter night than when Orion glows? Cygnus, the clouds of luminous gas in the Crab Nebula. Shock waves from the supernovas. Delphinus. Canis Major. Ursa Major. You can’t see it with the naked eye, but it changes the sky if you know it’s there. Like knowing a woman has a tattoo beneath her underwear.
SARA DIDN’T GO looking for trouble. After all, who does? Aside from those whackjobs you see from time to time and who, to be honest, I see at the university more than I used to. But that wasn’t Sara’s style. And the university had nothing to do with it. She took the first step, the real step, after some false starts, in selling cars. Subarus. She said it seemed like a good idea at the time to sell cars, and I guess it was. But she went over the cliff not simply because of greed. What’s greed? Just money. She had an idea, she said, to track me down, wherever I was (it might take some doing, but Sara was never afraid of things like that) and she’d be dressed in that stuff you see in Vogue and other magazines, Gucci, Versace, Chanel, and she would have, behind her ears and on her wrists, perfume that would make me think paradise had just walked up to my apartment. Wouldn’t that just blast all that interstellar medium, all those equations, all my cosmological theories into dust?
“But you were too smart to think that was going to really happen,” I said. “Weren’t you?”
“Let me tell you something, Jake, no one is better at outsmarting herself than someone who has brains. So, yeah, I thought we’d settle some old scores, and it would start by me walking up to your door, as though I had stepped out of Vogue. And was looking for trouble and the trouble was you.”
“It would have been something . . . ,” I said.
“That’s what I thought,” she said. “Would have been fun.”
The bar where we went had the periodic silence when everyone, for some unknown reason, stops talking at the same time.
“But you won’t believe the black hole I’m in now. When I think about it, I get the idea I am looking down a well. Darkness that is constricted, you know. It just gets tighter the deeper in you get.”
“You could have just written me a letter,” I said.
“Letter, schmetter,” she said. “I didn’t even know where you were. I was in the slammer. Then I got out and found out you were in Berkeley, but you’ve got to realize what that seems like for someone able, for the first time, to choose what she’s going to have for dinner. You might as well have been in the Amazon. But I had this idea. Think about that perfume, coming in like a romantic front. What’s a letter compared to that? Physical reality, Jake, how about that? I thought I’d be ready when you were still in school, but things didn’t work quite right, and then when you came back here I was still working on it.”
“I thought you didn’t believe in romance,” I said.
“I don’t know anymore,” she said. “It’s like in baseball trades, you know. A player to be named.”
“So you were thinking about it,” I said.
“Listen, Jake, I got things way ahead of that question. So I had a general idea of making up for all that trouble and I wanted to turn into a woman who would sear you into forgetting every bad thing that ever happened. And for a long time I just lived with this sort of hope, see? Years. Then that general idea turned into a specific action. It started, of course, when I decided to speed things up and began driving cars to Mexico. Not drugs. Nothing like that. All sort of clean. In a way.”
The memory of her voice, of her trouble, lingered, just like perfume, as my boots made that small thump on the first part of the trail to Furnace Creek. The trail starts at the road, and there it’s pretty worn, but that doesn’t last long. My father and I carried our waders and rods and a sleeping bag, and we went through the undergrowth, ferns like fans, oak and stands of pine, and then we came to the first suspension bridge, just wire and wood, and it swayed back and forth when we went across. There, in the middle, I stopped, and below the water, which was tea-colored in this section, flowed in long tongues, or like those patterns you see on the ground after the water has run during a thunderstorm. Even in the middle of the bridge, Sara’s trouble hung around like the stink of something vile, like an open grave.
On the other side of the bridge, the path gained some altitude, and my father, who was in front, started breathing hard. He put his hand on his side and stopped and I came up next to him and waited, although he had never had to rest here, not this early on the ten-mile walk, but then maybe he was just getting old. But he spent a lot of time in the woods and was able to out-walk men in their twenties, and so I said, “Hey, you want to rest?”
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s nothing.”
He put his hand on his side, and around his back, toward his kidneys, and then looked uphill, not with anticipation as he usually had but with a new darkness in his eyes, a sort of fear that was the color of the underside of clouds in a thunderstorm. Not gray, but on the way to purple. He breathed deeply and I said, “Maybe you should get that checked out.”
“Naw,” he said. “I just got worried when I saw you on TV.”
“Well, I don’t know,” I said.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go. If we go pretty fast we can get there before dark and fish in the evening for an hour. You know Harlan’s Pool? Now that’s a place worth fishing when the caddis flies come off and the trout get drunk on them.”
Still, as we went, as he took off in the way he used to, he nevertheless stopped and put his hand on his back and breathed hard and began to sweat a little. If your father is active all his life, who seems to be tougher than you could ever be, you think that he is indestructible. And as we walked, stopping and starting, the green and golden light of the afternoon fell onto the path in lovely patches, which moved on the ground when the wind moved, like green and golden butterflies on the path, wings slowly opening and closing, as though they loved the air. Then my fa
ther just kept going and I was left with Sara.
She had done time, as she said, more than she had thought it was going to be, because after she was done with the youth detention they added eighteen months for brawling and attempted mayhem, and then she got into a sort of halfway house run by a family that meant well, but they owned a dry cleaning business and she worked there on the weekends, where she took in the sweaty clothes and put tags on some stains. (“And let me tell you some of them were pretty sketchy stains, you know? Like, if you get it in the front seat of a car or someplace like that . . . but don’t you see, Jake, I was thinking of you. I had to get out of there and make some money. You were slipping away. That’s what time does . . . It’s not invisible but like a mist that covers things up.”) So, she said, by the time I was almost done as an undergraduate, she got a job in a hardware store, a big box, but even then she didn’t think about college, since that was “just waiting in line and letting other people tell you what you know, which is that you need some money and you need to have people get out of your way if you mean business . . . That’s the truth of the age, isn’t it, Jake?” After all, she said, all she had to do was open People magazine, or look at the gossip websites, where women were making so much money and they didn’t have to dick around with a bunch of pointy-headed professors (“No offense,” she said to me), and so she started a garage band and sang, dressed in fishnet stockings and a torn T-shirt and a garter belt (“You would have creamed in your pants just to look at me, Jake, and I’m not kidding . . . I really looked the part . . . ”) but, of course, she couldn’t sing very well. “Not worth a fucking lick,” she said. “So that was a bust. But we had them guessing there for a while.”
“But you could have called me. Written me. Sent me email,” I said.
“You just don’t get it, do you? First, I’d have to say I was wrong. When was the last time you did that, and the admission isn’t like ‘I forgot my jacket someplace’ but that ‘I was so stupid not to know someone cared about me.’ And then I wanted you to be set back on your heels. See? Bam. Like in a cartoon when someone gets hit with a frying pan.”