by Boyle, T. C.
She’s talking to a bony seventyish woman in a pink silk blouse the size of a football jersey about the feasibility of preserving island botanical specimens in mainland gardens, when Tim appears out of nowhere to take hold of her elbow—“Sorry,” he mouths to the woman, “emergency”—and guide her to the door. “I just called Hana Sushi and they’re serving till ten. You want that sake—that sake rocks, crisp on the palate, with the faintest nose of Hokkaido forest breezes and underlying hints of vanilla and pomegranate—or not?”
“But I need to say goodbye to Frieda—”
“With deep overtones of pineapple and, I don’t know, wet schnauzer?”
“But Frieda—”
“Call her from the car.”
“I can’t do that,” she’s saying, but they’re already out the door and into the night, where the parking lot stands all but empty and the clouds crouch low over a rejuvenant drizzle. She’s thinking I’ll send her a note, thinking she’s had enough for one day, thinking of the sushi bar wrapped in its soft calm glow of the familiar, jazz softly leaking through the speakers and Shuhei and Hiro poised there to joke and gossip and whip up something special just for her, thinking of halibut and yellowtail and albacore tuna from the depthless sea, and sake in a clear beaded glass, with ice.
She’s fifty feet from the car, its chassis moth-colored and palely glowing against the deeper darkness, when she realizes something’s wrong. Everything seems blurred, even with her glasses on, but they’re walking faster now, Tim aware of it too, and even when they’re standing there right beside the car, she still can’t make out what the marks are. They seem to be black bands of some sort—spray paint?
Tim, a shadow beside her, one facet of a deeper complication, lets out a curse, his voice strained with surprise and outrage. “Aw, shit! Shit! They graffitied the car!”
Great looping letters, coming into focus now as her eyes gradually adjust. Die, she reads. Gook, she reads. And, finally, Bitch.
The Paladin
If there’s one thing he hates, it’s a runny yolk. And toast so dry it shatters like a cracker before you can spread the butter. And rain. He hates the rain too. Three days of it now, making a mess of the streets and keeping shoppers out of the stores (pathetic numbers, absolutely pathetic, in all four units, and with the Christmas season coming on no less), depressing people, drooling like bilge down the plate-glass window at the Cactus Café, where he eats breakfast five days a week and they still can’t figure out what over fucking easy means. His dried-out toast is cold. The coffee tastes like aluminum foil, and it’s cold too, or lukewarm at best. And the newspaper has one stingy little article about what went down at the museum last night, tucked away in the Community Events roundup for Tuesday, November 20, 2001, the date in bolder type than the headline, as if to indicate that everything included beneath it would be just as mind-numbing and inconsequential as it had been the day before and the day before that. Under the headline “Protest at Museum Lecture,” there’s a scant two paragraphs that don’t begin to get at the issue, and worse, don’t even mention him or FPA by name, let alone set out the counterarguments he’d thrown right in the face of that condescending little bitch from the Park Service who was fooling nobody with her gray-eyed squint and her all-black outfit as if she were going to a funeral or a Goth club or something and all her tricked-up images of the cute little animals that just have to be saved in the face of this sudden onslaught by all these other ugly little animals, made uglier by somebody’s Photoshop manipulations, as if the birds wouldn’t last another week when a hundred and fifty years had gone by in complete harmony and natural balance with all the other birds and plants and the rats too, something Alma Boyd Takesue, Ph.D., didn’t bother to mention.
Suddenly he’s jerking his head around—and there’s Marta, fat Marta with her two-ton tits and big pregnant belly that isn’t pregnant at all, only just fat, bending over some other guy’s table by the door, flirting with him, for Christ’s sake—and before he can think he shouts out her name, surprising himself by the violence of his voice. Everybody in the place, and there must be thirty of them, half he recognizes and half not, looks up in unison, as if they were all named Marta, and what does he think about that? He thinks, Fuck you, collectively. He thinks he might have to find another goddamn diner where they know the difference between—
And here she is, her face drawn down around a mouth shrunk to the size of a keyhole beneath the flabby cheeks, coming to him as swiftly as her too-small feet can carry her, trying to act as if she cares. “Is everything okay?” she asks before she’s halfway to him so everybody can hear her doing her job, even Ricardo, the cook, who’s giving him a hooded look from behind the grill, a cigarette in one hand, spatula in the other.
“No,” he says, still too loud, and they’re still looking, all of them, because they’re a bunch of sad-assed pathetic voyeurs with nothing better to do, and fuck them. Really, fuck them. “No, everything isn’t okay. Because I come in here every day, don’t I? And you people still don’t know what over easy means? Shit, if I wanted sunny-side up, if I wanted a runny yolk, that’s what I would have ordered.”
She’s already reaching for the plate, already apologizing—“Sorry, sir, I’ll have the cook” and all the rest of the mollifying meaningless little phrases she dispenses a hundred times a day because the cook’s a moron and to call her incompetent would be a compliment—but he can’t help saying, snarling, and why is he snarling?, “Take it away and do it right or don’t do it at all.” And, to the retreating twin hummocks of her butt: “And the toast is like that shit they give babies, what do you call it—Zwieback—and I don’t want Zwieback, I want toast.” She’s at the swinging door to the kitchen now, making a show of upending the plate in the trash while Ricardo shrinks into the Aztecan nullity of his face and everybody else in the place pretends to take up their conversations where they left off and he can’t help adding, his voice lower now, the rage all steamed out of him though the heat’s still up high, “Simple toast. Is that too much to ask?”
After breakfast, he heads out into the rain, picturing his umbrella back at home leaning up against the doorjamb, but it’s not a problem because the moisture has the effect of puffing up his dreads, giving them body, frizzing them out—especially on top, at the roots, where he’s been noticing a little too much scalp in the mirror lately—and this is more drizzle than real rain anyway. He pauses a moment outside the diner to shift the newspaper under one arm and pull up the collar of his black nylon jacket, feeling self-conscious all of a sudden, as if the upturned collar were an affectation out of the dim past and an old Clash concert at the Bowl. Which, he supposes, it is. Glancing up, he catches some balding geek giving him a covert look through the rain-scrawled window, but the show’s over and he’s not going to get himself worked up over runny eggs or this jerk or anything else, and yes, he took his blood-pressure medicine and no, he didn’t take—will never take—the Xanax Dr. Reiser talked him into as a tool to combat the rage that seems to sweep up on him inexplicably like a rogue wave on a flat sea, which really isn’t anger so much as impatience with people and the multifarious ways they can and will screw up just about anything, given the chance, over and over again.
The car is two blocks away, down a gently sloping street studded with meters and sloppily parked Volvos and Toyotas, mixed use, apartments and businesses side by side, the odd lawn, street trees, then around the corner to the cross street below. He’s walking now, striding along in his business-as-usual gait, forty-two years old and as fit as the gym and Dr. Reiser’s Lotensin and blood thinners can make him, ignoring the cars lined up at the light with their wipers clapping and the exhaust coiling out of their tailpipes in the last petrochemical gasp of the black stuff pooled up under layers of shale in Saudi Arabia and Nigeria and Venezuela, the death of the earth, the death of everything, smelling crushed worm, rotting leaf and the wet acidic failure of the newspapers stuck to the sidewalk where the Mexicans tossed them short of house stoops and storefro
nts in the grim desperate hour before dawn. He’s walking, thinking he won’t bother stopping in at any of the stores today—LaJoy’s Home Entertainment Centers, with locations in Santa Barbara, Goleta, Ventura and Camarillo—because whatever might be happening or not happening there on a day like this is not so much his worry anymore as it is the problem and responsibility of the individual store managers and Harley Meachum, who’s being paid more than he’s worth to do just that: worry.
Semi-retired. That’s his status and he’s earned it, because he’s done his scrambling and made his bundle and he’s got his house in Montecito and his two cars and his boat and Anise too, time on his hands now, just the way he wants it—just like the bum he finds standing there by the Beemer when he turns the corner, a lean philosophical-looking white-haired bum planted there as if he’s thinking of making an offer on the car.
And that’s an automatic thing with him, calling a bum a bum instead of one of the homeless or less fortunate or needy or apartmentally challenged or whatever the phrase of the week is, Anise forever trying to correct him on that score, because his sympathies lie with the animals that can’t help themselves—the pigs electroshocked into the killing chute, the chickens dismembered on the assembly line while they’re still half-alive and conscious, the rabbits and donkeys and sheep the Park Service slaughtered on Santa Barbara and San Miguel and Santa Cruz islands without batting an eye—and not some white-haired upright primate who’s had all the advantages of living in America instead of some third-world country and still just wants to plant himself in the grass and suck on a bottle all day long in infantile regression. Is this a fundamental inconsistency: pro-animal, anti-human? Let it be, because it’s no worse than the way the eco-cops see things, and with what they’re spending on brodifacoum and the helicopters to deliver it they could put up every bum in town at the Holiday Inn for a month.
His favorite bum, not that he’d ever actually give him anything and would be more than happy to see him put on a bus back to Echo Park or San Jose or whatever hole he dragged himself up out of, is a guy who must weigh three hundred pounds, always in a pair of shorts and workboots and a dirty white T-shirt the size of the sail on a Hobie Cat. He’s got concrete pillars for legs and a gut that climbs up out of the shirt like a separate living thing all ready to set up on its own. His modus operandi is to stand outside whatever restaurant he’s in the mood for, begging doggy bags off the pouchy sated half-looped tourists coming out the door. And don’t try to hand him sushi when he wants Italian, uh-uh. Not this guy. He knows what he wants. He’s discerning. He’s a gourmet.
But this bum, the philosopher, has just become alerted to his presence as if he’s awakened from a dream, eyes grappling toward him like fingers reaching for a ledge in the dark, and as Dave eases around the car to the driver’s side, the bum, in a voice of carbon and phlegm, says, “You got a dollar?”
Key in the lock, rain on his dreads, collar turned up, and there is no anger here because he’s got things to do, an appointment to keep, and no bum who isn’t worth the time it takes to look at him, at his stunted eyes and deflected wrists and salvaged rain-wet black-and-red-plaid flannel shirt that droops away from him like shucked skin, is ever going to get a nickel from him, let alone piss him off enough—You got a dollar?—to tell him what he really thinks about the moral valence of this little interlude. He just holds up his hand like a stop sign, ducks into the driver’s seat and lets the scene shift to leather and the glow of the dash and the sweet German-calibrated tune of the engine that sings the bum and the rotting newspapers and dead worms and all the rest to oblivion.
The traffic is backed up on State, but he turns onto it anyway, because he’s in no hurry and he wants a look at all the stores with their newly erected Christmas displays—just, he tells himself, to get in the Christmas spirit and not at all to focus a trained eye on the hordes of shoppers and calculate who’s doing what kind of business. His own stores—specialty shops for people with money who want the sixty-inch Sony LCD flat-screen wall-mounted TV and the top-of-the-line Linn electronics imported from England with the five mini-speakers and the big subwoofer all set up for them in their media room so all they have to do is tap the remote to be engulfed in a truly theatrical experience—are never crowded, no matter the season. It’s always been that way, even as he transitioned from the audiophiles of the eighties to the big-screen TV and surround-sound aficionados of the nineties and now the zeroes. No, his business is high-end, appealing to a need rather than a want, the society closing down day by day, people investing in home entertainment because they’re increasingly reluctant even to go out into the backyard, let alone to the movie theater or anyplace else. His clientele is ready-made—they practically come to him—and he’s always had the luxury of forgoing advertising and of locating in the more modest retail spaces off the main drag, where the rent’s lower and you don’t need all the bells and whistles.
Still—and he’s looking at Macy’s now, women parading in and out with their shopping bags strung from both arms, striding along the sidewalk with real satisfaction radiating from the play of their haunches and the no-nonsense strut of their heels—he has to admit the big displays are something, all that color and glitz, all that slick retail über-perfection that makes the shoppers want to attain über-perfection themselves, and in the easiest way possible, by spending money. Make me over. Make me well. Make my eyes bigger and my gut smaller, my calves harder and my hair fuller. Make me beautiful and successful and above all longed for, admired, loved. Sure, and how about a home entertainment center while we’re at it?
It’s just past ten but the colored lights girdling the palms are lit and softly shining against the long descending backdrop of the rain-misted street, which sinks through the center of the shopping district and down through a maze of surf shops and eateries to the pier, where it intersects with Cabrillo, the Ocean Boulevard of Santa Barbara, famous as a tourist attractant and the earthly paradise of the peripatetic bum, broad, spacious, palm-lined, and stretching along the ocean from the cliffs at East Beach to the marina at its western verge, which is where he’s headed. He stops for the red at the intersection, wipers intermittently snatching away the misting rain. Directly across from him is the fountain at the base of the pier, and for a moment he’s distracted, thinking of the twenty-something bum in the top hat and scarlet jacket—and what is it with bums today?—who used to work the fountain with a generic Disney dog he’d dressed up in a crinoline tutu and taught to dance on its hind legs while the water leapt and flared in the background. King of the bums, that kid, the tourists lining up to empty their pockets for him. Of course, he’s gone now, probably pushing a shopping cart down an alley someplace, the hat crushed, the dog dead, the rest of his life one long continuous road to nowhere.
And then he’s thinking of the guy who could have passed for a board member of AT&T if you gave him a suit and a haircut, an industrious type who worked the sand just below the railing where beach and pier conjoin, fashioning boats out of discarded cardboard and handing them up to the tourists as they breezed past chattering in Korean, German, Swedish and New Yorkese. Nowadays the bums just spread a blanket in the sand with a cup located like a bull’s-eye in the middle of it, then sit in the shade of the big pilings, passing a pint bottle of whatever it is they drink, till the tourists sink cup and blanket under a rising tide of quarters, dimes and nickels. Jesus. It’s like crabbing or something. Like a sport.
A horn sounds sharply behind him. The light has changed. He looks to the rearview mirror—some asshole with his hat turned backward and his girlfriend and big yellow panting dog crowded in beside him in the front seat of an SUV—and then guns the car, shearing to one side before he rights it and rockets off down the street, not even angry, just . . . expeditious. There are two more lights to the marina, both in his favor, and at the first he slows just enough so that it goes red as he passes beneath it, trapping the asshole, who was trying to come up on him, trying to provoke him, and Goodbye, fri
end. Suck on this. A moment later he’s out of the car and striding along the concrete pathway that runs along the waterfront, already digging out his card key. When he comes within sight of the wire-mesh gate erected at the entrance to the catwalk specifically to keep out unauthorized persons (read bums, and what was that story a couple years back where a seafaring bum had got out to one of the yachts and took it for a joyride down to Ventura, where he wrecked it on the rocks?), Wilson is there waiting for him.
Wilson Gutierrez is twenty-seven, a first-rate carpenter whose mother came over from Copenhagen in the sixties and never left, and whose father, according to the check-one-or-more-boxes feature on the census form, is a white Hispanic from the west side of Santa Barbara via Culiacán, and he pronounces his name Weel-soan, something he’s very particular about, edgy even. His eyes are blue, he wears a black silken goatee and a gold pin thrust through the auricle of his left ear that makes him look as if somebody’s nailed him with a blowgun, he burns under the sun like anybody else, he’s lithe as a weed but built in the shoulders, upper arms and especially forearms—“Like Popeye,” he likes to say, “and it ain’t from no spinach, man, but swinging a hammer all day long because I am am-bi-dextrous and you better believe it”—and Wilson is one of the three charter members of FPA, along with himself and Anise, going all the way back to its founding six months ago in direct response to what was happening out on the islands. At his feet are three visibly swollen black plastic trash bags. “What up, Dave?” he says, swinging round on him with an ear-to-ear smile that lights his face like the screen of an LCD in a darkened store window.
“Not much. You get the stuff?” And then, because he can’t help himself, he’s laughing aloud. “Shit,” he says, bending forward to swipe his card, “it sounds like we’re doing a drug deal or something.”