by Skip Horack
And there was Marina to think of as well. The likelihood something real, something good, could come from that either. Sunday had passed by without any word from Viktor about my date with her, but I knew she took the bus to the park most mornings to see her friends at the nanny pond. I couldn’t stay gone too long with those ribs in the oven, but I was restless. I combed my hair and shaved, put on jeans, my Red Wings, a T-shirt. The Loranger Drilling windbreaker I’d poached off some jackup a long, long time ago. As I was slipping out the door with Sam I was reminded of my boyhood hunting days —of me and Tommy in a tree stand together, of the deer whose antlers were collecting dust in Peach City Self Storage. My first rack buck. An eight-point that lived wily and nocturnal all season only to lose his vigilance and cunning during the rut, chasing does across a daytime clear-cut until Tommy whispered, “Take him, Roy,” and a bullet fired by a kid drilled through his animal heart. Tommy’s hands wet with blood; my face painted red.
A milky, sun-hidden day, but several glum nannies were already pondside when I arrived. Sam and I were walking the blacktop path, and I didn’t see Marina initially —but then the nannies parted, a woman in pink waved, and I realized it was her. She had revamped herself since our Saturday dinner, had dyed her hair from copper to the color of oil. I waved back, and all of the nannies were looking at me now. Marina said something to them, then pushed her stroller a few feet closer to the group, set the brake, and came over. She was wearing tennis shoes and tight gray corduroys, the same puffy pink-and-wolf coat she’d had on at Viktor’s. Sam was watching her approach with his head cocked.
“Small world,” I said.
But if Marina was shocked to see me, she wasn’t showing it. “This is your dog?”
“Yes. Sam.”
She put her cigarette between her lips. “Let him go.”
I tossed my end of the leash, and Sam went wiggling to her. She crouched and began smoothing his yellow hide.
“I like your hair,” I told her. “It’s Elizabeth Taylor-y. You know, as Cleopatra?”
She slapped her hands together before taking the cigarette from her mouth. A smile, then. I’d never seen one from her. A closemouthed, teasing sort of smile. Cleopatra. This looked to be the best thing I ever could have said. “You are here for me?” she asked.
“Maybe.”
“Maybe or yes?” She ground her cigarette out on the asphalt. “Viktor knows I am coming here always. He told you this, no?”
“Yes,” I admitted. “But I don’t want to take you away from your friends.”
She stood, satisfied. “Say what is true. At least with me this is how you should be.”
“I meant what I said about your hair.”
“I could tell this. And you are taking me?”
“For a walk or something. But —”
“Stop. I would like to walk with you.”
“Yeah? Great.” I pointed in the direction of her stroller. “The little Satan?”
She sighed and gave a slow nod. The other nannies were watching still, and I waited with Sam while she went back in among them. She spoke to the nannies, then retrieved her charge. The big, sleek buggy was like the Cadillac of strollers. She wrestled it over to us, and I saw the sleeping Coleman baby, all bundled and as pink as a piglet.
“He seems calm enough,” I said.
“Da. For now, yes. You will push him?”
I situated myself behind the stroller, and she took Sam’s leash. We kept mostly quiet as we walked, and I decided I liked this about Marina. How she didn’t come at me with question after question. We made it to the end of the pond, then turned left onto a path that followed a road. Eucalyptus trees loomed over us, and a salt, icebox breeze was rustling their fingery leaves in a white noise type of way. The park’s concrete lampposts looked like the iron ones I remembered from downtown Vicksburg, and a Mark Sorensen flyer was taped to the first of them we passed. A few cars went by, a few bikers, a few joggers, and anyone taking us in would think we were just an American Dream family out with their dog. This Russian woman might actually be my wife one day. She might even have my child. I stared down at the baby, but I didn’t feel a thing. He was like a plastic doll. Not even an extra in this movie, but a prop.
The baby was still sleeping when we came to the buffalo pen. Shaggy bison were grazing in the middle of about ten high-fenced acres, and Sam barked once at them but then quit, paws on the fence, unsure if he was seeing wild animals or livestock. I’d been by here before, and in a park full of strange things this was one of the strangest. I looked over at Marina, but she was standing with her back to me as she watched the buffalo. There was a small red heart tattooed at the base of her neck, right below her purple-black hairline. I wanted to ask about it but stopped myself.
I got Sam to sit and started telling Marina what my mother or maybe my father once taught me about nineteenth-century market hunters. Part science, part history. How sharpshooters would catch up to a quivering sea of brown and position themselves on a distant rise, then —working methodically, beginning with the outliers and the strays —drop buffalo by the hundreds without ever spooking the herd. “To the buffalo,” I explained, “all that shooting didn’t sound any different than thunder.” And of course, I was thinking of Lionel Purcell too. Of him and his crazy sniper rifle, shelling Himalayan snow cocks.
I wasn’t sure if Marina was listening, but then she turned to me. “How do you know what it is buffalo believe?” she asked. “Are you a buffalo?”
We were like Terry and Larissa now, joking in the parking lot of the Sureway in Grand Isle. She seemed interested, so I dipped back even further on the timeline and described a buffalo jump. Imagine a great, loping herd being stampeded through a long chute of rock and willow until bulls and cows and calves plunge over the edge of a cliff. Imagine more braves waiting below with their spears. They move blood-soaked through the broken-legged and lowing buffalo.
Then came Spanish ponies, rifles, railroads. I finished my lecture and asked if she’d like to have dinner. “Only me,” I said. “No Viktor, no Sonya.”
Marina didn’t answer right away. We just stood there, but then I saw her shrug. “Yes. But it cannot be tonight. Tomorrow, Mr. Buffalo?”
We traded phone numbers, and she texted her address to my cell. Then I told her I had something cooking in the oven and needed to head back. She nodded but stayed where she was —on a rise with someone else’s baby, watching those city buffalo —until finally she said she was ready and let me return her to the nanny pond.
On the way back to the apartment I called Viktor, and he seemed annoyed I hadn’t waited for him to coordinate with Marina himself. “For what time?” he asked.
“She told me to pick her up at seven.”
“Okay. I will make a dinner reservation.”
I tried to tell him that wasn’t necessary, that I should have the LeBaron fixed by then, but he hung up before I could get the words out. The day was growing colder, and the fog sliding in from the Pacific looked like billowing smoke. I have a talent for layering worries atop worries, and I began to picture a sequence of events in which my unattended oven had set the building, then the block, then the Outer Richmond afire. An earthquake jostles Karen Yang’s apartment, and a gas pipe tears lose. A sulfur-stinking cloud snakes toward the open flame of the oven burner, a pilot light.
Earthquakes. I didn’t know the first thing. Do I run outside or stay indoors? Fill the bathtub? And there were these signs all through the neighborhood —TSUNAMI EVACUATION ROUTE written across a drawing of a big wave. At least a hurricane gives fair warning. San Francisco sat on a powder keg.
But on this day the earth kept still, and when we got back the apartment smelled only of cooking meat. I pulled a rib bone for Sam, cooling it with water from the sink, then he slurped the bone from my hand and went parading to his towel like a happy thief.
In three days I’d have to leave San Francisco. I was feeling restless again.
The grounds of Washington High covered at least two whole blocks in the Outer Richmond, and at three fifteen a mob came pouring from the main entrance. The building looked more like a misplaced slice of the Pentagon than a school, and I positioned myself off the fog-socked corner of Thirty-Second Avenue and wide, median-split Geary Boulevard, figuring Joni would probably cross there on her way home to Marvel Court. And just as I was reckoning this was a stupid idea —me showing up, believing I could find her —a black-jeaned, book-bagged, sunglasses-in-the-fog girl with long, straight hair and a highlighter-blue I ♥ NY sweatshirt emerged from the crowd.
Marvel Court was directly ahead, less than two blocks away, yet for some reason Joni turned left. I followed her to Thirty-Third Avenue, then realized she was about to join a crush of students forcing themselves onto a city bus. I hustled over, but the door closed behind her. The 38 Geary was a beast. A long, limited-stops-to-downtown double bus with accordion bellows between the two segments. The rear door was still open, and I jumped aboard without paying. Book bags and teenagers were pressed every which way against me, but I was nothing to them. They went on about their conversations. California slang. Hella this and hella that. I could see now just how young they were. Damn. They were babies. Is that really what I’d looked like in high school? The ninth grader at Tommy’s basketball-court memorial service?
And where was Joni going anyway? We rode east, at each stop exchanging rowdy adolescents for cheerless adults until eventually the bus wasn’t quite so crowded. I was still standing near the back, and she was in a sideways row of seats up front. It was no real trick to hide from her, as she seemed to be making it a point not to look from the book she was holding. The librarian posture, the level-bangs-then-sunglasses disguise, the hood of her sweatshirt thrown over her head —she was doing everything she could to make herself invisible as well. No, to make all of us invisible. She’d transported herself to someplace where she could forget the garbage bags spilling clothes an apple-gumming man in an oversized WE FEED THE CITY T-shirt had dropped by her leg. Someplace where she didn’t have to acknowledge the peekings of those salesmen and blue-collars who, despite the paisley book bag between her feet, appeared to have concluded she was fair game. The pages of her paperback were turning so fast I couldn’t help but wonder if she was only pretending to read. If instead she was keeping tabs on everyone. Hoping the grease monkey to her left and the polyester suit to her right would quit hitting their knees against hers, on purpose or otherwise. That WE FEED THE CITY would never get around to asking her whatever question seemed to be forming on his lips. That the nine-fingered sex offender would have a comforting explanation as to why he was shadowing her.
A half hour went by, and we were in a seedy, liquor-stores-and-massage-parlors section of downtown when Joni stashed her paperback. The Tenderloin —a neighborhood that seemed dominated by tenement buildings and dilapidated hotels that looked like tenement buildings. I was certain this couldn’t be her destination, but then she shouldered her book bag and stood. The bus stopped, the door opened, and she hopped down onto the sidewalk. Unless I could content myself with a second missed opportunity, another lost day, I had to do the same.
I was behind Joni, on the sidewalk near a cluster of African men divvying up stacks of pirated DVDs. And I was about to say something to her when she went hurrying across the street. No Sea Cliff sauntering, not here, but as soon as she reached the opposite sidewalk she paused in front of a brick building. Crooked fire escapes latticed the narrow six-story, and a neon sign on the first was blinking TAROT READINGS. Joni had a key in her hand and was unlocking a graffitied door. Suddenly I was very, very afraid for her. If I had been her shadower before, I was her angel now, her sworn protector. I wasn’t really thinking anymore, just acting. I was sprinting, dodging cars, and I made myself call her name but the honk of a horn drowned me out. The heavy door shut. She had been swallowed up again, and when I tried the handle it was locked.
Then I got the feeling I was being watched. I looked back at the street. A police cruiser was parked where the bus had been —a windows-down black-and-white with a cop at the wheel, bulky in his body armor, the visor of his blue service cap aimed my way. He was shaking his head but had an amused look on his veteran face, loving the moment when the perp sees he’d been made. I was trapped —walk off now, I had no doubt he’d be coming to hassle me.
You weren’t following that girl, were you? Let’s see some identification. My oh my, a Louisiana pervert. How long you been with us here in San Francisco, ace?
The door. I didn’t see any other choice. An intercom was bolted against the side of the building. A single button, no room numbers or anything. Some asshole had molded chewing gum over the button, and I pushed at the hardened glob.
There was a long nothing, then a woman’s voice came on. “Yeah?” she said. “Who’s this?” She sounded faraway and scratchy, as if she was speaking to me from a space pod orbiting the earth. I could feel the drill of cop eyes even worse than before.
I brought my mouth closer to the intercom. It smelled like bile. “Is Joni Hammons there?” I asked.
“What?”
“Is Joni Hammons there?”
“What? Talk!”
“Can you hear me?”
“Fuck. Stay put. I think this cocksucker is broken.”
The intercom hushed, and I stood there, nervous and waiting, fighting the urge to glance back for that police cruiser. Long minutes ticked by before the door creaked open, and I saw an enormous woman dressed in purple sweats. She wasn’t fat, just large —a true giant of a woman pulling at her curly hair like some frustrated cartoon character. I was guessing she worked as a gatekeeper for this hell, that she was a minion of a slumlord. She was pan-faced and blotchy, had toothpaste-blue eyes.
“Whataya want?” she said.
“I’m looking for Joni Hammons. Do you know her?”
“Daniel’s chick?”
I had no clue, of course, but I’d say anything to get off the sidewalk. Away from that cop and toward the unknown dangers Joni might be in. “Yeah,” I said. “Her.”
“So call them. I’m the super, not a doorman.”
“Sorry, sorry. Dead phone.”
The woman looked me over, and I was preparing for her to tell me to beat it when instead she moved aside. A lesser miracle, but I felt like I’d parted the sea, calmed a lion —or at least tickled some curiosity within her. I stepped in before she could reconsider, and she closed the door, turned her back to me, went lumbering on. It was like she was daring me to accost her, like she was hoping I might be dumb enough to try something, and I saw now that, of all things, she had an aluminum fish bat in one hand —a sort of billy club sports use to bash the brains of gaffed tuna and whatnot.
We were at the head of a dark and grimy hallway. The floor was carpeted, but a tear ran down the centered length of it like a wound showing concrete flesh. On either side of me unmarked doors led into what could only be very small rooms, and stairs rose up at the end of the hall. Joni was in one of these rooms, a victim of bad judgment, doing God knows what with God knows who. Perhaps this was not about jumping into a river with her and seeing where the current took us. Perhaps the only reason fate had brought me to California, perhaps the only reason I was ever even born, was so I could brave that miserable building and save Joni Hammons from Joni Hammons. She had a curse in her blood. No matter what her name was, she would always be a Joseph.
I followed the woman up to the third floor, then halfway down the hall, before she stopped to pound on a door to our right. I heard the click of a dead bolt turning, and then I saw her —Joni standing between the frame and the cracked door, hair like splayed horsetail, her lipstick a smear of pink. The sunglasses were gone now, and her eyes fli
cked to me but then returned to the woman. Green eyes. Those didn’t come from any Joseph I ever knew. I have plain brown eyes, all of us did.
“Where’s the fire?” she said. An uneasy girl trying to sound like a droll adult.
I eased forward. “Hi,” I said. “I need to talk to you.”
Joni looked back over at me. I was about to speak again, but now she was staring at my face and touching her own. “No freaking way,” she said. She staggered, still holding the doorknob. The door swung all the way open, and I saw the room. A guy was in there with her. No shirt, older than Joni was, but not by too much. There was a leather tool belt lying on the floor, and the legs of his torn jeans were tucked into a pair of work boots. Red Wings just like mine.
“Joni,” he said, “who is this?”
She’d let go of the doorknob and was twisting at the bottom of her sweatshirt. I ♥ NY was like an eye chart now. “It might be him,” she said.
“Who?”
“That man I wrote.”
“That’s right,” I said.
“You mean?”
“Yes,” said Joni. “Him.”
The no-shirt kid was straw-haired, good-looking. Skinny but strong. A hammer jockey, judging by the gear on his tool belt. I was studying him, being wary, when a jab to my arm spun me around. That mean little fish bat was in the giant woman’s hand, and she was squared up, ready to unload if she had to. “You come in here starting crap?” she said.
“No. It’s not like that.” But I was bracing for her to smack me on the skull like a swordfish when the kid got between us.
“Geraldine,” he said. “Wait. I think we know him.”
She lowered her fish bat, but Joni only stood there watching. “Dang,” I said to Joni. “I’m sorry we had to meet this way.”