by Skip Horack
“Even if you will not say it, it is what you think.”
“All right. You’re no fool, but yeah, it might be a foolish thing for you to trust someone who treated you that way.”
The rose man had indeed shuffled back over, and before Marina could reject him again I pulled some bills from the pocket of my khakis with my free hand. “Cinco, amigo,” said the rose man. “Five, por favor.”
Marina got her thorn-stripped rose, and he left us. She smiled at the wilting flower. “You should meet Viktor’s other girls for you,” she said. “I know them. They are both pretty.”
“We’ll see,” I said.
Her hand had remained locked in mine, but I made myself release her. I took our trays to the trash can, and when I returned to the table she was holding that rose like a candle.
She looked up at me. “I was expecting you to be different,” she said.
“How do you mean?”
“I was expecting you would be worse than your photograph. That I would hate you. Even though I agreed to meet you I was expecting this.”
“Oh.”
“But you are good man. A much better man than I thought you would be.”
Then she stood and kissed me on the lips. A long kiss that tasted of watermelon juice and had me questioning if that business about an Efim and a Konstantin had only been a test. She kissed me, yet when I tried to haul her closer still she broke free. I collected our helmets, struggling to think of something to say as she wafted back and back toward the door on those silver heels. But before that something came to me she began to sing. The words were in Russian, and there was no way for me to tell if they were even her own words. For all I knew the sole purpose of that song was to save me from myself. To fill that silence so I wouldn’t fill that silence and ruin everything. She sang until we were on the Vespa and riding away —and it was almost as though she was thinking what I was thinking. Let’s just keep going and going, Roy. There’s so much to see, but so little time.
On Wednesday morning I was lying facedown in bed, not resting so much as thinking, when Viktor called. I didn’t pick up, but then, since I was afraid I’d hear him ringing my apartment bell before long, I called him back and asked if we could meet by the beach in a half hour. In the end Viktor seemed to have done right by me at every step, and I felt bad for having wasted so much of his time and energy for nothing but a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar check. But I was also anxious to be done with the guy. I’d pack up today and see Joni in the afternoon, attempt to last one more round with her before I was forced to hit the road tomorrow and make my San Francisco getaway.
When Sam and I reached the end of Fulton Viktor was already waiting on the sidewalk that ran above and along the beach. A bleak, broken-fog, windbreaker morning. The Great Highway between us. Two hundred yards of low-tide sand and then miles of Pacific behind him. The waves were up, the surfers at battle. A faraway legion of sprites in black wet suits. And farther still: a lone man on a paddleboard, sweeping the ocean. I heard the low rumble of a fighter jet hidden in the clouds, and I thought of Marina, outside somewhere, maybe searching for that jet plane too. Soon she’d begin surfing the Colemans’ Internet for her ticket to Moscow. Soon she’d be like me, packed and about to bolt.
One Viktor fist was clutching a cigar; the other was jammed into his pocket. Dina’s leash was winding out from his jacket, and that clover-honey Saluki had coiled into herself like a sleeping deer. A kid walked past them with a loose dog, a pit bull that was clipping at his heels and shark-looking Dina. But Viktor didn’t even glance at the pit. I crossed the highway, and we dropped our leashes so Sam and Dina could have their reunion.
“How was the date?” Viktor asked. His voice was flat, his expression blank. He was more somber and serious than I’d seen him since that first morning we met. He wasn’t angry yet, but that seemed to be the next click on the dial. And Dina was in one of her moods as well. Sam wanted to tussle and play, but she just lay there as he sniffed at her.
“We had a good night,” I said. “She was on her way home by ten, though.”
Viktor was about to suck on his cigar, but this stopped him. “So soon?”
“She had to get back with that scooter.”
“Where did she take you?”
The cigar had burned down almost to his fingers, and a bitter Pacific breeze was throwing smoke into my face, dancing my hair. I stepped to the side. “We drove around, looked at the city.”
“Did you ask her?”
“To marry me? No.” In fact she will be leaving both of us, Viktor. But I didn’t say that. Her news to share, not mine. “And I’m not gonna ask her. I’m sorry.”
He sighed. I got the feeling he’d never struck out with a client before. “What then?” he said. “Now you go home?”
Sam had given up trying to rouse Dina. They were lying beside one another. Dina’s eyes shut, Sam’s open and sad. “Yeah,” I said. “Tomorrow. If I don’t take off I have to register here. Remember?” I could picture cops counting days on a calendar, hoping nonresident RSO Roy Joseph would be stupid enough to postpone his departure.
“You could not tell the police you are here.” Viktor checked the wall separating the sidewalk from the beach below us for seagull shit, then leaned back against the concrete. “How would they know? Stay another week. Meet more women.”
“I can’t,” I said. “I can’t.”
The wheels in his head were turning, him attempting to think of a way to convince me not to disappear. And though there was nothing to suggest he knew of Marina’s own plans to leave, I couldn’t resist prying.
“Besides, why?” I asked. “You said yourself she was the best of them.”
Viktor spun to face the beach and the water. “Yes. But some Russian women, they can be —” He stirred at the air, groping for the rest. “Like hummingbirds, is what I mean. All over the place.”
“Maybe so, but I’m sort of that way myself.”
“This is obvious. Two kolíbri. But you, you do not even try.” He shielded his eyes as if watching his hummingbirds zip away together. “And now, off, off you hum.”
Sprawled out in the sand between us and the surf was a man dressed in cracked and faded leathers. He looked like he had just tunneled up from hell, and I was worrying he might be as dead as the woman they’d found in the killing acre when he rolled onto his side and scratched at his balls. A postapocalyptic foot soldier, but once, a pioneer child. Long ago that man was a boy somewhere near the Continental Divide. His family died in a plague, so he walked alone for a century and a half, came the farthest west he could come. He made it to California, then the Outer Richmond. But he was too late. All he found was block after treeless block choked with square houses. A drab, soul-sucking grid pattern. The man yelled something at us, but the wind twisted his words and I couldn’t make out what he was saying. Nothing good, I was sure. I turned my back to him. Golden Gate Park was a green, grandson-swallowing wilderness across the highway, the stuck sails of the towering windmill like the hands of a clock. The lead sky and the gull shit and the trash. The foaming ocean. The traffic stacking up on the Great Highway. That sandy, road-warrior motherfucker. All I could see was ugliness and disappointment.
Viktor threw his stub of cigar down onto the beach. “A ship hit the bridge this morning. Did you hear?”
“Which bridge?”
“The Bay Bridge,” he said. “Buy a television.”
“That bridge looks pretty tough. It’s probably not that bad, right?”
He shook his head but didn’t say anything, more concerned with staring at the Pacific than listening to my nonsense. So maybe my guess was wrong. Maybe the city wanted to evict me and trap me. Both bridges are out and the airport is closed. Every road leading south has been land-mined.
I kicked at the concrete wall. “How can you live in this place?” I asked.
>
“What?”
I started to repeat myself, but he stopped me.
“Because it is beautiful,” he said. “California.”
He didn’t see any of it. If he spent much more time with me I’d poison him. He’d turn around and begin to see California as I saw California. He wouldn’t buy into it any longer, and then everything he had would mean nothing to him.
“I’d stay if I could,” I said. “Promise.”
“No,” said Viktor, “you would rather be alone, and that is fine. Some men are that way.” He shrugged his ox shoulders. “But you are no man, Roy. You are a boy. To become a man, first the child must die.”
Then Viktor Fedorov gave up on me. He walked away with Dina —an irritated Russian and a haughty sight hound —and Sam whined as if he knew we would never have another shot at winning either of them over. As if he knew tomorrow I’d pile everything into the LeBaron and we would quit San Francisco. The rest of my life was waiting whether I was ready for it or not, and this is what I imagined that morning by the ocean:
That I would return to Grand Isle, but only briefly. In December I’d be forever off the sex offender list, and when January rolled around and I hit thirty Mr. Donny Lee would switch on the faucet. I’d sell the Airstream and the LeBaron. Buy myself an off-the-lot truck. Have Ruston professionals load up my storage unit. Through with Louisiana, I would move to another small town on the Gulf Coast. Some Southern Living place I knew from summer vacations with my parents. A pretty water town like Pass Christian, Mississippi. Fairhope, Alabama. Apalachicola, Florida. My house might be nothing extravagant, but in a large yard hemmed by strong, high fences Sam would be happy and safe. I’d chop my hair short, shave every morning, stop buying Winstons. And if the whispers grew too loud I’d try to explain my side of the story. I’d tell my new neighbors that if they’d give me a chance I would prove to them I was trustworthy and decent. That I was a man who deserved their compassion. I’d worship at a United Methodist, join them all afterwards at the picnic. Corn bread and iced tea and softball. The congregation would at last embrace me, and since there weren’t many other single men in the church maybe I’d revisit the idea of marriage and find my wife there. A big-haired, bless-her-hearting girl who wore stiff Sunday dresses cut from flowery wallpaper prints. A woman with no desire or reason to ever leave her hometown. Even a spit-and-polished me would be the nearest thing she’d ever known to the soap opera rebels she lusted after. Her family would become my family, and we’d vacation in the Smokies and Disney World. I would fish for trout and reds with her brothers on the weekends, and in due course my right to bear arms would be restored so I could hunt again, shoot ducks for Sam in his twilight years. I’d be rich and wouldn’t need to work, so maybe I’d volunteer with the fire department, coach Little League. Gradually even the thought of having children of my own wouldn’t seem so frightening. My wife would insist we name our son Thomas, and on birthdays and Christmases we’d send our niece Joni a thinking-of-you Hallmark. At least once every year I would fly to see her, and as our conversations became easier and easier perhaps Joni would sometimes come to me as well. And between those visits she’d live her life on her coast while I lived my life on mine. A life in which I’d wrapped myself in layers and layers of family, friends, and possessions, hoping that trinity would be enough, that all the obligations that come with having people and things to care about wouldn’t smother me. That I wouldn’t lie in bed at night feeling snared and terrified, a vial of Panther Mound dirt clenched tight in my hand.
But then I realized I was also perfectly situated to break another way. To run to another sort of life. A life that didn’t scare me at all. In that life Joni would be more like a pen pal than a niece. I’d give Sam to Malcolm, sell everything in the storage unit, never buy a house or marry or have kids. With no one to please or be accountable for, I wouldn’t have anything to lose. That’s an opportunity most never have, and I’d spend my days traveling, getting into adventures, seeing the world, my hair growing longer and longer. I’d drive to Alaska, follow the pipeline to the Arctic Circle, trade the LeBaron for an old motorcycle. Border towns, tramp ships. Nothing would be impossible. In the Himalayas a monk would touch my forehead, call me a seeker, and then maybe I’d show up in Russia, track down Marina just to have a hello, see how she was getting along. Efim would be out of the picture, and soon she’d find herself in love with me instead. But one morning I’d tell her I couldn’t tarry, that this is where I ride away. You can fall in beside me, but you can’t make me stay. And on a school night a few decades distant some child of Joni’s would construct a family tree for his class, then obsess over the dead end where the names of the died-young Joseph brothers were suspended like hanged men. His grandfather and his granduncle, the hero and the vagabond, the incredible experiences they surely must have had on this earth. All those ancestors, all those lives, yet ours would be the only two that seemed interesting to him.
In the afternoon I drove the LeBaron to Fort Miley to meet with Joni. Lands End: The American Finish Line. That same cliff-top bench. That same awkwardness and dread. The flowing Golden Gate false river more gray than blue in this weather, more dull than shimmering.
But, nevertheless, on our second day at Fort Miley I was a good soldier mostly. I didn’t object when Joni asked a tourist to snap a picture of us with her phone, and then I forced myself to linger over the photographs in FOR OUR TOMMY —even after the first of them to capture my brother and me together almost had me crying. I told Joni that all I really knew about her father’s death was that somehow, some way, he’d gone out like a hero, and with that lie I felt what Lionel Purcell must have felt in Battle Mountain. That I had given everything I could regarding Tommy. Here I am even now —alone, pen in my hand —but all I want to do is speed up the tape and rush for the exit.
Finally Joni appeared to sense I was done, spent, and she let us sit there on our bench in quiet reflection. Her hair was down, veiling her face, and she was wearing her buckskin jacket. My San Francisco niece. Her Louisiana uncle. There is only so much, so little, you can actually learn about another person, living or dead, and that’s a hell of a thing to realize at any age. Those two sentences in my mother’s journal: To be a parent is to always wonder whether the world sees your children the way you see them. My son is gone. Joni and I had come to appreciate what Mom meant by that, at least in part. How we are all strangers, mainly. How we all believe we are the star of the same play, but none of us are.
I lifted my Red Wings and clicked them together, Dorothy in her ruby slippers. “So I guess today has to be it,” I said. “But we’ll talk soon. Write me, call me, whenever.”
Joni’s hair fell back, her lips moving as she spoke to the sky. “I broke up with Daniel last night.”
I let my feet drop. “Really?”
She looked at me, hands in her lap, green eyes chasing mine. I was all pauses and fidgets, but she wasn’t ready to let me escape from her yet. “I took your advice,” she said. “I just came out and told him.” She shook her head. “And he got mad, very mad. So I got mad.”
“But that was what you wanted, wasn’t it? To split with him?”
“I think so.”
“Then all right.” I smiled. The Golden Gate was vacant now. No ships. No boats. Simply water. “Now don’t ever take any advice from me again.”
Joni smiled too. Laughed, even. “Do you have an hour, weird uncle? Will you drive us somewhere?”
“Somewhere where?”
“I know a place that’s kind of like your Panther Mound. I want to show it to you.”
But why? She put one thumb up, one thumb down, waiting for me to decide. This display of interest in me —and trust —could only be a ruse to maybe get me talking about Tommy again. I was trying to remember when I’d ever told her about the Panther Mound. Yesterday? Today? Then there was the LeBaron. The floorboards littere
d with receipts, napkins, empty packs of cigarettes. The seats coated with the yellow hairs of a dog she was probably allergic to.
“Say yes,” said Joni.
She stood then, and as we made for the parking lot I thought of all the other places I’d been in my life, dreamed about. I was pondering what it was that always made me believe the thing I really had to see was over the next hill, around the next corner, across a Cane River. Why any new place seemed better than wherever I happened to be. Why all it takes to tempt me is to holler, Hey, let’s go take a ride. I had been made to leave Dry Springs, and soon I would be made to leave this city as well —but there’s never any need to exile me. Just be patient, and I’ll run.
The Monarch Bear Grove was in a hidden, eastern section of Golden Gate Park, along a weave of trails that led from a sidewalk into forest. On the drive I’d rolled down the windows to help Joni with her allergies, and between sneezes and sniffs she told me the Monarch Bear Grove was one of the few remaining oak groves that predated the city. That the Monarch Bear Grove was considered sacred by the Wiccans and whatnot who’d given it that ridiculous name. “Mom used to be into that scene,” Joni had said. “She would bring me there.”
Hippie silliness, I assumed, but in her buckskin jacket Joni was now a frontier scout guiding me through wilds, a mixed-blood taking me to raid an Indian encampment —and we’d walked a fair ways into the forest when she froze in the trail. I looked past her for napping Comanche, Apache, but all I saw were scattered clusters of weathered, luggage-sized stones surrounded by gnarled and knotty oaks.
Joni pointed. Ashy quail were dusting themselves beneath the low oak canopy of the dark clearing, curled plumes of feathers dangling like apostrophes from their heads. These were California quail. Not the bobwhites Tommy and I would sometimes flush while stomping along fencerows for rabbits —but similar enough to have me recalling those wintry, twenty-gauge mornings with my brother, heart in my throat as birds erupt from the high grass, Tommy firing away, me too startled to even take my own gun off safety.