I sat back on the couch, holding the picture in front of me.
“What?” Ronnie said.
“I did have the Brownie when Toby and I drove to the desert. I remember taking this picture. The girls were at a car wash. Toby stopped the car, they came over, I got the picture. Then they ran away. I—never mind.”
“What?”
“I fantasized over them for weeks afterwards.”
She stifled a laugh. So did I. Then I sat up and went through the rest of the box. “Nothing.”
“Maybe you missed something.”
I ran through them again, checking for pictures stuck to the backs of others. Still nothing.
“Where haven’t we looked?” Ronnie said.
We went through every box in the house, then hit the garage. I found a lot of junk for Goodwill, but no more photographs. Then I remembered a carton of crap on the top shelf of my bedroom closet. It had been there so long it was part of the architecture. I pulled it down, put it on the floor, undid the flaps.
“It’s empty,” I said.
Ronnie was leaning against my dresser with her legs crossed at the ankle. “Looks like it,” she said.
“Why have I had an empty carton in my closet for thirty years?”
“Drugs?”
“Probably.” I looked in it again. Nothing had materialized. “This is stupid. I’m looking for a picture I don’t know exists, and if it exists there’s no reason to expect it would show anything useful.”
“Don’t give up. You’ll think of something else.” She pushed off from the dresser, turned, caught her reflection in the mirror. “You really think I’d look better with my natural color?”
I moved over next to her. I looked at her reflection.
I remembered.
Cache Cache
We started with my sock drawer. Took out all the socks, checked under the shelf paper, put the socks back. I managed not to reveal what I had wrapped up in the fabric sample.
It wasn’t there, nor in any of the other drawers.
“Maybe it slipped behind,” she said.
We pulled all the left-hand drawers out. We found a couple of rubber bands and a nickel. We moved to the right side. No rubber bands, but several paper clips, another nickel, a Mercury-head dime.
And a photograph.
I reached in and pulled it out. I looked at it, showed it to Ronnie, and stared at it some more.
And Whatever
Comes My Way
Underture
They were cruising out toward Palm Springs in Toby’s Triumph, with the wind blowing their hair and the sun hot on their faces. Their second joint hung from the corner of Toby’s mouth. They had KBRK on the radio, and Jim Ladd was dishing out Cream and Vanilla Fudge and Moby Grape.Their guitars were jammed in behind the seats. A dozen candy bars filled a bag by Joe’s feet. He reached in and came out with a Snickers. He undid the wrapper and tossed it on the floor with all the other junk and held it to Toby’s mouth for him to take a bite. How he could do that and not lose the joint, Joe never could figure out. After Toby chewed some off Joe swallowed the rest of it and washed it down with a Coke. Then he snatched the joint, took a hit, and coughed his guts out.
Toby grabbed the roach from Joe’s fingers. “You okay, man?”
“Yeah,” Joe said. “Just had some Snickers in my throat.” He coughed some more, then suddenly sneezed, blowing snot onto the dash. He stared at it, amazed at the color. Toby glanced over and said, “Far out, man.”
“Far fucking out,” Joe said.
Around Pomona there was a big wreck, and they had to get off the freeway. They came up on some girls in bathing suits running a car wash. Toby drove real slow to get a good look. Two of the girls started waving. One was short with big tits and the other tall with little ones. Toby stopped the car, and Joe said, “Hold on, girls,” and dug out his Brownie camera and hopped out of the car and snapped their picture. Then the girls got giggly and ran away.
After they got started up again Joe said, “How’d you like to get a piece of that?”
“Man, I’d like to get a piece of anything.”
“That’s the truth.”
They got back on the freeway. Joe said, “How far we going?”
“A ways yet.”
“I gotta piss.”
“Whyn’t you piss back there?”
“Didn’t have to then.”
“Hold onto it. We’re almost there.”
“How much is almost?”
“A few miles. Sixty, maybe.”
“Too far. I really gotta piss.”
“So finish your Coke and piss in the bottle.”
“Fuck, man. You just want to see my cock.”
“Seen it. Little tiny thing.”
“Least I got two—”
“Hey, just shut up, okay?”
“Sure, man, whatever you say. But I really gotta go. Stop this fucking thing, okay?”
“Okay, okay.”
Toby pulled off at the next exit, and Joe jumped out and down into this sort of ravine and let it out. It was cool watching as the piss pooled up on the ground and then started soaking in.
“You jerkin’ off down there?” Toby said.
“No, shithead.”
“Then get yourself up here.”
Joe shook off the last drops and zipped up and spit on his hands to wash them. He climbed back up to where the car was, and they got back on the freeway. After a while he said, “Hey, man.”
“Yeah?”
“How come you’re taking me to your secret place?”
“Why you asking?”
“Because you won’t even let anybody else know where it is.”
“I don’t know, man. It just feels right, you know what I mean?”
“No.”
“You’re like my brother, man.”
“Right on. You mean it?”
“Yeah.”
“I never had a brother,” Joe said. “Or a sister, even.”
“Only thing is, you gotta promise not to tell anyone where it is.”
“Why would I tell?”
“By accident, maybe.”
“I won’t. I promise.”
“Far out.”
Somewhere along the way KBRK faded out. Joe fooled with the radio to get another station. All he could find was some country and western shit. “This’s all I can get,” he said, and turned it off.
“Man, put that back on.”
“That country crap?”
Toby flipped the radio back on. “This’s Chet Atkins. Guy’s fantastic.”
“You like this?”
“Anybody plays good guitar, I like. You ever hear Segovia?”
“Never even heard of him.”
“Spanish guy. Plays classical shit on guitar. Like nothing you ever heard.”
Somewhere near Palm Springs Toby drove the Triumph down a ramp. He turned left at the stop sign. They went back under the freeway and headed for the mountains. After a while the road got rough. Over to the sides were some neat-looking flowers, orange ones and yellow ones, and behind them lots and lots of tall grass. If it hadn’t been for the road and the electric poles and the wires between them, you wouldn’t have known anyone had ever been there.
After a while they made a couple more turns. Joe had no clue where he was or even which way he was going. He looked up at the sky to find the sun, but when he did he couldn’t figure out how to get it to tell him anything.
“Wow, man,” he said. “It’s beautiful out here.”
“Even better where we’re going.”
They drove some more and all of a sudden pulled off to the side. There was a little path leading off through the grass. “This’s it,” Toby said. He grabbed the bag of candy bars and told Joe to take the drinks and got out of the car.
“I don’t see anything,” Joe said.
“You dumbfuck, when I said this is it, I meant in the car. We gotta walk some.” He pulled his guitar from behind the seat. “Come on.
What’re you waiting for?”
Joe got the drinks and his own guitar and followed Toby down the path. It curved off from the road and went down a hill and ran into another path. When they got to the end of the other path you could see the tops of a bunch of palm trees way off.
“This it?” Joe said.
“Nope. We got a way to go yet.”
Toby started climbing down another hill that was all covered with big rocks. Joe went slow, because he was still real loaded, and because the rocks were hard to find a place to put your foot in, and because as soon as he started down he banged his guitar case on one of the rocks. He still didn’t know why they’d brought the guitars. There couldn’t be any power out there in the middle of nowhere.
He clonked his case a couple more times on the way down, but he didn’t think it’d been hard enough to fuck up the SG. When he got to the bottom Toby was already half a football field away. The rocks went up on both sides, and as you went along they got closer together, so you ended up in the shade and felt all closed in. Joe ran after Toby, but he saw something funny in the rocks and stopped to look at it. He thought maybe it was a fossil. A long time ago there’d been all sorts of weird animals running around out there, dinosaurs and mammoths and maybe cavemen. No, that couldn’t be right. The dinosaurs happened a jillion years before the mammoths and the cavemen.
Except he saw a movie once where dinosaurs showed up in modern times in a place not a whole lot different from the one they were in. He felt a weird tickle on the back of his neck and ran like hell to catch up with Toby. They kept walking down the valley thing.
“The fuck you doing back there?” Toby said.
“I had to tie my shoe.”
“Which one?”
Joe looked down. Left or right? Oh, yeah. He’d just made up the thing about his shoe. “Both of them.”
“You’re so full of shit your eyes are brown,” Toby said.
“Are we almost there yet?”
“Soon.”
He wasn’t lying about that. The path curved around and all of a sudden they were out in the open. They went up another hill, this one nice and easy. But Joe banged his guitar case anyway. “Shit, man, I’m gonna break this thing.”
“Thing’s a piece of shit anyway.”
They climbed up the rest of the hill. And there they were. “Outta sight,” Joe said.
It was like one of those places you saw in desert movies. An oasis. There was a pond in the middle, smaller than a backyard swimming pool. It was dark, like it was real deep. A little in back of the pond was a cliff. You could see all the different layers of rock in it. The cliff ran off to both sides, as far as Joe could see.
They went down the path until they were right by the pond. There were five palm trees around it, two together, and two together, and one all by itself. Joe figured they were the ones he’d seen the tops of a while back. He imagined a monkey up in one, throwing coconuts down at them.
“I didn’t know there were palm trees out here in the desert,” Joe said. “Or water either.”
“Why you think they call it Palm Springs?” Toby said.
“Huh. Never thought about it that way. Far out.”
There were a bunch of cacti around too. There were some of those with flat pieces, like his next door neighbors once gave him to eat. A kind with long red spines that looked like they’d cut you up if you fell into one. And some covered with spines like little daggers. Joe bent down to look at one, and Toby said he’d better watch it, because the stems would jump out and stick themselves into you if you got too close. Joe thought what Toby said was probably a bunch of bullshit, but he steered clear of them anyway.
On the other side of the pond was a shack. It was made of old wood that looked like it had been there a hundred years. They went around the pond and walked up to it.There was a big old padlock on the door. Toby pulled out his keyring and opened the lock. Joe saw a couple of old kitchen chairs in there, and a low table, and a tarp covering something up.
Toby reached up for something, and a light came on. “What the fuck?” Joe said. “Did you slip acid in my Snickers?”
“Fuck, no.”
“How the hell’d you do this?”
“I didn’t. It was all out here already. Come look.”
They put down their guitar cases and walked around back of the shack. Toby pointed up the cliff. Joe’d missed the electric line coming down from a pole up there, attached to a metal pipe on top of the shack. He went round front again and stuck his head inside. The line came into the shack and through some more metal pipes. One went across the ceiling to the light and the other went down the walls to a metal electric outlet boxes like in his garage.
“Why’s this out here like this?” Joe said. “With electric and everything.”
“Guy who showed me this place said there was a scientific station out here.”
“Who was he?”
“Friend of my dad’s. Name’s Brad, neat guy, nothing like my dad. Long hair, and he’s gotta be forty. He worked here until they shut the place down. He said they were studying rocks and stuff, but he got a funny look when he said it, like there was something he wasn’t saying.”
“Like what?”
“I think it was a spy station. That’s why they ran electric out here. They wouldn’t’ve done it for a crummy science station, but for a spy station I figure they’d spend whatever they had to.”
“Who were they spying on? Russians?”
“That’s what I think. I think there was a commie spy ring out here and they were checking them out. There were other buildings here, but they fell apart after they stopped using the place.”
“When was that?”
“In ’62, right after that shit with Cuba where they were gonna set off A-bombs. Story is the government cut off their money. I figure after the Cuba thing the spies went home. But my dad’s friend, he kept coming, ’cause it’s such a cool place.”
“Why’d he show you?”
“He was balling my mom after my dad ran off, so he was around a lot. And you know what? He was more like a dad to me than my real father. And one day he said, I got something cool to show you, and he drove me up here.”
“He still around?”
Toby shook his head and said, “Went off a while back. He was mixed up in some bad shit and had to leave town.”
“So you’re the only one knows about this place?”
“Me, and you, now.”
“Far out.”
“And I suppose the other guys that worked here, but Brad said none of them ever came back.”
“So the power was still on after all this time?”
“Nah. They shut it off. I got it going again.”
“How’d you do that?”
“Wasn’t very hard. Come on. We gonna play, or what?”
Toby went in the shack and lifted up the tarp. There was an amp underneath, a big Fender Showman with two speaker boxes. He plugged in the amp, and then he got his guitar case and put it on the table and got his Les Paul out. He picked a real long cable off a hook on the wall and stuck it in the jack. He turned on the amp and played one of those runs of his like Joe knew he’d never be able to do. The whole time Toby had this big shit-eating grin on.
After all that he looked at Joe and said, “C’mon. what’re you waitin’ for?”
Joe got his SG out too and grabbed another cable off the wall and hooked himself up. They took the guitars and a couple of folding chairs that were stacked against the wall outside and to the edge of the water. Toby gave Joe his guitar to hold, which made Joe feel good because Toby hardly ever let anyone touch his ax. Then Toby went back to the shack and kind of swung the amp around so it was in the doorway. And then he came back and they started to play.
They were out there all afternoon. Toby taught Joe a lot of stuff that day, showed him how he was fingering a couple of things wrong, and some riffs that ended up a lot easier than you would have thought, and how to use his whammy bar better. The l
ast one was weird, because Toby didn’t have one on his Les Paul, but he took Joe’s SG and he could use the thing better than anyone Joe’d ever seen, except maybe Hendrix.
Along the way they finished up the candy bars and the drinks and had another couple of joints. A lot of the time they just sat there with their guitars on and talked. Toby was Joe’s best friend at The House, except of course for Bonnie, and he’d told Joe a lot, but that afternoon he told him a whole lot more. Stuff he said he’d never told anyone before, about his family mostly, and how fucked-up it was. And about his brother, who he got along fine with but who was in the Army in Vietnam, and how he worried about him. And how if Toby got drafted he would go to Canada. He asked Joe what he would do, and Joe told him how his dad knew someone who had something on someone on the draft board, and had told him not to worry. Then Joe told him about how his dad was in jail for murder, which he hadn’t told anyone else, not even Bonnie.
When the sun got pretty low Joe said how the sunset was really going to be out of sight, but Toby said they couldn’t stick around for it, because you couldn’t walk back in the dark, you’d get lost or eaten by coyotes. Joe got a little scared, but Toby told him he’d never actually seen a coyote, and he figured as long as they got back to the car before dark they were okay.
They packed up their axes and Toby covered up the amp and made sure everything was where it belonged, and they left. Joe did a lot better on the way back. He only tripped once or twice.
They were almost back to the car when they came to a really big rock sticking out of the ground. One side of it was flat, and there was a gigantic peace symbol painted on it. The peace symbol was painted in white paint and was about ten feet tall. Joe didn’t know how he’d missed it on the way in, until he looked at the angles and saw that the way the flat side of the rock faced, he wouldn’t have seen it if he wasn’t looking for it.
“I wanted to use DayGlo,” Toby said, “but the guy at the store said the white would last a lot longer.”
“You did this?”
“Year or so back. Nearly broke my fuckin’ neck doing the top part.”
One Last Hit (Joe Portugal Mysteries) Page 23