Then there was Vanessa. Rudy didn’t know what to make of her. Like her mother, only worse. Her silence, the way she watched him. As he strolled away from the handbags, he thought of how—at his insistence—Vanessa called him Dad, but in a way that made it sound like there were quotation marks around the word. There was never anything to scold her for: her grades were perfect, she never broke any of the rules he set, she dressed and spoke modestly. Still, something was wrong. It was like Inez and Vanessa had a secret code between them, like they talked in a completely different tongue when he wasn’t around. There was no getting between them, they were thick as thieves.
He stopped at the scarf counter and ran his hand over the silk and knits. The colors made his head swim. He glanced at the price tags and chose the most expensive: a fuchsia scarf with initials at the bottom, one that would glow next to Vanessa’s honey-colored skin. Beautiful! It was so light it crushed down to almost nothing as it slid into his left pocket.
“Could I help you, sir?”
Whoa! Rudy jumped. He stuffed the last corner of the scarf down farther and held it down with his fist as if it might climb back out. The clerk, a razor-faced woman with elaborately upswept hair, had been bent down behind the counter. She straightened up and walked over to where Rudy was standing.
“You looking for something in particular?” she asked, eyeing him suspiciously. Before he could stop himself, Rudy glanced up at the ceiling, expecting to see a camera’s eye trained on him. The woman tidied the counter between them, evening the space where the fuchsia scarf had been.
“No, no,” Rudy said, holding on to the edge of the counter to steady himself. He smiled. “I’m just having a look.”
“These are all designer scarves,” she said, waving a withered hand over the piles in front of her. Her pale skin looked gray in the fluorescent light. “The ones down there are less expensive.”
Was she trying to keep him there until security arrived? And who was she to decide what he could afford and what he couldn’t? Fighting the urge to hurry away, Rudy fingered the corner of a scarf the color of dried blood. When he looked up, her eyes were fixed on his face.
“Like I said, I’m just looking,” he huffed. “I’ll let you know if I need help.”
The clerk shrugged and turned away. Rudy pocketed the brownish red scarf and stalked away, his shoulders hunched with outrage. He passed mannequins with long necks and racks of sunglasses. He kept walking. When he was almost to the exit, he picked up a rectangular gold lighter, box and all, and placed it in the pocket of his jacket.
Was this really all there was to it, or were they just waiting until he got outside to nab him? He clenched his teeth as he neared the door, kept his fists in his jacket pockets. His chest felt tight and fluttery as he slowed to let the crowd make its way out through the doors ahead of him. Boy, did he want to push through, to run. A uniformed employee eyed everyone as they walked out. Holding his breath, Rudy smiled and nodded at him. The idiot!
Outside the sun was still beating down, the same current of people swam in a circle. He waited for someone to grab him from behind, for a voice to say in his ear, “Come with me,” but there was nothing.
He didn’t stop walking until he saw the pink circle with the letter B.
He leaned into the car and pulled the two scarves from his pocket, laid them on the passenger’s seat. Spread the gold bracelet on top of them. Wow. He set the wallet beside them and checked his watch. Still a couple of hours before he could go home. Boy, was he tired. What a day! Maybe he could stop and buy wrapping paper on the way home, get a cup of coffee. Then take Inez and Vanessa out for a nice dinner. Why not? A man and wife didn’t always have to be talking to each other, he told himself. A man and wife, in a true marriage, understood each other without a lot of explaining.
He suddenly felt optimistic, like the world was opening up to him. Work smart, not hard, his father used to say. Maybe he hadn’t explored all of his options. He decided to look into things, maybe talk to a lawyer. The two weeks’ pay would hold him over until he figured it out.
The lighter was the last thing he took out of his pocket. It was pleasantly heavy, etched with thin vertical grooves. It lit when he spun the little wheel with his thumb. He looked up at the garage ceiling, at the exposed concrete, the crisscrossing pipes. The stupid assholes. All of them. He got out and walked to the front of his car, stood on the bumper, and held the flame under one of the daisy-shaped spigots. See how they liked a taste of this medicine. They messed with him, he’d mess back.
It took longer than he expected. Just when he thought it wasn’t going to work, the spigot sputtered, bubbled, and a blast of water shot down on him. As he ran to the open door of his car he saw identical cones of water spraying at regular intervals, like lawn sprinklers turned upside down. He slammed the door and started the engine as water hammered on his roof.
9
At five minutes to three, Georgette came into the bar wearing the same black pants and Band-Aid-colored polo shirt as Wylie. She ducked under the counter, stowed her purse on the shelf near the glasses, retrieved her name tag from the cash drawer, and took a quick, expert inventory of the bar.
“Hey, handsome. What’s up?” she said.
Wylie just shook his head. Her smell of just-smoked cigarettes and way too much dime-store perfume was like nectar after his nerve-racking day. With Georgette you could relax.
“You see what happened down the hall?” she said, scooping money off the bar and dealing napkins out casino-style.
“Where?” Wylie asked anxiously.
“Down at the men’s head.”
“Oh yeah. I saw they had some tape up.”
“Waterworks. All the toilets overflowed, so the rug’s soaking wet all the way out to the gate.” She’d been tending bar so long she took orders and made drinks as if she didn’t notice she was doing it. “Felix, you know him? The janitor guy? Says they think somebody did it on purpose. Even got the cops in there in case it’s some terrorist thing, like trying to distract attention away from something bigger.”
“Great. What’s next?” Wylie asked. He put on his jacket and watched Georgette fill three glasses with ice. Unlike him, she paid no attention to the number of cubes in each. He was so relieved to see her and so glad to be going home that he put his arm around her shoulders and gave her a peck on the cheek.
She shrugged. “Who knows? I guess we should be glad it’s only a few plugged toilets. And, hey, what did I do to deserve that?”
“That’s just for being you,” Wylie said.
On his way out of the terminal a few minutes later, right before he got to the ticket counters, it happened. The streak across his peripheral vision, the impression that someone was running across the terminal toward him, about to ambush him. The sensation was so strong that he jumped to the side, whirled, and stood stunned, heart pounding. But there was only a row of newspaper racks. He looked around to make sure no one had seen him and stumbled toward the sliding doors, queasy with panic.
It happened again as he was opening his car door. A flash like a shooting star off to the right, almost out of his range of vision. When he turned his head it was gone, but he had the impression that someone, or something, was crouching behind the car next to him. It was a trick of the light, he told himself, the sun reflecting off a windshield or bumper. It was an acid flashback, or all that speed he’d done so many years ago. Some part of his brain misfiring, an electric impulse gone haywire, a psychotic flare-up.
Wylie made an effort to be rational, to pinpoint the cause. Speed, he finally decided. Dexedrine the army medics had handed out before the night patrols. Wylie didn’t need it to stay awake, but if he took enough he felt like he could do anything, specifically avoid dying, or at least not care if he did. In that state, he was a listening machine. Everything was amplified, every little noise. When that got to be too much he reached into his other pocket, took one of the downers. He kept it up all night: ups in the right, downs in the le
ft, fine tuning. If you went too far one way, you just balanced it out with something from the other side. A few nights or weeks of that and your nerves were fried. You were sighting down a long tube of whatever was right in front of you, but it was the stuff at the corners of your eyes that got you. Things moving. Tigers. Ghosts. Whole platoons of VC crouched down all around you, giggling in the brush.
He felt a little better once he was on the road, heading away from the airport. He wished he’d get over it. He’d hoped that as life evened out, the old stuff would go away. He accelerated onto the freeway and merged into traffic, heading east. Once he was home he’d feel better. He concentrated on breathing deeply, on relaxing the muscles in his arms and legs. Cars fed in from all the ramps. Traffic slowed. The sun was behind him. Clouds blew in from over the ocean.
What in the hell is wrong with you? he asked himself angrily, glancing in the rearview mirror. Exactly what is your problem?
Mr. Anxiety. It had been easier when he was drinking. At least that brought some relief, the reckless feel of the booze taking hold, that inner swagger that made him feel everything was okay. But there was hell to pay at night: waking up with the sweats and a pounding heart, all of it coming back to him double force, over and over. Maybe it was just his nature, he reflected as he signaled and switched lanes. He thought of himself as he appeared in his second-grade photo: shirt buttoned all the way to his neck, brush-cut sticking up in dual cowlicks. Eyes fixed nervously on the camera. Maybe he had a chemical imbalance. Maybe he should see about a prescription.
Forget it, he told himself as he reached his exit. Just chill. He braked, curved off the freeway, started up the two-lane road toward the hills. How long was he going to let this stuff bother him? He passed the little mall with the liquor store, Korean barbecue, video shop, and nail salon. Deep breath, he told himself. Deep breath, shake it off. Jesus Christ, get over it already! The guy who sold oranges out of the back of his pickup was there, parked next to the gas station. There was an old folks’ trailer park, a public storage facility, a place where they rented U-Hauls. Then he was climbing, winding up the narrow road, no sidewalk on either side, the haphazard houses clinging to the sliding eucalyptus leaves and the thin earth, the sparse chaparral. It was more Appalachia than L.A., with fishing dinghies sitting on trailers in the yards, dogs tethered to porches and trees.
His driveway split from the road and ran up the hill to the house he rented. A long, narrow, no-frills prefab, just one step away from being a trailer. One bed, one bath, and a little kitchen. There was a metal shed at one end, a porch big enough for two beach chairs in front. Three trees: pepper, avocado, loquat. Straggly eucalyptus dotted the hillside behind it. The whole place would go up in seconds if there was a fire, but—fingers crossed—so far so good. Elsa, his collie mix, waggled down from the porch when Wylie got out of the car. Murphy, the lab, thumped his tail from where he lay under the pepper tree, still chewing the shin bone Wylie had given him that morning.
After chain-eating a couple of Snickers and downing a can of root beer, Wylie looked at the mail. He felt better: the plaid couch, the rag rugs, the dogs wolfing their kibble. So what if he saw things? He remembered one night, right before his hitch was up, when he had walked to the edge of the camp and looked at the supply road that drove straight out to nowhere. The full, frosty moon cast long shadows. As he stood there, the whole road moved: a swell that started at his feet and surged slowly toward the horizon like a monster wave rolling out to sea. The mail was all junk: a catalog for sports equipment, the latest sale at Mervyns, a circular for missing children. These things passed, Wylie told himself as he tossed it all in the recycling bin. They came and went. The thing to do was ride them out.
He shaved in the shower, put on a clean pair of Levi’s, and ironed a cotton shirt with thin blue stripes, one of his favorites. He caught a look at himself in the mirror on his closet door. He sucked in his gut as far as he could, trying to prevent it from spilling over the waistband of his jeans. He’d weighed one-forty when he went into the army. Lean and mean. Now, who knew? It had been years since he’d been anywhere near a scale, but chances were pretty good he’d gained somewhere around fifty pounds since then. He turned, looked at himself from behind. His butt was no bigger, thank God, but two pillows of flesh just below his kidneys swelled his once-trim waist. The iron-warm shirt felt good on his skin. He experimented with tucking it in, but decided it looked better out. “I don’t like those New-Agey guys,” Carolyn had told him, wrinkling her freckled nose. “Their little goatees and linen pants. Ponytails. Soft on the outside. But on the inside, all dried up. Twigs, little sticks.” She had grabbed a handful of his fleshy waist and said, “I’ll take the meaty boys anytime. They’re the real pussycats, even though they act tough. They might not put the toilet seat down, but they got a lot of heart.”
He was whistling by the time he came into the living room to put his sneakers on. The dogs looked up expectantly. “You guys gotta stay here,” he said. “Stay here and keep an eye on the place.”
10
It was a miracle, but Logan made it home without running out of gas. On every hill he’d expected his pickup to sputter and stall, but by God he’d made it, though he must really be running on fumes now. Wonder of wonders, there was even a parking space on the same block as his residence hotel.
Use isthmus in a sentence, he challenged himself, then answered his own joke: Isthmus be my lucky day.
The Morningstar Hotel was on a downtown side street that wasn’t too noisy. There was a check-cashing place on the corner, a cavernous Chinese restaurant that specialized in noodles, a liquor store run by two brothers from Lebanon, and a tropical-fish shop that was never open. Big goldfish with bulging eyes were painted on the side of the building. Three doors down from the hotel was the St. Vincent de Paul’s where Logan had bought a camel-colored jacket that looked like something Humphrey Bogart would wear, Levi’s perfectly broken in, two long-sleeved Brooks Brothers shirts, and a pair of Italian shoes with ivory-colored accents. He’d also bought a striped bowl for his morning cereal, two plates decorated with grapevines, a coffee mug with a lion on it, and a handful of silverware.
The front door was supposed to be locked, but someone had left it ajar, as usual. Salem, the old junkie with eyes that drooped like a bloodhound’s, was in the little cage next to the elevator.
“How’s it going?” Logan said.
Salem raised his head long enough to give his usual slow nod. The lobby was carpeted in something that looked like it had been torn out of a bowling alley, a green and red diamond affair with stains whose history you didn’t want to know. Along one wall were two worn armchairs and a dusty rubber plant that you’d think was artificial, except who’d make such a lopsided thing on purpose? The place smelled of Lysol, cigarettes, and cinnamon rolls. The elevator was old-fashioned, with a metal grate you had to pull closed. It was so small you got jumpy if there was more than one person inside, plus it jerked and clanked in a way that Logan didn’t like. He took the stairs.
He was on the third floor, room 312. Not a bad place, really. They changed the sheets once a week, the bathrooms were kept fairly clean, and some all-right guys lived at Logan’s end of the hall. Adrian, a would-be writer who was basically a speed freak, had the room to the left. Only trouble with him was that he talked too much and kept his TV on 24/7. On the other side, in 314, was Damon, another ex-con in the same line of business as Logan. Mr. Whipple, an old man with a caved-in chest who always wore a hat and suit jacket, was across the hall. He’d lived at the Morningstar for thirty-two years.
The radiators were going full blast on Logan’s floor, and the hall felt like a steam room. The carpet there was red and the hall was dark, lit by dim sconces that were supposed to look like torches. Disco music boomed from behind a door near the elevator, which clanked past as Logan headed toward his room.
He struggled with his door. You had to jiggle the key, lift up on the knob, and throw your shoulder against t
he door to open it. The heat in the hall was unbearable. The TV was turned all the way up in Adrian’s room next door. Come on, baby, open up, Logan pleaded as he shook the knob. Had someone been fucking with it? He heaved himself against the door until it finally gave and he stumbled into the room. He’d left the curtains open and light streamed in, blinding him after the dark hallway. It smelled dusty. Traffic noise came through the window. He locked the door and sat on the foot of the bed near the window. The sun was low in the west. He looked out at the civic center and downtown buildings, small and quaint like a city within a city compared to the bigger skyscrapers to the west. The scuffed-up plazas and warehouses, the wide streets. A row of palms looked like they were sketched in black ink against the sky. He checked his watch. Almost four. Before long he’d have to leave again. Pick up the car and meet his group at the airport.
Hot plates weren’t allowed in the room, but everyone had them anyway. Logan put on some water for coffee. There was a small scratched table next to the window where he ate and read the paper, and a chest of drawers where he kept his clothes neat and folded. After being inside, that seemed important. The double bed, sunken in the middle, was covered with a red corduroy bedspread that faded progressively pink toward the bottom, where the window was. In the corner, next to the radiator, was a sink that doubled as a urinal if he didn’t feel like making the long trip down the hall. At night the cockroaches scurried over everything, but you never saw them during the day.
He dumped two heaping teaspoons of Folgers crystals into his coffee mug, along with packets of Cremora and sugar he’d taken from the diner down the street, and sat down at the little table. He had stacks of takeout menus stained with coffee rings, yesterday’s paper, and, propped up against the wall, snapshots of his kids. He’d arranged them in order of age, from the oldest to the youngest. Just as he was taking his first sip of coffee, someone knocked on his door.
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