Moonlight Water

by Win Blevins

  “We think a week is a reasonable amount of time for you to get out of the house. Meanwhile, Georgia will stay with me.”

  Robbie realized they were waiting for him to say something.

  He looked from the face of his wife to the face of her lover. But his throat wouldn’t make words. His mind slashed with violent answers, which fit Rob Roy of the Elegant Demons but were wet noodles in the hands of Robbie Macgregor, husband.

  No goddamn words were right. He squatted in front of his wife. She closed the blinds on all feeling and shut him out.

  He looked up and tried to peer inside the heart of the woman who was stealing his wife. Nora stood behind brick walls.

  “One minute,” he finally muttered.

  He held his wife’s chin. He felt her head sink onto his hand, but she kept her eyes down. Georgia was no Julee, his first wife of long ago. Julee walked through the world chirping, chatting, and popping her gum. Georgia was a good woman, intelligent, spiritually aware, and maybe the best-looking almost-forty woman in Marin County. So she’d explored herself and found she preferred women. My fury is stupid.

  Robbie prodded himself to full height and shot a look down at Nora. Homely, tough, middle-aged, armored in classy suits and iron-gray hair. Outspoken, honest, hard-nosed. At this moment he hated her. At any time he would refuse to negotiate with her. That’s what he had a lawyer for, his best friend, Gianni Montella.

  Robbie hurled the words he spoke like boulders. “I’ll be gone day after tomorrow.” He let them feel the weight of the boulders. “Anything to say, say it to Gianni.”

  Georgia blinked tears downward.

  Robbie clenched his stomach to keep from throwing up. He turned and slammed his back to them.

  As their shoes clicked and padded away, they sounded out Robbie’s silent words all the way to the front door. I despise you. I despise this house. I despise this too-too Marin County. I despise the music business. And, even more mutely, I despise myself as a fool.

  At the heavy, carved door Georgia turned. “Robbie?” She waited until he looked around. “It’s not just about Nora. It’s about you. I can’t find you. I lost us.”

  He ignored the words. Though she shut the door gently, he heard a slam, one that sounded like it was inside him.

  4

  HOW DO WE GET THERE FROM HERE?

  Robbie sat at his own bar, drank two Anchor Steams, and put the third back. He knew what to do—go ask the one person who always had wise words for him. Robbie needed his grandfather, and he needed him big-time. Top of his car down, time for a visit.

  In his Alfa he zipped through the tunnel just north of the city and cruised into the world’s finest vista—the Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco Bay. The city’s spires caught light and held it. To the west stretched the vast Pacific. It was a perfect day with the kind of clarity that comes rarely, an extraordinary gift. He could have seen, maybe, a hundred miles out to sea, but he didn’t glance that way. He listened to his own heartbeat. That was surprising. The double thump drummed freedom, freedom, freedom.

  Grandpa, here I come.

  Robbie’s only relative now lived in the Columbarium, a sanctum of the deified dead in the middle of Pacific Heights. Like a grand old dowager, the Columbarium faced the world in the style of her youth, Beaux Arts, a high-flown elegance.

  Her function was simple: She housed the ashes of San Francisco’s finest and quirkiest. Here they rested forever, in a fairyland that fulfilled their mannered or freakish dreams.

  Grandfather Angus Stuart first brought Robbie here, just after he came home from his stint in the army. Though the Columbarium had a caretaker and guide, Grandfather Angus conducted his own tour. “This is the end you come to,” he said, “when you waste your life on society.” Grandfather Angus was a lifelong socialist and had started as an IWW man, one of Harry Bridges’s stevedores during the days when unions ruled the docks.

  “Look here now. Here’s a man gone to his rest, and on his urn are two martini shakers. Sums up his life, don’t it, and a wasted life it was. Here’s another’n, gone to his grave with a big cigar and a highball glass for a memorial.” Grandpa snorted in disgust.

  “Now this lady, per’aps she wasn’t such a wastrel.” Her niche featured a big ceramic baseball in front of a painted backdrop and tiny players surrounding it. “Loved the game, she did, and the Giants. A magnetic key turns on that little light, and the robotic players make motions of throwing, catching, and hitting. Those grown-ups and kids in the bleachers there, they cheer for the team. Nothing beats passion. It’s the only reason for being.

  “Look here, now, at this niche.” It bore two tobacco canisters behind a glass wall, Balkan Sobranie brand, but no legend bearing the name of the deceased. Robbie was antsy—the place would give anyone the creeps. “Pay attention! I want you to put me to rest here.”

  “Grandpa?”

  “Yes, right here. When I was a young man, I had two friends, names of Brian Connery and Hamish McDougal. Real mates we was, did everything together. One night we pooled our cash and made the bet of our lives. The headlines had been beating the drums for the big fight between the new heavyweight champion of the world, Joe Louis, and Max Schmeling. Everyone knew a war was coming, and this was America versus Germany, freedom versus fascism, our way versus theirs. Note, Robbie, that it was the first time a black man carried the flag of American ideals.

  “It was the purest patriotism to place a bet, and we won a bundle. We celebrated with Laphroaig, and decided to go afloat on that prince of Scotch whisky for a month. Then Brian, he was the thinker, had a different idea. “Two bottles, then let’s go buy a spot in the Columbarium.”

  “Says I, ‘There’s only rich stiffs in that place.’

  “‘Exactly,’ says Brian. ‘That place needs a workingman to pollute the cologne of the swells.’

  “Hamish and me, stinking drunk, we laughed and come down here with Brian and bought this niche. We drew straws for which of us should rest forever among the bleeding rich. I lost.” He fixed Robbie with his eyes. “So you will put me right here,” said Grandfather Angus. “Swear it.”

  When Grandfather Angus went to his reward in great age, Robbie dutifully deposited the ashes inside the two tobacco canisters.

  Now he stood spread legged before the man who felt like his real father. There were no benches or other seats in the Columbarium, which was a nuisance. Robbie shifted his weight from foot to foot and read the words engraved on the plate below the canisters:

  ANGUS STUART, 1910–1995

  WARRIOR FOR HIS PEOPLE

  DEFENDER OF THE POOR

  REST IN PEACE

  Robbie had been an agnostic for twenty years, or what he sometimes called a Seventh-Day Absentist. Nevertheless, he said a prayer. Then he held a Sobranie out toward the canister, a toast to the old man. If Grandfather Angus was hovering nearby, nothing he’d like better than a puff of strong Turkish tobacco. But a hint was all Angus would get—no smoking allowed inside the Palace of the Dead.

  “Light it,” said a sepulchral voice. Robbie turned toward a head of frizzy hair at the level of his chest. A bony face gazed up at Robbie, skeletal except for the eyes, which were mad, lit with the avidity of the devotee. “It’s all right. I have the honor of being the caretaker here. Light it.”

  Robbie did, took a deep drag, and blew the smoke toward Grandfather Angus’s ashes. He offered a cigarette to the caretaker but got a smiling shake of the head.

  “Does he ever speak to you?”

  Robbie stubbed out the cigarette, thinking. Somewhere in this caretaker of the dead burned an ancient and mystic flame twisted wrong. “Not directly. No. But right now he’d probably like a little piping.”

  “The bagpipes?” asked the caretaker. “I don’t know much about them.”

  Robbie said, “Perhaps you could read a Robbie Burns poem for him. He loved Robbie Burns. Don’t all Scots?” He heard the skepticism in his own voice.

  The caretaker whisked Robbie’s c
omment aside. “I know. Some people think I’m crazy. But I’ve found that if I’m to spend my days among these dead, I must befriend them. Maybe it keeps me sane. And it seems essential. Their lives continue through me, through my stories of them. I yearn to pass them along to other pilgrims who come here.”

  Those eyes gave Robbie the willies.

  “You said he’s your grandfather. Were you close?”

  Robbie took in a deep breath and let it out. “Lived with him when I was a teenager. My mother’s father. Grandfather Angus.”

  “You don’t say now.”

  What the hell! The weirdo was doing a bad Scots’ brogue.

  They looked into each other, one man a hungry skeleton, the other a car wreck and wandering soul.

  “My grandma,” Robbie said, “she died early on. Then it was just me and Grandpa Angus—my mother was off chasing romance. Pretty soon she married an accountant and moved to Ohio. Me and Grandpa, we lived in the old apartment, rented out the downstairs for a shop, made ends meet. We were the gravity of each other’s lives. When I think of him, I start striding big, like him. Scots all the way, he was, with a fighting spirit.”

  Somehow Robbie wanted to talk about his family, and this man had the need to taste these lives and swallow them whole. Robbie looked at the caretaker and understood. The man was less a guardian of the dead than a spirit cannibal.

  “I’m a musician,” Robbie said, as if that were a shield. Looked at the strange man once more. “Think I’d better go now.”

  “Glad to hear your stories, Mr. Macgregor.”

  Robbie’s stomach went into a double knot. How’d this ghoul know his name? “I won’t be seeing you again,” Robbie said.

  “Everyone comes back, sooner or later.”

  Robbie leveled him with a gaze. “Give me a moment alone with him, will you?”

  “Certainly.” He wafted away.

  Robbie turned back to the canisters.

  Deep breath. He relit the Balkan Sobranie and blew smoke toward the canisters. “So long, Grandpa.” Robbie kissed his fingers, touched them to the glass, and strode out. There was a friend to see, things to do.

  * * *

  Revulsion. Walking into Gianni’s law office, Robbie realized he couldn’t talk with his friend here. Deep rugs, polished wood, gleaming metal, a receptionist decked out for show—the room oozed glitter and luxury. Gianni owned this law business with a single partner, and they specialized in keeping tax money out of the hands of the government by setting up living trusts. They had two young lawyers who did most of the actual work. A wealthy man’s enclave. The ambience writhed around Robbie like a serpent.

  Gianni strode into the outer office, steps long, arms wide. For a little guy he acted big. “Hey, paisan.” His Italian ancestry served him well in San Francisco. He’d been born Johnny Montella to the only Catholic family in a tiny Mormon town, but now he called the upper echelon of a great city paisan. And he was Robbie’s oldest friend. They grabbed each other in a bear hug. Gianni’s head came up to the middle of Robbie’s big chest.

  “What brings you to the city?”

  Robbie let out a big breath. “I need to borrow your cabin for a few days, maybe a few weeks.”

  It was a big request. Gianni had a one-room house on a hill above Stinson Beach. He called it his cabin, perhaps to minimize its luxury. On weekends he used it as his personal refuge from the world. He invited almost no one there, and even Robbie had never stayed overnight.

  “I’ll need to hang out alone, except for tonight. Tonight we need to talk.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Too big. I’ll tell you when you get there.”

  Gianni handed over the keys. “I’ll bring cartons of Thai.”

  He was the best of friends.

  * * *

  Robbie spent the rest of the afternoon in a chaise longue on Gianni’s deck, looking out at the Pacific and toward the Farallon Islands, just beyond the horizon. As a devoted weekend sailor Robbie knew those waters well. But he didn’t think about sailing. He didn’t think about anything at all. He was not an analytical man. His way was to sit with something, whether a new song or a personal problem, and just keep it company until he had a feeling about what to do.

  So now he lay back and sucked the ocean into his lungs. He felt the sun on his skin and the wind in his long, thick red hair, now streaked with gray. He deliberately left his mind a blank. There were some comings and goings inside there, faces, remembered bits of talk, and wisps of music, some of it his own, some that belonged to other people, some he’d never heard before. But he let it all come and go.

  When the sun went down, he went inside and wandered around the single, open octagonal room of the cabin. Funny, he’d never realized how many beautiful objects Gianni had gathered here. He had Navajo rugs, probably because his hometown was mostly Navajo, right on the border of the rez. The rugs were large and, now that Robbie looked, extraordinarily beautiful. There were baskets, woven with motifs similar to the rugs. There were wood carvings of dancing figures that must be mythological. For whatever reason, all of it pleased Robbie. He felt no need to know what it was, who made it, or what the various designs might symbolize. He stretched out on an eight-foot leather sofa and let his mind roam.

  In good time Gianni arrived with the Thai.

  Over full plates, Gianni went right to it. “Give. What’s going on?”

  Robbie told him. First, and in full, about Georgia losing the baby. Then, bluntly and briefly, about Georgia and Nora kicking him out.

  He let the information sit between them, no comment. He didn’t know any more about what it meant for his future than his buddy did.

  Gianni got up and brought them snifters of an Armagnac that probably cost a hundred bucks a bottle. “Where now?”

  “Gianni, I have no idea.” He wanted company but wasn’t ready to bat ideas around. He turned away from Gianni and pretended to study the room. “Would you tell me something about this collection of art? I’ve never really paid attention. Extraordinary stuff.”

  Gianni led him from piece to piece. Later Robbie half-remembered terms like eye-dazzler and Two Gray Hills for the rugs and ceremonial for the baskets, but not much more. He fingered a basket woven of sumac and sealed with pine pitch so it would hold water. Robbie listened as Gianni explained that he tried to support young artists doing traditional Navajo art in new materials, letting the art change with the times while paying tribute to the past.

  Making conversation, Robbie asked about Hopi art.

  “I love the Navajo people, because I grew up among them. I don’t do other Native art, not Pueblo, not Anasazi, nothing.”

  Robbie suppressed a yawn.

  “Friend, you need some sleep.”

  “Gianni, I see a bit of the way ahead. Tomorrow I go to the house, get my clothes and a few instruments. Then I need to hide out here until I can see things clearer, figure out what I want to do.”

  “What do you need to do in this world, except play music, make a little art?”

  Robbie held his friend’s eyes. “I don’t know. Everything. Something. I’m in the dark here, Gianni. That’s why I need time. Time to be alone long enough to figure it out.”

  In other words, I need to take over your private space. It was a lot to ask.

  “Anything I have, anything I can do, it’s yours.” Gianni walked to the door and turned back. “Meanwhile, I’m still protecting your ass. Georgia and Nora can get half your money, but not the house. It was bought with your money before you met Georgia, payments came out of your money, so it’s yours.”

  “I don’t want to talk to them.”

  “That’s what you have me for.”

  * * *

  Robbie made two last trips to the house that was now a stranger to him, carefully avoiding Georgia and Nora. He slipped away with his favorite instruments—the Fender Stratocaster, an old Martin D-28, his accordion, and two harmonicas. His collection was a lot bigger, but these he wouldn’t do wit
hout. Then he got his keyboard. Final thought, urgent, he remembered both laptops. His music-writing programs, the digital versions of all his lead sheets. Someday, maybe, he’d want to write music again. And what about the years of sketch pads stacked in his office, fewer filled as time had passed? He took one that had only a few drawings in it and shoved a Rapidograph pen in his pocket, fine point. Black ink.

  Back at the cabin he lounged through the evening, thoughts drifting by, big and small. He decided to quit drinking for a while. The next day he mostly walked the beach. Thoughts came to him like driftwood, the same way his music came. On the second day he discovered that mixing a little jazzy movement in his steps across the sand fertilized his imagination and fed his body. Nothing like the athletic moves he made with the band, but it didn’t matter why dancing helped—you don’t take a cardiogram of the heart and soul of music, art, or dance. A sign above his desk back in the old house quoted Nietzsche, something like, “Those who can’t hear the music think the dancers are crazy.” True.

  So he walked and napped and remembered and dreamed, and every once in a while he pulled out his pen and sketch pad. Didn’t flow like it used to, but it pleased him. Letting his hand do the drawing, he tossed around what had gone right and wrong for twenty years, and the many times he had been sound asleep during his waking life.

  Gianni. How clueless and how wonderful we were.

  Robbie threw himself into a deck chair and ticked back over their friendship—right now it was an anchor. They’d enlisted, met in the army, one city kid and one country kid, working-class young men, gung ho to help their country in the first Gulf War. By the time they finished basic training, the war was over, and the army assigned them to duty on Okinawa. Turned out the Okinawan occupation was the embodiment of the Japanese government’s pretense at complying with the World War II treaty granting America a military presence in Japan—the island was nowhere near the real Japan. They spent their enlistments doing drills, and all they learned, really, was bar fighting.