“Wow!” Mary said. “This is beautiful. What islands are those?”
“The closest one is Santa Cruz. The one beyond that is Santa Rosa.”
“How far away are they?”
“Sixty or seventy miles.”
“Awesome!”
“Look back this way,” I said, turning to the south. “That’s Catalina. The island beyond it is San Clemente.”
“Cool! I love Catalina. Saul and I used to go there for the weekend.”
“Who is Saul?”
“He’s the man I was with for a couple of years, until he died last year. Let’s not talk about him.”
“All right.”
The wheel jerked forward as the carnie brought another car to the loading platform.
“Thank you for bringing me here,” Mary said, her voice quiet and close to me in the infinite space of the heavens. “It was a cool idea.”
Her eyes were liquid and sleepy. I leaned over and kissed her, feeling her soft lips for the first time. She rewarded me for my good idea by kissing me back. She kept her mouth closed, but she put her hand on the back of my head. When I put my hand on her breast, feeling her hard nipple press against the center of my palm, she pulled away.
“Don’t,” she said.
“Why not?” I begged.
“I’m going through a lot of changes right now,” she said sincerely. “I feel like my body is the only thing I have control over, and that’s important to me. I don’t want to do it with every guy that comes along. Baba has been after me since I moved in to do tantra with him, but I feel stronger when I say no.”
“You mean you aren’t sleeping with him?” I said, and I guess my voice gave me away.
“Does it matter that much to you?” she said softly.
“Yes.”
“You’re awful sensitive for a criminal.” Her eyes were sparkling. “I think it’s sweet.”
She put her lips to mine and her cherry-flavored tongue went briefly but generously into my mouth. After a blissful moment, I pulled away.
“Was he bothering you today?”
“I don’t know. He walked in on me while I was taking a shower, but he said he didn’t mean to.”
“He meant to,” I said, and the wheel lurched, lowering us toward earth.
“You don’t know that. He’s good guy in a lot of ways. He’s taught me tons about Vedanta, and he lets me stay there rent-free. He does a lot of good in the community.” She paused and matter-of-factly put a barrier between us: “I may end up doing tantra with him. I haven’t decided yet. He has a way of looking at me that makes me feel really amazing. Maybe I could find God that way, you know?”
“Come on, Mary. You know the guy is off the reservation.”
“I’m still making up my mind,” she said firmly. “I have to make my own decision about him. If he pushes me too hard, I’ll leave. But in the meantime, as long as I am staying with him, I owe him some loyalty. Who knows? Maybe all this stuff that seems bad is just a test of faith.”
She was groping for integrity and a worldview of her own, separate from that of the men who desired her. At the same time she may have been rationalizing a little bit, because the ashram was a good deal for her and she wanted to keep staying there.
The wheel jerked into motion once more, bellying out and dropping us back down to the loading platform.
“I just don’t want him to do to you what he has done to those other girls,” I said.
“He won’t,” she said. “Let’s not argue about it. We’re having a fun day at the beach. Let’s just enjoy ourselves.” She reached over and took my hand as we walked back along the pier toward the shore. But her hand felt cool and impersonal, more casual than intimate.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
As we walked south on the crowded boardwalk, it seemed to me that we were drifting apart. The bulky guru had wormed his way between us. What Mary had said about her preference for older men was a gift to me, but it also made her easy prey for Baba, a father figure who praised sex and made a good case for its spiritual potential, in contrast to her biological father, who had viewed her stirring sexuality as a threat.
Baba had a huge advantage over me because Mary lived with him and was an eager student of Vedanta, which he was a true master of in some respects, while I had to concentrate on stealing the necklace that he believed was his. Whether that led to a direct confrontation or not, I wouldn’t be hanging around the ashram after I got the diamonds and so wouldn’t have the chance to try and win Mary over. It seemed like our kiss in the big blue California sky might be the high point of our relationship. We had touched and tasted each other but nothing would come of it.
Then I got lucky.
Two of the hip-hoppers we’d seen earlier were walking toward us. The big one was black, about my height but thirty pounds heavier. The smaller one was a wiry white guy who had been acting as the group’s mouthpiece, rounding up the crowd and badgering people for money. As they approached, he threw his hands out to his sides and shifted his head back and forth like a Balinese dancer, ogling Mary.
“Goddamn, girl! You’re too fine for the wintertime. Where’d you get those pink pants? Why don’t me an’ you do the dirty dance?” He hopped back and forth, grinning.
His clowning brought a lewd smile to the face of his friend.
“Fuck off,” I said harshly, before Mary could respond.
The grins dropped off both their faces.
“You talking to me, bitch?” the mouthpiece said.
“I must be,” I said, giving Mary a hard shove toward the sand to get her clear. “You’re the only loudmouth piece of shit I see.”
The little guy did an impressive back flip and landed in a crouch, cocked and ready for action. The big guy took a step toward me.
“Whud you wanna do?”
I paused as if reconsidering and raised my hands to shoulder level, palms toward them.
“I’m not going to do anything,” I said. “You guys look too tough. Let’s let this cop handle it.”
As I said that, I extended my left hand, pointing off to the side and behind them. At the same time, I shifted my hips so that my weight rested heavily on my flexed right leg and my right hand hung down to the level of my knee.
Both sets of eyes followed my left hand as it pointed, and both heads swiveled to look for the cop. As the big guy’s head turned away from me, I brought my right fist up from way down low in a good old-fashioned roundhouse, pivoting my hips and hitting him in the temple as hard as I have ever hit anyone.
He dropped like a sack of cement.
When the white guy turned back toward me, responding to the thunk of my fist on his friend’s skull, I was following through, swinging my right leg forward and planting it, toes toward him, holding my left fist low behind me and my right forearm upright in front of me, guarding my solar plexus and my face.
As the little guy charged me, I snapped a back fist in his face to throw him off balance and pivoted again, opposite, stepping forward with my left foot and swinging my left fist in a second roundhouse that was a country cousin of the first one.
He was quick and ducked to one side so that I only hit him a glancing blow, but it still knocked him down. When he bounced back up, he jumped sideways like a jackrabbit, put two dirty fingers in his mouth, and gave a piercing whistle. Immediately an answering whistle came from the crowd to the south and the other three acrobats came running.
Two were black, one Asian. All three were muscular and, after they saw their boy down, mad as hell. For a bad moment I thought I might get my ass stomped in front of the girl. But we were next to the weight pens, and two big lifters who had witnessed the altercation ran over and took flanking positions on either side of me.
“Beat feet, niggers,” the biggest one said. His naked pecs were the size of dinner plates, his biceps like thighs. The hip-hop boys didn’t want any part of him. They helped their friend up and retreated.
“We’ll get you, motherfucker!” the m
outhpiece said when he and his crew were at a safe distance, pointing at me with a look of fury on his rat face.
“Thanks, guys, you saved me,” I said to the lifters.
“Anytime, bro,” Humongo said. “I don’t like those guys, anyway. Thur always causing trouble around here.”
“Nice moves,” the other one said, giving me a thick-necked nod of approval before rocking back into the weight pen.
I looked around for Mary and saw her standing by a palm tree at the edge of the sand with her hand over her mouth. Her eyes were wide.
“You okay?” I said, walking toward her.
“Yeah,” she said, coming to meet me. “Man! You really laid that guy out!”
“Just a lucky punch,” I said, playing it to the hilt.
“I don’t think so,” she said, looping her arm through mine and walking close beside me as we continued south. Most girls like guys who will fight for their honor, especially when they win, and it felt intimate again between us. But I knew Baba was still lurking in the background, exerting his mystic gravity on the girl.
Ahead of us to our right, a crowd was gathered on the beach, facing a man standing on a temporary stage who was speaking into a microphone. The crowd’s back was to the ocean, the speaker’s to the boardwalk. As we came closer, the sound of his amplified voice clarified into words.
“… lose essential housing and see rents on what’s left go through the roof. It will change our neighborhood so completely that we won’t recognize it anymore. And for what? So a corrupt city councilman and some greedy out-of-town developers can make a killing and rich people can have another fancy hotel to stay at on the weekend? There are plenty of fancy hotels, but not nearly enough affordable housing.”
The speaker was Walt, the artistic Baby Boomer from the ashram. This was the protest I’d read about in the paper. Clearly, Baba Raba’s role in the development was not known or the aging hippie would not have been doing karma yoga for him that morning.
“Hey, that’s Walt,” Mary said.
“Let’s hear what he has to say.”
I stopped beside a concrete wall that bordered the sand and half-leaned, half-sat on top of it with my feet wide enough apart for Mary to stand between my legs. When she leaned back against me, into my arms, I had one of those moments of supreme happiness that Vedanta offers, not just through the channel of meditation but through the aperture of love, a sense of true ananda, escape from the boundaries of both time and self. The feeling made me think of Kim Henner, my first girlfriend, who I was crazy about in fifth grade. I remembered the first time I held her and gave her a tentative kiss out behind the shed in her backyard. That was my earliest taste of the magic that can be in the union of male and female. I had not thought about that moment in many years, but it turned out I had not forgotten it, either.
When I wrapped my arms around Mary, pulling her closer, she snuggled against me, pushing her buttocks into my groin. A dizzy wave of desire washed through me as all the blood in my body rushed to the spot. It felt like my genitals were about to explode. Her sensitive ass felt the change and she turned her head to look back at me over her shoulder, smiling.
“Easy, big boy,” she said.
“Sorry,” I said. “Can’t help it.”
“It’s okay,” she said, shifting her butt slightly from side to side, rubbing it against me. “I like to know a guy has a strong drive.”
“… tax breaks that make it a bad deal for the city, any way you add it up,” Walt was saying as I tuned back in to his exhortation. “The city council is in their pocket. If we don’t organize to stop this, we are going to lose our shops, our homes, and our way of life. Do you want that?”
“No! No! Fuck them! Boo!” the crowd shouted. There were at least a hundred angry people standing in front of the stage, all of them potential opponents of Baba if his role in the resort deal should happen to somehow mysteriously leak out.
One particularly booming boo caught my attention and I looked over to see Budge standing at the edge of the boardwalk. He was wearing his AWOL shirt and carrying a Rite Aid bag.
As Walt resumed his speech, Budge turned away from the platform and saw me. We exchanged a nod and he trudged over.
“Hey, Rob,” he said. He looked hungover.
“Hi, Budge. What’s going on here?”
“They’re trying to fuck up the surfing, same as always,” he said. “Build a big hotel with a marina. Walt’s trying to stop it.”
“How did last night turn out?” I asked him.
He shook his head mournfully. “It got purty drunk out.”
“Your girlfriend spend the night?”
“Was I with a girl?”
“Yes,” I laughed.
“She musta gone home. Who’s this?” His bloodshot eyes had been darting quick looks at Mary while we talked, starting with her ankles and working up to her alert face.
“This is Mary,” I said. “Mary, this is Budge.”
“Hullo, Mary,” he said.
“What are you AWOL from?” she asked.
“It don’t mean ‘absent without leave,’” he said. “Means ‘always west of Lincoln.’ Lot of us down here don’t like to go too far from the shore. Everything we need is right here.”
“Really?” I said. “You don’t go past Lincoln?” That busy avenue was only eight or nine blocks inland. The ashram was just within that boundary.
Budge shrugged. “I might go as far as the 405 a couple of times a year, but that’s about it, bro. There ain’t no point. Everyone in the world wants to come here, and we’re already here.”
Mary saw a girl she knew passing by and went over to say hello. Budge watched her going.
“Damn, Rob,” he said. “Where’d you snag that little hottie? I thought Reggie was the ladies’ man.”
“I get lucky every once in a while,” I said. “What’s in the bag?”
He closed his eyes and shook his head, holding his free hand over his abdomen. “Laxative,” he said.
“Problems?”
He nodded very slightly, like a headwaiter acknowledging a bribe. “I ain’t shit in three days,” he whispered.
When Mary came back, she had Ozone Pacific with her.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
“Look who I found,” Mary said, putting her hand on Oz’s shoulder.
“Hey, little buddy,” Budge said, exchanging his constipated grimace for an affectionate grin. “What you up to today?”
“Hi, Budge. Hi, Rob,” Oz said, giving us his trademark smile. “I was thinking about taking a bus out to the country today to visit a farm or something. Do they have farms like that, Rob? Where you can see cows and horses and stuff and ride on a tractor?”
“They probably do,” I said. “I’ll find out for you. How’s everything else going?”
“Great,” he said. “It’s a bee-you-tee-full day at the beach!”
“I see you’ve been hanging with Mr. Parker,” I said.
Oz nodded happily. The old parking lot attendant sometimes bought the boy dinner after he knocked off for the day. I had seen the two of them sitting at the counter where Mary and I had Cokes, Ozone devouring a hamburger and french fries while Mr. Parker explained the finer points of backing big cars into tight places and removing scratches with rubbing compound.
“Where’d you get those cock boots?” Budge asked Oz. The boy’s ragged tennis shoes had been supplanted by a pair of brown cowboy boots with black stitching. They were a little bit run-down at the heels but still in good shape overall. The color matched the brown of his two-tone cowboy shirt.
“Mr. Parker gave them to me,” Oz said. “They were his grandson’s but he got too big for them. He’s a six-footer.”
“They’re really nice,” Mary said. “Those are just what you’ll need for a trip to the country.” Then, in a gentler voice, she asked: “Did your mom ever show up?”
The smile fell from Oz’s face, leaving it looking haggard and aged, like the face of a famine victim.
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“No,” he said. “She didn’t come. I walked all the way down to Ozone looking for her, but I couldn’t find her. I waited all day but she never came back.”
The street he mentioned intersected the boardwalk a mile north of the palm tree where he hung out.
“Ozone isn’t that far,” I said, with false heartiness, trying to counter his mood.
“It sure seemed far,” he said in a small voice.
“Aw, cheer up, little buddy,” Budge said, slapping him on the back. “Maybe she’ll come see you next weekend.”
Ozone’s wide eyes were amazed and hopeful. “Do you think so, Budge?”
“Never can tell,” Budge said. “Come on, let’s walk back down to the house and get something to eat. You going that way, Rob?”
“No, I’m going to walk Mary back to the ashram.”
“Do you live at the ash farm?” Oz asked Mary.
“Yeah, for right now,” Mary said.
“Do you know when Baba Raba is coming back to the beach?”
“He’ll probably be down here in the next day or two. Why?”
“I just want to ask him about something”
“We’re gonna get going,” Budge said. “Come on, Oz.”
“Let’s walk with them,” Mary said, taking my arm in hers. “It’s such a pretty afternoon, I don’t feel like going back yet. Evening meditation isn’t for another couple of hours.”
“No argument here.”
“I shouldn’t have asked about his mother,” she said as Oz and Budge went on ahead. “It upset him.”
“Don’t worry about it.” I squeezed her hand. “He’ll be fine. She’ll show up one of these days.”
The four of us strolled leisurely southward, Oz telling Budge how beautiful the country was, Mary and I stopping occasionally to look at the vendors’ wares. I bought her a mood ring, and when she put it on it glowed bright green.
“That means a romantic feeling,” said the old woman selling the rings.
“Oh, really?” Mary said. She held her hand out in front of her to look at the ring, then looked over at me, smiling. “Maybe there’s hope for you, pal.”
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