by Mark Joseph
“It’s a small boat,” Dean said. “We can show you around.”
Touring the tight spaces of the twenty-seven-foot cabin cruiser, the galley, and forward cabin with two bunks, they tripped over themselves staring at her ripe chest while trying desperately not to touch her. Amused, when the brief tour ended she resolved their confusion by stationing herself on a deck chair on the polished mahogany bow.
Dean started the engine, they cast off the lines, and the journey up the river started anew. Within a few minutes Sacramento was a haze in the southern sky.
They weren’t kidding about being gamblers. While the big one drove, the others played poker in the cabin, the crude, exuberant sounds of the game drifting up from below like pungent clouds of smoke.
“Pair of fours bets a dime.”
“See your dime and raise a quarter.”
“See your quarter and raise another two bits.”
“On a pair of fours? You gotta be kidding.”
“Put up or shut up, man. C’mon.”
“Okay. I see your two bits. Whaddya got?”
“There it is—trips. Three of a kind, the two fours you see, and presto, from the hole, the four of hearts, the whore of farts. Haha.”
Upstream from the state capital the river changed color with astonishing quickness. The Toot Sweet chugged along, engine generating a pleasant exhaust note, the water reflecting a palette of green from the trees and brambles along the banks. Suddenly, the wake from another boat would rock the cruiser and turn the river into a stream of gleaming metal. Straight down alongside the bow the water was dark green and murky brown speckled with flakes of pure light. Sally remembered from the eighth grade that gold had first been discovered near Sacramento, and as far as she knew it might have been at that exact spot. It looked rustic enough, and she could imagine miners toiling in the sun with pan and sluice box. That made her feel like a pioneer, a circumstance that suited her just fine. She liked Westerns.
Above and behind her on the flying bridge, guzzling beer and indulging in the crudest pornographic fantasies his overheated mind could concoct, Dean was having difficulty keeping the boat in the channel. Suddenly he kicked down the throttle and yanked the wheel to avoid a snag near the eastern bank, almost spilling Sally into the water. She grabbed a handrail and twisted around, shouting, “Hey!”
When the boat suddenly swerved to the left and tilted deep to the right, chips and cards slipped off the table and clattered onto the deck. Charlie fell off his chair and beer cans rattled in the galley.
“Christ. What the hell was that?”
“Dean’s so toasted I don’t think he could drive a toy boat in a bathtub.”
“Well, damn, if this ain’t up shit creek without a paddle. Who can drive this tub? Nelson?”
“No way.”
“Maybe the broad.”
“I don’t think so.”
“I can,” Bobby said, rising from the table and climbing the ladder. “It ain’t no big thing.”
“Studley,” he hollered from the stern, “you can’t drive the boat anymore. You’re drunk.”
Dean drained a can of Schlitz, hooked the empty into the river and firmly grasped the wheel, eyes dead ahead. “Go fuck a duck, McCorkle.”
“I’m gonna drive.”
“What? You can’t do that. That’s mutiny.”
“That’s what it is, yes sir, a rebellion at sea.”
“This is my boat.”
Bobby stepped up to the bridge and laid his palm on Dean’s cheek. “I’ll go into the engine compartment and pull the distributor cap and close the gas valve, Dean. Either let me drive the boat, or we drift back down the river all the way to the bay.”
“Shit.”
“C’mon, man. Go play cards.”
Dean took off his tri-cornered hat and dramatically tossed it into the river. Laughing, he abandoned the bridge and, casting a soulful glance at Sally, went below, yelling, “Who wants to play low hole card wild?”
“No wild cards, goddammit!”
Bobby knew next to nothing about boats and quickly discovered that turning the wheel to the left made the stern swing to the right. Furthermore, the current affected the boat’s direction. When he pushed the throttle lever, engine noise increased but forward progress as measured by the shore was less than expected. Meanwhile, shouts of glee rose from the cabin as Dean joined the game and attacked the cards with zeal.
The river was mellow, Huck Finn-like in its serenity, and he was alone above deck with a mystery named Sally. She watched him experiment with the controls, gently zigzagging the boat against the current, and after a few minutes she asked, “Do you know how to drive a boat?”
Pretending to ignore the question, he tried to keep a straight face but after a few seconds he cracked a smile.
“No, but I’m learning.”
“Should I be scared?”
He laughed, saying, “I’m scared, but if we’re going to get up the river, someone has to run the boat.”
“At least you’re honest.”
“No, I’m not,” he said. “I lie all the time.”
She thought that was cute. “Me, too,” she said, and when he said nothing, she asked, “Where are we going?”
“You ask a lot of questions.”
“Is that so bad?”
“Another question.”
“Why didn’t you want me to come with you?”
“Like machine-gun bullets, zow zow zow. Maybe I’ll just pull over to the side and put you ashore.”
He turned the wheel a little to the right and the stern came around and began pushing the boat toward the river bank. Fifty yards east of the wooded bank a thirty foot levee supported a highway where a semi rolled south toward Sacramento.
She couldn’t tell if he was serious, but in case he was, she said, “If you want me to get off, I will. Just tell me why.”
Bobby realized that at one level the answer was: Because you’re a girl who asks too damned many questions. With that in mind, he said, “This would be a good time to lie, but I’ll tell you the truth. There’s five of us, see, and we’ve known each other since we were little, and in a few weeks we’re all going our separate ways. We got this boat to have one last adventure together, to go up the river as far as we can go and play cards as long as the money holds out. With you here, well, that makes you the adventure, you understand? And that wasn’t the idea. It changes the equation.”
“Hmmm.”
“Do you understand ‘equation’?”
Bobby spoke this last question in such an undertone that Sally had to get out of her chair and climb to the flying bridge to continue the conversation.
“I’m not a dummy,” she said. “I’m just trying to get to San Francisco.”
“We’re going the other way. Those trucks on the highway are going to the city.”
“I’m sick of truckers, if you want to know the truth. They’re nasty.”
“I bet they’re not sick of you.”
“Are you?”
Bobby had to admit that he liked her feistiness, but liking her only made her presence more complicated.
“You know you drive these guys crazy,” he said. “You do it on purpose.”
“I just want to get to San Francisco. I told you.”
“What’s so special about San Francisco? It’s just a city.”
“I won’t know until I get there, will I? I heard about beatniks. Maybe I can be a beatnik.”
Bobby cracked up. His high school class had included an inordinate number of baby beatniks, Charlie and Alex among them, who listened to jazz inside the cage at the Blackhawk and flocked to North Beach to hang out in cafes with eccentric refugees from the East Coast who wore sandals and buttons that said Ban the Bomb. Beatniks were interesting, almost as interesting as the hysterical reaction they provoked in some quarters. Sally didn’t look like beatnik material to him, but her mentioning the beats hinted that she might be something more than an empty-headed surfer girl. He figu
red she’d earned a reprieve and steered back toward the middle of the river.
“What do you think a beatnik is?” he asked.
With that question Sally knew she had him.
“I think a beatnik must be everything people don’t like,” she said. “My grandmother said they’re communists. She said they’re dirty and against God and the American way and they smoke watchamacallit.”
“Reefer.”
“I guess that’s it. I don’t know what it is.”
“What it is is dope, marijuana,” Bobby said. “It’s illegal.”
“I’d like to try it sometime. I’d like to try everything, especially everything you’re not supposed to try.”
“Oh, boy,” Bobby said. “You’re jail bait. You know what that is?”
“You keep asking me if I know what things are. I know exactly what jail bait is,” she exclaimed in a hoarse voice that startled him with its intensity. “That’s what my last foster father called me, the bastard.”
“Is that why you ran away?”
She sighed and fished in her jeans for a rumpled box of Newports. Bobby popped open his Zippo, and with the flame came a flash between their eyes.
“Thanks,” she said, drawing stylishly on her cigarette. “I was bored. The only really cool people I know are surfers, you know, and, well, they’re surfers. All they care about is the ocean and the waves and the beach and, that’s all right, I suppose, but for me, I just got bored. I can’t even swim.” She giggled. “I lived a block from the beach, and every day and all night the waves are sloshing in from I don’t where, Japan or Hawaii or someplace, and it was always the same and I got bored. So I left.”
“To become a beatnik.”
She smiled. “That would be fun, but the truth is I have to find a job. I’ll probably become a waitress. It’s the only thing I know how to do. I don’t care. I want to see the Golden Gate Bridge. Is it beautiful?”
“I don’t know,” Bobby said as though the idea had never occurred to him, which it hadn’t. “I just go across it to get to wherever I’m going.”
“I hope it is beautiful,” Sally said with a dreamy smile. “It is in the movies.”
21
At ten minutes to three in the morning a steaming pot of room service coffee occupied the center of the card table. Four miles west, fog rushed through the Golden Gate and into the bay, obliterating Alcatraz and ending the heat wave everywhere except the Enrico Caruso Suite on the fourth floor of the Palace Hotel.
They were telling the story now, slowly, painfully reconstructing a hot summer day in the Sacramento Valley, quibbling over details, adding nuance and interpretation, groping like blind men for some semblance of truth. Bobby’s conversations with Sally came back in a rush, and he repeated oddly dated words and phrases he scarcely remembered—beatnik, Golden Gate Bridge, jail bait. The more he plunged into long-suppressed memory banks, the more he realized the only thing he remembered clearly was Sally. Once she was aboard the boat, he hadn’t paid much attention to anything else.
“You made us swear we wouldn’t touch her,” Alex said. “Do you remember that?”
They were staring again, inspecting him, measuring his response against an invisible benchmark. Reminded, he started to recall their swearing to keep their hands off Sally—that segment in his memory was fuzzy if not blank.
“If there was any nobility that day no matter how childish or melodramatic, your making us swear was the saving grace,” Alex continued. “You called a caucus and made a speech about jumping ship if we didn’t swear, and so we did.”
“You wanted her on the boat,” Bobby said. “You said if we didn’t take her, we’d spend the rest of our lives wondering what would’ve happened if we did. That’s a pretty fair irony, as it turned out.”
“You got that right,” Dean added. “Instead, we’ve spent thirty years wondering what might have happened if we didn’t.”
Bobby shook his head. The Feather River had tormented him in many ways, but not that way. “Maybe you did, pal, but not me. What if, what if, that’s a waste of time. What if Kennedy hadn’t been assassinated? That’s bullshit. What happened happened, and you can’t change the past.”
“If you know what it is,” Dean rebuked.
“Don’t we?”
“I think,” Alex said, lighting a Lucky, “we may be raising questions we can’t answer.”
“Or asking the wrong questions,” Bobby said.
“Okay, what’s the right question?”
“Whose deal is it?” Nelson roared, drumming a loud conga beat on the felt. “Let’s get some money into this game. Come on. Yak yak yak yak yak.”
“You ahead or behind?”
“Don’t you know it’s bad luck to count your money at the table, Charlie?”
“More superstitious twaddle, to use your words, Nelson. Besides, you’ve been counting your chips all night.”
“I’m a do as I say cop, not a do as I do cop.”
“Very funny. Ha ha. It’s Bobby’s deal.”
“Five draw, jacks or better.”
They tossed in their antes, and Bobby thought his old friends were just too damned cute, too smug, too quick with the sharp remark. He didn’t trust their documents or confessions of overweening guilt. Curiously, as they loosened up and discussed the details of their trip—the boat, the river, Sally, and her extraordinary effect on them—the game became less predictable. Perennial losers Charlie and Nelson were winning; Dean, playing erratically, was losing; and Alex was barely breaking even. Ahead, but not by much, Bobby decided to change his style of play and turn up the heat.
He dealt a hand of draw, Charlie and Nelson checked, and Alex opened for five hundred. Dean stayed in and Bobby, with three fives, an ace, and a six, raised a thousand. Alex saw the raise and Dean dropped.
“Now I want some Elvis,” he said, getting up to change the record.
Alex took two cards and Bobby kept the ace and took one. The five of clubs. Four fives.
As usual Alex glanced at his hand and left his cards where they lay, then planted his elbows on the table and chin on the backs of interlocked fingers.
“A thousand,” he said and placed two bumblebees in the pot.
“See your grand and raise—”
There was a sizzle, a flash, a loud bang, and all the lights in the suite went out. The stereo stopped dead, leaving Elvis six bars into “All Shook Up.”
“What the—?”
Charlie rushed to the window and reported, “The lights are on outside. It’s not a power failure.”
Dean strode to the front door and yanked it open. “Lights in the corridor.”
“It’s just this suite,” Charlie said, picking up a telephone. “I’d better call the front desk. This is too much. Next year we go to the Saint Francis.”
Alex stood on a chair and used his lighter to illuminate the light fixture. “This is weird,” he said. “Too damned weird.” He cautiously tapped the bulb, unscrewed it, and climbed onto the table to examine the temporary fixture installed for the game.
Bobby remained in his seat, calmly watching the Chinese fire drill unfolding around him. Dean came back to the table, dug into his bag, and pulled out the rum box that contained twenty-five thousand dollars.
“What’s going on, Deano?” Bobby asked.
“I don’t know, but I don’t like it. Got to protect this, no matter what.”
“Forget the box,” Alex said. “Cover the bags, Studley.”
“Nelson?”
“You got me. Maybe a short-circuit or blown circuit breaker.”
“They’re sending up a repairman,” Charlie said, hanging up. “The guy says he’s going to check the control panel down the hall.”
“What the hell?” Alex squinted and poked his face closer to the metal fixture, now blackened and blistered and hot to the touch. “What’s this?” He pulled a long, thin wire and tiny microphone away from the device and dangled the contraption in the air. With a long face he announ
ced, “We’ve been bugged.”
“Bugged?”
“Oh, Christ.”
Bobby’s face went white and he jerked to his feet, his mouth opening to speak but he couldn’t bring himself to utter a single expletive. If he stayed in the room another five seconds, he’d explode. Eyes blazing contempt, he grabbed his shirt and coat and hustled out the door and down the corridor past the elevators toward the stairs, pulling on his shirt.
“Bobby! Wait! Oh, shit.”
Suddenly realizing what had happened, Alex pointed an accusing finger at the policeman and hissed, “Nelson, you didn’t. Oh, Jesus, you did.”
“This is your stunt?” Charlie screeched.
“It’s just a mike and wire and cherry bomb,” Nelson said, laughing. “They’re not attached to anything except a timer to make it go bang and cause a short. It went off right on time at three o’clock.”
“God damn, Nelson,” Alex fumed as he climbed off the table. “You freaked him. He doesn’t know about the stunts. What were you thinking?”
No athlete, Alex started running clumsily down the corridor just as Bobby disappeared into the stairwell. In shape and much quicker, Nelson quickly passed a huffing Alex, shouting, “Go back to the suite and sit tight. I’ll bring him back.”
Alex stopped and leaned against a wall, groaning, “Don’t give it all away, Nelson. Just enough to get him back.”
Leaving Alex wheezing in the corridor, Nelson pushed into the stairwell and heard Bobby tramping down the stairs two floors below.
“Bobby!”
No answer.
“Bobby! I put the mike in the lamp. It was a joke. There’s no tape recorder. Bobby! Stop! I can explain!”
“You can’t explain shit, Chinaman! Fuck you!”
“It was a joke, Kimosabe.”
“Not funny.”
Descending the stairs three at a time, Nelson caught his quarry in the empty lobby and gently touched his shoulder. The ground floor of the hotel was so quiet they heard a streetcar rattle by on Market Street.
“Bobby, wait, please.”
The plea echoed through the deserted foyers that opened into the lobby. Emitting a primal groan, Bobby pulled away from the brotherly touch but stopped short of the doors. He turned, arms loose at his side, poised and ready, and faced his old friend.