Sleeping Tigers

by Robinson, Holly

  The greenhouse door was unlocked and the house was silent. A forlorn yellow tea cup sat on the kitchen counter near the empty sink. There was no sound other than the rattle of the eucalyptus leaves in the tree outside the window. The house had the musty, abandoned feel of a house whose owners are on vacation. Where could they all be? It was nearly six o’clock in the evening.

  “Hello?” I called. I wandered from the kitchen to the foyer and stood beneath the teardrop chandelier. The glass shuddered slightly above my head as I moved to the foot of the stairs and called again. “Hey, anybody home?”

  There was a faint shuffling sound. Val appeared at the head of the stairs. She was swaying slightly, wrapped in a tattered Navajo blanket, droopy-eyed and snuffling. She was either sick, coming down from a high, or suffering from her vegan diet. Maybe all of the above.

  “Who’s there?” she said.

  “Oh, hey, Val. It’s just me. I’m looking for Cam.”

  Val clutched the blanket around her neck, but it gaped open from the waist down. She was naked beneath it, the V between her legs so light with blonde hair that at first I thought she was wearing pink leggings. “You’re too late,” she said.

  “What do you mean?” My skin prickled with alarm.

  “Cam’s gone.” Val leaned on the wall. The blanket fluttered open, her body emerging from within its fraying folds like a pink pupa sliding out of its cocoon.

  “You’d better sit before you fall down,” I coaxed, ascending the stairs slowly until I stood on the step beside her. “What’s wrong? Are you sick?”

  Val sat down but misjudged the distance. Her butt met the step with a painful sounding thump. “Not sick. Alone again,” she moaned, dropping her head into her hands.

  “You’re not alone. I’m here.” I touched Val’s hand. “And the others will be home soon, won’t they?”

  Val scuttled away from me, sliding her rear along the landing until she was hunched against the wall. Her blonde hair was matted close to her head. She had a tiny skull beneath all that hair and her face had seen too much sun. The skin was dry and slightly wattled beneath her double chin.

  “Nobody’s coming home,” she insisted. “I’m alone again! Just like last time.”

  Now I was really feeling panicked. Val seemed so certain. “Val, what are you talking about?” I kept my voice light. “You live with friends. Of course they’ll come home.”

  Val started pounding her fist on the wall. A small dent appeared in the plaster as the ancient wallpaper gave way. “I! Am! Too! Alone! Again!” she shrieked with each punch, then collapsed, folding her body forward and pressing her face against her knees.

  I stroked Val’s back while she cried, wondering how she stood the itch on her bare skin. Val’s story oozed out: Jon had bought everyone plane tickets. But Val had no passport. And that was just too bad, Jon said, since he’d advised everyone to keep their passports up to date, always, in case of emergencies like this one.

  “What emergency?” I frowned, my heart pounding.

  “Cam’s emergency. Cam was in trouble, Jon said.” Val raised her head and glared at me. It was dawning on her that, since I was Cam’s sister, this latest twist in her life could be my fault. “Cam had to leave the country. They all did, to save him.”

  “Save Cam from what?” I could hardly breathe.

  “That girl coming around here with his baby! She catches up to him, Cam’s going to be screwed, Jon said. He won’t be able to stay clean.”

  “Where did they go?” I stood up and gripped the railing, as if I could leap down the stairs and start chasing Cam right now, the way I had when we were kids playing tag.

  “To the mountains. The Shepherd wants everyone to cleanse themselves in the purest air, especially Cam. And he wants them to serve the earth. He bought them all tickets to Nepal and everybody signed up to be an eco volunteer.”

  I had no idea what an “eco” volunteer was, but it must have something to do with plants, knowing Jon’s passion for plants over people. “Are you serious? Nepal? That would cost thousands of dollars!”

  Val nodded, morose. “Jon bought them all tickets,” she repeated. “All except me. And I’m the one who needs cleansing more than anybody.”

  She wept while I rubbed my temples and tried to focus on what to do next. Why did it surprise me so much that Cam had pulled this disappearing act? Irresponsible, self-absorbed brat. What kinds of drugs did he use, to make him behave this way? Even his homeless girlfriend had been thoughtful enough to leave me a note.

  Well, I wouldn’t make things easy for him. I’d find a way to contact him. I wouldn’t leave Berkeley without making one last attempt to find Nadine, too. There was a slim chance that she hadn’t gotten her act together to leave for Oregon. I reached down and touched Val’s oily hair. “Look, I’ve got to go. Will you be all right?”

  “Sure. Why shouldn’t you leave? Everybody else does.”

  “Is there anyone I can call to come over? Do you have friends here in town?”

  Her voice was muffled, exhausted. “You’ve met my friends.”

  “Maybe it’s time to get new ones,” I said gently.

  “Oh yeah?” She raised her head and curled her lip at me. “And maybe you should just piss off.”

  By the time I arrived at People’s Park, the light was fading. It would be dark in another hour. I made my way slowly into the thick brush edging the park, following a narrow path towards the scent of cooking fires. The shadows were long, the grass was damp around my ankles, and the clacking of the tree branches made me jumpy.

  Small knots of people were gathered around a bonfire in the same spot where I’d first talked to the naked flamingo man and the woman in the Hawaiian shirt. I searched for them among the faces flickering in the firelight, lingering on the fringes of the crowd, reluctant to draw attention to myself. Everyone was drinking, the bottles glinting in the firelight as they were passed around.

  I finally approached a bull-necked woman standing on the sidelines. “Hi,” I said, feeling the terror of every new child on a school yard. “I’m looking for someone, and I was wondering if you’ve seen her.”

  The woman wore fingerless wool gloves and a frayed tweed jacket; she was missing a front tooth. She drew back when I spoke, startled. “I don’t hear so good out the left side,” she apologized.

  I repeated myself and described Nadine. “I think she was staying here with a man called The Admiral.”

  The woman nodded. “The Admiral, he and your girl packed up two, maybe three days ago. Ain’t been back since. You can check with Sister, though. Sister keeps track.”

  “Who’s Sister?”

  The woman gestured towards the opposite side of the fire, where I spotted the woman I’d spoken to that first day. She wore the same Hawaiian shirt and remembered me, too, when I squatted beside her and asked if Nadine had left the Park.

  “Packed up to go north,” Sister answered. “Went off with a truckload of folks. There’s a farmer comes around here every few weeks. Says he gets tired of pissing money across the border to Mexicans when he can get red-blooded American workers with college degrees. He comes here to fetch people and drives them far as Portland, sometimes.”

  I thanked her and turned to leave, but Sister grabbed my wrist between two fat fingers. “Nadine weren’t a bad girl,” she added. “She found a good home for that baby with family, she told me. Knew better’n to try and raise it up herself.”

  Talking about Paris made me miss her. I thanked Sister again, and told her that I was the one who had the baby now. Sister beamed. “Nadine’s nobody’s fool,” she said.

  I hurried out of the park. Several hundred feet into the brush, though, I realized I had taken a different path. Well, it had to lead out to the street. I kept walking, ducking my head to avoid the branches, my heart beating hard as cracking sounds popped in the undergrowth all around.

  Finally, I heard the comforting, belligerent honks of the fog horn in the Bay. I forced myself to stand
still and focus on the sound until I was certain of my direction. But then I heard the sound of footsteps behind me and panicked. I dashed through the brush, pinwheeling my arms to clear away the branches until I burst out onto the sidewalk.

  There was nobody following me. I looked around, panting, and recognized one of the houses by its creative paint job of aqua trim, pink clapboards and lime green door. My car wasn’t far away. I limped towards it, holding my side with one hand until I could lean against the car’s solid, comforting hulk and search for the keys in my purse.

  What had I been thinking, taking my purse into People’s Park at sunset? Jesus, what an idiot.

  I glanced around, relieved to see that the only other person on the street was a tall, broad-shouldered blonde in a short skirt. She walked towards me with brisk strides, her heels clacking along like horse’s hooves.

  I turned my back on the woman to unlock the door. Within seconds she was on me, clutching my head beneath her arm in a muscular half-Nelson while she grabbed my purse and shoved me down onto the sidewalk. This was no she, I realized by the size of his feet and legs. My mugger wore platform shoes, but black stubble poked through his pale stockings like the bristles of a nail brush.

  The assault was over in an instant, my little car speeding away from the curb before I could scramble to my feet. My purse was on the passenger seat. I brushed myself off, silently cursing my own stupidity. If this were a TV show, I’d want to turn it off. I’d been alone on a dark street and broken the cardinal rule of city dwellers everywhere: get into your car fast and lock the doors.

  Miraculously, a patrol car rounded the corner. I bounded into the street and stood there like a deer trapped in headlights, waving my arms. My saviors were a pair of Berkeley cops, a black man and a white woman, both with bellies they carried like sacks over their belts. They approached me with hands on their guns and I blubbered out my story. Within a few minutes they’d whisked me to a police station lit up like a bus terminal.

  “And you say the perp was wearing platform shoes?” The officer taking my statement on the computer was an older man with a scar across one eyebrow. “Any other identifying features?” he pressed.

  “He had on a blonde wig and a red miniskirt.”

  The officer in the cubicle behind us snorted, but my man remained professional. He poured a cup of sludge into a styrofoam cup and handed it to me, then tapped a few notes into a computer. “You seem pretty sure this was a male assailant.”

  “He had a five o’clock shadow around his lipstick and his legs were covered with black stubble.”

  A muscle in the cop’s jaw twitched. “You got anything of value in the car to report?”

  “You mean my purse and car aren’t enough to lose?”

  He shrugged. “This is the time to give your insurance company a full report of anything you lost.” He kept his eyes on the screen. “Anything at all.”

  I sighed. “Nothing but my purse and an old pair of sneakers.” Luckily, I’d left the baby seat with Karin in case she had an emergency with Paris. I ached to call Karin. What if the baby had panicked in my absence, had another bout of croup, or suffered a bad reaction to those shots? I’d already left her longer than I’d promised. Not that Paris could understand about time at her age, of course, but still: a promise was a promise. Enough people had already let her down.

  The cop delivered a pat speech about procedures, asked me to sign some papers, then offered me his phone. I called Karin. She was appropriately appalled and I felt instantly better. “Oh, poor you. That sounds horrible!”

  “Well, it was my own damn fault,” I said. “I should have known that area wouldn’t be safe at night.”

  “That’s ridiculous. It’s not your fault you were mugged. Look, give me half an hour and I’ll be there. I’ll bring you back to my house, and we’ll cry over spilled milk. You should see how your kid trashed my kitchen!”

  Like anyone would notice the difference, I nearly said, but was stopped by the words “your kid.” Was that what I really wanted, for Paris to be mine?

  Right now, I wanted Karin to rescue me. But that wouldn’t be the best thing for Paris, waking her and driving over here at night. I told Karin that I’d borrow subway fare from the police, and she encouraged me to go straight home instead of picking up the baby.

  “You need a good night’s sleep,” she insisted. “Paris will be fine here until morning.”

  So much for feeling essential. I hung up on the verge of tears, begged a few dollars from the cop, and walked to the BART station around the corner. The train arrived and departed with merciful efficiency. It was well after eight o’clock, yet the train was still clogged with evening commuters, mostly in suits and headphones, hypnotized by their phones. I couldn’t believe there was this much normalcy left in the world.

  Half an hour later, I arrived at my station. No car, no purse. Just me and a pocketful of loose change. I started trudging towards Noe Valley, dreading the idea of my empty apartment.

  I hadn’t walked more than two blocks before spotting a blue neon sign– Aunt Mary’s–outside a bar with a bright pink beaded curtain fluttering across the doorway. I fingered the change in my pocket. This was where David was meeting Enrique and the rest of his friends.

  With luck, I could get them to buy me a drink before I went home. That might take the edge off the fact that I’d lost not only my wallet and my car, but my brother, too.

  Chapter nine

  Entering Aunt Mary’s was like wading into a city swimming pool on the Fourth of July: lots of blue light and standing room only. This was an affluent, intellectual looking crowd, people in their twenties or thirties who dressed like Berkeley but had Silicon Valley money.

  The band was working a noisy rhythm and blues set. I threaded my way through the crowd, noting the bits of car fenders, tires, and steering wheels comprising the giant mobiles dangling ominously above the crowd. Nobody could ever accuse San Francisco artists of wasting materials.

  I felt claustrophobic and discouraged. I had as much chance of finding David in here as stealing my car back from that high-heeled mugger. I resigned myself to spending my last few dollars swilling a beer alone before going home to bury my head under a pillow. At least I could look forward to seeing Paris in the morning.

  This accidental longing to see the baby left me feeling just as terrified of losing her as I’d been, only days ago, of raising her. That was scary: every baby belonged with her parents, if possible. I had to give Cam the opportunity to do the right thing, no matter what my feelings.

  The room shuddered with bodies in motion. I spotted another doorway and angled towards it. This opened onto a swimming pool enclosed in a courtyard. The water was eerie, green lights gleaming from beneath its surface like cats’ eyes shining through the fog. The pool was covered with a thick sheet of plexiglass.

  Dancers cavorted on top of the pool with the sweaty abandon of pagans celebrating the rites of spring. I half expected the men to have hooves. They certainly sounded as if they had hooves, stomping on the plastic like that. The band was playing a blues tune I recognized as “Got My Mojo Working,” and the pianist kept up pretty well with Otis Spann’s famous finger work on the keys.

  Above the swimming pool, a crowd observed the dancers. It took me several minutes to realize that the onlookers weren’t people, but mannequins dressed in tropical tourist gear: Hawaiian shirts, Bermuda shorts, sundresses, and sunglasses. I climbed the stairs to the balcony and scanned the club for any sign of David. I was excited to see him but anxious, too. Maybe he had only invited me along because Enrique mentioned it, and David was being polite.

  The stage was directly below. The musicians were all men except the drummer, a black woman with bright red beads braided into her hair like ladybugs marching down her neck. The pianist, who had his back to me, was announcing the next tune.

  “This here’s the Gravier Street Rag, made famous by the untouchable Champion Jack Dupree,” he shouted into the microphone, movin
g his fingers over the keys in a rapid blues shuffle.

  The singer sauntered up to the piano. A tall, thin man with slick black hair and an enormous gold hoop in one ear, he choked the microphone with one hand, waggled his hips and howled like a wet cat. The singer’s rendition of wine-headed Sue made the crowd hoot in return. This was clearly a regular.

  I laughed, drawn into the music despite my own blues. Or perhaps because the music fit my mood and hit my gut. There were sad blues and happy blues, I’d once heard Billie Holiday say in an interview. This was definitely the happy kind.

  I gripped the railing and bobbed to the music. I still couldn’t believe the audacity of Cam’s vanishing act. And to Nepal, of all places! How many people even knew where Nepal was, much less flew there on a whim?

  Jon must be rolling in dough, if he’d flown the coop and taken the others with him like a flock of geese. I imagined them in a perfect V formation, Jon in the lead, the rest frantically flapping their arms to keep up, as I leaned down over the balcony between a pair of mannequins and tapped my foot to the music. Then the pianist turned his head toward the microphone again, and my foot froze mid-tap.

  That was David below me, playing the piano, his hands hopping across the keyboard. And Enrique, David’s nurse, was singing, all flexible hips and gleaming grin as he played to a cheering, hooting crowd. Impossible, but there they were.

  It took me several minutes to make my way back down from the balcony. Once in front of the stage, I was drawn onto the floor by a group of dancers who gestured for me to join them. I did, working my way up to the stage that way, and began dancing in front of the band.

  They finally broke set. Sweat was pouring down my face and neck by the time David stood up behind the upright piano and knocked back a bottle of water. Enrique, laughing at something the saxophonist shouted in his ear, spotted me first. He tapped David on the shoulder and pointed. David’s grin was all the invitation I needed. I reached up, and Enrique grabbed my hand and tugged me onto the stage.