by Marc Laidlaw
“You know, they . . . they wounded him. And cauterized him with the torch, so he wouldn’t bleed to death. There were burn streaks like whiplash scars all over his legs and butt. But they’d held it a good long time between his legs.”
Raymond sat with his head between his knees, just listening, not responding. Sal was grateful for the silence. They continued to wait for medical attention, but the looks from the staff at the counter suggested that no one was in a rush to help a couple of queers.
Sal cleared his throat and continued.
“He got better, slowly. Real slowly. But how can you ever get over something like that?
“He lived with me for a while, when he got out. I made him follow through with his therapy, and there was a lot of it. But it was like the whole experience pushed him over some edge I could never really understand. He all of a sudden seemed much older than me, in a weird way. More independent. It’s hard to explain.
“I sat in on some of his counseling sessions, and I could see him taking to them, working them around to suit him. The doctors kept working on Lupe to . . . to not let anything stop him. To face his fears, that was the main thing. To get power from the things that terrified him. They gave him visualizations, you know, like meditations to do. Imagining himself whole again, and healthy, and strong. I sometimes think he took these things too seriously. I know he stopped drawing, period. I tried to convince him to keep at it, as therapy, but he had stopped listening to me. I always felt he sort of blamed me. Because, you know, I wasn’t there for him.
“It wasn’t long before he left my place. He lived like I had for a while, on the street, among strangers. But he wasn’t afraid of anything. The worst had already happened. I tried to help him when I could, but he rejected my help. He didn’t need me anymore; and in some strange way, I felt he didn’t trust me.
“I ran into him less and less . . . and eventually, my own life got to be more than enough for me to deal with. I was working hard to get myself together, onto a path of strength and healing. I tried to stop hustling, tried to make money at a few other shitty jobs—though that was hard, since the pay was nothing. But one of them, an art sales job, led to something more rewarding. . . . And that eventually let me get away, let me come down here. I hadn’t seen Lupe at all for years, until a few weeks ago. Then I saw him for only a few hours, and he vanished again. Or I thought he had.”
“My God,” Raymond said. “The poor boy. What he went through . . . ”
“I know,” Sal said, “but that only goes so far. We can’t blame him for what happened when he was younger. But we have to protect ourselves from whatever it is he’s become.”
“Then you don’t trust him either?”
“A boy died a few weeks ago, I don’t know if you remember.”
“You mean the one at Central Beach?”
Sal nodded.
“And you think . . .”
“I have reason to think Lupe and that boy had a run-in.”
Raymond suddenly went pale. “That was the night I met him. I remember they were talking about it at the bar.”
“The night I saw you together,” Sal said.
Raymond suddenly bolted from his seat, stumbling toward the reception desk. The nurse rose, white-faced. “What’s wrong?”
Raymond barely made it to the trash can near the desk; he bent over it, heaving, his whole body racked by spasms.
“Oh dear,” the nurse was saying. “I thought it was only a burn.”
Sal hurried to put his hands on Raymond’s head and back, offering what comfort he could. “We’ve been waiting almost an hour!” he said while he held on to the other man. “Even if it was only a burn, don’t you think he needs care?”
She gave him an embarrassed look, and set off down the hall. The things one had to do to get attention; you had to make a lot of trouble.
Sal looked down at Raymond, who relaxed and sank back on his knees, panting for breath. Sal patted his head and left his hand there. It was sort of absurd to be the one comforting Raymond. “My God, my God,” Raymond moaned.
Imagine how I feel, Sal thought. He’s my brother.
15
“Come on, Dusty,” Stoner kept pleading as they played cards in the van. “Crack a window, woncha? It’s an oven in here.”
“I see you know fuck-all about surveillance,” Dusty said. “Our only advantage is this tinted glass. We crack a window, anybody going in or out of Sal’s place can look over and see your big dumb face grinning at ’em. You might as well stand on his lawn, watch him through the fucking picture window.”
They sat in the dark rear of Dusty’s van, a dim grotto stinking of motor oil and spilled beer. They were parked on the wilderness side of the street, where the windshield gave them a poor view of Sal’s house, about a block away. Sweat covered Stoner like suntan lotion; his T-shirt was drenched in it. If the playing cards hadn’t been waxed, they would have swollen up like sponges, sopping sweat from his hands.
Stoner threw down his cards.
“I’m dying, man!” he choked. “Hawk wouldn’t do this to a fucking dog!”
Dusty slowly put down his own cards.
“You gotta learn patience—bide your time. You ever watch the surfers, man, sitting out there all day waiting for that perfect wave? It’s transcendental, Stoner. You gotta transcend.”
“Don’t talk about the ocean, Dusty. It’s bad enough already.”
“No? You don’t like me to talk about the cool, wet, refreshing ocean? Those nice icy waves, frosty as a big glass of beer? Just salty enough to quench your thirst?”
“Dusty!”
“Come on, be a man.”
Stoner set his hands on his knees and pushed himself to his feet with painful effort, like a clawhammer pulling an old bent spike from hard wood. He staggered toward the door, making the whole van tip like a boat about to capsize.
“Where you going?”
“I need air.”
He opened the side door, stepping into the dead grass at the embankment.
“Jesus Christ,” Dusty swore.
Stoner hesitated, then reached back in and pulled a wad of Kleenex from a box on the floor.
“What’s that for?”
“Not that it’s any of your business, but I have to take a shit.”
“Oh, great. Why don’t you ask Sal if you can use his toilet?”
“Plenty of bushes in the hills, asshole.”
“Just hurry it up.”
“What do you think I’ll do?”
“I seen you spend half the afternoon in the trailer’s little shitter, and you hardly fit in there. I can’t imagine what you’ll do when you got the whole outdoors.”
“Fuck you.” He started to slam the door, then remembered to ease it shut.
“If Lupe comes around . . .” Dusty said.
“That’d be just my luck.”
He shut the door and heard it latch, but not before Dusty called, “Remember to light a match!”
There was no one in sight, not even at Sal’s place, but he tried to keep between bushes as he scrambled toward the ridge. A couple guys had come out Sal’s front door fifteen minutes ago, lugging a big black painting that looked like Venice: canals, lights, those canoes with the big fruity curves at one end, the kind you rowed with a pole. He couldn’t imagine who liked that crap, until he remembered how he saw them all the time in restaurants, motels, bars. The paintings were a good front. Just about anyone might have reason to buy the ugly things.
He wondered if Sal had any black velvet bullfight pictures. Stoner kind of liked those. Or dice and cobras, that real Mexican stuff. Or maybe one of those big burly Aztec dudes in a feather headdress carrying some native chick up the steps of a pyramid like he was about to sacrifice or maybe rape her. That was the kind of thing he’d hang on his wall, if he had a wall to hang things on. He knew Hawk wouldn’t want stuff like that in the trailer, even if there was room.
Jesus on black velvet, that was more Hawk’s speed. Ye
ah!
He reached the top of the slope and stood figuring out how to get through the barbed wire. The fence was a joke: three rusted strands strung between bug-eaten posts. Flimsy, but it was still more than Stoner could slip through easily. He found the rottenest post and kicked till it cracked and snapped at the base, spewing dust and termites. He walked down the post, over the wires, and into the Greenbelt.
On the far side of a thick growth of sage, he came out in a cactus patch. Deer trails, marked with pellets and paw prints, suggested an easier path. He sauntered through the late afternoon; it felt cool and breezy after hours in the stinking van. It was useless, staking out Sal’s house. Lupe was probably in Mexico or Canada by now. He’d have seen Alec, known they were after him, and split town.
Looking back, all he saw of Shangri-La were the tips of poles and the wires they held up. He cut north through the brush until he found the fire road they’d followed the night they’d hid the grenades.
He quickened his stride, looking for thistles. The stickers had worked their way through his boots for days afterward. He was still finding them in his socks, weeks later. If he forgot every other landmark, he would remember the field of thistles.
Everything was different by daylight, but Stoner knew the hills from years of hiking and riding dirt bikes up here. He used to live in Rim of the World, before he failed so miserably at school so many times that he’d had to drop out, causing his father to kick him out of the house since any kid old enough to leave school was old enough to leave home, as the old man said. When I was your age, I was working fifteen hours a day blah blah blah . . . But Stoner had never held a job for long. He couldn’t concentrate; it was the same problem he’d had in school. He did odd jobs, helped out here and there (a car theft here, fence some stolen weapons there), with no steady friends till Hawk came along.
Hawk had set him up with jobs and places to stay, but always put him up again and again when things didn’t work out. Hawk put up with a lot. Stoner owed him more favors than he could count. He felt obliged to wait in the van and watch Sal when Hawk asked him to. Still, that didn’t mean he had to do everything Dusty said. He could take a break every once in a while.
As the vast field of thistles appeared ahead, he grinned. He cut off the road, kicking up clouds of bristly down, anticipation quickening his steps. Sitting in the van with Dusty, he had thought of a way to relieve his boredom with a little walk—and a lot of privacy. Oh, it had looked like good stuff, way better than the cheesy crap he usually got ahold of. He wondered if he could smuggle it into the van without Dusty noticing. If he didn’t hide it, Dusty would lay claim to the stuff, and then so much for privacy. Besides, getting caught with the stuff would be embarrassing. Dusty would know why he’d taken so long, and tease him about it for days, or forever, like those stickers that were even now working back into his boots. And what if Hawk found out? Would he kick him out of the trailer?
A huge shape bounded out of some bushes. Stoner’s heart nearly stopped. He was mortified, as if he’d been thinking aloud.
But it was only a deer, a big buck with sprawling antlers startled by his approach. It leapt away from him, springing over a ridge, and was gone.
He laughed with relief, but he could feel his cheeks burning.
Fucking deer! Why was he ashamed? What did an animal care? It was thoughts of Hawk that made him feel guilty.
He kept hearing the deer for some time, crackling through the underbrush. It seemed to circle back behind him, sometimes loud and close at hand, then cutting out abruptly. Echoes were weird in the hills. It all made him feel even more apprehensive. The thought occurred to him that Dusty might be following. But why would Dusty want to watch him take a crap? And Dusty was dedicated. He’d be watching that house twice as hard now that Stoner was gone. Playing solitaire.
Stoner went slipping down a dusty slope and found himself in a little canyon. The sandstone walls were pitted and pocked with caves, the biggest of them hardly enough to shelter a dog from the rain. Years ago, he and some neighbor kids had scouted the whole Greenbelt—the name was new back then—looking for caves. The only decent one in the whole region made up for all the measly little pockets. It was enormous. They dubbed it the “Forty Thieves” cave because it was the sort of place you could imagine Ali Baba hiding treasure chests and pots of gold. The Forty Thieves was a steep tunnel that went upward fifty feet or more into the rock, on a dusty slope. At the end of the climb was a high round chamber. An owl lived way up inside it; you could see the hole it nested in, and its pellets were scattered all over. Stoner hadn’t thought about that cave for years, but the memories were amazingly clear. Forty Thieves: little wads of bone and fur; the taste of the dust every movement stirred up; how good it felt to enter cool shade after toiling over hot, dry trails.
He would like to see it again sometime, but he couldn’t remember where it was anymore. All the gulleys and canyons in the Greenbelt looked alike. He’d have to set up an expedition with Edgar. Edgar knew the Greenbelt real well. He probably knew the Forty Thieves cave, though only Stoner and his friends had called it that, and sworn themselves to secrecy. All the kids who roamed these hills and canyons probably found that cave and thought themselves the first to discover it.
Skulking through manzanita and juniper bushes, Stoner wondered if he’d passed the place. Suddenly the ground beneath his feet let out a splintering sound and began to sag. He threw himself back, barely in time. He’d stepped on the plywood trapdoor, nearly broken right through.
After the cracking sound, he heard branches breaking softly nearby. That deer was still banging around. He looked for antlers briefly, but saw nothing. He couldn’t see how it had gotten down the slope, but it probably wasn’t the same beast anyway. There were other animals in the hills, even wildcats—or so they said. In all his years of roaming the Greenbelt, Stoner had never seen anything worse than a rattlesnake.
He got down quietly, not wanting even animals to see him now, and swept at the dirt with his hands, uncovering the rope handle. As he pulled the trap open, earth sifted into the hole. He leaned the door against the juniper tree, then lowered himself into the pit.
He had to get on hands and knees to move deeper into the hideout. He could see the trunk full of grenades on the foam pad, exactly where Hawk had left it. His pride and joy, souvenir of the best night of his life, a raid on Camp Pendleton that he’d made with some pals (all of them now in jail for other crimes) just to prove the U.S. Army was no match for a handful of wild boys. Stoner had walked off with the biggest box he could carry; the other guys had left with a few guns and small demolition bombs that looked like nine-volt batteries. The crate was his baby, and he was happy to pay it a visit, just to see that it was safe. Hawk always complained it was too dangerous to have around, but Stoner held onto the thing. You never knew when it might come in handy.
He waited for his eyes to adjust, then looked around for the shelves he remembered. First he saw candle stubs, but he wouldn’t be staying down here.
Ah. There they were. Hawk had shoved them back on a shelf, out of sight. Grinning, Stoner squeezed in a few more feet. The ceiling scraped his back; dirt grated down his pants and made him cough. He felt like Winnie the Pooh, stuck in Rabbit’s hole, as he reached for the stack of porno magazines.
They were cool to the touch. Slick paper. Good stuff. He was almost unbearably excited. He considered going ahead and lighting one of the candles, sitting down to look them over in the dark, where it was nice and cool. But the place was built for boys, and too tight for him. Reluctantly he backed out, dirt falling in his face and gritting up his eyes. He crouched on his knees in the sun, coughing and wiping his hands on his shirt, then trying to wipe his eyes with some shirt cloth from his shoulders.
Brush crackled behind him. He dropped the magazines instinctively. He’d seen a shadow move over the sun, and it didn’t have antlers. He opened his eyes before they were quite clean; dirt chafed his eyeballs.
“Dusty?”
he said, though he could see right away that it wasn’t. It was some kid he didn’t think he knew, though it was hard to tell because he was standing right over the hole, silhouetted against the sun.
“Uh,” Stoner said, dropping his gaze for a second, finger in his eye. The magazines had fallen open on the dirt floor, showing everything. His face was burning.
When he looked up again, the kid moved out of the sun’s way, blinding him. Squinting, painful tears in his eyes, Stoner could see that the kid was holding a chunk of rock so big it made his arms bulge and tremble with the strain of raising it over his head. Stoner was so embarrassed that although he saw the rock, its meaning just didn’t register.
He started to rise, propping his weight on the edge of the pit. “These aren’t,” he said, awkwardly.
Then the rock came down like a hammer, nailing him into the ground.
16
“Close your eyes,” Edgar said. “Imagine a blank movie screen.”
Mike’s eyes were already closed. He tried to see the screen as brilliant white, as if the film had snapped and the bare bulb was glaring on the surface. He discovered that his imagination produced a scene far more detailed than Edgar suggested. He had an impression of empty seats around him, a lofty ornate ceiling decorated with chandeliers and baroque plaster moldings, as if he were sitting in an old fancy theater. Maybe it was a memory of someplace he’d seen as a child.
“Keep your mind empty,” Edgar said. “See only that screen. Now . . . pictures are going to start appearing on it. They’ll just sort of pop into view. That’s what you draw. And keep your eyes closed if you can.”
“Draw with my eyes shut?”
“Sh . . .”
His grip tightened on the pencil; the tip rested lightly on the sketch pad he held.