Homer smiled, showing off his true-yellows. The bills disappeared into his pawlike hand.
I'd met him not at the various soup kitchens and shelters where I'd worked but on the street. Homer was one of the stubborn ones, who preferred rooting in garbage cans and sleeping under the open sky. Foolishly, I admired him for that. Working with the homeless could drive you nuts, because you wound up liking the right people for the wrong reasons. But I think I took to Homer- and my work-because I'd also lived in the awful crush of imposed anonymity. A few times I'd been one bounced check from the street. Homer's wryness about his fate had touched a nerve with me from the start. He was as amused as he was resigned, in on the existential joke. Where I'd fought tooth and nail not to slide over the edge, he'd long ago embraced despair, and that made him a seer of sorts, a guide through an underworld I'd only glimpsed.
But Homer also stood out because, in a community of fragmented minds and souls, he'd managed to keep some part of himself intact. On an outreach shift a few years ago, I'd turned my back on a bulky schizophrenic living out of a park utility shed, and the guy had taken a swing at my head. Homer, who'd followed along with me in hopes of free lunch, had tried to flop on his shoulders but misjudged his jump and landed on a water fountain. The guy rang my bell pretty hard before I recovered and subdued him with the help of a coworker. Homer seemed utterly unshaken by the episode; his only injury was where he'd hit his funny bone on the water fountain's spout. He'd shrugged off my gratitude, but I'd never looked at him the same. Whoever said it was the thought that counts was sure as hell right when it came to going up against a 280-pound schizo off his risperidone.
I hurried into the store, Homer at my heels, and snatched a Los Angeles Times from the stack. "Have you eaten?" I asked.
"No."
"If I give you a couple more bucks, will you buy a sandwich?"
He nodded his head.
"Come on, then." I detoured to the refrigerated aisle, and Homer perused the selections with maddening thoroughness. Hacmed watched us closely from behind the counter. "How's an Italian sub sound?" I asked, shifting the cash on my back and trying to move things along.
"A lotta fat in mortadella," Homer said.
"Do you have one in the back without mortadella?" I called over.
"For Jesus sake, Homer, is there not expression about beggar and chooser?" Hacmed looked at me and I looked back, and he sighed and went through a curtain that looked like something from a drive-through car wash.
While Homer waited at the counter, staring at the alcohol cabinet, I searched out the prepaid cell phones and grabbed a few from the hook. Hacmed returned, and we paid and walked out, Homer sliding the pint of whiskey into a ragged pocket and munching away, bits of bread clinging to his beard.
"Can I get a shower?" he asked.
"Thursdays only," I said. "That's the deal. You can wait until tomorrow."
"I don't see what the difference is."
"The difference is, if you shower whenever you want at my place, then you can start paying rent or putting out."
"Okay. Tomorrow." He slid down the wall, kicking his legs out at a flung-doll angle, and readied himself for the next passerby. "Do I look sufficiently abject?"
I gave him the thumbs-up and rushed home, reading the paper. Front and center, the article about the San Onofre face-off was vague, all quotations coming from "high-placed government officials." It mentioned neither Charlie/Mike Milligan nor me. A terrorist whose name couldn't be released due to security considerations had been thwarted in a plot to blow up the nuclear power plant. Bland as the story was, it had pushed the debate roundup, more flattering to Caruthers, to below the fold.
Evelyn Plotkin was in the lobby sorting through her mail and dumping the flyers into the trash bin. She had on a neck brace.
"Evey. Are you okay?"
She was holding her eyeglasses up before an envelope, but she let them fall back around her neck. "Not really. I'm feeling very weak. I haven't eaten all day."
"Why not?"
"I didn't want my mouth to be full of food if you should call to let me know you were all right."
I'd already hurried into the elevator, but I dug deep for patience, shouldered out, and walked over. She appraised the small wound on my face with heightened gravity, then gave me a warm, clutchy hug, the kind only mothers give.
"I'm sorry," I said.
"Who did that to you?"
"The Secret Service. There was a mix-up. They confused me for someone else." I got on the elevator again but stuck my foot out just before the doors closed. "By the way, did one of the agents call you to apologize?"
She looked at me like I was out of my mind, then laughed.
The elevator closed, shutting me in with my anger at Sever for ignoring my only request. I rode up, the rucksack sitting heavily on my shoulder. The hoarded cash likely took Charlie out of whistle-blower contention, which meant that his involvement was less than honorable. Given the two $10,000 stacks with matching purple bands Charlie had brought with him to San Onofre, I figured he'd started with two hundred grand. A heist? Extortion money? Terrorist funds? Or a payment? For what service? Aside from $180,000 and a key, Charlie had barely left behind an imprint. He was a phantom. A cipher.
None of that troubled me much. His association with Frank did.
The crime-scene tape across my dark doorway reminded me of the mess awaiting me. I yanked it down and stepped in, dumping the rucksack.
A rustle startled me around, the shadow on my wrecked couch resolving slowly as a feminine form, and then Induma's voice came out of the darkness. "Love what you've done with the place."
"Jesus, you scared the hell out of me." I righted a tipped-over floor lamp and clicked it on. "Why didn't you turn on a light?"
She shrugged. "Didn't want to be presumptuous." She was leaning on the torn arm of the couch with her legs tucked beneath her, her dark skin beautiful even in the clinical halogen glow. She was yoga fit but carried enough extra weight to curve where she was supposed to. Her high cheeks tended plump, and an emerald glittered in the side of her nose. She was Indian before it came into style, growing up right here in Brentwood, and she spoke with a casual L.A. intonation that caught most people by surprise.
In the year that we dated, just before her money really started flowing in, we never really discussed my life from before I moved back to L.A. Induma had something of her parents' Buddhist restraint. She never pushed for more answers than I offered and was glad to give me space as long as I adored her-which wasn't hard-and as long as I was honest. And I was honest, but at the same time I let myself off the hook for lies of omission.
Standing the front door on end, I pushed it to the frame.
She gestured at it. "How will I get out?"
"Oh, yeah, right." I placed it a few inches offset from the jamb.
"Wendy called, said you no-showed for your interview. I figured something was up."
"I'm sorry-I meant to call."
She glanced at the phone, still in pieces on the kitchen counter. Her mouth tightened, but she didn't comment. "The nice hysterical woman downstairs gave me a version of what happened. It sounds like you're in the middle of whatever you've spent your life afraid you'd be in the middle of."
I said, "Yes."
"Come here." She rested a hand on my cheek, tilted my head to get a better look at the wound. Her concern turned to anger. "Is there someone- a lawyer, cop, whoever-you know who can help you navigate this?"
I thought about it. "No."
"Is there anyone you'd want to call?"
"Bugs Bunny."
Her burgundy lipstick set off her smile, the perfect whiteness of her teeth. "What's he do when he gets in a jam?"
"Cross-dresses."
"Hmm. Maybe it's time to look for some new allies. Or new candor with old ones." She leveled that cool stare at me, in case I hadn't figured out that it was a challenge.
I cleared my throat, then cleared it again. "If I gave you an a
ddress, could you look online and find out about whoever's renting the place?"
"Probably." She cocked her head, grinned pertly. "What address?"
"It belonged to the guy who was killed last night at San Onofre."
"Okay," she said, processing. "Okay. Guy have a name?"
I jotted down the address on a junk-mail flyer and handed it to her. "I was told it's Mike Milligan."
She took the paper with a flick of her hand. "I'll help you on two conditions. First, you're coming over for dinner tomorrow night. I'm making puliyogare."
"Will Alejandro be there?" Her boyfriend was dense and exceptionally good-looking, so of course I was mortally jealous of him. She nodded, so I said, "Fine. Second condition?"
"You tell me who you really are."
Her directness put me back on my heels. "This is something that happened to me. That's happening to me. But it's not who I am."
If the vehemence of my voice startled her, she didn't show it. "Okay," she said. "But there was always a part of your life that you avoided. You can't deny that. It's why we never got past where we did." She kept her eyes on mine, unafraid to press the point. "And now? This?" She gestured to the turmoil of my condo. "It's a whole different thing. I need to know what I'm prying into for you, what's really going on. I never got to know all of you when we were together. And that was fine. But if I'm gonna help you, I need to know now."
My apartment felt suddenly stuffy, and I realized I'd broken a sweat. "I… I can't do that."
"New alliances, pal. They come at a price." She extended the paper, holding it pinched between her thumb and forefinger, ready to drop.
I'm not sure how long I stared at her, but she didn't lower her gaze. I'd always told myself that if I had my past to relive, I'd make different choices. I looked around at the mounds of hurled clothes, the clumps of couch stuffing, the strewn papers, the offset front door. Maybe this was, bizarrely, my shot at a fresh start.
I crossed and sat on the gutted couch. Induma shadowed me, sitting also and leaning against the arm to face me. My throat was dry and my thoughts jumbled, but patience was one of Induma's virtues.
I made a few mental runs at the beginning before I forced it out. "My stepfather was murdered when I was seventeen." Saying it aloud gave it a profound power that I couldn't have imagined. But I was talking. The words poured out. I told her everything. The Zapruder tape and Isabel McBride on the pitcher's mound and the way the calluses on Frank's heels scraped the floorboards as he died. I told her about the dark sedan trolling the street, the phone call telling me to come outside, my trip to the Metropolitan Detention Center, the envelope stuffed with traveler's checks.
And then I told her the rest.
Chapter 13
The cold interrogation room, the car ride with Slim and the big guy, the coerced drop-off at LAX- they left me unable to catch my breath. At the Alaska Airlines counter, my hands shook so badly I could hardly count out seven of the traveler's checks from the envelope. I didn't know that oneway cost more than round-trip, and it took the agent to say, "Then just buy a round-trip and don't come back."
She looked mystified by my expression. I could only imagine what / looked like.
A moment later she frowned down at my driver's license. "I can't issue you this ticket. You're not eighteen for two more days."
I showed her the number written on the envelope and waited, melting in sweat, as she called and explained the situation.
"Oh, okay, sir. Right away, sir." The reverence in her voice and her lack of eye contact seemed to seal my fate as a nonentity. She hung up, printed my ticket, and handed it to me without further comment.
I spent half the flight in the cramped bathroom, sitting on the toilet and rocking myself while impatient passengers banged on the flimsy door. My running made me look guilty, but it also kept Callie clear, and that was a trade I was willing to live with. But how would I know when it would be safe to see her again?
We set down in Anchorage, the wind on the tarmac cutting me at the neck, the shins. I didn't even have a jacket. I followed a matronly woman who'd been on my flight to the terminal and boarded the same bus. I suppose I was clinging to anything familiar. She got off an hour in, and I watched her vanish into the white morning haze, my breath steaming the window. I rode on, watching the permafrost roll by, as blank and lifeless as I felt. I woke up half dead at the end of the line in Ketchikan.
It was light till ten-thirty at night. I got a job in a cannery, cutting the heads off salmon. No one asked questions. All those felons in Alaska, everyone on the run from something. Deadbeat dads and bail skippers. My own private Siberia.
I worked the line next to a massive bearded guy named Liffman who wore an eye patch and a maniacal grin. He brandished his knife with skill and zest that left me wondering.
After a few weeks, at bedtime, I called Callie just to hear her voice. I had to assume that the house was bugged, since they'd known about my conversations with her, but I needed to know she was safe. After she said "Hello" a third time, I hung up. I couldn't sleep, so I pulled the phone onto my little rented bed and curled around it, as if it held some imprint of my mom's voice.
I watched the news obsessively for some news about an attempt on Caruthers's life, but as the months dragged out, I tuned in less and less. Winter got so cold it froze the ears and tails off cats. I jerked awake at 2:18 every night, my arms clutching at Frank as he bled out. After six months Callie's home line was disconnected, so I risked a call to her at work.
Leaning against the pay phone at the back of the poolhall, sticky with sweat and trapped air, I pressed the familiar buttons. I'd gulped down a few beers to shore up my courage, and my buzz turned the whole thing into a dream-the sound of her, my shaky words, so much resentment and pain that neither of us could stop talking to breathe. She demanded to see me. When I told her it wasn't safe, she yelled at me until I eased the phone back onto its cradle.
I spent a sleepless week worried that they'd monitored the call and were coming to throw me in jail, but there wasn't anything I could do about it.
A few nights later, I came across Liffman outside the bar, shooting a pistol at a moose-crossing sign. His night-vision goggles were askew, and he staggered under the weight of the booze, but he cracked that sign again and again. The cops had wisely parked at a good distance and sat smoking on the curb, waiting for him to pass out. But Liffman, I'd learned, never passed out.
As he fumbled with a reload, I approached. Callie had never let Frank take me shooting, but I'd been around his guns enough to be calm in their presence. "Liffman."
"Yuh, Nicky?"
"What do you say we get you some sleep so tonight doesn't cut into your drinking tomorrow."
It took a few moments for him to decipher the words through the booze. Then a smile cracked his wind-chapped face, and he slid the gun into his pocket and trudged home. The cops waved as we passed.
The next day at work, while whacking the head off a sockeye, he gave me that missing-tooth grin. "You ready for when they come for you?"
I kept working.
He lopped off a few more heads, flicked them to the bin, the pink spray specking his corded forearms. "/ am. I'm ready for those motherfuckers. DEA, IRS. Shit, when the black suits come sniffin', I'll be a trace in the wind. Or a round in their chest."
When the whistle blew, I followed him out to his truck. He never turned around, but he unlocked the passenger side first, left the door standing open. I got in.
I said, "I don't want to be at the mercy of anyone ever again."
We drove out to the nowhere tundra and sat on his hood, draining a six-pack and squinting into the white. He pulled a pistol from his parka pocket and aimed it at my face. His head was crooked, his black curls hanging down like a curtain fringe. He was smiling, and it wasn't a pretty smile.
I said, "Liffman."
"Wanna learn how to shoot?"
"Yeah."
He walked off twenty paces and crunched the bottl
es into the snow. We shot. He drank the next six-pack himself. We shot some more. When I turned to reload, I heard a flicking sound, and he had a knife out, low and mean at his side. He faked a swing at my head, the blade whistling by so close I could feel the air move.
"Knife fight?"
I said, "That, too."
Every six months I sent Callie a card at work telling her I was alive and okay, delivered through a remailing service in Utah so it would bear a different postmark. Another lesson from the school of Liffman. The service would alert me if the letter bounced back as undeliverable, so I'd know if she quit or moved. I was terrified she'd get sick and wouldn't be able to contact me, or that she'd die scared and alone. Those sporadic cards served as my lifeline to her.
I moved to Washington and snagged a job driving a delivery truck for a bakery. And then, two years later, to Oregon, where I worked mornings on a road crew and earned a night-school B.A.
I felt like a hermit crab trying out new shells, looking for a fit. I didn't realize it consciously at first, but I was inching my way toward Los Angeles.
Nine years after that first flight, I finally came home. When the plane touched down at LAX, I was so ashen that the kindly schoolteacher next to me offered his airsickness bag. The first weeks were awful. Some nights I lay awake, wrapped around a pillow, eyes on the door, until sunlight fell through the dusty motel drapes. Other times I prayed they would come just to get it over with. But, slowly, perspective returned. They had to know that if I hadn't talked all this time, I had nothing to say. Surely they had moved on.
I waited a month to track down Callie. She was living in a big white house in Pasadena. Frank's hefty life-insurance policy had bought her a nice piece of property. Coming up the walk, I almost puked in the tulips. When Callie opened the door, she stood perfectly erect, her face motionless except for the tears streaming down her cheeks. We hugged and sat and talked, and I told her some of where I'd been. I lied, too-those lies of omission that had become part of who I was, blank spaces at the center of me. I said I'd fled because of guilt alone, and given what I'd done, that was plausible enough.
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