by Tyler Keevil
I stood up, and stepped between him and my cat. ‘You’re not going to touch that cat.’
He pointed the bat at me.
‘You telling me what to do, son?’
I removed the pistol from my pocket, making sure he saw it. ‘I’m not your son.’
We faced each other in the firelight. Then he laughed his hacking laugh, turned, and lurched off. He headed into the woods in the direction of his trailer. As he went he swung the bat randomly, using it like a machete, smashing branches and cracking tree trunks. He didn’t have a flashlight. I listened to him getting further and further away, until it got quiet.
I walked around my campsite, gathering up the bigger glass shards. I tossed them in the flames and put another log on the fire. Then I went to get my sleeping bag, unrolled it, and stretched out beside my cat.
‘I swear, cat,’ I said, ‘I haven’t met a single normal person on this trip.’
She mewled in agreement, and I patted her. She wasn’t shivering as much any more.
‘Maybe there aren’t any normal people left.’
As we dozed off, I kept one hand in my pocket, on my gun.
At some point I woke up. Or I might have dreamt I woke up. It’s hard to say, since I had no frame of reference. The fire had burned itself out, and the stars were hidden by clouds. I couldn’t see the forest. I couldn’t see anything. I was surrounded by darkness, silence and empty stillness, like sleep. But coming from up at the campsite I heard noises: banging and pounding, shrieks and screams. I listened for a long time, wondering if I should go up there and do something. Finally the noises seemed to reach some sort of climax, and died down.
In the quiet that followed, my cat meowed.
‘Go back to sleep,’ I told her. ‘It was just a dream.’
chapter 56
When I set out the next morning, the old man’s wife was in the yard, hanging laundry on the clothes line. She’d done a load of underwear: off-white ginch and wire-rimmed bras and a few pairs of wrinkled granny panties. I drove past the trailer, parked, and walked back to her. I guess I just needed to see.
She was wearing sunglasses that hid her eyes. They didn’t hide the bruise on her cheek, or her puffy lip. Her face had a pinched look, and her whole body seemed to have shrivelled in on itself like a dried flower.
‘Sorry about the noise last night,’ she said.
‘I’m sorry I gave him that booze.’
‘Weren’t your fault.’
Neither of us was really looking at the other. We were both staring at the ground, the trees, anything. I’d started fiddling with my keys.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘guess I should get going. I’m headed for the coast today.’
‘I never been. I never seen the sea.’
‘But you’re so close.’
‘He don’t like the sea.’ She had one of his undershirts in her hands. She twisted it slowly, wringing it like the neck of a chicken. ‘You’ll enjoy it, though. Travelled far?’
‘Not so far.’
‘There are a lot of kids on the road these days. Both mine are. My boys.’
‘He told me.’ I was shuffling my feet, feeling sheepish. ‘You must miss them, eh?’
‘I miss them plenty.’
She draped his shirt on the line, pegged it, and then looked at me directly for the first time.
‘Say – you haven’t seen them, have you? My sons? Last we heard they was around these parts.’
I shook my head. ‘That would be pretty unlikely, but you never know. I might’ve.’
She put a hand to her throat, took a step towards me. She looked ready to cry. ‘Do you really think so?’
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘I mean, I met a couple guys along the way. One was hitchhiking. The other was biking around with his friends.’
‘That’s wonderful – just wonderful. I been looking so long, hoping to find them. If only he’d…’ She glanced towards the trailer. The door was open and I could hear the nasal grind of the old guy snoring. She lowered her voice and asked, ‘How are they both doing?’
‘Good, you know. Getting by, anyways.’
I didn’t mention that one of them had attacked me wearing a tiger mask, and that the other wanted to kill me for stealing his mezcal. She didn’t need to know the truth about her prodigal sons.
‘That’s something, at least.’
‘It sure is.’ I hitched my thumbs in the pockets of my jeans, trying to think of something else I could tell her. ‘One said he was going to Sausalito.’
She raised her eyebrows. ‘That’s a nice place. Maybe he’s doing well.’
From inside the trailer came a low grumble-groaning, like the sound of a grizzly bear shaking off hibernation. We both went still. In the silence I could hear her laundry dripping.
‘You better go on now,’ she whispered.
‘I’m going.’
I tiptoed away, trying not to step on any twigs. Halfway to the car, I stopped and glanced back. ‘Where is Sausalito, anyways?’ I asked.
She mouthed the answer to me: ‘San Francisco.’
I smiled. It made perfect sense – in a synchronous kind of way.
I headed out along the road that circumnavigated the reservoir. The cat lay in her usual position on the passenger seat. She was still with me, and still alive. I hadn’t had to bury her in her grave after all. I placed a palm on her belly. Her sweats and fever-chills had passed and her breathing was steadier.
‘You’ve got a lot of spirit, cat,’ I told her. ‘Enough spirit for the both of us.’
She yawned, displaying her canines.
The sun hadn’t cleared the surrounding hills, and the moon was still up – slender and white and curled like a soap shaving. The right side was lit, and you could see the rest of the moon’s shape to the left, in a faint outline. It had been ages since I’d seen the moon. The last time I could remember was back in Trevor, with that Slovak girl.
As I passed the information board, I pulled over again and got out to look across the water. The morning was calm and windless, the water perfectly still, reflecting the trees, the hills, the moon. It looked like an alternate world, a looking-glass realm. I could even make out a tiny version of myself down there, standing beside his Neon. Nobody else was around.
‘What do you think, cat?’ I asked. ‘Ready for a dip now?’
She blinked at me, bleary-eyed, as if to say, I’m feeling better, but not that much better, buddy.
‘You watch the car, then.’
I stripped down to my boxers and set out across the mudflats. At first the ground was hard, but as I got closer to the water the mud softened, becoming smooth and clay-like. It squelched up between my toes, coated the soles of my feet. I padded over it like a monk. At the water’s edge I stepped in and kept going. The water was cold and shivered over my skin, rising to my calves, my knees, my groin. When it reached my waist I dived in. Since the water level was so low, the reservoir was only about half a mile across. I put my head down and broke into a front crawl and swam out to the centre, then stayed there. I tried lying on my back, but the fresh water didn’t buoy you up as well as the sea. It wanted to draw me down, so I let it. I took a breath, tucked into a ball, and dropped. I sank deeper and deeper, away from the light, feeling the pressure in my ears, the ache in my chest. When my oxygen ran out I clawed my way back up, one stroke at a time, climbing an invisible ladder. I broke the surface, gasping. The sun had just crested the hills and the water around me was lit up, flickering like a lake of fire. I pulled myself through it towards shore.
Back at the car, I perched sideways in the driver’s seat, with my feet on the tarmac. Water dripped from my hair and the tip of my nose. As I sat there, I felt something brush my knuckles. The cat was licking droplets of water off me. I went back down to the reservoir to fill our bottles up. I drank half a litre myself and poured some in her beer-can saucer. She lapped away at it, gulping every few seconds. It was good water – what we needed. But it wasn’t nearly enough.
‘This is just a taste, cat. Wait’ll we get to the coast.’
By the time she finished I was dry. I stood up to put my clothes on. In the window of the Neon I caught a glimpse of my reflection. My sunburn had faded to a tan. The bruises on my face and scratches on my torso were healing. All the fat had melted off me, like candle wax. I was lean as a wick, burnt down to the quick.
I got back in the car, adjusted my rear-view, checked the side mirrors. The cat was licking her paw and using it to rub behind her ear. It was the first time I’d seen her clean herself properly.
‘Better find some flowers for your hair, cat,’ I said. ‘Today, we’re heading to San Francisco.’
I turned the key in the ignition. The Neon sounded all right. The rattle was gone, at least. As we rolled out on to the highway, the cat’s tail was twitching in anticipation.
chapter 57
I smelled San Francisco before I saw it. Somewhere past Sacramento the air grew heady and thick with the scent of sea. I knew that smell. It was the same here as at home: a mix of surf and sand and landed fish and dried-out crab shells and kelp-whips and suntan lotion and sex on the beach and tidal pools and seine nets and herring roe. The old Pacific.
‘Smell that, cat?’ I said. ‘We’re getting close.’
From there the I-80 swooped west into Solano County. The land was low and flat and divided by a gridiron of irrigation ditches. We passed through a series of sprawling orchards, where all the trees were evenly spaced and laden with fat-ripe fruits – plums and apples and nectarines – that weighed heavy on the branches. Further on lay wineries, and vineyards. The grapes glowed gold in the sun, their skin tight and translucent. There were swallows bobbing back and forth between the rows. When the cat noticed them, she perked up and put her paws on the window to watch, and made a strange bleating sound – a kind of cat-squeak.
Then came Vacaville, and Vallejo, where the highway was lined with these big, forty-foot birch trees. The I-80 carried us, smooth as a conveyer belt, past a Safeway and a Motel 6 and strip malls and suburban sprawl, and on into Richmond and Berkeley. In Berkeley we caught our first glimpse of the bay – a swatch of green water stretching out to the right. On the opposite side, hidden in the horizon haze, were the hills and towers of a distant city.
‘That’s where we’re headed, cat!’ I cried. ‘This is going to be an epic moment – our entrance into a fabled, legendary city. We might even get to cross the Golden Gate Bridge.’
The cat looked, and yawned. It took a lot to impress my cat.
We lost that view as we entered a tangle of spaghetti junctions, where the I-80 and the I-580 joined for a few miles. Cars swerved from lane to lane, merging and exiting, slinging around the loops and ramps in a kind of orchestrated chaos. Then all the traffic was slowing, and we were approaching what looked like a big concrete barricade. It was a toll, which I hadn’t expected. It kind of marred the momentousness of our entrance.
We got in one of the lines, and waited behind a big yellow school bus. The kids were all leaning out the windows to escape the heat, letting their arms dangle down. When it was our turn we pulled up to the booth and a burly guy in a high-vis bib asked me for six bucks.
‘What’s the toll for?’
‘The bridge.’
‘The Golden Gate Bridge?’
My voice cracked when I said it. I was getting a little bit excited.
‘The Bay Bridge.’
‘I was hoping to go over the Golden Gate.’
He had his palm out, waiting for my money. ‘You’d have to turn around, scoot over to San Rafael, and come in from the north.’
‘Oh.’ I thought about that. It seemed like a lot of trouble. ‘I guess I’ll just cross here.’
I handed him the six bucks.
On the other side of the tollbooths the traffic was all sluggish and congested. This wasn’t what I’d imagined at all. I wanted speed, freedom. I wanted that rush of arrival. I wanted a helicopter shot tracking us as we sped towards our ultimate and final destination.
‘Goddammit,’ I said, ‘we should have doubled back, cat.’
We crawled on to the bridge and entered a long section of trusswork, with beams and girders overhead, riveted together, creating a kind of canopy. It was like driving through the skeleton of a giant caterpillar. We were moving as slowly as a caterpillar, too. It was only as we approached a mass of land in the centre of the bay that things began to pick up. I saw a sign for a turn-off to Yerba Buena Island, and Treasure Island, which I’d thought was just a fictional place in the book.
‘See, cat,’ I said. ‘I told you this city was legendary.’
Even the cat had to grant me that. As we approached we both peered at the island – so mysterious with its forests, its breakwater, its secluded cove – and then we plunged into a tunnel bored through the centre of it. Everything seemed outrageous and new: a bridge that led to a fabled island and into a tunnel. Traffic was thinning and we were going faster, faster. We accelerated through the tunnel and emerged into a glare of daylight, like a flare-out in a film, so bright I couldn’t see, as if I’d driven right into the afterlife.
Then the world faded back into view and I saw we’d come out on to another bridge, a suspension bridge, stretching across an expanse of blue. We were driving on air, through the sky, flying. We blazed like a plane, low over the bay, and up ahead was the city – towers and skyscrapers, steel and glass, parks and piers and stretches of grass – and, inflated with a giddy, vertiginous feeling, we swooped in to land in the mystical, mythical city called San Francisco.
Beatrice lived on a houseboat in a place called Mission Creek. Before I’d left, she’d given me directions. We should have been fine. But when I came off the highway I must have taken a wrong turn. Instead of the waterfront we ended up among the famous San Francisco hills. We went up and down, up and down, feeling our stomachs do that familiar rollercoaster flip-flop. No matter where we went, the bay always seemed to be in view. It was like driving around in a retro video game, with a backdrop that never changes.
‘What does the map say, cat?’
The cat was navigating for me. By navigating I mean she was sitting on the map and attacking it, shredding it with her claws. The wind coming through the window kept making the map flutter, which drove her absolutely bonkers.
‘We better not be lost, cat!’
We were lost. For about half an hour we cruised around and around, like a boat with a broken rudder. Then I pulled over at a payphone and called Beatrice. When she heard my voice, she let out a cowgirl whoop.
‘Trevor! I dreamt you crashed your car and died in my arms.’
‘I did crash my car. Twice.’
‘I knew it!’
‘But I’m not dead. I’m just lost.’
She got me to describe where we were. I’d stopped at an intersection between a public park and a big sports complex, called the George R. Moscone Recreation Center.
‘You went north from the bridge instead of south. Go back a couple blocks and take a left on Lombard Street. Follow that to Columbus.’ She paused, then added, ‘You’ll have to go down the hill.’
She sounded happy about that.
‘What hill?’
‘That famous hill from Bullitt. It’s the crookedest hill in the world.’
I thought she was joking, but it really is the crookedest hill in the world. I found that out when we got there. It was paved with red brick, and so steep that they’d had to put in seven or eight hairpin turns to make it passable. It looked ridiculous and cartoon-like and suicidal. The cat meeped.
‘Buckle up, catnip.’
We nosed over the edge and dropped off, spiralling down. At each switchback, the Neon bottomed out and the muffler ground against the bricks. Ever since going up to the twin peaks her suspension had been shot to shit. We scraped our way to the bottom and levelled out. From there we coasted down Lombard, and followed the rest of Beatrice’s directions: Columbus to Stockton, and Stockton to Four
th Street, which took us right back to where we’d started – at the base of the Bay Bridge. ‘We were nearly there, cat!’
Mission Creek was just a few blocks further south. A wide
access road snaked past a park and down to the water. We could see the houseboats, moored to a dock running parallel to shore. The roadside was lined with parking spaces, and in one of them, halfway down, she was waiting for us. She was wearing a blue bandanna on her head, and around her waist a red sarong that snapped and fluttered like a flag in the wind. She was shielding her eyes from the sun with one hand, watching us approach. In that pose, surveying her terrain, she looked like the daughter of a Basque freedom fighter and an Indian healer – which is exactly what she is.
‘That’s her, cat,’ I shouted. ‘That’s Beatrice Carmen!’
I honked and skidded over there and parked at an angle and jumped out. When she saw me, Bea clamped a palm across her mouth, as if holding in a laugh.
‘What?’ I asked.
‘Honey,’ she said, ‘you look like hell.’
‘I’ve been through hell, in a way.’
‘You’ve made it to heaven now. Come here.’
She grabbed me in a huge bear-hug and held me. I relaxed against her, resting my chin on her shoulder. We’re the same height, and our bodies seemed to fit together.
‘Oh, my God,’ she said, looking past me at the car. ‘You really have a cat.’
I tried to explain about finding the cat in the desert, at the diner – but the story sounded completely nonsensical, even to me. It didn’t matter. Beatrice let go of me and scooped up my cat, who squirmed around in Bea’s arms, and started nuzzling at her hair.
‘I need to get her de-wormed,’ I said.
‘We’ve got tablets,’ Bea said, scratching the cat’s chin. ‘What’s her name?’
‘She doesn’t really have one.’
Bea pressed a finger to the cat’s forehead, as if anointing her. ‘We’ll call you Sprite.’