by Alex Austin
In the house, under the watchful eyes of a CSI team, he gathered his clothes and shaving kit.
Hugh drove slowly through Topanga. At Abuelita’s Restaurant, the parking attendant scrambled to deal with a rush of cars. The attendant appeared hemmed in by the vehicles. At the restaurant’s door, a brightly garbed waitress served margaritas to the blossoming line of waiting patrons. Hugh considered stopping at the bar. His blood pressure felt astronomical, and his head ready to crack. He had twice cheated death to go through all this shit? Death had cheated him. The radio played a song about the body as a cage. He smelled the tequila, but didn’t stop, turning left on Old Topanga.
On the old road, Hugh accelerated, his tires squealing on the turns, the headlights glancing off the granite walls and the occasional fugitive house behind the trees. The road straightened and the houses grew more substantial. He drove past the school with the paddock, where globular brown eyes looked up under the curious headlights. He remembered walking down the aisle and seeing Anna’s notebook. The hard, drear words. Older than his boys, but a child still. He wondered if the photo had just slipped out of Anna’s purse. Surely they hadn’t planted it? Hugh had refused to take them to their destination, but they wouldn’t be that vindictive—would they? The road ascended then, climbing at every turn. There were several hairpins where it would have been easy enough to twist the wheel, left or right and go sailing into the night. At the peak of the road, he pulled into the turnoff, rolling until the bumper tapped the chain like a key turning in a lock. There was no possibility now of staging an accidental death. He remained in the car a moment, remembering a summer night when the universe seemed to radiate from his fingertips, as if he had thought it all up himself.
Not bothering to lock the car, he scuffed along the shadowy horse trail that wound between the hilltops. The air was sweet with jasmine. Where the trail split, the valley spread out in a sheet of innumerable lights until it collided with the San Gabriel Mountains, icy black against the inky sky. An animal scurried past. Hugh walked to the edge of the cliff. Not quite ninety degrees but close enough to do the job. He would just run for the lights. Would the pole-vaulting coyote eat his corpse? Would he be the one that landed with a puff?
Gazing out at the sea of lights, he saw something huge floating east across the valley. He thought it a cloud, but then its lights became clear. The Goodyear blimp, or was it now named for a foreign corporation?
He followed the blimp’s slow smooth flight above the earth; he had seen it a hundred times, yet it seemed impossible floating there, something out of H. G. Wells, something out of a future that was always a fiction.
As he walked back to the Volvo, he looked west and saw a car parked tight against the roadside. The Camaro? The lights of an oncoming car lit the driver’s head in outline. The long hair gave no clue as to whether it was a man or woman.
Hugh walked toward the parked car and then sprinted as the engine started, the whine rising to a roar. It’s headlights shone, flicking to high beam and blinding Hugh as he got within fifty feet of the vehicle.
“Hey!” shouted Hugh. “Hold on!”
Its tires burning, roadside dust swirling in the headlights, the car sped toward Hugh, veering into the center of the boulevard and quickly disappearing around the bend. Hugh caught a glimpse of the taillights.
He bent down, picked up a stone and hurled it after the vanished car.
“Fuck. Who are you?”
It was ten P.M. by the time Hugh had checked in to the motel across the street from the café. After dropping his gym bag in the room, he crossed the raging boulevard with his laptop, dodging twenty-something Persians in sports cars, windows down, hip-hop blasting from their speakers. He walked toward the café entrance accompanied by the random notes of the trumpet player serenading a man in a parked van, in the back of which a goat chewed straw and stared contentedly at a group of helmeted motorcycle riders standing beside their pocket rockets. The bikes could go two hundred mph. While standing still, the bikes appeared in motion, appeared like the blimp from the future.
“Can I help you?” one of the group asked as Hugh approached.
“Your motorcycle,” said Hugh, smiling. “I was admiring the design. What do they call the design?”
“Twenty thousand dollars,” responded the man.
The others laughed.
“Thanks. Real helpful,” snapped Hugh, gazing once more at the bike.
Nodding to the Israeli bunch, smoking cigars and talking boisterously, Hugh entered the café, ordered his coffee and sat down at the handicapped table with its view of the parking lot. On a brown napkin he sketched the handlebar cowling of a bright yellow-and-blue Kawasaki. He erased and redrew until the napkin fell apart. He went through four napkins before he was satisfied with the drawing. With the adjustments, the Kawasaki’s cowling mirrored the boat’s pilothouse. The part determining the whole, he then drew the deck and hull.
He set the napkin beside the keyboard. He brought up yachtworld.com. On the search form, he typed in the length as forty feet minimum and seventy feet maximum. He checked powerboat and the year of manufacture as between 1960 and 2000. He hit search. There were nine thousand results. He scanned the first page, which took perhaps thirty seconds. Finding nothing close to the boat in the picture, he clicked next. The page took maybe five seconds to appear. He scanned the second. Each page had ten photos. He could browse twenty photos in a minute. That made twelve hundred in an hour. He could see every photo in the course of a night. Two hours later, there had been a half-dozen times when he thought he had found the boat, but bringing up a larger picture, he could see that each was different from the boat that had motored off the beach that day. It was already midnight, the café closing down, but he didn’t want to stop. He checked the available Wi-Fi sites and saw that the motel was equipped.
Returning to his motel room, he made a pot of coffee on the courtesy coffee maker and powered up his computer. As he watched the coffee drip into the pot, he started at a tap on the window. Bending back the Venetian blind, he scanned the parking lot, but for a cat padding across a car’s hood, it was still and silent. With a sigh, he let the blind drop and returned to work. An hour later, he found a boat so similar to his drawing that he might have traced it. He brought up a larger photo whose caption read:
GOTO, 50', Twin 3208 turbocharged Caterpillar diesel with 575 hours. Tempter Pilothouse Boat. Very Fast, 1989.
He continued to read the sales pitch until he came to a line in capitals: RARE BOAT. ONLY 100 MANUFACTURED.
“Fuck yes,” Hugh said.
This particular boat was being sold in Bradenton, Florida. He clicked through a dozen pictures showing the boat from various angles. One showed the name Magnolia on the stern.
He returned to the search form and typed in the new information. There was one response: The Bradenton boat. He Googled “yacht sales” and found a dozen sites. He searched on all twelve and found sixteen of the Tempter Pilothouses for sale. Four were in Europe, five in Asia, two in South America, one in Mexico and four in the United States. Of the US boats, the first was the one in Bradenton, the second was in San Francisco, the third in Redondo Beach and the fourth in Marina del Rey. Was it common for these boats to move halfway around the world? What could he ask? He brought up the page for the boat in Mexico. There was one picture of the boat and it didn’t show its name. Hugh thought that even the colors were the same. But if this many were for sale, how many existed that were not. Why should one of them be the boat?
He composed a generic e-mail and sent it out to all sixteen sellers.
At three A.M., he took two Lunestas, drank a beer and fell asleep.
When he awoke, he was staring at the computer screensaver. He reached across the bed to jiggle the mouse. The screen took its familiar form. The AOL mail page showed twenty new messages. He rolled out of bed and climbed into the chair, clicking on the link. The messages appeared on the screen. The first was from Zazzle. The second was from Barnes
& Noble, the third was from [email protected]. The subject line was Re: Tempter Pilothouse. He clicked on the message.
Dear Mr. Mullen,
I regret to inform you that my boat has been purchased. The advertisement should have been removed. Thank you for your interest.
J. Papandokolis
Athens, Greece
Hugh clicked reply.
Mr. Papandokolis,
Thanks for the quick response. I’ve been interested in acquiring a Tempter for about fifteen years now, since I viewed one in Southern California. Just curious if that could have been your boat. Have you ever sailed your boat in Southern California?
Sincerely,
Pirie Mullen
Sent.
Without showering, he dressed and dodged the early morning traffic on the boulevard for a coffee and bagel. When he returned to his room, there were two new messages. One was from the Greek: No.
The second message was from [email protected]. Subject, re: Tempter Pilothouse.
Hi Pirie,
I was pleased to hear you were interested in the Tempter Pilothouse. She’s an amazing boat, and there are very few on the market. The boat is now docked in Marina del Rey. I live aboard so it’s possible for you to view the boat anytime. Just give me an hour’s notice to tidy up. Looking forward to meeting you.
Albert
Hugh clicked reply.
Chapter 20
Kazuki placed the CD in the player. Finding the volume low, he turned the knob another quarter turn and restarted the disk: Mendelssohn’s Symphony Number Three, the Scottish symphony.
A visit to Scotland had inspired Mendelssohn to compose the symphony; the overture was the composer’s musical response to the eerie magnificence of the grotto known as Fingal’s Cave in the Hebrides, a rocky, windswept archipelago off the west coast of Scotland. Mendelssohn called the sea cave a natural cathedral. In the music, Kazuki heard the sounds of the North Atlantic waves breaking and reconstituting—dying and aborning—at its entrance, repeating themselves in stirring, weirdly unsettling variations against the basalt walls and columns. Some believed it a sacred portal: an earth womb. Others, a sepulcher.
Kazuki sat down before the laptop.
Fingal’s Cave/27
THE DISAPPEARANCE
On Yuudai’s left the forest drew back, revealing a low, dark green meadow divided by a silver stream, the mirror only broken where it ran over boulder and bough. Above the lush field a hawk flew in a lazy circle, and above the hawk interminable blue, flawed only by a silver jet crawling west. Through the car’s open windows, mingled with the scent of pine and juniper, the breeze carried the meadow’s sweet breath, like a waiting girl’s. Yuudai adjusted the rearview mirror, which had loosened and would not remain steady. He centered Brent and James. An hour ago, they stopped along a stretch of redwoods, wandering for an hour in the cool dusky air under the umbrella of the enormous trees. Spotting a blackberry bush, Yuudai popped one of the riper ones in his mouth and urged his sons to fill themselves on the plump fruit.
“Some of these trees are a thousand years old,” said Yuudai, as they chewed the berries, bending back his head to stare at the nearly invisible treetops. “Imagine. Centuries before Columbus discovered America.”
“He didn’t,” said Brent. “It was Leif Erikson.”
“The Indians were already here,” added James.
Father and sons joined hands to see if they could encircle one of the trees, but no matter how close they hugged the wood, their outer fingertips would not touch.
The family had planned the camping trip months ago, but at the last moment, Sumiko developed a painful stomach flu. She had found the open campsite, not easy at the height of the season, made the reservations, packed the clothing, but she was too sick to go. She urged Yuudai to take the boys. They looked forward to doing so much: fishing, mountain biking, swimming under waterfalls, finding Indian arrowheads. How could he disappoint them? Yuudai agreed, and he didn’t slough off a pledge when Sumiko made him promise not to take chances.
As they drove deeper into the mountains, Yuudai’s pulse quickened. As a boy, Yuudai had not once gone on a real outdoors vacation. His father, Herb, was too entangled in his cause to bother with family outings. In fact, Herb had taken the family on only one trip. It was to California. The family flew and then rented a car. Yuudai remembered driving across a vast valley of apple orchards, not knowing clearly where his father was taking them. In the distance were snow-peaked mountains, but they were not going to the mountains. At some point they got behind a caravan of cars, all apparently going to the same destination. When the other cars pulled to the roadside, Herb parked behind them. Yuudai was surprised to see that most of the people getting out of their cars looked like the people in the picture books his father collected: Japanese. Herb led his family to the site where the people were gathering. There wasn’t much to see. Some big posts, some tombstones.
“Where are we, Dad?” asked Yuudai.
“Manzanar,” said his father, his sleeve to his eyes.
The boys’ bikes were mounted on the car’s roof. As a strong oblique wind struck the car, the wheels whirred.
“How much longer, Dad?” asked James.
“Just around the bend,” said Yuudai.
“Think there’s fish in that water?” asked Brent, pointing to the winding stream, which threw off rainbows.
“I can see the trout jumping,” said Yuudai.
“Let’s go for it,” said Brent.
“Oh, we’ll have plenty of time.”
Yuudai glanced again in the mirror. He loved the intensity in his sons’ eyes when they anticipated their next adventure. Concentrated light, like laser beams. But in the rearview, he saw nothing, as if they had jumped out of the car. It took him only an instant to realize that the mirror was totally out of whack. He adjusted it, found his sons.
They reached the promised bend in the road. The meadow disappeared behind them and the forest closed in. A sign told them that Hawk’s Flight Camp was two miles distant. Yuudai accelerated past the speed limit, squealing around a tight curve. James and Brent discussed motocross techniques. The sun touched the treetops.
Hawk’s Flight Camp One Mile.
In the cooler were hotdogs and beef patties. He would have to start a fire. He tried to remember if he had brought the propane stove. There was so much camping stuff to remember.
Hawk’s Flight Camp Five Hundred Yards.
Yuudai glanced to a clearing on the left-hand side of the road. There was a tavern: Boom Boom’s for Beer and Pizza. There were a couple of cars in the parking lot, one a vintage red Mustang. Red interior, too. Pretty.
“Look, Dad, pizza.”
“Yeah, I see that . . .”
As the bar slid by, a woman got out of the Mustang. Yuudai caught her shapely profile.
It was a big, well-situated campsite and the ground was level where they pitched the tent. In an hour, they had the tent up, the sleeping bags arranged inside. They had everything they needed but the propane stove.
The boys were already riding their bikes on the trails around the campsite. Nearby were numerous families setting up camp or cooking. The smell of the grilled meat made Yuudai’s mouth water. He remembered the woman who had gotten out of the Mustang. She wore a red and white checkered shirt. On a nearby path, Brent raced his bike toward a mound, pulling back on the handlebars but then leaning forward as he hit the little hill. The bike flew above the ground, landing with a satisfying thump. James followed, not quite as fast.
They took the jump again.
“Boys, how does pizza sound?” called out Yuudai.
The nearby families, the smoke drifting lazily into the treetops, a doe and fawn foraging at the edge of camp.
“Come on,” said Yuudai. “Lock up the bikes.”
“Can’t we stay?” asked Brent.
“Better come.”
“We’ll be fine,” said James.
Yuudai again considered the
surroundings. How could such peace not be trusted?
When Yuudai pulled into the parking lot of Boom Boom’s, the Mustang was still there.
Like most roadside bars in the mountains, the tavern was an accumulation of discards and therefore familiar and comforting; its walls were covered with license plates from every state, no doubt removed from wrecks and cars that had given up the ghost on the long ascent, and its log tables etched with countless visitors’ names, many long out of fashion: Jeds and Mabels. A nice place to have a beer, but Yuudai would order his food and go.
Extra large. Half mushroom, half pepperoni.
Adjacent to the take-out counter, a worn hardwood bar supported the arms of a few rustic patrons. The woman from the Mustang occupied the nearest stool. Maybe a year or two older than Yuudai from the lines around her mouth when she smiled at him, she was very pretty with a petite figure, the slope of her breasts visible within the unbuttoned collar of her worn flannel shirt. When Yuudai glanced at her, she took off her glasses and set them on the bar, pushing back her straight auburn hair. Her soft green eyes stayed on his and her full lips broke into an amused smile. Why not have a beer while he waited? From the rough-hewn bartender he ordered a tall beer and slipped onto the chair beside her. She was pretty and laughed at his remarks, but he wasn’t looking to cheat on Sumiko—even if he had a second beer, bought the pretty woman another Jack and Coke and held his breath when she pressed her leg against his. He felt the firmness and heat through the denim.
“I’m Demi. What’s your name?” the woman asked.
“Yuudai O’Keefe.”
“Yuudai? What kind of name is that?”
“Japanese.”
She pulled back her head. “No offense, but you don’t look Japanese.”
“It’s a long story.”
She lifted her drink. “I’m in no rush.”
Yuudai began, “My father, Herb O’Keefe, was assistant tail gunner on the Enola Gay . . .”