by Alex Austin
I frightened a little mouse under her chair.
To Hugh’s applause, Lily curtsied.
“If you mean Kazuki, the famous novelist, certainly. He’s my mother’s second cousin, once removed, which is a very odd term.”
Chapter 26
A FedEx package awaited Hugh in the lobby. As he walked back to the room, he tore open the envelope and extracted the newspaper.
He read the date and then opened to page three, where—if memory were to be trusted—the story took up half a page. His chest tightened as he prepared to view his sons’ faces.
Instead, he saw a pickup wrapped around a California cypress.
He confirmed the date: July 16 . . . He turned to pages four and five, six and seven. He went back to the front page, confirming that the page dates were not typos. He leafed through the entire newspaper, but found no coverage of the drowning. The family arrived at the Oceanside condo on July 14. He took the boys surfing the following morning, July 15. The boys died on July 15. The story was printed on the following day, July 16.
It took an hour to get through to the correct desk at the Oceanside Police Department.
“You’re absolutely certain?” Hugh asked.
“There were four beach rescues on July 15, but no reported drownings.”
“No one swept out to sea? Missing at sea?”
“No, nothing.”
“Perhaps the Coast Guard has different—”
“We would have that also, sir.”
Hugh turned off his phone and strode once again into that turbulent ocean seeking his sons. He was promptly swept back to shore.
The Irish bar on Sherman Way. The Irish bar with all the rules. No colors. No sleeveless shirts. No swearing. No baseball hats worn backward. No cell phone conversations. Strictly enforced. You didn’t fuck with the old bartenders. They kept sawed-off shotguns behind the bar, which had never been robbed—successfully. Hugh sat and drank, staring into the tea leaf eyes of his sons. Not black holes. Not pennies. Not the ivory-framed windows of some opportunistic sea creature. The living eyes of his sons. If he had moved an inch, he would have danced a jig. But the only move he made was to slide another bill to the bartender and nod his head at his drink. To the others arranged like hogs at a trough, he was invisible. The visible invisible. The party’s in my mind. Yet one white bearded Old Testament saint leaned into him and offered to take his burden. Facing the man, he reached between his thighs, drew up Enrique the Freak and slapped it on the bar. He halved the book and thumbed to page one thirty-seven. He placed his index finger on the highlighted text and in competition with Al Hirt’s trumpet read, “He smeared the mechanical crayfish with butter.” He smiled into the saint’s beard.
“Poor light to read in,” said the saint.
“Crayfish.”
“Yeah?”
“I promised my sons crayfish.”
“Like pets?”
“No, we . . . we were watching two crayfish in a tiny pool of water. My sons, Hitoshi and Takumi, wanted to catch one, but I said it was getting late.” Hugh closed his eyes. “ ‘Your mother will be getting worried.’ ‘Can you eat crayfish?’ Takumi asked me. ‘Yes.’ ‘What do they taste like?’ ‘Crab.’ ‘Crayfish, yum,’ Hitoshi said. I promised that in summer we would go camping at Big Bear Lake, where ten thousand crayfish lived. We would catch them and cook them.” Hugh opened his eyes. “But we never did . . .”
“That’s too bad.”
“Like Aaron’s grandfather.”
“Excuse me?”
“Aaron’s grandfather told him the story. My sons told Kazuki our story.”
“Umm . . .”
“We’d seen the crayfish in the water that shouldn’t have been there. Hitoshi and Takumi sipped from the honeysuckle . . . That moment, those moments . . . that’s all there is and he stole it. He stole it and he put it right here.” Hugh tapped the book.
“You’re a little hard to follow.”
“He stole my sons.”
“Who did?”
Hugh tapped the book again, harder. “Kazuki Ono.”
“Ah,” said the saint, as if that made perfect sense.
“Kazuki and his daughter, my wife.”
“Gotcha. A custody thing, huh?”
“In Japan they go back forever,” muttered Hugh.
“They do, huh?”
“Tradition. When a couple divorces, the wife and children go back to her father’s home and that’s that.”
“What’s that?” asked the saint.
“The father never sees his children again. It’s as if they don’t exist.”
“Sucks.”
“Yeah, sucks.”
“So Mr. Ono drowned them. Because let me tell you, I would have dug a tunnel. I would have parachuted down his chimney. I would have swallowed invisibility pills.”
“No stopping you, man.”
Hugh laughed. “But he killed me.”
The saint grinned.
“You want to see my grave? I have it out in the car,” said Hugh.
“Good luck, brother,” said the saint, patting the lunatic on his back and turning to a new arrival.
Hugh shoved the book back under his legs and continued dream drinking.
His sons were alive and would reunite with him. There was no longer the insuperable barrier of life and death. They would be . . . twenty-three, twenty-three! How much would they remember? Some would be lost, of course, but there would be enough . . . the ecstatic adventures, the plunge into mystery. The father comes back from the dead as well, considered Hugh, gripping tightly his drink. Everything had to be carefully planned. Should he try to speak with them first by phone? Skype? Should he just hop on a plane and fly to Tokyo? Walk there on the water? Could this all be true? Was he in a delirium? Was he back in that Oceanside hospital room, staring vacantly at that newspaper?
He pushed off the stool. Steady. The Irish bar with all the rules. He walked to the juke box, pressed his hands against the warm glass. As he scanned the columns of song titles, Johnny Cash roared from the speakers.
“I hear the train a coming . . .”
Hugh tapped out the beat on the warm clear glass.
It was all real and he would have his sons back.
Hugh lifted his hand to reveal a fly walking upside down on the other side of the glass. Looking for a way out . . .
Chapter 27
Fingal’s Cave/29
YUUDAI PLAYS DETECTIVE
A call to the California Department of Motor Vehicles got Yuudai nowhere. In the Stalking Age, numerous obstacles had been set up to prevent a citizen from tracking down someone through a license plate number. Yuudai suspected that even his preliminary phone call was being recorded. Before he took the step of falsely reporting a hit-and-run, he turned to Google.
CSNDRA was of course Cassandra. Demi was Cassandra.
“Cassandra California” produced 2,890,000 results.
“Cassandra’s 1972 Mustang” produced 1,260,000
“Cassandra’s 1972 Red Mustang” produced 105,000 results.
He closed his eyes and returned to that night. He was the one who had done most of the talking, but she had used an odd word . . . Bodacious? No. Delicious? No. Bitchin’? No. Hellacious. Hellacious. Yes.
He typed in “Cassandra’s 1972 Red Mustang Hellacious California.” 79 results.
Within an hour, he reduced the field to three candidates who had posted 1972 Mustangs for sale and described their cars as “hellacious fast.” One Cassandra was in San Francisco. Two were in Los Angeles. That there might be dozens of 1972 Mustangs not for sale whose owners favored the word hellacious didn’t dismay him, for he felt caught in a current that he neither wanted to nor could resist, and were he tossed up on some barren bank one hundred miles downstream, he would be no worse off than in his present state. He called the phone number of San Francisco’s Cassandra Gissing. No, the Mustang, which had been her deceased husband’s car—hellacious fast, he called it—hadn’t been
sold. She was retired, confined to a wheelchair and had no use for it. She offered to reduce the price by $300 if he bought the car within forty-eight hours. He thanked her and told her that he would consider.
Of the two remaining Cassandras, one was in North Hollywood, close to where Yuudai lived, and the other in Topanga Canyon. Neither listed a phone number, so he e-mailed both expressing his interest in the Mustang and asking for an appointment. The North Hollywood Cassandra responded within an hour with a phone number and address. He phoned her back, could not tell if her voice was Demi’s, and so arranged to see the car. The North Hollywood Cassandra was the right age, but the wrong height—by a good six inches—and the wrong color. In ten minutes of conversation, he learned that she was a bookkeeper, recently divorced—from a loud-mouthed drunken asshole—and unemployed. Yuudai agreed that the Mustang was cared for, a classic and a bargain at her price. Recognizing that she might have found a buyer, she stroked the car’s hood, dabbed her eyes and offered him an iced tea. With misgiving, he promised to get back to her within a day. Unhappiness was well distributed.
When Topanga’s Cassandra did not get back to him within forty-eight hours, he drove out to LA’s rustic and close-knit community of artists, freethinkers and aging hippies, unfettered by even a traffic light until recent decades. Yuudai had commuted through the canyon for several years and knew well its few cafés and restaurants. The most popular was the Peace & Love Café, near the canyon’s center, and always buzzing with left-of-center opinion, magical thinking and nonjudgmental gossip.
Kazuki ordered his coffee and took it to the café’s deck. A few minutes before noon, it was a glorious day, the air so clean and clear as to be austere. He sat at a small table in the shade of a dollar tree. Vines threaded through a cedar lattice against which he laid his head to take in the rocky cliffs and dense green brush, a hawk circling lazily above. Dreamily, he turned from nature to observe the three people on the deck. Two were a young couple engaged in a fierce argument. The young man was shirtless and the woman wore a thin torn blouse. Head bobbing and weaving, screaming for her to be quiet, the shirtless man thrust his mouth at her face as if looking for the most paralyzing place to bite. The woman dug her fingers into the telling blue hair, bent her head almost to her knees and repeatedly asked him to leave her alone. A moment later, she jumped up, ran from the deck and strode south along the roadside. The bare-chested young man sprinted after her. Kazuki was tempted to follow them, to see how it would turn out. But the setting was now so peaceful. Not a car or motorcycle passed. The hawk circled. Quiet enveloped the deck. The only movement was when the other patron, a haggard man in worn flannel shirt, lifted his eyes to Kazuki, as if a question might be on his mind, as a question was certainly on Kazuki’s mind. Would Hugh show up? He was a regular at the café, so it was not improbable. Kazuki chose to risk it. If it happened, it happened. With Gina’s phone call, Kazuki suspected that Hugh would soon be seeking him out. But the prospect of the finished book had invigorated and strengthened Kazuki for the confrontation. Kazuki continued to think through the scene . . .
Yuudai would play it cool. He would drink his coffee until an opening appeared. He settled into a table on the deck and leafed through a latte-stained issue of the Topangan Times that had been left on a chair.
The other customer on the deck was an older man rocking on his bench, eyes closed, a cigarette clinging to his cracked lips, brittle white hairs springing from the open neck of his greasy green fatigue jacket. Yuudai took the lid off his coffee, set it on the napkin and sipped, gazing at the mountains and smelling the jasmine, occasionally returning the man’s glance.
“Would you like to hear a poem?” asked the man.
“Of course,” said Yuudai.
The poet glanced at Yuudai. “Uh, well . . .” The poet turned his head. “I charge a dime a poem.”
“I’ll take ten.”
“That’s all I got today.”
“You won’t use them up. You can say them again.”
“That’s right, I guess.”
“I’ll pay you for ten, but please just read six.”
“Six, huh?” He pulled a dirty black notebook from his flannel pocket and removed the pen that had hitched a ride. He thumbed through it, notching pages.
“What you want to hear first? I got one about angels.”
“No. No angels.”
The poet cleared his throat. “Well, let’s see . . .” He flipped through the pages. “I got one about flowers.”
“What else?”
“The flower one is pretty good.”
“All right. Flowers, then.”
“What about the sea?”
“The sea? Sure.”
The poet stood up, holding the notebook with two hands like a preacher with a Bible. He studied his words for a moment and his eyes danced around until they settled on the open page.
“The world is a pisser in many respects . . .”
Yuudai listened, applauding each time the poet looked up, which Yuudai supposed to be the end of each poem.
The poet’s last poem was titled “Rock Pool,” and Yuudai was surprised to find that it resonated with him.
A rock pool can be calm, but deep,
A rock pool can be shallow and stormy.
A rock pool can be cold as dry ice.
A rock pool can be warm as shit.
The poet repeated the stanza, the fourth line becoming the first line, the first line the second and so on. Using this formula he read the remaining stanzas, and then raised his glittering eyes to Yuudai’s.
“I like that very much,” said Yuudai.
“You got four more coming.”
“Great. Hey, do you know a Cassandra?”
The poet grinned. “Damned straight. Calls my poetry hellacious, Cassy does.”
Chapter 28
Fingal’s Cave/30
CASSANDRA’S WARNING
Yuudai drove toward Cassandra’s house, which the poet had described in detail. But the detail was not necessary, for when Yuudai came within fifty yards he saw the Mustang and the license plate.
Yuudai knocked on the door. There was no answer. He knocked again.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m coming,” a woman shouted.
A half minute passed. A lock clicked, a chain rattled, a hinge squeaked. The door opened a sliver.
“You the guy who called about the Mustang?” the occupant asked as she drew back the door. Her face was bloated and splotchy, her soft green eyes rimmed with red and her dark hair now streaked with gray, but the ten years provided no disguise. Nor had the years so changed Yuudai, for her eyes went big with recognition. She slammed the door shut, but Yuudai had already stuck his foot in the jam. As he entered, she backed toward a table glowing with lit candles.
“What do you want?” she said, pulling the collar of her flannel shirt tighter.
“My sons!”
Cassandra backed toward the flames.
Yuudai dashed across the room and grabbed her shoulders. “Where are my sons?”
“I don’t know hardly nothing about your sons. I was paid to get you to buy me a drink and talk.”
“Did Katashi take them?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know.”
“Where are they?”
“I told you—”
Yuudai pushed her against the table. A candle tumbled off, flickering on the floor.
“My house! You’re going to burn down my house!”
“Did Katashi Ito hire you?”
“No. I don’t know—”
Yuudai’s hands slipped around her neck.
“Help!”
Yuudai smelled the melting wax. He kicked the table, knocking it over and spilling the remaining candles to the floor.
“Oh, my God,” she rasped as his hands tightened.
“Katashi Ito?” asked Yuudai.
“Please, huh?” She coughed and her eyes brimmed with tears. “Yeah, yeah, it was the Chinese guy!”
“
Japanese.”
“Chinese, Japanese, whatever!”
Yuudai’s hands fell. Cassandra dropped to the floor, crying with relief and snuffing out the candles.
Yuudai turned toward the door.
“You shouldn’t fuck with him,” said Cassandra. “I’m sorry about your sons, but you shouldn’t fuck with him. You listen to me. Stay away from that boat.”
Yuudai jerked around. “Boat?”
Chapter 29
Fingal’s Cave/31
AN ALARMING PHONE CALL
Katashi watched the young woman draw the panties up her smooth legs. She turned her back to him. The thong settled between pink-hued cheeks. She had a small tattoo on her right shoulder, but without his glasses he was not sure if it was a flower or a face. He didn’t want to see the woman clearly. He did not want to recognize her on the street. He wanted her to be no more substantial than a dream. He, himself, was not much more than a dream when the ferried women kneeled beside his bed and he touched them, pretending to paint them with his fingers, paint on a woman who had no resemblance to them, any more than to this woman who now removed the steel or marble or whatever the fuck it was at his request, though her lips were no less obdurate. She had no thought of him, this old man who paid more than was required, who offered her orange juice and goat cheese, who paused to write a note, to take a piss, to scratch a pimple on his sagging ass. Her clothes floated toward her. Shimmering. Shimmering.
“Is it a flower or a face?”
“Excuse me?”
“On your shoulder. Flower or face.”
“A mole.”
“Ah.”
She kissed his lips, nose and ears. For an instant, he forgot whether she was leaving or arriving.
“Sayonara,” she said, opening the door of the stateroom. Stepping into the passage, she stumbled, regained her balance, and called out, “Hey, how do I get back to Malibu?”
“Nigel’s waiting for you on deck. He’ll have a boat take you to the pier.”
“Cool.”
The woman gone, Katashi paced his room for ten minutes trying to remember a call he was supposed to make. The clear logic and steel-trap mental operations that had served Katashi so well in his various enterprises were starting to elude him. He was no longer sure what eight times seven or nine times six were. Not that he couldn’t figure it out with a little concentration, but the answers didn’t come to him instantaneously. The times tables weren’t at the top of his head. Not to mention algorithms. Nor were all the words with which he once constructed pristine—what did the physicists call it? Damn, he couldn’t remember!— arguments. Elephant—elegant! Elegant arguments that had penetrated his opponents’ positions like armored bullets through flesh (that ultimate argument rarely called for). In certain circles, he remained Fuka, the shark, but would Fuka soon be toothless?