Empty Pockets

by Dale Herd

  I haven’t been hardly able to play at all since this happened on the ninth of this month. I did manage to finish the “Etude in D Minor” I subtitled “The Warlock,” meaning male witch. It is in Gould’s style. You will like playing it and I will send you a new copy of it as soon as I have my little copyist run off some copies for me. I have three more piano solos to write yet and then all I have heard from the piano spirit is completed, and I will make a piano album of twenty piano works. Then I shall go on writing another symphonic suite I have written around Mary’s life story, entitled “The Mary Magdalene Suite.” It is beautiful. It tells of her birth, her school days, her ballet lessons, her tragic life of drugs and booze, her loves, her career as a writer, and now her final incarceration. It is so gorgeous in melodic line you wouldn’t be able to keep from crying when you hear it. If I come and get you in my car someday soon, will you come over and spend one day with me, dear Bobby? I need you near me now to comfort me in my time of heavy sorrow. We shall play music, and comfort one another. Call me and tell me what day you can come. Saturdays are good for me. Through the week is hard as I read people all day for my living, etc. So I shall await your call real soon now and long to visit with you again.

  Handcrafted Dolls

  They met in Rose Garden Park. She arrived late. Shane watched her set up her stand, a card table, a white tablecloth, and handcrafted baby dolls pulled from a cardboard box. She placed the dolls on the table and stood by them. She was a small blonde. His mother was a small blonde. She was prettier than his mother. He was selling glass-covered prints of pandas and bunnies with tiny red hearts painted on their chests. She thought they were awful. He agreed. They sold to single women. He sold lots of them. She sold nothing. As the day ended she sold her first doll for one hundred dollars. She was excited. He asked her to dinner. She suggested a Japanese restaurant. She selected what they ate. At fifteen she had joined the Venceremos Brigade, went to Cuba, and cut cane. She’d worked as a linesman for PG & E. She’d gone to UC Berkeley. She’d been a radical. She was still a radical. She was twenty-four, separated from her husband who was thirty. They’d been separated for a short time. The next day she sold two dolls, then a third. She thought it was unbelievable. He asked her to dinner again. They went to the same restaurant. He left his wallet on the counter and had to go back in to get it. The Japanese waitress said, “She’s got you flipping out, doesn’t she?” They made out in the parking lot. She had an unfurnished apartment on the ground floor of an old building. There was only a mattress and a blanket on the living room floor, a table with a single chair in the kitchen, a set of Calphalon pots and pans, and a phone in the empty bedroom. They made love. They did this repeatedly. She said, “I don’t want to go too fast, emotionally.” They drove to Point Arena on the coast. She made a picnic high in the Berkeley Hills. They could see all of Berkeley, Albany, and then Oakland to the south, and across the bay San Francisco with fog over Russian Hill. They spent every day of the next two weeks together. She’d had an abortion. Her husband had not wanted a baby. Shane loved her face, the slant of her cheekbones. In Oakland, a trio of black guys walking by his van saw her on the front seat circling him with furious kisses, and began singing a cappella: “. . . I’m hers, she’s mine, wedding bells are gonna chime; singing do wah diddy, diddy dum, diddy do . . .” grinning and waving at them when they looked out. Her face was flushed. So was his. It was wonderful, their energy spinning out across the sidewalks. He needed more prints. She went down to L.A. with him to get them. They made love in the Half Moon Motel on Sepulveda. Back in Berkeley he cut out all his other girls. He called each one and told them. She heard him do it. That night she went out for groceries. Someone came to her door. Shane got up and opened it. A square-jawed Chicano guy with a skull-tight haircut and a straight nose looked at him and said, “Who the fuck are you?” Shane said, “Yeah, so who the fuck who are you?” The guy turned around and walked away. Shane closed the door. She’d asked him not to answer the phone but hadn’t said anything about answering the door. When she came back she cooked dinner. He told her about the guy. She said that was my husband, just don’t answer the door. She was a wonderful cook. The cardboard box of dolls sat on the floor next to them as they ate. He stayed a week longer than he was supposed to. He had never been happier. She was a runner. He wasn’t. Every morning she ran a circuit around Lake Merritt in Oakland. He ran with her and got stronger. He had to go back to the north shore of Lake Tahoe. It was July now, and the lake would be bumper-to-bumper with tourists. He would sell a lot of prints. He had to work there through August. She could sell her dolls. They could run on the high mountain golf courses cut between the trees early in the morning before anyone else was up. They would see deer, and the air was so pure it was unbelievable. Every day you would wake up and feel it was the most wonderful day of your life. She would love it. The sky would be as blue as the lake. The lake would be shockingly cold to swim in. There was a club there that you could sauna in afterward. He had to leave early in the morning. She said she would meet him there. She would finish the wash the next day and bring him up the rest of his clean clothes when she came.

  That night when he started in again she put her hand on herself and said, “No, it wants to be quiet for a while.” They lay there for a moment, and then she said, “No, it doesn’t want to be quiet anymore.” A week later her car loaded with all her belongings showed up at Tahoe. It parked on the lakeside of the highway with the sparkling blue of the lake behind it. He watched her walk across the dusty lot, coming along the other arts and crafts stands, and knew she was the loveliest thing he had ever seen. She brought him his folded jeans and clean T-shirts, then told him she was leaving, that she didn’t know where she was going. He said, “What are you saying?” She said, “I don’t mean to shock you, but I have to go.” He was shocked, saying, “I don’t understand this. Why do you have to go?” She said, “I wanted to tell you face to face.” “Well, you have,” he said, “but why?” “It’s not you,” she said. He tried to argue. Nothing worked. They started walking toward her car. Crossing the road she was careless about the traffic. A car came too close and he pulled her back, keeping her from getting hit. “At least spend the night and get a fresh start in the morning.” “I can’t,” she said. “If I don’t go now, I’ll end up staying the rest of my life.” “Jesus Christ,” he said, “what’s wrong with that?” “No,” she said, “I can’t.” She kissed him and got in the car. Under all her clothing in back he saw the box of baby dolls, the box of pots and pans. It had been a good, deep kiss. He watched her drive away, going east toward Reno, her hand out the window fluttering good-bye. Coming back across the lot, he heard McMaster, the painter of the very large, very bad oil paintings, say, “What was that?” Shane said, “You tell me.”

  One month later, the summer over, he began looking for her. He looked for her in other cars. He looked for her in the street. He went to the lake in Oakland and watched the runners. He went to the Japanese restaurant. No one had seen her. He drove to her empty apartment in Berkeley and looked up the landlord and asked for her forwarding address. There wasn’t one. He called the phone company and got new listings in every major city in the country. He made over seventy phone calls, calling everyone with her last name at least once. He called the gas company saying he was her husband, saying there was a mix-up, and had she given them their correct forwarding address? They gave him one. It was somewhere in the mountains in back of Santa Cruz down on the coast. He drove there and found the house in the redwoods. No one was inside. The doors were locked. He went around the back and opened a window and went in. It was her sister’s house. He found a letter to the sister with a return address in Portland, Oregon.

  A week later he spent all of his money to fly to Portland.

  He checked into a nice downtown hotel. It had begun to rain. She might be living with someone. It was dark out when he found her address. Her car was parked on the street. It was her car. There was nothing inside it. The buildi
ng was a three-story brick building in a block of apartments. The outside locking panel had only a numbered security pad. The famous Portland rain was now coming down. Upstairs on the third floor a lit-up window was partially open. He shouted her name. He shouted again. She looked out the window, staring down at him for a moment before she recognized him. Then she came downstairs and opened the door and brought him upstairs. Inside the door he kissed her. She stepped back and let him in. The apartment was just like the one in Berkeley, completely empty save for a blanket and pillow and mattress on the floor, and a book lying open facedown next to the mattress. A small lamp next to the book was the only light in the room. The book was One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. “You’re soaked,” she said. “Let me dry your hair.” Getting a towel, she began drying his hair. “I’m impressed,” she said, “with how you found me.” He didn’t see the cardboard box of dolls. She went in the kitchen and turned on the lights and made some tea. Her pots and pans were hanging on hooks above the stove. She was running a restaurant in downtown Portland. She had walked in and told them how she could improve their business and just like that they hired her. The restaurant was doing well. They really liked her. “Why Portland?” Shane said. “This is where I ran out of money,” she said. “I wanted to see if I could survive in a place where I knew no one. It’s something I always wanted to do.” “That’s amazing,” he said. “Is there anyone else?” He sat there looking at her. No, she wasn’t seeing anyone. Something made him hesitate. She said she had to get up early in the morning. She said, “You’re welcome to sleep here.” Feeling it was best not to press her—she had left him, she was the one who had to come forward—he said, “I think I’m going to go. I’ll get up really early, and meet you for breakfast.” He told her he had gotten a hotel room. He stood and put his coat back on. He told her the name of the hotel. They set the time. She again said he could stay. He said, “No, I don’t think so,” trying to take charge when in fact he knew he really wasn’t, but that didn’t matter; it showed her he could be. She was the one who had left. She was the one who had to choose. He could be patient. He could wait. She said, “Should I call a taxi?” He told her no, he wanted to walk. They kissed again, and he left, happy with himself, knowing if it were to happen it would happen in the right way. The “right way,” he thought, going outside. It needed to happen in his space, on his turf, not hers. Looking up in the rain he saw her light go out.

  Walking downtown in the dark, he didn’t mind getting soaked.

  Early in the morning she came to his hotel and up to his room. When she came in he thought it would happen now, but there wasn’t enough time, she was pressed for time, and they went downstairs and ate in the dining room. She told him to go back to L.A. and write her. He said, “No, I want you to come with me.” “I want you to write me,” she said, and she said it again. He got angry. She said he was too vain. She had seen him looking at the two of them in the mirrored wall of the elevator on the way down when he was thinking they looked good together. She thought he was looking at himself. He explained. She said, “No, it’s because I’m good-looking and you’re good-looking and you think my being with you makes you even more good-looking.” He said, “That’s bullshit,” then said, “I don’t get it. Last night you said I could stay.” She said, “That’s because I’m weak, not because you’re ready for what I want.” “I am ready,” he said. “No,” she said. “I want you to go back to L.A. and write me.” He didn’t say anything. “I know you’re mad,” she said, “I expect you to be.” “I’m not,” he answered, but he was. He paid the check and walked her out to her car and they didn’t kiss and she left for work. The rain had stopped, and he flew back to L.A.

  Nine months later he saw her again.

  He was working in Rose Garden Park again. She wasn’t. She was looking. She came by his stand with the same Chicano guy who had knocked on the door. The guy had the same skull-tight haircut and a mustache now and looked subdued and stood a few feet behind her and didn’t look at Shane. She was in a dress. He had never seen her in a dress.

  She was very beautiful and very pregnant.

  She stepped away from the guy and came close to Shane, “I really would like to talk to you, but I can’t right now. Maybe I can come by later.”

  For the next two days of the fair he kept looking for her. He never saw her. He had no idea where she lived. Looking for her would be pointless. When the fair was over, and he packed up his van and drove off from the empty park, he was the last vendor to leave.

  Looking back all he saw was the long sweep of lawn, the packed-dirt path across it, the trees beyond the park, the big houses beyond the trees, and a small boy riding a bicycle way up at the top of the long, diagonal path.

  Shane had a long, dull drive to L.A. He didn’t feel like doing it. He stopped the van and parked and walked back across the street. The trees and houses at the edge of the park formed a natural bowl. The light was leaving the sky, melting the houses and trees and park into the dark.

  He went out on the lawn and lay down on the grass.

  The sound of the bicycle on the long path came toward him, the spokes of the bike making a whirring rill—a playing card attached between the spokes snapping against the wires as they turned—that increased and then faded as the boy went by.

  Shane lay there. The mornings had been cool, the afternoons warm, the evenings cool again. The sound from the bicycle was gone. The grass was cool and damp. The work season was over with. He heard the crickets start up. He lay there for a while longer, his eyes open, and saw the small orb of soft light that was Venus appear in the dark. He opened his hands and felt the coolness of the grass. A slow wind began flowing across the lawn. Several cars, their headlights on, went by along the street. The wind was warm. The night grew quiet. He saw other stars appear. He sketched their lines—Orion, Polaris, Cassiopeia, the Big Dipper—across the dark. There was an order out there. He realized he’d never had a chance.

  Together Again

  “I hope you don’t blow up at this. I don’t think you will because now there are no more secrets between us. Trying to make it alone can really set you apart. I found myself turning from the things that really make me happy because I had no one to share things with. So I tried to overcome these feelings of gloom and depression by stopping being alone all the time and by starting to share my time with someone. Things went along okay, not great, but okay. I started feeling better somewhat, to a certain extent. But things didn’t turn out exactly right. You know who I’m talking about. You saw him that one time and didn’t like him. You were right. We were always arguing because of silly little incidents, him wanting me to be something I’m not. He was talking about marriage, and so on, trying to pin me down, which just made me pull away more, made him more insane, and just forced me back down into myself, which was what I was trying to get away from in the first place, which won’t happen. We just don’t fit. So I am sick at the whole scene. He doesn’t want to turn loose, but I’m getting over him. Whatever he wants I don’t care. I don’t know what I’m going to plan next, or what you want to do. When and if you work out your romantic involvement with that little girl, or girls, and you feel that you seriously want to be with me, then that will be the time for us to come together to try to build again what we know we could really have with each other.”

  Emeralds

  Sitting on the suitcase on the curb outside the Intercontinental Hotel in downtown Bogotá, dripping with sweat, air temperature sixty-four degrees out, Chris thought, Well, God is either with you or he isn’t. Look at this as just a test. Until you gave Zack those tickets, the whole thing was done on trust. He didn’t owe you a penny until then. As soon as you bought them he owed you the twenty-five hundred back, Tori’s twenty-five hundred. He will either come through or he won’t. He wouldn’t send you into a situation knowing it was different than he represented. He’s always been honorable as long as you’ve known him. Break it down. One thousand for the four men o
n the horses; then one thousand each for them not to look in the jars they had to deliver to Zuniga; then one thousand to the lawyer in Medellín whose secretary won’t release the eighty-four thousand without you making the call. Then, when you called Tori, what did you tell her? This would be the one and only time? That after this it was done? That was what the money was for? That we would both make lots of money? And this is the only time. And then you said, “They are crazy. All they do is smoke crack, get wired, and chase cunt. When I saw them in New York, and Zack just walked in and handed me the ninety thousand and walked out, saying only, ‘Okay, it’s up to you now,’ I knew they were crazy. And then they were so fucked up they were trying to open doors that weren’t even doors to their rooms.” Then her saying, “I can’t believe you did this. I hope this goes okay for you, but even if it does I don’t think I’ll be here.” The unbelievable coldness in that. And then the scummy emerald dealer coming in the room here, saying, “Okay, go out and shop around. Look at everything and see how much your five hundred dollars will get you, even with any of the wholesalers. You will not get better than these.” And now you’ve got what, a suitcase full of dirty clothes, your passport, and nothing else? No, you’ve still got your five hundred. Your thoughts are all over the place. Just chill the fuck out. If you go back now, you’ll be short the six thousand, no, the fifty-five hundred. How’ll you explain that . . .?

  An old 1984 blue-and-yellow Mercedes taxi pulled up and Alberto Ramon Zuniga got out and Chris slowly stood up, conscious of the sweat on his face.