Digging James Dean

by Robert Eversz

  Sharon was quick to set a pen next to the document. I signed my name and dated it, never imagining how such a simple gesture could so completely change the trajectory of our lives.

  I rose after dawn the next morning, careful not to wake Sharon, who slept curled at the edge of the futon, blankets tucked over her shoulder. The Rott waited impatiently at the door while I stumbled into my running sweats and shoes, letting out a low bark to hurry me along. Sharon dug herself further under the blankets and lay still again. I dashed off a quick note directing her to the coffee and anchored the note with a spare set of keys in case she woke and wanted to step outside for air.

  The Rott and I had become accomplished running partners in the few months we’d been together, and though he lost his sense of discipline every now and then, particularly when encountering other dogs, I could pretty much let him run off the leash with confidence that he’d heel when commanded. The night with my sister hadn’t turned out badly at all, and by the end of it, curled by her side on the futon, half drunk and giggly, I had begun to remember what it had been like to have a big sister. Her language coarsened in direct proportion to the number of margaritas she drank and the chatty real estate saleswoman stripped away to someone darker but also more familiar. A runaway at age sixteen, her life couldn’t have been an easy or sheltered one.

  She’d begun to curse our pop during the walk home, using language I hadn’t heard since my release from prison. I didn’t want to talk about him anymore, I’d said. To hate someone gives that person power over your life. I didn’t want to give him that power anymore. I wanted, finally, to be free of him. I told her that I was having problems remembering Mom. I could remember isolated moments, like snapshots stored in memory, but couldn’t see her move or laugh anymore. We prepared for bed telling stories and when Sharon mentioned the smell of Mom’s home permanents I suddenly saw her as clearly as a Super 8mm movie, bent over the kitchen sink, massaging the vile-smelling liquid through her hair. Sharon and I had fallen asleep giggling.

  I followed the run with ten minutes of stretches a few yards from the high-tide line, then returned to the apartment an hour after I’d left it. Sharon had awakened in my absence and straightened the blankets over the futon. The keys were gone from the kitchen counter. I cast a quick glance at the note she’d left before I closed myself into the bathroom to shower. Out to get juice, she’d written. Back soon. When I emerged from the bathroom she hadn’t yet returned and so I puttered about the kitchen, preparing a fruit plate to share for breakfast, until I noticed the blinking red light on my answering machine. I pressed the play button and instantly recognized the voice. “Hi, remember me? It’s Theresa,” the girl with the lavender glasses said, her voice falsely cheerful. “Listen, I have something really important to talk to you about, something that could be—”

  The message ended midsentence. I played it a second time, glancing about the apartment as I listened for any clue in the background noise to where the girl could be found, and noticed that my sister’s suitcase was gone. Maybe she wanted to load it into her car, then come back for breakfast. Maybe she wanted to sit on the beach and go through the things she’d packed. That she’d taken her bag proved nothing.

  I waited out the hour and part of the one that followed before I allowed myself to realize that the girl in the lavender-colored glasses wasn’t going to call again and my sister wasn’t coming back. I searched the apartment for some clue to her leaving and found under the bottom-right corner of the futon my spare set of keys and a note scrawled on the torn half of an envelope. Some day you’ll understand, the note read. Maybe she’d returned from her walk and, still not finding me home, had decided to leave. Did my morning run take so long? Did my absence so offend her that she decided to return to Seattle without saying good-bye? Someday I’ll understand what? That once again she’d run away?

  I shouldered my bag and headed for the bank to collect the money I’d need to secure the lease on the cabin in Malibu. It served me right, I thought. Dysfunctional was an understatement when applied to my family. Sharon may have been justified in running away from home, but she’d left behind more than an abusive father. I was only six years old when she left. No matter what her reasons, she had abandoned me to the same fate she’d escaped. It shouldn’t have surprised me that she’d left without bothering to say good-bye. She hadn’t really ever cared about me, not then and not now.

  I pulled my personal organizer from my bag as I approached the teller window, intending to purchase a cashier’s check big enough to cover renting the place in Malibu. It felt lighter than usual but I didn’t think anything about it until I unsnapped the cover. My checkbook was missing and the slot where I kept my California driver’s license was empty.

  “How may I help you?” The teller was a young Latina, her round face open but serious.

  I tore open my bag to see if it had somehow fallen free of the organizer, said, “My checkbook, it was right here.”

  “You mean you lost it?”

  “I don’t know, I mean, my identification is gone, too.”

  “Could you have left them at home?”

  I shook my head. I never stored them separately from my organizer. The top of my ATM card poked from its slot. When I pulled it I noticed my hands were shaking. “Can you tell me how much money I have in my account?”

  The open look in her face closed to one of suspicion. The bank probably warned her against situations like mine, a dodgy-looking woman coming up to her window and making claims that can’t be substantiated. “I need to see identification,” she said.

  “But it’s missing,” I said. I wasn’t mad at her. It wasn’t her fault. “It was here last night and now it’s gone.”

  “Do you know your PIN?”

  The personal identification number to my account. Her tone of voice suggested she doubted I did, that she doubted I even had a legitimate account. I could use the automatic teller machine to check my balance. I stuttered out an apology and hurried out of the bank. Three ATMs lined the bank’s street-side wall. I inserted my card, tapped out my PIN, and selected “balance inquiry” from the menu of services. The five-digit number that flashed to the screen hit me like a blow to the womb. I had less than three hundred dollars remaining in my account. Someone had just robbed me of nineteen grand.

  Ten

  BEN FOUND the Rott panting at my side that sunset, exhausted from an afternoon chasing seagulls while I stared at the breaking waves. Since the morning I had careened between rage, disbelief, grief, and depression, and the tensions between those emotions crippled me. I hadn’t moved from my spot in the sand for hours, except to push the Rott when he stopped the chase long enough to sit between me and the view. He’d always been sensitive to my moods, one of the reasons we got along so well. He did his best to cheer me up, and when he saw I wasn’t going for it, he pursued other interests.

  “Sorry about your money,” Ben said, settling into the soft sand next to me. I’d told him over the phone what little I knew about the theft of my money, timed not so coincidentally with my sister’s disappearance. “Funny you didn’t see it coming.”

  “What was there to see?”

  “Somebody your sister’s age doesn’t come from nowhere.” His glance both faulted and pitied me. “If she stole from you, she’s probably stolen from a lot of other folks.”

  I thumped the Rott on his side, said, “You think because I did time I’m supposed to have some kind of radar for other criminals? Or maybe we have some special handshake we give one another, like we’re part of some secret society?”

  “I think it’s more like a gut feeling. I made you the moment we met, didn’t I?” The smile he tried failed to work and so he dropped his head to pinch the sand between his boots. “Well, I got no right to second-guess. That’s a hell of a thing to do to somebody, sister or not.”

  “We’re sisters, all right,” I said. “Sisters in a screwed-up family. How was I supposed to know she was going to scam me? I hadn’t s
een her in more than twenty years. I’d always looked up to her. How was I supposed to know she’d rip me off the day after our mother’s funeral? I’ve never met a better liar in my life. You should have seen the tears in her eyes when she was talking about her imaginary stepdaughter.”

  “Why imaginary?”

  “Part of the setup. The second she began to cry she asked me to act as a witness to this will she’d just drawn up. Said she wanted to make sure her stepdaughter was provided for. The whole thing was a lie. The will, the daughter, everything. The day we met I told her I’d just cashed a big check. She wanted my signature so she could practice forging it.”

  “The stepdaughter could be real, though.”

  “The stepdaughter is a fiction.”

  “You don’t know that for fact, do you?”

  “What the hell difference does it make?” Talking about it made me mad and Ben’s contradicting me made me mad at him, too. “My sister is a liar. She lied about everything.”

  “Liars never lie about everything,” Ben said.

  “My sister’s the exception.”

  “You could predict her if she was. Just take the opposite of what she said. That’s almost as good as telling the truth.”

  I thumped the Rott hard on his side, said, “I’ll remember that the next time I see her.” The Rott stood, shook off the sand, and circled over to Ben’s side. I’d offended him, anger tainting even my gestures of affection.

  “Liars lie about one thing, tell the truth about the other, and you never know which is which.” Ben wrapped his arm around the dog’s neck, rubbed the top of his head. “If you’d get over that stubbornness of yours, maybe you’d understand I’m making a point. What’s your sister’s name?”

  “Sharon.”

  He looked at me like I was an idiot. “Her last name.”

  I started to say “Baker,” our family name. But of course she’d been twice married and divorced. Had she kept her married name? Her second husband, the banker, what was his name? She never mentioned it.

  “Where does she live?”

  “Seattle.”

  “You see a letter with her name and address?”

  “Of course I didn’t.”

  “A driver’s license?”

  “What, I’m going to ask my sister for ID?”

  “You even see her car, look at the license plate?”

  “I understand what you’re telling me.” I didn’t know her name or where she lived, whether she had married or not, was childless or the mother of a criminal brood. I knew nothing about my sister except that she was a liar and a thief. “She stole my boot cam, too,” I said.

  Ben thought about that in his usual measured way, asked, “What’s a boot cam?”

  “A little camera I keep in my boot when I’m on assignment. That way, if something happens to my primary camera, I have a backup.”

  “I get it. Like a boot gun.”

  “It only cost a hundred dollars. Big deal, right? At least she left me the big Nikon.”

  “You report what happened to the police?”

  “Not yet.”

  “You going to?”

  “She’s still my sister,” I said.

  “That doesn’t mean she doesn’t belong in jail.”

  “Sure, but I don’t want to be the one to put her there.”

  “She abused your hospitality, stole your checkbook and your driver’s license, forged your signature, and took you for nearly every dollar you had in the bank. If you saw her right now, what would you do?”

  “Drown her, probably.”

  “Still the vigilante at heart, I see.”

  He pushed himself to his feet awkwardly, knees cracking with the movement, and dusted the sand from his backside. “Come on, we’ll go together,” he said, and extended his hand to pull me up.

  Ben was a good friend, probably better than I deserved. After we reported the theft he took me to dinner at the Galley, a steak and seafood joint in Santa Monica that looks something like a tiki bar designed by Captain Nemo, with blowfish lighting fixtures and year-round Christmas lights threaded through the thatched-roof booths. Ben ordered a bucket of clams and a beer and I ordered cut lime and salt to go with successive shots of bar-brand tequila. After the third shot Ben said, “You keep drinking like that you won’t be too happy to see the sunrise tomorrow.”

  “I don’t think I’ll be happy tomorrow no matter what,” I said. “So why not concentrate on getting happy here and now?” The owner-bartender dropped by when I signaled for another shot. I bit into a lime, licked the spread of salt on the back of my hand, and flung the tequila down my throat.

  “Any chance the bank will give your money back?” Ben asked.

  “Not much.”

  “I thought they were insured against fraud.”

  “She’s my sister. Who’s to say I didn’t give it to her?” I waved at the bartender before he returned the bottle to the shelf. “The fact that I’m a paroled felon doesn’t dispose them to be generous. If I ask for my money back, they’ll investigate me for fraud. But if the police arrest my sister and she cops a plea or they convict her and meanwhile the money doesn’t turn up anywhere, then there’s a chance I might be quote compensated unquote after the bank completes its review.”

  “Don’t hold your breath, in other words,” Ben said.

  “Why not? If I hold my breath I’ll die and won’t have to worry about it anymore.”

  The bartender returned with the bottle and told me he’d be happy to stand there and pour until I drank myself unconscious, or he could just leave the bottle until I was too drunk to pour for myself, when he’d come over again and help me fill the glass. I think he was being sarcastic. I asked him to pour two shots and promised to wait at least five minutes before calling him over again.

  “If you want, I can loan you some money,” Ben said.

  “You mean the rent?”

  He nodded.

  “I can’t take your money, Ben.”

  “I’m not asking you to take it. I’m offering to lend it.”

  I should have accepted his offer with heartfelt thanks but I couldn’t do it. I was too proud to accept charity, even in the form of a loan, or maybe I feared that I might have trouble paying him back and that would interfere with our friendship. “Thanks,” I said. “It’s important to me that you offered. But I just can’t take money when I don’t know where my next check is coming from. I’ll call tomorrow, tell your friend to go ahead and find somebody else.”

  “Suit yourself.” He eyed the bucket of clams coming toward the table and tucked a cloth napkin under his collar like a bib. “Any idea where you’re going to find another place?”

  “Lots of people sleeping on the street in Venice. Always room for one more.” I watched him pry apart the clams one by one, dipping chunks of sourdough into the broth, and drank myself into oblivion in near record time. He ate through my increasingly drunken rant without complaint. We both liked to drink every now and then, and when drunk we ranted about what bothered us. The distances make Los Angeles a lousy town for drinkers; one of us had to stay sober enough to drive, and the one who stayed sober listened to the other rant. When Ben let me off in front of my apartment I thanked him for agreeing to be the designated listener that night.

  “I didn’t agree to nothing.” The dome light clicked onto his mock-grim smile. “You didn’t give me the chance to drink more than a couple beers. If we’d stayed any longer I would have needed to drag you out by your heels.”

  I thought about leaning across the seat to give him a peck on the cheek but figured I’d just fall onto the floorboard if I tried. A quick walk with the Rott along the boardwalk sobered me enough to shower and then sleep without the room whirling about my head, but I was still a little drunk when the Rott let out a low warning bark at five that morning. I counted two sets of footsteps before the door shook with a full-fisted knock that provoked a retaliatory fit of barking from the Rott. I shushed the dog and pulled myself up to a p
eephole view of black uniforms and billy clubs. Black uniforms meant LAPD. I cracked open the door until the security chain engaged and asked them what they wanted.

  The officer nearest the door, a wary-eyed Latina, scanned the space between the door and jamb, then met my eyes. “Mary Alice Baker?”

  I nodded.

  “Can you open the door, please? We’d like to talk to you.”

  I’d received visits from the police before. Every few months the call went out to round up the usual suspects and because of my record I was near the top of the list. I knew better than to fight it. I asked her to give me a minute to dress and lock the dog in the bathroom. They’d probably ask a few questions and then leave. I bolted enough ibuprofen to dull the edge on my hangover in case I was wrong.

  And I was wrong.

  “Could you collect your identification and keys and come with us, please?” the Latina officer said when I unlatched the chain and opened the door.

  “Am I under arrest?” I asked, shocked.

  “Not at this time,” she said.

  That hardly filled me with confidence.

  “Can you tell me where I’m going and why?”

  “You’re wanted for questioning.”

  “Oh, well that explains it.”

  I don’t think she noticed the sarcasm.

  The black and white was double-parked in front of the apartment. They didn’t bother to handcuff me, but at the bottom of the stairs the Latina officer told me to stand with my feet at greater than shoulder width and to place the palms of my hands on the roof of the cruiser. Her frisk was brief but efficient. She opened the rear door to the prisoner compartment and told me to watch my head getting in.

  “Will I get a phone call to my lawyer?” I asked.

  “You’ll have to ask the detectives that,” she said.

  “What about my dog?”