by Dan Vining
“I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” Ava said.
Cali said, “She’s on your side. She thinks I should go home, go back to Tom, go back to Belleville. What she said was, ‘California’s not for everyone.’ She also said she envied me.”
Ava waved at Tommy Cairo behind the bar. Where was that second lemon drop?
“Where is he?” Cali said, looking at the front door.
“Don’t worry,” Ava said. “He’s probably riding his bike.”
“He has a bike?”
“He had one the other night. He rode it from Downtown to Westwood to my office.”
“You don’t understand who he is, what he can be like.”
“Girl, just give it a chance. He said—”
“What not one of you ever understood was that I love him,” Cali said, stopping Ava cold. “I love him and I miss him. I never stopped missing him.”
“Oh,” Ava said.
“We’re not as far apart in age as you probably think,” Cali said. “People in California have messed up ideas about age anyway. I’m older than I look and he’s younger than he looks. I always wore clothes that were younger and he wears clothes that make him look like a man instead of a boy. Looks aren’t everything.”
“Maybe I should live in Belleville, Illinois,” Ava said.
“That would be hilarious,” Cali said, flat.
Ava was going to miss her. How could that be?
“He’s probably walking here,” Cali said.
“He said he was going to take a helicopter,” Ava said.
“No way. He hates to fly. He won’t even go up in tall buildings.”
“He flew out here.”
Cali looked at her. “Really?”
“He told his hired actor Beck to talk about taking the train out, but he flew out,” Ava said.
“That’s so sweet,” Cali said.
Ava was still trying to process the wild idea that Vivid might be envious of Cali. Could it really be true that all women wanted the slavish devotion of a top-notch g—of a guy?
Ava said, “Speaking of which…”
Tom “Happy” Hadley was walking up to the table, literally hat in hand. A white Panama. He looked as if he’d lost ten pounds since the night in front of her office. He was wearing a new suit, light-colored—corn-silk blue?—possibly seersucker, almost fashionable. Ava pictured him standing before a mirror in a froufrou men’s store in Beverly Hills thinking that the color would remind his wife of the sky back home.
It was an awkward first thirty seconds. Hadley stood over his wayward wife, bowed as if to kiss her, but thought better of it and ended up just bowing. Ava sat back in her chair, mum, letting the two of them talk. Her second lemony vodka treat had come so she had something with which to occupy her hands and lips.
Hadley probably had his case for why Cali should come back with him laid out on three-by-five cards, but he never took them out. Instead, he just talked about home, about people from home, animals, flowers, other animals, weather. It’d been raining a lot back in Belleville. Of course it had. It was normal, a normal place with normal people. Ava could see that just being around his wife turned Tom Hadley into a different man, a man he almost certainly would rather be than the angry, red-faced, gun-totin’ man who’d stood in front of the Hudson in the garage. Cali wasn’t saying anything but she didn’t move her hand when his hand brushed against it on the table. Hadley was being careful, so self-consciously careful. He’d start to tell her about something or someone and then stop himself just before he said something that he realized she might find corny now, too Belleville, Illinois. He was talking about a church function—or was it the Boy Scouts or 4-H or Little League?—and just as he reached what was probably the best part, he stopped and said, “I didn’t go.”
When he’d first sat down and started talking, he had locked eyes with his wife—as if it were just the two of them in the place and it was do-or-die—but now he started looking at Ava, too, including her in what he was saying, though Ava only nodded and smiled and smiled and nodded.
The whole thing felt as if it could collapse in on itself at any moment.
“How’s Mom?” Cali said. It was clear she meant his mother, not hers.
“She’s good,” Hadley said. “I got a ramp built for the front of her house. I drew up the plans and Lamar nailed it together for me. I made it gradual but she still goes down it too fast. Speed demon.”
Cali turned to Ava. “My mother died when I was seventeen.”
“Oh,” Ava said. “Sorry.” She stole a look at her watch.
Cali pushed back from the table and stood. “I need to go to the ladies’ room,” she said. “Excuse me.”
“I should go, too,” Hadley said. “I mean, the men’s room.” He laughed awkwardly.
Cali put a hand on his shoulder and leaned over and kissed him on the lips.
It was like he’d won the lottery.
There was so much familiarity in the gesture, Ava thought, such ease, so many years behind it. Togetherness. A marriage. What a concept! It was as if Hadley’s happiness (and Cali’s?) only existed in proportion to Ava’s…what? Unhappiness? Dissatisfaction? Loneliness? Singleness?
“We should think about dinner,” Cali said. “I’m hungry and I know you are, Tom.”
Speaking his name doubled his joy, fool that he was. He watched her walk away across the club toward the door marked Damas. Once again, it was just the two of them in the world. He watched until she reached the ladies’ room and went in.
“Life is funny,” he said, mostly to himself. “Sometimes you have to go through the valley of the shadow to stand in the light.”
“I guess,” Ava said.
“I hope I have proven myself to you,” he turned back to Ava and said. “I am a better man than the man I hired to make you think I was a good man.”
“You don’t have to prove anything to me.”
“Of course, I do,” he said. “California is about nothing except judging the rest of the country. And finding all of us out there unworthy, except maybe for people from New York.”
He had a point.
“I’ll never be like you people,” Hadley said. “But I’ll say this: my heart is tuned to her wavelength.”
It was among the most Californian things Ava had ever heard, bless his heart.
Two things happened in quick succession.
Vivid came in with about a dozen people, blowing in like a gust of wind.
“Uh oh,” Ava said.
Vivid stood just inside the door, waiting for everyone to spot her. In the last half hour, the room had filled, table by table, stool by stool at the bar. Now Ava knew why. Word must have gotten out that Vivid was on her way.
“Look at me, I’m so happy!” Vivid said to the room at large. Everyone laughed. Most of them were already on their comms, telling their friends what they were seeing: Vivid in the flesh.
The second thing that happened was Cali came out of the ladies’ room.
She looked to the right and saw Vivid. Vivid didn’t yet seem to see her. Cali glanced in the direction of Ava and Hadley at the table across the club—that’s all it was, a glance—and then she started toward the empty stage through the grove of metal trees. A beeline, a straight course. She stepped up onto the stage, slowed just enough to make it seem she was going to take the mic and say something—or sing a song or introduce Vivid—but Cali kept going, moving faster. She continued on across the stage from front to back, headed as she was toward what was behind it: the open windows with the view of the ocean and the moon.
She jumped into the ocean—or so it seemed. There was a shattering sound. The ocean behind the open windows wasn’t the ocean at all, just a wide screen; the moon wasn’t the moon, wasn’t even a projection of the real moon, the shimmering path to the unreal moon was just a pixel p
ainting. The high drifting clouds weren’t real. How could they be, so perfect? Hadn’t anyone noticed the patterns repeating, noticed that the thirteenth high drifting cloud in the cycle had Vivid’s face on it? Hadn’t anyone figured out that the waves never broke, that the night sky was impossibly clear, that the constellations in the sky were from the Southern Hemisphere? With the shattering, the image went to black and jagged pieces fell.
Ava had seen every step from Cali’s exit from the ladies’ room on and she’d jumped to her feet. She knew what she was seeing. She knew this wasn’t going to end on stage with a song or even a recitation of a poem from an amateur from Belleville, Illinois. She knew what was about to happen.
Hadley had his back to the club and wasn’t seeing anything. Vivid saw, Vivid knew. She turned to a man who was part of her team and said something and he started in. “Cali!” Vivid said.
It was then that Hadley turned and saw what was happening. He sprang to his feet and went after Ava going after Cali, throwing people and tables and chairs out of his way. He and Ava both got to the back of the stage before Vivid’s bodyguard did. They looked into the void behind the screen. Fake sea breeze propelled by oscillating fans blew in their faces. The air didn’t at all smell like the sea—it smelled like the oil that lubricates electric fans.
“Oh, God no,” Hadley said, looking down, stepping over the rail, over the shards of the screen. Cali was already halfway across PCH, the coast road, threading her way through the stalled traffic to the empty beach. Hadley ran after her. Ava followed.
Cali didn’t look back once. She couldn’t. She knew what was behind her, not just a man, not just who she had been—or tried to be—but mile after mile after mile of California. That was what was behind her, California. And beyond California was the desert and then Arizona and then New Mexico and the Texas Panhandle and then Oklahoma and Missouri…and Illinois. There was no chance of catching up to her. She ran like an animal, wild to live, driven by instinct that in the moment seemed to her infallible. The beach here was so wide, so groomed, she was thinking as she ran. They came through with rakes behind trucks in the hours just before dawn and raked it again in the afternoon. She ran past a red county lifeguard tower, tipped over on its side for the night. She could barely see the water from where she was, just the black-and-white stripes of the waves a hundred yards ahead. She’d pulled off her shoes as soon as she’d reached the sand. Now she tugged at the tie at the waist of her dress and it came undone and fell away.
Hadley had no chance of catching her. He was too fat and too old. He kept shouting her name into the wind. Her real name. She reached the water. She swam straight out and dove under the first wave that met her. Hadley was hopelessly behind her, but he followed her into the surf, shocked by how cold it was but not letting himself think about it. She was already fifty yards out, swimming with sure strokes, still not ever in any way looking back at him.
Someone at The Shinola had called the police and here they were already, four Crows.
Ava walked in the sand, carrying her shoes. She knew it made no sense to run after them—that she’d never catch Cali, never even catch up to Hadley—knew she couldn’t stop either one of them if she did. Or wouldn’t try.
She’d think about the philosophical questions some other night.
Ava reached the water’s edge. The tide was coming in, each successive wave darkening more sand. Cali couldn’t be seen anymore. She was out beyond the end of the pier already. Two of the Crows had gone with her but now—by the way they were flying—Ava knew they’d lost sight of her. The other two Crows split up to cruise just above the surf line, already looking for a body. Tourists and locals lined the railing on the pier, watching the show. Ava looked behind her. The window of The Shinola was filled with spectators, too.
Hadley flailed away in the black surf just fifty yards off the beach.
Cali knew his secret—that he didn’t know how to swim—not that it meant she would turn back.
Ava looked up at the Crows as their NightSuns knifed through the night. In a perfect world, she thought, one of them would be Nate Cole. But it wasn’t a perfect world. It was Los Angeles.
Chapter Forty-Four
Bodie opened the glove compartment, looked in, and closed it again.
“I listened to you on the radio the other night,” he said. “That radio you gave me with the big black arrow drawn with Magic Marker at the frequency number, as if I was blind and senile on top.”
Nate just drove. He felt so good in the moment—behind the wheel of the old pickup, the windows down, the engine humming—that he could barely contain himself. He was almost spilling out of himself. He hadn’t felt that way in he couldn’t remember how long.
“You can sure talk some bullshit, I’ll tell you what,” Bodie said. When Nate didn’t say anything, he said, “Made me proud. The family tradition, bullshit. The Cole Man Way.”
Bodie had his window down, too, had his arm out. Since air-conditioning had taken over the world, nobody rode that way anymore. How’s a man going to get a respectable trucker tan sealed up in his car with processed air blowing in his face?
The sky was hard blue. “This thing still runs good, doesn’t it?” Nate said.
“It does. I miss V-eights. Hell, I even miss straight-sixes.” He looked over at Nate but Nate had his eyes on the road. Bodie seemed skittish. His leg was bouncing of its own accord.
It had taken some doing, but Nate had busted his father out of the Police Sunset Home in the middle of the night. He told the night guard it was Bodie’s birthday the next day and that Nate and his sister were planning a big pool party. His nonexistent sister. The guard was just a guard and the duty nurse—who might have known about the new diagnosis—was over in the other wing. Nate rolled Bodie out in a wheelchair, picked him up, and stowed him in the second seat of the Crow, buckled him in, and blew up and out of there, leaving the wheelchair sitting in the parking lot, Exhibit A. Bodie hated to fly as much as anyone in the history of the world ever hated to fly, so there was a miniature bottle of emergency vodka in the seat. Bodie drained it as they flew over Dodger Stadium. They buzzed out to El Centro. Nate and Bodie had a car man, Galen—mechanic, painter, procurer of new/old parts, legal and otherwise—who maintained and stored the family wagons, keeping them road-ready. Nate had six cars with Galen, all but one of them illegal to drive now. Six cars, one truck, the ’55 Chevy pickup Bodie’d dropped a 409 V-8 into. Nate had filled the truck’s tank with Crow fuel, 101-octane leaded gasoline, and driven east. Once you were out of Los Angeles proper, the roads opened up, just electro slot cars and FedEx triple-rigs. Open road, what a concept.
Nate steered off onto the ramp for the overpass and Highway 62, heading north past Palm Desert toward Yucca Valley and Joshua Tree and Twentynine Palms.
“What happened with your crooked cop?’ Bodie said, looking out his window at the spiky yuccas and organ pipe cacti. The desert liked the new dry world just fine, thank you very much.
Nate didn’t seem to want to talk about it, but after another mile he said, “On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, I think everybody gets away with everything. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I think nobody ever gets away with anything.”
“What about the weekends?” Bodie said.
“I don’t think about it either way,” Nate said. “What was I saying, on the radio? I usually don’t say much, believe it or not.”
“You were talking about Mexico, constellations, dicking around when you were a kid.”
“First time I ever went down there was with you.”
“I don’t remember,” Bodie said. He didn’t like the way that sounded. “I mean, I remember a dozen trips.” He turned to look at Nate. “You didn’t teach yourself to surf, you know. Or even how to drink tequila I don’t think.”
“You remember what I was playing, the song?”
“It’s All right, Ma, I’m Only Blee
ding…” Bodie grunted a laugh.
Wonder of wonders, the sky started getting dark, very dark. “Son of a bitch,” Bodie said. “Smell that!” It wasn’t raining yet—not where they were—but by God it was raining somewhere close by.
A half-hour later, they were in the middle of the town of Joshua Tree. JT had gotten itself back together again after becoming so fashionable and filled with rock stars and movie directors and actors and models that it was all but insufferable. Then the Big Quake came along, rolled the boulders, and realigned the chakras—whatever the hell they were—and the holy order of the pure desert was somewhat restored. Now you could buy a homesteader’s shack without electricity or running water for less than a hundred grand.
Nate left 62 and went north, away from town and the National Monument. Bodie got quiet, hadn’t said a word for ten minutes. As they drove farther and farther into the nothingness, the sky got darker and darker. It wasn’t a sad or angry kind of quiet on Bodie’s part. There was resignation in it. And what seemed like a little fear, which was always a surprise in a beat-up old man who talked a good game like Bodie.
“I sure miss the rain,” he said, drawing in as much of the free air as his lungs would hold.
Ahead, there was a plateau. There were a half-dozen people there, desert people, Joshua Tree hippie leftovers and art lovers. There was an honest-to-God teepee, so honest you’d have to spell it tipi. Parked in a rough circle around it were a variety of mad homemade vehicles the beautiful oddballs had gotten themselves out there in or on: motorbikes and motorcycles and dune buggies and one vintage school bus with the back half of the top sawed off. And one powered unicycle painted purple.
Bodie looked across at Nate as he parked the pickup. “What is this?”
Nate tossed a screen to Bodie. On it was a map. “Something new, something they never needed before,” Nate said. “It tells you where the closest rain is, where it’s going to be. You want to just stay in the truck? Or I can lift you out, we’ll sit on the tailgate. For as long as we want, at least until it rains.”