Power Slide

by Susan Dunlap

  “The Saturday of the full moon.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Right, tomorrow morning.”

  “I’ll try that then, and see.” He hugged me, turned, and strode back downhill. When I got back to the zendo, his car was gone.

  6

  MOST ZEN STUDENTS greet the passing out of the sutra cards for the Bodhisattva ceremony with surprise. In the old monasteries, monks performed a long version of this acceptance of the fruits of their actions twice a month. They, surely, knew the ceremony by heart. Here, we do it monthly, and most students forget the date and are surprised to see the zabutons, the two-foot by four-foot mats, turned lengthwise to the altar instead of toward the wall. They are surprised they won’t be sitting cross-legged on a zafu, facing the wall, but will be standing, bowing, kneeling as they do the call and response.

  I was surprised only that Guthrie was not here. Still, I had to admit, not very surprised. A strange ceremony in a strange place is going to be less appealing when you’re actually faced with it. As we chanted All my ancient tangled karma, from beginningless greed, hate, and delusion, I now fully avow, I kept wondering what was this thing that Damon Guthrie did years ago, without much thought, an act that now haunted him as much as Mike’s disappearance did me.

  We chanted three times, following with the vows. Afterwards, Leo bowed to the altar and to us in the zendo, and walked out, followed by his attendant of the day.

  It was only then that I saw Guthrie, near the door. Without looking at me, he turned and followed the two of them.

  Had it been someone else, I would have wondered if he’d tracked down Leo’s phone number and scheduled an appointment. But Guthrie? He’d be trotting right up the stairs behind them, charming the shocked jisha, and making his case to Leo. Before I finished putting out the candle and straightening the cushions, he’d be sitting cross-legged in Leo’s room, telling him . . . what?

  I wanted to plant myself at the foot of the steps to snag him . . . to ask Leo . . . or at least to see Guthrie’s face. But by the time I trimmed the candle and sifted the ash for the incense, I was lucky to catch him as he ran down the last step into the lobby and turned toward the outside door. “Hey! Where’re you off to?” What did you say upstairs?

  “To walk.”

  “Want company?”

  “Later. I need to think.”

  “Oh. Sure.”

  He turned, then turned back, hugged me hard, and said, “Leo’s right. But it’s a lot to take in.”

  Right about what? What was hard to take in?

  “You free for dinner?” He’d loosened his grip but was still holding me against him.

  “Yeah.”

  “Come to the truck. It’s parked where it was last night.” He plunked a kiss on the top of my head, pushed a spare key into my pocket, and was gone.

  The whole time I hadn’t seen his face. To a stranger, his voice would have seemed normal, but not to me. I tried to rewind the reel of the last twenty seconds but didn’t have enough information. I had to stop myself from racing upstairs to ask Leo, which would have been a really bad idea on a bunch of levels. Instead I walked into the courtyard, poured a cup from the after-service tea table, and introduced myself to a pair of new-comers. Then I went to the gym, spent an hour in the weight room, and took a yoga class. I left my phone on, bad luck as that is when you want to hear from a guy.

  The only call was from my brother John as I was walking out.

  “You’re serious about this?” he demanded. No pause for pleasantries. Not that I’d expect it from “the enforcer.”

  “About what? Do you mean the all-out search for Mike?”

  “All or nothing?”

  Was he furious, frightened, or merely affronted? After all, he was the professional, the police detective who’d been on the case for two decades. “Nothing’s what we’ve got now. Much as this may terrify us, we’ve got to do it for Mom.”

  “Do you imagine there’s any hint of irregularity I haven’t investigated?”

  “Listen, you’ve turned night into day, you’ve followed every lead, you’ve probably spent more money on p.i.’s than Gary has on alimony. And time! John, I think no person on earth could have done more.”

  “Well, I’m not the only one,” he said, clearly taken aback. “Gary’s been under my feet the whole time re-interviewing leads because he thinks he can do it better.”

  Because you’re a heavy-handed cop and Gary’s had years of negotiating settlements and charming juries.

  “And Katy’s kept Mike in the news. Like coming up with the earthquake retrospective year,” he pointed out.

  Katy had used all her newspaper connections to keep Mike’s story alive the entire time since he disappeared. The twenty-year anniversary of the Loma Prieta earthquake was a natural for a newspaper series. Weaving Mike’s story into newspaper stories had become natural for my oldest sister. “She’s behind the review of all the buildings in the Marina?”

  “No. That’s from the building trades unions. Big waste of time. Dad did some of the work there. Had me on the sites with him the summer before I went into the academy.” He paused. “Even Janice checks the missing persons’ sites.”

  Even Janice. What did that mean? I’d done that only once. Once was plenty. You stare at the dead whose pictures were taken in the morgue, or at faces reconstructed from their skeletons years after their bodies had been tossed in the woods. Janice—referred to as “the nice one” of my older sisters—was sure tougher than she seemed.

  “I’m telling you, we’ve covered every lead. But now—I’m not going to say this in front of Mom—but now if we find Mike, it’ll either be by some crazy fluke, or because he just walks in the door.”

  I nodded. Not that he could see that.

  “Guys his age who go missing—and late teens, early twenties is the most common—they’re naïve. They think they’re invincible. They hitch a ride; it doesn’t occur to them they could be climbing into danger. Girls, they ought to know better, but the boys, they figure they can take on anyone. Makes them easy marks.”

  I couldn’t believe he was saying that, not about Mike. “Do you really think that’s what happened to—”

  “No. I don’t think that. I’m telling you what any Missing Persons division guy would. And if it was someone else’s brother, I’d think that, too.” A muffled noise came through the phone, possibly my brother’s attempt to get control of himself. “It’s the easiest thing in the world for a con man to take in a decent person. But to get a kid who’s angry, depressed, distracted, not paying even normal attention—no contest. If you—”

  “I get the picture!”

  “So, I don’t see how a big family meeting’s going to do anything but upset Mom.”

  I let out a long breath. “We’ve done everything. At the same time we missed something. Obviously.”

  “Okay. Be there at seven.”

  “What? Tonight?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I can’t.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I have a date.”

  “A date that’s more important than finding Mike?”

  “Can’t we reschedule?” I felt like shit.

  “No. Gary’s got a deposition in L.A. in the morning. He’s cutting it close as it is. Like you said, we’re doing this for Mom. Just be there.” Then he hung up.

  I hit number three on my speed dial and got my sister’s answering machine, which was just as well. “Dammit, Gracie, how come you insist we have this final search for Mike, but now it’s billed as my meeting, and it’s set for seven tonight, and if I miss it to go have dinner with the guy who thinks he loves me, then I’m a traitor to the family! No wonder only children are more likely to marry.”

  I called Guthrie. No answer. I was about to leave a message but couldn’t, not with things like they were with him, and with me. I rounded the corner on Columbus, coming abreast of Renzo’s Caffè. There, at a table, sat my brother Gary, looking ready to pounc
e.

  I glared at Renzo. Renzo’s an old hand in this part of town, a guy with a lot of opinions and no hesitancy in sharing them. Now he said nothing, finished making an espresso, and set it and a frittata in front of me.

  “This meeting.” Gary leaned toward me, as if anything could be a secret in such a tiny space. “It’s a bad idea, very bad.”

  “Postpone it! You’re the one—”

  “I can’t. Guy I’m deposing’s leaving the country tomorrow night. Anyway, it’s not the time, Darce, it’s the meeting. Mom’d never admit it, but Mike was her favorite. Lucky for the rest of us we were too old to be jealous much.”

  “But?”

  “But there’re things Mom doesn’t want to know. Things you don’t.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Exactly.”

  “What is it I don’t want to know?”

  “If you hadn’t set up this powwow, none of this would be happening.”

  I grabbed his arm. “Tell me, dammit.”

  He exhaled and leaned back as if to balance on the back legs of his chair, a trick I’d seen him use to distract opponents before. Now, in the café’s metal chair, he reconsidered. “Lore is that you were the wild one. Okay. Mike, meanwhile, was the happy one and was happy to keep you from breaking your neck. Everyone believes that because he made it easy for them. But I was the brother nearest him, so he wasn’t quite the little kid to me that he was to John and the older girls and to Mom and Dad. Here’s the thing, Darce. Your wildness gave him cover.”

  I sipped the espresso, for once barely tasting it.

  “How many times did he take you downtown and stop in some place you couldn’t go? How often did he say he’d meet you in an hour? And you’d never have told anyone, right?”

  “Yeah, but it was just head shops, or porn—teenage boy stuff.”

  “Maybe. No, really, maybe you’re entirely right. I’m just saying that’s an example. Until now there’s never been a suspicion he wasn’t with you every moment he took you anywhere.”

  “Are you saying that I—”

  “Not you. Look, here’s how it was. When I was a kid John drove me crazy.”

  “He drove us all—Mr. Enforcer. It’s only now that I’m beginning to get past it.”

  “Me, too. But being three years younger than the enforcer made me what I am.”

  I laughed. He was the best defense attorney in the city. He could outwit any D.A., impress the judge, and charm the jury while doing it.

  “It took me years to master getting around John. When Mike came along, I taught him all I’d learned. It wasn’t till near the time he disappeared that I realized he’d done me one better. He was getting around John and me, too.”

  “Doing what?”

  “That I don’t know. But if this comes out, John’s going to be hurt, and Mom.”

  Stop! Don’t make me choose! But when it came to Mike, for me there was never any question. “Gar, it’s Mike’s life we’re talking about. If some of us get our feelings bruised, so be it.”

  “If, suddenly, after twenty years of each of us chasing every tiny lead, if this unearths him, yeah, fine. But here’s the likelihood—we don’t find him, and the only thing that changes is the scabs we pull off each other.”

  I stared down at the table. Each of the siblings had a tag: John, the enforcer; Janice, the nice one; Katy, Numero Uno; Gary, the Can-Do-Kid; Gracie, the scrapper; me, the wild kid. Only, Mike, I suddenly realized, was untagged. He was Mike—no need to say more. Or maybe it’d been that each of the rest of us viewed him differently, so one label couldn’t suffice. Maybe Gary was right about Mike. The notion seemed at once shocking and yet so right, I had to wonder why I hadn’t seen it before.

  Still, it unnerved me that Gary, Mr. Optimist, saw nothing but bad coming out of this search.

  I needed to be at that meeting to protect . . . whoever. I was going to hear what my brothers and sisters had been unable to say before. They were right that I was the one who cared most about Mike, and dammit, that made me the one responsible for seeing that this time, once and for all, we got the search right. If there was any chance at all of some clue, lead, something Mike had said that could be interpreted differently now, I had to recognize it.

  But I needed—wanted . . . longed—to be with Guthrie. All the years of our odd, intermittent relationship had led to this moment when he was ready to face his past, and do it with me. It was the only time he’d ever needed me like this. I couldn’t blow him off.

  Cut off your right arm? Or your left? How could I—

  I reached across the table to Gary and said, “Give me your car keys.”

  7

  ON THE WAY to pick up Gary’s car, I called Guthrie again. Still no answer. Any other time—but this wasn’t any other time. I wanted to go back and knock on Leo’s door and have him tell me Guthrie was okay, that now, after their talk, Guthrie was going to be feeling better and better. But Zen interviews didn’t work that way. They’re not salve. Often they pull back the scab and say, “Look!”

  I hit redial. Again, the call went to his recording. There could be a dozen good reasons for Guthrie not answering or—

  I left a message that I was on my way.

  The wind was whipping down Montgomery Street, pushing handfuls of fog into my face. If I got across the bridge to Oakland in half an hour, I’d have at least a few minutes, see that he was okay, spend a little time before I had to tell him why I was abandoning him at the one time he really needed me. If I did.

  But how could I leave Mom and everybody sitting around a table waiting like we’d all done day after day when Mike disappeared?

  I turned the corner to the garage—the wrong garage! What was I thinking? Gary kept his big client car here, not the Honda he was lending me. The Honda was in a lot across from his office half a mile away. Talk about not focusing! Now there’d be no time to do more than say sorry to Guthrie.

  In any other city I could hail a cab! I turned and ran full out, beating the pavement so fast I couldn’t think. Sprinting, I made the light at Broadway and in twenty minutes was poking the key in the ignition. The heel of the key jammed into my hand. Pain shot to my elbow. I shook it off.

  The Bay Bridge was crowded. I weaved in and out of traffic. The bandages cut into my palms. I loosened my grip, but in a minute I was back clutching the wheel.

  Traffic just about stopped in the Treasure Island tunnel, and when I finally got onto the eastern span of the bridge it wasn’t much better. Cars were shifting right. In the low-slung Civic I was practically sitting on the roadway; every van and SUV that cut in front of me blocked the view. If there was an accident ahead, I’d never spot it. I was almost to the toll plaza before I saw the smoke spreading up, coming from the Port of Oakland.

  Omigod, fire! No wonder he hadn’t answered the phone.

  Was it anywhere near his truck? Too hard to tell.

  The van in front of me slammed on its brakes. I swung left inches in front of a truck and kept moving. The fire looked huge.

  The port’s loaded with imports—cloth, plastics, stuff that’ll burn.

  At the gateway, I waved my production company card as I raced through. Sirens blared, but I ignored them, and the smoke, too. I didn’t look at the plume. Instead I kept my eyes down, retracing the route I’d taken yesterday. It didn’t matter where the fire was; all I cared about now was Guthrie.

  A giant red fire truck swung around me. I hadn’t even heard its siren in all the distraction of my panic. The smoke turned thicker. I could barely see anything but the fire engine’s flashing lights. It swung left onto the pier. Our pier.

  I stared in horror as it raced to the burning white mass—a big light-colored eighteen-wheeler. Guthrie’s ride.

  A police car came out of nowhere, blocking me. Red lights flashed.

  “Get that car out of here!” It was a bull-horned voice. “Back up! Now!”

  “Guthrie!” All I could do was scream his name.

  The
cop jumped out, instantly in my face. “Back up!”

  “My friend!” I pointed to the burning truck.

  “There’s no-one—nothing—in there. Nothing but gas. Understand?”

  I got it. No one could be alive in a fire like that. If he was—but he wouldn’t have been. No way! “He’s not there!” I said aloud. “Not there.”

  Before the cop could shout at me again, I shifted into reverse and shot back up the pier.

  Something was behind me! I braked with a screech mere feet in front of a big white truck cab.

  This was Guthrie’s truck! Thank God! I jumped out and raced for the cab door. “Guthrie!” I pulled myself up to look through the window. “Guthrie!”

  The cab was empty.

  I raked my pocket for the key.

  Behind me the cop was yelling.

  Where was Guthrie? Was he in the back? I blinked hard against the smoke. “Guthrie! Are you in here?”

  I felt for the flashlight beside the door, sprayed the room with the light. Empty.“What the hell are you doing?” a fireman yelled. “We got a blaze to fight here. It’s moving this way. You’re blocking our access. Get your truck out of here or we’re going to push it off the pier!”

  It’s not my truck! I don’t know how to get the damn thing in gear! I said, “Yessir!”

  I jumped into the driver’s seat, balled up a jacket I found, and crammed it behind my back so I could reach the pedals. Then I switched on the engine. My heart was hammering against my ribs. Turn the wheel wrong in a truck and you’re sunk. I could barely breathe. Think!

  Another fire engine swung around to my left. The sirens reverberated off the building on one side and the huge cargo ship on the other. Think!

  Where was Guthrie?

  Focus! The truck!

  In the gag, he’d driven the truck around the corner, but I didn’t have to do that. I just needed to back out straight.

  Tentatively, I shifted and very slowly let out the clutch.

  The truck inched forward.

  I slammed on the brake. Too hard. I stared at the gear stick. That had to be reverse. Had to! I shifted again, let out the clutch again. The truck jolted backwards.