Pacific (9780802194800)

by Drury, Tom

  “And could you play that for us now?”

  Eamon opened the guitar case and took up his Gibson Archtop with loving care, tuned it, and played and sang the song while sitting on the grass.

  A trance came over the Luddites as they listened to the song of staying out late and picking apples and dancing on ice and being half-awake in the empire of the title.

  “Show of hands,” said Micah, and all hands raised as one. There were tears in Cilla’s eyes.

  “I’ve got the title card,” she said softly. From her backpack she brought a big black placard with white letters in the unforced freehand that comes so naturally to girls:

  LIVE IN THE WORLD

  THE NEW LUDDITES

  “We might want to change the words,” said Micah. “Lyons told me yesterday to shut down the club. It conflicts with our corporate masters.”

  “Oh, no,” said the Luddites, “You’ve got to be kidding,” and the like. Eamon chewed a licorice whip like field straw and glanced around as if considering more interesting places he could be.

  “Why are we even talking about the action?” said Dakota. “If we’re not a club anymore.”

  “Lyons told me to get the word out,” said Micah, looking at each of them in turn. “So that’s what we’re going to do.”

  “He’ll kill us,” said Silas. “Throw us off the towers one by one. Birds will eat our bones.”

  “This could go on our transcripts,” said Dakota.

  Micah had poor grades and seemed as likely to be back home in Boris or living under a bridge as going to college in four years, so transcripts did not enter into his thinking.

  “It will be our first and last action,” he said. “I’m in it till the end. Anyone who wants to withdraw, I think we’ll understand. Eamon, you’re a senior. What do you advise?”

  Eamon closed his guitar case. “Do it.”

  “Just get me the visual,” said Rafa. “I’ll find an MP3 of ‘Fake Empire.’”

  Micah caught up to Eamon as he walked to the parking lot. “Are you mad at me?”

  “I’m not mad at you,” said Eamon, repeating the words as people do when they’re mad at you. “I don’t know what to think.”

  “Did your dad tell you what happened?”

  “What did?”

  “We don’t talk about it. I don’t want to know.”

  “I think she was seeing somebody.”

  Micah nodded and rubbed his eyes. “You know what? Joan has left both our fathers.”

  “I never thought of that,” said Eamon. “I kind of miss her. The way she smiled. She floats along in her world. You can’t tell what she’s thinking. Maybe she isn’t thinking anything.”

  “You should come to the apartment. She’d love to see you.”

  “What’s it like?”

  “Small. She sleeps in the living room and I sleep in the bedroom. There’s a trash chute in the hallway. You open the door and throw the stuff in and it falls forever. You don’t even hear it land sometimes.”

  “Sounds nice. It was okay, being your brother.”

  “You still are if you want to be,” said Micah.

  The action took place the following Tuesday. For three minutes and twenty-seven seconds, the National’s recording of “Fake Empire” played and computer programs shut down, replaced by the message:

  The New Luddites have been disbanded by order of the Headmaster. Let no one disband an idea. Live in the world.

  The song began with a lone organ note that gave way to four rolling chords of bass and piano and then the singer’s voice, deep and glassy. Tiptoe through our shiny cities, with our diamond slippers on. The music came from all over the school. Teachers paused, chalk stilled in their hands, gazing at the ceiling. Kids rose from their desks and drifted to the hallways as if looking for the band. Let’s not tyry to figure out everything at once. People danced elegantly at first and then wildly when the manic horn section began. Mr. Lyons emerged from the administration offices and paced with folded arms until the end of the song.

  “Where is Micah Darling?” he said.

  Micah pushed through the crowd. “Present, Headmaster.”

  “This is my school.”

  “Well, I don’t agree with that,” said Micah. “The school belongs to all of us.”

  There was quiet. Everyone seemed to be considering whom the school belonged to. It was not a simple question. Without Mr. Lyons there would still be a school, but wihtout the students, what would there be? People in offices with nothing to do. Then the silence broke into cheering and clapping and whistling and requests for the song to play again.

  “Go to your homerooms,” said Mr. Lyons. “The next one who makes a sound will be suspended. The Luddites are suspended. Darling, you’re expelled. Your parents shall be notified.”

  “Our address has changed,” said Micah.

  There were three weeks left in the school year. Micah spent them at the beach. He would take the bus down to Crenshaw and Venice and another bus west.

  Joan gave her blessing. They couldn’t afford the school, and she thought that Micah had been mistreated for an event that showed initiative and creativity.

  If all the midways of all the fairs he’d ever seen were pushed to the edge of the continent, Micah thought, they would make a place like Venice Beach.

  Music played and dogs barked, skateboards clacked and seagulls pierced the ocean air with their greedy calls. Lots of birds were hungry but few had the seagull’s sense of owning all things that could be eaten. Refugee rows of shops sold henna tattoos and massages, shark teeth and Tarot readings, your name on a grain of sand.

  Many parts of Los Angeles had next to no pedestrians, and that might have been because they were all here and dressed like professional athletes on their day off. Along the waterfront promenade they traveled on foot and skates, on rented bicycles and Segway scooters that had caught on here if nowhere else.

  One man on a Segway rode about pointing things out to himself and commenting into a tape recorder. A Segway family glided along, the children on smaller models.

  Painted on the wall of a hostel and watching it all was the Venus of Venice Beach, who wore blue leggings and a pink camisole and thought that history was myth.

  Micah played volleyball on the sand beside the flat white ocean. He didn’t play hard in these games. He’d smoke a serve or smother a spike sometimes, but in the spirit of the beach he was not looking to show anyone up.

  Late one day he walked along the row of shops. A man skated in and out of the crowd with an electric guitar, a body-mounted amp, and a bandolier of batteries. He plucked complex chords that lingered as he glided by.

  “Fly on, Little Wing,” said a lady in a straw hat.

  Micah walked into a medical marijuana shop, a clean and orderly space with canvas awning. It was like a candy store, with backlit cabinets and glass counters offering weed in plastic bags and glass jars with silver lids.

  “And how are we today?” said a man in a white coat with pens in the pocket.

  “Very well, thank you,” said Micah. “I’d like to get certified.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Fifteen.”

  “You have to be eighteen or accompanied by a parent or guardian. Can you bring your mother or father in?”

  “No.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “They just wouldn’t.”

  “I mean the medical problem.”

  “Ringing in the ears.”

  “Come back when you are older and have a California ID. Will you do that?”

  “Oh, probably not,” said Micah.

  He left the shop and ate a hot dog on a bench facing the ocean. He felt a profound and enjoyable emptiness.

  Soon a man in
his twenties came along and sat beside him. He had a red beard and sunglasses and worn leather sandals.

  “I saw you at the marijuana doc’s,” he said.

  “You have to be eighteen.”

  The man took a silver cigarette case from his pocket and gave Micah a joint.

  “Look eighteen to me.”

  “Thank you.”

  The man’s name was Mark. He’d come down from Olympia after graduating from college. His father was a software maker who’d helped him get a little house and a shop that sold shirts and jewelry.

  “I’ve seen you playing volleyball.”

  “Yeah, I like it.”

  Micah got high, his thoughts fading to simple awareness of the ocean. He felt made of stone. If seagulls attacked he would probably just sit there getting pecked.

  You never knew what you were getting with weed. Probably someday it would all be as uniform as alcohol. The sun bled red into the water and the ringing in his ears fell to a whisper.

  “I like volleyball,” he said.

  “You want to get in a real game, I know some people. They play at night on other beaches. Gets pretty serious.”

  “Where would you end up if you just started swimming?” said Micah.

  “Channel Islands.”

  “How far is that?”

  “Twenty miles.”

  “And then what?”

  “Japan.”

  “How far is that?”

  “Way out there.”

  “I want to go to Japan.”

  “Fuck, man,” said Mark. “Fly out LAX tonight you got the money.”

  “I don’t have the money.”

  “Japan is beautiful.”

  “Have you been there?”

  “No.”

  Mark invited Micah to have supper with him and his girlfriend. They lived in a narrow yellow house with flowers and vines on a street going down to the ocean.

  You could see far into the house from the street. The furniture was white and orange and green, and there were paper lanterns.

  Mark’s girlfriend, Beth, had green eyes, freckles, and strawberry-blond hair parted on the side. She didn’t mind that her boyfriend had brought home a stray from the beach. Maybe people were like that here.

  Micah called Joan to say he was having supper with friends. Now that they were living in the apartment, she had a better sense of when he was home and when he wasn’t.

  They had vegetarian curry, soft bread called naan in a woven basket, red wine in two-dollar bottles from Trader Joe’s.

  Beth came from St. Louis. She was a nurse and the daughter of a minister who was very strict and she was glad to be away from his world.

  She worked at a clinic in Lomita and painted in her spare time. She liked to paint little bits of ocean as seen through cars or people’s legs or over rooftops.

  After supper they sat in the living room, and Micah explained how he got expelled from school. They thought it was a wonderful story, though, as Micah told it, he saw that it was a silly thing that didn’t amount to much and wouldn’t make the school right.

  Micah stayed the night on Mark and Beth’s couch. He could not sleep and went to the kitchen sink and drank glass after glass of water. A friendly light shone from beneath the cupboards.

  He went back to the front room and lay down beneath a quilt. An hour later he heard the refrigerator open, and then Beth came into the front room with a bottle of grapefruit juice.

  “Sleeping?” she said.

  “Not yet.”

  She placed pills in his hand.

  “What is it?”

  “Painkiller.”

  “It helps you sleep?”

  “It passes the time till you do.”

  Micah looked at her, and she said, “I’m a nurse, baby. First I do no harm.”

  They took the pills and washed them down with the grapefruit juice and went out to sit on the front porch by the street.

  It was a clear night. The moon rode high above the blue roofs of the beach town. Micah felt no restlessness, no sorrow. There was a soft and intermittent breeze.

  After a while skateboarders came rolling down the street. They leaned back looking around with long hair and cool blank expressions.

  “There they go,” said Micah. “Down to the sea.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  THE TRAIL of the Laughing Bandit took Dan Norman to Aqualung Spas of Stone City. He stood with the owner in the showroom, by a hot tub bordered in cedar planks.

  “Are we a target?” said the owner, a former minor league slugger with a big yet solid gut. Once played for Duluth in the Northern League.

  “You fit the profile,” said Dan. “You’re on the highway. Got a loading dock in back.”

  “Spa parts ain’t much use ’less you have a spa.”

  “The guy’s a pack rat. No pattern in what he takes. Now, what I’d like to do is give you a box. There’s a couple wrenches inside for weight and a beacon. You set it out at night, take it in come morning. See if he won’t swipe it, and we find out where it ends up.”

  “Other places doing this?”

  “Big Wonder is. World of Wheels is.”

  “It’s in everybody’s interest.”

  “That’s what I’m hearing.”

  “You and Louise have a spa?”

  “We don’t.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t go all salesman on you.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  “Do you good, though. Most of us are raised to think of comfort and relaxation as bad somehow.”

  “I expect there is some of that.”

  “Some. I’m here to tell you it is rampant.”

  He turned the hot tub on. The engine hummed, the water churned, the floor vibrated. It seemed like a lot of commotion for a bath.

  “It’s hydrotherapy,” said the owner. “Return to the sea with your loved one. We work hard. I know you must. The world is cold. Are we not entitled to comfort? Even pleasure. And yes I will use that word. All for pennies a day.”

  “You are going all salesman on me.”

  “Can’t help myself. I believe in spas.”

  “I can see that you do.”

  People thought Louise would be lost without Mary, and there was something to that. So much of herself had been formed in response to Mary’s judgments that now she didn’t seem to be formed of anything.

  She put up a sign in the thrift shop window saying closed until further notice. The metal shutters came down over the stuffed crow, which looked away as if abandoned by its protector. Then she took the Scout to Ronnie Lapoint’s shop in Morrisville.

  “What’s this thing doing to you now, Louise?”

  “Pulling to the left.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I was hoping you could fix it.”

  “No way I can do it now. For you though I will.”

  “You’re the best.”

  Louise read Scientific American in a waiting room smelling of Glade and grease and gasoline. The television played without sound a talk show featuring three women who seemed so engrossed in their topic that they might jump up and dance.

  Ronnie came in after a while, wiping his hands on a red flannel rag.

  “Sure sorry about your mom.”

  “Oh. Thanks, Ronnie.”

  “I want to say my condolences, but what are condolences?”

  “I think you just gave them.”

  “That lady could argue me up one wall and down the other.”

  “That’s my mom. How’s the truck?”

  “You won’t have the pulling. But she really needs rings.”

  “How much are rings?”

  “Aw, it’s not worth p
utting rings in.”

  Louise drove to North Cemetery on a hill outside Grafton. Robins walked about with long strides in the uncut grass. She put flowers down on Mary’s grave, a hill of dirt covered in green fabric. She waited for revelation. Mary had done her part to make her world go around, and it had gone around seventy-seven summers—not so many when you thought about it, her life ending in a dream, and she never spent one day in a nursing home. Louise rolled up the green cloth and left it by the maintenance shed, because Mary would prefer the honest dirt.

  Louise went to her baby’s stone, which always needed tending in the spring, as it was flush with the ground, and grass tended to grow over it. She trimmed the grass and troweled away the dirt and scrubbed the gray slate with rags. MAY 7, 1992.

  “I wish you were here,” she said.

  From the cemetery she went to see Don Gary and Lyris about a headstone.

  The fragrant and industrious Don Gary told of a ballgame he’d seen once at the Metrodome. The clean-up hitter was on deck, and Don looked forward to seeing him hit a home run or strike out or whatever he would do. The score was tied, men on base, tense. It was a long story and to Don’s thinking a parable about losing a parent. Louise stopped paying attention to the words, but she liked the sound of him talking.

  A manila envelope addressed in red ink landed on the desk of Albert Robeshaw at the newspaper in Stone City.

  The office was built before the print business went into decline, and before the old editor making good money had been fired in favor of a new editor making poor money. Probably it would cost more to take the office apart than to leave it.

  Albert sat at a table by the vending machines and opened the envelope, which contained a letter and a map sent by a man who lived in Mayall, Minnesota.

  Dear Mr. Robeshaw,

  I have followed with interest your coverage of the missing Sandra Zulma, however I wish to clarify a statement in the recent article “Fantasy Life of a Fugitive.” The encounter between Sandra Zulma and the Boy Scouts took place in the State Forest not the Fen, where overnights are not permitted because of the native plants. See map (enclosed). This is a minor imperfection in an outstanding article, sir. I was one of the scouts who discovered Sandra Zulma on the river. You can be sure I remember that day.