by John Decure
Dale hadn’t moved yet to unlock the car. “In the glove, Rudy,” he said. “Want to see it?”
I was growing tense at the passage of time and began checking over my shoulder. Any second now the concrete cowboy, the kid wife, and the boyfriend would figure things out and be circling back here. “Let’s see that key go in the ignition,” I told Dale. “We can show him the manual in the fast lane.”
“Right.”
Dale frowned, but I could tell he was done with his automotive reverie. Rudy went quiet again as I helped him into the backseat and buckled him up. His manner was helpless and distant, that fog rolling right back in already. I decided to hold off on any more tough questions about his latest entanglements.
We cut through residential streets beneath a canopy of mature elms, then traversed an empty restaurant parking lot, bouncing through a big dip in a shower of front-end sparks and flattening a row of rubber cones like bowling pins as a valet pumped his fist at us in the rearview mirror. I knew we’d shaken them when we hit the freeway on-ramp at about seventy-five, not a pursuer in sight.
“Where to?” Dale said. We were currently headed inland, due east, toward Pasadena.
Good question. “What day did the daughter say she’d be flying down?” I said.
“Not really sure.”
I shot him the stink-eye across the big front seat. “Say what?”
“Thing is, she didn’t exactly say. Really soon, I think.”
I thought of the bag of empty Coors cans in Dale’s trunk, considered again his claim that he was recycling, and the possibility that what he was recycling was actually the evidence of his own inevitable demise. Was he reliable? The question made me wince, for if he wasn’t, I could get stuck housing a semicoherent elderly man for days on end. Carmen was going through something of a grinding transition, facing the imminent passing of her mother, the problem of finding a caretaker for Albert—maybe even caring for him herself—and as of today, adjusting to living in Christianitos, in my own home, and with me. If she and I were ever going to cut it together, helping make her and Albert feel at home had to be my first priority. So why hadn’t I gotten on the phone with Rudy’s daughter, ironed out the plans myself? Because I’d felt obligated to defer to the Dale Bleeker Redemption and Rehabilitation Project currently under way, and because, more important, Rudy was Dale’s client. I needed to give Dale a little room to work, at least for now.
I thought of Eloise Horton, her tight-ass sneer cocked in my direction, shaking her head at me like it was pointed, hands on those high, high hips. Hissing: Told you so, Shepard. Writing me up or demoting me or pounding me with whatever bureaucratic hammer was within her reach at the moment she got wind of this reclamation project gone awry. Hissing: Reaching out to a probationer has its price, Shepard. Should’ve considered that before you galloped off to save the world. Should’ve stayed home and done your stats, like I told you.
I didn’t even want to think what Carmen would have said right now, yet I could see those round, brown eyes going even rounder and fixing steadily on me as she listened, not blinking, as if to hold back the hurt from another sadly inevitable disappointment. Well, what else is new? she might ask me if she were the cynical type—which she is not. But you don’t need a weatherman to tell you it’s raining when the drops are spattering on your goddamned forehead. I didn’t need to hear her say that something was always getting in the way of real togetherness for us. I knew this much by now.
I waited until Dale guided the big Buick into the carpool lane before I hit him up for more details. Behind us, I saw no signs that the shyster lawyer with the Cadillac was following, which was encouraging. “You talked to her about coming to get her dad,” I said. “I heard you.”
We hit a relatively open stretch of highway and Dale opened it up, his window half down.
“Mind if I smoke?” he said. He took out a pack of Lucky Strikes from the glove box, handing them to me so I could light one for him. Then he toked with the left hand, flicking the ashes into the breeze as the Buick roared forth and found its groove at a steady seventy-eight miles per hour. Dale was looking a tad too nonplussed for my liking, considering the task at hand, and I frowned. But he didn’t look away from the highway to catch my expression, which was a mild reassurance that I might yet live.
“Like I told you,” he said, “she didn’t exactly say what day. Wasn’t sure on such short notice and all.” He dragged hard and flicked his butt onto the roadway. This time he caught me looking. “What?” he asked.
“Nice touch,” I said. “Next rain, that butt goes in a storm drain and washes into the ocean, right where I’m surfing.”
That seemed to pop Dale’s little comfort bubble.
“Sorry, my mistake.”
A cool, clean breeze shot through the car’s interior like an electrical charge. Without notice, Rudy began to sing in a rumbling baritone.
“Won’t you come home, Bill Bailey, won’t you come home? …” Dale and I eyed each other across the front seat. Rudy was slipping again, with that child’s smile shining through the wrinkles.
“So, he’ll stay with you then,” I said. When Dale nodded yes, I felt relieved enough to sit back and enjoy the ride. This Buick still looked like it had a date awaiting at a demolition derby in a mud-caked arena on some clear, wind-whipped, moonless late-winter Saturday night in Bakersfield or Fresno or wherever they still wreck cars for sport on weekends, but the machine did undergo a bit of a transformation at seventy-eight miles per hour, I must admit, shedding its familiar pings and shimmies like a rattlesnake slipping out of its old skin.
“So what about you, J.?” Dale said.
“I guess you can take me home for now. Just go six-oh-five south until you hit Christianitos Boulevard.” I sat back, beaten down from the day’s events, but a loose spring in the vinyl seats rose up and scratched at my shoulder until I couldn’t take it and had to straighten up. I sat there, arms folded stiffly around my knee, no longer wishing to hear about what the top end was for this rig, for it was simply a royal piece of shit.
And try as I might to assimilate this information with my precious vision of Dale, none of it would fit. Not the wienie-wagging rap, or the disheveled suit, or the hundreds of empty beer cans in the trunk, not the bad judgment required to get hooked up with a shady office of nonlawyers, and certainly not the hungry seat springs in the piece-of-shit ride. I sat up straighter still, the seat gnawing at my ass this time as I shifted my weight forward, and I felt like a child confronted with a simple interactive toy I had no hope of mastering, shoving a square peg into a smooth round hole again and again, clinging to the vain hope that the hard edges might somehow wear down enough to make a fit.
“Righty-o,” Dale said. He seemed content, as if full up with a sense of hope that had been but a dark cavity inside him an hour ago. Perhaps finding himself to be of use to someone again was the shot he needed.
In the backseat the saints were marching in.
Dale swiveled his head and caught Rudy with a grin. “Oh, when the stars—oh, when the stars! Refuse to shine—refuse to shine!”
An out-of-service commuter bus in front of us finally slowed our pace. Traffic was loading up in every lane, the red lights blinking on in a chain reaction. A billboard plastered across the back of the bus screamed “Abogados!” and “Accidentes!” in bold neon pink letters, a bigger-than-life Hispanic dude with a pencil mustache and an unhinged grin bearing down on us.
“You’ll call me when his daughter gets here?” I said to Dale. But he and Rudy kept bellowing, trading their creaky end-of-the-world verses, and the Hispanic dude kept eyeballing me from the billboard as if he somehow knew an accident would befall me of all people and soon I would be sorely in need of aggressive legal representation, and I gave up. Dale was a licensed practitioner, an experienced former prosecutor. The discipline against his license was minor, unrelated to his professional competence. He could handle the care of an incompetent old man for a few hours without m
y assistance, couldn’t he? Well, he would have to try.
I remembered what Carmen had said that morning, when I tried to carry four bags at once and tripped on the front walk, pulling a nice three-point header into the roses. Don’t try to help too much, J. No need to overdo it. Then she’d looked at me, those round eyes going rounder, as if to say: Remember why I’m even here, displaced and forced to move in like this, unable to sleep another night in what I thought was my own home.
Because you had to help.
I wish I could say how it got to be this way, my lending a hand where no other has reached out to take it, offering an answer when no question is pending. Doing more at times when to do less would be advisable, maybe even a virtue. Looking back on my personal history, the view seems somehow oversimplified, like a bad painting, a doctor’s-office landscape with spring grass, trees, a fence and a barn dashed into the foreground in bold, easy colors and a swift brown line of rolling hilltops in back connoting the horizon, all of it rendered in a pleasing fashion that, upon closer inspection, reveals itself as a rank counterfeit of any scene you would ever stumble upon in real life. I suppose this is one of my many shortcomings, having a limited view of my history, but I will offer you the best counterfeit vista of my past that I can manage.
I used to think my problem was that I didn’t know what I wanted to do with myself, and that until I did, my life would proceed from one diversion to the next, offering plenty of distractions and titillation, but little substance. That suspicion probably arose from my tireless pursuit of the surfing life, particularly during the year after my graduation from college. I was twenty-one, without a girlfriend, wife, or parents to please, my degree in English guaranteeing little more than a low-paying gig as a teacher, or maybe an entry-level sales job with a corporate giant looking for fresh bodies. I had yet to return the rented cap and gown when the phone rang late one night, a lawyer from Chile on the line, telling me in broken English that my mother’s aunt Miluca had died a few months earlier, bless her soul, and by the way, I was in the will.
A week later a Banco Pacifico money order for roughly ten grand arrived, made out to me. For three days I propped it up on my kitchen table, leaning it against the salt and pepper shakers, repositioning the thing like a skewed picture on a wall every time I had to season my food, thinking about what it meant to me, almost listening for an answer to that question as if the small instrument of commerce might actually pipe up with a helpful suggestion at an opportune moment. The money order did not speak to me, but on the fourth day, a travel agent did. The following Monday, on one of those solemn gray days in June on the coast when you know the sun will be a miserable no-show, I split for South Africa, aiming to catch up with my best friend, Jackie Pace, hoping to just surf and travel and live and put off all the big questions in hopes that, in Zen-like fashion, the answers would come precisely because I hadn’t done any asking. I figured the trip—and my money—would last for maybe a month or two. I’d packed relatively light, bringing three new surfboards, two wetsuits, a pair of trunks, a ding-repair kit, my Walkman, roughly five K in travelers’ checks, and not much else. In the surf world, Jackie was a legend, a former competitive great and short-board innovator who had refined the noble quest (at least among surfers) for uncrowded, perfect surf into something of an art form. Perhaps teaming up with such a veteran seeker would help me locate some new personal signposts. Perhaps eight thousand miles of separation from home would shed a new perspective on my aimless situation.
A month or two turned into a year. I remember surfing deserted, sharky point breaks in the South African Transkei wilderness. Sleeping all day in hammocks on the beach in Mozambique, drinking cheap East African rum and playing chess with the old men in town outside the same little restaurant that served nothing but slabs of fresh sea bass that the half blind chef would incinerate nightly. Riding huge, perfect lefts in Mauritius, Jackie blowing minds while I took the wipeout of my life, broke my big-wave gun, and fought the seagoing rip for an hour. Camping in a wild animal park in Kenya with a twitching yellow-toothed diamond smuggler who wanted us to carry for him, Jackie enthused, me repeating the words “No fucking way” like a chant. Moroccan dust storms, empty Portuguese reefs, Spain looking as green as Austria in the winter. A slow thaw in southern France and a long flat spell made tolerable by a side trip to an ancient spa high in the Pyrenees. A lot of a certain shy Basque local girl who spoke no English but managed to cut my heart from my breast like a surgeon, and a lot of absinthe, not necessarily in that order. Hurricane surf, a stolen rent-a-car, and a bout of roadside sunstroke in the West Indies.
Through it all, not a single question answered about myself, my personal inventory uncounted and undisturbed, nothing Zen-like to report. Except that, in spite of the hell of a good time I had, I sensed a hollowness metastasizing in me, not creeping like a cancer often does but fairly busting around, like a stray helium balloon at some kid’s birthday party bouncing along the ceiling, well out of reach and groping for the sky. One night Jackie and I were in a popular local seafood spot, playing pinball and slamming rum and Cokes after dinner. I guess the competition got hot, because when we finally ran out of coins, we looked up and found ourselves alone, a storm siren sounding off an unseen hilltop. The next two days we spent hunkered down in a one-room cinder-block apartment, playing penny poker, go fish, and old maid atop Jackie’s suitcase and swapping lies by candlelight, a surfboard fin biting at my ass as hundred-mile-per-hour winds sandblasted the door and the ceiling beams rattled like bad teeth.
The day the storm broke, we sidestepped fallen tree stumps and coconuts down the beach path and lost our breaths at a most unlikely sight: ten-foot, hot-glass, absolutely reeling point waves at a spot we didn’t even know was a spot, not a soul in the water. Jackie and I surfed for six hours without a break. Everything I knew, every maneuver in my repertoire, every pent-up expectation that had gone wanting on fifteen previous years’ worth of crummy, overcrowded, wind-chopped mornings—all of it was brought to bear out there among those spinning racetrack walls, all I had to offer, really, laid over in an instant, set on a rail in an extended bottomturn, an arcing cutback, a hypnotic, needle-threading tube ride. The sun rose higher and the oily surface glass shattered into ten million sparkling shards and the jungle birds screamed their approval, and Jackie and I looped and banked and trimmed and ducked without a care or a worry or a boast or a regret, and not a word passed between us, for there was nothing to say. One latemorning set I paddled into delivered the finest wave I have ever ridden, and when I kicked out a few hundred yards later in the channel I was oddly numb, the way you feel when you find a place you’ve been seeking for days on a map and it doesn’t resemble anything you’d imagined, and immediately you just want to go back the same way you came. The horizon was still throbbing with lines of energy, but suddenly, paddling out for another wave seemed pointless and vain. I belly-rode a line of whitewash in, walked up the beach without looking back, packed my things, and caught a flight to Miami that night, then home the next day.
Tossing the bags on my living-room couch, I could still feel that hollowness, a knockabout pressure in the chest, that damned helium balloon scraping to get out. I suppose it took me that year on the road to learn that surfing may offer a hell of a lifestyle, but it is not, in itself, a substitute for life. I didn’t get around to unpacking my wave-riding gear for a month.
Not long after my great wave-hunting odyssey deposited me firmly back on square one, I took a job selling office copiers for a company that reputedly owned about half of Japan. The business plan was to cold-call thirty small businesses a day, and I stuck to the plan, which was about as fun as it sounds—enough said. I was still in training when the sales manager, a reedy former ladies shoe wholesaler named Swede who was actually Jewish and from Brooklyn, invited me out for a friendly beer one afternoon. I should have known it wouldn’t be friendly, but Swede was smiling when he told me I was too laid back, and that if I didn’t step up my game he’d
be canning me at month’s end. Then he bought me another beer, saying something about there being no hard feelings as I tipped my suds and wondered why I couldn’t stop smiling like an idiot. So this was the world of business. He kept smiling right back at me, muttering something about positive thinking and what he had learned in Alcoholics Anonymous, and I felt like the butt of the Swede from Brooklyn’s private joke and contemplated quitting on the spot, yet I held my tongue. I knew I wasn’t much of a huckster, but I wanted to go out on my own terms.
Then luck intervened. That night, a summons for jury duty was waiting for me in my mailbox. When I showed it to Swede the next day, I thought he’d explode, but instead, he just shook his head and said son of a bitch, over and over, all the way back to his office. Apparently the company that owned half of Japan was big on civic responsibility here on American soil—they paid for unlimited jury service.
A week later I was sitting in a jury box, captivated by the eloquent, even-handed counselor for the People of the State of California, Deputy District Attorney Dale Bleeker. I pictured myself in his shoes, making my objections, the learned judge nodding, thanking me for my erudite clarification of the evidence code. I saw myself expertly framing a point of fact as a dozen jurors scribbled notes, saw myself boldly contradicting a lying witness with the truth. I couldn’t tell if this lawyer thing was shaping up into an actual calling, but in my meandering life, at least it felt like a direction. Maybe even a path.
How I came to overstep is harder to pinpoint. My father died of a heart attack when I was six, and my mother disappeared when I was just turning seventeen, forcing me to become self-sufficient pretty much overnight. I have no other relatives, a lot of acquaintances in the small-town surf scene tradition, and few real friends besides Jackie, who is a world-class loner in his own right. I’ve basically been alone since before I became a legal adult.