by Ivy Pochoda
THE PARTY HOUSE IN ECHO PARK WAS ON ONE OF THE STEEPEST HILLS IN Los Angeles—a place where skateboarders played chicken with runaway vehicles. Blake sat on the opposite side of the street from the house, hidden behind a recycling bin in someone’s driveway, trying to make himself comfortable on the angled asphalt. Around one A.M. the music stopped and thank fuck for that. Soon, people started filtering out, getting into old Hondas and twenty-year-old diesel Mercs.
At one thirty, the redhead came out alone. She’d parked down the hill—and that was lucky. A short walk. A dark street. Anything could happen to her.
See, he said to Sam, who’s a pussy now? Who can’t take care of a girl?
Blake nicked his finger as he pulled his knife. Jesus, he was out of practice.
Throat or in the side prison style? He had about twenty feet left to decide.
She was fumbling with her keys, having trouble figuring out her own damn door lock—a sure sign she shouldn’t drive. Blake stopped. If he was lucky—and he usually wasn’t—maybe she’d lose control on the downhill, kill herself, and spare him the trouble.
Pussy, Sam said.
“Fuck you,” Blake said.
The woman turned. She’d heard him. She got her key in the lock and was jiggling it. Blake ran, knife out, not sure he was going to hit his mark in any meaningful way. She got the door open.
He was a few steps away. If she was smart, she’d get in the car without turning back, pulling the door shut, barring him outside.
But she looked, her face terror-white. And in the weak light from the car’s interior, Blake saw his mistake—he didn’t know this woman. Not at all.
He staggered past her, lurching into a bush, then righting himself. He lost his footing on the steep hill and rolled. He felt asphalt scrape his face. He scrambled out of the road so the woman couldn’t hit him as she drove past.
20
TONY, LOS ANGELES, 2010
Tony stands in the King Eddy. His phone is vibrating. He checks it. He’s missed five calls from Stephanie. And now there’s a text from Danielle. Call Mom. She’s really losing it. Tony searches for the number of a cab company. But he doesn’t dial.
The Filipino bartender’s still staring at him, her lip curled, her eyes narrowed. There are smudges under one of her eyes that Tony now realizes are tattoos.
“What,” Tony says, peeling off two twenties and dropping them on the bar.
“You just let her go off like that?”
“I don’t know her,” he says.
“So you just let her go off.” The bartender pockets Tony’s bills, mistaking his generosity. “It’s your life.”
Jesus. The room is swimming. Tony’s not sure whether or not he’s about to puke. And now the bartender at the scummiest dive bar he’s ever set foot in is calling him out for his lack of chivalry.
She pulls a beer for a man who’s barely managing to sit upright. “This world,” she says. “A woman says she needs help.”
She doesn’t need to tell him. No one needs to tell him. Tony knows. He knows. But it’s not his problem. Not at all. He has others. Many others. He wants to tell the bartender this—wants to explain that he’s drunk and it’s nine thirty and he needs to get home and somehow sober up and somehow pacify Stephanie and somehow drive his family to Ojai and somehow make it through the weekend. So, problems. Right?
Fuck it. Fuck it. “Fuck it,” he says.
The bartender looks over and shakes her head like nothing Tony could do or say would please her. Like his presence—his existence—is an insult.
“Fuck it,” Tony says again. He can’t let Britt go off like that. He can’t let her escape. Because that’s what he’d done with the naked runner. He’d let him go. He hadn’t caught him. He hadn’t tried hard enough. And the guy was in trouble. Or at least Britt thought he was. And she was drunk, staggering around Skid Row. And Tony was going to Ojai.
He’s been in this situation before. And look how that ended for him. Dead-end job. Pretending to care.
It wasn’t really his fault that the summer intern had wandered onto the el tracks. Not entirely.
Tony lunges for the exit, then pauses in the doorway to the King Eddy and takes a deep breath. He shakes his head side to side, feels his brain knock into his skull and settle. Then he runs.
For a few steps he feels terrific, like why doesn’t he run after a few beers all the time. Like he’s invincible. Like he could go on and on to the goddamn ocean if need be. But then he wants to vomit. In few steps a sickly perspiration erupts on his forehead. His legs feel boneless. He is nauseated. He has vertigo. He can’t keep a straight line.
He plunges down Fifth weaving wildly through the middle of the street. He turns south on Los Angeles. Then he dry-heaves into a wastepaper basket. He approaches Sixth.
Where the hell is she? Where did she go?
Downtown is waking up. The dingy stores on Los Angeles have lifted their roll gates, revealing windows filled with crap—gaudy, synthetic fabric, dusty disco lights, off-brand toys in sun-bleached boxes—that Tony can’t imagine anyone buying.
He runs another block then doubles back toward the King Eddy. Again he has to stop, support himself on a lamppost and take deep gulps of the unpleasant air to combat the urge to vomit.
This is dumb. This is fucking dumb. And pointless. Because she could be anywhere, could have run in any direction. And what he should do is go home. Get a coffee on the way and maybe some hand sanitizer. He should call the hotel from the cab, get an upgrade, a couple’s massage, organize an on-site sitter. Max out on all the comforts and pay his way out of this mess.
But then he sees her about half a block away talking to a man in a tent. He calls her name. She turns and begins to stagger north. He follows.
If the cops come, he’s screwed. It doesn’t look good—a drunk man chasing an equally drunk stranger through Skid Row. Especially after yesterday.
He calls her name again. She stops. He catches up to her and she catches him before he collapses. “Okay,” he says, “I’ll help.” Although he has no idea what he’s promising, no idea how helping her on this ill-formed quest is even possible.
“You’ll help me find James?”
“Yes,” Tony says. “Yes.”
He thinks back to his run earlier that morning, his mind scrolling through all those neighborhoods he’d never seen or noticed before—the unknown city stretching out on all sides, spreading inland, climbing toward the mountains, flowing down to the beach towns. And somewhere in all this is the naked runner. Maybe. Because he could be anywhere by now. He could have left the state. He could be dead.
“That guy,” Britt says, pointing to the phone in Tony’s hand. “We need to find James before that guy does. He’ll kill him.”
Tony almost laughs.
“Blake will kill him,” Britt repeats. Her tone is stony serious—sober as hell despite the way they’d wasted the morning.
“Why?” Tony asks.
“Revenge.”
But before he can ask Britt to explain, his phone is ringing again. Stephanie, of course. He switches it to Do Not Disturb. He’s in it now. “And the police?” Tony says.
“I told you before. You can’t go to the police. Promise? Promise?” Britt’s shaking his arm like she wants to tug the promise right out of him.
“Okay,” Tony says. The second promise in just as many minutes to a woman he doesn’t know.
Britt takes his phone and presses it to her head, like it’s going to transmit a revelation of where they should start their wild goose chase. “He was running down Main,” she says. “So the hotel, maybe. Maybe that’s a start.”
“What hotel?”
“There’s a place around here where James used to crash. Maybe he still does. Who knows. Who knows what he does.”
“And you haven’t checked?” Tony says. If she hasn’t checked, there’s a chance this could be over before it starts.
“Let’s go.” Britt slaps him on the back like they�
��re partners now—Nick and Nora.
She smokes a bidi on the way. Tony has to breathe through his mouth to avoid the smell.
They stop outside an enormous building on Main near Seventh while Britt finishes her smoke. The sign says they’ve arrived at the Cecil Hotel and from the people coming and going, it’s pretty clear this is a place Tony will never spend the night.
The doors to the hotel are dingy brass and the glass is smudged. While Britt grinds her butt in a large planter by the street, Tony shades his eyes and squints into the lobby. It’s grand and gaudy and run-down all at once. He can see some cheap brochures for tourists unfortunate enough to have mistaken this hotel for somewhere in the middle of it all.
A skinny blond man is checking in, presumably because he doesn’t know better. The clerk is giving him a hard time about something. Their conversation is getting tense, a fraught pantomime muted by the thick glass of the doorway.
Britt’s back at Tony’s side, their reflections obscuring the scene in the lobby. The man turns, pointing out onto the street—gesturing large, waving. The clerk is shaking his head vigorously.
Tony grabs Britt’s arm. Because it can’t be. It can’t be that easy.
That’s James—the naked runner right there, standing at the desk.
“Oh my God,” Tony says. He’s relieved. Not just that he doesn’t have to spend the day looking for James but that he’s okay, alive, standing in the hotel where he supposedly lives. He hasn’t been hit by car. He hasn’t fallen into some train tracks. He hasn’t been killed. Because if something had happened to him, if the kid turned up dead, missing, or whatever, it would always be hanging in the back of Tony’s mind that he hadn’t caught him—that he could have but didn’t. And whatever happened—that would be Tony’s fault. Always.
“Oh my God,” he says again. He wants to cry, which is probably partly due to the booze. “I can’t believe it. I can’t—”
He exhales deeply, setting free a tension he hadn’t noticed gripping his muscles and chest.
Britt pulls the door open. She barrels past Tony into the lobby, running full tilt. “James.” The man at the desk turns, but he doesn’t approach.
Britt skids to a halt. “Oh, fuck this.”
Now Tony can see his mistake. It’s James but not quite. Because this man’s arms are covered in full sleeve tattoos that Tony hadn’t noticed through the glass door. And there’s a sharpness to his features, an angry angularity he hadn’t seen on the naked runner.
The sour, vicious look on his face when he sees Britt is enough to stop Tony from coming closer. “Why are you here?” he says.
“Same as you—looking for your brother.”
“Go,” the man says. “Get out.”
“Excuse me?” Britt says. “Excuse me?”
“Last time I checked, this isn’t your life.”
“And when was the last time you checked? Let me see,” Britt says, tapping her lips. “I lived with your brother for years, and as I remember the number of times you checked was never.”
“Who do you think is paying for this hotel?” James’s brother turns back to the clerk as if that settles it and Britt should leave. But she stays where she is. The man turns. “Go,” he says. “Go!”
“No,” Britt says. “You’re the one who left and never came back.”
“Don’t tell me anything. Don’t talk about my family.” The man bangs his fist on the counter, scattering the desk clerk’s pens and sending a pile of brochures to the dirty marble floor. “Don’t—” He turns and takes a step toward Britt.
“You left him there,” Britt says. She’s shouting now, her voice echoing in the vast marble-floored lobby. “You left him—”
“I left him with you. And now you tell me that’s a bad thing.”
Britt lunges for him, but Tony catches her, pulls her back. She’s writhing and clawing like an animal.
“And who the hell are you?” the man says with a glance at Tony. “Who—” Then he looks from Tony to Britt and Britt back to Tony. “Oh, I get it. You’re the new one.”
“Owen, fuck off.” Britt is shaking in Tony’s grip.
“So she’s wrecking your home now?”
“No,” Tony says.
“Oh, I bet she is,” Owen says. “I bet she is. Or she will. And you don’t even know it.” He points at Britt. “You’re a dirty, fucking home wrecker. Now get the hell out and let me figure out what happened to my brother.”
“That is one thing you’ll never understand,” Britt says. She sounds confident, satisfied.
“I don’t know what you and my dad did to James. All I know is he got good and fucked up staying out in the desert with you.”
“That’s right and I’m never going to tell you,” Britt yells. “Ever. And you are not going to find him because you have no idea what kind of danger he’s in. You probably think he’s just off on his own trip. That it’s some cute and stupid adventure. But let me tell you—you have no idea. None.” Britt’s shouted herself hoarse. She’s kicking, spitting almost.
The desk clerk steps out from behind the desk. “Get her out,” he says to Tony. “She’s disturbing the guests.”
Tony looks around the lobby. The only guest he can see is an elderly man passed out in a fake leather chair, a free newspaper sliding off his lap.
Tony wrangles Britt out onto the street. Eventually she relaxes and lets herself be led. Just before the heavy door swings shut behind her she turns, “Fuck you, Owen Flynn!” Then she and Tony are on the street. “Asshole,” she says.
Tony steers her away from the hotel. After a few blocks, she calms.
“He’s an asshole,” Britt says. “I barely knew him, but that’s my lasting impression. Looks like he hasn’t changed.” She pulls out a bidi. “They’re twins, but he didn’t treat James like a brother. He just looked down on him because James stayed in the desert while Owen went to some rich kid school in the Palisades. And look at him now.” She’s fumbling with her lighter, and Tony has to help her get her smoke lit. “After the ranch burned, James went to him for help. His dad and I were God-the-fuck-knows-where. When James got to Los Angeles, Owen ignored him, pretended to his friends like he didn’t have a brother at all. So James drove all the way back out to the desert and lived in the ruins of the farm until his dad and I got back.” She grabs Tony’s arm. “He lived in a burned-down building in the desert for weeks all because Owen was too good for him. James was a weird kid before, especially after what we did. But after that trip to see Owen and those weeks alone on the burned ranch, he was totally changed—no more real world.”
“What did you do?” Tony asks.
“You know what? Maybe Owen’s right. I should go.” She starts walking east along Seventh Street, into the heavy heart of Skid Row.
“Where?”
“Home. Back to Indio. I’m a tennis coach. Can you believe that? I teach tennis to half-dead people at a retirement community.”
Tony can’t quite believe it. Except for the fact that she’s dressed in athletic clothes, he’s almost certain that she’s lying.
“I got lost and that’s where I wound up. So I get it. You think I don’t but I do. I fucking get it why you chased James down the freeway. I understand being stuck. I’m fucking stuck. And I know that you could see that he was unhinged from the everyday—that he had never played by the rules because the rules had never occurred to him. So you were right.”
With the last hour’s drinking beginning to congeal into a hangover, Tony can’t imagine he was right about anything—that he had ever once in his life been right about a single thing.
“Here’s what I know. Chasing James won’t do a thing. It won’t help you at all. Because what you need to do is find your initial mistake, the thing that got you stuck in the first place. That first error you made that made you the way you are now. And maybe if you find it, you can undo the damage.”
Tony knows what that is—or he thinks he knows. But maybe it went deeper than that stupidity
back in Chicago. Maybe it was whatever took him to that bar, whatever deluded him into thinking bottle service and private tables and partnerships in fancy law firms were the thing.
“I know how you felt when you saw him running down the freeway,” Britt says. “And for a moment I was happy for him too. But, then, I know too much.” She flicks her cigarette toward an approaching bus. “You can’t change yourself by grafting your life onto someone else’s. I know,” she says. “I tried.”
At the corner of San Pedro she stops walking. “What the fuck are we doing, Tony? What the fuck are we doing? This is a huge city, and he’s the most untethered person I know. He could be anywhere. Literally anywhere.”
Tony agrees but doesn’t say anything. They cross the street, avoiding a woman in a motorized wheelchair with a boom box strapped to the front.
“You know what my biggest mistake was? I tricked James into thinking that you could escape the worst thing you ever did by ignoring it.”
“What did you guys do?” Tony’s not sure he wants to know. But knowing will make this story complete.
“What did we do? We killed someone.”
Tony feels sick. Because this has finally gone too far. The smells and sights of the neighborhood are creeping in on him. He can’t breathe. He can’t think. And there’s something else in the air—a heady odor of fresh paint. “You what?”
“And now that man’s buddy is looking for James. Or maybe he’s already found him and it’s all too late.”
This is the moment when Tony knows it’s time to walk away. He takes Britt’s shoulder, draws her to a halt. He’s going to buy her a ticket back to the desert. He’s going to put her on that bus. Because she’s right—they won’t find James. But he can extract her from this mess. See her safely gone. That’s the least he can do. And that is what he has to do.
He takes a deep breath, searching for his serious dad voice. It’s time to cut their losses. And then he looks over her head. A young black man is rattling a can of spray paint. He aims the nozzle at a mural he’s painting on the side of the building that wraps around Crocker to Seventh. It takes Tony a second to understand what he’s seeing. And instead of finding the sober words to tell Britt that this charade ends here, he spins her around to show her the art on the wall.