by Peter Craig
By the time they had passed downtown, onto the Hollywood Freeway, she was saying wistfully that she had probably missed her chance for that kind of “hard-core academia,” and that now, if she ever got to Portland, she was going to be a tree sitter.
“You go up there and you just sit in this tree house made out of ropes, so that the logging companies can’t cut it down without killing you. It’s really beautiful, when you think about it.” She said that there were whole species of rare molds and fungi that lived in old-growth forests, and the only way to protect them from extinction was to have dedicated kids up there. She figured it was a good opportunity to make herself useful, fugitive or otherwise.
“You’re going to sit in a tree to save some kind of mold?”
“You just asked me what I wanted to do. That’s the current plan, if I can get up there. I mean, at least I’ll be doing something meaningful for once in my selfish, miserable life.”
“Sit in a tree and get high?”
“They have rules, I think—that you have to be sober.”
“Like hell they do. Nobody would do it who wasn’t fucked up.”
“What are you then? Some kind of right-wing freak? Were you one of those Hell’s Angels who beat up hippies all the time?”
“I’m just not real worried about a tree.”
“Well, pretty soon we might not have any more.”
“Sounds like a tragedy.”
“The death of an entire ecosystem. Yeah, it is. Total destruction of the planet.”
“I’m crying already.”
Through thickening traffic, exiting beside the hills and empty lots near the Hollywood Bowl, she led him to the apartment building, a giant stucco slab just off La Brea, where the early-bird hookers were already working their corners in latex skirts, strutting between palm trees and the gated entrances to underground garages. The building was a faded mustard color, rising tall amid the groves. Lydia tried to buzz in beside a row of drooping birds of paradise, but there was no one home. When a listless Russian kid opened the door, Lydia said, “Spasibe.” He smiled with crooked teeth and replied, “Whatever,” in a thick accent.
The elevator was broken, so they took the stairs to the sixth floor. Lydia said that she didn’t have a key, so they were screwed if her friend Shannon was still in Vegas.
When Lydia knocked on the apartment door, it came unlatched by itself. She looked back at her father, eyes wide, and said, “That’s not good.”
“She’s probably home.”
“No, no, no,” said Lydia. “People lock their doors here. This isn’t Seinfeld.”
Her father pushed past her into the apartment, where he saw that the place had been torn apart.
Lydia tiptoed around him, moving into the center of the disaster. The floor was covered with CDs and broken cases, the smashed and gutted wiring of a stereo system, fragments of mugs and plates, uprooted plants, and the remains of a shattered glass table. Someone had pissed on the couch. An aquarium had been dropped, transparent rocks piled among kitty litter and torn papers, and, in the debris, a few exotic fish lay motionless with bulging eyes. The room smelled like a bucket of chum. Hissing and traumatized, the cat still roamed around overturned bookshelves and smashed computer chairs.
While Lydia sifted through the wreckage, Link checked the lock: the wood around it was splintered; someone had bluntly pried open the door with a crowbar.
Lydia started packing a duffel with the frantic pace of a looter. She searched a table beside the phone, where cards had been plucked from a Rolodex, flipping through ripped-up address books and notebooks, whispering to herself. She found what looked to be a giant scrapbook. “They read my diary, I think.” In a drawer, she found a pastel-colored cell phone and said, “Yes.”
She dialed the phone and moved back into the bedroom. Buried under a mess of pillows and overturned kitchen stools, another phone began ringing. Lydia shouted, “Can you get that?” Link hunted for the ring around drifting feathers and album sleeves, finally digging up a pink phone. He put his ear to it without speaking, and then he heard his daughter’s voice in the receiver: “Daddy? So good to hear your voice. What are you doing?”
“I’m in the living room.”
“Wow, that’s great. I’m in the bedroom.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t use your cell phone.”
“Okay, I’ll be right there.”
She came out of the doorway with another armful of clothes, and she threw the cell phone to him across the room. Link said, “Why don’t you quit fucking around and tell me who did this?”
“Did what?” asked Lydia, standing with her legs spread over the drifting remains of a stabbed pillow. “I’m just really, really messy.” She snorted, not quite following through with a laugh; and then she seemed to get lost in some autistic daydream. “Toothbrush!”
For a while, he could hear her digging through the bathroom, moving a broken shower door. Link waited beside the kitchenette, watching thick droplets of something ooze down from the refrigerator door. On the counter lay a black case. Carefully, he opened it to reveal a grimy clarinet, sullied with breath and fingerprints, but seeming almost like a living thing with its rows of valves and latches. Lydia had been in the bathroom too long. The sink ran, the toilet flushed. She emerged with rejuvenated pink coloring in her cheeks, nodding at the trash around her as if for an argument she had already heard. “So—we’re out of here. All my camping supplies, my scrapbook, my—oh, nice work! You found the clarinet.”
“You play this thing?”
“Yeah, you deadhead. I wrote you like a thousand letters about it. My mother was seriously boot camp about it. You want to hear me play something?”
Link was chewing his lips and beard, so angry at the suspicion that she might have taken a bump in the other room, but he sat down and closed his eyes, figuring it would be better not to confront her while she was high—the little c-word, the foulmouthed linguist. He took a deep breath and said, “Make it short.”
She took the clarinet and perched on the edge of the couch. She readied her fingers, curling them up into a long row like the legs of an overturned centipede, and she placed her lips over the reed.
He listened to the song. Her fingers rose and fell, and she bobbed her head around to the melody, eyes focused downward and faintly crossed. Link watched the varying pucker of her mouth, and noticed how it was the same shape as when she exhaled cigarette smoke. When she finished, she smiled and looked eager for approval. He studied the cracked rosy streaks on her face, her dilated pupils, and the sweat on her forehead.
“Pretty,” he said.
She told him it was Ravel. She spoke so rapidly now that he could hardly keep up. Apparently, she had once done a recital of Benny Goodman, but had botched it so badly that her mother had taken it as a personal attack; she was okay at classical, but she “sucked dick” at jazz. She could play the piano also, but never well enough, because she had these big, awful fingertips, thick and bulbous and not at all feminine. They weren’t suited to musical endeavors. Her mother hadn’t thought of the possibility, but had assumed that Lydia would grow up “prissy and cute and dainty” like she was. Instead, she had sprouted into a “gigantic buffoon” with the hands of a bear; and, though she believed that she might have had musical talent in her mind, or in her heart, or soul, or wherever real music was conceived, she was born with the wrong hands to deliver it.
“We should go,” said Link.
In the car for the next hour, she alternated between manic stories and attempts to play the clarinet while Link swerved through traffic. She wanted to play “Name That Tune” with him, and she was delighted with herself whenever she performed some classic rock flourish as if redone by skittish fairies.
Meanwhile, Link was watching a suspicious white car in the rearview mirror, which matched his speed and lane changes for at least thirty miles. Lydia played Deep Purple and Steppenwolf; she played Led Zeppelin and Jefferson Airplane. Her giddiness lasted all the way t
o the train yards and factories in Fontana; and when the sprawl of incorporated cities gave way to hills and horse ranches, she asked if he had known Grace Slick? No. Jerry Garcia? No. Sonny Barger? “Sure, met him back when he got out of Folsom for a while in seventy-seven.” Did he ever go to any of Ken Kesey’s parties?
“Where did you learn all this shit?” asked Link.
“I had an English class where we read The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and then I did this extra-credit report on outlaw biker clubs, because you were a one-percenter.”
Scanning the headlights behind him, Link noticed how, whether he braked or accelerated, the white car maintained the same skilled distance. Link had the sense it was a cop, maybe from a stakeout around the building.
“What kind of teacher would let you do that?”
“Oh, he wanted me, this guy. He was all like—we’re going to work hand in hand; you’re so talented, but so unfocused. Yeah, right. I know where he wanted me to focus.”
She started playing a Police song on the clarinet, the one about the teacher and the underaged girl, while Link glanced at the mirror and noticed that the white car was closing the gap now, possibly trying to get a better look at his plates.
“That’s what all that tuition was for?”
“Don’t get preachy in your old age,” said Lydia, frolicking into his shoulder, in a way that seemed suddenly too kittenish. She hovered against him, her hair smelling like the shampoo from his lousy shower. “I know your whole story.”
“Yeah, what’s that?”
She rotated so that her back rested against the dark passenger window, and she put her bare feet onto his lap, wiggling her toes. The lights of the last little cities, like afterthoughts, rolled past her shadow. She said, “I’m serious. My mother must have told stories about you more than anything else. How you guys rode all over, and you were this psycho bar brawler. Couldn’t keep out of a fight. If anybody looked at her twice, you beat the hell out of him. Is that true?”
“No.”
“She would tell that shit at dinner parties. Everybody was all: Wow, that woman really lived it up; she’s got a wild side. That’s what everybody would say. But you know what? She was a lousy lay. A CPR dummy.”
“That’s no way to talk about your mother, kid.”
“Yeah, but I know. For a fact. You want to know how I know?”
“Not really.”
“You’re not even one little bit curious?”
“No.”
He looked up and saw a patrol car now surging along the slow lane, flanking them. Link’s hands were sweating, and he tried to calculate in his head how many parole violations he had made in the last twenty-four hours by hiding this girl and her nine-millimeter handgun, whatever she had done, her duffel probably full of broken evidence.
She rolled her head back against the closed window, lights soaring past her darkened face, and she said, “I know because every guy she was ever with—well, not every guy, but practically every guy—a pretty significant percentage, I would say—”
Link slowed the car and eased into a pocket behind the white car, which decelerated rapidly with flaring taillights. The patrol car pulled around and passed him on the left side, and Link wondered why they were stalling.
“—all her boyfriends, husbands, you name it, sooner or later, they would make some kind of move on me. What does that tell you?”
Link suddenly lost track of the two cars.
Lydia wiggled her toes on his lap.
“Are you shitting me?”
“No,” she said. “Honestly. I’d say pretty much every guy in her life tried something on me, at some point or another. Except you.” She cleared hair from her face. “Of course, you never really had that opportunity.”
Link responded to this as if she had come up on him with a knife. He grabbed her bare feet and threw them off, then he jerked the car into the emergency lane. The white car didn’t stop in time, and, as if avoiding a confrontation too early, it pulled off the freeway at the exit about two hundred yards ahead. Stopped under a bluish streetlight, Lydia’s face looked glossy with sweat. She had a huge, tickled smile, as if she were winning a game of tag.
Link said, “Stop it.”
“Stop what?”
“This bullshit. Stop it. Right now.”
“What bullshit?”
“It’s not cute—it’s disgusting.”
“I’m sorry I disgust you.”
“Number one, don’t talk that way about your mother. She’s got her problems like anybody else, but I don’t want to listen to your bullshit theory about her.”
“Like you even know her.”
“Second thing—you tell me some motherfuckers put their hands on you, you better give me names and addresses, because I will hunt them down and smash their fucking teeth in. You don’t tell me that shit like it’s funny. It’s not. I’m going to firebomb their houses. You hear me? I will turn fucking serial killer right here in this car.”
At this, the smile left her face.
He continued, “And don’t you dare play me like some kind of punk. You got at least a gram of speed in you right now, and you’re talking to me like I’m just another asshole. I’m not. I’m your asshole father. I held you in my hand, one goddamn hand, when you were no bigger than a Twinkie. You got to be out of your mind talking to me like you just did. If you can’t treat me with some respect, then we got a big problem on our hands.”
She replied, “That’s just what I figured. Respect. Of course. You have all my undying respect, dearest Father.” She spoke as if dictating a letter to him in prison, then she made a robotic pivot in her seat to face the road ahead. He draped his hands over the wheel; she braced hers against the glove compartment.
“Anyway,” he said, “it’s good we stopped. Some John Le Fucker was trailing us home.”
When Link made it back to the trailer with his daughter, at a little past midnight, he was confident that he had lost the white car in the San Gabriel Valley. While Lydia watched the black-and-white TV, Link searched for his sponsor’s new cell phone number, cursing his poor memory. He wrote it in marker across the back of a flier, which he taped beside the phone. Whispering, so that Lydia couldn’t eavesdrop, he told Kirby that he was inches away from giving up and getting shit-faced for good. He might not even drive to the liquor store; he could just get a straw and drink the antifreeze out of his radiator. Kirby gave him a speech, every phrase of which Link had heard before, like lyrics in a hit country-western song; but when he was finished, Link thanked him and grabbed a Dr Pepper. He sat outside on his steps in the cold wash of desert air, listening to laughter from a talk show inside.
From far down the highway, a car approached. It passed and swung suddenly into a U-turn through the gravel along the road. It hovered with the engine rumbling and a stereo reverberating through closed windows—a late-sixties Chevy Impala convertible. The sound died, the headlights faded, and the car became a silhouette near the one pale streetlight.
Four shadows rose out of the opening doors.
Link had seen this kind of swagger practically every day of his life; he had learned the nuances of it like the grammar of a primitive language. The rolling of the shoulders, the dangling of the arms. Before he could see their faces, he knew that two of them were dangerous, one of them was questionable, and one was a punk. He knew that they had guns in their waistbands from their altered strides and the way their shirts hung unevenly.
They emerged out of the dimness and into the outskirts of his porch light. Two wore three-quarter-length pants with tube socks pulled high and Eighteenth Street symbols emblazoned across their arms and necks. One of them had a giant tat that read “El Salvador,” which looked scratched in by a homemade gun. Some of the tattoos on the thicker, shorter cholo showed that he was CLCS (Columbia L’il Cycos), a clique near MacArthur Park. He also had a brand on his fist that read “Kanpol,” which Link knew meant “southerner” in Nahuat
l, the Aztec language.
“Can I help you gentlemen?” Link asked.
They didn’t answer until they had formed a semicircle around him. The third was a long-haired white kid wearing an L.A. Kings jersey, with the Brotherhood shamrock on his forearm. This was interesting: If this kid was working with the others, then he was likely NLR, a Nazi Lowrider, a newer prison and street gang, an enforcement arm of the Aryan Brotherhood that collaborated sometimes, secretly, with Chicano gangs.
The fourth kid seemed like a prospect, scrawny and loud, with a fuzzy little mustache and peroxide in his hair. He had definitely never done time, and he looked too anxious to prove himself. He was sniffling and groaning, as if sick with a head cold, yet he spoke first: “Yeah, man. We want tattoos.”
“I’m not open.”
“The sign says ‘Or by appointment,’ so we want an appointment.”
“Come back tomorrow.”
“Nah, man. Not tomorrow,” said El Salvador. “Right now. I want some shit on my arm. Like a big skull or something.”
“Or a heart with a girl’s name in it,” said the prospect.
“Yeah,” agreed NLR. “On my dick.” He grabbed himself, and the young prospect broke into such laughter that he needed to take large twisting steps around the gravel to restore his poker face.
“Go home,” said Link.
“We got money,” said NLR. “That’s bad business, turning us away.”
“Yeah, don’t judge us by our looks,” said El Salvador. “Judge us for who we are on the inside.”
“Our money is good.”
“I’m not judging you,” said Link. “I’m closed. I’m going to bed in a minute.”
The prospect said, “What if I said I wanted this bitch’s name on my stomach, yo?” He pulled up his shirt and showed his thin torso, free of ink, a Glock nestled diagonally into his loose pants, matching the one in Link’s bathroom. “Lydia Jane,” he said. “L-I-D . . . some shit like that.”
“Not today.”
“And her picture under it.”