Or so Sam would have said. Lydia would still need to repeat it a few hundred more times before she really accepted it. At the break Bob called to clear the air in the forlorn little gym, Johnny came up to the rancid coffee urn and hugged her.
"What's that for?" she laughed and hugged him back. There was a time only weeks before, when she would have blown clear through the roof.
"I dunno exactly," he confessed, embarrassed. But she gave him a gentle smile and a pat on the back to let him think it felt okay for her too.
She excused herself early again, but this time drew no reproachful frown from Bob. She hoped Sheri hadn't arrived yet and was thankful to find the parking lot empty of drivers. She stood in the shadow of the entrance and lit up a cigarette. And faced the depressing realization that all her big talk amounted to a passive sentence of death on her husband. She heard her words to the group and now detected a fatalism she hoped she would never bring herself to truly feel. But at least it didn't feel so selfish anymore, so much like it was all about her and her rickety little emotional shelter.
The blue BMW pulled into the far end of the parking lot. Lydia hugged the shadows to remain invisible a few minutes more. Sheri would be all full of Rudy talk, how she had bought him yet another dumpster-load of photography manuals and how-to books. The more Lydia tried to accept her husband's fate, the more Sheri lunged in to help her Rudy with his. She had seen something in him, both in the boat and in the water, something she had never found in another human being. She had gone from solo and dismissive to leaping on and grabbing the reins, without the slightest reality check in between. Or so it seemed. It wouldn't have mattered, if they hadn't got so damn involved in each other.
By the time Sheri leapt out and they hugged each other—they were doing a lot of that lately—and climbed back in, Lydia decided something. "Take the PCH up through Redondo," she said grimly. She had a point to make, before the girl drove her crazy. She just wasn't sure what it was. Sheri glanced at her quizzically. Redondo couldn't be more out of their way, and they both knew Sam would have a fit. But something in Lydia's tone prompted Sheri to take off and do as she was told. Oil refineries, strip malls, residential neighborhoods with blank windows passed in quick succession.
"I had the dream again," Lydia said. "Right in the middle of the damn group."
"You fell asleep?" Sheri looked unsure if she was supposed to be amused or horrified. The closer the two women grew, the more Lydia noticed these little snags in their mutual understanding.
"No, not exactly. It just hit me. Take the next left and slow down." Again, Sheri did as she was told. In Redondo, they cruised down to the Esplanade and around past Lydia's apartment. In the dark night, they passed the sliding glass doors boarded up with plywood, the deck outside a wreck of broken spars and smashed furniture. The next-door neighbor Nancy had been released from the hospital two days earlier. The tiniest of lights peeked out of the girl's apartment from where she had made the mistake of defying the anonymous intruders.
"Take your next left," Lydia said.
"Why are we doing this?" Sheri asked, genuinely hurt and perplexed, as if Lydia were deliberately provoking her. They drove past the remains of the studio, also boarded up with plywood, the fire scars and shadows still visible in the dark night. Lydia opened her window and let the breeze waft in the faint, rancid odor of burnt wood and hopelessness.
"Because this is the reality of it," Lydia finally answered, probably long after Sheri had forgotten her question. Lydia had more to add, but couldn't bring herself to slash so mercilessly at the younger woman's gossamer thread of a lifeline. We're sitting in that hellhole in South Gate, she thought silently instead. Waiting for a pair of invalids to climb out of their beds and rush to the rescue. But to the rescue of what? What good would it do to struggle, if they were all just going to wither away and die anyway? Or so her husband would have said.
Lydia had demanded retribution from her invalid Sam on the way down the Baja, justice for an anonymous eleven-year-old child addict and for the deep wounding of her own sensibilities. Since then, she had withdrawn her demand, only to reinstate it when the Smullens upped the ante by destroying everything that mattered to her here in Redondo. Only now, the yo-yo of her outrage was spinning off the other way again, and all she wanted was for it to stop. Because none of this charred wood and glass and none of the trivialities it protected would hold back the inevitable. None of it would bring her husband flying out of his dying shell into the ancient, mistake-laden history she so desperately wanted to revisit and relive and get right an impossible second—and sober—time around.
The move into South Gate and the horrifying shadow of Sam's youth was such a bad idea. All the ugliness, all the confusion in Lydia's own demands and desires. This wasn't her. Yes, she wanted action out of Sam, any action, any sign of life, but not if it meant a plunge into the cesspool of his family's history. What good would it do to cheat one face of death, only to fall for another?
She finally relented and waved out at the night to send Sheri speeding off for Artesia and the quickest exit out of this improvised South Redondo torture chamber. The girl's relief reverberated through the car and threatened to bring on another cheerful gush over her Rudy and his astonishing talent. But Lydia headed that off by closing her eyes and sagging into the passenger seat, to feign sleep and ponder dying husbands and vengeful Smullens. A twinge of guilt later over deliberately provoking the girl, she opened her eyes again and let Sheri launch into it. The girl's enthusiasm might threaten strangulation, but someone had to supply the mindless, pointless desire in this utterly hopeless tangle.
Chapter 35
Sam knew exactly what Lydia was thinking, how the ugly house and its uglier memories were suffocating her, dragging her down. He could see her trying to turn off her hope, to do him a favor by letting him sink into the pit of his despair. He could see it killing her every day she woke him, automaton-style, with the ghastly broths she still fed him. She hadn't forced him to walk since they arrived in South Gate and he physically collapsed from the Baja trip. She mistakenly took his retreat here for a final failure of all hope.
But what was he supposed to do? They had to hide out somewhere while he figured things out. The news about the Smullens ratcheting up the stakes by wrecking and burning everything they owned had only reinforced that. Not that Sam gave a shit about all those worthless possessions, but Lydia was another matter. Things mattered to her, and not out of some crass materialism. They were all the tiny anchors she had thrown over the stern in a life awash in the flood of their marriage.
Sam glanced across the gloomy, decrepit living room at the twenty-eight-year-old boy lying on the makeshift daybed on the other sofa. Sheri had spent their first day back setting up this unsubtle sanitarium for two. Another huge irritation. After Sam made the off-handed mistake of handing over the camera on the way back from the Baja, Sheri had seized on the connection. Now, the young woman was a walking tube of emotional crazy glue. Sam could smell ambition from a thousand miles away. If Sheri didn't let up on her neurotic attempts to turn her boyfriend into Pulitzer Junior, he was going to haul off and hit her.
Rudy lay across the room under a growing pile of manuals and idiot guides. Pretty soon, the weight of all that useless paper was going to suffocate him. But he was getting none of it.
"Let me tell you everything you'll ever need to learn about photography," Sam finally said.
"What? Leave your atheism on the dock?"
That stopped Sam. He couldn't help laughing. "You heard that speech too?"
"When I was fourteen, right after Donny pitched me into the water."
Sam laughed uproariously, laughed until it hurt his incisions. He couldn't help it. Every so often, the intuitive young jerk came out with a crack more wise than he could imagine. But he was still a dumb punk who couldn't see beyond the tip of his nose. Speaking of which. "Where are your glasses?"
"What's it to you?" Rudy's tone showed that he knew the sound of
contempt when he heard it. Sam figured he had probably heard it enough to recognize the real thing.
"Don't give me all that vanity shit. Put them on." Rudy reluctantly found them and complied. "What do you see?" Sam asked.
"I see an ugly old fart with an attitude."
Sam laughed and nodded. "Fine. Now take them off and tell me the difference."
"What's your point?"
"What's the difference? To your eyes, not your under-nourished brain."
"Fine. You're out of focus—"
"Meaning?"
"You're blurred! What do you want me to say?" Rudy threw the glasses on the table between them.
Sam said, "You keep reading all those manuals, trying to figure out why the things you see don't show up in the photograph. Before, you were just out there, absorbing and shooting, but now all of a sudden, you think there's some technical formula will let you pretend you're in control, make the world conform to how you want to see it. But it doesn't exist. The camera is just another pair of glasses, another way of seeing things. The world doesn't change inside your camera. It's how your eyes talk to your brain that has to change."
This obviously made no sense to Rudy, so Sam tried another tack and pointed. "Here, give me that thing." Rudy tossed across the camera. Sam spun a few of the dials and tossed it back. He set the scene with, "You're behind a wall in a firefight with a platoon of soldiers. I'm the enemy. You want a photo of me shooting at you, but you don't know where or how far away I am. So you have no choice but to raise your head above the wall to take my picture."
Rudy hesitated, glancing at the dials. He started to make adjustments, but Sam grabbed a pillow and threw it at him.
"Hey! What was that for?"
"Because you're dead, asshole! You've been shot through the head! Now take my fucking picture!"
Rudy quickly set to the dials, but not quick enough. Another pillow hit his head.
"What the—"
"Dead again! By the time you get a photo, the war's over, and everybody's gone home!"
"What the fuck!"
"You're thinking! You have to stop thinking! Call this the Donny school of photography. I'm going to keep kicking you off the boat until you stop thinking and take the fucking picture!"
Sam had made his point, so he let up on the young hoodlum and showed him a minimum set of rules for working his camera. Then he took back the pillows and ran Rudy through it again. The kid got it, no question he was a natural. It was only a matter of time before he would outrace any snail in the garden. Finally, Sam glanced out the window and realized how late it was. The Lydia-Sheri invasion would be hitting the beaches any minute. He struggled grumpily off the sofa and motioned for Rudy to follow.
"Get dressed," he told him. He went to the telephone in the hall and glanced at the names and numbers still scrawled across the wallpaper in Henry's clumsy, illiterate handwriting. He dialed a number and waited. "You still in business?" he asked. He gave the address and chuckled with ersatz nostalgia through the cascade of the limo service owner's happiness to hear from him. Then he hung up and took Rudy down into the bunker.
"The drunk built it during the Cuban Missile Crisis," he explained. Houses in South Gate were nearly all built on concrete slabs. The bunker was the talk of the neighborhood.
"The drunk?" Rudy asked.
Sam caught himself and laughed. "It was my brother's name for his father."
"You had different fathers?"
"No, we had the same drunk for a father. It was just our way of distancing him."
"At least you had a father."
"Yeah, you're probably right. You probably had to learn all by yourself how to beat the shit out of mouthy children." Which wasn't entirely honest in Sam's case. His older brother had gleefully leapt in to wreak vengeance on the vicious old drunk for every hair he touched on Sam's head.
But at least it shut Rudy up. Sam glanced through the racks of dusty nineteen-sixties-vintage cans and boxes of rotten food and paranoia, and spotted the flashlight on the otherwise empty wooden bookshelf along one wall. "Here, help me with this," he said. They pulled the shelf out to reveal a hidden opening into another room. The flashlight was dead, but unnecessary. Henry must have installed the lighting since the last time Sam came down here.
"Jesus," Rudy said. The second room spilled over with racked weapons and boxes of money. The machine guns, pistols, grenade launchers, and ammunition lay in immaculate rows and piles with nothing but a congealed film of dust to mar their well oiled finishes. The cash, on the other hand, lay strewn about, carelessly tossed into boxes and foul-smelling piles on the floor. Nothing could have better illustrated the warp of Henry's mind.
"Henry never gave a shit about the money," Sam said, as much to himself as to Rudy. He took a handful of the less moldy bills and handed them to the boy. "Where'd you say your car was?"
"In Santa Monica at a Park-N-Ride near the airport."
"You still got the keys?"
"I can wire it."
"Of course you can. Come on, let's go before they get home."
"Go where?"
"We're going to take pretty pictures."
Chapter 36
The gleaming rental limousine exited from the cul de sac in South Gate, just as Sheri and Lydia were turning in. Lydia followed it with her eyes. It didn't take a genius to figure out which of the families on this working class block would be splurging on a limo ride tonight, but for some reason she let it go. Maybe it was the wave of relief that swept over her at seeing Sam doing anything more than lolling around on a daybed in his disgusting mausoleum.
She climbed out in the driveway between Henry's house and the cookie-cutter two-bedroom bungalow on its left. According to Sam, Henry bought the houses on either side of his and dug emergency underground passageways between them. Fields of fire and crossfire complemented seemingly random gaps in the fence that separated the properties from the railroad tracks. All the stuff of a deeply unpopular man daring the world to come in and get him. On the outside, all three of the forlorn structures looked and smelled like too many souls had already passed through here on their way to hell. First, Sam's father, in a mystery drunken accident. Then his mother, still hiding from the disaster of her family behind the beads of her rosary. And then Henry himself, spiteful and angry to the end. Or so Sam had told her.
In the empty living room, Sheri dug through the pile of books she had bought, as if expecting to find her precious little project of a boyfriend hidden underneath. Lydia suppressed a snide comment and brushed by the girl into the kitchen. The door down to the bunker still lay open, Sam's way of telling Lydia to shut up and get out of the way. Hallelujah for that! The oversized praying hands of a framed velvet Jesus—Sam must have knocked it askew on its nail—pointed down the stairs, but Lydia needed no directions. Two minutes later, Sheri followed her down to the weapons cache to gawk at all the firepower.
"Oh my God!" Sheri burst. "They've gone to kill them!"
Lydia laughed. She couldn't help it. "You obviously don't know your man very well. My Sam would never deign to touch one of these beauties. Here," she said and handed Sheri her purse. "They came down here for the money. I have no idea why."
Lydia forgot about the puzzle of Sam's mind and walked the gun racks like a connoisseur, fingering and touching here and there, until she settled on an M-16. She picked it up and hefted it appreciatively. The AKs across from her might be the simpler weapon, but there was still no substitute for the finest automatic rifle in the world. At least when Henry was busy collecting. She picked up another rifle and handed off both to Sheri, already glancing around for a supply of clips, when she realized the younger woman had frozen, horrified.
"What?" Lydia asked.
"You don't expect me—"
"Get a grip! Here, take them. What's the matter?"
Sheri held her hands by her sides. "Don't you remember what happened to me?"
Lydia sighed. This had been coming for days. "Judging by the fact y
ou're standing here, I'd say it happened to the other three. And good riddance too."
"How can you be so callous? I killed them in cold blood!"
"I would hardly call defending your man and yourself cold blood. Is that what's bothering you, or was it that you finally jumped in and took a side?"
Sheri threw Lydia's purse to the floor and ran out. Lydia didn't care. Maybe she was a bitch, but the girl had been driving all of them crazy since they got here. If she wasn't badgering Rudy about the photography, she was agonizing over her Dastardly Deed and all of its horrifying consequences for the health and sanity of the planet. Lydia didn't mean to sound unsympathetic, but enough was enough. The girl was grating on everyone. Lydia found a half-dozen clips in perfect condition and managed to haul the two rifles through the main bunker and up into the kitchen.
"What's going on in your devious mind?" she asked her absent husband. Sam knew how comfortable she was with guns, especially since the fiasco at the hospital. Surely, he would have expected something like this out of her. But then, maybe not. Men could be so dense sometimes, especially when they had sailed off into hero land. She was still checking over the two rifles, when Sheri appeared in the living room door. The girl had evidently prepared a speech, but at least she wasn't crying.
"Whatever you're planning, Lydia, you're on your own. I won't—"
"You won't what?" Lydia asked. "You won't defend your man against any of his failings that you can't be blamed for? No wonder you're so lonely. Now shut up and take the rifles out to the car."
Sheri finally caved in under the barrage of condescension, but she might as well have been a new father handling a baby's diapers. They exited to the black night and stowed the rifles and clips in the trunk. Out on Firestone Boulevard, Sheri started to turn west for Redondo, Western Avenue, and the gruesome shadows of their histrionic fate. Lydia rolled her eyes and surprised the girl by telling her to head the opposite way and north on the 710.
Exposure Page 17