Be the One

by April Smith

  Suddenly he gripped her wrists.

  “They call me the Black Panther. Give me a kiss.”

  She pried off his fingers like growing vines.

  “Dlo kler va koule devan ou,” the old man said, a blessing. “Clear water will flow in front of you.”

  Holding up the Mama Juana to the dashboard light she could see a pale curling unctuous river of essential oils that had leached out of the medicinals into the gin. Watching it twine the dark herbs and rise to the surface like thoughts, like dreams, Cassidy became lost in the tiny forest of stalks and leaves trapped inside the crystalline world of the bottle. The heavy saturated liquor stamped an acrid burn in the back of the throat like pot, like sinking in extreme slow motion into the mother herself, giving up consciousness in her many arms.

  Joe was driving. She clenched the thick curly hair at his collar and pulled his head back so his throat was exposed.

  “You’re turning me on but I can’t see.”

  She released him. The road had been a tunnel of black, their route a maze that curved and connected in incomprehensible patterns. The stadium, heads of dolls in bottles, Río Blanco and the sugar mill, were floating points that shifted and changed with every turn.

  Cassidy, so good at maps, had left all markers behind.

  Some people were talking about being afraid but it was hard to tell who because their voices kept fading in and out like the sound on an old-time radio.

  “Baseball is all about fear.”

  An interesting theory. She’d have to discuss that with Gregg.

  “… The hitter … facing the enemy.”

  Yes, she’d heard that one and also about—

  “All my life. Major league ball.”

  Afraid of getting hit by the pitch? She laughed. You never get up thinking I’m not going to hit the ball—

  “It is very funny—”

  Lots of times I’ve—

  “… little dribbler … checked bunt…”

  See, but I get up there and I want it.

  “This is kind of embarrassing to confess, but I once had a pissing contest with a boy and almost won.”

  She was hanging out the window of the speeding car throwing up without discomfort, leaving nothing but a trail of weightless confetti on a wet wind.

  The darkness had yielded the Colonial Hotel, a motor court by US standards, perched on the ocean. The place looked closed for the night. A few cars were parked in the lot, desultory spikes of light shooting up the peach-colored walls.

  “Wait a second. I own a fucking hotel,” Joe kept saying as Alberto directed him to park in the shadows.

  They had found a perfect grove of coconut palms. Joe and Cassidy got out, instantly enveloped by a warm humid breeze and the ripe apricot smell of copa de oro. Everything was blowing. A light rain off the ocean.

  They walked through the palm trees to a small crescent beach on an inlet where high waves were falling. They kissed and the kiss became insatiable. Slowly Joe sank to his knees in the sand and she followed, finding his lips, entangling her fingers in his hair.

  “You taste like bread and coffee and sugar,” she whispered, tasting each again and again, lost in sensation, nothing but warm wind and knowing hands. She wanted to roll in his flesh like a dog.

  Joe said, “Kamaki.”

  Cassidy giggled. “What?”

  “ ‘Fish in a barrel.’ The way we were on Santorini, the island of my youth, the girls—”

  “Excellent!” shrieked Cassidy. “The girls of your youth!”

  “English girls. Tourists. My cousin had the record for the most in one summer. Fifty.”

  “Fifty!” Cassidy laughed so hard she couldn’t see through the tears.

  Alberto remained in the shadows, staring at an iguana which had been looking at him for the last eternity. With the approach of the storm the ocean was crazy, the darkness beyond the hotel filled with endless thundering concussion.

  “Alberto!” Joe called. “Remember this! You have to be kamaki.”

  He got up and strutted.

  “We don’t know how to do it,” he confessed to the boy. “Women teach us.”

  Alberto smiled slowly.

  “Sí?”

  “Oh, sí. Here is a beautiful woman. Look at her. Read her mind. She doesn’t want us to miss beauty. We’re just butterflies, you and I, we transform the beauty of the universe into physical energy and then we get it back in a flashing moment of ideal happiness. We want it to last, to repeat, to be forever—”

  He knelt behind Cassidy, gathering her hair over and over like a male courtesan, sometimes slumping completely forward as if momentarily blacking out. Cassidy had stayed easily upright, supporting his sloppy weight against her back.

  The last thing she remembers, she had been invincible.

  Edith is barking, that sharp warning yelp that goes along with hurtling herself at the door and sliding down on her nails.

  Cassidy gets up from the sofa, tying the belt on a lavender terry bathrobe. Four years ago her color was lavender. What are you going to do?

  She expects it to be one of the Laguna Beach cops, but through the peephole sees that it is Joe.

  She checks her watch. 10:35 p.m. The patrol car must have just made its ten o’clock check. She opens the door.

  “Can I come in?”

  She waits, arms folded. Joe is wearing a black unconstructed linen jacket and drawstring pants, no shirt, his contrite face no less handsome in the zinc yellow porch light.

  “Let’s not throw it all away.”

  He pries her arms apart and takes her hands. Reluctantly, she steps into a stiff embrace. Then Nora moves out of the darkness and follows inside.

  “We came to say we’re sorry,” she says.

  “We are?”

  Cassidy pulls away. “What are you doing here?”

  “We’re here as family,” answers Joe.

  Cassidy looks at them together—Nora’s jeans ripped artfully at the knee, shocks of thick black hair like her father’s, and a fierce entitlement they both possess, completely self-created, without lineage or crown.

  “Anybody want a beer?”

  “What do you think, Dad, could you handle a beer?”

  “Sure, I’ll take a beer. Thank you for having us in your home.”

  “Did I have a choice?”

  She distributes Coronas and they sit on the secondhand plaid-and-maple furniture in front of the Malibu tile fireplace.

  Joe suddenly doesn’t seem to know what to say. He smiles oddly and scratches at his chest hair.

  “What I want to express”—bowing his head, pinching the place where his heavy eyebrows knit— “… Look. It’s silly to be upset over who owns the title on a beach house—”

  Cassidy’s leg starts kicking.

  “I’ll tell you anything you want to know about Alicia.”

  “Three facial surgeries,” supplies Nora.

  “I don’t care about Alicia.”

  “I know how you feel,” says Nora. “I was jealous, too, at the beginning. But really, they’re just friends. She gave him the house because she’s living with an art dealer in London. Truth.”

  Cassidy’s leg keeps kicking.

  “So those paintings in the house aren’t yours, either. They belong to Alicia’s friend, the art dealer in London.”

  “They’re mine.”

  “At this point, Joe, why should I believe anything you say?”

  Joe gets up. “Let’s go.”

  Nora, “Wait, Dad, hold on—”

  “Why? This is hopeless. She won’t talk to me. She hangs up on me.” The finger jabbing angrily, “I shouldn’t let you get away with that.”

  “Then don’t. Then leave.”

  Nora grabs her father’s arm. “Stay. Talk. Work it out. She’s good for you, Dad, better than the neurotic gold-digging cunts you usually go out with.”

  “You shut up,” he tells his daughter.

  “Me?”

  Joe is on his feet
, facing Cassidy.

  “I’ve had it up to here, but I’m going to try this one last time, because all I want right now is for this whole ugly thing to go away. I offer this in Alberto’s best interest, so try to see it that way. Let’s be brutally honest. He’s a kid with potential who has about a one percent chance of ever playing major league ball. You know the stats better than I. He’s cheap Latin labor, there are hundreds like him, and he’s already got some strikes. Bad attitude. Run-in with the cops. You told me yourself, he’s not on his game. You want him to be a star, but what does he really want? I’ll tell you: a new home for mama and a hundred channels. I’m not being racist, I’ve spent a lot of time down there. So why don’t we cut to the chase? I can write a check right now for more than he would ever make in baseball.”

  “If? Say it. If?”

  “If he does the right thing and turns himself in. I’ll get him a lawyer. I’ll pay whoever we have to pay. This is fixable. Let’s be smart and get on with our lives.”

  Cassidy says, “No.”

  Joe smacks her across the face.

  “You don’t say no.”

  She weaves.

  “You don’t talk back. And you never hang up on me.”

  He hits her again.

  Nora screams, “Don’t fight!”

  She’s bitten her tongue. He’s cracked her nose. Blood is gushing in astonishing volume.

  All Cassidy can see are pinpoints of light. She is dizzy, listing sideways.

  Joe says, “I gave you lots of chances.”

  She can make him out, blurry, moving to the left. She puts her shoulder down and suddenly releases all the torque in her body in one quick lash that lands him in the jaw.

  You can hear it.

  “Daddy!”

  Stumbling over furniture.

  And Nora, cowering and crying like a child.

  Cold air blows through the open door. Cassidy hasn’t bothered to close it behind them, sitting on the kitchen floor holding an ice pack to the mother of all nosebleeds. She has gone through all the clean rags in the house and half a roll of paper towels. Edith has stolen a blood-soaked dish towel and is lying in the corner, tearing it apart.

  You start off hell-bent, don’t think about it, just go. Then you get slapped across the face and realize you couldn’t even say where you’ve been, or who was really with you—maybe, to give yourself credit, because the nature of what was there, and who he was, were truly hidden.

  You fight it. But now you’re back in your own kitchen, where facts are as unavoidable as the streaks on the window and dog hair on the floor.

  Joe hit her because in some desperate way, he wanted her to remember.

  She was sprawled across the backseat.

  Joe had been talking about an old movie where four guys drive trucks full of nitroglycerin through a jungle in a shitstorm like the one they were in.

  Cassidy asked, “Why?”

  “For money,” he replied.

  The hurricane was on them. Black rain pelted the windshield with unworldly force. Visibility zero.

  Didn’t matter. Cassidy was watching the patterns behind her closed eyes, pulsating like pieces of the Bible if verses of the Bible could be reborn as shapes of brilliantly colored glass that could arrange themselves several thousand times a second into arabesques and mazes, mosaics, Navajo zigzags and fluorescent argyle.

  They were driving fast when the Rover hit something with a sickening crunch and rolled right over it. There had been a splatter on the windshield like heavy mud. It braked too quickly and lost traction on the rain-swept road but remained upright, taking a lazy sideways skid, spinning, coming to a sudden stop. Their necks whipped and the seat belts squeezed all the air from their lungs. Cassidy’s limp body was thrown off the backseat.

  Someone called her name.

  She said she was all right.

  Someone opened the driver’s door, the puddle lamp providing an illuminated triangle of seething rain.

  The door slammed.

  The Rover was still warm and humming, impervious to the shuddering winds, the deafening clatter of the rain on the roof like a payload of pebbles thundering down a chute.

  She was lying on the floor mat staring at a plastic Dalmatian under the seat. Pretty soon she couldn’t breathe. Her nasal passages were blocked and blood was filling her throat. Drowning, she clawed her way up. She reached for someone to help her.

  Alberto turned from the passenger side.

  She saw Alberto’s frightened face. She saw his hands reach out to help. He found a roll of paper towels. One by one he tore them off.

  “Lie back. Here is water.”

  He found a plastic bottle.

  Joe pulled the door open, climbing back into the driver’s seat and ramming the gearshift all in one motion.

  “Seat belts on?” he asked briskly.

  In the front seat Alberto obediently clicked his belt.

  “What was it?” he asked.

  “One of those ponies,” Joe told them. “Wandering loose by the side of the road.”

  “Is it hurt?”

  “It’s dead.”

  He jerked the wheel around and pivoted cautiously in the slick mud then rolled ahead slowly, fighting to stay on the road.

  “They’ll skin it and string it up like that cow on the truck. Did you see? It was like a cruxificion in a painting.”

  “Who will?”

  “Whoever finds it.”

  Alberto said, “We should go back to that hotel—”

  But Joe did not seem to hear.

  “The three of us?” he said. “We have died to the world.”

  Crumpled wet paper towels like roses were scattered all around. Cassidy struggled to keep her head up, trying to look ahead in the dim light from the instrument panel. Those polka dots of red on the windshield—were they crusted dead mosquitoes—or long clots of blood stuck to the outside of the glass, resisting the rain?

  “What do you mean, we have died?” murmured Alberto, sounding scared.

  Cassidy is sitting alone on the cold kitchen floor, rocking back and forth, surrounded by a garden of red-stained paper towels.

  Alberto was in the passenger seat.

  She saw his face: worried because she was hurt; in pain because she was in pain.

  The good face.

  26

  “And who are you waiting for?”

  “Harvey Weissman.”

  “And what is your last name?”

  “Sanderson. Two other guys already asked me the same question.”

  “I see. Thank you, Miss Sanderson.”

  The security attendant bows and leaves. Cassidy sits there smelling the lilies which swoon from a silver stand on a scroll-legged library table as big as a Ford Expedition. It is amazing how the scent can fill the vast main lounge, twice as long as a fifty-foot pool, she would estimate, coffered ceilings maybe twenty-five feet high. The paneling is the color of oak logs which have been lying around the bogs of England for a couple of centuries until having attained the deep rich brown of truffles soaked in brandy.

  A grandfather clock strikes the quarter hour. We are in a different time, California Club time, not the time of the ordinary world. Here there is no hint of traffic out on Flower, the Central American marketplace along Broadway, no sense of Chinatown or Dodger Stadium just minutes away. Inside this Beaux Arts clubhouse, hidden away without canopy or sign, shoulder to shoulder with bank buildings and corporate towers, beats the hushed heart of downtown Los Angeles. In these private rooms money only needs to whisper. Even the cool cathedral air seems to have been resting undisturbed since the boom of the 1920s; a stillness so profound the sound of one page of a newspaper being turned by a gentleman seated forty feet away crackles as if put through an amplifier.

  Sweat forms like dew along Cassidy’s inner thighs from the effort of keeping her feet flat and long legs pressed together—an attempt to stay buoyant on the down-filled cushions of the couch. She is wearing a blue blazer over a s
hort paisley wrap skirt, which doesn’t help. At least Harvey told her to dress. Her exasperation has grown to bursting with each insulting security check.

  Finally Harvey Weissman appears across the carpeting. From her low angle sunk into the couch his six-foot frame appears even larger than life, or maybe it is the dapper two-button seersucker suit, oxblood bow tie, and navy silk pocket square. The light of the manor hall suits him. It cherishes the pudge over the cheekbones and the upturned crinkles at the corners of the eyes, the ageless advisor at ease in the corridors of power.

  “Have you had a look around?”

  “I was afraid I would get arrested.”

  He leads her down the great hall, which goes on for a city block, carved sideboards and flower arrangements spilling out of urns, and explains who did the Western landscape paintings and where the pink and gray marble came from (Morocco) and what it is called (gris perle rose).

  “You know a lot about this place.”

  “Joe is the expert.” His tone is nasty. “Joe can tell you everything about it. For example, the club was built in 1930 but they didn’t admit women as members until 1987. Until then, females were not permitted to enter through the front door. ‘Manhood, wealth and energy.’ That was the criteria for membership.”

  “I go for the manhood part.”

  “Don’t we all. See this—?”

  Harvey taps a framed list of prospective members and their sponsors, who are, in several cases, the mayor or the cardinal.

  “You have to be approved.”

  “It’s the same thing at my gym,” Cassidy sighs. “You have to be able to put at least fifty bucks a month on MasterCard.”

  Harvey smiles for the first time.

  The main dining room is carpeted in deep cherry and probably seats five hundred within those same fecund-brown paneled walls, beneath some spectacular silver candelabra. This afternoon there are just thirty guests for luncheon scattered across the immense space, drone males in gray suits and one or two heavyset women dressed like senators.

  Their table, oceans apart from the others, is set against its own window overlooking a fountain.

  “Thank you for seeing me.”