by Dave Eggers
“It’s not here,” he says.
“Then you guys better come with me,” I say. “We’ll have to find a phone. You can tell the cops your side of the story, I’ll tell mine, and we’ll see what happens. But if you guys take off, you’re fucked because then they’re going to assume you took it.”
We look at each other. He starts walking toward the parking lot, his friends follow.
Meredith grabs the second towel, shakes it out. We walk behind the three of them, to keep track. Three total—I can take two of them. All three even. I am massive! I am America!
No one talks. Our shadows, two each, crisscross and jump over the sand. The scratching of our feet. The lights from the houses above the beach are few. That weird windmill at the end of Golden Gate Park is straight ahead, black.
When we get to the parking lot, what I thought was a phone—a box attached to a lamppost—is not a phone.
We stand for a second under the glare. I look around, up at the houses across the Great Highway, all glass facing the ocean, looking for support, maybe someone on a porch, or a jogger, a biker; there is no one awake.
“Okay, well have to walk across,” I say. “We’ll cross the highway and walk up until we get to a phone.”
I’m still in charge. We’re a team. I am their leader, their stern but fair warden. They seem to consent.
I walk toward them, expecting them to turn and walk toward the highway. As I come among them, they don’t move. I am suddenly between all three of them.
Everything is new.
“Fuck you,” says the tall one, swinging at my head. I have no time to move, but he misses. Another swing, from behind. Nothing. Then a leg appears and the foot lands in my crotch. I fall to my knees. I stare at the cement. Gum, oil stains—
They run away, arms and legs, like big spiders, laughing.
How long do you stay on your knees in a situation like this?
“Fuck you!” they say. Creative.
The kick wasn’t bad. I still have breath. Then Fm up! I am up and running after them. Fm in the middle of the parking lot road and I see them just off to the right, fifty yards ahead, getting
156 A.H.W.O.S.G
into—there are—what? Fuck! fuck!—two cars, in the middle of the street, ready, revving—
How did they know? How did they know?
As I reach the middle of the street the doors shut; the cars start toward me. The front car is an old convertible, dark green with a black top, huge hood. One of the girls from before is driving. Holy fucking shit. Like a getaway car! I stand in the middle of the street as they come toward me. I’m going to get the fucking license plates.
They drive at me, slow at first but then faster. I have them. License plates, suckers! License plates, fuckers! As they come toward me, I yell the numbers of their plates out loud, pointing at them with every digit, exaggerating the pointing to make sure they know what I’m doing, that I’ve got them—got them!
“G!
“F!
“Six!
“Seven!
“Nine!
“O!”
Beautiful! Beautiful, you fuckers! You dumb stupid motherfuckers!
They swerve around me, yelling, laughing, waving their little middle fingers at me.
I am yelling, thrilled, high.
“Ha ha you fuckers! I got you! I got you motherfuckers!”
They pass, then turn onto the highway, accelerate, are gone. I got the first car’s plate but not the second’s. I run back to Meredith. A block away we find a phone.
“Wait, calm down, where are you?” the operator says.
“I don’t know. The beach.”
“What’s wrong?”
“We were attacked, robbed.”
“By who?”
“Bunch of Mexican kids.”
I tell her what the car looked like. I try to tell her the license plate number, but she says she can’t take it, to tell it to the officer when he gets there, she says. I hang up.
G-H...6-0...
Fuck.
G-H-O-0-
Fuck!
We sit down.
I’m not hurt. I think about whether or not I’m hurt. I’m not. We sit on the cement wall of the path and for a moment I fear they’ll come back. Maybe there’ll be guns, maybe to eliminate the witnesses, a drive-by. No, no. They’re gone, they’re gone. Won’t be back. I jump down from the wall; I can’t sit, I’m wired. I pace in front of her. / got their plates! Stupid assholes.
The police car pulls up two minutes after. It looks huge. The engine roars. It’s immaculate, shiny like an enormous toy. The officer steps out and he is burly and mustached and—is he? It’s after 2 a.m.—he is wearing sunglasses. He introduces himself and asks us to get in the back of the car and we do. It is a beautiful car, clean, the black vinyl bright, perfect. I answer:
“Yeah, we were just hanging out on the beach.”
“Seven of them.”
“Mexican.”
“I’m sure of it. Their accents, their looks. Completely. They spoke English, but with a Mexican accent.” I try to think of what they looked like, who the older one looked like. Baretta. He looked like Robert Blake.
“They took my wallet.”
“I don’t know how much. Maybe twenty dollars.”
“We were calling the police to straighten it out.”
“Yeah, they came with me.”
“I don’t know why. Because they said they didn’t take it.”
“But then they kicked me in the groin [groin being the more police-report-appropriate word for crotch] and then they got in two cars and took off.”
“A big dark green convertible with a black top.”
“Yeah, yeah, I had it down before. Fuck. It start with G-H, and there’s a six in it, and a zero. I think it ended with zero. Is that enough? Can you go on that?”
The car is so clean. I love the car. A shotgun hangs at eye level in front of us. The computer next to the steering wheel glows blue, beautiful thing. The radio fitzes and beeps. The officer listens and answers questions on the CB. He turns around.
“Okay, it looks like we have some suspects. We’ve stopped a car just off the highway. We’re going to have to go there so you can make a positive I.D.”
I look at Meredith. We have been in the car maybe three or four minutes. Is that possible?
“You already found the car? Is it the dark green convertible?” I ask him, leaning into the front seat.
“I’m not sure. But we better go.” We go.
Meredith and I look out the window bright-eyed and attentive, like tourists passing through a city on a Saturday night. We turn onto another highway and suddenly there are lights everywhere. It looks like an accident. At least four police cars. Five. All parked, lights spinning, popping. There are cops on the street, walking back and forth, standing outside their cars, talking into CB’s pulled through their windows. It’s an event.
Our car stops before an overpass. There is an old convertible parked about twenty yards ahead, light blue with a black top.
“That’s not it,” I say. The officer turns around.
“Excuse me?”
“That’s definitely not the car,” I say. “Theirs is green. Dark green. With a black top. I’m positive.”
He looks at me and turns back around and talks into his CB. After a minute, he turns back to us.
“Okay, we’re going to ask you to take a look at the people in the car, just to make sure,” he says.
“That’s definitely not the car,” I say.
“We have to do this,” he says.
There are four cops standing by the blue convertible. One of them opens the front door and reaches in, helping out a handcuffed man. The man shimmies out of the car and stands up. He turns toward us, squints. He has long blond hair, a goatee, is wearing a flannel shirt, army shorts, black boots. The spinning lights make him blue and then red and then flesh-colored again, then blue and then red again. He looks through our windshield
and into our car.
“Do you recognize him?”
“No. That’s definitely not him. I’m positive they were Mexican. This’s definitely not the right car.”
“Well, hold on there. We’re going to have to look at all of the passengers.”
Why?
The cop makes a signal with his hand to one of the officers outside. They bring out a young woman with dyed red hair, a miniskirt and go-go boots. She stands next to the first man.
“My god, those poor people,” Meredith whispers.
“No, no,” I say to the cop. “You’ve got to understand, these people were Mexican. You know, shorter, dark-haired. These people are white.”
They bring out three more, two more men and one other woman, until they are all standing there, shoulder to shoulder, lit up, tinted red and blue, squinting into our headlights. Maybe they’re people we know. Meredith grabs my arm, sliding down in her seat. “God I hope they can’t see us.”
I lean forward and tell the cop again:
“That’s not them.”
He talks to his CB for a while and writes something on a clipboard. As he makes a U-turn to drive us back, the kids standing by the road are just getting their handcuffs taken off. The other cops are getting back into their cars. We duck.
We drive back to the beach parking lot. Once there, the cop turns around and gives us his card. Cops have cards.
We get out. I ask him about the likelihood of them finding the Mexican kids, or the wallet.
“It’s pretty small odds,” he says. “It’s a wallet, you know? It’s a little thing. Here’s an incident report card. That’s your incident report number, in case you have anything to report. Or if we need to call you, you’ll need that as a reference.”
Then he’s gone.
Meredith wants to go home and sleep. Half of me wants to get back to my car and cruise for the green convertible, hunt them down, get some kind of weapon first and then drive, hunt, do bad things, to each and every one.
But I need to go home to see what’s happened to Toph, whether the baby-sitter’s done what I fear he’s done.
We don’t talk much on the drive back to the Haight, down the wide, barren avenues of the Richmond. At her friend’s place she gets out; we agree to see each other again before she goes back to L.A. Then I’m going home, past all the dumb kids at Haight and Masonic, sitting against the wall, smoking in their rasta hats, playing with those sticks, flipping the stupid fucking stick around with the other two sticks, as if that could possibly be diverting for more than twenty or thirty seconds, just the stick up and down, back and forth, my God—and down Fell, onto 80 and toward the Bay Bridge.
Motherfuckers. Stupid motherfuckers steal my dad’s fucking wallet, the only fucking thing I have of his, that and some stationery, the paperweights, the business cards, a high school yearbook, some papers about him being in the army—
Those fucking kids. Those fuckers— I’ll stake out the beach tomorrow. I will not forget.
The clouds above are fat, moving slowly over the gray bridge like manatee ghosts.
On the bridge I begin to feel the leaden, downward pull of the alcohol in my system. I nod off and on. I slap myself, for the sound and the shock—awake! Turn up the radio. On the bridge, the lower tier, it’s straight ahead and action-packed. It’s a Battlestar Galactica runway. It’s the circuitry inside a computer, an old rickety computer, a 2 XL—
I nod again. Awake!
The bridge is a tunnel. On bridges I think of the accident, the one I heard related a hundred times: my mom driving her tiny powder blue Beetle, somewhere in Massachusetts, Bill and Beth toddlers, over a two-lane bridge—a tire blows, she skids, swerves, across traffic and breaks halfway through the opposite guardrail, the car’s front hanging over the edge, her seeing it all ending, Bill and Beth screaming, me in her womb—
There are a few other cars. There is a earful of men in a shiny black BMW. The lights of the bridge make the cars shinier, sleeker, faster-seeming. We are all returning home, to our adobe homes, our wooden homes. There is a family in a small blue—good god, put that kid in a seatbelt!
Stupid fuckers take that fucking wallet.
I’m alone and will never go out again. When will I get out again? It will be weeks from now. It will be never. I am lost. I am in the bridge’s dark corridor, the lower tier, riding under cars going the other way, to San Francisco. I am heading back to Berkeley, to the flatlands, to our house, where there is no one, where it is just my bed, quiet. And Toph. Blood on the porch. The baby-sitter has taken him away. Or the baby-sitter has left him bleeding, as a warning. Markings on his face, numbers, astrological shit, on his chest, clues to the culprit. All my fault. I will run away. They will be looking somewhere tropical but will not guess that I went to Russia. I will go to Russia and will wander around Russia until I die. How could I have left? My parents never left us as children. They didn’t go out. They stayed home, were ensconced, at home, in the family room, reliable, he on the couch, she on her chair—
After the bridge accident she was a mess when driving over water, near cliffs, on two-lane highways. On our one trip to California, all of us under ten, we went to see the Sequoias, all the way up that mountain, and she made it up, around and around, two lanes all the way, but could not make it down, on the outside lane, there was no barrier, just the sheer drop, and Bill tried to calm her—
“Mom, just—“
“I can’t! I can’t!”
and so she parked, waited until a trooper could come and drive the car down for us, she in the passenger seat, turning around to smile at us, embarrassed—
I make it off the bridge, down the hill, toward the highway’s split, Oakland or Berkeley. I nod awake again, this time after veering toward the median divider. I slap myself again, and again and again. I open the window. The Ashby exit. Good, good. Close, close. University. I am home free. Stephen did something. Maybe I should leave now, go to the airport, assume the worst. I will turn around if I see the flashing lights. I will come from Solano Avenue, down the hill, so I can see if there are ambulances and if so I can turn around and go to the airport before they see me—
The wallet is gone. My father has slipped further down the well. The wallet was the constant reminder; every time I used it, it was always there, in my pocket! Taken by stupid Mexican spiders, the fuckers. The only thing I had of his. The rugs are unraveling, the furniture splitting. I cannot be trusted with anything, everything precarious, lost, broken, soaked—
This is not the way things should be, Toph and I in our dingy little house, holes in the floor, everything decomposing, me losing things, letting a bunch of kids take our father’s wallet. And Toph with the baby-sitter, this evil man—
It’ll be cold in Russia but maybe not now. I can get a jacket at the airport.
The Gilman exit! I will not crash. I will move in with friends. I will get over it. I will either move to Russia or I will get over it. I turn onto our street, Peralta, and there are no lights, no cops, no amusement park lights of ambulances and cops and fire engines—
The door is closed. There is no blood on the steps. I walk up to the porch and through the window I can see the baby-sitter’s bike still parked against the fireplace and then, as I approach the door, I can see Toph sprawled on the couch. Good, good. At least he’s here.
Though he might be dead. He could still be dead. The door is not locked—maybe someone else has killed Toph and the baby-sitter! I hadn’t thought of that but of course! A burglar has come in, has taken what he pleased, and then... poisoned both of them! Or else he was Stephen’s accomplice. It was all a setup—
I step inside, careful, fists clenched. I step toward Toph. I look for blood—none. Poisoned maybe. Or beaten—internal bleeding. I bring my face close to his. His breath is hot on my cheek.
Alive! Alive!
He could be dying, though, like the boy in that movie, Bruce Davison and Andie MacDowell’s son. How will I know? I will trust. Go to the hosp
ital? No. No. He is good. He is fine. There is drool on the arm of the couch.
Where’s Stephen? That’s it. Stephen is gone because he poisoned Toph. Toph is dying. Toph has an hour to live. There will be no point to taking him to the hospital. The woman’s voice from the poison hot line will crack—“There’s nothing...nothing you can do—“ and, broken, hysterical, I will gather my faculties so I can wake him, so we can talk for our last hour together. Should I tell him? No, no. We will have fun. I will pull it off.
Hey, little man.
What time is it?
One.
He is not dead. He will live. Everything is normal. Normal, normal, normal. Good. Good. Normal. Normal. Fine.
I walk into the kitchen, drop my keys, tick, in the bowl with the change. I peek into the bedroom. No Stephen. To the back bedroom, open the door. There. Stephen is asleep on the bed, school papers spread out everywhere.
I wake him up. He gathers his stuff.
“He was talking in his sleep,” he says.
“Huh. What did he say?”
“Nothing, really. Just mumbling.”
I write him a check. I open the front door for him. He gets on his bicycle and, still half-asleep, rides away, awkward and jumpy like a butterfly. I lock the door after him.
I go back to the living room, where Toph is splayed, as if boneless, on the couch. He has brought a comforter from his room, which is now on the floor. His mouth is open and there is a dark round pond of drool on his gray T-shirt.
“Hey.”
“Mmph.”
“Hey. Help me out here.”
“Mmph.”
“I’m gonna put you in bed. Put your arm around.”
He puts one arm around my neck and grabs it with the other, pulls his head toward me so I don’t hit it on the door frame.
“Don’t hit my head.”