by James, Terry
As I opened the door of the building and stepped out onto the silent, empty street, a fresh wave of anxiety rolled through me. It was going to be another miserable, lonely Sunday, I knew it, like all the Sundays before and all the Sundays to come. Already the heat was rising from the blindingly bright sidewalk. Up and down the block the parking meters stood like cops at the funeral of a fallen comrade. Absent all the traffic and parked cars the street seemed as wide and desolate as an abandoned airfield.
I made my way down the block to the newsstand at the corner. Halfway there I could see that it was closed, but I carried on nonetheless, obliged to allow my disappointment the satisfaction of a close-up. Nothing on the bolted shutters indicated why Witold wasn’t there today. He was always there, even on Christmas day. I stood for a moment, thinking about where else I might get the paper, but the feeling of the sun on my cheeks and hands suddenly made sitting in some dark, musty movie theater seem neurotic. I returned to the apartment, having if nothing else on this fruitless errand eliminated one of the possibilities.
Back inside, I reconsidered the beach. The advantage there was the women, sometimes gorgeous ones, as well as the philosophical profundities one is given to in the presence of the sea. The disadvantages were the sand, the heat, the difficulty of getting comfortable in anything but a fully supine position, which I refuse to assume in public. I considered other options. I made a cup of coffee and sat drinking it at the kitchenette table, reading and rereading every scrap of text on the label of the empty ketchup bottle. Half an hour later I made an executive decision.
It was roasting inside the car. I rolled down the windows and gave it a few minutes to air before getting in. I decided to take the longer route and drive through the park. The plan had been to enter at Talbot Avenue, but as I neared the junction I was reminded by all the barriers there that they closed it off to traffic every Sunday for the cyclists and skaters and family strollers, so I carried on down the south side of the park and turned in at 19th.
Out in the fields, families and friends and lovers were kicking and throwing balls, playing frisbee, sitting on blankets. Dogs were sprinting joyfully. Smoke was rising from portable barbecues. It was a heavenly scene, everything drenched in Sunday sunshine, the cleanest, brightest sunshine there is. It made me miserable. The cars were parked bumper to bumper down both sides of the road, men and women and children walking along beside them. Progress was slow, as every other car was cruising for somewhere to park. I began to lose my patience. I had envisioned coasting unimpeded all the way through the park to the beach, the cool breeze rushing around me. Instead I was crawling at a snail’s pace, stopping and starting every fifteen feet, the sun cooking me through the windshield. Predictably, I began to yearn for the speed and solitude of the coast road.
The traffic gradually thinned as I got beyond the family fields and into the dense eucalyptus and cypress groves at the western end of the park. Passing the duck pond, I thought of Mrs. Fletcher. I saw her beautiful backside strutting up Pierce Street. I heard her beautiful voice across the wall. I took my foot off the pedal and glided down the grade deeper into the dappled chill of the eucalypti, emerging at last to the resplendent sunshine of the coast road, the beach, the blue-gray ocean.
The beach was packed. Lingering at the stop sign, I entertained the possibility one last time of taking a right and carrying on up the coast and out of the city, far from the madding crowds. An impatient honk behind me settled the issue. I crossed the road and started looking for parking. The first lot yielded nothing. I crossed into the second and continued my search.
Stuck in a line of cars, I found myself studying a surfer in a wet suit who was strapping his board to the roof of his Roadmaster. Something about his feet caught my eye. The fact that they were bare on the hot asphalt may have had something to do with it, but not everything. No, it was their perfection that captivated me. They were the color of stained oak, the tendons as taut as telephone wires, honed from years of balancing the rest of him against the might of the waves, the coppery brown on top giving way to golden sandstone at the sides, all the more riveting against the black of his wet suit, which stopped just above his ankles. His feet spoke of an unshakeable belief in the sovereignty of the sea.
The line advanced. I drifted past him like a shark cruising for prey. Finally after fifteen minutes of driving in rectangles around the lot someone began to back out a few cars ahead of me, and I closed in for the kill.
I parked and sat there for a while, relishing the end of the ordeal. With the engine off, I could hear the roar of the ocean behind the squeals of children.
I grabbed one of the Conway novels, several of which were still in the glove box, got out and hiked up the scrubby embankment to behold the immense tapestry of pinkish white flesh, dashes of bold-colored beach towels, striped umbrellas, sand, sand, sand, stretching in a shallow curve for miles to the north and south, sliced off by the scimitar of the Pacific. I stood there for a moment seeking out an unoccupied and sufficiently spacious patch of sand.
I walked down to my chosen spot, careful with my steps to avoid getting sand in my shoes, and plopped myself down. If not for the cool breeze coming off the water, it would have been too hot to sit there fully clothed. I sat upright, my hands behind me in the hot sand, legs outstretched in front, watching the people. Fat, pale men in disgusting shorts, with hairy backs, parading their offensive bulk for all to see. Big, lumpy women with massive, saggy udders, saddlebag thighs, in bikinis. Frenetic kids running every which way. A man in a white uniform came along selling pink cotton candy, barking his mantra as he trudged through the sand. Of course there were the requisite gorgeous people, men and women alike. In the end, they weren’t as interesting to watch as the less aesthetically pleasing ones.
I did watch a splendid-looking guy and gal throwing a frisbee for a while. At one point, caught by a sudden updraft, the frisbee soared straight up. Up and up it went, to an amazing height, as the man and woman craned their necks to follow its trajectory. All forward momentum ceased as caught by the opposing air current it reversed course and accelerated back the way it had come, quickly overtaking the man’s position and flying ever faster the wrong way down the beach and curving out over the water. The man turned and started running after it. The frisbee picked up speed as it banked down. Finally, fifty yards down the beach, it splashed into the shallows and was soon tumbled by a breaking wave. The man was sprinting now, determined to save it. The frisbee was sucked under for a few seconds then appeared scooting along the grit of the backwash before being pummeled anew.
Weary of bodies I stared at the breaking waves for so long that it seemed they were flowing backwards, that the source of their energy was the land, not the ocean, that they had traveled unimpeded across the continent only to break against the solid shelf of the sea. I studied the sand around me. The breeze was making off with the uppermost granules, while other grains were tumbling into craters and declivities, sliding down to come to rest sheltered from the wind. I closed my eyes and listened for a long time to the rhythmic susurrations of the surf, the wind, the squeals of children, barking dogs. I entertained the idea of taking off my shoes and going down and stepping into the water, but the thought of having to deal with wet, caked sand on my feet wasn’t appealing.
My shoulders were starting to ache. In the end I gave in to it. I took off my jacket and spread it out behind me and scooted down enough to allow my head to rest on it. I took my hat off and set it over my face. The breeze kept threatening to make off with it. The smell of my head was strong in it, a fine, musky scent that helped send me off.
According to my watch I was only asleep for fifteen minutes, but when I lifted my hat from my face and looked around, everything had changed. The people who had been around me were no longer there. None of them were the same people who had been there before I drifted off. The sun had shifted position, however slightly, the shadows a few inches longer.
I sat up and pulled Murder at the Crossroads
out of my back pocket and reread it for a while. Dotty Dupree had hired me to find her daughter Galatea (a.k.a. Galley). Galley was married to a small-time mobster named Joe Balantine, who, as it turned out, was also missing. A big-time mobster named Franky Gold subsequently offered me five grand to find Balantine. The investigation quickly acquired a body count. I kept bouncing from Galley to Gold and back again trying to tie together details that seemed as random as they were violent. The novel pretty much got all that right. The problem was Dotty. Here is how she is described in the book:
She was tall. Thick blonde hair fell to her shoulders in metallic waves. Her eyes were a vivid blue, and when she turned their full force on King, it was like a physical impact. Her body was ripe, lush. Swelling breasts showed over the top of her gown. Her legs were long, sensuously shaped. Full rounded thighs swelled into high-set hips, converged into a narrow waist.
The real Dotty Dupree wasn’t much over five feet tall, her jet black hair coiled in chin-length ringlets. She wore velvet cut-away jackets (green, burgundy, or buff), matching knee pants, and a ridiculous ruffled collar. She was addicted to lemon cough drops, always one clicking against her teeth, lolling around her tongue. She made no effort to conceal her tyrannical nature, ordering her employees about as if she owned them. Ironically, the almost comical disparity between her conception of herself and the dull little vessel she carried it around in stirred a strange lust in me, which thankfully I managed to keep at bay.
In that first angry reading of the novel, it had entirely escaped my notice how Dotty Dupree had been transformed from Little Lord Fauntleroy into a sparsely garmented Playboy centerfold. Upon reflection, I recalled similar transmogrifications in the other novels. While the male characters, apart from Eddie King himself, usually bore a passing resemblance to their real-life counterparts, the women were almost always complete fabrications. All the important ones were blonde-haired, blue-eyed bombshells.
If, as Mrs. Morris had contended, they actually were her own creations, why did all the women read like an adolescent boy’s wet dream? Contrary to her claims, they were just as cliché as everything else in the books.
These were my thoughts when a ball landed near me, followed soon thereafter by a boy of six or seven in red swimming trunks. He picked up his ball and stood looking at me like I was something washed up by the waves.
“Aren’t you hot?” he asked impertinently.
“No, I’m very comfortable.”
“You look hot in that suit.”
“It keeps the sun off me.”
He frowned. Then smiled.
“Guess how many eggs I found.”
I made a stab in the dark: “Six.”
“How’d you know?”
“Lucky guess.”
“Bobby McGruder found twelve.”
“Is that right?”
It finally sank in when he told me about Bobby McGruder’s basket full of chocolates. I looked out again at the multitudes, seeing them now through the gauzy filter of Easter.
“Nick!” a woman yelled, rightly concerned that her boy was talking to a shifty-looking stranger. He turned towards the voice. “Come here!” the woman hollered. Nick ran off, kicking sand over my shoes.
Suddenly I felt a soft jab of hunger. Gradually it spread, becoming indistinguishable from the ache of loneliness that I was beginning to believe was the non-negotiable price of freedom.
16
AS I WAS pulling out of the parking lot, an old familiar guilt emanating from beyond the hills to the east tugged at the steering wheel. No matter the arguments I lobbed against it, it refused to succumb to reason.
I took Seaview Drive through the western suburbs, got on 480-East at Lake Park, and stayed on it across the vast cubist canvas of the metropolis.
Twelve miles from Merino, in the verdant apron of the Espolon Hills, the freeway narrowed to two lanes. At the approach to the Calaveras Tunnel, a sign advised me to turn on my headlights. The air boomed, my wheels roared around me as I entered the muggy darkness of that bullet hole through the earth. Far ahead, a pair of tail-lights hovered beneath a disc of sunlight the size of a quarter. Fluorescent streaks shot past with hypnotic regularity. The farther I drove into the tunnel, the more distant seemed the light at the end of it, diminishing in inverse proportion to my progress towards it, the quarter, now a nickel, now a dime, receding still farther into the paradoxical distance. For a moment I had the nauseating sensation that I was driving in reverse. Only when the sunlight began to spill again onto the tunnel walls did time and space reunite with a sonic boom.
The car slammed into a wall of light and heat. Hot wind singed my nostrils as the road snaked through a herd of parched blonde hills. Soon the business parks appeared, clusters of human aquariums ringed with nameless streets and parking lots and saplings designed never to reach maturity. Car dealerships stretched for miles along the access roads either side of the freeway, a thousand sparkling suns rolling over rivers of flawless windshields. Discount outlets, big-box retailers, warehouse clubs, and super stores as vast as military bases battled it out in fonts of Jurassic proportions. The ocean, the city, my apartment, may as well have been on the other side of the world. I had passed through a rabbit hole into middle America.
The offramp at East Pleasant Valley Road was half a mile of nothingness culminating in a congregation of gas stations cum mini-markets cum car washes servicing a division of armor-plated pickups and Sport Utility Vehicles. After the roar of the road, the silence at that soulless traffic light was absolute.
On the corner of East Pleasant Valley and César Chávez, the steep red A-frame of Der Wienerschnitzel caught my eye, and without thinking twice I pulled in line behind a black Camaro. There were about four cars ahead of me leading into the drive-thru that cut through the middle of the building. The waitress, a short Mexican girl about nineteen years old, in her uniform of red shorts, yellow shirt and company cap, was standing at the window of the car in front of the Camaro. Her legs were tanned and athletic. I pulled out my wallet and checked my cash.
The line advanced. The waitress served the Camaro. Then it was my turn.
“Willkommen zum Wienerschnitzel,” she said. “Darf ich Ihre Bestellung aufnehmen?”
“Excuse me?”
“Welcome to Der Wienerschnitzel, may I take your order?”
“Was that German?”
“Yes.”
“They teach you that here?”
“No. I’m in my second year at City College.”
“Studying German?”
“Actually my major’s Mass Com, but I’m getting a minor in German.”
I nodded, impressed.
“So what can I get you?”
“Give me a chili cheese dog and a coffee.”
“We have a special today,” she said. “Order any two classic dogs and you get a free medium soft drink of your choice.”
I gave it some thought.
“Which are the classic dogs?” I asked, just to humor her.
“The mustard dog, the kraut dog, and the flogo dog.”
I turned and looked at her face.
“Could you repeat that?”
“The mustard dog, the kraut—”
“No, the last one.”
“The relish dog?”
“That’s not what you said. You said the flogo dog.”
“The what dog?”
“The flogo dog. That’s what you said.”
“There’s no such thing as a flogo dog.”
“Then why did you say it?”
“I didn’t,” she insisted. “I said relish dog.”
“You distinctly said flogo. Relish sounds nothing like flogo. Maybe you lapsed into German.”
“Would you like to speak to my manager?” she said, switching into customer-complaint mode.
“No. I would just like you to admit you said what you said.”
She looked towards the building, as if for guidance. She turned back to me.
“Do you w
ant the special or not?”
“No,” I said, agitated. “Just give me what I ordered.”
She wrote it down and without further comment walked on to the car behind me. I adjusted the mirror to get an angle on her. I watched her lips as she went through her spiel. I didn’t see anything resembling “flogo,” not that I have any special capacity as a lip reader. When she was done with that car, there being no others behind it, she returned to the building and went in through a door that was all but invisible until she opened it, no doubt to tell her co-workers to watch out for the guy in the hat.
The Camaro pulled forward. A few minutes later I was in the shade of the drive-thru, abreast of the service window, through which I could see the teenagers working away. A pimply white girl handed me my bag and told me the total.
“Listen,” I said. “Do you guys have something called a flogo dog?”
“Excuse me?”
“A flogo dog.”
“No, sir. Only what’s on the menu.”
“Anything that sounds like flogo?”
“What?”
“Anything that sounds like the word flogo.”
“I didn’t even know flogo was a word.”
“It’s not. Not an English one, at any rate.”
She looked at me. “I can give you a take-home menu if you want.”
I shrugged. She stepped over to a shelf and returned to the window with a sheet of paper, which she handed to me. I gave her the buck and she gave me my change.
I set the bag beside me on the seat and carried on through the building and back onto the street. Memory Lane, Pontoon Way, Kingfisher Street behind me, I came at last to Lemon Lane.
It was one of the older neighborhoods of Merino. Decay was its only charm. Faux Spanish villas with dead century plants in their front yards neighbored side-gabled bungalows with American flags planted in their porch pillars. Pickup trucks, pre-millennial sedans, the odd motorboat or two, their sunbleached canvas covers stiff with dust, sat roasting in oil-stained driveways.