A Place of Hiding (2 page)

China lifted the lopsided gate and swung it open, her camera cases weighting down her shoulder and her intention to head for the garden hose and drag it over to soak the poor flowers. But she forgot this intention in the sight that greeted her: A man, naked down to his Skivvies, was lying on his stomach in the middle of her lawn with his head pillowed on what appeared to be the ball of his blue jeans and a faded yellow T-shirt. No shoes were in evidence, and the soles of his feet were black beyond black and so calloused at the heels that the skin was canyoned. If his ankles and elbows were anything to go by, he appeared to be someone who eschewed bathing, too. But not eating or exercising, since he was well built without being fat. And not drinking, since at the moment his right hand clutched a sweating bottle of Pellegrino.

Her
Pellegrino by the look of it. The water she'd been looking forward to downing.

He turned over lazily and squinted up at her, resting on his dirty elbows. “Your security sucks the big one, Chine.” He took a long swig from the bottle.

China glanced at the porch where the screen door hung open and the front door gaped wide. “God damn it,” she cried. “Did you break into my house again?”

Her brother sat up and shaded his eyes. “What the hell are you dressed like that for? Ninety frigging degrees and you look like Aspen in January.”

“And you look like an arrest for exposure waiting to happen. Good grief, Cherokee, show some sense. There're little girls in this neighbourhood. One of them walks by and sees you like that, you'll have a squad car here in fifteen minutes.” She frowned. “D'you have sunblock on?”

“Didn't answer my question,” he pointed out. “What's with the leather? Delayed rebellion?” He grinned. “If Mom got a look at those pants, she'd have a real—”

“I wear them because I like them,” she cut in. “They're comfortable.” And I can afford them, she thought. Which was more than half the reason: owning something lush and useless in Southern California because she
wanted
to own it, after a childhood and adolescence spent trolling the racks in Goodwill for clothes that simultaneously fit, were not completely hideous, and—for the benefit of her mother's beliefs—had no scrap of animal skin anywhere on them.

“Oh sure.” He scrambled to his feet as she passed him and went onto the porch. “Leather in the middle of a Santa Ana. Real comfortable. That makes sense.”

“That's my last bottle of Pellegrino.” She dropped her camera cases just inside the front door. “I was looking forward to it all the way home.”

“From where?” When she told him, he chuckled. “Oh, I get it. Doing a shoot for an
architect.
Loaded and at loose ends? I hope so. Available also? This is cool. Well, let me see how you look, then.” He upended the bottle of water into his mouth and examined her while he did so. When he was sated, he handed the bottle to her and said, “You can have the rest. Your hair looks like crap. Whyn't you stop bleaching it? Not good for you. Sure not good for the water table, all those chemicals going down the drain.”

“As if you care about the water table.”

“I've got my standards.”

“One of which obviously isn't waiting for people to get home before you raid their houses.”

“You're lucky it was only me,” he said. “It's pretty dumb to go off and leave the windows open. Your screens are complete shit. A pocket knife. That's all it took.”

China saw her brother's means of access into her house since, in Cherokee's typical fashion, he'd done nothing to hide how he'd managed to enter. One of the two living room windows was without its old screen, which had been easy enough for Cherokee to remove since only a metal hook and eye had held it in place against the sill. At least her brother had had enough sense to break in through a window that was off the street and out of sight of the neighbours, any one of whom would have willingly called the police.

She went through to the kitchen, the bottle of Pellegrino in her hand. She poured what was left of the mineral water into a glass with a wedge of lime. She swirled it round, drank it down, and put the glass in the sink, unsatisfied and annoyed.

“What're you doing here?” she asked her brother. “How'd you get up here? Did you fix your car?”

“That piece of crap?” He padded across the linoleum to the refrigerator, pulled it open, and browsed through the plastic bags of fruit and vegetables inside. He emerged with a red bell pepper, which he took to the sink and meticulously washed off before scoring a knife from a drawer and slicing the pepper in half. He cleaned both halves and handed one of them to China. “I've got some things going so I won't need a car anyway.”

China ignored the hook implied in his final remark. She knew how her brother cast his bait. She set her half of the red bell pepper on the kitchen table. She went into her bedroom to change her clothes. The leather was like wearing a sauna in this weather. It looked terrific, but it felt like hell. “Everyone needs a car. I hope you haven't come up here thinking you're going to borrow mine,” she called out to him. “Because if you have, the answer is no in advance. Ask Mom. Borrow hers. I assume she's still got it.”

“You coming down for Thanksgiving?” Cherokee called back.

“Who wants to know?”

“Guess.”

“Her phone doesn't work all of a sudden?”

“I told her I was coming up. She asked me to ask you. You coming or what?”

“I'll talk to Matt.” She hung the leather trousers in the closet, did the same with the vest, and tossed her silk blouse into the dry-cleaning bag. She threw on a loose Hawaiian dress and grabbed her sandals from the shelf. She rejoined her brother.

“Where
is
Matt, anyway?” He'd finished his half of the pepper and had started on hers.

She removed it from his hand and took a bite. The meat was cool and sweet, a modest anodyne to the heat and her thirst. “Away,” she told him. “Cherokee, would you put your clothes on, please?”

“Why?” He leered and thrust his pelvis at her. “Am I turning you on?”

“You're not my type.”

“Away where?”

“New York. He's on business. Are you going to get dressed?”

He shrugged and left her. A moment later she heard the bang of the screen door as he went outside to retrieve the rest of his clothes. She found an uncooled bottle of Calistoga water in the musty broom closet that served as her pantry. At least it was something sparkling, she thought. She rooted out ice and poured herself a glassful.

“You didn't ask.”

She swung around. Cherokee was dressed, as requested, his T-shirt shrunk from too many washes and his blue jeans resting low on his hips. Their bottoms grazed the linoleum, and as she looked her brother over, China thought not for the first time how misplaced he was in time. With his too-long sandy curls, his scruffy clothes, his bare feet, and his demeanour, he looked like a refugee from the summer of love. Which would doubtless make their mother proud, make his father approve, and make her father laugh. But it made China . . . well, annoyed. Despite his age and his toned physique, Cherokee still looked too vulnerable to be out on his own.

“So you didn't ask me,” he said.

“Ask you what?”

“What I've got going. Why I won't be needing a car anymore. I thumbed, by the way. Hitchhiking's gone to crap, though. Took me since yesterday lunchtime to get here.”

“Which is why you need a car.”

“Not for what I've got in mind.”

“I've already said. I'm not lending you my car. I need it for work. And why aren't you in class? Have you dropped out again?”

“Quit. I needed more free time to do the papers.
That's
taken off in a very big way. I've got to tell you, the number of conscienceless college students these days just boggles the mind, Chine. If I wanted to do this for a career, I'd probably be able to retire when I'm forty.”

China rolled her eyes.
The papers
were term papers, take-home essay tests, the occasional master's thesis, and, so far, two doctoral dissertations. Cherokee wrote them for university students who had the cash and who couldn't be bothered to write the papers themselves. This had long ago raised the question of why Cherokee—who'd never received less than a B on something he'd written for payment—couldn't himself get up the steam to remain in college. He'd been in and out of the University of California so many times that the institution practically had a revolving door with his name above it. But Cherokee had a facile explanation for his exceedingly blotted college career: “If the UC system would just pay me to do my work what the students pay me to do
their
work, I'd do the work.”

“Does Mom know you've dropped out again?” she asked her brother.

“I've cut the strings.”

“Sure you have.” China hadn't had lunch, and she was beginning to feel it. She pulled out the fixings for a salad from the refrigerator and from the cupboard took down one plate, a subtle hint that she hoped her brother would take.

“So, ask me.” He dragged a chair out from the kitchen table and plopped down. He reached for one of the apples that a dyed basket held in the centre of the table and he had it all the way to his mouth before he seemed to realise it was artificial.

She unwrapped the romaine and began to tear it onto her plate. “Ask you what?”

“You know. You're avoiding the question. Okay. I'll ask it for you. ‘What's the big plan, Cherokee? What've you got going? Why won't you be needing a car?' The answer: because I'm getting a boat. And the boat's going to provide it all. Transportation, income, and housing.”

“You just keep thinking, Butch,” China murmured, more to herself than to him. In so many ways Cherokee had lived his thirty-three years like that Wild West outlaw: There was always a scheme to get rich quick, have something for nothing, and live the good life.

“No,” he said. “Listen. This is sure-fire. I've already found the boat. It's down in Newport. It's a fishing boat. Right now it takes people out from the harbour. Big bucks a pop. They go after bonita. Mostly it's day trips, but for bigger bucks—and I'm talking significant big ones here—they go down to Baja. It needs some work but I'd live on the boat while I fixed it up. Buy what I need at marine chandleries—don't need a car for that—and I'd take people out year-round.”

“What d'you know about fishing? What d'you know about boating? And where're you getting the money, anyway?” China chopped off part of a cucumber and began slicing it onto the romaine. She considered her question in conjunction with her brother's propitious arrival on her doorstep and said, “Cherokee, don't even go there.”

“Hey. What d'you think I am? I said that I've got something going, and I do. Hell. I thought you'd be happy for me. I didn't even ask Mom for the money.”

“Not that she has it.”

“She's got the house. I could've asked her to sign it over to me so I could get a second on it and raise the money that way. She would've gone for it. You know she would.”

There was truth in that, China thought. When hadn't she gone for one of Cherokee's schemes?
He's asthmatic
had been her excuse in childhood. It had simply mutated through the years to
he's a man.

That left China herself as the choice of a source. She said, “Don't think of me, either, okay? What I've got goes to me, to Matt, and to the future.”

“As if.” Cherokee pushed away from the table. He walked to the kitchen door and opened it, resting his hands on the frame and looking out into the sun-parched back yard.

“As if what?”

“Forget it.”

China washed two tomatoes and began to chop them. She cast a glance at her brother and saw that he was frowning and chewing on the inside of his lower lip. She could read Cherokee River like a billboard at fifty yards: There were machinations going on in his mind.

“I've got money saved,” he said. “Sure, it's not enough but I've got a chance to make a little bundle that'll help me out.”

“And you're saying that you haven't hitchhiked all the way up here to ask me to make a contribution? You spent twenty-four hours on the side of the road in order to make a social call? To tell me your plans? To ask me if I'm going to Mom's for Thanksgiving? This isn't exactly computing, you know. There're telephones. E-mail. Telegrams. Smoke signals.”

He turned from the doorway and watched her brushing the dirt from four mushrooms. “Actually,” he finally said, “I've got two free tickets to go to Europe and I thought my little sister might like to tag along. That's why I'm here. To ask you to go. You've never been, have you? Call it an early Christmas present.”

China lowered her knife. “Where the hell did you get two free tickets to Europe?”

“Courier service.”

He went on to explain. Couriers, he said, transported materials from the United States to points around the globe when the sender didn't trust the post office, Federal Express, UPS, or any other carrier to get them to their destination on time, safely, or undamaged. Corporations or individuals provided a prospective traveler with the ticket he needed to get to a destination—sometimes with a fee as well—and once the package was placed into the hands of the recipient, the courier was free to enjoy the destination or to travel onward from there.

In Cherokee's case, he'd seen a posting on a notice board at UC Irvine from someone—“Turned out to be an attorney in Tustin”—looking for a courier to take a package to the UK in return for payment and two free airline tickets. Cherokee applied, and he was selected, with the proviso that he “dress more businesslike and do something about the hair.”

“Five thousand bucks to make the delivery,” Cherokee concluded happily. “Is this a good deal or what?”

“What the
hell
? Five thousand dollars?” In China's experience, things that seemed too good to be true generally were. “Wait a minute, Cherokee. What's in the package?”