After the Plague (33 page)

“You want to buy a dog?” they were shouting at everybody who came up the beach. “Cheap. He's real cheap.”

They asked him—they asked Edison, Edison Banks—as he kicked through the sand to lay out his towel in the place tucked into the rocks where he'd been coming every afternoon for a week now to stretch out and ease the ache in his knee. He'd just had arthroscopic surgery on the right knee and it was weak and the Tylenol-codeine tabs they'd given him were barely scratching the
surface of the pain. But walking in the sand was a good thing—it strengthened the muscles, or so the surgeon told him. “Hey, man,” the ugliest of the three kids had shouted, “you want to buy a dog?”

Edison was wearing a pair of shorts nearly as big as the stiffened shrouds they'd somehow managed to prop up on their nonexistent hips, and he had his Lakers cap on backwards and an oversized T-shirt and beads, the beads he'd been wearing since beads were invented back in 1969. “No, thanks,” he said, a little ruffled, a little pissed off at the world in general and these three kids in particular, “—I had one for breakfast.”

That was the end of the exchange, and on a better day, that would have been the end of the encounter and let's turn the page and get on with it. Edison wanted to lie in the sun, shuffle through the deep sand above tideline for maybe a hundred yards in each direction, thrash his arms in the surf a bit and let the codeine work on the pain till cocktail hour, and that was it, that was the day he was envisioning, with dinner out and maybe a movie after that. But the kids wouldn't let it rest. They didn't recognize Edison as one of their own, didn't appreciate his wit, his graying soul beard and the silver stud in his left ear. They saw him as a gimpy, pinch-faced old relic, in the same camp as their facially rejuvenated mothers, vanished fathers, and the various teachers, principals, deputy sheriffs and dance club bouncers who washed through their lives each day like some stinking red tide. They gave him a cold sneer and went back to the dog.

And
that
would have been it, but no sooner had Edison stretched out on his towel and dug out the sunblock and his book than the stick came rocketing his way. And after the stick, half a beat later, came the dog, the wet dog, the heaving, whimpering, sand-spewing whipcrack of a wet dog with a wet smell all its own. The stick vanished, only to come thumping back at him, this time landing no more than two feet away, so that the sand kicked up in his face. Were they trying to provoke him, was that it? Or were they just drunk and oblivious? Not that it mattered. Because if that stick came his way one more time, he was going to go ballistic.

He tried to focus on the page, his eyes stinging with sweat, the smell of the sunblock bringing him back to the beaches of the past, the sun like a firm, hot hand pressing down on his shoulders and the heavy knots of his calves. The book wasn't much—some tripe about a one-armed lady detective solving crimes in a beach town full of rich people very much like the one he was living in—but it had been there on the hall table when he was limping out the door, a relic of Kim. Kim had been gone three weeks now, vanished along with the Z3 he'd bought her, an armload of jewelry and a healthy selection of off-the-shoulder dresses and open-toed shoes. He expected to hear from her lawyer any day now. And the credit card company. Them too, of course.

When it came this time, the final time, the stick was so close it whirred in his ears like a boomerang, and before he could react—or even duck—it was there, right at his elbow, and the black panting form of the dog was already hurtling over him in an explosion of sand and saliva. He dropped the book and shoved himself up out of the sand, the tide pulling back all along the beach with a long, slow sigh, gulls crying out, children shrieking in the surf. They were smirking, the three of them, laughing at him, though now that he was on his feet, now that he was advancing on them, the line of his mouth drawn tight and the veins pounding in his neck, the smirks died on their faces. “Hey, Jack,” he snarled in his nastiest New York–transplanted–to–California voice, “would you mind throwing that fucking stick someplace else? Or do I have to shove it up your ass?”

They were kids, lean and loose, flat stomachs, the beginner's muscles starting to show in their upper arms and shoulders like a long-delayed promise, just kids, and he was a man—and a man in pretty good shape too, aside from the knee. He had the authority here. This was his beach—or the community's, and he was a member of the community, paying enough in taxes each year to repave all the roads personally and buy the entire police force new uniforms and gold-capped nightsticks to boot. There were no dogs allowed on this beach, unless they were leashed (
Dogs Required on Leash,
the sign said, and he would joke to Kim that they had to
get a dog and leash him or they were out of compliance with the law), and there was no drinking here either, especially underage drinking.

One of the kids, the one with the black crewcut and dodgy eyes, murmured an apology—“We didn't realize,” or something to that effect—but the big one, the ugly one, the one who'd started all this in the first place by giving him that wiseass crap about did he want to buy a dog, just stood his ground and said, “My name isn't Jack.”

Nobody moved. Edison swayed over the prop of his good leg, the right knee still red and swollen, and the two blond kids—they were brothers, he saw that in a flash, something in the pinched mouths and the eyes that were squeezed too close together, as if there weren't enough room on the canvas—crossed their arms over their tanned chests and gave him a look of contempt.

“All right,” he said, “fine. Maybe you want to tell me what your name is then, huh?”

Up on the street, on the ridge behind the beach, a woman in an aquamarine Porsche Boxster swung into the last open spot in a long line of parked cars, pausing to let a trio of cyclists glide silently past. The palms rose rigid above her. There was no breath of wind. “I don't have to tell you nothing,” the kid said, and his hands were shaking as he drew the stub of a joint out of one of the pouches in his shorts and put a match to it. “You know what I say? I say fuck you, Mister.”

And here was the dog, trembling all over, a flowing rill of muscle, dropping the stick at the kid's feet, and “No,” Edison said, his voice like an explosion in his own ears, “no, fuck
you!
”

He was ten feet from them, fifteen maybe, so imprisoned in the moment he couldn't see the futility of it, standing there on the public beach trading curses with a bunch of drunk and terminally disaffected kids, kids a third his age, mere kids. What was it? What did they see in him? And why him? Why him and not one of the real geeks and geezers strung out up and down the beach with their potbellies and skinny pale legs and the Speedos that clung to their cracks like geriatric diapers?

That was when the tall kid snatched the stick out of the dog's mouth and flung it directly at Edison with everything he had, a savage downward chop of the arm that slammed the thing into his chest with so much force he found himself sprawling backwards in the sand even as the kids took to their feet and the harsh, high laughter rang in his ears.

Then it was the bar, the scene at the bar at four o'clock in the afternoon, when the sun was still high and nobody was there. Edison didn't even bother to go home and change. He hadn't gone near the water—he was too furious, too pissed off, burned up, rubbed raw—and aside from a confectioner's sprinkle of dry sand on his ankle and the dark stain in the center of his T-shirt, no one would have guessed he'd been to the beach, and what if they did? This was California, beach city, where the guy sitting next to you in the bleached-out shirt and dollar-twenty-nine Kmart flip-flops was probably worth more than the GNP of half a dozen third world countries. But there was nobody sitting next to him today—the place was deserted. There was only the bartender, the shrine to booze behind him, and a tall slim cocktail waitress with blue eyes, dimples, and hair that glistened like the black specks of tar on the beach.

He ordered a top-shelf margarita on the rocks, no salt, and morosely chewed a handful of bar mix that looked and tasted like individual bits of laminated sawdust, his dark blood-flecked eyes sweeping the room, from TV to waitress to the mirror behind the bar and back again. His heart was still pounding, though he'd left the beach half an hour ago, humiliated, decrepit, feeling like the thousand-year-old man as he gathered up his things and limped up the steps to his car. It was irrational, he knew it, a no-win situation, but all he could think about was revenge—Revenge? Murder was more like it—and he methodically combed the street along the beach, up one narrow lane and down another, looking for any sign of his three antagonists. Every time he came round a bend and saw movement up ahead, he was sure it would be them, drunk and stoned and with their guard down, whacking one another with
rolled-up towels, shoving and jostling, crowing at the world. He'd take them by surprise, jerk the wheel, and slice in at the curb to cut them off, and then he'd be on them, slamming the tall kid's face, over and over, till there was no more smirk left in him… .

“You want another one?” the bartender was asking. Edison had seen him before—he was the day man and Edison didn't know his name and he didn't know Edison's—and he had no opinion about him one way or the other. He was young, twenty-eight, thirty maybe, with a deep tan and the same basic haircut as the kids on the beach, though it wasn't cut so close to the scalp. Edison decided he liked him, liked the look of him, with his surfer's build and the streaks of gold in his hair and the smile that said he was just enjoying the hell out of every goddamned minute of life on this earth.

“Yeah, sure,” Edison said, and he found that the first drink, in combination with the codeine, had made his words run down like an unoiled machine, all the parts gummed up and locked in place, “and let me maybe see the bar menu. You got a bar menu?”

The cocktail waitress—she was stunning, she really was, a tall girl, taller than the bartender, with nice legs and outstanding feet perched up high on a pair of black clogs—flashed her dimpled smile when Edison cocked his head to include her in the field of conversation.

Sure they had a bar menu, sure, but they really wouldn't have anything more than crudités or a salad till the kitchen opened up for dinner at six—was that all right, or would he rather wait? Edison caught sight of himself in the mirror in back of the bar then, and it shook him. At first he didn't even recognize himself, sure that some pathetic older guy had slipped onto the stool beside him while he was distracted by the waitress, but no, there was the backwards Lakers cap and the shades and the drawn-down sinkhole of his mouth over the soul beard and the chin that wasn't nearly as firm as it should have been. And his skin—how had his skin got so yellow? Was it hepatitis? Was he drinking too much?

The bartender moved off down the bar to rub at an imaginary speck on the mahogany surface and convert half a dozen limes
into neat wedges, and the cocktail waitress was suddenly busy with the cash register. On the TV, just above the threshold of sound, somebody was whispering about the mechanics of golf while the camera flowed over an expanse of emerald fairways and a tiny white ball rose up into the sky in a distant looping trajectory. A long moment hung suspended, along with the ball, and Edison was trying not to think about what had happened on the beach, but there it was, nagging at him like grief, and then the bartender was standing in front of him again. “You decide yet?”

“I think I'll,” Edison began, and at that moment the door swung open and a woman with a wild shag of bleached hair slipped in and took a seat three stools down, “I'll … I don't know, I think I'll wait.”

Who was she? He'd seen her around town, he was sure of it.

“Hi, Carlton,” she said, waving two fingers at the bartender while simultaneously swinging round to chirp “Hi, Elise” at the waitress. And then, shifting back into position on the stool, she gave Edison a long cool look of appraisal and said hi to him too. “Martini,” she instructed the bartender, “three olives, up. And give me a water back. I'm dying.”

She was a big girl, big in the way of the jeans model who'd married that old tottering cadaver of a millionaire a few years back and then disappeared from the face of the earth, big but sexy, very sexy, showing off what she had in a tight black top—and how long had it been since Kim had left? Edison, the T-shirt still damp over his breastbone, smiled back.

He initiated the conversation. He'd seen her around, hadn't he? Yes, she had a condo just down the street. Did she come in here often? A shrug. The roots of her hair were black, and she dug her fingers deep into them, massaging as she talked. “Couple times a week maybe.”

“I'm Edison,” he said, smiling like he meant it, and he did. “And you're—?”

“I'm Sukie.”

“Cool,” Edison said, in his element now, smiling, smiling, “I've never known anybody named Sukie. Is that your real name?”

She dug her fingers into her scalp, gave her head a snap so that the whole towering shako of her hair came to life. “No,” she said.

“It's a nickname?”

“No.”

“You don't want to tell me your real name? Is that it?”

She shrugged, an elegant big-shouldered gesture that rippled all the way down her body and settled in one gently rocking ankle. She was wearing a long blue print skirt and sandals. Earrings. Makeup. And how old was she? Thirty-five, he figured. Thirty-five and divorced. “What about you?” she said. “What kind of name is Edison?”

Now it was his turn. He lifted both hands and flashed open the palms. “My father thought I was going to be an inventor. But maybe you've heard of me, my band, I mean—I had an eponymous rock band a few years back.”

She just blinked.