Chance (95 page)

“Right.”

Time passed.

“Do you remember the name of the motel?”

“The Blue Dolphin, but like I said . . .”

“You have to talk to someone.”

“Will you call me when you get there?”

“I’m there, buddy. And then I’m gone.”

“I have to be smart about this,” he told her. And then, after a beat, “I want us both to be smart.”

“I think it might be a little late for all of that.”

He found the old man in back of the warehouse where he appeared to be placing luggage into the trunk of the Starlight coupe. “Thank God you’re here,” he said. “I’m just going.”

“You’ve found him, then?”

“Not exactly but I know where to look.”

“Should I drive?” Chance asked. But the old man was already behind the wheel of the coupe and in the end Chance joined him. It was, after all, the reason he’d come. He went heeding the advice of Jaclyn Blackstone, or at least of someone calling herself by that name, hoping against all reason that the magic rabbit was still among the living, neither institutionalized nor incarcerated, and above all still his friend.

C
ARL FILLED
him in as they drove, all about how D had been taken to the father’s house in Berkeley, that
they
were trying to set up something . . . a transfer to some private facility . . . that D had gotten wind of it and left, even in the face of some apparent attempt to prevent his doing so.

Chance was a moment in trying to envision what that must have looked like before reminding the old man that Big D was in fact an adult, a subject upon which he was beginning to feel like a broken record.

“He’s afraid of his father.”

“His father should be afraid of him.”

“I told him that was what you said but he may need to hear it from you.”

“And when exactly will he have the opportunity to do this?”

“Soon enough,” the old man told him. “I’m just hoping we’re not too late.”

“Meaning what?” Chance asked. They were by now leaving the city, headed south. The old man’s shrugging motion was noncommittal and Chance was left to study the moneyed hills in approach to Palo Alto, their blue green tops lost to the great billowing banks of cloud
that marked the coast and in whose canyons the Merry Pranksters had once partied with Hells Angels and the nineteen-sixties might be said to have begun. In time he closed his eyes, giving in to exhaustion, and even managed to doze, albeit fitfully. His dreams were in orange and blue, all nipple clamps and penis rings, a woman he couldn’t find, all of it infused with the distant throbbing of unseen engines.

He woke in a place where the money ran out, where apartment buildings distinct for their resemblance to government-funded housing projects in close proximity to the 101 freeway running south to Los Angeles had taken its place. And then they were past even that, on a two-lane road now, and had come to some last vestige of what had once held sway here, long before the coming of the hippies or the yuppies that would rise from their ashes. It appeared in the form of a derelict avocado grove, its ruins commingling with those of citrus set to rows but long since overcome and in the midst of which the remains of an old Victorian half lost amid the brush and weeds and unkempt trees.

The old man veered from the pavement near the mouth of a long dirt drive leading toward the house, marked by two large stones and each of these the bearer of iron rings as might once have been used for the hitching of horses, and parked in the dirt on the side of the road. One of the rocks was painted red white and blue with an old-fashioned peace symbol sprayed over that in black paint. Opposite was a sign suggesting that much of the surrounding land had been recently sold and was now slated for development. It allowed for the imagining of shopping malls and industrial parks.

“That’s too bad,” Chance said, by which he meant the sign and what it promised.

Carl took in their surroundings. “My father used to pick out here,” he said. “Only job he could find back in the day. Came out when I was a teenager. Family left Missouri, landed in Oregon. My dad started picking fruit, wound up following a harvest down the coast till we got to San Francisco.”

“That’s something.”

“Yeah,” Carl said. He appeared to be watching a small, orange-throated bird at work at the top of a dying tree. “He didn’t like me much.”

Chance took this as a reference to the old man’s father. “Guess mine didn’t like me much either,” he said, “when you get right down to it.”

The old man watched as the bird flew away. “Doctor. Thought that was supposed to be one of the good ones.”

“There were some bumps along the way.”

Carl nodded and lowered his window, their mad flight from the city having apparently come to this, a recounting of parental disappointment in the bucolic south. “So . . .” Chance said, but the old man was suddenly mute as a stone and there was nothing but the hum of insects, the faintest trace of orangewood and sage on the dry and motionless air. Chance tried once more. “So . . .” he said.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Carl told him. “But this is the best we can do. If he’s here he’ll know that we are too. He’ll come or he won’t.”

“And how long do we give it?” Chance asked. He found that he had joined the old man in looking toward the trees.

“That’s a tough one,” Carl said.

In real time it was probably no more than five minutes before a sizable number of quail broke from the grass like a scattering of buckshot and the big man in their wake, moving out from some particularly dense thicket back up where the old house held sway among the trees then making his way down along the long drive, dressed as he had been the first time Chance laid eyes on him, in the old military jacket over a black T-shirt and cargo pants and combat boots with their laces flapping in the dust and he came up on Chance’s side of the car where he wanted to know what was up. He posed the question as if nothing of consequence had passed since their last meeting.

Chance found himself more moved by the other’s appearance than he might have imagined. “How are
you
would be the question.”

There was a smudge of dirt on the big man’s face. The cuffs of the cargo pants were full of leaves and there were twigs in the laces of his
boots. “I’m good,” D said. They left it at that and Chance and Carl got out of the car and D led them back among the trees where Chance could see more clearly what had been a grand old Victorian such as the East Coast transplants had built when they’d first come west to escape their various and assorted histories, to grow their citrus and avocados, their almonds and walnuts. This one had fallen upon hard times with many of its doors and windows covered in plywood and a whole section of roof gone entirely yet managing even in the face of these insults to retain some air of stubborn dignity. It said something, Chance thought, about the people who’d built it, and he was reminded in just that moment of Jean-Baptiste’s fierce and demented subjects, of the light in their eyes.

There had been, at some point in the tortured history of the place, a fire to go along with its other woes and the property rather obviously condemned, the final straw perhaps in prompting its sale to what had undoubtedly been just one of many hovering developers. The property was the last of its kind for miles around and certainly they must have circled, sharks drawn to the remains of a creature so much larger and grander than themselves.

From the looks of the place it had all been sitting like this for a good long while, with new brush, wildflowers, and the green shoots of trees spreading to hide a good deal of the charred and sorry wood. A small community of the homeless, of both sexes, had moved in. Some appeared to be occupying the old house while others had pitched makeshift tents among the trees. There was an old-fashioned carriage house off to one side of the big house and someone had painted
WELCOME TO THE HOUSE OF SPACE AND TIME
across one of the doors and
ABANDON ALL HOPE, MOTHERFUCKER
across another. A number of the men were dressed not unlike D in old military gear of one type or another and Chance was willing to take them for veterans of the fight, in flight from or perhaps part time denizens of the large VA hospital in Palo Alto, and knew it for one of the haunts described in the medical reports he’d read at the hospital.

Darius Pringle, Chance noted, his military service or lack thereof notwithstanding, was treated by the other members of the camp with great deference as they were shown somewhat ceremoniously to an old couch and recliner chair arranged about a battered coffee table someone had salvaged from what might well have been the city dump and placed far enough back among the trees to have been invisible from the street. A large canvas tarp in colored patterns of camouflage greens and browns had been strung overhead to form a makeshift roof and the setting was, as near as Chance could tell, based on the reaction of others, a meeting place of some distinction.

D dropped himself into the recliner. Chance and Carl took the couch. “Talk to me,” D said.

Chance did.