Divisadero (5 page)

Her father stared down at
them. Then he walked slowly over to the bed, picked up a sheepskin, and came
back and covered her with it. He ignored Coop’s body. He carried his daughter
over the broken glass until they were away from the cabin and he could put her
down, back on the earth. Then he took her by the hand, and never let go of her
on the twenty-minute walk down the hill to the farmhouse, the quarter horse
nodding beside them, and Anna screaming his name.

He could see
nothing,
he sat up and could see no frontier between land
and sky. Storms had
fi
lled the valley.
Rain and then sleet.
Hail
clattering on the corrugated roof. He found himself in the very centre of the
room, as far as he could get from the smashed window that sucked in the gale.
Outside, the
fi
ve bannered
fl
ags that Anna had strung up a few weeks earlier
fl
ew parallel to the ground.
Blue, red, green, the hint of yellow, and the now unseen white.

Only the cuts on his face
felt sharp and alive. The rest of his body was numb and cold. He was going to
die here. He would die here, or walking
down
the hill.
Who was at the farmhouse now? He stood up slowly. The noise around him was so
loud he could not hear his own footsteps when he walked across the room, as if
he did not exist. He sat at the half-painted table and picked up a book of
Anna’s. It felt cold.

When he woke he realized
he had been asleep at the table. There seemed to be a momentary clearing, but
the wind swivelled back and the cabin was again cut off by the storm.
Just the flags snapping.
He put his hand through the broken
window, to test the weather. Was Anna at the farmhouse? All those times she had
risen from the deck, laughing nervously, so that at
fi
rst he believed she was laughing against
him, or worse, at both of them. But she was frailer than he knew. She had
pointed twenty yards away and said,
‘
That
’
s what I want. A bathtub out there someday.
’
As if denying all that was happening between them.

An hour later he was on
his knees, on the bare hill, scared he might veer from the path and be fully
lost in the unseen landscape. He was keeping to the narrow path by holding on
to its texture, brushing away snow to
fi
nd gravel or mud rather than grass. After leaving the cabin, he had
walked into a clutch of barbed wire, cutting open his cheek and tearing his
thin coat. He had turned back. When he reached the cabin, banging his arm
against its corrugated walls and moving alongside it to
fi
nd the steps, his face brushed the
fl
ags, and he grasped them, wound them
around his wrist, and pulled them loose. Come with me, Anna.
And
turned back down the hill.

The sky was darkening with
sleet and he could sense leaves circling in the wind all around him. But nearly
everything was invisible. The dead eye just ached.
If you were a Buddhist,
you would rise above this. It would be a good thing, no?
He kept moving
forward. A heavy push of water flung him sideways. He must have got onto the
footbridge and the sluice water had risen over it, and he was tumbling within
it down the hill, his clothes suddenly full of water and stones. His back
slammed across a tree, and that held him. He had a fury in his head, and he
didn’t allow himself to lose it. Not letting go of the tree trunk, he stood up
until he was touching the lowest horizontal branch, and moved along under it.
His face was unprotected from the sleet, but he kept holding the branch, moving
further; then his fingers touched the pesticide bag hanging from the tree. So
he knew where he was. He knew that if he walked forward, in the direction the
branch pointed, he would hit the fence just above the gate. As he began
climbing the angle of the hill, he hung on to that small line of a direction.
His body stepped into the fence, and he promised himself when he was on the
other side he would sit for a while, rest forever. But when he was over it he
kept walking, one hand holding the fence wire, in the direction of their
farmhouse. It would be only a hundred yards

35

more
. He had no idea who would be there. The wire burned his hand and he
didn’t let go, but then he had to leave it, to cross the thirty yards of open
space to the house.

Ten minutes later he was
lost, wandering about in darkness. He brushed against a barrel and thumped it
to make noise. He took another step forward and a vehicle blocked his way. At
fi
rst he was angry. He discovered the door
of the car and pulled at it. Nothing moved, but then it gave a little, so it wasn’t
locked, just a coat of ice. He pushed all his weight against it and then pulled
the handle again. This time the door came free. He eased himself in stif
fl
y and closed the door. It was quiet. He
could hear his breath. He turned on the interior light. With a numb hand he
brushed the felt on the ceiling and saw black blood on his
fi
ngers. If there was a key he could turn
on heat, but there was no key. He pressed the horn for a long time and would
not stop. Otherwise he might die here. He was listening to her, Yellow is earth
and green is water and red is
fi
re and white is cloud and blue is sky, limitless space, mind. Then
he passed out.

Unlike her, you did not
want to die. You got down here. Did she want to die?
She did. Oh yes, I think she did.
Who was talking? Someone pressing down on his stiff bent

knees
. He was on the
fl
oor in front of the stove, stretched out and wrapped in blankets. A
spark
fl
ipped
over to him. Soon he
was smelling
burning wool.
A good smell.
Like food. He liked it.

Don’t throw away my
clothes.
Why?
I want the . . . things.
What?
The...the...
Flags, she said. Did Anna give you the
fl
ags?
Yes. They
’
re not supposed to
touch ground.

Well, unlike her you
didn’t wish to die, somehow you got yourself down here.
It was Claire talking.
Where is she?
They were here. He took her. She wouldn’t say a word, even to me. She was
screaming when they both came into the farmhouse. She wanted to die. He put
Anna in the truck and drove off with her. There was blood on him. They were
here just ten minutes.
He said nothing. He didn’t know what Claire knew.
There was blood all over him, Coop.
All over his clothes.
I thought he was the injured one.
She’d had no idea that Coop had remained in the cabin during the storm; her
father had said he was somewhere else, before he drove off with Anna. Then
Claire had heard what she thought was a car horn, and she opened the door to a
thick curtain of sleet. But there was nothing out there.
A
short while later she heard it again, and went onto the porch once more and
looked out.
The storm had lessened and she saw a faint orange light, and
as she peered into the blackness, it faded. A minute later she would have
missed it altogether.
An interior car light.
Thunder
broke loose above the house. She stood very still for a while, then unravelled
a circle of rope, tied one end to the porch railing, the other around her
waist, and went into the storm in the direction of the light she had seen.
When she saw him through the windshield, she thought he was dead. Then his hands
twitched in the ochre of her
fl
ashlight. The thunder began again while she was under it. Claire
could hardly lift him, but she managed to pull him down out of the car and then
to drag him across the hard stubble of the yard to the house and then up the
steps. She untied the lifeline of the rope and wrapped him in a blanket and
stretched him out before the fire in the empty, dark house.
The next morning there was a faint sunlight. She woke and remembered
everything, what had happened to them all. In the barn Claire held the bridle
up, and the horse dipped his head and brought his ears through the upper
straps. She placed the blanket and saddle high on the animal’s back and cinched
the girth, keeping it loose for now. She leaned forward to smell his
neck,
there was always something about that smell.
The cypress trees along the driveway were still and she felt her senses fully
alive riding out after the storm. The horse climbed the hill slowly while
Claire’s eyes skimmed every ridge for any small bump of life that might look
like burlap or rock that could be a calf or some other creature. Going after
lost things was as uncertain as prayer. Branches and fence posts were scattered
across the slopes. An oil drum had rolled in from another farm during the night.
The landscape off-kilter.
She rode past their river,
black with a mud that had probably never surfaced before. From the
fi
rst hilltop she looked back and saw that
the water tower had buckled under its weak legs.
Coop had left.
Already.
And where Anna was, where her
father was, she didn’t know. She was alone, sixteen years old, on a horse that
bristled with nervousness and temper after his night in a barn full of crashing
thunder. She talked quietly, constantly to him, the creature yearning to
gallop, wanting to use the energy that Claire was containing.
A swath of buckeye trees had come down across from Coop’s cabin. She dismounted
and walked onto the deck. It was littered with glass. Through the broken window
she saw the cat, Alturas, stretched out on the bed. Claire had never witnessed
the cat indoors before. Its head was actually on a pillow, not expecting a
soul. Even this one had been changed by the chaos of the weather. She gathered
the dozing creature into a pillowcase, before it was fully awake, leaving his
head free, and stood in the coldness of Coop’s cabin. Years before, she loved
camping here alone, when there had been just a pallet and a
fi
replace. It had been an eagle
’
s nest for her in those days. Before it
had become Coop and Anna
’
s.
Now, with the storm’s destruction, it looked humble again. She was imagining
what she could do to it. She imagined herself riding back and turning to see
the building on fire, the black plume of smoke in the air. But this cabin was
all there was left of the past, their youth.
Coop would never come back. Claire knew that. She knew about the two of them.
She had lived in mid-air all those weeks. She’d witnessed Anna returning,
sometimes as late as dusk, to the farmhouse, wild-eyed, her face holding
nothing back, full of new certainties and knowledge, scared of everything. Anna
hadn’t stopped moving. She did not have to confess a thing as she circled and
circled their small, dark kitchen.
Claire should have burned the cabin down then.
She walked out into the sunlight. She untied the reins and rose onto the horse
with the cat in her arms, talking to both of them.

T
he
Deadhead, or hippie, would be the one true ally Cooper found when he arrived at
Tahoe. And the thing about ‘the hippie’ was that he seemed the healthiest
person in the casino. He was a salt-of-the-earth hippie, cow-shit-on-his-Tevas
hippie. From the
fi
rst time Cooper heard rumours of him to the last night he saw him
sitting at that card table with The Brethren, there was never a change in his
out
fi
t. There
were his unironed Hawaiian shirts, there was the long hair, the loose beads
that jangled whenever he moved, and the uncomfortable-looking necklace at his
throat made from seashells. Cooper had been sitting on a banquette when he
fi
rst overheard talk about him.

That friend of yours, that
hippie...
Dorn’s not a hippie. You can’t gamble and be hippie. Man’s a hippie. He goes
way back. Lives with that speech

therapist
he met at a Grateful Dead
concert. That’s hippie.

Dorn, slouching and
robust, was the most collected card player to come down from the Sierras. He
had a theory that two hours of handball a day justi
fi
ed and cancelled the drinking and cocaine
and sitting in the presence of smokers during the long evenings.

Are you the hippie? Cooper
asked. They were both watching a game.
Could be.
There’s that line—‘Hippies are living proof that cowboys still fuck the
buffalo.’
I wonder how many times I heard that one.
Cooper had spoken to almost no one since he’d arrived. Now, in thirty seconds,
he realized he had managed to insult one of the smartest and most anarchic
players in Tahoe, who, the rumour went, had twice skunked David Mamet in a
game. His new acquaintance put his hand on his shoulder.
Excuse me. Have to meet someone. My name is Edward Dorn. Like the poet.
The hippie left, and Cooper followed him outside and watched him get on a
bicycle, and drift down the street.
Cooper was twenty-three years old when he
fi
rst arrived in Tahoe and fell into the company of Dorn and his compatriots.
He had begun his gambling career watching and playing pool in bars and halls
along the coastal towns. He’d studied how the quickly aging players slunk
around the pool tables, how they forgave themselves too easily with a grimace,
how some were falling in love with the stroke. And he recognized those who were
too bitter or ambitious, as well as those who could conceal the larger range of
their talent. Cooper had known little about people before this. But pool was by
necessity a game of disguises by which you coaxed your mark to the table. And
then, when he started playing cards, discovering a technical skill in himself,
he saw that in poker you did not need to hide your talent. No one refused a
game because you might be a better player than you seemed. This was furious
mathematics, a stone in your heart, luck, and the chance of an eventual
card—the River—that would glance you towards your fate. He found himself at
ease within all this chaos and risk. When he saw drunks steer themselves
uncertainly between the card tables in Tahoe, as if avoiding whirlpools, he
recognized the same look that had been on him and the other fooled youths
coaxed back towards the great Anaconda hoses on the
fl
oating platforms of the Russian River.
The group around Dorn took Coop under their wing. There was Dorn, Mancini, and
‘The Dauphin,’ so named because he had been seen reading a European novel. They
would enter gambling halls like royalty from Wyoming—save for Dorn, in sandals
and beads,
fl
ash-frozen in the sixties. Gamblers scarcely remembered the name of
the president of the United States, but Dorn followed politics with an
obsessive aversion. He hated Born-Agains like Pounce Autry, whose group,
nicknamed ‘The Brethren,’ formed a prayer circle on the mezzanine before coming
down to the card tables. Dorn gave Autry a wide berth. Autry bounced between
Tahoe and Vegas, but Dorn and his cohorts saw Vegas as the end of the world.
They preferred to be based in Tahoe. Now and then they drove to Reno for a
weekend on journeys that were non-stop arguments as to what was the best drug,
worst drug,
best
breed of dog, who was the best
cardsharp they had met, the best masseuse, the best or worst actor. Without a
doubt, for all of them, De Palma’s
The Fury
was the very worst movie
ever made, that was a given. And at some point Mancini would insist that Karl
Malden was the greatest actor.
Almost every movie
—On the Waterfront, Streetcar, I
Confess.
There’s
One-Eyed Jacks...
You took those three fucking words right out of my mouth.
Him
and Katy Jurado—that’s the whole movie.
He’s in
Cincinnati Kid,
isn’t he? Isn’t he the mechanic in that?
Mancini, who’d been warming up, hesitated. You know, Karl has been in great
fucking pictures, but
Cincinnati Kid
has problems. Remember they
’
re having this game of no-limit
fi
ve-card stud. And Steve McQueen has, I
recall, aces and tens. And Edward G. Robinson
—
another
grand master of the art, if he
’
d been a chess player,
they
’
d have a statue of him
—
has
three cards, no pairs. Now, you never ever give them a chance to draw, when
that happens. You just don’t give them a chance to draw again.
Period.
But Fancy-Pants McQueen puts in a piss amount and
allows Edward G. to stay in and draw a card—he should
never
be allowed
to get to that card. You’d put in everything, your wife, your
parrot,
to
prevent him from drawing, you make it too expensive.... You know you have the
best hand as things stand. You bet all your money.
So what happens? I forget what happens.
Edward G. lays down a straight
fl
ush he
’
s just made, and busts him.
Cooper didn’t know the movies they were talking about. The others were in their
thirties and
forties,
he was the youth among them.
They watched over him, knowing him as a compulsive risk-taker, dangerous even
to himself. But what he could do, which surprised them, was imitate the way
each of them played, as if he were speaking in tongues.
Though
in the mania of a game, when you had to be calm, Cooper could be either
startling or foolish.
Someday he might be their skilled heir, but it
felt to them that for now he was still in hand-to-hand combat, mostly with
himself.
Whereas Dorn’s friends were in it for the way of life.
They played twelve-hour marathons, crossed over from scotch to cocaine, read
Erdnase and Philip K. Dick by the pool or in the back of an air-conditioned
car, fucked glowing women with the Discovery Channel loud in the background,
and shot up in the elevator going down. Cooper didn’t participate, was an
untouchable. He was sane everywhere but within a game. There was Peruvian
fl
ake to keep the others from getting
tired. Asleep they could not win. That was the only logic. Several years later
in Santa Maria, when a woman named Bridget attempted to give Cooper some, he
held her face between his hands and said, ‘I know you won’t believe me, but one
day you’re going to write four hundred words down on the back of a matchbook
and think you’ve written a masterpiece, you’re going to believe you’re
invincible.’ She smiled back at him: ‘
You’re
invincible, Cooper.’
In a deli one evening their group spoke of unusual winnings. Dorn mentioned a
player called The Gentile who had won his future wife in a card game, with a
pair of nines.
There were setups, larceny, and drugs everywhere. Two men asked Dorn to suggest
a reliable card mechanic, and he mentioned Fidelio. ‘Pretty name,’ they said.
‘What nationality is he?’ ‘Filipino,’ Dorn said. ‘No, thank you,’ the gamblers
said, ‘we need an Aryan.’ Cooper was appalled, but Dorn said, ‘Fair enough,
they want a dealer who’s invisible.’ It was a world where you needed to quickly
forgive. You found yourself drinking with hit men or smack dealers who might
have killed someone with an eight ball the previous week. Fast lives were
ending all around them. The concern among their own group was which one of them
would be the
fi
rst to crash.
The Dauphin or Mancini.
They
saw less evidence of disaster with The Dauphin. Though he took Quaaludes
regularly, the odds were with him. And he seemed preoccupied with teaching his
friends about the recordings and skills of the great concert pianists, as well
as how to dress, railing against slip-on loafers, tattoos, men’s cologne, the
Windsor knot. He talked for hours on the proper length of the sleeve and the
correct height of a collar. The greatest work of literature for The Dauphin, as
far as clothes were concerned, was
The Tale of Genji,
and on those long
drives he read the other passengers to sleep with paragraphs from Lady
Murasaki. He had already lectured them on Japanese noir and the early
femmes
fatales. ‘You’ve not met them yet,’ he told Cooper,
‘but you will. They’ll come at you with a weakness. There is nothing more
seductive to a man than a woman in distress. They’re like
priests,
you never give them a handicap.
Cocaine fooled The Dauphin, however, and under its in
fl
uence two Baptists lured him into a game
of Deuce to Seven and he lost everything. A few days later a heart attack
felled him. He placed his last bet on a football game that was showing in
preop, and was dead a week later. When Dorn went to identify him, the orderly
pulled back the sheet and they saw the Jack of Hearts tattooed on his calf, a
mistake of taste from his youth.
That left Mancini the winner. (He continued his cicada-length relationships
with women and surprised everyone by eventually becoming a drug counselor in
Iowa.) They gathered in his apartment at eleven the morning after The Dauphin’s
death. The colour TV was on mute. There was some coverage about the buildup of
the war in the Gulf, and Mancini switched channels and stopped when he found a
programme with a female snakehandler wearing shorts. They watched her in
silence, remembered anecdotes about The Dauphin, then got in the car and took a
drive around the lake. They were more than six thousand feet above sea level
and it was easy to get drunk.
They played shorthanded poker among themselves and learned new games and broke
down percentages. Dorn
’
s
fi
rst principle had always been (as in the
song) that you go with
‘
the one with hair down to here
and plenty of money.
’
In the lull after The Dauphin
’
s death, Cooper decided to show them how good a card
mechanic he could be. He tore open a new pack, discarded the guarantee cards
and jokers, cut at twenty-six and gave a series of faro shuf
fl
es, eight times in under a minute, so the
deck ended in exactly the same order he started with. He confessed all this to
them, even if it was something he would never use in a game, so they would
trust him. ‘Watch carefully,’ he said at the start. ‘You have the
fi
ngers of a good Catholic with his rosary,
’
Mancini noted. ‘Why do you do this?’
There is a great history of people being given the wrong book, at some key
moment in their lives. When Coop had been scammed a few years earlier in
three-card monte on the pier in San Francisco, he went to a game shop to
discover how he had been cheated, and instead found a reprint of
The Expert
at the Card Table,
published as far back as 1902. Apart from explaining the
three-card-monte hustle, the book became a
Pandora’s box
for him. He found a subterranean world.
I thought I should discover everything that might come against me, Coop said. I
found a treatise on the ‘Science and Art of Manipulating Cards.’
Well, someday you must meet The Gentile, Dorn said, and learn a few more things
from him. He’s an old-time faro player. Maybe I will write you a brief letter
of introduction.
A few days after The Dauphin’s funeral, they scattered. Dorn returned home to
Nevada City, where Ruth, his perennial girlfriend, worked as a speech
therapist. He invited Coop to join him, and they drove a winding road bordered
by pines and were caught in a swirling snow until they left the mountains. Dorn
changed the radio dial to KVMR as they entered its frequency. In Nevada City,
he turned out to be a pillar of the community, active with the local public radio
station, and with helping transform an old forge into a community centre. At
the same time, he remained obsessed with conspiracy theories that, like poker,
had a disguised structure, revealed only by footnotes and glances. Dorn could
always sense the contours of a setup or read a deceit. What frustrated him in
his dealings with the Vegas Brethren, the born-agains, was that he hadn
’
t broken their code, couldn
’
t
fi
gure them out; he felt
fi
nessed by them. He was unsure whether
Pounce Autry was a great poker player who hated to lose or whether he was
always assisted by a mechanic or cardsharp who stacked or beagled every deck.
Recently, during the buildup to the war, he kept seeing their lapel
fl
ags. Coop, disgusted by their adamant
political self-righteousness, wanted to take them on.
Can’t be done.
I think I could.
Well, visit The Gentile
fi
rst, if you want to go up against Autry
’
s crowd. The Gentile will teach you. He
’
s become a civilian, but he hates everything about Vegas. Also, he
ran off with someone
’
s girl.
The one he won in the card game?
Yes.
So how do I get there?
First of all, you don’t ever call him The Gentile. His name is Axel. Get a bus
to Bakers
fi
eld,
then you can hire someone to drive you the seventy miles into the desert.