Heat (11 page)

Rowan calls his father by his first name, Bill, and his Mom is called Bev by everyone, and while I played along, I was, privately, a little uncomfortable with this casual way of addressing parents.

“Are you ready, Miss Chamberlain?” said Mr. Beal. He had a manly little dimple in each cheek, Thomas Jefferson with short hair.

We drove in a Land Rover so new the gearshift knob had a plastic hood like a shower cap. Pigeon droppings already splotched the hood.

The Pacific rarely confronts broad, gentle beaches in Northern California. The land stretches, blackberry and tawny scruff grass. And then it ends, a cliff, a twenty-meter drop to rocky rubble, and the rinse and shrug of the surf.

I didn't know what sort of trek we had in mind, carrying my part of the gear and the two thermoses—French roast and cranberry juice. Mr. Beal carried the nerve center of the sound equipment in a backpack, and Rowan and I scouted ahead with mike booms, a few lengths of aluminum poles that telescoped into each other. When a casual misstep had me lurching into Rowan, neither of us minded.

The wind tufted the dunes into brief scatterings of sand; the dune grass whispered in the breeze. The air was crisp, the sun warm, kneading through my sweatshirt. Rowan was going on about the charms of a den of coyote pups they had captured with the sort of shotgun mike spies use, and how you could hear each yip as the little teeth of the playful creatures took fun bites out of each other.

I could imagine my father's voice, what he said on one of our visitations, as the divorce became final. We sat on lawn furniture in his new garden, before the white gravel and the bamboo, before the gardener whose tastes had been celebrated in
Sunset Magazine
. Georgia wandered among the stands of wild fennel, and if you didn't know her you would think she wasn't listening.

Dad's landscape in those days had been dry dirt and milkweed, and a cord of firewood snaked over by morning glories. His new house was three stories, with a billiard room and four walk-in closets, a skylight in the master bedroom, and an armed-response security alarm.

Dad pointed out where his sand garden was going to be, a white empty expanse you could rake into different patterns. He showed me where the river gravel would shape a path through fluttering, decorative grasses.

“And we'll put in a swimming pool,” he said, “with a hot tub, Jacuzzi, twelve-foot deep end.” He touched me, on my hand, the way he does when he is describing an intercepted pass, a wild throw from center field, trying to pass his enthusiasm like an electric current.

“What is happening now doesn't change the way I feel about you,” he said. He turned, speaking toward the shifting, swaying stalks of fennel. “It alters nothing about my feelings for my two girls,” he said.

He touched my hand again, and rested his fingers there when he added, “It doesn't change the two of us.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

It was a long walk, the hike to the sea elephants. I imagined my father avoiding eye contact with tattooed skinheads on his way back from breakfast. I imagined the locker-room echoes of the jail. I wished I could send him a mental picture of the scrub jay chattering in the cypress.

“You haven't reviewed the larger implications of this sort of activity,” I was saying, talk as a kind of game I play to keep my mind busy. Maybe I wanted to keep convincing Rowan that I was as smart as his traveling debutante, the one who won prizes in calculus.

“Like what?” Rowan played along, placid as a horse.

The Beals are under contract with Microsoft to expand the Sounds of Nature software. I could easily perceive the fun it would be for a kid in the inner city to double-click on the cow icon and hear a cow moo. But what would happen if the Beals failed to get a sound bite of a killdeer, a bird that lives in the flat marshes in the Bay Area? As a result, when Microsoft decided to issue the next edition of their encyclopedia, the company would omit mention of the killdeer altogether.

The menu of creatures offered would be limited to the animals who had made the Top One Hundred. And animals that didn't make any noise at all, the hermit crab, the lawn moth, would be absolutely overlooked. Rowan agreed that this was very true and a real deficiency in the whole idea of sound-replicated nature.

“You're creating a skewed universe,” I said.

His eyelashes were blond in the sunlight.

I added, “I'm not annoying you, am I?”

He laughed.

“Carry on,” said Mr. Beal approaching from behind, upbeat but impatient, an army officer wishing the army was all male.

Sea elephants smell funny, even at a distance. They smell like decay, rotting chicken skin, garbage left too long under the sink. They didn't smell bad individually. We nearly stumbled on a living sofa, a finned mammal with doe-like eyes, and she nosed the air in our direction with an air of drowsy courtesy. But the crowd of male sea elephants elbowing up and down the beach in the distance needed to have its locker-room cleaned.

I knew that once the microphones were in place, conversation would enter a cease-fire, so I asked, keeping my voice low, “What would you do if your father got arrested?”

“There isn't much you can do,” said Rowan.

“How would you feel?”

“My father gets arrested every now and then,” said Rowan.

Somehow I had forgotten this, misfiled it in a part of my mind. I could not associate the Beals with criminal conduct.

“The government trucks carry radioactive isotopes,” Rowan said. “Right through the streets. They go past schools and Laundromats where they could have an accident. Bend a fender and spill plutonium all over the intersection. My father gets together with a Sierra Club spin-off, a group called Atomic Abstinence. They picket the nuclear research lab in Livermore, the Port of Oakland.” Rowan shrugged: Parents, what can you do?

I hate coming out with such a bare question. “He's been in jail?” I asked, keeping my voice down, Mr. Beal intent on untangling his earphones.

“Overnight, once or twice. When it comes to sentencing, the judge orders him to do community service. He goes around playing the voices of the carnivores for school kids.”

“It's important for children to learn all about hunting and killing,” I said. What I wanted to say was, Doesn't it bother you?

“Dad says he looks pretty good,” said Rowan lightly, “in a county jail jumpsuit.”

He must have read the trouble in my eyes. Rowan put his arm around me, enclosing me. “Don't worry, Bonnie.”

I wanted to joke: Okay, whatever you say.

“Your dad didn't do anything wrong,” he said, his lips at my ear. Sometimes I'm self-conscious about my earring hole, thinking I should go back to wearing jewelry.

“The courts make all kinds of blunders,” Rowan was saying. “During one of my dad's protests the cops arrested a mailman, gathered him in with the protesters. He was just following his route, delivering mail.”

I managed a creaking what-do-you-know laugh.

“The law is really stupid, Bonnie.”

Maybe Rowan didn't realize that if the courts could make tiny mistakes, they could also make a really gigantic one and put an innocent man in prison.

“If it's all right with you two,” said Mr. Beal, in a half-whisper. Worry lines had appeared in his forehead, the equipment all set up, the digital recorder he had bought in Japan. This was a new Mr. Beal, one I had not seen, the pro at work, and I was almost relieved to see how impatient he was, eager to get Rowan in place with the microphones. I had wondered if the Beals communicated perfectly with each other, every blessed minute.

Rowan put a finger to his lips but motioned me to come on. I tiptoed by Mr. Beal, sure he would snap something at the two of us. But Mr. Beal had that otherworldly expression people wear when they are listening through earphones, and Rowan and I took our places just ahead, on the ridge of a dune.

I had not been aware of any danger, but now I put my hand to my chest.

My body perceived the threat. Not just my eyes and ears. My entire nervous system tingled. Sea elephants basked just a few meters away. Most of the animals were in an advanced state of molt, tattered fur lofting and spinning from their bulk. The blown tatters of skin felt artificial, like nylon. I tucked a triangle of fur into the hand pockets of my sweatshirt. I would show it to Dad. I would bring my father here, soon, next week.

He would love the massive athleticism of the young males, each the size of a Buick, crashing through the surf, plundering the sand, heaving upslope. Almost every individual hulk rose up from time to time to spar with a neighbor. Each sea elephant had a boxing-glove-size swelling on his nose, and he punched and blocked with this single fist. Sparring partners ascended together, rising high from the crusty sand, and their mutual weight would send them toppling, crashing into the sea foam.

Dad would admire the way Rowan sat, eyes narrowed, catching every belch and chuckle, perched on the ridge, holding the microphones aloft on a glittering aluminum T. He looked my way and lifted his eyebrows: Quite a noise.

I rolled my eyes in agreement, like I was used to this. When I looked back at Mr. Beal he flashed me encouragement with his eyes. We were trespassing, I knew, stealing something, close to these massive animals so we could lift their voices from the air. We did no harm, but I felt the hush of a thief.

The sound was guttural, tenor and bass, growling, yammering, and sometimes one elephant seal would roar. It was the kind of thunder that must have awakened people in villages centuries ago, wide-eyed, gasping: Was it only a dream?

CHAPTER TWENTY

Well before dawn the summer before this, the telephone had startled me awake. I thrashed, struggling to find the clock radio, thinking it was time to get up and run my miles.

I picked up the telephone at last, desperate to silence the source of the noise. “Go outside in the backyard,” my father's voice was saying, “and look up at the sky, Champion. Don't ask, don't talk, just do what I say, and call me back. Do you hear me? Are you there?”

I was sleep-silly, three-thirty in the morning. “Okay,” my voice said, like a rasp from the tomb. He hung up, and I sat there in the bedding. It's hard for me—some people are brisk before breakfast. I crawl.

Mom had bought me a cute phone, mock antique, fake ivory and gilt, a rococo instrument a gangster's girlfriend might use. The problem was you couldn't take it anywhere. I staggered into the bathrobe I had long ago outgrown, the frilly one I rarely wore beyond the bedroom, and I mouse-footed my way through the kitchen, outside.

Neighborhood quiet surrounded me, a last cricket, a steady rush and hiss of freeway sound. I tilted my head. We don't get much of a night sky in the Bay Area. Summer clouds, winter rain, city lights, smog. You can sometimes look up and catch the moon. And if you let your night vision develop you can see a few of the more brazen stars, point to point in the smoggy dark.

But I expected what I saw: not much, a few stalwart stars, a slender piece of moon going tan as it approached the western horizon. I was more concerned about not falling into the pool and not tripping over the sprinkler at the end of the hose. Still, I kept looking. Dad was watching with me, in his bamboo-and-gravel garden a couple of miles away.

A flash across the sky. Another. Like flaws in my own vision, glints that weren't there, too fast. I lay down flat on the dewy crab grass.

It was a meteor shower, flicking chips of light that arced across the sky. I could almost sense my father watching with me.

I stayed like that until dawn and finally fell asleep there, curled up on the wet grass. Mom approached me in the sun glow, her features set, a woman afraid to make a sound. We made it a joke later, the expression on her face, but we both knew what she had been thinking, my body flung there on the tough, prickly grass.

The Beals dropped me off late that afternoon, sunburned and full of stories, shouting over the ragged, metallic jazz Mr. Beal loves to play at full volume, saxophones and anguished trumpets. They had a good laugh over the story of Rowan running full-out from a cougar at Tamales Bay, the cat wondering if Rowan was lunch.

“That was really stupid,” cried Rowan over a drum solo. “You never run from a predator.”

When I left the car Rowan snapped out of his nature-happy routine and reached for my hand. “Everything's going to be all right, Bonnie,” he said. His father waited at the steering wheel, gazing off at the street, keeping time to the music with tiny movements of his head.

“Everything,” Rowan said, getting out of the car to hold me.

I couldn't say anything that would keep him there in the gathering twilight.

“This is a piece of sea elephant skin,” I said.

Mom fingered the triangle of fuzzy polyester-like fur. She said, “Yuck,” but with something like wonder.

I was glad to reenter my mother's solar system. Her professional life had spilled out of her office, paper clips and envelopes, and she was working at the dining room table. Her hair was gathered back in a shaggy, silvery ponytail, a style that didn't look that good on her.

I gave her a brief verbal postcard, peanut butter and jelly and seagulls. I left out the sunlight in the hair of Rowan's arms, the muscle in his jaw bunching as he chewed.

I put my elbows on the table.

As though sensing my deletion, Mom said, “Rowan and his dad had a good time?”

I wanted her to know that this had been a serious activity, contributing to science and the spread of knowledge. “I like them,” I added.

She gave me a thoughtful smile. “I do, too,” she said. She let one arm hang, the other draped across the table, a folder of receipts, the sort of paperwork you're required to keep on file for four years. You can only work so long, even to take your mind off trouble.

I hadn't planned to talk, but it happened. I found myself describing my dream and said I was down to antihistamines in the medicine cabinet, hoping they would help me sleep. I told Mom Miss P was thinking of retiring. I told her Miss P was leaving it all up to me. I wasn't supposed to tell anyone that she was thinking of early retirement.