Pacific (9780802194800) (17 page)

“Go to your homerooms,” said Mr. Lyons. “The next one who
makes a sound will be suspended. The Luddites are suspended.
Darling, you're expelled. Your parents shall be notified.”

“Our address has changed,” said Micah.

There were three weeks left in the school year. Micah spent them at the beach. He would take the bus down to Crenshaw and Venice and another bus west.

Joan gave her blessing. They couldn't afford the school, and she thought that Micah had been mistreated for an event that showed initiative and creativity.

If all the midways of all the fairs he'd ever seen were pushed to the edge of the continent, Micah thought, they would make a place like Venice Beach.

Music played and dogs barked, skateboards clacked and seagulls pierced the ocean air with their greedy calls. Lots of birds were hungry but few had the seagull's sense of owning all things that could be eaten. Refugee rows of shops sold henna tattoos and massages, shark teeth and Tarot readings, your name on a grain of sand.

Many parts of Los Angeles had next to no pedestrians, and that might have been because they were all here and dressed like professional athletes on their day off. Along the waterfront promenade they traveled on foot and skates, on rented bicycles and Segway scooters that had caught on here if nowhere else.

One man on a Segway rode about pointing things out to himself and commenting into a tape recorder. A Segway family glided along, the children on smaller models.

Painted on the wall of a hostel and watching it all was the Venus of Venice Beach, who wore blue leggings and a pink camisole and thought that history was myth.

Micah played volleyball on the sand beside the flat white ocean. He didn't play hard in these games. He'd smoke a serve or smother a spike sometimes, but in the spirit of the beach he was not looking to show anyone up.

Late one day he walked along the row of shops. A man skated in and out of the crowd with an electric guitar, a body-mounted amp, and a bandolier of batteries. He plucked complex chords that lingered as he glided by.

“Fly on, Little Wing,” said a lady in a straw hat.

Micah walked into a medical marijuana shop, a clean and orderly space with canvas awning. It was like a candy store, with backlit cabinets and glass counters offering weed in plastic bags and glass jars with silver lids.

“And how are we today?” said a man in a white coat with pens in the pocket.

“Very well, thank you,” said Micah. “I'd like to get certified.”

“How old are you?”

“Fifteen.”

“You have to be eighteen or accompanied by a parent or guardian. Can you bring your mother or father in?”

“No.”

“What's the problem?”

“They just wouldn't.”

“I mean the medical problem.”

“Ringing in the ears.”

“Come back when you are older and have a California ID. Will you do that?”

“Oh, probably not,” said Micah.

He left the shop and ate a hot dog on a bench facing the ocean. He felt a profound and enjoyable emptiness.

Soon a man in his twenties came along and sat beside him. He had a red beard and sunglasses and worn leather sandals.

“I saw you at the marijuana doc's,” he said.

“You have to be eighteen.”

The man took a silver cigarette case from his pocket and gave Micah a joint.

“Look eighteen to me.”

“Thank you.”

The man's name was Mark. He'd come down from Olympia after graduating from college. His father was a software maker who'd helped him get a little house and a shop that sold shirts and jewelry.

“I've seen you playing volleyball.”

“Yeah, I like it.”

Micah got high, his thoughts fading to simple awareness of the ocean. He felt made of stone. If seagulls attacked he would probably just sit there getting pecked.

You never knew what you were getting with weed. Probably someday it would all be as uniform as alcohol. The sun bled red into the water and the ringing in his ears fell to a whisper.

“I like volleyball,” he said.

“You want to get in a real game, I know some people. They play at night on other beaches. Gets pretty serious.”

“Where would you end up if you just started swimming?” said Micah.

“Channel Islands.”

“How far is that?”

“Twenty miles.”

“And then what?”

“Japan.”

“How far is that?”

“Way out there.”

“I want to go to Japan.”

“Fuck, man,” said Mark. “Fly out LAX tonight you got the money.”

“I don't have the money.”

“Japan is beautiful.”

“Have you been there?”

“No.”

Mark invited Micah to have supper with him and his girlfriend. They lived in a narrow yellow house with flowers and vines on a street going down to the ocean.

You could see far into the house from the street. The furniture was white and orange and green, and there were paper lanterns.

Mark's girlfriend, Beth, had green eyes, freckles, and strawberry-blond hair parted on the side. She didn't mind that her boyfriend had brought home a stray from the beach. Maybe people were like that here.

Micah called Joan to say he was having supper with friends. Now that they were living in the apartment, she had a better sense of when he was home and when he wasn't.

They had vegetarian curry, soft bread called naan in a woven basket, red wine in two-dollar bottles from Trader Joe's.

Beth came from St. Louis. She was a nurse and the daughter of a minister who was very strict and she was glad to be away from his world.

She worked at a clinic in Lomita and painted in her spare time. She liked to paint little bits of ocean as seen through cars or people's legs or over rooftops.

After supper they sat in the living room, and Micah explained how he got expelled from school. They thought it was a wonderful story, though, as Micah told it, he saw that it was a silly thing that didn't amount to much and wouldn't make the school right.

Micah stayed the night on Mark and Beth's couch. He could not sleep and went to the kitchen sink and drank glass after glass of water. A friendly light shone from beneath the cupboards.

He went back to the front room and lay down beneath a quilt. An hour later he heard the refrigerator open, and then Beth came into the front room with a bottle of grapefruit juice.

“Sleeping?” she said.

“Not yet.”

She placed pills in his hand.

“What is it?”

“Painkiller.”

“It helps you sleep?”

“It passes the time till you do.”

Micah looked at her, and she said, “I'm a nurse, baby. First I do no harm.”

They took the pills and washed them down with the grapefruit juice and went out to sit on the front porch by the street.

It was a clear night. The moon rode high above the blue roofs of the beach town. Micah felt no restlessness, no sorrow. There was a soft and intermittent breeze.

After a while skateboarders came rolling down the street. They leaned back looking around with long hair and cool blank expressions.

“There they go,” said Micah. “Down to the sea.”

C
HAPTER
S
IXTEEN

T
HE TRAIL
of the Laughing Bandit took Dan Norman to Aqualung Spas of Stone City. He stood with the owner in the showroom, by a hot tub bordered in cedar planks.

“Are we a target?” said the owner, a former minor league slugger with a big yet solid gut. Once played for Duluth in the Northern League.

“You fit the profile,” said Dan. “You're on the highway. Got a loading dock in back.”

“Spa parts ain't much use 'less you have a spa.”

“The guy's a pack rat. No pattern in what he takes. Now, what I'd like to do is give you a box. There's a couple wrenches inside for weight and a beacon. You set it out at night, take it in come morning. See if he won't swipe it, and we find out where it ends up.”

“Other places doing this?”

“Big Wonder is. World of Wheels is.”

“It's in everybody's interest.”

“That's what I'm hearing.”

“You and Louise have a spa?”

“We don't.”

“Well, I wouldn't go all salesman on you.”

“I appreciate that.”

“Do you good, though. Most of us are raised to think of comfort and relaxation as bad somehow.”

“I expect there is some of that.”

“Some. I'm here to tell you it is rampant.”

He turned the hot tub on. The engine hummed, the water churned, the floor vibrated. It seemed like a lot of commotion for a bath.

“It's hydrotherapy,” said the owner. “Return to the sea with your loved one. We work hard. I know you must. The world is cold. Are we not entitled to comfort? Even pleasure. And yes I will use that word. All for pennies a day.”

“You are going all salesman on me.”

“Can't help myself. I believe in spas.”

“I can see that you do.”

People thought Louise would be lost without Mary, and there was something to that. So much of herself had been formed in response to Mary's judgments that now she didn't seem to be formed of anything.

She put up a sign in the thrift shop window saying
closed until further notice
. The metal shutters came down over the stuffed crow, which looked away as if abandoned by its protector. Then she took the Scout to Ronnie Lapoint's shop in Morrisville.

“What's this thing doing to you now, Louise?”

“Pulling to the left.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I was hoping you could fix it.”

“No way I can do it now. For you though I will.”

“You're the best.”

Louise read
Scientific American
in a waiting room smelling of Glade and grease and gasoline. The television played without sound a talk show featuring three women who seemed so engrossed in their topic that they might jump up and dance.

Ronnie came in after a while, wiping his hands on a red flannel rag.

“Sure sorry about your mom.”

“Oh. Thanks, Ronnie.”

“I want to say my condolences, but what are condolences?”

“I think you just gave them.”

“That lady could argue me up one wall and down the other.”

“That's my mom. How's the truck?”

“You won't have the pulling. But she really needs rings.”

“How much are rings?”

“Aw, it's not worth putting rings in.”

Louise drove to North Cemetery on a hill outside Grafton. Robins walked about with long strides in the uncut grass. She put flowers down on Mary's grave, a hill of dirt covered in green fabric. She waited for revelation. Mary had done her part to make her world go around, and it had gone around seventy-seven summers—not so many when you thought about it, her life ending in a dream, and she never spent one day in a nursing home. Louise rolled up the green cloth and left it by the maintenance shed, because Mary would prefer the honest dirt.

Louise went to her baby's stone, which always needed tending in the spring, as it was flush with the ground, and grass tended to grow over it. She trimmed the grass and troweled away the dirt and scrubbed the gray slate with rags.
MAY
7
,
1992
.

“I wish you were here,” she said.

From the cemetery she went to see Don Gary and Lyris about a headstone.

The fragrant and industrious Don Gary told of a ballgame he'd seen once at the Metrodome. The clean-up hitter was on deck, and Don looked forward to seeing him hit a home run or strike out or whatever he would do. The score was tied, men on base, tense. It was a long story and to Don's thinking a parable about losing a parent. Louise stopped paying attention to the words, but she liked the sound of him talking.

A manila envelope addressed in red ink landed on the desk of Albert Robeshaw at the newspaper in Stone City.

The office was built before the print business went into decline, and before the old editor making good money had been fired in favor of a new editor making poor money. Probably it would cost more to take the office apart than to leave it.

Albert sat at a table by the vending machines and opened the envelope, which contained a letter and a map sent by a man who lived in Mayall, Minnesota.

Dear Mr. Robeshaw,

I have followed with interest your coverage of the missing Sandra Zulma, however I wish to clarify a statement in the recent article “Fantasy Life of a Fugitive.” The encounter between Sandra Zulma and the Boy Scouts took place in the State Forest not the Fen, where overnights are not permitted because of the native plants. See map (enclosed). This is a minor imperfection in an outstanding article, sir. I was one of the scouts who discovered Sandra Zulma on the river. You can be sure I remember that day.

Albert spread the map on the table. It showed the state forest and a winding river with an X drawn on either side, one labeled
Scout Encampment
and the other
Sandra Zulma
.

Albert wondered whether the newspaper would need to print a correction. The new editor kept track, so one didn't correct lightly.

He took the correspondence to the city editor, who had been with the paper for years and made more money than anyone else. She was hoping to get bought out rather than fired.

“Hey, what do you make of this?” said Albert.

She took the letter from Albert and looked at the dense handwriting.

“I'm not about to read this,” she said.

Albert took the letter back and paraphrased it.

“Did we say it was in this fen thing?”

“We said in the woods.”

“And that's accurate.”

“Yeah.”

“Fuck it. Inside baseball.”

“That's what I thought. Maybe I should go up there.”

“No you shouldn't. Our out-of-town money is spent, and you spent it. Now listen, honey. I want you to slip over to the American Suites. There's a greenhouse conference going on.”

“A greenhouse conference.”

“Yeah. You know, with plants. See what they're talking about. If there's some new hybrid. Have fun with it. People love greenhouses.”

Dan Norman wandered the Great Hall of the American Suites, where the spring meeting of the Garden Supply Consortium of the Upper Midwest was taking place.

He was monitoring two unrelated cases of suspected infidelity. That was four people counting the partners. Apparently these greenhouse operators were highly sexualized, perhaps from being around seeds and earth and growing all the time.

The private investigation business relied on this simple work, but Dan felt like a crumb. Whatever you found out, you seemed to be taking financial advantage of the death of a marriage.

To which Lynn Lord would say, “Well, far as that goes, Dan, if you're too sensitive to take financial advantage of things, you shouldn't be in any business. You should go be a monk, get yourself one of them monk haircuts.”

Moving with the tide of conventioneers, Dan strolled booth to booth, holding the Fanta camera that had nailed the clandestine bowler. He checked out the latest in spray nozzle technology.

Every couple years he or Louise would buy one of these, but it would always break or disappear, and they would go back to thumbing the end of the hose to wash the car or chase leaves down the eaves trough.

Dan paused at a booth crowded with concrete statues—trolls and mermaids, deers and frogs and eagles, naked people who seemed to be stretching after a restful nap and wondering where they put their clothes.

The nipples of the female statues were concealed by strategically placed arms or vines or locks of hair, and the men all had very small penises, but then, when you thought about it, there probably wouldn't be that much of a market for a garden statue with a large penis either.

The statues reminded Dan of the adulterers. He had not seen any of them for a while. Possibly they were in their rooms, under the covers. He left the Great Hall, and in the corridor he saw one of the couples.

They didn't seem quite old enough to be married to other people they'd got tired of. The man had his back to the wall, and the woman leaned close holding his face in both hands.

Dan could not ask for a better chance to get them on video. As they were standing by the elevators, he could move naturally down the hall with his attention trained on them the whole time.

All he had to do was turn the camera on and walk over and take the elevator to any floor. He put his finger on the button that would turn the camera on, and, as he did so, he asked himself why should he do this, and saw that there was not one reason in the world.

He turned and walked to the hotel lobby, where Albert Robeshaw was just coming in.

“Hey, Dan,” said Albert. “I'm looking for the greenhouse convention.”

“Just go on down that hall.”

“What are you doing?”

“Working.”

“What on?”

“Ah, it doesn't matter. I quit.”

“The whole thing.”

“Yeah.”

“What will you do?”

“Not sure. Your dad's after me to run for sheriff again.”

“You would win.”

“I might. And if I don't maybe I'll just be a monk or something.”

“You'd be a great monk.”

“You think so?”

“Well. A good one, anyway.”

Dan drove home, coming up on Delia Kessler's place. She and Ron were divorced now, and the kids had long since moved away.
labs for sale
, said a sign.

Dan parked in the lane. The house was a prefab that had been brought in after the spectacular Kessler fire of the nineties. It was long and gray with small windows and looked like an ocean liner.

Dan knocked on the side door and Delia let him into the kitchen, where she was cooking something in a speckled black pot.

“What're you making?”

“Oyster stew.”

“I seen your sign. You've got pups.”

“Too late,” said Delia. “They've all gone but for one, and her I'll probably keep.”

“To breed,” said Dan.

“Nah. I think she's a little slow. The last one to go, they're never happy about it, but she hasn't come around the way they do. I charge a fair price, and I don't want it out there I'm selling depressed dogs. I mean I'll show her to you but don't expect too much.”

“Might as well have a look.”

Delia put a wooden spoon on a porcelain rest, turned the fire down, and led the way to the room where she kept the litters.

The dog room smelled like pee. There was a wire crate with blankets inside and brittle newspapers spread on the floor. “Sword Killer Escapes in Daring Hospital Break,” said an old headline.

The Lab pup lay underneath a water heater, eyes brown and slightly crossed.

Dan knelt on the newspapers, and the dog yawned, stuck her head out, and smelled his hand.

Delia stood in the doorway, chewing the skin by the nail of her little finger.

“She's certified hips and eyes. Just kind of withdrawn.”

“How much?”

“Three hundred.”

The dog cocked her head, as if the price sounded high and she wondered if Dan would have the same reaction.

“She seems okay to me.”

“Tell you what. Take her home and see how she does. I'll have her back if it don't work out.”

Dan sat at the kitchen table and wrote Delia a check that he tore off and laid on the table. Delia stirred with the spoon.

“Will you and Louise eat oyster stew?”

“You got extra.”

“I always cook the same batch as when the kids were home. My grandpa used to make it in the winter. Us kids wouldn't get oysters, you had to be a certain age. We'd put the crackers in and let them swell up big as silver dollars.”

Dan drove home with the new dog asleep on his lap and a mason jar of oyster stew on the floorboard.

Louise had never been to the house where Tiny and Joan Gower had lived. It was on a bend in the Boris road, from which no other houses could be seen. She got out of the Scout with the necklace in the box Tiny gave her at Mary's wake.

She knocked on the door and listened to the soft clatter of the wind chimes. “Look, someone has come to visit,” they seemed to say. “Oh, it doesn't matter, doesn't matter . . .”

The chimes were made of sandalwood and, like the necklace, seemed an unusual item for Tiny to have laid eyes on, let alone acquired.

It was not too late to run until Tiny opened the door and raised his hand to cover his face. Louise pulled his hand away and saw the cuts and swelling.

“What the fuck happened to you?”

“Well, these guys come over, you know.”

“No I don't. What guys?”

“There were four of them. Earl Kellogg. One of them Mansfields from Mixerton. I didn't know the other two. They were wearing their class rings.”

“What was it about.”

“I'm the Laughing Bandit.”

“You have got to stop this shit, man.”