Pacific (9780802194800) (3 page)

C
HAPTER
T
HREE

C
OMING INTO
Los Angeles, where jet airplanes crossed the mountains and drifted down over rivers of cars and trucks, Micah could not imagine people and things enough to fill the buildings he saw. It was the world's largest place.

Joan had a silver Audi with a straight stick and the roundness and precision of a toy. She wore big, dark sunglasses and drove with a thoughtless confidence Micah did not remember. She knew the way without thinking, turning down a curving, single-lane highway high in the sky.

Micah saw a giant woman dressed in an emerald gown and holding a violin on the side of a parking garage, and he saw the shining towers above the highways, and he thought maybe he'd made a mistake, which made everything more interesting.

Joan lived in a village north of Los Angeles with her husband and her husband's son. The husband's name was Rob Hammerhill, and he produced animal shows on television and managed a library of wildlife footage. His business took him often to Russia.

The house was a cluster of reddish boxes hidden from the road by vines, orange trees, and evergreens. No one was home. Joan led Micah to a room on the second floor in the back. Everything was new: bed and desk, wicker laundry hamper, big chair of blue and white stripe, bedside table with a black box on it. The smell of fresh paint made him miss the grounding smells of home—tobacco, motor oil, gravel dust, things like that.

Joan raised the window shade, and they looked out at a slate terrace, deep green yard, and, beyond that, stone steps climbing a hillside rife with trees and bushes and ivy.

“This is your room,” said Joan. “I hope you like it, though you might not at first. That's okay. I want you to feel free to tell me what you think.”

“It's nice.”

“Those are redwood trees,” said Joan. “Thank you for letting me be your mom again.”

When Joan left the room, Micah opened his suitcase and dug out a framed photograph of Tiny and Lyris. They were washing the goat in a wading pool, and the goat looked into the camera, wondering if it could be eaten.

Micah set the picture on the desk, lowered the shade, and lay on the bed. He looked at the black box and pressed the top of it, and it made the sound of rain. Then he pressed it again: the singing of birds. He cycled through wind, crickets, ocean waves, rain again, and he fell asleep.

Someone said it was morning time, and Micah opened his eyes.

“I lied,” said a boy in the room. He was older than Micah, small and thin with a dark goatee. “It's evening time.”

Micah sat up and looked around for his shoes, before realizing they were on his feet.

“I'm Eamon,” said the boy. “We're the sons of the people in the house, so we have to get along, no matter if we hate each other or what.”

“What time is it?”

“Seven-thirty.”

Micah yawned. “I'm Micah. Nice to meet you.”

“Are you a loner?”

“Don't think so.”

“Good. Let's go for a drive.”

Soon they were on another freeway. The green banks of the hills came down to the road and rose again on the other side. They listened to a band Eamon liked called the Libation Bearers.

The hilltops looked close in the evening light and Micah thought you could climb them and look around, though it would probably take longer than it appeared.

“How was the flight?” said Eamon.

“I got patted down in Minneapolis.”

“You look dangerous.”

“I'm sure.”

“One time they dusted my backpack. I was seven years old. It's an honor, really.”

They drove for half an hour and got off the highway, headed south on a two-lane road that wound through tunnels and canyons. Micah rolled down the window, feeling the cool wind on his face.

It was forested country, and they arrived at last on a soft dirt lane, beneath the interwoven branches of trees, with horse farms on either side, or perhaps it was the same farm.

“We're meeting some friends of mine,” said Eamon. “How do you feel about drugs?”

“I've done grass,” said Micah.

“We say ‘weed.' Interesting.”

“Well, we say ‘weed' too. I don't know why I said ‘grass.
'
”

“Six of one.”

“It didn't do anything. I thought I was smoking it wrong.”

“It's not all good.”

Eamon led Micah down a grass path between white wooden fences. A few horses stood stoic in the pastures and others could be heard knocking about in stalls. A husky with white eyes barked in a friendly way and lay down panting.

The three friends of Eamon sat peacefully on the front steps of a little house. With crescent eyes and thick black braids, Charlotte looked like one of the girls in the Boston Persuasion shoe commercials. Thea's small face shone in the twilight. Curtis's hair lay dense across his forehead, the color of wheat.

“This is my stepbrother Micah,” said Eamon. “Son of Joan Gower.”

“And Tiny Darling,” said Micah.

“Your father's name is Tiny Darling?” said Thea. “That's fantastic.”

“Well, his name is Charles, really,” said Micah modestly. “Only my mom called him that.”

“Micah's from the Middle West,” said Eamon.

Charlotte was wearing multicolored necklaces of glass beads, and she took one off and put it on Micah.

“Welcome to Southern California,” she said.

They walked beside the house and made themselves comfortable in lawn chairs. Curtis had a backpack, from which he took a translucent red bong, a gallon of distilled water, and a glassine bag of dried leaves.

“This strain is called King Scout,” he said. “It's a short high and kind of intense. It grows on the sides of mountains in a cool climate. Very hard to get.”

“We're not the drug culture,” said Charlotte. “Cocaine we would never do. Meth we would never do.”

“Vision drugs, as opposed to metabolism drugs,” said Thea, and the others agreed.

“You don't have to, Micah,” said Eamon.

“They say you can do old drugs with new people, and new drugs with old people, but not new drugs with new people,” said Thea.

Curtis prepared the bong. “It's not one size fits all,” he said. “You shouldn't enter into it with fear. That I agree with.”

“I'm not afraid,” said Micah.

“I'll be his copilot,” said Charlotte.

Joan and Rob had a late supper at a restaurant on West Sunset. She had the Caesar salad, and he had macaroni and cheese baked in a ceramic dish, and they split a bottle of wine.

The soft orange lighting and sexy pictures on the wall made Joan think of sex. She imagined the people in the pictures coming to life after closing time, drifting down to get it on.

“What are you thinking about?” said Rob.

“I'm going to audition for a movie,” said Joan. “It's called
The Powder Horn,
about Davy Crockett.”

“What's the part?”

“Ann Flowers.”

“Who's she?”

“When Davy Crockett was fifteen, he made this canoe trip across a river in a winter storm, because no ferryman would take him. His boat was swamped, and he was freezing, and when he did get across he had to walk three miles before he found a house. Ann Flowers is the daughter of that house. The canoe story is true, but Ann is made up. So they gave him some liquor to warm him up, and he and Ann Flowers ended up sharing a bed.”

“With all that follows.”

“No. That's what's different. They just lie on their sides looking at each other, far into the night.”

“How old is she?”

“His age. Somebody else will play her then.”

“Where do you come in?”

“Thirty some years go by, right? Davy Crockett gets into politics, wins, loses, goes to the Alamo, all the things he does. And after the Alamo he shows up at Ann Flowers's cabin, and they spend the night together again. It's bittersweet, because their lives have gone by, and in the morning he's gone.”

“The older role can be the better one,” said Rob. “But I thought Davy Crockett died at the Alamo.”

“He did. It's his spirit that visits Ann, but she doesn't know that till he's gone. A friend says, Hey, did you hear what happened at the Alamo? So now she doesn't know what to think, having slept with a ghost or whatever he was. And when she goes back to her little cabin, what do you think she finds?”

“A powder horn.”

“Yes. And ‘clutches to breast' and up music and roll credits.”

“And this is getting made?”

“They've got financing,” said Joan. “They just need a bridge loan. Or a mezzanine loan. Some kind of loan that sounds like architecture. I was thinking I would get into movies so I would have more time for Micah.”

“Where is he?”

“Eamon took him to see Charlotte Mann's horse.”

Rob waved for the check. “What is a powder horn?”

“I'm not entirely sure.”

A transparent blue screen had unscrolled before Micah's eyes. The screen was cracked like a mosaic, with beads of light pulsing along infinite pathways. On the other side of all this disturbance were his new friends, small and geometrical in appearance.

Then Micah looked at the sky and found that the stars were connected by the lines in the screen, as if he had been born and brought here to make this discovery.

“Is it happening?” said Charlotte.

“There are lines between the stars,” said Micah.

“Are you okay? Look at me.”

Charlotte leaned close. Her forehead was damp, and he reached out to brush back a lock of hair that had escaped her braids.

“You have perfect eyebrows,” he said. “I wish I had a mirror so I could show you.”

She closed her eyes, and with the tip of her finger she wiped her eyelids dry, first one, then the other.

“Once I saw a man on a street corner,” she said. “At La Brea and Third. He had his little boy on his back in a carrier. And the boy had wooden train cars, one in each hand, and he was driving them around on his father's shoulders as they walked.”

Eamon shuffled around in the dust, looking at his bare feet, with a shoe on each hand. “I got a lemon one time and it had a phone number on it,” he said. “So I called the number and this lady answered and I asked why her phone number was written on a lemon, and she said it shouldn't be, I should just throw the lemon away and forget I ever saw it. So I said I would and in a few minutes she called back and asked where I was going to throw it away, and I said what, and she said the lemon, and I said probably a trash can, and she said that wasn't good, because someone might see it and think here is a perfectly good lemon going to waste and they might pick it up and call her like I did. So I said well where do you want me to throw it and she thought for a minute and said where are you now, and I told her I was on Franklin by the Magic Castle and she said don't go anywhere, so I waited and in about twenty minutes this little green Lotus pulls up and the woman rolled the window down and she said do you have the lemon and I said yeah and gave it to her and she gave me twenty dollars and drove away.”

They laughed. The dog began to bark, and a noise came down from the sky. A helicopter flew sideways over the hills, its light coming and going, a pure silvery beam touching the ground, as if the helicopter were walking on stilts.

“What's that about?” said Micah.

“No one really knows,” said Curtis.

“I used to think they were looking for criminals,” said Thea. “But they do it so often that I don't think that anymore.”

“Maybe they're bored,” said Eamon. “Just fucking around till quitting time.”

“They're like the night watchman in a Russian story,” said Charlotte. “Checking the doors of the midnight village to make sure they're locked.”

“I lived in that village,” said Micah.

Then a man in corduroy jacket and white cowboy hat rode down from the stables in a golf cart, the husky and two yellow Labs trotting behind. The dogs found them first and licked their faces while the man stopped the golf cart.

“That's Angel,” whispered Charlotte to Micah. “The owner.”

“What's going on here?” he said. “I have the television on, and I can hear the noise you're making all the way up the hill.”

“We're sorry, Angel,” said Charlotte. “We'll be quiet. We're leaving now.”

The driver of the golf cart looked at each of them in turn, touched the brim of his hat, turned the cart around, and drove back to the stables, escorted by the dogs.

“Now Angel's mad at me,” said Charlotte.

“I want that golf cart,” said Thea.

From the horse farm, they went to the beach in Santa Monica, where they bought hamburgers and french fries and sat on a ­blanket on the sand, eating and listening to the sound of the ocean.

When Micah got home he hung the beads Charlotte had given him on the photograph of
Tiny, Lyris, and the goat.

The next day Joan was at an auto salvage yard off Mission Road shooting
Forensic Mystic
. Most of the autos seemed beyond salvaging. They were twisted and sliced, mangled and melted, and the yard workers had stacked them into neat mounds like city blocks with paths running between.

The yard made the highway system seem like the work of an evil god. Joan sat in a mallard-green canvas chair beneath a parasol.

In this scene she would throw away a knife that had been used in a murder. Her character, Sister Mia, would debate whether to turn it in to the police. That was her conflict. Everyone must have an arc and a conflict.

Joan strolled the junkyard path, slapping the knife blade on her thigh. An athletic brunette walked backward, Steadicam strapped on her body. Then they laid dolly tracks and filmed Joan's walk from the side.