Silver Lake (28 page)

In truth, Robbie didn’t know what he thought but felt justified in his own behavior if he could believe the worst about Carlo. Although Robbie had to wonder what it said about him that these grim pictures came so fluently. At that moment, he did not like himself very much.

“Tom had dying on his mind,” Jay said. “We’ve talked about it. He didn’t want to be stopped. He would not have gone through with any of it, if he thought he was being watched.”

“You can’t say that for sure.”

“Maybe I can,” Jay said. “You gave me a detail.”

“I did? What detail?”

“And you know your boyfriend didn’t watch Tom die. It’s not fair to say that.”

“Fair to whom—why are you on his side? And what detail?”

Jay finished tying his shoes.

“When will you be back?” Robbie asked.

“I’m not sure.”

“You want me to leave.”

Jay was looking at the floor, out the window, everywhere but at Robbie.

“Where will I go?” Robbie asked.

Jay put on a fleece-collared denim jacket.

“What detail?” Robbie asked.

Jay kissed him on the cheek, wished him a happy New Year, and left.

• • •

M
EANWHILE,
Carlo at the house was recognizing he could not live the way he’d been living. In the main room there were newspapers and magazines everywhere, the couch cushions all askew, blankets and pillows brought in from the bedroom since he didn’t want to sleep in the bed alone, empty wine bottles, empty water bottles, coffee mugs, goblets, socks, shoes, sweaters everywhere. A couple of cereal bowls, an open bag of cookies, an orange peel. He couldn’t account for what he’d done these last days but in some vague way, perhaps only calendrically inspired, he was filled with resolve and therefore spent the first part of the day cleaning up.

He needed to keep moving because whenever he stopped, he suffered memories: Like the time he’d been sitting high up on the library steps and Robbie happen to walk by on the quad below, not noticing Carlo, and there was something about Robbie’s stride, short yet fast, determined yet springy, something about the way he left his parka unzipped even though it was cold out and the way he wore his bookbag high on his back, the way he appeared to be singing to no one but himself that drew Carlo to Robbie. That stride, that confidence—maybe Carlo had observed it recently, but it had been missing for such a long time, it seemed. What if Robbie were happier now wherever he was, on his own, then shouldn’t Carlo let him go? Wouldn’t that be an act of love, even if Carlo himself were destroyed? His life would be nothing, he would have nothing.

He did not need to be in a good mood about being alone, but sooner or later he was going to have to accept his station. He decided to drive down to the grocery store and pick up ingredients and busy himself in the kitchen cooking; not the traditional leg of lamb, but roasting a chicken might occupy him. But then the idea of cooking for only himself was depressing. He had gone through all the soup and canned goods in the pantry, and all the wine. He put off going to the grocery store until the late afternoon and then finally ventured out.

The streets were layered in leaves and twigs, and palm fronds strewn across the boulevard looked avian and skeletal, as if large birds had been thrown from flight and smashed dead by the wind. Carlo had electricity at his house, but down the hill it was out: the traffic lights were operating on backup power, pulsing red. On the way to the grocery store, he ended up at a café and stood in
line, ordered to-go and paid for his latte like a normal person, albeit an extremely scruffy one, and the caffeine in his system when he’d eaten little both gave him a jolt and the shakes.

In the car again, he held the steering wheel with both hands. He was jittery, and therefore not sure at first whether what he saw while waiting for the light to change at Hyperion and Griffith Park was what he thought he saw: a long black sedan,
the
long black sedan with a band of young guys in it, heading toward the high school.

Carlo was in the right lane, and watched the car stream past, and he didn’t have a clear view because another car came in close behind the black car. He made the turn and followed the black car, too.

The other car peeled off at St. George, but the black sedan turned left and, maintaining some distance, Carlo turned left as well. The car turned right again in front of the brick school, up Tracy, as did Carlo, and he didn’t know what he was thinking, what he thought he’d do, but here they were, yes, his young assailants with their wild black hair and wild eyes, yes, the one with his drooping chin and drooping moustache, the other maybe a brother or cousin, but minus the moustache. Don’t look, they barked, but he’d looked, now he was looking again. They had to slow down at the bend in Tracy, and then they made a left on Monon, a dead end.

It all began with them. If they hadn’t ambushed him and humiliated him, he would not have met Tom at the police station, and then not gone to see Tom a month later and had sex with him, and then Tom would not have surfaced at the office that otherwise benign autumn afternoon. He would not have played tennis with Robbie and won over Robbie and then come home
with him and had too much to drink and become so dark and disconsolate—Carlo never would have met up with Tom in the kitchen after Robbie was to sleep and then, then Carlo would never have failed Tom Field. Tom never would have killed himself on a cold morning and Carlo’s life with Robbie would never have been cleaved into a before and an after. After all this, then, here they were again, the carjackers, and as he followed them down Monon, once a river and now a narrow street of unassuming houses, followed them all the way to the thicket of brush beneath the white concrete pillars and trusses and arches of the Shakespeare Bridge overhead, he knew he had to achieve some kind of vengeance and in revenge, closure.

The black sedan stopped at the dead end and pulled into the single space parallel to the bridge overhead. The doors flung open and the three young men hopped out, immediately lighting cigarettes. They didn’t appear to notice Carlo’s car as he drifted closer. They were leaning against the side of the sedan, facing the brush, their backs to him. They looked tense in the shoulder, all of them wearing black leather jackets, expectant, as if they were ready to meet someone, ready for a transaction, most likely up to no good.

Carlo put his car in park, and only because he’d stopped in the middle of the street, effectively blocking any other car from approaching the black sedan, or for that matter, preventing the black sedan attempting a getaway, did first one and then the others turn and look at him. Carlo stared the tallest one in the eye. He had a moustache and a full beard now, too.

Why don’t you try me again, Carlo thought, and fixed his gaze on the young man. Try me.

But the man looked away, up at the bridge, at nothing.

Carlo wondered what Tom would do, and he knew damn well what Tom would do. Carlo opened the glove compartment and removed the gun, its grip heavier than its barrel, but secure in his hand. He held the gun in his lap and stared and waited.

The tallest man glanced back again and could see Carlo still staring at him. He shrugged, What?

Carlo didn’t blink.

What? the man seemed to be asking, and his pals watched him as he came round the sedan and began moving toward Carlo’s car. What do you want?

And Carlo sat up in his seat, his gun concealed, his finger wrapped around the trigger, ready now, ready. Alone in the world, he had nothing to lose.

• • •

R
OBBIE LEFT JAY’S
but didn’t know where to go and ended up walking around the Reservoir. There was no dusk to speak of, night had fallen. He wandered up to Neutra Place and peered at the glass houses, the lights coming on, wondering why the life inside, the careful arrangement of things, seemed alien to him when for better or worse it looked no different than his own house and life, at least once upon a time. His hands in his pockets were fists. He was angry at Jay for kicking him out, angry at Carlo, angry at happy people cooking happy New Year’s Eve dinners.

He shuffled along toward Glendale and down Glendale to the diner, where he saw a group of cops eating burgers and fries. Robbie slipped into the rest room and took out his cell phone. He didn’t know what he would say, but he’d decided to set the record straight. He wanted Carlo to have to admit his role in Tom’s demise—he wanted Carlo at last to pay. Robbie dialed the number
on the card Detective Michaels had given him almost three months earlier.

“Hi there,” the detective said, cheery. Was she at a party already? There was music in the background. “Thanks for returning my call finally,” she said.

This naturally confused Robbie.

“You got my message?” Detective Michaels asked.

Robbie explained he’d not been home in more than a week.

The detective must have moved to her office or a private room wherever she was because the background music was gone. “I see,” she said. “It was a courtesy call to let you know our finding.”

Robbie waited.

“To be frank,” the detective said, “I think there may be more to the story about what happened that night.”

And she paused and Robbie held his breath. Yes, more. What?

“But I can’t justify keeping this case open when in the end, we’d still end up finding that Mr. Field committed suicide,” the detective said.

Robbie slumped against the tiled wall, he sat down on the floor.

“But you were calling me?” Detective Michaels asked.

He was picturing Tom lying dead on the patio, remembering that brief moment when he thought Tom might be pulling a crude prank. A suicide: What kind of lonely.

“Did you have something you wanted to tell me?” Detective Michaels asked.

Robbie was picturing Tom that morning, and suddenly he understood what detail Jay possibly was referring to.

“Mr. Voight?”

“Happy New Year, Detective,” Robbie said.

• • •

I
T WAS A LONG WALK HOME
up the hill and down the hill again, down their street, and Robbie was so beat that when he finally arrived at the house, he couldn’t make sense of what he witnessed:

First, Carlo pulling into the driveway and throwing open the car door and jumping out, Carlo was holding in his right hand what appeared to be—no, what was—a silver pistol.

And second, the lower part of the old pepper tree was illuminated, and for a moment, Robbie thought Carlo had strung up Christmas lights, until he realized the broad boughs were outlined in flame, and that the wind was drawing the blaze up so that the tree was fast becoming no longer a solid thing but a negative of itself, ghostly white in the dark.

Then there was a cry, a man crying, but not Carlo—Carlo was not the one screaming.

Robbie couldn’t take his eyes off of the gun in Carlo’s hand, which he wanted to connect somehow to the tree on fire. And Carlo had a blankness about him, a hollow gaze like he’d seen something, or done something awful, and this gun—it looked like a natural extension of his arm, his finger comfortably wrapped around the trigger, like Carlo wasn’t even aware he was holding a weapon. If it was possible in a glance no longer to know someone, then Robbie no longer knew who Carlo Stein was.

Robbie heard the cry again, both men did, and it looked like a lower limb was crashing down in flames. But it wasn’t a branch, it was a person emerging from behind the tree, throwing something square and flaming away from him. It was a person standing, and falling, and standing again, flailing his arms. It was a man on fire who was screaming, who was in agony, lit up as bright as the tree. A tree on fire, a man on fire.

The man shouted, “Help!”

He shouted, “Help, help!” and the man on fire was not a man at all: it was Gabriel.

• • •

C
ONFUSION THAT LAST NIGHT OF THE YEAR,
who should do what. Robbie yelled, “The hose, the hose,”—because this was what he thought should happen, first shower the boy with water, and then the pepper tree because the pepper tree was close enough to the eave that the fire could set the house ablaze, too.

Carlo called out to Gabriel, “Don’t mov,e”—by which he actually meant stop trying to stand up—”don’t move, roll. Roll on the ground, roll on the ground.” He smelled gasoline, noxious burning gasoline.

The wind whipped up beneath the tree and blew the flames up over the house.

And then Carlo seemed to wake up to the fact he was holding a gun and flung it behind him onto the front seat of the car and ran toward the front door, and Robbie thought that Carlo was heading to other corner of the yard to turn on the faucet and dash back with the garden hose—Robbie therefore ran toward
the house, as well, the two men both heading inside.

“No, no, get him to roll on the ground,” Carlo shouted at Robbie.

Robbie turned back toward Gabriel, who was motionless.

“Roll!” Robbie screamed.

The boy was engulfed and Robbie wanted to jump on the kid to smother the flames, but he didn’t know if he could because it seemed that Gabriel was now surrounded by a bed of fire, the lawn on fire, too. There was fuel spilled everywhere and about the only thing that wasn’t on fire was the chucked gas can itself lying on the sidewalk.

Carlo appeared with a blanket pulled from the bed. He threw the blanket over the boy and jumped on the kid, and the kid was beneath him and he felt, he heard the squelched flames, in contrast to the tree, which flared up with new wind.

Robbie ran over to the hose and turned the faucet and began to aim the spray gun at the tree, but the gun was rusty and loose, and the water was coming out in a trickle.

Carlo yelled at him again, “Call 911! Call 911!”

Robbie ran inside to the kitchen phone and was dialing it as he dashed back out, as if bringing the phone closer to the injured boy would somehow make the ambulance come faster. Of course, it was New Year’s Eve and while not late in the evening, late enough that it was a busy time at emergency services and the pick-up seemed slow.

Carlo peeled back only enough of the blanket to reveal Gabriel’s blackened face and Gabriel was unconscious but Carlo said, “It’s okay, sweetie. Everything will be fine, sweetie.” And for some reason, again, “Don’t move, sweetie, don’t move.”