Winter Tides (26 page)

“Okay, never mind the money,” Dave said. “To hell with the money. Doesn’t it bother you just a little bit that you’re being cheated?”

“Nope.”

“Well, it bothers me. But to you it’s just like that kite in the wind, or whatever the hell it was; you just let it go.”

“I just let it go. My brother is who he is, like I said. The clothes, the car, the country club. All of that shit just bores the hell out of me. The
last
thing I give a damn about is getting my share of it. Let him have the damned properties. I won’t waste ten seconds on him, Dave. And that goes double as long as my father’s alive. You know what the Earl thinks about Edmund. The Earl doesn’t remember anything but what he wants to remember. The past is just dust to him. Edmund’s the success. Edmund’s the shining star. Edmund came into the family business with all his expertise, and the Earl went into semiretirement. He can spend all his time horsing around with Collier.”

“All what expertise?”

“I don’t know what the hell kind of expertise. Edmund’s
family,
Dave. He’s my mother’s son. He’s nearly
respectable. You know, to tell you the truth, I don’t have any damned idea what my father
really
thinks about Edmund. All I know is that he won’t listen to you if you say anything against him. He won’t even hear you. He certainly never heard me, so I just shut up finally. I found out I was happier when I shut up.”

“He’s stealing from your old man like a fox in the god-damn henhouse.”

“It’s a
big
henhouse. Plenty of chickens to go around. The only thing the Earl doesn’t have plenty of is
time,
What the hell good is the truth to a man whose heart’s on the ropes? When you’re that close to the graveyard, you stop giving a damn about the henhouse. Why the hell would you want to tell him that his number-one son is a liar and a thief? You think it would make him happier? That he’d shake your hand? Check it out: I don’t
care
about properties, and neither does the Earl. All I give a damn for is moving this whole tired charade along from one day to the next without the old man getting hurt. I get a few waves on the side, keep Nancy happy, and I’m a satisfied man.”

“How about Collier? Do you care about Collier?”

“How is Collier involved in this?”

“Collier’s certain that Edmund’s going to evict him from the bungalow and sell the property to the city for municipal parking.”

“Edmund wouldn’t do that. He couldn’t do that. He doesn’t have the authority.”

“He doesn’t have the authority to hire Mayhew to masquerade as your father, either, but he did it.”

“That’s entirely different. That’s just money. What you’re talking about is more than just money.”

“To whom? It’s more than just money to
you,
maybe. Or to the Earl. To Edmund, though, it’s just money. Everything’s just money. Edmund’s always thought Collier was a sponge. You’ve heard him go on about it—wasting thousands of dollars on goofball plays that don’t earn a penny. You ought to see what Collier’s got cooked up this time. Edmund’s going to bleed from the ears when he finds out.”

Casey shrugged. “Okay, you’re right. Edmund’s got a thing about Collier. That’s fair enough. And now I’m warned. I’m ready for him. If he wants to take me on over Collier and the bungalow, I’ll fight with him. Otherwise he can go to hell rich. Just promise me you won’t go calling the cops or anything like that. I don’t need it, the old man doesn’t need it, nobody needs it. If something comes up, call
me.
Keep it in the family.”

“Whatever you say.”

“That’s what I say. And one more thing. I keep telling you to leave Edmund alone. It’s bad for your karma, you know? Your chakras get all messed around, completely out of alignment.”

“I guess I don’t give nearly as much of a damn for my karma, or whatever the hell it is, as you do, Case. I just can’t play make-believe all the time.”

“I understand that, although I’m going to keep working on you. My brother’s just smoke, man. Tinted glass. Try looking right through him.”

“I really wish I could. I keep straining my eyes, you know?”

“Get a new pair of glasses, then. And one last thing,” Casey said, swinging his board up under his arm. “There’s more to Mr. Edmund than meets the eye. You know what I’m talking about? He’s a jerk, but that doesn’t make him a fool. He can actually be
very
dangerous. He has a
long
history. So don’t even think about taking him on. It’s just not worth it. Life’s too short.”

“You’re right about that,” Dave told him.

Casey stood looking at him for a moment. “All right,” he said at last. “I’ll say something to Edmund, at least about Collier. We’ll leave the money issue alone, though.”

“Fair enough,” Dave said.

E
DMUND LEFT HIS CAR PARKED ON 8TH
S
TREET AND
walked the two blocks to the Earl’s through the early-morning darkness. He wore a sweat suit over his jogging togs, and he had put on his Nike running shoes. From the look of it, he was just another early-morning jogger burning up a couple of miles of pavement before the day started. He felt good—alert and rested. Last night he had taken a couple of pills and made a point of sleeping. It was a matter of control more than anything else. The day before, he had lain in bed all day, hadn’t even shaved. If he let himself degenerate that way …

A car cruised past, turning at the corner and disappearing, and he saw the roof of the Earl’s over the housetops. There was no way Collier would be awake yet. The morning belonged to Edmund. He felt safe, nearly invisible. The world was waiting for him to make sense out of it. When he reached the west side of the theatre parking lot, he took one last hasty look up and down the street and cut across the lot, back into the shadow of the high theatre wall. Collier’s house was dark.

Dave’s car was parked in the lot near Collier’s lawn, and Edmund stood watching it for a few moments. It would be fun to torch it, too. The car couldn’t be seen from the street because of the theatre and the warehouse. While the morning darkness lasted, he could do anything to it that he wanted to do. His mind scurried around, thinking of flammable substances. The burned pallets had been cleared away, but there was a satisfying black smudge on the asphalt. A liquid that he could splash over the car would work better than the pallets, if only to burn the paint off before
somebody put the fire out. There was thinner and turpentine in the Earl’s, but if anyone—like Dave—was working early, then going into the warehouse would wreck things entirely. And anyway, it was best to stick with whatever he could find lying around, just like a kid would do. Collier probably wouldn’t leave his lighter fluid next to his barbecue any more, not with his pyromaniac granddaughter on a rampage….

Another morning, perhaps. A car fire now would just wreck his plans, since Jenny was in bed and couldn’t be blamed for starting it. He set out up the kitchen side of Collier’s bungalow, walking carefully through the grass, making as little noise as possible and looking around carefully for something he could use. He stopped at Collier’s rusty old Weber barbecue, carefully lifting the lid high enough to see underneath. There was half a bag of charcoal briquettes under there along with a can of lighter fluid. The old man had left it accessible after all! Apparently there was no accounting for idiot faith. He took out the can, then reached in and slid the bag out, too, set the lid down silently, and unrolled the top of the bag. Sure enough, there was a matchbook lying on top of the charcoal. He pulled the matches out, rerolled the bag, and put it back under the lid, then wiped his sooty hands on the grass. He saw a little Matchbox truck in the weeds along the wall then, and he picked it up and put it into the shallow pocket of his sweat-pants along with the matches, nearly laughing at how appropriate it all was.

And then it struck him that it was more than appropriate. It was synchronicity, purely and simply. Artistic intuition. Things were falling into place because he was
allowing
them to fall into place by letting go, by trusting to his art, by trusting himself.

How wonderful that he hadn’t given it a second thought! It had simply happened. Intuition and instinct had opened the doors to perception…. He found a doll in the weeds farther along, back near the vacant lot—a little dime-store doll about six inches high. It must have had clothes at one time, but they’d been removed, which was too bad, because the clothes would have made it that much more flammable.
On the other hand, there was a certain purity in the doll’s nakedness. He ran his fingers over her smooth plastic flesh, cleaning off the dirt, sweeping her hair back. Her hair, probably, would go up like a torch. She had moveable joints at the elbows and knees, and he moved her arms up and down, swiveled her legs, understanding the vision that was spinning together in his mind, the picture that was taking shape. This blonde doll with its idealized figure was a counterpoint to the Night Girl’s dolls. It was all surface, the facade that the world was anxious to believe in but knew to be false. The nylon dolls were true on the deepest level. He was full of the fire of inspiration now, energized by finding the doll.

Clutching it, he went hurriedly around the back of the bungalow, where for a few seconds he was exposed to the eyes of people in cars on the Highway, but then he was safe again, hidden by the bushes that crowded up against a big eucalyptus tree near the corner of the yard. Around the tree, lying on the lawn, were papery sheets of bark that the tree had sloughed off. On impulse he picked up a half-dozen hand-sized pieces along with a bunch of leaves, and, having no place else to put them, he shoved them up under his sweatshirt and tucked the shirt into his pants. He headed back up the bedroom side of the house now, moving very quietly and carefully, looking into the high grass and wishing he had brought a penlight along with him.

A decorated lunch sack lay at the back edge of the porch, and he picked it up to have a look at it. It contained what appeared to be baseball cards, although when he picked one out and looked close, it turned out to be some sort of comic trading card—a mutant-looking child holding a bloody ax. The very idea of such a thing disgusted him. It was nothing but pornography for children—the kind of thing that the social worker should get a good look at. He picked out a handful of the cards, enough to share, and dumped the rest into the grass, then put the doll and the toy truck into the sack with the cards. This would be enough, this sack of miscellaneous articles. Art made from found things—the Japanese had a word for it…. He couldn’t remember what it was.

The bungalow’s front porch was a couple of feet high, the crawl space beneath it sided with lattice. An overgrown night-blooming jasmine hid the back corner of it, where it extended a couple of feet beyond the house itself. Years ago there had been an opening down there, where the lattice had fallen apart, an opening wide enough for a child to crawl through. Edmund crouched beside the jasmine, pushing the spindly limbs aside and peering past it. The hole was still there, virtually unchanged from the days of his childhood. Years ago, he himself had played under that old porch, sitting alone, hidden from the world in his own personal cave. He had buried cats and small animals down there—a gopher, he remembered, that a cat had half killed, and a pigeon that had hit the kitchen window and knocked itself out. He had lured Casey down there when Casey was three, and tied him with cotton rope to an exposed post, and then boarded up the entrance with junk, keeping him down there all day long and into the evening until the Earl had gotten home. He had sat all day on the porch above, knocking like hell on the floorboards with a broom handle every time Casey had started to shout.

Surely Collier’s granddaughter played in that cave, too. Dark places were irresistible to children….

He pushed in past the jasmine, shoving his head and shoulders into the darkness. He could smell the fine dust and the old wood of the floorboards, and the smells brought it all back to him, all the dim memories, the things he had done beneath the porch, the things that were buried there, the things that nobody but he knew about. He thought about the Night Girl suddenly, what they had done together in the darkness during the past nights, and he was suddenly anxious to reveal himself to her—and to Anne—more fully….

O
N THE WAY HOME HE SAW A DEAD POSSUM IN THE ROAD,
its body nearly flattened. He stopped the car, got his knife out of the glove compartment, and climbed out of the car, quickly severing the possum’s long tail. He got back into the car and drove the rest of the way home, whistling happily.

In his kitchen he turned the oven onto low, put the leaves and bark inside to dry out. Then he sorted through the playing cards, finding a half-dozen that were particularly offensive. He set those aside and then poured a cup of lighter fluid into a cereal bowl and floated the rest of the cards in it. He would leave them there while he took a shower, and then package them in a Ziploc storage bag to keep them damp.

A
FTER AN HOUR’S CONSTANT PADDLING TO STAY IN THE
break off Magnolia Street, Dave let himself drift south, leaving Casey and eight or ten other surfers behind. There were sandbars working everywhere down the beach, plenty of waves for everyone, and even if all of them weren’t up to the Standard of the waves they’d paddled into at dawn, Dave would rather find a wave of his own than continually jockey for position with younger and more aggressive surfers. And besides, he was tired. Whatever muscles he had been using over the past fifteen years apparently weren’t the muscles he was using now, and his arms and shoulders ached from paddling.

It was a good ache, though, and it was good to be wet, and it was almost funny the way Casey had muscled him into going out this morning after all these years away from it. It would be a lie to say that he had forgotten any of it—the salt smell of the morning ocean, the particular smell and feel of a Santa Ana wind on his face, the instant response to the moving gray mass of a wave looming up out of deep water. The whole thing was like an old and instantly familiar friend back in his life after years away. It had only taken a couple of waves to get the timing back,
too, to read the wave’s face as it drove in over the sandbar and started to peak, to spin around and go when he felt the gathering energy beneath him.