His body was all jags and angles. He took its cluttered assortment back to the couch and sat down and a long breath filled him almost to bursting before it racked out in a sigh. Bag of reefer right there on the floor, a red leather purse open on the couch beside him. Clouds took the daylight farther off.
The walls about him creaking and shrugging, he sat amid an arrangement of dark spaces on which he made out scattered hieroglyphics. I am in the deepest time-chasm ever, he thought. Thirst raked up and down his esophagus, or was it another craving? Maybe a cigarette—he couldn’t remember whether he smoked or not.
The dog broke through it all, a dog of action, moving to the forefront and standing there in bleak nobility and communicating its desire for a can of soup.
Truman!
Frank rose up and made his way toward the kitchen, the world of soup, but heard the humming catch its breath around him, and he burst out of the place into the night.
New universe. Oxygen and fog. He’d exited that tomb and regained the animal world. Things without thought but twitching. Heads closed around stuff like walnut meat that never bothered them.
“Your rights. Don’t worry, I’ll read them ten times to you in the car, okay? Let’s go, the man here is hungry for his supper.”
—This wasn’t being said now, but hung out in the karmic aether to be bumped into much like the sappy mist. He didn’t know where he was but he could hear the wheels of old carts laboring along the coast and the cries of scuttled fishers trying to find one another in the closing moments.
Yvonne was about to call him. She inhaled the last of the day, leaving the dark of eventide. She breathed out the word of his name. He heard it long before it reached him.
On this side of the road the presence of a cherry-colored metal-flake Harley both moved and consoled Clarence Meadows as he entered the Full Sails.
He nodded to the leather-garbed bikey and his wife, who sat at a table with beers before them, also shiny black helmets.
“That your beautiful machine out front?”
“Yes it is,” the man said.
“Best thing I’ve seen all day.”
“Thank you.”
Meadows wanted to correct himself when he saw the waitress, for she was another gift of the afternoon, almost as stunning as a Harley in the sun. Lovely in a way that made him feel like ordering something. He sat at the counter and said to her, “Wherefore.”
“What?” she said.
“It’s Shakespeare. It’s all I know of Romeo and Juliet.”
She didn’t laugh. She stared at him until her evident concern prompted him: “Oh yeah,” he confessed, “it’s a deep down day.”
“Are you feeling bad?”
“The worst in a long time.”
“You need a friend.”
“I lost a friend.”
“You need another.”
“Maybe we could”—he shrugged, sighed—“Go camping or something sometime.”
The woman looked regretful. “I don’t think I could.”
“Why not?”
“I’m in love.”
“Yeah. I guess…me too.”
Outside he opened the driver’s door of Billy’s Scout. He guessed now it was his. He released the handbrake and pushed the vehicle backward into the road.
Clarence passed the Phillips 66 station, the mall, the offices of competing realtors strung together, gift shops, each with a philosophy, the Safeway’s long glass windows. Citizens of the Empire stopped and went, blinded slaves, beautiful slaves, moving down the laser lines tuned to every electronic thing. With their tattooed pensions. Their chains and memberships. On the straightaway crossing the Gualala bridge he looked at the maniacs charging him in monstrous vehicles at better than a mile a minute: great, blimplike motor homes, and others parked by the sea, stuck among the driftwood sculptures of beachcombers. He had in him the power to lengthen his touch right through the walls and into their minds where they lay propped up with their TVs turning them to ghosts. Whatever else he himself might be accused of, at least he’d managed to stay out of their world. He couldn’t truthfully be demonstrated even to be a citizen of this planet.
At the Stewart Point Store he turned left and followed the close, switching asphalt road upward. The weather clung but there was dust on the feathers of the redwoods. Rhododendrons bloomed in sunlit patches back among the trees. He crossed a tiny bridge over a gorge and thirty feet below a tributary of the Gualala compressed and bowed into white falls. Down there it was dark. The shadow of the planet’s curve tracked him uphill as the sun went down.
At the ridgetop the road switched back south toward a bluff and a view and then north again alongside some properties and buildings. The name of this locale, West Point, referred not to some coastal spur, but to this promontory some miles inland.
Clarence rolled past the church and parked uphill of it at somebody’s gated driveway and got out to hear, from the chapel, the sounds of a lamentation that he presumed to be very bad singing. Down the slope for miles. Out to sea. And the trees attending it with perfect concentration.
Twilight had caught him by now. He walked among a lot of cars and trucks past a couple of structures too darkened to be intelligible, cabins or sheds, and another possibly a workshop or garage. The chapel itself seemed to be howling out music, less like song than like the agonies in a hen coop at laying-time, two lit windows either side of its doorway making an astonished face.
He climbed the steps and stood in an entryway full of groans and the smell of old wood. In the vestibule he paused as he came against the cloud of their human warmth. He stumbled among miscellaneous footwear. Am I supposed to kick off my boots? Everyone was giving voice in a scary way. He saw netters and woodmen and professional poachers; lost beatniks, grandmothers, people who might have been in real estate, rocking forward and backward in the pews, not singing, all suffering terribly…Mike Rose, who worked at the Phillipps station in Gualala and was known formerly to Clarence as Shakey Mikey, a rehabilitated rumdum now, with some history also as a cocaine demon, stood at the head of the room shouting amid the uproar: “And the dawg! Shall rise up a human. And kiss! The lips! Of his master—
“Pray for the ones still out there. Pray for the ones still seeking but, Lord, they just don’t know what. They don’t know it’s you, Lord, so help them, help them, help them.”
In the crowded space the mob’s colossal voice had a flat, concussive quality. It slapped against Clarence’s head and he received rather than heard the preacher’s desperate instructions: Psalm fifty-one! Psalm fifty-one! The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit! A broken and contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise!
The gales of misery came up out of their vitals and whirled around their heads. It drove over him the dense stifling vapours of their intimacy and stopped him there, sucked from him all the cursing and left only blankness, silence, a question mark.
He didn’t see Carrie among them until she leapt into the aisle crying Jesus! Jesus! Her little boy clutched at her sweater’s hem but she brushed his hand away. The assembly’s roar diminished and broke into scattered urgent praise.
“Jesus save me! God forgive me! Please! Please!” she begged. She wobbled on her feet, feeling around with her fingertips like the blind.
Clarence moved toward her. Others tumbled from the aisle seats and converged on her. Mike began his groaning again and they all took it up along with Carrie’s hysterical cries.
He saw the blaze of Yvonne in the West.
Trees shorter than himself—hunched excited trees—muttering like monks as he approached the house. He looked in through a window at the quiet kitchen. Through the living room’s glass he saw her stock-still inside, occupying a leather chair. Dead…
—Not dead, but emptied. Where had she gone, leaving this flesh? A suspicion—that same terrible feeling—as if he floated on a bubble’s skin above a poisonous bath: Yes, she’d come around behind him. He felt on the hairs of his nape the fire-breath
of her astral self. She’d outflanked him astrally, now large as a comet, making noises like a great jet engine, her light flooding and ebbing in the treetops. Bowed in fear, he turned around. She flared beyond the trees, orbited over the ocean, which had come around behind him in some cataclysmic shifting of the earth. He went forward toward the cliffs and surf. Breaking from under the treetops he knelt at her shores and raised his eyes toward the sun dawning behind her and her wings opening out and the heartrending beauty of her face and the blood-red darkness in her skull as her mouth opened. He didn’t want to touch her. He only wanted to see her feet. He wanted to understand this vision in its details, to glory in it by transacting with its minutenesses. He shuffled forward on his knees…
Wheels ran over him.
Let this be the place, Lord. The start. Or the end. Or whatever. But the place,” Mike prayed.
Others came to help. She looked up at the faces of love and joy, faces of welcome, and beyond them the face of the man whose child she would bear in sin, a stunned, confused, and violent man backing away. “Jesus save me! God forgive me! Please! Please!” she begged.
As Mike prayed, she wept entirely without control. A purple veil fell down over all things. She fell backward into the robes of Christ.
And the preacher stood over her with his arms parting the jungle of faces, his own mouth moving: The Lord just broke her heart. Stand back. Give her room. It’s beautiful. The Lord has broken her heart. Let her heart pour out. It’s beautiful, it’s beautiful.
Meadows craned to see over their heads to the center of the throng. Carrie stood still among them, perceptibly vibrating, looking right at him. Then her eyes rolled upward to the whites. A spasm pitched her backward onto a soft buoying sea of worshippers. He would have got closer but a tremendous force, a great breath, propelled him out of the place and he found himself standing in the parking lot. The cabins next door stood mute, looked neutral. The wind spat rain on their siding.
He retraced his steps as far as the porch’s gable and got under it.
The storm started out a scattered rain but blew harder by the minute. He sat on the porch with his back to the door and his arms around himself. This cold rain had him by the bones. From inside he heard one voice above the others, wilder than all the others.
Water fell on Frank’s face. And then he stopped feeling its wet, stopped tasting it.
He floated out the top of his own head but didn’t get more than his own height above his own body. Figures in complicated apparel knelt around him. It seemed they were bending his legs in mysterious ways.
He saw faces floating by. Police waving brilliant lights. A man pounding on his chest. Don’t put me back in that thing. Please. Not in that one. It’s broken.
But abruptly he was back behind his eyes in a general darkness, and he felt his heart like a fist grabbing at the life and pulling it back inside and closing over it hungrily and obscenely.
At this point he sensed the rain again. His vision returned.
Faces floated by, looking down at him from their windows. Police waving them past…Glories in the very air. Thunderous multicolored flashing.
September 14, 1990
He started the day at Mo’s, waking in the bed she’d left already and wandering out to find her. In the mornings the house was shaded; she’d made a fire. He sat at the table with his hands around a cup of coffee and watched her. She plucked at the stove latch and laid a chunk across the coals, bumped shut the loading door with the heel of her hand. Bending like that before the fire made her robe, unfastened, hang like Spanish moss from her bones. “Hey,” Navarro said, “I gotta tell you.”
“What.”
Her eyes were so dark. But her face—no. Sometimes the light came from under her skin.
“I like your house.”
She stood straight, spread wide the folds of her robe like a pair of wings. And such a sad sweet body, like it never grew.
He said, “Something hit me last night. After we were in bed.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Right in the middle of last night I got hit with, I don’t know. Aloneness.”
“I’ll fix that shit,” she said.
“I mean aloneness, I felt the true thing. Nobody fixes it.”
“You can—” She broke off. Sat down across from him.
“Not that it scares me,” he insisted, aware that he was insisting. “Once you feel it, it’s like you don’t need to feel it ever again.”
“If you wanted to, you could move in.”
“I practically live here now.”
“Yeah, you do.”
“Well, I like having my own place to fade to when it’s time to fade.”
She reached for his hand across the table. “Put it this way. You can turn up here when you want and you can stay as long as you want.”
He stared at their hands, feeling a little uncomfortably that maybe this kind of thing was better said in the dark. “How long have we been at this?”
“This is our tenth anniversary.”
“Ten days? It seems like longer. And shorter at the same time.”
“I told you you were fast.”
When Mo had left him for the noon-to-nine run at the Full Sails, he dressed in civies and presented himself to residential Anchor Bay, a dozen or so homes scattered up the hill behind the stores among many large pines and redwoods. The blue-and-white Caprice had collected a dusting of brown needles on its surfaces.
Navarro had taken calls the last two nights; Merton had worked the days. Navarro had lucked out completely there, sleeping soundly all last night while Merton, yesterday morning, had been forced to observe a kind of mini-demonstration at Gualala’s shopping mall. Which would necessitate a written report—names and numbers, you never knew: the feds, the feds.
As long as he had the cruiser, he was on call, and so he took it up to Point Arena and parked it outside the shop between his own Firebird and Jenny’s torpedo-style RX-7. Merton had evidently driven off somewhere in the county van, that is, the paddy wagon. Up into the quiet hills, maybe, where he could get a regular snooze.
Inside the shop, Navarro found Jenny down on one knee by the filing cabinets, her skirt hiked up prettily, two file drawers pulled all the way out and resting on the floor on either side of her. “It’s history day,” she said.
He sat at his desk looking at her thighs. She wore almost invisible stockings. Jenny was punctual, and more competent than they deserved. Mid-twenties, neatly appareled and nicely shaped with abundant auburn hair and a quite homely face. She cherished her small Mazda sports car and conversed fluently with Merton as to its idiosyncrasies. Navarro gathered it had a rotary engine. It was fast, but not that fast. According to Navarro’s observations, homely women with trim figures got more dates than any others, but aside from her job and her car Jenny seemed to have nothing to interest her. He liked Jenny but he thought she’d probably be happier somewhere else in the world. Navarro wasn’t at all sure what a rotary engine was.
“You gonna torch it all?”
“I’m weeding out everything over seven years old,” she said. “It should be three, but Taylor says seven. That’s a bureaucratic personality, right there.”
“Bureaucratic? That doesn’t sound like Merton.”
“More of a pack rat, really. You give him eight-and-a-half by eleven inches of floor, he’s gonna make a stack to the ceiling. It all started when we moved to this modular. Then he revealed himself.”
“How old is the coffee?” he asked as a way of mentioning there wasn’t any.
“Oh. I’m sorry,” she said.
“No. That means I get the first cup of the day. I’m honored.”
“I usually wait for Taylor.”
Suddenly Navarro understood. “You’re in love with him.”
“He’s good-looking, but…”
“A crush.”
“I wouldn’t—what are you talking about?” she said. She slapped a stack of folders onto the floor and stood up smoot
hing her skirt.
“Any letters?”
“Letters?”
“Any letters for me?”
“Nope.”
He left her the keys to the Caprice and drove away in the Firebird and headed north. Right outside of Point Arena he left the highway and lugged in high gear up Buckridge Road and, topping the rise, took the ridge road south, driving extremely fast and passing Shipwreck, which would have taken him down to Anchor Bay, and continuing south at a much slower pace—all on impulse, he wanted to suppose, though in truth he’d been planning this visit for some time—now watching for mailboxes on his right.
Navarro found the broken-off sign: HILD. He turned right, passed along a silent dirt drive to the ridge’s drop-off, where a broken dirt track began, braked momentarily but kept going, skirted a car under a dust cover and then many other cars too, relics dragged aside and rusting away; and he came to believe, as he descended through the mute woods, that bringing the low-slung Pontiac onto this road ranked among his airiest plans. Apparently people drove here, he saw fresh tire tracks, but at the edge of more than one washed-out place he had to get out and ponder the depths and plot a hopeful trajectory across in order not to bust an axle. After a long mile, he checked his watch, worried that he’d waited till too late in the day for this visit—he didn’t want to find his way out in the dark. But it wasn’t yet two, though his solitude, his missing Mo, had made it feel longer.
Merton had more than once advised him, not about the road through the Fairchild property, but about the Fairchild brothers themselves. The younger one was a genuine curio—witness his file of letters—owing to experiments, decades of experiments, with psychedelic stuff and nonsense. Now even a couple cups of coffee drove him wild. If you ever saw him with so much as a cigarette in his hand, expect to be accomplishing his arrest. While the older one lives nefariously among us, anyway until his fate should nail him, the younger hides in the father’s forest, where he’s created a world strewn with junk and deadwood. His sister-in-law buys it piecemeal and makes it into, some claim, works of art.