Sheba surprises us by saying, “I’ve told you: neither do I, Ike. Neither does Trevor.”
“Tonight, Sheba Poe,” Ike says, “you’re coming clean. You’re going to lay it all out for us. I don’t mind dying for you. I really don’t. But I’d sure as hell like to know why.”
That night, Sheba takes center stage in her scrumptious bedroom, which stretches the length of the top floor. It has a sitting area made bright with an infestation of pillows and comfortable chairs, an overdone realm dedicated to comfort. All of the women look tiny on their observation perches, except Fraser, who sits tall next to Niles. Molly and I sit ten yards apart, pretending we do not inhabit the same world.
“Trevor and I don’t know where we were born or when,” Sheba begins.
“You’ve got birth certificates?” Ike asks.
“Several,” Sheba says. “On one my name is Carolyn Abbott, and my twin brother is Charles Larson Abbott. The birthday remains the same. But we were born in St. Louis on the first birth certificate and in San Antonio on the second.”
“Your dad?” Ike asks.
“He changed his name and job every time we moved.”
“Why on earth?” Molly asks.
“Don’t have the foggiest. When you move every year, when you go from town to town, when everyone you meet is a stranger, you get confused about everything. When we lived in Cheyenne, Wyoming, Dad was called Dr. Bob Marchese. He spoke with an Italian accent and spent that year as a veterinarian whose specialty was beef cattle. In Pittsburgh, he called himself Pierre La Davide and sold Jaguars. In Stockton, California, he was an insurance salesman. I don’t even know if my real name is Sheba Poe. Trevor once claimed he found four or five fake birth certificates and three passports for my dad, using three different surnames, none of them Poe.”
“Didn’t you ask your mother questions?” Fraser asks.
“Not many. If it was strange for us, it was a nightmare for her. When we got old enough to know better, we could tell she was scared of him. Of course, by then, we knew she had every reason to be.”
Ike asks, “Did he beat her?”
“Not where it showed, but he could devise a thousand ways to torture her. Sometimes he would torture her by not giving her any money for food. We’d always lived out in the country with no one around. No radio, no television, no neighbors, no cars. My dad was the only connection we had with the outside world.”
Fraser cries, “Stop it, stop it right now! None of this adds up. This isn’t an American life you’re describing to us. No one grows up this way. Where were your grandparents, your aunts and uncles? What did they say when they came to visit?”
“Grandparents? Aunts? Uncles? If I have them, Fraser darling, they haven’t stepped forward. Don’t you think I’ve fantasized about that a million times? Don’t you think I hoped that someone would see one of my films and say, so that’s what happened to Sheba? But what if these mythical folks never heard of twins called Sheba and Trevor? What if they know us as Mary and Bill Roberts of Buffalo, New York? What if our mother just fell in love with our dad and said farewell to her family? There are a million scenarios, Fraser, and it’s your tragedy that you only think there’s one.”
“That’s not my tragedy,” Fraser says. “I have the luxury of knowing exactly who my family is and where they’ve lived for three hundred years. Stability was the most important gift of my childhood. I’m giving that same gift to my kids.”
“You don’t know where half of your children’s family comes from,” Niles reminds his wife. “They’re half mine. They’ve got hillbillies and moonshiners and mountain girls who didn’t make it past the third grade in their backgrounds. Our kids have got as many ghosts in their family tree as Sheba and Trevor do. My mama stabbed someone and so did my granny, and both her and my mama went to prison. That’s one of the few things I know for sure.”
“That sad story has nothing to do with our children,” Fraser insists.
“It’s got everything to do with our children,” he says. “It’s the central story of their whole lives; they just don’t know it yet.”
“I’ve protected them from everything about your history,” Fraser says.
“My history’ll find them,” Niles says. “’Cause that’s how history works.”
“That’s how it worked for Starla,” Fraser admits. “But I’ve protected you from that past.”
“There’s no such thing as protection from the past,” I say.
Ike puts up his hand to end this. “The subject is Sheba. It’s Trevor. It’s her dad. It’s her past we are trying to figure out now. We can talk about this other shit when we get back to Charleston.”
“The smiley face?” Molly asks Sheba. “I don’t understand why that became the theme of your dad’s presence, his evil.”
“When I was a small girl, I loved smiley faces.” Sheba shrugs. “We had no money, so I would clip smiley faces out of newspapers and magazines. I found them everywhere for a while—on cups and paper plates, on ribbons and balloons. My dad didn’t believe in hobbies, except for the piano. He was the one who taught Trevor and me to play. Otherwise, he had to be the center of our world. I came home from school one day and he had painted a red tear on every smiley face I owned. He used my mother’s fingernail polish. But by that time, everything was clear. My mother had already made plans to escape.”
Molly asks, “What was clear?”
Sheba says, “He’d already started in on me and Trevor. Especially Trevor. I always thought he liked little boys better than girls, but he had a taste for both.”
“Enough,” Fraser cries. “I can’t even pretend I want to hear the rest of this. And I think I speak for all of us.”
Silence can be measured out in shot glasses of time or it can take up space in half-gallon bottles. This one lasts to the point of making Fraser feel both isolated and defensive. Her eyes glint as hard as those of a lioness that has caught the scent of hyenas moving toward her cub. Sheba’s confession is unsettling to us all, but it is taking a horrific toll on Fraser’s famous self-composure. In the elaborate collage that our friendship has patterned itself into over the years, Fraser has taken the high ground of normalcy. You could always depend on her to be both a solid citizen and a good egg, no matter how powerful the disturbances became in the air-streams around us. It is painful to watch her world turn to quicksand.
“Niles, are you coming with me?” Fraser asks. “I’ve had enough. My imagination can provide the details.”
“I want this thing finished,” Niles says, not unkindly. “We all need to close this loophole in our lives, especially Sheba.”
“Sheba, there’s no use in dragging us through every sordid detail of your dad’s abuse of you and Trevor,” Fraser protests. “We get it already. We’re in the middle of trying to live decent lives. We don’t live in a world where kids get sexually abused by the adults in their lives. That’s alien and disgusting, and I don’t think it helps us find Trevor.”
Niles says, “In an orphanage, anything can happen to a kid, Fraser. I was butt-fucked by two men before I was ten and survived it. Me and Starla survived. That was the only thing.”
“Your sister didn’t survive anything, Niles. Your sister is human wreckage and we never know where she’s going to wash up,” Fraser spits out.
“Niles and I know what an orphanage can do to a kid’s spirit, Fraser,” Betty says. “We’ve made good lives for ourselves, but we have a long way to go.”
“Good night, everyone,” Fraser says. We hear her footsteps as they bound down the stairs with the athletic grace that remains her trademark. A door slams on the floor beneath us.
Ike asks, “You okay, Sheba?”
“No,” she answers. “This is starting to make us hate one another. So I would rather stop. I’m sorry that my dad did that to me and Trevor, but these are the facts of my life. I didn’t even know it was wrong when it was happening. Dad told me that girls and boys owed their fathers sex. It was how they paid for the
ir upkeep. How were we to know different? Now I know it’s sick. But I didn’t know it when I was five or six.”
“Sheba?” Betty slides off the couch and kneels down next to a distraught Sheba, taking her hand. “Same thing happened to me. My mother’s boyfriend. He did me till social services moved in and got me out of there. I got to Charleston the same year as you and Trevor, same orphanage as Niles and Starla. We all helped save one another a little bit at a time. I was lost so deep inside myself I thought I’d never get out. Let’s put an end to this, sweetheart. I ever get your old man in my gunsights, I’ll send him over into the next world. So will Ike and Niles and Toad.”
Molly interrupts. “I feel the same, but I don’t think I could kill him. I just don’t think it’s in me to kill anyone.”
Sheba says, “Don’t worry about it, Molly. I couldn’t do it, either. For the stupidest reason on earth, one that you will hate me for admitting.”
“You can tell us anything,” Ike says. “We’re not capable of hating you.”
“Because he’s my goddamn father. And here’s how screwed up he’s made me: I still love him because of that, and only that. He’s my dad and he’s Trevor’s dad. I’d love to see him disappear, but I don’t want to see him die.”
As she weeps, I observe Sheba and think that she has invented herself out of masks so numerous she can no longer select her own legitimate face out of the museum she has cultivated to hide herself in. Because she is an actress, she has fashioned an entire career out of identity theft. Sitting there, I find myself believing her completely, yet not really knowing if she has spoken the truth. It is difficult to trust a woman who has built herself out of a house of exits and not marked a single entrance.
“What else do we need to know?” Ike asks us as a group. “We’ll make this as fast as we can, Sheba. This has been terrible for you, for all of us.”
“Knowing your dad, why did you believe he was really dead, Sheba? Even with what was supposed to be his ashes?” Betty asks.
Sheba shrugs. “That’s what they told me in New York. They found his ID. I got the ashes.”
“When did this happen?” Ike asks.
“A few months ago,” she says.
“So how does he know you’re out here?” Niles says.
“Herb Caen told him Sheba’s address,” Molly says. “Sheba’s father was staking out Trevor’s old apartment. Hell, Leo’s written a bunch of columns about Trevor’s apartment, too.”
“That’s enough for tonight, Sheba,” Ike says.
“But there will be more?”
“Why the obsession with you and Trevor?” Molly asks.
“A simple game. One of absolute control. One that brooked no rebellion,” Sheba says. “My dad called himself master. He called us slaves. He said it was the simplest and most ancient and most honorable game on earth. And he once said, ‘Here’s my promise to you: it will never end.’ When he raped me in L.A., he confessed to me that he only had children because he wanted someone to fuck for the rest of his life. ‘Having twins was a surprise,’ he told me. ‘Double the pleasure, double the fun.’”
CHAPTER 17 New Denizen of the Washbag
On Friday we begin the difficult process of saying good-bye to the dying men we have been bringing lunch to for almost two weeks. The farewells are trying and emotional for all. Though Open Hand warned us about the dangers of growing too attached, the nature and seriousness of the duties have changed everything about us. We spend much of the day weeping as we make our departures. Already, we have found four dead men in the hotels we serviced in the Tenderloin. That we have failed to locate Trevor weighs heavily, that sense of imminent failure causing despondency in most of us and surliness in Sheba. None of us has ever encountered such indomitable courage, relentless wit, and passion for life as we have since our lives intersected with these disease-ravaged men.
My soul feels tired as we head into the Washbag. The waitress Leslie greets us with a hug; word has spread among the regulars that there still have been no sightings of Trevor.
“I wasted everybody’s time coming out here,” Sheba says. “I’ve put everybody’s life in danger. And we still don’t have jack-shit to show for any of this.” She stops herself and collapses into tears. There is no acting here, only despair, and she begins whimpering like some small, soft nocturnal creature. Before we can respond, Leslie comes running to our table from the front room, breathless.
“Something odorous and homicidal this way comes,” Leslie says.
“What do you mean?” Ike asks, rising out of his seat.
“A huge black guy. Obviously homeless. Says he needs to talk to you guys.”
Sheba has gained some control of herself, and it is she who first makes the connection. “That creep on the cable car! The one who tried to steal my purse.”
I say to Leslie, “Make the biggest steak you’ve got with all the works. Bring it out to that first bench in the square.”
Niles and Ike are already on the street, talking to the only linebacker for the Oakland Raiders who lives in the backseat of a junkyard car.
“Maybe he has news,” I say to the women following me as I reach the tense convocation taking place on Powell Street. “I ordered dinner for our man here,” I tell Ike and Niles.
“They threatened to call the cops on me when I tried to go inside,” Macklin Tijuana Jones says, with true indignation.
“You don’t fit their client profile,” Ike says in his most appeasing voice.
“You promised five grand if anyone found your little faggot.” Macklin is sitting on a park bench as the rest of us stand. “Where’s my money?”
Ike says, “Where’s our friend? The money doesn’t change hands until we’re shaking hands with Trevor Poe.”
“I found him,” Macklin says. “Like I said I would. I proved myself trustworthy. Now I want my money.” He takes out the flyer that we spread over the length and breadth of San Francisco and studies it as though it were a treasure map of infinite worth. “That’s him, okay. I’ve seen him with my own eyeballs. Saw him yesterday.”
Leslie comes into the park carrying a tray full of food and a six-pack of beer. With some solemnity, she places the tray on Macklin’s lap and says, “We fixed the steak medium-rare. Is that okay with you, hon?”
“Just the way I like it, ma’am,” he says. “My compliments to the chef and please add a thirty percent tip to my bill.”
We watch as Macklin begins to eat dinner with surprising delicacy and enjoyment. Then I remember that he was once an NFL star and knew how to conduct himself in the best restaurants of any city. “Gentlemen, ladies, this is a fine, fine meal.”
“You’ve seen Trevor Poe?” Ike demands impatiently.
“With my own two peepers,” Macklin answers between bites.
“Can you get us to him?” Ike asks.
“Your boy’s in trouble, lawman,” he replies. “Yeah, I can get you to him. But getting him out’s going to be hell.”
“Where is he?” Sheba cries.
“Bunny’s got him,” Macklin replies.
“Who’s Bunny?” Ike asks.
“You don’t even want to know,” he says, concentrating on his food. He points his fork at us. “Tell you what. Meet me at eight in the morning on Turk and Polk Street.”
“You’ll take us to see this Bunny?” Ike asks.
“Hell, no. Bunny’d kill me if he knew I was leading cops to his place.”
“You afraid of somebody?” Ike asks. “That don’t sound much like you.”
“Bunny played for the Raiders a few years before I did,” Macklin says as he resumes eating. “Bunny Buncombe, wore number eighty-nine. White boy who played for Florida State. He weighed three hundred pounds then. Bet he weighs in at four hundred now. He’s mental. Bad crazy. Not cute crazy, but mean crazy. He’d kill his own mother and sell her used Kotex for a cough drop.”
“What a beautiful image,” Fraser says.
“Watch your language around my wife,” N
iles growls.
“We came out to San Francisco for a vacation and a few laughs,” I say. “And we get to meet our friend Macklin again. Sheba’s dad shows up for another go at the father-daughter dance. Now we find out Trevor’s developed a friendship with a four-hundred-pound whacko named Bunny.”
“Why would Trevor stay with someone like Bunny?” Betty asks in bewilderment. “He’s always hated that kind of man.”
“You’ve got it all wrong, ma’am,” Macklin says. “Your friend Trevor’s a prisoner of war. Like the rest of the pansies locked up in Bunny’s house. He can’t leave. Not allowed to.”
“He’s an adult,” Fraser says. “He can leave if he wants to.”
“Hey, society lady, I’ve seen people go low in the Tenderloin. Hell, I’ve been low in the Tenderloin. But Bunny has built his own kind of hell there. It may be worse than hell. I’ll have to die to find out, won’t I? Anyway,” he says, finishing his meal and laying his napkin on the tray, “I’ll meet you nice folks at eight in the morning, and we’ll see what we can do. There’s a coffee shop run by a Mr. Joe on the east side of Polk near Golden Gate. Meet me there.”
“How do we know you’ll be there?” Ike asks.
“Five thousand reasons. You come ready to rumble. Bunny’ll kill every one of you if you try to interfere with his little lifestyle. By the way, your particular faggot ain’t doing so good. And I’ll bet one of you’s gonna get killed by Bunny.”
In the meanest part of the Tenderloin, we meet Macklin Tijuana Jones for breakfast at a place where the proprietor, who identifies himself as “Joe Blow,” is an elderly Vietnamese man. Macklin sleeps in Joe Blow’s backyard, in a rusted-out Mazda up on cinder blocks.
“Order everything,” Ike says, and we do. “Another steak, Macklin?”