It was Vera, wanting to know how his trip was.
“Exhausting,” Ram said. “Good, I think, but I don’t have any way of knowing that until we turn our stories in.”
“Do you miss me, Ram?”
“To tell you the truth I haven’t had time to think about it.”
She laughed. “So, it’s all work then?”
“Well, not really, but the play’s hard work too. There doesn’t seem to be much of a line between the two.”
“You sound terrible, baby.”
“It’s been a long night. It just ended really.”
“Are you alone?”
“Of course, I’m alone. I’ve been working and feeling my way around Sagrada again. It’s been a long time; it’s a different place now.”
“I don’t have time now. But I want to hear all about it as soon as you get home. When will that be?”
"On Sunday, early evening, I think. Depends on whether or not we go to my Mom’s for brunch. If not, it’ll be in the late afternoon.
“I’ll be waiting for you, ready for you. I miss you.”
Ram smiled. “I’ll be looking forward to it then.”
“Hah! Bring me something nice. Surprise me.”
“I’ll try to.”
A moment later, the phone rang again. Ram thought it was Vera, following up with sexy repartee, and was about to answer in character for the part. Instead, he picked up and said hello. On the other end of the line, he heard the now familiar baritone. “I trust I’m not disturbing your sleep?”
“Not at all,” said Ram. “I need to get up and get rolling. What can I do for you?”
“You could do me the honor of honoring us with your presence. My wife, Esmeralda, and I would like to invite you to an early supper, in an hour or so. Let’s say two o’clock.”
“Shall I bring anything?”
“Bring whatever you like,” said Llewellyn, “but I do have brandy and beer handy, so there’s really not much need for further refreshments of the liquid variety.”
“I think I get your meaning.”
“I trusted you would.”
“I’ll see you then,” said Ram. When he hung up the phone, he got out of bed and took a long shower.
Before he left the motel, he stopped by Thomas Honey’s room and knocked on the door. There was no answer. Ram went to the front desk and asked for his messages. There was a note in his box from Honey. “There’s an art opening at the Matrix Gallery,” it read, leaving the gallery’s address and phone number. “See you here at six if you don’t come.”
Ram walked to the address on E Street that Llewellyn had given him. It was one of the Eastlake Victorians across from the small park that Ram had stopped in front of a few days earlier. The house was a two-story with a basement beneath it and a wide staircase leading to the entry. Llewellyn stood at the top of the stairs; a pair of Great Danes alongside him barked Ram’s arrival. “Excellent timing,” said Llewellyn, extending his hand, “We have a ham in the oven. These are my dogs, Ariel and Zephyr. My wife is around here someplace. Take a chair on the porch and I’ll pour you a drink,” he said, gesturing toward a high-backed woven cane chair.
Ram sat down and told Llewellyn that he’d take a beer. His work in Sagrada was pretty much finished, and Ram relaxed and let go of the anxiety that had been attending him for much of the past week. They’d either got it or they hadn’t, Ram and Honey, and they wouldn’t know the outcome until Michael Gates read the stories and gave his verdict in another week or so. Now, he could relax and enjoy the rest of his stay in Sagrada. A moment later, the screen door opened. A woman came through it. She was large with straight hair down to her waist that was almost ebony colored, black with red highlights. She had the most beautiful complexion Ram had ever seen, pale but healthy, with rosy cheeks and red lips that smiled warmly. Her eyes were pale green and utterly luminous. Seated on her shoulder was a one-winged crow. “Ram Le Doir, I’d like you to meet my wife, Esmeralda Ruiz y Santos Llewellyn. Esmé, this is Ram Le Doir.”
“I’ve been hearing so much about you from Wesley,” said Esmé, taking Ram’s hand and shaking it strongly. “We’re very happy to have you in our home. Welcome to Sagrada.”
“It’s actually a sort of reunion for me, my coming back here I mean. I grew up here. Well, sort of grew up here, you could say.”
“I think I take your meaning,” said Esmé laughing. It was a throaty, hearty laugh and it was utterly charming. Ram liked her immediately and Wesley could see that, smiling approvingly.
“Well, now we’re all acquainted, except for you and the bird. This here is our orphaned crow, Sookie,” said Esmé, coaxing the crow onto her finger and presenting him forward to meet Ram.
“Does he bite?”
“Only heathens,” said Esmé. “Maybe a born-again Christian or two. Tell me that you’re not a born-again?”
“No, Mrs. Llewellyn, I’m not. I’m still dead on arrival.”
“Good. Their self-righteousness gives me a pain. Care to guess where?” she asked, arching her eyebrow.
“No, Esmé. May I call you Esmé? I’ll leave that one alone.”
The Llewellyn’s and Ram sat on the porch, making casual conversation, talking about their backgrounds, their families, their political beliefs, and their spiritual belief systems. The Llewellyn’s derived theirs from pre-Inquisition Catholicism and paganism. They had a regular church they attended, St. Philomene’s, the Filipino Catholic Church by Southside Park, and they had other places where they celebrated and worshipped with their pagan friends. “We’ll tell you about that some other time if you’re really interested,” said Esmé. “Tell us a little bit about yourself?”
“I wouldn’t know where to begin,” said Ram. “It’s not all that interesting.”
“Oh, please. That’s not what Wesley said.”
Ram hesitated for a long moment before opening up. He was reticent to say much to people like the Llewellyn’s, much as he’d first been reticent around Z’all and George Rogers. They seemed far more sophisticated and urbane than Ram was and far better educated. When he was around people like the Llewellyn’s or Z’all or Rogers, his deficiencies were magnified, Ram felt. But as it was with Rogers, Ram’s lack of education or urbanity meant nothing to the Llewellyn’s, in fact, they didn’t regard him as deficient in these areas, only formally unschooled in them. For them, much as it was for Rogers, Ram’s appeal was in his intuitive sense; he could cut to the heart of a literary debate by summing up the matter in a summation, as he had just done with Hemingway. “I think the real reason that he had to keep shooting those animals was so he could avoid shooting himself,” was what he said. He thought for another long moment before responding to Esmé’s direct question. Then he asked her, “What would you like to know?”
Esmé snuggled in close to Wesley, who put his arm around her, looking on at Ram.
“Start wherever you feel comfortable. I think the question is really more what would you like to tell us.”
Ram mentally thumbed through the catalog: his Sagrada past, his time in Canada and Europe, his Endymion days, his poetry and Vera, the vision he had that long-ago day that was totally unexpected and utterly transforming. He started with that story and told a few minutes of it, then he noticed it was getting time for him to go. The Gala awaited him.
“That’s an amazing story that you’ll have to finish the next time we see one another. I’d like to ask you some questions about that,” said Esmé.
“There will be another time, my love,” said Wesley. “Our young scribe has assignments in Sagrada that demand his attention.”
They watched Ram gather his things, asking him if he wanted to take some ham with him. Down in the street, two young Mexican boys emptied the contents of a bag onto the park grass and talked amongst themselves in Spanish. Llewellyn overheard them and held his hand out, shushing Ram. “They’re burglars,” he said, “discussing their take.” He walked down the front porch steps and boomed out at them in Span
ish, which he then translated for Ram. “I told them don’t walk across my grave. Go before I call the devil down on you.” The boys scooped up their goods and vanished. “I may be rusty but I can still get my point across,” Llewellyn smiled.
“I’d say so,” said Ram. “I’ll see you both.”
“Stay in touch,” they said, waving goodbye from the porch.
Twilight was falling over the town. The air had a chill now, although the sky was still clear and without clouds on any horizon. When he got back to the motel, there was a message from Thomas, telling Ram he’d see him on the esplanade in front of the west steps. There was another from Jill and Phil, saying how much they enjoyed their evening together and asking Ram to call them, which he did, arranging to have coffee with them the following morning at a café they suggested. Ram reviewed his notes on the Gala and the Capitol Restoration, seeing they were far more extensive and in-depth than those he had on lobbyists and lobbying, which still seemed like a shell game that Ram wasn’t quick enough to follow. It was beyond his ken; all that he had was a feeling about it, and his editor wanted to see facts reported, not feelings. ‘It was fun while the party lasted,’ he told himself. Ram dressed warmly, putting on a hat and gloves and a wool overcoat, then walked south to the Capitol. It was gleaming, white and regnant, and lit by a dozen roving spotlights.
A crowd was already gathered on the esplanade. Among them was a contingent from the Kit Carson Mountain Man Club from a gold rush town called Washington. The women from the club wore dresses and bonnets; the men were grizzled types “wearing enough fur to place them at the top of the World Wildlife Fund hit list,” Ram noted in his notebook. There was the New Helvetia Club from Hangtown (the original names of Sagrada and Placerville, Ram noted) shambling along, reeking of hard liquor “looking like a cross between Boxcar Willie and Emperor Norton,” Ram wrote. There were a few protesters carrying a bed-sheet banner with a slogan painted on it “No Nukes,” it read. A number of high school marching bands were dressed in uniform, while the San Francisco Gay Freedom Marching Band braved the cold weather in short shorts, twirling batons and fluttering flags while a boom box blared Kool and the Gang’s Celebration.
A couple of speakers took turns at the podium, marking the dedication ceremonies. Louie Verde rambled on for 20 minutes or so, saying how wonderful the restoration was and reminding everyone present that it was he, Big Louie Verde, who had brought it all to pass; it was he who had given back to Californians a building to match their dreams and destinies. Then Barry Bailey took the dais for three minutes or so, relating the past to the future, the future to the past, tipping his hat to technology, and dipping briefly into philosophy, saying what a spiritual moment it was “a typical Barry Bailey speech littered with his usual non-sequiturs,” Ram jotted down.
When the speakers finished, the anticipation began to build. Then rockets began to fly. They were coming from the opposite side of the Capitol, and showered the sky in every color imaginable. At times, they seemed to shoot from the gold ball atop the dome itself. Red lasers trained on the building’s west face gave it a demonic cast, “an incandescent torch poem to power,” jotted Ram. The red gave way to hundreds of flecks of white, spinning across the building like a candlelit procession, while green and purple rockets exploded above the dome.
The air was redolent with the smell of gunpowder and you could feel the thunder of the larger explosions rolling under your feet in waves, “almost like an earthquake,” Ram noted. The crowd oohed and aahed, their faces lit by the explosions, pointing and gesturing as they filled the sky. Children screamed and cried and some had to be carried away by their parents. It went on for an hour or so, finishing with a cannonade of thunder and lightning that lasted a full five minutes. Then the façade was bathed in a lurid-green wash. “The spectacle is over,” said Big Louie over the p.a. system, “so let the party begin.”
Ram found Thomas Honey standing with Mac and Emile and three young women. They told Ram they were going to go to The Torch Club, then to a private party hosted by Big Louie. They insisted that Ram join them, but Ram declined, begging off due to fatigue.
“I had my party last night, Thomas,” he said. “Tonight’s your night.”
Later that night, Honey called Ram’s room. He said he was in jail and asked Ram to bail him out. He called back five minutes later as Ram was going out the door, to tell him he was being released. Emile Donner had interceded on his behalf.
The next morning, Ram met Jill and Phil for coffee, talking with them for an hour or so, telling them about the Gala and saying he’d come see them again whenever he got back to Sagrada, not knowing if he would be coming back. Then he returned to the motel and called his mother. There was no answer, so he and Honey headed back, taking the same route they’d come in on, down the Delta, around the backside of Contra Costa County and then south through the San Gregorios, past the summit and then into Refugio. When they pulled into the driveway, Vera stood waiting in the doorway. Ram took his bags from the trunk and told Honey he’d call him the next day. Honey seemed miffed that Ram didn’t invite him in. Ram chose to ignore it. He was done. He’d had enough of Thomas Honey, and politics, and Sagrada.
When he got inside, Vera pounced on him, tearing his clothes off. Ram stopped her before she could have her way with him. “I need a bath first, Vera. I really need a hot bath.”
Ram drew the water scalding hot, so hot he could barely sit down. He scrubbed himself for half an hour with Vera’s coarse loofah. When he still had not emerged an hour later, Vera opened the bathroom door to check on him. He was passed out in the tub, his mouth opened, his arms hanging over the sides—like dead Marat in the David painting, thought Vera. She grinned broadly, lit three candles, stripped off her clothes and got in on top of Ram.
The next day, he slept. The day after that, he rested. The following day, he wrote, spinning the word. The next day, he slept. The day after that, he rested. The following day, he wrote, spinning the word scraps from his notepad, from bar napkins, matchbook covers, and the backs of business cards into the whole cloth of three different stories that he thought might be worthy for publication. It surprised Ram that one of them was. It was the story on Wesley Llewellyn that Michael Gates extracted from the two others, and it made Ram Le Doir a star doing something he’d never dreamed of doing.
Chapter Nine
Ram sat at his usual spot under the camphor tree, dwarfed by its hundred and forty-year-old branches, its dusk-green leaves making him disappear almost into the fog that still hadn’t lifted yet. It was early, just past seven, almost spring, and the forecast held for general clearing although it was still misty, and the iron-tasting air was chilly though the bite of winter had almost left it.
On the wrought iron table in front of him was a stack of newspapers, just the front and metro sections, Ram having removed the classifieds, entertainment and sports sections, except the ones from the Times and Chronicle. Alongside his latte was a pair of orange-handled scissors, beside which Ram’s upside down fedora was halfway-full with the stories he’d clipped, each new one drifting from his hand to his hat like snowflakes.
Ram performed this routine daily when he was in Sagrada, Monday through Thursdays, dispensing with Friday, the day he filed his stories and proposed new ones with half-page-long queries, reviewing the morning editions of the LA Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Orange County Register, The Sagrada Stinger, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, looking for anything that provoked him to write a proposal for Golden State or The Stinger, his primary forums and sources of income.
He’d been operating as such for the past five years now, ever since his star had further risen in the firmament of news with the story he’d written for the Stinger on the terrorist bombings in Paris. It was a story Ram never intended to write, just something he’d stumbled onto while waiting to be summoned to the set of a movie being filmed in Sicily. As he sat at his friend Evan Zimmerman’s apartment on the Quai aux Fleurs, waiting for th
e phone to ring and the film’s publicist to tell him that what he’d been promised (an interview with the film’s notoriously reclusive director was arranged), Ram began paying greater attention to the other story unfolding around him.
He began to see a developing pattern to the bombings and how they perhaps related to a grander geopolitical matrix that the mainstream reports seemed either to be missing or not reporting. At first, it was just a hypothesis. Then, as the events further unfolded and the phenomenon began to spread, the skeleton of Ram’s hypothesis began growing muscles and nerves and skin and fleshed out into the living being which Ram’s intuitions sensed it would be shortly after the bombings began. What struck Ram much later, long after the story had been filed and printed and then almost forgotten by him, was how correct his intuition had been and how the subsequent facts that later congealed around the story substantiated his stated hypothesis.
Ram’s prophecy in that story published in The Stinger had proven profitable. The magazines and newspapers that once spurned his queries and proposals at the beginning of his career, now called him regularly, offering feature assignments or staff positions. Ram spurned the offers, preferring to propose stories on his own, oftentimes ones that passed under the radar of the mainstream currents, culling his ideas from the clips that gathered in his hat, which Ram would later sift through on his deck at The Arbor, over the weekend after meeting his Friday deadline.
He had a good living now, his budding career had flowered into a profession, as had Vera’s as an actress, and they had their home, The Arbor, to show for it. Ram paused, saw that he’d had his lot for the day, and regarded the sky above him, remembering the day when he and Vera first came upon The Arbor.
It was just after Ram won his first major journalism award and the New York Film Critics had nominated Vera for Best Actress. Ram won a first prize for a story published in Sagrada Magazine about a local politician with grander aspirations. The politico was a member of a community college school board member named Joe Boniface who was trying to reform its balkanized system through a series of actions to centralize power in the Chancellor’s office. In doing so, he’d riled the turf-protecting local warlords and they came after him with a vengeance.
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