“…it’s been a while, hey, Ram?” a voice said behind me. I felt the distinctive grip on my shoulder, squeezing it in that familiar way, and knew, before I turned to look, that Tor was standing behind me. I rose up from the chaise and Tor took me in his arms. He hugged me tightly and clapped me on the back. I stood there limply for a moment, then hugged him back as tightly as I could.
“Let’s go for a walk?” he said.
We walked down the path on the edge of Fran’s property line abutting an adjacent vineyard and proceeded to the end of it. When we got there, Tor shook out a couple of Pall Malls, lit them, and handed one to me. I wanted to say something but my embarrassment kept the words bottled up inside me. Tor saw this and stood there with his hand on my shoulder while we watched the falling snow. Finally, he spoke.
“Are you okay?”
I thought about it awhile, shrugged my shoulders, and sighed.
“I guess I am, sort of. I’m just trying to hold my mud through dinner and then get out of here in one piece… relatively speaking.”
He laughed, inhaled a drag of his cigarette, and stared straight ahead.
“I’m totally at sea here. I really don’t have a clue what I’m doing here, why I was asked here, and why I came.”
He nodded and waited for me to continue.
“I mean, this is embarrassing, especially for Fran, if you stop to think about it… but also for me… ‘Hey, Joe, did you meet my brother Ram, the famous murderer?’ It’s pretty horrible when you come down to it.”
“I see your point, but it’s not like that for Fran, whatever embarrassment it causes him, and I’m sure it causes him some. For Fran—and to Fran—you’ll always be the little brother he feels he has to look out for. It’s been that way with him ever since I’ve known you guys, and that’s what, thirty-five years or something? He’s always been impressed by your abilities, and you’re sort of, how should I say this, your almost idiotic courage in the face of staggering odds. I think Fran’s always been a little envious of that about you, Ram. I mean, you are one barn-burning son of a bitch.”
“Ahh, not really.”
“Come on, Ram, it’s me you’re talking to. Yes, you are.”
“Maybe I’m just not bright enough to get out of my own way. And I still have some feelings about how he and Peter abandoned me during the Verde deal.”
“And you’re going to hold that against them?”
I shook my head. “No, what’s the point? But I did, and it took me a long time before I could let it go.”
“I’ve never met a family like yours, with three brothers who couldn’t be more different from one another. It’s like straight out of—”
“—the Brothers Karamazov,” I finished.
“You remember that?”
“You’ve been telling me that ever since I was fifteen, and I’ve never forgotten it. In fact, I never forgot much of anything you’ve said, although I wish I could have gotten more of it when it could have helped.”
“You mean the stuff that I said about you and Vera?”
“That especially; you had her pegged. She was way too much for me to handle. I should have walked away from that a long time ago. I wish I had. I wish she was still alive. Maybe she’d have found somebody more suited to her. Maybe I would have too.”
Tor sighed and nodded and I turned to look into his face directly. His red hair was short now and his beard closely trimmed. His blue eyes were deeply lined but still merry and young in nature, warm and open and reflective of the spirit they housed.
…the years peeled back, and I saw Tor as I first knew him when he and my brother were high school buddies. I remembered them fencing in the backyard with un-tipped epées and Tor taking one of Fran’s thrusts right through the shoulder blade. I remember the time when I was in high school and came out to the garage, summoned by Tor’s beeping horn, and had to pry him off his Dream 300, remembered how he got the name Tor, which I bestowed on him after he’d bought a Tor Johnson latex mask one Christmas and wore it all day while we were shopping at the Del Monte Center in Monterey, remembered him befriending Vera when nobody else from the Endymion crew would and how he tried to gently suggest to me that a future with her was not in my best interests; I remember, too, that he tried to warn me about the deep water I was in on the Louie Verde story and that maybe I should leave it alone and not wake the sleeping beast. I remembered our laughter together and the wonderful madness of our wild years together at Endymion until it played out for us both, right around the same time, with Tor leaving Suzie and me jumping ship right after Jaime OD’d. The faces and voices of our shared history together swarmed and congealed and smeared together—and I smiled at the comfort and joy they still gave me these many years on—way back when we were still young. I laughed recalling an incident from the Monterey days…
“What are you laughing at?”
“The time where you climbed that tree on Spencer Street and somehow managed to step in a fresh pile of dog shit.”
“I remember that.”
“Remember what I said?”
“You said only Michael Boswell could find dog shit climbing a tree.”
“I’ve never met anyone in my life so prone to stepping in shit.”
“You took over when you waded into that Louie Verde shit pile.”
“Touché, Tor,” I said, aiming a fake epée thrust to his shoulder.
Tor smiled. He paused, then he spoke again.
“During the whole time I’ve known you, I’ve always known there was something that you wanted from Fran, some kind of recognition or approval or appreciation for you as your own person that you wanted.”
“That’s true. But wanting and getting are two different things, Tor. Fran never could see it that way. I knew he couldn’t bring himself to do that. I don’t think he operates at that level. For all his talents—”
“Fran could have been whatever he wanted to be, Ram. He could have been a surgeon or an astrophysicist. I always thought he’d eventually move on to something else, something more challenging for him personally. I got him started on building, so maybe I’m partly to blame. I don’t know. But he’s happy, and he is successful, so really, what does it matter? And I know that he’s happy you’re here. I think he’s proud of you for what you did.”
“I haven’t done anything, Tor.”
“You showed up.”
“Yeah, I did that.”
“And now you’re back and you’re working, and that’s a good thing. You can’t let one mistake ruin your whole life and hold you back for the rest of it.”
“Come on, Tor, it was a pretty horrible mistake, and it was a whole series of mistakes, really. I was pretty gone for a long time.”
“But you’re a different person now, I can see that… even if you are still Fran Le Doir’s little brother.”
Tor was smiling, his eyes shining. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go inside and get something to eat.”
“There’s one thing I want to know,” I asked him.
“What’s that?”
“Which of the Karamazov brothers were Peter, Fran, and I?”
He smiled. “Fran was always Ivan, the middle brother, the even-keeled one. In the beginning, I used to think you were more like Dmitri, the oldest one, and Peter was like Alyosha, especially when he was in the seminary. But when all that stuff happened with Peter’s divorce and you going to prison and coming out the way you have, it’s like you switched positions with Peter.”
He squeezed my shoulder and we walked slowly back to the house. When we got there, the family was gathering at the table and Tor insisted that I sit between him and Bill Bochs, another comrade from the Endymion days. Plates were passed out by Fran and Maria and Kelly, who ladled out the dinner of turkey and ham with all the trimmings. When everybody had theirs, Fran shocked me by saying a prayer and asking God to bless this gathering and thanking him for his blessings upon him and his family, looking directly at me as he spoke the last line. Then shock
overtook me. It was the first time I’d heard Fran say a prayer since he was fifteen or so. He raised his wine glass, proposed a toast, and we dove into the feast.
For the next two hours, the conversation ricocheted around the table with people taking their familiar turns—Kelly and Maria on household products and how much things cost; Peter and his girlfriend and two boys talking sports; Fran and Bochs and Tor talking business and wine, and me, sitting there deaf as a stone to most of it, but smiling because everybody was in such good spirits.
I sat there quietly and watched it all, registering everything that was said and taking it all in. Shopworn stories from the past now repeated for those who’d never heard them before, no longer rankled me as they once did, and the longer I listened, the longer I stayed, the more human contact I had, the calmer I began to feel. After dessert, when the plates were being cleared away, I drifted off and remembered the stories my dad used to tell me about the Le Doirs when I was a boy…
…there was one ennobling feature about my namesake, Ram Le Doir, which my father told me about on his bibulous forays into the foothills, and that had to do with how Ram came to lose the bottom half of his right leg, from just below the kneecap down…
Driving north from Sagrada to Red Bluff to visit Yick one summer, my dad pulled off 99 somewhere close to Yuba City and drove into the Sierra Buttes, the Sleeping Indian as it’s locally known because it looks like one from a certain angle. The Buttes are a pretty and tiny chain of mountains of still working cattle ranches and almond orchards, mostly owned by the same families who first settled the area over a hundred years ago. We parked and got out and climbed one of the peaks and sat down to a lunch of salami and cheese sandwiches. For a while, my dad said nothing, just looked at the flat valley land stretching out in all directions. Shasta and Lassen were visible on the northern horizon, snow-capped and shining, while Diablo loomed darkly in the southwest.
“Well, I guess you’re old enough to have this now,” said my dad, reaching in his pocket and pulling out a handkerchief wrapped around a gray-white bone. It was desiccated and fragile and ancient—a shinbone missing the bottom half. “This was your namesake’s leg. It got shot off by a sniper in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. I thought you should have it, Ram,” he said, placing it in my hand.
I gazed in wonder at it and carried it proudly with me during that visit, telling people about it and what it meant and whose it was, when Yick and my dad and I would go down to the Crystal in the evenings. And later, when I got back home to Sagrada, I tied it to a fishing line and placed it in the window above my bed, where the moon, when it was full, would shine on it and make it glow with an almost blinding luminosity. And the wind, when it picked up at night, would drift through the hollowness of the shinbone and make a plaintive whistling tune. So I gave my namesake’s bone a name of its own, calling it the ‘windwhistle bone,’ and during my insomnia period as a teenager, the only thing that could put me back to sleep, was the haunting whistle it made while it hung there in the window, glowing above me…
“Maybe it’s just me, but I prefer my Chards a little oakier than this one. This one’s a little heavy on the tannins,” said Bochs.
I didn’t know how long the conversation with Bochs had been going on, and couldn’t remember what prompted it as I’d been drifting, lost in the Le Doir family boneyard.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said.
After coffee was served, the party started to break up. It was still daylight outside when Fran bundled the crew up and escorted them to the door.
I wandered about the house for a minute and walked down the hall into Fran’s office where the shafts of the afternoon light passing through the blinds painted a grid on the wall. One of the beams fell directly on a picture of Fran taken some years back when his hair and beard were still salt and pepper before going entirely gray. I looked at it more carefully and saw that it was Idaho, and then I remembered that it was me who had taken the picture and when that was.
…the wake spun in symmetrical waves behind the skiff as we sped southward toward the Sawtooths goldening in the setting sun invisible behind the range.
My focus narrowed in to the sun-hammered green of the mountain lake and the throbbing pulse of the throttle shivering through my forearm. I silently remarked to myself at the wondrousness of the layered complexity of the simple actions and luxuriated in the glow of these phenomena: piloting a boat; reading riffles and back eddies, the signposts of danger; the form and passage of clouds; the scent of the lake. They all now assumed an importance that made events perceived, dissected, and interpreted somehow petty—a vainglorious attempt to capture smoke from dubious fires and bottle it, or better yet, pin them like butterflies to a specimen board, with genus and species painted on an index card underneath, which would then yellow and age over time. It was a chase after wind, this profession of mine, this career, and this was my first admission to myself of this irreducible fact.
Fran was torn by the forces fragmenting him and he offhandedly inquired about my upcoming projects, shouting over the engine from his place near the bow. But I was divorced from that right now, immersed in the prismatic complex of this now, and replied simply and finally, “A movie.” I recited by rote the names of the stars and the storyline, which Fran nodded at and then replied. “Sounds interesting,” was what he said.
“Yeah,” I replied. It was the best I could manage.
Afterwards, we sat in the log cabin bar of the Redfish Lake Resort, he with his vodka martini and me with a beer. After a few minutes, a wedding party marched in noisily and drunkenly announced that their near catatonic friend in the corduroy jacket, whose jaw muscles were flexing tightly, would tomorrow be making the leap of faith. He smiled and nodded stupidly.
“Remember Tor’s wedding?” I asked.
“That would be difficult to forget.”
“Tomorrow’s groom has the same greenish tinge.”
“Maybe he’ll need oxygen too.”
“Or something stronger, like Tor did.”
Fran laughed.
Then we dragged the ghosts of Tor and Suzie out from the then that was, and all the friends who were there in attendance: Conrad Neuer and his wife Janie, Hackett and Bochs, Sandy and Doc, and Phil and Cisco and the Whale, shaking shook-up champagne bottles that we sprayed on one another, stops behind the canvas tent for a toot or three, Jay’s band kicking into New Orleans, Teddy and the Boatworks people making a late appearance in Doc’s birthday costumes; the release of the cage full of doves after the vows while two beautiful long-tailed peacocks strutted around the grounds on parade. It was a long time ago…
“It didn’t seem to help Tor much,” Fran said in the then present moment. He nodded and took a long sip from his drink.
Wondering what Fran was thinking, wondering what he was ‘going through’ in the parlance of those times was of concern to me. I could see that his marriage was crumbling, and that he didn’t want to admit that to me or share what he was feeling, which was prototypical Fran. I left the space open for a long moment and concluded there would be nothing forthcoming from him and let it pass, let the moment fall away behind us with the waves from our passing wake.
From the conversations I burgled from the bar patrons, I learned that the wedding party was from Boise, a three-hour long drive from here, and they were at the lodge to get down… with motorcycles and Winnebagos, with jet boats pushed to the max, with giant stereos blasting, with large quantities of liquor and drugs to consume and all the other urban implements of survival/destruction; getting it on in the glacier-carved meadows and the tall timbered woods and out of the ice-blue light, all in honor of a pledge for a life together that the principal parties couldn’t predict in with respect to vows recited against an uncertain future; a serene little wedding at a Lakeside Lodge, surrounded by the jagged Sawtooths…
…I heard the front door close and could hear Fran’s footsteps as he walked down the hall. When he entered the room, he looked a
t me with the same abstracted look of the time back in the lodge, a look that I’d often seen in Fran whenever he felt crowded into a corner. He went to the humidor, picked out two pre-Castro Cubans, and chopped them with his guillotine. He lit a wooden match from the tinderbox, then handed me another for mine. We rotated the cigars slowly until the tips were white and even. After he exhaled, Fran was smiling again and, finally, he broke the silence.
“You look great, Ram. I’m glad you came. So tell me, what’s going on? What are you doing these days? How are you?”
“So do you, Fran,” I said. “You look good and I’m glad I came, and I’m not doing too much other than working… I’m okay, though,” I laughed.
“That’s good. I know it’s been hard for you these past years.”
Fran looked at me and smiled, then took a puff on his cigar. He got up from behind his desk and walked over to the bookcase left of me. He poured himself three fingers of Dalmore, looked at me and asked. “How about some single malt?” I shook my head no. As he walked back to his desk, I looked around the room at what was in it: the framed fine art, the tasteful furniture, the bookcases all full of classic literature and illustrated tomes on artists and architecture, the miniature cannon and caisson on the desk, the hand-loomed Chinese rug, the Venetian glass, and thought to myself that I’d been here before. I didn’t know where that here was until he started speaking again.
Maybe it was his tone—flat, even, deliberate—or maybe it was the way he sat in his chair, reclined with his feet on the desk between us. Maybe it was the uncanny similarity of the things decorating this room to those within the other room. Fran’s voice morphed into that of the other Fran and time shifted to that day in the similarly furnished study of my father’s. A time that I’d never remembered or even thought about at all until then…
Windwhistle Bone Page 62
