“I never heard anything like what you just said.”
“Well, that’s how it was… I guess it was a good thing in the end—at least for me anyway, because that incident where Ram busted up the place and got his leg shot off and killed, got my mom out of the business and away from Virginia City. It also made her a respectable woman again when she married my other dad, Smiley Bookman. Now, how unlikely was that?”
“Pretty unlikely. Maybe it’s more a case of something wrapping around itself and repeating itself again.”
“I never thought of it that way,” Bookman said, “but I think I see the point you’re trying to make.”
“I’m not really trying to make a point. Maybe there is no point. But if there is one, then what I said is one possibility.”
“Maybe,” he said. Take a look at the papers, it’s all in there, it’s all recorded. Those are all legal and official documents from the land grant forward. And the photos are all original, so how could I fake all of this… and why would I?"
I looked at the photo album and examined the portrait of the woman again. There was a commotion inside me that shot my concentration and I could make nothing of the images that made any sense. They were just images now; figures from a past that was fabulous and gone, appendages of a time that was maybe nothing more than a story from a long time ago, or maybe far more than that.
The old man picked up the portrait of his mother and pocketed it, leaving the rest of the bag on the bar.
“Don’t you want this stuff?” I asked him.
“That’s your property now, and to tell you the truth, I’m glad I’m shed of it. You take care now, Ram…”
The old man shook my hand, got up, and left the bar. I sat there for a half-hour or so, looking over the albums and files, searching for a meaning, but couldn’t find one. They were artifacts that my dad would have died for, but to me, I didn’t know what they were other than a history, a riddle I’d once tried to solve but didn’t.
Back at the motel, I watched a detective story on cable, a multiple murder in Los Angeles as grim as the Black Dahlia. I turned off the movie and listened to the sounds of the street outside: sirens and drunken shouts and breaking glass. It seemed as though the curse that John Sutter cast against the Le Doirs, if it was true, was now being visited wholesale on the city of Sagrada. It was general now, if not endemic to the place itself.
I could remember vaguely why I loved Sagrada once, and then why I had shunned it. But that was long ago and I wasn’t the same man who felt such feelings any longer. I thought perhaps the tears would come, but my capacity for suffering for an old sin was spent. I packed my things, loaded the car, and drove out Riverside until it became River Road.
I remembered how on certain days in the late spring, the barometer in the Sierras would rise and the resulting vacuum would cause the wind to change direction and come galloping back over the eastern spines of the mountain chain, pushing the clouds back toward the ocean, breaking small chunks of them away from the mass, carving a crescent into its body. At sundown, the clouds would turn black, and the exposed portion of the sky would become a watery blue. I remembered that if you looked long enough at it from the supine position, a feeling of inversion could overtake you: the cloud floes becoming islands in a sea chasing the black sand of that scimitar shore forever westward.
The floes were clearing as I drove River Road. In a shallow bog, a lone egret stood, and the surrounding fields, shot by the afternoon light piercing the chinks in the cloud cover, were russet, milk-gray, and heather, the standing rainwater lightening from black to green. I could taste the smoke from a fire southeast of me. Diablo was wreathed in gray.
I drove through the pear orchards by Scribner’s Bend, the road dipping down off the levee and plunging directly onto the level ground of the orchards, where the treetops beneath you a moment ago, suddenly rose up to meet you at eye level, surrounding and engulfing you with their limbs, then dropping away again as the road rose to the crest of the levee. On the dark water, the sun fired the undersides of the clouds—orange, mint, and vermilion—and reflected them in the river.
Past the Rio Vista Bridge, I pulled into the marina, rented a boat, and headed southwest where the valley’s two main waterways drained out to sea. The tide was going out. I found the line marking where the gray seawater of San Pablo Bay met the brown freshwater of the Sagrada and San Joaquin Rivers draining the valley. I looked up at the sky and said a prayer, for Shaughn and all the Shaughnessy’s and all the Le Doirs, the living and the dead. Then I reached in my pocket, pulled out the windwhistle bone, laid it on the water, and watched it drift away.
Epilogue
The sun slanted hard across Oudezijds Voorburgwal and the moisture on the wet cobbles was diamantine while it evaporated under the soft light. Looking out into the street, he saw that close of day was coming.
The light was draining from the northern sky and evening was falling quickly on the city. At the corner café, a hurdy-gurdy was audible and you could hear the coins the monkey was shaking in his tin cup. The air was biting cold and there was a sweet scent of leaves burning and a smoky smell of chestnuts roasting. A tall, thin, man sat at a café at the corner near the bridge over the Amstel, taking it in and savoring the smell.
Then this world and all that it was in the moment fell away and all times and moments and places melded into an infundibulum; a Brompton’s Cocktail of congealed moments and fractile reductions and expansions, details becoming more detailed until they evaporated into the moil of nothingness that preceded them, waves expanding outward into infinities until they eventually dissolved back into zeroes again with the idea of what they might become. The moments collided and spun, into and out of each other and centuries of voices in countless tongues smeared into and out of the mass. First, all was great and Brobdingnagian, the perspective from far below and microscopic. Then it reversed into puny and Lilliputian, the perspective from above and macrocosmic. Empires rose and fell, their edifices erected, then reduced to ashes. Mountains rose and crumbled. Continents sprouted and, just as quickly, vanished. Philosophies prospered and faded. All was constant, all in flux, yet nothing changed…
…the gusting wind blew him back into the now of a Friday evening in Amsterdam. When it did, he arranged things back into their properly labeled files and put them back where he could make sense of them again. He stood, paid his bill, and walked off down the canal into the growing blackness of the evening.
As he walked eastward, he thought of his life and times. In one sense, it was as if he had dreamed it, made it up as he went along through it, wove it together with warp of fantasy and weft of myth, until he arrived at the whole cloth fabric of what it was and is and what it might have been. In another sense, it was more like he wished he had dreamed it, for it was far too real, a waking nightmare that dripped acid on the back of his horizon. He stopped, shook his shoulders, lit a cigarette, exhaled, and sat on the bench at the foot of the Oudeschans.
Soon they will come, say their lines, strike their poses, and eventually go, not in peace, but reluctantly off into the wings to wait out the intervening week until they all return again. And they were as they always were way back then—Fran at 16, Peter at 12, Tor in his 20s, Wesley in his 30s, and Shaughn and Devlin and Peach and Vera as they were in what one might generously call their heyday.
For the past few months now, he’d been working on letting this last bit of it go so the world would become now again and contain only that which happened in its current moments. It had been such a long time that it had been so that he couldn’t even remember when that time was—age six or so.
Still, he consoled himself that the time when all moments—past present and future—congealed and melded and smeared—only happened but one day out of seven now. He took some solace in it and suffered the ghost show as best he could, unimpeded by any additive or palliative to assuage it or shield him from it. So he did as he always did on Friday nights when the day was finished, and the w
eek was done and night was falling. He walked slowly and purposely to the heart of the old quarter, drawn like a magnet toward the little canal just off the Amstel, then mounted the wooden stairs of the narrow bridge, and climbed to the top and stood at its crest, looking down into the water.
Sometimes, he felt her hand on his shoulder, speaking to him and telling him that she’d been waiting all these years for him to return for her. Sometimes, he thought he would see the jagged white femur floating beneath him, the windwhistle bone having circuited half the world and returning to claim him. Sometimes, he told himself it was folly to think so, but still, he held on to his faith that something would happen if he remained patient. He stood in the dusk that gave way to moonlight for an hour or so. Then he descended the other side of the bridge and disappeared into the heart of the ancient but timeless quarter where he lived.
Windwhistle Bone Page 71
