“Look! Look out there! Do you see them?” Kathleen’s arm came up and she leaned back against Younger, pointing in the direction of the island’s curving harbor, all the way out to its end, a spit of land dominated by the five-story-high white dome of the Avalon Ballroom, perched improbably between land and sea like a sheik’s stretched tent on the desert.
Younger followed the line of Kathleen’s arm across the water. Palms and flags fluttered around the dome of the ballroom. The small town of Avalon rose behind the ballroom, climbing steeply up the fall of cliffs protruding abruptly from the sea, then surrendering to steep terrain, a straggle of brave houses perched on poles eight hundred feet up the mountainside, as if prepared for the ocean to one day lap at their front doors. “What am I looking for?”
“You’re looking too far, Nathan. Not all the way to the town. Out there, on the water.” Kathleen placed her hand gently against Younger’s cheek, guiding his gaze to the sight the people on the observation deck above were screaming and shouting about. “Flying fish!”
Younger saw them. Skimming over the white frothing tongues of the ocean’s chopping waves, the fish were actually flying, sailing through the spray in a display of dazzling acrobatics, creatures not of land or sky, but wedded in breathtaking moments to a realm all their own, unique, without parallel. Younger felt the slightness of Kathleen’s body pressed against him, trembling with excitement at the fish flying by, freeing themselves from the depths of the sea, bounding from the ocean’s floor, sailing toward the sun in a fabulous pursuit of freedom. He slipped his arms around Kathleen’s waist. She did not object. All the way into the harbor he held her tightly, feeling himself tremble, trembling from fear of the unknown within her, the questions he knew must be asked, the answers he didn’t want to hear. He held on to her as if it was for life, afraid she might escape the few moments they had together, like the flying fish long left behind in the wake of the steaming ship, living between two worlds, never questioning the impossibility of their existence, never testing the improbability of their realm, sailing forever through water and air.
In the Avalon Ballroom beneath banners of a thousand balloons Younger thought Kathleen died in his arms. For hours he held her, breathless, dance after dance, the big trumpeting sound of Harry James’s band breaking over them like stormy brassy waves. Everywhere sailors and soldiers laughed and shouted, hoisting their girls into the air like proud prizes just won at a carnival, offerings to be displayed on the altar of good times. The war was a million miles away in the ballroom. The packed swirling dancers made the vast domed building spin like a private planet, a reserved place in space where romance reigned, red lips of young women pressed against the faces of eternal partners. Drums, trombones, and trumpets of the band fired thundering rockets of sound, coursing through the blood of every tribal foot stomping on the dance floor. Against Younger’s cheek the slightest breath escaped from Kathleen’s lips, a high whistling sound, almost a wheeze, her red hair covering her eyes, the dampness of her skin welding the two of them together, offering a physical promise far beyond a simple fusing of their flesh. For hours the balloons spun above their heads. The weaker Kathleen grew in his arms, the stronger Younger became, until finally he carried her from the ballroom, spent and exhausted, the red curls framing the radiant smile of happiness on her face. He walked her slowly along the tiled promenade of the harbor. The sea had become gentle inside the island’s protective arms, its soft rocking barely disturbing the rows of small anchored boats. Kathleen’s body swayed beneath Younger’s tight hold around her waist as they passed lovers crowded together on concrete benches, holding hands, anxious to make plans for a future never to be. At the end of the promenade Younger took Kathleen up a narrow dirt road winding above the last houses of the town and dropping suddenly into a purple canyon, hidden from the sea and blaring music of the ballroom below.
“What are those?” Kathleen pointed to a clump of rough spiked plants tall as a man, long tongues of pearlescent flowers blooming from the cluster of their sharp green fingers.
“It’s a type of yucca, a yucca whipplei. The Spanish explorers named it the Lord’s candle. Here on the island it blooms those thousands of little blossoms in the spring.” Younger took Kathleen’s hand and led her along a steep trail descending into the canyon. “But that is not what will help your asthma. What we’re searching for is cyanothus americanus.”
“What?”
“The plant I told you about, remember? The plant we came here to find, the one the Mexican brujas make a tea from and believe will clear the lungs, help you to breathe easier. Better than your marijuana cure.”
“What’s a bruja? You never told me.”
“A witch.”
Kathleen stopped, stretching out her hand to stroke the blossomed tongue of a spiked yucca next to the trail. “This plant of yours, do you really think it could help me? I’d try anything, even a witch’s brew, if I thought it would help me to breathe easier. I’m so dispirited taking medicines all the time.”
“It’s worth a try, Kathleen. Anything’s worth a try. The Indians who lived here boiled poison oak leaves and drank the broth, believing it made them immune to poison oak rashes.” Younger waded off down the trail into thigh-high brush. “There are two varieties of the plant we’re looking for. One has a blue flower, the other white. I just hope we can find the right one, since it’s not in bloom now and won’t have any flowers.”
Kathleen plucked teardrop-size yucca blossoms and studied them in her palm, calling to Younger as he went deeper into the canyon. “How come you know so much about this island?”
“Because”—Younger pushed his way through a thorn bush grabbing at his flapping sport coat—“when I brought my CYO boys over here last summer I decided to study up on the place. This is the only nature lots of those kids will ever see. I like to be able to answer their questions, leave them with a feel for the specialness of a place. Most people don’t know it but this island is more than twenty centuries older than the mainland of California, just twenty-six miles away, a freak of nature. There are plants here that exist nowhere else in the world. Ask me about the firewood trees on the way back and I’ll—” Younger stopped. Before him a broad hardwood bush that appeared to be dying from lack of water came up out of the ground in a swirl of stiff branches blocking his passage. He snapped off the brittle tip of a branch, a strong scent of resin racing up his nostrils, a scent so powerful it seemed like he had just uncapped a can of ether. Younger plucked off the tips of more branches until his coat pockets bulged with them, then made his way back up the steep trail to Kathleen.
“Did you find it, Nathan?”
“Smell.” Younger reached into his pocket and held out a handful of twigs beneath Kathleen’s nose. She pulled back suddenly and shook her head as if getting a whiff of smelling salts.
Younger laughed, slipping the twigs gently back into his pocket, like they were eggs about to be hatched. “I’m not promising we have the right variety. Like I said, cyanothus is dormant this time of year, so it’s impossible to tell whether we have the blue or white one. Come on, we better go back.” He took Kathleen’s outstretched hand and led her up the trail. “But it really doesn’t make any difference which variety we have, because to be honest I don’t know which one will do the trick for you.”
“You actually expect me to drink that? It smells like gasoline.”
“Or ether. You said you would try anything.”
Kathleen stopped at the top of the canyon, the dome of the ballroom in sight against the calm sea below. “I will try it on one condition.”
“What’s that?”
The shuddering boarding blast from the steam whistle of the S.S. Catalina hauling anchor in the harbor drowned out the first part of Kathleen’s words. “And besides that, you must promise to drink some with me.”
“It’s a deal.” Younger shook her hand solemnly. “We’ll drink it together, then if it’s hemlock we’ll die side by side.”
“
Oh, Nathan, that’s funny, the two of us dying in each other’s arms like in some sad Greek tragedy. Come on, we have to hurry or the ship is going back to San Pedro without us.” Kathleen put her arm around Younger’s waist for support as they ran down the steep road toward the harbor, all the while her strange breathless laughter ringing in his ears.
27
The five photographs tacked to the wall stared glossily down at Younger. He studied them carefully, closely, with full attention, committing every distinguishing feature to memory. The dark mustaches of the two men on the end, the scar straight down the middle of the forehead on the man in the center, the slightly receding hairline creeping up the broad head of the one who seemed to be the oldest of the group. But it was the face of the second man from the end that Younger kept coming back to again and again, the one who finally dominated his attention. That was him, Younger was certain of it. He was Chiquito Banana. There was an unmistakable air of authority in the man’s lean Latin face. The lips straight and strong with no trace of obvious malice, but the eyes potent, a gaze so full of life it followed Younger around his small room from the glossy surface of the photograph. The man was handsome, in his early thirties, his thick eyebrows almost growing together, merging in a definite V above the fine slanting nose. This man had character, authority in the tight fist of his cleft chin, nobility in the arched bones of his cheeks. This man was a natural leader. Maybe the FBI didn’t know which of the five men in the photographs tacked to Younger’s wall was one of the most dangerous Latin Fascists in California, but there was no question in Younger’s mind. None. And he knew sooner or later he would meet him, or at least see him. This man who was not above hooking young kids on dope to buy their political allegiance. This man who played on every physical fear and mental anguish of the people in the Barrio. This man Younger wanted to ferret out of his rat hole. This man was the ultimate danger. Younger didn’t like why this man was the ultimate danger: the danger lay in the larger truth of his politics. Younger was a good American. Younger knew the Barrio was a dead-end trap for the thousands who came across the border to find an honest day’s wage. Why shouldn’t they come with that hope? Everyone else came to America for the same reason. Was it a crime to want to work, speak another language, demand an equal wage? Younger knew the Barrio was a giant, elaborate net, stretched across the east side of Los Angeles for one purpose: to trap cheap labor, migratory labor, labor that would stoop and pick in the hot summer fields, labor desperate and dying for a chance to work in factories, prove itself, that it could take it, take the low wages, the inhuman living conditions, the heat, the dust, seasonal work, overcrowding, the abuse. Take it and come back for more, because abuse had become in America the conditional price tag for hope. That’s why this Fascist was dangerous, because many conditions of abuse he spoke about were true. There was no denying it. Younger himself hadn’t yet figured out why people of the Barrio were denied work in many war industries. It didn’t make sense. It wasn’t the American way; during a war everybody is supposed to work. If these people were asked to go and fight for America, die for America, why couldn’t they work alongside anyone else in America? Everything seemed confusing, but in the end Younger knew there was one constant in his own life: he was a good American. He knew the system wasn’t perfect, but there wasn’t a better one to replace it with. The Fascists and the Communists all had the same corrupt bottom line—kill individualism. Younger would rather die protecting an imperfect system than live without freedom. Younger knew what was dangerous about this man, this Chiquito Banana. He had seen the Fascists’ pamphlets scattered every morning throughout the Barrio. The Fascists used small truths to mask the big lie. The whole world knew what the Fascists were. The whole world knew if America didn’t defeat Hitler it would become one big Nazi slave camp. Some things Younger was confused about, but about that he wasn’t, about that he was certain.
The phone hadn’t rung for days; no word from Cruz. Younger was afraid to leave the house in case he missed the call. He left the house only to see Kathleen. He put out the word to Wino Boy to tell the Zoot gangs he wanted Cruz to call him, to let Cruz know he went to Holly woodland, he was late, but he kept his part of the bargain, he got there. Cruz hadn’t been seen on the streets for the last week. Younger couldn’t sleep at night. If it wasn’t one thing it was another. He woke up from dreams about his brother screaming in a sea of fire. He woke up from seeing himself rip open Cruz’s shirt, his narrow hairless chest crisscrossed with fine razor-blade slashes, festering and swollen from the heroin he powdered directly into his bloodstream. These Barrio kids were too smart to jab themselves full of needle holes in the legs and arms, the first places every probation officer looked to see if a kid had a monkey on his back. Younger woke up seeing bombs fall like rain as the odd, sensitive words of the Voice rang in his ear, words enticing and cool, breathed in like pure oxygen through a gas mask. Younger couldn’t sleep worth a damn. Four o’clock in the morning and he was looking at the photographs of the faces pinned to his wall.
He tried to get his mind to relax, but who can relax when the whole world is at war? He tried to concentrate on the perfect pitches Angel could throw for the Stars. The game of baseball followed certain rules. Lines of performance had to be upheld, but there were always the two wonderful surprises: either smash the ball straight out of the park and make all rules meaningless or throw pitches so sincere and absolutely down the middle that the game became an excuse for poetry. Games were the reality of dreams. How the game of war should be played, Younger thought as he studied the photographed faces of the men on his wall, is Hitler, Roosevelt, Stalin, Hirohito, Churchill, the whole pack of them, should get up some national baseball teams to manage, then square off against one another in the World Series of War, but with baseballs. It was four o’clock in the morning and Younger didn’t like his thoughts. They were stupid when he thought about them. But he couldn’t get any satisfaction. The only whole, solid piece of sweet dreaming he was capable of was about Kathleen. Sweet, simple dreams about her small breasts or about the white of her slender calves as she walked before him up the stairs of her apartment, and the sound of her breathing, always breathless, unnerving, like her words just arrived after a night of exhausting lovemaking, her entire body still damp, her excited fingers trembling, seeming to trace the outline of another body in the empty air as she talked. But he didn’t like to think of her feeble condition, dream of her spent body. When he did he went hard as a baseball bat between the legs, and he felt dumb and empty.
Younger sat at the small card table. For the hundredth time he picked up the V-mail letter from Marvin. A false dawn staggered down the empty street out the window over the palms, a strange and faint light coming from behind the bouldered peaks of the San Gabriel Mountains. He pulled the light cord above his head and watched the strange light through the window. He didn’t know what caused it; he had seen it before. Steadily, as the true dawn began to flood the sky, the strange light grew more distant, at the same time giving off a distinct color, like spilled red wine on a rug or blood on a sheet moments before the stain fades. He strained his eyes in the new light that poured through the window, reading over and over the words of the letter he already knew by heart. He didn’t know why he kept rereading the letter. It depressed him, but it was the only form of contact with Marvin he had had for the past eight weeks. It depressed him that any time of the day or night Marvin’s aircraft carrier might take a direct hit and go down. Why should Marvin have to worry about Jap subs, fight a stinking war, and still be obsessed with having to defend himself against someone like the Shitter? The Shitter wasn’t such a joke anymore. The Shitter wasn’t so cavalier and swashbuckling with his stinking protest against the Navy and the war. The Shitter was some crazy guy out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean who was terrorizing Marvin. The Shitter had become so real Younger would wake up in the middle of the night, out of one bad dream or another, half expecting to see a reeking hot mound on his bed with a letter tacked to i
t: Sweet Dreams, Nathan. Your Pal, The Shitter.
What was more terrifying than the Shitter stalking the streets of Los Angeles was the fact that Younger thought he might be the Shitter himself. That was the silly thing about it. If the Shitter singled you out of a whole shipload of other sailors, or if he picked you out of three million lost souls in Los Angeles, weren’t you just as guilty as he? Wasn’t the target himself the reason for the revenge? Didn’t the target feel deep down inside, with not too much prodding, that he too could be driven to such an infantile act? Or, worse yet, somehow the target himself was the one who provoked the act. So in the end every victim of the Shitter thought of himself as the guilty one, the true Shitter. As Younger again read between the censored lines of Marvin’s letter, he understood his brother’s frustration. As long as the Shitter hadn’t personally struck Marvin he was still clean, guiltless; in a world full of Shitters he was still ahead of the game.
Zoot-Suit Murders Page 15
