I'll Let You Go

by Bruce Wagner

  “Yes yes yes, I understand! All right? OK? Take your fucking points, all right? Goddamnit! You can have your points! Fucking take them take them take them!”

  It was dark by the time they reached Topanga—another canyon. Kristl convinced her friend it wasn’t anywhere near “Tunga,” but only after Tina and her boyfriend concurred.

  Amaryllis lay in a moldy sleeping bag on the open-air tabernacle of the deck. There were tons of insects, and the sound of animals was all around. The sky was a puddle of black ink and the discrete brilliance of galaxies confounded her. An old mangy dog, no bloodhound indeed, sniffed at them but couldn’t be bothered.

  Mike had his little girl with him. She was about four and slept outside with the runaways. She had a talking doll called Amazing Amy. Mike said the doll had a computer chip, so it always knew the time. At eight o’clock each morning, Amazing Amy said she wanted breakfast and if you tried to give her a little plastic pizza slice that came with the set she’d say, “Not pizza for breakfast!” Mike said there were sensors embedded in the pizza slices and in Amazing Amy’s mouth, too. Sometimes she got a temperature and asked for aspirin. If you gave her pizza instead, she got mad. Mike said she cost $90.

  The girls got up early and whispered awhile. Amaryllis asked if her mom was really going to call MacLaren, and Kristl said probably not, but if she did, it wouldn’t be before noon. She never got it together before noon. Kristl said that maybe they should split. Then she said maybe her mom wouldn’t snitch if she had “business”—if her mom was busy with business, she might not have time to deal with anything else and it would probably be easier to just let them stay in the Canyon and help with chores instead of hassling with driving them all the way back to El Monte. But Mike would have to agree, because it was his house—Kristl said Mike was on parole too, so that probably wouldn’t happen, because he would get in trouble if anyone found out two underage AWOLs were staying at his house. He’d be an accessory, big-time. Amaryllis asked what parole was, and Kristl said it was when you got out of jail but still had to live by jail rules.

  They went to the kitchen to look for food and, Amazing Amy aside, did have pizza for breakfast. They cackled and whispered and Tina shushed them from the bedroom. The little girl came in the front door with her doll and the mangy dog. The latter, casting a rheumy eye on garbage and grotty dishes, turned around and sauntered out to the deck.

  For some reason, watching him go struck the girls’ funny bones, and they laughed some more, then Kristl broke a glass; they winced and grew still. Her mother sprang from the bedroom. Amaryllis stared—her bush was the center of a giant spiderweb tattoo that spread across thighs and stretch-marked stomach. Tina fastened on to Kristl’s arm and shoved her into the bedroom. She started screaming and Kristl screamed back and Amaryllis heard Mike tell them both to shut the fuck up. The doll said it wanted breakfast.

  Amaryllis saw money and a pack of cigarettes on the floor next to a beanbag chair. She grabbed them, crept through the front door and bolted down the long gravel drive.

  Shutting its sticky eyes in sleep, the old dog listened to her steps recede.

  CHAPTER 29

  Doggish Days

  It has been written that after many a summer dies the swan, but plenty happens in the seasons preceding such a lyrical demise. To wit: the heavy-bodied bird must shed its feathers before finding a mate. That is what renders it flightless.

  During most of his season, Will’m nested. Though he never ventured to Northern California, he did take the other half of his friend Fitz’s advice, trimming the wild oak tree of a beard close enough to skin so that it looked inadvertently modern (or nearly so). His accent too was shorn, the notes still melodious yet steeped in less juice; anachronisms came fewer and further between, while contemporary phrases and intonations grew like sprigs from pavement cracks. There was no explaining that. Our fugitive ruefully discarded his telltale tweeds and took to wearing a Smart & Final Iris windbreaker. He did not want for money, thanks to the deathbed bequest of the late, lamented Geo. Fitzsimmons; in the envelope that graced the blouse of the suicide lay $6,000, which Will’m did nothing to flaunt.

  To what do we owe this transformation? That he was mindful of police and the continuous danger of his circumstances certainly did not explain all, for a larger part of him remained quixotic and incognizant of the threats of the world. On the streets, and with his toilet, he proved competent as always: only twice did he find himself significantly interviewed, each time by armed squadrons on horseback. Polite and sober-eyed throughout, still “in character”—but with the lambent fire of an actor more than midway through a very long run—Will’m refrained from the extemporaneous outbursts that were already so much a part of his past. In both instances, though he couldn’t produce sufficient I.D., he remained apologetic and unmolested, Santa Monica on the whole being indigent-friendly; the tanned, hairy-armed cops cantered off in search of nubile beachgoers committing misdemeanors.

  How, then, to explain the mellowing?

  He spent hours atop a Macy’s bath towel, burning his skin at the shore. The waves lapped relentlessly as is their wont; sunbathers lazed and sortied in pointillist ballet; dusk ushered in the nebulae. He imagined himself illustrated, a hero on a dead world that was tentatively beginning to flower again—saw himself standing tall under empyrean tempera of cloud-scudded sky, replete with William Morris’s beloved Arthurian garb, a gleaming, high-crested morion stuffed onto thickened head, with smoky visor and ventail, fat thighs squeezed into cuisses, wearing épaulières of rubies plucked from Saturn’s rings, sword and escutcheon raised against bottomless heavens filled with vessels of improbable size disgorging a-hundred-thousand-score armies of desperate, adventuresome men: celestial warriors! Will’m lay on the sand with his recumbent DNA and bore minuscule, magisterial witness to the wonder-book of yawping cosmological eye. (Science fiction pocket-book covers had forever seared the memory of a boy called Marcus Weiner, but the cryptonesic Will’m knew not whence the images came.) The pounding of surf stupefied him with reverence—any damn fool knew there had to be life elsewhere. Soon starships would hover like floating Escherian cities, ivied and fountain-filled, populated by toga’d handmaidens. “Fitz?” Will’m used to say. “We are temporal and temporary beings, nebulous childr’n on a wildly moving place!”

  Like most fellow nomads, our friend enjoyed roaming the 3rd Street Promenade and varied fringes of this fair Bay City, and sitting on benches in front of the bookstores. The presence of so many volumes preening for passersby from behind the glass was heartening. One day, mused Will’m, he must use a portion of Fitz’s legacy to take a cab to that downtown place where the News from Nowhere journal of his wandering years was stored; a taxi would be more prudent than profligate—the detective and his minions were likely to entrap him if he went on foot.

  On emerging from his reverie, he found that a woman of tremendous bulk had materialized beside him. She panted and perspired, her tender dewlap trembling as she turned to address him with doleful eyes.

  He could do nothing but place an arm about her shoulders—something she seemed to sorely need, for her shaking instantly ceased.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  She made a guttural sound, then sneezed. He looked at her quizzically, and she sneezed again. Coughed. Laughed. Trembled and coughed again. He laughed himself, then said: “Christ! Can you speak?”

  “Ih c’n! Ih c’n! C’n spake!”

  But not well enough to intelligibly give her name: Jane Scull.

  “Are you—are you hungry?”

  “Yihss! Am—am unh-gree!”

  She spoke in great grunting edicts, like a cannonball angel. Dirty white hearing aids were shoved in both ears.

  “Good!” he shouted. “Let’s get you a Johnny Rocket’s!”

  Will’m stood and walked a pace, then turned to see what she was up to. She stayed rooted, staring back like a frightened child—it panged him, for her helplessness evoked his orphan-dau
ghter Amaryllis. Seizing a clammy hand, he steered them past storefronts. Three cheeseburgers and a quantity of milk shakes were ordered (strawberry, vanilla, chocolate), for which the cashier made him pay in advance. Then all the waiters and waitresses seemed to go mad, abandoning their posts while dancing and gesticulating to the music of the little silver jukes; he’d been to this café before, but had never seen such mayhem. Of an instant, their choreographies ceased and everything returned to normal. A few patrons laughed among themselves, amused by the gaping transient couple.

  That he called her Janey (a thing that made the startled girl feel as if he could read minds), was a happy coincidence to his own privately parallel world—a slew of personae now alternately burning bright and fading too within the frayed fabric of a serpentine, superbly demented history. For while Will’m had begun to molt (as established), strange plumage persisted: wife Jane Burden, daughters Jenny and Mary; mentor Ruskin; boon companions Burne-Jones and Rossetti—the latter his best friend, who, so legend had it, betrayed Mr. Morris to become Janey’s paramour …

  At dusk, they made their way to the boarded-up hotel where he’d been squatting. Jane Scull’s eyes widened with delight on seeing the room, as if it were Bexleyheath itself. It was clean and presentable enough, with a large scrap of wax paper tacked to the wall, upon which Will’m had stenciled flowers—trademark latticework of poppy, honeysuckle and fritillaria. The work left off abruptly, its maker having lost the thread.

  “Lay down awhile, girl!”

  He nearly pushed her onto the futon, retrieved during a freeway-litter sally. While ecstatic to have found something like a real bed to lie down upon, this Jane flushed and demurred.

  “I won’t take advantage of you! What would you have me for? I want you to rest. I’ve some aspirin—you’re feverish. Here: water. Drink!” She swallowed the pills, too, and he lit some liquor store–bought votives. “Dangerous for a woman out there, no? Brigands’ll rape and leave you bleeding. Happen yet? And the policemen—thugs and abominations! The policemen are worse! ’Cepting the ones on horseback … they seem a reasonable lot. Though maybe it’s the horses who are reasonable. But you don’t have to worry now, Janey—where’ve you been living? Where’ve you had a bath? Or have you had one at all?”

  “ ’ave! ’ave uh bith!”

  She would not have him think she was careless and filthy; Lord, not him!

  He sat back on his heels and stared, like a director at an audition. She was all jiggling flesh and great salmon-sushi lips, thighs and buttocks tattooed with the black-and-blue fingerprints of roughhouse vagrants, and wore deep squarish patches of dirt on shoulder and hip that would take more than scouring soap to erase. She kept repeating “un-keen” (which Will’m eventually translated: “I’m clean”), her echolalia accompanied by an almost involuntary disrobing, so that suddenly she sat before him naked and quaking, breasts avalanching to either side, bruised-white mutton legs rudely splayed.

  He had never seen a woman of such epic proportions, and was humbled by her offering. Gently, he covered her up and sat down at futon’s edge.

  “I don’t need any of that, Janey—don’t want that. It’s not that I don’t find you a stunner, all right? That, you most certainly are! It’s just—well, you’ve been with him, haven’t you? With Rossetti. And I understand it. I know I drove you to it. But you see I don’t know much anymore. Don’t know much about myself. And I don’t know you … and you, well, you don’t know me, now do you? What I’m up to. You’re not as keen on my work as you once were, no? Anyhow”—he stroked his stubble, mulling a mathematical problem—“it’s a while since I’ve been with a woman—why, I’d hardly know what to do! It’s a while since I’ve been with myself! And we don’t need do it, Janey. We don’t need do it for me to look after ya, we won’t have any of that—not for me to look after you. Is that all right? That’s all right, isn’t it, Janey?”

  While he spoke, Ms. Scull went from puzzlement to tender acquiescence, until finally answering “ess! ess!”—a thousand times ess. For while she could hear little, she understood all.

  From that moment on, she became exceedingly careful of her person; carried herself differently when she walked, with and without him; and modulated her outbursts, which themselves became more studiedly articulate. The corrective afflatus was not the result of “falling in love,” for Jane Scull felt she had always loved this man, but rather a kind of self-reckoning that came upon her as would a religious vision—a sudden, inexplicable, karmic settling of accounts, a cosmic ordering and coming-to, a gyroscopic awareness that arrived with such ease and graceful surety that it would remain the rest of her days.

  That night in the defunct Tropicana, they stayed up late and Will’m sang old Oxford songs. Then he lay on his back while she slept, attentive to her respirations. At half-past three, like that time at the Higgins, there were crashes and shouts and flashes of light as policemen raided the units. Will’m took her hand and ran as he’d run so often through the years—this time into the night, past the quiet pier and Camera Obscura, north along refurbished bluffs to the palisades of the California Incline.

  They leapt a low wooden fence and spent the night huddled against each other on the cliffside brush of the esplanade, where, hours before, couples had lingered to watch the raked evensong of sunset skies.

  Will’m was fated to meet all manner of eleemosynary souls—he brought that out. A few weeks ago, he had caught the eye of a Catholic outreach worker giving away condoms and toothbrushes on the Promenade. Now, seeing the bedraggled couple the morning after their eviction, the benefactor approached.

  “Do y’all need help?”

  “What do you mean, sir?”

  “Do y’all need a place to stay?”

  Will’m shifted, stroking his cheek where once the beard had been.

  Jane Scull took the man in with benign, near stately indifference—proud new wife of the Chairman of the Disembodied.

  “It is possible,” said Will’m, with guarded eyes.

  “Y’all know SeaShelter? Over on Olympic? Salvation Army? Sure you do. Over by the buses—y’all seen the big yard with the Blue Buses?”

  The voice loved to rise up, whether asking or telling.

  “And what,” said Will’m, “is there, sir?”

  “Well, showers and beds and lockers—y’all been to St. Joseph’s, haven’t you?” He looked at Jane Scull and squinted. “SeaShelter’ll get you a hot shower? And there’s food and lockers for your personal things?”

  Her eyes lit up at the mention of amenities—yet it was the idea of a locker that for Will’m was a real enticement. He would be able to retrieve his manuscript and stow it close at hand.

  “I can help y’all be guests if you want to be. Y’all can stay for twenty days. They can help with medical needs, too. Would y’all be interested in being guests?”

  “Possibly yes, sir.” He didn’t want to be a pushover, or a charity case either. But he had Janey to think of now.

  “Real good then! They’ll find you a job? Lotta hotels in this city now—new hotels. There’s one thing you should know? They’re drug- and alcohol-free? I mean, SeaShelter? That’s something they don’t tolerate. So they expect you to be sober?” He handed them a flyer with a map to the facility and a general list of rules and requirements. “Go stand at the gate between three and six, that’s when guests are let in. Three and six in the evening. Best get there early? Now, one more thing is, they ask you to leave by seven-thirty each morning? Because they don’t want you sleeping in? Y’all like me to go on and call ahead to say you’re coming?”

  The couple agreed. After the minister left, Jane threw her arms around Will’m and said, “Shower!” without impediment.

  CHAPTER 30

  To the Four Winds

  SeaShelter is a small, clean hangar on Olympic, in the crook of the Santa Monica Freeway as it loops into PCH. Showers and lockers reside outdoors, while the structure itself contains kitchen, administrative offices and beds
segregated by sex. Morning coffee and biscuits are provided, and supper too. At twenty days, guests are asked to decide whether they wish to stay on as bona-fide residents in a six-month social re-entry program. Jane and William elected to do so, becoming sterling citizens in short stead.

  William was sent to a clinic for pills, the daily cluster of which had a sly way of distancing the voices of Victorian friends and family. The medications’ main side effect was obesity—he now tipped the scales at three hundred pounds. Jane Scull ate less than before admission but did not lose any flesh. She was fitted with new hearing aids, and waxed indispensable with pail and mop; whereas William Marcus—for that is how he came to be known—having offered his services impromptu during a mundane culinary emergency, was drafted thereafter into the role of kitchener and off-hours pâtissier.

  At the same time they thickened body and senses, swallowed prescriptions made for small miracles too: soon, the face of a wife appeared before him that was neither of the Janes—it was Katrina’s, come not as hallucination but as odd curio, to evoke sorrow and tender sympathies. While waking or rising or even strolling with Ms. Scull, the exagent formed memories of himself in restaurants and exquisite cars with boisterous, passionate men. He was able to recall premieres and brises and corporate retreats, and saw the landscape of Oxford—less the colleges of his communion with Swinburne and Ruskin, though he did see the stones of Avebury and his own bare, bleeding feet; more, Katrina with him at hospital … but perhaps at a later time than during those English peregrinations. Adirondacks? He turned the queer word over in his mouth like a taste he was trying to identify. He’d spent lots of time in hospitals, it seemed. After a while, William even visualized the cul-de-sac at Redlands, but could not remember the name of that place or the faces of the couple who nurtured him there.