by Zack Parsons
The interval ended, and Woody thanked the crowd and the band as the dance floor cleared. Red-faced men rejoined their friends in the lobby, exuberant and exerted, sharing the details of their fleeting romances, raving about the sweet things their girl had whispered in their ear. The dance girls went to the couches, safely behind the ticket counter. A few disappeared into the powder room. Three or four accompanied men to the coatroom for some earning on the side.
The line was long but efficient, and by the time the music was starting up again, I was in front of one of the ticket-sellers. A dour old pair of eyebrows with a banker’s visor sat high behind the counter. He pointed a bony finger at the roped-off section of the lobby and spoke with rote detachment.
“Pick a girl. One dollar a dance, three for the interval. If you want another dance, you need to get back at the end of the line.” He tapped his finger on a placard on the counter. “Get fresh, and you get tossed. No refunds.”
“Give me until the interval with a woman who can dance,” I said. “It doesn’t matter what she looks like.”
The old man had a sense of humor. I took to the dance floor with a six-foot-tall brunette named Mary. She had the body of Olive Oyl and a face like she’d been getting fresh with a lemon. Her rationed dress was plain and ill-fitting, and she smelled like soap, she didn’t look too happy to be dancing with a beat-up old man either, but none of that mattered, because she was as sweet as custard once I got her on the dance floor. I searched for Veronica and found her with an Air Force man. A handsome officer.
“You look like that actor,” said Mary. “The pilot who died.”
“He offed himself because he couldn’t stand sharing my face,” I said. “You look very fetching yourself.”
She covered her bad teeth with one hand when she smiled. “Can you dance?” she asked.
Maybe years ago. Maybe before I caught the wrong side of two beatings in one week. Yeah. I used to cut a rug with Lynn. She would work me into a lather like a rodeo horse, but all the dances I knew were old. Jitterbugs and Lindy Hops. Mary said those would be fine, even though clearly she knew how to dance the current steps and resented being shackled to an old-timer like me.
I used the pause between songs to take her by the hand and move closer to Veronica. Her customer was handsome, all right, but a lousy dancer, or maybe just more concerned with seeing how much of her he could get his hands on. Their version of a Balboa was infuriating. The Air Force man caressed her shapely hips and pressed against her. I was distracted and wasn’t so good at the Balboa anyway. I stubbed my toe into Mary’s foot.
“Watch it,” she said.
I pulled her against me and dipped her in my arms. The song ended. The Air Force man and Veronica were standing very close and laughing. What an impossibly good time they seemed to be having. He touched her arm and whispered in her ear. She was smiling and playing with his medals.
“All you old-timers out there,” Woody said, “might want to have yourself a drink. If you listen to the radio, then you’ve probably heard this one. It comes from Ray Anthony, and if you’ve got a pretty girl and you brought your dancing shoes, then ‘Let’s Dance!’ ”
A cheer went up from the crowd. The music was unfamiliar to me. The dance was a swing dance with very elaborate footwork that resembled a tango. Mary knew it, Veronica knew it, even the Air Force man knew it, but I was completely out of my element. I was stubbing my toes against Mary’s again, searching for a context, trying to copy the dancers nearby.
“I thought you said you knew how to dance,” Mary said.
“I need a drink,” I said, and I left Mary on the dance floor. She carried right on dancing, seemingly happy to spend her time alone.
I found a stool facing a mirror and sat my ass down. I tapped out a Bravo and slid it between my lips. A Spanish-spewing Chicano with a bar back’s mien accepted fifty cents and slid something wet and poisonous over on a napkin. The ice clicked against my front teeth, and the booze burned my throat. It tasted like a bad memory of rum and soda.
I looked at myself in the mirror. Sweaty, taped-up wounds, one eye still puffy from mistreatment. Christ Almighty, I had no business dancing out there. I was lucky I didn’t have a coughing fit. One of those ones that ended with me doubled up and spitting blood.
I set the empty glass on the counter and tapped it for a refill. I turned my back on the bar. Veronica was still out there, a bit sweaty, dancing energetically with that dashing Air Force officer. I was beginning to entertain jealous fantasies, the sort of ridiculous garbage that ends with me victorious and her swooning. Rather than let my machismo get the better of me, I took my drink and stepped out a side door. The booming of the music was muffled in the narrow space between the Cabirian Palace and a roller rink. I walked up the alley to the through street running behind the boardwalk.
The Cadillac was there. Tinted windows, big chrome grill. It had to be the Cadillac from before. I reached into my pocket for Ishii’s Jap pistol, but I’d left the damn thing in my car half a mile away.
I threw my drink down and bolted back down the alley. The door locked from the inside, and I couldn’t get back into the dance hall. I went into the roller rink, right out onto the rink itself, dodging kids and whole families thudding along the wooden track. Some employee shouted at me as I bolted through the snack bar and out the front door.
The bouncer at the Cabirian wanted to be paid again, and I wasn’t in the mood, so I put him on the ground with two quick taps to his kidney. A sailor tried to grab me, and I tripped him backward over my foot. I cut a path through the crowd. The music was ending, and the dancers were starting to come off the floor. I fought my way against the flow of people and toward Veronica. She was canoodling with the Air Force officer. Standing close and whispering in his ear.
I grabbed her wrist. “We’ve got to get out of here,” I said.
“What the hell are you doing here?” she demanded.
“He’s outside, waiting to take you back,” I said.
“Hey!” The Air Force officer shoved me.
I smiled at him. You put me one on one against anyone but a heavyweight champ, and I’ll take them down. I’ve been in too many scraps over the years to be afraid of getting hit and not know how to throw my own punch. I laid Air Force out with an uppercut that was sure to loosen some teeth. He fell and did that slow-lowering of his head that meant he was knocked out but trying to pretend he wasn’t.
“Come on,” I said, and I grabbed Veronica’s wrist.
Of course she wasn’t grateful about it. I’d just made a scene at the place she worked and knocked out a guy who was probably one of her best customers. These are the sorts of things I might have thought of if I’d stopped to consider what I was doing.
The bouncers were forming a blockade at the front entrance. There was another exit at the back, by the stage, but the dance floor had turned into hostile territory. I’d made too much of a scene. That left the alley. I dragged Veronica behind me as we ran out the door. Our escape through the alley was blocked by the towering shape of the giant in his flat-brimmed hat.
“Fuck off!” I shouted.
He started toward us, and I pulled Veronica into the roller rink. She screamed as two hand-holding teenagers skated right toward her. They managed to break apart and skate around us, but Veronica pitched over backward and pulled me down on top of her. No time to enjoy the soft landing. I pushed off her curves in a hurry and helped her up. She stumbled and lost a heel in our rush to get across the rink. I picked her up and put her over my shoulder.
“You again,” said the rink employee from earlier. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
The alley door banged open, and people on the rink began to scream at the horrible sight of the giant. I wasn’t going to stand around with a monster bearing down on us. I hustled past the rink employee and out onto the boardwalk.
By the time I got her to my car, Veronica was laughing hysterically.
“It’s not funny,” I insisted.<
br />
“It is,” she said, “a little bit. Admit it.”
The lights of the boardwalk receded in the back window. Veronica leaned over the back of the seat to watch them disappearing behind us. Her merry laughter teased a smile onto my face, but I hid it and played the part of the serious man.
“You only think it’s funny because we got away,” I said.
“But we did,” she said.
CHAPTER TEN
When I dreamed of Annie, I was always separated from her by a distance. It was usually some memory or symbol my brain coughed up, a gulf or canyon, a gore-filled trench or a river. Once, she could only be reached by picking up a special telephone. It was ringing, and I knew she was calling, but people from my life kept preventing me from answering it.
Other nights the dream was straight from memories. I’d see her leaning on the porch rail, waiting for me as I rode down from Spark, or I’d see her shuttering up the windows for a storm while I was out in the barn closing in the animals. There was never an embrace. Not even a hug. I’d try to go to her and never arrived near enough to touch her.
Veronica Lambert was touching me, and she didn’t even know it. She was asleep, slumped against my arm, and while she softly snored beside me, I enjoyed her warmth, the sound of her breath, and once I even leaned over and smelled her hair. It was the depraved act of a dime-novel creeper. I knew it was sick, but I couldn’t stop myself.We were headed to the supposed location of Ian Bendwool’s house in Malibu. Maybe it was just my imagination, maybe Max Holden was a hallucination, but I’d written down a real address on that dry cleaning ticket. If there was a real place in Malibu, then maybe it held answers. If not, at least we’d swerved unpredictably away from the path everyone expected us to be on.
LA was at our backs. To the west the Pacific met the continent, white waves rolling in from the shelf and crashing against the coastal cliffs; to the right were the sorts of nowhere towns that catered to folks forever passing through.
Up ahead the Pacific Coast Highway was out, so I followed a detour, turning inland as the alternate road traced the contours of the hills and mountains. Veronica awoke and said she smelled smoke blowing in through the open windows. I smelled it too. The creosote and charcoal stink grew thicker and thicker until we could see the cinder mounds of the fire-claimed hills. In the distance a conflagration swept over the land in a moving front, burning brighter than seemed possible, turning the night red and leaving behind vast fields of glowing trees and stumps.
“Look out!” Holly cried.
I braked hard to avoid hitting a full-grown buck crossing the road. It stopped, taller than the car, antlers like the branches of some dead tree. It gazed at us with primeval arrogance. It was a million years of history rendered in fur and sinew and the dark, gelatin marbles of its eyes.
The buck’s world was ending, consumed by fire, and so it came into our domain, crossed man’s asphalt, and stood before the dangerous machine of his invention. The buck looked into my eyes—the eyes of the pale beast that had gathered up all four corners of the world—and I saw it proud and untamed. I saw in it a hero of its kind, its deeds and victories venerated in the wicked branches of its antlers and in no other language or song.
“What is it doing?” asked Holly.
“Escaping,” I said. “Running to the ocean to die. To throw itself off a cliff so that it can choose its own fate and deny the fire.”
In a single bound it disappeared into the darkness. Snowy ashes swirled in the headlamps’ stark void. More deer were crossing farther down the road. They were small and panicked compared to the buck. Their heads were down. They did not look up. I motored on more cautiously.
The fire had a voice, complex and tidal, audible as a rumble and a rush and a steady crackling of exploding sap. The heat was becoming uncomfortable. We rolled up the windows to keep the ash out of the car and stewed in the heat baking through the metal.
“It’s beautiful,” Holly said.
There were fire trucks up ahead. Three of them and an ambulance. Hoses looped and unspooled onto the asphalt. No sign of the firemen.
“I want to get out,” Holly said.
“That’s a bad idea.”
I was driving so slowly, she went ahead and opened the door. I stopped the car, and she dashed out and ran into the beams of the headlamps. Loose ash shivered across the lanes. She escaped down the highway beyond the reach of the light. Straight into the worst of the fire.
I cursed and pulled the car to the side of the road. I held a hand to my face against the blowing ash. The sound was incredible, like burning waves crashing against shores of kindling. I chased after her.
“Come back,” I shouted. “Don’t breathe the smoke.”
It was impossible advice. I felt the spasms in my chest as the smoke aggravated the cancer. I began choking and coughing and leaned over in the road, spitting out scabrous globs of mucus. Each spasm of coughing hurt slightly worse than the last.
I wiped my mouth with my sleeve and started after her again. Into a pulsing wall of heat. My eyes stung with ash; cinders swirled above my head. There was a thundering and crying sound, and fireballs exploded from the wildfire and launched horizontally across the asphalt. At last, Veronica stopped, arms hanging at her sides, hair and skirt whipping wildly in the hot updrafts from the fire. She was silhouetted by the streaks that spread the blaze across the road.
“You need to get back,” I said. “I saw a motor lodge back a few miles. We can ... we can ...”
A tsunami of fire was overtaking the road, curling flames spitting in incandescent arches fifty feet high over both lanes of the highway. The thundering and the crying sounds were issuing from a stampede across the road. The shooting fireballs were live animals, burning, crazed with pain and desperate to escape the holocaust. They raced out of the front of the wildfire by ones and by tens.
Jackrabbits and more deer and squirrels and raccoons screamed across the road in their death panic. Some were already dead but still moving; blackened bodies stumbled over the asphalt, cooked muscles compelled by the animal’s will to survive. Some collapsed in the road and tried to drag themselves forward or curled up and lay still as their bodies were consumed by the fire. The smell of the burning hair and roasting meat was overpowering.
Veronica leaned in against my shoulder. I walked her to the car and put her into the backseat. Her dress and her face were smeared with soot. I cleaned her off with my necktie.
The road was completely impassable now. Our way denied. The fire was burning on both sides, and the molten asphalt would be a trap for any fool who dared to run the gauntlet. I turned the Ford around and drove for the motel.
“It’s like the end of the world,” she said.
“It’s just a fire. It happens all the time.”
I said it, but I knew she was right. By increments and in ways small and large the world was ending. The red sky blazed in the mirror; by some cinematographer’s trick its molten fury layered over my reflected eyes.
The motor lodge was a two-story motel with a neon sign fouled with soot. The swimming pool was a charred custard cup. The motel amounted to no more than a dozen rooms and a detached office. The only other guest was driving a repainted Army twelve-ton truck. The door of the truck cab was stenciled with the dog placard of Mastiff Logistics. The boxes of cargo were covered with a tarp. A few boxes visible above the truck’s tailgate were stamped with the Bishop Unlimited miter symbol.
“Rooms eight and nine.” I helped Veronica out of the back of the car.
She stood on her own and pushed my hands away. “Give me the key,” she said. “Do you have an aspirin?”
No aspirin, but I had a flask. She took a slug and handed it back. She carried her shoes and walked barefoot through the ashes drifting in the parking lot. I toted her valise into the room behind her. Her footprints smudged black on the lurid orange carpeting.
Someone had recently updated the motel with atomic-age ugliness. The garish papered walls were
decorated with chrome spangles, there was a small television set, and the queen-size bed came with a red headboard made of plastic. The overhead lights were hung in a chandelier made from twists of black iron and yellow glass lanterns that produced weak, diffuse light.
The room’s air conditioner was dormant, and the room was hot and smelled of past guests and a long vacancy. I switched the air on for her, and the ghosts of cigarettes gusted into the room. It also brought in the charred stink of the distant fires.
Veronica sat on the bed. Her face and dress were smudged with soot. She sighed and laid on her back with her knees hooked over the edge of the bed. I watched her chest rise and fall.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“I told you,” I said. “Malibu.”
“We should be there already.”
“There was a detour and the fire.” I took off my hat and sat down on the bed with my back to her. I tried to convince myself I wasn’t just lingering in the room waiting for something to happen.
“Is it about Holly’s case?” she asked.
“There’s a man there who might have some answers for me.” Telling her much more would be an even greater violation of the Covenant. Meeting with him, if he was real at all, was already punishable by death. No need to drag her into such a sordid thing.
Veronica sat up behind me and slid her hands onto my shoulders.
“She was a good girl.” Her voice was dredged in honey. “A lot better than me. I’m bad.”
She ran her fingers up my neck and into my hair. They were centipedes against my skin.
“Now she’s gone.” Veronica’s hand slipped away from my neck.
“What happened to Holly’s family in Riverside?”
There was a long silence. I leaned over her, forcing her to look at me.
“It was only a few weeks after her mother died, and she’d come back to Riverside to stay full-time with her dad,” said Veronica. “That was about six years ago. She was at my house, spending the night. We were thirteen. No, fourteen.”
