by Daniel Braum
“Good. You are awake,” he said, his face rigid as one of the chiseled idols.
“I brought you to this city of refuge. I now offer you a chance to repent.”
Nicola rubbed her eyes and brought her hand to her neck. “You’re serious?”
“The Kings yearn for your blood. I hear their whispers in the shadows and the waves. This is your chance.”
Nicola rose, slowly, sleepily and paced the borders, careful not to walk outside the line of stones.
“I’m leaving and will return later with your supper. Should you stay your first task is to begin to clean this place up. Clear the idols. Repair the wall. While you are working, think of your best stories for the boys. Only the true ones. They can be about me if you wish.”
“I can just walk away?”
“Whenever you wish,” he said. “The choice is yours. But leave without my absolution and I think they will find you.”
Max knelt, carefully picked a white orchid, added it to the lei, and left her.
****
Max held the lei over Kenjo’s grave.
“Will I see you draped in these next procession?” he said. “Someday, I will join you. But not yet, not yet.”
Back at Kealakekua Bay Iwana and Kekipi were giving a tour. The real Hawaii, they called it. After what they had witnessed, they had been studying diligently. And talking a lot to the old timers.
Captain Cook’s ship rested somewhere at the bottom of the bay. Someday all trace of the metal and wood would be gone, but the cliffs and caves would still remain.
Iwana and Kekipi didn’t think that far ahead. They mourned the loss of their brother and friend and struggled to make sense of kapu and why it was he and not they.
He draped the flowers over the stone and walked away.
“It is a start, my Kings,” Max said. “A start.”
THE MOON AND THE MESA
Jamie and I have claimed a little bit of elbowroom. I can’t hear her, or anyone very well, but that’s okay. The bartender has his eye on her, as do most of the showboats drinking twenty-dollar cocktails at the bar. She’s dressed down, for her, but even still, I’m very aware of her simple black top that doesn’t even come close to hiding her curves.
We’re silent. People-watching. Together. The wordless space between us is comfortable and familiar. The extension of a frankness and trust born of being drunk as sin together more times than I can count. My hands remember how they want to touch her but as always they stay at my side, obediently under dominion of my mind, my higher self, despite the alcohol.
Two guys at the bar are staring right at her. Both tall and blond. Their crisp shirts tightly tucked into well-tailored dark slacks. This bar is full of Euro-trash like them. It’s why she brought me here. Midtown on a Saturday is always good for hunting.
Jamie’s noticed their stares and encourages them with her smile. They come over. I didn’t even have to say a word.
“You from here?” tall and blue eyes asks her.
“Why do you ask?” She tosses a ringlet of her long black hair.
They laugh and mutter something quickly in German.
“I’m Heinrich and this is Klaus. Klaus wants to know if this is your boyfriend?”
“My boyfriend? Oh no, no, no.” She touches my arm. “Just my friend David. And he looks thirsty. Klaus, why don’t you go get us a round?”
She plays with the silver chain disappearing beneath her shirt, like she always does when it begins. I used to think it was just a flirty habit, until the first time I saw the silver Star of David. Must be from her grandparents. Looks very old country. I never asked. I never needed to.
“So, are you New Yorkers?” Heinrich asks. He so wants to tell us he is traveling. He’s dying to tell us all about what it’s like for him to be in New York. I’ve seen it a hundred times before. For a second I almost feel bad but a childhood image of my grandmother prevents me.
A thin line of drool hangs from the corner of her mouth as she sits blankly on the couch in the house I grew up in. Often she’d spend the night during the High Holy days and when I’d get up in the night for water or to sneak a cookie I’d catch her unplugging appliances and asking the refrigerator questions about guard locations. Sometimes she’d just go on and on in Yiddish, her eyes all freakily far away.
“Where do you think we’re from?” Jamie asks.
“Uh, here. New York, of course,” he says.
“Nope.”
Jamie and I laugh. He doesn’t get it. He can’t. There’s nothing funny about it, except him and the way she said it. I’ve been worried about her lately and there’s something different about the way she laughs tonight. Like the start of a twisted belly laugh she won’t be able to stop.
After a second he laughs too, pretending to get it. His eyes dart to the line of skin showing between her shirt and her jeans.
“Where do you think I’m from?”
Jamie starts to talk, but I interrupt. I’m more than worried about her taking it too far. Tonight I want to be the one.
“Wait, wait, wait,” I say. “I know. I know, don’t tell me. I have it between two places—”
“Just say,” he says.
“Uh, I’m not sure. Say something. Say like, Florida Oranges. Say, the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain.”
He does. He’s enjoying it. We’re enjoying it more. Klaus is back with our drinks, trying to figure out what he missed.
“Fuck. I’m so close,” I say. “It’s right on the tip of my tongue. Okay. Whatever. New Jersey?”
His face is still smiling but the cheer has left.
“Where?” he asks.
“New Jersey. Around Hoboken. Right?”
Jamie’s disappointed. I can tell she wanted to keep it going longer. As in all the way back to her apartment.
“I was thinking Jersey City,” Jamie says, stirs her pink drink, tastes it, then licks her lips.
“No,” he says, his smile now a forced grin.
“Damn, I should have gone with my second guess, Nashville, right? I should have heard that Tennessee accent right away.”
“No. I’m from Hamburg. Klaus is from Vienna.”
“Really?” Jamie says. “You look like Jersey boys.”
They stare, not sure what to say.
I turn my back to them and make mindless small talk with Jamie. I make it a point to touch her shoulders, her arms, her back with every sentence. After a minute Klaus and Heinrich meld back into the crowd of showboaters. Jamie’s pleased. Our stupid trick slams their type every time. But I know this wasn’t why she came.
“That was great,” she says and leans in for a kiss.
Her mouth barely touches mine. Her lips don’t mean it. She doesn’t mean it. It’s just another song and dance, steps in a connect-the-dots that is supposed to form a picture of normalcy, but never does. Beneath I suspect she’s nothing. Nothing but something very broken with no idea how to even begin to reassemble. I don’t even want to think about what that makes me then.
“Fucking Nazis,” she says in my ear. “But it was too fast. Didn’t you want to take them home?”
Her new Glock is at home. She keeps it on her pillow, its angles and blackness obscene among the plush get up, like a sex toy among teddy bears. She tells me about it when we talk on the phone and I sense her staring at it when she’s supposed to be listening. Someday soon, she’s gonna use it. She’s right, it was over too fast. We’ve done much, much better, but I thought that someday soon might have been tonight.
We push our way through the hot maze of cologned bodies and emerge into the relative quiet of the street. She fishes in her purse but instead of taking out a pack of cigarettes she pulls out the little black gun. She holds it up admiring it in the streetlight.
“Didn’t you want to take them home? Didn’t you want to—”
“Aw fuck. What the hell are you doing with that? Don’t take it out here!”
I snatch the gun and stuff it back into her purse.
“Hey. Easy there,” she says. “Don’t you dare tell me you’re not going to. You said.”
She’s much too calm. It’s that calmness that scares me.
“I know I said and I’m going to,” I say.
“When then? Tomorrow?”
“I already called Larry. He’s in. Not tomorrow, but soon. Real soon. For real. I promise.”
“Take it, then.”
She kisses me. This time for real. And she deftly slides the gun into the waist of my slacks. It feels horrible against my skin, but I let it stay, savoring the floral shampoo smell of her hair and her hot alcohol breath on my ear before she pulls away.
****
Larry flips through my stack of pictures stopping at a black and white landscape of a lonely mesa.
“That’s a good one,” Larry says.
“Is it?” I ask.
“Yeah. Fuck, yeah.”
This is where he tends bar. I brought Larry because he is strong. A black-belt now. And smart, but just dumb enough to listen to me. We’re both in from the City for Rosh Hashanah family obligations.
“What the hell were you doing out there?” Larry asks.
“Dworkin was looking for the place on the map farthest away from everything. The place the farthest away from any city—the place with the least sky glow so we could see the stars. He wanted to fulfill a dream to lay on his back in the middle of the night in the desert and play the guitar as loud as he could. I wanted to take pictures, so I was in.”
That’s what I say but really I was doing everything I could to avoid coming here. Now that I’m back, Jamie’s having no more excuses.
****
Dworkin found the place on the map, a secluded campground near the Reservations on the Arizona-Utah border. He said to meet him in the airport in Flagstaff. He’d take care of the rest. He rented a little Honda four-by-four and packed it full of his instruments, camping gear, and a gas generator.
The place on the map turned out to be a crowded trailer park. So much for the power of Triple-A. I mean we were so freakin’ tired we just drove on in, pulled into our spot and went to sleep. We woke up in the morning and realized we were surrounded by RV’s. What a nightmare.
(“That must have sucked,” Larry says.
“It did.”)
So we just rolled on, figuring we’d hit the scenic drive through Monument Valley, cruised the Rez, and found a new spot.
Highway 166 turned into County Road 75 and took us into the heart of the Rez. Signs admonished that we were leaving the U. S. of A. and entering Navajo-land, to stay on the road unless given permission.
The road snaked into the deep, wide chasm that is Monument Valley, a white line weaving into hundreds of ancient red-rock formations. Two Native American dudes waited at a roadblock, a two-by-four laid across the road, collecting a toll. We paid and followed the road and pulled off at the most awesome little vista as it began to wind its way down.
Two mini-buses took up all the spaces in the small parking area. A few dozen wheelchair-bound people were jostling into position for a group photo. Two aides were helping them line up. One of them, a blond, in denim shorts and a white cut-off shirt, was walking backwards, looking into a camera instead of where she was going.
Dworkin hit the brakes but she walked right into us.
“Move,” she said to Dworkin along with something in German that I took to be curse words.”
(“Dworkin Spreken-ze Duetsch?” Larry asks.
“No. But you know Dworkin. He doesn’t like to be told what to do.”)
So I told him just to chill, get his guitar, and to trust me. I jumped out of the car and asked the woman if she’d like to get in the photo. The wheelchair crowd was watching the exchange like a television program.
She handed the camera over to me. Since I couldn’t fit them all in the frame, I climbed on top of the Honda, noisily going right over the hood and onto the roof. They all cheered. And it was a hell of a photo. The blond. All the wheelchairy people. And in the background one crazy-ass bird’s eye view of Monument Valley and its majestic mesas and winding roads snaking into the corners of Navajo Country. It’s the kind of sight that makes you believe in God.
So Dworkin lightened up and is posing for pictures with everyone, hamming it up doing Elvis impersonations and windmills on his guitar, just getting them to be silly and shit.
The German chick is having a smoke behind the bus. She’s staring at this mesa. Fucking beautiful. The mesa. Like Devil’s Tower from Close Encounters. A flat top. Sloping sides. All red rock, the shadows constantly shifting and the tones changing as the clouds crossed the sky.
“That was good,” she says. Her German accent is thick and she speaks slowly.
She’s enjoying her cigarette like it’s her last. She looks me up and down and wasn’t shy about it. Really casual and unashamed, like Europeans are. I could sense her sizing me up, deciding what to think. I wished I wasn’t covered in sweat and all the red dust that was everywhere.
“That was very good, for them,” she says. “They loved it.”
“How long’s this show been on the road?” I ask.
“Two months,” she says. “We’re heading to Disneyland and are flying back to Germany out of L.A. Just came from the Grand Canyon.”
“Fuck. Two months,” I say. “I’ve only got two weeks.”
“Fuck is right. You Americans need to learn to take more time.”
“It’s been good?”
“I get to see the states, for free. But not a lot of people to talk to, eye to eye. Where you staying?”
“Not sure. Somewhere around here, we hope. My friend brought his guitar to play out here in the middle of nowhere. I’m gonna take pictures.”
“Cute,” she says. The fine white hairs on her stomach are coated with red dust. She has a faded scar running along the left of it. I wonder if it was a C-section.
“We’re up at the lodge in the little tourist trap up the road,” she says. “Just for tonight. I’m sharing a room with the other two so you can’t meet me there.”
“I’d invite you for a drink or something but well, you know. Can I buy you a water?”
“Just meet me at the mesa. Tonight. After midnight.”
****
“I’d hang with you guys more often if I knew you rolled like this,” Larry says. “Okay. So why don’t you?”
“I dunno. Work. And I’ve been the one stuck taking Grandpa to fucking chemo.”
Larry’s grandfather escaped from Dachau. And then went back. Became part of the underground railroad smuggling escapees into Italy. I remember when Spielberg’s people came to the city to interview him and other survivors.
“He’s become so small,” he says.
The bartender looks over. It’s him. No doubts at all. I can feel the blows in my gut. See his face as a boy, standing over me. It wasn’t easy for Larry and I being the only Jews in our grade. And there never was any other reason needed to chase us after school. Sometimes they’d catch me.
“That’s him, right?” Larry says.
“Yeah.”
“You sure?”
“Yup. We gonna do this?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“All right. A couple more beers then. We wait till it empties out.”
“Okay.”
I think of Jamie out hunting in the city without her new gun and the unlucky fucker who thinks he’s found a hot date.
Larry’s putting ’em away to mask his nervousness. I keep the beer flowing and the story going to prevent any second thoughts.
****
So we leave the overlook and cruise on into the Valley. We spend the day looking at stuff and taking photos. Dworkin’s getting antsy and has his guitar on his lap in the front seat.
There really isn’t any place to camp. And we’re not supposed to just pull off on the side of the road but come late afternoon we pull over anyway. Dworkin has to piss and runs off behind a big rock. I walk a ways up the road with m
y camera. There’s a fence and a little stable. A white horse absently flicks its tail at flies in its shade.
I raise my camera to take a shot and notice there is a man in a ten-gallon white hat standing in the shadows. The hat and his clothes are stained red from sand.
“Didn’t see you there. Sorry,” I say. “Can I take a photo?”
He emerges from the shed without answering. He’s a white guy or maybe he once was. His old skin’s wrinkled, leathery and tan, and marked with spots of age. His shirt is stretched thin to its fibers.
“I dunno,” he says. His mouth is almost toothless. “I shouldn’t let you but it’s been a dry one. The horse needs hay and all.”
I think about this for a second.
“I don’t have any hay, but how about a couple of bucks?”
“That’d be fine, fella.”
I hand him a couple of bills and snap the picture of the horse. Dworkin has come out from behind the rock.
“What you boys doing here?” the man asks.
“Looking for a place to stay. He wants to play his guitar as loud as can be in the middle of the desert. I’m gonna take pictures.”
“’lectric guitars? You boys got power?”
“Yup. A generator. He thought of everything.”
“Hmmmn. All this land is in the care of my boss, Mr. Yiskil. I suppose maybe if you had some gas money or what not it’d be okay for you to stay. You don’t look like trouble. I could ask him.”
“Sounds good.”
“’K then. Be right back.”
He disappears behind the shed and a few seconds later pulls out in the ricketiest pick-up truck you can imagine.
It arcs across the desert throwing up clouds of red sand behind it. It’s just a far away speck when it stops. I can make out a little trailer in the distance.
Three vultures are high overhead sweeping around the mesa in long lazy circles. Small holes are everywhere at the bases of all the cacti. Snake holes. Spider holes. Homes for the world of things that come alive at night.
Fifteen minutes later the pick-up returns. Our host steps out and leaves the door open. The most beautiful long feather hangs from the rear view mirror. It’s white and flecked with a dozen shades of brown, like from an owl. An eagle, maybe.
