by John Shannon
He knocked once on the wooden door and walked in. There were two beds in the pie-shaped room, which was against the recent American fashion for making all hospital rooms private. On the far bed, near the window, a figure was rising up under the covers and groaning, then falling flat, over and over.
“Piscatelli?”
“Over here.” The near bed, a dim figure lying on his side facing the door. The bed burred noisily all at once and pumped itself up to lift the man’s body.
Shit, Roski thought. So much for thinking the man was pretty much okay. “Can I turn on some light?”
“Use the local one. This doohickey. My roommate doesn’t like light.”
A spotlight came on overhead, pooling on Piscatelli’s face and chest. He was propped up on his side with pillows.
A groan, then another, from across the room. This was going to be a lot of fun.
“How you doing?” Roski asked.
“As well as can be expected, sir—etc., etc.” The mattress, pumping and hissing softly, seemed to tilt the man a bit further onto his back. “It’s like living on a tilt-a-whirl. But without the cotton candy.”
“That could be arranged,” Roski offered.
Piscatelli seemed to drift for a moment. “You’re Arson, right?”
“Captain Walter Roski, County Fire. I won’t offer my hand. They told me to stay back three feet.”
“Infections and all that. I just had my cocktail of antibiotics and morphine, so I’m ready to talk. I’m actually floating a bit.”
Roski checked his notebook. “I’ll go right to it. Was your partner religious, Mr. Piscatelli?”
“Routt was about as devout as a chair.”
“Are you religious?”
“Yes, sir. Very much so. I’m a deacon of the Holy Trinity Lutheran Church in Vallejo. I was praying hard for both of us when the firestorm hit.”
“Do you have any idea why your partner would have a Catholic rosary with him in the fire shelter?”
A long pause. “Jerry Routt may have believed something, deep down, but he certainly wasn’t Catholic. I’ve known him for ten years.”
Walt Roski basically disliked religion. He’d arrested more than one young matcher over the years who swore that his beliefs required him to scourge the world with fire.
“Can you think of any reason your partner would be carrying a rosary? Maybe a new girlfriend gave it to him? We think it was made of amber beads and the heat ignited it.”
Piscatelli seemed to be trying hard to reclaim a memory from the abyss, but the sensation passed. “Honestly, sir, no. If something comes to me, you’ll be the first to know.”
Roski asked the rest of the questions from his notebook without eliciting anything useful, and then left his card on the far side of the bed table.
“My card is right there. Don’t touch it, it’s full of my germs, but you can have the nurse read my phone number if you think of anything. I’ll be in touch.”
“Thank you, Captain. God bless.”
“I can always use a blessing.” Particularly since he was about to be read the riot act by his chief, probably with a note in his file, for once again feuding with the Feds.
*
Megan watched the man from a county animal welfare truck scrape up the remains of the dog. What an alien place, she thought. The heart of my darkness.
She was having trouble resisting the tug of the vodka bottle across the room. She turned on the radio, but the only thing she could get was Mexican rancheras or American country music. She wondered if she had grown any less intolerant of cowboy culture.
She listened to a male voice keening about a manly trucker carrying steel to Texas, and she wondered if the driver would be any less manly driving Tampax to Delaware. It was exactly the kind of unexamined American lying that always left her cross.
It was growing accustomed to your unhappiness that made you so self-absorbed, she thought. After us, the savage god—she’d read the phrase somewhere and it resonated.
FIVE
Set Big Cap Free
Tony Piscatelli could tell that the morphine was wearing off, and he was starting to feel the gnaw of medium-well-done soft tissue along his shoulders, but he resisted pushing the button on the nurse call. He was in a lucid time, and he wanted to stay in it. It was difficult to think productively against the pain—especially with his roommate groaning and humping away—but if he opiated again, his consciousness would become a vapor. He repeated a short prayer in his head, starting with an entreaty for the unknown groaning roommate. The nurse had told him it had been a motorcycle crash, and his roommate was only about nineteen. The age when everyone knew they were invulnerable.
Piscatelli recalled a visit from some arson desk guy, but didn’t remember his name. Something about Jerry Routt and a rosary. Probably a morphine dream. Routt was about as likely to carry a rosary as a lava lamp. The man had once laughed out loud when Piscatelli told him about Martin Luther’s big moment of crisis, throwing his inkwell at the devil.
“Dude,” Routt had said. “I know that’s not true. Europeans can’t throw. They can only kick.”
Yet something about the dream visit from the arson guy held him. Lying on his stomach, he did a few slow pushups before the airbed could start whirring and fussing with him again. He saw the arson guy’s business card on the nightstand, so it was real. Something inside you is trying to get out, Deacon Piscatelli.
“Tony, look at this!” Was that Routt? Frustrating maybe memories. The fire had been about to flame over. He’d just started getting worried, but Routt had yelled at him to come back. That was so like Routt, fastening on second things first. But he’d stepped back and they’d both seen something there on the ground. What?
Pain swept through him, and he thumbed the red button, then again, harder. Nurse, come now! Oh, Sweet Jesus, now. Our Father, who art in Heaven…
*
Ellen Chen, short blue hair and all, walked with intense self-absorption off the L.A. State campus into the empty parkland across Paseo Rancho Castilla. Spanish Ranch Walk. Another example of Southern California naming nonsense. The future, when it finally came, would be without such nationalist nonsense. Reason would rule, she thought.
Sabine hadn’t phoned or texted in ten days now. That was their agreed definition of a political emergency. She sat to look out over much of the San Gabriel Valley below. Home.
She and Sabine were the last of the Orange Berets—the two musketeers, she thought sadly—pledged to fight for immigrant solidarity, human rights, not to mention the Revolution. Rah, rah.
Her dad had been badgering her that very morning about her grades, so she could get out of a second-best college and go to a really good school like Caltech or Berkeley. Her whole future depended on her grades. Her car would stop running, the stars would crash to earth. As politics had crumbled away into hopelessness for her, his incessant hectoring was becoming intolerable.
Now she had to worry about Sabine. Back when the Berets had been a viable Chicano-Chinese alliance of over thirty idealistic kids, and their blood enemy, the Commandos, had still been a rampaging racist gang, each of the leading berets had taken one of the thugs to watch. But as far as she could tell, the Commandos were down to three now, and the Berets had shrunk to two. Mosquito vs. gnat. Dear Lenin. Did you ever cry when things became this pathetic?
*
Overcome with trepidation, Megan Saxton parked in front of the isolated ranch house near the border. She had come from her motel again to carry on the interview with this strange man for the New Yorker. He had turned out to be another force of nature, truly frightening, but she had to go with that.
The flagstone patio beside the pool was an artifact from the 1950s, ribboned with blown-in desert dust. Hardi Boaz sat there in a cast-iron ice cream chair, wearing some kind of Arab robe. He glanced up and grinned. “You save me the trouble of searching you out, liefling.”
He waved an arm grandly toward a pitcher of margaritas on the table. The
gesture billowed his loose sleeve like a giant seabird trying to get airborne.
She set the tiny recorder on the table and turned it on, but didn’t know quite how to begin.
“You have violent, piercing eyes,” he said.
She felt herself blush.
“Have a margarita, lovely. It’s proof the Mexicans are good for something.” A smile acknowledged her lack of response, though he still didn’t look directly at her. “The loud Boer has offered you a drink. I believe for the moment you are choosing to punish my magnetism with silence. That is fine, too. By birth I am pure South African beef, but now I am as big as all America.”
He laughed a peculiar stage laugh.
“Look there.” He pointed out at sparse chaparral beyond the hurricane fence surrounding the pool. “I can sit here with a rifle and hunt wetbacks and drug-runners. From this yard I protect the American race from a flood of mud people.”
She checked to make sure the recorder was going.
A hard, dark point of abhorrence was congealing at the center of her chest, a numbness spreading through her, and she was losing her peripheral vision. The man talked and talked. What is this, what’s happening to me?
“Go ahead and drink, sweet. I promise there is no aphrodisiac in it. I’m all the aphrodisiac any woman needs. I am the force of life, but my sweetest fruit is my gentle nature.” He threw back his head and laughed.
She noticed a giant Rottweiler waiting just inside the sliding door of the house, glaring straight at her.
“My charm consists in not caring a damn what people think about me, especially the weak-kneed city pooftahs. I am the full-blown runaway id of the white people. I am the goddamn poet of our race, where poetry is written in grunts and growls and gunshots.
“I am the only thing standing between the sissy white people and the barbarian hordes. It’s true, I may lose here, too, and the brown monkeys may end up running us out. Who knows? Even if you can give me mathematical proof that I am going to be overrun, I am still going to do my best right now to prevent it. And along the way I’m going to enjoy every goddamn minute.”
She knew she should consult her notes, ask more about the Border Guardians, but her forehead burned. The odd harangue went on and on. She had been planning to slap him hard, but she couldn’t move. An ice cube cracked like a firecracker in her margarita, and she almost screamed.
“Listen, sweetling, you didn’t get yourself home before the dark, and your fantasy life is becoming real. The hairy Boer stirs, and his life force is in ascendance.”
He stood and walked over to her. His great ham hands lifted her as if she were weightless.
“Yes, please,” she heard herself say weakly. She hadn’t even switched off the recorder.
*
Somebody had added a generous picture window to the back wall of the garage, really just a huge sheet of glass with unpainted moldings tacked up to hold it in place. The window offered a breathtaking view out over the hills east of her studio bedroom, though all that glass chilled the room at night and blinded her with sun in the mornings. She’d set up the studio portion of the room to be near the window and grab non-directional skylight from about ten on.
This afternoon she was using the light to study a still life she’d set out on a small table. A tipped-up cast-iron frying pan. A pebbly black Scotch Tape dispenser. A shiny black coffee cup. A study in tones. She’d discovered she was better at tones than colors, and wanted to see how far she could push it.
Her teacher seemed so helpful and so genuinely impressed by the works she brought in on Tuesdays and Thursdays that Maeve had decided to ignore the half-inch wood Tinkertoy spools he had in his slit earlobes. You’re trying way too hard, man, she’d thought.
She dabbed some white into the bare image of the pan and saw she’d gone too far. With acrylics you had to work fast and you couldn’t move the paints around and blend later. She’d probably switch to oils. She realized it had been more than an hour since she’d fussed about Bunny.
There was a tap at the door, like punctuation to her thought. But it could have been anybody. Annoyed, she stabbed the brush into a jar of water and unstrapped her apron.
“Come,” she called, trying to sound odd and mysterious.
She froze. It was Bunny herself, peering in with a hangdog look and carrying a flask-shaped bottle of Bunny’s favorite, Mateus rosé.
“Peace offering.”
Maeve’s spirits soared. She felt faint and had to grasp the back of the sofa for support. “Thank you, Bunny. So much.”
“Did I hurt you bad?”
“I was hurt.”
“I understand, sweet. I laid my good down and my own problems gushed all over the place. I been under pressure in ways you don’t want to know.” She made a gesture, waving it all away. “I want to make it up to you.”
Maeve wasn’t all that fond of sweet Mateus wine, but she would have drunk battery acid just then. All her affection flooded back in. She couldn’t help thinking—trying hard not to stare—what a glorious, abundant body Bunny had. Maeve plucked two washed-out jam jars from her painting supplies, opened the wine and poured. They sat face to face on the hooked rug.
“Can you tell me about this pressure?” Maeve asked.
“I need a cigarette.”
“So smoke.”
“You said this was a smoke-free zone.”
“Girl, smoke.”
Bunny lit up with a wooden match and sighed with relief. Maeve fetched a jar lid for an ashtray.
“I’m supposed to color inside the lines for now,” Bunny said.
“Who said that?”
“Swami Muni.”
Maeve was startled. She’d had no hint of another side of Bunny at all. The name sounded like a local bus line.
“He assigned me a boyfriend two months ago, like some zoo, and I didn’t like the guy at all, but he told me I had to give him a try. He picks his nose, Maeve, and he never went to college. But I try to like him.”
“You’re the one who’s going to get hurt,” Maeve said.
Bunny hung her head for a while, and Maeve resisted the urge to sidle over and hug her.
“I still feel I have things to learn from the swami. I can be pretty shrewd.”
“No, you can’t. Why are you doing this thing?”
“I offered my searching soul to Muni at a retreat a year ago. He knew startling things about me with just a little talking. I know you’re not persuaded.”
“I’m here for you right now.”
There was a sudden hammering at the door, definitely none of their roommates.
“Are you holding?” Maeve asked.
Bunny shook her head. “It’s probably the guy. He acts like he’s Thor, the god of the big dick.” She giggled once. “Actually, the appendage is just so-so.”
“I think I could get him beaten up if you want.”
“Just get him to leave me alone.”
After more door-banging, Bunny crouched down behind a Japanese screen. A muscular redhead with freckles everywhere tried to barge in.
“Stop there, freckle-face.” Maeve stood against him as firmly as she could, and after a lot of mindless shoving back and forth, he backed off.
“I want to see my Bunny.”
“Cool it. This is my home. Look, guy, my father runs bets, and his pals will teach you manners in an alley if I ask them to.”
“What the fuck’s the matter with you, girl?” His voice almost went shrill.
“You push into my room and ask what’s the matter with me? If you’ve got a message, tell me.”
“Bunny Walker is my woman. We been assigned. She’s fat and a smarty-pants and I let that go ’cause I’m a good guy. Tell her I ain’t strung out no more and to come over. She better.”
“I’ll tell her. Don’t get in my face again.”
Maeve was amazed how easy it had been to buffalo him. She locked the door, including her new deadbolt, and found her hands trembling like a kitten.
&n
bsp; Bunny peered out, obviously impressed.
“You got any feelgood?” Maeve asked.
“I got some in the bedroom.”
“Forget it. Stay here.”
They poured out more rosé.
“The guy’s a pendejo, as we say. You’re not fat. You’re perfectly proportioned.”
Bunny laughed and brushed away a tear. “Thanks, Maeve. I know I’m a biggish girl. You’ve seen me in the altogether.”
“A lovely altogether it was.”
Then Bunny did cry a bit and hit the wine hard. She explained that the swami had her money and credit cards and some horrible letters against her parents.
“Maybe we’ll have to take this swami down,” Maeve said.
“You sound like the Lone Ranger.”
“I am the Lone Ranger.”
Bunny lay on the floor and wept silently.
Other lives made her own seem so idyllic, Maeve thought. She slid closer and rested a hand on Bunny’s shoulder, comfort fashion. She knew better than to seem to take advantage.
“Maeve, if you’ll promise to be my best friend forever you can have my body whenever you want.” The woman said it like an offer of self-immolation.
“I’m your BFF right now. Just cuddle. I’ll protect you.”
*
“I got this brainstorm,” Marly Tom said. “We write us a new phone app. Call it Whack-a-Chink. Bucktooth faces pop up out of holes and you smack ’em into big blood splashes.”
“Work it out. I got to plan the kegger right now.” Zook cradled a beer he wasn’t planning to share.
Across the room, Captain Beef danced heavily at the beat-up old foosball console in the clubhouse, whiz-bang-rattle. He had no opponent but it was still taking him two or three spins to score.
“Beef, that noise is driving me to drink,” Zook called.
“Put your mind at rest, Zookie. Just drink up and say, thank you, Jesus.”
“I ain’t trying to turn you around. I need you over here for a minute.”
