by Skip Horack
“It’s not your fault.” And it wasn’t, of course. Still, it made me sick to see Sam hurting. I examined a small cut on the inside of his left ear. “It’s he,” I said. “Sam.”
Viktor nodded. “I believe your Sam will be fine.”
In my sweatshirt I found a wad of napkins I’d pocketed at some point, and I was wiping the blood from Sam’s ear when he slipped away, tail wagging, and went back over to the Saluki. Soon they were rolling around together near the tulip garden, all forgiven. Viktor laughed, and I stood.
“Dina and Sam,” he said. “You see? They are falling in love now.” He took my wrist in his hand, avoiding the blood-smeared napkins. “How was your trip?”
“It went okay. No problems till yesterday.”
“Something is a problem?”
Last night I had planned to go searching for a diner, but the LeBaron wouldn’t crank. “My car,” I said. “I need to replace the battery, I think.”
“I just saw a Louisiana car. The red BMW on Cabrillo?”
“The Chrysler on Fulton.”
“A 300?”
“An old LeBaron.”
He frowned. “You are missing a finger.”
“I am.” My left hand was in the pouch of my sweatshirt, but he must have noticed the clipped knuckle while I was seeing to Sam’s ear.
“This happened on an oil rig?”
“Yep.”
“You did not tell me this.”
“Does it matter?”
“Probably no.”
“But possibly yes?”
He stuck his own meaty thumb in my face like a hitchhiker, an artist measuring proportion. “I had an uncle in Leningrad who lost his thumb. Do you forget sometimes it is gone?”
“What?”
“My uncle, his missing thumb, it would tingle.”
“Oh. No. Not really.”
“Maybe it is not gone long enough?”
“Could be.”
His arm fell. “How is our friend Terry? He is still with Larissa?” But without waiting for my answer he glanced at his watch. It was as shiny as a gold disco ball. “Let us walk,” he said.
There were only a few roads on this end of Golden Gate Park. Paved, gray arteries and veins in a choke of green. We leashed the dogs and headed in the direction I’d come from the apartment. Past the archery range, on Forty-Seventh Avenue, was an exit from the park onto Fulton. On the corner to our right was a grass acre field. Viktor brought me halfway across it and stopped.
“Yesterday they found a body here,” he said. “But today you cannot even tell this.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Right here. In the early, early morning after Halloween. A homeless woman. She had overdosed herself.”
I’d been asleep in a Battle Mountain trailer, but as Viktor moved on I was picturing a scabby, rotten-toothed woman collapsing in the wet grass of that little field. She’s vomiting. She’s seizing. There is the faint roar of the nearby ocean, a cold night breeze. She lies dead for hours before anyone even knows.
From the killing acre we took a dirt trail that led through a forest. Eucalyptus trees with leaves like narrow lance tips, the bark shedding from their creamy trunks in long, spiraling strips. Cypress. Pine. An understory of rhododendron and azalea and ivy, dark topsoil and thicket. From somewhere in the brush a radio was playing.
Viktor was doing all the talking, rambling on about a guy he’d seen in that same forest over the weekend. A falconer hunting squirrels. The morning was misty and chilled, but he seemed to be warming to me, his monotone lifting on occasion as he spun his tale, and I followed along, half listening, smelling the dank of the moist woods and the salt of the Pacific, sporadic whiffs of urine and shit. I was wondering what I’d gotten myself into. Probably no, he’d said regarding my finger being a deal breaker. Kiss my ass. No doubt I could come up with a less depraved and creepy cover story to explain my presence in San Francisco than bride shopping.
“What a thing,” said Viktor. “To see a sokolnik and his bird in this park.”
“Terry said you have a car service? Limos?” I’ve learned asking questions helps keep the focus off me.
Viktor nodded. “I have four limousines and a Mercedes.”
“How long have you been in America?”
“I got out in 1973 with nothing but my wife. I was just twenty-four. But a smart man can make his living here, raise a family.”
“So y’all have kids, then?”
“We have a daughter in St. Louis and a son in Seattle.”
That seemed crazy to me —the Americans created by this Russian. A family transforming and morphing into something completely different than it had once been. The new family becomes the real family; the old family becomes trivia. If Nancy Hammons was to be believed, Tommy had spent one night with her in San Diego, and now the only other descendant of the Dry Springs Josephs left in the world was here in California. We walked on in silence.
Eventually the forest opened, and we came to a long, tapering pond hemmed by willows, water grasses, blackberry bushes. Along a blacktop path was a bench hidden within all that jungle between us and the pond, and we stopped there to sit. Sam sprawled out at my feet. Dina came over and lay by Viktor. There were mallards and wigeon and pouldeau in the pond. Red-winged blackbirds were bouncing on willow limbs.
I lit a Winston; Viktor was working on a cigar. “We watch now,” he said. “The Russian nannies. They come here and they gossip.”
“Nannies?”
After a few minutes they began to file in —five youngish women pushing baby strollers the size of shopping carts. The nannies collected on a small gravel-and-sand beach on the other side of the pond, their strollers parked like circled wagons as they smoked cigarettes and talked.
“There she is,” said Viktor.
“Who?”
“In the white sweater. The blue jeans. Do you see her?”
She was far away, but I did. Her chin-length hair was a coppery color, and she was apart from the group, scraping sand off her black boots with a long stick. Once she finished she went to join the others. Her body was full, compact but curved, and the way her chest pushed against the front of her wool sweater made me think of those Fox News anchors the guys on the rigs liked to leer at. Free porn, we’d call Fox News.
“Yeah,” I said. “I see her.”
“Marina Katanova.” Viktor tapped the ashes from his cigar. “From Moscow. One of the three women I have spoken to for you. The best one, probably. And they are like wives and mothers already, these nannies.”
I felt something inside me shifting. This was the difference between hearing Lionel Purcell speak of unlikely creatures and seeing them appear on a mountainside myself. The difference between having an address and seeing a house. My father happened to be born just across the Cane River from the girl he was meant to be with, and if that isn’t fate I don’t know what is. But, hell, perhaps this was fate too. That the search for a lost niece in San Francisco and the long-ago blatherings of a crew boat captain would bring Viktor, then this woman, into my life.
“You will be meeting her tonight,” said Viktor. “That is the soonest she can get away from her work.”
“Does she live there too? At the place she works?”
“Exactly.”
“That’s near here?”
“No. But she comes on the bus with the baby. She is lonesome.”
“And she knows about me?”
“She does —though we should go before she sees us.”
“About that stuff I wrote to you in my e-mail, I mean.”
“Ah. Yes. Some of it. The good things, those I told her.”
“But not everything.”
He shook his head. “Let her learn for herself that you are nice, that you have means. If there is a
later, then yes, we will tell her everything. But for now that can wait, okay?”
I was still watching Marina Katanova as he stood. I would have traded another finger for binoculars right then.
Viktor looked down at me. “You are not happy? We could begin with one of the other two. Do you want that instead?”
Marina was no less Russian than the rest of those across-the-pond nannies, far as I knew, but even at that range, and even though she was among baby strollers, a single dopey thought would not leave my brain. Maybe she’s like a Cane River girl for me, I was thinking.
“No,” I said. “I’d rather get to know that one first. Marina.”
With the LeBaron’s battery dead I was left riding the bus to travel any fair distance, lurching from stop to stop on those rattletrap barges. Marco Polo in jeans and a gray sweatshirt, adrift in the washed-out and faded pastels of a new world. And after my walk with Viktor I set out for the bayfront shipyards. I’d seen them from the bridge as I had crossed into the city, and though I’m not sure why, I thought going there today might somehow inspire me, help me lay out my plans.
So I was eastbound on a bus called the 5 Fulton. At five-thirty I would be meeting Marina Katanova, and before that, when school let out, I’d try to steal my first glimpse of Joni. With that accomplished I was confident the rest of my plan would form in my mind. Somehow I’d have to introduce myself to Joni, but that clearly couldn’t happen at Marvel Court, the home turf of Nancy Hammons. I had to find a way that wouldn’t spook her. A way that wouldn’t end with me being driven to a police station. The best way for Joni, but also the best way for me.
In a half hour I was downtown, and I quit that bus to wait for another. Glass and concrete. Tall buildings and bike messengers. A different terrarium here than the Outer Richmond. Warmer. The sky not overcast but cornflower and streaked with the cotton contrails of planes. Classy, on-the-go women and men with all ten of their fingers marched by. In their smooth dresses and suits they were like some different species.
When I reached the shipyards I saw longshoremen and dockworkers gathered by the bay. They were throwing crusts to seagulls as they finished their lunches. I went into a corner store and bought a Mountain Dew, some Funyuns, and a ham sandwich secured inside a triangle of plastic, then found a bench and ate. To my left the I-80 bridge looked like a spiderweb dropping into the water, and I could see across the bay to Oakland and Alameda. Tommy had cooled his heels for a few weeks at an Alameda naval base after completing boot camp in Illinois. His only stop before, on his road to becoming a SEAL, he went to Coronado for BUD/S training. A tanker was heading north, a container ship was coming south, and I imagined my brother tracking them from his side of the bay. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad way to go, drowning. Maybe Tommy held his breath until a peaceful euphoria slid over him and he couldn’t resist that last, fatal swallow. Then, no more struggling, no more suffering, no more fear. Just blackness without pain except, at the very end, when there was a starburst of light and his thoughts went to us, his family.
Or, better still, maybe he never even woke up from his fall.
By three o’clock I’d walked from a bus stop to Lincoln Park, and I found a spot on the bushy hill above Marvel Court where I could sit. After an hour a green Subaru Forester pulled into the garage, and then a woman came jogging out to grab the newspaper from the driveway before retreating into the house. And though she was too quick for me to make out much of her face, she had the same close-cropped platinum hair as in the photo of Nancy Hammons I’d brought up in the Cybermobile. But she also appeared to be older. Tommy would have been thirty-seven. This woman looked at least forty-five.
There was a rainbow sticker on the bumper of the Subaru, but on Thursday I’d managed to locate a collection of Nancy’s poetry in the “local authors” section of a bookstore, and several of the poems in Salted Waters had more or less outed her already. I’ll admit to feeling a twinge of disappointment Nancy wasn’t closer to my age and straight. Ever since I’d learned of Joni I think part of me had been hoping all she was missing in her life was a father, and that the woman who’d given birth to my brother’s daughter was thirty-six or thirty-seven and as unattached and available as I was. That Nancy had never stopped loving Tommy and couldn’t look at me without thinking of him. That the daughter and the mother might gradually grow to love me, maybe even take the Joseph name. That a man with no one but a dog might stumble upon a family.
If I had to stay on that Lincoln Park hillside from morning to sundown tomorrow, so be it. I’d come to see Joni, but all I could do was try again later.
Six o’clock. Balboa Street. On a short strip of blocks that was like a colorized photograph in the cold, dead center of the mostly muted Outer Richmond. A hodgepodge of commerce amid the neighborhood’s suffocation of homes. I was sitting at the back of Simple Pleasures Café with finger-combed hair, waiting for Marina Katanova —and asking with each passing no-show minute how I’d let my true mission get derailed by this honey trap.
Simple Pleasures was a coffee shop, but they also had food and beer and wine. All I’d bought so far was a water. At the table to the right of mine a man was giving chess lessons to a schoolboy. The man was different looking but in a rock singer way, and the boy’s manicured, wedding-ringed mom was across from him with her arm around her son. I watched them and noticed that whenever the boy pondered a move the chess instructor and the woman would smile at each other. Eye-fucking, really.
And I was musing about how it was the mom who was actually playing a game when a girl in a blue nursing uniform said, “Excuse me,” then squeezed through the foot or so separating my table from the vacant one to my left. She was Indian, the overseas kind. She sat down next to me with a glass of red wine, and I put my hand under the table so she wouldn’t see my bird claw. All of these people —the innocent boy and the handsome chess instructor, the good-to-go mother and the nurse with the speck-of-ruby nose stud —were close enough for me to reach out and touch.
“Checkmate,” said the boy.
“Word,” said the chess instructor, fist-bumping the boy.
“That is awesome,” said the mom. “You’re a fantastic teacher.”
I just stared ahead and listened, but the nurse was looking across my table now, watching the chess lessons. After a while I noticed a guy in medical scrubs and plastic clogs angling our way. He was cradling a pint glass of beer like it was filled with nitroglycerin, and he kept shuffling toward me in his orange shoes but then sat opposite the nurse.
“Hi, Radha,” he said. “Oops for ordering without you. Didn’t see you when I came in.”
“That’s okay,” she said. “Hi.”
“Thanks so much for coming. And sorry. Dr. Weiss made all the residents stay a little late today.” He pointed at her wineglass. “Vino. Cool. Cheers. You already paid for that?”
“Uh-huh.”
Obviously. Great question, guy. He barely looked old enough to drink. “A lot of people in here,” he said to Nurse Radha.
“Yeah,” she said. “I guess because it’s Friday.”
“Totes. How was your shift?”
And so on and so on. The flouncy-haired resident would be a bona fide doctor eventually, but he still talked and acted like a frat boy. “So,” he said, “have you thought about it?”
He started to say more, but the nurse sighed and cut him off. “I have thought about it,” she said, “and here’s the deal —you seem like a really nice person, but I don’t think it’s such a good idea. Me being a nurse, us at the hospital every day.” A speech spilled out of her, one I could tell she had prepared well beforehand. A speech she’d maybe practiced on her hospital sisters between rounds. It was like there was someone standing behind the resident and holding up cue cards for her to read. He tried to stop her but she rolled on, rushing her words as if now those cue cards were on fire a
nd disappearing. “It’s not smart,” she said, “with us having to work together, and so, yeah —”
Her voice trailed off, and she looked at her lap. This was a pre-date, a negotiation to perhaps have a date in the future. A powwow not so different from the one Viktor claimed to have organized for me and Marina (forty-five minutes late and counting). There you go, Radha. Piss on all doctors. May they spend their nights alone in their castles, raping their sterile and perfect hands. I was being shot down, or at least stood up, as well —but we weren’t in the same fraternity, me and him.
The resident was trying to save face now. “I understand,” he was saying. “I understand totally.” Nobody had lifted a chess piece in a long time; we were all listening to this death rattle. “It’s just that I dig you,” he added.
Suddenly I needed to get out from between those twin soap operas. The scene had snapped into perspective, and I saw how pathetic it was to be waiting to present myself to some Russian woman I’d never even spoken to. I called Viktor’s cell, but no one answered. I didn’t bother leaving a voice mail. Despite having given him a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar check in Golden Gate Park, I’m not sure I ever really believed he could find a woman willing to have anything to do with me. No Marina. No Joni. One working day in, this trip was already shaping up to be another wrong turn for me.
I jostled the chess instructor’s table as I went by, apologizing when a captured knight fell to the floor. It was a downhill mile to my place. Nail salons and dentist offices and markets. A liquor store and a laundromat and an old movie theater. Chinese restaurant after Chinese restaurant. The air was even colder than before, and I pulled up the hood of my sweatshirt as I headed toward the horizon. Through a mesh of phone lines and cable and wire, the western sky was bleeding in pinks and reds.
The door to Karen Yang’s three hundred square feet of San Francisco was cut into the back of a two-car garage I wasn’t allowed to park in, and when I got inside Sam started whirling around in a circle, black claws clicking against the apartment’s lemon tile. The floor was all that same ugly tile, and I had one room of living space that doubled as a kitchen, plus a bathroom with a shower but no tub. I pushed Sam away, too cross about Simple Pleasures to pet him, then opened the back door. “Go on,” I said, and he skulked out into the plot of sandy dirt and brown weeds I shared via a corkscrew of metal stairs with whoever lived in the second- and third-floor flats above me.
