Leave It to Me

by Bharati Mukherjee

  Ham’s groupies were mostly single-again thirtysome-things. Only two of his women friends—Jess and a bony hat-wearer with two nose rings—were the right age to interest me. The Hat-Wearer shot me bitter, brooding looks, but didn’t speak to me. She wasn’t speaking to anyone. The only communicating she did was to press up real close to Ham and tap his arm whenever she wanted another drink.

  I answered the routine questions. Ham worked the booth. “How do you like our Bay Area?” “Do you kids still come to the Haight?” “Has someone taken you wine tasting through Napa?” I kept my deflectors up. “Gee, I don’t know!” “Oh, wine goes to my head!”

  Jess busted the routine with her “Devi, where are you from?”

  “Upstate New York.”

  “I mean, where are you really from?”

  I knew, but played dumb. “From Schenectady. Up near Albany.”

  “You know what I really mean, Devi. Come on, where are you from?”

  “Some toxic dump. I’m a radioactive geek, can’t you tell.”

  Ham stopped our sparring. “That’s how I’d describe Schenectady too. Anyone aching to salsa?”

  “Vámonos!” Jess laughed. She plucked the Hat-Wearer’s hand off Ham’s arm, and led him away.

  I caught Fred’s wince as Jess and Ham hit the dance floor.

  Until I watched Jess move on that tiny floor, I hadn’t figured salsa for a courtship dance. Retreat and pursuit. Promise and withhold. All longing and heartache. Ecstasy without messy consummation. Jess should be my double, not my rival.

  “Life’s a bitch,” Fred muttered beside me, “and I know her.” He signaled a waitress.

  He must have had something going with Jess. I felt sorrier for the waitress. Satin shorts and a halter top, and probably two kids eating cold pizza at home. Life’s a bastard, too.

  Fred ordered rum. He didn’t ask me what I might want. “An investigator is put on this earth to dig up dirt, right? It’s in his genes. Everybody’s got something hidden. I lift the rock. It’s a mission. You know about missions, Devi. Everyfuckingbody has slime tucked away.”

  I didn’t hear Jess walk up behind me until she stuck a finger between my shoulder blades. “I’m really very boring,” she said. It sounded like a warning.

  “We weren’t talking about you,” said Fred. He reached for her hand and got fingertips. “Wanna give me a chance?”

  “And have you find all those bodies? No thanks.” Jess slipped out of Fred’s range. We watched her head back to the dance floor. The way she moved she had to know we were watching. Ham was on the outer edges, sweating out a salsa number with a Latina in pink knit. She cut in on Pink Knit.

  There are moments when I can’t tell the difference between lunacy and luminosity. The Creator passes off riddles as meanings. Invisible weights pin me. One of those moments came on as I watched Fred watching Ham and Jess hugging. Crisscrossing destinies. I was part of the tableau, but I didn’t know how or why.

  “Let it go, Fred,” I pleaded.

  “Shit!”

  “The center’s a zero, Fred. Work the peripheries.”

  The Hat-Wearer suddenly came out of her coma. “Whoa, that’s deep, that’s so otherworldly. Did you just get back from Dharmasala?”

  I risked a laugh. It came out hoarse, mean. “Not in this life,” I mumbled.

  The Hat-Wearer concentrated her stare on my chin. Her eyes were so pale they seemed flesh colored. “The universe is doughnut shaped,” she said.

  “That’s good,” Fred snapped. “So why not write fortunes for fortune cookies?”

  I felt the pressure of Fred’s palm on my thigh. I glanced up, but his sad eyes were on Jess and Ham on the dance floor. Remake of the Frankie/Ovidia/Debby Triangle, starring middle-aged whitebread. Debby’d burned Frankie’s house down, and possibly killed a rival. Devi was more mature, but you wouldn’t dis her and get away with it.

  Fred played his misery low-key. “Say goodnight for us to everybody,” he told the Hat-Wearer. “I’m driving Devi home.” I let him hustle me out of the booth. Nothing wrong with some private time with Fred. a bonus, in fact. “Ciao!” I said.

  Somewhere on Geary, Fred said out of the blue, “She tried to leap off the bridge, I know.”

  “Who? The weirdo in the hat?” But I knew he was talking about Jess.

  “She tried to kill herself.”

  “She looks so …”

  “Teflon?”

  “So … so buff, Fred.”

  “Her second try.”

  “A long time ago?”

  “Not long enough.”

  I kept my finger on the release button of the seat belt, chin angled down. “Looks like we’ve both been abandoned, doesn’t it?”

  “Go with the flow, as we used to say.” He touched the top of my head with his lips. It didn’t feel like a lover’s gesture.

  Loco Larry was smoking on the stoop in his combat fatigues.

  “Will you be okay?” Fred asked.

  I nodded. “It’s a two-melatonin night.”

  “Sweet dreams,” Larry snickered from the dark stoop.

  That night, and the next night, and the next, I dreamed of Jess DuPree’s leap. I dove into a rough, vast sky of implacable indigo. The dream sky thickened and roiled, like oceans churned by typhoons. I hit the sea-sky headfirst, heard the clumsy crack of bone, felt the cozy warmth of blood, tasted the sandy grit of earth, saw fluttery shadows of leaves in a tiny circle of light.

  Loco Larry must have heard me pacing. He had the room below mine. On my third insomniac night, he knocked on the door. “You at war with yourself, babe?” He never waited for answers. “You know the worst part? The worst part of that war is things.”

  I didn’t mind listening; he had Seconal and Mandrax to sell as well as custom-painted signs. Better Larry make money off my nightmare than a shrink.

  Things meant wadded, balled-up paper blowing in the street; it meant stiff, straight lines wrinkled with suspicious bulges; it meant disorder. Whatever was where it shouldn’t be, or wasn’t where you expected it to be or where it should be. Larry was the only person I knew who expected perfect order, who banked on it, who would have been happy living inside a Swiss cuckoo clock. Anything that wasn’t exactly where it should be or wasn’t precisely where you left it or didn’t follow clean right angles was a thing, a death-in-waiting. The noise of panic travels up as well as down. I’d heard his screams in the night and, once, a shot. He’d terminated—that’s the word he used—a plastic Kodak canister. The canister’d found its way between layers of T-shirts in his dresser drawer. Except that he’d stashed it there himself, then forgotten it. Getting forgetful was the same as inviting Death in the front door with a hearty “Howdy!”

  “Things.” I keep an open mind.

  “Call me paranoid.” Larry grinned.

  “I do.”

  “Call me loco?”

  “Some people do.”

  “Yeah? So if I’m loco how come the other guys didn’t make it past forty and I did?”

  The other guys meant Larry’s band of Golden Gate campers and Haight Street panhandlers, the survivors of war who didn’t make it through peace.

  He had a point. He wasn’t wacko, just hypersensitive to repression, extra-wired to surveillance, the way some people develop allergies to pollution or chemicals in the air.

  Things were out there. Things were in him, too. One day, things would get him, but he at least could see them coming, he had night-vision implants and ESP and when all failed him he had the hairs on the back of his neck.

  “That’s how it’s going to come, you know. A snake curled up looking just like a loop of electrical wire. Sentex inside a stray sock. A ballpoint pen someone drops on the street. A dog with an extra-wide collar. Think about that, sweetheart, they’re out there. Things are going to get you.”

  He stood in the hall. I invited him in. My mother had cadged a prison-term’s worth of smokes from the Gray Nuns; I was panhandling pills and consolation from a veteran
.

  Larry spat out his Vietnam stories. They could have been poems. He said things like “I went into villes scouting Charlie with twenty-twenty vision / I came out scoping Satan with the hi-res clarity of hallucination.” That’s more poetry than Mr. Bullock had us read. When Larry got going, his words just popped, they belonged to me as much as they did to Loco Larry, and I didn’t know shit about wars or Vietnam except for the Flash kick-boxing Commies. His war poems made me mourn the major job Vietnam had done on boys like him, the tinkerers of vintage cars, the village idiots from movie-set towns with Art Deco fronts in the adobe valleys between the Coast Range and the Sierra foothills, the turban-and-sombrero country, the farmers from India, the laborers from Mexico, the crazy Armenians speeding on the shoulders raising dust and shouting insults at Okies like his old man selling corn and beans on the side of the road. All the stuff I’d picked up, all the things, stuck to my antennae, like pollen on a bumblebee. I didn’t know shit about his California either. But I knew it was okay to be loco. There was a Bank of Craziness out there, and all I was missing was my own ATM card. It was okay to let him invite me down to his room for the sleeping pills.

  “How’re you intending to pay, doll? Piastres or C rations?”

  “How about cash? Like running a tab?”

  “How about cash, and considerations?” But he dipped from the waist in a courtly bow as he asked and defanged the come-on. “Yikes!” He groaned. He couldn’t straighten back up. “Arthritis.”

  On the ferrying-the-Styx, crossing-the-Rubicon scale, passing behind the I MY ARSENAL sign was an 8. Inside lay loud messages of serious derangement. Larry couldn’t keep his face scab-free or his shoelaces tied and his fly zipped, but inside his bunker he’d bent the world to a primal schema of monochrome madness. Cleanliness counts when you cook on a hot plate without a kitchen, wash your dishes in the lavatory and rinse with a toilet flush. He painted his room every day. Nightly battles with resident bugs resulted in the ritual necessity of a decent burial and memorial every morning. When he switched the light on, I saw hundreds of shiny little crosses swirling up the matte white walls and down the wood paneling. His vertical Flanders Field of cockroach corpses. There was an open bottle of white enamel on the sill, and a handful of enamel-caked Q-tips.

  “Wanna drink?” Larry asked. “I got muleshit whiskey.”

  I looked around for a place to sit. There wasn’t much furniture, just a dinette table, a wooden swivel office chair with its back missing and a futon. And hardware. Thing-busters.

  Larry savored my curiosity. “You like it?” He dropped to the floor, stretched himself flat on his stomach and squinted into a sleek piece of weaponry.

  “What is it?”

  Inside every man lives a Henry Higgins. Larry described it in precise detail. A Ruger M-77 Mark 11 Countersniper Rifle with Leopold Varix 111. 3, 5x–10x variable-power tactical scope, mounted on a Harris bipod.

  “Capable of serious mayhem.” He beamed at me. “Did I hear yes to mule piss? And did I ever tell you about your smile?”

  “What about it?” I smiled.

  “What?” he asked.

  He scrounged around for a clean glass or cup. I prowled his room (a cheetah’s walk, Hari), touching his things (a killer’s hands, Larry). I turned over ashtrays that turned out to be tape recorders, played with pens that concealed air-powered bullet-shooters, flipped through a copy or two of Machine Gun News. Larry was crazy for ownership. He kept mean little pyramids of knives and daggers on the floor by the futon, within easy reach. The bulkier toys he’d lined up against the walls, like gallery exhibits. I dusted a pistol crossbow with a sleeve. Some of the toys I had no names for; I hadn’t ever seen them, not even in Frankie’s Flash extravaganzas. I took in the bowling trophies and the war trophies lined up neatly on the dinette table. The war trophies were in jam jars: pickled mushrooms and ginseng roots labeled “Charlie Ears.” I wandered into the kitchen alcove and checked out the snapshots held in place with magnets on the refrigerator door: buddies looking like summer campers grinned out of pedicabs. Okie faces, some African American faces. All of them romantics and innocents. And, all of them, fated to be victims or villains. I identified with those guys. I’d been drafted, too.

  We sat with our whiskies, I on Larry’s only chair, Larry on an ammo crate. He started on his stories again. Some I’d heard before, but I heard them differently that night; I heard them as Muzak in the museum of needs and loss.

  He told the story of the time he’d come across a codger sleeping in his hooch, and shot him six times in the head because you never know when Charlie’s dead or just playing dead. We’d warned them; we’d told them to clear out. We’d told them this was big-time pacification. And the story of the old gal fishing in a canal, just a line in the water coming out from under a broad hat, and he’d figured where her head had to be, and he’d let her have it.

  You can never be sure, never get careless: that was Larry’s motto. It was also the tragedy of the loco. You kill someone doing what you do all the time, like sleeping, or what you used to do, like fishing, or what you want to do, like beating off—he took out a teenaged boy once—and you can never do it again. Larry could be rolling in proteins, fishing off the shallows, but every time he saw a fisherman the big, round peasant hat bobbed and teased, daring him to line up its center like a bull’s-eye. And if Larry could line up, so could someone else. I learned the lesson Larry was teaching. Things are out there. The war Ham had protested wasn’t the war that Larry had fought.

  “How about those sleepy pills you offered?”

  “I have a better idea,” Larry said. He pulled me up off the chair without the back. “Wanna dance?” He didn’t ask it as a question. We stumbled around the room in a clumsy foxtrot a couple of times.

  “Not tonight,” I said.

  He loosened his grip. “Let’s have a kiss then.” He pressed my face into his.

  “Not tonight, Larry.”

  “Sumbitch!” But he let go of me.

  On the Seconal, I got a great deal.

  Ham and Larry. Larry and Ham. I spent a lot of time with each of them, because I wanted to. It wasn’t about sex, and it wasn’t about self-discovery as it had been with Frankie. Frankie’d looked exotic, but acted familiar. Ham and Larry were harder for me to read. They were the true exotics, coming of age as they’d done in contrary times. Larry’d napalmed villages; Ham’d impresarioed love-ins. And Bio-Mom? She’d embroiled herself and me in messy mysteries.

  Like Ham and Larry, she would be in her fifties now. She must have started out romantic, must have floated into the sixties in a haze of sex, drugs and the sanctity of rebellion. Then the war had snuck up on her as it had on Larry and Ham, an apocalypse segregating hawks from doves, cynics from idealists, setting up areas where women couldn’t follow. Vietnam had plucked a slow, shy kid from a Central Valley farm and provided him paranoia and cheap arms. Peace had coarsened a draft resister to deal maker on the minibudget Bay Area film circuit. We know how our men had reacted. Vietnam had been their central experience—you couldn’t escape their blasted faces on the streets—they’d coped or they’d been gutted. War had blessed them with terrible clarity.

  But what about the women? What about that flower fräulein, Bio-Mom? Should I envy the mother who had put her bad karma behind her in an Indian prison, dumped her bastard child on Hindi-speaking nuns and moved on? She’d done what’d felt good, what’d felt right at the time, and consequences be damned.

  For her and Ham as much as for Larry, Vietnam ended on the roof of the U. S. Embassy in Saigon. Scramble into choppers, then pull up the ladders! Teach the Statue of Liberty to catch up to speed!

  But what about us, Vietnam’s war-bastards and democracy’s love children? We’re still coping with what they did, what they saw, what they salvaged, what they mangled and dumped on that Saigon rooftop that maniacal afternoon.

  I quit my cocktail-waitressing job in midshift the night Fred Pointer came into the club looking as though
he’d wandered in from a Mylanta ad.

  Fred ordered a glass of house red and shoved an airmail envelope in my face. I didn’t grab the envelope from him. The more nowhere a country, the prettier its stamps: been-everywhere Frankie’d taught me that. The stamps of dingy, deforested, microscopic hills with the Indian postmark on Fred’s envelope weren’t exotic, which meant India saw itself as a world power. That cheered me. I concentrated on the stamps. Saplings sprouted out of the brown hills. I felt the universe was communicating messages of hope to me.

  I brought Fred his glass of Cabernet Sauvignon from the bar, and sidled in beside him on the banquette. Beth was tending bar that night. She aimed one of her go-slow-on-the-fraternization frowns at us. “Cheers.” I raised an imaginary glass.

  Fred stretched his legs out under the table. The legs were very long. The Gucci loafers stuck way out into the aisle. “Are those Mona Lisas on your socks?” I asked by way of small talk.

  Fred peered at his own feet, amazed. He lifted them a foot off the floor. “Aliens have begun a slow takeover of my body,” he said.

  “Don’t do this to yourself, Fred.”

  “I don’t have to. Jess is doing it for me.”

  “Jealousy doesn’t suit you. I’m not giving Ham a hard time about …”

  I stopped myself before I said, “Jess.” What happened at Vito’s between them, the circumstances that made me leave Ham on the dance floor and cadge a ride home with Fred that night, whatever mean streak made me even consider punishing Ham and Jess by seducing Fred, those feelings were unworthy of me. I wasn’t a victim and I wouldn’t become a codependent. Jesus, Mama DiMartino used to say, made a cornerstone of the very stone that builders had the dumbness to reject. Matthew 21: 22: The one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; and it will crush anyone on whom it falls. I needed Fred’s help. Which meant I had to stop his world from caving in on him.

  Kiki, the waitress I was closest to, scowled as she hurried past our table with a tray of margaritas. Get the slob to buy expensive cocktails or get back to your station. I flashed Kiki inscrutability.