Arlanda waved her knife at me. “C’mon, that’s an exaggeration. Not everybody’s like that.”
“No. But I am. I’m like that. I came here for the same reasons. I wanted to be a fine-arts photographer. Still do. We’re all the same. Rootless and shifting, never sure when or where to make our stand. A screwed-up town for dating, that’s for sure.”
After a shot-and half a bottle of wine I felt buzzed but not so drunk I couldn’t respect every rule of the road, except the one about drinking and driving. Arlanda had matched me glass for glass and topped it off with a cognac and Irish coffee. She wasn’t rolling drunk but she weighed about thirty pounds less than I did and lacked the space for those two extra shots. I wasn’t going to let her drive, not in a strange car down an unfamiliar highway, and by the time we greeted the Rott, who waited patiently in the front passenger seat, she had entirely forgotten her offer to drive. I didn’t worry much about the cops, not with the bravado of alcohol firing my blood and a witness in the front seat. Midway between the restaurant and the hotel we swung across the highway to let the Rott run on the beach.
A lopsided moon wobbled up the sky, bright enough to cast our shadows across the sand. Unleashed, the Rott streaked in pursuit of gulls, which flapped insolently to sea the moment before he lunged. A ragged line of froth marked the wave edge at low tide, and we walked the hard sheen of sand left in the ebb. Arlanda admired with a word here and there the beauty of the sea and the Rott’s tireless energy, her track weaving erratically behind us and her tongue not so nimbly rounding the corners of consonants. “I’m thinking I should move someplace new,” she said. “The boys are young enough, not so rooted a move would hurt them. I wouldn’t mind living in a place like this, away from the city but close enough to go there when I wanted.”
“Living here isn’t so easy. If the wildfires, earthquakes, and floods don’t scare you off, the real estate prices will.”
“I stand to inherit a lot of money from Aunt Angela.” The moonlight caught her in a contrite smile when she lifted her head. “Awful, isn’t it? We don’t even know for sure she’s dead yet, and already I’m thinking how I’ll spend the money.”
“You looked at the will?”
“Nope. Spoke to her accountant over the phone. He’s acting as the executor, said I’m mentioned but didn’t say exactly how. We’re all waiting for the identification. I shouldn’t even be thinking about it.”
“Can’t help it, can you? You inherit money, it changes your life.”
“I wish I could grieve a little more, but I just can’t. In some ways, Aunt Angela died years ago, when she walled herself away from the world.”
The Rott doubled back to check on us, holding still just long enough to allow Arlanda to thump his flanks, then raced up the beach again.
“Family.” It was a simple word, heavy with meaning, and she sighed it loudly at the sea, where it sank like a stone. “Is yours as fucked up as mine? Excuse the language.”
“I’ve heard worse.”
“I learned to swear from my ex. Don’t know why I still do it.”
“My dad taught me,” I said. “He was a man of few words, most of them four-lettered.”
“How long ago did he pass away?”
“What makes you think he’s dead?”
“I’m sorry. You said he was. You spoke in the past tense.”
“He still lives and breathes about fifty miles from here, but he’s dead to me.” My dad swore like the boxing style of a lead-footed heavyweight, straightforward and predictable combinations that struck with great percussive force. Sometimes I was happy to hear him swear because I could judge from the rage in his voice when words would turn to fists. His silences were worse, because he might be content at that moment or ready to rage from the dark nowhere inside his head.
“I don’t have much family left in Douglas. If I move, I want it to be someplace I know somebody. Here I know Ben, and now I know you.” She ran after the dog and the Rott was so surprised to see her on his tail he turned sideways and rolled. She tried to leap over him but her skirt was too tight and her foot caught his chest. Her shoulder tucked and when she hit the sand she somersaulted onto her back and lay there for a moment before her laugh cracked over the waves. When I reached her she looked up at me and said she thought she was drunk.
On the drive back to the hotel she fell asleep holding the neck of the Rott, who sat contentedly at her feet. I called her name and when she did not open her eyes or lips I said, “I was meaning to tell you the reason I haven’t been seeing anybody, why I’m alone. I was married about six months ago, just after I got out.” When I thought about Gabe, my chest tightened and my throat began to swell. I pinched the skin at my forearm and twisted it hard, a trick I’d learned as a little girl to blunt emotional pain, to turn grief to anger. I don’t know why I had such a difficult time talking about him. I’d thought about mentioning him to Arlanda during dinner, but I’d held back. I always held back. “My husband’s name was Gabriel. He was an Englishman, a paparazzo, maybe the funniest man I’ve ever met. We got married . because I needed some money and he needed a green card. It was supposed to be a straight commercial transaction but then we slept together. Less than a month later, he was beaten to death and dumped in Lake Hollywood. I thought I was in love with him when he died. I don’t know what I think now. I just know I’m afraid of getting close to anybody ever again.”
Arlanda stirred when the Cadillac rolled to the stairway leading to her room. The Rott rose from beneath her legs and licked her hand. She stretched and blinked, more asleep than awake, and mumbled something that might have been an invitation to sleep in the second bed. I told her I’d be fine driving home and waited until she waved from the open door to her room.
But I wasn’t fine driving home. A few miles from the hotel I pulled to the broad dirt shoulder on the ocean side of the highway. The edge of the shoulder sloped to a ragged barricade of boulders tumbling down to the beach. I crawled onto the backseat and cracked the windows facing the sea. To the rumble and hiss of waves sweeping across the sand I thought about my dead husband and about a father who people sometimes say I resemble but whom I’ve hated most of my adult life, and I thought about my mother, who refused to speak to me anymore, and about my only sister, whom I barely knew, and most of all I thought about the terrible void I felt where family once had lodged, as hurt and hurtful as that family had been, and then a wave larger than the rest washed above the sand and rocks and swept me to a dark sleep.
Lupe Potrero rented a room in a six-story residence hotel constructed from unreinforced masonry around a central staircase, the type of structure most likely to go down in an earthquake or up in flames, a liability reflected in the room rates. The glass in the windows flanking the entrance hadn’t been cleaned in recent years so not much light leaked into the lobby, which was probably a good thing, judging by the patina of grime on the walls and the strands of frayed red carpet that led to the front desk. With great foresight, the management years before had bought vinyl chairs for the lobby, easily repaired by plastic tape that now patched each piece of furniture like a quilt. The residents who sat in the lobby, pretending to stare out the windows, were similarly patched, though with bandages, canes, and pint bottles drunk from paper bags.
“Lupe Potrero? Never heard of him,” the desk clerk said. His right eye swam independently of his left, giving him the appearance of a bottom-dwelling sea fish brought too fast to the surface. I couldn’t judge his wandering eye but the fixed one looked shrewdly hopeful.
Frank palmed a five-dollar bill on the desk. “You tell me where Lupe Potrero is, and I’ll help you find Abe Lincoln.”
“Room fifty-four, up the stairs five floors and to the right. He sleeps heavy.”
We climbed through floors that reeked of too many people living in too small a space for too long a time, if the alcoholic’s slow decay can be called living. A sooty light fell onto the fifth floor from a window above the fire escape at the end of the
hall, providing just enough illumination to read the tin numbers. Number 54 hung crookedly on a door midway down the corridor. Frank knocked first. When his knuckles began to hurt, I gave it a try. Down the hall, the head of a young man with swollen eyes and a stitched lip poked into the corridor.
“Algunos de nosotros trabajan por la noche y duermen durante el día,” he said. Some of us work at night, sleep during the day.
I backed away from the door, said, “Lo siento.” I’m sorry.
As his eyes cleared he noticed we weren’t the usual drunks or druggies banging on doors to disturb his sleep. “¿A quién buscan?” Who are you looking for?
“A Lupe. ¿Le conoce?” Lupe. You know him?
“¿Quiénes son, de la policía?” What are you, cops?
I turned my face away to spit on the floor. Frank, who didn’t speak much Spanish, looked at me in horror. He thought I wanted to start a fight.
“Periodistas,” I said. Journalists.
Lupe’s neighbor ambled across the corridor. His triceps corded from the sleeves of his T-shirt, and beneath his striped boxer shorts his legs bowed. He didn’t have an ounce of fat on him and he didn’t stand higher than five and a half feet tall. A half-moon bruise purpled the skin below his left eye and I counted four stitches in his lower lip. His arms were longer than usual, not thickly muscled but wiry, and the knuckles jutted ridgelike from his large hands.
“Bantamweight?”
He grinned like a recognized movie star. “El Cangurito. Ventiocho y seis.” The Little Kangaroo, twenty-eight wins and six defeats. Not bad, but not good enough for a legitimate shot at a title either. “Le tienen que decir quiénes son, si no, no abre la puerta,” he said. We had to tell Lupe who we were or he wouldn’t open the door. He knocked and called in a voice loud enough to penetrate the wood, “Lupe! Soy Juan. Dos periodistas quieren hablar contigo.”
The door squeezed open to a man with eyes the color of a slain bull and a moustache spraying six directions. He didn’t look happy to see us, but then he looked too hungover to be happy about anything. Frank said we were doing a piece on the fire in Malibu and would like to speak to him about his work for Ms. Doubleday.
“No hablo inglés,” Lupe mumbled.
I put my foot in the door before he could shut it. “Bueno. Pues, hablamos en español. Ayer hablamos con sus hermanas. Escribimos para el periódico Scandal Times sobre la Señora Doubleday y el incendio de Malibu.” We spoke with his sisters-in-law yesterday, I said, and wrote for the newspaper about the fire in Malibu.
“I know nothing, no, not about the fire, but okay, sit down.” He backed away from the door, forgetting that he didn’t speak English and that his room had only one chair. Sun and drink had furrowed his brows, and his cheeks sunk like an old man’s. He sat on the mattress and fumbled at a pack of Marlboro Red. I stepped over the beer bottles on the floor to glance out the one window in the room. It overlooked the brick wall of the adjacent building. The bottles, a single bed, chair, and bureau furnished the room. The sink jutting from the wall implied a communal toilet and shower down the hall. Lupe stabbed a cigarette into a mouth missing a third of its teeth. His hands shook with the match so badly he might have lit his moustache save for the last-second influence of his other hand to steady the flame. For once, I was happy for the smell of cigarette smoke, because what it masked was much worse.
Frank asked a few questions, lighting a cigarette of his own. Lupe answered diffidently. He worked on the grounds three days a week, also cleaned the pool and took care of minor repair work around the house. He almost never spoke to the señora. She didn’t have much interest in the garden, and he probably could have let everything go to slow ruin except for the close eye his sisters-in-law kept on his work. “I know what they say about me.” He spoke to hands clenched tightly on his knee. “They say I drink too much. I’m lucky to have a good job, I lose it if not for them. They yell at me all the time. Son unas brujas.” Witches. “I’m not so lucky now, ¿verdad? No money, no job. I ask them, What gonna happen to me? Just a little money, pay for the room, is that too much to ask? Not for the bottle, they say, not one dollar. They want Lupe to starve. Son unas brujas.”
“Sus hermanas son buenas mujeres, intelligentes y simpáticas,” I said. “Quesieran solo el mejor á Usted. Es mejor les escuchar,” Your sisters are good women, I said, they want only the best for you.
“Las sorpriendo. Yo sé gano el dinero grande.” He’d surprise them, he knew how to make big money.
“¿Como?”
He wagged his head, as though unwilling to talk about it or maybe just stung by the injustice of his current situation. “I work hard. I not miss one day of work for six months. Some days, I not feel so good, but I work anyway. I work hard. I’m a good gardener.”
I leaned against the wall to steady the camera and took a long exposure of his hunched form on the edge of the bed, his hands clasped like a penitent. I asked, “Then why were the cypress trees in back dying?”
He turned his head to the camera, skin lines fracturing his face into multiple planes. “Is not my fault! I water the trees, my padre was a ranchero, I take care of the land my whole life.” He leaned his head forward so his shaking hand didn’t have to travel so far to stick his mouth with the cigarette. “Okay, I didn’t see right away something is wrong. Maybe I don’t look close enough. But why someone poison the trees, you want to tell me that? I don’t even think about it until I see they go brown, more and more every day, no matter how much I water.”
“What do you mean, poison the trees?”
“Quicklime!” He stared at Frank, then at me, thinking what he said was unbelievable but daring us to contradict him. “I see the water, it looks like milk around the tree, so I taste. Quicklime.” He crossed himself rapidly and kissed his fingertips. “I know quicklime. I see it in Salvador. They throw it on the bodies. I think, Somebody buried under the trees, ¡Madre de Dios! I dig a little to see, but no, just quicklime, buried one foot deep. Why? I don’t understand why.”
“How long ago?”
“When I first see?” The concept of time gave him fits, I could see that. Or maybe he was just lying. He lunged for another drag on his cigarette. “After Easter. A month, maybe.”
“How long had the quicklime been there, you think, before you noticed?”
“A month?” His answer was more hope than fact.
Frank flicked his ashes into the sink, asked, “You want to show him the sketches?” His notebook dangled between thumb and forefinger at the side of his hip. He hadn’t written much down. I’d asked the last few questions. He didn’t know what was going on, and he didn’t like having the interview taken from him.
I pulled photocopies of the original sketches from my camera bag, careful to keep their blank backs toward Lupe, and passed them across the room. Frank dragged the chair toward the bed and sat, eye level with Lupe.
“Ever seen this man before?”
Lupe was looking at the corner of floor where it ran against the walls when Frank turned over the sketch of the gunman’s face. His eyes slid to the sketch and careened away as though hit. The smell of singed hair infused the room and before any of us identified the source, the coal of the cigarette burned through to Lupe’s flesh. I was certain he’d recognized the man in the sketch but the moment his eyes shot away he felt the pain of the coal between his fingers and yelped. The cigarette spun to the base of the door. I stepped on it, twisting my foot until I heard the tobacco crackle like a cockroach. Lupe sprang toward the sink and ran water over the burn. He noticed a half finger of tequila in the bottle above the sink and decided that would kill the pain faster than water. He opened his throat to it and set the bottle carefully back on the shelf, even though he’d sucked it dry. Maybe when he looked again a miracle would occur and another swallow would be left.
“You okay?” Frank didn’t care about the man at all, but he wanted to finish the interview.
Lupe lit another cigarette and sat back on the bed. “Sí,
bueno, I’m okay.” The focus of his eyes deepened, as though an idea had just stuck him to the hilt. “That man. Who is he?”
“We hoped you knew. You’ve seen him, then?”
“No. Never.”
“Sure, you’ve seen him. Why else would you ask?”
“He looks like a bandido. He the one started the fire?”
Frank shuffled the sketch of the man gone prematurely gray to the front. “What about him?”
Lupe leaned back as though he didn’t focus short distances well and contemplated the sketch through two drags of his new cigarette. Behind the smoke stream of the second drag, he nodded.
“You know him?” Frank asked.
“I think so,” Lupe answered, a little uncertainly. “It’s George Clooney, verdad?”
The air cleared of smog as we climbed the foothills to Sunset Boulevard, and the cars crowding the lanes changed from domestic clunkers to German imports racing from red to red as though the difference between placing third or fifth in the queue really mattered. Frank reviewed his notes as I drove, takeout coffee in a sack at his feet. The Rott stood on the rear passenger seat and hung his head over my shoulder. It was bad enough I had to leave him in the car half the day. Frank didn’t care much for dogs so I’d banished him to the rear. I gave him a pat. The Rott propped his front paws on the back of my seat and licked the side of my face. I pushed him away.
“Why you so interested in Doubleday’s trees?” Frank lifted the takeout coffee free of the sack and sucked on the drink spout. His eyes bulged and he turned to spray a scalded mouthful into the wind. The first words to follow the coffee were a vulgar and not particularly original riff on the sexual habits of someone he didn’t identify by name. After a moment his mouth cooled, and he said, “They have a special technology, these chain coffee places, keeps the liquid temperature two degrees below boiling, then they design this special lid to keep the heat in so you can’t drink the stuff until you’ve driven halfway to San Francisco.”
Burning Garbo Page 7
