“How’d you get way up there?”
“I was so high I fuckin’ floated, man.”
“I gotta get a picture of this.”
“You need a camera to get pictures, dumbass.”
“I got the Brownie with me, remember? I took those two girls’ picture, ’member?”
“The one with the big tits.”
“Her, and the other one too. I think I left it in the car. Stay here, okay? I’m gonna go get it and take a picture.”
“You can’t show it to anyone.”
“Sure, sure.”
“And hurry up. It’s gettin’ dark.”
“Don’t worry. I got flashbulbs.”
It only took a minute to get back to the car and another to get back. They walked across the rocks to where the peace symbol was. Joe made Toby stand in front of it. He told Toby to give the peace sign. Toby gave him the finger instead, and Joe thought that rocked. He tried to line up the picture just right and Toby made howling noises, like a coyote would. Then Joe snapped the picture and the flashbulb went off and Toby said, “Can we get the fuck out of here now?”
They picked up KBRK again on the way back. They played some Beatles and some Stones and some of everybody else Joe and Toby wanted to hear. Partway home Toby asked if Joe wanted to smoke their last joint. Joe said he didn’t think he needed it, that the day had been so fucking fantastic he didn’t need any more dope, and Toby said he thought the same but just thought he’d ask.
When they got back near Mark and Ginger’s, Joe told Toby thanks for taking him out there. Toby said he’d really wanted to and he was glad he did, and that they’d do it again soon. But just a few days later he and Bonnie got discovered and Joe never saw either one of them again. Joe thought about going to the place without Toby, but he wasn’t sure he could find it. And besides, without Toby it just wouldn’t be right.
A couple of months later Joe got around to developing the film in his Brownie. The picture of the girls was pretty good, except the one with the big tits was blinking. The one of Toby wasn’t so good. He looked kind of like a zombie. And with all the time Joe took, he still cut off the top of the big peace sign.
Empty Glass
“It was the only photo of Toby I had,” I said. I touched the surface of the mirror, a couple of inches up from the lower left corner. Then I slipped the picture between the frame and the mirror, right where it had been way back when, just below the Who ticket stub that had been there since ’71.
“How do you think it got where it was?” Ronnie said.
“One day Elaine said my room was a pit and I had to clean it up. I was working on the dresser and I looked at the picture. I wasn’t sure why I still had it up there. I took it out and threw it in a drawer. Somewhere along the line it fell behind, I guess.”
I showed up at Gina’s well after nine. I ate reheated Pollo Loco and a dish of Ben and Jerry’s. The three of us sat on the couch watching a Buffy the Vampire Slayer rerun. Gina and I put Aricela to bed at ten-thirty and went back out to the living room. We sat silently, side by side, leaning on each other. After a while I said, “Guess what I found.”
“The holy grail? A lottery ticket worth a million dollars?”
“Actually, I should’ve said ‘we found.’ Ronnie and I.”
“If you’re trying to get a rise out of me, I’m too tired.”
“A photo of Toby.”
“Where?”
“It fell behind the drawers in my dresser I don’t know how many years ago.”
“And this is significant why?”
“The peace symbol. I forgot all about it. But there was a giant peace symbol painted on the rock on the way into his hideaway.”
“So?”
“So all we have to do is find that, and we’re on the way to finding the hideaway.”
“We.”
“Deanna and me.”
“Right, her. I have trouble keeping track of all your new girlfriends. There are two problems with your scheme.”
“Only two?”
“First, knowing there’s a peace symbol on a rock doesn’t tell you where the rock is.”
“I know. But there are only so many turnoffs from the freeway in the area, and so many turns off each turnoff, if you know what I mean.”
“Sounds tedious. Here’s the second problem: What makes you think it’s still there?”
“Why wouldn’t it be there?”
“Thirty-however-many years of sun and wind.”
“I don’t know. What about that big rock off the Pasadena Freeway? The one with all the fraternity letters and things painted on it. Some of that stuff has been there as long as I can remember.”
“Pasadena isn’t the desert.”
I thought about it. “There’s still a chance.”
“A very small one.”
“I really want to be in this band.”
“And I really want you to. But if it depends on finding Toby Bonner, you might as well forget it.” She took my hand. “You’re not going to forget it, though, are you?”
“You know me so well.”
“So be careful out there. Drink plenty of liquids. Wear sunscreen. Take a snakebite kit.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The Channel 6 news came on. I muted the TV. They made as much sense with the sound off as on.
“How’s our little girl?” I said.
“For one thing, I caught her going through my dresser.”
“She have an explanation?”
“I didn’t let on that I’d seen her. The way she was doing it. Sort of reverently. She’d touch something and run her finger over it, pick something else out and hold it to her face.”
“She’s a snoopy one, all right. I found her going through the pictures in your closet last night.”
“I think she’s auditioning us for parents.”
“Boy, did she use the wrong casting director.”
“Be serious for once. Living with Gran and Gramps clearly wasn’t a walk in the park. I think she sees us as a chance for some stability. Maybe some love too. God, listen to me. I sound like a fucking Junior Leaguer.” She looked back over her shoulder, like she was watching Aricela through the wall. “That little girl’s going to have a lot to deal with. I think she’s buried what happened that night with her grandparents. It’s going to come out sometime. She’s going to need lots of therapy, I’m afraid.” She turned back and stared at the TV. “Did you call Burns?”
“I did, but she didn’t call back.”
“Did you leave a message?”
“No.”
“That would explain it, then.” She picked up the remote. “Let’s drop it for now.”
“I do wonder why they still haven’t said anything about her on the news. I caught a report just before I left, and they just talked about the one daughter. Not Aricela’s mom, the other one.”
“The Basque separatist, or whatever she is. What part of ‘Let’s drop it for now’ didn’t you understand?”
“I’m sick of that expression. That ‘what part didn’t you—’“
“I knew what you meant.”
A minute or two went by. The skeleton of a bus smoldered on the silent screen.
“Why are we getting snippy here?” I said.
She clicked off the TV. “Mental exhaustion. Also PMS.”
“I don’t have PMS.”
“You should try it sometime.” She moved up to the edge of the sofa. “Don’t take it seriously, babe. I’m still dealing with my stuff.” She stood and held out a hand. “Come, let’s go to bed. I need my beauty sleep.”
“That,” I said, “would be gilding the lily.”
I got a smile out of it. “Smooth-talker,” she said.
I got out of there early. Gina was still dozing and Aricela was watching Katie Couric make thirteen million a year. When I got home I poured a bowl of cereal and read the paper. I checked out who had died, how many were over eighty and how many were under seventy. Some World War I veteran had kicked the
bucket at a hundred and four. A spate of centenarians had moved on lately, the supposed oldest man in the world among them. Guys like that gave me hope that my life wasn’t more than half over. Which was something that had been bugging me lately.
I checked out the comics. In Zits, Jeremy’s friend Pierce had taken Jeremy’s guitar apart. The pieces were scattered all over a table. Pierce said Jeremy looked more like a keyboard player anyway. I knew this related to my situation. I just didn’t know how.
On to the sports page. The Lakers were storming through the playoffs. The purple and gold flags were appearing on cars again, supplanting the Stars and Stripes that sprouted on September 12. I’d been waiting for the nationalistic fervor to calm down and for all the instant patriots to return to their regularly scheduled programs. In the days after the attacks, everyone kept saying everything had changed. They were wrong. Nothing had changed. Not really. Especially my life. Everything was as it had been for the last decade or more, except that I was sleeping with Gina. I lazed around the house, went out on auditions, booked the occasional job, sold bugs at shopping malls. I watered my cacti and watched Jackie Chan movies and ate takeout. I’d probably do the same things until I dropped dead. Thoreau said most men lived lives of quiet desperation. I didn’t even do that. I led a life of quiet apathy.
I didn’t want to do it for the rest of my life. I called Deanna and told her about the photo.
Going Mobile
We were just past downtown when the sun began to break through, bathing us in that peculiar light L.A. gets when most the overcast has burned away. A few minutes later the last of the clouds boiled off, and we were under a hot blue sky. The 10 was as clear as it ever gets, and we were making good time. It was a quarter after eleven, just more than an hour since I’d called Deanna and been told that Mott had wandered off again, and that she was raring to wander around in the desert. I picked her up in Hollywood, stopped for supplies at Mayfair, and jumped on the freeway.
I let Deanna rave about Mott until we got over the big hill before Pomona. Then I said, “Enough.”
“Excuse me?”
“I gave you forty miles worth of bitching. You’re starting to repeat yourself. The guy’s a loser. Get over him.”
“Asshole.”
“No. I’m not. I’m just a friend who wants to remind you you’re over fifty and the rest of your life doesn’t have to suck.”
“Well, la-de-da.”
No conversation for a couple of miles. KLOS started crackling and was gone half a minute later. I shoved Tom Petty into the tape player. Tom let it be known that he didn’t want to live like a refugee.
“Okay,” Deanna said. “I’m done.”
“Good. Tell me why you really want to find Toby.”
“I told you why.”
“That something-I-have-to-do business? That you might feel your life is complete if you see him again?”
“Did I say those things?”
“You did. At my house.”
“I probably could have done better, couldn’t I?”
“Probably. You could have said, say, a friend of yours was doing a documentary on the sixties. Or that Toby had a child he’d never seen who wanted to get to know him before going off to be a missionary in darkest Africa.”
She didn’t say anything. She just stared out the side window.
“Is that it?” I said. “Something about a child?”
She turned to me. I took a quick look. Her eyes were wet. “Yes.”
“You want to talk about it?”
“No.”
More miles unspooled. Neither of us spoke. I created a fantasy. We’d get to where we were going, find or not find Toby, drive all the way back without either of us saying a word.
Just past San Bernardino she blew that scenario to shreds. “The part about not sleeping with Toby? That wasn’t quite the truth.”
“Oh?”
“I did. Just that once.”
“Why tell me you didn’t?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it made a better story. I was mixing fact and fiction and that part came out fiction.”
“Why lie to me at all?”
“I didn’t want you to know the truth until I was sure I could trust you.”
“And now you trust me?”
“Yes. Actually, since the business up near Ventura. When I did my little death scene and you were genuinely concerned I’d been shot.”
“Good. Okay, let me guess. You slept with Toby and you got pregnant and had a kid. And now the kid’s in his thirties and wants to see his father.”
“The kid never reached thirty. He never even reached ten.”
“What happened?”
“A playground accident. He got hit in the head with a baseball bat.”
The image blew my mind.
“He was old enough to wonder why most of the other kids had daddies and he didn’t. He’d started asking about his. I let it slip that his father didn’t know he existed. He wanted to meet him. When I lost him I felt horribly guilty. I decided to at least tell his father about him, show him a picture, something.”
“You keep saying ‘his father.’ Not ‘Toby.’“
She smiled, barely. “When I got pregnant I had a boyfriend. He and I fucked like bunnies, two, three, four times a day. You know what those days were like. Free love and all that.”
I didn’t tell her I’d missed out on that aspect of the sixties.
“When I got pregnant—I was on the pill, but with all that sex the odds were against me—I assumed Roger was the father. The odds on it were so in favor. A couple of months later he took off.”
“Didn’t want to be a father.”
“He didn’t know I was pregnant. He was just moving on. I knew where he was, more or less, and probably could have found him, but I chose not to. Not until Chris died. Then I looked him up and told him the whole story. He looked at the pictures I had and said the whole thing was a trip and that was that.”
“But there was always the chance Toby was the father.”
“Right. I tormented myself with that. Eventually I convinced myself I was over it.”
“And now, just in case, you want to make sure Toby, if he’s even alive, knows about the kid.”
“Sort of. I ran into Roger a couple of months ago. He became a grownup somewhere along the line, runs a restaurant, respectable businessman, all that. He was with his family, a wife and two daughters. The wife was much younger, blond, big boobs, you know the type. Not a big surprise. The kids were the surprise.”
“How so?”
“They were Chinese. Roger’s family’s from Denmark.”
“He adopted them.”
“Give the boy a stuffed bear.”
I thought I knew where she was leading. I wanted to hear it from her. “Lots of people adopt Chinese babies. It’s a big thing nowadays among guilt-ridden liberals.”
“The wife went off with the kids. Roger and I went for coffee, to get caught up. Soon as we sat down he told me they adopted because it was the only way they would ever have kids. They’d tried and tried, gone to doctors, found there was a problem. His problem. He couldn’t father a child. And according to the doctors, he never could have.”
I Can See For Miles
We found him on the second day.
On the way out to the desert Deanna told me how, now that she knew Toby had to be Chris’s father, she’d obsessed on finding him, or at least finding out if he were alive. The trail led nowhere. Then I came along, all bright and shiny-eyed and ready to go looking for him.
We tried Highway 62 that first afternoon. It came off the freeway before Palm Springs, but neither of us had more than the vaguest memory of where we’d gotten off the road all those years ago. It came first, we investigated it first. We went down a lot of side roads, walked down a lot of trails, breathed a lot of dirt, and emerged each time wondering whether if we’d just gone another twenty yards we would have found the right place.
When it got dark,
when we were more tired, dirty, sweaty than we could stand, we found a motel. We rented rooms, got ourselves cleaned up, had dinner at a Red Lobster, returned to the motel. We got a drink in the lobby bar and went to our rooms. I called Gina, brought her up to date, found out she’d taken Aricela to Universal Studios, where they both had a blast. We chatted a little more, love-you-love-you’d, got off the phone. I channel-surfed and found pro wrestling. It was just the kind of mindless entertainment I needed. When it was over I turned off the TV and reached into the gym bag I’d used for luggage. I took out the two photos, the one of Toby and the one of the two girls. I’d tossed them in the bag just before I walked out the door. I looked at the one of Toby, asked him whether he wanted to be found, didn’t get an answer. Then I checked out the one of the girls. I wondered what had happened to them, whether they still lived in Pomona, whether the big-breasted one had gotten fat, whether they had kids of their own, grown ones, ones who would make me feel old if I knew about them.
We got an early start in the morning. We had a quick breakfast and planned our strategy. We weren’t sure we’d exhausted all the possibilities up 62, but decided to try something else. Dillon Road seemed the best choice. It formed a big loop starting in North Palm Springs and returning to the freeway a little south of Indio. We opted to take the freeway south and follow the loop back.
The morning was much like the day before. Drive, turn, drive, walk, turn back. Repeat as necessary. We stopped for a lunch of sandwiches and fruit at noon. Even in the shade of a tall date palm it was hotter than Salma Hayek. The previous afternoon we’d used up our water by four. This time we brought five gallons of Sparkletts. It was almost half gone.
After lunch I let Deanna drive. We dismissed several more possibilities. We were both tired and cranky. I was questioning my sanity and sure she was uncertain about hers. Around our fifth post-lunch expedition I was beginning to doubt I’d make it through the afternoon.
We drove up a narrow dirt road that ended in a T. We chose to go right. A dusty mile later we hit a dead end. We turned around and drove past the crossroads. A couple of miles on the other side was another T. Again we went right. In a couple of minutes we saw a trail. We got out and followed it until it stopped at a big outcropping. Somebody had done some painting there, but it wasn’t Toby. It was Julio, and he wanted the world to know he loved Celia.
One Last Hit (Joe Portugal Mysteries) Page 24
