The Wild Card

by Mark Joseph

  “I was born there, but I haven’t been there since I was three.”

  “What are you running away from?”

  She hesitated. In her view, her story was complex, tragic, and sad, and she wasn’t inclined to tell the whole truth to strangers, no matter how attractive or useful.

  “A foster home,” she said.

  “Bad scene?”

  “Very bad scene.”

  “You’re a lost soul,” Alex pronounced. “And you want the Toot Sweet to transport you to paradise.”

  “Are you a poet?” she asked. “Some kind of beatnik?”

  “No,” he answered, surprised by the question. “I’m a mathematician.”

  “Don’t mind Alex,” Dean said, coming back. “The skinny one is Charlie and the Chinaman is Nelson and Bobby is around here somewhere. Down below. Bobby! Come up on deck, we have company.”

  In 1963 the epitome of teenage cool was Marlon Brando’s eyes, Elvis Presley’s hair, a smoldering Hells Angels swagger, and a pack of Luckies rolled up in the sleeve of a white T-shirt. The ace of diamonds suited Bobby like a birthmark. He rose up through the hatch like an angel from below, a can of Schlitz in one hand and a Lucky in the other and Sally caught her breath. Bobby instantly injected a charge into the tableau the way carbonation adds zest to beer. Before Bobby could say a word, Sally fell in love.

  “Hey! What happened to the game?” Bobby complained, coming up the ladder and for some reason looking behind him, unconsciously showing off his tight jeans and a rakish, provocative mass of dark hair slicked back in a duck tail. “Are you guys gonna come back down and play, or what?”

  He looked down onto the dock, saw Sally and blurted, “Oh, shit.”

  Her eyes wouldn’t let go. They were light blue, the color of a high sky in the afternoon, tinged with cloudy gray around the edges, and he knew she wouldn’t be fooled by his carefully constructed façade.

  “Bobby,” Alex said. “Meet Sally, our little runaway from the city of angels.”

  And Dean added, “She wants to come with us.”

  Girls fell in love with Bobby all the time, white girls, Chinese girls, black girls, all kinds of San Francisco girls, and he recognized a world of trouble when he saw it. Whether it was true or merely a fabricated Hollywood tradition, he remembered that women were supposed to be bad luck on boats. He swallowed a mouthful of beer and said, “Hey guys, let’s leave her on the dock and get on up the river.”

  She didn’t blink. She smiled and looked away from Bobby and enveloped each of the other boys one at a time in her gaze. Except for Charlie, their pulses raced and their dicks swelled inside their pants. “If you take me with you”—she paused to slide her tongue over her lips—“you won’t regret it.”

  19

  Every few hands the queen of hearts appeared and transported each player to his private vision of the past. The first time it came up, the red queen spoiled a nine high flush in diamonds for Charlie, and he threw in his hand with a groan.

  “Four diamonds and then this. I swear, the card is cursed,” he said, exasperated. “The hearts are drops of blood and the queen a taunting ghost.”

  “Superstitious twaddle,” Nelson said to grunts of approval, but for a while no one could win with the queen of hearts in his hand. A little spooked, they continued to play until all the cards seemed freighted with obscure meanings as though the red and blue Bicycles had become tarot decks.

  Finally, after the fickle queen ruined a ten high straight, Alex said to Bobby, “You wanted to leave her in Sacramento. Do you remember that?”

  “Sure.” Bobby closed his eyes and thought, here we go; the opening scenes of this movie play in slow motion with great clarity. “I remember you calling her a lost soul. I was still down below when I heard you and that’s why I came up on deck.”

  “I was just trying to be cute. I had no idea what I was talking about.”

  “But you were right, and your words were ringing in my ears when I saw her. I thought, holy shit, if she wasn’t lost before she met us, her fate would be sealed if she got on the boat. It doesn’t matter now if I had a premonition, and I’m not sure it mattered then. You guys decided it was okay. She wanted to go and you outvoted me.”

  “There was no vote,” Dean declared. “I was the captain. I decided.”

  “That’s not true,” Nelson contradicted immediately. “There was a vote. There was no show of hands but we voted with our dicks.”

  “Horseshit,” Dean insisted.

  “Do you really believe you decided by yourself that she could go, Dean?” Charlie’s face contorted into a smirk. “My ass.”

  “That is the way I see it, damned straight. Everyone could see she fell for Bobby right away. Her eyes popped, but when you said”—he jerked a stubby finger toward Bobby—“‘Leave her on the dock,’ I guess she figured, what the hell, and made a play for all of us. If I’d said no, she never would have come on board, but that chick batted her eyes at me and licked her lips like Marilyn Monroe and turned me into a jellyfish.”

  “That sounds like voting with your gonads to me,” Nelson said.

  “Chicks know how to do that,” Dean said. “Especially that one.”

  “No kidding,” Bobby said sarcastically. “What’s the point?”

  Before Dean could answer with another angry expletive, Alex interjected. “The point is Dean has blamed himself all these years for allowing her on the boat, and that’s not fair. Any of us could’ve said no, and that would have been that. As it was, only you said no, Bobby. We were eighteen and horny as hell and she was absolutely out of our league. You were the only one who could’ve said no to a sexy girl like that, and you did, but we didn’t have enough sense to listen. You had girls hanging around you all the time, but not the rest of us. We were geeky, gawky teenagers lucky to get a taste of your leftovers. You were way ahead of us on that score and besides, you had that old black magic. That’s what I remember.”

  Nelson grinned and chuckled and said, “Hey, Kimosabe, do you still have it?”

  Gimme a break, Bobby thought, and added to himself, whatever it is you’re talking about died that night.

  The room was so still they could hear the city rumble. Four stories below, the hotel doorman blew a taxi whistle, and a moment later an engine raced in the street, followed by a squeal of brakes. A car door slammed shut and a journey began. Life went on. The city—the world—was indifferent to their plight. What happened to them meant no more than the turn of a card.

  He was fucking her and so drunk he passed out in situ. A real high school romeo. And when he woke up she was dead. That’s all there was to it. Her skull was cracked, her skin was blue and she was dead.

  Charlie drew back the drapes and admired the view up Montgomery Street to Telegraph Hill. He could see his house.

  “Ah shit,” Bobby said, sensing that if he played along they’d start to tell him whatever they brought him here to tell him. “I never thought about what Shanghai Bend did to you guys. I only know what it did to her.”

  “Fair enough,” Alex said.

  Another silence. Alex walked over to the cart and began cracking crab legs, loudly crunching the pink and white crustaceans. “Let’s have a little music, what do you say? How about a little Miles Davis?”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  Sketches of Spain. Mellow tones, ancient rhythms, Miles the pure. They listened for a few minutes, and then Nelson asked Bobby, “Do you want to know who she was?”

  “I thought she hasn’t been identified.”

  “I said Yuba County hasn’t identified her.”

  “But you have?”

  Nelson opened his briefcase and took out the first document. “We knew three things: Her name was Sally, she came from L.A., and she was born in San Francisco. That’s why I joined the LAPD, to get access to the right archives. Anyone can get a birth certificate for anybody, so this first document is a formality, and it gives us some important information. Her name was Sally Richfield, and she was
born in San Francisco, which is what she told us. This is her birth certificate.”

  He handed Bobby the stiff, formal paper that registered a live birth at San Francisco General Hospital on May 28th, 1947.

  “The rest is straightforward, really,” he said. “The only means of identification in this case is dental work. The county medical examiner has X rays of her teeth that he’s circulated statewide. A state forensics lab was able to approximate the date of death as between 1961 and 1965. The medical examiner’s circular arrived in Los Angeles two weeks ago, and a trainee clerk was sent to look through a warehouse full of old microfiche records of missing persons from that era. The clerk will find nothing because all the records are right here. I took them out of the files twenty years ago, about the same time Dean moved to Verona.”

  Nelson handed Bobby a sheaf of documents, bulky, old dental X-ray film in manila envelopes, official police reports, and brittle, gelatinous sheets of microfiche. The last document was the Yuba County medical examiner’s circular.

  “You sure you got them all?”

  “I think so. I can’t think of anything I overlooked. I got all the duplicates, too.”

  “So what this means is when they go looking for records, they won’t find anything.”

  “That’s the idea.”

  “So you’re home free.”

  “As far as Yuba County is concerned, they’ll never identify her.”

  “Unless she has family,” Bobby said. “Unless there’s someone who’s always been looking for her.”

  Charlie coughed, closed his eyes and thought of all the fishes in the sea.

  “Is that the ghost that haunts you?” Alex asked.

  “One of many,” Bobby said, studying the documents. “Her birth certificate lists a mother and father.”

  “Correct.”

  Nelson handed Bobby two death certificates.

  “Sally’s mother died in San Francisco in 1950 when Sally was three. Her father died in Los Angeles in 1962 when she was fourteen.”

  “An orphan.”

  “Yes. When her mother died, her father took her to Los Angeles to be raised by his mother in Manhattan Beach. Her grandma became ill with cancer in 1961 and couldn’t take care of her granddaughter. She died that year. The dad was out of the picture, a drunken bum—he died of cirrhosis of the liver—and Sally ended up in the care of the welfare department who placed her into a succession of foster homes. None of the foster fathers could keep his hands off her, and she ran away from three foster homes. The last foster family reported her missing two months after she left because they wanted the checks to keep coming. They never would have reported her if a social worker hadn’t shown up for a routine check. They told her she disappeared the previous day when in fact she’d been gone for two months. I can’t account for the first month before we met her. I can only guess.”

  “So who’s left? Friends?”

  “Nobody, Bobby. Only us. She had just about the worst luck a human being could have. He mother was a hooker and a junkie and her father was an alcoholic car thief in and out of prison. Her grandmother was an illiterate Okie who came to California in 1935 and worked in an aircraft factory for twenty-five years as a bolt inspector. When she retired, she was almost blind. She couldn’t control her granddaughter. Sally was a wannabe surfer girl. She took care of the boys on the beach, and they took care of her.”

  Taking that statement with a grain of salt, Bobby said, “So she had friends. Beach people. Surfers.”

  “Maybe you could say that, and maybe not. If she’d had real friends, I don’t think she would’ve tried to hitchhike to San Francisco. She hung out on the beach and stayed for a few days with whoever would take her in. The first two foster homes she ran away from reported her right away. The school authorities declared her a truant, yada yada, and this one social worker knew how to find her on the beach. The last time she was shocked to learn that no one had seen Sally for two months. The surfers were pretty loose, but they remembered Sally. The missing person report was filed on July 22, 1963, a month after we encountered her.”

  “The social worker. What about her?”

  “I know her,” Nelson said. “She’s a lovely old lady who’s long retired. As a matter of fact, she’s a card player, a blue-haired demon who plays in Gardena. It’s a small world.”

  “That’s it? Nobody else?”

  “Just us, Bobby.”

  “Jesus,” Charlie said. “What time is it?”

  “Almost two,” Nelson said.

  “So what do you want to do?” Bobby asked. “Lay it out.”

  “First we have to find out what really happened,” Nelson said. “I’m pretty sure we have five different versions sitting at this table. We need to sort it out.”

  “And then?”

  Alex broke his rule and performed his signature card trick, fanning a deck in which every card becomes the jack of diamonds. He winked and did it again and the entire deck was the queen of hearts.

  Alex laughed. “Then we play cards. Even better, we play cards first and sort it all out later.”

  20

  Dean hopped into the boat and glanced at Bobby who looked away, muttering, “There goes the game.”

  “We can still play,” Alex said.

  “Play what?” Bobby sneered. “Pin the tail on the donkey?”

  “She’s stranded,” Nelson said earnestly. “It wouldn’t be right to leave her here, a girl like that. She’ll get in trouble.”

  Gazing down at Sally who stood on the dock smiling up at him like a teenaged vixen, Bobby said quietly, “Let’s go inside and talk this over.”

  Below, Bobby took a seat at the table and waited until the others filed into the cramped galley.

  “Nelson is right,” he began. “She’ll get in trouble because she is trouble. You guys don’t see it. She’s got you all excited, thinking you’re gonna get laid like this was some dirty movie gang bang. You know what? That’s bad news because if it happens you’ll feel lousy and dirty and cheap. It isn’t worth it. And the next thing you know she’s running to the cops and we’re in jail.”

  Charlie snickered and Alex rolled his eyes. Across the river a flock of coots thrashed river water into foam and lifted into the sky. Unseen, a train rumbled in the distance. The gas man had disappeared.

  “If we don’t take her,” Alex said, “we’ll spend the rest of our lives wondering what might have happened if we did.”

  “Nothing is going to happen,” Bobby said.

  “You never know.”

  “I’ll tell you what,” Bobby said, suddenly inspired. “Swear you won’t touch her, and she can come on the boat. Otherwise, I’m going back to San Francisco right now.”

  “She’s just a broad,” Dean said. “Maybe we can have some fun. I’m the captain. It’s up to me.”

  “Shut up, Dean,” Bobby snapped. “You’re the boat driver, not the captain. We don’t have a captain. You swear to leave her alone, or I’m gone.”

  “Who are you all of a sudden, our daddy?” Dean demanded. “I think you just want her for yourself.”

  “You swear, or as far as I’m concerned this trip is over,” Bobby insisted.

  “What if she touches us?” Nelson said.

  “You’re not gonna let that happen, Nelson. That’s what.”

  “You’re serious,” Charlie said.

  “Damned straight. We’ve done a lot of shit together, all of us, but taking advantage of some girl who’s lost and scared and alone is over the line.”

  “She doesn’t look scared to me,” Dean said. “She looks hot to trot.”

  “Bobby’s right,” Alex said, placing his hand over his heart. “Besides, we all saw how she looked at him. There’s nothing to lose. I swear.”

  “Me, too,” Charlie said with a little laugh. “You know I’m not going to touch her.”

  “Okay, let’s do the right thing,” Nelson agreed.

  “Dean?”

  “Oh, man, it ain’t no big deal
,” Dean said. “All right. Cross my heart and hope to die. Ha! What a hoot.”

  “You better mean it, you big son of a bitch, or I’ll have your ass.”

  “I’d like to see you try. Who is this guy?”

  “He’s just being Bobby,” Alex said. “Humor him.”

  Bobby drummed his fingers on the table, fatigued by the constant play of threats and counterthreats. They’d done as he’d asked, yet he considered packing his gear and taking a hike anyway. Something had clicked in his mind and he saw his friends in a new light, as overgrown children with trashy minds and overactive hormones. As pals, a royal flush, they’d run their course and it was time to move on. In a few weeks he’d be in Berkeley strolling through Sather Gate and pitting his wits against the big brains on Telegraph Avenue. If he bolted, he’d have to hitchhike to San Francisco and explain to his parents why he was there—it wasn’t gonna happen. Maybe it would be all right. Maybe the girl would behave and allow the boys to act like gentlemen. He picked up a deck and began shuffling while the others trooped back up on deck.

  “Hey!” he heard Dean shouting to Sally, still on the dock. “You coming?”

  Sally grabbed her suitcase and radio and scrambled onto the Toot Sweet before the boys could change their minds. By teasing them to get aboard, she’d created a ticklish situation. She knew what “You won’t regret it” meant to them and hoped she didn’t regret having said it, but after one look at Bobby she’d made up her mind to say anything to get on the boat. It had happened so fast, out of the blue, but once she was on the deck, theatrically patting her chest and catching her breath, she saw the boys were merely boys, a species she understood. They were close, one girl and four boys standing in the compact stern of the boat, close enough for her to smell beer on their breath. She made them nervous.

  “I’m dealing,” Bobby shouted from the cabin, and that’s when Sally noticed the tattoos. In 1963, an era of crumbling conservatism when tattoos on middle-class youth were almost unheard of symbols of rebellion, she guessed their defiance was only skin deep.

  “You guys are really nice to take me along. I won’t get in anybody’s way.”