by Mark Joseph
“Wait for what? The cops?”
Breathing hard, Nelson bent over to catch his breath, his words coming in spurts. “No cops … No one … Nothing … at the other end … of the wire … It’s part of our … game … goofy stunts … I do something crazy every year … I guess this was the wrong year for this. I’m sorry.”
Teetering on the brink of control, hands clenching into fists, Bobby fought a temptation to strike. A disturbing vision of Nelson bleeding profusely onto the white marble floor splashed across his mind. He let it fade. Across the lobby, a lone clerk behind the registration desk was watching.
Standing up straight, Nelson recognized the menace in Bobby’s eyes and sensed he’d pushed his old friend too far. Raising his hands, he took a step back, repeating, “It was only a stunt, a practical joke.”
“A joke?”
“Yeah.”
“On me?”
“On everyone. The guys didn’t know. They were just as surprised as you. Look, I knew it was going to be tense during the game, so I thought I’d create a little fun, you understand? Help lighten up. Looks like it backfired.”
The notion of the game being recorded sent a shiver of revulsion down Bobby’s spine. A tape could damage them all. Alex had admitted using his security clearance for personal ends; Nelson had described overstepping his authority as a cop; Dean had talked about his marijuana business; and all of them, including Charlie, had talked about Shanghai Bend. Would someone intending to bug the room be so inept that he’d cause a short-circuit in a light fixture? No. Nelson was telling the truth. It had to be a joke. It was too stupid to be anything else. Bobby felt his fear and anger drop away like a suit of wet clothes, leaving him drained and annoyed but no longer on the brink of violence. In spite of an adrenaline edge he wanted to laugh. He lit a cigarette, drawing a scowl from the clerk.
“Some joke,” he said, shaking his head. “I had a good hand.”
“The breaks,” Nelson mumbled.
“I haven’t moved so fast in years.”
Every sound echoed across the lobby. Phone to his ear, the clerk was still watching them. Nelson scuffed his Nikes on the marble floor creating an eerie screech.
“You used to do crazy stunts all the time,” Nelson said, revealing his nervousness by speaking low and fast. “How d’you think I learned? You put a smoke bomb in the school vents and cleared the building so you wouldn’t have to take a history test, remember?”
“We’re not high school kids anymore, Nelson.”
“Sure, and I know it’s foolish, but once a year we act like we are. I suppose it’s our pathetic way of dealing with”—Nelson paused before adding—“the past.”
Bobby choked on a guffaw, thinking his old friends dealt with the past the same way he did, by not dealing with it, ignoring it, denying it, pushing it to the far corners of their minds. They hadn’t learned to live with it any better than he had.
“With practical jokes and the game and the bullshit, we’ve been dancing around the past all night,” Bobby said, puffing his Winston and sending a cloud of gray smoke toward the elegant ceiling. “The game isn’t going anywhere.”
“Excuse me, sir!” The clerk was gesturing frantically from the desk. “There’s no smoking in the—”
Bobby turned away from Nelson and spun through the revolving doors onto the sidewalk. Expecting bright lights, big city, he found a ghost town. The bars had closed at two and the city, debauched and spent, awaited tomorrow’s hangover. With stomach churning and sweat running down his back, Bobby rocked on his soles, heel and toe, heel and toe, breathing the fresh night air and furiously struggling to slow his thoughts.
What really happened to Sally? The discovery of her grave changed nothing except the psyches of his old friends. They were spooked. The documents, real or forged, made no difference to him. What did make a difference was knowing the boys from Noë Valley had had thirty-two years to prepare for his return, a lifetime to refine a script, but Nelson’s stunt had thrown a monkey wrench into their carefully crafted agenda.
Nelson had followed him outside and stood near the doors, hands in pockets. Watching him, Bobby gained control of his thoughts, if not his emotions, and his cunning emerged from the shadows. He had no doubt they planned to fuck him over, but there was a chance Nelson would let slip a telling revelation if he prolonged their separation from the others. The old Nelson, the kid he used to know, fearless Crazy Nelson, had been a loyal friend, a genuine sidekick who called him Kimosabe. That had been great, but he needed to know if the new, badge-and-gun toting Nelson was capable of screwing up his life with cops and district attorneys. Or had the old Nelson betrayed him on the Feather River? Those were the real questions.
A lone taxi, engine idling, waited for a fare in the hotel cab stand. Bobby bent over to peer in, hoping to see Driver. Alas, an old man in a flat cap sat at the wheel.
“Anything open around here?” Bobby asked.
“No, sir, nothing. What’re you looking for, sport?”
“What about Twenty-fourth and Church?”
“You want to go to Noë Valley? That’s way ’cross town.”
“I’m glad you know where it is. What’s open out there?”
The driver thought for a moment and said, “An all-night doughnut shop. Favorite of the police.”
“Perfect.”
Bobby opened the car door and slid into the back seat. Nelson walked over and looked down at Bobby sitting in the cab.
“So is this it?” the policeman asked. “No good-bye? No handshake? No nothin’, Kimosabe?”
“Why should I stay? I can go home and wait for a knock on the door.”
“There won’t be a knock on your door, Bobby, not now, not ever, but we have a lot more to tell you. We’re just getting started.”
“You want to talk? Okay. Let’s take a ride.”
“What about the game?”
“The game will keep,” Bobby said. “Get in the cab, Nelson.”
22
A hotel repairman happily pocketed a twenty and exited the suite, leaving a new fixture that illuminated the table with the familiar cone of light.
Dean had passed out and was snoring loudly on the living room couch, Charlie lay on a bed in one of the bedrooms watching a rerun of I Love Lucy, and Alex sat at the card table playing solitaire. He laid out a hand and immediately began to cheat, flipping over a buried deuce of clubs. The William Tell Overture played on the stereo.
Charlie shouted over the music, “How much will Nelson tell him?”
“Hopefully enough to get him back,” Alex shouted in return.
“Dean almost blew it, you know.”
“It really doesn’t matter, Charlie,” Alex said, dropping his voice to a whisper. “In the end, it’s just a card game.”
23
A king of spades painted on the door identified the taxi as King Kab 209. The night had turned balmy, sensuous, fragrant with jasmine. They rode in silence, Nelson wisely keeping quiet. Bobby opened the window and let the wind evaporate the sweat on his neck. In the distance the deep bass of a foghorn sounded, and he could feel lifetimes rolling in with the great Pacific fog bank. Ah, God, he sighed, the memories searing his mind’s eye, warm evenings in Saigon, a silky night on the Feather River, freezing winters at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin, images dissolving one into the next and superimposed on dark streets that held their own vast stores of secrets.
Bobby knew what terrified the boys from Noë Valley—like revealing tells in a poker game their fear announced itself in blazing lights from the dark marquee of the Orpheum Theater at Eighth and Market—The Secret of Shanghai Bend—he saw it on the towering billboards that lined the board boulevard—Thrills Galore Based on a True Story—he read it in the ads on the back of the taxicab’s front seat—The Curse of the Queen of Hearts—the lurid promotional copy of a dime novel, a B-movie, a TV special of the week. The truth shall make you free. Yea, brother, free from what? Bobby had stepped into the abyss of freedom lon
g ago, and he’d embraced his freedom like his uniform. The boys didn’t have a clue; they were like civilians or slaves or robots or clones: dumbbells without a fucking clue.
Twenty-fourth Street was a ten minute ride across the deserted city. As the cab moved away from downtown, the slick new buildings on Market Street gave way to Victorians with bay windows and gaudy false fronts, the familiar city of Bobby’s childhood. Rattling over the streetcar tracks on Church street triggered his oldest memories, childhood rides on the J car to explore the mysteries of the fishwharf where Charlie’s father operated a fleet of boats, racing around in Dean’s Impala, picnics in Dolores Park, making out with girls on dark side streets in the fog—benign, innocent, sentimental memories that Bobby had quashed for many years and was reviving now, bitterly, he realized, in order to pry a secret out of Nelson Lee.
They were deep in the city now, miles from the Palace Hotel and the places tourists visit. As the cab climbed the hill alongside verdant Dolores Park, in the shadows of a pedestrian bridge over the streetcar tracks Bobby caught a glimpse of furtive movement, and his infallible junkie’s radar detected dope and dope dealers. The innocence of his thoughts vanished in an instant.
Nelson saw the same flash of watchcaps and hooded eyes in the bushes. The policeman smirked and chuckled. It wasn’t his beat.
“Do you ever come back here?” Bobby asked as the taxi crested Liberty Hill and dropped into the wide ravine on the east side of Twin Peaks called Noë Valley.
“Sure. My mom still lives here.”
“This is us, Nelson. This is where we come from. These streets are the paths of our souls.”
“If you believe that, why didn’t you ever come back?”
“You really want to know? It was because I was going to show Sally the city, and since she never made it, there was nothing for me here. I couldn’t come back and go to Berkeley, just across the bridge, because that was too close. When Sally was taken away, my life exploded. It sounds corny, but my heart was broken. I didn’t want to see anyone or talk to anyone or answer any questions. To tell you the truth, I wanted to run away and join the French Foreign Legion, but it was too far away. It was easier to enlist in the army, and that worked out fine. It got me far away.”
Nelson became very still in his corner of the back seat. The taxi arrived at 24th and Church, a well-lit corner whose cluster of shops was closed except for the doughnut shop and a laundromat across the street. A black and white patrol car was parked in the bus stop in front of the doughnut shop. Inside, two uniformed cops, the only customers, occupied the rear table.
The meter read twelve bucks. “Can you wait fifteen minutes?” Bobby asked the driver, handing him two twenties. “Get yourself a cup of coffee.”
Bobby got out of the cab, waited for Nelson, and led him across the street to the laundromat. It was empty and they were alone.
Shiny new washers and dryers surrounded a large folding table in the center of the bright and spiffy laundry. Cowboy boots clicking on the floor, fingers popping in a quick rhythm, Bobby walked around the table peering into the dryers until he came up with a faded green terrycloth towel. Suddenly, he twisted it into a rope and snapped it at Nelson like they were kids in a locker room. Whap!
“Hey!” Nelson protested.
“You people are fucking with me, you know that?” Whap whap. Bobby advanced and Nelson retreated around the table. “I hate being played for a sucker, you know what I mean?” Whap. “It pisses me off.”
Bobby stopped his mock attack, wiped his face and neck with the freshly laundered towel and tossed it into a washing machine. Grinning at Nelson, he fed quarters into the appliance and started the cycle.
“It all comes out in the wash, hey, Nelson?”
“You forgot soap.”
“I forget a lot of things,” Bobby quipped. “I have a very selective memory.”
He walked over to the windows and peered across the street at the doughnut shop. The taxi driver was sitting two tables away from the cops.
“Would you rather talk in front of those cops?” Bobby asked.
“Pass.”
“I thought so. You know, I don’t think there was a doughnut shop there when we were kids. It was a diner. I remember the grocery store next door because, as we used to say, it was the corner store that wasn’t because the diner was on the corner. I’m pretty sure it was a diner, a little restaurant with a counter. Care for a doughnut, Nelson? I could go for a real greasy maple bar myself.”
“What do you want, Bobby? You hijacked me across town to our old neighborhood for what? A fit of nostalgia? I’m not sentimental. What are you looking for in a damned Laundromat of all places?”
“What do I want? What do I want? I don’t want anything. The question is what do you want? It’s three-thirty in the morning, nobody’s around, we’re on the old corner where we used to hang out. It’s a good place to come clean, don’t you think?”
“Come clean about what?”
“You guys are close to panic, Nelson, and it seems like you’re afraid of me. You can’t be afraid of anyone else because you’ve got that covered, according to you. Birth certificates, dental records, very impressive.”
“We thought we had everything covered at Shanghai Bend, but it got uncovered, didn’t it?”
“So what? Dean claimed that was inevitable. Why didn’t you leave me in peace? What difference does my being here make? I would have been content to live my life and live with what I live with.”
“Maybe you can live with it, Bobby, but not the rest of us. When it was all over and we had to come back without you, we had to lie and say we had a fight over the poker game and you took off. You just walked away and we had no idea where you were. You called your mother the next day and said you were joining the Army, and after that the lies generated more lies and they never stopped. We can’t live with that anymore.”
“Too bad. You have to play the hand you’re dealt.”
“That’s right, and we were dealt a wild card.”
“Me?”
“Yeah. You’re crazy. You’re a junkie and a drunk and a gambler and completely unpredictable.”
“Well, excuse me for stepping off the straight and narrow path of bullshit respectability. You don’t like it? Then jump off the fucking bridge, Nelson. This is not my problem.”
Tormented, unsure what to say because he felt responsible for the fate of everyone in the Enrico Caruso Suite, Nelson plunged his hands into his pockets and kicked at the floor.
“Look,” Bobby said. “This whole thing seems scripted which is fucked if everyone has seen the script except me.”
“That’s because we talk about Shanghai Bend every year, and you don’t. It’s new to you, this dredging up the past, going over every detail, trying to find out what happened.”
“And you think I know?”
“Do you?”
“I can guess.”
“Guesses aren’t good enough, Bobby.”
“What else is there?”
“You believe we killed her.”
“That’s right.”
“Well? What are you going to do about it?”
Bobby leaned back against a washing machine, flashed his charismatic grin, and lit a Winston. “You’ve got balls, Nelson, I’ll give you that. I think you know what happened. You’ve always known. I’ll tell you something. I had a few hours with a girl named Sally and that’s all there was, a few hours—I figured it out, thirteen hours and maybe thirty minutes, and during those few hours she changed me. She saw things I didn’t see, and she opened my eyes. She was like a drug and I became instantly addicted. I went to the moon, Nelson, to the galaxies. No shit. I painted the Mona Lisa and she was the model. Can you understand me? I loved her. Because of Sally, I became something different, but Nelson, Nelson, that was a long time ago. Sally was—like turning a page and everything suddenly changes from black and white to color. Then, after half a day, she was gone, but I was changed. I took something of her away a
nd that’s all of her there is. Your shitty pile of papers isn’t Sally. Resurrecting her is not my idea of fun especially when it’s done according to your agenda. Like the way you laid out documents, and Dean told his story, and Alex told his story. You planned it.”
“You’re damned right we planned it, but we’re not trying to do a number on your head. We’re not trying to get you into any kind of trouble. We want you to listen to what we have to say, and, yes, we’ve been planning what to say for thirty years. This is a trial, but it’s not you who’s in the dock, Bobby. Oh, no. It’s us. You’re the judge and jury.”
24
Little Eva’s “Loco-Motion” rocked out of Sally’s transistor radio, beaming a sexy top-forty beat over the placid waters of the Sacramento River. Sally knew the lyrics and the moves, and to Bobby’s amazement he was dancing like a choo-choo on the flying bridge of the Toot Sweet.
“See, you do it like this,” Sally instructed, elbows pumping like pistons, hips swaying like the little engine that could. “Come on, baby, chugga chugga chugga.”
Soon there’ll be touching, he thought; she’ll take my arm or rub her tits against me while she slides by in the confined space. With his head swimming upstream against a flood current of lust, he thought, Jesus, I gotta drive the boat.
“No more dancing,” he declared, gripping the wheel tightly. “Go back to your chair or we’re gonna have a shipwreck.”
Sally bumped him with her hip and said, “Oh-kay,” splitting the word into two long syllables. Bobby made her feel safe, and so with a smile and a playful salute, she settled into the chair to watch the river roll by.
In the late afternoon millions of bugs swarmed over the water, raising the fish which naturally multiplied the number of fishermen. Suddenly, guys in outboards sprouted like tules from the river, churning the water and casting lines into schools of shad. At the wheel, laughing and having a grand old time, Bobby waved cheerfully at passing boats and swatted at mosquitoes, often with the same motion.
