“I had a chance to go on the road with the guy I told you about. I’m driving him, helping out. We’re in San Francisco.”
She seemed to let that settle in for a moment. “That’s great.”
“Is it?”
“Of course it is.”
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.” He could see the gray bedsheet, the thin column of cigarette smoke, the cold coffee curdling beside her on the nightstand. “I really am glad for you. Call me soon.”
“Mom,” he said, but she’d already hung up.
Have an adventure, Richard had said. This sounded like a good idea in theory, but impossible in practice. He was already overwhelmed by the city, and a distressingly large part of him craved the dark sanctuary of home, the brooding silence of his bedroom. In the distance, the water of the bay sparkled, as though it had gold coins scattered across it. He walked toward it for lack of any other destination. Getting closer, he was increasingly surrounded by hordes of tourists, like walking into a hovering globe of gnats. He caromed off the large leader of a large clan of large tracksuited Germans, whose large blond head remained lowered to his tiny phone. When he finally reached the retaining wall by the bay, the water—so beautiful from an elevated distance—was oily and rank with seagull shit and the smell of dead fish. Ersatz shacks set up near the water sold crabmeat sandwiches for fourteen bucks a pop. An authentic black man in sunglasses and a fedora played Mississippi blues through a tiny battery-powered amp for a crowd of overreverent tourists.
When Vance was ten, his father had taken him to Seattle, parking the car by the waterfront. Vance had never been that far away from Spillman before and still vividly remembered his shock at seeing the skyline and buildings and the waves crashing into Puget Sound. He was scandalized by the thought that, while he’d been growing up in the eastern woods, this city had always been a few hours down the road. His excitement was quickly tempered when he realized his father—as was miserably predictable—had no plan and no money. They had loitered around by the waterfront and eventually shuffled hungrily through Pike Place Market, where they were mistaken for a nomadic fishmonger père et fils by a family of French Canadian tourists inquiring after saumon frais.
Now, he twisted his tall, narrow shoulder to the throng surrounding the man’s performance and cut back sideways through the crowd like a parrying fencer. Up on Market, the masses dispersed again; some stubborn cloud seemed to follow suit, and the sun came fully out for the first time since he’d left the hotel. As it warmed his upturned face, he realized how cold he’d been. The upper reaches of the buildings he passed were lit by the sun, their windows aflame as though anointed by celestial truth. Sunlight filtered through the buildings to his left, creating a golden path, which he followed.
As he wandered, guided only by a desire to remain in the shifting grids of warm sunlight, he noticed a girl in front of him. She was consistently about a half block away, a slight person wearing oversize white tennis shoes and a jeans skirt and some kind of zebra-print halter that exposed the top vertebrae of her narrow back. He might not have noticed her if it hadn’t been for her hair, which was short and messy and dyed an emphatic red. Not the brick red or magenta punk that daring girls at his high school and college had favored, but a bright, coppery auburn that might have looked natural if it hadn’t been for her fawn complexion. She seemed to be walking in the light as well, so Vance just followed the head of bright red hair as it moved along like the cartoon bouncing ball, past Korean delis and pizza shoppes and bar after bar, and here teenagers smoking cigarettes looking mildly dangerous and there a businessman talking into his phone as though it was a walkie-talkie, and he became so fixated on the girl and on following her, and the pleasant yet contradictory sensations of mindless motion and mindful pursuit, engaged somehow in a purpose he didn’t yet fully understand, that it took him an extra second to understand what had happened when she was hit by a car.
———
Thirty blocks north and three stories up, Richard had managed to locate San Francisco’s NPR affiliate station, in a little room that looked more like an auxiliary storage space than an on-air studio. Cardboard boxes and an array of Cold War–era radio technology and related detritus partially blocked the door. The interviewer was a professional woman in her midforties, wearing business slacks and a tailored jacket, with a serious yet warm demeanor. The interviewee was an unprofessional man, early fifties, wearing polyester leisure slacks, with an unserious yet cold demeanor. Also a half-bombed demeanor, as he’d been unable to resist marking the moment with one more quick drink at the bar beneath the studio. Or “marking the moment,” as he’d thought about it, sitting in the bar, with finger quotes around the phrase in his head because, one, what moment was he marking? And two, he marked every moment nowadays. He needed to try not marking a moment—now, that would really make it stand out.
Susan—to the best of his memory, that was the interviewer’s name—said, “Today, on Cool Breeze, we have Richard M. Lazar. Mr. Lazar’s memoir, entitled Without Leave, came out last year and has been receiving a lot of notice. Thank you for coming, Mr. Lazar.”
“Thank you, Susan.”
“Mary.”
“Sorry.”
“Okay. So, Richard, without giving anything away, this book describes your experience going AWOL from the army during Vietnam.”
“Deserting, actually.”
“I’m sorry, what’s the difference?”
“AWOL is when you get too drunk on a weekend furlough and miss your plane back. Desertion is more serious and involves intent. Separation versus divorce.”
“The title’s misleading then.”
“Yeah, I think the publisher thought Deserter would sound unsympathetic. Without Leave is snappier, too, I guess.”
“Were you worried at all about publishing this?”
“Why?”
“Well, people finding out you’d deserted, or gone AWOL, for one.”
“No, I wasn’t worried.”
“Did your family know what had happened? Had you told your wife?”
“My wife knew I’d gotten a general discharge halfway through my tour, that there had been a little trouble. She didn’t know quite how bad, but I’m not embarrassed about it. At this point, I’m unembarrassable, especially about things that happened four decades ago.”
“But you hadn’t told her what happened?”
“Not the whole story, anyway.”
“Why not?”
“I was probably too embarrassed.” The interviewer shifted in her chair, and Richard relaxed into his. He wished he didn’t enjoy it so much when people disliked him. If he didn’t, he might not be disliked by so many people, which would probably have some advantages. “I guess the honest answer is that I’ve spent a long time trying to figure out what happened, and I wanted to get it straight with myself before anyone else.”
“Without spoiling the book, you also seem to assert war crimes. Was there a concern about libel or the military’s response?”
“Well, first of all, the names have all been changed, so no one’s getting libeled. Also, I don’t know if it’s an assertion of war crimes. The army gave Endicott a Bronze Star for distinguished service. It’s a moral assertion, maybe, but since when does the military care about that?”
She shuffled her notes and said, “I wonder if you could talk a little bit about it. I mean, obviously the memoir covers your time in Vietnam and a good amount of your childhood as well. Could you describe the path that brought you here?”
“Here where? Here, this studio with you?”
“If you want to think of it that way, sure.”
“Okay, I don’t know. When I was a little kid, I think we had two books in the house—the Bible and The Joy of Cooking. Then my parents split, and my aunt Polly took me in for a while to live with her and her two kids. She’d been a teacher and a librarian, back when libraries were still called lending libraries. Her living room had floor-to-ceiling bookca
ses, I’d never seen anything like it. She was even trying to write a novel for a while, which for a single southern mother at the time was pretty unusual. I can still remember her after dinner, sitting at the kitchen table in front of an old Remington with a cigarette burning in a saucer. Never wrote anything, I don’t think, but still. If I have a literary impulse, that’s where it came from. She has a lot to answer for.
“I went to college for a year, dropped out, and my number immediately got called, perfect timing, as always. After the army, I worked construction all over California, taking notes for a book idea I had. Just roamed around, you know, being an asshole moron—excuse me—a dumb kid, in this pair of electric-blue bellbottoms. I wish somebody had been nice enough to tell me not to wear those things, although I should have known. Anyway, I was working on a high-rise in Fresno when I met my wife, my ex-wife. My first ex-wife. She was an assistant professor at Fresno State, and she encouraged me to go back to school. I took night classes and got my degree.
“I was still working high-rises. One day, someone, I never found out who, dropped an eight-pound wrench on me from three stories up, and I fell three more. When I came to, I was in a half-body cast, two broken legs and a broken pelvis. I started writing seriously during the six months I was on disability. Eileen encouraged me, said she thought I had some talent. I wrote a few chapters while my hipbone was setting. I thought they were pretty good. I sent a couple of them out to agents and publishers and magazines and didn’t hear a word back. It was like releasing them from the airlock of a spaceship into outer space.
“But I got the taste for it and kept going after I got healed up and went back to working construction. I wrote a little at night, when I had the time. I finished the first novel that year, 1975, sent it out, and got an agent, and he got it published. It all happened so easily.”
“Skyscraper Blues, which put you on the map.”
“It wasn’t a bestseller or anything, but it turned a few heads. Got written up in the Times and so on. People were saying, Here’s this new kid, Richard Lazar, he might be a real guy. A dude, even. I quit construction for the next year or so, working on the next novel. Eileen was pregnant. This moment when all these wonderful things were about to happen. That was probably the best year of my life.”
Mary looked down at a note card. “The Cassandra Letters came out in 1978.”
“Had you heard of it?”
“Honestly, no.”
“No one has. It’s been out of print since it got printed. It might have been out of print before it got printed. Talk about anticlimactic. I don’t know what I expected when it came out, but it wasn’t to go back to rigging elbow joists.”
“And then The Blivet, in 1981.”
“My agent at the time told me it was going to be a hit. It was going to be the one—like, get ready for the big time, put some champagne on ice. Then it came out, and nothing. Just radio silence from the world. I should have known better that time around, but I didn’t. That was devastating. And, you know, I wrote two more novels after that. Tennis in Golgotha I wrote in the mideighties, when my first marriage was ending, and I was kind of a mess. It’s not a great book. Then, uh, Birdmen of the Antarctic, which came out in 1993 on a little press. I got three copies of it. That was devastating, too. They were all devastating.”
“When did you start work on this book?”
“I’d been screwing around with it forever, little odds and ends, but I never thought I’d do anything serious with it. Then my second marriage ended. She wasn’t wild about my work, anyway. It got in the way of us playing golf and rearranging her furniture. I moved out to the desert. Suddenly I had nothing to do but work on it, so that’s what I did.”
“Why memoir?”
“I don’t know. I’d written about it for a long time, little pieces, but never put it all together as one piece of narrative. It felt like something I should do, even though I didn’t really want to. I wanted to, you know, drink gin and throw darts down at my local bar. But anyway, I made myself do it and sent it to my agent. I didn’t hear from him for two years, during which time I figure I’m done, that’s it. Then he calls out of the blue to tell me they’re picking it up. Then a year later, it’s getting good reviews, it’s selling, for some reason.”
“And here you are.”
“Here I am, yeah. Big success.”
She smiled, turned a card, and cocked her head at him, signaling a change of gears. “Do you see your book, at least partially, as a commentary on current events?”
“How so?”
“Well, obviously there’s a groundswell of mistrust against the government right now—against the Iraq invasion and the motivations for it and our continued presence there and in Afghanistan, and just a general sense that there’s been a failure of moral leadership. In a way, you’ve come forward at a very opportune time, telling a personal story of questioning the military and opting out, so to speak.”
“That makes it sound pretty calculated.”
“I don’t mean it was calculated, but it clearly has cultural relevance right now. That’s part of why it’s selling.”
“Is it? I don’t know why it’s selling, to be honest with you.”
A young man with a mustache walked by the studio window, carrying three coffees in a cardboard cup holder. Who was that young man, what did he want, who was he in love with? All very valid questions, Richard thought, more valid than the trifling details of his own story, which had already mostly been told. He was struck by an enormous sense of his own irrelevance, and a sense of the interview as an exercise in self-importance, not to mention the need to fill up airtime with something. He said, “But to answer your question, it’s not meant to be a commentary on anything. It’s just something I wrote in my trailer, out in the desert, to get some things straight for myself. I don’t care about current events or politics or what piece-of-shit country we’re presently fucking up and dying in for no reason. Current events can go to hell. I wrote this thing for me.”
———
The car, a souped-up Honda Accord with a spoiler and tinted windows, stopped in the smoking tracks of its own burnt rubber. It settled with satisfaction back into its haunches like an animal fresh from the kill. The hood was lightly dented from the impact, but it was already comprehensively scarred and dinged. A cracked bumper, a missing side mirror, a paintless gash running the length of one crumpled side like a C-section scar—this was a vehicle with a long history of running into things. It took off down the street and disappeared, to a chorus of outraged yells from the gathered witnesses.
The girl had been thrown to the sidewalk and lay very still; a small crowd of people, Vance among them, clustered around her. There seemed to be no doubt she was dead until her eyes flicked open, and with the aid of a nearby NO PARKING sign, she struggled to her feet. No one spoke—there was a feeling in the air that talking might break the magic, the collective wish that had levitated the girl and now prevented her from collapsing in a pool of blood. She leaned against the pole and moaned lightly. A fresh strawberry swelled on her right jawline, and a trickle of blood ran out of her nose, which she wiped off with the back of a dirty wrist. The man nearest, a fat guy clutching a forgotten backpack, said, “Are you okay?”
She moaned again and then pushed off from the pole, between two plaid-skirted schoolgirls, agog, who parted for her like a pair of saloon doors, and she stumbled away in the same direction as before. People looked at one another, shook their heads, said Jesus, shrugged, and moved on—relieved in part that the girl was okay but mostly that they didn’t have to do anything or further interrupt their day. Vance alone remained at the spot; he found his own arm supporting him against the same street sign. She was small in the distance now, a block away, turning left. He followed.
———
Not much later, the sun had dipped out of sight and taken any lingering warmth with it. The wind, previously content to gust and flurry, now blew through the streets with mythic force; Vance had to
drop his head and slant his long body to meet its wrath. The few people he passed were pitched at the same angle and, like him, clutched insufficient outerwear around their necks. A woman across the street lost her balance and fell over, legs splayed sideways like a dog in repose. For a moment, she sat there, framed by the glowing chartreuse of a Midori ad behind her, seemingly reluctant to get back up and do further battle with the wind.
The girl was only a few feet ahead of him, yet he couldn’t bring himself to stop her. She felt her head periodically and spat on the pavement, little pools with ruby-red blood suspended in them. Vance fingered the bills in his pocket; as they’d walked, the surrounding neighborhood had gradually grown seedier, and seedier still. A bearded man crouched on a stoop, his pinwheel eyes spun by the relentless air. Trash skipped gaily past Vance’s legs. There weren’t any visible restaurants or bars, and what storefronts there were seemed to be either closed or else in the business of selling strange items: one window showcased what looked like bootleg DVDs of pan-ethnic, midriff-baring child stars singing into oversize mics; the next featured mannequins bent in sinister postures over and around wooden wheelchairs and obsolete medical devices. No one was around. It felt as though they had entered a wormhole and emerged in some shattered Eastern European nation during a government-imposed curfew. Without warning, the girl had turned and was facing him in a pugilistic stance, one foot in front of the other.
“What the fuck, man?”
Vance put his hands up in surrender.
She said, “You’ve been following me.”
“No, I haven’t.”
“Yeah, you have. I’ve seen you in windows for the last twenty blocks.”
“I wanted to make sure you were okay.”
She squinted at him and rubbed the lump on the side of her face. “You saw that car hit me?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I’m fine. You can fuck off now.”
“I can take you to a hospital.”
She laughed. “Hold up, let me see if I have my insurance card on me.”
The Grand Tour Page 11
