by John Raymond
Ben looked at the icon for a while as a rat skittered in the bushes and a grumbling homeless man wandered through, searching for cans. In the morning, Ben would come back and look at the bell again. Maybe he’d even go inside and join the tourists. It wasn’t that he had any great desire to see the Liberty Bell. It was only a hunk of cracked metal someone had put in a box. But if the Mission was truly happening, if the Mission was real, it was exactly the kind of false step that would throw the drones off his trail.
9
“So tell me about Oakland,” Aaron said again, but Grandpa Sam didn’t respond. He didn’t even bother shrugging this time, such was his disinterest in answering any more questions about Oakland and his life decades before Aaron’s birth. Much more interesting to him on this sunny, mild California morning were the oncoming freeway stripes and the gradual growth of a turquoise Corolla in the right lane as they gained on it and finally, roaringly, passed. Another half mile of I-5 rolled underneath before he sighed and continued his silent sitting.
Aaron didn’t try asking any more questions. For days he’d been making queries about the Oakland years and thus far had learned almost nothing. He’d established the basic window of his grandpa’s residency there, 1949 to 1959, or thereabouts, and he’d unearthed the name of one friend, Joe, but almost nothing else. No address, no photographs. He didn’t mind sticking to the subject—it wasn’t as if they had a lot of other topics to discuss—but the distinct lack of desire on his grandfather’s part to continue the interview was profound. Not that his grandfather knew an interview was occurring.
But eventually he got bored. “So. What part of town did you live in again?” he said.
The sound of the engine spinning softly under the hood mixed with the muffled moaning of the wind flowing over the windows and the low drone of the AC. This time it was Aaron who eventually sighed. Fuck it. He was really done with the interview now. For the next five hours he’d just let his grandfather sit there like a loaf of bread and stare unmolested at the flat expanses of soy or cabbage or whatever it was spreading infinitely to either side.
Bakersfield, sixty-one miles.
At least they were making decent time after the morning’s crawling start, he thought, what with all its last-minute packing and snacking and methodical locking of doors. The city streets had been brutally clogged, construction intersecting construction, but once they’d crossed the Santa Susannas, the highway had mercifully opened to twelve lanes, and for the past hour they’d been fairly flying across the open-air factory of the Central Valley, the feudal domain of Monsanto, Sysco, and all the titans of agribusiness. Stealing glances at the featureless land, home to generations of Mexican laborers manning the tractors and delivery trucks, and generations of Anglo overlords managing the Mexicans, Aaron spotted not a single living figure in sight.
Bakersfield, fifty-five miles.
What the miles were steadily filing down to, Aaron didn’t know. Soon enough they’d arrive in the East Bay, scene of his grandpa’s early American apprenticeship, where his grandfather was quite sure his old safe deposit box remained packed with gold, but the truth of that belief was still very much debatable.
The existence of the box itself was a fact; at least that much Aaron had ascertained. Over the past weeks, he’d made a few calls on his grandpa’s behalf, and he’d learned a little bit about the Bank of Oakland, if nothing else. The Bank of Oakland, which had at one time housed his grandfather’s savings account, no longer existed. It had made it only until 1986, at which point it had been eaten by Wells Fargo. Wells Fargo had in turn been eaten by Washington Mutual in 1999. And WaMu had been eaten not long ago by Chase, one of the few behemoths to survive the great meltdown that his elders had bequeathed to his generation. All of this Aaron had learned from a single phone call with a consumer watchdog agency in Walnut Creek. A quick street-image mapping had located the physical structure of the original Bank of Oakland, still standing on the corner of Broadway and Tenth, the signs over the door having just changed with each new owner.
Aaron had called the branch, thinking maybe, possibly, doubtfully, the antique safe deposit box was still somewhere on the premises. He’d been handed off to four different tellers, explaining his question over and over again, and eventually had discovered that the bank shipped old, delinquent safe deposit boxes to a central warehouse in Vallejo. He’d called that warehouse, they hadn’t found it, and a cursory search of his grandpa’s mail had uncovered the fact that he’d been paying the monthly fee all along. A call back to the downtown Oakland Chase branch had revealed that the branch did in fact house some old safe deposit boxes in the vault, maybe, possibly, doubtfully, left over from his grandfather’s day, and at this point the manager had gotten on the line and things had accelerated. The manager had confirmed that indeed one of those boxes did share a number with the key in his grandpa’s possession, 306, and it was maybe, possibly, doubtfully, the case that the key would open the old box. The very prospect of this had filled her, the manager, with almost orgasmic pleasure. It had been a bad decade for banks, PR-wise, and this tale of a loyal, Greatest Generation customer reuniting with his long-lost treasure had all the earmarks of a positive, community-oriented news item. She was ready to help however she could.
So the plan was to open the box on Friday. Today was Thursday, and if everything held steady, Aaron and his grandfather would arrive in Oakland by the late afternoon. They’d sleep in the Marriott Hotel kitty-corner from the bank, and in the morning they’d walk across the intersection and meet the manager, Jackie, who would kindly guide them into the vault. The key would be inserted. The lid would open. And . . . then what?
Aaron was not getting his hopes up. Sure, there was a box, and there might even be something inside the box, as his grandpa believed, but it was highly unlikely it was gold. More likely it’d be some old stamps or old passports or old shoelaces—who could say? His grandpa had been gruffly positive he had orange juice in the freezer this morning, and it’d turned out there was only a bag of frost-encrusted fish sticks.
But the adventure was still worth having, Aaron told himself again. He’d even brought along his video camera, loaded with fresh batteries, in hopes of taping his grandpa for the archives of the Shoah Foundation should the chance come up. Maybe they’d end up in the hotel room tonight, watching The Big Bang Theory, quaffing a few beers, and the conversation would turn in the right direction. Though more likely, considering his grandpa’s current torpor, the camera would remain in his backpack.
Bakersfield, forty-nine miles.
Aaron blew by a sixteen-wheeler and, gliding back into the right lane, he noticed a rank smell infiltrating the car. Grandpa Sam? No. That was a different kind of bad smell. This was a tangy, harsh, burned-earth odor, and it continued getting worse for miles, until the source became clear. It was the smell of manure. Many metric tons of manure, baking in the Central Valley heat.
Soon they were passing an industrial cattle farm spreading as far as the eye could see, and for the next ten full minutes, they were exposed to the sickening expanse of reddish-brown dirt, barbed wire, looming watchtowers, and thousands upon thousands of huddled cows awaiting slaughter. Field after field of interred animals. Families of cows crouched on the bald earth. No food. No nothing. Just dead brown earth and fence line. And, somewhere among the ugly, low-standing buildings, the charnel house itself. If Grandpa Sam noted the resemblance of the architecture to a concentration camp, he didn’t mention it, and neither did Aaron, but the smell of the cows’ shit followed them for another thirty miles north before fading.
They ate lunch at a place called the Bagel Café in the town of Dublin, half an hour east of Oakland, because his grandfather thought it would be simpler to stop outside the city and avoid the congestion. Aaron’s main intention was to eat something vegetarian after the horror show of the factory farm, but in the end he settled on Asian chicken salad, hunger outstripping conscience. His grandfather ordered a grilled-cheese sandwich and tom
ato soup and immediately got started on his occasional restaurant routine, which was harassing the waitress with his unanswerable questions and plying her with his Reader’s Digest–level jokes. Here they came: the one about the whorehouse on a mountaintop, the one about the dog and the cat in the graveyard. Aaron had heard all of them approximately eight hundred times.
This waitress was tolerant. The lunch rush was over, and this old man at table five at least offered a moment of rest. Grandpa Sam took the toleration as encouragement and kept slinging the chestnuts. “Do you want a tip, young lady?” A long, awkward pause. “Here’s a tip. Don’t bet on the horses.” “What’s black and white and black and white and black and white?” A long, puzzled pause. “A nun falling down the stairs.” Aaron tried to ignore the edge of confusion and mild contempt in the waitress’s eyes as his grandpa extolled her beauty and advised her to smile more because America was the freest country on earth. By the time he finally released her, under the displeased gaze of the Bagel Café’s manager, he’d even promised to show her his gold treasure on the way home from the bank.
“You’ll be here tomorrow, Kari?” he said. He was on a first-name basis with her now. “We’ll be here with the bag. We’ll show you.”
“Okay,” Kari said, backing away, and left Aaron’s grandpa to bask in the afterglow of his flirtation. Tunelessly, he began humming one of his old crooner songs and fondling the key to his safe deposit box, at which point Aaron decided he might as well capitalize on the rare light in his grandpa’s eyes by asking more questions.
“So you met Grandma in Oakland, is that right?” he said. He figured maybe if he piggybacked on the family lore, he could get some traction. The mention of his grandma was a sure way to extract at least a few pieties about her cooking and accounting skills.
“I did,” his grandpa said, still a-tingle. “That is true.”
“And you guys met at a dance, is that right?” Aaron said. “That’s what Mom said once.”
“At a dance, yes.”
“So yeah, tell me something about the dance.”
“What’s to tell?”
Aaron slid down in his seat, holding back the first thought that came to mind: How about anything, Grandpa? I’m asking you about your goddamn precious life here. The life you’re getting real close to the end of. So give me some details before it’s too late, how about that?
Instead, he said, “What music did they play?”
“Oh, I don’t remember the music,” his grandpa said.
“Come on, what kind of music? I don’t need to know the exact song. I just want to know what it was like.”
His grandpa stared at Kari, filling a napkin holder, his face too old and slack to express the leer that was probably somewhere in his head. Even at this age, the vain dream of getting laid wasn’t wholly extinguished. He barely seemed aware of Aaron’s presence, but he managed to mumble out an answer. “Jewish music.”
“So it was a Jewish dance?”
“The temple put on dances. Yes.”
“So, like what?” Aaron said, genuinely mildly interested now. “Klezmer? Is that what we’re talking about?”
“No, no, no.” His grandfather shook his head with some vigor, pleased his grandson knew the word “klezmer.” This, plus the residual high of the Kari banter, seemed to dislodge a granule of memory from somewhere deep in his skull, sending it through the long bottleneck of his nerves, all the way to his tongue.
“Big-band music,” he offered. “There were trumpets, trombones. They always had a bandstand.”
“Ah,” Aaron said. At last, they were getting somewhere. Trumpets and trombones. That painted something in his head. Suddenly he could dimly see something moving in the past: his youthful grandfather and grandmother standing on the edge of a dance floor in Oakland, horns gleaming, strings of lights shining, shadowy palms buried in the East Bay mist. He could see them standing there, talking but not dancing. That was still too much to conjure. The image was sketchy but enticing and brought more questions to mind. What were the first words they’d said to each other? What were they wearing? Sadly, all the rich, fine-grained, sense-memory details, the flashes of hot life itself, were lost to the ages.
“I didn’t know big-band music was Jewish,” Aaron said.
“Of course it is. Benny Goodman. He’s Jewish.”
Aaron laughed. It was true. He’d thought about this before: all music was Jewish music, wasn’t it? Gene Simmons was Jewish. David Lee Roth was Jewish. Lou Reed was Jewish. The Beastie Boys were Jewish. His grandpa’s big-band sympathies confirmed the thesis again.
He wanted to extract more information in this vein, but the food was coming out, transported in the hands of his grandpa’s angel, Kari. They’d made some progress, though, established a new line of inquiry, and it wasn’t as though his grandpa was going to start painting an oil picture of those bygone nights in Eisenhower’s Oakland. He wasn’t, at this late date, going to transform into some raconteur.
They were back on the road within the hour, and almost immediately they hit the outskirts of Oakland, the tangle of highways all ending, confusingly, in the suffix “-80.” This final leg took only a few minutes, but his grandfather was fast asleep by the time the off-ramp to downtown swung into view. Aaron parked on the side street near the Marriott and let his grandpa snooze awhile, zoning out on the low clouds seething over the rooftops, testing the air’s ocean brine. Downtown Oakland wasn’t much to look at, he discovered. It was basically a bus mall, home to a few dozen methadone addicts bargaining their last dollars back and forth.
“I need some money, man, or I won’t get my medicine.”
“You can’t have it, man. I got to pay my rent.”
“Come on, baby, tomorrow my check comes.”
Aaron pulled out his earbuds and tracked down Benny Goodman on his phone. He landed immediately on a YouTube clip of the song “Sing, Sing, Sing” and opened the window to find a performance that looked pulled from an old detective movie. Benny and his band were in a tropical nightclub, laying the mood for the first make-out session with the buxom moll, or something like that. Aaron gave it a try, listening tentatively at first, worried it was only cheese, but soon with curiosity and even delight, riding the swinging, thumping party number into the era of his grandpa’s youth. The music was just cartoonishly fun, the horns bending and swaying, rising and punching their golden, brassy blasts, the clarinet solo slinky and sophisticated. The drumming was truly wild. The guy looked like a sex criminal, with his wolfish, hunchback style, his arms and his spine all out of sync. “Swing” was the right word, all right. To gaze out at modern-day Oakland with that soundtrack in his ears was truly bizarre, the shabby city suddenly shot with sex and optimism. The horns ricocheted over the empty walls, the rolling drums clattered down the littered street. What abundance! The buildings and buses and trees were suddenly strutting all over town. Aaron wasn’t sure he’d ever realized quite how ballsy the old music was.
He listened to the song twice and then checked the vintage: 1937. Another quick search confirmed his dark hunch: 1937, the very year Buchenwald opened its gates. In Europe, the nightmare was boiling, and this was the sound of America’s Jew jazzman. How those worlds could share the same planet was beyond him.
When his grandpa woke up, they checked into the hotel. Since it was too early for dinner, they took a walk around Lake Merritt. The park was a riot of joggers, skateboarders, bicyclists, tai chi’ers, the whole Eden of Oakland on display, and the smell of weed wafting from behind boulders and bushes almost made Aaron salivate as he imagined the moment later on when he could safely break out his stash.
His grandfather, well rested, sprung from his La-Z-Boy, the spirit of the waitress still with him, shuffled along the path with a whistle on his lips. He stopped and patted a giant pit bull and regaled the owner with the mountaintop whorehouse joke, for which he received a polite guffaw, and then they sat on a bench near the boathouse and let the day’s heat soak into their bones. All a
round them lesbians were necking, hobos were napping, glowing amaretto-skinned men were stretching out in their clinging running shorts. Some happy ducks staggered nearby, and Aaron listened with amusement to his grandpa’s little clicking sounds and finger snapping; he was apparently under the belief he could coax them over and pat them on their heads.
“Oakland’s changed a lot, I bet, huh?” Aaron said as a warlock with a cybernetic helmet of some kind shambled by. The sheer quantity of weed blowing through was somewhat incredible. He could see Karl digging this rainbow-hued town. Maybe there was a sunporch in these parts for them to crash on.
“Eh?” his grandpa said.
“I bet it’s changed here a lot,” Aaron said again. “A lot more skateboarders now.”
His grandpa sat immobile in the sun. The ducks were frustrating him, but he still seemed to think he had a chance to touch one if he was patient. He held his hand down at beak level, his fingers limply rubbing in welcome. “Still a lot of poor people,” he said. “A lot of people doing anything to make a buck.”
Aaron folded his arms and observed the ducks, not sure what his grandpa was talking about. The hobos sleeping on the grass were stamped with facial tattoos, having burned their bridges to straight society. Make a buck? Not these people. But such was his grandpa’s strange perception.
“I never enjoyed Oakland much,” his grandpa said without prompting.
“Oh,” Aaron said, scratching his eye.
