Summer in the Land of Skin

by Jody Gehrman

  Without knowing I’m going to say it, I blurt out, “I want to build guitars, like Dad.”

  She looks at me in surprise, then smiles. “Groovy,” she says. “Do you still play?”

  I shake my head. “Not since he died. Mother didn’t want any music in the house.”

  “Good God. That woman.” She takes off her pink fur coat and finishes her beer. “I don’t know why she has to be like that. It’s not good for you. It’s not good for her, either.”

  “She acts like he never even existed.”

  “I know,” she says. “It’s sad. I always thought it was sad.” She pushes my White Russian toward me. “Drink up, baby girl! You haven’t had a sip.”

  I put the straw to my lips and suck a little of the sweet, creamy liquid. I’m not used to drinking, really. I’m not used to going out at all, lately.

  “Well, I’m not surprised you want to learn the trade. You’ve got guitars in your blood. Your dad and Bender were legends.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Elliot Bender. Old friend of your dad’s. They had a business for years—shit, they made guitars for Jerry Garcia, Bob Dylan, Bo Ramsey.” She looks around the bar dreamily, remembering. “They had a falling-out—everything fell apart. It was ridiculous, really.” She turns to me abruptly, her eyebrows raised high. “I have an idea,” she says.

  It takes me one day to prepare, with Rosie’s help. I break my lease and fill my dad’s old leather backpack with four changes of clothes, ten pairs of underwear, a toothbrush, floss, and a notebook. I’ve got a thousand dollars to my name. Rosie insists on lending me her third ex-husband’s pickup truck. I leave my furniture and most of my belongings in her cluttered garage, with little hope of ever finding them again, buried in that sea of ancient trunks and stereo speakers, plastic shower curtains and milk crates full of yellowed photos.

  Standing outside her old Victorian in go-go boots and a red chenille robe, Rosie cuts quite a figure in the chilly morning fog. It’s too early for her—seven a.m.—and it shows. Her hair is hectic with static electricity, and rings of mascara circle her puffy eyes. She yawns wide as she hands me an envelope and a carved statue of a Hindi god that fits in the palm of my hand.

  “What’s this?”

  “Shiva was your dad’s favorite—he took that thing with him everywhere. I figured you should have it.” I stand there on the sidewalk, fingering the smooth, cherry-colored wood, trying to imagine it in his hand. “Open the envelope later. It’s another good luck charm.” She smiles sleepily, and I hug her. “Now get out of here,” she says. “Before someone sees me like this.”

  I forget all about the envelope until I’m in Portland, late that night, surrounded by the quiet gloom of a rest stop. I’ve been driving so many hours, when I rest my head against the steering wheel and close my eyes, I still see the road rushing at me. I reach for my backpack and take out the envelope, hold it in my hands a moment before opening it carefully. There’s a Bob Dylan quote scribbled in large, messy letters on the back of an ATM receipt. Kitten: She’s got everything she needs, she’s an artist, she don’t look back. XOXOXO, Rosie. I sit there, smiling in the dim yellow cast by the dome light, reading her words over and over, lingering on the urgent X’s and O’s. In the envelope is a crumpled one-hundred-dollar bill. As I pull back onto the interstate, I can feel a dull stinging behind my eyes, and I know if I weren’t so out of practice, I would cry.

  On impulse, I get my hair cut in Seattle. I decide to let Ray, a high-strung man in a shaggy vest and leather pants, have total creative freedom with me above the neck. It takes hours, and there’s a lot of paraphernalia—intricate layers of foil, multiple applications of toxic-smelling goo. When he’s done, he spins the chair toward the mirror, and I barely recognize the girl staring back at me. I look like a 1920s starlet—he’s fashioned me in a chin-length bob, shorter in back like the flappers used to wear, and he’s highlighted my blond with streaks of bright gold.

  “Girl,” he says, appraising me proudly, “I’ve really outdone myself today.”

  As I’m driving the last seventy miles north to Bellingham, I tug at the rearview mirror now and then to look at myself. Each time, I’m startled by the strange woman staring back at me.

  CHAPTER 2

  So This Is Bellingham

  I arrive. My mouth is so dry, it feels like somebody replaced my tongue with a wad of cotton. I drive past old houses painted creamy whites and weather-beaten yellows, wild gardens filled with morning glories and nasturtiums tossing gently in the breeze. The blues are bluer here, the greens greener. I turn a corner and catch my breath; there’s the bay, its wind-textured surface catching the gold. My heart is thumping inside me as I drive. Everything—the cars, the buildings, the people strolling about on the sidewalks—seems like moving photographs, hand-painted in tasteful colors. On the air I can smell a trace of salt, mixed with a strange, pulpy odor.

  Driving along the main street that slopes gradually toward the bay I pass the old brick buildings of a small downtown. The sun is warm through my windshield. There are couples and students window-shopping and sipping from paper cups. They look sleepy and content.

  I hear a loud shriek and I turn to see a girl in a dress and combat boots, one hand on her hip, the other hand pointing directly at her companion, a long-haired guy leaning against an old station wagon, covering his eyes and shaking his head. The girl begins kicking at the tires of the car, her brown hair flying. I slow to a crawl, mesmerized by the rage in her movements. She looks up at me for an instant, her hair still in her face, making her look feral and dangerous; our eyes hold, and the moment stretches on strangely. The man turns and stares at me now, too. Then all at once, the girl cries, “What are you looking at, bitch?” and the car behind me starts honking.

  I shake myself from the trance and pull my foot off the brake, put it back on the gas. From my radio, Johnny Cash sings, Drive on, don’t mean nothin’, drive on.

  It takes me a good two hours to find Elliot Bender. Aunt Rosie wasn’t able to dig up his phone number, so he has no idea I’m coming, and all I have is a Post-it with a barely legible address scribbled on it. What I find there is a startled woman in a terry-cloth sweatsuit and a couple of astonishingly fat kids. It’s a rundown cabin near the train tracks. A greasy yellow dog with brown teeth strains from the end of a chain and barks so loudly my head throbs. When I ask if she knows who lived there before, she nods and squints up at the sky.

  “Weird fellow,” she says. “We used to drink together, back when I lived in that little shit hole over there.” She points her chin at a trailer across the way. “Heard he moved onto a boat.”

  “A boat?” I echo.

  “Down at the marina,” she says. “Out by that stinky old mill. I wouldn’t live there if you paid me.”

  I’ve never known anyone who lives on a boat, but I’ve always been fascinated by pirates, so I’m a little titillated. After a half-hour spent asking around down by the docks, I’m finally able to locate his slip. When I see the size of it—no more than thirty-five feet, bow to stern—I realize that my half-baked assumption that this guy could put me up for a while is out of the question. No guest rooms here.

  There’s a locked gate separating the boat owners from the world at large, and I’m standing behind it, my fingers laced in the wire diamonds, staring at the two lines of sailboats knocking quietly against the docks. The guy at the office told me to look for slip number thirteen. I hadn’t anticipated the problem of how to announce myself, when there’s no real door to knock on. As I’m standing there, staring at Elliot Bender’s boat, a mounting shyness nearly turns me back around. I reach into my pocket and feel for Shiva, finger the comforting lines of the wood, warmed by my body.

  “You looking for somebody?”

  I jump a little, then locate a very small man sanding the bow of a sailboat. He’s not even four feet tall, with disproportionately long arms and a pink, bearded face.

  “Elliot—um—Elliot Bender?”
I stammer.

  Before I know what’s happening, he’s hollering in an unnaturally loud voice, “Bender!” He looks at me, rolls his eyes, and mutters, “Lazy bastard,” then resumes with even more volume, “BENDER!” We both watch the rundown old boat intently, but nothing happens. Gentle waves swish against the docks, while a seagull screeches disapprovingly. The little guy goes back to sanding. “Who are you, anyway?”

  I stand there, trying to find the right answer. I grip Shiva tighter in my pocket, and I can feel the wood sliding against the wet of my palm.

  Just then, a head appears from below deck. It is turned away from me, and all I can see is a wild mess of dark gray hair.

  “What do you want, Stumpy?” Stumpy gestures in my direction, and the head turns abruptly toward me. As he rises from the hole, there’s a flash of blue eyes, a face grown silver with stubble, and a great swell of belly beneath a grease-stained undershirt. He freezes, visible only from the waist up, and something tells me he’s not decent from the waist down.

  “Yeah?” he says to me, blinking in the sunlight.

  “Are you Elliot Bender?” I force my voice into a deceptive evenness.

  “Who wants to know?”

  “I was wondering if I could talk to you for a minute. Is this a bad time?”

  “Look, I paid that dentist bill, if that’s what you’re after—”

  I smile. “No,” I say. “It’s nothing like that.”

  “What, the phone?”

  I shake my head.

  He sighs, starts patting at his mess of hair, stroking it into submission like it’s an animal that must be tamed. “Do I know you?” he says, his tone still wary.

  “Sort of,” I say. “I’m Anna Medina.”

  He stares at me. I watch as his Adam’s apple bobs once in a hard swallow.

  “Just a minute,” he says finally, and disappears down below.

  Stumpy climbs over onto the dock and opens the gate for me. “Man doesn’t know how to treat a lady,” he says, winking.

  I thank him, then stand there awkwardly, waiting for Elliot Bender to reappear. I am still exhausted from the hours of driving, and feel ill-equipped to deal with this unexpected turn of events. I imagined my father’s partner as a quaint, pipe-smoking man, with an immaculate, spacious studio filled with the finest guitars, smelling of lacquer, spruce and rosewood. Here I am, with a midget sailor and an overweight, half-naked man who thinks I’m trying to collect on a dentist bill.

  “Climb on board,” he says, having reappeared in a pair of ragged corduroys and a flannel shirt whose buttons don’t match up, holding a can of Budweiser.

  I carefully make my way onto the boat; it is old, plagued with layers of peeling paint, and as I get a better look I see it is cluttered with beer cans, crumpled newspaper, piles of tangled rope gone black with grease.

  He sees me looking around and shrugs. “Home sweet home,” he says, his voice flat.

  His free hand floats again to his hair, patting it down. I see he has attempted to slick it down on top, though rather unsuccessfully; it is now matted and greasy in places but springs rebelliously to life everywhere else. I look around for a place to sit, find none. He sees this, sets his beer down and scurries below deck, then emerges with a lawn chair in one hand and a bucket in the other. He flips the lawn chair open and sets it down, nodding at it in invitation, then sets the bucket upside down and sits on it, reclaiming his beer and taking a long swig.

  “You take the chair,” I say.

  “Never,” he says. “Go on, sit.”

  I do as I’m told, though the sight of him balancing on that bucket is dangerously comic, and I’m afraid I might laugh, I’m so giddy with nerves and lack of sleep.

  “Offer the lady a drink!” Stumpy yells from across the dock.

  “Hey,” Bender says over his shoulder. “Mind your own damn business!”

  He smiles a little, sheepishly, and for a second I catch a glimpse of the handsome young man he must have been, with the square jaw and heavy brow of a young Marlon Brando. The sunlight glints on his eyes; they are the brightest blue I’ve ever seen.

  “You want a beer? You old enough to drink?”

  “I am,” I say, sounding prim in spite of myself. “But no thank you.”

  He lets his eyes rest on my face for an unnaturally long pause. I touch the back of my head, feeling the foreign shortness of the hair there, and start to blush.

  “Yep,” he says, softly. “You’re Medina’s kid, all right.”

  “What makes you say that?” I say, smiling at my shoes.

  “That smile,” he says. “Your mouth’s got Medina all over it.”

  I look up and see him feeling for the button of his shirt at the place where his belly is biggest, making sure it’s still fastened. I realize it must be very hard for him to find shirts that fit, and for a second I feel sorry for him. He looks back at me intently, and I find myself staring shyly at my shoes again. He drinks from his beer, a long hard swig, then he crushes the can beneath his foot and tosses it near the bow, where it settles with a tinny clang amidst a pile of others.

  “You sure you don’t want a beer?” he says, getting up and grabbing another Bud from a beat-up ice chest.

  “No thanks,” I repeat.

  He pops open the can and tilts back his head. Then he sits on the ice chest, and I’m relieved that I don’t have to watch him teetering on the tiny bucket anymore.

  “I don’t have guests very often these days,” he says. “Don’t have much to offer—you just let me know if you change your mind about the beer.” I nod. “So, what brings you to Bellingham?”

  “Well…” I can feel my face going hot. I take a breath and say, “I’m interested in learning a trade.”

  “What trade is that?”

  I force myself to look him in the eye. “I want to be a luthier.”

  “Is that right?” he says. “Your father teach you much?” I shake my head.

  “Still doesn’t really explain what you’re doing up here.”

  “I was hoping you could teach me.” He’s staring out over the water, that serious brow and the silver stubble making him look like an old-time sea captain. He brings the can to his lips again, fastens his mouth to the hole, and slurps loudly, then burps.

  “You want to be a luthier….” He won’t look at me now. He gets up abruptly and fishes in his pocket, produces a book of matches. “You smoke, Medina?”

  “What?”

  “Do you smoke?” he says, exaggerating his enunciation as if I might be slow.

  “No. Why?”

  “I quit. Ten years ago. But times like this I could really use a smoke.”

  He stuffs his hands in his pockets. I want to say something that will put him at ease, but I’ve got a feeling just my being here is the worst part. He shakes his head and stares out at the bay, shifting his weight from side to side, making the boat rock a little. I hold on to the aluminum armrests of the lawn chair.

  “Do you still have a shop?” I ask.

  “Oh yeah. This right here’s my shop,” he says. “They come from miles around for their Bender guitars!” He shakes his head again, drinks his beer.

  “My aunt Rosie says you’re the best.”

  A small grin takes over his mouth, seemingly against his will. “Rosie. I should’ve known. She put you up to this?”

  “She told me about you.”

  “Your aunt is one crazy woman,” he says. “Almost as crazy as your mother.” He sits back down on the ice chest. “I guess your dad didn’t tell you much about me, huh?”

  “Not that I remember,” I say.

  “No,” he says. “I guess he wouldn’t.” The grin is still there, but now it looks more like a grimace; his mouth curves up at the edges, but there’s no pleasure in his eyes. “Well, I’m sorry you came all this way, but I can’t teach you anything, Medina. I haven’t touched my tools in a long time.”

  I swallow, try to make my voice sound polite. “So, what do you do now?�
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  He finishes his beer, leans forward so his elbows are resting on his knees and twists the empty can in his hands. “This is what I do,” he says, staring at the mangled can. “You’re looking at it.”

  I wander the streets as the sun goes down. It’s moving in slow motion—a torturous slide into the water. The mill sits like a big rusty beast near the bay and belches white smoke into the air. Clouds huddle along the horizon, gradually starting to display a spread of garish pink. I pace the sidewalks, trying to concentrate on the windows. In the orange light, the neighborhood takes on a watercolor glow.

  I keep walking.

  The absurdity of this mission is all too clear to me. I am several states from anyone I know, homeless, jobless, sporting a haircut that only this morning was glamorous but now is a ridiculous anachronism—I’m a flapper lost in space. Bender is a hopeless drunk, and my plan to apprentice with him is a farce. Yesterday morning, Rosie was a radiant goddess in go-go boots, launching me into my destiny. Tonight, she is revealed as a bored divorcée, tinkering with my life to escape her own.

  My pace increases. I can’t remember where I left the truck. I walk and walk, as if the feel of the concrete under my shoes will keep me from floating away, balloonlike, into the sky.

  Rounding a corner, I hear a few strains of slide guitar. It’s a song I used to know. The sun is finally down, and I can feel a chill trying to seep through my T-shirt to my skin, but my legs keep moving, pumping heat into the rest of me. Oh, sweet mama, your daddy’s got those Deep Ellum blues. I move in the direction of that voice, that guitar. I figure it must be coming from a bar somewhere, but I’m lost in a neighborhood quite a few blocks from downtown. I’m surrounded by trees and rows of old houses, some elegant, some abused and graying. The flowers that line their stone paths and white fences are bathed in a fiery light. The street sign says Walnut.

  Without warning, there he is, leaning back in a weather-rotted easy chair, his feet propped up on the porch railing. His hair is long and brown and falls below his shoulders. A cigarette dangles from his lips, the orange tip glowing, and he works that guitar with his head swaying easy, his fingers gliding. His voice is a low, mournful growl, and it is so much like my father’s that I stop walking and stare, the chill spreading through me. Oh, sweet mama, your daddy’s got—