There is a palpable awareness in him that this easing of vexation will involve more effort than Jimmy wants to exert. But he knows he will to have to find some motivation if he’s going to meet new people. Cali Pasco, newly minted Desert Hot Springs P.D. distaff detective, isn’t exactly new per se, but she was off limits as long as they were on the force together. Now, though, he’s got nothing to lose. She answers on the third ring, sounds happy to hear from him. Hi, Jimmy, how you doing? Fine, you? I’m good, what’s up? Well, I was wondering . . . and they make what neither calls a date but involves them having dinner together tonight.
The apartment is an improvement over the cell in which Dale has spent the previous three years even if it’s in Mecca. A bright one bedroom with handicapped access on the first floor of a building with walls and a roof, as a place to resume a free life Dale knows he could do a lot worse. The building is not due to open for another month and Dale is the only tenant. He spends his first hour alone watching a TV show about cars, plotting how he might get his life back on track, and not the one where he’s hustling recreational vehicles to retirees. Yes, Randall has bought him a new wheelchair, arranged for a place to live, and got him a job, but it wasn’t like Dale Duke could ever go completely straight. Whatever he does this time, he vows it will be better planned than the scheme that resulted in the three-year stretch at Calipatria. That was a home invasion in Rancho Mirage. Being paraplegic limited his utility if not his desire in the home invasion field. So Dale was the lookout and the wheelman. A lot of Los Angelenos own weekend houses in the desert. Dale and his partner Gorman, a guy he knew from high school, were working the second home circuit and doing good business. They’d steal appliances mostly and sell to a fence in Hemet who ran his operation out of a secondhand furniture store. Gorman would go into the house with his cell phone on vibrate and Dale, seated behind the wheel of his hand-controlled van, would keep him abreast of what was occurring on the street. They’d done nearly twenty jobs together and other than an unexpected run-in with a pit bull that Gorman nearly blinded with pepper spray, they had never had any surprises. On the night they were pinched a freak winter storm had knocked out a cell phone tower and the two of them weren’t able to communicate when Gorman went into the house that belonged to a couple from Los Feliz, a high-class neighborhood on the east side of the Los Angeles. A Sheriff’s Deputy in a patrol car had noticed Dale parked outside this particular house and had pulled alongside the van. The uniform was engaged in a conversation with him when Gorman emerged carrying a thirty-two inch flat screen television. Gorman quickly ascertained the situation, dropped the television and ran off into the desert. The officer persuaded Dale to stay put by pointing a gun in his face. When he told Dale to get out of the car, the man was nonplussed to learn he was dealing with a paraplegic. Gorman got picked up the next day and the two of them went down. It was a front-page story in the local paper because Dale’s brother was serving his second term in Congress. Randall had cursed whoever it was who said there was no such thing as bad publicity. Dale Duke was certified bad publicity, having been in and out of jail most of the last two decades, drug possession, check kiting, now breaking and entering. Gorman: still in prison, his brother a pipefitter not a Congressman. Dale: ready to rock with ten thousand dollars cash parked in a safe deposit box in Borrego Springs.
Being the bad boy is something Dale embraces more from a paucity of choices than an inner conviction. With only a high school education and no marketable skills breaks have never come winging through his window. It would be a pleasure unbound to show Randall that he is possessed of innate worth. But where is the opportunity? Selling recreational vehicles does not satisfy his craving for larger meaning on a bigger stage.
Stripped to his boxers and tee shirt, Dale lies face down on the floor doing one-armed pushups, withered legs behind him, crudely tattooed arm thrusting up and down. In prison he lifted weights and played wheelchair basketball with the five other inmates in chairs. The scarring in his brain that causes the seizures also resulted in a weakened left arm that is immune to weightlifting. On his upper right side, Dale looks a gymnast. But his left arm and legs, they look like a bad science experiment.
On his twenty-fifth pushup the door opens and he hears a familiar voice: “You’re not gonna get up and lay me out, are you?”
“Jimmy Ray motherfuckin Duke,” Dale says. “You want to arm wrestle?”
Jimmy drops the bag of takeout food he’s holding on the table and says sure.
They line up opposite each other on the floor and grab hands. Jimmy counts off and they begin. Both are powerful men and neither has an advantage at first, but the superior leverage Jimmy has as a result of all of his limbs working, combines with Dale’s push-up induced fatigue and allows him to finally get the back of Dale’s hand to touch the floor.
“You get stronger in prison?”
“I want a rematch and next time I won’t do any pushups before.”
“You’re not getting a rematch, Slick. You might win.”
“Forget might, dude.”
Jimmy flops on the couch and looks around. He tries not to look as Dale crawls along the floor and hoists himself on to a chair like a seal. Feeling sorry for Dale is not in Jimmy’s repertoire. And how do you feel sorry for someone as badass as Dale anyway? He’d just laugh at you. “Why are we in Mecca?”
“Randall wants to put me where I won’t be seen, Jellybean.”
“You just call me Jellybean?”
“I’m rhyming is all. Got to rhyme to pass the time. Fuck that anyway. Randall’s hiding me.”
“You blame him?”
When Dale doesn’t respond immediately, Jimmy wonders for a moment if he wasn’t a little too blunt. Jimmy announces he’s brought lunch and asks if Dale is hungry. Although he never once visited his brother in prison, it’s as if they talked a day earlier. He takes out a sandwich and tosses it to Dale. “I remember you like tuna, but I hear there’s too much mercury in it now.”
“I can’t eat tuna no more?”
“I got you roast beef. They’re shooting the cattle full of hormones, but what the hell, right? And I got you some beer.” Jimmy flourishes a six-pack of beer. “All for you. I quit drinking.”
“Bullshit.”
“Swear to God.”
Dale laughs. Unlike his charged relationship with Randall, he and Jimmy have an easier rapport, one that comes from each knowing the other will never ask for anything. The brothers chew their sandwiches in silence. Dale considers asking Jimmy why he never came to see him the three years he was in prison. But he decides nothing good could come from that line of inquiry.
Jimmy cracks open a can of soda. Takes a swig, says: “The Congressman did pretty well by you.”
“You see this wheelchair he got me,” Dale says, pointing to the contraption now parked several feet from the chair in which he is currently seated. “Motor vehicle is what it is, engine painted red and shit. And he hooked me up selling RVs.”
“Who’s buying RVs now? Price of gas and all.”
“Alls I know is I’m getting paid, likes to be getting laid.”
“Big brother told me to keep an eye on you, check in. Gave me a key to your place. Hope you don’t mind.”
It bothers Dale that Jimmy has been presented with a key, doesn’t care that a paraplegic might need emergency help, chooses to resent the lack of trust he believes it reflects. But on the surface he is determined to keep it light. “Give me lectures on the straight and narrow, bow and arrow?”
“No lectures from me. You go right ahead and do what you want. And stop the damn rhyming, please. You’re getting on my nerves.”
“And if you catch me, you’ll throw my ass in jail?” Dale pauses, then says: “Then forward all my mail.”
Jimmy smiles. Can’t help it. He says, “I’m leaving law enforcement in a couple of years, Dale. So if you’re gonna be a fuck-up, I’d appreciate if you’d wait until I was out of the catching fuck-ups business.”
“It’s a new day, Jimmy Ray.”
“Well, that’s swell.” The word swell an ironic hint that he’s not buying what Dale’s selling. Dale misses it. “You want a lift somewhere?”
“Lets take a ride to Bombay Beach.”
This is a speck of a town on the shores of the Salton Sea about twenty-five miles south of Mecca. It is not a place anyone generally asks to be taken. Where Dale would really like to go is Borrego Springs so he can pick up the cash he has stowed, but he doesn’t want to explain to Jimmy what he’s doing in the Wells Fargo bank. He can take a cab.
“Why you want to go there?”
“To touch the water.”
“Just roll your ass into the kitchen turn on the tap you want to touch water.” Dale laughs. At least that’s how Jimmy chooses to interpret the soft guttural bark that issues from his throat.
“You remember the time Dad took us fishing down there?”
“Yeah, I must’ve been about twelve. We rowed around in some piece of crap rental boat and I nearly got heat stroke.”
“I used to think about that day while I was in prison. Think it was maybe the only thing I could remember the three of us ever did with him.”
“What’d he take us, like, once?”
“Yeah, once. I caught a fish, but he wouldn’t let me cook it because he said I’d get sick.” There is a silence that hangs between them for a moment as they each recall that day more than thirty years earlier. “We got date shakes at the Medjool Date Oasis.”
“How do you remember that?”
“Just do. Tried to get Randall to stop off and get one today but he’s too damn important now.” Looks for backup on this sentiment but Jimmy gives him nothing. “You won’t take your poor cripple-ass brother down there today?”
“Tell you what. You got a rain check for next week. Get a date shake at the Medjool Date Oasis, head down to Bombay Beach, how’s that sound?”
“Profound.”
Jimmy spends another ten minutes there. He tells Dale about his new job he’s about to start and Dale talks about what it was like being inside for three years. He’d never done a stretch that long before but he tells his brother he handled it well. Jimmy makes Dale nervous. Not because of anything he’s doing, though. But his presence, his work in law enforcement, and their history together are a rebuke to Dale’s entire life. Dale has felt this way about both of his brothers for a long time. Although grateful for the visit, when Jimmy says goodbye and closes the door behind him, Dale is relieved. The day is starting to stress him and stress can bring on a seizure. He reaches into his pocket for his meds and takes his second dose of the day.
CHAPTER SEVEN
After a ten-to-five shift at Fake and Bake, Nadine returns to her house in Cathedral City, just east of Palm Springs. Her place is a small, two bedroom bungalow, fourteen hundred square feet, built with cheap materials during the nineties real estate boom. The house had been foreclosed on six months earlier but Nadine is not the owner. A client from Fake ‘N’ Bake is a loan company representative and he surreptitiously arranged for her to move in. The water was still running and Nadine found someone on Craig’s List who knew how to hook up a generator so although she is technically a squatter, the place feels like a home, the Foreclosed sign in the front yard notwithstanding. An easy mixture of whites and Latinos, the low-key town is desert-on-a-budget and Nadine blends right in.
She puts a Lean Cuisine teryaki chicken dinner in the microwave and lets Diablo the Chihuahua out for a run in the fenced yard. Nadine straightens up while her food cooks. The place is sparsely furnished with a white velour couch, two upholstered chairs and a coffee table, all purchased at local garage sales. She removes the dish from the microwave and while it cools on the kitchen counter, she takes a shower. Hard called earlier and asked if he could come over. She had hoped he would ask her out to dinner but that wasn’t on his agenda. She told him not to expect to be fed and he had said that was fine with him.
Nadine towels off and gets dressed. Her slim legs taper into delicate ankles, one of which is sporting a gold anklet Hard had given her. Examines herself in the mirror. She’s wearing a pair of low-slung Capri pants from which a hot pink thong peeks in the space below a sleeveless white cotton blouse. She has been dieting and exercising at a hotel where she pretends to be a guest and her already attractive form is in fine shape.
Nadine fishes in the medicine cabinet, locates a bottle of Valium. She had taken one about three hours earlier, as far as she can remember, and wonders if it’s too soon for another. But she was feeling on edge today, figures she can start cutting back tomorrow. Down it goes, chased with a Diet Coke. Sitting in a chair with a magazine, she wonders when her life is going to change. Nadine did not have a lollipop childhood, and hoped that the dark clouds that shadowed her early years would finally dissipate. She thinks about her mother, who ran off with a friend’s husband when she was little and her father, a Navy veteran who raised her and an older sister on a restaurant manager’s salary, bringing the girls to free tennis clinics in the city parks. The sister didn’t take to the game, but Nadine loved it, playing for her high school team and earning a spot on the varsity at San Diego State. Her father had been a heavy smoker and was sipping a whiskey sour in a Tijuana bar when he went into cardiac arrest. Nadine took it hard and dropped out of college a year short of graduation. San Diego was starting to feel old and she found a job as a tennis instructor at a desert resort. But a month after she arrived, the property was sold and the new owners wanted to give it a facelift so she found herself filing her nails on the unemployment line. To her chagrin, Nadine discovered there were not a lot of tennis instructor jobs to be had. She saw an ad in the paper one day and so began her career as a tanning technician. The job is a stopgap; something to do while she tries to determine her future. Now she has been assisting people with their tanning needs for more than a year and is getting antsy. The Valium’s taking the edge off that feeling. At least that’s the idea. When Hard is an hour late, she wonders if she should take another. How many has she taken today? Recently she’s been losing count. The bottle advises no more than one every six hours, Nadine leaving that suggestion to the amateurs. Figures the chemical palliative is easier on her internal organs than the four tequila shots it takes to get the same effect. She calls Hard, but it goes straight to the message.
Now she’s tap-tap-tapping on her beat-up iBook, filling out an on-line application for a popular reality show. A professional football player from the depths of the eighties is allegedly in search of a wife. He made a couple of bad action movies, had a DUI arrest, then declared bankruptcy. In his picture on the web site for the show he has a mane of hair blown dry from here to Las Vegas and full lips that have been god-knows-where. Wrapped in fake endangered species skins, his entire mien screams STDs but Nadine doesn’t care. She’s not planning to marry the guy, and since twenty women are going to be chosen as contestants she probably won’t have to anyway, assuming she is even selected. But she likes the idea of being brought to Los Angeles for a few weeks, installed at the mansion where the show is taped, given free food, a shopping spree at a mall, and the other seductive perks made available to those women lucky enough to be chosen.
Now her attention is drifting from the application. Is that the Valium? Wonders whether or not taking too much Valium can cause some kind of hyper-activation in the brain. She’s heard it can put a girl on the crazy train. But if you take too much Valium, you’d die, right? Or would you go crazy and then die? And if she were to go crazy, would she be aware of it? Did crazy people know they were crazy? It was a conundrum. She’d have to get on the Internet and do a little research.
If her social life were better she’s certain her tranquilizer intake would drop precipitously. Lately it’s been an utter disaster. From the time Nadine was in high school she displayed an unerring lack of discernment when it came to men, which she mistakenly attributed to her occasional bi-sexuality. She has gone back and forth between men and wom
en with a pendulum-like regularity and occasionally wonders if this fluidity has hindered her deeper understanding of either gender. But she has listened to straight girlfriends with their endless complaints about the inscrutability of boyfriends, and to straight men that cannot fathom their incomprehensible girlfriends. She is comforted by what seems to be an endemic ignorance on the entire subject.
Before Hard there was the fling with the married woman with a successful husband and a kid. The woman claimed it was the first time for her, the cheating part and the same-sex angle. Nadine was sad when her lover ended it, and in a place of genuine vulnerability. That was the week she had met Hard. She wishes she could transplant her Chihuahua’s personality into Hard. She gazes at her dog, lying on the rug at her feet, chewing a golf ball. Diablo looks at her with large brown eyes that bespeak a world of understanding, sympathy and love.
She suspects Hard no longer loves her, if he ever did. Their relationship had begun in a burst of optimism, Nadine hoping her streak of bad luck had come to an end and was extremely disappointed when she discovered he was married and seemed ambivalent about leaving his wife. And this was five minutes after meeting him. She wonders whether her life is on some kind of frantic loop, an endlessly repeating catastrophe? Are there any men who are not incorrigible liars or manipulative cheats? If there are, they must exist in a shining realm to which Nadine has not gleaned the access code. And she is sick of it. It isn’t like Nadine to raise hell, particularly when it comes to men, but she has reached a point where she is feeling like the universe has painted a target on her back and the gods are hurling darts.
Angry Buddhist (9781609458867) Page 5
