by Toby Olson
He went to the fence in the wall and opened the gate, stepped out and moved to the sidewalk, starting back in the way he had initially come. There were a few tourists walking the street on which the Crystal Palace was located a block away to his right. He crossed the street and continued on toward where his car was parked. There were a couple of people walking the other side of the street, but they took no notice of him. When he got to the corner, he did not turn toward the car but waited while the traffic passed. Coming into the town and leaving it to get to Route 80, the traffic was heavier on this street, and he had to wait for some time for the light to change. He saw that no one was around the car. Another car had parked behind, but it was empty. It was not the car that belonged to the two men, he thought, but he wasn’t sure. He crossed the street when the light changed, went another block, and turned to his right, walking until he came to the corner of the street that would lead him back to the Crystal Palace. He realized he was holding back from approaching the car and that he had no good reason for doing so. They either had a line on him or they didn’t, whoever they were, and he had better just go to the car and see what happened. He turned toward the Crystal Palace, walked the block to the street on which he was parked, and turned right again, getting the keys out of his pocket as he moved. When he reached the car, he unlocked the door, got in, started it up, and when there was a break in the traffic, pulled out into the street and drove away.
When he hit Route 80, he brought the car up to sixty miles an hour, lit a cigarette with the dashboard lighter, and settled himself into the seat. Then he began to relax a little and to think things over. He felt a quick chill as the realization hit him that he could have left the car where it was and hitched back to Tucson. If they had a line on the car, leaving it there would have given him some time, maybe even enough to get away East. This was not his line of work, that was sure; he had been lucky. There was one thing he knew then. There would be no drop-off of cocaine in Kansas City. He would put more miles between them, then he would get in touch with Richard. A few minutes after the rain had begun hitting the windshield, pelting the town behind him in a heavy wash, he drove the car out from under it, into the light of a clear sky and the edge of the beginning of twilight.
Richard
WHAT TREES THERE WERE OUTSIDE COULD BEND THEIR boughs, their twigs reaching, in that green aching intensity they wear, out to touch each other in the night, and he wouldn’t care. There were, in fact, two walnut trees, because in the late eighteen-eighties this had been a walnut grove: black walnuts, their small protected satellites, in green jackets, scattered under the boughs. The flesh within those meaty jackets, under those hard, brainlike shells, he could have eaten, sat beside a fire, in a soft chair, with a cat and a bottle of good wine, some cheese. Even a small space heater, because this was California, little change, and in the winter just small bites at times; he could have faced it in against his legs, the way his father had put feet up on ottoman, before the fender, felt toasty warm, hearing the little crackles. The trees had made their peace so many years ago, much like the large rock in Idaho into which pioneers had carved their names, those of their wives and children, and their dates of passage.
In the failed and now intractable bark: hearts, initials, and gang names, some spray paint on the trunks and lower limbs. He could have trimmed the bark and sprayed the holes with sealer, done some small amount of pruning, gathered up the fallen nuts before the birds got to them, but the fact was he had never set foot beside the entrance path, running from the cyclone gate up to the porch, had only seen the backyard while shaving, and not because he had in any way intended to look there. He had lived in the house for one year. The man there before him had put up the cyclone fence to keep his dogs in, two Dobermans who roamed the yard at night, dark, aware, and silent, keeping the place safe. He didn’t need the fence, he had certain powers, and the kids stayed away.
There were raspberries along the back fence and a small lemon tree, four feet tall, in the corner, feeble but surprising in its fruit. There were flowers, mostly hidden, but not choked off, by the variety of weeds around them. And the weeds themselves were beautiful. He could have brought some in and dried them, put them in a container on a window sill, noticed the way they looked in sun and shade. The flowers were poinsettias, (oddly) a few columbines, and morning-glories. Once, a century plant had come to bloom for a few days, but he had not seen it. Along the fence running the sides of the house, through windows by which he only passed, could have been seen remnants of rhubarb and the orange vines that are often found in the company of poison oak, and poison oak as well. To both sides of the front gate were shrubs, and in among them the new shoots of an avocado tree were coming on strongly, and maybe in a few years a large tree, with its green and bulbous fruit, would be growing there. Even had he known of all these things, he would not have thought of the grounds around the house as all potential and realization; he would not have thought of the place as a yard at all. It was another world; he had no knowledge of, nor care for, its seedy warmth and complexity.
He did not even go about that daily business any more of small pleasures: food, the way of his bowels, and specifically for him, the sound of good jazz. Though he still played it, he didn’t tap his foot or hum tunes. He didn’t buy clothes, nor did he look at the bodies of women in them; they held no surprises that he was capable of. He knew there was another kind of world of feeling that he was outside of, but he could not quite believe that it was any more than sham, and he was beyond the possibility of touching it. It was like the quiet cooking of the yard around the house. He would have accepted its occurrences as knowledge, but he could in no other way have awareness of them. A week ago some kid had thrown a stone that thumped into the side of the house wall of the living room. He had been rolling joints at the card table when it happened. The sharp report had startled him, and a place in his mind began to uncoil like a snake finding a new pathway through fixed stones; the sound, the cause of the sound, the possible human hand in it, the vision of the kid running away: the unencumbered freshness of the stately thoughttrail. He had felt a welling-up from somewhere, but his mind had quickly closed it down, and he backed up to think if he would have to get onto the kid, and he was grooved again.
He stood in the middle of the shower now. His arms hung at his sides. He accepted the thick jets of water pounding heavily into his chest. Above the open stall of the shower was a mirror, a small tilted oval he had rigged there in which he could see himself, the dents in his water-pounded chest, the hanging arms, the sodden, half-erection. He had begun lifting weights because it was something to do; he had felt that there was little left to do, and there had been some new pain in it. But the pain had gone, and he continued with the weights because of the definition and not the strength. As the muscles pushed out of his body, he could both see and feel them individually, and pain could be isolated; he could be struck, and he could strike the specific bulks of his body against things. He had started with the weights four years ago, at the time she had returned from prison and had begun to whip him. She had learned whipping in prison, and she had liked it, and she taught it to him. He whipped her also, but she did not understand why she liked it. When he had met her, twelve years ago, she had been searching for a definition of herself, and he knew immediately that she was so damaged (there was so little of her there) that she would take anything that would give her any sort of integrity in the eyes of anyone.
He had hooked into that; she was holding to voracious sex at the time, out of some recent desperateness, but the conventional devouring was soon exhausted, and as the pathetic integrating had become concretized she had begun to think of herself as “kinky”; anything in any way different in sex defined her. Finally she had come to think of herself as what she called a “kink,” and whenever he battered her, she thought she became who she was. She thought she liked the whipping because it was odd and different; he knew better. But though, as he thought, he insulted her about it often, above he
r intelligence, playing with irony, it was a weak game, and he did not care to try to deal with her mistaken sense of herself. He liked her the way she was. She had whipped him, and he had cried out “Mother, Mother,” and then he had often beaten her, heavily, pounding her with the sand sock and wet towel. And it was true that there were other ways of living going on around them the interstices of which they came into, but not often. And when they did find themselves in situations, he smirked inwardly to himself about them and pointed out their phoniness to her; that way, though at different levels of consciousness he thought, they both shut them out. And perhaps the largest irony was that, for both of them, it was within the parameters of what might be called the conventional, where the deep and real unknown abided, that the thing feared at its very roots was incomprehensible to them because it was not grooved for them and was beyond their context. But such quality of fear was beyond their articulation also; so, they did not know of it.
At certain angles the water beat into his chest as if he were a hollow gourd, the tight skin over his muscles a drumhead.
He turned to feel an individual jet bite into his nipple, scalding him though the water was cool. He thought of the image of the slab of stone on his chest, his stepfather standing over him with the sledge, the heavy, concussive thud as the sledge dropped, the veins in the muscles bursting, the way a rib broke from his sternum and dove into his heart, the deeper and more satisfying pain as he was cracked and split open. He smiled under the spray. He knew all about it: the systems of psychology, the old marquis, the sickness in the smiles at pain. Her whipping him had been really the last thing that had lifted him up, and that had not been successful for him for a number of years. The image of his stepfather with the sledge coming down on the stone was a toying, a distance in history. It did not move him. Nor did the sex, the risk of selling drugs, the chances taken on the Harley, the occasional busts, the intimidation of the narcs.
She was lying in the other room on the bed, waiting for him. Soon he would go in there and fuck her; that was the only way he could now think of it, and there would be nothing new or imaginative to it. She had little imagination, of this he was sure, and if he just wore something, a piece of her underwear, some lipstick or eyeliner, it would lift her. She would say when she saw him coming, “That’s kinky,” and she would be moved some when he entered her. But he had gone the limits of his imagination with her, and many times what he had proposed and accomplished was well beyond her. She would just stare at him then, not under – standing, and so he would whip her again, and she would like that and call it kinky. For him she was now like a strip of rag, some half-rotten piece of fruit, and he would gain little pleasure as he ripped into her, pounded her, and the only thing that would keep him in anyway erect would be the very slight pain of the loss of desire in giving and taking pain, and even that would be fading.
He had thought recently of killing her. He had never killed anyone, and she was still close to him and was appropriate.
The killing would have to be right, because it would be near the end, and he would have to plan how he would get himself killed afterward. He had begun, casually, to think of a possible plan for it. They had seen some snuff movies, and she had been dimly interested in them. They were kinky she thought, but she had been heavily zonked on scag at the time, and she could not really see through to the fact that that would be the final kinky act. Whatever else she was, she was a survivor in her passivity. This he saw clearly and had he ability to do so, he would have admired her for it as he might have admired her for other things beyond his image of her. With him it was more ironic; he survived in spite of himself. He was too smart to get caught seriously in the web of pain that he found ways of arranging. The drug deals with the vicious, desperate Mexicans in Ensenada, his cheating them on their own turf, his touches with the more dangerous big buyers in West L.A.—whatever net he got himself into his intelligence forced him to solve and get out of. He had the pleasant bruises and the rushes of danger to remember, but he had stayed alive.
He stepped back in the stall a little, letting the water strike down against his penis, hit into his testicles, and hurt them; it made him a little harder. He would go into her soon and do the thing, be done and finished with her for now, in that way at least. In the morning the two of them would get up early and get ready to leave. He felt good thinking of the new start. He would go East, beyond even Detroit where he had come from. Maybe it would take some time. But he would find and then he would kill his old friend Allen, who had cheated him. He knew that Allen’s wife was from that Cape out there, and he would take his time and would probably find them there. He would kill him not so much for the cheating but for the surge of it and the pain that would follow, possibly a new kind of pain, a mix of what they would do to him when they caught him and the hurt that might come a little from the loss of Allen. He had not been at all desperate or unhappy; he had been numb and bored. He knew he was close to burned out at thirty-three, but now he would be alive again for a while. Maybe this fresh feeling would get him up enough so that he could visit his mother in Detroit on his way East. The fact that he had arranged the drop at her place, and the pain in having involved her in his life again, gave him some little hope that it might be so. The way she would look at him and the way he would behave with her stirred in him a bit.
He turned the shower off and let the water run from his body, down through his creases. He waited while he drained, and then he stepped out of the stall, took a towel from the rack, and began to dry himself. He rubbed each muscle that he could identify individually, dabbing at his chest and his angular face. When he was finished and while he was splashing cologne on his inner thighs, he heard her voice, whining he would have called it, from the other room.
“Come on, Daddy, come on.” She sounded bored and a little flat. It was as if her voice and its performance could make the desire real, the request urgent and sincere, though it was incapable of that.
He reached up and took the watch cap from its place and put it on. Then he hung his thick chain and medallion around his neck. Then he soaked his towel in the sink and rang it out into a wet, thick rope; he tested it by slapping it into his leg. Then he checked to see how he looked in the mirror. He was fine, he thought, if a little uninteresting. He was getting older, he thought, but most of him was hard and firm.
“Time enough,” he said softly, “time enough.” And then he turned from the mirror and went in to her. It was dark in the room, and he could not see her very well. But he knew she was ready and waiting. Outside, the sad and injured walnut trees, as if from a kind of instinct, reached out and fought against their peace.
Melinda
BORN MELINDA PRADA IN THE WARM AUGUST, SHE GREW up on a young sandspit of land that pushed into the Atlantic like the fragile arm of a young boy. The arm might have been diseased, at least a mutation or birth defect; it lacked fingers, a positive hinged and mobile elbow; it seemed eaten away in some places, one of them an inlet where Melinda lived. The name was pronounced pray-da, the slight pathetic anglicizing of the Portuguese that the women had accepted and the men had forced, historically. For the women had changed their names anyway, but the men had work to do among Yankee fishermen and thought to become Americans, against their skin color and language. It could not have been a young girl’s arm, with its welcoming or slight defiance, because it was a public gesture in the sea, and there was no public act for women to perform. And yet the calm and yielding, but resilient nature of the spit was surely feminine and not to be controlled, and this was the geological irony, confronted and not solved: there was no manipulation of the spit possible to good ends. There was, as with the women, a fragile working relationship.
She was an only child, to her father’s chagrin (her mother’s pleasure), and she came to his dragger and to the sea when she was twelve years old, at the same time as boys came to her. Her father knew his sources were circuitous. They shamed him, and he made no mention of the following passage when he fou
nd it, even put the book away out of eyeshot. Every returning New Bedford whaler brought home a few bravas, or black Portuguese, among its crew. These Cape Verde savages—a cross between exiled Portuguese criminals and the aborigines of the Islands—began to drift into Mashpee and marry into the hybrid of Indian and African Negro that they found there. This vicious mixture caused what Mr. Pocknet called “a drift of disgust against Mashpee”. When the other boats came zigzag in to see, at first her father hid her (as he had hid the book) below decks, but this was futile, since news traveled among the fishermen, who were like old folks with nothing to do when it came to rumor. She was revealed, and she was good enough at the nets to become quickly integrated. And, though not approved of, she was his daughter and was accepted as an oddity.
On the way in from the Georges Bank she used watercolors sometimes, oils occasionally, and pastels, and she wrote stories. The boys saw she could do all this well and the dragging too, and they could see their own dim, secret wishes for the joining of tenderness, sensitivity and strength in it, and they feared and shunned her. Her stories were sea stories and like her painting, very clear and comprehensive and tough. She saw the way the water came in against the boat, the way it looked at a distance, the colors in the various cloud covers and the light in them. She had insight into the lives around her, and what she wrote affected those who read it. She took up with girls then, who knew their places and were full grown and integrated. And when she was sixteen and her parents drowned, ironically, on a pleasure cruise to Boston, she took up with an older woman, an artist in the town at the Cape’s end, who taught her things about technique and taught her to mourn her parents properly, and loved her and let her go with grace when she was eighteen, and she went to art school in Boston.
