by Dick Cluster
The DC-10 banked right to spiral in toward the airport, giving Alex a view of lights and a darkened ridge of hills bordering blue-black sky. He changed his watch to say nine P.M. instead of midnight. He’d slept about a half hour on the flight to O’Hare and a good two hours on this second leg. Now he was ready to revisit this city, ready to pry secrets out of Agnes Amelia Sturdevant if he could. When the plane disgorged its cargo, he hurried through the airport till he emerged into a clear chilly night with stars coming out overhead. The ridge to the west was dark, but he could picture the brown and folded contours of the mountains between the bayside suburbs and the Pacific. He stood in line until he got a cab driven by a small man who according to the ID on the visor was named Samboun Doungmany.
“Alabama Street, in the Mission,” Alex said. He felt his tongue savor the geography and history encoded in those words. The Mission District lay in one of the valleys. It was where Spanish missionaries had founded the city, before the gold seekers came. It was where he’d lived for six months, one of six people crammed into a small apartment, all of them coming or going somewhere. Not for the first time, he asked himself, If I’d stayed here, what?
He dozed without meaning to while the cab took him past Daly City and South San Francisco, past the Cow Palace and Candlestick, and then off the expressway at Army Street. He woke to find the driver waiting politely for a pedestrian before hanging a right.
Dee Sturdevant’s block, on the eastern outskirts of the Mission, turned out to be a quiet one with narrow houses packed tightly together. Alex paid the driver and stood outside the house that mattered. It was wooden, clapboard, a typical San Francisco working-class house of the sort you saw a lot in the Mission or the Sunset. In the streetlight’s illumination, the white paint and green trim seemed to have needed new coats for quite a while. Instead of a basement, under the house the builder had put a one-car garage. This too was common, familiar. In the garage under that apartment on Eighteenth Street there had been a guy who spent weeks trying to get an old Plymouth starter motor to work. He would take it off and take it apart and put it together and put it back on, and it would work for a few days. When it failed someplace, he’d enlist everybody in the building to help him push-start the car. When he got the car home he’d try again. Alex, knowing next to nothing about cars then, had been impressed by the guy’s doggedness. When he’d landed in Nebraska a few years later, hitchhiking like Jay Harrison, he’d apprenticed himself to a factory-trained Volkswagen mechanic named Hans Heidenfelter who had come to the States to avoid the Bundeswehr draft, even though Germany wasn’t at war and the U.S. was. I might’ve become a mechanic here too, he told himself. A Muni mechanic, keeping those ancient cable cars alive.
Above the garage door this particular builder had added some decorative trim, a rising sun with rays radiating out. A gray Honda Accord was parked on the street in front. Upstairs a lit window showed a big plant, an avocado, or maybe a small tree. Alex climbed the steep steps, found a BELL NOT WORKING sign, and banged hard on the wooden door. He banged, yawned deeply, and banged again.
From the name, Dutch, and her age, which would be over fifty, Alex had developed a picture of Dee Sturdevant as somebody sharp-eyed probably, but knobby and round. He wasn’t prepared for the lanky woman in faded blue jeans who opened the door. Her hair was cut short, a pale blond like straw, going toward white. She had a lot of crow’s feet around pale blue eyes.
“I’m Alex,” he said, raising his shoulder under his carry-on bag, as if to prove he’d just crossed the country for real.
“Dee,” she said. “Welcome. I’ll be back down in a minute. We’re going out.”
“Sure.” He hoped she might have changed her mind and decided to take him to Foster. More likely she was leading him away from something, probably just away from her life, her space. She left him at the door and then reappeared with a long woolen poncho on. It was old like the jeans, its geometric pattern faded. Relic of some trip to Mexico, he guessed. He felt out of place in his jacket from Hudson Bay.
“Do you know San Francisco?” she asked. “Now that you’re here, is there someplace particular you want to go and make your explanations, tell me what this is all about?”
“I once lived here, but I don’t know what places are like anymore.” Alex followed her back down the steps to the Honda. He realized he didn’t want to face her across the table of some ritzified coffee shop. He wanted some place that wouldn’t have changed— that wouldn’t have changed for him, and that might put her in mind of old days too. That might melt some of her suspicions. “I used to live on Eighteenth Street near Guerrero. If it’s safe, I don’t know… what about Dolores Park?”
“We won’t be alone. It’s safe in that respect.” She opened the passenger door for him. “Okay,” she said. “Dolores Park.”
Dee Sturdevant drove north on Alabama to Twenty-fourth, and west on Twenty-fourth to Mission. She asked him about his flight, delays, coast-to-coast fares. She said she was thinking of visiting friends in Boston sometime. She had a kind of unslurred Midwestern pronunciation that made her words sound less trivial, crisper than they’d otherwise be. He asked where she was from and she said North Dakota. He told her about Hans, about working with Hans until he was ready to keep moving east, about getting a ride east with Laura, which turned into a marriage, a daughter, a divorce. He told her about his sideline, explained that Jay had hired him, that’s why he was here.
Outside, at night, the Mission didn’t seem so changed. Still the little shops, bakeries, hardware stores, jewelry stores, taco places, pool halls, a few crummy hotels. A fair number of Asian stores had crept into the Mexican and Central American mix. Dee turned west off Mission onto Twentieth, climbing up out of the valley. She crossed the street called Dolores and squeezed into a tiny parking space at the upper end of the park. Getting out of the car, Alex admired the downtown lights spread out along Market and up Nob Hill. Dolores meant sorrows, Alex knew. The Spanish priests had called their settlement the Mission of Sorrows, though he didn’t know why.
“Nobody much goes into the park at night except to make drug deals,” Dee Sturdevant said. “So why don’t we be sensible and circumnavigate it instead?” She set a fast and silent pace. Keeping up with her, Alex realized how truly tall she was, a good five-eleven, just about an inch shorter than he. She broke her stride halfway down Dolores, where a lighted pathway bisected the park. Figures huddled together around the picnic tables near this pathway, the dealers and their customers, Alex guessed. He thought she’d say something, ask something, but she seemed to be waiting for him.
“I once saw the Mime Troupe perform here,” Alex said.
“Yeah?” she asked him. “Which show?”
“I think it was something about the Chicago conspiracy trial. I think I remember somebody in a Judge Julius Hoffman mask.”
“Could be,” Dee said. She pointed toward the statue at the far end of the pathway, just before the fringe of trees where, Alex remembered suddenly, the J-Church streetcar ran. The statue represented Padre Miguel Hidalgo, the Patrick Henry of Mexico, holding a Bible in his hand. “Speaking of performances, I made a speech up there once. They had a rope ladder hung down it, and the kids took turns climbing onto Father Miguel’s shoulders to do their thing. I went bombing up the ladder, ready to take my turn with the bullhorn, and then remembered I was in teacher drag. There was no way I could wrap my legs around his neck in a skirt. I just kind of slung my arm around his neck, as if we were partners. I held onto him all the way through my talk, hoping I wasn’t going to fall and break my neck.”
“What kids? What was going on?” Alex tried to imagine her up there, on top of the life-size statue on its big pedestal. If she was now giving him some of her own history in return for what he’d confided in the car, that seemed like a good sign.
“Mission High School student strike.” She started walking again, farther down Dolores toward the Spanish-style, gingerbread-ornamented school across Eighteenth from the p
ark. “The various races were all cooperating, for once. The kids were striking for a lot of surprising and educationally sensible demands. If they’d won more of them, and gotten to keep them, and kept that brief sense of power and expectation… You didn’t come out here to have me tell you what’s wrong with American education, but let’s just say that granting those demands couldn’t have made things worse than they are now. It would have made them a lot better, I bet.”
Was she testing him now, Alex wondered. Or was she just making small talk? He said, “Did you get away with that? A teacher, addressing a rally of kids on strike?”
“No, I got fired. But the experience was an eye-opener. You’re the ambassador from Jay Harrison. That’s what puts me in mind of those days. Tell me about him.” There was a tone of command in that sentence. It was like, Now you tell me about Jay Harrison, young man.
“He’s a doctor, cancer researcher. Um, he’s not married, no kids. He had his picture in People, sort of by accident. He seems to remember his old days fondly, as far as I can tell.”
“People!” she said. “Is he a celebrity?”
“Not a celebrity, I wouldn’t say that. He had a baseball player for a patient. The point is, somebody who saw the article wrote him a letter. Somebody named Foster, or so they claimed.”
He stopped at the corner, reached into his back pocket, and gave her the copy of the letter he’d brought. Unlike Jay, she had surgeon’s fingers, long ones. She didn’t wear any bracelets, any rings. Alex thought about how those fingers had, a long time ago, caressed the man that might have written this note. She moved under a streetlight to read, and Alex saw how the veins stood out on her fingers, how the joints were more swollen than they would have been then. These things happened, he was starting to notice among his contemporaries, to women who stayed thin.
He tried to picture her with Foster, based on Jay’s sketchy description, but he had trouble because she seemed too ascetic, too self-contained. It helped that while she read the letter she licked and then sucked on the tip of her right index finger. The gesture was playful, even though it looked like something she might do if she were getting ready to leaf through a book. People grew more self-contained as they got older, Alex thought. It was good, but you could carry it too far. He’d noticed this in himself.
“Jay wants to understand what’s going on,” he said. “Without getting Foster in trouble, if that’s possible. Or anybody else, as long as this situation gets resolved.” He was letting the “situation” unfold in front of her the way it had unfolded in front of him. Letter first, marrow second. They might be connected. They might not.
“And Jay is too busy with his celebrities to track Foster down himself? That’s why he hired you and flew you out here? My image of Jay is pretty faint, but I didn’t think he’d get as far as hiring other people to handle his personal life.”
“Right now he has a patient in a lot of danger. Not anybody famous, just a woman with good health insurance and two kids.” Alex explained at last about bone marrow transplants, and about what had gone wrong this time. Hearing himself tell it erased the separation the long day and the air travel had imposed. He shivered with the hollow, angry fear he’d felt in the beach parking lot when there hadn’t been any frozen marrow, only the kidnapper’s note.
Dee Sturdevant searched his face with those pale eyes. She seemed to draw herself up to her full height, her eyes nearly level with his.
“One of the few leads we have is this letter,” Alex pressed. “If Foster by any chance did this, or has any idea who did, we need to be in communication with him. All we care about— all I care about, anyway— is getting the specimen back in good condition. If you were to pull the thing out of your closet I’d forget where I got it and say thank you very much. I’d do the same thing if Foster were to pull it out of his.”
Dee said, “I’m not sure that would be very responsible. Shouldn’t the person who did this be punished, once the patient is safe?”
“Spare me the values clarification, Ms. Sturdevant,” Alex snapped. He heard the anger flaring in his voice and felt the heat rising to his face. She had asked him for the true story, and what he was saying was the truth. He didn’t like her hiding behind her teacher drag, as she put it, now.
“I’m sorry,” Dee said. “It doesn’t matter anyway, what you tell me you would do. It’s been a while since I dealt with fugitives or people living any kind of clandestine life. But I remember the procedures. I’ll try to get your message to Foster. Then if he wants to contact you, he will.”
“You’re saying he’s underground, clandestine?” Procedures. The word rankled. It sounded dry and bureaucratic. There might not be time for that.
“No. I’m saying you don’t seem to know where he is, so it’s not my place to tell you, that’s all. His decision, not mine.”
Logical. Or loyal. But not helpful. Alex said, “When you dealt with fugitives in the past, did it have anything to do with Jay?”
“With Jay Harrison? No. During the strike I mentioned, a cop discharged his gun into the air right next to my ear. Up there, near Twentieth Street. The cop was arresting a kid named Eddie Suarez, one of the better thinkers and orators, and I made the mistake of pulling on the cop’s arm. I was pissed off, and I’d just come charging out of the school in my teacher outfit and full of my teacher authority, so I thought I could interfere with this policeman. Little did I know. Blam! Before that I always thought it was just a slogan, political power comes out of the barrel of a gun. A few months later that same cop got killed. In a shoot-out, or that’s what the police claimed, with a bunch of Latino kids. One of those kids was Eddie’s girlfriend’s brother. There was a warrant for him for the murder of that cop. That was my introduction to hiding fugitives, because it would’ve been the police shooting first and questioning later, that much I knew. When the case finally came to trial, when things had cooled down, the jury decided there hadn’t been any shoot-out, only pushing and shoving, and the officer was most likely shot by his partner, by mistake. All of that was before I met Jay Harrison, though.”
“Uh-huh,” Alex said. As she talked he remembered echoes of this case. There was no mistaking her sincerity, but she hadn’t necessarily answered what he’d asked. “I mean later, after you knew him and Foster. Jay had something to do with an underground railroad for soldiers that had turned against the war.”
“I know he stayed around a while. I used to run into him here and there. But I never worked with him on anything political, no.”
“Oh.” Alex accepted defeat on that one. He began walking along Eighteenth, with the park on the left and the school on the right. Now she matched his pace. He nodded his head toward the school. “Did you keep teaching, or what?”
“I still teach, believe it or not. I didn’t for a while, after I got fired, and for a long time I couldn’t get a job in the City and County of San Francisco, as they say. But now I teach here again, in a high school for ‘newcomers,’ which is this year’s polite word for immigrants. Why?”
“Curious.”
“No, you want to work your way back around to Foster. I don’t blame you.” She stopped at the next streetlight and ran her fingers along the rough silvered surface as if trying to feel something out, to come to some decision. “It’s not that I don’t want to help this woman. What you described, this situation she’s in, scares the hell out of me. It scares you, too, I can see that. It must scare Jay, whoever he grew up to be. But giving Foster your message, trying to give your message is all I can think of to do. If he knows anything useful, if he wants to talk to you, he’ll get in touch. Or else you’ll have to find him some other way. I could have told you all that on the phone, if you’d leveled with me then.”
“Well, would it be worth it for me to hang around the Bay Area and wait for a response?”
“No, I don’t think so. He’s not out here, as far as I know. And let me remind you, my information about where he is might turn out to be wrong, if anyone puts a badge
in my face. I wish I could do something else, but I don’t know what else I can do. It wasn’t only Foster on that trip, of course. Does Jay have you chasing our other companions, too?”
“Your other… oh, you mean the teenage runaways?”
“ ‘Oh,’ ” she mimicked. “A remote possibility crossed my mind, that Jay made up this whole letter, that he’s not really trying to find Foster but to find Barbarella. But if you can really vouch for the missing marrow, that can’t be it, can it? Too bad.”
This time Alex didn’t try to hide his ignorance. The only Barbarella he knew about had been a comic-book sex kitten played by Jane Fonda in the movie version.
“Barbarella?” he said.
“Jay didn’t mention the woman-child who formed a part of this adventure?” Dee let a smile grow into a laugh. She had a whoop of a laugh, Alex thought. This was only a piece of it. What he’d been seeing had to be Dee Sturdevant under wraps. “How much did he tell you about that journey, anyway?” she asked.
“Less than I thought, apparently. You’re saying Jay wasn’t lonely the whole time? He and one of those runaways…”
“Oh yes. Not that getting it on with Barbarella is something he could be blackmailed about decades later. That doesn’t make sense to me.”
“Maybe we could go somewhere for coffee or a drink after all,” Alex said. “And you could tell me more about those travels. It wouldn’t hurt me to know Jay better. My clients don’t always tell me the whole truth about themselves.” And as Hans Heidenfelter would say, the only way to understand how anything worked was to take it apart and lay all the parts out in order, one by one. Hans had meant starter motors or clutches or master cylinders, but the same thing applied to tangled histories and lives.
