Bread to the Wise--Book I of The Libertine

by Angus Brownfield

  She said, “I have an appointment at nine. I’ll be on the first plane back after that.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “My academic career doesn’t seem too damned important right now. If tomorrow I can’t settle things, well, tough shit. I’m coming back.”

  I said, “No one meant this to happen, not even the dumb shit who shot him. You can’t change anything by coming back before you finish your business.”

  She said, “What has that got to do with my responsibility towards Jake? I’ll call right before I leave.” And she hung up.

  Responsibility towards Jake? Was this about atonement? I repeated what she said. I hefted it, to measure its weight. I didn’t understand. Was she, after all, the person more in tune than I with friendship and ethics and all the things that make a human being human?

  two

  This I understood, as I hung up the phone: my exile was over. Whatever ground I stood on, I was no longer in the never-never land of La Morinda, I was in Mary Clare’s land of reality.

  “Get out of Moraga,” she had said. Well, I was doing that, too. I wasn’t sure exactly where I’d end up, but I was going to keep my bargain with Amanda and quit the Pritchett household. To start a new job in Berkeley. Then what? The ‘then what’ would have to wait. One thing I was pretty certain of, my life wasn’t going to roll along like it had when I went from dishwasher to the Gold Dust Twins to Assistant Vice President in several giant steps. This gig with ABAG was just that. In a year and a half or so I would zip my brains into a gig bag and saunter off into the sunset.

  It had taken long enough. Mary Clare was in high school when I shot the drifter named Ralph Delano Renwick and ended the string of luck that I attributed to the Divine Accident. Now I was going to be a real grownup and quit relying on dodges. I had a real job, a job I got because someone thought I was good at something, not because I came up with one flashy idea.

  This time there were no tearful goodbyes, no gifts, just Bienvenida helping me carry my things out to the truck and giving me a smacking kiss on each cheek. I think she was relieved to see me go, given Amanda’s animosity towards me. She wasn’t one to be comfortable with divided loyalties.

  The Pritchetts, plus Bienvenida and Mary Clare, had been my family while I convalesced, the first time I’d felt like I was part of a family since my mother died. But then, I thought, waving back at Bienvenida, who waved one last time from the kitchen window, the pattern was all too familiar. You no sooner find a family and one of the members threatens to croak.

  I was glad to be going to work. I could have called Howie Manheimer and got a few days’ reprieve, his knowing Jake and I were tight, but I would have gone crazy cooling my heels.

  “I’m going home,” I told myself as I drove up the hill from the Pritchetts’. I entered the stream of traffic on Highway 24 and I really felt like it. Back in the day, I walked up the hill from my last class on a Friday evening and, bag already packed, Ford coupe already gassed, it was up Claremont Avenue to Fish Ranch Road, and then onto Highway 24—going the opposite way, of course—to enter the river of life as I knew it then, the highways of California, the shortcut on State 33 to Los Banos about the time the sun went down, and, merging into the bigger river, Highway 99, another five hours and I was at my father’s home in Manhattan Beach. I couldn’t see the ocean but I could hear it as I alit from my car. It was the friendly ocean of my youth, where I’d body surfed and fished, and cooled off from summer workdays as a hard hat laborer.

  The first morning home, after breakfast with my father, I’d walk downtown, left on Pier Street, and out to the bait shop at the end of the municipal pier. It was my pier, I loved watching dizzy waves race into crests beneath it and shiver into foam against the pilings. I loved to watch the daredevil lads, who always seemed to favor denim cutoffs, leap from the railing, three stories above the waves, to defy fear, life guards and sometimes the police. I caught a twenty-eight pound halibut off that pier. It was the only pier it was okay to play a portable radio on while I fished, cause that’s what they did when I was growing up.

  Not tonight, but sometime soon I was going to visit the Berkeley pier, longer than the Manhattan Beach pier, but much closer to the water. I might even buy some cheap fishing gear and make that a pastime.

  In Berkeley I picked the Pelican Motel. Besides being named for the University’s humor magazine, it was a cousin of the motel in South Lake Tahoe, where three amateurs felt good about outsmarting two pros. Otherwise, it supplied a firm mattress and a telephone. I called Moraga and told Jane to write down how to reach me. I likewise called Sergeant Rutledge’s line and left a message on his answering machine. I secured my truck, by backing it against the back wall of my parking bay, and walked two blocks to Berkeley Square.

  Mac the bartender was behind the bar. Mac knew everyone in Berkeley who stopped there for fortification on the way home. Mac knew me and he knew Jake, but he didn’t yet know Jake and I knew each other.

  “Hi, kid,” Mac said. He was the only one who called me kid any more. “I haven’t seen many of the old regulars lately. Where’ve you been?”

  “Over the hill in La Morinda.”

  “Well,” he said, “it’s nice to see a familiar face I actually like.” He poured a gin and ran a neatly cut piece of lemon peel around the rim of the glass. He wouldn’t let me pay for it.

  “How’s Louis?” I asked, referring to the owner.

  “Louis sold the place, you know.”

  “You wanted to buy him out, as I recall.”

  “Couldn’t swing it,” he said, shaking his head.

  I said, “Is the new owner anyone I know?”

  Mac jerked his thumb at the other man behind the bar—not someone I knew. The motion of his thumb and eyes told me Mac didn’t think I would like the man any better than he did.

  “You see Buck at least?”

  “Buck’s dead. Died not very long after the last time I saw you—three years, is it?”

  “About that. Liver?”

  “Suppose so. Buck was in the hospital a while. A bunch of us went over and took him flowers. The other Mac’s dead, too.”

  “No. He was way too young.”

  I really didn’t know either of the men that well, two men who worked at the State Department of Public Health when I was at the University. The occasional drink together, swapping bureaucratic tales. Both deaths were premature.

  Mac went further down the bar and drew a beer for a man with a Peterbilt insignia on his bill cap. I finished my drink and asked for another. “How’s the food here now?”

  Mac said, “Same as ever.”

  “Know any good places?”

  “There’s a new place called Chez Panisse, gets written up in the Sunday supplement, French food and fancy wines. You used to like that kind of stuff, as I recall.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “but not to eat alone.”

  Mac said, “You could go over to the old train station, pretty safe bet.”

  It was still light when I left Berkeley Square and walked up the street to the Santa Fe depot, a yellowish building, half WPA utilitarian, half California Mission. Someone had converted it into a steak house. I got a table amid flocks of kids who only seemed to be young enough to be my own. They were all pert and handsome, not a revolutionary crowd. Even my waitress perked me up, although she was in many ways the opposite of Mary Clare. She was too pendulous to go braless and too young to be so pendulous. She also didn’t shave her legs, which was a subculture thing I decided you have to acquire a tolerance for at an early age.

  Still, it was Berkeley. Berkeley had enacted an ordinance banning smoking in eating establishments, the first such ordinance in the land. So I didn’t smoke, I made myself a salad at the salad bar. The T-bone arrived medium rare, just the way I wanted it, the baked potato hot and fluffy, with sour cream and blue cheese. After staying with the Pritchetts, where both Amanda and Jake could whip up a salmon soufflé or an asparagus timbale in no time flat, it was nice t
o have meat and potatoes. I drank a green but deep-bodied cab and indulged my penchant for people watching.

  Berkeley at the cusp. Lots of beards, beards had become standard. The girls wore waist-length hair and granny glasses, but they looked pleasant instead of grim. None of those kids paid me any mind: I was over thirty—but then so was Ringo Starr.

  I sipped wine and sucked my teeth, remembering, the summer I was seventeen, the girl at the beach who didn’t shave her legs, or at least her thighs, and on that day the fact impressed itself on me because, suddenly—her thighs were particularly well shaped and inviting—I blurted out my observation, and she took umbrage. It was as if I’d called attention to a hare lip. She said, “I don’t have to shave,” and she was right: the fine golden hair of her thighs complimented the pancake brown of her summer tan, but I was too abashed to apologize.

  Which led me to wonder, in a place full of college kids, if anyone were abashed any more. Until the Sixties, I recall, people still got abashed. Characters became abashed in certain novels. John Steinbeck knew that; any second he’d walk in and my table would be the only one with a vacant chair. Hello, Mr. Steinbeck, I bow to your appreciation of abashedness.

  Eating and watching kids without that tension that came from the People’s Park days counted as a diversion from incipient panic. I could feel old in the face of all that youth and brashness about me, the lack of respect for abashedness, but I couldn’t feel panic.

  I paid my tab and handed my waitress a good tip and walked out into a Berkeley summer sunset with a green cast to it.

  three

  I walked away from the sunset, heading for Shattuck and Haste, a distance that would work off some of the calories I’d just consumed. The destination was the Cinema Guild, where I’d seen Chushingura three times. My corset took some of the pleasure out of walking, an activity as natural to a Berkeleyan as breathing. Walking and sex had kept me in shape in Berkeley, although the proportions changed after I met Lana.

  Lana didn’t walk, she strolled. She was from Southern California too, but while I had embraced Berkeley’s ways and used my feet as my main form of transportation, Lana retained the automatic assumption that a car could do it better and faster, and never walked except for recreation. She had uncanny luck finding parking places, while my luck was the opposite.

  Lana was a South Side person. Different kinds of persons lived north and south of campus. Partly it was a matter of major: engineers, chemists and architects lived on North Side, liberal arts majors lived on South Side. Personality came into it, too. I had a South Side major but by temperament was a North Side person, and that’s where I lived.

  At Shattuck and Haste I looked at the marquee in momentary puzzlement. One title implied gigantic orgasms, the other a young lady who laid everyone in sight. I’d seen a couple of porno movies in my life and I could take them or leave them, but I wasn’t going to spoil the memory of Chushingura and the forty-seven martyrs by watching massive orgasms with multiple partners.

  My back being tired, I looked for a taxi to take me back to the motel, but I had as much luck with taxis in Berkeley as I did with parking places. The sunset was tired now, the sky below a certain stratum the color of a big ugly Buick, while above that stratum deep purple set off with rich pinks and salmons. Other Berkeley sunsets I’d known came through the deep purple, sunset conversations, some with strangers, some with friends, like the one I had with one of the leaders of the student revolt, a woman I shouted at by day and whispered sweet nothings to at night.

  She and I didn’t see each other in public—her public or mine—but some evenings we took secret strolls and talked. One day at sunset we walked to the steps west of the Divinity School, where converged with Scenic and LeConte Avenues. We watched the sunset ripen while she told me about hitchhiking through Europe the summer previous. Spain was the place where, as a lone woman hitchhiking, she ran into trouble. A truck driver—the third man that day who had got more than a little lecherous—so wore her down that she cried out, “Do what you want with me, I can’t take it anymore,” and broke into sobs of frustration and resignation.

  It was sunset in Spain as well. Tears turned a swaggering Lothario into a don Quixote. He not only didn’t accept her surrender, he drove two hours out of his way to take her to her destination. He deposited her at a pension run by his aunt, and announced to the trajabadores in the dining room that anyone who insulted his protegida would answer to him on his return trip.

  My secret lover and I talked until the cricket-guarded darkness enfolded us in scents of wisteria and night-blooming jasmine, as we held hands and joined epicenters, approaching synonymy, however fleeting.

  I enshrined the conversation and made it into a simple-pretty. And the night my exile ended was a time to entertain the memory of a simple-pretty, however ephemeral.

  *****

  Maybe, if I’d got out of a movie at ten o’clock I might have slept on Jake’s telepathic news of Meany’s furtive movements, or convinced myself that I had an overly-vivid imagination. I would have gone to bed hoping sleep would find me before my conscience did. I was too restless to sit still in a motel room, so it wasn’t hard to get in my truck, after the long walk into the dusk, and head back to La Morinda.

  But I still had to ask myself why—loyalty to Jake aside—I would go looking for Meany. I wasn’t going to turn him in, any more than I was going to forgive him.

  The answer that seemed to fit best was curiosity. Maybe a fugitive Meany would give up his secret, of how he had stalked and ultimately devoured his own soul, so that he could become large and fearsome, a maker of senators and governors, a demigod among real estate developers.

  But there was a teaspoon of adventure in the answer, for even if the telepathic conversation with Jake was a figment of my imagination, getting up there past Sergeant Rutledge’s sentinel was worth the trip.

  I parked at the high school and walked into Bobwhite Court on the SP right of way, feeling with shuffling feet for any unseen debris. Up ahead, the familiar shape of the complex, a familiar pattern of lights and darks. All except the penthouse, which was black against the city’s night glow.

  My replacement had left the front door unlocked and I walked in, expecting to run into him any second, rode the elevator to the third floor, took the stairs to the roof, where I could see the whole complex. Just at the entrance to the driveway sat a blue Plymouth two-door, a twin to Rutledge’s gray one, but no sign of Meany’s Caddy.

  I used my pass key to fetch the elevator, tingling with anticipation, this time I wouldn’t encounter a disillusionment, I would have a secret tryst with a ghost and be on my way.

  The door slid open to reveal a large blot on the light coming from the cityglow, a Meany-sized blot, standing on the spot where he’d once tried to rip my face off. This time his stance told me he was holding a much more efficient weapon. The slightest glint of nickel told me he was holding the twin to Mary Clare’s revolver.

  four

  It’s me,” I said, as if that would disarm him—in the social sense; I wasn’t fool enough to think he’d put the gun away. Once inside, I could see a finger of light leaving the bedroom, to die before it could escape the penthouse.

  Meany said, “How’d you know I was here?”

  “Let’s say it was a hunch.” I wasn’t about to talk woo-woo things with Meany.

  “Bring anyone?”

  “You mean the police?”

  “I thought police,” he said, “but I meant Mary Clare.”

  “She’s not around.”

  “Where is she?”

  I said, “East of Winnemucca.”

  “I assume she went to Boston,” Meany said.

  “If you could assume that—which is correct—why’d you hire those two cretins to follow her?”

  “Keep her from doing anything stupid, like marrying you.”

  “And those two were supposed to stop us?”

  “What do you think, Gattling?”

  “I
think you didn’t have a notion of what to do. For once you didn’t have a strategy.”

  Meany had walked over and hauled himself up on one of the bar stools.

  “You mind if I make myself a drink?” I asked. I went around the bar and found the gin bottle by memory, ice cubes in the fridge under the bar, the light from the fridge suddenly making me squint.

  Meany said, “Make me one, too.”

  “I hear you drink Old Fashioneds.”

  “Shit, just pour some bourbon over ice and a splash of sweet vermouth.”

  I stayed behind the bar after mixing the drinks. We raised glasses to each other.

  “Why’d you come, if you didn’t bring the police?”

  “I don’t know, exactly.” Swirling the ice in my glass, soft sounds of a full drink tinkling in my hand.

  “You think it’s stupid, don’t you. My feeling for her.”

  “No, I think you’re in love with her. That may be foolish, it’s not stupid.”

  Meany said, “I’m too old to be in love.”

  “You put any label you want on it, then.”

  He said, “Being in love is being crazy.”

  “And you don’t fit that definition?”

  “It got out of hand, is all. It isn’t like business; you can’t start and stop it so easily.”

  “Why’d you get into it, then?”

  “All I wanted,” Meany said, “was for Clare to be happy. I was afraid she’d end up the way she was before. I thought if she got strong, got all that crap out of her system that made her do all those things. I thought another year—two at the outside—she’d be ready to go back to school.”

  I drained my glass, the ice cubes louder. “You ready for another?”

  He said, “Hit me.”

  As I poured I said, “You’re gonna have to pay the piper this time, you know.”

  “Is your friend in bad shape?”

  “About the same kind of gunshot wound as when Mary Clare shot you, only he’s got a bad heart to go with it.”

  Meany made a ripple in the shadows. “No one but the police said that to me, ‘Mary Clare shot you,’ since it happened. Everyone else was afraid to.”

  I said, “Why don’t you go away, get out of town.”