Be the One

by April Smith

  “What’d he do?” “He left.” Deep laugh. “Didn’t want any part of that situation.”

  Cassidy continues to the last seat at the bar where she can stare at the dead-fish aquarium. Why would anyone construct such a thing? What could be more melancholy than dried-up seahorses, shriveled to the size of paper clips?

  Big Tyson slaps down a coaster and a menu of microbrews.

  “How are you?” Cassidy asks in a hollow voice.

  Big Tyson doesn’t answer. The heaviness in the shoulders slumped beneath the leather vest tells her he’s sunk into one of those Tysonian depressions, the cause of which probably goes back to some bad window-pane during his Stanford undergraduate days, when he was a physics major living above a garage in a single room papered with blacklight posters, traveling in a beat-up Toyota Corolla to every concert the Grateful Dead ever gave, dropping acid and trying to climb on stage to blesh with Jerry Garcia. But the freakiest, he once confessed, was tripping out when he worked nights at the Stanford University nuclear reactor.

  That is why, when he gets like this, Cassidy leaves him alone:

  Because watching Maurice Tyson set down a Pilsner glass of honey ale thirty years later, squarely on a coaster, without a tremor, without a spill, without blowing up the western coast of the United States, is an awesome and deeply spiritual experience.

  “Thank you” is all Cassidy chooses to say.

  The woman is signaling for the bill. “I’ve got a crush on you,” she sings, a warped Etta James.

  Tyson frowns and picks up the phone.

  “I’m calling a cab for you people.”

  “What for?”

  “Take you home.”

  “What for?”

  Tyson dials.

  “We’re not drunk!” says one of the men, jowly, gold-rimmed glasses, white short-sleeved shirt and bolo tie, indignant.

  The others chorus, “Sober enough to drive!” and “What’s your problem?”

  “I don’t want the responsibility,” Tyson says quietly, continuing to talk into the phone.

  “Let’s go.”

  The cowboy queen scrapes her keys and cigarettes off the bar. The keys are attached to a rawhide braid and the pack of cigarettes fits into its own hot-pink leather purse with a twist-snap catch.

  “Mellow out,” suggests Cassidy. “Take a ride.”

  The woman turns. Her rheumy eyes are rimmed with black and her hair is lacquered auburn.

  “You know what, honey? I can fucking well drive a car.”

  Cassidy slips off the barstool. Her body feels like it is filled to the brim with very unstable, highly flammable rocket fuel.

  “You know what, asshole?” Cassidy replies. “You could kill somebody.”

  The woman plants her heels, hands on hips. For a stringy old broad she looks fairly strong. Cassidy gets ready to block if she whips those keys around.

  The woman fixes Cassidy with a deranged stare.

  “I have a son who died in Vietnam.”

  Her pals are saying, “Let’s go, Ricky.”

  “No! I’m on this bitch.”

  Cassidy’s nails are digging into the nearest barstool cushion, through the worn plastic to the crumbly foam.

  “Bring it on. Bitch.”

  Big Tyson steams around the bar like a robot activated to life, fingers clutched, all but red laser beams shooting from his eyes.

  “Now,” he tells the woman, “I have to ask you to leave.”

  “Up yours,” Ricky says.

  “Watch it,” cackles one of the geezers. “She kicks.”

  “Let’s all chill,” Tyson says. “Nobody’s going to hurt you,” trying to move her backward by taking a step forward. “Nobody’s doing anything.”

  Cassidy: “Want me to call 911?”

  “You know what you can do?” Ricky croaks.

  Cassidy retires to the end of the bar, taking herself out of the action. Tyson is bigger than all three of these goons. She picks up the glass but her hand is shaking.

  “Girls like you,” Ricky says, “fuck niggers.”

  Cassidy pushes down so forcefully on the rung of the stool in an effort to get to Ricky fast enough and hard enough to knock her to the ground that the stool flips backward and she is off-balance as she scrambles forward, recovering lithely but abruptly shouldered back by Big Tyson’s big torso. The blow snaps her neck and takes her breath away.

  Ricky shouts, “All right!” and her companion announces, “I gotta go pee-pee,” shuffling off as if it were halftime in his own living room.

  Tyson looks at Cassidy. “Do me a favor? Answer the phone.”

  “Do not let that trailer trash get into a car.”

  “Trying my best.” Tyson gives up a tight smile. The small yellow teeth are not his best asset.

  As Cassidy moves behind the bar she becomes aware of several things: pain in the ribs, throbbing fingers, a squat Croatian in the doorway yelling, “Somebody vants a cob?” Ricky’s hoarse coughing mixed with sickening seventies music that has been blaring the whole time, Come on! Take the money and run!

  “Papa’s!” she spits into the phone.

  “Is Cassidy Sanderson there?”

  “Speaking.”

  “I have Joe Galinis calling for you.”

  Why not? The universe is perfect.

  In an instant he is there: “Cassidy!”

  The announcement of her name as bright as ever.

  “Where are you?”

  “In the car. My secretary said you were ballistic. What’s the matter?”

  “Everything.”

  “First of all, are you okay?”

  “No. I’m not okay. Everything is blowing up. It’s meltdown, Joe—”

  The line goes dead.

  “What are you doing here?”

  Mary Jo Martin, the sportswriter, who usually never makes it before midnight and always wearing a conservative blazer and slacks with a belt, always in a tiff about some editor or newscaster messing with her stuff, has materialized on the buying side of the bar. She is backlit by a burning wedge of sunset through the open door which hurts Cassidy’s eyes, so it takes a moment to adjust to the new, unexpected, daylight Mary Jo: sweats, no makeup, looking like a radiant vision of herself, as if she’d just been turned into an angel.

  Mary Jo says, “I just sold my screenplay. For half a million dollars.”

  They stare at each other. The phone rings.

  “That’s going to be my agent.”

  Cassidy picks it up.

  Joe: “I’m at a pay phone now. We can talk.”

  Mary Jo: “My agent—”

  Cassidy turns away, squeezing up her eyes so Mary Jo recedes like an actress in a harness being cranked back into the wings.

  “—I was on my way to the site. I didn’t want to have this conversation over the air—shit. This was not a good idea. There’s going to be jackhammers. Wait a minute. Shit.”

  “Joe? Can you hear me?”

  “Yes.”

  Something is different in the bar. The drunks and the cabdriver are gone and the music has changed to Terence Blanchard’s soothing horn. Cassidy is trying to talk loud enough but not too loud, the effect a punching rasp. Tyson is squeezing past to take care of some professional surfers, more pumped than usual, who have gathered around Mary Jo. Ignoring their raucous greetings Cassidy takes the radio phone into the women’s bathroom and hooks the door.

  “Joe, I have to ask you a question.”

  “Ask.”

  “How long have you owned the house on the beach?”

  “The beach house? What?”

  “Who was the architect? Who was the contractor? How long did it take to build it?”

  “I’m sorry. I’m lost.”

  The background fills with the roar that words make when they accelerate through the ozone layer into space.

  “You said the house reminded you of Greece.”

  “Yes?”

  “So did you build it? Custom? Or did you buy it
from someone else, who’s also a fanatic about the natural light?”

  Someone’s knocking on the bathroom door.

  “I don’t know what your problem is. The architect was a young guy named Jason Kilbourne, a disciple of Richard Meier. The house is six years old. Okay? Now what the hell is going on? Did you talk to Alberto about going to the police?”

  “No.”

  “I thought we agreed that you would.”

  “I would if I were sure.”

  “How can you not be sure?”

  Someone’s getting cute, going rat-a-tat-tat like a woodpecker.

  Cassidy screams, “I’m in here!”

  “You have no idea how many lives and livelihoods you are placing in jeopardy,” says Joe over what sounds like a semi thundering by, “by clinging to this nothing kid. I just don’t get it, but there’s not a lot I can do about it right now, I’m standing in a phone booth at the corner of Eleventh and Flower—”

  Alone in the bathroom, Cassidy says quietly: “I don’t know who to believe.”

  Despite the noise, she can hear Joe’s breath, quick and close.

  “I’ve always tried,” he says at last, “to understand what the world is really like, the world outside my own head. The real world, the pure world, that’s beyond our vision and the limitations of our own psychology, everything we carry with us, how we grew up. Sometimes you get a shot at it.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  Cassidy looks at herself in the silver-stained mirror and waits.

  Joe: “Do you want me to say I love you?”

  “Do you?”

  “Yes. You sound surprised. I mean, by your silence, I’m guessing you’re surprised.”

  “People who love each other don’t lie about stupid things like beach houses.”

  Joe’s voice rises with helplessness. “What is this crap about the beach house? Jesus Christ.”

  “The cops are investigating you. They know a lot of things—”

  Cassidy slides down the metal divider between the sink and toilet until she is sitting on the filthy bathroom floor. Disinfectant or no disinfectant, there are shards of toilet paper, hairballs, a tampon applicator, a couple of bright yellow capsules someone dropped on the way to hypnotic sedation.

  “—including the fact that you don’t actually own the beach house.”

  Mocking, “They know this?”

  “There’s no record of it, okay?”

  Another truck roars by whatever half-demolished corner Joe is standing on, a tiny figure watching the gargantuan construction of his dream. Tears well up as if the very same dust had stung her eyes.

  “If we can’t be honest with each other, there’s no point.”

  “There is a point, but never mind. I care about you, of course I want us to be honest. I had a reason, but okay. The house belongs to a friend of mine. Her name is Alicia Morgan.”

  “Alicia.”

  Cassidy stands up and jams her hip into the corner of the towel dispenser.

  The knocking starts again.

  “I’ve known her a long time. She’s in Europe for a while—”

  Cassidy says nothing.

  “See? I knew you’d be upset.”

  “Are … you … still … involved?”

  She kicks the metal divider, once for every word.

  “No. We haven’t been for over two years.”

  When she’s made a few good dents, she stops.

  Joe is pleading, “Sweetheart, please, this is all so out of proportion—”

  “Do not disrespect me now.”

  She presses the END button.

  The bathroom door springs open. Three pissed-off girls are waiting, a skinny one in bell-bottoms, one with pierces up the nose, one a hairdresser with teased hair.

  “About time.”

  “For what?” asks Cassidy, and the skinny one takes one look at her and decides to slip inside and lock the door.

  She walks into a full-swing Papa’s evening. After-work regulars are clustered at the bar and the Mary Jo OhmyGoddoyoubelieveitthisisinsane! contingent has spread to three tables. It’s wild, it’s a party, and it’s going to get wilder, but to Cassidy the scene seems muffled by a peculiar silence and a vast psychic distance.

  She puts the phone back behind the bar and ambles past the pool table where unaccountably she picks up the yellow, hefts it in her good right hand, crow-hops and throws it low and hard at the wall. The heavy ball fires through the cheap wood paneling like a meteor, demolishing the plaster and flying clear out the other side.

  Two of the surfers cueing up, who might, had they moved one step to the left, be on their way to South Coast Medical Center for a brain scan, look at Cassidy without saying a word. Then the long-haired one, Skyler, goes to the hole and rubs a finger around the splintered edge. They can hear a diminishing crack-crack-crack as the ball bounces down the alley.

  Skyler says, “Fresh.”

  25

  Cassidy, Joe and Alberto left Francisco A. Micheli Stadium in the Range Rover and drove through a warren of unlit streets in the old colonial section of town—shuttered windows, Romanesque archways, a church with ruined tile walls—then suddenly found themselves on a dark country road, a dead cow swaying off the back of a pickup truck in front of them.

  “Can we please lose the cow?” asked Cassidy.

  “Sure,” said Joe, taking the very next turn. The road forked several times across the cane fields, bumping downhill to a marsh. The headlights poked through climbing philodendron and swung around to a stucco house painted acid green. Despite the isolation, the doors and windows were barred.

  “Where are we?”

  Alberto answered, “Yo no sé.”

  “I think you could say we’re lost.”

  At the ball game they had eaten soft orange cheese cut into wedges and ground meat steamed in banana leaves, and peanuts and chips and a steady flow of rum and Cokes from vendors whipping flasks out of their back pockets. It had been a while since Cassidy had been drunk on rum: a slow, steep ascent.

  The game was a blur of spectacle played at a tempo meant to savor each moment, the stadium announcer rooting unabashedly for the home-team Azucareros like the troublemaker in the back of the class—a blaring raspberry for the ump, a shout of despair on a strikeout, a maniacal laugh on a double play, filling every lull with a sonorous refrain, “Siempre, Coca-Cola.”

  “Who is this guy?” Cassidy shouted.

  Joe said, “Our modern concept of God.”

  A CRACK!, a gasp, but the towering hit went foul, continuing to rise with incredible grace in a slow perfect Euclidean arc, the spinning white ball reaching its zenith against a jet-black sky, then falling gently, inevitably, into somebody’s outstretched cap.

  Now the rum was making Cassidy spin out in the motionless car. She drew her legs up beneath the long skirt and held on to her knees. Lizards. Hibiscus. Rats. Orchids. Wild ginger and oregano. Small charred bones in a pile. An egret stalking the edge of the swamp. The green house impaled in the headlight beam, scalding white as a lamp on an examining table.

  “Whoever lives here,” she observed, “has a lot of water.”

  Five-gallon containers were hanging off the roof like tassels.

  “No,” said Alberto, “that to keep the devil away.”

  “Wrong turn, no problem,” said Joe, immediately shifting into reverse.

  Just then the security door, heavily meshed as a liquor store in South-Central, creaked open and a cadaverous-looking old man with sunken cheeks of dark sienna, wearing an ancient black suit, stepped into the headlight beam.

  “I know this place!” Alberto said suddenly. “This guy is a Haitian guy—” and he was out the door, haranguing the old man, “You tell your friends, they lose. I win. I play for the Los Angeles Dodgers!”

  Cassidy was beside him, pulling his arm. “Back in the car.”

  Alberto was still angry at the Haitian pitcher who had cursed them after the tryout.
<
br />   “I no got bad spirits. They got the bad stuff. Who care for obeah? We no believe it. We say junk!”

  The old man fixed Cassidy with golden eyes. He must have been ninety.

  “Do you have a problem?” he asked in English.

  “No. No problem.”

  “This young man, he has a bad thing on him?”

  “No, no. We’re fine.”

  “Come inside.”

  “No, thanks.”

  Joe charged up behind them, rolling down his sleeves against the swarms of biting mosquitoes.

  “You can’t stand here,” pushing Cassidy through the door, “you’ll get malaria.”

  Inside it was wondrous. The walls were dusky colors, tomato and sage, with huge skulls and crossbones painted on them in thick primitive black lines like cartoon pirate flags. Embedded in the dirt was a wooden cross draped with chains and studded with white candles. Behind that, a child-size chair had a broken doll and a real human skull bound to it with rope. The skull wore a Panama hat, and a pipe was inserted backwards between its jaws.

  On a large red table there were thousands of ritual objects in fetishistic clutter—champagne bottles, rum bottles, ram’s horns, cigarette packs, rocks, sticks, tiny rocking chairs, plaster saints, rusted knives, scrolls of paper, rattles, bells, drums, funnels, scarves, plastic hands, fans, feathers—wrapped in twine or knotted ropes or padlocked chains or ribbon—snared and bound, to capture, trap, punish or dispel.

  Joe asked the old man, “Who are you?”

  The old man answered, “I serve.”

  He shimmied a hand toward the objects.

  “These are the powers of Bawon Samdi.”

  “Junk,” Alberto spat.

  “Look what we have here,” wheedled the boko priest as if amusing a child, and he lifted the bottle of Gordon’s gin that had been stuffed with pieces of dry twig like grapevine kindling.

  “What is that?” wondered Cassidy, with a peculiar feeling of having arrived at a strange altar at which she had been expected.

  “Mama Juana.”

  The priest pronounced it so slowly she could see the red sores floating on his gums.

  “You put any liquor inside, any liquor you want, and let it stay for three days and it becomes five times stronger and gives to you special powers of love.”