by Boston Teran
"Tell me then."
"I have two daughters I love, and who enrich me. I was deeply into you once upon a time. With your long hair and pretty, pretty smile. I went for the package. I am guilty of youth."
"Tell me why."
"Get yourself a girlfriend, or a boyfriend, or a hobby."
"Say it."
"I own some very tony vibrators and I'll take my vacations."
"Say it."
"And we'll survive the distance."
"Say it."
She shut off the light and pulled herself down under the sheets. He heard the sharp intake of her breath which meant "leave."
* * *
BEHIND A lace curtain Sancho Maria watched Dane. He sat on the silver metal steps of a small Airstream the Carusos parked in their front yard. He had bummed a cigarette from Paul and that shirtless, barefoot man-child held the burning tip upright and stared at it. He stared as the red glowing fire ate away paper and tobacco. He stared as the snake charmer would when facing down the snake.
From behind Sancho Maria, Paul whispered to her, "If I hadn't turned out such a mess, we could have a kid like that."
She slid away from the window and got her arms around him to still his heartache. "You are not a mess. And, we really don't know anything about that boy."
"You're talking like a corrections officer now." He gruffly and playfully grabbed her.
She slapped his bare ass on the way to bed. "Lock down."
* * *
ON WEEKENDS The Burrow drew quite a crowd. Word gets around which local airstrips have the best restaurants near a runway where you can fly in, walk to a good meal, then fly out.
Dane was having coffee at the bar. Sancho Maria was serving. Paul was working the coffee shop and they could hear him burn up acres of testosterone anytime someone deigned to activate a cellular.
Dane kept sneaking looks at the wall clock, and just before nine Essie walked in. Standing at the door she looked extremely reticent. He walked over to her. "Thanks for coming."
Her voice, when she spoke next, sounded as if she were trying to get past the privacy of her situation. "I sat up most of the night uncertain and afraid of what would happen to me, how I would feel and act, if I took you there. So… I will take you there."
* * *
AS THEY drove out toward Airport Road they had to pass a last row of hangars. Above one set of doors painted in huge silver and black letters was written: THE ROCKET BOYZ. This is where the Fenns had their plane repair business and kept a crop duster.
Essie noticed the brothers were playing coolios to a group of beer-drinking fly freaks as they showed off a '99 Stationair that had set them back almost three hundred thousand dollars. She had asked Paul where they could have gotten the money and he told her word was Charles spotted the Boyz a loan.
It wasn't sitting right with her. Ever since Taylor's death it seemed Gill and the Fenns had gotten tight. She'd noticed it the first time that day they marched their way into Taylor's hangar on a little errand for Charles.
Music from the Rocket Boyz' hangar banged out across the haze swept tarmac. As Shane came around the Stationair he spotted Essie. His deadeyed raver grin locked on and her insides contorted.
It must be tough having a boyfriend off himself like that—
As they swung away from the hangar Shane bent and squinted to see who was riding shotgun and Dane heard Essie say under her breath, "That's one prick asshole I'd like to run over, and then set on fire."
Chapter Sixteen
ESSIE'S FORD WAS a '63 Falcon, all cleanly original except for the new four shift on the floor and a heavy duty clutch, which she worked with decisive efficiency. They crossed the Rio Vista Bridge and drove in silence till they reached the Ryer Island Ferry.
The Real McCoy, as it's named, was a diesel powered affair with overhanging pilot house and metal railing, port and starboard. It could hold maybe four cars, but this morning, as they crossed Cache Slough to Ryer Island, there was just the Falcon and half a dozen Italians on a cycling tour of the Delta.
As they began the crossing Dane noticed Essie had started to relax. He got out of the car and went to the railing and looked out upon country he had yet to see.
Essie, too, got out of the car, but she remained alone leaning back against the fender. The sleeves of Dane's white T-shirt had been cut off and she noticed a tattoo on his right shoulder she could not, from that distance, quite make out.
Ryer Island was a flat trace of uninterrupted waist-high slender reeds. The sun was only now burning off the last of a dewy ground mist and it seemed the earth was being born through this smoking creation.
Behind those sunglasses Dane's gaze went from point to point until he saw a flock of birds bound up out of a timeless wave of green reeds.
He did not know what the white birds were. But he followed their silent formation as it struck toward the sun. He held them in his sight until their ascent blended into the sky and they were no more.
By this time Essie had walked to the railing and gotten a good look at that tattoo. It was a black and red lightning bolt, two, maybe three inches in length. Both tips were shaped like arrowheads. One pointed upward, the other downward.
"Is there a story attached to that?" she asked.
He saw she meant the tattoo. "After the subway incident, when my eyesight began to go, I decided to bum around the country and really see it, on the chance I would be blind."
His hands slipped into the pockets of his faded jeans. He got one motorcycle boot up on the railing to balance himself as he leaned back. "I refer to this as my Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas period. A fluke hooked me up with a vanload of social radicals."
He shook his head. "They were trying to keep alive an internet mag they'd started called Twisted Clarity. Actually, it was more of an anti-mag mag.
"There were five of them. Imagine Tom Paine and the Merry Pranksters. The Beat Generation as dressed by Marilyn Manson."
Memories gave way to something more reflective. His hands slid from his pockets and gripped the railing. He watched those Italian students chat and laugh and pose for snapshots that would mint time and place on the coin of memory.
"Then one day the messenger arrives and strikes you down." Dane paused. A slow wiring moved up through the muscle of arm and shoulder, then into the face. "You listen, you hear. And when that's done, you are no longer you."
He turned to her and smoothed over what there was that edged those feelings. "The lightning bolt represents that reality, the arrowheads a commitment to strike out in new directions. The up and down speaks for itself about the pull of reward and warning."
Silence followed, held together by the wash tide and cable motor turning. An Italian asked Essie in hobbled English if she would play photographer for a group smile. With that done she returned to the railing and Dane said, "What made you so angry back at the airport?"
Without answering she walked to the car and leaned in the open window to get at the glove compartment. She returned with a badly flattened half pack of cigarettes. "I don't smoke much, so these are about three months old. You want one?"
He did. They smoked.
"You always wear those sunglasses?"
"My eyes are light sensitive. If you don't want to talk about—"
"One of my stepfathers grew up in the Delta. He was a mechanic and on Sundays he had a part-time job running this ferry. He would take me along and I'd get to play engineer, which for a ten-year-old was a hoot.
"As a boy he had been an extra in a movie that was shot here called All the Kings's Men. This ferry was actually used in the movie. He had it on VHS and would play it all the time. He was more connected to the past than he was to the present; it's the one thing about him I remember most.
"I'm telling you this as a way of explaining something to myself. Reminding myself about how I should not be."
She got quiet after that. He waited as she did. She could feel unsettled niches inside her and then, without beginning,
she began. In a stream of words she told him about the Fenns, about that day in Taylor's hangar, their sudden relationship with Charles over recent months, the new plane, the tension between Charles and Nathan since the murder, and when she used the word murder, she did so with emphatic assurance.
"Did you tell this to your D.A. friends?"
"I did not."
"Why?"
"I will not let them call me an idiot. And I will not let them know what I am doing."
"What are you doing?"
She waded through the thought of telling him she was trying to unearth evidence, if there was any, in a small collection of details she'd been quietly stitching together without anyone's knowledge. But until her intuition made it a necessity silence was the next best thing.
"Do you think those garage punks were somehow involved?"
"I think it's possible with them," she said. "But I think some things much worse than that. Much, much worse."
Chapter Seventeen
SNUG HARBOR IS a marina and RV park under huge ancient willows near the southern tip of Steamboat Slough. They would use Taylor's runabout, which was docked in a covered berth on the cove side of the harbor, so they could get to the island in Disappointment Slough.
The quiet waters and deep green overhanging shade made the docks and dwellings feel like something you'd find in Louisiana rather than California, and as they pulled past the tent camps Dane caught sight of a sign pitching the resort. It was one of those clean American mottoes meant to lure you in with its accursed sweetness: There are no strangers here… only family, old friends, and newly found friends.
* * *
ROY WAS at The Point restaurant in Rio Vista having a Bloody Mary and trying to get the bad taste of last night out of his mind. As Flesh had ordered, he'd invited Nathan to brunch so he could smooth over any problems on the chance word got back about his conversation with Essie and Rudd.
The Point looked out on the Sacramento and from a waterside window Roy killed time watching the white proud yachts and the black gray freighters move between the bay and the city.
Roy hated boats of any kind, and here he was living in the Delta. They made him seasick, his polio turned into a catastrophic humiliation on a rolling deck, and to top it off, he couldn't swim. He couldn't even float.
He was mindlessly watching a barge pass when he caught sight of a runabout. He recognized the boat, and Essie driving. Then he saw who was with her.
Mr. Well Spoken. Mr. "I Didn't Mean Anything More Than What I Said." Mr. Distinct Good Looks, as Flesh kept reminding him on the way home.
His whole body twisted trying to follow the runabout with his eyes. Mr. Well Spoken had been there less than a day and already he had one hand in their lives.
* * *
REACHING DISAPPOINTMENT Slough was a meander of sweeps and curves that traced a path through Seven mile Slough and down the San Joaquin, past Prisoner's Point and the Empire Tract. The way was marked by nested ports done in the river architecture of the twenties and by bascule bridges whose cool shadows touched the day. It was a dock side world of restaurants made from the hulls of steamers and small harbors with clustered sailboats whose masts stood above the trees like the spears of knights would unto the sky. There were the remains of homes the changing tides had taken back, and vast drifts of silence filled with pampas grass and, of course, the overwhelming throaty scent of life on water.
Essie found herself wandering into a thought. Was it she taking Dane somewhere, or was it he taking her? Was there some guiding consciousness in control, or was it just drift? For one short solitary moment she was darkly frightened. She got away from the strong undertow of that idea by asking, "What do you think of the Delta?"
He turned to her. The sun was against his face. "I was taking it all in. The eye-delightful simplicity. And telling myself how easy it would be to imagine living here and being… roughly free."
Chapter Eighteen
ROY WAS GOING on and on with his self-absorbed expiation concerning last night's argument when Nathan just flagged. "Enough."
While Roy pulled at his ponytail Nathan said, "I heard you were talking to Charles about backing you in a run for Congress."
As if this course change were just an intrusion Roy went on, "Do you know who gave Taylor the pills?"
"Ivy told me it was her. Has Charles offered to back you?"
"Did she tell you why he wanted them?"
"Listen to me on this. Stay away from Charles' money. I'll get you people who will—"
"Did she tell you?"
Roy's fingers kept spidering through his gray hair. Nathan hated that, always, and at this moment even more so. He turned away and sighed. He tried by looking out the window to find something he could concentrate on that would stop the urge to ask, "What did she say?"
"I kept it from the police. Away from the press."
"What did she say?"
"I did this for your sake. For Essie's."
"This is about you, Roy. What did she say?"
"You have to swear not to tell Ivy we spoke of it."
"You know you are going to hurt me."
"I don't want people to think it was murder when it wasn't. At least, we have no proof—"
"But some people believe it was murder, Roy, and I'm one of them."
"I'm not trying to hurt you." Of course, Roy knew he was being selfish and hurtful, but if it would make the case for his life being better. "Taylor was thinking about suicide. He told Ivy."
Nathan's eyelids sunk until they shut. "Did he say why?"
"Because he felt… his life was a failure, compared to yours."
* * *
WHEN THE runabout passed the St. Francis Yacht Club the boundary on Essie's pain tightened. "The two witnesses came from that yacht club bar."
As Dane looked the St. Francis over, the runabout came to port and Disappointment Slough opened out before them.
The river is a road that moves, so says the old adage, but the pull of the tides seemed to have no direct control on the water there.
Up that few mile stretch were thickly treed islands which hid small cabins. There were calm glades and wreaths of hyacinth that drifted on the idle current. It was, to the eye, a continuing series of classically lit camera poses from some easy past.
They tied up at Taylor's dock.
"How did a place as beautiful as this get a name like Disappointment Slough?"
"That is a mystery no one has ever been able to answer."
He looked toward the far berm. "You swam from there?"
Barely above a whisper, "I did."
He followed Essie up the walkway and under shaggy poplars toward a clap board bungalow with screened-in porch and metal roof. The house was wrapped in a brown-green thistly brush that covered the island's three, possibly four acres. Dane noticed a slight swell of earth forty yards or so from the house, where stood a stone well and a windmill. The windmill was now used as a river beacon which lit up at night.
Essie pointed to a cracked piece of railing. "That's where I fell and broke my wrist." She turned to the front door. "And that is where I found Taylor."
Her mouth stiffened as she tried to maintain a rigid discipline on her emotions. Looking at that door, now under a spell of delicately shaded sunlight, one would never suspect that death had visited so violently.
Her body suddenly shuddered. "I'm not sure I should have come. I feel too many questions, too many hurts."
She started back for the boat but Dane grabbed her by the arm. She jabbed at his grasp with an elbow and got loose. "You don't know. You don't know."
She sounded like something caged. "They say it was part my fault. That because I'd moved the body I'd 'contaminated the site.' Should I have left him there and not checked to see if he was breathing?"
Her body trembled. "Is that what I should have been about?" The full force of the past was having at her. "I still see him lying there and I'm not good at pretending things away. It is part of my mind and m
y heart. Blood and all.
"Am I the only one who hurts enough to keep caring? Where is Nathan? Where is Ivy? What about Roy? Even if Roy believes it was suicide, why should he rest on that? Taylor was his good friend's son. This isn't a matter of fact.
"I'm not slick or shrewd. I'm not one of those people who can sit around and think sinister with the best of them. But something happened here." She pointed to the doorway. "Something more went on than what they say.
"Fuck!" She screamed so loud the slough echoed with her. "I need to be alone for a few minutes so I can calm down. All right!? All right!?"
She didn't wait for his answer. She walked through the brush on the thinnest thread of a trail up to the windmill, where she sat on the edge of the stone well and lit a cigarette. She seemed to be shivering.
* * *
DANE WATCHED her. She was quite something, he thought. All heart and feelings. Compared to her he was— Dane could barely manage a comparison. She was the honest contrast to everything he'd been.
How much more did she know? How useful would it be? He could offer to help her, to make a plea for her trust. But his instincts warned to call in and have that choice cleared, because he had been advised that any decision he made on his own they disagreed with could jeopardize his shot at freedom.
If he did make the call, with everything that had happened, with the possible leaks in security, where would that leave her? What might she become vulnerable to?
He looked at the spot where Taylor had lay dying. I have thrown my life away once, Dane thought… and for what?
* * *
ESSIE STARED down into the cool hollow of that well and used the trancelike quiet to help her settle out until the telltale signs of fatigue stopped her crying completely.
She smoked and gave everything that plagued her a chance to just ease away, if only for a while, so she could think more clearly, be more in control of her decisions.
She only heard Dane once his shadow moved across the morning sun upon her face. Looking up she said, "I'm sorry."
"No one should be sorry because they are admirable."
