by Tim Sandlin
***
“I will now reveal what I have learned. You two pay attention. I’m happy Mrs. Elkrunner isn’t here, because she thinks she has nothing to learn from her elders. You kids know better.”
“What have you learned, Mr. Pedersen?” Shannon asked.
“This here is the important fact you must accept, should you live a hundred years, as I have. No matter how long you pass on this Earth and in this body, you will look back on your time and say, ‘It went by in a heartbeat. How did that happen so quickly?’”
Roger said, “That’s the most important thing you’ve learned in a hundred years?”
Oly’s voice was angry. “The most important thing—time is short. Don’t toss it down the toilet.”
On the tape, there follows two minutes of silence. You can hear someone—Shannon or Roger—shifting uncomfortably and Oly’s asthmatic breathing. One of them coughs. Papers are rattled.
Finally, Oly’s voice comes back. He says, “Let that be a lesson to you.”
25
Loren Paul lived up a steep slope of lush greenery. The third switchback above the state highway, Roger got his first glimpse of the Pacific Ocean. It was gun-barrel silver and not what he had expected an ocean to look like, although Roger couldn’t say what he had expected. Blue, maybe, or a deep green. This ocean was so flat it didn’t quite look wet.
He sat in back, holding hands with Shannon, who’d found a stick of Doublemint in her back pocket. She gazed out the window and chewed with her lips pressed tightly together. Lydia drove. She was in the foulest mood of a lifetime of foul moods. Her eyes burned. It took no imagination to see the black cloud hovering between Lydia and the roof. The other three were afraid to make small talk. Oly had been waiting all night to bait her over the boy she’d seduced, but even he knew that right now, any sound could prove fatal.
Roger wondered what had gone wrong. The possibilities were so endless he couldn’t think up a decent guess. Lydia hadn’t spoken an unnecessary word since she came back to the Comfort Inn. Roger didn’t expect thanks for setting up the next session of Oly’s history, but acknowledgment would have been appropriate. Lydia didn’t even criticize the way he’d packed the recording equipment.
Roger thought of poison ivy. The hillside came across as reeking of poison ivy. And snakes. Sure enough, they drove by a roadkill snake on the shoulder. It was long as a jump rope and banded in fall colors. Northwest Wyoming didn’t have poisonous snakes, spiders, or ivy. Roger was comfortable wandering the mountains where nothing smaller than a bear might kill him. He wouldn’t have been comfortable wandering the Santa Barbara hillside. All that life made him claustrophobic.
At the top of the rise, a pickup truck hooked to a horse trailer sat parked with the right tires up on the curb. The trailer had Wyoming ranch plates. No one but Roger seemed to notice, and he was too afraid of Lydia’s wrath to point it out.
A half block later, they pulled up in front of Loren Paul’s address. The house looked pretty much like any other house on the hill—white stucco with red semi-circular tiles on the roof. The front yard was mauve gravel. A couple of varieties of cactus and a willow pushed through rocks. Alongside the house grew a decorative border of red and yellow big-blossomed flowers. Something about an existence between mauve gravel and white walls made the flowers more forlorn than festive.
Shannon said, “Is this it?”
Lydia more or less sneered. “No, I just stopped for the fun of it.” She got out and said, “Let’s get this over with.” Then she slammed the door.
In the quiet of the car, Oly said, “I wonder who planted a scorpion up her drawers.”
Shannon said, “Right.”
While Roger went around to pull Oly’s chair from the trunk, Shannon searched for a gum-dumping site. The street was too clean. Someone might step on it. Finally, she stuck the gum up under the mailbox on a post. Lydia glared at her but didn’t speak. It occurred to Roger that Shannon had chosen the mailbox for gum dumping as a ploy to yank Lydia from her malaise. It didn’t work, but the gesture struck him as noble. Everything about Shannon struck Roger as noble that morning. Without Shannon, he wouldn’t have been able to cross the yard. As it was, Oly got stuck. Lydia did nothing to help Shannon and Roger wrestle Oly through the gravel.
Shannon said, “They must go in through the garage.”
Oly leaned forward to take some of the weight off the back wheels. “Doesn’t look like these folks want company.”
The four travelers stood—or in Oly’s case sat—on the front porch, looking at each other, until Lydia growled. “Are you going to knock, or what?”
Roger rang the doorbell. His mind felt blank. Not clear so much as empty. Would Loren appear at the door, recognize Roger for who he was, and throw his arms around his long-lost stepson? Or would he shriek and bolt? Maybe the lost child had been recovered years ago, and he would be the one to answer the door, and Roger would feel like a fool. The only thing that kept him from running back to his cabin in the woods was Shannon’s hand on his back.
She said, “Breathe.”
Oly said, “No one’s home. Let’s go.”
The door opened. A girl, eighteen or so, stood there draped in a UNCG Spartans basketball jersey, spooning yogurt from a carton. She was pole thin with flattop-cut watermelon hair and a nail protruding from her cheek.
She said, “About time you guys showed up.”
“What?” Roger said.
“The gang’s out back by the pool. Come on through here,” and she turned to walk away.
Roger sought out Lydia for guidance. “What do we do, Callahan?”
“You heard the tramp.”
Roger said, “But.”
“Don’t stand there like a buffoon. Go in.”
The house was dark and tasteful—hardwood floors, weavings on the otherwise-bare walls, a minimum of places to sit. There were some Lladro pieces on the fireplace mantel and a huge Chinese vase in the corner. Through French doors, Roger made out a library with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. No photographs of family. It wasn’t a personal living room, but it was comfortable. The people who lived there didn’t care what professional designers thought of them.
Roger’s first urge was to peel off from the group and sneak into the library. He was curious as to what a mid-list novelist reads. Besides, after coming all this way, he was in no hurry to meet Loren. The illusion of hope would be no match for the reality of disappointment.
Shannon was guiding Oly’s chair. She nodded toward the back of the girl leading them through the house. “That’s my shirt.”
“Oh, please,” Lydia said. “This isn’t about you.”
“How did my shirt beat us across the country?”
Roger believed her. If Shannon said an impossible event had come to pass, in his mind, an impossible event had come to pass. “When did you see it last?”
“Yesterday morning.”
“And your shirt miraculously flew a thousand miles to reappear at this house on that grotesque woman,” Lydia said. “Give me a break.”
“UNCG Spartans, number 12, Sambotini. They don’t sell Sambotini shirts at the mall. He wasn’t that good.”
“Is that another one of your boyfriends?” Roger asked.
Lydia said, “Shannon has so many ex-boyfriends, they’ve saturated America. I imagine we’ll run into evidence of Shannon’s love life wherever we travel.”
Oly bobbed his head up and down and meowed.
Lydia said, “Clam up, old man.”
They cut through the kitchen that was lighter than the living room, but just as organic. There was a stand-alone cutting block the size of a picnic table and an array of copper pots and pans hanging from a rack on the ceiling. A walk-in pantry sat off next to the stainless-steel side-by-side refrigerator-freezer. The stovetop was smooth.
“They’re out here,�
� the girl said, pushing through the Dutch door that led to the backyard.
“That shirt isn’t random,” Shannon said. “It came from my closet.”
***
While Bruce Springsteen didn’t record Roger’s favorite music, he could tolerate pounding rock. Lydia couldn’t. The first thing she said when they filed into Loren Paul’s backyard was, “Would somebody please turn that dreck down?”
“This isn’t our house,” Shannon said. “The music is their choice.”
“Even if it is dreck,” Oly said.
Leroy said, “Haven’t seen you in a while, son.”
Roger’s chest twitched, and nausea swept through. His focus swung from the CD player on the stone table to the salamander grinning at him from the hot tub. The man had the look of a Hindu god-man. No chest hair—hell, no chest to brag about. No muscles in his arms or shoulders. No teeth. This was the man from his nightmares, the one who stood too close and smelled of rubbing alcohol. This was the man who had silenced Roger’s voice.
“Are you Loren Paul?”
“I’m Loren Paul.” Loren spoke from over by the pool, in his pajamas and bathrobe, next to a beautiful woman on a chaise lounge.
The beautiful woman—mid-forties, silk caftan, bare feet—lowered her sunglasses to stare at Roger. “Who the hell are you?”
“I might be Loren Paul’s son. Fred.” When she didn’t react, he said, “Buggie.”
Loren had the slightly stunned face of a writer whose real world is elsewhere. You would think a man confronted by the child he lost so many years ago would react visibly. Loren had more of a tornado-victim-in-shock demeanor.
The beautiful woman was angry. Roger could see tension in the tightness of her forehead, although he couldn’t tell if it was caused by him or the freak in the hot tub. Her anger wasn’t the general irritation toward everything and everyone he was used to from Lydia. This woman’s anger was more specific.
She said, “I see you brought an entourage.”
Lydia had been left out of the conversation as long as she could stand. She said, “You must be Lana Sue. We met once, back when you were a young trophy wife.”
Lana Sue dropped her sunglasses back into position and studied Lydia with what Roger assumed was coolness behind the lenses. The mutual disdain was instantaneous and palpable.
“I’m still a trophy wife.”
Lydia snorted.
The skeleton in the hot tub sloshed water over the top, dangerously close to swamping Bruce Springsteen. “You’re my son. He’s a fraud.”
Roger’s confusion was about what you’d expect in a kid who suddenly went from having no fathers to having two.
“I don’t get it.”
The scary man’s left hand came into sight, over the lip of the tub, pointing a pistol at Loren. “That scumbag is a liar.”
“Can I borrow a swimsuit?” the girl with the nail in her cheek asked Lana Sue. “My neighborhood back in Trinidad is too normal for pools in the backyards. I’d be so thrilled to work on my tan and swim some laps while Charley decides which one of you to kill.”
The word kill threw a pall over the gathering. Until then, Roger had been interested in the father question and wondering what he was supposed to feel. Whatever it was, he didn’t feel it. All he felt was mixed up. The death threat only added to the conflicting swirl of information.
Lana Sue said, “Nobody’s getting killed on my patio.”
The girl smiled at her. “I’m afraid that’s out of us girls’ hands. Can I borrow a bathing suit?”
Leroy—who’s going to be called Charley until someone corrects the misconception—snapped. “Zelda, you pig. You want a bathing suit, go in the house and get a bathing suit. Don’t ask permission. We have guns. They don’t.”
Zelda said, “I forgot.”
“God, you are stupid,” Leroy said.
Shannon said, “That’s no way to talk to your girlfriend.”
“That’s okay,” Zelda said. “Charley doesn’t mean it. It’s the way he was raised.” She left her yogurt and spoon on the table and scooted inside. There was a moment of silence while the Springsteen CD stopped playing and Talking Heads started. It was a multiple-disc machine.
“Let’s go back to the who-the-hells?” Lana Sue said. She spoke to Lydia. “Who the hell are you, and why have you people invaded my home?” Then she glanced at Oly, who had rolled around the pool and over to the back fence and was standing up to relieve himself on the slats. “And what is that?”
Shannon said, “She’s my grandmother, Lydia.”
Lydia said, “Shannon, there’s no call to define ourselves.”
Shannon kept on going. “Lydia got out of prison on Mother’s Day. She brought us to Santa Barbara to meet Roger’s dad. And he’s Oly Pedersen. He’s turning one hundred pretty soon, and I have no idea what he’s doing.”
“I need a hand here,” Oly called.
Roger walked over to the fence and Oly.
Loren said, “Your name is Roger?”
Roger was bent over, helping Oly with his zipper. He spoke without looking back. “That’s my name now. It used to be something else.”
“I’m not his sister.” Shannon sat in one of the lawn chairs scattered about the lawn. They were high-end redwood like the fence, not cheap webbing like most lawn chairs. “Not genetically speaking. Even though we both call my mother Mom.”
“You people have invaded my home. I don’t care about your inbred love life,” Lana Sue said.
“I care. I’m going to sleep with Roger after we get to know each other better. Only not yet. I have a history of sleeping with men too soon.”
Leroy fired a shot into the air. Bang! “Shut the fuck up.”
“The neighbors heard that,” Lydia said. “You’d better pack up and go, before they call the police.”
Loren looked distractedly at Lydia. As far as Lydia could make out, he wasn’t attracted to her. It was one more nail in the coffin.
He said, “You must not be from California.”
“We drove in from Wyoming yesterday,” Shannon said.
“The neighbors won’t be calling the police.”
Leroy shouted over the music, “I’m the boss here. No one talks till I say so.”
Everyone stopped talking and turned their attention to the hot tub. Oly shook and tucked, Roger zipped him up, Oly fell back into his chair, and together, they came around poolside.
“Well?” Lydia parked herself in a lawn chair beside Shannon. She’d had enough of standing and waiting.
Leroy said, “What?”
“Isn’t it time you explain why you are holding us at gunpoint?”
Leroy’s eyes shifted back and forth from the pool to the house to the group before him. When he swallowed, his Adam’s apple hopped like a frog in panty hose. To Roger, it was obvious Leroy didn’t have a plan. He’d taken hostages with no real idea what to do with them.
Leroy’s gaze fell on Loren. “Where’s the book?”
Whatever Loren—or anyone else—had expected Leroy to say, Where’s the book? wasn’t it.
Loren pulled his bathrobe tighter. “What book is that?” No matter how befuddled Loren came off—whether from a stranger with a gun in his hot tub, or the return of Ann’s child, or maybe Loren always came across as befuddled—he didn’t show a hint of self-consciousness about the pajama thing.
Leroy waved the pistol vaguely toward Roger. “The book where you exploited my boy. I have to read what you wrote about me.”
Lana Sue swung her legs off the chaise lounge and sat up. “Are you saying this mess was caused by one of Loren’s novels?”
Lydia said, “I don’t know about Charley the Sociopath, but that novel is what brought us to town.”
Lana Sue stood. She was shorter than Roger had envisioned. For some reason, he didn’
t expect short, beautiful women. It’s a flaw in Roger’s character.
“Nobody asked you,” Lana Sue said to Lydia. “I still don’t understand why are you at my house.”
“I told you, she’s my grandmother,” Shannon said.
Lydia’s voice was a slap. “Shannon.”
Loren said, “I have no copies of Disappearance.”
Zelda came from the house wearing a creamy white bikini so brief it only had laces on the sides and between the cups. The bottom was a thong. None of the Wyoming contingent had ever seen a thong, not in person. Lydia and Shannon had seen photographs. Roger didn’t even know such attire was possible.
Oly groaned. “Jesus and Mary Magdalene.”
Lydia scowled at Lana Sue. “That belongs to you?”
Lana Sue was a bit embarrassed—Zelda had chosen the suit Lana wore in the privacy of their enclosed backyard—but she hid it well. She said, “Are you going out of your way to offend your hostess?”
“This is California,” Shannon said to Lydia. “All older women dress like teenagers.”
Zelda walked to the pool and stood on the side, bouncing on her toes. She’d never shown this much flesh in public. It was thrilling yet terrible. Her own swimsuit was a one-piece her mama bought at Target a size too large because she still bought clothes Zelda was supposed to grow into. Zelda decided against the dramatic dive. That would be too much. Instead she turned around and worked her way down the ladder.
Oly said, “I only wish I was eighty years younger and had two dollars.”
Loren missed the Zelda saga. Without so much as a glance at her, he said, “I’m clear out of copies of Disappearance.”
“Filthy liar.” Leroy cocked the pistol. “What kind of crock is that—an author with no copies of his own book?”
Loren was more embarrassed over the book than Lana Sue was over the swimsuit. He didn’t expect anyone to believe he’d published a novel and didn’t have a copy. “I gave them all away when the movie was being made. The cast wanted to read it, to research their motives. It wasn’t in print, of course, so I lent them copies, and they never gave them back.”
