A Cold and Broken Hallelujah (18 page)

When I got home, I opened the windows and turned on the ceiling fans. The temperature didn’t drop, but the stuffiness gradually dissipated. I sat in the lamplight of the living room and reviewed the case file again. After an hour, I felt myself skimming through the familiar information and realized it was becoming nothing more than a rote exercise and that I was unable to bring anything new to my reading, as if I was simply repeating the same thought processes I’d gone through dozens of times before. There was nothing to be gained while I was in that frame of mind, so I put the file away and wondered what would be the best way to take my mind off of Bishop and get some distance from the work.

I hadn’t checked my personal e-mail in days, and I remembered Patrick mentioning the e-mail he’d sent me. Once I’d powered up my MacBook, I opened my Gmail account and found Patrick’s message. It was a YouTube link with a note that said, “Danny—You’re going to like this.”

When I clicked on it, a window opened on a channel belonging to someone calling himself Banjo Boog. The video opened to a blue background with title graphics that looked like they’d been created on someone’s Commodore 64 and read, in a primitive pseudocursive font, “Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen.” I was almost too apprehensive to keep watching. But I did watch.

A white-haired man with glasses and a Colonel Sanders facial-hair arrangement began picking out the opening chords of the song. As soon as he began to play, I felt a twinge of guilt for my prejudiced reaction.

He was good.

The image was grainy and the sound thin and tinny, but his skill with banjo was more than enough to overpower the technical limitations of the video, and after only a few seconds, I was pulled into the melody and felt myself connecting to the music in a way I wouldn’t have thought possible only a few minutes earlier. I’ve always been a Cohen fan, and I had at least five covers of this song in my collection, but this one struck me with its simplicity—no singing, just the perfectly picked notes singing out of the man’s open-back instrument.

I’d always loved the song, especially the original version. Ever since Jeff Buckley had gotten a hold of it, it seemed everyone who did their own cover went over the top with it, using it to display a kind of gymnastic vocal virtuosity that, while often impressive, always seemed to me to be much more about the singer than the song.

Boog’s straightforward arrangement, though, reminded me of the relative simplicity of Cohen’s original, and the dissonance from hearing the melody on the banjo, surely one of the last instruments most people would think of when calling the song to mind, somehow became a surprisingly effective substitute for the ever-present irony of Cohen’s voice.

I replayed the video several times and bookmarked it in the browser. Halfway through the first viewing, I knew I now had a very specific goal. I had to learn how to play “Hallelujah” on the Saratoga Star.

By the fifth or sixth replay, though, I was thinking about my difficulties with the fingering of even the most basic of chords, my virtually nonexistent sense of rhythm, and my inability to get my Saratoga Star anywhere near proper tuning even with multiple electronic aids. My ambition began to wane, and the hopeful optimism I’d been feeling slipped away.

Why even bother? After months of practice I was still struggling with the most basic lessons on Tony Trischka’s website.

No. There wouldn’t be any practicing that night. Instead, I cued up
The Essential Leonard Cohen
in iTunes, reclined on the couch, and stared up at the spinning ceiling fan. My weariness caught up to me, and I was nodding off when track eleven—“Who by Fire”—began to play, and with a cruel inevitability I should have foreseen, I found myself doing exactly what I had been doing two hours earlier. Thinking about Bishop.

16

L
EATHERMAN MULTI-TOOL
:
WELL USED, IN BLACK NYLON SHEATH
.

I woke to a deep, slicing pain running down my neck and into my arm. On the shelf at the bottom of my nightstand was an industrial-strength heating pad of the type that athletic trainers use for professional sports teams. My physical therapist special-ordered it for me. It felt like a smaller version of one of those protective lead aprons they put over you when they x-ray your teeth at the dentist’s office. It was always plugged in and ready to go. I turned it on in the dark, making an educated guess at the temperature setting because I couldn’t see the LCD display in the dark. The maximum was 165 degrees. Hot enough to give me a burn if I wasn’t careful. I didn’t care about that then, only about getting the pad as hot as I could as quickly as I could. While I waited, I popped a Vicodin.

I tucked one corner of the pad between my shoulder and the bed, and then pulled the opposite corner up alongside my neck and held it there. After about five minutes, the pain at the edge of my trapezius had dulled somewhat, but the sharp tendrils slicing up into my neck and down into my arm and back were even worse than they had been when I woke up.

The heating pad wasn’t going to be enough. I got out of bed, went into the bathroom, and opened the hot-water faucet in the shower all the way. When the mirror began to fog, I added just enough cold to the mix to prevent any actual skin damage, stepped inside, and let the scalding water wash over me.

The heat and the pressure and the opioid analgesic slowly began to relieve the pain. I knew it wouldn’t go away. It never did. That had long ago stopped being the point of any of the treatments I employed. The best I could ever hope for was a lessening, an easing, a tempering of the hurt.

As the hot water supply began to diminish and the flow began to cool, I thought again about my landlord and his impending plumbing improvements. If he really thought he was going to replace my old high-pressure showerhead with one of those useless low-flow models, he could go fuck himself.

I was still sweating when I put on a pair of cargo shorts and a seersucker shirt and walked out the door for breakfast at Egg Heaven.

Harlan Gibbs was an early riser, too, so I sent him a text message asking if he’d like to join me.

I walked slowly, hoping to cool off, but it was clearly going to be another torturously hot day, and I knew the layer of perspiration that had been present since my shower would remain either until late that night or until I decided to settle in somewhere with air-conditioning.

Halfway through my corned-beef-and-bacon omelet, Harlan came in. He surveyed the other diners. Only two tables were occupied, as were three seats at the counter. Then he saw me in the back corner.

“You really need the gunfighter’s seat at seven thirty on a Sunday morning?” he said.

“Can’t be too careful.”

He sat down and the server brought over another menu. “Coffee?” she asked.

“A bucket if you have it.”

She smiled at him and he smiled back.

“You know she’s only being nice because you’re old and sad, right?” I said. When I first became acquainted with him, Harlan had already added five years of retirement to the thirty he’d spent with the LA Sheriff’s Department.

“So what? I’ll take it. Would have thought you’d understand that.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re older and sadder than anybody I’ve ever met.” He chuckled at his own joke.

I took too long with a rejoinder, and I could see that he was worried that he might have crossed a line with his quip. So I looked down wearily into my half-empty cup and let him think he had. After he had a few seconds to stew, I brought my napkin up to the corner of my eye and began delicately dabbing at it.

“Asshole,” he said.

“Come on, you were asking for that one.”

“It’s early. I’m not at full alert yet.”

The server brought his coffee—in a perfectly regular cup—and asked, “Need a little more time?”

He shook his head and ordered scrambled eggs, bacon, and an English muffin.

“You back on the regular diet?”

“Doctor says anything that doesn’t make me puke is okay.”

“Really? The doctor said that?”

“More or less.”

“Is it working okay for you?”

“Yeah, as long as I don’t overdo it, I’m eating pretty normal again.”

“That’s good.”

“Taste keeps getting better, too.” For months after his stomach-cancer surgery and chemo he couldn’t taste anything. Nobody could tell him definitively if he’d regain the ability.

“It’s funny,” he said, sipping his black coffee. “In some ways that was the worst part of the whole mess. It’s the stuff you don’t anticipate that’s the toughest. I was ready for everything else. No one ever said anything about not being able to taste.”

I clenched and unclenched my fist and looked at the scar on my wrist. “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.”

He paused long enough for me to wonder if he got the Monty Python reference, and then he looked right at me and the corner of his mouth curled into a quarter of a grin. “It’s good that you can turn everything into a joke.”

Three cups of coffee and forty-five minutes of conversation later, I still didn’t know how to take that.

At home after breakfast I tried to call Jesús. After several rings, I got his voice mail. Rather than leaving a message, I sent him a text:
Jesús, how’s it going? Everything okay? Let me know.

He didn’t reply for a few minutes, and I started worrying. I knew it was silly. He was, after all, a teenager. How many other texts was he getting? How many tweets was he reading? Maybe he even had the good sense to put his phone down for a while. But before I could get too worked up, he replied.

everythings ok. its weird here. hope we can come home soon

I hope so, too. Do me a favor—don’t mention where you are to anyone. Especially on the phone or in text messages, okay?

Ok

Good. Let me know if you need anything.

As I typed, I felt self-conscious for properly capitalizing and punctuating.

i will

thank you for helping us

You’re welcome.

He signed off with a happy-face emoticon.

Instead of going back to the case file, I picked up
The Grapes of Wrath.
I’d been working my way through it five or ten pages at a time, whenever I had a few minutes to spare or when I wanted to get a bit of distance from the investigation. With the empty day stretched out in front of me, I settled in on the couch and really dug in.

Kyle had photocopied the pages of Bishop’s edition of the book so I could study the marginal notations. But the text of the novel itself was difficult to read in the photocopy, so in addition to the Kindle version, I’d found online a copy of the same Viking edition that Bishop had owned and paid triple the price to have it shipped overnight.

There were three versions of Steinbeck’s novel in front of me.

As I read, I was spurred on by the marginal notations, which, because of their depth and the close reading they demonstrated, reminded me of the first time I’d read the book—in an American literature seminar in college—and how boring I had found it then, how much of a struggle it was to slog through it.

I read for most of the day. I was surprised at how caught up I got in the book. Ever since Springsteen’s
The Ghost of Tom Joad
came out, I’d meant to go back to it, but I never had. After two decades, though, it had taken on a new weight. This time through, I felt like I got it. So much of the thematic material that resonated with me now had just gone over my head when I was still in college. It made me wonder how many of the multitudinous other books that I hadn’t liked in college would strike me differently today with so much more life behind me. And I thought, too, about the degree to which my response was due to Bishop and the case. Was I really that much more mature than I had been in college, or was I only more bleak and weary and desperate to understand a man who I could never really know?

I didn’t quite make it all the way through the book. There were still about a hundred pages left when I put it down and decided it was time to figure out what I was going to do for dinner. Having eaten with Jen and Patrick the evening before and with Harlan that morning, I had already exhausted all the people I might conceivably share a meal with, so all I had to decide was whether to stay in or go out. A quick examination of the refrigerator told me my only dine-in options were frozen Stouffer’s lasagna, Frosted Cheerios, string cheese, or overripe bananas.

I decided to walk around the corner to Mosher’s for a corned-beef sandwich. The food wasn’t great, but what it lacked in quality it made up for in convenience. The small Seventh Street shop was only half a block away from my duplex. I’d have to hurry, though. For some unfathomable reason they closed at five on Sundays.

My upstairs neighbors, Keith and Kim, were just walking up the street as I locked the front door. Since their son had graduated from Warren High School and matriculated at San Diego State, they’d been talking about moving south. I hadn’t seen them since I’d gotten the notice about the landlord selling the building.

“You get the notice from the owner?” Keith asked.

I nodded. “Haven’t heard anything else yet. Think they’ll remodel? Go single on us?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Hope not.”

“That wouldn’t be so bad,” Kim said. “It would finally give us the motivation we need to start looking for a house.” She was obviously more enthusiastic than he was, but I knew better than to say anything about that.

I said, “I’m more worried about the plumber they’ve got coming. They’re going to install low-flow toilets and showerheads.”

Keith’s face fell. “They are?”

“I’m sure that’s what they meant about the ‘upgrades.’”

“Shit,” he said.

Kim frowned. “It’s not that bad,” she said. “This is a desert and we’re in a drought. It’ll be good for the environment.”

He raised his eyebrows at me as if to apologize for her.

“Don’t look at him like that,” she said.

“You’re all eco-friendly now,” he said, “but wait until the first time you try to wash the conditioner out of your hair.”

I laughed as they walked up the stairs.

In the few minutes since I’d decided on dinner, the idea of a mediocre corned-beef sandwich had really grown on me. But the neighbors had slowed me down. I looked at my watch, muttered “Shit” more loudly than I meant to, and looked over my shoulder to make sure no one had heard me.

Unless I wanted to walk for several blocks, which in the late afternoon heat I really didn’t, the choices were limited. So I strolled past the Chute Boxe Vale Tudo martial-arts school and momentarily considered something from FroGurtz for dinner, then remembered that the frozen-yogurt vendor had been replaced by a taco shop that hadn’t lasted long either. Something called Seoulfood was coming but wasn’t there yet.

All that was left was Starbucks. I got a ham-and-Swiss panini and a venti vanilla latte and took it back home to eat. I sat at the dining-room table, opened Bishop’s file, and reviewed it while I ate.