Conundrum (54 page)

He dressed in layers, found his boots and laced them up. Took the stairs two at a time with careful footing. He hurried the day in his mind. A few hours on the open range, appeasing his father, dodging his brother. The requisite small talk, groveling, laughing at the appropriate moments, tolerating scurrilous language, sucking in denigrating remarks, smothering humiliation, choking down acerbic responses that longed to lash out but that would summarily be aborted. He’d learned his lessons years ago: when to speak, when to keep silent. When to calm his face with deliberation, erasing any telltale trace of disdain that might be answered with a backhanded blow.

He zipped up his coat and grunted. Just another day in the company of the Abrams men.

He found his father and brother in the dark kitchen, stuffing food and thermoses into packs, gathering rifles and ammunition, moving in efficient silence, measured routine from a thousand like outings. Jake caught his father’s scowl in the dim light broadcast by the hall lamp. By that unflattering illumination his father’s years wore heavy on him; shadows snagged in the deep lines around his eyes and mouth. But Isaac Abrams moved about like a man of fifty, not one creeping up on seventy. Jake chalked up his old man’s agility to stubborn fortitude, and used to think his deficiency of affection hailed from the mores of a bygone generation. But his father’s gruffness was nothing but nourishment to Ethan, infusing in Jake’s twin something that had mysteriously turned him into a man—in his father’s estimation. Seeing the dearth of results with Jake led Isaac to believe the only thing he could—that he just needed a heavier hand, needed to apply more pressure to squeeze out Jake’s frailties and harden him into something solid and worthy.

Coffee aroma permeated the room, soaking into Jake’s very bones the way coffee tended to do. A stale scent of cold bacon lingered by the stove from years of grease layered on adjacent walls, despite his mother’s fervent scrubbing efforts. Jake’s stomach grumbled as he reached for a bowl from the cupboard shelf.

“No time for breakfast. Sun’ll be up soon.” His father’s voice, perfunctory, lacking warmth. Why did Jake think this day would be any different—that some sentimentality would show through that tough veneer? He chided himself for hoping for an encouraging word, his father’s blessing on his parting. He chided himself for siding with that constant miserable companion of hope that never let up. Time and disappointment had taught him hope proved to be a fickle friend, promising then recanting. Would he never learn?

As Jake capitulated and closed the cupboard door, he caught the slight gesture from the corner of his eye. Laced with conspiracy, his father’s eyes met Ethan’s in understanding. In a thousand unspoken words that had at one time or another been spoken and needed no elaboration now. All the words that had been piled on Jake’s shoulders year after year such that they had driven him like a spike, over time, into the ground, pinning him in impotency. Words that had trumped his own, wrung opinions out of him until not even a drop of blood could now be had for the effort. He had bent so often to their collusion of denigration that his backbone now swayed as supplely as a willow in the wind.

Yet, he couldn’t help himself taking one last dangerous step.

He turned to his father. “You two go. I’ll just be in the way. You know I never shoot anything anyway.”

Isaac Abrams narrowed his line of sight on Jake. He pursed his lips, which made his cheeks redden. “You want a lift to the train station tonight, you’ll stop your whining and get in the truck.”

Jake’s heart beat hard; he forced words out of his mouth that struggled to hide in his throat. “I’ll just have Mom drive me.”

The last two words broke apart and fled the room. The air quickened, as if the dawn was holding its breath in anticipation, in commiseration for the ax about to fall.

“Like hell you will.”

His father turned from him and hefted his pack. He stuffed a rifle under one arm and opened the front door with the other. Ethan threw a look at Jake on his way out, a look tangled up in the snarl of his mouth, while his boot steps stomped in similar fashion to Isaac’s, four feet sounding more like a herd, or a stampede. Or at the very least, an exclamation mark.

Jake stood in the kitchen, listening to the truck engine kick over, to doors opening into the welcoming arms of morning. He weighed what might happen if he stood there unmoving. Would his father come after him? Or would he drive off? Would his mother take the brunt of it if his father returned in the afternoon to find Jake gone without having said good-bye?

Jake’s spirit sank. Even if he scrounged a ride from a friend, or hired a taxi, his mother would suffer recrimination. Sides had been drawn long ago, before he and Ethan could utter intelligible speech. His father had loved the burly, aggressive toddler with the wild red hair, a child intent on grabbing the world with both hands and shaking it until every shiny thing fell around his feet. His mother wanted a son that clung, that needed affection and didn’t pull away from her kisses. Jake found safety in her orbit and learned early that although she was softer spoken than his father, her words could form salient walls of protection. He gravitated to the kitchen, her universe, and spent hours in refuge helping her with domestic chores, scrambling for excuses that relieved him from venturing into his father’s domain—the great outdoors—which constituted any and every step taken beyond the front stoop.

Their house—sitting at the end of a lane in an older neighborhood on the outskirts of Windsor, a tiny in-between community at the base of the Rockies and an equal stone’s throw from Greeley or Fort Collins—opened to an untamed world, one well-suited to both his father’s and his brother’s inclination to subjugate nature. By watching his mother, Jake learned early how to model the appearance of timidity and compliance. He’d watch how she shifted under her husband’s exertions of power, nimble as a mountain goat leaping on light feet from rock to rock on precarious inclines. Jake learned to move lightly too, perform a dance that distracted and assuaged. That sometimes forced him to keep to shadows, merge into backgrounds. In return for his mother’s protection and instruction, though, she demanded loyalty and alliance, and at times, unwavering devotion. It was the least he could do, but she knew it. She always wanted more than he could give.

Jake heard the horn blast twice, shaking him from his musings. Without further hesitation, he picked up the duffle he’d brought down to the kitchen and lugged it out to the idling truck. Icy air stung his cheeks and made his eyes water. Frosted pine needles crunched under his boots. The souped-up Ford 350 belched steamy exhaust from the tailpipe as a sliver of dawn smudged the horizon in vibrant pink.

The passenger door opened and Jake slipped into the backseat, glad for the heat blowing out the dashboard vents. He tossed his duffle on the packs piled behind the driver’s seat, where his father sat staring out the windshield, unblinking.

Ethan squirmed around in front to face Jake. He smacked Jake’s head with the back of his hand, knocking his wool hat to the floorboard.

Ethan grinned, but his eyes burned like dry ice. “That’s for making us wait.”

Leah Sacks heard the bus rumble up to the corner and pop the front door open with a hiss. At that moment, she was squatting on the sidewalk with her back to Santa Monica Boulevard, picking up the few stray flyers the ocean breeze had lifted out of her hands and stuffing them back into her stack. When the unruly bunch of paper settled down, she pushed her tangled mess of hair from her face, kelp mangled in a strong surge. Grateful for the abatement of wind, she took advantage of the respite to sit on the concrete and pull out a hair tie. She ledged the flyers under one knee as she fed the swath of hair in and through the band, making a ponytail. Through stray strands, she watched the bus disgorge its passengers—her targeted audience.

She jumped to her feet and positioned herself next to the bench, then extended her hand, disbursed her papers, deliberately meeting the eyes of the tired commuters, who, at this time of day, gave her less resistance than the early morning crowd.

It never ceased to confuse her—why anyone resisted what she had to say. This was California, 1971. Everyone was fed up with the war. The polls earlier in the year proved that over half of all Americans thought Vietnam was a bad idea and that we needed to get out. Now, with the
Washington Post
publishing the Pentagon Papers, it was only a matter of time. Troops were withdrawing, but not fast enough. There were still over one hundred and fifty thousand troops over there.
Troops
! Boys—her age. Younger. And the draft! Facts were leaking out how an inordinate number of December birthdates had higher call numbers. What did they expect? They’d dumped the number capsules in a shoe box in batches of months, for crying out loud! Obviously they didn’t mix them up enough. Leah’s throat started choking up again. Three of her best friends from high school were dead. All three had been inducted right off the bat; all three had December birthdays.

That was one of the travesties her flyer dealt with. Among others. There were too many to list on a single sheet of paper. But she knew words and their power. One sheet of paper, written with care, could sway the masses. She was a crafter of words. Words swam in her head until she speared them and pinned them to paper. Any poet could tell you how much could be said with few words. She’d read the cult classic, McLuhan’s
The Medium is the Massage.
She knew how the media manipulated minds with propaganda; how people needed shaking, waking up, to see through the lies they were being fed. Her generation would not be fooled again.
“I get on my knees and pray we won’t get fooled again
,” she sang in her head, letting the powerful new song by The Who energize her as she pressed flyers into hesitant people’s hands.

One last person was trying to get off the bus, impeded by an uncooperative duffle bag. Leah summed up the young man squeezing his way down the narrow steps and tripping onto the sidewalk. He had to be either a draft dodger or had gotten a lucky lottery draw. He couldn’t have been older than twenty-five. One look in his untormented eyes told her he’d never been in country. And not the West Point, career-track-type either, for sure. She hung back and watched him descend, and those red-tired eyes fell into her net.

She smiled at him, took in the strong, tanned biceps carrying the duffle, the stature and clothing that heralded him from some place other. And that haircut. The first ears she’d seen on a guy that young in a long time—who wasn’t military. Yet, it suited him, gave him a childlike innocence. Everything about him—from the secret gleam radiating from his face to his expectant and pleased posture—told her he’d just arrived.

And that he had no idea where to go.

“Hi,” Leah said. “You look lost.”

The man searched left and right, checking the street signs. He shook his head apologetically. “I think I’m turned around.” He fished around in a pocket of the coat slung over his arm. “I have a street map somewhere.”

Leah sat cross-legged on the bench and brushed off the soles of her bare feet. She had nowhere else to go at the moment. No other corner in West Los Angeles looked as inviting as this one. “I’m at your service. Know this neighborhood backwards and forwards.” She held out her hand. “Name’s Leah.”

He shook it. “Jake. Jake Abrams.”

“You look like you’ve been riding a bus for months.”

When he narrowed his eyes in amusement, a dimple formed above his lip. Leah about melted. “Well, first a train, then a bus,” he said. “Two days. Is it really that obvious?”

“Newcomer. Written all over your face.” She pressed a finger into his chest. “Also, written across your shirt: ‘I need shower.’ ”

Jake rolled his eyes and Leah drank in his gentle features. She liked her men soft and cuddly like that, usually with a lot more hair, but his was a shimmering shade of polished wood. Driftwood brown. Apt for a drifting man.

“I’m sure you’re right. Don’t stand too close to me.”

Which was exactly what she longed to do.

“Um, how ’bout you tell me the address you’re looking for. I can be your tour guide.”

“I didn’t know California provided tour guides at every bus stop.”

That made her laugh. And blush. “Not every bus stop. Just this one. Just today.”

She couldn’t stop staring at his eyes. More brown. His irises were streaked with the grain of wood, a dozen different hues of rich color. The medley of traffic sounds murmured like the sea. With the wind’s retreat, the summer sun beat a hard rhythm against her shoulders and neck. She could smell the beach mingled with the acrid smog. Water was calling her. She shook her head to fling away the drops of thought.

He fumbled around in his jeans pocket and retrieved a piece of paper. She recognized the street name when he read it to her.

“Follow me,” she said. “Your pad is only a few blocks west.” She fingered the love beads dangling from her neck. “Is this your first time in California? Where are you from—and why come here?”

“Yes. Colorado. I’m enrolled in UCLA.” He answered her questions in a manner that made her think he was used to being interrogated.

She began trekking down the sidewalk, adjusting her pace to his. They walked with an easy gait; she liked the way he moved alongside her. She was sure he had to be a Virgo, and his aura radiated a dark muddy blue. That could be portentous.
Fear of the future, fear of self-expression, fear of facing or speaking the truth.
She studied him surreptitiously as they marched past storefronts and wove through pedestrian traffic. Cars sped by. He did look like he was carrying a lot of karmic baggage. Just her type.