Dalva (17 page)

The finale was a meal in Yountville at Mustard's where Michael ordered all ten entrees for the five of us. He was a little manic but Mother was happy from a day of wine-tasting and bird-watching, so it was hard to be cross with him. It was a place favored by locals, and a number of people from the wineries waved or nodded at Naomi and Michael. He seemed to know a good deal about wine but he doubtless also could pass himself off as an astrophysicist. I was unnerved by the sight of an older man from Pacific Palisades in the far corner of the restaurant. He was renowned for his sexual cruelty to women in the film colony. I found myself wondering how there could still be pathology when pathology had begun to approach the norm.

The change of mood followed me back to Santa Monica the next afternoon. I began to regret what training I had had in psychiatric social work. Enthusiasms can stretch one into remote corners, from comparative literature (three-day-old bread), to game biology (biometric fatuities), the Peace Corps (kindness regimented into banality), to social work (torn anuses, and the very real boot heel of the late twentieth century grinding the bottom ten percent into very real dust). In short, I was ready for Nebraska.

When I reached the parking garage under my apartment
building from the airport there was a quarrel in process between a professional football player who lived in the building and two women. Someone had swiped his cocaine. The building superintendent was watching and greeted me with a wink and a shrug. There was another man waxing his car and ignoring the fuss. In the elevator it occurred to me that every man, woman, and dog in America was tethered on too short a lead or chain, and that's how they begin the training of guard dogs—a three-foot lead to an iron post and the dog was permanently pissed off within a few weeks.

About an hour later, just before Andrew called, I remembered I had seen a movement in the far corner of the garage beyond my immediate attention span. Andrew was calling from the basement asking me to come right down and sign a complaint against Guillermo Sandoval to add to a dozen others. How could this be? I thought. It's not even dark yet.

The police were the same two who had handled the original problem with the boy and greeted me by name. “We got the fucker,” they said. Andrew was talking to the man who had been waxing a car. He turned out to be the bodyguard Ted had hired. The two women had disappeared and the football player and the building superintendent were eagerly talking to a reporter. A TV mobile unit swerved up to the garage entrance, then stopped and checked for clearance. I noticed the bodyguard's shirt was torn in one place and he had a handkerchief wrapped around a hand with some blood coming through it. Sandoval was handcuffed to an iron support pole, and leaning against a car fender; the healed scars gave his face a rumpled look. We looked at each other long and hard and I refused to avert my glance. Not very deep in my heart I admitted I could have shot him like a rabid dog. What had happened is the two women in the cocaine quarrel had begun screaming and Sandoval, fearing a problem he hadn't bargained for, slipped from his hiding place and had been seen by the bodyguard. The bodyguard couldn't subdue Sandoval by himself, in fact was losing the struggle, when the football player in a fit of rage over his lost cocaine decided to help. Meanwhile the building super notified the police and the relieved bodyguard called Andrew. I was a bit numb from it all and was unwittingly shown in the late TV news, and morning newspapers, as the
damsel in distress saved by the linebacker. All the other details were neglected. Around such violence there is always a smell in the air like tire smoke. Sandoval was carrying a sharpened car aerial, a piece of rope, and a .38 Ruger. Among this evidence the rope disturbed me the most.

Two hours later, after a half-dozen drinks, a lot of trembling, and some stories, I was in bed with Andrew. We decided not to feel bad about it because we had been thinking about making love for several years. Except we felt a little bit bad anyway. It was far beyond talk and any immediate effort to clear up the situation, as people say. Instead, we decided to feel merely compromised and made a late dinner out of my freezer, an assortment of recipes my uncle Paul had taught me in Mexico. Violence, sex, food, death. I showed Andrew a letter from a social-worker friend who had moved to Detroit. Her first assignment was to counsel the children of two men whose heads had been cut off in a dope execution. She said she had never had to handle a dismemberment case before.

Curiously, I didn't feel bleak at dawn. I've always had a rather masculine, perhaps naïve, sense of recovery—so many men believe a morning can mean a fresh start, while women suspect a night's sleep scarcely changes the terms of life. With Andrew it was only a matter of comfort; adult lovers can pretend nothing has really happened because it hasn't. There is an obvious trace of melancholy in this freedom.

I took my habitual beach walk, the pleasure of which was tempered by the city crews cleaning up the detritus of the first big summer weekend. I gave up and climbed the embankment stairs, heading east on San Vincente. I smiled, remembering Naomi's first visit years before. Armed with George Hasting's
Trees of Santa Monica
she attacked the hundreds of botanical introductions as if she were Rommel invading North Africa. It was a two-week campaign with a city map on my living-room wall streaked with multicolored crayon marks. Many mornings I hiked along with her, though somewhat inattentive to the details she found fascinating. “My God, a yellow oleander from the dogbane family,
Thevetia peruviana,
native to Mexico, Central and South America, the West Indies, and it's right here in front of us.” I suppose I'm a romantic and the sight of a specific bird or tree reminds me of the other times I've seen
the bird or tree, and there's no urge, despite my training in the area, to run to a book for a name.

I spent the afternoon with the movers and had an early farewell dinner with Ted and Andrew. I had seen them at the most once a month but leavetaking proved difficult for all of us. It was as if precise language was just beyond our reach and the clumsiness wasn't obvious enough to be humorous. Andrew was uncommonly moody and drank too much, baking a fish too long for the first time ever. His eyes were moist as he dumped it into the trash. Ted gulped his drink as we watched a big dog chase a little one down the beach, tumbling the smaller animal repeatedly in the surf. He became sullen and wanted Andrew to shoot the larger dog. At first he was happy that Ruth had given up the idea of the grocer, then became morose over his lack of family. His son had decided not to visit the coming summer. During his third consecutive drink he tried to pin me down on a possible date for a return visit, and my inability to give him one hurt his feelings. It was still well before dark when we simply gave up, hugged each other, and said goodbye.

I left an hour before daylight, getting on U.S. 10 in the middle of Santa Monica—if you cared to you could drive straight through to Jacksonville, Florida, on this same highway, but I got off in Indio and took 86 down to U.S. 8. I had driven home in three days when in a hurry but this time I was giving myself a week to ten days or more if I chose. There was also the barely admissible thought that I wouldn't pass this way again, that the vertigo of leaving L. A. was mostly that of relief. I numbered the things, the people, and the locations that I would miss but none of them tugged at the heart as much as the trees and most of all, the Pacific, which I had listened to so many days and nights that I often thought we could speak a common language: perhaps a verbless language just short of madness, a sound of flowing blood and water, but nevertheless a language.

By early evening I had reached the dirt road a dozen miles short of Ajo, Arizona, that was my immediate destination. I turned off back west into the desert toward the mountains for a dozen miles, downshifting into four-wheel drive in the loose sand. The road disappeared and I turned up a dry wash at the
bottom of an arroyo, parked under a paloverde tree. I stood for a moment in the nearly absolute silence, the car engine ticking away its heat, then covered the car with a lightweight camouflage tarp, a promise of concealment to the two men who had introduced me to the area. I didn't feel silly at this paramilitary gesture, only thankful that the enormous bare spot on the map that I faced was still reasonably intact in 1986. I took out my summer sleeping bag and a gallon canteen of water, then leaned against the car and put on my hiking boots.

I still had over an hour of light when I set off up the wash toward the Growler Mountains. It was a twenty-minute walk to where we had cached a collapsible army cot years before, in deference to my waking up one morning with a rattlesnake nestled on my sleeping bag. One of the men thought this was very funny but that same evening he had been bitten in the calf by a sidewinder while gathering firewood. Luckily the snake hadn't injected any venom—not an uncommon thing. I pulled a fang out of his calf with tweezers and we had a few unpleasant hours waiting to see if an emergency move was going to be necessary.

I found the cot inside a cairn we had built, set up my simple camp, and went to gather some firewood. The air had finally begun to cool, and the trickle of sweat between my breasts dried into an itch. I wandered carefully among the cholla, octillo, the bright-green agave from which tequila is made, and the greasewood, picking up ironwood sticks for my fire.

Back at my camp I stacked the wood, then took off all my clothes and sat on the cot naked to watch the dark descend over the mountains. The Cabeza Prieta, a huge area just above the Arizona-Mexico border, doubles as a wildlife refuge and an Air Force gunnery range, which must certainly send a double message to desert creatures. I had given up trying to worry about such matters. Not a mile from the cot we had discovered a footpath over a thousand years old littered occasionally with shards of pottery from ancient water jars, and the brighter glint of seashells. The Hohokam Indians, a tribe that had disappeared a thousand years ago, used the path to travel south from the Gila River to the Sea of Cortez to gather seashells for jewelry. What was it called before the Sea of Cortez? Cortez
was a latecomer like ourselves. I could see them walking in a file through the desert in the moonlight when it was cooler, down to the sea to camp and gather shells. Now the darkness did not seem to descend but swept slowly up the mountains as if the dark came out of the earth herself. I felt the slightest tremor of fear hearing the first call of the elf owl, who lives in the holes it burrows into the saguaro cactus. I had camped here several times before and each time this tremor had arrived when I sensed the vast foreignness of the landscape. I had never seen anyone here before. The assortment that was me was totally alone, except for the desert, a slip of moon, and the summer constellations slowly emerging above me.

I had all night to watch the stars so I got off the cot to light the fire. A scorpion, a less friendly relative of the shrimp, skittered away from the flame. I stopped short of saying hello to him, or to the coyote I heard miles away south of me. I was hungry but never ate when I slept here, wanting to stay awake as long as possible to look at the stars. Uncle Paul had introduced me to the two men who first brought me here. I looked upward from the gathering fire and thought of a line in an essay by Lorca, “the enormous night straining her waist against the Milky Way.” I looked down at my body, my arms and belly and thighs turned golden by the fire. I liked living a great deal but there was nothing in me that regretted growing older. I lay back down on the cot in a state of intense physical excitement for reasons I couldn't understand. I felt an almost imperceptible breeze touch my feet and move up my body. It was my incapacity to admit what laying there on a June night at that latitude would cause—the curious way our emotions withhold information from us.

It was the first of June in 1972 when Naomi called me in New York where I worked as an assistant to a ragtag film documentarian who was obsessed with the poor. We worked and lived together, along with an English sound man, making
cinéma-vérité
short films for Public Broadcasting. The afternoon Naomi called we were packing the van for a trip to West Virginia for some footage on a coal-mine strike. “I looked at this postcard for two days without calling,” she said. “It's from Duane in the Florida Keys and says for you to come down quick, I don't feel too good.” She added a phone number and
the fact that I would be in her prayers. I called the number but there was no answer. I called Delta, made a reservation, and packed an overnight bag. I tried to explain myself to the director and lover but was summarily fired from an affair and a job.

I reached Key West before midnight, rented a car, and drove to a motel recommended by a Cuban girl on the plane who wore lots of jewelry. No one at the number had answered at either La Guardia or the Miami airport. The air smelled like dead fish and rotten fruit and even at that late hour was sodden with humidity. Oddly, the airport bar doubled as a strip club and through the open door I could see a girl grabbing her ankles and bending over as far as possible. This was 1972, well before Key West cleaned itself up and became a tourist mecca.

At the motel I drove the desk operator crazy by calling the number every ten minutes for the next hour and a half. Finally he suggested that I direct-dial from the bar. It was the Pier House bar, crowded and nightmarish with what I thought was a convention. There were at least two dozen men and women around my age, thirty, who wore blue shirts that had “Club Mandible” printed on them. They were getting quite drunk and some of them were smoking huge marijuana cigarettes out on the patio. I bought a drink and stood outside in the hall by the pay phone, watching the activity in the bar. It reminded me of some sort of party in a private insane asylum. Then a woman answered the phone. Her name was Grace Pindar and she sounded black. Yes, Duane expected me, and no he wasn't there, he was out fishing until at least noon tomorrow. How can he fish at night? That's when they catch the fish, she said. Duane and Grace's husband were commercial fishermen. Bobby was the captain and Duane was the mate. She gave me directions to where they lived on Big Pine Key.