Half World: A Novel (20 page)

From his perch on the windowsill he says the name aloud every few seconds or so, in time to the music,
Dick Hinkle, Dick Hinkle,
trying to get the words to fit in his mouth.

He thinks up a biography, a loose family and professional history, conjuring some names, a mother, father, sister, coworkers, ex-girlfriends. He lights another joint, switches on the dresser lamp as the sky gets dark. Keeping it close to the truth was always the rule of thumb, made it easier to remember, so Dick Hinkle was a guy who drank too much and took too many pills and had just watched his father die. Brilliant. Shouldn’t be too hard to remember.

After an hour or so, he has his story straight, or as straight as it’s going to get. He finishes the joint and decides to vacate the premises for a while, get some air, find somebody who can resupply his stash, realizing it might be a good idea to clear his head of Dick Hinkle’s sob story before he starts to feel too bad for the guy.

*   *   *

Javier Buñuel paces a long spread of stone steps on Hollywood Boulevard, about a block east of the freeway cutting across town. The steps lead up to what was once an impressive and official-looking building, a bank, maybe, or some kind of government office, now security-gated and “For Sale”–signed. A good location, what with the bus stop at the corner and the heavy foot traffic on the sidewalk, a mix of office workers and prostitutes and hustlers, bewildered tourists desperately consulting maps and brochures.

Dickie watches from the front seat of the Cutlass, parked across the street. Buñuel is a large man in a small suit. Dark-complected, Mexican Indian, maybe, mestizo, with hair hanging down past his chin, wet from grease or sweat. He has a microphone wired to a small amplifier. He holds the mic in one hand and shouts at the pedestrians passing on the sidewalk a few steps below. In his other hand he holds a large wooden
placard, hoisting the sign by its handle, thrusting it higher into the air to underscore a particular point. Eyes bulging, spit flying. The sign features a handwritten list of people who are supposedly ushering in the coming apocalypse: Jews, homosexuals, blasphemers, idolaters, homosexuals (again), false prophets, sexual deviants. Some creative spelling on that list, but Dickie is no walking
Webster’s
himself, so who is he to judge, really.

Zero shade. Buñuel works sweating, baking in the sun on the steps. He speaks with a substantial accent and sometimes the combination of the accent and the poor-quality amp makes his rant indecipherable, just distorted noise that vaguely resembles speech. It seems possible that he’s aware of this because whenever it happens he works himself into a frenzy, shouting louder and faster, reveling in the impenetrable sound.

Dickie spends the morning watching the spectacle, either from the Cutlass or a window table at the sandwich shop across the street. He guzzles coffee, smokes a pack of cigarettes, eats a rubbery sub for breakfast that contained something that may have been roast beef in a previous life. He reads through Buñuel’s tracts for the umpteenth time, dozes in the hot car. A real stakeout. He feels like sending Father Bill a palm-treed postcard,
Wish You Were Here.
Don’t TV detectives in these situations always have a partner to bounce jokes off of, or share bear claws with?

He’d been up early, staking out the Hollywood post office, watching as an Old Testament procession crossed the lobby: the halt, the lame, the nearly blind squinting at the wall of PO boxes and laboriously fixing their tiny keys into the locks. Each sad sack pulling out long sheaves of junk mail, bills, chain letters, hungrily scanning the envelopes for something of worth, the answer to some previously sent missive. Luckless, just about all of them, turning and shuffling out the way they’d entered. Finally, the man in the seersucker suit arrived, though at first Dickie took him to be just another in the long string of jetsam that received mail at this particular PO branch. But he had the key to the magic number and pulled his mail, looking furtively in each direction. Dickie waited for Buñuel to leave and then followed him to this very street corner a few blocks away.

An ambulance roars down the boulevard and everyone on the sidewalk stops to watch. Buñuel stops and watches, too, and after the sirens fade he starts declaiming again with renewed vigor, pointing at the now-distant lights of the ambulance as if this proves something he’s been saying all along.

Dickie crosses Hollywood Boulevard and sort of meanders, hands in his pockets on the sidewalk below the steps. He’s not alone—there are always a few people who’ve stopped to listen to or ridicule Buñuel. Dickie walks past the amp, the array of tracts fanned out alongside. Spies the one he already has, but picks up some others to complete his collection. Peels some of Father Bill’s cash from his roll and drops it into the coffee can where Buñuel accepts donations. The can a quarter full with bills and change, cigarette butts, wads of bubble gum, chewing tobacco, spit.

It’s almost like Buñuel could hear the legal tender settling into the can, because he turns and looks at Dickie from the other end of the step, the far reaches of the microphone cord. Dickie caught for a second, deer-in-the-headlights-style before catching himself, giving a little aye-aye-Captain
salute and hoofing back across Hollywood Boulevard.

He spends the remainder of the afternoon reading the new tracts, more first-person accounts of Buñuel’s torture and brainwashing at the hands of shadowy government agents. What’s scarier, here—the grammar, or the stories themselves? Turns out to be the latter, really, as despite the obvious nutcase quotient, this is some pretty heavy stuff. Buñuel drugged and locked into a coffin of some sort, a sensory-deprivation chamber, listening to nothing but the sound of his own screams for days. Then pulled from the coffin and hooked up to electroshock machines that wipe out his memories, his personality, and instill new memories, a new persona. Years of wandering follow, until Buñuel has a sudden revelation, all of this coming back to him, the truth, skywritten, literally, in the clouds above Dodger Stadium during an afternoon game when he was working as a janitor at the ballpark.

Shit. Dickie has to put the tracts down for a while, slide a little lower in the seat, light a joint to take the edge off the tall tales. What all of this
has to do with a gang knocking over banks in Orange County is anybody’s guess, but it’s hard to get the image of Buñuel locked in that coffin out of his head. No sight, no sound. Dickie imagining himself in his own dark place, locked in a box with nothing but his own breath and panic.

Sundown. A red-eye explosion to the west, and then the day smoldering to embers, cooling a little, losing its sharper edges. The postwork rush is winding down as the light fades, the streetlights along the boulevard blinking on in random patterns. Buñuel packs his amp and sign into a small laundry cart, drags it all over to the corner, where he boards the next eastbound bus. Dickie follows along in the Olds, the bus hanging on Hollywood until it merges with Sunset Boulevard, the neighborhoods getting sketchier, the lights of the downtown buildings visible a few miles away in the brown smog haze. The bus stops and Buñuel gets off. Dickie turns onto a side street, watches Buñuel unlock a pretty serious-looking gate, relock it carefully after he’s passed through, then haul his gear up a winding stone stairway to a small house at the top of the hill.

Lights in the house, windows shining, but too far up for Dickie to make out much of what’s going on. He takes note of the address, takes note of his growling stomach, decides it’s time for dinner and bed. Stakeout over, officially. Good night, Danno; good night, McGarrett. Shit, wait, of course, that’s Hawaii, not Los Angeles, but probably, Dickie thinks, heading back on Sunset, close enough for government work.

8

Summer 1971

They sat at a picnic table in the tree-ringed park, Ginnie with one of the Eliot volumes from Henry’s shelves, Thomas with the newspaper, each section spread wide so he could see as many pages as possible. He read the paper in its entirety every morning, every article and sports score and classified advertisement. Ginnie didn’t look at the news anymore; she didn’t have to. Later in the day Thomas would recount it all to her, down to the smallest detail, vote counts in a Canadian election, the high temperature in Chicago the previous afternoon.

The park’s grass was getting long, dotted with wildflowers, white and purple and gold. There were a few couples and young families on blankets in the shade, children chasing one another into the sun. Ginnie lit a cigarette. She had always liked smoking in hot weather, the feel of a higher heat at her lips. It was the only thing she’d ever missed about living in Washington. The close-pressed summers, the world slow and wet.

There was a man sitting on a bench on the far side of the park. Alone, reading a newspaper, smoking. Dark sunglasses, so she couldn’t see his eyes, but she could feel them when the man shook his paper straight, turned the page, refolded.

She hadn’t seen one of them in months, which she knew didn’t prove anything. Not seeing them didn’t mean they weren’t there. In the first few years after Henry had gone, she’d thought they were just nervous
figments of her imagination, a fear she’d caught like a virus, something Henry had left her. But over time it became apparent that they were real. Men in cars at the top of the hill; men across from Hannah’s school, standing in the deli doorway, watching parents come to gather their children.

They weren’t always around, as far as she could tell. A year would go by when she wouldn’t see a car, or a stranger taking a long, slow stroll past the house. Then one morning she would look out the window or across the park and someone would be there, like this man in his sunglasses, turning his paper, shaking it stiff again.

Thomas came to the international pages, photographs from the war. He lifted his hands to the sides of his head, his fingers rubbing the short hair of his crew cut. Ginnie began to hum, quietly, a hymn from morning Mass, one of Thomas’s favorites, a melody that usually soothed him, working its way into his brain, dampening some of the distress signals she imagined there, the flashing lights, the warning bells.

He was a man now. As tall as his father but solid, and so strong. At times she couldn’t control him, his rages. She would cower in the kitchen, hating herself, this terror of her own son, crouching in a corner while Thomas threw pots and pans, plates, silverware, whatever he could grab.

His good days outnumbered his bad, though. On the good days they played games at the community center or worked in the church food pantry, where Thomas was in charge of the heavy lifting, restocking the highest shelves. The good days were blessed with all manner of surprises. Thomas repeating an overheard joke or shouting out a win in Bingo and blushing at the applause; the two of them standing in line at the grocery store and Ginnie realizing that one of the voices in the conversation behind was his, that Thomas was talking with a stranger, telling them about scheduled maintenance on a particular line, about his sister the photographer in Los Angeles.

The bad days were awful, but the good days were plentiful now. She had to remember that.

The man across the park stood to stretch, yawning like a cat. It was entirely possible that he had no interest in her or Thomas. He could be
waiting for someone else, a wife, a mistress. He could be skipping work, detouring from the prescribed day.

It had been fifteen years since Roy Pritchard sat in her kitchen and told her Henry had disappeared. Roy drinking coffee at her table, another man in a car outside. They believed that Henry had suffered another breakdown, Roy had said. Possibly the entire year had been a breakdown. Roy had told her that they were still piecing together the whole story of what Henry had been doing in San Francisco. He had refused to give details, telling her that he was sparing her the particulars, but he’d tried his best to make Ginnie understand that Henry was not the man she’d thought he was, that his illness had made him into someone else.

Henry had an apartment in the city, Roy had said, and the things that transpired there went beyond criminal.

Ginnie hadn’t asked Roy to elaborate. There was no need. Henry was no criminal. No matter what had happened to him, what they had driven him to, she knew his heart, his soul. She wouldn’t listen to the blackening of his name.

The man on the other side of the park was gone now. His newspaper sat alone, folded on the end of the bench. Ginnie returned to the poem on the dog-eared page. Faint inky fingerprints in the margins, Henry’s thumbs pressed to the paper.

A year after Henry had gone, she’d removed all of his books from the basement. She couldn’t stand to see them down where he’d sat for so many months, torturing himself. She brought them up into the living room, where they could have some light, warmth on their spines. She wanted them to be part of the house. She wanted to move around them, sit across from them in the muted evenings. She wanted those books to live with her, to inhabit the space he had left behind.

She watched Thomas’s hand, his finger tracing a route on a transit map in the newspaper. He’d freed himself from his own tracks over the last few years. Ginnie didn’t know how or why. The trappings just fell away. One day he no longer plugged himself in to refuel. On another he left the house without looking at the sidewalk, squinting to see the
rails. As if a season in the world had changed, and he no longer needed those things.

That morning in the kitchen with Roy, she had asked where he thought Henry had gone. Roy had turned his coffee cup in its saucer, stared down at the table, told her that they had no idea.

Hannah hated that Ginnie had disassembled the basement, moved her father’s books. She blamed Ginnie for Henry’s absence, as if the woman she believed Ginnie became after Henry disappeared, the humorless jailor, was also the woman who had driven him away. A teenager’s irrational fury, Ginnie knew, but there was some truth it, what she had become. Over the years without Henry, Ginnie had felt her love for Hannah and Thomas hardening to something concerned more with survival than affection.

She was unsuccessful at that, even. Hannah went to college, and then Hannah went farther, returning once or twice a year now, arriving by bus or a boyfriend’s borrowed car, staying only a few days. Hannah spent most of that time with Thomas, sitting in his room, or taking him down to the park if the weather held. Ginnie followed when they left the house, trailed them shamefully, but it was a necessary evil. She had lost her husband and daughter; she wouldn’t lose her son.

She’d never told Hannah about the men watching, had never asked if Hannah ever noticed them in Los Angeles. Hannah wouldn’t have believed it, would have thought it was just another instance of Ginnie’s paranoia, or a ploy to scare her home. Or she wouldn’t even care, possibly. Hannah liked to believe she was fearless. Maybe she was.

In the first years after Henry had gone, Ginnie had thought about traveling to Washington, demanding to speak to Paul Marist, showing up at Roy Pritchard’s door, asking all of the questions she’d been too afraid or too stunned to ask that morning in the kitchen. Wanting to know everything, no matter how awful. Or calling the police, hiring a detective, using some of the money from the pension checks that came from Washington every month. She did none of this, though. Henry was gone and she could feel Hannah slipping away and she needed to stop the bleeding, the death of their family. So she narrowed their world, she closed the
doors and locked the windows. She turned into the woman who at times Hannah saw so clearly. She had no other choice.

It was difficult to fight the proof. Hannah, Thomas, Henry. They had all fled in one way or another. At night, desperate for sleep, she heard the voices of Thomas’s doctors from years ago, their unsparing accusations. Thomas was the antidote for this. Mass with Thomas and then, blessedly, a quiet hour at the park, an afternoon at the pantry. A surprise smile. He was all she had left, but he was enough.

The man with the sunglasses had returned to his bench, joined by a woman in a polka-dot dress. They sat hand in hand, leaning their heads close to speak. His sunglasses were on, and Ginnie wasn’t sure if she could feel his eyes. It was hard to tell anymore if she was the only one still waiting.