Leave It to Me (18 page)

Ham took charge and produced the wake as a little folk, a little punk, a little gospel-rock catharsis extravaganza. The music: Peter, Paul and Mary; Pete Seeger. The flowers: Lilies in mourners’ hair. Cremation: Blessed and switched on by a Buddhist priest named Steve Lama. Scattering of ashes: After a two-hour hike and off a Point Reyes promontory.

The powdered corpse played with seals and sea lions.

Vietnam wasn’t a war; it was a divide. On one side, the self-involved idealists; on the other, we the napalm-scarred kids. In between, a country that elected leaders, who got boys like Larry to pull the triggers.

After the hike, the select few, among them the ex-lover who’d shaved her head—Ham kept A and B lists—ended up on his houseboat in Sausalito. The way they grieved wasn’t familiar. Where I wept, got drunk and started songs I didn’t know the words to, they hugged, they smoked, they groped, they melted into an intimacy that was physical. One image that stays with me from that evening: the Hairless Hat-Wearer, wearing the wispy dress I’d clowned in in Dahlia’s shop the first time I’d run into Jess, danced the Seven Veils in the galley kitchen, and when she finished, she grabbed a pasta-serving platter and asked Ham to deliver her his head. Ham couldn’t console the hatless woman just then, because he was consoling Jess. I was sober enough not to confuse hugs and pats with grabs and gropes. The soft scrape of lips, the shucking off of loafers, the peeling off of sticky shirts: I heard the sweet, low moans of invitation and acceptance.

I didn’t exist. I might as well have never existed. That snake-
thing
had been a Dickinson wanna-be’s fantasy.

Ham pushed open the door to the lavatory, guided Jess in, then kicked the door to shut it behind them. The door didn’t swing back all the way. I could have closed it; I should have walked away. I didn’t have to watch my mother and my lover make love in the cramped loo of a
houseboat in Marin. I saw her legs straight out, a flash of Ham’s blue Jockeys. Mother Steals Daughter’s Boyfriend belongs on
The Jenny Jones Show
.

I stayed rooted; I stared; I envied.

This has to be serenity
.

Jess and Ham inhabited space where all actions were guiltless, all feelings natural.

And when I couldn’t stand watching my lover and my mother go at it any longer, I fuzz-busted all the way from Sausalito to Beulah Street, stole a parking space from a tourist’s Beamer, rushed to Loco Larry’s apartment.

“What freaked you out, doll?” His bulked-up torso blocked the
I
MY ARSENAL
sign on the opened door. He had a beer in his hand. Empties lined up along the sides of the futon. Drunk enough to hope his luck had changed. “A beer? Grass? Nookie?”

“I’m not a couch potato. The evening deserves better.”

He took it as we’ll-fuck-later.
“No problema, señorita.”
He grinned. “
No
fucking
problema
. We’ll get in the Larry-mobile and drive around a bit.” He checked the pockets of his fatigues for the keys to his truck.

The keys had to be in the left pocket of the windbreaker hanging from a peg just inside the front door—I could make out a lumpy sag that looked car-keys size—but hanging with Larry meant accommodating the macho locked inside the loco.

“If you’re in the mood, let’s go do some serious gardening.” He clicked his crepe-soled heels and let me in. “Let’s fucking garden till we drop.”

I hadn’t figured Larry as a green thumb. There were no potted plants on his windowsills, not even marijuana under artificial lighting in his closet.

He stripped off the fatigues he had on, down to his plaid boxer shorts, no explanations, then pulled on fatigues exactly like the ones he’d just taken off. “Help yourself to a beer,” he ordered. He opened the apartment door, and swaggered off to the bathroom in the hall. I followed, because he didn’t say no. The top shelf of the bathroom cabinet held the greasepaint he was looking for. I watched him daub on battle-ready black.

“Great gardener look,” I joked.

We ambled back to his apartment. One of the Somali kids stuck his head in the open door. “Scoot!” Larry barked, but he tossed the kid a half-used-up roll of Certs. When we were finally ready for the road, he had on a camouflage helmet and jackboots. Any guy who’d poop-scooped shredded buddy-flesh in paddy fields on the other side of the moon was entitled. Larry
looked
wired; I
felt
it.

“The bulbs for planting are in the truck.” He grinned. “When apocalypse hits, we dig up what we sowed. That’s the plan.”

Whatever the plan, I didn’t get it. “Sweets, put yourself in Robinson Crusoe’s shoes.”

“Crusoe lost his shoes when his ship went down.”

Larry tried again, a good sport. “What’s the one must-have item on a desert island?”

“A sun-powered TV?”

He thumped my arm, buddy fashion. “An arsenal in weatherproof storage underground.” He pulled a dolly out of a cluttered corner of the kitchen alcove, and started to pile up crates, canisters, cache tubes. “Yours truly’s partial to AK-47S and Colt AR15HBARS.”

Forget
The Victory Garden;
tune out
Martha Stewart Living
. Larry’s gardening was for survivalists who relied on more than organic flowers and vegetables for their postapocalypse days.

I was Larry’s buddy; I took a shot at wheeling the loaded dolly closer to the apartment door. The dolly didn’t move, but pain did, and that pain settled in the small of my back in one burning, bouncing ball.

“Hey, forget that.” He grinned. “You bring the ammo. I got me the genuine article. Steel cored, with mega mayhem capacity.” He handed me a heavy-enough box. I locked up after us, and lugged the box to where Larry’s panel truck was parked, in front of a fire hydrant a block and a half away on Cole.

Larry had a right to think his luck had changed for the better. The truck hadn’t been ticketed. The only paper under the windshield wiper was a flyer for a new Shabazz Bakery.

We loaded our gardening equipment and the dolly into the back of the truck, which was already a mess of sleeping bags, movers’ quilts, water canteens, baseball bats, tire irons. “Where to, sweetheart?” Larry rammed the key into the ignition.

“What makes for a good garden site?”

“A weekend hideout of a rich bastard who owns too many hideouts to visit any of them regularly.”

The upside of being included on Ham’s A list was knowing people with more than one house in more than one country. “No
problema
,” I echoed Larry, and suggested we check out Beth Hendon’s once-or-twice-a-summer shack in Lafayette. It was a joke, but I talked up the property’s remoteness from roads and from other houses, its treed grounds, its skinny, twisty, unpaved driveway. Easy to defend in postapocalypse days, I tempted. Larry grilled me on details: the layout of the shack, the physical contour of the grounds, estimate of total acreage. I told him what I remembered from the one time I had dropped off her out-of-town hunk of the moment, and invented what I didn’t. “Sounds doable, pardner!” He shot out of the illegal parking space, and speed-merged into traffic. Behind us on busy Cole, I heard drivers hit their brakes.

The month was January. When Larry and I started our dig on a rise with a floaty night view, the cabin’s windows were shuttered closed, the pool covered with tarp. Beth was smoking dope on the deck of Ham’s houseboat and giggling her grief at the stars. She didn’t spend winter nights in the cabin. The chance of her showing up in Lafayette was one in a million.

I didn’t recognize the car throttling up the loopy driveway because it wasn’t Beth’s white Camry. I’d had to re-parallel park that Camry too many times or had had to
drive her home. The car inching up the driveway was a dark green VW bug. It stalled halfway up the loop, and Beth Hendon tumbled out of the driver’s side and lifted its snub hood. Beth was wearing the same short, dark sheath she’d grieved in. She wasn’t a
thing
, but I worried about Larry. You popped up at the wrong time in the wrong spot on Larry’s horizon, you became one fast.

Beth minced her way from the hood to the passenger side, reached in and helped a woman out. It was the Hairless Salome of the Wüsthof knives and Crate & Barrel platter. In the bug’s cockeyed headlight, I saw Beth hold up and prop her against the car. There was a connection—moral, or at least poetic—between Beth, Salome, dead Fred, Larry, me, Ham—but I couldn’t stay with it long enough to figure it out. I didn’t have the time.

Mayhem in real time happens faster than in the movies. One moment I was standing on the rise near where Larry was drilling deep holes, feeling good about all that women bonding with women below; the next I was on the ground, cheek pressed into dug-up clumps of grass and earth, throwing up. One moment there was an efficiently lifted, ex-model’s gaunt face; next a pulpy mess, exploding in record tropical heat like overripe fruit.

I heard the shot that killed Beth, but I didn’t see the dying.

Larry was fulfilling the promise he’d made me earlier that evening: an alfresco date with mega mayhem. The vet who made it home from the ruby-red paddy fields is a survivor on permanent metabolic overdrive. The moralist’s low-tech radar tracks the Larrys’ guilt but not their pain.
I was throwing up in the starved light of a stooped moon because I’d nixed Larry’s original plans for a beer and a blowjob; you nudge one block out of line, and all the neighboring blocks teeter and realign. You flee in the face of middle-aged lust in Sausalito, and before the night’s over you end up in Lafayette, accessory to murder.

There’s no accurate predicting, though, of the intensity and range. I had no idea what loco pleasure Larry would indulge in next. He did a brief celebration jig like he’d just made a touchdown with network cameras rolling, and yelled, “Shabazz! Shabazz! Shabazz!…”

I rolled over and lay on my back. The moon was a pale scar in the sky’s star-pocked face. The dewy air was doused with vomit and sweat. I closed my eyes tight, and saw familiar veins like snakes squirm across my eyelids; I smelled charred scrub and singed flesh. When I opened my eyes again, Larry was racing down the rise to where the two corpses lay; he was plucking trophies. He hacked a thumb and a toe off Beth, who didn’t have a head left to ravage, then he straightened her legs into a long, lean uncrossed A, and crouched with his head in its apex.

That’s when I shot him. That’s why I shot him. The why and when of that moment are joined like Siamese twins.

Each of us has two brains, one in the gut and one in the skull. It’s true; I heard it on CNN. My skull-brain must have asked the why the very moment that my gut-brain was shouting the when.

All wisdom is visceral. I know to leave my dead to be discovered by somebody or
something
else.

I drove Larry’s truck back to the Haight, and parked it in front of the same fire hydrant Larry had. There were no legal spaces left. With Larry’s keys, I let myself into his apartment and helped myself to a few knives and automatic handguns, most of the lock-picking tools, a few of the bugging devices, and all the pills, powders and vials. No breaking and entering. No slipshod signs of petty pilferage. That felt good, but not great enough to make me careless. I slipped Larry’s keys back in the pocket of his windbreaker still hanging from a lopsided peg, and left the bureaucratic business of discovering and reporting Larry’s sudden absence to the landlord and the meter maid.

The three bodies on Beth’s property in Lafayette were discovered by two kids joyriding on crystal meth, but it took them awhile to think of looking for a pay phone and dialing for help. The police chose to be tight-lipped about Larry’s “gardening” equipment, leaving it to barroom detectives to deduce and to local journalists to speculate. Ham identified the bodies of Beth and the woman with the shaved head. He and Jess made the funeral arrangements. I grieved with them in public. In private, I celebrated. The dead women were the same age as Jess. Two stand-ins for Mother down. I was closing in.

Courtesy of a madman, I felt closer than I had to my bio-parents, but Ham, the Mr. Berkeley, aged.

Part Three