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Authors: Mark Joseph

BOOK: The Wild Card
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A lone taxi, engine idling, waited for a fare in the hotel cab stand. Bobby bent over to peer in, hoping to see Driver. Alas, an old man in a flat cap sat at the wheel.
“Anything open around here?” Bobby asked.
“No, sir, nothing. What're you looking for, sport?”
“What about Twenty-fourth and Church?”
“You want to go to Noë Valley? That's way 'cross town.”
“I'm glad you know where it is. What's open out there?”
The driver thought for a moment and said, “An all-night doughnut shop. Favorite of the police.”
“Perfect.”
Bobby opened the car door and slid into the back seat. Nelson walked over and looked down at Bobby sitting in the cab.
“So is this it?” the policeman asked. “No good-bye? No handshake? No nothin', Kimosabe?”
“Why should I stay? I can go home and wait for a knock on the door.”
“There won't be a knock on your door, Bobby, not now, not ever, but we have a lot more to tell you. We're just getting started.”
“You want to talk? Okay. Let's take a ride.”
“What about the game?”
“The game will keep,” Bobby said. “Get in the cab, Nelson.”
A hotel repairman happily pocketed a twenty and exited the suite, leaving a new fixture that illuminated the table with the familiar cone of light.
Dean had passed out and was snoring loudly on the living room couch, Charlie lay on a bed in one of the bedrooms watching a rerun
of I Love Lucy,
and Alex sat at the card table playing solitaire. He laid out a hand and immediately began to cheat, flipping over a buried deuce of clubs. The
William Tell
Overture played on the stereo.
Charlie shouted over the music, “How much will Nelson tell him?”
“Hopefully enough to get him back,” Alex shouted in return.
“Dean almost blew it, you know.”
“It really doesn't matter, Charlie,” Alex said, dropping his voice to a whisper. “In the end, it's just a card game.”
A king of spades painted on the door identified the taxi as King Kab 209. The night had turned balmy, sensuous, fragrant with jasmine. They rode in silence, Nelson wisely keeping quiet. Bobby opened the window and let the wind evaporate the sweat on his neck. In the distance the deep bass of a foghorn sounded, and he could feel lifetimes rolling in with the great Pacific fog bank. Ah, God, he sighed, the memories searing his mind's eye, warm evenings in Saigon, a silky night on the Feather River, freezing winters at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin, images dissolving one into the next and superimposed on dark streets that held their own vast stores of secrets.
Bobby knew what terrified the boys from Noë Valley—like revealing tells in a poker game their fear announced itself in blazing lights from the dark marquee of the Orpheum Theater at Eighth and Market—
The Secret of Shanghai Bend
—he saw it on the towering billboards that lined the board boulevard—
Thrills Galore Based on a True Story
—he read it in the ads on the back of the taxicab's front seat—
The Curse of the Queen of Hearts
—the lurid promotional copy of a dime novel, a B-movie, a TV special of the week.
The truth shall make you free.
Yea, brother, free from what? Bobby had stepped into the abyss of freedom long ago, and he'd embraced his freedom like his uniform. The boys didn't have a clue; they were like civilians or slaves or robots or clones: dumbbells without a fucking clue.
Twenty-fourth Street was a ten minute ride across the deserted city. As the cab moved away from downtown, the slick new buildings on Market Street gave way to Victorians with bay windows and gaudy false fronts, the familiar city of Bobby's childhood. Rattling over the streetcar tracks on Church street triggered his oldest memories,
childhood rides on the J car to explore the mysteries of the fishwharf where Charlie's father operated a fleet of boats, racing around in Dean's Impala, picnics in Dolores Park, making out with girls on dark side streets in the fog—benign, innocent, sentimental memories that Bobby had quashed for many years and was reviving now, bitterly, he realized, in order to pry a secret out of Nelson Lee.
They were deep in the city now, miles from the Palace Hotel and the places tourists visit. As the cab climbed the hill alongside verdant Dolores Park, in the shadows of a pedestrian bridge over the streetcar tracks Bobby caught a glimpse of furtive movement, and his infallible junkie's radar detected dope and dope dealers. The innocence of his thoughts vanished in an instant.
Nelson saw the same flash of watchcaps and hooded eyes in the bushes. The policeman smirked and chuckled. It wasn't his beat.
“Do you ever come back here?” Bobby asked as the taxi crested Liberty Hill and dropped into the wide ravine on the east side of Twin Peaks called Noë Valley.
“Sure. My mom still lives here.”
“This is us, Nelson. This is where we come from. These streets are the paths of our souls.”
“If you believe that, why didn't you ever come back?”
“You really want to know? It was because I was going to show Sally the city, and since she never made it, there was nothing for me here. I couldn't come back and go to Berkeley, just across the bridge, because that was too close. When Sally was taken away, my life exploded. It sounds corny, but my heart was broken. I didn't want to see anyone or talk to anyone or answer any questions. To tell you the truth, I wanted to run away and join the French Foreign Legion, but it was too far away. It was easier to enlist in the army, and that worked out fine. It got me far away.”
Nelson became very still in his corner of the back seat. The taxi arrived at 24th and Church, a well-lit corner whose cluster of shops was closed except for the doughnut shop and a laundromat across the street. A black and white patrol car was parked in the bus stop in front of the doughnut shop. Inside, two uniformed cops, the only customers, occupied the rear table.
The meter read twelve bucks. “Can you wait fifteen minutes?” Bobby asked the driver, handing him two twenties. “Get yourself a cup of coffee.”
Bobby got out of the cab, waited for Nelson, and led him across the street to the laundromat. It was empty and they were alone.
Shiny new washers and dryers surrounded a large folding table in the center of the bright and spiffy laundry. Cowboy boots clicking on the floor, fingers popping in a quick rhythm, Bobby walked around the table peering into the dryers until he came up with a faded green terrycloth towel. Suddenly, he twisted it into a rope and snapped it at Nelson like they were kids in a locker room.
Whap!
“Hey!” Nelson protested.
“You people are fucking with me, you know that?”
Whap whap.
Bobby advanced and Nelson retreated around the table. “I hate being played for a sucker, you know what I mean?”
Whap.
“It pisses me off.”
Bobby stopped his mock attack, wiped his face and neck with the freshly laundered towel and tossed it into a washing machine. Grinning at Nelson, he fed quarters into the appliance and started the cycle.
“It all comes out in the wash, hey, Nelson?”
“You forgot soap.”
“I forget a lot of things,” Bobby quipped. “I have a very selective memory.”
He walked over to the windows and peered across the street at the doughnut shop. The taxi driver was sitting two tables away from the cops.
“Would you rather talk in front of those cops?” Bobby asked.
“Pass.”
“I thought so. You know, I don't think there was a doughnut shop there when we were kids. It was a diner. I remember the grocery store next door because, as we used to say, it was the corner store that wasn't because the diner was on the corner. I'm pretty sure it was a diner, a little restaurant with a counter. Care for a doughnut, Nelson? I could go for a real greasy maple bar myself.”
“What do you want, Bobby? You hijacked me across town to our
old neighborhood for what? A fit of nostalgia? I'm not sentimental. What are you looking for in a damned Laundromat of all places?”
“What do I want? What do
I
want? I don't want anything. The question is what do
you
want? It's three-thirty in the morning, nobody's around, we're on the old corner where we used to hang out. It's a good place to come clean, don't you think?”
“Come clean about what?”
“You guys are close to panic, Nelson, and it seems like you're afraid of me. You can't be afraid of anyone else because you've got that covered, according to you. Birth certificates, dental records, very impressive.”
“We thought we had everything covered at Shanghai Bend, but it got uncovered, didn't it?”
“So what? Dean claimed that was inevitable. Why didn't you leave me in peace? What difference does my being here make? I would have been content to live my life and live with what I live with.”
“Maybe you can live with it, Bobby, but not the rest of us. When it was all over and we had to come back without you, we had to lie and say we had a fight over the poker game and you took off. You just walked away and we had no idea where you were. You called your mother the next day and said you were joining the Army, and after that the lies generated more lies and they never stopped. We can't live with that anymore.”
“Too bad. You have to play the hand you're dealt.”
“That's right, and we were dealt a wild card.”
“Me?”
“Yeah. You're crazy. You're a junkie and a drunk and a gambler and completely unpredictable.”
“Well, excuse me for stepping off the straight and narrow path of bullshit respectability. You don't like it? Then jump off the fucking bridge, Nelson. This is not my problem.”
Tormented, unsure what to say because he felt responsible for the fate of everyone in the Enrico Caruso Suite, Nelson plunged his hands into his pockets and kicked at the floor.
“Look,” Bobby said. “This whole thing seems scripted which is fucked if everyone has seen the script except me.”
“That's because we talk about Shanghai Bend every year, and you don't. It's new to you, this dredging up the past, going over every detail, trying to find out what happened.”
“And you think I know?”
“Do you?”
“I can guess.”
“Guesses aren't good enough, Bobby.”
“What else is there?”
“You believe we killed her.”
“That's right.”
“Well? What are you going to do about it?”
Bobby leaned back against a washing machine, flashed his charismatic grin, and lit a Winston. “You've got balls, Nelson, I'll give you that. I think you know what happened. You've always known. I'll tell you something. I had a few hours with a girl named Sally and that's all there was, a few hours—I figured it out, thirteen hours and maybe thirty minutes, and during those few hours she changed me. She saw things I didn't see, and she opened my eyes. She was like a drug and I became instantly addicted. I went to the moon, Nelson, to the galaxies. No shit. I painted the
Mona Lisa
and she was the model. Can you understand me? I loved her. Because of Sally, I became something different, but Nelson, Nelson, that was a long time ago. Sally was—like turning a page and everything suddenly changes from black and white to color. Then, after half a day, she was gone, but I was changed. I took something of her away and that's all of her there is. Your shitty pile of papers isn't Sally. Resurrecting her is not my idea of fun especially when it's done according to your agenda. Like the way you laid out documents, and Dean told his story, and Alex told his story. You planned it.”
“You're damned right we planned it, but we're not trying to do a number on your head. We're not trying to get you into any kind of trouble. We want you to listen to what we have to say, and, yes, we've been planning what to say for thirty years. This is a trial, but it's not you who's in the dock, Bobby. Oh, no. It's us. You're the judge and jury.”
Little Eva's “Loco-Motion” rocked out of Sally's transistor radio, beaming a sexy top-forty beat over the placid waters of the Sacramento River. Sally knew the lyrics and the moves, and to Bobby's amazement he was dancing like a choo-choo on the flying bridge of the
Toot Sweet
.
“See, you do it like this,” Sally instructed, elbows pumping like pistons, hips swaying like the little engine that could. “Come on, baby, chugga chugga chugga.”
Soon there'll be touching, he thought; she'll take my arm or rub her tits against me while she slides by in the confined space. With his head swimming upstream against a flood current of lust, he thought, Jesus, I gotta drive the boat.
“No more dancing,” he declared, gripping the wheel tightly. “Go back to your chair or we're gonna have a shipwreck.”
Sally bumped him with her hip and said, “Oh-kay,” splitting the word into two long syllables. Bobby made her feel safe, and so with a smile and a playful salute, she settled into the chair to watch the river roll by.
In the late afternoon millions of bugs swarmed over the water, raising the fish which naturally multiplied the number of fishermen. Suddenly, guys in outboards sprouted like tules from the river, churning the water and casting lines into schools of shad. At the wheel, laughing and having a grand old time, Bobby waved cheerfully at passing boats and swatted at mosquitoes, often with the same motion.
To Sally, the rural Sacramento Valley struck her as so different from Los Angeles that the only thing comparable to her journey on the river was the Jungle Cruise at Disneyland, an E ticket ride for
sure. Fresh water, strange sounds, new colors, bugs, fishermen, an occasional small log floating by, glimpses through levee breaks of vast fields and orchards, rusted farm equipment, swooping red-tailed hawks, the bright yellow of dried grasses on the steeply banked levees. Sally was enchanted; her heart moved. Like Alice in Wonderland, she'd slipped into another dimension. As the Toot Sweet made way slowly upriver, her radio added to the unreality by broadcasting Chuck Berry's East Saint Louis boogie and street corner doo wop from Philadelphia.
And to top off the set here's the fantastic harmonics of California's own, the fabulous Beach Boys.
America was cross-pollinating itself on the radio.
Sally snapped her fingers and sang along with “Little Deuce Coupe.” The sun was sinking in the west and half the river fell under the shadow of the levee. Ahead, the levees gradually receded several hundred yards to create a flood plain for rice paddies. The setting sun flashed long streaks of red across the water, an alien river on an alien planet. Two hours from Sacramento the last top-forty station faded into static, and when Sally fiddled with the dial, all she could find was hillbilly music from Yuba City. Patsy Cline and Johnny Cash. She turned it off and listened to the boat, the river, and the bugs. The boys in the cabin below had been quiet for half an hour.
“This is so peaceful,” she said to Bobby. “You aren't angry anymore, are you?”
“No. It's okay.”
The boat was making way slowly now, skirting snags—huge tree limbs that had barreled downstream in the previous winter's storms and embedded themselves in the bottom creating submarine hazards like organic icebergs. Bobby figured if he hit one, the trip was over and he'd turn around and go back toward Sacramento. Unless they sank.
“There's a lot of angry people in L.A.,” Sally said, looking up at an angry red sky. “Is it like that in San Francisco?”
“Angry at what?” he asked.
“Oh, I don't know. The system, or because you're black or white or Mexican. Stuff like that.”
“I suppose there's people like that everywhere,” Bobby said. “I don't know about any system.”
“That's because you're part of it and don't know it.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah. You're part of the system, Bobby McCorkle. You toe the line, walk the straight and narrow, don't break any laws, stay in school, and do what you have to do to become a respectable member of society who doesn't rock any boats, especially this one.”
“Like hell. I break plenty of laws.”
“Oh, yeah? Name one.”
“I drink beer, that's one. I know how to hotwire a car.”
“Oh, boy. That makes you an outlaw. Hey,” she said. “Are you a tough guy?”
“What? Come on.”
“Do you get in fights and things like that?”
“No.”
“You're lyin'.”
“When I was a kid. Not anymore.”
“Then why'd you get that tattoo?”
“A tattoo doesn't make me a tough guy.”
“Does where I come from.”
“Then maybe it's a good thing you left.”
“You
are
a tough guy. Tough in the head.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah. You're gonna go to college at Berkeley, right?”
“Yeah.”
“I heard of that place. They got a lot of smart people there. You're gonna be all right there.”
“How would you know?”
“See? You challenge everything. You don't take nothing for granted and you don't believe anything. That's how I know.”
Ahead, the river divided and Bobby didn't know which fork to take. One of life's little conundrums. He asked Sally which way she thought he should go.
“I don't know anything about rivers,” she said. “Eenie, meenie, minie, moe, I don't care which way you go.”
“Maybe you are a beatnik,” he said and yelled, “Dean! I need a map.”
Alex emerged from the cabin into the stern, threw up his arms in a gesture of helplessness, and hollered, “Dean threw all the maps and charts overboard.”
Bobby blinked, ran his fingers through his hair and shook his head. “That moron,” he said. “Why?”
“It's just one of those things, Bobby. He was muttering about being Mike Fink the Riverboat Man and he didn't need any damn maps. Whoosh! Out the window; then he passed out.”
“Wonderful. Take a look. The river splits. Which way do I go?”
Alex ascended to the bridge and studied the river ahead.
“Take the biggest one. Go right.”
“How's the game?” Bobby asked.
“Dean is wasted and Charlie's seasick. Nelson and I are playing blackjack. Crazy Nelson hit a soft eighteen and got the three of hearts. Can you believe it?”
“Stick to poker, Alex, or that Chinaman will take all your money.”
The
Toot Sweet
putted merrily past Verona, and Bobby steered to the right, unknowingly navigating onto the Feather. It looked the same, the banks lined with brush at the base of tall levees, a few trees, and here and there a cornfield or apple orchard in places where the levees opened and offered a peek at what lay beyond. Bobby studied the trees and bushes and realized they had to pull up on the bank somewhere and make camp before dark.
From time to time Sally turned around and smiled. The sun went down and in the twilight, a half mile ahead where the river slipped around an island and curved to the east, Bobby could see a trace of white water, the cataract at Shanghai Bend, the end of the line.

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