Tropical Depression (29 page)

I went back to the hotel. A police cruiser fell in behind me at Western Avenue and followed me all the way back. I parked in the small lot and waited, but they drove on past.

I went upstairs and packed. The suitcase closed easily. There was much less to put in than I had started with. I wondered if that meant anything. I wondered if the fish were biting, and if Captain Art had any charters for me. And I wondered how it was possible for a reasonably competent human being to screw up everything he touched so completely.

They were all tough questions. I sat on the bed and thought about them. When I couldn’t think anymore, I called Ed.

He was at home. He picked up the phone on the third ring.

“It’s me,” I said. I told him what had happened with Woodstock, the cops, Dan Hoffman. Then I said, “I’m going home.”

He let out what sounded like a half-pack of smoke, a long slow breath filled with pain and loss as well as smoke. “You done all you could, Billy,” he said at last, like it hurt him to talk at all.

“It wasn’t enough.”

“It never is, Billy. You just stay careful.”

Early the next morning I was on the Hollywood Freeway again for the last time, I hoped.

I hadn’t slept much. I had a cold knot in my stomach and another in my throat. All night long I’d rolled around on the small, humpbacked bed, wondering what I could have done differently. I couldn’t think of anything.

I never should have come here. I’d known that all along, but I’d come anyway. It didn’t make me feel any better to know I’d been right.

I was out of the hotel before the coffee shop opened. I figured that was the only good thing to happen to me in a while. I wasn’t hungry anyway.

I took the turn-off downtown onto the Harbor, and then onto the Santa Monica. Traffic was still light. The sun was behind me, throwing gigantic shadows on the road.

I took the Sepulveda Boulevard exit and headed north. It wasn’t far. At this hour I even found a place to park.

I walked across the grass to the spot I was looking for. Two small granite markers stood side by side.

“Hello,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

I tried to think of something else to say and couldn’t. That seemed to cover everything anyway. So I just stood.

In the movies, there is always rain falling in L.A. I guess the people who wrote the movies have never been here. Or maybe I was undervaluing them. It might have been wishful thinking. Maybe they felt like me. I could have used the rain, the cold and clean relief of it. But rain does not fall in L.A. Rainy season in Los Angeles is two days every three years.

So there was no rain falling on me, just the wind, the hard hot dry wind that pushes all the razor-sharp yellow air into one corner of the valley and leaves it.

There was no answer to any of my questions, either. There wasn’t even anything to say. Just the wind.

I went back to my car.

L.A. wouldn’t let go of me. I had to wait six hours in the airport before I got a flight. I sat in a cocktail lounge alternating between beer and coffee.

Everyone seemed to be happy about something. A lot of good-looking women seemed to be kissing men in expensive suits. There were more kids in the airport than I remembered seeing in a while.

I read the paper all the way through. It was hard work. Dan Hoffman had a story about a halfway house for battered wives. Darryl Strawberry was not expecting to play any ball this week. I didn’t laugh at any of the funnies.

It seemed like several days dragged by before they finally called my flight. I left the paper beside a half-full coffee cup and an empty beer glass. It made a very depressing still life.

I was herded onto a full plane and crushed in between a very large grandmother who smelled like gin and a Cuban businessman who kept elbowing my arm off the armrest.

I know it’s supposed to be a lot quicker flying west to east. But it seemed much longer. We made a stop in Dallas where we sat on the ground for over an hour. Nobody moved except the businessman. He elbowed me three times while we sat there.

The grandmother got up and went to the rest room. When she came back the gin smell was stronger. She smiled at me. Her false teeth were so white they looked as if they might glow in the dark.

The plane finally took off again. It was night when we landed in Miami. There were no flights to Key West until the next day. I could camp out in the terminal or take a bus.

It was a hard decision and I didn’t know if I had any more hard decisions in me. I sat on a chair, drained.

There were signs all over the airport forbidding smoking in several languages, but there was an ashtray attached to my chair. A man sat next to me and lit up a cigar. He was about five-six, bald, and weighed four hundred pounds. After a moment he was joined by a buddy, slightly taller but just as heavy. He lit up and sat down, too. The row of seats wobbled and tilted.

I decided to take the bus.

We pulled into Key West at 4:38 in the morning. I had dozed once or twice on the trip, each time jerking awake again, heart hammering, from dreams that were dark and full of pain.

When I got off the bus I felt like my skin was covered with a thick layer of grease. My eyes ached, my head felt large and dull, and that was all a lot better than I felt inside.

The parking lot behind City Hall, where the bus had dumped me, was deserted except for two or three of the citizens who had decided to sleep there. I looked around and blinked for a few minutes, trying to remember where I lived. I felt like I had just landed from another world.

I could feel myself slipping back into that dark sea where nothing mattered. I wanted to fight it, to hang onto something positive. I closed my eyes and tried to think of something good. I couldn’t.

I walked up Simonton, across US 1, and got home just after five. The sun was lightening the sky just a little, but it didn’t do much for me.

A man was sitting on my front stoop when I got to my house. He was scrawny and bald and wore a greasy nylon parka.

He stood up as I approached. “William Knight?”

“Who are you?”

“Are you William Knight?” he insisted.

I pushed past him and got the key in my lock. “That’s right. And you’re trespassing.”

He looked pleased with himself. “Nope, this here is official business.” He stuck a hand inside the soiled jacket and pulled out an envelope. “I’m a process server.” He held out the envelope, looking smug.

I took the envelope. “All right, I’m served. Go take a shower.”

He stood there watching me open the envelope. I looked up at him. He looked back for a moment. I took a step towards him. He flushed and stumbled backwards. He caught himself and turned to walk away.

I read the documents in the envelope. I was being sued by someone named Peter Schlosser. It didn’t make any sense until I remembered Pete, my nightmare charter. He wanted half a million dollars in damages.

Welcome home, Billy.

I went in and fell onto the bed.

I woke up late in the afternoon and lay on the bed until dark. After all that had happened, after the way it had ended, there didn’t seem to be any point in getting up and doing anything.

Doyle would walk away from it all. He was probably in better shape than before I had started nosing, because now he knew where his weaknesses were. I had failed.

I had failed with Nancy, too. More than failed. A murderer was smug and untouched, and a wonderful woman had been hurt. Nice going, Billy. With an even hand, I had punished the innocent and rewarded the guilty. All I had really accomplished was to push my-self back into despair.

I lay there with my eyes open until well past midnight. Then I got up and went into the living room. I stood in the middle of the room for a long time, trying not to think about it. I failed at that, too.

Around two-thirty I turned on the television and that seemed to help.

I was home for two days before Nicky found me. There wasn’t much food in the house, but that didn’t seem to matter much. I had a couple of cans of soup, and I hadn’t really gotten beyond that state when Nicky came in on the third day.

There was an old movie on the TV. I’d seen it a dozen times, but that was okay.

I’d heard rustling outside for a half-hour, and once I thought I’d seen Nicky’s chinless, beaked face peering in the window. But it seemed like too much trouble to get up and look. There was a movie on. I was comfortable in the chair. So I ignored the cautious taps and the increasingly energetic pounding on the door until finally he pushed his way in.

“Mate!” he said. His face was lit up with a cautious glow, like a little kid’s on Christmas, not sure whether he was getting a new bike or a bundle of twigs.

“Hi, Nicky.”

“You’re a right sight, you are,” he said. There didn’t seem to be too much to say to that, and not too much point in looking for something. I watched the movie. After a long moment, Nicky sat in the other chair.

“Well, Billy. How’d it go out there?”

“You were right, Nicky.”

“’Course I was, Billy. Goes without saying. They put the wood on you, eh?”

I frowned. It was hard to concentrate on the movie with him talking like that. “What does that mean?”

“You got lumbered, mate. They put you in jail.”

“How did you know?”

He tapped his huge nose. “Smell it on yer. The smell takes a while to wash off. ’Sides, didn’t I say they would?”

“I guess so.”

“It’s all in the stars, laddie. All in the stars.”

“Okay.”

I sat for a while watching the movie. Nicky sat watching me.

“You going to tell me about it, Billy?” he asked finally.

“Maybe later.”

We sat some more. The movie ended. The announcer said a talk show was coming on next. That seemed okay.

“Well, Billy. You ready to get back to work?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know.” The talk show started.

At the first commercial in the talk show Nicky stood up. He looked worried, but I was watching the commercial. I hadn’t seen it before. “Billy,” he said. “Listen, old son, I know this has got you down, but you’ve got to let go of it. Get out of the house, get back to normal.”

I glanced at Nicky. “This
is
normal,” I said, and went back to watching the show.

He stood there looking down at me for a long spell. “Oh, mate. Oh, Billy,” he said at last. He sighed.

“I’ll be fine, Nicky.”

He didn’t say anything for a while. Neither did I.

“Well,” he said at last. “I’ll see you later, then, all right?”

“Okay, Nicky.”

From the corner of my eye I could see him. He stood and watched me for another moment, then shook his head and left.

I watched the show. After that there were some cartoons, then the news.

Nicky came back that night and left me a big pot of stew, but there was a movie on and I didn’t get around to it.

In fact there was stuff to watch all night long, and it seemed like such a big effort to get up anyway, so I stayed in my chair and watched most of the night.

The next day was about the same. I thought about getting up and going somewhere, but I couldn’t really think of anywhere I wanted to go. I realized what I was doing wasn’t good, that there was something wrong with me, but I couldn’t think what it was or what to do about it, and anyway there was an awful lot to see on television.

Again in the evening Nicky brought food over. I didn’t look at it. He tried to talk for a few minutes, and once or twice I let him. Then he took yesterday’s stew and went home.

That night around ten the telephone started ringing. I almost got up to answer it, but there was always something on the television. Around two A.M. it stopped ringing.

The next morning I felt a little hungry for the first time. I went in the kitchen and looked at the food Nicky had brought. It was spaghetti. It was cold. I decided I wasn’t hungry.

I went back to the TV just in time to catch a story on “Today.” It was breaking this morning in Los Angeles.

Seemed an assistant chief of police was accused of being the leader of a paramilitary racist organization. Civic leaders had already called for his resignation, but Warren Francis Doyle had disappeared in the face of several serious indictments and nobody knew where he was. It was speculated that he had already left the country. A massive manhunt was on for the fugitive.

I got up and got a plate of spaghetti. It tasted pretty good.

“Today” ran the story again. It was a big story. Even Bryant Gumbel tried to look serious. I didn’t. In fact, my face felt almost like it was smiling.

When the commercial came on I yawned and turned the TV off.

“Yippee,” I said to myself.

I dozed off in my chair. I woke up to an unearthly roar outside my window. I blinked a few times, but the sound didn’t go away and I was awake. I got up and looked out the window.

Art was seated on a Harley Davidson 1250 Electroglide, as far as I know the biggest bike Harley ever made. Nicky was perched behind him. Art was revving the motor. I had heard Art owned a Harley. He had supposedly ridden it into town thirty years ago and decided to stay. I had never seen him on it. I had never seen the bike at all.

In fact, the shock of seeing Art anywhere but on the stool in his dockmaster’s shack made my jaw sag.

He revved the engine a few more times, kicked down the stand, and climbed off. Nicky bounced off and followed him up to my front door.

I swung the door open. Art stood there gasping like a spent fish.

“Billy,” he wheezed. “The hell you doing in here.”

I just stood holding the door, still too shocked to speak.

“The hell out of my way, then,” he said, and lumbered past me into the house. He barely fit through the doorway. “Got a chair in here?” He answered his own question by sinking deep into my easy chair. The chair groaned and settled several inches lower than it ever had before.

Nicky scuttled in behind Art, hopping anxiously around like a very small puppy following a St. Bernard. “G’day, mate,” he murmured and whisked off into the kitchen, looking guilty.

“Billy,” Art puffed from deep within the chair. “Nicky says you’re watching television.” He said the last word with disgust, like he didn’t really believe it was possible. He made it sound like somebody had accused me of having sex with farm animals.