Matt bobs his head obediently and Darnell heads down the sidewalk for the station.
He opens the side doors of the van. It’s a Westfalia camper van, two-tone tangerine and white, a 1958 model with windows along both sides, a pop-up top, a framed side-awning that stows along the ceiling, cabinets, a fold-out table and padded seats that convert to a bed, an ice box and sink, and curtains sewn by Julie from bongo drum and palm tree — print cotton. Matt has never quite understood how they fit this many features into a small space, but it’s all functional, more or less.
He pulls a sleeping bag over Jasmine’s ukulele on the bed. Remembers his sister, playing the little instrument down at Crescent Bay one evening last summer around a campfire that threw orange shadows across the faces gathered around it. Matt, lurking behind the fire and the older teenagers, watching. Jazz pretty and sweet-voiced in firelight. Seems much longer ago than just a year.
His paper route, counting the folding and rubber-banding, is four hours of zinging pain, with his raw knees and elbows and his bruised palm heels, which have turned pale blue since Saturday night.
Having Jazz’s “missing” poster folded inside each and every Register makes him feel useful, deflecting the pain. Some. That’s forty-eight subscribers who might see her and call Darnell, he thinks.
He lands the Coiner’s Register in the sprinklers again, has to wade through those knee-high sprayers to fetch the paper and hobble with it to the porch, Gigi shrieking from behind the screen door, old Coiner hollering at the dog and Mrs. Coiner yelling at him.
When he gets home, landlord Nelson Pedley is standing in the middle of the tiny dried-out front yard, examining the sparse crop of fruit on the centerpiece avocado tree. It’s a brown Fuerte, sun-starved and dehydrated because Pedley won’t water it, so it produces small fruit. Pedley does not allow the Anthonys to pick any — it’s an actual condition of the lease agreement. When he comes to collect the monthly rent, he sometimes brings a small paper bag into which he puts two or three skinny avocados as a gift for his valued tenants.
As he does today, handing it to Matt with a smile.
“She’s not home so don’t even knock,” Matt says. “She’s out trying to make some money if that’s okay with you.”
“Well, of course, young man, certainly it is.”
“Okay, good. I have an errand to run, Mr. Pedley.”
“It’s late again, Matt. The rent.”
“It’s on the way. Don’t worry.”
“I do worry, about your mom.”
Matt shrugs and walks off toward the cop house half a block away.
When he’s done signing Officer Darnell’s almost verbatim report of his Sapphire Cove adventure, Matt hurries back home for something to eat. He’s starved, as usual, after three hours of peddling the hills and heaving papers.
The pantry has nothing but peanut butter and a can of beets, and his mother is still not home from the Jolly Roger with possible leftovers. Matt’s got almost fourteen dollars, which can buy plenty at the market, but he’s saving money for another expensive sketchbook and some good pressed charcoal, and something for Laurel’s birthday next week. His next route collection is almost two weeks away. So he rides to the Assistance League Food Exchange, his stomach grumbling hopefully. Last time it was milk, bread, eggs, cereal, rice, and...
Today it’s closed.
He settles for the peanut butter, the beets, and all three of Pedley’s scrawny avocados. He eats in front of the TV, watching the news. Walter Cronkite has been suggesting the war will not end in an American victory, but a “stalemate.” Cronkite had left his CBS studio in February and traveled to Vietnam to see firsthand how the war was going. He looked funny in his helmet. This evening he suggests that the American president has been overoptimistic about the war, in spite of the first five months of 1968 being exceptionally bloody, thanks to the Tet Offensive in January.
This evening’s battle footage shows helicopters landing under fire from communist Viet Cong gunners hidden in a misty forest. The bullets zip into the choppers but you can’t hear them over the rotors. The American troops come spilling out, running hard, crouched and heavily zig-zagging. Some pull up, kneel and shoot. No Kyle.
He takes his dishes to the sink. Looks out the kitchen window past the GTE building and sees that this will be a dramatic evening: blue skies, dark clouds blowing in, an orange-and-black sunset made for photography. Sunset just after eight. It’s going to be warm tonight, too, for June.
Matt still feels hungry, but lucky, too, like he’s going to see Jazz soon. Going to get her back where she belongs, safe from bad people and the things they do.
He loves beets. And avocados. Hates the thought of another long bike ride with his knees and elbows dipped in acid. He considers the lumpy tangerine-colored van in the driveway.
Figures the best driving route to Thousand Steps without getting caught.
Hopes to catch a glimpse of what Laurel saw there two days ago.
13
The camper van putts down Coast Highway, pulling to the right. Matt feels the gears shifting under him as he pushes the squishy clutch and moves the stick from gear to gear. His mom has coached him on timing the shift to the rpms and keeping the clutch all the way down until you’re in the next gear. It feels funny to have control over this much power and weight, even though this Westfalia camper has only thirty horsepower. The non — power steering wheel is large and takes some muscle.
It gets Matt down to Ninth Street, where he finds a place to park. No driving mistakes and no cops. He’s pleased to have broken the law and gotten away with it. Wonders what else he might get away with. Puts a sketchbook and a box of pressed charcoal sticks into his backpack, a burly thing made by his mother from outgrown blue jeans with surf shop patches and emblems. Slings it on and begins his long descent down Thousand Steps.
Which are actually 219 steps. Matt has counted them once every year since his ninth birthday — another day he very clearly remembers — when his mom and dad took him and Kyle and Jasmine to the big wide-open sandy beach here, perfect for surf-mattresses, bodysurfing, tidepool-combing, and getting tan. The menfolk had fished the south-end rocks that day because that’s what Matt had wanted on his birthday and there weren’t too many tourists. Matt, now at step number eighty-eight, remembers a keeper-sized halibut he caught that became dinner that night. Remembers the Boston cream pie his mom made and the Rapala lures his dad got him. Less than a year later his father was suddenly gone.
Now he’s nearly to step number one-seventy-two. The steps are concrete, and narrow, and they are bordered closely by steel railings. The dense shrubbery of the oceanfront lots line the railings on either side. It’s like being on a path through high jungle, and he thinks of Kyle on real paths in real jungle, in narrow dark tunnels filled with men and women waiting to spear or shoot you. “Sunshine of Your Love” plays on his left, and “Foxy Lady” on his right. Voices and laughter and the smell of marijuana. He remembers Kyle telling him he wasn’t scared of war and he’d “kick Victor Charlie’s sorry ass” or die trying. Jack Bruce sings about waiting so long to be in the sunshine of somebody’s love. Hendrix sings about a sweet little lovemaker.
The beach is still crowded, the tide low. He walks into the suntanning bodies and their bright swimsuits, sees the skim-boarders and surfers out in the crashing white-foam waves. Two pale jarheads throw a football, faces and backs burnt pink. Hippie girls in cutoffs and genie pants play hacky sack. Young people try to keep their Frisbees from beaning old people. Acres of sunbathers recline on their colorful rectangles, radios play, a biplane pulls a banner for Tab across the sky, and the sexy aroma of suntan lotion hovers over it all.