Rose steps into the crosswalk but Laurel lags behind. Matt holds her gaze for as long as he can stand it, then follows her into the crosswalk and ferries her safely through the fog to the other side of Coast Highway.
He backtracks when the light tells him to, then swings boldly into the saddle for the short ride home.
Where, in his garage, he stays up even later, making drawings of the sisters but mainly of Laurel. They’re good, even to Matt’s self-critical eyes. There’s an interesting connection, he thinks, between what you think of someone and how you draw them.
Still full on Ernie Rios’s generous table scraps, and unable to sleep, Matt goes back to his earlier sketchbooks, where he finds three drawings of Laurel Kalina’s face from when they were nine. And ten. And twelve. He’s known her for almost half his life, but he’s never really seen her until tonight.
7
Kyle’s letter arrives the next day in an airmail envelope with red and blue bars on the edges. It’s written in his aggressive, forward-leaning print, on flimsy field stationery.
May, 1968
Dear Matt,
Just thought I’d drop you a line from beautiful Cu Chi base. As you know from my letters, we Tunnel Rats see most of the ’Nam from underground. But here at Cu Chi base there’s fucking AC, ice machines, golf courses and swimming pools! First, we bombed them then we built this damned base, THEN we found out that the ground under it is full of tunnels and they’re building more every day. The tunnels are full of VCs. Thousands of them, digging in from all over the Iron Triangle. So many Charlies, they got underground hospitals with doctors and nurses to treat the VC as fast as we can shoot, stab or strangle them down there in the cold dark. They have babies down there. If you get stuck on your way down, you can expect a bayonet up your ass. They skewered Myers with a bamboo spear last week and he bled to death by the time we got to him. They left the spear in him like savages. A GOOD GUY. It’s so quiet and dark in the tunnels you can hear a man blink.
So, I got a weekend of R&R here at base, where we got most of the VC cleaned out of. Right now I’m by the pool. Play some Foosball, read magazines. Hoochie girls sneak on base but they’re syphilis bombs. I think of the girls in high school. Seems like a thousand years ago. I’m not the same but I hope they are. An innocent girl is the most special thing on EARTH.
Then I go back to the tunnels. ‘Rat holes leading to hell,’ the colonel calls them.
What’s going on with you in groovy Laguna? Mom and Jazz hanging in there? Jazz graduates soon, right? Hear anything from our asshole dad?
I’m down to fifty-three days in-country. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit it’s driving me fucking crazy. Everybody gets this way, even Tunnel Rats. They say we’re crazy and maybe we are but we’re not TOO crazy to know the shorter you get the more chance you’ll catch a bullet or a knife or a spear. It’s just an odds thing, like how many times in a row you can roll a six. Say the six is life. The pure odds on each roll are one-in-six that you’ll roll a six — LIFE — but anybody who’s thrown the dice knows that after you’ve thrown, say, five straight sixes, it’s not very damned likely that you’ll throw another one. It’s proof of the law, right there, simple. So when your tour is nine months and you’re down to say, fifty-three days, you’ve got to roll a lot of sixes to extend your life. All of which is just a way of saying I’m deep down afraid now, and the afraid gets thicker and darker every day. Which tunnel should I follow in this dark? Which one will end in the light that is my death? A surprising number of guys buy the farm their last day of tour. If that happens to me, just remember I love you and you’re a good brother. If that happens to me, take care of our family.
Love,
Matt writes his brother right back, as always. Toward the end he thinks of mentioning that Jasmine hasn’t come home for two nights running but decides against it. He doesn’t want to burden his brother in combat. What if Kyle gets deep into one of those tunnels and gets distracted about his sister back home? Takes a bullet or catches a spear? Matt doesn’t tell Kyle about Bonnie Stratmeyer either.
Big Yellow is a two-story wooden home built in the fifties, up high in Bluebird Canyon. The house slouches due to a landslide that undermined the foundation. The site was dozed and stabilized, a new foundation was poured and the house hoisted back onto it by helicopters. Matt watched them do it. The city engineers signed off on the home as safe but it never did look quite plumb to Matt or anyone else in Laguna. Over the past several years it has become a notorious party house, loud and overrun with musicians, surfers, and of course, artists.
He has to walk his bike up the last hundred yards because the road is so steep. It’s almost eleven o’clock, and he’ll be back here in just a few hours, delivering his papers.
Big Yellow presides crookedly over the tawny dry hills and the other houses downslope. Matt can see batik curtains blowing in and out the second-floor windows, and a guy leaning on a deck railing with a guitar, no shirt, and long blond hair. A cloud of smoke hangs over him and two girls reclining on chaise lounges. Beyond, the Pacific is white-capped, blue and infinite. Matt searches the street for his mother’s VW van, last commandeered by Jasmine.
On the front porch he toes down the Heavy-Duti kickstand, parks the bike, and knocks on the door.
After a long minute he knocks again louder.
Eventually, Austin Overton opens the door. He’s the jeans and no shirt man from the deck, with two days of stubble and stoned eyes. Barefoot. Bigger than Matt remembered from seeing him at the ’Piper that one night. Overton gives Matt a hard look.
“You got the wrong guy,” he says, with a twinkle in his blue eyes.
“I’m Jasmine Anthony’s brother.”
“Meaning what?”
“I was wondering if you know where she is.”
“She was here, uh, yesterday morning and the night before. Haven’t seen her since, though. Everything cool?”
“She didn’t come home. Hasn’t come home two nights in a row now.”
“I guess I’m your prime suspect, then.” Austin Overton’s voice is strong, and sharp as a knife, and his Louisiana accent is heavier than Matt remembers.
“Suspect of what? I mean, sir, mister,” Matt stumbles with his words. “Mr. Overton, did something happen?”
“Settle down now boy — nothing unusual. But your Laguna girls do run a little on the wild side. She is eighteen, right?”
“Yes, just graduated.”
Overton rubs his stubble and shakes his head. “High school. Hell, Austin. Won’t you ever learn?”
He walks into the house and Matt follows, closing the door.
The big living room is sparsely furnished, sofas and overstuffed chairs, bean bags and amps and guitars. A few people sleeping. Beer cans and wine bottles and bulging ashtrays. Everywhere Matt looks there’s a guitar on a stand, in a corner, up on a couch. Toward the back of the room is a grand piano with a mic on a stand beside it. Concert posters on the walls. Cats everywhere.
“Kinda dead around here this early,” says Overton. “Back in the bayou they’d be guzzling frozen daquiris this time of morning. You Californians are kind of lazy to tell you the truth.”
Out on the back patio, Overton reclaims his guitar and takes a hit from the joint the girls are sharing. He introduces them to Matt: Dana and Crystal. They look about his sister’s age. Tie-dye shirts and sandals and lots of hair.