If Deane was disappeared, then so was her book. If her book was disappeared, then so was Sammy. If the necklaces were disappeared, then none of it ever happened. If none of it ever happened, then nothing was my fault.
Silently, they removed their necklaces and handed them over. Warmth surpassing simple body heat wafted out. I wanted to toss them then and there, and should have, but instead I put them in my coat pocket, figuring they were bound for the cigar box.
“Stan,” Linwood said as we turned off Canal Street and headed into the heart of the Quarter, “you take the girls out somewhere to eat. I’m getting a kidney infection.”
Her kidney infections were always well-timed.
“Oh great.” Stan took her infections, like any ailment of hers, personally.
“We get to pick where,” June said.
I stared at the random, oddly angled streets. This was a city that could lose anybody. And keep them lost until they desired to be tossed up on the shore, chance disclosure of effluvia coughed up from the deep.
Chapter Twenty
“Listen,” Darlene said. “Did you find that friend of your sister’s?”
I expected severe bodily pain from any of these: strangulation, knife through the heart, hand between my legs.
But instead, almost disappointingly, Tommy’s grip relaxed. When I swung around, he fell down like a freshly cut tree. We should have called out Timber!
The guy was such a loser, you almost had to feel sorry for him. Some master criminaclass="underline" a little pot and a burst of anger, and that was it for the evening, all tuckered out.
“Was that him?” Darlene had her arm wrapped around her catch of the evening. Outfitted in body-glued worn denim, chestnut mustache scintillating like the fuzz of a spiny caterpillar, this specimen looked like he’d be hard pressed to cop a whizz.
I stood up and brushed off my jeans. Little flecks of marijuana fell to the floor. “Thing is, he’s not supposed to know who I am.”
“Whoops!” Darlene covered her mouth cartoonishly.
“Not that he could remember, even if I told him.” Oddly, a bunch of stuff roiled up in my chest: relief, that the guy was a goner; excitement, that at last, at last! something was about to happen; and then the odd one—a feeling of anticlimax, like this confrontation that was always there for me, wasn’t there for me. Someone that had haunted me for so long—Tommy—and this was all there was to it. I had my lead to Deane. What else was there to do? Kill him? Follow him home and burn down his house? Besides, like the girl at The Surf Burger said: scumbags like him don’t live anywhere.
You had to know when to walk away.
“About my car…” Darlene said.
“I’ll be fine driving back. You sure about bozo here?”
“Sure enough. Anyway, he lives back at the beach.”
“Jerry” just sort of swayed, like a feather in the wind.
“Do me a favor?”
Darlene nodded.
“Keep the thing around your neck on.”
She winked. “Pretty kinky!”
I waited a few minutes after they left, thinking something might happen, like who knew what, but the scene was strictly a scene.
And Tommy snoozed on, just another dead-beat gone dumb.
What was the point? I went back out into the beachy night, inhaling the moist salt air as if for the last time, knowing I was on my way. I had what I came for: a direction, a place to go to. Most of all, this feeling that once again, any old damn thing in the world, or not in the world, was possible.
But first, there was an important stop to make.
My dream sense of what had been led me over the railroad tracks, up the hill, past the fields, and up the other hill, where the proud yellow house should have risen up in the moonlight. Or, you’d have thought something else would have been built in the ruins. Instead, as the Mustang pulled into the driveway, I saw—ruins.
Even the cypresses were gone!
One of Stan and Linwood’s few attempts at landscaping had been the planting of a dignified battalion of cypress trees, which shielded the front side of the house from the passerby. Now, the foundation was simply there, right next to the road, as unprotected as a child with a new haircut.
I lit a cigarette and rolled down the car window. At least the baby redwood was still standing; perhaps being of a grander line than the cypress, it was more resistant to fire. I climbed out of the car and walked over, crunching snails like Rice Krispies beneath my feet.
The moon, crescent and orange, came out from behind a cloud.
The avocado trees that separated our house from the DiBordios’ were there, slightly worse for the wear. I wondered if they still raised peacocks, and if the peacocks still escaped and shed their glorious feathers for the lucky to happen on.
I picked my way around to what had been the rear of the house, Deane’s room. Everything was so small and hard to believe in—this overgrown slab of concrete the floor on which so much had happened to me? I just couldn’t get it.
The pepper tree was a stump in an ex-lawn the size of a postage stamp.
The question was: what were you supposed to be feeling in this situation? What was there before your eyes seemed to have no real connection to what you remembered. What do you believe, then, your senses or your memory? Listen to Jean Genet or Gertrude Stein, forget your real experiences. You make it art and then it achieves artful reality.
But I wasn’t an artist. And standing there in the moonlight, the house, the whole thing—it didn’t mean beans to me.
There was only one place to go and that was New Orleans.
Chapter Twenty-One
It took me about ten minutes to pack my duffel bag. What was there to take? Underwear, makeup, a few pieces of clothing. The cigar box. Four hundred-odd dollars, not much dough but it would have to do. The dream book I’d been keeping. Departing my room was nearly as weird as seeing the old house—you get stuck in things and they seem so important to you. But, like the existentialist said, Blaugh!
I walked into Bread’s room and shook him on the shoulder. His sheets smelled like kelp and sand and zinc oxide. Or maybe that was him.
“Go away,” he mumbled into the pillow.
“I need you. It’s important!”
He halfway sat up and did routine wake-up behavior, the eye-rubbing and so on. “Huh what?”
“You’ve got to take me to the bus station.” I lit us each a cigarette. “And it has to happen now because Aunt Edith won’t want me to do this.”
“You in trouble?” Light from the bathroom reflected phosphorescent on his hair. The nicotine was hitting his brain.
“Not exactly.” I gave him the story synopsis. “But knowing she might be there—well, I have to go.”
He nodded. “Mom’s gonna kill you.”
“She’ll have to find me first.”
“You better leave a note so she doesn’t call the police. Need some money?”
I accepted a hundred dollars and promised to repay and then composed my remarks while Bread pulled on his clothes. Trouble was Aunt Edith had never been what you could call enthusiastic about Deane, and it seemed she kind of blamed Stan and Linwood somehow. After these years of putting up with me, she probably figured the flaw was genetic. I tried to express my love and appreciation for what she had tried to do, and also she was my legal guardian and I wanted to make sure I got that money, from the sell of the ex-house in Vista and the farm in Arkansas plus what was left of Linwood’s inheritance, when I turned twenty-one in five years. Provided my life continued that long.