There was some coming and going at the Wildcat, people milling around the door in schools like fish, like barracuda — or no, like guppies, bloated and shining with all their trumped-up colors — but he peered in the window and didn’t see Dana there at the bar. In the off chance she was in the ladies’ or in the back room, he went in to have a look for himself. She wasn’t there. It was crowded, though, the speakers were putting out music and there was a pervasive rising odor of rum and sour mix that brought him back to happier times, like the week before last. He took the opportunity to duck into the men’s and wash some of the grit off his face and hands and smooth back the gray-flecked scrub of a beard that made him look about sixty years old, though he was only thirty-two — or no, thirty-three. Thirty-three, last birthday. He thought to reverse the hat, too, just for the sake of respectability, and then he stood at the bar awhile, hoping somebody would turn up and stand him a couple of drinks. Nobody did. Steve, the bartender, asked him if he wanted anything, and he asked Steve if he’d seen Dana. Yeah, she’d been in earlier. Did he want anything?
“Double vodka on the rocks.”
“You going to pay for it this time?”
“When did I never pay?”
There was a song on he hated. Somebody jostled him, gave him a look. Steve didn’t answer.
“Can I put it on Dana’s tab?”
“Dana doesn’t have a tab. It’s cash only, my friend.”
He got loud then, because he wanted that drink, and they knew him, didn’t they? What did they think he was, some kind of dead-beat or something? But when Steve came out from behind the bar he felt it all go out of him in a long hissing rush of air. “All right,” he said. “Okay, I hear you,” and then he was back out on the street.
His feet hurt. He was at the tail end of a week-long drunk and he felt sick and debilitated, his stomach clenched around a hard little ball of nothing, his head full of beating wings, the rasp of feathers, a hiss that was no sound at all. Dana was out there somewhere — it wasn’t that big a town, a grid of palmy streets configured around the tourist haven of the main drag, and a bar and T-shirt shop on every corner — and if he could only find her, go down on his knees to her, abase himself, beg and whine and lie and wheedle, she would relent, he knew she would. He was heading back up the street with the appealing idea of forcing a back window at the house, climbing in, making a sandwich and washing it down with bourbon and just crawling into bed and let come what will, when he spotted Dana’s car in the lot behind the movie theater.
That was her car, no doubt about it, a ravaged brown Corolla with a rearranged front bumper and the dark slit at the top of the passenger’s side window where it wouldn’t roll up all the way. He crossed the street, sidled through the lot like any other carefree moviegoer and casually worked his arm through the crack of the window till he caught the handle and popped open the door. There was change in the glove compartment, maybe twelve or thirteen dollars’ worth of quarters, dimes and nickels — and one Sacajawea dollar — she kept there against emergencies, and it took him no more than thirty seconds to scoop it up and weigh down his pockets. Then he relocked the door, eased it shut and headed back down the block, looking for the nearest liquor store.
IT WAS GETTING DARK when he made his way down to the beach, hoping to find Sky there, singing one of his Christmas songs, singing “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” or “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus,” singing just for the sheer joy of it, because every day was Christmas when you had your SSI check in your pocket and an ever-changing cast of lubricated tourists to provide you with doggie bags of veal piccata and a fistful of change. He had a pint of Popov in one hand and a Big Mac in the other, and he was alternately taking a swig from the bottle and a bite of the sandwich, feeling good all over again. A police cruiser came down the street as he was crossing at the light, but the bottle was clothed in its brown paper bag and the eyes of the men behind the windshield passed over him as if he didn’t exist.
The cool breath of a breeze rode up off the water. He could hear the waves lifting and falling against the plane of the beach with a low reverberant boom, could feel the concussion radiating through the worn-out soles of his sneakers and up into his feet and ankles like a new kind of friction. The parking lot was deserted, five cars exactly, and the gulls had taken over as if he’d walked into that other movie, the Hitchcock one, what was it called? With Tippi Hedren? They were grouped at the edge of the pavement, a hundred of them or more, pale and motionless as statues. “Tippi, Tippi, Tippi,” he said aloud. “The Tipster.” There was a smell of iodine and whatever the tide had brought in.
He went from fire to fire on the beach, shared a swig of vodka in exchange for whatever the huddled groups were drinking, saw the guy with the broken glasses — Herbert, his name was Herbert — and a few other faces he vaguely recognized, but no Sky and no Pal. The night was clear, the stars alive and spread over the deepening sky all the way out to the Channel Islands and down as far as Rincón to the east. He shuffled through the still-warm sand in a kind of bliss, the second pint of vodka pressed to his lips, all the rough edges of things worn smooth, all his problems reduced to zero. He was going to find Sky, Sky his benefactor, the songbird, and see if he wanted a hit or two of vodka, and maybe they could sit around the fire and sing, order up another pizza, lie there and stare up at the stars as if they owned them all. It was early yet. The night was young.
The train gave him his first scare. He’d just come across the trestle and stepped to one side, careful of his footing in the loose stone, when the whistle sounded behind him. He was drunk and slow to react, sure, but it just about scared him out of his skin nonetheless. There was a rush of air and then the train — it was a freight, a thousand dark, clanking cars — went by like thunder, like war. He twisted his right ankle trying to lurch out of the way and went down hard in the bushes, but he held on to the bottle, that was the important thing, because the bottle — and most of it was left — was an offering for Sky, and maybe Knitsy too, if she was there. For a long while, as the sound of the train faded in the distance, he sat there in the dark, rubbing his ankle and laughing softly to himself — he could have been like the deaf-mute, somebody Dana would read about in the morning paper. Raymond Leitner, cut down by the southbound. After a week-long illness. Currently — make that permanently — unemployed. Survived by his loving mother. Wherever she might be.