Gale considers. “Enough.”
“How do you know what enough happiness is?”
“I wonder about it,” he says. “Sometimes I feel good, but sometimes bad. Same day, sometimes the same hour. Even though nothing has changed. Does that make sense?”
“Totally,” says Geronima. “My Indian half thinks the right to the pursuit of happiness is a strange right. Strange as in, get out of my way so I can be happy — I’ll need your land, your daughters, your things. My non-Indian half says I should be happy enough to just survive.”
“That’s what I meant about feeling good. Just being here, surviving is enough.”
She pours them each another drink, picks her glass off the trunk, and takes a sip.
Gale drinks.
“Until it isn’t,” Gale says. “Just surviving, I mean. And I doubt it’s all worth it.”
She studies him. “That sounds serious.”
“I’m not impulsive enough to do anything final.”
“You seem about impulsive as a tortoise, Lew,” says Geronima. “I like that.”
“Thank you. I’m not good playing the room for laughs.”
“I’ve had plenty enough entertainers,” she says. “You and your ex get along?”
“Pretty distant,” Gale says. “When it was over, it was over. We talk now and then.”
“And what part of it was your bad?”
Gale feels the old black thoughts coiling around inside.
The fragments, and the fragments of fragments.
Always ready for another round.
“I brought back some wounds from the war, post-trauma stress for sure. Killed a man who turned out to be a noncombatant. Took him out thinking I was God himself. Other stuff. Lots of painkillers and mood stabilizers. Too much of this,” he says, tilting his glass. “Things just got darker and darker.”
“Until?”
“A breakdown. Almost pulled the plug. Had all the stuff ready. But I talked to a great doctor at Pendleton instead. He was a sniper in Vietnam. Let him keep me a month in the ding wing. Stopped the pills cold turkey. Back home I cut the drinking way back. Started putting one foot in front of the other.”
Geronima considers this, twirling her whiskey glass gently. “I remember that phrase from the Times profile on you — ‘one foot in front of the other.’ You look different now than in that picture.”
“I’d just gotten back when that picture was taken. Wouldn’t have let them run it, if I’d known they were going to.”
“Dress blues and a thousand-yard stare and your hair long and messed up,” says Geronima. “Chills up my spine, warrior-soldier. Am I making you nervous?”
“I think you’re bright and beautiful,” he says. “So, yes. Do I make you nervous?”
“Sure, Lew, but more just happy you’re still here. In this world and in my house. And that we got to see the crystal cathedral in an ocean of light. Souls in transit, you and me. I’d really like it if you said my full name. For the first time.”
“Geronima Mills.”
She looks at him in the dim light with a hopeful expression.
A long silence now, Gale staring through a serape-print curtain. A distant mission-bell streetlight spreads a cone of light on the empty street.
“I’ve lived my whole life in this town,” he says. “My ancestors helped build the mission.”
“Mine, too,” says Geronima. “They must have known each other, two and a half centuries ago. Maybe that’s why you seem so familiar to me. Like I’ve known you for a long time. I recognize you.”
“Those are nice words. I think I recognize you, too, Geronima Mills.”
Another silence.
“I don’t take this lightly,” she says. “And I invite you to share my bed tonight.”
“Oh boy.”
“I expected that!”
Gale again faces the stark future that the explosion gave him. The quick, sharp moment that reshaped him forever.
“I can’t do that,” he says. “Some of me didn’t make it back.”
“From the war,” she says.
“The war.”
“I’m so sorry, Lew.”
Gale watches a matte gray pickup truck glide by on Acjacheme Court, an electric one, nearly silent. Rivian, he thinks, very cool.
Hulk, perched on a chairback, watches through a window but doesn’t bark. Looks back at Gale like he can’t figure why this truck doesn’t make noise.
“I’m so very sorry,” she says.
Gale sips the bourbon. “Don’t be. It’s contagious. I don’t feel bad or empty, Geronima. I believe that my work is valuable. My life, too — and Mom and Frank and even Dad.”
“Oh, Lew, you are more than valuable. Invaluable. Incalculable. Priceless. I wore my shells and bone comb for you, to make you love me.”
To Gale, the long silence is a roar.
“I still can’t honor that bed of yours like a man should.”
“I want you there, anyway.”
“Thank you very much, but no. You made my day. A lot more than my day. It’s hard to explain. What you said was important to me.”
“I meant it. Every word.”
“I should go.”
“Need an Uber?”
“I’ll walk. I’m down off Rios, so not far.”
“Nightcap first?”
“Sure.”
35
Gale walks toward home. The streetlights are soft but the stars are bright in the partial moonlight. He’s solidly drunk and he knows it, the bourbon fueling his confidence and his stride, the old groin and upper leg scars taut and itchy. It took him almost a year to walk without pain so now there’s some pleasure in this locomotion, prickly surgical scars or not.
He walks fast, trying to get far away from Geronima Mills and her innocent but humiliating proposition, her crushing beauty, his impossible desire. He’s made that soul-wrenching confession before — to Marilyn — but tonight, for some reason, it’s worse.
Tonight, he felt like he was saying hello to a friend he’d made a thousand years before he was even born.
A sister.
A mate.
He cuts across La Calera to carless Acjachema Street, walks past the up-lighted ruins of the Great Stone Church destroyed in the 1812 earthquake during Mass — leaving forty of his ancestors dead and now buried just a few hundred feet from here.
He follows the broad sidewalk of Old Mission Road.
Gale has always loved this little city in the early morning, loved the high mission walls with the bright violet bougainvillea spilling over the top, the smell of the gardens from within, especially at night like now, no tourists and most of the townspeople tucked in and sleeping, an occasional coyote trotting small-footed down the middle of Camino Capistrano with no apparent care in the world.
But what Gale sees now stops him in his tracks.
Halfway across Old Mission Road, a big mountain lion lopes along with a coyote dangling limply from his mouth.
The cat gives Gale a bored inspection without breaking stride, cheeks bright red, eyes tan in the streetlight, the coyote’s thin legs and bushy tail flopping along on the asphalt.
Gale crouches and sidles to the curb, his vision locked on the big lion as he continues down Old Mission, his long, black-tipped tail flicking left then right, testes shifting, shoulder muscles bunched and swaying beneath his tawny fur.
Spooked, the cat heads away from the mission, galloping onto Arguello Way and disappearing into an abundant flower garden that separates two ancient adobes, the tall hollyhocks parting, then shivering, then not.
A moment later, Gale sees the tan smudge of the lion emerge from the garden and disappear down the alley that intersects Trabuco Creek. Which, he knows, will lead the cat out of the town and into the rough hills, dense with oak and toyon.
His heart still thumping with the adrenaline, Gale listens for cars behind him but sees only a gray pickup parked curbside and apparently unoccupied.