Strange Itineraries Read online

  Her family, I have to admit, has given her a lot of grief. Her husband was born in a part of Iran that was under British jurisdiction, and when he tried to go back there after going to school in England the Iranians said he was an enemy of the Shah; they took his passport and gave him some papers that permitted him to leave but never come back, and he got as far as Charles de Gaulle Airport, but France wouldn’t let him in without a passport and Customs wouldn’t let him get on another plane. He’s lived on the Boutique Level of Terminal One now for decades, sleeping on a plastic couch and watching TV, and Lufthansa flight attendants give him travel kits so that he can shave and brush his teeth. My sister met him there during a layover on a European tour my mother bought for her right after high school, and now she’s got a job and an apartment in Roissy so she can be near him. I keep telling her she’s going to lose her job, staying away like this, but she says she has no choice, because nobody else can get through to me the way she still can. I’m backward, she says.

  My uncle makes himself scarce when she drives up the dirt track out front in one beat old borrowed car or another; so does everybody. When I hobbled off the bus at his warped chain-link front gate, all scorched and blinking and hoarse and dizzy from the radon, he was waiting for me out in the front yard with his usual straw hat pulled down over his gray hair; all you really see is the bushy mustache. The house is empty now, just echoing rooms with one old black Bakelite telephone on the kitchen floor and a lot of wires sticking out of the walls where there used to be lights, but he told me I could sleep in my old room, and I’ve carried in some newspapers to make a nest in the corner there. I’m thinking about moving the nest into the closet.

  “Don’t bother anybody you might see here,” my uncle told me on that first day. “Just leave ’em alone. They probably live here.” And I have seen a very old man in the kitchen, always crying quietly over the sink, and wearing one of those senior-citizen jumpsuits that zip up from the ankle to the neck; I’ve just nodded to him and discreetly shuffled past across the dusty linoleum. What could we have to say to each other that the other wouldn’t already know? And a couple of times I’ve seen two kids out at the far end of the backyard. Let them play, I figure. My uncle is generally walking around in circles behind the garage trying to find his beer. There’s a patch of mirage out there – if you step into the weeds by the edge of the driveway, walking away from the house, you find with no shift at all that you’ve just stepped onto the driveway, facing the house.

  “It’s been that way forever,” he told me one day when he was taking a break from it, sitting on the hood of his wrecked old truck. “But one night a few winters ago I stepped out there and wasn’t facing the house; and I was standing on one of your mom’s long-ago rosebushes. The flowers were open, like they thought it was day, and the leaves were warm. Time doesn’t pass in mirages, everybody knows that – so I hopped right in the truck and bought two cases of Budweiser out of the cooler at Top Cat, and stashed ’em there right by the rosebush. The next morning it was the two-for-one-step mirage again, but whenever it slacks off, I know where there’s a lot of cold beer.”

  I nodded a number of times, and so did he, and it was right after this conversation with him that I started keeping all our old toys back there.

  Yesterday my sister came rocking up the dirt driveway in a shiny green Edsel, and when she braked it in a cloud of dust and clanked the door open I could see that she’d been crying at some point on the drive up. It’s a long drive, and it takes a lot out of her.

  My voice is gone because of the explosion having scorched my throat, so I stepped closer to her to be heard. “Come in the house and have … some water,” I rasped – awkwardly, because she’s doing all this for my sake. We don’t have any glasses, but she could drink it out of the faucet. “Or crackers,” I added.

  “I can’t stand to see the inside of the house,” she said, crossly. “We had good times in this house, when we were all living in it.” She squinted out past the dogwood tree at the infinity of brown hillocks that is the backyard. “Let’s talk out there.”

  “You’re testy,” I noted as I followed her up the dirt driveway, past the house. She was wearing a blue sundress that clung to her sweaty back.

  “Why do you suppose that is, Gunther?”

  I glanced around quickly, but there wasn’t even a bird in the empty blue sky. “Doug,” I reminded her huskily, trying to project my frail voice. The name had been suggested by the phone call I’d got on the day before the explosion, and certainly Doug Olney himself would never hear about the deception, wherever he might be. “Always, you promised.”

  We were walking out past the end of the driveway among the burr-weeds now, and I saw her shoulders shrug wearily. “Why do you suppose that is – Mr. Olney?” she called back to me.

  I lengthened my stride to step up beside her. The soles of my feet must be tough, because the burrs never stick in my skin. “I bet it’s expensive to rent a classic Edsel,” I hazarded.

  “Yes, it is.” Her voice was flat and harsh. “Especially in the summer, with all the Mexican weddings. It’s a ‘57, but it must have a new engine or something in it – I could hardly see the signs on the old Route 66 today. Just ‘Foothill Boulevard’ all the way. I may not be able to come out here again, get through to you, not even your own twin, who lived here, with you! Not even in a car from those days. And Hakim needs me too.” She turned to face me and stamped her foot. “He could figure some way to get out of that airport if he really wanted to! And look at you! Damn it – Doug – how long do you think a comatose body can live, even in a hospital like Western Medical, with its soul off hiding incognito somewhere?”

  “Well, soul…”

  “This is certainly unsanctified ground. Is it a crossroads? Have you got rue growing out here with the weeds?” She was crying again. “Propane leak. Why were you found out in the yard, out by the duck? You changed your mind, didn’t you? You were trying to walk away from it. Good! Keep on walking away from it, don’t stop here in the, in the … terminal, the nowhere in-between. Walk right now to that silly old car back there, and let me drive you to Western Medical while I still can, while you can still make the trip. You can wake up.”

  I smiled at her and shook my head. I know now that I was never scared of the boy in the dark ballroom. I was tense with fear of each fresh unknown dawn, which the boy had found a way to hide from, but which always did come to me mercilessly shining right through my closed eyelids. I opened my mouth to croak some reassurance to her, but she was looking past me with an empty expression.

  “Jesus,” she said then, reverently, in a voice almost as hoarse as mine, “this is where that other picture was taken. The photo of the duck by the avocado tree. In the photo album, remember?” She pointed back toward the house. “There’s no tree here now, but the angle of the house, the windows – look, it’s the very same view, we just didn’t recognize it then because we remembered this house freshly painted, not all faded and peeled like it is now, and like it was in the picture, and because in the picture there was a big distracting avocado tree in the foreground!”

  I stood beside her and squinted through watering eyes against the sun glare. She might have been right – if you imagined a tree to the right, with the poor duck leaning against the trunk, this view was at least very like the one in that old photo album.

  “The person with the camera was standing right here,” she said softly.

  Or will be standing, I thought.

  “Could you drive me to Stater Brothers?” I said.

  Several times I’ve gone out and looked since she drove away, and I’m still not sure she was right. The trouble is, I don’t remember the photograph all that clearly. It might have been this house. All I can do is wait. I don’t imagine that I’ll be going to Stater Brothers again soon, if ever. The trip was upsetting, with so many curdles and fractures of mirage in the harsh daylight that you’d think San Bernardino was populated by nothing but walking skeletons and
one-hoss shays. I did get an avocado, along with my crackers and processed cheese-food slices, and my sister left off a box of our dad’s old clothes because I’ve been wearing the scorched pants and shirt still, and she said it broke her heart to see me walking around all killed. I haven’t looked in the box, but it stands to reason that there’s one of those jumpsuits in it.

  I know now that she’s going back, at last, to poor stalled Hakim at the airport in Roissy. I called her from the phone in the kitchen here.

  “I’m on my way to the hospital,” I told her. “You can go back to France.”

  “You’re – Gunth – I mean, Doug, where are you calling from?”

  “I’m back in Santa Ana. I just want to change my clothes, try to comb my hair, before I get on a bus to the hospital.”

  “Santa Ana? What’s the number there, I’ll call you right back.”

  That panicked me. Helplessly I gave her the only phone number I could think of, my old Santa Ana number. “But I didn’t mean to take up any more of your time,” I babbled, “I just wanted to – ”

  “That’s our old number,” she said. “How can you be at our old number?”

  “It – stayed with the house.” If I could still sweat, I’d have been sweating. “These people who live here now don’t mind me hanging around.” The lie was getting ahead of me. “They like me; they made me a sandwich.”

  “I bet. Stay by the phone.”

  She hung up, and I knew it was a race then to see which of us would be able to dial the old number most rapidly. She must have been hampered by a rotary-dial phone too, because I got ringing out of the earpiece; and after it had rung four times I concluded that the number must be back in service again, because I would have got the recording by then if it had not been. My lips were silently mouthing, Please, please, and I was aching with anxious hope that whoever answered the line would agree to go along with what I’d tell them to say.

  Then the phone at the other end was lifted, and the voice said, breathlessly, “Hello?”

  Of course I recognized him, and the breath clogged in my numb throat.

  “Hello?” came the voice again. “Am I talking to a short circuit?”

  Yes, I thought.

  That oil tank in San Pedro hadn’t been in use for years, but it had once been equipped with an automatic-dial switch to call the company’s main office when its fuel was depleted; a stray power surge had apparently turned it on again, and the emergency number it called was by that time ours. Probably the oil tank hadn’t had any fuel in it at all anymore, and only occasionally noticed. Certainly there had been nothing we could do about it.

  “Gunther!” It hurt my teeth to say the name. “Jesus, boy – this is – Doug Olney, from Neff High School! You remember me, don’t you?”

  “Doug?” said the half-drunk, middle-aged man at the other end of the line, befuddledly wondering if I had throat cancer. “Olney? Sure I remember! Where are you? Are you in town – ”

  “No time to talk,” I said, trying not to choke. What if Doug Olney, the real one, had been in town, in Santa Ana? Would this unhappy loser have suggested that the two of them get together for lunch? “I don’t want to – ” Stop you, I thought; save you, for damn sure. “ – change any of your plans.” My eyes were watering, even in the dim kitchen. “Listen, a woman’s gonna call your number in a minute; she’s gonna ask for me. You don’t know her,” I assured him; I didn’t want him to be at all thinking he might. “Say I just left a minute ago, okay?”

  “Who is she – ”

  I just hung up. You’ll find out, I thought.

  My uncle’s beer appeared in the yard today, two cases of it, still cold from the cooler at Top Cat. The roses are still fresh, and I looked at the clip-cuts on some stems and tried to comprehend that my mother had cut the flowers only a few hours earlier, by the rosebush’s time; the smears in the white dust on the rose hips were probably from her fingers. Sitting in the dirt driveway in the noonday sun, my uncle and I got all weepy and sentimental, and drank can after can of the Budweiser in toasts to missing loved ones, though probably nobody was in the house, and the two children were by then long gone from the backyard.

  I’ve planted the golf-ball-sized seed from the avocado, right where the tree was in the picture – if it was in fact a picture of this house. Eventually it will be a tree, and maybe one day the duck will be there, leaning on the trunk, on his way back from Disneyland and Grauman’s Chinese Theatre to the house where my sister and I are still seven years old. I plan to tag along, if he’ll have me.

  The Way Down the Hill

  Then I was frightened at myself, for the cold mood

  That envies all men running hotly, out of breath,

  Nowhere, and who prefer, still drunk with their own blood,

  Hell to extinction, horror and disease to death.

  – GEORGE DILLON, FROM THE FRENCH

  OF CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

  I HADN’T BEEN to the place since 1961, but I still instinctively downshifted as I leaned around the curve, so that the bike was moving slowly enough to take the sharp turn off the paved road when it appeared. The old man’s driveway was just a long path of rutted gravel curling up the hillside, and several times I had to correct with my feet when the bald back tire lost traction, but it was a clear and breezy afternoon, with the trees and the tan California hillside making each other look good, and I was whistling cheerfully as I crested the hill and parked my old Honda beside a couple of lethal-looking Harley-Davidsons.

  I was late. The yard spread out in front of the old man’s Victorian-style house was a mosaic of vans, Volkswagens, big ostentatious sedans, sports cars and plain anonymous autos. There were even, I noticed as I stuffed my gloves into my helmet and strode up to the front steps, a couple of skateboards leaning on the porch rails. I grinned and wondered who the kids would be.

  The heavy door was pulled open before I could touch the knob, and Archie was handing me a foaming Carlsberg he’d doubtless fetched for someone else. Somehow I can always recognize Archie.

  “Come in, sibling!” he cried jovially. “We certainly can’t expect Rafe yet, so you must be Saul or Amelia.” He studied my face as I stepped inside. “Too old to be Amelia. Saul?”

  “Right,” I said, unknotting my scarf. “How’s the old man, Arch?”

  “Never better. He was asking just a few minutes ago if you’d showed up yet. Where the hell have you been, anyway, for … how many years?”

  “Twenty – missed the last three meetings. Oh, I’ve been wandering around. Checked out Europe one more time and took a couple of courses back east before the old boredom effect drifted me back here. Living in Santa Ana now.” I grinned at him a little warily. “I imagine I’ve got a lot of catching up to do.”

  “Yeah. Did you know Alice is gone?”

  I tossed my helmet onto a coat-buried chair, but kept my leather jacket because all my supplies were in it. “No,” I said quietly. I’d always liked Alice.

  “She is. Incognito underground, maybe – but more likely …” He shrugged.

  I nodded and took a long sip of the beer, grateful for his reticence. Why say it, after all? People do let go sometimes. Some say it’s hard to do, as difficult as holding your breath till you faint – others say it’s as easy as not catching a silver dollar tossed to you. Guesses.

  Archie ducked away to get another beer, and I walked across the entry hall into the crowded living room. The rich, leathery smell of Latakia tobacco told me that old Bill was there, and I soon identified him by the long, blackened meerschaum pipe he somehow found again every time. The little girl puffing at it gave me a raised eyebrow.

  “Howdy, Bill,” I said. “It’s Saul.”

  “Saul, laddie!” piped the little girl’s voice. “Excuse the nonrecognition. You were a gawky youth when I saw you last. Been doing anything worthwhile?”

  I didn’t even bother to give the standard negative reply. “I’ll talk to you later,” I said. “Got to find something for thi
s beer to chase.”

  Bill chuckled merrily. “They laid in a dozen bottles of Laphroaig Scotch in case you came.” He waved his pipe toward the dining room that traditionally served as the bar. “You know your way down the hill.”

  It was a long-standing gag between us, deriving from one night when a girlfriend and I had been visiting a prominent author whose house sat on top of one of the Hollywood hills; the girlfriend had begun stretching and yawning on the couch and remarking how tired she was, and the prominent author obligingly told her she could spend the night right there. Turning briefly toward me, he inquired, “You know your way down the hill, don’t you?” Bill and I now used the phrase to indicate any significant descent. I smiled as I turned toward the bar.

  I stiffened, though, and my smile unkinked itself, when I saw a certain auburn-haired girl sipping a grasshopper at a corner table.

  I could feel my face heat up even before I was sure I recognized her. It hadn’t been long ago, a warm August evening at the Orange Street Fair, with the blue and rose sky fading behind the strings of light bulbs that swayed overhead. I’d been slouched in a chair in the middle of Glassell Street, momentarily left in a littered clearing by an ebb in the crowd. The breeze was from the south, carrying frying smells from the Chinese section on Chapman, and I was meditatively sipping Coors from a plastic cup when she dragged up another chair and straddled it.

  I don’t remember how the conversation started, but I know that through a dozen more cups of beer we discussed Scriabin and Stevenson and David Bowie and A. E. Housman and Mexican beers. And later she perched sidesaddle, because one of the passenger foot-pegs fell off long ago, on the back of my motorcycle as I cranked us through the quiet streets to my apartment.