Bread to the Wise--Book I of The Libertine

  “A veritable brick,” I echoed.

  “And to Amanda, the wimpy puss,” she said.

  “How so?”

  “We could have taken her car and she could have come with us.”

  I said, “You have to figure the Buick Twins have seen her car.”

  “Yeah, but if you were leading the SOBs the other direction, what would have been the harm?”

  I said, “I over-thought this whole damned thing.”

  “Yeah, babe, but here we are.” She said it softly, her lips a half inch from my ear. Then she put her tongue in my ear as I was lifting the glass to my lips and I sloshed a little scotch on myself.

  “Hey!”

  “I get your attention?”

  “You betcha.”

  “Gimme a lipper,” she said.

  I gave her one. We put down the plastic glasses and went at it, as they say in the locker room, and did one of those movie scenes with the clothes coming off on the way to the bed, strewn, not folded, to wrestle each other between the sheets and float away on a harmony of sighs and moans until we both came and she screamed and then we panted.

  “I probably woke Jake up anyway,” Mary Clare whispered.

  “Naw. You know how much sleep he’s had since the biguglyBuick showed up? He’s dead to the world.”

  She said, “How much sleep have you had?”

  “Never mind.”

  “I do mind. You’ve got a long drive tomorrow.”

  I said, “How about you?”

  “I sleep fine on airplanes. And if I hesitate a second, I whip out my Dramamine and that knocks me out pronto.”

  “You sure you wouldn’t want to wait until my red-headed friend comes looking for you again?”

  “How you talk, sir. No. I promise to come back from Boston and fuck you blind. It’ll be the first thing on my agenda.”

  “Well, I guess I’ll go to sleep, then, and dream about being fucked blind.”

  She said, “One more kiss.”

  The one more kiss almost led to more loss of sleep, but she whispered, “Your back is definitely mended.”

  “It’s all this good loving.”

  “Hush.”

  I jumped up and turned off the heater and dove back in bed, to spoon behind Clare and whisper night-night.

  I’d lost the knack of actually sleeping with someone, so I started visualizing the numbers from one hundred to one, counting backwards, having them jump over a fence like sheep.

  I’d reached fifty-nine when she said, “Jake knows, you know.”

  “Jake knows what?”

  “You know.”

  I said, heart pounding, “Did he tell you?”

  “Jake has this thing about staying out of other people’s shit. It is, perhaps, his most sterling quality, besides empathy.”

  I lay still, my mind dodging about, looking for cover. At last I said, “Now is not the time for me to tell you.”

  She said, “Will there ever be a time?”

  “Must there?”

  “Yes. The story’s not so important as your dealing with whatever. But I can’t help you if you won’t fess up. And I’m not going to put up with whim-whams for however long we’re together.”

  That stopped me. I had got used to us being together forever. Emotions don’t have a time horizon. Emotions are timeless, and I had so many dependent on Clare: love of the crazy-mad kind, love of the caring kind, admiration, curiosity, closeness.

  I said, “I promise. When you get back.”

  She reached back and grabbed my thigh. “Gonna hold you to it, buster.”

  I kissed the back of her neck and she pronounced the final good night.

  *****

  In the morning three tired persons ate in a hotel coffee shop awaiting Clare’s airport shuttle. We spoke very little, and then only about topics people talk about when a loved one is going away—other goodbyes, trips when we were the departing one, a hope for a smooth flight and happy landing. They had sweet rolls and juice; I had French toast. It was much fancier than my dad’s Lake of the Ozarks French toast, not nearly as good.

  four

  Before I give you Jake’s take on events between discovering the biguglyBuick and seeing Mary Clare onto the shuttle, I have to wonder once again why he wrote, or rather recorded, his memoir. He was already engaged in writing a thing of import to him, but now lacked the facility to type, convalescing from the gunshot wound. Maybe he couldn’t dictate fiction but could history.

  But the big Why? I’m betting that his body was telling him the end was near, no matter the medicos’ prognoses. In his mind he was probably writing ‘for Posterity’—but who? His kids? Me? Mary Clare? Or was it Posterity writ large: his generation or the next? Maybe, and it strikes me as plausible, he wrote it to persuade a wife who was angry at him—first for risking himself and then for getting shot—that the endeavor was worth the consequences.

  It’s worth pondering. Why? Because it’s a record of things as they are. I do not come off as a completely mature citizen under his scrutiny, nor does Mary Clare. Meany, I think, is painted in his true colors. Jake’s treatment of Amanda is, perhaps, too severe, as is his assessment of himself—more of which later.

  *****

  Anyway, Jake on the Lake Tahoe gambit:

  I’d already thrown my gear in the Mercedes’ trunk when I knocked on Robert and Clare’s door. Every corner of the room volunteered answers to Uncle Irish’s questions about what was important in life. They were navigating as if drunk on love—or at least on the most ardent manifestations of it. Never mind that the bed had been straightened to accommodate packing luggage, lights blazing—the aura was as subtle as musk. Parzival’s spouse had reached him in the snow, had taken his head in her lap and brought him back from the swoon that leveled him as no knight’s lance ever had.

  I behaved as if oblivious of what went on: the scene of carnal carnage, bodies penetrated and penetrating, slaughtering sleep and inhibitions and dying in each other’s arms. I said something offhand I don’t remember, I only remember it was said to ward off the feeling of being left out. Of course you were left out, nitwit, three’s a crowd in any language but especially the language of love.

  Breakfast was a minuet. We swapped chowing-down stories, those times it was good for the soul if not the body to pack away the food: Mary Clare at a Chinese wedding banquet with a hundred delicacies, from abalone in oyster sauce to Lobster Cantonese; Robert hiking on the John Muir trail, relishing bacon and grits; myself breakfasting at Inverness after clamming early Sunday morning in Tomales Bay.

  I regaled them with my fishing feats at Báhia Kino, the sierra grandes that struck viciously the livelong day at anything small enough to fit their mouths—great fish to barbeque, with just enough fat to baste themselves. And the corbina, caught on the setting moon further up the bay, warier and more delicate of mouth. I was pecking away at the wall between us, the loner trying to break into the redoubt of lovers. It passed the time until we had to say goodbye.

  For me the trip home was going to be short and sweet, no thoughts of a tail or evading one. In Sacramento we’d pick up I-80 and sail home in time for an early cocktail. Only, the gods were not through with us. On California Highway 50, short of Placerville, another fiery vehicle blocked the way, this time a gasoline tanker which would close the road for hours. A Highway Patrolman was walking up the line of vehicles we were stuck in, explaining the delay (the smoke was clearly visible but the truck not) and suggesting that, if our destination were the Bay Area, we could follow a CHP cruiser that would be coming by in a moment, and use the shoulder to get to Highway 49, which would take us to Auburn and I-80.

  I got out of the car the same time Robert did and we powwowed.

  “The shits,” he said.

  “Hobson’s choice,” I said.

  “Lunch in Auburn,” Robert said, “sounds like a Tom Wolfe literary diversion.”

  Luckily, Robert had put on his corset that morning. Driving the slower Triumph, he
was to lead the way home, but on the way to Auburn speed was not of the essence. It was not a “moment” before the pilot car came by, it was twenty minutes or more, and he already had a line of baby ducks behind him. We snaked along Highway 49 at the pace of the slowest vehicle ahead, which gave me plenty of time to take in the grandeur of a very unspoiled part of California. Not someplace you’d want to have a breakdown in the middle of the night.

  In Auburn finally, we stopped at a restaurant that served “traditional American” food, including chicken-fried steak and a “cowboy burger,” Robert’s choice. I had an omelet. We exhausted the significance of two vehicle fires in one trip while our waitress, who called me “hon” and Robert “son,” went out and caught the chicken and wrestled the steer into the meat grinder.

  Over coffee Robert said, “She was right, you know.”

  “The waitress? Clare? Amanda?”

  “I was thinking Clare but sure, Amanda, too.” And after lighting a cigarette he said, “This feels like a Bogie movie, only we don’t quite know the ending.”

  “What else could we have done?” I asked.

  “Limit ourselves to the ordinary kind of worries. What were those guys really likely to do, anyway? If they were out to snatch Mary Clare, they’d have done it already. Surely they weren’t planning to rub her out.”

  I said, “More likely rub you out.”

  Robert said, “That’s crazy. We were crazy. Meany’s got no plan, he’s just like us—sure as hell isn’t any smarter, hiring those jokers.”

  “So we’re just a couple of saddle bums, rode into town and rescued the schoolmarm from the Wild Bunch.”

  “But she was right, Jake, we could just as well have put her on a plane in the first place.”

  “It happened so fast.”

  “We wanted it to happen fast. Living out a fantasy—at least I was.”

  “So, you gonna call Meany out when we get back?” I asked.

  “Would that be fair?” Robert asked. “I mean, Clare winged him on the side he wears his shootin’ iron.”

  “He wasn’t exactly fair with you, walloping you in the back, in your bad back.”

  Robert thought a moment before saying, “I’m not afraid of him anymore. I was afraid of him until I went over to turn in my keys. But that cured me. He isn’t a bear any more.”

  “More like a troll or an ogre.”

  “Like the cattle baron in a Western movie, hires the gun slingers to clean out the nesters, a man lost sight of why he succeeded.”

  I said, “I’m afraid of him, because he may hurt someone yet. I’m going to the police tomorrow, see if they won’t investigate his connection to those men in the Buick.”

  “There’s always your shotgun. We could get the drop on them, make them admit the connection.”

  On the way out to our cars we joked about how we could do this, what would lure them out of the Buick. What would make them do something palpably illegal so they’d get arrested.

  *****

  Bold as brass, I left I-80 at the Green Valley Cutoff, Jake right behind me. The route was eerily deserted, no one ahead of us, no one behind. Halfway to I-680 I signaled and pulled off the road. Jake pulled in behind me. We both alit.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Don’t you feel it?”

  “Feel what?”

  I said, “No wind.”

  Jake wet his finger and held it up. He made a gesture of bafflement. The only trees close by were still as photographs.

  “It’s an omen,” I said.

  “Of what?” he asked.

  “We’ll find out when it happens. Just be ready.”

  Back on a major freeway again, the last of this day’s light expired and my concentration narrowed the area of my brain I could devote to omens.

  Silly me. I’m just giddy in love. Things going so well I’m afraid something bad will happen, à la The Great Accountant in the Sky, balance off my loving Clare.

  I thought about omens I’d known—none, in real life—unless you counted two vehicle fires on one trip. There were omens, though: in Macbeth, Julius Caesar, in the Greek tragedies, in the Iliad. Meteors, quirky chicken guts, eagles clutching serpents.

  Turning onto Hwy 24 I felt an urge to speed up and had to deliberately let off on the accelerator. Cars got between me and Jake, and I didn’t see him in my rear view mirror until I took the Moraga exit. Who would be at Jake’s house: Amanda, or was she forever estranged? Bienvenida, or had Amanda given her time off until the crisis with Jake was resolved?

  I pulled into their driveway and waited for Jake to pull alongside. I parked so that, if Amanda were home, she could get her car around the Triumph. Jake hit the garage door opener once, twice. The bay where he kept the Mercedes opened a tad earlier than the other, but I only saw what was in what should have been a vacant space.

  The nose of a Buick Riviera was staring at us.

  An Exchange Of Fire

  one

  The crack of a handgun came from inside the garage, I saw its muzzle flash. At almost the same time I heard the thump of the shotgun, its muzzle flash bigger but diluted by Jake’s headlights. Jake dropped the shotgun and crumpled into the shadow of the Mercedes. I froze, standing next to the Triumph, until the Buick screamed out of the garage. It wasn’t going to fit between the two sports cars. The driver swung it sharply to his right, directly into the left front fender of Clare’s car just as I dove over the hood, to almost land on Jake.

  Once again the corset saved my back. I was on my hands and knees, all of which hurt, staring at Jake, who was head down hill, panting. Blood and air came from a hole in his shirt in time with his panting. The Buick pushed the smaller car, tires protesting loudly, across the street before the two disengaged, then it burned rubber uphill, two wheels up on the sidewalk, and screeched around the corner at the hilltop, heading south.

  “Did I hit him?” Jake asked. He didn’t sound like himself, he sounded like a stereo LP played on a monaural system.

  I said, “You took out the windshield on the passenger side.”

  Jake said, “Good,” and I said, “Don’t talk:” because that’s what they say in the movies.

  The man from the house with the Triumph in its front yard came running over. “I called the sheriff; they’re bringing the ambulance.” How could he react so quickly? I was still on my hands and knees.

  He ran back and turned off the Triumph’s engine and lights. A man in pajamas and bathrobe, from one house up the hill on the far side, came running over with a black doctor’s bag. “Where’s Amanda?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  He knelt next to Jake and looked at him with a flashlight and said, “Help me turn him so his head’s uphill.”

  Before we figured out how to do that gently, another man arrived, also saying he’d called the sheriff. He got into the Mercedes and rolled it down to the street. The doctor and I could then move Jake’s legs and hips without lifting his torso. Still, he cried out in pain. I said, “Oh Jesusjesus.”

  The doctor said, “There’s not a lot of blood, it mustn’t have hit any major blood vessels.”

  I said, “Goddamn, Jake, why you?”

  He muttered, “Why me, indeed? I didn’t do anything to Meany.”

  Until I’d talked to the sheriff, I wouldn’t have time to guess why the Buick, icon of Meany’s folly, this thing we’d gone to extremes to elude, would be parked in the Pritchetts’ garage. The fucking garage. Why weren’t they out looking for Mary Clare east of Winnemucca or sitting quietly down the block from the house, staked out? Why in the garage? It was a what-the-fuck moment.

  Six or seven questions thrashed through the cobwebs of my mind, none sticking, because I turned back to Jake.

  The source of the blood was a hole maybe two inches under the center of Jake’s right collarbone. The doctor peeled the packaging off as many gauze squares as he had in his bag and applied them to the wound, keeping the flat of his hand over the hole. A woman I’d
never seen before arrived with a pillow and blanket and proceeded to dispatch them to the right places. The doctor thanked her.

  How did all these people know what to do? I didn’t have to do anything but hold Jake’s hand. The doctor said, “You’re doing just fine, Jake.” Feeling his pulse, he said, “Good. Good.” I was glad it was dark, because I couldn’t see blood. There wasn’t any arroyo silt to soak it up.

  I thought Jake was unconscious—his eyes were shut—but he managed to say, “How are you in crises?” when he opened his eyes a second and then closed them. Two more Good Samaritans guided the Triumph off the lawn across the street and a third—maybe he needed to do something to quell his nerves—was telling the gathering neighbors that the doctor said ‘good’ and that sheriff and ambulance were on their way.

  “I can hear the sirens,” I didn’t actually hear them until a couple of seconds after I said the words, when Jake said, “me, too.” The fire company rescue pumper reached us first. When the van with the paramedics reached us, the doctor was listening to Jake’s heart and intact lung with his stethoscope. The battalion commander showed up in his Chevy Suburban, so shiny white and red it reflected all the lights of all the equipment around it, including the private ambulance that came to take Jake to the hospital and the sheriff’s patrol car that came up with lights flashing but sirens silent.

  I watched the cone from the oxygen bottle go over Jake’s mouth and nose as one sheriff’s deputy began taking names and addresses from milling onlookers. “Good evening; did you witness this?”

  I pointed to the Triumph. “I was driving it.”

  “But you did see the incident?”

  I said, “I was in the incident. Jake Pritchett, the guy they’re putting in the ambulance—can I go with him?”

  The deputy shook his head. “A detective will be here to interview you in just a moment.”

  “You need to take V.M. Meany off the street.”

  “I beg your pardon, sir?”

  “The two men in the Buick—”

  “The Buick?”

  I said, “Officer, two men and their Buick were in the garage when we pulled up, Jake in that Mercedes over there, me in the Triumph across the street, one behind the other. They shot at us and hit Jake. They took off, going that way.” I pointed up the hill and made the motion of a car turning left.