Golden States

  “That’s terrible,” Mom said, her mind elsewhere.

  “I’m going to get some dog shit and dump it on Roxanne’s head on Monday,” Lizzie said proudly.

  “You are not,” Mom told her. “And please think of something else to call it.”

  “Dog doodle,” Lizzie said, which sent her and Pia off into a spasm of giggling.

  “I don’t think I can eat any more,” David said. “Lizzie makes me sick.” After he’d said it, he decided he didn’t like sounding so delicate in front of Pia.

  “Just grit your teeth and be brave,” Mom said.

  Janet came down and took her seat again. She nodded to an invisible signal of Mom’s.

  “What did you tell him?” Mom asked.

  “Everything’s all worked out,” Janet said. She smiled cheerfully at Pia and said, “So Pia, how are you liking the school here?”

  “I hate it,” Pia said politely. Lizzie fell into a renewed burst of giggling, followed by Pia. David would have taken his ice cream into the living room to finish it, but he didn’t want to miss anything further Janet might say about Rob.

  She didn’t say anything about him for the rest of the evening. Pia had to be taken home right after dinner, and the Starks watched television together as usual. David was itching to ask Janet questions but hung back, for fear of violating the mysterious rules that held sway. He took his cues from Mom, who went along as if everything was normal. She smoked cigarette after cigarette, sitting beside Janet on the sofa. Once he saw her reach over and pat Janet’s knee, without taking her eyes from the television. Janet stroked the back of Mom’s blue-veined hand.

  Bedtimes came, first Lizzie’s and then David’s. Before going up he reached for Janet in a movement that started as an embrace but halted halfway, from uncertainty. He stood a moment before her with his arms out, frozen, and she finished the gesture for him by taking both of his hands in hers, pulling him forward, and planting a smacking, exaggerated kiss on his forehead.

  “Good night, handsome,” she said.

  “Night. Night, Mom.”

  “Good night. See you in the morning.”

  Up in his room he lay with his eyes wide, straining to stay awake. The house sounded only like itself, the steady drone of the television moving through the walls like the pulse of an engine. Mom’s voice, Janet’s voice, the minute ring of a dropped glass. Laughter. A car horn, a dog barking. Sleep took him against his will, opening slowly inside his head. With a final effort to be in the world a moment longer he speculated over a distant, muffled bang, knew it to be nothing more than a truck backfiring, and tipped over into dreams.

  He woke knowing something was wrong. Something. He hesitated a moment, between his fading dream and his awakening. A door had opened and closed. He hadn’t dreamed it; it was what woke him up. He got up and went, automatically, tothe window. Nothing in the backyard. He stood still, holding his breath, weighing the darkness. Nothing. But he had the same odd feeling, the moth fluttering at his forehead.

  He went downstairs, into the deeper dark of the stairwell, across the entry hall which was lit by streetlight that seeped in through the three small windows in the front door. They made three pale stepping stones on the carpet. The silent living room looked weighted, like a stateroom in a sunken ship. David walked into the kitchen.

  The blue gaslights of the stove sent up their glow. Against the tiled wall, the blender and the crock of wooden spoons threw faint gray shadows surrounded by blue shadows. David paused by the window over the sink, checking the pool. The night sky was a mottled no-color, low clouds sending back the city lights, the elusive green-gray-yellow of a bruise. Behind him the refrigerator ticked.

  He saw the white envelope standing on the table in the breakfast nook and knew immediately it was something. He approached it warily. It bore no address but sat propped against the salt and pepper shakers which, when he picked up the envelope, were revealed. A king for pepper and a queen for salt, with twice as many holes in her head as the king had.

  The envelope was not empty. David took it over to the stovetop and switched on the light in the scalloped copper hood. Inside the envelope was a single piece of paper. It said:

  Morning, everybody,

  This is the chickenshit of the year, up to her old tricks again. I’m doing a shameful thing—sneaking out under cover of darkness, and going back to San Francisco with Rob. This is like something out of the movies—with everything but a ladder made of sheets—I hope you all can forgive me. The truth is I feel so shaky about this I just couldn’t face telling you what I decided—I knew you’d all be disappointed in me. I guess I did too good ajob convincing everybody that staying with Rob would be some kind of grisly death—I guess I was trying to convince myself of that. The truth is he loves me very much and I think I really love him too—I just had a walloping case of cold feet, so I had to make up a reason for not getting married that would sound more convincing than plain old garden variety terror. I think I’m doing the right thing now, I really do. I’ll call you tomorrow, from the city. Until then I offer my cowardly love, and my thanks for taking me in and putting up with me.

  Love,

  Janet

  David put the letter down on the counter and raced up to Janet’s room. It was empty, the bed neatly made, the suitcase gone. He went back downstairs and read the letter again. Gone. She had gone with Rob. He read the letter a third time. Maybe it was true, what she said about loving Rob and having had cold feet. He tried switching over into an alternate version of the truth, in which Janet never really cared much about becoming a doctor; what she really cared about was Rob. It felt hollow and wrong. He sat down with the letter at the kitchen table and thought about it. A week ago, she’d told him, “The bride has flown the coop.” Now he imagined her in a white doctor’s smock, flying out of control, floating up and up and out of sight. If he’d taken better care of her, if he hadn’t told lies—he searched his memory for the moment at which Janet had made her decision to leave. What had he said to make her do it?

  He stood and went out the front door, as if he expected some vestige of her still to be there, getting into Rob’s car, stoppable. The street was empty, tinted with yellow light from the street lamps. The sky was the same bruised color. She had gone.

  He sat down on the stoop, unconcerned about whetheranyone might drive by and see him in his pajamas. He bent over and held his head between his knees, looking down at the shadowed concrete step where a ragged weed, wiry as a stray dog, grew lopsidedly out of a meandering crack. She had gone without saying a real good-bye, without worrying about whether anyone else would be all right. Somewhere out on the highway she and Rob were speeding along in Rob’s trim little car, unworried over anything except their own private future. David raised his head. Rob’s car skidded on a curve somewhere in the desert. It shot over a cliff’s edge and bloomed with flame, dwindling in the blackness. Janet was thrown out onto the rocks. She’d live but she’d never walk again, she’d come home in a wheelchair. Rob’s car blazed on, spiraling down into a canyon that had no bottom. Coyotes howled in the mountains. Across the street, a gray cat skittered along a fence, keeping close to the shadow. Everyone in the houses on this street had been smothered by the night and lay now, tangled up in bed-sheets, silent as the furniture. Darkness gathered around the streetlights and hung low to the ground. David drew a breath that was like breathing fine, cold soot. Darkness lay in his own house, thickly on the rugs and tables, and on the stairs. Darkness had slipped under the door to Lizzie’s room, dusting her as she slept her fierce sleep, and it found Mom alone in her room down the hall. It settled on her, filling her mouth and nose, sifting through her throat to her belly, into her blood to her heart. She had let Dad go, and she had let Janet go. She deserved to die.

  David jumped up in a panic. He was trembling. He took back what he’d thought, hoping the curse was removable. He bit his hand. He could never do anything that mattered, he could only think thoughts that came crookedly true.
A black sportscar shot by, materializing out of its own rumble. The idea came to him in the wake of the car.

  He and Billy could go to San Francisco and bring Janet back. It was exactly the kind of thing Billy liked. They could hitchhike north together, have adventures along the way, and then knock on Janet’s door where David would say, “Janet, I know you don’t really love Rob. I’ve come to take you home.” He could even kidnap her, a kindly kidnapping. In his mind it started turning into a movie. The actors who played Billy and David had had a fight, the way normal friends do, but when their old archenemy came around again they jumped straight into action together, their differences forgotten. They talked an easy, joking sort of talk. That made it possible for them to be friends and rivals at the same time. The actress who played Janet was the girl they were both in love with. At that point the story got too complicated. David figured he’d just get moving and let things work themselves into a conclusion. He told himself you couldn’t plan too far ahead. Nothing ever turned out the way you expected it to, anyway.

  He went up to his room and put his clothes on. The clock on his bedside table said 3:25. He couldn’t decide whether to go now or to wait until it started getting light. He thought he’d rather wait for a little light. He sat on the bed, and before he knew it he was lying down, chewing on the corner of his pillowcase. He jumped back up again. He went to his dresser and opened the top drawer, with no idea of what he expected to find. Here in the drawer were socks, shorts, the green tin box marked stash.

  He took the box to his bed, sat down, and spilled the money out on the sheet. There were fifteen dollar bills and another dollar seventy-seven in change. He thought that should be enough.

  He pictured himself, or his actor self, going to Billy’s house, throwing gravel at the window and saying, “Psst, old friend, sorry to drop in unannounced like this but there’s a spot of trouble and I think I may need your help.” The Billy-actor would lean irritably against the windowpane, because he was the skeptical one, the one who never believed there was a plot and who always needed to be rescued from traps he refused to notice. He’d say, “What trouble?” and David would answer casually, “Well, Nixon’s back. Seems we didn’t finish him off last time after all.” He tried it the first time saying, “Rob’s back,” but the name Rob sounded too usual and small.

  Billy would say, “Where?” in an impressed voice. “San Francisco,” David would reply. “We leave immediately.” “I’ll be right down,” Billy would say, “Do you have the—?”

  The gun. David knew suddenly what he had to take along to give the journey its proper weight. That way Billy, the real Billy, would know how serious he was. He could see himself standing on Billy’s lawn with one hip cocked, holding the gun. Just thinking about it got him jiggling his legs in a nervous ecstasy.

  He stood up and walked, carefully setting one foot after the other, down the hall to Mom’s room. The darkness there was infused with her breathing and her sleepy smell. He held himself steady through a rush of fear. Slowly, moving on the ballsof his feet, he walked inside and went to the nightstand. He pulled out the drawer. It creaked, and Mom muttered in a dream. David waited, expectant, but she settled herself and her breathing stayed regular. Moving by inches, holding his breath, he worked his hand in and touched the gun. It scraped softly against the wood as he withdrew it. It was much heavier than he’d expected it to be. Holding it against his thigh, away from Mom’s vague form under the blankets, he sneaked out of the room. He realized with horror that he had made it.

  David took a towel from the bathroom and wrapped it around the gun. He went into his room and got his backpack from the closet, a slick empty blue nylon bag with padded black shoulder straps. When the gun and towel were stuffed inside it was like carrying a heavy pillow. He couldn’t feel the gun at all when he squeezed. Hefting the backpack in one hand he went downstairs to the kitchen, coins jingling in his pocket. He ate a banana and drank milk from the carton. He left the kitchen, then went back and took Janet’s note from the table. He chose a pen from among the bouquet of pens and pencils that sprouted from the square flowered canister by the telephone, and wrote at the bottom of the letter, “Have gone to get her. XXXXX, David.” He regretted the X’s, but since he’d written in ink he couldn’t rub them out. He slid the letter back into its envelope, propped it back up against the salt and pepper shakers, and walked outside into the spotlit night.

  The pack bumped against his thigh as he walked to Billy’s. He worried that the gun might go off and shoot him in the leg, and he walked as long as he was able holding the pack stiffarmed, away from his body. Once he heard rustlings in the shadows to one side of a house like his own. He thought he could make out a shape there, something small that stood watching him with invisible eyes. Experimentally, he waved his free arm. The thing disappeared. He walked on, full of happiness.

  Billy’s house lay in the shadow of its lemon grove, shelteredfrom the light. Lemons shone among the silent, waxy black leaves. The leaf-littered yard was spotted with lemons, the newly fallen ones gray on the ground and the rotten ones black. He went around to the side were Billy’s room was. The walls of the house were covered with shingles, made of something brown and pebbly, each one outlined in black tar.

  David stood under Billy’s dark window. The prow of the roof cut into the sky. He just stood for a while, unable to move. It all seemed suddenly like a bad idea. When Billy came to the window David would have to say something interesting, and say it fast. He thought it over and settled finally on, “It’s time to stop playing games and be serious.” Then he’d show the gun. He hoped Billy wouldn’t come down, take the gun away from him, and shoot him with it.

  He started looking around for some gravel to throw. There wasn’t any. He threw a rotten lemon instead, which struck Billy’s window with a disappointing plot sound and left a smear, like a bug on a windshield. Billy didn’t come to the window.

  David threw another lemon, a riper one. It bounced off the window with a much more dignified sound, but it still didn’t rouse Billy. Somewhere, close by, a cricket chirped; it seemed to come from everywhere at once. David threw another lemon, and another. The glass shivered liquidly after the last one, and he waited. No one came to the window. He could see the corner of Billy’s curtain, a flimsy blue-and-green material that was like woven plastic. He knew Billy’s room almost as well as he knew his own: the fake wood paneling covered with pictures clipped from Soldier of Fortune, the nicked furniture, the old black-and-white photo of Billy’s father, in an army uniform, sitting on the dresser in a gold-colored frame. Billy’s father looked a little like Ray. David had spent a thousand hours in that room, two thousand. Under the bed was a withered apple core he himself had tossed there the week before. It was like being shut out of his own home.

  He searched the ground until he found a rock. It was much too big, almost the size of a tennis ball, but the yard was all grass and dead leaves, without a speck of gravel. The rock was cool and gritty. He threw it at the window underhanded, as lightly as he could.

  It sailed through the glass with only a soft ping, a sound like crystal struck by a fingernail. It left a jagged hole of pure black on the glossy black of the window. David couldn’t believe it. He had thrown so gently.

  A light went on, and the hole disappeared. A rectangle of light fell at David’s feet. Nothing else happened; Billy’s face did not appear. David stood dumb for a minute, because he couldn’t think of what to do. He stared up at the window and after a while Billy’s mother’s face appeared.

  It had never occurred to David that Billy might get his mother. She was a sharp-nosed, small-chinned woman from someplace like Texas. She drilled him with her little eyes, and opened the window. David was out of the yard and halfway across the street before she could start screaming. He ran over the invisible line back into the ordinary neighborhood, got a block up the street, and crouched down behind a parked car, where he stayed for a few minutes in the hope that Billy would come running past,
alone, and that he’d be able to get a sentence out before Billy cracked his head open. He unzipped his pack and worked the gun out of the towel, so he could show it to Billy right off. He was impressed all over again with how hefty it was, how comfortably it fit his hand.

  After a minute a police cruiser passed in the street, going toward Billy’s house. David froze half under the car, which he noticed was a Dodge Dart. He could see his nose reflected in the bumper. He thought sadly of how nothing ever happened the way you pictured it. The police car turned the corner and he sprinted across the street, with the pack in one hand and the gun in the other. He ran six blocks before he allowed himself to look back. Nothing.

  Now he would have to go to San Francisco alone, or go home and sneak back into bed. He stuffed the gun into his pack. The idea of going home was so appealing that he walked two blocks in that direction before he remembered it was also possible not to. If he went home he could wake up in a few hours in his own bed, returned to his life with nothing worse than a broken window to worry about. Monday would come and the week would pass; Janet would stay in San Francisco with Rob, and David and Lizzie would go to Spokane. Mom would be lowered into the ground, hands crossed on her chest, her hair brittle with a permanent. Dad would hoist Lizzie high in the air and pinch her. Nixon would get reelected. David turned around and headed out of the neighborhood.

  He thought he should take a map, but the only map he knew of back home was his own, the map of the universe. He decided to take a bus partway, and use the time on the bus to build his courage for hitchhiking. He wasn’t sure how far eighteen-seventy would take him; he’d go somewhere close on the first ticket, and if he had money left over he could buy another ticket. His first problem would be finding the bus station.

  He knew it was on the other side of the freeway, and that it would be much shorter to cross right over than it would be to double around to the underpass. The freeway could be heard from some distance away, its roar constant and penetrating as a river’s. To reach it, David had to cut between two houses and cross the rough concrete gutter to the embankment. Overhead, the freeway threw a liquid shimmer of light into the sky, and as David climbed uphill, bracing himself with his free hand, he could smell the sharp green odor of crushed ice plant. He thought of black widows.