Golden States

  A police cruiser pulled up. There were two Cops inside. Theone who was not driving got out. A black cop. He walked toward David. He was no more or less logical than the woman who wanted a quarter.

  The cop said, “Your name David Stark?”

  “No,” David said. He heard his voice from far away, a fluttering thing, a scrap of paper.

  “What is your name, please?”

  “Um—” He hesitated, and knew he was lost. “It’s David Stark,” he said.

  The cop nodded. His head grew directly out of his shoulders. “David Stark,” he said. “Your family is worried about you.”

  “I know,” David said. He wondered if he was trembling. He checked his hands. They were trembling.

  “You come on with us, David Stark,” the cop said, “and we’ll put you together with your family again.”

  “Um, I was just coming to see my sister. Could you take me to her house? She lives on Bush Street.”

  “No sir. That we cannot do. We’re going to take you to the station, and we’ll call your sister from there. Come on into the car now, hmm?”

  David speculated a moment over whether he could outrun the cop. The cop looked pretty old. As if he sensed what David was thinking the cop spread out a big pink hand and said, “Come on now. Hmm?”

  David went. The two women were staring at him. The closer of the women wore a bandana around her head and gold hoops in her ears, though she wasn’t a gypsy. David tried to walk proudly, like a good, interesting criminal.

  The cop opened the back door for him. As David was getting in, the cop said, “I’m going to have to take the backpack up front.”

  “Oh,” David said.

  “It’s the rules.” Again the big pink hand appeared. David looped the pack’s strap over the man’s palm.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “You’re welcome.” David got in the back of the cruiser, and the cop closed the door after him. The back was separated from the front seat by thick wire mesh, just like you’d think.

  “It’s him,” the black cop said to the other one at the wheel. “T-shirt with Stevie Wonder on it.”

  “Boy’s got taste,” the other cop said.

  “Well, I wouldn’t know,” the black cop said. “Who’s Stevie Wonder?”

  They pulled out into traffic. “Stevie Wonder is the greatest pro ballplayer who ever lived,” the other cop said.

  David looked back and saw his bus coming. He sat with his arms folded over his chest. The black cop took up a microphone* and said into it. “This is car nine-oh-six. We have apprehended a runaway at Market and Van Ness and are bringing him in. Stark. Right. Ten four.”

  They really said “ten four.” David looked at the people in the car next to them, three Japanese men in a Pontiac, and wondered what they would think of a kid sitting in the back of a cruiser. They did not appear to think anything at all.

  “I can’t believe we found him,” said the cop at the wheel.

  “I told you it was him. I spotted the shirt.”

  “You got a sharp eye, man. Hey, you ever heard of Miles Davis?”

  “Nope. Who’s he?”

  “He’s a famous ballplayer too.”

  “I don’t follow baseball.” They both laughed. The black cop went “Haw haw haw.”

  They drove with traffic, and left their siren off. David was no emergency. He wondered if they would test him and find out he was stoned. He wondered what they would think about the gun. His legs started jiggling and he let them do it. He had almost gotten to Bush Street. He whispered, “Sorry, Janet,” and liked himself for having done it, for saying something like that right out loud in a police car. For one fine soaring moment heimagined a movie he was the star of, about a kid who travels enormous distances through the north woods to rescue the girl he loves. He survives terrible dangers. He swims icy rivers and outruns packs of wolves, he battles criminals and murderers, and is falsely arrested just before he reaches the final shootout. He tried to picture what the ending would be. In the movie version he’d escape from jail and save his girl amid a swarm of bullets.

  The police didn’t find the gun in his pack until they were at the station, until David had checked in with a sergeant and been sent to sit alone in a room with a big blond table surrounded by chairs. The room had no windows, and three of its walls were covered by bulletin boards, scrabbly-looking white cork covered with pinholes. The only piece of paper was a pale green sheet with three telephone numbers written on it in blue ink. There was no telephone.

  He sat in the room for a long while. He switched from chair to chair. The man who finally came in was not a cop at all. He wore green corduroy pants and a plaid shirt.

  “Hi, David,” the man said, with such cheerful recognition David wondered whether they’d met before.

  “Hi,” he said with a friendly smile, just in case.

  “Mind if I sit down?” the man said. He had a wide round face and no hair on top of his head. The hair on the sides, spaniel-colored, drooped down over his ears.

  “No,” David said, still grinning uncertainly.

  The man pulled out a chair next to the one David sat in. He was wearing Old Spice lime. “My name is Darrell,” he said, extending his hand.

  “Hi,” David said. They shook hands. Darrell’s was so dry it might have been talcumed.

  “I just want to talk to you for a few minutes,” Darrell said. “Would that be all right?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Darrell nodded, a series of short elastic bobs of the head. “How are things at home?” he asked.

  “Okay.”

  “Have you been having some trouble there?”

  This was difficult to answer. He was not sure what Darrell meant by “trouble,” and not sure what the right answer would be. “I don’t know,” he said.

  Darrell nodded and nodded. “How do you get along with everybody back there?” he asked.

  “Okay.” He wondered if he should mention Lizzie, and decided not to.

  “Really okay? Everything at home is really just fine?”

  “I guess.” He was not holding up his end of the conversation. To be polite, he added, “Are you a psychiatrist?”

  “I’m a counselor,” Darrell smiled, nodding. “Does that bother you?”

  “No,” David said.

  “Good. David, can you tell me why you left home?”

  “Well, I was going to get my sister. She’s my half-sister, really. Her name is Janet.”

  “I know her name is Janet. What exactly do you mean when you say you were going to ‘get’ her?”

  “Well, she went off with this guy Rob, and she doesn’t really love him.”

  “Did she tell you that?” Darrell asked.

  “Uh-huh. Sort of.”

  “Then why do you think she went off with him?”

  “I don’t know.” He searched his memory for a phrase. “I think she was afraid,” he said.

  “Afraid of what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you think?”

  “Well, I think she’s afraid she won’t get to be a doctor.” “Does she want to be a doctor?”

  “I don’t know. I think so.”

  “What do you think about the man she went off with?” “Rob. He’s okay.”

  “Is he?”

  “Well, my mother doesn’t like him very much.”

  “Do you like him?”

  “No. Not very much.”

  “David, what were you going to do with the gun?”

  “Well, I just sort of thought I should take it.”

  Darrell nodded. “Did you ever think you might shoot anybody with it?”

  “No,” David said.

  “Did you think you might shoot your sister’s boyfriend with it?”

  David thought for a moment. “No,” he said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What if it had gone off accidentally? Would you have been sorry if it did?”


  “Well, yes.”

  “Do you know how many bullets were in the gun?”

  “Oh. There were bullets in it?”

  “Actually no, there weren’t any bullets in it. I wondered if you knew that.”

  “Oh.”

  “Did you know for sure that there were no bullets in it?” “Yes,” David said.

  Darrell nodded and nodded. “David, if you left home again, would you take a gun? Do you think it’s a good idea to take a gun with you?”

  “No,” David said. And he added, for good measure, “I wouldn’t leave home again anyway.”

  “Would you be afraid to leave home again?”

  “No,” David said, and realized only after he’d said it that it was true.

  Darrell sighed. “I guess that’s enough for now, David,” he said.

  “What’s going to happen?” David asked him.

  “Your sister’s out there arranging things. She’s going to put you on a plane back home.”

  “Janet’s here?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Is she going to come in here? I mean, in this room?”

  “No, we’ll send you out to her. It won’t be long. Do you have to use the bathroom?”

  “No,” David lied. He could hold it.

  “Okay. It’s been nice talking to you, David.” Darrell stood up and shook his hand again.

  “Bye,” David said.

  “See you.” As Darrell left the room, David wondered if he’d gotten his answers right.

  A cop came for him some time later. He took David down a corridor, and instead of going back the way David had been brought in, the cop directed him down a second hallway and into a waiting room. As he went, David searched for a less pathetic way of being. He walked with a slight cowboy bend in his legs.

  Janet was standing in the middle of the waiting room, smoking a cigarette. David stopped and stood, unable to negotiate the last few paces. She smiled at him, holding her cigarette between two fingers, and they stayed that way a moment. Janet wore jeans and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Her hair hung loose around her shoulders.

  “Are you okay?” she asked him.

  He nodded. They both stepped forward. She took his hand rather than embrace him. “I can’t believe you did this,” she said.

  “I know,” David said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry. Nobody got hurt. Come on, I think we can go.” She looked over his shoulder at the cop. “Can we go?”

  “Yep,” the cop said.

  “I signed about a thousand forms,” Janet told David, “and you’re released to my care. I fooled them into thinking I was an adult.”

  “Oh.”

  They started out of the waiting room, and she rested her hand on the back of his neck. “There’s going to be some court stuff in L.A.,” she said. “I think you’re going to have to see a shrink for a while. But don’t worry. I’ve been to half a dozen of them and they’ve hardly done me any harm at all.”

  She guided him out of the room and down a wide hall with a speckled brown linoleum floor.

  “What are we going to do?” David asked.

  “Rob’s waiting outside in the car,” Janet said. “He helped me with the negotiations and everything, and then he couldn’t stand to be here anymore. He’s going to drive us straight to the airport. I’ve got you booked on an eleven o’clock flight home.”

  “Oh.”

  “They gave me your pack. It’s out in the car. They’re going to keep the gun for a while.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  She laughed. “I asked one of them if you’d set the record for gun-bearing, and he thought it was a big joke. He said they had a nine-year-old in last week, with a magnum.”

  They reached the front door. Through the glass panel, David could see the street, awash in yellow light. In a minute they’d be with Rob, in his car. He stopped walking and said, “Janet?”

  “What?”

  “Um, do you want to come back home with me? I mean, do you want to stay in San Francisco? You don’t, do you?”

  She sighed, and draped her wrist over his shoulder. “That’s what you came all this way to ask me, huh?”

  He nodded.

  She shook her head. “You traveled five hundred miles to tell me in person how I should come back home and not marry Rob. Who had just traveled five hundred miles to tell me I should marry him.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What is it about you men? Why do you have to make everything into a quest? I mean, David, why didn’t you just pick up the telephone?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  Janet held the door open for him and he walked outside and down a half dozen granite steps. They were on a quiet, brightly lit street. Across the street a building said garage in pink letters.

  “This way,” she said. They crossed the street and went into the garage. Janet rang for the elevator, which opened its doors with a dangerous-sounding skreak. Inside, the elevator smelled of piss. White light glanced off the scabbed white walls.

  He and Janet rode up in silence. This was his last chance to say something to her, something only she would hear, but he couldn’t think of what. The passing moment cut through him. He had nothing for her but his presence.

  The doors opened and they got out. Rob’s car was parked two rows down. As they walked along the concrete, their footsteps ringing, Janet said, “Don’t worry if Rob seems a little testy. He’s sort of upset about all this.”

  “He is?”

  “He thinks you were bringing the gun to shoot him. I told him you weren’t.” She paused. “Were you?”

  “No,” David said.

  “Try to reassure him that you had no intention of killing him, okay? It would make him feel better.”

  “Okay.”

  Rob was sitting behind the wheel of his car. Janet opened the passenger door and said, “Here we are. Sprung.”

  She tripped the latch and pulled up the seat so David could get in back. As he crawled in he said, “Hi, Rob.”

  Rob looked at him over his shoulder, without turning in his direction. “Hi,” he said in an empty voice.

  Janet got into the front seat and closed the door. Rob started the car.

  “We have to stop at the first phone booth,” she said. “I promised Mother I would.”

  “Right,” Rob said, pulling on the R like a zipper. Rrrr-ight.

  David sat in the middle of the back seat. His pack was there, his towel folded neatly on top and the folded umbrella sitting on top of the towel.

  “Are you hungry?” Janet asked him.

  “Uh-huh,” he said. His hunger had persisted so long it had become a steady state, something he thought no more of than breathing.

  “We’ll get you something at the airport. Can you hold out that long?”

  “Sure.”

  She reached back over the seat and took his hand. “What I want to hear about now,” she said, “is the last fifteen hours. How did you get up here, exactly?”

  “Well, I took the bus partway,” he said. “And I hitchhiked.”

  “You’re much too young to hitchhike,” she said.

  “He had a weapon,” Rob said. “That’s why people don’t pick hitchhikers up, because some of them have guns in their backpacks.”

  “An unloaded gun,” Janet said.

  “Yeah. Did he know that?”

  Janet maintained her grip on his hand. “He said he knew. I believe him.”

  David was returning to his old smallness, sitting in the back of a car, being talked about. Rob piloted the car down a spiral ramp. He drove too fast, and the tires gave out a constant,pained squeal. Janet pressed David’s hand. They all kept quiet until they were down off the ramp.

  “So you hitchhiked,” she said. “Did you have trouble getting rides?”

  “No,” David said. He thought of Warren. He’d decided not to tell anyone about Warren, at least not right away.

  “Who picked you up? I mean,
what kind of people?”

  “Well, a black man picked me up,” David said. “And a lady did.”

  “Just two rides? Oh, wait a minute, there’s a phone booth. Rob, pull over.”

  Rob pulled over without saying anything. He had to switch lanes, and he cut off another car doing it. The car sounded its horn as it passed. Rob held tightly to the steering wheel.

  He parked in a no-parking zone, beside a phone booth which stood before its reflection in the obsidian window of a dry cleaners. “Come on, David,” Janet said. “We’ll be right back.”

  The two of them got out of the car. Janet stepped into the booth and dialed. David propped the door open with his shoulder. The glass pan of the overhead light held the shadows of dead moths. Janet said, “Collect, please, from Janet,” and then, after a few seconds, “Hi. I’ve got him.

  “Yes, he’s fine. Wait till you see the little striped suit he’s wearing. No, I know it isn’t funny. Sure. Just a minute.”

  She handed the receiver to David. They had a moment’s trouble jockeying around one another, then David put the receiver to his ear.

  “Hi, Mom,” he said.

  “David. Are you all right?” Her voice threaded itself through the static.

  “Uh-huh”

  “Good. When you get home I’m going to kill you.”

  “Oh.”

  “No, not really. I’ve just been crazy with worry, is all. Is Janet putting you on a plane?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Okay. I’ll pick you up at the airport. Oh, wait a minute, Lizzie wants to say hello.”

  The line went hissingly quiet, and Lizzie said, “Hello?”

  “Hi, Lizzie.” Her voice sounded so small and distant. It occurred to him that he shouldn’t have left her and Mom alone. “Where are you?” she asked.

  “In San Francisco. Didn’t Mom tell you I was in San Francisco?”

  “Yes. Did the police let you out?”

  “Uh-huh. I’m going to come home.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Mom’s going to kill you when you get back.”

  The line quieted again, and Mom came on. “Don’t worry,” she said. “You’re safe here. Let me talk to Janet for a minute, okay? I’ll see you at the airport.”