Adrift in the Sound (2 page)

“I got attacked by a dog under the freeway and freaked out, that’s all,” she said softly, sat down at the table again, checked the clock. No way could she tell him the truth.

“I was crashing there with friends,” she lied. “Camping out for a few days. They kept me a while to stabilize, adjusted my medication.”

Which I don’t take anyway
, she thought, but didn’t say it because she didn’t want to get into it with him. Instead, she said, “I want to see Watches Underwater.”

Her father twisted in his chair, raked his thinning ash-colored hair, said he didn’t recall where it was stored.

“You know where she is.” She said it like an accusation and stared into the dining room, toward his study in the front of the house, pictured the closet where he kept his artifacts, saw in her mind the mask’s red lips supping air, Watches Underwater skimming along beneath the water’s surface.

He followed her glance, finally said, “Not now.”

“How did you get it?” She studied his face, looked for flinching lies around his watery eyes.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s not yours. You took it.”

“I got it years ago. I’ve taken care of that mask and everything else all this time. I could’ve sold it, gotten a lot more than I paid. I know the history. And, I know dealers who’d buy it, but it has been safe here. What are you suggesting?”

“Everyone knows what you did. Raven told me. We’ve talked.”

“What do you mean?” Her father pulled back from her, dismay creasing his face.

“I’ve seen all the stuff, Dad. Spirit drums, carvings, masks, breast plates. It belongs to the Lummi people.” She scowled at him. “You took advantage and you know it. Raven calls it grave robbing, even if you try and say it’s archeology.”

She saw she’d hurt his feelings, and reached out to pat his boney arm, but he jerked away.

“Get out of my house.” The sound came like a growl from a disturbed animal, warning her.

Lizette jumped up and checked the clock, grabbed her bag from under the table.

“I’ll get a palette knife from the studio and go,” she said defiantly to his bowed head. In a few minutes the clock would make its mechanical noise and she wanted to be gone before it sounded its mocking accusations. “I have to catch the afternoon ferry out to Orcas.” She gathered her bag and bolted out the back door. “I’m late.”

The cuckoo sounded as she fled across the grass to the studio that squatted under a low roof, weighed by encroaching vines and tree limbs. Two big windows stared into the tangled garden, watching the house through rain-streaked eyes. The air inside was stiff from lack of use. She pursed her lips to suck air like the woman of the mask, skimming under the water’s murky surface, alert to trouble.

Tools lay scattered on the work bench, as if her mother would arrive soon and put them in order, prepare them for work. She picked up a worn palette knife, its blade nicked, the wooden handle spattered with paint. Turning it over, looking closely, she felt her mother’s fingers in her hand. Dropping it into her canvas bag, she noticed a small, framed photograph in the corner of the workbench, behind a wadded rag. It was her, dressed in a white, gauzy robe with a crown of burning candles on her head.

St. Lucia, the Light Queen
, she thought, and remembered the night the photo was taken, recalled the smell of warm candle wax, the hush of the Swedish Lutheran church when she entered and glided down the center aisle. Her parents sat in the front pew. The choir filled the darkened sanctuary with sound like bubbles that lifted into the ceiling timbers, popped against the jeweled surfaces of the stained glass windows, the music buoying her as she walked alone to the altar.

In that moment long ago, Lizette gave up the hard edges of her will and yielded to the sacred energy that ebbed and flowed around and through her. She surrendered her boundaries to the spirits, to the sounds. That night she had her first menstrual period and knew she’d grown up. From then on, when life pushed on the edges of her being, she exited from the pressure like music exhaled, submerging, releasing into the depths of her being, rising, always wary. Watching.

She dropped the photo into her bag and left by the side yard. She sensed him spying and looked up at the dining room window, caught a glimpse of his blue plaid shirt through the glass before he pulled back. She hurried down the narrow path beside the house and into the rain-slicked street, feeling like a grave robber.

TWO

WAITING FOR THE BUS AT 45
^TH
AND WALLINGFORD
, she felt lost and confused, remembered when she’d felt the same way, that day at the market, before it happened, people handing her cash for quickly drawn portraits, while she sat surrounded by vegetable stalls and singing fish mongers. Thanksgiving shoppers had washed through Seattle’s Pike Place Market, carrying armloads of russet and white chrysanthemums, orange pumpkins and yellow gourds, the air heavy with the smell of salt and roasted coffee beans.

A child. She remembered a toe-headed boy. He’d stuck out his hand to thank her for his picture. They shook. She could almost feel his plump hand, now, see the baby dimples over his knuckles. His parent’s had read the handmade sign she’d taped on the metal beam above her stool and easel. They’d stopped and thrust the child onto the stool, paid her five dollars for the sketch when she was done, said she was a regular Picasso, loud, like they wanted the indifferent crowd to stop and marvel at their baby’s image. Then they rolled the sketch and put it into their vegetable sack.

Loneliness washed through her as she thought about that day, about watching them disappear in the throng, vanish into the dusk. She wanted her drawing back, but more than that she wanted the child, wanted to feel the plump rise of new flesh, and thought about her mother and the warm, yeasty smells of baking bread. That day in the market she felt like she did now standing on the sidewalk—waiting, alone, without a place to go, without a place to call home, a discarded puzzle piece. She shivered, pulled her jacket tighter, peered into the February rain, clamped her mind against the dark memory, submerged.

When a bus bound for downtown pulled up, she hopped on and changed her mind about the ferry to Orcas. She knew she’d never make it to the ferry landing at Anacortes before dark and right now she needed to stop this gnawing loneliness. She got off on Eastlake Avenue, headed up the hill to Sandy Shore’s house on Franklin Street, next door to Rocket’s place. The two run-down houses used to be home to Norwegian fishing families, but that was years ago. Now the houses served as a gathering place, a crash pad for junkies, losers and odd-ball sports fans.

Lizette had lost her bedroll and the drawings tucked inside when they picked her up in the alley that night and hauled her off in the ambulance. The attack was sometime in December, she thought, or was it January? No.
This is January
, she thought.
Isn’t it?
She couldn’t remember when it happened. After Thanksgiving, she thought. She still had her bag with sketch pads and paints and knew she could work, but not on Franklin Street. She could figure that problem out later, she thought.

Dazed and hungry, she climbed Sandy’s front steps, waved to a couple of the guys carrying baseball gear into the house next door, noticed Rocket’s two-toned Olds 88 parked in front, and let herself in the unlocked front door. She knew Sandy would be at work, top-less dancing at Vixen’s in Tacoma, and hoped she wouldn’t throw her out when she got home. Lizette called out for her in the empty house, just in case, and felt the hollowness. She settled on the couch by the front window and spread an afghan over her legs, soothed herself with coos, and watched the rain come down.

Startled awake at the sound of a car door slamming, Lizette watched Sandy totter up the walk in spike heels, swinging a red garment bag in the dark. She dropped it in the front hall and flipped on the light. Lizette sat with folded hands, the blanket over her knees, and noticed Sandy’s false eyelashes and rouged cheeks, the doll face she used when stripping.

“What the hell you doing here?” Sandy said, sniffing like she smelled bad meat. “Where’ve you been, anyhow? Marian asked about you a couple of weeks ago. I thought you were staying downtown.”

“I was…before I got attacked,” Lizette said, downplaying what’d happened. “I just got out of the hospital.” She hung her head.

Sandy looked at Lizette huddled in her old afghan and snorted. “You can only stay the night, Liz. That’s it! Sleep on the couch. You gotta stop sneaking in here. I’m not runnin’ a rescue mission. Go home to your dad’s or get your own damn place.”

Sandy headed back out to her Volkswagen bug. “How about helping with Bella?” she called and Lizette followed her into the cold.

“She’s getting heavy, hard to handle.” Sandy yanked the car door open, leaned into the backseat, pulled the huge snake out of its travel box. “Shits like a horse!” She controlled its head and grunted as she lifted the snake’s thick mid-section, shifted her hips so Lizette could squeeze in and hoist out the long tail.

In the days that followed, Lizette found ways to make herself useful to Sandy—doing the dishes, mopping, running to the co-op for raw milk and bulgar. Sandy let her slide. Lizette folded laundry in the basement now and watched Bella the Beautiful Boa, star of Sandy Shore’s striptease act, expand and contract under a heat lamp in its glass cage.

Sandy came down and poked around, checked to see how much laundry soap was left in the box, told Lizette she’d quit her job, had decided to stop dancing. Lizette finished folding and watched Sandy drop a live rabbit into Bella’s cage, then secure the hatch. Bella went after the prey, the rabbit squeaking, beating its hind legs against the glass as the big snake fit its slimy mouth over its furry head. Then the rabbit went still, only the dryer’s rhythmic tumble stirred the air.

Pulling laundry from the dryer, Lizette said, timidly, “I get money from the county for disability. I can help pay rent.”

“What disability?” Sandy scanned Lizette up and down. “You seem pretty healthy to me.”

Some arrangements would have to be made on the rent, Sandy knew that and pictured the landlord’s hairy back and discolored toenails, but she didn’t see skinny-assed Lizette as the answer to her problems. She turned and studied the bulge in Bella’s long body and patted her own tummy, smoothed the fabric of her flannel shirt over her abdomen. She studied the piles of Bella’s expelled waste from past meals—clumps of fur and bones—deposited in the cage’s shredded newspaper. She turned her scrutiny back to Lizette, who flinched at the disapproval she saw on Sandy’s face. Climbing onto a wobbly step-stool, Sandy opened the cage’s hatch and reached inside, scooped the waste piles into a paper bag with a rusted coal shovel, whacked the snake on the head when it nosed toward the tank’s open top.

“You sick or what?” Sandy said, looking suspiciously over her shoulder at Lizette, who shrugged and kept folding laundry. “Why don’t you just go home, make up with your old man, get a job, stop hanging out?” She bent over the rim of the cage, butt in the air. “The 60s are over and this ain’t a crash pad,” Sandy said, coming upright. “I’ve got a lot of shit to do here.”

“My dad doesn’t want me,” Lizette whispered. “He told me to get out. No one wants me.”

Sandy bent again and stirred the shredded newspaper with the little shovel, finally got down from the stool and dropped the paper bag with Bella’s droppings on the floor, pushed it aside with her foot. “Save the sorry shit,” Sandy said, turning squarely to Lizette. “I don’t feel sorry for you. At least you have an old man and a place to go. That’s more than me.”

Lizette started to protest. Sandy put up a hand to stop her.

“My friend Jerry owns this whole block,” Sandy said sweeping her arm around the basement. This house, the Dog House next door, and all the empty lots around here. It’s not like he needs the money. I can work something out with him on the rent.”

Lizette wandered to the crooked basement door and opened it, looked out at the gray morning. The vacant lots along Franklin Street were snarled with blackberry brambles, sagging sheds and weeds, a leaning post with a clothesline pulley still attached. People guessed Jerry was some kind of urban renewal scam artist with plans for a high-rise apartment building. She’d heard them talking on the TV. It was easy to see through the morning drizzle that Lyndon Johnson had lost the “War on Poverty” several years ago.

She looked over at the battered side of Rocket’s house, wondered what the guys were doing, if they were getting ready to go out, if she could tag along. The way Sandy told it, she’d picked Rocket up at Vixen’s on a slow night and they hit it off. He moved in next door after the old folks he’d been staying with in the Wallingford District, died and left him a grand piano, plus the money to move it and keep it tuned. He’d said it was some kind of Bosendorfer, more than 130 years old, which Sandy told her she doubted because it looked new. After the old couple died, the story went, relatives in Spokane sold the house and, when Rocket suggested renting a room from Sandy on Franklin Street and moving in with the piano, she told Lizette she’d blurted out “Hell no!” Sandy said he looked hurt at the time, but she said the piano monstrosity was like a boat anchor—once the thing dug in, she’d never get rid of it—or Rocket. Sandy said she didn’t want to chance it.

When she’d checked on the empty house next door to her, and, after giving Jerry the landlord a good spanking with her hairbrush during a visit to their usual motel, Sandy said the rent he’d wanted was pretty cheap. She gave him an extra blow job and he didn’t ask a lot of questions about the new tenant. He made it clear, however, he wasn’t into repairs because the place needed to be torn down, said he was waiting for his project financing to come through and he’d put up some apartment units. Lizette remembered Sandy telling her Jerry gave her a bunch of bank deposit slips for his business account and warned her to pay the rent on time or else. A bargain Sandy told her she’d always kept.

Rocket, his piano, and the pack of softball bums who called themselves the Franklin Street Dogs, had lived side-by-side with Sandy ever since. Probably two or three years by now, Lizette figured, as she surveyed the decay from the doorway. She heard the Dogs rummaging around, recognized the sound of beer bottles breaking. She grabbed a stack of folded laundry and took it upstairs, bounded up the flight to the second floor, shoved the fresh towels into the linen closet, and slipped into the small bedroom where she slept on a saggy twin bed, shut the door.