Bones of the Barbary Coast (6 page)

Tomorrow he'd try to put his thoughts in order, show her some paper. Tell her the rest of it.

He thought about checking his e-mail and then decided against it; he had a good idea what he'd find and didn't need it tonight. Instead, he went to the kitchen to get the fourth drink he felt he was owed. He poured it into a tall glass so he could mix it with water, but then decided he'd just pour it long. He brought the glass into the living room and stood in the middle, taking the whiskey like medicine.

The house was a single floor, anchored on the slope on one side and twenty feet off the ground, on a lattice of girders, on the downhill side. This far up, its windows gave to views of the near rooftops and farther away to the glow of light from Market and Castro, so that after dark Bert had the dubious pleasure of imagining ten thousand queers going about their nightlife. A long living room with a dining alcove separated from the kitchen by a counter, then a hallway leading to the bathroom, a couple of closets, one big bedroom, and a smaller bedroom that Bert used as his office. That was it. No basements, no attics, no secrets, keep it simple. A narrow deck projected out over the slope, where in good weather he could sit and have his morning coffee. It wasn't the house in Pacific Heights by a few million bucks, but you could do worse.

The whiskey and the music came together in a good feeling in his stomach. He switched on the lamp by the couch, turned off the overhead, and then stood just feeling the music. This was a good collection. Nowadays he was into the slower, spacious numbers, the ones an older guy could move to without making a fool of himself. The Count. You couldn't count on much, but you could count on the Count. The Count said life was okay and kind of graceful, and you could almost believe him. You had less gravity when you moved to the music. Bert took a few steps, found the catch, the slide, the short step. He put his right hand around an invisible partner's waist, his glass in his outstretched left hand, and spun lazily through the room. Muted brass over a solid foundation of saxophones, rhythm section subdued, brushes on the snare, it never failed.

He closed his eyes and floated and spun for a while, then bumped his thigh on the Barcalounger and realized he was a little dizzy. When he opened his eyes, the first thing he saw was his own reflection in the sliding doors to the deck, with the darkness and lights of the valley shining through.

A big old guy in a wrinkled suit dancing with an empty whiskey glass and an armful of air.

Bert poured another splash, took his glass out to the porch, leaned against the railing. A car nosed along the street below, pulled into the curb, went dark. A couple got out and went into their house. The fog made it blurry and soft like a cameo, and the general hubbub of activity all around was going quiet. Inside, the CD had played itself out. He sat on the tube-aluminum lawn chaise, then lay against its angled back and closed his eyes. A little later he heard the clank of his glass hitting the boards, but he didn't let it rouse him. He was concentrating on the sounds of the city, a lullaby hum that floated him gently away.

6

T
HE CHILL AIR and the exertion of climbing eight blocks steeply uphill, fog beading on her face, refreshed Cree and brought her mostly out of the funk she'd been slipping into. On each side the tall, narrow houses angled themselves against the slope, their warm windows revealing glimpses of the lives unfolding inside, people taking the mild domestic comforts of late evening. It felt tranquil and reassuringly mundane.

The wolfman's house was as lovely in the dark as it was in daylight. Even with the windows so blank and hollow, it didn't look forbidding; it looked like it was just wanting company—a nice house, ready to provide a happy home for somebody. She went in with only a trace of reluctance.

She left the lights off, as always. Darkness was essential to the job at hand, because it tended to induce the mental state required. She and Edgar had conducted functional microelectroencephalogram tests that verified a neurological explanation: With vision frustrated, the spectrum of other senses, physical and extraphysical, came to the fore; different parts of the brain became active. Plus it was always a good idea to avoid alarming the neighbors with signs of unexplained late-night activity at an empty house.

The obvious thing to do was to head straight to the basement to seek out perimortem resonances of the wolfman, but the charm of the place beguiled her. She was feeling no whisper, no silent trill of danger or anticipation, so she took her time and wandered for a while through the main floor rooms. She savored the Victorian era's approach to space and proportion, for which she'd always had a weakness. Finally, she got curious and went upstairs.

It was hard to see in the dim glow of ambient light through the windows, but Bert was right, these rooms were gorgeous. The floors were shiny and smelled new, the walls appeared pristine with fresh paint, the woodwork had been stripped and refinished. A few pieces of furniture stood swaddled in heavy plastic sheeting, shapeless masses in the half-light, but otherwise the rooms were empty, airy. Feeling a little like a burglar, she peered into each doorway as she made her way to the front of the house. In what must have been the master bedroom, she lounged in a broad bay windowseat and just let the house come to her. Beyond the fog-blanked glass, she could sense the steep hill more than see it—a few blurry rectangles of neighbors' windows, warm and yellow, and the sulky hoots of foghorns somewhere out in the Golden Gate.

After a few minutes, she went through her sensitization ritual: lotus position, hands laid in the
dhyana mudra,
breathing slow and deep. An inventory of her sensory and affective state didn't reveal any hidden energies or subconscious disturbances. Her pulse was steady and moderate; behind her eyelids, the phosphene field appeared as a uniform galaxy of tiny lights, and in her ears the sound current maintained a steady, silvery hiss. Her skin sensitivity registered as normal, no wandering cold spots; her emotional landscape seemed devoid of inexplicable dissonances.

Mainly what she felt was a sense of privilege, being for the moment the sole occupant and mistress of this fine place. She savored that for a while, and then it occurred to her maybe it was time to look for a new, nicer place when she got back to Seattle.

She thought she had shed her earlier droop on the brisk walk uphill, but in fact it had tagged behind like a blue balloon, wafting along in her back draft, and now it caught up:
Lovely place,
she thought, /
want this;
maybe it's time to look for a new apartment; can't afford anything this nice, but
could come closer if there were two incomes paying for it; what will happen with
Paul, how long do I hold on to expectations there, why does it always have to be
complicated; what am I doing with my life, why am I not connected with a man;
why can't I be normal; what's the matter with me?

From balloon to avalanche, starting slow but gathering speed and weight until she unlocked her legs and fled the upstairs.

She'd always been uncomfortable with close, dark, underground places. It was a natural reflex: the instinctive fear of limited mobility, of being trapped or suffocated, of being far away from other human beings, where visibility is poor and where dangerous things can easily hide. But knowing its origins didn't help contain the discomfort; being in the basement put her senses on high alert.

She used her penlight to make her way to the end room, panned the beam just once to orient herself, then cut the light and headed to the wolfman's chamber. She felt her way inside and sat on the floor in a silence that was absolute, black darkness that fizzed with phosphene sparks.

The smell of earth and stone. The faintest of movements in the chill air, invisible currents shifting.
And what else?
she asked the darkness.

She groped her way through the layered subjective impressions of the space. She felt the weight of the house above and the walls all around, fought off the fear of enclosure and suffocation, formed her mind into a empty place occupied only by a gentle question:
Hello?

Silence and darkness and the formless passage of time.

Two hours later, she finally gave up. As far as she could tell, no revenants had made themselves apparent. Her problem was similar to Skobold's challenge with reconstruction: She lacked any precedent to draw from. Given the extent of the wolfman's deformities, she couldn't be sure what kind of mind he had. She needed to "get into the head" of the wolfman, but she wasn't sure what that head might feel like, how she would even recognize it as distinct from her own thoughts, fears, or half-dreaming imaginings. For all she knew, the deviations in his cranium had been accompanied by extreme retardation, or behavioral pathologies and affective disorders.

She stood stiffly, groped her way into the larger basement room, then paused to ask the darkness one more time,
Who are you?
But if any trace of the wolfman remained here, it gave no answer.

7

C
AMERA ON RAY,
bird's-eye view,
Ray thinks.
A naked man,
running,
a tiny pale shape against the broad dark flank of the hill. Three dogs
ranging in wide patrol, a shifting triangle in the knee-deep grass. Sun sunk
behind
the ocean fog bank, murky darkness stealing over the coastal range from the
east.

Camera on Ray: Cameron Raymond puzzles at his hawk's-eye perspective, seeing himself as a scissoring figure bounding upward. He wonders whether it's some new neuropathology or some kind of inspiration—the vertigo scares him, but the freedom is worth it. For a time he wheels above, then stoops in a steep dive and drops to himself again. Close is better. He is the hill's lover, the night's secret paramour. He runs uphill tirelessly, racing the clouds to the ridge, certain tonight will be a good night.

Take off your clothes,
Ray exults.
Leave the face behind, the scarred scary
stranger face, a ghost face that hangs in midair and then blows away on the breeze.
Drop all the masks. Underneath is raw you.

Everything registers. He scours his skin on branches and thorns, the night air strokes him with caresses alternately cold and warm. The mountain looms ahead, approaching clouds still far to the west. Behind, the valley lights make a galaxy of sparks caught in the bright webbed strands of highways. When the half-moon nudges above the eastern horizon, he sees his own limbs flashing pale against the grass, then mottled into shifting camo by trees overhead: long muscle bands standing out on the pumping thighs, fisted hands punching, arms corded with effort. Shock of feet hitting the ground, the inburn and outburn of every breath, the syncopated heart battering in the chest. All the parts doing their job to their utmost.

Ray thinks joyously:
What are you, really? This.

In the scrub woods and fields, it was less a run than an obstacle course, where he dodged boulders and trees, swung under branches, leapt bushes and rocks. Sometimes where the slope steepened, he scrambled on all fours.

Ray ran near his limit, but the dogs roved and probed at an easy trot. He knew they felt what he did: that fierce electric life, expressed in the will to run and to hunt. Joyously honing the blade of self against darkness, sky, earth.

He wasn't in the condition he'd been in last year, but on a good night like this he knew he could still run as much as five miles, uphill and over the roughest terrain, and after some rest could easily do the downhill return. He'd once tried to do the same
on
a quarter-mile track and found himself exhausted after only four miles. The difference being the magic of the night, the scent of mystery, the allure of danger. Those things gave you power. Round and round the track, that was the treadmill of the ordinary, destination preordained. No mystery Of course your fire dimmed, will faltered. But out here you never knew where you'd end up. Where the night would take you.

Ray knew of a dozen good places to run within an hour of San Francisco. He preferred to head north to Mount Tamalpais or Point Reyes, but when time was limited he'd stay close. Tonight he'd chosen the Fish and Game Refuge, just twenty miles south of the city. The eastern slopes of the Santa Cruz mountains rose above the densely populated valley, where the streets of San Carlos and Redwood City made a webbed orange glow in the night. But this was protected land and mostly roadless and nobody came to places like this at night. Except Ray.

People didn't come because there was danger in being alone, outside, at night. Every sense shrieked a warning. Darkness and solitude conjured images from the primal imagination, the womb from which fear and religion were born. Ray felt it and it was one of the energies that propelled him, but he also knew that he and the dogs were
part
of that danger—they
constituted
danger, too.

And that was fitting. The epiphany had come to him during another night, a few years ago:
Only when you are dangerous are you truly equal to the
world.

He had chosen the Refuge tonight because the sky had been clear at sunset yet the weather report was predicting heavy clouds later. Fog often embraced San Francisco, but this weather pattern sometimes created an opportunity for a certain kind of connoisseur. A massive cloud bank would shove in off the Pacific, a sky-borne herd of aqueous, gaseous bison. Shoulder to shoulder, blunt heads lowered, they'd roll over the lowland coast, push up the steepening slopes, and then grind to a halt against the spine of the coastal range. For an hour or two the clouds would build against the dam, piling higher and higher until the mountains could no longer contain them. First a few tendrils of fog scouted through saddles in the ridge, and soon a smothering cascade rolled over and down and blotted out the eastern slopes.

If he was lucky and arrived at the summit at just the right time, he'd find himself simultaneously at the top of the ridge of earth and at the bottom of a cliff of boiling cloud. He'd feel the pressure mount as hundreds of miles of weather pressed against the last few feet of earth. Then he'd see it break and pour, and he could join it, become it: He'd run down with the wall of mist at his heels, the clear night ahead.

If he was very lucky, he could stay on the edge. That was best. Always it was the edge of things, the brink of transformation, that was most ecstatic.

It all constituted a thrill so deep and strong it seemed to change him at a molecular level, promising all good things: power, healing, endless vigor, perpetual life. Sky, water, and earth met the fire in his head, lived on inside, remade him into an elemental being.

He knew of no one who had done this except himself. He knew of no one who hungered for it as much or had the vigor for it. Maybe no one but him knew why this was necessary, how it made you whole.

Maybe no one else in the world knew. Maybe you had to be an angel. Or maybe you had to be a werewolf.

Tonight the right conditions didn't materialize. Ray straddled the crest only to find that the clouds had stalled a few miles offshore, arrested by some dynamic of air pressure and wind. He was disappointed, but still took savor in being here, especially with his thoughts so clear, his senses refreshingly free of distortion. Anyway, there was so much to think about. Ever since the discovery of the wolfman's bones, he'd sensed some extraordinary convergence occurring, lines and forces and ideas coming together, deeply meaningful in ways he had not quite determined. These runs, the night, the moon's serene face, were also crucial parts of the ingenious riddle.

He sat at the ridge top until he got too cold. The moon had passed the zenith by the time he stood and whistled to conjure the dogs from the dark. Then they were all running downhill in long, loping bounds, gravity now an ally to flight.

The terrain was mixed here, thickets of manzanitas and junipers casting blots of shadow into clear patches of long grass made pearly by moonlight. They had barely started before the dogs began sending little signals to each other, yelps triggered by something in the scent landscape. A half mile below the ridge, running at a long diagonal, Ray saw a faint flash in the darkness a hundred yards ahead. Fritz's voice rang in a series of urgent yelps, and suddenly there was Basil, angling out of the brush on the right. An instant later Sadie burst from shadows on the left, farther back.

They'd flushed something. That was the flash he'd seen: a deer. It had been grazing at the edge of tree shadows and flicked its white tail as it fled.

Ray broke through a thicket of slashing branches to see Fritz and Sadie veer hard to the left, Basil to the right. Ray followed up the middle as they drove the deer in a long curve back toward the heights.

A hundred yards farther on, he caught sight of the semaphore tail, seesawing through the darkness ahead, then vanishing to the right. He followed the dog's voices in the dark. He hurtled through a patch of chest-high scrub, and when he emerged onto the lighter slope of grass he could see the deer ahead, just flicker and moonshadow.

The land rose hard on their left, a dark wall of bare rock and loose earth that reared on the uphill side. The deer had made a mistake coming this way. It bounded along the base of the cliff with Fritz and Sadie closing from behind, two shadows slicing low through the grass. Then Basil burst from the trees at the far end. The deer turned downhill but sensed Ray pounding up from below. Confused, it turned back toward Fritz, shied, then shied again from Sadie. At last it cut hard left and flung itself at the cliff. It clung to the slope, fell, leapt, slid down again. Basil closed in. Another terrific leap, a desperate struggle of spindle legs for purchase, a rattle of pebbles as it slid down.

Ray stopped forty feet away. He was breathless with exertion and stunned by awe. Flis brain Was a fire, and in the fire was a blot and in the blot another kind of fire. He could see everything clearly. The slant of moonlight and the shape of land made a perfect theater, animated with a performance acted for him alone. So this would be tonight's gift: a stark truth five hundred million years old.

The deer leapt again, slid, and Fritz made the first lunge. The deer dodged and tried to leap over Basil, but the big shepherd reared and caught a haunch and they went down together. Fritz and Sadie were on it instantly, shadows converging close to the ground, humping and flailing. The kill became a single shadow animal in mortal battle with itself, a many-legged, convulsing thing. Ray watched, stunned, transfixed, for only a moment.

"Off!" he barked. "Get off!"

He ran to the wall and shouted again as he came among them. This close, the night air was spiced with blood, charged with terror and the killing urge. It seared him. When he pulled at Sadie's stub tail, the Rottweiler slashed at him with a snarl but then moved away as she saw who it was. He yelled another command as he put a foot against Basil's heaving chest and pushed the shepherd away.

Ray cuffed Fritz from the throat and growled at Basil when he started to move in again. In their frenzy, they were at the very limit of their capacity to obey, but they stood back as Ray knelt to the deer. They were ceding the kill to the pack leader.

The young buck had been badly wounded. Its chest heaved and its breath raged in its throat. Its heart thrummed a muffled drum roll in its chest. Freed of the dogs, it tried to right itself in a convulsion of flailing legs, raised its head, dropped it, tried again. Each time, a flash of moon from one wild eye. Ray felt the spray from its nostrils on his bare skin.
Calm,
he willed it.
Accept. Show me it can be done with grace.
He put a hand on the straining neck and felt the heat, the wet, the quiver and throb. Musty wet fur and the copper smell of blood.

The dogs' hunger for the kill was a dark blade of yearning. The deer's terror and its will for life was another, keen and pure.

Ray was both. And Ray was the eye of knowing.

Camera on Ray as he sits and lifts the quaking head to his lap: In the dark, he strokes the slimed fur, feels the hot spraying breath. He wills the deer to calm, but it twitches away from his touch. For a moment he can find no serious injury, and he wonders if maybe the buck has burst its very heart, its will to live that strong. The thought makes him weep. But as his hand moves along the muscle of the neck he feels a tear in the pelt and a hot pulsing flow. He tries to look into the deer's eye, to stare into its transformation, to meet the animal self in that instant. But the deer no longer sees anything. The eye is a black glistening orb, without mind, angled up at the sky. The thick pulse ebbs and soon stops. Ray waits for something to pass out of the deer. He wants to see it. He tries to feel what is in himself that is the same.

A final exhalation and then all that's left are random quivers. The tension goes out of the night and the aftermath washes in, sadness and wonder. Ray knows the dogs' hunger to kill is what makes them dogs. The deer's desire to run and to live is what makes it a deer. Ray's ability to feel both, his yearning to understand both, is what makes him human.

What are you really? This.
The truth is rapturous and so hard.

"I'm sorry," Ray whispers. "My beauty," he says. "Thank you," he says.

For a while he strokes the deer's body and weeps for it and then he gives it up to the dogs.