Edge (5 page)

Chief carried a bowie knife thonged against his right leg. Here at this roadside place beside Interstate 80, the Chinese people who rolled the utensils in paper napkins and counted out our change were used to him. Sometimes in coffee shops up and down the state a police officer stopped and asked him about his knife, in friendly, cop way.

Cops don't start out
You are now under arrest
. They act friendly;
Whoa, party's over
. It wasn't against any law to carry a nine-inch blade against your leg, a tool of his trade, a sharp edge to cut through cardboard and packing straps.

It was the knife that had caught my eye months ago when I was looking for work, in and out of factories, laid off for the second time in a year. I filled out five or six applications a day, able to write my previous employer as a reference. I was never fired—there just wasn't enough entry-level work. I saw this man who needed a shave, scampering up and down the loading dock, a happy buccaneer. I wanted to work with that guy, I thought. I wanted to
be
that guy, armed and ready.

Later that day I was able to tell my dad that I had a new job, better than the one at Garden World. All Dad had to do was talk Mom into signing some waivers so Outlet Spa couldn't be sued if I dislocated a gut carrying fiberglass hot tubs.

I still liked Chief, but not as much as I used to. I pointed to his plaid shirt, where the shred of lettuce had fallen. He brushed it off.

“What did you do,” he continued, “storm out—How dare you ask me questions like that. Or did you saunter out, like this?” He cocked his shoulders without getting up, an arrogant look on his face exactly the way I wish I had looked leaving Mr. Kann's class.

I ignored him, like my mom looked when someone farted.

It was late that afternoon when I got home and saw my mom's note under the Federal Title Company magnet, a plastic outline shaped like the United States. Her writing is all slashes, the dots on the i's sideways lines like cartoon characters showing surprise.
Good news! Call Sgt. Hollingsworth
.

Sometimes I can't do something right away—unwrap a present, answer a phone. It drives people crazy.
Why is he taking so long?
I knew what my mom's note meant. I was excited. But I had to take some time.

First I called my dad's number and got his sex-kitten wife on the machine again. The message light was blinking, other messages, other news. I paid no attention, sure they had nothing to do with me.

S
EVEN

I waited at the curb late that afternoon, believing that this was the beginning of my new luck.

I knew my dad felt the same way sometimes, superstitious in little ways, wearing his argyle socks to the taping of his PBS pilot, the one based on
Prehistoric Future
. Every day under his creased gray slacks or his khaki field pants he wore those knee-high canary-and-purple socks, a gift from me when I was in second grade and thought they were really handsome.

He washed them every night, and in the thick fishbowl glass of the dryer we could see them darting and pausing, getting ready for the next day's round of good fortune. My parents never bickered and bitched at each other, even when their own personal
Titanic
listed and began to go down. We could all still make jokes about things, how the wool-blend socks were wearing out, how we hoped Dad's big toe didn't ask to be listed in the credits.

Rhonda Newport swerved over to the curb. I trotted alongside the van, wrenching open the door, piling in, as the van kept moving like a getaway car. The van smelled like spearmint, Mrs. Newport chewing gum, snapping it between her teeth.

She floored the accelerator, the van lurching around corners. We squealed way out into the far lane as we entered Park Boulevard, cars ahead of us slowing down, easing to the side to let this madwoman and her passenger get by. I hung on to the armrest.

“I'm running on empty,” she sang out.

I would later remember each detail, how happy I was. I wasn't even very annoyed with Bea's mom for being almost out of gas.

You pay in advance in most gas stations in Oakland, and Mrs. Newport gave me several wrinkled bills without paying much attention, as though money didn't matter.

Money has a dark, vegetable odor, not like the overpowering, breath-punishing smell of Chevron unleaded. I couldn't help feeling impatient with how slowly everything moved. Gasoline flows into a big empty tank with a noise that can be calming, a river falling softly over a dam. Some of the fuel spattered onto the pavement, and the gas gun would not hook back where it belonged. Mrs. Newport stayed in the front seat, hanging her arm down the side, dancing her short nubby chewed-off fingernails against the car door.

“Did they say what shape it was in?” she shouted over the music, KSAN turned up so loud screwheads vibrated throughout the car, music impossible to distinguish, a bellowing country-western voice.

“They close in eight minutes,” I said, hanging on. I wanted to ask Mrs. Newport how she felt about Bea's new haircut, but not right now. Sometimes I could see through Rhonda Newport's shiny manner and see another person. A bright metal hair clip she must have forgotten about dangled over one ear as she drove.

She turned knobs, got the radio to shut up. “Where'd they find it?”

My mom was running a meeting in her office, the One Two Threes of Escrow, a must for new staff. Bea was in her exercise class, a martial arts and dance class combined. We were speeding along in a van I had never ridden in before, a vehicle with calico curtains and a little kitchen stove in the back. We were moving at thirty miles an hour over the limit along Lakeshore, the lake calm and empty, little black charred places in the street, like cigarette burns, last night's flares.

Mrs. Newport had that come-as-you-are look of someone interrupted in the middle of Saturday afternoon, an oversized man's shirt unbuttoned halfway down, lipstick stabbed on too fast, too bright. It struck me that maybe she was one of those women who didn't mind getting pulled over for speeding, a chance to flirt her way out of a ticket.

I pointed to the side of my head, over my ear.

“What?” she asked.

I pointed again, widening my eyes a little. She plucked the hair clip from her hair and tossed it onto the dash, where it landed in a beanbag ashtray.

Cars were jammed under the freeway, parked derelicts, abandoned heaps, the sounds of traffic overhead. It was not the rushing, windy symphony of highway traffic from down there. Trucks hit the seams of the roadway above with a metallic bang that echoed in this dark, dusty refuge for unclaimed autos.

The woman in the office had given me a form, the words
Press hard you are making five copies
prominent at the top of the page. A man in a navy-blue OPD jacket and the gray, comfy overalls of a parking attendant led us along past the rows of cars, yellow crayon on the windshields, dates, last names, and symbols that meant nothing to me, police algebra.

“All rightie,” said the parking lot cop. “All rightie, all rightie,” a little unmusical song to himself.

“I picked up a twenty-dollar tip today,” I said.

I felt immediately foolish, bragging about my exploits in the trucking business with Mrs. Newport. She consulted for the marketing division of Pacific Bell, selling people extra phone lines for their computers and their fax machines, speaker phones and phones that allowed you to do banking, how much money you were down to flashing on and off on the screen.

“Twenty dollars, my heavens,” said Rhonda Newport, looking away from me, kicking a chrome bumper, a little tap with her snakeskin cowboy boot.

But it had been an interesting day, the tarp blowing half off on Highway 29, Chief's knots failing, not mine. Then, after we sweated all the way up to a big hole in a lawn and waited there, holding the big, blue spa shell, a man who looked exactly like Abraham Lincoln, but tanned and wearing a bikini brief, asked us to stand like that while he took our picture.

“A dark blue Honda,” said the parking lot cop.

“This empty space in the dash,” said the parking cop. “That mean they took something out, or was that always there?”

A hole, a red wire, a yellow wire. “They took my CD player,” I said.

“That's a shame,” said Mrs. Newport.

“It was a terrible stereo,” I said. “A Pioneer FM/CD combo that only got about half the stations, Radio Shack speakers.” My dad had bought the car from the stepson of a friend, and gave it to me one Christmas, “just to give you a start,” he had said.

“Look, they left the speakers right where they were,” I was saying, my voice dazed with the wonder of it. The gray speakers were composed of matching metal grills covered with a gray, fuzzy fabric, one speaker in each door. I felt embarrassed. For a moment I was hot with gratitude, almost tearful. My car had come back to me. Through the windshield I could read the scraggly backwards writing, my last name and today's date.

But I knew the engine would not start. That would be too much to ask. I almost wished there was some way I could contact the thieves, to thank them for leaving my car almost entirely intact. I fitted the key into the ignition.

E
IGHT

I had to sign one more form, with a pen attached to the clipboard by a beaded chain. I pressed so firmly the clipboard nearly tumbled from my hands, and I had to rest it on the roof of the Honda while I finished
Madison
.

“You may now,” announced the parking cop cheerfully, tearing perforated paper into separate sheets, “at this time, take possession of your vehicle.”

I thanked him. He handed me the last sheet, my signature so dim I could hardly see it. Something somewhere made an insistent chirping sound, a happy electronic noise almost lost in the banging and sighing of traffic overhead. Rhonda Newport pawed through her purse, a wispy white tissue tumbling to the ground.

She held a telephone to her ear, briefly. “It's for you.”

The traffic at the Bay Bridge toll plaza tends to back up. Brake lights everywhere, nothing moving. Rhonda was right: I wouldn't have been able to drive, feeling the way I did. No, that wasn't quite the case. I could have driven to San Francisco alone, fighting traffic in my Honda, but it wouldn't be right to let me do it by myself, not now. People owe some things to each other.

I had to admire the way Rhonda whipped the van from one lane to another, leaning on the horn. A dotted arrow on a Caltrans truck was directing traffic to merge to the left.

“It's not as bad as they think it is,” I said. Or maybe I didn't actually say the words. Maybe I just kept repeating them over and over in my head.

The horn had a solemn, muted quality, sounding from somewhere down below our feet. I hated the way it sounded, too soft. “UC Medical Center,” said Rhonda, talking mostly to herself. “I think I know how to get there.”

“You
think,
” I heard myself say, unable to keep from sounding like my mother.

“Don't worry,” she said.

In surgery for hours
.

It was a long sundown, no fog tonight, city lights just now coming on. Rhonda held her arm out the window like a wide receiver giving a straight-arm, holding off traffic while she maneuvered into another lane.

The hair clip vibrated with the engine, a dry, buzzing sound from the beanbag ashtray. My mother's news had to be all exaggeration, something we would think about a few weeks from now, a minor incident that got blown out of all proportion. I folded my arms, feeling cold, with no sense of time passing. We had always been here on the bridge, stuck, going nowhere.

I should turn on some quiet music, the kind the dentist plays, soothing, music that gets you thinking the world isn't real. I didn't touch the radio. I just sat there, trying not to think.

It was a phrase I had heard on the news. The words had never had any special, personal meaning for me.
Condition critical
.

“You can't park there,” said a very stout, tall man with a zipper jacket and a glittering badge,
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA POLICE
. “This is emergency vehicles only.”

My legs were stiff, the shrubbery unreal, people in quiet conversation, searching their pockets for keys. How wonderfully normal it all was, a newspaper machine beside a green bin decorated with a picture, a stick figure, dotted lines showing the path of his litter into a receptacle. It was probably over already, good news. Mom didn't bother to call—she wanted to tell me in person.

The man looked me up and down, his eyes hidden behind tinted glasses, black plastic frames. “We have visitor parking in lot B across the street.”

Rhonda was there beside me, then, putting her keys into her purse, and some of the telephone company executive was in her voice when she said, “I'll move the car in just a minute. We have an emergency.”

The man with the badge seemed to grow taller. His whole world was full of people with emergencies.

Rhonda added, like it was easy to say, an afterthought that might help explain, just a little detail, “His father's been shot.”

My mother didn't even glance at Rhonda, stepping right up to me and giving me a hug. It was a real hug, a rib-crusher.

“What happened?” I asked, my voice sounding pretty calm, although higher than usual.

My mom said, hearing what I was really saying, not just my words, “I don't believe it either.”

“Are they still …” My voice did one of its fade-outs. I couldn't even complete a question: still operating?

“They wouldn't tell
us
, Zachary. You know that. We're just the ex-family.” Sometimes my mother's argumentative manner drove me crazy. But now I found it familiar, the two of us sharing the same paranoia. It was just a tradition with her, sounding relaxed and pissed-off at the same time.

“Did it happen downtown?” said Rhonda.

I winced inwardly. You had to use irony with my mother, sarcasm, adopt my mother's tone. My Mom gave Rhonda a look now, her face dead. “No,” she said. Then, deciding to communicate to me, if not to Rhonda, she added, “Nineteenth Street. In an ordinary neighborhood, not far from Golden Gate Park. He stopped at a red light.”