Losing Clementine (20 page)

It rang and rang and rang and no one—not even an answering machine—picked up. I hung up and typed the number into an online reverse directory. The address was forty miles outside of Fresno.

An hour later, I'd packed a knapsack for a possible overnight and poured extra kibble into Chuckles's bowl. He pretended not to notice. I told him not to throw any wild parties while I was gone and reminded him we needed to talk about his future plans.

Fresno is a little more than halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco as far as mileage goes, and a whole world away by any other standard. It's in the middle of the San Joaquin Valley, where all the water used to drain into a lake that no longer exists. Everything wet has been diverted to the farms that surround it. Grapes and oranges, garlic and almonds. Even kiwifruit, which I have trouble imagining growing at all. Any fruit that grows hair is the gift of a friendly alien race. There's even hay and cotton, though the south gets all the credit for that.

I turned off the 5 well before Bakersfield and watched as civilization thinned out and road signs got larger and more interesting. A helpful tip-off that a fast-food restaurant was only twenty-two miles ahead got me a little excited and not just because I had to pee. The road was flat and straight and the rows and rows of irrigated farmland trancelike. Combined with my lack of sleep, it was all I could do to keep my eyelids from snapping shut.

By the time I approached the address, it was still only early evening, and the sky had just barely started to hint at the dusty purple and salmon pink of velvet Elvis paintings. The weedy shoulder of the highway had been blackened for the length of two football fields, and I could smell the acrid soot. Fire is so common during California summers it has a season of its own. The landscape is opposite that of the rest of the country. It's during summer that everything turns brown and dies. Instead of the remains being covered with snow, they catch hold of some careless cigarette butt and ignite. Not until fall and winter bring rain does everything sprout green again.

I had turned off Highway 99 at an intersection too small to have so much as a gas station. I went another few miles before finding a stand of neglected single-story homes all clustered together in the middle of open farm country like cows in a thunderstorm. Some of them were brick, but most had aluminum siding that was well past its warranty date. Large mismatched awnings shaded the windows, and the yards—front and back—were surrounded by chain-link fences. More of the fencing blocked off gravel driveways with gates that were chained and locked. Each of the gates had signs that read
NO SOLICITING/NO TRESPASSING.
The only things not fenced off and guarded were the mailboxes, each stencil-painted with a number.

I pulled off and parked at the edge of the road. When the crunch of loose gravel under my tires quieted and the engine powered down, there was nothing to hear. No birds. No kids. Nobody watering the weedy brown grass. I rolled up the window and watched. Closed up, the inside of the car smelled like stale french fries from a pit stop an hour ago.

Call it city-girl paranoia, but something was wrong with a place that didn't move a twitch in all the time I sat there watching and waiting. It had the stillness and ill will of a military base long abandoned for being too close to a nuclear testing site.

I got out and walked across the road—no need to look both ways—and stood in front of the gate across the driveway of my target house. There was a dusty brown Cutlass circa 1980 parked behind the gate with its long nose nearly touching the garage door. There was not, however, any way to knock or ring a bell or for any visitor at all to announce her presence except, perhaps, by shouting, which just felt wrong. I put my toe into one of the diamond-shaped holes just below the
NO TRESPASSING
sign and boosted myself up onto the fence. I threw my other leg over and landed on the gravel drive.

The growl and the bark and the roar that came at my back sounded like a tyrannosaurus. My spine stiffened, and my pee muscles clinched. I was afraid to turn around and afraid not to, and there wasn't enough time to consider my options because it was on me in less than a second. When I did turn, I was pressed up against the gate looking into the open jaws of a German shepherd. The mouth was so big and gaping and full of yellowing teeth that I couldn't see the rest of its body. It had come darting out from under the Cutlass like a greased weasel, and I knew I was going to get bit. The question was only how bad. I tried to scamper back up and over the fence, but I was afraid to turn around again, and my hand slipped on the top. The sharp twisted wire at the apex of one of the diamonds sliced through the skin of my forearm as neatly as a butcher's knife but with a much higher risk of tetanus.

The creature's jaws lunged at me, catching my jeans and scraping against my shin underneath. They clamped down on the tough fabric and yanked, pulling me the rest of the way down off the fence. I heard the denim rip.

“Jasper!”

The front door flew open, and a man in a ball cap charged out onto the small cement stoop. He did not come any closer.

“Jasper, cut that the hell out!”

Jasper let go and sank into his shoulders, giving him the scary hunchbacked look of a hyena. A growl rumbled around in his chest like one of the hot rod engines that had got me into this mess in the first place.

I took a gulp of air that rattled my rib cage as if the bones had come loose from their moorings and for a horrible moment wondered if I had peed myself. I couldn't tell by feeling. The adrenaline rushing through my system like five eightballs mixed up my nerves, and there was no polite way to look down between my legs to check.

“What the fuck is the matter with you, woman? You trying to get yourself killed?”

It was so ironic I wouldn't have known how to answer even if I could speak, and I wasn't sure that I could. I was still looking at Jasper, who was obeying his master but giving the impression that either of them could renege on the current arrangement at any moment.

“What do you want?”

The bottom fell out of my brain, and for a minute I couldn't remember what I wanted. “We don't buy nothin' around here. Can't you read the damn sign?”

He was older than me, but I couldn't tell by how much. I got the feeling people aged differently out here. It was hot out, hotter than L.A. by a lot, and there was nothing to provide shade except for the big plastic awnings over the windows, which came down so far I couldn't imagine you could see anything from the inside. Nonetheless, Jasper's companion wore jeans and a long-sleeved plaid shirt buttoned all the way up to the very top of the neck. The ball cap, like the awning, blocked too much and made me even more uneasy, if such a thing were possible.

“Did you own a '56 T-Bird?”

He shifted where he stood, and it was impossible to tell if it was curiosity or unease. “Why you asking?”

“It's an unusual car,” I said. “My dad owned one once. I'm trying to trace it.”

“I don't have it no more. Sold it more than a year ago.” He turned toward the door. “Jasper, come.”

Jasper was a lot easier to read. He wanted to turn away from me about as much as he wanted to leave a two-inch-thick rib eye.

“Did it have a tear in the seat?” I hollered after him. “The passenger-side seat?”

“Not anymore. I fixed it. How did you know that?”

I ignored his question in favor of my own. “Where did you get it?”

“That ain't any business of yours.”

I nodded my concession of the point. “I'm only asking because I'm trying to find my dad. I don't know where he is or if he's even alive, but I know he owned a car like that. So maybe whoever you bought it from bought it from someone who bought it from him.”

“I bought that car thirty years ago. I can't help you.”

I took a step forward to stop him, forgetting about Jasper, who scrambled up to an attack position and growled a reminder.

“Jasper, down.”

“What year? What year did you buy it?”

His shoulders dropped and he looked on the verge of an audible sigh.

“I'd just bought this place. So it must've been seventy-eight.”

“Just after school started?”

“What?”

“September? Did you buy it in September?”

“Mighta been.”

“Do you remember anything about the man you bought it from?”

The street and all the surrounding houses remained still and silent. Not one person had so much as pushed back a drapery.

“It was a couple.”

“Pardon?”

“I bought it from a couple.” He raised his voice, as if the problem was that I might be a little deaf or a lot dumb. “Husband and wife. They was moving to the Midwest somewhere, and his old lady didn't want to take it with them. Made over twenty thousand dollars on it when I sold it, too. Man was a dumbass selling that car for less than it was worth. I talked him down, but he shouldn't-a let me do it.”

“He had his wife with him?”

“Yeah, she was the one so keen on selling.”

“The Midwest, you said?”

“Kansas, maybe. One of them real flat places. I remember thinking it was good he was selling it out here. Cars don't last long in them middle states. All that salt they put on the roads in the winter corrodes the metal something awful. Never buy a classic car that's been livin' out there. It won't last you.”

It hadn't occurred to me that Mom might have known he was leaving, might have insisted he sell the car before going, taken her cut.

“Thank you for your time,” I said and took a step back.

I turned to climb back over the padlocked gate, and Jasper gave one last bark in case I had any fancy ideas.

“Wait a minute,” the man called out. “I can open the damn thing.”

I waited for him to cross the wide lawn and thought all the things I'd never thought as a kid. Had it been my father's choice not to write or send birthday gifts or had Mom told him not to? What about when she died? Did someone tell him? Why did she lie to me? Why act surprised?

Up close the man's neck was burned red with white creases where the skin folded. He smelled like engine oil and soap, and when he bent over and pulled a lump of keys out of his pocket to unlock the gate, his shirt sleeve pulled up and showed a tiny bit of gold watch on his wrist. Jasper had trotted up to him and was sitting at his foot, panting under the sun. I knew how he felt. After only a few minutes, I felt the prickly pink of sunburn threatening.

The man unlocked the gate, and I went through, then turned to say good-bye.

“She had pretty red hair.”

“Who did?”

“The woman. I got kind of a thing for redheads. I just remember cause it looked natural like. Not that bottle red that don't look nice.”

“Oh,” I said.

“You color your hair?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “I don't.”

“Good. It never looks nice.”

I nodded, unsure of what to say. This John Frieda side of my new backwoods friend was unsettling.

“Come on, Jasper.”

He locked the gate and walked back up to the house with the German shepherd behind him. Once he was inside with the door shut, the silence was so complete it pressed down on my eardrums. No birds. No people. No cars. No nothing.

I walked back to the car and started the engine.

I'd inherited my hair color from my mother. “As close to black as it could be without being Chinese,” Aunt Trudy used to say.

I had no idea who the redhead was.

I drove on to Fresno with my brain spinning out, my thoughts pooling on the floor like an unraveled roll of toilet paper.

I stopped at the first chain drugstore I found and went in for gauze pads, ointment, and liquor. I ripped open the packaging right there at the cash register and squeezed the oily, clear gunk onto the cut on my arm, which had pulled away from itself on either side like a rip in a couch. The skin around it was an angry red.

“You gotta be careful,” the girl behind the counter said. She was round, Hispanic, and not a day over sixteen. “That could get nasty infected.”

I only needed it to hold together for another two weeks, sort of like having a rental car. As long as it runs, right?

I put on too much of the ointment, pressed a gauze pad to it, and then—with the help of the counter girl, who told me she was thinking about going to college to become a nurse—applied four strips of no-ouch medical tape.

“Why not be a doctor?” I asked, stuffing the trash back in my plastic sack along with a not-so-great-but-as-good-as-they-had bottle of tequila.

“Doctors are assholes.”

“Especially shrinks,” I agreed.

“Yeah,” she said and nodded, even though I was willing to bet the closest she'd ever gotten to a shrink was a school counselor, which was probably close enough.

Three stoplights later I found a chain hotel/motel with a big red sign on the building that said
$119/NIGHT POOL AND FITNESS CENTER
in white letters. I took a front parking spot, a complimentary newspaper, and a Chinese take-out/delivery menu from the front desk.