Moonlight Water (5 page)

“You love it.”

“No, I wouldn't say that. It's more like it amazes me. The pieces feel like they're from a different place altogether, from a different time.”

“A month after you leave the Bay, why don't you meet me in Moonlight Water? It's past time for me to visit family and old friends, been a while, and Moonlight Water is where the artists are. Who knows what you might get out of it?” Gianni looked at the shades of gray, exquisite chunks of real estate, crawling up the hills of Mill Valley, and the amber lights filling those homes. Across the Bay, towers shone with the fluorescent lights of people still at work, but the lower levels, including the houses, were below his line of sight.

“Moonlight Water is the most beautiful place on the planet,” Gianni told Robbie.

Red suddenly understood something real about his friend, something he'd missed all these years. Gianni was truly an expatriate. Never truly at home in San Francisco, and when he was in Moonlight Water he probably missed the energy and the river of money flowing through the Financial District. Maybe Rob was an expatriate, but from where?

He'd meet Gianni, no question about it. Being alone, Robbie needed that. After a month his friend would be a great gift. And, Gianni might like to see both of his own worlds come together. “Done deal,” Robbie said.

They smoked a little and walked back to the cabin together.

Gianni stopped at his Mercedes in the driveway and fished for his keys. “Don't forget. One month after you leave, you meet me.”

“Don't you forget, when I get things taken care of, meet me at Point Reyes with my new van.”

“You got it.”

Robbie looked to the west over Gianni's head. Patches of fog obscured the infinite ocean.

 

6

FUNERAL ARRANGEMENTS

After Robbie set a course and got the boat on autopilot, he carefully set the gas leaking into the bilge. There his perpetrators were, two bare wires pointing toward each other like the fingers of God and Adam in the Sistine Chapel. The wires were ready to launch the apocalypse. He took several deep breaths.

Before reaching the Golden Gate Bridge, he took the tiller again. Robbie intended to enjoy his last sail. She went sweet but not easy, and he arrived shortly before dark. Approaching the Farallons, he pulled himself into a matter-of-fact mood. Things to do.

Then he saw another boat at the moorage, and he held the
Elegant Demon
a quarter mile or more offshore. There was enough light for some sailor to see the shape of Robbie's boat, but not to guess its name or see the man on board. He dropped his sails, as if he meant to motor to the moorage. It would look like he'd started the engine in the usual way, seeing no need to vent the bilges first, forgetting he might have a leak. A spark between those bare wires, bilges sloshing with gas and fumes—the big bang.

After what was going to happen to the
Demon,
no one would be able to tell whether she had been running under sail or power. Nor would anyone be able to tell what had happened to the parts of her. Or him. Some bits would sink, shoved by currents and tides. Some would float away. And most of the fleshy human parts would be scooped up by great white sharks, top of the heap in the ocean's food chain. Simple as that.

A fine gesture.

For sure, whoever was moored at the island would hear the blast and see the flames, and another cautionary tale of a sailor's carelessness would write itself in the annals of recreational boating.

Robbie worked with deliberate, efficient movements, black in his wet suit, an onyx shadow in the fading light. He bolted the big outboard onto the stern and slid the inflatable into the rocking sea. He clambered up and down, stowing food, water, a spare set of oars, mask and fins, and other supplies for his escape. He took a last look around with a practical eye, jumped into the raft, untied, pushed off, fired up the raft's engine, and motored a hundred yards away.

He wanted to do it in the first moments of absolute darkness. With his heart's eye he looked back at her, cradled on the sea like a lover asleep.

Sweetness, sadness, eagerness, fear. All stirred within him.

He lifted a black plastic garage-door opener high. He heard the blast before he saw it.

Elegance and beauty turned to charred chaos. The cockpit belched flame like a bomb hit her. Pieces of the
Demon
arched up like rockets. The sails held her at the surface for a moment, and then she slid to the bottom of the sea.

When the last echoes of destruction had floated away, he said quietly in a tone that was almost steady, “The old me is dead. Long live Red Stuart.”

*   *   *

Red shook all the way to Drake's Beach. It wasn't the wind and the water. It was the heady cocktail he'd downed, destruction and creation.

It was a clear night, and he picked up the Point Reyes Lighthouse from well out. Nearing it, he turned east and cut around the point into Drake's Bay. Easy going. Headlights beckoned to him from the beach—his one friend, Gianni. Red got on his mask and fins. He slashed each compartment of the inflatable raft with gaping rips. Instantly, he was in the water and the inflatable was ghosting to the bottom of the sea. He started swimming.

About five minutes later he emerged from the water, baptized and arisen. “Hi, Red,” he said to himself, by way of introduction.

Gianni shook his hand and cried, “A toast!”

They traded high fives. They drank from Gianni's flask. They crooned in turn, “To a new life.”

Gianni looked at the wet suit, fins, and mask. Deep gray smoke, acrid, wove with the fog. He shook his head. “You sure go in for the dramatic.”

“A necessary statement.”

Red checked that everything was in order, registration, cash, clothes, a cooler. Then he checked his other necessities—his few musical instruments, his computers, sketch pads, and good pens—all that he wanted to keep from his old life tucked into drawers beneath his mattress. He could part with everything else.

Near midnight he dropped Gianni off at his house. Red handed Gianni a handwritten note. Gianni understood—tomorrow he would call Kell and Kell would hold a press conference with the tragic announcement. Robbie's final note for the world would read: “Sorry. I just can't do it anymore.”

He stepped out and gave his only friend a hug.

“By the way,” Gianni said. He opened the glove box. “I put in a book you'll want to read before you meet me at Moonlight Water. Lots to discover before you get there.”

Red glanced at the paperback,
Desert Solitaire,
written by someone named Edward Abbey. But Red had no interest in finding out
about
things. He wanted to suck life deep inside his lungs, and pump every molecule of the journey into his heart.

Red got in the van and started it up. He thought,
Before me lies the adventure.
The first spin of the wheels waved good-bye to his old world.

When he was a kid, Grandpa Angus always bought him bottles of goop and loops to blow bubbles. Right now he felt as bright and fragile as those rising, bright-colored bubbles on vagrant winds.

 

PART TWO

In Which Red Arrives. Somewhere.

 

7

LOST OR FOUND?

Don't eat without feeding something to the fire, or you'll never be rich.

—Navajo saying

 

A thousand miles and one universe from San Francisco

In the darkness Winsonfred Manygoats had a seeing. It was a flash of light, and he saw it not with his ordinary eyes but with his spirit eyes. A flash of light and parts of a boat flying into the sky, like birds flushed up by gunshot. Strange.

He was 103 years old, and in this last decade he'd gotten used to drifting from one world to another. Sometimes, as now, he also saw things. He knew when they came from another place.

He shivered, not from the evening cold.
Something is going to happen.
He knew that much. He settled back on the bench, closed his eyes, and let his mind wander. After two or three minutes he opened them again. Nothing came to him. Sometimes, along with a seeing, there were clues. None tonight.

His thoughts turned to the taste of tapioca pudding. The cook prepared it for the old folks—Winsonfred loved tapioca. In his mind he pictured his great-granddaughter Zahnie, who had a good heart but spent her life fretting. He wondered if the seeing had to do with her. She was a good granddaughter, but she lived in a shell, hurt by life, feeling guilty and sometimes afraid.

He was sorry about that foolishness, but she was still his favorite. Zahnie had moved into a cabin in back of the care center so he wouldn't be alone there. He appreciated that, but he wished she had a man. A good man, not like the few she had let peek inside her shell.

Then he pictured Neville the patriarch in the house, glaring down from his portrait on the landing above Winsonfred's recliner. Neville was the bishop of the Mormons who founded this desert town on the edge of the Navajo reservation 103 years ago. It was the summer Winsonfred was born. The two of them had struggled for decades about what this little community would become. He sought out Neville in his heart, for Neville was long gone from the earth.
What are you up to this time?
But Winsonfred came up blank. Maybe Neville was about to make something bad happen again, another disharmony. That was his nature.

Winsonfred looked to the south, where the river ran, and sent out a wordless call to Ed, a call that would wobble his question across the indigo-domed sky to the cottonwoods along the stream. Winsonfred wasn't great with this gift of seeing. His gift was as a singer for the ceremonies, leader of the Blessing Way and Enemy Way and other paths to healing. Only in this last decade, living half in this world and half on the other side, did he begin to develop second sight, and he didn't understand most of what he saw. It was really kind of a nuisance. Maybe Ed would know something.

Ed was a buzzard now. Twenty years ago he'd been a man, a friend of Winsonfred's. He was a writer of books, but Winsonfred had never read any of Ed's books, couldn't read much of anything beyond street signs and the signs that marked Walmart, Safeway, and the like.

Ed had always said he wanted to return to earth, after his human cycle, as a buzzard. He wanted to ring up the sky in great circles on the warm, rising air, behold the deserts and mountains in every direction, get a little to eat every day, and spend evenings roosting in the big trees along the river with his buzzard buddies. Ed had gotten what he wanted, and the two were still friends.

Ed lit on a big branch in the top of the cottonwood by the driveway. Winsonfred sent his silent message upward:
I saw a big flash of light and parts of a boat being flung up into the sky. Then I got a feeling, a strong feeling, something's going to happen.

Ed cocked his head at Winsonfred, waiting for more details. There weren't any.

You seen anything, Ed? You know anything?

Ed cocked his head the other way and held it, listening, looking thoughtful.

This thing that's coming, is it good or bad?

Ed lifted one wing, then the other. That message was:
I don't know. Good and bad are the way you humans see things.

Out loud Winsonfred said, “Keep your eyes open, will you?”

Ed lifted his wings, coasted off the branch, and wheeled toward the Old Age River. Keeping his eyes open, that was what Ed did. He spotted water pockets in dry stone and meals that hadn't had time to cool off.

When the time came, and it would, he would tell Winsonfred all that he saw.

*   *   *

Zahnie sensed the music, but she didn't hear it. Always when it came, this was the way, feeling without hearing. It was soft and languid and delicious and it stroked her hair, silk-scarf smooth. Orchid petals, soft and shuddering, a pulse of purple.

The pulse was not silk or orchids but the music itself. She could feel it clearly now, a soprano sax gliding over her skin. Why could she never hear it? Swirling from the sax, it was a gentle waterfall gliding note by note down her shoulders. Floating sound-feeling sensuality.

Zahnie startled awake. She searched inside the half-dark room. She shook her head, realized she'd been dozing in the recliner where her great-grandfather Winsonfred always sat. Where was Grandfather? Must be outside. He would be getting chilled in the cool evening. She stood up, scraped the door of the assisted living center open, and saw the old man on his bench. “You'll be getting cold, Grandfather,” she said in Navajo.

She helped him stand and held his elbow as he climbed the few steps to the front door.

“I saved you some tapioca pudding, Grandfather.”

He smiled at her. Then he said gently, “I saw something.”

She didn't exactly let her eyes roll, but she knew his mind.

Winsonfred told her, “Something's going to happen.” And she thought maybe he looked a little afraid.

 

8

ADVENTURE AND CATASTROPHE

Don't stand on high rocks. They will grow into the sky with you.

—Navajo saying

 

Now, by God, now, today.
Moonlight Water late this afternoon. Weeks of wandering, of wondering, weeks of strangers, today all that would end when he met up with Gianni. A friend to hear his stories. A friend to report what was happening back in San Francisco, if Red decided to go into that at all. A friend.

What a month. That first night, when he blew up his life, Red pointed his van east with no idea where to go in the vast hinterlands of America, which to him meant anywhere outside the Bay Area. True, he had touched down in this or that town on tour, but in those alien spaces he'd experienced almost nothing. The band had a big tour bus with the rear half cleared out for a rehearsal area, and Red (well, Robbie) spent all his time in the bus asleep in a reclining seat, never taking in the scenery that whizzed by at seventy miles an hour. In the cities they toured he saw the faces of thousands of fans, backstage areas, the walls of hotel suites, and, when he wasn't married, the geography of some female bodies. His knowledge of the interior of his country was less than what anyone might get out of the Sunday travel section.