North of Montana (9 page)

PART TWO

DESERT CLARITY

SEVEN

IN THE DESERT everything is clear.

It doesn’t hit until you are two hours out of Los Angeles, past the tangled hell of downtown and the protracted ugliness of San Bernardino, beyond the world’s biggest freeway interchange where the 605 meets the 10 in swooping parabolic ribbons of concrete. It starts somewhere out there when the shoulders of the road turn to white sand and there are no more sky-blue town-house colonies popping up in the distant wasteland; when the air, thinned of pollutants, becomes light and transparent and you can see amazing details like rockfalls on the slopes of snow-topped mountains miles away.

Slowing down off the freeway, suddenly quiet enough to hear your very tires chewing over feathers of sand blown across the off-ramp, as the setting sun shoots every tiny needle of every single cactus with scarlet backlight, it hits. Desert clarity. The absence of motion, pressure, traffic, and people. A mysterious monochromatic landscape speckled with life. Your body settles down. The air feels spiritual—that is, filled with spirits that a tacky little town can’t restrain. Rolling down the gamy main street of Desert Hot Springs you want to shout just to hear how your own voice would sound as a loose uninhibited coyote wail instead of the tight pissed-off squeak with which you usually address your fellow man.

Poppy’s condominium is no great shakes for what it cost, set up on a ridge looking west over an empty shopping center with a Thrifty Drug and a Vons market, a KFC and video rental store, all new construction—clean black asphalt without a tire mark and spindly palms in redwood boxes. Carrying groceries to my car (if I don’t buy my own supplies, I wind up drinking Seagram’s at night and gagging on All-Bran in the morning), I enjoy the mild breeze and calculate that by the time the town grows big enough to actually support this overblown supermarket Poppy will be dead and I can sell his condo for a nice piece of change.

I know I am fooling myself with that kind of thinking. We buried my mother when I was fourteen, my grandmother was gone before I was one year old. One more trip to Eternal Valley Memorial Park would finally cut me loose from the already thin thread of kinship like rusty shears operating in the hands of one of those gnarly sisters of fate. It wouldn’t be a clean easy cut, not at all, but a slow severing with lots of fray and lots of pain. I can see my fingers stretching up last minute to catch the end of the line so I won’t fall into space, because without my Poppy I don’t know who I would be.

In fact, when I really look at our family, it becomes as clear as the lucidity of cactus spikes revealed by the blood-red sun that three generations of females have lived our lives not as free individuals but in relation to this one man.

Grandma Elizabeth was a policeman’s wife in a small seaside town in the 1950s—what choice did she have? When she died, my mother, aside from working as a receptionist in a dentist’s office, took over the solemn duty of caring for Poppy, preparing Koenigsberger Klops, his favorite veal and pork meatballs (when he worked the night shift, she woke up at five in the morning to warm them up for him in the oven). These past ten years it has been my turn (drawing the line at Koenigsberger Klops). We talk on the phone several times a week, I drive out to see him at least once a month. First thing in the morning Poppy is in my thoughts, sometimes with a fearsome rush of anxiety that he has died during the night, although I know he is independent and strong as a horse. When I have a question, his voice tells me what to do. When I screw up, his voice punishes me. I may be a hotshot federal agent who carries a gun and a pair of handcuffs (they’re light, you can throw them in the bottom of your purse trash) but my self-worth is still measured by my grandfather’s rules. From childhood he was my standard and my mother’s standard and I have always believed as innocently and completely in the rightness of Poppy as I do the American flag.

I am here for an overnight visit to wish him a belated seventieth birthday, but questions about my supposed cousin Violeta Alvarado and my father and the lost Latino side of the family are definitely percolating in the back of my mind, so that when I approach the tan steel door loaded with groceries, a birthday cake, and a duffel bag and hear barking from within, I am not pleased.

Sure enough it’s Moby Dick, one of Poppy’s whacked-out desert pals, and his friendly pack of killer Akita dogs, which he raises in a shack out there in the wilderness, illegally crossing purebreds with German shepherds to create these hulking muscular monsters with mottled gray fur and curling tails and schizophrenic personalities, just like his. Bikers and police officers with families buy them for five hundred dollars apiece.

“Freeze! It’s the FBI!” laughs Moby Dick, opening the door. I give him a wincing smile. His enormous bouncing belly is almost covered by a black T-shirt that says Fuck Dieting.

The television is on, beer cans on the coffee table.

“It’s about the dogs.”

“No problem.” He drags them out to the balcony by their collars and slides the heavy glass doors shut, shouting, “Commissioner! Your little girl’s here!”

I put the stuff in the kitchen. Poppy keeps a neat place. The dish drainer is empty. One box of Keebler’s crackers on the counter. Inside the refrigerator everything is low salt, low cholesterol—except for Bloody Mary mix and two New York steaks. At least Moby Dick isn’t staying for dinner.

“Annie!” He is there in the doorway wearing nothing but a white towel at the waist, vain as ever, showing off his extraordinary tanned barrel chest and weight-lifters ropy arms.

Even though he is seventy, hugging him bare-chested is an experience in maleness that brings back Sunday afternoons at the YMCA on Long Beach Boulevard, the reward for sustaining a perfect freestyle for fifty yards being holding my cheek to that strong upper quadrant—the compact pectorals, cool feel of chlorine-scented skin, dark furry hair surrounding a useless nipple, fascinating turkey folds under the chin, hard shoulders beneath my small naked feet as he magically lifted me out of the water to dive over his gleaming wet head. I didn’t have a father to teach me to swim; I had Poppy.

“Happy birthday. You’re looking great.”

“Not bad for seven decades on this earth. What’re you drinking?”

“Brought my own.” I slip a bottle out of a bag.

“White wine?” He shakes his head. “That’s the L.A. crowd.” Grabbing a handful of ice, “Hope you still eat red meat.”

“I eat it and I fuck it.” Beating him to the punch.

He cracks a can of 7UP. “Easy on the language.”

“Sorry. I wouldn’t want to offend Moby Dick.”

“Is that how Feebees talk?”—derisive cop term for FBI agents—“I thought they were educated bastards.”

I laugh. Here we go. “We try to be tough. Almost as tough as you.”

•  •  •

Poppy sits in a chair near the balcony wearing nothing but the towel, legs crossed demurely, drinking Seven and Sevens until long after it is dark and the relentless air conditioning has given me a chill. The dogs are still out there. From time to time they nose against the glass near his feet like canine spirits conjured up by the original Agua Caliente Indians.

I admit that the other reason I drove out to the desert was to tell all the details of my perfect bust at California First Bank to Poppy in person. How I was alone. How I staked the guy out and made the right moves and cuffed him with no assistance. How my brilliant interview technique led the suspect to confess to six other robberies. How it was so good it was pure sex.

I am always offering Poppy things like that. Accomplishments. Gifts. His reaction is usually noncommittal, with the implication that it really isn’t good enough, although he did attend my graduation from Quantico in his lieutenant’s full-dress uniform, and he did cry. Still I keep coming back, hoping that what I’ve done will be better, that it will please Poppy at last.

Moby Dick is a more appreciative audience and I find myself playing to him. He follows the action as if it were a
Police Academy
cartoon (which he watches religiously in the shack on Saturday mornings), stomping his huge Jordans and shouting “Right on!” Poppy’s only reaction is to tell about the time
he
, as a rookie patrol officer, cornered a murder suspect alone on the footpath near the Santa Monica Pier and chased him onto the beach. It was Saturday in July, crowded as hell, the suspect dove into the ocean and was never seen again.

“Wow, Commissioner, that’s a story,” Moby Dick tells my grandfather reverentially.

“What else happened when you were a rookie? When we lived north of Montana?”

“Well, we had the famous Hungry Thief,” Poppy grins, settling back with his drink. “Broke into a market, stole a thousand bucks, left two half-eaten knockwurst sandwiches.”

Moby Dick laughs, a whistling snort up the nose.

“I went past the old house on Twelfth Street,” I put in casually. “Trying to remember what it was like. Did you and Mom and I ever live there with my father?”

“I’ll
tell you something that happened,” Poppy says suddenly, eyes bright, blatantly ignoring my question. “I had you down at the station one time when all of a sudden we hear this god-awful racket and we run outside to see what the hell it is, and goddamn, a military helicopter is making a landing right in the parking lot.”

Moby Dick asks, “What for?”

“For John Fitzgerald Kennedy.”

Poppy nods to our dumbfounded silence. “The President wasn’t actually on board, but at that time he used to make quite a lot of trips out to L.A.—
they said
to see his brother-in-law Peter Law-ford at the beach, but actually it was so he could keep on sticking Marilyn Monroe, so the Secret Service was checking out where to land the presidential helicopter and I guess they thought the Santa Monica police station would be pretty secure, the stupid bastards, boy did they fuck up in Dallas.”

Moby Dick says, “Amazing.”

Poppy chuckles. “They had these guys painting lines on the parking lot, they had it all marked off with chalk, then this goddamn huge thing lands and blows it all away.”

“Did I see the helicopter?”

“You?” Poppy looks at me, surprised to remember I am part of the story. “You were a little girl, you were scared of all the noise and the hullabaloo. Held on to my hand like there was no tomorrow.”

I remember none of this. It is the oddest sensation to hear a description about yourself when you can’t remember any of it, like having sex and feeling nothing.

“Is it true President Kennedy had an affair with Jayne Mason?”

“Great legs,” Poppy croons, again ignoring my question. “They used to call her Little Miss Sunshine, of course that’s when she was a kid. She grew into some looker. The guys had a picture of her up in the station. I saw Jayne Mason maybe ten years ago in Vegas. Beautiful voice, really something. The way she sings makes you cry.” He pats a finger against his eye as if I wouldn’t believe him. “Those are my songs.”

Moby Dick interrupts my grandfather’s reverie with an urgent bulletin: “I’m only laying this on you because I hope and pray the FBI could do something about it but I’m warning you right now that when the shit goes down, I’m gone. I’m invisible. Okay?”

It turns out he’s heard there are satanic sacrifices of children taking place at Frank Sinatra’s compound in Palm Springs.

By this time I have killed the bottle. We forget about the steaks, work our way through two Domino’s pizzas and the birthday cake. “Let’s go down to the Escapade,” suggests Moby Dick.

In my present state it sounds like a lot of fun: “You mean that place with the twin girl saxophone players?”

“Those dolls were in their sixties at least,” Poppy corrects me.

“All I remember is drinking Salty Dogs and dancing with a retired locksmith,” I say.

“He’s dead. Sorry, golf tomorrow, seven a.m.”

“It’s a rough life, Commissioner.”

Poppy slips on a polo shirt and khaki slacks and we all go down to walk the beasts. It is midnight and the air must still be seventy degrees. The moon is high, crumpled, yellow as an old dead tooth. Moby Dick loads the animals into his van, which is spray-painted black and gray, and mercifully drives away.

We take a circuitous route through the complex just to breathe the night air. I suddenly decide that it is too late to start rooting around the family tree. I still feel stung by Poppy’s refusal to acknowledge the question about my father and don’t want to bring it up again. Besides, I’m tired. He’s tired. I have to get up at five to drive back to L.A. and be on duty by eight. Another time. Maybe over the phone. But my voice is talking anyway:

“Do I have a cousin named Violeta Alvarado?”

“Not to my knowledge. Not with a name like that.”

“On dad’s side of the family.”

‘Who is dad?” Genuinely puzzled.

“My father. Miguel Sanchez. Or Sandoval. Nobody ever told me which.”

Jesus, what is this? Just saying the name out loud, seeing him tense, and a cold chill passes through my body. Through the warm cozy alcoholic shroud I am suddenly alert. I am scared.

“We don’t know a lot about that son of a bitch, do we?”