Snowstorms in a Hot Climate (11 page)

Elly turned from the window laughing. “Your guess is as good as mine. Why don’t you ask him? I’ve never had the nerve. Boy, if you think Lenny plays his cards close to his chest, you wait until you meet J.T. He’s a one-man secret society. What do I know about him? Let’s see … That he and Lenny met in Bogotá, five—maybe six—years ago. He was set up by then; Lenny was just starting out. They got on, worked together for a while—something of a legendary partnership I gather—then split up and went their separate ways, east and west. But they still keep in touch. Sit out on each other’s porches, drinking beer and reliving the good old days.”

“You sound as if you disapprove.”

“
Approval
isn’t the right word. I just have a little trouble with the whole ‘We were there together,
amigo’
routine, that’s all. It’s a bit like being the girl in the Butch Cassidy legend. A lot of fun until you’re the one who gets left behind.”

“Aren’t there any women in the business?”

“Oh sure, but you don’t often find them running the show. They work on the ground, moving it on once it comes in. And there are some who bring it in: the mules, lovely
señoritas
tightrope-walking their ways through Customs. But usually in someone else’s operation. For the most part it’s all much like life in the fifties. The ladies stay home and spend their old men’s money. I tell you, it’s a very traditional business, despite all the hype and the glamour. You’re looking at a kept woman.”

“Come on, Elly. Profit margins like Hermosa’s don’t make themselves. You earn your living. You and Lenny both know that. What about J.T.? Who launders his banknotes?”

She shook her head. “No one. Or not that I’ve come across. Anyway, they don’t need cleaning anymore. He’s retired.”

“What happened?”

“As usual, I don’t know the details. It was a couple of years ago now, just before Lenny and I got together. J.T. used to run a big operation around the Palo Alto area. Same deal as Lenny, bringing it in and moving it on. Then, just after he’d cleared a big shipment, someone got busted and the links led directly to him. They never touched him, but he saw it as an omen. He’d made his killing anyway, plowed it all into real estate. There was so much money moving around California in those days that no one looked too closely at where it was coming from. Land was safe, small holdings led to big profits, and once you’d bought in you could push all your earnings through it. He was a rich man. He’d already bought a chunk of coastline and started putting down houses on it. He sold off a few and built one for himself. That’s where he lives now, in early and comfortable retirement, although he doesn’t splash it around.”

“What does he do with his life?”

“Search me. He certainly hasn’t reentered society, that’s for sure. He’s crazy about stargazing and gardening, that’s all I know. Grows enough to feed a small army, and gives most of it to the chickens. He’s the kind of guy who a hundred years ago would have made a great rancher. He’s built like an ox, doesn’t like company, and isn’t really interested in the twentieth-century bits of life. One of nature’s genuine eccentrics.”

“But you like him?”

She smiled at herself. “Yes, I suppose I do. Although I don’t quite know why. He’s a bit of a misfit really, less glamorous than Lenny. Maybe I’ve just come to mistrust the gloss. Also, he was good to me. Helped me when I needed it.”

Of course, it had been to J.T. she had come after the separation.
And it had been J.T. who had advised her to leave Lenny. Although not in so many words …

“It was funny. He never said it directly. But I knew what he meant. Brotherly advice.” She pulled a face. “Except, of course, I ignored him.”

“What did he say when he found out?”

“I don’t know. We never discussed it. He just left me at the airport and I flew out. Since then nothing. That was part of the deal. He didn’t want Lenny to know I had been there and neither did I. It was our secret. When I rang him to ask if we could use the guesthouse, he didn’t say anything, just agreed to meet us. It was as if the conversation had never taken place. That old cocaine silence—no wasted words. I think you’ll like him. My guess is contact will be kept to a minimum, and with the exception of the odd delivery of carrots and kohlrabi we won’t see him again until the day we leave.”

The perfect neighbor. He did, as it turned out, have one fault. He was not punctual. The Greyhound hit Santa Cruz bus terminal maybe two minutes behind schedule. Half an hour later J.T. had still not arrived. Inside we sat listening to the integrated rhythms of pinball and Space Invader machines played by a small army of travelers who seemed to have nowhere to go. Muzak to our ears.

The concert was interrupted by a short scene from a spaghetti western, as the sunlight streaming in through the doorway was momentarily eclipsed by a figure arriving. The whole place looked up as a man roughly the size of a bear walked in. The bear was my first thought. The second was that for such a large animal he was remarkably light on his feet. In fact, the proportions were altogether unusual: a big square head on broad stacked shoulders and massive torso, but from the waist down the body tapered unexpectedly to reveal slim, almost boyish hips and long, well-formed legs. It was like on those
games of cards where you match the right top to the wrong body, making Mr. Bun a fishmonger. I moved my eyes back up to his face. He had a surprisingly gentle appearance: untidy brown hair and beard with dark eyes, like small lumps of coal, set back behind John Lennon glasses. Long before he stopped in front of us, I knew this had to be J.T.

Elly had risen to greet him, but still he towered above her. He must, I calculated, have been at least six feet four. She made a small, almost shy gesture, putting both her hands on his arms and squeezing slightly. I wondered if he even registered the pressure. He stared down at her and nodded.

“I’m late.” An earth-mumble of an apology. Elly tossed it aside and put out a hand toward me. “J.T., this is Marla, a very old friend from England.”

I came up to his shoulder. It was not a usual experience for me. I caught a glimpse of myself miniaturized in his glasses. What next? A handshake seemed too formal, anything else too forward. I nodded. He almost did the same.

Formalities over, he bent down and scooped up our bags, Gulliver picking up Lilliputian boulders. Outside, a battered blue pickup truck was parked halfway up the pavement. He tossed the cases in the back and opened the door for us.

We piled in. I sat at the far end, near the window, Elly in the middle, crushed between his huge bulk and my large one. The ride had the expectation of silence about it. It seemed to be a silence that he carried with him, and that infected people as and when he came across them. I settled my attention on the scenery: downtown Santa Cruz, sunshine everywhere, flattening the shadows, toasting the air. The pace of life seemed sleepy after New York. In the sixties this little town had been a mecca of easy living, with its radical new university, its endless sunshine, and its surf. Many had come here to freeload on sun, sea, and food stamps. And many, it appeared, had never left. We
passed half-dressed bodies in faded denim loitering on the pavements and in the street cafés, long-haired blond angels on the way home from the beach, the commuters of pleasure. Beside me Elly was laying down cables of communication between herself and this giant.

“Lenny sends his regards. Said he might come out sometime next week.”

“Uh-huh.”

“He asked me to say if there was anything you needed from the big city to let him know.”

“Yeah.”

At the stoplight a parade of boys in cutoffs passed in front of us, surfboards clutched clumsily under their arms. One of them had a nose covered in white zinc. They were laughing at something. In the car, Elly had turned to farming.

“How’s the garden?”

“Pretty good.”

What had she said, about J.T. and Lenny sitting out on each other’s porches reliving the old days? It was hard to imagine such fluency. The pause grew into a silence and became a habit. We left the city and its health food shops, boutiques, and beautiful people behind. The forest began to spring up again, fringing the roads and dappling sunlight onto the truck. We were traveling due north. About ten miles outside town we turned west, up through a road which wound high and crinkly into the hills. J.T. drove it like a straight highway. The truck seemed to enjoy itself, as if it knew the way home.

At the top of one of the bends, opposite a lonely clump of mailboxes, we braked sharply and swung left down a dirt track. The pickup’s wheels spun on the dry earth. We trundled onward, heavy trees roofing the sky and cutting out the light.

In the distance an explosion of sunlight promised a more
open sweep of land. The truck slowed down to greet it. Then all at once we were free from the trees, on the edge of a great rolling open plateau, wide meadowland, corn-colored with the sun, while ahead the horizon fell off into what looked like a sheer drop, and along the top of it a band of pointillist blue and silver—the Pacific Ocean, for all the world like a retouched picture postcard.

Elly flashed me a grin. “See,” it said, “I told you it was spectacular.” If J.T. registered the admiration, he didn’t show it.

We drove across the plateau until the track began to slope toward the edge of the canyon. A small house appeared on the right of the skyline, all wood and glass surrounded by a huge vegetable plot with a line of gigantic sunflowers marking its boundaries. This surely was J.T.’s Garden of Eden. I searched for ours, but when I caught sight of it a few moments later, it seemed to make no sense. All I could see in the distance was a roof covered in grass, sloping down into the meadow. A house with no back to it? Closer, the illusion proved to be fact. The roof was indeed meadow, the building itself gouged out of the hillside like some twentieth-century cave. The entire frontage was glass, just one huge transparent wall leading out onto a wooden deck with a wild uninterrupted view of the chasm as it plunged down toward the ocean.

“Extraordinary,” I muttered, as the car bounced its way toward the horizon.

“Yep, and not an architect’s drawing in sight, isn’t that right, J.T.?”

J.T., needless to say, said nothing. But somehow you could tell he was pleased. Houses, market gardens, kilos of cocaine. It was becoming clear that there was more to J.T. than a couple of initials. We reached the house and parked in a small gravel square just beneath it. As the noise of the engine died away, a
great, magnificent silence came gusting in through the windows, broken only by the occasional cricket chafing its limbs in baked slumber. J.T. got out. The slam of the car door was like a gunshot in church. We followed quietly.

In through the glass door, wooden floors hot with the sun ran into cool shady places filled with cushions and easy chairs. At the back, tucked in against the side of the hill, a kitchen ready for visitors, two large brown bags of groceries on the worktop. Above, up an iron spiral staircase, I could make out two simple bedrooms. J.T. put down the bags and turned to Elly.

“I’ll bring you some vegetables. If you need a car, the VW’s got the keys in the glove compartment. See you around.”

Then, with a cursory nod, he was gone. We stood where he had left us and listened while the sound of the engine rose, then faded as the truck crossed back over the meadow to the other house. The silence returned. We looked out over the canyon, shimmering in the haze of the sun. The view went on forever. It was like being in an American supermarket: the same sense of chronic exaggeration. Why have so much beauty when a little would do?

“Baby laxative,” Elly muttered into the still air.

“What?”

“Baby laxative. One of the perfect cuts. White and fluffy. J.T. probably owes a portion of his canyon to it. Along with borax, baking soda, talcum powder, sulphate, and benzocaine, to mention but a few. The only use I’ve ever found for chemistry O level. They should teach special classes to young Americans. Professional studies. Absurd, isn’t it?”

But then who ever expected the world to make sense? All this based on a million burned-out membranes. So what? Henry Ford made his fortune out of lead pollution. America belonged to self-made men. What about the women? Left to my own devices, I would be curled in a London bed with the soft drone of
the World Service as an ally against insomnia. London darkness and cocaine empires in the sun: the two images were further apart than the miles that divided them. Yet because of Elly I belonged here. Temporarily at least. She slipped her arm through mine and pulled me toward the edge of the deck.

“Come on, teacher. I’ll show you where the lizards sunbathe.”

T
here now followed a short intermission. Four and a half days to be exact, during which time our being together became just a way of life, careless, easy, undisturbed. J.T. was as good as his word. When I woke early that first morning, bullied awake by the light, I found a box of vegetables on the deck by the door—onions, beets, and lettuce, topped by a layer of Bugs Bunny carrots, large and sprouting. Elly rose an hour later, complaining that she couldn’t sleep because of the silence. And so together we set about constructing the day as a prototype for the times to come.

First came breakfast, hot rolls and coffee on the deck amid a subtle percussion of gecko calls. Then the morning spent frying
slowly, Elly stretched out coated in sweat and suntan oil, while I reclined next to her on a sunbed, half clothed, like some overweight Matisse model, a large parasol angled over me, shading my view of the canyon. By 2:00
P.M
. it proved too hot even for sun worshipers, and so we would retire indoors for the quiet hours, when we might sleep or read, or listen to music. Then, as the sun grew lower, we would venture out for small walks into the belly of the canyon or up across the meadow. But we never made it down to the sea or out to the road, for we were not interested in entering the world or in meeting its inhabitants. And by the time we got back, it was only a short run to the final act of the sunset, which we watched from the best seats in the house, returning to them after dinner to chatter our way into the night silence. And in this way, gradually, our togetherness ceased to be a novelty. Our conversations became less greedy and intense, we laughed and gossiped more, and thus, little by little, we caught up on each other’s lives.