Snowstorms in a Hot Climate (16 page)

Inside the room, safely locked, we tried phoning J.T. to explain our absence. But there was no answer. It was after 1:00
A.M
. He must still have been out, cruising the Santa Cruz bars on his night on the town. Elly let it ring, just in case, propping the receiver under one ear, while we lay in bed watching reruns of
Lou Grant
on a television which had seen better days. After ten minutes she gave up. Lou Grant put the
L.A. Trib
to bed and we went to sleep.

Her cry woke me from what must have been the deepest part of sleep, because I remember a sensation of dizziness as I rushed back to consciousness. She was sitting upright, one hand over her eyes, as if she had been struck by a sudden blinding migraine. I got up and went to her, putting my arm around her shoulders. “Elly, what is it? What’s wrong?”

“Oooh, it’s nothing.” She shivered violently. “Just a bad dream, that’s all. A touch of Brian De Palma in the canyon. I must have scared myself awake.”

I leaned over and switched on the bedside light. She winced in the glare. “I’ll get you a glass of water,” I said, taking a sheet with me for protection. In the bathroom a small spider was resting halfway up the sink. I gave him the thumbs-up and ran the water from the bath. Elly gulped at it greedily.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

She shrugged. “There’s nothing to tell really. I dreamt I was in the guesthouse on my own at night, asleep on the verandah outside. I woke suddenly to see this figure standing in the doorway,
watching me. I cried out, but he began to come toward me. I scrambled up, but there was nowhere to go. He was blocking my path into the house. I desperately started to climb over the side of the verandah to drop down onto the deck below, but just as I was hanging there, about to let go, I spotted something in the corner, the shadow of someone crouching, waiting to pounce. That’s when I woke up. It scared the shit out of me. Stupid, eh?” She grinned wearily. “It must have been the lobster. Seafood revenge. It’s OK. I’m all right now. Just give me a minute.”

I walked over to the window, where a dull, dirty light was filtering in through the curtains. I peered outside. For the first few yards the lamp above the door threw down a semicircle of yellowish haze. Beyond there was nothing. Somehow the light made the darkness seem blacker. Sand City USA. Once again we were alone in a lost landscape. What was it about this country that seemed so alien when the night fell? Maybe it was just the size.

I said nothing but kept my eyes focused on the darkness. Finally, when it came down to it, it was her battle and not mine.

“You know, I really did believe it was the golden land,” she said, more to herself than to me. “The place where anything was possible so long as you had the energy; and that energy was something everyone had, like a natural resource. Funny. I must have squandered mine along the way. It’s certainly taken me long enough to realize there are some things you can’t change … some people—” She broke off.

Peering into the night, I imagined waves of Indian warriors crouching in the blackness, light-footed, intent on mischief. I tensed myself for the war cries. Elly and Marla’s last stand. One for the history books. Not bad as endings go. Time passed. Outside everything stayed the same.

“You know, I think I would like to go to Paris. For a visit. If that’s all right with you.”

I let the curtain fall softly back into place. The world contracted and became more domestic. Manageable. I turned to face her. She was sitting huddled, staring at the wall, frowning, as if the problem were not yet completely solved. I felt as if we had been in the room for days, working it over, sorting it out. For a moment of triumph, it was all very subdued. She looked up at me and smiled. I smiled back. It seemed enough. She settled herself back down under the covers. “I think I’ll be able to sleep now. How about you?”

“I think so too.” I got into bed and lay there for a while, feeling a kind of satisfaction. I also felt her sadness. Beginnings are endings too. Eventually her breathing evened out into a regular pattern of sleep. I called her name softly; she did not respond. I turned over and closed my eyes. The next thing I recall was the sound of a car door slamming and a motel morning dragging me out of sleep.

The first day of the rest of our lives. It did not stand on ceremony. Sand City welcomed us begrudgingly. The girl at the breakfast diner was impatient, though we were the only customers in the place, and even the eggs did not seem sunny-side up. We said very little. Elly was light and shade, the exhilaration of a decision made and the knowledge of the battle to come. I did not intrude. The car limped faithfully into town, only to die quietly a hundred yards from the garage. We pushed it the rest of the way and stood like worried parents as the doctor prodded and poked under the bonnet.

“Fuel-flow problems,” he announced in a voice that had traveled a long way to get to California. “I ain’t got the right
parts here, but I can fix her up temporary like, so you can git home. Take me a couple of hours, though.”

We left him to it and headed for the beach. Sand City—it meant what it said. Miles of it, dazzling white under the sun, tons of it, pounding in on every roll of surf. Even the air was blurred with sand mist, sticking to your skin and stinging your eyes. We lasted just over an hour, watching a few mad surfers become waterlogged with failure. Then we took refuge in a darkened bar, where we drank tequila sunrises without the tequila and felt the windburn on our faces.

By 2:00
P.M
. the car was better, if not well. We took it easy, pootling the back roads and chugging our way up the hills toward home. An hour and a half later we reached the mailboxes, and although I would not have admitted it, I was glad to arrive back in daylight. From the summit of the ridge we looked down onto the J.T. homestead, still uninhabited, the truck nowhere to be seen. We left the VW in the drive and walked back across the meadow.

We were perhaps fifteen yards from the house when the telephone began to ring. Before I could quicken my pace, Elly had made a run for it. By the time I stepped in through the glass door, she was talking animatedly, her back turned away from me. I didn’t need to hear the words to know that this was no death’s voice intoning platitudes. Her body language gave away the identity of the caller. Inside the house, the air was stale from a day’s baking, but otherwise everything felt just as we had left it. Outside, the canyon seemed empty in the heat. Just bad dreams?

She came out and joined me, squatting on the floor next to me and wrapping her arms around her knees. She looked uneasy.

“Lenny,” I said, to save her the trouble.

She nodded. “He’s been ringing since yesterday. Both here and J.T.’s. Trying to get in touch urgently.” She hesitated.

“When’s he coming?” I said evenly.

“Tonight.” She pulled a face. “I’m sorry. Nothing I could do. He’d made all the arrangements, was just walking out the door. He gets into San Francisco at nine
P.M
. Wants us to meet him at the airport and go into town for the night. There’s someone he has to see tomorrow. It means we have to book a cab to pick us up, then hire a car in Santa Cruz—”

“You have to book a cab, you mean,” I said deliberately. “I’m not going.”

“Don’t be stupid, Marla, you—”

“I’m not going.” This time more firmly. “You need to see him on your own. If you have things to say to each other, you can’t say them when I’m there.”

She frowned. “What we have to say can wait. I’ll talk to him later. I don’t want to leave you here on your own.”

“Elly,” I said quietly. “You should talk to him now. It won’t get any easier tomorrow or the day after.”

“I know that, but—”

“But nothing. What are you waiting for?”

“I don’t want to leave you alone,” she said again, this time with what I recognized to be a note of Elly stubbornness in her voice.

“And I don’t want to come with you. I want to stay here.”

“And what will you do?”

“Oh, read a book, eat a steak, drink a bottle of wine, watch the sunset. It’ll be hell, but I’ll manage somehow.”

“Seriously.”

“Seriously, I’ll be fine, Elly, don’t use me as an excuse. You have to tell him, and you have to do it alone. Now is the perfect opportunity. We’ve spent the last two years at opposite ends of
the earth. Eighty miles for a night won’t destroy us. If I feel like company I can always go and spend the evening with the chickens.”

“And what if J.T. doesn’t come back?”

“Of course he’ll come back. Even if he’s drunk and incapable in some Santa Cruz brothel, he’s not the kind of man to neglect his animals. I’ll be all right. I promise.”

She gave me one last look, to which I steadfastly lied. Then she nodded. “OK. You win. I’ll go alone.”

It was just after 7:00
P.M
. when the taxi arrived. The time of day when the light is drunk on its own beauty and generous to everything and everyone. Elly looked magical, her skin warm with the sun and her eyes bright with the prospect of conflict. Were I Lenny, I would treasure her more than cocaine, I thought, and told her as much as we walked together to the car. She laughed and climbed in, holding my hand through the open window. “Don’t worry, I’m stronger than I look.”

“I know. It’s him I’m worried about.”

“I’ll call you tomorrow evening. Take care. And remember, if you feel at all—”

“I know. Give a little whistle. If you don’t leave now, you’re not going to make it in time.”

I stood and waved until I could no longer make out her hand held in salute out the window, and all I could see was the cloud of dust as the wheels churned up dry earth crossing the ridge. Then I went back to the house, poured myself a stiff drink, and thought about how anxious I really was.

Logically, I knew I had nothing to fear. Two stargazers and a disembodied voice on the other end of a telephone. Both separate, innocent facts. Only paranoia made them threatening. I understood that in many ways I was infinitely safer here, in the middle of nowhere, then I would ever have been in the center of a town. Anyway, I am lucky. Unlike Elly’s, my fantasies of evil are
not of the Brian De Palma kind. I live alone in one of the biggest cities in the world; I walk its dark streets late at night, take shortcuts down its alleys. People do not challenge me—if anything they steer clear of me. I do not smell vulnerable. And if sometimes I lie awake at night, it is not because I hear noises on the stairs. No. I would treat this night as any other, wrap myself in a little history and enjoy the quiet. And if I did look over my shoulder once or twice, it would be in the almost certain knowledge that there was nothing to be seen.

It was less than an hour later, when the sun was halfway through its flashy nosedive into the ocean, that I found the Santa Monica parking ticket in the undergrowth and my anxiety became more concrete.

I
certainly wasn’t looking for it. In fact, if it hadn’t been for the animal, whatever it was, I would never have spotted it. But when I heard the bright, crackling sound of dead grasses rustling near the edge of the deck, and saw the undergrowth shiver, it was simple curiosity—a town girl’s fascination with nature—that made me want to discover what it was. It had sounded too loud and too careless to be any kind of lizard, and my immediate thought had been one of J.T.’s gophers coming up for air. I had a vision of a wide-eyed cartoon-type rodent with Bugs Bunny teeth and a “What’s up, Doc?” kind of mischief. Maybe they were taking time off from the lengthy process of gnawing
through steel coating. I was interested to make the acquaintance of one of the “little bastards.”

I got up from my chair and lowered myself from the deck to the spot where the noise had come from. Nothing. Of course. I pushed aside the grass in the hope of coming across some telltale mound of fresh earth. It was then that the flash of orange caught my eye: a piece of soft cardboard no bigger than a calling card but fierce in color. I picked it up, curious to know what remnant of California history I had excavated. I didn’t notice the date at first, although I remember thinking that it looked newish. For those few moments it seemed I had chanced upon a common or garden-variety parking ticket from a Santa Monica car park. It was not until I had carried my spoils back up to the deck and there indulged my historian’s mania for tidiness and accuracy that I deciphered the date. The ticket had been punched out at 1:45
P.M
. on August 2. It took the teleprinter in my brain about thirty seconds to assess the significance and start spewing out conclusions.

Today was the eighth. That made the second a Saturday, the day we had arrived from New York. We had reached the house in the late afternoon. The ticket could not possibly have been dropped before then. Santa Monica was in Los Angeles, which in a fast car was five or six hours from here. Even substituting planes for cars, by the time airports had been reached and schedules allowed for, the owner of the ticket could hardly have arrived here before we did. Which meant they must have arrived after. But apart from J.T. (could he have been in Los Angeles that morning?), the only visitor we had had was Sir Frank Galahad, and his story had not included Santa Monica. He had not seemed the kind of man to lie. That left the thirty hours while we had been away on the coast. At some point during that time someone had been here,
someone who had, perhaps, walked up from a campsite down below?

In the canyon, twilight was chipping away at the definition of the landscape. There must be a rational explanation. It was 8:00
P.M
. The day was living on borrowed time. Elly was eighty miles away. J.T., for all I knew, was unconscious in some Santa Cruz bar. I was alone in a house that was totally isolated, with no transport and no one to call. There had to be a rational explanation. I set about constructing one. While we were away, someone—a hiker, maybe even a visitor for J.T., who not finding him at home had tried the guesthouse instead—someone had stood on or near the deck. Maybe they had reached in their pocket for a cigarette and the ticket had tumbled out, obscured immediately by the undergrowth. What could be more innocent than that? They had stood smoking, admiring the view—I would have done the same—then gone their way. Why not?