The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl (12 page)

“It sounds beautiful,” Jonathan said.

“We tried to go back a few times, but we could never make it. When the tide’s too high, the rocks are totally inaccessible, pounded on by waves, and you can’t climb up there. It seems like the tide’s always too high, whenever I come here. I can’t ever seem to get back to that place anymore.” She felt the start of tears, and blinked them back.

“Maybe it’s not too high now,” Jonathan said. “Why don’t we go see?”

Marzi nodded, slowly. “Sure. It’s worth a try.” She led the way to the end of the beach, and they climbed up the head-high wall of uneven rock, finding foot- and handholds. She pulled herself up over the edge, to the top, and offered her hand to Jonathan to help him up. “This way,” she said, and set off over the uneven rock toward the ocean. The waves were breaking hard on the rocks, white foam spraying, but the way was passable. “We probably have an hour or so before the tide’s too high,” Marzi said, pleasantly surprised. The window of opportunity to pass by was limited here, and she’d never managed to get the timing right since that first night with Lindsay. “We might get splashed, but we can make it.”

“I won’t melt,” Jonathan said. “Let’s go.”

They went carefully down the rocks, spray flecking them both as the waves broke, and then across a narrow ridge of rock to the largest part of the tumbled natural bridge. This place was tilted, pocked, and ridged, surrounded almost entirely by water, attached to the land only by the thin umbilicus of rock Marzi and Jonathan had crossed over. “I claim this land for us,” Marzi said. “Look, there—tide pools.” They went down on hands and knees to look into the clear water, at starfish and waving sea plants. They moved on, looking into others, exclaiming over mussels and crabs, and then Marzi saw a familiar pool. “Oh, this is the one,” she said. “I remember this.” This was the largest tide pool she’d found with Lindsay, a narrow cleft nearly ten feet long, an alleyway teeming with life. Marzi stretched out on her stomach, the better to see in, and Jonathan lay down beside her. They watched tiny silver fish dart through the water, past anemones like strange flowers. “There,” she said. “Under that little shelf of rock? I saw a crab.” A moment later the crab scuttled out sideways, claws upraised, followed by a pair of smaller crabs.

“Oh, that’s awesome,” Jonathan said, and Marzi caught something in his voice, some reverent echo of her own thoughts. She looked over at him, at his dark eyes and fair skin, and felt for the first time in ages that she was truly
with
someone, sharing something beyond the civil or superficial.

He turned his head and caught her looking at him, but she didn’t turn away. He leaned his head toward her, a little, and she moved her head toward him in return, and in a moment they were kissing, and unlike the
last
time Marzi had kissed someone here, there was a thrill and sparkle now, and she thought she could go on kissing him for some time. He must have thought the same, because they did keep kissing, until their position on the rocks became too uncomfortable for Marzi, and she broke contact to sit up.

“That was nice,” Jonathan said, still stretched out, looking up at her with his eyes half closed against the sun. “I’m glad we ran into each other this morning.”

“Me, too.” She’d let herself open up to someone, a little, and the sky hadn’t fallen. She didn’t feel endangered or scared. Trouble was easier to bear when there was a little joy in the midst of it. “We should get back, before the tide comes in.”

“Right. I need to get some work done this afternoon, but maybe, if you’re not busy, if you wanted to do something later . . . I told you about my sordid past, but I want to hear about yours. This commune stuff intrigues me.”

“I’d like that. But the commune stuff, really—not as interesting as it sounds, unless the theory and practice of milking goats excites you. I’ll drop you off by the café. I’ve got some errands to run downtown. Meet you at Genius Loci around six, we can get some dinner?”

“Consider it a date.”

Three-up Outfit

Marzi came up the steps to Genius Loci late in the day, after an afternoon spent reading Terri Windling’s
The Wood Wife,
sitting in a park, watching ducks in a pond, and thinking about Jonathan. She’d put caps in her toy pistol, too, and fired it a couple of times—it was satisfyingly loud, with none of the kick of a real gun.

The lamps outside the café were already on, though dark was another hour away, and moths were clustered hungrily around the pale white globes, seeking some ethereal nourishment. Jonathan sat at the table just outside the double doors, at the top of the steps, the neon “Genius Loci” sign bathing him in red light. “Jonathan,” she said, and he looked up from the oversized art book he was leafing through.

“Hey, Marzi. Lindsay was here earlier, looking for you.”

“Everything okay with her?”

“Yeah, she just wanted to see how you were doing after everything last night. We hung out for a little while here. She, ah, asked me about the afternoon, and I told her how it ended. I hope that’s okay.”

Marzi laughed. “Lindsay’s like the Spanish Inquisition with glittery nail polish. What’d she say?”

“Just that if I broke your heart, she’d break my fingers.”

“Only your fingers? She’s going soft. Is she going to be around later?”

“She said she was going out.”

“Hot date?” Marzi asked.

“So I assume. She’s meeting Alice—” He frowned. “Well, she
said
she was meeting Alice, but there she is now.”

Marzi turned around in her chair to look. Lindsay came bouncing up the steps, smacking gum in her mouth. “Damn, girl,” Marzi said. “You’re looking good.”

Lindsay flounced the skirt of her sundress and batted her lashes. “I know. I’m hot as hell tonight.” She dragged a chair across the deck with an awful scraping sound and flopped into it, then crossed one sandaled foot over the other. “But, alas, Alice stood me up.”

“She wouldn’t have done that if she’d gotten a look at you,” Marzi said.

“I daresay,” Lindsay agreed. “She left a message on my answering machine, said something came up, she was really sorry, yadda yadda. All very vague.” Lindsay put her elbows on the table, crowding an empty glass out of the way, and put her chin in her hands. She exhaled huffily, dramatically, but with an undercurrent of genuine sadness, Marzi thought; Lindsay was always one to cover actual distress with melodramatic lamentations. “Methinks she’s had her fill of me. That, or she doesn’t like the idea of being seen out on the town with me. She hangs out with a pretty hard-core crowd—those women don’t believe in bisexuals, and they sneer at anything in a skirt, though they’d also like to get up
under
those skirts, as often as not.”

Marzi thought of her conversation with Alice. “I don’t think that’s it, Linds. I ran into Alice last night when I was out walking, and she seemed very much into you. She
did
seem like she had something on her mind, though, so maybe something really did come up.”

“You’re too trusting,” Lindsay said, poking Marzi in the arm. “You’ve got to learn to expect the worst. That way, you can only be pleasantly surprised.” Lindsay took Marzi’s hand, then Jonathan’s. “Speaking of pleasant surprises . . . “

“Are we having a séance, Lindsay?” Marzi asked.

“Yes. We’re going to call up the spirit of my dearly departed fun night out. Do
you
know what I think we should do, Marzipan?”

“I shudder to think.”

“Young Jonathan has never been to the boardwalk. Young Jonathan has never eaten a deep-fried Twinkie a mere hundred yards from the ocean. Young Jonathan has never ridden the oldest wooden roller coaster in the tricounty area. Do you see where I’m going with this?”

“I think so, yes.” She glanced at Jonathan.

He shrugged. “I’m up for a night on the town.”

“I bet you’re up for all sorts of things,” Lindsay said, “but we’ll have to settle for the boardwalk, for now. We’ll eat hot dogs and ice cream for dinner. When I was a kid, I thought I’d eat meals like that every night when I grew up. Let’s be true to our younger selves!”

“My parents would be proud,” Jonathan said. “Is it far?”

“No, it’s just down by the wharf,” Marzi said. “We can walk there in fifteen minutes or so.”

After a brief detour for Jonathan to put his book away in the Pigeonhole, they set off toward the setting sun, passing neatly painted little houses on Washington Street. They chatted amiably for a while about inconsequential things, then Marzi said, “Oh, guys, you won’t believe this. When I got up today, there was a message on my answering machine from
Beej,
asking if I’d come bail him out of jail.”

“Jeez,” Lindsay said, shaking her head. “I hope he gets some help. He’s always been weird, but I think he went over the rainbow recently.”

“It’s strange,” Marzi said. “Beej talked about a god, the earthquake god, the other day, and he mentioned something about it at the café, too. And Jane, in between totally
attacking
us, talked about setting her goddess free. Remember, she asked me why I hadn’t embraced the goddess yesterday, when she jumped me on the deck?”

“I can’t say I was paying that much attention to what she said,” Lindsay said. “I was shocked, mostly.”

“I remember,” Jonathan said, looking off at the horizon, a worry line marking his forehead. “That
is
odd, that they’d both be talking about some god—”

“And both assaulting the coffee shop,” Lindsay interjected.

“Yeah. Converging delusions,” Marzi said, but not with any great conviction. There had been so
many
odd things in the past two days. The vision of death-from-a-Western in the Red Room, the recurrence of her problem with doors, that dream of Santa Cruz destroyed—all of it was taking a toll on her. There was something else, too, something she could
almost
remember, and for a moment she had a brief vision of a door opening in a yellow wall, and sunlight pouring in from the space beyond, light as harsh as ground glass, and then a man, or something at least mostly man-
shaped,
rising up before her—

“This is bumming me out,” Lindsay said, and that broke Marzi’s connection to whatever she was remembering—for that, Marzi was simultaneously annoyed and grateful. She’d had a good day, and possibly a good night ahead, and she didn’t want to spoil it with shit like this. But on the other hand, Jane, at least, was still out there, perhaps still mud-spattered, probably still crazed. “You guys are supposed to be soothing my injured ego since I got stood up,” Lindsay said. “So let’s refrain from dwelling on the habits of your garden-variety crazy guy.”

“Agreed,” Jonathan said. “Is that the roller coaster?” He pointed to an arch of red-and-white showing just above the trees.

“That’s the Big Dipper,” Lindsay said. “It was built in nineteen-early-something. It’s made of wood, and when you ride on it, it sounds like it’s going to fall into the ocean any minute. This whole boardwalk is famous, actually. It was in
Lost Boys,
you know.”

“That vampire movie with Pee-wee Herman?” Jonathan said.

“No, no, that was the original crappy version of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
.
Lost Boys
is the one with Kiefer Sutherland, playing his career-defining role as a wicked vampire lieutenant,” Lindsay said.

“I’d forgotten that,” Marzi said, distracted. Thinking about vampires and the boardwalk made her think of
other
monstrous things, like the rustling creature in her vision, the one denned inside Neptune’s Kingdom.

“Ah, and here’s the skate park,” Lindsay said, nodding toward the fence-enclosed patch of asphalt, with ramp and rails chained down inside, and a few teenagers standing around holding their skateboards and smoking. A ten-year-old wearing a helmet and knee pads rolled slowly back and forth on his Rollerblades in the half-pipe. “Skater boys always did it for me when I was just a wee teenybopper,” Lindsay went on. “Something about the way they slouched.”

“I used to skate,” Jonathan said. “I haven’t done it in years, though. Guess I’m getting old.”

“You’re still a champion sloucher, though,” Marzi said.

“Good posture is crucial,” Jonathan said.

Pedestrian traffic thickened as they approached the wharf. They passed thin teenage girls with their sweaters tied around their waists, an Asian boy in a long black trench coat trying to look remote and cool, a few surfers, dripping wet and walking intently away from the sea, all walking across the street, ignoring the traffic lights with the blithe assurance that such a critical mass of jaywalkers was a match for any car. Marzi, Lindsay, and Jonathan jostled together, clustering up close out of necessity. “Are these all tourists?” Jonathan asked.

“Mostly,” Lindsay said. “They start to come as soon as it stops raining every year, pretty much. More on the weekends, of course. Everybody streams in from over the hill in Silicon Valley for fun and sun and so on.” Lindsay put her arm around Jonathan’s waist. “But you’re no tourist! You’re a Santa Cruz native by association.”

“Lindsay bestowed the same honor on me years ago,” Marzi said.

“Oh, you’re from Humboldt County,” Lindsay said. “Your people are my people. Come. The boardwalk beckons.”

They passed the arcade, Neptune’s Kingdom, and Marzi couldn’t resist glancing inside as they passed. The decorating motif was faux-nautical, with life preservers and fishing nets hanging on the walls—like a bad seafood restaurant, only without the grease stains. Just inside the door a fake bathysphere with pincer arms moved slowly up and down on wires, claws opening and closing, and a surprisingly lifelike animatronic pirate climbed a long rope to a crow’s nest suspended from the ceiling. Steps led up to the second floor, where you could buy overpriced food with kitschy names like Barnacle Burgers and Foot-Long Sea Dogs. The rattle of pinball machines and the hum of arcade games drifted out. No rustling, no monsters, no oracles, nothing unusual at all—Neptune’s Kingdom was as prosaic as ever. That should have reassured Marzi, but it didn’t. Instead she felt the resurgence of her old feeling that there was a world just beyond the visible, that behind any door she might find monstrous wonders and wondrous monsters. Lindsay and Jonathan didn’t slow down as they passed the arcade, Lindsay chattering away and Jonathan nodding, so Marzi didn’t break stride, either, but the hairs on the back of her neck rose as she passed the building. Having Neptune’s Kingdom at her back gave her the distinct, ridiculous feeling that she was being watched.

Lindsay led the way, turning right to cut between two bright yellow buildings, onto the boardwalk proper. “And here we are. The world-famous beach boardwalk.”

Jonathan scuffed his boot heel against the concrete. “If it’s a boardwalk, shouldn’t there be actual boards?”

“I thought you were an artist,” Lindsay said. “It’s an impressionistic boardwalk!”

“Yeah,” Marzi said. “Why be so literal? It’s a boardwalk in
spirit
.”

“There’s even Skee-Ball!” Lindsay said. She arched an eyebrow. “You don’t look impressed, Jon-jon.”

“I’m reserving judgment,” he said.

“Perhaps a deep-fried Twinkie will do the trick,” Marzi said, pointing toward the Extreme Fried Foods! booth.

“Those were invented in the South,” Jonathan said. “We’ve had them at state fairs for years.”

Lindsay poked him in the shoulder. “Fine, be unimpressed. Go get us some tickets. Lots. I like to ride the rides and play the games.” She pointed toward the ticket booth, and Jonathan walked amiably in that direction.

Marzi leaned toward Lindsay. “He’s a hard sell,” she said. “He thinks our boardwalk is lame.”

“Oh, we’ll get him,” Lindsay said. “You’ll note I’m wearing a white top, and no bra, and I have every intention of going on the log flume ride, which, as you know, has copious splishy-splash tendencies. We’ll see if me all dripping wet and clingy cheers him up.”

Marzi knew Lindsay’s lasciviousness was as natural for her as breathing, and quietly quashed the little upsurge of jealousy she felt.

“Maybe you should save something for the second date,” Marzi said dryly.

“Speaking of which, I hear this is
your
second date with him, Marzipan,” Lindsay said. “Something about true romance amid the tide pools?”

“We had a moment, but who knows what’ll happen? He’s only here for the summer anyway.” She was reluctant to express hope for something deeper, to even
allow
herself such hope.

“A summer can be like a
lifetime,
if you do it right,” Lindsay said. “I’m glad you’re giving him a chance.”

Jonathan returned, holding a roll of blue tickets and looking amused. “Bumper cars,” Lindsay said, and grabbed their hands.

As Lindsay demanded, they rode the rides and played the games. Jonathan admitted to being impressed by the unusual amount of maneuverability on the Space Race bumper cars, but was less than wowed by the house of horrors. As they creaked slowly along the tracks beneath red lights and artificial cobwebs, Marzi found herself wishing that her fears were as simple as this—big spiders, mummies, screams in the dark. Her fears were entirely too baroque. Lindsay was squished in close next to her, with Jonathan sitting in the seat behind them, distinctly not screaming in fear at every new scare. Lindsay whispered, “I want. To suck. Your—”

“Blood,” Marzi said firmly.

“Well, if you insist on being so
traditional
about it,” she said.

Jonathan leaned forward, resting his head between theirs. “Can we do something that goes fast next?”

So they went to the Big Dipper, the centerpiece of the boardwalk, and ratcheted up the track, zoomed down the incline, and whipped through the curves. There were no loop-the-loops or spirals, not on a roller coaster that old, but the structure rattled and shuddered and seemed to tremble as they rode, which was terrifying enough. As they got off, Jonathan said, “That was sort of the Model-T Ford of roller coasters, but it was fun.”

“Time to get wet,” Lindsay said, and they got in line for the log flume waterslide. It was a short line. The night was turning cool, and most people weren’t eager to get wet, but Lindsay, of course, could not be discouraged. “If we get cold, we’ll just huddle up,” she said. “This is my date, so no arguments!”