Chance

In the Church of Big D

Carl filled him in as they drove, all about how D had been taken to the father’s house in Berkeley, that they were trying to set up something… a transfer to some private facility… that D had gotten wind of it and left, even in the face of some apparent attempt to prevent his doing so.

Chance was a moment in trying to envision what that must have looked like before reminding the old man that Big D was in fact an adult, a subject upon which he was beginning to feel like a broken record.

“He’s afraid of his father.”

“His father should be afraid of him.”

“I told him that was what you said but he may need to hear it from you.”

“And when exactly will he have the opportunity to do this?”

“Soon enough,” the old man told him. “I’m just hoping we’re not too late.”

“Meaning what?” Chance asked. They were by now leaving the city, headed south. The old man’s shrugging motion was noncommittal and Chance was left to study the moneyed hills in approach to Palo Alto, their blue green tops lost to the great billowing banks of cloud that marked the coast and in whose canyons the Merry Pranksters had once partied with Hells Angels and the nineteen-sixties might be said to have begun. In time he closed his eyes, giving in to exhaustion, and even managed to doze, albeit fitfully. His dreams were in orange and blue, all nipple clamps and penis rings, a woman he couldn’t find, all of it infused with the distant throbbing of unseen engines.

He woke in a place where the money ran out, where apartment buildings distinct for their resemblance to government-funded housing projects in close proximity to the 101 freeway running south to Los Angeles had taken its place. And then they were past even that, on a two-lane road now, and had come to some last vestige of what had once held sway here, long before the coming of the hippies or the yuppies that would rise from their ashes. It appeared in the form of a derelict avocado grove, its ruins commingling with those of citrus set to rows but long since overcome and in the midst of which the remains of an old Victorian half lost amid the brush and weeds and unkempt trees.

The old man veered from the pavement near the mouth of a long dirt drive leading toward the house, marked by two large stones and each of these the bearer of iron rings as might once have been used for the hitching of horses, and parked in the dirt on the side of the road. One of the rocks was painted red white and blue with an old-fashioned peace symbol sprayed over that in black paint. Opposite was a sign suggesting that much of the surrounding land had been recently sold and was now slated for development. It allowed for the imagining of shopping malls and industrial parks.

“That’s too bad,” Chance said, by which he meant the sign and what it promised.

Carl took in their surroundings. “My father used to pick out here,” he said. “Only job he could find back in the day. Came out when I was a teenager. Family left Missouri, landed in Oregon. My dad started picking fruit, wound up following a harvest down the coast till we got to San Francisco.”

“That’s something.”

“Yeah,” Carl said. He appeared to be watching a small, orange-throated bird at work at the top of a dying tree. “He didn’t like me much.”

Chance took this as a reference to the old man’s father. “Guess mine didn’t like me much either,” he said, “when you get right down to it.”

The old man watched as the bird flew away. “Doctor. Thought that was supposed to be one of the good ones.”

“There were some bumps along the way.”

Carl nodded and lowered his window, their mad flight from the city having apparently come to this, a recounting of parental disappointment in the bucolic south. “So…” Chance said, but the old man was suddenly mute as a stone and there was nothing but the hum of insects, the faintest trace of orangewood and sage on the dry and motionless air. Chance tried once more. “So…” he said.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Carl told him. “But this is the best we can do. If he’s here he’ll know that we are too. He’ll come or he won’t.”

“And how long do we give it?” Chance asked. He found that he had joined the old man in looking toward the trees.

“That’s a tough one,” Carl said.

In real time it was probably no more than five minutes before a sizable number of quail broke from the grass like a scattering of buckshot and the big man in their wake, moving out from some particularly dense thicket back up where the old house held sway among the trees then making his way down along the long drive, dressed as he had been the first time Chance laid eyes on him, in the old military jacket over a black T-shirt and cargo pants and combat boots with their laces flapping in the dust and he came up on Chance’s side of the car where he wanted to know what was up. He posed the question as if nothing of consequence had passed since their last meeting.

Chance found himself more moved by the other’s appearance than he might have imagined. “How are you would be the question.”

There was a smudge of dirt on the big man’s face. The cuffs of the cargo pants were full of leaves and there were twigs in the laces of his boots. “I’m good,” D said. They left it at that and Chance and Carl got out of the car and D led them back among the trees where Chance could see more clearly what had been a grand old Victorian such as the East Coast transplants had built when they’d first come west to escape their various and assorted histories, to grow their citrus and avocados, their almonds and walnuts. This one had fallen upon hard times with many of its doors and windows covered in plywood and a whole section of roof gone entirely yet managing even in the face of these insults to retain some air of stubborn dignity. It said something, Chance thought, about the people who’d built it, and he was reminded in just that moment of Jean-Baptiste’s fierce and demented subjects, of the light in their eyes.

There had been, at some point in the tortured history of the place, a fire to go along with its other woes and the property rather obviously condemned, the final straw perhaps in prompting its sale to what had undoubtedly been just one of many hovering developers. The property was the last of its kind for miles around and certainly they must have circled, sharks drawn to the remains of a creature so much larger and grander than themselves.

From the looks of the place it had all been sitting like this for a good long while, with new brush, wildflowers, and the green shoots of trees spreading to hide a good deal of the charred and sorry wood. A small community of the homeless, of both sexes, had moved in. Some appeared to be occupying the old house while others had pitched makeshift tents among the trees. There was an old-fashioned carriage house off to one side of the big house and someone had painted WELCOME TO THE HOUSE OF SPACE AND TIME across one of the doors and ABANDON ALL HOPE, MOTHERFUCKER across another. A number of the men were dressed not unlike D in old military gear of one type or another and Chance was willing to take them for veterans of the fight, in flight from or perhaps part time denizens of the large VA hospital in Palo Alto, and knew it for one of the haunts described in the medical reports he’d read at the hospital.

Darius Pringle, Chance noted, his military service or lack thereof notwithstanding, was treated by the other members of the camp with great deference as they were shown somewhat ceremoniously to an old couch and recliner chair arranged about a battered coffee table someone had salvaged from what might well have been the city dump and placed far enough back among the trees to have been invisible from the street. A large canvas tarp in colored patterns of camouflage greens and browns had been strung overhead to form a makeshift roof and the setting was, as near as Chance could tell, based on the reaction of others, a meeting place of some distinction.

D dropped himself into the recliner. Chance and Carl took the couch. “Talk to me,” D said.

Chance did.

“That’s a crazy-ass story, Doc,” D said when Chance had finished. “That’s fucked up.” He looked to the old man as if for confirmation and the old man looked back and Chance sat there looking at the two of them. It occurred to him that the sun had moved to a place more directly overhead, thanks no doubt, at least in part, to the planet’s rotation upon its axis. “Well what isn’t crazy?” he asked finally. He was possessed of the sudden urge to mount a defense. In truth, he felt at the verge of some hysteria, the light coming down preternaturally bright through a tear in the canvas and burning his neck, burning right through him is what it felt like, as if he weren’t actually there or about not to be. “How is it not crazy that there’s something instead of nothing,” he railed, “or that one day the mud stood up and began to walk or that the three of us are even sitting here right now? How fucked up is all of that?”

He had after all been days with very little in the way of food or sleep. His ass was on fire. It was not inconceivable that he was developing an infection, which would also account for his almost constant need to excuse himself for the purpose of making water amid the brush. Still he persevered. He was on to the odds of things now, of anything at all really, save some featureless void, and might even in time have worked his way round to Banach-Tarski and his particular take on their troublesome paradox had not someone at D’s direction given him a slightly odorous plastic bottle filled with water from which to drink. That he accepted without further regard for the bottle’s point of origin or even a good look at its contents, yet one more indicator of his precarious mental state.

“That’s a goddamn interesting way of looking at things, Doc,” D said as Chance paused to drink. The bottle smelled even worse at close quarters.

“Fascinating,” Carl added.

Chance mopped at his brow. “It’s just that when you say a thing is crazy…” He was feeling the need for a second defense in defense of the first defense. “The thing I want to say is… what isn’t crazy? What is not against the odds? And who really thinks that we are rational beings? It’s all such a goddamn joke.”

“We get all of that,” D assured him.

“The whore and the cop,” the old man added. “My God… it’s the stuff of song.”

“I’m good and lost,” Chance admitted. He might also have added that it felt as if a burning coal had found residence at a point just north of his perineum.

“Slow down,” the big man told him. “Let’s take a step back, see what this thing looks like piece by piece.”

“Amen to that,” Carl said.