A Thousand Steps

10

Where, of course, the guard sits within his guardhouse as Matt covertly watches from behind a low mandevilla-covered wall. It’s almost midnight, according to his Timex Skindiver, bought cheap at King’s Pawn. The guard seems to be reading. He sips from a cup. Matt’s only fifty feet from the lowered gate arm but there’s no way he can get past the guard without a distraction.

It’s a full ten minutes before his opportunity arrives: a convertible red Mercedes with a middle-aged hippie dude at the wheel and a young blonde next to him, her hair wild and bright in the guardhouse floodlight.

Matt walks his bike up the sidewalk now, right out in the open as the guard steps out to confront the driver. With the guard’s attention likely on the woman, Matt swings onto his bike and makes a hard left toward the guardhouse. There’s plenty of room for a kid on a bike to get around the lowered exit arm. In a blink he’s a pedaling blur on the privileged grounds of Sapphire Cove.

He keeps to the darkness of the wall and the windbreak trees. Without slowing he braves a look back: the entrance arm rising, the guard standing by, the headlights of the Mercedes just beginning to move. The car passes him a moment later, the total chop Tijuana Brass blasting. This older guy has to be taking his date to a party, Matt thinks.

Cove View is a long, curving street studded with handsome houses, some grand and some humble. Matt distantly follows the Mercedes and soon arrives at a large, modern post-and-beam two-story home backed against a rocky cliff. It’s set well away from the street. He wedges himself and his bike into a hedge of oleander and watches.

To get to the house from here he’ll have to go through a closed iron gate. There’s a keypad/intercom box on a brick gatepost, and the driver of the red Mercedes is speaking into it.

Beyond the gate, the driveway is littered with cars parked on the downslope side. Matt doesn’t recognize all of the brands, but he knows Porsche, Jaguar, and Ferrari when he sees them. Near the house a young man trots away from a valet stand where, in the lights of the porte cochere, stand two men. They have mod, over-the-ear haircuts and baggy white bell-bottom suits. Midthirties maybe. Matt wonders for the millionth time why old men are so eager to look ridiculous. The valet, keys shining in one hand, disappears into a knot of cars beyond his stand.

Matt forces his bike deeper into the hedge, clambers up the brick gatepost and drops to the other side. Scurries into the shadows as the Mustang headlights rake past him.

Closer to the house now, he hears the music, a droning Sonny and Cher song the old people think is hip. He cuts deeper into the dense garden, away from the driveway and its lights, and finds himself within a lush grove of ferns, squatting for a better look at the house. A Buddha fountain gurgles to his left. Colored lights behind the windows. Invitation only, he thinks. Old guys. Young girls the same age as his sister.

The house is a staunch-looking structure of darkly finished wood beams and posts, anchored together with metal connectors and ties. Lots of windows and sliding glass doors.

Interconnecting walkways and decks link room to room and floor to floor. A giant treehouse. The railings are lined with potted plants, the air heavy with the smell of weed and incense, patchouli, Matt thinks, always patchouli. On one upper deck a man and a woman make out — both naked to the waist.

Wow.

He hops through the islands of shadows, finds his way to a first-floor room and looks in. There’s a faint red glow coming from inside but the shades are drawn. Still, pressing his nose to the glass and squinting with one eye, Matt can see a section of what’s inside: a dimly lit room in which a man and two girls/women writhe nakedly on a bed.

Matt once saw a 16-mm porn movie that his friend Teddy stole from his dad and showed in his backyard for money. Teddy billed it as “Night at the Cruddies,” and Matt paid his seventy-five cents. It was black-and-white and almost unbearably stimulating. He had no idea that’s what people did. Besides that, he’d only seen Playboy magazine, a couple of racy drawings, and an astrological sex-position poster at Mystic Arts World that Furlong actually pulled off the wall and took to headquarters as obscene material.

But this live action here in Sapphire Cove is another level of excitement altogether — far more powerful and immediate. Matt feels incomprehensible currents massing against each other inside, mixing and separating and massing again.

He slumps down against a wall, hiding in a pool of darkness, making himself small, figuring what to do next. It seems necessary to continue. Cowardly to quit. What if Jazz is here and he fails her by leaving now? Worse, what if Jazz is here and he finds her and she won’t come home? Why would she come here in the first place if she wanted to be home? This idea has hit him before but never this hard — that his sister has run away because she wanted to. In that case, he wishes she’d have taken him along. Just them in the Volkswagen van, heading up the coast to L.A. or maybe down to San Diego or even Mexico, working odd jobs and sharing their money for gas and food and cool things.

Currents massing and pooling.

He presses on.

Through another first-story window he sees more naked people, more coupling, more combinations. Lava lamps, thick smoke. Naked people on beds, sofas, chairs, the floor. Some wear masks. Some are frenzied, some slow. Young girls and mostly older men. He studies each female face but no Jasmine. Into the room strides a fully clothed middle-aged man in blue denim bell-bottoms and a long-sleeved paisley shirt open to mid-chest. A lumpy mod haircut, bangs. He’s got a bong that he offers to the various fornicators. Cavore?

A woman trails him, stoking the bong dope with a fireplace lighter that throws a blue flame. She’s wearing a black dress and a small black mask that covers only her eyes and part of her cheeks. White-blond hair and a wholesome-looking smile. Apple-red lips. She’s one of the only women with any clothes on. To Matt she looks more like a hostess than a participant.

Possible Cavore takes a take a deep hit off the bong, then blows his smoke down the throat of a girl grinding away on top of a man.

Carefully, Matt times his sprint up the stairs to the second floor. Makes the landing unnoticed. From here he can see the twinkling black ocean and the pale curve of Sapphire Cove and a plump half-moon behind clouds.

Bent at the waist, he sneaks along a dark second-story deck, then stops short of a sliding glass door. It’s been left open a crack and they haven’t bothered with shades or curtains up this high. He peers in. Couches and a pool table. Overstuffed chairs and fluffy sheepskin area rugs. Smoke to the ceiling. Draped everywhere are bodies in motion, and joints being passed, and plates of white powder being snorted through red plastic straws. Beer and wine and cocktails going down. Sinatra croons at low volume. It’s a big room, and as far back as Matt can see it’s a panorama of humans, some mating or finishing mating or about to mate. Some naked, some clothed. Some just watch, sitting or standing or milling around like shoppers.

It’s impossible to believe his sister would do this.

He, Matt, will not allow her to do this.

Again, the mod bell-bottom-and-paisley-shirt man goes from person to couple to whatever combination he finds, offering the bong to his guests, blowing smoke down the throats of the girls.

“Jordan! Over here!” a man calls out.

When Jordan Cavore begins to thread his way back out of the crowded room, Matt hustles into position on the second-floor wraparound deck. Doesn’t even bother ducking out of sight as he passes the picture windows and sliding glass doors overlooking the endless dark Pacific.

He takes his sketch of Jasmine from his pocket and unfolds it. His hands tremble and his ears roar. The man’s shadow is approaching as Matt steps into the light and directly into the path of Cavore, bong in hand.

Cavore comes to a stop. He’s taller and huskier now.

“Get out.”

Matt steps forward, knees shaking, but holds the sketch up for the man to see. “That’s Jasmine Anthony and she’s my sister. You need to tell me if you’ve seen her.”

“I don’t need to tell you shit.”

“Have you seen her?”

Cavore looks at the drawing and the trespasser, then snatches the sketch, crumples and drops it. Matt reaches for it as Cavore swings the bong into the side of his head, which sends shards of glass into the lights. Matt hits the deck, braced on one hand and holding the other to his head. A light smear of blood on his fingers.

“You are on private property,” says Cavore. “Now beat it and don’t say one word about any of this. I can find you. And no, I’ve never seen that girl before.”

Matt grabs the wadded drawing, flies down the stairs and across the property the same way he’d come in.

He stuffs the drawing in his pocket then tries to wrestle his bike from the poisonous oleander. Really has to wrench it. His rope bounces from the basket and gets caught up in the spokes. Finally, he jumps aboard and hauls butt along Cove View toward the guard booth and Coast Highway.

As he speeds around the lowered gate arm, the guard stands for a better look at him. Matt flips him off.

The next thing he knows he’s down hard on the Sapphire Cove sidewalk. He rolls twice, then pops up and runs back to his bike. The guard comes fast. Matt remounts and pedals away with all his might.

Skids into the turn at Coast Highway and heads for home, cars swooshing past him just a few feet away.

It’s almost 2 A.M. when he turns on the garage lights and gets a good look at the damage: elbows and knees scraped badly, bloody at the edges, pink in the middle. His palms are gravel-ground and feel bruised. In a hand-mirror he checks his head where the bong hit him — swelling and a few nicks.

His mother appears behind him in a kimono, sleep-faced and bed-haired. “What happened?”

“Nothing, Mom. I’m tired and need a shower and that’s all.”

“But where have you been?”

“With Ernie at the hotel. Don’t worry. I slid out on my bike. I’m fine.”

“But you didn’t come home like Jazz hasn’t come home. I waited up and saved most of the spaghetti and meatballs for you.”

“Thanks, Mom. I’ll eat it later. Now leave me alone. I’ll be in to take a shower in a minute.”

“Did someone hit you?”

Matt is rarely angry but when he is, it owns him. It’s like a switch gets thrown. His facial expression is tied to that switch and his mother knows exactly what it means. He forces her out of his garage with it.

The next thing Matt knows he’s in the shower, warm water gurgling through the old plumbing while images of this night flood through him. He’s short of breath and there’s a clenching knot in his throat. His ears roar and his balls ache. The soap and shampoo scald his palms, knees, and elbows. While inside him, the incomprehensible currents mass and separate and mass again — Laurel and Jazz and Bonnie and everything he saw at Sapphire Cove.