A Thousand Steps

19

Hounded and haunted by images of Jasmine running for her life, and vowing never to be outrun by a hippie van again, the next morning Matt drives illegally to the DMV and passes both the written test and the actual driving test.

Now he heads toward home, his first journey as a fully licensed driver. Inwardly, he berates himself for not having done this earlier. He could have caught up with Jazz driving Julie’s van, right? But he didn’t have the guts to take the driving test until it was too late.

Back home he finally manages to get his father by phone. Matt tells him what happened and Bruce goes quiet for a long moment. Always a bad sign.

“Expect me,” Bruce says.

“You’ve said that before.”

“I’ve got a few things to nail down first,” he says.

And hangs up.

Matt helps Tommy load his papers onto the driveway behind the Westfalia. He can’t stop thinking about what he saw last night. Still can’t believe that the desk officer on duty thought he was somehow mistaken. He’d asked if Matt had been smoking dope or maybe tripping. When he had finally gotten home early in the morning, wholly unable to sleep, Matt had furiously sketched out what he’d seen with his own good eyes, in twenty-ten vision, tested by the school nurse, best in the ninth grade at LBHS.

“Now that you got your license, you want a vehicle route when one comes up?” Tommy asks.

“I’d like to make more money.”

“More papers, more money, Matt. But it means wear and tear on this old van, and insurance and gas. Up to thirty-six cents a gallon now.”

“Sign me up for a car route.”

“There’s a wait. Heard anything out of Jazz?”

“No, Tommy.”

“I worry about her. Back home in Asbury Park, Elke Meier ran away from home and never came back. And she was really clean-cut and smart. Like Jasmine. Maybe the posters will help.”

“Jasmine didn’t run away.”

Matt does not recount last night’s event for Tommy. First of all, Darnell asked him not to tell the press or anybody else about it. The cops want to work this white-on-green VW van lead quietly for now, and if the bad guys know their vehicle has been seen, they just might leave it in the garage for a good long while. Second, Matt’s exhausted after going over Jazz’s abduction with the doubtful desk officer, and later with Darnell and later again with the very skeptical Sgt. Furlong, who asked pointedly if Matt had been smoking dope with Johnny and Tim and Christian last night before he and Darnell had come in. You look a little dazed to me, Furlong had said. Matt said no, he’d tried pot months ago and didn’t like it — a half-truth only.

“You know, we’ve got a story in the paper today, about Bonnie Stratmeyer’s autopsy,” says Tommy. “They’re saying she drowned. An accident maybe. But maybe not. And she had drugs in her that the coroner could not identify. So the FBI is helping.”

Bad news is failing to surprise Matt. It’s everywhere he goes.

But his route goes without a hitch, even with the rod and tackle box strapped behind him. He just pedals harder, takes the corners easier. No dogs today, the Coiner paper perfectly porched, nice words from Miranda and Mrs. Zahara. They’re worried sick about Jazz, and Matt can tell they both feel somewhat responsible, since Jasmine’s disappearance commenced in the wake of hers and Miranda’s connivance. He actually finishes his deliveries early.

He arrives at the two-story home of Patricia Trinkle, the MAW customer on Diamond Street. The house is surrounded by walls of bougainvillea in eye-shimmering violets and hot pinks. The hedge has a cutout for a gate. When Matt opens and closes it behind him, a bell chimes brightly.

The front yard is a square of healthy green grass and three bird baths, all with gurgling fountains. Two doves in the far bath look up at him then go back to their drinking.

The walkway is brick and the house a Craftsman style, with pillars and a raised wooden porch. Matt takes one more look at the heavy, handsome Tibetan Book of the Dead and sets it in the blue milk bottle crate near the screen door.

In the blue crate, propped up on the far side to face him, is a square white envelope with the letters M.A. typed on.

Matt lifts it out and feels it, sensing a cash tip.

Inside is a once-folded twenty-dollar bill, crisp, dry, and new.

A fortune.

Too cool for words.

By five thirty Matt has caught three good calico bass off Moss Point. He’s about to land a fourth but he slips on a slick sharp rock and goes in. He feels the power of the surge and the bouyant lightness that is his body, a speck in the vast Pacific. He hangs on to his rod, though, waits for the surge to lift him up, clambers back onto the rocks and up.

That hasn’t happened in a while, he thinks.

His knees are freshly banged up now and there’s a new scratch on his shin that bleeds weakly but at least it’s a warm day.

He works out his wallet to make sure the twenty isn’t too badly soaked. Jackson is damp but fine. His new driver’s license is pretty soggy.

Later Julie makes dinner for Matt and Laurel Kalina. His mom is supercharged with energy to rescue Jazz from her tormentors. She took the day off from work to put up more posters around town, and made still another trip to the police station to convince them that Matt’s story of her abduction is true. Then spent the rest of the day cleaning the house, playing a dreadful Tom Jones album that Matt had given her last Christmas, straightening Jasmine’s room and changing the bedsheets. As if a clean house will draw Jazz home. Jazz, kidnapped not a hundred feet from where they now make dinner. Matt, unable to help her. It makes him feel sick.

In the kitchen Julie has a little trouble with the fish so Matt takes over at the skillet and gets the fillets done but not too done. He mixes the last of the dressing into the salad, puts a piece of bread on each plate.

This is the first time Laurel has been in his house, and he’s aware of its age and smallness. When Matt walks toward her with her plate she’s like a vision of paradise here at the yellow chrome dinette for four. Gauguin’s vision, maybe. She seems inordinately large. Her sleek black hair moves upon her brown shoulders, her red lipstick matches the red in her cherries-on-white dress.

“I have some very good news for you, Matt,” says Julie. She smiles at Laurel, too. “We’ll be moving from here to somewhere better, out in Dodge City. It’s got enough rooms for you and Jazz and Kyle. Just one bath, but the neighbors will let us use theirs when we need to. Lots of very cool people around. As you know, my first room in Laguna was there, in 1946! The neighborhood wasn’t called Dodge back then. It was mostly colored people. So, this will be like a homecoming for me. Roosevelt Lane. Pretty name, isn’t it?”

Matt feels like a housefly flicked off a table by a giant finger. Today of all days, Julie announces they’re moving? With Jazz kidnapped and Kyle on his way home and the fridge always empty and her sucking on the opium pipe like some kind of oxygen bottle?

He also wants to throttle his mother for bringing this up in front of his girlfriend. His first girlfriend. He’s been to Dodge City and he doesn’t like Dodge City and he doesn’t want to live in Dodge City, his own room or not.

Matt can’t believe his mother is selling the house out from under her own daughter. “What about Jazz?”

“What do you mean? We’ll have a nicer home to welcome her back to!”

“I hope she knows where to find it, Mom.”

A look from her. “Please try to be okay about this, Matt.”

“I’m sick of being okay with everything,” he says, looking away.

“That is exciting news,” Laurel says quietly.

“And that’s not all,” Julie says. “No more of me being a serving wench! I’ve got myself a job right in Dodge. I’ll be canning tomatoes they grow in the community garden. I still have my canning skills from being a farmer’s daughter. Remember the jam I used to make? We use organic tomatoes grown in the canyon, right off the vine. They sell them at the roadside stand and farmer’s markets. Doesn’t pay a ton, but enough. We’ll finally have enough for all of us, Matt. Enough.”

“When’s all this going to happen, Mom?”

“Soon,” she says, with a smile. “I’m not sure exactly.”

He wonders how to let Jasmine know where her family has gone. Tack a message to the front door? Run a classified ad in the Register or the News-Post and hope she sees it? What are the chances that a kidnapped girl even sees a paper?

After dinner they spend a few minutes with Walter Cronkite, looking for Kyle on the snowy black-and-white RCA. This report comes from Cu Chi in South Vietnam. Matt watches with a clenched gut as two medics rush a soldier toward a waiting helicopter. The soldier’s torso is wrapped in a bloody white bandage the size of a bath towel. His helmet is off and his face is a grimace. He looks enough like Kyle to send a jolt of adrenalin through Matt. His breath catches and his eyes are locked on the screen.

“It’s not him,” says Julie, digging her nails into his upper arm, hard. “It’s not, Matt.”

“No, it’s not.”

Heart pounding.

Laurel looks up at him with a pity that embarrasses him.

“Mom, Laurel and I are going to take the van and drive around before the Pageant. Look for Jasmine. I know it’s a long shot but, well, she’s out there somewhere. Somewhere close. We could use another set of eyes. You want to come?”

“You bet I do.”