A Thousand Steps

23

Matt drives because his mother’s feeling a little spaced. A touch of the flu, she says, nothing serious.

Matt steers out Broadway, passing the pageant amphitheater on his left, then picks up the Laguna Canyon frontage road. Putts past the new Sawdust Festival, where Christian is selling his psychedelic paintings and his bodacious wrought iron sculptures of desert animals. Makes a right onto Woodland Drive and a left on Roosevelt.

The houses here are small and old, some stucco but most of them the same wooden clapboard as the Third Street bungalow. Their front doors and windows are mostly open and the smell of dope rides the air. The streets are dirt, with cars parked chaotically. Long-haired young people stand around smoking, eyeing Matt and his mother. Children and dogs. Matt sees a skinny black monkey chained to an oak tree in a brown front yard. And an aviary that takes up half of a vacant lot, filled with bright red macaws and green parrots. A bunch of barefoot boys in swim trunks run alongside the Westfalia, lunging up toward his open window, for what reason Matt does not know. He slows to a crawl to avoid running over someone’s foot.

Matt knows from his mom that this area — made up of Woodland Drive, Fairwood Lane, Roosevelt Lane, Victory Walk, and Milligan Way — had been a black neighborhood until the hippies and dealers and artists took over. Cheap rent, walk to town and the beach. A few of his schoolmates live out here. Christian told him Johnny Grail had started calling it Dodge City because of all the cops raiding and hassling him and his Brotherhood of Eternal Love, chasing them around with guns drawn.

“There, Matt! The red one.”

It’s a small barn. The paint and white trim are faded and he can see space between some of the slats. The sliding door is open, chickens fussing in the sunshine. Matt has always liked barns. His Grandma Mae and Grandpa Elmer lived on a farm near Dayton, Ohio, and Julie took all three kids there one summer for two weeks. He remembers that barn clearly, from the rusted hand-crank corn husker that had taken off a man’s hand in 1921, to the pigeon feathers wafting down in the dusty light, to the livestock-and-hay smell of it.

This barn sits on its lot, weirdly angled and somehow apart from the other buildings on Roosevelt Lane. Like it’s been dropped here. Matt thinks of Dorothy’s house in The Wizard of Oz, the way the tornado just picks it up and sets it down.

Like most of Dodge City, the barn looks a little long in the tooth.

“Do you like it, Matt?”

“I’m not sure. It’s bigger than Third Street. What’s the rent?”

“Less than Third Street! Plus I’ve got some canning and kitchen work.”

“Kitchen work?”

“It’s kind of communal. You’ll see.”

The boys tear into the barn ahead of Matt and his mother. There’s no walkway or porch or entryway, just a footpath that leads through the dead-grass barnyard to the sliding door.

Inside, it’s an odd mix of barn and home. There are enough windows to let in some sun, but not a lot. Matt stands just inside the door, his mother beside him. There are no stalls or pens, tractors or tools. Rather, a main room with a beaten linoleum floor with a white-on-purple fleur-de-lis pattern. In the center of the room is a large, upturned wooden utility spool with six mismatched bar stools around it, some with backs and some not. Against the rough slat walls are a wooden chair and three thrift-store sofas that look like they’ve supported generations.

The kitchen is spacious, with a four-burner stove, a stainless-steel sink, and an oven. Two refrigerators: a bulbous white Frigidaire with a Grateful Dead poster of a skull smoking a cigar, and a newer one with hundreds of surf stickers and peace signs on it. There’s a wood-burning stove for heat. The barn smells of woodsmoke and skunky marijuana.

The boys peer down on them from the hayloft, point and laugh and disappear into the darkness. Matt looks at the stairway and the handwritten DO NOT ENTER sign hung across the handrails with twine. Suddenly the boys come flying down the stairs, jump the twine, and pound across the old linoleum and out the door.

“Welcome!”

“Welcome!”

“Butts!”

Through open doors, Matt can see a “master” bedroom and three smaller ones. He steps into each momentarily, because a moment is all it takes. They all have mattresses on their linoleum floors, defeated dressers, and saloon-y wooden furniture that reminds Matt of Gunsmoke. Each room has one window and a sink. The master has an old-fashioned clawfoot bathtub and a toilet. Matt, skinny and prone to his garage drafts, feels a shiver just imagining this place in February.

“There’s no shower.”

“Right next door, Matt — Don and Connie Schwartz — the owners of this place. They’re Brotherhood. And they’re hardly ever home. At least Don isn’t. He travels a lot.”

Smuggling in hash from Afghanistan, Matt assumes. “And we share our kitchen?”

“With one other family only.”

“Is the rest of it ours?”

“The barn is all ours! Except the kitchen, sometimes.”

Matt can’t stop himself. “I hate it. I’d rather have the old garage and my own kitchen and a decent shower. Your room at home is better than this one. And we’d freeze here. The canyon’s cold in fall and winter.”

“But warm in spring and summer. Except for, you know, the June gloom...” A tear rolls down Julie’s cheek and she brushes it away. A catch of breath. Then another tear.

“Why are you doing this, Mom?”

“I thought I could... you know...”

“No, I don’t know.”

“I feel very sad inside.”

“Why? You weren’t sad before.”

“It gets a little bigger every day. And the things I have and love and look forward to, they get smaller.”

“Do you have cancer?”

“Oh, no honey, no!”

“Is it what happened with Dad?”

“Maybe what happened to all of us.”

“But Kyle’s going to make it home alive. And we’re going to get Jasmine back. And Dad’s gone for good. Don’t dwell on him.”

“I know.”

“Maybe it’s the dragon balls, then.”

Julie shakes her head but avoids Matt’s eyes. “No, certainly not. What do you know about opium?”

“The hash you smoke is laced with it. From Afghanistan. The Brotherhood smuggles it in by the pound. It’s how they finance the LSD and the Happenings.”

“But what makes you think that I smoke that stuff?”

“You left a dragon ball in the silverware drawer and I found it. Wrapped in foil.”

She looks down, takes a wavering breath. Her voice is softer. “If you’re ever tempted to try it, don’t. It will make you care less about the things you love. So all you’ll want is more of it.”

“That’s happening to you.”

“I’m fighting hard. I love you so much and I don’t want anything bad to ever happen to you. You are my baby forever, Matt. My last and in some ways my first.”

“First what?”

“My first and only you.”

More tears, chin trembling.

“We need to stay on Third Street, Mom.”

“No. This is where I need to be. This is where I make my stand. Where I started. When I was young and brave.”

Matt’s anger spikes. He pities his mom but she infuriates him too.

“I’m staying at Third Street until Pedley throws me out,” he says. “I don’t like it here and Jasmine needs a home to come home to. I can’t believe you’re ditching her when she’s in some living hell we can’t even imagine.”

“I need to be here, Matt. I need to save myself so I can save my daughter. You can have the van.”

Half an hour later they’ve finished unloading the boxes. There is mostly silence between them, and a heaviness in the air.

The first thing she takes from a box is the countdown calendar for Kyle’s return from the war. She’s already filled in today’s magic number: thirty-six. She’s packed the tape in the same box, so the calendar goes right over the skull on the Grateful Dead poster on the fridge.

“Can I bring you anything from home, or town?” he asks.

“Everything I need for today is here. I got it all. Thanks for your help!”

She gives him a hearty hug and a beaten smile. Matt can feel her desperation.

He drives down Roosevelt Lane to Milligan, loops back around into view of the barn and parks again. Leaves the engine running. Sees that the big barn door is now closed.

Notes the thick plume of smoke drafting out of the master bedroom window.