A Thousand Steps

24

With the house to himself Matt calls Laurel but her mom says she’s out with Rose. He eats two Husky Boy burgers and fries in front of the TV, watches the Huntley-Brinkley Vietnam coverage for yesterday — one of the deadliest days in the entire war. Most of the segment is from an address by President Johnson, who urges the American people to be patient with the war: we are winning but it is costly. He suggests that TV is turning America against the war. There is grim footage of metal coffins being unloaded from a huge cargo plane at a military base in Maryland. Kyle could be in one of those, Matt thinks. The military is supposed to notify you as soon as it happens, though, so families don’t get shocked to learn it on TV. He read about a dad who died of a heart attack when they came to his door. Matt thinks of how scared Ernie Rios is of getting drafted, even though he’s not eighteen yet. Kyle was number 353 and enlisted anyway.

He half watches The Flying Nun with the sound off. So stupid a show, with all the bad things in the world, he thinks. Then stares at the street outside where they’d bagged his sister. He wonders what she’s doing right exactly now. Are they feeding her? Is she being tortured or raped? He feels like hitting someone, maybe the damned nun. Or how about the men who took Jazz? Or whoever sells that shit to his mom?

He looks again through Jasmine’s room for some hint or clue to her whereabouts. With his mom moved out, Matt misses Jazz more than ever. Leary looks back at him. As do Aretha and the Beatles. Maybe the Beatles had her kidnapped.

And Jazz loves her music. Which reminds him of the Advanced Ukulele Hits book he got for her birthday, and the lyrics she scribbles inside the back cover and in the margins. Maybe there’s some clue in her songs.

He takes it off the shelf and leafs through, but no luck. Just phrases and lines and chords written over them. Feels some of his mother’s desperation, the good things getting further and further away.

He gets her diary and sits on her bed. It’s got a black leatherette cover and gold-edged pages of heavy, lined paper.

Opens where the marker is, and reads:

She’s always liked birds. Writes about migrating warblers the size of a woman’s thumb. Millions of them flying at night. How if they get tired over large bodies of water they fall from the sky and drown.

Matt thinks of the carelessly vain Austin Overton, guitar strapped over his muscles, entertaining Dana and the other girls on the patio of Big Yellow. How Overton remembered sleeping with Jasmine but not much else about her. Again, Matt wonders at his sister’s brittle arrogance, how she’s superior and self-doubting at the same time. How she likes the singer and is repelled by him, too. Matt traces this to his father and mother, the way that, between them, they stoked pride in their children one day, followed it with belittlement the next.

She told Matt that a year ago. He said he’d go too, fish and draw and paint.

He fans back a few pages.

Matt feels sneaky, reading these words that were never meant for him. Jasmine’s handwriting changes with her moods: angry, sad, playful, curious, confident. He hears her voice in the words. He reads a few more entries, but finds nothing to point him in her direction. In any direction at all.

Then he’s back in the dimming light of the small living room, looking out the window through the lank avocado tree to the street and the hulking GTE building. He realizes this may be one of his last nights here, and it surprises him how unhappy this makes him. This is a crummy place by Laguna standards, a barely affordable rental, small, drafty, and shadowed by other buildings. The landlord is annoying, stingy with his avocados, and looks at his mother creepily.

But this has been Matt’s home for his last four years — two of middle school, and two of Laguna Beach High School. The artists, he thinks. Like Christian. And Gauguin. This clapboard box with the groaning pipes and the flickering lights is a big part of what he is. He’s really kind of loved it.

From here on Third, he’s fished with Kyle, listened to Jasmine play and sing, had long talks with his mom about her growing up on that Ohio farm, the small school, Julie being the high school valedictorian for a graduating class of twelve, Julie and her friend Dee spreading out a map of the United States on the floor, closing their eyes and Dee dropping a Chinese coin onto it. The coin had a square opening cut into its middle and this square was to frame the city where fate told them to go — to find jobs and begin new lives in a world that might offer more than endless flat miles of corn, tiny towns, few people and little opportunity. The coin landed in New Mexico but there was nothing in its square window. On the next drop it landed way up in New Hampshire but again there was no town or city. Third try, Dee flipped the coin high and it landed in California. And when Julie and Dee leaned in close, they saw the small empty square framing letters Lagu... where his mother and Dee, aged eighteen, had begun their new lives in 1946, in rooms for rent on Victory Walk, and where they had learned to dance up in Newport Beach and to swim in a rich lady’s pool in Emerald Bay.

His mother’s lucky Chinese coin had made this place on Third Street in Laguna possible. Inevitable?

So yes, Matt will miss this house, and the hard garage that’s been his lair for two years. All the sketches he’s done there, all the music he’s played on the rinky-dink Motorola portable stereo with the pop-up lid and the needles that get dull every few months. He’ll miss lying back on that mattress and imagining what fish he might catch the next day, and how to make better time on his paper route with smart short-cuts, and picturing Laurel Kalina, the girl he’s been furtively admiring since fourth grade and now has told him, I like you so much.

Again, spurred by fears for Jazz, hounded by images of her in pain, Matt drives to Laguna’s beaches — Thousand Steps, Brooks, Main, Crescent Bay — hoping for a glimpse of his sister...

The evening is cool and breezy. Scores of young people walk the shores, trailing smoke and laughter.

But no weird LA Moves photo shoots, no Jazz.

At Diver’s Cove the sun has just set when three girls come over and ask him where’s the nearest party. They’re older than him, maybe Jasmine’s age: one with a red satin cape over leopard-print leotards, another wearing a long rainbow-pattern duster, and a barefoot redhead in shorts and a macramé sweater with beads woven in. The redhead has a joint going and they all three huddle in close to him, and she offers it to Matt, who declines, but the girl takes a big hit and aims her exhale into his face, leaning in close, lightly kissing his lips. Her kiss is pungent and warm and it sends a lightning bolt of lust through him.

“Michoacan,” she whispers. “You ought to try it.”

Suddenly there’s a hand on his crotch and Matt almost jumps out of his shorts.

“You sure you don’t want a hit?”

The hand still moving on him.

“No, thank you.”

By the time he realizes what they’re doing, Red Cape is handing off his wallet to a muscular guy in jeans and biker boots who has appeared from nowhere, and he hands off the wallet to a little guy who turns and runs like a rabbit toward Coast Highway. Then from the dark comes a third man, fists up and ready to fight, joining his muscular buddy to corral Matt from the escaping rabbit. The girls dance around Matt, a swirling circle of cape and coat and sweater, the redhead shaking her tangle of curls into his face.

“Come on girls,” says Muscles. “Kid, you stay the fuck right there. The wallet will be in the trash can.”

“Longton! Move it, man!”

Laughter trails into the night.

A few minutes later he’s driving toward home, hands shaking and stomach muscles locked. He’s got his wallet, license, student ID, and not one dollar. His incredible twenty-dollar tip from Sungaard is gone. The dollars he had before that windfall are gone too. All of which could have fed him for weeks, bought him a new sketchpad and some used clothes from Fade in the Shade, paid for ice cream sundaes and dinners for Laurel. The loss is almost what he makes in a month delivering papers. Eighty-three fucking cents left in his pocket.

But his adrenalin won’t let go and he really wants to fight, though he’s only been in one fight in his life, which he lost.

Add those girls kissing and rubbing him — which makes Matt feel depraved and deprived and wanting Laurel — and he doesn’t know how he’s supposed to feel. He screams out the open window into the PCH traffic, just a scream, no words.

Making it all even worse, Matt has suspected since he last saw Jasmine two nights ago that it’s basically useless looking for her like this. As if she’ll appear again, running crazily free, and he’ll magically be there to rescue her. It’s futile.

Flattened by tonight’s sorry events, this futility hits him like a wave breaking over the rocks where he fishes. He feels angry and stupid. He has been robbed by hippies.

“This is idiotic, Matt,” he says. “You are an idiot.”