A Thousand Steps

27

In the fragrant Dodge City “packing house,” Julie, wearing one of her mother’s homemade dresses and a matching bonnet, hands Matt a mason jar. Matt thinks that, for the first time in his life, she looks like the farm girl she once was. The dress is beige and the bonnet ties at her chin. She looks like the label of a dairy product.

This warm morning, the packing house is dense with the smells of tomatoes, garlic, and onions.

“I’ve been checking with Darnell by phone twice a day,” she says. “They haven’t learned anything. I’ve talked to all the neighbors about Tuesday night but nobody saw it happen. Ten thirty P.M. and nobody sees a thing! I’ve called all of Jazz’s friends’ families again, just hoping that something might click into place to help the cops find her. I taped up another fifty posters down in South Laguna and Dana Point. I had a long talk with an old friend who used to be a PI. I’ll be meeting with him tomorrow. I even meditated at Mystic Arts World with one of that swami’s so-called Enlighteners, hoping I could make that connection to Jazz you keep talking about, you know, like cosmically. I didn’t. But we’re going to find her, Matt. And I’m going to find my own strength, too.”

She looks serene, he thinks. Her skin is smooth, eyes bright, her dark ringlets bounce beneath the bonnet lid. Matt has prepared himself for a kimono-and-dragon-ball Dodge City Julie, not this. Is it all an act, possibly drug-enhanced?

“This is from Johnny,” she says, pressing some bills into his hand. The five bucks for the flyers, Matt thinks: just in time.

She takes a mason jar off the table and hands it to him. “Check out the cool label.”

The label shows on-the-vine tomatoes in hot blue, cinnamon, and yellow, with the words in loopy psychedelic tomato red:

“We grow them right here,” she says. “Sell them out at the roadside stand. We deliver and ship, too.”

The packing house is an old home on Woodland, gutted of most interior walls, with an exposed beam ceiling, skylights, and enormous windows. The windows have no glass, only screens, so the weather outside is the weather inside, which this morning is warm and humid. Looking up, Matt can see sunlight between the ceiling beams and bees clustered near the peak, buzzing lazily.

“So anyway, this is where I work. Me and Crazy Carol, who isn’t crazy at all. Basically, it’s one big kitchen, but with canning stations. Those are the water bath canners and jar racks. There’s all my jar wrenches and lifters and funnels. And those are ladles and bubble removers. Those boxes are all mason jars, the good ones with screw bands and commercial sealers. All new. Carol and I are supposed to work about eight hours a day, but they’re flexible. And we get as long a lunch as we want. She usually comes in later. So it’s working out for me here, Mattie. I’m keeping all the bad things away. Most of them.”

Matt sees the pasteboard boxes of Laguna Sunshine Farms canned stewed tomatoes stacked along one wall near the double doors. The boxes have enlargements of the mason jar labels stickered onto them. There’s a conveyor belt running from the cooling table to cut down lifting the heavy boxes. The prep tables are piled with spices, blenders, chopping blocks, and cleavers.

“Anyway,” she says, looking around inquisitively, as if she’s just arrived here. “We compost the skins. But I had the most terrifying dream last night. That my skin was being composted too. It was my responsibility to peel it off before bed, and throw the rolls into the compost heap.”

Matt sees that troubled fear coming back into her eyes. Senses her mood beginning to tremble, like a building at the beginning of an earthquake.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” she asks.

“Nothing, Mom.”

“I’m sorry. It’s Jazz. It’s what I said to her that last night, before she left. I said, bring the damned van back with a full tank or don’t come back at all. I can’t support you your whole life. That’s what I told my daughter.”

The words hit Matt hard and he knows they would have hit Jazz hard too.

“Sometimes you blow up like that, Mom. She knows you didn’t mean it.”

“Love the ones you love, Matt, because you never know what’s going to happen next.”

Suddenly, the Dodge City dogs are barking, and Matt sees two of them tearing off toward Laguna Canyon Road. Then two more. He hears popping sounds, like firecrackers, then bigger explosions, like the shotguns he used to shoot with Kyle and his dad. A fire alarm rings loudly, cutting through the popping and booming.

“Cops again,” says Julie.

Outside Matt sees Moby Cop lumbering down Woodland. The Dodge City denizens emerge from their homes and yards, dogs charge the vehicle, the same barefoot boys who had invaded his mother’s barn scramble toward the van brandishing sticks. The skinny black monkey screams crazily, pulling at his chain like a prisoner. Smoke wafts, and Matt recognizes the sulfur smell of firecrackers as a cherry bomb explodes on the crumbling paved road and sends up a burst of paper and asphalt that brings Moby Cop to a stop.

Furlong and Darnell drop out, slam the doors and advance, firecrackers skittering and popping ahead of them, and the dogs barking shrilly from behind.

“Hello, Dodge City hippies, artists, and drug fiends!” Furlong calls out. “I smelled smoke all the way out to Laguna Canyon Road and thought I’d come see what you bad kids are up to.”

Fuck off, pigs!

Peace and love, brother and sister!

Fuck off, pigs!

We’ve got the Constitution on our side!

“For cryin’ out loud, folks,” Darnell calls out, her rope of blond hair braided and pinned atop her head. “We’re just here on a friendly visit!”

A cherry bomb explodes in the air not far from her, and Darnell flinches.

Bullshit!

The times they are a-changin’!

But the citizens mostly stay in their yards and on their porches, tossing lit strings of firecrackers, launching their words like artillery. The boys with sticks run off after each other, shrieking. Some of the dogs lie down in the middle of street to watch as Furlong and Darnell march toward the packing house.

“This kind of stuff happens a lot,” Julie says.

“Wow,” says Matt, watching Johnny Grail walk to the middle of Woodland Drive, stop, and face Furlong and Darnell like a Western gunfighter. Grail furtively jams something into a rear pocket of his jeans.

Then he takes a few steps toward the cops and stops again, ten feet away. Matt hustles closer for a better view, joins a family of five, all wearing overalls. Grail raises both hands high.

“Don’t shoot. I’m innocent!”

“You don’t look innocent, Johnny,” says Furlong. “You look like a spaced-out drug pusher.”

“My kids are around here somewhere, man. Don’t go spreading lies about me.”

“I don’t have to lie. When I saw you smoking dope with them last week, that said it all. And I really don’t like it when you run from me, Johnny.”

“Well darn, Marshal Dillon, that’s better than getting handcuffed and taken away.”

“What’s that in your back pocket?” asks Furlong.

Furlong and Darnell stride forward but Grail holds his ground. Then submits with a shake of his shaggy head as Furlong takes him by the back of his neck, marches him to the curb, and bends him over the hood of a dusty white station wagon. Furlong cinches up on Johnny’s arm as Darnell pulls a baggie from his back pocket.

“What’s this?” she asks.

“What’s it look like?”

“Weed, to me.”

“You have no probable cause for this search.”

“Cause? Plain sight, Johnny! I watched you try to hide it.”

With this, Darnell pulls open the bag and sniffs it.

“Funny, Johnny.”

“Isn’t dried dog shit still legal in Laguna?”

With this, the Dodge citizens laugh and scream and resume the firecracker-and-cherry-bomb assault, and the dogs spring into action and the tribe of boys comes screaming out from behind the mailboxes at the corner of Woodland and Victory Walk.

Furlong has his handcuffs out and he tries to get Grail back over the car hood but Johnny twists free and hauls ass down Woodland away from Moby Cop and into the steep, rough flank of Laguna Canyon.

Furlong digs heavily after him, Darnell too.

Go, go, go Johnny go!

Fuck you dog shit — sniffin’ pigs!

Matt can see that the cops don’t have a chance. Lithe Grail has already vanished into the dense canyon brush. Furlong and Darnell gamely pursue, burdened by equipment.

Four of the feral boys converge on Moby Cop, squat at the wheels and let the air out of the tires. Matt hears the hissing. They finish the job and are peeing on the wheels just as the cops come panting back into Matt’s view, Furlong trudging and Darnell’s braided ponytail dangling.

When Matt gets back to where he’d been standing with Julie, she’s not there.

He finds her in the barn on Roosevelt Lane. She’s in her bathroom and not visible, but the bathroom door is mostly open and its mirror throws her reflection to Matt, who has stopped in the living room.

“Mom, I’m here.”

“Good, Matt. Sorry, I just couldn’t stand all that.”

She’s in the bathtub, still in her prairie dress but the bonnet is gone. She’s reclining as if in a bubble bath, her back to him. A thick cloud of smoke surrounds her head, rolling back over her shoulders like fog. It swells and sways as she lightly coughs.

“I’m taking a warm bath but I’ll be out in a minute!”

“I know what you’re doing.”

He strides into her bedroom, slams the bathroom door on her, and rifles the room for dope. Finds a foil-wrapped dragon ball on the dresser, another in the nightstand drawer. She isn’t even trying to hide them, he thinks. And she can get more anytime she wants out here in Dodge. Furlong told him that every person out here was a drug user or dealer or both. Told him that even the kids out here are users, burying joints and chunks of hashish in the ground where the adults won’t find them. Maybe Furlong isn’t a paranoid fascist storm trooper after all.

The kitchen sink has a garbage disposal. The balls go down in a roar and a stream of hot water. Foil in the trash.

“What are you doing in there, Mattie?”

“Nothing that fucking matters!”

Matt takes the van and drives home. Julie’s opium addiction is his personal last straw. She looks dreamy and content on the outside but inside she’s as thin as the smoke she lives on. He feels suckered by her, manipulated, discarded. Probably what Jazz felt. And Julie dares to warble on about finding her strength. All of which leads him to conclude that the Westfalia is now his. He can use it for lots of things. His useless stoner mom doesn’t need it and she shouldn’t be driving anyway.

He lets himself in and answers the ringing phone.

“Matt, it’s Dad. Is Jazz home or not?”

“Not. I told you two men threw her into a van in front of our house. Right in front of me. Four days ago. She’s been missing nine days, Dad.”

“Can’t you handle the problem?”

“I’ve been looking all over for her!”

“But it sounds like you’re not handling it. So, expect me.”

“I’ve heard that before.”

His father hangs up.