A Thousand Steps

42

Matt and his father pick up Laurel just after ten. The early morning is thick with coastal haze. Bruce wears a white straw Stetson, a snap-button shirt, a yoked corduroy sport coat, and a pair of suede cowboy boots. He sets a tattered leather briefcase at his feet.

Matt and his father have already discussed whether Laurel should continue to be a part of the revised quest team. Matt has argued well in her favor, and prevailed.

But the first thing Bruce says to her after she climbs into the Westfalia and Matt has introduced them is:

“You’re a fine young woman, Laurel, but I don’t think you should be involved in this.”

“Oh, why not, Mr. Anthony?”

Bruce turns around in the passenger seat, holds open his blazer to show her the gun.

“This mission has taken on some complexity,” he says.

“Good God, it sure has. Matt? Is this okay? A gun, and what you’re doing?”

“I think it is, Laurel. Dad’s former law enforcement, as you know. But you, Dad, do not get to give Laurel Kalina orders. You are not her boss. Or my boss, either.”

Bruce drops his jacket flap.

“I am one hundred percent not your boss, Matt. Nor yours, Miss Kalina. I’m simply pointing out that sooner or later, we will find Jasmine, and very likely at least one of three physically powerful kidnappers. Things could turn. I don’t want you in the middle of it, Laurel. An unarmed girl. You can get hurt, or worse. I can’t let that happen. What would your parents say about you doing this?”

“She’s great on the interviews, Dad. People let us in because she’s intelligent and asks good questions. She saves time.”

“Do you know how reckless and naive that sounds, son?”

Matt throws his brain into reverse and sees very clearly that his father is right.

“I resign,” says Laurel. “I don’t want to go. I’m not putting myself around guns for this. I have books to write.”

“Good girl,” says Bruce.

“Matt, Matt, look at me,” Laurel says, tears forming. “I’m so sorry.”

She climbs out and slams the van door and comes around the driver’s side, where Matt has gotten out to say goodbye.

“Please don’t cry.”

“Okay, I won’t cry.”

Laurel kisses him loudly on the mouth and hustles through her front door without a look back.

Of course, the door-to-doors go nothing like the old days. Matt starts the first interview as before, which gets them inside, but refused a full walk-through. Bruce introduces himself as Matt’s father, a detective, and flashes his Tulsa PD shield.

Matt starts his backup pitch about Jasmine being a songwriter and ukulele player, and her tireless volunteer work with Down syndrome children and the Laguna Food Exchange — somewhat exaggerated.

The occupant — a young man in a jeans and work boots and apparently on his way out — is explaining that he really needs to go, when Bruce simply walks past him, across the living room, and into a short hallway.

“He can’t do this,” says the man.

“He’ll be done in just a second,” says Matt. “Don’t get him riled up.”

“Is he really your father?”

“Yes, really.”

“Get him out of here.”

By then Bruce is striding back down the hall, grin on, hat in hand, and his cowboy boots clunking authoritatively on the old hardwood floor.

“Cute little place,” he says.

“Get the fuck out of it.”

Matt hears the anger in his voice.

“Gladly,” says Bruce. “Come along, son.”

Heading for the next house, Bruce says, “Let me do the talking for these next few. Just see how it goes.”

Strangely to Matt, by the time they stop at one o’clock for his paper route, they’ve gotten more permissions to enter and done room-to-room searches than he and Laurel had ever managed in one morning.

Matt sees that Bruce isn’t just tall, handsome, and obviously concerned for his kidnapped daughter, but he’s fast. He swiftly charms and/or intimidates. The men his own age want to be peers, and most of the women seem to admire him, some openly. Homosexual men and women instinctively dislike him, Matt notes, though they’re polite in their refusals.

Bruce just talks and walks past the reluctant citizens anyway, leaving Matt with the small talk.

They’re in and out in no time.

They knock on the door of their old home at Top of the World. It’s a nice little fifties ranch house with a large American flag hung from a pole in the middle of the front yard.

“The pole, Dad.”

“Still standing.”

Matt pictures Kyle and Jazz and him helping their dad pour the cement footing. And later, sneaking their thumbprints into it. He toes back the grass and sees the prints.

“I liked this house,” says his father.

The owners now are a young couple with children in the den, watching cartoons on TV. They’ve both heard of Jazz and have been hoping for good news since reading about her in the papers and seeing the downtown flyers.

“Is the bomb shelter still here?” asks Bruce.

“It’s a wine cellar now!” says the missus. “Have a look.”

Standing amid the racks of down-slanted wine bottles, Matt pictures the old shelves with the alphabetized cans. His favorite canned food was the paper-wrapped tamales that tasted nothing at all like tamales, Dinty Moore stew a close second.

Matt remembers the time Kyle locked him down here for eating his birthday candy. Then ran. Matt was five. It was a hot day and upstairs his parents had the window-mounted air conditioner going full blast and nobody could hear him yelling. The insulation down here was incredibly thick, too, Bruce and his builder friends having done their best to harden the cellar against bombs, Russian MiGs, tanks, and small-arms fire. So the longer Matt yelled the more hoarse he got, and the longer nobody came to let him out, the more claustrophobic and afraid he became. He called his own number and got a busy signal. The rising panic was one of the worst things he’d felt in his five years. Didn’t know what it was. Worse than nightmares. Worse than measles. It was Jasmine who missed him first, finally came down and found him, and Matt in that moment pledged that if Jazz ever got locked up, he’d find her and set her free. Then Matt had quit blubbering and wiped his humiliating tears. He found Kyle upstairs and hit him in the side of the head with his baseball glove as hard as he could. Kyle got Matt in a headlock and waited for him to say uncle, which didn’t take long. Matt had held a grudge for weeks.

“We had it,” says his father. “We had everything here.”

“What do you mean?”

“Life.”

“It seemed pretty good.”

Bruce nods. “It’s incredible how bad a man can fuck things up. Without even meaning to.”

By the time they’re heading back to Third Street, Bruce has calculated a record-breaking 212 searches. Combined with the many residences obviously home to children, the old and the infirm, they’ve done three times his best day with Laurel. Figuring conservatively, Matt realizes they’ve covered well over half the city.

“Check this, Matt.”

From his briefcase Bruce removes a tablet of quarter-inch graph paper, sets the briefcase across his lap, and squares the graph paper tablet before him.

“Last night, I sketched a street map of Laguna onto twenty-four sheets,” he says. “Which makes one quarter-inch square for almost every house in the city. It’ll show us where we’ve been and where we still have to go. We made some real progress today.”

Bruce uses the ride home to log one- or two-digit alphanumeric address references from Matt’s and Laurel’s interview notebook into the quarter-inch squares. His numbers and letters are perfect. Matt thinks he got his own smidgen of artistic aptitude from his dad. Years ago, Bruce told him he’d rather be an engineer or pilot than a cop. Guiding the Westfalia toward Third Street, Matt glances at the graph paper map and the man making it, realizing how much about him he does not know.

Matt sits on the red bucket to fold and rubber-band his newspapers in his former Third Street driveway.

Bruce sits in the beach chair with the maps and a pack of colored pencils, coloring each graph paper square appropriately:

Orange for search completed.

Yellow for search not warranted — meaning old people, the handicapped, women, parents with young children.

Blue for no answer or nobody home.

Red for call the police: warranted, suspicious, and denied.

No reds yet, Matt notes. There was a guy over on Catalina who seemed worried and untrustworthy. His dog was barking viciously from a bedroom as Bruce pled his case, but the man was dramatically obese and looked nothing like the men stashing his sister in the van.

Now Matt takes a minute to look at the big GTE building and the blue summer sky and its wispy clouds. He feels oddly wonderful to be sitting here in the driveway getting his papers ready, the Heavy-Duti gamely standing by, just as he’s done for well over the last two years of his life. He didn’t think he’d ever be here again. Didn’t think he’d miss Third Street. He definitely never thought he’d be sitting here folding papers with his dad.

“I’ll drive and you can throw,” says Bruce.

The proposition catches Matt off guard, and so does his answer. “No, thanks, Dad.”

“Why not?”

“This route is more efficient on the bike.”

“And?”

“And it’s something I like to do.”

“Because you’re the boss?”

“Because I’m good at it.”

“That’s a good reason to do a thing. I’m proud of you for that, son.”

Matt hears the engine before the shiny blue Porsche whines past him down Third, hooks abruptly into the GTE parking lot, decelerates around its perimeter, and rumbles back onto Third, parking on the driveway behind the pile of papers. The top is down.

“Matt Anthony, where’s my fork and picnic basket!”

Matt’s up off the bucket. “They’re out in Dodge, Sara. Mom got hurt. I’m living there for now.”

“I’ve been calling but no one answers. I saw the for-rent sign. Nobody at the Jolly Roger would tell me where you went. I get the feeling you’ve been avoiding me.”

Matt approaches, a folded, rubber-banded Register in hand. “I wouldn’t avoid you.”

“Well that’s a relief.” She’s wearing little round John Lennon sunglasses and a Chairman Mao cap. Her hair spills out from under it in a tangle.

“Mom broke her leg in two places, and two ribs, out at the festival on Sunday.”

“Bummer,” says Sara. “Some of my friends went, said it was horrible. Hippies mating in the bushes and people overdosing on LSD.”

“Two babies got born.”

“You take Laurel?”

“Yeah.”

She glances at Bruce then back to Matt.

“Look, I need that fork and basket. But I also need to talk to you. I’ll pick you up after your door-knocking tonight for Jazz. Say nine thirty?”

“Nine thirty is good. You’re not going to make me carry logs up and down hills, are you?”

“You just be here and be ready, Buckwheat. I swear, you’ve grown in the last week.”

“Two inches and twenty pounds in six months.”

“Wear something nice tonight, and bring an appetite. That shouldn’t be hard.”

Matt watches the Porsche trundle down Third toward Forest.

“Be on time for that one,” says Bruce.

Matt and his father have TV dinners in Matt’s old digs. Bruce has brought a small color television with him and they watch the news.

Cronkite suggests again that the war is not being won and might in fact be unwinnable.

“Fucking communist patsy,” says Bruce. “He’s worse than Frontly and Pinkley.”

He makes a gun-finger at the screen and fires.

That night they knock on 142 doors, get 120 invites in, and make almost that many full searches.

On their way back to Third Street Bruce thoughtfully flips through his twenty-four page Laguna residence map, framing the alphanumeric address references in the tiny quarter-inch cubes. Matt sees him make a quick calculation in a margin.

“Roughly thirty percent of Laguna,” he says.

“Already covered?”

“Left to go, Matt. Left to go.”