A Thousand Steps

5

But no.

No sun-faded two-tone tangerine-and-white van in the driveway. Jasmine’s room is empty and his mother’s door is shut. When she’s “sleeping,” Julie hangs a puka shell necklace on the knob, but Matt sees that her light is on. He hears music inside.

He cooks and eats the fish, cleans up, and sits on the lumpy living room couch, looking out the window. Sets a soft drink can on the wicker trunk that serves as their coffee table. There’s a streetlight directly across Third that sends down a misty cone of light that reminds him of Hopper. Hopper was the first painter he liked, years ago as a fifth grader, courtesy of a book in his classroom at El Morro Elementary. Hopper made it okay to be alone.

He hears the music stop and his mother’s door open, the puka shells tapping against the wood.

“Hi’ya Matty,” she smiles dreamily. She walks through the living room into the kitchen, wearing another of her silk kimonos, the orange one, her hair up in chopsticks, something in her hand. “I didn’t hear you come in. No Jazz, huh? I called all her friends soon as I got home. Nobody’s seen her.”

“I thought she’d be here.”

Matt hears her open and close a kitchen drawer. Utensils rattle and clink. He smells a different odor in the little bungalow. It’s not the usual skunky green odor of pot, it’s sharper and darker smelling.

The refrigerator clunks open and shut and Julie comes out with a white sack in one hand and a fork in the other. She sits across from Matt on a blue vinyl chair, part of the furnishings when they moved in.

His mother’s voice sounds thin and somehow distant. “I’m going to talk to the police tomorrow if she’s not home tonight. I think she’s still mad at me.”

He knows that Jazz chides Julie for smoking dope and drinking too much wine. That Jazz can get under her mother’s skin quick as a bee sting. And seems to enjoy it, sometimes.

“I’ll wait up for her,” says Matt.

“Great, honey. It’s only nine. I promise you she’ll be home tonight.”

She pulls a cardboard canister of Jolly Roger leftovers from the bag and goes to work on the noodles. Matt smiles at this tableau, his mother in a kimono with chopsticks in her hair eating noodles with a fork. She looks up and smiles back.

Watching her eat makes Matt hungry again. His hilly paper route leaves him consistently famished on the scant twenty-five dollars a month. The home fridge and cabinets are poorly stocked due to what his mother calls budgetary concerns, and her free take-home food from the Jolly Roger rarely lasts the night. She’s admitted to Matt and Jazz that she eats her way through her shifts, trying to preserve the home foodstuffs for them. Thus for Matt: fishing the rocks for the plentiful bass, halibut, and perch; occasional handouts from a friend who washes dishes at the swank Hotel Laguna restaurant on Pacific Coast Highway; stolen neighborhood oranges and occasional avocados; and embarrassing runs to the Assistance League Food Exchange. He’s never full for long. He’s skinny. Jazz told him he probably has a tapeworm.

“Have you heard any more about Bonnie Stratmeyer?” asks Julie.

Matt shakes his head. “Just people making things up.”

“I see you got another letter from your father. Did he have anything good to say?”

“What he always says. For me to come out and live with him. Hippies and queers are ruining the country and that’s all there is in Laguna.”

“Is he still in Nevada?”

“Oklahoma now.”

Matt knows that his mother knows where Bruce Anthony is and what he’s up to. Bruce had been an Orange County Sheriff deputy, handsome and hard-drinking. Matt got his thick blond hair and gray eyes, but not any handsome part that Matt can tell. Jazz got the hair too, not Julie’s dark curls.

Matt was ten when his dad left for Texas with a woman from county payroll, in order to take a cop’s job that didn’t pan out. He’d come to hate California, especially Laguna Beach, which was the stated epicenter of Bruce Anthony’s vision of Armageddon. When he left the family, Julie cut him off — no calls, no letters, no contact at all. Threw his things in a church dumpster and set them on fire. She sent his first few letters back to sender, then they stopped coming altogether. Matt and his father have traded occasional letters and postcards for four years now, and Matt knows his mother reads them by the careless way she leaves them on the counter then pretends not to know where Bruce is, like tonight. When he analyzes his mother and father as individuals, they seem like vastly different people, almost fated to despise each other. His father gasoline; his mother a match. Or maybe the other way around.

“I don’t know why he always picks such rough places to live,” says Julie.

“He thinks California is soft and spoiled.”

Julie shakes her head with a soft catch of breath, sets the white container on the coffee table. “I know he thinks I am.”

“He doesn’t say that. I think those places he lives make him feel tough. They seem more like him than here does. His guns and the hunting and fighting. The survival stuff.”

She smiles slightly. “Remember the bomb shelter? In case the Russians dropped atom bombs on us?”

Sure he does, and it wasn’t that long ago. The bomb shelter house is up in Laguna’s Top of the World neighborhood. Its three-room basement had been fortified by his father and his ultraconservative John Birch Society friends, who added extra thick sheetrock and insulation, an industrial-grade AC/heater, and powerful air and water filters. This was all to protect against a communist nuclear attack or a race war, both of which the Birchers thought possible. It was provisioned with enough canned food and bottled water to last six months, Bruce claimed. Matt remembers helping Jasmine arrange the shelved cans in alphabetical order so you could find exactly what you needed, quickly. Hundreds of them, and jars too, of peanut butter and pickles and jellies and jams and tomato sauce. And big locking plastic bins of spaghetti and bow-tie pasta. The game freezer for meat. Two electric can openers; five manuals. And, of course, the noisy generators to keep the bunker going when the end came. Now, he wishes he lived around that much food, wonders why his mother doesn’t seem to mind.

Matt had never thought the basement was that funny until last week, when he’d told Christian Clay about it at Mystic Arts World. Something in the telling brought back all sorts of details. Christian said the household bomb shelter was one of the funniest concepts he’d ever heard, and he got Matt to repeat the story to BEL founder Grail and Tim Leary, who were back in the MAW office awaiting a rumored delivery of forbidden products from Oakland. Matt’s story elevated his status around Mystic Arts from a mere sixteen-year-old paperboy to someone who had survived the Establishment, seen the folly of materialistic, soul-dead, military-industrial America and cosmically advanced to a higher level of consciousness. They’d offered him a hit off a huge joint — the first he’d ever taken — and by the time Grail grinned and popped the roach into his mouth, Matt’s face was melting and his thoughts were being heard by everyone in the office. When the weed first hit him he was suddenly scared of everything and his feet and hands went cold. Then, not long after, he was laughing like a tickled child. It was the last time he’d smoked dope, on purpose.

“I liked our basement days, Mom.”

Julie yawns, covers her mouth. “Your dad felt obligated to protect us. Maybe overprotect us. Like a lot of cops — you know — they’ll do anything to protect you. Even if it’s half-crazy like alphabetizing the cans in a bomb shelter. It seems so long ago.” She yawns again, then forks up another load of noodles. “Kyle has forty-three more days in Vietnam. That’ll put him home the last Friday of July.”

Matt knows this. And he knows his mother obsesses about Kyle even more than he does. Together, they watch the news almost every night, dreading the Vietnam War coverage, during which they stare in wide-eyed silence, waiting to see Kyle being carried from battle or maybe in battle. Matt has seen bloody young men who look like Kyle, tattered and dying or even dead already, right here in his own living room, on the crummy black-and-white RCA.

There’s a calendar on the fridge and she X-es through every day that passes. Kyle’s letters have been coming more often now that he’s getting “short.” Matt hears the fear creeping into them, but what really worries him is brother Kyle’s spooky idea that short soldiers have a better chance of dying the closer to discharge they get. It’s a common superstition, Kyle has written. Matt can’t remember seeing anything like fear or resignation in his brother, ever. Kyle, a natural athlete, a four-sport varsity player and champion at high hurdles. With enough balls to bodysurf the Wedge up in Newport, which has the scariest waves that Matt has ever seen except in Surfer magazine. Kyle has shot river rapids in a kayak. Caught rattlesnakes in Laguna Canyon. Killed a bear with his father in Montana. Enlisted in the U.S. Army.

Matt looks out at the streetlight across Third, watches a hippie girl with her dog. The dog is an Irish setter with a red bandanna around its neck. The Irish setter is the hippie dog of choice. It lifts his leg on the lamppost, produces a well-lit stream. The lamplight cones down through the dark. A Hopper in Laguna, Matt thinks. The hippie puts a lighter to something in her mouth and a puff of smoke rises into the damp night air. Matt wonders if she knows that the cop house is less than a block away. He thinks about those bomb shelter days when they were all together. Lots of fights between Mom and Dad. Terrible words. Threats and thrown objects. Jazz cried more than he did. But good times too. A driving trip to the Grand Canyon in the red Country Squire station wagon with the fake wood trim. Mom and Dad at his and Kyle’s Little League games up at Thurston, and Jazz’s synchronized swim meets over in Tustin. Helping Dad at his workbench and Mom in the kitchen. Christmas Eves with the Calhouns.

When he looks at his mother, she’s asleep sitting up, head back against the well, the chopsticks pushed forward like antennae, almost far enough to fall out. She’s mouthing something, softly. Matt picks up the container, bag, and fork. Touches her shoulder and startles her awake.

“Oh, jeeeez,” she slurs. “Weird scenes in my head.”

“Time for bed, Mom.”

Julie rises and drifts back to her room. The door shuts and the music comes on. In the kitchen Matt tosses trash, rinses the fork and checks to see what she put in the drawer: a small pipe, glass and stainless steel, thick with residue. Puts it to his nose and gets that strong pitchy reek that’s new to him.

He sets it back, next to a wrinkled foil package about the size of a Ping-Pong ball. Inside is a crumbling half sphere of what looks like black mud wrapped in a thick gray skin. The smell is heavy and strong. He’s heard that the Brotherhood of Eternal Love smuggles hashish to Laguna from Afghanistan, pounds of it at a time, some as dragon balls — powerful hashish frosted with opium from the famous Afghan poppies. He’s never seen one until now, if that’s what it is. People say that dragon balls are the best euphoria possible. They say that Orange Sunshine, the BEL-supplied LSD, opens your mind to new realities. But dragon balls make you feel like you’re floating on a cloud having orgasms one after another. Matt imagines that. Bums him out that his mom is using this stuff. He’s tempted to flush it down the toilet.

He shuts the drawer and resumes his vigil on the living room couch. Dozes awhile. Has strange dreams: a pale girl in a yellow bikini standing on a rocky beach and waving at him while an enormous wave comes at her from behind; the Mystic Arts World meditation room in flames and he can’t find his way out; Kyle gaunt and bearded, with the body of a dog. Matt wakes in a sweat, ears thrumming.

Listens at his mom’s door — music off now.

Considers his sister’s quiet bedroom.

Looks into his and Kyle’s old room. Wonders if he should move back into it. Keep a little closer eye on Mom. But with Kyle coming home in a little over a month he’d have to move back out. Too cramped in here for both of them, and no space at all for his art supplies, records, and books. It was always more Kyle’s room than his, anyway. On the dresser is a photo of Kyle in his U.S. Army dress uniform. Matt knows it’s only in his own head but the closer Kyle gets to coming home, the less confident that face in the picture seems to get.

From the garage he fetches a sketchbook and a piece of charcoal, takes it back to the living room. Dashes off a sketch of Furlong questioning him down at Thalia. More caricature than portrait; but the details are telling. Then of Miranda washing her Beetle.

Matt stares out the window a moment, then starts in on the streetlamp, tentatively at first, then begins to feel it and speeds up until he’s slashing that hippie girl into being, then her dog with its lifted leg, even the pee dancing off the pole in the lamplight. He carves darkness in around the cone of light and the two figures, so everything is black except for them. His strokes are angry and hard and the drawing is a violent mess. He’s tempted to rip out the page, wad it up and chuck it, but there’s the clean backside and you can’t waste supplies. He tosses the sketchbook onto the blue chair.

Around nine thirty, Matt quietly panics, suddenly sure that Jazz isn’t coming home tonight. What can he do but go get her and bring her back? She’s only been really missing for less than twenty-four hours but his heart tells Matt that she needs him.

Right now. He’s sure of it. She needs him.

Back in her room he takes his pen-and-ink sketch of her off the wall, puts the thumbtack back in its hole, and folds the drawing into his back pocket.

Start at the Sandpiper, Matt thinks — the last place where anybody he knows has seen her.

He’ll pick up her trail and follow where it leads.