A Thousand Steps

52

Matt and his dad finish their late Husky Boys at Matt’s old Third Street home, the Westfalia stowed in the garage he’s lived in for two years.

“Try this,” says his father. He pours the Colonel Givens into the final ice of Matt’s large soft drink cup. “To Jasmine.”

They lift their cups and drink. Matt feels the fumes in his sinuses, the burn in his throat.

“Strong,” he says.

“It can give you strength and take it away.”

Matt tells his father about the bottle of wine he drank with Sara Eikenberg, how the alcohol stayed with him for hours and made him want more. Matt thinks of the gear-shifting lesson but says nothing of it. Bruce says that a restaurant serving wine to sixteen-year-olds is proof of California’s moral rot.

“She must like you to take you out to La Cave. Pricey.”

“Her dad’s an owner.”

“I imagine a successful home-builder owns a lot of things. I would like to have married rich but I married poor instead. I knew when I first saw Julie that she was the one for me. She took some convincing but I finally got her attention.”

“How did you do it?”

Bruce smiles, takes another sip of Colonel Givens. “I used flowers and poems and restaurants. They say the shortest way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, but I’ll tell you, your mom can eat like a great white shark. Especially if you put something good in front of her.”

“I’ve seen her,” Matt says. “I cook calico bass in the skillet with butter and garlic, then bake ’em with bread crumbs. She’ll eat three, four plates, plus tater tots and canned beets.”

“And she never gains weight,” says Bruce. “I have to say she’s still the most attractive woman I’ve ever known.”

Matt sips again but he can already feel the bourbon speeding up his mind, pushing his thoughts closer together.

“I like Laurel and Sara in different ways,” he says.

“How so?”

Matt describes his sudden crush on Laurel while learning to write cursive in fourth grade, how She’s beautiful! was one of his early original cursive sentences. How he looked at her when he thought he could get away with it, and talked to her sometimes, all the rest of that year and through fifth grade too. Then, how in sixth grade he started feeling different toward her, more than friends, serious and all like that, which made him afraid to talk to her for fear he’d spoil things. Same, all the way through middle school and into his sophomore year of high school. But this weird feeling for her, growing. Until just a few weeks ago when he ran into her downtown and he looked at her under the traffic light at Forest and PCH and had this crazy burst of like, energy that made him accompany her across the crosswalk. Then she invited him to see her in the Pageant and him climbing the eucalyptus tree to see for free, and this powerful emotion that grabbed him by his insides and wouldn’t let go. And still hadn’t.

“No sex though, you said.”

“Yeah. No. We make out a lot. Used to. And she let me get to second, once.”

His father takes another sip of Colonel Givens and Matt does too. Then launches into first seeing Sara down at Thousand Steps looking for Jazz, and Sara was being photographed with a huge oiled muscleman in these horndog poses where she looked like she was having some badass fun, the opposite of Laurel looking innocent in the Gauguin tableau. And how Sara invited him to her Evolution ceremony that night at the Vortex of Purity, then later gave him the job of moving twenty cut-up eucalyptus trees, eight thousand goddamned pounds of logs up and down her driveway with just a wheelbarrow. And how Sara took him out to dinner at La Cave, which is quite possibly the finest restaurant in the world.

“I’m sure it is,” says Bruce with a knowing smile. “Sex after?”

Matt shakes his head, still unwilling to confess the test drive to his father. He’s not even sure if that was sex. If not, pretty close.

“So,” he says. “I like Laurel because she’s beautiful and smart and nice. And I like Sara because she’s beautiful and smart and brave.”

“Brave how?”

“She rides skateboards and drives sports cars.”

“You’re lucky to have two nice chicks after you. Especially in this town, where drugs and perversion are tolerated. If not worshipped.”

“Yeah, I dig it.”

Bruce leans forward on the little living room couch where Julie watched her TV for years. It’s more than strange for Matt — especially with the Colonel Givens surging through him — to see his father there. Matt’s got the blue chair with the view of the street and the GTE building.

“Matt, what makes you think Mom wants to believe me, when all she does is ride me like a stolen bike?”

Matt has to think about this. He wants his parents to get along and maybe love each other again someday but look what Bruce did to her. The gap between that, and what he says he wants, seems too wide for Julie to cross.

“Has she ever said anything to indicate that to you? That she wants to believe me?” asks Bruce.

“No.”

“Just all fire and brimstone?”

“She’s protecting herself.”

“From me.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I truly wish I could change her mind.”

“You could try the flowers and poems and restaurants again.”

“That’s funny, son.”

Bruce takes a swig and replenishes both cups. Matt drinks again too, his thoughts bursting like fireworks on the dark screen in his head.

“I could show you how to catch calico bass,” he says, smiling. “To cook for her.”

“I was never good off those rocks,” he says. “Scared the hell out of me.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Dads put on shows for their children. I always wanted to be your mighty man.”

They drink through midnight. Topics come and topics go. The Angels’ sorry season, Cassius Clay, the war, guns, politics, assassinations.

“Mark these words, Matt — Khrushchev says they’ll feed us little bits of socialism until America becomes communist. He says we will fall like overripe fruit into their hands. Son, anybody who doesn’t see that Vietnam, civil rights, the riots, and assassinations are all parts of the world communist conspiracy is not a man. He is a naive boob. We have nukes for a reason. Moscow should know that. President Johnson just doesn’t have the nuts to use them.”

Thoughts swirling, Matt considers nuclear war. The mushroom cloud over Hiroshima. Bodies and gigantic sores and deformed babies. The duck-and-cover exercises at El Morro Elementary School. The Mystic Arts World poster: IN THE EVENT OF A NUCLEAR ATTACK, PUT YOUR HEAD BETWEEN YOUR KNEES AND KISS YOUR ASS GOODBYE.

“That’s why we had the bomb shelter,” Bruce says solemnly. “I’d build another one if I had anybody to look out for.”

“That’s why you want your family back?”

Bruce drinks and stands as if he’s decided something. Then sits back down.

“Yeah, it’s all linked together.”

“I love you, Dad, but I don’t think I want to live with you.”

Bruce gives him a furrowed look. Matt’s vertical hold is now on the fritz, like his mom’s RCA every October for the World Series.

“But that doesn’t mean I don’t want you to have your family back,” Matt says. “My thoughts are coming out of order. Sorry.”

“Why don’t you want to live with me?”

“Freedom.”

“I was the same way.”

“Did you kill a lot of people in Korea?”

“Not nearly enough.”

Matt watches the GTE building blipping up and down and up again. “Man, I’m plastered.”

“First time for hard stuff?”

Matt nods, takes a small sip.

“You’ll learn to pace yourself. One good hangover is all it takes.”

“I think I’ll have one. The room is spinning.”

“Maybe crash in your old room. If Furlong knocks on the door I’ll steer him out of here.”