A Thousand Steps

53

Matt wakes with first light, throws up, showers. He looks in on his father, always an early riser, sitting up in bed and making notes in a small black book.

In the dark garage Matt starts up the Westfalia and backs it into the driveway.

A white sedan pulls in behind him, blocking his exit.

Furlong, he knows. Matt knew it had to happen. You can’t vanish in a small town forever unless someone is holding you prisoner.

He curses, kills the engine, and climbs out. Leans against the van, trying to figure some way around this. He’s too hungover to run, almost too hungover to stand. The ache in his head feels permanent and he wants to go back to bed for the rest of the week. But he will surrender with dignity.

The driver’s window goes down on Brigit Darnell. She’s in street clothes, Matt sees, probably on her way to work.

“Get over here,” she says.

Matt shoves off the van, his brain sloshing in his skull, goes to the car window.

“I should arrest you.”

“Okay.”

“Don’t be an ass, Matt.”

“I won’t.”

“Lean closer.”

He does, smells coffee, looks at her frowning, pretty face, then away.

“Have you found any more paper airplanes?” she asks.

“No, ma’am.”

“I have. Cheryl Cruz, 242 Hillview. Her cat was pawing it in the backyard. She took it away, looked at it briefly, then wadded it up and threw it in the trash. Which was picked up yesterday. But she remembered the shape, and the print on the paper — musical chords and lyrics.”

“This is important.”

“I’ve been going door-to-door with the originals you gave us. In my spare time, while my husband and daughter wait for me to come home and make meals. While you hide from the police and drink God knows what. It’s still on your breath.”

“Sorry. It was a lot.”

“I could lose a promotion for helping you,” says Darnell. “Or worse. I’m in a cross fire at work, caught between cops who would pull out the stops to find Jasmine, and cops who think a missing runaway is as waste of time.”

Matt doesn’t know what to say. He looks at Darnell, feeling the tidal swoosh of the bourbon still in him.

“Matt, you shouldn’t be here. The day shift is coming on now, and someone’s going to spot you. Your sister is out there somewhere, Matt. Find her.”

Matt’s Sunday collections seem feverish and eternal. The Heavy-Duti weighs a ton. Hercules almost gets him. Matt grinds it out on willpower, water from his clients’ hoses, and pit stops at two parks to use the heads.

The only good thing is no Furlong.

After a shower at Ernie Rios’s and a quick change of clothes in the van, he picks up Laurel.

Even through the hangover, Matt’s heart jumps when she comes out her front door. She’s in that cherries-on-white sundress she wore the first time she had dinner at his house. With a smile she climbs into the Westfalia. It feels like the old days, when they’d walk the city before sunset, their arms just barely touching sometimes, knocking on doors and pleading with citizens in the innocent belief that they would find Jasmine.

“It’s so good to be with you again,” she says. Then delivers a kiss to his lips. “But if you’ve knocked on all the doors with your dad, what exactly are we doing?”

“Looking for a Little Wing.”

She gives him a puzzled look.

“I’ll explain.”

But the search is a bust, and half an hour before sunset Matt drops Laurel off at the Festival of Arts grounds in time to get in costume for the show. She gives him a really good kiss before she gets out, even though people are streaming by the Westfalia’s many windows and Julie’s handmade bongo-drum curtains are tied back so everyone can see in.

“I feel good with you, Matt.”

“Me too. I mean with you.”

“I don’t mind if you get your words mixed up sometimes,” she says, tapping his chest. “It’s what’s in here that counts.”

Laurel smiles and closes the door.

He signals and waits to pull out of the loading zone, still feeling her fingers over his heart, feeling strong and happy again. The hangover is mostly gone.

There’s just enough daylight left to see Laurel making her way through the turnstiles. But when Matt looks into the rearview mirror for a farewell view, all he sees is Moby Cop on Laguna Canyon Road, hooking a U-turn toward him, lights bright and siren blaring.

He pulls out, draws a long honk, and pushes hard on the gas. The thirty-horsepower van sputters, then lurches. He shifts into third and thinks of Sara. Traffic is thick but he makes the light at PCH, leaving Furlong caught behind a clot of tourist buses and stranded at the red.

He heads north, quickly gauging the Westfalia’s chances of outrunning Moby Cop on the long road to Corona del Mar. The chances being none. So he makes a sharp right turn on Cliff, which returns him to the crowded festival grounds in a sneaky double back that will leave Furlong futilely gunning Moby Cop up Coast Highway. It’s a cool move, Matt knows, but his left turn onto Broadway will be illegal and perilous with the festival crowd.

He hits his brights and rolls onto Broadway without stopping. Broadway becomes Laguna Canyon Road. He yanks a turn against the traffic and barrels through the chorus of horns and the river of headlights, tires screeching, and vehicles stopping. A covey of crosswalk pedestrians flushes and he accelerates around them, and — with muscular cranks of the big, stubborn, non — power steering wheel — straightens out of the turn.

The Westfalia sputters past the festival grounds. No sign of Moby Cop behind him. It kills Matt to stop at a crosswalk for more tourists but he runs the light as soon as they’re out of the way, drawing curses and raised fists. The traffic is much lighter heading out of town now, and he sees the comforting darkness of the canyon before him.

He knows exactly where he’ll go and where he’ll hide the van — Windy Rise — where he and Kyle used to camp and look for tarantulas and the bird feathers that collected on a forbidding swale of prickly pear cactus. It’s a rough place and hard to get to. You can’t drive there and there’s no trail in. Not even the hippies will be there. There’s a sandy wash, too, less cactus, and good for campfires and sleeping bags. Furlong has probably never heard of it and Matt can ditch the van in the brush out beyond Dodge City.

Just off a rutted dirt road in the canyon dark, Matt noses the Westfalia into a stand of black mustard. Loads what he needs into his backpack, then lops off some mustard branches with is fishing knife, draping them over the back end to hide it.

He slings on his backpack and follows a rabbit trail through the scrub brush and into the hills.

It’s easy going at first and there’s a waxing gibbous moon that throws good light. He’s got enough in the pack to get him through the night. Tomorrow he’ll take his chances at his mom’s place in Dodge for food and a shower and then... well, he really doesn’t know. Furlong will be all over his paper route.

As he follows the trail up the hill, Matt feels free, kind of, and his mind wanders.

First, he thinks he could just surrender to Furlong tomorrow. Maybe a lawyer could get him off. But that would leave no one on Earth really looking for Jazz. No one to free her from the hideous men who threw her into their van like an empty dress. No one to free her like she freed him — terrified, imprisoned — from the bomb shelter when he was five.

Unthinkable.

Setting up Johnny Grail and the BEL for Furlong is unthinkable also.

Something very thinkable? Turn around right now, walk back to the Westfalia, take Laguna Canyon Road to the freeways, and just keep going. Freedom. Camp in the van for a couple of years on a beach in Mexico, catch fish, draw and paint, live cheap. Get Laurel to come down and write a book. You don’t need a writing program to do that. Or maybe hit the Sierras or Yellowstone, where the campgrounds are cheap. Could finish up high school in a small town where nobody knows who you are, or anything about stewed tomatoes packed with LSD, or the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, or orgies in beachfront mansions or Bill Furlong or Moby Cop.

And let Jasmine rescue Jasmine?

Full circle, back to unthinkable.

The trail vanishes, the grade steepens, and a bank of clouds arrives off the ocean and hides the moon. He can see well enough to avoid the bigger buckwheat and toyon and sage, but the rough-edged groundsel and young thistles rake his bare ankles and calves. Itches like hell. He should have put on jeans for this.

He should have just told Furlong to go to hell the first time he’d offered his betrayal money.

He should have found his sister by now.

He gives wide berth to the meadow of prickly pear cactus, darker than the scrub in the muted moonlight, and carefully picks his way to the sandy wash beyond. He remembers a loose circle of boulders where they used to pitch the tent but the boulders are gone now, likely washed downslope by last year’s record rains.

He shucks off his backpack and rolls out his pad and sleeping bag. The sandy wash is still warm as he sits and looks out at the canyon.

From this part of Windy Rise he can see the hilly backside of Laguna: the fog-dampened lights at Top of the World, and Alta Laguna, and the long face of the canyon tapering off in the dark.

His world as a boy.

He thinks of catching tarantulas here with Kyle one hot September, and how angry Bruce got when they brought two glass mustard jars teeming with them back to Top of the World. Remembers hiking all the way back down here to Windy Rise to let the tarantulas go.

He makes three peanut butter burritos — not bad when you’re starved — and chases them down with canteen water.

The fog bank lifts. By moonlight Matt sketches the night scene around him, the cool play of light on the prickly pear and the sandy wash and a big oak he remembers. Dashes off a quick one of his first look at the halibut suspended in the wave. He sketches the feral boys standing around him in his mom’s bathtub, surprised Neldra Sungaard in her doorway, a bottle of Colonel Givens.

But neither boyhood memories nor drawing pictures can pull him out of his sense of doom. His options seem either bad or worse. He reviews: He can give up on Jazz and run away. He can turn himself in to Furlong and betray people who have treated him well, and go through the rest of his life as a snitch and a traitor. He can stay a fugitive and sleep here or at the Living Caves, use his mom’s and dad’s bathrooms, or the stinky ones downtown or at the parks. He could get a cheap camping place down at Doheny State Beach. He’s got less than three dollars. He’s got Furlong, who will arrest him, sooner than later.

And underneath all of that — running deeper and sadder than all of it — is Jasmine and his failure to help her, as she once helped him, locked in the bomb shelter. She is a prisoner of some dark enemy that he can’t even locate, let alone defeat. He sees no method and is out of plans.

So he gets into the sleeping bag and looks up at the stars and prays:

God up there, Matt here. Show me what to do. I tried to find my sister and failed. Summer will be over and fall is cold in the canyon. The halibut will only last a few more days. Furlong will arrest me and I’ll lose my job, my school, my family, Mystic Arts, Laurel and Sara, fishing and drawing. They’ll lock me in a cage with a bunch of ugly, stinky, stupid teenagers who think they’re tough. Maybe they are tough.

Show me what to do. I promised you I’d do anything you want if you let me get away from Furlong, and you delivered me from him and I now repeat my holy vow to do anything you want. But you have to show me what it is. I know you can help me. Since I was small I’ve asked you to make Mom and Dad not mad, and to help me catch lots of fish, and for Laurel to like me and for Jazz to get over the pneumonia and Kyle the mono. Sometimes you said yes and sometimes it was no.

Show me what to do. I’m tired of my fear and your silence. I need to hear you, or see a sign. It doesn’t have to be a miracle. Don’t let Luke go to hell even if he was a drug smuggler.

Amen...

By amen he’s asleep, his snores part of the Laguna Canyon night.