A Thousand Steps

60

On this last Friday morning of late July, Matt’s hobbled parents sit quietly in the living room of the Third Street house. Julie, in a long blue birds-of-paradise kimono, has her cast propped on the wicker chest. The cast is crowded with signatures and doodles. She’s reading I’m OK — You’re OK and drinking ginger ale.

Bruce sits across from her, intent on the Register sports page. His bad leg rests on the table also. He’s wearing sweatpants with one leg cut short, and a crisp white snap-button Western shirt. His elaborately hinged postsurgical knee brace is black and looks painful.

Matt’s at the breakfast dinette, sketching the bouquet on the table before him — chipper daisies, courtesy of Bruce — and waiting for his sister.

The house is decorated for Kyle’s homecoming. There’s an American flag taped to the wall above the TV, and a cake with red, white, and blue frosting, and a red plastic tub filled with ice, beer, and soft drinks. Food on the way.

“Come on Matt!” calls Jasmine, coming down the hall, slinging a bag over her shoulder. “Let’s give these lovebirds some privacy.”

“We are not lovebirds,” says Julie. “We are parakeets in separate cages.”

“You look like lovebirds to me,” says Jasmine.

“I can’t believe they call them the Angels,” says Bruce. “They take a five-run lead into the ninth and blow it.”

Matt has noticed that, in the nearly three weeks since the Vortex night, when his mother and father are together there is tension but few words. They seem to occupy separate but shared worlds. Whether here or in the red barn on Roosevelt Lane, Julie and Bruce maintain a truce. Occasionally, Matt catches his father looking at his mother the way he used to: pride of ownership. Julie looks at Bruce more and more often but her thoughts are less obvious. She’s cautious and analytical, not quite friendly and not quite hostile. Matt gives his father fifty-fifty odds of staying in California more than two weeks. And his mother a fifty-fifty chance of throwing him out before that, finally and forever.

Today is about Kyle, though. Nothing bad will happen today.

His and Jasmine’s daily walks are at eleven, so Matt has time to get his newspapers folded, banded, and bagged. Sometimes they walk the beach, but mostly they go downtown, then north or south to the galleries or the museum or Mystic Arts World, sometimes get a quick lunch. The purity nectar has been hard for her to kick. She gets nauseous and mean without warning. She sleeps a lot.

After almost three weeks of this, Jasmine has shed her crude disguises and is able to talk to the many locals who know or recognize her. Now she actually stops and converses. Matt steers her away when she gets tired, or is being asked too many or too personal questions.

He asks her almost nothing about the Vortex. She talks about it when she wants to, rarely but suddenly, in short sentences or phrases, as if she’s just now remembering and wants to get it on the record quickly. As if she wants to forget. He’s done some reading at the library on recovered memory and trauma-induced amnesia and selective processing.

I wouldn’t let them touch me. They talked and studied me and brought gifts. Most spoke English and most were old. I tried to make them afraid of me. I strummed my ukulele and made up ugly, crazy songs. Om called me the crazy princess. Om said I was one he couldn’t break. He said we all want to be broken. He said he knew he wanted me to become pure the second he saw me. He tried to pass this off as some sort of spiritual insight that he had. He said he was like the Hamsa, the eye that sees and protects. His price was twenty-five thousand dollars for a year with me. I would get twenty-five hundred when the year was up. No contract. No vows. No obligations except to be peaceful and available for travel and pleasure. That is what Om said. He also said his grandfather was a custom dollmaker in the old country, which stuck in my mind because of how Om was trying to make us into dolls.

They cross PCH at Forest toward Eiler Larsen — the old, unofficial Laguna greeter. He stands at the curb, smiling and waving, his big gray beard lifted to the breeze. When they hit the sidewalk, Jazz pulls Matt hard away from him.

“I can’t look at another beard,” she says.

The protesters have clustered on the boardwalk, shouting their slogans and waving their signs against the war that Kyle will be coming home from in just a few hours.

Matt can’t wait to see him. He couldn’t sleep last night he was so wound-up. Kyle beat the odds. Kyle made it. Kyle, back in his room and them fishing again! Matt has gotten Tommy Amici to come up with a sub for his route today so he can be there when Kyle gets off that Greyhound. Today will be the third day of work that Matt has missed in two years and four months. Tommy says it could hurt his chances of a third Outstanding Carrier medal but Matt hasn’t been this eager for something to happen since knocking on doors to find Jazz. The last time he saw his brother, Matt was in the eighth grade!

Neldra was my groomer. Brought me clothes and makeup and everything for skin and hair. Expensive things. She thought she was counseling me. How to please a man. Her Sapphire Cove parties were where she scouted for Purity Girls. Others came from the LA Moves shoots at the beach. Neldra’s husband trolled the gay places for Purity Boys. He was mostly that way himself, she said. They filled up the Vortex with good looking young people who could pay the tuition and were actually there for a spiritual journey. Or estranged and adrift. But they handpicked which Evolvers would be groomed and sold. I talked Neldra into getting me a ukulele and a book of sheet music. For my sanity, I said. Later I realized I could make Little Wings and fly them over town. I wanted to write “help!” or something but they wouldn’t let me have a pen or pencil, like in prison. It really was a prison. I ran away after a fight with Mom, took a few things, got ripped and slept with Austin Overton. Couldn’t really stand more than one night of those people. I’d been hanging with the LA Moves Happenings for weeks, and took up Neldra’s offer to party at Sapphire Cove the next night. Disgusting. I tried to leave but they put me in a room and shot me with drugs. When I woke up I was in the bell tower. It was so windy. When the planes rose up with the wind I wanted to fly away too. I got out that night because Om left a door unlocked. He was very absentminded. After that they put on the ball and chain. I yelled until I lost my voice then gave up. The generators were so loud. I couldn’t sleep at first then I slept a lot. The Vortex sleeping potion was powerful and not through a needle. I got used to the noise after a few days. Hypnotic. I used it like a mantra. People can get used to just about anything, especially when they’re drugged. She told me she met you and her husband liked you but said you were not Purity material. I’m not surprised Neldra is betraying her husband for reduced charges. She’s very manipulative and selfish. I met Danielle early on. I think she was supposed to be next, after me, like I was next after Bonnie.

“Why wasn’t I Purity material?”

“You don’t have enough imagination.”

“Oh.”

“Just kidding, Mattie!” She reaches out and flicks his ear with her middle-finger nail, a painful nip perfected in early adolescence.

Matt tries to get her back but she skips out of range.

When the Anthonys get to the Greyhound station on Broadway, the protesters have set up on the curb where the buses arrive. It’s a bigger protest than the one that sent his father bonkers down at Moss Street a few weeks back. Louder too.

Matt sees that they’re the usual protest crowd — mostly but not all young — lots of hair and beads and peace signs, all that. He hopes not to see his English teachers among them because Kyle had them in school, too, and what would he think of them protesting him risking his life?

He feels the heavy pressure trip from these loud, sign-waving zealots, telling him what to believe. To take a side. Join us. Can’t he honor his own brother and not want the war? They yell about killing babies, he thinks, but Kyle saved one in a tunnel! He scans the faces in the protest crowd, relieved that his teachers aren’t here for Kyle to see.

Matt halts his mother’s wheelchair well short of the crowd. Kyle is due on the 2:45 and it comes lumbering down Broadway just a few minutes late, swinging wide into the station.

The door hisses open and the passengers spill out, mostly hippies and tourists of all description, families and singles, old and young.

There’s a pause in the exodus and Matt worries that Kyle changed his mind.

But a young serviceman gets off, then another, followed by Kyle Bruce Anthony.

Which is when the protesters come off the curb into the pull-out, signs raised.

Hey! Hey! LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?

No lies about Mi Lai!

The crowd surges toward Kyle and the other servicemen.

Kill hate, not babies!

Draft beer, not boys!

The lean, short-haired, smooth-faced young servicemen make it to the luggage bay, which the driver has already opened. The crowd closes around them and Matt pushes Julie closer, looking through the bodies. Suddenly, Kyle is coming toward him, his head down but his eyes up, one hand out for protection, the big oblong duffle heavy over his shoulder. He’s got a growing-out buzz cut, pink cheeks, and a nervous smile, and he looks smaller to Matt, maybe even shorter too. Jeans and a T-shirt and combat boots. The shouting is louder now and the signs wave crazily and the protesters close around the servicemen again.

Kyle breaks through and Matt rolls their mother toward him. Bruce swings on his crutches toward Kyle too, but Jasmine easily outspeeds all of them and is the first to fly into Kyle’s open arms.

Matt with Julie, caught in the swarm.

Baby killer! Baby killer!

“He’s not that!” Matt yells. “He saved a baby! He’s not that!”

Matt manages to U-turn Julie and gets ahead of Kyle and Jasmine, pushing the wheelchair forward through the noise and crowd, leading his brother and sister toward home.

An hour later, the party is in full swing. Friends of the family come by and the little house fills up. Matt picks the music and changes the LPs. Good rock, but not too loud because vets like peace and quiet, he has read.

Kyle is mostly smiles, thousand-yard silences, then smiles again. He’s tremendously alert and his eyes dart. He smokes a lot. Matt stands close to him even when Kyle’s talking with someone else. Feels funny to be almost eye-to-eye with his big brother. Kyle has lost weight, but Matt notes the sinewy muscles in his arms and neck.

Matt drinks a beer, then another. Watching his brother he imagines Kyle in the black tunnels of Cu Chi. A helmet light and a handgun. Matt sees that young girl running off with her baby into the safe dark. Then without warning, Matt sees the disciple at the Vortex breathing hard and staring up at the sky after he shot him. The blood on the oak tree. Makes his soul cry. Matt has pictured that man a thousand times, and knows he’ll see him ten thousand more. A million, all the way to his grave. Part of his punishment for taking a life, even one that was trying to take his own.

Laurel Kalina calls, then comes over with a bottle of champagne for Kyle. Matt’s not as happy to see her as he thought he’d be. She’s lovely in a black dress with red roses and her hair is up, and it saddens him to see what he can’t have. It’s a bummer to be not enough. She radiates more than just beauty and every male eye in the room is on her.

Matt wolfs cake, pizza, hot dogs, potato salad, more cake. Sitting on the blue chair in the crowded, smoke-filled living room, he watches his mother and father, brother and sister. Really concentrates on them, one at a time. Draws them in his mind. Pictures them five years ago, then ten, then twelve or thirteen years ago, when his earliest memories start. Those years fly past him now in seconds but they’re not gone, he thinks, just shelved, like books. Like drawings in a pad you can open and look at.

He ponders wholeness, as in being whole. An author was talking about that on Johnny Carson the other night. Matt knows he hasn’t been whole since his father took off back in ’62. Less whole when Kyle joined up, and less than that when Jasmine disappeared. Even less when his mother lost herself to Dodge and the pipe. Now, for the first time in all those years, Matt feels whole. Not like when he was ten but in a more complicated, weirdly less whole way, like maybe a man is supposed to be.

He’s apparently the only one who hears the rattling knock on the front screen door and it breaks his thoughts and he answers it.

Through the screen it’s Sara Eikenberg, a pink dress and granny boots, her hair up on one side.

Matt holds open the door but she doesn’t move.

She gazes past him, taking it all in, skeptical brown eyes on assignment.

Her gaze comes back from the party to him.

“Go for a ride, Matt?”

He turns and looks behind him for a moment, catches Kyle’s eye. Then Jasmine’s. Now back to Sara.

“God, yes. Bitchen.”