Little Saigon

Chapter 7

The kitchen looked as if it had been bombed; the bedroom was worse. His box of Christmas ornaments had been dragged from the cave region to his living room. Through the carnage, strings of Christmas-tree lights blinked on and off, multi-colored, gay. A wreath hung from a nail that used to hold up a Surfer magazine photograph — framed, thirty bucks, now broken on the floor — of Frye dazzling the locals at Pipeline.

He toured the house with an unhealthy voltage roaming his nerves, alternating currents of rage and helplessness, feeling the need to reach out and break someone. His worst instincts gathered, brooding like demons. I’ve done some dumb things in my life, but this is off the charts.

He stood in his room for a moment, Christmas lights twinkling around him. Truly, he thought, the best thing I can do for anybody is just stay off their side. He thought of calling the Laguna Police, but the last time they were here was to bust him for indecent exposure at his own Halloween party. Hard feelings still lingered. He thought of calling Minh, but that was out of the question. He thought of calling Bennett but Bennett’s fury was simply too much to even think about at this point.

He thought of calling Linda but lost heart.

Instead he called the Newport Beach surf report, the recorded daily message that had comforted him in trouble spots all over the globe. Air sixty-eight; water sixty-five, visibility six miles; swell from the south at eleven-second intervals and a height of two to three feet; for skin and scuba divers underwater visibility is considered fair.

He listened twice, then finally decided to call the Laguna cops anyway.

The two officers who showed up half an hour later — Simmons and Kite — looked about nineteen years old and carried impossibly loud radios. The sight of their uniforms made him nervous. Frye wondered why cops were always turning down their radio volume but it never got quieter. They scribbled the vital statistics with an air of gravity befitting funeral mourners. Kite inquired as to the identity of the “Mystery Maid.” The officer attempted something jocular with his eyebrows. Frye referred him to his lawyer and Kite backed off.

Frye answered questions. Kite wrote with diligence.

Half an hour later came the detective, a middle-aged gentleman named Pavlik. He took one look around, sighed, and set down his case.

It was then, for the first time, that Frye noted the faint, muddy footprint on his floor. From the cave region, he figured, where they found the tape. Looks the same as the light gray stuff the dead kid at the Asian Wind had on his shoes. Mud. In the middle of August in Orange County, these guys find mud to walk in.

“What’d they take?” Pavlik asked.

“Nothing,” said Frye.

“What were they looking for?”

“No idea.”

“Got someone mad at you?”

“Not that I know of.”

Pavlik studied Frye through his thick lenses. “You’re the surfer reporter guy. Frye. Married the mayor’s daughter, right?”

“I’m not sure how right it was, to tell the truth.”

Pavlik surveyed the scene, pushed his glasses snug to his face with a forefinger. He looked disappointed. “I’ll try to lift some prints.”

Kite and Simmons left to question the neighbors, turning down their radio volumes, trails of official static following them into the darkness outside.

Pavlik already had his brushes and powder out, arranging them on the opened case lid with myopic intensity. Then he erected a tripod lamp, plugged it in, trained it on the door. “These bastards trashed your place here pretty good.”

“Bastards?”

Pavlik shrugged, dipped a narrow brush into a vial of black powder and went to work on the doorknob. “Just an expression. One could have done all this, I suppose.” He pointed to the footprint. “The one with the muddy feet.”

Frye looked at it, the wisp of gray on his wooden floor. “The guy who got shot the night they took Li. He had muddy feet too.”

“Not my jurisdiction.”

Pavlik held out a piece of white tape with a partial, black thumbprint on it. “Gimme your right thumb,” he said. Frye held it out. It was still black from the booking ink. Pavlik raised his eyebrows, passed the brush over it, then pressed it to the tape, which he finally held close for inspection. “They either wore gloves or wiped the knob. This is you. We’ll try the TV. You fingerprinted recently?”

Frye nodded but offered no explanation.

Pavlik dusted patiently, more black powder for the silver face of the television set. “Anything on your sister-in-law?”

“A suspect at large.”

Pavlik looked at Frye over his glasses. “Vietnamese?”

“Yeah. A gang kid named Eddie Vo.”

“Those gangs are bad news. The thing about the Viets is they don’t trust anybody. Keep it all to themselves. That’s what I hear anyway. Interesting that Lucia Parsons and her MIA Committee think they can deal with them, when our own government can’t. We don’t have many refugees in Laguna, ‘less it’s from the IRS. So I don’t really know.”

The television was clean, and so were the lamps, the light switches, the picture frames and the Christmas bulbs, still glowing red and green and blue all over Frye’s living room. Kite and Simmons later returned to report that the neighbors hadn’t seen a thing. The detective took a few pictures, examined the lacerated couch cushions, and made some notes.

He finally packed up his things and leaned in the doorway, beaten and apologetic, like a man about to abandon his wife and family. “They wore gloves.”

“What kind of gloves?”

“Hard to say. We could run a fiber sample through county, but it takes lots of time, and lots of money. Chief wouldn’t approve it, I can tell you right now.”

“But I’m important. I’m the former second-best surfer in this entire metropolis. This is a glamour crime if I’ve ever seen one.”

“It’s not even worth taking a sample. Nothing was stolen. For all we know it could have been Linda Stowe coming here to make your life miserable.”

“Tell the mayor that.”

“Not in my lifetime.”

“If they’d murdered me I’d be better off.”

“Anyone would be, evidence-wise.”

When the cops left, he repaired the major damage, putting the television back on its stand, rearranging the speakers, stuffing some of the foam back into the cushions. He played back his phone messages, finding a dinner confirmation from Tuy Xuan. He thanked Frye again, three times, for saving his life.

The Christmas lights actually pleased him in some unspeakable way, so he left them blinking brightly around the living room. He knew he couldn’t sleep, so he poured a rather colossal vodka over ice. Linda’s ghost threatened from the shadows. He sat for a while on his patio, watching the traffic below, listening to the throttled buzz of electricity in the power lines overhead.

The vodka disappeared at a truly astonishing rate. Evaporation, he concluded: a real problem here at sea level. He made another, which vanished immediately.

Half an hour later he was illegally parked near the Hotel Laguna, wondering at the dire motive that had propelled him here. He jaywalked Coast Highway to the Sail Loft Restaurant and found a seat, ordered a double and let the loose-jointed jazz rattle his bones. He asked the bartender if he knew a blonde who walked a dog with a red scarf around town. “I’ve seen her. Killer legs. Don’t know much about her, Chuck. Cristobel something or other. Why?”

“I owe her an apology.” I’m after her now, he thought. On a mission from God.

It seemed critical to keep moving.

Coast Highway was thick with walkers. He fell into a slipstream of perfume, letting two women pull him along like tugboats leading him to ports north. Their hair swung in the night breeze, riots of gold breaking out under the streetlights. Then everybody seemed to know him: Hi, Chucky; Hey, Chuck, big contest coming up and Bill says you’re gonna surf it; Chucky, my MegaSkate broke in half; Radical sandals, Chuck; I got an eight-ball of the flakiest, Chuck; Chuck... Chuck...

He suddenly longed for a remote island, a big city, for blinding motion or invisible stillness; but the cave house with its ruined rooms was all that called, where Linda’s succubus beckoned from the bed, an apparition warm and tactile as the woman herself. Why does everybody know who you are, he thought, just when you want to be somebody else?

He paused for a moment at the corner of Forest and Coast Highway, where the street people hang out in summertime. A poster showing the outline of a man’s head and a strand of barbed wire was hanging in a storefront window. On top it said:

Her third rally in the county this month, thought Frye. He wondered if Lucia Parsons had bitten off more than she could chew. She keeps promising proof that they’re alive. Good luck to you, he thought. Bring them all back home, each and every one.

The nearest bar was dark, hopeless and comforting. I am blending with my habitat, thought Frye, I am camouflaged. He felt like a perfect jungle lizard, hidden here amidst friendly branches. He ordered a double he was determined to nurse, which knocked another five bucks from his life’s savings. He took a stool and watched the pool balls roll around the felt. Sounds of contact from the table reached him late, like distant pistol shots, and the balls weren’t moving fast enough. His drink disappeared ahead of schedule. The TV on the wall kept falling down, then levitating up again, but no one seemed to notice. The physical world was a tad off tonight.

Try as he did to concentrate on the billiard balls, all he could see was Li being dragged offstage, the curve of flesh under her ao dai as it tore away, her screams amplifying through the Asian Wind. He could see her struggling through the back door exit. He could see her bloody blouse in the trunk of Minh’s car.

And most of all, perhaps, he could imagine the looks of disappointment on Bennett’s and Edison’s faces when they found out that he’d helped Eddie Vo get away.

The really fun part, he thought is when I tell Bennett that his tape is gone.

He paid, veered off the stool, and headed back outside. Snap out of it, he told himself, melancholy is the nurse of frenzy. You tried. If you don’t make mistakes it means you’re not doing anything.

He walked south now, past C’est La Vie and Georgia’s Bistro to the Hotel Laguna, where he stopped to contemplate — with a thrill beyond delirium — the dog sitting dutifully beside a bench. The red scarf looked freshly arranged, John Waynesque.

Cristobel Something or Other. Eureka.

She wasn’t in the bar or on the patio. He marched through the dining room, horrifying the maître d’, nearly taking out a two-top, apologizing profusely and promising a free bottle of wine, seeing her nowhere. He made a quick pass through the women’s restroom, calling her name. Someone screamed. The hotel security chief intercepted him forthwith, threatening police. “You can do that in Manhattan,” Frye protested. “I read Bright Lights, Big City. “

“Then move to Manhattan, creep.”

The man was still glaring at him, arms crossed, as Frye headed for the door. At the desk he secured a pen and a sheet of hotel stationery. Sitting on the bench outside, he wrote: “Apologies for a bad opening line. Things get better from here. Charles Edison Frye requests the honor of an introduction.” He added his phone number, then approached the dog. Dogs had always loved him, which he felt reflected poorly on his character.

“Hey, mutt,” he said. The dog’s tail thumped on the sidewalk as a police siren ascended in the distance. The dog smelled his hand and the folded note. When Frye intertwined the paper with the bandana, the dog licked his arm. The cop car was nearing now, drawing a bead on him, of that much he was certain. The security man regarded him with malice from the doorway. “This animal belongs to my long-lost cousin,” Frye explained. “Until tonight, we believed her dead.”

Someone he didn’t recognize hooted at him from a car, the war cry of the Southern California surfer, loud enough to match the fast-approaching siren. The thought occurred to Frye that he had just disturbed the peace, that he would fail any sobriety test, that he had a morals rap pending, that he had just spent far too long in jail, that he was, in short, poorly positioned to deal with our criminal justice system again.

He bolted around a corner, down a sidestreet, and into an alley. The Cyclone waited at the far end, 390 cc’s of freedom. He sprinted for it, dove in and was about to start the engine when the dog hurled in after him, barking its fool head off. It licked him with zeal, note still locked around its scarf. Frye started up, easing from alley to street in time to meet the cop car speeding his way. He nodded officiously — pursue the criminal element, gentlemen, you have my total support — barely making a yellow light at the signal, then turning south, and gunning the Mercury down Coast Highway toward Linda’s house. It was a short blast to Bluebird Canyon, his heart pounding far too hard, the dog ricocheting from back seat to front then back again, shrieking with delight. He punched the car up the steep incline.

The city fell away below. Then they were high in the hills, rich with the narcotic aroma of eucalyptus, heavy sea air, the faint scent of brush from the canyons to the east.

Linda’s house was a big shady affair off of Temple Hills. Frye pulled up near a huge bougainvillea aflame with purple bracts that shifted in the darkness. In a vague technical sense, he considered this to be their tree: they had made love under it in a sleeping bag one summer night that now seemed ages ago, and the purple discs had stuck to her back and her hair. Odd, he thought, that when she left the cave-house she moved here, right behind our tree. Was it a declaration of independence, or nostalgia?

In the upstairs bedroom a light shone, and for a moment he saw her behind the curtains. With a burst of optimism he commanded the dog to stay, then jumped out of the car, crunched across the leaf-strewn yard, hurdled a low white fence and hailed her from below the window. “Linda! It’s Charles here! Chuck Frye, inventor of the MegaSkate, joy to millions of skateboarders across the world!”

The curtain parted.

“Linda’s not here, Chuck. She moved out three weeks ago, just like I told you last week and the week before that.”

This was all wrong. This was not the woman he was expecting. From somewhere back in the narrow lanes of his memory came the message that he had been here before. “I’m prepared to hang myself for you. I’ve brought a belt to do it. Right here on our tree, where we made love.”

The face above him laughed. The curtain swung open. “Chuck, you know she’s in New York, so why do you do this? You’ve got her number, for heaven’s sake. You put the poor woman through enough. Really. You kinda give me the creeps when you’re like this, to tell you the truth.”

Frye tried to take off his belt for the self-lynch, but he wasn’t wearing one. This is getting gothic, he thought.

“Sleep it off, Chucky.” The curtains came back together, and Frye heard a window slide shut and lock. Glad she set me straight before something stupid happened. What are friends for? He tore a branch off the bougainvillea shrub.

Back in the Cyclone now, Frye sped up Coast Highway, past the hills of the Laguna Paradiso, past Crystal Cove to Corona del Mar. The night was clear and the stars dense and he could see the ocean stretched like a jeweled blanket to the horizon. He parked on top of the bluff and found the marker. The grass was freshly cut. Someone had brought flowers. Hyla, probably. He set the bougainvillea branch on the granite, closed his eyes, and started a prayer he couldn’t finish. Things just kept unwinding. Everything was a blur: the moon, the city lights below, the paths among the stones. The dog wandered, apparitional. Frye wiped his eyes. He brushed the smooth granite with wet fingertips and tried his best not to remember.

The trip back to town was a blur of steering wheel and brakes, the stink of rubber, of close calls with large objects positioned specifically to cause him death. The dog sat beside him, bandana lifting in the breeze, tipping left and right, barking with insane happiness.

The dog followed him into the house. Frye stopped in the doorway and felt a shot of adrenaline course through him. Inside, his neighbor, Denise, was sitting on his couch, pulling at the loose foam, watching his TV, which miraculously still worked. “Hi, Chucky. I was lonesome so I let myself in. Mind?”

“No,” someone said. “You scared me.”

Denise giggled. “Sorry. What a beautiful dog. Is he yours?”

“We’re brothers.”

“That’s what this lady on Letterman says too. Look.”

Frye regarded the lovely face of Lucia Parsons. She was speaking of governments getting us into war and the people getting us out. Letterman swallowed his gap-toothed smile and mustered a look of sincerity. “This is a grass-roots movement of people,” she said. “Our Committee is Americans working with Vietnamese. There is no direct government involvement. The governments simply can’t get the job done — look at past efforts. We’ll get our prisoners back, working with the Vietnamese people. My counterpart over there is a man named Tran Tanh — he’s a wonderfully open and generous man. He has the support of Hanoi, but he isn’t a politician. In fact, he teaches school.”

“But are there any POWs?” Letterman asked.

Lucia Parsons smiled. “I have some very strong evidence. It isn’t something I can make public yet, but I will. I can tell you, David, as surely as I sit here, there are American prisoners alive in Vietnam, And I can tell you we’re going to get them out. We need money, we need time, and we need the support of the American people.”

Letterman alluded to the support of his sponsors, and the program cut to some deal on Nissan hardbodies.

“She lives right here in Laguna, Chuck. Isn’t that neat we’ve got a national movement in our own back yard? There’s a meeting tomorrow and I’m gonna sign up. Think of all the good-looking guys around if someone like her is running it.”

“The mind reels.”

“You look bad tonight, Chuck. How come your house is all busted up? What happened to your face? This couch here is really fucked, you know that? Salvation Army’s got a good one for seventy-five bucks, some rich lady died but it’s got cat pee all over it. I love cats, so for me that pee isn’t a negative thing at all. Want some homemade acid?”

“God please no.”

“You need something. Come here and lay down. I’ll give you a rub since I’m drinking your wine.”

The dog leapt to take his place, and Denise shooed him away. Frye nosedove to the couch, then worked himself over to his back. He looked up at Denise, who from this vantage point had implausibly large nostrils. Lucia Parsons was saying that the Vietnamese government had entirely approved the basic concept of working with the American people. Denise kneaded his shoulders with strong fingers. “Poor Chuck. Linda ditches him so he drinks too much. It’s lonely at the bottom.”

Looking up, Frye wondered how Denise made thirty look like sixteen. A pale little woman without fat or wrinkles, a wonderfully preserved pixie. Amazing, he thought, considering her appetite for abuse. Might drugs and relentless fornication promote age-abatement, a pickling of youth in its tracks? Worth looking into. “Who’s the squeeze this week?”

“Week nothing, Chuck. I’ve been seeing Simon for almost a month straight. He’s a chemistry student at State, and makes this great acid. I’m tripping right now. Your face looks like wax, except for the beat-up part, and that looks like, well... something geological.”

“What happened to Dick?”

Denise’s fingers moved to his neck. “Went back to his wife.”

“Billy?”

“Turned out to be gay.”

“It makes you think.”

“Yeah, but not that much. Life is reflex. Want me to take you to bed?”

Frye looked up, considering Denise for the thousandth time. She was pretty and willing, but her legion lovers implied venereal realities of the worst kind, crippling viral bummers with cures still centuries in the future.

“No. Thanks.”

“You really look bad, Chuck. Want some coke?” She produced a heap and held a loaded fingernail toward him. He turned away.

“God please no.”

Then she was off on a detailed account of today’s colonic enema, how clean you feel when it’s over, how pure and new. “I’ll give you one sometime,” she offered.

“You certainly won’t, young lady.” Frye felt the first waves of sleep tilting over him, let out a groan.

“You’re no fun anymore, Chuck.”

“The trouble is, Denise, I just keep messing things up.”

“Today’s problems are tomorrow’s jokes and yesterday’s worries. God, that’s stupid.”

“It really is.”

Frye shook his head, patted the dog’s. He liked how round and smooth it was. “I had one little thing to do. Keep something for a few days. That’s all I had to do. Then they come in here today while I’m gone and take it.”

“Those little boat people?”

Frye sat upright. Below him, the dog’s ears shot up: full alert. “Who?”

“Those Viet Cong-style guys who came to see you. Kinda cute. One was tall with a great flat-top and the other one was short and extra skinny.”

“Flat-top?”

“Like a totally bitchin’ one — two inches high at least. I’d just come onto this acid when they drove up so I figured I was seeing things. They knocked and went in. Then they came out half an hour later, waved good-bye to you, and drove away. Did they tie you up or something?” Denise’s eyes glittered with excitement.

“I wasn’t here.”

She blushed a little, retreating. “I just figured you knew them. I mean, they turned around and said something and waved when they left. Little dark guys. Gosh, Chucky, maybe I kinda like blew it.”

Little Dark Men.

“What kind of car?”

“Beats me. Just a car. The only car I know is a red Champ, ‘cause that’s what I’ve got.”

“What time?”

“Four maybe. Or five. Something right in there.”

Frye lay back down. The ceiling moved on its own. So, he thought, while I was at Smith’s, the Dark Men were here bagging Bennett’s tape.

“I knew I should have called the cops, but I can’t deal with authority when I’m high. Some came around a couple of hours ago, but I played nobody home.”

Frye groaned.

Long after she had left, he was still on the couch, staring at the darkness and listening to the pounding in his chest. Eddie’s garage, this afternoon. He could hear the dog roaming his house and at times see the outline of its head as it stopped by the couch to pant hot loyal dog breath into his face. Chuck, you know she’s in New York, so why do you do this?

Lucia Parsons was gone, replaced by the dizzying effects of Letterman’s Monkey-Cam.

He could sense Linda’s ambassador in the far corner, looking on.

“Keep that bitch away from me,” he told the dog. “She thinks she owns the place.”

He dreamed of Debbie, going under.