My mother came home with just enough food for the two of us. I was lying on her couch with the mauve fringes. I stood up to avoid a comment. There was a smell of fried chicken and warm wrapping paper. The fries were separate, stuffed into cones dripping with oil. She had spent more on beer than on food. When it came to that, she hadn’t changed. She kept looking either up or down but rarely straight ahead. She knocked back two bottles then muttered, “I found you a job in a gas station just outside town. And a room with an honest woman for just over a third of your salary. If you get good tips, the rent won’t be any kind of a burden. What did they say about Vietnam?”
“They didn’t say anything but I think they were afraid they wouldn’t be able to find shoes for me.”
“Is that all?”
“No, you can imagine. If I’d killed Indians, they’d have taken me, but my own grandparents . . . They didn’t seem that enthusiastic. They’re supposed to call me back.”
“They’ll never call you back. Someone capable of killing his grandparents is just as capable of shooting his army buddies in the back.”
I leaped to my feet. “You can’t say something like that to me!”
“Yes, I can, because it’s what I think.”
I sat down again. She opened another bottle of beer without offering me one. My anger deflated quickly. We ate in silence. She switched on the TV. They were showing an item about Vietnam. She switched channels to a baseball match. My mother liked baseball. I saw her fidget.
“Your sister’s pregnant.”
I paused before I answered. “With what?”
She looked at me in surprise. “What do you mean, with what?”
“A marine mammal?”
She pursed her lips, a sign that she was making an effort to control herself.
“I really would have liked to be proud of you, Al.”
What can you say to something like that?
“I see all these students at the university and I tell myself you could have been one of them.”
“What’s to stop me?”
“You’ll never get a scholarship, and I don’t have the money to pay for you. Now that your father has vanished, you can’t count on me to pay his share of anything. Anyway, I’d just be throwing money away. I don’t deny you’re intelligent, Al, but you have no willpower. You’re a ditherer. You don’t follow through on anything. Do you even know what you want to do with your life, apart from wrecking it?”
She stood up to clear and wash the dishes. I stayed where I was.
“What do you think I am, a servant?” she yelled. “Can’t you get up off your ass and help me?”
I got up slowly. I took a paper and pencil to write down the addresses of the gas station and the landlady, which she dictated wearily. When she’d finished, I tore up the paper.
“What are you doing?”
“As you can see, I tore it up. I don’t need a piece of paper to remember an address. But the main thing is, I don’t need you to find me a job. I’m not going to that gas station and I’m not going to your landlady. I don’t want to owe you anything. Not even a night here. I’m getting my bag and taking off. But not before I tell you one thing. I’m really sorry I killed my grandparents.”
“You’re sorry, good news!”
She couldn’t give a damn. She looked around for something to light her cigarette.
“Yes, I’m sorry, I should never have killed them. It’s you I should have shot.”
She gave a nasty little laugh, but I could tell she was scared. My expression must have changed without my realizing it.
“Well, since I can’t rely on you for the dishes, I’ll finish them by myself. You can go.”
She was putting on a show, but all the same she went and got herself another beer.
“If I were you, Al, I wouldn’t come out with that kind of threat too often. If you do, I’ll talk to your probation officer and you’ll go back to the hospital pronto. That’s not what I want. Take your things, vanish like your father, live your life, any kind of life, I don’t care, but go.”
She said all that with her back turned, and me looking at the back of her neck. I went to my room, put the few things I had taken out back in my khaki bag, and left without saying another word. I had the vague feeling I’d just saved her life. Outside, I realized how damp the house had been because the air was dry and warm. Night had fallen over the town like a curtain on a lighted stage in a theatre, but it wasn’t yet pitch black. I headed back to the park where I’d been that afternoon. It’s hard for me to describe the pleasure I feel, walking around when there’s a vague danger in the air. Nothing might happen but you feel it wouldn’t take much for the situation to descend into tragedy. It’s the hour when dissatisfaction, resentment and madness are on the prowl. It’s all a matter of opportunity, circumstance, and moonlight.
My exceptional memory often registers details that are insignificant to ordinary people. But it can also wipe out whole areas of my life. The hospital seemed a long way away. Leitner even further. Walking the deserted streets of Santa Cruz, I wondered if I’d really known him. I thought about my father, who’d vanished into thin air. I wanted to find him, I wanted to explain to him what I had done so that he could judge me based on a full knowledge of the facts. I could see myself moving in with him. We’d gotten along well when we lived together in Los Angeles. Women had always separated us. My mother and my sisters, whom he’d fled as if they were the plague. His second wife, who’d imagined I was ogling her. And now the new one, who I knew nothing about. But above all his mother, my grandmother. In killing her, I’d given him a strange sense of guilt. Guilt for not mourning her, because I’m sure his mother’s death hadn’t moved him.
Santa Cruz has the fake casualness of a university town. It was hard to imagine, but the place would be a heap of ashes if the San Andreas Fault started moving. There’d be mass destruction, the whole coast of California would be one big disaster area. Hell is never very far from heaven, but people don’t want to know that, they sleep as if a good star was watching over them. They spend their time building enclosures for themselves. They accumulate possessions and don’t see further than the tips of their shoes. It never occurs to them to wonder what they’re doing there. If anyone gets bumped off around them, their own lives take on an unsuspected flavor. Murders don’t horrify them, they give their petty existence a value they’d never hoped for.
Much to my surprise, the park was even livelier at that late hour than in the middle of the day. I had to walk around a bit to find a bench where I could sleep alone. I’d never seen such a concentration of freaks. They’d streamed in from all over, all shambling along in the same way. About a dozen groups had formed circles to play music and take up weird poses. The most stoned of them were lying on the ground with their arms outstretched, looking up at the stars. I was glad I’d had a close shave before dinner, trimmed my mustache and ironed my shirt. I sat down in the middle of a bench to mark my territory. I decided I needed a good sleep before I set off to look for a job. I could tell you lots more about those Martians and their stench of grass, but I didn’t really care about them. I didn’t wish them any harm, I just didn’t understand where they had come from and where they were going, they seemed to be in an unreal world, floating about on transparent clouds.
Lulled by the Indian music, I was starting to fall asleep with my chin on my chest when I sensed a presence. I opened my eyes and saw a girl my age or a bit more. Her loose blonde hair fell all the way down to her lower back. She was wearing a rumpled, almost transparent white dress with lots of ruffles and a low neckline that revealed the upper part of her big breasts. She was looking at me sweetly. I replied to her greeting because I thought she was really pretty. I was just getting over the anger I’d felt since my conversation with my mother, and it hadn’t completely given way to calm, which is an unusual state for me anyway.
“Are you traveling?”
She sat down at the end of the bench. Not looking at me made her confident.
“Quite the opposite. I’m trying to settle.”
“Were you in Vietnam?”
“No. They didn’t want me, I’m too tall.”
She nodded. “It was written.”
“What was written?”
“Ever since you were born, it was written that you wouldn’t go out there and die because you’re too much of a target. All the better. You have good karma. I have a brother over there. I feel it deep down in my belly that he’s not going to come back. That’s why I’m on the road. I’m from Sacramento. I don’t want to be there the day men in uniform come to the door of my parents’ house and tell them my brother’s dead. I wanted him to desert. He didn’t want to. I’m with a group of people that are forming a commune as we go along. There are already about fifteen of us. If you like the idea, you’re welcome to join us.”
“What kind of commune?”
“We’re going to try to live according to our principles. Abolish property of goods and people.”
“Some kind of a Communist thing?”
“No, nothing like that. I mean, I don’t really know what Communism is. We’re going north to cultivate some land and be self-sufficient. Everything we own will be shared, love will be free . . . ”
“Free?”
“Yes . . . we have to get rid of all this crap about possessions, my land, my wife, my dog, my TV. We’re even going to make children who’ll belong to the commune. Our children will be loved the way no children have been loved in the history of the world. They won’t have any more psychological problems, they won’t have to deal with rivalry or competition. We’re going to invent a new world without wars, where the only thing that matters is love, a world radically different from our parents’ world, where material things won’t matter anymore. We’ll get back in harmony with nature and spend our time enjoying it.”
She paused to catch her breath.
“Wanna fuck?” she said.
I couldn’t have been more surprised if I’d been hit by a truck.
“Don’t worry, nobody will watch. There’s no jealousy with people like us. We satisfy a natural need, as natural as eating or sleeping, do you want to?”
She stood up, lifted her skirt, and sat down astride my knees. I pushed her off, gently but firmly, and she realized it would be a bad mistake to insist.
“You’re not yet ready to make the big leap into a better world. I understand that, brother. But if you want to join our commune, we’re still here for two more days, time to do a little work and get some bread together. Then we’re going north to Mount Shasta, you know it?”
I knew it of course but I didn’t tell her that.
“If one day you want a better world, you’ll always be welcome. What’s your name?”
“Al.”
“Mine’s Lisbeth.”
It was terrible to let a girl like that one go for the simple reason that you don’t know what to do with her. She made me a little sign with her fingers and disappeared into the semidarkness.
I caught a glimpse of her about seven o’clock the next morning, as I was setting off to look for work. She was under a sleeping bag between two unwashed men. The thought that she had slept with them in turn or together turned my stomach. I could happily have kicked them. Without quite knowing why, I thought free love was a man’s idea, even when it was women who were selling it. Anyway, that didn’t matter right now, what worried me was the thought of showing up to look for work without shaving.
I walked downtown, stiff and aching from my uncomfortable night. With what was left from the few dollars I’d begged from my mother the night before I had a coffee and three doughnuts. I could feel a slight breeze from the sea on my face. I was in a state between well-being and the fear of losing it. I absolutely had to find a job before evening so that I wouldn’t be forced to see my mother again. I could carry on sleeping in the park as long as the weather stayed fine but I had to eat and you don’t feed bulk like mine with what I could scramble together. The proprietor of the first gas station I tried was sorry, but he couldn’t offer me anything. In the second, the boss wasn’t there and I didn’t want to wait. With the third, a Texaco station, I hit the jackpot. The manager was a pudgy Italian who looked more like someone who sells pizzas than gas, but that’s the kind of cliché that doesn’t mean much. As I expected, he couldn’t offer me wages, but he said I’d get plenty of tips for pumping gas, washing windshields, swelling tires and all the little maintenance jobs like checking levels. In fact, he reckoned I’d earn more than I expected. By chance, my predecessor had taken off with a customer, a woman around forty who drove the latest model Cadillac. According to Giannini, she might well have offered him more than a ride in her car, but it wouldn’t last, even though he was a handsome kid, as far as he was any judge. Two hippies had come looking for work before me, but he had no intention of employing degenerates. The way he put it, the smell of gas and grease wasn’t enough to cover their stench. He may have been exaggerating a little, but wops love to do that. He asked me if I knew anything about mechanics because he had a repair shop next to the gas station. He asked where I was from, but that was just a matter of form, he wasn’t really interested in the answer. I told him I was from Montana. He seemed to think that was a long way to come just to pump gas or even to repair motorcycles—I’d told him that was something I knew about. As he only came up to my waist, he never looked at me when he spoke to me for fear of wearing out his cervical vertebrae. He couldn’t get over how tall I was. I’m sure he must have thought I was very strong, too. He didn’t know I had incredibly thin bones for a man my size.