EDDIE wanted to forget about the snapshot entirely, to tell himself it meant nothing at all. He wanted to write it off as a prank by someone he hadn’t seen in years and throw it away. He wanted to do all of that, but he couldn’t.
In Eddie’s experience, weird things that happened to him seldom meant nothing. Weird things, he had found, almost always turned out to mean something, frequently something not too good. Every time he tried to ignore weirdness until it went away, he eventually found it tattooed onto his butt. No, Eddie had decided a long time ago, it was always good policy to take on weirdness before it took him on, to meet it out in the street before it got inside his house, popped open a Coors, and made itself at home on his couch.
The problem was, he wasn’t certain how to apply his policy in this particular case. For the life of him, he couldn’t work out what the point of the photograph was supposed to be.
Maybe it was a threat, but he really couldn’t think of anybody who would want to threaten him at all, much less in such an obscure way. Certainly none of his clients were the sort to go in for that kind of subtlety. If any of them had a problem with him, they were the kind of guys who would come around to his apartment one night with a hockey stick. But if the photograph wasn’t a threat, then what the hell was it? A joke?
Eddie stared at the other men in the photograph and at the women, too, threading them back and forth through his memory. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t recall any of their faces. He might even have sworn he didn’t know anybody in the picture at all, but there he was right in the middle so he guessed he must have seen them at least that once. Surely no one would have gone to the trouble of faking such an innocuous picture. All of which brought him back full circle again to wondering why anyone would send the picture to him at all, even if it were real.
The best idea Eddie could come up with offhand was to show the picture to someone else he had been in the marines with and see what they made of it. Only one guy came readily to mind, but he was close by, so Eddie tucked the photograph into a jacket pocket and headed for the door.
Joshua was on the telephone as Eddie came out of his office. He put the call on hold and turned his head until his eyes caught Eddie’s.
“Must be family day for you,” he said.
Eddie was about to say something impatient; he was already up to his ass in subtlety and couldn’t face any more. Then Joshua laid it out.
“It’s Kathleen.”
Eddie had given marriage another shot three or four years after Jennifer left him. Her name had been Kathleen Strong—not Kathleen Dare, Kathleen Strong—and she had been an assistant district attorney in Marin County. He always had to stop and think to work out exactly when they had been married and when they got divorced, so he seldom bothered. It hadn’t lasted very long, and thank God they hadn’t had any children. Eddie flinched a bit every time he realized he was thinking that but, if they had, Kathleen would probably have hung the unfortunate kid with some idiotic surname like Strong-Dare, and that was a future too horrible to wish on any child.
Actually Kathleen had been okay, if a little strident and overly prone to sneak attacks. At least Eddie had thought of her that way until the day she announced she had decided to leave him and move to Alaska. Kathleen failed to mention then that her motivation was neither a new found love of elk crap nor a sudden obsession with the NRA, but rather that she was screwing a federal judge in Fairbanks.
Eddie hadn’t really minded all that much finding himself single again, actually he hardly noticed any change in his life at all, and he figured that anybody who ran off to Fairbanks to sleep with a federal judge probably had enough trouble already so he didn’t make a fuss when she filed the papers. That meant the divorce was—what else?—okay.
“She’s calling from Alaska?”
“No, from Tiburon. I gather the judge is history and she’s back.”
“Oh, Christ.” Eddie thought for a minute. “You didn’t—”
“No, I said I thought you’d just left.”
Eddie wiggled his eyebrows a couple of times and then cut Joshua the biggest wink he could and ducked out the door. That damned picture was already giving him heartburn. Kathleen would just have to take a number if she wanted to make him miserable today.
He covered the few blocks down Grant to the Transamerica Pyramid in a brisk walk, cut through the plaza underneath it, and turned north on Columbus toward the bay. Maybe he would get lucky and figure this thing out quickly. This guy he knew had a way of doing that kind of thing.
Heluska Jones had been the endlessly good-natured guy in his platoon, the volunteer for whatever might be going. There was one in every outfit. Lusk always claimed to be a full-blooded Apache Indian whose name meant ‘great warrior’ until deeply stoned one night he admitted he actually came from a tribe called the Winnebagos and that Heluska really translated as something more like ‘little fairy sent by the gods.’
From then on, of course, Lusk was Winnebago Jones for life. They would have tried out Little Fairy Jones for a while, but then they saw the look in his eyes and decided that fucking with an angry Indian was probably riskier than fucking with the VC. Anyway, Winnebago Jones had something. You could almost dance to it.
Winnebago and Eddie rotated back to Camp Pendleton together in 1975 and were discharged within a few days of each other. Eddie was hitching up the coast to San Francisco to get himself into college and, since Winnebago had nowhere to go but back to the hard scrabble of Northern Arizona, he just tagged along. As it turned out, Winnebago quickly found the beatnik ghetto around Columbus Avenue, or it found him, and he was home.
A hippie Indian named Winnebago was just the thing for San Francisco in the mid-seventies and for a few years he worked in a bookstore and wrote what he insisted was poetry; but as a decade slid past and Columbus Avenue turned from a hangout for aging beats into a tourist attraction, Winnebago just went with the flow and became a tourist attraction, too. Even now, after more than twenty years, he could still be found in the same little bookstore on Columbus, wearing what he thought was an appropriate costume for a hippie Indian in San Francisco, selling a few books and a lot of other garbage to tourists.
When Eddie pushed open the door, a bell on the back tinkled and Winnebago glanced up from a paperback propped against the cash register. He was wearing a shirt with a beaded front that he had bought at a garage sale in San Jose because it reminded him of the one Tonto wore in the Lone Ranger movies, and his shoulder-length, black hair was tied back off his face with a red and white beaded headband that said FULL-BLOODED AMERICAN INDIAN.
Eddie had once tried to tell Winnebago that he wasn’t supposed to be an Indian anymore; that somebody had gone and made him a Native American when he wasn’t looking. It had something to do with preserving the dignity of his race, Eddie explained, but Winnebago said he didn’t really care too much about that since he already had all the dignity he could use in San Francisco anyway. He was an Indian; he had always been an Indian; and he intended to stay an Indian. That seemed to settle it, and Eddie never brought the matter up again.
“Hey, Eddie, my man!” Winnebago closed the book and scraped his stool back. “How long’s it been?”
“Two weeks. I was here two weeks ago Thursday.”
Winnebago thought about that as he reached for the pack of unfiltered Camels he always kept at hand.
“Yeah?”
“We walked over to North Beach Pizza.”
Winnebago seemed to strain a moment, trying to remember as he shook a cigarette from the pack. He gave up quickly, struck a match and lit the cigarette, exhaling in a long, steady stream.
“Well, if you say so, Eddie. Can’t remember a damned thing about it though.”
“You must be getting old, Winnebago.”
Winnebago tapped one finger slowly against the side of the cash register and considered the proposition. Eddie waited for him to decide what he thought, but when it became obvious that it might take a while, Eddie went ahead and fished the photograph out of his pocket and put it on the counter. Winnebago took another toke on his cigarette and shifted his weight slightly on the stool so that he could see it more clearly.
“Hey, that’s you, Eddie! Damn, you look so young!” Winnebago lifted the picture off the counter and peered at it. “Why’d you draw that circle around your head?”
“I didn’t. It came that way.”
“Your head? Came that way?”
Winnebago apparently was not having one of his better days, Eddie reflected.
“No, the picture. The picture came that way.”
“What do you mean? Where’d it come from?”
Eddie told him.
After he heard the story, Winnebago just shook his head slowly.
“Ain’t that the weirdest thing, man? Ain’t that the weirdest?”
“Do you recognize anyone?”
“I recognize you, Eddie.”
Winnebago had times like this, times when all the foreign substances he had poured and sucked and snorted into his body over the years held a convention in his brain all at once. On the other hand, Eddie knew there were also times when Winnebago was so penetrating and insightful that he scared the hell out of most people. When the magnetic fields in his brain overlapped just right, Winnebago sounded like an Old Testament prophet who had suffered the bizarre misfortune of emerging from reincarnation as a hippie Indian working in a bookstore in San Francisco.
“No, Winnebago, anyone else. Do you recognize anyone else in the picture?”
Winnebago looked hard at the snapshot, tilting it from side to side to study the faces more closely. The smoke from his Camel formed a little wreath around his head and caught the light in such a way that it made Eddie think for a moment of some bizarrely vandalized Renaissance painting.
“Isn’t that guy behind you somebody from our squad?” Winnebago laid the photograph back on the counter and twisted it toward Eddie.
“Maybe. You can’t see him well enough to tell.”
“There’s something about his ears. They look familiar.”
“You can’t remember we had pizza together two weeks ago and you recognize the ears on a guy you haven’t seen in twenty years?”
“Man, I remember every minute of twenty years ago. Don’t you?”
“Well,” Eddie admitted, “a lot of it, I guess.”
Eddie and Winnebago stood together in silence for a moment, each contemplating the mute relic of their past that had suddenly elbowed its way into their present. Finally Winnebago took a last puff on his cigarette and stubbed it out in an ashtray already overflowing onto the counter.
“Who do you think sent it, Eddie?”
“Beats the hell out of me.”
Winnebago just nodded a couple of times, then looked up and studied Eddie carefully.
“I look at that picture,” he said, “and I got to tell you I get a real bad feeling.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning I don’t see why anybody would send it, except to say they had some sort of business with you. And don’t you think this is a pretty strange way to say that? Unless a guy was a little off, wouldn’t he just call you up and say, ‘Hey, Eddie, how’s tricks? Maybe you don’t remember me, but I’ve got some business with you.’ Wouldn’t he just do that?”
“You’d think so.”
“Yeah, well, that’s what gives me a bad feeling.”
Eddie decided that Winnebago was just being inexplicably logical for once rather than measuring the pulse of the unseen.
“How about the girls, Winnebago? Can you remember any of them?”
“No. I’m ashamed to admit it, but all them little chickens always looked pretty much the same to me. Besides, I was only in Thailand a few times.” Winnebago tapped the snapshot with his forefinger. “This is that place in Bangkok where we used to go on R&R.”
Eddie picked the photograph up and looked at it again. “How do you know that?”
“Those are Thai girls, man. Couldn’t be anybody else.”
“I thought they were probably Vietnamese.”
“Shit, Eddie.” Winnebago sounded disgusted. “How could you forget? We’d get off the R&R flights, not even get a room, just go straight to the bars. Usually slept on the floor of one of them.” He shook his head a few times. “Those girls may have been whores, but they were nice girls. They saved my life more than once, I’ll tell you. Those are absofuckinglutely Thai girls. You can bet your ass on it, man.”
Eddie looked at the picture some more and felt the memories begin to stir.
“Maybe you’re right. I didn’t see that before.”
Winnebago snorted. “You see today better. I see yesterday better. I’m not sure who that makes worse off, Eddie.”
The bell on the shop door tinkled and a very fat woman came in with a very skinny man. They were wearing matching polyester jogging suits in phosphorescent blue with white stripes running down both legs and they stood looking around uncertainly until Winnebago bounded out from behind the cash register.
“Welcome, welcome! Just have a look around folks. Hasn’t changed a bit since Allen Ginsberg and I started the place in ‘65. Got first editions of Ginsberg’s books up there.” He pointed to the rickety staircase. “Every one autographed by him personally!”
The couple nodded tentatively and started up the stairs as Winnebago settled back on his stool behind the counter.
Eddie gave him a long look.
“Sometimes commerce demands you stretch a point or two,” Winnebago mumbled, carefully avoiding Eddie’s eyes.
Eddie picked up the photograph and pushed it back into his pocket. He now knew something about it he hadn’t known before, but it wasn’t much, and off-hand he couldn’t see what use it was to him anyway.
“Okay, Winnebago. I got to run. See you later.”
“Later, man.”
As he left the store, Eddie heard the fat woman and the skinny man coming back down the stairs.
“Who the fuck is Allen Ginsberg?” the woman was asking the man, but he wasn’t answering.