TWO

Lake Merritt is fresh water, mixed with salt tide from San Francisco Bay. The water has a smell, a room too full of people, or eggs going slightly bad. I took a moment to crouch beside the water as a family of ducks griped, looking over their feathered shoulders.

Traffic was backed up, the Oil Towners gone now, grass trampled and litter squashed out into the streets from the trash cans. My orange juice bottle was still there, a minor wonder, upright in the street.

The cops had their gas masks off, little lines on their cheeks from the pressure and the sweat. Talking into radios, writing reports. Flares had been lit on the pavement, dazzling magenta flames leaving ash like bone, and a traffic cop stood in the middle of the street, hands on his hips, watching the traffic.

I found a pay phone beside the library and got Bea’s mother on the machine, her fake country western twang, “None of us are right here right now, I am very sorry to say,” said Bea’s mom, taking her time explaining what we could do after we heard the beep.

I hung up without leaving a message. I told myself Bea was too smart to get arrested or trampled to death.

There was no one home at Bea’s house, just a front porch with bikes chained together and the TV set on a timer, CNN playing to an empty room.

A car door slammed, and there was Bea’s mom in a full skirt and western boots, clumping up the slope of dried-up crabgrass. For a moment she didn’t know who I was, maybe trouble waiting for her there on the porch.

“Look at you, Zachary, forlorn and lonely,” she said before I could break my silence. One thing about Bea’s mom, she always sounded happy. It cheered me up, sometimes, to watch her lip-sticky mouth. “Don’t tell me you and Bea had a parting of the ways.” Bea’s mom had insisted I call her Rhonda, but I called her Mrs. Newport or else refrained from using any name at all.

“I just sort of lost track of her,” I said, working on sounding casual.

“You look a little funny, Zachary,” she said.

I made a casual gesture: funny, not-funny, what did it matter?

“Is Bea all right?” This was asked in a normal voice, for a second no country vanilla in her voice.

“Of course,” I said. I made it sound macho: of course she’s okay; she was with me.

Mrs. Newport had a solemn, stubby-looking man in tow in the darkness. She took square dancing lessons and went to Neon Leon’s, a country western bar on San Pablo Avenue. She had been born and raised in South San Francisco but worked hard at her role. Her skirt looked like it had been made out of two or three red checkered tablecloths, but her blouse was pretty, little metal beads in the shape of a bucking bronco, when she turned on the porch light. She had leaned against me in the kitchen last New Year’s Eve, her full weight pinning me to the dishwasher, telling me she could show me how to dance the Silverado two-step.

When I shook hands with the man I could feel the weight of the steel dragging down one side of my jacket. I didn’t catch the man’s name, and I didn’t ask him to repeat it. Mrs. Newport kept a string of these guys around, phone numbers and business cards held to the fridge with poodle dog magnets.

Earl strode up the middle of Bella Vista Avenue with a liter bottle of grape soda. He was a perfect example of why I had dropped out of school, as he stopped to take a long drink and then belched almost musically, a clown even when he was alone.

My eyeballs felt like they had been soaked in Clorox. I liked Earl, in a way, but I didn’t want to talk to him.

“Were you just in the Mini Mart?” I asked, working up to the subject obliquely, the way Bea does.

“No, I just found this lying around somewhere,” said Earl, his way of saying: dumb question.

“You’re not hurt, are you, Earl?” I heard myself ask. Maybe I was trying to wish a little pain on him.

“Of course I’m hurt,” he said. He handed me the half-empty soda and I took a swig, that ripe, delicious fake grape. “Right here, on my left butt,” he was saying. Hoover High had an entire student body like this. I felt years older than any of them, although I wasn’t.

“The cops should take down license plates,” said Earl. “Don’t you think?”

The way he asked showed how my status had changed since I got up out of Junior English one afternoon, in the middle of a test on The Scarlet Letter, an essay exam, the changing role of the scaffold in the novel. I had put the test on Mr. Kann’s desk, not meeting his eyes, turning back to give him a look when I reached the door.

Mr. Kann was holding up a yellow hall pass, not being unfriendly, reminding me that I would need permission to leave the classroom. I looked back and shrugged. It was the shrug I regretted. If I had it to do over again, I would just keep my eyes level, open the door, and walk out.

I liked Mr. Kann, and I usually enjoyed reading. But ever since my best friend, Perry Sheridan, moved to Seattle, school had lost a lot of its flavor. When I had the trouble with Mrs. Hean in World History I decided to quit. I straggled on for another few weeks, but it was a death march, class after class without really seeing or hearing.

“The cops should drive up to Rodeo and Hercules,” Earl was adding, making his voice full of ridicule as he mentioned the refinery towns, as though their names weren’t silly enough already. “Kick in some doors.”

I finally asked what I really wanted to know. “You didn’t see Bea, did you? Or did she get stomped to death in the stampede?”

“A hundred people got stomped to death,” he said, emphasizing hundred, as though giving me news any fool would know.

“I didn’t see any ambulances,” I said.

Earl gave a little whinny, finding my remark humorous.

A cat slipped from the shadows and hesitated at the curb, startled by the sound of our voices.