I come here once a year. At exactly this time. And lay the unbound pages on this table. I come here thinking I’ll write the ending to The Four Corners, but I haven’t.
Beyond the iron railing, the sun drops slow into an icy South Atlantic; the harbor’s saltwater air and today’s catch of rock cod drift upland in the wood-fire smoke. Gusts ruffle my hair and the yellowwood trees. A winter gale’s coming, but then there’s always a gale coming at the Cape—took me two winters to get used to wearing sweaters in July, to having the seasons backward. Becoming someone else wasn’t as difficult; except for a few hours five years ago on the Mexican border, I’ve always been someone else.
Thunder rumbles behind Hout Bay’s Constantia Mountains. And who’s to say which plans work out and which don’t? Some plans are fairy tales from the beginning, the only thing they can do is fall apart.
Was being a valued, successful actress a fairy tale? Was for me, is for most of us aspirants, more of a Pentecostal walk through the fire than a career. If you’re still alive after the fire walk, you don’t exit cleansed, just charred; but if you’re willful to a fault, and tough, and lucky to have options other than old photographs and an apron, you find another dream when the actress dream dies, another dream that can save you.
You shoot for happiness instead of bright lights and marquees, however happiness might come. And then when some form of happiness is so close you can actually believe it’s your turn—it crashes at the Mexican border. Then you come here—out of hiding twice a year, stand on this high, seafront patio with two bodyguards from Pretoria, and wait. It’s risky and childish and melodramatic, but it’s what you have, what Norma Desmond had.
Because on any given day—ten thousand miles across that stormy ocean—Bobby Vargas could walk out of a special U.S. military prison and into a federal courtroom that frees him and forces a trial. Political winds change; Japanese campaign contributions fall out of favor. Fear of all things dark stops winning elections, selling NRA memberships, and anointing TV demigods.
If that day comes, and relentless Korean mob bosses magically quit believing we have their $20 million, Bobby Vargas will walk between these empty, windblown tables, Fender guitar case in hand. And I’ll be here. It could happen—he was sitting in the L7 after twenty-nine years. What are the odds of that? Forrest and Jenny found each other in the thousands at the Lincoln Memorial.
For more nights on my pillow than I’d care to admit, I’ve watched Bobby walk across this patio. I blink, not believing it’s finally him—the boy who promised to save me from the Four Corners and did—I run into his arms, his lips on mine, his hands in my hair, the same kind, beautiful hands that drew on my stoop. It’s good, better than what Tennessee Williams could write.
Sometimes it’s the night after, Bobby and I are smiling like little kids, sharing one of these cliff-side two-tops, the candle barricaded from the wind, our hands gripped soft under the table. Just us out here, the whole world our vista. We sip Castle beers that taste sweet like his mouth, talk about Cape Town and Hout Bay while the South Atlantic’s twenty-foot waves crash below us, talk about how our dreams ended up so far away in Africa.
But they are our dreams and we finally have them; that’s how I’ve written it, how J. M. Barrie would’ve written it had he known about Bobby Vargas, Coleen, and me. J. M. would write that Coleen was Wendy, the girl who went back long ago to grow up and show us the way here, then Bobby and I flew and flew and flew till we found each other again, found our Neverland at the far end of the world.
When I cleared customs into Namibia’s Restricted Area, the first thing I bought was the case of champagne and sunblock. Call them a talisman; I was angry and hurt and bought them anyway. Both are stored upstairs in the small apartment I keep over the bar. The Seven Spanish Angels. A handsome Afrikaner runs it for me, a rugged gentleman I shared a bed with briefly last year, before he and I realized that my heart and head were elsewhere, or gone altogether. I keep Tharien Thompson’s photo on the wall as well; a rave review in the Cape Times for her performance in Streetcar. Like Julie McCoy’s famous faces and their photos in the L7, Tharien stumbled into the Seven Spanish Angels once and signed hers. They love her here.
Watch check. Low clouds top the mountain and spill toward the bay. Might want to go inside and tell the staff I’m in town. With the time difference, in three minutes it will be five years since I got in that dusty pickup with Bobby’s extended family. That part of the plan worked—not perfect, and not without a few scary moments, but it worked. Made me think hard about family, why some people have it and many don’t. Other than Coleen, the families I built were wastelands. Bobby has two sets, neither one a wasteland—the Mexicans who saved me, and the gang cops and city he saved. Some people are like that; they look for the light until it finds them.
I wonder if there’s light in Bobby’s cell, what it’s like to be a hero, the price you pay when the crimes of a brother can’t go unrepented. I didn’t know it then, but I do now—Bobby went back to save me, to buy the Brennan sisters a pass at a life we’d never had. Just like he promised he would.
My fingertips trace the play I’ve written—we’ve written, using my hand.
An Alfa sedan passes slower than it should and I reset the SIG Sauer under my jacket. The Korean mafia is a world organization with a strong element in Nigeria and South Africa, but I had connections here via the ex-military couple who kept me at the L.A. youth home. All alone in Panama, they seemed like my best option—hell, my only option. Carel Roos of CTC Security eyes the Alpha, hand inside his jacket. Carel and one of his Afrikaners travel with me when I come down here through Port Nolloth from the Restricted Area. Out in the open I’m a much easier target. I’ve heard Bobby and I are both worth mid-six digits, but it has to be alive.
Thunder rumbles closer behind me, one of the daily storms that batter the end of the African continent. More than anything, I wanted Bobby and I and Coleen to win one time. I wanted to deserve the light, wanted to hold hands with it, with a man who wasn’t my father or a director or a casting agent. Just a man who loved me, a boy in a window whose promise that we would fly away kept me alive through a lifetime of dark.
Carel Roos nods not to worry about the Alfa, then steps back to his spot on the stairway wall. His shoulders flatten against the cut granite, as does the sole of one shoe. He turns to the Seven Spanish Angels’ arched front door and a black girl exiting toward me. Stephanie smiles at him, then hands me an envelope. “From America.” She points inside at the bartender opening up. “Étienne thinks it might be for you.”
The envelope’s addressed to Blanche DuBois, c/o the Seven Spanish Angels Bar, Hout Bay, South Africa; then the postmark—Michoacán, Villamar, Mexico. The Ruiz-Peñas know the Seven Spanish Angels and the name Blanche DuBois should there ever be a reason … I check Carel, then Chapman’s Peak Drive, heart adding beats, fear of contact, the price on my head. I draw the SIG Sauer. Carel stiffens, eyes on me, the patio, the road. He draws his pistol, sends his man back inside the bar, then up into the apartment.
Nothing. No Korean kidnap team.
Exhale. Swallow. Bobby Vargas is dead: that’s what is inside this envelope.
I belt my pistol and open the envelope, all the emotion I thought was dead rushing at me. Inside is a newspaper clipping from the Chicago Herald dated six weeks ago and nothing else. The clipping recounts the successful business dealings of Furukawa Industries and its CEO, Dr. Hitoshi Ota. The last paragraph mentions a Chicago ex-policeman, Roberto “Bobby” Vargas. Concern has been expressed by a spokesman for Furukawa because the terrorism charges against Bobby Vargas have been dropped, and pending a trial for the murder of Danny Vacco, Bobby Vargas has been released but did not appear at his pretrial hearing.
Wind flutters the clipping; I grab it back before I lose it to the South Atlantic. On the back is an outline … a heart, like the chalk ones we drew on my stoop. Inside the heart, tiny letters read: Forrest & Jenny.
Stephanie says, “Hand delivered,” and points across the road.