CHAPTER SIXTEEN

He squinted against the sun, concentrating on the flicker of movement, consciously turning his back to the men on the blanket. Get thee behind me, he thought. And didn’t know why.

The figure shimmered, moved closer. Clots of dream-world distorted his vision; for an instant, the figure seemed only a dark lump against the brightness, a night-swathed, crippled figure lurching from behind the rocks. Then the instant passed and the figure stepped out of the shadows into full light.

It was a girl. She was dressed in almost immodestly short cutoff levis and a T-shirt with something printed on the front. The words were too faded to read; by the time she was sufficiently close for the words to be marginally legible, Payne would have been too embarrassed to stare long enough to read them. She was barefoot.

She picked her way carefully along the damp rocks, leaning into the cliff when the spray threatened to reach her. She made slow progress, as if she had no particular purpose in following the ridge of rocks bursting through the ocean spray. She was too intent on finding and keeping her footing to notice anyone.

Behind Payne, two voices joined the muted undercurrent of sound. The two men were awake and talking, their voices blurred by the pounding waves and by Payne’s pounding heart. Payne knew which of the two was speaking and didn’t know how he knew it. Part of him wanted to turn around. He swallowed hard, and for a second he saw the blank white wall of his…of her room back in Tamarind Valley.

He shook his head violently and the whiteness turned red then disappeared, blending into sandstone cliffs rising cormorant-stained and rain-cut above the girl. She was nearer now, almost ready to drop from the last boulder onto the sand. She crouched down, balanced herself with one hand against a cut in the cliff. As her legs spread wide, he saw a thin ridge of muscle tracing the inside of her thighs. He focused on a deeper shadow.

Static-twisted blue lightning flared through his mind, crashed against his ears. The dream. He shivered, passed his palm across his eyes, panting in the delicious coolness of the shadow of his own hand. The fingers on his right hand twinged with a passing pain.

The men’s voices rose, fell, rose again in a cadenced counterpoint to the surf. He understood no words but the intonations of intertwined sound grew more intimate, more threatening. He knew that he would turn and instead he looked straight ahead, concentrated again on the smooth line of silken muscle along the girl’s inner thigh. A single drop of ocean spray had caught there and glistened in a perfect droplet.

She still had not looked up. She had not seen him standing there. The girl jumped. Her feet thudded against wet sand, leaving shallow prints like fading echoes. She straightened and walked along the beach, her feet just inside the tide line where froth curled around her toes and slid over the arch of her foot, licking away glittering sand.

Payne followed her with his eyes. The men’s voices faded again. The dream struggled to the surface once, then faded also.

He followed her with his eyes. She continued down the beach, looking neither left nor right. Payne felt dizzy. The sand between them stretched white and unruffled, studded by rock as black as midnight scattered across the whiteness. The cliffs bleached out, whitening to match the lime streaks of generations of sea-birds.

He swayed, steadying himself with one hand against a rock. The men’s voices rose and fell, sparkling like blue-white static against the stillness. About to faint, he half-turned toward them, then twisted back.

“Hey,” he whispered to the girl. Then he spoke again, stronger, tossing his voice toward her retreating back. He let his gaze drop from her shoulders to her buttocks, to the clean, neat line of her legs.

“Hey, there.”

She paused. For a moment it seemed that she would continue onward, then she glanced over her shoulder. The beach was silent, except for the layering of surf through the air.

“Me?”

“Yeah, wait just a minute. Please.” He stooped and retrieved his T-shirt and shoes, then walked down the beach toward her.

The two men did not notice him as he passed; they were lying on their stomachs, apparently asleep. Their elbows touched.

The girl waited for him. Payne thought he saw relief flicker across her face when he emerged from behind the waist-high boulders. He was wearing swim trunks. Had she expected something else?

He caught up with her, smiled, and asked, “What’s on the other side?” as he gestured back to the ledge jutting into the ocean.

The sand was gray now, not white. The rocks were reddish-brown, bearded with dying seaweed and locked barnacles. There were no voices at all.

“Back there? Not much. Mostly rocks. No beaches, at least not for a mile or so. I like to walk there. There’s never anyone else there, or at least not very many. I can be alone there, to think.”

“Oh. I see.” He started to turn away.

“Hey,” she said with a laugh, “that’s okay. I’ve thought my quota of deep thoughts for today. I’m just leaving.”

“Oh.”

They walked a few more steps. Payne felt urged to speak but lacked words. He dug his toes into the hot sand.

“Live around here?” he finally managed.

“Down the highway. And you?”

“In the hills. Tamarind Valley.”

“I’ve been almost everywhere in the area, but never there,” she said, sounding mildly surprised. “I’ve heard it’s nice.”

“Yeah. It is. I like it. I’ve only lived there a few weeks, though.” As if that explained something important.

They reached the end of the beach and began climbing the rocks. Their silence remained unbroken except for an occasional watch out, there or you okay on the trickier parts, until they both dropped the last foot or so onto the damp sand at Zuma. By then, Payne already knew a lot about her.

Her name was Cathy Litton. She was a student in LA. She had been born in the city and lived her life there, moving from suburb to suburb with her family but always circling like an eternal satellite of Los Angeles. Now she shared an apartment with two girls in the older part of the city south of Santa Monica. She loved walking along the beach...obviously!...and—what luck!—she loved watching old films.

That much he learned as they walked from the point to the parking lot. By then he had forgotten his dream, his panic, even his uncharacteristic boldness in calling out to her, although he was certainly pleased that he had done so. She seemed to like him; he certainly liked her.

“How about lunch?” she said as they neared the lot.

“Here?” He glanced at the beach, this part now crowded with families and umbrellas and volleyball nets where an hour or so earlier there had been only sea gulls and silence. “I didn’t bring anything.” That last came out more apologetic than he liked.

“Neither did I. And not here. Follow me.” She slipped into a small car waiting only two down from Payne’s and pulled out of the parking space and onto the roadway, gunning her engine impatiently as he fumbled for the key to his Toyota—shit, the thing looked a wreck next to hers and it wasn’t polished and he had left a pile of papers in the back window where she could see what a clod he was and it won’t turn over shit what’s wrong now the thing better start this time. It did.

He followed her along PCH, never lagging more than a couple of car lengths behind, pulling closer when someone threatened to cut between them. Not fifteen minutes later, she turned into the shopping area in Malibu.

John’s, a little sandwich place, was almost hidden behind a row of stores. The place was nothing more than a plain wooden counter where you ordered, a pick-up window where the cooks yelled out the numbers of the orders, and some benches and tables outside in the middle of a rose garden.

It was not what Payne expected. The benches were bare wood but aged and weathered, scarred by hundreds, probably thousands, actually, of seam rivets from Levi’s back pockets until the wood seemed almost malleable, like some oddly grained upholstery.

They ate lunch together at John’s. It was not a date really, he kept telling himself, as if trying not to let his hopes build too high. They were just eating in the same place, at the same table, at the same time.

The sandwiches were great, he decided, but because the alternative would have been to talk with Cathy, he ate more quickly than usual. Then he sat and stared at the orange rind curling along the side of his paper plate. Even though he had enjoyed the lunch, sitting outside and eating next to a beautiful woman who seemed to like him, he felt suddenly self-conscious. There was a long moment of silence.

“Look,” he said finally, staring at a single red-and-white rosebud unfurling a yard away. “You don’t really know me or anything, but if you’d be interested, I make a great spaghetti dinner and I have hundreds of old films on videocassette. If you’d like to...?

“Come up and see my etchings, eh?” Cathy said, twirling an invisible mustache and dropping her voice into a creaky basso in imitation of a leering, lascivious melodrama villain.

Payne flushed and faced her, his mouth working but no sounds coming.

“No,” he finally squeaked, embarrassed by her response as much as by his reaction.

“Hey,” she said, recognizing her mistake. “I’m sorry. It’s just that sometimes guys...well, sometimes they come on stronger than I want.”

He started to stand but she laid her hand on his arm. “No, I’m really sorry,” she said. “That crack wasn’t called for.” She paused a second, looking directly at him. “And I love spaghetti.” She tugged at his shirt sleeve, using gentle force to pull him back to the bench. She spoke again.

He looked away.

After a moment, “Look, I’m used to guys and lines. I’m not bad-looking, it happens to me often enough. I guess so often that when the real thing happened just now, I didn’t recognize it. Seriously, I would love to come over. Do you have Casablanca?”

“Sure.” He turned toward her.

“It’s my favorite.”

He brightened. “Okay. Can you come now? You could follow me into Tamarind Valley. I’d only have to stop to pick up a few things at the store.” He felt childishly eager and for a moment thought Cathy might agree. Instead she glanced at her watch and shook her head.

“I can’t right now. I’ve got an appointment at three.” She saw him begin to retreat again. “Seriously. No line this time. But I can get to Tamarind Valley by five-thirty or six. Okay?”

He nodded.

“Great. It’s set.” She rested her hand on his arm again. “I’ve always wanted to see Tamarind Valley. Even the name sounds peaceful and quiet.”

He walked her to her car. “Five-thirty or six,” he called into her open car window as she backed out of her parking place.

“Right,” she called back.

He watched until she pulled out of the parking lot and disappeared between the rows of stores. His car was not far away, glistening in the sunlight. It took him only seconds to cross the black pavement; the heat radiated though his shoes and the asphalt gave softly beneath his feet, as if the summer sun were melting it. The heat increased when he stood next to his car, taking the full reflection of sunlight from its windows.

He reached for the handle. “Shit!” He jerked his hand away from the burning chrome. Swearing softly, he wrapped his shirttail around his fingers, gingerly opened the door, and slid into the car.

It was oven-hot and stuffy inside. He rolled the windows down, grateful for once for the cheap plastic knobs painted to look like metal. Metal would have blistered his fingertips. The steering column was in full sunlight, though, and the wheel was too hot to touch. For a moment he envied the guy who owned the car in the next space; his car had some kind of aluminum fan-like apparatus connected by a suction cup to the base of the window. When the fans were open, the inside of the car was shaded.

The sun reflecting off the hood of Payne’s car bleached the metal into a glare of unbroken, searing white. He stared at it, his thoughts trailing into nothingness, into the emptiness of white sand. He stared, and black boulders appeared in the sand. Static rose in his ears, like whispering male voices at first, then more and more like a television tuned to the wrong channel. Sweat beaded from his forehead and dripped to his cheeks, his upper lip, his neck.

He decided to open all of the windows, get out, and wait outside the car in the shade of an arbor of Double Delight roses, just until the wheel was cool enough to touch. He didn’t move. The static grew louder and the white vista through his windshield spread. It encompassed John’s Sandwich Shoppe, the gardens, the rows of stores, everything, until there was nothing left but white and black and roaring static. Payne stiffened, his muscles tight, his right hand curling into a claw on the hot leather beside him. Without knowing it, he slept.