Given World Page 12

  I want so badly to explain all this to you in a way that makes sense to both of us. This is me, Riley, your mom, trying to figure out how to do that and not mess it up any more than I already have.

  Your father, on the other hand, just says to tell you hello. Your father sends his love. He misses you a lot. So do I. And Cash. He’s old now, can’t catch a rabbit anymore. But he still tries.

  I hope this finds you. I think I hope that. Maybe it’s too much. I have no idea where you are. Call if you can. Collect is fine. Happy New Year, sweetie.

  I love you, Mom

  8. The Last Thing You Need

  “S o this orphan walks into a bar,” Cole says, to make Riley laugh, although there is no more to it, just the one line. It is not a joke at all. He gives her his best Elvis look: blue eyes narrowed (eyelashes ridiculously long), head cocked slightly right and down, the merest rumor of a smile at one corner of his mouth. She is five, maybe six years older than he is, which is not quite twenty-one, but he has a fake ID she pretends to believe even though it is an obvious hack job.

  He watches as she consoles another regular, listens attentively to a story of love gone wrong, the inability to find someone new, the futility of trying.

  “You just haven’t met the right person,” Riley says. “But you will. You have so much to offer.”

  In one month, Cole has heard these same words come from that beautiful mouth at least ten times before, spoken to at least ten different women with ten different ex-girlfriends. Well, sometimes the ex-girlfriends overlap; it’s sort of that kind of a bar.

  An hour later, she is pouring a club soda for a repeat wagoneer who is obviously hanging on by a weakening thread. “One day at a time,” Riley says, without apparent irony, and the gal repeats it.

  “Yes,” she says.

  Riley says, “Maybe a meeting?” Gently. No judgment. It’s that kind of bar too, sometimes. “I think there’s a two o’clock at St. Kevin’s.”

  “You’re right, there is.” She downs her soda, squares her shoulders, and reaches across the bar for Riley’s hand. “You’re a doll, sweetheart. Thanks for saving my life, again.”

  Riley pats her hand. “You’re going to be fine.”

  When the woman leaves, Riley sighs. “Whoa,” she says, and pours herself a shot.

  “Everyone loves the bartender,” she tells Cole later. “It doesn’t matter who it is.”

  It does matter, he thinks, but it is just like her to believe it doesn’t. It matters that she’s nice to people and doesn’t act like she’s something special just because she can reach the bottles without climbing over the bar. And she’s funny. And pretty, sometimes. She has that mouth; he loves watching it—the way it never seems to be able to stay still even when she isn’t talking. And he loves how she gives everyone a bunch of second chances, because she knows that human beings are flawed. He knows this because she has told him, but he is not supposed to tell anyone else.

  He brings her presents: strawberries, pizza, Valium, flowers he’s picked out of someone’s yard. When he brings the Valium, she says, “How did you know my favorite color is blue?” She cuts one in half, chases it down with a beer. She picks the toppings off the pizza and feeds the crust to a dog someone’s tied to a parking meter out front. The flowers go in a chimney glass, set on the bar by the beer taps. Customers ask where they came from. “My new boyfriend,” she says, and laughs. Cole watches her mouth when she does it.

  He plays songs on the jukebox for her when he can tell she’s starting to wear down. Songs like “Brown Eyed Girl.” Even though it is not one of her very favorites, when he plays it he knows that she knows it is for her, even though her eyes are green, like his mother’s eyes were, the way he remembers them. The Van Morrison song she really loves is the one about Jackie Wilson, the one about heaven, and smiling. He sings the chorus to her, and often she will smile when he does, and this is what they do: flirt harmlessly, avoiding any complication, any chance of collateral damage.

  The orphan joke is on him: he really is an orphan, his parents dead of a car wreck in the California desert east of Barstow, where the Mojave begins, and doesn’t end again (as far as his mother was concerned) until Albuquerque. She kept a diary, and in it she hated, with a steadfast determination, the desert; envisioned breaking down and having to walk until their knees buckled, the sun so bright and hot it filled the sky, with only a narrow, pale-blue band of not-sun just at the horizon. She imagined their skulls bleaching alongside cow skulls and scaly armadillo skeletons, and she didn’t like it at all. But there was contract work at Los Alamos, and a couple of times a year they had to go. When the station wagon rolled, Cole was thrown clear. He was six, and still dreams sometimes of sliding face-first through the sand, hands out in front of him, like a runner trying to touch third base before the throw comes wicked hard and fast from the outfield.

  “Did I ever tell you,” he says, bouncing a quarter, in some trick manner, off the wooden floor and snatching it out of the air on its way back up, “that I was named after John Coltrane?” He knows, since he’d been in the bar last night with her until past closing, that she has a hangover, and he is hoping to maybe distract her from it. He doesn’t get hangovers. Not really. She has told him it is because he is young. “Just wait,” she says. “You’ll get yours too.” But he doesn’t expect to live long enough to be old enough for that. Does not count on it at any rate.

  “Only about a hundred times,” she says, smiling with that mouth. She stacks just-washed glasses on the stainless-steel drain board and dries her hands on the white bar towel she pulls from her back pocket. Takes two more aspirin and washes them down with Kahlúa-laced coffee. She’ll be cured—or drunk again—by the end of her shift, but she’ll keep it together; like always. Almost always. At least more often than not.

  “How about the one—”

  “Where your heart was turned around backward when you were born?”

  “Yes. That one. Did I ever tell you that one?”

  “No,” she says, coming around the bar to sit next to him and listen. “Tell me the story about your heart.”

  It is not a long story, but it comes with illustrations: before and after. On a small white bar napkin, he draws with a black felt-tip pen the outline of what is ostensibly a baby boy. He draws it without lifting the pen so it ends up looking like the outline of a chunky adult chalked on the sidewalk, the aftermath of a drive-by down at Army and Folsom. He draws the heart, shaped exactly like a Valentine candy one, and reaches across the bar for another napkin. The second drawing looks almost exactly like the first, except on one he letters a small B on the heart, and an F on the other one. “See,” he says, putting the pen in his back pocket, “that’s how they did it. Unhooked it, flipped it over, and hooked it back up again. Good as new.” He pats himself on the chest like a Boy Scout in the bleachers, waiting for “The Star-Spangled Banner” to get to the good part.

  It isn’t good as new, though. His heart isn’t. It needs special care, and instead he feeds it pints of Anchor and shots of Beam. Speed sometimes, when he can get it. Riley, unlike the other bartenders, is stingy with the whiskey. He knows it is because she cares about him, and because he tends to get sullen on the brown stuff; it makes him feel sorry for himself. He doesn’t want to feel sorry for himself, but he does want the warm numbness, the feeling of invincibility he has heard most young people have until they are at least thirty. He has some years to go yet and would like to feel that way for a few of them anyway.

  Spring comes on a Sunday, and they walk to the flea market at the bottom of the hill. Riley lets Cole hold her hand, for a little while. It makes him happy, makes him feel safe, or as if he is taking care of her. He pretends he has a girlfriend; a version of Riley who could be that. The market smells, in turn, like diesel fuel, Mexican food, and the bay, and Cole sees a group of men in animated conversation in another language. They all look very serious, despite the fact that one of them is wearing a foam hat shaped like a wedge of ch
eese. Cole points the group out to Riley.

  “Très chic,” Riley says. And they laugh, go on to paw through tarnished silverware and cheap jewelry. Riley tries on a ring made from an old silver spoon. Cole wants to buy it for her, but she says, “Don’t be silly. I don’t need a ring. I’d just lose it.” She puts it back in the case and walks away. Looks back to make sure he isn’t up to something.

  When they are done shopping, they take the bus back up the hill because they are carrying their purchases, not because of Cole’s untrustworthy heart. They have both found cowboy boots: Riley’s a pair of deep-brown, hand-tooled Tony Lamas and Cole’s a gaudy pair of snakeskins with no discernible label. Riley has added to her collection of T-shirts, and Cole has found one as well. It says, “Dip Me in Honey and Throw Me to the Lesbians.”

  “Oh yeah,” Riley says. “The girls are going to love that.”

  “I know.” He is delighted, grinning pork chop to pork chop. Some of the women at the bar are still not smitten with him, but he knows very soon any lingering resistance will be futile.

  When they get back, Lu—one of the irregulars, out for the time being on her own recognizance—is the first to weigh in. “Where the fuck did you get that?”

  “Flea market,” Cole says proudly.

  Lu holds her hand out. “Give it to me.”

  “Sorry, Lu. Not this one.”

  She narrows her eyes. Turns her back and hunches over her drink. “You little shit.”

  He laughs. This one loves him for sure. He can tell by how fierce she is. And she is the same with Riley, only different. They have a thing, but Cole hasn’t figured out what it is yet. He thinks it might be a simple wish on Riley’s part to mend broken objects. Of which he is not one.

  When Riley is busy, and it is pointless or at least ill-advised to vie for her attention, Lu and Cole play pool together, or pinball, or wander around the neighborhood collecting stuff people leave out on the sidewalks. They present Riley with treasures to take her mind off her hangovers, her regrets, her drug-addicted boyfriend, and to keep reminding her that they are her best (however damaged) angels. They give her a broken but still beautiful and delicate gold chain; an old green typewriter missing only a few keys; potted succulents for the windowsill, clay pots chipped in places but still perfectly good. Some of the scraggly little suckers are even in bloom. Riley makes room for it all, since neither Cole nor Lu lives anyplace in particular.

  “We are campers!” Cole says. Because life is nothing short of a grand adventure.

  At the moment he is camping out at a pizza joint just the other side of the panhandle. The man who owns it is an old friend of his mom and dad, and has given Cole something of a job—gopher, really; fill-in prep cook—even though the kid is nothing if not unreliable. He tries really hard. But something keeps wanting to yank him back, to a time when he was someone else’s responsibility.

  After closing—if Riley has not drunk all the shots people buy for her during her shift, and/or snorted any of the lines of coke they leave for her in the bathroom—and after Cole has helped her clean the bar, Riley drives him to the restaurant, to sleep on his bedroll in the small dining room.

  It is usually after three by the time they get on the road, and this night they are still wound up. She leaves the car parked on Stanyan, and they run together into Golden Gate Park, past the tents and sleeping bags scattered at the edge, through the tunnel, onto the soccer fields, and then farther, into the woods. Other nights they’ve gone all the way to the ocean. They don’t care that the grass is wet or that the moon shines down on them only in their minds, hidden as it is by the unrelenting fog. They pretend they are actually in the ocean, in a fabulous place only they know about, able to walk around and breathe underwater because they are special.

  Sometimes Riley takes her clothes off and dives into some damp thing: Stow Lake, a lily pond, a pile of medicine-scented eucalyptus leaves, the sea. She lies down on the wet grass and tells Cole stories about Montana and its mountains; its dinosaurs, fossils, and preposterously blue sky. She talks about the South China Sea and about a brother she says she invented because she is an only child. He wants to hold her, bury his face in her hair, tell her he knows how she feels. But it is enough—he lets it be enough—to be connected to her by this, by anything.

  Before he met Riley, Cole had never gone into the park, had not known of its many wonders or just how big it was, how many places in it a person could conceivably hide, and how unalike all those places were from one another.

  “One minute,” he tells Lu, back at the bar, “you’re in Hawaii. Then Australia. Then the redwoods. Then—”

  Lu breaks in. “Before you know it,” she says way too brightly, “you’re getting a blow job from some guy behind the fence in Queen Wilhelmina’s tulip garden. Under a windmill.”

  “Jesus, Lu,” Riley says. “Give the kid a chance.”

  “Well, it’s true,” Lu says. “That’s what they do out there.”

  “In a very small part of a very large park. You are such a cynic sometimes.”

  Lu snorts.

  Cole says, “Sometimes?”

  “I am not cynical,” Lu says. “I am a realist.”

  Riley shakes her head, does that oh-no-I-won’t-smile maneuver with her mouth and her eyes, and goes back to washing glasses. “Don’t you two have some trouble to get into somewhere else?”

  Lu downs her brandy. “Come on, you little rat fink. We’ll find something. Let Glamour Girl here entertain the masses.”

  It’s early afternoon. There’s no one else in the place. Cole hates leaving Riley alone, because he thinks it makes her sad. Sadder. But she sounds serious. And they won’t be gone long.

  “Shot for the road,” he says, as if he is just another customer and his money is as good as anyone’s.

  “Fat chance,” Riley says. “Nice try, though.”

  Cole laughs. “Thanks, Mom.”

  Riley raises her eyebrows. He tries again. “Thanks, baby.”

  “You two make me sick,” Lu says. “Stop it right now.”

  She and Cole leave arm in arm.

  Lu says they should take the bus downtown, straight down Mission Street, all the way to the end. But first someone has to go back into the bar and get two dollars from Riley for the fare. That someone being Cole. Riley gives him ten bucks.

  “Aren’t you going to tell me not to spend it all in one place?”

  “Nope.”

  “Cranky.”

  “I’m not cranky, sweetheart. I’m tired. I’ll be better when you get back. Promise.”

  “Okay.” He stands on the rail and leans over the bar, turning his not-quite-clean-shaven cheek toward her.

  She kisses it. “Git,” she says. Behind the bar smells like limes and bleach and spilled liquor. He wonders if she even notices it anymore.

  “Will you miss me?”

  “How can I miss you if you won’t go away?”

  “Ha,” he says. “That’s my line.”

  “Mine now.”

  He waits. She sighs, and her eyes are a little squinty. He still sees a light in there, though. “Yes, I will miss you.”

  Outside, he finds Lu sitting on the curb with her back to a parking meter, smoking a cigarette with her eyes closed. The sun is out and the wind hasn’t begun to blow yet.

  “Pretty day,” Cole says.

  “What do you know about it?” She pushes herself up off the concrete, offering him the crook of her arm.

  “Nothin’,” Cole says, certain it is the correct answer.

  “That’s right,” Lu says, as they head down the hill to the bus stop.

  The 14 arrives and they get on, finding seats together because this far south it is not jam-packed with bodies yet. As the bus crawls through the Mission, stopping at nearly every corner, more and more people board, and nearly all of them, when they speak, are speaking Spanish.

  “Do you understand any of that?” Lu says.

  “A little.” Because he is a Cal
ifornia kid, Cole had Spanish in elementary school, and his mother would practice with him. “¿Cómo se llama?” she’d say. Some days he would be Roberto. Others, Antonio. Someone new every day. “¡Me llamo Zorro!” Leaping onto and then off the couch, into her arms.

  He learned more in high school, before he dropped out. “La luz del porche está prendida,” he says to Lu. “Pero nadie es en la casa.”

  “What?”

  “The porch light’s on, but nobody’s home.” He cracks himself up. “Pretty good, huh?”

  “La luz,” Lu says. “Nadie.” She looks over at him. “What did I just say?”

  You said, “The light. Nobody.”

  “How do you say blue?”

  “Azul.”

  She repeats it, stretching out the ooooh sound. “I like it.”

  “There are more where that came from.”

  “More what?”

  “Colors.” He starts to name them.

  “Easy, Buckwheat. Don’t overload me.”

  “Right,” he says.

  They are at the corner of Nineteenth and Mission. A man with a Detroit Tigers baseball cap and a red halyard around his neck that says “I ♥ Guadalupe” is standing next to the bus, under their window, and talking to himself, waving his scrawny arms around like a drunken orchestra conductor, though he does not look particularly drunk.

  Lu says, “I wonder where old Lupe is.”

  “What?”

  “Lupe. Guadalupe.”

  “I think it’s a place,” Cole says.

  Lu says, “I don’t think so. I think Lupe went out to shit and the hogs ate her.”

  “You’re so bad,” Cole says. “I don’t know what Riley sees in you.” He is kidding, but somehow it comes out as if he isn’t.