Given World Page 14

  “Hit it low, Cook. Get under it but keep it on the table. Soft now, you’re not trying to kill anything.”

  We never snookered each other, since that would have been cheating. When folks started filtering in, Lu faded out. I hardly ever saw her go.

  I had surprised myself by making it to and past twenty-five, and thinking that made me a grown-up making a grown-up decision, fell for a guy who knew how to keep a girl on her toes: a freebasing Cajun bricklayer who wasn’t about to let me bring Lu home, or else I probably would have. As it was, I was on call. About the fourth time, I got the hang of it.

  “Hey, Cookie. I need a ride.”

  “Not going to the projects, Lu.”

  “Cookie.”

  “No.”

  I picked her up and drove her across town, our destination the projects at Hayes and Buchanan—the same ones, as it turned out, the boyfriend frequented, though I never saw him there. Maybe they had a different entrance for the high that would fix whatever sickness ailed him.

  “You worry too much,” Lu told me. “I’m not going to get you into anything I can’t get you out of.”

  “That’s comforting.”

  She opened the door and leaned out to puke. I pulled over, and she cussed me. “Goddamn it, Cook.” She dragged her sleeve across her mouth and pulled the door closed. “Drive like I taught you.”

  Once she’d copped and eased back into herself, there was no one I’d rather have been around. When the ghosts were asleep or off somewhere playing poker, or even the rare weeks or months she was actually, comparatively, clean, she’d bust open the front door of the bar, light streaming in behind her, and wrap her arms around me. Hold me in a full body clench, drenched in Marlboro and brandy fumes, and just a tolerable touch of panic. She said she’d been born with that panic, spent a lifetime stuffing it. Slept with a .357 under the pillow, when there was a pillow.

  Some days—the steadiest ones—she’d go to the zoo, draw the animals, capture their essence in a few stark lines. Wildflowers were another favorite, sprouting crazy-legged from stumpy, misshapen vases, the colors startling and otherworldly. Later on she did a series of her cat in various poses, on an assortment of perches around the only room she had in years she could call her own, and in each one he looked shocked to see her there, as if they’d never met or maybe only in a dream.

  The Cajun also had some charming tendencies, and a peculiar schedule only he could fathom. Day one of the mystery rotation: beat me up, steal my money, disappear. Day two: stay gone. Day three: run out of drugs and money and come home. Expect soup. Homemade. Vegetarian.

  In that town in those days, the odds of choosing a loser were pretty good if you were drawn to edgy like I’d turned out to be. I have no idea what I wanted that edge for. Maybe it’s just the way I was. Or maybe I thought it would give me a chance to fix something that had only the remotest chance of coming unbroken. Whatever it was, every time I showed up with a fat lip or a black eye or fingertip-shaped bruises on the backs of my arms, Lu would offer to shoot him for me. I always turned her down, out of some sense of irrevocability, or not wanting to have to drive all that way to visit her in San Quentin. “One of these days, Cookie, I’m just going to do it. I don’t need your fucking permission.” She’d stare me down, waiting for a sign of weakness, a sign I’d had enough, but I wouldn’t give it to her, not yet. Thought I could save him, is what I thought. Repair him, damaged as he was.

  He was full of ceaseless surprises, but Lu wasn’t. She was my stand-up guy, and all her secrets were already out. She wasn’t going to come up with some new dark episode or previously disguised, dreadful personality trait; that shit was pretty much already on the table. And we wouldn’t be lovers. She just wanted to hold me and look after me, chase the other girls off. After my tour with the bricklaying cokehead, that was good enough. And even though our hearts worked in tandem, I never expected anything resembling consistency, flat knowing I wasn’t going to get it. By the time Lu infiltrated my life, I’d done enough time with the shell-shocked and war-wounded, the alcoholics and the drug addicts to count her showing up clinically alive a bonus.

  “Hey, you. Looking good.”

  “Don’t lie to me, Cookie.”

  “Really?”

  “No. Lie to me. Buy me a drink.”

  I lent her money and everyone told me I was crazy. Well, of course I was. The years since I’d left Montana had fallen well short of a pure, unadulterated, youthful-type trajectory, and my soul was every iota as snakebit as some of the worst ones. Climbing out of the ditch was a hit-or-miss proposition, and even though I was working on it, down was still a hell of a lot easier way to go than up. Lu was my reflection some of those days, and sometimes it scared me half to death.

  • • •

  We get through the weeklong autumn heat wave in Sid’s flat, and whatever atmospheric front brought it in disappears back out to sea. Everyone goes a little crazy when it gets steamy like that, and Lu’s even crazier than normal with the early arrival of hot flashes, brought on by the weather—she likes to believe—but more probably by the whiskey and the drugs. The hot flashes prove she’s a girl too, but she adamantly denies it. That’s something she left in the rearview in Indiana, back there with the gropey uncles, the cousins she says stank like sour milk and lighter fluid.

  A little fresh fog cat-foots east from the City. Lu hugs herself and shivers when I say the part about the cat’s feet. I tell her about the poem Carl Sandburg wrote and she says, “You’re so smart, Cookie. How’d you get to be so smart?”

  “I’m not,” I tell her. “I just read a lot. I have a lot of books.”

  “Books,” she says, the tone of her voice signaling something irrefutable, as if she’s just realized a few things are that simple and no one is going to talk her out of it now. I don’t tell her that even in my life nothing is that simple; that when we lost Mick I inherited those books, and only barely had the good sense not to throw them into the ocean when I first got to California, when I realized no god had any intention of answering my questions—here, or in a horizon-to-horizon wheat field under the three-hundred-sixty-degree Montana sky, or anywhere else, from what I’d been able to determine.

  The end of the week I have to go back to work, but Lu says she’s okay, and she has been keeping it together pretty well. Her eyes are clear, and the shakes have subsided to barely noticeable. She’s back to dressing like a gentleman. When she’s on, Lu is remarkably fastidious about what she wears, mostly tailored men’s britches and pressed white shirts. Sometimes a French racing cap, sometimes a derby. She’s pretty cute, but that is something I am not allowed to say with my actual voice.

  She watches me dress, does a quick pen-and-ink of me standing by the bathtub in my slip, pulling my Friday-night-only stockings on, grimacing at the torture of them, but she doesn’t draw that part. The sketch is all black and white, until she colors the windows in red and orange, with crayons gripped in her fist like she’s wielding an ice pick. She makes it look like the world outside is burning, and then finds a small strip of brown velvet somewhere and ties it into my hair.

  Since I close at two and the subway stops running at twelve, Lu has to come get me after work. We’re both driving one car these days, a car I bought but that somehow we both own and she has christened Alice. Alice is a 1969 baby-blue, four-barrel 383 Plymouth Fury that Lu just had to have, and if nothing major goes wrong, I can usually keep her running myself.

  After we finish stocking the beer, washing the glasses, and sweeping the floor, we shoot a quiet game of pool and blaze out of town. Looking back from the Bay Bridge, the city behind us is all smoky pink with sodium-vapor light radiating up into the clouds, refracted through the fog. Lu drives, cabbie-fast and maniacally as always, and I lean out the window to shotgun the briny-smelling breeze into my lungs. I look west into the darkness, and see incomprehensible, ceaseless ocean, clear to Asia and back. Miles and miles. Really far and really deep. Lu says, “You ever think about jumpin
g, Cook?”

  “Never,” I say, and I’m not really lying. I don’t think about jumping, but I do think about falling—wonder for how long I could make it feel like flying—but I’m never going to get close enough to the edge to do any of those things. Seems silly to have the conversation at all, in that case.

  “I don’t believe you,” Lu says, downshifting into second to pass a semi on the right, just before the lane ends. He has to brake to let us in and yanks on the air horn. It’s really loud.

  “It’s hardly going to matter if you drive us off a bridge.”

  “Oh, be quiet, Cookie. Have I ever killed us?”

  Oakland is still awake when we get back. Even though we’re pretty close to the relative sanity of Berkeley, there are still a few young Turks hanging out, waving come-hither dime bags at us, watching just a little longer than maybe they’d watch a couple of guys driving through. Lu doesn’t look anywhere but straight ahead, doesn’t blink, smile, cuss, or nod. When we get to the flat, she throws herself through the door and onto the center of the bed like she’s just escaped a ravenous tiger.

  “Jesus Christ. Maybe you need to blindfold me.”

  “You’d have to let me drive.” I know what is called for here is not a joke, but it’s been a long night, and maybe I think I can make her laugh.

  She throws the keys at me, hard. I duck and they hit the wall. “Not funny,” she says, her voice close to cracking. Hearing it surprises me.

  “Sorry. I’m tired.” I sit down next to her, pick her hand up, and feel her pulse. It’s going about a million miles an hour. “Criminy.” I put my head on her chest and listen while her heart slows to a semi-normal speed.

  I’m nearly asleep there when she says, “You want to check my teeth too?”

  I sit up. “No. I want to go to bed. But you’re going to have to give me some more room.”

  “Were you always this much of a pain in the ass?”

  “I reckon.”

  “It’s a wonder your mother didn’t drown you in the horse trough.”

  “My mother loves me.” Last time I checked. Which was a while ago.

  “So you say.” She turns over onto her stomach and spreads her arms wide across the bedspread, her face mashed into the pillow. She says something, but it’s impossible to tell what.

  “Speak English.”

  She turns her head to one side. “Don’t let me go, Cook.”

  I take the ribbon out of my hair, tie it twice around her wrist. “There. Now you are in my custody. You can’t escape.”

  At five, it is just beginning to get light. Sirens and dogs howl somewhere not far from here. I crawl under one of Lu’s outstretched arms, and when I wake up hours later she’s gone. All her shit and some of mine: the car, the cigarettes, gone. It’s noon, and the steps and the sidewalk are lined with wilting crimson bougainvillea petals. “What the fuck am I supposed to do with these? Goddamn it, Lu.” I am out of words. I pick up a handful of the red petals and hold them until a breeze comes and blows them out of my hand. Inside I press the same hand flat into her side of the bed. I’d swear it’s still warm, sweaty in the indent her body left. I pack my little kit bag, put Sid’s key under the mat, and head for the subway.

  Alice comes back to me because the tow and impound notice is mailed to my address. I go down there and talk the cashier into releasing the car into my custody. Lu surfaces about three months later. I hear what she’s doing from Andy, who’s still at Harbor Lights, feeding Lu now, and her new girlfriend; smuggling them leftovers out the back door. They’re both strung out, flopping in an abandoned building on Sixth Street. The whole neighborhood is being torn down, all the residence hotels emptying out to make way for lofts and condos. Lu and her gal are lucky to have a roof; the alleys between Market and Mission are lined both sides with appliance boxes and shopping carts.

  I tell Andy to have Lu call me. “Tell her all is forgiven. Tell her there’s nothing to forgive. Tell her something.” A few days later she shows up at the bar right at one, when I open. Rode hard and put up wet, as my brother once liked to say. She stares straight down and mumbles into her sweatshirt. I know I couldn’t raise her stubborn head with a car jack.

  “Don’t look at me, Cookie.”

  I just want to heal her all up. I have medicine. “You want a drink?”

  “I want a gun.”

  “What happened to yours?”

  “Some cocksucker stole it.”

  I sigh, pour her a brandy. Her hands are shaking so bad she has to hold the glass with both of them. I can see fresh track marks on the backs, among the smaller veins and the tiny bones. That piece of brown velvet is still tied around her wrist, hanging on by a few fine threads. She won’t meet my eyes, and all I can think to ask is how she is and know what a ridiculous question that would be, so I don’t say anything. I go back to setting up the bar, cutting limes, making Bloody Mary mix. The place smells a bit more like bleach than booze still, since Andy was in this morning cleaning. Light prisms through the beer signs overlapped in the front window, illuminates the settling dust. For lack of something more befitting the occasion, I examine the floor and see how scarred it is, not just in the burned spot, but all over. Lu says, “I did not set that fire.”

  “I believe you.”

  “You’d better, Cookie. No one else does.” I know some people who would call that a burden, a moral obligation, but I am not one of those people. Nina Simone sings softly on the jukebox, about the morning of her life. Lu finishes her drink.

  “You got fifty bucks?” she says. Like she’s saying, “Can I have a bite of that?” I hand her a wad out of my pocket. “I’ll pay you back,” she says, crumpling the bills up even more. “I will, goddamn it.”

  “I don’t care about that. Just don’t die on my dime.” I pick up a lemon, wonder if I can throw it hard enough to break a window. “Just don’t.” I put it back down, take the big stainless-steel bucket to the alcove where the ice machine is, by the back door that leads to the deck and the garden, where by my count seven trees have been planted for dead people in the five years I’ve worked here. And those are only the special ones. We don’t plant trees for just anybody. That would require a second lot. Probably some new zoning. I don’t need ice, but Lu needs space to pull off her ever-astonishing vanishing act.

  I say, “I am not planting a tree for you, Lu. You can just forget about that.” I don’t say it very loud, and she probably wouldn’t have heard me even if she wasn’t already gone. She’s left a cigarette burning in the ashtray. She knows I hate that. I leave it burning, to remember her by. Lu one; Cookie fuck-all.

  The new girlfriend lasts until spring and then dies on Lu’s birthday in April. Lu calls a few weeks later, and I go pick her up at Fifth and Harrison at three in the morning. It’s raining, but she’s standing out in the open, no coat, saturated like she’s been swimming in the bay. She has a small duffel bag and a pure black kitten in a carrier behind her in a doorway, out of the rain. “I was afraid you wouldn’t see me.”

  “I know how to find you. You glow in the dark. Get in here.” I don’t ask about the cat right away, and we drive back to my flat in the Mission. My roommate and his girlfriend are out of town, so I can run a bath for Lu, keep her for a day or two. I put the cat in its carrier in the bathroom to keep an eye on Lu and put her clothes in the washing machine. When she’s done in the bathtub, I wrap her in a bathrobe and put her to bed. “You sick?”

  “Not too terrible. Been doing some home-remedy detox since Chrissy OD’d. Pot and Valium. I got a stash.” She doesn’t try to hide the abscess scars on the back of her right hand. I hold it and run my thumb over one of them. Smack doesn’t burn like that unless it’s cut with something really weird.

  “What the hell, Lu. Speed?”

  “I don’t know. Seemed like a good idea at the time. Something new. Chrissy liked it.” She looks at the scars like she’s seeing them for the first time. “That’s what killed her. She was just a kid.”

  �
��I’m sorry, honey.”

  “I didn’t know how much, Cook. I think I almost died too. My legs went right out from under me. My heart must have just been stronger than hers.”

  “You’re a pro, Lu.”

  “You bet I am.” She looks away so I can’t see her eyes. After a minute, she reaches into her pocket and holds out a handful of little blue pills. “You want some?”

  “Not now. I’m pretty sleepy. I’d just waste it.”

  The cat yowls from the bathroom. I raise an eyebrow at Lu, but she just says, “He came to me in a dream. His name is Mick.”

  “Mick.” At the moment, whatever it means that Lu named her cat after my brother, accidentally or not, doesn’t register. Not on any scale. That’s how good I am. “Does Mick eat?”

  “There’s food in my bag.”

  I get the cat, the bag, a bowl, a towel, a dishpan with some torn-up newspaper in it. I say, “We’ve got ’til Sunday.”

  “Time enough,” she says. Then, “What’s that line? That song? About Valium. That Rickie Lee Jackson song.”

  “Jones,” I say.

  “Yeah, sure, whatever, Cook. But what does she say? You know.”

  “She says you shouldn’t let them take you back. Broken.”

  “Like Valium?”

  “Right. And chumps.”

  “Out in the rain,” she says. “I love that. It makes so much sense.”

  “It doesn’t really,” I say. But it kind of does.

  I could just holler, but I might not ever stop, so I close my eyes and play dead instead. When the Valium kicks in and Lu falls asleep, she’s curled around me like a boa constrictor.

  Amazingly, she stays cleaned up for a while: two months and a slip, two more, et cetera. It gets so I nearly start trusting her to show up when she says she will, even though a part of me is off in the corner, frantically waving its arms in alarm and asking loudly, “Have you completely lost your mind?” She gets a little room down on Market for her and that cat, a place that’s safe and not blow-your-brains-out depressing like most of them. The guys at the front desk are nice and, of course, immediately fall in love with her because she’s smart and funny and doesn’t take any shit. She gets a steady cab gig with National, driving mostly night shifts, but night is her best side anyway, since she’s still really vain and it’s so much harder to see in the dark how the years have worked her over—better than the Cajun could ever have done to me and been allowed, by Lu, to live.