Given World Page 8

  It’s true. I did, but I always stayed within a few blocks of the ocean, because the ocean was why I had gone to California in the first place. Primo said he noticed the Montana plates right away, but not me, the girl sleeping in the backseat.

  “If I had, I would have checked on you sooner, to see if you was okay.”

  “I was okay,” I said.

  He said, “Sure you was.”

  Once he found me, it didn’t take too long for me to start imagining how we’d tell the story later on, together, to whoever asked how we’d met, as surely people would want to know. I knew, even before anything like that happened, what I would say: I’d say everything was just peachy in my world; that it was Primo who was the lucky one, the one who needed finding.

  I was awake, still wearing my pajamas, when he rolled up in his navy-blue San Francisco Chronicle truck, got out, and tapped on my window. It was about four, and I was in my sleeping bag in the back, reading The Old Man and the Sea by flashlight. I turned it off, but with the streetlamps we could still, if just, see each other. I didn’t think he looked at all dangerous or deranged, and was obviously working, unless he had stolen the truck, which seemed unlikely. I trusted, at any rate, that he wasn’t skulking around at that hour in search of young girls to prey on, because other than me, I figured no one else was out. After he tapped on the window, he stood waiting, as if he had all day and nowhere in particular to be. I saw him checking out the peeling duct tape that more or less held the top of the car together and, also more or less, kept the rain out, which was good, since there had been quite a lot of it since I’d gotten to town.

  It was September, and I was about to turn nineteen. I was almost a grown-up. A nearly broke one. Also really hungry, alone, and beginning to wonder how long I could live in my car. And if the sun was ever going to come up or out again. Because even when it wasn’t raining, the fog made it feel like it was. I had thought California was supposed to be a sunny place. Seemed like that’s what all the fuss was about. Come visit. Come see the ocean and the palm trees and the Sun. Ha.

  I leaned forward and rolled down the back window a few inches. Primo crouched slightly to peer in, filling the window and then some. He was not very tall, but he was plenty wide, like he was wearing shoulder pads, and not just on his shoulders. He didn’t appear to be fat, though, just solid, like a wall of Mexican. His dark hair was a little long, and messy, as if he’d brushed it with his pillow. Of course mine looked pretty much the same, though it was brown and not black, and there was a lot more of it.

  “Hey there,” he said, awfully chipper for four in the morning. “How’s tricks?”

  “Pardon?”

  “How’s life? You okay in there?”

  I glanced around the car, thinking what was obvious to some might not be so obvious to some others. “Could be worse,” I said.

  “That’s good.” He nodded approvingly, as if that was the answer he’d been expecting. “I’m Primo,” he said. “Usually.” He brought his hand up, but the window was in the way, so he dropped it back down to his side again, reluctantly, or so it seemed.

  “Hi,” I said. I didn’t know what sort of etiquette was called for, or what he meant by “usually,” or whether Primo was a name or a condition or what. He rescued me, for a minute, from having to work it out.

  “What do they call you?” he asked.

  “What does who call me?”

  “Whoever. Friends? Family? I mean what’s your name?”

  “Tinker Bell.” I didn’t know why. It just appeared, like all the other names I’d been given or had made up, Tinker Bell not among them. Mick had called me Cupcake, or Smartass, or Punk, and Darrell had called me Ginger, after Ginger Rogers, but that was different. That was the past.

  I could see him thinking hard, squinching up his forehead. “Peter Pan,” he said, as if someone had asked him a really hard question and he had, against all odds, come up with the answer. “Right? Never-never land?”

  “Right.”

  He was clearly relieved. “Well, hey there, then, Tinker Bell. Me, I’m still Primo. Almost always.”

  “Nice to meet you.” I was intrigued, at the very least, to meet someone else whose identity might not be carved in stone.

  He looked about thirty, maybe thirty-five; it was hard to tell. He asked if anyone ever called me T.B. Because sometimes people called him T.C. Because his given name was Tony, and his last name was Castaneda.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “T.B. stands for tuberculosis.”

  A baffled expression came and went. “Oh, right. That wouldn’t be so good. Would it?”

  “No. Not really.”

  “Do they even have that anymore?”

  “Tuberculosis?”

  “Yeah. That.”

  “I’m pretty sure they do. In some places, anyway.” I thought about the rez; thought I remembered hearing something about TB there. But it was hazy, just a flicker. Something Darrell had said? Something from a history book? Maybe cholera or yellow fever. The plague. Whatever it was, I was sure it was something special. Some lovely keepsake to remember white people by. Darrell hadn’t held any of it against me, though, not like some. He’d actually loved me, in a way; I could see that, from this distance, even though he’d never said it in so many words. Maybe because I wouldn’t let him.

  One of Primo’s eyes looked strange, and it didn’t follow the other one as he took in the arrangement of my living quarters. What little there was to take in. A small cooler in the front passenger seat. Six or seven books stacked on the floor in back. My day clothes—jeans and a red sweatshirt with a wolf design—folded on top of the cooler. A jug of water and a thermos. Remnants of last night’s dinner: cheese and peanut butter crackers. An open Buck knife on top of the books. The rest of my life, what there was of it, was in the trunk.

  I’d been dining on 7-Eleven fare, bathing in gas station restrooms, couldn’t remember the last time I’d properly washed my hair, but there was a dim memory of a shower at a truck stop in Nevada. I hoped I didn’t appear as animal-like as I was starting to feel.

  “Home sweet home?” Primo asked.

  “Yeah, pretty much.”

  “Nice,” he said. I didn’t think he was being sarcastic. He sounded, truly, as if he liked what he saw, as if he could see living there, or in a place just like it.

  He glanced again at the cooler. “You got plenty of food in there?” My stomach growled, and I wondered if he heard.

  “Yeah. Lots.” There had been easier lies.

  The last bag of ice I’d bought had finally finished melting; a hunk of cheese floated in the water, wrapped in plastic but wet and slimy anyway, accompanied by a hard-boiled egg and a few mealy apples. I had been thinking about dumping out the water and throwing away anything irretrievably rotten as soon as the sun came up, or at least when it got light, somewhere out by the beach, where no one would see and maybe yell at me. Other than what was drowning in the cooler, I owned a half jar of peanut butter, some saltines, and a bag of jerky I’d been working on since Missoula. I had about sixty-five dollars left to my name.

  “I don’t know,” Primo said. “You look hungry. I bet you’re hungry, aren’t you?”

  Ravenous. Eat-a-whole-pig hungry. Hungry for food even more than for someone to talk to, though there was that too. “A little bit,” I said, and swallowed.

  “You like donuts?”

  “I like bacon and eggs.” Like my new name, it came out of nowhere.

  He nodded slowly. “Knowing what you like is half the battle.”

  “I’ve just been dreaming about bacon and eggs,” I said. And home, but I didn’t say that part. At home it was breakfast time. My mother’s kitchen, right then, smelled like bacon and eggs. Dad was eating, dragging a piece of toast through yellow yolk, telling her what a good cook she is.

  Dreamt about but not missed. Not allowed to be missed. None of them.

  Primo said he knew a place. Open early. Right by the beach.

  I
said, “Aren’t you working?”

  “Yeah, but this is the quiet part of my shift. It’ll be a while before people start calling in.”

  “Calling in where? For what?”

  “The office. For their papers. If the kids don’t deliver them on time, or if they get stolen or wet or something.” And there was always something, he said, but to him it was job security. He was out here to fix these things, and he liked it. He was good at it. Talking to people and working with the kids. He liked to work. This work. And he’d been one of those kids once. He told me all of this without taking a breath. It made me happy, him liking his life like that.

  I tried to picture him as a kid, and he looked exactly the same, only in miniature. Like a third the size he was now, but with exactly the same proportions and features: same shoulders, same hair, same scruffy mustache, same husky voice.

  Primo smiled when I did. “Well, can I buy you breakfast? Or you want me to bring it to you in bed?”

  It took about two seconds to weigh the possibilities. Maybe he was a serial killer or a Bible salesman, but I thought I’d have caught on by then, and truly, I was way too hungry to care.

  “Yes, please,” I said.

  The newspaper truck was really a huge van, all metal on the inside, with the engine cover in the middle next to the driver’s seat. There was no passenger seat. Primo told me he’d always thought the engine cover looked like a doghouse, with no door and a flat top. A doghouse for an aluminum dog. One who could walk through walls, who didn’t need a door. He had a cup of coffee sitting there, surrounded by an impressive array of donut crumbs. There was a metal divider, like a chain-link fence, between the front and the back, but it was open on the passenger side. Primo set a bundle of newspapers in the opening for me to sit on.

  I asked what time he went to work in the morning.

  “Two thirty. Except on Saturdays. I get to sleep in all the way till three on Saturdays.” He had a low, growly laugh.

  “Wow. That’s early.”

  “Yeah, it is. But it’s not so bad once you’re up.”

  He loved being out there most mornings, he said, with the quiet, the occasional cop or taxi or garbage truck. There were the bums too, mostly on Geary, but not nearly so many out in the Richmond district as he’d see passing through the Tenderloin on his way from the plant. In the Tenderloin were those guys, and the pushers down on Golden Gate Avenue with their little glassine bags of white powder. The prostitutes stayed downtown too, he said, chilling around their claimed corners, all fishnet-stockinged and stoned. There had been a bunch of kidnappings and killings the past year or so, but they’d caught the guys who were doing it, they thought; at least the worst of it had stopped for now. He warned me about all the different kinds of trouble a person could get into in the city, told me which neighborhoods were best avoided, especially after dark, and congratulated me on picking a relatively safe one to pitch my encampment in.

  I tried to process it all, to not look startled like some hick straight out of the backwoods, to act like I’d at least heard of some of these things. I did wonder how much getting used to San Francisco was going to take, and figured it was a lot. Maybe someone—like maybe Primo—could be my guide for a little while, until I got it. If, that is, he didn’t turn out to have a machete and a backyard full of bodies, or Bibles.

  I had been waking up early too, out there by the beach where I could hear the waves crashing, for real and in my dreams. The sound was comforting but spooky. And there was that smell: fishy and salty and dark. Since I’d had a chance to look at the ocean for real, it didn’t look the way I’d always imagined it—a constant blue, with the waves coming in row after row, steady and predictable. It was a lot wilder than I’d been expecting, and not always blue. I’d taken off my shoes and waded in a few times, but it was too cold to go any farther than about knee-deep. I wondered if it was cold on the other side too, where it was no longer the Pacific, but the South China Sea. The three words echoed in my head, in Mick’s voice. I wanted to hear them as much as I didn’t.

  On our way to the restaurant, Primo made maybe a dozen stops, pulling up to corners to check on his crew of teenage paperboys. They were huddled in apartment-building entryways, folding newspapers and doubling rubber bands around them, or slipping them into plastic bags. I was amazed at how fast they worked, how quickly their fingers moved.

  Primo orchestrated: “Make sure you get that one at Forty-Third and Balboa through the gate today. Mr. Puto is starting to give me heartburn.” And: “Just bag that one on Lake from now on. You know the one. I’m tired of hearing her bitch about wet papers.” The kids nodded, heads down and intent on their work. They’d heard it all before. “Later,” Primo said. “Do good.”

  The restaurant was a little diner that could have been anywhere; it could have been in Montana, in my town, except that it looked out on an ocean rather than on scattered mountain ranges and open plain. I had imagined a fancy, big-city place, but the tables were plain, worn-yellow Formica threaded with gold; the booths red Naugahyde, patched in places, like the top of my car, with bits of duct tape. Creased and crooked black-and-white photos of old San Francisco lined the walls. We were on a cliff overlooking the water, but it was still too dark and foggy to see it properly. The gulls stood out, though, as they were white, and noisy. I could hear them through the windows, their calls a faint echo of the feral kittens back home, mewling in the barn.

  Primo said I could have anything I wanted, and what I wanted was orange juice and bacon and eggs. When the waitress asked what kind of toast, I didn’t know what to say, because I hadn’t known there were different kinds. Primo said sourdough. He said if I was going to live in San Francisco, I’d have to learn to like it.

  “I am going to live here,” I said.

  Primo nodded. “Best place there is. But you need to get the hell out of the Avenues.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When was the last time you saw the sun?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “For how long?”

  “Maybe fifteen minutes.”

  “It was out all day in the Mission.”

  I didn’t know what he meant. I thought missions were a kind of church, like the ones they built in Montana and sent the Indian kids to, to change their ways and their religion; make them good, short-haired Catholics. And basketball players. I remembered Darrell telling me that, about the basketball teams the Jesuits commissioned of the boys they spirited away from their families, how good some of them were, and how the white players and their coaches always accused them of cheating. But sometimes they’d get a title anyway, because there was just no question; scores were too lopsided even with the bad calls.

  Darrell was his team’s point guard in high school. Since we met after he’d already graduated, I never saw him play in an actual game, but I was sure he’d been a star. Sometimes we’d messed around on the court at my school, where he’d found and claimed me that rainy afternoon, and the way he moved and spun and pivoted and shot made me dizzy, made my heart hurt remembering. He was so graceful, so tall, so good.

  I wondered if our son would grow up to play basketball, but didn’t think it was possible, since he’d been born so early and maybe wouldn’t grow like a normal kid. But maybe it didn’t work that way, and he’d catch up, get big, like his father. Wherever he was now. Wherever they both were. If they both were. But I was not thinking about them, or where they were.

  A jungle, however imaginary and probably wrong, appeared; I bit my lip, hard—a reminder to stay in the present. Vietnam was supposed to be far away—a lifetime away—someone’s life, at any rate. Montana too. It did not occur to me that I might be too young to be thinking in terms of lifetimes.

  Now that we were in the light, I could see Primo was blind in his right eye. It had that milky look, bluish white, like frozen pond water in winter. There was some scar tissue around it, and trailing off across the top of his cheek. His ear was a little mangled too.

 
I touched my own cheek, near the corner of my eye. “What happened?”

  “ ’Nam,” he said.

  “What?”

  “ ’Nam. Vietnam.”

  Damn. “Oh.” I felt sick. Like I had conjured up the place with my stupid daydreaming. I put my fork down next to my plate and sipped some orange juice. I should have been ready, though. It should have been obvious. “How?”

  “White phosphorus. Our guys accidentally threw some too close, and my face got in the way.”

  “What’s white phosphorous?”

  “It’s a chemical thing. It lights shit up. Mostly it burns. Sets a village or the woods or a rice paddy on fire and kills people. You can’t put it out with water. It’s nasty.” He turned toward the window, and the fog. “Like that, at first,” he said, pointing with his chin. “Only brighter. They called it Willy Peter, like it was supposed to be your pal or something. It wasn’t mine, except I got to come home early, so maybe in a way it was.” He lit a cigarette, still looking away. “Fucked up pal, though.”

  He picked up his coffee cup and set it back down again without drinking from it.

  I said, “Sounds like napalm.” Mick had told me about it, in one of his letters. He thought whoever invented it was sick in the head.

  “More or less,” Primo said. “Part of the SOP, actually. Of torching human beings.”

  “SOP?”

  “Standard operating procedure. It was wicked messed up.”

  “That’s what my brother says.” I looked down at my pancakes, afraid Primo could see that the present tense was a big, fat lie.

  “Well, he’s right. I guess he was there. Who with?”

  “Twenty-Fifth Infantry. Củ Chi. They made him a tunnel guy.”

  “A rat, you mean. Little.” Compared to Primo, I figured, a lot of them would have qualified as little. But Mick really was. He never got much taller than I did: like five foot six and a bit. Five eight, maybe, in his boots. And he was skinny, wiry.

  “I guess so,” I said. “A rat.” It was hard for me to think of Mick as a rat, even though he’d seemed kind of proud of it. He was more canine than rodent. But the tunnel dogs were real dogs. German shepherds. Mick had one for a while, but it died.