Beautiful Kate

Beautiful Kate

Newton Thornburg

Copyright

Diversion Books
A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.
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Copyright © 1982 by Newton Thornburg
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

For more information, email
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First Diversion Books edition April 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62681-752-4

Also by Newton Thornburg

To Die in California
Cutter and Bone
Dreamland
A Man’s Game
Eve’s Men
Valhalla
The Lion at the Door
Black Angus

Once again, to Karin

1

I have been back all of three days now, back in my father’s house. So where else would I find myself at this moment but alone upstairs in the old bedroom sitting at the old desk, Bic in hand, trying to exorcise the same demons that drove me out of here in the first place, at the fearless age of eighteen. Goddamn his ancient ass, but I do find it hard to like the man, even now, when I can barely afford to feed myself, let alone indulge some grizzled animosity of the blood. It has been eleven years since I was here last—to see my mother into the ground then—and in all that time he has not changed any more than the bronze doughboy posturing down at the town square. Oh, the hair is whiter and his step is less sure and he is thinner than ever. But for me it is the eyes that count, and they are just the same, only blacker and harder, if that is possible, twin points of burning moral certitude in a world clouded by weakness and doubt and corruption—
my
sort of world, he would tell you. And best of all, you would not even have to ask, for he has never been shy about expressing himself on the subject of his moral inferiors, who happily are so numerous that all he has ever had to do is look up from whatever cranky tome or pamphlet currently deemed worthy of his interest, and there we are, wretched sinners against his word.

Jason, his name is, Jason Cutter Kendall, seventy years old, asthmatic and arthritic and arteriosclerotic, not even rich or powerful anymore, yet here I sit at my perennial legal pad venting my spleen against the old bastard as if I couldn’t punch him out if the spirit moved me, or as if I had no choice at all in coming back here. But then, as you will no doubt discover, logic and strength of character are not exactly my strong points, which might explain why I have been traveling with Toni, a paragon of the simpler virtues.

I remember four nights ago as we rattled across the Mississippi and headed into Illinois in my venerable Triumph, both of us tired and cold and irritable. All I hoped for was a few hours of silence from her, long enough for us to reach Woodglen and—I hoped—safety. Instead she picked up again the tiresome litany of bitching that had plagued me all the way from Hollywood.

“You could stop somewhere,” she said. “Any one of these little burgs ought to have a bar where we could score. Just one lousy joint, that’s all I’m asking.”

I told her to shut up.

“I’ll make us crash.” She reached for the wheel, only to get shoved back against the car door for her trouble.

“God, I hate you,” she wept. “Miserable old washed-up fart. What the hell am I doing here with you anyway? Middle of nowhere, with nothing! I should’ve stayed with Dandy—he could’ve got a part for me, I know he could.”

“Sure, in some stroke opera for the Princess thee-ay-ters.”

It was not a nice thing to say, and not really fair either, for she has appeared in only one porno film and that was almost five years ago, when she was in her teens. But that
miserable old washed-up fart
still rankled. Forty-three wasn’t that old, I thought, smiling grimly to myself because I could not dispute any other part of her epithet. I expected her to kick me or at least go for the wheel again, though all she did was look over at me with those show-biz eyes of hers while pulling her mouth down into a sexy pout. But whatever she was trying to communicate did not quite come through, such is the general effect of her appearance, that pert face and long bleached hair and tan California body, which together send out a message so clear and constant that all lesser communications tend to get lost in the process.

“I hope they catch you,” she said. “I hope you wind up in Soledad.”

I pointed out that being wanted as a material witness didn’t exactly qualify me as public enemy number one.

“That’s bull. It was your boat and you knowingly rented it to the poor bastards. So you’re just as guilty as they were. The narcs aren’t gonna forget about you. Ever.”

“If you say so.”

“I say so.”

We had just driven through a small town and now were going past a roadhouse with a bright neon sign simulating a bubbling glass of champagne.

“There!”
Toni cried. “They’re bound to have stuff in there! Please, Greg! You can stay in the car. I’ll do it myself.”

It was a scene she had already performed, probably a half-dozen times in the last few hours. At first I patiently had explained to her that a country bar in the Midwest was not the same as an L.A. disco and that all we were likely to score in them was beer nuts and boilermakers. But now I simply drove on past, saying nothing.

“God, I wish I was back in Venice,” she lamented.

At two in the morning we reached the far southwest suburbs of Chicago and finally Woodglen itself, which over the years had not undergone change so much as decimation. The town square still existed, but only as an arbitrary and purposeless street arrangement, considering that the courthouse had been razed long ago and the four rows of stores which once had surrounded it now stood empty or had been torn down and converted into parking garages—for whose cars I could not imagine, since the entire area was similarly blighted and empty. It was only as we went out of town on Main Street that the city began to show some life again, in the form of bars and fast food franchises and supermarkets, all shuttered and dark at that late hour.

Farther on we came to Woodglen Estates, a sprawl of tract houses on land that once had been part of old Jason’s country-gentleman farm—and my home, the place where I had grown up with Cliff and Kate. As on my last return here, I began to feel an odd oppressiveness in the air, almost as if memory were a storm moving in upon me. The “estates,” I saw, were in even worse shape than they had been eleven years before, identical tiny wooden ranch houses on sixty-foot lots, once gaily painted yellow and pink and light green and inhabited by young white-collar couples on their way up in the world, but run-down now, gray and ramshackle, a number of them abandoned. On the occasion of my mother’s funeral, the area was already beginning to turn black and Latino, and I could see now that it was probably solid minorities, a suburban slum surrounding the startling anachronism of Jason’s big old white house and barn—which suddenly now came looming out of the darkness like a feudal manse in the midst of the spreading huts of its serfs. Only as you drove nearer could you see that the manse was equally ramshackle, and not all that large either, just an old-fashioned two-story nine-room house. Across from it a half-dozen young blacks stood drinking wine on the street corner.

“Christ,” Toni said. “I don’t see anyone but spades.”

“Maybe that’s all there is.”

“Beautiful.”

“That’s what they call it.”

As we pulled into the driveway, she shook her head in disbelief. “This is
it?
This is what we drove halfway across the fucking continent for?”

“It’s called home,” I told her. “A place of refuge and succor.”

In response she gave me a pitying look and struggled out of the tiny car, sighing like a condemned woman. I had parked at the side entrance to the house. In front of us the driveway curved back to the barn, which was unpainted and covered with spray-can graffiti. In the gloom I could make out only the largest message:
the Lords rule
.

“Why not honk the horn?” Toni said. “Stir ’em up a little.”

Instead I knocked on the door and waited, then knocked again, louder and longer until finally a light went on inside.

Toni sighed. “Well, it’s about time. They must all be stoned.”

“Or asleep. Do you think that could be it?”

The porchlight came on and the door opened—on Junior, my younger brother by a decade, once known as Tan Pants, for the soaking diapers he had worn till the age of four or five. Now though he stood before me very much a man, husky like me, but bearded and longhaired, a hippie diehard in an old bathrobe. As he stepped onto the porch, a smirk pulled at his mouth.

“Well, I’ll be pissed—the big screenwriter, no less. And with the usual Beautiful Person in tow.”

I introduced them. “My brother Junior—and this is Toni. Toni’s an actress.”

“Of course she is,” Junior said.

But Toni liked combat.
“Junior?
Nobody’s called Junior.”

“Make it Little Jason, then. Will that do?”

Toni smiled at him. “How about some grass? You got any grass?”

Junior looked at me. “Well, at least she ain’t a stuffed shirt like the last one.”

Behind him, in the kitchen, the back stairway door opened and Sarah stood there blinking against the light and frowning. She had her hair up in curlers and she was tugging an old chenille housecoat tightly around the dumpy thickness of her body. But now her eyes opened wide and a joyous smile spread on her face.

“Greg? Greg! Oh Jesus!”

She came running into my arms and I picked her up and hugged her and kissed her. I have always believed that there should be a law that every man have at least one Sarah in his life, a sister or mother or whatever who thinks he’s simply the greatest and loves him doggedly and unquestioningly, no matter how little he may have done to merit such devotion. Sarah, a thirty-five-year-old spinster schoolteacher, evidently feels that I’ve done all the things that she has only dreamed of, from leaving home early and writing screenplays to traveling abroad and bedding the rich and the beautiful. And I don’t think it bothers her in the least that none of these “accomplishments” has prevented me from washing up on her doorstep now like any other flotsam. But then that’s what I mean by
unquestioning
love. A gift.

Anyway, that was the scene when I made it back here four nights ago, with Toni. Sarah embraced us and fed us and fell all over us, asking so many questions that the ever tactful Toni finally suggested that she give us a little space.

“Jesus, there’s still tomorrow, isn’t there?” my love remonstrated.

Sarah sat there in the kitchen like a squashed bug, unable to respond even after I apologized for Toni, saying that we’d had a long hard trip and the girl just wasn’t herself. I tried to pump Sarah about her teaching job at the high school, but she seemed not even to hear me, so great was her awareness of Toni by then. She kept glancing furtively at her, as if she feared not just another reprimand but possibly corporal punishment as well. And when Toni renewed her inquiries about marijuana, flirting openly with Junior in her quest for the stuff, I was afraid that Sarah was about to crawl under the table and stay there. So I took her by the arm and had her show me to my old room upstairs, just down the hall from Jason’s. Till then, not much had been said about the old man’s failure to get up and greet us himself. Sarah had gone into his room to see if he was all right, which he evidently was. But he chose not to get up. It had been eleven years since he had seen me last, I overheard, and he could endure the privation one night more. I told Sarah that it was just as well, because I too would most likely survive the night.

In the eighteen months Toni has been living with me I have not done any writing, so she is somewhat annoyed at my new habit of coming up here alone to our room to scratch out a few words. She keeps asking me how my “diary” is coming and did I mention the great head she had given me last night? Did I record how “utterly bored” she is on this “ghetto farm”? Naturally, in her boredom she has taken to doing what she does best, which is to keep all available males in a state of high sexual turmoil. Junior, for instance, is suddenly much clumsier than I remember his being. He keeps spilling things and is always tripping over himself, especially when Toni is flouncing around in my shorty samurai robe. And unbelievably, she seems to have even old Jason’s juices running stronger, to the point now where he is getting out of bed at eight in the morning instead of at noon, as he has been for years, according to Junior.