House of Sand and Fog (22 page)

My waitress came, asked if my salad was all right, and I said, no, it wasn’t: “It’s too
green.”
She was young, short and chunky with shoulder-length blond hair. And she looked like she was about to explain to me that guacamole has avocados in it which are green, but I cut her off and asked for another drink, thinking as she left with my salad that
she’s
green, she’s new to the world and it’s going to eat her. It eats everyone. I thought I was going to cry. I refused to. With my third margarita, she brought the check, a sign, I knew, for me not to bother ordering another one. I didn’t like getting the message like that. I sipped my drink, as iced and fruity as the first two, licking the rim, turning the glass till all the salt was gone, swallowing it, telling myself I wouldn’t be at the fish camp when he did come. The music stopped. I could hear the tink of someone’s silverware, the opening of the kitchen door. My face felt as soft as a clay doll’s. I wanted one more drink, but I knew it was no use to try and get another, that mall restaurants have three-drink ceilings for their customers because they think drunk people shoplift more or don’t shop enough or scare away real customers. Knowing this didn’t take away what I felt as I left my child waitress a good tip and stepped out into the main mall, looking for another restaurant, feeling watched, monitored.

The place was loud with voices, the ring of cash registers, different kinds of music coming from each shop—like it’s all a test to see how much you can take—teenage girls talking and giggling in twos and threes, their hair high, their nails flashing. I passed some in front of a CD shop and one of them glanced at me, then turned back to the huddle of her friends.

I stopped and stood still, my face warm. Other shoppers walked around me as I watched these girls, waited for any of them to look at me again, try and say something cute or even make a face. They were all copies of each other: they wore jeans three sizes too big, pastel Gap T-shirts tucked in loose or tight—to either show off their breasts or hide them—tacky leather pocketbooks over one shoulder, loose bracelets jangling on their wrists, their makeup too heavy. They all chewed gum, talking at once, oblivious to the thirty-six-year-old woman watching them, wanting, for a day anyway—no, for just this minute—to be them again, though I never had been in the first place. Not really. Not a girl with girlfriends. Now, twenty years later, I could be their mother. But I wasn’t anyone’s mother, or wife. I wasn’t a real girlfriend to anybody, or a friend; I was barely a sister, and whenever I thought of myself as a daughter my body felt too small and filthy to live in.

At the far end of the mall I wandered into an upscale pizzeria, sat in the back, and ordered a glass of white wine because they sold only that and beer. The lunch rush was over and just a few tables were taken up. The ceilings were low and the walls were covered with fake antiques: mirrors set in leather ox yokes, green-glass kerosene lamps, yellowed newsprint photos of strongmen, and wood carvings of Indians. It was quiet back here, dim and cool, no music, just the sound of the busboy still clearing the table. I smoked my cigarette, drank from my wine, and pretended to study the menu. When the waiter came for my order I smiled up at him, careful not to smile too hard, and tried to say very clearly, concentrating on not mumbling my words, “I don’t see anything I want. I’ll have another chardonnay, please.”

He took my order and menu without a word. I must’ve just sat there a little while because when he came back with my second glass of wine and a basket of sliced Italian bread I went to put out my last cigarette and saw it was a long ash on a filter between my fingers. I took a tight, ladylike sip of my new wine. I started to butter the bread I knew I wouldn’t eat. My head and face felt blended, one the other, this second evaporating into my skull and hair and today might as well be yesterday when I was a girl, nine or ten, and every Saturday my father would take me with him on his rounds to deliver linens to restaurants and butcher shops and nursing homes up and down old Route 1, me in the passenger seat of his brown van, him smoking a Garcia y Vega cigar, the radio tuned to a baseball game or to a station playing music from when he was younger, but to me he had always been old, a small quiet man with thick glasses and thin lips, his hands always busy, and mine too, the two of us pressing clean linens on the electric roller we had in the basement, me on a stool at the feed end of the rollers, Dad sitting at the catch end because he could fold faster and better than me and he’d taught me how to use the knee lever that would open the hot rollers so I could slide in the first tablecloth or apron or napkin, but after doing that he didn’t want me to use the lever again, didn’t want to have to slow down to set in each piece of linen, taught me instead to take the corners of the next piece and with my thumbs and forefingers hold it to the corners of the last piece being pulled slowly through so one rolled straight into the other and we worked “like Henry Ford,” and I kept burning my fingertips as I fed one piece of linen in after the next, but he seemed so content sitting on the other end of the roller from me, quiet but maybe proud he had such a useful daughter, that I never told him about my fingers because they seemed beside the point to me, and they always felt better when he’d buy me a cold Coke at one of the restaurants after and I’d put my fingers into the ice.

My wine was almost gone. My head and body were pulsing, and I lit a cigarette, held the lighted match close to my face, studied its flame, the blue and green sulfur colors at the base as it spread down the cardboard shaft. I watched it reach my fingertips, bumping up against flesh that wouldn’t burn, and I didn’t feel much and dropped it smoking onto the table, saw myself dropping one in the dry shrubs around my father’s house, the flames rising up to the windows. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. I saw my house burning to the ground, the flames eating everything inside, the Persian carpets and fancy furniture, the pictures of the bearded horsemen on the wall, the colonel and the Shah, even their family portrait, the fire so hot the glass would blacken and shatter and the beautiful daughter would curl up into a fine ash. But then I thought of Mrs. Bahroony, the weeping little Arab woman and her love of the Italian people, her ability to be at the same party as Sophia Loren; I didn’t want to hurt
her,
just everything she owned. I would have to find a way to get her out of the house before I burned it, the son too. A diversion maybe. A fire in the front yard. The bands in my stomach vibrated with this thought and I felt tickled by it, ready to laugh.

Soon, I was walking through all that bright noise into Sears, down the clean wide aisles past brand-new power tools and fishing gear, lawn mowers and lounge chairs, air filters and finally gasoline cans. I seemed to watch them from a distance, like I’d just been dropped off somewhere to run an errand for someone and I forgot what it was. There was a stack of them, five-gallon and made of tin, painted bright red with yellow stripes. They were beautiful in a way, and I thought how nice it must be for other people’s husbands to buy these, to fill them with gas for their lawn mowers on a Saturday morning. I thought of Lester’s house at Eureka Fields, the one I never found. Did he cut it himself? Was that part of his family life? Next to the gas cans were shelves of charcoal lighter and bags of charcoal. Should I buy some for the hibachi in the trunk? But after tonight, if even then, I knew the fish camp would be a memory, and so then what would I do? Spend months parking my car in rest areas, barbecuing my supper, looking for a safe place to sleep till Connie had settled the lawsuit with the county? Months? I picked up a gas can. It was light in my hand, only a reminder of what heavy could be.

The kid behind the counter asked if I needed a funnel.

“Nope,” I said, no longer caring if I sounded loaded or not. “Just a book of matches.”

And he smiled, this skinny-necked nineteen-year-old, like he knew firsthand the sort of problems solutions like this required, and out in the parking lot I carried my new gas can and saw the weather had changed to one of those West Coast fogs moving in from the beach, the sky gray, the air cooler, smelling like wet metal, though the cars were dry and the trunk lid of my Bonneville was still hot from sitting in the sun. I felt it against my palm as I steadied myself to unlock it, my gas can at my feet like a loyal dog, my face feeling strange, stuck in a smile that came from deep inside me. I was having a hard time sliding the key in. Cars were coming and going throughout the parking lot. I could hear the squeak of shopping-cart wheels over asphalt, somebody’s child crying far away. The trunk lock clicked, I stooped for the can, and there in my trunk next to Nick’s hibachi was Lester’s coiled black leather belt, the fine checks in the grip of his gun, the worn black of its holster, and it was like being eleven again, walking into my brother’s room for a pencil or pen, pulling open drawers and finding a color magazine of women sucking off men, when all the tiny currents open in you and they feel like evil and opportunity all at once, temptation and salvation, the cause and the cure, touch it, pick it up, take it away with you.

And so I did.

In one fluid motion I put the gas can in and pulled the coiled leather snake out, kept it tucked under my arm as I unlocked my door, rested it on the seat beside me, what Lester left behind before we went into the truck-stop bar for our last dance, his sheriffness, his sword, like a gift he’d willed me, a piece of him to carry and remember him by. I thought of us making love on the banks of the Purisima, him pulling out of me and coming all over my stomach, hedging his bets. I thought how a man’s dried come smells like dead shrimp, how I’d never even shot a gun before, just held one, a small one my first husband owned for about a month when the white snake wriggled through us and in the fluorescent light of the bathroom he had me hold it loaded, point it at my reflection in the mirror.

I drove north on the Camino Real, the King’s Highway. I reached over and rested my hand on the gun, felt its steel indifference. I kept my fingers on it as I drove the two miles to San Bruno, passing ugly housing developments on each side of the freeway, their hot top lanes broken up by an occasional grove of eucalyptus trees that looked olive in the gray light of the beach fog. I pushed in the Tom Petty cassette and turned him up almost all the way, turned into a mini-mall, placing the gun and holster on the floor, locking the Bonneville and walking into a package store next to a hair salon. I bought three Bacardi nips and two Diet Cokes, a pack of spearmint gum. Back in the car, I didn’t remember who had sold me these things—a man? A woman? I parked in the far corner of the lot near a row of manzanita brush, dumped half of one soda out the window, poured in two of the nips, sipped pure Caribbean heat, smoking, listening to Tom Petty on the cassette player but keeping it low, not wanting to draw any attention to myself, feeling like a cop in a parked cruiser, looking out the window at cars, people going in and out of stores. I was waiting for something to happen.

Through the brush to my right was a self-serve gas station. I started the car, took a huge drink of my Diet Rum, but the bubbles were too much and I coughed and started to gag and had to lean out the window but nothing came. I smoked two cigarettes before I noticed the music had stopped. I flipped over the tape, turned up the volume, and drove around to one of the pump islands of the gas station. I freed my gas can from the trunk and pressed the pump button promising I would pay inside and I started to fill the can, my cassette player loud through my open windows—louder than I had thought it was. Lester’s gun was still on the floor where anyone could see it, but there was no one around, just a woman in the pay booth reading something, her glasses pinching the end of her nose, her chin fat, Tom Petty singing, “Break down, it’s all right,” his voice as high and over the edge as everything I felt, what the rational would call an enemy voice, I knew, but to me the sound of him was good company, a warm drunk hand on my back, encouragement for what I had to do, the inevitability of it even. But the woman kept looking up from whatever she was reading, watching me with her head tilted back slightly so she could see me better through her glasses, so she could purse her lips at me like my own mother, already concluding just who I was and what I was up to before I even did. The pump clicked off, gasoline foaming up out of the can at my feet, the fumes so strong it was all I could smell or taste. I leaned into the car, Petty’s singing a smear of sound, and I pulled a few bills from my pocketbook, but I didn’t know if it was enough and I didn’t stop to count, the music so loud the cigarette butts vibrated in the ashtray and all I could smell was gas and I didn’t want to leave Lester’s gun exposed in the car so I unsnapped it from its holster and slid it out, black with a square barrel, lighter than I thought it would be.

I stuffed it into my pocketbook I hardly ever carried, hooked the strap over my shoulder, and walked under the bay to the lady in the glass booth. I could see my reflection in the window glass, my lips parted like I was sleeping, my face as still as a nun’s before she prays. The lady’s glasses were halfway down her nose, pinching the flesh, and she had her fingers on the short microphone in front of her, saying something, but it was just nagging static to me, nothing I could hear over my cassette player blasting from the Bonneville, Petty pleading
Break down, it’s all right, it’s all right,
the pay drawer sliding out and me dropping in my money, my left hand still in my pocketbook, resting on the hard checkered grip of Lester’s gun. The woman unfolded and counted the bills, three dollars. She shook her head, the drawer pushed out empty, and she sat there looking at me, waiting, her head tilted slightly, her face in a squint, her eyes narrowed like she couldn’t bear me or the noise coming from my car another second. She shook her head again, quickly. She put her lips to the microphone, but then I stepped back, felt myself pulling out the gun, saw myself pointing it at her through the glass, her hands jerking up in front of her as she sucked her lips in as if she were holding her breath, her pinched nostrils trying to flare, her eyes filling up behind the glasses. I watched her, surprised, I suppose, at how suddenly things had changed between the two of us. I wanted to tell her it’s all right; it’s all right. Her lips were trembling and her fingers were straightening into a church steeple. I lowered my arm, but her eyes weren’t on me, they were on the gun, so I stuffed it into my pocketbook and walked back to my car, a pickup truck pulling into the opposite bay as I got in behind the wheel, turned the music down and drove slowly back onto the street, my entire body as thin and light as the fog moving in around us, my trunk lid open, my full gas can still at the pumps.