The Last Blue Plate Special (28 page)

Set at the top of Nance Canyon, it faced Coyote Road, which at the lip of the canyon ceased being a road and became again
the rugged trail I’d just climbed on foot. The building also faced a ridge that cast half its facade in impenetrable gloom.
Curious, I moved closer, wishing for a flashlight. I’d never climbed Nance Canyon, never been there before, and yet I was
sure I’d seen the old shack, was familiar with it. But I couldn’t place it, couldn’t pull up an identity for it. An adobe
line shack, desolate and abandoned.

Isolated places always harbor these structures—miners’ shacks, solitary chimneys rising from bare dirt, a fire ring of stones
where someone unaccountably tried to burn a wall clock and one tennis shoe. Evidence that people have come and then vanished,
both for unknowable reasons. Nothing unusual. I’d probably seen a hundred crumbling adobe buildings since moving to California,
I told myself. This one just looked like the others.

The building’s door and three front windows had been covered with sheets of corrugated steel, rusted long ago. One kick from
my foot and the flaking orange metal behind the door-frame fell inward, raising whirlpools of dust that immediately caught
the wind and blew away. The sheet metal had at one time been nailed to the doorframe but now merely leaned there. Invading
teenagers, I thought.

Beneath my boots the doorsill crunched softly and turned to wooden crumbs as I stepped inside. Termites had done their work
and then left, like everybody else. The interior smelled of dry rot, animal scat, and a medicinal odor I associate with wasps.
From the door a gray rectangle of moonlight struggled to illuminate the dark corners and failed. I could see the dim outline
of an overturned table, some seatless chairs with rusty chrome legs, and a bar or counter against the far wall. The place
had been a saloon or eating place at one time, I assumed. Maybe after the line crews left it had been used as a watering hole
for local ranchers and the occasional prospector still combing nearby canyons for overlooked caches of gold.

In the interim it must have been a hangout for teenagers with a satanic bent, I assumed, since the walls had been decorated
fairly recently with pictures torn from magazines. Most of them were obscured by darkness, but near the door I could make
out several pictures of owls and one of a dragon I suspected was the logo for a popular teen rock group.

Even so, the place felt so empty it seemed to swallow light. I pulled the corrugated metal against the doorframe again and
stepped back outside. On the ground beneath a clump of bur sage, half buried in sand, I saw a hand-painted sign fallen from
above the door. DESSERT Something-or-Other, it had once announced in dark paint on a whitewashed board. Apparently someone
had once provided desserts here, like the apple pies that now drew people to Julian. The second word had been obscured by
time. When I picked it up the board was as light as balsa wood, just a fragile shell left by termites.

Time to go home, I told myself. Go home to Brontë, who would stay at my side until her death, and Roxie, who wouldn’t. And
shouldn’t, my Midwestern ethic insisted. Roxie should be helped along her path by me and then let go. It was true and it’s
the hardest thing in the world to do.

“Dammit, I
hate
this!” I yelled into a wind that blew my voice away like smoke.

At the top of the trail I turned to look back at the strange place which I would remember, I thought, as the scene of my personal
despair that night. And I’d take the old sign with me, I decided. Take it home and patch it together and hang it over my door.
A symbol for the passage of time which would eventually make of Roxie Bouchie just such a forgotten place in my heart.

It’s how I operate, the deliberate imposition of images on my mind. It’s how I don’t forget what’s happened to me, how I don’t
forget my life. Later I’d provide a sound track for the scene in my mind. Something unbearably sad. Paganini’s
Variations on a Theme,
maybe. That haunting melancholy. I liked the mental composition I was creating. It meant I’d survive.

I felt valiant and wise as I tucked the old sign under my arm and loped toward the jeep trail and my truck below, turning
to look back one last time. That’s when I saw it. That’s when I saw why the place had seemed familiar. From that angle it
was
familiar. There was a picture of it on my living room wall! A black-and-white photograph of the building as it once had looked
at dusk. Half of it darkened by the shadow of the ridge behind me, the other half blasted by light from a setting sun. The
same photograph in moonlight.

“Oh, my God,” I said so softly the wind took my words before I heard them. I don’t usually believe in coincidence, as I’ve
said, although there are coincidences. They’re meaningless. Running into your next-door neighbor at a movie theater three
miles from your house is a coincidence. Noticing that the woman sitting in front of you at that movie is your high school
English teacher from twenty years ago and fifteen hundred miles away isn’t. What it is, is something for which there is no
word. Even if the English teacher died in Ethiopia with the Peace Corps three years after you graduated and the woman in front
of you is just a body-double, it’s not a coincidence. The world is divided into people who understand this and people who
don’t.

I had lived for two years within a day’s hike of the old line shack, but I had never seen it. Then I’d bought a grainy photograph
of it taken in the past from an odd angle and brought the photograph home. There I had hung it where only my dog could see
it without looking down.

“Okay, Grid,” I whispered to nothing but a concept I’d made up, “what does this mean?”

There was no answer but the howling of a wind which was beginning to annoy me. Apparently I would have to figure it out for
myself.

“All right,” I thought defiantly, “then I will.” Meanwhile, I would help complete the job Roxie and I had undertaken together.
I’d do everything I could to determine who among the Rainer medical staff had killed patients with a timed-release antidepressant
that exploded their brains when they ate liver pâté. I’d stay up for days and nights running statistical analyses until my
computer crashed in curls of smoke and I’d narrowed the field to one. One person and only one who met the criteria, who had
motive. One person who was waiting to be caught. And I’d do it for Roxie. I’d do it to close the path behind her and free
her to leave.

On the bump-and-bang trip back through Coyote Canyon I felt brave and strong. I would do the Right Thing for Roxie because
I loved her. Someone less prone to solitary, dramatic scenes involving dubious moral decisions might have paused to consider
the operative term, “love.” Someone other than I might have remembered how deadly Jerry Russell Jones’s love for Ruby Emerald
had become in the hours before he shot her with a .22 handgun. Or the cruelty Pieter Van Der Elst’s love for his wife, Kate,
had caused him to unleash at her weakest moment. The love between Wes and Annie Rathbone, too, might be drawn into the analysis
before a decision was made. But I didn’t consider any of those things. In my mind was a picture of my sorrow, complete with
music. I would make sure I earned it, paid the admission price to a movie of my own life. That was all.

Roxie’s car was still there when I got home, as I’d known it would be. Roxie is rational and therefore does not do dumb things
like drive over mountains at night in fits of pique. In the long run this quality might rub off on me, I thought as I killed
the engine and let the truck coast quietly to a stop. Except there wasn’t going to be any long run.

Brontë, of course, heard the truck and came sleepily to the door, licked my hand, and then trotted back into the bedroom.
I took the old sign into the kitchen and propped it in the sink. Indoors, it looked phony. Like a ghost-town prop from a “Southwestern”
catalogue also offering plastic steer skull snack-servers and Kokopelli toilet tissue. So I kicked off my boots, grabbed the
sign, and padded outside to the pool. There I lay the sign on a chaise lounge and looked at the water, which seemed gray and
forbidding without the underwater lights which would make it blue and sparkling again. Except the lights might wake Roxie,
I thought.

But then so would I if I tried to clean up in the bathroom.

“Oh, hell,” I whispered, then pulled off my clothes and slipped into the warm water at the shallow end. No splashing. No sound
at all. Just soft, thick water holding me in the dark. I was tired, I realized. Every muscle limp and aching from exhaustion.
The motel pool was quiet and felt as big as a lake. I’d been drifting for a while when suddenly I wasn’t sure I was awake.
Wasn’t sure I remembered where the edge was, or how to get out.
So tired,
I thought.
So tired I can’t make myself move.

And then an awareness of depth. I’d drifted to the deep end, floating on my back, more than half asleep. Gallons of gray water
beneath me, fathoms of gray. I could see the splash gutter all around me, see the rectangular shape of the pool against the
decking. But I couldn’t move. And then I was sinking. Or I thought I was, and I still couldn’t quite remember how to move,
how to make the dead weight of my body cross a few feet of dark liquid to safety.

A chill, then. Coldness drifting in my arms and legs like oil in a lava lamp. I felt the water close over my head and kicked
a little out of instinct, but I wasn’t sure which way was up. And the feet kicking at the ends of my legs didn’t feel like
mine. Feeling them was more like watching them. Like watching puppet feet on a screen inside my head. And then a kernel of
panic burst somewhere and I was choking and thrashing as something crushed my chest. Something pulling me, hurting my lungs,
the skin over my ribs. Something holding me so tight I couldn’t breath, and then something hard hitting my head.

The splash gutter. The splash gutter had hit my head, and the thing crushing my chest was an arm, dark against my pale skin.

“Roxie,” I choked.

She was in the gray water, one arm around the kickboard, the other around me. I could feel her trembling, feel it in the big
muscles of her arms and shoulders. Without a sound she pulled me along the edge to the shallow end and then pushed me up the
pool’s steps. On the decking a black animal moved in worried circles, then pushed its face against my neck and licked frantically.

“Roxie?” I said again when she returned with towels and began scouring me until my skin burned. I could feel the race of blood
in a million vessels, the pulse of capillaries stretching in my fingertips.

“I’m okay, Roxie,” I said. “I don’t know what happened. I didn’t want to wake you. I think I fell asleep in the pool.”

Her eyes looked strange in the dark and I could still feel the trembling inside her, beneath her wet skin.

“You’re cold,” I said, standing shakily. “Let’s go inside, get into some dry clothes, have some coffee. I have to tell you
what happened, what I found, Roxie. The shack. The one in the photograph I bought at the Aphid Gallery. I saw it, Rox. It’s
at the end of Coyote Canyon where it comes out above Anza. It’s real. It’s really there.”

I hung on her, wrapped in towels, as we moved inside. I could hear myself jabbering about an adobe shack, saying the same
things over and over while deep inside I faced an awareness I didn’t want to face. That if I couldn’t
tell
Roxie Bouchie about my life, if she weren’t there to hear, then whatever might happen in my life would be less real than
it really was. Years spun out ahead of me in which my own experience could never be as intense and clear, as
defined
as it was when I simply told it to Roxie Bouchie. The awareness felt like drowning.

“Rox, say something,” I begged after we’d gotten into dry T-shirts and I’d reassured Brontë with a liver treat that I was
okay and she could go back to sleep. But Roxie just clenched her fists and walked into the darkened bedroom alone.

“Please,” I whispered, following and crawling into bed next to her. “I’m sorry I took off and left you here, but I had to.
When you told me about Philadelphia—”

“Blue, there’s something I didn’t tell you about the MAOIs,” she said, pulling me fiercely to her. “You left before I had
time. And I don’t feel like telling you right now. Stop running, Blue. You’re always running. And I’m asking you, just this
once, to stop.”

It occurred to me that drowning in the night-gray water of my pool felt preferable to her request. Running is what I do, who
I am. Running, always observing and thinking and assessing everything, watching my own life like a movie seen through a moving
car window. As long as I’m running, I’m safe. Whatever it is I fear can’t catch me. But Roxie was asking for a kind of courage
I’d never displayed. She deserved my best. And she would have it.

“I’m not running,” I told her. “I’m right here.”

After that we didn’t talk but made love all night as if it were the first time, or the last. And I was there. I didn’t run.

Eventually I must have slept because I woke up suddenly, a knot of fear in my gut. It was almost nine o’clock in the morning,
somebody was pounding on the door, Brontë was barking, and Roxie was beside me in bed but fully dressed and watching me anxiously.

“Oh, Rox,” I mumbled, “what’s going on?”

“A lot. Hard to know where to begin. But first I have to know if you’re still here, or if you’ve gone off in your head again
like you do, running away.”

“Rox,
I’m
not the one who’s going away,” I began. “And who in
hell
is that at the door? And why aren’t you at work? What’s going on, Roxie?”

“I took the day off,” she said, not moving from my side. “Personal leave, and God knows, honey, this is personal, except now
we don’t have time for it. At the door we have the FBI. There are a few things I need to tell you, Blue.”

“FBI? What’s the FBI doing here?” I croaked, lurching toward the bathroom. I wanted to be alone with Roxie and have a hot
shower and a huge breakfast with a lot of fresh coffee. In that order.