North of Montana (18 page)

Nurse Kathy is waiting for me inside the Three Greeks, smoking a cigarette and reading a paperback of poetry by Robert Frost. She has changed from hospital greens into denim and looks like a female truck driver.

“I had to look in on my mother and father,” she tells me first thing. “Make sure they get their dinner.”

“You live with your parents?”

“They own their own house and they’re getting on. Frankly, they’re too old to move.”

She stubs the cigarette out in a gold paper ashtray and looks at me. Just looks. The place is overly warm and smells of yeast. I shrug out of my raincoat.

“So, Kathy,” I say pleasantly, figuring I’d better try to establish some kind of a rapport, “what do you like about being a cardiac nurse?”

“It’s intense. You’re on your toes. You have to make decisions quick, like if someone has ventricular tachycardia you have to decide whether to give them a precordial thump.”

She is showing off. The Robert Frost book is part of it. She is trying to say that she is really a smart, sensitive person trapped inside a toad’s body. Now she is giving me that toad look again. Sly. Unblinking. Hostile.

‘Was Claire Eberhardt a good cardiac nurse?”

“Very good.” She nods slowly. “She could take the pressure. She liked the adrenaline rush. Nice with the patients, a good care provider. But she was feisty. She’d argue with the doctors.”

“About what?”

“Medication. Whatever. If she thought the patient wasn’t getting what he needed. We get to know the patients a lot better than the doctors.”

“Did she argue with Dr. Eberhardt?”

“Why should she argue with him? He was taking her to California.”

“Is that the reason she got married?”

“I dunno.” Nurse Kathy laughs. “Seems like a good reason to me. Want to get something to eat?”

Donnato was right. The Boston Italian meatball sub made by a Greek in an Irish neighborhood is a unique experience. There is something special about the way the red sauce dissolves the bun into a spongelike mass and something exciting about the pursuit of the meatball when it drops out onto the paper plate, forcing you to get up and go to the counter for a fork with orange grease running down your chin, twenty napkins glued to your fingertips. I vow to bring one back on the plane and force him to eat it during a squad meeting.

“My parents’ house is around the corner from here.” Kathy settles back with a paper cup of black coffee and another Parliament. “Claire’s folks still live two houses away.”

“You two were best friends?”

“I wouldn’t say best. She hung out with the cheerleaders, with those freckles and that cute body. I hung with the nerds, obviously. But we went through a lot. We both grew up very Irish. Oppressively Irish. I even took a course in the sociology of drinking—I could discuss that deeply, if you’re interested,” she says with bitter irony.

“Sure.”

But she shakes it off. “Claire and I were both the first ones in our families to go to college. Then nursing school. There was never even a consideration that we could go to medical school.”

“But she got out.”

Kathy takes a long draw on the cigarette. “She got out.”

“And you hate her fucking guts.”

“I don’t hate her fucking guts,” she says, unnerved. “I wish her the best of luck out on the coast.”

I let her sit with her anger for a moment. Then,

“What if I told you Randall Eberhardt has been accused of overprescribing narcotics?”

Kathy answers quickly, unthinkingly, “I wouldn’t believe it.”

“No?”

“No. Randall’s a good guy.”

“You don’t think he might have changed out in California? Life in the fast lane?”

“Randall’s the type of person who is very happy with himself. Why would he change? Unless there was a money problem or something unforeseen. Or someone’s setting him up.”

“So maybe the person who changed was Claire.”

“What do you mean?”

“Maybe she wanted the fast life.”

“The thing Claire Eberhardt wants out of life is a good lay,” spits Kathy Donovan before she can stop herself. “In high school she was the first to lose her virginity.”

I nod, returning the bitchy sneer. “There’s always one.”

“She wasn’t actually a tramp. She had a boyfriend, Warren Speca. He’s out on the coast now, too.”

“In Los Angeles?”

“Pretty close to there. The girls in the neighborhood threw her a going-away party. We gave her Warren Speca’s phone number in—what?—
Venice
, California?”

“That’s right.”

“I wrote it on a prescription. ‘Rx for horniness—Call Warren Speca.’ She died. She turned beet red.”

“She still had the hots for Warren?”

“Oh, I don’t know about that. They weren’t in contact after high school. For a long time nobody knew where Warren was. He was into some stuff”—this time she catches herself—“I shouldn’t tell you about. Anyway, my mother was talking to his mother and it turns out he’s an electrical contractor in this place called
Venice
, California. I mean it was a joke—the only person Claire ever heard of in California was her old high school boyfriend. I thought it was a hoot.”

I agree with her and force a smile, making sure to get the correct spelling of Warren Speca’s name. We have balled up our plates and napkins and tossed our cans of Diet Slice into the trash. I’ve got Donnato’s meatball sub triple-wrapped in aluminum foil inside a waxed paper bag. I thank Nurse Kathy for her help and move toward the door. If I leave now and don’t get lost I can make the last plane.

“So what’s it like in California?” she asks as we hit the night air.

“Great. You can wear a T-shirt in December. Are you thinking of coming out?”

I hand her my card. She studies it, intrigued.

“Who knows.” She pockets the card and looks at me for the first time in an unguarded way. “I promised myself next year I’m moving out to my own place in Quincy.”

•  •  •

I have noticed that violence happens very fast, faster than the way they stage it in movies, faster than you’d think of it in your imagination.

Moments after leaving Nurse Kathy, I am at a traffic light at Cushing Avenue. I look down for half a second, checking the map for the fastest way to the airport, and am rear-ended with enough force to throw me almost to the steering wheel before the seat belt locks. A moment later the front-seat passenger window explodes and I am smacked so hard on the shoulder by a brick that my arm goes numb.

Gloved hands reach quickly through the shattered glass and grab my purse off the passenger seat.

“Suck my dick!” howls a male voice, then he and the purse are gone.

I get out of the car with my hand on my weapon but the late-model Oldsmobile that whacked me is already disappearing into the night. I can’t make out the plates. I stand there in the intersection in a daze like any other victim, flexing my tingling right hand. I take off the raincoat and shake out shards of broken glass, picking them out of my hair. The lady two cars back pulls out and takes off, she wants no part of this. My federal ID and plane ticket are in the blue canvas attaché case in the trunk and thank God they didn’t take Donnato’s meatball sub. I get back in and toss the brick into the backseat. I am shaking like a dog. The pain is tightening my shoulder muscles into a spasm and my back does not feel great. I slam the car into gear and, swearing steadily, kick it up to fifty miles an hour as cold air pours in through the busted window, not stopping for traffic lights or asshole pedestrians, focused on only one thing:
Get me out of this depressing fucking place and onto a plane for Los Angeles
, knowing that Claire Eberhardt, leaving Savin Hill, was thinking the very same thing.

Forty minutes later, as I gimp toward the open door of the plane, I think again of Claire Eberhardt, possibly hurrying down this very same ramp, the toddler asleep on her shoulder, the little girl holding her hand. She believes she is escaping those dead-end streets, but instead arrives in California with the phone number of an old high school boyfriend written out like a prescription, a gift from the gals in the neighborhood. I begin to wonder if Warren Speca was the “wrong guy” she was talking about in the doorway, and if so, how many times she made the same “really bad” mistake.

If they had wanted to destroy her for saving herself and starting another life, they couldn’t have found a better way. That innocuous slip of paper was like a time bomb placed on the airplane. My buddies on the Inter-Agency Task Force Against Terrorism have come up with some pretty hardened amoral killers. But they are amateurs compared to the terrorists who operate with skillful deadly accuracy among our own friends; and, as I am soon to find out, within our own families.

PART THREE

TRAVELTOWN

TWELVE

THE VISIBILITY over Los Angeles is a million miles, the air so smooth I feel as though I am gliding home in an armchair, one of those heavy green damask armchairs from the thirties with fringe along the bottom, sailing over the crystalline city of Oz.

The Russian immigrant cabdriver tells me, “They predict a socko storm,” which must be some lunatic misinterpretation of English because there can’t be rain so late in the season, especially on a night so clear. We are driving up Lincoln Boulevard with all the windows open. It is midnight and I should lie back and dream, but my mind is ready for the start of the day, churning with a catalogue of urgent tasks, from calling the credit card companies to checking up on Wild Bill.

The cab lets me off at the main entrance to Ocean View Estates, where I borrow twenty bucks for the fare from the night guard, Dominico, who has been here as long as I have. Carrying the overnight duffel, the blue attaché on the good shoulder, I walk the familiar maze of pathways to Tahiti Gardens.

The ritual is always the same: I’m glad to be home but instantly crave fresh air, opening the glass doors to welcome a humid breeze and the calming view of legions of sailboats peacefully moored under bright white spotlights.

Even after such a brief absence, my bedroom seems unfamiliar, a hotel with a few pieces of institutional furniture scrupulously dusted, on view for the next occupant; nothing personal or telling except a trace of White Linen perfume and an antique handmade quilt that covers the double bed.

If I were trapped in a fire and could save one thing, it would be this quilt. It belonged to my great-grandmother, Poppy’s mother, Grace, who was born in Kansas in 1890 and drove all the way to California in a Model T. The design is made of tiny hexagons in pale floral prints and you can plainly see the topstitching in coarse white cotton thread. The fabrics must have come from ladies’ house dresses and kitchen curtains that hung in farmhouses lit by kerosene lamps.

I remove my clothing, which smells like the inside of an airplane, and lie naked on this quilt, wondering about the circle of women who made it, imagining their fingers working all around the hem, callused fingers, lean hard fingers, joining scraps of fabric in weak yellow light; as long as they kept working they could hold in their hands the sweet connection of female companionship.
Where is my connection?

I am thirsting for fresh orange juice. I am back in Los Angeles, back to the feeling of being watched, maybe by a camera mounted on a crane up there in the shadows of the ceiling, looking down at me on the bed.
I should call Poppy
. Outside the wind is nudging the brass chimes hanging off the balcony, sounding them like tiny warning-bell buoys for tiny distant boats. The camera is moving closer, a slow spiral ending with the pupil of my eye.

Why is there part of me that is always afraid?

I am drifting in the center of all those tiny hexagons. Is it Boston time or California time? Is it my empty body or Claire Eberhardt’s hungry body or Violeta Alvarado’s, cremated to ash?

Those mysterious faded aqua snapshots of her life are never far from my mind: brothers lined up in a solemn semicircle, Grandma Constanza holding a baby, the parrot. What would it be like to grow up in a house without walls? To sleep on a bamboo mat on bare ground, through a dry season of parched dust and a wet season of steamy rain—to live in a house that is open to it all?

Suppose I made the trip to El Salvador and located the Alvarado encampment? If I walked through that landscape, past male cousins stripping the kernels off dried corn with their fingers, females grinding it in a
molino
, patting the mixture into flat circles and baking them on a stone, if I finally came to Constanza and called her name, would she look up from the wood cooking fire at this strange foreign relative and panic … or would she simply go on making tortillas, not at all surprised to see me, or to hear the news she has feared since the day her daughter left for America?

•  •  •

I awake to rain needling the windows, turn over in the bed and reach for the TV remote. My shoulder is feeling better but my lower back is stiff and sore. Channel 9 unfolds on the screen. A strong Pacific cold front is driving sleet and showers along the entire West Coast of the United States. It is thirty degrees in San Francisco, hailstorms during the night. There will be two feet of new snow in Nevada by tomorrow and more storm systems are backed up over the ocean like airplanes at LAX. When I hear there is flash flooding in Palm Springs, I grab the phone and hit two digits for Poppy’s number, which I have stored on speed dialing.