The Wave (4 page)

9

“The wind,” GT sang in ecstasy. “On my face and down my skin. The wind is the greatest joy in the wide world.”

He was again wearing my jeans and the Mao T-shirt. His head and shoulders were thrust out the window of my Civic. I had owned that copper-colored car since before my marriage.

“Get back in the car, GT.”

“But it’s so beautiful, Airy. It’s so fast.”

“. . . in other late-breaking news,” the radio announcer was saying, “a deranged man pushed two police officers from a three-story roof in downtown L.A., seriously injuring both men. The officers were responding to the complaint that a vicious dog had been threatening nearby residents. The man, possibly the owner of the dog, fled with the animal when police arrived. They chased him to the roof of the downtown apartment building and were surprised by the man. The attacker eluded custody, and an intense search is now being conducted in a ten-square-block area . . .”

“Get your head back in the car before someone knocks it off, fool,” Nella said to GT.

In response, GT pulled his head in, took off his T-shirt, and then shoved most of his upper torso back out the window.

“The wind!” he shouted.

While Nella shouted at GT, the radio announcer was saying something else about the man and dog running from the police. I was looking for my sister’s street, which was off Olympic and east of La Brea.

“Pull over,” an amplified voice commanded.

At first I thought it might have been the radio, some kind of joke that the announcer was making about the runaway felon. But then I looked in the rearview mirror. Blue and red lights were flashing. The police car pulled up on the driver’s side.

“GT!” I shouted. “Get the fuck back in the car.”

He jumped to obey while I pulled to the curb.

“Oh shit,” Nella said.

“What’s wrong, Airy?” GT asked sheepishly.

“Just be quiet,” I told him. “Stay still and don’t talk crazy.”

“Okay.”

In the mirror, I could see the policemen coming up on either side of the car. One white and the other black, they both had their hands on their guns.

“Please step out of the car,” the black officer, the one on my side, said.

GT and Nella got out of the passenger’s side. We all moved toward the curb, while passing cars and pedestrians slowed to gawk at us.

“Let’s see some I.D.,” the black officer said.

He wasn’t really black. He had dull gold-colored skin with dozens of dark freckles in groups around his face.

The white cop stood three or four paces away with his palm on the butt of his revolver.

Nella and I took out our licenses.

All GT had was the T-shirt wadded up in his fist.

“What about you?” the black cop asked GT.

“That’s my cousin, Officer,” I said. “He’s had some emotional problems since the death of his father.”

“What’s your name?” the cop asked, still addressing GT.

“Arthur Bontemps Porter, Officer.”

“Why were you hanging out of the window like that?”

While the black cop interrogated GT, the other one moved to look in the windows of my car.

“I was homeless for a while, sir,” GT said. “Airy took me in. I guess I was a little, um, uh, overjoyed.”

The change in the young man was nearly complete. None of the mindless exuberance showed in his demeanor. His eyes still lacked concentration, but the light of insanity was almost completely extinguished.

“Walk over to that fire hydrant and back,” the cop said.

GT did so. The only problem he had was that he was wearing a pair of my old tennis shoes, which were a size or so too big. His walk was a bit sloppy, but he moved in a straight line, as far as I could tell.

“Touch your nose with the point finger of your left hand,” the policeman commanded.

GT complied.

“Now your right.”

The mad youth was as obedient as Beefeater.

“He’s your cousin?” the cop asked me.

“Yes, sir.”

“And who are you?”

“Nella Bombury,” Nella said. “I’m Errol’s girlfriend.”

“What’s wrong with you?” the cop asked, looking directly into GT’s eyes.

“I just got out, Officer. I was in a—a crazy place, but then they put me back together and let me out, and—and after a while, I called Airy and he took me in. Him and his girl.”

“Where’s your identification?”

“I hold on to it,” I said then. “GT loses everything. I’m sorry, but I didn’t think to bring it along today. You see, we’re just going to my sister’s house, and so I didn’t think we’d be needing it.”

“Where does your sister live?”

“Two blocks up,” I said. “On Croft.”

“It’s very dangerous to allow a passenger to lean out of the window when the vehicle is in motion, Mr. Porter,” the policeman said.

“I’m sorry, Officer. I won’t let it happen again. I promise.”

“And get him some clothes that fit,” the man inside the uniform suggested. “If his clothes fit, then maybe he’ll feel more normal.”

“Yes, sir.”

Angelique was seven and a half months into a difficult pregnancy. The simple effort of answering the door exhausted her.

“Hi, Errol,” she said wanly, looking at Nella and then GT. “What are you doing here?”

“Can we come in, Angie?”

“Oh.” She hesitated. “I guess so.”

Angelique and Lon lived on the ground floor of a three-story house that had been subdivided into three apartments. Light flooded in from every window. The floor was bright pine, and all of the furniture was lightly varnished white ash. Lon was a carpenter and a furniture maker. He was from a South Carolinian ex-slaveholding family that had broken off contact with him when he married my light-skinned sister.

I was the darker of the two children. Angie looked almost white. But Lon’s parents wouldn’t have cared if she’d been blond and blue-eyed. Black was black, where they came from. I guess that was why Lon moved to L.A.

Angelique sat us in the living room. By then she was stealing concerned glances at GT.

“This is Nella Bombury, Angie,” I said as soon as we were seated, “my, um . . . And this is GT.”

“Hi, Anj,” GT said. “How’s the Waterwog?”

The shock registering on my sister’s face brought me all the way back to our childhood. Her wide eyes gawked, and her jaw dropped down as if there weren’t a bone in it.

“Daddy?”

“Baby girl,” GT said.

He went to sit by her and folded her in his arms.

Nella looked over at me with
I told you so
radiating from her face.

“No,” I said. “He’s a fake, a sham. He is not our father.”

10

Angelique accepted GT as her father with no qualms and few questions. I thought at the time that it had something to do with her pregnancy; the life growing inside her enhancing her spiritual side.

“. . . and do you remember when we went down near Pismo Beach that year there was that big windstorm . . .” my sister was saying.

“. . . and Airy held out his coattails like wings, and the wind caught him and he went flying over the edge,” GT said, finishing the sentence, further proving to my sister that he was our father come back from the dead.

“Mama was so scared,” Angelique said.

“But,” GT continued, “he landed in that scrub oak just over the drop and cried for all he was worth.”

I didn’t remember the event because I’d been too young. I doubted if Angelique did, either, but our parents had told the story so often that she believed she was calling on her own memory.

“It’s just a story,” I said. “Somebody, probably our father, told GT when he was a child. Now he thinks that he was there, but it’s just the same as you, Angie—you’ve heard it so often that you think you remember me falling. But you don’t.”

“I do,” she said.

“She might remember, Errol,” Nella said. “How do you know what’s in somebody else’s mind?”

“Because I was five when it happened, and she was only three.”

“Three-year-olds can remember,” Nella argued.

“But I don’t even remember,” I said.

“You’re the one who fell,” she reasoned. “Maybe it was too upsetting. Maybe you blocked it out.”

“Look at him. He’s not even twenty. How the hell could he be our father?”

“Here,” Angelique said.

While Nella and I argued, my sister had gone and gotten the family album our mother had made for her. She opened it to an old black-and-white photograph of Dad. He was sitting in a chair set before a fake backdrop of a potted fern and a window looking out onto a large painting of an empty beach. He was smiling, with his legs crossed, wearing a light jacket and dark trousers.

He was the exact duplicate of the man sitting on the couch before me.

“GT’s probably his son,” I said again. “That’s the only explanation. Dad had a second family, one that he never told us about. You know how he loved to tell stories. He probably sat around with GT here and told him about us, about the big stories. I’m sure there are some things he couldn’t know.”

GT was smiling at me. He had one arm around my sister and his bare feet out of my shoes and crossed before him. I had seen my father sit like that a thousand times in our old house, on the old sofa.

“What are you grinning at?” I asked the young man.

“You were always stubborn, Errol. Always trying to prove something in your mind when the truth was right before your very eyes.”

“You can’t be who you think you are, GT,” I said. “My father is dead. He died nine years ago. How could you be him?”

“I’m not him,” he said, “not exactly. I am his memories, his blueprint. His heart.”

“How can that be?”

“The Wave.”

“What’s that?” Angelique asked.

“Some cult he belongs to,” I said.

“It is the fount, Waterwog.”

“Where we all come from?” she asked, bedazzled.

“Yes,” he said. “And where we all shall go.”

“This is crazy,” I said. “He was a homeless man living in the graveyard until yesterday. How can you think he’s some kind of second coming?”

“Why not?” Nella and Angelique said together.

“Because,” I said. “Because it doesn’t make any sense. People don’t just rise up out of the grave.”

“Jesus did,” Nella said.

“My father wasn’t any kind of Jesus. He didn’t go to church. We had to pay the minister to read over his grave because Dad had never been inside a church.”

“I know,” Angelique said. “Let’s ask Mama.”

“We can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“Because what if he isn’t some divine spirit and instead the nutso bastard son of our father who is still dead? How do you think Mom will feel about that?”

“We could call her up and ask her a question that only she and Papa would know the answer to. Something that he’d never talk about to children.”

“She has a strawberry tattoo under her left breast,” GT said.

“What?” I asked him.

“She has a strawberry tattoo under her left breast,” he said again. “Bobby Bliss made her get it. She said that she just went crazy one day, that her hairdresser told her about a tattoo parlor. She said that all the girls from the beauty shop went in to get them, but later on, she admitted that it was her lover who wanted her to make the vow to prove she loved him.”

Tears flowed from GT’s eyes again.

“Mama cheated on you?” Angelique asked.

“She said that she still loved me as a friend, but her heart belonged to him. We stayed together because of you children, but our bed was cold as a stone.”

I thought about Shelly and Thomas Willens, about her coming in late every Tuesday and Wednesday for six months. She’d said that she had a flower arranging workshop, that they all went out for drinks after the class. To prove it, she brought home samples of flowers that she had arranged.

Fool that I was, I believed her.

“Newspaper,” she said, as she always did when she answered the phone at work.

“Hi, Mom, it’s me,” I said.

“Oh, hi, Errol. I was just thinking about you. Are you all right?”

“Sure I am, Mom. I’m fine. How are you?”

Angelique wasn’t exhausted anymore. She’d made tea for Nella and was holding GT’s hand. They were all sitting on the blue couch, the one soft spot in the blond-wood room, watching me talk on the cordless phone.

“I’m fine, hon,” my mother was saying. “Have you gotten a job yet?”

“I’ve made a line of mugs, Mom. I’m going to be selling them at the Third Street Fair in Santa Monica.”

“That’s nice, honey. But have you at least called AT&T? Mona Ramp says that they’ve been hiring computer people.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “Yeah, you told me. Listen, Mom. I have something to ask you.”

“What is it?”

I spied a huge white cloud out Angie’s window. It seemed to be rearing up like a great reptile, but not a species I had ever seen before.

“I’m here at Angie’s house,” I said, stalling.

“Oh. How is she? I hope you’re not making her serve you, Errol. You know she’s having a hard pregnancy. I had the same problems when I was carrying you.”

“Do you have a tattoo, Mom?”

She made a gasping sound and then was quiet.

“Mom? Mom?”

“Why would you ask me something like that, Errol?” It was as if there were a different person on the line. Not my mother at all. Or maybe she was my mother, but the tone of her voice said that I was the stranger, the threat.

“Do you?” I asked, driving the wedge deeper between us.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” If I hadn’t been her son, she would have slammed the phone down, I was sure of that.

“A strawberry tattoo,” I said. “On your—your chest.”

“Oh my God. Who have you been talking to? What have they said?”

11

My mother lived in the upper half of a duplex, set behind another duplex on Raleigh, near Santa Monica Boulevard. She asked me to meet her there in an hour, and I agreed.

The apartment had been too large even when she and my father lived there alone. Now she might as well have been living in a warehouse. There were four beds in as many bedrooms, dozens of chairs, four tables, and three television sets. The apartment had ten rooms, not including the two and a half baths and kitchen.

Despite the large apartment my mother was a small woman. She could have lived in a studio. She was only five feet tall, and slender, with short gray hair and big gray eyes. She hadn’t been beautiful at any time in her life, but the intensity of those eyes made up for it. Her love exhibited itself as anxiety instead of warmth. She had worried about me and Angelique, making sure we were healthy and clean and getting along well at school.

She answered the door, looking past me.

“Did Angelique come with you?” she asked without greeting.

“Can I come in, Mom?” I said.

“Of course you can, honey.” She backed away from the door, looking me up and down.

“You’ve put on a few pounds,” she said.

“Yeah. You got some coffee?”

The TV in the den was on. The TV was always on in there, usually set on one of the news channels. I didn’t ask her to turn it off. The set had been on pretty much nonstop since the day my father died.

“It keeps me company,” my mother had complained when Angie and I asked to shut it off. “If I get up in the middle of the night, it’s here waiting for me,” she added. “The light keeps me from tripping and falling down.”

The national news was on, but the volume was pretty low. She served me coffee in my favorite mug, with just the right amount of half-and-half.

“Who told you about that tattoo?” she asked as I took my first sip.

“A guy I met in the cemetery.”

“What?”

I told her the whole story. From the late-night calls to breaking into the graveyard and bringing GT home. I told her about his delusions, too.

“Where is he now?” she asked. Her words were stiff, I think because she agreed with me in thinking that GT was probably my father’s bastard son.

“So did you have an affair, Mom?”

“It was all a long time ago, Errol,” she said. “We all make mistakes.”

“So you had an affair with a man named Bobby Bliss?”

My saying the name horrified her.

“He told you his name?”

“Yes. He knew that you were with him.”

“But I never told him Bobby’s name,” my mother said. “I never told him that. He said Bobby Bliss? You’re sure?”

“I don’t know what to tell you, Mom. He knew your boyfriend’s name. I figure it’s because Dad used his second family to say things that he couldn’t say here with us.”

“He told you about the strawberry tattoo?”

“Yes.”

“And about Bobby?”

“Yes.”

“Where is this young man now, Errol?”

“He’s at Lonnigan’s diner with Angie and my friend Nella.”

“Okay,” she said. “Finish your coffee, and then let’s go talk to him.”

Lonnigan’s was a throwback to the coffee shops of L.A. in the eighties. It was red and glass with a roof shaped like an artist’s palette set on a tilt. There was a long chrome counter and booths in the windows. Nella and Angelique were sitting at a large booth with the handsome, wild-maned young man when my mother and I arrived.

On the ride over, she’d sat silent. That silence was the mark of her anger. Her hands were in her lap, and every now and then she’d take in a deep breath through her nose. She was wearing a simple gray button-up dress that came down to around her shins.

She walked with a quick step to the door of the restaurant and then steadily toward the booth.

But when she got close enough to get a good look at GT, she fell backward into me.

“Oh my God.”

GT stood up, all smiles and welcome.

“Hey, Sprout,” he said in just the tone my father had used every morning. “How’s the little Sprouts?”

“Artie?”

My head felt like it was going to break open. If he could fool my mother, too, then maybe my newfound half brother really was my father. I mean, if enough people believed it, why couldn’t it be true?

“How have you been, Madeline?” GT asked.

He reached for her hands, but she pulled away.

“You’re not Artie,” she said.

Relief flowed through me.

“You can’t be,” my mother continued. “But how do you know all of those things you’ve been telling my children?”

“Come and sit, Maddie,” he said. “Let’s talk about it. Let’s talk.”

The craziness had subsided again. He moved differently. His tone was reasonable. I noticed that the T-shirt was tucked into his pants.

We all sat.

“Mom, this is Nella,” I said. “She’s my friend from the pottery studio.”

“Pleased to meet you,” my mother said without even a glance at my new girlfriend. “Now, answer me, young man. How did you know the name Bobby Bliss?”

GT laced his fingers together and leaned forward. He smiled and shook his head slightly.

“So it’s true, Mother?” Angelique said. “You did cheat on Daddy.”

“Be quiet for a minute, honey,” our mother said, the way she used to when we were small children. She kept her gaze on GT’s face. “You can’t be Artie, you know.”

“Why do you say that, Maddie?”

“Because Artie had a scar below his right eye. He got it roughhousing with another boy when they were only nine.”

All right! Finally some proof, I thought.

“I already told Airy,” GT said, “that I’m not exactly Arthur Porter but the memory of him made flesh.”

“Then what about the scar?” I asked.

“The memory doesn’t include physical pain,” he said, and then he looked at my mother. “Only the pain of the heart and mind remain.”

“Are you his son?” my mother asked.

“In one way,” GT said. “I have learned from his mistakes. And, of course, I’ve entered the Wave.”

“How dare you tell my children about these things?” my mother asked the now strangely mature youth. “You have no right.”

“‘When I think of you,’” GT said, obviously quoting from something, “‘my breasts surge against my clothes, my feet get restless and the touch of my plain cotton skirt takes on an intimacy that the most ardent lover could never know—’”

“Stop it,” my mother said. “Artie never knew Bobby Bliss’s name. How could you? I mean, you’re no more than twenty. Bobby went away before you were born.”

GT’s smile faded then. His fingers unlaced, and he looked down at his hands.

“I hired a detective,” he said, then he shuddered. “He followed you”—another shudder—“and took pictures. It was after you told me about being in love with another man, Sprout.”

“No,” she said.

My sister was crying softly as Nella shook her head in disbelief.

“You see, Errol,” GT said, “I confronted your mother when I began to suspect. She told me that she was in love with another man, but she wouldn’t say who it was. She told the real story of the tattoo and promised never to see him again. But she lied.” He looked at her, and she looked away. “I hired the detective, and he brought me proof.”

“Did Artie make Bobby break it off with me?”

“Yeah,” GT said. “Yes, I did.”

In that instant GT took on the demeanor of an old and broken man. He could have been my father, almost.

We were all silent for a while after that. Angelique and I were trying to comprehend the deep drama that had unfolded while we were going to school and living blissfully, blindly ignorant. GT was lost in sorrow. I have no idea what my mother and Nella were thinking.

After a long while I said, “That still doesn’t prove anything. My dad could have told you or your mother all of that. It doesn’t make you our father.”

GT shuddered again, this time so violently that he fell from his seat to the floor under the table. I pulled him out from the booth, but he stayed on the floor, shaking and groaning.

“What’s wrong with him?” a waitress asked from behind the counter. You could see the fear in her eyes.

“It’s an epileptic fit,” I said, and then I made a decision.

“Nella, help me get him out to the car,” I said.

I got my shoulder under his arm and dragged him toward the door before she could move to help me.

“What are you doing?” Angelique asked me.

“I’m taking him home,” I said. “You take Mom back, Sis. I’ll call you later.”