The next morning he had been awakened at about ten by intermittent laughter, and a harsh voice droning on and on, outside his bedroom window, in the alley; but he had not, opened his eyes and dragged himself out of bed until he had recognized the lines the voice was reciting. Then, his face cold with nausea and disoriented horror, he had reeled to the window and squinted out.
Apparently Sukie had taken out the trash.
Some ragged old man had found the drafts of Pete’s sonnet in the Dumpster and, in mock-theatrical tones and with exaggerated grimacings, was reading the verses to an audience of about half a dozen unkempt men and women, who were bracing themselves on their shopping carts to keep from falling down with laughter.
Pete hadn’t been able to work up the peremptory tone to tell them to go away, and neither could he bear to go back to bed and listen to more of the recital, so he had defeatedly set about showering and shaving and making coffee. He had eventually got to deLarava’s studio at about noon—to discover that Judy Nording had quit. When he rushed to her house he was told that she had packed up her bed and stereo and books in a U-Haul trailer and had simply driven away. By nightfall he had established that none of her friends, nor even her parents in Northridge, would admit to knowing where she might have gone.
Upon hearing of it, Sukie had denounced Nording as a teasing, fickle bitch and probable sociopath; and under her indignation she had been obviously pleased and relieved.
In November, Pete had located Judy Nording—she’d been working for a news station in Seattle, and he had flown up there and surprised her on her front doorstep one rainy evening when she was returning from the studio. She had burst out sobbing at the sight of him, and he had walked her to a bar across the street. Over a calming gin-and-tonic she had stiffly apologized for disappearing the way she had done, but insisted that she had had no choice, after finding out about his previous marriages, and his children and his bisexuality. Sukie had told her all of it, Nording had assured him—Sukie had taken her to one last lunch and had shown her the wedding announcements, pictures of the many kids, and had even brought along a man who’d been one of Pete’s ill-treated gay lovers: Sukie, Nording explained, had felt that she ought to know.
NOW, SITTING on the narrow bed in his van six years later, Sullivan winced as he remembered that he had not been able to convince Nording that Sukie’s stories had been lies. It hadn’t really mattered anymore for Nording was by that time involved with some guy at the station, and Pete himself had begun dating a young woman who worked in a Westwood restaurant—but though he had laughed, and spoken earnestly, and shouted, and thrown a handful of change onto the table and waved at the telephone, during the course of a long half hour in that Seattle bar, he had not been able to convince Judy Nording that he really was single, childless, and heterosexual.
Pete had been glad Sukie hadn’t gone on to attribute to him something like heroin dealing, or murder, for Nording would probably have believed those things too, and called the police on him.
He had flown back down to Los Angeles later that night. Nothing about the scene he’d then had with Sukie in their shared apartment had gone the way he had indignantly planned. Sukie had cried, and told him why she had chased Judy away, and, hanging on to his jacket sleeve as he struggled toward the front door, had kept on telling him.
HE GULPED the last of the hot coffee, and decided against another cup. Sukie had always had a couple of cups of coffee first thing in the morning, and then followed them with two or three cold beers “to keep anything from catching up.”
He could see now that Sukie had been an alcoholic by the time they’d got out of college in ’75. By the early eighties, when the twins had been working for Loretta deLarava for a while, they had been known to some of their friends as “Teet and Toot”—Pete was “Teet,” for teetotaler, and Sukie was “Toot” for off-on-a-toot.
He was sure that he must have tried on a number of occasions to talk her into at least cutting back on her drinking, but this morning he could remember only one time. During a break at a shoot somewhere in Redondo Beach, years before she would wreck his engagement to Judy Nording, he had timidly suggested that one more slug from her bourbon-filled thermos bottle might be enough for the day, or at least for the rest of the morning, and she had said, “What you don’t know can’t hurt you.” She had given him a strange look then—a sort of doubtful smile, with her eyebrows hiked up in the center and down at the outer edges, as if affectionately forgiving him for having asked a naively rude question, one that could have elicited a devastating answer.
He stubbed his cigarette out in a little tin ashtray on the narrow sink, then stood up and pulled his pants on. Later today he’d have to get a shower in some college gym, but right now he wanted to find some early breakfast at a place with an accessible men’s room…and then have a look around the city.
He put on his shoes and a shirt and ducked between the front seats to pull back the windshield curtain. The windows of the houses on this street were still dark, though the dawn was beginning to fade the orange glow of the flares crowning the Naval Fuel Reserve.
As he sat down in the driver’s seat and switched on the engine, he was suddenly, deeply certain that Sukie had indeed killed herself three nights ago. His heartbeat didn’t speed up, and all he did was light another cigarette as he fluttered the gas pedal to keep the cold engine running, but quietly and all at once he had realized that for decades she had been wanting to be dead—maybe ever since their father died, in 1959.
A.O.P., dude. Accelerate Outta Problems. She hadn’t exactly accelerated out of that one. It had taken her thirty-two years.
And now Sukie was a ghost. Sullivan hoped she would rest quietly and asleep, and not be searched out and snorted up by some East Coast deLarava, nor stay up, awake and agitated, and eventually grow by slow accretion into one of the lurching, imbecilic creatures such as he had seen at the Houdini ruins yesterday.
He let off on the gas pedal. The engine seemed to be running smoothly. He turned on the lights, squinted at the green radiance of the gauges, then clanked the engine into gear and nosed the van away from the curb into the still street. May as well head up to Sunset and see if Tiny Naylor’s is still there, he thought.
IN THE Greyhound bus station on Seventh, Angelica Anthem Elizalde stood by the glass doors off to the street side of the ticket counter, down at the end where the word BOLETOS was printed very big over the small word TICKETS on the overhead sign.
For the last several hours she had tried to nap in one or another of the cage like chairs, or peered out the doors at the empty nighttime street, or paced the shiny linoleum floor while humbled families gathered around Gate 8, to eventually all pile aboard some bus bound for God knew where, and then after half an hour or so be replaced by more shuffling, apologetic, fugitive families. Their luggage was old thrift-store suitcases, and cardboard boxes hastily sealed with glossy brown tape, and woven-nylon sausage bags so stained that they might plausibly have contained actual sausages; Elizalde kept expecting to see goats on rope leashes, too, and wicker cages full of live chickens.
After some time she had convinced herself that the hands of the clock on the wall did move, but she had been wearily sure that they moved with supernatural slowness. Without believing it very much at all, she had played with the thought that she had died on the bus, that the jolt that had waked her up as they’d been passing through Victorville had been a massive cerebral hemorrhage, and everything she had experienced since that moment was only after-death hallucination; in that case yesterday’s eerie sensation of momentarily anticipating events had probably been pre-stroke phenomena. This fluorescently bright bus station boarding area, with its cage-chairs and its chrome-and-tile restrooms and its jarringly jaunty posters of rocketing buses, would be the antechamber of Hell. This night would never end, and eventually she would defeatedly join one of the crowds of departing families and go away with them to whatever lightless tenements and government-project housing Hell consisted of. (She could offer her apologies to Frank Rocha in discorporate person.)