“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, real men don’t wear boxers. Especially plaid ones.”
“How would you know? You’ve never had a real man.”
“I was just trying to say-”
“The same shit you’ve been handing me all along to keep me moving.”
“Which worked, finally.”
“I worked up to it on my own, little lady.”
Kat folded her arms and stared straight ahead, though the bouncing from the potholes detracted from this dignified posture. They were sending up a rooster tail of dry sand behind them, even though Ray was doing under thirty miles an hour now.
After a minute, he said slowly, “Although the hot poker up my ass did make me jump a little faster.”
“You really were frozen. Immobilized. Except for running around L.A. peeking in houses like a hamster running in a wheel.”
“Had to do it,” Ray said.
“What did you get out of it?”
“I figured out where some keys fit.”
“That’s not all of it.”
“It’s good enough for now.”
Kat felt they had just barely avoided an impasse that would have sent them careening back home. Ray seemed relieved, too-he whistled a little under his breath. She resolved, as she had a thousand times before, to keep a close watch on the openings to the body, guard the mouth-guard the-whoa, guard all the orifices, that meant-she had a silent epiphany involving her love life, an epiphany which she managed to keep from sharing with Ray.
“I think his name was Pablo,” Ray now said. “Of course, I could be making that up to throw you further off the scent.”
Replying carefully and reasonably, she said, “Okay, Baños Calientes, here we come. We still have a few hours before we should turn around and go to the police. How far are we from Topanga?”
“Two and a half, maybe up to three hours, depending on traffic. I’ll get us back.”
Behind them, the San Jacinto Mountains loomed, their rugged shapes piercing the sky like vampire teeth. An outcropping of sedimentary rock appeared, and over a rolling hill a settlement of nondescript ranch houses and trailers in an oasis of willows.
Four-thirty in the afternoon. A small hawk perched on a telephone pole, feathers barely moving; women wearing Sunday-go-to-church dresses chatted in the parking lot of the trading post, which was basically a mom-and-pop grocery store; a leathery senior in a white hat and lived-in jeans filled up his Ranger at the gas pump out front. Ray pulled the car into a parking spot.
He locked the car remotely with a click. Kat followed him into the store.
Racks of bait mixed incongruously with fresh spices. Apparently the people down here not only liked to catch fresh food, they liked to cook with spices, rare beer batters, unusual root-based roux. Unlike the grocery stores near her house in Hermosa, the aisles were not speckled with plastic grasses or lit with halogen spotlights to create the illusion of cozy gourmet. This store reminded her of the one down the hill from Franklin Street in Whittier when she was a kid, what they used to call “the little store.” Fusty candies in moldering baskets decorated the shelf below the counter cash register. The rest of the store held basics like toilet paper, tampons, and peanut butter stacked up to the black painted ceiling without any fanfare.
A gum-chewing teen manned the register. Ray did not pretend he wanted to buy anything.
“Pablo around?”
The jaw worked. Gum popped once, then twice.
“Haven’t seen him today.”
“I need to see him.”
A stare as indifferent as the stars blinked back.
“I know him,” Ray said.
“Who are you?”
“My name is Ray Jackson. My wife’s name is Leigh. Leigh Jackson.”
The gum popped again. The boy at the counter took a dirty rag out and wiped his counter down. When it continued to be grubby, he spit on the rag and wiped it again. “Don’t know you.”
“You sell my wife manzanita.”
A dim light penetrated the distant universe of his eyes. “Sounds familiar.”
“She builds furniture, and sometimes she uses the manzanita as bases for glass tables.”
“It grows wild out here.”
“Yes.”
“He doesn’t steal it, you know.”
“Nobody said he did.” When the boy began to straighten the newspapers, Ray said, “It’s not like he was selling her drugs.”
“He wouldn’t.”
“He around?”
“No. You want to buy something?”
No problem, Kat had a handful of goodies she wanted at the ready. She plopped them in front of the boy. Ray looked at the candy bars and said, “That’s not your lunch.”
“No, I missed lunch. This is high tea.”
The clerk smiled, revealing gold-tipped incisors, and rang their purchases up.
“Where can we find Pablo?”
Ching. Ching. Ching. “He’s my grandfather. You want to buy some manzanita?”
“Maybe.”
“We call it madrón. He rambles around the desert collecting what he calls found things. He used to follow the Grateful Dead around, you know? Fell in love with a woman who played harpsichord with them a few times, named Margaret. When she dumped him, he married Grandma Rayella.”
“Sounds like a live wire,” Kat said, while he bagged up the food she couldn’t wait to eat. The cornflakes at the Idyllwild cabin had not assuaged her need for nutrients.
The boy began to hand her the change from her twenty; she waved him off.
He narrowed his eyes and tucked the money into the right front pocket of his jeans. “Grandpa comes in around five almost every night. Since Grandma died, he doesn’t cook.” He waved toward a steaming bar along one side of the shop. “He’ll eat any soup we dream up.”
“Is that what I’m smelling? Smells good.” Kat was now regretting the Mounds, the Snickers, and the paper-wrapped Necco Wafers she had just opened.
“White bean soup. I make it with fresh parsley, garlic, and a delicate imported parmigiano.” He smirked, and Kat imagined how many cans he opened in the morning, getting that fresh soup going.
“I’ll take a quart,” Ray said, pulling out his wallet.
They left to await the appearance of Pablo. They had only a few minutes to kill. Cars passed by but nobody stopped. Lights winked on behind them.
They didn’t want to return to the car, so they walked up the block toward a distant blinking sign that said, “Desert Tots.” On both sides of the street, empty lots extended for miles beyond the road. Tumbleweeds blew by. An early moon floated in the blue. A shaded wooden bench sat in front of the store, which on weekdays sold secondhand items for children. It was very quiet.
Ray opened his soup container and pulled a plastic spoon out of his pocket.
“You going to eat all that?”
“You could have told me to get two spoons,” he said, offering her the first bite.
“I couldn’t. I was embarrassed.” She slurped down a bite, then two, then three. “Oh, man.”
He took the spoon from her and sampled the soup.
“That kid can cook!”
They polished off the soup and walked up and down, past the library trailer, the bank branch, and the post office in the heat. That was one block and then they were in a neighborhood where a few kids played in a yard.
When they got back to the little store, they had a new contact, a middle-aged babe with bold silver streaks in her hair, who wore a lowcut T-shirt that displayed her amplitudes. Ray asked for Pablo again.
Seconds later, a man in a straw cowboy hat with a dark, seamed face appeared from behind a door at the back of the store. He had a cloth napkin decorated with roosters tucked into his neck like a bib. “Cheche outdid himself,” he said to the woman at the register. He paid no attention to Kat and Ray.