The city fell away below. Then they were high in the hills, rich with the narcotic aroma of eucalyptus, heavy sea air, the faint scent of brush from the canyons to the east.
Linda’s house was a big shady affair off of Temple Hills. Frye pulled up near a huge bougainvillea aflame with purple bracts that shifted in the darkness. In a vague technical sense, he considered this to be their tree: they had made love under it in a sleeping bag one summer night that now seemed ages ago, and the purple discs had stuck to her back and her hair. Odd, he thought, that when she left the cave-house she moved here, right behind our tree. Was it a declaration of independence, or nostalgia?
In the upstairs bedroom a light shone, and for a moment he saw her behind the curtains. With a burst of optimism he commanded the dog to stay, then jumped out of the car, crunched across the leaf-strewn yard, hurdled a low white fence and hailed her from below the window. “Linda! It’s Charles here! Chuck Frye, inventor of the MegaSkate, joy to millions of skateboarders across the world!”
The curtain parted.
“Linda’s not here, Chuck. She moved out three weeks ago, just like I told you last week and the week before that.”
This was all wrong. This was not the woman he was expecting. From somewhere back in the narrow lanes of his memory came the message that he had been here before. “I’m prepared to hang myself for you. I’ve brought a belt to do it. Right here on our tree, where we made love.”
The face above him laughed. The curtain swung open. “Chuck, you know she’s in New York, so why do you do this? You’ve got her number, for heaven’s sake. You put the poor woman through enough. Really. You kinda give me the creeps when you’re like this, to tell you the truth.”
Frye tried to take off his belt for the self-lynch, but he wasn’t wearing one. This is getting gothic, he thought.
“Sleep it off, Chucky.” The curtains came back together, and Frye heard a window slide shut and lock. Glad she set me straight before something stupid happened. What are friends for? He tore a branch off the bougainvillea shrub.
Back in the Cyclone now, Frye sped up Coast Highway, past the hills of the Laguna Paradiso, past Crystal Cove to Corona del Mar. The night was clear and the stars dense and he could see the ocean stretched like a jeweled blanket to the horizon. He parked on top of the bluff and found the marker. The grass was freshly cut. Someone had brought flowers. Hyla, probably. He set the bougainvillea branch on the granite, closed his eyes, and started a prayer he couldn’t finish. Things just kept unwinding. Everything was a blur: the moon, the city lights below, the paths among the stones. The dog wandered, apparitional. Frye wiped his eyes. He brushed the smooth granite with wet fingertips and tried his best not to remember.
The trip back to town was a blur of steering wheel and brakes, the stink of rubber, of close calls with large objects positioned specifically to cause him death. The dog sat beside him, bandana lifting in the breeze, tipping left and right, barking with insane happiness.
The dog followed him into the house. Frye stopped in the doorway and felt a shot of adrenaline course through him. Inside, his neighbor, Denise, was sitting on his couch, pulling at the loose foam, watching his TV, which miraculously still worked. “Hi, Chucky. I was lonesome so I let myself in. Mind?”
“No,” someone said. “You scared me.”
Denise giggled. “Sorry. What a beautiful dog. Is he yours?”
“We’re brothers.”
“That’s what this lady on Letterman says too. Look.”
Frye regarded the lovely face of Lucia Parsons. She was speaking of governments getting us into war and the people getting us out. Letterman swallowed his gap-toothed smile and mustered a look of sincerity. “This is a grass-roots movement of people,” she said. “Our Committee is Americans working with Vietnamese. There is no direct government involvement. The governments simply can’t get the job done — look at past efforts. We’ll get our prisoners back, working with the Vietnamese people. My counterpart over there is a man named Tran Tanh — he’s a wonderfully open and generous man. He has the support of Hanoi, but he isn’t a politician. In fact, he teaches school.”
“But are there any POWs?” Letterman asked.
Lucia Parsons smiled. “I have some very strong evidence. It isn’t something I can make public yet, but I will. I can tell you, David, as surely as I sit here, there are American prisoners alive in Vietnam, And I can tell you we’re going to get them out. We need money, we need time, and we need the support of the American people.”
Letterman alluded to the support of his sponsors, and the program cut to some deal on Nissan hardbodies.
“She lives right here in Laguna, Chuck. Isn’t that neat we’ve got a national movement in our own back yard? There’s a meeting tomorrow and I’m gonna sign up. Think of all the good-looking guys around if someone like her is running it.”
“The mind reels.”
“You look bad tonight, Chuck. How come your house is all busted up? What happened to your face? This couch here is really fucked, you know that? Salvation Army’s got a good one for seventy-five bucks, some rich lady died but it’s got cat pee all over it. I love cats, so for me that pee isn’t a negative thing at all. Want some homemade acid?”
“God please no.”
“You need something. Come here and lay down. I’ll give you a rub since I’m drinking your wine.”
The dog leapt to take his place, and Denise shooed him away. Frye nosedove to the couch, then worked himself over to his back. He looked up at Denise, who from this vantage point had implausibly large nostrils. Lucia Parsons was saying that the Vietnamese government had entirely approved the basic concept of working with the American people. Denise kneaded his shoulders with strong fingers. “Poor Chuck. Linda ditches him so he drinks too much. It’s lonely at the bottom.”
Looking up, Frye wondered how Denise made thirty look like sixteen. A pale little woman without fat or wrinkles, a wonderfully preserved pixie. Amazing, he thought, considering her appetite for abuse. Might drugs and relentless fornication promote age-abatement, a pickling of youth in its tracks? Worth looking into. “Who’s the squeeze this week?”
“Week nothing, Chuck. I’ve been seeing Simon for almost a month straight. He’s a chemistry student at State, and makes this great acid. I’m tripping right now. Your face looks like wax, except for the beat-up part, and that looks like, well... something geological.”
“What happened to Dick?”
Denise’s fingers moved to his neck. “Went back to his wife.”
“Billy?”
“Turned out to be gay.”
“It makes you think.”
“Yeah, but not that much. Life is reflex. Want me to take you to bed?”
Frye looked up, considering Denise for the thousandth time. She was pretty and willing, but her legion lovers implied venereal realities of the worst kind, crippling viral bummers with cures still centuries in the future.
“No. Thanks.”
“You really look bad, Chuck. Want some coke?” She produced a heap and held a loaded fingernail toward him. He turned away.
“God please no.”
Then she was off on a detailed account of today’s colonic enema, how clean you feel when it’s over, how pure and new. “I’ll give you one sometime,” she offered.
“You certainly won’t, young lady.” Frye felt the first waves of sleep tilting over him, let out a groan.