“So what does Sticks say? He’s like, let’s take the brain.”
“He wants to take the brain,” Moss said. He laughed, a short, deep bark. “That sounds about right for Sticks.”
Fingers nodded. “Yeah, he wants the brain. I’m like, you got to be fucking kidding me. Is this a joke? He wants to take it for a souvenir. Thinks he’ll put it in his refrigerator or maybe pickle it. And he starts getting adamant about it. I’m like, man, I am not driving twelve fucking hours to New York with a brain in the car. You want the brain, call a cab.”
Cruz had had enough of their conversation.
He slipped the music back on his ears and picked the dossier off the floor. He started to read about Smoke Dugan again, but then changed his mind. Instead, he gazed out the window and watched the passing trees.
Pamela jogged the Back Cove trail.
It was three and a half miles of dirt track around the Cove. On a cool fall day like today, the trail was packed with joggers, walkers – some with baby strollers, and bicyclists. It was high tide and the Cove shimmered blue with the skyline of the city in the distance. Out on the water, two wind surfers raced back and forth.
Pamela was an avid jogger. She jogged here often, stealing glances at the men who passed. The Back Cove trail was a veritable smorgasbord of fit people out getting their exercise. She noticed the women, too. The women in their tight spandex shorts and halter tops. The sexy women with whom she could never compete.
She in her sweat pants and layered t-shirts.
God, what was wrong with her? As long as could remember, she had always been this way. Shy, retiring, tongue-tied with people she did not know. But she was good looking. At least she thought she was and Lola always told her she was. But she was twenty-nine years old, and more than three years had passed since she had been alone. She thought of her last boyfriend – Thomas – bookish, thin, with glasses. He was smart and had an off-beat, self-deprecating sense of humor. He was a student at the University of Maine law school, and when he graduated, he asked her to marry him.
She said no.
Things were good with Thomas, and she thought long and hard about becoming his wife. But in the end, he wasn’t her type. At least, he wasn’t the type she imagined was hers. And she was not the quiet suburban wife of Thomas the corporate lawyer. She recalled the last time they had made love, right before he left town for Providence, Rhode Island. He had cried, and so had she, and they had stopped halfway through. It made her think of the old joke – if I’d known the last time was really going to be the last time…
Why could she never seem to find a man?
She was bookish, certainly, just like Thomas. From the earliest age, she had been more interested in reading books and watching movies than in dealing with people. Life seemed so boring sometimes, and the lives lived in books, well, they seemed so exciting. She had grown up in Newmarket, New Hampshire, a town where the big excitement was the freight trains passing through town – so close to her family’s backyard that Pamela often thought of jumping aboard as the open cars passed – and summers on the nearby Seacoast beaches. In the evenings, she and her brother would often play Scrabble or Monopoly with her mom and dad. It was a normal, stable life. And for Pamela, from the time she was a little girl, the real excitement – and maybe the only deep enjoyment – came from escaping into the stories. The Nancy Drew mysteries. Encyclopedia Brown. A little later, The Lord of the Rings. And of course, the movies: Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and The Never Ending Story.
She envied Lola. She loved her like a sister, but there was also the sting of envy. Could you imagine? Lola had grown up in a Chicago housing project – a slum where drug deals went down on street corners, where gunfire sounded at night, where men murdered each other in the hallways. Just last week, two men tried to rape her, she beat them both at once, and now she acted like it never happened. Pamela could never do that, would never want something similar to happen to her, and yet, there was something about it that enticed her.
She remembered how as a girl, she would imagine herself as a pirate. Not as a woman who hung around with pirates, but as an actual pirate herself, sailing the high seas, attacking and plundering other ships, making people walk the plank.
She would give anything to live a life of swashbuckling adventure. She should have become a cop, or a spy, or an ambulance driver – not a librarian who half the time felt afraid to meet the eyes of library patrons.
Face it, her life was boring. It was an endless string of days, each fading into the next, her youth passing away fruitlessly. The lives of the library patrons were boring, too. She watched them. She saw the emptiness in their eyes, the longing for escape, the unfulfilled wishing for something, anything, to happen. Even the homeless people – she had once held a romantic notion that the life of a homeless person might be exciting. But they came into the library by the dozens during the cold weather. They slumped in chairs and dozed. They leafed through magazines for hours on end. Some of them simply sat and stared into space. The homeless people led boring lives.
Adventure. That’s what she longed for, what she had always longed for. To be in danger. To survive on the edge. And to take a lover, a dark and handsome stranger – yes, just like in the books – a desperate man with rippling muscles, yes and long hair and a fire in his belly. A savage, passionate man. Yes.
She finished her run at the parking lot. She was sweaty, out of breath, and felt exhilarated as always. It was a nice day, and it was good to get these negative thoughts out of her system. She consoled herself as she stretched on the grass near her peppy little car, a Volkswagen Golf.
Someday, she thought, it will happen. I will be like Lola. And I’ll lead a life of adventure just like the one she has lead.
Empty hand, empty mind.
Lola sat cross-legged on a wool blanket. She had placed the blanket on the gently sloping hill of the city’s Eastern Promenade. Eastern Prom was the extremity of the peninsula that made up downtown Portland. A long avenue of stately Victorian mansions giving way to early 20^th century tenement buildings on one side of the street, and a grassy park and pedestrian walkway overlooking the islands of Casco Bay on the other side, the Prom was just around the corner from her apartment. Indeed, Lola could see this same bay from her back deck, if she chose. As on any Sunday in the fall, the bay was dotted with white sails driven by the wind – there was a sailboat rental concession on the waterfront not a half mile away from where she sat.
Lola came here to meditate.
Empty hand was karate. She learned to fight with no weapon but herself – and she believed now, for the first time, that she needed no other. Empty mind was Zen, a path that had been married to karate almost since the beginning. It was a term one of her teachers had given her. The karate practitioner – the karateka – sought to train herself to develop a clear conscience, an empty mind. This would enable her to face the world truthfully. An empty mind was tranquil – because to see the truth meant no fear of death, no fear of pain, no fear of anything. An empty mind lived in the present, the essential time, the only time that was available. The past was irretrievably lost and the future was forever unattainable. There was no time but now.
She sat, eyes closed, facing the water. Her hands were upturned and resting lightly, one on each folded knee. She wore jeans and a light jacket. Her feet were bare, her sandals kicked off in front of her. The cold breeze blew across her, each gust with the bite of the coming winter embedded deep within it. She took deep breaths, each one coming from the belly, and with each breath she tried – she tried too hard – to let go. It was no use. The memories flooded back. They always did.