I glanced toward Rebecca, whose smile was the wistful one I’d gotten used to over the past year or so. When I reached over and squeezed her hand, she squeezed back, but absently.
“What’s the smile for?” I said, and turned us into the drive. Past the gateposts, we emerged into a startlingly large parking lot that sprawled in both directions. A handful of older cars – an orange Dodge pickup, a ‘60s-vintage Volkswagon van, a U-haul trailer with no lead-vehicle attached to it – clustered like barnacle shells near the foot of the wooden steps that led up to the pier. Otherwise, there were only empty spaces, their white dividing lines obscured but still visible, rusted parking meters planted sideways at their heads like markers on anonymous graves.
“There used to be a billboard right next to that gate,” Rebecca said, staring around her. “A girl dressed in one of those St Pauli Girl waitress uniforms, you know what I’m talking about? Breasts like boulders, you felt like they were just going to pop loose and roll right off the sign and smash you when you drove under them. She was riding one of the merry-go-round horses and holding a big beer stein. Her uniform said LITE-YOUR-LINE on it, and in huge red letters over her head, the sign read, LONG BEACH PIER. GET LIT.”
Ash laughed quietly as I pulled into a spot a few rows from the van and pick-up, and Rebecca got out fast and stood into a surprising sea wind. Ash and I joined her, and I had a brief but powerful desire to ditch our friend, never mind how good it was to see him, take my wife by the elbow and steer her to the dark, disused stretch of beach fifty yards ahead of us. There we’d stand, let the planet’s breath beat against our skin until it woke us. The whole last year, it seemed to me, we’d been sleeping. Or I’d been sleeping, and Rebecca had been mourning, and something else, too. Retreating, maybe, from everything but her child. Shaking free of something old, because she had not been sleeping, even before our daughter was born.
“I think this is the only place I remember coming with him,” Rebecca said. “For fun, anyway.” She moved off toward the steps. We followed. Ash’s vest left little purple trails of reflected streetlight behind him. His gaze was aimed straight up the steps. Rebecca had a deeper hunger for these spots, I thought, these night-places where people washed up or swept in like sharks from the deep sea. But Ash could smell them.
“You came here a lot?” I asked. I considered taking Rebecca’s hand again, but thought that would be crowding her, somehow.
“More than you’d think.” She mounted the stairs. “Some days, he hadn’t even started drinking, yet. He’d wait until we got here. Buy my sister and me three dollars each worth of tickets – that was like fifteen rides – and plop us on the merry-go-round while he—”
The hands closed around us so fast, from both sides, that we didn’t even have time to cry out. One second we were alone at the top of the leaning staircase and the next there were filthy fingers clamped on all of our wrists and red, bearded faces leering into ours. The fingers began dragging us around in a sickening circle.
“Ring around the funny,” the face nearest to me half-sang, his breath overwhelming, equal parts bad gin and sea salt and sand. “Pockets full of money. Give it. Give it. Give it now/”
Then, as suddenly as they had grabbed us, they let go, a hand or two at a time, fell back a step, and we got our first good look. If we hadn’t been on a glorified dock at the edge of the Pacific, a hundred yards that felt like fifty miles from anywhere I knew, I think I might have laughed, or wept.
They stood before us in a clump, five decrepit men in ruined pea-coats with their noses running and their beards wild and their skin mottled with sores red and raised like octopus suckers. Probably, I thought, Long Beach – like the former People’s Republic of Santa Monica, and every other Southern California town I knew – had passed and enforced a new set of vagrancy laws to keep all that fresh sidewalk pavement free of debris. And this particular quintet had scuttled down here to hide under the great steel magician’s hat and sleep with the fishes and pounce on whatever drifted out to them like marine snow.
“Here,” Ash started, sliding a hand into the pocket of his vest, just as Rebecca stuck an arm across his chest.
“Don’t,” she said.
It shouldn’t have surprised me. I’d watched her do this before. Rebecca had worked with the homeless most of her adult life, and felt she knew what they needed, or at least what might be most likely to help. But I was always startled by the confidence of her convictions.
“Nearest shelter’s on La Amatista,” she said, gesturing over her shoulder toward the frontage road, town. “Five, maybe six blocks. They have food.”
“Don’t want food,” one of the men snarled, but his snarl became a whine before he’d finished the sentence. “We want change.”
“You won’t get ours.”
“Change.” The five of them knotted together – coiled, I thought, and my shoulders tensed, and I could feel the streaky wetness they’d left on my wrists and their breath in my mouth – and then, just like that, they were gone, bumping past us down the steps to disappear under the dock.
For a good minute, maybe more, the three of us stood in our own little clump, and there were unsettled feelings seeping up through my stomach, and I could neither place them nor get them quiet. Finally, Rebecca said, “The most amazing merry-go-round,” as though nothing whatsoever had occurred.
I glanced down the pier toward the magician’s hat, which was actually the roof of an otherwise open pavilion. There were lights clustered beneath it, yellow and green and red, but they seemed to waver above the water, connected to nothing, until I realized I was looking through some sort of threadbare canvas drapery suspended from the rim of the overhang like a giant spider web, generations in the making. Between us and the pavilion lay maybe fifty yards of moldy wooden planking. Shadows of indeterminate shape slid over the planks or sank into them, and on either side of the streetlights, solitary figures sat at the railing-less edges and dangled their legs over the dark and fished.
“Is this safe, Rebecca?” I asked.
She’d seemed lost in thought, staring after our would-be muggers, but now she brightened again, so fast I felt myself get dizzy. “We’ll let Ash go first. Drive everyone back with the vest.” She flicked his front with her fingers, and I felt a flicker of jealousy, couldn’t believe I was feeling it, and made myself ignore it.
Of course, Ash did go first. The lights and the pavilion and the curtain floating on the wind drew him. Me, too, but not in the same way. Rebecca waited for me to return her smile, then shrugged and stepped off behind our friend. I followed.
“They used to sell T-shirts from a stand right there,” she said as we walked, gesturing at the empty space to her left. “Army camouflage. American flag prints. They sold candy popcorn, too. My dad always bought us the Patriotic Bag. Red cherry, blue raspberry, vanilla.”
“Are there such things as blue raspberries?” Ash asked, but Rebecca ignored him.
“Lot of patriotic stuff, come to think of it. I wonder why. Bicentennial, maybe?”
If she was asking me, I had no answer. Periodically, one of the streetlamps buzzed or flickered. No moon. Our footsteps echoed strangely on the wet wood, sounding somehow lighter than they should have. Not one of the fishermen glanced our way, though one twitched as we drew abreast, hunched forward to work furiously at his reel, and yanked a small ray right up into the air in front of him. It hung there streaming, maybe a foot across, its underside impossibly white, silently flapping. Like the ripped-out soul of a bird, I thought, and shuddered while the fisherman drew the ray toward him and laid it, gently across his lap. It went on flapping there until it died.