Sole Survivor Read online

  He opened his eyes and stared at the traffic speeding past him. If he chose the right moment, he could open the door, step out of the car, walk onto the freeway, and be struck dead by a truck.

  He remained safely in the Honda, not because he was afraid to die, but for reasons unclear even to him. Perhaps, for the time being at least, he felt the need to punish himself with more life.

  Against the passenger-side windows, the overgrown oleander bushes stirred ceaselessly in the wind from the passing traffic. The friction of the greenery against the glass raised an eerie whispering like lost and forlorn voices.

  He was not shaking anymore.

  The sweat on his face began to dry in the cold air gushing from the dashboard vents.

  He was no longer plagued by a sensation of falling. He had reached bottom.

  Through the August heat and a thin haze of smog, passing cars and trucks shimmered like mirages, trembling westward toward cleaner air and the cooling sea. Joe waited for a break in traffic and then headed once more for the edge of the continent.

  3

  The sand was bone white in the glare of the August sun. Cool and green and rolling came the sea, scattering the tiny shells of dead and dying creatures on the shore.

  The beach at Santa Monica was crowded with people tanning, playing games, and eating picnic lunches on blankets and big towels. Although the day was a scorcher farther inland, here it was merely pleasantly warm, with a breeze coming off the Pacific.

  A few sunbathers glanced curiously at Joe as he walked north through the coconut-oiled throng, because he was not dressed for the beach. He wore a white T-shirt, tan chinos, and running shoes without socks. He had not come to swim or sunbathe.

  As lifeguards watched the swimmers, strolling young women in bikinis watched the lifeguards. Their rhythmic rituals distracted them entirely from the architects of shells cast on the foaming shore near their feet.

  Children played in the surf, but Joe could not bear to watch them. Their laughter, shouts, and squeals of delight abraded his nerves and sparked in him an irrational anger.

  Carrying a Styrofoam cooler and a towel, he continued north, gazing at the seared hills of Malibu beyond the curve of Santa Monica Bay. At last he found a less populated stretch of sand. He unrolled the towel, sat facing the sea, and took a bottle of beer from its bed of ice in the cooler.

  If ocean-view property had been within his means, he would have finished out his life at the water’s edge. The ceaseless susurration of surf, the sun-gilded and moon-silvered relentlessness of incoming breakers, and the smooth liquid curve to the far horizon brought him not any sense of peace, not serenity, but a welcome numbness.

  The rhythms of the sea were all he ever expected to know of eternity and of God.

  If he drank a few beers and let the therapeutic vistas of the Pacific wash through him, he might then be calm enough to go to the cemetery. To stand upon the earth that blanketed his wife and his daughters. To touch the stone that bore their names.

  This day, of all days, he had an obligation to the dead.

  Two teenage boys, improbably thin, wearing baggy swim trunks slung low on their narrow hips, ambled along the beach from the north and stopped near Joe’s towel. One wore his long hair in a ponytail, the other in a buzz cut. Both were deeply browned by the sun. They turned to gaze at the ocean, their backs to him, blocking his view.

  As Joe was about to ask them to move out of his way, the kid with the ponytail said, “You holding anything, man?”

  Joe didn’t answer because he thought, at first, that the boy was talking to his buzz-cut friend.

  “You holding anything?” the kid asked again, still staring at the ocean. “Looking to make a score or move some merchandise?”

  “I’ve got nothing but beer,” Joe said impatiently, tipping up his sunglasses to get a better look at them, “and it’s not for sale.”

  “Well,” said the kid with the buzz cut, “if you ain’t a candy store, there’s a couple guys watching sure think you are.”

  “Where?”

  “Don’t look now,” said the boy with the ponytail. “Wait till we get some distance. We been watching them watch you. They stink of cop so bad, I’m surprised you can’t smell ’em.”

  The other said, “Fifty feet south, near the lifeguard tower. Two dinks in Hawaiian shirts, look like preachers on vacation.”

  “One’s got binoculars. One’s got a walkie-talkie.”

  Bewildered, Joe lowered his sunglasses and said, “Thanks.”

  “Hey,” said the boy with the ponytail, “just doing the friendly thing, man. We hate those self-righteous assholes.”

  With nihilistic bitterness that sounded absurd coming from anyone so young, the kid with the buzz cut said, “Screw the system.”

  As arrogant as young male tigers, the boys continued south along the beach, checking out the girls. Joe had never gotten a good look at their faces.

  A few minutes later, when he finished his first beer, he turned, opened the lid of the cooler, put away the empty can, and looked nonchalantly back along the strand. Two men in Hawaiian shirts were standing in the shadow of the lifeguard tower.

  The taller of the two, in a predominantly green shirt and white cotton slacks, was studying Joe through a pair of binoculars. Alert to the possibility that he’d been spotted, he calmly turned with the binoculars to the south, as if interested not in Joe but in a group of bikini-clad teenagers.

  The shorter man wore a shirt that was mostly red and orange. His tan slacks were rolled at the cuffs. He was barefoot in the sand, holding his shoes and socks in his left hand.

  In his right hand, held down at his side, was another object, which might have been a small radio or a CD player. It might also have been a walkie-talkie.

  The tall guy was cancerously tanned, with sun-bleached blond hair, but the smaller man was pale, a stranger to beaches.

  Popping the tab on another beer and inhaling the fragrant foamy mist that sprayed from the can, Joe turned to the sea once more.

  Although neither of the men looked as if he’d left home this morning with the intention of going to the shore, they appeared no more out of place than Joe did. The kids had said that the watchers stank of cop, but even though he’d been a crime reporter for fourteen years, Joe couldn’t catch the scent.

  Anyway, there was no reason for the police to be interested in him. With the murder rate soaring, rape almost as common as romance, and robbery so prevalent that half the populace seemed to be stealing from the other half, the cops would not waste time harassing him for drinking an alcoholic beverage on a public beach.

  High on silent pinions, shining white, three sea gulls flew northward from the distant pier, at first paralleling the shoreline. Then they soared over the shimmering bay and wheeled across the sky.

  Eventually Joe glanced back toward the lifeguard tower. The two men were no longer there.

  He faced the sea again.

  Incoming breakers broke, spilling shatters of foam on the sand. He watched the waves as a willing subject might watch a hypnotist’s pendant swinging on a silver chain.

  This time, however, the tides did not mesmerize, and he was unable to guide his troubled mind into calmer currents. Like the effect of a planet on its moon, the calendar pulled Joe into its orbit, and he couldn’t stop his thoughts from revolving around the date: August 15, August 15, August 15. This first anniversary of the crash had an overwhelming gravity that crushed him down into memories of his loss.

  When the remains of his wife and children had been conveyed to him, after the investigation of the crash and the meticulous cataloguing of both the organic and the inorganic debris, Joe was given only fragments of their bodies. The sealed caskets were the size usually reserved for the burial of infants. He received them as if he were taking possession of the sacred bones of saints nestled in reliquaries.

  Although he understood the devastating effects of the airliner’s impact, and though he knew that an unsparing fir
e had flashed through the debris, how strange it had seemed to Joe that Michelle’s and the girls’ physical remains should be so small. They had been such enormous presences in his life.

  Without them, the world seemed to be an alien place. He didn’t feel as if he belonged here until he was at least two hours out of bed. Some days the planet turned twenty-four hours without rotating Joe into an accommodation with life. Clearly this was one of them.

  After he finished the second Coors, he put the empty can in the cooler. He wasn’t ready to drive to the cemetery yet, but he needed to visit the nearest public rest room.

  Joe rose to his feet, turned, and glimpsed the tall blond guy in the green Hawaiian shirt. The man, without binoculars for the moment, was not south near the lifeguard tower but north, about sixty feet away, sitting alone in the sand. To screen himself from Joe, he had taken a position beyond two young couples on blankets and a Mexican family that had staked their territory with folding chairs and two big yellow-striped beach umbrellas.

  Casually Joe scanned the surrounding beach. The shorter of the two possible cops, the one wearing the predominantly red shirt, was not in sight.

  The guy in the green shirt studiously avoided looking directly at Joe. He cupped one hand to his right ear, as if he were wearing a bad hearing aid and needed to block the music from the sunbathers’ radios in order to focus on something else that he wanted to hear.

  At this distance, Joe could not be certain, but he thought the man’s lips were moving. He appeared to be engaged in a conversation with his missing companion.

  Leaving his towel and cooler, Joe walked south toward the public rest rooms. He didn’t need to glance back to know that the guy in the green Hawaiian shirt was watching him.

  On reconsideration, he decided that getting soused on the sand probably was still against the law, even these days. After all, a society with such an enlightened tolerance of corruption and savagery needed to bear down hard on minor offenses to convince itself that it still had standards.

  Nearer the pier, the crowds had grown since Joe’s arrival. In the amusement center, the roller coaster clattered. Riders squealed.

  He took off his sunglasses as he entered the busy public rest rooms.

  The men’s lavatory stank of urine and disinfectant. In the middle of the floor between the toilet stalls and the sinks, a large cockroach, half crushed but still alive, hitched around and around in a circle, having lost all sense of direction and purpose. Everyone avoided it—some with amusement, some with disgust or indifference.

  After he had used a urinal, as he washed his hands, Joe studied the other men in the mirror, seeking a conspirator. He settled on a long-haired fourteen-year-old in swim trunks and sandals.

  When the boy went to the paper-towel dispenser, Joe followed, took a few towels immediately after him, and said, “Outside, there might be a couple of cop types hanging out, waiting for me.”

  The boy met his eyes but didn’t say anything, just kept drying his hands on the paper towels.

  Joe said, “I’ll give you twenty bucks to reconnoiter for me, then come back and tell me where they are.”

  The kid’s eyes were the purple-blue shade of a fresh bruise, and his stare was as direct as a punch. “Thirty bucks.”

  Joe could not remember having been able to look so boldly and challengingly into an adult’s eyes when he himself had been fourteen. Approached by a stranger with an offer like this, he would have shaken his head and left quickly.

  “Fifteen now and fifteen when I come back,” said the kid.

  Wadding his paper towels and tossing them in the trash can, Joe said, “Ten now, twenty when you come back.”

  “Deal.”

  As he took his wallet from his pocket, Joe said, “One is about six two, tan, blond, in a green Hawaiian shirt. The other is maybe five ten, brown hair, balding, pale, in a red and orange Hawaiian.”

  The kid took the ten-dollar bill without breaking eye contact. “Maybe this is jive, there’s nobody like that outside, and when I come back, you want me to go into one of those stalls with you to get the other twenty.”

  Joe was embarrassed not for being suspected of pedophilia but for the kid, who had grown up in a time and a place that required him to be so knowledgeable and street smart at such a young age. “No jive.”

  “’Cause I don’t jump that way.”

  “Understood.”

  At least a few of the men present must have heard the exchange, but none appeared to be interested. This was a live-and-let-live age.

  As the kid turned to leave, Joe said, “They won’t be waiting right outside, easy to spot. They’ll be at a distance, where they can see the place but aren’t easily seen themselves.”

  Without responding, the boy went to the door, sandals clacking against the floor tiles.

  “You take my ten bucks and don’t come back,” Joe warned, “I’ll find you and kick your ass.”

  “Yeah, right,” the kid said scornfully, and then he was gone.

  Returning to one of the rust-stained sinks, Joe washed his hands again so he wouldn’t appear to be loitering.

  Three men in their twenties had gathered to watch the crippled cockroach, which was still chasing itself around one small portion of the lavatory floor. The bug’s track was a circle twelve inches in diameter. It twitched brokenly along that circumference with such insectile single-mindedness that the men, hands full of dollar bills, were placing bets on how fast it would complete each lap.

  Bending over the sink, Joe splashed handfuls of cold water on his face. The astringent taste and smell of chlorine was in the water, but any sense of cleanliness that it provided was more than countered by a stale, briny stink wafting out of the open drain.

  The building wasn’t well ventilated. The still air was hotter than the day outside, reeking of urine and sweat and disinfectant, so noxiously thick that breathing it was beginning to sicken him.

  The kid seemed to be taking a long time.

  Joe splashed more water in his face and then studied his beaded, dripping reflection in the streaked mirror. In spite of his tan and the new pinkness from the sun that he had absorbed in the past hour, he didn’t look healthy. His eyes were gray, as they had been all his life. Once, however, it had been the bright gray of polished iron or wet induline; now it was the soft dead gray of ashes, and the whites were bloodshot.

  A fourth man had joined the cockroach handicappers. He was in his mid-fifties, thirty years older than the other three but trying to be one of them by matching their enthusiasm for pointless cruelty. The gamblers had become an obstruction to the rest room traffic. They were getting rowdy, laughing at the spasmodic progress of the insect, urging it on as though it were a thoroughbred pounding across turf toward a finish line. “Go, go, go, go, go!” They noisily debated whether its pair of quivering antennae were part of its guidance system or the instruments with which it detected the scents of food and other roaches eager to copulate.

  Striving to block out the voices of the raucous group, Joe searched his ashen eyes in the mirror, wondering what his motives had been when he sent the boy to scope out the men in the Hawaiian shirts. If they were conducting a surveillance, they must have mistaken him for someone else. They would realize their error soon, and he would never see them again. There was no good reason to confront them or to gather intelligence about them.

  He had come to the beach to prepare himself for the visit to the graveyard. He needed to submit himself to the ancient rhythms of the eternal sea, which wore at him as waves wore at rock, smoothing the sharp edges of anxiety in his mind, polishing away the splinters in his heart. The sea delivered the message that life was nothing more than meaningless mechanics and cold tidal forces, a bleak message of hopelessness that was tranquilizing precisely because it was brutally humbling. He also needed another beer or even two to further numb his senses, so the lesson of the sea would remain with him as he crossed the city to the cemetery.

  He didn’t need distraction
s. He didn’t need action. He didn’t need mystery. For him, life had lost all mystery the same night that it had lost all meaning, in a silent Colorado meadow blasted with sudden thunder and fire.

  Sandals slapping on the tiles, the boy returned to collect the remaining twenty of his thirty dollars. “Didn’t see any big guy in a green shirt, but the other one’s out there, sure enough, getting a sunburn on his bald spot.”

  Behind Joe, some of the gamblers whooped in triumph. Others groaned as the dying cockroach completed another circuit either a few seconds quicker or a few slower than its time for the previous lap.

  Curious, the boy craned his neck to see what was happening.

  “Where?” Joe asked, withdrawing a twenty from his wallet.

  Still trying to see between the bodies of the circled gamblers, the boy said, “There’s a palm tree, a couple of folding tables in the sand where this geeky bunch of Korean guys are playing chess, maybe sixty, eighty feet down the beach from here.”

  Although high frosted windows let in hard white sunshine and grimy fluorescent tubes shed bluish light overhead, the air seemed yellow, like an acidic mist.

  “Look at me,” Joe said.

  Distracted by the cockroach race, the boy said, “Huh?”

  “Look at me.”

  Surprised by the quiet fury in Joe’s voice, the kid briefly met his gaze. Then those troubling eyes, the color of contusions, refocused on the twenty-dollar bill.

  “The guy you saw was wearing a red Hawaiian shirt?” Joe asked.

  “Other colors in it, but mostly red and orange, yeah.”

  “What pants was he wearing?”

  “Pants?”

  “To keep you honest, I didn’t tell you what else he was wearing. So if you saw him, now you tell me.”

  “Hey, man, I don’t know. Was he wearing shorts or trunks or pants—how am I supposed to know?”

  “You tell me.”

  “White? Tan? I’m not sure. Didn’t know I was supposed to do a damn fashion report. He was just standing there, you know, looking out of place, holding his shoes in one hand, socks rolled up in them.”

  It was the same man whom Joe had seen with the walkie-talkie near the lifeguard station.

  From the gamblers came noisy encouragements to the cockroach, laughter, curses, shouted offers of odds, the making of bets. They were so loud now that their voices echoed harshly off the concrete-block walls and seemed to reverberate in the mirrors with such force that Joe half expected those silvery surfaces to disintegrate.

  “Was he actually watching the Koreans play chess or pretending?” Joe asked.

  “He was watching this place and talking to the cream pies.”

  “Cream pies?”

  “Couple of stone-gorgeous bitches in thong bikinis. Man, you should see the redhead bitch in the green thong. On a scale of one to ten, she’s a twelve. Bring you all the way to attention, man.”

  “He was coming on to them?”

  “Don’t know what he thinks he’s doing,” said the kid. “Loser like him, neither of those bitches will give him a shot.”

  “Don’t call them bitches,” Joe said.

  “What?”

  “They’re women.”

  In the kid’s angry eyes, something flickered like visions of switchblades. “Hey, who the hell are you—the pope?”

  The acidic yellow air seemed to thicken, and Joe imagined that he could feel it eating away his skin.

  The swirling sound of flushing toilets inspired a spiraling sensation in his stomach. He struggled to repress sudden nausea.

  To the boy, he said, “Describe the women.”

  With more challenge in his stare than ever, the kid said, “Totally stacked. Especially the redhead. But the brunette is just about as nice. I’d crawl on broken glass to get a whack at her, even if she is deaf.”

  “Deaf?”

  “Must be deaf or something,” said the boy. “She was putting a hearing aid kind of thing in her ear, taking it out and putting it in like she couldn’t get it to fit right. Real sweet-looking bitch.”