Sole Survivor Read online

  Even though he was six inches taller and forty pounds heavier than the boy, Joe wanted to seize the kid by the throat and choke him. Choke him until he promised never to use that word again without thinking. Until he understood how hateful it was and how it soiled him when he used it as casually as a conjunction.

  Joe was frightened by the barely throttled violence of his reaction: teeth clenched, arteries throbbing in neck and temples, field of vision abruptly constricted by a blood-dark pressure at the periphery. His nausea grew worse, and he took a deep breath, another, calming himself.

  Evidently the boy saw something in Joe’s eyes that gave him pause. He became less confrontational, turning his gaze once more to the shouting gamblers. “Give me the twenty. I earned it.”

  Joe didn’t relinquish the bill. “Where’s your dad?”

  “Say what?”

  “Where’s your mother?”

  “What’s it to you?”

  “Where are they?”

  “They got their own lives.”

  Joe’s anger sagged into despair. “What’s your name, kid?”

  “What do you need to know for? You think I’m a baby, can’t come to the beach alone? Screw you, I go where I want.”

  “You go where you want, but you don’t have anywhere to be.”

  The kid made eye contact again. In his bruised stare was a glimpse of hurt and loneliness so deep Joe was shocked that anyone should have descended to it by the tender age of fourteen. “Anywhere to be? What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Joe sensed that they had made a connection on a profound level, that a door had opened unexpectedly for him and for this troubled boy, and that both of their futures could be changed for the better if he could just understand where they might be able to go after they crossed that threshold. But his own life was as hollow—his store of philosophy as empty—as any abandoned shell washed up on the nearby shore. He had no belief to share, no wisdom to impart, no hope to offer, insufficient substance to sustain himself, let alone another.

  He was one of the lost, and the lost cannot lead.

  The moment passed, and the kid plucked the twenty-dollar bill out of Joe’s hand. His expression was more of a sneer than a smile when he mockingly repeated Joe’s words, “‘They’re women.’” Backing away, he said, “You get them hot, they’re all just bitches.”

  “And are we all just dogs?” Joe asked, but the kid slipped out of the lavatory before he could hear the question.

  Although Joe had washed his hands twice, he felt dirty.

  He turned to the sinks again, but he could not easily reach them. Six men were now gathered immediately around the cockroach, and a few others were hanging back, watching.

  The crowded lavatory was sweltering, Joe was streaming sweat, and the yellow air burned in his nostrils, corroded his lungs with each inhalation, stung his eyes. It was condensing on the mirrors, blurring the reflections of the agitated men until they seemed not to be creatures of flesh and blood but tortured spirits glimpsed through an abattoir window, wet with sulfurous steam, in the deepest kingdom of the damned. The fevered gamblers shouted at the roach, shaking fistfuls of dollars at it. Their voices blended into a single shrill ululation, seemingly senseless, a mad gibbering that rose in intensity and pitch until it sounded, to Joe, like a crystal-shattering squeal, piercing to the center of his brain and setting off dangerous vibrations in the core of him.

  He pushed between two of the men and stamped on the crippled cockroach, killing it.

  In the instant of stunned silence that followed his intrusion, Joe turned away from the men, shaking, shaking, the shattering sound still tremulant in his memory, still vibrating in his bones. He headed toward the exit, eager to get out of there before he exploded.

  As one, the gamblers broke the paralytic grip of their surprise. They shouted angrily, as righteous in their outrage as churchgoers might be outraged at a filthy and drunken denizen of the streets who staggered into their service to sag against the chancel rail and vomit on the sanctuary floor.

  One of the men, with a face as sun red as a slab of greasy ham, heat-cracked lips peeled back from snuff-stained teeth, seized Joe by one arm and spun him around. “What the shit you think you’re doing, pal?”

  “Let go of me.”

  “I was winning money here, pal.”

  The stranger’s hand was damp on Joe’s arm, dirty fingernails blunt but digging in to secure the slippery grip.

  “Let go.”

  “I was winning money here,” the guy repeated. His mouth twisted into such a wrathful grimace that his chapped lips split, and threads of blood unraveled from the cracks.

  Grabbing the angry gambler by the wrist, Joe bent one of the dirty fingers back to break the bastard’s grip. Even as the guy’s eyes widened with surprise and alarm, even as he started to cry out in pain, Joe wrenched his arm up behind his back, twisted him around, and ran him forward, giving him the bum’s rush, facefirst into the closed door of a toilet stall.

  Joe had thought his strange rage had been vented earlier, as he had talked to the teenage boy, leaving only despair, but here it was again, disproportionate to the offense that seemed to have caused it, as hot and explosive as ever. He wasn’t sure why he was doing this, why these men’s callousness mattered to him, but before he quite realized the enormity of his overreaction, he battered the door with the guy’s face, battered it again, and then a third time.

  The rage didn’t dissipate, but with the blood-dark pressure constricting his field of vision, filled with a primitive frenzy that leaped through him like a thousand monkeys skirling through a jungle of trees and vines, Joe was nevertheless able to recognize that he was out of control. He let go of the gambler, and the man fell to the floor in front of the toilet stall.

  Shuddering with anger and with fear of his anger, Joe moved backward until the sinks prevented him from going any farther.

  The other men in the lavatory had eased away from him. All were silent.

  On the floor, the gambler lay on his back in scattered one-and five-dollar bills, his winnings. His chin was bearded with blood from his cracked lips. He pressed one hand to the left side of his face, which had taken the impact with the door. “It was just a cockroach, Christ’s sake, just a lousy cockroach.”

  Joe tried to say that he was sorry. He couldn’t speak.

  “You almost broke my nose. You could’ve broke my nose. For a cockroach? Broke my nose for a cockroach?”

  Sorry not for what he had done to this man, who had no doubt done worse to others, but sorry for himself, sorry for the miserable walking wreckage that he had become and for the dishonor that his inexcusable behavior brought to the memory of his wife and daughters, Joe nonetheless remained unable to express any regret. Choking on self-loathing as much as on the fetid air, he walked out of the reeking building into an ocean breeze that didn’t refresh, a world as foul as the lavatory behind him.

  In spite of the sun, he was shivering, because a cold coil of remorse was unwinding in his chest.

  Halfway back to his beach towel and his cooler of beer, all but oblivious of the sunning multitudes through which he weaved, he remembered the pale-faced man in the red and orange Hawaiian shirt. He didn’t halt, didn’t even look back, but slogged onward through the sand.

  He was no longer interested in learning who was conducting a surveillance of him—if that was what they were doing. He couldn’t imagine why he had ever been intrigued by them. If they were police, they were bumblers, having mistaken him for someone else. They were not genuinely part of his life. He wouldn’t even have noticed them if the kid with the ponytail hadn’t drawn his attention to them. Soon they would realize their mistake and find their real quarry. In the meantime, to hell with them.

  More people were gravitating to the portion of the beach where Joe had established camp. He considered packing and leaving, but he wasn’t ready to go to the cemetery. The incident in the lavatory had opened the stopcock on his supply of adrenaline, can
celing the effects of the lulling surf and the two beers that he had drunk.

  Therefore, onto the beach towel again, one hand into the cooler, extracting not a beer but a half-moon of ice, pressing the ice to his forehead, he gazed out to sea. The gray-green chop seemed to be an infinite array of turning gears in a vast mechanism, and across it, bright silver flickers of sunlight jittered like electric current across a power grid. Waves approached and receded as monotonously as connecting rods pumping back and forth in an engine. The sea was a perpetually laboring machine with no purpose but the continuation of its own existence, romanticized and cherished by countless poets but incapable of knowing human passion, pain, and promise.

  He believed that he must learn to accept the cold mechanics of Creation, because it made no sense to rail at a mindless machine. After all, a clock could not be held responsible for the too-swift passage of time. A loom could not be blamed for weaving the cloth that later was sewn into an executioner’s hood. He hoped that if he came to terms with the mechanistic indifference of the universe, with the meaningless nature of life and death, he would find peace.

  Such acceptance would be cold comfort, indeed, and deadening to the heart. But all he wanted now was an end to anguish, nights without nightmares, and release from the need to care.

  Two newcomers arrived and spread a white beach blanket on the sand about twenty feet north of him. One was a stunning redhead in a green thong bikini skimpy enough to make a stripper blush. The other was a brunette, nearly as attractive as her friend.

  The redhead wore her hair in a short, pixie cut. The brunette’s hair was long, the better to conceal the communications device that she was no doubt wearing in one ear.

  For women in their twenties, they were too giggly and girlish, high-spirited enough to call attention to themselves even if they had not been stunning. They lazily oiled themselves with tanning lotion, took turns greasing each other’s back, touching with languorous pleasure, as if they were in the opening scene of an adult video, drawing the interest of every heterosexual male on the beach.

  The strategy was clear. No one would suspect that he was under surveillance by operatives who concealed so little of themselves and concealed themselves so poorly. They were meant to be as unlikely as the men in the Hawaiian shirts had been obvious. But for thirty dollars’ worth of reconnaissance and the libidinous observations of a horny fourteen-year-old, their strategy would have been effective.

  With long tan legs and deep cleavage and tight round rumps, maybe they were also meant to engage Joe’s interest and seduce him into conversation with them. If this was part of their assignment, they failed. Their charms didn’t affect him.

  During the past year, any erotic image or thought had the power to stir him only for a moment, whereupon he was overcome by poignant memories of Michelle, her precious body and her wholesome enthusiasm for pleasure. Inevitably, he thought also of the terrible long fall from stars to Colorado, the smoke, the fire, then death. Desire dissolved quickly in the solvent of loss.

  These two women distracted Joe only to the extent that he was annoyed about their incompetent misidentification of him. He considered approaching them to inform them of their mistake, just to be rid of them. After the violence in the lavatory, however, the prospect of confrontation made him uneasy. He was drained of anger now, but he no longer trusted his self-control.

  One year to the day.

  Memories and gravestones.

  He would get through it.

  Surf broke, gathered the foamy fragments of itself, stole away, and broke again. In the patient study of that endless breaking, Joe Carpenter gradually grew calm.

  Half an hour later, without the benefit of another beer, he was ready to visit the cemetery.

  He shook the sand out of his towel. He folded the towel in half lengthwise, rolled it tight, and picked up the cooler.

  As silken as the sea breeze, as buttery as sunlight, the lithe young women in the thong bikinis pretended to be enthralled by the monosyllabic repartee of two steroid-thickened suitors, the latest in a string of beach-boy Casanovas to take their shot.

  The direction of his gaze masked by his sunglasses, Joe could see that the beauties’ interest in the beefcake was pretense. They were not wearing sunglasses, and while they chattered and laughed and encouraged their admirers, they glanced surreptitiously at Joe.

  He walked away and did not look back.

  As he took some of the beach with him in his shoes, so he strove to take the indifference of the ocean with him in his heart.

  Nevertheless, he could not help but wonder what police agency could boast such astonishingly beautiful women on its force. He had known some female cops who were as lovely and sexy as any movie star, but the redhead and her friend exceeded even celluloid standards.

  In the parking lot, he half expected the men in the Hawaiian shirts to be watching his Honda. If they had it staked out, their surveillance post was well concealed.

  Joe drove out of the lot and turned right on Pacific Coast Highway, checking his rearview mirror. He was not being followed.

  Perhaps they had realized their error and were frantically looking for the right man.

  From Wilshire Boulevard to the San Diego Freeway, north to the Ventura Freeway and then east, he drove out of the cooling influence of the sea breezes into the furnace heat of the San Fernando Valley. In the August glare, these suburbs looked as hot and hard-baked as kiln-fired pottery.

  Three hundred acres of low rolling hills and shallow vales and broad lawns comprised the memorial park, a city of the deceased, Los Angeles of the dead, divided into neighborhoods by gracefully winding service roads. Famous actors and ordinary salesmen were buried here, rock-’n’-roll stars and reporters’ families, side by side in the intimate democracy of death.

  Joe drove past two small burial services in progress: cars parked along the curb, ranks of folding chairs set up on the grass, mounds of grave earth covered with soft green tarps. At each site, the mourners sat hunched, stifled in their black dresses and black suits, oppressed by heat as well as by grief and by a sense of their own mortality.

  The cemetery included a few elaborate crypts and low-walled family garden plots, but there were no granite forests of vertical monuments and headstones. Some had chosen to entomb the remains of their loved ones in niches in the walls of communal mausoleums. Others preferred the bosom of the earth, where graves were marked only with bronze plaques in flat stone tablets flush with the ground, so as not to disturb the park-like setting.

  Joe had put Michelle and the girls to rest on a gently rising hillside shaded by a scattering of stone pines and Indian laurels. Squirrels scampered across the grass on milder days than this, and rabbits came out at twilight. He believed that his three treasured women would have preferred this to the hardscape of a mausoleum, where there would not be the sound of wind-stirred trees on breezy evenings.

  Far beyond the second of the two burial services, he parked at the curb, switched off the engine, and got out of the Honda. He stood beside the car in the hundred-degree heat, gathering his courage.

  When he started up the gentle slope, he didn’t look toward their graves. If he were to see the site from a distance, the approach to it would be daunting, and he would turn back. Even after an entire year, each visit was as disturbing to him as if he had come here to view not their burial plots but their battered bodies in a morgue. Wondering how many years would pass before his pain diminished, he ascended the rise with his head down, eyes on the ground, slump-shouldered in the heat, like an old dray horse following a long-familiar route, going home.

  Consequently, he didn’t see the woman at the graves until he was only ten or fifteen feet from her. Surprised, he halted.

  She stood just out of the sun, in pine shadows. Her back was half to him. With a Polaroid camera, she was snapping photographs of the flush-set markers.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  She didn’t hear him, perhaps because he had spoke
n softly, perhaps because she was so intent upon her photography.

  Stepping closer, he said, “What are you doing?”

  Startled, she turned to face him.

  Petite but athletic-looking, about five feet two, she had an immediate impact far greater than her size or her appearance could explain, as though she were clothed not merely in blue jeans and a yellow cotton blouse but in some powerful magnetic field that bent the world to her. Skin the shade of milk chocolate. Huge eyes as dark as the silt at the bottom of a cup of Armenian espresso, harder to read than the portents in tea leaves, with a distinct almond shape suggesting a touch of Asian blood in the family line. Hair not Afro-kinky or in cornrows but feather-cut, thick and naturally straight and so glossy black that it almost looked blue, which seemed Asian too. Her bone structure was all out of Africa: smooth broad brow, high cheekbones, finely carved but powerful, proud but beautiful. She was maybe five years older than Joe, in her early forties, but a quality of innocence in her knowing eyes and a faint aspect of child-like vulnerability in her otherwise strong face made her seem younger than he was.

  “Who are you, what’re you doing?” he repeated.

  Lips parted as if to speak, speechless with surprise, she gazed at him as though he were an apparition. She raised one hand to his face and touched his cheek, and Joe did not flinch from her.

  At first he thought he saw amazement in her eyes. The extreme tenderness of her touch caused him to look again, and he realized that what he saw was not wonderment but sadness and pity.

  “I’m not ready to talk to you yet.” Her soft voice was musical.

  “Why’re you taking pictures…why pictures of their graves?”

  Clutching the camera with two hands, she said, “Soon. I’ll be back when it’s time. Don’t despair. You’ll see, like the others.”

  An almost supernatural quality to the moment half convinced Joe that she was an apparition, that her touch had been so achingly gentle precisely because it was barely real, an ectoplasmic caress.

  The woman herself, however, was too powerfully present to be a ghost or a heatstroke illusion. Diminutive but dynamic. More real than anything in the day. More real than sky and trees and August sun, than granite and bronze. She had such a compelling presence that she seemed to be coming at him though she was standing still, to loom over him though she was ten inches shorter than he. She was more brightly lighted in the pine shadows than he was in the direct glare of the sun.

  “How are you coping?” she asked.

  Disoriented, he answered only by shaking his head.

  “Not well,” she whispered.

  Joe looked past her, down at the granite and bronze markers. As if from very far away, he heard himself say, “Lost forever,” speaking as much about himself as about his wife and daughters.

  When he returned his attention to the woman, she was gazing past him, into the distance. As the sound of a racing engine rose, concern crinkled the corners of her eyes and creased her forehead.

  Joe turned to see what was troubling her. Along the road that he had traveled, a white Ford van was approaching at a far higher speed than the posted limit.

  “Bastards,” she said.

  When Joe turned to the woman again, she was already running from him, angling across the slope toward the brow of the low hill.

  “Hey, wait,” he said.

  She didn’t pause or look back.

  He started after her, but his physical condition wasn’t as good as hers. She seemed to be an experienced runner. After a few steps, Joe halted. Defeated by the suffocating heat, he wouldn’t be able to catch up with her.

  Sunlight mirroring the windshield and flaring off the headlight lenses, the white van shot past Joe. It paralleled the woman as she sprinted across the grave rows.

  Joe started back down the hill toward his car, not sure what he was going to do. Maybe he should give chase. What the hell was going on here?

  Fifty or sixty yards beyond the parked Honda, brakes shrieking, leaving twin smears of rubber on the pavement behind it, the van slid to a stop at the curb. Both front doors flew open, and the men in Hawaiian shirts leaped out. They bolted after the woman.

  Surprise halted Joe. He hadn’t been followed from Santa Monica, not by the white van, not by any vehicle. He was sure of that.

  Somehow they had known that he would come to the cemetery. And since neither of the men showed any interest in Joe, but went after the woman as if they were attack dogs, they must have been watching him at the beach not because they were interested in him, per se, but because they hoped that she would make contact with him at some point during the day.

  The woman was their only quarry.

  Hell, they must have been watching his apartment too, must have followed him from there to the beach.

  As far as he knew, they had been keeping him under surveillance for days. Maybe weeks. He had been in such a daze of desolation for so long, walking through life like a sleeper drifting through a dream, that he would not have noticed these people slinking at the periphery of his vision.

  Who is she, who are they, why was she photographing the graves?

  Uphill and at least a hundred yards to the east, the woman fled under the generously spreading boughs of stone pines clustered along the perimeter of the burial grounds, across shaded grass only lightly dappled with sunshine. Her dusky skin blended with the shadows, but her yellow blouse betrayed her.