“Grady,” Hattie said from behind me, “shut up.” She dipped a hand in her purse and brought out a foil-wrapped package. “Eat your dinner and shut up. You ain’t done nothin like that.”
“I did.”
“You a lie. You never said nothin to me.”
“Fantine—you was at the barn that night.” He held up his hand, as if to stop me, but he was showing me his finger. “Chicago had a knife. When I got to the dump and went to the back of the truck, he raised up and took a piece of me with him. But I had me a tire iron.”
I looked up at the slice of sky between buildings. Missippi and Cleveland and Louisiana and Chicago—all in California. Men and fathers and fools.
Grady tucked the package against him then, like it was a football. “I was waitin on Fantine. She can tell Glorette he didn’t leave. I disappeared his ass, and then I married her. But she left anyway. She still loved him. I don’t love her now. I’m done.” He brought the package to his lips and breathed in.
“You left him there?” I said. Sere Dakar—his real name something else. A laughing, thin musician with a big natural and green eyes. “At the dump?”
Grady threw his head up to the black sky and dim streetlamps. His throat was scaly with dirt. “The truck was full. I drove it up there and hit the button. Raised it up and dumped it in the landfill. Every morning, the bulldozer covered the layers. Every morning. It was Tuesday.” He stepped toward me. “He had my finger in there with him. I felt it for a long time. Like when I was layin in the bed at night, with Glorette, my finger was still bleedin in Dakar’s hand.” His eyes were hard to see. “Tell her.”
“She’s dead, Grady. I came to tell you. Somebody killed her back in Rio Seco. In an alley. They don’t know who. I’m going to see her tomorrow morning. Pay my respects.” I pictured Glorette lying on a table, the men who would have to comb and coil her hair. Higher on her head than normal, because she couldn’t lie on her back with all that hair gathered in a bun.
We’d always slept with our hair in braids. My eyes filled with tears, until the streetlamps faded to smears and I let down my eyelids hard. The tears fell on the sidewalk. When I looked down, I saw the wet.
Hattie went back inside without speaking to me, and she closed the black door hard. And Grady started to walk away, that familiar dipping lope that I’d watched for hours and hours while just behind him, that night.
I had to call a cab to get home. I went to Rio Seco the next morning in my Corsica. I thought I would see Grady Jackson there, or at the funeral, but I didn’t.
My father said to me, “You goin to Brazil? That far?” He shook his head. “You never fall in love with none of them place. Not one, no.”
I smiled and kissed him on the cheek. I sat all that night in my apartment, listening to Al Green, hearing the traffic on Echo Park Avenue, watching out my window as the palm fronds moved in the wind.
No one ever saw Grady Jackson again. I asked Hattie the following week, and the week after that, and then a month later. She was angry with me, and told me not to come back to the Golden Gopher. “You didn’t have to tell him,” she hissed.
“But he would have known someday,” I said.
“You know what?” she said, her fingers hard as a man’s on my wrist. “I loved my brother. I never loved nobody else in the world, but every day I saw my brother. I can’t never go back home, but he came to me. And you done took that away. You don’t know a damn thing about me or him.”
The next time I went to the bar, she was gone too.
I knew him. I figured he just started walking one day and never went back to Skid Row. Maybe he walked to Venice and disappeared under the waves. Maybe he walked all the way to San Francisco, or maybe he had a heart attack or died of dehydration, still moving.
That night, when we were young, when Grady left the car in Pomona, we walked down Mission Boulevard, leaving behind the auto shops and tire places, moving past vacant lots and tiny motor courts where one narrow walk led past doors behind which we could hear muffled televisions. Junkyard dogs snarled and threw themselves against chain-link. And we moved easy and fast, me just behind Grady. Walking for miles, past strawberry fields where water ran like mercury in the furrows. Walking past a huge pepper tree with a hollow where an owl glided out, pumping wings once and then gone.
That night, we walked like we lived in the Serengeti, I realized all those years later when I watched Grady disappear down 8th into the darkness. Like pilgrims on the Roman roads of France. Like old men in England. Like Indians through rain forests, steady down the trail. Fools craving movement and no words and just the land, all the land, where we left our footprints, if nothing else.
C
hange flows swiftly through L.A. like the shallow river that cuts into downtown on its way to the ocean. But in Los Angeles there are pockets, tiny whirlpools eddying in the stream, where change cannot reach. In those places, things even worse than change can find you.
Five till 7. With the taste of second-hand smoke in his mouth, he settles into a dark corner of his favorite bar in Chinatown, early for his date, ready to dope his new girlfriend. He has two beer bottles from the bar. He sets them on the wobbly square table. He looks around the place: The loud bleached-blonde harassing the bartender, the old men drinking Crown near the door, the smoking Chinese couple, all unconcerned with the packet of crushed powder he’s sifting down into the brown longneck. His eyes dart between them and his work, all the while he’s doing the male math in his head:
Four dates and still no sex. Tonight makes five.
He was proud to have walked away from the first date without so much as a kiss goodnight. If you can’t get a second date, she’s not worth sleeping with in the first place. It was date three that made him nervous, caused him to question his game. He knew then she wouldn’t be easy. He even wondered if she really liked him.
Now, it’s been ten days since they last saw each other. He was kicking himself for letting an opportunity with someone so beautiful slip by. He had thought it was all over, until she called earlier today.
Why the call? Why the rush to meet? Perhaps in her mind they were just friends, and this is what friends do, how friends behave. Even if so, what does she want from him?
When she arrives, she looks pale. Sweat darkens the hair around her temples. Her hands look dirty.
“Is this for me?” Slumping into the seat next to him, she grabs the full bottle and lets it drain into her mouth. “Have you been waiting long?”
He stares at her. “No, I haven’t been here long. Are you all right?”
“There was a problem.” She finishes her beer. “I think I need your help.”
“Of course. Anything. But you’re scaring me.”
“We’ve grown close in the last month, haven’t we?”
“Sure.”
She reaches her hand out to touch his arm. Her laughter sounds forced as it cracks, turning into something like crying. Hysteria.
He waits for her to compose herself. She looks around the dark room and says, “Not here. I can’t tell you here.”
He leans back, keeping quiet. He’s being baited and wants no part of it. He is familiar with the dynamics of power, the rules of hunting. Give too much and you can’t take. Push forward and your target retreats. Remain silent and she will open up.
He knows all this. He should have slept with her weeks ago.
She gives in, speaks: “It happened in the river.”
“What river?”
“The river, the L.A. River.”
“What happened?”
“I think … I think I just killed somebody.”
He waits for the punch line, which does not come. There’s no reason for her to lie to him. He fingers the empty powder packet in his suit jacket. Slowly, like powder, his plan dissolves.
He straightens up in his chair, reaches for a new plan. “Maybe we should go back to your place. You can tell me everything there.”
“No. There’s no time.” She lowers her voice. “I’ll take you to the body. You’ll know what to do. I’m in over my head. I trust you.”
He stammers out the beginning of an argument. She is already up, heading toward the door.
Trust. If he thinks about it too much, his muscles tense.
He offers to drive, insists upon it, concerned about her staying alert enough with the substance in her system. She won’t have it. They argue. Unable to reveal why he opposes her getting behind the wheel, he concedes.
She drives east out of Chinatown. They cross the river. A dark left takes them down an industrial service road until they hit Riverside Drive. They exchange no words. She speeds and swerves. He clutches the handle above the window.
Elysian Valley. She gets out of the car, locks the door, and heads toward the entrance of a bike path that runs along the crest of cement lining the deep, empty river basin.
“Hey!” he calls after her. “I think we need a plan. You haven’t told me anything. I want to help you, but I need a little more.”
“It was an accident.” Her words slur.
“Accidents happen.”
“We should walk and talk.” She takes his hand. “He knew so much about the river, more than most Angelenos.”
“So do you.”
“Yeah, well, that’s it. I think he was stalking me. I think … I was next.”
“An old flame?” He looks over the edge of the bike path. A knee-high barrier of loose chain-link tops an almost perpendicular sheer.
“No, I didn’t know him. I mean, I hadn’t ever met him. He started posting anonymous comments on my blog. Every time I wrote an article on the river, he would add his two cents. Sometimes he’d make corrections, sometimes he’d start an argument by taking a contrary point of view. At first I assumed he was with FoLAR—”
“Friends of the L.A. River?” He remembers this detail from her site.
“Yeah. But it didn’t fit. I know most of the gang over there, and he wasn’t anyone I recognized.” Her breathing has become labored. “Later, we e-mailed back and forth. His username was Pavlov.”
“A strange handle.” His eyes adjust, searching for the body. The only light comes from across the river. She tells him the MTA uses this defunct Southern Pacific structure as a place to store their spare light rail train cars. To him it looks like an abandoned factory.
“Wait, wait a second, please. I gotta stop.” She rubs her eyes. “I didn’t realize I was so out of shape.”
He touches her between her shoulder blades. “He wanted to meet you alone at night in the river? How did it get to that point?”
She walks away from his fingers. “Didn’t you ever want something so bad that, well, it’s not that you’d be willing to do
anything
, it’s that each step adds up and soon you find that you’re over the line, somewhere you shouldn’t be? You’ve got to help me, Jim.”
He does not say anything. His mind is already made up.
She points to where the body is, although he has a hard time seeing it at first. He must walk several yards farther north to where the embankment is gentle enough to descend. He makes his way down, his feet sideways so he doesn’t slip.
The body lies crumpled on the bone-dry, flat edge of the riverbed, several feet away from the small swash of water tracing the center of the channel. The man is dressed in a gray sports coat and jeans. His neck is twisted. His face is down.
“Hey,” he whispers, nudging the guy in the rump with his shoe. “Hey.” He leans down to find a pulse. The guy’s neck is cold.
She whispers down the embankment. “Is he definitely dead?”
“I wouldn’t think a fall down here would kill a guy.”
“He must have snapped his neck. It was a bad fall. From here it’s almost a straight drop.”
He looks up at her.
She says, “What? What are you thinking?”
“What aren’t you telling me?”
He hears her breathing heavily through the sobbing. “He … he took her.”
“Who?”
“Before I pushed him, he, he said I could find her … through … through the six cats. Should’ve went right away, but … got scared. Thought you could help.”
“You’re crazy—you’re not making any fucking sense.” He continues to examine the body, looks in the guy’s pockets. No wallet, no ID, a few dollars in cash. “I’ll help, but you need to start filling me in.”
“What … what are you doing?” Her voice rises like helium.
He pulls something from the body’s right suit pocket. A small metal object. A bell. Caked in dried mud.
He walks to the center of the river, to the water.
“Where are you going? What are you doing?” she asks.
He tries to wash the bell. He shakes it under the water, as if ringing it. No sound comes up past the surface. The cold water is surprisingly swift, like a full-force faucet running over his hand.
“I know you want me, Jim. And I know why you think you can’t have me. Doesn’t matter to me anymore. Find her and … I’ll do anything … I’ll let you do anything.”
Something in the water touches him, something that floats around his hand, something that feels like fingers. He flinches. The bell slips from his grasp.
“Shit,” he says.
“What! What’s going on down there?”
He splashes his hand in and out of the shallow water, but he can’t locate the bell.
“Shit. That guy had something in his pocket and when I tried to clean it off in the river, I dropped it. Now I can’t find it.”
“Was it the bell? Was it?”
He turns around to look up at her. She screams, using all her energy. The effort actually deflates her. Her body withers, goes limp. Her knees strain against the short chain-link fence. It buckles. She topples.
The drug. His drug. Now is its time. Its damage, far from expected, doesn’t seem real. Had she stayed a couple feet back, he would be crawling out of the river, gathering her unconscious body, and returning her home.
But she is too close to the edge. The fence cannot hold her body when she loses consciousness. Her upper body folds over the edge, the momentum carrying her head down fast in a dive. Her feet flip over the fence, and she’s falling. He watches her as she goes down with impressive velocity. Her limp condition might have saved a more substantial body, but her delicate frame snaps when her curved neck crashes into the dry gravel at the bottom. He runs to her, stops in front of her twisted, broken form.
He can hear the river churning, flowing fast behind him; its thimble-full of water, a flood.
He hyperventilates, looks for something to hold, to steady himself. His tongue pumps piston-like into the back of his throat.
What is happening?
He doesn’t bother with a pulse this time. He is afraid to know; although he knows he knows.
He speaks out loud, hoping his voice will give truth to the lies: “This is not my fault. This is not my fault. This is not my fault.”
This is a trap
, he thinks, his heart still racing.
I see it clearly, this quicksand of culpability. If I do nothing, I sink. If I struggle,
I go down faster. I must remain calm, go backward up along the path that brought me here, until another path presents itself. A tiny pocket. A window. An escape. If not from responsibility, from guilt.
Her dress has come up above her knees. He glances over to the man’s body. The head is cocked on its broken axis. Jim imagines the body looking back at him, even though only one eye is open. The man would say,
You can look. Take a peek.
It’s okay. You haven’t gone any farther than the rest of us. Don’t
worry about crossing the line. I am the eraser. The line is gone.
He walks away from the bodies, climbs out of the river. He takes her purse, checking for her keys and wallet. He leaves.
It takes him almost an hour to walk back to Chinatown. All the while he repeats to himself:
You can find her through the six cats.
Who is she? How can he find her? How can he help her?
He gets to his car, drives to the dead girl’s place, a one-bedroom cottage in Echo Park. With her key, he enters. He goes straight for the bedroom.
The scent of the place is familiar. It smells like her. He has been here a couple times, but never has he come into this room. He allows himself a moment to take it all in.
He opens the closet’s double doors. She has pushed a four-drawer dresser into the closet, clothes hanging on either side. On top of her dresser are two photos in stand-up frames. One is a picture of her with another girl, much younger. They are laughing, standing arm in arm. Sisters. The other is a picture of a young lady, taken at the beach. The sunglasses the woman is wearing, as well as the color and quality of the print, date it. Most likely, her mother.
Starting with the top drawer, he goes through the contents of her dresser. Bras, panties, socks, scarves, sweaters. What would have been a puerile thrill has become numerous slugs to the stomach. Still, he finishes, digging under the piles of folded fabric, knocking the four corners of each drawer, hoping to uncover a hidden relic of some sort.
Secret photos, perhaps. A bundle of old love letters. A diary.
He moves onto the shelves, finds a leather-bound volume of lined paper with less than half of its pages filled. He reads the first entry. As he reads, her voice rings in his ear.
He closes the book, looks around the room. He shakes his head and feels his forehead with the back of his hand. He’s hot.
He must not get distracted by emotions. There is a task at hand, he reminds himself. Whatever she was doing in the river remains unfinished. He owes it to her to see it through, all the way to the end. He remembers the list of clues he’s assembled: a missing girl, Pavlov, six cats, a bell.
He opens the book again. He tries speed-reading the diary to see if any of these things are mentioned. Nothing. The information is either not there or he’s too impatient to find it.
Frustrated, he turns to the last entry. Ten days ago. It’s an inconsequential write-up, but it gets him thinking: Wasn’t that the night of their last get-together?
Flipping through the pages, he searches for his name. He tries to remember the exact day of their first date. He finds it, an entry about that night. He reads her words. Her voice rings louder.
He rips the page from the book, stuffs the paper in his pocket, slams the book shut.
The ticking of a clock fills the quiet that remains. He’s concerned that he’s been in here too long. He expects a knock at the door any moment, but can’t imagine who would come calling at this hour.
He sits at her desk, digs through papers there. A good number of them are printouts of online reports: girls gone missing, kidnap suspects arrested, and alleged abductors still at large.