Pasadena (64 page)

Lindy got out of the car and opened the iron gate, a cloud of yellow dust rising, veiling her, but through it she could see him, and he never lost sight of her, of the whites of her eyes peering out. The sun was hot and Lindy’s headache remained, but the fatigue that had mounted in her the past several weeks was receding. She thought that if she had to, she could run up the hill—all the way to the great lawn and the loggia—and her blood was racing. And she thought it would be fun if the two of them left the cars at the gate and ran up the hill together, and she imagined their chests rising and falling with panting breath, and she imagined their hands clasping as she slowed before the lawn, and she imagined the great heat each of them would cast upon the other and she imagined the smell of sweat, the musk of a working heart.

She was standing next to her car dreaming of all this when the Pierce-Arrow’s door opened and Bruder got out: “Linda? Are you all right?”

“Lindy.”

Bruder cocked his chin.

“They call me Lindy now.”

“Lindy?”

“Lindy Poore.” Bruder got back into the Pierce-Arrow and yanked the door shut. Her daydream collapsed upon itself, and she got back in her own car and they drove up the switchbacks, like any two cars in traffic. Her radio lost reception at the turn just before the hillcrest. She
drove around the brittle summer lawn with no sound but the wind flushing through the car and the grind of the Pierce-Arrow behind her. As she approached the house, she felt the tent of her soul collapse with disappointment: Willis and Lolly would be on the loggia, listening to music and reading the newspapers, the children playing at their feet. Already Lindy felt duplicitous, and she grew quietly angry at Willis for making her feel this way. Her husband would be alarmed that she had brought a fugitive to the house; Lolly would blanch with fear, a balled hand fluttering upon her breast. They had always found Lindy reckless; “My girl of the Wild West,” Willis would say. “I pulled her off the frontier,” he would proclaim, shuddering at the thought of what California had once been, and comforting himself by what it had become, what it was on its way to becoming. They say that the only constant in California is its rapid rate of change, and Willis had tried to track down who had said it first, but he hadn’t found the answer; the researcher over at the Romanesque library on Walnut called back with an unspecific response: “My guess is they’ve been saying it since long before the Spanish arrived, Captain Poore.” Nonetheless, Willis would use the quote in his next presentation about the proposed parkway.

Now, as Lindy approached the house in her car, she feared her husband’s reaction to Bruder. Willis would study Lindy as she talked to Bruder; he would note that she hadn’t smiled in months and that now, on this afternoon in early August, her cheer had returned, her shoulders pulled back and her head leaning in to listen to her visitor. Lolly would coo and fan herself and look at the man through her fingers; she would rise from her chair and turn and offer a silhouette so thin in crêpe de chine that one might wager she wasn’t even there, or was merely a delicate pillar of bones held together by translucent flesh. She weighed only eighty-five pounds, and Lindy had heard the screams behind the bathroom door when the round-faced scale told Lolly that a new pound of flesh had latched on to her fragile pile. Lindy had seen Lolly’s lips seal upon themselves as the platter of
filet de boeuf au jus
moved around the table. Now Lindy imagined Lolly offering Bruder a lemonade and a licorice stick, and she and Willis would inspect him as if he were a delivery man from Model’s.

But Lindy couldn’t anticipate what Bruder would do. She still didn’t know what he was entitled to. She didn’t know that the scrap of paper with Willis’s written last will and testament was in an envelope in Bruder’s
breast pocket; she didn’t know that it was all he had arrived at prison with, and that it was the only thing they’d returned to him when he departed last week.

She drove the Gold Bug through the
porte cochère
, and there they were, her family: Willis in a fan-backed chair and Lolly on the swinging bench, one foot hooked beneath her. She was reading and he was examining papers and they had a soft, clayish appearance in the heat. The children were building a house of wood blocks, and Sieglinde was insisting that Pal didn’t know the correct way to erect a barn. Lindy had never felt it so distinctly, but the sensation pulsed through her that she did not belong to her family. They were strangers, except her daughter, and her heart felt what a heart feels for a stranger—very little beyond common compassion. Did Lindy feel even this? No, she felt even less for those who had become her own. She tried to stamp out the embers of this smoldering pitilessness, but she failed. Every now and then we stop loving those whom we love, she told herself, Bruder’s face still filling her rearview mirror. Love isn’t constant, it skips across a gap—does it not? She thought so, knowing also that more than once she had failed to navigate those bottomless ravines. In the mirror was Bruder, but it might as well have been her entire past, a memory sailing from one edge of the mind’s sea to the other. He’d come in a new seersucker suit, but he’d brought everything with him, every last memory.

When Willis saw Lindy, his face folded grimly upon itself. Lolly lifted her head and waved childishly and the Arcadia orange trees planted in the porcelain saki barrels were so sweet in the heat that their perfume caused Lindy to gag, and she didn’t stop the car but continued to steer through the pillars and past the house, down the other side of the hill to the ranch. She didn’t wait to see her family’s reaction to who was following her, and she sped along and Bruder remained behind her, the Pierce-Arrow clearing the pillars by a few inches and then emerging free from the
porte cochère
, and both cars gathered speed down the hard dirt road into the valley where summer sat in a haze.

They parked beneath the pepper tree and Linda got out of her car and Bruder slammed his door and the afternoon was silent, the grove dry and aching, the leaves parched and crisp, the irrigation ditches dead, the sun flashing off the packinghouse’s corrugated roof. Through the haze the mansion appeared white and faraway in a smudged white sky. “Nothing’s changed,” said Bruder.

And she said he was wrong.

He inspected himself and shrugged, as if excusing the suit and the tonicked hair. He had his reasons, and they didn’t have anything to do with Lindy, not anymore. He reminded himself of this each time the wind lifted her hair and pressed it against her throat, each time her face opened up and she said, “I don’t believe you’re here.”

She asked where he’d come from and he said Condor’s Nest and she said she didn’t understand. “I sold a couple of acres and bought myself a suit and a car,” he said, and again Lindy didn’t know what he was telling her. There’d been no word since the wadded apron arrived in the mail more than five years before. She’d written him two, maybe three times, but each letter was returned unopened, stamped
REJECTED BY PRISONER
. Over the years, whenever she read in the newspaper an item about San Quentin—another convict sent away for life—a precise vision would press upon her of Bruder in a colorless jumpsuit standing alone in a bleak yard, fingers curled through a fence, the clear, blank sunlight bringing a permanent squint to his eyes. He would be looking to the bay and the yawning mouth of Golden Gate, where the sea lions paddled with silver fish in their mouths. On some days she did her best not to think of him, but she almost always failed, and there was a terribleness to what she had done, or hadn’t done. Yet hadn’t she seen what she had seen, and what she hadn’t seen? Hadn’t she testified as precisely as she could? And she reassured herself that she hadn’t chosen Edmund over Bruder; no, she had chosen the truth, or what she knew of the truth. But even as the years in Pasadena had passed, and especially in the 109-degree summers when it was hard to think plainly at all, Lindy never forgot that Bruder had testified after her. She hadn’t been there, but Cherry had told her afterward: he took the stand and he was wearing a tie for the first time in his life and he told a story of Edmund’s eyeglasses flying from his face and his tripping over a lobster pot and the mallet twirling in the night sky. He carefully recounted his version, but it was too late: the jury had reached its conclusion even before he laid his hand atop the court’s warped Bible. “If this is the case, then why didn’t Mrs. Poore tell us about it yesterday?” Mr. Ivory had asked. He was a man with fleshy ears that had made Lindy think of a hound’s, and his quivering nostrils too, and what else could have happened that night other than what she thought she saw, and what the jury had agreed she must have seen? She had come to realize that Edmund and Bruder had
always been destined to destroy each other, each in his own way, each to remove the other from her life. All in one night her path to the rancho’s gate had been cleared. And now it all felt like fate—as the inevitable always does. It now felt as if she’d never lived anywhere else; as if Edmund and Bruder were men she had read about in a book pulled from Willis’s library or selected for her by Mr. Raines at Vroman’s—characters who remained in her head through her dreams and who felt more real than anyone she knew in Pasadena. Real because they weren’t real, not anymore. And yet, look there now, here was Bruder circling the ranch house, Panama hat in hand … And oh, Lindy, Lindy! Why were you saddled with the burden to never really know the men around you? To never really know yourself?

“You’re free,” she said. She said she didn’t understand what had happened—hadn’t the sentence been for twenty years?—and the fever in her hips caused Lindy to wince. Did Bruder see it, her creased eyes? Yes, for he came to her and said, “I’ve been back at Condor’s Nest almost a week.”

She wondered if he knew that earlier in the summer she had thievishly visited the farm, lurking in the yard and stealing memories? Had her fingers left prints in the dust on the knobs? Prints waiting for him as he returned? He didn’t say. Instead, he spoke of catching a barracuda almost five feet long, and of the lobster pots he had mended and returned to the ocean floor. He asked where she had sent Dieter. “I want to bring him home,” Bruder said, and she wondered if his voice held an accusation within it.

They were standing next to each other and a watery sensation passed through Lindy, as if Bruder were transferring something to her; as if he were a spirit passing through her. She felt something brush against her arm, but when she looked it wasn’t Bruder, who was two feet away, next to her but a small, treacherous gap away from her. She felt the pull and the resistance at once. She felt her heart rise high in her chest like a turnip-shape buoy lifted by a wave; she felt her pulse working. For the first time she feared he might find her silly. “Silly woman,” Willis would say about Ellie Sickman or Connie Ringe or even Lolly; “Don’t be silly, Lindy,” Willis would say. It was an insult Lindy would fight off with fists upon her husband’s lapel, but from Bruder it might simply crush her, its crinkle of truth.

“How did you come here?”

The ranch-house door opened and soon Hearts and Slaymaker were shaking hands with Bruder and slapping his back and they were standing close to each other, their arms folded against their chests as they were congratulating him for busting out.

“You’re living proof that truth is freedom,” said Slaymaker.

“I told you you should’ve never left us,” said Hearts. Time had touched him kindly in his lanky frame. But age had fallen swiftly upon Slaymaker, whose hair had whitened like sagebrush gone dry. The flesh around his throat had continued to pile up, his jowls sloppy, but his eyes remained blue and clear. Over the years Hearts would say, “It’s all in his eyes. I see straight through them, all the way down.” Now both men said that it was nothing but hard luck for a man to be thrown in like that, only to have the truth pull him back out five years later—and that’s five years too late, said Hearts. The two hands were jumping up and down, so excited were they to see their old foreman; and Hearts and Slaymaker confessed that they had missed Bruder, though they knew Bruder well enough not to hope for a similar confession in return.

Hearts pulled the newspaper from his pocket and said, “We were reading it just now in the afternoon edition. I read it and ran across the groves to tell Slay.”

“I thought someone was dead the way he was running after me, waving the paper. He had it folded up like he was about to hit an old dog, and he was saying, ‘You’ll never believe it! You’ll never believe it!’ ”

“I don’t think I’d have believed it if you weren’t right here,” said Hearts, and he tossed the paper onto the table, and it opened as if on its own, and on the back page was a story by Cherry Moss—she had abandoned the “Chatty Cherry” moniker sometime last year—with the headline:

CONVICTION OVERTURNED; JAILED MAN FREED

There wasn’t a picture, only two columns of newsprint, and Lindy brought the newspaper to her face and began to understand. She was shaking and the paper was blurry before her and there was a moment when her eyes wouldn’t focus—as if she didn’t know how to read and the letters didn’t fit together into words—but then she blinked and understood.

“Can you believe it? The tide was going out, not coming in,” said Hearts. “Leave it to Cherry.”

That wasn’t the whole story, but they didn’t say anything else. Lindy read the newspaper in silence, and when she was done she said, “You’ve been free for a week?”

“What was the first thing you did?” asked Hearts.

“Did you take the ferry into the city and drink yourself down?” asked Slay.

“I would’ve rented me a fancy hotel room,” said Hearts, “with sheets starched harder than ice, and gone to sleep for three days.”

“I would’ve taken the bus out to Sunset Beach,” said Slay. “Stripped down to nothing and gone for a swim, just to feel myself as free as a fish.”

“What’d you do, Bruder?”

“I went home.”

Hearts and Slaymaker nodded, this made sense to them—except that by now the old ranch house at the Pasadena was their only home.