Stolen Pleasures (32 page)

The
San Pedro
—
lindenwood,
7
ft.
graced the roof of the harbormaster's office. Painted, it resembled the figures at the prows of old sailing ships. Gazing at it from the pilings among the private yachts, he saw Jukovich's intentions. With face set serenely forward, with hand over its thrusting heart, this saint could be counted on to guide you through the chaotic, dark night of the soul, just as the old carven figureheads had carried voyagers over tumultuous seas to shore. Closer, he saw that the paint, once deeply luminous, gemlike, was scaling off, fading, so that the face resembled that of a blind leper. He wondered then if the artist had intended this disintegration in order to affirm the spirit of universal love in beings considered
loathsome, or who were pariahs, or who ought never to have been born. Seagulls had left a redemptive white mantle over the figure.

The
Santa Catalina
—
buff marble, 9ft.
was situated, he read, atop that island's Blackjack Mountain. Yachtsmen, engrossed in polishing and varnishing, failed to hear him ask if they were bound for the island. Others, hoisting sail, seemed anxious to leave him behind—a space case, unshaven, his clothes evidently slept in. At last one lean and aristocratic yachtsman—white pants, white deck shoes, white polo shirt—told him to hop aboard, and where did he wish to go?

The wind died down as they were making their way out of the harbor, and Milo's benefactor discovered that the engine would not work without fuel. While frighteningly large container ships loomed past the becalmed sloop, the man became abusively drunk. After several staggering attempts on Milo's life with an iron spike and a galley knife, the man fell down on the deck, beyond reviving. Wind filled the sails at that point, and Milo piloted the boat safely across the channel.

Dawn was already breaking when he touched the island, and so he set out to climb the mountain before the day got too hot. He climbed to the top and then beat the bushes all day under the merciless sun. The
Santa Catalina
must have been stolen. Exhausted from the previous night's ordeal and the day's futile search, Milo lay down to sleep on the base of the missing saint. So far, whatever Jukovich had hoped to reveal in his hulks of marble and wood and metal wasn't evident yet to his son's eyes and heart. All that he knew for certain was that his bones ached, his jaw moaned where
the iron spike had skidded by, his eyes burned, and the soles of his feet were molten lead. Then the moon rose.

The moon rose, a full moon so unexpected, so filled with its own intentions, it was the most alarming thing he'd ever seen. Unable to take his eyes away, he watched every inch of its slow and unimpeded glide. Until he saw that while he was watching the moon itself, it had immersed the mountain in a sea of moonlight, slipping into the weave of his thin blanket and bringing forth little silver threads to rise and sway en masse, as it did the silver hairs on his arms and hands. Small white spiders sprayed over him and a silver raccoon drifted by, while a nightbird went on and on with its long, involved story, almost desperately, because the same moon might never come by again and the bird had a lot pent up in its breast. The spirit of everything alive was amove in the moonlight, of everything that had ever been born and of everything coming up alive in the future. At the peak of it all Milo wondered if he were feeling what the buff marble saint would have felt if she weren't missing.

Some of the Jukovich saints were commissioned by the cities that bore their names, others by public utilities and oil corporations and banks, and still others by philanthropists. Controversy erupted over one, the
San Bernardino,
when a reigning philanthropist there donated it to the city, suggesting the steps of the city hall. A referendum was called for by opponents, and the majority of residents voted against the emplacement of a sectarian object on civic property. Art Lovers, a group of artists, interior decorators, actors, and architects, trucked the sculpture out to a site in the San Bernardino mountain range, visible from Highway 15.
Gray
granite, 12 ft.,
it blended so well with the boulders that Milo, on foot, passed it by.

Almost felled by the heat of those desert mountains, dazed, Milo wandered into the Cucamonga Wilderness area. A helicopter on surveillance from the Marine Corps Training Center dropped down and hauled him aboard. Since he was so darkened by the sun, and his hair, unwashed for so long, had turned black, he was mistaken for a terrorist. They searched his backpack and his person, and relayed his description to Edwards Air Force Base, the Naval Weapons Center Mojave Range, and Fort Irwin Military Reservation, all within that inhospitable region.

As the helicopter hovered above what appeared to be a stone curiously shaped like a man, Milo recognized the saint.

“That's my father's
San Bernardino!”
he cried, pointing.

The sergeant assured the crew that Jukovich was not a name from the Middle East, though he didn't know where it was from. He released Milo, setting him down on Highway 15 again. The crew waved good-bye and Milo waved back until the helicopter disappeared into the devastating waves of desert heat.

On the road again he was picked up by a black car resembling a huge shark with sinister fins. From a seat in the commodious interior which was filled with several electric guitars and sound equipment, he thanked the two men by praising them.

“What's this car?”

“Where you been? This here's a 'fifty-nine Eldorado hearse.”

Slumped down in repose, neither man turned around. The hair of the musician at the wheel was a burning bush, so massive it obscured Milo's view of the road ahead. Leaping from stereo speakers
underfoot and overhead, hard rock struck at all parts of Milo's body before escaping through the open windows. Despite this assault, Milo fell asleep.

At San Luis Obispo he woke in a panic, afraid he had missed some saints. The musicians got out with him to stretch their legs, and he saw that their legs, in black leather pants, were extremely thin and so were their bodies. Coke heads. Seeing, then, that his own legs and body were even thinner than theirs, he wondered how to explain, as facilely, his own condition.

The
San Luis Obispo
—
black granite + stainless steel, 7ft.
stood in an industrial park in company of a few straggly trees, erected there by a chemical corporation whose trucks roared around it. Milo sat on the employees' bench before the sculpture. The chemicals in the air had pocked the granite and stained the steel. Furthermore, it was only a block with a round steel head bent way down between its chunks of feet. All day he sat on the bench in staring search of the spirit of love somewhere within that figure, whose deterioration was certainly not the artist's fault. This saint lacked any and all redeeming qualities, rousing in Milo a desire to dissociate himself from the artist.

At nightfall Milo tore up his identification—his driver's license, his university card, his credit cards. As he was depositing the handful of scraps in the brimming trash can, he was arrested for vagrancy. At the police station, when it was made clear to him that by obstinately refusing to tell them his name and residence he could be charged with any number of crimes, from misdemeanors to felonies, he gave in. The police called his mother and she verified him. After that, they proved to themselves that there was no
crime committed anywhere in the whole country for which a Milo Jukovich was wanted by the law, and only then was he released from the longest night of his life.

One morning, as he was making his way down from the Santa Cruz Mountains to the city of the same name and the sculpture there, which he hoped was to make up for all the others found wanting, he paused at an extinct one-pump gas station to fill his canteen and douse his hair and face. When he stepped onto the porch of the very small grocery to thank the proprietor for the water, his attention was caught by the morning newspapers in their rack. Not the headlines. Something else was signaling him: JUKOVICH DIES IN EGYPT.

Struck in the eyes by the rising sun, he had a difficult time reading the particulars. Jukovich, he read, was dead from a heart attack while exploring caves in the Egyptian desert where the early Christian saints dwelled. The artist, he read, was on the last lap of a pilgrimage to the world's sacred places, among them Kyoto, Mecca, and the highest Buddhist monasteries in Tibet. Jukovich had devoted his life to his Saints Series, hailed by critics as the most uncompromisingly religious art since the twelfth century. An ascetic, he often fasted. His only marriage was brief, childless, and ended in divorce. The last photo of Jukovich, taken shortly before his departure, accompanied the front-page item. Milo leaned away from it, avoiding his father's eyes though Jukovich was not facing the camera. The artist was standing beside his most recent sculpture, a rose marble
Santa Rosa.
He wore only a loincloth and sandals. The muscles were bunched up on his bony legs, and his brow, also bony, was crossed by a rolled bandanna.

The girl in charge of the grocery was studying a physics textbook at the counter, eating an apple and combing her hair, obviously about ready to go down to her classes at the university.

“My father just died,” he said, smiling over his whole sunblackened face, his tears mingling with water already there from the dousing. Shocked by his smile, he saw that she was not.

“Did he leave you a fortune?” she asked.

“He left
me,
” he said.

Out in the sun again, he climbed a low hill to the oak at the top and walked around the trunk a few times, under a restless, shadowy flock of vultures up in the branches. Juri Jukovich was gone, leaving his son incontrovertibly alive, ecstatically alive, born for the first time in his life. Jukovich had taken the gift of life meant for his son and given it to his outsize saints, instead, and on whom it hadn't worked. Contrary to that old saw about art being long and life short, it was the other way around. He lay facedown under the tree and bit off some grass near the roots, chewing to distract his smile, but it would not give in, and so he lay there the entire day, smiling into the earth.

T
HE OVERCOAT WAS black and hung down to his ankles, the sleeves came down to his fingertips, and the weight of it was as much as two overcoats. It was given him by an old girlfriend who wasn't his lover anymore but stayed around just to be his friend. She had chosen it out of a line of Goodwill coats because, since it had already lasted almost a century, it was the most durable and so the right one for his trip to Seattle, a city she imagined as always flooded by cataclysmic rains and cold as an execution dawn. His watch cap came down to his eyebrows.

On the Trailways bus the coat overlapped onto the next seat, and only when all other seats were occupied did a passenger dare to lift it and sit down, women apologetically, men bristling at the coat's invasion of their territory. The coat was formidable. Inside it he was frail. His friend had filled a paper bag with delicatessen items, hoping to spare him the spectacle of himself at depot counters, hands shaking, coffee spilling, a sight for passengers hungrier for objects of ridicule than for their hamburgers and French fries.
So he sat alone in the bus while it cooled under the low ceilings of concrete depots and out in lots under the winter sky, around it piles of wet lumber, cars without tires, shacks, a chained dog, and the café's neon sign trembling in the mist.

On the last night, the bus plowed through roaring rain. Eli sat behind the driver. Panic might take hold of him any moment and he had to be near a door, even the door of this bus crawling along the ocean floor. No one sat beside him, and the voices of the passengers in the dark bus were like the faint chirps of birds about to be swept from their nest. In the glittering tumult of water beyond the swift arc of the windshield wiper, he was on his way to see his mother and his father, and panic over his sight of them and over their sight of him might wrench him out of his seat and lay him down in the aisle. He pressed his head against the cold glass and imagined escaping from the bus and from his parents, revived or destroyed out there in the icy deluge.

For three days he lay in a hotel room, unable to face the two he had come so far to see and whom he hadn't seen in sixteen years, the age he'd been when he'd seen them last. They were already old when he was a kid, at least in his eyes, and now they seemed beyond age. The room was cold and clammy, but he could have sworn a steam radiator was on, hissing and sputtering. Then he figured an old man was sitting in a corner, watching over him, sniffling and sadly whistling. Until he took the noise by surprise and caught it coming from his own mouth, an attempt from sleep to give an account of himself.

Lying under the hotel's army blanket and his overcoat, he wished he had waited until summer. But all waiting time was
dangerous. The worst you could imagine always happened to you while you were waiting for better times. Winter was the best time for him, anyway. The overcoat was an impenetrable cover for his wasted body, for his arms lacerated by needles, scar on scar, like worms coming out, with the tattoos like road maps to show them the way. Even if it were summer he'd wear the overcoat. The sun would have to get even fiercer than in that story he'd read when he was a kid, about the sun and the wind betting each other which of them could take off the man's coat, and the sun won. Then he'd take off his coat, he'd even take off his shirt, and his parents would see who'd been inside. They'd see Eli under the sun.