Bobby cracked up. His high school class had included an inordinate number of baby beatniks, Charlie and Alex among them, who listened to jazz inside the cage at the Blackhawk and flocked to North Beach to hang out in cafes with eccentric refugees from the East Coast who wore sandals and buttons that said Ban the Bomb. Beatniks were interesting, almost as interesting as the hysterical reaction they provoked in some quarters. Sally didn't look like beatnik material to him, but her mentioning the beats hinted that she might be something more than an empty-headed surfer girl. He figured she'd earned a reprieve and steered back toward the middle of the river.
“What do you think a beatnik is?” he asked.
With that question Sally knew she had him.
“I think a beatnik must be everything people don't like,” she said. “My grandmother said they're communists. She said they're dirty
and against God and the American way and they smoke watchamacallit.”
“Reefer.”
“I guess that's it. I don't know what it is.”
“What it is is dope, marijuana,” Bobby said. “It's illegal.”
“I'd like to try it sometime. I'd like to try everything, especially everything you're not supposed to try.”
“Oh, boy,” Bobby said. “You're jail bait. You know what that is?”
“You keep asking me if I know what things are. I know exactly what jail bait is,” she exclaimed in a hoarse voice that startled him with its intensity. “That's what my last foster father called me, the bastard.”
“Is that why you ran away?”
She sighed and fished in her jeans for a rumpled box of Newports. Bobby popped open his Zippo, and with the flame came a flash between their eyes.
“Thanks,” she said, drawing stylishly on her cigarette. “I was bored. The only really cool people I know are surfers, you know, and, well, they're surfers. All they care about is the ocean and the waves and the beach and, that's all right, I suppose, but for me, I just got bored. I can't even swim.” She giggled. “I lived a block from the beach, and every day and all night the waves are sloshing in from I don't where, Japan or Hawaii or someplace, and it was always the same and I got bored. So I left.”
“To become a beatnik.”
She smiled. “That would be fun, but the truth is I have to find a job. I'll probably become a waitress. It's the only thing I know how to do. I don't care. I want to see the Golden Gate Bridge. Is it beautiful?”
“I don't know,” Bobby said as though the idea had never occurred to him, which it hadn't. “I just go across it to get to wherever I'm going.”
“I hope it is beautiful,” Sally said with a dreamy smile. “It is in the movies.”
At ten minutes to three in the morning a steaming pot of room service coffee occupied the center of the card table. Four miles west, fog rushed through the Golden Gate and into the bay, obliterating Alcatraz and ending the heat wave everywhere except the Enrico Caruso Suite on the fourth floor of the Palace Hotel.
They were telling the story now, slowly, painfully reconstructing a hot summer day in the Sacramento Valley, quibbling over details, adding nuance and interpretation, groping like blind men for some semblance of truth. Bobby's conversations with Sally came back in a rush, and he repeated oddly dated words and phrases he scarcely rememberedâ
beatnik, Golden Gate Bridge, jail bait
. The more he plunged into long-suppressed memory banks, the more he realized the only thing he remembered clearly was Sally. Once she was aboard the boat, he hadn't paid much attention to anything else.
“You made us swear we wouldn't touch her,” Alex said. “Do you remember that?”
They were staring again, inspecting him, measuring his response against an invisible benchmark. Reminded, he started to recall their swearing to keep their hands off Sallyâthat segment in his memory was fuzzy if not blank.
“If there was any nobility that day no matter how childish or melodramatic, your making us swear was the saving grace,” Alex continued. “You called a caucus and made a speech about jumping ship if we didn't swear, and so we did.”
“You wanted her on the boat,” Bobby said. “You said if we didn't take her, we'd spend the rest of our lives wondering what would've happened if we did. That's a pretty fair irony, as it turned out.”
“You got that right,” Dean added. “Instead, we've spent thirty years wondering what might have happened if we didn't.”
Bobby shook his head. The Feather River had tormented him in many ways, but not that way. “Maybe you did, pal, but not me. What if, what if, that's a waste of time. What if Kennedy hadn't been assassinated? That's bullshit. What happened happened, and you can't change the past.”
“If you know what it is,” Dean rebuked.
“Don't we?”
“I think,” Alex said, lighting a Lucky, “we may be raising questions we can't answer.”
“Or asking the wrong questions,” Bobby said.
“Okay, what's the right question?”
“Whose deal is it
?” Nelson roared, drumming a loud conga beat on the felt. “Let's get some money into this game. Come on. Yak yak yak yak yak.”
“You ahead or behind?”
“Don't you know it's bad luck to count your money at the table, Charlie?”
“More superstitious twaddle, to use your words, Nelson. Besides, you've been counting your chips all night.”
“I'm a do as I say cop, not a do as I do cop.”
“Very funny. Ha ha. It's Bobby's deal.”
“Five draw, jacks or better.”
They tossed in their antes, and Bobby thought his old friends were just too damned cute, too smug, too quick with the sharp remark. He didn't trust their documents or confessions of overweening guilt. Curiously, as they loosened up and discussed the details of their tripâthe boat, the river, Sally, and her extraordinary effect on themâthe game became less predictable. Perennial losers Charlie and Nelson were winning; Dean, playing erratically, was losing; and Alex was barely breaking even. Ahead, but not by much, Bobby decided to change his style of play and turn up the heat.
He dealt a hand of draw, Charlie and Nelson checked, and Alex opened for five hundred. Dean stayed in and Bobby, with three fives,
an ace, and a six, raised a thousand. Alex saw the raise and Dean dropped.
“Now I want some Elvis,” he said, getting up to change the record.
Alex took two cards and Bobby kept the ace and took one. The five of clubs. Four fives.
As usual Alex glanced at his hand and left his cards where they lay, then planted his elbows on the table and chin on the backs of interlocked fingers.
“A thousand,” he said and placed two bumblebees in the pot.
“See your grand and raiseâ”
There was a sizzle, a flash, a loud bang, and all the lights in the suite went out. The stereo stopped dead, leaving Elvis six bars into “All Shook Up.”
“What theâ?”
Charlie rushed to the window and reported, “The lights are on outside. It's not a power failure.”
Dean strode to the front door and yanked it open. “Lights in the corridor.”
“It's just this suite,” Charlie said, picking up a telephone. “I'd better call the front desk. This is too much. Next year we go to the Saint Francis.”
Alex stood on a chair and used his lighter to illuminate the light fixture. “This is weird,” he said. “Too damned weird.” He cautiously tapped the bulb, unscrewed it, and climbed onto the table to examine the temporary fixture installed for the game.
Bobby remained in his seat, calmly watching the Chinese fire drill unfolding around him. Dean came back to the table, dug into his bag, and pulled out the rum box that contained twenty-five thousand dollars.
“What's going on, Deano?” Bobby asked.
“I don't know, but I don't like it. Got to protect this, no matter what.”
“Forget the box,” Alex said. “Cover the bags, Studley.”
“Nelson?”
“You got me. Maybe a short-circuit or blown circuit breaker.”
“They're sending up a repairman,” Charlie said, hanging up. “The guy says he's going to check the control panel down the hall.”
“What the hell?” Alex squinted and poked his face closer to the metal fixture, now blackened and blistered and hot to the touch. “What's this?” He pulled a long, thin wire and tiny microphone away from the device and dangled the contraption in the air. With a long face he announced, “We've been bugged.”
“Bugged?”
“Oh, Christ.”
Bobby's face went white and he jerked to his feet, his mouth opening to speak but he couldn't bring himself to utter a single expletive. If he stayed in the room another five seconds, he'd explode. Eyes blazing contempt, he grabbed his shirt and coat and hustled out the door and down the corridor past the elevators toward the stairs, pulling on his shirt.
“Bobby! Wait! Oh, shit.”
Suddenly realizing what had happened, Alex pointed an accusing finger at the policeman and hissed, “Nelson, you didn't. Oh, Jesus, you did.”
“This is your stunt?” Charlie screeched.
“It's just a mike and wire and cherry bomb,” Nelson said, laughing. “They're not attached to anything except a timer to make it go bang and cause a short. It went off right on time at three o'clock.”
“God
damn,
Nelson,” Alex fumed as he climbed off the table. “You freaked him. He doesn't know about the stunts. What were you thinking?”
No athlete, Alex started running clumsily down the corridor just as Bobby disappeared into the stairwell. In shape and much quicker, Nelson quickly passed a huffing Alex, shouting, “Go back to the suite and sit tight. I'll bring him back.”
Alex stopped and leaned against a wall, groaning, “Don't give it all away, Nelson. Just enough to get him back.”
Leaving Alex wheezing in the corridor, Nelson pushed into the stairwell and heard Bobby tramping down the stairs two floors below.
“Bobby!”
No answer.
“Bobby! I put the mike in the lamp. It was a joke. There's no tape recorder. Bobby! Stop! I can explain!”
“You can't explain shit, Chinaman! Fuck you!”
“It was a joke, Kimosabe.”
“Not funny.”
Descending the stairs three at a time, Nelson caught his quarry in the empty lobby and gently touched his shoulder. The ground floor of the hotel was so quiet they heard a streetcar rattle by on Market Street.
“Bobby, wait, please.”
The plea echoed through the deserted foyers that opened into the lobby. Emitting a primal groan, Bobby pulled away from the brotherly touch but stopped short of the doors. He turned, arms loose at his side, poised and ready, and faced his old friend.
“Wait for what? The cops?”
Breathing hard, Nelson bent over to catch his breath, his words coming in spurts. “No cops ⦠No one ⦠Nothing ⦠at the other end ⦠of the wire ⦠It's part of our ⦠game ⦠goofy stunts ⦠I do something crazy every year ⦠I guess this was the wrong year for this. I'm sorry.”
Teetering on the brink of control, hands clenching into fists, Bobby fought a temptation to strike. A disturbing vision of Nelson bleeding profusely onto the white marble floor splashed across his mind. He let it fade. Across the lobby, a lone clerk behind the registration desk was watching.
Standing up straight, Nelson recognized the menace in Bobby's eyes and sensed he'd pushed his old friend too far. Raising his hands, he took a step back, repeating, “It was only a stunt, a practical joke.”
“A joke?”
“Yeah.”
“On me?”
“On everyone. The guys didn't know. They were just as surprised as you. Look, I knew it was going to be tense during the game, so
I thought I'd create a little fun, you understand? Help lighten up. Looks like it backfired.”
The notion of the game being recorded sent a shiver of revulsion down Bobby's spine. A tape could damage them all. Alex had admitted using his security clearance for personal ends; Nelson had described overstepping his authority as a cop; Dean had talked about his marijuana business; and all of them, including Charlie, had talked about Shanghai Bend. Would someone intending to bug the room be so inept that he'd cause a short-circuit in a light fixture? No. Nelson was telling the truth. It had to be a joke. It was too stupid to be anything else. Bobby felt his fear and anger drop away like a suit of wet clothes, leaving him drained and annoyed but no longer on the brink of violence. In spite of an adrenaline edge he wanted to laugh. He lit a cigarette, drawing a scowl from the clerk.
“Some joke,” he said, shaking his head. “I had a good hand.”
“The breaks,” Nelson mumbled.
“I haven't moved so fast in years.”
Every sound echoed across the lobby. Phone to his ear, the clerk was still watching them. Nelson scuffed his Nikes on the marble floor creating an eerie screech.
“You used to do crazy stunts all the time,” Nelson said, revealing his nervousness by speaking low and fast. “How d'you think I learned? You put a smoke bomb in the school vents and cleared the building so you wouldn't have to take a history test, remember?”
“We're not high school kids anymore, Nelson.”
“Sure, and I know it's foolish, but once a year we act like we are. I suppose it's our pathetic way of dealing with”âNelson paused before addingâ“the past.”
Bobby choked on a guffaw, thinking his old friends dealt with the past the same way he did, by not dealing with it, ignoring it, denying it, pushing it to the far corners of their minds. They hadn't learned to live with it any better than he had.
“With practical jokes and the game and the bullshit, we've been dancing around the past all night,” Bobby said, puffing his Winston and sending a cloud of gray smoke toward the elegant ceiling. “The game isn't going anywhere.”
“Excuse me, sir!” The clerk was gesturing frantically from the desk. “There's no smoking in theâ”
Bobby turned away from Nelson and spun through the revolving doors onto the sidewalk. Expecting bright lights, big city, he found a ghost town. The bars had closed at two and the city, debauched and spent, awaited tomorrow's hangover. With stomach churning and sweat running down his back, Bobby rocked on his soles, heel and toe, heel and toe, breathing the fresh night air and furiously struggling to slow his thoughts.
What really happened to Sally? The discovery of her grave changed nothing except the psyches of his old friends. They were spooked. The documents, real or forged, made no difference to him. What did make a difference was knowing the boys from Noë Valley had had thirty-two years to prepare for his return, a lifetime to refine a script, but Nelson's stunt had thrown a monkey wrench into their carefully crafted agenda.
Nelson had followed him outside and stood near the doors, hands in pockets. Watching him, Bobby gained control of his thoughts, if not his emotions, and his cunning emerged from the shadows. He had no doubt they planned to fuck him over, but there was a chance Nelson would let slip a telling revelation if he prolonged their separation from the others. The old Nelson, the kid he used to know, fearless Crazy Nelson, had been a loyal friend, a genuine sidekick who called him Kimosabe. That had been great, but he needed to know if the new, badge-and-gun toting Nelson was capable of screwing up his life with cops and district attorneys. Or had the old Nelson betrayed him on the Feather River? Those were the real questions.