This One Time With Julia (19 page)

“That’s right.”

“Then why did Houston follow you?”

“I don’t think he wanted to take any chances,” said Alvin. “Also I’d stolen a few hundred thousand dollars from him, so he probably wanted it back.”

“You stole that bag of money?”

“Of course I stole it. Where did you think I got it?”

“How should I know? Maybe you earned it.”

Alvin laughed.

“God bless you, Joe. Storing dirty money was the whole point of that hotel. Did you ever wonder how they stayed in business, when there were never any guests?”

“No,” I said. “I didn’t.”

“It actually seemed funny when I stole it,” said Alvin. “I liked to imagine Houston in the basement, finding the suitcase missing, calling up old Bill Manning and sweating all over the phone. When they realized it was me, I thought they might even be amused. At the time I did not think this prank would cause my life to end in murder. But there I proved to be extremely wrong. I suppose I will have to chalk it all up to experience.”

Alvin climbed up on the bench and raised his little arms dramatically above his head. “Let this serve as an important lesson to us all,” he shouted. “The powerful and ruthless are not generally amused by humorous pranks of this kind.” He climbed back down off the bench. “Is Julia beautiful? I know I used to think she was, but by the end I couldn’t see her well enough to tell.”

“She’s beautiful.”

“Today I jumped the wall around the kiddie playground. I’m four. Do you remember that we used to switch names at this age?”

“I think so.”

Alvin stuck out his chest, and he was a four-year-old again. “Throw the ball again, Joe.”

This time I threw the ball a little farther, all the way into this little clump of trees behind home plate. Alvin tore after it. It was too dark to see him racing around in the trees, but I could hear him shrieking. When he came back he was completely happy and his face was red. He was too young to get tired from running.

“That was awesome,” he said. “Throw it farther.”

“I can’t understand what I did wrong,” I said. “Nothing worked out the way it was supposed to.”

“Don’t worry,” he said. “Losing a girl isn’t the end of the world. It only changes your whole life.”

“Did I already tell you I killed Houston?”

“Just throw the ball again, Joey. Throw it even farther this time.”

“All right. But hug me first.”

Alvin climbed up on me and put his little arms around my back. He smelled like caramels. I felt his tiny freezing body and his little heart thumping away.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll throw it now.”

He nodded. “Just throw it as far as you possibly can.”

He gave me the ball and I threw it as hard as I could, much farther this time, far into the trees. Alvin squealed and sprinted off across the baseball diamond. Then he disappeared into the trees, and I never saw him again.

Life is so full of impossible things that I can’t understand. I sat down on the bench next to the basketball court. Everything was starting to get dark. The courts were empty, and the sky was empty too. Two kids showed up with a basketball and practiced dunking in the light from the tennis courts. Neither one could jump up high enough to dunk, so they just hung on the string with their fingers. Once they tore down all the nets, they got bored and left.

I felt like playing, but I didn’t have a ball.

Fall was coming soon. It was already cooler in the valley than when I’d left. I wandered over to Ventura Boulevard, where everybody was driving around beeping like crazy. I walked for maybe twenty blocks; then I sat down in the marble doorway of a bank, where some hot air was pouring out of this Chinese restaurant next door.

I still had the package Marcus had left for me, and I figured it was time to open it, since I had nothing else to do. There was a little vase in there, painted like the ocean. I guess Marcus had decided to leave me Alvin’s ashes. I looked at the yellow card again—at Marcus’s handwriting, and then the note the girl left me. I stared hard at her name. I tried to read it.
Sheryl
. I was sure that I really did read it, even if I was partly remembering it too.

I closed my eyes. The wind blew over me and sort of crushed me into the ground, and as I fell asleep I thought about the bus, and Marcus’s apartment, and that singing I’d heard. Throwing my jacket in the dumpster. Carmen pregnant. Seeing Alvin one last time. I knew things would never be the same for me, and I also knew there was a lesson here; but I was too tired to learn it now. The air was so warm, and that day I’d done one of the very best things. I’d met a girl who was really beautiful, and then I’d made her laugh.

When I woke up, the air was cooling off because the Chinese restaurant was closing. But the street was still extremely bright and full of cars and people, children, and couples holding hands. Farther down the block, a man in this filthy canvas jacket was sitting on the sidewalk in a plastic folding chair, selling these very sparkly watches out of a briefcase on his lap. I couldn’t afford to buy anything anymore, but those watches looked pretty, and so I went over to look at them.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author would like to thank Anne Heltzel, Butler and Lois Lampson, Andrew Leeds, Gideon Lewis-Krauss, Jim Rutman, Ben Schrank, and Tobias Wolff for their help and support over the years.