Nothing to Declare Page 13

  “Sorry, I guess I fucked up,” Jesse says. “I’d been led to believe...”

  Moskowitz interrupts him. “I got another piece of wisdom for you, sonny boy. A man in business—never apologize. Makes you look like you don’t know squat.”

  Jesse listens as Moskowitz explains their deal in punishing detail, the man loving the chance to give instruction to the uninformed. Barring the unforeseen, his shipment will clear in forty-eight hours. Bring the papers to the U.S. Customs warehouse at the Oakland container terminal, and bring a truck, twenty-six footer should do it.

  “For half a dozen crates of vests and bangles and masks? I was going to borrow a friend’s VW bus.”

  Moskowitz rolls his eyes. “You read your docs, you’ve got eighty crates, almost thirteen hundred cubes. Fifty thousand doodads won’t fit in a lousy hippie ride.”

  This is a mistake, Jesse wants to say, but the broker’s strong hand is helping him toward the exit. Moskowitz makes a point of consulting his watch—there will be no fond goodbyes. While the broker watches, Jesse shakes his hair out of his collar, fans it in relief against his shoulders. Just before he steps into the hallway, Jesse snatches up the Chinese calendar.

  “So I don’t forget to show up on the 29th,” he tells the broker, sliding the pinups under his arm.

  Outside, the salt air is bracing, the jolt of iodine promising life abundant. Come to think of it, fifty-thousand’s the kind of number with Marty’s name all over it. Jesse brings Miss April into the light. Her body shines in the spring sun as though catching fire.

  NINETEEN

  THE REGINA GRACE JOSTLES AGAINST PIER 59, lurching in the rain-struck water. Jesse steps out of his rented truck and watches a two-story crane jerk a container out of the ship’s hold. Metal grinds against metal. The rain pours down. As the cargo hits the ground there’s a wet thump, and three stevedores jump back to escape a shower of mud. Maybe it’s the Hanuman shipment—fifty thousand lizard souls making their presence known. If Marty were here, he’d have something interesting to say about the view.

  Moskowitz’s call came at 8:30 this morning, the pier number barked into the receiver and the time the truck was needed at the port. Jesse knew better than to ask any questions.

  “Got it,” he said, and clicked off.

  The customs shed smells of diesel and wet lumber and there are cartons and crates stacked everywhere as though lobbed willy-nilly by the storm. Heading for the office in the rear, Jesse negotiates the maze of aisles and half-aisles, dodging a silent forklift scuttling through the mess. The driver wears a hard hat with the Stars and Stripes over the brim. One look at Jesse’s ponytail and dripping pea coat, and the driver’s expression jells. Jesse pops him a sharp salute.

  A large fellow in a bulky blue uniform manages the office, and he sits Jesse opposite him, inspects his papers while drinking a can of Coke. Every so often he turns to a ten-inch black-and-white TV that sits near him running without sound. In miniature, a newsman faces the camera on the roof of a building, palm trees in the distance, American soldiers behind him sitting in rows. It’s raining there, harder than here, the raindrops whipped by helicopter wash.

  “They won,” the officer says, jabbing at the screen. Specks of cola spot a bill of lading, and Jesse wonders if he should snatch it to safety. The officer clutches his soda as though it is the dearest thing in the world. “We used to be a country to be proud of, but now I wouldn’t give a bent nickel for the whole shooting match. You don’t care, naturally, let Charlie wipe the floor with us, who cares.”

  Vietnam, Jesse finally puts it together. He hasn’t been following the TV news or reading papers for more than a month. He’s been in Marty-land—the timeless land of frog skins and flying monkeys with their tails on fire. “I think my waybills are all OK,” Jesse says. “You’ll tell me if I didn’t dot my ‘i’s or cross my ‘t’s.”

  The officer passes Jesse’s sheaf of papers through his fingers, giving him a sideways look as he steps out of the room. On the TV set, soldiers jog into the belly of a helicopter. The picture’s so tiny, nothing on the Marines’ faces bleeds through the general blur.

  Someone new walks into the office, and her navy skirt suit and neatly styled hairdo speak to a professional approach. She introduces herself as Special Agent Holloway, shows him her badge, and sits behind the desk, close enough for Jesse to smell her perfume, something woodsy. Holloway switches off the TV and dumps the Coke can in the trash.

  “Name?”

  Jesse tells her. As Holloway shuffles through the import documents, her jacket reveals a holstered gun under her arm.

  “Mr. Kerf, you’re in some serious trouble. I’m here to tell you you’re under arrest.”

  She pulls a laminated card from her pocket and reads him his Miranda rights. Jesse finds himself grinning, as if treating things lightly will wind time back, make the moment evaporate into nothing. Holloway’s stare betrays little. Thai stick, Jesse imagines, or hash, what they like to grow in Indonesia. Whatever Marty thought he’d smuggle in under Jesse’s signature. His smile feels pasted on his lips.

  “Somebody tell a joke I missed?” Holloway says. “Nothing about ten years in the feds seems all that funny to me. Violate 18 USC 545, we have a great desire to lock you away. Smuggling, in case you thought otherwise, is very much against the law.”

  Jesse finds his words cautiously. “I’m here to receive a shipment of Indonesian leather goods and crafts. Beyond that, I don’t have a clue.”

  “Is that how you want to play it? Clueless? Why don’t we have a little conversation, you and me. Maybe we can see what you do know.”

  “No,” Jesse says. “Nothing more without a lawyer.”

  The customs agent pretends not to hear and tries to sell Jesse on the joys of confession. The court system, she promises, goes easy on any culprit disposed to save it time and dollars. Jesse clamps his jaw. The culprit, that curly-headed motherfucker, is God knows where. Maybe tooling along the Coast Road aiming for rain puddles and singing to the radio. Marty might be coming up on Castroville and stopping for a slice of artichoke pie.

  Holloway finishes her pitch, clasps her hands together as though she’s just delivered the Sunday homily.

  “Excuse me,” Jesse says, “You said something about pants?”

  “The contraband, Mr. Kerf. Thirty thousand units of counterfeit blue jeans, right down to their copper rivets hiding under the leather and crafts you claim you’re here for. Not the usual thing we see, sure, but highly profitable and as illegal as hell. Beautiful work, I might add, best I’ve ever come across.”

  “Blue jeans,” Jesse says.

  Holloway sighs. “You really want to play the idiot. We’ve got you on smuggling and trademark violations, just for starters. These are Class D felonies, maybe C once we figure out the street value. Levi’s is the hometown brand in San Francisco, in case you forgot. The U.S. attorney’s going to go for full extent, and we caught you dead to rights.”

  Jesse bites his lips, fighting off another smile. Fake blue jeans. It is a joke. “All news to me,” he says. “Lawyer, please.”

  The woman sits back in her chair and tries to put on a friendly face. “Can I call you Jesse? OK, so maybe you’re in the dark. A little lamb. Just a guy who showed up to carry the weight for someone else. It wouldn’t be the first time. But then—this is hard to explain—yours is the only name on all the papers stretching from here to overseas and back. If there are other folks involved, just say the word. Your day will turn instantly better, I promise you.”

  Jesse shakes his head. “Do I get a phone call? Or is that just something they make up on TV?”

  Inspector Holloway produces a pair of handcuffs. Her fingernails are short but neatly filed and polished red as roses. Jesse sticks out his wrists.

  The boy was glowing by the time I bailed him out, fear, naturally, and anger, but something else surging through him, as though he’d mined up a new state of being. All that height, Jesse usually slumped down an in
ch or two when we were together, but going to the car, he stretched over me big as a tree. I couldn’t keep up with him.

  Once we were alone, he yelled and pounded his fist, furious because I’d sent him out blind, put him in harm’s way without his say-so. I worried he was going to beat a dent in the dashboard or splinter a bone, but I admired all that unfiltered physical expression, his need to flush the venom out of his system. I wish I could’ve done more, but there were no good choices, only different kinds of bad. What was left was to guide him through the mess we were in. I saw a path to safety if Jesse wanted to take it.

  We went to Wong’s, a noodle place not far from the Bryant Street lock-up, the place done over like an antique railroad car, brass rails and plush banquettes, waiters dressed in Pullman porter military white. Midnight, and the place was humming with Chinese, Jesse and I the only Gwai-los in the joint. He ordered Chivas rocks and started in on me again, slapping the table with his palm, almost rattled the chow fun out of our bowls. Buck up, I told him, I’d already figured out a plan to make things right.

  I showed him the headline in the Chronicle: SAIGON FALLS. “You heard the news? Hard to believe the time would ever come.”

  “You want to talk about Saigon?”

  “Ho Chi Minh City. It’s all over the radio, the NVA are repainting street signs as we speak. You got to love it, in the Twenties, Ho’s a busboy at the Parker House, couple of trolley stops from where we lived. Now he’s getting a city named after him, the father of his country. Fate rolls that way.”

  “So?”

  “Tell me, Little Brother, you have any inkling when you were having breakfast, your day was going to hand you a shot to be a hero to your friends?”

  Jesse was on his third scotch by now, and he was staring at me with that floaty look booze will give you, imagining, alas, his bust was something he and I were going to go through together. I hated to tell him I wanted him to keep the whole thing for his own, I had no choice.

  Here was the rundown: we had an attorney on retainer who’d said he’d make book on Jesse’s chances. A pink-cheeked first offender, lose the hair and dress him up in Hickey Freeman, he’s the kind of defendant the jury wants to take home to fuck their daughter. The guy’d read Jesse’s SAT scores into the record, truck in testimonials from his rabbi and his third-grade teacher, his heartbroken mom and dad. The very worst Jesse’d see would be three months’ probation and a $10,000 fine that I’d dig up the scratch to pay. The point was the story began and ended with Jesse. It had to.

  “I wish I could switch places with you and take you out of things entirely,” I told him and I meant it. “It was my deal and I blew it royally—the jeans should have been buried under a bigger layer of goods, more hands greased, any number of angles I failed to predict. Believe me, the money was going to be astounding, make all of us whole forever. And the product, you should have seen them—501s so perfect even the Marlboro Man would put them on and never know.”

  Jesse was quiet, watching the raindrops smack against the window. I leaned forward in my chair. “But if this spreads beyond you, it will touch Isabel. She’s got an old cocaine beef she never talks about, a parole violation, a chunk of history waiting to implode. She’ll waste her thirties in Chowchilla. You take a plea, Jesse, play it like you were a one-man band and Customs will go to bed happy. We all will.

  “You’ve talked to her about this?”

  I didn’t want to tell him it was her idea. “She won’t be difficult,” I said.

  “You make it sound so figured out. All that’s missing is a shiny ribbon.”

  “It’s what we could jam together on short notice.”

  Jesse seemed strangely peaceful, sipped on his jasmine tea. “Now I know why your name is nowhere on any piece of paper. Just little old me.”

  I had to sigh. “No, man, it wasn’t like that. I thought making you the number one would put some hair on your balls, bring you into your own. Sure, I had to keep a wall between me and my money guys and the rest of the show, but that was never the whole reason.”

  “Were they really that good?” he said.

  “Was what?”

  “The 501s. The customs agent said they were the best she’d ever seen.”

  I smiled. “She’s got an eye. Don’t usually find that in a cop.”

  Going home Jesse insisted on stopping to buy champagne. “We’ll wake up everyone at Escalona House and drink a shout to Uncle Ho,” he said. “The good guys won today.”

  In the late afternoon, Isabel jogs barefoot along the 26th Avenue beach, skirting the shoreline. Jesse watches from the cliff top as she churns past driftwood piles and tattered kelp without a thought for where she’s putting her feet. If I went running, he thinks, where would I stop?

  Isabel’s turned into Little Ms. Health, Marty announced last night, three miles of running every other day and so long, coffee, so long, Southern Comfort, hello, Adele Davis. She’s mixing brewer’s yeast and bone meal into her morning muesli and juicing carrots by the carload. Last night, she didn’t come down the mountain to Jesse’s party, but spent three wan minutes with him on the phone while he shouted to her above the ruckus. They’d have dinner in the next few days, she promised, and was gone before he could ask her how she was.

  At the breakwater, Isabel reverses direction and Jesse descends the stairs in time to her approach. Her face is tight with exertion and she hesitates when she sees him, running in place for a bit. Then she’s back on pace, churning up sand. Jesse falls in next to her, fine to jog along in silence. Isabel stops, though, her body heaving. “You found me,” she says after she’s caught her breath.

  “I didn’t feel like waiting till tomorrow or next week or whenever. I’ve got room for a big workout, what about you, ready for more?”

  She looks at him. “I don’t like your pace.”

  She strips down and washes herself in the ocean while Jesse sits on dry ground. Her face tightens in a kind of grim pleasure as she douses herself with the freezing water. When Isabel returns to dress herself and sit next to him, Jesse can see how weary she is, dark circles under her eyes, her flesh pimpled with the cold. “I’m not going to throw myself at you and cover you with thankful kisses,” she says. “That’s not my style, but you know that, or you better. Is your mind made up?”

  “Piece of cake,” Jesse says. “Marty painted me the picture—I’ll get a rap on the knuckles from some judge and then out the door into arms of my friends and lovers. Your tragic past is safe with me, don’t worry.”

  “You’re making fun. Fuck you.” Isabel gets to her feet, but seems unwilling to move. She gazes down at him sadly. “Don’t wring too much enjoyment from this, Jesse.”

  “Somebody’s in a bad mood today. I thought it was me.”

  Isabel’s laugh is bitter. “More than enough of that to share.”

  They walk together up the stairs to the parking lot and Isabel mounts her bike.

  “Let me cook you dinner,” Jesse says. “Adele Davis has an oatmeal loaf, I think.”

  The wind’s picking up and fine sand powders their skin. Isabel puts out her hand to Jesse’s face as if to brush him off and he leans close for her touch, receives instead a painful flick on his earlobe. “Don’t know me so well,” she says and stands hard on her pedals, leaving him alone.

  Lulu’s is two deep at the bar tonight and it’s a fight for Jesse to order a sandwich and a row of boilermakers, solemnize the day with them—the drink of jailbirds and reprobates. There are women looking for dancing partners, but they look sideways at Jesse’s sandy clothes and beery grin and pass him by. Hell, nothing wrong with swaying solo in the center of the dancing crowd, mug in one hand, shot glass in the other, sing along with the boleros—their lyrics nothing but tears and broken hearts. Beneath the mirror ball, the spinning lights map a picture Jesse can’t unravel, follow the bouncing dots to where? Before the first tune ends, Lulu leads him to the door, where she kisses him on the cheek and orders him home.

  Near midn
ight Jesse shows up in the alley behind Hanuman Designs, beer bottles tucked into his side pockets. He forces a window open—putting his shoulder to it—and the empty store is before him. It’s bare from wall to wall and thick with the odor of Lysol and paint thinner. Gone the showcases, the thatched roof dressing rooms, gone the crates of T-shirts in the corner. Even Miss March has made an exit from her place near the front door. Someone’s repainted the walls, the strokes of Jesse’s mural blanked out in white primer, erased as if they never were. He crouches to the floor. Marty’s eagle eye has skipped a spot or two: a few drops of magenta and yellow stain the polished wood.

  Jesse scoots over to set his back on what had been the mural face and stretches out his legs and drinks a beer. He spins one of the empties on the floor, a rattle of glass on wood. Who could ever have seen this place as the repository of anybody’s dreams? Empty, it seems smaller than before, ashamed of itself somehow. He finishes his second beer and stands unsteadily, finds his way outside to pee against the alley wall.

  Around the corner, Jesse shivers at a pay phone waiting for his call to connect. The wind’s blowing harder from the bay, salt in the air along with the scent of new roses. “Inspector Holloway,” the voice announces at the other end at last.

  “Jesse Kerf here. Just tell me where you want to meet, Ms. Holloway. I’m ready for that conversation.” Jesse’s breath mists the glass of the booth until his reflection vanishes.

  TWENTY

  1990

  THE RESTAURANT BOLTED INTO VIEW before Jesse was ready for it. Bumper to bumper from the airport to Santa Monica, and it was all he could do not to dent the BMW. Where was everybody going at 10:30 on a Sunday night? Where had they been? The container of Marty’s ashes shifted on the passenger seat whenever Jesse was forced to slam on his brakes.

  At Copain, lights blazed and the front windows were open to the weather, music sailing onto the street—Guns N’ Roses popping loud enough to summon the cops. He’d have to talk to Cheryl. He could see her working the front of the house in her leather skirt and famous fuck-me pumps, making sure the servers hustled Helena’s duck three ways and sashimi salad to the customers. Cheryl was the best manager and sommelier they had—she’d polished the art of ego massage in rehab. If you can put one over on your fellow junkies, she once told him, you can con a deuce of Hollywood morons into buying the $120 cabernet.