Nothing to Declare Page 5

  Behind him he can hear the sound of two women settling in for an afternoon under the sun. Their subject is Watergate, which they dissect in energetic counterpoint. He could turn and have a peek, but even the most discreet rotation seems oversized and clumsy. Instead, he remains on the distant cloud line, following it to where the blues of sky and ocean are smoothly joined. He feels unalloyed contentment and a brilliant, sun-washed invisibility.

  The soprano’s fervor tilts toward outrage. The corrupt core of the Death Culture has been exposed; they should be making revolution, mobilizing the masses, taking it to the streets. She can feel it, Tricky Dick is going down. The alto responds with a modest laugh. Please, she says, the hearings are scripted top to bottom. Nothing’s been exposed that both sides don’t contract in advance. Short of a couple of tanks barrel first to the Oval Office, Nixon’s going nowhere. She has a round, reliable delivery, a farm girl, Jesse imagines, accustomed to ringing in the hands for supper.

  There is a pause in the conversation and Jesse switches position for a glimpse in their direction. The women are naked, one on her side, a blonde with a ripe, freckled bottom and a restless jitter along the limbs. The other lies carelessly upon her back, her face half-lost within the oval thrown by the brim of her sombrero. She is older than her friend, perhaps thirty. From instep to knee, her left leg wears a walking cast of rigid white. Jesse registers the immediate impression that she is staring at him.

  As he watches in astonishment, she worms a wooden ruler between her cast and leg, pumping her elbow in a private fury of concentration, her brown hair flying. Well, Jesse thinks, naked—of course, isn’t that the West Coast way? He yanks off his jeans, scouring his flesh with the salty denim. The women, when he turns again, are belly down. They pay no mind to him at all.

  The sun has found a mean line to his pupils and Jesse flips onto his stomach, falling into drowsiness as though diving from a height. Before sleep comes, his last thought is of the twenty ladder rungs the brunette had to stump along to reach the sand.

  The winds stall over Santa Cruz through late July, slamming windows shut and singeing the magnolia blossoms the color of burnt milk. There are fire warnings in the hills and the wail of sirens late at night. Jesse feels alive to the heat, as though it were inside of him and streaming outward.

  He runs as often as he can—five bareheaded miles up King and Walnut and on through downtown trailing the morning traffic, saving his energy for the climb back to the Spanish-style house on Escalona Court he and Marty share with their three roommates. Some days, he runs to work, cruising to a stop inside the loading dock of Whole Earth Retreads, prickling with sweat and jetting his rapid breath into the dark warehouse. His shifts pass in a fog of hard labor. Seven hours of stacking eighty-pound cases of tire tread, his clothes stippled by a skim of melted rubber.

  His work companions, lifers except for him, treat Jesse with a tiny measure of respect, call him College, or the Beast. It started once they saw him roll truck tires—one in each hand—up the loading ramp and pile them in the storage bays without excessive effort or complaint. There’s a painting here, maybe, something lit by the glow of the extruder and livened by the spirited faces of the other guys. Dark faces, black rubber, shifting light from places where dirt has scraped away from the windowpanes. In the middle of Jesse’s day, moments come when the pain in his back and arms leaves him, an instant when a truck tire is settling on the top of an eight-foot stack, when he is empty of who he is or what he’s doing, when Jesse shakes free of the weight of his body, watching no one.

  The house on Escalona was built in 1958 when Santa Cruz was colonized by military retirees and moneyed gentry from the Central Valley who parked their Fairlanes and Impalas underneath the eucalyptus trees. Jogging from his bus stop one September evening after work, Jesse slows down at his corner to enjoy the vista: the mild-toned terracotta roofs in rows against the hillside, the shell pink stucco walls, the early perfume of jasmine that will be overly sweet by dusk. Eyes closed, he could trace the scent and find his door.

  Their house is the lone rental on the block and in the worst condition, marked by a patchy lawn and chipped paint and shunned by every neighbor but the dogs. At Marty’s insistence, a piece of plywood Jesse painted has been nailed above the lintel. The smiling face of Uncle Ho. One day soon, Jesse thinks, he’ll take it down to coat the man’s beard with a brighter glaze of white.

  In the living room, his housemate Paul watches cartoons while riffling through a well-pawed block of graph paper. In the blue-green backwash of the TV screen, Paul’s round face gives off an accommodating aroma of marijuana and Dr Pepper. “Dig it,” Paul says, raising his meaty fist in greeting. “So far I’ve clocked six minor assaults, three medium, one heavy, two deaths, and two resurrections. This motherfucker gets a slot in the permanent collection.” He yells over his shoulder, “Nat, we got another keeper.”

  Under curling posters of Jack Lord and Che Guevara, Paul’s girlfriend, Natalie, collates leaflets at the long dining table that all but fills the next room. Her expression is obscured by a tangled mass of blonde hair, though it seems to Jesse she slams down on her stapler with more authority than needed. Tomorrow night at the Civic Auditorium she’ll lead a demonstration against the Miss California Pageant. She has no humor for the meandering fizz of Paul’s intelligence.

  Jesse never tires of watching her do the simplest things, as now she gathers mimeo paper and sorts by colored ink. Natalie wastes few movements; her actions condense into their leanest versions, even the quick, sisterly smile she lays out when she takes note of his attention. As usual she is wearing Danish clogs, which give her step a decisive, almost military clatter.

  He steps to her side and lends a hand with the collation, careful to mimic Natalie’s method, aware of her watchful eye. “Don’t let me screw this up,” he says. “Page two after page one, I got that right?”

  Natalie wants to hide her laugh. “Appreciate the help,” she says. “We’ve got hundreds of these to get on top of before tomorrow night. Once we get them sorted, it’s staple and then triple fold.”

  “Triple fold,” Jesse says. “When it comes to mindless effort, I think I’m going pro. Come and see me at the factory sometime. They call me Beast.”

  At this, Natalie winces a little. She’s told him she’s not sure a middle-class kid like him should be taking a job that could belong to a member of the working class. But help is help, and they work side by side happily enough. Is this what having an older sister is like? As an only child he can only guess. Someone to laugh at his jokes and keep him honest?

  On the TV screen there’s a hot jiggle of color and spastic energy, with a cat speeding on propeller legs over a cliff. Paul’s theory is that violence on kids’ TV has tripled since the bombing of Cambodia fired up in 1970. He has a chart of the most lurid samples, plotted as to frequency, kinetic energy, and length. The parabolic curve the data make is like the shape of Nixon’s nose, Paul says. He’s undecided what to make of the connection.

  “I think they had this on last month,” says Jesse. “The cat gets flattened by a steamroller.”

  “Cliff fall, steamroller, fake tunnel, TNT kaboom, I’m gonna show it to my rats,” Paul says. “They’ll freak. The rat never lies.”

  Up at his UCSC lab, Paul shows five rats a daily dose of Warner Brothers animation, Chuck Jones, Tex Avery, and the like. Three months of immersion and the animals burn out the bearings on their treadmills. Six, they gnaw each other’s tails. At eight, Paul sections through their hypothalami to analyze the sectors for aggression. Once Jesse asked him what he hoped his research might produce. No break in my allowance, Paul answered, with a grin composed of pride, contrition, and the better portion of a nickel bag of Humboldt Blue. Following that, OK, the downfall of the power structure as we know it.

  Jesse finishes stapling Natalie’s leaflets, then heads to the couch to watch cartoons, drinking cold Dr. Peppers and smoking pot until the soundtrack starts to wriggle through his skul
l. He wanders onto the back porch where he checks his watch, his thoughts twirling loosely, and then there is a click from the neighboring yards on either side and automatic sprinklers switch on. He touches his dry tongue to his lips and catches the warm lick of mown grass.

  At the far end of the driveway near the garage, Lucy hunkers over a set of wooden sawhorses. By the quantity of lumber at her side, she must be making protest placards for tomorrow. She stands barefoot, working quickly as the light recedes, her saber saw yowling through the cuts.

  She is singing, Jesse marvels when she quiets her saw, an old mountain ballad of lovesickness and betrayed devotion. Her voice glides with tender feeling along the verse—until she turns and catches him listening. Silence moves between them as if by consent, and Lucy breaks into laughter and stamps on the asphalt, sending wood chips flying.

  “Busted,” she says between snorts. She fits her saw into its case and kicks it shut with her heel.

  “I liked it. You have a sweet voice.” Jesse lopes toward her, remembering at the last not to press too close. Lucy is five-two and often takes his height as a personal affront. “Your wicca’s into Appalachian music, I guess. Or maybe a subset, you know, the pagan-lesbian-feminist-separatist-folk-singing subset.” Jesse licks his lips again. “Did I mention I am completely stoned?”

  “No shit.” Lucy squats to fill her arms with boards. “How about shutting the fuck up and lending me a hand?”

  “No problemo.” Jesse boosts up a stack and straightens tremulously erect.

  “I am not impressed.” Lucy’s pile is less than half as large.

  “Biology is destiny, isn’t that the line?”

  “Don’t push it.” As she brushes past him, Jesse can see the white skin of Lucy’s scalp. With her crew cut and cowlick, the button-front jeans she favors, she has the look of a fearless teenage boy. Her rep is legion for accelerating hearts at any number of Santa Cruz’s lesbian bars.

  “You gonna set that down,” she asks, “or just space out on me?”

  “Hmm. Multiple choice. Gimme a minute to see what I come up with.”

  Later while Lucy scrubs sap off her fingers at the kitchen sink, Jesse munches from a bag of granola. “Who’s on dinner call tonight?” he wants to know.

  Lucy jerks her head toward the wall the kitchen shares with Marty’s bedroom. Through the plaster Jesse can detect a Mahler symphony at full throttle, and during a quiet passage, the daintier tempo of a woman’s moaning.

  “Ariel,” says Lucy. “A Capricorn with Pisces rising. She told me on her way to the bathroom. She had one of those flowered zipper purses to stash her diaphragm. Pink daisies, man, just as sweet as you please. Her moon is in Jupiter.”

  “Meaning?”

  “You wanna eat, you better cook. Myself, I have a meeting.”

  Jesse runs the faucet over his head. Under the icy water his neck tightens. His skin might sound a note if it were touched.

  “Hey, Lucy, what you were singing, do you believe it? Love grows cold and fades away like the morning dew?”

  Lucy flings her towel at Jesse’s dripping face. “It’s just a fucking song, Jesse. Mop up your mess, or somebody’ll have your ass for breakfast.”

  Across the floor there is a muddy trail of Jesse’s sneaker tracks. As soon as Lucy goes, he marches with purpose across the cracked linoleum, aiming for balance in the composition. “The water is wide—I cannot get over,” he sings, evening the border with his tread. “And neither have I wings to fly.”

  EIGHT

  THE KFAT MORNING SHOW is playing bluegrass as Marty coasts around the kitchen in his bathrobe. Drinking from a bottle of beer, he looks into a hand mirror to calculate the virtues of his changed appearance. Explosions of reflected light bob against his newly minted blonde curls.

  At the counter, Jesse completes a set of stretches. Ten miles before breakfast—ten, goddamn it, and he might have done another five, the groove was that clean, his will that strong. At the center of the room, Marty scuffs aside dye-stained newspapers and slugs of shorn hair to perch upon a wicker stool.

  “Okey-doke,” he says, dipping the mirror in benison toward Ariel who hops forward. “Have at me.”

  Jesse turns to watch as Ariel leans her body into Marty’s, nicking at his beard with a scissors, taming the point into a compact blond barb. She is wearing one of Marty’s black T-shirts and white bikini underpants, and as she pauses to rough her fingers against Marty’s sideburns, Jesse sees pink abrasions circling her wrists and ankles. Good God, Ariel shows qualities not instantly apparent. Marty’s never mentioned that he has a taste for ropes.

  In keeping with the women Marty often chooses, Ariel is eager-faced and young, with a bit of baby fat carried in her cheeks and chin. But she displays a tinge of secret knowledge—in her bitten lips, in the wild moss of armpit hair revealed by her loose sleeves. She poses Marty’s face against her scissors in a stiff-fingered grip that raises impressions upon his flesh. He lets her move him how she likes.

  Women appear in Marty’s life without particular exertion on his part, and Jesse wonders how to learn the trick of his allure. “There’s a fish,” Marty explains one night. “A zippy Japanese item they call fugu. This item sets you back, I don’t know, a hundred bucks a serving, depends on where the yen is with the market. Anyway, the liver is deadly—one bite will stop your clock in thirty seconds. The body flesh is worth so much because it’s got a speck of neurotoxin nails your nervous system with a high hard one. The fingertips go numb and the tips of your ears, the heart scampers like a fucking poodle. The closer to the liver the chef slices, the more you pay, the more you risk, the more you feel.

  “A little trouble and a reliable amount of nasty fun. A complexity in my attentions some women find invigorating to the spirit. That’s my deal, and it works its charms. You, Little Brother, are just too goddamn nice. Roughen up and see what doors may open.”

  Blond, Marty seems happier than Jesse can recall. Only the mobile darkness of his eyes and the drop of his nose ring familiar. He hops off his stool and flicks hair from his bathrobe with a shimmy that exposes bare skin to his waist.

  “Christ,” Jesse says. “You even did your chest hair.”

  “That ain’t all, pardner. Want a peek?”

  “Spare me.”

  Marty has gained sight of himself in a mirrored picture frame and squirms to admire the view at several angles.

  “You aiming for that messianic thing, I think you hit a bull’s-eye,” Jesse says.

  “Don’t say?”

  “Absolutely. You look exactly like that swishy Jesus in the Pasolini movie.”

  Marty curls his fist to offer Jesse his middle finger. “Small is the gate and narrow the way,” he says. “Know me by my sign.”

  Ariel steps between the two men. “I think Marty is beautiful. We picked the fawn tone to set against the flecks in his eyes. You have the grooviest eyes, did anybody ever tell you, love? You could dive right in.”

  Marty bares his canines toward Jesse. “Listen and learn. We California blonds, we have our depths.” He pulls Ariel to him, allowing his fingers to fall against her small breast. “You delivered, babe. This is more than I hoped for. I feel—how to put it—sort of exalted.”

  Ariel cups Marty’s hand with hers to halt the up-and-down of his thumb. “Gosh, I mean, a new hairstyle and all? Is your brother usually so serious, Jesse?”

  Jesse looks to Marty, who shrugs with benign amusement. “We’re both serious,” Marty says. “Solemn as shit, handed the appropriate inducement.”

  “Runs in the family,” Jesse says. “Blood will tell. Isn’t that so, Big Brother?”

  “God’s truth,” Marty says. His thumb renews its circular motion. This time Ariel accepts his caress.

  The demonstration has an antic energy, like a late night party running out of kilter. Loudspeakers strung to a parked VW bus amplify a woman’s singing through a squeal of electronic feedback. She sits on the van’s roof, sailing prettily through a protes
t ballad, blowing kisses to the watchful cops between her stanzas. “Angry Young Dyke,” her T-shirt reports.

  Two hundred demonstrators mass the sidewalk by the auditorium where Miss California waits to earn her crown. Behind police barriers, on the Civic Plaza, there are four klieg lights whose beams speed starward in an outpouring of sound and light. In any given instant, Jesse reasons, the chanting, marching crowd might leap into stampede and he would follow. Or would if his high heels were not so wobbly.

  He wears a chiffon frock of powder pink and pumps with satin bows to match the contest sash that’s pinned from neck to hip. Natalie begged him into drag using sweet talk and revolutionary cant and a promise to do his dishes for a month. His orders are to win the notice of the press who prowl for footage on the plaza and the street. He serves his tidbit to the cameras with all the dignity his six-foot-two can bring to bear, a placard reading: MS. CONGENIALITY SEZ: SEXISM = RAPE.

  As the demonstration goes on, Jesse locates an unexpected pleasure in the enthusiasm of the mob. Playing the fool, who would have thought? He adds a curtsy to his stroll and inclines his head to the whoops and cheers as though the affection were real.

  On the opposite sidewalk, a woman watches the demonstration from the saddle of a bicycle. There is a familiarity to the jab of her foot against her pedal, to the spray of brown hair that feathers her neck. Then he sees the cast on her far leg, white as a tooth.

  From the loudspeakers, the singer urges “love and freedom,” and the woman launches through the crowd with verve and grace and aggression. Before she disappears around the corner, Jesse drops his sign and kicks his pumps into the gutter. He runs a hard canter, chasing the spark of her reflector and calling out to her to wait.

  The woman pays no heed, stands upright upon her pedals, despite the cast, and notches along the Chestnut Street hill in a beautiful and resolute line. But Jesse closes the gap, and she stops and observes his uphill progress without so much as a smile. Perhaps she’s seen her share today of barefoot men in party pink.