Nothing to Declare Read online

  “You can’t go that way,” Jesse says in more panting fashion than he likes. “The governor’s due any minute, and I personally know eight people who want to see how many eggs it takes to send the asshole back to Sacramento.”

  The woman sights up the tree-lined avenue of gingerbread Queen Annes only recently laced with drifting fog. “And how many do you think that would be? I expect Reagan’s good for at least a dozen before he turns tail. Assuming he doesn’t have his people open fire. Under the cover of arms, he’d go somewhat longer, wouldn’t you guess?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. I hadn’t pictured gunplay.”

  The woman gives him her frank, open-faced regard. “I can always imagine the worst.”

  Her voice is much as he heard it at the beach, though more subdued than he recalls, as if the plaster weighs it down. Through the splay of her pants leg, cut to fit the cast, there is a morsel of tan thigh. Tan all over—the remembered image flushes through him. An untamed color like tree bark or sand.

  “Do I know you?” she asks him. “I’ve seen you, I’m sure of it. I’ve got this memory for faces, pieces of faces and the like. It’s a curse, believe me, sort of always having gravel in your shoe.”

  “What exactly do you remember?”

  She dismounts to examine him at close reach. He smells her flowery perfume and an unnameable gamy funk.

  “No,” she says. “The chiffon throws me a curve. Sorry.”

  “The Forty-first Avenue Beach. The end of June.”

  Her smile has an agreeable limberness. “You bet. Your eyes. You checked me out, gave me your up and down and roundabout and pretended not to, I remember now.”

  The dress binds at Jesse’s chest. “I don’t think I did. I wouldn’t.” He fluffs his printed sash. “That would have been distinctly uncongenial.”

  She laughs. “It was a nude beach, hon. Everybody watches everybody—me included.”

  She introduces herself as Isabel Lantana and they sit at the curb, talking and watching the fog soften the prospect of houses, trees, and street. She works trimming hides for a used clothing and leather boutique called Rags to Riches; her scent derives from tannin and what she identifies as Condensed Cream of Cow. She lives alone in the Felton redwoods and chipped her metatarsal bone while doing limbo in a roadhouse out on Highway 9.

  “I won grand prize,” she says, skipping her fingers against her cast. “You’re sitting beside top limbo dog of Santa Cruz County. I won a plastic trophy and a hundred dollars, not to mention a bottle of overproof rum.”

  “With a broken foot? In pain?”

  Isabel is checking out the spot where Jesse claims the egg assault lies pending. “I needed new derailleurs for my bike,” she says.

  The fog is thickening around them and Jesse feels enclosed by it, untethered and calm, as though pleasantly lost at sea.

  “Come now, walk me up the hill,” says Isabel. “Maybe your friends will loan a girl an egg or two.”

  “You’re sure? If something goes down, won’t it be tough to get away?”

  Isabel cushions her weight upon him to stand up, her hand callused and hot and strong. “We’ll improvise,” she says.

  Her cast thumps on the sidewalk. Beside her, Jesse pushes the bike, scattering cedar bark and pebbles, feeling the beating of his heart like an engine in his chest.

  NINE

  LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT ISABEL. Months went down before she nudged her luscious toes across our threshold. She drifted by as an idea. A name. A tale that Jesse told us over dinner. Nude On The Beach, The Limbo Dog, The Woman On Her Bicycle With Broken Foot. Jesse was ratcheted to higher levels than I’d ever witnessed, and played the parts in different voices. All fall he cooked up recipes that had a mighty zip and zing. I learned Bel first in his behavior before we ever met. The meals he served that season were addictive little wars. Chipotle chile moles, Jamaican jerk, treacly desserts that bounced an ache directly to the temples. The other roommates grumbled but I felt satisfied and grateful. I’d wipe my eyes and hail a toast up to the heavens. I like a dish that has the stuff to leave the mouth in shreds.

  They loved to dance, that’s what he told me. Met once a week on Fridays at a low-rent bar down by the pier. I knew the place, Lulu’s, with its clientele of coke dealers and abalone divers, graybeard surfers at their tequila. The jukebox leaned toward Willie Colon and the Fania All-Stars. The air had the odor of kelp and, from its further reaches, a pleasant herbal dew.

  I can see the two of them in their work clothes bumping through a frisky salsa. Behind them the bar talk rumbles on all night—the soured deals and sneaky ocean currents, the general capriciousness of Man and God and Nature. She leads and Jesse clings to all the dips and turns a half-step behind. Dancing with sentiment to the passionate Latin brass.

  Friends, Jesse told me, that’s what they decided. They’d start with conversation and shots of Sauza Gold and lime. She’d lick salt crumbs from the corner of her wrist and escort Jesse to the floor so that music and momentum could strip away her sense of where she was. They’d stay there hardly talking until she called the final number, then they’d chart their separate trails to separate beds.

  But when are you gonna fuck her, was my point of view. Nothing wrong with good old Mr. Fuck. Even for friends. Especially for friends, if you pay attention to the details. Sex lends a merry fidget to a friendship, cranks it tight until it sits right up and begs. No telling what you’ll get—messy sheets, or some intense species of disaster. Nothing from nothing—it takes a fleck of dirt to grow a pearl.

  I’m happy, Jesse declared. We like our friendship as a partnership of equals—consider it an article of liberation that sex is off the table. He was facing away from me, but I caught the sweetest piece of fear flit through his vision. I made my mind up then to nose out Lulu’s from a careful distance. I don’t trust anybody’s politics until I’ve seen them dance.

  Isabel is sitting on a barstool waiting for merengue music when Jesse comes into the bar. It’s the fast tunes she holds to, the swing and the frenzy, not these slow Celia Cruz heartbreakers full of untranslatable Cuban sorrow. He sequesters himself in the doorway as she finishes her drink. She strips a lime rind of its flesh with her teeth, double-snaps her shot glass to the bar and orders up another round.

  She has on her favorite dancing outfit, a carnelian dress Jesse loves her in, scooped necked and featuring a print of snarling Chinese tigers. Their yellow bodies are sewn with rhinestones that thieve colored light from the electric beer signs on the facing wall. With no more thought than if she were alone, she twists her torso in a ballerina’s stretch. Shimmers streak the rayon fangs and stripes and claws.

  Work is caked over him, the char of overheated machinery, and Jesse jogs to the men’s room for a session with the scrap of Lava he carries in his bag. He scrubs his arms and chest a stinging pink, steaming the mirror until he cannot see his face. Marching to the bar, he plants his still-damp fingers around Isabel’s untouched glass.

  Her look up at him is softened by alcohol. “You have soap in your ears,” she says.

  “It was a dirty day. You know how they are.”

  “Don’t go feeling sorry for yourself. Dirt comes off.”

  Jesse swallows and sighs, and a cactus-flavored heat runs down his gullet. “God, what’s finer than ending the week by drinking tequila on someone else’s dime?”

  Isabel motions to the bartender for two more. “Nothing I can think of,” she says. “Next round’s yours.”

  They drink while Isabel unrolls the story of her week—a history of missed deadlines and bicycle flats and bounced checks and lost earrings. “My life’s turned into slapstick,” she says, with a note of amusement and pride. “It’s a lesson, I have to think, a past life sniffing at my heels. But I don’t intend to let it spoil the evening. Good behavior only. I’m aiming upward.”

  “I like it. Upward. Do you have any idea of how great you are?”

  “You’re being foolish.”

  “N
o, I’m not,” Jesse says. He crowds closer to her, smelling citrus and the musk he knows her by. “Here you are, even after a miserable patch like this—you’re barely mussed. You don’t even know how to complain.”

  “Is someone going to come and save me if I do?”

  “Not the point. Nothing’s out of place, don’t you see? You have your house in the woods, a job you don’t exactly hate, a dancing partner who’ll last the night. Tranquility reigns. We’re aiming upward.”

  Isabel shakes her head in wonderment. “Connect the dots and there I am.”

  “I was trying to make you feel better. Not put you in a box.”

  “Yet here I am.”

  She isn’t beautiful—not in the school-taught, classical sense. Her features are too peasant-shaped; her appetites and scars and hungers range in the open—an image out of Goya or Millet. Jesse collars her within a sidelong stare. Her dusk-colored eyes hide a terrain of undeclared emotion.

  The jukebox has switched over to a Portuguese vocal of exquisite soulfulness and the singer’s moody phrasing brings Isabel up short. “I don’t understand what kind of downer Lulu’s on,” she says. “It’s Friday night, for heaven’s sake. Mambo, mambo, mambo, don’t you think?”

  Jesse rises unsteadily to his feet, feeling the peculiar surprise of too much drink. “I hope the old woman’s in a friendly frame of mind. If I’m not back in twenty minutes call the shore patrol.”

  In spite of herself, Isabel sways to the melody. “It means fate,” she says.

  “I’m sorry. You’ve lost me there.”

  “Fado. This kind of song.”

  He waits for further elaboration. “Go on,” Isabel says, shooing him off, smiling her covert smile. “I want my workout.”

  In her office near the fire exit, Lulu sits before a plate of Moros y Cristianos. She stalls Jesse in attendance on her couch, audience to the clatter of the bangles on her wrists. The bar owner takes her rice and beans indolently, enjoying Jesse’s impatience as though it were an extra course. At last, freshening her lipstick and straightening her enormous dress, she leads him to the Wurlitzer where he hurries to pick out tunes to flood the dance floor with their heat.

  “Mira,” Jesse hears Lulu’s syrupy voice behind him. “You have the right heart you can dance to anything you like.”

  In a far corner, Isabel revolves to the fado in a slow, lightly held samba. There is no mistaking her companion’s bleached hair or the pressed, white guayabera shirt, which Jesse recognizes as his own. Marty puts Isabel through a turn and twirls her in reverse, rustling her skirt around her calves. A second effortless twirl. Isabel’s laughter soars loose above the sounds of singer and guitar.

  Lulu breathes onion against Jesse’s cheek. “He’s a strong dancer, that one.” In her musical accent, the old woman’s words fuse with the Portuguese lyrics; she might be murmuring the chorus.

  “Yes,” he says finally. “He’s got some moves.”

  “And you know him? He is your friend?”

  Jesse concentrates on the dancing couple. Their bodies are spotted with a pelt of mirror-ball illumination. “They both are,” he says. “My two best friends.”

  “Ah,” Lulu says, cocking her gaze toward the pair.

  Jesse crouches over the jukebox. “Help me, Lulu. Which merengue do you love the most? Which makes you feel like you’re back home in Santo Domingo?”

  Her song arrives in a brilliant salvo of horns and congas, a rhythm section like a howling jungle. Johnny Ventura, she tells him, the king of them all. Across the room, Isabel holds out her arms for Marty’s taking. Before the verse is over, they are indistinct among a flock of dancers who have rushed the floor. Jesse puts himself near to the speakers, where the music has a weight like a constant, thumping wind. From this vantage the postures of the merengue seem formal and showy, but Isabel and Marty attack them with a carefree spirit. As they swirl now and again into sight, they wave to Jesse with unforced affection, pleased to show off their fanciest maneuvers to their friend. Marty is moving his lips, Jesse sees, so as not to lose the complicated meter of the steps.

  TEN

  WHOLE EARTH RETREADS FILLS A BLOCK in the railway district west of downtown, two stories of sallow prewar stucco. In a fit of architectural enthusiasm, the building’s designer hitched a facade of Mission tiles to the edge of the flat warehouse roof and inset arches above the second-story windows. Our Lady of the Lug Nut, Jesse calls the place—where tires are born to life anew.

  He does his time in the dark holds of semi-trailers, heaving worn-out truck tires to the warehouse floor at more than sixty pounds a throw. They land with a violent, rubbery boom, inflaming his nostrils with a scat of soot and truck exhaust. He’s never felt so tired or so filthy or so strong.

  His partner Henry Johnson wears a truss over green work pants and carries in his breast pocket a large bottle of Louisiana Hot Sauce, which he splashes against his tongue as the afternoon wears long. He exceeds Jesse’s quota with an elegant minimum of exertion, all middle-aged hip and finesse. In Henry’s thinking, Jesse wastes too much muscle on his day.

  “You have some size, College, I give you, but your working habits are puny. Time is short and money’s funny. Johnson’s Rule is always do the boss a little shy of what he wants to earn your green.”

  At noon break, Henry and the other men take stations at the factory windows, playing grab-ass and chomping hot link poor boys and tamales they’ve reheated on the tread extruder. Through the open transoms they shout to women on the sidewalk, cheering at the catcalls that fly upward in return. As newest hire, Jesse stands guard behind a barrier of rubber-speckled shirt backs, satisfied with a narrow slice of gray November sky. How will he handle it, he wonders, if the men rain their attention on a woman that he knows—Lucy, perhaps, or Isabel?

  Lucy would find a rock and flash it to the windows, star the glass, he’s sure. But Isabel? She’d pedal by Our Lady full speed, tires hissing on the pavement, eyes on the road ahead. The only difference between men and dogs, she’s told him more than once—dogs can be trained.

  “What about Top Limbo Dogs?” Jesse had asked. This was amid the wreckage of breakfast in the Escalona dining room a week after Isabel and Marty met.

  She sipped the last of her tea with a modest dipping of her chin. “They’re an exception. They can’t be taught a thing.” Her hair was wet from the shower and hung weedily against her neck. From the kitchen they heard Marty doing dishes, and Isabel smiled so sweetly at the racket, Jesse wanted to look away. Marty was singing Sonny Boy Williamson and splashing holy hell inside the sink.

  The Whole Earth whistle signals end of lunch, and Henry pushes from his window perch. “I had seventy-five dollars,” he says, “I’d buy some halter tops at Pick ‘n Save and hand them out like Mister Johnny Appleseed. I’ll be fair-minded, any pretty young sister I happen to meet, black, white, or polka-dotted. Get one of those folding chairs and maybe a pint of V.O. and choose a watching spot nearby the walking mall. Won’t it be fine to let the world go bobbing by.”

  “You’re a man of charitable instincts,” Jesse says.

  “I am well organized, son. All I need is capital.”

  “Come summer if you’re short, I’ll be your banker, we’ll go fifty-fifty.”

  “Come summer, shoot, you’ll be long gone. But I appreciate the offer very kindly.”

  “Where’m I going to be?”

  Henry spikes a ruby assault of Tabasco into his mouth, sprinkling the space between them with vinegar and pepper. “Back where you belong, I expect.” He hitches up his truss and lumbers past Jesse, offering high-five to every buddy on the line. A fanfare of slapping palms steers Henry back to work.

  The shift boss is a twenty-two-year-old named Mitchell Michaelson Jr., the firstborn of the factory owner. Little Mitch has a way of wandering his attention around the compass when he talks. His floury complexion, Henry claims, is a proven tell of a devoted whack-off artist. Of late, he’s taken an unfortunate liking to Jesse, corner
s him at lunchtime several times a week to spitball marketing concoctions—blimps and banners, a retread exposition at the County Fair. He speaks about the Whole Earth Family of Products with the deferential whisper of a golf announcer waiting for a putt.

  Today, as Jesse rounds the corner toward the loading bay, Michaelson is shambling by in a corduroy suit, trawling the warehouse lanes for malingerers and thieves. His wan face gleams dangerously with good news.

  “Hi there, Jesse. I know something about you.”

  “Yeah, what might that be?” Behind the boss, Henry grunts as he piles cold-cure rubber onto a pallet.

  “Donelle Bishop just got fired,” Little Mitch says.

  “The order clerk? I don’t think I’ve talked to her three times since June.”

  “Chick punched her sister’s time card out last night—that’s fraud, I guess. Big Mitch canned her at lunch. The sister, too. They’re lucky Dad’s too soft to prosecute.”

  “Maybe Donelle should have punched out Big Mitch instead.”

  “Ha. Ha. So, here’s what, I told Big Mitch you probably type OK, you’ve been to college, you’re good people. We’re giving you your opportunity.” His look grazes Jesse’s ponytail. “You’ll have to cut that mess.”

  “You want me for Donelle’s job?”

  “Well, yeah, sure. We’re bumping you $37.25 a week, I think. Better a bump than a poke with a pointed object, ha ha.”

  Little Mitch’s mouth jerks into a smile and then his attention latches onto the extruding equipment, which groans as though the machinery were working up an effort.

  “I’d like to think it over, Mitch,” Jesse says. “I’ve just figured out which end is up here on the floor.”

  The boss’s Adam’s apple throbs. “Think it over—jeez. My dad will burst a vessel, I told him you’d be golden.”