Stuart shakes out his match like a movie tough, draws deeply, exhales a volcanic plume through his nose. Can we go someplace, he says, where I can just cool out and think for a goddamn change?
They wind up at somebody’s pad: the upper floor of a rickety old house, now subdivided into a triplex, in the neighborhood that Welles and Stanley walked through last night. The buckets are lined up on the landing, their silvery surfaces broken now and then by a tiny fin or a gasping mouth. Inside, a new bop record rotates on the hi-fi, and the sleeve gets passed around: a photo of a white altoist posed with his horn in the shade of trees, cool and blank-faced, eyeing something offstage right that could be the setting sun, could be approaching doom, it’s all the same to this cat. Stuart and Tony sit on the floor by a cinderblock bookcase, smoking and complaining. I go home, and it’s the kids, the bills, the rent. How am I supposed to get any serious work done? Women don’t understand how hard it is to keep an idea in your head, especially when it’s a dangerous idea, one that nobody wants you to be having. At the kitchen table Alex has settled in: matches, dropper, spoon, needle, the dead biker’s junk. Some of the guys are rolling up their sleeves. Lyn drifts from room to room like a shade, ignored by everyone. Charlie’s propped in a corner, trying to open a bottle of beer, talking loud in his radio voice: Are you risking your life—or the life of your child—by using dirty syringes?
Stanley aches all over, in his leg most of all, and his skin is raw and filmy from the sea. He can’t stop thinking about the fish outside, tapping their noses against the sides of the pails, sucking air off the top. Whatever moment he felt passing before has now definitely passed. He and Claudio slip outside as the moon sets, saying goodnight to no one, lugging their heavy buckets home.
44
Adrian Welles lives in a clapboard bungalow on Wave Crest, a big house for the neighborhood: two stories, custard-yellow eaves and siding newly painted, long second-floor deck ringed by a wrist-thick wisteria vine. The slab has settled unevenly over the years; from the street, the front door seems slightly off plumb, tilted at a funhouse angle. The house sits on its wide sandy lot like a lunatic on a parkbench, tricked out in his best suit, with nowhere to go and nothing to do but fix passersby with a silent crooked smile.
Stanley and Claudio have spent the day in a frenzy of primping, hauling their filthy clothes to the coin laundry, then hiking north along the beach into Santa Monica to shower and shave at the communal washroom there. By the time they got back to Horizon Court, the wrinkles had fallen from Stanley’s stolen clothes; Claudio slicked his hair back and donned a loud rayon shirt. Then they crowded together as Stanley held out his steel pocket mirror in an outstretched hand. The two of them could pass for horn-players in a hot hotel combo—or film stars, Claudio insisted. We are like two young stars of film.
They headed up Pacific as the sun began to sink, moving through the shadowed mercantile valley of liquor stores and shuttered warehouses and careworn Jewish bakeries, slowed by the weight of the buckets they bore and the risk of splashing seawater on their clean trousers. Stanley’s greatest fear—an encounter with the Dogs that would end, at best, with their catch spilled—did not come to pass, and as they made the corner onto Welles’s street they paused for a moment to relax, to flex their cramped fingers, to feed the gathering neighborhood cats with the handful of fish that died in the night.
Now they’ve come to the house. At this hour the light is exactly wrong for peeking in the windows: each pane is a mute sheet of reflected sun, shaded here and there by pale green clusters of unopened wisteria blooms. Beyond the low wooden gate, the flagstone path is edged with winter-green, infiltrating the patchy grass. Tall hibiscus grows beneath the windows, and a pair of fuchsias hangs in baskets over the stoop. On the left side of the lawn is a shallow birdbath; on the right is a sundial set on a concrete pedestal, its rusty iron blade adorned with a round laughing face. Text curves around the pedestal’s edge: but a name I snatched, it says. Stanley can’t read the rest. Somewhere inside the house a hi-fi plays a string-orchestra record; it’s hard to hear at first, but when it crescendos, it’s loud enough to rattle the windows in their frames. The music is discordant, keening, like nothing Stanley has heard. He has a hard time imagining why anybody would listen to it on purpose.
Stanley, Claudio says. Will we go in?
Stanley feels a gentle pressure on his ankle. He looks down. One of the bag-of-bones stray cats is rubbing the dome of its skull against his leg; another rears on its hind feet to tap the rim of his bucket with a cautious paw. Claudio is fending off three more.