The Do-Re-Mi Read online

  “Go away, Vic.”

  “Bitch, you ever seen me take orders?”

  By now, I was up and ready to charge whichever Cossack attacked first. A loud whistle sounded and the Texan bouncer came loping, followed by three other fellows in jamboree t-shirts and Security baseball caps.

  Without a glance at the bikers or Ava, as though I were the obvious villain, the Texan stepped between me and Little Vic and dropped two heavy paws on my shoulders. “Partner, give me your pass and get along outta here.”

  Bikers laughed. Vic said, “See you in hell, Pretty Boy.”

  Ava looped her arm in mine. As we reached the path, she said, “You’re not so pretty.”

  “That’s a matter of taste,” I grumbled, and got rewarded by her gripping my arm a little firmer. A minute later, as we neared the concessions, we heard shouts and turned to watch a platoon of security hippies surround the Cossacks.

  I said, “Jimmy didn’t know bikers but apparently you do?”

  “Who said Jimmy didn’t know any bikers?”

  “I thought you did.”

  “I said he didn’t hang out with them. Okay?” Then, as though giving me a secret I had no right to know and would find myself ashamed at having pestered out of her, she said, “My sister’s Vic’s girl.” She let go of my arm and marched toward the exit.

  The Cossacks’ Harleys were parked in a line with their front tires under the rope and sawhorse barricade that was supposed to discourage freeloaders from entering the jamboree. The way Ava stopped and stared death rays at them, I imagined her kicking the first one over and watching the whole line domino.

  Six

  WE drove my Chevy to a turnoff just east of the river bridge and walked down the bank to a place Ava knew where the river narrowed and swirled into shade. Buffy St. Marie's pretty warble in the distance harmonized with cooing birds in the shore-lines bushy pines.

  Ava slipped out of her sandals and dipped her feet in the water. We listened to the roar of Harleys leaving the festival and fading, going west. Ava’s arms folded over her chest. She said, “Lord, thanks again for Jimmy’s life. If he gave up on you, please forgive him. Take him to eternal joy. And Father, please send angels to help us find the killer. And bless Jimmy’s poor mom.” She looked up at me. “And protect Alvaro,” she added, without much fervor.

  To spend an August day with such a girl on the bank of Whiskey River might rank as a highlight of my twenty-two years if my brother hadn’t been wanted for murder and if I felt certain that Ava was honest. “Christian” and “honest” weren’t always synonyms, I had learned quite well at my college. I watched her muslin dress flutter in the breeze, her fingers become a spider on a mirror, and her chin tilt forward onto her breastbone.

  “You know Jimmy’s mom pretty well?” I asked.

  "Some."

  “How about taking me to her?”

  Shading her eyes with one hand, she squinted at me.

  I said, “If I go by myself to talk with Jimmy’s mom, why’s she going to talk to me? But if she thinks I’m a visiting evangelist or something, maybe she’ll talk.”

  “About what?”

  “How about what Jimmy was doing in the forest night before last?”

  “Maybe he wasn’t in the forest until the killer took him there.”

  I waited, hoping she would let go of a secret. But she stood, bent, and picked up a handful of stones and pitched them one by one into the river. “Okay. Let’s go.”

  AVA suggested we take her car in case the Cossacks were out looking for me. Her car was in the jamboree lot, an old Plymouth held together with bobby pins and duct tape. I rode shotgun, ready to duck at the sight or sound of a Harley.

  Jimmy’s mom lived on Burgundy Lane, one of the residential streets off Manhattan Avenue. The homes nearest Manhattan were large and genteel, their hedges clipped, lawns emerald green, tulip beds weeded. A quarter-mile north, where Delene Marris lived, the houses looked like servants’ quarters on weed-choked lots. The Marris cottage was barn-red splotched with white, recently scraped and primered. A bird feeder hung from the roof of the porch. The lawn was the yellow of hay.

  We parked at the curb. For a minute, Ava sat still behind the wheel, probably quieting her heart. Then she climbed out and rounded the car. A next-door neighbor stopped pushing her child in a rope swing to watch us and an old fellow across the street leaned on a rake and stared.

  Ava knocked, waited, and knocked again before the door opened. Through the screen door, I saw a spindly woman whose short bleached-blond hair showed an inch of dark roots. She had deep, haunted eyes like her brother Brady and the same sharp features as his. She might once have been a looker. “Hi, honey,” she rasped, and pushed open the screen. “Who’s your friend?”

  “Clifford. Just a guy from church,” she said. “We were praying for you and decided we should come see how you’re doing.”

  “Well . . . " Delene held her small hand out to me. She led us into a living room furnished like a budget motel in straight lines and dark blue fabrics against powder-blue walls and frilly white curtains. A single mom with a lousy income attempting to create a gracious home, I supposed.

  Ava and I took the couch. Delene sat stiff in the matching chair. On the coffee table lay a fat paperback called Havana Heat and a TV Guide serving as a coaster for a Coors bottle half-full of ashes and butts.

  “Funeral’s Monday,” Delene said. “You wanta ride in the limo with me and Brady?”

  A little moan escaped from Ava and her shoulders hunched toward her ears. “Even though I broke up with Jimmy?”

  “Honey, anybody would give him the boot the way he was behaving. Ever since he got that damn scholarship letter to Whitman College. What kind of deal is it, they give you a scholarship but you still hafta pay out a fortune? The time he pays for this dormitory and the cafeteria, it’s gonna cost more than I make in a year, counting tips. You know, that kinda deal’s what soured him. What turned him into thinking like a communist.”

  Only minutes ago, we had passed banners emblazoned with Phil Ochs’ name and photo. So when she said “communist” I remembered the poems of Chairman Mao on the back cover of a Phil Ochs album.

  “Aw,” Ava said, “just because he was reading some books doesn’t make him — ”

  Delene said, “Not books dammit. I’m talking about the union. Big Dan folksinger and that Chavez and their communist union. Last two days of Jimmy’s life, he was out in the cherry orchards signing up pickers for the communists. The way I figure, the Mexican killed him for money.”

  “Whose money?”

  “Somebody that wants to get rid of the union. Somebody paid him. Every lousy thing’s about money.”

  “Mom,” Ava said, “it wasn’t only the money. When Jimmy got saddest was when he worried about leaving you.”

  “Me?”

  “The way he saw, you two were a team. He wasn’t sure either of you’d be worth much without the other.”

  “Jimmy thought that? Girl, he would’ve been ten times better without me.” Delene turned to me and stiffened her jaw, surely to keep it from quivering. “Jimmy got it all, like the genes all dove in the pool and hit the mark one time, so Jimmy got the smarts and the goodness that our family never put together before. Like Brady says, family’s what counts in the long haul. It’s family that’s going to carry on, make us all somebody. Or nobody.”

  The image of Brady Barker as philosopher was odd but not amusing. My right hand lay like a sausage on my knee. Ava glanced up at Jimmy’s mom, whose brow had crinkled deep.

  “Brady’s sterile,” Delene said. “That’s one of the reasons Susie left him. And look at me, you think any man that could father a boy like Jimmy would get the hots over a sight like me. I mean, before, sure. Not now. Not on your life. Me and Brady are the last of the Barkers.”

  Ava leaned forward, reached out and began, “Come on, Mom, you’re — ”

  Delene interrupted by taking Ava’s hand. “No way around it, honey.
Jimmy was our hope. Now we’re good as extinct. And don’t go telling me God’ll make things right. God’s no damn use to me now.”

  Ava petted the woman’s hand while I sat confounded between sadness over the fate of Delene and Jimmy Marris and questions like had Alvaro as well as Jimmy gotten mixed up in radical politics? If so, might they have worked together? But those questions could wait until I was alone. Now, I needed to find a way to swindle Delene into reminiscing about the last days of her son.

  Brakes squeaked, the rat-tat of an old motor with loose valves shut down, a creaking door slammed, and boots tromped the gravel path. Through the window I saw Brady Barker climb out of a ’59 Chevy convertible. As he climbed the porch, he called out, “Brought lunch, Sis.”

  He walked in carrying two Foster’s Freeze sacks. By the time he saw me, I was on my feet. He panted through his teeth while he placed the sacks on the floor. Waving a thumb at me, he snarled, “Who’d this cocksucker tell you he is?”

  “Jesus, Brady . . . ” Delene said.

  Ava came and stood beside me. “I brought him here.”

  “He’s your friend, little girl, then you got till the count of one to scoot your ass out of our house.”

  “It’s my house,” Delene said.

  “Sis, you’re talking to the brother and accomplice of the Mexican that murdered Jimmy.”

  She covered her eyes then dropped her right hand and grabbed the Coors bottle from the table. Her face had transformed from pale, slack, and wrinkled, to a horror mask, round-eyed and taut as if the sharp bones were attempting to break through the skin. When she hurled the bottle, I ducked so it only clipped my ear and the base of my skull. It bounced off the bookcase stacked with old magazines and cracked the lower right pane of a French window. “I talked my heart out,” she screamed. Barker pointed at me then at the door.

  Keeping my distance while I passed him, I walked out. As I stepped off the porch onto the gravel, the deputy growled, “Hey.”

  I walked a few more paces and turned. Ava was on the porch. She looked around and paused in mid-stride. Delene was in the shadow of the doorway. Barker came and stopped an arm’s length from me.

  “Hickey,” he said, “you think if you disappear anybody around here’s gonna look real hard? Or you think some USC law professor’s gonna come investigate? Or you think your old man being a retired rent-a-cop puts the fear in anybody?”

  His eyes sparked then dropped to stare at my hand. “What I’m saying is, you want to live to grow up, run home to your mama and daddy. And tell them to give up the wetback for dead. See, your Alvaro makes it out of the mountains, I’m going to chase him through the valley. He crosses the valley, I’ll chase him over the plains. He gets to the water, I’ll chase him across the ocean. I’m like that TV cop on the trail of Richard Kimball only I’m smarter than him and the wetback’s dumber than Kimball. Way dumber. Why just this morning he broke into a cabin in Little Falls, stole food and a Colt handgun. You hear?”

  "No."

  “Well he sure did. You going to run home like I say?”

  I smiled to keep my teeth from grinding, and shook my head. In his eyes, I saw a punch coming. Maybe he would’ve let it fly. Maybe not. Ava pushed me out of his reach.

  IN the Plymouth, I waited for Ava to break out of her guilt over violating Delene Marris’ trust in her and to bawl me out for causing it. But she drove on in silence and without telling me her destination.

  The trail that led down from the Cossacks’ camp atop Sugar Hill intersected the River Road about a hundred yards east of Big Dan's commune. A Harley was stopped at the intersection. A woman passenger, behind the tiny driver, leaned against the sissy bar. As we neared them, the Harley skidded a U-turn and fishtailed back toward the Cossack camp.

  “Lola and Vic,” Ava said. “You didn’t duck fast enough. He’s probably going to get Boomer or somebody. God, Clifford, it might take a miracle just to get you out of Evergreen alive.”

  I had been thinking the same way, wondering who would kill me first, Vic, one of his slaves, or Brady Barker.

  She used the Sugar Hill intersection to make a U turn then she raced the old car back west nearly sideswiping a flowered school bus that was lumbering onto the road out of jamboree parking, while a guy with a scratchy voice like Dave Van Ronk belted out a Phil Ochs song:

  “We’re the cops of the world, boys,

  We’re the cops of the world . . .”

  Alvaro used to sing that one in the shower after he came back from Vietnam.

  Ava said, “I thought we could go to my church and ask Pastor Bob for guidance, but Vic might catch us there. We need to go someplace the Cossacks don’t dare come.”

  Saint Bob, I thought. The label Simon had used. But I kept silent, as Ava must’ve thought more highly of the Pastor than Simon did.

  I wanted to ask why did we need to go anyplace rather than simply drop me at the jamboree parking lot but the question seemed rude and as long as I didn't ask I could hope the answer was that she felt some connection to me.

  Just past the garden-field she turned into the commune owned by the stock analyst people called Quig. The gatekeeper, a slight, pale fellow with a bush of chalk-white kinky hair, sat flipping shelled peanuts overhead and trying to catch them in his mouth. His shaggy dog snarled and woofed at us.

  I had heard about Quig last summer and in a letter from Alvaro. His real name was Charles Quigley. When he wasn’t on lecture tours, treks through the Himalayas, or photo safaris, he lived in a stone house perched on a hill with a view of Whiskey River, downtown Evergreen and, to the south, woods thick with spruce shapely as Christmas trees and stands of redwood rising up above the spruce like skyscrapers out of a one-story suburb.

  The commune’s two dozen or so structures included a yurt, miniature A-frames on stilts, rusted camping trailers, army tent-houses, and a Quonset. With nearly all Quig’s people at the jamboree, the grounds appeared deserted. Maybe, I thought, Ava wanted to ask Quig for an opinion or for me to question him. But she wove along a car-path between the structures and parked out of sight from the road in a clearing behind Quig’s residence. She ushered me out of the car and led me down the river bank to a trickling creek.

  We sat on a log and she asked, "What now?"

  Motorcycles roared past on River Road. Their noise in league with my numb hand might have been what gave me a shiver and made me feel useless, not half the man it would take to save Alvaro. Once again, I reconsidered calling Pop. As I told Ava, Barker’s zeal to take down my brother had convinced me that to keep playing detective on my own was to play games with Alvaro’s life. The detective in the family wasn’t Clifford, but Tom Hickey. And Pop would rather have another problem to solve, or another thousand problems, than lose Alvaro.

  If, once again, Pop didn’t answer, I could phone Harry Poverman. He wasn’t only our closest neighbor; he was Pop’s loyal amigo.

  Ava picked up my limp hand and gazed at my face. The sunny river appeared in her eyes. “Let’s go see my uncle Mitch. He’s a doctor. And you can use his phone.”

  I asked her to stop by the jamboree. Mid-afternoon, the heat was getting so cruel, I worried about my Hummingbird, which I had left in my Chevy. I needed to loosen the springs or the tension might yank the bridge off the box.

  As Ava’s Plymouth rattled into the jamboree parking lot, Big Dan was reminding the crowd that tomorrow Phil Ochs would join them to sing his own compositions and lead a tribute to Woody Guthrie.

  At first I thought the change in my car was a mirage, some prismatic effect of sunlight. The Texan and an Asian guard stood beside it, chatting.

  After I realized it was no mirage, as I stumbled toward my Chevy, Ava caught up, wrapped her arm around my waist and snuggled her head against my shoulder. I guessed she knew my desire for comforting had just grown to boundless.

  The Texan said, “I bet this is yours. I shoulda figured. Man, we couldn’t see taking on thirty of ’em.”

  “About ten, actually,
” the Asian guard said.

  “Whatever. So I radioed and got hold of the sheriff but his boys are occupied, out chasing a murderer.”

  “They didn’t touch the glass,” the Asian guard said. “It looked more like they were doing an art project than trying to wreck your wagon. Six or eight ball peen hammers. Five minutes is all it took.”

  I leaned over the hood, burning my elbow on the metal and feeling some foreign spirit or substance come to a boil inside me.

  Master Yi, with whom my brother and I had studied Tae Kwon Do, taught us not to fight unless we were ready to die or kill. I felt ready for either.

  Seven

  AFTER we saw my car, Ava changed our plans. She asked me to drive into town, report to the sheriffs what the Cossacks had done, then go Babe’s and wait for her. Don’t leave the cafe. Give her an hour. She wouldn’t say why.

  The Cossacks had customized every inch of the doors, roof, fenders, and hood of my Chevy with dents like a golf ball’s dimples, each about a quarter inch deep. When Ava drove off, west toward Evergreen, I sat on the hood listening to Lightnin’ Hopkins. He groaned a blues I had played but never honestly felt until now. It was about sinking as low as low went.

  Pop had driven Chevys until Harry Poverman gave him a Cadillac as a bonus for five years as his South Shore casino’s chief of security. And Pop maintained his cars like new. To smooth the body and repaint my Chevy would cost more than its new car price in 1955 plus the repairs ever since. But it ran as smooth as ever. On the way to town, I watched for Harleys. Any Cossack, I meant to run over or off the road. His choice.

  Whatever Ava thought telling Willis about the hammering of my car would accomplish, I didn’t foresee anything but grief coming out of a visit with the sheriff for any reason. Instead, I pulled into the shopping mall, parked in front of McNees Emporium, walked in and marched to the gun counter.

  I had grown up mistrusting guns on account of Pop’s stories of folks who might be alive if they or their husband hadn’t owned a gun. If Pop ever kept one in our home, it was hidden. The .38 he had owned since his days as a rookie Los Angeles cop stayed in his office until he needed it.