The Do-Re-Mi Read online

  I had never before used a pistol or wanted to. I replayed the past forty hours since I came to Evergreen, feeling light and hopeful, excited to visit my brother and to play on the same stage with masters. Now that I’d gotten jailed, crippled and threatened with death, I felt in the grip of some proud demon that wouldn’t let me skulk away and live in shame.

  In McNees Emporium, the handguns were in a locked glass case. I pointed to a .38 like Pop’s. “How much for this one and a box of cartridges?”

  Hal the gun clerk beaded his eyes and stared. No doubt he wondered if I meant to rob the store. “Hunting?”

  “Target practice. Beer cans and such.”

  “Uh huh. Eighty-seven for the gun, eight for the bullets. Half now, the rest when you come to pick it up in ten days.”

  I croaked, “Ten days.”

  “State law. You want to shoot your beer cans today, there’s no waiting period on rifles, and with a rifle you might hit ‘em.”

  AT the pay phone inside Babe’s, I looked up the number of the Crossroads, dialed it, and got lucky. The redhead answered.

  “Cherry,” I said. “Clifford Hickey here. The guy who had to leave abruptly.”

  “Oh, hi. So you’re the Mexican Hickey’s brother or what?”

  “You know Alvaro?”

  “He stopped in a couple times to ask the boss if he could use a musician. The boss told him to get lost and told me don’t serve him. Mister Hoppe thinks Mexicans are dirty or something.”

  “But he lets Cossacks drink there?”

  “They’re white.”

  “Are you from around here?” I asked, and paid full attention to her rambling answers, using the formula Pop had taught Alvaro and me for scoring points with women. Ask most anything, then hush up and listen.

  When she’d told me all she wanted to, I said, “I'm betting the Cossacks killed Jimmy Marris. They must’ve framed Alvaro. And the deputies who are stalking him through the forest — the sheriff told them shoot to kill.”

  “That’s not right,” she said, as though truly distressed.

  “All I need is a private audience with one Cossack,” I said. “Preferably Hound Dog, the one who clobbered me with a tire iron. So I’m wondering, since he’s a drunk, maybe he comes there alone sometimes.”

  Her voice dropped to a whisper. “Here’s an idea. Hound Dog, he was always clogging the john. So Mister Hoppe tells him, ‘I see you going in there, I’m throwing a grenade in after you.’ So Hound Dog tried pissing off the deck but Hoppe went out and knocked him over the rail. So now he goes down to the edge of the woods.”

  “Your boss has got some guts,” I said.

  “Aw, it’s not guts. Just that him and Little Vic are tight. They both used to ride with the Rebels.”

  She told me what time the Cossacks usually arrived. I thanked her and said she must be an angel. Then I let her go and phoned our number in Incline. Nobody answered so I called Harry Poverman’s number, telling myself I only needed to know where Pop and Mama had gone and that they were okay. If Gloria couldn’t find them, I would call Harry at his casino and ask him to send out a search party. He had the resources.

  Harry had lived what Pop called the crooked American dream or what he once called the Gatsby dream when I was a college English major. As a teenager in Detroit, during Prohibition, Harry drove for a gang that ran liquor down from Canada. While the others passed along their loot to women and bookies, he invested in enterprises Pop chose not to discuss and used the profit to open a nightclub and set up roulette and craps tables in back. In 1946, he came west and discovered Tahoe and soon moved to the lake and built his South Shore Casino.

  I grew up in the lowliest cabin along the beach in Incline, between Harry’s estate and the mansion of the Blackwoods, a family of Tahoe pioneers. Claire Blackwood was a young widow when she and Mama became like sisters. Claire was elegant, tall, strong and educated, while people thought Mama simple-minded.

  My evil grandfather had used his daughter, my mama, for sport, and made her retreat so far inside, she found God there. She hadn’t attended even a day of school. Still, Claire thought Mama was wise. She adored Mama so dearly, Pop said one reason Claire married Harry Poverman was to keep on living next-door to us.

  The month Alvaro returned from Vietnam, while Harry and Claire were sailing, one of two bullets fired from a hill near Meeks Bay, from an Italian WWII surplus MC carbine like the one Lee Harvey Oswald shot at President Kennedy, nicked off Harry’s shoulder and severed Claire’s jugular vein.

  Though Mama hadn’t spoken more than a few words at a time since the awful news came, every afternoon she and Pop crossed the meadow between our shack and Harry’s estate. She liked to feed and brush the horses. And, Gloria told me, they were with the horses now.

  While Gloria went to fetch Pop, I reminded myself I was only calling to check on him and Mama. I might tell him about Alvaro, I rationalized, just to get his advice. Or maybe he would know how to pressure Willis with a phone call.

  He sounded winded. “How’s the music, so far?”

  “Good,” I said. “But Alvaro’s in a jam. They think he murdered a kid.”

  Pop breathed hard into the phone. I imagined him springing out of his chair.

  “They think he fought the kid in a bar,” I said. “The kid went to Alvaro’s camp to settle, they’re saying, and Alvaro shot him and dumped him in the river.”

  Still I heard him breathing hard. I told him Alvaro was probably hiding in the Trinity Wilderness. Then I asked about Mama.

  “Better,” Pop said. “Now what are we going to do about your brother?”

  I had hoped he would tell me, not ask. “Find the real murderer, I guess. I turned up a few leads. Maybe you could stay near the phone, though. I’ve got an appointment that might solve the whole mess. If it doesn’t, I’ll call and read you my notes, get your advice.”

  “When you call,” he said, “have some comforting words for Wendy. She knows something’s up with her boys.”

  “How did she know?”

  “God, I guess.”

  I didn’t tell him I might be crippled or need surgery on my hand, and the car he had pampered for eighteen years looked like something the Marines used for target practice, and both a miniature psycho and a deputy sheriff had threatened to waste me.

  MY mind is peculiar. I can imagine better than I can remember. Like I imagine Pop calling Harry Poverman.

  I see him telling Harry about Alvaro’s mess. I hear him saying, “I’d be on my way to Evergreen if Wendy could handle the ride. Yesterday, she asked me to drive her around the lake. We got ten miles. Then she started that humming she does when she’s about to go under.”

  “Where the hell is Evergreen?” Harry says.

  “Up by Eureka.”

  “Right. I got a couple pals retired up that way. This hick sheriff got a name?”

  “I’ll find out, call you back.”

  “Hey, you go watch out for Wendy. I’m getting on the line up north soon as I hang up on you.”

  Asking favors of Harry or anybody isn’t Pop’s way. Besides, Harry’s pals leaning on the sheriff could backfire, he knows. But Alvaro on the run justifies unorthodox methods.

  I see Pop return to where he had left Mama, in the pen behind Harry’s stable with nut-brown Gloria clutching her hand.

  In a couple years, Mama would be fifty but she looks more like a girl with her trim figure and creamy Danish skin, soft lips and eyes still trustful and bright, no matter what evils she has endured. She asks, “Clifford’s okay?”

  Pop says, “Yeah. Sure.” He thanks Gloria, takes Mama's hand and leads her out the gate and onto the path through the cedar grove. They walk to the deck on the lake side of our homemade cabin, which the township of Incline would have condemned years before if Harry hadn’t advised them where to stuff their snooty plans. “Wine?” Pop asks.

  “The small glass.”

  He returns with her wine and a small tumbler of Dewar’s on the rocks.
She’s in her favorite chair, which Pop made out of cedar planks. She sits peering across the lake at the Rubicons, through the mist that rises from the cold water on days as hot as this.

  Pop lays his hand on her shoulder and shakes his head while telling himself he can’t leave her, not even for Alvaro.

  He knows he can take Mama back to the sanitarium. If they don’t want to babysit, he can exaggerate her symptoms. Except he can’t make himself leave her. Not when’s she’s still teetering on the edge of catatonia. Pop has watched people die, seen friends tortured and mutilated, witnessed the suffering and degradation of men and women he loved or admired, but nothing chills or haunts him like the sight of Mama’s body with the spirit gone missing.

  Besides, he can’t leave her while his heart pains are coming too hard and often to let him feel assured of living through the day. Not while his only fervent wish about death is that he can see Wendy’s face and feel her hands on him while he does it.

  He watches a catamaran tacking into the wind, fills his lungs with what Mark Twain called the air the angels breathe, and wonders if he should have told his boys about his pesky heart.

  Chasing a murderer might kill him, he knows. But he isn’t about to let his boys down. As precious as his life still feels, Alvaro’s life is far more precious than his own. So he tells Mama my story.

  I HAD hoped Steph would come into Babe’s. If I told her how the Cossacks wrecked my car, she might direct me to a hippie with a gun for rent. But the waitress was the old gal with a hearing aid. I ordered a pastrami sandwich and water.

  My right hand lay on the table, worthless as a stump. Out the window at the curb sat the ball-peened Chevy, which Pop used to wash every week and wax every month. A dragon in my state of mind would be spewing flames.

  I was eating my sandwich and had just chomped my lip when Ava pulled up across the street. The sight of her quenched a small fraction of my wrath. She walked with short steps, like a ballerina on pointe. I imagined long, downy legs beneath the peasant dress. Her hair cascaded over one shoulder and down her breast. In those days, hippie girls often gave up the half of their beauty that makeup, creams and perfumes bestowed upon other girls, for the sake of going natural. But natural Ava looked so fine, I suspected no salon or spa could improve her. Her skin was supple, the freckles on the crests of her cheeks like tiny gems, her unpainted lips a deep magenta.

  She sat across the booth from me, sighed, drew her shoulders up, and folded her hands on the table. “I went to see Lola.”

  I stared, my brain as numb as my hand.

  “My sister,” she said. “Vic’s girl. I went to ask if the Cossacks have had their fun with you or if next time, you know.”

  I asked, “Do you think if we knew why Vic is so anxious to get rid of me we’d know who killed Jimmy?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Did you ask her what’s Vic’s problem with me?”

  “Uh huh. She laughed and said, you know, ‘Buzz off.’ Now do you want to hear what I think?”

  “You bet.”

  “Jimmy’s dead. He’s not in danger anymore. Your brother’s okay. He’s not too worried, or he wouldn’t be robbing cabins.”

  “Maybe the robber wasn’t Alvaro.”

  “Anyway, the guy in mortal danger around here is you. Vic is talking up how cool Jimmy was — I don’t know where he gets off, they weren’t any kind of friends. But never mind, Lola says Vic figures if you got killed in a fight or something, the sheriffs would call it self-defense. I mean, everybody knows the sheriffs are scared of the Cossacks. And Vic says the sheriffs would consider it a favor if the Cossacks got rid of you.”

  “Vic let her tell you all that?”

  “He wasn’t there. I got lucky. Lola’s having asthma so she didn’t go on the run down to Clearlake.”

  AVA’S uncle Mitch had an office attached to his home, a redwood two-story that covered most of its half-acre lot on Daiquiri Street. The uncle looked stiff and wan as any mortician. He appeared to adore Ava and despise me. Still he wedged me into his schedule, examined my hand and determined that a ligament had torn clean through. He prescribed X-rays at a Eureka clinic. He bandaged my wrist and hand and rigged them into a sling.

  “How long before it works again?” I asked.

  “Get the X-ray,” he said.

  Outside in the sunshine, I doctored my lungs with the scent of the colossal redwood in Mitch’s front yard while I set my next goals. First, since it seemed Ava had decided to help, I asked her to snoop, find somebody who could tell her what Jimmy had been up to Wednesday night. While she was busy, I meant to find a gun.

  We sat on the running board of her car and she agreed to snoop if I would promise to lie low at Quig’s.

  I said, “The Cossacks are gone to Clearlake.”

  “I didn’t say all of them went.”

  AS we pulled into Quig’s, I began to notice the heat. Weather hadn’t made my list of concerns the past couple days. But now I felt wilted and I noticed heat waves rising off the dirt and vapor hovering above the river, though it was a quarter mile away.

  Dogs and chickens clustered in most every parcel of shade. Evergreen was starting to feel more like Death Valley than Eden. No birds cawed or peeped. The only creature who braved the sun was a fellow standing in the small vegetable garden beside the parched corn stalks. He looked stiff and ragged as a scarecrow. Aside from him, the only people in sight were two girls holding infants, sitting cross-legged on the shaded grass beneath a giant madrone, beside the sandy playground.

  Ava pulled up at her dwelling, a yurt two doors toward River Road from the community toilet and bath house. She had bought the place in exchange for an autoharp she got in trade for a rug she wove. She told me yurts were the Mongolian version of teepees, made for climates of strong winds and bitter cold. Ava’s was shaped like a circus tent with a hole at the top of the ceiling and a fire-ring in the middle of the floor. The floor was tarpaulins, her bed a futon. Mobiles of origami designs fluttered whenever one of us moved, like a physics lesson on the delicate activity of air. A stool sat in front of a hand loom with the beginning of a tapestry, a wavy pattern in sunset pastels.

  The place lacked chairs. She pointed at the futon. “Lie down if you want.”

  I flopped down beside a Bible commentary on St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans. She sat on the stool, folded her hands, studied me and frowned. “You look sick.”

  “A little discouraged, is all.”

  “Does your hand work any better with the bandage?”

  I lifted it and tried to wiggle the index and bird-flipping fingers. “Nope.”

  “Clifford, things could turn out okay. Maybe we’ll find a way to clear your brother. Maybe you can still play on Sunday.”

  “Yeah, if I can figure how to hold a flat pick between my teeth, hold the guitar up to my mouth, and sing at the same time.”

  Her smile, which dimpled both sides of her mouth, boosted me more than a smile ought to. “Okay,” she said, “so what else should I ask people, besides where did Jimmy go the night he died?”

  “Get them talking, pay attention, people will blab and let things slip. Remember everything anybody says about Jimmy. Take notes.”

  “Okay. Make yourself at home. Sleep. If you want to read, hang that flashlight from the mobile there.” She pointed to an Eveready on the floor beside the bed and hitched a thumb toward the mobile. “In the Chattagua Hall there’s a fridge that’s always got Kool-Aid.”

  “I’ll be fine. You’ll come back in a couple hours?”

  She leaned closer. You can kiss me, I thought. Instead she touched my chin with her cool fingers.

  Moving the Bible commentary, I sprawled on my back until her car sputtered away then gave myself another minute to appreciate the futon and the mint and sandalwood scents and wondered if God had realized the depth of trouble he was brewing for men when he made girls so damned pretty. Reveries about Ava’s humble voice and moist lips tempted me to keep my word and stay here.
But, laying my hand on the wound from Hound Dog’s tire iron, I pushed myself up and walked out.

  On my way to befriend the gatekeeper and ask if he owned a handgun, I noticed a long, ebony leg draped off the side of a chaise lounge beside the rustiest of several rusty trailers in an oak stand along the riverbank. The trailer was an old, melon-shaped 12' Shasta, the wheels replaced with a foundation of concrete blocks. The attached veranda was woven from saplings.

  Simon reclined in the lawn chair amid a dissipating cloud of smoke. A book, up close to his face, held him captive. Even when I squatted beside him he ignored me. The book was Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, a meditation on the story of Abraham and Isaac. A requirement at my Christian college for philosophy minors, which I had been.

  Simon turned the page, then closed the book, cocked his head, and looked me over.

  I said, “Remember my Chevy, nice green paint job? Check out how the Cossacks customized it.”

  Rising like a sleepwalker, he shaded his eyes from the glare and gazed over my pointed finger at the ball-peened wreck beside Ava’s yurt. “You’ll need a ton of Bondo.”

  “A gun’s what I’ll need,” I said, and confessed the essence of my plan.

  He paced to the riverbank, leaned over the water and stared like a predator scouting fish. He craned his head around, sized me up, laughed and turned back to the river. At last he walked over to where I stood in the shade. “Who all are you going to shoot?”

  “Maybe nobody. If it’s anybody, it’ll be a Cossack.”

  Simon watched a tall girl, naked except for the towel her hair was wrapped in, stroll out of the bathhouse and down a path. After she entered a teepee, he said, “Here’s the deal, if I can cut it. Thirty bucks now, like you said. Five hundred more if it shoots anybody and you want me and its owner to clam up.”

  “And I get to keep it until morning?”