The Do-Re-Mi Read online

  “Let’s see what can I do.” He went for his keys, jumped into his microbus, fired it up and sputtered away.

  Walking to the river, I thought, God help me. I sat in a dugout place on the riverbank, felt the snakes in my belly hiss and writhe, and played a game I had invented while trying to prep myself for law school. I argued a case. This one I called Clifford the Hero vs. Clifford the Chickenheart. For Chickenheart, I argued, "Heaven? You only hope there’s a heaven. You know how you’ll miss Mama, Pop, Alvaro. Even if your music dreams don’t fly, you’ll miss your chance of finding and winning a wife, maybe one like Ava, miss playing your songs, writing your stories, miss taking care of Mama and Pop as they grow old.”

  Before I could argue on the hero side, I needed to ask myself what made heroes plunge into danger? How did Pop and a band of Indios once rush into battle against Nazis and a brigade of the Mexican army? How did Alvaro trek through the jungle dodging traps and land mines without letting terror melt his brain?

  Pop and Alvaro, I surmised, just quit thinking and did what they got called to do. But I wondered what allows a guy addicted to thinking to quit it when his brain is firing commands to find a safer option. Maybe Pop had been tired of life or fed up with worrying. Maybe Alvaro, as a Tijuana street kid, learned to survive by turning off his brain whenever he needed to act.

  Maybe other guys believe they have no choice, or think they’re invincible, or delude themselves with visions of glory, fame, or adoration.

  None of those ways fit Clifford Hickey, who loved life and peace and imagined happy futures. And if I had once thought myself invincible, the past couple days taught me otherwise.

  Eight

  WHEN Simon returned, he climbed out of his microbus empty handed and opened the tailgate. The pistol lay atop the engine compartment, wrapped in an olive drab towel. It was a small black model like you’d see a floozy holding on the cover of an old mystery novel. The maker’s name-plate was gone and the serial numbers were invisible beneath a riot of scratches.

  “Looks like the gun has a history,” I said, and gave Simon thirty dollars. I picked up the gun with my left hand. It weighed about half as much as Pop’s .38, the only other pistol I had held. Simon handed me a kitchen-match box heavy with bullets. “Twenty-five caliber,” he said. “I wouldn’t plan on hurting anybody from more than about twenty feet.”

  I needed to see if I could work even a small pistol left-handed. I asked Simon for a ride to some remote place where gunshots wouldn’t draw return fire from a weed farmer. Simon agreed to show me such a place.

  The gatekeeper’s bush of kinky hair had changed from white to midnight black. Simon must’ve noticed me gaping. He said, “Twins. This one does Clairol.”

  We turned east on River Road and chugged past McNees Park and the Bend in the River Church. Simon hitched a finger toward the church. “Home of Saint Bob, your typical junkie con from the Haight who found out Jesus is not only the savior but also a meal ticket. Have you asked that crook who he thinks popped Jimmy?”

  “Should I?”

  “It’s your game.”

  Simon’s way of tossing crumbs made me wonder if he was attempting to lead me away from the truth. Maybe if I held the gun to his head, something I needed would spill out of him.

  Beyond the covered bridge that cast its shadow over a log loading ramp, we crashed over ruts up a logging road, five miles into a razed forest of cedar saplings that drooped as though in shame. Simon pulled off the trail and stopped beside the remains of a party site. The beer cans and bottles could supply a battalion of shooters with targets.

  While Simon sat in his microbus reading Kierkegaard, I shot left-handed from ten paces, fifteen, then thirty. I used the back of my right hand to brace the gun underneath. That skewed my balance, but when I used the left hand alone, it trembled. The longer I practiced, the more my hand quaked. After firing two clips, twenty shots that knocked down three cans, I pocketed the gun.

  On our way out of the forest, I pointed to a footpath through a grove of second growth fir I imagined would lead to some hippie’s secret garden. I said, “The forest service ought to tack up a sign warning hikers not to eat the foliage unless they want to get high.”

  His scowl made me wonder if he had agreed to and abetted my plan because if it failed, Evergreen would be infested with one less snoop.

  BACK at Quig’s, as he dropped me off at my mutilated Chevy, Simon handed me a joint.

  “No, thanks,” I said. “All it would do is make me paranoid.”

  “Or it might help you be still,” he said. “You’ve got to be still to hear the voice that told Abraham, ‘Take your son up to the mountain and stab him.’”

  Fear and Trembling is an essay on Abraham and Isaac. I assumed Simon meant to inform me that if father Abraham had missed, ignored, or disobeyed the voice of God, he might’ve lost out on his destiny, as would the whole Jewish race. And, having attended lots of church and my Christian college, I would need to add, so would everybody. Which may be why Simon's philosopher deemed ol' Abraham the Knight of Faith.

  As I pulled out of Quig’s past the gatekeeper’s shaggy dog that choked itself from lunging at my car and me, I thought about destiny. I wondered if I had one and if I did, whether it involved getting shot and dumped into Whiskey River. My plan began to seem loco. But Pop had acted loco. He had rushed in to fight Nazis and mobsters. And at least a dozen times he’d told us, “Once you’ve decided, turning back is the most dangerous thing you can do.”

  Not exactly a Knight of Faith, but similar.

  A QUARTER mile east of the Crossroads, behind a wall of redwoods, I sat in my car and held the pistol with both hands and wondered what had become of the rage that made me willing to shoot people. I no longer wanted to even risk shooting anybody. Besides, I was taller and heavier than Hound Do, and perhaps stronger from sports training and surfing. He had the military but all through college and then some I had practiced Tae Kwon Do.

  Still, I wedged the gun under my belt, tripped down the gravel road and mumbled words like, “It’s okay, Clifford. You’re cool. Nothing to fear.”

  A hundred yards from the saloon, a trail crossed a vacant lot to the river. I hustled along the trail, slid down the bank and plodded downriver on rocks and mud. The sun was already behind the forest. Its rays came at me in pastel shades of green and rose. Gusts of sea breeze fluttered leaves, needles, and small cones.

  A hammering woodpecker startled me. A brown trout swam figure eights an inch below the surface. Mosquitoes swarmed and squads of them at once attacked my neck and forehead. Last year, I hadn’t seen a mosquito, and one of the beauties at the swimming hole told us the pests never came near Evergreen because the sea breezes carried them east to the mountains. But here they were, like an omen.

  I sat near the river, out of sight from the saloon deck and parking lot, listened for motorcycles and worried lest Cherry might’ve sold me out to the Cossacks.

  If night fell and the bikers didn’t show or if they roared past the Crossroads without stopping, I would take that as a sign to make a safer plan.

  I gnashed my teeth, chewed grass, swatted mosquitos, and tried to occupy my brain remembering the melodies and lyrics to some old Quaker songs that usually could quiet my mind.

  But thoughts of Ava kept interrupting. I felt like a creep for lying to her, going off on a loco mission when I had promised to wait for her at Quig’s. “Quit thinking, Clifford,” I mumbled every minute or so, only I used various nicknames. Bonehead. Jerk. Fool. Still, I felt as able to become a werewolf as I did to quit thinking.

  In twilight I peered across the river and down the highway at the cross I first saw when arriving in Evergreen, where the three cupids and their dad had clustered. I wondered, would anybody place a shrine marking the spot where Hound Dog killed me.

  As dark fell, fog rolled in from the ocean, about twenty miles west. I shivered as though time had warped and delivered me to winter. Black fog seeped through my pores, nose,
and ears. I reminded myself of Friedrich Nietzsche’s opinion that courage was the will to overcome fear. And I remembered our Tae Kwon Do master’s promise that having earned our black belts proved we possessed indomitable spirits.

  Even through the fog, I heard the rumble of a dozen Harleys when they were still a mile away. To me, they were like a fleet of Cobra helicopters. I climbed the river bank and drew the pistol from under my belt.

  They cruised at about one m.p.h., it seemed. Maybe they were looking into the forest, searching for me. Maybe Simon was a Cossack snitch. Maybe Little Vic had planted Simon at Quig’s to snoop out the locations of marijuana farms and after he dropped me off he sped to a phone and called some roadside bar where he knew the bikers would stop. Maybe he had given them a laugh about the chump with his tiny gun who thought he was a match for them.

  As the choppers swung off the highway, revved, and bumped across the gravel, I imagined Vic yelling, “Come out and play, Pretty Boy.” I reached for the pistol and held it beside my face.

  They parked in a straight line against the railroad ties that marked the walkway. I counted eleven of them, five with tattooed girls perched behind them. As they dismounted, the girls shook their hair loose and unsnapped the fronts of their leather jackets or Levi vests, exposing their halters. The men looked around, alert as guerillas and with savage expressions. A loud biker said, “That farmer in the Dodge that wouldn’t let Frag go by, we oughta rode circles around him.”

  “Shut up, Hound Dog,” another guy said, “shut up and get in there and tell Daisy Mae to start pourin’.”

  I guessed the hand that shot up from behind other bikers and gave the finger belonged to Hound Dog.

  Little Vic led his pack into the Crossroads. I wheezed a breath and stared at the gun until my night vision sharpened and I could inspect it. I pulled out the clip, shoved it in again, checked the safety, and crammed the barrel under my belt.

  As I tiptoed across the road, my Converse shoes on the gravel sounded like avalanches. “Sneakers, hell,” I whispered. Cowboy boots with full-heel taps might’ve made less noise. I considered going barefoot. But I might have to run from the Cossacks into the forest and through burred vines and lava spills and across the snow-capped mountains.

  I stationed myself behind a tall pine at the edge of the woods about twenty yards from the steps that led down off the saloon deck upon which nobody sat drinking. I thanked God for the plague of mosquitoes. I crouched, peered around the tree, and slapped at the pests with my good hand. When my legs started to tingle, I stood and stretched and shook blood into them.

  About a half hour passed before the Crossroads’ rear door flew open. My heart triple-timed. A couple men who looked like weekend hippies with holey jeans and leather bands around their business-cut hair came outside and leaned against the rail. One of them fired up a joint.

  While they smoked, I watched the door, imagining Hound Dog would appear and stroll across the meadow and piss on the base of my pine while I couldn’t jump him, with the smokers there to witness. But as usual, my imagination failed to prophesy the truth. One of the men flicked the roach into the meadow where it sizzled in a patch of stagnant water as they shuffled back inside.

  Somebody opened a screened window. The jukebox was loud with John Fogarty’s complaint about getting stuck in Lodi. Hound Dog slammed the door open and stumbled out. He tripped over something on the deck but righted himself before he reached the steps. Going down them he used the rail for balance.

  I grabbed the ski mask and pulled it on. Once the eye and nose holes were straight, I watched Hound Dog crossing the meadow, heading for the tree to the left of mine. I felt for the ripped T-shirt hanging out of my left hip pocket then reached around for the nylon cord in my right pocket.

  Tonight, Hound Dog looked peaceful. He yawned then cleared his throat and spat a big wad. He was the kind of pisser who unlatches his belt and drops his jeans.

  After a long, deep, and silent breath and exhale, I rushed around the pine and attacked from the rear, ducking my shoulder to waist high and curling my head out of the way. By the time I landed a cross body tackle he was reacting to the noise, starting his turn toward me, with his right hand still occupied. It didn’t keep the stream of piss from shooting up like water out of a loose hose.

  After glancing off the tree, he fell hard, face first. I shoved his face into the pine needle mulch and held it there with my right elbow.

  My good hand found a pressure point on his neck and jabbed with my thumb. Though I had felt the effect the move had on my own neck, that was during Tae Kwon Do class. This was the real world. So when the biker quit thrashing and went limp, after I caught my first breath since before my attack, I thanked the spirit of Master Yi.

  I grabbed the ripped T-shirt, worked one end of it under Hound Dog’s down-turned face and to where I could grab both ends in the same hand and pull. After fumbling and cussing, I managed to gag him and use my good hand and the other elbow to tie a knot. Then I pulled his arms around back and cinched his wrists together with a short length of nylon cord.

  He was twice as heavy as I expected, until the black-out passed. Even when he came to, he was groggy, and still limp. But he knew what a gun looked like and what even a little one could do from up close.

  I held the pistol at the top of his spine and shoved it upward. With that encouragement, he rose to his knees, then to his feet, and started walking the way I pointed.

  Whenever he tried to pull up his jeans, I shoved him. A guy with his pants half down might be less dangerous. He couldn’t walk fast but still we arrived at the gravel road and marched along it, deeper into the forest. In about ten minutes, we passed my Chevy, which was mostly hidden from the road. While he walked, he tried to shout but made no sense and little noise. A hundred or so steps past my car, I marched him off the road and between cedars and undergrowth to the bank of the river. I slammed him against a crooked cedar and kicked him in the groin to dissuade him from trying to break and run while I lashed him to the tree using the rest of my nylon cord.

  That done, I untied the gag. His cussing didn’t show much imagination. But the name he threw at me dozens of times was a good choice for making a savage out of a guy like me who cherished his mother. I shouted, “Hold on, partner. All you’ve got to do is tell me which Cossack killed Jimmy Marris and why, and I’m gone.”

  He laughed and added “Hickey” to his curses.

  I threw a side kick on his belly. It knocked the wind out of him but didn’t erase his smile. I backhanded him in one ear and clobbered him with a roundhouse punch on the other ear. His laugh became a bray.

  When I noticed his boner, I gave up and left him there. He filled the woods with noise while I plodded back toward my Chevy.

  Nine

  RATHER than drive through territory where Cossacks would be scouring the woods for Hound Dog by now, I drove deeper into the forest, remembering Alvaro’s directions: “If you get to the second bridge, you’ve come too far.”

  At the second bridge, I crossed the river. On the south side, the gravel road was smoother, and every few hundred yards I passed a house. One of them was an A-frame near which two of the cupids I had seen by the cross beside the highway and again at the jamboree attempted to play catch with a Frisbee beneath a round silver moon and bright stars.

  THE detour I chose on my way back to Quig's and Ava was a country road that delivered me to the coast access loop and killed an hour.

  In Evergreen, I saw Delene Marris staggering around a corner, probably walking home from Louella’s. I made the turn, pulled over across the street and offered her a ride. Maybe, from a woman deranged from liquor and grief, I could learn something that would make the day less than a perfect failure.

  She stopped and peered through the dark. When she recognized me, she reared back and screeched, “Hey, you louse, if your brother ain’t a killer, why’s the FBI keep tabs on him all summer?”

  “FBI?”

  “Get lost, Hickey.�
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  “Did your brother tell you about the FBI?”

  She staggered off muttering curses. I let out the clutch so my Chevy crawled along beside her until she wheeled and shouted, “You don’t believe me, go ask the Swede.”

  Knudsen, I thought.

  I let her walk on alone, shifted into reverse and thought, Yep, he’s watching Alvaro on account of some business with Phil Ochs.

  I PICTURE Mama reading A Tale of Two Cities, which Pop and I had recommended. Pop is studying maps of the Shasta Wilderness, trying to deduce where Alvaro might go. He catches the phone before the second ring. “Clifford?”

  “I’m a lousy detective,” I say.

  “What’d you learn?”

  “Some bikers and a deputy sheriff act like Alvaro came from hell to spoil their fun and since I’m his brother, I’m just as dangerous. And it looks like the FBI’s been keeping tabs on Alvaro. That’s all.”

  “We’re on our way,” he says. “How far is Evergreen up the 101 from Highway 20?”

  “You can’t leave Mama,” I tell him. “Sure, things are getting too complicated for my second-rate mind, but all I need is advice.”

  “How far?”

  “Eighty miles or so.”

  “I’ll be there by half past six.”

  “No, Pop. Just tell me what to do. You can’t leave Mama.”

  "1 won't."

  A half hour later, they cross Donner Summit and speed down the grade toward the Sacramento Valley and the Mendocino Forest. They’re in the 1970 Cadillac Eldorado, the Rat Pack Cadillac, people call it, because Dean Martin and his cronies drove such cars.

  Pop is wearing his favorite driving hat, a relic from the last year the San Diego Padres played in the AAA Pacific Coast League. He prefers minor league baseball, where the hungry players always hustle. The black-framed glasses, which he only uses for driving and watching movies or ball games or at church if he cares to see the preacher, magnify and darken his eyes to the blue of deep water. His face is so flushed, he looks sunburned. He drives left-handed while his right hand kneads the scruff of Mama’s neck.