Halfway House Page 5

  So as the thing raged and spat and shit in the white and pink crib with the seahorse mobile ratcheted to a tired and useless tune, she grasped the edges of the pillow and pressed it to the creature’s gaping maw. Never had something so soft and so tender been so hard to press down as the pillow when the thing that was her baby began to thrash.

  And although she’d silenced that first great scream, here and now in this dead universe between heaven and hell, a million babies raged, the noise a physical manifestation pressed against her face and skin.

  She felt a pressure against her back.

  Then her thigh.

  Her arms.

  Her head.

  Out of the corner of her eye she saw black stalks grow from the flat plain. Like the sped-up video of a green bean growing she’d seen in biology the year before she’d given birth, the stalks grew impossibly fast, a million of them covering the entire plain in a black wave of grain. An undetectable wind captured them and poured across the surface of the stalks, causing them to undulate like an ocean far out at sea. Buds began to form on the ends of the stalks. Growing from nothing to a round plumpness, promising the bloom of a flower, the buds grew and grew. As one they opened. But instead of the black rose she’d expected, five tiny fingers unpeeled from a fist and waved in the air, fingers moving like the legs of an insect back and forth as if they’d just discovered themselves and the ability to grasp.

  Then the hands took her. They lifted her up and propelled her broken and rent body toward the black speck on the horizon.

  The babies raged.

  The hands propelled.

  The tiny fingers raked her skin.

  And soon, too soon, she was taken to the speck which was the halfway house, that place where her mother had spent months trying to beat addiction, that place where Lashondra had actually spent her sixth birthday when her mother had promised she’d stop doing the drugs, only to find her later bent over a sink as one of the gray-garbed wardens pumped her from behind, like a game of adult choo-choo train her six-year-old mind could not grasp.

  Only this was not the same halfway house.

  Beneath a blood-red sky, atop a sea of dead baby arms, the horizon twisted by the broken skeletons of the harbor cranes as if the bodies of giants had fallen and died, the house pulled at her. She felt herself lifted free of tiny hands, carried upon vile winds to twist and pirouette around the house in a maelstrom of souls. Unlike Dorothy, who’d giddily ridden the Kansas twister in a death-defying dream, Lashondra was already dead, already damned, and knew that the end had nothing at all in common with yellow brick roads or munchkin lands or a seat at the right hand of her lord. She was a moth caught in the convection currents of a supernatural campfire, spinning and spinning, out of control, until eventually, she’d burn to nothing…

  And that nothing became her ambition.

  Chapter 5

  As a nurse, Laurie had seen grand mal seizures before, so she knew what to do. What made her pause was that it was Bobby who was having the seizure. At first she thought he might be having a drug reaction. She’d seen that before, too, but she couldn’t imagine Bobby being the kind of person to take such drugs. Yet as he fell stiff and his muscles began spasming, she knew in her heart what was happening. And she cursed. Not because she was angry that he was epileptic, but that he’d kept it from her. Part of her understood why he’d kept it a secret, but the love-struck girl in her wanted to know everything about him. She had a thing for Bobby Dupree and not knowing something special about him was simply unacceptable.

  Grabbing a wet towel from the kitchen counter, she rushed into the living room. To Lucy’s credit, he didn’t freak out. Instead he just stared, a little wide-eyed, not knowing what to do. The irony of a gang leader who knew the perfect survival trajectories of drive-bys being suddenly agog wasn’t lost on her. She stepped around abuela and slid the coffee table out of the way before Bobby could crack his skull.

  “Lucy, grab that pillow and hand me the other one,” she ordered, pointing to the two pillows on the sofa.

  When he handed it to her, she immediately applied it to the side of Bobby’s head. Seeing what she did, Lucy put his pillow on the other side. Adding pressure, they gently cradled Bobby’s head in place as his arms and legs twitched and quivered, sometimes slamming against the carpet. Several times the two were forced to duck as Bobby’s fists arced toward their faces.

  Laurie noticed Lucy’s inquisitive glare. She forced a smile. “He’s epileptic. Something’s wrong with his brain and makes this happen.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. No one really does. He should be on medication, but I don’t think he has any.”

  “Saw a boy do the kickin’ chicken like this once after he snorted twin lines of crank laced with rat poison. He didn’t stop jerking until his heart exploded.”

  “This isn’t the same.”

  “No. I didn’t think so. But is it always like this?”

  “I doubt it. This kind of seizure, or grand mal as they call it, is pretty rare.”

  “I’d hope you’re right. How fucking embarrassing is this?”

  “Do me a favor, Lucy.”

  “I thought I was doing you a favor.”

  “I need one more. I need you to keep this a secret.”

  “What do you mean? Not tell anyone about this epilepsy thing?”

  “Exactly. Listen, Louis,” she said, invoking his Christian name. “What he has going on in his brain doesn’t affect his mind. This is pure motor function. It could happen to any one of us. But if one of your Angels or anyone else finds out about this, they’re not going to take him seriously.”

  “You’re right. They’d never let up.”

  “He’d lose respect.”

  “And never get it back.” Bobby slipped free of Lucy’s grasp and slammed the back of his hand into Lucy’s chin. Lucy grinned as he brought his free hand rub the area. “All right, I’ll keep quiet. But he’ll owe me one too.”

  For the first time, Lucy’s abuela spoke. Her arthritic hands held the armrests of the chair in a claw-like grip as she leaned over them. Laurie could smell the age of her skin, unwashed sweat covered inexpertly by makeup smelled putrid.

  “Toqué su aureola,” she cackled. “Toqué su aureola.”

  “What, Grandma?”

  “Toqué su aureola. Tan muchos colores divertidos. Hay algo mal con él.”

  Growing up in San Pedro, speaking Spanish was a requirement. Though she understood what the old lady said, she had no idea what she meant.

  Seven minutes after it began, the seizure ended.

  * * *

  Bobby was in no condition to walk, so Laurie arranged a cab to drop them off at Point Fermin Park. He felt numb. His thoughts were jumbled, and try as he might, he couldn’t get them straight enough to form a coherent sentence. It had been at least a year since he’d had a seizure that bad. He was off his medication, but he’d been told that he was growing out of the seizures. Besides losing time with petit mals, he’d barely registered that he even had epilepsy.

  He glanced at Laurie, who stared back at him from across the picnic table, her wide brown eyes both worried and annoyed. The timing of the seizure had been impeccable. He might as well have pulled his pants down right in front of the gang leader. Whatever street cred he’d had, had evaporated in that instance, not to mention the sad little fact that he’d never once mentioned his problem to Laurie.

  He let another ten minutes slide by as his brain found the right sequence. He allowed the wind to brush against him as he soaked up the sun’s warmth. Several children ran by, chasing a somersaulting kite that had fallen but wouldn’t die. An elderly couple carried a poodle, the California version of walking a dog. A clamshell amphitheater stood empty now, but he remembered two weeks ago when he and Kanga had watched the Shakespeare By the Sea presentation of The Tempest. He’d never seen the play before and was swept away by Caliban and everything he’d represented. Kanga was like a modern day Caliban.
He hadn’t begun his life that way, but he’d sure turned out similar.

  Bobby glanced up as Laurie checked his forehead for a fever, then brushed his hair out of his eyes. He gripped her wrist and brought it to his cheek. They’d yet to kiss. This was the most physical he’d ever been with her.

  “Sorry.” He made brief eye contact then looked away.

  “You should have told me, you know.”

  “It wouldn’t have stopped it from happening.”

  “Trust, Bobby. You have to trust me.” She pulled out of his grasp and grabbed his hand. She held it on the table with both of her hands as she looked imploringly into his eyes.

  “I know.”

  “Something like this was just too big a deal to keep private.”

  “I know.”

  “Well if you knew, then why the hell didn’t you tell me?”

  He found the horizon and followed it until it disappeared around the corner of Rancho Palos Verdes. Because you would have left me, just like all of those moms and dads did when they found out.

  “I don’t know why.”

  “Come on.”

  “Do we have to have this conversation? I’m not feeling well.”

  She let go of his hand and crossed her arms. “Don’t get all weak on me, Bobby Boy. I’m a girl and I expect certain things. One of which is to know everything that’s going on in that handsome head of yours.”

  “Maybe there are things that I’ve done you don’t want to know.”

  “Maybe there are. But that’s history. If I spent my life worrying about what people did, I’d never care about their potential.”

  “Potential?”

  “Yes, my fixer-upper-boyfriendly potential. That’s what you have in spades.”

  “You make me sound like an old house.”

  “Or an old trailer.”

  “You making fun of my Tennessee heritage?”

  “Me? Never.”

  They watched as a man and a woman walked by on the bike path. They held the hands of a little boy between them. Potential. Yeah. He had some of that.

  “Lucy’s never going to talk to me again.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Because I did the kickin’ chicken on his living room floor.”

  She snorted.

  “I really made a fool out of myself, huh?”

  “No. It’s not that. I’d never heard that expression before, and now I heard it twice in one day. You and Lucy both said it.”

  “He said kickin’ chicken?”

  “Yup. He said kickin’ chicken.”

  “Just what I need.” Bobby rolled his eyes.

  “Lucy is also going to help you. I had a talk with him.”

  “Dear God. Could it be any worse? Now I have my girlfriend sticking up for me.”

  “It could be worse. You could have no girlfriend.”

  “Yeah. That would be worse. Thanks, Laurie.”

  “No problem, Bobby Boy.”

  They sat and watched the ocean for a while. Eventually their hands drifted toward each other. After an hour of comfortable silence, she reluctantly pulled her hand away. “I need to get to work at the hospital. Can I drop you off at the cove?”

  “Naw. I’ll walk.”

  She nodded once, then began toward the Lighthouse Deli where she’d left her car. Before she got fifteen feet, she spun around and ran at him. Bobby was so surprised that he held his arms out in front of him. She deftly slid between them and kissed him square on the lips. Bobby froze, and it wasn’t until she’d stepped back, a wicked grin on her face and a twinkle in her eye, that he realized he’d been too stunned to kiss her back. Too late: she bounded off. Bobby watched her go, a special tingling in the pit of his stomach, like a butterfly raging in a hollow jar.

  * * *

  Bobby had nine bucks to his name. Before heading back, he grabbed a fifth of Cluny and six frozen burritos from the Lighthouse Mini Mart. He didn’t have a microwave, so he’d cook them by wrapping the burritos in foil and sticking them in the fire for a few minutes. They’d done it before. And knowing Kanga, he was probably doing his surfer Zen routine and not taking care of himself.

  Bobby trekked about a mile and a half past a palm-lined cliff walk, Royal Palms, the old artillery batteries of Fort MacArthur, and Paseo Del Mar. The thing about San Pedro was that, because of its constant ocean breeze, when the rest of Los Angeles was hot enough to melt the pollution, San Pedro was somewhere between 70 and 85 degrees. Even walking at midday he wasn’t breaking a sweat.

  When he got to the cliff overlooking Jap’s Cove, he noticed about a dozen surfers bobbing in the water atop their boards. From here they looked like sharks waiting for some tender tourist morsel.

  Bobby couldn’t see the shack or Kanga. Careful not to tumble ass over heels, he crabbed the path sideways. He stopped when he came to the Jap’s feet, about halfway down. It was a good place to catch his breath. His left calf was already screaming nasty curses. His boots weren’t made for walking, but they were as much a part of him as the tattoo of his daddy on his right forearm.

  Six sets of footprints were at the top of the trail to the beach. The footprints appeared to be made from some type of dark mineral. He’d reached down once to touch them, but jerked his hand away. Not only did the footprints have ridges as if they were the bottoms of boots, but they were warm. He remembered Kanga laughing at him. “Of course they’re warm, numbskull. It’s made of rock and has been in the sun all day.”

  Despite the obvious, Bobby couldn’t help but consider the legend that the footprints were attached to six Japanese soldiers who’d tried to attack America during World War II. He tried to imagine six upside-down men, only the soles of their feet showing, but he couldn’t. The idea was just too preposterous. The prints were nothing more than someone’s idea of a joke.

  Even so, he decided he’d rather take the pain in his leg than remain by the footprints, and hurried the rest of the way down the path. When he hit the sand, he spied Kanga resting in the beach shack with his feet up, reading a worn paperback copy of Gregory Corso’s Mindfield. One of Kanga’s oldest possessions, the old man had tried to get Bobby to listen to a few passages, but the rhythms and rhymes of the beat poet were lost on him.

  “Hey, Kanga!”

  The old man looked up, then got to his feet. He grinned, the effort scrunching his white beard into the creases of his tanned face. “Bobby. Did you have breakfast with my daughter? How is she?”

  “She’s good.”

  Kanga dropped the book on a bench and met Bobby halfway from the path. He grabbed the bag of burritos, checked inside, then nodded in satisfaction. “What’d you guys do?”

  Kanga proceeded to cook the burritos in the ever-present fire at the beachside entrance to the shack as Bobby told him the tale. It wasn’t much, as far as tales went, so he got quickly through it until he spoke of the abuela. Kanga seemed inordinately interested in a woman whom Bobby barely remembered. In fact, he seemed more interested in the woman than he did in the fact that Bobby was epileptic.

  “You said she pointed at you and then your seizure started?”

  “Yeah. But that was just coincidence.”

  “Coincidence, my ass. Didn’t I tell you about the Bruja who once lived in San Pedro?”

  “Sure. She was the one who was responsible for the footprints.” Bobby dramatically waggled his fingers at the mystery of it all. “Or so they say.”

  “Don’t scoff at the possibility. Until you dig underneath the prints, you’ll never know. Until that happens, the potential for magic exists.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “If you’re so damn certain I’m full of shit, get yourself a shovel and dig them up. Hell, I’ll even help you.”

  “What if we dig them up and there’s nothing but dirt beneath the footprints?”

  “Then at least we exercised a hypothesis. At least we attempted to understand rather than remaining indigent in our disbelief. See, it’s easy to say so
mething doesn’t exist, but to admit to the possibility of something existing that can’t be touched, tasted, felt, or seen... Well, that’s the sign of someone open to possibilities.”

  “Or televangelists.”

  “Touché.”

  Bobby grabbed a clean shirt from his bag and threw it on. He stuffed the old one under his sleeping bag. He’d wash them later in the surf. Or at least he planned to.

  When he got back to the fire, he said to Kanga, “I do get what you’re saying. I’d like to believe. Sometimes I wish there was more out there than what I’ve seen.”

  Kanga turned from stoking the fire and stared hard into Bobby’s eyes. “I’m not saying that it’s a true thing. But I do believe in cause and effect. Look at the waves, for instance. Where do they come from? Why does the water rise up and move a thousand miles? Is it an internal force? No. An external force exercises its gravitational mass on the water, resulting in tides and waves. What do we call that external force? The moon. Now tell me, how ridiculous do you think this would’ve sounded to a person five hundred years ago? About as ridiculous as a woman having the power to cause a seizure just by pointing. Remember, just because we don’t see the connection doesn’t mean it isn’t there.”

  Bobby saw the logic in the argument. Not that magic was a true fact, a phrase Kanga liked to use, but that magic was a possibility. Sure. He could believe in the possibility. He just didn’t think it was that possible.

  “So you think she caused my seizure?”

  “When’s the last time you had one?”

  “A grand mal? At least a year. Probably two. I was in Kansas City, and the seizure probably saved my life.”