He wakes up. Three devils watch him
from the opposite wall. He has grown accustomed to their morning sneers, their
wild hair and mascara’d eyes. Since Thompson’s return, Jack has been sleeping
in Nikola’s room, across from a poster of the punk group Green Day. How an
eight-year-old has developed this attachment is a mystery. But the bed is
incredibly comfortable (no doubt thoroughly researched by Esmerelda the
supermom), and Jack has never slept better.
He
is conscious, however, that he is sleeping among shadows. Nikola should be
here, hammering away on his Guitar Gods video game, ignoring his mother’s
commands to get ready for school. Whenever Jack considers these absences, he
develops a painless but bothersome pressure in his forehead that makes him
squint. He thinks of the pleasure-squint belonging to Barbie the opera singer,
and decides that this is something much different. He has become a human
barometer.
Jack
stands in the shower, looking out over the beach. Sometime this month the false
exhibitionism stopped bothering him. In its place he found the shower’s central
idea: a chance to embrace the outside world even as one prepares to enter it.
He lathers the soap between his hands, raising it to his nose to take in the
aroma. He has developed a fixation for handmade soaps, this one a lemon verbena
purchased at a farmer’s market in Soquel.
The
barometer begins to hone in on its target. An overheard answering-machine
message revealing that Esmerelda has hired a private tutor, determined to keep
the children in Madison through the holidays. And Thompson, despite his great
show of emotion at Sanderlings, has apparently done nothing about it. Jack
realizes that none of this should be his concern, but the forehead barometer
says otherwise. Arriving on the first floor, he is surprised to find Thompson
next to the whitewater, wrapping himself in a windbreaker, laptop case lolling
at his feet like an affectionate puppy.
“Wow,”
says Jack. “You’re still here.”
“Yeah.
Got a presentation at eleven, and it was easier to polish the spreadsheets at
home base. How you doin’? Is the bed and breakfast meeting your expectations?”
“Where
do I begin?” says Jack. He’s about to follow with laudatory details, but
Thompson will soon be out the door and the barometer needs feeding. “Hey, I
know work is pretty crazy, but have you had a chance to talk to Esmerelda?”
Thompson
gives him a cold stare. “What’re you, my mamasita?”
Jack
begins to melt into an apologetic stance, but then Thompson busts out laughing.
“Dude!
You are such an easy mark. Don’t ever lose that gullibility, man. It’s
beautiful! See ya.”
And
he’s out the door, getting into his Carrera, repeating the word “mamasita” and
chuckling. Having successfully dodged the question. Jack feels like a sitcom
wife, left at the door without a goodbye kiss.
Despite the
squinting, these are good days. Ben is largely absent, spending his every free
minute with Sophia Loren de las Salinas. This has left a large space in Jack’s
days, but he finds himself embracing it, his mind simmering with a slow warmth.
His thoughts feel simultaneously slower to arrive and sharper when they get there.
It could be that he has become a shaman. As Barbie would say, Ha!
After his
two standard two bagels and mango nectar, Jack fetches the pressure washer from
the garage and attends to his morning chore: turd removal. He wheels it onto
the deck, attaches the hose and cranks up the preposterously annoying engine.
He holds the wand until the hoses work out all their air bubbles and then takes
to the railings, where the seagulls love to congregate and shit. After that, he
runs the deck two planks at a time. He’s nearing a cutout in the house wall
when he realizes that he’s cornered a salamander, a yellow-gray critter, four
inches long, flicking his tail in great alarm. No wonder, thinks Jack. This
has got to be like a class-five hurricane. He sets down the spray wand and
picks him up. Being a salamander, he doesn’t put up much of a fight.
“Sorry, little dude. We gotta find you a new
place.” He carries him to the edge of the deck and drops him onto a spread of
ice plant.
“Come back
in half an hour.”
At noon, the
day turns fairly amazing. A bright late-fall sun breaks through the fog to pull
the temperature into the low seventies. Jack abandons shirt and shoes –
inordinately proud of the tan that he has developed – and walks toward the
cliffs of New Brighton. The waves have lain out an even spread of medium-sized
rocks, many of them in the shape of perfect skippable discs. What’s more, the
waters of Monterey Bay are remarkably quiet, smooth as a lake. After a couple
of warmup tosses, Jack winds up on a big yellow-brown stone, leans far over and
tosses a hard sidearm. The result is stunning, a dozen even skips that cover
the length of a football field. He’s pretty certain that he could not actually
throw a rock that far without the help of the water. He’s pondering the physics
of this thought when he spots a tiny square of paper flapping around on the
sand. It seems to be alive. He leans down to find a monarch butterfly,
struggling to work the wet sand from his wings. Jack imagines he’s been
ambushed by a breaker.
He recalls
an urban myth about touching a butterfly’s wings – that this somehow disables
them – so he digs in from either side and carries the butterfly aloft on a
mound of sand. He walks uphill past the break line and sets the pile down, then
blows on the butterfly until he comes to rest in a scoop of warm, dry sand.
“Dude! Be
patient. Let the sun do its work. You’ll be fine.”
His next
client lies a hundred feet away. A pack of pelicans are conducting bombing
raids on a spread of water; directly landward of this commotion, Jack finds a
strip of silver the size of a pencil, flopping on the sand. The anchovy looks
quite alarmed (although, of course, fish always
look alarmed), and Jack realizes he must act quickly. Out there, this one might
serve as an appetizer to a pelican, but out here
he dies for sure. Jack leans down to pick him up, then carries him toward the
water.
“Dude! Try
to stay away from the big birds.” And he tosses him in.
Toward the
cliff’s edge, Jack finds another perfect stone. It skips twice, then rockets
off of a wave like Evel Knievel. At the base of the cliff he finds White
Horse’s latest creation, a thin seven-foot
column of rocks, and as he’s meditating on this he thinks, Shaman? I’ve become St. Francis!
He finds a
rock and moves it around on the top of another rock, until he senses something,
like a bolt slipping into a latch. He lets go. The rock stays in place. The
barometer in Jack’s temple ticks forward. A bath of warm mango nectar floods
his frontal cortex.
Late that
night, Jack prepares for bed, the friendly devils of Green Day eyeing him
curiously. Jack hears the click of the
front door. He attempts a trick of telekinesis, drawing Thompson toward the
coffee table, where he has “accidentally” left out the case that holds a DVD of
Esmerelda’s performances. A minute later, he hears the familiar grind of guitar
strings, the stamping of feet.
Jack is so
thrilled at this new talent of his that he fears he won’t be able to sleep.
After twenty minutes, the music clicks off. He hears the beep-tones of a cell
phone, followed by Thompson’s voice, colored with anxiety.
“Hello…
Ezzie?”
Silence.
Too much silence.
“I miss you
too.”
The
barometer opens up. The squint retreats from Jack’s eyes. He bids the three
devils good night, and drifts away like a rescued anchovy.
Image: the author (photo by Janine Watson)
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