Double Take (7 page)

1975

“Wasn't he great?” Joey said.

“He was magnificent.”

“Ain't he a hard dude?”

“The hardest.”

“Did you see the way he punched out that whole room full of guys?”

“Incredible. I was mesmerized,” I said. In fact, I had slept through most of the movie, waking up every so often when Joey nudged me in the ribs to rhapsodize about Charles Bronson. I could hear pummeling in my dreams.

We were rounding the S curve on the Outer Drive. The downtown skyscrapers stood like shadows against the blue-black sky, lights twinkling from them. This was the skyline so dear to our mayor's heart. He was a sentimental fellow who had ordered the police to “shoot to maim or cripple” looters during the 1968 riots. On the other side of the highway was the vast darkness of the lake.

I took a deep breath and let it out. “I've been thinking about what you said about Bando.”

“It don't pay to think about it, Cookie. I just wanted you to know so you wouldn't feel . . .”

“Feel what?”

“I don't know.”

“Guilty?”

“Something like that.”

“But maybe it
does
pay to think about it.”

“How's that?”

“Maybe we can find out who did it.”

“What would we want to do that for?” He turned and looked at me.

“Hey, keep your eyes on the road.”

“You worry too much.”

I didn't say anything for a minute. Then I said, “I want to know what happened.”

He shook his head. “What difference would it make if you knew?”

I took fifty cents out of my pocket—I was still wearing my waitress uniform—and put it in the jukebox. A flirtatious plumber had tipped me two quarters, though he had only ordered a ten-cent cup of coffee. I played “Miles Runs The Voodoo Down.” I, too, planned to run down some voodoo.

We sat at the same small dark table in the back room we had sat at last time.

“So,” I said. I had noticed that people always said “so” when they didn't know what else to say. I had noticed I was saying this a lot lately. Sometimes I modified it to “how so?” and sometimes “so what?” It seemed to me upon reflection that meaningful communication had not always been so difficult, but I could not remember when that might have been. I still remembered staying up all night with Michael, lying in bed and talking, but I couldn't imagine what we could possibly have been talking about.

I made a stab at a topic. “Okay, Joey, here's the question. You ready? Okay. What's your favorite bar?”

“In the world?”

“No. The world's too big. Just the hood.”

“Well, Cookie, I have been known to frequent the Tiki, the Eagle, the Cove, and occasionally even the Sundial. But the only real contender is Bert's.”

“Which room?”

“Wow, tough one. I may have to get back to you on this.”

“I can't wait. I need to know now.”

“All right. I'd have to say that it depends on my mood.” He took a sip of Scotch and leaned back. “When I feel like seeing people and hearing a lot of noise, I go to the front room. The middle room is for when I don't feel like talking to anyone. When I feel like having an intense conversation with a friend, the back room is the place to go.”

“You feeling intense tonight?”

“I'm always intense, baby.”

“Let's have a conversation.”

We smiled at each other like bar chums. “What do you want to talk about?” he asked.

“Bando. Tell me what you know.”

“What I know.” He didn't say anything for a long moment. Then he jumped up, saying, “I'll be right back.” He came back with another Scotch and another Old Style, then poured beer into my glass. “Okay, Cookie, I'll give you the little bit of information I have. I guess I owe you that.”

“Somebody owes me that. I don't know if it's you. All Chad told me was that Bando jumped out of a window. The 27th floor, he said, the party room in his father's
high-rise. I tried to call his mother, but she'd moved and left no forwarding address. I thought he would have left me a letter or something, and it seemed so weird to me that he didn't. It never occurred to me that he had been, you know,” I lowered my voice to a whisper, “murdered.” Then I said in the pleasant voice of my mother, “I'd really like an explanation.”

“Okay, Cookie. I'll try. I don't really know much.” He took a sip of Scotch and leaned toward me. “You knew he was strung out on smack, right?”

“Yeah, I knew.”

“He told you?”

“Let's just say it was apparent.”

1972

It was strange how you could get on an airplane on a sunny, pastel day and then get off and be so cold your skin hurt and everything was dark and colorless. Outside Rachel's bedroom window was a web of frozen tree limbs. Beyond the trees, the sky was swollen with snow waiting to fall. Her parents were at work and everything was quiet except for the cracking, settling noise the house always made and the click of the dog's toenails against the scratched wood floors. Going back and forth between places made her feel confused, almost panicked, because it was hard to know which, if either, place was real. It was a logical problem. Both could not exist simultaneously because in one of them, life was easy and colorful, the sky brilliantly blue when it wasn't brown, the sun turning everything golden. In the other, dark buildings were etched against a frozen gray sky, a land of shadows. It was easy to conclude Southern California was the illusory place, with its plastic palm trees and fanciful pink stucco, but she felt uncertain. She imagined herself in a meadow, picking flowers, sun pouring down on her, when suddenly a dark, hooded figure in a speeding chariot grabbed her and sped away. She felt her body relax as she and Hades galloped off toward the underworld, as if the beautiful day in the meadow couldn't possibly have lasted, and she was too numb to be afraid.

She picked up the phone to call Bando. For the past three days, she had been hanging around Bert's expecting to see him, but he hadn't come in. She tried walking up and down 57th Street where Casa Sanchez used to be, but he wasn't there either. She had rarely been forced to phone him before, they always just ran into each other. A woman's
voice answered, and Rachel asked for Bando. His mother had a sweet, musical voice that seemed incongruous. In fact, it was weird that Bando had a mother at all.

When Bando came to the phone, Rachel said, “It's me.”

As she neared the corner, she could see that the building Casa Sanchez had been in was still not occupied, and its front door was boarded up. She had found out from her mother that it had closed last October. There had been a fire, perhaps arson, or maybe even—it was rumored—a bomb that had gutted the inside of the building. Even though everything else on the street was the same, it looked completely different without Casa Sanchez, the way a face is transformed by a missing tooth. She stood on the corner, hopping from one foot to the other and shivering. Her coat was not warm enough, and although she had borrowed a scarf and hat from her mother, she had forgotten gloves. The ground was covered with snow that had begun to go black around the edges, and she broke up a few stiff patches with her foot.

At the far end of the street, a thin figure in a black coat and a broad-brimmed hat approached, leaning slightly sideways as if buffeted by wind, though in fact this was the way he always walked. As he drew closer, she could see his round wire-rimmed glasses, then his face. His skin was dead white, as if he hadn't seen the sun in months, and his face was thin. She thought of a poem she had read in English class about someone who drank the wind and took a mess of shadows for her meat. She reached for his hand. He had no gloves either, and his hand was even colder than hers. He clasped her fingers, then let go.

“Where to?” he asked. It was what he always said.

“I don't know any more.” She found herself wishing it was summer and they could walk over to the lake and listen to the conga drums, but for some reason, as she had discovered last summer, the drums were no longer there.

“It's like Hamelin,” Bando said, as if he knew what she was thinking. “All the children are gone. Let's just walk.”

As they headed east toward the lake, the air grew even colder. Her breath hung in clouds, and she dug her bare hands into her pockets and pulled her coat around her. As they passed a row of gray stone houses, there was a warm lull, but at the end of the block, a blast of wind whipped them. Bando always walked as if he knew exactly where he was headed, but she knew this was an affectation and that he had no idea.

They hurried through a muraled viaduct beneath the train tracks where it was even colder and darker, and for a moment Rachel felt the fear of tunnels and trains she had had as a child going downtown with her mother. They paused outside a drug store, where Bando went in and bought cigarettes. He offered her one.

“I don't smoke any more,” Rachel said. “And neither you do.”

“Of course not,” Bando said, lighting a cigarette. “I'm not smoking.” He gestured toward an apartment building on their left, a gracious old high-rise. “You know who lives there? A famous writer,” he said in the withering voice he had often used with her in the past when she didn't know something, before she had been to college. “All he can see from that window is the lake.”

“What should he see? Us down here?”

“No, Rachel. We're not the least bit interesting.” He stopped and scowled upward.

She followed him across the street into the lobby of the high-rise where his father lived. He nodded to the concierge, who nodded back, and they got on the elevator and pressed the button for the top floor. She had been there before one night when they were looking for somewhere to drink a bottle of pink Chablis a wino had copped for them. They snuck into the building's ballroom and had their own party there, drinking wine, smoking a joint, and gazing out at the dark, unknowable lake. The lake always looked exactly the way she thought it ought to look. When she was feeling good it was clear and blue, when she was depressed, it was gray. It was always uncannily right, like someone with good clothes sense.

She sat on a black vinyl couch that faced the window. The lake was steely gray with mean little whitecaps. Bando sat next to her and pulled a flask of Southern Comfort from his pocket. He took a sip and then offered her one.

“No thanks,” she said. “I don't drink any more.”

“Of course,” Bando said. “I forgot. You're living the life of the mind.” He gave her one of his rare smiles.

“It's not a big deal. I just don't feel like drinking.”

“I applaud you. I don't feel like drinking either.”

“I was a little worried when I didn't hear from you. You were so good about writing last year.”

“I've been busy.”

“Doing what?”

“Nothing worthy of mention.” He took another sip from his flask.

It seemed so pretentious to be drinking Southern Comfort in the middle of the afternoon, so Janis Joplin-like, that she felt annoyed. She had an impulse to grab the flask away from him and throw it out the window but was afraid it might kill a passing pedestrian.

“So you're living at home?” she asked.

“It's not exactly home at this point.”

“With your mother, I mean. Are you working or what?”

“Yes, I'm working, my little Puritan.”

“Doing what?”

“A little of this, a little of that.”

There was a little silence, and she looked at him. He had taken his hat off, and his hair fell across his face. “Are you all right? You don't seem very well.”

“Bronchitis. It's nothing.” He took another sip of Southern Comfort and absently handed her the flask, then withdrew it. “You're changing, Rachel. Now that you're a college girl. You've even stopped bleaching your hair.”

“Yeah, well, everyone out there is sort of blonde.”

“I always liked your dark roots. Dark roots are so metaphorical, don't you think?”

“I think they were kind of tacky.”

“You look so natural now. Like a California girl. You even have a cute little tan.”

“You're so pale. Are you okay?”

“I'm fine.”

“It's something, isn't it? Something's not right.”

“I've been sick,” he said. “But I'm better now.” He stood up and walked over to the window.

She followed him. His face was framed by the white sky, and behind him the lake had grown a darker, steelier gray.

“Have you kicked?”

“Yes,” he said, without looking at her. The lake writhed beneath them.

1975

Joey brought me another beer and continued. “Then you also knew Bando was working for Sam.”

“What are you talking about?”

“He was working for Sam.”

“No way.” I waved my hand, bumping into my beer bottle and knocking it to the floor.

Joey leaned over and picked it up. He held the bottle up to the light to see if there was still beer in it, then handed it to me. “You need to be more careful, Cookie. You could have spilled this.”

“What the fuck do you mean he was working for Sam?”

“I think you know what I mean.”

“Impossible. No way in hell.”

“Really. It's the truth.” We sat there not saying anything, then he said, “You know what else? He was good.”

“What do you mean he was good?”

“At business. Good at increasing sales. Territories and shit. If he'd been working for Xerox, he'd have been a fucking vice president by now.”

“Instead of dead, you mean.”

“Honey, it's a cold world. Dude had to do something. Wasn't much else he was suited for.”

“He tried.”

“He didn't try. He had an attitude.”

“He was so smart. He was much smarter than me.”

“Is that what he told you?”

“Of course.” I laughed, and Joey laughed, too, in an affectionate way that showed me he had known Bando better than I thought. “But really, what was he supposed to do? He wrote me that first year I was away and told me that he got a job through the city placement office. They had him separating piles of nuts and bolts. He wrote me a long description of it, how he'd hold the thing up to see if it was a nut or a bolt. Then he'd say, real sarcastically, ‘Yep, it's a nut,' and he'd put it in the nut pile. Or else, ‘Nope, it's a fucking bolt.'”

“Really scrutinizing them and shit, right?”

“Right. Of course, by his next letter, he'd been fired for reading Proust on the job.”

“Excuse me?”

“
Remembrance of Things Past
?”

“Sure.”

“He did the nuts and bolts real quick, and then he read. His boss didn't like it. Anti-intellectual, Bando said.”

“He had a little problem with authority, don't you think?”

“I guess. I know he and Sanchez never got along.”

“He didn't get along so good with Sam, either.”

“I mean, there I was at college, and there was Bando separating nuts and bolts in a factory. Did you know he had an IQ of 162?”

“It's not your fault.” Joey leaned over into the candlelight and covered my hand with his. “You've got this guilt thing down cold. What are you, Catholic? Jewish?”

“Both.”

“Well, there you go. It was
his
fault. You're making a bunch of excuses for him. People got to be responsible for their own shit.” He let go of my hand and took a sip of Scotch. “I know you really cared about him. You're probably the only person who did. But he made his own choices. He did what he had to do.”

“And then—”

“Somebody killed him.”

I pressed my palms on the sticky table, leaned over, and hissed, “Tell me who did it.”

“Cookie,” Joey said, meeting my gaze with candor, “I honestly don't know.”