Steven Thomas - Criminal Carma

The people in the backyard eyed the food while carrying on conversations about yoga, yard maintenance, and local politics that rose from murmur to emphatic discussion and died down again, punctuated by bursts of laughter.

After about ten minutes, Walt called out from across the yard, “Ganesha, we’re starving, man. When do we eat?”

Ganesha looked at the kitchen door, then up at the second-floor windows of Baba’s bedroom and shook his head.

“Right now,” he said decisively. “I guess Gurudev is occupied. Let’s gather around the table and join hands.”

As the group encircled the table, Johnny came up on my left side, Evelyn on my right. I had no consciousness of Johnny’s hand, concentrating on the touch of the fine feminine instrument I had first noticed in the lobby of the Oasis Palms Resort Hotel. Even as it rested quietly in mine, returning gentle pressure with gentle pressure, Evelyn’s hand was articulate and exciting.

Of one accord, everyone bowed their heads and closed their eyes. Ganesha chanted the sacred syllable om , drawing it out for thirty seconds or so as everyone joined in. Twice more the welded circle chanted with a single resonant voice the sound that is said to have ten thousand meanings. Afterward, we stood in silence for another minute, ears ringing, before a simultaneous squeeze of hands signaled the end of the meditation.

When I opened my eyes, I saw that everyone else was grinning, too.

“Dig in,” Ganesha said. “You’ve earned it.”

As people formed a line to get at the groceries, Mary came out the kitchen door and down the steps, looking angry. As she stalked past me, I reached out and snagged her, grasping her bare arm with my hand, which was still glowing from the eloquent touch of Evermore’s smooth skin.

Mary jerked her arm away, whirling to face me, then calming slightly when she saw who I was.

“Sorry,” I said. “Didn’t mean to startle you. I was just going to say you can cut in line in front of me if you want to.”

“That’s all right,” she said. I couldn’t tell if that meant “No thanks, I don’t want to join you in line” or “No problem, I don’t mind that you touched me.”

As I watched her face for a clue, she looked up at the back of the house. Following her azure gaze, I saw Baba Raba looking down from one of his bedroom windows. The casement window was cranked open and he was visible from the middle of his thick hairy thighs on up, wearing his dhoti and a bent iron frown.

Mary lowered her eyes to mine, smiled, and then slid into line in front of me. There were additional impulses but I kept my hands to myself as we edged forward. When we had our food, she linked her arm though mine and led me to the bench in the rose garden, glancing up once at Baba, who still loomed like a dark demigod above the picnic. I wondered if he recognized me and regretted his invitation.

“You still want to take me to the beach?” Mary asked when we sat down.

“I sure do.”

I didn’t care if she was using me to make a point with the guru. It gave me an opportunity to sit close beside her, with our thighs touching. When we came to dessert, she let me feed her a piece of the coarse sweet cake, taking it from my fork delicately with her lips and tongue, chewing it slowly while looking me in the eye, occasionally blinking her fairy eyelashes. When I tried to feed her a second piece, she laughed and pushed my hand away.

“That’s enough of that,” she said. “Let’s get this place cleaned up, then we’ll go.”

Everyone pitched in to straighten up the yard and put the food away, with Ganesha and Mary supervising.

“You’re really having a good day, man,” Johnny said as we moved one of the picnic tables back where it belonged.

After lunch, some of the volunteers left and some returned to the jobs they had been doing, scraping paint or pulling weeds. I was waiting for Mary by the kitchen steps when Evermore walked up and handed me a card with her name and address written on it.

“When do you think you can come by and take a look?”

“I’m booked up next week,” I said. “But I could stop by tonight if you are going to be home.”

“Super!” she said. “Make it around six-thirty.”

“I’ll see you then.”

Mary kept me waiting for fifteen minutes, either because she was tied up with Baba or to test her power over me. When she finally came back out, her subtle smile made up for the wait. I don’t know if she was truly beautiful or just very pretty, but I sure liked her looks. Her body was perfect from my point of view, occupying the midpoint between a too-skinny fashion model and a too-voluptuous Playboy bunny. She looked as wholesome as the girl who lives next door on Sycamore Street and sings in the church choir, raising a soprano hosanna to the heavens, and as experienced as the girl who sleeps with the prime minister when his wife is in the country.

“What are you grinning at?” she said, giving me a little shove.

“Take a guess,” I said.

As we walked down Broadway toward the ocean, I tried to sort out my mixed motives toward Baba’s delectable blonde. I was powerfully attracted to her, so much so that I was in danger of thinking more about how to get into her pink pants than how to find the pink diamonds. At the same time, when I reminded myself that the necklace was the true object of my tratakum, the thing I should be focused on as if it were a blip on a radar screen on the eve of Armageddon, she seemed like a good potential source of intelligence, someone who could fill me in on Baba’s operation, if I could gain her confidence.

“Did you know these streets used to be canals?” I asked her.

“What do you mean?”

“Where we are walking right now was water sixty years ago. All the streets in this area were canals until they filled them in during the nineteen thirties and forties.”

“Why did they fill them in?”

“Lack of imagination,” I said. “They were silting in and overgrown with weeds. It was simpler and cheaper for city hall to turn them into streets than to repair and maintain them.”

“Wow, that’s interesting. I never heard anyone mention that before. You know a lot of stuff, don’t you?”

“I pay attention,” I said.

“I bet you do.”

Whatever Baba had done to annoy her had shifted her attitude toward me to some degree. She was trying on a girlfriend persona, seeing what it would be like if I were her man, feeling for where my buttons were.

“Ganesha told me you fixed the roof,” she said after a little while. “He said it seemed like you knew what you were doing. It’s cool that you know how to do stuff like that. So, are you really in the construction business?”

“Kind of,” I said, not wanting to lie to her any more than I had to. She let the ambiguity pass.

The boardwalk was packed with a typical Sunday-afternoon crowd out to enjoy the atmosphere and entertainment. A “silver man,” wandered down from the Santa Monica Promenade, was doing his robot impression in exchange for dollar bills proffered by wide-eyed little kids pushed forward by their parents. A gang of hip-hop acrobats was bouncing and spinning and flipping in front of a suitcase-size boom box that made my chest reverberate as we strolled by. A man in a harlequin costume was swallowing swords.

The breeze had shifted quarters and was now blowing inland off the splashing water, carrying the exhilarating scent of the sea and seeming to impart the energy of the ocean to everything along the shore, putting a three-dimensional kaleidoscope into motion. Palm trees stirred, sparrows twittered and hopped, basketballs thumped and banged on the courts, boys and girls whizzed past on wheeled devices, pennants flapped, seagulls skimmed, and the homeless shook their silvery cups. Cappuccino machines hissed as sweet foam boiled up like the waves where they curled and creamed on the beach.