Marian Palaia - Given World

After we finish stocking the beer, washing the glasses, and sweeping the floor, we shoot a quiet game of pool and blaze out of town. Looking back from the Bay Bridge, the city behind us is all smoky pink with sodium-vapor light radiating up into the clouds, refracted through the fog. Lu drives, cabbie-fast and maniacally as always, and I lean out the window to shotgun the briny-smelling breeze into my lungs. I look west into the darkness, and see incomprehensible, ceaseless ocean, clear to Asia and back. Miles and miles. Really far and really deep. Lu says, “You ever think about jumping, Cook?”

“Never,” I say, and I’m not really lying. I don’t think about jumping, but I do think about falling — wonder for how long I could make it feel like flying — but I’m never going to get close enough to the edge to do any of those things. Seems silly to have the conversation at all, in that case.

“I don’t believe you,” Lu says, downshifting into second to pass a semi on the right, just before the lane ends. He has to brake to let us in and yanks on the air horn. It’s really loud.

“It’s hardly going to matter if you drive us off a bridge.”

“Oh, be quiet, Cookie. Have I ever killed us?”

Oakland is still awake when we get back. Even though we’re pretty close to the relative sanity of Berkeley, there are still a few young Turks hanging out, waving come-hither dime bags at us, watching just a little longer than maybe they’d watch a couple of guys driving through. Lu doesn’t look anywhere but straight ahead, doesn’t blink, smile, cuss, or nod. When we get to the flat, she throws herself through the door and onto the center of the bed like she’s just escaped a ravenous tiger.

“Jesus Christ. Maybe you need to blindfold me.”

“You’d have to let me drive.” I know what is called for here is not a joke, but it’s been a long night, and maybe I think I can make her laugh.

She throws the keys at me, hard. I duck and they hit the wall. “Not funny,” she says, her voice close to cracking. Hearing it surprises me.

“Sorry. I’m tired.” I sit down next to her, pick her hand up, and feel her pulse. It’s going about a million miles an hour. “Criminy.” I put my head on her chest and listen while her heart slows to a semi-normal speed.

I’m nearly asleep there when she says, “You want to check my teeth too?”

I sit up. “No. I want to go to bed. But you’re going to have to give me some more room.”

“Were you always this much of a pain in the ass?”

“I reckon.”

“It’s a wonder your mother didn’t drown you in the horse trough.”

“My mother loves me.” Last time I checked. Which was a while ago.

“So you say.” She turns over onto her stomach and spreads her arms wide across the bedspread, her face mashed into the pillow. She says something, but it’s impossible to tell what.

“Speak English.”

She turns her head to one side. “Don’t let me go, Cook.”

I take the ribbon out of my hair, tie it twice around her wrist. “There. Now you are in my custody. You can’t escape.”

At five, it is just beginning to get light. Sirens and dogs howl somewhere not far from here. I crawl under one of Lu’s outstretched arms, and when I wake up hours later she’s gone. All her shit and some of mine: the car, the cigarettes, gone. It’s noon, and the steps and the sidewalk are lined with wilting crimson bougainvillea petals. “What the fuck am I supposed to do with these? Goddamn it, Lu.” I am out of words. I pick up a handful of the red petals and hold them until a breeze comes and blows them out of my hand. Inside I press the same hand flat into her side of the bed. I’d swear it’s still warm, sweaty in the indent her body left. I pack my little kit bag, put Sid’s key under the mat, and head for the subway.

Alice comes back to me because the tow and impound notice is mailed to my address. I go down there and talk the cashier into releasing the car into my custody. Lu surfaces about three months later. I hear what she’s doing from Andy, who’s still at Harbor Lights, feeding Lu now, and her new girlfriend; smuggling them leftovers out the back door. They’re both strung out, flopping in an abandoned building on Sixth Street. The whole neighborhood is being torn down, all the residence hotels emptying out to make way for lofts and condos. Lu and her gal are lucky to have a roof; the alleys between Market and Mission are lined both sides with appliance boxes and shopping carts.

I tell Andy to have Lu call me. “Tell her all is forgiven. Tell her there’s nothing to forgive. Tell her something.” A few days later she shows up at the bar right at one, when I open. Rode hard and put up wet, as my brother once liked to say. She stares straight down and mumbles into her sweatshirt. I know I couldn’t raise her stubborn head with a car jack.

“Don’t look at me, Cookie.”

I just want to heal her all up. I have medicine. “You want a drink?”

“I want a gun.”

“What happened to yours?”

“Some cocksucker stole it.”

I sigh, pour her a brandy. Her hands are shaking so bad she has to hold the glass with both of them. I can see fresh track marks on the backs, among the smaller veins and the tiny bones. That piece of brown velvet is still tied around her wrist, hanging on by a few fine threads. She won’t meet my eyes, and all I can think to ask is how she is and know what a ridiculous question that would be, so I don’t say anything. I go back to setting up the bar, cutting limes, making Bloody Mary mix. The place smells a bit more like bleach than booze still, since Andy was in this morning cleaning. Light prisms through the beer signs overlapped in the front window, illuminates the settling dust. For lack of something more befitting the occasion, I examine the floor and see how scarred it is, not just in the burned spot, but all over. Lu says, “I did not set that fire.”

“I believe you.”

“You’d better, Cookie. No one else does.” I know some people who would call that a burden, a moral obligation, but I am not one of those people. Nina Simone sings softly on the jukebox, about the morning of her life. Lu finishes her drink.

“You got fifty bucks?” she says. Like she’s saying, “Can I have a bite of that?” I hand her a wad out of my pocket. “I’ll pay you back,” she says, crumpling the bills up even more. “I will, goddamn it.”

“I don’t care about that. Just don’t die on my dime.” I pick up a lemon, wonder if I can throw it hard enough to break a window. “Just don’t.” I put it back down, take the big stainless-steel bucket to the alcove where the ice machine is, by the back door that leads to the deck and the garden, where by my count seven trees have been planted for dead people in the five years I’ve worked here. And those are only the special ones. We don’t plant trees for just anybody. That would require a second lot. Probably some new zoning. I don’t need ice, but Lu needs space to pull off her ever-astonishing vanishing act.

I say, “I am not planting a tree for you, Lu. You can just forget about that.” I don’t say it very loud, and she probably wouldn’t have heard me even if she wasn’t already gone. She’s left a cigarette burning in the ashtray. She knows I hate that. I leave it burning, to remember her by. Lu one; Cookie fuck-all.

The new girlfriend lasts until spring and then dies on Lu’s birthday in April. Lu calls a few weeks later, and I go pick her up at Fifth and Harrison at three in the morning. It’s raining, but she’s standing out in the open, no coat, saturated like she’s been swimming in the bay. She has a small duffel bag and a pure black kitten in a carrier behind her in a doorway, out of the rain. “I was afraid you wouldn’t see me.”