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“People were here. Lou was here. But they left.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Lou wouldn’t just leave the store to be robbed by gangs.”
“No gangs come in here.”
“My point is that there are valuable items lying around.”
“I’m not saying if it were my store I would go away, but Lou is different. He is a smart businessman.”
“I’ve never heard anyone call him that.”
They sat in silence for some time before Silas said, “You mind if I ask you something?”
“Okay.”
“A few days ago, in the morning, early, did you come by my place and peek through the window for a minute and then run away?”
“Me?”
“I’m just curious.”
“You think I spy on you?”
“That’s not necessarily what I’m asking.”
“I wouldn’t do that.”
“Okay.”
Beto pulled three white gold rings from his left hand and laid them on top of one another on the smudged porcelain countertop. Silas reached around the soda dispenser for a glass that he filled with cola before adding a thick vanilla syrup. Beto stared at the carbonation running up the insides of the glass and whistled. Silas drank it all out of a bent straw.
“You were thirsty,” said Beto appreciatively.
“Yes.”
The front door jangled open and Lou walked in, a short man with a brush-bristle crew cut dyed jet black. His eyes were red from the conjunctivitis he claimed to have gotten from the redwood and marijuana pollen in Humboldt County’s air. It clogged his tear ducts. Although he’d lived in Eureka for forty-seven years, his Georgia accent sounded thicker to Silas than any Southerner he’d ever heard. Lou talked about retiring in Georgia, but he hadn’t been back to visit in over a decade and feared the changes time had wrought. Better the devil you know, he said.
“Lou,” Silas said. “You left this place unattended. Beto and I could have broken into the pharmacy and taken everything.”
“You’d have left fingerprints.”
“True.”
“I went to the police station.”
“What for?”
“My employee Leon—part-time guy—is missing.”
“I read that,” said Silas.
“His mother’s offering ten thousand dollars for his return.”
“They think he’s been kidnapped?” Beto asked.
“They didn’t let on what they think.”
“What’d you tell them?” asked Silas.
“That a couple months back he stopped coming in because of an illness.”
“They think he’s dead?” Beto asked.
“They didn’t let on what they think.”
“You going to hire new help?” Silas said.
“I am.”
Silas left money for his soda on the counter and left. Walking down and up Buhne hurt his knees this time, and when he got home he took pills and lay in bed until his consciousness went blank.
3 (#u0d8a8110-faf2-5d7f-a0e7-971b457b91fa)
In a small condominium in Old Town Eureka, Barry Klein dabbed water on the button-sized stain marring the front of his double-knit sweater and rubbed and rubbed it and then draped the sweater over the radiator. He went to the kitchen and placed two apples, a shearing knife, a corned beef sandwich, a pockmarked copy of The God of Small Things, and a thin folded blanket into a wicker basket, his Prairiewalker model Longaberger, and closed the top. It was four thirty and he wasn’t gay. Sunlight dappled the checkerboard carpet on which he rested his huge feet in the living room. The hairs growing out of his two big toes were long and he was ashamed of their coarseness, of their pubic quality. He would never again wear sandals.
A cat meowed from the top of a bookshelf and he said to it, “You could easily be a dog. I could’ve gotten a dog and been happy. It’s a cliché for gay men to have cats but that doesn’t matter because maybe I’ll meet a girl at Rainie’s tonight.”
He thought about eating half the corned beef sandwich, but then thought better of it. As a new guest, he was presenting at that evening’s Longaberger party, meaning whatever he packed was what he’d show, and if that included a half-eaten sandwich, what impression would that make? That he couldn’t control himself? That he was too poor to afford a whole one? That he kept an unkempt home? What a wrong impression that would be. Barry looked at the walls of his one-bedroom apartment and saw the Napa wine poster perfectly aligned with the street-facing window, a photo collage of his family and college friends, the theater masks of laughter and tears, a giant handwritten quote, “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” Now hold on. Would he have an Oscar Wilde quote on his wall if he weren’t gay?
“Don’t be so literal,” he said to the cat, which stared at him mercilessly. “Lots of straight people like Oscar Wilde. He has big crossover appeal.”
He shaved again and applied antioxidant cream to the worry lines on his forehead and put on the sweater he’d cleaned, which was casual and said I’m approachable. He really hoped he would meet a girl at the party.
He looked in the mirror and raised his eyebrows and saw with a sinking feeling that the worry lines weren’t fading despite the diligence with which he daily applied the cream. And the hairline at his temples was getting uneven. And that stain on his sweater hadn’t gone away! What did he have to do, cut it out? Put on a patch? Bleach the whole sweater? He ran more water over it and said to the cat, who had followed him into the bathroom, “Last night didn’t happen so I wish you’d stop thinking that.” He’d been roaming around on the Internet and had paused to graze in a pasture that wasn’t his preferred pasture, not his oriented field, and the stain was proving impossible. “I was just looking around,” he said. “It doesn’t mean anything.” The cat sneezed. “Do you understand? Nothing.” The image of loving a man and touching a man and intimate urgent kissing and reaching down to grab an erect cock and his grabbing yours … Tonight he would meet a girl and impress her with his observations about Rainie and the ridiculousness of Longaberger parties—twenty adults all swapping stories about how they use their Longabergers?—but that it was a good excuse to be social without getting drunk or sitting through a dumb movie. He would be supercharming. There was to be an eclectic group of Rainie’s friends with names like Elaine Perry and Sadie Jorgenson and he didn’t know how many of them would be single. But how long can you call it accidental grazing when in your heart of hearts it thrills and excites and fills you up with a longing so pure, so real, so intensely overpowering that you could turn your back forever on the prospect of a tepid marriage to someone you have to constantly tell yourself you’re attracted to, and for what? Social approval? A military stint if he ever so chose? Freedom from fear of Faggot! You like to suck dick, huh? How you like to swallow blood? And bashed skull and helplessness and shame—oh God, the unutterable shame—and self-censure and the imprisonment in a life, a position, a love that dare not speak its name? Barry took off and folded up his sweater and placed it on the dry-cleaning pile. Then he put on another sweater and strategically ruffled his hair so that the thin parts weren’t visible, making perfect his beauty. He felt good. He started crying. Tonight, maybe, he would meet someone.
A few hours later he was ready. The map to Rainie’s house that came with the Longaberger party invitation unfolded on his couch like an origami flower bud, and Barry would have left it sitting there if he hadn’t thought in the back of his mind that he might bring someone home later. Everything in that case should look neat and inviting, so he took the four-square-inch paper to the recycling bag. Then, with basket in hand, he met his neighbor Amphai in the hallway outside his apartment and gave her a light one-armed hug.
“You all set?” said Amphai.
“I feel like one of those Saint Bernard rescue dogs,” said Barry, lifting his basket to his chin.
Within fifteen minutes they were at Rainie’s, where a man neither of them knew welcomed them in. Barry shook his hand and—was he imagining it or did the man thumb-press his palm significantly?—walked into the living room, where he set down his Longaberger next to the fireplace and a cast-iron tool stand in which were slotted a mini-broom, fire poker, and extended-reach tongs.
“Amphai and Barry!” Rainie said, emerging from her bedroom in a knee-length yellow dress tied at the waist, her hair freshly released from curlers. “You’re the first ones. Have you met Alvin? We used to work together at the Cutten Nursery. These things usually start on time, so the others should be here any minute.”
“Hi, again,” said Barry shyly, Amphai and Alvin nodding around the triangle.
“I had cucumber slices over my eyes for two hours today,” Rainie said. “You want coffee? I’d peek a little and it was like I was actually inside the cucumber, you know you get cucumber juice deposits around the corners of your eyes. And what do you think of this dress? I got it and a hoop skirt at the Hop-Hop last weekend for only forty dollars, tax included. The guy who owns that store was in our year at Eureka High, Amphai. Jason with a Spanish last name. Who’s got psoriasis or some really unfortunate skin predicament, but it turns out he went with Sandrine, remember that French exchange student our junior year who everyone thought was a lesbian, well according to Jason they were getting it on for three months.”
“She left a used rag in the toilet once in the gym and I went in right after her,” said Amphai, stirring her coffee. The spoon-on-porcelain nrr-nrr-nrr sound driving everyone a little crazy once they tuned in to it. “There it was like an aborted fetus.”
“That continental charm,” said Rainie. “The exchange students were always so gauche, to use one of their words. Except the German boys and oh God do you remember Claude?”
“With the big cock.”
“Ladies, ladies,” said Alvin, who had a thick, well-trimmed beard and curly black hair styled into a pompadour that Barry thought becoming. “Some of us haven’t had our dinner yet.”
“Sorry.” Rainie poked him in the ribs. “Making you hungry?”
“I refuse to dignify.”
“Then the three of you should sit down and the others will literally—oh, that’s the door. Hold on.”
By six fifteen, twenty people were standing or sitting in the living room, ranch-dipping celery sticks and saying, “the farmers’ market in Arcata is a spent force” and “appalled by my mom’s Tupperware parties and thought I’d have to be lobotomized before doing anything like it” and “broken condom is how she described it to me, not that they won’t love it with all their hearts.” Of the twenty people, eighteen were women.
“Welcome to those of you who it’s your first time at a Longaberger gathering,” said Rainie, pushing a cart stacked with baskets to the center of the room and smiling at everyone. She unpacked the baskets and arrayed them in crescent formation with their identifying name tags in front. The 2002 Ambrosia Combo. The Small Harvest Blessings Combo. The 2005 Founder’s Market Basket Combo. “As most of you know I’m Rainie and I’m a Longaberger independent sales associate, which means that I’m licensed to sell Longaberger products by the Longaberger company itself.” The first of the coughs and sneezes and body mutinies from the audience. “I’m going to give a little historical background and then show you some of the more fantastic models and give you a chance to buy the ones you want. I know that stocking up on holiday Longabergers is one of your main reasons for being here, but I think it’s also important for you all to enjoy yourselves and get to know one another. I’ve made some of my best friends through attending Longaberger gatherings just like this one.”
During the ensuing report on Longaberger history—the inspirational account of an epileptic and stutterer named Dave Longaberger whose learning disability prevented his finishing high school until he was twenty-one, a man who then founded and, against the advice of friends and creditors, sold two successful small businesses to finance his dream of creating the largest basket manufacturing company in the United States—Barry scanned the faces around him hoping to alight on an interesting and attractive person—woman, he meant—whom he might approach after the demonstration. His eyes kept hiccuping on Alvin’s, who for some reason was looking at him, so that he had to yank his gaze elsewhere and settle on, say, Sadie Jorgenson, a generously built therapist with frosted hair and a thin silver necklace buried in the folds of her neck.
The history segued into an in-depth basket-by-basket examination of Rainie’s wares, taking time for questions and for-examples and personal testimonials. Then there were three guest presentations, among them Barry’s, about which he was nervous, though you’d never know it to watch him pull out his Prairiewalker’s items, sandwich and book and blanket. In fact, to most observers his was the most accomplished basket packing, certainly the most comprehensive. With these items you could spend an entire day at Sequoia Park or the Willow Creek River or on a drive in some picturesque part of southern Humboldt. And The God of Small Things as his book choice; yes, this was a man worth getting to know, thought the curvy ladies in attendance.
When it was time for Rainie’s closing remarks, before welcoming the chance to talk one-on-one with people and take their orders and write down their mailing information and email addresses to keep them in the Humboldt Longaberger loop, she thanked her guests and said, “You might wonder what’s in it for me to provide this Longaberger service, and I don’t mind telling you because that’s fair and honest. If I sell $250 worth of merchandise tonight, I not only get my five percent commission but I also get the Inaugural Hostess Appreciation Basket and Protector, which is a beautiful basket, five and three-quarter inches by three and three-quarter inches by four inches, and it has a swinging handle and is woven of alternating red and natural quarter-inch weaving with a star-studded blue trim strip. It’s only available to hostesses this month, so I really hope I make it.”
The semicircle broke up and people turned to one another and asked which Longabergers, if any, they would buy. Barry told himself, The woman with short dark hair who looks like Snow White, and set off in her direction—whatever you do don’t look at him—and passed by Alvin and his heart skipped a beat and—
He found himself staring at a man in his mid-fifties with curly chestnut hair graying at the sides, dressed in a brown open-collared cotton shirt, pleated wool slacks, and bubble-toed black boots. Lived-in clothes that looked tumble-dried and thrown on. Unconcerned clothes. The sort of ensemble you’d wear if you were taking a cross-country train trip and couldn’t bring any luggage. Barry hadn’t noticed him at the party before or seen him walk into his personal space and was frankly a little disturbed to be standing so close to him.
“What is this?” the man said, arching his shoulders. “Where am I?”
“Where are you?” said Barry.
“Wait a minute. This is my old apartment.” The voice, a rock-rake gravelly sound, had panic stabbing through it. The man looked nervously at the trios and quartets of women—and Alvin—eating and making mouthful comments and nodding at the mention of others’ children and husbands and termagant mothers-in-law. He took in and held a big breath.
Barry had heard of drug-addled bums—although drug-addled bums these days were usually younger than this fellow, some in their teens or even younger because the country’s safety net had so many tears in its mesh—wandering into any house with an unlocked front door and having freak-out breakdown sessions in front of horrified, suspended-animation families or single mothers or amorous couples. Too much PCP and THC and LSD—not enough TLC. The bums, having worked toward this moment ever since taking their first cigarette drag or saying bombs away with a bottle of Everclear or tying off with a rubber tourniquet and nearby syringe, were generally unarmed and harmless if you could contain them somehow. The trick was to get them into a small empty room; otherwise they’d accost the furniture or wrestle with the leaf blower while screaming obscenities until the authorities arrived to take them away.
Barry’s first impulse, therefore, was to try to keep the man calm while signaling for someone to call the cops. “You’re at Rainie Chastain’s house, where we’re having a Longaberger party.”
“Longaberger? Those woven baskets?”
“That’s right.”
“You’re saying this is a Longaberger party? I’m afraid—what’s your name?”
“Barry.”
“I’m afraid, Barry, that I’ve lost my mind.”
Barry reached up to scratch his head and made a check swish in the air hoping that Rainie or someone would see it. No one did. “That’s possible. Is there a reason you think so?”
“Yes,” said the man, nodding unhappily. “Yes, there is.”
Barry looked down at the man’s left hand and saw a hand grenade. He knew in a terrible instant that they all were going to die, that this guy was a holdout from the Symbionese Liberation Army, that they were going to explode into a hard rain of body parts and wicker and building rubble, and in that split second Barry experienced superregret at never having admitted to himself what he was just because of social opprobrium and other stupid intangibles. Barry, Barry, quite contrary, how does your garden grow? He knew how it grew and had always been too cowardly to openly acknowledge it and celebrate the strange and wonderful and natural things that grew there. Oh, he had lived life with one arm tied behind his back, he thought as his initial panic ebbed and with a surreal helicopter seed comedown he realized that the round stubbly object in the drug-addled bum’s hand was not a grenade at all but a pinecone. He careened into awareness as the bum shook his head and walked heavily to the hallway leading to the front door.
“Friend of yours?”
Barry looked from the door to the person addressing him. Alvin. “No, I’ve never met him before.”
“Rainie has the widest circle of acquaintances.”
“Yeah.”
They regarded the crowd around them and Alvin said, “Can you take a compliment?”
Barry didn’t flicker with embarrassment when, after a moment of silence, he realized that he was staring hard at Alvin. Blood rushed to his groin and head at once and there seemed to be stability in this combination, a balance struck. He would neither rip Alvin’s clothes off nor pass out. He stood calmly, coolly, and what would follow would follow.
Alvin said, “I really like your sweater.”
“Thank you.”
“Did you get it in Eureka?”
“No, I found it in a catalogue from a very small company in Healdsburg that manufactures their clothes by hand. Feel how much integrity the weave has?” And then he was saying that he had other sweaters like it, and perhaps Alvin wanted to see them—and Alvin did—whereupon the two of them gathered their things. As they filed out of the apartment Barry scanned the crowd and Rainie winked so subtly at him that maybe she didn’t know. Maybe nobody would insert sex into his and Alvin’s departure. And yet—what would it matter if they did? Would he make room in his head for their suspicions when at last he was full of certainty?
The next morning Joon-sup Kim called his friend Hyun-bae for their once-a-month California comparison, a Eureka versus San Diego debate. They had immigrated together to the Golden State from Pusan, South Korea, six years earlier when they were seventeen. Joon-sup, nicknamed Jack by his coworkers at the Better Bagel and only slightly shorter than the average American, with matted hair that hung like coils of moss down his back, lived in a Eureka tenement building occupied primarily by Laotians and Salvadorans who seemed all to have taken a vow of silence. He would step onto the lanai outside his second-story apartment and wave down at a freakishly over-groomed Latino family sitting in the courtyard around a murky half-drained swimming pool, eating papusas, Sunday best on a Tuesday afternoon. Not receiving a wave back, he’d follow up with a hale “Nice day for a picnic, know what I’m saying?” though it might be fifty-two degrees and overcast. One by one—man woman teenage boy little girl—they’d look up at him, never all together, and say nothing before pulling out more papusas from their Longaberger. “Weirdos,” Joon-sup would mutter under his breath and then go back inside his dungeony bachelor pad.
He’d originally moved with Hyun-bae to southern California and then gone north after a vacation had convinced him that Eureka was where he was meant to be. There were trees and a temperate climate and the ease of mobility that only smaller cities offer. The smog was bearable. The people friendly. Plus, Joon-sup was something of a chef and would-be small businessman and had happily noted Eureka’s dearth of Korean restaurants. Which, he discovered upon arriving there and getting a job as an assistant bagel maker and learning more about the area’s cultural and ethnic components, was because there was a dearth of Koreans. Laotians, Vietnamese, and Cambodians, sure, plenty, enough not to render the phrase “northern California Asian population” completely nonsensical, but there was almost no one from his home country.
Hyun-bae liked to lord this over him—that Joon-sup was an island in a sea of round-eyes and boat people—but Joon-sup liked being unique, even if most whites eventually got around to asking him what he thought of Ho Chi Minh and My Lai, and he felt that this was a place where he would become American quicker than if there were a Korean community to fall back on. Here he had no choice but to go to all-night reggae jams and to bonfire parties at Moonstone Beach with the local university kids high on Native American herbs and the urgency of their environmental science major. Here he threw away the preppy stiff-collared shirts he’d bought in San Diego and adopted the local garb: alpaca tube hat, cotton-hemp hybrid long-sleeved pullovers, draw-string calico pants with neo-bell-bottom stylability, hefty mountain-climbing boots with graphite support system. Joon-sup went native.
His parents were disturbed by the pictures of himself he sent home, and by his increasingly foreign intonations when talking to them on the phone, for in his daily life the Korean language had become like a trophy sword kept over the mantel, an unused adornment. He had sex with American girls and seemed so at home in Humboldt that people from out of town pulled over while driving to ask him directions. Once when his van broke down he hitched a ride to a mechanic with a schoolteacher named Elaine who didn’t know the first thing about efforts to strengthen the Environmental Protection Agency’s jurisdiction over the local logging industry, and when he informed her of them she was impressed and asked if he’d grown up in Eureka, which was a flattering question. He didn’t plan ever to visit South Korea again. He was free.
At just after two in the afternoon Joon-sup finished reading thirty-four small-font pages of a loan application for the restaurant he wanted to open, the Joon-sup Experience. His head hurt and he had to go to a rally in Arcata for the Pacific black brant and other migratory waterfowl that annually made a stop in the shoals of Humboldt Bay, so he put down the hefty application and got in his turtle-green Volkswagen bus and put on a music collection of stoned hippie reggae standards about Marcus Garvey and sensimilla and the scandal of the Banana Republics. Lighting a sausage-sized joint, he backed out of his numbered parking space in front of his apartment, running bump over something that turned out to be a deflated football left out by one of the building kids. The joint smoldered as he came to a stop sign and his mother had called in the morning because she had met someone she wanted him to consider. Yes, she knew he was in America now and had adopted certain regrettable American customs and had once said, in a breach of filial respect so extreme it had left her speechless, that he would marry whomever he wanted, be she white, Asian, African, or transvestite, but she had met the most remarkable girl with a university degree and knew Joon-sup couldn’t refuse to just look at this girl’s picture and read her handwritten note about herself. He couldn’t possibly be so insensitive. The package was on its way.
There was a trippy knocking sound in this dance-hall song, like an echoing submarine sonar noise, that was spacier for the subwoofer and thousand-dollar equalizer Joon-sup had recently installed in his van. He frowned at a red light on his dashboard that flickered on and off, thought he recognized the burrito maker standing outside Amigas Burrito, accelerated and worried about his lack of loan collateral, cursed his Asian hair for being so difficult to dreadlock, and figured that the picture of his “intended” would look nothing like she did in real life, that it would be doctored into the realm of fantasy. One of his old school friends worked in a photography studio in Pusan where ninety percent of the customers were women insisting that the studio airbrush to the extent of reconfiguring noses and lightening skin colors and trimming neck widths. Marriage was such a desperate business in South Korea, and what was Joon-sup supposed to do, see the picture and flip and—
Joon-sup snapped to attention. A man was standing in the middle of the road on the outskirts of Eureka, directly in front of Joon-sup’s van traveling at 42 mph. The guy was maybe three seconds away, meaning that Joon-sup couldn’t possibly stop in time, though he slammed on the brakes reflexively as a low scream got stuck in his throat. The man had appeared from out of nowhere, with his legs spread apart like he was about to draw in a shootout. Joon-sup thought, in a spasm of fear, Holy fuck I am going to hit this guy and braced himself for the impact, tensed and skidding and seeing everything in slow motion. His white knuckles on his enormous steering wheel, involuntarily closing his eyes and—
Nothing happened. No kerchunk and smashed metal and street-smeared pedestrian. Joon-sup was merely slowing to a stop just past Kinko’s and a shoe store and a veterinary clinic, beyond the place in the road where the man had stood. Cars honked as they swerved around his parked van. Joon-sup craned his neck in every direction and then looked at the reefer in his hand. He’d had a hallucination. With his Gatling-gun heart going rat-a-tat-tat, Joon-sup shifted into gear and sped up onto the highway. He had to be cool, be cool. Cars continued to gust by and a highway patrol vehicle got a good look at him. Feeling the police stare, Joon-sup looked straight ahead and finally reached the speed limit and tried to seem unconcerned with the fact that he was holding a marijuana cigarette in plain view. It was only a cigar and Joon-sup was just a conscientious driver. But normal people looked around when they drove, so he made some natural-seeming head turns and saw the face of the highway patrolwoman, a Laotian in a flat-topped police hat. He smiled and made a little bow with his chin. She slitted her eyes and moved on.
When Joon-sup parked along the edge of the Arcata Plaza, still shaking, the Humans for the Pacific Black Brant rally was about forty people in clusters around an Earth Mother woman wearing a lavender sarong and standing on a large box with the word “soap” stenciled across every side. Two of Joon-sup’s coworkers from the Better Bagel, Alleycat and Soulbrother, held hand-painted posters with colorful depictions of the black brant in flight. Majestic creatures, rare and fine with white bellies and noble dark wings, requiring large areas of undisturbed tundra in which to stop during their flights between the Arctic Coastal Plain and Baja California. Joon-sup had never seen one of these birds in the flesh, which was compelling evidence that something needed to be done to protect them. He had almost killed someone. Manslaughter. Plans to develop offshore oil drilling along the northern Humboldt seashore—and what a dangerous future the state faced without adequate electricity—were getting daily more serious, so a group of environmentalists and concerned local citizens had come to protest the quick fix of fossil fuel development. He had driven right through a man.
“Jack,” said Alleycat in his feral purr, “what’s the good word?” Alleycat was pot-bellied with a Vandyke goatee and Van Gogh red hair.
Joon-sup shrugged.
