The Loss of Leon Meed

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.

“The mayor was here a minute ago,” said Soulbrother, “to bestow his blessing.”

“It was a bestowal,” agreed Alleycat.

“Said the city council has penned a letter to Congressman Sawyer demanding that the oil scouts be held in abeyance.” Soulbrother wore a nest of Ugandan bead necklaces and held a jade-tipped staff in his left hand. Alleycat also had a staff, though his was a weathered piece of driftwood without ornamentation.

“Until it can be proven that the black brant doesn’t nest in the sound.”

“Except that everyone knows it does, so we’ll get a permanent abeyance.”

“It’s crafty and it’s just.”

“The fate of the Pacific black brant is intricately tied to the fate of California itself,” the woman with the microphone was saying. “If we allow its natural habitat to be torn up so Big Oil can come in and bleed the ocean for a few more years of gas dependency, what’ll we have? We’ll have a displaced black brant, which might just be an extinct black brant, and a wounded Humboldt Sound and further retardation of alternative energy research. Will the problem of California’s energy needs be solved by however many millions of barrels of crude oil can be pumped out of our ocean? Of course not. There are far too many of us, and our needs are too great. All we’ll have as a result is a permanently impaired ecosystem.” She paused and looked searchingly at the crowd and someone made a low moaning noise. “Does anyone remember the Bligh Reef in the upper Prince William Sound, where Exxon spilled eleven million gallons of oil in 1989? While efforts to clean it up succeeded in some ways, there were still vestiges left over a decade later, in areas sheltered from weathering processes, such as in the subsurface under selected gravel shorelines, and in some soft substrates containing peat.” A quick scan of the people around Joon-sup showed how unacceptable this was. Peat in the soft substrates? She might as well have been describing child pornography.

Joon-sup clasped his shaking hands behind his back and declined Alleycat and Soulbrother’s suggestion that he get his own staff and join them for a walk through Arcata Park with some pot and a ukulele.

Earlier that day, Eve Sieber applied a darker shade of black lipstick than normal and wandered the aisles of Bonanza 88, noting how little effect the blue-light special on cutlery was having on the store’s business. Despite the ad in the Times-Standard, potentially seen by over forty thousand people countywide, no one was thronging into the place to snatch up low-grade knives and forks and serving salad prongs. Was Eve surprised? No. The metal was cheap and flimsy. The spoons looked likely to bend under the strain of a bite of minute rice, and the forks were too small to provide the fulsome bites of steak and pasta that Eureka’s bargain hunters demanded. Even with prices slashed below cost—and what a minor bloodbath it was—this sale barely competed with the deep-discount chain stores that, because of their size and intimacy with manufacturers, could afford to sell everything at the leanest rates.

Eve returned to the cash register and tried to figure out if she had a cavity in one of her upper left molars and organized the open box of chocolate eggs meant to be irresistible to women in the checkout line. Her manager, Vikram, was hanging a perforated-edged WARNING: GREAT SAVINGS HERE! sign over the cutlery display, a warning unheeded by the four customers listlessly examining paper cups and Limoges Nativity scenes. Vikram was a tall man with movie-star cheekbones and elephantine ears who’d moved to Eureka the previous year to work at a newly opened software development plant but was fired when the company’s abysmal third-quarter earnings report led to layoffs of fifty percent of its employees. Vikram, by then in love with a shaggy-haired lesbian named Callie who worked at a travel store called Going Places, decided not to return to the Bay Area and instead to concentrate all of his psychological and romantic powers on winning Callie’s affection. He described his life as an act of radical romanticism.

“Hey you!” Vikram said to Eve. “Could you do me the kindness to please bring two fishhooks here?”

Eve dug into the display supply box stashed under the checkout counter and brought them to Vikram. “We’re never going to sell all these cutlery sets,” she said, straightening a stack of boxes. “There’s forty more in the back.”

“Forty-four,” he corrected her.

“So much the worse.”

“That is the wrong attitude to have toward this fine Millennium Dreams Cutlery Set. In Gujurat we’d kill to get such inimitable craftsmanship, such loving attention to detail.” Holding up a tarnished knife so flimsy that it almost wobbled, he whispered, “Such a bonanza of practical value.”

The two of them laughed. Making fun of Bonanza 88’s wares was among their favorite activities, though it usually led to an existential despondency—after all, they did nothing all day but sell these wares—from which they didn’t fully recover until the end of the day.

“Do you know the bar Callie goes to, the Pleather Principle?” Vikram asked.

“I haven’t been in it. Why?”

“The man who goes there might have an opportunity of knowing her in a more congenial setting than the Going Places.”

“It’s a lesbian bar.”

“My point exactly.”

“So men aren’t welcome.”

“What if the man looks like a woman?”

“You’d never get away with it and you’d end up humiliated. Maybe even beaten up by some hardcore bull dykes.”

Vikram folded up the step ladder he’d used to hang the sign. “You’re right. You see some things so clearly.”

At lunch Eve went to the back office to use the phone. She had a responsibility as an adult to alert the police about the man she’d met at the Fricatash—not that the police were her or her friends’ most trusted allies, but she acknowledged their authority in certain matters—and so called the sheriff’s office. She was put on hold for twenty valuable lunch-break minutes, at which point she talked to an Officer Fuller, who took her statement and thanked her for the interesting information regarding the Leon Meed missing person case.

“What happens now?” Eve asked.

“With what?” Officer Fuller responded.

“Do I need to identify him or something?”

“He’s not a criminal suspect.”

“I know, but you don’t need me to do anything else?”

“We’ll be in contact if we do.”

After this disappointing act of public service—she’d imagined being enlisted by the police as a consultant—Eve told Vikram she needed a longer lunch hour and then went to Amigas Burrito and talked to burrito maker Aaron Hormel, a primped skater she’d slept with when she was thirteen who now took occasional biology classes at College of the Redwoods and taught himself bass guitar and was someday going to move to Oakland and become either a veterinarian or a musician god. He’d been struck in the throat by a baseball bat in high school and suffered critical injuries to his vocal cords, so that he always sounded like he was breathing in while talking.

“Where’s Ryan these days?” Aaron asked. “I haven’t seen him at the Fricatash.”

“Working at Muir as much as possible where—ooh, listen to this. So last week Principal Giaccone catches him doing junk in one of the bathroom stalls, he was passed out for just a moment, and Giaccone starts fulminating about—”

“Nice word.”

“Thanks. So Giaccone was all, ‘This is a school, godammit you little junkie! You can’t be shooting up when kids are right outside playing basketball. What kind of place do you take this for? How long have you been working at Muir? I think it’s time we reevaluated the desirability of your being here.’”

Aaron sprinkled cilantro onto a Veggie Behemoth burrito. “Did he get fired?”

“It turns out,” Eve said, filling her cup with root beer, “that Ryan had walked by Giaccone’s office the week before and heard him sexually blackmail a fourth-grade teacher, saying, ‘You want to keep your job you’re going to have to fuck me.’”

“No way.”

“So Ryan mentioned what he’d heard and now his job is like lifetime guaranteed with a rosy little raise to boot. We’re going to save up and move to Bel Air.”