It’s been more than two weeks now since Charlie and I came back from a hike at Jack London State Park to find the condo vandalized. Desecrated may be a more accurate word for describing the condition of the apartment. The front door was left wide open and, before we walked in, we were assaulted by the smell of shit; a steaming pile of it sat in a frying pan on the stove, the burner dialed to low.

After dealing with the fry pan, Charlie raced to the second bedroom. I followed him in after I heard him scream. The parrot cage was in pieces on the ground, having been trampled, but there was no sign of Roscoe, save for a few stray feathers; this, of course, is what prompted Charlie’s wail of disbelief and grief. We later found the parrot perched atop the armoire in the master bedroom. Mute and terrorized, he shied from Charlie, who collapsed to the carpet in tears. I gave Charlie a moment before getting down on the floor beside him to offer comfort.

We discovered other damage in the apartment—the sliding glass door to the deck had been shattered with a hammer, and one of Charlie’s prized paintings, a gloved hand, by his friend Arrow Wilk, was on the ground; it had been slashed repeatedly with a knife.

We called the police as soon as we regained our wits and we were told not to touch anything until they came to dust for prints. If they wanted more, Charlie and I agreed, they could always dig in the dumpster for the shit-filled frying pan.

Two cops came within a half an hour of our call, a sergeant named-tagged Castillo, who introduced herself as Esther, and an exceptionally tall young dude, named Snopkowski. He didn’t offer his first name and I spent more than a moment fixated with his name tag and pronouncing his name in my head. Sergeant Castillo walked in first and had a quick look around the place. “There’s nothing worse,” she said, “than having your home defiled.”

Snopkowski wore a thin mustache that looked to be either too much or too little of an accent for his long egg-shaped face. He had a large camera dangling around his neck. Charlie stuck close to Sergeant Castillo, the two of them speaking in conspiratorial tones, while I followed Snopkowski on his photo safari through the rooms. We didn’t exchange a single word. I noticed that the tall lank of a cop grimaced, his little mustache bunching up, each time he snapped a shot. Did the resulting photographs somehow carry the mark of his disdain?

Once Sergeant Castillo established that neither Charlie nor I could account for anything that had been stolen, she exhaled expressively and pronounced the word vengeance. Did we know anybody who might “seek to extract it?” I found her phraseology beguiling; extraction was something that happened at the dentist or involving natural gas wells. Charlie and I faced each other and in a marvel of simultaneity, we each pronounced Vince’s name.

The sergeant’s face turned thoughtful. She had a sweetness about her—I think that must be the first time I’ve had that thought about a cop—and this impression may have been heightened by the fact that her face bore the significant scars of teenage acne.

Sergeant Castillo nodded. “We know Vince. He has a place in this complex, doesn’t he?”

“Number fourteen,” I said.

Charlie and I each detailed our history with Vince and his possible grounds for grievance.

Neither of the police officers had much to say in response. Snopkowski went off to take a few more photos and Sergeant Castillo began dusting for fingerprints. When the officers were finished their work, we were asked if it was possible for us to stay somewhere else for the next couple of nights, since the apartment was a crime scene.

I remember smiling at Charlie and saying, “We have no choice—we need to go on vacation.” Shortly after the police left, we packed two bags with clothes, our computers, and the traumatized parrot, and drove up the coast to Gualala, where we found, through Airbnb, a two-room cottage a few blocks from the beach.

Charlie heard back from Sergeant Castillo the next afternoon—they found Vince’s prints all over the apartment and would be charging him with unspecified crimes as soon as they could find him. At the end of the week Charlie got another call from the sergeant giving us the all clear to move back into the condo.

Apparently Vince remained on the lam. I imagined he was back in the Tenderloin, where Charlie and I found him many months ago, scuffling along the street, hidden among the homeless. I no longer recognized Vince as the man who charmed me into his life eight years ago. Did I recognize myself? That’s a question I posed most days as I walked alone along the beach. For convenience sake, I decided I was the first cousin of the woman I used to be, back in my Vince days. In my new incarnation I was wiser, less prone to histrionics, and more open to love. Even if those characterizations bore little resemblance to reality and were only aspirational, my choice of values cheered me and seemed a genuine improvement over my old cousin’s.

Charlie was able to make arrangements to have the Sonoma condo deep cleaned and the glass door to the deck replaced. In theory we could return home in two days, but I convinced Charlie that it would be good for us to stay on another week in Gualala. Our lives in the two rooms had taken on a certain grace. Minimalism has its virtues, and if Charlie still loved me after having to duck beneath my underwear—which I had drying on a line in the kitchen—to make a cup of coffee, I saw great hope for us.

Although Roscoe remained mute, Charlie felt he was making steady progress with PTSD exercises he designed for the parrot. “Roscoe understands everything I’m saying to him,” Charlie told me, “and we’ve now developed a system with which he can answer affirmatively or negatively. He will speak again; I know he will.”

I’ve been surprised to find myself rooting for Roscoe. If Charlie’s attention is going to be distracted by a bird, it might as well be one who speaks.

Last night, our last in Gualala, we got word from Augie Boyer that Vince was found dead in the garage of his San Francisco house. He’d affixed a hose to the exhaust of his BMW and ran it to the driver’s window. A needle was found beside his feet, along with a bag of powder. There will be an autopsy, but who cares what killed him.

After getting off the phone from Detective Boyer, and relaying the news, Charlie watched me closely to see how I’d respond. I could feel my face pucker with sadness. Strange to shed tears for a man, whose last act directed toward me was to leave a pile of shit steaming in a frying pan on the stove where I cook.

When he saw my tears, Charlie, without a trace of irony, said, “I’m sorry for your loss.”

The phrase sounded so absurd that I couldn’t keep myself from laughing. Soon Charlie joined my hilarity, and it began to feel unseemly to be joking about the dead. After we managed to corral our laughter, I proposed a toast to Vince, who used to enjoy fine wines. All we had left among our provisions was a bottle of cheap Italian red. Somehow a six-dollar bottle of wine seemed fitting.

When we were adequately lubricated, Charlie told me the haiku Augie Boyer left him with:

What a way to go:

oh, sadness of the world,

 needle in the arm.

Charlie and I each took a stab at a memorial haiku for Vince. Neither of them is worthy of repeating.

In our two weeks away we stayed away from newspapers, although we gleaned a fair amount of news online. On the drive down we decided to play a game with the news, the kind of game Charlie likes best, without a winner or loser.

Many months ago when Charlie, a bit tongue and cheek, described games with a single winner as macho, I argued with him. “It’s not a game,” I said, “without a winner.”

“You’re such a product of your culture, Pina,” he fired back. “It’s all winners and losers, cowboys and Indians, the colonizer and the colonized.”

“We’re talking about Scrabble,” I said. “Why play if we’re not going to count points?”

“The object is to build the most beautiful words possible.”

“We might as well play collaboratively,” I complained.

“Worse things have happened. Think of it the way you’d consider a family jigsaw puzzle.”

“That’s why I hate jigsaw puzzles,” I remember saying in my bitchiest voice.

“What’s the matter with you?” Charlie joked. “I bet you suspect me of lacking a competitive gene, of having low testosterone levels.”

This was in the first weeks of our relationship when we made love at least twice a day, so low T would have been a difficult argument to make. Finally, I gave in and found myself enjoying Scrabble when intriguing words were what were valued, and you could continually dip into the sack of letters until you found the ones that you wanted.

The car “game” involved taking turns forming headlines out of the bits of news we’d picked up in the last couples of weeks.

My reason for not really liking this “game” was that just about every headline featured Republicans, who were supposed to be the minority party now. Charlie tossed out the first headline, I lobbed one back, and so on:

Texas Governor Blames Massive Power Outage on Renewable Energy

Cruz Flies to Cancun While His State Dives Into Deep Freeze

Texas and Mississippi Governors Lift Mask Mandates

Biden accuses Republican Governors of Neanderthal Thinking

Republicans Find New and Creative Ways to Suppress Voting

Republican Affirmative Action: Voter Suppression

Catholic Leaders Discourage Their Flock From Getting J&J Vaccine

Anti-Vax Republicans Will Keep the U.S. From Herd Immunity

Idaho Republicans Hold Mask Burning Party

Republicans Believe Science=Socialism

A Gilded Statue of Trump in Flip Flops Delights Conservatives

After Dr. Seuss Books Deemed Racist They Become Bestsellers

House Minority Leader Reads Green Eggs and Ham on Video

Charlie effectively ended the game with his final headline: Democrats Pass 1.9 Trillion Relief Bill

What fun could we possibly have with good news?

Charlie had planned our return to Sonoma around a stop in Forestville to visit Sally on family day in her rehab facility. I suggested that I could take a hike while he visited, but Charlie made a special pitch for me to come with him. “You’re family now, Pina.” Suddenly I had a family: a sweet man without a competitive streak, and a grown daughter who happened to be an addict, but then Charlie insisted on adding his mute parrot to the family. I discouraged him from bringing Roscoe, but he wouldn’t have it.

“It will cheer up Sally to see him,” he said.

“It will distract everybody else,” I countered, to no avail.

I must say that Sally looked good. We got a little time with her before the formal session began and she took us on a tour of the lush grounds. There were horseshoes, bocce ball, and a small basketball court. Sally seemed particularly excited to show us the small redwood grove where she came every morning to meditate before anybody else was up. When I told Sally how good she looked she shook her head and said: “This is the easy part, being here. The true test is when I get home and have to make smart choices.”

She seemed particularly concerned about Roscoe’s condition. She spoke directly to the parrot, but didn’t overdue it when she realized that nothing was coming back. Charlie told her that Roscoe had been attacked during a break-in, but he didn’t mention that Vince was the perpetrator. Charlie and I also agreed not to mention Vince’s death.

We joined other families who were beginning to gather in a widely distanced circle of chairs set-up in a meadow. A few people wanted to make a fuss about Roscoe, sitting atop Charlie’s shoulder, but the social distancing precluded that. I gazed at the families, noticing, or imagining I noticed, a very tentative hopefulness in the eyes of the parents. My heart went out to them. How many times had their kids been in rehab? I couldn’t help thinking of them as kids even though most of them were probably in their mid twenties or early thirties like Sally. Two of the group—men in their fifties, who were both Safeway employees, looked out of place. Sally had explained that their union covered a good part of the program’s cost. I wondered what it was like for those men being mixed in with all these kids who looked like they were at summer camp.

A counselor opened the meeting, greeting the families, before having each of the clients introduced themselves in AA manner and talk about their work in the program. One young guy named Eric introduced himself and then said, “It’s good to be back at Fresh Mornings. I know I’m not supposed to say that, but I always feel better when I’m out here. My counselor Rex says I need to figure out how to bring Fresh Mornings with me when I go back in the world.”

I watched Eric’s parents while he talked—the mother was teary, but the father had gone somewhere else. How many rehab family meetings had he been to? I decided that Eric’s father was thinking about the woman down the street that he wanted to bed.

Even though I saw it coming, I was surprised when Sally’s turn came and she said, simply, “Hey Everybody, my name is Sally and I am an addict.” She went on to note her regret about not caring for herself and for all the pain that she’d caused her father. Then, in a breathless riff, she thanked the staff and talked about the mass of notes she’d taken during meetings, all the personal writing she’d done—six notebooks completely filled—and how she’d come to see her addiction as a terrible itch that she was trying to teach herself not to scratch.

“It goes away,” she said, “I really believe it goes away if you stop scratching and just ignore it.”

Charlie and I exchanged glances. I couldn’t know for sure what he was thinking, but I had the feeling his thoughts were in concert with mine: that equating heroin addiction with an itch might not be the ticket to long-term sobriety.

That is when Roscoe shocked everybody in the circle at Fresh Mornings. He chirped a couple of times and then in full parrot voice, rich with nasal resonance, said, “Sally, please come back to Sonoma Valley.”

Charlie, being so thrilled to hear his parrot speak again, didn’t do a very good of faux ventriloquism to cover for Roscoe. The meeting broke into pandemonium, with clients and their families gesticulating wildly and mimicking the parrot. When things calmed down, Sally spoke, teary-eyed, “I am coming back, Roscoe, I swear I am.”

After another brief hubbub, Chet, the counselor running the meeting, said, “Can we please get back on task now?”

Roscoe, in a manner as sheepish as a parrot could possibly manage, said, “Forgive my interruption.” This time Charlie’s lips were fully tuned to the parrot’s speech; the circle of addicts and their family members seemed relieved.

We bid Sally a long goodbye, with virtual hugs and tears; along with promises that will be difficult to keep.

The drive back to Sonoma was quiet. Roscoe had returned to his tacit self despite Charlie’s efforts to engage him in conversation.

As we drove back into Sonoma, I surprised Charlie with an idea I’d been entertaining before we left on our retreat.

“I’m thinking I’d like to get a dog.”

“What?” Charlie said. “What brought that on? I’ve never heard you express any interest in having a dog.”

“I haven’t. But sometimes when I’m on the deck I listen to people talk to their dogs. They’re so kind to their dogs. So loving. When I hear them express their affection, I wonder if these dog owners are as nice to any humans. Then I think that if I was a dog owner maybe I’d become a more loving person.”

Charlie laughed. “You’re a very loving person, Pina. Anyway I can’t see you walking a dog three times a day.”

“Three times a day?”

Roscoe piped in with a command: “Pina, Pina, Pina, walk the dog.”

Charlie was delighted on any number of levels. “There you have it, directly from the voice of Sonoma.”

It’s true; Roscoe pretty much settled the question for me. When you have a wise parrot laughing at your ideas it’s clearly time to rethink them.

“So?” Charlie asked.

“So, I’m glad to be back in Sonoma.”

 

— The End —

     August 14, 2020—March 8, 2021

 

Yesterday was a long day. It started in the morning at the Basque Boulangerie with Sally. We had an outing planned that made both of us nervous. Well, I know it made me nervous; since her journey to addiction it’s become increasingly difficult for me to measure Sally’s responses. I brought Roscoe along as a way of defusing the intensity with Sal. Maybe we’d be less inclined to say hurtful things to each other in the presence of a thinking parrot.

I commandeered an outside table in the far end of The Basque’s street patio, in a spot where nobody could approach us. Otherwise the curiosity of a parrot perched on my shoulder, might have tempted people to lean in dangerously towards us.

I was prepared for Sally coming late or not at all. Twenty minutes after the appointed hour, however, Roscoe spotted her and called in his outside voice, “Sally is in the valley.” The parrot goes a little mad at first when I bring him out, but he gains confidence quickly. I think he understands that the world of humans, aside from me, vastly underestimates his abilities of speech and cognition. He seems to take pleasure in his opportunity to shock.

Meanwhile Sally looked like a waif shuffling up First Street East. Maybe she was sick and badly in need of drugs to make her right; I couldn’t tell. How heartbreaking to see her like that. It wasn’t hard to imagine a big wind lifting her off the sidewalk and pitching her in another direction.

She and I had been negotiating for the better part of a week. I wanted to get her into rehab, but she said she wasn’t ready. When I asked how she’d know she was ready, she responded cryptically, “There will be a sign and I will feel it.” Her statement, echoed of all things, Justice Potter Stewart’s definition of pornography, “I’ll know it when I see it.”

I decided that given the condition she was in, I might have to feel when the time was right for her. This approach went against everything I’d learned at Al-Anon.

At the table she did her best to appear sprightly at first, forcing a smile and chattering a moment with Roscoe, but she couldn’t pull it off for long. Halfway through her latte, she fell asleep, her head dropped to the table and her half-eaten croissant became an accidental pillow.

I’d arranged a spot for her at Fresh Mornings, a treatment center outside of Forrestville, and by hook or crook I was determined to corral her into the car and get her out to the scheduled intake appointment at noon.

After I nudged Sally awake and Roscoe greeted her with a “Good morning, Sal,” she finished her latte, sipping it deliberately in short mechanical bursts. I told her what was what, and our negotiations resumed. She’d go, she said, if I first gave her the cash to get high.

“I can’t contribute to that,” I said. “Anyway, what’s the point of getting high right before you detox?”

“The last thing I want is to go into a place like that straight, Dad.”

I told Sally that her getting high wasn’t an option and she stretched her lips wide into a clown’s smile. “It’s the price of admission, Dad.”

I’d been watching Roscoe’s small head swing back and forth between Sally and me as he followed the conversation. Now that it stalled, he said, “So?”

I fed him a little hunk of my scone to nibble during the stalemate.

Of course, Sally prevailed in the end. She told me that there was a spot along the way where she could pick up what she needed.

We went to her apartment to pack clothes and whatever else she’d need for a month at Fresh Mornings. I left Roscoe in the car with some scone that I’d wrapped in a napkin. It surprised me that Sally invited me in. Maybe it was a confession, of sorts, to let me see the conditions in which she lived: a disaster of dirty dishes and clothes, with used needles threaded through the soiled shag carpet, and paperback novels stacked in tippy towers. It was all I could do not to cry. I started to go to the sink and do dishes, but Sally quipped, “Stop, Dad, the maid comes tomorrow,” a joke carried from her teenage years, uttered whenever I asked her to clean her disaster of a room. During the month that Sally will be in treatment I’ll come by and turn the apartment spic and span, thus cementing my status as an able bodied codependent. Now I leaned against the door as Sally tossed clothes from the floor into her hard-sided chartreuse suitcase. She seemed suddenly energized and I wondered if she’d had a line or two of coke when she went to the bathroom. “Don’t worry, Dad,” she said, as I watched her fill her suitcase, “they’ll have a laundry at the place and, from what I’ve heard, they’re big on having you do chores. They make it like boot camp.”

As we headed west on Highway 12, through Boyes Hot Springs, I hoped against hope that Sally would allow me to drive her directly to the treatment center without stopping “to get herself tuned up,” as she phrased it. But just after we passed into Agua Caliente, she said, “Okay, Dad, you’re going to go pull over to the right before the next light. There’s a hair salon with an empty lot. The place is closed. I won’t be more than fifteen minutes. Please stay in the car. There’s nothing for you to see out here.

I backed in to the lot so I could watch Sally cross at the light and walk down the street past a popular Mexican market, El Brinquinto. I used to buy half chickens there on summer weekends. You could smell them grilling on a wide grate from blocks away. According to Augie Boyer, this area is close to where Jesus was murdered, a little more than a month ago. As Sally disappeared from my view I watched a steady stream of Latinos walk in and out of the market.

I waited nearly a half an hour in the car, enumerating my litany of crimes as a father. Most involved neglect, and yet as a single dad it was me who made every meal, helped with homework, and read the bedtime stories. To be honest, my crimes mostly had to do with spoiling my child, trying to make up for her not having a mother.

Roscoe napped in the back seat, but as soon as I became impatient and opened the car door to slip out, he snapped to: “Where you going, where you going, Charlie?”

I hoisted the parrot onto my shoulder; I could feel his talons digging in. We waited for the light and then followed the crosswalk gingerly. I was afraid that the cars might frighten Roscoe, but the parrot remained steady. When somebody honked his horn at the sight of Roscoe on my shoulder, he said, “Imbecile.”

Two men, each with a load of Coronas, came out of the market as we passed and started laughing when they saw Roscoe. One of them shouted: “Polly quiere una galleta?”

Roscoe responded without skipping a beat: “Si, gracias,” but I kept walking, past the grocery and down Depot Road. I had no idea where the depot was or if one even existed. Sally was nowhere to be seen. Why had I let her go?

There were no houses on the first block. I had no idea where she could have disappeared? Depot Road veered in two directions, circling around a solar plant that may have occupied the space of the old depot, and spilling to the left toward Flowery Elementary School. I headed toward the school, which appeared to be closed. Behind some fencing I noticed a playground. Roscoe began chirping wordlessly, and then he managed to say, “Sally in Sonoma Valley.” Not only does Roscoe have the ears of a parrot he has the eyes of an eagle.

Sally sat, her feet on the ground, atop a red plastic swing. I couldn’t tell when I first spotted her if her eyes were open or closed. Although static, it didn’t seem like she was dead—she sat erect with each of her hands gripping the chain of the swing. I lifted Roscoe from my shoulder and held him close to my chest as I sprinted the fifty yards to the playground. Something kept me from calling her name, perhaps the fear that there were other creatures lurking about.

Sally lifted her head. “Hey Dad, you found me. I just needed to sit for a minute.”

The ride out to Sebastopol was quiet. Sally seemed to be residing in a place between sleeping and waking, and though I was overwhelmed with emotion when I first spotted her on the swing, I had no desire to engage with her in her semi-somnolent state.

By the time we arrived at the treatment center, Sally had perked up. She delighted Roscoe, who’d remain in the back seat of the car, with a long goodbye. “I will be back in a month,” she said, “and you and I are going to do some great things together, Roscoe.”

Sally saved some of her charm for the intake counselor Cindy, telling her how grateful she was to get a chance for a fresh start at such a lovely place. I figured that given Cindy’s experience—I judged her to be in her mid-forties—that she could read Sally’s bullshit even better than me.

We were given a breakdown of meetings and activities during the course of a day. “There’s very little idle time,” said Cindy, and yet as we were given a tour of the grounds, we saw a number of the other clients or campers at their leisure. This was break time, after lunch, we were told. Some young men played basketball; I noticed a number of young women walking together in twos and threes. For a moment, I thought of the other parents, like me, not knowing whom to blame for our child’s fractured life, except ourselves. The kids—I couldn’t help myself for thinking of them as such, even though some were pushing thirty or more like Sally—seemed like a privileged, suburban lot, which made sense given the cost of a month’s stay.

Sally offered me a kiss on the cheek and told me how grateful she was that I set this up for her. I chose to take her words at face value. As I walked back to the car, she called to me, “You’ll come on family day, won’t you, Dad?”

The fog had lifted and I stood in a shaft of sunlight beside the car, as a cloud of wistfulness crept over me. Not only was I worried about Sally, but I also feared that the dark business about the murder was sending Pina beyond the pale.

If I were a guy in a movie I’d have pulled out a cigarette, and I practically craved one, despite having never smoked. I couldn’t decide whether it was laughable or worrisome to view myself as an objectified creature for which any middling actor could stand in.

I debated driving further west, back to Armstrong Redwoods in Guerneville, which I visited with Augie Boyer not long ago. I wondered what Roscoe would make of the giant sequoias. He regarded me with some concern from the back seat, or was I imagining that? When you suspect your parrot of worrying about you, you may be in trouble.

The sun disappeared behind the trees, but I still hovered in this purgatorial state beside the car until my phone rang. It was Augie Boyer. He announced a break in the case and asked if I could meet him in an hour at Barking Dog Coffee Roasters in Boyes Hot Springs. It would take me nearly that long to get back that way.

When I asked if it was good news, the detective sighed. “Jesus remains dead.” After a bit more chatter, Augie Boyer uttered a sentence that amused me: “In the likely event that you have more sway over your woman than I have over mine, would you ask her to meet with us.”

I repeated that phrase in my head several times, on the ride back toward Sonoma, afraid that if I said it aloud Roscoe would make it part of his repertoire. I decided not to leave Roscoe in the car this time. I had told him that we were going to meet Detective Boyer at a coffee shop, and we practiced a haiku I’d written for Augie Boyer. When that was done, Roscoe asked if the coffee shop served rum. I was sorry to tell him no and made a note to take a flask of rum with me whenever I brought Roscoe on an outing.

I noticed Augie Boyer slumped over an outside table at Barking Dog with a tall thermos of coffee. Hatless, his spiked red hair looked like it had been recently waxed. When he spotted us coming he sat up straight. Apparently his wife had given him another makeover: he was wearing a white Scottish-style ghillie shirt, laced together with a leather braid, atop a plaid kilt and a pair of Birkenstocks.

“Roscoe, my man,” he said, “how’s tricks?”

The bird didn’t miss a beat: “Good to see you again, Detective. How’s the coffee?”

Augie Boyer glanced back and forth between Roscoe and me. “Sometime you’ll have to explain how you do that, Charlie.”

I thought to demonstrate that Roscoe spoke for himself but I recalled Sally’s admonition that the bird has less value as an actual speaker than as an illusionary trickster whose strings I pull. And yet I’ve been miffed by people refusing to see what’s right in front of them, and here was a man, who made his living by detecting, turning a blind eye on my gifted parrot’s reality.

Augie Boyer preferred playing games with Roscoe, winking at him now, and delighting when the bird winked back at him. I reminded myself of the reason the detective called for this meeting and decided to stall until Pina arrived.

“But you didn’t answer, Roscoe,” I said. “How’s the coffee?”

“Yeah, how’s the coffee?” the parrot asked, his voice overlapping with mine.

The detective shook his head. He didn’t want to believe what he was witnessing, and shivered a minute. I thought that might have something to do with wearing a kilt on a cool day.

“The coffee is how I like it,” he said. “Nice strong French roast. In regards to coffee, Quince says I’m a philistine, a word I taught her, by the way, which she uses against me extensively. She says I’ve killed my taste by drinking only dark roast. Give me a break, woman, I’m finally getting used to the almond milk.”

“Don’t you have a haiku for Mr. Boyer, Roscoe?”

“Yes, indeed, Charlie.”

This was becoming too much for Augie Boyer. He put on a pair of Ray-Ban Aviators.

Roscoe chirped a couple of times and then recited:

The old detective

Is beginning to see things

that aren’t even there.

I was delighted by the little poem’s aptness. Augie Boyer looked confused; he turned his head from the parrot to me, and back again to Roscoe.

Pina pulled up about then and, spotting us at our table, gave a little honk. I left the parrot perched on the back of my chair as I went to greet Pina and order coffee. I imagined Augie Boyer being so shaken by a one-on-one conversation with Roscoe that he’d start eating meat again.

Returning with our coffees, I heard Roscoe say, “I love rum. Charlie told me my ancestors drank it.”

When we got to the table, Detective Boyer was looking a little pale, but Roscoe perked up when he saw Pina. “Pina, Pina, Pina, where you beena?”

She greeted him with a smile. “How’s my favorite bird?”

“Tip top,” Roscoe said, his head bobbing a few times.

Pina said hello to Detective Boyer. I could see that she noted the detective’s get-up and did what she could to suppress a laugh. Otherwise, she wasted no time. “So there’s been a break in the case.”

Augie Boyer nodded. He still looked shaken from his tête à tête with Roscoe.

“I have . . . I have good news and bad news—which do you want first?”

Pina and I answered at the same time. Predictably, I said good while Pina opted for the bad. Roscoe chimed in, siding with me. I could tell Pina was thinking, the fucking bird gets a vote?

“Alright,” said Augie Boyer, “here’s the good news, at least I hope it’s good news for you.”

Pina and I exchanged glances. If the good news is of dubious value, I thought, the bad news must be rotten.

The detective took a sip from his thermos and faced Pina. “I had a chance to meet with your client Aubrey.”

“How did you manage that?” Pina asked.

“I posed as one of your colleagues. I told him that you recommended I call because of the method I’d developed for stutterers. We met at Dolores Park in the city, each sitting in our own chalk circle. That man is not a murderer, I can tell you that. Before recent developments, he seemed a likely candidate, but I was barking up the wrong tree. I came up with the daft theory that a waiter shamed a stutterer, who followed the waiter back to his house and murdered him.”

“It sounded reasonable to me,” I said.

“Thank you, Charlie. Anyway, the meeting with Aubrey gave me the chance to definitively rule him out.”

Pina, sitting with her chin cupped in her hands, said, “Just curious, what’s your method for stutterers?”

“I thought you’d never ask. It’s the haiku—three simple lines to make it through. Focus on one line at a time. I told Aubrey that his haikus should reference a season and some aspect of nature.”

“You got him writing haikus?” Pina asked.

“Of course, he’s a natural. I also reminded Aubrey that he, too, is a part of nature. The upshot of this is that I think I’ve stolen your client, Pina. Aubrey‘s going to do some haiku work with me. It may be just as well. The poor bloke has some serious puppy love for you. I don’t think he’d do any harm, but just the same.”

Roscoe perked up with all the talk of haiku. “I have another poem for you, Detective:

This midwinter day,

the parrot, unable to sing,

has other virtues”

It was me, this time, who recited the haiku, in my thrown parrot voice. Augie Boyer could no longer tell what was what. I winked at him just before he went into a coughing spasm.

When he’d recovered, after turning away and blowing his nose floridly in a red handkerchief, Pina said, “And the bad news.”

The detective nodded his head gravely. “The bad news is spelled V I N C E.”

I wondered if the detective thought that spelling out the name would preclude any commentary from Roscoe.

“Vince is the killer?” Pina shouted.

“No, perhaps an unwitting accomplice. I followed him for a couple of nights to the spot in Agua Caliente where he made his connection. On the second night I got out of my car, dressed all in black, with a mask that completely covered my face, and a black Stetson that I tucked my hair under. I came on strong with my Wolfman Jack accent, a brogue I perfected in high school, and posed as a member of the syndicate. Vince did not recognize me. As the saying goes, desperation spills the beans. I asked him about the killing of Jesus and he played dumb for a while. I stood out there in the cold night for quite some time. His supplier must have spotted us and decided I was the fuzz.

With a bit of prompting, your old boyfriend said that he was forced to give your name, under pressure. They asked for his girlfriend’s name and he said, ‘She’s my ex.’ They didn’t give a damn; they wanted your name and they wanted him to write it five times on the back of a check at The Girl and the Fig.”

“Why?” Pina asked.

“Who knows? To set the investigators on a bogus trail, to have Vince implicated in the crime.” Augie Boyer turned to face me directly. “This is where the bad news gets worse, I’m afraid. Your daughter Sally became dope buddies with Vince.”

I heard the words but could not assemble them properly. Meanwhile Roscoe chirped: “Sally in Sonoma Valley.”

Augie Boyer forged ahead. “And he pressured her, when she was in desperate straits, into signing Pina’s name multiple times on the back of the check.”

“And why was Jesus murdered?” Pina asked.

“Poor guy was trying to leave the business behind, but he had debts. When the new syndicate moved in, they came collecting old debts. These are not the kind of guys who give you a mulligan. They wanted to set an example with Jesus. Now the FBI is all over the case.”

“The FBI?” Pina asked.

The detective nodded and twirled a spike of red hair around his index finger. “Yeah, two of the members from the Stockton family happened to break into the U.S. capitol on January 6. They’re about to be indicted with other Oath Keepers on conspiracy charges. The Feds tracked them to Santa Rosa through the walkie- talkie channel they were using: Stop the steal J6.” Detective Boyer guffawed at that.

“How does that affect the case?” I asked.

Augie Boyer slumped back in his seat. “They want everything they can find on these white supremacist conspirators. The murder of a Latino guy named Jesus is not going to hurt their cause. So there’s the good news and the bad, boys and girls. I’ve let the sheriff know what I found out. They may bring Sally in to talk, but I don’t think they’ll be much interested in her.”

“And Vince?” Pina asked.

I could tell that she had a lingering sympathy for her old boyfriend.

“Vince?” the detective said, “That’s anybody’s guess. As a former emergency room doctor, they may key in in on his knife skills. Did he do the deed to pay off debts or insure his supply line? I think they’ll probably put the squeeze on Vince to help them make a murder case against the syndicate. Vince looks to me like a man who will be scratching his itch for the duration. As they say, he who lies down with dogs shall rise up with fleas.” Augie Boyer whistled three or four notes tunelessly, and stood up. “At this point, my work is done.”

Now we got to enjoy Detective Boyer fully in his kilted splendor. He bowed to each of us, including Roscoe, and said that he had a date in Santa Rosa to look at some used bagpipes. “The things I’ll do for my bride.” He left us with a final haiku:

The man in the kilt

likely appears as foolish

as a man in love.

 

I see Vince’s BMW parked on the sidewalk out front and decide to pay a visit. Once I climb the stairs to his condo, it’s clear that he’s there; I hear his cough underneath a frantic smear of guitar jazz, broadcast at high volume from his Bose system. The music, if it can be called that, seems like a fresh take on that old public service announcement: “This is your brain on drugs.” The man’s raspy cough suggests that he has COVID.

I push Vince’s doorbell three times, pause, and then hit it again—our old code for each other—but he doesn’t answer. Along with the guitar jazz and Vince’s cough, the incessant crowing of the two roosters, across the street at The Patch, add a shrill counterpart. I always thought that roosters were designed to squawk at an impossibly early time in the A.M. and then be done for the rest of the day, but these guys never quit. What an instinct to have bred into you, and consider a rooster’s anatomy—the power packs in their voice boxes, and their cast iron throats. Do their relentless cries indicate the degree of their horniness? Imagine the level of cacophony if every time a man ogled a girl or a woman he was forced to crow like a rooster.

I pounce on the bell again and finally Vince shouts: “What the fuck? Is the sky falling?”

He pulls open the door, unmasked. The left half of his face is spread with lather, the right shaved clean. Vince affects a sidewise posture at the door, his shaved side aimed forward, as if he could bluff me into not seeing the Foamy side. The way he’s standing, he looks a little like a one-eyed-jack without any of the regal trappings. Actually, he’s barefoot—his toenails, thick and jagged as the blade of a serrated knife—in boxer shorts and a wife-beater tee with a long drool of coffee stain, just south of his throat. He lifts a hand towel that had been draped over his right shoulder and wipes off the lather. The result: a perfectly split personality—Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Even his mustache is divided between a five-day bush and the faintest suggestion of its twin.

I stand well back from the door. He looks me up and down and I listen to the cries of the roosters.

“You going out on a date, Vince?”

He grins at me. “No, my date’s come here.”

“Fat chance.” I can see track marks on his arms. At least that’s what I think they are. “I want to talk.”

“Talk’s cheap, Pina.”

“Well, that’s all you’re getting from me. Get your ass dressed, put on a mask, and come out here.”

“A little demanding today, are we?” he says, and turns away to produce his three-note, sandpaper cough. “Give me five minutes.”

“Don’t tell me you have COVID now.”

“I don’t know.”

That’s as close to an affirmative as I’m going to get from Vince. I’m struck by a moment of sorrow for the man. Although I never was in love with him, we shared seven years of our lives. At his best Vince was a boon companion who looked after me, from time to time, with a measure of consideration. Such partners go whichever way the wind blows, and this grief, if it can be called that, concerns my spurious hope that he and I shared more than a string of good times. There is also the simple human shock in noting the extent of his disintegration. This longtime doctor with a swagger has cashed it all in for a season of oblivion.

Vince has a teak bench outside on which he never sits; he’s cluttered it with neglected succulents in chipped crocks. I looked after them when I stayed here, but I doubt they’ve been watered in months. Somehow they go on living, which make them the perfect companions for an addict.

I push a few pots aside to make a place to sit. I’m puzzled with myself for not recognizing the depth of Vince’s addiction earlier. Was it willful ignorance on my part? For years I wrote off his flirtations with doom as a doctor’s experiments with enhancements. It all seemed part of a game he was playing because, as far as I knew, it only involved prescription medications. Of course, at the time, I kept myself stewed into the deep night, on alcohol and weed. We engaged in a form of parallel play, and I was lonelier than I’d ever been. Vince, who betrayed me any number of times, didn’t offer the ideal refuge for a youngish widow.

His five minutes turn into ten and, after I hit his doorbell again, I squirt my hands with disinfectant, as if that’s going to keep the fucker’s COVID at bay. I back away from the door and step halfway down the stairs.

The jazz guitar assault ends and Vince appears in the doorway, masked and still barefoot, in dirty jeans and a Mexican football jersey that reads: Caliente.

“Put on some shoes, Vince, we’re going to talk on the street.”

He turns obediently on his heels, without a word, and comes back a moment later in a pair of ancient huaraches. I lead him down the stairs, his persistent cough reminding me to take two steps to his one. I assign Vince a spot on the stone wall across the street from the complex, and I park myself on the wall fifteen feet north. The wall, extending behind a row of Osage trees in their bare winter glory, is high enough that I am able to dangle my legs. It’s an evocative sensation, and for a moment I feel girlish and almost forget why I am sitting here.

Vince clears his throat and spits to his left; thankfully I’m sitting to his right. “So what’s with the wild hair up your ass, Pina?”

“Would you like me to cut to the chase?”

“By all means.”

“Alright, tell me about your relationship with Jesus.”

Vince pulls down his mask and absently scratches the side of his nose, before blowing it into a soiled handkerchief. “You know I’m not a religious person, Pina.” He makes a show of fixing his mask back in place.

“Fuck off, Vince, and tell me about your connection to the dead waiter. Was he your dealer in Sonoma?”

“Who says I had a dealer?”

My heels kick against the wall. “Take a look at yourself, man. You’re as fucked up as the day Charlie and I peeled you off the sidewalk in the Tenderloin.”

“Hey, I’m having a minor setback.”

“Whatever you say, Vince.” The ability to delude ourselves may be more distinctive to humans than opposable thumbs, and addicts have a special advantage in this regard. “Tell me about Jesus,” I demand.

Vince nods several times as if he’s considering a new ploy. “Thing with Jesus,” he says, and breaks off coughing. After spitting again, he continues: “Thing about Jesus, according to what I’ve heard, is he stopped dealing drugs. The problem with that is that it doesn’t get you out of debtor’s prison.”

“Did he help with your connection?”

“Help is a dubious word in this context, Pina.”

“Let’s not fuck with semantics here, Vinnie. So you used to have your lunch over at The Girl and the Fig and Jesus would wait on you.”

“Sometimes. You know, The Girl was never my favorite. Did you hear the restaurant just closed down? They were afraid of protests once it came out that they forced a waitress to change her Black Lives Matter facemask, or some such bullshit.”

“That’s beside the point.”

“Anyway, I prefer the Swiss Hotel . . .”

“I don’t give a fuck what you prefer. Tell me about your relationship to Jesus.”

“Nothing to tell.” Vince pulls a crumpled pack of Marlboro Reds from his jeans pocket and shakes out a bent cigarette. When he flicks his Bic, the flame shoots so high it catches not only the cigarette but also of one of his fingertips. He doesn’t seem to notice. As soon as he inhales he begins coughing again. Now he shakes the hand with the singed digit.

“You keep on, you’re going to burn yourself up, Vince. You think smoking is a good idea with your croup?”

“Who are you,” he manages between hacks, “Pina the healer?”

“You were telling me about your thing with Jesus.” I find myself dangling my legs again and quickly stop.

Vince shrugs. “What thing? I was telling you exactly nothing. Jesus brought me my Hendricks martini, my chicken liver pâté and, if I had an actual appetite: a burger with Gorgonzola melt. Nothing special.” Vince flicks his lit cigarette stub into the street.

“Okay, who was the connection he set you up with?”

“Why are you giving me all this grief, Pina? I’m not feeling so well.”

“Who was it?”

“Look, it wasn’t exactly somebody attached to a name, and the somebody changes faster than you can keep up with.”

I have no idea where I’m going with these questions but sense that Vince knows more than he’s letting on. “So where did you meet these somebodies?”

“Fuck, Pina. Enough.”

“Where?” I’m surprised he just doesn’t get up and leave. There’s nothing compelling him to stay, but he seems to have lost his will. “Where did you meet them?”

Vince faces me blankly, his eyes dim. “You know that bodega in Agua Caliente where they grill chickens every weekend. Right down the street from there. A guy comes out of the shadows as soon as you walk down the street.”

That might be useful information, but not for me. I need to strike another vein. “Tell me about Sally.”

“Who’s Sally?”

“Don’t go dumb on me, Vince. It doesn’t become you.”

Again, Vince lifts his mask and scratches the side of his nose. “Oh you mean, Charlie’s daughter?”

“When did you last see her?” It’s a decent gambit, like asking, when did you last beat your wife?”

He gazes at me, with a little more light in his eyes, to try and find out what I know. This tells me that my shot in the dark hit pay dirt. “When did you last see her?”

“I don’t know. It was a while back.”

I’m dangling my legs again. Who gives a fuck? I’m on a roll. “How often does she come by?”

“Who says she comes by?” Vince shakes out another cigarette.

I decide to stay quiet, to wait Vince out. The flame of his Bic shoots high again and, again, singes one of his fingers. “Okay,” he says, after exhaling, ”she comes by when she needs something.”

“And you give it to her.”

Vince’s eyebrows rise and he blows out a trio of smoke rings. “For a price.”

I’m disgusted, but don’t want to show it. I stop myself from picturing him manhandling a desperate young woman, less than half his age. Whatever burst of sympathy I had for Vince a while earlier is fully dissipated. “Okay, which one of you wrote my name multiple times on the back of a restaurant check?”

He looks aside. “I know nothing about that.”

“And the carving on Jesus’ back?”

“You know me, Pina, I can’t stand the sight of blood.”

“You fucking quack.” If I weren’t obliged to keep my distance from the prick, I’d waltz over and kick him in the nuts.

The house is empty except for the five long stemmed tulips that Charlie arranged in my favorite glass vase when I was out yesterday. He brings flowers from time to time and I always think that it is the kindest thing. I never remember to pick up flowers. Charlie doesn’t make a big thing out of it; he arranges them as soon as he comes in the door and puts them on the dining room table. Suddenly our haphazard lives are civilized. I stand a moment now in front of the tulips—our first of the early California spring. These creamy white spirits, angling east and west, north and south, on their live stems, framed by a brightness of green leaves, suggest odd concepts like purity and virginity, concepts that have grown defunct in my middle age, in the midst of a pandemic.

The last couple of days Charlie and I have been like ships passing in the night. I don’t know what to do with myself. It’s a feeling I had when I first moved to Sonoma, nearly a year ago, after the pandemic first surfaced. I’m so lost I even go in to say hello to Roscoe, but he’s not there. Charlie’s been taking him out lately on walks. I have no idea what his plan is. Maybe he’s getting the parrot ready to release into the wild. Wishful thinking.

My options are limited; I haven’t had the attention span to read a book. Since I first heard about the killing of Jesus and the way my name got mixed up in it, I’ve done my best to sidestep a slurpy quicksand of shame. It comes with a degenerating sound loop: I’m not responsible for this. It just happens to be my name. I haven’t done anything wrong. Or have I? Haven’t I done everything wrong? Isn’t this my karma? Isn’t this what I deserve?

I am determined to alter my circumstances: I pick up the Irish novel I’ve been trying to read for the last two months—The Story of Lucy Gault, by William Trevor—and lay back on the bed. The object of reading is to get inside somebody else’s head, to be diverted by somebody else’s story. So far, Lucy, a girl of indeterminate age, hides from her parents when they are about to move from Ireland to England. She packs a bag of sugar sandwiches. While I wonder if I’ve ever had a sugar sandwich, the book slips from my hands.

In the dream I was clearly too old to be climbing a tree, especially without clothes on. It appears that I was running from something, some person or force, perhaps a charging St. Bernard or a natural disaster. I sat in the crotch of two branches trying to figure out who or what was chasing me but, first, I needed to determine who I was, if not myself. I found it to be a tricky question. There was nobody to consult. I feared that I could be anybody, maybe even an historic figure, perhaps a mythological character, frozen in time. I pronounced the term womanchild aloud, and then said, womanchild naked up a tree. My voice sounded sprightly and rigid at once, like a song played on school bells of varying pitches.

It seemed odd that a naked middle-aged girl, who’d climbed a tree because something was chasing her, would be more in her head than in her body, but that seemed to be the case. The body was made of sticks and stones, while the mind comprised a supple amalgam of fluid and glands. Although this womanchild didn’t feel fevered, she had a thermometer in her mouth. At first it tasted of glass, if glass has a taste, but then the tongue, long and swollen, picked up a tinge of berry.

What we see affects how we taste. A couple of branches away a cedar waxwing nibbled on berries. If the bird saw me, or this persona, he didn’t care. The womanchild in the tree was glad to be invisible, but then she thought: maybe I’m not here at all. Not only did the bird eat berries, he shat them, dropping little purple bombs. I, if it was truly I, decided it be great to trade places with him. Do nothing but eat berries, shit purple grenades, sing songs more tuneful than school bells, and fly off whenever the spirit moved me. A phone on another branch rang. Somebody must have seen a womanchild, scamper naked up a tree, and reported it to the police.

It’s Charlie on the other branch. “Can you come down to Barking Dog in Boyes Hot Springs?” he says.

I want to tell him about being up a tree, but think better of it. “The Barking Dog?” I ask.

“Yes, the coffee shop. Right now. There’s been a break in the case.”

I put on my shoes and, while I pee, take my temperature. Normal, I say, in a voice no longer made of school bells, although I feel anything but normal.

 

 

Aubrey smelled a rat when Pina called him. She and I have a difference of opinion about that. Aubrey told her that she’d hurt his feelings when she walked away from him in Sonoma. “Why,” he asked, “would he meet her again and subject himself to more humiliation?” Or so Pina related, without filling in the stuttering, thus giving Aubrey vocal fluency he’s never had.

“He’s on to you, Pina,” I said. “It made no sense to him that you’d suddenly want to meet after you brushed him off.”

Pina stood with her hands on her hips and shot me a withering look, as if I was both foolish and pitiable. Her posture reminded me of the way Sally used to stand when she was outraged at me at me as a teenager. It was all I could do to take her seriously. With her hands on her hips and elbows pointed out she reminded me of her five-year-old self, singing “I’m and a little teapot” with her kindergarten class. As a sixteen-year-old adopting a similar posture, she’d shout, “You don’t get it, Dad; you just don’t get it.” Of course, she was right. My not getting it was so profound that I often didn’t have a clue of what the it referred to.

The situation with Pina was different—I knew exactly what I was getting that she wasn’t.

Pina made her case. She said that she told Aubrey that the reason she called was that she felt bad that she’d been dismissive. The fact is, she said, she’d been distracted that day. There’d been a death in the family. She made up a story about a stepfather she’d never had whom she’d been closer to than her actual father. Aubrey told her that he was sorry for her loss, but that he’d still rather not meet at this time.

“See, he was onto you,” I said.

“Zzz zzz,” Pina hissed through her teeth, a dismissive exclamation that I imagined her Italian immigrant mother modeled for her. “Like you know what you’re talking about,” she said dismissively, reminding me again of my daughter. “You’ve never even met the man.”

“So now you think that Aubrey, who Augie Boyer thinks may be a cold-blooded killer, had nothing to do with the murder?”

“Fucking Augie Boyer. All he knows about Aubrey are the things I told him. Tell me this, Charlie, who hired Augie Boyer? Who the fuck hired him?”

It’s a question I’ve asked myself, but I must say my curiosity has gone a bit slack. “I don’t have a clue. Maybe The Girl and the Fig hired him to find out who killed their waiter. In the old days they could have paid him off with a couple of seasons of steak frites, but now that he’s become a svelte vegan, it’s hard to imagine.”

Pina shot me a sideways smile, a peace treaty of sorts.

“So what are your thoughts about Aubrey now?” I asked.

“I don’t know what I think.”

“Trust your instincts, Pina.”

That’s when she flipped me off and the conversation ended.

Augie Boyer called me this morning and asked if I could meet him out in Guerneville, claiming his car was in the shop. I tried to find out what was up, but the detective said he didn’t want to discuss it over the phone. When I asked if he wanted Pina to come along he told me that I’d be sufficient. Maybe Pina put a scare into him by flashing him the bird. Suddenly she’s terrifying the world with her middle finger. It’s amusing that the professor of speech is now relying on sign language.

Pina left the house without letting me know where she was going. I heard her car start up and drive off quickly and tried to decide whether she was racing away or toward something. Her foot is always heavy on the gas pedal, but times like this leave everything open for interpretation.

I walked in to say hello to Roscoe.

“Charlie, you’re becoming a stranger again,” he said in his singsong parrot voice, “ I can see you’re worried about Pina.”

“How can you see that?” I asked.

“Charlie, do you think the only sense I have is hearing?”

“Don’t answer a question with a question, Roscoe?”

“Why?”

I wondered what to do with Roscoe—teach him a poem as Augie Boyer suggested or a political command as my daughter Sally demanded. Oh, Sally, what’s become of her? We haven’t spoken in two weeks. I tried to remember what I learned from Al-Anon: is it my job to be in touch with her or vice versa? Is no news good news or bad?

Roscoe chirped: “What’s it going to be, Charlie?”

I considered the equation again. Poetry is always a good idea, but I surprised myself by saying: “Let’s talk about the filibuster, Roscoe, it’s racist history and other reasons that it should be abolished.”

Augie Boyer and I agreed to meet at noon in the front parking lot of Armstrong Redwoods State Preserve. “Bring lunch with you, Charlie,” he said. “I’ll be chowing down with carrot sticks and humus.”

I enjoyed the long ride from Sonoma. The fog had just begun to rise in town, but driving west through Santa Rosa and Sebastopol I was right back in the thick of it. I still was able to catch a glimpse of the Russian River here and there as the road became curvy after Forestville. I’ve always thought of the west county of Sonoma as a magic kingdom with its natural beauty and hearty population of dopers and anti-capitalists.

There were only a few cars parked in the front lot when I arrived at Armstrong Reserve, and no sign of Augie Boyer. I wondered how he’d get to this remote spot with his car in the shop. I imagined him setting off on a long hike from his house with his polished walking stick. I planted myself at a picnic table. The redwoods were deeply draped in a misty fog. You could see up only a small fraction of their height. Even on a clear day at Armstrong, where the senior redwood is reckoned to be 1,200 years old, you can’t see to the top of the 300-foot trees. Sometimes they make me think of “Jack and the Beanstalk,” one of the most beguiling stories of my childhood. Were there giants who lived above the redwoods?

Along came Augie Boyer in red racing tights on a teal-colored electric bike, with the letters TREK plastered on the wide hunk of frame that must encase the motor. Instead of a helmet the detective wore the Sherlock Holmes hat that he described as beyond the pale, the other day in Sonoma. A few waxed spikes of his red hair shot out from under the hat.

All was not lost, Augie Boyer had returned to a haiku facemask, this one reading:

The man on the moon

isn’t pedaling his bike,

and either am I.

“You’re wondering why I’m wearing this hat, when I disavowed it the other day,” he said, as soon as he’d hopped off the bike. “It’s not a tribute to Sherlock, but to that great San Francisco P. I. Jack Palladino, who died yesterday.” Augie Boyer bowed his head.

I’d read about Palladino in the Chronicle. He was a legendary detective who worked for both Bill Clinton and Harvey Weinstein to defame their female accusers. Not exactly savory work. I hadn’t heard about the man before his murder.

Augie Boyer looked up at me with tears in his eyes. “Jack carried a camera, but not a gun. They say he was out photographing on the street before his ultimate killers were aware of him. His photos are the evidence that will convict them. My theory is that he knew he was going to be murdered that day—that it was an unavoidable reality that he wanted to document.”

Before the detective joined me at the picnic table, he pulled a vintage Snoopy lunchbox from the basket bungee-corded to the rear of his bike. We sat kitty-corner from each other at the picnic table.

He opened his lunchbox and pulled out a baggie of carrot sticks. “I bought this at the flea market in Monte Rio not long ago,” he explained. “Guy wanted twenty-five bucks for it, which seemed a little high for west county. I opened up the box and it was filled with fishing lures. This dude, an old time hippie in overalls with a bandana wrapped around his head and an ugly throat beard, says, ‘I’ll throw in the lures for another fifty dollars.’ I tell him I don’t fish and he says, ‘Great opportunity to start, and if you don’t get so inspired then realize that you’re taking home some genuine objects of art,’ which he pronounced in a faux French accent as objets d’art. I could tell he was just another of these over educated west county guys who calls himself a writer and hasn’t worked a day in his life. ‘And consider the metaphoric value of hanging lures around the room where you meditate,’ he says. ‘Things will come to you. You’ll end up snagging all sorts of good fortune. Just like a vacuum is made to be filled, a suspended lure dazzles the spirits until it ends up capturing the unfathomable.’ That’s the kind of woo woo talk you get out in west county, Charlie. Dude won’t let me purchase the lunchbox alone. ‘All or nothing,’ he says. Do I walk away like any sensible man would? No, I buy the whole shooting match, hang the damn lures from the ceiling around my office—no small task—and am still waiting for my metaphoric fortune to materialize. My wife Quince says, ‘what are you trying to catch with those lures, Augie, flies?’”

The detective didn’t seem like he was in much of a hurry. That was fine with me. I decided to treat this day as vacation. After lunch I’d take one of the trails through the redwoods. I was no longer worried about why Augie Boyer summoned me out there. He held a carrot stick in the air as if he was considering its potential properties as a lure.

“So what do you have for me, Charlie?“ he asked, finally.

I explained with regret that Pina was unable to set up an appointment with Aubrey.

That’s a shame,” the detective said, “I’ll have to get creative—just when I thought I had no more tricks left in the bag. Between you and me, Charlie, I’m ready to wind it down and retire from this game. The time I met Pina in the cemetery in Sonoma I thought, you should start shopping for a grave, old boy. Now I’m forced to persist. I trust you’re hip to the William Carols Williams lines, Charlie:

‘I’m persistent as the pink locust,

once admitted

to the garden,

you will not easily get rid of it.

Tear it from the ground,

 if one hair-thin rootlet

remain

 it will come again.’”

“’It is flattering to think of myself so.’ I continued.

“It is also laughable.’”

“Good man, Charlie, you know the poem.”

“Absolutely. I’m also fond of the phrase from Hexagram 34 of the I Ching: Perseverance furthers.”

“Indubitably,” the detective agreed and raised me one, “You know what Hannibal said—‘We will either find a way or make one.’”

I countered with Confucius: “The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.”

After Augie Boyer and I finished impressing each other with relevant quotes, he started dipping his carrot sticks in humus and I crunched into a sardine sandwich, having forgotten that my companion was a vegan.

The detective’s eyes narrowed and he assumed a mournful expression. “I used to love sardines.”

After we finished our lunch I asked the question Pina would have wanted me to pose: “May I inquire who you’re working for, Augie.”

“The Sheriff’s Department,” he said, without skipping a beat. “I’m a little more nimble than they can be. I have more gray area in regard to the law than they do.”

He went on to reveal something he’d discovered via the sheriff’s department. The Reddick Syndicate, a crime family based in Stockton, are possible suspects in the murder of Jesus.

“They have strong ties to the Oath Keepers,” the detective said.

“The militia group?” I asked.

“Yeah, those virulent jokers that had a hand in the capitol insurrection. They think they’re patriots,”

“Oh, God, those fucking people intent on destroying the world that is not in their own likeness.”

“That’s right. The street drug trade,” Augie Boyer said, “is providing cash for weapons and the next insurgency. These bums have moved into Santa Rosa; Sonoma Valley is their next stop. One of the syndicate’s goals is to vanquish the local Latino dope trade. They want a pure white business model, from Stockton to the coast, for their dirty heroin and fentanyl. Their motto is: Beaners will not replace us.”

“Can’t see Aubrey fitting in with them,” I said.

“He might have been used. The same may be said of Vince. They’re both still suspects.”

I waited for him to mention my daughter, but thankfully her name didn’t come up. “And the link to Pina?” I asked.

Augie Boyer lifted off his Sherlock hat. I half expected a dove to fly out. “The business with Pina’s name is what has my hair standing on end,” he said.

I gazed at the waxy red spikes of hair shooting off in all directions. The diffuse light through the redwoods burnished the red spikes. Jesus was dead and Augie Boyer wore his own crown of thorns.

 

A crazy thought dawns on me as I pull a chef’s knife out of the block to butterfly a pork loin and stuff it with figs. I’m not sure whether it is the knife or the figs that have triggered the daft notion. I take a deep breath and gaze at the Pyrex bowl of water in which the dry figs are hydrating, becoming plump again, as if reborn with a memory of themselves lolling from their stems in the copiousness of a summer tree.

The idea is so unsavory I decide not to entertain it as I prepare dinner. I pull out the rainbow chard and chop the stems separately from the leaves. Now what? I seem to be unable to keep the thought at bay. How could my client Aubrey possibly be a killer?

The other day when I ran into him outside The Girl and the Fig he was dressed up like somebody going to church, but it was a Saturday afternoon. He wore a facemask crafted from a peculiar fabric, a print that featured model airplanes. I stood there on the street wondering if Aubrey made models when he was a kid, and then I mused about him as a child, a habitual stutterer plagued with shame.

As he looked at me, his eyes bright with excitement, I made the mistake of telling him that I liked his mask and he said he really liked mine. I don’t recall which mask I was wearing, but something felt creepy when he said that. He asked if I’d heard about the murder at the restaurant. I didn’t want to talk about that with him. Really I didn’t want to talk about anything, but the particular way he mentioned the killing made it sound like a bit of dark gossip. Thankfully, he said nothing about my name’s association with the victim’s body. As far as I know that is not public knowledge. My name did not appear in either the Sonoma Index-Tribune account of the killing or in the subsequent article in the S.F. Chronicle.

Aubrey got out of the takeout line and started to follow me, although I gave him no encouragement. In fact, I was walking away from him, up Spain, past a gaggle of folks waiting to gather their takeout pizza at Mary’s. I decided to turn south on First Street East rather than to continue on my way back to the condo. I didn’t want Aubrey to know where I lived in case he kept following me. He lagged a few steps behind me, but I didn’t know how to lose him. Being rude comes naturally to me, but somehow I didn’t want to act that way toward Aubrey. He has developed a certain skill at making people feel sorry for him, which I suppose I fell victim to.

I tried a practical approach at first, telling him that he’d lose his place in line and his food would be cold by the time he got it. That didn’t seem to concern him. He spoke with minimal stuttering about “the great co-co-coince-coincidence” of running into me. I had the odd feeling that he’d been working hard to create such a “coincidence.” He went on about the dishes he had ordered; how he always bought two meals at once and managed with his own side dishes to stretch them into four meals. On that day he’d ordered a pair of duck confit legs and fried chicken for two. It all warmed up well in the microwave. Why I remember these details I do not know. Aubrey thought it was worth the drive up from the city once a week to get four meals from The Girl and the Fig.

Now I extract the figs from their broth and dry them with a towel, add salted pistachio nuts to the fattened figs, and fill the cavity of the pork loin. In the past I’ve had bad luck with tying the loin. More often than not the stuffing seeps out. So this time I find a needle with a fat eye, thread it with kitchen twine, and sew the loin together. I stand back and admire the straight seam, pour the fig broth in a saucepan, hit it with a half dozen shakes of piment d’Espelette, and boil it down a moment before pouring it over the stuffed loin and roasting it—all this in a failed effort to forget Aubrey and his possible involvement with the killing.

Aubrey followed me down First Street East, past the Plaza Bistro, Basque Boulangerie, and Sebastiani Theater, chattering the whole way.

“More than a ma-month has gone by,” he said, “and they haven’t caught the murderer yet, Pa-Pina.”

I wondered how he knew this, but my curiosity wasn’t sufficiently piqued to inquire. It felt a bit like having a rabid dog on my tail and, when I got to Napa Street, I turned to face him, and spoke sharply, “I will see you later, Aubrey.” In case he didn’t understand, I repeated the phrase.

He seemed to get it. See you later, Pa-Pina. Ga-good to see you. Can we do a Zoom soon?”

I didn’t answer. Instead, I turned the corner and slipped into Readers’ Books, hoping Aubrey wouldn’t follow me. I spent half an hour browsing through the wall of fiction, looking over my shoulder, from time to time. As far as I know, Aubrey never entered the bookshop.

I browsed the small poetry section, wandered over to travel books—a strange fantasy realm given these times—and ended up in the cookbooks, gawking at glossy photos of soufflés and moussakas—bone fide food porn—before stumbling on a book by Jennifer McLagan called Blood. The title should have given me pause, but it didn’t. McLagan had been awarded a James Beard honor a few years ago for her book Fat. The Blood book is small, not a hundred pages, but with lovely line drawings; it has twenty-six recipes. I got swept away with the idea of making Blood Meringues, substituting blood for the eggs, despite the recipe’s caution that blood takes longer to whisk into shape. The recipe for pork, chicken liver, and blood terrine caught my eye, as well as the blood pancake mix, and the chocolate blood tarts. The book even featured blood cocktails. Fancy a bloody Ramos Fizz. I ended up buying the book and when the clerk asked if I wanted it wrapped, I nodded. Who will I give it to? Perhaps a Valentine’s Day gift for Charlie, should we live that long.

I walked out the back door of the shop into the alley with my wrapped package of Blood, and saw no sign of Aubrey. But the blood stayed with me, and my secret abortion at seventeen, which I’ve spent the last thirty-five years trying to forget, played on every channel of my brain. It wasn’t that I thought it was so terrible a thing to do, or that the idea of my unborn child now entering middle age, haunted me. The craziness of keeping it secret is what spooked me. I did tell the boy, Roger, and somehow he came up with the money I needed. It was my friend Leslie that accompanied me to the clinic. Leslie’s older sister Barbara had had an abortion so that somehow made Leslie an expert consort. She told me about her older sister getting blood from a butcher shop to drizzle onto her panties so that her mother wouldn’t know that she missed her period. “Your mother does your laundry doesn’t she?” Leslie asked. I knew she was right, and the fact that my mother bought the cheapest menstrual pads, which always leaked, couldn’t be overlooked. So a week before the procedure was scheduled I drove to a butcher in Novato, where nobody knew me, and asked for blood, claiming my father was going to make blood sausage. The butcher looked at me like I was half-crocked and said, “So you want pig blood?” I walked out of the shop with a pint of pig blood when all I needed was a half a teaspoon. The next problem was what to do with all the blood I didn’t use. A sensible girl would have poured it down the toilet and flushed a couple of times for good measure. I dug a hole behind the persimmon tree in the backyard, when nobody was home and buried the blood there. Even as a daft teenager, the symbolism of the burial wasn’t lost on me. Years later, when I came home to visit my parents, I’d always go out behind the persimmon tree and stand for a moment.

Wouldn’t you know it? I’ve forgotten to pre-heat the oven. That’s how distracted I’ve become by my thinking about Aubrey and the pint of blood.

As the oven begins to warm, I wash the Swiss chard and peel potatoes, which I then cut into wedges. Now I pour myself a stiff glass of Glenlivet and drop a single ice cube into the tumbler. The sound of distant footsteps draws me to the kitchen window. I look out onto the courtyard as a young woman knocks on the door of the lower condo across the yard. It’s Rico’s place. He has a lot of young women visit him, even in these times. The door opens and the woman disappears inside. Maybe it’s Rico’s sister, I tell myself. That’s what I think every time. The man has a lot of sisters. I feel like a besotted concierge watching the street, even though I’ve barely touched my drink. It’s time to sit down and seriously address what’s in the glass.

Suddenly I remember my intake meeting with Aubrey at our Bush Street office. I asked about his history of stuttering and what kind of treatment he’d had. He spoke about his elementary school speech class and, as he did, his stuttering got worse. How bad must PTSD be for adults who grew up being humiliated for stuttering? In our first meeting Aubrey talked about some of the bullies who had made fun of him. He still could not pronounce the word bully without making a mess of it. I praised him for his perseverance. Praise, even as a strained alternative to shame, is the only antidote I know for easing the burden these longtime stutterers carry.

Aubrey seemed to calm down. He took off his sport coat and I remember being surprised that his white shirt was short sleeve and had deep yellow perspiration stains under the arms. The sight of his mighty biceps was even more startling. He noticed me looking at them and said, “I’ve been lift . . . lifting weights for years. I all-also have a ba-black belt in karate. The next bull-ba-bully who makes fun of me is going to ga-get it.”

Charlie and I have been strangers in the last week. I’m not clear what’s been consuming him most: Roscoe, his daughter’s addiction, or the sorry business with the death of the waiter. My strategy at dinner is to not mention any of that. I’m not ready to communicate my speculation about Aubrey; what kind of definitive proof am I waiting for?

Charlie is tip-toing around me as much as I am around him. Somehow we’ve arrived at a tacit agreement of what not to discuss, which leaves us not much to say. We’ve already exhausted the weather: the forecast is for a week of rain, much needed. I drink down the Pinot Noir as quickly as he pours it. We are on our second bottle now and I’ve done most of the heavy lifting, that after I had a couple of hardy wallops of Scotch. Charlie waxes eloquently about the fig and pistachio stuffed pork loin, telling me that he can cook a decent meal but that only I can rise to the level of true chef. It’s a sweet lie and I thank him.

Then Charlie surprises me; he breaks our treaty by asking me to think again about all of my clients. Couldn’t there be one who’s obsessed with me? He has a half glass of Pinot in his hand that he’s clearly not going to drink. He uses the wine glass as a prop. Let’s see if he can get the glass to talk like his fucking parrot. He’s been mocking me all night; as l pollute myself, he’s doing his sober bit. It comes naturally to him, and he finds pleasure in watching Pina get smashed on Pinot. He wants to know about the stutterer I told him about, who can’t pronounce my name, the guy who is always a little too eager.

“What about him?” Charlie asks.

I give him a name. “Aubrey.”

“Yeah, that guy.”

My mouth has a bad taste, but it’s neither from the meal or the wine. I feel like spitting. “Will you do me a favor, Charlie? Either drink your fucking wine or put down the glass.”

Charlie looks at me sideways. It makes me think of a B movie trick with cinematography—tilting the camera to indicate a character is crazed or that we are now entering a new dimension. Charlie takes a long sip of his wine and puts down the glass.

“Thank you. Yes, I was stewing about Aubrey all afternoon. I don’t want to believe it’s him.”

“Of course you don’t.”

A half an hour after we’ve cleared up the dishes, we meet Detective Boyer on the street out front of the condo. He’s smoking pot out of a curved Meerschaum pipe baring the carved head of a pirate. Charlie and I keep our distance from him. My idea had been to contact the Sheriff’s Department, but Charlie argued that Augie Boyer was a friend of a friend and would be more help to us. I told Charlie that the detective seemed like a nutcase to me, but in the end I demurred.

“Nice touch, the pipe,” says Charlie, who really seems to enjoy Boyer and his bizarre get-up.

“Yeah, my wife is trying to turn me into Sherlock Holmes. She gave me the Sherlock hat as well, but I had to draw the line somewhere.”

Boyer’s wearing an eggplant colored baseball cap with the words: “Everyday I have the blues,” stitched in tidy white cursive script across the front. Something’s wrong about the cap. Nobody who actually has the blues advertises it with neat handwriting, and yet, I remind myself that whoever carved my name into the dead waiter’s back did it carefully.

Charlie kicks off the conversation, nice and easy, asking Boyer about the predominant type of cases he gets, given that he’s based in the small river town of Guerneville.

The detective pulls out a metal pipe-cleaning tool attached to a key chain. He goes at the bowl of the Meerschaum with a few sturdy jabs and dumps the contents onto the street. After dropping the pipe in a pocket of the canvas briefcase that hangs by a strap from his shoulder, he fits his facemask into place. He’s dispensed with haikus, at least for the time being, and wears a simple surgical mask.

“The thing is,” he says, “I have offices in San Francisco and Berkeley. Actually, I am the office and I’m always in, with a Berkeley phone number and one for the city. I carry three phones; it’s the price of doing business.”

“But you don’t get a lot of murders,” Charlie says.

“No, they’re even rarer than I like my steak. You know, I always wanted my work as a detective to be iconic, Charlie: solving terrible crimes by following clues nobody else finds, but the day to day is nothing like that. It’s a cliché, is what it is. I mostly follow guys their wives suspect of cheating. I get word of mouth referrals from women from three counties. Divorce attorneys give me simple assignments. Minimal video documentation suffices. Yep, infidelity is my bread and butter. My mother would have been ashamed of me. I can hear her from the grave, ‘You’re nothing but a Peeping Tom.’”

Charlie laughs. “But don’t you get male clients suspicious about their wives?”

“Rarely, Charlie, rarely. In my experience most men are too arrogant to suspect their wives of doing the dirty with somebody else. And when a man calls I usually send him to a female detective I know. Working with cuckolds is not good for my digestion—they remind me of myself.”

“Well,” Charlie says, “you have a violent case now.”

Boyer straightens the brim of his cap. “Yeah, so what do you guys have for me? You’ve been very quiet, Pina.”

“It’s only a hunch,” I say.

“Hunches are good.”

“A man I work with, a client—I think you know that I’m a speech pathologist.”

“Yes.”

“His name’s Aubrey Kincaid.” It’s odd revealing my suspicions to Boyer. It feels a little like finking to the vice principal in middle school about another girl’s misdeeds. I remind myself that a man’s been killed and that I may know the murderer. Boyer scribbles with a yellow pencil in a notepad while Charlie nods encouragement to me. “Aubrey has a connection with The Girl and the Fig. He lives in the city but comes up to the restaurant regularly. Now he just gets take-out, but at the time of the murder they were still serving meals outside.”

I told the detective about running into Aubrey outside of the restaurant, the other day, and how he brought up the subject of the unsolved murder.

“Funny,” Boyer says, “I’ve noticed how these killers don’t like it when all the noise about their crime goes quiet. It’s like it hasn’t happened. What did they go to all that trouble for? What else can you tell me about Aubrey?”

“I think he has a crush on me.”

“Seems like everybody does, Pina.”

I flipped off the detective. Charlie looked horrified, but Boyer smiled at me.

“First time today somebody’s shot me the bird; my wife’s out of town. So, what else can you tell me about Aubrey.”

“He’s a weightlifter with a black belt in karate.”

“Or so he’s told you.”

“I’ve seen his biceps.”

“Hmm.” Boyer unfurls a leather tobacco pouch and refills his pipe with pot. I’m dying for a few hits of weed. The detective senses where I’m at. “I’ve got a doobie in a tube in here,” he says, indicating his briefcase.

I nod to him and he pulls it out. Next comes a vintage Zippo lighter with a detailed rendering of a fly on its face. Boyer gallantly lights the joint before putting fire to the bowl of his Meerschaum. It shouldn’t surprise me how much better I feel after a few tokes.

“So we have a dude who’s a bodybuilder but also a black belt. Sounds like a very careful creature—the kind of guy who wears a belt and suspenders at the same time. And yet, you think he may have blood on his hands. What else?”

“I think he has it in for people who mock his stutter.”

“What makes you think that, Pina?”

“He told me.”

Boyer takes a long hit from his pipe.

“Tell Augie how he says your name,” Charlie chirps.

I do and the detective asks me about my next session with Aubrey.

“None is scheduled. I was doing personal Zoom sessions with my clients but I needed a break.”

The detective shakes his head. “Break’s over. Schedule an in-person meeting with him next week. A lunch session with take-out from The Girl and the Fig. I’ll give you a little something to wear.”

“I have to wear a wire?”

“Don’t be dramatic, Pina,” Boyer says.

Charlie asks, “Is this safe, Augie?”

“Safe as a meal of milk and cookies. You will be in the park in plain sight and I’ll be nearby. In the meantime, relax, you two. Enjoy the coming deluge. They tell me it’s going to rain for thirty days and thirty nights. Let me know when you have a date with Mr. Aubrey Kincaid. Remember, Pina, our goal is justice for Jesus.”