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.”

 

 

Roscoe gave me the cold shoulder for more than a week. Since I’d been neglecting him, he regressed, or at least pretended to. He designed his limited speech to disturb me. Top of the morning, he’d say at nightfall, along with Sleep well at dawn. His repetition of Roscoe wants a cracker was a particular irritant. I finally won him back with a few thimbles of rum and a hike. It was a little before sunset on a warm day for January. The parrot sat squarely on my right shoulder as we made the brief climb to the cemetery. Though rarely out of his room, Roscoe knew exactly where he was, and almost immediately quoted Victor Hugo: “It’s nothing to die, Charlie, it is frightful not to live.” That came from a tape of pithy phrases I made for him; his ability to find the apt spot for using them has always amazed me. Roscoe amplified the Hugo quote in an encore performance, stretching out the fry in frightful and coming as close as he could to whispering not to live. I felt like I was being scolded.

We started up Sonoma Overlook Trail, which rises gently through a small forest to an upper meadow. Unfortunately, on a warm weekday, it was more crowded than I’ve ever seen it. Since the pandemic began, everybody’s become a hiker. Now people were out to catch the sunset. We either stepped aside or took a wide berth around the masked and chattering hikers crowding the switchbacks that climb through scrub pines, oaks, and California buckeyes to a clearing with a view of the town and the bay beyond. Voices, some of which sounded amplified, came from every direction in the woods. I half expected Puck from A Midsummer’s Night Dream to appear, singing: Up and down, up and down/ I will lead them up and down.

I realized long ago that a man could make friends too easily if he walked a dog, which is why I’ve never had one. I don’t mean to sound like a misanthrope, or do I? All of which is to say, that if you want to go up trails inconspicuously don’t wear a parrot on your shoulder.

At the top of the meadow, I sat with Roscoe on one of the stone benches. I tried to get the parrot to come down on the bench beside me but he wanted to stay on my shoulder. The sort of people who have dutifully kept their distance during the pandemic—couples in their early forties; young families, even people my age—clustered close to us as soon as they noticed Roscoe. Fortunately, the bench is recessed from the trail and nobody pushed forward beyond the trail, so I felt safe from the crowd, if not comfortable.

Once Roscoe spoke up, people became attentive. After being deprived of live performance for many months, folks held their ground. I’d spent a week trying to get the parrot to talk and now, when I wanted him quiet, he wouldn’t stop. As the crowd inched closer, Roscoe offered a cautionary speech, punctuated with a chuckle between each phrase: “Hey boys and girls, don’t forget the protocol: mask up and keep your distance, as if your life depended on it.” People’s eyes shifted from the bird to me, trying to catch me at some subtle ventriloquism. To help folks relax I mumbled discreetly with my lips. I’ve spent some time practicing my fake voice-throwing, in order to deflect attention from Roscoe and to support Sally’s conviction that a genuine thinking and speaking parrot is worth less than a talking prop crafted with clever artifice.

Two high school boys, one with a hand-rolled cigarette fixed behind his ear, posed a flurry of questions to the bird: “What’s your name, dude? How old are you? Do you have a girlfriend?” The parrot responded a bit arrogantly, “The name’s Roscoe; I don’t give away my age; what makes you think that I’m not hip to the birds and the bees?”

People in the small crowd were really taken with the performance and many addressed their appreciation to me: “You’re really good, man,” and such. A young Latina, who’d pulled out her earpiece, said, “You should take Roscoe on TV. I mean it.”

I have made up for my neglect of Roscoe in the last week, hiding out in his room for many hours each day and night since Augie Boyer shook our world, presenting the conjunction of Jesus the waiter’s murder and Pina’s name. Roscoe may as well be my shrink now. When I told him that it is becoming harder for me to disguise my chronic depression, Roscoe nodded his head and responded: “I understand, Charlie.” I’ve talked about my sense of inadequacy with Pina, how she feels like a moving target with whom I can never become fully comfortable. I’ve also spoken about my phobia regarding the dead waiter and, in the days since the insurrection, I’ve detailed my fears for the nation, particularly given the climate of disinformation that continues to hang like a toxic cloud over much of the country. I even spoke with Roscoe about my ambivalence regarding my work with him. “It’s wrong to not openly celebrate the magnificence of your intelligence, Roscoe, and to pretend it’s me speaking rather than you. I’m afraid the world is not quite ready for you.”

Although I can tell he’d been listening, Roscoe remained silent. I doubted that he understood much of what I babbled about; that’s where I was wrong.

As Roscoe sensed that the small crowd wanted more from him, he secured his position on my shoulder and used it as a soapbox.

“As an outside observer,” he began, with me mumbling shamelessly along, “I must warn you against conspiracy theories.” Conspiracy came out sounding more like conspicery, and theories like harries. “Forty percent of Americans,” he continued “believe the horseshit propagated by our rogue president.”

The two teenage boys laughed hilariously, especially when the parrot stumbled over propagated. I gazed around at the others, whose expressions ranged from incredulous to sober, as if some were actually considering the wisdom of Roscoe’s words.

“These false ideas caused what happened at the capitol on January 6,” said Roscoe. I concentrated mightily on my lip-syncing. “Do not become one of the brainwashed. The world is not flat.”

I couldn’t have said it better, but this was not a script I designed for the parrot, but an extemporaneous speech he developed on his own. Even I found that hard to believe. People began to slowly disperse, believing that it was me who had spoken, and yet they offered their farewell messages to Roscoe rather than to me.

On our way down the looping trail, the parrot offered encouragement to whomever we passed: “Follow your bliss, bucko. Keep your eyes on the prize, sister.” I noticed that hikers smiled at the parrot but regarded me as if I were an odd man, perhaps a pervert.

When we were by ourselves, Roscoe spoke to me directly, “So what’s our plan, Charlie? How can I be best utilized? What’s the message and how do we get it out?”

As we got close to the trailhead, I began to formulate a response: “I think you’re onto something, Roscoe. The question is how do we develop one kind of message to help deprogram the brainwashed, and another type for healing those suffering from PTSD?”

I heard footsteps coming our way from below and stepped aside with Roscoe as I’d been doing all afternoon.

“Those are just the kind of questions I’ve been asking myself, Charlie. At least you have somebody to talk with.”

In the gloaming, coming around a curve, I made out Augie Boyer. He stopped a good ten feet from Roscoe and I, and leaned on his polished walking stick, his head adorned in a conical brown felted hat, a rakish pheasant feather rising from the ribbon. It was hard to tell whether the detective, under his curious brim, was emulating Robin Hood or Peter Pan. Boyer’s facemask bore an ominous haiku:

Nobody knows for sure

if Jesus died for our sins.

Why was he murdered?

“So this must be Roscoe. I’ve heard a lot about you, my dude. I’m Augie Boyer.”

“The crazy detective,” the parrot said, as I dutifully lip-synced.

Boyer grinned. “That’s very clever, Charlie.”

Roscoe piped up.“ He shouldn’t get all the credit.”

Now the detective pivoted in his Blundstones and dropped a hand on his hip. He wanted to watch Roscoe and me at once.

I stroked Roscoe’s head. “Don’t say anymore,” I told the bird, “or he’ll suspect you of murder.”

Augie Boyer narrowed his eyes on Roscoe. “That’s nonsense, my dude. You can’t be incriminated. So what have you heard with your marvelous parrot ears about the murder of Jesus?”

“Good to see you, Detective.” I said, trying to clear out fast. I took a wide berth around Boyer, and in my best parrot voice said, “Jesus died a long time ago. Many of the claims about him are contested.”

Back at the condo, Bobby Sabbatini called. Without salutation, he croaked in his artificial speakerphone voice: “Give us a poem, Char.”

“Posey,” I said.

“The one and own.”

I remembered that he was restricting his speech to single syllables so his software wouldn’t make him stutter..

“Let’s hear it Char.”

I recited the haiku I’d just seen on Augie Boyer’s facemask.

“Call that a poem, Char?”

“It’s by your buddy Augie Boyer?”

“Aug, Aug. ‘Fraid he’s lost his way with verse. He gives too much weight to the syl counts.”

The irony of that struck me and I couldn’t leave it alone. “Sounds like you’ve been juggling syls, Posey.”

“Hey, I got balls in the air, Char, balls in the air. The words . . . the parts of speech . . . blaze of verbs . . . the lims that show me how free I am. Those are my balls, and if I drop one . . . I play it as it lays.”

Sabbatini was starting to affect me like he did on the pulpit, back in the day. At his best, he could inspire an entire congregation to memorize poems and recite them. Construction workers, guys on highway crews who’d never read a poem in their life, were proudly declaiming E. E. Cummings and Gary Snyder poems. That was before Sabbatini got shot in the throat at Ginsberg’s Galley in Guerneville, his religious tavern, with its poetry karaoke device. The sniper was a member of First Christ River of Blood, a local church that felt threatened by poetry and Pastor Sabbatini’s following.

Speaking in single syllables didn’t fully mitigate the problems Sabbatini had with his software. He typed out his words and the app spoke for him in discrete plinks of sound that could not be bent or accented. The steady march of his single syllables lacked the fluidity of normal speech. It must be hard for him to hear his words issue forth without the emphasis and golden euphony that characterized them; in the past.

“I’ve called to see how you are, Char. I heard ‘bout the death in Son. How are you and Peen? How is your soul? Tell me how I can help. What’s new with the pear? Have no seen him on Twit.”

I wasn’t ready to have Sabbatini become my confessor. Later I would talk with him about Roscoe but first I needed the lowdown on his friend Augie Boyer.

“Augie’s hanging out over here in Sonoma, busting our balls about the death of some poor waiter. We don’t know anything more than we’ve told him.”

“Aug knows what you think you know, Char. He wants to find that which you know but don’t know you know.”

I had trouble making sense of that machine gun round of syllables and wanted to ask Sabbatini to repeat what he just said, but didn’t think I could stand to hear it again.

“Aug will hit pay dirt soon. You can bet on it, Char.”

Somehow that pronouncement didn’t give me comfort. I shifted the conversation to Roscoe and his remarkable abilities as a speaker but also as an intelligent thinker who can synthesize complex ideas. “Nobody believes it’s actually him,” I said, “with the high cognitive intelligence and sophisticated speech. I pretend that I am the ventriloquist and he is my dummy.”

“It does not mat what peep think, Char.”

“But I need to utilize him wisely, to give him a purpose. My daughter Sal—that’s another story—thinks Roscoe loses value if he’s perceived as a he is—a thinking and speaking parrot, rather than a clever construction. What people really want, she maintains, is artifice.”

“She’s dead wrong ‘bout that. Let the pear be the pear—you owe it to him. And, of course, Rosc has a purp, Char. The God of verse chose him. He’s here to be the voice of Son.”

“The voice of Sonoma.”

“Spell it out, if you must, Char, but teach your pear poems, and soon he will write them. Like Aug Boy, he can lead us to know what we don’t know we know.”

 

Days have gone by with little talk about my name being knifed into the back of a poor waiter named Jesus. I think both Charlie and I are pretending the whole business was a bad dream that we shared. I’ve made no attempt to contact Vince; the fragile truce between Charlie and me can’t sustain much more stress and, frankly, I can’t feature Vince as a killer; he’s always struck me as too weak-willed for even verbal conflicts. 

Charlie’s gone into a shell, spending most of his days and evenings holed up with Roscoe in the second bedroom, where he not only works with the parrot on who knows what, but attends daily Al-anon meetings on Zoom. Charlie seems more disturbed by his daughter’s addiction than by the chilling business surrounding the murdered waiter, and the horrid business of my name being associated with the killing. Last night at dinner Charlie said he’s found some comfort in the three C’s of Al-anon: I didn’t cause it; I can’t cure it; I can’t control it. Is there a lesson in that formula for me to apply?

Late this morning Charlie comes out of Roscoe’s room and tells me about the insurrection at the capitol. We sit down to lunch with the television on and watch it together for most of the afternoon. On the sofa we snuggle close and hold hands. What we’re watching is truly unreal. I have to remind myself that it’s a life event; the outcome is unclear. This is not the same as being at the movies—a place that Charlie and I have never been together. I reflect for a moment on this oddity and even say to Charlie how curious it is that we’ve been through so much together and yet have never held hands in a theater. Perhaps Charlie misunderstands me because he says what I’ve just been thinking, rather harshly, “This is not a movie, Pina. This is happening right now in our nation’s Capitol.” I know it is unseemly to have hurt feelings at a time like this, but I do.

We no longer speak. The indecent spectacle—a mass of white cretins breaking into and trashing the undefended Capitol during a joint session of congress to certify Joe Biden’s election to the presidency—numbs us, as loops of the same videos play and Charlie switches the channels between CNN and MSNBC. I watch him hold onto the remote control and think of how much Vince loved the device. I’ve never seen a woman hold onto a remote control device with the same urgency as these men do. It is as if they’re gripping their last vestige of power. One time, when the batteries went dead in the device and there were no replacements in the house, Vince looked like a broken man. Another time, as I watched him clutch the damn thing, I said: “It’s a good thing you have two hands, Vince, one for holding the remote and the other for grabbing your dick.” 

After switching channels endlessly and not finding what he wants, Charlie starts shouting at the screen: “Where are the police? How about the National Guard? When are they going to arrest Trump and Trump, Jr., and Giuliani for inciting a riot?”

We listen to the talking heads for hours. Charlie insists on switching to Fox News to see how the hard right is characterizing the event. When we discover that most of the talk is about Antifa infiltrators provoking the violence, Charlie roars again at the television screen before turning it off.

Misery loves company. I remember at age nineteen or twenty, when I was routinely depressed five days of seven—and I admit this now with outrage at my callowness—that I took some comfort in the tragedies of others—floods, earthquakes, political disaster—and even thought that if the whole world went to hell it would be a balm to me not to suffer alone. And I am ashamed to say that now, as Washington burns, I am enjoying, if not comfort, at least, a bit of distraction from my own insecurities. 

I meet with the kook of a detective, Augie Boyer, at his request, beside the plaque of the Revolutionary War veteran in the Sonoma Mountain Cemetery. When I get there he’s sitting on a large stone eating an apple, his facemask, dangling from an ear, a canvas briefcase at his feet.

He stands and tips his Giants cap; the red blades of his hair point in all directions from under the cap. Then he secures his facemask in place. “Augie Boyer. Thank you for coming, Pina.” 

As Charlie told me it would, Boyer’s facemask bears a haiku:

The old detective

needs a magnifying glass

to read the tea leaves.

He’s not sure what to do with his half-eaten apple. I should tell him to finish it, but I enjoy his discomfiture. He’d like me to turn away for a moment so he can bury the fruit in a pocket of his brown leather bomber. He’s a funny guy to be a detective. Charlie told me he used to be stout, but now he’s stringy looking, a vegan who stays away from French fries. He looks like the sort of dude who has a collection of vintage gum machines at home. Nothing he loves more than to feed pennies to the machines and spin the gears that drop gumballs. 

“Hope you didn’t have trouble finding the spot,” he says, holding the apple by its stem.

“No, I’m particular fond of Captain Smith’s monument.” I do turn away for a moment and, poof, when I look back, Boyer, empty-handed, is scratching his nose.

I nod to the two plaques commemorating the Revolutionary War veteran, who is said to be the only known vet of that war to be buried in California. One of the plaques is from the Daughters of the American Revolution, the other from the California Society Sons of the American Revolution.

“You know,” I tell Boyer, “I’ve stood here a couple of times puzzling out this guy’s dates. I’ve also done a bit of research on him. Born in 1768, he was eleven when he joined the Virginia Navy as a mate and served with his father on The Hazard. Apparently, he sailed around the globe eight times, including a voyage to Canton, China with a cargo of 63,000 seal and otter skins picked up at the Farallon Islands.” How I remember these factoids, I don’t know. Charlie would be proud of me. 

“I love that he went from the Hazard,” I continue, “to become captain of the Albatross, a merchant vessel, which was wrecked somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. How big a space in his psyche did the names of his ships occupy? That’s what I want to know. Captain Smith lost everything on the shipwreck of the Albatross, including his journals. Imagine what they may have told us. He died in 1846, down the hill in an adobe on First Street East. His host, Jacob Leese, General Vallejo’s brother-in-law, asked him if he’d consulted with himself about leaving this world, and he answered that he hadn’t.” I have no idea why I’ve told the detective all this—just to postpone the inevitable inquisition, I suppose.

 “Ah,” Boyer says, “You have enough on the captain to write a novel. You’re venturing into forensic archeology, here. That’s a field I wish I’d gone into.”

 “Why didn’t you?” 

“Oh, that requires a lot more education than a guy like me could stomach. Shall we take a little stroll?”

I nod and the detective leads me up Palm Walk to Laurel Lane, and then we follow Toyen.

“We’re going to visit the grave of an Italian-born stonecutter named Luigi Basagilia. As a matter of fact, I’ve done a little research on him. The guy never learned English. His foot was crashed in a quarry accident and he had three toes amputated. He spent the rest of his life sunk in a depression.”

“Why are we visiting his grave?”

“You’ll see. I’m sorry that you’ve been pulled into this case, that your 

name . . . ”

“Maybe this business has nothing to do with me,” I say. “Maybe it refers to another Pina. In Italy it’s not that uncommon a name. It’s a diminutive for Agrippina, Jacopina, Giuseppina, and, in my case, Crispina.”

“But in this country? Have you ever met another Pina?”

I didn’t bother to answer. At the stonecutter’s grave I wince as I see my name carved five times into the granite stone. It’s been rendered with a steady hand in wide looping letters, just the way Charlie described it on the back of the restaurant check.

“Somebody’s really got you on the mind,” the detective says.

“Or the name of someone else,” I counter.

“You have to admit he has a solid technique.”

“A professional stonecutter,” I suggest. “That should narrow your search.”

“If only. Do you know how many stonecutters are in Sonoma County now that everybody and his mother have a granite countertop? At first I thought the clean handwriting took your old boyfriend Vince out of the running, but it’s occurred to me since that he may have had an accomplice. Any thoughts about Vince in this regard?”

“He avoided conflicts at all costs.”

“Until he didn’t.”

 “You really suspect him of murder?”

“I think Jesus was his local dealer and that Vince may not have liked what he was peddling.”

 “What about my name?” I holler. “Why the fuck is my name mixed up in all of this?”

 “That’s the thing that’s got me stumped. Vince certainly seems to be obsessed with you.”

I imagine Boyer’s half-eaten apple turning brown in his bomber pocket. “Vince’s interest in me intensified only after I left him.”

“That’s the way it often goes—seller’s remorse.”

“I was never his property, detective, and if anybody did the selling it was me.”

“Point taken. And I take it you felt no remorse.”

“Only that I didn’t leave him sooner.”

“An exemplary character witness,” Boyer says with a wink. “But you don’t think he had anything to do with the killing?”

I shrug. “I have no idea how desperate these addicts get when they don’t find the heroin to their liking.”

“Or Fentanyl, as is more likely the case.” 

The detective pulls a joint in a tube out of his briefcase. “Hey, I hear you’re a smoker, Pina. I brought another doobie for you.” He pulls out a second tube and hands it to me. “The joint’s clean, been in the tube for two days.” Now he yanks out a little spritzer of disinfectant and aims it at my open hands. “Better safe than sorry.”

I slip the joint from the tube and allow Boyer to light it. He has a funny way of smoking; he tugs on his joint three times before inhaling deeply. After exhaling he says, “Go light on this, Pina, this is Forestville Fuckface, a supercharged Sativa that I’ve enhanced with kief. I like to say that it turns thinking into a spectator sport in which the smoker is both athlete and observer.”

“You don’t seem to be going light,” I say, before taking a full toke.

“Well, I’ve become an elite athlete at this sport.”

 I point to Luigi Basagilia’s gravestone. “How did you happen to find this up here?”

“Oh, this cemetery is one of my favorite stomping grounds. This place, more than any cemetery I know, tickles my forensic archeology funny bone, my FAFB,” Boyer says with a laugh. “In the old days when I was still a carnivore I’d come up here with a couple of meatball sandwiches and a bottle of Guinness and spend the afternoon exploring. The only disheartening thing about those times is that I discovered I had more in common with the dead than the living. This time I had a hunch that I’d find something up here. I wasn’t looking for your name, per se, but perhaps the knife. Something.”

“I see what you mean about this stuff,” I said after taking a couple of more tokes.”

“Yes, this weed turns into a kind of truth serum. Try and lie when you’re high on it and your nose will grow.”

”My nose is already long, detective.”

“You haven’t seen anything yet. Let’s try it out. Tell me a lie, Pina. Tell me that you think Vince is an honorable man; that you have an abiding love for Charlie’s daughter Sally; tell me that you haven’t thought of poisoning Roscoe, and that Charlie doesn’t repeat your name in triplicate when he’s being affectionate, just a couple of times less than the handwriting on the restaurant check and the carving on the tombstone.”

“I’m not going to tell you any of that,” I say.

“That’s good, Pina, your nose won’t grow any longer.”

“Don’t tell me you’re looking at Charlie for this crime.”

“Looking. I like that, Pina. It’s right out of NYPD Blue. Let’s just say my eyes are open.”

The strange man is beginning to frighten me. “How about me? Do you suspect me detective?”

Boyer pulls a yellow legal pad out of his briefcase, along with a felt tip pen. “Would you mind writing your name five times, Pina?”

“You really think I’d carve my name into somebody’s back, detective?”

Boyer strokes his chin. “Well, if you happened to have murdered the man, I’d say all bets are off.” He sprays the pen with disinfectant and hands it to me.

I shake my head, suddenly pissed to be wasting my time with this doofus detective and his charade. Nonetheless, I take the pen and write my name five times on the legal pad.

“Very interesting,” he says. “The backward slant of your signature bares no resemblance at all to the samples of your writing I’ve seen.”

“Where have you seen my signature?” I demand.

“Public records. I’m always interested in the phenomenon of people who are not a suspect but turn themselves into one. How much time did you spend, perfecting that backward slant, Pina?”

“I don’t have to talk with you. You’re not a cop,” I say, stepping away from Boyer.

“No, you don’t. I’m curious why you did.”

With that, I head back down Toyen and, turning back once, I see Boyer nibbling on his apple. 

Furious now, I walk down First Street West into town, past a couple of empty wine tasting gardens, and fucking tourists everywhere, waiting for the party to start. I notice a line in front of The Girl and the Fig—people lining up for takeout. That’s when I hear the voice: “Pa-pina . . . Pa-pina.”

Fucking Aubrey, the last person in the world I want to see. 

 

Pina came into the condo with two-dozen oysters and a big smile on her face. “What’s going on, Charlie? All this talk about Jesus. Have you gone and found religion?”

I didn’t have the heart to reveal what Augie Boyer had told me and, surprisingly, Pina didn’t press me about our phone conversation and what she called my freneticism. She knew something was up, knew that I had an upsetting thing to tell her, but we left it there, glowing between us like a steady campfire. I watched Pina at the sink. Her attention shifted to the oysters. She’d collected ice from the freezer and layered the bottom of a beer platter with it, and then spilled the oysters from their sack, crackling into a tin colander. My desire for her was tremendous; I wanted to bite her neck, to ravage her, really, as if her presence was endangered and I needed to act quickly. I watched her fetch a pair of oyster knives from the junk drawer and wave them at me. The specter of knives, even dull ones like these, sent a chill through me.

“Are you going to help with the shucking?” she asked in her flirty voice, her head turning to watch me watching her. I grabbed her by the waist and turned her toward me. After I kissed the corner of her lips and took a nibble of her neck, she aimed an oyster knife at me. “What’s on your mind, Mister? Hmm, maybe religion is a good idea for you.”

We shucked oysters together and my distress, at least momentarily, shifted to the fact that Pina opened them so much more quickly than I did. When I was halfway through my dozen, she said, “I’ll make a mignonette, while you finish up with those.”

I pulled out a bottle of Schramsberg Blanc de Blancs that I was saving for the next night, New Year’s Eve, and Pina asked if she could saber the bottle. It was a trick I’d showed her. She took a chef’s knife from the block and we went out on the deck. With macho force she swung the blade, achieved a clean break, and sent the top of the bottle soaring over the railing and into a hedge below. I stood by with a couple of champagne flutes to catch what I could of the bubbly gusher. Pina nodded her head smugly like a combatant who had conquered a difficult opponent.

After we toasted each other, I told Pina, for no reason but to avoid what I should be telling her, that Schramsburg was the California champagne that Nixon brought on his trip to China.

“And that’s supposed to endear me to it?” Pina asked.

“It was just an interesting factoid,” I said.

“Oh, Charlie, you are so full of interesting factoids.” Pina was still holding the chef’s knife, swinging it at her side; she looked ready to saber another bottle. Knives out were clearly the theme of the day.

After eating the sumptuous oysters we went to bed with the idea that we’d have an omelet after we enjoyed each other.

I don’t know how to say this nicely, but I fucked Pina especially hard, my afternoon of fear coalesced into carnal force. Pina didn’t seem to mind; she screamed with pleasure, her nails carving jagged lines into my back.

After love, I propped myself up on an elbow and faced Pina. It seemed as good a time as any. “You know, I had that meeting with Augie Boyer, the detective.”

Pina, facing me now, grinned as if my encounter with a detective was among the silliest things she ever heard. “Yeah, that’s what you were trying to tell me about on the phone.”

“He’s working on the case of The Girl and the Fig waiter that got killed in Boyes Hot Springs. Do you remember?”

“Vaguely.”

“It happened a month or so ago. A guy named Jesus.”

“Oh, that’s the Jesus you were talking about.”

The distance between Pina’s indifference to the killing and the fact that her name was carved on the victim’s back was too great for me to bridge. There’s no other way of saying it: I chickened out. I’d given the detective Pina’s number. He’d be calling her in the next days. Let him spill the beans. I did mention Augie Boyer’s idea that the killer might have been a disgruntled customer.”

Pina laughed. “The guy really didn’t like the service. What was he expecting—Jesus to multiply the fishes and loaves?”

I felt ashamed of myself for withholding the pertinent facts and went further astray by talking about how the detective had allowed his wife to give him a makeover, which I described with all the particularities I recalled. As I mentioned Augie Boyer’s spiked red hair and pirate hoop earrings, my tale turned into a farce.

“So is that what you want from me?” Pina asked. “To give you a makeover? Actually, I kind of like you as you are, Charlie.”

“That’s a comfort.”

“Don’t get too comfortable.”

That was a laugh—I felt so far from comfortable that I thought I might crack. That’s when the pounding on the front door started. I dressed in a hurry. The thoughts racing through my head were dizzying. Was this the killer at the door making the racket? Don’t open it. Was it the sheriff, or Augie Boyer having connected more threads to the web of the murder? The pounding stopped and I listened for footsteps. Whoever was at the door hadn’t yet descended the stairs. Pina had put on her kimono and was crouched behind me at the door. We’d become a pair of farcical figures, awaiting doom.

The pounding began again. “Open the door, Dad! I have a mask on.”

I exhaled deeply before screaming at the door: “Why all the racket, Sally?” I didn’t want to open it, but I put on a mask. I turned to look at Pina who shrugged, as if to say it’s your call.

“What’s on your mind, Sally?”

“Your dereliction of duty, Dad.”

“Stand back from the door, Sally, and I’ll come outside.” I opened the door gingerly. How had my daughter become a threat to me?

Sally stood against the railing at the top of the stairs and I could tell she was high. Very high. Her eyes shot to the right and then to the left as if the only vision she had was peripheral.

“What are you on, Sally?”

“’What am I on?’ That sounds so Fifties, Dad, like ‘Marijuana Confidential’ or something.”

“Except you’re not high on weed.”

“You’re very perceptive, Dad.”

I reminded myself of my Al-anon lessons. It was inappropriate to ask anything about Sally’s intoxication. I had another question for her. “Did you know Jesus from The Girl and the Fig?”

“The guy who got killed?”

“Did you know him?”

Sally’s response was not verbal. She did something she used to do when she was a kid, hiding her eyes behind her forehead in an if-I-can’t-see-you, you-can’t- see-me ploy. It was no longer cute as it had been when she was a child.

“Did you know him?” I repeated.

Sally glared at me, if such a thing is possible, with absent eyes. “What’s with the interrogation, bitch?”

“Do not talk to me like that.” It distressed me profoundly to see Sally like this. The fact that I couldn’t do anything about it disturbed me all the more. ”Tell me about Jesus.”

“The son of God or the dude from The Girl and the Fig?”

“Don’t be a smart ass.”

Sally sat down on the top step. “Jesus had his share of enemies.”

“How do you know that?”

My daughter sighed unpleasantly. “Dude not only sold drugs, he had a mouth on him.”

“What does that mean—he had a mouth on him?”

“What’s up with your curiosity, Dad? I came here to talk about how you’re wasting your Roscoe capital, and I end up getting ambushed with all this Jesus crap.”

“Tell me about his mouth.”

“What? You want to know about his mustache, for crying out loud.”

“Don’t fuck with me, Sally.”

“I don’t know—he just went off on people. He had no patience for stupid white people, which essentially means all white people.”

“Then how could he work at The Fig?”

“He needed the job for his parole.”

“So you bought drugs from him?”

Sally shrugged, which I took for a yes.

“Were you using when you first got down to Sonoma?”

She turned her head to the side and I chided myself for the interrogation of her personally. It was a complete no-no in the Al-anon playbook.

“What can I help you with, Sal?”

“I need money.”

So her visit had little to do with Roscoe. “I can’t give you money. I can give you food.”

Sally stood up. “If I don’t get money I’m going to have to sell my soul, Dad.”

“Your soul or your body?”

“You sell one you sell the other. Just give me a hundred bucks, Dad.”

I shook my head.

“Come on, Dad. It’ll be the last time.”

“It’s not going to happen, Sal.”

“I got some guys I got to pay.”

“I can help you get into rehab.”

“I need cash, Dad. That’s all I need.”

“We can drive to the county detox.”

“It doesn’t sound like you talking, Dad. What’s the matter, fucking Pina get into your head?” With that Sally turned and, like a pony, gamboled down the stairs.”

“Take care of yourself, Sally,” I called after her.

“Sure thing,” she shouted, and then after a beat, added, “Bitch.”

I walked down the steps slowly, without any intention of following Sally, my heart riven. It’s difficult not to blame yourself for you child’s waywardness, but it’s not a useful response. It was much easier with Sally living on the Lost Coast. Out of sight, out of mind. Of course I always had the suspicion that Sally was lost on the Lost Coast. I’d lost my family to addiction—first my wife to alcohol and another man, now my daughter. Where does my culpability lie?

I walked east on the bike trail and texted Pina that I’d be back soon. A runner, hyperventilating without a mask, dashed past me and I shouted after him: “What’s the matter with you? Are you too Republican to wear a mask?” He turned and flipped me off. Of course, my anger was misplaced. I sat on one of the benches facing north and called Augie Boyer. I hoped I could just leave a message, but the detective answered: “Charlie, what you got for me?”

“I was going to ask you if you had any breaks.”

“Breaks? No, I’m just plotzing along with my magnifying glass. What’s on your mind, Charlie?”

“I spoke with my daughter Sally, who, it seems, knew Jesus from the street.”

“She bought drugs from him.”

I took a long gulping breath. “Yes. She says he had a mouth on him and had it in for white people.”

“So was it a white person or gaggle of white peeps that had issues with Jesus? I’m going to want to talk to your daughter as well as your girlfriend, Charlie. From what I’ve ascertained, it appears like your daughter has been candy-flipping.”

“Candy-flipping?”

“In her case a combo of Fentanyl and crack cocaine. They used to call it a speedball back in the glory days of Chet Baker and the like. I’m sorry to tell you this, Charlie.”

“You’ve been tracking her?”

“Just watching the street.”

“It’s heartbreaking.”

“I can only imagine. I don’t know what I’d do if my eight-year-old Buson went astray. Tell me this, Charlie—does Sally get along with Pina? Is there any animus there?”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s a simple question, Charlie.”

I thought of Sally saying fucking Pina, not a half hour ago. Again, I gulped for breath. “You don’t think . . .”

“I don’t think anything, Charlie. I’m not paid to think. Take a look next time you see me—do I look like a thinker? No, I’m not paid to think; I’m paid for the pudding, as the proof is in.”

Augie Boyer, as is his way, left me with a haiku:

 The tooth of the crime

Is sharpened with grievances.

Save us from ourselves.

When I got back from my walk I sat Pina down and told her about Augie Boyer and about her name being written in multiples on the back of a restaurant check, but also carved into the dead waiter’s back. Pina’s mouth dropped open slowly, and stayed open. She began to shake and, sitting beside her on the sofa, I held her close. She mouthed why several times, an existential query she couldn’t manage to say out loud. The word hung on her lips. Of course, we both felt the terror—her name carved on a dead man’s back. I hoped against hope that there was another Pina out there and that this horror had nothing to do with the woman in my arms.

When she was able to speak, Pina asked about the victim; I reminded her of the news item we’d read in the Index Tribune about Jesus, and told her what I’d learned from Sal and Augie Boyer. Then I posed obvious questions: Was she aware of anybody that might be obsessed with her? Did she and Sally have bad blood between them? Was Vince using again? If so, might the dead Jesus have been his dealer? Noting that the waiter was killed a month ago, I asked when Vince moved up here from the city.

Pina responded in the negative to the first questions, but went silent when it came to Vince. She wiped her watery eyes with the handkerchief I handed her, and then licked her lips like somebody who was parched. “I think Vince is using again,” she said, finally.

“What makes you say that?”

“A hunch. I can find out.”

“What are you going to do, go undercover with Vince? Last time you ended up under the covers with him.”

“Don’t you trust me, Charlie?”

“Should I?”

“That’s for you to decide,” she said, and wiped what was left of the tears from her eyes.

“I’m worried about your safety.” That was partly true. I also imagined her coupling with Vince again.”

“Are you concerned that he might kill me?” she asked with a bit of dare in her eyes, “or seduce me?”

“I won’t dignify that with an answer,” I said, feeling disingenuous as soon as I uttered those words.

Pina smirked. “Whose dignity is it that’s at stake here?”

That struck me as a clever question, but I didn’t give a damn about the answer. I got up and walked to the far end of the room. When I looked back, I noticed Pina, again, mouthing the word why.

 

 

Today I am at loose ends, after giving myself a two-week holiday from my clients. Almost all of them seemed happy for a break. A person can only work so much on her frailties. The only client who’s seemed to regret the interruption is good old Aubrey, who’s actually made strides with his stutter. He’s had two recent setbacks, however: his mother died of COVID in a Berkeley nursing home, and then he got furloughed from his job. The man still has difficulty pronouncing my name. “Pa-pina,” he said during our last session, “can’t you make an excep . . . an exception for me? You’re the only thing that . . . that . . . that keeps me ce –ce-centered.”

I insisted that I needed the break. When I expressed sympathy for his mother’s passing for a second time, Aubrey said, “That woman was a ba-bitch, Pina. She always made fun of me, made fun of her own . . . her own son. Ba-bitch.” 

We were out of time, but that didn’t seem a good place to leave it. I asked Aubrey if he had any plans for the holiday. 

“I might do anything, Pa-pina. I’m a free man now. My mother, the ba-bitch, left . . . left me her how-house and her stock . . . stock holdings. One thing for . . . for sure, I’m not going to take shit . . . take shit from anybody. I will miss  . . . miss you, Pa-pina.”

After Charlie leaves to meet some detective in town, I decide to drive to the city. I’ve become a little homesick for San Francisco and have thought again about renting an apartment there, seeing if I can get Charlie to divide his time with me in the city. It’s a discussion I’ve been afraid to bring up as Charlie and I repair our relationship.

Musing about this upsets me and I respond with an odd homing instinct by taking the exit for San Rafael, the small city in which I grew up, and where I lived during my marriage to Marco. The problem is that I’d just as soon keep the ghosts of San Rafael at a distance. The solution, I decide, is to head to Fairfax and pick up a Reuben at Gestalt Haus. I turn onto Sir Francis Drake and suddenly I am all appetite. The Gestalt Haus Reuben is perhaps the best example of the species I’ve ever had. On marbled bread, with a glut of corned, Swiss cheese, and sauerkraut, it is so large that half of it could be today’s lunch and half tomorrow’s. 

But, alas, Gestalt Haus is closed and it appears that closure might be its permanent fate. When there is so much to grieve—345,000 deaths from the virus when I last looked—is it unseemly to mourn the demise of a watering hole, beloved to bicyclists and lovers of beer, sausage, and deli sandwiches, an establishment that bills itself with endearing humor as The French Laundry of Sausage? I think not. 

And now I’m left with the matter of my appetite. I walk the three or four blocks of the village looking for some takeout that appeals. Nada. Where the hell am I going next? Such pressing problems. I decide, finally, that a walk on Limantour Beach at Point Reyes might clèar my head. Before leaving Fairfax I call ahead to the Bovine Bakery in Point Reyes Station and order my consolation prize: two croissant sandwiches, one with chèvre and spinach, the other, scallions and comté. 

The drive from Fairfax to Point Reyes is filled with memories from my childhood and beyond that I am unable to steer clear of. I suppose that is to be expected at the end of a year that featured the Death March as its theme song. I drive past the one-block town of Lagunitas, the site of my first car crash. I backed away from the lone grocery store, without looking, and rammed an old man’s weathered pickup, as he was about to pull in. My friend Denise was with me and, though we were both sixteen, we’d each managed to buy a pint of Southern Comfort. After backing into the truck, I whispered frantically to Denise, “Hide those bottles under the seat,” and then climbed out of my car—an ancient Oldsmobile Cutlass that my father thought would be a good “learner” car for me—and apologized to the old man, who’d stepped from his truck and actually tipped his seed cap. “Young lady,” he said, “looks like we was both in the wrong place at the wrong time. The good thing about it is you managed to wake me up.” He laughed at his own joke and then bent over to consider his fender. “Don’t see any damage here worth enumerating.” He turned to my Olds. “Looks like you lost a taillight. You’re gonna want to have that replaced. Other than that it’s a matter of cosmetics, young lady, and I guess you know more about that than me.”

“So we don’t have to call the police?” I asked and held my breath.

“I don’t see why we would.” He tipped his cap again and, as he climbed back into the truck, said, “Watch out now. Next time it might be me backing into you.”

At that moment in my life, when I suspected anybody over the age of twenty of being an alien, the old man’s kindness brought tears to my eyes. 

Instead of driving home, Denise and I pushed off to a spot along Lagunitas Creek, where we managed to polish off one pint of Southern Comfort between us. I can still remember passing the bottle back and forth and practically gagging on the stuff as I wiped my lips on the tails of my summer blouse. The Southern Comfort was Denise’s idea. She said, “If it’s good enough for Janis Joplin, it’s good enough for us.” That sweet hooch, along with a long crooked joint, left us both sizzled and we were wise enough to save the extra bottle for another time. It was a warm August day and we went skinny-dipping in the creek, wishing a couple of boys would come along and join us. 

Now the winding road that passes through the redwoods of Samuel Taylor State Park reminds me of my family and the times the three of us camped in the park. My father grew up in Italy with a love for American cowboys. Camping was as close as he could get to the wild frontier. Conflating the wilderness with this particular campground, which always seemed to be filled with screaming teenage boys, took some imagination, and yet being less than a half hour drive from our home in San Rafael, made Samuel Taylor my father’s favorite spot. Back in those days you didn’t need to make a reservation; there always seemed to be an open campsite. My dad would come home from work on a Friday afternoon and say, “Pack your sleeping bag, Pina, we’re going camping.” My mother, a good sport in these matters, brought a tin of Folgers—she carried teabags for herself so she wouldn’t have to drink the cowboy coffee—and filled the Igloo with eggs, bacon, potatoes, and the ubiquitous package of Oscar Meyer hotdogs. I was responsible for making sure every piece of the camp cook set was clean. My father stacked a supply of firewood, which he kept under a tarp in the back of the station wagon. You were only allowed to burn presto logs at the campsite. I suppose that sneaking some cherry wood into our campfire was his way of being an outlaw. We also fished without licenses, though rarely caught anything. One time my dad landed a good-sized trout and it became part of our supper. He charred it on the outside and it was raw inside. I remember pushing hunks of it off my tin plate when he wasn’t looking and grounding them under my shoes.

My father wore his cowboy hat, an outsized black Stetson, on our camp outs. When I was young he looked heroic to me in the hat, but by the time I hit middle school, by which time my parents embarrassed me, nothing underscored what yokels they were as much as the black Stetson.

How many times did Marco and I take this road from Point Reyes Station to Limantour? It was our favorite beach. Today it is practically empty. Marco was a man who liked to hold hands. As I walk north along the beach, I feel the weight of my empty hand. Twenty minutes north I spot a pod of whales. The sight of three or four breaching gets me excited. I want to believe that Marco sent them, but I know better. I wish I had someone with me to share my excitement. That somebody would be Charlie. There is no bringing back the dead. That I’d choose Charlie, from all living beings, for company—that’s the way I phrase it in my head—is a genuine comfort and strikes me as a line from a marriage vow.

The whales must be feeding because they’re not heading north or south, just breaching in some kind of cosmic choreography with an occasional spout slowly feathering into the air. I can’t gauge their distance—two hundred yards or much further? How close must I be to see such particularities? 

I had questions along the same lines the other week when Charlie and I climbed to an open spot in the Sonoma Mountain Cemetery to gaze at the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn. Being high above the lights of Sonoma gave us the illusion that we were closer to the planets than to the town. It was a cool night; we brought a blanket, a thermos of coffee, and a flask of cognac. With our bare eyes we could see the fat dot of Jupiter and the blurred suggestion of Saturn to its left. Then Charlie surprised me: he pulled a good pair of field glasses from a case in his pocket. With those the distance shrank; our vision became crisper and our imaginations more daring: Charlie saw all the rings of Saturn and I had no doubt that my enhanced eyes actually perceived the fluid dry-ice atmosphere of Jupiter, which Charlie kept referring to as the gas giant. He explained that both planets consisted of mostly helium and hydrogen, and that neither had a hard surface. I couldn’t understand how a thing could exist, especially such a huge thing, without a hard surface.

At some point I asked the distance we were from the planets and Charlie, like a guy who had studied for the quiz, said, “Jupiter is between 365 and 601 million miles away depending on our respective orbits of the sun.” 

I took a good slug of brandy and asked, “Well, how many miles away is it now?”

Charlie picked up the binoculars and took a long look. In his British astronomer voice, he said, “It appears to be 385 million miles away at the moment.” 

I demanded to know how the human eye could see something 385 miles away.

“We can hardly not see what’s right in front of us,” he responded in his arch brogue. “It gives you a sense of just what insignificant specks we are in the universe.”

Charlie poured himself a cup of coffee; I wasn’t sharing the cognac. 

“It’s a comfort,” I said, “to know that no matter how much you fuck up your life it doesn’t even register the tiniest blip in the universe.”

“Oh, Pina,” Charlie said, in his own sweet voice, “you’re always looking on the bright side.”

There is no cell service out as far as Limantour Beach, not that I wanted any. My phone doesn’t start dinging with missed calls for quite a few miles, and I don’t stop to respond to Charlie’s numerous calls until I reach Petaluma.

“Where are you, Pina?” Charlie shouts. “Where are you?”

It is hard to go from the solitude of the beach to Charlie’s frenetic talk. I do my best not to take it in, once he checks off the list of all the terrible things that could have happened that didn’t. I feel badly for whatever has made him so anxious, but he tells me that he can’t explain until we are together in the same room. He keeps asking if I am safe. I wonder if he’s had a nervous breakdown, and if so what’s driven him to it. He keeps talking some nonsense about Jesus being killed. I tell him that I will be home soon.

 

I barely remember Augie Boyer, although I saw him numerous times, years ago, at Bobby Sabbatini’s poetry church in Guerneville. Boyer, a stout, disheveled looking detective, had actually taken over the church for a short period after the attack on Sabbatini, but I’d stopped attending the church by then. Yesterday he called out of the blue about a month-old murder he was investigating, just outside of Sonoma in Boyes Hot Springs.

I’d read about the killing in the Sonoma Index-Tribune. The victim had been a server at The Girl and the Fig, a man called Jesus—a hard-to-forget moniker—whose surname, of Latino origin, I’ve forgotten. All I recall from the newspaper’s profile of Jesus is that he was a graduate of Sonoma Valley High, had overcome a drug addiction, and was leading a productive life along the straight and narrow. I can’t remember any mention of how the victim was killed or anything about the investigation. I assumed, in my ignorance, that the case was drug related. Pina and I had talked briefly about the murder, because they are so rare in this area; you see a killing occasionally in Santa Rosa or Fairfield, but not in Sonoma Valley. Neither of us could recall a waiter named Jesus.

Augie Boyer wanted to come out to Sonoma and ask me a few questions about the case. I didn’t see how I could help him, as I didn’t know the victim and had no connections in Boyes Hot Springs.

“Have you eaten at The Girl and the Fig in the last three years?” Boyer asked.

“Yes, of course.”

“Then maybe you’d recognize the victim. Perhaps he even waited on you.”

“Yes, but I don’t see . . .”

“Our mutual friend, Sabbatini, says you have an uncanny way of bringing clarity to difficult situations and, damn it, Charlie, I could use a little clarity after going around in circles the last few weeks. There are a couple of things I’d like to show you.”

I asked Boyer if he was working with the sheriff’s department and he laughed in a way that sounded as if that was an absurd idea. “No, no, I’m working for a private party.”

I agreed to meet him this afternoon in the square and he left me with a haiku that sent a chill:

Murder, Boyes Hot Spring:

strung up with black Rhino rope,

a dude named Jesus.

Meanwhile, I sent Sally the four videos of Roscoe I’d just finished editing this morning.

She responded quickly by email: “These spots are too generic. Where are Roscoe’s appeals to voters about the Georgia senate races? Where is his outrage re Trump pardoning his mob of criminal loyalists, about blocking the stimulus package and leaving millions of Americans to starve? Where’s the strategy, the political will, the urgency, the relevance? What you’ve made are feel-good ads, and feel-good is so twentieth century. Get a spine, pops.”

I decided to not respond and pretty soon Sally started to call. There seemed no reason to answer. Then the texts started flying and I turned off the sound. No way I was going to be terrorized by my daughter.

Walking to the square I got nervous—I remembered that the murdered Jesus had a history with drugs. Did Sally know him, know people who knew him? Anything was possible. Why else, I wondered, would detective Boyer want to see me?

I didn’t recognize the man when I got to the appointed spot in the park, but he came straight toward me. He’d either changed completely or I was thinking of another man. This guy had spiked red hair, wore platinum hoop earrings, and Ray-Ban aviators; he also appeared significantly lighter than the chubby man I remembered. The detective, if this was he, even appeared to have gained height, but his houndstooth Converse platforms may have accounted for that. The high-tops reminded me of Gita in her saffron Chuckies, and our brief tryst in San Francisco. She’s called a few times since but I haven’t picked up. If I’d only applied that strategy to the detective.

The guy wore a light tweed sport coat and pressed jeans, which, along with the hoop earrings, gave him the look of a pirate on his way to church. He stopped ten feet from me and I decided it had to be Augie Boyer because his facemask featured a haiku:

Winter evening—

 It is not a piece of cake

 To be born human.

“Good to see you, Charlie. Thanks for agreeing to meet with me.”

I nodded to Boyer.

“I know, how could you recognize me, Charlie? My wife Quince gave me a makeover. She wanted a little more edge from her man. What could I say; I adore the woman. I also lopped off fifty pounds, became a vegan, and jump rope every morning for forty-five minutes. Quince seems happy with the transformation, but I’m in perpetual mourning: I miss my hamburgers; I miss my baby back ribs. I woke yesterday morning from a dream of fried chicken, a platter of it with pork-braised collards.” The detective looked down at the ground like a man beset with grief. Of all things, he wore a display hankie in his breast pocket, monogrammed 5-7-5, the syllabic count of a haiku.

“I like your mask,” I said.

“It’s quite a bastardization of the original haiku by Issa.” Now he gazed at me intently. “But you, you look great, Charlie. Fit as a fiddle. Hey, that would make a decent first line for a haiku. Let’s see:

Fit as a fiddle

in the middle of the plague,

he counts his blessings.

“That’s my new thing—the speed-haiku. When we get to the end of the plague, I’ll be hosting speed-haiku slams, doing my best to promote the American vernacular. In summer contestants will be encouraged to wear their Speedos. I think it will be very popular with the post-Millennials. I bet they bring amazing velocity to their haikus, with vernacular that we can’t even imagine.”

It occurred to me that Augie Boyer had turned into a full-fledged nut case in the years since I’d seen him.

Sensing that he was losing me, he said, “But back to you, Charlie—I remember you and your daughter from the church. Sally, isn’t it?”

“That’s right.” Here we go, I thought.

“And now you have Roscoe. ‘Roscoe here.’ He’s a marvelous manipulation, Charlie. I don’t know how you get him to look so real. If you’d only get him to recite haikus, the whole world might start writing them.”

Little did this chump detective know that Roscoe could compose his own.

“Oh, before I forget, Bobby and Blossom send their fond regards, and Bobby wants you to know that your one-syllable idea for his talking machine has been invaluable.”

“Glad to hear it.” I led Boyer to a bench near the duck pond. Once we were seated, the detective unzipped his canvas briefcase and pulled out a photograph.     “Do you recognize him?”

“That’s Jesus?”

“Yes, before he was crucified.”

“He was crucified?”

“Well, I’m not sure about the technical requirements of a crucifixion. If you need to be nailed to a cross, then this Jesus doesn’t qualify. He was bound to two pillars in his family’s basement, with weighted jump rope, the same kind I use. Don’t tell anybody about that, Charlie, or they’ll come looking for me.” Boyer sniggered at his little joke. “But the poor guy’s arms were stretched out just like he was on the cross. You’d think they’d bring in the FBI to look at this as a religious killing—guy named Jesus strung up like that.”

“So it wasn’t the jump rope that killed him.”

“Nope, it wasn’t the rope.” The detective was in no hurry to tell me how Jesus died.

“So do you recognize him, Charlie?”

I looked again at the photo. “Matter of fact, I do. I haven’t been to The Fig during the pandemic, but he’s waited on me before.”

“Notice anything particular about him?”

“He was business like, not the overly friendly type server.”

“Anything else?”

I shook my head and gazed down at Boyer’s absurd houndstooth hi-tops.

“Was English his first language?”

“I believe so.”

“Have you seen him around town, Charlie?”

“Can’t say I have.”

The detective’s next question frightened me: “Do you have any reason to believe that Jesus had anything to do with your friend Pina?”

“Pina?”

“Yes, Pina.”

I expected him to say Sally, but not Pina.

“Have a look at this.” Boyer pulled a Girl and the Fig restaurant check from his briefcase. Nothing about it seemed remarkable. “Flip it over.”

I took the check and did just as the spike-haired detective said. The backside, in careful, looping handwriting, looked like this:

Pina

Pina

Pina

Pina

Pina

Pina

“Does the handwriting look familiar to you?” Boyer asked. He was watching me closely now. In shock after seeing the written repetitions, I simply shook my head.

“The handwriting is very deliberate. Very neat, wouldn’t you say? Almost fastidious.”

Again, I nodded.

“You can see that the writer strove to make each Pina identical to the others, which signifies I know not what, although it may underscore an obsessive tendency. Pina is not a common name, is it, Charlie?”

“No.”

“But it’s your girlfriend’s name. She lives with you in Sonoma and her favorite restaurant is The Girl and the Fig.”

“True, but I don’t understand the connection to the murder.”

“Maybe there is none. Maybe the customer, who Jesus waited on, just chose the word at random. Maybe the guy was thinking about another Pina when he doodled the name repeatedly.”

“Maybe it wasn’t a man. The handwriting looks like a woman’s.”

“You can’t tell these days, Charlie. It could be transgender handwriting, for all we know, but I’m betting it’s a man’s, a very special man.”

“If you don’t mind my asking, how did you end up with the check?”

Boyer rocked his head sideways and I watched his hoop earrings jiggle. “How did I end up with the check? A lot of schmoozing and, though you wouldn’t think it to look at me, a good deal of hard work.”

“I still don’t get the connection between the handwriting and the murder.”

“What if I tell you that Jesus disrespected this customer?”

“Is that what happened?”

“Could be.”

It began to feel like I’d fallen into a surreal mystery with Joe Pesci as the detective. Boyer looked at his watch and then pulled a lidded tube out of his pocket. “Hope you don’t mind, it’s my cocktail hour.” He shook a joint from the tube and lit it. After taking a few tokes, always blowing the smoke away from me, he said, “Sorry to not be able to share it, Charlie. That’s yet another casualty of the virus, what my friend Coolican calls peace pipe phobia.” The detective dropped his hot joint back into the tube, capped it, and slipped it all back into his pocket. When he noticed my surprise, he said, “The flame needs oxygen to maintain, just as my suppositions need some form of corroboration to stay kindled.”

“I don’t see how I can help with that.”

“And if I told you that the disrespected customer waited until the end of Jesus’s shift and followed him home to Boyes Hot Springs, and attacked

him . . . ”

“This is more supposition?” I asked.

“Except for the fact—and I don’t want to upset you, Charlie, because this is a very disturbing crime—except for the fact that the name Pina was also carved into the victim’s back.”

“That actually happened?”

Boyer nodded and lowered his eyes. “The handwriting match isn’t identical; the back version is roughly twice the size as the names on the restaurant check, and I think one has to make exceptions—again, this is very upsetting—given the difference of writing with pen on paper and knife on flesh.”

I stood up, not to leave, but in an involuntary response to the horror that Boyer described.

“I know how upsetting this must be, Charlie.”

I sat back down. “Why Pina?” I asked in exasperation.

“That’s what I want to know. I hear she’s a very attractive woman.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“I agree, it shouldn’t, but once in a while you get a sociopath who fixates on what he knows he can’t get.”

“Do you think Pina’s in danger?”

“If she were my wife, I wouldn’t let her out of the house for the time being.”

“You should speak with her old boyfriend.”

“Vince. Yes, I just met with him down at that food truck on Broadway, El Coyote. I knew that a Mexican food truck was unlikely to have vegan fare so I decided to emulate a Jewish fellow I know who won’t eat bacon in his house, but first chance he gets in a restaurant he’s talking BLT. Two carnitas tostadas with plenty of hot sauce later, I think I may be headed to an early grave. How are you with heartburn, Charlie?”

I ignored the question. Why the fuck did I have to listen to this joker go on about his digestion? “And Vince?”

“Yes, Vince. I met with him under false circumstances. Some times you have to do that. He doesn’t know what I told you. He sent some haikus into a contest I judge for 5-7-5 Magazine and I pretended he was one of the winners. Told him I wanted to meet him. Between you and me, Charlie, his haikus were for shit. But he’s the kind of guy that dicks like me dream about—all you need to do is flatter him. I told him that to make it personal we were collecting handwritten copies of the winning haikus, then I produced pen and paper, and he scrawled out his silly three lines. No way it was his Pina on the restaurant check. This quack has been knocking out cramped, illegible prescriptions for more than thirty years. And have you looked at his hands—knuckles twisted this way and that—that junkie’s got some serious arthritis.

“Yeah, I know all about Vince: his philandering; his fear and trembling as a doc; his subterranean journeys through the Tenderloin. I know how he wronged Pina in the past and how he took advantage of her recently after he got her drunk. I can only imagine how that made you feel, Charlie. I also know that he taunted you outside of the vegetable shack, and that you put him on the ground with a single punch; that’s enviable efficiency, Charlie.”

I could feel myself blush and wondered how Augie Boyer had found all this out.

“I took a distinct approach with him,” the detective continued. I let nothing out of the bag. The dude tried to flatter me, told me he admired my haiku book, Colloquial Man, which won the annual Seventeen Syllable Prize. I played a little speed haiku with him. The free-associations can be telling. Fed him the first line: He’s known as God’s son. Old Vince came back real flashy with, a messianic nightmare; I closed it out with: for nonbelievers.”

Boyer recited the haiku:

“He’s known as God’s son,

a messianic nightmare

for non-believers.

“Then it was Vince’s turn to commence. Man without courage, he said; I followed with, like an arthritic eunuch and he brought it home with, cries for his own soul.

Man without courage,

like an arthritic eunuch,

cries for his own soul.

“I started a final haiku for Vince: The woman I love; he came back quickly, was always too good for me; and then, in a switcheroonie, I asked him to finish it; the words must have been on his tongue: oh, how I miss her. You see, three speed-haikus tell you more about a man than a year on a therapist’s couch.

The woman I love

was always too good for me.

Oh, how I miss her. “

“So, what did you learn?” I asked, getting weary of Boyer’s hijinks.

“That Vince is a nonbeliever riven with guilt, but powerless to act, and that he’s sentimental about love, but incapable of it.” Augie Boyer pulled out his joint again and lit it. “My second martini. I’m incorrigible.” Again he blew the smoke away from me.

“So, what’s your next move, detective?”

“I’d like to speak with Pina, but I wanted to talk with you first, Charlie.”

“What do you want from her?”

“Just what you’d expect.” He holds his joint in the air. “To find out if she can think of anybody who’s obsessed with her.”

“Will you let me sit in with her when you meet?”

“You realize, Charlie, I have no legal means to compel Pina to talk with me. It’s a favor I’ll ask her, just as I asked you, but I believe it is to everybody’s benefit. By the time the sheriff’s department gets around to Pina, the killer might strike again.”

“You’re not going to play speed-haiku with Pina?” I asked, as a bad joke.

“I don’t see it as a game,” the detective said, slipping his joint back in its tube. “How about you, Charlie, you up for a quick round? Here’s the first line: The woman I love. What do you got?”

He was baiting me with the same hook he’d set for Vince. I spent some time thinking about the second line and Boyer finally barked at me: “It’s called speed-haiku, Charlie.”

“Has surprised me more than once,” I came back.

The detective said, “Why don’t you finish it, Charlie?”

With less deliberation this time, I said, “This winter alone.”

The detective recited the haiku:

“The woman I love

has surprised me more than once

this winter alone.

“Very nice, Charlie.”

Now this spike-haired creep was patronizing me. He opened his canvas case once more, pulled out a blank sheet of paper, and handed me a pen. “Would you mind writing it out, Charlie?”

For some reason I complied. I supposed I was now a suspect.