“No. I mean really. You graduated.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“University of Minnesota. Journalism.”
Travis grinned. “I’ve handled twenty-three people, counting dependents, in WITSEC. You’re my first college graduate. Also the first one who had a workable plan for their future. I’m fucking amazed.”
They were winding through rolling foothills, and soon the land broadened out. The air thickened, spongy with mist.
There were orchards, fields, and more swarthy people in jeans and straw Stetsons. Mexicans. Mexicans with muddy boots. The Pajaro was soggy this season. Travis stopped for a red light and then put on his left turn signal.
“This is Scotts Valley. I know a guy here. We’re going to get you a haircut.”
Not suggesting. De facto. Danny shrugged. They pulled off in front of a rundown strip mall of storefronts. One had a crude barber pole painted on the plate glass. Inside there were two chairs, both empty. A short Mexican guy in a white smock was sweeping the floor. A quick smile creased his brown face when he saw Travis.
“
“Hey, Travis. Good, man. Finally got it.”
They shook hands ritually, locking thumbs, cupping fingers, then clasping both hands.
“Great. Ah, this is a friend of mine. Danny Storey. Meet Hector Sanchez.”
Danny took the guy’s hand. After a more conventional handshake, he discreetly wiped a patina of Vitalis off on his pant leg.
Travis said, “Danny needs a haircut. He looks like he just crawled out of a blizzard. Fix him up so he looks at home eating fish and chips on the Municipal Wharf.”
“Could you cut it like James Dean?” asked Danny.
Hector squinted. Vacant. But he winked and said. “Yeah, sure, sit down.” Travis laughed and said, “I’ll do my best to stage direct.” Hector unfurled an apron like a matador and whipped it around Danny’s neck as he sat in a chair.
Travis gave pointers as tufts of Danny’s hair collected on his shoulders and tumbled down into his lap. Hector massaged some fix in Danny’s new hair and worked him over with a hair drier.
Travis paced, arms folded, squinting. “Yeah, I think so.
James Dean for the 1990s.”
The chair spun and Danny studied his new head in the mirror. His hair was full on top and short on the sides. Kind of lightning-struck.
“Get you some sun, maybe a little body piercing, you’ll look like a native,” approved Travis.
“I’ll skip the earrings,” said Danny.
“No problem, I just do it to blend in with the gazelles up in Frisco.” Travis handed Hector a roll of bills, they did their elaborate routine with the hands again. Then Travis and Danny left the shop. The soft late afternoon light was a cool haze around Danny’s ears. They got back in the truck.
“So what do you think?” asked Travis.
“He’s one of your success stories,” said Danny.
Travis gave him an appraising look. “You got it. I’m trying to help, but he’s sucking wind, one day at a time. Maybe I can swing him a better location in town, that’d help. But basically he’s fucked. He’s an almost illiterate Mexican dude who sold dope all his life. And now he’s the one thing he was raised to hate: a rat, a squealer. Guy never heard of James Dean.” Travis sighed. “What are you gonna do. Most of my clients are up north in the Bay Area. I don’t get down here a whole lot.”
“You put him through school to cut hair?” asked Danny.
“Nah, he picked that up in the joint.”
“Life is not fair. And anything that can go wrong, will,” he observed.
“A-fucking-men,” said Travis. They drove in silence for a while, entering a built-up area. Travis whipped into another strip mall, but this one was broad, paved, land scaped, full of late-model cars and devoid of Mexicans.
“What is this?” Danny balked as Travis walked him into a tanning salon.
Travis spun on his Spanish heels. “Hector just got his new birth certificate. It took nine months. Yours is in the glove compartment of the truck. Along with a new Social Security card. Tomorrow when you get a driver’s license, they take your picture. Right now your face looks like veal.
“After you get your temporary license, we go to the bank and you open a checking account. Then I sell you this truck and the tools in it. Then we take you to look at the house you’re going to buy from us on a land contract. You’re getting it at a steal because of a stipulation we write into the contract, that you rehab it. You with me so far.”
“What about the computer, printer, modem?”
“In the works. The best money can buy.”
Danny pushed past Travis into the salon and walked up to the receptionist. “How long is the wait to get into a booth?”
An hour later they were strolling past an open fish market on the Municipal Wharf that jutted into Monterey Bay from downtown Santa Cruz.
“You don’t need that jacket, it’s warm,” said Travis.
“That’s okay,” said Danny, hugging his jacket.
“See that.” Travis pointed at a large mound of fish flesh on ice. “That’s a bonito, that fish rode El Nino from Hawaii.
Everything here is upside down this winter.”
Danny smiled; the idea that things were upside down put him on top for a change. Soon they were, as Travis had predicted, sitting outside at a picnic table, eating fish and chips.
Lassitude wrapped Danny. He watched the twilight play on his newly grilled arm. His reflection in the restaurant window stared back at him. Tanned, the contacts, the shorter, swept-back hair. Eerie.
“See that big hotel over there on the boardwalk,” said Travis. “That’s where we’ll stay tonight. Tomorrow I’ll take you to the house.”
Danny swung his eyes, saw a lot of hotels. Yawned. There was a beach, but nobody was swimming. And the Coney Island fretwork of an amusement park. And sailboats. Some tourists, Japanese maybe, were tossing shreds of hot dog buns off the pier to sea lions that roared hollowly below them among the pilings. A pelican perched on the railing in back of Travis, and behind the pelican the setting sun smelted the smoky sky and the ocean into a sheet of burning amber chrome.
He had been trained to ruthlessly excise cliches from his writing. But right now, he couldn’t improve on: today is the first day of the rest of your life.
52
Danny woke early, windows thrown open to the swoosh of Pacific surf, and went slowly at the day, one cup of room service coffee at a time. He took the carafe of coffee and the little silver creamer out to the small table on the balcony that overlooked the fog-soaked boardwalk. Wet cement tickled under his bare feet. Mist. Dew. Everything was jeweled. He could make out the ghostly shapes of palm trees and pine trees side by side, and the white tufts of the tall lollipop grass that Travis called pampas grass. Red tile roofs and squared-off hacienda architecture.
The gourmet air smelled like rising tropical dough. Dank.
Humid.
People came here to start over. They had to. No more land to run away on. Me too, he thought.
The fantasy returned. Warm in his lap. As the first blades of dawn stirred the mist he pictured Ida Rain sitting across from him in a silky little bathrobe, kind of a kimono thing.
Saw it draped open to show the one perfect crease that marked her smooth stomach. They’d have hidden the
