Clandestine

Bakersfield wasn't the place. At three-thirty P.M., the temperature was still close to one hundred degrees. I stopped at a diner and ordered a Coke. The Coke cost a nickel and the ice that accompanied it a quarter. The counterman was giving me the fisheye. He handed me my Coke in a paper cup and opened his mouth to speak. I didn't let him; I slammed some change on the countertop and walked quickly back to my car.

Some hundred and fifty miles north of Bakersfield, I realized I was entering Steinbeck country, and I almost sighed with relief. Here was a place to light, filled with the nuances and epiphanies of my carefree college reading days.

But it didn't happen. My mind took over and I knew that being surrounded by verdant farmland and picaresque, hard-drinking Mexicans would bring back the wonder full force, along with a barrage of guilt, shame, self-loathing, and fear that spelled only one thing: it is over.

I pulled to the edge of the roadside. I let Night Train out and he ran ahead of me into a seemingly endless sea of furrowed irrigation trenches. I walked behind him, listening to his happy bays. We walked and walked and walked, kicking up dust clouds that soon covered my trouser legs with a rich, dark brown soil. I walked all the way into a spot where the world seemed eclipsed in all directions. All my horizons were a deep dark brownness.

I sat down in the dirt. Night Train barked at me. I scooped up a handful of soil and let it slip through my fingers. I smelled my hands. They smelt of feces and infinity.

Suddenly the irrigation pipes that surrounded me broke into life, spraying me with water. I got up reflexively and started running in the direction of my car. Night Train did too, quickly passing me. Some unseen timing device was at work, and the sprinklers kept popping on in perfect succession, right behind me. I ran and I ran and I ran, barely staying ahead of the ten-foot-high geysers of water. Exhausted, I came to a halt at the edge of the blacktop, trying to catch my breath. Night Train barked happily, his chest heaving also. My shoes, socks, and trouser legs were soaking wet and smelled of manure. I got clean clothes out of the suitcase in the backseat, and changed right there on the roadway.

By the time I had finished dressing and had regained my breath, an eerie stillness had come over me. It held me there and wouldn't let me move or think. After a few moments I started to weep. I wept and I wept and I wept, standing there on the dusty roadside, my hands braced against the hood of my car. Finally my sobbing stopped, as abruptly as the stillness had begun. I took my hands from the car and stood upright as tenuously as a baby taking his first steps.

It took me a solid four hours of lead-footed driving to make it back to Los Angeles. After dropping Night Train with my mystified landlady, I drove to Lorna's apartment.

I could hear her radio blaring from the living room window as I pulled to the curb. Her electrically operated front door was propped open with a stack of telephone books. She had left the light on in the stairway, and I could see the glow of candlelight illuminating her living room at the top of the stairs.

I cleared my throat repeatedly to prepare her for my coming as I took the stairs slowly, one at a time. Lorna was lying on her floral-patterned couch, with one arm dangling over the side holding a wineglass. The light from candles placed strategically throughout the room on lamp tables, bookshelves, and windowsills encased her in an amber glow.

'Hello, Freddy,' she said as I entered the room.

'Hello, Lor,' I returned. I pulled an ottoman up alongside the sofa.

Lorna sipped her wine. 'What will you do now?' she asked.

'I don't know. Who told you?'

'The four-star edition of the L.A. Examiner. 'Underhill Resigns in Wake of False Arrests Suits. Communist Ties Cited.' Do you want me to read you the whole thing?'

I reached for her arm, but she pulled it away. 'I'm sorry for yesterday, Lorna, really.'

'For my office door?'

'No, for what I said to you.'

'Was it the truth?'

'Yes.'

'Then don't apologize for it.'

Lorna's face was an iron mask in the candlelight. Her expression was expressionless, and I couldn't decipher her feelings. 'What are you going to do, Freddy?'

'I don't know. Maybe I'll paint my car red. Maybe I'll dye my hair red, too. Maybe I'll enlist in the North Korean Army. I've never done anything half-assed in my life, so why be a half-assed Commie?'

Lorna lit a cigarette. The smoke she exhaled cast her in a second halo within the amber light. Her mask was starting to drop. She was starting to get angry, and that gave me heart. I threw out a line calculated to compound that anger. 'The wonder got me, I guess.'

'No!' Lorna spat out. 'No, you bastard. The wonder didn't get you; you got you! Don't you know that?'

'Yes, I do. And do you know the only thing I'm sorry for?'

'Eddie Engels and Margaret Cadwallader?'

'The hell with them. They're dead. I'm only sorry I took you with me.'

Lorna laughed. 'Don't be sorry. I fell for circumstantial evidence and the brightest, brashest, handsomest man I'd ever met. What will you do now, Freddy?'

I took Lorna's hand, holding it tightly so she couldn't withdraw it. 'I don't know. What will you do?'

Lorna wrenched her hand free and began twisting her head sideways, banging it back and forth violently on the couch. 'I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, for Christ's fucking sake, I don't know!'

'Will you stay with the D.A.'s office?'

Lorna shook her head again. 'No. I can't. I mean, I could if I wanted to, but I can't. I can't go on with justice and cops and criminal law. When you called me and told me Engels confessed, I went straight to the D.A. Maybe I gushed about you, I don't know, but he had my number, and when Canfield brought Winton to see him and we talked afterward, I knew that I was through in the office. With Engels dead, it's final. I don't even want to be there now. Freddy, will you try to get another policeman's job?'

The naive question was a challenge. I shook my head. 'Not unless it's in Russia. Maybe I could be a deputy commissar in Leningrad, something like that. Write parking tickets for bobsleds in Siberia.'

Lorna stroked my hair: 'What do you want, Freddy?'

'I want you. That's all I know. Will you marry me?'

Lorna smiled in the candlelight. 'Yes,' she said.

We decided not to lose our momentum. Lorna hurriedly packed a suitcase while I put the top up on the car. We left immediately for the border, cracking jokes and singing along with the radio and playing grab-ass as we highballed it south on Route 5.

Coming into San Diego, Lorna started to cry as the realization hit her that she had lost her secure old life and had gained an uncertain new one. I held her tightly with one arm and continued driving. We crossed the border into Mexico at three in the morning.

We found an all-night wedding chapel on Revolucion, the main drag of Tijuana. A fat, smiling Mexican priest married us, took the ten-dollar wedding fee and typed our marriage license, assuring us all the while that it was lawful and binding before man and God.

We drove through the impoverished Tijuana streets until we spotted a hotel that looked clean enough to spend our wedding night in.

I paid for three days in advance and carried our bags to a rickety elevator that took us up to the top floor. Our room was simple: clean, polished wood floors; clean, threadbare carpeting; a clean bathroom; and a big clean double bed.

Lorna Underhill undressed, lay down on the bed and fell asleep immediately. I sat in a chair and watched my wife sleep, believing that the steadfastness of my love for her would cover all the contingencies of life without the wonder.

III