trying to look every which way at once. She’d been driving for thirty years. She’d seen from experience that people in L.A. didn’t know how to handle rain. They went too fast and they tailgated. If she hadn’t seen it for herself, the stories Colin brought home from the cop shop would have rammed the lesson home.
So she wasn’t astonished when things ground to a halt halfway home. Disgusted? Yes. Ticked off? You betcha. Astonished? No way. It was about time for the news station to run its traffic report. On the off chance, she hit the third button on the radio.
“-fic on the fives,” came out of the speakers. Freeway crashes-and there were a slew of them-came first. Then the announcer said, “And there’s a bad surface-street accident in San Atanasio, near the corner of Sword Beach and 169th Street. At least four cars are involved, and a light pole is down across the road. That’ll put a hitch in your git-along.”
He sounded absurdly cheerful. Of course, he wasn’t stuck in it. Louise was. She slid into the right lane, ignoring the horn from the asshole who didn’t care for it. Then she got off Sword Beach with almost as much relief as soldiers must have felt escaping the genuine article in 1944.
Stores and restaurants and gas stations and banks and all the other impedimenta of Western civilization fronted the avenue. As soon as you got away from it, things changed. White clapboard houses from before the war sat side by side wit faded stucco ones from not long after. The house where she’d raised her family with Colin was only a couple of miles away, but in a much better neighborhood.
A much whiter neighborhood, too. Louise might be living with a Hispanic man, but when she didn’t watch herself she still eyed faces darker than her own with suspicion. That was one more inheritance from being married to a cop, even if it was one she wished she could have escaped.
Not many white faces here. Mexicans, Salvadorans, blacks, Koreans, Filipinos… You could find everybody, and every kind of hole-in-the-wall eatery, in San Atanasio. A lot of lawns hadn’t been mown any time lately. Some of these men mowed other people’s lawns for a living, and had no time or energy to worry about their own. Before the rains started, the grass would have been yellow or brown. It greened up in a hurry, though. A few lawns had cars on them.
An Asian woman with an umbrella pushed a stroller along the beat-up sidewalk. A black guy who’d got up onto his roof with an aluminum ladder secured a blue plastic tarp with broken bricks to bandage a leak till the roofers showed up. That wouldn’t be till after it quit raining, of course, if it ever did.
Nobody paid any attention to her as she drove along. It wasn’t a neighborhood like South Central, where people stared at any white face. San Atanasio’s everybody included honkies, too. And when you were in a car, especially a car closed up against the rain, you were halfway towards invisibility anyhow.
She hit the brake as a boy on a bike zoomed out from nowhere. Plenty of kids ran here and there, rain or no rain. Well, okay. It was Saturday. No doubt their older brothers had scrawled the graffiti that marked fences and garage doors the way cat pee marked toms’ territories. San Atanasio had a graffiti-abatement program. You could call in and get them painted over for free. You could, but nobody here seemed to care.
And how long would a program like that last now that times were hard and getting harder? Probably not long. But then again, who could say where spray paint came from? If it wasn’t made here, the gangbangers would have trouble getting any more.
Would they go back to buckets and brushes? Or would they…? Cut it out, Louise told herself sternly. It wasn’t her worry. Even if it had been, she couldn’t do anything about it these days. Back when she was married to Colin, she’d fed him tips, and he’d used some of them. She was damned if she’d call him or e-mail him now. Unless it was about the kids, she wanted nothing to do with him. She didn’t want that, either, but she knew she was stuck with it.
If she turned left here, she ought to be able to get back on to Sword Beach beyond the accident. She turned-carefully. The rain was really coming down in buckets. You never saw rain like this in the fall. You hardly ever saw rain like this in January or February, as wet a season as L.A. had.
There was the stop sign at Sword Beach. Louise didn’t California it, the way she would have in good weather. It wasn’t only that she’d lost the immunity to tickets cops and cops’ spouses enjoyed in their hometown. Some jackass barreling along the street after going slow for so long was liable to cream her.
She made good time after she turned on to the thoroughfare. The accident receded in her rearview mirror. She saw a lot of smashed sheet metal, two black-and-whites, an ambulance, a fire engine, and a yellow truck with a cherrypicker from the Department of Public Works. A mess, all right. She supposed the Public Works guys were in charge of the downed light pole.
Back to the underground parking lot that had become as familiar as the old driveway used to be. She popped the trunk and grabbed as many sacks of groceries as she could carry. Rainwater dripped from the bumper. It rilled down to the center of the concrete expanse and vanished into a softball-sized drainage hole with a metal grate over it.
Louise got soaked all over again lugging the groceries up to the condo. “Oh, you poor thing!” Teo exclaimed when she came in. “Are there more? Let me fetch the rest.”
“Don’t bother. Why should you get wet, too?” Louise said. But he wasn’t listening to her. He plucked the keys out of her handbag and vanished down the stairs. He came back with the rest of the sacks a couple of minutes later. Sure as hell, he was as wet as if he’d just come out of the shower. The keys clanked when he put them back in her purse.
“Forty days and forty nights,” he said, more happily than the sentiment deserved.
Louise was already putting stuff in cupboards and the fridge. She missed her old kitchen; she didn’t have room to swing a cat in here. “I wouldn’t be surprised,” she agreed. “There was a godawful wreck on Sword Beach, too. I had to kinda go around it to get home.” She told him about it.
“Did you?” Teo said. Louise nodded. So did he, as if that explained something he’d wondered about. And it did: “I thought you were taking a while getting back.”
“Well, I was. Couldn’t help it,” Louise replied. “Hand me that chub of ground round, will you?” She stuck it in the freezer. “You can still get beef,” she said. “I know it’s fatty and everything”-Teo worried much more about nutrition than anybody she’d known before-“but you can still get it.”
“The earth is angry at us,” he said. “Who would have imagined a volcano could throw all our plans for a loss?”
He was a football fan. Louise… tolerated that. As for who would have imagined-well, Colin had been tiresome about it even before the supervolcano erupted. Of course, that was because his new squeeze worried about such things. People rubbed off on each other as they rubbed against each other. You couldn’t help it.
She smiled. Teo smiled back, and ran a hand through her wet hair. As far as Louise was concerned, she’d got the best of the bargain.
There was a technical term for what riding a bike through heavy rain was like. It bit the big one, was what it did. Marshall Ferguson had a plastic poncho that kept him at least partially dry. It bit the big one anyhow.
But so did the UCSB parking policy. There weren’t nearly enough spaces on campus. The ones that were there cost too bloody much. A bike was a lot more practical.
Most of the time. This past week, riding the bike to school tempted Marshall to take the bus instead. But he would have got drenched waiting for it, and it stopped three blocks from his place, so he would have got drenched walking to and from, too. You couldn’t win.
A car zoomed by. It kept its distance; most Santa Barbara drivers, unlike their counterparts in a lot of Southern California, at least had some notion that they shared the road with people on two wheels. That didn’t mean the tires didn’t pick up water and plaster it against Marshall’s side, then splash him in the face as the Toyota got ahead of him.
This happened at least half a dozen ties before he finally got to campus. As he did every day when he arrived, he wondered if the bus wasn’t a better idea after all. He wondered the same thing every time he pedaled home in the rain. Maybe I should suspect a trend, he thought. Somehow, though, he climbed aboard the bike every morning instead of walking to the bus stop. He always figured things would get better this next time. He might have been like that annoying song about tomorrow, tomorrow. Or he might have met one of the short definitions of insanity: doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different result.
“Hey, at least I have fun,” he muttered as he escaped the nasty traffic at last. Whether getting cold, dirty water flung in his kisser from speeding Michelins honest to God counted as fun was something he’d worry about
