North of Montana Read online

  “Annie!” He is there in the doorway wearing nothing but a white towel at the waist, vain as ever, showing off his extraordinary tanned barrel chest and weight-lifters ropy arms.

  Even though he is seventy, hugging him bare-chested is an experience in maleness that brings back Sunday afternoons at the YMCA on Long Beach Boulevard, the reward for sustaining a perfect freestyle for fifty yards being holding my cheek to that strong upper quadrant—the compact pectorals, cool feel of chlorine-scented skin, dark furry hair surrounding a useless nipple, fascinating turkey folds under the chin, hard shoulders beneath my small naked feet as he magically lifted me out of the water to dive over his gleaming wet head. I didn’t have a father to teach me to swim; I had Poppy.

  “Happy birthday. You’re looking great.”

  “Not bad for seven decades on this earth. What’re you drinking?”

  “Brought my own.” I slip a bottle out of a bag.

  “White wine?” He shakes his head. “That’s the L.A. crowd.” Grabbing a handful of ice, “Hope you still eat red meat.”

  “I eat it and I fuck it.” Beating him to the punch.

  He cracks a can of 7UP. “Easy on the language.”

  “Sorry. I wouldn’t want to offend Moby Dick.”

  “Is that how Feebees talk?”—derisive cop term for FBI agents—“I thought they were educated bastards.”

  I laugh. Here we go. “We try to be tough. Almost as tough as you.”

  • • •

  Poppy sits in a chair near the balcony wearing nothing but the towel, legs crossed demurely, drinking Seven and Sevens until long after it is dark and the relentless air conditioning has given me a chill. The dogs are still out there. From time to time they nose against the glass near his feet like canine spirits conjured up by the original Agua Caliente Indians.

  I admit that the other reason I drove out to the desert was to tell all the details of my perfect bust at California First Bank to Poppy in person. How I was alone. How I staked the guy out and made the right moves and cuffed him with no assistance. How my brilliant interview technique led the suspect to confess to six other robberies. How it was so good it was pure sex.

  I am always offering Poppy things like that. Accomplishments. Gifts. His reaction is usually noncommittal, with the implication that it really isn’t good enough, although he did attend my graduation from Quantico in his lieutenant’s full-dress uniform, and he did cry. Still I keep coming back, hoping that what I’ve done will be better, that it will please Poppy at last.

  Moby Dick is a more appreciative audience and I find myself playing to him. He follows the action as if it were a Police Academy cartoon (which he watches religiously in the shack on Saturday mornings), stomping his huge Jordans and shouting “Right on!” Poppy’s only reaction is to tell about the time he, as a rookie patrol officer, cornered a murder suspect alone on the footpath near the Santa Monica Pier and chased him onto the beach. It was Saturday in July, crowded as hell, the suspect dove into the ocean and was never seen again.

  “Wow, Commissioner, that’s a story,” Moby Dick tells my grandfather reverentially.

  “What else happened when you were a rookie? When we lived north of Montana?”

  “Well, we had the famous Hungry Thief,” Poppy grins, settling back with his drink. “Broke into a market, stole a thousand bucks, left two half-eaten knockwurst sandwiches.”

  Moby Dick laughs, a whistling snort up the nose.

  “I went past the old house on Twelfth Street,” I put in casually. “Trying to remember what it was like. Did you and Mom and I ever live there with my father?”

  “I’ll tell you something that happened,” Poppy says suddenly, eyes bright, blatantly ignoring my question. “I had you down at the station one time when all of a sudden we hear this god-awful racket and we run outside to see what the hell it is, and goddamn, a military helicopter is making a landing right in the parking lot.”

  Moby Dick asks, “What for?”

  “For John Fitzgerald Kennedy.”

  Poppy nods to our dumbfounded silence. “The President wasn’t actually on board, but at that time he used to make quite a lot of trips out to L.A.—they said to see his brother-in-law Peter Law-ford at the beach, but actually it was so he could keep on sticking Marilyn Monroe, so the Secret Service was checking out where to land the presidential helicopter and I guess they thought the Santa Monica police station would be pretty secure, the stupid bastards, boy did they fuck up in Dallas.”

  Moby Dick says, “Amazing.”

  Poppy chuckles. “They had these guys painting lines on the parking lot, they had it all marked off with chalk, then this goddamn huge thing lands and blows it all away.”

  “Did I see the helicopter?”

  “You?” Poppy looks at me, surprised to remember I am part of the story. “You were a little girl, you were scared of all the noise and the hullabaloo. Held on to my hand like there was no tomorrow.”

  I remember none of this. It is the oddest sensation to hear a description about yourself when you can’t remember any of it, like having sex and feeling nothing.

  “Is it true President Kennedy had an affair with Jayne Mason?”

  “Great legs,” Poppy croons, again ignoring my question. “They used to call her Little Miss Sunshine, of course that’s when she was a kid. She grew into some looker. The guys had a picture of her up in the station. I saw Jayne Mason maybe ten years ago in Vegas. Beautiful voice, really something. The way she sings makes you cry.” He pats a finger against his eye as if I wouldn’t believe him. “Those are my songs.”

  Moby Dick interrupts my grandfather’s reverie with an urgent bulletin: “I’m only laying this on you because I hope and pray the FBI could do something about it but I’m warning you right now that when the shit goes down, I’m gone. I’m invisible. Okay?”

  It turns out he’s heard there are satanic sacrifices of children taking place at Frank Sinatra’s compound in Palm Springs.

  By this time I have killed the bottle. We forget about the steaks, work our way through two Domino’s pizzas and the birthday cake. “Let’s go down to the Escapade,” suggests Moby Dick.

  In my present state it sounds like a lot of fun: “You mean that place with the twin girl saxophone players?”

  “Those dolls were in their sixties at least,” Poppy corrects me.

  “All I remember is drinking Salty Dogs and dancing with a retired locksmith,” I say.

  “He’s dead. Sorry, golf tomorrow, seven a.m.”

  “It’s a rough life, Commissioner.”

  Poppy slips on a polo shirt and khaki slacks and we all go down to walk the beasts. It is midnight and the air must still be seventy degrees. The moon is high, crumpled, yellow as an old dead tooth. Moby Dick loads the animals into his van, which is spray-painted black and gray, and mercifully drives away.

  We take a circuitous route through the complex just to breathe the night air. I suddenly decide that it is too late to start rooting around the family tree. I still feel stung by Poppy’s refusal to acknowledge the question about my father and don’t want to bring it up again. Besides, I’m tired. He’s tired. I have to get up at five to drive back to L.A. and be on duty by eight. Another time. Maybe over the phone. But my voice is talking anyway:

  “Do I have a cousin named Violeta Alvarado?”

  “Not to my knowledge. Not with a name like that.”

  “On dad’s side of the family.”

  ‘Who is dad?” Genuinely puzzled.

  “My father. Miguel Sanchez. Or Sandoval. Nobody ever told me which.”

  Jesus, what is this? Just saying the name out loud, seeing him tense, and a cold chill passes through my body. Through the warm cozy alcoholic shroud I am suddenly alert. I am scared.

  “We don’t know a lot about that son of a bitch, do we?”

  “We must know something. Was he from El Salvador?”

  “Somewhere.”

  ‘What was he like?”

  “He was
a common laborer. What do you care?”

  “I’m curious.”

  “Forget about it.”

  Almost thirty years old and still afraid to make Poppy angry.

  “Some people have shown up claiming to be relatives.”

  “What do they want?”

  Making it simple: “Money.”

  “You know what I would tell them, whoever they are—get lost.”

  “You didn’t like him because he was Hispanic?”

  “I have nothing against Hispanics. I was pissed off because he knocked up my daughter.” He says this easily. Authoritatively. As the one in charge of history. “Then the son of a bitch walks away. Abandons her—and you. Why would you care about a guy who left? I’m the one who raised you.”

  “I know that, Poppy.” I take his hand. “Would you rather he stuck around?”

  “No. I didn’t want her to have anything to do with him.”

  “What did she think?”

  Poppy makes a little snuffle. A warning. “Didn’t matter what she thought. She was eighteen years old.”

  “Why didn’t she ever marry again?”

  “She was busy raising you.”

  “But she was pretty. Did she go on dates?”

  “I didn’t encourage dating.”

  “Why not?”

  “She was too young.”

  I laugh. “Young? She lived with you until she died at the age of thirty-eight.”

  Unexpectedly he puts his arm around me. “You getting this from the L.A. crowd?”

  “Getting what?”

  “This multicultural bullshit.”

  I grin with slow deep amusement. “Poppy … I think maybe I am the epitome of multiculturality.”

  As has been said of the Ayatollah Khomeini: he doesn’t get irony.

  “Like hell you are. You’re an American and if you’re not proud of it then one of us has fucked up beyond belief.”

  He goes behind a palm tree to take a leak.

  I call after him, “The house on Twelfth Street is for sale.”

  “I’m surprised it’s still standing.”

  “Who lived in the little white place next door?”

  “Swedish family. Everyone in the neighborhood was German or Swede. What I remember about them is I was working nights and they had a dog that barked its head off all day long so I couldn’t get any sleep.”

  Alone, I sit on a curb with my arms around my knees. I am getting a headache from the gummy pizzas and the saccharine cake and too much wine and I really don’t like it in the parking lot anymore. Although the sky is jammed with glittering stars, down here it is very, very dark and the lights spotting the parked cars are too weak. A constant dry wind rakes the palm fronds, rattling them with a sound like the snapping of cellophane. I am wearing cutoffs and a sleeveless denim top and I feel vulnerable. My gun is in my bag upstairs. Just around the corner from these last silent buildings is open desert. Black space.

  My heart is beating fast. I keep hearing dogs. No, now I can identify them as coyotes, laughing like a bunch of lunatics out there in the darkness. The parking lot looks strange. Did that fat asshole put LSD in my drink? I am walking home with Juanita Flores. She is wearing a sleeveless lilac-colored cotton dress trimmed with red rickrack and she is older than I am, maybe eight years old. She has stolen a tablet of white paper from school for the novel she is writing about a pair of sisters who live in a haunted house and she is asking me to steal some stamps from my mother’s bureau drawer so she can send it in to be published. She seems to be lonely and never supervised and I don’t know where she lives. We met in the playground at Roosevelt Elementary School and she drew me into her vivid world of fantasy, often wandering up to Twelfth Street on her own to find me and continue our games.

  In this memory I am seeing in the black and white of the park ing lot, a mongrel named Wilson gets out of the yard of the brick house next door and confronts us in the middle of the street, snarling and snapping. We are terrified to go on. Juanita begins to whimper. I know I must save her. I drag her back to my house.

  “Wilson’s out! Juanita can’t go home!”

  My policeman grandfather will take care of this. He comes out of the bathroom holding a rolled newspaper, big, blocking what little light there is in the narrow corridor to the kitchen.

  “She can’t stay here.”

  “But Wilson—”

  “I don’t want a little spic girl in my house.”

  I watch dumbly as he escorts my friend to the front door and out. Parting the white lace curtains that cover the narrow windows on either side of the door I see Juanita Flores alone, immobilized by humiliation and fear. The barking dog is ahead. A closed door is behind. Slowly a yellow stream trickles from beneath the lilac dress, puddling on our doorstep.

  But I am safe. I am not thrown out. Even though I have heard the boy who was my father referred to as “the Mexican,” that was far away and doesn’t count and I am not a little spic girl like Juanita Flores. In the cool darkness I look up at my grandfather, grateful for his love. From that moment on, I want to be just like him.

  EIGHT

  IT IS KYLE VERNON’S IDEA for everyone to contribute to a potluck lunch once a month. A serious student of French cooking and connoisseur of fine wines, Kyle once conned three of us from the office into taking a class in pizza making in the private kitchen of some schmancy chef up in the Hollywood Hills. I sat on a bamboo stool and drank the free Chianti Classico and made wise-ass remarks. Kyle was in ecstasy. He just didn’t want the excitement to end. The Brentwood housewives went home with special pizza baking stones and dried oregano still on the vine; I went home with no illusions about rolling out the dough for the man in my life.

  This month Kyle shows off with a couple of French apple pies for which the apples have been cut so thin he must have used a razor. The slices are arranged in perfect concentric circles on a layer of custard and covered with a coating of orange jelly that he identifies as apricot glaze.

  “Geez, Kyle,” I say, “why didn’t you just go to a bakery? You could have saved a lot of work.”

  “Ana, it’s people like you who wrecked the Pietà.”

  “Pietà,” I muse just to get him going, “isn’t that some kind of a Middle East sandwich?”

  Barbara baked lasagne and Rosalind brought a tuna casserole. Duane Carter’s contribution, needless to say, is Texas chili so bitter and hot it makes you sweat. Frank Chang’s mother made Chinese raviolis and I plunk down a family-size container of Chicken Mc-Nuggets.

  Kyle looks pained. “I’m not even sure we should allow that semi-food product on this beautiful table.”

  “Hey, I don’t have a wife to go shopping for me.”

  “Who’s talking wives? I went to Ranch Market and personally inspected each and every piece of fruit that went into those tarts.”

  “That’s because you’re a compulsive maniac who should be treated.”

  “What about Barbara? What about Rosalind?” Kyle goes on. “Do they have wives? Or do they put their best effort forward for their squad?”

  “He has a wife.” I point dramatically to Donnato, who looks up from prying the lid off a giant blue plastic bowl filled with lettuce and topped off with slices of carrots and radishes that are in turn carefully overlaid with rings of red onion and green pepper to create a virtual kaleidoscope of vegetables.

  “Admit it, Donnato. Your wife made that salad.”

  “The evidence is compelling. I’ve never known a man who could use Tupperware,” Barbara remarks in her dry way. “The airlock seal is beyond them.”

  Donnato unscrews the lid from a fresh bottle of blue cheese dressing and dumps the entire thing in a pile into the bowl. “Guilty as charged. Chain me to the wall and beat me.”

  “Very tempting,” I whisper, reaching past him for the Chinese raviolis, which I know from experience are the best thing out there.

  At first he doesn’t seem to react. His eyes are on the black plastic tongs he is us
ing to toss the salad; the tongs from the utility drawer in the harvest gold kitchen in the tract house in the Simi Valley, where the daisy pot holders match the daisy towels and the metal canisters lined up by size are lettered Sugar, Spice, Everything Nice.

  Finally, after giving it a lot of thought, Donnato calls my bluff: “If you’re into that sort of thing I know a leather bar up on the Strip.”

  “And I bet you’re a regular customer.”

  Still deadpan: “We’ve been partners for three years but how much do you really know about me, Ana?”

  I laugh. “I can see you in a lot of things, Donnato, but somehow leather is not one of them.”

  “What’s so funny?” Barbara wants to know.

  “Donnato in a black leather girdle.”

  Donnato’s mouth has taken on a funny pull, a hint of a smile beneath the beard.

  “I can see you,” he says. “Annie Oakley in black lace.”

  Barbara elbows my ribs conspicuously and fires something back at him which I am not hearing. His eyes touch mine for half a moment—Annie Oakley in black lace?—then he turns away and I find myself unexpectedly flushed from the groin like a teenager.

  Back in the bullpen a phone is ringing.

  “I’ll get it.” Rosalind automatically puts her plate down.

  “No—it’s mine.” I can see the light flashing on my desk across the room.

  The moment I hear Mrs. Gutierrez’s voice the sexy little high evaporates as my stomach contracts into an anxious knot.

  “Everybody is sick,” she is telling me. “All the children have the runny nose and Cristóbal is hot.”

  “Does he need to see a doctor?”

  “I don’t think so. I think he gonna get better in a day. I just give him soup.”

  I am watching the group behind the glass partition of the lunchroom. Donnato is listening along with everyone else to Duane Carter holding forth. Even with his slumped shoulders Duane is tallest. He says something that makes everyone laugh.