Golden States (22 page)

“When you’re a little older, this won’t seem so bad,” he said. “I have a feeling it may come to seem very usual. Please don’t cry.”

“I’m not crying,” David said, and just that suddenly he wasn’t. The tears dried up. He lifted his pack and walked out of the room, with Warren following.

“Look, it’s starting to rain,” Warren said when they got to the living room. David looked at the window and saw silver slashes of rain against the glass. The tears had left a ragged heaviness in his throat.

“Uh-huh.” He went to the door.

“Wait,” Warren said. “You liked this parasol, didn’t you? Take it with you.”

David hesitated, holding the doorknob. Warren jumped across the room and picked up the paper umbrella. When he lifted it the light behind was exposed, a glaring round bulb onthree black metal legs. The light in the room changed from pale gold to white.

“Here,” he said, offering David the umbrella. After a moment, David accepted it. The handle was a stick of bamboo, wrapped at the bottom with thick green cord.

“It won’t do in a typhoon,” Warren said. “But it’s better than nothing.”

“Thank you,” David said. He looked up at the umbrella and saw the painted Japanese letters, backwards. Ordinarily he’d have asked what they said, in case it was something embarrassing that a Japanese person might laugh at.

“You’re most welcome,” Warren said. “Have a safe trip.”

“Okay.” David now had both hands full, and Warren opened the door for him.

“If you feel like coming back when you’re older, you know where to find me. Drop in anytime.”

“Uh-huh. Thank you. I mean ...” David got the umbrella out the door and stood in the hallway with it over his head. It cast a patch of golden light around him.

Warren stood in the doorway with the door half closed. “Do you really like that umbrella?” he asked.

David shrugged, and nodded.

“See? Things aren’t so bad. Night.”

“Good night.”

Warren shut the door. The paper angel came up close, her perfect red lips pressed together, her eyes indistinguishable behind the dark glasses.

H
e walked out into the street with the umbrella over his head. Rain thumped against it like gravel on a drum. David closed the umbrella and put it in his pack, so it wouldn’t get ruined. The rain fell on his head and shoulders as he walked down the hill. He watched his white tennis shoes on the glistening concrete. He thought about nothing. His mind was as empty as it had ever been.

He came to the bottom of the hill, where the quiet street intersected a busy one. A group of people waited at a bus stop. He asked one of them, a woman in red overalls, how to get to Bush Street. She reeled off a series of buses. Bush Street was far away. David lost track after the second bus but nodded comprehendingly as the woman spoke. When the woman was finished he thanked her and went to wait at the stop across the street, where she’d directed him. He held his pack tightly to his belly.

The bus came in a few minutes, crackling with hard white light. David hung back and was the last one on. The driver wasa thin black man with a pocked face and a goat beard that came to a grizzled point. He held the wheel straight-armed, as if he were driving a plow.

“How much is it?” David asked.

“Sixty cent,” the man said without looking at him. He pulled a lever and the doors closed with a rubberized sigh.

David dug sixty cents out of his pocket. It was nearly the last of his money. “Could you tell me how to get to Bush Street?” he asked.

“Transfer at Van Ness,” the driver said. He tore a slip of paper off a pad, flicked it in David’s direction.

“Thank you,” David said. He accepted the paper. As he started down the aisle the bus lurched forward. He nearly fell over into a Mexican woman’s lap, knocking her big brown knee with his pack. He said, “Excuse me.” It didn’t help. He struggled into an empty seat. He was wet from the rain. Everybody on the bus knew there was something wrong with him.

When he got off at Van Ness, an old woman with her dress buttoned wrong walked up as if she’d been expecting him. She said, “Got a quarter?” in an impossibly deep, froggy voice. He gave her his last one because he didn’t think in time that it was possible not to.

He stood at the corner of Van Ness, wet, waiting for his next bus. There were two other people. They were both women, both carrying umbrellas and big purses. The darkness was complete now. The utility tower at the top of Warren’s hill, studded with red lights, blinked to warn low-flying aircraft. Lights had come on in the windows of houses on the hill; one of the lights was Warren’s. He had wanted Warren to touch him. A part of him had known Warren would try to touch him when he first stepped into the car in Oakland. His clothes clung wetly to his body. For a moment he had no idea why he had come here, or what he would do next.

A police cruiser pulled up. There were two Cops inside. Theone who was not driving got out. A black cop. He walked toward David. He was no more or less logical than the woman who wanted a quarter.

The cop said, “Your name David Stark?”

“No,” David said. He heard his voice from far away, a fluttering thing, a scrap of paper.

“What is your name, please?”

“Um—” He hesitated, and knew he was lost. “It’s David Stark,” he said.

The cop nodded. His head grew directly out of his shoulders. “David Stark,” he said. “Your family is worried about you.”

“I know,” David said. He wondered if he was trembling. He checked his hands. They were trembling.

“You come on with us, David Stark,” the cop said, “and we’ll put you together with your family again.”

“Um, I was just coming to see my sister. Could you take me to her house? She lives on Bush Street.”

“No sir. That we cannot do. We’re going to take you to the station, and we’ll call your sister from there. Come on into the car now, hmm?”

David speculated a moment over whether he could outrun the cop. The cop looked pretty old. As if he sensed what David was thinking the cop spread out a big pink hand and said, “Come on now. Hmm?”

David went. The two women were staring at him. The closer of the women wore a bandana around her head and gold hoops in her ears, though she wasn’t a gypsy. David tried to walk proudly, like a good, interesting criminal.

The cop opened the back door for him. As David was getting in, the cop said, “I’m going to have to take the backpack up front.”

“Oh,” David said.

“It’s the rules.” Again the big pink hand appeared. David looped the pack’s strap over the man’s palm.

“Thank you,” he said.

“You’re welcome.” David got in the back of the cruiser, and the cop closed the door after him. The back was separated from the front seat by thick wire mesh, just like you’d think.

“It’s him,” the black cop said to the other one at the wheel. “T-shirt with Stevie Wonder on it.”

“Boy’s got taste,” the other cop said.

“Well, I wouldn’t know,” the black cop said. “Who’s Stevie Wonder?”

They pulled out into traffic. “Stevie Wonder is the greatest pro ballplayer who ever lived,” the other cop said.

David looked back and saw his bus coming. He sat with his arms folded over his chest. The black cop took up a microphone* and said into it. “This is car nine-oh-six. We have apprehended a runaway at Market and Van Ness and are bringing him in. Stark. Right. Ten four.”

They really said “ten four.” David looked at the people in the car next to them, three Japanese men in a Pontiac, and wondered what they would think of a kid sitting in the back of a cruiser. They did not appear to think anything at all.

“I can’t believe we found him,” said the cop at the wheel.

“I told you it was him. I spotted the shirt.”

“You got a sharp eye, man. Hey, you ever heard of Miles Davis?”

“Nope. Who’s he?”

“He’s a famous ballplayer too.”

“I don’t follow baseball.” They both laughed. The black cop went “Haw haw haw.”

They drove with traffic, and left their siren off. David was no emergency. He wondered if they would test him and find out he was stoned. He wondered what they would think about the gun. His legs started jiggling and he let them do it. He had almost gotten to Bush Street. He whispered, “Sorry, Janet,” and liked himself for having done it, for saying something like that right out loud in a police car. For one fine soaring moment heimagined a movie he was the star of, about a kid who travels enormous distances through the north woods to rescue the girl he loves. He survives terrible dangers. He swims icy rivers and outruns packs of wolves, he battles criminals and murderers, and is falsely arrested just before he reaches the final shootout. He tried to picture what the ending would be. In the movie version he’d escape from jail and save his girl amid a swarm of bullets.

The police didn’t find the gun in his pack until they were at the station, until David had checked in with a sergeant and been sent to sit alone in a room with a big blond table surrounded by chairs. The room had no windows, and three of its walls were covered by bulletin boards, scrabbly-looking white cork covered with pinholes. The only piece of paper was a pale green sheet with three telephone numbers written on it in blue ink. There was no telephone.

He sat in the room for a long while. He switched from chair to chair. The man who finally came in was not a cop at all. He wore green corduroy pants and a plaid shirt.

“Hi, David,” the man said, with such cheerful recognition David wondered whether they’d met before.

“Hi,” he said with a friendly smile, just in case.

“Mind if I sit down?” the man said. He had a wide round face and no hair on top of his head. The hair on the sides, spaniel-colored, drooped down over his ears.

“No,” David said, still grinning uncertainly.

The man pulled out a chair next to the one David sat in. He was wearing Old Spice lime. “My name is Darrell,” he said, extending his hand.

“Hi,” David said. They shook hands. Darrell’s was so dry it might have been talcumed.

“I just want to talk to you for a few minutes,” Darrell said. “Would that be all right?”

“Uh-huh.”

Darrell nodded, a series of short elastic bobs of the head. “How are things at home?” he asked.

“Okay.”

“Have you been having some trouble there?”

This was difficult to answer. He was not sure what Darrell meant by “trouble,” and not sure what the right answer would be. “I don’t know,” he said.

Darrell nodded and nodded. “How do you get along with everybody back there?” he asked.

“Okay.” He wondered if he should mention Lizzie, and decided not to.

“Really okay? Everything at home is really just fine?”

“I guess.” He was not holding up his end of the conversation. To be polite, he added, “Are you a psychiatrist?”

“I’m a counselor,” Darrell smiled, nodding. “Does that bother you?”

“No,” David said.

“Good. David, can you tell me why you left home?”

“Well, I was going to get my sister. She’s my half-sister, really. Her name is Janet.”

“I know her name is Janet. What exactly do you mean when you say you were going to ‘get’ her?”

“Well, she went off with this guy Rob, and she doesn’t really love him.”

“Did she tell you that?” Darrell asked.

“Uh-huh. Sort of.”

“Then why do you think she went off with him?”

“I don’t know.” He searched his memory for a phrase. “I think she was afraid,” he said.

“Afraid of what?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you think?”

“Well, I think she’s afraid she won’t get to be a doctor.” “Does she want to be a doctor?”

“I don’t know. I think so.”

“What do you think about the man she went off with?” “Rob. He’s okay.”

“Is he?”

“Well, my mother doesn’t like him very much.”

“Do you like him?”

“No. Not very much.”

“David, what were you going to do with the gun?”

“Well, I just sort of thought I should take it.”

Darrell nodded. “Did you ever think you might shoot anybody with it?”

“No,” David said.

“Did you think you might shoot your sister’s boyfriend with it?”

David thought for a moment. “No,” he said.

“Are you sure?”

“Uh-huh.”

“What if it had gone off accidentally? Would you have been sorry if it did?”

“Well, yes.”

“Do you know how many bullets were in the gun?”

“Oh. There were bullets in it?”

“Actually no, there weren’t any bullets in it. I wondered if you knew that.”

“Oh.”

“Did you know for sure that there were no bullets in it?” “Yes,” David said.

Darrell nodded and nodded. “David, if you left home again, would you take a gun? Do you think it’s a good idea to take a gun with you?”

“No,” David said. And he added, for good measure, “I wouldn’t leave home again anyway.”

“Would you be afraid to leave home again?”

“No,” David said, and realized only after he’d said it that it was true.

Darrell sighed. “I guess that’s enough for now, David,” he said.

“What’s going to happen?” David asked him.

“Your sister’s out there arranging things. She’s going to put you on a plane back home.”

“Janet’s here?”

“That’s right.”

“Is she going to come in here? I mean, in this room?”

“No, we’ll send you out to her. It won’t be long. Do you have to use the bathroom?”

“No,” David lied. He could hold it.

“Okay. It’s been nice talking to you, David.” Darrell stood up and shook his hand again.

“Bye,” David said.

“See you.” As Darrell left the room, David wondered if he’d gotten his answers right.

A cop came for him some time later. He took David down a corridor, and instead of going back the way David had been brought in, the cop directed him down a second hallway and into a waiting room. As he went, David searched for a less pathetic way of being. He walked with a slight cowboy bend in his legs.

Janet was standing in the middle of the waiting room, smoking a cigarette. David stopped and stood, unable to negotiate the last few paces. She smiled at him, holding her cigarette between two fingers, and they stayed that way a moment. Janet wore jeans and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Her hair hung loose around her shoulders.

“Are you okay?” she asked him.

He nodded. They both stepped forward. She took his hand rather than embrace him. “I can’t believe you did this,” she said.

“I know,” David said. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. Nobody got hurt. Come on, I think we can go.” She looked over his shoulder at the cop. “Can we go?”

“Yep,” the cop said.

“I signed about a thousand forms,” Janet told David, “and you’re released to my care. I fooled them into thinking I was an adult.”

“Oh.”

They started out of the waiting room, and she rested her hand on the back of his neck. “There’s going to be some court stuff in L.A.,” she said. “I think you’re going to have to see a shrink for a while. But don’t worry. I’ve been to half a dozen of them and they’ve hardly done me any harm at all.”

She guided him out of the room and down a wide hall with a speckled brown linoleum floor.

“What are we going to do?” David asked.