House of Smoke (7 page)

“Do you have all your stuff?” Franks asks her. “You check through the lockers, bathroom, storage bins?”

“Yes, Frank,” she promises, soothing his anxiety, which she doesn’t understand. If she did forget something on the boat she could call the people Frank chartered it from and they could mail it to her. Sometimes he can be too much of a mother hen.

“Okay, then,” he says. “I’ll see you …”

“Whenever. Don’t take too long.”

“I’ve got to stay until they’re gone,” he tells her, his voice also low. “I trust Rusty, but it’s your family’s dock and I feel responsible.”

“That’s comforting.”

Against her better judgment, she had given them permission to put in at her family’s private dock north of Santa Barbara, because it was Fiesta, and during Fiesta the harbor’s a zoo, there’s no mooring for miles; with the clear understanding that they’re leaving tomorrow at first light for points unknown to her. She had wanted to say “no,” but she would have felt like a snob. Besides, Frank already promised them, she could feel his unspoken pressure.

He kisses her neck. “I won’t be long.”

She kisses him back. He can be a prick at times but she loves him, that’s the way it is. He’s a man, a man among the boys she’s known all her life. “And keep your hands off Sheena,” she adds, directing her stare at Morgan, who’s striking a pose on the dock.

“If that’s the best I can do, I’m pretty pathetic. I’ve got you, babe, and that’s more than enough woman for any man.”

Which is a crock of shit, but he’s her man, you put up with it.

She calls out in false bonhomie to the others: “See you later, guys. It was fun. Thanks for everything.” Then she starts walking the length of the dock (uttering a final “and fuck you” under her breath) towards a dusty Jeep Grand Wagoneer which is parked alongside a couple of ranch pickups, both of which are adorned with camper shells.

“Hey, wait up!” Morgan calls as she emerges from below deck, wrestling a Samsonite valpack behind her. “I’ll ride in with you.” She’s pulled on a pair of skintight shorts over her bikini, the two-inch-wide top barely concealing her nipples.

“You’re not going in till I do,” Rusty informed her curtly.

“But why do I have to wait around here?” Morgan pleads. “I want a real shower, I want to wash my hair.”

“Because you’re with me, not her,” Rusty answers with finality, putting his body between Morgan and the dock.

“Don’t bother Laura,” he orders her. “And get your silly suitcase out of our way.”

Laura gives Morgan a bemused smile, as if to say “your
problema
, sister, not mine.” Tossing her bag into the back of the Wagoneer, she starts the engine and takes off up the private hard-pack dirt access road that winds through the hilly overgrowth to the highway. After waiting a moment to let the dust settle, she gets out of the car to unlock the security gate, swings it open, then turns and looks down the bluff, at the boat.

The men are lounging on deck, drinking an end-of-the-journey beer. Morgan, apart and alone, stares up at the car. Even from this distance Laura can see the pathetic look on Morgan’s face.

“
Hasta la vista
, baby,” Laura sings out gaily. She shuts the gate and slams home the combination lock, twirling the dial and pulling it hard to make sure it’s secure. Then she jumps back into the car and eases onto Highway 101, disappearing in the flow of the traffic as she heads south towards the Queen Mission city.

“Okay, everybody who’s done this before, I want you on this side, the rest of you, over here with me.”

They are in what used to be, seventy-five years ago, the gymnasium of an exclusive all-girls high school, decades defunct now. Located in the center of town (a block from the bus station, making it especially convenient to seniors), the county appropriated it by eminent domain a couple of decades ago and brought it up to speed, serving now as a multicultural center for a multitude of gatherings: “The New Woman: Empowering Her Liberty Through Non-Competitive Sexuality”; Craft Gatherings: “Pottery for Seniors”; and this evening’s dance class, “Introduction to Western Swing with Ron and Gloria.”

Kate is clustered with the other rank amateurs, wondering what the hell she’s doing here. It seemed like a good idea a little while ago, when she spotted the poster on the bulletin board of the Venezia Cafe, a local coffeehouse where she had repaired to escape the meat-market frenzy of Kris & Jerry’s. A break in the action; to sit in a quiet, comfortable spot, listen to some jazz coming over the CD system, peruse this week’s issue of
The Grapevine
, the weekly alternate newspaper, while sipping a double latte, so as to better fortify the body and soul for one more plunge into public revelry before going back to blessed solitude. But no! Like a brain-damaged girl-scout she had to check out the poster, remember that she’d been wanting, on and off, to learn how to dance country; and here, a foot in front of her face like a small gift from the gods, she spies a sign promoting an absolutely introductory lesson two blocks down the street, starting in less than half an hour. How could she resist?

“Okay now,” instructor Ron tells Kate and the other stags, “you and you, you and you, you and you,” all down the line. Boy-girl, boy-girl, near the end running out of boys, so some of the girls become boys for now, don’t worry, they’re reassured, partners are changed after every few dances, everyone will have the chance to dance their own sex’s part.

“I guess it’s you and me,” Kate’s partner says to her.

“Guess so,” she replies, looking up at him.

“Lucky me,” he says with a grin; a nice grin, for real.

She could have done worse, she thinks. She could have done a lot worse. Fairly tall, hard and athletic; rough as a cob, that’s her immediate impression, but with the kind of lived-in face that’s sympathetic rather than off-putting. Dressed like a cowboy; a real one, not the drugstore kind. Jeans, old scuffed boots, short-sleeve western shirt. About her age, she guesses, give or take a few years one side of the ledger or the other. In fact, she realizes, looking around at the other men in here, this fellow is the pick of the litter.

“Have you ever done this before?” he asks her politely, as they wait for the lesson to start.

“No. You?”

“A couple times, informally. You know, in a dance bar where they’re playing something by Garth Brooks or someone.” He smiles. “I’m pretty much a left-footed dancer, so you’ll have to be patient with me.”

“I’m no great shakes myself,” she tells him. Which isn’t true; she dances well enough, particularly the slower ones, she likes them when she’s with a man she cares about, being held close and feeling a man’s body pressed up against her own.

“We should introduce ourselves,” the man says with old-fashioned formality. “My name’s Cecil Shugrue.”

He holds his hand out. It’s callused, cracks around the nails. Maybe he is a cowboy. She’s never met one.

“Kate Blanchard.”

They shake hands. He knows how to shake a woman’s hand; nice and strong, but not hurtful. Big hands—hers is lost in his, and she isn’t petite.

“Nice to meet you, Kate.”

“Let’s form a big circle, people.” Gloria, the female half of the dance team, claps her hands to get everyone’s attention, “men on the inside, ladies to their right. No, hon, you’re a boy this time, remember? Like this.” She stands in the center, joining hands with Ron. “Quick-quick slow-slow, quick-quick slow-slow, quick-quick slow-slow, quick-quick slow-slow. That’s all there is to it.”

She nods to the band, four elderly men who have been sitting patiently on the sidelines holding their respective banjo, fiddle, guitar, and dobro.

“Watch us one time, then you all can try it.”

Frank Bascomb leans against the mast, shading his eyes against the sun, which is parked on the horizon, taking its own sweet time to set. Enough of this bullshit waiting around, he thinks, as he turns to Rusty. “Let’s get started.”

Rusty glances to the west. The sun’s sitting there, on top of the water, stubbornly refusing to sink out of sight.

“Still light out,” Rusty comments.

“Not for long,” Frank answers back. “We’ll be fumbling around in the dark with this shit—I don’t want to trip on a rope and lose a hundred grand overboard.”

Rusty licks the side of his lip, as if tasting that option.

“Security’s gone home? For sure?”

“I told you. More than once.” Frank wants out of here. This has been a long time coming; years of letting friends of his use the Sparks family dock, always for legitimate reasons, with the same excuse to the family—the harbor’s too crowded. They’re not crazy about his cavalier attitude regarding their property, but they let it slide, because Frank Bascomb is the best ranch manager on the central coast. So he gets a big head at times, doesn’t always remember the distinction between employee and employer. They can live with that. He gets the job done, that’s their bottom line with Frank.

Now it’s his turn. One time for all the chips: a million large, his share after cutting Rusty his piece (an equitable quarter-million) and splitting with his secret partner, the moneybags who fronted the buy. Their deal is equal, fifty-fifty after the money recoups the investment. This is Frank’s fuck-you money, his freedom. No more ass kissing, to anyone.

Get the shit off the boat pronto and into the pickups, drive the pickups to San Marcos Self-Storage, the garage unit he rented before they set sail. Then a shower and Miranda Sparks’s bash.

Rusty takes another squint at the sun.

“Okay,” he concedes. “We can get started now.” He calls to his partner, the other sailor. “Come on down below, let’s start hauling this shit up top.”

“A
RE WE HAVING FUN
yet?” the younger man mockingly asks, ineffectively wiping the sweat off his face with the front of the sodden T-shirt which lies heavy across his body, so wet he could wring a cupful of water out of it. He’s a good fifty pounds overweight, he’s been warned to cut down on the excesses or he could be a statistic before he’s forty.

“Three degrees to the right,” his partner calls out, ignoring the sarcasm. This partner, almost a generation the lard-ass’s elder, has a washboard stomach and the same military flattop he acquired in the Marines forty years before. Nothing impure ever touches his lips, not even decaf coffee. It’s rumored that his shit truly doesn’t stink.

The surveyor standing downhill, who had asked the question, moves his pole slightly.

“Two more degrees.”

The pole moves to the right again, a fractional motion.

“Stake that.”

“It’s getting too dark to see,” the downhill man complains as he pounds a numbered wooden stick into the ground with a five-pound sledgehammer. “Let’s bag it now and come back tomorrow.”

The lead surveyor, who is known for his obstinacy, shakes his head. “We’re behind already, the company needs to hand in this report to the planning commission by Tuesday, and we have the whole other side of the range to do yet, which’ll take all day tomorrow. We only have to set two more coordinates, we can do it. Anyway, you’re on overtime, so quit your bitching.” He squints into his transit. “43 degrees, 12 minutes,” he mutters to himself, marking the figures in his log. He shoulders his tripod and starts moving further west across the plateau.

The reasons for this survey are unknown to those doing the work in the field. This happens all the time, for numerous purposes: the Southern Pacific Railroad wants to add a spur for which the state must buy or condemn private lands through the doctrine of eminent domain; a developer wants to build a retirement community; whatever. The information these two surveyors compile will become part of a 30-page supplement to a 350-page document that will be one piece of a paper blizzard that will take years to compile and will be read, in total, by no one.

“You see that?”

“Where?”

“Down there.”

“It’s a sailboat.”

“I know that. What are they doing?”

“I don’t know. Taking stuff off.”

The lead surveyor takes up his field glasses, Bausch & Lomb 10 x 42 Armored Elites that cost upwards of seven hundred dollars and are rated one of the best compact field glasses in the world for long-range work like birding in wide-open spaces (an extravagance for someone in his income bracket, but it’s his one true passion), adjusts the eyepiece screw to the left to compensate for his nearsightedness, and looks down at the dock.

“What’re you looking at?” the other man asks.

The lead man doesn’t answer; he keeps staring down.

“If there’s a chick down there lying naked on the deck I want to see it, too.”

“Shut up for a minute.”

They can see the boat clearly, but they can’t be seen; the trees and growth hide them from sight. Still, the surveyor cups a hand over the top of the binoculars to make sure the sliver of sun that hasn’t fallen below the horizon doesn’t reflect off the lenses and reveal their position.

“Take a look,” he says finally, handing the glasses over.

The second man readjusts the focus. He searches around, looking for the dock, then spots it.

“Yeah, I see what you mean,” he says, smiling. “They’re huge.”

“Give your cock a rest. Do these people look familiar to you?”

“How the hell should I know?” The other one laughs. “No shit, with a set like that she ought to be in
Penthouse
.”

“You asshole,” the lead man growls, pulling the glasses off the other’s face.

“Come on, man, lighten up. It’s a private dock, it’s none of our business.” He starts to put the glasses to his face again, to get another look at Morgan.

“That’s my point. Those people down there are trespassing.”

His companion laughs, a donkeylike bray. “You’re paranoid, man. It’s probably friends or relatives.”

The lead surveyor, more angry than impatient, shakes his head.

“The Sparkses don’t know anything about this, I guarantee you. Someone’s using their dock. Those people were sitting there on that boat for over an hour, doing nothing, like they were waiting for it to get dark. So they wouldn’t be spotted,” he adds ominously.