Jack Wakes Up (14 page)

“Guys,” Jack says. “Relax. We’ve got work to do.”

“Fuck the deal,” Al says. “I want to start we should shoot back.”

Jack shakes his head. “You want to find out what happened to Michal, right? And to Ralph.”

He raises his hands. “That’s not going away if we leave it.”

Al walks over to the bar. “Oh, this is fucked up, Jack.”

“What can we do?” Vlade asks. “Now we have no coke. Our friend is gone. Let us repay the fucks who did this to you.”

“OK. OK.” Jack opens his hand toward the couch. “All right if I sit down?”

Vlade nods to Jack and comes over to sit on one of the couches himself. He waves to Niki that he can come sit down too. “Niki did good job last night. So did your Maxine.” David and Niki both nod. “Without her, we get arrested. She showed us way out.”

Al comes all the way out into the center of the room, stands behind the couches. “Thank you Jack,” he says. “You helped me there.” He’s got his lower lip buttoned up over his upper one, looks like nothing could be worse than how he feels. “Can I make you drink?”

“Sure,” Jack says. “Club soda.”

Vlade laughs. “This has not made you to drink yet?” Al walks to the bar as David drains off the rest of his scotch and holds his glass up, clinking the ice against its side. “Yes David,” Al says. “I hear you.”

In a half-hour, Jack’s got the Czechs telling stories about where they’re from and how they made their money. They explain that they have an importing business in the Ukraine that brings in fish for the fancy sushi restaurants that’ve started popping up in the former Soviet Bloc. It’s doing well enough that they can take a few months off and come to tour America. But not so well that they aren’t thinking about staying on if they can score enough blow to start dealing a little. First they want to rent motorcycles and drive across the plains and around the whole US, stopping at the major cities. Their bikes won’t be ready for another few days, and getting the coke they want for the trip is causing problems—problems they’d like to see end.

Jack wonders whether he should tell them it’s not a good idea to be driving across the U.S.

with guns and a big supply of coke, but he figures that’s their problem, not his. The coke they started with came from Ralph—he gave them a key when they arrived—then he was supposed to connect them directly to his supplier, a guy named Junius. The one Maxine mentioned. Then, Ralph being Ralph, he decided he thought he could get a better deal from Castroneves.

They never got to meet Ralph’s original connection.

“What the hell kind of name is Junius?” Jack asks.

They all frown, then shrug. “We do not know,” David answers. “We just know Junius. That his name.”

This is when Jack remembers Ralph’s message from his machine that morning, telling him to contact Joe Buddha. It’s not a lead to Junius but it’s someone else Jack needs to follow up with.

“Let me get one thing straight,” he says, unable to leave it alone. “You guys want to take ten keys across the country with you on motorcycles?”

Vlade laughs, shakes his head. “Ten is too much. We will take just enough and leave the rest here in San Francisco. They have lockers here, no? We leave and then sell what we can for ourselves, to our own community here.”

“Yes,” David says. “Part we sell, part we keep.”

“OK.” Jack raises his glass and the others follow. They’re all drinking scotch except for him and Niki. “We put this thing back together. Find out what’s happening with the guns, get in touch with Junius if that’s what needs to happen, and find out who did Ralph and Michal. We get you your coke.”

Jack looks at his watch: it’s a little after three in the afternoon.

“It is now Saturday. If you give me until this time tomorrow, we will get these things done.”

Jack holds his glass over the coffee table and waits while the others exchange glances. Finally, they lean forward and touch glasses with his, Niki using his bare fist.

“You are on, Jack Palms,” Vlade says.

“But first we go to The Coast and burn down the motherfucks who have attacked you. About last night, we do not know who. But this,” Al gestures toward Jack’s face. “This we know.”

Vlade picks up his gun off the table and sights down the barrel. Then he holds it back and looks at the gun’s side. “We have business there with Mr. Tony Vitelli.”

Jack finds Joe Buddha listed in the phonebook under his real name, John Wesley Taraval, with an address in Noe Valley.

Driving down Market, Jack tries Maxine at home to apologize and gets her machine. “Sorry about before, Max. I just found out you helped the Czechs get out last night. Thanks for that. I guess I owe you in more ways than one.”

He hopes he hasn’t pissed her off completely but thinks she’ll be OK once she settles down and has some time to unwind. If he has time, he decides, he’ll stop by her place again before meeting the Czechs at The Coast.

But that’s after Joe Buddha’s, where he pulls up in front of a white row house on Church Street, at Chavez. As he gets out of the car and walks closer, Jack notices a little altar mounted high up beside the front door, that it’s a small shelf screwed right onto the side of the house. It holds a bowl of pears, a small collection of incense sticks, and a ribbon, what looks like the prize from a horse-riding contest, but with Japanese characters on it.

Jack rings the bell and in a little while hears feet in the hall, then a small Asian woman opens the interior wooden door, regards him through a thin metal grate.

“Joe Buddha?” he says, and when that brings no response, “John Wesley Taraval?”

“Oh,” she says. “You are here to see John? Come right in.” She opens the metal grated door and leads Jack inside a dark, carpeted hallway that smells like incense. At the end of the hall, 120

Jack can make out a kitchen in the light of the room’s windows. Inside, at a small table, a small, wide man sits on a chair, eating in silhouette. Jack can tell it’s Joe Buddha even without seeing his face; nobody else has the body, the round paunch like Joe—the reason for the nickname Buddha. The woman leads Jack down the hall, and before she can announce him he bellows,

“Old Joe Buddha!”

Buddha turns fast, surprised, and stands up. Jack comes into the kitchen and sees him in the full light: before him stands his old friend, only smaller, older, more wrinkled, and with an even more pronounced middle. He’s always had one of those bellies that look like someone stretched the skin over a watermelon: tight looking, but large.

“Holy shit,” Jack says. “You look even more like the old man now than ever.”

Buddha nods, spreads his arms. “As it has turned out to be.”

Jack fakes a punch at the paunch. “Don’t tell me you’ve finally gone Asian in your old age, turned religious on us.”

“This?” Buddha raises his short arms. “No,” he says, waving at it all with both hands. “This is all her. You just met my wife, Yuko.” He puts his arm around her and she smiles. They both laugh.

“Joe Buddha,” she says, rubbing his belly. “My little religious icon.”

Buddha runs his hand over his scalp and then around to the sides of his head, where he still has a bar of hair behind his ears and around the back. Otherwise, he’s shining bald. “Old Buddha,” he says. “Haven’t been called that in a while. You heard from Ralph then?”

Jack nods. “Before he passed.”

Buddha shakes his head. “Yeah. We saw that one on the news. Not good.” He shrugs. “But what can you do? He got popped.”

“He told me to come find you.”

“He would. It was only a matter of time.” Buddha tucks in his chair at the table, carries the bowl of cereal he was eating over to the sink. He turns to look at Jack. “How are you?” he asks, all serious concern.

Jack nods. “I’m all right. Getting by.”

Yuko leans against the counter and looks at Jack sideways, regarding him. Buddha shakes his head. “We were worried about you, Jack. Really worried.”

Jack sits down at the table. “Yeah, well. I’m OK now. How long have you been up here in S.F.?”

Buddha shrugs. “Two years.” He moves to the table and puts his hands on the back of a chair.

“I’m sorry we didn’t get in touch with you. I wanted to. I was concerned about how you’d be doing.”

“So you saw what happened?”

“Who didn’t? I’m still so sorry about Victoria, about what happened to the second picture.”

Buddha was like that: he liked to call movies “pictures.” He’d been involved with Jack’s sequel, Shake It Up, as one of the producers. When it came down to it, though, the others all pulled out around the time of Sgt. Hopkins’ arrest. “The thing is, Jack, we could all see that coming for miles.”

“And you tried to warn me,” Jack says. “I know.”

“Victoria, Jack. She was fire.”

Jack nods. “But it was me too. I wanted some of that. I got into the coke myself, I guess H

was just a matter of time. What did I know?”

Buddha shakes his head. He pulls out the chair and sits across from Jack at the table. “You know, Jack, we knew. We could see it all happening too slow. I’m just sorry I couldn’t help you.”

“I don’t know.” Jack shrugs. “Maybe it had to happen.”

Buddha nods. Then he shakes his head as if he’s considered it and decided that it did not have to happen. “No Jack,” he says. “We could’ve helped you more, gotten you out of that mess, helped you clean up. I have to believe that now.”

Jack nods, feels the soft tablecloth under his fingers. He knows what he’s come back from, that he’s in the middle of something crazy now, something he’s only hoping he can control.

“Can I have some cereal, Joe?” Jack says, realizing he hasn’t eaten breakfast, that all he’s had is the coffee with Maxine and no food.

Buddha laughs. “Yuko, will you bring my friend here a bowl of our finest?”

Yuko looks at Jack, then back at Buddha. “No,” she says. Without hesitation, she walks out of the room. Jack can hear her feet padding on the rug in the small, quiet house as she moves back down the front hall and then up a flight of stairs.

“Did I say something wrong?” Jack asks.

“No. I did. I guess I’ll be getting that for you.”

Buddha gets up and moves around the kitchen, placing items on the table in front of Jack: the box of cereal, milk, a spoon and a bowl. Jack pours out the cereal for himself, adds the milk.

He hasn’t had any cereal in a few days and misses something about it, about the routine of eating from the round bowl, the cold milk.

“Routine is what makes us who we are,” Buddha says, as Jack starts eating. “It’s how we find our true self.” He nods. “Once you read this Zen business, it’s actually not that bad.” He rubs his own stomach. “I actually used to hate that nickname for a while, but now it seems I’ve really grown into it.”

Jack tastes the corn flakes, still crunchy, and counts his chews. He won’t have another cigarette today, not for a while, and he’s been doing well by avoiding all of the drinks he’s been offered. He’s still on the wagon. And he’s turned down the blow—all of it. He’s been out of the hills and his routine for three days now, and he’s still getting by. But it’s nice, in the small bowl 123

of cereal and milk, to go back to routine even just a little. “I had a hard time coming back from the drugs and shit,” Jack says.

Buddha nods. “No one ever said that part was easy.”

Jack looks up, regards the lines around Buddha’s mouth, as he says, “You know I never hit Victoria, right? Any woman.”

Buddha puts his hand over Jack’s, then withdraws it. “I know,” he says. “I knew from the first time I heard it, never believed those stories. But you know how they are down there. Still small and you get some bad pub, no one will touch you. You’re big and the bad pub works for you. The whole system is fucked.

“You got through though. That’s what’s important. Those battles have been fought. The newspapers fucked you, and now you’re here. The question is, how you going to move on?”

Jack sits back. “You really have turned into a little buddha! You fuck.”

He nods. “It’s true, as they say. Sometimes life imitates itself or gives some indication of where you’re going. I met Yuko when I got into Zen, and we moved up here.” He waves his hand dismissively across the table. “Fuck L.A.!”

“Fuck L.A.” Jack holds up his bowl of cereal to toast to that—it’s all milk now—and drains it off with one swallow. “I was at Ralph’s house the other day, the day he got killed. I found him.”

Jack shakes his head, pushing away the image. “I saw a pad by his phone with both of our names on it, yours just above mine. It was crossed out. Any idea why?”

Buddha shakes his head. “He called me about helping him out with some drug deal and I turned him down. Let me guess: he came and asked you next?”

Jack nods. “That’s how I got into all this: I guess I was a second option.”

Buddha laughs, his small compact frame bouncing from the middle as he lets out the sounds.

“Figures. Then he’d tell you to come find me and we’d talk about it. That sounds like Ralph.”

“I was trying to help him, you know? He seemed like he could use it. And I can use the money. But things got weird. The deal went sour. What can I say?”

Buddha nods, he stands up and leads Jack into a room off the kitchen that, sure enough, has a few meditation pillows set up around a low table and incense burning in a burner on the wall.

“Come on,” he says, walking in ahead of Jack and sitting down on one of the small pillows.

“Let’s sit zazen for a little.”

When they’ve both been on the cushions for a couple of minutes, Buddha starts to laugh.

“What the fuck, Jack. Welcome over here. It’s good to see you.” He jumps off his cushion and slaps Jack on the knee. “We were pretty worried about you for a little while.” Then he tackles Jack off of his cushion, knocking him back onto the floor. Jack laughs, pushes the smaller man off him like he was doing a bench press. Buddha rolls over and sits up.

“You’re lucky you guys got these soft pads down, little man.”

Buddha laughs, climbs back onto one of the pillows, and tucks his feet into the lotus position. “So let’s talk Jack. You’re back now, out from your self-imposed exile at your house in Sausalito.”