Losing Clementine Read online

  The brat in me didn’t want to play ball, but the grown-up considered the circumstances. It would, after all, be my last show. I sucked on the inside of my cheek.

  “We can get you some supplies,” he said.

  “I don’t work on an empty stomach,” I told him.

  A secretary brought me a menu from one of the octopus salad places nearby and then went to call Jenny, who, it was reported back to me, would come with everything I asked for. I asked if she’d seemed surprised.

  “Not really.”

  I ordered half a chopped salad and grilled prawns, which each turned out to be the size of a baby’s arm. I got my bag back and fed quarters into the machine for a diet soda, and by the time I’d polished off the side of toasted bread, Jenny was there with brown paper grocery sacks in either arm.

  “I was on a date,” she said.

  “And I feel bad about that. You want dinner?” I asked, pushing the menu toward her.

  “I ate on the way.”

  I took a swig of diet soda. “Would I have approved of him?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “He’s an artist.”

  “A species not to be trusted,” I agreed. I dunked the last bite of bread into the leftover salad dressing and shoved it into my mouth and, before chewing, said, “Let’s do this.”

  The museum had been closed for over an hour. The sun had set while I’d been held up inside. The grid of streets below had quieted. When red turned to green, there was no one waiting to go. Jenny and I walked alone back to the exhibition space. A guard stood out front. I didn’t recognize him, which was nice for both of us.

  He showed us to the final room of the exhibit, two rooms past where I’d made it. There was a large blank wall that had been freshly skinned, a process museums use to allow artists to paint directly onto it. The guard stepped away, and Jenny and I stood in front of it. It was bigger and whiter than I’d thought. Even I felt small.

  Jenny sat the bags down, and the clatter echoed in the empty room.

  “Why are we doing this again?” Her normal voice sounded like a shout bouncing around the hard planes.

  “I forget.”

  “Maybe we can just leave.” She’d dropped down to a golf whisper.

  “A soldier doesn’t flee the battlefield,” I golf-whispered back.

  “It’s called desertion. Happens all the time. If it didn’t, there wouldn’t be a word for it.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be inspiring me to have confidence?”

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “You’re going to rock this.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You’re the man.”

  Was it my imagination or was the wall getting whiter and bigger the longer we stood there?

  “Desertion, you say?”

  “You’re a soldier. This is a battlefield.”

  “Did you bring everything?”

  She looked down into the bags at her feet. “I think so.”

  I held out my hand, and she handed me a charcoal pencil like I was a surgeon being handed her scalpel. And like the first cut, I touched the lead to the wall, took a breath, and started to sketch. It wasn’t long before I had to send Jenny in search of the guard and the guard in search of a ladder.

  When she came back, she sat down cross-legged on the floor, cutting out leaves from all the clippings I’d saved over the years, every bit of press I’d ever received. I’d kept them the way a mother would, stashed in a shoe box that became two that became three that eventually became a plastic filing box when Jenny brought some order.

  There are some artists who do little of their own work, who have assistants who paint and draw and sculpt for them. You might purchase a piece by Tom, and all he did was spout some babble at the beginning and sign it at the end. Those artists run their studios like businesses. They are the CEOs of Artist, Inc. They work the press to keep their brand solid, they work patrons like stock investors, and they work their assistants like assembly-line workers trying to keep up with the demand created by the first two.

  That would be fine except it’s shit.

  When you buy my piece, you buy my piece. Mine. I did it. Jenny and all my assistants before her—a proud lineage of recent art school graduates with poor job prospects—stretched and treated my canvases, mixed my paints, and washed my brushes. They answered my mail, bought my groceries, and generally tried to keep me from collapsing in on myself too often. Some were more successful than others. Some lasted longer than others. But not a damn one ever painted a stroke. Frankly, it made me a shitty boss, but it made me a good artist, even if I was a slow one. So fuck the rest of that shit.

  Until that night.

  I only had one night. Tomorrow, I’d already told the museum, I had plans. So I was selling out like William Shatner. Jenny was cutting, and I was drawing. And her name wouldn’t be anywhere on it.

  I climbed down off the ladder, having finished adding a series of lizards that morphed into birds as they rose higher.

  “Come here.”

  She looked up. Her hair really was as blond and as flyaway limp as a woodland fairy’s. As always, it was falling out of the ponytail and hanging in her face, and it made me say what my mother had always said to me:

  “How do you see like that?”

  “Like what?”

  “With your hair in your face.”

  She shrugged and tucked a particularly problematic lock behind her ear.

  “Come take this,” I said, holding out the charcoal pencil.

  She stood up and brushed small slivers of newspaper trimmings off her shorts before taking it and starting to put it back in one of the bags.

  “No,” I said and pointed at the bottom of the weeping willow—a long, dangling, melting, abstract version of a weeping willow that I had drawn eight feet tall, leaning so far to the left it looked like it might fall. It wrapped inside the corner of the wall so it folded in half like a book on its way to closing. “Sign it.”

  Jenny froze as if I’d handed her a gun and told her to shoot a whole litter of golden retrievers. Who were all Seeing Eye dogs. For disadvantaged children. She looked at the wall and then at me and for a second I thought she was going to cry and run away, which would’ve been a big problem considering all the paper leaves I needed her to cut out.

  “I can’t,” she said finally and tried to hand the pencil back to me.

  I wouldn’t take it.

  “Yes, you can.”

  “But it’s not right.”

  “You’re doing the work.”

  “Assistants don’t sign things.”

  I opened my mouth to argue the point, to make clear logical statements as to why that was twenty-seven kinds of utter bullshit, but all I really managed to do was sigh, because some things are so obvious that you can’t explain them without tripping over your own words. So I did what any good authority figure would do. I dictated.

  “Sign it,” I said. “I command you.”

  She stood there, unsure.

  “Go on,” I said. “Time is wasting.”

  She took a step toward the wall, crouched down on one knee, touched the lead to the paint, and looked up at me one last time just to make sure before signing her name in clear schoolgirl loops very different from mine.

  She took a step back and looked at it.

  “Now get back to work,” I said, deliberately avoiding any sort of hugging moment that might have led to swelling orchestral music. “Those leaves aren’t going to cut themselves.”

  Twenty minutes later, just as I was dipping my brush into a muddy green and brown mixture of paints and touching the bristles to the wall for the first time, a reporter and a photographer walked in. Both were wearing jeans and looked like they’d been pulled away from a family dinner or a child’s T-Ball game, which they probably had.

  It was five o’clock in the morning by the time Jenny and I finished. We were stupid with tiredness, jittery and almo
st nervous from lack of sleep. The guard let us into the break room—or as I thought of it, my cell—and we bought packages of powdered sugar doughnuts and Bugles with our pocket change.

  I waited until she had white powder on her cheek to bring it up.

  “You called that reporter at the Times, didn’t you?”

  She took a swig of Sprite, the morning soda of choice, to wash down the masticated carbs. “Yes. Are you mad at me?”

  “I might be if I thought about it more, which I haven’t.”

  “I guess I should’ve asked your permission first.”

  She wadded up a wrapper and held it in her hand.

  “You should have.”

  She looked up at me. Her hair was no longer in a ponytail so much as in a general mess that suggested a ponytail might have once existed there.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Okay.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  16 Days

  The ad on a classic car enthusiasts’ Web site was for a canary yellow ’56 T-Bird with pale green upholstery. There was a photo taken on a grassy field and a red banner across the ad that said SOLD. It listed a contact phone number. I called it.

  It rang and rang and rang and no one—not even an answering machine—picked up. I hung up and typed the number into an online reverse directory. The address was forty miles outside of Fresno.

  An hour later, I’d packed a knapsack for a possible overnight and poured extra kibble into Chuckles’s bowl. He pretended not to notice. I told him not to throw any wild parties while I was gone and reminded him we needed to talk about his future plans.

  Fresno is a little more than halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco as far as mileage goes, and a whole world away by any other standard. It’s in the middle of the San Joaquin Valley, where all the water used to drain into a lake that no longer exists. Everything wet has been diverted to the farms that surround it. Grapes and oranges, garlic and almonds. Even kiwifruit, which I have trouble imagining growing at all. Any fruit that grows hair is the gift of a friendly alien race. There’s even hay and cotton, though the south gets all the credit for that.

  I turned off the 5 well before Bakersfield and watched as civilization thinned out and road signs got larger and more interesting. A helpful tip-off that a fast-food restaurant was only twenty-two miles ahead got me a little excited and not just because I had to pee. The road was flat and straight and the rows and rows of irrigated farmland trancelike. Combined with my lack of sleep, it was all I could do to keep my eyelids from snapping shut.

  By the time I approached the address, it was still only early evening, and the sky had just barely started to hint at the dusty purple and salmon pink of velvet Elvis paintings. The weedy shoulder of the highway had been blackened for the length of two football fields, and I could smell the acrid soot. Fire is so common during California summers it has a season of its own. The landscape is opposite that of the rest of the country. It’s during summer that everything turns brown and dies. Instead of the remains being covered with snow, they catch hold of some careless cigarette butt and ignite. Not until fall and winter bring rain does everything sprout green again.

  I had turned off Highway 99 at an intersection too small to have so much as a gas station. I went another few miles before finding a stand of neglected single-story homes all clustered together in the middle of open farm country like cows in a thunderstorm. Some of them were brick, but most had aluminum siding that was well past its warranty date. Large mismatched awnings shaded the windows, and the yards—front and back—were surrounded by chain-link fences. More of the fencing blocked off gravel driveways with gates that were chained and locked. Each of the gates had signs that read NO SOLICITING/NO TRESPASSING. The only things not fenced off and guarded were the mailboxes, each stencil-painted with a number.

  I pulled off and parked at the edge of the road. When the crunch of loose gravel under my tires quieted and the engine powered down, there was nothing to hear. No birds. No kids. Nobody watering the weedy brown grass. I rolled up the window and watched. Closed up, the inside of the car smelled like stale french fries from a pit stop an hour ago.

  Call it city-girl paranoia, but something was wrong with a place that didn’t move a twitch in all the time I sat there watching and waiting. It had the stillness and ill will of a military base long abandoned for being too close to a nuclear testing site.

  I got out and walked across the road—no need to look both ways—and stood in front of the gate across the driveway of my target house. There was a dusty brown Cutlass circa 1980 parked behind the gate with its long nose nearly touching the garage door. There was not, however, any way to knock or ring a bell or for any visitor at all to announce her presence except, perhaps, by shouting, which just felt wrong. I put my toe into one of the diamond-shaped holes just below the NO TRESPASSING sign and boosted myself up onto the fence. I threw my other leg over and landed on the gravel drive.

  The growl and the bark and the roar that came at my back sounded like a tyrannosaurus. My spine stiffened, and my pee muscles clinched. I was afraid to turn around and afraid not to, and there wasn’t enough time to consider my options because it was on me in less than a second. When I did turn, I was pressed up against the gate looking into the open jaws of a German shepherd. The mouth was so big and gaping and full of yellowing teeth that I couldn’t see the rest of its body. It had come darting out from under the Cutlass like a greased weasel, and I knew I was going to get bit. The question was only how bad. I tried to scamper back up and over the fence, but I was afraid to turn around again, and my hand slipped on the top. The sharp twisted wire at the apex of one of the diamonds sliced through the skin of my forearm as neatly as a butcher’s knife but with a much higher risk of tetanus.

  The creature’s jaws lunged at me, catching my jeans and scraping against my shin underneath. They clamped down on the tough fabric and yanked, pulling me the rest of the way down off the fence. I heard the denim rip.

  “Jasper!”

  The front door flew open, and a man in a ball cap charged out onto the small cement stoop. He did not come any closer.

  “Jasper, cut that the hell out!”

  Jasper let go and sank into his shoulders, giving him the scary hunchbacked look of a hyena. A growl rumbled around in his chest like one of the hot rod engines that had got me into this mess in the first place.

  I took a gulp of air that rattled my rib cage as if the bones had come loose from their moorings and for a horrible moment wondered if I had peed myself. I couldn’t tell by feeling. The adrenaline rushing through my system like five eightballs mixed up my nerves, and there was no polite way to look down between my legs to check.

  “What the fuck is the matter with you, woman? You trying to get yourself killed?”

  It was so ironic I wouldn’t have known how to answer even if I could speak, and I wasn’t sure that I could. I was still looking at Jasper, who was obeying his master but giving the impression that either of them could renege on the current arrangement at any moment.

  “What do you want?”

  The bottom fell out of my brain, and for a minute I couldn’t remember what I wanted. “We don’t buy nothin’ around here. Can’t you read the damn sign?”

  He was older than me, but I couldn’t tell by how much. I got the feeling people aged differently out here. It was hot out, hotter than L.A. by a lot, and there was nothing to provide shade except for the big plastic awnings over the windows, which came down so far I couldn’t imagine you could see anything from the inside. Nonetheless, Jasper’s companion wore jeans and a long-sleeved plaid shirt buttoned all the way up to the very top of the neck. The ball cap, like the awning, blocked too much and made me even more uneasy, if such a thing were possible.

  “Did you own a ’56 T-Bird?”

  He shifted where he stood, and it was impossible to tell if it was curiosity or unease. “Why you asking?”

  “It’s an un
usual car,” I said. “My dad owned one once. I’m trying to trace it.”

  “I don’t have it no more. Sold it more than a year ago.” He turned toward the door. “Jasper, come.”

  Jasper was a lot easier to read. He wanted to turn away from me about as much as he wanted to leave a two-inch-thick rib eye.

  “Did it have a tear in the seat?” I hollered after him. “The passenger-side seat?”

  “Not anymore. I fixed it. How did you know that?”

  I ignored his question in favor of my own. “Where did you get it?”

  “That ain’t any business of yours.”

  I nodded my concession of the point. “I’m only asking because I’m trying to find my dad. I don’t know where he is or if he’s even alive, but I know he owned a car like that. So maybe whoever you bought it from bought it from someone who bought it from him.”

  “I bought that car thirty years ago. I can’t help you.”

  I took a step forward to stop him, forgetting about Jasper, who scrambled up to an attack position and growled a reminder.

  “Jasper, down.”

  “What year? What year did you buy it?”

  His shoulders dropped and he looked on the verge of an audible sigh.

  “I’d just bought this place. So it must’ve been seventy-eight.”

  “Just after school started?”

  “What?”

  “September? Did you buy it in September?”

  “Mighta been.”

  “Do you remember anything about the man you bought it from?”

  The street and all the surrounding houses remained still and silent. Not one person had so much as pushed back a drapery.

  “It was a couple.”

  “Pardon?”

  “I bought it from a couple.” He raised his voice, as if the problem was that I might be a little deaf or a lot dumb. “Husband and wife. They was moving to the Midwest somewhere, and his old lady didn’t want to take it with them. Made over twenty thousand dollars on it when I sold it, too. Man was a dumbass selling that car for less than it was worth. I talked him down, but he shouldn’t-a let me do it.”

  “He had his wife with him?”