Into the Beautiful North(53)
“Let’s get some onion rings,” Atómiko recommended.
Ma Johnston was one of those good, invisible, hard-luck women who lived along the tougher low-rent sections of Clairemont Drive. Her duplex was in a line of duplexes that were set face-to-face across small yellow strips of lawn. They turned their sides to the main street, and their large living room windows had peered at one another for forty years. The occasional palm tree shot into the sky like a frozen firework and seemed to be caught as the trajectory of its ascension started to decay, curving a bit before it fell back to the ground. Pigeons and palm rats rattled the dry fronds. Ma’s place was the rear unit, back off the street, beside the alley that ran between Clairemont and Apache. She had two bedrooms and a small kitchenette and a bathroom with a fiberglass tub. She liked to keep her plants on a table by the living room window. Matt used to sleep in the back room, separated from her by the bathroom.
She was the first mom of any of the boys from the high school to have HBO, and though she knew they were coming over to see naked girls, she liked their company when they piled in on Friday nights. She didn’t even mind it if they smoked or snuck a beer, though if they smoked dope, they had to go out to the alley, and she’d pretend she didn’t know.
Matt’s crazy surfer friends always brought her presents—sand dollars or starfish, a bag of doughnuts or some beer. The ZZ Twins were wild-haired long-boarders of the old school—so old-school they still wore Hang Ten shorts, though everybody else was wearing high-tech neon-colored threads. Zemaski and Zaragosa. When they became born-again, they brought her Bibles and CDs of Christian singers. She still had her Rick Elias and the Confessions CD in her little stereo beside the TV.
The ZZs were her favorites, and even when Matt had gone missionary on her, run off to Mexico to save the Mexicans, the ZZ Twins had hung around her house, keeping her company in his absence, keeping the bad guys at bay. They spoke that weird surfer talk she had never quite translated. Once, when she’d asked Zemaski how he was feeling, he said, “I’m creachin’ the bouf.”
She had laughed for weeks about that one.
Two years later, she’d been hunting through the library’s cast-off$1.00 sale table when she glanced at their computers and ventured to access the Internet. The librarian helped her search the phrase “creachin’ the bouf.” The best translation they could come up with was “I am a fool for the light comedic opera.” She liked to think that’s what Zemaski meant, though she knew it wasn’t.
It had been rough since Matt had returned from his missionary days, unsure of his faith. He had questions. Well, she was never happy with his Bible-thumping phase. He had come home from Mexico and lost his friendship with the ZZs when he’d fought with them about the Rapture. Matt was of the opinion that there was not going to be a rapture, and nobody would be “left behind” to battle evil demonic hordes because nobody was going anywhere, no matter what the Twins’ favorite books said. The ZZs might have forgiven this theological breakup, but Matt had also become, heretically, disinterested in surfing. The boys could not believe it. To abandon the waves was truly abandoning the Lord. “Dude,” Zaragosa had warned, “Satan’s whispering in your ear!”
Oh, well. It was a crisis of conscience for poor Matthew. Ma Johnston knew how thoughtful he was. She knew he was given to liberal ideas. She was a Reagan Republican all the way. But she knew that young people had to search. Hadn’t she searched? It had brought her from Virginia to San Diego and Matthew’s father. Ah! She tossed her coffee. Ancient history.
Ever since she’d retired, things had been tighter than usual. Being a low-level secretary for the school district had not provided them with lots of money. She had to admit that Matt’s missionary phase almost broke her. But between her retirement and her late husband’s Social Security, she had done all right. The rent was low and she could manage, even though Matt had gone to San Francisco to work in some store, selling “art pins,” whatever they were. They sold a ceramic nipple pin that you apparently wore on your breast. Ha ha. He sent her fifty dollars, sometimes hundred-dollar checks, stuck inside funny greeting cards. The kind that had kittens hanging on to the ends of ropes and said, “Hang In There!” Matt… he was a good boy.
She maintained his room for him, at least for the few times he came home to visit. All his Steve Miller albums were stacked up in there, in order, the way he liked them. His black Jimi Hendrix banner hung above the bed. Matt liked the old stuff—he said new music didn’t speak to him.
Instant coffee, Rice-A-Roni, dry cat food for the alley cats she fed, strawberry jam. She walked out of the little shopping center and thought about buying some doughnuts at the Winchell’s, then remembered they’d torn it down. Why did everything good have to be destroyed?
It was a little over a half mile to her house. The next day was trash day. She put away her things and was seen by skinny Carla who hung out in the alley hoping to score some ice off the bikers that lived next door to Ma. Carla was sweet. She always waved at Ma Johnston.
That was a Thursday.
By Saturday, Ma hadn’t come out to collect her empty garbage cans. Carla wandered across the alley to see if she was okay. And she found Ma Johnston, dead on the kitchen floor, a broken jar of jam beside her.
Matt was through crying, really.
His mother’s sad last effects—used books, little doilies and figurines. Albums of photographs of people he did not recognize. He had given her clothes to Goodwill and had thrown out her bras and underwear. Carla was majorly stoked to get the nipple pin. She laughed out loud when she saw it. The Mongols who lived next door came over with beer and sat with him for a while. They scared the hell out of him, but they were decent and spoke highly of his mom.