California(40)

“Frida!” Sailor repeated fiercely. Peter socked him in the shoulder.

The other man was named Dave. Cal was glad they didn’t all have cutesy names like Sailor. Dave had chosen to kneel and go through Frida’s rucksack item by item. Cal turned just as Dave was pulling Frida’s shirt out of the bag like a magician’s endless scarf. He shook it out and, satisfied that it didn’t hide any knives or bombs, tossed it to the ground.

“Come on,” Frida said. “Really?”

“Let’s not get too security guard on her, Dave,” Peter said.

Dave looked up at Peter and scowled. Unlike Sailor and Peter, he had shorn off his hair, and his scalp was pink beneath the blond bristle. What an idiot, Cal thought. Not even a hat.

Dave was rooting around deep in the rucksack, his brow furrowed. Cal imagined him as a former mechanic, diagnosing car parts.

“What is this?” Dave said.

Frida stepped forward. “Please, it’s meant as a gift.”

From where Cal stood, it looked like Dave had pulled out a discarded page from a magazine, wrinkled as a pirate’s map. It was just paper, but it was wrapped around something.

Frida looked at Cal, and then to Sailor. “Please don’t.”

Dave stood up as he unwrapped the paper. Cal saw it was old wrapping paper, shredded at its edges, from a Christmas long ago. Was it possible that he recognized those anthropomorphic gingerbread men with their demonic red eyes and meaty fingerless hands?

Cal turned to Frida. “What is that?”

“You don’t even know?” Sailor asked.

Frida tried to take the package out of Dave’s hand, but he stepped away from her.

“I told you,” she said. “It’s a gift. Please just leave it be.”

“If it’s a gift,” Dave said, “then I’m excited to open it.”

“Maybe it’s for you,” Sailor said to Cal, smiling.

Dave unfolded the paper and pulled out a turkey baster. “This?”

Frida nodded. “I don’t know who it’s for. It’s an offering. I guess.”

“Where’d that come from?” Cal said.

“One of my artifacts,” she said, under her breath.

“What are those things called again?” Sailor asked.

“It’s a turkey baster,” Cal said.

In another life, this would have been any other piece of kitchen equipment, though rarely used; his mother had only trotted theirs out on major holidays, and once, as part of his fine arts credit, she’d had him draw it, first in pencil, and then with charcoal. He didn’t remember owning one himself. And this one was new and fancy, its cylinder made of glass. It still had its tag.

In another life, Frida would not be in love with this object, but he could tell, by the heat that colored her neck pink, that it meant a lot to her. More than it should.

He imagined taking the baster from Dave and cracking the cylinder in two over his thigh.

“We’ve got one of these already in the kitchen,” Sailor said, taking the baster. He held it up to the sky. “But that one’s cloudy and made of plastic. This one’s a beaut!”

Peter took the baster from Sailor and handed it back to Dave. “Wrap it back up. Let her choose who to give it to.”

Dave folded the paper around the baster and shoved it along with her sweatshirt back into the rucksack. “We’ll keep these bags for the time being,” he said, and Cal was about to protest when he saw that Frida was merely nodding. She looked at the three men, then at the ground, once at the sky, and back at the Spikes. She was looking everywhere but at Cal.

All at once, he pitied her. His dear wife. When had things gotten so bad? He remembered something his father had once told him. “People get sad.” It was true. Maybe sadness was where they were all headed.

“Let’s go,” Peter said, and blew his whistle three more times, the same message as the first. After a pause, he blew it once more, quick and sharp. His whistle was a train station announcement, a grandfather clock, an emergency broadcast system.

Cal and Frida were led onward. As they passed the lookout tower, Sailor grabbed one of its wooden girders and spun around it as if it were a telephone pole and he were the star in a musical.

“Calm down,” Peter said.

“How can I?”

Dave grunted.

Past a few spindly trees, they reached what looked like a kiosk at a movie theater or a small visitors’ center. Cal was all at once back at Cedar Point, the line to buy tickets not as long as it should have been. He remembered the way his father had leaned into the windowed booth to give the uniformed woman cash for two tickets. On their way out, a different woman had stamped their hands with fluorescent ink that smelled of lemon cleaning spray. “So’s you can get back in,” she’d explained.

The windows of this kiosk were covered with foil, and he couldn’t see in. By the blisters in the paint and the vines crawling along the sides, it was clear that its original purpose had long been discarded.

“What used to be here?” Cal asked.

“On the Land?” Sailor said.

Frida smiled. “The Land? Is that what you call this place? I guess that’s a little more inviting than the Spikes.”

Even Peter laughed at that one. “Keep walking,” he said. “It’ll become evident.”