We Begin at the End(8)
“You know Skip still works, guy named Andrew Wheeler runs a charter. Skip must be eighty now.”
“My mother tore me a new one that day.” Vincent cleared his throat. “Thanks. The funeral, doing all that.”
Walk dropped the visor to the sun.
“You gonna tell me about her then?” Vincent shifted in his seat, legs hunched, pants an inch long at the ankle.
Walk slowed at a railroad, a freight crossed them, boxes of steel, rust red and whining.
They rolled over the track and into the kind of town that had run when the mines had before Walk finally spoke. “She’s alright.”
“She’s got kids now.”
“Duchess and Robin. You remember that first time we saw Star?”
“Yeah.”
“You’ll head right back there when you see Duchess.”
Vincent, lost then, Walk knew where his mind was. That first day Star’s father rolled his Riviera into the Cape. Vincent and Walk rode up, saw a life packed into the trunk, clothes and cases and boxes pressed the glass. Side by side, hands on their Stelbers, sun hot on their necks. The man got out first, he was big and broad and he’d eyed them like he knew their kind. They were kids, though, that’s what Walk remembered, concerns limited to finding the Willie Mays Pro card because Vincent’s Magic 8-Ball told them they were due some luck. Then he scooped out a little girl, still sleeping, her head on his shoulder as he looked up and down his new street. Sissy Radley. They were about to turn, to head back to Walk’s yard and the treehouse they’d been working on when the rear door opened to the longest legs Walk ever saw. Vincent had cursed, mouth open, eyes fixed on the girl, their age and Julie Newmar beautiful. She got out, chewing gum as she glanced at them. Holy shit, Vincent said again. And then her father ushered her into the Kleinmans’ old place, but not before she turned and cocked her head at them, no smile, just a look that burned its way into Vincent’s soul.
“I missed you. I would’ve come, you know. If you’d let me. I would’ve come and visited every weekend.”
Vincent’s eyes never left the scenes, the interest of a man that had lived life through a television set.
On the Central Valley Highway they stopped at a diner by Hanford and ate burgers. Vincent finished half, his eyes fixed on the window as he watched a mother and her child, an old man that stooped like he was carrying each of his years on his back. Walk wondered what he saw. Cars he did not know the names of, stores he had only ever seen on screen. A lifetime missed, from 1975 through, turn of the millennium, 2005 had once looked like flying cars and robot maids, now here they were.
“The house—”
“I check on it. It needs work, the roof, the porch, half the boards are rotten.”
“Alright.”
“There’s a developer, Dickie Darke, he crawls over it each month before summer. If you did ever want to sell—”
“I don’t.”
“Alright.” Walk had said his piece, if Vincent wanted money he could sell the place, the last home on the front line, Sunset Road.
“You ready to go home?”
“I just left home, Walk.”
“No, Vin, you didn’t.”
There was no fanfare when they arrived back in Cape Haven, no friendly faces or party or fuss. Walk noticed the other man take a breath as they crested the Pacific, the endless water coming at them, the tops of pines and grand houses on the Cape and beyond.
“They’ve built,” Vincent said.
“They have.”
There’d been resistance at first, just not enough because the promise of money was more than kept, business owners like Milton held the floor and said they were tiring of the struggle. Ed Tallow said his construction company was struggling to keep the lights on.
Cape Haven was carved into the cliffs, tranquil and preserved, a town lifted from Anaheim. Walk felt it, each new brick laid right on top of his childhood, on the memories he so desperately needed to hold on to.
Walk stole a look at his friend’s hands, at the legion of deep scars that crossed his knuckles. He’d always been tough.
Finally, they rolled the slope onto Sunset Road, where the King house stood like unwelcome shadow on the brightest day.
“The neighbors are gone.”
“They fell. The cliffs are breaking, like Point Dume. Last one yesterday. Fairlawn. Your place is far enough back, and they put in the breakwater a couple of years ago.”
Vincent looked at the scene, taped off like the crime it was. There were homes behind, near enough to keep the street from isolation, but far enough for the King house to command the most spectacular view.
Vincent got out and stood before it, an eye on the rotting gables and fallen shutters.
“I cut the grass.”
“Thank you.”
He followed Vincent up the winding path, the steps and then into the cool, dark hallway. Papered walls with flowers recalling the seventies and a million velvet memories.
“I laid sheets.”
“Thank you.”
“And stocked the refrigerator. There’s chicken and some—”
“Thank you.”
“You don’t have to keep saying that.”
Above the fireplace was a mirror and Vincent passed it without looking. Walk thought he moved differently now, each step a cautionary tale about placement and better judgment. He knew the first years had been rough, and not rough in a cry-and-can’t-sleep way, rough in the handsome-boy-amongst-the-darkest-kind-of-men way. They’d written letters, Walk and Gracie King, to the judge and the supreme court and even the house on Pennsylvania Avenue. They’d asked for segregation at least. They’d got nothing.