By the time he pulled up in front of the clinic, the sky was showing a runny, gray-mustard stain off behind one pewter corner. A stranger would have missed it, but Farrell still knew an Avicenna dawn when he saw one. He turned to Pierce/Harlow, who was slouched against the door, eyes closed, fingers in his mouth, and said, “Well, it’s been real.”
Pierce/Harlow sat up, blinking from Farrell to the clinic and back. His mouth was badly swollen, but his style was already beginning to regenerate itself, spinning pink-and-white self-assurance before Farrell’s eyes, as a lizard grows new limbs. He said, “I’m going to look pretty silly, coming in for a chewed-up tongue, for God’s sake.”
“Tell them you cut yourself shaving,” Farrell said. “Tell them you got French-kissed by the Hound of the Baskervilles. Good-bye.”
Pierce/Harlow nodded meekly. “I’ll just get my gear out of the back.” He rose and squeezed past Farrell, who turned to follow his movements. He picked up his sweater and groped unhurriedly for the authentic Greek fisherman’s cap and the pocket stereo. Farrell, bending to recover his wallet, heard a sudden sweet clunk and straightened up quickly, making a sound like Madame Schumann-Heink’s transmission.
“I’m sorry,” the boy said. “That’s your mandolin thing, isn’t it? I’m really sorry.” Farrell handed him his knapsack, and he opened the slide doors and started to step down, then paused, looking back. “Well, I thank you very much for the ride, I really appreciated it. You have a good day, okay?”
Farrell shook his head, marveling helplessly. “Do you do this a whole lot? I ask out of some concern.”
“Well, I don’t do it for a living, if that’s what you mean.” Pierce/Harlow might have been a college golfer defending his amateur standing. “It’s more like a hobby, actually. You know, some people do underwater photography. I just get a kick out of it.”
“You don’t know how it’s done,” Farrell said. “You don’t even know what to say. Somebody’s going to kill you, you keep this stuff up.”
Pierce/Harlow shrugged. “I get a kick out of it. The look on their faces when it finally starts to sink in. It’s really addictive, just knowing I’m not what they’re so sure I am. Sort of like Zorro or somebody.” He dropped to the curb, turning to give Farrell a reminiscently affectionate smile, as if they had shared an adventure long ago, in another language. He said, “You ought to try it. You’re practically doing it anyway, right now. Take care, Mr. Farrell.”
He slid the doors carefully shut before he sauntered away toward the clinic. Farrell put Madame Schumann-Heink in gear and eased her into the thickening San Francisco commuter traffic that seemed to be starting far earlier than he remembered. What would you know? Back then, everyone in the world lived on Parnell Street and slept till noon. He decided that whatever Madame Schumann-Heink was dragging would keep until he got to Ben’s house, as would thinking about the events of the last half-hour. His skin felt stiff with dried sweat; his head had begun to thump with each heartbeat. The Volkswagen smelled of feet and blankets and cold Chinese food.
Driving north on Gould Avenue—where the hell is the Blind Alley? It couldn’t be gone, everybody played there, I must have missed it—he did allow himself to consider, though with some wariness, the matter of the green convertible. At the time, his mind—having promptly skipped town, leaving no forwarding address but only those weary, cynical old suckers, his nerves and reflexes, to settle his debts and post bail one more time—had registered nothing but the driver’s huge helmet, the black man’s jaunty toy sword—was it a toy?—and the woman dressed entirely in gold chains. But the black guy was wearing something like a mantle, a bearskin? And the back seat had been tossing with velvet cloaks and stiff white ruffs and plumes like firelight in the fog as the old rag-top hurtled by. Doubtless the Avicenna Welcome Wagon. The one with the chains must be from the Native Daughters.
Gould was a long street, stretching from one end of Avicenna nearly to the other and effectively dividing student country and the hills beyond from the hot, black flatlands. Farrell drove until the used-car lots gave way to antique shops, those to office buildings and department stores—damn, what happened to that nice old fish market?—and those in turn to one- and two-story frame houses, white and blue and green, with stairs on the outside. They were old, thin houses, most of them, and in the dour morning air they looked like boats abandoned on the beach, unsafe to take to sea. Farrell’s breath tightened, just for a moment, at the southwest corner of Ortega; but the gray, bulging, fish-scaled house was gone, replaced by a Tas-T-Freeze.
They were trying to condemn that place all the time I lived there. As unseaworthy a house as ever I went deepsea sailing in. Ellen. Even after so much time, he touched the name cautiously with his tongue, like a sore tooth, but nothing happened.
Ben had been living on Scotia Street for a little more than four years, almost since his move from New York. It was not territory Farrell had ever known well, and he was flying blind when he turned right arbitrarily on Iris and sweettalked Madame Schumann-Heink up a triple fall of short, steep hills. The houses were changing within a block, becoming larger and darker, with shingly New England angles supporting California sun decks. The higher he drove, the further they drew back from the street, keeping to the shadows of redwood, eucalyptus, and ailanthus, except for a few corner stuccos, parrot-bright. No sidewalks. I can’t imagine Ben in a place without sidewalks.
The sky was still overcast behind him by the time he found the house; but up on Scotia Street the sun was already clambering around in the vines and bushes, purring, rubbing itself against bougainvillaea. Scotia was a shaggy, cranky jungle, winding and crimped as a goat path—a street meant for broughams, post chaises, and ice wagons, where Madame Schumann-Heink and a descending Buick briefly got wedged into a curve like fighting stags. Unlike the tame lawns and gardens of the slopes below, the Scotia shrubbery was voluptuously brazen, spilling across garage roofs and over low stone walls to link properties in defiant wrong-side-of-the-blanket alliances. A long way from Forty-Sixth and Tenth Avenue, boy.
He recognized the house from Ben’s letters. Like most of its neighbors, it was an old, solid, two-story structure with the majestically shabby air of a buffalo shedding its winter coat. What made it unique on Scotia was a porch roof that ran all the way around the house, wide and level enough for two people to walk comfortably abreast. “Nothing at all to do with sea captains’ widows,” Ben had written. “Apparently the guy who built the place in the nineties was trying for a pagoda. They took him away before he got the corners turned up.”
When he parked the bus and scrambled in back to get the lute, he discovered that his cooking kit was missing. Momentarily enraged as he had not been during the entire holdup, he was quickly fascinated, amazed that the boy could have gotten away under his eyes with something that bulky. The electric razor was gone too. Farrell sat down on the floor with his legs straight out in front of him and began to laugh.
After a little while he drew the lute to him from the corner where it had ended up. Afraid to remove the cloth and plastic swaddlings to check for damage, he only said, “Come on, love” to it and got out of the bus, sneezing sharply as the smell of damp jasmine and rosemary tickled his nose. He glanced at the house again—birdhouses, I’ll be damned—then turned and walked slowly across the narrow street to look back down the hills at Avicenna.
The Bay took up half the horizon, rumpled and dingy as a motel bedspread, with a few sails frozen under the bridge and San Francisco beyond, slipping like soap through a dishwater mist. From where Farrell stood in the private sunlight of Scotia Street, treetops and gables broke up his line of sight; but he could make out the university’s red-brick bell tower and the campus plaza where he had first met Ellen hustling chess games with freshmen. And if that’s the corner of Serra and Fox, then that window has to be the Nikolai Bukharin Memorial Pizza Parlor. Two years waiting tables and breaking up fights there, and I still always got him mixed up with that other one, Bakunin. The only movement that he could see anywhere was the green wink of a streetcar sliding down through the flatlands, vanishing between the naked pastel roofs that seemed to overlap one another like lily pads all the way to the freeway. He stood on tiptoe for a moment, looking for the Blue Zoo, the warty indigo frog of a Victorian in which he and Clawhammer Perry Brown and a Korean string trio had shared the top floor rent-free for almost three months, before the party downstairs ended and the owner noticed them. Did I dream all that, that time, those people? What begins now?