Divisadero Read online

  She risked everything out there, taking narrow trails too fast in moonlight, swimming in turbulent river currents, cantering over No Hands Bridge with the reins loose and her arms outstretched. Her associates at work would barely have recognized her. Even her father might not have, though he had witnessed this love of escape from her youth. (She’d found him always to be a still man, rarely driving a car or riding a horse.) Claire assumed some ancestor in her changeling blood had been a horse person. She rose from her limp into the stirrup and was instantly free of it. It was in this way that she discovered the greater distances in herself.

  The first time Claire had entered an endurance race, she’d been thrown by her horse and went careening down a rock-strewn slope. The animal stood there patiently, in a cloud of red dust, as she managed to climb back on with a dislocated shoulder. She continued for two miles before giving up and turning with an un-bloodlike intelligence, something more to do with reason and survival, to follow the yellow markers back to the camp at Robinson Flat. The horse had balked as it descended a canyon and she had already forgiven it. Horses had their sudden demons too. Someone rolled her a joint, and she smoked that before she telephoned her father.

  He got there an hour later with a horse truck. He came up to her and saw in her eyes the look of a dog who’d run too far and wild, injuring itself with a lack of knowing how much it could take on or achieve. She told him it was nothing, but at the farm, when she climbed out of the truck, she could hardly walk and he carried her into the house. It was the first time he had touched her in a year. He put her down on the long kitchen table and pressed a hot towel around her shoulder, put his knee onto her back, and torqued the shoulder up so that she burst into tears. When he did it again she passed out.

  When Claire woke, she was where he had left her. There was a pillow under her head. She saw him sitting on the old tartan sofa, watching her, for safety. She tried rolling to the right and to the left. Then she got into her car and drove the forty minutes to San Francisco, where she was expected at work the next day.

  The Public Defender’s Office provided legal defence to those with no money, and Claire had worked there for five years. Aldo Vea, a state lawyer, had two assistants helping him with research; she was one of them. Vea met Claire and Shaun every morning at a café on Geary Street, and they ate while Vea discussed pending cases. He was brilliant at freewheeling the possibilities, conceiving and laying out angles for defence. By nine-thirty they’d go off to their phones, talking to anyone in the defendant’s past—school friends, lovers, employers. Then they’d investigate the victim. There might be a hint of violence in the victim’s past that could turn the case. They carried an obvious notebook and a hidden microphone. They were better than cops, Vea said. And they were a family. Claire knew everything about Shaun, and about Vea and his family. When Vea’s wife was ill, Claire picked the kids up after school and brought them along on stakeouts. When Shaun broke her silence about her growing attraction to women, Claire and Vea had dinner with her and gave her a game plan.

  Claire would always turn up on Monday mornings wearing a pastel-coloured dress. The homespun image and the sense of defencelessness was important, Vea said, but she suspected that he also liked it. She wore a ring she could move from finger to finger, depending on whom she was interviewing. To men her dresses suggested gentleness and courtesy; she did not appear to be in charge. If someone hit on her, the ring on her finger came into the foreground and she’d softly announce that she was pregnant. (When one dangerous-looking sort quizzically responded, ‘With child?’ she lowered her head to hide her smile. Now she was going to be treated like a Madonna.) She was supposed to be a creature of empathy, revealing no moral stance, just easiness and compassion. She knew the best times to get people to talk. Women were better on the phone, because they could do something else at the same time. During stakeouts, if curious neighbours knocked on her car window and asked what she was doing, she’d point vaguely towards a house. ‘My boyfriend’s in there, drunk,’ she’d say. ‘I had to get out. I’m waiting.’ ‘Can I get you something, dear?’ they would ask. ‘No, thanks.’ She was dying for coffee, but then she would have to pee. In stakeouts you lived in a state of high awareness, and by the end of the day you were exhausted.

  Most days Claire was investigating the provenance of an insurance scam or a molestation case. What the Public Defender’s Office did in their work was essentially defend any indigent brought up on a criminal charge. Until the landmark case of Gideon v. Wainright, only the rich would get a lawyer. The Public Defender’s Office had to respond to the police and the ‘evidence orgy’ that took place after a crime was committed. The police believed that if they didn’t solve the crime in three days, they were never going to. They rarely gave a case more time than that, so they didn’t want complications or subtleties. Public defenders were allowed to see the evidence only after the third day and had to quickly find witnesses and flaws, to prove either that the client didn’t do it or didn’t deserve to die. The latter applied to the penalty phase, and it was the only time the defence was permitted to try to influence the outcome. Claire had once researched the history of a man who was up for the death penalty, and discovered an earlier violent assault he had committed in the past, when he was twenty. She found that he had attacked a man who had been viciously beating his dog. Bingo. That turned out to be the detail that got him a life sentence, and saved him from lethal injection. As Vea had said at the time, if it had been discovered that he’d read all of Herman Melville, it would have had no effect, but the mutt had returned to save him.

  After work, Claire would sometimes meet up with Vea for a drink at Fog City, watching that little oil slick on his vodka martini curling dangerously. Aldo Vea was the most principled man Claire knew, and he had taught her how to survive in this profession of crime and retribution, how to accept the flawed barrier between cause and effect, how to see that the present continually altered the past, just as the past was a strange inheritance that fell upside down into one’s life like an image through a camera obscura. All that was consistent was a principle. ‘You believe in the principle,’ Vea would say, ‘if you cannot believe in the man. You meet monsters and you help defend them. You believe in the principle of full justice. When a murderer fights the death penalty, he is not the one asking to be pardoned, he doesn’t deserve to ask, we are the ones asking.’ Vea had been in Vietnam between the ages of seventeen and nineteen, and he had seen the monster. He knew how the monster could come upon you.

  They would have that drink at Fog City at the end of the day, and she would stop him from having one more. If he drank more she would leave, and if he didn’t, she would stay and listen to him. He always needed to wind down, always. He talked Vietnam. He talked out the cases he was struggling over, but he was really talking Vietnam. One day she began to tell him about what had happened all those years earlier between her father and Coop, and how her sister had disappeared at that time. ‘Well, these are not monsters,’ he said, waving his hand as if dismissing an eyelash. ‘There’s always damage collected in childhood.’ Vea was the only person Claire talked to about where she came from. ‘Has she ever made contact with you?’ ‘No.’ ‘Then there is still sadness in her life. Were you jealous of your sister?’ ‘No. Only once.’ If anyone calmed Claire and defused her past, it was Vea. She wondered whether her father and Coop and Anna seemed quaint to someone like him.

  If she arrived too late at Fog City and he was already drunk, she would not sit with him. Instead she would take the car keys out of his pocket and wait until he struggled out of the narrow booth and paid the bill. They would find his car and she would drive him home, calling his wife to let her know. In his driveway she would put the keys back into his pocket and walk to the waiting taxi that she had ordered. She would wave to Vea’s wife standing at their door, who would yell, ‘Love you, Claire,’ as she got into her cab. Vietnam.

  Claire felt that Vea had implanted a cause in her, a guiding principle fo
r what she could do with her life, and so she would do anything for him. He never approached her except as a compatriot, alongside the honour of his work, although god knows what his darknesses and hidden emotions were. Vea’s wife, she knew, could map him intricately. She took Claire to symphony concerts and the ballet, things that Vea could not sit still for. Ballet had not enough words to keep him awake. The closest he got to formal was Thelonious Monk, whose music, in the neglected recordings, were, he said, like imprisoned birdsongs. When Claire went to the Veas’ for dinner, he would be once more rebuilding his homemade sound system, and this always led to a discussion of the most recent eavesdropping equipment on the market. ‘There’s a laser scope,’ he would say, ‘that can measure the vibrations in the glass of a window across the street, and then translate them into sounds. From there it’s one step to hearing the conversation going on in that room. And we’re the ones who lost the war. … ’

  Claire woke abruptly. She was in a hotel room in Tahoe. She had driven from San Francisco that afternoon and had needed to sleep for a few hours. Days before, she had been discussing a school board case with Vea, and he told her she would have to go to Tahoe. When she got up and looked out the window onto the town by the lake, she saw the casinos all lit up, beckoning. But when she came downstairs, the bellman suggested that a club called the Stendhal might be more interesting than any entertainment in a card lounge.

  At some point during her evening at the Stendhal, someone offered Claire a tablet. ‘What is it?’ she asked the person beside her, and he mouthed something that she could not hear. She broke it in two, then swallowed one of the pieces quickly, deciding on the lesser dose.

  The Stendhal was a small city of moods. There were rooms for silence and for loud music, rooms for fruit juice and fresh vegetables, for massage, for films that seemed plant-based or planet-based—like Baraka or Koyaanisqatsi or the one in which a small section of plot from a thriller was replayed in slow motion so that a woman’s arm packing a suitcase became as illuminating as a chrysalis in time-lapse. Claire had fallen under the spell of a brief scene from Psycho that was played slowly, Anthony Perkins walking innocently towards Janet Leigh with a tray of milk and sandwiches. Claire watched it just after taking the tablet, and as a result she was never certain whether the extension of the forty-five-second scene, which played out as a ten-minute sequence, was the talent of the tablet or the artist. In any case, she was now able to read, with a knowledge of what would take place in the future, all those innocent looks that went back and forth. When she turned away from the film she saw strangers moving cautiously around her, and a man who walked painfully slowly towards her with a glass of milk on a tray, so white there must have been a lit bulb within it.

  She found the dance hall and remained there for an hour or two. Sometimes she was alone, and sometimes she was jammed up against several bodies moving together like the particles of a wave. She was in Tahoe for something, but she could no longer remember what. There was something she had to do, she just could not distinguish where it was in her memory. She would go into the silent room, behind thick pneumatic doors, and work it out there. The reason for being in Tahoe would then roll in her direction like a marble.

  Some hours later she woke, and walked back from the club to her hotel. It was a cloudy morning, and gusts of rain were coming off the lake. The narrow streets sloped down towards the centre of town. She looked back to determine what a certain noise was and saw it was someone on a skateboard about to pass her. His eyes caught her look, and he made a quick decision and reached out, lifting her onto the board in front of him. He barely held her and she was holding nothing, just standing encircled within his arms, with her eyes wide open. They raced over the clacks of the sidewalk against the rush of the rain, hardly seeing faces as they slid past, everything was colour and rain. She began to relax, and at that moment he lifted her and placed her on the pavement, then sped away ahead of her. Claire turned to see the distance they had come, and stood there instantly still, immovable in front of the clapboard houses. She needed to find her hotel and lie down.

  Somewhere during this somnambulistic walk, she entered a diner and sat down in a booth. She asked for mineral water, three eggs, sausages, and mushrooms. Did they have green tomatoes? Yes. A double order, then. The waitress brought her the food and she started eating, picking at it, feeling clumsy, tired, not controlling her knife and fork. That was when she saw someone who looked like Coop come into the restaurant.

  Coop?

  She didn’t say it out loud, not quite sure if she had summoned him from the darkness. She just stood up in her booth. He looked across the room for a seat, and he saw her. Then there was an amazed smile. She went up to him and embraced him. It was him. She wouldn’t let go of him, because she was sobbing. It was her tiredness, or the vapour trails of that pill. She was not expecting this, and the emotion of seeing Coop invaded her.

  He sat down across from her. Both were silent. He kept looking around. He turned to look behind him, then back to Claire.

  So this is where you live?

  No. In San Francisco. I don’t live here.

  Coop said nothing, just watched her.

  I work for a defence lawyer. I do research, investigations. I work for Aldo Vea. Do you know him?

  Does he investigate gambling?

  That’s prosecution. I’m defence.

  All at once she became conscious of what she was wearing.

  I’ve been at a club. Not typical for me. Her eyes flickered. The excitement and exhaustion were hitting her simultaneously.

  Listen, I want to talk, Coop, hear everything, but I need to …

  Let’s go, he said. He knew where her hotel was, and suggested they walk, for the fresh air. Once outside he told her that he made his living by gambling, and asked her again about the kind of work she did. He kept walking sideways so he could look at her. Are you investigating something here?

  Just briefly. I’m looking in on a case for my boss.… You move like a gangster, Coop.

  I’m a card player.

  I see.

  I live a few hours north of L.A. A small town called Santa Maria. I’ve been there some years now. I’m in Tahoe looking for someone.

  Do you have a house? In Santa Maria, I mean.

  I live in a hotel.

  Jesus.

  He waved down a cab.

  What are you doing?

  You’re tired. I don’t think you will make it to the Fuller.

  He stood in the doorway after she entered her hotel room and asked when she was leaving Tahoe.

  Sit. Have a drink, Coop. I can stay long enough to see you again, if you have the time. She fell back onto the sofa and toed her shoes off, watching him.

  Coop walked over to the window that showed the still-pulsing lights of Tahoe.

  There’s a big card game down there, in the next few days. Somehow I need to get out of it. I need to get some help, from an old friend. Coop turned and saw that Claire had slipped sideways on the sofa and was asleep. He went over and stood looking at her.

  He pulled her up so that she was against him, her face at his neck. He could smell a remnant of perfume. He had never thought of Claire as someone with perfume. She was a girl he had taught to fish, ride a horse, drive a car. Up close he could see the same warmth in her face, and he found himself smiling at her. It was years since he had last seen her. ‘C’mon, you need a bed.’ She half woke and her hands pushed him away. ‘It’s okay, it’s me, Coop. I’m just helping you.’

  During the next two days, Claire worked on the school board case, and waited for Coop to call. She tried the number he had left for her, but there was never an answer. Perhaps he had left town, after all. She went into a few card lounges, but when she asked players about Coop, they turned away or ignored her. Anonymity seemed a courtesy in this world. She might be the wife of an errant gambler. She had nothing, no address for him, only his scrawled phone number. After all these years she had managed to lose him again.
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  She called Vea and said she was staying on for a while, and asked if he would track an address from a phone number for her. Someone she knew well, a sort of relative. She’d begun to feel something was wrong. That is, if he had existed in the first place. Perhaps the half of the pill she had swallowed had invented him, a little gift to end the very long night.

  In Santa Maria, in the hills a few hours northwest of Los Angeles, during the years he had been there, Cooper would gamble long into the night, returning to his room at the hotel at three or four in the morning. He lived alone, mostly anonymous within the community of the town. A generation back, Santa Barbara County was populated mostly by migrant labourers, Mexican, Colombian, Vietnamese, Italian-American, who worked on the ranches and vegetable farms that spread over the landscape beyond the highway. The rich lived in the hills, and it was there one found the errant sons who loved to gamble. This was how democracy got a toe-hold in the valleys. Sometimes Cooper drove south and risked playing in bigger amateur games along the coast, but mainly he was at ease in this small highway town. Since the episode in Vegas, where he had cheated The Brethren, he was better off hidden. He went to movies in the afternoon, read legal thrillers, bought hookers when he needed them, and sat down at card tables at night. He would wake late in the day, then go running to burn off the staleness of the previous night. There was a balance to this spare life, and that was the trick. He didn’t go to Vegas or Tahoe anymore. He was unknown to the strangers he played cards with. There was no desire in him to step back into his past.

  In the early evening Cooper would drive to a steak house on the Taft road and stand at the bar and drink a bad margarita, then sit down at a table by himself. He was usually out of Jocko’s before the main dinner crowd came. He preferred eating alone. Later, during the night, he would be surrounded by gregarious company at the card tables, but here he silently watched the few other diners and the tells between couples. He had become preoccupied with a woman who came in every Monday and Friday with a bearded man. Jocko’s wasn’t known for its fast service, and while Cooper waited he tried to imagine the man’s profession. A surveyor? Or one of those men who drove insectlike trucks up to planes at airports? The woman, in her black-and-white-checked woollen skirt, and with legs that barely seemed to fit under the table, was almost six feet, tall as Cooper anyway, and she was a ripple of energy. She’d leap up and talk to the staff, or check a name or a date on one of the posters tacked to the wall and come back with information for her partner.