GARAGE BAND

You punch in Joe’s number.  After several rings he picks up.  Music’s in the background, big band, Sinatra.

“You there?” you say.

“K-Kyle.”

“You still up for working?” 

He waits a second before asking, “What time?”

“Eight.”

“Okay.”

                       *                                  *                                     *

The next morning Joe shows up ten minutes late, Styrofoam cup of coffee in hand.  At 11 AM, you’re pruning fruit trees and he has to shit.  “Go behind the Bamboo—” you tell him.  “Or in the ravine behind the Rhododendrons.”  But he makes you drive five minutes to a gas station.

Later that afternoon, after cleaning out storm gutters at the home of an elderly couple, you say, “We’re only a few miles from where my friend Lila lives.  When I was there yesterday I left one of my rakes.  Might as well swing by and pick it up.”

  At a gravel turnout up the street from her place, you park.  The sun is down and the Redwood canyon is dark and fertile, smelling of damp rich earth.  Joe is exhausted and waits in the truck; the only sounds are distant traffic and the soft slap of your cross-trainers against the pavement.

In front of the cottage is a green Chevy Vega.  Lila’s white VW Rabbit is gone.

You knock on her door, then wait a moment and tap again.  Music is playing; the Eurhythmics’ Sweet Dreams are Made of This. 

The cottage’s east wall is windowless; it’s raised on a slab of concrete and wooden blocks, forty years old and not up to code.  At the back end of the cottage six feet off the ground is a window, with a decaying wooden ledge and half-dead potted plants.  The lacy curtains are shut partway.  On the ground, amongst the carpet of Redwood leaves, cones and twigs, is your leaf rake.  Blackberry bushes stretch back into a tangle of Bay and Redwood.  Before your date with her yesterday—oops, it wasn’t a date—you had spent two hours trimming the brambles from within a yard of the house.  And you hadn’t noticed what you see now: on a patch of earth underneath her window are several crushed cigarettes.  Last night she had mentioned a stalker, or someone spying on her. 

You squat and examine the cigarette butts.  Whoever watched her was a smoker.  No shit.

They must have been fairly tall too, to see through her window, unless they had wings or a ladder.

At the corner of the house next to the carport is a white metal barrel.  You go over, examine it.  A five gallon paint drum.  Empty, though the lid is pounded on tight.  Looks like it could be used as a perch, to offer enough stability to allow someone to stand on it.

You haul it to the spot below the window, squat on it and slowly raise yourself to the window pane.  Nobody’s inside.  To the right, underneath a Georgia O’Keefe print, is her bed.  A chewed-up-looking teddy bear sits on it next to an unpainted night-stand with a clock-radio, a can of diet Pepsi and a pair of wire-rimmed eye glasses.

Then, to the pounding bass of Sweet Dreams, she bops into the room, wearing underpants and a sports bra, her abdomen smooth, lean and pale.  Only it’s not Lila.  It’s some other gal, with shoulder length reddish hair and a little purple dumb bell in each hand.  She’s doing curls, awkwardly swinging the dumb bells from thigh to shoulder, as she lifts alternating knees in time to the music.  Her underwear and bra are off-white and she’s good looking, about Lila’s age, with smaller tits.  Her buttocks are well-defined; two tight round cheeks beneath the Hanes waistband, the cotton traveling up the crack of her ass.

Her eyes flash over where you are and your heart pounds and you squat beneath the window and scamper over to the side.  It’s dark now.  She couldn’t have seen you, no way.  She would have seen the curtains, if anything.

 Though your heart is still racing, you decide to sneak another look. Quickly and quietly you mount the paint drum and raise your eyes between the potted plants on the ledge.  She’s staring straight at you and you jump and crunch your ankle oh mother of god and limp as fast as you can, back around the side.

Joe’s napping in the truck when you get there, head against the window. You fire up the engine, ankle throbbing painfully, and do a three-point turn. 

“Why you flippin’ a bitch?”

“What?”

“The U-turn.”

“I screwed up my ankle,” you say, wincing. 

You drive down the canyon a half mile, then swing onto the Boulevard.  “She wasn’t home.  When I walked behind the house to pick up the rake—which I fucking forgot to pick up—I saw some chick in the window, half-naked, doing exercises.  She saw me, or I think she did.”

“Your girlfriend?”

“No, someone else.  I have no idea who.”  You drive on, describing to Joe, from the beginning, how you met Lila—the blond who wasn’t home—when you were a seasonal clerk at the Records Office of San Quentin Prison.  You were twenty-one and sometimes you’d deliver paperwork to other buildings.  The R & R office—Receiving and Release—was a five minute walk.  You were buzzed through a gate, then crossed a courtyard and skirted a huge building that housed the machine shop and A-block.  Then, with only a guard in a distant rifle tower to watch your back, you were in the main yard with baseball diamonds and basketball courts.  And finally, R & R, where the bus dropped off or picked up prisoners.

Most often though, the women in the office got this task.  Not wanting to cross the yard alone, they’d ask you to escort them, feeling safer having a testosterone buffer between them and the convicts’ catcalls, the hey mamacita, hey baby, hey girl, give me some popcorn to go with that shake.

While walking the ladies across the yard, you avoided all eye contact with the convicts, sometimes suppressing an involuntary lump in your throat. You walked frowning, stiff-legged in your dress slacks (employees weren’t allowed jeans or blue pants) and shiny black cowboy boots.

That’s where you met Lila.  White, like you.  A Marin county girl. You became file-clerk buddies in the Records Office, processing paper work together from crime scene photos, correctional counselor interviews, parole board hearings.  And the guard’s disciplinary “chronos:” Slips of paper describing who stabbed who, who hurled piss on which guard, who’d been found with shivs or drugs in their cells.  Fascinating reading when you weren’t checking out Lila or the other women.  With Lila, you went off grounds together for lunch a couple times, having the occasional beer or margarita.  You were just getting the courage to ask her out on a real date when she quit. 

You called in sick that day. 

The rumor was, she was delivering paperwork, unescorted, to R&R, and a group of inmates on the basketball court lined up as she walked by.  Nobody told you exactly what happened, but apparently one of them stepped up to her and said something that was enough to make her quit.