It’s been more than two weeks now since Charlie and I came back from a hike at Jack London State Park to find the condo vandalized. Desecrated may be a more accurate word for describing the condition of the apartment. The front door was left wide open and, before we walked in, we were assaulted by the smell of shit; a steaming pile of it sat in a frying pan on the stove, the burner dialed to low.

After dealing with the fry pan, Charlie raced to the second bedroom. I followed him in after I heard him scream. The parrot cage was in pieces on the ground, having been trampled, but there was no sign of Roscoe, save for a few stray feathers; this, of course, is what prompted Charlie’s wail of disbelief and grief. We later found the parrot perched atop the armoire in the master bedroom. Mute and terrorized, he shied from Charlie, who collapsed to the carpet in tears. I gave Charlie a moment before getting down on the floor beside him to offer comfort.

We discovered other damage in the apartment—the sliding glass door to the deck had been shattered with a hammer, and one of Charlie’s prized paintings, a gloved hand, by his friend Arrow Wilk, was on the ground; it had been slashed repeatedly with a knife.

We called the police as soon as we regained our wits and we were told not to touch anything until they came to dust for prints. If they wanted more, Charlie and I agreed, they could always dig in the dumpster for the shit-filled frying pan.

Two cops came within a half an hour of our call, a sergeant named-tagged Castillo, who introduced herself as Esther, and an exceptionally tall young dude, named Snopkowski. He didn’t offer his first name and I spent more than a moment fixated with his name tag and pronouncing his name in my head. Sergeant Castillo walked in first and had a quick look around the place. “There’s nothing worse,” she said, “than having your home defiled.”

Snopkowski wore a thin mustache that looked to be either too much or too little of an accent for his long egg-shaped face. He had a large camera dangling around his neck. Charlie stuck close to Sergeant Castillo, the two of them speaking in conspiratorial tones, while I followed Snopkowski on his photo safari through the rooms. We didn’t exchange a single word. I noticed that the tall lank of a cop grimaced, his little mustache bunching up, each time he snapped a shot. Did the resulting photographs somehow carry the mark of his disdain?

Once Sergeant Castillo established that neither Charlie nor I could account for anything that had been stolen, she exhaled expressively and pronounced the word vengeance. Did we know anybody who might “seek to extract it?” I found her phraseology beguiling; extraction was something that happened at the dentist or involving natural gas wells. Charlie and I faced each other and in a marvel of simultaneity, we each pronounced Vince’s name.

The sergeant’s face turned thoughtful. She had a sweetness about her—I think that must be the first time I’ve had that thought about a cop—and this impression may have been heightened by the fact that her face bore the significant scars of teenage acne.

Sergeant Castillo nodded. “We know Vince. He has a place in this complex, doesn’t he?”

“Number fourteen,” I said.

Charlie and I each detailed our history with Vince and his possible grounds for grievance.

Neither of the police officers had much to say in response. Snopkowski went off to take a few more photos and Sergeant Castillo began dusting for fingerprints. When the officers were finished their work, we were asked if it was possible for us to stay somewhere else for the next couple of nights, since the apartment was a crime scene.

I remember smiling at Charlie and saying, “We have no choice—we need to go on vacation.” Shortly after the police left, we packed two bags with clothes, our computers, and the traumatized parrot, and drove up the coast to Gualala, where we found, through Airbnb, a two-room cottage a few blocks from the beach.

Charlie heard back from Sergeant Castillo the next afternoon—they found Vince’s prints all over the apartment and would be charging him with unspecified crimes as soon as they could find him. At the end of the week Charlie got another call from the sergeant giving us the all clear to move back into the condo.

Apparently Vince remained on the lam. I imagined he was back in the Tenderloin, where Charlie and I found him many months ago, scuffling along the street, hidden among the homeless. I no longer recognized Vince as the man who charmed me into his life eight years ago. Did I recognize myself? That’s a question I posed most days as I walked alone along the beach. For convenience sake, I decided I was the first cousin of the woman I used to be, back in my Vince days. In my new incarnation I was wiser, less prone to histrionics, and more open to love. Even if those characterizations bore little resemblance to reality and were only aspirational, my choice of values cheered me and seemed a genuine improvement over my old cousin’s.

Charlie was able to make arrangements to have the Sonoma condo deep cleaned and the glass door to the deck replaced. In theory we could return home in two days, but I convinced Charlie that it would be good for us to stay on another week in Gualala. Our lives in the two rooms had taken on a certain grace. Minimalism has its virtues, and if Charlie still loved me after having to duck beneath my underwear—which I had drying on a line in the kitchen—to make a cup of coffee, I saw great hope for us.

Although Roscoe remained mute, Charlie felt he was making steady progress with PTSD exercises he designed for the parrot. “Roscoe understands everything I’m saying to him,” Charlie told me, “and we’ve now developed a system with which he can answer affirmatively or negatively. He will speak again; I know he will.”

I’ve been surprised to find myself rooting for Roscoe. If Charlie’s attention is going to be distracted by a bird, it might as well be one who speaks.

Last night, our last in Gualala, we got word from Augie Boyer that Vince was found dead in the garage of his San Francisco house. He’d affixed a hose to the exhaust of his BMW and ran it to the driver’s window. A needle was found beside his feet, along with a bag of powder. There will be an autopsy, but who cares what killed him.

After getting off the phone from Detective Boyer, and relaying the news, Charlie watched me closely to see how I’d respond. I could feel my face pucker with sadness. Strange to shed tears for a man, whose last act directed toward me was to leave a pile of shit steaming in a frying pan on the stove where I cook.

When he saw my tears, Charlie, without a trace of irony, said, “I’m sorry for your loss.”

The phrase sounded so absurd that I couldn’t keep myself from laughing. Soon Charlie joined my hilarity, and it began to feel unseemly to be joking about the dead. After we managed to corral our laughter, I proposed a toast to Vince, who used to enjoy fine wines. All we had left among our provisions was a bottle of cheap Italian red. Somehow a six-dollar bottle of wine seemed fitting.

When we were adequately lubricated, Charlie told me the haiku Augie Boyer left him with:

What a way to go:

oh, sadness of the world,

 needle in the arm.

Charlie and I each took a stab at a memorial haiku for Vince. Neither of them is worthy of repeating.

In our two weeks away we stayed away from newspapers, although we gleaned a fair amount of news online. On the drive down we decided to play a game with the news, the kind of game Charlie likes best, without a winner or loser.

Many months ago when Charlie, a bit tongue and cheek, described games with a single winner as macho, I argued with him. “It’s not a game,” I said, “without a winner.”

“You’re such a product of your culture, Pina,” he fired back. “It’s all winners and losers, cowboys and Indians, the colonizer and the colonized.”

“We’re talking about Scrabble,” I said. “Why play if we’re not going to count points?”

“The object is to build the most beautiful words possible.”

“We might as well play collaboratively,” I complained.

“Worse things have happened. Think of it the way you’d consider a family jigsaw puzzle.”

“That’s why I hate jigsaw puzzles,” I remember saying in my bitchiest voice.

“What’s the matter with you?” Charlie joked. “I bet you suspect me of lacking a competitive gene, of having low testosterone levels.”

This was in the first weeks of our relationship when we made love at least twice a day, so low T would have been a difficult argument to make. Finally, I gave in and found myself enjoying Scrabble when intriguing words were what were valued, and you could continually dip into the sack of letters until you found the ones that you wanted.

The car “game” involved taking turns forming headlines out of the bits of news we’d picked up in the last couples of weeks.

My reason for not really liking this “game” was that just about every headline featured Republicans, who were supposed to be the minority party now. Charlie tossed out the first headline, I lobbed one back, and so on:

Texas Governor Blames Massive Power Outage on Renewable Energy

Cruz Flies to Cancun While His State Dives Into Deep Freeze

Texas and Mississippi Governors Lift Mask Mandates

Biden accuses Republican Governors of Neanderthal Thinking

Republicans Find New and Creative Ways to Suppress Voting

Republican Affirmative Action: Voter Suppression

Catholic Leaders Discourage Their Flock From Getting J&J Vaccine

Anti-Vax Republicans Will Keep the U.S. From Herd Immunity

Idaho Republicans Hold Mask Burning Party

Republicans Believe Science=Socialism

A Gilded Statue of Trump in Flip Flops Delights Conservatives

After Dr. Seuss Books Deemed Racist They Become Bestsellers

House Minority Leader Reads Green Eggs and Ham on Video

Charlie effectively ended the game with his final headline: Democrats Pass 1.9 Trillion Relief Bill

What fun could we possibly have with good news?

Charlie had planned our return to Sonoma around a stop in Forestville to visit Sally on family day in her rehab facility. I suggested that I could take a hike while he visited, but Charlie made a special pitch for me to come with him. “You’re family now, Pina.” Suddenly I had a family: a sweet man without a competitive streak, and a grown daughter who happened to be an addict, but then Charlie insisted on adding his mute parrot to the family. I discouraged him from bringing Roscoe, but he wouldn’t have it.

“It will cheer up Sally to see him,” he said.

“It will distract everybody else,” I countered, to no avail.

I must say that Sally looked good. We got a little time with her before the formal session began and she took us on a tour of the lush grounds. There were horseshoes, bocce ball, and a small basketball court. Sally seemed particularly excited to show us the small redwood grove where she came every morning to meditate before anybody else was up. When I told Sally how good she looked she shook her head and said: “This is the easy part, being here. The true test is when I get home and have to make smart choices.”

She seemed particularly concerned about Roscoe’s condition. She spoke directly to the parrot, but didn’t overdue it when she realized that nothing was coming back. Charlie told her that Roscoe had been attacked during a break-in, but he didn’t mention that Vince was the perpetrator. Charlie and I also agreed not to mention Vince’s death.

We joined other families who were beginning to gather in a widely distanced circle of chairs set-up in a meadow. A few people wanted to make a fuss about Roscoe, sitting atop Charlie’s shoulder, but the social distancing precluded that. I gazed at the families, noticing, or imagining I noticed, a very tentative hopefulness in the eyes of the parents. My heart went out to them. How many times had their kids been in rehab? I couldn’t help thinking of them as kids even though most of them were probably in their mid twenties or early thirties like Sally. Two of the group—men in their fifties, who were both Safeway employees, looked out of place. Sally had explained that their union covered a good part of the program’s cost. I wondered what it was like for those men being mixed in with all these kids who looked like they were at summer camp.

A counselor opened the meeting, greeting the families, before having each of the clients introduced themselves in AA manner and talk about their work in the program. One young guy named Eric introduced himself and then said, “It’s good to be back at Fresh Mornings. I know I’m not supposed to say that, but I always feel better when I’m out here. My counselor Rex says I need to figure out how to bring Fresh Mornings with me when I go back in the world.”

I watched Eric’s parents while he talked—the mother was teary, but the father had gone somewhere else. How many rehab family meetings had he been to? I decided that Eric’s father was thinking about the woman down the street that he wanted to bed.

Even though I saw it coming, I was surprised when Sally’s turn came and she said, simply, “Hey Everybody, my name is Sally and I am an addict.” She went on to note her regret about not caring for herself and for all the pain that she’d caused her father. Then, in a breathless riff, she thanked the staff and talked about the mass of notes she’d taken during meetings, all the personal writing she’d done—six notebooks completely filled—and how she’d come to see her addiction as a terrible itch that she was trying to teach herself not to scratch.

“It goes away,” she said, “I really believe it goes away if you stop scratching and just ignore it.”

Charlie and I exchanged glances. I couldn’t know for sure what he was thinking, but I had the feeling his thoughts were in concert with mine: that equating heroin addiction with an itch might not be the ticket to long-term sobriety.

That is when Roscoe shocked everybody in the circle at Fresh Mornings. He chirped a couple of times and then in full parrot voice, rich with nasal resonance, said, “Sally, please come back to Sonoma Valley.”

Charlie, being so thrilled to hear his parrot speak again, didn’t do a very good of faux ventriloquism to cover for Roscoe. The meeting broke into pandemonium, with clients and their families gesticulating wildly and mimicking the parrot. When things calmed down, Sally spoke, teary-eyed, “I am coming back, Roscoe, I swear I am.”

After another brief hubbub, Chet, the counselor running the meeting, said, “Can we please get back on task now?”

Roscoe, in a manner as sheepish as a parrot could possibly manage, said, “Forgive my interruption.” This time Charlie’s lips were fully tuned to the parrot’s speech; the circle of addicts and their family members seemed relieved.

We bid Sally a long goodbye, with virtual hugs and tears; along with promises that will be difficult to keep.

The drive back to Sonoma was quiet. Roscoe had returned to his tacit self despite Charlie’s efforts to engage him in conversation.

As we drove back into Sonoma, I surprised Charlie with an idea I’d been entertaining before we left on our retreat.

“I’m thinking I’d like to get a dog.”

“What?” Charlie said. “What brought that on? I’ve never heard you express any interest in having a dog.”

“I haven’t. But sometimes when I’m on the deck I listen to people talk to their dogs. They’re so kind to their dogs. So loving. When I hear them express their affection, I wonder if these dog owners are as nice to any humans. Then I think that if I was a dog owner maybe I’d become a more loving person.”

Charlie laughed. “You’re a very loving person, Pina. Anyway I can’t see you walking a dog three times a day.”

“Three times a day?”

Roscoe piped in with a command: “Pina, Pina, Pina, walk the dog.”

Charlie was delighted on any number of levels. “There you have it, directly from the voice of Sonoma.”

It’s true; Roscoe pretty much settled the question for me. When you have a wise parrot laughing at your ideas it’s clearly time to rethink them.

“So?” Charlie asked.

“So, I’m glad to be back in Sonoma.”

 

— The End —

     August 14, 2020—March 8, 2021

 

Yesterday was a long day. It started in the morning at the Basque Boulangerie with Sally. We had an outing planned that made both of us nervous. Well, I know it made me nervous; since her journey to addiction it’s become increasingly difficult for me to measure Sally’s responses. I brought Roscoe along as a way of defusing the intensity with Sal. Maybe we’d be less inclined to say hurtful things to each other in the presence of a thinking parrot.

I commandeered an outside table in the far end of The Basque’s street patio, in a spot where nobody could approach us. Otherwise the curiosity of a parrot perched on my shoulder, might have tempted people to lean in dangerously towards us.

I was prepared for Sally coming late or not at all. Twenty minutes after the appointed hour, however, Roscoe spotted her and called in his outside voice, “Sally is in the valley.” The parrot goes a little mad at first when I bring him out, but he gains confidence quickly. I think he understands that the world of humans, aside from me, vastly underestimates his abilities of speech and cognition. He seems to take pleasure in his opportunity to shock.

Meanwhile Sally looked like a waif shuffling up First Street East. Maybe she was sick and badly in need of drugs to make her right; I couldn’t tell. How heartbreaking to see her like that. It wasn’t hard to imagine a big wind lifting her off the sidewalk and pitching her in another direction.

She and I had been negotiating for the better part of a week. I wanted to get her into rehab, but she said she wasn’t ready. When I asked how she’d know she was ready, she responded cryptically, “There will be a sign and I will feel it.” Her statement, echoed of all things, Justice Potter Stewart’s definition of pornography, “I’ll know it when I see it.”

I decided that given the condition she was in, I might have to feel when the time was right for her. This approach went against everything I’d learned at Al-Anon.

At the table she did her best to appear sprightly at first, forcing a smile and chattering a moment with Roscoe, but she couldn’t pull it off for long. Halfway through her latte, she fell asleep, her head dropped to the table and her half-eaten croissant became an accidental pillow.

I’d arranged a spot for her at Fresh Mornings, a treatment center outside of Forrestville, and by hook or crook I was determined to corral her into the car and get her out to the scheduled intake appointment at noon.

After I nudged Sally awake and Roscoe greeted her with a “Good morning, Sal,” she finished her latte, sipping it deliberately in short mechanical bursts. I told her what was what, and our negotiations resumed. She’d go, she said, if I first gave her the cash to get high.

“I can’t contribute to that,” I said. “Anyway, what’s the point of getting high right before you detox?”

“The last thing I want is to go into a place like that straight, Dad.”

I told Sally that her getting high wasn’t an option and she stretched her lips wide into a clown’s smile. “It’s the price of admission, Dad.”

I’d been watching Roscoe’s small head swing back and forth between Sally and me as he followed the conversation. Now that it stalled, he said, “So?”

I fed him a little hunk of my scone to nibble during the stalemate.

Of course, Sally prevailed in the end. She told me that there was a spot along the way where she could pick up what she needed.

We went to her apartment to pack clothes and whatever else she’d need for a month at Fresh Mornings. I left Roscoe in the car with some scone that I’d wrapped in a napkin. It surprised me that Sally invited me in. Maybe it was a confession, of sorts, to let me see the conditions in which she lived: a disaster of dirty dishes and clothes, with used needles threaded through the soiled shag carpet, and paperback novels stacked in tippy towers. It was all I could do not to cry. I started to go to the sink and do dishes, but Sally quipped, “Stop, Dad, the maid comes tomorrow,” a joke carried from her teenage years, uttered whenever I asked her to clean her disaster of a room. During the month that Sally will be in treatment I’ll come by and turn the apartment spic and span, thus cementing my status as an able bodied codependent. Now I leaned against the door as Sally tossed clothes from the floor into her hard-sided chartreuse suitcase. She seemed suddenly energized and I wondered if she’d had a line or two of coke when she went to the bathroom. “Don’t worry, Dad,” she said, as I watched her fill her suitcase, “they’ll have a laundry at the place and, from what I’ve heard, they’re big on having you do chores. They make it like boot camp.”

As we headed west on Highway 12, through Boyes Hot Springs, I hoped against hope that Sally would allow me to drive her directly to the treatment center without stopping “to get herself tuned up,” as she phrased it. But just after we passed into Agua Caliente, she said, “Okay, Dad, you’re going to go pull over to the right before the next light. There’s a hair salon with an empty lot. The place is closed. I won’t be more than fifteen minutes. Please stay in the car. There’s nothing for you to see out here.

I backed in to the lot so I could watch Sally cross at the light and walk down the street past a popular Mexican market, El Brinquinto. I used to buy half chickens there on summer weekends. You could smell them grilling on a wide grate from blocks away. According to Augie Boyer, this area is close to where Jesus was murdered, a little more than a month ago. As Sally disappeared from my view I watched a steady stream of Latinos walk in and out of the market.

I waited nearly a half an hour in the car, enumerating my litany of crimes as a father. Most involved neglect, and yet as a single dad it was me who made every meal, helped with homework, and read the bedtime stories. To be honest, my crimes mostly had to do with spoiling my child, trying to make up for her not having a mother.

Roscoe napped in the back seat, but as soon as I became impatient and opened the car door to slip out, he snapped to: “Where you going, where you going, Charlie?”

I hoisted the parrot onto my shoulder; I could feel his talons digging in. We waited for the light and then followed the crosswalk gingerly. I was afraid that the cars might frighten Roscoe, but the parrot remained steady. When somebody honked his horn at the sight of Roscoe on my shoulder, he said, “Imbecile.”

Two men, each with a load of Coronas, came out of the market as we passed and started laughing when they saw Roscoe. One of them shouted: “Polly quiere una galleta?”

Roscoe responded without skipping a beat: “Si, gracias,” but I kept walking, past the grocery and down Depot Road. I had no idea where the depot was or if one even existed. Sally was nowhere to be seen. Why had I let her go?

There were no houses on the first block. I had no idea where she could have disappeared? Depot Road veered in two directions, circling around a solar plant that may have occupied the space of the old depot, and spilling to the left toward Flowery Elementary School. I headed toward the school, which appeared to be closed. Behind some fencing I noticed a playground. Roscoe began chirping wordlessly, and then he managed to say, “Sally in Sonoma Valley.” Not only does Roscoe have the ears of a parrot he has the eyes of an eagle.

Sally sat, her feet on the ground, atop a red plastic swing. I couldn’t tell when I first spotted her if her eyes were open or closed. Although static, it didn’t seem like she was dead—she sat erect with each of her hands gripping the chain of the swing. I lifted Roscoe from my shoulder and held him close to my chest as I sprinted the fifty yards to the playground. Something kept me from calling her name, perhaps the fear that there were other creatures lurking about.

Sally lifted her head. “Hey Dad, you found me. I just needed to sit for a minute.”

The ride out to Sebastopol was quiet. Sally seemed to be residing in a place between sleeping and waking, and though I was overwhelmed with emotion when I first spotted her on the swing, I had no desire to engage with her in her semi-somnolent state.

By the time we arrived at the treatment center, Sally had perked up. She delighted Roscoe, who’d remain in the back seat of the car, with a long goodbye. “I will be back in a month,” she said, “and you and I are going to do some great things together, Roscoe.”

Sally saved some of her charm for the intake counselor Cindy, telling her how grateful she was to get a chance for a fresh start at such a lovely place. I figured that given Cindy’s experience—I judged her to be in her mid-forties—that she could read Sally’s bullshit even better than me.

We were given a breakdown of meetings and activities during the course of a day. “There’s very little idle time,” said Cindy, and yet as we were given a tour of the grounds, we saw a number of the other clients or campers at their leisure. This was break time, after lunch, we were told. Some young men played basketball; I noticed a number of young women walking together in twos and threes. For a moment, I thought of the other parents, like me, not knowing whom to blame for our child’s fractured life, except ourselves. The kids—I couldn’t help myself for thinking of them as such, even though some were pushing thirty or more like Sally—seemed like a privileged, suburban lot, which made sense given the cost of a month’s stay.

Sally offered me a kiss on the cheek and told me how grateful she was that I set this up for her. I chose to take her words at face value. As I walked back to the car, she called to me, “You’ll come on family day, won’t you, Dad?”

The fog had lifted and I stood in a shaft of sunlight beside the car, as a cloud of wistfulness crept over me. Not only was I worried about Sally, but I also feared that the dark business about the murder was sending Pina beyond the pale.

If I were a guy in a movie I’d have pulled out a cigarette, and I practically craved one, despite having never smoked. I couldn’t decide whether it was laughable or worrisome to view myself as an objectified creature for which any middling actor could stand in.

I debated driving further west, back to Armstrong Redwoods in Guerneville, which I visited with Augie Boyer not long ago. I wondered what Roscoe would make of the giant sequoias. He regarded me with some concern from the back seat, or was I imagining that? When you suspect your parrot of worrying about you, you may be in trouble.

The sun disappeared behind the trees, but I still hovered in this purgatorial state beside the car until my phone rang. It was Augie Boyer. He announced a break in the case and asked if I could meet him in an hour at Barking Dog Coffee Roasters in Boyes Hot Springs. It would take me nearly that long to get back that way.

When I asked if it was good news, the detective sighed. “Jesus remains dead.” After a bit more chatter, Augie Boyer uttered a sentence that amused me: “In the likely event that you have more sway over your woman than I have over mine, would you ask her to meet with us.”

I repeated that phrase in my head several times, on the ride back toward Sonoma, afraid that if I said it aloud Roscoe would make it part of his repertoire. I decided not to leave Roscoe in the car this time. I had told him that we were going to meet Detective Boyer at a coffee shop, and we practiced a haiku I’d written for Augie Boyer. When that was done, Roscoe asked if the coffee shop served rum. I was sorry to tell him no and made a note to take a flask of rum with me whenever I brought Roscoe on an outing.

I noticed Augie Boyer slumped over an outside table at Barking Dog with a tall thermos of coffee. Hatless, his spiked red hair looked like it had been recently waxed. When he spotted us coming he sat up straight. Apparently his wife had given him another makeover: he was wearing a white Scottish-style ghillie shirt, laced together with a leather braid, atop a plaid kilt and a pair of Birkenstocks.

“Roscoe, my man,” he said, “how’s tricks?”

The bird didn’t miss a beat: “Good to see you again, Detective. How’s the coffee?”

Augie Boyer glanced back and forth between Roscoe and me. “Sometime you’ll have to explain how you do that, Charlie.”

I thought to demonstrate that Roscoe spoke for himself but I recalled Sally’s admonition that the bird has less value as an actual speaker than as an illusionary trickster whose strings I pull. And yet I’ve been miffed by people refusing to see what’s right in front of them, and here was a man, who made his living by detecting, turning a blind eye on my gifted parrot’s reality.

Augie Boyer preferred playing games with Roscoe, winking at him now, and delighting when the bird winked back at him. I reminded myself of the reason the detective called for this meeting and decided to stall until Pina arrived.

“But you didn’t answer, Roscoe,” I said. “How’s the coffee?”

“Yeah, how’s the coffee?” the parrot asked, his voice overlapping with mine.

The detective shook his head. He didn’t want to believe what he was witnessing, and shivered a minute. I thought that might have something to do with wearing a kilt on a cool day.

“The coffee is how I like it,” he said. “Nice strong French roast. In regards to coffee, Quince says I’m a philistine, a word I taught her, by the way, which she uses against me extensively. She says I’ve killed my taste by drinking only dark roast. Give me a break, woman, I’m finally getting used to the almond milk.”

“Don’t you have a haiku for Mr. Boyer, Roscoe?”

“Yes, indeed, Charlie.”

This was becoming too much for Augie Boyer. He put on a pair of Ray-Ban Aviators.

Roscoe chirped a couple of times and then recited:

The old detective

Is beginning to see things

that aren’t even there.

I was delighted by the little poem’s aptness. Augie Boyer looked confused; he turned his head from the parrot to me, and back again to Roscoe.

Pina pulled up about then and, spotting us at our table, gave a little honk. I left the parrot perched on the back of my chair as I went to greet Pina and order coffee. I imagined Augie Boyer being so shaken by a one-on-one conversation with Roscoe that he’d start eating meat again.

Returning with our coffees, I heard Roscoe say, “I love rum. Charlie told me my ancestors drank it.”

When we got to the table, Detective Boyer was looking a little pale, but Roscoe perked up when he saw Pina. “Pina, Pina, Pina, where you beena?”

She greeted him with a smile. “How’s my favorite bird?”

“Tip top,” Roscoe said, his head bobbing a few times.

Pina said hello to Detective Boyer. I could see that she noted the detective’s get-up and did what she could to suppress a laugh. Otherwise, she wasted no time. “So there’s been a break in the case.”

Augie Boyer nodded. He still looked shaken from his tête à tête with Roscoe.

“I have . . . I have good news and bad news—which do you want first?”

Pina and I answered at the same time. Predictably, I said good while Pina opted for the bad. Roscoe chimed in, siding with me. I could tell Pina was thinking, the fucking bird gets a vote?

“Alright,” said Augie Boyer, “here’s the good news, at least I hope it’s good news for you.”

Pina and I exchanged glances. If the good news is of dubious value, I thought, the bad news must be rotten.

The detective took a sip from his thermos and faced Pina. “I had a chance to meet with your client Aubrey.”

“How did you manage that?” Pina asked.

“I posed as one of your colleagues. I told him that you recommended I call because of the method I’d developed for stutterers. We met at Dolores Park in the city, each sitting in our own chalk circle. That man is not a murderer, I can tell you that. Before recent developments, he seemed a likely candidate, but I was barking up the wrong tree. I came up with the daft theory that a waiter shamed a stutterer, who followed the waiter back to his house and murdered him.”

“It sounded reasonable to me,” I said.

“Thank you, Charlie. Anyway, the meeting with Aubrey gave me the chance to definitively rule him out.”

Pina, sitting with her chin cupped in her hands, said, “Just curious, what’s your method for stutterers?”

“I thought you’d never ask. It’s the haiku—three simple lines to make it through. Focus on one line at a time. I told Aubrey that his haikus should reference a season and some aspect of nature.”

“You got him writing haikus?” Pina asked.

“Of course, he’s a natural. I also reminded Aubrey that he, too, is a part of nature. The upshot of this is that I think I’ve stolen your client, Pina. Aubrey‘s going to do some haiku work with me. It may be just as well. The poor bloke has some serious puppy love for you. I don’t think he’d do any harm, but just the same.”

Roscoe perked up with all the talk of haiku. “I have another poem for you, Detective:

This midwinter day,

the parrot, unable to sing,

has other virtues”

It was me, this time, who recited the haiku, in my thrown parrot voice. Augie Boyer could no longer tell what was what. I winked at him just before he went into a coughing spasm.

When he’d recovered, after turning away and blowing his nose floridly in a red handkerchief, Pina said, “And the bad news.”

The detective nodded his head gravely. “The bad news is spelled V I N C E.”

I wondered if the detective thought that spelling out the name would preclude any commentary from Roscoe.

“Vince is the killer?” Pina shouted.

“No, perhaps an unwitting accomplice. I followed him for a couple of nights to the spot in Agua Caliente where he made his connection. On the second night I got out of my car, dressed all in black, with a mask that completely covered my face, and a black Stetson that I tucked my hair under. I came on strong with my Wolfman Jack accent, a brogue I perfected in high school, and posed as a member of the syndicate. Vince did not recognize me. As the saying goes, desperation spills the beans. I asked him about the killing of Jesus and he played dumb for a while. I stood out there in the cold night for quite some time. His supplier must have spotted us and decided I was the fuzz.

With a bit of prompting, your old boyfriend said that he was forced to give your name, under pressure. They asked for his girlfriend’s name and he said, ‘She’s my ex.’ They didn’t give a damn; they wanted your name and they wanted him to write it five times on the back of a check at The Girl and the Fig.”

“Why?” Pina asked.

“Who knows? To set the investigators on a bogus trail, to have Vince implicated in the crime.” Augie Boyer turned to face me directly. “This is where the bad news gets worse, I’m afraid. Your daughter Sally became dope buddies with Vince.”

I heard the words but could not assemble them properly. Meanwhile Roscoe chirped: “Sally in Sonoma Valley.”

Augie Boyer forged ahead. “And he pressured her, when she was in desperate straits, into signing Pina’s name multiple times on the back of the check.”

“And why was Jesus murdered?” Pina asked.

“Poor guy was trying to leave the business behind, but he had debts. When the new syndicate moved in, they came collecting old debts. These are not the kind of guys who give you a mulligan. They wanted to set an example with Jesus. Now the FBI is all over the case.”

“The FBI?” Pina asked.

The detective nodded and twirled a spike of red hair around his index finger. “Yeah, two of the members from the Stockton family happened to break into the U.S. capitol on January 6. They’re about to be indicted with other Oath Keepers on conspiracy charges. The Feds tracked them to Santa Rosa through the walkie- talkie channel they were using: Stop the steal J6.” Detective Boyer guffawed at that.

“How does that affect the case?” I asked.

Augie Boyer slumped back in his seat. “They want everything they can find on these white supremacist conspirators. The murder of a Latino guy named Jesus is not going to hurt their cause. So there’s the good news and the bad, boys and girls. I’ve let the sheriff know what I found out. They may bring Sally in to talk, but I don’t think they’ll be much interested in her.”

“And Vince?” Pina asked.

I could tell that she had a lingering sympathy for her old boyfriend.

“Vince?” the detective said, “That’s anybody’s guess. As a former emergency room doctor, they may key in in on his knife skills. Did he do the deed to pay off debts or insure his supply line? I think they’ll probably put the squeeze on Vince to help them make a murder case against the syndicate. Vince looks to me like a man who will be scratching his itch for the duration. As they say, he who lies down with dogs shall rise up with fleas.” Augie Boyer whistled three or four notes tunelessly, and stood up. “At this point, my work is done.”

Now we got to enjoy Detective Boyer fully in his kilted splendor. He bowed to each of us, including Roscoe, and said that he had a date in Santa Rosa to look at some used bagpipes. “The things I’ll do for my bride.” He left us with a final haiku:

The man in the kilt

likely appears as foolish

as a man in love.

 

I see Vince’s BMW parked on the sidewalk out front and decide to pay a visit. Once I climb the stairs to his condo, it’s clear that he’s there; I hear his cough underneath a frantic smear of guitar jazz, broadcast at high volume from his Bose system. The music, if it can be called that, seems like a fresh take on that old public service announcement: “This is your brain on drugs.” The man’s raspy cough suggests that he has COVID.

I push Vince’s doorbell three times, pause, and then hit it again—our old code for each other—but he doesn’t answer. Along with the guitar jazz and Vince’s cough, the incessant crowing of the two roosters, across the street at The Patch, add a shrill counterpart. I always thought that roosters were designed to squawk at an impossibly early time in the A.M. and then be done for the rest of the day, but these guys never quit. What an instinct to have bred into you, and consider a rooster’s anatomy—the power packs in their voice boxes, and their cast iron throats. Do their relentless cries indicate the degree of their horniness? Imagine the level of cacophony if every time a man ogled a girl or a woman he was forced to crow like a rooster.

I pounce on the bell again and finally Vince shouts: “What the fuck? Is the sky falling?”

He pulls open the door, unmasked. The left half of his face is spread with lather, the right shaved clean. Vince affects a sidewise posture at the door, his shaved side aimed forward, as if he could bluff me into not seeing the Foamy side. The way he’s standing, he looks a little like a one-eyed-jack without any of the regal trappings. Actually, he’s barefoot—his toenails, thick and jagged as the blade of a serrated knife—in boxer shorts and a wife-beater tee with a long drool of coffee stain, just south of his throat. He lifts a hand towel that had been draped over his right shoulder and wipes off the lather. The result: a perfectly split personality—Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Even his mustache is divided between a five-day bush and the faintest suggestion of its twin.

I stand well back from the door. He looks me up and down and I listen to the cries of the roosters.

“You going out on a date, Vince?”

He grins at me. “No, my date’s come here.”

“Fat chance.” I can see track marks on his arms. At least that’s what I think they are. “I want to talk.”

“Talk’s cheap, Pina.”

“Well, that’s all you’re getting from me. Get your ass dressed, put on a mask, and come out here.”

“A little demanding today, are we?” he says, and turns away to produce his three-note, sandpaper cough. “Give me five minutes.”

“Don’t tell me you have COVID now.”

“I don’t know.”

That’s as close to an affirmative as I’m going to get from Vince. I’m struck by a moment of sorrow for the man. Although I never was in love with him, we shared seven years of our lives. At his best Vince was a boon companion who looked after me, from time to time, with a measure of consideration. Such partners go whichever way the wind blows, and this grief, if it can be called that, concerns my spurious hope that he and I shared more than a string of good times. There is also the simple human shock in noting the extent of his disintegration. This longtime doctor with a swagger has cashed it all in for a season of oblivion.

Vince has a teak bench outside on which he never sits; he’s cluttered it with neglected succulents in chipped crocks. I looked after them when I stayed here, but I doubt they’ve been watered in months. Somehow they go on living, which make them the perfect companions for an addict.

I push a few pots aside to make a place to sit. I’m puzzled with myself for not recognizing the depth of Vince’s addiction earlier. Was it willful ignorance on my part? For years I wrote off his flirtations with doom as a doctor’s experiments with enhancements. It all seemed part of a game he was playing because, as far as I knew, it only involved prescription medications. Of course, at the time, I kept myself stewed into the deep night, on alcohol and weed. We engaged in a form of parallel play, and I was lonelier than I’d ever been. Vince, who betrayed me any number of times, didn’t offer the ideal refuge for a youngish widow.

His five minutes turn into ten and, after I hit his doorbell again, I squirt my hands with disinfectant, as if that’s going to keep the fucker’s COVID at bay. I back away from the door and step halfway down the stairs.

The jazz guitar assault ends and Vince appears in the doorway, masked and still barefoot, in dirty jeans and a Mexican football jersey that reads: Caliente.

“Put on some shoes, Vince, we’re going to talk on the street.”

He turns obediently on his heels, without a word, and comes back a moment later in a pair of ancient huaraches. I lead him down the stairs, his persistent cough reminding me to take two steps to his one. I assign Vince a spot on the stone wall across the street from the complex, and I park myself on the wall fifteen feet north. The wall, extending behind a row of Osage trees in their bare winter glory, is high enough that I am able to dangle my legs. It’s an evocative sensation, and for a moment I feel girlish and almost forget why I am sitting here.

Vince clears his throat and spits to his left; thankfully I’m sitting to his right. “So what’s with the wild hair up your ass, Pina?”

“Would you like me to cut to the chase?”

“By all means.”

“Alright, tell me about your relationship with Jesus.”

Vince pulls down his mask and absently scratches the side of his nose, before blowing it into a soiled handkerchief. “You know I’m not a religious person, Pina.” He makes a show of fixing his mask back in place.

“Fuck off, Vince, and tell me about your connection to the dead waiter. Was he your dealer in Sonoma?”

“Who says I had a dealer?”

My heels kick against the wall. “Take a look at yourself, man. You’re as fucked up as the day Charlie and I peeled you off the sidewalk in the Tenderloin.”

“Hey, I’m having a minor setback.”

“Whatever you say, Vince.” The ability to delude ourselves may be more distinctive to humans than opposable thumbs, and addicts have a special advantage in this regard. “Tell me about Jesus,” I demand.

Vince nods several times as if he’s considering a new ploy. “Thing with Jesus,” he says, and breaks off coughing. After spitting again, he continues: “Thing about Jesus, according to what I’ve heard, is he stopped dealing drugs. The problem with that is that it doesn’t get you out of debtor’s prison.”

“Did he help with your connection?”

“Help is a dubious word in this context, Pina.”

“Let’s not fuck with semantics here, Vinnie. So you used to have your lunch over at The Girl and the Fig and Jesus would wait on you.”

“Sometimes. You know, The Girl was never my favorite. Did you hear the restaurant just closed down? They were afraid of protests once it came out that they forced a waitress to change her Black Lives Matter facemask, or some such bullshit.”

“That’s beside the point.”

“Anyway, I prefer the Swiss Hotel . . .”

“I don’t give a fuck what you prefer. Tell me about your relationship to Jesus.”

“Nothing to tell.” Vince pulls a crumpled pack of Marlboro Reds from his jeans pocket and shakes out a bent cigarette. When he flicks his Bic, the flame shoots so high it catches not only the cigarette but also of one of his fingertips. He doesn’t seem to notice. As soon as he inhales he begins coughing again. Now he shakes the hand with the singed digit.

“You keep on, you’re going to burn yourself up, Vince. You think smoking is a good idea with your croup?”

“Who are you,” he manages between hacks, “Pina the healer?”

“You were telling me about your thing with Jesus.” I find myself dangling my legs again and quickly stop.

Vince shrugs. “What thing? I was telling you exactly nothing. Jesus brought me my Hendricks martini, my chicken liver pâté and, if I had an actual appetite: a burger with Gorgonzola melt. Nothing special.” Vince flicks his lit cigarette stub into the street.

“Okay, who was the connection he set you up with?”

“Why are you giving me all this grief, Pina? I’m not feeling so well.”

“Who was it?”

“Look, it wasn’t exactly somebody attached to a name, and the somebody changes faster than you can keep up with.”

I have no idea where I’m going with these questions but sense that Vince knows more than he’s letting on. “So where did you meet these somebodies?”

“Fuck, Pina. Enough.”

“Where?” I’m surprised he just doesn’t get up and leave. There’s nothing compelling him to stay, but he seems to have lost his will. “Where did you meet them?”

Vince faces me blankly, his eyes dim. “You know that bodega in Agua Caliente where they grill chickens every weekend. Right down the street from there. A guy comes out of the shadows as soon as you walk down the street.”

That might be useful information, but not for me. I need to strike another vein. “Tell me about Sally.”

“Who’s Sally?”

“Don’t go dumb on me, Vince. It doesn’t become you.”

Again, Vince lifts his mask and scratches the side of his nose. “Oh you mean, Charlie’s daughter?”

“When did you last see her?” It’s a decent gambit, like asking, when did you last beat your wife?”

He gazes at me, with a little more light in his eyes, to try and find out what I know. This tells me that my shot in the dark hit pay dirt. “When did you last see her?”

“I don’t know. It was a while back.”

I’m dangling my legs again. Who gives a fuck? I’m on a roll. “How often does she come by?”

“Who says she comes by?” Vince shakes out another cigarette.

I decide to stay quiet, to wait Vince out. The flame of his Bic shoots high again and, again, singes one of his fingers. “Okay,” he says, after exhaling, ”she comes by when she needs something.”

“And you give it to her.”

Vince’s eyebrows rise and he blows out a trio of smoke rings. “For a price.”

I’m disgusted, but don’t want to show it. I stop myself from picturing him manhandling a desperate young woman, less than half his age. Whatever burst of sympathy I had for Vince a while earlier is fully dissipated. “Okay, which one of you wrote my name multiple times on the back of a restaurant check?”

He looks aside. “I know nothing about that.”

“And the carving on Jesus’ back?”

“You know me, Pina, I can’t stand the sight of blood.”

“You fucking quack.” If I weren’t obliged to keep my distance from the prick, I’d waltz over and kick him in the nuts.

The house is empty except for the five long stemmed tulips that Charlie arranged in my favorite glass vase when I was out yesterday. He brings flowers from time to time and I always think that it is the kindest thing. I never remember to pick up flowers. Charlie doesn’t make a big thing out of it; he arranges them as soon as he comes in the door and puts them on the dining room table. Suddenly our haphazard lives are civilized. I stand a moment now in front of the tulips—our first of the early California spring. These creamy white spirits, angling east and west, north and south, on their live stems, framed by a brightness of green leaves, suggest odd concepts like purity and virginity, concepts that have grown defunct in my middle age, in the midst of a pandemic.

The last couple of days Charlie and I have been like ships passing in the night. I don’t know what to do with myself. It’s a feeling I had when I first moved to Sonoma, nearly a year ago, after the pandemic first surfaced. I’m so lost I even go in to say hello to Roscoe, but he’s not there. Charlie’s been taking him out lately on walks. I have no idea what his plan is. Maybe he’s getting the parrot ready to release into the wild. Wishful thinking.

My options are limited; I haven’t had the attention span to read a book. Since I first heard about the killing of Jesus and the way my name got mixed up in it, I’ve done my best to sidestep a slurpy quicksand of shame. It comes with a degenerating sound loop: I’m not responsible for this. It just happens to be my name. I haven’t done anything wrong. Or have I? Haven’t I done everything wrong? Isn’t this my karma? Isn’t this what I deserve?

I am determined to alter my circumstances: I pick up the Irish novel I’ve been trying to read for the last two months—The Story of Lucy Gault, by William Trevor—and lay back on the bed. The object of reading is to get inside somebody else’s head, to be diverted by somebody else’s story. So far, Lucy, a girl of indeterminate age, hides from her parents when they are about to move from Ireland to England. She packs a bag of sugar sandwiches. While I wonder if I’ve ever had a sugar sandwich, the book slips from my hands.

In the dream I was clearly too old to be climbing a tree, especially without clothes on. It appears that I was running from something, some person or force, perhaps a charging St. Bernard or a natural disaster. I sat in the crotch of two branches trying to figure out who or what was chasing me but, first, I needed to determine who I was, if not myself. I found it to be a tricky question. There was nobody to consult. I feared that I could be anybody, maybe even an historic figure, perhaps a mythological character, frozen in time. I pronounced the term womanchild aloud, and then said, womanchild naked up a tree. My voice sounded sprightly and rigid at once, like a song played on school bells of varying pitches.

It seemed odd that a naked middle-aged girl, who’d climbed a tree because something was chasing her, would be more in her head than in her body, but that seemed to be the case. The body was made of sticks and stones, while the mind comprised a supple amalgam of fluid and glands. Although this womanchild didn’t feel fevered, she had a thermometer in her mouth. At first it tasted of glass, if glass has a taste, but then the tongue, long and swollen, picked up a tinge of berry.

What we see affects how we taste. A couple of branches away a cedar waxwing nibbled on berries. If the bird saw me, or this persona, he didn’t care. The womanchild in the tree was glad to be invisible, but then she thought: maybe I’m not here at all. Not only did the bird eat berries, he shat them, dropping little purple bombs. I, if it was truly I, decided it be great to trade places with him. Do nothing but eat berries, shit purple grenades, sing songs more tuneful than school bells, and fly off whenever the spirit moved me. A phone on another branch rang. Somebody must have seen a womanchild, scamper naked up a tree, and reported it to the police.

It’s Charlie on the other branch. “Can you come down to Barking Dog in Boyes Hot Springs?” he says.

I want to tell him about being up a tree, but think better of it. “The Barking Dog?” I ask.

“Yes, the coffee shop. Right now. There’s been a break in the case.”

I put on my shoes and, while I pee, take my temperature. Normal, I say, in a voice no longer made of school bells, although I feel anything but normal.