The Dust Will Answer

By Richard Risemberg

1978: The wave of gentrification has yet to break over downtown Los Angeles, and vast swathes of the warehouse district lie nearly abandoned by the sterile trench of the city's concrete-clad river.

Lenny Strasser, a straight-arrow type with a taste for shady places, plunges into that world to discover that sometimes the only distance between two points is a very crooked line. When Lenny's friend Dave Larrabee nags him into helping him track down a missing girlfriend, Lenny suspects that the girl doesn't want to be found. He knows her all too well: she was his before she was Dave's, and she'd gone gleefully missing from his life one time too many. Worse, he's not entirely sure he's over his feelings for the theatrical and self-centered Kate.

But this time it wasn't one of her ordinary infidelities--she may have fallen, again, into the hands of the charismatic Nighthawk, who could lead her into territories where the danger is real and role-playing no protection from harm.

The quest takes them into hobo jungles and punk squats by the LA River--and into an after-midnight darkness of moral ambiguity that changes Lenny's life in ways he'd never dreamed of.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Richard Risemberg
• Release date: Feb 27, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311869449

Richard Risemberg

Richard Risemberg was born into a Jewish-Italian household in Argentina, and brought to Los Angeles to escape the fascist regime of his homeland. He has lived there since, except for a digression to Paris in the turbulent Eighties. He attended Pepperdine University on a scholarship won in a writing competition, but left in his last year to work in jobs from gritty to glitzy, starting at a motorcycle shop and progressing through offices, retail, an independent design and manufacturing business, and most recently a stint managing an adult literacy program at a library branch in one of the poorest neighborhoods of the city. All has become source material for his writing. So has his family, in particular his son Jack, for whom Journey Through the Shadowlands was originally improvised. He has pursued journalism, photography, and editorial writing, as well as fiction, publishing stories, poems, essays, editorials, and articles in edited publications including newspapers, professional journals, and literary magazines the world over. The complete list, updated regularly, is available at CrowTreeBooks.com. 

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The Dust Will Answer

by Richard Risemberg

Copyright 2015

Crow Tree Publications, Los Angeles

Smashwords Edition

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be constructed fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblances to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you did not purchase this ebook, or it was not purchased for you, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to first reader Gina Risemberg, my dear wife, and to volunteer editors Robert Brazile of Massachusetts and Duncan Bourne of Brighton, Australia, for their careful proofing, their enthusiasm, and their insightful criticisms. The comments they graciously and unstintingly tendered helped me make this a much better story than it would have been otherwise. Any remaining infelicities are entirely my own fault, and none of theirs.

1.

The clanging in my head was not a hangover. It couldn’t have been; there had barely been so much as a bottle of wine in the house since Kate left three years before. I never drank much anyway, and never alone. The little Catholic church down the street, which used to wake me now and then when I wasn’t sleeping well, had given up ringing their bells after gentle complaints from the neighbors. That left one reasonable possibility: the phone. Which was altogether too far away in the next room. I looked at the clock. Six a.m.

I’d missed the dawn, but light comes early in the summer. The sky was already blue in the window by the bed when the phone woke me. I let it ring for a while, because I get plenty of wrong numbers. Mostly people calling from Guatemala, looking for their brothers and uncles lost in the land of gold. Because I speak a little Spanish, they always think I’m someone they know at first. I try to get them off the phone quickly, because I fret about how much it must be costing them. But everyone sounds different on the phone, and they keep insisting that I’m Rafael or Guillermo. They seem so disappointed when they finally give up. Maybe they’ll never find their cousin. What can I do? Even at six in the morning you have to answer the phone sooner or later. And I’m a morning person anyway. I got up and went to the living room.

My house is small, only four rooms, but because it’s up on a hill and the front room is windows on three sides, it seems bigger than it is. That’s what I like about it, that it lets the world inside. This morning the sun was already glaring through the big front windows, and even with nothing on I felt warm. Over the treetops on the hill below the house I could see the tall glass buildings of downtown a few miles away. The sun reflecting from a thousand corner offices made it seem as though the heart of the city were melting. I could smell the lemon tree by the front steps, one of my favorite features of the place, but one I’d never thought of when I decided to rent it. I loved my house at times like this. I would have loved it more if the phone hadn’t kept ringing. I went to the desk and picked it up.

When the speaker croaked my name into my ear, I knew it was Dave Larrabee, tragic, and annoying, Dave. He was losing his woman, and sometimes I thought he was losing his mind. I could understand what he was going through, as I’d gone through it myself a few years earlier—and with the same woman. I didn’t want to go through it again with Dave. But when your friend seems to be losing his mind, you do what you can to help him out. Even at six AM on a sunny Saturday morning when you’d rather be thinking of anything except emotional torments, your own or anyone else’s.

His voice gave it away, but just from the early hour I would’ve guessed that Dave had been awake all night, wondering where she was.

You up? he said. I didn’t want to call too early....

You did too want to, I said. But thanks for waiting. Kate, I suppose?

She’s gone again—

You should be getting used to this by now.

Don’t say that! I don’t want to be getting used to it. She’s—

Gone, I butted in. She’s been gone for a long time, Dave, she just hasn’t left completely. Yet.

He gave an exasperated sigh. You’ve said that before. It doesn’t help.

I’ve said it before because I’ve meant it before. And it will help you—

It won’t help me get her back.

It was my turn to sigh. Dave. You’re not going to get her back. And if you did, she wouldn’t stay.

Silence. Then: She might.

Dave. Dave. She never has before. Silence. I mean, how many times is this now?

Silence. I don’t know—

That’s right, you don’t know and she doesn’t care. Forget her.

Have you?

Damn right I have.

This time Dave was the indignant one. How can you lie like that? No one forgets her.

An oblivious bumblebee hovered at the open window, bathed in sunlight and green scents. Of course it was true. No one forgets her. She had a way of making you feel completely at ease in your skin—till she left on another foray, and your skin turned inside out. But you had to try. You have to protect yourself. And here was Dave, my best friend, bringing her back to me even as she drifted away yet again....

2.

Dave wanted to meet me at a coffee shop not far from my house. He was always that way. I don’t think he’d visited my place more than ten or twelve times in the several years we’d known each other. The same for meeting at his house. I’d been there, sure. It was a little apartment in a busy, run-down neighborhood with lots of small, cheap shops nearby. He lived on the fourth floor in two rooms with two windows each. You could smell fryer grease through the windows. All day long, and half the night, the sounds of motors and strident voices drifted up. Dave was on a long-term assignment from a computer company in New York, and he said it was the only part of our town he’d ever felt comfortable in. There was nothing much in the apartment: a hot plate and a miniature refrigerator, a desk and a phone, an old typewriter, and one of those now-laughable computers that you used to build out of kits, along with a newer one that he used for his work. And—since he’d been with Kate—a king-sized bed. Kate always insisted on a king-sized bed. I’d let her take ours when she left. It used up too much space, even though my place was bigger than Dave’s. I don’t think that’s why he liked to meet in coffee shops, though. To Dave, a man’s house wasn’t his castle, it was his cave. You bathed, slept, fucked there; for everything else you went out. He was a real city person: he lived his life in public spaces.

The coffee shop wasn’t far, a couple of miles, if even that. I decided to walk over. Since my neighborhood’s all low hills, it hasn’t been scraped and six-laned and parking-lotted over like so much of the rest of the city, and it makes for pleasant walking. We’re near enough downtown that the houses are old and ramshackle, many of them left over from World War One. There are trees everywhere, mostly oaks, and old twisted sycamores in the canyon bottoms, here and there a few eucalyptus trees brought in fifty years ago. And people who live in quaint old houses seem to end up planting flower gardens in front of their porches, no matter who they are. Even the house down by the boulevard, where a couple of brothers lived who were in the local street gang, had a tangled row of geraniums between the porch and the weedy yard. But the real prize of the neighborhood was the hidden stairways. They were just vertical sidewalks, connecting the narrow streets that wound along the hillsides. Over the years they had become overgrown with arches of vines and bougainvillea and waist-deep nasturtium beds. Almost nobody used them: a few old folks, an occasional kid hurrying to school, and me. The one at the top of my block led to a little cul-de-sac populated by retired couples who spent the day gossiping as they half-heartedly clipped at masses of dark ivy. From there, another stairway zigzagged down the back of the hill to the local reservoir. From the reservoir it was couple of blocks to the coffee shop.

The Saturn coffee shop was a holdover from the ‘Fifties, stuck at the edge of a parking lot that separated it from a supermarket and a row of smaller shops all built in that dreary shoebox style. In any other part of town, the Saturn would have been torn down for something with a more contemporary theme, or even just a Denny’s. Here it hung on. All the other eating places were cozy little candle-and-tablecloth restaurants, so if you wanted breakfast, or just had an urge for bad food, you had to go to the Saturn. The booths were red vinyl, the tables formica, and there was a shiny curved counter and a flock of waitresses in yellow polyester jumpers. Big windows facing north let a soft light swoop in under the upward-slanting overhang of the roof. I knew where Dave would be sitting and looked in the window as I walked up. He’d been watching for me, and waved without smiling. As I went to the door I saw him gesture to the waitress. By the time I sat down across from him, my cup of coffee was there.

You still take decaf, right? Dave said.

I’ve got you and Kate to deal with now. I don’t need caffeine too. You eating?

A little bit. I’m not too hungry.

I didn’t think you’d be.

The waitress came, carrying her order pad, and Dave looked up at her with his eternally sad eyes. He had a thin face and a little pointed black beard, so despite the eyeglasses he looked like the cliché of a New Testament saint. The waitress smiled down at him and absentmindedly stroked his shoulder. I wondered whether she even noticed she was doing it. Dave smiled back but his eyes stayed sad. He ordered a surprisingly large meal for a man whose heart was broken. I was the one who hardly ate. If I’d known what a long day I had ahead of me, I would’ve eaten more.

3.

It’s hard to be tragic in a coffee shop on a sunny Saturday morning. Dave tried, but the waitress kept coming by to comfort him with those little unconscious touches of her hand, and then the yolk of an egg burst when he bit it and the yellow juice ran down his chin, and then there was the pigeon. The pigeon was sitting on the windowsill by the booth, just outside the plate glass window. There was ten feet of dusty bird-of-paradise plants between the window and the sidewalk, and the pigeon felt comfortable enough on the sill to turn its back on the outside world and study the gestures Dave made as he talked. Every time Dave swept his hand around to emphasize some overblown statement, the pigeon’s beady-eyed stare would follow. Back and forth, up and down, its little pointed beak tracked Dave’s hand. Of course I couldn’t help noticing. I managed not to laugh, but after that I couldn’t take my own eyes from the pigeon. Finally Dave saw that I wasn’t looking at him while he talked. His mouth dropped open and he prepared to feel hurt and indignant, when he looked over to where I was staring and saw the pigeon. The pigeon stared back at him like an adoring idiot child. It was Dave who laughed.

The waitress walked by smiling. She was happy he was feeling better.

That’s how it was with Dave. I could see how Kate had ended up with him, even though it had happened after Kate and I hadn’t spoken for at least a few months. He was intense and vulnerable, which must be an appealing combination to women, who don’t like to be bored any more than men do but who have to watch out for being literally hurt by them. Even more so for Kate, who liked to play at living dangerously. Dave was a small, unthreatening man who had dark moods and powerful emotions and a constant need to be saved. Of course that could get old real fast. Maybe she’d left because she’d gotten tired of being on call. That was not an idea I’d offer to Dave right then.

I wondered what nicknames they’d had for each other. Kate was a great one for nicknames. Your own name could be Attila Rasputin Shakespeare, but if it was your real name, she’d have to change it. My name is Lenny, Lenny Strasser, but when we were together, she decided to call me Abe, because of a faint resemblance I have, in profile, to Abraham Lincoln. Once that was established, she started to call herself Martha, after George Washington’s wife, and then went on to devise a sexual fantasy where we were reincarnations of the originals, having an illicit affair while the souls of our historical spouses watched in frustration from somewhere in the ether. It went on long enough to become a habit. On the day she finally moved out, she gave me a quick little kiss and sighed, Good-bye, Abe. Maybe in our next life we can get it right. And flounced out the door for the last time.

By then I was just wishing she would leave and quit wasting my time. As far as I knew, I still felt relieved she was gone. But there was no convincing Dave of that.

4.

I had met Kate in college, where I met many other things both good and bad. Kate was like the little girl who had the little curl, who, when she was good, was very very good, but when she was bad, she was horrid. Only to this day, I don’t believe she was bad on purpose. She was not cohesive enough to cause intentional hurt: that requires an awareness of a principle of harm. Kate knew principles only as something to be memorized and quoted when she wanted to make an impression on someone she felt was intellectual. Anyone could see through her right away, but the charm of her effort had its effect: she’d tried to impress you, you must be worth trying to impress. It worked on me. I remember when I first saw her, I noticed her right away—and she irritated me. She was good-looking in an average American way: not too thin, not too fat, small chin, a little too short at five-foot-three. Nicely rounded where you wanted her to be, as almost every woman is at nineteen. But not spectacular. Yet she dressed to force you to look at her: brightly-colored halters and red tube tops, little white shorts just loose enough at the hem that your eye couldn’t help following the line of her leg right up into the sheath of fabric.... Nothing fancy: yet you knew that if you stuck her in a pair of jeans and a cotton shirt, she would vanish in a crowd. Likewise you knew that the girl in the next chair over would be so self-conscious in one of what we called Kate’s whore suits that she would sit with no more grace than a department-store mannequin. But there was Kate, leaning serenely back on a bench in the quad, the tails of an unbuttoned shirt knotted loosely below the curves of her breasts, the sunlight glowing on the little mound of her bare belly. You felt perfectly safe to be fascinated with her as she asked you your opinion about Whitman’s pansexuality. Knowing that she didn’t give a damn about Walt Whitman.

She wanted to be looked at just too damn much. And you knew it and you still looked.

Then there were her eyes. Her clothes and her posture were a result of art, but her eyes were a grace of nature. I don’t know where she got those big, dark, almond-shaped Mediterranean eyes, but I think there was a little bit of Jew in her family that no one would confess to. Even the campus homosexuals, who wouldn’t look once, let alone twice, at her body, wrote poems to her eyes. Later, when she began using make-up, the charm was lessened, but when we were all young together, they drew you out of yourself, the way the night does when you stare up at the stars from some deserted place. At nineteen, you are always in a deserted place, and I was nineteen. I wrote poems too. I never wrote one to her, but that didn’t matter. Once we were lovers, I made up the conceit that I wrote her poems with my body, not with words—and told it to her, of course. She accepted the compliment. But now I realize that she never cared about those poems—mine or anybody else’s—any more than she cared about Whitman’s. And that when she stared into your eyes, it was to make sure you were staring into hers.

Sometimes I think it’s delusions that make youth worth living through. I can still remember the pleasures of those first nights of love with Kate, her complete unself-consciousness at being naked, the way she inhabited darkness as naturally as the moonlight at the window. Even now, knowing how false it all was, how each gesture was so willfully choreographed to keep her back turned to that fear she had, of seeming inconsequential enough to be left out of things. Even now, I can see her sitting on the bed, nothing but the night her garment, her great eyes glittering, the pupils wide, looking at me smiling; I can take pleasure in remembering the moonlight on her breasts as she reached up to embrace me, the smell of her hair, the way she had of suddenly going soft and weightless in my arms. If I had known what would come later, would I have come back to her as I always did? I don’t really know. Probably I would have. Probably all young men are crazy; they have to be to keep living through