Los Angeles Noir - Denise Hamilton [119]
Yancy stumbled up onto the dunes. Soft sand with not a speck of oil on it. Sand like sugar, heaps of it … and he had a perfect view of the big boat. He sat down. Just a little break. A little rest before starting back up again. He lay back on that pure white sand. Stretched out his arms, scooped them back and forth. Made sand angels. He and James used to do that when they were kids. Spreading their arms wide, the two of them making flapping sounds. Wings big enough to carry them to heaven. Now, though, his sand angel was sloppy and uneven … broken somehow. Yancy lay still, arms poked out at a crooked angle. Just a little rest, that’s all he needed. He watched the Queen Mary floating there in the blazing sunset. Every seam and rivet in sharp focus. Ship of gold. Close enough to touch.
WHAT YOU SEE
BY DIANA WAGMAN
Westchester
It was a street like any other street in Westchester. Small square homes lined up on either side like kindergarteners on their first day of school. Tidy but timid, they were little houses where your neighbors might live, where your mother might live, where you might live if it was all you could afford in Los Angeles. Two bedrooms, one bath, sometimes a small sun porch in the back. On Orange Street it was still 1965. The yuppies hadn’t found it and torn up the green lawns to do drought-tolerant landscaping with native plants.
Orange was my childhood street and I was stuck there. I’d inherited the house from my mother and I had nowhere else to go. After living in New York City and other points east, I’d come back to L.A. to take care of her. Not that she needed me; she was dying and there was nothing I could do. But I moved right back into my childhood room. I slept in my twin bed with the brown plaid polyester bedspread. My blue ribbon from freshman football was hanging where I’d stuck it in ninth grade on the bulletin board over my desk next to my picture of Bruce Lee. Everything in my room was the same as I’d left it, but covered in a shroud of dust. It made me sneeze. My mother would call out while she still could: God bless you.
Sneeze.
God bless you.
Some days it was our only communication.
Then she died and I stayed in my room and she went to Heaven. At least that’s where she had always told me she was going. And I wasn’t. She would be singing with the Heavenly Choir and I would be roasting in the flames of Eternal Damnation. If only I had died before I was twelve and got caught jerking off in the Sunday school teacher’s car. My mother never forgave me. The Sunday school teacher wouldn’t let me back in her class. From puberty on, everyone agreed I was just like my father, the missing felon.
The first few days after she passed away, I watched a lot of TV and didn’t eat anything. I wanted to see how long I could go without food. It was just something to do. The commercials made me really hungry. So, after eighty-one hours and twenty-two minutes, I ate. Whatever she had in the house. Cans of peaches and kidney beans. Dried prunes. I even made a devil’s food cake from a box mix that had probably been on the shelf since the last time I’d been home. My birthday, three years earlier. We’d had a fight and she’d never made me the cake.
Once I was eating, I started pacing. I made a route from the TV to the kitchen to the back door. Touch the door. Turn around. Kitchen to my mother’s room, and touch the headboard on her stripped bed. Turn around. Into the bathroom. Touch the glass poodle on the window ledge. Turn around. Into my room. Touch the empty fish tank, the blue ribbon, and the row of James Bond books. Back to the TV.
The glass poodle broke. Guess I tapped it too hard that time. It fell