Chapter 2
Rocinante and Drifted Friends
ocinante's left headlight came nosing around the corner of Jerry's Pasadena place like a suspicious eye, catching the afternoon sun and flicking once behind a row of half-dead bushes as I rode up the block. A strip of cracked concrete ran straight through his weedy, sun-scalded lawn, a patchwork of brown spots and stubborn crabgrass that looked as if it had given up sometime during the Nixon administration.
Floey hadn't shown at her own opening. Not for the paintings that were selling so well, not for anything. I had slept badly on that and woken with the question already driving me out the door, and I kept telling myself I was only a brother looking for his sister. But the part of me that had trained to be a reporter, before I decided reporting didn't pay and took easier money instead, was already running the other way. Find the last people she talked to. Work outward from there. It was the only method I trusted, and the one nobody had ever paid me to use.
I slid in beside my childhood friend Jerry's eternally "almost restored" Nash, shut off the engine, and walked past Rocinante, letting my hand trail along the cool fiberglass flank of the beast that had carried me through more chaos than any machine had a right to endure. I hadn't just come for the camper van. I'd come because Floey had been here, and the crew who'd seen her last were down a hole in the backyard. That made them witnesses before they were friends.
Floey bought that rig for me, a thirty-foot RV, as a high school graduation gift. She got a supermodel discount and left the banker wondering, later, when exactly he'd agreed. People did things for her that way. She carved the funds out of her cut from selling our ranch house, the one we unloaded when she married Eugene "Carl" and I was exiled to boarding school. I named the bus Rocinante, after Steinbeck's rig and Don Quixote's horse before it, so it carried borrowed madness before I ever turned the key.
Nobody answered the front door, so I let myself in. The living room looked the same. The television was gutted and replaced with an aquarium, as if the house had given up on artificial narrative and settled for fish, and a single orange goldfish with a swollen, lumpy head drifted inside its murky water like a convict doing time. The tables were clear, no soda cans, no fossilized mystery food. Mark was still enforcing his sterile neatness, policing ashtrays and shelf placement like a man who held a franchise on his own square footage, though the neglected tank suggested something inside his order had begun to rot. The gallery crowd that morning had been all motion, buying and preening and spending, none of it adding up to anything they'd made themselves. Here it was the reverse. No spending, no preening, and nobody had moved an inch in a year. Two ways of getting nowhere.
Rock music bled into the house from outside. I cut through the musty laundry room and followed the noise across the backyard to the bomb shelter hatch, sound pouring up through the steel vents, a tangle of guitars and percussion with a flute riding on top like a small, crazed bird. A year ago I'd have gone down those stairs to get stoned and listen. Today I went down them to ask questions.
The bomb shelter was some previous owner's fallout fantasy, late-fifties steel and concrete once stocked with canned food and enough guns to start a war. Jerry had gutted all that and turned it into a musician's den. Waterbeds at one end, a sound system wired into every corner, instruments rigged for maximum volume and minimal sleep.
The clamshell hatch sat propped open with a two-by-four. I clanged down the welded steel stairs and turned into the curved corridor, stepping into the shelter's cylindrical belly like entering a buried submarine. The three of them were jamming exactly the way I'd left them a year ago, locked into an eternal practice session. Only one thing was off: the sweet, spicy cloud of marijuana that had always hung in the air was gone, replaced by a sour, vegetal edge, the smell of something green left too long in the dark.
Randy stood in the middle of the room with his flute, swaying, eyes half-lidded. He lived down the street and kept a long chemical résumé: orange sunshine, microdots, a week lost to windowpane. He had graduated Beverly Paige "most likely to be found unconscious in an alley." Mark and Jerry reclined on the waterbeds, guitars in hand. Jerry had his hairy legs propped on a cabinet, cut-off jeans and no shirt, the way he preferred it whenever the temperature rose half a degree.
Randy set the flute on an amp. "Hey, Cutty, you're back," he said. "Give me five." We slapped hands. "When did you get in?"
"This morning. Came from Floey's exhibit." I kept it light, but I was already watching faces. "She was supposed to be there. She wasn't. When did you all last see her?"
"She came by," Jerry said. "A month ago, maybe."
"What for?"
"To borrow your bus," Randy said. "To haul some of her paintings to the show. But Mark had it out, so she couldn't."
There it was. The first hard fact. She'd been here, mobile, planning the opening, looking for a way to move canvases. I filed the date and pressed. "Borrow it for when? The show just opened. Was she hauling them herself, or did she have help lined up?"
"She didn't say." Mark's fingers ghosted over the bass strings, not quite stopping. "I took a little trip to Lake Arrowhead. You don't mind, yeah?"
"You're always telling me to ask before I use anything of yours."
"But I'm responsible," Mark said, as if that explained cosmic order.
The old reflex was to fight him about the bus. I let it go. The bus didn't matter; what she'd said while she stood here did. "When she came by, how did she seem? Wired? Scared? Talking about anybody new?"
They traded a look, the kind people give each other when a serious question wanders in wearing the wrong clothes. "She seemed like Floey," Jerry offered. "Up. Said the show was going to change everything."
Mark got up and opened a cabinet I didn't remember, pulled out a glass coated in dried green sludge and a pitcher crusted with something violently green a year and several health fads ago. "Fermented cabbage and wheatgrass," he said, pouring. The vapors hit my nose like lawn clippings left in a plastic bag until they turned mean. "Floey turned us on to it. Drink a few glasses a day and you don't need drugs anymore."
It was Floey's whole effect in a dirty glass, making them believe something was powerful with nothing but her charisma and a smile. They'd traded one sacrament for another and never noticed who'd handed them the cup. Which meant she'd been down here recently, working on them. I wanted the timeline. "She talk you into this on the same visit she wanted the bus, or before?"
"Before," Randy said. "She's been coming around. Brings the juice, talks about cleaning out your system, getting clear." He said it as if her name legitimized the science.
"Clear for what?"
Randy shrugged, the question sliding off him. "Jerry's even getting a job. His dad's insurance company."
"Monday," Jerry said. "Haircut, suits, the whole act."
I let them detour for a second. Sometimes you learn the most when a witness thinks the interview's over. "You hear what the Animal's been doing up in Santa Barbara?" Jerry asked, filling a Mason jar from the toxic pitcher.
"No." Mahesh Daniel Davis, old crew, the only one I'd ever really trusted, the kid who read the Wall Street Journal at his desk in sixth grade while the rest of us doodled.
"Studying music at UCSB," Mark said. "Sold his first piece to some big rock star last month."
"Was it the one with my lyrics?"
"I don't know," Mark said, with a small twist of his mouth. He probably did. I made a note to call Mahesh; if anyone in this orbit kept his head clear enough to remember details, it was him. Not today. Today I needed the people who'd actually watched Floey walk out the door.
Jerry knocked back his juice and grabbed a relatively clean jar. "I'm fixing you a cocktail, Cutty. This'll cure everything."
"No thanks. Where'd she say she was going after the show? Did she mention traveling? Chiapas, Guatemala, anywhere south?"
That landed somewhere. A flicker, quickly smoothed over with noise. "She talks about the Maya country all the time," Randy said. "Palenque, the ruins, the mushrooms the shamans give you. Says there's something waiting for her down there. Old, she calls it. Says the ruins are where you can still hear it." He brightened. "Marsha's flying down to Palenque with her uncle. Private plane, he's already made a couple of runs. I'm thinking about riding along. Get out of here for a while."
"Floey, though," I said. "Did she say she was going south?"
"She said a lot of things." Jerry wouldn't meet my eye. "You know how she gets."
I let it drop, but the reporter in me had already filed it next to the rest: a private plane making quiet runs to Palenque, Randy half out the door to join them, and my sister a month gone, talking Palenque, never back for the bus, a no-show at her own opening. It might be nothing. Floey trailed coincidences the way she trailed admirers, and half the canyon was always chasing some enlightenment they'd never reach. Or she'd climbed into somebody's plane and let the sky carry her south before I had left my job in Alaska. I had no way to tell which, and that not-knowing settled in my chest and stayed there.
I knew this room well enough to know when it had stopped being useful. They hadn't changed in a year, except in small, crooked ways, and I'd never really fit here. With me they were tolerant. With Floey they turned into unpaid roadies and spiritual consultants, carrying her canvases, rearranging their lives because she needed "a hand." Whatever she'd told them on her way out, they'd already let it dissolve into the feedback.
"Can I use your phone, Jerry?"
"Anytime."
"Too bad Braughn won't stay for the party," Mark murmured as I started up the stairs. I kept my hand on the cold metal railing and didn't turn back. I had two facts worth the climb: Floey had been here within the last few weeks, mobile and bound for the show, and she'd been talking about going south.
Walking back across the yard, I felt as if I were leaving the rehearsals of my youth behind me.
The phone sat on the coffee table between the couch and the fish-tank television. One of Floey's letters had said she'd never go back to Carl, but I had to be sure. He'd divorced her in a courtroom in Austin, Nevada, before a rancher-judge, the kind of county authority the Magnins could summon with a phone call, and walked away with their two kids.
I dialed long distance, knowing Jerry's father would swallow the bill along with the others. The line clicked and hissed, long stretches of static between rings. The Magnin ranch sat between Austin and Tonopah, in the same Ophir Canyon Valley where my family's place used to be, just a bit farther north. I'd lived there after my father died, folded into Floey and Eugene Carl's household, until he sold our ranch and shipped me off to school.
"Hello," a small voice finally said.
"Hey, Davy. It's Cutty."
"Daddy says I'm not supposed to talk to you anymore."
"Why not, buddy?"
"'Cause he doesn't want you corrupting me," he said, stumbling over the word.
"Then you better get him," I said.
He called for Carl in his little voice, and after a moment I heard the man breathing on the line.
"You've got a lot of nerve calling here."
This was the place that used to be my home. That fact was dead weight between us now.
"I'm trying to find out if Floey came back there."
"She hasn't. And she won't. I keep the doors locked and a light on. You learn to, with Floey."
"Have you heard from her at all? Any idea where she is?"
"She's in L.A., trying to sell her psychotic, psychedelic paintings."
"Today was the opening," I said. "She didn't show."
"Keep her away from me," he said, and there was something new in his voice. Fear.
I'd been trained to hear exactly that. What I heard under Carl Magnin's voice wasn't a man angry at my sister. It was a man afraid of her.
"I don't know where she is," I answered. "But I'll give her your love when I find her."
"You tell her to stay away from me and the children," he said, and hung up.
My degree was journalism, University of Nevada at Reno. Two years of it paid for at poker tables before I ever declared a major. After that, one quarter of graduate astronomy at UCLA. Then north, because Alyeska was hiring. They put me in public relations, less for the journalism than for the pilot's license. A man who could write a press release and fly himself out to a pump station in the same afternoon was worth two of anybody. But the part of Reno that stuck wasn't the writing. It wasn't the flying I'd learned at Stead, either. It was the rest of the track. Data analysis. Deep-dive research. A seminar in advanced interviewing where a hard old professor drilled us to hear the thing under the words. The pause that runs too long. The answer to a question nobody asked. That was the road to investigative reporting, and for a while I was on it. I'd talked myself off it because it didn't seem practical. PR paid. The pipeline paid better. But the training doesn't wash out.
When I'd lived with him, Eugene "Carl" had seemed like a man carved from dry wood: no visible emotion, no cracks, no release. Floey stayed loyal to him for eleven years. In her letters she described a chain of accidents and bizarre events that led to his final blowup and her leaving, and it always seemed to me that part of her had nudged those accidents along, sabotaging the situation until she had enough wreckage piled up to justify escape.
I set the receiver back in its cradle and stared at the fish tank. The goldfish drifted in its cloudy world, bumping softly against the glass, as if it had forgotten there was anything beyond it.
Fear in Carl's voice. Floey missing. South on her mind.
I told myself I was only days from finding her.
I was wrong.
At the time I was standing in Jerry's living room, dialing Nevada and listening to Carl Magnin slam down the phone, Floey was stumbling along the last stretch of the sacbé, half-conscious and nearly out of water.
She had been walking for two days. Time had broken apart on her out there. The humidity lay thick and unmoving over the road, and the air came back warm off her own skin that had grown clammy. The jungle pressed in on both sides, breathing, full of things she could not see.
She believed she had been guided there. The voices hadn't left her. They never had.
They spoke to her the way they always had, calm, certain, just beyond the edge of language. The same presence she had followed since 1954, since the day her brother disappeared into a story no one had ever told straight. Project Blue Book was the name they gave the adults, the stamped and filed explanation, but even as a girl she could feel the lie pulsing underneath it, like a second heartbeat out of rhythm. They had taken her brother. They were still up there, ancient and not gone, waiting to finish what they had started, and she had walked this far to meet them.
Now she was nearly too weak to keep going.
When the jeep found her, she didn't resist. It came up behind her in a low growl of engine and dust, appearing out of the green like something summoned by exhaustion. Two men in the front, hard and quiet-eyed. In the back, a young woman, the only woman among them, watching her with a kind of recognition that wasn't quite kindness.
The woman gave her water first. She drank fast, coughing, spilling it down her chin. Then the woman handed her something wrapped in paper, soft and salty, and pressed a steadying hand under her arm to help her up into the seat. She ate without asking what it was. Hunger didn't allow for questions.
Only after that did the men start talking. Not to her. About her.
Their Spanish came in fragments she tried to follow, drifting in and out as the jeep bounced along the broken road toward Tikal.
"...la extranjera..."
"...dice que los oye..."
The woman at her side cut in then, quick and low, and whatever she said had an edge of defense in it. This was the one the old man had sent them for, she seemed to be saying. The one he told them to bring. One of the men answered her by name, tired, as if they had been over this. "Ixchel." Just that, and then more Spanish, and she went quiet.
Ixchel. Floey kept the word. It was the first thing on this road she had been given that was not pain or new fears.
"...el viejo va a querer verla..."
The old one. The shaman.
When they brought him up, the jeep went a shade quieter. No one stopped talking, but the words came slower, softened at the edges. Shoulders hitched a little higher. Ixchel, pressed in at Floey's side, smoothed an invisible wrinkle from her skirt and kept her eyes on the road ahead. Even the driver's grip changed, his hands sliding wider on the wheel, thumbs braced, as if he expected the asphalt to turn treacherous at any moment.
Floey felt it before she understood it.
She leaned back against the torn vinyl seat, eyes half-closed, listening. The jungle slid past in streaks of green and shadow. The voices, her voices, had gone quiet now, as if they were content to let someone else do the talking.
"¿Sabes quién es?" one of the men said.
"Sí," the other answered. "Dicen que tiene conexión."
Connection.
That word reached her. She smiled faintly. "Yes," she murmured, more to herself than to them. "I do."
They glanced back at her, exchanging a look she couldn't quite read. Respect, maybe. Or calculation. In that moment she couldn't tell the difference, and no one there was in a hurry to explain it.
Up ahead, the road narrowed, bending toward the ruins. The men in the jeep were not acting alone. There were others they answered to, further up the road and further up something else she had no name for.
Floey, slumped and still recovering, only understood pieces.
"...la Fundación...camino..."
"...gringos de la luna..."
"...no se meta el pueblo..."
The Luminous Path Foundation. The moon temple people.
She let the words wash over her like fever-dream phrases, fitting them into the story she already believed: ancient visitors, returned; a chosen intermediary walking where they pointed. Her mind filled in the blanks the way it had been since childhood.
The men in the jeep were somewhere else behind their eyes.
She could feel it in them, the way she had always felt things: they were carrying her toward someone, and the delivering of her would settle something between them and him. Whatever he was, he frightened them a little. That she could read plainly, and it told her more than any of the words had.
They would bring her to someone who would know exactly what she was worth.
Someone like Ayer Dada, she thought, drifting. But older. More certain. Harder to leave.
What happened to her after that would depend on who reached her first.
She closed her eyes as the jeep carried her forward, the last of her strength dissolving with the motion. The jungle wind moved over her face, hot and damp, and for a few moments she let herself believe she was being delivered, not delivered into something.
She believed she had been found.
She did not yet understand she had been taken.
Back in Pasadena I drove off in Rocinante, leaving my drifted old friends behind me. My next move was north, to the commune in the hills where Floey had been living. I had called everyone I could think of, still believing this was something I could solve myself. I had no idea the game was already a thousand miles ahead of me.