One Way to Bolinas

The first Hitchhiker at the bend of the road out of Mill Valley, heading up the coast toward Stinson Beach and Bolinas, had a face like an abandoned coal-mine disaster site--collapsed shafts of blackened meat, eyes smokily polluted by internal fumes, crevices and sun-bared teeth. Frank shivered at that scene of death.

The second hitchhiker, 50 yards farther on, near the Yogurt Shack, looked to be about 17; she had long straight hair, a blouse that pulled out of her jeans when she raised her thumb, only a blotch of sunburn on the high cheekbones to mar her perfect teeny's unborn moon face. There was a gentle roll of baby flesh where the blouse was raised. In the twinkling of this summer season, it would surely disappear into ancient history.

Frank stopped not for the first hitchhiker but for the second.

"Oh, wonderful," she said, running prettily to the open door, her wrists jerking sweetly in that way of running girls not yet fully tuned into their new bodies. She didn't say groovy, she didn't say, "What's your sign?" She said, "Hey, you want to give a ride to my old man, too?"

She indicated Mr. Mine Disaster.

Frank paused.

"Oh, never mind, then," she said and jumped in. She turned and waved goodbye to the man of gritty rage, who, in a burst of speed, had run (continued on page 222)One Way to Bolinas(continued from page 121) alongside Frank's little Fiat. Frank's little Fiat took care of the problem. "I mean, you got room in the jump seat," the girl said, "but I'm tired of carrying him around with me. I don't suppose this is the conventional way to break up a relationship, but how about it? I see it just worked very nicely."

"You improvised," Frank said.

"Got to in this life," the girl said, smiling up at Frank. She actually turned on the bucket to face him and to heat the side of his head with her smile. Well, she ran with her wrists turned out like that, but she was more than 17. Well, that's nice.

"Where are you going?" Frank asked.

"Uh."

"I'm headed for Bolinas."

She grinned brilliantly and shook her hair out of her eyes. Evidently she had singed some front fringes, let's see, making organic bread in an unpredictable oven. She had these singed fringes, like bangs. "Bolinas," she repeated thoughtfully. "Bolinas. Me, too. I've never been there. We were heading for Stinson."

Bolinas is just a few miles around a spit of land, on the same basic inlet and bay as Stinson Beach. But it's not on the main road north from San Francisco, and there's a colony of artists, poets and retired people, but fewer of the stoned hippies watching the road go by, fewer of the baked surfers pretending they are the northern branch of Malibu or Laguna. You used to be able to gather mussels on the beach at Bolinas, cook them over driftwood fires, have long lazy days with pink-and-white shellfish and white wine cooled in the Pacific tides. Frank used to like to do that with a couple of friends. You can still do it, only now you'll probably turn up a few weeks later with hepatitis, and that takes some of the fun out of it. But Frank drove up to Bolinas from time to time to get a grip on his immortal soul. He ate hamburgers instead of mussels but walked on the beach alone and asked what he was doing, year after year. He never got the complete answer. Now he might try it with this accidental roadside creature.

"Basically I was headed for Stinson, deep down," she said. "I'm leveling with you, but he'll be looking for me there, so I think I better go on with you to Bolinas. He's likely to, well, do harm to whoever, whomever, he finds me with."

Really cares, Frank thought.

"And of course this yellow Fiat is hard to forget," she said, "not to speak of losing me, which I know will upset him as soon as it sinks in."

"Looked like it was sinking in right away, like quicksand."

"You pick up on things, don't you?" she asked. "When a fellow runs along the road, yelling, groaning and shaking his fist at you, you pick up on it right away."

"Thanks," said Frank. "I have to live with my delicate reflexes."

"Smart?" said the girl. "I realize smart. I think he killed somebody in Mexico. At least nobody ever saw the dude again. My name is Lana, Lana Adams, that's my real name."

Frank then did one of his famous reflexive stabs in the dark. "You ran away to Mexico with a drummer, your family was upset, he was a spade, now you're finding yourself, they're still upset."

"How do you know so much about me all at once like that?" she asked. "Man, you're terrific."

"It's easy, I'm afraid. You fall into a groove."

She was humming and smiling to herself. "You're so smart it destroys me. That's fantastic. And you must be nearly forty, too."

Frank beamed with pleasure.

"'Course, it's not like that at all. Boris is not a spade drummer, even if you picked up so smart about how I called the kid he killed a dude, 'cause that's his word for kids he does in. Consider that a smart crack."

"Oh, I sure do," Frank said.

"Mais tu as tort tout-de-même," she said. "French major at Stanford, no drummer--why you say spade?--just Boris, that Boris back there, and I'm just taking off a quarter to live Céline a little, Queneau, Francis Carco, Clébert --la vie de bohème. But you win the Well-Worn Conversation Prize of the summer."

"Merci bien," said Frank. He decided to put all his energy into cornering.

"Nevertheless, I imagine you're instinctively a very intelligent old person, otherwise you wouldn't get yourself in this kind of situation with a memorable face and automobile and some limited options about travel, when my former friend Boris back there--I call him Boris, he calls himself Boris, that's not his real name--is planning to give you a lot of physical trouble as soon as he catches up with you."

"Looking like he does, it'll take him a while to get a ride anyplace."

"Money in his briefcase, about forty thousand, he'll rent a car if he gets tired. He just hates signing receipts, but he'll do it for me. Now that he's done dealing for a few weeks, he wanted to have some fun spending the money and humping me. So he'll have his fun doing evil things to you and then humping me --dry--if he can catch me, that is."

Frank let a few curves go by. She dealt pretty fast, too. A quick answer would be inappropriate at this stage of their match. What would prove he was really smart would be this: to pull up to that gas station, stop the car, ask her to remove herself, and to move on alone, maybe inland toward Nova to for a couple of days of spacy regeneration in a plastic motel with swimming pool. Going to Bolinas with this young lady was really, Frank, no way to go.

"Do you like making trouble for people?" Frank said.

"Who else?" she asked.

He shut off his FM receiver. Do without Purcell at this moment of crucial concentration, although it was the short trumpet Voluntary, which was his favorite wake-up music. She hummed along with some other radio. Maybe she had a rock-station implant in the silky lock of hair sliding past her ear.

"Trouble," she said. "Urn. I suppose so. I suppose I do. I owe you a serious answer, now that you're giving me this ride and all." She seemed to switch off the implant and stopped humming; she turned to him with one of those perfect smiles, buds of teeth with healthy gums, pink folding flesh of mouth and tongue, unabashed greediness in her healthy face: "Do you mind, mister?"

Frank had to admit he was available for trouble, but he didn't, since she already knew. He didn't mind at all. He was looking for something and evidently Lana Adams, her smile and her cool eyes were what he was looking for (also her tight little behind), since he felt alert, happy and focused for the first time in months--since his divorce, since the minirecession that cut into the gallery, since a couple of his best artists had gotten into speed and wiped themselves out as producing painters. They did stupid speedy junk assemblage instead.

Frank registered at Snarlie's in Bolinas. The bartender also handled the rentals for the couple of cabins out back. As always, Frank got a little extra twinge of illicit joy when he used his credit card and billed it to the Curtis Gallery. The bar was where the serious drinkers of Bolinas drank. Across the street was Smiley's, where the serious sandwich eaters and ice-cream slurpers gathered. Surfers and hippies and teenies, and now Frank Curtis, charging his good luck to the business.

He put the yellow Fiat behind Snarlie's. But no trouble finding it from the street if you were really looking. He tried to hide it in the stand of pine.

They entered the room, Lana and Frank, and began to do all sorts of easy friendly things, as if it were the third lesson of an Aikido Energy class. Just nice. Just fun. But that sweet rump. But sweatier than Aikido. "Oh, nice. Oh, nice," she kept saying.

"I'm forty, all right," he said.

"Oh, that's good. I heard about older men. Oh, nice."

Later, cooling, with the sound of wind in pine overhead, the sound of drunks in Snarlie's alongside, he said, "Older?"

"Well, I don't count Boris. He only looks old. Forty is what I call the watershed age, and he says he's thirty-four, you know, like Sonny of Sonny and Cher--remember them? Well, maybe he's crossed the watershed without telling me the truth. Have to ask him next time he catches up with me."

"Next time?" Frank asked.

"Next time, darling?" she said and he felt that familiar choking in his chest. No, keep control; words don't change anything.

"Next time what?"

She thought for a moment. She turned on the implant. She was humming. "Boris doesn't seem to commit crimes for money, unless you consider selling speed a crime, but rather to solve some personal difficulty or other. He's not really a classical criminal type. Rather a new sort. But one time he really freaked going into a speed factory, the dust was all over, he didn't wear a mask, you know, a surgical mask, so he breathed a lot of it into his lungs, freaky, paranoid, so he--" She paused for breath. "But I doubt if he'll do that again."

Like a card, the face of Boris was turned up in Frank's head in this sunbaked summer room. They were up a wooden ramp. They had no clothes on. She was lovely, slimming down fast, someday she might even be haggard. They would hear the feet of Boris on that ramp, wouldn't they?

Wouldn't they what?

Wouldn't they do what they had just done once again?

"Ooh, funky, you're a funky old man," Lana said. "I'm getting to know you. I like, oh, this, plus getting to know you."

Afterward they walked on the beach. She turned a cart wheel. Oh, she was lovely, slimming down like that. The faint blonde fuzz on her tanned arms. The tight behind. She would never be haggard, not in his lifetime. Pointed clawlike prints of her hands in the tidal sands, and a clear day, the Farallon Islands visible out there, a Japanese freighter visible, gulls visible, cloudlets of fog hiding the white city of San Francisco above the horizon. Some surfers had built a lean-to against an uprooted tree. They were cooking on a driftwood fire. One was wearing a sleeveless khaki sweater, relic of a distant war. It wasn't Boris.

"Let's get off this beach," Frank said.

"Where? Back to our cabin?"

Not a bad idea. "Well, let's get a hamburger first and see."

"You think they got those clipped frenchburgers in this town?" she asked. "Or aren't they much on sophisticated eating?"

Smiley's is across the street from Snarlie's. Smiley's has hamburgers and milk shakes. From the back of the room, Frank could see a strip of yellow where the door of his Fiat caught the light, parked among the trees across the street. He hadn't really hidden it too well. The girl was so happy with food that he couldn't worry very seriously; pure cholesterol it was, and it brought back afternoons of sand and wind, beach and water, girls and girls, and he let himself ride with her. "You can just take off like this?" she asked. "You don't mind goofing with me? You don't care?"

"Present or future," he said.

"Till death do us part," she murmured, teeth squeezing into fried granules of meat, squirting a few droplets of fat onto his denim shirt.

He was following his own day like a progress report on a man who had survived a heart transplant. He was happy. He was healthy. He was watching for trouble. He was pretending there would be no trouble. He was tasting pleasure as if it were his last. He was tasting pleasure as if it would go on forever. He was trying to tell the truth. He was lying to himself. He was terrified.

She smelled of sun, heat, catsup, wind and sex. Suddenly Frank wanted to gobble her up again, as if he wouldn't have her for long. He wanted her forever. She blinked and leaned near him. He kissed her. His eyes fluttered open and he saw, very near him, those round blue saucerlike eyes open and watching him.

"Come on," he said.

"I haven't finished my hamburger."

He waited.

"But I've had enough. You're right. Let's go."

She had left her sandals in the place. Or on the beach. Or hadn't been wearing sandals. They were crossing the street, she was leaning against his shoulder, her feet were bare. There was a car with the hood up and a mechanic working on it down the street, making it roar like a lawn mower. It was a Bolinas mechanic, long hair twisted in a single braid and a tie-dyed sweatband keeping his brains together. There was a pickup family lying in the sun on the sidewalk in front of Snarlie's. There was a row of beer mugs on the ledge where customers had deposited them. Lana picked her way carelessly through broken glass. Frank glanced down and read history on her feet--dirt from the street, buffed-clean skin from her running on the beach, distant baby flesh beneath that. She had dirty toenails, but who doesn't?

But who was she?

And who was he to be submitting like this?

He was just following her up the wooden ramp to their room, number five. Before he had a chance to reach for the key, her hand went out and seized the doorknob. She knew it would open.

She pulled him in.

Boris was waiting, his face still looking like a mine disaster. Lana was smiling fixedly, like a girl who is breathing amphetamine dust as she walks through the speed factory. Now she was having her summer adventure. Not just love with a new man. Something else. Love with a man who was about to have a very bad time with her lover.

Frank was also feeling something at last. The tunnels were collapsing about him. Struggle for breath. Fight back. Despite all trouble, too early to quit this life.