Peeko Pacifiko by Ken O'Steen

 

  I recognized wakefulness when it arrived. Still, pudgy clouds bumped against one another inside my head. And they remained there for a little while. When they began to scatter, then I remembered. I remembered the hurricane. I remembered Bob’s.

  And I opened my eyes. The surroundings, what I saw at first of them, looked peculiar. On the other hand they looked familiar. It wasn’t Bob’s. Exactly where it was I didn’t know. But it wasn’t Bob’s.

  I raised myself, and using my hands, scooted myself along the floor, and propped myself against the wall. So I had taken a trip, after all?

  Then I commenced piecing it all together. I was able to peel apart, though the parts were sticky, fragments of what had actually happened, from their representation in this drugged and drunken fever dream. I remembered confusion, the Pacific Coast Highway, wandering along beside it. I recalled riding in the back of a truck with others. I remembered telling someone where I was headed. I had a recollection of hitting things, of hurting myself and of things that cracked or broke. I could see cuts on myself. I could see bruises. But I didn’t remember with clarity my actions inflicting damage; nor could I remember to what I must have done it.

  Then it dawned on me. Then I knew…exactly where I was. It didn’t look the same, empty of furniture or furnishings, which had been replaced by yard supplies and garden tools. It was the guesthouse, Bob’s guesthouse…behind his house on the Westside. Rushing into my head after that as I sat there, were pictures of Bob and Lila bobbing up and down in water, and floating away. I felt a welling up inside, though it wasn’t remorse. It was testiness. It was confusion at what had happened to Bob and to Lila. I caught myself…what MIGHT have happened to Bob and to Lila. I didn’t really know. Not yet.

  But then, what first had been testiness and what had been confusion, turned to pure anger. Shaking my head, moving my eyes around the premises, looking at seed and fertilizer, at hoes and dirty gloves, my eyes lighted upon, and then fixed on the gallons of gasoline that rested beside the mower. I stood. When I was upright, I could see that indeed, I had smashed out the window glass, obliterated molding, and crawled my way inside the place. I turned, walked over, lifted up two cans of gasoline and carried them to the door, where I set them down. I kicked the door wide open with my foot and picked up the cans of gasoline, and carried them to the yard. When I closed the door, I saw the evidence of my futile use of my body as a battering ram.

  The main house, Bob’s, looked deserted. Nobody was in sight. There were no lights…no sounds…no cars…no one home. Then it occurred to me they had scampered inland to escape the storm.

  In the yard I checked to make certain my cigarette lighter still was in my pocket. It was. I tested it with a flick. All systems were go, so I picked the gasoline up, and began to walk, in the direction of the adjacent house, the neighbor’s house, the rat-finking homunculus Scheer’s house.

  I crept, once I reached the grass in the side yard. I stopped, thinking I would look first around in back for places to begin to pour accelerant. No…I had to check, do my best to determine if Scheer was home, or if anyone else was in the house by attempting to peer inside the front windows. My bet was that the weasel, and his weaselettes, had scampered as well, scared out of their wits by Giorgio.

  I tip toed around the corner, and stopped, and put the gas down behind the shrub that was blocking the way. Then, I proceeded to do reconnaissance. The process wasn’t a long one. A tree, a very large one, fifteen feet perhaps from the front of the house, had snapped in two, a third of the way up. The top of the tree lay inside the house, having sheared the roof, flattening half the house at least to the height of a manhole cover. I stood, took it all in, then turned around and walked away.

  I opened the door of the guesthouse, and went inside again. I sat down on the floor and slumped against the wall like I had before. My mind felt as though it temporarily had been voided…and then, a need to return to the beach as quickly as possible filled it up.

  Still, there was confusion. I felt the need to return, to know; and at the same time, to stay away…to protect myself from knowing. I was unable to make clear in my own mind, whether I believed I was returning to discover what had really happened, to verify what I assumed; or to face, what perhaps I knew already. My temporary conclusion was that I must be experiencing a condition very akin to shock, and that uncertainty, and possibility were nature’s way of looking out for me a little bit; and I took heart, so to speak, that nature believed there remained feelings in me I needed protection from.

  On this note of mental tranquility I ventured behind a bush in the yard, the girth of which allowed me to relieve myself in utter privacy. I returned to my spot inside, but no sooner had I sat, than I became aware, not so much of hunger, but of the crater in my stomach yearning to be filled, and how thirsty I was. It was time to go.

  As soon as I started out, walking in the street since there were no sidewalks, I could see how forceful the storm had been, seeing leaves, fronds, branches, and in some cases limbs, that were on the ground. But nothing I saw indicated the storm approached anything like severity, Scheer’s house being the only example of serious damage I had seen. It was a little worse than what one might witness after a rather powerful buffeting by Santa Anas.

  I completed the few long blocks of walking it took to get to Little Santa Monica, made my way over to Santa Monica, and then waited for an opportunity to scoot across the lanes. A couple of blocks west, I came to the corner market I had visited on many occasions before, though never on foot. I stopped beside a car in the lot in the ownership of a driver with strong convictions about regular trips to the car wash, and used the window glass to spruce myself into a marginally more presentable presence.

  Inside I bought a sandwich, a giant bottle of water, a pen and a spiral notebook. I was left with sixty dollars or so (my life savings, which I responsibly kept in my wallet). My plan was to go to the payphone out in the parking lot and call a cab. The cab would take me to the Greyhound station, from which a bus would take me to Carpinteria. From there I would take a taxi back to the beach.

  I sat on a bus bench to eat my sandwich before I called the cab. Preoccupied though I was with other matters, even perhaps in the back of my mind anticipating that toiling on my little political encyclopedia project might be the best medicine for me in the days ahead, if not a faux career path excellently suited to me, ideas for entries penetrated those preoccupations, and I compulsively opened the notebook and began to write. The initial entry was: