LEAVING CLOUD DRIVE by Marjorie Kemper
Every night at dusk an ion-charged wind blows up out of the canyon, carrying the scent of sage and anise over the walls and into the patios of Cloud Drive. It eddies in the breezeways, and prevails for a time over tamer scents – chlorine from swimming pools and hot tubs, fabric softener wafting from dryers, and newly mown grass. The wind carries the spoor of predators and game, and for dogs this is like news from home; they rise stiffly to sniff at the breeze and pace their enclosures. On top of the ridge, coyotes lie panting in the shade of creosote bushes eyeing the dogs and the mostly deserted patios and lawns below.
It’s six-thirty. Inside the houses it’s time for the news. Time for drinking a glass of wine, or a gin and tonic. For Joan Castle, an actress who hasn’t been up for a part in ten months, and who isn’t getting any younger, it is time for three quick shots from the bottle of bourbon she keeps hidden in the ash grate of the barbecue pit. After which, she will go inside and sip at a glass of iced-tea while her husband drinks a very good, very dry Chablis.
But not quite yet. Joan is watching a coyote. Every morning and evening for a week this particular coyote has come to the hedge of oleander that screens her patio from the chaparral. The animal sits on his hunkers in plain sight and stares at her. She should tell Charlie about the coyote. It’s come closer each day. But if Charlie knows, he will whip out his cell phone, he will make a call, and someone will come to trap it. Or worse. And what has it ever done? Thus far, not even trespassed, just come close. The animal makes Joan uneasy but she won’t give him up to the authorities. She puts the whiskey bottle back in the grate; when she looks up, the coyote is gone.
After dinner Charlie drives back to the studio and Joan goes back to the patio. She reclines on a chaise lounge facing the hillside and waits for the moon to come up. The only human generated sounds she hears is the ice clinking in her glass and the hum of pool filters and air conditioners. It is still hot and all the houses are shut tight. Children don’t play out; neighbors don’t sit out. In the front of these houses it is yet more deserted. There sprinklers go on and off on timers. No one has ever stood with a hose in one hand and a beer in the other on these lawns. Joan wonders what she’s doing here.
Out past the oleander hedges, beyond the flood-lit, empty pools and back terraces, out in the night proper, crickets chirp and mockingbirds sing, owls call, wind strums a thin melody from the grass, and when the moon comes up, coyotes trot purposefully from their dens to the top of the ridge, stand silhouetted against the moon, and howl. This is what Joan has been waiting for; she knows the voice of her coyote. She gives him her full attention. He does Joan’s howling for her. When the bottle of bourbon is empty, she goes in to bed.
When Joan wakes, Charlie’s already gone. She only vaguely remembers saying goodbye to him. His current picture is in post-production and he leaves for the studio early and stays late, and when he does come home, it’s because he needs to sleep or eat – like last night. Joan knows that this will continue for another month. She only wishes she minded. She wishes she missed him. She used to miss him. She used to miss everybody, even people she doesn’t know; even people in books. She doesn’t miss anybody anymore.
She goes down to the kitchen and puts on the coffee. Then she goes into the garage and gets a new bottle of bourbon from the trunk of her Mercedes. In the trunk there is some part left of a case of whiskey, her packed suitcase, four gallons of bottled water, and a sleeping bag. She takes the new bottle and her coffee into the patio. She pours whiskey into her coffee, puts the new bottle under the chaise lounge, tosses the empty high up on the hill, and lies down. She props a pad of paper on her knees, and begins to write:
“The hillside is empty now, except for two red-tailed hawks who circle the ridge, riding the updrafts. The coyotes are asleep in their dens. I am watching the hawks. Without my glasses, they could be buzzards. Perhaps with my glasses they would be buzzards, but we’ll call them hawks. I envy them their perspective. It’s been a long time since I was able to look down on anything. Or anyone.”
Joan puts down the pen and sips her coffee. She could still leave today. It’s not too late. If she can finish this letter to Charlie. She wants him to understand why she’s leaving; she’s been writing this letter for three days. It gets longer and longer but she still hasn’t managed to say why she’s packed the car; why she’s ready, or almost ready, to drive away from everything she owns. That Charlie owns, actually.
Today she’s begun with a description of what she is doing, watching the hawks, the buzzards, whatever they are (Joan’s no naturalist), because she no longer knows what is happening on the inside; the best that she can do is to observe herself observing. That’s what it’s come to. Perhaps if she leaves, puts actual physical distance between herself and Charlie, she will miss him again. But she doubts it. She puts down her cup and tries again:
“I don’t think I love you. I think I used to love you; but I don’t know what that word means anymore.”
And if I don’t know what love is, what do I know, she asks herself, because love has been Joan’s specialty. Crazy, bone-shaking, teenage love is what brought her to California from Texas in the first place; it wasn’t until much later that loving Charlie marooned her here in these empty hills.
Joan used to love Charlie. Or thought she did, which came to the same thing. Now she thinks maybe she just had him confused with Clint Eastwood, the person Charlie reminded her of; she’d actually thought he was Clint Eastwood the first time she met him at a restaurant in Malibu. That’s happened to her a lot. Joan always falls in love with people who remind her of people she’s loved before. She married her first husband because he reminded her of her cousin Billy. She loved Clint Eastwood because he reminded her of her daddy; she loved Charlie because he reminded her of Clint Eastwood. And so on.
The hawks, or buzzards, circle again and slip down the other side of the canyon. Joan pours more bourbon in her coffee.
Will Charlie even read this letter? Or will he stand there in his perfectly pressed chinos and his impossibly white polo shirt, scanning it, and then proceed to the phone to report her disappearance to some authority? Isn’t that what he will do? Charlie still looks like Clint Eastwood, but not the young Clint with the abashed smile that Joan fell in love with. Now he looks like the scary, remote Clint Eastwood of The Unforgiven. Recently Joan has grown a little afraid of him.
She pictures Charlie reading the letter: She sees him leave it on the chaise lounge while he goes inside to use the phone – the pages flutter in the breeze, the last page blows away over the wall. No. He won’t go into the house to phone, he will pull his cell phone from his belt like a gun from its holster. That’s what he’ll do. He will not read the letter twice, or even once – not all the way through. So what does it matter what she writes? It matters.
She picks up the pad again and writes: “I hate this house. I hate Cloud Drive,” she begins, but she looks up from the page when she hears the rain. Birds sputter to life on the hillside and Joan sees the coyote run part way up the hill to escape the spray. He grows bolder and bolder! Out in the broad daylight now. As she watches, he lies down outside the circle of spray and puts his nose on his paws. Why does he look at her like that? What does he want? Worse, what if the coyote isn’t real? Joan is the only one who’s seen him. But no one else is ever home. In the daytime Cloud Drive is like a deserted movie set. The people who live there are all on real movie sets. Joan watches the breeze riffle the pages of her notebook, and thinks, I’ve got to get out of here.
She takes a deep breath and returns to her letter: “Something I ought to mention. There’s a coyote coming around. Maybe you should tell the neighbors.” She regards this a moment, and then crosses it out and writes instead: “I can’t say where I’m going because I don’t know. It is my plan to get on I-10 or I-5, and drive either south or east. One way or the other I will be a very long way away from here when you read this.”
The sun is climbing, it’s getting hot, and Joan is beginning to feel the effects of the whiskey she’s been slipping into her coffee for inspiration. Her handwriting has begun to wobble and slant. She will have to finish the letter later. On her way upstairs she touches the walls of the stairwell with the palms of her hands. To steady herself? Is she already that drunk? No, just to reassure herself that she’s really here.
When she wakes it is late. Too late to finish the letter and leave. She will leave first thing tomorrow. But hadn’t that been her plan yesterday? Yesterday is a slippery concept and it gets away from Joan before she’s downstairs.
Charlie’s called while she was asleep and left a message on the machine; she listens to it, leaning on the counter in the kitchen: He probably won’t make it home for dinner. The machine clicks off. She doesn’t move. She’s waiting for something. What? It dawns on her that she is hungry; she is famished. She tries to recall the last time she ate. She remembers sitting at the table with Charlie the night before but she hadn’t been hungry then. She never eats breakfast; she never eats lunch, she never has. She hasn’t eaten anything for two days. Or is it three? She’s heard people talk about this at AA meetings. Forgetting to eat. A sign you were in trouble. But she’s not in trouble. She’s just hungry.
She’s gone to AA meetings since her DUI conviction last fall. She had to in the beginning; it had been a stipulation of her probation. She’s off probation now, but she’s kept going to meetings mainly because it keeps Charlie off her back, and also because she likes having someplace to go at night. She rarely goes to the same meeting twice. Once she drove all the way to Palm Springs for a new one. Joan likes to drive and the meetings give her a destination. A sense of purpose. Also a stage.
She gets up in meetings and says: Hi, my name is Joan and I’m an alcoholic.
People sing back: Hi, Joan.
Then Joan pauses, looks them in the eye, and says, “I am celebrating six months of sobriety today.”
Everyone applauds.
Other times Joan says she has a year, or two years, or eight days of sobriety. She likes to vary it. Joan doesn’t think of this as lying, she thinks of it as acting. And she’s very convincing. Let’s face it, she’s a far better actress than she’s gotten credit for in this town. And why shouldn’t she bring these people some good news? Her performances cheer them up, encourage them, and anybody can see they need encouraging. Big time. Well, it’s the least she can do. After all, these people have given her someplace to go at night and they always act glad to see her.
And it’s not like she’s one of them. She’s just had some bad luck. Who hasn’t been nailed for speeding on Mulholland at one time or another? What is Mulholland for if not for taking the curves a little faster than posted? Probably half the people who’d driven past while she was stopped on the side of the road, trying to talk the cop out of the ticket, had a couple of margaritas under their belts. Or three or four. The worst part had been that the cop hadn’t recognized her. It had been the first time she wasn’t let off with a warning and a request for an autograph. And okay, she is drinking quite a lot now, but it’s just a way to get through this interval. No harm, Joan thinks, no foul. She hasn’t been to a meeting this week. She’s been too busy writing her letter to Charlie.
For the moment, after two days without food, the issue isn’t drinking, it’s eating. She needs something to eat; her hands are shaking. She crosses to the huge, gleaming refrigerator and looks in. In all that luxury of cubic space, there is one white container of Mongolian barbecue, two limes, a bottle of tonic water, a jar of mustard, and a steak. She remembers defrosting the steak earlier in the week, in case Charlie should come home for dinner.
Since moving to Cloud Drive, Joan hasn’t cooked much. Not long after they’d moved in, Charlie went on location. Now he’s too busy with post-production to get home for dinner, that’s what he says. Maybe it’s true. Probably it’s true. It doesn’t really matter if it’s true or not.
When Joan and Charlie met she’d lived in a studio apartment in North Hollywood. She had a two-burner stove. The oven had no thermostat and she’d had to tie the oven door shut with a piece of rope, but she’d cooked most every night. (When the rope burned through, it meant the roast was ready.) Here she has a four-star-restaurant-class kitchen, and Charlie brings home food in paper cartons, and she forgets to eat. Joan can still appreciate the irony of this.
Actually the stove scares her. It’s not even called a stove, it’s a “cook-top,” it has digital controls. She stands staring at it now, the packaged steak in one hand. Maybe it would be easier to cook outside. They’ve used the barbecue exactly once – at the housewarming they’d invited studio people to, the only party they’ve given in the new house.
Joan puts the meat on the counter and puts some ice in a glass and goes outside. She pours bourbon over the ice, and studies the damper on the barbecue. This she can handle. You light a fire; you suspend some meat over it; it cooks. Cavemen cooked this way; her father cooked this way. The only digits you need to worry about are the ones on your hands.
In the garage she finds the bag of charcoal and a can of charcoal lighter left over from the party; she lugs these back to the patio. She goes back in the kitchen and retrieves the steak. So far, so good; she pours herself another drink, she’s drinking from an iced-tea glass today, she replaces the bottle in its hiding place just in case Charlie should come home early, and lies down on the chaise lounge to rest. Just for a minute.
When she opens her eyes the sun is going down. She doesn’t know how long she’s been asleep, but she’s still hungry. She gets up again and shakes brickettes into the grate. Standing back as far as she can, she sprinkles them with lighter fluid. How much do you use? She adds another splash of the stuff. She holds her lighter to the charcoal and it ignites with a whoosh of flame which causes Joan to stagger back; but the flames die down quickly, and she steps forward again to look at the charcoal. It looks okay. It looks about right. Now all she has to do is wait for the brickettes to heat evenly. God knows, she can’t forget this part!
This was the juncture in the proceedings at the housewarming party which had caused all the trouble. That had made everyone have to wait so long to eat. Waiting for the coals. And naturally, while they waited they drank, Joan more than most, because of having to answer questions about her next project. There was no next project, of course, and the more often she either admitted this or lied about it – depending on the questioner – the more often she took a sip of her drink, which the caterers kept freshening. When the meat was finally cooked, and it was time to usher their guests to the tables on the terrace, Joan had scarcely been able to walk, had, in fact, tripped and would have fallen flat, had Charlie not caught her elbow. Things between them haven’t been the same since.
She looks up from the coals and sees the coyote. He is so near this time she can see the gold of his eyes. He smells the meat, she thinks, and watching him narrowly, she picks up the steak and waves it in the air to see if she is right. The animal cocks his head, his eyes follow the steak. Well, it’s a big piece of meat, she’d meant it for two; she will share it with the coyote. Why not? They are old friends. He may be her only friend at this point; he is for a fact the only one who comes to see her. The coyote creeps forward three feet. Joan calls, “Yes, okay. We have to wait for these damn coals. You remember.”
Joan is happy that the coyote will be joining her for dinner. Maybe this whole time he’d just been trying to make friends. Even a coyote can be lonely. It is while Joan is leaning over the barbecue pit, putting the steak on the grill, that the bottle of whiskey which she has forgotten in the ash pit, and which the coals have been heating, explodes. The force of this explosion inside the narrow flue sends bricks flying, and the igniting whiskey fumes shoot flames four feet in every direction, which touches off the can of charcoal lighter.
Joan, of course, doesn’t know any of this. Right before the first explosion she’d looked up and met the coyote’s eyes. And then a terrific noise, and then, nothing.
In this string of events, it is probably safe to say that it is the concussion of the first explosion which indirectly kills Joan, for it knocks her backwards, and when she falls she hits her head a fatal blow on the flagstone paving.
The coyote runs back up the hill a little distance, but returns moments later, when the flames die down and the woman lies perfectly still.
Charlie pulls his car into the garage. He has come home early, there is still a little light left. The other Cloud Drive residents aren’t home yet, they are sitting in restaurants and bars in Malibu, or they are rocking gently on boats in the marina. Charlie means to surprise Joan with a meal from her favorite Mexican restaurant in the Valley – which is on the seat next to him, double-wrapped in foil to keep it hot. He hates that the Beamer will smell like carnitas in the morning. He thinks, with grim satisfaction, that none of his good deeds go unpunished.
He enters the house through the door from the garage into the kitchen, puts the food on the counter and heads out to the patio, where lately he’s been able to count on finding Joan. What does she do out there? What, in fact, he wonders, does she do anywhere? He hopes she hasn’t stopped going to AA. He really couldn’t handle another disruption right now.
What Charlie sees when he steps out onto the patio stops him in his tracks. He stares at it for some moments as he might a frame of one of his movies in the editing room. He sees Joan sprawled on her back near the ruins of the barbecue, her face blackened. Her blue eyes stare up at a piece of matching sky. Bricks lay tumbled on the flagstones; there are long shards of glass everywhere. The patio reeks of whiskey. A dog sits near Joan’s body.
Charlie does not approach the body right away. He’s a director of B-action films; if there’s one thing he knows, it’s what a dead woman looks like, and Joan, he notices, is still perfect in the part. He doesn’t, however, know what a coyote looks like, and he tries to shoo it away with his jacket.
Charlie, who is wondering why he feels nothing though he is looking at his wife dead on the ground at his feet, decides that he must be in shock – forgetting for the moment, the fact that he felt nothing when this morning he saw his wife, very much alive, in his bed.
He gives up his efforts to scare off the dog. Whose is it anyway? Who on Cloud Drive would let their dog roam? Or own such a nondescript dog? Charlie intends to find this out. He turns his back, pulls the cell phone from his belt, and angrily punches 911. At least he’s feeling something now.
While Charlie talks to the emergency operator, the coyote nudges Joan’s body with his nose a last time, then turns and leaps easily over the wall; when Charlie looks up, all but its tail has disappeared into the creosote bushes. To avoid looking at Joan, Charlie watches two hawks wheeling over the crestline. He sits on the edge of Joan’s chaise lounge and waits for the ambulance in silence – but for the hum of air conditioners and pool filters. As the light fades, the crickets in the jasmine start up, and then the canyon breeze rustles the dry grasses and a dog barks nervously, and then comes what Charlie at first takes for the wail of the ambulance approaching (and it’s about goddamn time!) but is, instead, his wife’s coyote.
Marjorie Kemper is the author of Until That Good Day (St. Martin’s Press, 2003). Her short stories have appeared in The Carolina Quarterly, Greensboro Review, River Styx, The Southern Review, and in the 2007 Atlantic Special Fiction Issue. She received an O. Henry Award in 2003.