Freeze Frames Read online

  The store stands some six blocks to the west, down the long slope that eventually falls all the way to the ocean. A couple of vets run it, stocking the things they know that the neighborhood, mostly vets like themselves or Mark and Tiffany, both will want and can afford to buy. As Tiffany limps up, Ger Chong is just raising the American flag that hangs over the front window. In the brightening sun, the brand-new Stars and Stripes and Maple Leaves snaps and sways: an ugly design, really, with too many elements all jumbled together, but it’s only temporary, until the National Committee comes up with something better.

  “News yet?” she says.

  “Not the local. That’ll be any minute. But we got the overseas cartridges already. And the bread truck’s been.”

  Getting a bottle of milk, a couple of cinnamon rolls, and a loaf of raisin bread into the bag takes Tiffany a while. She has to hang the handles over her left arm, set the bottom of the bag on a pile of boxed noodles to make the top open, then slip the objects in, one at a time, with her good hand. All the while she is aware of Ger not looking, of exerting his willpower to keep from insulting her by offering to help. Finally she’s done, adds a stick of butter—only half the price of real margarine—and limps to the counter to find two other customers ahead of her. Or rather, one customer, a tall blond dude wearing an Army fatigue jacket over a pair of cammo pants, is buying a pack of gum, while an old man dressed all in black stands beside a bushel basket of apples. Her heart wrenches; she thinks of dropping the bag and running for the door; too late. Nick turns round with a smile and moves out of her way.

  “Fancy meeting you here.”

  “Oh get stuffed.” She flops the bag onto the counter. “And the news, too, Ger.”

  The Devil and the rabbi wait for her on the sidewalk outside while she pays. Although the store does have a second exit near the dairy case, she decides that sneaking out that way would be cowardly. Besides, try as she might to shut them up, her memories are demanding answers. As she walks out the front, Nick reaches for the string bag with a small bow.

  “I’ll haul it myself, fella. What are you guys doing here?”

  “Seeing how you feel this morning, my dear, nothing more.” The rabbi raises his hat to her. “You’re well, I hope?”

  With a shrug she starts walking toward home, but with the weight of the bag to balance, the bad leg slows her down to a hobble. Nick and the rabbi stroll along, one on either side of her, as she makes her painful way up the long slope. She decides that her only safety lies in silence. It seems to her that she can physically feel the rebel neurons firing, the questions forming, racing down the nerves toward her mouth, burning in her mouth. She refuses to speak one word.

  “Well, yes, of course, there’s another Mark,” the rabbi says. “A large number of Marks, really, but I’m sure you only mean the one back in the California Republic.”

  “Damn! Did I say it?”

  “What?” The rabbi looks briefly puzzled. “You asked me a question, yes, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Shit! Well, sorry, Reb Akiba. But I dint want. Oh hell.” Rebel eyes burn with tears. She wipes them on the sleeve of the Forty-Niner jacket.

  “You believe us, don’t you?” Nick laughs, crowing victory. “Half the battle, right there! You believe us.”

  “Dunt! Just a what if. Just a what if question, just taking your damn crazy theory for argument’s sake. That’s all.”

  “Yeah, sure. You’re bullshitting and you know it.”

  “Will you shut up?” Reb Akiba intervenes. “But, Tiffany my dear, that Mark is indeed alive and well. He mourned you, of course, and rather bitterly. I don’t suppose he’s over you, yet, though he does seem more his old self these days.”

  “Now you shut up,” Nick says. “When Tiff comes back, he’ll be the happiest man alive. Not like he forgot her or anything.”

  “And this Mark here?” Despite all her intentions, she cannot take refuge in silence, cannot let this conversation go on without her. “If I leave?”

  Neither man says anything. Nick glances absently at the clearing sky, the rabbi frowns at the sidewalk. Giggling and elbowing each other, a group of young girls runs by, heading for the store with their parents’ cards clutched tight in their fingers.

  “You know, Tiff,” Nick says. “Back home you’re a hero. California’s naming an air base after you.”

  “You lie.”

  “Nope.” He glances at the rabbi. “Do I?”

  “Not this time, no.” Reb Akiba admits it reluctantly. “Down in the desert, in that part of Los Angeles that’s been cleared away.”

  “Owens Air Services Base. The president herself is gonna open it. ’Bout six more weeks now. Sure beats the crummy little citation you got here, doesn’t it? What’s it say? Thanks for trying, you and your lousy unarmed plane? Here’s a piece of paper with eagles on it. Cheap gold ink, too. But back home, jeez, just think what would happen if you, hum, if you, lemme see, if you got released by the Emirate. Yeah, that’s it! One of the anti-shah terrorist groups, they’ve been keeping you a secret hostage, waiting for their chance to trade you in for something big! I knew I’d think of something, and I’ve got just the group lined up. Kind of on retainer, you could call it. Okay, so, they hand you over to the California Embassy as a goodwill gesture, trying to get some of their prisoners back from Israel, and you get back home just in time for the opening of that base. Hero’s welcome. Parades, TV interviews, marching bands, flowers. Your fellow officers lining up to salute. Hell, bet you could run for the senate. Be president yourself, someday.”

  “The prince of lies, that’s you, fella,” Tiffany snaps. “You said it yourself.”

  “So I did. But it’s the old Cretan paradox. If I say I always lie, well, hell, sometimes I gotta tell the truth. And besides, all I did was say you could maybe be president someday. No guarantees. Just a possibility. It’d be up to you.”

  “Yeah? Dunt worry ’bout it. Last thing I wanna be, some stinking pol.”

  The rabbi is scowling, his lips set in a thin line, as if he’s forcing himself to stay silent. In her mind Tiffany is seeing not cheering crowds and the television appearances, but a line of her fellow officers saluting as someone hands her a folded flag and antique rifles fire. The most seductive image of all, however, is a simple green and white railway sign: Owens Air Force Base, next station. In that world, back in the California that Nick persists in calling her home, everyone knows that she’s one of the best damn pilots that ever flew.

  “Ah get out of here! Get stuffed! None of this crap’s true anyway. Who the hell are you guys, talking all this crazy bull?” Her voice shakes in her throat like a living thing. “Leave me alone!”

  Hauling her bag she wrenches herself forward and strides off, as fast as she can, so pitifully slow.

  “Tiffany, my dear, don’t hurt yourself. We won’t follow you.”

  She glances back to see the rabbi grabbing Nick’s arm and making good his word with surprising strength, but still she strides on, gasping for breath, dragging the bad leg, until she turns a corner and can no longer see them standing, far behind her. Get thee behind me, Satan. Ohmigawd. I dunt believe this. Can’t believe this. Can’t. And yet, of course, she does believe it, finds her traitor of a mind’s eye picturing the green and white sign and, as she pants up the last block to home, the cheering crowds as well. In that world the power plant still stands, in that world a hundred thousand people still live who died in this one, and all because Captain Tiffany Owens pulled off a miracle, shooting down solo three enemy planes before they could arm and fire a single missile.

  When she gets back to the apartment, Mark is awake, half-dressed, shaving, his baritone booming in the tiny bathroom.

  “Run to the stars! Stars they be a-fallin! All on that day!” A gasp for breath at verse’s end, then the next one. “Oh sinner man, where you gonna run to? Oh sinner man, where you gonna—Hey Tiff, that you?”

  “Sure is. Why the hell you singing a morbid fucking ugly s
ong like that one, anyway?”

  Half-bearded in white soap Mark’s face appears round the doorjamb.

  “You okay?” he says mildly. “Oh hey, you been to the store! Great! Thanks, hon.”

  “Oh shut up.” She slings the bag, dangerously hard, onto the kitchen table. “I been to the store, yeah, and on the way back I met the Devil. Whaddya think of that?”

  “I think maybe you gone and taken too many pills. Doctor warned me ’bout this. Want me to call the hospital?”

  “No. Just shut up and shave. Just making a joke, man. You and your lousy hymns.”

  The face retreats, and she hears wash water running. Apparently, though, he believes that indeed, she was merely joking in a bad-tempered way, because when he comes out, wiping his face on a torn towel, he’s taken the time to finish shaving.

  “Well, that ain’t the most cheerful number from my days in the choir, no.” He is grinning at her. “Wanna hear ‘Let the Sun Shine In’?”

  “Ah shut up.” But she finds herself smiling in return. “I’m sorry. Kinda tired me out, walking all that way.”

  “Yeah, I bet. And we got to go to your mom’s next. I mean, I’ll be real glad to see Amber and the kids. They ain’t seen you since you started walking.”

  “Hey, that’s right. That’ll be cool, yeah.”

  Tiffany sits down and takes the bread out of the bag, sets the milk bottle upright and just so while Mark gets out a pair of plates and a couple of mugs. He’s brewed up Postum in a glass carafe, dark, steaming, foaming as he swirls it round to pour. Tiffany puts an inch of milk in each mug just ahead of him.

  “We need to leave early,” she says. “Buy some wine to take with us. Think we can find some chocolate for the kids?”

  “On the street, maybe.”

  “Oh, hey, right. I’ve got cash. I think.” She starts patting her pockets, half-expecting the wad of bills to have vanished like elf-gold. “Yeah, here it is, all right. Smells a little musty, huh?”

  “Where you get that?”

  “From that guy I told you about. Nick whatever his name is. He said he owed it to me. I sure dunt remember loaning it to him, but he said I did. Maybe he was in Basic with me. Jeez, wish I could remember.”

  Mark nods, believing her he so easily that the guilt stabs like another pulled muscle. But what is she supposed to tell him? The truth? She cannot bear to repeat that even to herself.

  “Better stop in Braziltown, then,” Mark says. “Never know what you gonna find for sale there.”

  Even though the refugees have settled all over the city, everyone calls the old Mission District “Braziltown.” The neighborhood was Irish way back in the Twentieth Century, then Hispanic, then a mixed bag of Asian cultures, then Rumanian, and now finally Brazilian as waves of refugees broke on the San Francisco docks and flowed down this flat and sunny valley at the city’s heart. Even though it suffered perhaps the least of any neighborhood in the Great Quake, it was a barrio for so long than none of the dispossessed rich even thought of settling there.

  Now, sixteen years later, with the city rebuilt, more or less, Mission Street crawls along through a welter of old wooden buildings, patched and propped, and new poured stucco-crete “temporary” structures, the kind that always, somehow or another, become permanent once the emergency that spawned them ends. The cubes and blocks of stucco-crete have flowered, though, into purples and reds and blues; huge murals cover every windowless wall, graffiti sprawl across doorways and overrun the commercial signs plastered on storefronts. For Tiffany, all these colors, the jumbled blocks of buildings, the crowds oozing their way down the street, men standing on street corners, gossiping and smoking tobacco, women crouched over blankets strewn with contraband, children racing through, shouting and pushing—the entire scene disintegrates into blots and splotches, streaks of movement, glints of light, all pulsing, throbbing, heaving like the chest of some vast and terrified animal, while the pitiless sun pounds down and robs the world of shadow. As the trolley bus lurches and hoots its way down the middle of the street, she slumps down in her seat and clutches the string bag, clanking with wine bottles, to her chest. Mark watches, frowning a little.

  “Tiff, if you dunt wanna get off and shop, we dunt have to.”

  “I wanna get something for the kids. I know you do, too. Besides, I might be better off, outside and off this goddamn bus.”

  “Well, I dunno bout that.”

  In two more blocks the decision’s made for them. On the corner where 30th Street dead-ends into Mission stands an enormous stucco-crete structure, a heap of cubes, one square tower, thrown together in an old parking lot to replace the big Catholic church on Dolores Street that went down in the quake. Over the years the devout have paid artists to cover the bleak flat walls with trompe l’oeil paintings of fluted columns, baroque arches, swags of fruit and flowers, bas-relief angels, and scalloped niches complete with faux marble portrayals of various saints, all this decoration earthquake proof, now, frescoed deep into the walls beyond the power of St. Andrew and his fault to shake it loose. Just past 29th the bus stops with a squeal of brakes and a lurch. Out in front of the church, spilling down the street and across the street, a crowd sways in place to music and waits, faces upturned to the pink tower with its painted bells in painted niches. The bus driver can lay on her airhorn all she wants, can lean out the window and scream her lungs out, too: the crowd will not part.

  “Hell,” Mark says. “Well, might’s well get out and shop, then.”

  Swearing, muttering, scowling at the Brazilians crouched at the back of the bus, the rest of the passengers are getting up and filing for the doors. The Brazilians—two young men in khaki pants and sweat-stained tank tops, and then, some seats away, a family, father in a white suit, mother in a flowered dress, four daughters in starched ruffled dresses—wait until most are out and off. The family cowers against the blame they’re taking for this crowd of their countrymen; the young men swagger down the aisle, waiting, perhaps hoping, for someone to insult them openly. Tiffany would like to say something reassuring to the family, but she knows no Portuguese, an infuriating language, or so the average bilingual San Franciscan thinks of it. It looks so much like Spanish that it seems you should be able to understand what these people are saying, that you should be able to speak to them without effort, but of course, you can’t, and they can’t reply, either, can only stare with miserable eyes as people shout at them in Español or speak Pocho very very slowly as if the Brazilians could—if they really wanted to, if they only wouldn’t be so stubborn—understand at last. As Tiffany steps off the bus in the shelter of Mark’s broad back, she feels as if she’s diving into a sea of Portuguese, the soft waves of voices she cannot decipher lapping her round.

  “We’re getting ’cross this street now.” Mark has been changed back into a Marine sergeant by the alchemy of danger. “Tiff, come on.” He grabs her shoulder with one broad hand. “Move!”

  At that moment music breaks out in a blare of brass, thunders with a hundred snare drums, jogs and jigs and syncopates as the crowd yells and sways. By peering through the packed dancers Tiffany can see that up on the church steps stand two huge box speakers. A fat priest wearing a black soutane and a pair of headphones huddles over a quadro off to one side. Swearing, glaring, shoving when he has to, Mark gets them around the back of the bus. The crowd, smelling of sweat and tobacco and rum, presses close, turns solid, one impenetrable body swaying back and forth on the dance floor of the street, but somehow Mark snakes and wiggles and slides their way across, yelling the few words of Portuguese he picked up during the war, snarling at someone here, smiling thanks at someone else there. At last they reach the for sidewalk, but making it to the bus stop, their transfer point, only two blocks but a universe away, lies beyond even Mark. By sheer Marine arrogance he manages to shove their way to a block of old wooden flats with a sheltered doorway, a tiny porch. He pushes a place clear for Tiffany to stand, two steps up and behind him, safe from the crowd, at a toler
able distance from the samba music bellowing out of the speakers.

  “Well hell,” Mark screams. “Guess we’re going to see what’s goin’ on whether we want to or not. Good thing we left home early.”

  Tiffany nods and rests her hands on his shoulders. The crowd is clapping to the rhythm, rocking back and forth, but no one sings, no one yells, no one even smiles, really. The faces that Tiffany can see are solemn, wide-eyed, expectant but never gleeful. She remembers, suddenly, that religion has something to do with this festival, that most likely the gathering celebrates the special day of one of their saints, beings as alien and innumerable to her as the stars. She looks back to the church just as the doors swing open from inside. The crowd does yell, one sharp wordless bark as a procession spills down the steps. How the crowd manages to move back and out of the way Tiffany cannot see; she’s only aware of a streaming, a sea of discrete particles forming a wave of motion, parting like ebb tide around rock, flowing down the street and spreading out onto sidewalks blocks and blocks away to leave the middle of Mission Street clear.

  While music pounds and pulses, painted wooden statues, each about ten feet high, ride this river down on little boats—litters draped in flowers, swaying and jerking on the shoulders of men dressed in white. Each figure wears real clothes, sewn, no doubt, by the ladies of this parish, according to some mixed iconography of Mexican Catholicism and Brazilian Condomblé. A few Tiffany recognizes: the Virgin Mary in her long blue cloak, spangled with stars, stands on the crescent moon; Jesus sails by, wearing a black top hat, his frock coat open to reveal a crucifix in the midst of the starched white ruffles of his tuxedo shirt; just behind them comes a tall, white-robed figure, wearing a triple crown and carrying a crook, who most likely represents the current pope. Others she cannot label, but each carries a palm frond in one hand.