A Man Named Doll by Jonathan Ames (popular books to read TXT) 📗

a sheer, frightening drop, down into the canyon far below, and then on the left there was a dirt overlook where cars could pull over and take in the view of the ocean.

There were no houses anywhere on Encinal, but about two hundred yards after the overlook, there was a driveway on the right, which Maurais pulled into, stopping in front of a large black gate with a call box.

First the BMW drove past him, and then I followed, glancing to my right, and Maurais’s big head was poking out of the Mercedes and he appeared to be talking into the box. The driveway in front of him, which was more like a private road, was steep and went up the side of the mountain at a forty-five-degree angle.

But whatever house the driveway led to wasn’t visible. It had to be over the ridge or set back from the ridge, but either way you couldn’t see it from Encinal, and as I continued down the mountain, I watched in the rearview mirror as the gate began to swing open; Maurais had been granted access.

A mile farther down the mountain, I was able to make a U-turn and drive back the way I had come. The imposing black gate was closed, and Maurais and his car had disappeared up the driveway. There was a number on the gate: this was 1479 Encinal Canyon Road. If my phone wasn’t dead, I could have called Rick Alvarez and asked who lived there.

But that wasn’t an option, and for all my bitching about phones, I was going to have to pretend I was in the past, when you couldn’t know everything right away and you had to be patient because time was different then. It lasted longer.

I went up to the dirt turnoff and parked the Caprice so that I had a good view of the driveway, not to mention the Pacific, which seemed to stretch halfway to Japan and its leaking nuclear reactors.

It was a little past 1:40—we had been driving for almost ninety minutes—and George and I got out of the car, both of us desperate to urinate.

Blinking in the overbearing sun and using the Caprice to shield us—or me, anyway—from any cars driving by, we passed our water.

I finished before George, and he seemed to make a deliberate point, midstream, of shifting his angle to cover over what I had done, replacing my mark with his mark.

“I can’t believe you did that,” I said, but he couldn’t have cared less, and he pulled on his leash, wanting to sniff about after the long, torturous ride.

So we walked around the dirt overlook, and the wind was cold up there on the edge of the world, high above the sea, but it felt good on my face—it was numbing—and I kept an eye on the black gate two hundred yards away.

And I had the feeling that we might be there awhile, that an old-fashioned stakeout had begun, which George then christened with a well-formed number two.

“Good boy!” I said, and I nudged his offering—without getting any stuck on my shoe—off the side of the cliff, and George, delighted with himself and mentally relieved, joyfully kicked up a lot of sand, with all four paws at once.

16.

After a few more minutes of letting George sniff and mark, two hobbies from which he derives great meaning and pleasure, it was getting a little too cold in the wind, and we went back to the Caprice, officially on the next stage of our stakeout: sitting in the car and wondering one thing: What was Maurais going to do next?

Settling in, George put his head in my lap and looked a little forlorn, and I said with concern, “Are you thirsty?” And he said yes from his mind to my mind, and so I checked, but my coffee cup from the deli was empty; I had finished it during the long trafficky quest on the 101.

I thought maybe he could have licked the cup—there was water in coffee, after all—but that wasn’t a possibility, and I was angry at myself for not being better prepared.

Dehydration is not good for a dog or an out-of-control individual on a variety of pharmaceuticals, and then I remembered that for a few weeks I’d been hearing my old thermos rattle around on the floor in the back and kept not doing anything about it, and I reached over the seat and dug around in a bunch of refuse and came up with it.

I looked down in the well of the thing and there was maybe an inch of stale H2O, and then I put my nose in the thermos and it didn’t smell too bad. So, thinking it was more or less safe, I poured most of the precious liquid into the lid, which serves as a cup, and said to George, “This is it for a while,” and he nodded, resolute, like a good soldier, and went at it.

When he was finished, I poured a meager drip into the cup for myself—George’s germs didn’t concern me—and I drank from it like an old-time ham in a desert movie, and that was it for our water supply. I screwed the thermos closed and dropped it back over the seat.

Then, as the numbing from the wind wore off, the fire ants really started up in my face again, and the pain was a cross between a relentless sting and a relentless throb.

At this point, I hadn’t taken a Dilaudid for about five hours, and I got the bottle out of my pocket and stared at it, very tempted to indulge. But if Maurais left all of a sudden and I had to do more driving, I didn’t think I could chance another pill just yet, even if I paired it with more Adderall.

So, showing some resolve despite the escalating pain, I hid the bottle from myself in the glove compartment, and I said to George, “Don’t let me weaken.”

But he didn’t