SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA | 1971
Doing his best to relax in a hard plastic molded chair, one of countless copies in a bleak line, the man formerly known as Fred Williams waited at the airport for a Pacific Air Lines 727 to arrive from McKinleyville. Khumalo sighed and took a deep hit of the local atmosphere. Filling his lungs with damp fog tinged with the volatile high note of spent jet fuel, he knew he had made the right decision. As soon as his current business was done, he was leaving.
Khumalo watched from the gateway windows as baggage handlers drove their cart out onto the tarmac and began testing the viability of any American Tourister luggage like the gorilla in the recent TV commercial. He was a Samsonite man, himself, and relatively sure that what he was waiting for would arrive unscathed by any simian exuberance.
He was actually relieved that this would be the last time he would be on the receiving end of a delivery from his people in Humboldt County. If he didn’t know everyone in the ground crews at both ends, he would never have put himself on the line. Leaving town, however, was always going to cost money. Spotting the innocuous Glacier Blue-colored case driving away from the plane on top of the handlers’ clown car, Khumalo made his way down to the baggage carousel.
He always got a perverse kick out of the way that one of the most frustrating and soul-sucking activities one could endure at the airport was tarted up with a circus allusion. Who doesn’t like a ride on the carousel? What goes up, must come down… if it was good enough for Blood, Sweat, and fucking Tears, then you can stand ass-to-elbows with a crowd of exhausted travelers waiting for your dirty underwear. Ride a painted pony, motherfucker.
Khumalo had long mastered the art of invisibility at the scrum. One just had to look tired and pissed off to be there. Any energy or excitement was immediately noticed as a tell that you were either on drugs, or up to no good. Perhaps both. It was the opposite of jury duty. He had been dismissed more times than he could remember by acting stoked to be a part of it all. Number 26… you can fuck right off.
Having retrieved his suitcase, Khumalo made it as far as the men’s room off of the carousel before the bindle in his boot started calling his name. It had been some time since he had dug into the remedy, and if he was going to hit the ground running, he needed a little pick-me-up.
After the supernormal vision he experienced on the corner of Broadway and Columbus, the newly-christened Zongo had somehow made it back to his North Beach flat and slept for three days. When he finally awoke, twisted in sheets damp with sweated toxins, he untangled himself, took a shower, and hightailed it over to the Fillmore District.
“Hello, Fred,” a spry eighty-four-year-old Liana Chaves answered the doorbell after Khumalo used it to play a brief but inspired solo. “Did I call you over?”
“No, Ms. Chaves,” he fought to keep from shifting from foot-to-foot and becoming the young boy the woman always made him feel like. Khumalo supposed that compared to the octogenarian, he was still a boy. Hell, compared to her, he thought, he was still a fucking embryo. Still, the old gal always treated him well, and Khumalo always mustered a little extra care when asked to maintain her jewel box of a home.
“I wanted let you know that I was thinking about going back up north for a bit. I could check in on your property while I was there if you’d still like. Maybe do some fixing up if need be.”
“Is that right?” Chaves eyed the handyman skeptically. “And you didn’t feel that you could call me on the telephone and give me that news?” The woman didn’t reach her eighties by being anybody’s fool.
Against his best efforts, Khumalo began to rock a little on the balls of his feet. Jesus Christ, he thought, all I need is a baseball cap to nervously twist in my hands as I ask for the damn money for the Chronicle.
“Ah, Ms. Chaves… you see… the thing is…”
“Get on in here,” Chaves kindly released him from the hook she had so masterfully landed in his cheek. “I’m just breaking your balls. That’s great news, Fred. The sun just might do you some good, you’re looking a little pálido.”
You don’t know the half of it, Khumalo thought, toying with the idea of telling the woman the whole story, starting with his mystic vision of the Giant Neon Doda and how she rechristened him on the side of Broadway while sailors and drunks passed between them on their ways to their own life-changing interludes. He thought better of it.
I’m sure the ol’ gal has seen some weird stuff in her time, he mused. Hell, she lived through two World Wars, the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression… but a Giant Neon Doda? Forget it. That story was not going to get the keys to her pad in Mendocino.
As Khumalo followed Chaves down the entry hall, he had to resist running a hand over the polished mahogany wainscoting. “Do you have any idea what kind of shape the place is in, Ms. Chaves?”
“Now, Fred, if we are going to talk business,” the elderly woman spoke without turning around, continuing her bustle toward the kitchen, “we should sit down and have a cup of tea like civilized folks, don’t you think?”
“I suppose a cup of tea wouldn’t kill me,” Khumalo spoke to the majestic gray bun meticulously piled on the back of the woman’s head. “It’s just that I know what that climate can do to a place.” Chaves ignored his comment, already having laid out how this transaction was going to go.
Once he was sitting at the comfortable farmhouse table that dominated the kitchen, its only competition a Wedgewood gas stove where an ancient copper tea kettle was happily coming to steam, Chaves told Khumalo about the property she hadn’t seen since the turn of the century.
“My father was a dairyman, originally from São Miguel,” she narrated over her shoulder while bustling around, opening drawers and cabinets. “Like everyone from around the world, he came to California to strike it rich but soon realized that the best way to do that was to stick to what he knew best. It didn’t take long for him to put down the gold pan and carve out a small ranch out on the Garcia.”
“The Garcia?” Khumalo raised an eyebrow, flashing on Jerry and helplessly imagining a farm hidden in his beard.
“The river that winds through the property,” Chaves explained. “It flows pretty heavy in the winter if there’s been a lot of rain. You’ll like it, Fred. My father used to take me with him to catch steelhead when they were running.”
“I’m not much of an angler, ma’am,” Khumalo lamented.
Chaves ignored the comment and continued her monologue unabated.
“I turned 13 in 1900, and that’s the last time I went fishing with my father, or saw the ranch. Sugar?”
“No, thank you, ma’am,” Khumalo reached out for the delicate cup of fragrant tea. He blew on the brew, gazing over the rim of the bone China, now fully invested in the woman’s story. “What happened? If you don’t mind me asking.”
“Ah, tragédia, I’m afraid,” Chaves sighed. My father had business here in San Francisco and came down in the middle of a pandemic.”
“Ma’am?” Khumalo had attended high school at Lowell out in the Parkside District and didn’t remember anything about a local pandemic from any history class.
“The bubonic plague,” Chaves noticed the blank look on her guest’s face. “It started in Chinatown, and tore through the City, but the government denied it was happening. About the only thing good about the whole place burning down in ’06 was that it finally put paid to that whole business.”
“Wow,” Khumalo offered, not knowing what else to say. “I’m sorry, ma’am.”
“It’s ancient history,” Chaves sighed. “Literally. When my father died, most of us children were farmed out to relatives. A few years later, I met my husband and we moved out to the Hawaiian Islands. He was in the sugar business, you see.”
“And you never went back?” Khumalo asked. “Not even to visit?”
“It was a different time, Fred. Back then, living in Hawaii… you might as well have been living on the Moon. I wrote to my mother every month after I left, but when the War broke out—this would have been the first ‘war to end all wars’—they started coming back unopened. I’ve tried over the years to find out what happened to her—what happened to Girassol—but life… you’re too young to have learned this yet, but life just has a way of barreling along like a train with no brakes. You see the stops as they go whizzing by, but too soon, you just sort of stop looking out the window.”
“Who is Girassol, Ms. Chaves?”
“Girassol is not a ‘who,’ Fred; it’s a ‘where.’ Girassol is, or was, our ranch. It means, ‘sunflower.’ The way I remember it, the Big House makes this place look like an earthquake shack. Oh, Fred, if it still stands, you’ll be amazed at all the amazing redwood. It was built a long time before that was hard to get.”
“So you don’t know for sure if anybody is living there… or has lived there since World War Two?” Khumalo asked, beginning to imagine the house as a total tear down, that is, if the place hadn’t already fallen into Jerry’s beard.
“World War One, dear. And, no, I have no idea; the deed came to me anonymously. How’s your tea, Fred?”
Khumalo took a sip from the delicate cup and sat back in the woman’s overstuffed chair lost in thought.
“Delicious.”
Román Leão 