souls of black | fever in, fever out

chapter 103: the end of the world

The next morning was a cold, gray, and soggy one, but Sam had no intention on returning to Louie's apartment for another round that day: she had already packed her things in the back seat and she nestled down in the front seat with her arms folded across her chest and the lapels of her jacket pulled up to her ears. She had no hood or something to cover her head but she wished for one. She didn't want to be seen. Louie himself meanwhile, locked the door behind him and he headed down the steps. She looked on at him as he rounded the front end of the car and opened the door. She sighed through her nose as he climbed into the front seat.
"You okay?" he asked her in a low voice, and she nodded her head.
"Look—I was thinking about this last night before I fell asleep, too," he started, "neither of us mean to inflame or kick up any old wounds with anyone. We're just—fooling around, messing around, you know?"
She gazed out the window right as he said that. She had nothing to say to that.
"If either of us made you uncomfortable—and I can tell we did—we didn't mean to. I didn't mean to, and I know Alex didn't mean to, either. And for that, I want to personally apologize to you for it."
Sam never moved from her spot in the seat next to him. She couldn't hardly stop thinking about any of what went down the night before, such that it almost brought a tear to her eye.
"Also—I, uh—" he stammered and then he cleared his throat, "—hate to tell you this, but I'm kinda out of money."
She turned her attention over to him and frowned.
"What do you mean you're out of money?" she demanded.
"I'm out of money," he repeated, "well, for now anyway. Remember what I said yesterday, I had enough for breakfast and a cab?"
"Oh, right, right." She hesitated. "So what's this mean?"
"Well, I have a full tank of fuel to start with," he stated, to which she frowned and scoffed at that.
"Louie, we're not driving back to Elsinore from here—it's too far." She was scorn.
"But the train already left, though," he pointed out. "It's kind of overkill to fly on down to Elsinore, too."
She sighed through her nose again.
"Don't really feel like driving through the valley, either," he added.
"Yeah, it's boring as hell," she said in a soft voice.
"Boring as hell and still hot as fuck, too," he said, "at least here we have a bit of leeway with the San Francisco fog. Seven hours of nothin'." He paused for a second. "We could take the coast."
"That's longer, though," she pointed out.
"Nicer, though," he insisted.
"True. It's way nicer, actually."
"Bet you've missed the Pacific Coast, too," he said.
"I have—it's one of the many things I haven't been able to do like at all. Especially when I was growing up out here."
"Really?" Louie was genuinely taken aback by that.
"Yeah."
"Well, let's—" He set his hand on the ignition key and turned it. "Let's."
Sam strapped herself in and Louie shook his head of hair about a bit.
"One thing I really wanted to do with Zelda," he started again as he pulled on the parking lever, "when we were together was go on a road trip with her somewhere. I always considered driving from Providence down to some place like D.C., or go all the way down to like West Virginia. The two of us on a trip together and just hanging out together."
"What kept you from doing it?" she asked him.
"Touring and making albums—and dealing with record company horse shit in her case—and in my case it was living a double life. There was no way I could do it, not with my other life in full swing."
They pulled ahead and began up the block, around the cemetery and towards the block on the other side.
"So—I haven't really taken the Pacific Coast Highway much from my place so just kind of—like—bear with me here," he sputtered.
"It's okay, it's okay."
Louie glanced over at her at one point as they rolled up to a stoplight.
"You know—and I'm being perfectly honest with you here, Sam—I'm a little intimidated by you," he confessed.
"You?" she asked him.
"Yeah."
"Why?"
"I dunno," he replied with a shake of his head, "but there's just something about you that completely intimidates me. Like it's hard for me to maintain composure when I'm near you."
"There's no reason to be, though," she promised him.
"But I feel it anyways, though. It could be because you made a bold move in moving across the country and back again, but I can't really say for sure."
"Funny you say that 'cause you did that," she pointed out.
"True. But see, you weren't living a double life like I was."
"I mean, I kinda am now," she assured him.
"How so?"
"Joey doesn't know about Bill. He also doesn't know that I'm hanging out with you guys, either. For the record, Bill doesn't know that I'm hanging out with you guys, either. It's like a triangle of sorts with me come to think of it."
"A delta," said Louie.
"A delta?"
"Yeah. You know the Greek letter delta?"
"Oh, yeah, yeah!"
"Apparently in the realm of science, it's symbolic of change. Like change in temperature or heat."
"How do you know that?"
"I dunno if she's shown you this but Morgan—you know, Morgan from the Cherry Suicides—has this old chemistry textbook back at her place. She found it in the garbage believe it or not."
"Something wrong about that," Sam declared.
"Oh, yeah. Unless it's actually trash, books do not belong in the trash. But yeah, she found it and I just happened to prop it open one day, and I read a tidbit in a chapter about equations at one point."
"Huh. Bill has a bunch of old books at his place—mostly old literature, but it's worth a peek, though. I keep meaning to crack them open but I'm not sure where to begin."
The light turned green and Louie lunged ahead on the street. The clouds hung even lower over them as he merged lanes and they headed for the 880 Freeway. To the right of them was the stretch of gray waters that made up the very Bay itself.
"If you ever come back up here this way," he started again, "you know you're in a car on the P.C.H., you've got to cross the Golden Gate Bridge at some point. There's just—something majestic about it, even if you've lived here your whole life like the five of us. Well, four of us, anyway, unless Chuck was telling a fib about where he was born. This will take us right by Santa Clara and down to the interchange in San Jose, which'll in turn take us all the way down the coastline to the City of Angels."
Sam nodded her head and she peered out the windshield to the gray overhead. To think that the assumption with the California coast was all bright sunshine and infinite beaches: it made her laugh the more in which she thought about it.
"What's even the deal with him, anyway?" Louie asked her out of the blue.
"Who, Bill?" She looked over at him with her eyebrows knitted together and he took a glimpse over at her.
"Yeah."
"Well," she began, "I mean, you were sitting right there when I called Chuck and told him what was going on."
"Pff, how could I forget? But what I'm asking is—is there like a time limit with him? Like you signed a marriage contract plus a prenup but surely someone over at the school has to figure that out at some point because it's totally illegal. Setting you up like that and forcing you into something that you had no desire to get into and then threatening a whole bunch of bullshit with you like locking you in your room and forbidding you from going out and visiting people."
"Well, when I first came out here and I spoke to Marla over the phone—you know, she's been trying to get a job and she finally did with Belinda up in Albany. But she went to the school and she told them that he was still on the payroll. He got fired, Louie, but there was some weird glitch of some sort so he still got paid and he got paid a lot of money, too. So he was able to afford that large house and care for his daughters, such that he enlisted them in a private school."
"So he loses his paycheck, he's fucked, basically," he followed along.
"Yeah. Unless he got something to help him out when we weren't looking, he's probably got to pull the girls out of school and sell the house."
"And what happens to you if and when that happens?" he asked her.
"I—" She froze. Louie glanced over at her with his eyebrows raised. "I—don't know. Oh, wait!" She snapped her fingers.
"What's that?"
"My mom's moving down to the Southland soon. Where exactly is another question, though. She might be going out to Catalina or she might be going to San Pedro, I dunno."
"Or you can go back to Joey," he pointed out. "You know, make things easier on your mom. It's another cross country, for sure, but I feel it'd be more beneficial to take that risk again and go with him rather than put extra pressure on your mom like that. But that's my opinion, though. You do whatever you want."
"There should be a way to null it, too," she added.
"Yeah, being in a car with another dude," he joked, and that brought a laugh out of her.
Within time, signs for the interchange came into their view and Louie took the next exit which looped around and met up with the Pacific Coast Highway. Right as they matched up with the pavement, the clouds over them swirled about like the old feathers or the wisps of paint mixed into the wash for a watercolor project. She looked out to the low hills off to the right, all of them different shades of green and yellow. All of them still that rich green despite the late summer. All of them still rich dark green despite the yellow dead grass everywhere. The clouds overhead beckoned rain but at the same time waned away from the coast line.
Such a strange position to be in as was the state of California, but that pocket there, the hills that followed her and Louie all along the highway on that lengthy seven hour drive, reminded her of that special place.
The quiet place. The spot that she and Charlie had found together and the place where she and Joey visited during their final days together.
"This is almost like the precious part of California," she noted aloud.
"Nah, the eastern Sierra is the precious part of California in my opinion," he said. "There's something lonely and ancient about the eastern Sierra Nevadas."
"This whole area here reminds me of a place that Charlie and I found together when they were making the Stormtroopers of Death album," she followed up.
"Really?"
"It was like this little nook in the trees down the street from the studio," she explained as she returned her attention to him. "We called it 'the quiet place' because you go in there and it's like completely untouched in comparison to everything else. You walk down the street and you have to duck underneath the trees as you're going in there."
"Sounds like something you keep a secret," he remarked.
"I told Joey about it, though," she told him. "I imagine upstate being covered in places like that."
"Places you go to that no one else knows about," he followed along. "This part of California and the eastern Sierra is like that, too. Lots of nooks and crannies and what have you. Like there's a place outside of Salinas—I'll have to show it to you when we get there. It's closer to Monterey Bay, though, which means we'll have to leave this highway, though."
"It's okay—it'll get us over to the ocean."
"The ocean makes everything better," he remarked.
The highway took them down past Morgan Hill and then Gilroy: at one point the road turned towards Monterey Bay; off in the distance loomed those cold dark gray waters that seemed to stretch on forever. The view enlarged as they came closer and closer to the next turn off and the 156: Louie told her it would take them to Highway 1, which would in turn take them to the place he had in mind. At that point, the clouds increased and everything grew dark despite it being almost ten o'clock in the morning.
"While we're over here, you don't mind spending a little money for breakfast, do you?" he asked her at one point.
"Not at all. I was just gonna ask you if you're hungry at all."
He showed her a grin in response, and then he pointed out the windshield to the next sign up ahead: the town of Castroville as well as the turn off to Highway 1.
"So anyway, this place—it's over by the Salinas River, which eventually heads out to the ocean," he explained. "When I first met Zelda, and I was waffling on if I wanted to go with her or stay with my concurrent girlfriend and our baby, I always came here. It always helped me clear my head to drive down here when the baby fell asleep and Zelda was back in Rhode Island. I remember staying down here for a full afternoon once. Like I didn't get back home until well after the sun went down. Needless to say, I almost got in trouble for that."
She laughed at that, and he gave his long smooth hair a little toss back from his face and the side of his neck.
"And the highway will take us all the way down the coastline, too. Take us down to Big Sur and all around the coast, all the way down to San Simeon and Cambria, and then Morro Bay, and then that'll take us over to San Luis Obispo and that's where we meet up with 101 again."
"And that'll take us all the way back to L.A., too."
He nodded his head at that, and then Sam cleared her throat.
"I don't think I get Alex," she confessed.
"A lot of people don't," he assured her with a straight face.
"It's funny, he said the exact same thing to me," she recalled. "Word for word."
"Well, because it's true! A lot of people don't get Alex. That kid is a bundle of contradictions, many of which are not for the faint of heart. I've only known him for a few years but can confirm that, though. And what's mind blowing to me is he's completely aware of it, too. I remember the first time I got into an in-depth conversation with him a few years ago when Testament first formed and we were still Legacy. Sam, I never had such a worse headache."
"Well, like. For example, when we were in Germany and he and I spent a whole day together—"
"And he missed the train?" he finished for her. "Chuck told me."
"Yeah, he missed the train and he got upset with me when I tried to grab his attention and get him to come onboard. Then the fireball happened and he realized the error of his ways and we patched it up. And then, you know last night, he opened up the wound over Cliff with me."
"The fireball happened and what exactly did he do there?"
"I put my arms around him and held him close to me," she explained. "Wept like a baby right into my chest."
"He probably liked to feel your chest," he pointed out.
"What makes you think that?"
"Sam—he's nineteen, soon to be twenty. When I was nineteen, that was all I ever thought about were touching and feeling boobs and clits. We're horny bastards at that age, and I would imagine that he is especially, too. Alex is bit of a nerd—it's the whole thing about how girls don't really talk to nerds."
"But he's a guitar player, though. I would imagine the girls getting all hot and bothered to guitar players."
"Not Alex and not our crowds, no. He's like the thinking man's guitarist. I'm sure you've seen him before a television."
"Oh, yeah, he's all over news reports whenever they come on. Well, I was with you guys in Boston and he and Greg were right before the TV in the room there."
"Oh, yeah, that's right! But still—at the end of the day, even with his large brain and social scientist parents, he's still a guy. And he probably wanted to feel something soft and warm and comfy." Louie glimpsed over at her. "You said he was scared, right?"
"Yeah. It was right when that big fireball went up. He just—came over to me and burst into tears at the sight of it. I held him so close to me and I let him weep into my chest."
"Well—if you see him next time, really pay attention to his behavior towards you," he advised her. "If he's actually sincere with you, then it's probably because he's confused and his inexperience is showing. If not, like if he gets close to you again, then don't bother with him for a second longer."
"What do you mean?"
"What I'm saying is he either wants you for you or he's using you," he explained. "I wish I could tell you more about it, but I'm not Alex, though. I can only tell you what I know from being in between two women for a couple of years." He shook his hair again and then raked his fingers through one side: outside, the signs for Castroville emerged from the scraggly shrubs on either side of the road.
"I imagine him being soft and sweet, though," he confessed in a low voice, such that it took her aback to hear that.
"Is—there something about him that you see with him?" she sputtered out as she took a glimpse over at him with a bewildered look on her face. Louie bowed his head and cleared his throat.
"Let me ask you a question," he said as he leaned his head closer to her.
"Okay."
"Does it bother you at all—" She could tell that he chose his words with care. "—when a guy finds another guy attractive and it's obvious he's not gay at all?"
She opened her mouth to say something to that, but no sound came out.
"Take as much time as you need to answer that, too," he assured her, "—I asked Zelda this once and she really had to think about it."
She thought of all the times that she made art while in class, and she thought of the time that she drew Marla in her journal. It wasn't until she really got to know Marla as well as Belinda when she began to see them as a couple of beautiful women. Indeed, as she thought about their willingness to help her out even while she had posted up out on the West Coast, the more she wondered if the whole thing extended further than their smooth New Yorker skin. Further than Marla's colorful hair and further than Belinda's soft doll like features. There was something more to Alex, much like there was something more to Louie in the seat there next to her, and there had to be something more to herself as well. More to them all, and the fact that she and Louie both had a quiet place, a place where they went that fell on blind eyes, was enough to give her a clue.
The hidden spots and everything in between. It was only the beginning.
And thus it only made sense to her to realize that it resided with everyone, including Alex himself.
"No," she replied after a long while. "No, it doesn't bother me at all."
"Okay," Louie proclaimed as they rolled into Castroville. "Sometimes I look at Alex and I think, 'god, he's a really beautiful boy. I imagine being the perfect cuddler, like he must be adept to snuggling and feeling soft underneath a bunch of blankets.' Not necessarily sexy, although he does have a nice chest and thighs."
"Nice arms, too," she said in a soft voice.
"Yeah, he's got those really lanky strong guitar player arms."
"Hey, you've got nice arms, too, Lewis," she declared.
"Drummer arms." He shook his right elbow about: his muscles were tight and sinewy.
"Reminds me of Joey's arms," she said.
"Oh, yeah, that's right! He's a drummer, too."
"Drummer and a hockey player."
Louie took the first exit off into that small town and Sam volunteered to buy the both of them cups of coffee and a couple of scones for themselves: she took a chocolate one where he took a peach one for himself.
Within time, they climbed back into the car and Louie guided her over to the spot in question, right down by the Salinas River and where it widened out before it reached the ocean in small narrow fashion. It was there that the shades of yellow that followed them out of the Bay Area returned to that rich dark green that reminded her of New York. The space in the forest outside of the studio where she and Charlie ventured to together, and then she and Joey visited under a blanket of pure white snow.
"We all have a quiet place," she declared.
"We really do," Louie said as he sipped on his coffee.
"We all have a house and a home, even if it isn't physical," she said.
"Yeah, we all have an attic. We all have secrets. We all have things that we show to everyone."
"We all have things that we've buried—skeletons in the closet," she muttered.
"And we all have a quiet place," he added with a raise of his eyebrows.
He took the next right turn, one that brought them down the Salinas River and away from civilization. All the while, the ponderosa pines stretched high up into the sky around them, all up into those low dark swirling clouds that enveloped them in a blanket of coziness. Soon, the pavement gave way to gravel and broken pieces of pavement itself; and every so often, Sam spotted a series of shrubs all over the places, shrubs with little light pink and pearly white flowers.
"The rhododendrons are still in bloom I see," Louie remarked.
"I don't think I've actually seen those before," she confessed; the whole scenery made her think of the hole in the wall back in Ithaca. "They only grow here on the coast and in northern Nevada, we have all manner of pines and trees but nothing like this, though. Nothing as delicate and fluffy as those, though."
"You guys get oleanders down in the Southland. I've seen those a number of times, they're quite lovely."
"Oh, yeah. Only drawback with oleanders is they grow like weeds down there. Which is absolutely amazing to me because they're very poisonous."
"At least it's not strychnine," he told her. "Strychnine or—better yet deadly nightshade." And Joey entered her mind right as that final word left his lips. "I don't even know if strychnine grows out here," he continued.
"Yeah, I don't know, either..." Her voice trailed off at that. She thought about Joey and what he was doing right at that moment. They were still touring over in Europe and they were about to drop their brand new album in the meantime as well. If nothing else when she got back to Lake Elsinore, she had to pick up a copy of that.
She would have to search about for that familiar lettering: she knew it when she saw it.
"There should be a garden somewhere," he continued, "one full of poison plants."
"The most dangerous garden in the world," she declared.
"We should literally call it that."
"'We'?"
"'They', I should say," he corrected himself; before them, the little road led to that wide part of the river. Big lush ponderosas as well as oak trees with large wide green leaves the size of dinner plates and tall narrow trees with high canopies surrounded them.
"I was just gonna say—do you really wanna go there, Louie?"
"Unless you wanna." He tugged on the parking lever and switched off the car. "I ain't gonna do it unless you want to do it."
"We gotta be careful, though," she pointed out.
"Oh, absolutely. That's something that's just not for the faint of heart. The quintessential declaration of 'you can look but don't touch'. Might wanna throw in a 'for the love of god' in there, too. 'You can look but for the love of god, do not touch.'"
"'Welcome to Shelley and Clemente's poison garden,'" she declared with a gesture of her hand, "the most dangerous garden on Earth. We've got everything from strychnine to belladonna to oleanders to—whatever else we can find. Have it all together under one umbrella. You and me—we could retire off the profits."
"You think people would actually pay money to see that?" he asked her, stunned.
"Yeah. People pay money to see the weirdest shit, Louie."
"Case in point!" He gestured to himself.
"You guys aren't weird," she assured him.
"Yes, we are. We're as weird as weird can possibly be." He sipped on his coffee a bit more and then he unbuckled his seat belt. "Anyways, this is where I come to clear my head. I call this place 'the end of the world' 'cause it's far removed away from anything. It's only ten miles back to Castroville but—still."
They both climbed out of there in unison; Sam peered up to the gray sky overhead and she took in the smell of the salt as it filtered in through the trees before them. The Salinas River flowed right next to the small stretch of gravel and partially collapsed pavement.
"This is like the perfect place for a poison garden," she told him as he led her to the soft dark river bank.
"Oh, yeah, this lush soil here. Look up the plants and see what kind of environment they thrive in."
"I do know oleanders like heat," she told him, "it's why they're everywhere in the L.A. area and in the south, too."
"Have a special greenhouse for those guys," he continued as he held his cup of coffee close to his chest. "Kinda clean up the pavement behind us a bit so—Skolnick can drive around on it on his—golf—cart."
"Shelley and Clemente's poison garden—featuring Alex Skolnick's golf cart." She laughed at that and he laughed with her.
"Can you imagine Alex on a golf cart?" he asked her, and then he held out his arms, "'oh! Oh god! Oh god here we go!'" And he lowered his voice to where he almost matched Alex's tone.
"Four wheelin' on a golf cart," she laughed some more.
"Hey, Alex! Take it easy, little man!" Louie lowered his voice to a near whisper. "There's stuff in here that'll kill you faster than you can say your middle name!" He shook his head and chuckled some more, and then he took another sip of his coffee.
"So what's the quiet place like?" he asked her as they neared the river's edge.
"In upstate?"
"Yeah."
"It's about like this, without the river, of course. There was another spot that Joey and I went to when Stormtroopers were in Ithaca a few summers ago—right by the water's edge at the one lake—one of the Finger Lakes that's there. It kind of reminds me of that, like I'm getting the same feeling as that."
They stopped at the water's edge and Sam leaned out a little bit for a view beyond the trees. The stretch of rich black and gray that was the Pacific Ocean, a mere stone's throw up ahead of them. Even though Louie had a different opinion, Sam couldn't help but feel that there was something prehistoric about this part of the river; something precious and untouched.
"Sometimes, when it's a bit sunnier out," he started again, "I'll kneel down to the waters here and search around for insects and rocks and stuff. There's a lot of bizarre life here that's endemic only to this part of the river and as far as I know, the whole state."
"Kind of like a 'keep it forever' sort of thing," she noted.
"Exactly, right. Keep this whole place hidden away from the world so as to protect it from everything and everyone. Eastern Sierra is the same way. Exact same way." He sipped on his coffee once again.
"C'mon, I think it's gonna rain—I feel it."
They returned to the car and sure enough, as Louie fired it up again and they made a turn back at the dead end and proceeded back up the pavement, the first large drops of rain pattered on the roof and the windshield. It would be some time before they reached the Highway 1 once again, but once they did, Sam wondered as to how far they could go without seeing another sliver of civilization between Monterey Bay and the next spot on the coast.
To the left of them stood the high sea cliffs in all their withered and eroded glory, strong and high over their heads, much stronger and higher than the buildings back in New York City or Los Angeles or even San Francisco itself. To the right stood the ocean: the gray and black waters that went on forever into the horizon. Empty and cold, and cradled by the clouds over them. Everything gray and black.
Every so often, Sam peered down to the waves down below as they crashed on the rocks. She looked to the left once again: every so often in the cliffs, a minute ponderosa jutted out from the cracks as if it gasped for the fresh oceanic air. The coast line seemed to stretch on for infinity before them. She glanced over at Louie and the serene expression on his face.
He was her drummer in that moment.
She turned her attention back out to the ocean beyond them as they went around a corner. Maybe it was the lack of anything discernible on the cliffs or the fact that the ocean appearead so endless beyond them, but something about all of this made her squirm in her seat.
Louie's occasional peers down to the gages behind the steering wheel didn't help, either.
An eternity in such a small pocket of the coastline. They really were at the end of the world.
A sign emerged on the side of the road but she had no idea what it read.
"We probably should've stopped for gas in Castroville," he told her at one point.
"Why, are we low?" she asked him as her heart skipped a beat.
"Sorta. I hope. I don't really know the economy on this thing—I don't really pay attention to that sort of thing."
They rounded another corner and Louie drummed his fingers on the steering wheel: that time they had a full view of the ocean. The grand view of the waves as they welcomed her to the end of the world, and they were about to run out of gas as far as she knew right then.
Another sign emerged from behind the guard rail and that time she saw that they were ten miles from the central part of the coast.
"Mother fucker!" he spat under his breath.
"It's okay—we're almost to San Simeon," she told him.
"Yeah, I know—I'm still kicking myself, though. We'll probably gonna coast there the rate we're going at right at the moment."
"Seriously?" she demanded, shocked.
"Yeah!"
She closed her eyes and she thought of Joey over in Europe. The only thing that seemed worse than losing Cliff to a bus accident that was far beyond her control was her being stranded on the Central California coast and not being able to tell anyone. But then again, they were close to the next piece of civilization.
"As long as we don't drive into the ocean, I think we'll be fine," she told him.
"We don't drive into a—poison garden," he muttered as they went around yet another bend in the road: the cliffs soon began to lower away to the sight of more ponderosas and scraggly shrubs.
"There's no poison gardens here," she assured him.
"You sure? 'Cause like—there's a bend here—and another here—it's like this."
They rounded a corner as it wound around the coastline: the road dipped inward into a gentle curve and they doubled back to the next crevice in the landscape.
"Sit—" He pointed to the left. "—down—" He pointed to the right. "—sit—down—sit—down—poison garden." He pointed straight ahead at that last part and she chuckled at that.
Sure enough, the car sputtered a bit right outside of San Simeon: Hearst Castle rose up off in the distance but they had no time to visit right at that moment.
"Told ya we'd have to coast," he told her as he guided the car to the gas station right there at the edge of town. The engine sputtered again and died right as they coasted into the first spot near the driveway. He let out a low whistle and leaned back in his seat.
"That was close," she remarked.
"Yeah, I'll say," he breathed, and then he turned his attention to her. "A twenty'll get us to the heart of Lost Angles and it'll get me up the Grapevine and into the Central Valley."
"You're not gonna hang out there with me?"
"I can't," he told her. "We're supposed to make a new album ourselves."
"Oh, yeah, that's right!" She handed him a twenty dollar bill, followed by another which would ensure him a ride back home to the Bay Area.
Once they were filled up, they returned to the road.
"I don't know if Hearst Castle is even open," Louie confessed.
"I don't, either. It's getting kind of late in the day, too."
"Yeah, exactly!"
Some more coastline and they found their way down into Solvang and then San Luis Obispo where they were met with the Pacific Coast Highway yet again, and they moved away from the end of the world. So much that she wanted to show to Joey. And so much that she wished Cliff could see again, especially that one stretch of the highway where everything felt so finite and endless at the same time.
They wound their way through the low foothills and yet another unknown pocket of California, until they skirted the outside of Santa Barbara followed by Carpinteria.
The waves down below thrashed even more as they wound along the cliffs towards Ventura. At that point, the sky began to darken with the setting sun on the other side of the blanket of clouds overhead.
"Part of me wants to go down to the beaches here," Louie confessed to her. "Like—take a walk on one of the beaches here. Yet another thing I wanted to do with Zelda when we were together."
"We don't have towels, though," she pointed out.
"And it's cold, too!"
"Right!"
The highway led them into Camarillo and then the heart of Los Angeles, where it ended and became the 210. At that point, night was about to fall over them, and the feeling of dread washed over Sam herself. She knew that Bill would be furious by the mere sight of her walking through that front door without any sort of explanation.
Louie drove them down to Corona and then the hills which cradled Lake Elsinore away from the rest of the region. The clouds had finally dissipated and gave way to a violet and orange sky overhead. Such a great length of time to be in that car with him and a part of her wished they had more time.
More time together. More time to relish over the idea of the poison garden.
But that time was all they had right then and there, much like that stretch of highway that overlooked the ocean.
She guided him to the house by the lake and within time, she recognized the neighborhood in question.
He pulled up to the curb and she sighed through her nose at the realization. Her head spun a bit from having driven such a great distance but at least they could come to a stop on a steady piece of ground. She looked on at the house, with its windows dark and the shades pulled despite the fact that it wasn't that late in the evening.
"Do you need any help?" he offered her, to which she shook her head. Instead, she sighed through her nose again and she climbed out to fetch her things out of the back seat. She decided to give her mother a ring later that night when Bill and the girls had gone to bed, that is if they already did. She hoisted her overnight bag over her shoulder and she held her purse close to her body as she reached the driver's side window. He rolled it down so she could speak to him one last time.
"Louie?"
He leaned closer to the window with his eyebrows raised.
"Thank you," she said to him in a soft voice, and he showed her a sweet smile.
"It's my pleasure," he told her with a wink. "Poison garden."
"Poison garden," she echoed him with a smile on her face.
"Also—"
She stopped and he gestured for her to come on closer to him.
"Don't worry, I'll—I'll talk to him," he vowed to her.
"Who?"
"You know. The little man."
"Oh, him!" She stopped right in her tracks. "What for?"
"Just to see if he's alright. One thing I've noticed about him when he fucks up something—he's real hard on himself. So if it's kinda messed between the two of you, I'll check in on him. I'll check in on him anyways."
"Good plan," she told him. "You be safe going back up, alright?"
"You be safe, too. Poison garden!"
Sam stepped away from the car and she turned back to the house, still in one place. Louie drove away right then and he disappeared around the corner. Another seven hours and he'd be back up there. She returned to the front door of the house and she opened it with ease. Silence.
She knew that he wouldn't do it. Sam shook her head and she bowed upstairs to her room.