So taken was the young man with his unknown heritage that he didn’t brood over Alyce that evening.
In the morning he got up early, before his mother, and went out to work in Oxnard, where he spent the morning rolling chunks of concrete and granite to a pit that had been excavated by the company bulldozer. He swung a sledgehammer for three hours in the early afternoon and then used an oversize shovel in the gravel pit until his shift was through. He worked harder than usual, imagining a one-man black army declaring war on a white southern town. In this reverie he didn’t feel the weight of his labors or the gravity of loss.
When he got home, the house was quiet and dark. Albert couldn’t remember the last time he’d entered the house when the television wasn’t on.
“Mama,” the twenty-one-year-old called.
He expected the “Here” to come from one of the back rooms. But there was no welcome.
Georgia Gordon was dead in her bed, her left hand gripping the edge of the blanket near her chin. Her foot, clad in a gaudy, pink cashmere sock, poked out from the sheets. There was an odor hovering in the room, a smell that Albert couldn’t get out of his nose for many weeks.
“Why didn’t you call for an ambulance?” Detective Todd Green asked Albert, for the fourth or fifth time.
“I, I could tell she was dead,” he said. “Her skin was cold, and she hadn’t been out of bed since I left this morning.”
“Why didn’t you call the ambulance this morning?”
“I didn’t know anything was wrong.”
“You knew that she hadn’t gotten out of bed.”
“I left the house at five in the morning. When I got home, all the lights were off and the paper was at the front door. I could tell that Mama had never gotten up. I went in her room after she didn’t answer, and there she was.”
“Why didn’t you call for an ambulance?” the detective asked again.
“I called my sister.”
“Your sister? Why?”
“She’s her mother too. And Mama was cold, and the room smelled bad. Lu said to call the police, and so that’s what I did.”
Thyme Roundhouse came down for the funeral with Betty Pann on his arm.
“I’m selling the house, Al,” he said at the reception after the service.
“But this is Mama’s house.”
“Your mother’s dead, and I’m still her husband.”
The full impact of the death hadn’t hit the young man until his father uttered those words. From then on, and through the next few decades, Albert was confused about the sequence of events.
There were some things he was sure of. He began crying upon hearing his father’s callous pronouncement. Not loud bawling; it was just that the tears wouldn’t stop flowing from his eyes. Luellen and Thyme argued. Men touched him on the shoulder and head. Women kissed him and held him like he was their child.
At some point everyone was gone from the house, and Albert was alone with a fifth of Jack Daniel’s that someone had brought for the repast . . .
The first bender lasted for eight or nine weeks. It carried him from the house his father was selling up to Berkeley and Telegraph Avenue. He crashed in the laundry room of a house on Derby Street.
One night he had sex with a woman in the back of a van while her husband watched from the driver’s seat.
He moved out of the house and into an empty lot, using a sleeping bag that a man named Hartwynn had given him. He did day labor when the hangovers were tolerable.
The Petals of the Sun commune was located in southern Oregon where a redwood forest met the ocean. There he dried out for some months, though he wasn’t sure how many. There was a woman with big hands named Rilette, who had built a one-room cottage and took him in. Rilette had a brother, Marquis. Marquis and Albert went into town one night and bought a bottle of red wine and then another.
When Albert woke up the next morning, Marquis was gone, and Rilette was blaming Albert for stealing her money to buy wine.
He hadn’t taken her money, but she sent him away. Albert marked this event as the beginning of his roustabout years.
Finally, after three months incarceration for vagrancy in northern California, he built up enough strength and sobriety to hitchhike across country with a woman named Bergit. She was half Native American and half Swedish and tall and blue-eyed and completely in love with the world she inhabited. She was leaving her boyfriend in Oregon to visit her husband in Vermont. This husband lived on a commune that raised silkworms and practiced Tibetan Buddhism.
For a year the master of that sect worked with Albert, trying to get him to “get outside of the inebriation.”
“You mean you want me to stop drinking, right?” Albert once asked. “I been tryin’ to put the bottle down, but every time I turn around I find it there in my hand.”
The master had a huge, round, burnt-orange-colored face. He smiled at Albert and shook his great head.
“It is not what I want that matters,” the master said. “You must seek your own equilibrium. If drinking brings balance then by all means drink. But if it is only a mask, a beard to cover the real face of your desire, then you must find another way.”
Albert would sit in his straw hut at night, wrapped in a down comforter that Bergit’s husband gave him. Outside it was below zero, but the round hut stayed warm, and Albert wondered what it meant to achieve balance.
In the spring the master died, and the man who ran the raw-silk production line asked Albert to leave.
“You’re just a drunk,” Terry Pin said to Albert three days after the cremation rite.
Theodore Bidwell, Bergit’s husband, apologized for Terry’s rough words.
“Bergit has relatives that work construction in New York,” Theodore told Albert. He bought the displaced Californian a ticket for the Peter Pan bus in Saint Albans and gave him forty dollars to hold him over till he contacted the Swedish Indian’s cousins.
Bergit had left some months before to return to her boyfriend and his son in the forests of Oregon. Albert thought it was nice of her husband to buy his ticket and give him a recommendation.
On the bus Albert sat by the window concentrating on the idea of balance. He thought about Alyce and his father, his mother, and Luellen. He touched the center of his chest with the middle finger of his left hand. At just that place there was a gap, a space that Alyce had stretched out and then vacated. There was something about this emptiness that kept him from the proper equilibrium. It was like trying to stand up straight atop a gas-filled balloon that always seemed to be shifting away.
Albert rubbed the area that felt hollow, wondering if somehow he could move the emptiness around.