Heat by Michael Cadnum Page A

pattern of seeds in a slice of banana look like a monkey’s face. My mom says the Man in the Moon looks like a rabbit eating cabbage. I had a piece of rye toast for breakfast, sliced banana, and a glass of pineapple juice.
    I gave Rowan a call, knowing the Beals were probably gone for the weekend. But to my surprise Mrs. Beal answered, and said that they had heard about my father’s troubles and that they had every sympathy. That was the way she expressed it, making this all sound historical, the Time of the Troubles.
    Mrs. Beal has the most wonderful voice on the phone, it melts all opposition. “But you have to come over,” she protested. Or maybe she has the gift, knowing what the caller needs to hear.
    Mrs. Beal’s parents were always appearing in the society pages, fund raisers for the ballet. Mr. Beal’s family used to own a company that manufactured environment controls for airplanes—the mechanisms that allow aircraft flying through cold and lethally thin air to turn the atmosphere into warm, breathable gas. Mr. Beal’s scuffed hiking boots and loose-fitting plaid shirts were made to order, and their driveway always had brand new cars spattered with mud.
    I wondered what they fed you Sunday morning in a county jail.
    Mrs. Beal opened the door wearing a sleeveless T-shirt and showing a smile of perfect teeth, the kind you capture after years of orthodontia. She’s a size eight and buys clothes already faded, carefully tailored rips at the knee. “Bonnie!” she cried, and I was a survivor, home from a war.
    â€œYou’re just the one we need,” said Mr. Beal.
    â€œI keep telling Dad you’re the most resilient person I know,” said Rowan, offering me a plate of corn muffins.
    â€œResilient,” I echoed. The Beal family doesn’t say you look “good.” They say you look “top-hole.”
    Rowan at once lowered his eyes. For a bright, earnest guy he is easy to embarrass. “I mean—full of life,” he said.
    â€œIs that what I’m full of?” I said, to laughter all around. Good old Bonnie, keeping her sense of humor. Sometimes I thought that despite their ever-warm welcome, Rowan’s parents preferred one of his other girlfriends, the mature sophisticate with long, glossy hair, off to Washington D.C. or Paris to visit her uncle the ambassador.
    My dad likes Rowan, always showing him how to lay down a perfect bunt, choking up on the bat, and how to get loose before racket ball, stretching, getting those thigh muscles, the adductor longus, the adductor magnus, ready for action.
    Rowan calls his father by his first name, Bill, and his Mom is called Bev by everyone, and while I played along, I was, privately, a little uncomfortable with this casual way of addressing parents.
    â€œAre you ready, Miss Chamberlain?” said Mr. Beal. He had a manly little dimple in each cheek, Thomas Jefferson with short hair.
    We drove in a Land Rover so new the gearshift knob had a plastic hood like a shower cap. Pigeon droppings already splotched the hood.
    The Pacific rarely confronts broad, gentle beaches in Northern California. The land stretches, blackberry and tawny scruff grass. And then it ends, a cliff, a twenty-meter drop to rocky rubble, and the rinse and shrug of the surf.
    I didn’t know what sort of trek we had in mind, carrying my part of the gear and the two thermoses—French roast and cranberry juice. Mr. Beal carried the nerve center of the sound equipment in a backpack, and Rowan and I scouted ahead with mike booms, a few lengths of aluminum poles that telescoped into each other. When a casual misstep had me lurching into Rowan, neither of us minded.
    The wind tufted the dunes into brief scatterings of sand; the dune grass whispered in the breeze. The air was crisp, the sun warm, kneading through my sweatshirt. Rowan was going on about the charms of a den of coyote pups they had captured with the sort of shotgun