Tales of the City 07 - Michael Tolliver Lives

it is now. I’ve been looking too low down. It’s up near the rim of the canyon. Not that far from the road.”
    “Where did you meet this guy?”
    “He was blogging about it.”
    Blogging about Ishi.
    “He wouldn’t get specific with me,” Brian added, “but he mentioned enough landmarks that I got a pretty good idea where it is.”
    There was this goofball quixotic gleam in my old friend’s eye that I’ve always found hard to resist. And given how little time I’d spent with him since meeting Ben, I couldn’t see the harm in tromping through that damned forest one more time.
    I asked him when he wanted to do it.
    “I dunno. Sometime in the next week or so. I wanna show it to Shawna.” He smiled sheepishly, rubbing his palm on the back of his neck, like an old lion with a pebble stuck in his paw. “I want her to see her old man’s not a total flake.”
    Shawna had grown up on the Ishi story, but, like me, had grown jaundiced about that cave. I knew she’d be kind, whatever the outcome, but it made me nervous that Brian was banking so much on this Tom Sawyer fantasy of Injun Joe’s Cave.
    “Maybe we should find it first,” I suggested.
    He seemed to catch my drift and didn’t take issue with it. “What’s a good day for you?” he asked.
    “How about Thursday. I’ve got a client in Parnassus Heights. It’s easy to get to the woods from there.”
    “Cool,” said Brian, hopping off the tailgate.
    When I was behind the wheel with the engine running, he leaned down for a final word. “Shawna’s moving to New York, by the way.”
    Brian’s daughter, as you know, had already shared that information with me, but I thought it better to play dumb. “No kidding?”
    “Déjà vu, eh?”
    He meant his ex-wife, the one who’d left him—left both of us, really—all those years ago.
    “It’s not the same thing,” I told him.
    “No,” he said quietly, “you’re right.” He whacked the side of the truck as if sending a horse on its way. “Give my love to the hubby.”

    Two days later, when Brian met me at my client’s house, he was decked out in cords and a multipocketed canvas jacket that gave him a semi-safari look. He’d brought with him a couple of rustic walking sticks, still golden with shellac, that he and Shawna had bought years earlier in a souvenir shop outside of Yosemite. Seeing me hunkered there in the rose bed, he held the sticks aloft and shook them like spears.
    “Cave ho!” he hollered.
    And I said, “Who you callin’ a ho?”
    He laughed and turned to my assistant. “How’s it goin’, Jake?”
    “No complaints,” said Jake.
    “Awriiight,” said Brian.
    (I can’t help but notice that Brian acts a little bit butcher with Jake than he does with me. Outnumbered by women and queers in the family circle, he seems to welcome the chance to engage, unapologetically, in a little masculine folderol.) I grabbed my knapsack and turned to Jake. “I’ll be back in an hour or two. Take your lunch break whenever you want.”
    “No sweat, boss.”
    The edge of the forest was four houses away, so we were there almost instantly, peering down into the gloom of the chasm. A week of hot weather had finally summoned the fog from the ocean, turning the ivy-hung eucalypts into a blurry old black-and-white movie. Amazing as it may seem, we weren’t far from the geographical center of the city.
    I have to admit, those walking sticks proved useful. I’d forgotten how steep the slope was at this entrance of the forest. There was a crude trail, but it was narrow and crumbly, weaving through a nasty barbed-wire tangle of blackberries. Here and there, amid the thorns, late-blooming calla lilies poked toward the sky, but since I was playing Lewis to Brian’s Clark, I resisted the urge to do my Katharine Hepburn impersonation.
    “It’s hard to believe this used to be a sand dune,” I said. “It did?” said Brian.
    “All the way to the ocean. Old Man Sutro bought up this half of town with the money he made in the Comstock Lode. He wanted to call this Mount Sutro, but that didn’t work too good for a sand dune, so…he brought the trees in.”
    “Well, you’re a font of information.”
    I shrugged. “I’m a Southerner. I like that sorta shit.”
    It’s interesting how I don’t mind owning my heritage when I’m in San Francisco; it’s only in Florida that it completely sticks in my craw.
    “So here’s what I’m wondering,” I added.
    “Yeah?”
    “How do you have a