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awkward episodes, so it wasn’t as if he were running a mean trick on his daughter’s boyfriend, whom he was still not 100 percent crazy about, or anything like that. And as a problem to be addressed, Isaiah was more like a vacation from deeper difficulties, chief among which, all of a sudden, was the recrudescence of Hector Zuñiga in Zoyd’s life, a topic, as he lit a joint and settled in front of the soundless Tube, that his thoughts unavoidably found their way back to.

I T was a romance over the years at least as persistent as Sylvester and Tweety’s. Although Hector may from time to time have wished some cartoon annihilation for Zoyd, he’d understood from early in their acquaintance that Zoyd was the chasee he’d be least likely ever to bag. Not that he credited Zoyd with anything like moral integrity in resisting him. He put it down instead to stubbornness, plus drug abuse, ongoing mental problems, and a timidity, maybe only a lack of imagination, about the correct scale of any deal in life, drug or nondrug. And though not as obsessed these days about turning Zoyd—they’d had that crisis long ago—Hector still, for no reason he could name, liked to keep on popping in every now and then, preferably unannounced.
    He showed up first in Zoyd’s life shortly after Reagan was elected governor of California. Zoyd was living down south then, sharing a house in Gordita Beach with elements of a surf band he’d been playing keyboard in since junior high, the Corvairs, along with friends more and less transient. The house was so old that all of its termite clauses and code violations had been waived, on the theory that the next moderate act of nature would finish it off. But having been put up back during an era of overdesign, it proved to be sturdier than it looked, with its old stucco eaten at to reveal generations of paint jobs in different beach-town pastels, corroded by salt and petrochemical fogs that flowed in the summers onshore up the sand slopes, on up past Sepulveda, often across the then undeveloped fields, to wrap the San Diego Freeway too. Down here, a long screened porch faced out over flights of rooftops descending to the beach. Access from the street was by way of a Dutch door, whose open top half, that long-ago evening, had come to frame Hector under a ragged leather hat with a wide brim, peering through sunglasses, the darkening Pacific in pale-topped crawl below. Out on the street, wedged into most of the front seat of a motor-pool Plymouth, waited Hector’s partner in those days, the seriously oversize field agent Melrose Fife. Zoyd, whose luck it happened to’ve been to answer Hector’s knock, stood trying to understand what this individual with the outlaw hat and cop sideburns was talking about.
    After a bit, Corvairs lead guitar and vocalist Scott Oof wandered in from the kitchen to join them, leaning on the doorjamb playing with his hair. “Maybe later,” Hector greeted him, “you could explain this all to your friend here, ’cause I don’t know if I’ve been gittín through. . . .”
    â€œÂ¿
Qué
?” replied Scott wittily. “
No hablo inglés.
”
    â€œWhoa.” Hector’s front-door smile tightened up. “Maybe I should get my pardner up here for this. See him, out there in the car? You can’t really tell till he stands up, but he is so big, that nobody ever wants to get him out of the car, ’cause once he’s out, you dig, he ain’t alwayss that easy to git back in?”
    â€œDon’t mind Scott,” Zoyd hastily, “he’s a surfer—so long, Scott—he had a little run-in a few years ago with some, uh, young gentlemen of Mexican origin, so sometimes—”
    â€œIn the parking lot at the Taco Bell in Hermosa, yes a memorable series of evenings, much celebrated in the folklore of my people”—this being in the early days of a