The Boys from Santa Cruz

by Jonathan Nasaw

  By the flickering light of his old Zippo, he managed to insert his key into the lock. The key turned easily enough, but Pender had to lean his shoulder against the door to shove it open. When he switched on the foyer light, he discovered why: the pile of letters and circulars under the mail slot in the door was a good three or four inches high. And where was the dog? he asked himself. Purvis worshiped Pender—the young German shepherd should have been all over him by now.

  Not surprisingly, considering his occupation, Pender’s first thought was of mayhem. He dropped his suitcase and raced upstairs, taking the steps two at a time, picturing his wife lying in a pool of blood. He rushed into the bedroom, flicked on the light, and found the room empty, the big bed neatly made. Also empty were the bathroom and spare bedroom, which Pam, who was studying for her Realtor’s license, had turned into an office.

  Puzzled and drained of adrenaline, Pender plodded back downstairs to check out the living room. A layer of dust had settled on the brown baize side table next to his recliner, and on top of the television. He made his way down the hall, past the seldom-used dining room, and into the kitchen. His mind was working furiously, trying to manufacture plausible explanations for Pam’s extended absence. One of her parents was sick; she was staying at a friend’s because she didn’t like being alone in the new house; or maybe…

  Aah, fuck it. He knew. Even before he found the envelope with his name on it propped up against the salt and pepper shakers on the kitchen table, he knew. Which was why he took his time before opening it. He got down a glass from the cupboard, filled it with ice from the refrigerator’s built-in dispenser, and took a new bottle of Jim Beam out of the case in the back of the duck-in pantry.

  Sitting at the yellow maple table they’d bought only a few months ago, Pender slit the bottle’s seal with his thumbnail and twisted off the cap. He could hear the ice crackling as he filled the glass to the rim. He took a sip, smacked his lips, then opened the envelope. The note inside was dated a full week ago. “Dear Ed,” it began, “It’s over…”

  Before reading on, Pender went back upstairs, took off his shoulder holster, and locked it and his gun in the combination safe bolted to the floor of the bedroom closet. That way, he figured, if he got so drunk he turned suicidal, he’d also be too drunk to remember the combination.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  1

  Back in the Buzzard-mobile, zooming down a long dark tunnel of a highway, I was trying to explain to Buzzard John why I hadn’t stepped in to stop him from being beaten up.

  “But sssee… hunh… what they done… hunh…to me,” he was saying, in this weird, thin voice, hissing on the s sounds and grunting between words. “Just sssee… hunh, hunh…what they done.”

  I didn’t want to look, but I couldn’t help myself. I turned and saw a vulture’s horrible red head bobbing and weaving at the end of the long snaky neck sticking up out of the collar of Buzzard John’s shirt. It fixed its beady little eyes on me and opened its beak. “Sssee what they done,” it hissed at me, its stubby crimson tongue wiggling in the back of its throat. Then it grunted again, hunh, and its head darted toward me. I scrabbled around for the door handle and couldn’t find it, pounded the window with my fists and couldn’t break it, threw my shoulder against the door and couldn’t budge it.

  Now it had me by the shoulder with its vulture’s claw, three scaly, crooked fingers ending in horrible sharp nails. I made a desperate, backward lunge, throwing myself against the door, which for some reason was no longer there. Screaming silently, I fell out of the moving truck, and just before I hit the ground…

  You guessed it: I woke up. Shawnee was kneeling by the edge of my mattress, her hand outstretched, looking startled. “Rudy told me to wake you for breakfast.”

  I felt so relieved, it was like getting a second lease on life. But in a way that’s what was really happening. However the thing with Buzzard John had been resolved, Rudy had made up his mind to take me in. He didn’t care that I wasn’t a Hatchapec, or that the police were looking for me. That might even have helped, because Rudy had done time himself. No, all that mattered was that I was an orphan who’d showed up on his doorstep, and according to Indian notions of hospitality and responsibility, he wouldn’t have been much of a man if he’d turned me away.

  There was, of course, another reason why Rudy might have wanted to take in a fifteen-year-old boy, but back then, it never even crossed my mind. All I knew was that for the first time in a long time, things were looking up.

  I located the bathroom all by myself this time, then joined Shawnee down in the kitchen, which I found with only a couple of wrong turns. There was an old woman (she might have been the same one as last night or not, I wasn’t sure) making Indian toast, which was like French toast, only thicker and heavier. I met some people I hadn’t seen the night before, most of whom Shawnee seemed to be related to. It was kind of neat, seeing all those generations together. And educational: I noticed, for instance, that old Indian women were mostly pretty fat and old Indian men were so shriveled and skinny you’d think the old women were feeding off them. Best of all, nobody seemed to hold it against me that I was white, and a stranger.

  After breakfast, I followed Shawnee outside, and she began showing me the ropes. Growing Humboldt sinsemilla, I learned, was a surprisingly labor-intensive affair. There were always chores to be done, from potting and sexing the plants over the winter, to planting them in spring (females only), to tending the drip lines, hand-watering and fertilizing the isolated patches, weeding, and mending deer fences throughout the summer.

  In addition to all that work, this time of year was considered prime raiding season. An armed watch had to be kept over the crop twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, to protect it from the pot pirates. (Because they were on a reservation, the Hatchapecs weren’t supposed to be subject to raids by state or federal authorities, but they did have to keep the palms of the rez police greased.)

  With the grown men patrolling the fields, the edge of the property, and even the back roads leading in and out of the reservation, the rest of us had to take up the slack. Shawnee and I were assigned to tend the isolated plants hidden in the woods. All that first day, I tagged along after her, learning where the various plants were hidden, how to pinch back the dead leaves, and how to spot boughs that might be turning hermaphrodite in a desperate effort to reproduce. (The whole idea behind sinsemilla, which means “without seeds” in Spanish, is that without exposure to male plants, instead of throwing seeds, the females put all their energy into growing big, sticky, THC-laden buds.)

  Naturally, hearing the word hermaphrodite reminded me of my stepmother. As we worked, I started to tell Shawnee about Teddy, but her reaction was entirely opposite from Dusty’s: she did not want to hear the details.

  All morning, we worked our way up the mountain from secret plant to secret plant. For lunch, Shawnee had packed peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches that we washed down with warm Mountain Dew. Sitting with our backs against the trunk of a red-barked madrone at the edge of a high, grassy meadow dotted with white puffs of clover, we watched a pair of hawks riding the thermals, swooping and gliding so lightly and gracefully they looked like they were made out of paper.

  After lunch we worked our way down the other side of the mountain, where the plants with southern exposure got so much more sun we had to tie up the nodding branches so they wouldn’t break off from the weight of the buds. When I took out the clasp knife with the buzzard head carved into the handle to cut twine for Shawnee, my nightmare, which I’d almost managed to forget, came rushing back so vividly that my knees went weak.

  The best part of the day came after we’d finished our circuit, when Shawnee took me swimming in the river. It was still pretty hot out, and the current was slow. We floated on our backs, looking up through the feathery branches of the river willows to the powder blue sky. Shawnee had worn her swimsuit under her clothes; it was a white two-piece that made her bronze skin glow. Peeking sideways
at her, I got a hard-on pushing up the underpants I was using for a bathing suit. Peeking sideways at me peeking sideways at her, she must have noticed it. She rolled over onto her stomach and swam away, then ducked under the water and popped up next to me. We exchanged long watery kisses floating in the shallows, then made out standing up, with the waist-high water pushing and tugging at us. I slid her top up over her breasts and pushed them together with both hands, sucking and nuzzling while she reached under my briefs and grabbed me tight, maybe a little too tight, working my joystick in a serious, goal-oriented manner.

  The test of wills, with me trying to put off coming and her trying to make me come as quickly as possible, didn’t last very long. She was victorious, of course, but if any contest ever had a win-win outcome, it was that one. “There,” she said, laughing deep in her throat, then dove away upstream to get away from my hardy little swimmers.

  Half an hour later we were trudging homeward along the dusty rutted track that followed the riverbank. Rudy drove up alongside us in his big red Dodge Ram pickup. “You kids want a ride?”

  “Thanks, Uncle Rudy.” Shawnee went around back, put her foot on the bumper hitch, and climbed over the tailgate, but I was still kind of frozen in place by the side of the road, staring up at Rudy’s old straw cowboy hat, which now had three long white eagle feathers stuck into the side of the crown, sweeping backward at a rakish angle.

  Time did one of those weird double-clutch, theory-of-relativity moves, slowing to a crawl on the outside, zipping along at light speed on the inside. All these visuals of Buzzard John started flashing through my mind like an ultrahigh-speed slide show. Behind the wheel of the Buzzard-mobile, fussily arranging the eagle feathers in his sweatband; driving with his head thrown back and laughing, wreathed in a cloud of pot smoke; on his knees in the stark light of the barn; behind the wheel in my nightmare, the vulture’s naked head darting cobralike at the end of his long scaly neck.

  Then time snapped back like a rubber band. “What are you starin’ at?” Rudy was saying, leaning out the window of the pickup.

  “Sorry.” I shook my head sharply to clear it. “Guess I must’ve spaced out or something.”

  “You probably got too much sun,” said Rudy. “Here.” He took off his hat and handed it to me through the window.

  “I can’t take your hat, Rudy,” I told him.

  “You can’t not take it,” he insisted. So I did, and as I climbed over the side of the truck to join Shawnee, it occurred to me that I now had Buzzard John’s knife and the eagle feathers.

  Lucky me.

  2

  A week after I got to the rez, we began the backbreaking work of harvesting the crop, tying up the plants, and hanging them upside down from the ceilings of the barn and drying sheds. Then came a monthlong lull, with little to do but grow my hair out. Having a Mohawk didn’t seem so cool when you were living with Indians.

  It took a month for the plants to dry. Shawnee and I did a lot of hiking, some swimming until the river got too cold. I don’t know if any of the grown-ups knew we were having sex. If they did, they didn’t say anything. Then when the plants were ready, Shawnee and I joined the trimming crews working day and night at long plywood tables in the barn. She taught me how to clip away all but the tiny hip leaves from the sticky, skunky, purplish green buds, and how to shape and manicure them. I got pretty good at it, too. I could clip as fast as any of the Indians, and never once ruined a bud.

  It makes me happy now to think back on those stony, fuzzy weeks, the haze of pot smoke drifting under the high roof, the spooky, snaky sound of R. Carlos Nakai’s wooden flute music over the sound system, and the constant snip, snip, snip of the special scissors Rudy ordered by the case from a hardware store in San Francisco’s Japantown.

  By mid-October the product was dried, trimmed, and ready to ship. Because at that time of year a single man driving a van didn’t have much chance of getting out of Humboldt County without being pulled over and searched, Rudy told me I’d be going with him on his business trip.

  And off we went the very next day, in a customized white Dodge Tradesman van, with false interior walls and raised floor filled with vacuum-sealed one- to ten-kilo bags of bud. Sorry as I was to be separated from Shawnee, but mindful of my status as a charity case, I looked at this as a tremendous opportunity to prove to Rudy how useful I could be. My job, as we worked our way down the coast to San Diego, then north up the Central Valley, was mostly to sit high in the passenger seat, always visible, when we were on the road, to roll joints while Rudy drove, and to guard the van while Rudy took care of business. At night we shared a motel room, but only in motels where we could park the van right outside our room.

  Our last stop was Stockton, where Rudy sold the last of the weed, except for a few kilos he’d held back for personal use, to some other California Indians, some Pomos, I believe. The van’s false floor and walls were stuffed with cash and I was more than ready to go home, which already meant the big house by the side of the river for me, though I’d lived there only two months. I especially wanted to get back in time for the big Halloween party the following night.

  But Rudy wanted to celebrate first. We took a motel room with two queen-size beds and got good and stoned. Rudy treated us to a prime rib dinner, then went out partying with his Indian friends while I watched TV in bed with the room curtains open so I could keep an eye on the van. I must have fallen asleep, though, because the next thing I knew it was dark, and Rudy was climbing into bed with me.

  I knew right away he was drunk. His movements were clumsy and his speech was slurry and he didn’t seem to understand when I tried to tell him that he had the wrong bed. He just kept pawing at me, patting me roughly on the head like I was a big sheepdog or something, and saying things like “You’re a good kid, c’mon, you know what to do.”

  But I didn’t. I didn’t even know what was going on yet. I still thought Rudy just had the wrong bed, so I got up and moved over to the other one, farther away from the window. But Rudy climbed in after me, buck-ass naked with a hard-on, and started slobbering against my neck, saying shit like “Give it to me, short stuff, c’mon, give it to me,” and shoving his dick at me.

  By now it was pretty obvious what was going on, but I still didn’t completely get it. I told myself Rudy was so drunk he thought I was a girl. So I pushed him away and turned on the light. “Quit it,” I kept saying. “Cut it out. It’s me, Rudy, it’s Luke.”

  Rudy’s eyes were all piggy and bloodshot, his dark skin was all splotchy, and his face with its bent-down nose was all twisted around like a devil mask. “No shit, white meat,” he said, looking right into my eyes. “Now roll the fuck over.”

  “I’m gonna go sleep in the van,” I told him, trying to climb out of bed. Rudy grabbed me around the neck with one hand and started punching me in the back of the head with the other, short hard jabs with his fist. I scrambled free, half-stunned, and dove off the bed. I was scrabbling around on the floor, snatching up my clothes, trying to get dressed and get away at the same time, while Rudy was riding my back, trying to force me down.

  Punch after punch rained down on me. I was trying to get my pants on when my fingers closed around something hard in the pocket of my jeans. It was Buzzard John’s knife. Still crawling around with Rudy on top of me, punching and grabbing at me, I fumbled it open, started jabbing backward with it, just poking it at Rudy, trying to get him off my back. Then I heard a gasp, lost my hold on the knife, and collapsed underneath Rudy’s weight, feeling a hot wetness soaking the back of my T-shirt.

  I rolled out from under Rudy. He was lying on his back, grabbing his neck with both hands, blood oozing out between his fingers. Buzzard John’s’s knife lay on the floor, the blade coated with a coppery sheen. I watched in disbelief as Rudy started convulsing, his back arching and his heels drumming the floor. After a few endless seconds of that, he went limp.

  “Rudy?” I said, my voice a horrified whisper. “It was an accident, dude. I swear, it
was an accident.”

  But Rudy, whose eyes were still open, bugged out and staring at the ceiling, was beyond forgiving anybody anything. And in the end, of course, it didn’t really matter whether I had meant to do it or not. Once again, through no fault of my own, my life had been torn apart. I couldn’t very well go back to Hatchapec now. My new friends, my adoptive family, and especially Shawnee, were lost to me, so lost it was like they’d never even existed.

  Then through the open curtains I caught a glimpse of the white van parked in the blacktop lot in the rear of the motel, and was reminded that things could have been a whole lot worse.

  3

  One of the truer things I learned from Rudy was that in spite of what most people thought, a person is less conspicuous driving during the daytime, when there are lots of cars on the road, than he is late at night. I left Stockton at dawn in my customized Dodge van with a shitload of cash, a few kilos of high-quality sinsemilla, and three mottoes to guide me on my path. Trust nobody, look out for number one, do unto others as others have done unto Luke.

  Not that I was looking for trouble or anything. All I wanted was not to be fucked with anymore, to be left alone to figure out what I was going to do with the rest of my life. But where? I needed someplace safe, off the beaten path, where nobody would think to look for me.

  I’d been working on the problem all night, but it wasn’t until I was on the road that I thought of the old homestead in Marshall County. That’d be the last place anybody would look for me, I figured. And I knew the area. I could drive around the back way, scope things out, make sure there were no cops still poking around. If the coast was clear, I could move back into my old bus. If not, I knew a few places in the hills where I could hide out until it was safe.