The Boys from Santa Cruz

by Jonathan Nasaw

  Nobody moved.

  “Please—go! Now!” Oliver rose from his squat and made shooing motions, until at last the group began to disperse. By then the sky had faded from gray to starry black, the night wind had begun to rise, and the leaves were whispering and murmuring like the hungry ghosts of Buddhist mythology.

  2

  It was a little frightening, being unable to remember one’s name. But it was also somehow liberating, like having been relieved of a heavy, lifelong burden. He foresaw that when his name did come back to him, he would regret the loss of this unaccustomed buoyancy, this lightness of being.

  Unless of course he was dead. That seemed like a distinct possibility, since there seemed to be an arrow sticking out of his side. But there was no blood, and little pain beyond a mild soreness in his ribs and a slight aching in his head, probably from striking the ground when he fell. So he ripped open the sport jacket pinned to his side and discovered that the arrowhead penetrating the leather safety flap of his shoulder holster had lodged in the trigger guard of the pistol inside it with such force that the metal rim had deformed outward.

  And that was all it took—seeing the shoulder holster immediately transported him back down to the plane of everyday existence, the plane where he had a name, Ed Pender, and carried a gun, a Smith & Wesson Model 10. Where he and a man named Skip were trying to catch a killer. Where somebody had slipped him a heavy dose of…of the dread El Ess Dee.

  Lucy in the sky with diamonds, he thought—that’s a song. Then he looked up at the sky and actually saw the aforementioned diamonds sparkling there, and suddenly another lyric fragment went fluttering through his mind: something something the diamond sky… Followed by another: stars shining up abuuuuve you…And yet another: bewitched, bothered, and bewildered…And now there was no stopping them: abandoned and forsaken…no direction home…can’t tell the forest for the trees…of greeeen, red roses, too—

  Enough! Enough! He squeezed his head between his palms, trying to slow the flow of lyrics so he could think… think…think what you’re tryin’ to—

  No! Make it stop!…in the naaame of love, before you—

  Please, God, somebody, help me make it… through the night…

  “Fuuuuck!” shouted Pender. The cry bounced off the surrounding trees and echoed across the clearing. Then the night went dead quiet, probably because there weren’t any oldies that started with fuuuuck.

  He was still tripping, though. Soaring. Suddenly the night noise came flooding back, like somebody’d turned up a big volume knob in the sky. The clatter of the aspen leaves like a zillion castanets, the lugubrious who-who-who of a great horned owl.

  “Special Agent E. L. Pender, that’s who, who, who,” he said aloud, and discovered that, for some reason, talking out loud seemed to help. “Special Agent E. L. Goddamn Pender, getting his shit together for your FBI in peace and war, from here to eternity, till death do us—Shut up, Pender! Yes sir, this is me shutting up, sir!”

  Now what? Got to find those fine folks in the pajamas before he does. Make them safe. Because like you told McDougal a couple centuries ago, that’s what you do. Even more significantly, that’s who you are. So focus, pal, focus.

  “Okay, this is me focusing. First thing I need to do is…” He snapped off the arrow just above the ferrule and tossed the shaft aside, leaving the arrowhead embedded in the bent trigger guard. “Okay, now all I have to do is find the trail.”

  Which turned out to be easier said than done. Because from the center of the perfectly round clearing, everything looked the same. There were no directions, and the twinkling stars, though bright enough to sugar-frost the round expanse of clover, were not twinkling brightly enough to light his way.

  But if the clearing was perfectly round, Pender told himself, then he couldn’t get lost in it, could he? All he had to do was walk around the whatchamacallit, the circumference of the circle. Pick a direction, clockwise or counter-, and stick to it, and sooner or later he was bound to strike the trailhead.

  And that was how it worked out. Pender aimed himself toward the edge of the circle, kept going until he couldn’t go any farther without leaving the clearing, then turned to his right and continued walking, with the clearing on his right and the trees on his left. Then all he had to do was not forget which was right and which was left—a challenge, in his condition, but not an insurmountable one.

  To keep the deluge of song lyrics at bay, Pender counted his steps as he marched, and had reached sixty-two when the trees to his left parted, revealing what looked like the mouth of a narrow, twisting tunnel. A rush of triumph, then a sudden wrench of panic—what if this wasn’t the path? What if it was some other path? Or no path at all? How goddamn lost would he be then?

  His momentum halted, Pender was on the brink of the condition known as paralysis by analysis when a voice that sounded suspiciously like his own growled, “Nothin’ to it but to do it,” and the next thing he knew, he was twelve, thirteen, fourteen paces up the tunnel, and counting.

  The rocky, uneven path from the main trail to the Omphalos hadn’t been easy to descend in daylight, without psychedelics; the ascent in the dark, alone, on acid, must have been nearly heroic. Or so Pender had to assume when he reached the top, because he had no memory of the climb whatsoever: his runaway mind had switched his body over to automatic pilot.

  Coming upon the golf cart parked by the side of the marked trail, Pender felt as though he’d stumbled on a relic of a lost civilization. Just beyond it, the trail forked downhill into the darkness to the left, uphill into the darkness to the right. The left fork, Pender somehow recognized, would take him back the way they’d come this afternoon, back to the Center and the hot springs and a telephone he could use to call for the cavalry to come bail his ass out of this one, because he had definitely screwed the pooch trying to handle it with only a gimpy P.I. for a partner.

  “Left fork it is, then,” he said aloud.

  On the other hand, said that little voice inside Pender’s head, not the one that knew all the song lyrics, but the one that listened to them.

  “On the other hand, what?”

  On the other hand, if they all went that way, they’re probably already back and they’ve already called in the cavalry, so what do they need you for?

  “And if they went the other way?”

  If they went the other way, and they’re in the shit, then you are the cavalry.

  “Okay, right fork it is.”

  Good thinking.

  3

  Acid trips ebb and flow. The roller-coaster car is slowing down, clanking back to the start-finish line; convinced the ride is coming to an end, you’ve just unsnapped your seat belt and are waiting for the safety bar to release, when whooosh—off you go again.

  Skip lost his hold on reality not long after everybody split up. The going got progressively weirder. At one point in time (insofar as there was such a thing), he saw himself in a great open-air ballroom, listening to a distant orchestra playing schmaltzy waltz music. And not long after that, he found himself limping with the aid of his staff down what seemed to be a long, dark tunnel with writhing walls and a lacy ceiling made of flickering stars and whispering leaves.

  With only a vague idea where he was or how he’d come to be there, Skip realized he might have been dreaming—either that or he had just awakened from a dream. He also had a strong sense that he was either lost himself or searching for somebody else who was lost. In his free hand, he held a slender flashlight pointing down at the ground. Fascinated by the way the bobbing oblong splash of light on the ground managed to stay the same distance in front of him, a few feet ahead of his feet no matter how fast or slow he went, Skip forgot to look up even after the oblong of light began to climb a tree trunk, and splat! he walked right into the tree.

  He bounced off, embarrassed but uninjured. Shining the flashlight around, he discovered that the path had taken a ninety-degree turn.

  “My mistake,” he murmured politely to the tr
ee, then corrected course. Rounding the bend, Skip raised the flashlight to direct the beam straight ahead, and suddenly the weirdness quotient soared to heights he was totally unprepared to deal with. For standing sideways in the middle of the trail, caught dead center in the beam of the flashlight, a humanoid-shaped archer with a black face and round, protruding insect eyes dropped the arrow it was aiming at Skip’s heart and threw up its arm to shield its bug eyes from the glare of Skip’s flashlight.

  While Skip’s mind was still trying to make sense of that, a towering, ursine figure loomed up out of the darkness and seized the insect man from behind in a bear hug. Skip stood there dumbfounded, watching helplessly as the struggle raged on, the insect man throwing himself from side to side in an attempt to free himself from the encircling arms, the bear man heaving and grunting in an attempt to lift the insect man off his feet.

  And just when Skip had convinced himself that things couldn’t possibly get any weirder, the bear spoke. To him. “Hey, Magnum!” it called. “I could use a little help here, if it’s not too much goddamn trouble.”

  4

  “Ollee ollee in freeee! Ollee ollee in freeee!”

  After subduing Charles Mesker, a.k.a. Asmador, and binding him hand and foot with his own bowstrings, Skip and Pender led, tugged, pushed, dragged, and half-carried their struggling captive all the way back to the bluff at the top of the hill, yelling Owen Oliver’s version of “home free all” at the top of their lungs every few steps.

  Dr. Oliver, carrying Steve Stahl in his arms, was the last of the hide-and-seekers to emerge from the forest, his white pajamas torn and stained, tear tracks cutting through the dirt on his cheeks, leaf crumbs in his bushy beard. Gently, he laid Stahl on the ground with the arrow still sticking out of his chest.

  Beryl bustled over and gave Steve a cursory examination by flashlight, then lay down with her ear pressed against his chest, taking care not to disturb the embedded arrow. He’d definitely lost a lot of blood, she told Oliver, and his left lung had probably collapsed. While they desperately needed to get him to a hospital as soon as possible, she was also concerned that he might not survive much more jostling.

  In the end, they decided to send the fastest runners to summon help. Tom, who’d run track in college, and George Speaks, a marathoner, volunteered. Pender, Skip, Oliver, and Beryl were to remain behind, two to keep an eye on Mesker, two to nurse the injured man.

  As for the others, suggested a visibly chastened Dr. O, casting an uneasy glance in Pender’s direction, it might be best if Candace led them back to their tents or cabins while they waited for the “sacrament” to wear off, rather than subject them to a grilling by the authorities in their present, vulnerable condition.

  “What condition is that?” said Pender, pointedly. Humiliation was the best outcome he could hope for if the gang back at Liaison Support learned he’d gotten himself dosed on LSD; more likely, he’d end up on the couch of some Bureau psychiatrist, trying to prove he hadn’t been rendered permanently unfit for duty. “How about you, Skip—you know what condition he’s talking about?”

  “Not a clue.”

  “Thank you.” Oliver’s entire being sagged with relief—he looked as though he’d just had a twelve-hour massage. But there was something in him that wouldn’t let him let it go. “You know, if you two had leveled with me in the beginning…”

  “Don’t push it, sir,” snapped Pender. “I don’t know what the penalty is for dosing a federal officer with an illicit substance, but I’m guessing it’s serious.”

  Somewhat startled, Oliver apologized, then nodded toward their wildly struggling captive, whom they’d tied to a tall, slender tree at the wider, landward end of the arrowhead-shaped bluff. “Would you mind if I had a chat with our friend there? Maybe I can help him calm down a little.”

  “Be my guest.” Embarrassed now at how readily he’d reverted to his asshole FBI guy persona, Pender began patting self-consciously through the pockets of his ruined sport coat, looking for his cigarettes. He was relieved to find his smokes undamaged—thank God for the Marlboro hard pack. Nor had the battered pewter flask in his right jacket pocket lost a drop of his emergency ration of Jim Beam. “And hey, I’m sorry I overreacted there. I don’t know what happened—it was like Bruce Banner turning into the Incredible Hulk.”

  “I understand,” said Oliver. “Old habits and all that.”

  Since his capture, Charlie Mesker had been alternating between extended spells of near catatonia and raging tantrums that were short-lived but exhausting, in which he threw his body around as if he were his own rag doll, or slammed the back of his head against the slender tree to which he was tied. His hands were bound behind him, and someone had thoughtfully provided a zafu for him to sit on.

  “Charlie,” Oliver said softly, hunkering down next to Mesker and cupping the back of the man’s head with his palm to cushion the contact between occiput and tree. He popped an orange capsule of Thorazine into Mesker’s mouth when Charlie opened it to spew curses, then tilted a water bottle to his lips. (Though not a prescribing physician, Oliver always took a few Thorazine along on these acid training exercises just in case.)

  Oliver watched Mesker’s Adam’s apple bob, then recapped the water bottle and eased himself to a sitting position on the damp, sloping ground at the base of the tree and began crooning to him. “Taaake it easy, Charlie. Caaalm and easy. You don’t have to fight any more. No one’s going to hurt youuu, and youuu’re not going to hurt aaanyone…, so you can juuust relaaax, relaaax into your breathing…thaaat’s right, thaaat’s the boy, Charlie…iiin and ouuut, niiice and easy…”

  Charlie? thinks Asmador.Why does he keep calling me Charlie? I don’t even know anybody named—

  No, wait, hold on a sec. There was a Charlie once…once upon a time. A human Charlie, a boy from Santa Cruz with a mother and a father and…and a dog. A mangy-looking, flop-eared mutt named Newton who got run over by a car on West Cliff Drive. And young Charlie, the tears in his eyes making everything all blurry, had helped his father bury Newton in the backyard, in a cardboard carton, and when they filled in the hole, the dirt and pebbles made a hollow, rattling sound hitting the cardboard.

  “Boo-hoo, boo-hoo.” A devilish voice, derisive, amused. Asmador opens his eyes and sees Sammael leaning in over Dr. O’s shoulder. The scornful redhead is in his changeling guise, with his wings half-furled and one talonlike hand resting lightly on the human’s shoulder for balance. He’s wearing his human face, though, and when he speaks again, he sounds a lot like poor Luke Sweet.

  “Well, aren’t you going to finish the story, dude? About how little Charlie dug up ol’ Newton a couple weeks later just to see what he looked like? And how instead of reburying what was left of his precious doggy, he hid it in one of the heat ducts in the school basement. And how they had to shut the place down for the rest of the week?”

  “How did you know about that?”

  “I’m the Poison Angel—I know everything.”

  “Oh yeah? Then what’s going to happen to me?”

  “That depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On how patient you are, and how clever. Because it’s going to take a long time, and you’re going to have to fool a lot of humans, doctors and nurses and lawyers and judges and just about every other variety, before they’re going to let you anywhere near a boiler room ever again.”

  “But if I can do it? If I’m very patient and very clever? What then?”

  “The answer is in the Book,” whispers Sammael. “The answer is always in the Book.”

  5

  Oliver, who had done more camping than Skip and Pender (no great feat: Stephen Hawking had probably done more camping than Skip and Pender), supervised the laying of the fire, with a little nest of dry grass and dead leaves in the center, an understory of twigs and smaller sticks, and a pyramidal superstructure of interwoven branches supporting the heavier logs.

  Then a flick of Pender’s reliable old Zippo, a puff o
f orange, and soon the flames were leaping merrily, a beacon to guide the rescue helicopter that wheeled out of the western sky like an evening star less than an hour later and alighted in the middle of the bluff, blowing Oliver’s campfire all to flinders.

  Unfortunately, the little medevac chopper had only enough room for the injured man and two others.

  “We’ll be back for you in no time,” the pilot shouted to Skip and Pender as the chopper lifted off with Steve, Dr. O, and Beryl aboard.

  Skip had to laugh at that. “What does he know about no time?” he called to Pender, who had finished stomping out sparks at the edge of the woods and was now gathering kindling to revive the fire.

  “I second that emotion,” said Pender. “There was one…time back there when I looked at my watch and it was actually melting. I’d always thought that was just a cliché, like in the movies when they want to show the characters are tripping.”

  “That’s how things get to be clichés—because they happen a lot,” Skip pointed out. “Hey, you know what I just realized? I haven’t taken a Norco since this morning, and nothing hurts!” Then, after thinking it over: “Of course, they’ll probably have to carry me home on a stretcher when the acid wears off.”

  When they had the fire going again, the two huddled under the blankets the paramedics had left behind for them, arranging their zafus so they could watch the fire and keep an eye on Mesker, who appeared to be asleep. Pender took out his flask and took a sip, started to offer it to Skip, then remembered. “Oh, right, you don’t drink.”

  “Oh, I drink,” Skip said sensibly. “I drink plenty. Just not alcohol.” He turned and brushed off the ground behind him, pried out a few of the larger rocks and tossed them aside, then lay back, propped himself up on his elbows, and watched the fire for either a long moment or a short eon. It all felt so elemental—the darkness, the crackle of the fire, the sparks shooting heavenward. “All we need is some marshmallows,” he told Pender.