by Steven Gore
The first two days were a washout.
Even as he hiked up toward the ridge-top trail above the dormant marijuana fields, he suspected that he was a victim of wishful thinking that made him choose the easiest first.
And a moment after setting up his spotting scope on the outside walkway of an abandoned fire lookout, he discovered he was right: The outbuilding was too large, the barn was too small, and the cabin was just one story.
Only with that failure did he feel the aches in his muscles and hip, and the bruises on his legs and arms inflicted by shrubs and tree branches as he had bushwhacked the deer trails.
The search for the second site took him down a forest service road into a canyon about four miles north of the highway and deep into marijuana country.
He climbed out of his truck and inspected the dirt to make sure there were no fresh footprints or tire tracks, then hoisted on his pack and began a cross-country trek that would begin with a hike up eleven hundred feet in two miles, then almost down to sea level two thousand feet below over the next eight miles, and back up again.
A handheld GPS kept him on track as he hiked the growers’ trails through the pines and oaks. He stepped over rows of macheted trunks of harvested plants and over hundreds of sections of black plastic piping, the drip systems veining the hillsides, waiting to be fed in the spring and summer by water trucks like Trudy’s.
At 9 A.M. on the second day he crested the final ridge and looked for a place to spot on the property. He found a rock outcropping shaded by a mature oak and set up his scope. He held his breath as he turned the focus ring, then a moment of relief: Bear’s red truck emerged against the brown and green background of the clearing.
Donnally set up camp on the level ground under the tree and moved the scope to a flatter section of rock fifteen feet higher. He then laid out a bird-watching guide next to it in case he needed to explain his presence to hikers or growers happening by.
A chilly ocean breeze stung his face and eyes as he lay prone, watching for movement. He didn’t want to break into an occupied house, but didn’t know whether Trudy ever left. He realized that he should’ve asked about her medical treatment, how often she went to visit doctors or herbalists or acupuncturists or Indian shamans, or whoever it was who was prepared to treat her psychosomatic illnesses as real. He figured Bear would be the one who ran their errands, but didn’t know whether she ever went with him.
Nothing stirred all day in the clearing below, not even Bear emerging from the shadowed forest making his rounds.
Mist filled the valleys below him in the late afternoon, blocking his view of the cabin. He used the time to cook spaghetti on a one-burner kerosene stove and was back at his scope when the dropping temperature condensed the moisture and turned it to drizzle.
By then it was dark, and the cabin lights, now filtered by the swirling silvery droplets, burnished the clearing with what seemed to Donnally, watching through the lens of Trudy’s delusions, like nothing more than the plastic innocence of a department store nativity scene.
Chapter 38
The fog to which Donnally awoke the following morning encased the ridge like the slumber he’d left behind in the night. The world around him, along with the images that had populated his dreams, was lost in gray.
Water dripping from the oak leaves overhead tapped the plastic tarp protecting him and ran off the edge and down the hillside in rivulets. He reached for his cell phone and searched the Internet for a local weather report.
The coastal range wouldn’t see the sun all day.
Donnally decided that what was concealment for the cabin and Bear was also cover for him, and that it didn’t make sense to lose another day waiting for the weather to clear. He ate breakfast, then packed up his gear and hid it thirty yards farther up the hill under a brush-concealed rock overhang.
The trail near the ridge where he began his descent soon merged with crisscrossing paths cut by growers through the pines, firs, and manzanita. The ten-foot visibility meant that he had to watch his GPS as much as his feet as he worked his way down the gullies and crossed small streams.
Halfway down the mountain, he tripped over a drip line and tumbled forward, rolling and bouncing down through ferns and deer brush. The impact of his shoulder glancing off a tree trunk ejected the GPS from his hand. From his back at the edge of a plot of harvested marijuana stalks, he watched it make a cartoonlike pause in the air, then drop into the mud next to him with a comical smack.
But the Mexican pointing the shotgun at Donnally’s head wasn’t laughing.
Donnally looked past the single barrel at the impassive eyes of the rain-slickered man and then spread his hands in the air.
“Usted habla inglés?” Donnally asked.
The man shook his head.
Donnally sat up and glanced around as he wiped his hands on his pants. Bags of fertilizer, jugs of pesticides, and coils of black pipe were stacked under a lean-to fifteen yards to his left. Next to it was a shack constructed of branches and covered by a camouflaged tarp. The grow seemed to possess the sophistication of a cartel operation, and the man’s knockoff jeans and new rain jacket suggested that he had been smuggled in from Mexico not more than a few days earlier.
Donnally cupped his hands and held them in front of his eyes like binoculars and pretended to scan the trees surrounding the field.
“Pájaros.” Birds.
The Mexican smirked and gestured toward the fog with a dismissive wave of his arm.
Donnally held up one hand, eased it into his jacket pocket, then pulled out his bird-watching book and held it up.
Another smirk and a shake of his head.
“Policía,” the man said, racking the shotgun.
“No. No policía.”
The Mexican waved the barrel in a small circle, indicating that Donnally should roll over.
He complied.
Seconds later, Donnally felt his gun jerked out of its holster and his wallet pulled from his back pocket.
Donnally guessed the moment when the Mexican would flip open the wallet and spot his retirement badge, then kicked the man’s kneecap. The leg buckled and the shotgun discharged as he fell backward, sending buckshot skyward. The Mexican grunted when his back hit the ground. Donnally pawed through the mud and yanked the shotgun from his hand and aimed it at his grimacing face.
Bracketing the grower on either side were the angled, four-inch stumps of last year’s harvested pot plants.
Donnally winced when he realized that the Mexican was impaled on the one between them.
After searching him for other weapons, Donnally raised him up and rolled him onto his side. The man gritted his teeth but didn’t scream. A bloody stump matched the hole in his back, just below his ribs on his left side. Donnally knew from observing dozens of autopsies that the wound wouldn’t be fatal if he could get it treated soon enough.
“Su nombre?” Donnally asked. Your name?
The man didn’t answer, his expression saying that giving up his name would be the first step in giving up his bosses, and that he was ready to be buried in a nameless grave in an alien land rather than do it.
Donnally remembered a noun from his high school Spanish, but had to struggle to recall the verb tense he needed to assure the man that he meant him no harm.
“Le llamaré Afortunado,” Donnally finally said. I’ll call you Lucky.
The Mexican tried to smile, but it ended again as a grimace.
Donnally worked Lucky’s rain slicker down his arms and spread it out under him. He then unbuttoned the man’s wool shirt and slid it off his shoulders to expose the wound.
The only clean piece of fabric Donnally could find was a towel hanging from a clothesline next to the shack. He used it to cover the wound, then cut a piece of rope from a roll and bound it around Lucky’s torso to hold the bandage in place.
But it wasn’t the external bleeding that worried him, it was the internal.
He checked his cell phone. No service
this far down in the canyon. He retrieved the GPS. Muddy, but unbroken. It told him that it was another five hundred feet down the hillside and a quarter of a mile to Trudy’s.
Donnally untied the tarp from the shack, ripped out a couple of supporting posts, and made an Indian-style stretcher. He knew it would be a rough ride, but there wasn’t an alternative.
The stretcher bounced behind Donnally like a buckboard on a rutted road as he dragged it down the deer and grower’s trails, with Lucky grunting and groaning at each bump.
After a fifteen-minute descent, Donnally set down the stretcher among the pine and scrub oak a hundred feet from the edge of Trudy’s clearing, then snuck through the trees until he could see the property.
The truck was missing. The inside cabin lights appeared to be off, and no smoke wisped up from the chimney.
The fact that Lucky was still conscious told Donnally that he probably wasn’t bleeding out internally. At the same time, he hated the idea of rolling the dice with someone else’s life—
But he needed Anna’s papers. Even if the Mexican refused to describe him to Trudy and Bear, they’d know that someone had been in the nearby hills, and increase their vigilance.
There’d be no second chance.
After peeking through the windows and satisfying himself that the cabin was empty, Donnally kicked in the back door. A quick search of the two bedrooms, the upstairs marijuana sorting room, and Trudy’s craft workshop turned up no paperwork other than recent sales records. He took thirty dollars that was lying on the dresser, a bottle of Oxycontin tablets, and a baggie of marijuana, hoping that Trudy and Bear would assume that these items alone were the target of the burglary.
Donnally returned to the Mexican, gave him one of the painkillers, and dragged him to the front steps. He then walked to the outbuilding and broke a back window with a piece of firewood and climbed in. Sheets of dust jumped off the workbench and the stacks of boxes when his feet hit the plank floor, and then plumed into clouds as he scanned the room.
The first boxes he opened contained an archive of Berkeley in the sixties, seventies, and eighties: copies of the Berkeley Barb newspaper, antiwar handouts, Black Panther manifestos, books on colonialism and imperialism: evidence of Trudy’s past, stored away and sealed against time.
In a box on top of the third stack he found Anna’s decades-old lesson plans printed on the Berkeley Unified School District letterhead. He pulled it down and searched through the next and the next, setting aside everything handwritten or typed that didn’t seem related to her teaching. He extracted spiral notebooks, date diaries, and financial records, pausing every few minutes to listen for the sound of Bear’s truck. He piled everything into a suitcase, and when that was full, began a second.
A downshifting transmission broke the silence, then the vehicle accelerated. Donnally figured that the driver must have spotted Lucky.
It skidded to a stop. Two doors opened.
“What the fuck?” It was Bear’s voice.
Donnally peeked between the blinds. Trudy and Bear were standing over the Mexican.
“What’s wrong with him?” Trudy asked.
“Who cares?” Bear scanned the property. “What I want to know is how he got here?” He glared at the Mexican. “English?” He kicked one of the branches that formed the stretcher. The Mexican winced. “You speak English?”
The Mexican shook his head.
Trudy kneeled down and felt around and under the man’s back.
“I think he’s been shot,” she said. “We need to get him to the hospital.”
“You get him to the hospital. I’m gonna find where he came from.”
Bear climbed into the truck, made a three-point turn, and backed toward the stretcher. He propped the head end on the lowered rear gate, then pushed it in the rest of the way.
“Maybe you should come, too,” Trudy said.
Bear didn’t respond, just handed her the keys. He scanned the clearing until he spotted the scrape marks left by the stretcher when Donnally had dragged the Mexican from the forest, then pointed toward the hill.
“I’m gonna check the house, and then get a gun and head up there.”
The ninety-minute hike that Donnally had taken down from his campsite turned into a four-hour struggle back up through heavy brush and rocky canyons, scraping his face and wrenching his hip along the way.
It wasn’t just the two forty-pound suitcases. It was finding a route that wouldn’t lead him back through the Mexican’s plantation, where he was sure Bear would be waiting.
Bear had impressed Donnally as a paranoid but patient man, and he knew that patient men, like deer hunters in tree stands, wait for targets to come to them.
Donnally wasn’t going to chance walking into Bear’s sights, no matter what the cost to his body.
Chapter 39
When Donnally drove into Mount Shasta, he found it quiet in the comfortable way that mountain towns get around midnight, especially when the ground is wet and the air heavy. He rolled down his window. The only sounds were the occasional shush of tires on pavement and the whoosh of pneumatic truck brakes, the surface water somehow canceling the low rumble of the gasoline and diesel engines.
The fog that had followed Donnally in from the coast haloed the streetlights and neon signs, rendering them three-dimensional. And his Lone Mountain Café seemed to him more lone than mountain, standing in the middle of its empty parking lot, locked up for the night, next to Mauricio’s junkyard, locked up forever.
After stopping at a pay phone to make an anonymous call to the Mendocino Coast Hospital to confirm that Lucky had survived, Donnally drove back across the freeway and north into the foothills to his house.
If a woman had been living there, the neighbors would’ve described it as cozy.
Without one, it was just small.
Detached garage. One story. Square. Shingled. With a hipped roof and dormers that brought winter sunshine into his attic office.
Donnally hauled the suitcases upstairs, then took a shower and made himself a sandwich. He stood in the kitchen as he ate, wondering how he’d strayed so far from fulfilling what had seemed a simple request: find Anna, show her the letter, and give her the money Mauricio had left. Instead he had committed one felony after another. Even the injury to Lucky happened because he was on his way to commit a burglary.
As a yawn came over him, he wondered who he was becoming.
And then the answer arrived: a vigilante.
He yawned again and stretched his arms high over his head, and then smiled. Until that moment, he’d always thought vigilante justice was a bad thing.
But as he undressed for bed, Donnally felt less like a vigilante than a viewer of one of his father’s early films, made after he had returned from Vietnam and had abandoned advertising to pursue his dream of becoming a new Truffaut or Godard or Chabrol or Rohmer. He had situated them in wartime France and Indochina and made the protagonists enemy collaborators and gangsters: antiheroes. Each film was riddled with irrelevant shots of manikins or garbage cans that were supposed to impart a mysterious meaning accessible only to the initiated, of which Donnally discovered he wasn’t one. It seemed to him, even then, that the stories were not reflective of great truths, or even a search for them, but of a psychotic break.
Now lying in bed, staring up at the ceiling, it struck Donnally that while his father’s fragmented films had been shot in the present tense, he himself had been wandering in a very imperfect past, one captured in a series of jump cuts by a handheld camera that never stopped moving, one that jerked him around in time and space like energy and matter in a physicist’s thought experiment.
Everyone he’d been thinking about seemed to be living parallel lives in two separate places, at two separate times—Mauricio, Charles, Anna, Trudy, Sherwyn—and he wondered whether he’d be any more successful in comprehending the universe in which they existed than his father had been.
But he knew he could do no worse.
Donnally remembered at age fifteen sitting in the Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood during the premiere of his father’s first mainstream Vietnam War movie.
And his own bewilderment.
It was a coming-of-age film in which maturity meant insanity, and the single soldier who survived the battle had gone on a berserk rampage, had been awarded a Silver Star, and then had returned home unable to remember what he had been fighting for.
Donnally now saw himself, felt himself, walking out of the theater, confused and distraught, wondering who the film was really about, for the only soldier he’d known during the war had been his brother, who hadn’t been insane, who hadn’t gone berserk, and who hadn’t won any medals while he was alive. Eventually, of course, like the character in the movie, he did come home, but in a body bag.
As Donnally relived his brother’s funeral, a side view of Janie’s face popped onto his mind’s screen. And with it a memory of one of their conversations prompted by a call from his father.
“Haven’t you ever wondered why your father always chooses a fool to speak the most significant lines in his movies, and always has him staring right at the camera?”
She’d been propped up in bed, sipping from a cup of tea.
“That’s just his form of ridicule,” Donnally had answered. “A way of painting a bull’s-eye on a piñata and hanging it in the middle of screen.”
“Not the doofus in Shooting the Dawn who says, ‘Wouldn’t it be weird if the best and the brightest confessed after we lost the war in Vietnam that they knew all along we couldn’t win it?’ ”
“I don’t remember that line.”
Looking over at him she’d said, “I’m starting to wonder whether you’ve ever watched one of his films, or paid attention when you did.”
“I stopped a very long time ago.”
“I think it’s time you started again.”
“I’ve seen the trailers on television. Nothing has changed. He’s still making self-indulgent movies about how Americans feel about war, not what war is really about and who it is we’re fighting and why they’re fighting us. His message that life is hell and only the insane survive doesn’t explain why my brother died. My father’s fool never seems to get around to answering those questions.”
