Freebird

by John Raymond

He paused to let this magical nugget of information dapple in the light.

  “Think about that,” he went on. “Los Angeles will step off of the regulatory grid. BHC Industries will become the sole customer for the city’s wastewater, and that means the city’s wastewater will no longer be flowing into the public ecosystem. It will be delivered into the possession of a third party, and that third party will have the pleasure of interfacing with the EPA, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the IRS, all of it. We’ll be responsible for diverting the water, cleaning the water, sending the water back through the system, and we will be responsible for making sure the water conforms to federal standards. The dirtier the water we get from the city, the better—we don’t care. We can handle it. Los Angeles gets to walk away from the Washington table. Say bye-bye to the feds. Bye-bye, regulators. Bye-bye, lawyers. Bye-bye, everyone.”

  This bullet point entered the brain of Randy Lowell and exploded its magical contents. He became a little kitten in the hands of Mark Harris.

  The questions following the presentation gave the impression of some toughness but were in fact anything but tough. “How soon will the reactor be ready to go online?” “What kind of tax incentives would BHC Industries need to commence building its facilities?” “What are the chances of a Nobel Prize?” The barb was plunged deep in their cheeks. It was so easy, especially with his beautiful assistant standing there with him the whole time, a lovely, sequined distraction. Anne might as well be doing a pole dance for these fuckers. Every ounce of trust she had ever built in her career was tossed on the floor. Here she was, pasties shining, spinning her tassels.

  “Amazing stuff, Mark,” said Charlie. “We’ll start circulating the paperwork ASAP.”

  “Mind-blowing,” said the mayor’s man. “A real honor. Thank you for bringing this to us.”

  “You hit it out of the ballpark,” Randy said. “We’ll talk and get back to you very soon.”

  Anne saw no way of avoiding the grotesquely expensive celebratory dinner with Mark afterward. They ate deviled quail eggs with smoked salmon, pan-roasted flatiron steaks with hazelnut romanesco, and sat under geometric paper-and-wire lampshades in view of a vertical garden of succulents. Anne tried her best to enjoy the incredible meal, but the food was like clay in her mouth. She had to fight the impulse to vomit, or bolt, or hurl insults at Mark. But she forced the glorious food and wine down. She’d done all the sinning. There was no point in forgoing the reward.

  Mark was seemingly not tormented by the day’s charade at all. He’d come around to her devilish plans and saw no reason to look back now. If anything, he seemed to relish his meal with extra gusto, scarfing it down like a teenager. Afterward he ordered a ludicrously expensive shot of scotch, like a simmering fire of peat and honey captured in thick cut glass, which he sat caressing, marveling at the day’s success.

  “I don’t want to be counting any chickens or anything,” he said, sated, “but, fucking A, Anne, that was good today. Those guys are fucking pysched. Am I right?”

  “Everything can still fall apart, believe me.”

  “Ha. I like your attitude. Negative, all the way down the line. Life is full of pleasant surprises that way, isn’t it? Stay negative, and the worst almost never comes.”

  “Or at least you get a lot of confirmation.”

  Mark rolled his scotch in his palms, chuckling in the back of his throat. “But just for the hell of it,” he said, “let’s pretend for a second that the best happens. Pretend all the paperwork goes through. Pretend we just slayed the dragon. What do you think happens next? What’s the encore?”

  “You tell me.”

  He sipped his amber fire, letting the heat infuse his skin. “I’m thinking we have a window open here,” he mused. “There are literally hundreds of other wastewater properties out there that we could probably acquire if we moved fast enough. This is the time. We’ve got this gap between signing the contract with the city and”—he searched for the proper euphemism here—“shedding the obligations of the contract. In this little window we have a magic amulet in our hands. We’ve set a precedent. If we move fast enough, we could potentially consolidate a much bigger pool of rights than just L.A.”

  “It would cost you a lot.”

  “More money to make in the long run. I consider it an investment in the future. If the pool gets big enough, the returns could jump in scale. Think about it. If we had Phoenix, San Antonio, Houston. Think about the Ogallala Aquifer. That’s the water supply for the whole breadbasket of America, and it’s about to bottom out. The middle of the country is a hollow shell. They need to start reusing. If we can consolidate all the rights west of the Mississippi, we have something. We can start on statewide acquisitions. Deal with governors’ offices. It would mean scaling up and moving fast, though.”

  “Lords of the American Shit Water.”

  “We’d be sitting on the biggest wastewater reserves in the world. Think about it, Anne Singer.”

  “Maybe you just need a trip to Vegas. Get this out of your system.”

  “Anyone can spin a roulette wheel. That’s for chumps. This is the real shit here, Anne. We’re making a bet on reality itself. I feel this one down in my balls.”

  “That’s how you read the future? With your genitals?”

  “I like the future in my hands, baby, that’s right.” He mimed cupping a giant pair of nuts, rubbing them in his face. “Hell yeah, that feels good. Oh yeah. The future. Right here. Time is my bitch.”

  At other moments, Anne would have laughed, but in this case she only rolled her eyes. “God.”

  “All I’m saying,” he said, cutting the theatrics, “is this might be the moment for you to consider joining the private sector, Anne. I like how we’re working together. This all wouldn’t be happening if it weren’t for you. I can see it’d be a little awkward, I guess; you’d have to answer some questions from Susan. But who cares, right? What’s she going to do? I think you need to quit this city gig and push on BHC full-time. This is happening.”

  “I don’t have any connections outside Los Angeles,” Anne said. “You’ve pretty much tapped me for what I’m worth.”

  “Don’t sell yourself short, Anne.” Mark was refulgent with his scotch in hand, ready to bequeath pardons and favors. Or was this his form of a proposition? “It’s not just what you bring to the deal; it’s what you make of it. I’ve seen how you operate. You set up all these introductions, but you also helped create the presentation. You already did the work. You deserve it. It’s your due. Think about it. But think fast.”

  Anne stared at the remains of the steak on her plate, the smears of grease and fat among the demolished leeks. She told Mark she would think about it, not even knowing what the “it” really was.

  Driving home, she felt queasy. It wasn’t the food, though the dessert of elderflower crème brûlée didn’t help matters. Rather, it was the feeling of some terrible judgment coming due, of storm clouds gathering on the horizon, pregnant with lightning. She wasn’t sure exactly how her fate was darkening, but she could sense the violent weather ahead.

  She got home, and Aaron was out, per usual. The next afternoon, he appeared for a span of hours, finally. He still wouldn’t say anything about his trip to Oakland, or about anything else, for that matter. He was so evasive and lethargic, she had to wonder sometimes if he was on heroin. Was he that dumb? She still wasn’t even sure if he was planning to go to college or not. Every query about applications was met with the same quick exit. If only he could understand that she didn’t give a shit about the degree. She only wanted him to go so that he wouldn’t regret it later on. Don’t let yourself get bullied by those college boys out in the world, she wanted to tell him. You can waste your life with that chip on your shoulder. But he wouldn’t listen. He might be on heroin. Wouldn’t it just be too perfect if the terrible news she was anticipating turned out to be her son’s addiction to hard street drugs?

  She set up a meeting with Temo, this time with her dad in tow. T
emo always answered her texts within seconds, and that was something positive, anyway. She arranged a lunch date between the two men with herself as chaperone.

  At some point, the initial storm of guilt over hiring Temo had faded away and settled into a small knot in her chest, tightening and loosening, depending. She’d talked to three friends about the dilemma, and all of them had reassured her that her decision was fine and natural. Of course, they all had parents in convalescent homes or on their way to homes, and they needed to rationalize their own life choices, but they were people she generally respected and whose moral fiber was regarded as stronger than most. If only she had someone else on her team, she thought, someone with whom to share the burden, it would be such a help. But the fact was, she was the only one.

  What would Ben say? she had to wonder. Now, that was a laugh. For all her brother’s big talk of duty and valor and patriotism, his sense of obligation always seemed to lead him in some far-distant direction. She’d left him five messages, and he hadn’t called a single time since their dinner, and she knew for a fact that he hadn’t called their dad, either. Her dad always called the second he heard from Ben. Ben is in Africa! Ben is off protecting Israel! Ben had a lot on his plate, Anne was sure, but when it came down to his own family, he’d just never really been there at all. It was a shame. Her brother was a man of such passionate convictions, and they only ever seemed to demand more blood.

  She and her dad met Temo in a park. The meeting was inconclusive. Her dad was not exactly happy to greet his new babysitter. He found the whole arrangement degrading. But Temo revealed himself to be adept at negotiating her dad’s brand of geriatric petulance. He was a smooth, patient, unhurried man, and Anne could see in his small gestures, the way he hovered near her dad’s elbow without touching him, ready to catch him if necessary, the way he never rose to the bait of her dad’s griping, that he understood the proper boundaries. He was on hand to protect her dad from physical harm, nothing more. She felt lucky, and for a moment the branches of dry lightning that had been flashing in her nervous system dimmed and receded.

  Storm clouds didn’t appear at work, either. Susan got home from Norway and seemed extra-happy and optimistic about the future of the bureau. She’d already apparently forgotten the deal she’d approved with Charlie and had moved on to new visions, new goals. She called Anne into her office to discuss the bureau’s five- and ten-year plans, which seemed absurdly grandiose but which also went a long way to reassuring Anne about her own future. It meant Susan valued her and she hadn’t been exposed as the terrible, conniving person she was, at least not yet.

  Sitting at home, watching the snakes of light bouncing off the birdbath’s water, onto the stucco wall, she wondered if maybe everything was going to be fine. Aaron was a good kid with good prospects, most likely not on heroin. Her brother was doing his best. Maybe Temo had been sent by a higher power. Maybe the BHC project was only a tiny blip on her time line, a deviation in an otherwise upstanding life. As of yet, no real transgression had even occurred. A few papers were circulating and accruing signatures. Some lawyers were feeding on the chum of their hourly negotiations. In the everyday fluxation of life, the moment-by-moment experience of reality as she most commonly understood it, nothing had really happened at all. So she’d hired a helper for her dad. So she’d given away the city’s wastewater. All of it was so incredibly abstract next to the delicate lavender of the flowering honeysuckle growing against the back fence, it barely seemed to exist.

  23

  You could always get unmarried in life. You could switch jobs. You could get fat and turn around and get thin again. You could change your haircut a thousand times. But there was one thing you couldn’t ever change, and that was being dead.

  No, you couldn’t ever stop being dead once you started. Death was the great and ultimate threshold of human experience, the one-way door through which no one ever returned. You could swap houses, you could make water into ice and back into water again, but being dead, that was the one irrevocable, unchangeable state.

  Curtains for you, Shane Larson, Ben thought. In ten minutes, the curtains would be drawn once and for all on Shane Larson’s life, and there would be no putting Humpty Dumpty back together again. Perched on the roof of Palm Canyon Resort, his rifle cradled against his chest, breathing slowly and methodically, Ben waited patiently for the next pivot point of his own vengeful life to arrive. You could never stop being dead; nor could you ever bring someone back to life once you’d greased them.

  His eyes remained fixed on the third hole of the Indian Canyons golf course, framed over the white lip of the resort roof. He’d chosen the Palm Canyon for its slight elevation; it was the only three-story building near the perimeter of the links. The third hole was not his favorite choice—he might have preferred a higher number, if only for the drama of letting the tournament play out—but overall the third hole was acceptable. There were at least three exit routes nearby, paths going north and south along South Palm Canyon Drive, and a vast, empty scrubland stretching west into the mountains. Plan A was to evacuate on the street using the pickup truck he’d stolen the night before, joining the flow of traffic, finding his car downtown, making the trade and drifting quietly away. Plan B was to evacuate on the street by foot, melding with the street traffic and reconnecting with his car and continuing on as per Plan A. And Plan C, should he need it, was to flee into the mountains. The nest itself was very solid. He could see the lima-bean green abutting a glittering pond at the end of an alley of palm trees. He could see a swath of the mountains sheltering the valley from the wind. He could see an immensity of cornflower-blue sky extending into infinity.

  This was a beautiful place to exit the world, Ben thought. Shane Larson was a lucky man in that regard. He would exit the planet in sunlight and fragrant desert air, surrounded by adoring fans, or at least admiring fans, or at the very least people who recognized him. He would avoid all the suffering of the elder years, the decrepitude and disease. He would not slowly wither until his mind was soft cheese and his family didn’t know what to do with him. He would go out in the greenery of the Indian Canyons golf course without a moment of pain. Or maybe just one very brief moment of pain. Depended on how well the shooting went today.

  Ben had arrived at the Palm Canyon at three in the morning, wanting privacy for the scaling of the wall and the choosing of precisely the right spot. The resort-goers had been sleeping, and he’d nestled in under the star-throbbing sky. He’d seen the sun rise over the San Jacinto Mountains, the wind-planed clouds turning pink and orange and the dome of existence gradually filling with color. He’d heard the desert birds awaken, including one strange type that made noises like R2-D2, greeting the day with a funny, computerized bleep-bleep-bloop song.

  Over the hours, the human world had come to life. The golf course had picked up employees. The tournament spectators had trickled through the front gate in their BMWs and Lexuses and hybrids, claiming parking spots with smooth self-confidence. From the sidewalk, the voices of the men floated in the air, talking about all the petty garbage of their privileged lives. From the pool area, the squeals of the children had begun. Ben had overheard numerous complaints about wives, lawyers, neighbors, contractors and subcontractors, many grousing complaints relating to people’s own revolting wealth. He’d overheard at least a dozen men he would have gladly killed if only their deaths would have meant anything to people. But he’d waited stoically for the one man he’d come to make an example of, Shane Larson.

  Doom on you, Shane Larson. Doom on you for all your lies.

  The third fairway was a lush, green carpet leading to the spotlight of the putting green. The tournament had begun midmorning, and the players had been wending through in clusters. The gallery had been shrinking and growing but generally sticking to about fifty or seventy-five bodies. Ben had been monitoring the progress of the overall competition on his phone, reading the ticker tape of the incoming Twitter feed, and he knew Larson had begun playing and w
as already four over par after only two holes. He was not in the running for golf victory today. The third fairway was waiting, only an occasional bird breaking the airspace. It was almost noon when Larson’s group ambled into view, with its attendant caddies and spectators in tow. At last, two hundred yards away on the fairway, the target had presented himself.

  Ben watched as the golfers selected their locations and stabbed their tees into the ground. He watched as they made their final calculations for windage, slope, and distance and straddled their balls, squaring their shoulders. He could see the naked napes of their necks as some turned and spoke to their caddies, the vulnerable spots of their temples, their ribs. And then one by one they teed off, swinging their silver clubs like scythes. He lost sight of the balls as they sailed in the sun, carving mountainous arcs, and caught sight of them again as they made their landings with delicate plops near the green. The balls rolled the final distance to their resting places and shone whitely on the turf, waiting, only seventy yards away. The gallery clapped. He could hear one meaty set of palms in particular amid the soft clatter.

  The golfers were coming in his direction, and one by one they approached the green, crouching and scoping their lines of attack. They weighed their options, balanced their minuscule judgments, and all the while Ben watched and measured as well. It was all a form of golfing in the end.

  Shane Larson putted second. His lime-green shirt and giant black watch shone brightly in the sun, as did his white arms, the consistency of uncooked dough. He waddled over the nubby grass with the overfed confidence of the truly rich, his backside a foreign country. He dug his thumb in his nose, not caring who saw, he was that rich. He approached his dimpled ball, separating himself from the bystanders, and took sole possession of the green apron. He crouched to his knee, angled his head. He stood and shook his leg.

  Ben watched him in the crosshairs of the scope on his Ruger Varminter, the fat body flattened on the lens. The gun had come from a dealer he’d found on Craigslist, located in Barstow, and it was not yet familiar in Ben’s hands. The stainless-steel stock was heavier than he would have liked, and he’d never used the .204 Ruger ammo before, but it had been priced to sell, and there’d been no questions asked. He’d gone to the man’s shack with no ID, only his SEAL insignia, and had blustered his way through the deal with anecdotes of killing in foreign lands, and that had been enough. The guy had treated him like royalty, never even asking about the driver’s license or full name.