The expression on Sunbeam’s tanned face was that of an impatient woman waiting for a bus already fifteen or twenty minutes late. After a few seconds she nodded and then she did her best to smile.
“Good,” Winter said. “Things are moving fast. Everything is right on schedule, including that accident out there on the road.” As he spoke he nodded toward the front of the building. “Later today my new business partners, your partners too whether you like it or not, have arranged for their contingent of foot soldiers to arrive at the big grow where the trouble was yesterday. They’ll spread out from there. All the people they need, more than they need, are here and fully prepared. They came up over Baldy Mountain on the old one-way gravel road, armed and dangerous. So I need to relay some fresh news to you. Unwelcome news no doubt. Your boys, some of them, at least a few of them, might be in some serious trouble.”
“What? How serious?”
“Serious,” Winter said. “Possibly life-threatening serious. It’s not in my hands. I can’t help it. Nobody can.”
“We have reinforcements coming in from the Big Dude.”
“But the Big Dude’s not that big in the big picture. Crazy Carlos’s people should get here about the same time your boys do, and I suppose about the same time the Big Dude and his boys do too. You got to get your boys over to that grow as fast as you can. The top dog’s people have plans to rip out every plant and carry it all away by the end of the week. They know where all the grows are. They don’t just know where they are, they have them mapped out in detail. I’d say they have better maps than the Forest Service ever did. They’ll move through the grows one by one, day by day.”
“Then I won’t send my boys out there. No. Are you crazy? No way!”
“Listen now! One more time. Just listen up! You’re not the boss here and neither am I! These orders, our orders, are coming from very high up. It’s a long, complicated chain of command. If you and I don’t do as we’re told, we might die. If we tried to run away they’d get us. If we tried to just give them everything they want and head off into the sunset they’d very likely kill us anyway. We know too much. Way too much. The point is, we’d be examples to everybody everywhere. We have to do what these people say, no matter how crazy it is. These people operate through intimidation. They enjoy killing people. Nobody crosses them. Nobody says no or even maybe to them. It’s that crazy. It’s that simple. They send harsh messages to anybody who might ever dream about crossing them. You have to understand. Because you’re in this now the same way I am and it’s way too late to back out unless you want to die. Understand?”
“You never told me this shit before,” Sunbeam said. “You never told me anywhere along the line. You never told me anything like this would happen.”
Winter stared hard at her. “In case you’re interested,” he said, “I’ll tell you what your major malfunction is, what it’s been all along. Old as you are, you still have the mind of a hippie, and as far as I can tell most of your boys, likely due to your influence, are pretty much the same way most of the time. Sure, they can kick some gluteus maximus when they know they have to, when there’s no other option. But generally they’d prefer to just drift along. Trust in luck. Let things happen. Well, the truth may well be that you’ve all used too much of your own product for too long, and this time you’ve drifted too far. I can’t do anything about it now. It’s not my fault. Accept the fact. That’s the way it is.”
Sunbeam wondered how much Winter had known and how long he had known it. All she knew for certain was that he’d never cared about anyone but himself. She stared back at his fat face and wondered how it had come so far. How had she come so far? Everything had sounded simple at first and the plans kept changing and things kept getting worse and the snowball had rolled down a steep hill growing fast and picking up speed and now here she was powerless at the bottom of the hill. First she felt frightened and then angry and then sick.
“This is bullshit!” she said.
“It may be bullshit,” Winter answered, “but people above us changed the rules.”
Sunbeam heard the sounds of clanking chains and then the log truck roaring to life.
She remembered the time she’d been chained up and hauled off to jail in San Francisco. She and her blue-eyed friend Cornflower had marched in the front row of a protest against the war and they had blocked traffic at Union Square near the St. Francis Hotel and the entire front row had been arrested and twelve young women were chained together by mean cops and herded into a van and driven to jail. The back of the van smelled of sweat and pot and exhaust fumes and she and Cornflower began a song and soon everyone was singing along and they sang all the way to jail. They were locked in cells for the night and they sang all night and they were released after first light in the morning and they sang as they left the city jail.
Sunbeam had been happy then and now for the first time in her life she hated herself. She hated what she had done and what she had become and most of all she hated the fact that there was nothing she could do about any of it. She looked at the floor. She stared at the white string from a mop caught under a front leg of her chair.
“This is awful,” she said. “Fucking awful.”
“Even if we tried to run off they’d get us. I know that. It’s the truth. But try to look at it this way. We’re all set. It’s dog eat dog and we’re in with the biggest dogs. The biggest dogs might be crazy but our payoff’ll be huge.” Winter looked over Sunbeam’s shoulder. “The road must be clear out there. Here they come back. You just make sure you get your boys where they need to be in a hurry. Make sure they’re there soon. You have to. Understand?”
“Beer!” the log truck driver called from up front. “Beer I said beer I said beer! I need me a cold one cold one cold one! Yes!”
ONE WAY ROAD
When Shrimp hurried back upstairs to check in with Rainbow he found her sitting in bright sunlight close beside Uncle Sam’s bed. She was looking out the window as she stroked his hair.
“I was watching you guys drag that thing off the road,” she said without looking around when she heard Shrimp come into the room. “You made it look so easy.”
“That log truck driver knows his stuff. Good man. You sure everything’s okay up here?”
“Oh yes.”
“You figure Uncle Sam knows what happened? You figure he knows anything happened? You think he heard the explosion?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I think he hears us, sometimes at least. I even think he wants to talk to us and almost can. Maybe he will someday. You want to talk to him? Want to spell me a while?”
“We’re taking off in ten minutes. We got business to attend to. I can talk to him till then.”
Rainbow stood up from her chair and kissed Shrimp’s cheek and held his hand briefly and squeezed it and Shrimp squeezed her hand back and took her place on the chair.
He looked down at Uncle Sam. “Hey, buddy,” he said. He looked into Uncle Sam’s eyes and studied his face carefully. Over the months and years Uncle Sam never seemed to change but Shrimp thought that might be because he saw him too often to notice the changes. When he’d come home from war he’d been shocked at how his parents had aged but he understood it was because he hadn’t seen them in more than three years.
“You’re lookin’ okay, dude,” he said to Uncle Sam. When he talked to Uncle Sam with Rainbow in the room he wasn’t certain which one he was actually talking to. He could feel Rainbow standing behind him now and supposed he might be talking to them both.
Down on the road the old couples had climbed slowly into their cars and now they were heading south with the two old men driving. The lead car was a red Ford sedan and the second car was a blue Volkswagen sedan. The log truck was already out of sight.
Then two identical black Cadillac Escalades with dark-tinted windows came speeding north no more than twenty feet apart and they slowed some as they passed the tavern and then resumed their high speed and soon disappeared around the bend beyond
the Jump Off Joe Creek Bridge.
“Did you see that?” Rainbow said.
“Uninvited guests,” Shrimp answered. “You’re lookin’ okay, dude,” he repeated to Uncle Sam. “Hell, the truth is you’re lookin’ better than me. I been missing out on my beauty sleep lately. Busy time of year. Two big ol’ four-wheel boats roared by outside just now. What the fuck’s that all about? Like I said, uninvited guests. Scumbags usually have the best vehicles, right?”
Shrimp could still feel Rainbow standing behind him and still feel the place on his cheek where she had kissed him. “I guess we got a little war coming up right out here in the woods, in the sticks. How come people call the country ‘the sticks’? ’Cause of the trees? Trees ain’t sticks, are they? I still get the nightmares with the sweats sometimes. I did last night. I sure hope you don’t get the nightmares, buddy. Remember ol’ Cowboy? He was in my nightmare. Sure you remember ol’ Cowboy. He was only with the outfit a week or two but you guys rode the same vehicle. Remember what his real name was? I’m pretty sure it was Horace Jones the Third. The Third! Judging by that one, we knew, one Jones, one Cowboy, would’ve been enough. More than enough. Who the hell needed three? I sure as shit hope the first two Joneses were better than that douche bag we ended up with. He stole your cigarettes, I remember that. Right out of your footlocker. Then after he stole your cigarettes he swiped your hash. They never found much of him that morning after the blast. Lucky you weren’t sittin’ next to him that day. We never scraped up much of him off that street. That’s what my nightmare was about, the mess we scraped up. Hell, they could’ve shipped him home in his footlocker, easy. They could’ve shipped him home in a bucket with a lid. Jones the Third came from someplace in Oklahoma. Ever been to Oklahoma? I was there for eight solid weeks, Fort Sill, Lawton, Oklahoma. Artillery school. We learned to fire 105 howitzers and once we left Fort Sill I never saw a 105 again. I shouldn’t maybe be so tough on ol’ Jones number three. From all I saw there Oklahoma’s no place you want to come from. Or go to either. Too bad we can’t pick where we come from and go to. Ain’t that the truth?”
Shrimp looked hard at Uncle Sam and felt Rainbow standing close behind him and thought he should stop talking but didn’t. “I’d pray for you, buddy, if I thought it made any sense,” he said. “If I figured there was some kind of god who might listen to me. You listen now, I got to go here pretty quick. Sunbeam’s sendin’ us out to work. Sunbeam an’ that asshole deputy.”
FIRST ESCALADE DRIVER
As always he felt relaxed and confident driving the lead Cadillac along the rural road through country he had never seen before and doubted he would ever see again. For eighteen of the thirty-one years of his life driving had been his livelihood. In the early years it was expensive cars stolen late at night and driven across the border before morning. He was barely fourteen when a jefe from a drug cartel bought him from the jefe who sold the stolen cars. When he tried to escape and got caught the beating he took resulted in six broken ribs and broken bones in both legs and seven teeth knocked out of his mouth with a quart Tecate beer bottle. As soon as he was sufficiently healed he tried to escape again and was caught and beaten again and then raped by many men. Not long after that the cartel was battling another cartel for control of a large and lucrative territory. Five men from the rival cartel were captured at a nightclub and taken by van to a lonely desert canyon many miles from the nearest village. He was the driver. The prisoners were held at gunpoint and four of them were stripped except for T-shirts, and then gasoline from a five-gallon red plastic container was poured over their heads and he was given the job of lighting and tossing the matches. The gasoline ignited with loud huffs of air and the men with the pistols stood together and shot the four burning screaming writhing victims to death and made jokes and laughed while they did it. When they drove away from that place after the shootings they left the fifth prisoner there so he could tell his people what had happened. An hour away on a lonely beach the men drank Hornitos tequila from bottles they had brought from the nightclub. They let him drink too and he had been a cartel driver ever since.
SECOND ESCALADE DRIVER
He was saving money that would give him time to paint. At age eighteen he had been arrested for possession and sale of marijuana. His pornographic drawings had been widely admired through school and as a way to pass time in the state prison he took up painting with oils and acrylics. From the very start people who saw his work knew he had talent and he loved painting landscapes and portraits. Shortly before he was granted parole he won an art fellowship to a prestigious and progressive university but he had no intention of attending school. He wanted to paint and that was all. The first thing he did upon arrival at the university was claim a check in his name at the financial aid office to cover a semester’s expenses. He walked to a nearby bank and cashed the check and bought a good used car at a lot two blocks away and then late in the rainy afternoon he visited the university art gallery. It was still raining late that night when he broke into the gallery and stole six valuable paintings. He cut the paintings from elaborate frames with a razor blade and rolled them up and carried them out and had driven them four hundred miles before the theft was discovered. Seven hundred miles away he tried to sell the paintings but was arrested and jailed and returned to a prison. This second prison didn’t allow him to paint and now he was on parole again and his plan was to save money until he had enough to buy his own new car and drive it to a small town on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica that a cellmate had described for him in great and loving detail. The town was Manuel Antonio and once he arrived he would buy a house and set up his studio and paint. He calculated he was no more than three or four months from living his dream.
* * *
Case parked at the trailhead and bushwhacked half a mile through the forest and then climbed a steep slope and set out hiking along the west ridge to reach yesterday’s grow. In his spare backpack he carried two quart containers of water and two red apples and several strips of venison jerky and a Swiss army knife and half a dozen .20 gauge shotgun shells. The shells held number 6 shot, which was what he had always used for upland hunting. In his good right hand he carried his Winchester over and under. He thought he might break tradition and kill a blue grouse if he had a sure shot but not a ruffed grouse because their local populations were thinning for unknown reasons.
The valley was miles from any road or established trail. Fifty years ago a reservoir had been formed when the main branch of Jump Off Joe Creek was dammed and the water behind the dam had isolated the valley. A family named Tucker had established a homestead in the valley in the spring of 1881 and three generations of Tuckers lived and died there and were buried there before the dam was built. Since the dam had gone in, no one knew of any Tuckers anywhere.
Jump Off Joe Creek’s east branch cut the valley almost exactly in half with steep wooded mountains on three sides and then the massive stone wall of the reservoir at the bottom end. At the top of the valley where the creek spilled over a solid rock waterfall there were signs of an Indian encampment for people who knew how to look for signs. Flakes and chips of obsidian lay buried beneath leaves and pine needles and there were occasional arrowheads and spear points and scrapers to be found along the creek banks after the high water of spring runoff. Faintly discernible pictographs were etched into the rock walls on the very upper reaches of the creek.
After discovering the pictographs Case had climbed the rock walls to explore the four small caves there. Inside the caves he came upon mortars and pestles and a quiver with five arrows in it. The arrow shafts had bird points, which proved men had hunted grouse in the valley long ago. In the most difficult cave to reach were three human skeletons. They were two adults with a child between them and all of them lay on their backs side by side. Case hadn’t taken anything from the cave. He hadn’t touched anything. The stone ceilings were black from the smoke of cooking fires. The natives had used the caves in wintertime and during bad weather. They had live
d on fish and game and lasted many centuries longer than the Tuckers.
Black oaks along with poison oak and a few pines and willow thickets grew along both creek banks with open ground between the vegetation and the mountains on either side. The marijuana grow was situated on the open ground on both sides of the creek and stretched nearly the length of the valley.
Case limped along and finally crested the last small rise and stood at the high point on the ridge with the long valley stretching toward the reservoir far below him. He wore a short-sleeved shirt and his right forearm was bandaged and he used the heel of his left hand to press the tape at both edges of the dressing but because he was sweating it wouldn’t stick. It was no more than yet another injury and one more minor pain. Many years ago before he had been a soldier himself Case had read a novel about soldiers and war. He couldn’t recall the title but now he remembered a scene in which an enlisted man had regarded his body’s scars as a book about his life.
Standing on top of the hill Case tried to mentally list all the wounds and scars and healed bones that comprised the pages of his own life. Beginning at the top there was a long scar that reached from just below his right ear to the middle of his throat. His right arm had been fractured in three places and his left arm in two. Two bones in his right hand had been broken in the same explosion. There were scars on his back and his chest and both thighs. His knee had been operated on and then eight months later operated on again to correct the mistakes made in the first surgery. He realized he’d almost forgotten his mangled wrist even though he could barely close his left hand all the way into a fist.
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