“This was your idea,” said Messina.
“Who cares where he came from?” asked Patrick. “The aqua-colored trailer, right? Here it is, so let’s do this thing.”
They stood on the spacious deck and Patrick knocked on the door. He heard the roar of the big air conditioner sitting on bricks beside the aqua trailer. Overhead was a slatted roof intertwined with vines with fragrant white flowers. The deck had colorful pots of bougainvillea and geraniums and canna lilies. There were two barbecues and a fire pit made with the perforated canister of a clothes dryer.
A man pushed open the door and stood in the doorway. He was dark and slender, maybe fifty, Patrick guessed, with a weathered face and thick gray hair. He wore a white yoked cowboy-style shirt tucked into clean pressed jeans, and work boots.
“We served with Alejandro,” said Patrick. “We just wanted to tell you he was a good man.”
“I am Raydel, his father. It’s too small in here. Wait, please.” Raydel pulled the door shut and a few minutes later he came outside followed by a thin dark woman. She had black hair and wore a light blue dress and she smiled without looking at the young men. She carried two white resin chairs from inside and Raydel set out three more from the stack on the deck. He introduced his wife as Theresa. She went back into the trailer and returned with a framed portrait of Sergeant Reyes in his dress blues. She set it on the railing of the deck, facing them. Pendejo looked proud and happy. He was not a hard man.
They sat in the shade and Salimony gave everyone a beer, and the rose to Alejandro’s mother, and he opened the jerky and passed the bag. “He hated the rations,” said Salimony. “Alejandro got those packages from you, with the spices and dried chilies and those weird pickled carrots you Mexicans eat. And he’d mix them with field rations and come up with real food. He was the best cooker in the whole battalion. I think you should know that he was doing something he liked when he died. He was cooking for us jarheads. Standing right out there by a barbecue he’d made all by himself. He was brave.”
Salimony’s leg bounced and he drained his beer and crumpled it and got out another.
“He was honored at the Three-Five memorial at Pendleton,” said Patrick. “Two of his best friends spoke about him. I didn’t see you there.”
Raydel nodded and sipped his beer. “We decided not to go,” he said. “It is a very long way.”
“It’s only about six hours from here,” said Messina.
Raydel looked at him and Theresa stared down at the deck. Then she looked at Patrick and he saw she was fighting something back. “We have no papers. When we go somewhere there is the chance we will be stopped and deported. The Marine base would be very dangerous. Here, people know us and we are safe. So we don’t go away from here.”
“Half the laborers in Fallbrook are illegal,” said Patrick. “It’s a tough way to live.”
Alejandro’s father set his can on the deck and crossed his hands on his lap. He had the relaxed, conservative movement of a man who had worked his life outside. “Alejandro was born in Tijuana. We brought him here when he was one year old. I always have work because I know farming and I work very hard. But he did not want this. He wanted something better. He join the Marines because he wanna become a citizen here.”
“He wasn’t even an American citizen?” asked Salimony.
Raydel and Theresa both shook their heads. “We have three more children,” she said. “And they were born here so they can always stay. But Alejandro, he live under the same fear we have. He wanna be a cook.”
“They should make him a citizen even though he’s dead,” said Salimony. He upended his can and drank the last drop.
“I wondered about such a thing,” said Raydel. “But I don’t want to cause attention. My other son, he’s gonna join too when he’s old enough. He don’t like to work but he wants to fight.”
“Well,” said Salimony. “Alejandro is a citizen of my country no matter what nobody says. He made me some kind of soup when I got sick over there. God knows where he found anything good to put in it. A whole pot of it, enough for me and ten other guys. I didn’t get why Alejandro wouldn’t stand up for himself. He was older and us young guys kinda pushed him around. Four or five of us jumped him one day, roughed him up good. It’s for fun, but he acted like he wasn’t there. Now I get it—he was afraid if he fought back they’d find out and toss him out of the country when he came home.”
“There is a program for those who come home to be citizens more quickly,” said Theresa. “That was his plan. Then to open a restaurant.”
Raydel had the same thousand-yard stare that Bostik seemed to have so often. Patrick looked at the picture of Alejandro, then stared down into the opening of his beer can and tried to banish the image of pink brains on a tan wall behind a barbecue. He was thankful that Alejandro’s dad didn’t have to see that.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The morning was the coolest of the month and Ted felt winter in his feet. His task was to strip off the herbicide-tainted paint he’d put on some eighty tree trunks. Archie patiently demonstrated how to use the pressure sprayer, cautioning Ted that a direct ninety-degree blade of compressed water would cut into the tree surely as an axe. Archie fired away at an angle, “lifting” off the possibly poisoned paint that Ted had applied. “If the bark starts coming up, your angle’s wrong.”
“I got it, Dad.”
“I’d like to get a full day of work out of you.”
“Moving the compressor will be pretty hard on my feet.”
“You think the compressor is heavy, Pat and I will be lugging bales and putting down straw.”
“The compressor is heavy, too.”
Ted grunted and as he pulled the heavy wheeled contraption tree to tree over the leafy, ash-frosted earth. He got the thing going but the pressure seemed insufficient so he put on a different nozzle. And sure enough, once he got the hang of it the paint came right off. He was surprised how thick it was and found it hard to believe he’d failed to triple rinse the spray canister. He had no knack for practical physical things. Ted put in his earbuds and cranked up Cruzela Storm. A voice like new motor oil, he thought, clean and smooth and durable, and a similar color, too. Her main theme was, keep going in adversity, keep your cool, and your faith. Her subtheme was, people will try to take what’s yours, so learn to stand up for yourself.
He moved beneath the spindly naked canopies. Lifting off the dried paint took longer than spraying it on in the first place, but Ted worked diligently. He stopped now and then to lift rocks to see what creatures were living underneath. He caught one big tarantula, one small scorpion, and an alligator lizard, and put them into separate cottage-cheese containers with air holes punched in their lids. He had always loved unlovable things. They were humble and expected nothing, though some of them packed secret stings and poisons. He set the containers in the shade of the truck and got right back to work.
Later, close to lunchtime, through the music streaming into him, Ted suddenly and clearly heard the sharp report of his father’s voice. He lifted off one bud.
“Goddamn son of a BITCH!”
Ted dropped the nozzle, yanked off the earbuds, and pawed open the low-hanging branches in the direction of the yelling. Through his sweat-and-soot-smudged goggles he could see Archie far downhill of him, and Patrick a hundred yards to the east. His father stood looking at Ted with both arms out, palms raised in an unmistakable question: What in the hell is this? Could he have found a cool snake?
Ted burst through the black limbs and hustled down the slope, sidling down the steep granite escarpments, his feet swaddled in pain but soon he was standing before his father, panting. He stripped off the goggles to see what Archie was holding in his outstretched hand. It was one of the thick slabs of dried paint that Ted had lifted from the tree.
“Paint, Dad!”
“This isn’t paint, Ted. It’s bark! Formerly living bark! You’ve killed thirty trees today, son. Congratulations.”
Ted took t
he white fragment and turned it over. The inside was colored a very pale green that suggested life. The whole thing was no thicker than half an inch. He held it up closer to make sure it wasn’t just paint. But he could see that it was not.
Patrick arrived and took the bark from Ted and saw the problem. “Took off a bit much here, brother.”
“I thought it was paint, Pat. I swear.”
“Christ all mighty, Ted!
“Screaming doesn’t help,” said Patrick.
“Nothing helps!”
“Then stop being an asshole,” said Patrick.
Archie glared at his sons, Patrick and Ted, in turn.
“I didn’t mean it to happen, Dad,” said Ted. “It was an accident.”
“You’re both worthless.” Archie snatched the painted bark from Patrick and backhanded it against Ted’s ample belly, off which it bounced. Then Archie shook his head and turned and headed muttering toward the trucks.
Ted closed his eyes and clutched his arms tight to his chest and began turning counterclockwise.
Patrick grabbed him by the shoulders and slowed him and held him in place. “Goddamnit, Ted—that won’t do you any good. You can’t just go away.”
Ted closed his eyes tight and waited for liftoff.
* * *
Ted switched jobs with Patrick and worked furiously through lunch, breaking apart the heavy bales and spreading the straw under the trees with a pitchfork. Occasionally he stopped to watch Patrick removing the paint from the tree trunks, and from this distance Ted couldn’t see what his brother was doing differently than he had. It looked as if Patrick had switched nozzles, and that was about all. But the real difference, thought Ted, is Pat won’t create a disaster. Pat will do it perfectly. Ted snapped through another nylon tie with the heavy cutters, threw the pieces into the back of the pickup, then rammed the pitchfork into the bale, broke off a load, and heaved it under a tree.
It was easy to think of a bale as someone who wished him harm, like one of the rapacious takers in the Cruzela Storm songs cranking in his ears, like Edgar or his foul-mouthed girlfriend or Evelyn Anders or his father. It felt good to impale them over the next hours, spreading them evenly around the trees that he had tried so hard to save and only managed to put at even greater peril. It was good to focus anger on a person, to have a face to use for a target. And thanks to me, he thought, when the rain comes, this soil and these trees will be protected by this straw. Just as when the fire had come, the Norris residence had survived because he’d trimmed back the trees and bushes around the house and outbuildings. And what exactly had Dad said about that? Not one word, Ted thought. Only his mother had had the good manners to thank him for what he’d done. And Pat. Patrick had said something right off about him doing a good job. Or had he?
Near sundown Ted carried the pitchfork back to the truck. He checked the creatures in their containers and set them up front. His phone rang. He checked the caller, took a deep breath and spoke in a low voice. “’Lo, Cade.”
* * *
He ditched family cocktails, showered and shaved, and drove to Pride Auto Repair. There were three cars in the lot, Cade’s white-and-aqua Bel Air, a Dodge Magnum, and a red Dodge pickup truck, late fifties, beautifully restored. Ted heard music inside, hard and reckless. He stood under the neon Model T sign and looked through the open front door. The overhead lights were strong and lit the room like a stage. Cade was in there, shooting pool with a man while two women sat on stools and watched. Cade wore a holster low on his leg like a gunfighter and a six-gun glinted in the leather. The women wore halter tops and small skirts and their legs shined in the overhead light. They held bottles of beer. The man playing pool with Cade was young, all muscles and freckles. He wore a black leather vest over his naked torso, a black cowboy hat, and had a large handgun on his belt, holstered high and back, like a detective. They all looked at him standing at the open door. Cade smiled. “What do you want, Ted, an engraved invitation?”
Ted stepped in. Cade bent to the table, formed his bridge, and sunk the seven ball with a clack so sharp it pierced the music. The strong young man ignored him but one of the women, the brunette, smiled and held up her beer. “Want one?”
“Sure.”
“The fridge is in the back, cold ones up front.”
“Can I get one for you?”
“Bring it on, big guy.”
“Anyone else?”
No one answered so Ted got two cold ones. He pressed them to the opener on the wall while he looked around the repair bay. There were two cars up on the lifts and two more waiting, hoods up. Back in the lobby he gave the woman the beer and pulled up a bar stool a respectful distance from her. The muscular man eyed him then looked back to the table. Cade leaned against the wall by the cue rack, twisting a cube of chalk onto his stick. The jukebox played hard fast music from a band that Ted wasn’t familiar with, something about brass knuckles, red blood and a flag that still waves. He leaned over for a look at the selection and saw that the old retro jukebox was in fact a newer one, outfitted to play CDs.
“I’m Joan and that’s Amber and Trevor,” said the brunette. She had a compact face and a pleasant smile and she was older than he had thought at first. “Friends of Cade’s from Idaho. Spirit Lake.”
“Are there really spirits in it?”
“Indian ghosts is the legend. It’s beautiful there. Cold in winter. We came to talk Cade into moving back but we’re already in love with this place and we only been here two days. This is like America used to be.”
“Before government took over.”
“Absolutely. Are you a friend of Cade’s?”
“I’ve known him my whole life, pretty much, so, yeah.”
“Then you know all about what happened here.”
“Yep, right out back. Mrs. Magnus was locking up and he surprised her.”
“Yes, and she wasn’t armed to defend herself.”
Ted nodded and saw the glance between Amber and Cade. Amber slid off her stool, shut and locked the front door, and made sure the blinds were closed. Joan set her beer on the counter and dug into her purse and produced an empty .45 caliber cartridge casing and a small glass vial. Looking intent, she unscrewed the vial and tapped some shiny white powder into the shell and sniffed it up her nose. She shuddered and grinned at Ted and loaded one for him. Ted peered down into the casing. There wasn’t much white stuff down there. “Crank?”
“Best there is. Cooked not all that far from here. Smooth and silky and it’ll keep you talkin’ into next week. Just kidding. There’s hardly any crash.”
“Really,” said Ted. He wanted to sound knowledgeable though he’d never tried methamphetamine for fear he might like it too much. He saw Cade and Trevor watching him. Joan smiled crookedly. He brought the shell to his nose and sniffed it up. There was an explosive burn that made his eyes water, then nothing.
“It’ll take a few seconds,” said Joan. She took the casing and put the works back into her bag. Ted watched her, listening to the billiard balls knocking around the table and trying to hear the muttered comments of Cade and Trevor. The singer on the CD screamed on about “cleaning up America and taking out the trash!” Suddenly Ted’s heart had shifted into a higher gear and he felt a great torque unleashed inside him, like horses coming down the stretch—power, clarity, and confidence.
“Woah,” he whispered.
“Woah is right,” said Joan. She had straight shiny hair held back with a barrette, and a cute nose and pretty hands. “You’d think the Magnus family would have gotten a little help after the mother was raped and murdered by a psychopathic killer,” she said, turning to Ted. “A black psychopathic killer. Instead, the monster got a fancy state hospital room and the Magnuses got bankrupted by the courts. Thank you, government. The liberal press didn’t cover that angle, though. Hardly a word of sympathy for the family because they believe in their own white race, right? Then later in court they made it sound like Jed Magnus was sending killers around the world to
kill black men. Bankrupted him. Absurd.”
“Joan?” said Cade, settling in for his next shot. “Shut the fuck up, will you? That’s old news.”
“Which relates directly to our own present times,” said Joan.
“Be a dumb shit,” said Cade. “You have the right.”
“I was eleven when she was murdered,” said Ted. He really wanted to talk. Had to talk. The crank brought out old feelings. Suddenly it was like he was here, fifteen years ago, age eleven. The crank seemed to bore out his brain, clean away the clutter and increase the capacity of it. “I rode my bike down here from home the next day and the whole place was still behind crime-scene tape. The deputies were here to keep people from coming in, so I sat in the shade across the street and watched all the people wanting to see where the murder happened. People driving and walking, and tons of kids on bikes and scooters, like me. And news crews, dozens of them. And by the time—”
“I was eighteen, living in Spirit Lake,” said Joan. “Everybody knew about it because Jed’s newsletter was popular. When Jed moved the family there later, we were honored to have them. There was a nice welcome party, home-cooked potluck and a bluegrass band. People showed up, like they’re supposed to. The whole town. Half of them were retired cops from ugly cities. Like my dad. So don’t you diss me, Cade Magnus.”
On top of the crank, the beer hit Ted surprisingly hard, not having drunk alcohol for nearly six months. He hopped off the stool and got another bottle and strode back. He felt seven feet tall, sleek, and extremely intelligent. No foot pain at all. Cade banked in the eight ball, set his cue on the table, and raised a fist. “Ted, you’re up. Ladies, doubles?”
The women came off their stools and headed for the cue rack. Trevor set his black leather cowboy hat on the counter, crown down, and wiped his forehead with the back of one big freckled hand. His hair was red and cut close. His handshake was powerful and Ted watched Trevor’s tan eyes roam his face. His voice was soft. “I heard you had some trouble with a local gangster of the Mexican variety.”
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