“He robbed me at gunpoint.”
“You should take him to the next level, Ted—white man style. I can help. Do you know where to find him?”
“He hangs out on Carmella Street. Or along Old Stage, behind the McDonald’s. I’ve seen him there.”
“Not good enough. Can you get his home address?”
“Easy.”
“Give me your cell phone.” Trevor took Ted’s phone and started pushing buttons. “Here is Joan’s number. When you get it, give her the wetback’s address. Not his name, just his address. I’ve never heard of you and never seen you.”
“I get it.”
“You and me will fix it so he doesn’t want to bother you again.”
“Yes.”
“Mostly you are going to fix it. I won’t fight your fights for you.”
Ted was amazed that the white powder could bring him so much power, then more, and more, and more. It was like being plugged into a wall socket for an endless charge. “I don’t want you to fight my fights.”
“Tell me about the mayor.”
“I hate her politics. And maybe her, too.”
“Your cartoon was cool.”
“Thanks, man.”
“Maybe you should take her to the next level.”
“What does that mean?”
“Whatever you need it to mean. This band is Hate Matrix. They might give you some ideas.”
“Well, I’ve thought about certain things I could do.”
“Thought is for the weak—act. Make a list of people who need to be dealt with. Hold on to your anger. It’s the only thing that’ll get you through.”
Ted felt the power prowling around in him like a tiger looking for a way out. Wasn’t that tiger his life, his passion to do a big and meaningful thing? He was the tiger and the tiger could do the big thing. He smiled.
“As of right now none of this ever happened.”
“I appreciate it.”
“I don’t know what the fuck you mean. I’m a Rogue Wolf, Ted. I live free and hunt alone. You should, too.”
Ted teamed up with Joan. She won the lag and broke and took solids. While she played Ted couldn’t help but notice the beauty of her, the harmonious proportions, the fair skin and the light sheen of perspiration on her neck. She had Pegasus tattooed on her shoulder. He had another beer, and then another. Amber was lovely too, curvier than Joan, with wispy blond curls and a dazzling smile. The women raised their cues and beer bottles and bumped hips each time they passed by each other, and Ted was certain that their laughter was getting him higher than the crank and beer were. He concentrated as hard as he could on the shot-making, and the drugs gave him plenty of confidence and even some steadiness. Between shots he sat on a stool with a half smile and the cue propped up beside him, watching the women and letting their sweet scents drift over him, occasionally looking at Cade and Trevor. He liked these people. Sound judgments on society but no judgments of him. Like-minded individuals but not in lockstep with anything or anyone. Strong but fair. Rogue Wolves, he thought, live free and hunt alone.
* * *
Buoyed by camaraderie, meth, and beer, Ted drove west out Mission Road. Near the San Luis Rey River he pulled into the Riverview Stable’s parking lot and got out. He went to the railing, looked down into the arena, and saw that he was in luck. His heart did a little giddyup. Dora was there! Two months ago he had given her a ride into town after her car had run out of gas near here. And of course a ride back to her car after she’d bought a fuel can that he filled for her. Since then, once a week, Ted had come out to watch her teach the night students under the lights. He could tell she liked him. And he liked watching Dora’s mastery over the huge, unpredictable animals.
Now he saw a big chestnut mare ridden by a girl, cantering around Dora. He heard the hollow clop-clop of hooves and the music of Dora’s voice floating up toward him. The air was sweet from the river and the moon was a sliver caught in the sycamore branches. He padded softly down to the grandstand and sat in the front row and watched.
Dora was a pretty red-haired woman in her late twenties. Tonight she was wearing jeans and paddock boots and a red cowl-necked sweater. Her hair shined in the arena lights. Ted smiled with pride. As he watched the horse and rider circle her, Ted thought of the first time he’d gotten on a horse. Why it had reared up, nobody could say. But the gelding’s neck had broken his nose and he had landed hard on his back, his breath knocked out of him. When he came to his senses he was looking up at his mother. He could hear his father cursing and the departing thump of his boots and the more distant thud of hooves. Now he pictured his mother’s face, her beautiful face, the furrow of her brow and the throb of the vein in her forehead, and beyond her the blue sky and white clouds. The horse was named Feather and it was the last horse he’d ever touched.
The lesson ended with a quick hand of applause from Dora. Ted watched the girl lead her horse toward the boarding stalls. Her parents were waiting for her on the other side of the arena and the dad put his arms over his daughter’s shoulders and they all walked slowly past the dressage arena. Dora glanced at her watch as she came from the lighted arena toward him. With a giddy tickle in his heart Ted waited until she was close, then jumped from the darkened grandstand, stumbling slightly. “Hi, Dora!”
He heard the intake of her breath. She stopped abruptly and it took her a moment to identify him. “Ted? Ted? Don’t be jumping out at me like that!”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yes, so what are you doing?”
“Watching, Dora. That’s all. I came to see you.”
“You scared the hell out of me.”
“I’m so sorry, I thought you would see me, even though the light’s not good.”
“Yeah, okay, well I didn’t see you. My heart’s still pounding. Jeez…”
Now Ted felt a twinge of fear too, a little tremble in his gut and a flutter in his heart, as if someone had just jumped out of the darkness at him. “You’re right, Dora. I should never have done that. I’m really sorry. Can I walk you to your car?”
She looked at him, but in the half-light Ted couldn’t read the expression on her face. “I guess,” she said.
He fell in beside her and she moved over and they headed for the parking lot. Ted looked up at the clubhouse and restaurant on the hill that overlooked the property. Through the windows he saw a few diners, candles on the tabletops, a waitress delivering something. He shifted his glance down to Dora to see her jaw set tight and her lips firm and her brow bent into a frown. “Dora, can I buy you a drink or dinner? I really didn’t mean to scare you.”
“I’ve eaten, Ted. No thanks.”
“Glass of wine? Decaf?”
“No and no. I think you’ve had enough to drink, too.”
“Maybe a little too much. Good lesson tonight?”
She didn’t answer. Ted listened to the crunch of their feet on the decomposed granite walkway. He looked down at her petite, lace-up boots, then at his own special-order, extra-extra wide walking shoes which, even fitted with unbelievably expensive orthotics, let his collapsed feet slosh and yaw with every step.
“I asked you not to come here again, Ted. What part of that was I not clear about?”
Ted still felt her fear and now he was feeling her anger, too. He didn’t know why other people’s emotions got into him so quickly and strongly but they always had. They could drown out his own. “I just came by to say I won’t be coming by anymore.”
“That’s lame, Ted.”
“I know. I’m starting to get mad at me, too.”
“I’ll call the sheriff. You know that, right?”
“Please don’t.”
“This is the last time you come here, then. The next time I’m pulling out my cell phone and calling them on the spot. Do you understand that?”
“Yes, ma’am. Yes, Dora, I do.” Do I ever, he thought. He needed to calm her. He cupped her upper arm very softly. “The moon is nice tonight, isn’t it?”
> She tried to pull away but Ted’s grip automatically closed. A reaction. His hands were very strong and always had been. She yelped and wrenched her arm free and he heard the clink of keys. She whirled. He’d never seen her angry and the anger spoiled her face and he felt responsible. “Ted, you’re a nice guy, and I thank you again for giving me that ride weeks ago. But it doesn’t entitle you to follow me around the rest of my life, touching me. We’ve been through all this. You scare me. You’re drunk. You’re weird.”
They came to the car that ran out of gas, an old Jaguar Vanden Plas into which Dora quickly disappeared. The door locks clunked and the engine started and Dora backed up fast, gravel blasting up against the chassis. In seconds she was far down the road, making a left onto Mission and punching it hard up the hill.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The next day Patrick spent ten hours pitching straw and four hours delivering pizza. Driving home from the pizza place someone slammed a car door. Patrick cranked the wheel sharply right, jumped a curb and slammed on the brakes, the grille of his truck stopping inches from the Gulliver’s Travels storefront window. He was breathing heavily, sweating hard. Myers and Zane were up the sidewalk under the theater marquee, looking at him. How the fuck did they get to Fallbrook? They merged with shocked pedestrians, whose drop-jawed stares brought Patrick back. It was terrifying to lose control of his mind and memories and even body. He unlocked his hands from wheel, repositioned them, and backed onto the street, thanking God he hadn’t hit anyone.
By the time he began pulling apart the Mercury outboard it was ten at night. The light in the barn was good and Patrick was pleased to find the motor in decent condition. The artillery on Pendleton commenced and Patrick flinched and went to one knee. Steady, he thought. Steady. The ghosts in his heart roiled and wavered and he was back in Sangin—Myers and Zane lying shredded against the rocks, Pendejo’s brains on the wall, Sheffield’s boots lying yards from the rest of him—all knots in the outstretched line of his memory from Sangin to Fallbrook, from Fallbrook to Sangin. He pictured hauling that line back, across continents and oceans, hand over hand, dropping the slack into the hold of his waking mind. When he was done he closed the lid. His breath was short and his body washed in sweat. He took a deep breath and felt the flutter of his heart.
He cleaned the points and injectors and hooked up the new battery. The carburetor needed cleaning so he disassembled it at one of the workbenches and let the parts soak in solvent. He ate another piece of the pizza that Firooz and Simone had pressed upon him, as they did after every one of Patrick’s shifts. The smell of the solvent reminded him of cleaning the SAW and the 240 and his mind went AWOL again and he couldn’t pull it back this time.
By the third day in theater you get your preview vision. Which is when you see something happen that really didn’t happen, and then it does happen, exactly how you saw it. So you’re seeing an event ahead of time. The problem is sometimes you’re think you’re having a preview vision and you’re not. So that turns every single thing that you imagine into something real, and if your imagination is filled with death and mutilation and agony, which in combat it will be, then you see ugliness and mayhem everywhere you look. So these things become your starting lineup; you can’t make substitutions. On patrol you see Sheffield trip an IED about fifty feet in front of you. And when you open your eyes Sheffield is still walking and there was no explosion. And then five seconds later an IED goes off and Sheffield crumples over, smoking and screaming. Lots of us grunts had those preview visions. Our theory was that you’re aware of more than you think you are, so things register on your senses without you knowing. I don’t know how I could have seen that IED, though. It was buried in the rocks and rocks were everywhere you looked. The skinnies made the IEDs out of wood and plastic so our mine detectors couldn’t pick them up, and they covered them with their own shit so if the bomb didn’t kill you whatever was left of you got infected. Preview visions were common for machine gunners like me, because we usually patrolled to the rear, to put down the fire when the contact came. Later on the tour I saw Lavinder shot by a sniper and I hit the ground. Bostik was behind me and next I know he’s looking down at me, laughing his ass off. There was no shot and Lavinder was fine. Thirty seconds later Lavinder gets shot dead by a sniper up in the rocks just about exactly how I saw it happen. We put some heavy fifty on the rocks and for once the air strike came fast. When the Blackhawks cleared out we climbed up there and went rock to rock, killing Talibs whether they needed it or not. I felt like taking scalps but didn’t. I put fire into a corpse just because. You just get pissed and lose it sometimes. Later I felt shame. Lavinder was one of those guys you hated to lose because he was happy so much. A happy guy was hard to find. It could be contagious but annoying, too. Once I asked Lavinder why he was always happy and he said it was because he knew he was going to die over there. And once he’d accepted that fact, the pressure was gone and every minute he wasn’t dead yet was another minute to be happy.
Patrick swirled the coffee cans of solvent to get the carburetor parts clean and ate another piece of pizza. He heard a truck park outside and thought, Where’s my weapon? A moment later Archie was standing in the doorway with a bottle of bourbon in one hand and two glasses in the other. The dogs barged past him, all tongues and tails. “Mind if the asshole comes in?”
“Not one bit.”
Archie nodded and walked in. He was a purposeful man, always on task, but tonight he seemed uncertain. “Ted gone to bed?”
“Think so. We tired him out the last couple of days.”
“Just as well. I wanted to talk to you first. Splash?” At the workbench he poured two bourbons neat. Patrick came over and took a glass and they leaned against the bench facing the Mako. The dogs patrolled the barn, sniffing things. “That’s a nice craft, Pat. Eleven grand. Well done. How’s the engine?”
“Low hours and clean.”
“Don’t overload the oil mix on those two-strokes.”
“Never. I learned that from my old man. What’s up?”
“I feel rather shitty about what happened out in the grove yesterday. I’m going to try to apologize. I think you understand my anger, but how could Ted? Sometimes I’m not even sure I do. When I saw those big chunks of tree bark all over the ground…”
“He’s always had a blind spot in his common sense.”
His father nodded and sipped the bourbon. “That’s a good way to put it. You know, right from the get-go Ted wasn’t fortunate.”
“The seizures and fever.”
“Your mother and I thought we might lose him.” Archie looked at Patrick then back at the boat. “I had very high hopes for him. I wanted him to not just survive, but to flourish and fly someday. I wanted to make it happen. I saw in Ted a chance to be a hero.”
“A hero to your own son?”
Archie was staring at the boat but Patrick could tell he wasn’t seeing it. Over the years Patrick had noticed the thousand-yard stare in his father and but only since the war did he recognize it for what it was. He’d seen it on Bostik and Salimony and Messina, on every man he’d known in the Three-Five. It was a strange thing: distant and focused, aware and oblivious, outer and inner, present and absent.
“Did I ever tell you about meeting your mother?”
“Sure, Dad. It was in a restaurant and love at first sight.”
Archie gathered his attention on Patrick and smiled. “Well, that was the party line. There was a bit more going on. Some of which may be pertinent. May I speak frankly?”
“You should.”
“It wasn’t a restaurant. It was a biker bar in Oceanside. Kind of a dump. I’d gone there with a buddy. I was forty years old, ten years widowed. The farm was making me some good money. I had plenty of energy and girlfriends. I was steering solo and happy with that. I’d loved my first wife perfectly, I thought. Or as close to perfect as I could manage. She died young. Cancer, as you know. And because our love was young, she was ideal. Even in death and after
, she remained ideal. So who could compete with that memory? Well, when Caroline walked into the biker bar she was beautiful, troubled, drunk, and about half my age. But she had an indefinable thing that was absolutely unmistakable in spite of the ideal love I’d once had. My heart registered it immediately. My first wife welcomed her. I felt things I hadn’t felt in years. Helpless, for one. I berated myself for foolishness, but it did no good. Does it ever? Caroline’s boyfriend was with her, a biker, a big guy who seemed to think he was in charge. When she took off her sunglasses I saw the smudges of bruises near her eyes. I’ll confess to being unimpressed by the boyfriend and saying so. The short version is we took it outside and I gave him a terrible whipping. Caroline called two days later with a story to tell. We made a date for the telling. Among others things it involved mental and physical cruelty, and pronounced recreational drug abuse.” Archie drank and looked at his son. “But she was something, Patrick. Sobered up, she had the looks and brains and appetites I’d intuited. Her heart was good and hungry. What a match for mine. And she was about to have something I had resigned myself to not having. She delivered him into the world approximately seven months later.”
“Ted.”
“None other.”
“I suspected.”
“As did many others. We were married before she showed. We delighted in our wicked little mystery. No confessions but nothing hidden, either. No explanations, nothing revealed, then the arrival of our little Ted. I pledged to save him from his own … unfortunate nativity. Ted’s father was a charming, brutal pig. Like Caroline’s father, he humiliated and hurt her. Her father was from money and of money. Layers of privilege and recklessness. Staggering unaccountability. The biker was intended as an antidote. Imagine. But you can’t satisfy swine of either type because they only want more. It takes a lot to fill a tiny heart. So she broke, Pat—right here in the house, right in front of my eyes. She broke, utterly and completely. And then she started over. Began to make herself again. To make herself herself for the first time. The baby was my project, my contribution to turning Caroline’s life around. It was my job to make that baby right. She chose me to accompany her on that journey. I have been honored. She’s become the strongest person I’ve ever known. She still frightens me in every good way and I would still lay down my life for hers in an instant.”
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