“Don’t pull the trigger,” he said. “Squeeeze it.”
When I fired that first shot, and that shot hit the round target in the bullseye, I thought for one moment, one small slice of my youth, that I really could learn to do anything and be anybody. That there was hope for me yet.
The two hours of target practice, mixed with a snack of beef jerky and lemonade, made the perfect morning.
Until the next one, when we went out to hunt.
WE GOT TO a clearing in the woods where the morning sun was just hitting the dew on the grass. Grandpa walked slowly, eyes ahead, and I copied his every move.
Mighty hunter. I wanted to be just like him.
And then he stopped, put up his hand for me to stop too.
He pointed.
There it was, a gray bunny, sniffing the ground.
Grandpa made a motion for me to shoot.
Adrenaline rush. I put the rifle up and got the rabbit in my sights, just like he’d taught me.
Squeeeeze.
Blam.
A burst of fur. A small spot of red.
And the rabbit started running—no, limping!—away.
“You need to finish him,” Grandpa said.
“Huh?” I was suddenly horrified at what I’d done.
“It’s suffering! Go find it and kill it!”
Looking back over the span of time, I know that Grandpa was teaching me what a hunter needed to know. But at ten it sounded like the worst thing in the world. Find. Kill. Because I had put a bullet in a rabbit and it was still alive.
“Now!” Grandpa shouted.
Gorge rising in my throat, I ran after the rabbit.
It didn’t take long to find. It had stopped running. It lay on its side, unable to move, but still breathing. Panting.
And the eye of the rabbit, the smooth, cold, and terrified eye, looked up at me.
I froze.
Grandpa yelled, “Find it?”
Tears in my eyes now. “Yes!”
“Alive?”
“Yes!”
“Shoot it!”
Bawling, I put another bullet in my rifle.
I put the rabbit in my sights.
And couldn’t shoot. I could not shoot the rabbit that was looking in abject fear.
“Now!” Grandpa shouted.
I put the muzzle to the head and turned my own head away.
And pulled, not squeezed, the trigger.
I could not look.
I ran back to my grandfather, ashamed that I was crying, that I was no hunter. That I was a failure.
He left me there in silence, went to put the rabbit in his hunting sack.
When he got back, bless his memory, he put his arm around me and walked me to the car and said, “You did right, Michael. And you never have to go hunting again.”
Never again did I hunt.
But I’ve killed.
I CAME OUT of my memory, and saw that the rabbit was long gone.
And I was colder than ever.
The phone rang. Ira calling back.
“I’m almost there,” he said. “Where’s your car?”
“Probably being watched or handled by people with drums.”
“With what?”
“Never mind. You’ve got some work to do.”
“Paid?”
“Challenging.”
“What I figured. Over and out.”
His van pulled into sight five minutes later. I made my way down the hill and got in. Ira reached behind and grabbed a blanket, tossed it to me.
Then he said, “I’m ready for your explanation now.”
“You want the short version or the long version?”
“Long, of course,” Ira said.
I said, “I’ll give you the in between. I got set up. By a guy named Zane Donahue. Ever heard of him?”
“I don’t think so.”
“He’s of the criminal element, let’s put it that way. I went to him to get information on this bartender.”
“Which bartender?”
“The one I killed.”
Ira said, “Oh no.”
“You want the story or not?”
He was silent.
“I had to kill the bartender and another guy—”
“You what?”
My voice rose of its own accord. “It had to be done. And now I’ve got this phone, see, and we need to get into it. There’s a video, but it’s password protected.”
“We’ll get it,” Ira said. “Shall we get your car?”
“Wait until it’s darker,” I said.
“You just want to sit here?”
“For now,” I said.
“Then please tell me everything,” Ira said.
I did, starting with the awesome sauce.
BY THE TIME I finished, it was moving toward dark.
“Let’s find Spinoza,” I said. “You bring any weaponry?”
“Only my wits,” Ira said.
“I’m comforted.”
It took us fifteen minutes to work around to the road where I’d left my car. Still there. We came up slowly, lights off. Ira stopped about thirty yards away and we both watched for movement in the fading light.
Seeing none I got out and walked to my ride.
He has looked better.
His black ragtop had a mean gash and the passenger side window was shattered.
I looked in the glove compartment. The envelope with the five hundred dollars was gone.
Since I didn’t have the key, I hot-wired Spinoza and drove to Ira’s. I took a shower and got dressed in a pair of Ira’s well-worn sweats. They were tight but did the trick.
“You look like an uncomfortable sausage,” Ira said when I joined him in the living room.
“That’s exactly what I am,” I said. “A bunch of inedible humanity wrapped in a skin.”
“Inedible?”
“I killed two people today.”
“Who were going to kill you,” Ira said.
“It keeps happening.”
“You go into dangerous places, you run into dangerous people.”
“It’s not like I want to.”
“Ah, but the world itself is getting more dangerous.”
“It’s always been dangerous,” I said.
“Less so when there was a genuine fear of God in abundance. Remember, it is the fear of God which is the beginning of wisdom. So as society proceeds in the removal of that basis for moral behavior, what do you get?”
“Reality TV.”
“That, and the unloosing of man’s natural tendency toward evil.”
“Am I evil?” I said.
“Do you think you are?”
“I’ve broken the commandment, thou shalt not kill.”
“It’s actually thou shalt not murder,” Ira said. “You’ve not murdered anyone.”
“What about New Haven?”
I’d told Ira of the man I’d killed a couple of years after my parents were gunned down in that Yale shooting. The shooter was a student named Blackpoole, but he’d been turned into a killer under the influence of one Thurber McDaniels. My father, a philosophy professor at Yale, had caught McDaniels in a clear case of plagiarism. That got McDaniels kicked out. He gathered a small group of disciples around an obscure nihilistic philosophy from ancient China. My theory was that McDaniels used drugs and mind control to get Blackpoole to do his deed then kill himself. I found Thurber McDaniels and confronted him with this. His answer was to try to slice me up with a samurai sword. I knocked him out, he hit his head on a table, hard. He didn’t move. My mind on fire, I used the sword to finish him.
Only Ira knows about this.
“As your lawyer,” Ira said, “I would argue that the blow to the head killed him, making it self-defense. Even if it was the sword, that would be heat-of-passion.”
“None of that’s going to help me sleep better.”
“Which is a sign that your heart is not cold, and that you are not evil.”
“Maybe I�
�d rather sleep.”
Ira shook his head. “There are some bargains we dare not take.”
I SLEPT BETTER than I thought I would.
I woke up to the smell of Ira’s cooking. He called it shakshuka, and it made me almost believe in goodness again. After we ate, Ira went to work on cracking the videos in Kalolo’s phone.
Dressed like an uncomfortable sausage again, with a pair of old flip-flops, I made one last attempt to get to Sophie. I walked to the Argo.
The guy behind the counter was college-age and trying hard to grow a goatee, and failing.
“Help you?” he said.
“I’m a friend of Sophie’s,” I said.
He gave me a long look.
“Oh … kay,” he said.
“I’ve been trying to get in touch with her. We were supposed to get together.”
“She’s not here.”
“She doesn’t seem to be answering her phone.”
“Wish I could help,” Goatee said.
“Do you?”
His eyelids did a little dance.
“Can I leave her a message?” I said.
“Um …”
“On a piece of paper.”
Goatee looked to the side, like an actor who forgot his lines seeking the prompter in the wings.
A moment later, out from a cubicle, the owner of the store emerged. I’d seen him before, in the background. He was around seventy and looked like a man who sat a lot. He came over and stood next to Goatee.
“Can I help you find something?” the owner said.
“Sophie,” I said. “I’m a friend.”
“Ah.” He stepped from around the counter and placed his hand on my arm, turning me. I let him. He walked me to a far aisle—the self-help section as it turned out—where we could be alone.
“I know who you are,” he said.
“It’s mutual,” I said.
“It would be best if you didn’t try to contact Sophie.”
“Why would that be best?” I said.
“Trust me,” he said.
“I need more than that,” I said.
“Please, she does not want to see you.”
“She told you that?”
He nodded. “And I’d like to ask you not to come into the store when she’s working.”
“I like this store.”
“Please leave,” he said
“This is not exactly good customer relations,” I said.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
I walked out.
IRA WAS IN his wheelchair, facing the door. Like he’d been waiting for me.
“You might need to sit down for this,” Ira said.
“I don’t want to sit down,” I said, still steaming from the encounter at the store.
“Michael, I’m sorry.”
He said it like there was a death in the family.
He wheeled himself to the computer. I came up behind him.
“I’ll start it from the beginning,” Ira said. He hit a key and a video began playing.
It showed feet. Walking. The camera operator, who I assumed was Kalolo Tuputala, was following along. The lighting was minimal. Twilight. Or early morning. The pairs of feet were crunching the ground. It was sandy and rocky.
The camera stopped moving and panned up.
It was a big man with a large bag or tarp over his shoulder. We only saw his back.
He stopped and took the package off his shoulder, lowered it to the ground.
Then he turned back toward the camera.
It was Claude.
He waved at the camera to come over. As it did, he opened up the package.
The camera moved in.
On the face of Brooklyn Christie.
Acid rose to the back of my throat.
Ira put his hand on my arm.
The video went on.
Claude dragged Brooklyn into a hole.
A grave.
The video ended.
Now I sat. Heavily. In a chair by the window. Out there somewhere, the body of a dead girl I’d been hoping was alive. Out there, her father hoping the same thing. I knew how this would hit him. I’d been there, big time, double time, my parents, and all of those feelings came together inside me then, a black ball of ice-cold emptiness.
I don’t know how long I sat there staring before I turned back to Ira. He was at the computer again, looking at the monitor.
“Come look at this,” he said.
“Forget it,” I said.
“No, you need to see.”
I walked over. Ira had paused the video on a frame that had a horizon shot in it. The sky was either going to dark or dawn. There was a burnt-orange hue to it.
Silhouetted against the sky was a rock formation, something that looked like the prow of a ship.
Ira said, “There is one place that has a formation like that.”
“Where?”
“About an hour and a half from here. In the desert. A place called Vasquez Rocks.”
“You don’t think we could—”
“I’m ahead of you. Give me some time and I might be able to pinpoint where this video was shot.”
I walked out to the backyard and sat on the bench under Ira’s magnolia tree. I tried to console myself with the thought that finding Brooklyn’s body and getting it to her father would at least give him some closure.
At the same time, I tried not to think of Sophie.
I didn’t have much luck on either count.
I lay down on the bench and put my arm over my eyes.
Then I heard Ira’s voice from inside. “Michael! Let’s go!”
“VASQUEZ ROCKS,” IRA said as he drove us in his van, “is where a bandit named Vasquez used to hide.”
“Now that’s a coincidence,” I said.
Ira sighed. “It’s a park now, but the place we’re going is outside those limits.”
The traffic on the freeway heading north was light. A nice change from the L.A. norm.
“And if we find her,” Ira said, “we go to the sheriff with it. They have jurisdiction out here.”
“Keep me out of it,” I said.
“That may not be possible,” Ira said.
“Think of something. You always do.”
“Right now I’m thinking of you. Cooperating with the law is not always a bad thing.”
I looked out the window at a row of tract homes lit up by street lights.
Ira said, “You never completed your story, about what happened back in New Haven. Why you’re on the lam, so to speak.”
“Another time,” I said.
“We’ve got twenty more minutes of driving. No time like the present.”
“How ’bout those Dodgers?”
Ira sighed. We said nothing through the Newhall Pass. On the other side, a bright sun lit up the sky.
“See that?” Ira said.
“See what?”
“The sun is pumping fire. As long as the sun pumps fire, there’s hope. It’s like a beating heart.”
“You’re awfully poetic today.”
He smiled. Knowingly. I hate it when he does that. It’s like he knows something about me. He’s usually right.
IRA PULLED OFF the freeway, pointing to Vasquez Rocks in the distance. He drove a couple of miles and then turned right on a two-lane blacktop. Another mile to a dirt road. He took that until we came to a smaller road. I could tell from the look on Ira’s face that he really wanted this to work. This whole thing was a challenge for him.
I was hoping it would work for another reason. At least we could give Ray Christie his daughter’s body so he could give her a proper burial.
We veered off the road onto raw desert and stopped about twenty yards in. He opened up his laptop, looked at it for thirty seconds. “It should be here,” he said. “Let’s have a look.”
“You’re going to look too?”
“I didn’t drive all the way out here to be a spectator.” He grabbed his forearm crutches and let himself o
ut of a van.
I got out on the other side.
“You don’t have to do this,” I said.
“I need the workout,” Ira said. He made a circle motion with one of his crutches. “It is somewhere in this general area. Let’s move in opposite directions about fifty yards, then make a square of fifty. We’ll tighten it inward after that.”
I marveled at Ira’s strength as he propelled himself with the crutches along the path he had chosen. I did the same going the other way.
The desert in November is not a bad place to be. There’s a beauty to it. As long as you don’t step on the wrong creature.
The ground was all rock and sand, with one Joshua tree in the middle of the square we were marking. I could see the big rock formations in the distance. It looked like Mars in an old science fiction movie. Reminded me of when I borrowed A Princess of Mars from the library when I was a kid. And the part where John Carter is brought into this massive building where the artificial atmosphere of Mars is created and pumped out. A ray of the sun is harnessed and combined with electric vibrations. Technology is what makes life possible on Mars.
I wondered if Dr. Gary Pasfield had ever read the book. I was thinking of that little biosphere he had on his desk, growing parsley.
As I was letting my mind wander around like my feet, I heard Ira call.
“I found it,” he said.
I JOGGED OVER. He was standing next to a mound of dirt, slightly discolored. As if someone had tried to move the sand around to blend everything, but hadn’t quite made it.
We looked at each other.
“Go get the shovel,” Ira said.
This was the second grave I’d dug up in a year’s time. I was getting good at it. Not a skill you want to have, unless you’re a Marine or a method actor preparing to play the gravedigger in Hamlet. Ira told me to go gently, so I wouldn’t disturb the body.
It was dismal work. Ira has been around his share of death, much of it inflicted by himself. Other deaths falling around him. He told me once you never get used to it. You get cold, you get hard, but somewhere inside you there’s a corrosion. You may not even feel it until years later when a big chunk of your soul falls off.
I was beginning to listen to his talk about a soul. Something about that kept nagging at me.
I dug for about five minutes before I hit something hard. A rock?
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