Mendocino Fire (4 page)

“N Dawg. I fucked up.”

Nate said the first thing that came to him: “It's gonna be all right.”

“Who was he hurting?” Petey was crying.

Ollie sat up, the T-shirt she slept in whiter than her nakedness would have been. “Who is it?”

“Listen to me,” Nate said. “It will all be all right.”

Back jammed against the wall, arms around her knees, Ollie said, “Is it Shug?”

“I've called the hospital like five times and they won't tell me alive or dead. I said I was his brother. I made up some Vietnamese name but they laughed—the nurse laughed. That has to mean he was awake and told them his name. If he was dead nobody would laugh, right?”

Aware of Ollie listening with her back to the wall, Nate said, “Yeah, that's a good sign. Now listen to me.”

“One of your famous plans, N? I got a plan. Mexico. Tell
Rafe so long and he was right, but then you had to go and say that thing about Shug, and Shug, man, Shug is like a father to me.” He coughed.

No longer caring that Ollie could hear, Nate said, “Shug's not like a father to anybody.”

Ollie uncrossed her arms.
Fur Is Murder.
Crossed her arms again.

“Why didn't you two fuckers hold me down?”

Nate didn't answer.

“My big mouth, shit, I'm sorry, man. That was unjust. You would've stopped me if you could, I know that rationally. I got to get going. Hey, I left the bag in your backyard.”

“What bag?”

Petey was gone.

In the five
A.M.
kitchen Shug was dabbling together a breakfast heavy on salt and lard, whisking eggs and
amen
ing the cadences of his favorite talk show host. When Nate came through the door Shug dialed down the volume—the jackal voice hectored from a dollhouse—and shook his big head in sullen wonder. “Left it right out there where anybody could come across it. Boone's been after me about buying the old truck and he could have come by. Then where would we be? Well, you. You would of still been in bed. But me, Boone trips over that bag and I'm looking at jail time. Fish and Game,” Shug added, in case Nate had forgotten who Boone worked for.

Nate barely managed not to say
Jesus, Dad, put your shirt on.
It didn't matter how used to each other they were on the boat, here in Louise's kitchen he was bothered by Shug's ribby, potent, belly-hanging nakedness, and especially by the scar between the old man's slabby breasts, the gleaming millipede that should
have been decently covered by the shirt hanging on the chair. Curious, that Shug had brought the shirt downstairs but not tugged it on over his shaggy head. Or had he taken it off when he started cooking? Though this time it was a trivial matter, Nate tried once more to figure out why Shug did what he did.

“If it was just you running the risk, I would almost agree you have the right to screw up your own life, but when your lying cheating deviousness threatens this family I can't turn a blind eye. You think I don't mean it, or that I can't handle the
Louise
on my own, or that I'll never draw the line because I'm your father, but you fucked up for good, and Ollie and the baby can stay but you've got to go. Now. Today. I don't want you spending another night under my roof.”

Nate's mind, groping, discovered not a single word of protest, and this was too bad—later he would understand that the one way he could have salvaged the situation was to get right into the old man's face. That might have worked. It might have meant their lives could go on. Much, much too late, he was to grasp the consequences of his silence and wonder why, when so much depended on it, he had not been able to come up with the straightforward
Fuck you
of a blameless man. Instead, as he had too many times before, Nate placed his faith in explanation. The problem was, his dad did not under
stand
. Look how quickly he could clear this up! “Somebody left the abalone in the yard while I was sleeping. Left them without my knowing.”

“Ah, now. Like I don't know how this world works. Like anybody would leave that bag if you weren't in on the deal. You think I never wanted to break the rules? Cheat some? But did you
ever
see me? How much do you think is in that bag? Did you count? I'm guessing—fifteen, twenty grand? You think I don't know you take divers out? A blind man could tell from the
mess you leave behind. You got your cut, and if you hadn't been drunk you wouldn't have left the bag out where I would find it. But part of you wants to screw up. Part of you always has.”

“No, Dad, this is about you. What you've been waiting for,” Nate said. “And here it is, your chance to end this, because now that Mom is gone there's nothing to keep me from hating you.”

He ducked, but then stood shaking his head, aware that nothing more would happen, now that Shug had tried to hit him. The words had come out wrong and he would have liked to explain that piece of it. He wasn't the hater. In his confusion it had come out backward. What he meant was:
Nothing to keep you from hating me.

He was almost through town, Highway 1 running between steep old false-front buildings housing four antiques stores and a used bookstore and a shoe store and an art gallery and a hardware store doomed to another day of almost no sales, when he noticed the star sparkling in the rearview, twinkling from red to blue, sharpening, fading, falling behind, his truck running good though he'd neglected to get the oil changed—well, he hadn't been contemplating any long trips, and even now he wasn't sure where he was going, except that he had an aunt he had liked when he was a kid, and she lived in a little town in Washington, Wenatchee, and that might work for a while, long enough for his dad to calm down. They could use a cooling-off period. Shug was right, Nate couldn't see him handling the
Louise
on his own, not for long, and if Nate chose a lucky evening to call, Shug would answer the phone as if there had been no fight and Nate had inexplicably taken off, leaving him shorthanded. That was exactly how Shug would play it, as if Nate was in the
wrong, and this forgiving, exasperating recognition of his dad's ability to put him endlessly in the wrong was complicated by the realization that the ricocheting red-blue twinkle was
for him
, and then as clearly as he had ever seen anything in his life he saw Shug rest his knuckles over his dark eye, recollecting the numbers of Nate's license and reciting them to the officer on the other end of the phone, and as it gained on Nate that scurrying to-and-fro light show would burn brighter and brighter and more righteously, its anger justified when Boone Salazar or whoever swung down the tailgate and dug under the tarps in the pickup bed until, aha, the goodie bag was hefted and swung before Nate's believing, disbelieving eyes, the shells within chattering like stones poured down a well except these would not be poured anywhere but held as evidence, and it didn't matter what he said or didn't say, they had the proof in the Vietnamese diver's bag, and if Petey was wrong and the man had in fact died this could get very, very bad and Nate could be gone for years, and there would be Ollie alone with their little boy in the trailer in the yard knee-deep in thistles and bindweed, and nothing Nate could do about it when Shug crossed that yard, and he would cross that yard, he'd already been crossing that yard, and with this recognition Nate was alone in icy water and it was time for him to go down and he really didn't care. It was just too bad that the end was on him before he understood his life. The end had been coming forever and now that it was here he saw no reason to object. He downshifted and pulled onto the shoulder without worrying about it because he was cradled in the shadow of his destined wave, heaping itself, its high rim a spitting, flinging banner of foam, and Nate rolled the window down and rested his face in his crossed arms on the steering wheel and waited.

“Nate.”

“Yeah.”

Boone said into the open window, “I'm gonna need to see in the camper,” and Nate said, “Yeah, okay,” but before he could get out of the truck Boone said, “Did you know that diver was a kid when you-all broke his ribs?” and Nate said, shocked, “It was not a kid,” and then, “How old?” Boone said, “Seventeen,” and then, “Well, now things get more problematic, because he's hurt pretty bad,” and Nate figured he might as well ask, “How bad?”

“He'll live.”

“That's good.”

“Well, yes it is,” Boone said, “yes it is and I'm surprised you're so damn calm in the face of important good news like this, but maybe you called to check on the kid during the night.”

“I didn't know it was a kid and I didn't call.”

“Been a night of interesting phone calls. A couple to the hospital during the night and an anonymous tip to my office a half hour ago. Christ, Nate, how could you get into shit like this, break your old man's heart?” And then: “Look, I'm gonna do something I'm bound to regret, so don't say anything and don't give me any fucking reason to think twice. Just drive.” He slapped the roof of the cab. “Just drive away.” He stepped back. “This is for Shug. Now you tell him that the next time you talk.”

In the rearview mirror Boone Salazar was backlit by alternating flashes of crimson and blue, his hand lifted in a wave, but it took an hour of dark highway, winding through the woods with no lights whatsoever in his rearview, before Nate could believe that he was free, and more miles passed before, remembering what he was supposed to tell Shug, he began to laugh, seeing the beauty of it.

David Merson, heartsore in the way of old activists, a stooped, unkempt forty-eight, leafs through his so-called love life for precedent and finds none. (Waiting in a parked car overlooking an arroyo induces introspection.) The other guys in EPIC share the leanness of long outrage, frequent marathons, and enduring luck with women, but obsession has not been good to David's relationships, his days spent tracking the toxins that bleed through watersheds, questioning children in hospital gowns printed with teddy bears, inking cancer clusters onto topo maps, bringing his peculiar skill set to bear, his milky mildness, what his second ex calls his anti-charisma, the hangdog air of bewilderment that makes even dying children strive to enlighten him, the harmlessness that glints through his wire-rimmed specs when he shakes hands with some CEO or other, except that mostly they know better, now, than to let a bigwig
sit down with David. Don't so much as nod when you pass him in the courthouse hall, they're told. Despite his scruffiness—one judge told him to get a haircut—he is sleek in pursuit, righteous, relentless, a scorner of compromise, a true believer.

Whose own luck with women was flawed, leaving him grateful for joint custody. David loves his two sons with the appalled passion of a dad whose work acquaints him with small coffins. From his right hand to the hollow of a kid's well-worn glove runs a taut thread of inevitability, the ball held aloft and displayed—
Dad, look!
In the making of a boy psyche this is the key phrase. It's David's job to arrange plenty of occasions for its happy proclamation:
Dad, look!
His rendition of
Goodnight Moon
is famous for the oinks, whistles, and cheek pops enhancing the line
Goodnight noises everywhere
. He's fed trembling white mice Coca-Cola from an eyedropper for the sake of fourth grade science, though his coworkers' connections in the Animal Liberation Front would rip his heart out and nail it to the front door—
Environmental Protection Information Center
—if they found out.

His abuse of white mice—with their teeny old-lady hands! their suffering docility!—is an unusual departure from the party line. Though they have long since abandoned ecotage, the five members of EPIC hew to the rituals of brotherhood, to their affinity-group habit of staying up until two or three, baring their souls, though they do so now under the harassing buzz of fluorescence, tipped back in ergonomic chairs, ties loosened, feet up on desks variously avalanched or anal (David's: anal) when in the old days it was shirts printed with raised fists, army surplus sleeping bags, a high-desert campfire sucked toward the moon, shooting sparks. Ice may be melting out from under polar bears, breast milk brims with mutagens, but change hasn't ever
before touched EPIC, not deeply, not at the level where they are bonded. At David's wedding last Saturday they slouched in attitudes of conscientious celebration. They kissed the bride, they told her when she was done with this loser to give them a call, they stuck orchids behind their ears, and David alone understood they were holding back, and why. Of the five of them, he was the reliable loser in matters of the heart, and the phenomenon of Jade, the fearful symmetry of teeth and cheekbones, plus the fact that she's on the other side, the sexiness of her being, basically, the enemy, can be neither assimilated nor forgiven.

The wedding's meticulously repressed question:
What does she see in him?
In his rented tux, David had shrugged, reading minds he'd been reading half his life. They could have had a little more faith, though. For a profoundly good man to find love shouldn't strain credulity. David caught himself thinking
profoundly good
and palmed his thinning fair hair in a manner Jade recognized as embarrassed or sad. She'd lifted her brows:
What's wrong?
He'd slung her over his arm, leaned in as if kissing were drinking, held her practically horizontal until people said
Aww.

But it was a moment's uncensored private felicity to have meant it:
profoundly good
.

He's earned it.

What he regrets now is not that thought but the ruefulness of his gesture, palming his hair—the mild, contrite, revisionist embarrassment—so that she'd had to lift her brows, to wonder what was wrong when nothing was.

In the arroyo a couple of wrecked trucks sail past a rusted washing machine, a listing, doorless refrigerator, tires of various sizes and degrees of rottenness, a cathedral window's worth of shattered glass and the jutting wing of a small plane. The boys
love coming here because nowhere else are they permitted such an array of dangers—prickly pear, anonymous stained underpants, rusty nails, rattlers. Actually, the altitude's too high for rattlers, but the boys reject this fact. Before he lets them out of the car, David lectures. Careful, careful, careful, the poisoned echo of small white coffins. Down in the arroyo, out of his sight, they look out for each other, a good thing for brothers to learn. They are step-mothered now, in fairy-tale jeopardy, though in taking them on Jade has shown an easy, can-do confidence. She read up on step-parenting, and it turns out that beauty figures even here, in the reconfigured family calculus, the boys defenseless as their father. Regarding love, David has always been a doubter, a holder-back, the lukewarm opposite of his passionate work self. As a husband he was often described as
just not there
, and he had accepted as deserved the amicable breakups of marriages one and two. Along came Jade: they had gazed, eaten, drunk, fucked, the usual plot, but then fucking took over, the great power of fucking had been awakened and they fucked themselves mutually transparent, fucked their way into a dazed adoration, discovering there this clandestine status in being the two of them, this insolent sexual satisfaction coexisting with the improvisational restlessness of genius, this safety, this bliss exempt from inhibition and nagging history, neither one bothering, neither needing to explain their
hasty
marriage, because it was natural to want to seal such transcendent fucking with that cultural kiss of approval, dubious though you were, otherwise, about that culture.

Crossing to the arroyo's edge, he can make out the boys' voices, and guesses they're intent on intergalactic slaughter. Lasers, viruses, dirty bombs—their games incorporate everything there is to fear. This is good for them, David believes.

“Hey Shane.

“Edmund.”

He calls the ill-assorted names—ranch hand, dandy—chosen by two of the three women he's loved and, from the hush that follows, figures he's been heard. A scrap blows by, and David stomps. This is the usual lawlessness, the regular Joe's cost-effective contempt for the environment. People find this wasteland irresistible: free dumping! Showing a perverse initiative, somebody has carted an oil drum out to the tip of this stony spur where the road dead-ends. The human love of shortcuts accounts for a lot of devastation, David thinks. The ADHD species, distracted from the story unfolding down at the level of chromosomes or up in the ozone. He releases his scrap to the wind, and it's whisked away. As if a signal has been given, more bits and pieces swirl past, the dervish blowing by, revealing that an object he had mistaken for a plank or beam sticking out of the oil drum is in fact a furled rug. It seems undamaged, and as David puts an arm around it and levers it out, a kamikaze egg carton rears up and crunches into his shoulder. He studies the oil drum's seethe: tin cans, a partially melted telephone, a doll's head trailing singed acrylic hair, a coil of filthy rope, a shirt stippled with blood, a clock, rain-fattened paperbacks, eggshells, ashes, a melee of electrical wire, a high-heeled shoe. As he works it loose, the rug dislodges a cascade of junk that tumbles along the ground, light bits scattering, heavier things rolling this way and that. Something, an envelope, wings past, nicking the corner of his eyebrow.

“—wouldn't
be
anybody.” Panting. “Left to. Operate. Lasers.”

“Wrong! Somebody lived! Cause they hid in—”

They come clambering up the slope.

“—caves—”

“—that, like, connect, a whole underground—”

“—
city
—”

Reaching the arroyo's rim, the half brothers come to a halt and stare.

Squatting, David peels back a corner of the rug. With only a few square inches revealed, the workmanship is unmistakably fine.

“Hey guys,” he says. “Look what I found.”

For a breezy minute they ponder the scene, litter skittering and dodging past. The moon catches their eye-whites. Two hours' reckless play brings out the brother in them.

“So?”

One brother's cool slides its knife blade through the bonds of pairdom.

“Show some fucking interest in what Dad found, whycantcha.”

Ordinarily, and despite the unfairness of enforcing rules in this male wilderness, David would have to deal with
fucking
. He does a quick check. Edmund does not appear hurt, only newly severed from his older brother. His eye-whites glitter. Not with boredom, either. Freshly relieved of intimacy, both boys are radiant. David gives the rug a good yank, and it thumpingly unrolls.

“Wow.”

“Wow.”

David sits back on his heels, trying and failing to understand, to account for the intrusion of marvelousness, the rug's fanatically executed geometry interrupted just at the point of frigidity by winding, organic movement, delicate leaves, impish involutions, this diversion, this near escape from paralysis part of its tale, its secret proffered with the bristling incomprehen
sible vitality of bees dancing within a hive, vision inspired by the challenge but the mind's movements tentative, repeatedly stubbed out, this agitating impenetrable beauty the work of how many nights and days, its blood reds and ominous crimsons contending with, outnumbered by, a choir of blues, azure, lapis, jay feather, baby blanket, forget-me-not, but to number them like that, to try to say what they're like, that's merely a poor, doomed attempt to domesticate them. They are gorgeous blues, and they assail peace of mind. In the center there is an oval where nothing happens, visually, and this is the indeterminate dun of animal camouflage, of a doe fading into underbrush, and what appears to be peaceful is really another wild evasion.

Edmund, at nine still sometimes playing the baby, hangs an arm around his neck. “You pulled that out of the garbage, Dad?”

“It shouldn't have been in there.”

Shane leans into David from the other side. “Why was it, then?”

“I really have no idea.” No taint of yeast or compost, no halitosis of souring milk carton, no oil-drum dankness mars the rug's dry, antique compound of
grass
,
twine
,
stone floor
.

Edmund says, “I want to see in the can.”

“Honey, there's nothing else in there, and we've talked about syringes and dangerous sharp things and how the guys handling garbage wear gloves.”

“You didn't have gloves.”

He tries a technicality and some italics, an old parenting tactic. “I wasn't reaching
down
into the garbage, the rug was right on
top
, and I carefully carefully
carefully
pulled it out.”

“Dad I really really need to see.”

Father and son go over and peer down into the oil drum: garbage. “Okay?” David says.

Behind them Shane wings stones at the drum until David says, “Cut that out.” Shane pitches a last defiant stone and the drum gives off the resonant
gong
of a bull's-eye. Edmund runs back to try to match this feat, and David decides to let them have at it, because what can they hurt? He rolls the rug up tight and improvises a kind of fireman's carry. The metal whines when the stones whang against it. The brothers have refined their aim, and as David grapples with the rug, shoving it into the car, he takes pleasure in his boys' prowess. Hunters. He's the father of a pair of slender, moonlit, stone-throwing boys: there may be no deeper pleasure on earth. He pauses to admire them. They sense this. It throws their aim off. They want to be fatherless, motherless, outcast, a savage tribe of two, their terrible prey—black, squat, stinking like a bear—moaning when it's dinged. Before they can leave this place, the spirit of the bear that the oil drum mysteriously incarnates must be stoned back to the underworld. If there were no boys throwing stones, that spirit would never have emerged from the underworld in the first place, but put a stone in a boy's fist and the old world breathes out reeky ghosts. The Pleistocene lives on in the heads of boys. In fact, three-fifths of EPIC believes that we're headed back that way: when weather chaos descends big-time and the center cannot hold, humans will regroup as hunter-gatherers. That's the optimistic view. What the other fraction of EPIC believes cannot be spoken aloud, since (David is one) they are fathers, and certain thoughts are forbidden to fathers.
Annihilation. Universal extinction
. Nestled, still tightly rolled, in the rear of the station wagon, the rug's strangeness is muted: it could be rightfully his, bought and paid for. David calls to the boys to
get into the car
but finally has to start the engine—David's own dad's long-ago threat—before the boys climb in. They're overextended, he figures, long
past the hour when they should have been freed of the intensity of their love for each other by the bleating electronic triviality of Game Boy.