Something for Nothing (27 page)

Martin cringed. Her theory about a potential buyer coming back was debatable—was wrong, in fact. But she was definitely right about getting away. He needed to get out of the Bay Area for a couple of days, put some distance between himself and Anderson Aircrafts, not to mention his secret life as a drug smuggler. And though he didn't want to admit it to Linda, he could probably close for weeks and no one would even notice. Business was that bad.

So they loaded up the car Friday afternoon. It was warm, really pleasant late-June weather. Somewhere in the mid-eighties.

“Look at that,” Martin said as they pulled out of the driveway. “Alan
Guthrie's working on his train set. That's a big surprise. I'll bet he's got a busy weekend ahead.”

“Yeah,” Peter said. “He's putting a new tunnel in this weekend. He's got a lot of work to do.”

Martin looked at Peter in the rearview mirror, trying to figure out if he was being sarcastic—if he was echoing Martin's own sarcasm, in other words. He couldn't tell. This had been happening more and more with Peter. He and Linda hadn't talked about it yet, but he was planning on it. “Is he actually just fucking with us?” he wanted to ask. It was a little unsettling.

They stopped for an early dinner just before Sacramento, at The Nut Tree. It had wacky theme rooms the kids liked, and a big candy and souvenir shop. But Martin particularly liked it because they had a little airstrip out back. People flew in and out all day long, and Martin liked to check out the planes. He'd actually flown the family up a couple of times for dinner. “
This
is what you call jet-setting” he'd say, and even Linda would smile. Now, though, those little dinner flights seemed like ancient history—somehow flying had lost its glamour for Martin.

They got up to the cabin around sunset, and everyone was in bed by nine-thirty. Careful to be quiet, Martin and Linda had sex. As he was drifting off to sleep, Martin thought that Linda had been right, that a getaway was just the thing.

T
HE RANCH WAS ABOUT
a half hour from the cabin, just over the Nevada state line, in Incline Village. Peter had seen a commercial about it on a local TV station first thing in the morning, and he was desperate to go.

“Dad,
please,
” he said. They were sitting in the kitchen, Martin sipping coffee and only half listening. “It's where they film the show. They've got the whole ranch right there, with their house and horses and everything. And they've got souvenirs you can get. Tin cups and stuff. Maybe we'll even see them making one of the episodes.”

Martin nodded. He knew where it was—he'd driven past the signs
a million times, and he'd always been a little curious. He'd heard that some of the episodes were filmed at Tahoe, but he knew production of
Bonanza
had stopped over a year ago. Not that the show wasn't still on TV. Peter watched the reruns all the time—especially now that it was summer, and he didn't have anything to do in the afternoon, because he didn't seem to have any friends. Martin watched it with him once in a while, if he was home early. It was always the same thing. Little Joe and Hoss and their other brother would ride their horses around, trying to keep their dad from getting upset about something. Usually it was someone rustling cattle, or a plot to steal part of their giant ranch (which was supposedly huge, half a million acres or a thousand square miles or something like that).

From what Martin had heard, some crazy guy had noticed that the pretend Ponderosa Ranch was located right where he owned a bunch of property on the lake, and so he'd started building a replica of the set you saw on TV, the one down in Hollywood. Eventually, the studio heard about it, figured it was a good idea, and cut a deal with him. Or maybe he'd approached them. Either way, money had changed hands. And so now there was a real Ponderosa Ranch at Tahoe, plus a pretty exact version of Virginia City, the nearby town where the characters would go sometimes to see the sheriff or buy dry goods or do whatever you did in town a hundred years ago.

“The Ponderosa Ranch?” Sarah asked, coming into the room. She was just out of bed—she looked tired and sleepy. “Like in
Bonanza
?”

“Yeah,” Peter said. “It's right up here in Lake Tahoe. They have tours and everything. We're going there today.”

“We are?” Sarah said, looking at Martin. “
I'm
not going.”

“Oh, come on, Sarah,” Martin said. He gave her his best version of a big smile, knowing as he did that it looked forced and unconvincing, maybe even off-putting. “It'll be fun. I promise. Maybe we'll see Little Joe. Did you know that the guy who plays him is the dad on that
Little House on the Prairie
movie we saw on TV a few months ago?”

She snorted. “Oh my God,” she said, folding her tanned arms. “No way. Count me out.”

“Hey,” Peter said. “How can he be on
Bonanza
at the same time as
Little House on the Prairie
? Aren't those two places a really long way apart from each other?”

Martin looked at Sarah, then over at Peter. Again he wasn't sure if Peter was just yanking his chain.

“Are you serious?” Sarah asked, looking at Peter. “Are you really that stupid?”

“All right,” Martin said, his voice more serious now. “That's enough. And listen, Sarah. You're going with us or no beach today. I mean it.”

T
HEY LEFT THE CABIN
at about ten-thirty. Martin had promised that they'd be back by one-thirty, so that Sarah could get some time lying out in the sun. She was obsessed about her tan, and insisted that the thin mountain air gave you a darker look, especially if you used baby oil. He doubted they'd make it by then—two-thirty or three seemed more likely—but at least he'd gotten her into the car. And she wasn't being sullen, which was nice. Peter was jabbering about episodes of
Bonanza,
and she was tolerating him. She'd watched the show plenty of times, too, and Martin could tell that she was getting curious about seeing the place.

“So is there horseback riding?” she asked at one point. “And what about the actors? Are they really going to be there?”

Martin was pretty sure that the answer to both questions was no, and in fact he was willing to bet money she'd find it boring. But he didn't care, because the truth was that he was glad to have something like this to do. It was a break from their usual routine at Tahoe, which he'd secretly begun to hate: get up, haul their crap down to the beach, and try to mix with all the other families who were doing the same thing. In some ways, of course, it was exactly the thing they'd paid for when they bought the cabin. The lake, the pine trees, the huge granite boulders (that looked as if they'd been placed by a landscaping crew, Martin often thought). What more could you ask for? He knew plenty of people who wouldn't have complained, including himself six or seven years ago.

The problem was that it felt obligatory . . . or forced. It was as if
they'd all been given a script and told to enact a family vacation and the bonding that went along with it. Worse, they weren't very good actors. They read their lines properly, but they were too stiff, there was no flow, no texture of deeply felt or genuine, in-the-moment emotion. If there were a director present (which Martin sometimes longed for, someone to be on hand and instruct him on how to have a family, be happy), he would have yelled “Cut!” and told them to try it again. “Memory-Making in Tahoe, take nine!”

What really bothered him, though, was that it all seemed to come naturally to the other families. Part of it, he knew, was that they were doing fine and had plenty of money. These were doctors and lawyers, or executives at big firms like Boeing or Wells Fargo (they were the bosses of the guys who'd turned down his recent loan request, in other words). Sure, the energy crisis was an issue, but it wasn't going to hurt them, not really. Plus, they'd inherited tons of money, anyway. They could float along for years, even without a job. They were born knowing how to inhabit the rarefied space of a resort like Lake Tahoe. When he watched Gordon Harmon's twelve-year-old daughter swim to that big raft, he could tell that she was using the long, efficient strokes and even kick of someone who'd been on a swim team for years, just as he knew that her life was filled with piano lessons, ballet, and maybe a little horseback riding.

The same went for that kid with the Sunfish sailboat. He was tall and muscular and tan, and when Martin saw him standing with his dad (getting patient and insightful instruction on tacking into the wind, no doubt), he knew that his future was secure. Someday that kid would have
his
kids up at the family cabin in Tahoe. And that kid's future family would laugh and joke and bond just like his own family did as they sat on their beach towels or big Pendleton blankets. And he wasn't going to choose a girl like Sarah Anderson for his wife. No, it was going to be someone like the Harmon girl—a person who had never for a moment questioned her place in the world.

They pulled into the parking lot at about eleven, and right away Martin felt as if he'd made the right decision.

“Jeez,” he said, as they walked along the main street of the replica Virginia City. “This is pretty cool.”

“Yeah,” Peter said, looking around. “It looks really real!”

And he was right. There was a whole series of wooden buildings that had the look and feel of the Old West. They had swinging saloon doors, balconies with wooden railings, and nicely painted signs that said things like
SILVER CUP SALOON, LIBERTY BANK, TAXIDERMIST, AND ANGIE'S HOUSE OF PLEASURE
. There was a church on one corner, and a little farther on, a big waterwheel that was connected to what looked like sluice boxes. There were old wooden wagons and buggies parked here and there along the street, and even a few horses tied to the railings outside the businesses (one or two were real horses, but most of them were made of hard plastic—though the saddles were real).

The best part was that mixed in with the still fairly light crowd were men and women in period costumes. The men were mostly gunslinger types in cowboy hats, with handkerchiefs around their necks. The women either had fluffy, brightly colored taffeta dresses and parasols, or red and black corsets and shorter skirts that showed their ankles. A couple of them were pretty cute—maybe college girls off for the summer, Martin thought.

“Hey,” Martin said to Linda. “They must be from Angie's House of Pleasure.”

“Uh-huh,” she said, giving him a sidelong glance. “Maybe you could go find out.”

Martin was about to offer a jokey response when he saw Peter wander into the
Sierra News,
and so they followed him inside. It wasn't very well lit, and it smelled like ink. There were only a few people milling around inside. After his eyes adjusted to the dim lighting, he saw that there were newspapers taped up on all the walls.

“Hey, Dad,” Peter said from across the room. “Check this out. They make newspapers in here for you. We can get our own paper made with our own headline.”

“Yeah, Dad,” Sarah said. “Listen to this: ‘Bigfoot Found Near Lake Tahoe.'”

“That's right, sir,” said a guy behind the counter. “Any headline you want, right here. Special Edition. Five dollars.” He was wearing a straw hat with a colorful band around it, and he had tiny glasses and two little black bands around his arms to hold his sleeves up—like an old-time news guy, Martin realized.

“Okay,” Martin said. “So what sort of headline should we get?”

“How about ‘Anderson Family Resorts to Cannibalism'?” Peter said.

“Or how about ‘Anderson Family Ditches Annoying Boy in Sierras'?” Sarah said.

“All right,” Linda said. “Be nice.”

They debated for a while, and finally Martin said that both kids could get their own headline, but that they had to wait a bit. “We've got plenty of time,” he said. “Figure out what you want, first. Make sure it's one you'll like.”

They were back out on the street, talking about possible headlines, when the swinging doors of the Silver Cup Saloon banged open, and one of the gunfighter-cowboy types came stumbling out into the street area. He was so close to Peter that he almost ran into him. Someone yelled at him from inside the saloon—“Hold it right there, Sampson! Hands in the air!” But then all of a sudden the guy drew his pistol, spun around, and fired a couple of shots into the saloon (or a couple of fake shots, Martin realized after a second or two). Someone inside (probably the guy who'd yelled at him) shot back, and a few seconds later two guys ran outside, blasting away at Sampson. But he'd taken cover behind a barrel, so the two guys from the saloon ducked for cover as well. Suddenly it was a full-scale shootout.
Blam, blam. Blam, blam, blam.

It was kind of goofy, but also kind of exciting. One of the two guys chasing Sampson took a bullet and did a slow roll out into the street. Then a guy came out on the balcony of the building next door and starting yelling that he was the sheriff, and then he started shooting, too. Finally, two guys with handkerchiefs over their faces came riding
up on horseback, guns blazing. Sampson (whom Martin was starting to like more and more) jumped onto the back of one of the horses, and the three of them rode away, whooping and firing their guns into the air.

It was quiet for a second, with Martin and Linda and everyone else standing there, not sure how to react. Finally someone, a fat, older man with white hair, started clapping. And then everyone seemed to realize that that was the thing to do.

“That was so cool!” Peter yelled. He was standing in front of Martin all of a sudden, looking up at him with wide, shining eyes. “Did you see that guy get shot? They totally got away!”

“Well,” Linda said. “It was really loud, anyway.”

“But weren't you surprised?” Peter asked Linda. “Didn't you think they were really shooting each other, at least at first?”