by Jon Land
“The last person to call me ‘child’ was a priest back home in Venezuela,” he picked up.
Madam Caterina seemed to look at him differently, as if suddenly seeing someone else seated across from her. She reached across the table and grasped Paz’s hands in hers, kneading them. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”
He resisted the temptation to pull his hands away. “Yes.”
“And you witnessed it, you watched him die, this priest,” Madam Caterina said, eyes straying off Paz as if surprised by her own words.
“Right again.”
“He was murdered. He was carrying something at the time. Two bags. He was walking back to the church with them. Something to eat.”
“Bread,” Paz said, louder than he’d meant to.
Madam Caterina looked into his eyes and something changed in hers. “Oh.”
“What?”
“You should leave,” the psychic said, letting go of his hands and pulling away.
“We haven’t finished.”
“We haven’t even started, and we’re not going to,” Madam Caterina said, rising to her feet in an unspoken signal for the giant across from her to do the same.
But Paz stayed in his chair, his knee knocking up against the underside of the plank table. “You answered my question.”
“You didn’t ask me one.”
“I meant about you being a fake. You’re not. You’re the real thing. That must’ve been what brought me here. Back in the La Vega slum where I grew up, the people thought my mother was a bruja, a witch. She had visions, saw things that weren’t there. For a long time I thought she was crazy.”
Madam Caterina sat back down. “What changed, child?”
“A few years later, I found her crying when I got home. She knew what I’d done.”
“You killed the man who shot the priest.”
“He had it coming.”
“You did it with a knife, his knife, a knife you still carry.”
“How do you know all this? Who told you?”
“Would you like to speak to your mother?”
“I speak to her all the time.”
“You talk, but you don’t hear what she’s got to say. She’s here now. Do you have something to ask her?”
“No,” Paz said, his voice taking on the sheepishness it always had in his mother’s company as a boy, because he knew he could never lie to her. She could always tell and would scold him with her eyes that could pierce his soul.
“Then what did bring you here … Mo?”
“That’s my mother called me. Short for Guillermo.”
“I know. She just told me.”
Paz suddenly felt very cold and realized he was trembling, an entirely foreign sensation for him. “I’m not the same person I became after killing the man who murdered my priest. I killed a whole lot of people after that—in service to my country, I told myself, but mostly because I enjoyed it.”
“Your mother says as much,” Madam Caterina told him. “But she also agrees you’re not that man anymore.”
“You don’t even know me.”
“Your mother does, and those were her words, not mine. You sure you don’t want to talk to her? Maybe about these other paths you’ve taken in search of the truth?”
Paz found himself leaning forward, his chair creaking from the strain. “I audited college classes for a while, but that didn’t work out too well. Then I tried teaching English to Mexican immigrants, but that worked even worse. I always end up back with my new priest at the San Fernando Cathedral near Main Plaza. Thought I was done seeking my answers elsewhere, until I showed up here.”
Madam Caterina seemed to study Paz briefly, then looked down at the plank table. “You came to this country to kill,” she said, eyes remaining poised that way. “And you’ve done plenty more killing since, but not toward your original purpose in coming.”
Paz nodded, even though she wasn’t looking at him.
“Toward a different purpose entirely.” Madam Caterina looked up but squeezed her eyes closed. “I see a woman wearing a badge.”
“My Texas Ranger.”
“She’s the one you came here to kill. I see you both with guns, aiming at each other.”
Paz couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “That was a long time ago. I look in the mirror now, I see an entirely different man looking back. Still a work in progress, though.”
“How’s that?”
“I want to see in my eyes what I see in my Texas Ranger’s.”
“And what’s that?” Madam Caterina asked, her tone different, the otherworldly forces that had grabbed her ear likely quieting themselves to listen as well.
“I don’t know. I’m still working on that, too.”
“Now you find purpose in being her protector, in searching for the light you see in her eyes, Colonel.”
Paz found himself taken aback again. “How’d you know that?”
“Know what?”
“That I was once a colonel. My Texas Ranger calls me that.”
“You didn’t tell me?”
“No.”
“Someone else did, then. Your mother maybe. Wait,” Madam Caterina signaled. “Something’s wrong.…” Her eyes sharpened. “Does this Texas Ranger have children, a son?”
“Yes and no. Two boys.”
“One’s in trouble. Danger,” Madam Caterina corrected quickly. “She’s going to need you.”
“My Texas Ranger?”
Madam Caterina nodded. “And this boy.”
Paz started to rise, when Madam Caterina clamped a hand on his forearm from the other side of the table. He’d been captured by antigovernment rebels back home in Venezuela once, manacled to a tree while they tried to figure out what to do with him. That’s what the woman’s grasp felt like—a steel manacle fastened over his flesh, squeezing tight enough to shut off the blood flow until his fingers went numb.
“Wait,” she said again, “there’s a light, a strong light, a blinding light. Everywhere at once, swallowing everything.”
“A nuclear blast maybe,” Paz reasoned.
“In my experience, it’s more likely metaphorical, the strong light a sign of something that’s coming.”
“In my experience,” Paz told her, as she finally released her grasp so he could rise as tall as the single light fixture dangling from the ceiling, “they’re the same thing.”
PART TWO
One Ranger who has come to epitomize the Ranger service of the early 1900s was Bill McDonald, captain of Ranger Company B. One reason McDonald is still so well known today is that he had a knack for hard-boiled talk.… Perhaps less known is McDonald’s statement to a large mob that confronted him as he left a jail with two prisoners in custody. “Damn your sorry souls!” growled McDonald as the men surged forward, intent on hanging the prisoners in his custody. “March out of here and get away from this jail, every one of you, or I’ll fill this yard with dead men.” The mob quickly dispersed.
—Jesse Sublett, “Lone on the Range: Texas Lawmen,” Texas Monthly, December 31, 1969
12
NEW YORK CITY
The bright light shining on the stage kept Calum Dane from seeing the protester storm down the aisle and yank off his own leg. The move had the look of a performance to it, slapstick comedy maybe, until Dane saw that it was a prosthetic leg he was now trumpeting over his head like a flag, while the audience hooted and hollered.
“You did this to me, Mr. Dane!” the young man yelled up toward the stage, holding the leg still to keep himself from falling. “You just said you’re in the business of giving back. How about it then, sir? Give me back my leg!”
Dane cupped a hand over his brow to shield his eyes from the lighting. He’d taken the stage just a few minutes earlier, the wires of the lavalier microphone threaded up under his shirt to emerge at his lapel like a clipped-on insect. He’d straightened it one last time in the mirror before he’d taken the stage. His own expression stared back at him, Dane amazed by how lit
tle different he looked from year to year. His coarse black hair showed barely a touch of gray, and his skin tone held just enough color and leathery stitching to capture his rough-hewn spirit and experience as a mere boy working farm fields and offshore oil rigs before he owned a damn thing.
Now he owned lots of things, though not this ballroom, where he’d taken the stage to give the keynote address to his company’s shareholders and was greeted with hoots, hollers, and boos. Dane had just managed to get the audience to simmer down, just a few catcalls about the lawsuits and controversies in which Dane Corp was embroiled stubbornly shouted his way, when the kid holding his leg hopped up the center aisle, much to the angry crowd’s delight.
“I’m glad to see we’ve got a packed house today, ladies and gentlemen,” he said to the cluster of faces and frames squeezed into the hotel ballroom’s tightly packed chairs, the shareholders he’d made rich who’d booed his entry. “And I appreciate the opportunity to address you, although I wish I could do it one stockholder at a time to better explain how Dane Corp is affecting, sometimes dramatically, your everyday lives.”
He paused long enough to meet as many stares as he could, doing his best to ignore the smattering of fresh boos that resounded, and to ignore the one-legged young man at the same time.
“You sleep on mattresses treated with a Dane Chemical solvent to repel bedbugs,” Dane continued, his long legs aching from standing for practically two days straight doing damage control. “You drive cars made safer by the new air bags Dane Technology invented. You talk on phones and communicate on the Internet more clearly and safely because of Dane Advanced Electronics. The food you eat costs less because of the advances in farming made by possible by Dane Petrochemicals and Dane Pharmaceuticals. We are in the business of giving back—primarily to you, our shareholders.”
“Then give me back my leg!” the kid yelled up at him, and the crowd roared with delight, cheering and applauding as he waved his prosthetic lower leg in the air at the foot of the stage.
He was probably in his midtwenties but his long, shaggy hair and soft, buttery features made him look young enough to pass for high school. Almost immediately, dark-suited members of Calum Dane’s private security force stormed down both aisles. But Dane held them back with a simple gesture of his hand while he moved to the front of the stage to address the protester personally, seeing the headlines that would surely result if he let his security team have its way.
“What’s your name, son?”
“Brandon McCabe.”
“How’d you lose your leg, Brandon?”
“You took it from me. And I’m not your son.”
Dane crouched in front of the protester so they were face-to-face. “By me taking your leg, I assume you’re referring to the unfounded claims that one of our pesticides caused cancer.”
“It’s not unfounded. This is living proof of that,” the young man added, addressing the crowd more than Calum Dane as he pumped the air with his leg. “My epithelioid sarcoma is living proof of that.”
“Not according to a joint investigation conducted by the EPA and FDA.”
“Bullshit. And that’s what the investigation amounted to: bullshit.”
“I’d ask you to watch you language, young man.”
“You didn’t ask me if I wanted to get cancer. There was no warning label on whatever it was that gave it to me, just all those reports I read later about people getting the same or similar disease, all linked to a pesticide your company produced.”
“And that has now been removed from the market on a purely precautionary basis. We take our role and our responsibility at Dane Corp seriously, son.”
“I’m not your son.”
“No, you’re not; my boy died serving in Afghanistan. If he’d lived he’d be about your age now. A land mine took his leg, too, along with pretty much everything else.”
“Shit happens, man. I should know.”
“It happens to everyone,” Dane said, stopping short of mentioning his other son, who a court order prevented him from seeing. “And Dane Corp is in the business of making sure it happens less. You may not believe this but, thanks to us, your food is safer than it’s ever been. When you travel, you’re safer than you’ve ever been. And if, by chance, you work around hazardous or toxic materials, you’re safer because of the improvements we’ve made in the protective gear you wear. We are in the business of making your life better.”
“Not all the time,” said Brandon McCabe.
13
NEW YORK CITY
Dane stood back upright and moved to address the rest of the crowd, turning his back on the kid who was becoming a royal pain in the ass.
“You can’t ignore me!”
“Yeah, yeah!” parts of the audience barked, supporting Brandon McCabe, as more boos and catcalls echoed.
“I’m not, and I’m not going to ignore you, either,” Dane told the audience. “You know the two most valuable commodities on the planet? Food and water. Maybe not now, or in the immediate future, but soon, and for the rest of our lives.”
The crowd quieted a bit.
“If we can’t find better, more efficient ways to grow food, as much as half the world’s population will be starving before the end of this century. Think about that. And think about this: on average, a quarter of crops worldwide are currently lost to pests, mostly insects. Eliminating the loss of that twenty-five percent would be enough on its own to reduce hunger and starvation by half.”
Dead quiet now; not a single sound of protest resounding.
Dane seized the moment to swing back toward the protester, his big hips swiveling so suddenly, and the motion so abrupt, that the young man lurched back from the stage and almost fell over.
“This young man, Brandon here, believes that our efforts in that regard made him sick, even though there’s nothing to scientifically back up his claims. But it’s still enough to make lesser companies think twice about the risks they’re taking and rethink their priorities. Not so at Dane Corp. At Dane Corp we know the ability to succeed comes from not being afraid to fail. We take risks so you can enjoy the fruits of our labors in your wallets and the world can enjoy them in their next meal, next fill-up, next doctor’s checkup, or next drink of water. Our goal is to leave everything behind better than it was when we found it. That includes the environment.”
Calum Dane stopped there. He could see the attention of the audience was still rooted on the young man now standing on one leg with his prosthetic leg tucked under his arm. Dane never had a chance today. All the great news he had to report on increased profits and the bottom line of Dane Corp fell on the deaf ears of investors, some of whom had seen triple-digit returns on their original investments.
Maybe he should show them the scar on his back from when a well cap blew out into it. How about the nose that was still bent, and the capped teeth, from when a horse he was trying to break to earn money as a teenager kicked him in the face? Or the cigarette burn marks left on his arm during one of his drunken dad’s rages about the unfairness of the world. His old man had beaten him good, and Dane was convinced that, in the end, it had toughened him up and helped define all the success he’d achieved. Who could blame him, then, for taking a belt to his own boy, the younger, ne’er-do-well one, who needed it more than mother’s milk?
Apparently, lots of folks, including his wife, who’d now won full custody—awarded it by a pissant judge who would’ve fit in just fine among the collection of commoners squeezed into the chairs before him, who thought Calum Dane was somehow beholden to them.
Didn’t they know he’d started with nothing? Grew up dirt poor, the son of migrant sharecroppers who moved from shack to shack wherever and whenever they could find land to work? Calum Dane had never spent a full year in the same place until high school, had gotten used to lugging his records home under his arm when the time came to hand them over at whatever school came next.
What would these people think if they knew how other kids had
made fun of how he smelled, or that day’s clothes, dirtied by yesterday’s work in the field after he got back from school? He’d pick or plant, hoe or rake, dig or flatten, all the time imagining himself as the person giving the orders instead of taking them. He’d saved every penny he’d ever earned, starting back then, to buy a whole bunch of Texas land everyone else thought had been bled of oil. Dane had bought the land for pennies on the dollar, the owners walking away figuring they’d just conned a big, dumb hick. Then, not long after, both slant and horizontal drilling came into vogue, and those thousands of worthless acres laid the foundation for all his success and the basis of his fortune.
What had Brandon McCabe done, besides lose a leg to cancer? And what was Dane supposed to do about it? He’d already withdrawn the pesticide in question from the market, replacing it with one that came with a significantly smaller profit margin to the point where he was actually losing money by doing everything he could to keep families like the one-legged kid’s fed. Calum Dane wished he’d lost his tongue instead, pictured himself yanking it out of Brandon McCabe’s mouth with a pair of pliers.
“Who of you out there can feel their bellies rumbling with hunger?” Dane heard himself asking the audience, unsure himself where this was going when no hands went up, as expected. “Nearly half the world would be raising their hands now. At Dane Corp we are committed to eradicating hunger.”
A smattering of applause followed his thinly veiled stab at self-justification.
“We are committed to making food more safe, wholesome, and plentiful than it’s ever been before.”
A slightly louder ripple of applause.
“And at Dane Corp, as you can find in that prospectus I can see lots of you holding on your lap, we are committed to doing all that while still making our investors money in the process.”
Much louder applause, even a few cheers.
“So, folks, this may seem like no more than a shareholders meeting, sure. But it’s actually plenty, plenty more than that. Because you are Dane Corp. And when we do good by the world, you do good by the world. Think about that the next time you open a dividend check, and remember that money came from doing good, from putting more and better food on the table, cheap and better oil in your tank, and energy to run this big world that’s plentiful and cheap, too.”