by Hart Hanson
“Look at you,” Dad says, “half mountain goat! Go ahead! Don’t let me hold you back.”
It’s like letting a dog off a leash, I scamper ahead so fast, showing off for Dad and myself and the universe, freer than Huckleberry Finn on a raft.
Which is why I’m the one who finds the calf and runs back to get Dad, like I’m being chased by wolves, about this close to tears, barely able to describe what I’ve found up ahead on the pasture beyond the ridge.
“Still alive?” Dad asks.
I nod, unable to speak.
Dad shrugs off his canvas backpack and digs through it for his whacking-big cowboy Colt revolver, a chunk of metal and wood he inherited from his father, a Vietnam vet turned game warden in the Sierras who was killed in a back-road hit-and-run when Dad was eighteen. That Colt is old and dependable, fair but firm, worn and reassuring.
“What happens,” Dad says, “is the coyotes find the calf and attack it, but then the mother cow comes running, scares them off, and the calf is left to die slow.”
“Its guts are hanging out.”
“Coyotes melt away until the calf dies, which is smart because, y’know, one kick to the jaw, even from a newborn calf, they’re gonna starve to death.”
“I wish those damn coyotes would die of starvation.”
“Don’t hate on ’em, Mikey. They are acting according to their nature, looking to feed their own young. It’s not good or bad. But we are cattlemen, so the coyotes are our antagonists. Big difference between enemies and antagonists. Enemies you can hate if you got the energy to spare. Antagonists you deal with respectfully.”
“You gonna shoot the coyotes?”
“Right now, it’s the calf requires shooting.”
“The calf didn’t do anything wrong.”
“You don’t have to do anything wrong to suffer.”
“I’ll do it.”
I have no idea where that came from. Dad lifts his eyebrows in surprise, but he takes me seriously, considers the offer.
“Ranching’s a hard life,” he says, “and I can use a hand doing the hard work. Shooting a calf counts as real hard work.”
Now we’re standing over the calf, the grass worn to dirt from where it’s kicking its legs and moving its head up and down, like making a snow angel in the dirt only awful and bloody. Its eyes are rolling all over the place, trying to watch us, trying to watch everything, panting and grunting. Dad hands me his father’s gun. Heavy.
“What do I do?”
“Stick the barrel in her ear and pull the trigger.”
Which is fully what I intend to do, but the calf keeps moving her head and making a desperate noise and suddenly I’m sniffling, then crying. Dad looks off along the ridge for a bit, giving me time to push back on and maybe overcome my emotions, before he takes the gun back.
“That’s okay; I’m proud of you.”
Dad places a foot gently on the calf’s neck, thrusts the gun into her ear, and pulls the trigger, and the calf stops making angel marks in the dirt and we stand there in the silence, Dad letting me pull myself together while he looks at Pico Blanco to the southeast and the fog rolling in from the ocean to the west, clouds scudding only a few feet above our heads. (If you want, you can reach up and touch them, make your fingers wet.)
He’s good that way, my old man, giving you a little time when you need it.
I tell Dad I’m sorry.
“No shame here,” Dad says. “It’s important for a man to be decisive, but that has two parts to it. Are you listening to me?”
I’m listening.
“Part one is making the decision. That should be the hard part. Take all the time you can to do that properly. Part two, taking action, that’s the easy part. You got ahead of yourself this time, is all. You put part two ahead of part one. Take your time making the decision so that the action you take is clear shallow water. Just like the German poet said.”
Dad pulls me into his leg and pats my back.
“Now,” he says, “we’re going down to the truck, get the rifle. Then we’re gonna climb back up here and head over in those ponderosa pines, and we’re gonna wait quietly until the coyotes come back to see if the calf is dead yet, ready to eat, and I’m gonna shoot them with the rifle. That’s my decision, which I will act upon without hesitation.”
“Like clear shallow water?”
“That’s right.”
I love my father and I’ve always known that my father loves me, and even when I was eleven, I knew then, as I know now, that I am one of the lucky sons who has a good father.
And I did not hesitate to shoot the lead coyote when he showed up to eat the calf he’d killed. And even though I didn’t understand it when Dad said it, I understood when I pulled the trigger and every single trigger I’ve pulled since that day.
Clear shallow water.
B!$M@R©K!
I open my eyes to the sight of celebrity skateboard mogul, rap figure, and TV reality star Bismarck Avila mean-muggin’ me from the doorway of my hospital room. You know Avila (you’ve seen him thirty feet tall on billboards, selling sneakers and aftershave and wet suits, hats and watches, etc.). Avila eyeballs me in full-on showbiz street mode (serious business, no flashes of humor because life’s a struggle skating these hard streets while copyright protected). The second he catches my eye, Avila glides into the room, compact, well muscled, smooth, weird pale-green eyes in a burnished mahogany face under well-coiffed and highlighted short dreads. Only twenty-six years old, famous for more than half his life for his abilities on a skateboard and with a microphone, for his rampaging sex life, for feuds with other skateboarders and rappers and athletes, for fronting a surf-rap-punk band, and today, I assume, for being the target of a high-profile, bungled hit that killed his bodyguard.
None of those pressures showed on Avila’s calm, famous face. He wore black linen pants with panic-blue unlaced basketball shoes, a skintight sleeveless white T-shirt with Buddha smoking a doobie on it (which I doubt is historically accurate), and some kind of multicolored Laplander tasseled wool cap because, you know, LA is freezing this time of year unless you go outside. I could see a police guard out in the hallway. Obviously, Delilah wasn’t going to just let me go. I was officially detained for questioning.
You know Bismarck Avila’s story: half-German half-Mexican gambler falls in lust with an African American escort/stripper, she gets pregnant, Dad gets murdered during an altercation after an illegal dogfight, leaving little Bismarck and his crackhead mother to bounce around a series of motel rooms and boardinghouses in and around Lennox. But the kid is gifted and determined and practices his street kicks and airs and grabs, kickflips and lasers and shuvits, all night until he gets discovered in an underground skateboard video sold on the Venice Boardwalk.
Two years later, in a big upset, fourteen-year-old Bismarck Avila wins the X Games for the first time; a year after that, he’s an emancipated minor living high on sponsorship. Mom dies ugly during a rape and young Bismarck Avila (now more a brand than a human being) stars in a salacious reality show, which was mostly about a barely legal kid hooking up with models and porn stars; he turns twenty-one and uses his TV money to form his own skateboard company (B!$m@R©k! with two exclamation marks and a dollar sign and other symbols instead of letters!), specializing in clothes, skate and surf accessories, videos, and condoms with street cred.
And now here he was, standing in the doorway to my hospital room, bottleneck in his fist.
“What I got here is a twenty-five-hundred-dollar bottle of Scotch.”
Tsunamis of light flooded through my window. I’d slept the night through; it was morning.
Sunday.
“What time is it?”
“I don’t tend to know shit of that nature.”
“You don’t tend to know shit like the time of day?”
“Trivial, brah.”
I had to pee, so I got to my feet and wobbled toward the can. I thought I did all right, considering I hadn’t been upright for well over twenty-four hours.
“Jesus, ass hanging out,” Avila said.
I shut the bathroom door on him. I heard him ripping shrink-wrap off the plastic cups on my bedside table. By the time I emerged, he’d poured two stiff drinks. He toasted me and tossed his back, tossed mine back, then poured us each another.
Maybe the strain was catching up after all.
“Drink up,” he said. “What’s the matter with you?”
“Relax. I’m not going to sue you.”
“Sue me?”
“Your bodyguard assaulted me.”
“C’mon, brah! It was a confusing sequence of events.”
“I’d appreciate it if you told the police I wasn’t working with the kids who tried to shoot you.”
“I want to hire you full-time.” Avila said it like he was bestowing the Nobel Prize for wonderfulness along with a plastic cup holding three fingers of twenty-five-hundred-dollar Scotch. Do the math. Fifty bucks a swallow.
“Drink up,” he said, pounding back his third.
“I don’t drink,” I lied like a lying-dog liar.
“You seriously gonna allow a man to drink by himself after he offers you the best job you ever gonna get offered in your whole life?”
“You seriously gonna talk about yourself in the third person?”
“You think I don’t know what that means. Bismarck Avila knows exactly what third person means.”
Okay, so he had a sense of humor. Still, I knew who this guy was at the core because I’ve met a version of him in every village I ever fought for hearts and minds in, every street corner and marketplace anywhere I’ve been deployed. Bismarck Avila was a thin-skinned showboater who does whatever it takes to be the center of attention and get his way.
Which meant this conversation was not destined to end happily.
“Thanks, but I already got a job.”
I put down the Scotch, leaned against the edge of my bed, and watched Bismarck Avila come to grips with someone not doing what he wanted the second he wanted it.
“You never even gonna ask how much I pay?”
“Thanks for the Scotch,” I said. “Somebody tried to kill you, so my advice is stay home until the cops get a handle on that.”
“Cops escorted me here,” he said. “I got cops up my ass. What job you already got? You mean that played-out limo company?”
I nodded. I reeled but did not pass out. Let the healing begin.
“I’ll buy your shit,” he said. “Three limos, three full-time employees, handful of freelance drivers, half dozen vans and trucks you lease out for airport shuttles and moving day and shit.”
Avila seemed very well informed—aside from the fact that he had less than a clue about what he was in for when it came to Tinkertoy and Ripple.
“That shit’s barely a company,” he continued. “You know what’s a company?”
“Bismarck? With exclamation points and dollar signs and symbols all over?”
I envisioned O@$!$ L!mO $eRv!©e$ on the sign above our bays and felt aggrieved.
“My company’s not for sale.”
Avila drained his Scotch and crumpled the cup, then said, “My bodyguard who died, his name was Brian. His brother Chris is grieving the loss heavy, y’know? Twins. Tight.”
Brian and Chris were not the names I’d have guessed. More like Goliath and Gargantua.
“Depending what Chris tells the police,” Avila continued, “you come off as either a hero or a suspect.”
“You mean depending on what you tell Chris to tell the police.”
Avila shrugged and downed another two ounces of Scotch.
“If you want a limo company so bad, go ahead and put one together yourself. It doesn’t take much. A few cars. You can afford that, right?”
“Hells yes, I can afford that.”
“Then why do you want my company?”
“None of your business why I want what I want.”
“My business isn’t for sale.”
Avila stood, pointed at the bottle. “Keep that for yourself.”
“No, thank you.”
One thing most soldiers get good at, dealing with officers, is making thank you sound like fuck you.
Avila blinked. I don’t guess lifestyle megamoguls hear even a polite fuck you every day, much less twice in a row, much less from a mere driver.
“Bismarck Avila your real name?” I asked. “Sounds made-up.”
“Look me up,” Avila said, peeved at me for the first time. I must have touched some sort of pride nerve there, not knowing enough about him. Avila tossed the Scotch into the waste can and left.
As soon as Avila was gone, a nurse stuck his head in the door and asked, “Are you ready for your next visitor?”
“Only if my next visitor is a beautiful lawyer.”
“Depends on how your tastes run, I guess,” he said, “but he looks okay to me.”
The nurse disappeared from my doorway and a few seconds later, Lucky entered the room, gazing around himself sadly and itching his ear with a carefully placed little finger.
“No, no, no,” I said.
“Apologies,” Lucky said.
Lucky’s real name is Luqmaan Qadir Yosufzai. He was born and raised in the Herat Province of western Afghanistan about a yard from Turkmenistan. Qizilbash Tajik on his mother’s side and Hazara on his father’s, raised Shia, it’s no wonder Lucky learned to survive at a very young age. Handsome but diminutive in that way where people think he’s a yard or two farther away than he actually is, Lucky is a living optical illusion, a fact that he maintains has saved his life on multiple occasions. Lucky was my interpreter when I worked with the anti-Taliban forces in Afghanistan. I smuggled him into the States after his last deployment before Taliban sympathizers or Aimaqs or Balochs or other Sunnis could string him up on a power pole and chuck rocks at him until he died. Lucky speaks Dari, Farsi, Urdu, Pashto, English, Hebrew, Russian, and French. He lives only for women, doesn’t care about men unless the man is a guest in his home. Lucky’s an observant Muslim mostly because he’s deeply invested in the prophet Muhammad’s promise of a heaven devoid of men. He watches all-female sports on TV (golf, diving, figure skating, volleyball, tennis, basketball) and he’s excited by the fact that female jockeys are finally making inroads in the sport of kings. Lucky despises sexism in every form except leering. I know I can trust Lucky with my life because I’ve done it plenty of times and come out on the other side with soul parts and meat parts properly conjoined.
“How’s your noggin?” Lucky asked, working, as always, on his dated colloquialisms.
“I left five voice mails for Connie. Because I need Connie. Because Connie’s a lawyer.”
“Yes, and Connie in turn called upon me to Convey Unto You a message.”
“What message?”
Lucky extended an Oasis Limo Services ball cap. “May I offer this so that civilians don’t Gaze Upon You and vomit?”
Although Lucky speaks English without any discernible accent, he rattles along in a kind of Victorian cadence that suggests he is capitalizing certain words in his head as part of his translation. (Like Winnie-the-Pooh or Henry James.)
“You and I are both civilians now, Lucky. Everybody around us is a civilian. We live in the civilian world and I need a lawyer.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m a person of interest in a murder. Which is why I need a lawyer, not an interpreter.”
“Yes, I see, but Connie has sent me in her place with a message.”
“Let’s have it.”
“Connie contends that you Labor under the Mistaken Impression that confer means the same as fuck.”
“Connie never c
urses.”
“I Divined the Hidden Subtext from the Vigor with which she declined to attend your summons.”
“That’s a lot of vigor.”
“As you are aware, Skellig, I myself have enjoyed Sexual Relations with Many Women,” Lucky said. “Dozens, approaching hundreds, yes, hundreds of women, including lawyers . . .”
I rubbed my eyes, wondering if Lucky was working himself up to quote the Koran, the Upanishads, or Oprah Winfrey. Lucky is a man who gathers his wisdom wherever it finds him.
“. . . but never my own Personal Solicitor,” Lucky said, “because I possess a Keen Intelligence. Because it’s important to keep a Professional Distance when Serious Legal Matters are at stake.”
“Connie and I are just friends now, Lucky.”
“Friends with Occasional Benefits.”
“Very occasional. Christmas. And I ruined even that by telling her I loved her with all my heart.”
“Perhaps Connie is under the impression that you are using this Current Imbroglio only in an attempt to have sex with her.”
“Yeah, I got that.”
“You pay me to advise you.”
“I pay you to drive a limo.”
“Indeed,” Lucky said, “I have fetched Number One from where you abandoned it in the alley—”
“I didn’t abandon One; I got sucker punched.”
“Nevertheless, One is outside and Readily Accessible. Would you like to Make a Break for it?”
“Yes. Great idea. Let’s do that,” I said. “Because what I really need right now is to overpower the cop out in the hall and then be in a televised car chase with an illegal Muslim alien from Afghanistan named Luqmaan Qadir Yosufzai.”
“Ah, sarcasm.”
“Go back to Connie. Tell her this isn’t a parking ticket or any kind of excuse. Tell her I’m a yard from being wrongfully indicted on statutory homicide charges and I really need her as a lawyer.”
“I will not return without her,” Lucky pledged, backing out of the room. “As ever, I will be the Instrument of your Salvation.”