by Hart Hanson
“She hates that Caddie,” I said.
“Tinkertoy believes it is haunted and malignant and that it means her harm,” Lucky said.
“That kind of statement won’t make Tinkertoy appear any saner,” Connie said. “And this back-and-forth routine you boys do? Does that work in the Army? Because to me it comes off as bobbing and weaving to obscure the truth.”
Both Lucky and I played it smart and shut up. Lesson learned. Gracias por the input, Connie.
Connie bit her lip then and looked at me, then at Lucky, then back at me. “Lawyers aren’t supposed to ask questions unless they already know the answer or don’t care what the answer is.”
“I’ve heard that before,” Lucky said.
“What happened to Darren?”
Lucky and I looked at each other and communicated in the way we have for years. We both knew to say nothing. We both knew to let the question fade away until everyone forgot it had ever been asked.
“Jesús lloró,” Connie said, shaking her head. Then to me, “¿Quién eres tú?”
“You know who I am.”
“I hate being manipulated.”
“Our Skellig is a good man,” Lucky said. “He is Trustworthy Above All.”
“Boys, I am not one of your Army buddies. I haven’t been tempered in war or forged in a Roman wilderness of pain or any other poetic violence crap. I live en el mundo real, with all the good, solid, social contract rules that we agree to abide by because we’re civilized. Unlike you, I’m normal.”
“We’ll go now,” I said, standing.
“You should do that.”
I felt my heart breaking, because even though Connie had always been clear about the eventual futility of our romance, I’d remained hopeful. What I heard in her voice now was the death of that hope.
“We should not leave,” Lucky said to Connie hotly. “We should sit here in silence until the Anger and the Distrust dissipate, and then we can speak again.”
“Like I said, I live in this world. And, Skellig, get yourself another lawyer.”
“C’mon, now, Connie . . .”
“I’m done. You’re lying to me or leaving something out, and I will not be manipulated. I’ll e-mail you a list of referrals.”
Connie left us sitting in her living room and headed for her bedroom. She shut the door on us.
“You should join her in there,” Lucky advised, “not allow these Harsh Words to harden into a Reality.”
“Let’s go,” I said. “You were right.”
“About what?”
“It’s time to get out of LA for a couple days.”
VARROA DESTRUCTOR
I follow my father down a dusty game trail that meanders along the southern side of a scrubby dry hill festooned with cartoon-looking cacti. It’s a microclimate on Rancho Pico Blanco in Big Sur, the warmest microclimate on the Central Coast, and if the hillside on our left wasn’t covered with thorns, it’d be a great place for a blanket and a bottle of wine and bouncing bare bottoms. A thought that leads me to Connie’s bare bottom, which leads me to despair, so I concentrate on the rhythms of Dad’s cowboy boots and try to exclude all other thoughts, the same coping mechanism I learned as a young grunt, boots on the ground, trying not to think about me or my buddies getting shot or blown up.
Knowing I was sleep deprived and depressed, Dad asked if the pace he was setting was good for me and I told him I was fine and he grunted, which meant he had his doubts but didn’t feel like challenging me on the subject. The old man sets a pretty fierce pace for a civilian. He’d have made one hell of a soldier if he wasn’t so wrapped up in peace and love and harmony and all the good vibes he cloaks himself in on this ranch along one of the loneliest coasts in an otherwise crowded state.
I’d pulled into Dad’s yard two hours before and sat on the hood of Three, knowing he’d seen me and my contrail of dust on the unpaved approach road from whatever ridge he was working on, and sure enough, forty-five minutes later he appeared behind the wheel of his hilariously (and continuously) modified vehicle that probably started as a Jeep CJ long before I was born. No windshield, no doors, no roof, and one seat. If you wanted to travel with Dad, you had to choose between a lawn chair placed where a passenger seat is usually found or bouncing around in the back like a sack of groceries.
When I informed Dad how (and why) Connie had dumped me both as a client and as a boyfriend, he whistled the three separate notes that make up the D minor chord. It’s Dad’s opinion that D minor is the saddest chord.
I told him that Keet might want to kill me as a way to motivate Bismarck Avila to give Keet something he wanted but also because I could connect Keet through his associates to the murder of Avila’s bodyguard. That’s when Dad whistled something a bit angrier than D minor and suggested that we hike out to his favorite, secret fishing hole.
It wasn’t until we’d crossed the winding creek seven times (Dad wading through in the knee-high rubber boots he kept in his crazy vehicle for just this reason, me jumping like Gollum from rock to log to rock) and we set our lines in the water to catch and release steelhead that I dropped the really big bomb on him. Dad listened carefully, then reeled in his line because a man’s emotional state travels along his line and into the water and he didn’t want to scare the fish.
“Michael,” he said, rubbing his eyes, “are you telling me you had absolutely no other option?”
“Not that I could see.”
“You couldn’t scare the man? Or bribe him? Or make a deal? Did you try to reason with him? Or knock sense into him?”
“I didn’t have time for any of that, Dad. He was going to shoot one of my guys.”
“You’re absolutely certain he was going to kill one of you?”
“I absolutely am.”
(I was.)
“Well, certainly it seems to me in that case you had to take him out.”
“Yeah.”
I thought Dad might cast his line back into the stream. But he didn’t. “You broke his nose with a wrench, busted his fingers, took his gun—do I have that sequence correct in my mind?”
“Yes.”
“And after all that ferocity, you still felt the need to crush his larynx? What danger was he to anyone at that point, Michael? It seems to me you should have considered more options before killing him.”
“Like what?”
“Hell, tie him up, put him in the trunk of a car, and have a good think on the matter! You gonna tell me that you had to go all the way and commit to ending a man’s life because you lack imagination?”
“Fine, Dad. Here we are. We have all the time in the world. I promise to feel really bad about killing him if between the two of us we can come up with another workable scenario.”
“I should hope you already feel terrible, Mikey.”
I did not feel terrible about killing Willeniec. (We’ve been through this, you and I.) I’d come to grips with my decision and my actions long before I slid Willeniec down that bottomless hole in a dead man’s dried-up orchard on a barren farm on the arid edge of the Carrizo Plain. I told Dad that I felt terrible, but the only truth he heard in my voice sprang from the anger I still felt that Willeniec had come to my home and hurt my people and forced me to kill him.
“Dad, the man was a sociopath and a sadist.”
“You had time to figure out his psychology but not enough time to figure out how to preserve his life?”
“Everything I’ve found out about him since has confirmed what he was.”
“When you took his life you also took away any chance he had to live long enough to redeem himself, to become a better man.”
“Or become even worse?”
“Mikey, it’s not good for you. You have to stop adding voices who whisper to you from the wind.”
Yes, I’d even told my father about the ghosts who haunt me
. We all need somebody in the world who knows who we really are.
We began the five-mile hike back, Dad letting me set the pace—but only because he expected me to talk the whole way.
“I hope you don’t intend to just abandon this Bismarck Avila fella,” he said.
“Dad, there’s nothing I can do with this task force looking at me now. Why do you think I’m here?”
“The police have fixated on him because they think he killed this corrupt cop—but that was you, Mikey.”
“Christ, Dad. What do you want me to do? Confess?”
“Only if you can’t find some other way to keep Bismarck Avila from paying the price for what you did,” Dad said.
I often wonder how my father, a tough old cowboy with a moral code, would fare as a soldier in a war zone where right and wrong and black and white are subsumed in noise and chaos and terror. Who would break first? Abel Skellig or War? (I can never imagine anything beyond a dead draw.)
“Why, after killing the man in self-defense, didn’t you call the authorities and explain your actions?”
I told Dad that at the time I didn’t know the police were aware that Willeniec was a corrupt cop. I didn’t know how many other cops might be working with him. And if I called Delilah Groopman, whom I trust, and she tried to help me, how did I know she wouldn’t get ground up by the same corrupt machine?
“Plus,” I told Dad, “I didn’t know who else was looking for those barrels and what they might do to get them. I still don’t.”
“Difficult,” Dad admitted.
“All I want is to run my little limo company, do my bit, hire some vets who need jobs. Marry Connie . . .”
I don’t know what Dad was thinking about while we walked past the wall of cactus, but I was trying to think of a way to do the right thing without getting lethally injected for killing a psychopathic corrupt cop who had every intention of shooting Ripple, Tinkertoy, Lucky, and me to get his hands on a couple of barrels of money.
Back at the house, I made dinner (hamburgers with fried eggs on top, Tabasco, raw onion on bread Mom brought Dad from Sacramento); then, before sunset, I accompanied Dad to check on one of his new enthusiasms, a collection of beehives. He had about twenty boxes up against a hillside, near one of his favorite cow pastures, tiny little humming honey factories. Dad checked each one of them, telling me about a mite called Varroa destructor that decimated beehives. Dad was trying out a bunch of different methods for fighting the mite, including synthetic chemicals like formic acid vapor (which he did not favor), powdered sugar (which he found amusing), thyme and lemon oils (which he found festive), physical methods like heat (which he found anxiety inducing due to the possibility of cooking the bees as well as the mites), and an involved method of moving the bees at crucial junctures in the honeybee and Varroa mite life cycle (which he found complicated).
It was more interesting than I’m making it sound.
On the way back to the house, we detoured up onto the ridge to watch the sun drop into the Pacific Ocean.
“There,” Dad said when it did, as though he was the one who’d overseen the whole operation.
Back at the house, Dad decided to read and listen to music, but he suggested that I get to sleep early.
“You look terrible,” Dad said. Which made sense, given that I hadn’t had more than one good night’s sleep since meeting Bismarck Avila.
When I stay with Dad, I sleep in the same room my brother and I shared growing up. Bunk beds. I fell asleep so hard it’s possible I actually expired. Something to do with the top bunk in my childhood room (a glow-in-the-dark poster of the solar system plastered to the ceiling), maybe the fine, clean air in Big Sur, maybe the subconscious reassurance provided by knowing my father was awake in the other room; or maybe it was simply lack of sleep that caught up with me. Who knows how long I’d have slept if Dad hadn’t pinched my nose shut the next morning (his tried-and-true method of waking sons for more than thirty years), thrust a tin cup of boiled, corrosive coffee into my hands, and said, “We have a problem.”
I figured Dad was going to tell me that the parasitic Varroa destructor mites had somehow overnight won the battle and overpowered all his bees, but instead he led me out of the house and across the yard past the haunted Caddie and past his modified Jeep to the root cellar that had been dug into the hillside by the original ranchers, Spaniards, before the turn of, not this century, but the one before.
Dad grunted and heaved the oak doors open.
There, trussed up with duct tape, rags tied around their mouths, lying on their sides, facing away from each other, were Mr. Tums (still in those Chelsea Boots) and X-Ray (ass hanging out). I stood there with my cup of coffee, gaping. I’d expected that Dad was going to show me evidence that pack rats or possums had found a way into the root cellar.
“Hi, guys,” I said, because literally nothing else occurred to me.
“Damnedest thing,” Dad said, in the same tone he used to talk about bees and coyotes and other minor threats to the ranch. “I turned in around midnight, but just after one in the morning I startled awake. I think what woke me was all the frogs singing and carrying on near the water hole stopped! Hell, I thought to myself, there must be a mountain lion in the vicinity.”
X-Ray did that thing that he must have learned from TV or movies where he started trying to talk through his gag.
“Trying to talk with a gag in your mouth is a TV trope,” I told X-Ray. “People don’t really do that.”
He stopped.
“But it wasn’t a mountain lion,” Dad continued. “It was these two, and now, here we all are.”
“You left out some important stuff in the middle, Dad.”
Behind his gag, Mr. Tums chortled.
“I went to check it out. I waited near the road, figuring that’s where I’d see whatever stopped the frogs from singing cross, and, sure enough, here comes the black fella there with a tiny little pistol in his hand and the young fella following along behind him with a sawed-off shotgun. I found that suspicious. You know them?”
“Yeah, I know them.”
“They here just to frighten or do real harm?”
“They’re here to kill me and probably you. I’m sorry, Dad. I didn’t know Keet got this serious this fast.”
I crossed the cellar to take a closer look. Dad had tied them up with duct tape, ankles and wrists separately, then ankles and wrists together and the strips of rag tied around their mouths. Mr. Tums had dried blood on his nose. X-Ray’s left eye was swollen shut. The two of them looked to have passed a miserable night.
“Why didn’t you wake me up?”
“You needed eight solid hours,” Dad said.
“I guess I can see you didn’t need help.”
“You gotta remember being color-blind means I see pretty good in the dark.”
“These two are usually with two other sons a’ bitches,” I said.
“There’s no one else,” Dad said. “They left their car parked a mile along the Old Coast Road, just this side of the bridge of the north fork of the Little Sur.”
“Is it still there?”
“Nope, it’s locked inside the trailer shed near the irrigation pumps.”
“Gee, Dad,” I said, “did you have to rough them up so much? X-Ray here is just a kid.”
“Well, even though they had guns,” Dad said, “you’ll notice neither of them is dead.”
Tums laughed again from behind his gag. I had to hand it to the guy—he enjoyed life in the moment.
“What do you want to do with them?”
“I don’t suppose you’d be okay with killing them and burying them under a bunch of rocks on Pico Blanco?”
“Hell, Mikey, we don’t have to bury them. We’ll tell the sheriff they were here to steal cattle,” Dad said. “It’s still legal to hang rustlers. I’ll go fetch a rope.”<
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Dad left the cellar. It wasn’t true about rustlers and hanging, but despite hanging out on Keet’s death ranch, these two were city boys and Mr. Tums stopped laughing.
COLD COMFORT
Instead of hanging Mr. Tums and X-Ray from the nearest California oak, Dad calls his buddy California State Patrol Trooper Stan Linmidis. Stan calls his girlfriend, Monterey County Deputy Sheriff Jana Isa. Both meet at the Crossroads in Carmel before driving out to the ranch to hear the story.
Jana removed the gags while Stan stood back with his hand on his weapon, wearing the serious face he wears when he’s trying not to grin. Jana Mirandized Tums and X-Ray both, put them in handcuffs, and placed X-Ray in the back of Stan’s cruiser. Stan put Tums in the back of Jana’s Charger, and then they both called their bosses with the result that a half dozen law enforcement officers showed up on the Pico Blanco Ranch to dare each other to drink Dad’s camp coffee, get some fresh air, and debate jurisdiction.
There was a lot of joking about whether or not Dad should be arrested for kidnapping and assault, which gave gullible X-Ray a bucketload of false hope. He readjusted his expectations when he complained that his rights had been violated and everybody laughed in his face. Dad gave Jana’s boss, the sheriff, a statement against Mr. Tums and X-Ray as armed trespassers, and I gave Stan’s boss, the highway patrol watch commander, a statement identifying X-Ray as the murderer of Bismarck Avila’s bodyguard and Mr. Tums as a person of interest identified at the crime scene. I provided both jurisdictions with Detective Delilah Groopman’s number as the LAPD Pacific Division investigating officer down in Los Angeles.
Mr. Tums and X-Ray were processed and on their way back to Los Angeles before I was.
Later that afternoon, as I was getting into my car to leave, Dad extended one of those old-fashioned plaid Thermos Kings full of coffee (like there weren’t six hundred Starbucks on the way back to Los Angeles).
“Dad, I’m pretty sure it’s just me Keet is after, but just in case, you gotta watch yourself. There’s no way those two followed me up here without me making them. That means Keet has your GPS.”