Wrack and Ruin

by Don Lee

  “You weren’t supposed to be here until tomorrow,” Lyndon said. He took a sip of the whiskey and grimaced.

  As Woody spun off an explanation for his early arrival, his brother scowled and frowned. He appeared lean and tan. Woody supposed farming did that for him. Lyndon had gotten the looks in the family, a long, strong face with wavy hair that he had kept on the longish side. Woody’s features were round, the classic big Korean head and pancake face. His hair was maddeningly straight, and his body naturally tended toward lumpy, which he had to curb with several torturous hours a week with a personal trainer. But at least he knew how to dress. Lyndon was wearing jeans, work boots, and a T-shirt that might have once been green but was now blue. Woody was, as usual, sharply garbed in a Hugo Boss suit, Paul Smith shirt, and Prada shoes.

  “You could have called and given me some warning,” Lyndon said.

  “I tried. You never pick up the phone. You don’t have voice mail or a machine.”

  “I disconnected it last week.”

  “Why?” Woody asked, knowing why but pretending not to.

  Lyndon didn’t answer, saying instead, “How’d you drive in, anyway? The gate was locked.”

  “I went around, through that little creek ditch. I have a Range Rover—six-speed, four-corner air suspension, and electronic traction control. It can roll through anything. You have a funny idea about security. All those KEEP OUT signs, the gate, you don’t want any calls, but the doors to your house are wide open. You don’t lock anything. What’s going on? Who are you trying to avoid?”

  “Woody, I told you this isn’t a good time to visit,” Lyndon said. “It’s one thing for you to be here, but bringing along Mrs. Bruce Lee…”

  “She’s quite famous, you know. This movie’s going to be an international blockbuster, like nothing you’ve ever seen. Art-house noir meets Hong Kong cinema. It’ll be groundbreaking. It’s going to crossover a ton of markets. You’ve heard of the director Dalton Lee, haven’t you? There Once Was a City? He got the Audience Award at Sundance last year.”

  Lyndon shook his head. “I don’t see a lot of movies,” he said.

  What a miser, Woody thought. How miserly and mean and hateful of Lyndon not to give him an inch of encouragement, a charitable little pat-pat way-to-go, just the slightest recognition, the tiniest acknowledgment, that Woody was doing well finally, that he’d rebuilt his life, that he’d rebounded from the lowest of the low—God, he’d been down so low—and he was thriving now, doing something important, something creative. “Don’t you think it’s ironic,” he said to Lyndon, “that we both ended up in the arts?”

  Lyndon gave him a long irritated look. “You’re staying the entire weekend? With her?”

  “Would it put you out that much? You’ve got four bedrooms,” Woody said. “Come on, we’re supposed to be nice to each other.”

  They’d barely seen each other since that afternoon in the Boston courtroom when he’d been given a miraculous reprieve—unsupervised probation and fines instead of prison for the multiple charges of fraud and embezzlement he’d faced. The deal with the prosecutor had been contingent on full restitution, with interest, to his clients, and his parents had emptied out their life savings and taken out a second mortgage so he could pay back the money he owed. Thereafter, Lyndon, who’d advised their parents against bailing Woody out, had refused to have anything to do with him. Their sole encounter—silent, at that—had been at their father’s funeral nine years ago. But then, last summer, their mother was ailing in the hospital, and she had gotten Woody and Lyndon to gather at her bedside, and she had implored them to reconcile. Once she had secured that promise, she had promptly recovered, bouncing back to a life that was far more active than ever before. She was, in fact, at that very moment, on a seniors’ bicycle tour of Tuscany.

  Woody looked at Lyndon. He had his fingers in his mouth, checking his teeth. Woody was almost two years older than his brother, but for so long, he’d been relegated the younger sibling, suffering Lyndon’s condescension and disdain. How everything had changed. All through their childhood in Watsonville, seventy-five miles southeast of Rosarita Bay, Woody had been the overachiever, excelling academically, scoring a perfect 1600 on his SATs and getting into Harvard, while Lyndon, ever the dreamer, slacker, pothead, freak, barely squeaked into a no-name arts college in Maine that was practically a vocational school. Woody had been studious and disciplined and ambitious. He had worked at Credit Suisse First Boston, gotten his Series 7, and set off on his own as a financial planner. Lyndon, meanwhile, after a year on a commune farm where, predictably, he had grown marijuana, moved to New York City and became famous. Lyndon, who as a kid used to sit for hours over the same sheet of paper, a piece of charcoal in his fist, running it over and over in rectangles until the entire paper was blackened. Lyndon, who they used to worry was autistic. He became the toast of the art world, Lyndon did, his sculptures—these beastly, incomprehensible junk piles he’d weld together from scraps he found in dumpsters and vacant lots—selling for tens of thousands of dollars. He dated supermodels and appeared in a Gap ad. He was voted one of People’s Top 50 Most Beautiful People.

  The inequities of the world had outraged Woody. Perhaps, he conceded, it was partly jealousy that had led him to over-extend himself. He made a few strategic mistakes, a few disastrously bad plays in the market from which he could not recover, and he had been forced to fudge a few earnings reports. Soon, he found himself in something akin to a Ponzi scheme, making impossible guarantees to new clients in order to appease the demands and inquiries of old clients, who had included his parents. He didn’t do anything blatantly illegal (or so he believed), just dumb and unethical. He lost everything—his securities licenses, his house, his fiancée, his good, hard-earned life.

  At least he hadn’t squandered his opportunities like Lyndon had, walking away from the art world at the height of his career. For what? To become a Brussels sprouts farmer, like some back-to-the-land tree hugger? To live in this musty house in this little howdy-doody town?

  The house was neat and reasonably clean, but there was a clammy feel to it, the smell of mildew and mold, the vague whiff of decay. All the furnishings were a combination of Arts and Crafts and country casual, with lots of dark woods in the wainscoting, floors, and built-ins, mixed with knobby light oak chairs and pine tables and floral-patterned upholstery that was incipiently threadbare. Most unexpected were the antique plates, bottles, and bric-a-brac lining the shelves and mantel, and the framed watercolors of birds hanging on the walls. None of it seemed like Lyndon’s style—not that he had ever really bothered to define a style of his own. It was decidedly retro décor, but not, Woody inferred, by choice. More by default. The whole house held the sad pall of dormancy.

  “Have you bought anything new for this place in, say, the last seventeen years?” Woody asked Lyndon in the kitchen.

  “Funny.”

  “No, seriously. The furniture came with the farm, didn’t it? Everything in here you got lock, stock, and barrel, and you’ve been too lazy to change a thing.”

  “It’s functional.”

  “It’s rather pathetic, is what it is.”

  Clearly Lyndon had lived here alone all these years. No woman worth her salt would have stood for such decorative apathy. So depressing. Positively funereal. Hadn’t he had a girlfriend in all this time? Woody didn’t know. He had asked their mother once, but supposedly she did not know herself, or, as was more likely, she chose to respect Lyndon’s privacy. The only sign of a female presence Woody had spotted in the house was a box of tampons. This wouldn’t have been unusual in and of itself, but this was no ordinary box of tampons. Woody had found it in the closet upstairs while searching for extra sheets. It was a huge, industrial-bulk-sized box of generic-brand tampons, five hundred of them. Either Lyndon had a frugal girlfriend who was a heavy bleeder, or he was keeping them for some kinky purpose, trying to lure neighborhood girls, maybe, as the pied piper of sanitary protection.

&nbs
p; Lyndon gestured toward the Styrofoam containers on the counter. “Is that food?”

  “You hungry?”

  They cracked open the containers of enchiladas verdes, and Lyndon handed him a plate and a fork and knife. Woody vigorously washed his hands in the sink and, while he was at it, scrubbed the fork and knife as well. He was a bit of a germaphobe—nothing really big, not a major deal, though his hygienic habits occasionally attracted attention, coming across, Woody conceded, as a little metrosexual and faggy. He wasn’t a nut about it, just used common sense. He only really drew the line with public restrooms, anathema ever since he’d learned that toilets produced an aerosol effect when flushed, a mist that threw microscopic particles airborne as far as six feet away. At home, he always closed the toilet lid before flushing and, for good measure, kept his toothbrush in the medicine cabinet.

  “I don’t have time to entertain you two while you’re here,” Lyndon told him. “I’m getting ready for harvest.”

  “Don’t worry about that.”

  “And tell her she can’t smoke in the house. I hate the smell of cigarette smoke.”

  “All right, no problem,” Woody said. He spooned out refried beans from a tub onto his plate and passed it on to Lyndon, who did the same with the tub of rice. They began to eat.

  “What’s there to do around here, anyway?” Woody asked. “Anything to see?”

  “You got this at Diego’s?”

  “How’d you know?” The Styrofoam containers didn’t have any identifying labels.

  “Only Mexican restaurant in town. So you’ve seen Main Street. That’s about it.”

  “That’s hard to believe,” Woody said, stuffing his mouth. The food was predictably mediocre, and Mexican was a flagrant deviation from his diet regimen, but he was hungrier than he’d thought.

  “There’s going to be a chili and chowder fest this weekend,” Lyndon said. “There’ll be some music, an arts and crafts fair.”

  “That’s something, I guess. Is there a gym here?”

  “YMCA.”

  “That’ll have to do.”

  They ate their enchiladas. “Brussels sprouts,” Woody said to Lyndon. “Leave it to you to grow the one vegetable everyone despises.”

  What a sorry life Lyndon led, Woody thought, alone and anonymous in this wretched little town and wretched little house that he was too cheap and indifferent to decorate. Everything about him bespoke isolation, failure, obsolescence. His brother was an idiot. Always had been, always would be. He deserved every last bit of the misfortunate that was certain—if Woody had anything to do with it—to befall him.

  CHAPTER 3

  IN THE EARLY MORNING FOG, LYNDON WENT OUT TO WALK HIS FIELDS. He took along a hula hoe, and he swept the loop of sharp steel attached to the end back and forth underneath the soil, cutting weeds. His bad weeds were amaranth—pigweed. They started out as tiny little things, no more than a quarter inch high, and if he didn’t kill every last one of them, if he left a single one, it’d grow into a small Christmas tree.

  He was worried about his plants. The week before, he had spent two days topping them, but then his irrigation pump had gone on the blink—yet another thing that had mysteriously broken down. He couldn’t figure it out at first. The pump itself was fine, the motor in perfect working order, so he decided it had to be the electrical wire. Probably a gopher had eaten through a conduit and water had invaded, causing his four-hundred-foot wire to corrode in some interior connection. But he didn’t know where. He had faced the prospect of having to dig up the whole thing. He had gotten lucky. He’d picked a side, the side starting at the irrigation pond, and he’d guessed right. He found the break within the first seventy feet. He’d lost a day, however—a day he’d needed to irrigate—and now his plants were looking a little stressed, a little blue instead of green.

  Brussels sprouts were fussy, eccentric vegetables. They liked inhospitable climates like Rosarita Bay’s, cool and dreary, next to the ocean, where the wind blew and blew and the fog lay over the marine terraces all day long. For a couple of hours in the early afternoon, the fog would recede and the sun would emerge and heavenly blue sky would yawn open, but then it’d all get swallowed up by the fog again. The Brussels sprouts loved it. They loved the cold evenings of fall, not even minding a mild frost, which actually improved the taste of the sprouts, making them sweeter and more tender. There wasn’t much else that could be grown in this area that was as salt-and weather-tolerant. Artichokes, pumpkins, and Brussels sprouts were pretty much it.

  Before Lyndon had taken over the farm, it had been run as a full-fledged commercial operation for three generations. When the patriarch died at the age of ninety-seven, though, his grandchildren weren’t interested in carrying on with his legacy. They’d long ago moved to cities far and wide, and they were happy to let go of the property. Along with it came the house and all of its contents, as well as a farm manager and a crew of seven who had kept the Brussels sprouts doused with chemicals from start to finish: organophosphates like Lorsban and chlorinated hydrocarbons like DDT and then lindane. Lyndon hated it, the idea of it, the residue of all those pesticides and herbicides on the sprouts, the trace elements of toxins seeping into the earth and contaminating it for decades. But, contrary to assumptions, Lyndon wasn’t a reformer. He wasn’t some sort of idealistic, hippie-dippy enviro-activist, not even a vegetarian. He just wanted to farm in a way that was simple and pure, and keep his life uncomplicated. He laid off the manager and the crew, and stripped everything down so he could work the farm by himself. As it happened, going organic was the most lucrative option, a pragmatic decision more than a moral one. He planted only a total of one acre on his twenty-acre farm now, and he didn’t spray at all, even with approved products on the OMRI list.

  Some inspectors found it hard to believe that Lyndon could go no-spray organic monocrop and produce the Brussels sprouts that he did—dense, dark-green beauties, with tightly wrapped, unblemished leaves, firm but delicate, with a succulent, nutty flavor. These were Brussels sprouts the way they were meant to be, not the boiled, sulfurous, bitter mushballs with which most people were familiar. Lyndon’s secret was to spread the plants out in small blocks of no more than six rows—two hundred plants per row. The minute you had too many rows together, you had problems. And in between blocks, he’d grow summer rye, barley, buckwheat, bell beans, and oats.

  The cover crops were the key to everything. In the spring, Lyndon would mow them into tiny bits and disc them in. Everything would get incorporated into the soil, and all the microbes would begin to eat the chopped-up pieces of greenery, and a tremendous amount of nitrogen would be sequestered, equivalent to ten thousand pounds of fertilizer per acre. Meanwhile, he’d seed the Brussels sprouts in nursery flats in his greenhouse, then transplant the seedlings to the field, and, barring trouble, they’d grow from six inches to over three feet. Big leaf petioles would spiral out from a thick central stalk, and at the base of each stem, buds would form into sprouts, elegant miniature cabbages shaded by an umbrella of leaves. At the end of September, Lyndon would crawl around the field with a jackknife and bucket, harvesting the early varieties, picking from the bottom first, working his way up, and in October he’d hire a few people to help him break off the leaves and cut the stalks with machetes and haul them into the packing shed and desprout them en masse. Each stalk would yield eighty to a hundred sprouts, about two to three pounds, and at the end of the harvest, Lyndon might gross anywhere between fifty and seventy-five thousand dollars, about three times as much as he would have made growing Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon on the same acreage.

  It was a tight, cost-efficient little operation if everything went well, but there were so many things, with the Brussels sprouts sitting out in the field for four months, that could go wrong. They were susceptible to all manner of disease and infestation. Clubroot, nematodes, black rot, powdery mildew, aphids, cabbage loopers, diamondback moths. To keep them at bay, Lyndon constantly rotated his crops, never planti
ng in the same place for years, trading sprouts for cover crops, and he was always watching the soil, wondering whether it was too hot or too cold, whether it needed water or not. The soil had to be moist, the nutrients flowing, in order for his plants to be strong and healthy and growing. If they got too dry, they became stressed. As soon as they got stressed, aphids appeared. If the plants were too wet, however, he might get cabbage flies, maggots that chewed the roots and turned the plants purple. One part of the farm was always too wet or too dry. One corner had too much clay and poor drainage; another corner was too sandy or low on phosphorus or potassium. He was always looking at the colors, reds and purples on the leaves, or the tint of blue he saw now after his pump had failed and he’d missed irrigating by one day.

  He was worried. He didn’t need anything more to worry about. Woody being here. Getting assaulted by an aging kung fu actress on a bender.

  She was standing outside the house when he came back from the fields. Wearing a form-fitting baby-blue tracksuit, white kerchief, and large sunglasses, she was doing a tai chi routine, slowly shifting her weight, moving from one pose to the next, her hands soft, her arms flowing in graceful circles. It stilled Lyndon, witnessing the beauty of her movements, and for a second he thought he might have been too quick to dismiss her. But then she began coughing, a deep, hacking, lung-rattling cough that had her convulsing and doubling over and pounding her fist against her thigh. It seemed to last forever, the cough, and Lyndon began to wonder if he might have to call an ambulance. Finally it stopped, but she stayed bent over, hands on her hips, laboring to catch her breath. When she did, she hawked out a prodigious glob of phlegm, a righteous grade-A loogie, then reached into her pocket, pulled out a pack of cigarettes, and lit a butt, blowing out a plume of smoke as she walked away toward the bluff.