Wrack and Ruin

by Don Lee

  “You want me to go bankrupt?”

  “I want you to sell your farm.”

  “Why? Why should it matter to you? You’ll still get your windfall. You’ll still get your tourists.”

  They’d had this debate so many times. Three hundred new jobs, tens of thousands of additional visitors, two million dollars a year in hotel occupancy and other taxes, The Centurion Group providing the funds for a new elementary school, weighed against higher property taxes and rents, more traffic, myriad environmental consequences, changing the nature of the town forever, paving away its rustic charm and leaving, in its wake, soulless sprawl.

  “You know why, Lyndon,” Sheila said. “Don’t be disingenuous.”

  “Let them drive around!” he said.

  The issue was, if Lyndon sold his land, the eighteenth hole of the golf course would be a long par-five that would hug the ocean and gently rise to the stunning vista of the six-story hotel on the bluff—a spectacular finishing hole that could rival the one at Pebble Beach, that one day might befit the hosting of a regular PGA tournament, or maybe even a U.S. Open. If Lyndon didn’t sell, the eighteenth hole would be a short, lackluster par-three, after which golfers would have to climb into carts and drive around Lyndon’s farm. The Centurion Group would have to reconfigure some other holes and change the layout of the course, truncating the total yardage far below championship level.

  “It’s their own damn fault,” Lyndon said. “They were stupid to assume I’d sell out.”

  It was ludicrous, actually, for them to have gone ahead with the design and construction of the resort without securing an agreement from him. He was certain that heads—especially Kitchell’s—would roll, which was why he didn’t put it past them to try anything at this point, including, perhaps, pressing Sheila to influence Lyndon.

  “Just take the money,” Sheila said. “It’s an obscene amount of money. And you could use it, couldn’t you? It mystifies me, what you’ve been doing. Don’t you realize what’s happening, how serious this is? All these pranks you’ve been playing—grow up, Lyndon. They haven’t been helping. This latest one—”

  “I had nothing to do with that.” Up to now the vandalism and tomfoolery at the golf course had been minor—misdemeanor shenanigans and high jinks—but a few days ago, someone had tried to torch Kitchell’s office trailer with a Molotov cocktail, melting the aluminum siding before the fire was snuffed out.

  “It’s bordering on terrorism. People are telling Ed he should call the FBI or ATF.”

  “Next you’ll blame the whale on me. I swear to you, it wasn’t me.”

  “Just sell,” Sheila said. “If you keep being difficult, the town might file for eminent domain.”

  This was a new threat, an ominous one. “You couldn’t do that.”

  “I couldn’t? The law’s on our side.”

  “It’d get tied up in court for years.”

  “Don’t be so sure. I’m still an attorney, remember.”

  “Why would you want to do something like that to me, Sheila? Something so mean, so malicious? What’s gotten into you lately?”

  Sheila’s eyes narrowed, and he could tell she was tempted to say something glib and insulting to him, but the impulse gave way to another sentiment—a mixture of incomprehension and despair. “You’ve become like that whale to me, Lyndon. To tell you the truth, it would greatly simplify my life if you would just disappear from this town.”

  A few weeks ago, a dead humpback whale had washed ashore between the harbor and the site of the new hotel—a thirty-foot, thirty-five-ton calf that began to decompose while the town and various agencies argued over who was responsible for its disposal, the police and fire departments insisting it wasn’t their problem, the National Marine Fisheries Service saying it was only charged with collecting data on the whale, not getting rid of it, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary wanting to study it where it lay, the town and the harbormaster and the California State Park and Recreation Commission all claiming it was outside their jurisdiction. Meanwhile, the carcass sat on the beach for four days, stinking to high heaven, the stench wafting downwind to The Centurion Group’s hotel, Ed Kitchell apoplectic because nothing was being done. At last, the harbor patrol and parks officials agreed to tow the whale several miles offshore, whereupon they would hand it off to a research foundation, which would haul it another twenty miles, where they hoped to observe a shark feeding frenzy. But they couldn’t even manage to slide the whale past the surf, and while more arguments ensued over who was at fault, overnight, as mysteriously as it had arrived, the whale disappeared. Search teams unsuccessfully combed the shore for it, concluding it had floated back to sea with a rip current, and everyone forgot about the humpback until last week, when the whale showed up again, this time a couple of miles to the south, in a hard-to-access cove off the new golf course, in very sorry condition now. This time, none of the governmental agencies would get involved. The research foundation, after carting away some blubber, said they had all the material they needed, their crews busy with other projects, so several more days passed before, finally, Ed Kitchell had been forced to hire two private towboats to drag the rotting, putrid carcass—his own personal Moby-Dick—out to sea.

  As Lyndon walked away from the house, he heard a series of soft thumps. Hana Frost, Sheila’s seventeen-year-old daughter from her first marriage, was shooting baskets at the end of the driveway. Lyndon himself had replaced the old hoop over the garage with this freestanding backboard when Hana had expressed an interest in trying out for the junior varsity basketball team. The interest—an encouraging sign of group socialization, Sheila had said—had been short-lived. She didn’t go to the tryout, and she returned to holing up in her room with her guitar all day long, writing weepy little love-is-lost, tears-in-the-rain songs.

  “Game of Horse?” Hana asked him, dribbling the ball.

  “Let’s play Pig,” Lyndon said. “I don’t have that much time.”

  “What’d you do to your eye?”

  “Never mind. Gimme.” Hana tossed him the ball, and Lyndon dribbled twice, pivoted, and threw up a sweet fade-away jumper from twenty feet that arced high and rotated true and hit nothing. Not the net, not the rim, not the backboard. Nothing. Nada. Rien.

  “Nice shot,” Hana said with a laugh.

  “That doesn’t count. That was a warm-up.”

  “No way, José.” She picked up the ball and dribbled to the free throw line and smoothly fired a line drive, clanging the ball off the front rim. A brick. This game would take a while. They were both terrible at basketball.

  Lyndon tried a little hook. Missed. Hana tried a baseline turnaround. Missed. And so they went, trading misses, until at last Hana awkwardly banked in a layup. Such a simple shot. Lyndon flipped the ball up, a foregone conclusion, except it spun around the rim and lipped out.

  “Ha!” Hana said. “P.”

  “Remind me why we do this again?” Lyndon said. “Is this supposed to be fun?”

  “It’s fun for me.”

  They matched two more misses.

  “Are you and Mom getting back together?” Hana asked.

  She had always been like this with Lyndon, unusually frank, although she could be equally naïve. She was an odd bird, a contrarian, a loner, as intellectually gifted as her mother. She was due to start her freshman year at Stanford as a premed major in a few weeks.

  “It doesn’t look likely at this point,” Lyndon said to her.

  “Do you want to?”

  “That’s sort of between me and your mom, don’t you think?”

  “It does involve me, you know.”

  “I suppose it does,” Lyndon said. “The answer is yes, I’d like to get back together with her, but she won’t have me. She told me she doesn’t want you at the farm this year.” For the last three Octobers, Hana had helped him harvest his sprouts on weekends.

  “We’re fighting,” Hana said.


  “What about?”

  “Isn’t that between me and her?”

  Lyndon lofted up a haymaker, grunting, his knees aching, his rotator cuff pinching, and, miracle of miracles, the ball ricocheted off the backboard and the rim and bounced into the air and swished through.

  “That shouldn’t count, it was so pitiful,” Hana said.

  “Chalk it up, sister.”

  Hana stepped to the same spot and threw up a prayer. She wasn’t close.

  “P,” Lyndon said.

  “You want to make this interesting?”

  “My truck could use washing.”

  “Not a car wash.”

  “What, then?”

  “Let’s say a favor to be named later.”

  On her next turn, Hana jogged to the top of the key and shot a rainbow that dropped straight through the net. “Have you been practicing?” Lyndon asked. “You hustling me?” He took aim, let it fly, and shot another air ball.

  “P-I,” Hana said.

  “Why do we do this?” Lyndon said. But he was enjoying the game. His relationship with Hana during the three years he’d dated Sheila had been a pleasant surprise. As moody and churlish as she could be, he had liked spending time with her, and he’d missed her company almost as much as Sheila’s.

  “Do you feel different lately?” she asked him.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Restless, antsy. I don’t know. Everything’s pulling at me,” Hana said. “Is it the weather?”

  “The weather’s no different,” Lyndon said.

  “Maybe it’s an influx of positive ions, or Mercury’s in retrograde or something. Maybe just hormones. I’ve been jumping out of my skin. Do you think sex would help?”

  It’d been a while since they’d talked, but the few times he’d run into Hana the last year, Lyndon had perceived a disturbing change in her. Before, she’d been all skinny arms and legs, wan, with lank hair and dark circles perpetually under her eyes, giving her the appearance of a junkie without the benefit of pharmaceutical agency. Partly this was due to her inimitable fashion sense, illustrated by the outfit she wore today: a thrift-shop brown cardigan, puke-green T-shirt, mango-orange skirt, black pantyhose, and square-toed clodhoppers. Now, though, not even her ugly clothes could conceal the startling fact that she had become, seemingly overnight, ripe with life. Her body had filled in with breasts and curves, her skin was plump and healthy, her lips larger, more protrusive. There was a new nubile, illicit quality to her. All of a sudden, she looked extremely fuckable. She was turning the heads of boys and men who’d heretofore not given her a moment’s notice.

  “I’m a little uncomfortable with this conversation,” Lyndon told her.

  “I’m still a virgin, you know,” she said.

  “I’m definitely uncomfortable.” Lyndon—two men removed from Hana’s father, the CFO of a software company whom she seldom saw anymore—had never been responsible for providing her with counsel or discipline, which, naturally, had accounted for their ease with one another. He liked that dynamic, and he didn’t want to complicate it by knowing anything about her personal life. She was seventeen. He preferred she didn’t have a personal life.

  “I don’t know squat about the world,” she told him. “I don’t know anything about life. I could end up like you.”

  “Meaning?”

  “A recluse, a misanthrope. I’ve got to pop my cherry before I leave for school.”

  “Stop. I don’t want to know,” Lyndon said. He tried a little bank shot from five feet away and butchered it.

  “I thought you were interested in my life.”

  “Some parts more than others,” Lyndon said. “Anyway, I think you’re sublimating. I think you’re nervous about Sunday.” The chili and chowder festival was going to be featuring some folk music, and Hana had won an open-mike competition at the Java Hut, the local coffeehouse, to perform a few songs on the main stage. Evidently she had learned a thing or two over the summer at a five-week program in Boston at the Berklee College of Music. Previously she had applied for regular admission as a full-time student there, but hadn’t gotten in, much to the relief of her mother, who had been opposed to the idea from the start.

  “Maybe I am a little,” Hana said. “Give me some advice.”

  “When it comes down to it, life is suffering.”

  “What?”

  “If you fall on your face, it won’t be the end of the world.” He didn’t quite know what to make of Hana’s musical aspirations. Everyone, even Steven Lemke, wanted to be an artist or performer these days, invariably for the wrong reasons.

  “You’re not helping.” She made another layup.

  “Do you know a girl named Jen de Leuw?” Lyndon asked.

  “What?”

  “She works at the ice-cream shop.”

  “I know exactly who she is. Why are you asking me about her?”

  “No reason, really.”

  “No reason? No reason? You just happened to mention her? What a funny coincidence. What a monumental laugh! It just so happens I was going to let André Meeker relieve me of my virginity, until that fat bimbo came along.”

  “Forget I said anything.” Wanting a quick escape, he muffed the layup on purpose—not that he would have necessarily made the shot if he’d really tried. “Okay, that’s Pig. I gotta go.”

  What was wrong with everyone? he wondered as he drove back down the hill.

  It was one o’clock. He hadn’t called Woody about lunch, and he had half a mind to turn east on Highway 71 and weasel out of town for the afternoon. Sometime or another he had to drive to Salinas to get the waxed cardboard boxes and perforated plastic bags with which he packed his Brussels sprouts—why not go now? That would kill at least five or six hours. He needed to be in his pickup, though, not his crowded panel truck, and he wanted to do some work in his barn this afternoon. He supposed he couldn’t evade Woody the entire weekend.

  It was awkward for Lyndon, trying to go along with this new mode of fraternal détente. He couldn’t get used to it, couldn’t quite slip into the pretense that everything was fine, they could pal around, eat meals and hang out together.

  As children, they had fought continually, more than once coming to blows. Woody had been a geeky kid, chubby and ungainly, always trying too hard to be liked. He’d been obsessed with getting into Harvard and, toward that goal, had enrolled in all sorts of extracurricular activities and sports, none of which he’d executed with the least bit of passion, everything just a means to an end, a tally of participation. Lyndon didn’t know where Woody had picked up this single-minded pursuit for achievement. Their parents hadn’t been particularly demanding in that regard, never meting out any bourgeois, upwardly mobile, model-minority pressure for their sons to go Ivy League (in contrast, say, to what Sheila expected of Hana). No, Wooddough had somehow come up with this compulsion all by his lonesome, and when Lyndon hadn’t been busy ignoring or mocking or despising his brother, he had felt a little sorry for him.

  In adulthood, whatever sympathy he’d had for Woody vitrified into pure hostility. It’d only been in the past few years that he had thawed at all, that he’d begun to feel it might be time to make peace with him. He hadn’t been willing to initiate anything, of course. Someone or something else had to do it for him. Frankly, he had been waiting for Woody to beg. Their mother’s deathbed charade had been transparent, but serviceable. She had looked awful in the hospital, weak and jaundiced. She hadn’t been able to eat or drink or go to the bathroom for days. It turned out she’d had a simple intestinal blockage that merely required a twenty-minute endoscopic procedure, but she had milked the situation for all it was worth. Lyndon knew she was faking it, and so did Woody, and the fact that no one called her on it was their gift to her.

  Still, Woody—with those ridiculous blond highlights in his hair, his cartoonishly white teeth and plucked eyebrows, his garish clothes and SUV—remained inimical to everything Lyndon believed in, and despite his best intentions,
Lyndon could barely stand to be in the same room with him. Thanksgiving and Christmas last year had been excruciating, but even worse had been Lyndon’s visit to L.A. in February. Woody lived in the Hollywood Hills in a one-story house with a partial view of the city, a cool, modernist affair with a flat roof and white stucco walls and sliding glass doors, minimally furnished with sleek chrome and leather showpieces, everything in black or gray or white. He’d hired an interior designer, Woody had said with pride. The house was beautiful, all right, but cheerless, without any character, and that was what Lyndon felt as Woody dragged him to studios and restaurants and clubs, continually pointing out famous people Lyndon had never heard of. It all looked good, but it was so vacuous. He couldn’t get out of the city fast enough.

  This was the thing about family: you were forced into an intimacy with people with whom, given a choice, you would never care to associate. It was so much easier to cast people off than to have to deal with them. People were difficult, annoying, intrusive. If only he didn’t have to bother with people, if only he could be left alone—that was all he really asked. Why was that so much to ask?

  Yet, to his bewilderment, he always seemed to be doing things that jeopardized his seclusion, inviting complications. Sheila, for one. The nails in his tire, the shrieking, the antagonism—they were something new, however. They weren’t at all like her. Sheila could be prickly and capricious and a little crazy at times (although not this crazy), but she was generally kind, reflective, occasionally wistful. Really, the most reckless thing she had ever done was fall in love with Lyndon.

  Four years ago, November 2001, she had hired him to build a spiral steel staircase in her new bookstore on Main Street. It was supposed to have been a relatively simple and quick job—two weeks on the outside, from ordering the materials to applying the protective coat. She was in a rush. Her store was scheduled to open soon, and everything else was essentially done: the cherry bookshelves, the maple floors, the interior stonework. Yet there’d been some sort of snafu with the original designer and contractor, who’d installed a beautiful mahogany ladder to a small storage loft near the back of the store. Neither had accounted for a county building code that stipulated strict modes of access, even for a passageway that would only be used by staff. The ladder had to come down and be replaced with a staircase.