Wrack and Ruin

by Don Lee

  “Do you want some lunch?” Lyndon asked.

  “Thank you. I’m famished. Just give me a minute to change, and I’ll be ready to go.”

  “I was thinking of just making some sandwiches for us.”

  “Really? Here?” Ling Ling asked. “You’re going to cook?”

  She sat down at the table and watched him prepare the sandwiches, apparently fascinated with his culinary ability. The attention made him nervous, which led him to be a little careless as he moved a cutting board from one counter to another, allowing a paring knife to slide off and drop.

  The knife hung suspended in the air, the tip an inch above his bare foot. With impossibly fast reflexes, Ling Ling had stretched out to catch the handle of the knife in midflight. Balanced on her chair, she was laid out horizontal to the floor, arm and legs fully extended, toes curled around the knob of a cupboard door for a fulcrum. She rose and handed Lyndon the knife.

  “Thank you,” he choked out.

  “Don’t mention it,” she said. She absently rubbed her shoulder. “Do you know somewhere I could get a massage?”

  Lyndon cut the sandwiches in half. “There’s nowhere to get a massage in this town,” he told her. “None.” He plated the sandwiches with some potato chips and sweet gherkins, popped open cans of diet soda for them, and joined Ling Ling at the kitchen table.

  She picked up her sandwich, took a bite, and grunted appreciatively. “This is marvelous. You’re really very talented.”

  “I think it’s something even you might be able to manage.”

  She laughed uproariously—a heehawing horse laugh. Relaxed like this, without her sunglasses for once, she was pretty, Lyndon had to confess. “Woody tells me you were once famous,” Ling Ling said.

  This was all Lyndon needed—for Woody to reveal the details of his past to everyone in town.

  “How famous were you?” she asked.

  “Not really famous. I could walk down the street unmolested, if that’s what you mean.”

  “I was famous once.”

  “I gathered.”

  “I could never, not ever, walk down the street unmolested. So I never walked anywhere. I always had a car and driver. I never had to do my own cooking, or cleaning, or laundry. I never had to go to the market or the chemist. I never had to stand in a line and wait for anything, ever.”

  “Some of that sounds very appealing.”

  “Oh, it’s sensational, until you lose it. Then it’s humbling. Then it’s humiliating. It’s degrading, for example, to go to the bank and be utterly lost when it comes to using the automated teller machine and having people treat you as if you were a useless git.” With the expulsion of the last word, she angrily bared her teeth, but then eased into an ironic smile. “You may have noticed, I have a slight problem with being told what to do. I like being the one who tells people what to do. What kind of sandwich is this again?”

  “Grilled cheese with tomato.”

  “Grilled cheese with tomato,” she said. “It’s heavenly. Could you make this for me every day I’m here?”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  She picked up a gherkin, turned it in the light and examined its texture, sniffed it, and put it back down on her plate. “Tell me about Brussels sprouts. Do you actually like Brussels sprouts?”

  “Sure,” Lyndon said, although frequently he was disgusted by them, the taste of them, the smell of them, God, sometimes he didn’t think he could look at another fucking Brussels sprout if his life depended on it. He was used to defending Brussels sprouts, however, and he knew dozens of ways to make them palatable. He knew how to sauté them, bake them, steam, fry, boil, braise, roast, stew, and blanch them. He knew how to serve them lyonnaised, au gratin, and à la barigoule. He knew how to make them with peanut butter, chestnuts, gorgonzola, Hollandaise sauce, grapes, pomegranate molasses, Beaujolais, curry powder, fresh dill, clarified brown butter, pimientos, soy sauce, balsamic vinegar, and marjoram. His head overflowed with recipes for Brussels sprouts, although he seldom ate them anymore. Teaching himself how to prepare Brussels sprouts, he had learned to be a pretty good cook, but he rarely cooked anything more complicated than a stir-fry. It seemed he was full of talents that were of no particular use to anyone.

  “Do you miss New York City?” Ling Ling asked.

  “No.”

  “Don’t you miss your celebrity?”

  “No.”

  “This is enough for you, being a farmer?”

  “Yes.”

  “I miss it—all of it,” Ling Ling told him. “I miss being recognized. Mobbed. Adored. I miss the tabloids and the paparazzi, the autograph hounds, the stalkers. I miss my youth, I guess is what I’m saying. It’s so unfair that we have to age. It’s a rotten trick, really.”

  “I like being my age. All those things I used to worry about when I was younger, I don’t worry about them anymore. It’s a relief.”

  “What sorts of things did you worry about?”

  “Everything,” Lyndon said. He took her plate and cleared the table.

  Bob made one of his infrequent appearances, stretching through the dog door and plodding into the kitchen, nails clicking on the floor. Ling Ling watched him sniff at his food bowl, then lick, and lick, and lick at his water, a prolonged drink that seemed without end. “What a fascinating animal,” Ling Ling said. “Is he always so thirsty?”

  “He’ll drink from anywhere,” Lyndon said.

  Bob traipsed back outside, and Ling Ling said, “Go on. What did you worry about?”

  “I worried constantly what people were thinking about me.” Lyndon dumped the remnants of food into the trash, put the pan in the sink, dripped a little detergent in it, and turned on the water. “I worried I was making a fool of myself but didn’t realize it. I worried I was becoming an asshole, and then I worried I was no longer worried about being an asshole.”

  Lyndon remembered one Christmas when he and Woody were home from college. Their mother was arguing with Woody—Lyndon couldn’t recall about what anymore—and Woody unleashed a familiar plaint: that she loved Lyndon more, that Lyndon was her favorite. Later that evening, as she and Lyndon were washing the dishes, she admitted that what Woody had said was true. She did love Lyndon more, he had always been her favorite. She said she’d started becoming frightened of Woody—frightened of her own son—when he was in high school. Frightened of his ambition and materialism and preoccupation with status, of his aggression and the way he treated women, girls. She’d realized she was raising a boy who was becoming exactly the type of man she’d always despised. She was raising an asshole. His mother had then burst into tears in the kitchen and made Lyndon promise never to reveal to Woody what she had just said.

  “I don’t see it,” Ling Ling told him. “I don’t see an asshole in you, and I’ve seen a lot of them in my time.”

  “A few people would disagree,” Lyndon said.

  Ling Ling stepped outside to smoke a cigarette. As she came back into the house, a high-pitched alarm began ratcheting up from the mudroom. “What on earth is that noise?” she asked. “I heard it a while ago.”

  “It’s the driveway sensor.”

  “Is it supposed to keep going like that?”

  It wasn’t. Instead of a short chirp, the sensor was emitting a continuous whine. Lyndon pushed the kill switch on the console in the mudroom, but the piercing whine continued. He banged on the console, to no effect. The noise was getting louder, more shrill, intolerable. He lifted the console off its mount and tugged on the wires in the wall and ripped them off the back of the console. The noise stopped.

  He expected to see Woody driving to the house, but it was JuJu LeMay. Lyndon could hear his rattling, spluttering, rusted-out Toyota—with the soundtrack of his head-banging music—approaching long before he could see the car.

  JuJu skidded to a stop, flung open the door, and extricated himself from the seat. “Hey,” he said tiredly. He was unshaven, his skin an unhealthy bluish tint, dark patches beneat
h his eyes.

  “Hey,” Lyndon said.

  “Beelzebub called. Wants to know if you can fill in for Pauly tonight.”

  JuJu worked as a bartender at the Oar House, where Lyndon occasionally picked up shifts, and Lyndon had been hiring him along with Hana to harvest his sprouts in October. Dreadlocked and tattooed, JuJu was a former surfer, originally from Santa Cruz, who had been in the seventh year of a Ph.D. program in Mesoamerican studies at UCSC before, at long last, he’d dropped out to surf full-time. He had been peerless at Rummy Creek, the big-wave break just north of Rosarita Bay that fired up thunderous monster barrels during the winter. A photograph of him—dropping down the sixty-foot vertical face of a hellacious peak—landed JuJu on the cover of Surfer magazine, and he went pro, started getting sponsors. But then two years ago, on a relatively placid, windless day at Rummy Creek, the water green and glassy, he’d lost his left foot to a roving great white shark. He had been straddling his board, waiting for a set, and he’d felt a tug on his leg, then unbelievable pain. He never even saw the shark. He was fitted with various prosthetics, the latest a carbon-fiber-titanium marvel that was so well designed, strangers sometimes didn’t realize he was a gimp.

  “I don’t know if I can work tonight,” Lyndon told him. “I have visitors.”

  JuJu gaped open his mouth, mocking disbelief. “You? Have visitors?”

  “You know what?” Lyndon said. “Tell him I’ll do it. I’m sure I’ll need a break later.”

  “Who are your visitors?”

  “My brother.”

  “I didn’t even know you had a brother,” JuJu said. “You are full of secrets and surprises, my friend. I want to meet him. Where is he?”

  “Out.”

  “How long is he staying?”

  “Too long.”

  “Oh, I see,” JuJu said, “some fraternal antipathy. Well, then, let’s see how our little girls are doing, shall we? How are they looking? Want to take a drive out and visit? What’s up with the black eye?”

  They climbed into Lyndon’s pickup and drove down the tractor path, spinning on the dirt at the turns. JuJu huddled on the passenger seat in his fleece jacket, sniffling snot—a perpetual cold he couldn’t seem to shake. He wasn’t looking good. He looked, in fact, strung out.

  “You’ve been monkeywrenching on your own, haven’t you?” Lyndon asked.

  “Hey, that wasn’t me.”

  “The stuff we’ve been doing, they’ve been kind of funny and juvenile and innocuous, but a Molotov cocktail—”

  “Dude, I’m telling you, it wasn’t me.”

  It had begun with a childish little prank. After the heavy equipment to clear-cut the adjoining land had first rolled in, Lyndon and JuJu had gone out one night and poured popcorn kernels into the exhaust pipes of some of the bulldozers and excavators, so when the engines were started the next morning, the kernels heated and popped and streamed out of the pipes. Then—they weren’t too inventive yet, still strictly high school—Lyndon and JuJu ordered fifty anchovy pizzas for delivery to The Centurion Group’s project managers in their office trailer. Then they signed them up for free trial subscriptions to a passel of rather hard-core homosexual porn magazines. Then they slipped sugar into the gas tanks of a few backhoes and front loaders. Then sand. Then dozens and dozens of tampons. After that, things got a bit out of hand.

  It was Ed Kitchell’s fault, really. In January, Kitchell and his project managers woke up the entire town with a parade. They drove their red SUVs in a caravan down every street in Rosarita Bay, shouting and singing and blaring music. It became apparent that the principals of The Centurion Group were all alumni of the University of Southern California, and that many of the project managers were former Yell Leaders for the Trojans football team. This was why the company SUVs were painted cardinal-red with gold trim, and why the hotel and clubhouse and McMansions along the fairways were taking on, as they were being built, a distinctly Romanesque cast, with porticos and Corinthian columns.

  The project managers were celebrating USC’s victory the night before in the national championship game, hanging out of the SUV windows with megaphones in their white V-necked USC sweaters, singing the school’s alma mater and fight song, the accompaniment for which they blasted out of an elaborate PA system. Once in a while they jumped out of their cars and did back handsprings and formed standing pyramids and dropped to the ground for linked push-ups in the shape of a T.

  Worst of all was Ed Kitchell. Muscle-bound Ed Kitchell was galloping half naked up and down the streets astride a huge white horse—a rented Andalusian, Lyndon later learned, just like USC’s mascot—dudded up in a skimpy Tommy Trojan outfit: leather tunic and skirt, knee boots, a silver helmet with a plume of feathers. Very authentic-looking, and with good reason. Ed Kitchell had been Tommy Trojan in college. This was the costume he had worn at games.

  Lyndon and JuJu had been sitting in Lyndon’s pickup, stuck at an intersection, appalled by the spectacle before them. Ed Kitchell rode his horse past the truck, yanked on the reins, spun the horse around, and made it whinny and rear up on its hind legs, affording them a nice view of its genitalia. Dropping the horse back down, Kitchell brandished his sword at Lyndon and JuJu, the muscles in his arm bulging, neck veins popping, and said, in a low voice thick with contempt, “Hail to the conquering heroes, you worthless shits.” It was too much to bear. It was, for all intents and purposes, a declaration of war.

  But it had been more than a month since Lyndon and JuJu had ventured out for any of their little stunts. JuJu had to be sneaking out solo.

  “Okay,” JuJu said in the pickup, “I’ll admit I’ve been doing a few tiny little jokey pranks on my own—”

  “JuJu…”

  “Harmless, man. They’ve been absolutely harmless—small-time, trick-or-treat, negligible nonsense. You know me. I’m a pacifist. I’d never do anything like firebomb a trailer.”

  Lyndon wasn’t so sure. JuJu had succumbed to a rash of self-destructive behavior of late. He’d been let go from his two other jobs—clerking in a surfboard shop and washing boats down at the harbor—and was forever close to being fired from the Oar House. General attitude problems, absenteeism, maybe skimming off the till. Recently he’d gotten into a bar fight, beaten soundly. He wrote a couple of bad checks and had been fined and almost jailed. He’d developed a form of road rage, following drivers who’d offended him until they parked, whereupon he’d slit the paint on their cars with a razor-sharp box cutter, the lacerations unnoticeable until they rusted.

  “If it wasn’t you, who, then?” Lyndon asked.

  “Beats fuck out of me. Maybe the real PLF’s come in.”

  The PLF was the Planet Liberation Front, an extremist organization that advocated ecotage—sabotage, property destruction, mischief, and vandalism in the name of environmental activism. They busted windows, put spikes in trees, and mailed letters containing razor blades. They booby-trapped construction sites, sliced power lines, and set buildings on fire. As an organization, they were highly decentralized, divided into cells that operated independently. Theoretically, anyone who adopted the organization’s ideology could claim to be a member, and people were welcome to monkeywrench to their heart’s content in the organization’s name, tagging their handiwork with the initials PLF.

  “You should have never sprayed that on the dump truck,” Lyndon told JuJu. “That was just inviting trouble.”

  “It seemed kind of funny at the time. You thought so yourself, if I recall.”

  “I can’t be responsible for my actions when I’m under the influence,” Lyndon said.

  “Exactly my point, bro. Now slow down, slow down.” Ahead of them was a thicket of bushes and trees. JuJu leaned his torso out the window and inhaled deeply. “Holy mother of Chong, you smell that? That’s unbelievable.”

  Lyndon drove the rest of the way to the edge of the thicket and killed the engine. They began walking into the bushes and were overwhelmed by the aroma of the marijuana plants. There wer
e five of them here, a second cluster of five more plants hidden in another part of the farm. The plants were Durban Poison, a cross between a South African sativa strain and a potent early Dutch skunk. They had grown to over six feet tall, springing up in the shape of Christmas trees with the alacrity of amaranth, and Lyndon and JuJu could almost see the THC crystallizing and dripping off the plants. They had huge leaves and long, compact, extremely resinous buds. Once harvested and dried, they would have a sweet, earthy flavor with a hint of anise and, according to reports, a clean, uplifting, trippy high.

  “Don’t you think they’re ready?” JuJu asked.

  “They’re not ready.”

  “They look ready.”

  “They’re not,” Lyndon told him.

  “We can’t just pick some off the top?” JuJu asked. “They look so ripe. We pick some off the top, that might help the buds on the bottom, don’t you think?”

  “Take my word for it, JuJu, it’s too early to harvest them.”

  They got back in the pickup and drove to the other cluster of plants.

  Lyndon didn’t think of himself as a stoner or an addict. He was a recreational user. He only smoked at night when he was home, alone, and knew he wouldn’t be going out or driving. True, he smoked a bowl of 420 almost every night, and if he missed a night he got jittery and restive, but, by and large, it didn’t have much effect on him. It didn’t alter his behavior, really, nor his perceptions. He was inured to it. To him, it was a pleasant indulgence, like a glass of wine with dinner, that hurt no one.

  The plants in the second thicket of bushes were equally healthy and robust. “You have got a mongo green thumb, man,” JuJu said, standing before the plants. “I can’t believe all of them came through. Every single one of them. You said we’d lose more than half to disease and mold.”

  “We got lucky.”

  “We should have done this eons ago,” JuJu said. “Simply fucking outstanding.”

  This was the first time Lyndon had tried to grow marijuana on his farm, and he hadn’t expected to be so successful. To be on the safe side, he had planted quadruple the amount he and JuJu would need for a year’s personal supply. In retrospect, the pot had been easier to grow than Brussels sprouts. They had the same growing cycle, and all Lyndon had needed to do was bury pipe extensions from his sprouts to irrigate them simultaneously with drip tape.