Wrack and Ruin

by Don Lee

  “So, what should we do with the surplus?” JuJu asked. “There’s no way we can smoke all of this ourselves, you know.”

  “Don’t even think about it,” Lyndon told him.

  “Come on, nothing serious, just to some friends.”

  “No.” Lyndon waded through the bushes toward open air.

  “Just for some pocket change,” JuJu said.

  “No, JuJu, we are not going to start dealing. We agreed. This is strictly for personal consumption.” Lyndon had been apprehensive about exactly this. Up to now a socialist, JuJu had become an opportunist. He had all sorts of entrepreneurial ideas lately, from the way the Oar House should be run to how Lyndon should operate his farm. He thought Lyndon should diversify his crops and “profit streams”—growing pumpkins, lettuce, and Christmas trees, establishing farm tours, U-pick programs, school field trips, pony and hay rides. He talked about direct-market sales like CSAs, farmstands, restaurants, country stores. He admired what other local farmers were doing to pull in tourists during the pumpkin festival and suggested Lyndon follow suit. Attractions for kids like a haunted house, face-painting, inflatable jumps, slides, electric trains, even the two Asian elephants, Esther and Louise, that one family farm had brought in to sell rides—JuJu thought these made good business sense. It was downright scary, what JuJu was turning into. A capitalist. A mercenary. A hustler. Lyndon wouldn’t have been surprised to find out that it had been JuJu’s plan all along to sell the pot.

  “Lyndey, we could both use the money,” JuJu said.

  Lyndon had a sudden alarming thought. “You haven’t told anybody about this, have you? Have you?”

  “No.”

  “I’m not kidding, JuJu. This would be cultivation with intent to sell, a felony, serious prison time. You better not have told anyone. You didn’t, did you?”

  JuJu stalled, his mouth contorting. “I may have mentioned it, in passing, as an inconsequential sidebar, to one or two very close compadres, who’d never, in a million years—”

  “Oh, God,” Lyndon said. “Who? Who’d you tell?”

  “They’d never utter a peep to anyone. Tank and Skunk.” Tank and Skunk B. were two of his old surfing buddies, not the most reputable people in the world.

  “Great. Just great,” Lyndon said. He went to his pickup, opened the storage bin in the truck bed, and pulled out a machete.

  “What are you doing?” JuJu asked.

  Lyndon walked toward the plants. “These are gone. They were never here. They never existed. I’m taking them down and burning them.”

  “Don’t, don’t!” JuJu said. “Come on, Lyndey, they’ll keep their mouths shut. I promise. Fuck, you can’t destroy these beauties. It’d be a monumental waste. It’d be sacrilegious.”

  “You know how happy Steven Lemke would be to put me in jail? Not to mention Ed Kitchell?”

  “Tank and Skunk, they’re cool, man. I can count on them with my life. You know that.” Tank and Skunk B. had been in the lineup with JuJu when the great white had attacked him, and they had used a wetsuit zipper strap as a tourniquet to stanch the bleeding and paddled him to shore. “Hey, come on,” JuJu said. “Everything’s cool. I—” He tripped on an irrigation pipe and stumbled to the ground.

  “Hey, you all right?” Lyndon asked.

  JuJu turned himself over and slowly sat up. “Everything’s hurtling toward oblivion,” he said. “It’s meaningless, man. It’s fucking meaningless. Look at me. I didn’t firebomb that trailer, but yeah, I would’ve liked to. I want to take things down. I want to fucking destroy everything. This is the only thing I have to look forward to, Lyndon, our little project. It’s all I’ve got. Don’t take it away from me. I’m asking you, let me have my fun. Let me have this small amusement.”

  Lyndon looked down at JuJu, concerned for him. “You need to talk to them,” he said after a moment. “Make sure they understand.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  “I’m not kidding, JuJu. The first sign word’s leaked, I take it all down. Shit like this, it has a way of getting out, and it does, Sunny Padaca will come after us with more than a machete.” Sunny Padaca was the town’s resident pot supplier, not a man to piss off.

  “I gotcha, I gotcha. Don’t worry,” JuJu said, getting up.

  Lyndon put away the machete. “Okay, then.”

  “Okay,” JuJu said. “Fuck, you damn near gave me a heart attack. I’m too delicate for this much excitement so early in the day.”

  Returning to the house, Lyndon took the path next to the bluffs, and JuJu, toking on a fatty to calm himself, gazed out at the ocean. “Wanna take the boats out? It’s flat, not much wind.”

  Lyndon knew JuJu didn’t really want to take the boats out; it was just bravado. “I need to do some work,” he said.

  “You work too much,” JuJu said. “You need to recreate more.” He pinched the cherry off his joint and stuck the remainder in his shirt pocket. “You know Ed Kitchell’s moved into one of the model homes on the golf course? They got guards all over the place now, but there’s an easy way to circumvent that particular nuisance. What say, Kemo Sabe? Kitchell and his boys are going to be gone tomorrow night. He’s flying to L.A. for USC’s home opener.”

  “Jesus, JuJu, you are incorrigible.” How had he let so much potential calamity enter the confines of his deeply ordered life? He didn’t understand himself sometimes.

  As they came up to the house, Lyndon spotted Ling Ling outside again, doing another kung fu routine on the grass, not tai chi this time, but something faster, flashing punches and kicks, blocks and traps.

  “What do we have here?” JuJu said. “Holy mother of Jackie Chan, you know who that is?”

  “She’s an actress.”

  “Not just an actress,” JuJu admonished. “That’s like saying Elvis was just a singer. That’s Yi Ling Ling! She’s a legend in the kung fu world. What’s she doing here?”

  “She’s with my brother.”

  “She’s your brother’s girlfriend?”

  “No. She’s going to be in a movie he’s producing.”

  “Your brother’s a movie producer? You’ve been holding out on me, Grasshopper.”

  JuJu had been obsessed for a while with the old TV series Kung Fu, a stoner show if there ever was one, able to quote Caine with uncanny fluency and frequency: “Before we wake, we cannot know that what we dreamed does not exist.”

  They got out of the pickup, and JuJu bounded toward Ling Ling. “Nehih ho ma, Yi Ling Ling,” he said, bowing with his left palm covering his right fist. “M sai hak hei.”

  Ling Ling looked pleased. She bowed back, hands in the same position. “Thank you,” she said.

  “I’m sorry, don’t let us interrupt your training. But I would be honored if we could observe.”

  She smiled demurely. “By all means.”

  She stepped to the middle of the yard, rolled her head to get her neck loose, hopped up and down a few times, did several knee bends, and flapped her arms, then put her feet together and took a deep breath. She lunged forward, arms whirling, fingers freeze-framing into claws, and continued—leaping, kicking, striking, slowing, stopping, bursting onward, all of it accompanied by explosive shouts and yips. At one point, she unfurled her arms like a whip and let them quiver in front of her, her body jerking as if electrified—a human vibrato. Then she twirled in a circle, dipped down, twisted, and threw her body upward so she was horizontal as both legs scissor-kicked the air.

  “Ooh, butterfly kicks,” JuJu whispered.

  She touched down and dipped and twisted and kicked again, but something happened this time, and she fell, landing flat on her face, dirt clouding out from the impact.

  JuJu ran to Ling Ling, who was momentarily immobile on the ground. “Are you all right, Ms. Yi?” he asked, helping her up.

  “I’m afraid I’m a little out of shape,” Ling Ling said, chagrined, brushing dirt from her tracksuit.

  “Out of shape? No, I don’t believe so,” JuJu told her. “Perhaps dis
tracted and unnecessarily burdened by trivialities. It looks to me you simply need someone to help you, someone to take care of things for you, so you can concentrate on your training.”

  “Yes?”

  “Like a personal assistant,” JuJu said. “Or a manager.”

  Ling Ling took stock of JuJu, examining him from head to toe. “I think you may be right.”

  “And I happen to know someone who would be perfect for the job,” JuJu said.

  “Oh, you do, do you?” Ling Ling said. They both laughed, and she hooked her arm around JuJu’s and led him to the house. “Are you a BK transtibial?” she asked, watching him walk on the dirt.

  “How did you know that?”

  “Oh, I have some experience in this area.”

  CHAPTER 4

  INSIDE CUCHI’S COUNTRY STORE ON MAIN STREET, WOODY STARED DOWN at his loafers, his poor Berluti loafers, which were spotted with mud. He had been careful this morning, going from Lyndon’s house to his car, hopping on tiptoe from one dry spot to another on the dirt driveway, but still his shoes had gotten spoiled. He couldn’t believe how much dirt was getting on him—on his clothes, his Range Rover, his person—embedding itself into every crevice and fold. He didn’t know how it was possible, when he hadn’t touched anything, hadn’t even gone into the fields.

  He had not been able to sleep much the night before. After eating dinner with Lyndon, Woody had cleaned his guest room—just a cursory wipe-down with a bath towel, nothing too obsessive. He was trying hard to be more relaxed, to let things go more. Let it go, let it go, his therapist, Dan, kept telling him on the phone. (Woody didn’t have time for office visits and spoke to Dan only on his cell phone, usually while driving.) As Woody lay in bed last night, however, on sheets as faded and threadbare as the upholstery downstairs, he was kept awake by the sound of the wind outside, buffeting against the windows, the house creaking. The smell of the room started bothering him—musty, mildewy. His breathing began to fracture. His lungs constricted, and he wheezed a little. How old was this mattress? he wondered. Had this been the previous owner’s room, the grandfather’s? Had he died on this bed? Woody began picturing the old man decomposing in his grave, maggots eating away his corpse, all those bugs and worms in the ground outside, and Woody’s skin began to itch. He felt things crawling on him. Bedbugs. Dust mites. He was swaddled in their feces and body parts, they were feeding on his skin.

  He went downstairs, found cleaning supplies, and scrubbed down the entire room, dusting, polishing, mopping, vacuuming the mattress and drapes. He was tempted to do the rest of the house; he’d taken care of the bathroom already. Once he got going, it was difficult to stop. This was why he kept firing his house cleaners. He would see they’d missed a spot, moved something. He would get out a sponge, reposition an item, and pretty soon he’d reclean the whole house. He was a bit of a neatnik—nothing really big, not a major deal, not too obsessive. When he went to other people’s homes, he had the compulsion to tidy things up a little, clean, rearrange. From experience, he knew people were offended by this, and he was trying to reform.

  In the store, he looked for some shoe wipes and polish, but there wasn’t much of a selection, just a couple of cans of old Kiwi black. How did people live in this town? There were a half dozen coffeehouses on Main Street, a wealth of choice that had surprised him, but they were bereft in almost every other basic service. He hadn’t been able to locate a shoe store or a dry cleaner, driving round and round. More astonishingly, there did not appear to be a cineplex anywhere in or near Rosarita Bay. How could they not have a single movie theater? They didn’t have a car wash, either. His tires, the beautiful twenty-inch chrome alloy wheels on his Range Rover, were caked in mud, the Buckingham Blue Metallic paint streaked with crud. His Range Rover wasn’t meant to go through creek ditches. It was meant for the quadrangle of L.A. freeways, the 405, 101, 134, and 10. It was meant for pulling up to Morton’s, Spago, the Ivy, and Mr Chow, to the Skybar, the Viper Room, the Whisky Bar. It was meant to impress. It wasn’t meant to get dirty.

  He walked down the aisles, searching for the diaper section. He’d learned that, in a pinch, baby wipes—the ones for sensitive skin—were versatile cleaning cloths. Alcohol-and perfume-free, hypoallergenic.

  It was an odd store. There were groceries, mostly gourmet and organic, and a butcher and deli counter. There was a bakery, a variety of cheeses, wines, homemade jams, relishes, and salad dressings, and a mishmash of housewares, personal hygiene products, and curios. In one corner, they had jeans, hip waders, fishing lures, and, honest to God, cowboy boots. All of it was stocked haphazardly on towering shelves divided by very narrow aisles, one of which he entered to discover two overweight young women stuffing a bottle of shampoo and a six-pack of soap bars, respectively, in the waistbands of their pants.

  Maybe they weren’t so young. It was hard to tell. One was short, Asian, the other tall, blond. They were layered in ratty fleece jackets, peasant blouses, T-shirts, and cargo pants, a couple of pairs each, and they wore floppy legionnaire hats with neck drapes and heavy hiking boots. Their hair was matted, faces grimy with soot, glowering at him. They looked like they’d been marooned somewhere and pushed to extremes. They looked dangerous, as if they had had to eat one of their own, and might tear into Woody at any moment. He backed out of the aisle.

  He located his baby wipes and paid for them at the checkout stand, then went outside to clean his shoes. As he was crouched down, working on some mud that was wedged into the crack above one sole, he saw two muddy pairs of hiking boots step into view on the sidewalk. They stopped directly in front of him. “They make an Argosy laden with gold out of a floating butterfly,” one of them said, “and these stupid grown-ups try to translate these things into uninteresting facts.”

  Woody rose and faced the two women. He didn’t know which had spoken, but, vaguely, he knew that quote, knew that voice.

  “How much wood would a woodchuck chuck, if a woodchuck could chuck wood?” the Asian girl said.

  That voice—low and smoky. It tugged at him, plucked at the recesses of his past. “Do I know you?” Woody asked.

  The women were expressionless, dour. “As much wood as a woodchuck would,” the blond girl said, “if a woodchuck could chuck wood.”

  “What’s this about?” he asked. “What do you want?”

  “Got any wood, Mr. Woody Woodpecker?” the Asian girl said.

  “Who are you?”

  She broke into a wide grin. “Woodrow Wilson Song, don’t you recognize me? It’s Trudy, Trudy Nguyen! Or Thorneberry! Trudy Thorneberry! Kyle’s sister!”

  Kyle Thorneberry had been Woody’s best friend at Harvard. Trudy had been Kyle’s younger sister, adopted from Vietnam, a shy, scrawny little girl who hardly ever spoke, six, eight years old when Woody knew her, barely registering a presence during his visits to the Thorneberrys’ house during the holidays, significant to him then only because she was Asian, making him wonder about Kyle, their friendship, if the real reason they were buddies was because Kyle was following some sort of familial streak of charity involving Orientals.

  Trudy threw herself at Woody and hugged him, something underneath her jacket making her body feel like jagged edges. She was filthy and smelled terrible. It was difficult for him not to recoil.

  “My God,” she said. “How have you been?”

  “I’ve been good, good,” Woody told her. Hadn’t she heard how he’d really been? But it seemed she had suffered her own fall from grace. The Thorneberrys had been very wealthy. Clearly Trudy had become estranged from the family and was now destitute, homeless, perhaps. “What about you?” he asked. “What have you been doing with yourself all these years? What’s brought you here?” Drugs, Woody imagined.

  “We’ve been recovering the plovers in Bidwell Marsh Preserve,” Trudy told him.

  “What?”

  “The marsh south of here. This is Margot, by the way.”

  “Schrempp,” she barked.

  “Excuse
me?”

  “Margot Schrempp.” She was a big-boned woman, toothy, with black horn-rimmed glasses.

  They shook hands—his fingers squeezed inside Margot’s strong grip—after which Woody, without thinking, cleaned his hands with the baby wipe he was still holding. “What’d you say you’re recovering?” he asked Trudy.

  “The western snowy plover.”

  “That’s a bird?”

  The girls laughed.

  “Yes, a bird,” Trudy said. “A shorebird. We’re relocating them to a new breeding habitat. They were displaced by the golf course they’re building, so we’ve been trying to get them to establish new colonies in the marsh preserve.”

  “How long have you been doing this?”

  “All summer,” Margot said. “This is our third seabird restoration project. We did the common murre at Devil’s Slide last year, and two years ago the roseate tern in Maine.”

  “You’ve been camping?”

  “Can you tell?” Trudy said.

  “We’re a little rank, aren’t we?” Margot said. “It’s funny how all I really want right now is a hot bath. I’d pretty much do anything for a hot bath. Anything.”

  “Have you ever been to the preserve?” Trudy asked.

  “No. I only got in town yesterday.”

  “You’re here on vacation?”

  “I’m visiting my brother. He has a Brussels sprouts farm here.”

  “That’s wonderful. I love Brussels sprouts,” Trudy said. “What about you? What are you doing these days? Are you still in investment banking?”

  Woody couldn’t tell if she was being sincere. “No, I’m a movie producer in L.A.”

  “Really? What kind of movies?”

  “Anything we might have seen?” Margot asked.

  He mentioned a few of his most famous remakes, slick reiterations of Asian horror and action films that, despite being bland Westernizations of the original hits, had been extremely profitable: The Well, Lethal Enforcer, Warrior of Wonder, Lying in Wait.