by Don Lee
“You’re reading me the obituary,” Woody said. “I could have gone to the library and looked all this up on LexisNexis.”
“I’ve been on the case all of five minutes,” Cross said.
Someone tapped Woody on the shoulder.
“You never learn, do you?” the Gestapo woman said.
Woody cupped his hand over the boom mike and said to her, “Look, I’m in the hallway, okay?”
“No cell phones on the premises. You understand what premises means?”
“I’ll get off in a second.”
“No, right now. You will get off right now.”
“What is your problem, lady? What is it that you find so objectionable about me? Because quite frankly your attitude sucks, and I think you know where you can stick it.”
She took a deep breath, held it, and let it out, then inhaled again. Woody knew what she was doing, a self-control trick taught to him by Dan: when you feel like exploding, breathe in, breathe out. “Who are you?” she asked. “What are you doing in Rosarita Bay?”
“I’m Woody Song. I’m here visiting my brother. Not that it’s any of your business.”
The anger seemed to sap out of her then, replaced by genuine bewilderment. “You’re Lyndon’s brother?”
“You know Lyndon?”
“Hello?” Cross said on the headset. “Hello?”
“Do I know Lyndon?” the woman said. “Do I know Lyndon Baines Song? I thought I did, I’d hoped I did, but I guess I don’t. I don’t think, really, I know who he is at all.” And with that, she walked away.
What an odd woman, Woody thought. He took his hand off the headset. “You still there?” he asked.
“Yes,” Cross said.
“I want you to look into Thorneberry’s family as well. They’re loaded. He had an adopted sister named Trudy. She’s going by Trudy Nguyen now. See what you can find out about her relationship with the parents. Have they cut her off, does she have a trust fund or something? Look into her father. When I think back on it, Mr. Thorneberry was kind of a dodgy character. Maybe, I don’t know, he touched his kids inappropriately.” Woody heard the two-tone chirp of the call being disconnected. “Hello?” He moved to the doorway and saw the Nazi matron holding up his cell phone. She gave it to a burly young man in a white YMCA shirt, who carried Woody’s gear bag and his colored towels and spray bottle to him.
“Sorry, bud,” the young man said, “you’re going to have to leave.”
“You’re kicking me out?” Woody said. “For taking one lousy call?”
“She said it was several. We have a policy—”
“Okay, okay, I’ll keep it shut off. Let me finish my workout. I’m almost done.”
The young man shook his head. “No can do. She was pretty clear.”
“Who is that woman?”
“She’s on the board of directors here. She’s the mayor.”
He went out to his Range Rover, which he’d parked on the street beside the front door, and there was a ticket on his windshield. Wonderful. Everything magnanimous he’d been thinking about this town, he took back. It was a shithole of a town, an uptight, small-minded, never-would-be hicksville of a town.
The thing on his windshield was not, upon further inspection, a parking ticket. It was a paper airplane, made with a sheet torn from a spiral notebook, and it had a handwritten message on it: “The Second Noble Truth is that the origin of suffering is attachment. Small wonder you’re so miserable.” Woody crushed the airplane into a ball and tossed it into the gutter.
He dumped his workout gear into his car and drove out of town, back onto Highway 1. It’d started out as a decent day and had become an annoying day, he was thinking, just as it turned worse. He almost hit a dog. He was distracted for a second, fiddling with his satellite radio, and the dog darted across the highway in front of him. He should have just run the goddamn thing over, but in a moment of weakness, he let some deep-seated, regrettable instinct for kindness get the better of him, and he swerved to avoid it, fishtailing and almost rolling over, skidding off the road and down an embankment and into a tree.
“Fuck!” he screamed.
He didn’t hit the tree hard enough to deploy the air bag, but his bumper was squashed, his diamond-mesh chrome grill was dented, his left Xenon-gas headlight was shattered. As he crouched down to check the damage a little closer, he heard a noise behind him, and he could make out the outline of the dog in the bushes. He realized then that he had flashed on an image of Lyndon’s dog, Bob, running across the road, and that was why he had swerved. But it hadn’t been Bob on the road. This was not Bob in the bushes. It was a coyote.
Still in a crouch, Woody slowly backed away, then jumped into his car and shut the door. Thankfully the Rover started without a problem, the wheels gripping securely as he sped up the embankment in reverse, watching his dashboard screen as it displayed the sky and then the highway and then an eighteen-wheeler barreling down on him.
“Fuck!” he screamed. He slammed on his brakes and reflexively covered his head with his arms as the truck’s horn howled. He could feel the vibration of its weight and speed and proximity as it came on top of him, but it missed the Rover, a whump of air violently rocking the car as it passed, horn bending in its wake.
Woody watched the truck disappear down the highway. “Asshole,” he said pointlessly.
He went back to Lyndon’s farm, where a rusty old Toyota was parked in the driveway. Woody heard a commotion, a series of pounding noises, in one of the greenhouses, and opened the door to see Ling Ling working on a wing chun dummy—a training device that looked like a denuded tree. It had a big freestanding trunk with a dozen thick logs branching out of it at odd angles, and Ling Ling was smacking them silly, both arms moving at once in rapid-fire contrapuntal synchronicity, as if parrying an attack.
“Outstanding, outstanding!” a dreadlocked kid standing beside her said. He gave her a towel and a water bottle, and when he noticed Woody at the door, he bounded over to him with a weird lurching gait and enthusiastically introduced himself as JuJu LeMay, Lyndon’s friend and coworker. “So you’re Lyndon’s brother!”
“What are you doing? Where’d you get all this stuff?” Besides the wing chun dummy, there were swords, staffs, boxing gloves, and pads spread out on the floor.
“We’re training!” the kid said. On second thought, he wasn’t a kid, more likely in his thirties. “I borrowed the gear from the kung fu studio in town,” he said. “I tell you, they were mighty excited and accommodating once they heard Yi Ling Ling was here, training for her new film.”
Finally someone knew who she was.
“Ms. Yi is a marvel, isn’t she? A whirling dervish,” JuJu said, although she wasn’t whirling at the moment. She was sweating and breathing heavily, gulping down water from the bottle, her face red from exertion. Maybe this much activity was not totally advisable, given her poor condition. But she was also doing something Woody had not witnessed once during the two days he’d been with her—she was smiling. She was happy.
“Don’t push her too hard,” Woody told him. “I don’t think she’s lifted anything heavier than a bottle in years.”
“I’m going to take good care of her,” JuJu said. “This movie of yours sounds fantastic. Dalton Lee and Yi Ling Ling! What a bravura pairing! An absolute stroke of genius! It’s a thrill for me to be involved in this project, even in this humble role.”
“Well, I appreciate it.”
“Let me know if you need anything, anything at all. To be frank, I’m a little underemployed these days, so I’ve got a lot of free time. Maybe, I don’t know, I can be of service to you in a more formal capacity. Something more substantive? Just a thought.”
Even in Rosarita Bay, everyone had an angle. “I’ll keep that in mind. You know where Lyndon is?”
He was in the barn. Barn was a bit of a misnomer. There was a huge barnlike structure behind Lyndon’s house, but, as far as Woody could tell, it wasn’t a barn used for farming. He did
n’t know what Lyndon was using it for. The barn doors were blocked by a permanent addition, essentially a large windowless shed in which Lyndon had set up a welding workshop, and in which he was now assembling some baker’s shelves.
The shed was well lit and neat, concrete floor swept clean, and Woody walked around, examining the tools of the trade: welding tanks and machines, a generator, grinders, sanders, drills, all sorts of clamps and jigs and vises, racks of rods, steel plates, square tubes, and angle irons, a couple of overhead pulley blocks with chains. What interested him most, though, were the sliding barn doors that took up an entire side of the shed. The doors were shut and secured with a heavy-duty chrome padlock.
“What have you got behind there?” Woody asked. “What are you hiding?”
“It’s just storage,” Lyndon said.
Unlikely, Woody thought. Too impractical. He couldn’t get anything in and out. “I was up last night and saw sparks from inside.”
Lyndon tilted up his protective shield. “Were you vacuuming? I thought I heard someone vacuuming.”
“I had insomnia,” Woody said. Actually, after he had scoured his bedroom, he had gone outside and sat in the back seat of the Rover and watched part of the DVD for Lying in Wait. It was difficult for him to sleep without watching some TV each night. “What happened to our lunch?” he asked.
“I got hung up with an installation.”
“Maybe you should do this full-time. It seems more profitable than farming.”
Lyndon clamped an S-scroll to a support frame. “That’s your professional opinion?”
“It’s like any business. Your investment is in material, labor, and overhead, and your success depends on getting a superior return on your investment, with a product that has a different form of value from your competitor’s. The problem with farming is you have variables you can’t control, like weather. Is that what happened to you the last few years?”
“What have you been doing? Looking through my books?”
“I was poking around your house a little this morning and came across some of your ledgers,” Woody said.
“Jesus, Woody. You don’t understand boundaries, do you?”
“You’re on the verge of bankruptcy. You’ve got a bridge loan due at the end of the year.”
“I’ve had a little run of bad luck,” Lyndon admitted. “Moth infestation one year, heavy rains the next. I’ll be all right.”
“You’re one bad harvest away from going belly-up. Your finances are a complete mess. You have credit-card debt! How could you let it get this bad? What happened to all your money, Lyndon? What’d you do with it all?”
“Besides help out Mom and Dad all those years?”
“The guilt trip’s getting old. I’ve been helping her out, too, you know.”
“There was never as much money as people believed,” Lyndon said.
“You should have invested it,” Woody said.
“You mean with you?”
An unnecessary low blow, Woody thought. “You’re going to have to take this deal, you know.”
Lyndon put on his gloves, turned on his welding machine, and flipped down his shield, then touched the electrode down where the S-scroll met the frame, crackling the air and suffusing it with the smell of burnt metal.
“You could do anything you want,” Woody said. “You could go anywhere. You don’t need this.”
Lyndon threw off his gloves and shut off the machine. “Where would I go?”
“You have to face up to it. Small farms are obsolete. This way of life doesn’t exist anymore. Don’t you see? You’re a walking anachronism. But you love farming so much, you buy another farm. With ten million, you’d have another twenty years to run that one into the ground.”
His brother tilted the frame, tapped on it with a hammer, and blew off excess chips. “Now that you’ve explained it to me,” he said, “it’s so simple.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Probably nothing,” Lyndon said.
“What’s the matter with you? You act like you have options, like something will miraculously drop out of the sky and save you. Why aren’t you panicking? You could be homeless.” Kitchell was right: his brother was an enigma, nothing he did made sense, he didn’t seem to care, as apathetic about losing his farm as he had been about losing his art career. “Let me talk to Kitchell for you,” he said. “I’m sure I could squeeze twelve from him without a problem.”
“You’re not going to do anything for me, Woody. You’re going to stay out of this.”
“I can help you,” Woody said. “You won’t let me help you?”
“No.”
“You’re the king of no,” Woody said. All of a sudden he remembered who Christopher Cross was—a one-hit wonder on the radio in the early eighties. How’d the song go? Sailing, na-da-da, sailing…Woody had loved the song, as mushy and sentimental as it was, when it’d first come out, but, as always, they’d killed it, overplaying the song until it became parodic. Could this possibly be the same Christopher Cross? Had the singer finally gotten sick of the endless nostalgia tours, the yesteryear retrospectives, the sad hide-the-belly-with-long-jackets, huffing-geezer podunk club dates, and become a private investigator with the Allegiance International Security Service? Doubtful. It had to be just a coincidence.
“You know the problem with us?” Woody said to Lyndon. “We’re fucking typical Asian men. We don’t talk. We’re emotionally inaccessible.”
“What have you been doing, going to therapy?”
“You might try it yourself. It might do you some good,” Woody said. “Don’t you think it’s odd we both ended up alone, without a family?”
“I like my life,” Lyndon said.
Woody looked at his brother, standing there in his dirty leather bib apron in the cheerless shed. “I don’t know what to do with you,” he said.
Sailing, na-da-da, sailing…Now that the song was in his head, he’d never get rid of it. He was tired. He wanted to get out of his workout clothes and take a shower. He wanted something to drink—a bubble tea, perhaps, or a smoothie. He had an urge for something with lingering texture and coolness, something refreshing and nautically brisk.
“You have any ice cream?” he asked his brother.
CHAPTER 5
THE OAR HOUSE HAD ONCE BEEN A COWBOY BAR CALLED THE LONE Night Cantina, but about ten years ago it had been bought by Milton Everhart, Rosarita Bay’s harbormaster, who, instead of getting rid of the existing décor, had simply begun nailing nautical castoffs around, over, and eventually above the cowpoke memorabilia. First came a single wooden oar from an old dinghy, then another. Then brass clocks, compasses, portholes, binoculars, sextants, ship’s wheels. When the walls were completely covered over, Milty started hanging things from the ceiling: anchors, diver’s helmets, lanterns, fishing nets, glass floats, buoys, bells, and fenders, plastic parrots, the old dinghies themselves. It looked like a cramped, run-down harbor museum—or a very disorganized curios shop—and it always felt a tad dangerous in there, the ornaments hovering haphazardly overhead from wires that seemed too thin and scant for the load.
With the funky atmosphere, the Jimmy Buffett tunes on the jukebox, and Milty’s reputation as a raconteur, the Oar House became one of the most popular bars in Rosarita Bay, a friendly neighborhood place for boaters and fishermen to come in for a few beers, a game of pool, and the occasional dominoes tournament. It had been a great place to work, very casual and relaxed, and Lyndon had liked being a bartender there. He’d had plenty of bartending gigs during his starving-artist days in New York, way back when, and though it had been a little demoralizing, the necessity, at this point in his life, to look for part-time work, the Oar House hadn’t been that bad, kind of fun, actually, to get off the farm one night a week, mingle with townsfolk, develop friendships with the patrons and other servers, one or two with whom Lyndon, over the years, had had brief affairs.
But everything changed this summer when Milty sold the bar and r
etired to Key West. The new owner, Mark Beezle, a.k.a. Beelzebub, the Prince of Evil Spirits, the Patron God of the Philistines, was a former manager of a T.G.I. Friday’s, and he was the biggest pinhead any of them had ever seen. A bean counter extraordinaire, he brought along all of his corporate accounting practices and procedures, raising the prices, instituting strict cost control measures, and casting a dreary pall over the staff.
Today, as Lyndon and JuJu came in, Beelzebub greeted them with his latest mandate: uniforms. Milty had let them wear whatever they’d wanted, although the mufti had naturally gravitated toward Hawaiian shirts and sandals. Beelzebub handed them dark red polo shirts with a new emblem—the blond blade of an oar underlining the logotype—and told them to wear the shirts with khaki pants from here on out.
“You have got to be kidding,” Lyndon said. They’d look just like the wonks at The Centurion Group.
“They’re nice shirts,” Beelzebub said. “I didn’t go cheap on them.” He was wearing one himself, form-fitting and tucked in, unfortunate choices that outlined the pear of his narrow shoulders and prodigious butt.
This was the problem with working in the service industry. It wasn’t the customers, although they could be a pain in the ass, since Lyndon usually saw them in the worst state known to man—drinking on an empty stomach—and people often wanted to talk to him, confide in him, be entertained, be his friend. No, the real problem was the managers, the bosses, the petty dickheads who needed, at every opportunity, to assert their authority and prop their puny egos by demeaning their employees and chipping away at their dignity.
“Hey, you look cute in that shirt, bro,” JuJu said.
“Shut up,” Lyndon told him.
“I suppose we shouldn’t begrudge Beelzebub,” JuJu said. “He’s really just a sad little man. He hates his life. That’s why he’s like he is with us. But it’s so hard not to despise him, you know? Not to wish him monumental harm. Not to wish this rattrap wouldn’t just cave in on the weasel’s head. Jesus, I don’t even own a pair of khakis.”