by Don Lee
“I did an audit,” Beelzebub said. “We’ve been losing 28.7 percent to shrinkage, which means you guys have been either overpouring, giving out too many comps, stealing outright, or all three.”
Woody cracked in a shot, and Ling Ling whooped. Lyndon hoped there was no money on the game. Sunny did not like to lose—at anything.
JuJu said to Beelzebub, “The Kamikazes are on my ticket.”
Beelzebub looked at the computer again. “So they are. But that still leaves you in the negative by five, Lyndon. Seven comps. You shouldn’t be so generous with your friends.”
A roar emanated from the back of the room, a bone-rattling primal yowl. Head tipped back, lips prized open to bare a massive dark maw, Sunny was screaming, enraged. He snapped the pool cue in two against his knee and, raising one of the splintered sticks into the air, started moving toward Woody.
By the time Lyndon and JuJu got to the pool table, Ling Ling had already intervened. She’d kicked the pool cue from Sunny’s hand, and, with a variety of yips and shrieks, she was running through a long series of maneuvers in front of Sunny, punching and kicking the air, faster and even more impressive than her demonstration that afternoon at the farm. Sunny was stunned and mesmerized at first, and now he was, of all things, giggling, seemingly delighted by the exhibition as Ling Ling skipped and whirled into her butterfly kicks, scissoring her legs, going higher and higher until she accidentally clipped one of the lanterns hanging from the ceiling with the back of her heel, shattering the glass in the antique lamp. The lantern bobbled, there was the ping of wire snapping, and it crashed to the floor.
They all stood motionless, holding their breath, staring not down at the lantern, but up, up at the vast, ponderous scrapheap hovering above them as they divined what might happen next: junkyard Armageddon.
Everything swayed and creaked, the buoys and diver’s helmets and old dinghies rocking and yawing, moving in unison to an invisible swell. But it held, nothing else fell, they were safe. Everyone began laughing nervously.
A faint ping sounded, a guitar string breaking. Then another, and another, like the detonation of sequential charges to implode a building. Wire after wire popped, and everything started crashing down, bells, anchors, oars.
“Move, move, move!” Sunny said, shoving people aside.
“Oh, fuck,” Beelzebub said.
They ran toward the exits, toward the storeroom and office and kitchen, everyone except Mandy, who stood glaciated, still holding her tray aloft, midriff protruding, as the detritus fell and exploded toward her.
She was directly underneath a dinghy, a rotted, weather-beaten ten-foot bucket that easily weighed two hundred pounds. Lyndon didn’t really want to, but he did. He pushed Mandy out of the way, and in her stead accepted her fate, deserved as it was—to be smote from the earth, obliterated by the boat, crushed by hull and keel.
ALTRUISM WAS NEVER REWARDED. Lyndon thought he’d have learned this by now. The bar was a wreck. It’d be closed for months. Beelzebub fired Lyndon and JuJu on the spot. Mandy, who’d escaped with nary a scratch, her job secure if and when the Oar House ever reopened, nonetheless threatened to sue, sue for emotional distress, post-traumatic whatsit, there had to be something she could get out of this. Didn’t Lyndon grab her tit as he was shoving her, wasn’t that sexual harassment? Couldn’t she sue Lyndon or that Chinese woman or Lyndon’s brother for the wages and tips she’d miss during the renovations?
It was a wonder Beelzebub didn’t threaten to sue them as well, but, not knowing any better, he insisted Sunny Padaca be held accountable. He called in the police, railing about malicious destruction of property, assault and battery, reckless endangerment, inciting a riot.
“How’d I know you’d be in the middle of this?” Steven Lemke said to Lyndon.
As it happened, he arrested Sunny—not for destroying the Oar House, but for an outstanding warrant: he’d skipped bail on trafficking charges in Hawaii, and Sunny was taken to the sheriff’s substation to await transport to the San Vicente County jail, from which he would be extradited to Honolulu.
No one was hurt other than Lyndon. He’d blacked out for a few minutes, and JuJu drove him to St. Catherine Hospital in Moss Beach, four towns to the north, for a gash on his forehead that would require five stitches, and also for his right knee, which would no longer bend correctly, yet which the doctor pronounced was just sprained, no ligament tears, necessitating a thick neoprene brace but no surgery. It took hours to get this diagnosis. It wasn’t much of a hospital, more like a clinic, with only one doctor on call, and, concerned that Lyndon had been knocked unconscious twice in two days, he wanted to keep Lyndon overnight for observation and possibly transfer him to San Vicente Memorial for a CT scan.
All Lyndon could think about was the hospital bill. He already owed the dentist for two visits—thank God the temporary crown had held this time—with a third scheduled to cement a permanent crown over his molar. He couldn’t afford an overnight stay at the hospital. He had medical insurance, but of the catastrophic variety, with an outrageously high deductible, almost useless.
Against the doctor’s advice, he went home, head throbbing, body limping and beat. It must have been four o’clock by the time he fell asleep, and he didn’t wake up until nearly nine, uncharacteristically late for him. Everything in a gray haze, he hobbled into the hallway to the bathroom, badly needing to piss. He heard rain, rain was splashing on his legs, it was odd, he didn’t think it’d rain today. He glanced down, and realized he was pissing on the closed toilet lid. Christ, who had put down the toilet lid?
He cleaned the toilet and the floor and washed his legs and hands and examined himself in the mirror. He looked quite terrible, his face collapsing with fatigue, eyes rimmed red, a bruised knot welling underneath the bandage that covered his stitches. He staggered out into the hallway. Woody’s room was empty, his bed neatly made. Ling Ling, however, was still in hers, and she was not alone. JuJu was asleep underneath the covers with her, Lyndon saw through the cracked-open doorway. He had a vague memory of being awoken by an earthquake in the middle of the night, a dream of tremors, the walls shuddering, a woman crying for help, a blue parrot flapping wildly toward him, waves cresting, a boat capsizing and flipping on top of him and trapping him in blackness. It hadn’t been an earthquake that had plagued his sleep, it’d been fucking. People fucking in his house.
He needed to walk his fields. He strapped on his knee brace and got dressed, microwaved some instant coffee and put it in a covered plastic mug, and went outside. The weather had turned, the fog gone, just bright sunshine and blue skies, no wind at all. Good for the tourists, not so good for his plants. He was still worried about missing that one day of irrigation when his pump had gone out of commission.
Water. So much of farming was about water. There was a ranch above town, the fields now fallow. For generations, the Nielsen family had dammed a creek to form reservoirs for their irrigation water, but various agencies—California Fish and Game, NOAA Fisheries, U.S. Fish and Wildlife—had suddenly decreed their dams prevented steelhead and coho salmon, threatened species, from swimming upstream to spawn. Forced to dismantle the dams, the Nielsens had tried, without success, putting in wells, and then tried to obtain permits to install new irrigation ponds—“off-stream impoundments,” the government called them—but learned it would take years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to get approval, due to the endangered red-legged frogs and San Francisco garter snakes that would make the ponds their habitat.
Lyndon felt fortunate not to have any such problems with his water supply. Arroyo Tunitas, the creek that bordered his property and fed his pond, ran down to the golf course as well, and The Centurion Group had once threatened to contest his water rights, but it became a moot point when the town—acquiescing to environmental groups—decided the hotel and golf course would have to recycle wastewater to qualify for zoning.
Lyndon grabbed his hula hoe and headed to the block nearest to his house. If there was
trouble, it’d appear first in the field closest to the upwind bluff. Limping—good God, his knee hurt—he looked at the color of the plants. They were a healthy green. They didn’t seem stressed. They were nearing maturity and very leafy, but were standing up nicely. He moved to the next block, his head beginning to clear as he walked along the ocean in the crisp, clean air, listening to the birds. He heard the call of a red-winged blackbird, check, deeek, and turned toward a stand of red alders. He stared at the lichen and moss mottling the bark, a swaying branch, the bobbing yellow catkins, and there, spreading its wings, was the bird, glossy black, with startlingly red patches on its shoulders.
Out here, Lyndon’s senses always felt heightened, everything—light, shadows, contours, textures, colors—more vivid. These quiet mornings alone in the fields, next to the sea, they were what he loved most about farming. The purity of the natural world, the sweet fruit of gestation and growth, the blooming of his labors. It was ridiculous to say, but he always felt a little regretful when it came time to harvest the plants, stripping the stalks and then mowing everything down. He’d have to remind himself that this was the ineluctable cycle of nature. As they always did, he and JuJu would go down to Baja in January to camp and kayak, and then he would return to chores and repairs, getting supplies and making preparations during the dead time of the winter rains, and then it’d all begin again, another year, another season, another spring, deciding on seeds—Oliver, Diablo, Trafalgar, or Jade—and where to plant them, prepping the fields, mowing the cover crops, discing them in, getting it level.
He was not going to give this up. He had crawled over every inch of this land. He knew every contour of it, every tree and knoll. He knew its moods and vagaries, its contradictions and inclinations, its bounty and wrath. He knew it better than any lover he had ever had. Whatever happened here—good or bad—was his doing, and his alone. It didn’t depend on the judgments of other people, on others’ approval or favor or consent, on arbitrary designations or ordinations. He made all the choices and had to live with them, and sometimes he was rewarded, sometimes not. Sometimes he’d do everything right, and it still wouldn’t matter—he’d fail anyway. Whether he was here or not, it would go on, this cycle, for thousands of years, like it had before him. Knowing this was humbling. It made him feel insignificant, and paradoxically that feeling was useful, freeing. He would do whatever it took to keep this farm, even if it meant turning down ten, twelve, fifteen million from The Centurion Group, even if it meant going against Sheila’s wishes or half the town’s. He couldn’t fathom trying to start a new farm somewhere else, not with the regulatory mess that would surely clutter every step. It would be easier, as the Nielsen family did, to simply quit. They’d sold their ranch to a land trust for far less than what they could have gotten from a developer. “At least it’ll never become a fucking subdivision,” Jon Nielsen had said. Lyndon supposed he could do the same—turn to a land trust. He had been solicited by more than one. Quite aggressively, in fact. But he still believed he could get through this year in the black, as long as everything went right this season. He had to have this harvest. He didn’t know how he’d continue next year, or the year after that, but those questions would be irrelevant if he didn’t have a good harvest this year.
He waded through the inside rows of a block, squinting, the glare of the morning sun making it hard to see. He should have brought sunglasses. But eventually he did see something, a few bottom leaves that were a little wrinkled, slightly cupped. He got down on his hands and knees in the dirt, inspecting the undersides of the leaves, feeling the sap. Soon enough, he found them, exactly what he’d feared, near the bottom stems, in the crevices of the plants. Gray spots, like waxed cigarette ash. Nascent colonies of aphids.
He sprint-hopped back to the house, where JuJu was at the stove in the kitchen, Ling Ling sitting at the table. “This is a wonderful American tradition,” she said to Lyndon, “the men cooking for the women.”
“Want an omelet?” JuJu asked.
“I need your help,” Lyndon said.
He could still save the block of plants if he got water on them and changed the microclimate. Aphids didn’t like it too wet. He needed to do it with overheads, though. Drip tape wouldn’t cut it. He had to haul the aluminum pipes to the field with his tractor and set them up parallel to the rows of plants, put a rise on one end so the pipes would be at an angle and shoot the water in an arc, and run them for at least half the day.
Ling Ling volunteered to go out with them, and they worked without a break for two hours. Lyndon didn’t know if their efforts would have any real effect. Tomorrow he’d do a foliar application of rock dust, another thing aphids disliked, but he didn’t really understand what was going on. The plants weren’t strong enough to fight off the pests, and he didn’t know why. At least the other blocks appeared safe. There was always a certain percentage loss with no-spray organic, and he could afford to sacrifice a few rows, but not more than that.
After they came back from the fields, they took turns showering, and Lyndon made grilled cheese and tomato sandwiches for them for lunch, during which Ling Ling apologized for precipitating the damage to the bar that had cost them their jobs.
It was sweet of her—a sober, sincere gesture. “It was only a matter of time before we would’ve been sacked,” Lyndon told her.
She and JuJu began clearing the table and washing the dishes, and Lyndon went to his workshop to finish the baker’s shelves he’d started yesterday. He was spraying primer on the supports when Hana Frost knocked on the door and rolled in her bicycle.
“Wow, you look like shit!” she told him.
“Thanks. Hello to you, too.”
“I heard what happened at the Oar House.”
“The little birdies in this town travel fast, don’t they?”
She had a crack on the frame of her bicycle where the bottom tube met the headset, and she asked if he could fix it.
“Easy enough to do,” he said, “but it’s not going to look very pretty when I’m done.”
He could have taken the bike apart to its bare frame and sandblasted the paint clean, but he had neither the time nor the desire. It was a cheap mountain bike. There should have been a thick even weld around the entire tube end, but the manufacturer had done a shoddy job, the bead thin and spotty. He took the bike outside and applied some paint and epoxy remover to the cracked joint.
“We need to let it set for a few minutes,” he told Hana.
“Do you think I’m attractive?” she asked.
Not this again, he thought. “Don’t you realize how pretty you’ve become? Even those clothes can’t hide that.”
“What’s wrong with my clothes?” She had on a baggy red Stanford sweatshirt over a turquoise housedress, gray knee socks, and brown Birkenstocks.
“Am I missing something?” Lyndon asked. “Is that supposed to be hip? The anti-fashion fashion?”
“Like you know about fashion.”
“As everyone keeps telling me.”
“If I changed the way I dress, would boys find me sexier?”
“I don’t know,” Lyndon said. “Don’t ask me these things. Ask your friends. Ask your mother.”
“I’m asking you.”
“God, I hate these conversations. I already told you I think you’re attractive.”
“Attractive’s one thing, sexy’s another,” Hana said. “This is what I’ve heard about men: they see a woman, and they make an instant assessment—they think, Yes I do, or No I don’t. Do you look at me and think, Yes I do?”
“Do I think you could be marriage material for someone?”
“Do you think about fucking me?”
“Hana!” Was this the favor she had intended to name later? That he deflower her? “Jesus Christ! There are boundaries here,” he said. “I’m forty-three years old. You’re seventeen. I used to date your mother. I was practically your stepfather. It’s against the law and morally indefensible in five different ways to even think about
this.”
“I’m not asking you to fuck me,” Hana said.
“Well, thank God for that.”
“I want André Meeker to fuck me.”
“Okay, good. Well, not good, but at least appropriate.”
He wiped the stripping solvent off with a cloth and carried the bike inside, where he clamped it to his table and began attacking the old weld joint with a wire brush, a file, a piece of steel wool, an emery cloth, a sheet of sandpaper.
“Why wouldn’t he fuck me?” Hana asked. “I threw myself at him. I said, Here, here I am, I’m yours, you can have me, and he decided to go out with that fat cow instead. Why? Why, Lyndon?”
“I don’t know, Hana. If you want my honest and objective opinion, he’s a complete wanker and dipshit moron to pick Jen de Leuw over you.”
“I’m in love with him,” Hana said. “I’ve been in love with him since sixth grade. I know what you’re going to say—I’ll get over it, I’m young, I’ll fall in love a dozen more times—but it’s not like that. I’m not thinking forever. He’s actually pretty dumb. No genius, that boy, not much upstairs, and he’s got some kooky ideas about the environment. Plus, he’s got unbelievably bad taste in music. But he’s so beautiful. It’s almost criminal, how beautiful he is, don’t you think? You know how long I’ve been planning this? You know how much work it’s taken? It was destined, don’t you see? It was meant to be. Then he starts working at Udderly Licious and hanging out with Jen de Leuw, and before I know it, it all falls apart. God, it’s so unfair. Why did this have to happen, Lyndon?”
“I wish I could do something to help.”
“There is something,” Hana said.
“What?”
“André has a little habit. He’s kind of like you.”
“In what way?” Lyndon asked, cleaning the bike frame with acetone.
“He’s kind of a pothead.”
He wiped his hands and looked at Hana. “What are you talking about? I don’t smoke pot.”