Wrack and Ruin

by Don Lee

“Oh, come on, Lyndon, you think I’m that naïve? All those times you were at our house, and you’d have to go out ‘for a walk’ after dinner?”

  “I’m a closet cigarette smoker.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “Sometimes I just need my alone time.”

  “Stop.”

  “How long have you known about this?” he asked.

  “Forever. It wasn’t hard to figure out, seeing you and JuJu together.”

  “Does your mom know? About me?”

  “She’d be an idiot if she doesn’t.”

  “Do you smoke pot?” Lyndon asked.

  “I’ve tried it a few times. With André. Sunny Padaca was his dealer.”

  “Do you do other drugs?”

  “I’m not a junkie, Lyndon. Don’t worry. But now that Sunny’s been arrested, André’s going to get desperate pretty soon. I’ll be in a position of power, if you help me out.”

  Now Lyndon became truly alarmed. Did she know he was growing? Was he going to have every teenage stoner in town hitting him up for ganja?

  “Could you give me a couple of joints?” Hana asked. “If I could just get André alone, if I could get him a little buzzed, I think nature would take its course. I’ll pay you, if you want. You’re probably worried about your supply as well, with Sunny in jail.”

  Lyndon breathed easier: she didn’t know. “I’m not going to give you anything, Hana. I’m not going to contribute to the delinquency of a minor, especially knowing you want it to seduce someone. God, what would your mother do if she found out?”

  “She’d never have to know.”

  “These things have a way of surfacing eventually.”

  “Are you still hoping to get back together with her?”

  “I’m a slow learner,” he said. In fact, Lyndon had decided this morning, after finishing with the irrigation pipes, that he wouldn’t call Laura Díaz-McClatchey about dinner tonight. He didn’t want to start something new. He wanted everything to stay the same. He wanted Sheila back.

  “She’s going on a date with that developer guy, Ed Kitchell,” Hana told him.

  “What?”

  “I picked up the extension by mistake last night. They’re going out to dinner on Monday.”

  It was impossible. It was just not possible. “They’re getting together to talk business,” he said. The Centurion Group was sponsoring the chili and chowder festival. They were probably planning a postmortem, strictly business. Or perhaps it was another insidious, conniving, cowardly attempt by Kitchell to pressure Sheila into swaying him. But not a date.

  “No, I can tell the difference,” Hana said.

  “Are you sure? Ed Kitchell?”

  “He’s a jerk, but they’re sort of a good match, you know. All she cares about is money. That’s why you two could never make it work. She’s a philistine. She always has been.”

  “That’s a little harsh.”

  “Yeah? She’s making me go to Stanford.” She looked down at her sweatshirt. “Premed. Whoever said I wanted to be a doctor?”

  “I believe you did,” he told her. “That’s all you talked about a couple of years ago. Don’t you remember? Doctors Without Borders?”

  “I got into Berklee College of Music.”

  “I thought they rejected you.”

  “I applied again for the spring, and they just accepted me. But she says I can’t go. I want to be a songwriter.”

  “You can go to Stanford and still be a songwriter.”

  “That’s what she says. Maybe you’d feel differently if you’d done better in New York.”

  “Now you’re getting mean.” Over the years, since he had never refuted Sheila’s initial assumption that he had failed as a sculptor, a certain mythology had developed, the extent of his defeat leavening to an image of carnage.

  “It doesn’t help that Steven was such a miserable hack,” Hana said.

  “Okay,” Lyndon said, his feelings for Steven notwithstanding, “I think that’s uncalled-for.”

  “You haven’t heard me lately,” Hana said. “I’m good now. You’ll see tomorrow when I play at the festival.”

  “I’m planning to be there. Stand back a little while I do this.” He turned on his Heli-Arc machine, flipped down his helmet, and scratched the tip of the tungsten electrode against the bike frame to strike an arc, then dipped the filler rod down to form a sturdy molten puddle.

  “I told Berklee I’d come in January,” Hana said. “I haven’t told Mom.”

  “You are full of surprises today.” He closed the cylinder valve, purged the gas line, and switched off the machine. He lifted the bike off the table and set it down in front of Hana. “You’re all set.”

  “You think I’m crazy.”

  “Is this what you really want to do? Write songs, sing?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you love it? I mean really love it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let me ask you, answer honestly, is it just because you want to be famous?”

  “I don’t care about that shit,” Hana told him.

  “Answer honestly, really think about this, you feel you can’t not do it, that even if you wanted to, you couldn’t let it go?”

  “You know how I feel, don’t you?”

  Maybe what he said next was out of spite, to hurt Sheila. “Do it, then.”

  “Really? You mean it?”

  “But go to Stanford first for a semester. At the end of the semester, if you’re still sure you want to do it, transfer.”

  “What if Mom won’t pay for it?” Hana asked. “They didn’t offer me a scholarship.”

  “Isn’t your father responsible for college?”

  “That wasn’t part of the settlement. She wanted full control.”

  “Apply for funding again,” Lyndon said. “Get a job. Get a loan. If you want it, you’ll find a way.”

  “Okay, thanks,” Hana said. “Your opinion’s important to me. Are you going to give me the joints now?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Didn’t I tell you already? Life is suffering.”

  Lyndon sent her home, went to the kitchen, and called Laura Díaz-McClatchey.

  CHAPTER 6

  HE COULDN’T FIND THE TURNOFF AT FIRST. HE WENT BACK AND forth on Highway 1, looking for the little dirt road down which Trudy had directed him, but it was nowhere to be seen. As he backtracked through the wooded area of Bidwell Marsh Preserve, his Rover began making a funny noise. The engine or radiator or something or another was misperforming, the car’s usual fine-tuned purr interrupted on occasion with a disturbing stutter. Had he sustained more damage than he thought when he had crashed into the tree yesterday? Not merely cosmetic—cosmetic was bad enough—but mechanical or structural as well? The prospect was troubling. It was extremely doubtful there would be a qualified service center anywhere in the vicinity.

  Woody had a headache. He hadn’t gotten to sleep until late the night before, wired from his near-death experience at the Oar House. Then, just as he was dropping off, Ling Ling and JuJu had started giggling and tussling in the bedroom next door, and very distinctly they had started fucking, going at it with an unbelievable racket, banging the bed against the wall, Ling Ling yipping and screeching as if she were whipping through one of her kung fu routines. What the hell were they doing in there? It went on and on—it seemed impossible for two people to fuck that long with such no-tomorrow gymnastic vigor. Woody finally had to succumb to a sleeping pill.

  Somehow, though, the clamor of birds outside pierced through his narcotic slumber in the early a.m., and he awoke with a start, an epiphany fully enunciated in his head, one that surprised him with its clarity but which vanished as abruptly as it had appeared. Afterward, he’d been unable to fall back asleep. Goddamn birds. They were perched in a tree right beside the house, singing happily. What were they so fucking happy about?

  Now, despite two espressos at the Java Hut, he was still hungover and bleary fr
om the sleeping pill. Maybe he needed to adjust his meds. He was on five different medications for his cholesterol, high blood pressure, anxiety, allergies, and male pattern baldness (he was receding just a touch in his temples), as well as an antidepressant and a mild stimulant for possible adult attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and antibiotics for some pimples on his back that wouldn’t go away, not to mention the beta blockers he sometimes took before important pitch meetings, the sleeping pills from which he was trying to wean himself, the Viagra he didn’t really need but used purely as a precautionary measure, and the inhalers for the asthma he was convinced he had. Some of these had been prescribed by his primary care physician, dermatologist, and allergist, most had not. Woody doctor-shopped, and whatever he couldn’t get from a doctor, like for the asthma, which, perplexingly, no one would confirm as a diagnosis, he bought on the black market or the Internet. And, of course, there were also his protein and ephedra supplements to burn fat and build muscle, his Omega-3 and flaxseed and various vitamins, his glucosamine chondroitin for his creaky knees, and his acidophilus and enzyme tablets, without which, owing to lactose intolerance, he would not have been able to enjoy that delicious linguini carbonara the day before. Modern medicine was a wonderful thing.

  At last he spotted the dirt road. Or so he thought. He turned into it, and immediately it seemed bumpier and narrower than he’d remembered. The Rover bounced haphazardly, the engine grinding; parts of the car seemed to be flying apart, clanging. Was this the right way? He didn’t recognize a thing. Yet he didn’t have room to turn around, and it was too difficult to try to exit in reverse, so he kept going—forever, it seemed. There was definitely something wrong with the Rover, and the last thing he wanted was to get stuck out here. The car was bucking crazily. Maybe it was the axle or the electronic suspension system—he knew nothing about cars. He hated going to garages, because there he was in an inferior position, never sure if he was being ripped off. That was one of the reasons he got a new car every two years, before the warranty expired.

  He broke through to the clearing. He shut off the ignition, and the Rover spluttered to a rest. God knew if he would be able to start it again. He got out of the car, spread a towel on the ground, and changed into a pair of old jeans and a T-shirt he’d snatched from Lyndon’s closet and some rubber boots he’d found in the mudroom. Everything was a bit tight, and certainly the outfit was the nadir of fashion, but it’d have to do. His own clothes were completely unfeasible for this walk into the marsh. He started down the trail that Trudy had pointed out to him.

  He had been thinking about Trudy, what she had said, that, as a little girl, she had been deeply in love with him. The confession had puzzled him. Not many women—none, in fact—had ever professed such a sentiment to him. Had it merely been a schoolgirl’s crush on a brother’s friend, bolstered by the happenstance that Woody was one of the few Asians she knew, or had there been something about him—a trait or quality—that Trudy had found particularly admirable? He couldn’t imagine what that might have been.

  During those summer and Thanksgiving visits, he had been preoccupied with trying to impress Mr. and Mrs. Thorneberry, or “Buzz” and “Tinker,” thinking they might serve as important connections in the future. His entire time at Harvard, he had been continually on edge, wondering how he was coming off, what people thought of him, if he was being patronized or ridiculed, where he fit in on the pecking order of the Future Leaders of the Ruling Privileged Wasp Elite. He studied hard, but nothing came to him naturally. He always found himself cramming, secretly relying on CliffsNotes, his grades never more than average. He knew he was out of his league intellectually, and he wasn’t particularly witty or funny, and as he struggled to partake in his classmates’ repartee, it became clear he didn’t have an original thought in his head. So he memorized esoterica—polysyllabic buzzwords and Latin phrases and quotations from Nietzsche and Schopenhauer—to parcel out in moments of insecurity. Intimidated as he was, he determined early on that he couldn’t waste his time with middle-class scholarship kids like himself on the lower rung. He had to prioritize and network. He had to befriend people according to their utility, their value in what they might be able to provide him after graduation—a strategy that proved wise. Kyle, although failing to help Woody with the top investment banks in Manhattan, had used a family entrée to get him the job at Credit Suisse First Boston, and other classmates had been essential assets when he’d hung out a shingle as a financial planner, though neither they nor Kyle had enough faith in Woody, he was wounded to discover, to entrust him with their own money.

  The trail became less distinct all of a sudden, the path blending in with the grass and the roots of the trees. He soon had to brush aside branches and brambles, and he began to sweat. He was under the canopy of the trees, but the sun was hot and bright today, insects homing in on his flesh. He should have brought along bug spray. And sunscreen. A hat. And water. He’d imagined a leisurely little stroll along a wide marked trail to the beach, not an arduous trek through jungle forest that required a machete. He carefully sidled past some spiny bushes, worried about ticks, Lyme disease. The ground was slippery, wild mushrooms popping out of the rotting vegetation. These birds above him, they were making such a din, shrieking like monkeys. Why were they being so noisy? Was it because the sun was out, or was it because there was something they were afraid of nearby? Could there be bears in the marsh? Or maybe that coyote.

  He was feeling the burblings of panic. It shouldn’t have taken so long to reach the ocean, and he feared he might be lost. He flipped open his cell phone. No reception, of course. He wished he had one of those portable GPS units. He looked up to see where the sun was, and walked right into a spider web, which wrapped around his face. He spat and clawed, brushing off the threads. He stepped into a space between the trees and looked up again. The sun in the morning would be in the east. If he kept going in the opposite direction, he’d eventually find the ocean, wouldn’t he? He’d never been a Boy Scout. All he knew about the outdoors, he’d learned from TV and the movies. He hated the outdoors. He didn’t understand the appeal of hiking or camping at all.

  He heard the sound of running water. He burst through a thicket and came upon a meadow with a creek. Thank God, open air. He’d follow the creek to the sea. Simple enough. He wasn’t lost at all. He didn’t know why he’d been concerned. He wasn’t an idiot. He didn’t need Boy Scout or wilderness training. He could figure these things out on his own. He was a Harvard graduate, after all.

  The meadow turned into marsh, and the creek widened into an estuary. He could hear breaking waves, see dunes ahead, a sign on a post: WESTERN SNOWY PLOVER NESTING AREA. BEACH AND DUNE AREAS BEHIND THIS SIGN ARE OFF LIMITS. SNOWY PLOVERS ARE PROTECTED UNDER THE ENDANGERED SPECIES ACT.

  The ground got muddier as he walked onto the flats behind the sign. It’d been a good idea, these rubber boots of Lyndon’s, but nonetheless each step was becoming more of an ordeal, his feet sinking deeper and deeper into the alluvial muck. He was having to yank his legs up as if in a snowdrift, breaking the suction of the mud. As snug as the boots fit on his feet, he slipped out of one, lost his balance, and fell on his back.

  “Fuck!”

  He was lying in the sludge, up to his ass in it, and the mud stank horribly, putrid from the marsh. He pulled himself upright, tugged the boot loose, and put it back on. He was caked in mud, soaked to the bone. He had a choice before him now. The mudflats broadened out away from the marsh, and he could cut across them or stick to the firmer ground alongside the trees, parallel to the beach, and circle back on the sand. He stiffly proceeded straight ahead. It couldn’t get any worse, he thought. He was already soiled through and through.

  He stepped into some sort of soft spot in the mud, and he sank all the way down to his knees. He wiggled his feet, trying to pry himself free, but only sank farther, now to his crotch. This wasn’t mud. This was a weird kind of liquefied sand. Quicksand. He jerked his legs and flailed his arms, and d
escended to his waist. He was trapped, he couldn’t move.

  “Help!” he screamed. “Help!”

  It came back to him, that profound revelation with which he had awoken earlier this morning. It must have been a delayed reaction, his brain, choosing to defer processing events until he was asleep, in shock from the string of close encounters with death—the car accident, the coyote, the truck on the highway, Sunny Padaca threatening to flagellate him in the Oar House, the piles of junk from the ceiling about to compress him into cookie dough. He had woken up knowing something with anguished, crystalline certitude: he did not want to die alone. And coupled with this thought was a startling resolution: he wanted—right away, if possible—to get married and have children.

  But he would not have the chance to do any of that now. He would suffer the most hideous of deaths, exposure and starvation, blistering in the hot sun, and he’d be out here alone, no one missing him for hours, no one even knowing he’d ventured out to the marsh, damn this place, damn this town, damn his brother for his intransigence and stupidity.

  He closed his eyes and yelled, over and over, “Help!” Was there an afterlife? he wondered. Had there been any purpose, any meaning, to his tortured, cursed existence? Why hadn’t his parents raised him with a religion?

  “Years that whirl me I know not whither, substances mock and elude me.”

  The two of them, Trudy and Margot, were standing behind him, wearing shorts and tank tops, looking very tan and sinewy.

  “Get me out!” Woody pleaded.

  “You’re really not in any danger, you know,” Trudy told him.

  “Unless you were to fall face-first,” Margot said. “Then you might be in trouble.”

  “The more you struggle, the more you sink,” Trudy said. The human body’s less dense than the quicksand. If you relax and lie on your back, you’ll actually float. Into the destructive elements immerse.”

  “Density’s one thing,” Margot said. “A lot of it has to do with lack of movement to reduce viscosity.”

  “You’re saying that’s an equal factor?” Trudy asked.