Wrack and Ruin

by Don Lee

  She picked up a pebble and handed it to Woody. “Climbers have this exercise,” she said. “They’re faced with a big wall and have to figure out a route on it, and they get overwhelmed by its complexity. So they start with something smaller, a boulder. They look at the holes and cracks, get tuned in to it, and then shift those doors of perceptions over to the wall. If you look at a pebble, really look at it, you can do the same thing. Look at the surface, at its texture and variations, the microscopic indentations and crevices. You see what I mean? There’s grandeur in a pebble.”

  It was getting hot in the blind, and Woody wiped the sweat from his forehead. He held the pebble in his fingers and turned it around in the sunlight, staring hard at it. It was a pebble. He didn’t see grandeur. He shook his head.

  “You think I’m full of shit, don’t you?” Trudy asked.

  “The air is getting kind of thick in here.”

  “There have been days when I’ve stared at the sky and the ocean and the horizon from this spot, and I’ve felt the earth rolling underneath me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If you sit still and really concentrate, you can feel the earth spinning on its axis,” she said.

  “Now you’re making fun of me.”

  “No, no, really,” she said. “It’s being aware. There’s a canyon of redwoods just above the marsh. I should take you to the hot springs up there. A couple of months ago, I found this waterfall, and I sat across from it for over an hour, and after a while I could follow individual particles of water flowing over the edge. Then I glanced over at the rock beside the waterfall, and I could see it flowing, too.”

  “The rock.”

  “Yes!”

  “You did this without drugs.”

  “Yes! We think of rock as being solid and unchanging, but it’s not. Nothing is. Everything in the universe is in flux. Molecules in motion, recycling. Everything’s a shimmering dance of energy.”

  She nodded at him gleefully. He hadn’t figured her to be such a crystal-gazing flake, tripping out on vision quests in the wild.

  “Did one of your parents do something to Kyle?” he asked.

  “Buzz and Tinker?”

  “Did something happen to him? Or to you?”

  “You’re still looking for an answer as to why he killed himself,” she said. “You’re not going to find it. There wasn’t any abuse or childhood trauma. Buzz and Tinker are only guilty of being rich and white and narrow-minded. Otherwise they’re well-meaning people.”

  “Why are you no longer talking to them, then?”

  She picked at a scab on her knee. “I went to Vietnam three years ago, after Kyle died. I went to find my birth parents.”

  “Did you?”

  “No. But a trip like that, of course I came back and nothing was the same. It made me realize I didn’t belong there, in Vietnam, but where did I belong? It magnified all the issues I’d had with Buzz and Tinker, and they weren’t very happy with the choices I was making, anyway, and without any sort of conscious decision, on my part or theirs, we cut each other off. It’s kind of weird how easily something like that can happen. You wouldn’t think it’d be so easy, but as time goes by, it gets too awkward to reconnect.”

  Woody knew all too well how easily these things could happen. “How much did Kyle tell you about me?”

  “Not much. You went bust. You lost pretty much everything.”

  “I almost went to federal prison.”

  “He didn’t tell me it’d been that bad.”

  “Was Kyle, I don’t know—was he ashamed of me?”

  “Ashamed? That’s an odd thing to ask. To tell you the truth, I don’t think it was that momentous to him. He felt bad for you, but you guys weren’t really that tight, were you?”

  “We were best friends,” Woody said.

  “You were? I always thought you were, you know, roommates—not really friends. I didn’t know you two kept up after school.”

  Was that the way Kyle had regarded him? As a mere roommate? Someone to be tolerated, a hanger-on, like a pathetic little brother? Trudy was right—they hadn’t really kept up after graduation, living in separate cities, each involved with their own careers and lives—but it made Woody heartsick to think that that was all he had meant to Kyle.

  “Are you proud of what you’re doing now?” Trudy asked. “Producing movies?”

  “Proud?” he asked. “Sure. Why do you ask?”

  “They seem so violent, your movies,” she said.

  “Dalton Lee is going to be directing my new one,” he said. She stared at him blankly. He’d forgotten she didn’t know who Dalton Lee was.

  “When I was little,” Trudy said, “I liked you because you wanted so badly to fit in. Maybe it was just status-seeking Twinkie-ism, but it was endearing to me, how hard you tried, because I was feeling the exact same thing. It took me years not to care. You know, Woody, it’s such a relief not to care.” She scooted up to the observation slot. “We should go down soon,” she said, looking through the telescope. “If you could do anything—let’s say money wasn’t a problem, let’s say you didn’t care what anyone thought—what would you do?”

  “I like what I do.”

  “Something different, something else. What would you do?”

  It was a silly hypothetical exercise, but he decided to indulge her. “I’d own an ice-cream store,” he said, grabbing at the first thing that came to mind.

  “An ice-cream store! That’s great. Why an ice-cream store?”

  “The transactions are always brief, no service complications, no returns, and people are always happy in ice-cream stores,” Woody said. He was only thinking of it because last night, after taking a chance on a Japanese restaurant on Main Street for dinner, which turned out to be surprisingly decent (Lyndon had recommended a couple of restaurants miles away, but Woody hadn’t felt like driving that far, especially with a busted headlight), he had wanted ice cream for dessert, and he and Ling Ling had gone to a little shop called Udderly Licious.

  Trudy told him it was time to head down to the nest. After lengthy instructions, she led him to the beach, keeping between the water’s edge and the wrack line of seaweed.

  “Don’t look at me, don’t look at me!” Trudy said, carrying a rake over her shoulder. “Look where you’re stepping!”

  “Okay, okay!” he told her.

  As they neared the fence enclosure, AY:BO did precisely what Trudy had predicted. He flew around them, twittering whit curr, whit curr, terwheeit, and then performed a broken-wing display, flaring out a wing and dragging it behind him while he limped in the sand, pretending to be injured, offering himself as bait to lure them away from the chicks. This was considerably better, Trudy had told Woody, than what they’d had to endure with the roseate terns, who dive-bombed intruders, pecking at their heads and shitting on them. They’d had to wear hats made of plywood.

  “Watch where you’re going for WY:GO,” she said. “She’s got to be crouched in a depression somewhere.”

  Trudy plopped a bright orange baseball cap into the middle of the enclosure and opened up the fence. “All right, you can come up here now.” She knelt down, unzipped her rucksack, and extracted tools. “This is what we’re going to put on the one that’s just hatched. USFWS Size 1B.” It was a silver aluminum band less than the size of a pinkie fingernail, etched with nine numbers and the inscription CALL 1-800-327-BAND.

  “You’re not putting four bands on it?”

  “Later. It’s too weak for adult bracelets.”

  “How will you catch it?”

  “Mist nets. With the bands, we’ll be able to trace its movements throughout its entire life span. People will send reports from all over the world to the Bird Banding Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. I’m sure in a few months there’ll be a sighting in Baja. That’s where they’ll starting migrating to when they fledge. Ready?”

  She lifted the baseball hat and revealed the two chicks. It was breathtaking, how minuscule they were,
mere cotton balls. Trudy gently picked up the one they’d already banded and placed it in the overturned baseball cap, then cupped the newly hatched chick in her hand, measured it with a ruler, dropped it into a pouch, and weighed it with a little spring scale.

  “Doesn’t this…traumatize them?” Woody asked.

  “I don’t think so, but we can’t really know, I suppose.”

  She was being exceedingly careful handling the bird, and it seemed to fall into a docile trance. “It’s so calm,” Woody said as Trudy clipped the band loosely on the chick’s leg.

  “This is what’s called a bander’s grip. When you hold on to its shoulders like this, they don’t struggle, for some reason.” She took a piece of orange plastic and wrapped it over the aluminum band. “There. Hold both your hands out.” She deposited the chick onto his palms.

  It weighed nothing. He could barely feel its wings and feet paddling against his skin. “My God,” he said, “how do these things survive?” It was truly miraculous.

  As they retreated from the nest, Trudy raked over their footprints all the way to the wrack line, and then they walked back to the blind on the wet sand.

  “Thank you for letting me do that,” Woody told her.

  “You’re welcome,” she said. “You know, you should spend the day with me. You look so much more relaxed already. You need to learn how to relax, Woodrow.”

  But when they reached the blind, Trudy herself was anything but relaxed, abruptly throwing down the rake and peeling off the straps of her rucksack. “I don’t believe it. What the fuck are they doing here?”

  “Who?”

  She tore up the dune and dived through the observation slot. Woody looked down the beach and saw a horse. A couple was riding on it together, bareback. As they got closer, Woody realized they were facing each other, entangled, kissing. The woman was straddling the man, who wore shorts but was shirtless. With each clop, she was bouncing up, and so was her skirt, flipping up to reveal lily-white ass cheeks. Improbably but unmistakably, the couple was fucking on the horse. Then Woody recognized them. They worked in the very ice-cream store, Udderly Licious, he had gone to last night. The black-haired skinny boy and blond pudgy girl behind the counter. They were locked into each other, bumping up and down with the horse, into it. Nothing could separate them, nothing could pull them apart. They could not be distracted or denied, they were the planet’s only inhabitants. It was stunning to behold, these kids on the horse, riding along the ocean, making love. Incredibly romantic. The sun was high in the sky, waves were crashing onto the shore, the grass and the sage above the dunes were waving in the breeze. Woody breathed in the clean, bountiful air. He could hear the birdsong. So many birds! This place, this vast stretch of windswept dunes, so wild, such a stark, beautiful no-man’s-land—it was magnificent. Youth! Life! Love! The propagation of the species!

  “Motherfuckers!”

  Trudy was running down the dune with a rifle—it looked like an old Winchester from the movies; was everyone an armed vigilante in this town?—and she was snapping forward the lever action to cock and load the gun. “Get the fuck out of here!” she yelled. She raised the rifle and braced the butt against her shoulder, taking dead aim, dispensing with any warning shots.

  “Wait!” Woody said. “I know them! They’re just kids!”

  Trudy fired anyway, but the rifle didn’t make the noise he’d expected—just a soft thunk. The shot wasn’t close, apparently, but she now had the attention of the boy and girl, who turned to them quizzically. Trudy reloaded. “Go away! Go away!” she screamed. She fired another shot.

  Frightened, the boy yanked on the reins of the horse and spun it around and hightailed it back down the beach in the direction they’d come, the girl clutching on to him.

  “Unbelievable,” Trudy muttered. “Can’t they read? It’s not like we don’t have enough signs down there.”

  “They’re just teenagers. They work at the ice-cream shop on Main Street,” Woody said. Immediately he regretted telling her this: she could be fanatical enough to pursue further retribution.

  “There’s a stable south of here. Everyone’s been warned time and time again. Last month that guy from the golf course development came through on a white Andalusian, wearing this outrageous getup, like a Trojan soldier. What a pervert. I scared the shit out of him, I’m happy to say.”

  “You’re going to hurt someone with that gun one of these days.”

  “I doubt it,” Trudy said. “This isn’t a real rifle. It’s a pellet gun.”

  “Yoo-hoo!”

  Grinning, Margot was standing at the top of the dune, an Amazonian warrior goddess, feet planted wide apart, arms spread in triumph, brandishing her fishing pole in one hand and a huge fish in the other.

  Trudy trudged up the sand, dropped her pellet gun, and wrapped her arms around Margot, sinking her head against her chest in a prolonged hug. All was forgiven.

  THE GIRLS GUTTED AND scaled the trout in the creek, and then cooked it in a large bamboo steamer over a fire with scallions, potatoes, and carrots, serving it with a sauce of Italian dressing and Dijon mustard. The meal was astonishingly good. The outdoors made everything taste infinitely better.

  After lunch, Woody changed back into his own clothes, which had dried by then, and they returned to the blind and watched AY:BO and WY:GO lead their two chicks to forage. Then they strolled behind the dunes, climbed the towering sandstone bluffs topped with wind-sculpted Monterey cypress, and navigated down the cliffs to the rocky shale reefs, exposed by the low tide. A sea otter was bobbing offshore in the golden-green kelp beds, and a couple of harbor seals were sunning themselves on the rocks. Yet the real view was in the tidal pools. Woody had never seen anything like it, the bold, iridescent colors, the variety of sea life in the small puddles of water: giant blue and green fluorescent anemones, hermit crabs, sculpins, starfish.

  “What’s that?” he kept asking.

  Red and purple algae, bright green surf grass, pricklebacks, black turban snails. Simply out of this world.

  Next they walked up the marsh trail, crossed Highway 1, and hiked through the canyon into the hills. The path was covered on all sides by big-leaf maples, willows, madrones, and alders, and the damp spongy topsoil was spotted with Calypso orchids and banana slugs, the ugliest, most peculiar creatures Woody had ever encountered—huge, neon-yellow, with black spots and a meaty hump on their backs, like mutated snails without shells.

  “They’re hermaphrodites,” Trudy told him.

  Farther along, there were newts, salamanders, and red-legged frogs along the creek, and when they reached a meadow of ridgetop chaparral, they had a view of the glittering Pacific.

  “Look!” Trudy whispered.

  For one glorious, heart-stuttering moment, Woody caught a glimpse of a black-tailed deer bounding into the manzanita.

  They kept climbing, surrounded by groves of live oaks and old-growth redwoods towering three hundred feet above their heads. Gray squirrels and raccoons scampered among the brambles, and thrushes and warblers flitted overhead, joined occasionally by yellow-bellied sapsuckers, woodpeckers, and western tanagers.

  At last they arrived at the hot springs—a boulder-lined pool ten feet in diameter, next to a cold brook. Trudy and Margot, as casual as could be, stripped off their clothes, tiptoed into the pool, and eased into it.

  “Aren’t you getting in?” Trudy asked.

  Woody had not foreseen that they would be naked in the hot springs. He was self-conscious about exposing his body to begin with, and now that he’d hesitated, he would have to undress as the girls watched.

  “Come on,” Margot said. “Don’t be shy. You know what they say: it’s not the size of the boat, but the motion of the ocean.”

  He took off his clothes.

  “Well, ahoy there, matey,” Margot said, giggling.

  “What’s the temperature of that water?” he asked, covering his genitals with his hands.

  “It’s just right,” Trudy said. “Arou
nd a hundred degrees.”

  Exactly as he feared. Bacteria grew best at body temperature: 98.6 degrees. Who knew how many people had been in these springs, what sorts of fungi were growing in there?

  “We won’t bite,” Margot said. “Unless, of course, you want us to.”

  Into the destructive elements immerse, he remembered Trudy saying. He needed to inject some spontaneity into his life, take some risks, let it go. He stepped into the hot springs. The water was warm and had a slightly sulfurous smell. It felt quite pleasant, actually. He took a seat between the girls and leaned back against the rocks.

  “How does it feel?” Trudy asked.

  “Pretty nice,” Woody admitted. It was very relaxing, sitting in the water next to the ferns and the trees and the stream.

  Margot leaned forward for Trudy’s rucksack, tugged out a joint and a book of matches, and fired it up, using only the tips of her fingers to keep it dry. She sucked in a toke and expelled a long, thick column of blue smoke. Trudy did the same and said to Woody, “Care for a taste?”

  He hadn’t smoked pot in many years, perhaps since Harvard—unlike Lyndon, who, he knew, was still a habitual pothead. Woody had found a stash of marijuana in his workshop when he’d been rooting through the farm. “Why not?” he said. He took the joint from Trudy. He inhaled deeply, held it for as long as he could, and breathed out.

  They sat quietly in the hot springs pool, passing the joint back and forth, listening to the brook and the birds and the insects scraping in the trees. Closing his eyes, Woody breathed in through his nose and smelled dried pine needles and something minty, almost lemony—a very agreeable, lush forest smell. He let his arms and legs float in the water, could feel himself drift.