Wrack and Ruin

by Don Lee

  He unbuckled his jeans, bent over, and took a gander. Everything was red, covered with those same bumps that were on his face, only there were more of them down there, and they were bigger. What were those things? Hives from an allergic reaction? The measles? Was it possible to get measles on your genitalia and ass? Good God, they itched.

  He heard an engine rumbling toward the house. He looked out the window and saw Lyndon driving his tractor to the shed. Woody leaned out of the window and waved. “Hey, hey!” he yelled.

  Lyndon turned off the engine. “What’s up?”

  “I need help!”

  His brother mumbled something under his breath.

  “What?” Woody asked, then deduced that Lyndon had said, “You’re not kidding.”

  “I’ll be up in a second,” he told Woody.

  He took his sweet time, stowing the tractor underneath the shed and unhooking the plow behind it before coming into the house. “What is it?” he asked when he reached the bathroom.

  “I have some sort of rash,” Woody said, holding up his jeans.

  “Where? On your face? That doesn’t look too serious.”

  “No,” Woody said. “On my…” He glanced downward, and Lyndon did, too.

  “There?” his brother said, smirking.

  “Yes.”

  “Who have you been consorting with?”

  “It’s not an STD.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Okay.”

  “I think it might be the measles.”

  “If it were the measles, it’d be all over,” Lyndon said. “It wouldn’t be isolated on Pat and Mick.”

  “Could you…take a look for me?”

  Lyndon winced. “You have got to be joking.”

  “Come on, we used to take baths together.”

  “Forty years ago.”

  “Just a peek.”

  Lyndon laughed. “No way, José.”

  Woody hopped up and down. “Holy fuck, it itches. What the hell is the matter with me?” He described the rash and bumps to Lyndon.

  His brother nodded. “You have poison oak.”

  “Poison oak?”

  “You said last night you took a shit in the woods. You used leaves for toilet paper.”

  “I did?” Woody had no memory of this. He barely remembered last night at all.

  “The sap oil was still on your fingers when you touched your dick and face,” Lyndon said. “Don’t worry about it. It’ll clear up by itself in two weeks.”

  “Two weeks? Isn’t there something I can do? I can’t live like this!”

  Lyndon rummaged inside the cabinet underneath the sink. He pulled out a bar of brown soap and a pink bottle. “Take a shower with this—it’s lye soap—in cold water, then put the calamine lotion on. The best thing you can do is keep it cool and dry. You have any antihistamines?”

  “Of course.”

  “That might help. Try not to scratch. You’ll get some blisters, and you don’t want to get them infected. And take all those clothes to the washing machine and run them on hot-hot.”

  Woody read the label on the calamine lotion, then frowned at his brother. “You don’t have to look so amused,” he told him.

  “It is pretty funny, you have to admit,” Lyndon said. “Now I have to find Bob. You might have gotten some sap on him.”

  The shower, calamine lotion, and antihistamines did help. Not much, but a little. He still felt nauseous and hungover, however, and he needed coffee. Good coffee.

  Outside, it was bright and sunny, but blustery—very windy, in fact. Ling Ling and JuJu were in the greenhouse, doing their training exercises or whatnot, and Lyndon was in front of the barn, hosing down Bob, who was less than pleased with the bath, arching his back under the stream of water.

  “I’m going into town,” Woody said.

  “We’ll catch up with you there,” Lyndon said. “We’re all going to the chili and chowder fest later on. Starts at noon. Maybe we can have lunch together.”

  Lunch? Woody thought. His brother was softening toward him.

  He heard a piercing trill overhead, the song of a bird, gurrga-lee, chu-laak, deeek. He glanced up.

  “That’s a—” Lyndon began.

  “Red-winged blackbird,” Woody said.

  “How’d you know that?” Lyndon asked.

  “I’m not a complete city yokel,” he said.

  As Woody approached his Rover, he noticed, in addition to the damage on his bumper, grill, and headlight from hitting the tree on Friday, that the Buckingham Blue Metallic paint on the passenger’s side was scratched. At first he thought he might have brushed against some branches as he had squeezed down that narrow road to the marsh preserve, but as he peered closer, he came to a different conclusion. Someone had deliberately keyed his car, raking a sharp implement several times across the paint, from stem to stern. He had been vandalized.

  “Son of a bitch,” he said. Unbelievable. But when had it happened? He’d come straight to the farm from the marsh yesterday evening. Had someone defaced the Rover the day before, when he had been in town? Maybe with all the mud and dust on it, he hadn’t noticed. Or had it occurred while he’d been parked in the marsh? Those kids from the ice-cream store on horseback, they might have decided to get their revenge, payback for being chased off the beach by Trudy and her pellet gun.

  “I meant to ask,” Lyndon said, “what happened to your headlight? Get into an accident?”

  “This is a hazardous town,” Woody said. “Call me later on my cell.”

  The Rover stuttered when he started it, and it made a swishing sound as he drove to town—squirming, trying to keep his butt raised from the seat—and it coughed when he finally found a parking spot and shut off the engine. There was no way he’d make it back to L.A. without breaking down. He would have to buy a new car somewhere nearby, maybe in Santa Cruz.

  They had closed off Main Street, and though the festival wasn’t due to begin for another hour, there were quite a few people milling around already. Woody picked up a copy of the Sunday Los Angeles Times inside Cuchi’s Country Store and got into an interminable line at the checkout. After a few minutes, he summarily cut to the front, ignoring grumbles and raised eyebrows, flicked off a twenty-dollar bill—the smallest he had—from his money clip and laid it in front of the cashier, and walked out. He went across the street to the Java Hut, saw a man vacating an outside table, and scooted across the patio into the chair.

  An elderly woman said to him in a pique, “We were waiting for a table.”

  “I was, too,” he said, and opened the Calendar section of the paper.

  With so many customers, it took a while—too long—to get served. Woody was a bit irritable by the time the waitress got to him and wiped down his table, but she was chatty with him, giggly, and she was sort of cute, in a wholesome, freckly, small-town way, and he cheered up as he realized that she was flirting with him. And why shouldn’t she? He was wearing a Roberto Cavalli shirt, Helmut Lang jeans, and Prada driving moccasins. Odds on, he was the most stylish, cosmopolitan man within a fifty-mile radius.

  He asked her for a double espresso, a walnut and raspberry scone, two large orange juices, and a large glass of water.

  “Thirsty this morning?” she said, smiling at Woody.

  “Just a bit,” he said, smiling back at her.

  She tarried, standing in front of him. “You’re not contagious, are you?” she asked.

  “What?” For a happy second, he thought she might be making an extraordinarily brazen proposition, offering to consort with him, barring an STD, but then he understood she was referring to the spots of calamine lotion dotting his face. “Oh,” he said. “No, I’m not.”

  “Just checking,” she said, and gamboled away. He returned to his paper, his ass beginning to itch again.

  He was deep into an article on the Toronto Film Festival when a caravan of three cars, with stacks of windsurfing boards strapped to their roofs, idled up
the side street, double-parking next to Cuchi’s. A pile of young men noisily disembarked, stretching and joking, shoving one another. They went into the store and, after ten minutes or so, came out again, arms full of snacks and sandwiches and drinks. As Woody watched them absently, one of the men—Asian, ponytailed—caught his eye. It couldn’t be, but he looked just like the director Dalton Lee.

  “Yo, Dalt,” one of the windsurfers said as they were getting back in their cars, and tossed a bag of potato chips to him.

  Woody stood up. “Dalton?” he yelled across the street.

  Dalton Lee turned, located who had spoken, and blanched. He jumped into the car, and Woody could see him motioning to the driver to go, go.

  “Oh, no, you don’t,” Woody said aloud, and ran to his Rover, which he had had to park two blocks away. He headed in the general direction in which the caravan had taken off and was momentarily afraid he would lose them, but with the boards on their roof racks, the cars were hard to miss. He spotted them turning south onto Highway 1. As he sped after them, he said, “Call Roland,” activating the Rover’s hands-free phone.

  “Yallow,” Roland said.

  “The little chickenshit didn’t leave!”

  “Who?” Roland asked.

  “Dalton Lee! He never left Sausalito. There was no emergency. He was lying! I just saw him. He’s going windsurfing!” Dalton Lee, according to reports, was an avid windsurfer, quite a good one. When There Once Was a City had won the Audience Award at Sundance, he’d been profiled on several entertainment news shows, segments showing him sailing off Crissy Field into San Francisco Bay.

  “Maybe he got back early,” Roland said sleepily.

  “That’s bullshit. Whose side are you on, anyway?”

  “No one’s,” Roland said. “I mean yours. Ours.”

  “He thinks he can weasel out of our deal? Well, not so fast, pretty boy.” Over the phone, Woody could hear Roland yawn. “Late night last night, as usual?” he asked.

  “Not too late. Just tired,” Roland said. “Hey, that PI’s been trying to reach you. Did you get his message?”

  Woody hadn’t checked his voice mail. Roland told him the only additional information Christopher Cross had unearthed was that Kyle Thorneberry had gone to see a psychiatrist and gotten a prescription for antidepressants, though he’d never filled it. He was, like many New Yorkers that fall, dealing with the aftereffects of 9/11. He’d been at the Goldman Sachs headquarters that morning, three blocks south of the World Trade Center. There had been no scandal. There had been no problems with his career or his marriage or his family. He hadn’t been in any money trouble, and there had been no drugs or gambling or terminal diseases. He wasn’t having an affair, and he wasn’t being blackmailed or extorted. Kyle Thorneberry—who’d treated Woody like the brother he always wished he had, who indeed appeared to have had everything—had shot himself in the right temple for no discernible reason.

  The absence of a reason was far more disturbing and depressing to Woody than if there had been one. If Kyle had had everything that Woody ever wanted, if he’d possessed the life, the dream, vita pulchra est, and he still hadn’t been happy, then what hope was there for someone like Woody? What was the point? How would he ever stop his monkey mind from torturing itself with regrets and loathing and envy?

  He heard the brief announcement of a siren.

  “What’s that?” Roland asked.

  In the rearview mirror, a sheriff’s cruiser was tailgating him, its lights flashing. “I’ll call you back,” Woody said.

  He pulled over to the side of the highway and, after putting the transmission in park, gazed straight ahead, hands at ten and two o’clock on the wheel, and watched Dalton Lee’s windsurfing caravan drive away from him.

  “License and registration.”

  It was one of the cops who’d responded to the ceiling collapse at the Oar House on Friday night—Lemke, the name tag on his uniform said. Perhaps Woody could finagle his way out of this. “Remember me?” he said to Lemke. “Woody Song, Lyndon’s brother? Listen, I know I was going a little fast, but I’m trying to catch up to a group of cars. It’s sort of an emergency. I’m a film producer, you see. Maybe you’ve seen something of mine. Lethal Enforcer? Lying in Wait?” Naturally, as was born out by audience demographics, cops were huge fans of his action remakes.

  Lemke, impassive as a telephone pole, didn’t respond.

  Woody tried another tack. “That woman I was with Friday night, that was Yi Ling Ling. You might have heard of her—the queen of Hong Kong cinema? Black Night Lady? Undercover Dragon Heart?” Audience demographics also showed that a significant percentage of rice chasers—white men with a fetish for Asian women—were cops.

  Nothing. Not a word. Lemke seemed to be staring at the spots of the calamine lotion on Woody’s face. He tugged out a pair of blue vinyl gloves from his pants pocket and put them on his hands, took Woody’s license and registration, and walked back to his cruiser. All day he sat in there, and then came back and silently gave Woody a ticket.

  “Fuck,” Woody said as he rolled up his window. And now he had no idea where Dalton Lee was. He could be anywhere. Getting back on the highway, the engine rasping, he tried Dalton’s cell phone, but of course the twerp wouldn’t pick up. “Call Roland,” Woody said.

  “Yallow.”

  “I need you to do something.”

  “What happened, get busted?”

  “Speeding ticket.”

  “Ouch.”

  “I need you to do some research for me.”

  “I’m not in the office today.”

  “You have a computer at home, don’t you?”

  “I’m, uh, not at home.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m, uh, at a friend’s.”

  Woody sighed. He didn’t care to know what sort of friend Roland was consorting with. “Does your friend have a computer?”

  “I don’t know. Let me see. Okay, yeah.”

  “Look on the Internet for me and find out where people windsurf between here and Santa Cruz.”

  As he waited for Roland, Woody felt his ass tickle and prickle. He put the car on cruise control, clumsily dabbed some calamine lotion on a cotton ball, and unzipped his pants. As he lifted his hips and bent his hand between his legs with the cotton ball, he drifted out of his lane and the car beside him honked, the woman driver looking at him in horror and disgust.

  “Yeah, that’s right, lady, I’m jacking off in my car, I can’t help myself, you’re so fucking hot, you’re turning me on so much, you stupid bitch,” he said.

  “What?” Roland said. “And I thought I knew you.”

  “Find anything yet?”

  There were three wave-sailing sites on the coast favored by Bay Area windsurfers when the swell and wind came up: Wads, Scotts, and Davs—or Waddell Creek, Scotts Creek, and Davenport Landing. The first, Wads, was about twenty miles south of Rosarita Bay—Roland didn’t give him anything more specific than that, no address or landmark, Woody’s GPS navigation system useless to him. But after driving half an hour, as the road curved down a hill toward the ocean, Woody located it easily enough by the collection of cars parked along the highway, all with roof racks. He couldn’t tell, however, if Dalton Lee’s car was among them. He had been in a late-model blue Nissan, and the other two cars in his caravan had been generic Japanese models as well—a silver sedan and a black SUV. Practically all the parked cars were nondescript, monochromatic Japanese makes.

  It was blowing like crazy on the beach. On the water were dozens of windsurfers, zipping every which way. Woody had thought he knew what windsurfing was. He’d spent a week on vacation in Playa del Carmen trying to learn the sport. But he was entirely unfamiliar with this type of windsurfing. There were no wide longboards, no uphauling sails from a standing position, no putt-putting along at a leisurely pace. These guys were moving, gaining breakneck speed as they skimmed out to sea on tiny shortboards, hitting the chop and launching straight up into the
air, some of them looping in somersaults. They barreled offshore and then jibed back in, timed the swells, and then took off down the face of breaking waves, carving bottom turns and snapping their boards off the lip.

  From the beach, he could hardly distinguish any of the wetsuited windsurfers from one another. He thought he recognized Dalton Lee several times, but it always turned out to be someone else. How many Asian windsurfers in their early thirties with ponytails could there be? Apparently quite a few. He watched a guy wipe out on a wave, his rig flipping and twisting after him. Woody was going to have to attach a special insurance rider to Dalton’s contract, forbidding him from windsurfing while they were on this project.

  More than Ling Ling, Dalton Lee was integral to the financing of Woody’s movie. As low-budget as There Once Was a City had been, it’d only taken half a reel to appreciate that Dalton Lee was brilliant, a savant, a budding genius auteur. But he was Woody’s genius. He was his employee. He had signed a development deal, a contract. Woody owned him. He couldn’t permit Dalton to lie to him and ditch him. He needed to put Dalton Lee in his place.

  He wasn’t at Waddell Creek, and, after Woody wasted an additional forty-five minutes searching for him at Scotts Creek, it appeared he wasn’t at that beach, either. That left Davenport Landing, and Woody twice passed the road to the cove (because some joker had removed the sign) before he saw a pickup with its bed heaped with boards turning onto it. Woody followed the truck down the road and, after parking his Rover, walked down to the sandy beach, which was flanked by promontories to the north and south. Windsurfers were launching into the channel in front of the beach, then coming back to ride the reef breaks in front of the steep outcrops. The lower reef seemed to be the one generating the best waves today, almost everyone sailing over there, and Woody trekked through the sand and climbed the shelf of rocks underneath the limestone cliff. The rocks were slick and covered with sharp mussel shells, and when a wave crashed onto shore and sprayed over the shelf, Woody slipped and—goddammit to hell—fell onto one knee, cutting open his jeans.