by Don Lee
“What’s with the chain?” Trudy asked. A chain was wrapped around the elephant’s back leg and anchored to a pole. “You could use a rope half as thick as this,” she said, pointing to the bulky rope strung across the front of the lot, cordoning them from the elephant.
A little boy towed his mother toward the elephant, and Roger said to the child, “Hey, want to feed her?” He handed the boy some hay, which he eagerly held out in front of Esther, who scooped it up with her trunk and curled it into her mouth.
“You know, a kid got tuberculosis feeding an elephant not too long ago,” Margot said, and the mother, alarmed, herded the boy away.
Roger, clutching a promotional flier that he had failed to pass on to the woman, said, “Nice going, girlie. Now, really, kindly get the fuck out of here.”
“Been tested yourself lately?” Margot asked. “Who knows what diseases you’re carrying. You look none too savory.”
“What time are you leaving tomorrow?” Woody asked Trudy.
“The flight’s at one-thirty.”
“Where are you going to sleep tonight?”
“A guy, a musician who was playing earlier, he said he’d take us to SFO. We’re just going to spend the night in the terminal.”
The thought of Trudy leaving further depressed Woody, puncturing him with loneliness. “Come here a minute,” he told her. “I need to talk to you.” When they were a few steps away, he said, “Don’t go to Hawaii.”
“Why not?”
“Come to L.A. with me.”
“Why?” Trudy said, perplexed. “What would I do in L.A.?”
“Anything you want,” he said. “Just be with me. It’s as simple as that. I won’t ask for anything more. We can figure it out later.”
“You’re not making sense, Woody. What are you talking about?”
“It feels right. It feels like we should be together. I don’t want to lose you, Trudy. I want you to be with me. I’m asking you, please be with me.” This moment—the present moment—seemed vitally important to Woody, the most critical of his life. He didn’t want to be alone. He wanted to feel love, to swoon and weep and giggle, to be completely absorbed, to look at someone with the all-consuming passion and yearning that possessed those kids from the ice-cream store. He wanted to feel consoled in someone’s arms, to be crazed when apart from them, to be thinking about the person all the time, first thing in the morning and last thing at night, to be besotted, enraptured. He wanted, just once, just once in his life, for someone to feel that way about him. And, for once, he was willing to quit trying to orchestrate everyone’s behavior, disregard prudence and ignore appearances, lay himself bare, and ask a fellow human being for clemency. “Please, Trudy. Be with me,” he said.
“Oh, Woody,” she said pityingly. “I can’t. I can’t be with you. I’m with Margot. We’re together. Didn’t you know that?”
He blinked back shame. Of course he knew that. Now that she said it, he realized he had known it all along. How could he not? Could anything have been more obvious? Trudy was a lesbian. She and Margot were lesbians. He was overcome with humiliation. What had he been thinking? He was not in love with Trudy, yet he had practically proposed to her. He had made a colossal fool of himself. What was he doing in this stupid, godforsaken town? “I’ll be right back,” he said.
“Woody, don’t go,” she said.
He intended to get his clothes from the farm and, if his ailing Rover allowed, drive straight home to L.A., but then he saw Ed Kitchell, wearing a USC sweatshirt, walking down Main Street.
“Hey, chief,” Kitchell said, “did you catch the game on TV?”
“What game?”
“Last night! The home opener!”
“No, I missed it,” Woody said.
“Oh, man, it was a great game. Unbelievable. I just got back an hour ago.” He seemed dazed, not quite awake, sporting a goofy grin. He was unshaven, his blond hair unkempt. “I want to ask you about something—something I just heard,” Kitchell said. “Is it possible your brother is growing marijuana on his farm?”
Woody wavered only a few seconds before he said, “I found plants in two places near his Brussels sprouts, in the southeast and southwest corners. They must be in pockets of trees all over the farm. Just follow the irrigation pipes. But most of it is inside his barn, an entire crop.”
Kitchell’s face lit up, very alert now. “I’ll be damned,” he said. “That explains a lot. And resolves even more.”
Woody felt suddenly sick. He couldn’t lie to himself that he was betraying Lyndon in the hopes of saving his movie. At this point, he knew that anything he did for The Centurion Group would not make a bit of difference. He was doing this, he had to admit, out of spite.
“Don’t make any moves until tomorrow afternoon,” he said to Kitchell, for he spotted Ling Ling and JuJu approaching on the street and realized he had forgotten about her—he needed to get her on a plane back to Hong Kong tomorrow—and then it occurred to him that he could give Trudy and Margot a ride to the airport, too. He could have them spend the night at the farm, steal a little more time with Trudy.
Ling Ling was carrying a painting. “Look what I bought!” she said, flipping around the oil seascape. “Isn’t it gorgeous?”
She was in such a good mood. Woody decided against telling her just yet that she would be returning home forthwith, her movie career dead.
“What did Kitchell want?” JuJu asked him.
“Who?”
“Ed Kitchell. You were just talking to him. Was he harassing you?”
“He was asking if there’s anything to see down the street. Why would he be harassing me?”
“Lyndey sort of has a history with him. Did he seem agitated?”
“No, not particularly. Why?”
JuJu chuckled to himself. “Guess he hasn’t been home yet,” he said. “He’s in for a few surprises.”
“Where is Lyndon?” Woody said.
“Around here somewhere,” JuJu said.
They were walking back toward the end of the block, slowed by Ling Ling, who insisted on stopping at every remaining booth to examine their wares, when they heard a loud pop, like a gun firing, followed by a horrendous scraping sound. Around the corner, they witnessed Esther the elephant ramming her head against a dumpster, sliding it across the pavement, trying to get free, trumpeting an awful keen. The dumpster was tied to one end of the bulky rope that had been used as a cordon, the other end around a telephone pole, and as Esther pushed against the dumpster—her trainer, Roger, waving and screaming at her—the rope was being swung around, pinning Margot and Trudy against a parked van.
Woody, JuJu, and Ling Ling were so flummoxed by the sight, they did nothing for half a second. Then JuJu and Ling Ling—dropping her precious painting to the ground—sprinted toward the girls, and Woody found himself beside them, trying to tug on the rope and extricate Trudy and Margot, who were groaning in pain, their arms trapped awkwardly as they were being cleaved at the waist, lifted off the ground, abject terror in their eyes, like animals about to be slaughtered.
“Pull!” Ling Ling said, bracing her foot against the van.
“My knife,” Margot moaned.
Woody saw the butt of Margot’s bowie knife poking out from beneath her shirt, the sheath inside her pants, and he yanked it out and hooked the blade against the rope, sawing back on it as hard as he could, and abruptly the rope snapped apart, everyone flying to the ground, Woody spinning and landing with the knife still in his hand, plunging it directly into JuJu’s left foot.
Woody, staring at the blade embedded in JuJu’s boot, began shrieking hysterically.
“It’s okay, it’s okay!” JuJu said. “It’s a prosthetic!”
“What?”
JuJu lifted his pants leg, revealing the black metal shank of a prosthetic foot. “No worries, dude!” he said.
They turned and watched the elephant, which had broken loose and was now lumbering down Main Street, crashing apart everything in its way.
CHAPTER 9
THE FIRST ANNUAL ROSARITA BAY CHILI AND CHOWDER FESTIVAL was a miniature version of the town’s larger, more established pumpkin festival, the usual five blocks of Main Street closed off to traffic for the usual arts and crafts booths, live music, children’s games, and other activities, with one notable exception, the chili and chowder cookoff itself, which caused some organizational problems. An inspector from the San Vicente County Health Department was on-site to ensure that the guidelines for food treatment, per its environmental health standards, were being strictly enforced. This meant the only ingredients that could be prepared in advance for the cookoff were “nonperishables”: canned or bottled clams and clam juice, tomatoes and tomato sauce, peppers and pepper sauce, broth, beans, and spices. All perishable items had to be prepared and cooked at the festival, especially the meats, which could not be cut or ground or otherwise treated in any way prior to the official preparation and cooking period—guidelines that the contestants, even though they had received them weeks ago, had not quite taken seriously. Thus, the chili and the chowder were not ready to be distributed, as planned, at noon, in time for the attendees to sample and purchase for lunch, but had to be, amid a chorus of complaints and finger-pointing, postponed until at least two o’clock.
Sheila Lemke, as the mayor, was thick in the middle of the fracas, and Lyndon watched her running to and fro with her megaphone, walkie-talkie, and clipboard, trying to mollify entrants, merchants, and members of the chamber of commerce, the city council, and the planning commission, and he knew, regardless of whatever stress and frustration and idiocy Sheila might claim were marring the proceedings, that she was in her element.
She had left his house at dawn, after waking him with a blow job—a rather unexpected act of philanthropy. “Don’t put any undue significance in this,” she had whispered to him. She had noticed his morning wood, she said, and had just felt like it. But he did put undue significance in it. Things were, he told himself, looking decidedly up. He was getting to her. There was, more than ever, hope for them.
His plants were faring better as well. Irrigating them with sprinklers had helped, and after applying rock dust on them with a spreader in the morning, he was reasonably confident he had staved off the infestation of aphids. His Brussels sprouts were looking robust and healthy. He was likely to have a good harvest after all.
All of this, on top of the amusement he derived from his brother’s poison oak, put him in a rare good mood, one that could not be broken despite his sore knee and black eye and cracked molar and the gash on his forehead, despite being informed by the service station that he would need four new tires for his pickup.
It was a beautiful day, windy yet relatively warm. There was a pretty decent turnout for the chili and chowder festival, several thousand people—not anywhere near the quarter million who usually poured into town over the two days of the October pumpkin festival, certainly, but not bad for a newly manufactured occasion—and Lyndon ran into townsfolk he hadn’t seen in quite a while. He talked to Hank Low Kwon, a former public defender for San Vicente County who was now a real estate attorney (Lyndon’s attorney), his wife, Molly Beddle, and their toddler, Wilder. He exchanged hellos with Ariel Belieu, the reference librarian, Beryl Pappalardo, the bookstore/café owner, and Gene Becklund, who’d quit the sheriff’s office recently to run the Moonside Trading Post with his wife, with whom he’d reconciled after a long separation. He chatted briefly with the chairmaker Dean Kaneshiro, who was the only true artist in Rosarita Bay, his wife, the poet Caroline Yip, and their two kids, Anna and Doc. He waved to B. J. Daniel, the photographer for the Rosarita Bay Horizon, Missy Stiegel, a waitress from the Java Hut, Will and Karen Somers, the proprietors of the trattoria La Bettola, and Katie Mitchell, who managed Cuchi’s Country Store. He nodded to Janet McElroy, a half-black, half-Korean psychotherapist (Sheila’s psychotherapist), her oncologist husband, Eugene Kim, and their four children. He shot the breeze with Evelyn Yung, a math teacher at Longfellow Elementary, her adopted Amerasian son, Brian, and his brother, Patrick, a Navy fighter pilot who was visiting from Coronado. It surprised Lyndon, how many locals he actually knew, and the realization comforted him. He was a part of this town, and, for better or for worse, it was a part of him. Not a single person, God bless them, mentioned The Centurion Group’s bid to buy out his farm.
With the chili and chowder postponed, he suggested to Ling Ling and JuJu that they eat lunch at Rae’s Diner. From the pay phone in the restaurant, Lyndon tried to call Woody on his cell phone, but his brother didn’t pick up, so he left him a message, telling him where they were.
Ling Ling ordered a brunch of blueberry flapjacks, sausage, and hash browns, JuJu asked for a Reuben, and Lyndon got a bacon cheeseburger. There was no better burger in town than Rae’s.
As they waited for their food, JuJu fidgeted, his right knee a sewing machine. Finally he blurted out to Lyndon that he had an announcement of sorts. “It doesn’t look like I’ll be here for the harvest this year, bro,” he said.
“Where are you going to be?”
JuJu and Ling Ling glanced at each other affectionately. “Hong Kong,” he said. “Then Vietnam for a couple of months.”
“A couple of months?”
“At least. Maybe more. So, uh, I might not be going with you to Baja in January, either, Lyndey.”
“What are you going to do in Vietnam?” Lyndon asked, miffed.
“Help Ling Ling set up a new prosthetic center in Ho Chi Minh City.”
Not comprehending, Lyndon turned to Ling Ling. “You’re setting up a prosthetic center?”
“There’re over a hundred thousand amputees in Vietnam,” Ling Ling said. “Most of them were maimed during the Vietnam War, but there are still anywhere between three hundred fifty and eight hundred thousand tons of UXO, unexploded ordnance, spread out through the country. Since 1975, almost forty thousand people have been killed and an additional seventy thousand injured. There’s a desperate need for orthopedic surgical care and clinical outreach there.”
A nice fundraising speech, but Lyndon still couldn’t wrap his head around the first part. “No, I mean, you’re setting up a prosthetic center? You’re in charge of it?”
“Well, I wouldn’t say in charge,” Ling Ling said, “but I’m the regional VIP volunteer director for the International Red Cross Millennium Movement on Land Mines.”
That Ling Ling—this heretofore self-centered, self-aggrandizing boozehound of a kung-fu actress—had an entirely different life as a humanitarian, one of substance and significance, floored Lyndon.
“She’s arranged for me to train there,” JuJu said. “Learn how to fit people with prostheses and assist with their rehabilitation.”
“How’d you get involved in this?” Lyndon asked Ling Ling.
She blushed. “Well, if you must know, it was because of Princess Di.”
“Princess Diana?”
“Yes. I loved her. She inspired me to volunteer. I saw her visiting Angola and Bosnia. You know, you must have seen the videos, with her helmet and flak jacket. But once I started working with these NGOs, once I saw the pain caused by all these UXOs, the victims, it’s so often children, any associations—or should I say, shamefully, aspirations—for glamour faded rather quickly.”
“What about Woody’s movie? Aren’t you supposed to start filming in San Francisco in November?”
She unfurled her fingers in a resigned wave. “Oh, that’s possible, but I doubt very much it will happen. Realistically, I know that this movie probably won’t get made—there are so many things that can disrupt these deals, it’s very arbitrary at times, this business, the financing can disappear with a single person’s whimsy—and even if it does get made, realistically, as much as I would like it not to be the case, I have to prepare myself that I probably won’t be in it. If you haven’t been able to guess, my career has been on the decline for quite some time now.”
“You’d be so fabulous in this role,” JuJu t
old her.
She kissed him on the cheek. “You’re sweet to say so.”
“You see what I was talking about, Lyndey? The coincidences?” JuJu said. “I mean, what are the chances that the queen of Hong Kong cinema would be marooned on your farm for the weekend, and I’d get to meet her, and she’d be the regional VIP director for the International Red Cross Millennial Movement Against Land Mines and I’d end up going to Southeast Asia with her? What kind of Vedic rabbit hole of temporally acausal connections have we tumbled through? I mean, holy mother of Carl Gustav Jung, throw down the I Ching, man, this is heavy, the serendipity of this, the Deschampsian plum-pudding wheel of karma that’s spun me off in this direction. Once Ling Ling mentioned it, it made total sense, everything that’s happened, the Oar House being destroyed, losing my foot to Big Mac at Rummy Creek. All those years looking for satori in Uluwatu and the Maldives and Lagundri Bay, I had a quest. Everything was so simple and pure, just searching out those secret, mysto spots for the perfect wave. And then it was gone, and I’ve just been floundering. I was lost, dude. I’d lost the one thing I’d loved most in the world. But now it feels like it’s all come full circle, this yin yang of alchemic interconnection and fate, lives and souls bound together.” He looked at Ling Ling. “I’m going to help people who are going through what I went through. This is, like, what I was meant to do, you know? Be part of something larger than myself. No pun intended. You understand what I’m talking about, Lyndey?”
Lyndon did understand, but the idea of JuJu—his buddy, his compadre, really his only friend—leaving, perhaps forever, saddened him immensely. “When are you taking off?”
“Next week. Yeah, I know—soon. Listen, Tank and Skunk will help you with the harvest. I talked to them already.”
“Thanks a lot,” Lyndon said.
“Come on, don’t be that way. They’ll be good workers. Be happy for me, man.”
“I am,” Lyndon said. He genuinely was, but he also felt something else, a shade of another emotion, which weirdly approximated envy.