Wrack and Ruin

by Don Lee

  They ate their lunch, and then returned to the festival, first to the kids’ stage, where there were jugglers and a puppet show. At the Bank of America parking lot was the main stage, a cover band called the Skyline Waybacks playing the Eagles, America, the Stones and Beatles, Christopher Cross, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and, inevitably, the Beach Boys. And all along Main Street were rows and rows of white canvas booths that housed a panoply of arts and crafts, remarkable only for their collective mediocrity: glass-beaded trees, tapestries and quilts, aromatherapy soaps and soy candles, doggie apparel, cigar-box purses, Zapotec rugs and Oaxacan wood carvings, Japanese shakuhachi flutes, feng shui wind chimes, and all manner of jewelry, ceramics, sculpture, photography, and bad paintings, several of which, to Lyndon’s dismay, captivated Ling Ling, particularly the endless iterations of moonlit waves crashing onto rocks. “I want something to remind me of your beautiful farm!” she said.

  They each bought a five-dollar tasting kit, which consisted of a plastic spoon, a stack of small paper cups, and ten tickets, and got in line to sample the chili and chowder. At the table for Gregorio’s Fishtrap, they were surprised to find Mark Beezle, a.k.a. Beelzebub, and Mandy, the erstwhile waitress whose myriad cases of litigation were presumably pending, serving the restaurant’s clam chowder entry, and even more surprised to discern that the two former employees of the Oar House were an item.

  Mark put his arm around Mandy and greasily nuzzled her, cheek to cheek. “I’ve been in love with her from the minute I laid eyes on her!” he told Lyndon. “But I couldn’t do anything! Not while she was working for me! It would have been sexual harassment!”

  Wonder of wonders, Lyndon thought, even the wretched and the woebegone found love.

  Alas, Gregorio’s Fishtrap did not win the competition. Controversially the R. B. Feed & Hardware Store, instead of one of the food establishments, took home both the Best New England and Best Manhattan Chowder prizes (one hundred dollars each). Da Bones won Best Traditional Chili, and the Coastside Institute of Shiatsu snagged Best Nontraditional/Vegan Chili. Lyndon perked up, expecting Laura Díaz-McClatchey to pick up the award, but someone else, a tall blonde in a white gossamer dress, stepped forward to accept the check.

  Because of the delay in the chili and chowder cookoff, after the prizes had been announced, a much larger crowd than expected migrated to the Bank of America parking lot, where the Skyline Waybacks were wrapping up their set with a spirited rendition of Loggins and Messina’s “Vahevala.” When the band vacated the stage, Tommy Fulcher, owner of Tommy’s Tunes, stepped to the microphone and went into a long-winded speech, acknowledging and thanking the festival’s organizers and sponsors, most notably The Centurion Group. Then he introduced the next act, crowing, “Now give it up for the winner of Java Hut’s open-mike competition, Rosarita Bay’s own Hana Frost!”

  Hesitantly, Hana stumbled up onto the stage, clearly dazzled by the number of people before her. She had on a god-awful getup: a mod red trench coat over a distressed brown T-shirt, denim miniskirt, white pantyhose, and green tennis shoes. She was sporting a pair of Windsor glasses with purple lenses, black lipstick, and she’d done something inopportune to her hair, teasing it into wild, kinky whorls that made her look emphatically asylum-bound. The sight of her generated a few gasps and laughs. “Test, one-two-three, test,” she said unnecessarily into the mike, her voice weak and craggy. Then she began nervously tuning her guitar, an excruciatingly long process that became all the more tedious since, with the adjustment of each peg, the bulky dreadnought sounded more and more discordant. Her hands were visibly shaking.

  This is going to be a disaster, Lyndon thought. While they waited, he glanced around the crowd, which was murmuring and giggling. Chief among the twitterers were Hana’s would-be paramour, André Meeker, and his ice-cream hussy, Jen de Leuw. They stood with their arms wrapped around each other, their bodies squeezed together in such a lascivious, hormonally intoxicated lock, Lyndon knew Hana would never have a chance of prying them apart, no chance at all. A few yards beyond them was Sheila, but strangely she wasn’t paying the least bit of attention to Hana. She was glaring off to the side, and Lyndon followed her gaze to discover the object of her ire. Her first ex-husband, Hana’s father, Chris Frost, was in attendance with his new, very young trophy wife.

  At last, Hana got her guitar in tune, and she started strumming, and strumming. Her head down, she repeated the intro to the song five times, in danger of being stuck interminably in the same cascade of notes, but finally she busted out into the first verse with a robust, bluesy contralto. It was a luscious, rich voice, rootsy and growly, sort of country and western, though the song distinctly fell into the indie folk-pop category, and the most startling aspect of it was how big and deep and powerful the voice was—a completely unexpected projection from an uncertain high school girl. She barreled ahead now, pitching perfectly up another register into a haunting falsetto. In the next song, she rumbled out like a gospel howler, and in the next she performed a little vocal trick in the chorus, half yodel and half warble, able to quaver at will.

  Her songs were well structured, complex, with good melodic lines, the chord progressions catchy and inventive. Her only failing, as Hana herself had intuited, was in her lyrics. She was trying to convey songs of wistful introspection, blue-collar, lonely-girl ballads, but they weren’t at all convincing, utterly derivative, with obvious shades of Patsy Cline and Jeff Buckley and Patty Griffin. Worse was their sentimentality. She crooned about loss and longing and heartache, but the rhymes were sappy and unimaginative, hand and understand, forever and never, tears and fears, and the images were mawkish and clichéd, sitting alone, a prisoner in her own room, the moon and the rain outside, lovers going down the lonely highway, away, away, goodbye, goodbye.

  Still, it was a beguiling performance, and the audience gave Hana her due, clapping and whistling. Breathless, flushed, and elated, Hana basked in the applause for a few seconds, and then ran off the stage, not to Sheila but to her father, burying her head in his chest.

  “Not bad, eh?” JuJu said to Lyndon.

  “Yeah, not bad,” Lyndon said.

  “I want to go back and get that painting of the water and cliffs,” Ling Ling said.

  “Which one?” Lyndon and JuJu said at the same time, there had been so many.

  Ling Ling and JuJu went off to locate the painting, leaving Lyndon behind in the parking lot. He was joking around with Todd Kemel, an artichoke farmer. They both sold primarily to Veritable Vegetables in San Francisco, a women’s collective that was the biggest organic-produce wholesaler on the West Coast. VV was run mostly by lesbians, and Lyndon liked to play little pranks on them. He was telling Todd about what he was planning for this year’s harvest—insert some fuzzy pink handcuffs in among his Brussels sprouts—when he looked across the parking lot at Hana and Sheila, who were arguing, daughter doing most of the yelling, mother staring at her murderously. Without warning, Sheila reached up and slapped Hana on the face.

  Lyndon ran over to the other side of the lot. By then Hana had already fled and Sheila was walking back to the main festivities. “Oh, Sheila, what are you doing?” Lyndon said, grabbing her by the arm.

  “Don’t touch me,” she said, twisting out of his grip. “Don’t you dare say a word to me. You have no right. You are not part of this family.”

  But he was. He felt, for better or worse, that he was.

  Sheila stalked away from him, and Lyndon turned in the other direction to look for Hana. She was probably already in her car, heading home. Lyndon hiked down Main Street toward the service station near Highway 71, where his pickup was supposed to have been repaired, but as he crossed the creek bridge near the end of town, he saw Hana below, near the water. He stutter-stepped down the steep embankment and sat next to her on a boulder.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey.”

  “You all right?”

  “My father offered to pay for Berklee,” she said. “I didn’t think he’d
even come today.”

  “Your mom know you invited him?”

  “Where is it written I have to tell her everything?” She flung a rock at the creek, and it skipped twice on the surface and then plopped into the water.

  “She’s just trying to protect you, you know,” Lyndon said.

  “She’s jealous. Jealous of my talent. She’s jealous I have a purpose—something she’s never had.”

  “I think it’s more complicated than that.”

  “She has no soul.”

  “Hana, you didn’t tell her that, did you?”

  She stood up and threw another rock.

  He joined her at the edge of the creek, picked up a stone, and flicked it sidearm, making it skip on the water’s surface. “Got three,” he said.

  “More like two and a half,” she said. “That last one shouldn’t count, it was so anemic.” They traded turns for a while. Hana flung a low-trajectory beaut—six long skips. She brushed the dirt off her hands and asked, “What did you think today? Honestly. Do I have what it takes?”

  “You were good,” Lyndon said. “But honestly, I can’t say whether you have what it would take.”

  “You didn’t think I was very good, then.”

  “That’s not it. It’s just I don’t know the music business.”

  “You can give me your uneducated opinion.”

  “You really want to know what I think?” Lyndon asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. I imagine it’s a lot like the art business—ruthless, arbitrary, agonizingly unfair. With any of the arts, talent isn’t always the deciding factor. Even if you have a shitload of it, you could still go unrecognized. It doesn’t happen for everyone. But let’s say you do make it, let’s say you manage to hit it big, you have to sustain it somehow, or you’ll just be a one-hit wonder, a flash in the pan, and you’ll grow old playing that one minor, inconsequential hit over and over, hanging on to a faded dream, looking for relevance, pathetically chasing lost glory. You could end up begging for gigs at coffeehouses and chili and chowder festivals in little pough towns. On the other hand, let’s say you become a star. There will be people out there whose sole mission in life will be to tear you down. Not just your music, but your personal life, your appearance, everything you say and do. Nothing will ever be good enough. You’ll have this enormous burden to keep topping yourself, keep coming up with something new, different, but not too different. You could become a parody of yourself. You could end up doubting your own worth and feel like a total fraud. You could end up hating yourself, asking every day why you ever became an artist. It could be a terrible life. You could regret not becoming a doctor, doing something more tangible to contribute, something not as subjective, not so dependent on other people’s judgment and the whims of public opinion and taste.”

  Hana stared at him with grim consternation. “Jesus, forget I asked.”

  “It won’t necessarily get you laid, either.”

  She flicked a stone. “I don’t care about that anymore. I’m over him,” she said.

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “You were right. He’s a complete wanker and dipshit moron. Jen de Leuw can have him.”

  “What made you change your mind all of a sudden?”

  “He has some really bizarre theories. He’s kind of a weirdo punk, if you ask me.”

  “Young love can be so fickle.”

  “Does age make a difference in that respect?”

  “You have a point there.”

  He climbed up the embankment and walked back to town. Hana would be all right. She might not make it as a singer-songwriter, but whatever happened, whatever she decided to do, she would be able to cope.

  The festival was winding down, the scaffolding for the cooking tents being dismantled, workmen carrying the framing to a truck. Lyndon crossed to the sidewalk to maneuver around them, and the world went black. Someone—it must have been two, maybe three goliaths—placed a hood over his head and clamped a hand over his mouth and dragged him away from the street as he tried to yell and writhe and escape. He was, it appeared, for a reason he could not begin to imagine, being kidnapped.

  He was lifted off his feet and thrown to a hard metal floor. The hood was lifted off, and sitting across from Lyndon was Sunny Padaca, smiling at him in the back of a van.

  “Howzit, brah?” he said.

  “Sunny!”

  Two of his vato crew stood outside the van. “Shut it,” Sunny said, and they slid the door closed, leaving them alone.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be in jail?” Lyndon asked.

  “Well, you know, it’s funny how, with a couple of good lawyers, these things can turn out, yeah? Seems there were a couple of technicalities that weren’t identified in the original indictment. Turns out it was all just a misunderstanding, a big misunderstanding, solly solly, velly solly, you know?”

  “I thought courts weren’t open on weekends.”

  “Helps to have connections, brah. And I got connections everywhere.”

  Lyndon shifted on the corrugated floor. “Good for you,” he said.

  “Yeah, good for me,” Sunny said. “Not so good for you, bruddah.”

  Lyndon felt something internal quiver. “What do you mean?”

  “What I mean? What I mean? Oh, I think you know exactly what I mean, Linda. No secrets here, right? No little birdies have to tell us nothing, do they?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Sunny sighed. “You and the pogo stick, you got ten Christmas trees from South Africa saying aloha, Nelson Mandela, on your farm.”

  Adiós, motherfucker, Lyndon thought. “Look, Sunny, they’re purely for personal consumption.”

  “Ten trees? That’s a lot of pakalolo. You and peg-leg must have some kind of habit.”

  “It was totally an experiment. I didn’t think they’d all make it. We were just fucking around.”

  “Just fucking around, yeah? I’d think you’d have more confidence in your abilities, Linda, seeing how you’re the local Brussels sprouts king.”

  “I’m a pretty bad farmer, actually. I barely make a living from it.”

  “So you decided you need to supplement your income,” Sunny said.

  “Absolutely not. We never, in a million years, ever thought about selling the stuff.”

  “No?”

  “We’d never be that stupid.”

  “That’s right, because, you know, this isn’t a business for barneys. Nasty things happen to barneys. There’s frightful, major, serious consequences for barneys. A lot more serious than a little vandalism here and there. More painful than Mac attacks, know what I’m saying? The Messiah would come to visit with righteous indignation. But as I assess the situation, I get the sense that nothing so dramatic would even be necessary, yeah? I get the sense, with your financial situation, one little phone call to old Five-O would be enough to take you down, permanent-like, you know. What’s your feeling on that?”

  “Listen, I’ll go home right now and chop down the plants. I’ll burn them.”

  “You’d do that for me, just to put my poor Nanakuli pea brain to rest?”

  “Without hesitation.”

  Sunny removed a pack of gum from his back pocket and folded a stick into his mouth. “That might be kind of a shame, though, huh?” he said, chewing contemplatively. “Because I hear it’s some good shit. Is that right? Is it good shit?”

  “We haven’t sampled it yet.”

  “But it’s ready to harvest?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “And they’re looking tasty? Ripe and mongo and Buddhalicious?”

  “Yeah.”

  “They’re totally organic?”

  “Of course.”

  Nodding, Sunny folded his fingers together across his stomach. “Okay, then, here’s what I think we should do. It happens I got a little supply-chain problem at the moment. So you could do me a favor, you could help me out. You could give me the plants. What do you think of that?
Isn’t that a good idea?”

  “All ten plants?”

  “All ten.”

  “For free?” Lyndon asked.

  “Linda, Linda…”

  Knowing he was pressing his luck, Lyndon said, “Couldn’t we, you know, negotiate a little, uh, transaction of some sort?”

  Sunny laughed. “Like I said, man, you got cojones, brah.”

  “At a substantial complimentary discount, of course.”

  “A discount, yeah? How about this, then? Tell me if you think this would be fair. What say we make it completely complimentary?”

  “Completely?”

  “Am I being too generous? Let me know if I am. I’d hate for anyone to think I’m being ripped off. I don’t want to come off as a chump.”

  “Sunny,” Lyndon said, “what about letting me keep a tiny little supply for myself?”

  “I’d be happy to sell you dime bags whenever you want.”

  “You’re going to make me pay for my own pot?”

  “It’s a hell of a world, isn’t it, for the enterprising opportunist? Your brother and his kung-fu mama still staying with you? When they leaving?”

  “Tomorrow morning, I think.”

  “Let’s say I swing by one-ish, then. You’ll have ’em ready for me, brah? Gift-wrapped would be nice.”

  Lyndon had little choice. “Yeah, okay,” he said.

  As Lyndon was about to exit the van, Sunny said, “Yo, Linda, it’s not like me to mess with family, but let me throw you a bone. Don’t trust your brother.”

  “Why?”

  “I just saw him talking to that developer, Kitchell.”

  “So?”

  “They looked kind of cozy, if you ask me.”

  Lyndon didn’t know what to make of the information. What could Woody be conspiring with Kitchell about? What was he up to?

  He jumped out, Sunny’s crew slammed the door shut, and they peeled off. Breathless, Lyndon slumped down, leaning against a dumpster for balance. The truth was, with the aphids threatening his crop, he had actually been thinking about selling the pot—just a small amount to tide him over. Who knew what kind of trouble that would have led to? Plenty, he was sure, if what had happened over the last few days was any indication. He was glad not to have the temptation anymore. He wanted this long weekend to be over. Whatever Woody was scheming to do was immaterial. He’d be gone in less than twenty-four hours, and Lyndon could have his life back. Everything could return to normal, be quiet, uneventful.