Wrack and Ruin

by Don Lee

  He walked through an alleyway and emerged onto Main Street again. He saw Sheila talking to a vendor at her booth. The woman specialized in bronzes of “canine heroes,” the statuettes dedicated to honoring K-9 police dogs across the country. As Lyndon neared the booth, a pop cracked the air, and then there was a tremendous ruckus, a piercing, grating, screeching noise, followed by an inhuman sonorous moan, like the song of a humpback whale, yet a hundred times more portentous—bloodcurdling and terribly lonely. Everyone, including Lyndon, turned toward the sound. In the distance, the white canvas tops of the arts and crafts booths were billowing up strangely, as if from updrafts of wind or from the rippling groundswells of an earthquake, one after another, a steady, rolling oscillation that appeared eerily familiar to Lyndon, evoking images of lanterns, anchors, oars. The growing din was familiar as well. Crunching, crashing implosions, imminent death by building collapse. Only it wasn’t a building, and it wasn’t an earthquake. It was an elephant stampeding toward them, head down, hell-bent on destruction, razing everything in its path.

  Lyndon ran at Sheila and tackled her, shoving her out of the way from the rampaging elephant, and in the process bowled into a row of canine heroes, knocking his head against a bronze of Snowball, a five-year-old Belgian Shepherd in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, who, as a plaque on the base of the statuette explained, had saved his partner, Sergeant Michael Torres, from further injury and very possibly death by attacking a suspect who had shot the officer, neutralizing him until backup arrived.

  “This is all your fault!” Sheila screamed at Lyndon, standing over him amid the wreckage. “You caused this! You’ve ruined everything!”

  As absurd as the accusation was, Lyndon had the distinct feeling, as he began to slip into unconsciousness, that—given the orbit of this weekend’s catastrophes—she was probably right.

  HE AWOKE IN ST. CATHERINE HOSPITAL in Moss Beach, and this time—third possible concussion in three days—they insisted on taking him in an ambulance over the hill to San Vicente Memorial for a CT scan. He also needed an MRI for his left shoulder, which he had apparently dislocated crashing into the bronze canines, but which a doctor had graciously popped back in the socket while Lyndon was still out.

  This all took hours, of course, and when he was finally released, with a pounding headache and an arm sling to immobilize his shoulder, he had to pay for a fifty-dollar cab ride back to his farm. More than from anything physical, he was wounded that Sheila had not accompanied him to check on his welfare. No one else had been hurt during the rampage other than Lyndon. The elephant, after tearing down the final arts and crafts booth, had trotted to a stop on Main Street, docile enough to allow capture, leaving the town undamaged, nada defiled except unsold bad art (although the insurance claims for it would probably be astronomical). Sheila, if she really cared, should have come to the hospital. Lyndon could have called someone else to pick him up, he supposed, but he didn’t feel like waiting. He just wanted to get home and have a peaceful night to himself—a beer, a bowl, a shower, dinner, sleep.

  As the taxi rolled up to the house, he saw a fire. Someone had started a bonfire near the edge of the bluff, and Lyndon could make out silhouettes of people dancing around the blaze.

  There was JuJu, Woody, and Ling Ling, and two young women who looked rather nappy, grooving to Santana’s “Black Magic Woman,” which was blasting out of a boom box, the women undulating their arms and bodies—bellies, pelvises, hips swaying. As the song reached the trippy instrumental crescendo, electric guitar going into high sustain and reverb, cymbals and congas and timbales voodooing out, everyone began twirling and flailing and hopping up and down, and at the song’s conclusion, they raised their arms into the air and hooted and howled. “Oye Como Va” began playing next on the boom box, and the dancing resumed.

  Woody jogged over to Lyndon as he got out of the cab. “Where have you been?” he asked. “We were getting worried.” He stank of booze.

  “Having a little party?”

  “I wouldn’t call it a party. What happened to your arm?”

  “Who’re the gypsy girls?”

  “Friends of mine, Trudy and Margot. They were kind of stranded, so I invited them to stay the night. You don’t mind, do you?”

  “Why would I mind?”

  “Come on, it’s only for one night. I’m driving everyone to the airport tomorrow.”

  “Early, right?” Lyndon asked. He wanted the place cleared out before Sunny arrived. “You have that meeting with the director?”

  “Well, that’s kind of off now,” Woody said.

  “What happened?”

  Woody shrugged. “You know, shit happens. It just wasn’t meant to be. But I’m okay with it. I can accept it. Things will work out.”

  This sort of equanimity seemed very unlike his brother. “What time are you leaving, then?”

  “I don’t know. Eleven? Twelve? What, can’t get rid of me fast enough?” Woody joked.

  “You don’t think your visit’s been a little disruptive? Fuck, look at me!” Lyndon said, gesturing at the totality of the injuries to his head, his shoulder, his knee, his eye, his tooth.

  “Hey, man, chill out,” Woody said.

  “Chill out?” Lyndon said. “Did you just tell me to chill out? Are you out of your mind? Are you stoned?”

  Woody stiffened. “No,” he said too quickly.

  Lyndon noticed his brother was concealing something behind his back. “What have you got there? A joint?”

  “No,” Woody said again.

  “Yeah, sure, raid my stash anytime you want,” Lyndon said. “Gimme.” Woody handed him the joint, and Lyndon took two deep tokes from it, a couple of seeds popping.

  Woody motioned for the joint’s return, pinched it between thumb and forefinger, and dragged. “You know, I saved a life today,” he said dreamily. “Two lives.”

  “It involved an elephant, didn’t it?” Lyndon said.

  “How’d you know?”

  He plucked the roach from Woody’s fingers. “Lucky guess.”

  While the elephant’s trainer, Roger, had been distracted, arguing with Trudy and Margot, someone had snipped the chain off Esther’s leg and then lit a firecracker, which had spooked the elephant into charging forward into the rope and the dumpster. On the back wall of the lot, “PLF”—the calling card for the Planet Liberation Front, the extremist organization—had been spraypainted in blood red. In the aftermath, the police—Steven Lemke chief among them—had threatened to arrest the girls for felony vandalism, inciting a riot, reckless endangerment, and malicious destruction of property, but, ironically, Roger, the trainer, had come to their defense, saying they couldn’t have been responsible, at least not directly.

  Lyndon looked over at the group around the bonfire, dancing now to “Soul Sacrifice,” and said to his brother, “You are just a magnet for disaster.”

  “You are such a hard man, Lyndon,” Woody said. “Why are you so fucking cold? What is wrong with you? Everything’s always been so easy for you. You’ve never had to work for anything. You had it all, and you threw it all away. It was your choice to walk. You did it. You have no basis to be bitter.”

  “How’s that different from what you did?”

  Woody tilted his head back and groaned. “God, it was all so long ago. It was a lifetime ago. I made a mistake. I’ve said I’m sorry a thousand times over. Can’t you forgive me? Mom and Dad did. Why not you? You had all that money. Why didn’t you help me? You could have bailed me out, but you let me sit in jail. I’m your flesh and blood.” He reached behind his back and pulled out a bowie knife from his waistband.

  “Jesus, where’d you get that thing?” Lyndon asked.

  “Flesh and blood, Lyndon,” Woody said, holding the knife in front of him.

  “All right, all right, calm down.” Lyndon stared at the knife. Had Woody been the one who’d slashed the tires on his pickup truck? But why? Did his hatred of him run that deep? Was he going to stab the knife into him now?
>
  “You know how many times I’ve wanted to kill myself?” Woody asked.

  “Hey, come on.”

  Woody tipped the point of the knife toward his chest. “I have nothing,” he cried. “Nothing.”

  “It’s okay,” Lyndon said. “Everything’s going to be okay. Let’s talk about it. We can talk about it. Why don’t you pass that thing over to me?”

  Woody looked down at the knife. Vacantly, he flicked the edge of the blade over his left palm, slicing his skin.

  “Fuck,” Lyndon said. He grabbed the knife from his brother. “Woody, what’d you do that for? We need to wrap that up. Keep your arm raised.”

  As they walked toward the house, a light suddenly blinded them. A spotlight was being trained on them from the sky, and Lyndon heard the whomp-whomp of a helicopter, then the thumping of drums and the earsplitting blaring of horns. Lyndon recognized that ominous heralding of trumpets. It was a recording of one of USC’s fight songs, “Tribute to Troy,” played by the Trojans’ marching band.

  Kitchell!

  As Lyndon and Woody shielded their faces from the dust and dirt swirling with the shear of the helicopter’s rotors, something dropped down to the ground, something hard and pink and shaped like a jagged rock. Several more pieces fell to earth, bouncing in a line toward Lyndon’s panel truck. Kitchell was towing a large orange cylinder beneath his helicopter—it looked like a firefighting bucket—and once he was in position over Lyndon’s welding truck, he released the contents of the bucket, letting loose a veritable cascade of what Lyndon could now see were pieces of blubber, frozen whale blubber, raining down on his truck, hammering and denting and piling up on the hood and roof.

  Had Kitchell been saving the blubber from the humpback carcass in a freezer for expressly this purpose? In anticipation of needing to retaliate if Lyndon and JuJu went a little too far with their pranks, as Kitchell most certainly must have felt tonight, assailed by the booby traps in his house? Lyndon, however begrudgingly, had to hand it to the guy, he had some chutzpah, maybe even, it could be said, some cojones.

  “I’ll give you this round, Kitchell,” Lyndon screamed up at the helicopter. “You’re still a fuckwad, but I’ll give you this one.”

  EARLY MONDAY MORNING, Lyndon walked his fields, turning on valves to the drip tape. He had an irrigation controller on the wall of his shed that was capable of automatically opening the valves on a programmed schedule. There were even fancier units that could factor in climate and water-usage data, even some with their own weather stations and meters that measured “soil tension.” The sales rep had told him they were as easy to operate as a VCR, all he had to do, practically, was plug in his zip code, but Lyndon couldn’t be bothered, and he no longer installed zone wires with his submains or electric solenoids on his valves. He preferred checking the plants and the ground himself, then deciding how much and how long each block needed to be watered. He only used his controller to regulate the pressure and flow rate and as a relay to start the pump near his irrigation pond.

  He waded between rows, occasionally stooping down to inspect an emitter on the tape, his movements hampered by his knee brace and arm sling, and when he bent down, he caught the waft of a funny smell, something rancid—not putrefied whale blubber, something else, sharper, more astringent, like gasoline. The night before, after tending to Woody’s hand, he had gotten everyone, including his two new female guests, to help him transport the blubber in wheelbarrows to his own freezers. He didn’t want it to melt and stink up the farm, and he thought the blubber could be put to future service. He and Kitchell might trade it back and forth in perpetuity.

  He heard an engine whining and revving over the berm. Woody spun around the corner of the tractor path in his Range Rover and slid to a stop. He rolled down his window and waved at Lyndon, saying in a panicked voice, “Something’s wrong with Bob.”

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  “I don’t know. He’s sick!”

  They drove back to the house, in front of which Bob was panting and staggering around in a wobbly circle. Lyndon hopped out of the SUV and squatted down beside his dog, stroking his throat. “Hey, hey, big guy, are you sick?”

  Bob coughed and hacked as if choking. He was twitching, and his heart was beating rapidly.

  “You swallow something?” There were so many things around the farm—ordinary, innocuous household items—that dogs could ingest by mistake, bringing them harm: detergent, alcohol, disinfectants, even coffee and chocolate, which contained theobromine, toxic to canines. Or maybe Bob had gotten ahold of a piece of blubber they’d missed. “Get me that bottle of hydrogen peroxide from the bathroom,” he told Woody. “And a turkey baster, from the kitchen, the drawer with the knives and spatulas.”

  He led Bob to the side of the barn and flushed out his mouth with the hose. Woody returned with the hydrogen peroxide, and Lyndon mixed it with water and squirted it down Bob’s throat with the baster. Bob gagged and squirmed, but Lyndon held him and massaged his belly to blend the peroxide with the contents of his stomach.

  “Is he going to be all right?” Woody asked. Bob began dry-heaving. “What’d you do to him? Do you know what you’re doing?”

  “We need to make him throw up,” Lyndon said. He kept shaking Bob’s belly, and finally he vomited. “Hang on to his collar,” he told his brother, and he knelt down in the dirt and sniffed the vomit. It smelled chemical, and he realized it was the same smell he had whiffed out in the field.

  “Shit,” he said quietly. He ran-hopped-skipped down to his irrigation pond, scooped up some water in his cupped hand, and tasted it. He spat it out and hurried back to his shed.

  “What’s going on?” Woody asked, holding Bob.

  Lyndon shut off his pump, knowing it was already too late. “Turpentine,” he said. “Someone dumped paint thinner into my irrigation pond.”

  “By accident?”

  “Not an accident.”

  “Are your sprouts going to be okay?”

  “My plants are dead. All of them. The entire crop.” Just the tiniest bit of solvent was enough to kill them. And not only was this season’s entire harvest lost, but he wouldn’t be able to plant in those spots for years, the turpentine having leached into the soil. Worse was the pond. He’d have to empty it, dredge it, hope it hadn’t gotten into the water table, and still he wouldn’t be able to use it again—ever. He’d have to dig a new pond, and that would require money and time to get a new off-stream impoundment approved, money and time he didn’t have. His farm was as good as finished.

  “Why would anyone do that to you?” Woody asked.

  “You tell me. You tell me, Woody.”

  “What are you implying?”

  “What have you been up to, Woody?”

  “Nothing. I can’t believe—”

  “I hear you’ve been palling around with Ed Kitchell,” Lyndon said.

  “Come on, you can’t seriously mean it. I wouldn’t do this,” Woody said, stroking Bob. “Not this.”

  “Then what? Exactly what would you do, Woody, to get what you want? You’d pretty much be willing to do anything, wouldn’t you? You’d hire someone to take the SATs for you. You’d embezzle your own parents’ money and wipe them out. What else would you do?”

  A car drove up to them, Laura Díaz-McClatchey’s car. She opened the door and stepped out, and Lyndon saw that she had someone with her, a man around fifty who was well dressed and well fed—quite portly, actually.

  “Well, Day-Glo my ass,” the man said to Lyndon. “Look at you, you little fucker. How is it you haven’t gotten fat like the rest of us?”

  Lyndon stared at him. His thinning hair was long and swept back, and he had a silk kerchief in the breast pocket of his sports jacket. “Alvin?” he said. It couldn’t be. He’d heard somewhere that Alvin had closed his gallery long ago, shortly after contracting HIV.

  “Come here,” Alvin said, and he hugged Lyndon warmly.

  “I thought you were…”

&nb
sp; “Dead? Ah, happily the rumors of my demise were extravagantly premature. No doubt wishful thinking by my competitors, most of whom I’ve happily outlived. Antiretroviral therapy is a miraculous thing. You’re looking well, my old friend.”

  “You are, too,” Lyndon said. “But what are you doing out here?”

  “I called him,” Laura said.

  “Imagine my surprise,” Alvin said. “A Brussels sprouts farmer! What an improbable twist! I love it!”

  “We want to put together a retrospective,” Laura said.

  “A what?”

  “I’ve already been in touch with the Hammer Museum,” she said. “They were wild for the idea. After L.A., we’re thinking of touring the show nationally.”

  “I’ve been putting feelers out to MoMA,” Alvin said. “Wouldn’t that be nice symmetry?”

  “I don’t understand what you two are talking about,” Lyndon said. “What would be the point? Why would anyone be interested? Didn’t you say I’m just a footnote?”

  “The new work,” Laura said. “The new work is what would make the show significant. We’d round up your old work and exhibit it with the new pieces.”

  “What new pieces?” Lyndon asked.

  “She said you’ve been working all this time!” Alvin said. “You’ve always been one secretive bastard, Lyndon.”

  “I can attest to that,” Woody said.

  Alvin and Laura regarded him quizzically.

  “My brother,” Lyndon said.

  “You see?” Alvin said. “I didn’t even know you had a brother!”

  “There is no new work,” Lyndon said.

  “What?”

  “You’ve made a long trip for nothing.”