Wrack and Ruin

by Don Lee

“Stop,” Laura said. “Stop pretending. I know what you’ve been doing in your barn.”

  “Can we see?” Alvin asked. “Will you show us what you’ve been doing?”

  “This is ridiculous. You want to see my barn? All right, I’ll let you see my barn.”

  He led Laura and Alvin inside his workshop to the barn doors and fished in his pocket for the key to the chrome padlock, but just as he was about to unlock it, he heard a helicopter approaching from the ocean. “Oh, fuck me,” he said, not believing the nerve of Kitchell, coming on another bombing run so soon. “Stay here.”

  Outside, Woody told him, “I think we should take Bob to a vet. He’s still looking pretty shaky.”

  “In a minute,” Lyndon said.

  He didn’t have enough time to load the spud cannon. Instead, he grabbed his Viper M1 paint gun from the shed. Standing in the yard, he tossed off his arm sling, braced the rifle’s buttstock against his shoulder, and waited for The Centurion Group’s chopper to draw into a hover.

  Yet the helicopter that appeared over the bluff wasn’t cardinal-red with gold trim. It was black, and its side door was open, a man hanging out from a harness, his boots anchored on the skid, machine gun in his hands.

  “What the hell?” Lyndon said.

  A dozen SUVs swarmed the house then, men in black with helmets and body armor jumping out and aiming their weapons at Lyndon.

  “Drop the gun, Lyndon!” Steven Lemke said.

  “Steven? What the fuck is this?” Lyndon asked.

  “Drop it!” Steven said, pointing his shotgun squarely at Lyndon’s chest.

  “Don’t shoot!” Woody shouted, hands raised in the air. “It’s a fake!”

  “Is this your idea of a joke?” Lyndon said. “This is not funny, Steven.”

  Steven fired the shotgun, and Lyndon flew back, the impact yanking him off his feet and landing him several yards rearward, flat on his ass.

  A horde of men flipped him onto his stomach and handcuffed his wrists behind his back. He moaned in pain. He couldn’t breathe, his sternum burned. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw JuJu, Ling Ling, and the two girls coming out of the house and being promptly manhandled and shackled, the vests on the SWAT teams stenciled with “FBI,” “DEA,” “ATF.” Had Steven enlisted every existing federal agency for this raid?

  “It’s a paint gun,” an FBI agent said derisively, and fired a poodle-pink blob into the dirt.

  “Get him up,” Steven said.

  Lyndon was hoisted upright, his shoulder searing. “You shot me,” he gasped. “I can’t believe you shot me.”

  “Relax,” Steven said. “It was a beanbag.”

  Perplexed, Lyndon looked at his chest—no gaping hole, no gushing blood—and at the red object on the grass. He’d been hit with a beanbag projectile from a riot gun.

  Lyndon and Woody were hustled behind Steven into the workshop, where Alvin and Laura, wide-eyed with terror, were being detained on their knees, hands behind their heads, in front of the barn doors.

  “Open it,” Steven said.

  Lyndon was confused. Who had snitched on him? Sunny? Kitchell? Someone Tank and Skunk B. had blabbed to? More pertinently, he could understand why the authorities might take an interest in the ten Durban Poison plants in his fields, but why the barn?

  A DEA agent chopped off the padlock with a bolt cutter and slid open the doors, revealing an orchard, a jungle, really, so dense with thickets and roots, it seemed as if the entire doorway was blocked by a solid arbor wall. These plants, these trees, however, were wholly made of metal—bent rods and wires, hammered sheets and plates, all welded together and twisting intricately into thousands of branches.

  “Lemke, what the fuck is this?” the FBI agent said, punching a bank of electrical switches on, streaks of light illuminating the interior of the rusty hollow structure.

  There was a small opening on the far side of the doorway, just big enough to slip through in a crouch, and they squeezed past it into the barn, stepping into a cramped rain forest of gnarled alloys and steel, wending their way between ory shoots of grass and undergrowth and iron trunks sprouting up from ground, vaguely in the form of bamboo and palm trees, willows, redwoods, and Monterey cypress, that covered nearly every foot of available space, vines, limbs, and tendrils extending upward to the roof, wrapping around the rafters, and spreading over the walls like mercuric ivy or kelp, like invasive weeds that had been steroidally fertilized, an elaborate latticework of climbing shrubs, tangles, and flanges, the canopy of leaves above populated by copper and aluminum birds of paradise, hawks, bats, butterflies, and cockatoos, and down below, perched on mesh resembling moss, were burnished lotus blossoms, orchids, and wild mushrooms, and dotting other parts of the floor were interweaved strips of bent wire, écorchés of geckos and snails and snakes, turtles and frogs and fish.

  They stood staring in wonder at the sandblasted, oxidized, patinaed grove, which shimmered in luminous shades of red, orange, black, blue, and green.

  “It’s like we’re inside a giant banyan tree,” Laura said.

  “Yes, exactly,” Alvin said. “You know, there’s a Buddhist sanctuary in Guangzhou called the Temple of the Six Banyan Trees, so-named by the poet and calligrapher Su Dongpo during, by coincidence, the Song Dynasty! New parents go there to receive blessings for their children. Lyndon, I adopted a Chinese baby. I’m a father! I can see it now, this is a logical extension of your last show, ‘Certain Epistemological Issues of Bestial Perversion,’ an offshoot of Borges’s Chinese encyclopedia. We could call it, oh, let me think, how about ‘Subpatriarchial Abstracts in Botanical Objectivism,’ something like that?”

  But slowly what dawned on him, what dawned on each of them as they peered at the vast, strange metallurgic anarchy around them, was that, like a banyan tree, everything inside the building—the thick, crisscrossing tubes of lignified roots, the intertwined branches and long aerial vines, the bursting mayhem of flora and fauna—was fused together. It was a single, massive, linked sculpture that would be impossible to separate from the barn, that could never be dismantled or moved or installed in any gallery or museum. And, while the individual parts were lovely and exquisite, with their workmanship and detail, the whole made no sense—no sense at all. It had no shape, no definition, no pattern or apparent meaning. It was impressive, but, as Lyndon had long known, it was not art. It was a product of seventeen years of getting stoned nightly and holing himself in the barn and welding and sculpting to the accompaniment of jam bands on his boom box, first on the ground, then on ladders, then scaffolds, then with a seat harness and climbing ropes and Jumars; a product of working without design or scheme or foreseeable end, letting himself go with whatever impulse that arose, unchecked by any aesthetic restrictions or commercial concerns; a product of an imagination allowed to run amok; a product, everyone inside the barn gradually came to conclude, of artistic madness.

  They had drug-sniffing dogs comb the entire property, and the helicopter buzzed every inch of the fields. They found nothing.

  “No plants?” Steven asked. He had believed Lyndon was the leader of a local cell of the PLF, of which everyone on the farm was a member, and that they were planning to fund their eco-terrorist activities by growing and dealing pot.

  “Oh, there are plants, all right,” the FBI agent said. “There are plants galore. But no marijuana plants.”

  “How can that be?” Steven said.

  Lyndon asked himself the same thing, but wasn’t about to voice dissent.

  “What about this?” Steven pleaded, pointing to Lyndon’s stash—baggie, bong, joints, hemostat—that had been discovered in his workshop. “We can at least arrest him for this.”

  “Less than an ounce,” the agent said. “Misdemeanor possession, hundred-dollar fine. You want to arrest him for it, go ahead. But if I were you, I’d be worrying more about what this is going to cost your career.”

  The SWAT teams drove away in their SUVs after uncuffing everyone except Lyndon, leaving Steven
with the ignominy of having to release him personally. Alvin and Laura departed in her car with dispatch.

  “Who tipped you off?” Steven asked.

  “You took the words right out of my mouth,” Lyndon said. He rubbed his wrists and then unbuttoned his shirt, examining the softball-sized bruise on his chest. “Fucking-A, look what you did, you maniac.”

  “Why can’t you just stay away from Sheila?” Steven said. “You’re never going to be the right person for her. You know that. I know that. She knows that. Why can’t you just go away? Sell your farm. Move.”

  “I like it here.” He eased the arm sling back around his aching shoulder.

  “Don’t you see?” Steven said plangently. “I love her. I love her so much more than you ever will.” He unstrapped his body armor, his T-shirt soaked through with sweat. “I’d be there for them. I could give her and the baby my whole being, every fiber. They’ll need someone who’s responsible, dependable, not a habitual punk like you.”

  “What are you talking about?” Lyndon said. “What baby?”

  “I don’t get why Hana’s always liked you more than me. I was her stepfather. I was good to her. Whereas you—you’re a fuckup, Lyndon. Look at you—too stupid to accept ten million dollars for this shithole junk heap.”

  “What baby?”

  Steven puffed disdainfully through his nostrils. “She didn’t tell you. She didn’t tell me, either.”

  “Hana’s pregnant?” Lyndon asked, confounded.

  “Not Hana, you dopehead. Sheila. A nurse at St. Catherine’s let it slip. She assumed it was mine and congratulated me. It says something, doesn’t it, that she’s kept my name all these years? That’s got to mean something.”

  Everything made sense to Lyndon now, Sheila’s behavior over the past few days, the dramatics and hysteria. “It’s my baby,” Lyndon said.

  “Maybe,” Steven said. “Or maybe it’s mine. She wouldn’t say. It doesn’t matter. She’s gone to a clinic in the city to have it terminated.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know, sometime this morning.”

  “Which clinic?”

  Steven shook his head. “Nothing in this life is fair. You do everything you’re supposed to do, and it turns to shit, anyway. I’m a good guy. I deserve better than this. Isn’t there supposed to be such a thing as karma? Why are people like you anointed and not me? Yeah, I knew all about you. You think I didn’t do a background check on you from day one?”

  “Which clinic, Steven?” Lyndon asked, grabbing him by the shirt.

  “I don’t know.”

  He let go of him and ran to Woody. “I need to borrow your car,” he said. His pickup was still at the service station, and his panel truck, thanks to Kitchell, had been flattened and would no longer start.

  His brother was sitting on the ground with Bob. “I think he’s getting worse,” he told Lyndon, who squatted down and rubbed Bob’s back. He was lying on his side, lethargic, and, ever so slightly, he seemed to be convulsing.

  “Wrap him in a blanket and get JuJu to drive you to the vet,” Lyndon said to Woody. “I need your keys. And your cell phone.”

  “It’s not running very well these days,” Woody said, hesitating.

  Unbelievable. His brother was worried Lyndon might damage his precious SUV. “I won’t leave a scratch on it, all right?”

  He got into the Range Rover and turned up Highway 1, heading north to San Francisco. Awkwardly he hooked Woody’s Bluetooth headset around his ear, jabbed at the PDA, and dialed Sheila’s house, where Hana answered. “Do you know where your mother’s gone?” he asked her.

  “She said she had a meeting,” she told him.

  “Find her—what’s it called?—that big calendar thing.”

  “Her Filofax?” After a minute, Hana came back to the phone and said, “She has an eleven o’clock at the Baycare Clinic. What’s this about? Is she all right? Is she sick?”

  “Did she write down an address?”

  It was on Fillmore, near Geary. If he was lucky, he could make it there in forty-five minutes. But just past the town of Montara, he hit a standstill. He had taken Highway 1, thinking since it was a holiday that the coastal route would be faster this morning than going over the hill on Highway 71, but he hadn’t counted on another Caltrans blockage at Devil’s Slide. The narrow, winding road on the steep bluff had been impeded or closed dozens of times over the years due to mudslides and rockslides, boulders the size of minivans sometimes crashing down from the hills and splintering the asphalt. The geology here was unstable, water in the soil, and the road had been slipping inexorably toward the ocean.

  The hillside on the southbound side of the highway had evidently given way again and cracked the road surface, causing a mile-long backup with single-lane traffic control, which gave Lyndon time, sitting in virtual gridlock, to ponder what he would say to Sheila if and when he got to her. The thought of it—Sheila pregnant with his child—was almost unfathomable. A baby at his and Sheila’s age? His entire life would have to change, his schedule, his preoccupations, his routines subordinate to the caprices of an infant. And what would this mean with Sheila? He would have to marry her, move in with her. She would probably force him, at last, to sell his farm. He didn’t know if he was willing to do or compromise on any of those things. It was an enormous adjustment to ask of him at this stage. He had fashioned a life he was comfortable with—one that was solitary, selfish—and he didn’t know if he was capable of relinquishing it.

  The Range Rover, true to his brother’s anxiety, was idling roughly, misfiring once in a while. Blue smoke was coming out of the exhaust, most likely oil leaking into a cylinder, fouling up the sparks, and the temperature gauge on the dashboard was rising, the engine beginning to overheat. As Lyndon squinted at the smoke in the rearview mirror, he noticed something sweeping past the front of the windshield. A paper airplane. A Volvo station wagon was creeping forward on his left flank, merging, as were all the cars, onto the northbound side of the road. The driver was a woman with a shaved head, dressed in an orange and red Buddhist nun’s robe, and in the back seat was a little girl with brown hair, mumbling angrily to herself as she scribbled in a notebook. She tore out a page, hastily folded it into an airplane, and chucked it out the window.

  The Fourth Noble Truth was that the end of suffering could be attained through the pursuit of morality, meditation, and wisdom, as described by the Eightfold Path: right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration.

  The little girl sensed Lyndon staring at her. She looked at him and stuck her tongue out. She contorted her lips and gritted her teeth. She squashed her nose up against the back windowpane to confer him with pig’s nostrils. She pulled her eyes slanty and wagged her head, silently chanting, “Ching chong, ching chong, Chinaman.”

  Lyndon spun the steering wheel to the right—right intention, right action—and accelerated, straddling the bank of the hill with the wheels, the SUV tilting and on the verge of rolling over as he sped past the stalled cars, ignoring the Caltrans workers who were waving at him, knocking down traffic barrels and crashing through barricades, pieces of wood whirling up and fissuring the windshield. The glove compartment popped open, revealing a USC baseball cap.

  To get beyond the last part of the bottleneck, he had to squeeze through a narrow space between a concrete retaining wall and a backhoe, a space that didn’t look like it would quite accommodate the full width of the Range Rover. He gunned it nonetheless, almost able to edge through intact, except he sheared off both sideview mirrors and crunched up the doors and snagged the rear bumper onto something, shredding the back quarter panels and leaving the bumper behind, tumbling end over end on the road.

  With a high-pitched whine emanating from the differential, the oil and temperature gauges warning of imminent failure, Lyndon proceeded on, racing onto I-280, then taking 101 to the Civic Center exit and Mission Street, swinging onto Van Ness, a
nd turning left on Geary. He parked the Rover in a bus zone, and as he shut off the ignition, the engine coughed and smoke began drifting out from beneath the hood.

  “The Baycare Clinic, the Baycare Clinic!” he said, accosting passersby. One of them pointed across the intersection, and he hobbled in front of oncoming traffic to the other side of Fillmore, saw the sign for the clinic, and pressed the buzzer for entry. He told the receptionist he was there for Sheila Lemke, she had an appointment, then he went through the metal detector and hurried inside to the waiting room, where Sheila looked up at him, a clipboard on her lap.

  “Great,” she said, watching him sit next to her. “Just great.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked.

  “There’s nothing to discuss.”

  “Are you joking? Nothing to discuss?” Lyndon said. “You’re having my child.”

  “I’m not having it,” Sheila said. She was filling out a questionnaire, and she checked off a box.

  “You’re not going to let me have a say in this?” Lyndon asked.

  “What, you’re willing to jump into full-fledged domesticity all of a sudden?”

  “I might be,” he said. “I just might be.”

  “Don’t kid yourself,” she said. “So to speak.” She placed the clipboard on the adjacent table and rubbed the heel of her hand against her forehead. “God, how did I let this happen? I’m forty-one years old. How could I have let things devolve like this? Was I intentionally trying to destroy my life?”

  Lyndon glanced at the other people in the waiting room—a couple of college students, a woman in her thirties—not very crowded, it was Labor Day, after all. He was surprised the clinic was even open. “Let’s go get a cup of coffee,” he told Sheila, adjusting his arm sling. “Let’s get out of here for a while.”

  “It’s not your baby,” she said.

  Lyndon turned to her. “It’s not?” he said. “It’s Steven’s?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know? What do you mean, you don’t know?”

  “I was still living with Steven when I came to your house in July. It could be his, it could be yours. I can’t really say. Isn’t that the stupidest thing you’ve ever heard? I suppose we could wait a few weeks for an amnio. Or we could all just wait until April and see what color pops out.” She laughed mirthlessly.