An explosion splits the air just as Roberto raises the tire iron over the man’s face, ready to strike. The gunshot seems to rip the valley wide open, freezing time. The only move anyone makes is to jerk their heads at the sound. It had come from where Oso is still slamming against the rope, jerking my truck’s four tires a few inches with each lunge.
My father stalks across the meadow with my .40 caliber Heckler & Koch held high. He must have found my keys and pulled it out of the glove box. “Get off him, Roberto.”
My brother shakes his head as if amused, then climbs off Fast’s enforcer.
Despite the gun in my father’s hand, David Fast walks right up to him. “Put that gun away, mister,” he demands, his voice out of breath. “It’s over.”
Behind him Burgermeister gets unsteadily to his feet with his eyes fixed on my brother.
My father complies. He uncocks my pistol with a snap of his thumb and slips the gun into a pocket of his baggy shorts. “You and your men leave. Now.” His voice is crisp and sharp, a colonel’s voice, used to having his orders obeyed. The force of his presence and his tone has all the men but Fast and Burgermeister walking toward their trucks. Roberto is righting his huge motorcycle, ignoring them all.
“Hold it!” Burgermeister shouts at them. Then to Fast he prods, “Tell him, Dave.”
Fast looks slightly uncomfortable, as if his dignity is offended by Burgermeister’s coarse presence, but he speaks with a firm voice. “This is my meadow. My valley. It will be by the end of the week, anyhow. We’re not going anywhere.”
Dad reaches into his pocket. For a moment I’m afraid he’s going to bring the H&K back out—the colonel isn’t used to being disobeyed. But instead he brings out the almost brick-sized shape of his satellite phone.
“If that’s the way you want it, then I’m going to have to call the authorities. Let them know that you and your men assaulted a young man and woman.”
Fast chuckles. “You go right ahead, mister. The girl and that fellow”—he points at me—“started it. Besides, the sheriff’s a good friend of mine.”
Dad doesn’t even blink. “I mean the federal authorities. This is still National Forest land.”
Still chuckling, but now to save face rather than out of amusement, Fast holds up his hands. I can see his face is red and that his thin lips twitch while trying to hold up his false good humor. “All right, all right. We’ll leave you and the hippies to smoke pot and do whatever else you people do while working men are out there trying to make a living.”
It’s funny to hear my dad called a hippie. If I weren’t hurting so much, I might laugh.
Then Fast calls out louder so that the entire meadow can hear him, even the Tribe members who watch from the trees, “But on Friday, you people better be out of here. I mean that. This will be my land by then.”
Burgermeister adds in a booming voice, “My boys and me are going to do what we call a ‘citizen’s arrest’ to anyone who’s still here. For trespassing. And I hope no one accidentally resists.”
As Fast and Burgermeister walk by where Roberto’s crouching by his motorcycle and plucking grass and mud from the cowling, Burgermeister points at him. “You’re gonna be mine, bitch.”
For a long moment they stare at one another. Roberto slowly comes to his feet. A smile creeps onto his face, then slowly disappears. He’s a lot smaller than the weight lifter, but as his smile fades, he looks just as mean.
“Roberto,” my father says warningly.
Fast, too, tries to intervene. “Come on, Alf.”
Burgermeister pauses before leaving and turns to me. “You too, Scarface.”
SEVEN
AS THE PICKUPS rumble down the valley, I walk over and hug Roberto. “Good timing, bro. As always.” Just putting my arms around him gives me a jolt of his energy. It’s like touching a nuclear bomb—you can’t even imagine what it’s capable of.
“Shit, che. What’s the matter with you, letting those rednecks get you down? You should of just whipped out that shiny little tin badge of yours.”
“My badge is no good here. I’m a cop in Wyoming, remember?”
“Oh yeah, I know to stay out of that fucking state,” he laughs, squeezing me gently, then pushing me away. “Wouldn’t want my little brother throwin’ down on me or nothing.”
I smile at him with the same combination of awe and fear that I’ve always felt around him. The awe comes from the fact that he’s unwilling to accept anyone’s limits and has no concern for any consequences. The fear is not for anyone’s safety but his own. He’s hurt a lot of people in his life—I’d recently looked up his criminal history on the FBI’s national database and had seen a laundry list of assaults and batteries, many that I hadn’t been aware of—but at least in his mind he’s only hurt those who had it coming. Roberto doesn’t tolerate cruelty or meanness.
During my college days we were once having lunch and a beer at an outdoor café in Boulder. Nearby, on the sidewalk, a local well-known television reporter was berating his girlfriend for something. The conversation between us stopped as we watched. I was wondering, What should we do if it gets physical. Get the police? Intervene somehow between them? Try to reason with the couple? When the chubby reporter raised his hand and brought it across the girl’s face, I didn’t even hear the sound of the slap because my brother had already launched himself out of his chair. The table crashed to the ground in a racket of breaking bottles, glasses, and plates. The reporter turned just in time to see my brother’s grinning, predatory face coming at him from just inches away as Roberto’s forehead crashed down on the bridge of his nose.
The result had been one of many assault convictions. It was an unprovoked attack on one of the community’s most cherished citizens, according to the local paper and the girlfriend (who, of course, had reconciled with her boyfriend and denied that she’d ever been slapped). Due to the contradictory statements of the parties and witnesses, my brother pleaded the case down to a misdemeanor and a stipulated thirty-day sentence in the Boulder County Jail. He had no regrets, would make no apology, he told the judge at the risk of having the plea refused and a felony mandated. He’d do it again if he ever saw the fat bastard hit a woman.
Although a slew of military physicians and psychiatrists had diagnosed him with dozens of different disorders throughout his childhood, everything from severe hyperactivity to a variety of antisocial neuroses, and he had been the guinea pig for a hundred types of medication, I think my mother was the only one who truly understood what was wrong with him. “Destraillado,” she’d said. Unleashed. “He lives in a world where he’s totally free, totally unrestrained. Your father used to have a foot in that world, too,” she’d told me. But Roberto was born with both feet over the line, like a spastic puppy that has slipped his collar. My brother acts on all the urges and impulses the rest of us are either too civilized or too afraid to express.
For the first time I notice that Oso is silent and has been ever since Dad fired that shot. I look toward the truck, worried that the rope has broken his neck or crushed his trachea. But he’s standing rigid in the tall grass and is still straining against the rope. I walk quickly to him and rub his head while kneeling in the damp earth. He pushes his froth-covered snout against my chest. “I know you were trying to help, Oso. I should have turned you loose.”
“Look at that thing!” Roberto says from behind me. “He looks like a goddamn bear.”
Before my father or I can warn him, Roberto reaches out a hand. Oso gazes steadily up at my brother with his eyes narrowed to golden slits for a few seconds, his lips raised in a half-snarl. Then the black lips drop over the long, clenched fangs. He licks my brother’s fingers with his rough tongue. I’m amazed. I expected Oso to take his hand off. Stepping back, I watch the two study one another. Oso’s ears start to lie back in a smile. They seem to recognize each other, maybe as fellow wild beasts. Like wolf cubs from the same litter.
Roberto is movie star handsome but his face has a feral c
ast. Behind the sunglasses he almost always wears, he has our father’s slanting, crystal blue eyes. But they’re set wide like our mother’s, and even in repose they burn with restless energy. Like dry ice, which will burn you if you touch it. No one looking at him would question the fact that he is a dangerous man. My features are like his but not quite as sharp and defined. More of our mother’s high Pampas blood shows on his face, while mine is thick-nosed and heavy-browed thanks to our father’s Celtic ancestry. He wears his tangled dark hair long, down to his shoulders. Mine is short and conventional.
I hear the snap of my glove box and the rattle of keys as Dad locks my gun away. He walks over to us, hesitates, and then throws an arm over Roberto’s shoulder. “Hi, son.” It’s an awkward gesture, this half-hug, and appears even more awkward because it’s my father who is performing it. Roberto pats my father’s chest with his far hand, turning it into a sort of embrace.
“Dad” is all he says.
This brief, tender moment ends quickly. My father says just the wrong thing without meaning to. “I’m glad you’re here, ’Berto. It’s good to see you. I just wish you hadn’t gotten involved in that brawl. You’re still on parole, aren’t you?”
Roberto’s face remains impassive, but I think I see a tightening of the muscles along his jaw. I know from my recent conversation with his parole officer that he’ll be under her supervision for years. His most recent conviction was for vandalism. The story I’d heard was that after a few days of being jerked around by the local telephone company (which is famous for bad service) about the installation of a line in his rented cabin, Roberto had borrowed a neighbor’s chainsaw and cut down six miles of poles. Unfortunately, the destruction of communications equipment is a federal crime. With federal time.
I chime in before Roberto’s almost nonexistent self-control is overridden. He looks on the verge of saying something that could ruin this whole trip. “When you guys are done playing grab-ass, would someone mind telling me if I need any stitches?”
“Same old Dad,” Roberto mutters, releasing my father from his embrace.
My entire body stings from abrasions and rising bruises. I touch my scarred left cheek, probe gently, and decide my cheekbone has remained intact although my fingertips come away bloody. The old wound on my face has reopened. Some of the blood is running into my mouth—I spit out the coppery taste. So much for my hope of the scar one day fading. The other damage seems to consist of bruised ribs and numerous contusions that I know will all start to hurt like hell in a few minutes, once the adrenaline climbs back into my glands.
My father, who’s had enough medical training in the Pararescue Corps to be a trauma surgeon, examines my face. I watch his eyes as he studies my cheek and notice that his blue eyes have faded to gray over the years, and that the whites surrounding them have become almost yellow. Deep creases that I’d never really noticed before fan out from the corners.
“You’re lucky, Antonio,” he says, turning toward his backpack in the rear of the open truck. “No stitches. Let me see where I put the Krazy Glue.”
I groan and Roberto chuckles. Ever since the stuff first came out when we were kids, when that ridiculous commercial always played on TV of a man hanging from where his hard hat had been glued to a beam, my father had been experimenting with the stuff. On us. Our mother would shout at him that he was poisoning us. He’d argue that he’d read the ingredients and none of it was toxic. But Roberto and I had been wary, sometimes staying out all night to avoid getting what we called the “treatment” and praying our new wounds would clot. It burns like hell when dabbed on raw flesh. On his missions he claimed it saved a lot of space to dump the bandages and field dressings and just carry a tiny tube of the gunk. He also carried a few tampons—his way of plugging bullet wounds.
After rummaging through the first-aid kit he always carries in his pack, my father snaps a sterile glove over one hand. Then he squeezes some glue onto a gloved fingertip.
“Bend over,” Roberto advises me.
Dad ignores him and smears the stuff on my cheek. The fumes and the sting make my left eye burn and water. He uses both hands to pinch my reopened scar together and holds it for about thirty seconds.
When he steps back, not only does the sting remain, but my face feels unnaturally tight, as if I’d just had plastic surgery. “Thanks, Dad. I think.”
In the meantime Roberto has wheeled the giant motor-cycle next to my Land Cruiser. It’s a type I’ve never seen before. A single word, Indian, is painted on the fuel tank. Dad and I admire it while Roberto explains some things about cc’s and gear ratios that I don’t understand while he picks dirt and grass out of the handlebars. Apparently the bike is more than forty years old and is something he’s rebuilt himself. It has enormous wheel covers, a low-slung seat, and sounds as deep as Oso’s growl when he starts it. My dad straddles it, looking strangely pleased. I’d never known he was interested in bikes. I’ve always thought of them as simply dangerous toys—I can easily understand the thrill that must come with the exposure and speed of such a machine, but all the uncontrollable elements of other traffic makes the risk seem not worth the pleasure.
I’m glad, though, that Roberto has found something other than soloing and drug abuse to occupy his attention. And motorcycle riding seems safe in comparison.
“Where’s your gear?” my father asks, getting off the bike. All that is visible on the back of the motorcycle is the rolled leather jacket and a tightly bundled sleeping bag. Roberto lifts the top of a saddlebag and takes out a pair of climbing slippers and a bag of chalk. “That’s all you brought? Not even a harness?” Dad either isn’t aware of my brother’s recent soloing exploits or he’s refusing to acknowledge them.
“I’ve got an extra harness,” I interrupt.
“Okay. What do you boys want to do? After all the excitement, I’m itching to get up on something.”
“You guys climb,” I say. “I think I’m going to go soak in the hot spring.” I want to wash out the blood I can feel hardening in my half-grown beard. And do something to ease the bruises that are already stiffening my muscles. Besides, they should spend some time alone together—I can’t always be around to act as a mediator.
“You’d be better off in cold water,” Dad advises. Roberto lifts his sunglasses to roll his blue eyes at me.
I shrug and start to walk to where the activists are camping. “See you in a few hours. Take whatever gear you need.”
I also want to see if Cal’s nose is busted. And I want to check on Kim.
EIGHT
THE ACTIVISTS’ CAMP is tense in the aftermath of the brawl. The college kids and the retirees are gathered in small groups, talking animatedly and looking both angry and scared. Cal sits on a log holding a bloody rag over his nose. Sunny, who appears cheerful and proud that her boyfriend had been a part of the excitement, stands behind Cal and massages his shoulders. A few of Cal’s metal-studded crowd surround them as if to offer some belated protection. Nearby, Kim is being engulfed by an older, concerned group of her own. Everyone stops talking and watches when I approach.
“Are you all right?” I ask Cal.
“Yeah, man. I guess. Shit, are you?” Speaking through the rag, his voice is high and nasal like he has a bad cold.
“Nothing’s broken. But I’m not so sure about your nose. Let me take a look.”
I squat painfully in the grass, inflamed joints creaking, as Cal lifts the rag from his face. There’s drying blood all over his cheeks and mouth, and his eyes are both turning black. He winces when I run a thumb and finger down his nose from between his eyes, checking for a rough ridge under the skin that could indicate a serious break. I feel nothing but it could be because of all the swelling.
“You should probably get an X ray,” I tell him, wiping my fingers on the grass.
“Nah, dude, I’m okay.” He glances up at Sunny to make sure she acknowledges his stoicism. “Thanks for stepping in. You definitely got the worst of it.”
�
�That’s your brother?” Sunny asks, staring across the meadow at where Roberto kneels shirtless on the grass and wipes dirt from his bike. His bare torso is bronzed from the sun. Even at this distance he resembles a perfect anatomy specimen. You can read every flex of muscle as he moves his hands over the bike.
“Yeah. His name’s Roberto.”
“He’s like . . . he’s like a Greek god or something.”
I say nothing but agree inwardly, thinking about just how much trouble those mischievous gods always seemed to get themselves into.
Sounding a little jealous and annoyed, Cal says to Sunny in his newly nasal voice, “Don’t get too excited about that guy. He’s not long for this world.”
I look at him. He begins to turn red where he’s not already bloody.
“What do you mean?” Sunny asks.
“Sorry, man,” Cal says to me. “It’s just that he’s always in the climbing rags, soloing some impossible shit. Guy has a serious death wish.” He shakes his head in wonder, and, I think, admiration. “He’s fucking sick.”
From the widely spaced trees beyond Cal and Sunny, Kim is walking toward us. Without a word I step up to meet her halfway. The taut skin on her face is streaked with red splotches—stains of anger. Even enraged, she looks beautiful. And my attraction to her is magnified when she works at a smile and it comes out almost shy. She’s still wearing the transparent beer-stained shirt. Her dark hair is a sticky mess with grass and twigs poking out.
Coming up to me, she says, “I’m not sure whether to thank you or apologize, Anton. But I’m glad you were around.”
I smile back and touch the stinging cut on my cheek. “I kind of wish I’d been somewhere else.”
Point of Law Page 7