The First Rule of Ten

by Gay Hendricks

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean to alarm you. Have you lived out here a long time, John D?”

  “Yep, my whole life,” he said. “Made my living off ah-mens, till the blight came.”

  For a brief, terrifying moment, I thought I had made a bad mistake and John D was a crazy cult member after all, one of those types who believed they were going to survive some cosmic disaster by rising up into the air, leaving the rest of us sinners behind. Then I realized he was saying the word almonds—his odd, nasal pronunciation a half-sigh, half-benediction—and by blight he meant an actual tree fungus.

  “My daddy worked these fields, too,” he went on, “but my kids? They never wanted much to do with raising almonds, and I’m beginning to see their point.”

  I opened my mouth to commiserate when a raspy voice rang out through the night air. We both reached for our weapons.

  “That you up there, John D?” God’s favorite night watchman, Nehemiah, strolled up the hill, bathed in moonlight, shotgun at the ready.

  “Hey there, Brother,” John D called down to him. “Sorry, but I can’t quite recall your name.” John D leaned his rifle against the side of my car, and I removed my hand from under my windbreaker.

  “Name’s Nehemiah,” Roach called back. He swung his legs over the fence and sauntered toward us. His eyes darted in my direction. They were narrow and beady, like a ferret’s.

  “Who’s this?” he asked, in a none-too-friendly voice.

  John D didn’t miss a beat. “This here’s my son, Charlie,” he said. “My older son. You’ve prolly met my other son, Norman, that works for the county water department.”

  “Don’t look much alike, do you?”

  John D laughed that one off. “Charlie here, he comes from my first marriage, to my Chinese wife.”

  Mild irritation spider-walked my spine. If you want to rankle a Tibetan, tell somebody he’s Chinese. I mentally exhaled—this wasn’t the time or place for petty sensitivities. There was a bad man with a gun involved.

  Nehemiah strafed my features with his lifeless prison-eyes. He said, “What brings you here in the middle of the night?”

  John D clapped me on the back and said, “Charlie here is thinking about coming home, getting back into the family business.” He could lie like a champ.

  I played along. “It’s a fact. People are eating a lot more almonds these days.”

  Nehemiah wiggled his jaw around. “I wouldn’t know. I got teeth problems. Ain’t crazy about real crunchy things.”

  “Well, I guess we oughta get on home,” John D said. “Charlie just got back. Couldn’t wait to see the lay of the land again.”

  “Where you been?” Shotgun asked me.

  Yes, where had I been?

  “Navy Reserve,” John D said. I straightened my shoulders. I was tempted to try out a salute, but that might be pushing things.

  Shotgun shook his head. “That wouldn’t work for me. I get seasick.”

  I could think of other problems that might interfere with Brother Nehemiah’s navy career as well, but I didn’t want to go there.

  We turned to leave.

  “John D,” Nehemiah said, “how come you ain’t never joined us for a service? We must’ve invited you a dozen times. It’s where the Real Word is being spoken.”

  “You mean to tell me the rest of those words I’ve been hearing my whole life ain’t even been real?” John D’s eyes twinkled.

  “Yes sir, that’s right.” Nehemiah’s voice grew fervent. Apparently, irony is no match for a brain washed clean by the Real Word.

  John D smiled. “Well, Brother Nehemiah, you are a man of conviction. I respect that.” Nehemiah preened a little at that.

  “You take care now,” Nehemiah said. He strolled back to the fence and walked off whistling.

  John D looked over at me and grinned. “What do you think, son?”

  “I’m impressed,” I said. “Where did you learn to fib like that?”

  “I used to be in law enforcement, just like you,” he said.

  Which explained his quick draw.

  “I worked for the Sheriff’s department for a few years when I was just out of high school. Till I was old enough to take over for my daddy.” John D waved his arms at the dead and dying trees around us. “Good thing Nehemiah there don’t know squat about almonds. He woulda realized nobody’s gonna grow nothing on these trees.” The lines in his face deepened as he surveyed the ghostly grove. “Well, I’d best be off.”

  “Want a lift back to your place?”

  “I wouldn’t say no,” he said. “My knee’s tore up something awful.”

  We got in my car and lurched our way back to the gravel. He directed me onto a second dirt road, just off to the left.

  “Let me ask you something,” I said as we bumped up the drive. “What kind of interactions have you had with the Children of Paradise?”

  “They never give me trouble,” John D replied. “’Bout the only time I see them is when I’m out walking my land. They’ll be down there singing or doing some ritual or other. I wave to them. They wave back. End of story.”

  “Have they been your neighbors long?”

  “They moved in maybe a dozen years ago. This other guy was their leader then—don’t recollect his name either—but he died a few years back. The new guy, I’ve just met him the one time, when they were having problems with the hog farm.”

  “They were stealing power, right?” I said.

  “Yeah, but they’ve always got some kind of fight going with the hog farmers. The Children of Paradise don’t eat meat, and when the wind blows the wrong direction, they get a face full of hog stink.” John D punched my arm lightly. “Hey, I’m not exactly a fan myself. When the wind blows southeast, I smell it all the way over here. Some L.A. outfit owns it, prolly the Mob, and like most business owners, they don’t have to deal directly with the stench they create.”

  The Mob again.

  He caught my look. “Don’t you know a lot of the big pig farms are owned by the Mafia?”

  What I didn’t know about the Mob was clearly a trough-load. “Tell me more.”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “The Eye-talians got into garbage collection a hundred years back. Nobody else wanted to haul waste. They saw the need, so they took it over. If you’re in the garbage-hauling business, why not pig farming, too? One hand feeds the other, you know? Pretty dang smart, you ask me.”

  I didn’t know whether this was true or just the ramblings of an old man’s imagination.

  An image flickered through my mind: Ostrich loafers mincing up a dirt road with a basket of gourmet goodies, and a contract that stunk as bad as this hog farm apparently did.

  I tucked the vision away for future reference. The correlation seemed far-fetched, but at this stage I was still just gathering dots—I’d start connecting them later.

  The dirt road ended in the front yard of an ancient wooden one-story ranch structure set within a small cluster of trees. A dim light glowed on the porch. The rest of the house was steeped in shadows. It looked like a very lonely place.

  “Care to come in?” His voice was casual, but I knew better.

  “Sure.”

  I followed him inside. His house was clean and sparsely decorated; a big recliner and a flat-screen television dominated the main room. A few family photographs decorated the mantel. John D gestured me to sit on a small leather sofa pushed against the wall, and disappeared into the kitchen.

  He came back with two icy-cold beers. I knew I liked this guy. He sank into his recliner with a contented grunt. We sipped in silence.

  The room seemed to darken a little.

  I glanced over at John D.

  He was deep in thought, and that thought was making him sad. I just waited. None of my business. He turned to me.

  “I wasn’t lying,” he said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I wasn’t lying, not completely. I did have a son called Charlie, and he was in the Navy Reserves.” I wasn’t sure h
ow to respond, so I said nothing.

  “Little bits of him are all over some godforsaken road in Al Asad,” John D continued. “The rest is buried at Arlington National Cemetery. He got blowed up, making the world safe, at least that’s what I used to think. Now I don’t know what to believe.”

  I felt the ache of his loss, resonating deep in my own chest. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “So am I, son. So am I.” Then John D folded the grief tight and tucked it back in, wherever it was he stored it.

  “So, Ten, you never did tell me what our robe-wearing friends did to get you to come all the way out here. Anything I oughta be worried about?”

  I told him my Barbara Maxey bedtime story, taking my time. I was curious to see what he thought. He mulled it over, frowning as he drew the same conclusions I had.

  “You’re thinking they might have sent someone after her,” he said. “Maybe kilt her because she broke away?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered. “I don’t have any evidence to support that scenario.”

  For the second time tonight, a vivid image invaded my cerebrum.

  Flat, spatulate thumbs, pressing, squeezing, crushing the life out of Barbara’s fragile neck as she stared up in horror at a hirsute face and crazy, leering eyes.

  I shuddered. Maybe my brain didn’t know enough yet, but my gut sure did.

  “You figure something out?” John D was watching me.

  “No. Maybe. I don’t know.”

  We lapsed into a second silence, lost in thought.

  “You ever see things?” I asked John D. “You know, with your mind’s eye?”

  He thought about it. “Sometimes I see these streaks of light, like ghosts. Floaties, I call ’em. That what you mean?”

  “More like actual visions,” I said.

  “Can’t say that I do. Why? Do you?”

  I was too far down the road to turn back. Anyway, for some reason I already trusted this man.

  “Before I was a cop, I spent a lot of time in a monastery.”

  “No fooling. You were a priest?”

  “Not that kind of monastery. A Buddhist one. In India. My father’s a practicing monk over there. Anyway, my teachers encouraged me and my fellow novices to notice any pictures that sprang to mind—you know, visualizations that arose without even trying. The more I noticed them, the more they seemed to happen.”

  “You talking about ESP?”

  “It’s more like staying attuned to what’s happening beneath the surface, and somehow picking it up in visual form.”

  “Like dowsing for water,” John D said. “Only it’s your mind that’s bent like a branch.”

  “Exactly. One time, I was maybe seventeen, I was called to the bedside of an old monk. My father thought it would be instructive. The monk was somewhere around eighty—he didn’t know exactly when he was born—and deep in his final passage.”

  “You mean dying?”

  “Yes. Dying. He was lying in bed, with his eyes closed. I was only allowed the briefest of visits. I sat cross-legged on the floor next to him. I started chanting from one of our traditional liturgies for the dying. All of a sudden, the clear image of a snowball fight flashed across my mental screen; you know, just a bunch of little Tibetan boys, lobbing snow at each other. It was like I was there. The monk must have sensed a change in my concentration. His eyes flickered open, and he turned to look at me. ‘Describe,’ he said.”

  “No kidding. You tell him what you saw?”

  “Yes. I told him. After a minute, he smiled. ‘That was the day I became a monk,’ he said.”

  “No kidding,” John D said again.

  “He described how a lama showed up at their little village that snowy afternoon and invited the boy to come live with him in the monastery.”

  “And his parents agreed?”

  “Well, it’s a great honor, to have a monk in the family. And they were very poor, so it was one less mouth to feed.”

  “Hunh.”

  “Anyway, then he started to weep. I was astonished. I had never seen a grown man cry, much less one of the monastery elders. He said, ‘I’ve always wondered what my life would have been if I hadn’t left my friends that day.’”

  “What did you say?”

  “I … I told him that his life had been full of merit, one I could only hope to emulate. After a moment, he just motioned at me to continue with the prayers, and closed his eyes. He crossed over later that night, sitting upright, surrounded by the senior lamas.”

  John D cleared his throat. “You ask me, sounds like that’s a fine way to go.”

  I was flooded with sharp longing for my own friends, Yeshe and Lobsang, so very far away. They knew me like no others, sensed my every mood. They loved me, without judgment. They nourished my being.

  John D seemed to register the press of grief in my chest. He walked over to the mantel and returned with a faded photograph.

  I looked down at the photo. A young man and two strapping boys posed side by side, grinning amid a thick grove of blooming almond trees. The older boy sported a cowboy hat and a carefree grin. The younger was looking up at his big brother, his mouth serious, his eyes ablaze with admiration. The trees were mostly swathed with snowy white blossoms, though here and there one boasted a frothy explosion of pink.

  “That’s me with Charlie, and my other son, Norman. Back when their mother was still alive. Back when we were all full of hope.” John D rubbed his callused thumb across the picture. “Things don’t always work out the way we want them to, Ten. Don’t mean they’re not working out the way they’re supposed to.”

  I handed the picture back. I touched his arm lightly.

  “Thanks. I’d better get going.”

  “Hang on, hang on, young fella.” He bustled back into the kitchen and returned with a small paper bag, which he pressed into my hands. “Take some of my almonds with you. Case you get hungry on the way home.”

  Visions are well and good, but sometimes the simplest deed will warm the cold places in our heart when we least expect it. As I drove away, I vowed to someday return John D’s act of kindness.

  CHAPTER 12

  As I cycled through my morning maintenance rituals, I was all too aware of the conflicting jumble of feelings inside. Each one vied for my attention, like siblings at a dinner table: excitement over the many tasks ahead; anxiety at the possibility of failure; concern for John D. Woven through all of these was a thin but familiar thread of dread—the sense that I was about to volunteer to be berated, yet again, by a woman I liked. I had to call Julie back, deal with the disastrous call of the night before, but I kept putting it off. This uncharacteristic procrastination told me I’d already assigned my heart in some way to this woman. After one dinner. How had this happened?

  I picked up the phone, looking over to Tank, asleep in a patch of sun.

  “She probably won’t pick up anyway, right?” Tank didn’t answer.

  She did, on the third ring.

  “It’s Ten. Is this a good time? Can you talk?”

  She snorted. “Gee, thanks. Rub it in, why don’t you?”

  I swallowed. “Julie, I’m sorry I snapped at you before.”

  “A girl steps outside after a long night of work, sees the full moon, gets up her nerve to call a boy about it, and bam! You put me off my feed, Tenzing, and I’m not happy about it. Nothing puts me off my feed.”

  “Look, I owe you an explanation. I also owe you a ride, and you owe me a meal. How does tonight sound?”

  She thought about it. I waited, wondering which way she would tip. Which way I wanted her to.

  “As it happens, I’m off this evening,” Julie said. “Come to my place. We can take the Mustang for a spin, and then you can fill me in while I fill you up.”

  I got directions—she was renting one of those temporary furnished apartments at the Oakwood in Burbank—and hung up feeling a little better about things.

  A FedEx truck scraped over the gravel into my driveway. Now what?
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  Moments later, I was looking down at Mike’s face, displaying an uncharacteristic ear-to-ear grin, filling the screen of a brand-new, very fancy cell phone. I spent one second wondering what Mike was so happy about, before I started to mess around with my new toy, tapping and stroking the little stamp-sized images the way I remembered Mike doing.

  At first, it was like trying to control little balls of mercury. Icons kept skittering away, disappearing and reappearing willy-nilly. Once I got the hang of it, though, I discovered that I not only had access to the Internet and my e-mails, I could also check on the weather, the stock market, Facebook, and YouTube. People could track me wherever I was, and I could get directions to anywhere, and listen to music by anyone. Now if it would only open cans of cat food, life would be perfect.

  I called Mike. The reception was clear as crystal. Man, I hate it when he’s so right. I left a message.

  “Okay. You win. I did need this gizmo to tide me over before I can afford the whole home office upgrade. Thanks.” I went to press end, then changed my mind. “Question: who took that picture of you? Why the goofy grin?”

  It was time to hit the road. I grabbed an old pair of binoculars and fed my beast. The new, 21st-century me downloaded door-to-door directions to today’s destination, and added Julie’s address and number to my address book. I was pretty pleased with myself. On a whim, I also Googled “Hog Farms.” We were strict vegetarians in the monastery, avoiding the consumption of any other sentient beings. In Paris, my mother was whatever suited her at any given moment. One week, she would eat nothing but fruit and nuts. Another week, only meat would do. Raw, cooked, gourmet or junk food, whatever she ate, I ate, or I didn’t eat at all. Since I’ve been on my own, I’ve tried to listen to what my body needs, while holding some awareness of the source of my nourishment. Mostly, I eat fresh fruit, vegetables and legumes, with the occasional cheese, egg, or fish product when there are no vegetarian alternatives. No red meat, though. The closest I’ve come to pork is bacon bits at a salad bar, which I’ve so far avoided. Anyway, what I knew about pig farming wouldn’t fill a thimble.

  What I learned about pig farming made me wish I owned a gas mask. Among other unsettling facts, apparently pilots are encouraged to avoid flying over hog farms at altitudes lower than 3,000 feet, due to instances of fainting in the cockpit from catching piggy updrafts. In other swine-related news, entire hog farms occasionally spontaneously burst into flames from the various gases produced by the active little fellows.