by Ben Tripp
Lately Patrick had been waking up alone in the master bedroom with the chocolate-colored walls and cream trim. He no longer went stomping off to the guest room to confront Weaver, whom he invariably found sitting up in bed with his hands laced together behind his head (accentuating his veined rock-climber’s arms), staring thoughtfully out the balcony window at the view of the Sunset Tower Hotel, which had incidentally been renovated by that bitch Paul Fortune. But of course Paul Fortune didn’t have his own show on cable television—that honor belonged to Patrick. Was Weaver dreaming of another man when he gazed out the window? Of course not. Weaver was simply looking out the window; he had no interest in décor or fashion or any of the refinements of life.
That was what Patrick loved about him—and also what he loathed. They had nothing tangible in common. The more distant Weaver became, the more frantic Patrick became, and Patrick knew damn well the whole thing was a vicious cycle, and if he shut up occasionally, the problem would most likely go away.
But he couldn’t, not to save his life. Not even to save the relationship. Please shut up. Can’t. Even as the thought went through his head for the millionth time, Patrick spoke.
“She looks like she’s in a very poor mood. Are you sure we’re okay to park across all those spaces like that? I mean shouldn’t we just you know park along the street or something?”
Weaver disengaged his eyes from the sheriff and fixed them on Patrick. He considered carefully, and then spoke:
“I think there’s something going on.”
Patrick’s heart bumped in his chest. Did Weaver know about the intern? Only once, and eight long months ago when Weaver was on location in Hawaii for three weeks, but maybe that’s why he was slipping off to sleep alone. Patrick pursed his lips as if to ask, “what?” but no sound came out. Weaver hooked his chin at the television up above the counter.
“Something weird. They keep showing part of these disasters in other countries, and then all of a sudden they cut away to cute stuff like babies watching parades and don’t go back. Something’s not right.”
Patrick simply couldn’t understand the man. At this moment, the eggs and toast arrived.
Danny found Deputy Ted eating a churro in front of Vic’s Barber Shop. He saw her emerge from the crowd a few moments after she saw him, and made the tactical mistake of trying to consume the entire thing before she reached him. Ted was probably too fat for his health and certainly too fat for his uniform, and Danny refused to order him another one because she felt to do so would be to condone a failure of personal discipline, hence a failure of team discipline. Danny was a firm believer in the “slippery slope” theory. She accelerated her pace and reached Ted while he still had so much dough in his mouth he could hardly close his lips.
“Eating on duty, Ted?” Danny said. Ted held a finger up: Hang on a second. Danny crossed her arms and waited. Gluttony was one of the Seven Deadly Sins, as she recalled. Whereas drowning your sorrows in alcohol and pills is A-OK, the unhelpful little voice in her head observed. Danny uncrossed her arms and pretended to watch the crowd while Ted struggled manfully to swallow the mouthful.
“Sorry, ma’am. No breakfast this morning ’cause we had to split our shifts.”
Danny’s late arrival this morning must have created chaos at the station. The fact that things were running smoothly was due to successful improvisation by her deputies. She would have to acknowledge that when things quieted down. Tomorrow, after the fireworks and the drunk drivers.
“Any word on Kelley?”
“No, ma’am, but this isn’t the first time she ran away, neither.”
“She…she took the Mustang.”
Ted gasped. There were lines a person did not cross. Not even family. But Danny was already on to the next thing:
“I’m going to be tied down from at least noon to one with this key thing and the chili contest afterward. I want you to be the point man if anything happens while I’m up there. Okay? Nick will be at the radio, but if you need extra hands, he can jump in.”
There was a highway patrol interceptor parked at the curb down by the barber shop. Danny hadn’t been notified there would be a state presence in town. She didn’t see the uniform that went with it; maybe somebody was moonlighting, or had to drop off a subpoena or something. Still…professional courtesy said you tipped your hat to the local fuzz.
There was something bothering her, a sense of off-balance. It was probably only the raging hangover, but Danny never wrote off “one of those feelings.” Ted was noisily clearing his throat. Some sugar had gone down the wrong way. He gave Danny the thumbs-up, unable to speak. Danny thumped him on the back and turned toward the Wooden Spoon, because the churro and the throbbing in her head had reminded her of something: the prisoner in cell one would need to eat. And in Forest Peak, the jailhouse kitchen and the local café were the same place.
The big woman who delivered the breakfast had aluminum-colored hair and a smiley-face nametag on her blouse that read Betty. Weaver asked for Tabasco. Patrick tried to change the subject, whatever that had been. Anything to take his mind off the squalor of this rustic little flypit in the mountains.
“It’s like Deliverance without the river,” he whispered.
“Just eat,” Weaver said, accepting the Tabasco from Betty with a gracious John Wayne inclination of the head. “I want to see the news.”
Then a red-eyed fellow turned around to face Weaver. He looks like that singer from that band, Patrick thought. Or a drug addict.
“You see it coming, right?” Red-Eye said. He was sitting at the next table, submerging a plate of pancakes in syrup and ketchup. He tapped the air with a finger. His nails were bitten down until the tips of his fingers looked like raw steak.
Weaver stabbed his eggs in the eyes with a sharp piece of toast. “What’s that, brother?”
Patrick could see Red-Eye thought he maybe had a sympathetic ear. Emphasis on the pathetic part. His teeth were awful.
“Something,” the man said. “War on D-R-U-G-Z, war on poverty, unliteracy, cancer, dietary supplements, and terror? One in a hundred Americans is behind bars, and people keep celebrating the Fourth like ‘freedom’ meant something. It’s bullshit. They’re up to something.”
At the counter directly behind Red-Eye, an old-timer in Caterpillar cap and suspenders turned from his hash browns to inspect the author of these treasonous words.
“Zap Owler, you communist asshole, we stop celebrating Independence Day, the terrorists win,” the old-timer reasoned. His name was Eugene, or at least his coveralls had a patch that said Eugene on the breast pocket.
Zap Owler turned in his chair as if Eugene had flashed a badge at him.
“What terrorists?”
“They could be anybody. Could be you.” Eugene obviously figured he had Owler trumped.
Patrick ate elaborately, hoping to demonstrate he wasn’t part of the conversation. But Weaver turned to face the clashing locals:
“Day like today means whatever you bring to it.”
Eugene nodded in agreement. “You got that right.” But Weaver wasn’t done.
“Then again, can’t mix patriotism with going along to get along, either. That’s what happened to the Germans a while back.”
“But you can’t say there are no terrorists,” Eugene protested.
“I’m not. But we better damn well stop using them as an excuse for what we do to people.”
Zap Owler was about to add something when Betty interposed her massive behind between the men to cut off any further argument, pouring coffee refills.
Eugene’s eyes drifted saintlike to the taxidermied deer head up above the front door: “I didn’t slaughter all them Koreans just so I could sit here and watch some dingleberry piss on the flag. Nosir. We get into a war on terror, we finish the job.”
Patrick pinched the bridge of his nose as if to clear his mind of suffering, a gesture he’d perfected on television. Zap Owler muttered under his breath and went back to his short
stack.
Weaver was pissed off. He slapped the table hard enough to make the coffee slop out of his mug. He was composing a statement and it was going to be short and to the point. At which moment, a merry jingle sounded: The front door swung open and Danny Adelman walked in. Zap Owler shrank himself until he was hidden behind the rest of the patrons.
Betty appeared to take Danny’s arrival as her cue, addressing Danny but speaking to Weaver: “Okay, mister, here’s one of our local heroes right now, Sheriff Danielle Adelman: She done three tours of Iraq, got wounded but she won’t say where. You tell ’em, Danny, you think America ought to walk away from all the sacrifice we made or you think we oughtta finish the job?”
Danny took in the room, scanning the faces that turned in her direction. She moved a lot like Weaver, Patrick thought. Same way of speaking slowly. She took off her hat and leaned on the counter.
“Sacrifice? It doesn’t look like anybody here is suffering much.”
Betty squeezed herself in behind the counter.
“You know what I mean. The usual?”
“One egg sandwich. However Wolfman likes it.”
“He finally in the lockup?”
“Lemme know when it’s ready.” Danny strolled on over to Patrick and Weaver.
“Sorry to barge in on you like this. I saw that land yacht outside and I figured it belonged to one of you gents.”
“It’s ours.” Patrick looked extremely guilty. Weaver gave her the Lone Ranger smile. Patrick blurted: “How did you guess?”
The sheriff considered this.
“That’s an expensive bus, and you got the most expensive clothes in town. Thing is, you’re taking up too many spaces. Got to park it up the road well off the shoulder. But take your time. Up here the shoulder goes down five hundred feet in some places.”
Betty called up Danny’s order. Danny put her hat back on. “You all have a great day,” she said, and walked to the door with the go-bag. Then a string of firecrackers went off in the street, and Danny flinched involuntarily, half-ducking back through the open door. Wounded on the inside, Patrick thought. Maybe that was Weaver’s problem, too.
Back in the station, Danny strapped on her walkie-talkie with the shoulder microphone, told Dave to get some rack time and be back on second shift at 8:00 P.M. (he welcomed the overtime), and pushed the sandwich in its paper bag through the bars of Wulf Gunnar’s cell. The man was still heavily asleep on the narrow cot bolted to the wall. To hell with him. Nick was supposed to take radio duty at the communications center now, but he was on his way back from his tour of the neighborhood. Danny resisted the urge to look in the bathroom mirror, contenting herself with a glance in the reflection on her office window. Then she went outside again.
Forest Peak was only an hour from downtown Los Angeles, traffic permitting, and might as well have been in another country, it was so smalltown and quaint—so it made for a convenient day-trip getaway from everything L.A. No palm trees, only evergreens. Snow in the winter. The hip, ironic Angelenos enjoyed Forest Peak for its guileless Americana; for others, the town was a reminder of where they came from—other small towns in other places, left behind for the biggest big city. Then again, many folks simply liked the fresh mountain air.
The crowd was picking up: babies on fathers’ shoulders, kids with balloons, Los Angeles bottle-blondes with their Gucci shades and fifty-dollar tubes of sunscreen, lots of Latino families from the flatlands, some with five or six kids. There was a guy on stilts dressed as Uncle Sam, probably hired by Gordy to attract business to the hardware store. The band played on. It might have been “Lady Marmalade” they were playing, or a polka; it was hard to tell. An intense, vinegar smell of bubbling chili wafted across Main Street from the dozen or so cooking stations set up in front of the Quik-Mart. Danny saw a “For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge” T-shirt, the initial letters far larger than the rest, but she didn’t have time to issue a citation to some mullet-wearing tool who couldn’t dress himself for public occasions. Past the crowd was the official ceremonial flatbed truck, parked up under the shade of the town’s lone ash tree.
Danny’s belly tightened with anticipation. She didn’t love public speaking. Gordy Morton and Eleanor Dennison were already sitting up on the back in folding chairs above the richly draped red, white, and blue bunting that hid the truck’s chassis. Also up on the flatbed was Zach Greer, the fire chief, Hillman Jones, who ran the public works department, and Mayor Sy Crocker, checking his notes at the podium they’d requisitioned from the gymnasium. Sy was dressed in the ill-fitting George Washington outfit he’d originally put together in 1976 for the Bicentennial. Danny walked toward them through the crowd, muttering a last checkup on her deputies over the radio.
The noon bell on the firehouse was ringing as Danny stepped up onto the flatbed and stood with legs apart and arms behind her back in the “at ease” drill stance. Sy tipped his braid-trimmed tricorn hat to Danny and waved down the street at Julius Argandoña, the music teacher. Julius made a throat-cutting gesture and the student band abruptly stopped playing, precisely as the last ring of the bell sounded out. Now there was only crowd noise, laughter and murmuring voices. Most of these folks couldn’t care less about the ceremonials, but at least they turned in the correct direction. Danny’s heart was racing. She did her breathing and brought it down.
Sy tapped the microphone, then launched into his speech. “Ladies and gentlemen, and local folks, welcome to Forest Peak’s Fourth of July celebration. Every year we get together to cheer on what’s great about our nation and our community. And by way of raising money for the fire department, we also sling a mean chili.”
People cheered at this. They’d cheer for anything edible, Danny thought. Part of the eternal holiday spirit.
“And every year we celebrate somebody who made a difference in our community, who gave more than they took, with our annual Key to the Mountains award. This year we honor somebody real special. She was born and raised here in Forest Peak, and before she took the job of sheriff, she took the job of serving with the U.S. Marine Corps. That job sent her overseas to a place very different from here. Like going from a birthday party to a fistfight is how she put it one time.”
Laughter was followed by more cheers. Danny could feel a hot blush crawling up her skin, making her back prickle. For starters, she’d never said any such thing. Sy was making it up.
“Let me introduce Sheriff Danielle Adelman: She won a Purple Heart and a Silver Star, got wounded but she won’t say where…”
Cheering, rebel yells, a “hell yeah” from the guy in the FUCK shirt. Sy patted the air down, indicating the crowd should let him finish his speech.
“…And as you can see, she came back alive, and she is still serving our community today as sheriff of our small but capable peacekeeping force. So here’s to you, Danny—it’s not fancy but it is the thirty-fifth annual Forest Peak Key to the Mountains, our award to an outstanding member of the community and a great American.”
Sy flipped open the official key-presenting box, revealing within its red velvet lining the gold-colored, five-inch key on a ribbon. He took the thing out and held it up for the crowd to see, then attempted to lower the ribbon over Danny’s head. Her Smokey hat was too big. So she took it off, and her hair fell heavily around her neck, to the tremendous delight of the crowd. People were cheering and hollering and it was about as embarrassing as anything Danny had been through, except maybe the moment S. Curtiss Booth called her a high-toned cripple bitch in front of the locals.
At last, Sy got the ribbon on her and the key hung there on her chest across the radio handset cable. From this elevated vantage point, Danny estimated the crowd at eight or nine hundred, about half the usual attendance for the holiday. Blame hard times for that. But enough of such matters. It was time for her speech. She stepped up to the podium and her walkie-talkie squealed feedback through the microphone. The crowd fell silent, genuinely interested in this local hero.
“Thank you,” Dan
ny said, her voice painfully amplified, and held the key up, and sat down on the chair between Gordy and Eleanor. That was it. The crowd went wild. A woman of few words between them and the chili, what a great American indeed! The cheering and clapping went on and on, and Danny gratefully accepted a bottle of water from Hillman Jones. Her throat was as dry as cardboard. It was finally time to judge the chili.
3
The man ran through the trees, his mind a cyclone of fear. He ran as if hell itself had opened up to swallow him alive. He ran, screaming until his throat bled, until his legs were on fire with the pain of oxygen-starved muscles and branch-whipped skin.
And then, in midstride, he was dead.
4
Danny was on the fifth Dixie cup of chili and the world seemed to be growing dim, but she figured it wasn’t as bad as a Baghdad sandstorm. So she kept on eating. The water helped. She’d probably swallowed a gallon of it, by now. The chili from Rosarita’s down in City of Industry was best, she thought. Spicy, but you could still taste the ingredients. But honestly it could have been Chef Boyardee and she wouldn’t have known the difference. The Key to the Mountains was heavy on her neck.
“Spicy, but you can still taste the ingredients,” Danny said to Eleanor.
Three thirteen-year-old boys, the Bixby twins and their cousin Cub Maas, were running for their lives.
They had propped the stick of an immense, illegal rocket firework (Sky Penetrator, it promised, in gaudy orange letters on the side) in a two-liter Mountain Dew bottle. The fuse was fizzing away at terrifying speed. The boys hurled themselves behind the recycling dumpster in the alley back of the hardware store just as the rocket lit up, a pillar of white sparks blasting out from among its tailfins. The two-liter bottle crumpled and caught fire, and a carbonized star was permanently scored into the concrete yard.
The rocket took off. Not ponderously like a space shuttle or an Apollo rocket, but more like something from a cartoon: One moment it was blasting away at the pavement, and the next it was gone into the sky on a crooked pillar of smoke. The twins saw it go but Cub was too afraid to break cover until it was well up in the air. They all saw it reach its zenith and hang there; then it exploded with a mighty roar they could feel on their cheeks.