She turned around to face her own house, tapped a ball in front of her with her foot. She swung—pok!—and the ball lifted up. It banged against the gutter along the roof and dropped to earth. She pushed another ball into place with her club. Pok! She shanked it: the ball twirled in the wrong direction and clipped the side of the house, causing Winnie’s heart to shudder as the ball skipped past the bedroom window and bounced harmlessly into the driveway. The close call made her focus. She didn’t want to break two windows in one night. She patted a ball into place, eased the club back and swung again.
She caught that one just right. The ball sailed upward, shakily at first but then with real purpose, like the last chopper out of ’Nam. She followed through without even thinking about it, up on her toes, her hips torqued, the club finishing over her shoulder. The ball continued to rise—over the roof, way over. It shimmered in the sky, white on black, hanging there like a Christmas ornament. It never fell—it just disappeared from view.
Winnie held the pose for a long time. She imagined herself as a statue in the Galleria dell’ Accademia, the female version of the David. No, that wasn’t right. Too static, too lost in the past. She was feeling alive and very much present all of a sudden. She felt the night air on her cheeks, on her arms and legs and the strip of belly flesh that had once again been exposed by the swing of her arms. The thought of it—of being alive and present—made her crack. She brought the club down, let go, and dropped to her knees. The feeling was wonderful but also tenuous, so very tenuous. The fragility of it scared her. Already she felt it slipping away. She wondered if she’d ever get a solid hold on it again.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Hicks and Lloyd picked their way along the lake, shuffling through tall grass, waving at unseen flying bugs. Hicks pictured the TV images of Southeast Asia that had become so familiar, soldiers pushing through the jungle in short sleeves, humpbacked and sweaty, as easy to startle as cats. Lloyd had been in the army near the end of the war but he’d never been in Vietnam. Korea, Hicks remembered. Lloyd had spent his army days staring across the demilitarized zone. Hicks had almost been in Korea as well, back when the fighting there was hot. He’d been out of the service for only a year and a half when Kim Il Sung’s troops crossed the thirty-eighth parallel. Hicks could have been called up, but he wasn’t. The only combat he’d ever see would be on the television.
Vietnam had been very different than Korea, of course. Like almost everyone he knew, he’d supported the war in Vietnam and had said so every time it came up. Sarah told him once that he might think differently if they had a son, but Hicks insisted he wouldn’t, that you couldn’t let the communists run roughshod over the world, that any young American man should be proud to serve his country and protect freedom. He’d believed this with a religious certainty; he’d been unwavering throughout the war. He wasn’t so sure anymore. Illness had made him soft. It sounded ridiculous, but having a heart attack made him realize what it must have been like for those draftees trudging through the jungle. They hadn’t asked for Vietnam to happen to them, just as he hadn’t asked for his heart to seize up. Sprawled on the bathroom floor, he’d been certain he was going to die, and he’d been surprised by how scared he was. When he woke up after surgery and saw Sarah standing against the back wall of the hospital room, looking exhausted and annoyed, he started crying. He couldn’t stop for ten minutes. That alone, bawling in front of his estranged wife, was enough to make him a pacifist. How could he support any policy that put men through such an experience? No one needed democracy so badly that they should go through that.
Hicks thought about Nixon’s secret plan to end the war. He couldn’t remember what it was anymore. Had Nixon abandoned it? Did he implement it and it didn’t work? The scandal over the break-in probably got in the way, messed things up. Hicks never paid much attention to the Watergate stuff. He watched that Robert Redford movie all the way through and didn’t see what it had to do with Nixon. About halfway in, Jason Robards asks Redford and the little Jewish guy, “Where’s the goddamn story?” Hicks didn’t see where it was, either. The movie was all about the Committee to Re-Elect the President. CREEP this and CREEP that. So what? Campaign dirty tricks went back to the ancient Greeks. They were as American as apple pie. Hicks didn’t understand the hoo-ha about it now. He liked Nixon—he’d grown up with guys like Dick Nixon—and hated to see the man getting attacked for being an ordinary American from an ordinary American town.
Hicks had been on the department’s security detail the time Nixon came through Fresno in ’62. When Hicks shook hands with the great man, Nixon looked past his shoulder and gave a little twitch of a smile. Hicks couldn’t recall a word of the speech at the fairgrounds, but he did remember Nixon leaving. The candidate came down the steps at the back of the stage and walked straight for the car, right into the crowd on the right side of the pavilion. The crowd fell back to let him through, though arms shot out all along the collapsing line, like cattle prods. Everyone was desperate to touch him, to feel his flesh—as long as they were off-center, as long as it was a sidelong, glancing contact. “Hey, Dick!” someone shouted. Another called out: “We’re with you, sir!” Nixon waved and smiled and threw his arms out to both sides, an umpire calling a close play at the plate. His face was flushed, he was excited to be in the middle of it all, but he kept his eyes cast slightly down and his shoulders slumped slightly forward, as if he didn’t want to be recognized. He looked like a man who might die of embarrassment.
The nattering nabobs, Hicks thought, remembering Vice President Agnew’s phrase about Nixon’s critics. He’d had to look the words up. The college men in their sharp suits hated the president, hated that he’d come up from nothing to make something of himself. Hicks thought of Mrs. Nixon standing next to the president on their last day in the White House. The image had stuck with him, the look of brokenhearted horror on her face, her eyes blasted into unseeing shame. He’d always liked her, thought she was every bit as pretty as that conceited Jackie Kennedy that everybody so loved.
A rustling sound off to his right grabbed Hicks’s attention. He couldn’t tell what it was. Could be an animal moving through brush. Could be his imagination. He glanced at Lloyd, who was frozen in his tracks. Lloyd caught Hicks’s eye and pointed, then bounded quickly into the woods. Hicks hesitated. He would have liked to discuss it first. He looked away from Lloyd’s disappearing form and out across the lake. The rugged, green landscape on the other side, lit by moonlight, rolled eastward with a powerful order and beauty. White Mountain and Waucoba Mountain floated over the horizon like competing postcards of the Egyptian pyramids.
He turned back and noted that Lloyd was gone, sucked into nature. He scurried after him, his stomach aching. He hated going directly into the woods. He much preferred to stay along waterways—lakes and streams—and manmade paths. It was too easy to get turned around among the trees, to end up headed deep into the forest when you thought you were going back to the car. Up ahead, Hicks spotted Lloyd—he hoped it was Lloyd—ducking under a low-hanging branch. The chief’s flashlight poked pathetically at tree trunks and grayish ground cover and darkness.
Hicks worried about how much noise they were making. They were so loud that the forest seemed emptied out; the animals had plenty of time to get out of the way, to watch them go by from makeshift hidey-holes. If the Johnsons were out here and nearby, they also could hear and probably see them, two city cops blundering along, tripping over roots in the ground, the beams from their flashlights bobbing. Hicks didn’t actually know what kind of outdoorsmen Melvin and Gordon were. When the Johnsons had rented out the Sky Flower for corporate retreats, they’d advertised themselves as hunting guides, but the few hunting tours they’d led hadn’t gone well. There’d been a threatened lawsuit from one CEO type who Gordon had almost winged. The county put a stop to the tours by getting Fish and Wildlife to enforce their license rules.
Lloyd—it was Lloyd, thank God—crouched
at the base of a tree, and Hicks came up behind him. The chief patted him on the shoulder to let him know he was there.
“I don’t hear it anymore,” Lloyd whispered.
Hicks cocked his head. He’d forgotten they were following the noise. He didn’t hear it, either. The sounds in the forest were strange. There was always noise in the woods, he’d noticed, but it always seemed far off, unthreatening and yet still unnerving. It was like they were listening to a factory’s assembly line through a seashell, the chick-chick of widgets being pressed into plastic packaging on the other side of the world. That was what had caught their attention about this now-gone rustling sound: it was close, right around the corner—right on top of them. Hicks clicked off his flashlight, figuring he should only use it if necessary, in case the Johnsons really were nearby.
A tickle of fear crawled up Hicks’s large intestine. The recognition of it—that he was afraid—made him angry. “What do you think?” he hissed at his subordinate.
“Let’s wait a minute, see if it comes back.”
Hicks dropped down and waited. He noticed that his teeth were chattering, which didn’t surprise him. His pants and shirtsleeves were still damp, weighing him down. He hugged himself and rubbed his upper arms with his hands. His eyes caught a flash of movement, and he blinked. Lloyd stood up, his head jabbing forward like an English Pointer. Hicks stood as well. Did they see something? He couldn’t be sure. Lloyd shuffled forward, ducked into the dark.
Hicks, feeling like the little brother no one wanted around, rushed to keep up. He broke into a jog, but Lloyd’s lead lengthened. He dared not run any faster, lest he crash headlong into a tree, lest his damaged heart give out. He kept his arms in front of him to ward off the natural world, tracking Lloyd as much by the huffing of the lieutenant’s breath as by sight. He rounded into a dry gully, his feet slipping on the powdery earth. He stopped, ducked his head. He’d lost Lloyd but spotted their quarry: figures in the gully moving in an orderly line. Definitely people, not animals. He noticed Lloyd a few yards away from him, squatting under the cover of a tree. He too was watching the forms up ahead. The Johnsons, it seemed, had accomplices.
Lloyd looked behind him, found Hicks, and held up four fingers. Four men. Hicks padded over to Lloyd. The two officers conferred quietly and then started down the ravine, staying low, staying within hearing distance of the Johnson Gang’s footfalls. Hicks kept his eyes straight ahead. It was pointless to try and determine where they were going or what route they were taking to get there. With their flashlights stowed in their belts, Hicks’s and Lloyd’s only light was the moon, which peeked over the top of the mesa like a porthole in a sinking ship. They were relying chiefly on sound, and hoping the Johnsons would stick to the easy path.
The gully disappeared in places. Cottonwoods elbowed into the floodway, sending out low, pugilistic branches. Other greenery—bushes and shrubs of some sort that Hicks couldn’t name—stretched across the opening in the forest, determined to close off any possible escape. At one spot, they had to get down almost to their knees to squeeze through the opening and then scuffle about in the dark to pick up the path’s thread. Somehow they kept the Johnsons within hailing distance.
Hicks worried that the Johnsons could hear the footfalls behind them and were figuring out how to circle around for an ambush, but he knew this was probably paranoia. The men up ahead marched on slowly, their feet clicking and cracking on the forest’s detritus, the occasional incomprehensible burble of a word uttered and batted back. Lloyd moved like a sumo wrestler in an effort to stay low and save his back. Hicks didn’t worry so much about keeping his head down, figuring the forest did a good job of obscuring them.
He pulled up at a tree and waved at Lloyd to keep going. He had to pee and couldn’t hold it any longer. Before he arrested the Johnsons, he had to take care of his own Johnson. Hicks snickered at his play on words until he realized Lloyd had hesitated and was watching him. Hicks, adjusting the rifle on his back so it wouldn’t sling around on him, waved furiously, and so the lieutenant turned and kept going. Hicks unzipped, dug his heels into the ground, and unleashed a stream, resisting the urge to let out a long, loud exhalation. The piss left his body like a bucket overturning. It splashed his boots, created surprising little streams that forked around the base of the tree. As he finished, a shiver ran through him, as if his soul had just departed. He couldn’t believe how much better he felt. He felt invincible.
He buckled up, stepped back into the gully and jogged into the nothingness. It took him about five minutes to catch up to Lloyd, who was still sumo-stepping slowly and deliberately forward. Hicks put a hand on his lieutenant’s back just as his subordinate ran into some kind of thick, brambly plant. Lloyd hadn’t realized the gully was curving. Straightening themselves out, they continued down the path as if in the middle of a tunnel. The moon had slipped behind the mesa, turning the night into a syrupy paste. They listened for footsteps and the rustle of plant life being shoved aside, but there was nothing. Hicks swallowed hard, hoping to break up the worry ball stuck in his throat.
The lawmen suddenly heard the sloshing of water. Shocked, they glanced at each other and then started running. They banged hips—there wasn’t enough room for the men to run side by side, but Hicks wasn’t willing to cede the lead to the younger man. His boots slipped on the crusty ground; with each step, he felt like his feet could go out from under him. He slapped a hand over his empty holster to hold it in place and pumped with the other arm, flattening out his feet as much as possible as he brought each one down. The forest opened onto the lake just as Hicks felt his breath give out, and he broke stride. Damn it, he thought, struggling to suck in air. Lloyd continued forward, and when the men they were chasing came firmly into view, he aimed his rifle. “Police! Stay where you are!” the lieutenant yelled. “Hands up! Hands up!”
Hicks also shouldered his rifle and stepped up beside Lloyd. Then the men came into focus, and he swore to himself. He pointed the gun skyward.
“Evening, Sheriff,” said a short, bearded man wearing a plaid shirt and stained brown pants. He stood ankle-deep in the water, his back to the lake. Behind him, the three other men sat in the canoe, the canoe Hicks had first spotted by the hunting cabin.
Hicks recognized Plaid Shirt. The man came into town every month to collect a disability check from a post-office box. The chief didn’t recognize any of the other men, though all four of them looked like they could be related.
“What are you doing out here?” Hicks said.
Plaid Shirt smiled and looked over his shoulder at the others with a bemused expression on his face. He turned back to the lawmen. “What are we doing? What are you doing?”
Hicks realized he’d asked a stupid question. The four men obviously lived out here. When he saw Plaid Shirt in town, he unconsciously recognized him as a mountain man. Not everybody liked the civilized world—and who could blame them? —so a scattering of men lived in the forest, hunting with bows, sleeping in hunting shacks or out in the open. Hicks couldn’t imagine living in the mountains—off the fat of the land—but he saw the appeal. All your regrets would be washed away out here. All the failures, all the hurts you’d caused, it all would become meaningless.
“You seen the Johnson boys?” Lloyd asked, finally letting his rifle drop. “You know who they are?”
Plaid Shirt tilted his head to look at Lloyd. He scratched his matted beard. “Can’t remember the last time I seen the Johnsons. Homer knows his way around these parts pretty good, but the sons don’t take to it in the same way.”
“They’re wanted men,” Lloyd said.
“Oh, yes, I can see that.”
“If you spot them,” Hicks said, stepping forward. “Don’t engage with them. They’re dangerous. We’d sure appreciate it if you came into town and told us you saw them.”
Plaid Shirt nodded. “We surely will do that, Sheriff.”
Hicks wan
ted to ask them where they were going, but he resisted. It didn’t matter, and he sensed the men wouldn’t want to say. Plaid Shirt pushed the canoe and climbed in. The night wiped them away in an instant.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Janice told herself not to worry. She pressed her forehead against the steering wheel and closed her eyes. Don’t worry, she repeated. That’s exactly what brings on an attack—worrying. Her head still tingled from all the juice she’d sucked down during the drive, but she knew it wouldn’t last. Now that her medication was gone, she was on her own. Her only defense against an attack was her will power, her own strength of character. She took in a deep gulp of air, let it out. The burger at Denny’s had helped. It had settled her down, at least while she was eating it. She pressed down on the brake, felt the car quiver. The image of illegal aliens massing at Lake Crowley slipped into her mind, and, realizing it, she chastised herself. Forget it, she mouthed.
She couldn’t help herself: the feeling of panic kept returning. The army must have the situation under control by now. Or the National Guard. Was there a difference? She didn’t know. She tried to remember what else the radio had said, before the explosions happened and she’d started to have the asthma attack, before the mountain had cut off reception. She’d read an article recently about illegal aliens earning just a few dollars a week in Central Valley fields, how they were worried the farmers would have them deported if they complained. That could explain it, she thought. Desperate measures and all that. The earthquake might have something to do with it, too. A quake always got people worked up.
Janice told herself it didn’t matter. Everything was different now. She felt like she truly was starting a new life. She pictured King’s face in the rear-view mirror as she roared away in the car. The shocked, blank face of a moron coming to a realization. That was the only way to get something into that thick skull of his, by giving it a good whack.
Mammoth Page 20