Directly across the valley from where he stood a small flock of band-tailed pigeons fluttered out of one tall fir and then flew fifty yards and settled into the top limbs of another fir. Seeing the band-tails made him momentarily happy. They were the first flock he had seen in this country in years. Like so many wild species the band-tails were gradually disappearing.
He had brought Heather here before there was a grow and they had always enjoyed visiting the Tucker cabin that sat near the middle of the valley. The day they first happened onto the place was in the spring and standing up high where he stood today they had looked down on a valley filled with thick white fog looking like rich milk filling a bowl.
Then as they hiked downhill the fog burned away under the late morning sun and soon they discovered the cabin with white and yellow daffodils blooming profusely between the well house and the front door. When they poked around inside Case found kitchen drawers lined with brittle newspaper pages with stories about Herbert Hoover and Babe Ruth. There were charred chunks of wood in the cookstove. Mason jars of preserves and tomatoes and green beans were lined up on a warped plank shelf above the tarnished metal sink. The glass jars had turned opaque with age. Shelves below the preserves held pots and pans and plates and dishes and empty jars. The steep narrow stairway to the second floor was solidly intact and they climbed carefully with Case leading the way.
In the second floor bedroom a gray long-sleeved dress that had once been white lay over the back of a wooden rocking chair beside rusted bedsprings on a crude wooden frame. A wooden frame without a picture in it hung on a nail in the wall over the bedsprings. Close to the empty picture frame a wide-brimmed straw hat hung on a wooden peg. Case tried the hat on but it was too small and he hung it back on the peg. Under the springs sat a cracked pair of men’s leather boots without laces.
Outside behind the cabin they came upon an old plow and the head of a splitting axe driven into a chopping block and leather harnesses and horseshoes and a child’s tricycle and countless rusted cans and empty bottles. Some of the bottles were clear glass and some blue and some green and a few of the small green bottles had Chinese writing on them. Case thought they were medicine bottles. He and Heather guessed at what the Tuckers might have been like and speculated about the kind of lives they’d lived.
Now after all these years the daffodils were gone and the cabin had collapsed into a pile of logs and splintered beams piled around the stone chimney and Case was here alone.
“Heather,” he said.
Then Case glimpsed the flash across the valley in the shade underneath the fir tree the band-tails had abandoned and less than a half second later the .30 caliber bullet tore through his chest. He never heard the sound that arrived after the bullet. The impact knocked him backward but not off his feet and the second bullet that he never heard passed through his right shoulder and spun him around and he fell flat on his face.
He lay there dazed and remembering. The last time he’d been shot long ago there had been no pain and now there wasn’t any either. Just like the other time the bullets had hit like hard blows from a fist or a hammer or the kick of a horse. Now he had gone numb all over and his head seemed weightless. With his face in the dirt and his arms at his sides he remembered his left wrist and tried to clench the hand into a fist but couldn’t tell whether or not he’d done it. As it had long ago the warm blood in his mouth tasted salty. He could hear himself breathing and could hear his heart pumping but had no sense of time and he tried to count off his breaths but he couldn’t make it past three. After he stopped trying to count was when he heard footsteps.
He wanted to roll over but couldn’t. He couldn’t move and a great weightlessness seemed to fill him now.
When the footsteps stopped he heard voices.
“Is he dead?”
“Naw. Can’t you see him breathin’?”
“Finish him then.”
“What the fuck for? Look at ’im. I mean look at what’s left. He’ll croak soon enough. Relax.”
Yes this was the end and he’d always feared the end would come in a hospital bed with tubes and needles and plastic bags and doctors and nurses pretending they cared but he’d also always been lucky and he thought he was lucky now. He was ready. Yes. The best luck of all had been Heather at the very start when he’d smiled at a stranger at a boring party and she smiled back and her look said save me from this place and he did. He’d have smiled at the memory now if he could as he lay in the dirt dying. He heard himself say Heather in his mind.
“Who is he?”
“He’s an old dead dude. Almost dead dude that is. Soon to be dead dude, right? Relax. We’ll stay right up here anyway right up till our guests arrive.”
“You think we should?”
“I know we should. We’re supposed to. It’s all worked out. We’ll finish up everything this afternoon.”
“Why’d you shoot him?”
“I do what I’m told. Anyway that’s what the government trained me for. I’m good at it. Good as anybody. I got a very sweet weapon here. Got to use the weapon. Got to utilize it to its full potential.”
“I hear you. Awesome weapon. But hey. I hear that old bitch at the tavern is a weird one.”
“Weird?”
“Weird.”
“She’s cool.”
“Whitey said she weirded him out.”
“Sometimes Whitey weirds me out. The bitch is cool. She got everything worked out. She’s okay.”
“Okay, okay.”
“Sure you got enough blasting caps?”
“More than enough, dude.”
“This dude right here’s dead already, see? He’s the first.”
“But not the last. Should we bury the son of a bitch?”
“What for? Why bother? It doesn’t matter what happens to anybody after they’re dead.”
“Well at least we should drag him back in the woods. You want his gun?”
“That peashooter? The dude’s not fat. You drag him. See what he’s got on him first.”
“Jesus, that’s a fucking lot of blood.”
“We’re used to it, right?”
“To what?”
“Blood.”
“Yeah I guess.”
“Go on then.”
“Hey, man! In his backpack! Jerky!”
“Cool!”
COMMERCE
With Deputy Winter gone Sunbeam sat with her young men gathered around her table. Her hand trembled as she sketched out the valley with a ballpoint pen on the top sheet of a pad of lined yellow paper.
She printed names at each landmark on the map.
“You okay?” Stones asked her.
She nodded her head and said, “Hell yes!” but didn’t look up.
“You crying?” Stones asked her.
“Hell no!” she said.
Sunbeam tore off the map and pushed it across the table to Shadow.
“You boys go on now,” she said. “Get!”
As they stood up and then walked off she pretended to write notes on the blank sheet at the top of her pad.
After they walked out the front door the Bird of Prey was empty.
Sunbeam stood and hurried across the room to the window.
She watched her boys drive off all together in Stones’s muddy Subaru.
As the Subaru rounded the bend at Jump Off Joe she waved.
She walked back to her table and sat alone drinking strong black coffee and smoking a fresh joint. She didn’t think the joint would help and it didn’t. She thought about going after her men and warning them off but she knew Winter had told her the truth. He was a fat greedy evil son of a bitch but he always told the truth about things when money was involved. But she wondered if he’d known about the top dog’s plans all along. Her boys were seasoned by combat and tough and mean when they had to be and she hoped it would help them now but knew it probably wouldn’t. All odds were heavily stacked against them. It was too late to find a way out or to change what she feared
might happen.
Sunbeam remembered her early years in this peaceful country. She and all her friends were naïve about nearly everything they needed to know to survive in an untamed place but somehow they had struggled and learned and established decent lives for themselves. They had all loved the trout streams and the wooded hills and the wild birds and animals and the fresh winter snow and the vivid colors of wildflowers against lush green grass after the snow melted in spring.
Every April Sunbeam had loved walking naked through green grass and wildflowers to swim in Jump Off Joe Creek with the water running high and hard and icy cold with snowmelt. Then she was young and strong and full of hope and now she felt as useless as a puppet with its strings cut.
Rainbow came quietly through the door from upstairs and walked across the room and took a chair at the table.
“What’s wrong?” she asked Sunbeam.
“I’d leave this place if I was you,” Sunbeam answered.
“Why?”
“I just would. I’ll give you all the money you need.”
“I have money.”
“You and Uncle Sam ought to go someplace else.”
“I’ve saved up plenty of money, thanks to you. Enough to last a long time.”
“You still think you might become a nurse someday?”
“I’d like to.” Rainbow nodded her head and smiled. “I want to try. What I’m thinking is, I can get care for Uncle Sam while I’m in school and then afterwards too. I mean, I’ll care for him, always, as long as he lives. In school I’d learn stuff that could help me do a better job with him. But, yes, I’d love being a real nurse.”
“Well now’s as good a time as any. You’d be a fine nurse. You should go on and leave. This lonely country out here’s changed. Changed plenty. You find yourself a nice town with a school with the program you need and settle there. There’s nursing schools all over. Everybody needs nurses. They always will. How’s your van running these days?”
“Running just fine. Shrimp works on the van whenever it needs repairs. Two weeks ago he put in a fuel pump.”
“I got chained up and crammed into a van once.”
“Chained up? Really?”
“Arrested at an antiwar protest down in San Francisco. The old days.”
“What’s wrong with you, Sunbeam? How come you’re crying? What’s the matter?”
“Honey, the old days are gone.”
* * *
By shortly after noon Sunbeam’s men had reached their scattered locations bordering the big grow. She had stationed Shadow and Shrimp just below the waterfall that fed into the valley. With their loaded weapons cradled in their laps and wearing faded army fatigue pants and long-sleeved camouflage T-shirts they sat leaning back against a smooth gray boulder in the shade of a giant sugar pine. Big cones that had fallen from limbs high in the tree lay scattered all around them on the forest floor. They watched what they could see of the grow and the open country down the valley toward the reservoir.
On the ground between them in an old Kelty backpack were spare magazines of ammo and a set of Bushnell quick-focusing hunting binoculars and six salami sandwiches and two packs of Pall Mall cigarettes and an old souvenir Zippo lighter and two quarts of water and four brown pint bottles of oatmeal stout. They had snuck the stout out of the Bird of Prey while Sunbeam wasn’t looking. They could hear the sound of the falls from where they sat and both men drank stout and smoked Pall Malls as they watched the country and talked to pass the time.
They believed they were in a safe and secure place for now and were well into their first bottles when Shadow posed an old question: “What the fuck are we doing here? Explain it to me. I mean, tell me why we’re right here, right now, today.”
“Right now we’re doing what the fuck we like,” Shrimp answered. “Sipping some brews. Sitting on our asses. Bullshitting. Trying to figure things out. This could maybe be another fucking false alarm.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. We never know what’s happening. That’s our problem. Like our restaurant we figure to open some day. When’s it going to be? Where’s it going to be? What’s it going to be. We talk about it. We argue about it. But we never figure that out or anything else out either. Do we?”
“No. I guess not. Not really. But we’ll figure it out about the restaurant. It’s an important thing but not a big thing. Not really big I mean. It’s the really big things that count most. Who the fuck ever figures them out?”
“Big things like what?”
“Like what the world’s really all about,” Shrimp said. “Like why the fuck people are like they are. Like why Uncle Sam ended up like he did. Like why shit always gets worse instead of better. Who figures that out?”
“Somebody must.”
“Who?”
“Don’t ask me. But if nobody ever figures anything like that out then we’re all idiots for trying. Right?”
Shrimp smiled and sipped some stout. “More like morons,” he said. “At least we know we’re morons. It’s the people who don’t even know they’re morons who’re the real fucking morons. Or they’re idiots. That’s how I see it. Most of the time.”
“Yeah, well what about the rest of the time? Explain to me how you see it then.”
“I guess I don’t worry about it the rest of the time. Worry too much and you end up going nuts. Hey, dude, how’s your head?”
“My headache’s about gone,” Shadow said. “Ninety percent gone. At least ninety. The stitches feel okay too. I always did heal fast. Charity says my head looks like a football though.”
“Looks more like a split coconut to me.”
“I felt like shit this morning but no problema now.” Shadow snubbed his cigarette out on the sole of his boot. “But what gets me is, sometimes it’s like we’re still enlisted men. I mean, here we are waiting around with weapons for assholes we never even met. Maybe they’re not even assholes. For all we know maybe they’re nice guys.”
Shrimp looked up and pointed where a plane that appeared as a barely visible shining silver speck was leaving a long white jet trail thin as a hair across a blue and cloudless sky. “You ever wonder who’s in those high-flying planes?” he said. “Looks like that baby’s headed up north over the pole. London maybe. Or Frankfurt or Zurich. Paris. Rome. It’s all filled up with people we never met and we don’t give a shit about them and they don’t give a shit about us. So what? What difference does it make?”
“At least we know the people on the plane exist,” Shrimp said. “Maybe that drink cart’s rattling down the aisle right now. Some hot flight attendant handing out cocktails or whatever. Vodka and tonics. Screwdrivers. Irish coffees. I could use an Irish coffee about now. This warm stout almost sucks.”
“Nobody serves Irish coffees on planes. And if you were on a plane and got to London and ordered a stout it’d be warm there too. And when was the last time you saw a hot flight attendant? Maybe they used to be hot about fifty years ago. That’s what I heard anyway.”
“I could use me a vodka and tonic then. A tequila sunrise. I bet they serve anything you want up in first class.”
“We could afford first class if we wanted,” Shadow said.
“Yeah, but I’d never feel at home up in first class. I’d never feel right chilling with all the rich assholes. Anyway, the food in first class sucks almost as much as the food in economy.”
“It might be a little bit better.”
“Not much.”
“You got it right, not much. Maybe you get it on a plate instead of in some fucked up plastic tray is all.”
“Hey, Shadow, you ever notice what Italian food they serve lots of times on planes?”
“Lasagna?”
“You got that right. You ever notice how bad it sucks? That’s Italian food, that you claim is the best, and the lasagna they serve on those planes is the worst shit I ever tried to eat anywhere. If I was starving on the Sahara desert or the fucking North Pole I doubt if I could eat that shit. Am I right, dude?”
> Shadow sat up and reached for another Pall Mall and lit it. “All airplane food sucks,” he said. “If they served French food it would suck, if they served German food it would suck, and if they served Chinese food it would suck, and if they served Mexican food it would suck worse than anything.” He exhaled a thin stream of smoke and shook his head and smiled.
“They’d be way better off serving Mexican food instead of lasagna,” Shrimp said. “Tacos. Enchiladas. Burritos. Chicken Mole. Fajitas. Tamales. All I’m saying is, not some fucked up limp pasta mixed up with cheese and tomato sauce.”
“They should serve pizza on planes,” Shadow said. “Pizza’s always good. Pizza’s good anywhere.”
“Oh yeah? You mean some goddamn stale loaf of bread that got run over by a steamroller and then some moron poured melted cheese and tomato sauce all over it?”
“I got a question for you. You remember that Mexican grocery store in town, where we stopped that time to pick up some beer?”
“Yeah, I remember.”
“You remember the meat counter they had in that place?”
Shrimp shook his head no.
“Well I do,” Shadow said. “It was fucking disgusting. They had brains on display behind the glass. Intestines stuffed into plastic bags. Lungs. Tongues. They even had balls I think.”
“Balls?”
“Testicles. Bull nuts. If their food was really any good why would they eat that shit? I went surfing down in Costa Rice once, years ago it was. I went into some little joint one night to eat and I asked the waiter if they had any good soup. So the son of a bitch smiled and said yes and guess what he brought me? A bowl of soup with fucking eyeballs floating around in it. Fish eyeballs they were. That’s disgusting.”
“So tell me what the fuck Costa Rica has to do with Mexico.”
“They speak Spanish there, that’s what. So they eat the same kind of crap there as in Mexico.”
“Yeah, well, you know why they eat that stuff? ’Cause they use all the parts from the animals they kill. Why’s it disgusting? It makes total fucking sense. Study some history, man. Some culture. Don’t bad-mouth the Mexicans. Listen. It’s getting pretty goddamn hairy around these parts. So I figure we got to make our move fairly soon. What if we had a place with both kinds of food?”
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