By the time she climbed the backstage stairs and began her journey toward the ferocious lights before her, Evelyn’s stomach was in knots and her legs had gone heavy and cold.
“They’re gonna love you, Mayor!” Cruzela called from behind her.
She had no idea of what walking into a stadium of applause would be like. She’d never bothered to imagine it. But it hit her with the force of a blow and she stopped for one moment before continuing. By the time she reached her mark, her citizens were clapping and yelling her name and some stood, then more rose, until all were on their feet. Their voices hit her as one voice, and their clapping as two thousand votes of confidence. Maybe all that approval would last until the election! She waved her tablet at them with one hand, and brought the mic to her mouth with the other.
Fans had left their seats and clustered up close to the stage right below her, mostly young girls with bouquets for Cruzela, but there were some boys and adults, too, and the sheriff deputies on either side of them watched, unconcerned.
“God bless you, Fallbrook!” she called out and the volume rose as if someone had turned a knob. “I’m your biggest fan!”
Smiling and still waving her tablet, Evelyn opened her mouth to speak again. At the same moment she recognized Ted Norris, wrapped in a heavy winter coat, working his way toward her.
* * *
Ted plodded through the rowdy crowd. Evelyn Anders stood up there in the lights with the gleaming musical instruments, her tablet held high. Her ten thousand commandments, he thought, what I shalt and shalt not do. She wore a black dress and a short white jacket. She recognized him, and he heard the falter of her voice as she began her speech. She cleared her throat and started again. He’d smoked the last of his crystal in the parking lot, drank half the pint of bourbon and slid the flat dark bottle into a coat pocket. The stadium and stage lights sent bright fissures across his mind’s eye, like lightning crackling down on a city. My world, he thought, my moment.
He glanced at the deputies standing with their backs to the stage, surveilling the crowd. He noted that they were very young and unarmed—not deputies at all, in fact—but so-called Explorers, earning their credits for academy. The Glock waited beneath his shirt and coat, firm against his belly.
He turned and looked at his brother and Iris, seated maybe a third of the way back. Even with the mayor up there chirping away, they were talking intently. Patrick had an earnest, optimistic posture. From this distance Iris looked stern. And they seemed separate from what was going on around them, like they were the only two people at the show, thought Ted, or on the whole planet.
Evelyn blathered, “Georgie … tragedy … lighted crosswalks … fifty thousand dollars…”
He shuffled around a group of teenaged girls, their scents finding him. He stopped just short of another gaggle of girls. They looked at him with an incomprehension he understood because to him they seemed no more knowable than penguins or aliens. The stage was ten feet away, and maybe waist-high. Evelyn reigned above them all, bathed in light. “And Joe’s Hardware, and all of the churches and Beth Israel have been so generous, also…” Surrounded by the giddy children, Ted ran his hand up under his coat and shirttail to the handle of the Glock—so solid, so unchanging, so there. Evelyn yapped on. She was beautiful. He remembered her voice on the other side of the bathroom door the night she’d babysat him, just making sure you’re okay in there, Teddy, and it was the same voice he heard now. Now, seventeen years later, that same woman looked down on him, trying to hide her fear. What a gift that fear was. “Fallbrook, you’ve done a wonderful thing … give yourselves a round of applause before Cruzela comes on…” Evelyn loomed there, searching his face with a frozen smile. He looked up the long rifled tunnel of his vision at her, drawing breath deeply, trying to get enough in so he could exhale slowly, like Kerry had told him.
He tightened his grip on the gun. It was warm and heavy and encouraging. The time was now. The crowd burst into applause for itself, and in the roar he commanded his hand to withdraw the weapon and shoot Evelyn Anders. This is for all of you, he thought, for you who hated and betrayed me. His command was clear and his heart was undivided. But the gun did not move. He commanded again. Nothing. He squeezed the grip tighter, finger outside the trigger guard as he’d been taught. Evelyn lowered the mic and tablet and bowed. As she leaned over she held the mic to her chest but the beginnings of her breasts were still visible, like in the cartoon he’d drawn of her. When she straightened she was looking right at him. He summoned all his will and courage. Her. Now. She turned and strode away and the crowd began chanting for Cruzela.
Ted watched her go. Her white coat was a good target, clean and bright in the lights. With every step she took, a voice inside said: You are nothing. He took his hand off the gun and jammed his fist into his coat pocket. As the applause and chanting grew louder he felt smaller and smaller. He listened to the sound of the world.
You are nothing.
You are nothing.
Invisible now, he turned and patiently worked his way through the cheering crowd. He took slow steps so as not to look in a hurry, though it was evident that not one soul in this stadium was aware of him. Well, his brother maybe. Maybe. Even the cops and Explorers barely looked at him as he walked down the wide aisle along the stands, toward the bathrooms and the exit. When he got to his truck in the parking lot he closed his eyes and crossed his hands over his chest and tried to unscrew himself from it all. Of course it didn’t work. But he understood that he could use some friends right now, friends like the Rogue Wolves, and maybe a cold beer and a little jolt of crystal and a game of pool. They’d have him back, wouldn’t they? At least for a while? At least so he could explain what he’d … not done?
You are nothing.
* * *
The neon red, white, and blue of the Pride Auto Repair sign glowed clearly in the Fallbrook night. Cade’s Bel Air was parked in its usual place along with a light blue Volkswagen Beetle convertible that Ted didn’t recognize. He parked and went to the front door. The blinds were drawn and it was locked but music pulsed. Loud. Through a thin slice of space between the blinds and the window he looked in. Cade, shirtless, his back gleaming with sweat and his pants around his ankles, plunged into the backside of a woman wearing only high heels, her arms braced on the pool table, hair swaying. Cade pulled her hair like a rein and her face came around. Jasmine.
Ted covered his head with his elbows and bashed through the front door in an explosion of shards and slats and blind cords. Jasmine was already scrambling away as he found his balance on the slippery glass and pulled the Glock. Cade looked at the holstered pistol on the floor and Ted shot him twice in his naked ribs, and when Cade spun away screaming, Ted shot him twice more in the back. Cade’s gun spun loose as he crashed facedown on the pool table, blood lurching and arms spread and his anguished screams cutting through the music. Ted shot again but missed and the green felt jerked. He wasn’t seeing right and his ears were roaring. What had just happened? He didn’t know how he’d gotten here, or why he’d come. Instinctively, he strode after the woman into the repair bay and although it was only half-light in the big room he tracked her by her sobbing and the sound of her heels retreating from him on the concrete floor.
“Don’t, Ted. Don’t, please don’t.”
“I can barely hear you.”
“Let me get around you to the door, Ted. Remember me? I’m Jasmine.”
“I don’t remember you.”
“Please don’t kill me.”
“You should go.” He felt the gun, suddenly heavy in his hand, and looked down at it.
“Can I get by you?”
“Go.”
Her pale naked body shook by. He stood for a moment looking at the paisley couch and the reading lamp. They meant something to him, something from his past, but what? When he got back to the lobby the woman had already left through the ruined door. He could see her unlocking the Volkswagen, shaking her head and talking to herself
, naked and clutching a handful of clothes to her chest, eyes wide and her face slack-jawed with terror. The wounded man had slid off the table and was now on the floor, curled in on himself, breathing fast. It looked like enough blood for two or three men.
Ted turned off the music and sat down on one of the bar stools. He set the gun on the counter and put his hands over his ears and watched the man on the floor. A moment later headlights came down Oak Street and raked across the still open door with the broken glass around its edges like shark teeth, its blinds snapped and dangling, and the pull cords swaying in the warm breeze.
When the man came through the door everything came back to Ted. A flash. An avalanche. Everything. “Oh, hi, Pat. I messed up pretty bad this time.”
* * *
Patrick stepped into Pride Auto. He registered Cade in the lake of blood, Ted and the gun on the counter next to him, the heavy smells of blood and gunpowder and solvent. “I saw a car leaving.”
“Jasmine, the escort. I let her go.”
Patrick called 911. While he spoke to the dispatcher he studied Ted, who slumped at the bar like a common drunk, dreamy and deranged. Patrick knelt over Cade Magnus and he saw the look of death in his eyes—a gaze locked open on the faraway. “You’ve got help coming, Cade. If you can hang in there they can help you. Hang in there. Can you do that?”
Cade coughed a mouthful of blood across the floor and whispered, “Christ…”
“I got mad when I saw him with Jasmine,” said Ted. “Doing that stuff to her. I thought you were my friend, Cade. I introduced you to her, you son of a bitch.”
Patrick put a hand on Magnus’s shoulder, felt the tremble. Taibo would have slammed a vial of morphine into him, eased his way onward. But there was nothing he could tourniquet or do with wounds like this. “If you can hang on just five minutes, Cade.” Magnus said nothing.
“What happened at the concert, Ted? What were you doing so close to the stage, then leaving so fast?”
“I was going to shoot the mayor but I couldn’t. My hand just wouldn’t move.”
“Where’d you get the gun?”
“Open Sights. Marked down. Shooting Evelyn was going to be my big important thing but it didn’t work out.” Patrick watched Ted pick up the gun and heave off the stool and come over. “I liked Jasmine.”
Patrick stood. “What are you going to do now?”
“I know what my big important thing is. Not Evelyn at all. Now I get it. It started a couple of days ago with this woman I know. She told me you have to tell the truth about what you’ve done. Even if it’s bad. She told the police what she’d done.”
“Well, isn’t that great?” said Patrick. Cade Magnus sighed once and shivered hugely and his throat rattled and caught. Patrick knelt and touched his bare bloody shoulder again and felt the buzz of life stop. “Look, Ted. What you did.” A shadow moved over Patrick. He turned his head to see Ted leaning down. Patrick stood and tried to swipe the gun from his brother’s hand but Ted was quick. He backpedaled and braced against the bar for balance, weapon still in hand.
“That isn’t all I did.” Patrick heard sirens and he saw his brother glance in their direction. “Ibrahim Sadal didn’t set the fire. I did. Later I put an accelerant and timer and the Al-Qaeda magazines in the supply closet at the gas station. Then I called Knechtl from a pay phone. I wanted to see it all burn, Pat. I needed to. I did my research and waited for the right weather. I wanted to burn this city down. Even the houses here and the people in those houses. Mayor Anders’s house for sure. And every avocado tree we owned. Most of all I wanted to burn Dad to ashes and watch the wind blow him away one puff at a time every day for the rest of my life. And every time a puff of him went up I would know. I couldn’t ever do much right, Pat. I tried. So I just went with wrong. Big wrong. Important wrong. Of course I messed it up. I was worried about Mom and the dogs and my creatures so I cut back the bushes around the house and barn. My fire never made it downtown. I don’t know why. I set plenty of others. This was the best by far. It’s all written down in a letter under my mattress. Everything. The letter is to Lucinda Smith but you can read it before you send it to her.”
The sirens wailed, closer. Patrick tried to make all of this useful, get it into workable condition, but could not. “Three people died in your fire.”
“Four now total.”
“God damn you, Ted.”
“I love you, Pat. You’re what I wanted to be.”
“Damn you again, then.”
“I’ve been damned my whole life. But now my big important thing is half accomplished. I’m almost done. I’ll be remembered for it. And it will make the world better. Sound good?”
“Okay, Ted. You make the world better now.”
“Do you know what I’m saying?”
Patrick studied his brother’s face for the clues he had missed. Missed for a lifetime. Again and again and again. Even now he didn’t see them. But he thought he understood what Ted meant about making the world better. “You have to mean it.”
“Oh, I mean it. But I want it to come from you. Here.” Ted held out the gun unsteadily. Patrick heard the sirens bearing down, out on Main Street now.
“I won’t do it, Ted.”
“I can’t do it alone.”
“It has to be from you.”
“But is it right?”
“It’s right, Ted. It will matter.”
“Really? It’s right?”
“I think it is.”
“You and me then? Pat?”
The sirens screamed and the cars barreled down Oak Street, their flashing lights cutting through the open door.
Patrick grabbed Ted’s wavering gun hand. He pressed his finger alongside his brother’s, through the trigger guard. The barrel of the weapon dug into Ted’s heart. For a moment they looked into each other’s eyes and Patrick saw the damage and confusion in someone whom life had mostly cursed. He knew there was some goodness among the darker things. He wrapped his free hand around Ted’s head and clutched him close. “I love you.”
“I’m not afraid anymore,” said Ted.
For a moment they were one, cheek to cheek, heart to heart, and hand to hand. Together they pulled. The explosion cracked through the lobby and out the open door into Fallbrook.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
The storm lumbered in from the southwest early Monday morning, heavy with blessing and menace. At sunrise the sky was black over the Norris Brothers groves and the wind blew warm and strong. Patrick and his parents stood on the front porch in rain gear, the steam from their coffee cups rising, the dogs alert beside them. Patrick noted the porch thermometer at seventy-two degrees and the barometer was the lowest he’d ever seen it.
He glanced at his mother and father, then up at the black clouds, which covered every inch of sky in every direction as far as Patrick could see. Numbness had descended on Patrick and he couldn’t free his mind from what had happened. He felt weighted and sinking, a brute mammal caught in tar. He was exhausted by deputies, reporters, sympathizers, and mostly by grief itself. He had lied to them all, even to his mother and father and Iris, about his part in Ted’s death.
“I’ll die before I let this storm take the last of what I have,” said Archie. “Pat, do you think we should stage from the Big Gorge or the upper roads?”
“It’s up to you.”
“I’m asking your advice.”
“The high ground then. Is the tractor ready?”
“Gassed and ready in the shed below the gorge.”
“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,” said Patrick. He knew that his father’s vow to die trying was not made lightly. The Norris Brothers Growers had lost a man, Frank Webster, in the winter of 1957. A saturated west-facing hillside had broken away and buried him and his tractor under ten feet of mud. The spot was marked by a concrete cross, now fully exposed and blackened by fire. The tragedy was recalled only occasionally and briefly, as if there was shame on the family for letting it happen, Patrick ha
d always thought—something in which they were complicit and maybe an accessory to. Like Ted.
“And we ought to lock the dogs in the barn,” said Patrick. “They can’t help and they might get hurt.”
“I’ll get them food and water,” said Caroline.
The wind lifted ash and straw from the grove and the air around them grew dark with soot. It looked like a dust bowl windstorm coming. From the kitchen Caroline brought steel containers of coffee and a cooler filled with food and drinks. Down at the barn they loaded shovels, a hundred empty sandbags, scores of four-foot lengths of reinforcement bar, and three sledgehammers into Archie’s truck. They jailed the dogs, who howled in frustration as Patrick climbed back into his truck.
He took the lead, the defroster on and coffee jostling over his fingers. The Norris groves were nearly all slopes, some gentle and others steep. He climbed the narrow road in long switchbacks, Ted hugely present in the seat next to him. Ted’s voice and some of the words from his letter to Lucinda Smith coursed through Patrick’s brain: I am attracted to you like my dogs are attracted to birds, because of nature.… Now that I know your secret you make sense to me.… Too bad it had to happen to you.… I never felt like I was part of my own family, but they mostly tried to make me feel like I was, except maybe Dad.… It wasn’t the first fire either, I set others but none of them did what this one did.… I didn’t have any talent for fires.… I want to be famous for a few hours so I’m going to confess like you did.… Don’t want Ibrahim to sit in prison either.… He never did nothing to me.… I’ll make sure Patrick sees this letter and he will make everything right as he always does.
As he always does. They parked the trucks side by side on the high peak near the center of the property. As boys, Ted and Patrick had nicknamed this hillock “Everest,” and climbed it using unnecessary ropes. They’d planted an American flag here. Now the eighty Norris acres flowed down from them in blackened corrugations spiked with scorched trees, their branches bare and sharp. When Patrick looked to the south he could see Lew Boardman’s adjacent acres, green and verdant and untouched.
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