He idly wondered if God had saved the Norris home. Wasn’t that Godlike? Roughly a year ago Patrick had wondered something similar, on his seventh patrol in Sangin, when Dahl had brushed up against an IED and been blown so high into a tree it took them a while to spot his body. Yet Sloan, Fortner, and Graff, all right there with him, were spared. Hand of God at the expense of Dahl? Things like that happened again and again, and Patrick came to believe that God decided everything by deciding nothing, that the specifics of your life and death on Earth were no reflection of you or God at all. You could call God luck, and though it might be a good approximation, it didn’t explain much. The most important truth he’d learned was the simplest too and it applied anywhere you went—get through the fucking day alive.
The rain started, blown in one direction and then another by the strong tropical wind. Patrick trotted to his father’s truck and squeezed in beside his mother. Archie set the wipers on low. They refilled their cups and listened to the rap of the rain on the roof and the hiss of the wind in the leafless trees. The rain had already turned the ground to gray-black slush, and the smell was strong.
They watched and waited a long while and the rain came faster. Beyond the bare and bloody facts of Ted they hadn’t talked about what had happened. Words were feeble and raw. Patrick still smelled the blood on himself. But now the silence was intolerable, made somehow obsolete by the coming storm. Patrick was about to speak but his father spoke first.
“I feel that he is here with us.”
“He was in my truck on the way here,” said Patrick.
“I keep waiting to wake up,” said Caroline. “And none of it is going to be true.”
“It’s the worst truth I’ve known, Caroline. To date.”
“And we’ll all be … like before. Right?” She wiped under each eye with a different fingertip. She sat bolt upright as always, shoulders back and chin up. “There was so much pain I didn’t see.”
“Me neither, Mom.”
“None of us saw,” said Archie.
Caroline stared straight ahead. “I still don’t know how I raised a boy tormented enough to destroy so much of the world around him. Then himself. There’s blood on my hands.”
“There most definitely is not,” said Archie.
“I didn’t see, but I knew,” she said. “They gathered up some moms on TV after one of the school massacres. From across the country. They all had boys who were wrong, they said. They were afraid their whole lives. Really afraid that their sons would hurt themselves or worse. They watched them and loved them and helped them. Talked to doctors, sometimes cops even. The boys didn’t commit crimes or serious violence that they ever knew of. The boys just kept plodding along, barely keeping in their lanes. And the mothers kept waiting for that terrible thing to happen, for their sons to make hell on earth for innocents. And that show hit me like an atom bomb because those moms were me.”
“You did everything on earth for him,” said Archie. “I won’t let you take blame.”
“Five dead by his hand,” she said. “Including…”
The rain drummed on the truck roof. “When I was a boy I thought my father was the meanest man in the world,” said Archie. “I promised if I was ever a father I wouldn’t withhold the things he withheld from me. I did just that to Ted. I tried not to but I did. I became … what I set out not to become. Love is not enough. You have to use it correctly.”
Patrick set a hand on his mother’s knee. The wind gathered speed. Blood on hands, he thought. He always knew Ted was different. Always knew Ted had that anger, a secret streak of crazy in him. But what should he have done differently? Or his mother or father? What?
Where was your preview vision for Ted? Like your preview vision of what was going to happen to Sheffield and Lavinder? How come you couldn’t do that for your own brother?
Blood on all of us, thought Patrick, from Fallbrook to Sangin, and from Sangin to Fallbrook.
“None of us lit that fire or shot Cade,” he said, “or killed Ted.” With this partial truth Patrick privately and forever renounced the bigger truth, in honor of his brother, for the sake of his family and himself. It would be his secret forever, his portion of the burden Ted had left behind.
“No, we didn’t,” said Archie. “It just feels that way.”
“Can I just miss him for a while?” From the corner of his eye Patrick could see his mother snugging the black silk scarf she wore around her neck, fussing with the knot, flaring the ends, then wiping her eyes again.
* * *
Patrick and his father switched seats and Patrick guided the truck into the mounting wind and rain. Patrick figured if the forecast of four inches was correct, and it fell over twelve hours, they’d be okay. But with more, or a faster rate, they might have to reconfigure the sandbag walls to guide the runoff. And they might have to fill more bags, an onerous task when sand was mud. In a full deluge, the upper roads would wash out and Big Gorge could overrun or collapse, taking the mid and lower roads with it. At that point only the tractor stood a chance. Worst case was an earth slide, which would destroy everything in its path. But slides were rare on the Norris ranch, the last one bringing Frank Webster’s death, more than half a century ago. In that case even the tractor became an enemy.
Patrick stayed in first gear, looked out at the slanting rain and the black sky. Up high the clouds roiled and rose. He thought of Iris. He touched the cell phone in his pocket to make sure it was there. Pictured her face. Remembered her words just before he had left her to follow Ted from the concert. I can love you, Pat. But I don’t know if I can survive you.
Now he thought of Iris bursting into Pride Auto Repair and, against odds, prevailing. She was clear-headed and rational. The deputies asked her to stay outside but Iris politely refused and brandished her press credential. Over the next hour she not only got the story and cell phone photos for the Village View, but managed to comfort him. Patrick, as a possible suspect, was ordered to sit on an old paisley sofa back in the repair bay and so he sat, dazed, trying to keep the blood-drenched details of his story straight for both Iris and the cops, trying not to hear the final report of Ted’s gun thundering over and over. Even through all that, he had registered Iris’s clarity of mission, the way she was able to accomplish it even with a choked voice and a makeup-streaked face. She’d shuttled back and forth between him and the crime scene proper, part friend and part reporter. Grief-numbed as he was, Patrick was aware that the sum of his love for her was being added to.
The rain roared against the metal roof. Patrick imagined the tropical and Alaskan fronts colliding as on the weather maps. Maybe right here in front of us, he thought. “This is going to be a whopper,” he said.
“The road’s already boiling,” said Archie.
“Where’s the thunder?” asked Caroline. “I love thunder. Ted loved thunder, too. We tape-recorded it once when he was four so we could hear it whenever we wanted.”
* * *
The truck slid on the steep higher roads but Patrick countered with the four-wheel drive. They crept along, gear low and wipers high, watching the water cut runnels and splash up against the sandbag walls. Patrick noted that the walls now looked about half enough high. Radio reception was poor but the L.A. news said two inches of rain had already fallen there, with another two to four inches expected before noon. There were reports of wind damage in Antelope Valley. Orange County was getting blasted too, power out in parts of Huntington Beach and Fountain Valley. San Diego public radio reported widespread destruction in Tijuana, San Ysidro, and National City, and an inch and a half of rain downtown with more to come. Fashion and Mission valleys were already flooded and closed, and a downed tree up on Bankers Hill had landed on a car and killed a man. NOAA radio estimated winds at ninety miles per hour at the storm’s center, and upgraded it from a tropical storm to Hurricane Harley. Her center was now just off Todos Santos, a brief sixty miles from the border and winds were expected to increase closer to landfall.
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sp; Patrick goosed the truck around a snug downhill turn. The wall of sandbags in front of them broke away and a stream of black, ash-stained water flooded through the break. He slid to a stop on level ground and set the brake and they piled out and wrestled the bags back into place. The bags seemed twice as heavy to Patrick and even with the heavy leather gloves they were hard to hold. When the wall was up they used the sledgehammers to drive in the rebar.
Patrick grunted as the rain found its way past his slicker and on to him. Their hammers clinked sharply on the steel and with every blow Patrick imagined he was demolishing Ted’s long history of bad fortune, which had started in his own body in his own crib. What kind of a beginning was that? Maybe life wasn’t random at all, as he’d decided in the Sangin Valley, but something ordered and invariable, like a book that you have no say in the writing of and can’t revise. So that what happened inside Pride Auto Repair on Friday night was a closing chapter, long fixed and waiting to be read. Same with Boss and Myers and Zane, Dahl and Pendejo and Prebble and Adams and Sheffield and … well, it added up to a lot of books. But was this notion of a book of life any better than the idea of one big game of chance? And if so, how?
Suddenly the storm shifted gears and became a faster and less resistible thing. Even on high the windshield wipers were insufficient and Patrick had to lean close to the glass for brief snapshots of the way forward. Another sandbag wall had collapsed above them and he caught a snippet of the waterfall cascading proudly down. The runoff was clearer now that the rain had washed the trees and earth of ash. The truck slipped and slid down the road toward the Big Gorge.
Patrick rounded a curve and drove on. The wind tried to pry the vehicle from the ground and for a moment the truck shivered as if it might lift off and take flight.
“I always wanted to see Munchkinland,” said Caroline.
Tree branches whirled through the air and whapped against the truck. Patrick saw a section of the bunkhouse roof rotating corner to corner through the sky.
“Goddamn you!” cried Archie, looking up through the windshield. “This is how you answer me?”
* * *
By noon the sandbag walls were collapsing everywhere they looked. They couldn’t replace them fast enough to matter. The wind had backed off but the sky was even blacker and the rain seemed more solid than liquid, not drops but sheets of water stacked back to back as far as Patrick could see. Everywhere he looked the water rushed across the ground and it was no longer clear but brown with precious soil. Patrick saw this and his spirit sank even deeper: Norris Brothers Growers washing away to the sea, as in his father’s dream.
They huddled in the truck with the heater going on full and ate the sandwiches and drank the coffee that Caroline had made. Their heat condensed on the windows and the world outside was a dark roar. Archie started laughing—an accusatory, low-down laugh that had more defiance than joy in it. Patrick understood this sound and felt what his father felt and he laughed, just before Caroline started up too.
* * *
They stood on the road where it passed over a large galvanized culvert that marked the narrows of Big Gorge. From here Patrick looked uphill to see the runoff overflowing the sandbags, rushing down into the gorge, filling the culvert below. Sandbags broke away and fell into the dark current and vanished. An uprooted avocado tree tumbled over the falls and the water swept it across the gorge, pinning it against the culvert. “The pipe is twelve feet in diameter,” yelled Archie, though Patrick could hardly hear him.
“About two feet to go!” called Patrick. He knew that if the torrent overflowed the culvert it would take the road with it.
“If the water gets one foot from the top, you two get out of here,” said Archie. “Promise me. One foot!”
“I’m prepared to die with a shovel in my hand,” said Caroline, her shovel held fast between her legs as she rearranged her drenched hair.
“Get me to the tractor, son!”
The tires spun and the truck slid on the downhill slope but Patrick kept it on the road. He glanced up to see a raven pinwheeling across the sky before them, bouncing wing to wing as if on something solid. They passed another section of the bunkhouse roof lying in the grove nearby, the metal sheared violently away from its beam, some of the rivets still in place. “That bunkhouse was eighty years old,” said Archie. “I shall not be defeated. I utterly shall not.”
“God bless you, Archie,” said Caroline.
“I defy Him to bless me. Caroline? I love you very much. You too, son.”
Patrick slid to a stop. Archie pressed through the door and staggered into the wind. The tractor shed had been blown away leaving nothing but a concrete pad and two six-by-six uprights. But the Ford was there, staunch in the rain, the blue paint faded and touched by rust. Archie climbed on and started it up. Diesel smoke billowed black at first and struggled up through the solid rainfall. Patrick picked up his phone and sent a text to Iris: Bad storm we fight I love you. He dropped the phone back into the center console, glanced at his mother and aimed the truck up the hill.
At the culvert they bent to their shovels but they could lift little more than slurry to fortify the upslope bank. It was like using teaspoons of sand to hold back an ocean. Patrick saw that the water had risen since they’d dropped off Archie at the tractor. He stopped shoveling long enough to look at his watch: 2:44 P.M. Almost eight straight hours of rain, he thought, and what—six, eight inches? Did it matter? He squinted up into the silver darts hurtling down from a black infinity.
“Another six inches in this culvert and we’ll be swimming,” said Caroline. She stopped working and handed Patrick her shovel and gloves. Standing straight, shoulders back and head erect she pulled back the hood of her poncho and straightened her bandana, which was soaking wet like the rest of her. Her fingers patiently loosened and retied the knot, then she slid the whole thing fashionably over to one side. Her hair clung like black plaster but she smoothed it down anyway. “In a true and awful way, the world is better off without Ted. But I’ll love him until my heart’s last beat.”
“You gave him every chance, Mom.”
“I didn’t know what to give him.”
The clank and groan of the tractor sounded downslope and Patrick turned to see his father guiding the old machine up the road. The front-loader was up and the tractor’s front tires skittered in the mud but the big, heavily treaded rear tires dug in deep and pushed the contraption forward while the diesel clattered and growled and belched smoke into the storm.
“Are you going to be okay, Pat?”
“Soon as we get through this storm.”
“Hurricane Harley is nothing.” Caroline yanked her hood back over her drenched head, slid the toggle tight, and took back her gloves and shovel.
Archie dumped the first load of tractor mud on the bank and tamped it down with the bottom of bucket. Patrick and his mother packed the earth down harder with their shovels but still the new rain washed away the berm almost as fast as they built it. Patrick, panting deeply, saw that the Big Gorge culvert was now only inches from being full and that their wall and their road, and everything below them, would soon be swallowed by the deluge.
Patrick watched his father bring another raised bucket load of dripping mud up the road, the front tires of the Ford gliding on the downpour, Archie up like a jockey in a crouch with his face raised. “You can take my son and trees! But you can’t beat me down! You don’t have the balls!”
Suddenly from uphill came a thunderous crack. It sounded to Patrick like some violent thing had thrown its shoulders up through the earth. He saw the hillside shudder and break away and start downhill toward them, leaving behind a raw dry crater. The detached hillside gained speed. Even in combat Patrick had never seen death written so clearly. He looked at his father, still crouching in the tractor, speechless in the face of this. Patrick took his mother’s arm and pulled her away from Big Gorge, up the slick road. They slipped and fell and struggled up again.
Then Patrick wa
s down without having fallen, swept swiftly away without leaving his feet. He clutched Caroline close and rode down, down, down on the great escalator of mud. Where they had been just seconds ago was far above them now. Below them he saw the blue tractor spinning downhill, Archie clenching the wheel his body midair, legs bicycling frantically. Then Patrick heard another sharp crack and he watched a second section of mud break off, roar down, and bury the culvert and the road finally and completely.
Surging downhill, he felt the clench of the mud around his legs and saw that he was waist-deep in it. Caroline’s slicker tore away, leaving nothing in his hands but rubber. She lunged and caught his jacket and they continued their rush downhill, locked in mud. They shot past avocado trees, black and sharp. Patrick sunk to his chest and his breath was cut to almost nothing. He struggled. Caroline gasped and flailed and Patrick saw the tree that they would hit. With a wild scream he pulled his arms free and when they crashed into the branches Patrick grabbed a heavy limb with both hands and held on with all the strength he knew. Somehow his mother got her arms around his middle and Patrick felt her weight and told himself yes, I can hold on to this branch forever if I need to, forever not a problem, hold, just hold …
Then, as if bored, the earth let go of him. Patrick looked downhill and saw the tractor on its side, moving with heavy, mud-bound momentum. It came upright and the seat was empty. Patrick’s heart dropped and he looked down at his mother, staring at the tractor, shock on her face. The tractor pitched upside-down again, surging away. Then Patrick heard faint words against the roar of earth and rain. He saw movement in one of the uphill trees, and then his father splayed awkwardly in the branches.
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