But worse, far worse. Slobodan Abarca confided something to me that made the blood boil in my veins, made me think of the braided bullhide whip hanging over the fireplace and the pearl-handled dueling pistols my grandfather had once used to settle a dispute over waterfowl rights on the south shore of Lake Castillo: Mr. John Longworth had been paying his special attentions to my daughter. Whisperings were overheard, těte-à-tětes observed, banter and tomfoolery taken note of. They were discovered walking along the lakeshore with their shoulders touching and perhaps even their hands intertwined (Slobodan Abarca couldn’t be sure, what with his failing eyes), they sought each other out at meals, solemnly bounced the basketball in the courtyard and then passed it between them as if it were some rare prize. He was thirty if he was a day, this usurper, this snout, this Mr. John Longworth, and my Paloma was just out of the care of the nuns, an infant still and with her whole life ahead of her. I was incensed. Killing off the natural world was one thing, terrifying honest people, gibbering like a lunatic day and night till the whole estancia was in revolt, but insinuating himself in my daughter’s affections—well, this was, quite simply, the end.
I stalked up the hill and across the yard, blind to everything, such a storm raging inside me I thought I would explode. The wind howled. It shrieked blood and vengeance and flung black grains of dirt in my face, grains of the unforgiving pampas on which I was nurtured and hardened, and I ground them between my teeth. I raged through the house and the servants quailed and the children cried, but Mr. John Longworth was nowhere to be found. Pausing only to snatch up one of my grandfather’s pistols from its velvet cradle in the great hall, I flung myself out the back door and searched the stables, the smokehouse, the generator room. And then, rounding the corner by the hogpen, I detected a movement out of the corner of my eye, and there he was.
Ungainly as a carrion bird, the coat ends tenting round him in the wind, he was bent over one of the hogs, peering into the cramped universe of its malicious little eyes as if he could see all the evil of the world at work there. I confronted him with a shout and he looked up from beneath the brim of his hat and the fastness of his wraparound glasses, but he didn’t flinch, even as I closed the ground between us with the pistol held out before me like a homing device. “I hate to be the bringer of bad news all the time,” he called out, already lecturing as I approached, “but this pig is in need of veterinary care. It’s not just the eyes, I’m afraid, but the skin too—you see here?”
I’d stopped ten paces from him, the pistol trained on the nugget of his head. The pig looked up at me hopefully. Its companions grunted, rolled in the dust, united their backsides against the wind.
“Melanoma,” he said sadly, shaking his visored head. “Most of the others have got it too.”
“We’re going for a ride,” I said.
His jaw dropped beneath the screen of the glasses and I could see the intricate work of his front teeth. He tried for a smile. “A ride?”
“Your time is up here, señor,” I said, and the wind peeled back the sleeve of my jacket against the naked thrust of the gun. “I’m delivering you to Estancia Braun. Now. Without your things, without even so much as a bag, and without any goodbyes either. You’ll have to live without your basketball hoop and sunblock for a few days, I’m afraid—at least until I have your baggage delivered. Now get to your feet—the plane is fueled and ready.”
He gathered himself up then and rose from the ground, the wind beating at his garments and lifting the hair round his glistening ears. “It’ll do no good to deny it, Don Bob,” he said, talking over his shoulder as he moved off toward the shed where the Super Cub stood out of the wind. “It’s criminal to keep animals out in the open in conditions like these, it’s irresponsible, mad—think of your children, your wife. The land is no good anymore—it’s dead, or it will be. And it’s we who’ve killed it, the so-called civilized nations, with our air conditioners and underarm deodorant. It’ll be decades before the CFCs are eliminated from the atmosphere, if ever, and by then there will be nothing left here but blind rabbits and birds that fly into the sides of rotting buildings. It’s over, Don Bob—your life here is finished.”
I didn’t believe a word of it—naysaying and bitterness, that’s all it was. I wanted to shoot him right then and there, on the spot, and have done with it—how could I in good conscience deliver him to Don Benedicto Braun, or to anyone, for that matter? He was the poison, he was the plague, he was the ecological disaster. We walked grimly into the wind and he never stopped talking. Snatches of the litany came back to me—ultraviolet, ozone, a hole in the sky bigger than the United States—but I only snarled out directions in reply: “To the left, over there, take hold of the doors and push them inward.”
In the end, he didn’t fight me. He folded up his limbs and squeezed into the passenger seat and I set aside the pistol and started up the engine. The familiar throb and roar calmed me somewhat, and it had the added virtue of rendering Mr. John Longworth’s jeremiad inaudible. The wind assailed us as we taxied out to the grassy runway—I shouldn’t have been flying that afternoon at all, but as you can no doubt appreciate, I was a desperate man. After a rocky takeoff we climbed into a sky that opened above us in all its infinite glory but which must have seemed woefully sad and depleted to my passenger’s degraded eyes. We coasted high over the wind-whipped trees, the naked rock, the flocks whitening the pastures like distant snow, and he never shut up, not for a second. I tuned him out, let my mind go blank, and watched the horizon for the first weathered outbuildings of Estancia Braun.
They say that courtesy is merely the veneer of civilization, the first thing sacrificed in a crisis, and I don’t doubt the truth of it. I wonder what became of my manners on that punishing wind-torn afternoon—you would have thought I’d been raised among the Indians, so eager was I to dump my unholy cargo and flee. Like Don Pablo, I didn’t linger, and I could read the surprise and disappointment and perhaps even hurt in Don Benedicto’s face when I pressed his hand and climbed back into the plane. “Weather!” I shouted, and pointed to the sky, where a wall of cloud was already sealing us in. I looked back as he receded on the ground beneath me, the inhuman form of Mr. John Longworth at his side, long arms gesticulating, the lecture already begun. It wasn’t until I reached the verges of my own property, Estancia Castillo stretched out beneath me like a worn carpet and the dead black clouds moving in to strangle the sky, that I had my moment of doubt. What if he was right? I thought. What if Manuel Banquedano truly was riddled with cancer, what if the dog had been blinded by the light, what if my children were at risk? What then?
The limitless turf unraveled beneath me and I reached up a hand to rub at my eyes, weary suddenly, a man wearing the crown of defeat. A hellish vision came to me then, a vision of 9,000 sheep bleating on the range, their fleece stained and blackened, and every one of them, every one of those inestimable and beloved animals, my inheritance, my life, imprisoned behind a glistening new pair of wraparound sunglasses. So powerful was the vision I could almost hear them baa-ing out their distress. My heart seized. Tears started up in my eyes. Why go on? I was thinking. What hope is there?
But then the sun broke through the gloom in two pillars of fire, the visible world come to life with a suddenness that took away my breath, color bursting out everywhere, the range green all the way to the horizon, trees nodding in the wind, the very rock faces of the cerros set aflame, and the vision was gone. I listened to the drone of the engine, tipped the wings toward home, and never gave it another thought.
Tooth and Claw
THE WEATHER had absolutely nothing to do with it—though the rain had been falling off and on throughout the day and the way the gutters were dripping made me feel as if despair was the mildest term in the dictionary—because I would have gone down to Daggett’s that afternoon even if the sun was shining and all the fronds of the palm trees were gilded with light. The problem was work. Or, more specifically, the lack of it. The boss had called at six-thirty
A.M. to tell me not to come in, because the guy I’d been replacing had recovered sufficiently from his wrenched back to feel up to working, and no, he wasn’t firing me, because they’d be onto a new job next week and he could use all the hands he could get. “So take a couple days off and enjoy yourself,” he’d rumbled into the phone in his low hoarse uneven voice that always seemed on the verge of morphing into something else altogether—squawks and bleats or maybe just static. “You’re young, right? Go out and get yourself some tail. Get drunk. Go to the library. Help old ladies across the street. You know what I mean?”
It had been a long day: breakfast out of a cardboard box while cartoon images flickered and faded and reconstituted themselves on the TV screen, and then some desultory reading, starting with the newspaper and a couple of National Geographics I’d picked up at a yard sale, lunch at the deli where I had ham and cheese in a tortilla wrap and exchanged exactly eleven words with the girl behind the counter (Number 7, please, no mayo; Have a nice day; You too), and a walk to the beach that left my sneakers sodden. And after all that it was only three o’clock in the afternoon and I had to force myself to stay away from the bar till five, five at least.
I wasn’t stupid. And I had no intention of becoming a drunk like all the hard-assed old men in the shopping mall–blighted town I grew up in, silent men with hate in their eyes and complaint eating away at their insides—like my own dead father, for that matter—but I was new here, or relatively new (nine weeks now and counting) and Daggett’s was the only place where I felt comfortable. And why? Precisely because it was filled with old men drinking themselves into oblivion. It made me think of home. Or feel at home, anyway.
The irony wasn’t lost on me. The whole reason I’d moved out to the Coast to live, first with my Aunt Kim and her husband, Waverley, and then in my own one-bedroom apartment with kitchenette and a three-by-six-foot balcony with a partially obscured view of the Pacific, half a mile off, was so that I could inject a little excitement into my life and mingle with all the college students in the bars that lined State Street cheek to jowl, but here I was hanging out in an old man’s bar that smelled of death and vomit and felt as closed-in as a submarine, when just outside the door were all the exotic sun-struck glories of California. Where it never rained. Except in winter. And it was winter now.
I nodded self-consciously at the six or seven regulars lined up at the bar, then ordered a Jack-and-Coke, the only drink besides beer I liked the taste of, and I didn’t really like the taste of beer. There were sports on the three TVs hanging from the ceiling—this was a sports bar—but the volume was down and the speakers were blaring the same tired hits of the sixties I could have heard back home. Ad nauseam. When the bartender—he was young at least, as were the waitresses, thankfully—set down my drink, I made a comment about the weather, “Nice day for sunbathing, isn’t it?” and the two regulars nearest me glanced up with something like interest in their eyes. “Or maybe bird-watching,” I added, feeling encouraged, and they swung their heads back to the familiar triangulation of their splayed elbows and cocktail glasses and that was the end of that.
It must have been seven or so, the rain still coming down and people briefly enlivened by the novelty of it as they came and went in spasms of umbrella furling and unfurling, when a guy about my own age—or no, he must have been thirty, or close to it—came in and took the seat beside me. He was wearing a baseball cap, a jeans jacket and a T-shirt that said Obligatory Death, which I took to be the name of a band, though I’d never heard of them. His hair was blond, cut short around the ears, and he wore a soul beard that was like a pale stripe painted under his lip by a very unsteady hand. We exchanged the standard greeting—What’s up?—and then he flagged down the bartender and ordered a draft beer, a shot of tomato juice and two raw eggs.
“Raw eggs?” the bartender echoed, as if he hadn’t heard him right.
“Yeah. Two raw eggs, in the shell.”
The bartender—his name was Chris, or maybe it was Matt—gave a smile and scratched the back of his head. “We can do them over-easy or sunny-side up or poached even, but raw, I don’t know. I mean, nobody’s ever requested raw before—”
“Ask the chef, why don’t you?”
The bartender shrugged. “Sure,” he said, “no problem.” He started off in the direction of the kitchen, then pulled up short. “You want toast with that, home fries, or what?”
“Just the eggs.”
Everybody was watching now, any little drama worth the price of admission, especially on a night like this, but the bartender—Chris, his name was definitely Chris—just went down to the other end of the bar and communicated the order to the waitress, who made a notation in her pad and disappeared into the kitchen. A moment went by, and then the man turned to me and said in a voice loud enough for everybody to hear, “Jesus, this music sucks. Are we caught in a time warp here, or what?”
The old men—the regulars—glanced up from their drinks and gave him a look, but they were gray-haired and slack in the belly and they knew their limits. One of them said something about the game on the TV and one of the others chimed in and the conversation started back up in an exclusionary way.
“Yeah,” I heard myself say, “it really sucks,” and before I knew it I was talking passionately about the bands that meant the most to me even as the new guy poured tomato juice in his beer and sipped the foam off the top, while the music rumbled defiantly on and people came in the door with wet shoes and dripping umbrellas to crowd in behind us. The eggs, brown-shelled and naked in the middle of a standard dinner plate, were delivered by Daria, a waitress I’d had my eye on, though I hadn’t yet worked up the nerve to say more than hello and goodbye to her. “Your order, sir,” she said, easing the plate down on the bar. “You need anything with that? Ketchup? Tabasco?”
“No,” he said, “no, that’s fine,” and everyone was waiting for him to crack the eggs over his beer, but he didn’t even look at them. He was looking at Daria, holding her with his eyes. “So what’s your name?” he asked, grinning.
She told him, and she was grinning too.
“Nice to meet you,” he said, taking her hand. “I’m Ludwig.”
“Ludwig,” she repeated, pronouncing it with a hard v, as he had, though as far as I could tell—from his clothes and accent, which was pure Southern California—he wasn’t German. Or if he was, he sure had his English down.
“Are you German?” Daria was flirting with him, and the realization of it began to harden me against him in the most rudimentary way.
“No,” he said, “I’m from Hermosa Beach, born and raised. It’s the name, right?”
“I had this German teacher last year? His name was Ludwig, that’s all.”
“You’re in college?”
She told him she was, which was news to me. Working her way through. Majoring in business. She wanted to own her own restaurant someday.
“It was my mother’s idea,” he said, as if he’d been mulling it over. “She was listening to the ‘Eroica’ Symphony the night I was born.” He shrugged. “It’s been my curse ever since.”
“I don’t know,” she said, “I think it’s kind of cute. You don’t get many Ludwigs, you know?”
“Yeah, tell me about it,” he said, sipping at his beer.
She lingered, though there were other things she could have been doing. The sound of the rain intensified so that for a moment it overcame the drone of the speakers. “So what about the eggs,” she said, “you going to need utensils, or—”
“Or what? Am I going to suck them out of the shell?”
“Yeah,” she said, “something like that.”
He reached out a hand cluttered with silver to embrace the eggs and gently roll them back and forth across the gleaming expanse of the plate. “No, I’m just going to fondle them,” he said, and he got the expected response: she laughed. “But does anybody still play dice around here?” he called down the bar as the eyes of the regulars slid in our direction an
d then away again.
In those days—and this was ten years ago or more—the game of Horse was popular in certain California bars, as were smoking, unprotected sex and various other adult pleasures that may or may not have been hazardous to your health. There were five dice, shaken in a cup, and you slammed that cup down on the bar, trying for the highest cumulative score, which was thirty. Anything could be bet on, from the next round of drinks to ponying up for the jukebox.
The rain hissed at the door and it opened briefly to admit a stamping, umbrella-less couple. Ludwig’s question hung unanswered on the air. “No? How about you, Daria?”
“I’m working, actually.”
He turned to me. I had no work in the morning or the next morning either—maybe no work at all. My apartment wasn’t what I’d thought it would be, not without anybody to share it with, and I’d already vowed to myself that I’d rather sleep on the streets than go back to my aunt’s because going back there would represent the worst kind of defeat. Take good care of my baby, Kim, my mother had said when she’d dropped me off. He’s the only one I’ve got.
“Sure,” I said, “I guess. What’re we playing for—for drinks, right?” I began fumbling in my pockets, awkward, shoulders dipping—I was drunk, I could feel it. “Because I don’t have, well, maybe ten bucks—”
“No,” he said, “no,” already rising from his seat, “you just wait here, just one minute, you’ll see,” and then he was out the door and into the grip of the rain.
Daria hadn’t moved. She was dressed in the standard outfit for Daggett’s employees, shorts, white ankle socks and a T-shirt with the name of the establishment blazoned across the chest, her legs pale and silken in the flickering light of the fake fireplace in the corner. She gave me a sympathetic look and I shrugged to show her I was ready for anything, a real man of the world.