For a long time, Uncle Crank had been sampling the family’s product. Even if the family’s product had been apple juice, it would have been a bad idea to partake of the quantities that Uncle Crank consumed when he was in a mood to pop some meth or poke it. If you do enough methamphetamine, byproducts of phenyl-2-propanone, a chemical used in the manufacturing of the drug, begin to accumulate in your brain tissue, and if you’re as dedicated to amped-up recreation as Crank had been, eventually you’ll experience toxic psychosis, which is maybe less fun than being eaten alive by fire ants, though not a whole lot less.
When fuses started to blow out in Uncle Crank’s brain box, he tried to soothe his suddenly anxious soul and to settle his confusion by beating the hell out of someone. That was when twelve-year-old Laura rang the doorbell. Or perhaps she had rung the doorbell five minutes before the fuses blew, and Uncle Crank had invited his niece in for one of his justly famous lemon ice-cream sodas, but then he’d succumbed to these maximum-bad whimwhams. Earlier, Lilly had taken the dog for a walk, and she hadn’t returned home until Uncle Crank had been pounding on Laura for a few minutes, first with his fists and then with a carved-mesquite statuette of Lady Luck that he had bought in a Las Vegas gift shop.
Lilly pulled Crank away from the girl and made him sit in an armchair. Perhaps only she could have subdued him so easily, because even during an episode of full-blown toxic psychosis, Uncle Crank was afraid of his wife.
Aunt Lilly’s brother—Noah’s dad—lived only a block away, and three minutes after receiving Lilly’s call, he was on her doorstep. His daughter was horribly beaten, unconscious, and possibly dying, and he wanted to call an ambulance, but he understood, as did Lilly, that they had to deal with Crank first. Uncle Crank was not as much a member of the family as he was a liability by marriage; even clean and sober and in charge of his faculties, if he found himself in a jam, he might sell them out to get a reduction of the charges against him. Now, meth-wrecked, mumbling, paranoid, delusional, alternately expressing anger at his niece’s imagined “snottiness” and weeping with remorse for what he’d done to her, he was likely to ruin all of them in his first five minutes with the police—without even realizing what he was doing.
Fortunately for the family, Uncle Crank committed suicide seven minutes later.
With his patient wife’s firm guidance, he wrote a heartfelt confession. Dear Laura, I am wasted on meth and some stuff. I did not know what I was doing. I am not a bad man. I am just an awful mess. Do not blame your sweet aunt for what I done. She is a good honest woman. I want her to buy you the biggest damn teddy bear of which she can find and give it from me. Love to you, Uncle Crank. In his derangement, he thought the note was going to be given to Laura in a get-well card.
The effort of putting these sentiments into words exhausted him, and by the time he signed his name, he phased from toxic-psychosis frenzy into a state of post-meth fatigue that meth freaks referred to as being “amped out.” In fact he was so thoroughly amped out that he couldn’t negotiate the stairs on his own and had to be supported by Lilly and by his brother-in-law on his way to the master bathroom on the second floor.
He believed that once he shaved and cleaned up, they were going to take him to a combination spa and clinic in Palm Springs, where he would undergo a Twelve Step program to cure his addiction, receive a really good daily massage, tighten up his gut with a healthier diet, and perhaps learn to play golf. While his brother-in-law balanced him with one hand to keep him from tumbling to the floor, Crank actually sat on the closed lid of the toilet and dozed—until Lilly disturbed him when she eased the barrel of the pistol into his mouth. She had put on a glove and wrapped a silk pillowcase around her arm to ensure that she wouldn’t be incriminated by traces of gunpowder. Surprised, biting on the barrel, Uncle Crank opened his eyes, seemed to realize that getting a last-minute reservation at the Palm Springs spa was going to be more difficult than first thought, and then Lilly pulled the trigger.
Of the available household weapons, she had chosen the smallest caliber required to get the job done. Too much gun would result in unnecessary mess and the risk of incriminating contamination from the splash. Lilly had a good mind for criminal conspiracy. Besides, she liked a neat house.
For over twenty minutes while Crank was being prepared for Hell and was finally dispatched there, Laura had been left lying on the living-room floor, with half her once-lovely face shattered and with cerebral damage progressing, before Lilly had called paramedics.
Noah had not been present for any of this. He’d heard about it secondhand, from his father.
The old man recounted these events as he might have retold a war story from his youth, as though it had been an adventure, for God’s sake, with eerily few references to the horror that his daughter had endured or to her tragic condition, but with brotherly admiration for Lilly’s quick thinking under pressure. “She is one hard-assed bitch when she needs to be, your aunt Lil. I’ve known men who, in a pinch, would go all female on you sooner than Lil.” His attitude seemed to be, Hey, shit happens, it’s horrible, it’s sad, but that’s the way the world is, there’s no more justice than what we dealt out to Crank, we’re all just meat in the end, so get over it and move on. “Live in the now,” the old man liked to say, which was psychobabble he’d heard spouted by some sociopathic self-help guru on television.
More shit happened two months later, when Aunt Lilly showed up with a far more powerful gun than the one she had used on Uncle Crank and with no concern about neatness, since the house wasn’t hers. Her brother had concealed seven hundred thousand dollars in meth profits. She didn’t want merely an honest accounting; she wanted him out of the business. Even the old man’s appeal to sisterly mercy didn’t persuade Lilly to “go all female” on him: Only Noah merited an I’m sorry from her before she squeezed the trigger.
Double-shot, first certain that he was dying on the front lawn, then later in the hospital when he knew he would survive, Noah had decided that his wounds were what he deserved, punishment for failing to protect his little sister. He wasn’t a bad kid, really. He wasn’t a bad seed, either, not born in his father’s image. His indifference to his family’s criminal behavior had not been nature’s fault; as the parenting experts would put it, his moral drift was the consequence of inadequate nurturing. But abed with time to think, Noah had come to understand that it was immaterial whether nature or nurture was to blame. Only he himself possessed the thread and needles to sew up his shabby life and to transform it into a suit presentable in the company of decent people. Only guilt over his sister’s suffering led him to the conclusion that this difficult tailoring was essential if he was to have any future worth living.
Guilt in fact gave him the power to become his own Pygmalion, allowed him to sculpt a new Noah Farrel from the stone of the old. Guilt was his hammer; guilt was his chisel. Guilt was his bread and his inspiration.
Whenever he heard anyone declare that guilt was a destructive emotion, that a fully self-realized person had to “get past” his guilt, he knew that he was listening to a fool. Guilt had been his soul’s salvation.
Over the past seventeen years, however, he had also arrived at the realization that acceptance of guilt was not an end in itself. Truly taking responsibility for the consequences of your acts—or in his case, the consequences of his failure to act—did not lead to redemption. And until he found that door of redemption, until he opened it and crossed the threshold, the old Noah Farrel would never quite feel that he belonged inside the new man he had created; always he would feel like an impostor, unworthy and waiting to be exposed as the thoughtless boy that he had been.
The only path to redemption that seemed open to him was his sister. After enough years of paying for her care, after thousands of hours of talking to her as she lay unresponsive behind her elsewhere eyes, might a moment come at last when the door appeared before him? If ever she made eye contact with him, soul to soul, however brief, and if in that instant her expression to
ld him that she had heard his monologues and had been comforted by them, then the threshold would lie before him, and the room beyond the door might be called hope.
Now, in the most unforgiving hours of the night, speeding along the streets of south Orange County, Noah was scared as he had never been before, scared worse than when he’d taken Lilly’s two bullets and rolled down the front porch steps with the expectation of taking a third in the back of the head. The prospect of redemption receded from him the faster he drove, and receding with it was all hope.
When he jammed the brakes and slid the Chevy sideways into the driveway at Cielo Vista Care Home, despair overcame him at the sight of all the police units parked around the front entrance. The phone call that rousted him from bed, the call that might have been a hoax or a mistake, was proved true and accurate by every pulse of red light and by every chasing shadow that leaped across the face of the building and through the bougainvillea twining the trellises.
Laura.
Chapter 30
DOG DRIPPING, boy dripping, dog grinning, boy not grinning, and therefore dog ceasing to grin, but both still dripping, they stand in the sudden light, Old Yeller trying to control her doggy exuberance, Curtis reminding himself to react now as a boy would react, not as a dog would react, trying to work his foot fully back into the shoe that Old Yeller pulled half off him.
The pump creaks and groans as declining pressure allows the untended handle to settle into the full at-rest position. The flow from the iron spout quickly diminishes from a gush to a stream, to a trickle, to a dribble, to a drip.
“What the jumpin’ blue blazes you doin’ out here, boy?” asks the man who holds the flashlight.
Not much can be seen of this person. Largely hidden behind the glare, he shines the light in Curtis’s face.
“You leave your ears in your other pants, boy?”
Curtis has just figured out that he should disregard “the jumpin’ blue blazes” from the first question in order to discover the essence of it, and now this second question baffles him.
“They full of horseshit, boy?”
“Who’s ‘they,’ sir?” Curtis asks.
“Your ears,” the stranger says impatiently.
“Good Lord, no, sir.”
“That there your dog?”
“Yes, sir.”
“He be vicious?”
“She be not, sir.”
“Say what?”
“Say she, sir.”
“You stupid or somethin’?”
“Somethin’, I guess.”
“I ain’t afeared of dogs.”
“She ain’t afeared of you neither, sir.”
“Don’t you go tryin’ to bullyrag me, boy.”
“I wouldn’t even if I knew how, sir.”
“You some sassy-assed, spit-in-the-eye malefactor?”
“As far as I can understand what you might mean, sir, I don’t think I am.”
Curtis is comfortable with a lot of languages, and he believes that he could conduct conversation easily in most regional dialects of English, but this one is challenging enough to rattle his self-confidence.
The stranger lowers the flashlight, focusing it on Old Yeller. “I seen dogs sweet like this here, then you dares turn your back an’ they bite off your co-jones.”
“Jones?” Curtis replies, thinking maybe they’re talking about a person named Ko Jones.
With the bright beam out of his eyes, Curtis sees that this man is none other than Gabby Hayes, the greatest sidekick in the history of Western movies, and for a moment he’s as delighted as he’s ever been. Then he realizes this can’t be Gabby, because Gabby must have died decades ago.
Frizzles of white hair, a beard like Santa’s with mange, a face seamed and saddle-stitched by a lifetime of desert sun and prairie wind, a body that appears to be composed more of leathery tendons and knobby bones than of anything else: He is your typical weathered and buzzard-tough prospector, your weathered and cranky but lovable ranch hand, your weathered and comical but dependable deputy, irascible but well-meaning and weathered saloonkeeper, crotchety but tender-hearted and banjo-playing and weathered wagon-train cook. With the exception of a pair of orange-and-white Nikes that look as big as clown shoes, his outfit is totally Gabby: rumpled baggy khakis, red suspenders, a cotton shirt striped like mattress ticking; his squashed, dusty, sweat-stained cowboy hat is slightly too small for his head and is parked on his grizzled skull with such desert-rat insouciance that it looks like a growth that has been with him since birth.
“She goes after my co-jones, I’ll plug her, so help me Jesus.”
Just as you would expect of any cranky citizen of the Old West, regardless of his profession, this man has a gun. It’s not a revolver of the proper period, but a 9-mm pistol.
“Maybe I ain’t so well-appearanced, but I sure ain’t no useless codgerdick, like you might think. I’m the night caretaker for this here resurrected hellhole, and I can more than do the job.”
Although he’s old, this man isn’t old enough to be Gabby Hayes even if Gabby Hayes somehow could still be alive, and he isn’t dead, either, so he can’t be Gabby Hayes brought back to life as a flesh-eating zombie in another kind of movie altogether. Nevertheless the resemblance is so strong that he must be a descendant of Gabby’s, perhaps his grandson, Gabby Hayes III. Flushed with excitement and awe, Curtis feels as humbled as he might feel in the presence of royalty.
“I can shoot me a man around the corner, by calculated ricochet, if I got to, so you keep that flea hotel in check, and don’t you try to run nowheres.”
“No, sir.”
“Where is your folks, boy?”
“They is dead, sir.”
Bushy white eyebrows jump toward his hat brim. “Dead? You say dead, boy?”
“I say dead, yessir.”
“Here?” The caretaker worriedly surveys the street, as though hired guns have ridden into town to shoot down all the sheep ranchers or the homesteading farmers, or whoever the evil land barons or the greedy railroad barons currently want to have shot down. The pistol wobbles in his hand, as if it is suddenly too heavy to hold. “Dead here on my watch? Well, ain’t this just an antigodlin mess? Where is these folks of yours?”
“Colorado, sir.”
“Colorado? I thought you said they was dead here.”
“I meant they was dead in Colorado.”
The caretaker looks relieved, and the gun doesn’t shake as much as it shook before. “Then how’d you and this biscuit-eater come to be here after closin’ time?”
“Runnin’ for our lives, sir,” Curtis explains, because he feels that he can tell at least a portion of the truth to any descendant of Mr. Hayes.
The caretaker’s wrinkle-garden face sprouts a new crop where you would have thought he had no room to plant the seeds for any more. “You ain’t tellin’ me you run all the way here from Colorado?”
“Run at the start of it, sir, then hitched most of the time, and run this last piece.”
Old Yeller pants as if in confirmation.
“Who’s the damn scalawags you been runnin’ from?”
“Lots of scalawags, sir. Some nicer than others. I guess the nicest would be the government.”
“The gov’ment!” declares the caretaker, and his wrinkles rise like hackles, pulling his face into a surprisingly taut bristle of pure disgust. “Tax collectors, land grabbers, nosey do-gooders more self-righteous than any Bible-poundin’ preacher ever born!”
Curtis says, “I’ve seen the FBI, whole SWAT teams of them, and I suspect the National Security Agency’s in on this, plus one special-forces branch of the military or another, and probably more.”
“Gov’ment!” The caretaker is so beside himself with outrage that if beside himself could be taken literally, there would be two of him standing before Curtis. “Rule-makin’, power-crazy, know-nothin’ bunch of lily-livered skunks in bald-faced shirts! A man an’ his wife pays social-security tax out the ass all their life, an’
she dies just two checks into retirement, an’ the gov’ment keeps all she paid, greedy bastards, she ain’t really got her no account with ’em like they tell you. So here’s me gettin’ one monthly check no bigger than a brush-rabbit turd, hardly enough to buy me the makin’s of a good long beer piss, while Barney Colter’s worthless lazy donkey-wit son, who never worked a day in his useless life, he collects twice what I get ’cause the gov’ment says his drug addiction’s left him emotionally disabled. So the doped-up little slug sits on his saggy ass, scarfin’ Cheez Doodles, while to make ends meet, I haul myself out here to this historical hellhole five nights a week an’ listen to blowsnakes blow, waitin’ to be turned into buzzard brunch when my ticker pops, an’ now facin’ down dangerous wild dogs what wants to chew off my cojones. You see the idea I’m gettin’ at, boy?”
“Not entirely, sir,” Curtis replies.
Because of all the excitement of trying to get Curtis’s shoe and the fun of splashing in the outfall of well water, and also because Gabby’s angry rant has frightened her, Old Yeller whines, squats, and pees on the pump platform.
Curtis perfectly understands her feelings about the caretaker. They have heard a lot of crankiness but not much lovableness, have been doused with buckets of crotchety talk but not with one teaspoon of tender-hearted sympathy; plus as yet there’s no sign whatsoever of a banjo.
“What’s wrong with your dog, boy?”
“Nothing, sir. She’s just been through a lot lately.”
And here comes more trouble for dog and boy: the giant-dragonfly thrum of the huge helicopter throbbing across the desert.