Full Measure: A Novel (16 page)

Messina demanded they see Pelican Bay Prison because he’d heard about it in a movie. So Patrick found Lake Earl Drive and followed it out. “The prison’s got a special cell block, right in the middle,” Messina said. “It drives you insane if they lock you in it too long. The cells are concrete cages with no windows.” Patrick pulled onto the grounds which, upon first sight, looked tranquil and parklike. The parking lot was very large and only one-third full. Behind the electric fences stood the prison, which to Patrick looked efficient and not quite humane. “My old man took me to Joplin Prison when I was a kid,” said Messina. “On account of I’d been doing some shoplifting. Just candy and football cards and stuff but he wanted me to see what was waiting for me. It pretty much worked. Except ever since I’ve been kind of fascinated by prisons. Well, that’s good enough—I doubt they give tours.”

They pulled out of the Pelican Bay parking lot in silence. Patrick followed the signs for the highway. Salimony got the sudden inspiration to visit Sergeant Pendejo’s family, too. He remembered that Pendejo had lived in Coalinga, where the big-ass earthquake happened a long time ago, and which was right on the way to home. “I mean, if we could tell Boss’s family what a great guy he was, we could tell Pendejo’s.”

“But he wasn’t a great guy,” said Messina. “And his name wasn’t even Pendejo.”

“It wasn’t?”

“No,
pendejo
means pubic hair in Spanish.”

“I always wondered why his tag said something else.”

“Pendejo was just a nickname, Salimony. You never knew that?”

“Pendejo’s name was Alejandro Reyes,” said Patrick.

“So it rhymed with pendejo,” said Salimony.

“Kind of not very much,” said Patrick. “He wasn’t bad. I always thought, down inside that guy who always did every damned thing he was told to do, was an okay human being. He wasn’t mean enough to be a Marine. But he was terrific on that barbecue. He made the thing out of a fuel drum, remember?”

“He died making burritos for his men,” said Salimony. “So let’s go see his family and tell them he wasn’t such a bad guy.”

“Oh, they’re going to love hearing he wasn’t so bad,” said Messina. “Sal? You really are full of shit. Maybe we could get some beers for the road.”

“It’s way past noon,” said Salimony.

Heading south they played the radio and threw empties out the windows and stopped at rest areas. Patrick quit after two beers but the rest of the twelver was gone before Patterson. The two other Marines fell silent then asleep. After six hours on the road Patrick pulled off for Coalinga. The evening was warm in the central valley and the land lay flat. He saw late-season cotton still in the fields but most of the soil was brown and groomed and ready to be planted. He saw the sign for the prison and the sign for the mental hospital then Messina’s head pop up from the crew cab into the rearview. “How come they got so many criminals and crazies in this state?” he asked. “That’s the third prison since Pelican Bay and I been asleep for three hours.”

“Any of those cheese things left?” asked Patrick.

Messina held the bag upside down and nothing but orange dust came out. Next to Patrick, Salimony finally sat up, yawned loudly, and burped. He took out his phone. A moment later he was leaving messages and talking to people, trying to track down the family of Alejandro Reyes.

Finally Salimony got Alejandro’s mother, who gave him Alejandro’s father, who gave him directions. Patrick drove to a convenience store and they bought a cold twelve-pack and three bags of expensive jerky and one artificial rose—pink, unrealistic, wrapped in a clear plastic cone and heavily scented.

The Reyes home was a travel trailer in a row of other trailers, all lined up for shade along a windbreak of drooping greasewood and oleander on the edge of a cotton field. Behind the windbreak was an irrigation canal. As he approached, Patrick saw that the trailers were old and faded, their shapes softened by weather and time. There were big air conditioners dripping water, some resting on wooden decks in front of the trailers, and some propped up on concrete blocks. Between the coaches, vehicles were nosed into the shade of the windbreak too, and they were older and dusty and some had folding sunscreens over the dashboards. He saw laundry drying on lines and children playing stickball and others sitting on upended wooden produce boxes in front of a TV that someone had set up under a portable shade screen. The sun hit the TV screen so brightly Patrick couldn’t make out what they were watching. He saw a group of five or six young men, wiry in their singlets, heavily tattooed, drinking beer and eyeing him. “Pendejo wasn’t exactly from Beverly Hills,” said Salimony.

“This was your idea,” said Messina.

“Who cares where he came from?” asked Patrick. “The aqua-colored trailer, right? Here it is, so let’s do this thing.”

They stood on the spacious deck and Patrick knocked on the door. He heard the roar of the big air conditioner sitting on bricks beside the aqua trailer. Overhead was a slatted roof intertwined with vines with fragrant white flowers. The deck had colorful pots of bougainvillea and geraniums and canna lilies. There were two barbecues and a fire pit made with the perforated canister of a clothes dryer.

A man pushed open the door and stood in the doorway. He was dark and slender, maybe fifty, Patrick guessed, with a weathered face and thick gray hair. He wore a white yoked cowboy-style shirt tucked into clean pressed jeans, and work boots.

“We served with Alejandro,” said Patrick. “We just wanted to tell you he was a good man.”

“I am Raydel, his father. It’s too small in here. Wait, please.” Raydel pulled the door shut and a few minutes later he came outside followed by a thin dark woman. She had black hair and wore a light blue dress and she smiled without looking at the young men. She carried two white resin chairs from inside and Raydel set out three more from the stack on the deck. He introduced his wife as Theresa. She went back into the trailer and returned with a framed portrait of Sergeant Reyes in his dress blues. She set it on the railing of the deck, facing them. Pendejo looked proud and happy. He was not a hard man.

They sat in the shade and Salimony gave everyone a beer, and the rose to Alejandro’s mother, and he opened the jerky and passed the bag. “He hated the rations,” said Salimony. “Alejandro got those packages from you, with the spices and dried chilies and those weird pickled carrots you Mexicans eat. And he’d mix them with field rations and come up with real food. He was the best cooker in the whole battalion. I think you should know that he was doing something he liked when he died. He was cooking for us jarheads. Standing right out there by a barbecue he’d made all by himself. He was brave.”

Salimony’s leg bounced and he drained his beer and crumpled it and got out another.

“He was honored at the Three-Five memorial at Pendleton,” said Patrick. “Two of his best friends spoke about him. I didn’t see you there.”

Raydel nodded and sipped his beer. “We decided not to go,” he said. “It is a very long way.”

“It’s only about six hours from here,” said Messina.

Raydel looked at him and Theresa stared down at the deck. Then she looked at Patrick and he saw she was fighting something back. “We have no papers. When we go somewhere there is the chance we will be stopped and deported. The Marine base would be very dangerous. Here, people know us and we are safe. So we don’t go away from here.”

“Half the laborers in Fallbrook are illegal,” said Patrick. “It’s a tough way to live.”

Alejandro’s father set his can on the deck and crossed his hands on his lap. He had the relaxed, conservative movement of a man who had worked his life outside. “Alejandro was born in Tijuana. We brought him here when he was one year old. I always have work because I know farming and I work very hard. But he did not want this. He wanted something better. He join the Marines because he wanna become a citizen here.”

“He wasn’t even an American citizen?” asked Salimony.

Raydel and Theresa both shook their heads. “We have three more children,” she said. “And they were born here so they can always stay. But Alejandro, he live under the same fear we have. He wanna be a cook.”

“They should make him a citizen even though he’s dead,” said Salimony. He upended his can and drank the last drop.

“I wondered about such a thing,” said Raydel. “But I don’t want to cause attention. My other son, he’s gonna join too when he’s old enough. He don’t like to work but he wants to fight.”

“Well,” said Salimony. “Alejandro is a citizen of my country no matter what nobody says. He made me some kind of soup when I got sick over there. God knows where he found anything good to put in it. A whole pot of it, enough for me and ten other guys. I didn’t get why Alejandro wouldn’t stand up for himself. He was older and us young guys kinda pushed him around. Four or five of us jumped him one day, roughed him up good. It’s for fun, but he acted like he wasn’t there. Now I get it—he was afraid if he fought back they’d find out and toss him out of the country when he came home.”

“There is a program for those who come home to be citizens more quickly,” said Theresa. “That was his plan. Then to open a restaurant.”

Raydel had the same thousand-yard stare that Bostik seemed to have so often. Patrick looked at the picture of Alejandro, then stared down into the opening of his beer can and tried to banish the image of pink brains on a tan wall behind a barbecue. He was thankful that Alejandro’s dad didn’t have to see that.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The morning was the coolest of the month and Ted felt winter in his feet. His task was to strip off the herbicide-tainted paint he’d put on some eighty tree trunks. Archie patiently demonstrated how to use the pressure sprayer, cautioning Ted that a direct ninety-degree blade of compressed water would cut into the tree surely as an axe. Archie fired away at an angle, “lifting” off the possibly poisoned paint that Ted had applied. “If the bark starts coming up, your angle’s wrong.”

“I got it, Dad.”

“I’d like to get a full day of work out of you.”

“Moving the compressor will be pretty hard on my feet.”

“You think the compressor is heavy, Pat and I will be lugging bales and putting down straw.”

“The compressor is heavy, too.”

Ted grunted and as he pulled the heavy wheeled contraption tree to tree over the leafy, ash-frosted earth. He got the thing going but the pressure seemed insufficient so he put on a different nozzle. And sure enough, once he got the hang of it the paint came right off. He was surprised how thick it was and found it hard to believe he’d failed to triple rinse the spray canister. He had no knack for practical physical things. Ted put in his earbuds and cranked up Cruzela Storm. A voice like new motor oil, he thought, clean and smooth and durable, and a similar color, too. Her main theme was, keep going in adversity, keep your cool, and your faith. Her subtheme was, people will try to take what’s yours, so learn to stand up for yourself.

He moved beneath the spindly naked canopies. Lifting off the dried paint took longer than spraying it on in the first place, but Ted worked diligently. He stopped now and then to lift rocks to see what creatures were living underneath. He caught one big tarantula, one small scorpion, and an alligator lizard, and put them into separate cottage-cheese containers with air holes punched in their lids. He had always loved unlovable things. They were humble and expected nothing, though some of them packed secret stings and poisons. He set the containers in the shade of the truck and got right back to work.

Later, close to lunchtime, through the music streaming into him, Ted suddenly and clearly heard the sharp report of his father’s voice. He lifted off one bud.

“Goddamn son of a BITCH!”

Ted dropped the nozzle, yanked off the earbuds, and pawed open the low-hanging branches in the direction of the yelling. Through his sweat-and-soot-smudged goggles he could see Archie far downhill of him, and Patrick a hundred yards to the east. His father stood looking at Ted with both arms out, palms raised in an unmistakable question:
What in the hell is this?
Could he have found a cool snake?

Ted burst through the black limbs and hustled down the slope, sidling down the steep granite escarpments, his feet swaddled in pain but soon he was standing before his father, panting. He stripped off the goggles to see what Archie was holding in his outstretched hand. It was one of the thick slabs of dried paint that Ted had lifted from the tree.

“Paint, Dad!”

“This isn’t paint, Ted. It’s bark! Formerly living bark! You’ve killed thirty trees today, son.
Congratulations.”

Ted took the white fragment and turned it over. The inside was colored a very pale green that suggested life. The whole thing was no thicker than half an inch. He held it up closer to make sure it wasn’t just paint. But he could see that it was not.

Patrick arrived and took the bark from Ted and saw the problem. “Took off a bit much here, brother.”

“I thought it was paint, Pat. I swear.”

“Christ all mighty, Ted!

“Screaming doesn’t help,” said Patrick.

“Nothing helps!”

“Then stop being an asshole,” said Patrick.

Archie glared at his sons, Patrick and Ted, in turn.

“I didn’t mean it to happen, Dad,” said Ted. “It was an accident.”

“You’re both worthless.” Archie snatched the painted bark from Patrick and backhanded it against Ted’s ample belly, off which it bounced. Then Archie shook his head and turned and headed muttering toward the trucks.

Ted closed his eyes and clutched his arms tight to his chest and began turning counterclockwise.

Patrick grabbed him by the shoulders and slowed him and held him in place. “Goddamnit, Ted—that won’t do you any good. You can’t just go away.”

Ted closed his eyes tight and waited for liftoff.

*   *   *

Ted switched jobs with Patrick and worked furiously through lunch, breaking apart the heavy bales and spreading the straw under the trees with a pitchfork. Occasionally he stopped to watch Patrick removing the paint from the tree trunks, and from this distance Ted couldn’t see what his brother was doing differently than he had. It looked as if Patrick had switched nozzles, and that was about all. But the real difference, thought Ted, is Pat won’t create a disaster. Pat will do it perfectly. Ted snapped through another nylon tie with the heavy cutters, threw the pieces into the back of the pickup, then rammed the pitchfork into the bale, broke off a load, and heaved it under a tree.