The Boys from Santa Cruz (11 page)

Pender shook his head.

“Money.” Oliver made the universal sign, rubbing his thumb against the tips of his first two fingers. “Moola. The almighty dollar. See, the fifth kid’s the profit margin. Less than five, we’re scarcely breaking even.” He offered the bottle to Pender, who took another slash and handed it back. “Now that poor little girl is dead, the other boy’s in a coma, and the Mountain Project is history. Along with my reputation. And for what? A few thousand bucks? If I had the guts of a flea, I’d…” His voice trailed off; he looked down at Pender as if he’d just remembered he was there. “Say, I don’t suppose you have a gun on you?”

“Can’t help you there,” said Pender, casually buttoning his sport jacket over his shoulder holster. “But you know what they say: in most cases, suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.”

No reply from Oliver, who was starting to topple off the arm of the couch, still clutching the bottle. Reacting with an agility that belied his bulk, Pender caught the psychologist with one hand and snatched up Johnnie Walker with the other. The former he laid out on the sofa, on his side lest he vomit in his sleep; the latter he took with him as he set off in search of a place to lie down for the night.

Pender awoke at dawn on Thursday in an Adirondack chair on the back porch of the lodge, damp and chilled, with his right arm temporarily paralyzed from being leaned on. Feeling returned gradually to the arm, starting with agonizing pins and needles, but the shoulder remained sore all day.

Although there had been no official announcement, it was obvious to Pender that a new paradigm had been established. Search parties were now deployed in groups of no less than three, with at least one of the three being an armed sheriff’s deputy. This had the effect of reducing by almost two thirds the area that could be covered in a day. The search parameters were further reduced later that morning when the California Department of Forestry pulled its helicopters in order to fight a catastrophic wildfire raging in the southern portion of the state.

By then, however, the search for Luke Sweet was no longer Pender’s concern. When he called in to Liaison Support, Pool told him he’d been ordered back to Washington. First, though, he had to return the Bu-car to the field office in Sacramento, along with the detailed mileage log he was supposed to have been keeping all along.

Oops.

But a veteran agent like Pender was not without coping strategies.
Stopping for lunch at a Denny’s near Sacramento, he filled in the blanks in dense black squiggles, with actual place names and legible numbers interspersed throughout, spilled black coffee on the little booklet while the ink was still wet, and dried it out under the hot-air blower in the men’s room.

Booked to Dulles by way of Phoenix, Pender used the long layover to catch up on his expense report, concerning which he was more meticulous; the pockets of his clamorous sport coat were stuffed with crumpled receipts. On the night flight out of Phoenix, as sometimes happened when he showed his badge and Department of Justice photo ID in order to carry his weapon aboard, he was upgraded, this time to business class. The extra legroom was greatly appreciated, as were the cute little whiskey bottles given him on the sly by the cute little flight attendant.

Losing another two hours to time zone changes, Pender arrived at Dulles a little after 2:00
A.M.
, eastern time. Pam wasn’t waiting at the gate for him, but then, he wasn’t really expecting her, though he had left a message on their machine before leaving Sacramento. The airport was mostly deserted except for the floor waxers, but there was one taxi waiting at the curbside stand. Pender woke the driver, who reminded him of little Billy Fish, from the movie version of
The Man Who Would Be King.

“Where can I take you, sah?”

“You know where Potomac is?”

“You are meaning the river?”

“No, the town in Maryland. Across the river.”

“Ah, yes, of course. Now I’ve got you.”

They drove east on 267, then turned north on the nearly empty Beltway. Pender rolled down his window as they crossed the river into Maryland, and inhaled gratefully; swampy and miasmal as the air might have seemed to some, to Pender it smelled like home.

At Bethesda, the cab left the Beltway, traveling northwest up River Road to the newly built subdivision halfway between Potomac and Seneca where Ed and Pam Pender had lived since early
spring of that year. The lawns were so new you could still make out the sod lines, and there wasn’t a tree taller than Pender in the whole development, but the two- and three-bedroom Virginia Colonials were solidly built on rolling half-acre lots. According to the Realtor, they were all but guaranteed to appreciate in value as the Washington exurbs continued their northward creep.

Pender paid Billy Fish, who rewarded his generous tip with a blank receipt for his expense report. As the headlights of the retreating taxi swept across the front of the house, Pender noticed that the living room curtains were drawn. No lights inside or out.
The least she could have done was leave the porch light on,
thought Pender, stumbling blindly up the walk leading from the driveway to the front door.

By the flickering light of his old Zippo, he managed to insert his key into the lock. The key turned easily enough, but Pender had to lean his shoulder against the door to shove it open. When he switched on the foyer light, he discovered why: the pile of letters and circulars under the mail slot in the door was a good three or four inches high. And where was the dog? he asked himself. Purvis worshiped Pender—the young German shepherd should have been all over him by now.

Not surprisingly, considering his occupation, Pender’s first thought was of mayhem. He dropped his suitcase and raced upstairs, taking the steps two at a time, picturing his wife lying in a pool of blood. He rushed into the bedroom, flicked on the light, and found the room empty, the big bed neatly made. Also empty were the bathroom and spare bedroom, which Pam, who was studying for her Realtor’s license, had turned into an office.

Puzzled and drained of adrenaline, Pender plodded back downstairs to check out the living room. A layer of dust had settled on the brown baize side table next to his recliner, and on top of the television. He made his way down the hall, past the seldom-used dining room, and into the kitchen. His mind was working furiously, trying to manufacture plausible explanations for Pam’s extended
absence. One of her parents was sick; she was staying at a friend’s because she didn’t like being alone in the new house; or maybe…

Aah, fuck it. He knew. Even before he found the envelope with his name on it propped up against the salt and pepper shakers on the kitchen table, he knew. Which was why he took his time before opening it. He got down a glass from the cupboard, filled it with ice from the refrigerator’s built-in dispenser, and took a new bottle of Jim Beam out of the case in the back of the duck-in pantry.

Sitting at the yellow maple table they’d bought only a few months ago, Pender slit the bottle’s seal with his thumbnail and twisted off the cap. He could hear the ice crackling as he filled the glass to the rim. He took a sip, smacked his lips, then opened the envelope. The note inside was dated a full week ago. “Dear Ed,” it began, “It’s over…”

Before reading on, Pender went back upstairs, took off his shoulder holster, and locked it and his gun in the combination safe bolted to the floor of the bedroom closet. That way, he figured, if he got so drunk he turned suicidal, he’d also be too drunk to remember the combination.

Back in the Buzzard-mobile, zooming down a long dark tunnel of a highway, I was trying to explain to Buzzard John why I hadn’t stepped in to stop him from being beaten up.

“But sssee…
hunh
… what they done…
hunh
…to me,” he was saying, in this weird, thin voice, hissing on the
s
sounds and grunting between words. “Just sssee…
hunh, hunh
…what they done.”

I didn’t want to look, but I couldn’t help myself. I turned and saw a vulture’s horrible red head bobbing and weaving at the end of the long snaky neck sticking up out of the collar of Buzzard John’s shirt. It fixed its beady little eyes on me and opened its beak. “Sssee what they done,” it hissed at me, its stubby crimson tongue
wiggling in the back of its throat. Then it grunted again,
hunh,
and its head darted toward me. I scrabbled around for the door handle and couldn’t find it, pounded the window with my fists and couldn’t break it, threw my shoulder against the door and couldn’t budge it.

Now it had me by the shoulder with its vulture’s claw, three scaly, crooked fingers ending in horrible sharp nails. I made a desperate, backward lunge, throwing myself against the door, which for some reason was no longer there. Screaming silently, I fell out of the moving truck, and just before I hit the ground…

You guessed it: I woke up. Shawnee was kneeling by the edge of my mattress, her hand outstretched, looking startled. “Rudy told me to wake you for breakfast.”

I felt so relieved, it was like getting a second lease on life. But in a way that’s what was really happening. However the thing with Buzzard John had been resolved, Rudy had made up his mind to take me in. He didn’t care that I wasn’t a Hatchapec, or that the police were looking for me. That might even have helped, because Rudy had done time himself. No, all that mattered was that I was an orphan who’d showed up on his doorstep, and according to Indian notions of hospitality and responsibility, he wouldn’t have been much of a man if he’d turned me away.

There was, of course, another reason why Rudy might have wanted to take in a fifteen-year-old boy, but back then, it never even crossed my mind. All I knew was that for the first time in a long time, things were looking up.

I located the bathroom all by myself this time, then joined Shawnee down in the kitchen, which I found with only a couple of wrong turns. There was an old woman (she might have been the same one as last night or not, I wasn’t sure) making Indian toast, which was like French toast, only thicker and heavier. I met some people I hadn’t seen the night before, most of whom Shawnee seemed to be related to. It was kind of neat, seeing all those generations together. And educational: I noticed, for instance, that old
Indian women were mostly pretty fat and old Indian men were so shriveled and skinny you’d think the old women were feeding off them. Best of all, nobody seemed to hold it against me that I was white, and a stranger.

After breakfast, I followed Shawnee outside, and she began showing me the ropes. Growing Humboldt sinsemilla, I learned, was a surprisingly labor-intensive affair. There were always chores to be done, from potting and sexing the plants over the winter, to planting them in spring (females only), to tending the drip lines, hand-watering and fertilizing the isolated patches, weeding, and mending deer fences throughout the summer.

In addition to all that work, this time of year was considered prime raiding season. An armed watch had to be kept over the crop twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, to protect it from the pot pirates. (Because they were on a reservation, the Hatchapecs weren’t supposed to be subject to raids by state or federal authorities, but they did have to keep the palms of the rez police greased.)

With the grown men patrolling the fields, the edge of the property, and even the back roads leading in and out of the reservation, the rest of us had to take up the slack. Shawnee and I were assigned to tend the isolated plants hidden in the woods. All that first day, I tagged along after her, learning where the various plants were hidden, how to pinch back the dead leaves, and how to spot boughs that might be turning hermaphrodite in a desperate effort to reproduce. (The whole idea behind sinsemilla, which means “without seeds” in Spanish, is that without exposure to male plants, instead of throwing seeds, the females put all their energy into growing big, sticky, THC-laden buds.)

Naturally, hearing the word
hermaphrodite
reminded me of my stepmother. As we worked, I started to tell Shawnee about Teddy, but her reaction was entirely opposite from Dusty’s: she did
not
want to hear the details.

All morning, we worked our way up the mountain from secret plant to secret plant. For lunch, Shawnee had packed peanut-butter-
and-jelly sandwiches that we washed down with warm Mountain Dew. Sitting with our backs against the trunk of a red-barked madrone at the edge of a high, grassy meadow dotted with white puffs of clover, we watched a pair of hawks riding the thermals, swooping and gliding so lightly and gracefully they looked like they were made out of paper.

After lunch we worked our way down the other side of the mountain, where the plants with southern exposure got so much more sun we had to tie up the nodding branches so they wouldn’t break off from the weight of the buds. When I took out the clasp knife with the buzzard head carved into the handle to cut twine for Shawnee, my nightmare, which I’d almost managed to forget, came rushing back so vividly that my knees went weak.

The best part of the day came after we’d finished our circuit, when Shawnee took me swimming in the river. It was still pretty hot out, and the current was slow. We floated on our backs, looking up through the feathery branches of the river willows to the powder blue sky. Shawnee had worn her swimsuit under her clothes; it was a white two-piece that made her bronze skin glow. Peeking sideways at her, I got a hard-on pushing up the underpants I was using for a bathing suit. Peeking sideways at me peeking sideways at her, she must have noticed it. She rolled over onto her stomach and swam away, then ducked under the water and popped up next to me. We exchanged long watery kisses floating in the shallows, then made out standing up, with the waist-high water pushing and tugging at us. I slid her top up over her breasts and pushed them together with both hands, sucking and nuzzling while she reached under my briefs and grabbed me tight, maybe a little too tight, working my joystick in a serious, goal-oriented manner.