The Boys from Santa Cruz (12 page)

The test of wills, with me trying to put off coming and her trying to make me come as quickly as possible, didn’t last very long. She was victorious, of course, but if any contest ever had a win-win outcome, it was that one. “There,” she said, laughing deep in her
throat, then dove away upstream to get away from my hardy little swimmers.

Half an hour later we were trudging homeward along the dusty rutted track that followed the riverbank. Rudy drove up alongside us in his big red Dodge Ram pickup. “You kids want a ride?”

“Thanks, Uncle Rudy.” Shawnee went around back, put her foot on the bumper hitch, and climbed over the tailgate, but I was still kind of frozen in place by the side of the road, staring up at Rudy’s old straw cowboy hat, which now had three long white eagle feathers stuck into the side of the crown, sweeping backward at a rakish angle.

Time did one of those weird double-clutch, theory-of-relativity moves, slowing to a crawl on the outside, zipping along at light speed on the inside. All these visuals of Buzzard John started flashing through my mind like an ultrahigh-speed slide show. Behind the wheel of the Buzzard-mobile, fussily arranging the eagle feathers in his sweatband; driving with his head thrown back and laughing, wreathed in a cloud of pot smoke; on his knees in the stark light of the barn; behind the wheel in my nightmare, the vulture’s naked head darting cobralike at the end of his long scaly neck.

Then time snapped back like a rubber band. “What are
you
starin’ at?” Rudy was saying, leaning out the window of the pickup.

“Sorry.” I shook my head sharply to clear it. “Guess I must’ve spaced out or something.”

“You probably got too much sun,” said Rudy. “Here.” He took off his hat and handed it to me through the window.

“I can’t take your hat, Rudy,” I told him.

“You can’t not take it,” he insisted. So I did, and as I climbed over the side of the truck to join Shawnee, it occurred to me that I now had Buzzard John’s knife
and
the eagle feathers.

Lucky me.

A week after I got to the rez, we began the backbreaking work of harvesting the crop, tying up the plants, and hanging them upside down from the ceilings of the barn and drying sheds. Then came a monthlong lull, with little to do but grow my hair out. Having a Mohawk didn’t seem so cool when you were living with Indians.

It took a month for the plants to dry. Shawnee and I did a lot of hiking, some swimming until the river got too cold. I don’t know if any of the grown-ups knew we were having sex. If they did, they didn’t say anything. Then when the plants were ready, Shawnee and I joined the trimming crews working day and night at long plywood tables in the barn. She taught me how to clip away all but the tiny hip leaves from the sticky, skunky, purplish green buds, and how to shape and manicure them. I got pretty good at it, too. I could clip as fast as any of the Indians, and never once ruined a bud.

It makes me happy now to think back on those stony, fuzzy weeks, the haze of pot smoke drifting under the high roof, the spooky, snaky sound of R. Carlos Nakai’s wooden flute music over the sound system, and the constant
snip, snip, snip
of the special scissors Rudy ordered by the case from a hardware store in San Francisco’s Japantown.

By mid-October the product was dried, trimmed, and ready to ship. Because at that time of year a single man driving a van didn’t have much chance of getting out of Humboldt County without being pulled over and searched, Rudy told me I’d be going with him on his business trip.

And off we went the very next day, in a customized white Dodge Tradesman van, with false interior walls and raised floor filled with vacuum-sealed one- to ten-kilo bags of bud. Sorry as I
was to be separated from Shawnee, but mindful of my status as a charity case, I looked at this as a tremendous opportunity to prove to Rudy how useful I could be. My job, as we worked our way down the coast to San Diego, then north up the Central Valley, was mostly to sit high in the passenger seat, always visible, when we were on the road, to roll joints while Rudy drove, and to guard the van while Rudy took care of business. At night we shared a motel room, but only in motels where we could park the van right outside our room.

Our last stop was Stockton, where Rudy sold the last of the weed, except for a few kilos he’d held back for personal use, to some other California Indians, some Pomos, I believe. The van’s false floor and walls were stuffed with cash and I was more than ready to go home, which already meant the big house by the side of the river for me, though I’d lived there only two months. I especially wanted to get back in time for the big Halloween party the following night.

But Rudy wanted to celebrate first. We took a motel room with two queen-size beds and got good and stoned. Rudy treated us to a prime rib dinner, then went out partying with his Indian friends while I watched TV in bed with the room curtains open so I could keep an eye on the van. I must have fallen asleep, though, because the next thing I knew it was dark, and Rudy was climbing into bed with me.

I knew right away he was drunk. His movements were clumsy and his speech was slurry and he didn’t seem to understand when I tried to tell him that he had the wrong bed. He just kept pawing at me, patting me roughly on the head like I was a big sheepdog or something, and saying things like “You’re a good kid, c’mon, you know what to do.”

But I didn’t. I didn’t even know what was going on yet. I still thought Rudy just had the wrong bed, so I got up and moved over to the other one, farther away from the window. But Rudy climbed in after me, buck-ass naked with a hard-on, and started slobbering
against my neck, saying shit like “Give it to me, short stuff, c’mon, give it to me,” and shoving his dick at me.

By now it was pretty obvious what was going on, but I still didn’t completely get it. I told myself Rudy was so drunk he thought I was a girl. So I pushed him away and turned on the light. “Quit it,” I kept saying. “Cut it out. It’s me, Rudy, it’s Luke.”

Rudy’s eyes were all piggy and bloodshot, his dark skin was all splotchy, and his face with its bent-down nose was all twisted around like a devil mask. “No shit, white meat,” he said, looking right into my eyes. “Now roll the fuck over.”

“I’m gonna go sleep in the van,” I told him, trying to climb out of bed. Rudy grabbed me around the neck with one hand and started punching me in the back of the head with the other, short hard jabs with his fist. I scrambled free, half-stunned, and dove off the bed. I was scrabbling around on the floor, snatching up my clothes, trying to get dressed and get away at the same time, while Rudy was riding my back, trying to force me down.

Punch after punch rained down on me. I was trying to get my pants on when my fingers closed around something hard in the pocket of my jeans. It was Buzzard John’s knife. Still crawling around with Rudy on top of me, punching and grabbing at me, I fumbled it open, started jabbing backward with it, just poking it at Rudy, trying to get him off my back. Then I heard a gasp, lost my hold on the knife, and collapsed underneath Rudy’s weight, feeling a hot wetness soaking the back of my T-shirt.

I rolled out from under Rudy. He was lying on his back, grabbing his neck with both hands, blood oozing out between his fingers. Buzzard John’s’s knife lay on the floor, the blade coated with a coppery sheen. I watched in disbelief as Rudy started convulsing, his back arching and his heels drumming the floor. After a few endless seconds of that, he went limp.

“Rudy?” I said, my voice a horrified whisper. “It was an accident, dude. I swear, it was an accident.”

But Rudy, whose eyes were still open, bugged out and staring
at the ceiling, was beyond forgiving anybody anything. And in the end, of course, it didn’t really matter whether I had meant to do it or not. Once again, through no fault of my own, my life had been torn apart. I couldn’t very well go back to Hatchapec now. My new friends, my adoptive family, and especially Shawnee, were lost to me, so lost it was like they’d never even existed.

Then through the open curtains I caught a glimpse of the white van parked in the blacktop lot in the rear of the motel, and was reminded that things could have been a whole lot worse.

One of the truer things I learned from Rudy was that in spite of what most people thought, a person is less conspicuous driving during the daytime, when there are lots of cars on the road, than he is late at night. I left Stockton at dawn in my customized Dodge van with a shitload of cash, a few kilos of high-quality sinsemilla, and three mottoes to guide me on my path. Trust nobody, look out for number one, do unto others as others have done unto Luke.

Not that I was looking for trouble or anything. All I wanted was not to be fucked with anymore, to be left alone to figure out what I was going to do with the rest of my life. But where? I needed someplace safe, off the beaten path, where nobody would think to look for me.

I’d been working on the problem all night, but it wasn’t until I was on the road that I thought of the old homestead in Marshall County. That’d be the last place anybody would look for me, I figured. And I knew the area. I could drive around the back way, scope things out, make sure there were no cops still poking around. If the coast was clear, I could move back into my old bus.
If not, I knew a few places in the hills where I could hide out until it was safe.

I crossed the Marshall County line late in the afternoon. Traffic slowed to a crawl where the state highway merged with Marshall Street, running through the heart of Marshall City. The main drag had stoplights every few blocks, the better to snag the summer tourists. I couldn’t help thinking that the last time I’d seen these buildings was from the back of a squad car. Who
was
that kid who’d sat up half the night in a segregation cell in Juvie, waiting for his milk and cookies?

Normally it was about a forty-five-minute drive from the city to what was now my place. For it was just beginning to sink in for me that with Big Luke having owned the property free and clear, and me being his only child, it probably belonged to me now. Still, I knew better than to just waltz up to the front door. Instead I cut off the county road half a mile before our driveway and circled around, coming in from the north, via a neighboring parcel known as Murphy’s farm, despite the fact that there hadn’t been a Murphy there, or a farm, for nobody knew how long.

Murphy’s house had collapsed long before my time, but the barn still stood. When I was younger, I’d spent hours swinging from the rope swing attached to the rafter over the hayloft. Grab the rope, jump off, swing out into thin air, try not to smash into the side of the barn on the return swing. What a rush!

Leaving the van hidden in the barn, I walked the rest of the way home, through the woods. It was nearly dark when I reached the northern edge of the property. I wanted to cry when I saw what the cops had done to the place. My bus was torn up like it had been hit by a tornado. My clothes and belongings were scattered all over the place, they’d unraveled my cassettes and taken my priceless vinyl records out of their sleeves and tossed them around like Frisbees, and slit my mattress and all my pillows. What a fucking mess!

Down the hill things were even worse. The shed and the trailer
were completely trashed, the trailer jacked off its moorings and the ground dug up underneath it, and the yard looked as if they’d gone over it with a rototiller or something. They’d dug up the fire circle, too, but at least Teddy was gone, trunk and all. Which made sense. It was only my subconscious that had half-expected to find her still there, rotting away along with the turkey vultures I’d shot.

I returned to my bus feeling kind of raw and sad. I restuffed my mattress as best I could, dragged it up to the roof, and spread out my sleeping bag on top of it. Dinner was a warm can of Mountain Dew and a package of cheese-and-peanut-butter crackers from a vending machine at a highway rest stop, dessert was a spliff-size joint, and on my last night as a free man, the night sky framed by graceful pine boughs was my bedroom ceiling.

I woke in the middle of the night, chilled and wet. The sleeping bag was damp and the flashlight batteries were dead. By moonlight, I climbed down from the roof and cleared a space at the front of the bus. I dragged the mattress inside, unzipped the sleeping bag, and covered myself with the half that was still dry.

After a few hits off the roach from my bedtime joint, I had no trouble falling asleep. When I awoke again it was daylight. I was lying on my right side with my head pillowed on my arm. Opening my eyes, I saw a skinny guy with fading reddish brown hair grinning down at me from the bus driver’s seat.

“He lives, he wakes—’tis Death is dead, not he!”

I started to sit up, but my right arm, the one I was lying on, jerked me back down. The guy, it seemed, had handcuffed my wrist to the railing above the front stairwell. “Sorry about that,” he said. “You were snoring away so peacefully I didn’t have the heart
to wake you.” He stuck out his hand like he expected me to shake it. “Skip Epstein.”

I rattled my handcuff. Epstein, who was wearing shorts and an old green T-shirt, chuckled at himself, then changed hands and we shook lefty.

“You a cop?” I asked him.

“Bounty hunter.” I could tell from the way he said it how much he liked saying it. “Like Steve McQueen in
Wanted: Dead or Alive.
Your grandfather hired me to find you before the cops did.”

I knew who Steve McQueen was from
The Great Escape,
but I’d never heard of
Wanted: Dead or Alive.
The title did fit in with what Big Luke had told me about bounty hunters. They worked for bail bondsmen, he’d said, and actually had more powers than real cops did. They didn’t need warrants, they didn’t have to read you your rights, and they didn’t have to face a review board if they shot you.

Epstein, though, didn’t look nearly as tough and mean as the bounty hunters Big Luke had described. “How much is my grandfather paying you?” I asked him.

“Enough.”

“I’ll give you twice as much to let me go.”