Full Measure

Chapter two

The Norris house sat on high ground overlooking eighty mostly burned acres. Jack and Spike, both wearing yellow ribbons on their collars, followed the truck up the drive, barking. Patrick got out and touched their spacious Labrador heads and saw the big yellow ribbons fluttering on the oak trees and the porch railing. He hated the ribbons. He pet the dogs. He’d thought of them often and almost longingly in Sangin, but now he felt little for them. Ted was pointing to where he’d cut back the landscape plants and trees just a week ago, pure luck he said — he’d had no idea how important it would be when the fire came. Patrick looked out over the slopes, steep and blackened. The San Luis Rey River trickled far down the valley in an untouched cushion of green.

His mother pushed through the door and hurried down the wooden steps and pulled herself into his arms. Caroline’s tears were wet and warm on his cheek. She firmly stroked his face and head as if to confirm their wholeness, and as Patrick smiled felt a great ledge of relief break loose inside him and tumble downslope, breaking into smaller and smaller pieces. They couldn’t finish their sentences.

“God, Pat, it’s so good...”

“I’m really...”

“I just can’t believe you’re... look at...”

Patrick climbed the steps to the veranda, where his father hugged him heartily. Patrick noted a new lightness in him, though he wondered if it might be his own strength from patrolling with eighty pounds of gear and a twenty-pound machine gun almost every day for a year. Archibald smelled of the same shave cream he’d used for all of Patrick’s remembered life. “It is damned good to see you, son.”

“You look great, Dad.”

Ted limped by them with Patrick’s duffel and went into the house. Patrick followed, his father and mother close on either side, all three squeezing through the door awkwardly, each person trying to lead the mission.

“Civilian chain of command is always a little inefficient,” said Archibald. He’d been Navy, service being a Norris tradition since the Spanish-American War.

“I’ll get used to it again,” said Patrick.

A few neighbors had gathered, and some of the church people. Patrick appreciated their smiles and hugs and handshakes but felt the discomfort he caused in them, their ignorant but heart-swelled gratitude. There was a table set up with food and soft drinks and more yellow ribbons and he wished he was back at FOB Inkerman eating an MRE, smoking with his battle buddies, just being necessary. Or maybe fishing out on Glorietta Bay.

“You’ll want to see the damage immediately,” his father said. “I’ll make you an authentic drink. I take it you’ll be staying with us?”

“Just a night or two, Dad.”

“Oh, Pat,” said Caroline.

“I need my own space, Mom.”

“I wish your brother aspired to that,” said Archie. “Rather than living in the bunkhouse the rest of his life.”

“Don’t start in with all that now, Archie,” said Caroline.

Ted came down the hallway and into the sharp glance of his father. “I’m working on getting my own place, Dad.”

“That’s good to know.”

Patrick glanced at the awkward and uncertain friends and neighbors, then let his eyes wander the high-ceilinged great room. Nice to see the familiar white walls hung with his mother’s treasured paintings, the mullioned windows, the tile floor and stately area carpets woven in Afghanistan decades before he had gone and seen so much death there. The great room of his life. How could any of it seem so new? Sunlight came through the shutters and made crisp white slats on the walls. From the wet bar, beneath the oil portrait of his father and uncle gazing down as if they had foreseen all of this and more, Archibald studied his older son again. Patrick watched him. Then Archie returned with two large tumblers filled with ice and amber liquid and topped with lemon twists.

“To the groves, then. Caroline, Ted, friends and neighbors — I need a few minutes alone with Pat.”

Patrick and his father walked a dirt road side by side through the scorched trees. Norris Brothers Growers was a second-generation concern begun by Patrick’s grandfather and great-uncle in 1953. As a child Patrick had learned that growing avocados was a risky business due to the vagaries of drought, water, wind, consumer demand, tree disease — from borers to lethal root rot — and competition from Mexico and Chile. He also knew that a third-generation Norris handoff would have to take place if the ranch was to remain in the family. But Patrick had not fallen in love with farming. His dispassion had cost him some portion of his father’s respect, which remained lost now. Ted’s early interest in growing had gone unremarked by his father.

This was the best avocado country on earth, Archibald had always maintained. The hills stood almost eight hundred feet above sea level, picking off the river breezes and the rain clouds that watered the fruit. Much of it was steep terrain, the decomposed granite soil draining beautifully. Now the air was pale and rank. Norris’s father told him that three Fallbrook citizens had died in the fire — a dad and two young children. What kind of man stays behind in a wildfire with two young ones? he asked.

“You can see where the fire burned through Big Gorge,” he said, gesturing with his tumbler. “It was really screaming by then. I watched a pair of coyotes try to outleg it. The gusts were fifty miles an hour, all bone-dry and straight from the desert, so you can guess who won that race. L.A. was burning. Orange County, too. And San Diego — terrible fires south of here. Ours broke out last so it took quite a goddamned while to get help. Fallbrook Fire says it looks like a downed power line way up in Rice Canyon, fanned by the Santa Anas. San Diego Gas and Electric, of course, they’re on the hook if that’s true, so they’re saying it had to be arson. Either way, like a lot of the growers, Norris Brothers doesn’t carry crop insurance. As you know.”

Patrick looked down at the blackened swath of what they called the Big Gorge. He could see where the fire had jumped the dirt road and taken out ten acres of trees in a rough circle. It looked like a giant IED had exploded. Standing around the edges of the circle like witnesses were trees that had partially burned, portions of their trunks still carrying life and some branches untouched, their ash-dusted leaves fluttering in the breeze.

“Patrick, I don’t know if there’s anything you can do for your brother. But if there is, please do it. I’m at the end of my tether with him.”

“I’ll take him fishing. He likes that.”

“He became stranger every month you were gone. First the dope. Then Evelyn Anders. Christ. I wonder if he’s back on the drugs. He seems either high or low, no functional middle. And he spends almost all his free time alone in the bunkhouse. God knows what he does on the computer. I can’t get him to see doctors anymore. They all threw their hands up on him anyway.”

Patrick took a long swallow of the bourbon. He felt the same bottomless pull of it that he always felt but surrendered to only on occasion. Still, he felt that such an occasion would be soon at hand and it was something he’d looked forward to in coming home — a good peaceful bender. These people will miss the point of it, he thought, I’ll drink to remember the good things, not to forget the bad.

“As you know, I let Miguel go. I just couldn’t afford him after this. Now I need help rebuilding our groves and our business. And of course someone to take it over someday. My first choice is you, as it’s always been.”

“I don’t want it, Dad.”

“I’m trying to make you want it.”

“But I don’t. I know that’s an insult to you. I’m just not a farmer and never will be.”

“I hear no insult at all. But you’re actually a damned good farmer. Ten summers teach a boy a lot. I’ve got another five years of muscle left in me, if we can make it through this thing. You know, you could help me get this place up and running again and chase your dreams later. Plenty of time in the future to buy that boat and guide those clients and catch those fish. How much money have you socked away for the boat?”

“Eleven grand.”

“That won’t buy much.”

“If I start off in the bay I won’t need that much boat.”

“So, you mean a panga like the Mexicans use?”

“I need a center console, good decks for casting, and a trolling motor for stealth.”

“And you think there are enough fly fishermen around San Diego for you to make a living?”

“If I figured right.”

“There’s what, three or four other guys already doing it?”

“Two on the bay and two offshore for the big stuff.”

“Eleven grand?”

“A used boat for sure, Dad.”

His father squinted out at the charred hills. “Farming isn’t a dream, Pat. It’s just a living. Business was bad enough before this. Ag water was cut back thirty percent because of drought, so I had to stump thirty acres back in May. Yield is down but prices are okay. It killed me to let Miguel go. I actually cried. You realize he arrived here without even one dollar in his pocket because the smugglers had robbed him? They’d even taken his shoes. But your grandfather liked the look in his eyes and hired him on the spot, got him papers. He was with us for forty years but I had to let him go. My watch. Me. Of course, there’s still goddamned Lew Boardman across the valley hiring one hundred percent illegals, so his bottom line doesn’t look half bad. He only lost a couple of acres. But even without the drought and the fire, this place isn’t worth near what it was before the recession. And I can’t break it up and sell it to a builder, not with the twenty-to-one zoning we’ve got. I don’t think I could sell it for that purpose anyway, in good conscience.”

“I don’t think you could, either.”

“I haven’t listed it but I told the realtor six months ago I’d entertain offers in the three million range. We had some interest. Then, three months ago, a two million dollar offer from a Newport Beach doctor. Of course I told his realtor to go to hell. A day after the fire came through, he dropped the offer to a million-three. It’s an insult offer. It would cover our debt and leave us with very little. Our cash flow is down to almost nothing. We lost a big part of last season’s paycheck to the frost. And of course, because of this fire, our spring fruit probably won’t develop.”

Archibald sighed and shook his head in the closest thing to defeat that Patrick had ever witnessed. In him Patrick saw himself some decades from now. He tried to imagine himself here in Fallbrook as a grower, but he could conjure to mind no more than rough sketches of this land and a small town, and the faint silhouettes of what might be a family. They seemed like the drawings of a child.

Suddenly the artillery on Pendleton boomed. Patrick saw a blast of bright light and his ears roared as panic surged through him, then he fell. The roar grew and he was grappling with something, then everything disappeared — the fear and the sound, even the light. He lay on the burnt ground, breathing hard and covering his father. He felt his father’s heartbeat and smelled his aftershave as he disentangled from him and helped him stand. Patrick laughed quietly, partly in humor but mostly in embarrassment. His ears were ringing so loud he wondered if his father could hear. Sweat drenched his back and he tried to brush the soot from his uniform while his pulse settled. “Car doors slamming are the worst.”

“It’ll take a while, Pat. It’s hard to come back. But few things in the world will ever mean more to you than what you did over there.”

The “meaning” part still escaped Patrick but he knew that he had done his duty. And now it was time to do it again. Maybe this would mean something. “All right. I’ll do what I can here on the farm, Dad. But there’s a condition — we bring Ted on board. He’d love to pitch in. It’s what he needs.”

“He’s not fit for it. I don’t mean to be judgmental.”

“Then don’t judge. He knows you don’t believe in him. But it’s time to try again anyway.”

“He posted hateful things about the mayor. I can’t go into Fallbrook without feeling notorious.”

“If we work his ass off he’ll be too tired for nonsense like that.”

“I’ve tried, Pat. A thousand times I’ve tried. I don’t need to catalogue his failures and his utter lack of attention.” Patrick considered the double meaning of “attention.”

“We’re just putting him to work, Dad. It’s the right thing.”

“Okay. He’s your responsibility. It shames me that I can’t pay either of you.”

“Ted can drive the taxi evenings and weekends. I can probably deliver pizza again.” Patrick felt constricted, as if by a large snake, and he could see his dreams puff right out of him and vanish into the foul air.

“You were just eighteen when you left. I’m very damned pleased with you, son. Very.”