Iron River

26

The next afternoon, Bradley steered his Cyclone GT up the dirt drive toward his mother’s ranch house. It was now two years since her death, and his heart turned heavy and full as his old muscle car rumbled slowly along.

The ranch was in Valley Center, northeast of San Diego. It was eight acres of savannah and rolling hills, with a stream and a pond, a pasture and a paddock and a barn, and citrus and avocado trees loaded with fruit. It was wedged between two different tribal reservations. One road in, and this road was gated and locked. Upon his mother’s death, the ranch had become the equally held property of her three sons, Bradley, Jordan, and baby Kenny. Bradley had very generously cashed them out six months ago and made it very clear that they were welcome to come back and live there whenever they wanted, rent free, as his guests, in the home that the three boys had spent six happy months before their mother had been killed. He was in negotiations to buy twenty-five adjacent acres, beautiful acres, he thought, acres the color of lions.

He looked into the rearview and saw Erin in the Cayenne Turbo eating his dust. Her vehicle was loaded to the top with boxes of valuable things, as was his Cyclone, the bulk of their possessions to be coming later by moving van from their former home up north of L.A. Bradley glanced up again at his fiancée and smiled. Without trying in the slightest, she moved him.

He parked in front of the house, and Erin pulled in beside him. Clayton and Stone wandered in behind them in their own vehicles, also loaded with personal possessions. Two of the casitas at the far end of the barnyard were theirs. Always attuned to appearances, Clayton the forger had already painted his to match the barn-red with white trim. The other three remained pink as Suzanne had liked them.

Bradley climbed the stairs to the porch and unlocked the front door. This porch needs dogs, he thought. He swung open the door for Erin and he stepped in behind her. The new tiles were in and the house smelled of new paint. Sunlight barged through the windows, no drapes or blinds or curtains needed in this remote place. It had a rambling, open-floor plan thanks to his mother’s knocking out of walls. Her last live-in lover, Ernest, father of baby Kenny, was a full-blooded Hawaiian who was good with his hands and had converted the living room to a kind of tiki room with wood carvings and masks and torches and a bar and a corkboard wall displaying all manner of Hawaiian clubs and axes and spears and knives. She called it the party pit.

Bradley walked into this room and saw people in it, drinking and eating and carrying on until the early hours. Loud. He saw himself stealing beers and selling them to the other kids. He saw Ernest, on a bet, hurling one of the great spears through a beer can taped to the corkboard wall. Bradley had grown up enamored of the primitive weapons, and Ernest had left the tiki room intact as Bradley had asked him. Ernest was living in Oahu with Jordan and baby Kenny now, and on Bradley’s last visit, two-and-a-half-year-old Kenny was already getting the hang of the skimboard. They would all be at the wedding.

Erin turned and looked at him. “You okay, Brad?”

“Perfect.”

“She’s everywhere. This place has her crazy energy.”

Bradley found the spear slit in the corkboard, pushed a finger into it. “It came out the other side.”

“I know.”

“Mom was pissed. Not because of the hole but because she bet against him, that he’d miss the can from across the room. Lost five hundred bucks.”

“We’ll have good times here, too.”

“I wouldn’t mind if my brothers came back. Ernest, too, for that matter.”

“Just bet on him, not against him.”

They carried boxes into the big master bedroom in the back. They helped the movers get things into the right rooms, and for every box he carried and every possession the movers brought in, Bradley felt his old life in L.A. growing smaller and his new life in Valley Center growing larger. The only downside was Erin ’s long drive for gigs, but like Bradley, she enjoyed fast cars, and a performer’s hours would keep her out of workday traffic.

The movers were finished by evening. Bradley gave them beers and fifty bucks each for not busting anything. When Clayton and Stone headed out for dinner and gambling, Bradley and Erin ran naked down the dock and dove into the cool pond, then wrapped up in blankets and climbed into the tree house hidden high in the enormous barnyard oak tree. From here they could see the minor lights of Valley Center and part of an Indian casino miles away and the black foothills to the east. Along this skyline, the palms dissolved into the night. Bradley had had the foresight to cache a bottle of tequila and two glasses, so they sipped the agave drink and sat on the old tree house couch, watching an inverted quarter moon float up over the hills like a capsized dinghy.

Later they set up Erin ’s studio in one of the big rooms that Suzanne had made by knocking down walls between three smaller bedrooms. Bradley had installed skylights that opened and closed by remote, and screens to keep the bugs and birds and leaves out, so when they opened them, the warm summer air unfolded down on them, and looking up, they could see stars. The baby grand had been moved in and tuned the day before, so now came the guitars and amps and mikes and recording equipment and, as always in a musician’s life, the miles of black cord needed to energize them all. Bradley knew nothing of this gear, so he simply put things where she wanted them and stole looks at her and felt as he had felt a hundred thousand times before that he had been lucky in her, the luckiest ever.

“I’ve got some things to move into the barn,” he said. “I won’t be long.”

“Take your time.”

He unlocked and pushed open the sliding barn door. He turned on the lights. It was one big and mostly unbroken space, no stalls, his mother never having gotten the horses she wanted. She always used to say she was too busy for horses. She had been a hard worker, he thought with a wry smile. Two jobs: schoolteacher and armed robber.

Pigeons fluttered in the new light, and a handful of feathers sashayed down from the rafters. This would be his version of Erin ’s studio, a place for working on his cars and daydreaming and being alone. A place for hatching plans. Maybe a place for becoming a poet.

His phone buzzed on his belt. He took the call from Owens, listened to what she had to say, hung up. He pictured her face, the lunar eyes, the raised serpents of scars intertwined upon her wrists. She made him uneasy, but she had helped him before and now she was offering to help him again. Her father was an interesting little man, likely insane, but he raked Bradley’s nerves when he was around, and Bradley’s instincts told him the man could help him. He knew things Bradley couldn’t believe he knew. Bradley tried to trust people as little as he needed to, and Owens, with her vague history and uncertain circumstances, made this easy. He thanked her and rang off and holstered the phone.

Then Bradley looked at the floor where a double murder had taken place, and a sharp anger arose inside him. Bradley himself had discovered the bodies and in that moment had shed his boyhood. He was sixteen. His mother had been the target and the two men who had died, brothers, were men he had known and liked. Innocents, generous men. Later his mother had had the concrete replaced because the blood had soaked into it and left its eternal smudge that no bleach or broom or high-pressure hose could remove, but when she had seen the new wet gray concrete, she had them shovel it back out and replace it with the broken-up blood-stained slabs. Respect, Bradley knew, though his mother had never explained herself.

He drove his Cyclone GT into the barn, the Cleveland 351 rumbling low through the glasspacks. It was a perfectly restored 1970 and it shone beautifully under the fluorescent lights suspended from the rafters. He closed and locked the barn door. From the trunk he took a JVC television box and carried it over to the far corner. He set it on an old wooden table, then reached under the table and retrieved the key fob hung from a nail.

He again collected the TV box and walked to the opposite end of the big room, which was separated by sliding shoji screens. He used his foot to slide one open and walked in. This area was finished off with hardwood flooring and some comfortable furniture and a big-screen TV and a good stereo. There were bookshelves, mostly automotive pictorials and histories, and hundreds of car magazines, and many volumes of poetry, which Bradley enjoyed. Poems were the opposite of cars. Cars went fast, while nothing stopped time like a good poem. He had tried writing them. There were notebooks filled with them, almost one entire shelf of notebooks, but he had never written one he liked. Too much emotion. Not enough. Too much detail. Not enough. He kept trying. But he also knew that at his wedding to Erin, he would recite from Neruda and not himself, though she had asked him to read something written in his heart.

There was also a Ping-Pong table. He carefully set the TV box down on the floor, then took the paddles and ball off the Ping-Pong table and tossed them onto an old leather sofa. With the table clear, he hit the fob button. The concrete slab and the hardwood flooring that was cut away around the Ping-Pong table and the table itself, all rose six feet into the air and locked into place on four staunch hydraulic lifters. Bradley hustled down the steep narrow stairway with the JVC box and hit the fob again, which lowered the slab above him. He listened to the hiss of the hydraulics and then the final clunk of the concrete settling back into place. He smiled. He had built the door using the powerful lift assemblies from two trash trucks he had stolen in nearby Escondido. Driving the trash trucks away fast at night had been surprisingly good fun. It had taken him six backbreaking months to excavate the vault, using pick, shovel, and bucket. The labor and the thousands of trips up and down the ladder had left him ten pounds lighter and considerably stronger than when he’d last played football two years ago. And there was no feeling like the satisfaction of having done something with his own hands. Welding and cutting and working the steel had come easy to him, through his passion for working on cars. This trapdoor and the vault below were a secret that he had shared with no one.

He set the JVC box down and turned on the lights. The room was generous-twenty by twenty, eight feet from floor to ceiling. One wall was lined with three steel combination safes with a total capacity of forty-two cubic feet. The safes were bolted to the concrete floor and they were fireproof. There was a workbench along another wall, and a metal rolling shop chair. The worktop was orderly and sparse: two expensive digital scales, a vacuum packer designed for use on game, a rolled lariat, a Colt single-action revolver, an oily red bandana, a handmade Indian arrow with a small obsidian head, two rough-hewn wooden boxes in which Bradley could see the leather-bound book with no title on the cover and old clothes and old newspapers and photographs and a bandoleer with some of the bullets still intact.

Bradley picked up the TV box and moved it to the workbench amidst these oddities, then cut the packing tape with his switchblade. He folded open the top flaps and reached inside and pulled out a black velvet hood, which he set aside. Then he gently lifted out a heavy glass jar. He held it up to be face-to-face with the head inside, a man’s head, severed cleanly at the neck, a pale and lonely thing. The head was bald, and a layer of black hair lilted just off the bottom of the jar. The face could have once been handsome. Joaquin Murrieta. El Famoso. Bradley’s great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather. Although history said the bottled head was lost in the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906, Bradley had read in his mother’s journal that in fact it had been stolen from an exhibition hall one week before by Ramon Murrieta, one of Joaquin’s grand-sons. The leather-bound journal said that the head had been spirited down through the generations by Joaquin’s most kindred descendants. Now it was here. Bradley believed the head. He believed that it had had power over his mother, the power of the past, the power of blood. Now it had power over him. She had kept it right here in the Valley Center barn, stashed in a hidden attic space that Bradley had discovered when he was fourteen. She had never told him about it or how it got here, but she had tried to. He remembered her sitting him down for important talks that failed to contain the important. She would begin but couldn’t finish. The journal had told him more than its writer ever could, and Bradley had spent hours with it before and after her death. Now when he read the words, he heard them spoken by her voice. I anguish over my oldest son. He is clearly Joaquin’s spirit, as I am. But I don’t know if I want him to grow up Joaquin’s way or just be a normal boy, a normal man. What am I supposed to do with the legend of Joaquin? Does it continue through me to Bradley? Does it end with me? Do I give Bradley his truth? Do I hide it from him? Do I let him search for it? Talk about a pickle. I’ve thought about it and prayed about it and even tried to just forget about it but I can’t. Carrying history is a burden. I’d rather be robbing a fast-food place.

Bradley knew that she had died not knowing what to tell him of his history, but when he had seen the head and put the pieces together, he understood.

He set the big glass jar on the workbench beside the Colt revolver and watched the head bob slightly and the hair begin to settle.

“¿Cómo estás, el Famoso?”

He rolled the work chair over and sat in it and looked at the tableau upon the bench. He got up and took his mother’s journal from the wooden box and laid it down beside the head and the gun, then opened a drawer and took out a feather duster and swiped it over the bench top. He put the duster back and sat back and viewed again. As he thought about his mother and Joaquin and his coming wedding to Erin, Bradley’s heart felt full and sad and joyful all at the same time. These powerful emotions were exactly what all those notebooks were filled with, he thought, lame attempts all just to say what he felt.

Later he opened each safe and inspected the bales of vacuum-packed cash. He liked to run his hands over the packages. Because his payments from Herredia were often in small bills, they took up lots of space. He had laundered some of the money through Israel Castro, in Jacumba. Israel had several legitimate and illegitimate businesses and he was happy to work with Bradley and his money. Israel, as a notary public and a loan originator, had helped Bradley buy the Valley Center ranch for cash. Of the approximately one and a quarter million dollars that Bradley had earned in the last year and a half, only one hundred thousand remained in the safes. But he’d learned that fifteen grand a week, base pay, adds up fast. There was also money from stealing cars, but he had not been doing much of that with the wedding to plan and his new position as an arms procurer for Herredia. The deal for the Love 32s would earn him ninety thousand if everything happened like it was supposed to. Erin would be making better money now with the recording deal, but as Bradley had seen, musicians almost always either starve or succeed hugely. Clayton and Stone were freelance and they worked their asses off forging payroll checks and stealing cars, and as their land-lord and mentor and occasional muscle, Bradley took a nice tribute from them.

He smiled and shut the safe door and spun the locks. Proximity to cash and Erin made him feel secure and full of heart and wicked horny. He put the hood on Joaquin and took the empty TV box and hit the fob. He stood and proudly watched the door ascend into the barn light.