Iron River

35

Hood parked his Camaro in the improvised lot near the pond on Bradley Jones’s ranch. There were scores of cars and a charter bus and a place for taxis and limos to drop off and pick up. A passenger helicopter lowered to a pad cut in the woodland beside the pond. Beth Petty waited for him to get her door and they walked toward the barnyard in the late afternoon.

Hood held a blue box with a white ribbon under one arm and Beth held his other. He wore a new navy suit and a white shirt and a tie and new shoes that had cost him dearly. Beth wore a beige knit dress with cut mother-of-pearl worked into the fabric, and their surfaces shimmered in the sun. Her hair was up and she had sapphires in her ears and around her neck. When Hood had picked her up and first seen her lovely face and chocolate eyes and the joyous blue jewelry, he was speechless. Suddenly he felt alive, when all he’d felt since Mexico was numb. He had smiled for the first time since Batopilas.

Now as the ranch came into view, Suzanne Jones surrounded him, the memory of her or the ghost of her, but Hood saw no reason to resist it and he didn’t try to. She barged right in. He remembered the light in her eyes and the volume of her body and the taste of her and he had a strong feeling that there was something special she wanted to tell him on this, the wedding day of her oldest son.

In the barnyard an oval ring had been made of pipe rail, complete with heavy wooden walls and bleachers all around. It looked like a rodeo ring. White bunting hung from the rails and the grandstand and the rain gutters of the barn and from the ranch house itself and from the arms of the floodlights surrounding the arena and from the generators that would power them. The tremendous old oak tree was hung with hundreds of tiny lights that even in the midday sun twinkled like fireflies.

They walked into the shade of a huge white tent and onto the gleaming wood of a great dance floor. The stage was big and raised, and Hood recognized two of the Inmates, the bass player and the lead guitarist, arguing over monitor placement. There was a long table already heaped with gifts, and Hood added his. It was a heavy lead crystal vase etched near the base with the date and the words Bradley & Erin, Long May You Run. He had ventured into Tiffany’s in all innocence, and the vase had chosen him.

Beyond the gift table was the bar. The bar itself was forty feet long and backed by a wall of mirrored shelves six feet high and filled with booze, and the barstools were cowhide, many of them taken. Four very beautiful barkeeps were tending and talking with the drinkers. They were done up like saloon dancers. There was a huge punch bowl on a table near the bar, and the pale pink liquid poured from a pitcher held by a glass maiden and spilled down tiers of scalloped ponds to the final basin.

“I think I’ll start with the punch and work up to the bar,” said Beth.

“Good call.”

Hood dipped gold-trimmed goblets into the stream and handed Beth the glass and touched it with the rim of his. “It’s good to be here with you,” he said.

They drank and she studied him. “You look better than you did a week ago, Charlie. There’s a little something coming back into your eyes.”

“ Mexico took it out of me.”

“Maybe this day will put something back.”

“I’d like that.”

Another large tent was set up near the ranch house. At seven o’clock, with the sun lowering and the heat of the day broken by a distant onshore breeze, Erin came up the aisle through the neck-craning crowd, in a dazzling white satin dress with sequins and lace and a veil through which Hood saw her half-smiling face framed in the red ringlets of her hair and her eyes bright and composed and aware. Her maids were lovely.

Bradley wore a black notch-lapelled tuxedo with a black tie and cummerbund and he bore it as only a slender but well-proportioned man can do, making it casual and unimportant. He glanced at selected faces including Hood, his expression amused and alert. Hood studied Bradley’s retinue: little brother Jordan, Clayton the forger, Stone the thief, and Los Angeles County Sheriff’s sergeant Frank Cleary.

The service was Catholic due to the McKennas. The priest was round and big-toothed and smiled greatly. Hood found the ceremony overlong but moving. In his heart was happiness for Erin and sadness and some anger, too, because he believed that Bradley had already come to no good and that his foolishness would eventually harm her. Before he knew it, Bradley and Erin Jones were striding back down the aisle and the crowd was hollering with reckless abandon.

The warm-up band was Los Straitjackets, who played surf music and wore Mexican wrestling costumes. Hood was a guitar lover and he had played unpromisingly as a boy and always liked the reverbdrenched, double-lead twang of the Ventures and the Surfaris. When Los Straitjackets found a groove, Hood felt a giant metallic wave had broken over him, and notes of music were shearing off the walls to splash him.

He saw Bradley’s half brother, Kenny, just three years old now, race onto the dance floor and begin flailing about. His father, Ernest, watched him from the crowd, his big Hawaiian face stoic as an Easter Island statue’s. Hood had met them right here at this ranch two years ago. He could see that day. It had been his first assignment as an LASD homicide team trainee. He had driven way down here from L.A. to interview Suzanne Jones, whom he suspected of having witnessed a crime, and by the time he drove off forty minutes later, the path of his life had changed.

The dance floor filled, and Hood and Beth worked their way to the bar, where the dance hall girls were making drinks. The drinkers were two thick the length of the bar. Hood watched one of the bar-tenders take an ornate faceted goblet and pour an ounce of pale green liquid into it. Then she balanced a flat perforated spoon across the opening and set a sugar cube on it. Next she moved the drink to a small but elaborate stainless steel fountain. It looked something like a hookah. There were six of these bright contraptions set up down the bar. But instead of drawing smoke through the tube, the bartender set the drink under it and began dispensing drops of clear liquid over the sugar cube and into the green fluid.

“What’s the green stuff?” asked Beth.

“Absinthe. It was banned a few years ago. Now they’re selling it again.”

“Why the ban?”

“It was supposed to make you hallucinate, then go crazy.”

“Permanently?”

“Temporarily.”

“What’s in the dispenser?”

“Ice water,” said the bartender. She was blond and bustiered and pretty. “The sugar melts slowly and makes the absinthe taste better. It was a popular drink with European artists and writers.”

“What’s it taste like?” asked Beth.

“Licorice. From the anise.”

“I love licorice.”

Hood watched Beth talk to the bartender and wondered if she was perhaps fascinated by the science behind the ritual. Beth was curious about the way things worked. She loved learning new facts. Maybe this took her back to med school. Hood watched as the dripping ice water slowly turned the pale green drink a milky white.

“This is called the louche effect,” said the bartender. “It’s the precipitation of herbal essential oils used in distillation. This is what gives absinthe its color. There.”

“What proof is it?” asked Beth.

“This is one forty-eight, or seventy-four percent.”

“I could prep a kid for a tetanus shot with it.”

“The unique ingredient in absinthe isn’t alcohol but a toxin called thujone. This is derived from the bitter wormwood the liquor is made from. Oscar Wilde said of absinthe: ‘After the first glass, you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not. Finally, you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world.’”

“Can we have one?” asked Beth.

Hood held up two fingers, and the woman looked at Beth and smiled wickedly as she pushed forward the first drink. “Slowly. Let the thujone do its magic before the alcohol charges in.”

Beth turned to Hood and sipped it and smiled. “Licorice, Charlie.”

While Hood waited for his drink, he saw Bonnie Raitt and Lucinda Williams and Jakob Dylan and James McMurtry among the revelers and he realized that Erin and the Inmates were getting their music to some important ears. The bartender handed him his drink with a wink and he tipped her well. It tasted like licorice and racing fuel, extrapolating from the smell of dragsters he watched run at Pomona.

Hood and Beth danced two songs. The thujone made him feel as if his feet weren’t quite touching the floor, that he was light and swift. Sound was rearranged without spatial logic: The laugh of a woman across the room became a shriek in his ear while Beth right next to him was hard to hear and the music broke apart into shards of sound and rained down. But memories jumped him like muggers from the darkness and he saw Luna in the river and he pushed this memory away and he saw the soldiers piled on the dirt road to Batopilas and these he pushed away also and he saw Jimmy’s blank stare and Jenny’s tears as she begged for his life on TV and he tried to vanquish these, too, but they were strong and wouldn’t go away.

Then the Inmates walked onstage, followed by Erin in her wedding dress. The guests roared. The players took their stations, and Erin announced a song she’d written for Bradley. It was sweet and up-tempo and hopeful. The crowd quieted and Hood closed his eyes, and for three minutes, he believed what Erin believed, that the best was yet to come, that there would be love and hope in the world. For three minutes the bad memories couldn’t get in. They hit against Erin ’s voice like raindrops against a window and ran off dispersed and unnamed.

“Just beautiful,” said Beth.

Hood opened his eyes to see Owens Finnegan gliding through across the dance floor alone, on her way toward the bar. At first he wondered if it was the absinthe. Owens wore a silver gray dress the same color of her eyes and she gave Hood a glance as she disappeared into the drinkers.

“Who is she?”

“Mike Finnegan’s daughter,” he said.

“Do you know her?”

“We’ve met.”

“What is Mike’s daughter doing here?”

“Mike knows the groom.”

“Mike knows everyone, doesn’t he?”

“Apparently, yes.”

“Let’s have another drink, Charlie.”

She smiled at him and held up her empty absinthe goblet. Hood bore through the revelers to get two more drinks and when he got back to Beth, Owens was with her. They were laughing. Hood gave Beth her drink and offered his to Owens, who accepted. He introduced the women.

“Nice to see you, Owens.”

“What a surprise,” she said. “Do you know the groom or the-”

“I know them both,” said Hood. “Beth is Mike’s doctor at Imperial Mercy.”

“One of them,” Beth said.

Owens looked at Beth with her nickel eyes. “Thank you for taking such good care of him. I just left his room a couple of hours ago and he looked, well… bandaged. Anyway, I’m going to come and visit again next week. If I survive this drink. Wow.”

“Yeah, wow is right,” said Beth.

Hood went to fetch a drink for himself and when he came back, Owens was gone and Beth had a strange look on her face.

“What did that poor woman do to herself?”

“Mike said she lost all reason to live.”

Beth shook her head and sipped her drink, looking over the rim of the absinthe goblet at Hood.

They walked across the barnyard toward the ranch house. Revelers pounded down the dock of the pond and splashed into the black water. Two tractors with livestock trailers came up the dirt road toward the rodeo arena, and Hood saw the moonlit dust rise, then settle in its wake. Up near the ranch house, they walked among the hard-walled tents set up in the grass. Each had an unlit electric lantern waiting outside the door. There were already party guests inside some of them, their lantern light glowing through the thick fabric and spilling out from the mesh vents at the rooflines, and their laughter bouncing out into the night. Hood let go of Beth’s hand and clicked on the lantern and held open the tent door. Inside were two cots made up and a stand with folded towels and a wash basin and a soap dish and a water pitcher and cut flowers in a cobalt blue vase.

“Hubba hubba,” said Beth, leaning into him. “I guess they weren’t fooling about a three-day party. I think it might take me three days to get this second drink out of my blood.”

Later they dined on barbecued meat and fowl and fish, all grilled in halved fifty-five-gallon drums in which beds of mesquite and oak smoked fragrantly. Bottles of wine were carried in and placed amidst the platters, all open, with the white wine in damp clay canisters to keep it cool. The wineglasses stood in decorative inverted pyramids, but one of these was suddenly demolished by a man who fell over backward into it, his absinthe glass still half full and held out so as not to spill one precious drop.

The wedding party sat on a dais above the celebrants. Photographers shot pictures, and Bradley threw bones to the dogs, then at the photogs. Two of the Inmate roadies were dancing on the old wooden bar top and kicking unattended goblets into the air, glass slivers shooting through the lights like tiny comets. Hood ate ravenously. Beth spoke in fluent French, stood and told a joke in Italian, then sat back down embarrassed. After dinner and toasts, James McMurtry and the Heartless Bastards took up arms onstage and their first portentous notes issued forth from the amplifiers like the disturbance in advance of a hurricane.

Hood bought a dance with Erin with a crisp Ben and they did a swing to a song about a guy with an Airstream trailer and Holstein cow. Erin told him they were honeymooning in Moorea but that wouldn’t be for a couple of weeks because of some L.A. gigs that the label had added late, and Bradley had some things to do. After the dance, Erin kissed his cheek and put her hands on his shoulders and looked directly into Hood’s eyes.

“You’re important to him and to me, too,” she said. “Watch over him, Charlie. He needs you more than you know.”

Bradley came up behind her. “I need you more than I know,” he said, taking one of Erin ’s hands off Hood’s shoulder and kissing it gallantly.

“Thanks for coming, Charlie,” said Bradley. “It means something to me. It would have meant something to my mother, too. Our futures go together, whether she’s with us or not.”

“Congratulations to both of you,” said Hood. And for a moment his hope for them was stronger than his dread.

Near midnight the crowd surged outside where the rodeo arena was now bathed in the floodlights. The bulls shuffled and snorted in the pen adjacent. There was a black bull in the chute and it stomped and snorted and threw its haunches against the rails, and Hood could hear the crack of wood. When the stands were full, a cowboy climbed onto the animal. The crowd was yelling loud when the black bull exploded into the arena and the kid rode its fury up and down, casually enmeshed in the circling chaos of the animal until he was suddenly flung from it and he landed and rolled and made the wall. There were five more bulls and five more riders. Hood watched them through an absinthe glow, transfixed and grinning.

Then Bradley sprung down from his seat and walked toward the chute. Erin turned and ran from the arena. Bradley stripped off his tuxedo jacket and flung it to his little brother, Jordan, who ran to keep up with him and appeared to be instructing him. Bradley climbed atop the chute, and the crowd roared into the night, and he lowered himself onto the dappled gray-and-white beast. Hood could see the shine of Bradley’s patent leather shoes against the great flank of the bull and he watched Bradley take the rope as a cowboy instructed, and the cowboy spoke fast to Bradley, and little Jordan was speaking, too, and Bradley listened with lessening patience, then he shrugged and nodded to the gateman. A gray-white bolt shot to the middle of the arena and went into midair without seeming to have jumped. It landed and Bradley, with his one hand high and his other locked to the rope, crashed hard to the bull’s back. The animal twisted and launched itself into the air again and this time Bradley was thrown high. The crowd went silent as Bradley sailed. Hood watched the bull watch him. Bradley gauged his speed and his height correctly and he landed on his feet and pitched forward and bowed. The crowd burst into cheers. He bowed again, then heard the thunder behind him and scrambled over the wall inches ahead of the slashing black horns. The audience mobbed him, and two men began bashing each other with chairs out in the bar area, and another ran for the pond with a bottle of vodka upturned in his mouth, and a great Dane on its hind legs lapped the pink punch from the glass maiden’s bowl, and two of the saloon girls danced burlesque on the bar top, waving their bras overhead like pennants.

“One more teensy little absinthe?” asked Beth.

“I don’t see why not.”

Beth threw herself into the bar crowd, and Hood found the coffee station and got a triple shot of espresso. Erin and McMurtry were onstage with the Inmates and the Heartless Bastards and two of Los Straitjackets, singing a not quite synchronized duet that advanced like an armored column.

Hood and Beth danced a song that became two more, then a slow one that Erin had written. They leaned into each other, bodies warm and hearts flush. Beth guided Hood off the floor and collected her goblet and aimed him around the rodeo arena and up the sloping barnyard to the tent city. There she delivered him to a unit up near the brushy hillside, set apart and unoccupied and welcoming. He turned on the lantern and held open the door for her. She stepped past him into the tent, clicking the lantern off on her way by.