Savages

108

I couldn’t have done it.

A mantra Ben involuntarily repeats, his mind on continuous loop as he races to the grow house.

I couldn’t have done it.

Couldn’t have pulled the trigger on myself, even to save O.

Would have wanted to.

Would have tried to, but—

I couldn’t have done it.

With the mantra comes shame, and, surprisingly for the product of two shrinks, a derogation of his manhood.

You feel less a man for not blowing your own brains out? On command? Ben asks himself. As if you’ve ever equated masculinity with machismo. That’s crazy. That’s beyond crazy, that’s over the crazy horizon.

Yeah, but crazy is where we live now.

The Republic of Crazy.

And Chon would have done it.

Check that—Chon did it.

And what if

what if

what if

they had ordered Chon to shoot not himself but

Me.

He would have done it.

Sorry, Ben. But bam.

And he would have been right.

Ben pulls off onto the cul-de-sac in the quiet suburban neighborhood in the eastern reaches of Mission Viejo. The “Old Mission.” (Meet the new mission, same as the old mission.) The house is at the top of the circle, its manicured backyard separated by a wall from a long slope of chaparral that shelters rabbits and coyotes.

He pulls in to the driveway, gets out, walks up, and rings the bell.

Knows a surveillance camera is on him.

(Better be, anyway.)

So Eric knows it’s him when he comes to the door.

Eric doesn’t look like a dope farmer, he looks like an actuary. Short light-brown hair, receding on his forehead, horn-rimmed glasses. All dude needs is a pocket protector to be totally dweeb.

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

He walks Ben through the living room—sectional sofa, La-Z-Boy recliner, big-screen TV playing America’s Got Talent—and then the kitchen—granite countertops, oak island, stainless-steel sink—to the indoor swimming pool under its canopy of tinted Plexiglas.

There’s a fucking pool, all right.

With grow lamps, drip lines.

Metal halide—vegetative phase

High pressure sodium—flowering phase

A fecund hothouse.

Ben looks at his watch.

Motherfucker.

Realizes that his armpits are soaked with anxiety sweat.

“It’s all packed up?” he asks.

“Everything that’s harvest-ready.”

“Let’s get it loaded.”

A soccer-mom van, stripped of the backseats, waits out back. Ben and Eric load the kilos in, then Ben gets behind the wheel and starts the motor.

He has forty-three minutes to get to Costa Mesa.