The Boys from Santa Cruz

4

It didn’t take long for Pender to grow bored with the chanting. Nor could he shake the mounting sense of dread that came with sitting in an open clearing, surrounded by a dark forest, hearing God knows what all rustling in the underbrush. He felt like a sacrificial goat tethered to a stake, listening for the tiger’s approach.

Opening his eyes to peek around the circle, he saw that everyone else had their eyes firmly closed, even Skip, whose eyelids were twitching like a dreaming dog’s. He remembered an old joke about the moribund shopkeeper whose family had all gathered around his deathbed.So who’s watching the store? was the punch line.

Special Agent E. L. Goddamn Pender, that’s who, he told himself, climbing to his feet. Glancing downward while dusting off the seat of his slacks, he experienced a peculiar sort of Alice-in-Wonderland effect. His Hush Puppies appeared to be much smaller and farther away looking than he was accustomed to, as if his legs had grown absurdly elongated.

It only lasted a second; when he looked again, his lower extremities had resumed their customary proportions. But something still wasn’t right. Time, or his memory, started missing beats, skipping like an old vinyl record. He had no memory, for instance, of leaving the circle or crossing the clearing. But here he was, hiding behind a tree at the edge of the woods.

Then out of the confusion, a burst of clarity.Asmador, Pender reminded himself with an effort, don’t forget Asmador. From where he crouched in the underbrush, he could see clear across the field to the gap in the trees that marked the trailhead. But what were the odds Charlie “Asmador” Mesker would come waltzing down the path in plain sight?Slim to none, as Sheriff Hartung used to say, and I don’t see no nuns around here.

No, if he’d been smart enough to escape capture thus far, Mesker would certainly be smart enough to cut off the trail long before he came into sight of the clearing, then circle around and approach the clearing from clover-No, cover! From cover. They don’t even rhyme, those words.Cover and clover. Lots more songs about clover though.Roll me over in the clover do it again. And I’m looking over a four-leaf clover. Or, as they used to sing when he was a kid, I’m looking over my dead dog Rover, Who lies on the bathroom floor. One leg’s broken, the other one’s lame, Dah-dah-dah-dah, He got run over by a railroad train.

Pender’s mind wandered back to 1952 Cortland, he and his gang playing soldiers in the woods, wearing plastic G.I. helmets and gunning down Japs with their Daisy rifles.Bang! I got you! No, I got you first. Lie down, you’re dead. No, you lie down, you’re-

A crackling in the brush wrenched Pender back to the present.What’s the matter with you? he asked himself.Can’t you concentrate on the job at hand for five goddamn minutes without…drifting…

Looking around, he realized suddenly that he could no longer see the clearing. Everywhere he looked, every direction he turned, three hundred and sixty degrees of trees, trees, and more trees, stretching outward to infinity. Pender held his breath, listening, and heard the forest-or was it the universe? — breathing all around him, expanding with every inhale, shrinking with every exhale. When he looked down again, his feet were so tiny and far away he could hardly see them.

And that’s when it occurred to him that he’d been drugged, involuntarily dosed with LSD. Suddenly he was afraid, more afraid than he’d ever been, except for when he’d nearly blinded himself with a firecracker when he was a kid. This was worse, though, because not only was he afraid, he was afraid of being afraid.

But you didn’t eat the crouton, his mind protested.You never even had it near your mouth.

Which meant what? That Stahl had played him like a Stradivarius. Don’t eat the crouton? Ha! The crouton was a straw man, a red herring. A red straw herring man. Because the LSD was in the grape or the water-that was the how of it. As for the why, Pender realized with a sad, sinking sensation that it didn’t really matter.Stahl, you stupid fuck, he thought, more in sorrow than in anger.You stupid, stupid fuck.