The Harder They Come

12

THE WHOLE IDEA OF a vacation, of a travel vacation, was to clear out the cobwebs, put your troubles behind you and come home refreshed. Well, it hadn’t quite worked out that way, had it? As he reminded Carolee every chance he got. His stress level was so high the first week home he had to go to the doctor to check on his blood-pressure medication and see about a refill on his Xanax, which he never took anymore, not since he’d shut the door behind him at the high school for the last and final time. It wasn’t enough that they’d been attacked or that the ship had been delayed in Puerto Limón for a full twenty-four hours while the Costa Rican bureaucrats conferred with the cruise line bureaucrats and the State Department flunkies so that when the boat did finally get to Miami they’d missed their flight to San Francisco or that the flight they did manage to get on was delayed for three hours because of fog on the other end — no, it was the press, the press was the real and continuing plague because they kept the whole thing going when all he wanted was to turn the page and forget about it. They didn’t care what he wanted. They never even asked. They just came after him.

Within an hour of his walking out of that room in the bowels of the ship, even before he and Carolee had got through the first bottle of Perrier-Jouët sent compliments of the captain and delivered by Kristi Breerling herself, his cell began ringing. Exhausted — wiped — and half-drunk too, he wasn’t thinking and just put the phone to his ear and rasped, “Hello?”

A voice came back at him, an unfamiliar voice, distant but clear. A man’s voice. “Mr. Stensen? Sten Stensen?”

“Yeah?”

The voice gave a name and an affiliation and without pausing to draw breath began hammering him with questions, each more inane and intrusive than the last—“What was it like out there? How many of them were there? How do you feel, you feel any different? You are a senior citizen, right — seventy years old, is that right? A war veteran? Did the alleged attacker say anything to you? He had a gun? Or was it a knife?” He tried to answer the man’s questions as patiently as he could, though Carolee was hissing at him to hang up and all he could think of was the cruise line’s slogan—Experience World-Class Indulgence—and wonder how in Christ’s name this reporter had managed to get his cell number, but finally, after a question about his service record—In Vietnam, was it? — he broke the connection even as the call-waiting light flared and he shut the thing off and stuffed it deep in his pocket.

“Who was that?” Carolee demanded.

“I don’t know. Some reporter.”

It was dark out over the water. They’d pulled the sliding door of their private veranda shut to thwart the mosquitoes and whatever else was out there — vampire bats, he supposed. The champagne in his glass had gone warm. He took a sip and made a face — it tasted like club soda with a dash of bitters and no more potent.

Carolee was giving him her severe look, her mouth drawn down and her eyebrows pinched together, a crease there in the shape of a V she’d been working on for sixty-four years now. “You don’t have to talk to those people,” she said.

The glass went heavy in his hand. He could barely hold his head up. “Yeah,” he said, “and you don’t have to swat flies either.”

Of course, part of the problem that first week was that he couldn’t seem to say no. He was a celebrity, an instant celebrity, the story plumbing some deep atavistic recess of the American psyche, and forgive him, because he knew it was wrong in every way, but after the third or fourth interview he began to feel he was only getting his due: Ex-Marine, 70, Kills Tour Thug; Quick Thinking Saves the Day; Costa Rica Tour Hero. If he stopped to think about it he would have been ashamed of himself — he was being manipulated, and worse, glorified not for any virtue, but for a single act of violence that haunted him every time he shut his eyes — but he didn’t stop to think. He’d never been interviewed on the radio before — or on TV either — and that shot up the stress level, of course it did, but he went through with every request until the requests began to trickle off in the wake of newer and riper stories, the mass shooting of the week, the daily bombing, the women imprisoned as sex slaves and all the rest of it.

There were calls from Hollywood too, producers making promises, naming sums, gabbling over the line like auctioneers — and that was what this was, an auction, make no mistake about it — but none of them ever followed through and he never received a letter from a single one of them let alone a contract or, god forbid, a check. But he didn’t want a check, didn’t want to be inflated any more than he already had been — who in his right mind would ever want to see a movie made out of his life, anyway? The camera pans down the street to focus on a frame house in need of paint in the sleepy lumber town of Fort Bragg, California, and there he is, ten years old and emerging from the front door to do something dramatic like walk to school, and here’s his mother calling to him like June Lockhart in Lassie, then we shift to the high school years, the junker car, the prom, Vietnam, college and Carolee, the birth of their son, student teaching, the rise up the rocky slope to the great and shining plateau of school principal, and all of it circling round the cruise ship and the blighted dirty jungle and one climactic moment to justify it all, this American life. Who would they get to play him — Sean Connery? Tommy Lee Jones? Travolta? Absurdity on top of absurdity.

As it turned out, he did agree to one TV appearance, gratis, with a station out of San Francisco, which sent one of their newswomen and two support people to the house and filmed him sitting in the rocker on the front porch with the blue pennant of the ocean flapping in the distance. When it aired that night on the six o’clock news, he saw himself loom up on the screen like something out of one of the Japanese horror flicks he’d loved as a boy—Rodan, maybe, or Godzilla—his eyes blunted, his face scaled and gray and his big fists clenched on the arms of the chair as if he was afraid of falling out of it. Were you scared? the TV woman asked him and he said he was too angry to be scared, his voice like the leaky hiss of an air hose. It all happened so quickly, she prompted. Yeah, he rasped, looking into the camera with his face absolutely frozen, something like that. And you just reacted? Yeah, he said, I just reacted.

By the second week, things had died down to the point of extinction as far as the press was concerned, but he couldn’t go anywhere without somebody giving him a thumbs-up or calling out to him, people he didn’t even know. It was as if he belonged to them now, the whole community, as if he’d graduated from being a retiree and homeowner to another level altogether. And that might have given him some satisfaction — it did — but somehow all he could see was Adam’s face, twisted in a sneer. Big hero. Yeah. Sure. That about summed it up. What was he going to do, run for mayor?

And yet still, at odd moments and always while Carolee was out or occupied elsewhere, he couldn’t resist googling his name to see what would come up. Most of the articles repeated the same information (and misinformation, one adding ten years to his age and another spelling his name variously as Sternson and Stevenson), but every once in a while he would find something new, a detail revealed, a tidbit that put everything in a fresh light as if the incident were reconstructing itself for him like a jigsaw puzzle. He was at it one fog-obliterated afternoon, surfing away, the world reduced to the dimensions of the screen in front of him, when he came across an article he’d somehow managed to overlook (or maybe it had just been posted, who knew? — the internet worked in mysterious ways). This was a fuller account of the AP story that had appeared just about everywhere, and as he scanned it, his eyes jumped to the one detail the other reports had left out as if it had no significance at all: the name of the dead man. To this point, he’d been anonymous — the thug, the mugger, the thief — and now he had a name: Warner Ayala. And more: here was his biography, compacted in two lines of print. He was twenty-four years old. A resident of Jamaica Town. He’d built up a long rap sheet of minor crimes from the age of twelve on and he was a suspect in a string of attacks on tourists and local residents alike. Or had been. Warner Ayala. And here was his movie, here was his life.

“Warner,” he repeated to himself, saying it aloud like an incantation, “Warner,” and all at once he was thinking of the parents, the siblings, cousins, grandparents, a father like himself who was mourning his dead son even now. It was as if someone had crept up and struck him a blow from behind, all of it rushing back in that instant, the sun, the mud lot, the fierce unrelenting intimacy of his body entangled with this other one, and he felt so filled with self-loathing and despair it was all he could do to lift his finger to the off button and make the whole thing disappear.

It was three-thirty in the afternoon. The fog sat in the windows. It was very quiet. The blank screen gave him back a ghost image of himself, of his ravaged face and unfocused eyes, the presence still there, still awake and alert and corrosive, even as he pushed himself up from the desk and the world came back to him in all its color and immediacy. Paneled walls. The den. The framed photo of Adam, eleven years old and holding a stringer of half-grown trout aloft with a smile uncomplicated by anything beyond the joy of the moment. Another picture there, of him and Carolee, squinting into the camera against a fierce tropical sun and no older than Adam was now. And another, of his mother, dead twenty years and more, a ghost herself. Next thing he knew he was in the kitchen, washing down a Xanax with a cold beer, and then he went into the living room and started a fire, as much for the cheer as the warmth of it. He felt hopeless. Felt like shit. The pill wasn’t working or the beer or the fire either.

For a long while he just sat there, moving only to stir the coals, the clock on the mantel ticking louder and louder and the fire hissing and the four walls closing him in until some sort of curtain seemed to lift inside him, dark to light, and gradually he began to come out of it. Here he was, still ambulatory, with his mind intact, or mostly so, sitting before a fire in the shingled ocean-view cottage they’d traded up to get — and get at a steal, jumping on it when the recession hit and the values plunged. Even better: he’d finally managed to escape Fort Bragg, winding up here in the religiously quaint little tourist village of Mendocino, population 1,008, where you could get fresh-baked bread every morning and afternoon and the world’s best coffee anytime you wanted. Enough, already — he wasn’t one to feel sorry for himself. What was done was done. Move forward. Shake some pleasure out of life. He got to his feet, groggy from the beer and the pill, but inspired suddenly: he was going to call Carolee and tell her to come home, right away, because he was taking her out to dinner — at the Bistro, the place she liked best.

Her phone rang but she didn’t answer and it went to voicemail. “Call me!” he shouted into the receiver and then rang the number again. She was down in Calpurnia, helping out at the animal preserve there where she liked to volunteer two days a week, but it was getting late — past five now — and they would have fed the animals already, wouldn’t they? Or shoveled up the shit or whatever they did? Maybe she was in the car, maybe that was it. He was trying to picture that, his wife, driving, the fog strangling the headlights, her gray serious eyes fixed on the road, which was slick and wet and deserted, when she picked up.

“Hi, Sten,” her voice breathed in his ear, “what’s up?”

“Where are you?”

“I’m just getting in the car.”

“Good. Great. Because I’m taking you out to dinner at that place you like.”

“The Bistro?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s the occasion?”

“We’re going to celebrate.”

He heard the muffled thump of the car door slamming shut, then the revolving whine of the engine starting up. “Celebrate what?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I just feel like celebrating. Life, I guess.”

There was silence on the other end.

“You there?”

The faint distant crunch of gravel, tires in motion, then her voice coming back to him: “Sounds fine to me.”

“Okay,” he said, “okay.” Everything was precious suddenly, his life, her life, the lives of the animals and of everybody else out there on the slick wet roads. He felt so overwhelmed he could barely get the words out. “You be careful out there, huh?”

The restaurant was in Fort Bragg, eight miles up the road from Mendocino. It occupied the second floor of a brick building the size of a department store that had once housed the operations of Union Lumber and it was floor-to-ceiling windows all around so that if you got a window table you could sit there and eat and feel as if you were floating over the whole town and the ocean too. Though it was the middle of August and the tourists were out in force, they got a window table without having to wait at the bar because the hostess was a former student at Fort Bragg High and recognized him, though he didn’t recognize her. “Who was that?” Carolee asked, once they were seated.

“Beats me,” he said, looking up at her, feeling good, if a bit shaky still. “At this point, they all look the same to me.”

There were menus, drinks, a basket of hot bread. He went through the bread without even realizing what he was doing, hungry suddenly, though he hadn’t got a lick of exercise all day.

“You are hungry,” she said. “Don’t tell me you didn’t eat any lunch?”

He ducked his head, grinned. “No, I had something.”

“What?”

“I don’t know — a sandwich. Or cereal, a bowl of cereal.” The fact was, he couldn’t really remember. He had a sudden vision of himself laid out flat in a nursing home, gasping for breath, all his vitals dwindled down to nothing. Old man. He was an old man. “But tell me, how was it down there,” he said, to cover himself, “—they get any new zebras in? Or what, giraffes? Or are they fresh out over there in Africa?”

“Same old,” she said. “But really, I don’t know why you have to make fun of them. If it wasn’t for the Burnsides and a handful of people like them, people who care, those zebras and antelope would be gone from the face of the earth.”

“Then why don’t they send them back? Because that’s where they belong, isn’t it? I mean, zebras in Mendocino County — give me a break. What does he think, he’s Noah or something?”

She was having a martini, three olives on the side. That was her trick: olives on the side so you get more gin, a matter of displacement — or lack of it, that is. She took a long slow sip, watching him. “That’s the idea,” she said. “Eventually. When things are, I don’t know, more stable over there.”

“Right,” he said, and he felt his spirits crank back up and it had nothing to do with the Xanax, or did it? “Because they’d just eat them now, right? Probably the minute they got off the boat.” The mountain zebra was almost gone in its native range, he knew that much, and the Grevy’s too. The kudu weren’t doing all that much better.

“Stable,” she repeated bitterly, sweeping her hair back. “It’s a joke over there. Places like Sudan or Somalia, even Kenya. Everything’s guns. Tribes. Guerrillas.” She paused to back up and give it an exaggerated Spanish pronunciation: “Gare-ee-yas, I mean. Not gorillas — gorillas we could use more of. A whole lot more. But that’s the mentality over there — shoot everything that moves.”

“Over here too,” he said.

She was silent a moment. Then she said, “What are you thinking of having?”

“Me? Fish. What about you?”

That was when he glanced out the window to the street below and saw Adam climbing out of an unfamiliar car that had just pulled up to the curb — a Japanese thing, pale blue, that suddenly became familiar, because here was that woman, what was her name, emerging from the driver’s side to join him on the sidewalk. From this angle — he was right above them — he saw only the crowns of their heads and the flat plateaus of their shoulders, Adam’s head shaved to the bone and glowing in the light trapped beneath the fog. The woman — her name came to him then, Sara — wore her hair parted down the middle, a crisp white line there as if her skull had been divided in two. They seemed to confer a moment and then started across the street to the pizza place and the bar there, Adam in the camo outfit he seemed to wear perennially now and Sara in jeans, boots and a low-cut top that displayed the deep crease between her breasts, bird’s-eye view.

“Isn’t that Adam?” Carolee said.

“Yeah, he just got out of the car there.”

“Who’s that with him?”

“Sara. The woman I told you about — from the other day?”

A silence. The restaurant buzzed around them. They watched the two of them cross the street, mount the curb and disappear into the pizza place — the pub that sold pizza, that is — Adam hunching in ahead of her, no thought of standing aside or holding the door, but that was only typical, that was only to be expected, that was Adam.

“She’s old for him, isn’t she? She’s got to be forty.”

“That’s his business.”

“I mean, what’s she even doing with him?” She was leaning to her left, at the very edge of the table, squinting to peer out the window, though there was nothing to see but the closed door and above it the neon sign doing battle with the fog. “She’s a piece of work herself, is what I hear.”

He just shrugged, took a sip of his martini. He’d given up worrying about Adam a long time ago — or at least he’d tried to. Adam had problems. He’d always had problems. There’d been shrinks, a whole succession of them, but once he turned eighteen they had no control over that, and even after the last time he’d been arrested and evaluated by a state-appointed psychiatrist they still couldn’t get access to the records. Privacy laws. He was an adult. Living in his own world. And while that world had its intersections with theirs and they did what they could — helped him with money, gave him a place to live where he could have some privacy and do his thing, whatever that might be, putting up walls, obsessing over the Chinese, calling himself Colter — he kept pushing them away till there was no point in it anymore.

“Cindy Burnside says she’s got some pretty strange theories; I mean, really out there — as in right wing? As in conspiracies? Anti-everything? You know she got arrested for refusing to show a cop her license and registration?”

“She’s fine,” he said. “He’s fine too.”

“Fine? Where’s he going to live when we close on my mother’s house? With her?”

He didn’t have a chance to answer because the waiter suddenly appeared with two fresh drinks, two more martinis, which would put them both over their self-imposed limit, if they were going to drink wine with dinner, that is — and they were. But there was the tray, there the perspiring glasses, there the waiter, smiling. “We didn’t order those,” Sten said.

The waiter — fiftyish, in white shirt and tie, his hair slicked tight to his skull — gestured to the couple sitting two tables over. They smiled, waved. Did he know them? “Compliments of the gentleman and lady,” the waiter said.

“I don’t want another martini,” Sten said. “I’m not even half-finished with this one—”

“They want to buy you a round,” the waiter said.

He wanted to say For what? Why? I don’t even know them, but they were already raising their glasses to him and here was the man giving him the thumbs-up and then the peace sign — or maybe it was the V-for-victory sign — and he said, “Yeah, sure, okay,” and in the next moment he was raising his glass in return.

“That was nice,” Carolee said.

“Real nice,” he said, and he couldn’t keep the sarcasm out of his voice.

She must not have caught it because the next thing she said was, “The sturgeon sounds good,” and then, in non sequitur, “I thought Adam wasn’t supposed to go in there? Piero’s, I mean.”

“That was a long time ago,” he said.

“They don’t eighty-six you for life?”

He stared into the fresh martini — and he wasn’t going to rush even if it was getting warm before his eyes because he wouldn’t have strangers dictating his life to him — before he looked up and said, “If every time somebody got a little rowdy they eighty-sixed you for life all the bars in the world would be out of business.”

“A little rowdy?” And here was that look again, the one that bunched her eyebrows. “I’d say he was more than a little rowdy — and what did that wind up costing us?”

He felt the irritation come up in him, despite the Xanax, despite the gin and the whiff of vermouth riding atop it. “I don’t know,” he said. “Can’t we talk about something else?”

13

THE NEXT MORNING, EARLY, he found himself back in Fort Bragg, at the grocery there — the cheap one, the one the tourists didn’t know about — pushing a cart and working his way through the itemized list Carolee had pressed on him as he went out the door. The place was over-lit, antiseptic, as artificial as the flight deck of a spaceship, and at this hour there were more shelf-stockers than shoppers. That was all right. He liked the early hours, when things were less complicated. He’d been up early all his life and though everybody said the best thing about retirement was sleeping in, he just couldn’t feature it. If he found himself in bed later than six he felt like a degenerate, and he supposed he could thank his mother for that. And his father. The work ethic — once you had it, once it had been implanted in you, how could you shake it? Why would you want to? Relax, he kept telling himself. Keep busy. Relax. Keep busy. The last thing he wanted was to wind up sitting in a recliner all day staring at the TV like some zombie or pulling on a sun visor to chase a golf ball around the fairways with a bunch of loudmouthed jocks. Or bridge. He hated bridge, hated games of any kind. But how did you relax? That was the problem he was trying to resolve — and certainly world-class indulgence wasn’t the answer.

He seemed to have a package of meat in his hand, T-bone steak, slick and wet and red, and when he set it in the cart, there was a fine glaze of blood on his hand, and no place to wipe it off. Some stores provided paper towels to ease the unpleasantness of this little reminder of precisely where that steak or chop or chicken breast originated, but not this one. He stood there a moment, rubbing the pink glaze over his fingertips before surreptitiously wiping it off on the soft plastic wrapper of one of the packages of hamburger buns stacked on the display case behind him.

When he turned back to the cart, reaching down to reassemble the things there and check them against Carolee’s list—1 % milk in the plastic jug, pickles, cookies, more meat, pasta, beans, rice — he felt the twinge in his lower back again, the muscle there balky still. It seemed to bother him more in the mornings, stiffening up overnight despite the form-fitting neoprene pad Carolee had stretched over the mattress, but then he hadn’t slept on that pad or in that bed — their bed — the previous night. He’d wound up on the narrow single bed in the guest room because Carolee was in one of her moods. And it wasn’t all her — he’d been in a mood too, absolutely. And why? Because after they’d finished their celebratory dinner, she’d insisted they go across the street and into the pizza place where Adam was, where Adam had been for the better part of an hour. “For an after-dinner drink,” she said, taking hold of his arm as they came down the stairs at the restaurant.

“They don’t have after-dinner drinks there. Only beer and wine, remember?”

“An after-dinner wine then.”

They were passing by the bar on the lower level — the door swung open on muted lighting and inflamed faces — and he said, “Why not have one here? A real drink, a cognac or that Benedictine you like. I’m wined out, if you want to know the truth.” They were in the hallway now, moving toward the front door. “Or actually, I’ve had enough. More than enough. Let’s just go home, huh?”

She was chopping along in her short swift strides, tugging at his arm as if leading him on a leash. “I want to go to Piero’s,” she said.

And he stopped, right there, right at the door, to tug back at her. “Let it go,” he told her. “Drop it. He’s a big boy now. He’s an adult. You can’t just go around spying on him—”

“I’m not spying on him. I just want a drink at Piero’s, all right? Is that a crime?”

“No,” he said, “but stalking is.”

She’d jerked angrily away from him. “I can’t believe you,” she said, pushing through the door and out onto the street while he followed in her wake, the folds of her dress in violent motion, her perfume an assault on the damp night air, perfume he didn’t like, had never liked, perfume she wore just to make his eyes water. He made a note to himself to find the little bottle amidst the clutter in the bathroom and dump it in the trash when she wasn’t looking, but then of course she’d just go and buy another bottle and he’d dump that and she’d buy another one, a losing proposition all the way round. He hadn’t gone two steps before she swung round on him, combative, her legs braced, hands on hips. “He’s my son. Our son.” She took in a deep moist breath and blew it out again. “I just want to get a look at her.”

The fog softened the lights of the buildings up and down the street. There was no traffic. No noise, no sound of any kind. Even the ocean, no more than five hundred yards away, was silent, as if the waves had been sucked back down the beach before they had a chance to break. “Right,” he said into the stillness, “like we just happened to be passing by and got a sudden craving for pizza, at what — nine-fifteen at night? When we’re normally sitting in front of the TV and thinking about bed? He’s not stupid, you know.”

Her face was contorted, angry, the lines at the corners of her eyes etched in the faint tricolored glow of the neon across the street. “I’m going in there,” she said. “Whether you’re coming or not.”

What he did then was take hold of her arm — or no, he snatched it with a sudden jolt of violence that seemed to explode inside him. “You’re going nowhere,” he rasped, his voice locked tight in his throat.

She tried to pull away but he held on to her, his hand clamped just above her elbow, feeling the bone there, the humerus, and how weightless and weak and fragile it was. She was angry enough to curse him, except that she never cursed — in her quaint moral universe, women didn’t use offensive language, only men did. “Let me go,” she demanded, “you’re hurting me.”

He didn’t know what had come over him but it was all too much — Adam, Warner Ayala, the martinis sent over by two total strangers as if they could buy his approval, as if he’d asked for it or wanted it in any way, shape or form — and he just tightened his grip till all he could hear was the furious chuffing intake of her breath and the kick and scrape of her heels on the pavement. This was a dance, a kind of dance, more jig than polka, and it might have gone on till one or the other of them gave in, but then a car came up the street, headlights sifting through the fog to pin them there as if they were onstage, and he let her go. At which point she lurched back a step and then, without so much as a glance, stalked across the street and into the bar, leaving him with no choice but to follow.

It was a tiny place, claustrophobic, smelling of hops and cold sweat. There was an L-shaped bar that seated ten maybe, kitchen beyond it, a narrow hallway, a cramped array of tables. People were packed in shoulder-to-shoulder, chattering away in a percussive animal hum. In the old days there would have been a dense haze of cigarette smoke and a whiff of marijuana too, but if you wanted to smoke now it had to be outside, on the street. Behind the bar was a chalkboard featuring the brews on tap, with brief descriptions, the most pertinent of which seemed to be alcohol content. One of the ales, Sten noticed, was listed at 11.9 % alcohol by volume, which must have had a real kick to it, but then that was the point, wasn’t it?

Carolee was standing at the bar behind a cluster of people, mostly young, who were hunched over their elbows and their pints of stout, pilsner and ale. Nobody was drinking wine. And Carolee, her shoulders tense with agitation and her hair tucked haphazardly up under the collar of her coat, made no move to flag down the bartender. Her hands were clasped before her as if she were patiently awaiting her turn, when in fact her eyes were fixed on a table in the back, the last one down the narrow hallway which gave onto the restrooms and the rear exit. She was trying to be discreet, trying to look like a thirsty, gracefully aging woman who was only waiting for her pint of 11.9 % ABV ale, but she wasn’t doing much of a job of it — she just looked awkward, that was all. No matter. Adam’s back was to them. He was leaning into the table, apparently staring down into his beer, while Sara, her face animated, did the talking. And gesturing. She was really going at it, her face running through all its permutations, her hands dancing and fluttering as if she were directing traffic on top of it, and what was the subject? The problems horses had with their hooves? The DMV? Dogs? Or was she just talking, was she one of those people — women, for the most part — who just talk to round out the sonic spectrum? Which would have cast Adam in the role of listener, but then Adam never seemed to pay much attention to anyone, off in a trance half the time, as if it wasn’t words that had meaning but the sound itself, voices sawing away like instruments in an ever-expanding orchestra. Sten eased his way through the crowd and tapped Carolee on the shoulder. “Okay, you’ve seen her,” he hissed, “now let’s get out of here before she spots us — or Adam does.”

Carolee wouldn’t look at him. She made a pretense of studying the chalkboard. “I want a beer,” she said.

“A beer? I haven’t seen you touch a beer in ten years.”

“All right, a wine. A pinot noir. Get me a glass of pinot noir.”

There was music playing over the sound system, a thin drift of high harmonies rising above an insistent guitar, the volume turned just low enough so that you couldn’t actually hear it except at odd intervals, though you knew it was there. He shuffled his feet. Put his hands in his pockets. He felt bad. Felt conflicted. Carolee was going to get her wine, that was as certain as the law of diminishing returns, and he was thinking he could maybe maneuver her back toward the door, as far from Adam as possible, and hope for the best. But then what was he thinking? What was wrong here? Why couldn’t they just stop by their own son’s table and say hello as if they’d drifted in at random? (Yeah, they’d been to a movie and had a craving for pizza and what a surprise to see you here, but we won’t keep you, no, no, just go ahead and we’ll see you later, okay?) Because Adam wouldn’t believe them, that was why. Or maybe he would. You could never tell with him.

If all this was about making a decision, it was taken out of his hands, because Sara looked up then, her eyes languidly scanning the room, till they settled on his and then Carolee’s. He watched her face change. First she looked puzzled, as if she couldn’t quite place them, but then she smiled and waved and ducked her head to say something to Adam, who seemed to stiffen in his seat. His head was down still, the muscles at the back of his neck bunched, but he didn’t move or respond. He might have been frozen in place, might have been a statue. There was a lull. The music emerged. Somebody shouted out something inane, the way people tend to do in bars. And then, very slowly, Adam turned in profile to glance over his shoulder. The look he gave them — his parents, his own parents — shaded from incomprehension to hate, to a look of such ferocious contempt you would have thought they’d come to tear the flesh from his bones. In the next moment he was up and out of the seat and hurtling down the hallway, past the kitchen, past the restrooms and right on out the back door. And Sara, the horse lady who was fifteen years older than he was and no paragon herself, gave them a fleeting apologetic smile before she snatched up her purse and hurried out after him.

But now it was morning and Sten was in the supermarket, arching his back to take the crick out of it, Carolee’s list clenched in one hand and the steak seeping blood at the bottom of the cart, getting on with his life. Eggs. Hadn’t she mentioned something about eggs? He scanned the list, her handwriting a neat rounded script that flowed like music on the page, handwriting that was as familiar as his own, but he saw no eggs listed there. What the hell, he was thinking, reaching for the carton anyway, thinking better safe than sorry, when he became aware that someone was standing right there beside him, too close for casual contact, someone who started off as a pair of running shoes and shorts climbing out of the floor and turned out to be Carey Bachman, who used to teach social studies at the school till his wife’s cosmetics business took off and made earning a paycheck extraneous. He was in his mid-forties, with a narrow slice of a face dominated by his milky protuberant eyes (“Fish-Eyes,” the students had called him behind his back) and he was dressed in a T-shirt though it was fifty-eight degrees outside and colder in here, what with the refrigerated air of the meat and dairy displays, and he should have been smiling, but wasn’t.

“Carey,” Sten heard himself say.

Still no smile. Sotto voce: “Hi, Sten.” A glance over his shoulder, conspiratorial. “Listen,” he said, “you see what’s going on here?”

See what? What was he talking about?

Carey led with his chin, eyes up, then down again, and Sten looked across the aisle to see three — no, four — Mexicans pushing a pair of overloaded carts. They were dressed in work clothes — boots, jeans, long-sleeved shirts — and each wore a brand-new Oakland A’s cap pushed back on his head with the bill jutting out at an odd angle, as if it were a fashion trend. Other than the caps, which they might have got at a ballgame at the Coliseum the night before, there was nothing to distinguish them. Three were young — teenage or early twenties — the other middle-aged. They could have been anybody. “Yeah,” he said, “I see them. What’s the deal?”

Carey gave him a look of disbelief. “What’s the deal? ‘Take Back Our Forests,’ that’s the deal. Remember, you came to the first meeting? Before you went off on vacation — on that cruise?”

It came back to him now, though so much had happened in the interval he’d completely forgotten about it, and even if he hadn’t he still couldn’t fathom what Carey was talking about. It was seven-fifteen in the morning. He’d had too much to drink the night before. The overhead light cut into his eyes. “Yeah,” he said. “So?”

“This is just what we were talking about. This. Right here. Right now.” Carey was having trouble containing himself, but he dropped his voice as the Mexicans wheeled past and turned into the next aisle over.

Sten saw that their carts were loaded with staples, four-pound bags of Calrose rice, dried pinto beans, cellophane-wrapped boxes of instant noodles and what looked to be half the ground meat in the store, but still he just stared at Carey, the moment unwinding in slow reveal. Take Back Our Forests had been Carey’s idea — his and Gordon Welch’s, who managed the local B. of A. branch — and it wasn’t a vigilante group, not at all, a designation they’d bent over backwards to deplore. No, it was a citizens’ group — an association of concerned citizens, property owners, businessmen, locals all — that had risen up spontaneously in response to what was going on in the forest. The drug cartels — La Familia, the Zetas, Sinaloa — had come north, had come here, to grow marijuana on state and federal land, bypassing the need to smuggle product across the border, and in their wake they’d brought violence to the Noyo Valley, to Big River and the Mendocino National Forest. And worse: they poisoned everything, putting out baits for rabbit, skunk, deer and bear, even poisoning the streams. The calculus was simple: a dead rabbit wouldn’t be girding the base of the plants to get at the moisture there and a dead deer wasn’t going to browse the nascent buds — or a dead bear either or a marmot or a squirrel or anything else that ate, moved and breathed — and the best way to ensure that was just to poison the drinking supply. Hikers had been shot at. Fishermen. Hunters. People were afraid to go into the woods.

“I was out for my morning run,” Carey said, and then he broke off to crane his neck and peer down the aisle. “Mules,” he said. “These are the mules. You see what they’re buying?”

Sten shrugged. “Maybe it’s a church group. Maybe they’re going on a picnic.”

“Bullshit.”

They stood there a moment, blinking in the light. Sten wanted a cup of coffee, an English muffin, maybe a soft-boiled egg — and a nap, definitely a nap. He watched a heavyset woman who looked vaguely familiar — another early-morning shopper — stump by with a handbasket bristling with celery, seven or eight bunches of it, and wondered what that was all about — cream of celery soup? Carey put a hand on his wrist. “Listen, we’ve got to follow them, you know that, don’t you? To find out where the camp is—”

“Why not just call the sheriff?”

“Don’t be naïve. There’s no law against buying groceries. And even if they’re illegal, which you damn well know they are, the cops are prohibited from checking their status — they can’t even ask because it might abridge their precious rights, to which everybody is entitled the minute they set foot in this country, whether they’re drug dealers or not. The cops are useless, you ought to know that.” He was going to say more, all ready to go off on a rant, but he suddenly stopped himself, motioning with his eyes, and here came two of them with their cart that was heaped now with peppers of every description — jalapeños, serranos, green, red, yellow, orange — and a pyramid of tortillas in the family-sized packages, twenty, thirty or more. When they’d turned down the next aisle, heading for the checkout stand, Carey let go of his wrist and lowered his voice to an urgent whisper. “You got to help me out here.”

Sten was noncommittal, but he was aroused: more dark little men, more criminals. And here, right here in the U.S. He was no racist — he’d seen the demographic shift in the school population over the years, the Swedes, Norwegians, Italians and Poles who’d worked the lumber mills when they were a going concern giving way ever so gradually to the Hispanics who cleaned their houses, repaired their cars, stocked the shelves in the supermarket and made up the beds for the tourists, and it had meant nothing to him, immigrants in a nation built on them — but when they destroyed the land, drove people out of their own parks and forests, it was another thing altogether. He’d seen their abandoned camps deep in the woods, the mounds of trash, the carcasses of the animals, oil and pesticides leaching into the ground, the abandoned propane tanks and crude listing shacks. It was a matter of ecology as much as anything else. Save the forests. Save the trout. The salmon. The deer.

“We’re going to have to use your car. Because I told you, I jogged here”—Carey picked at the front of his T-shirt in testament—“and mine’s all the way back at home.”

“Follow them? Isn’t that a little extreme?”

“We stay back, way back. Just till we see what road they turn off on.”

“Then we call the sheriff?”

“Yeah, then we call the sheriff.”

14

THEY WERE DRIVING A new Ford XLT pickup, white, with Nevada plates and dust-streaked sides, which only seemed to confirm Carey in his suspicions, as if every Mexican had to be driving a beater prickling with rakes, shovels and blowers, as if it were a condition of their lives on this planet, as if the stereotype was the only type. “Stolen,” he said. “Bet anything.”

Sten just nodded. But it was odd, he had to admit it. He wanted to think they were traveling mariachis, the construction crew for some millionaire building a getaway in the hills, a church group, real and bona fide, but as he sat behind the wheel of the Prius in the parking lot, Carey at his side, and watched them load the groceries into the bed of the truck, he knew he was fooling himself. He’d tried to appear casual at the checkout stand as the girl there, a Latina with heavy purple eye shadow who might or might not have been a student at the high school, scanned his items. Hovering over the counter in his jeans and sweatshirt, he went quietly about the business of bagging his forty-two dollars and thirty-five cents’ worth of groceries, nothing amiss, the most ordinary thing in the world, but out of the corner of his eye he was watching the Mexicans in the next checkout lane while Carey kept a lookout at the door. They had a third cart he hadn’t noticed before, this one filled with plastic jugs of water, half a dozen twenty-four-packs of Tecate and a couple bottles of E&J brandy, real rotgut, not at all the sort of thing you’d take on a church picnic.

The men huddled there in their askew caps and they didn’t say a word, not to their own checkout girl or to each other either. They looked at nothing, at the wall, at the floor. When the customer ahead of them — the woman with the celery — had concluded her transaction, they came to life, juggling things from the carts to set them neatly on the rolling black conveyor belt. Sten took his time so he could study them, the three young guys doing all the work while the older one stood there watching the display on the computer screen as if totting up every item in his head. The bill, which the older man paid — in cash — came to over seven hundred dollars.

There was a row of cars separating Sten’s Prius from their pickup, and if they noticed him and Carey sitting there, they gave no indication. They were focused on what they were doing, and they were quick and efficient, the groceries transferred from the carts in minutes, and then the older man got behind the wheel while two of the younger ones slipped in beside him and the third sprang up into the bed in a single bound, nimble as a gymnast. Sten waited until the Mexicans had backed out of their spot, conscious of Carey, who’d gone quiet with the tension of the moment, and then put the car in drive and slowly followed them out of the lot. The street they were on — Franklin — paralleled the Coast Highway, which was the town’s main thoroughfare and lively with traffic this time of year, what with all the tourists either coming or going, even in the morning, especially in the morning, because tourists liked to get right up, gulp down their coffee, eggs over easy, three strips of bacon and hash browns and hit the road to invade the next charmingly decrepit coastal town before everybody else got there. He was surprised when the pickup turned left — no signal, just a lurch — and headed down the block to turn right on the Coast Highway, where they’d be more visible to any patrol car that might happen by. But then — and he had to remind himself lest he get carried away — they really hadn’t done anything, had they? Aside from pumping seven-hundred-odd dollars into the local economy, and what was wrong with that?

“Watch it,” Carey said, “watch it!” and he saw that he’d come up too close on them, almost rear-ended them in fact, swerving now, at the last moment, as the pickup — no signal — swung into a gas station and he rolled on by, the blood pounding in his temples and his hands locked on the wheel, trying his best to look innocuous. And old. Old and befuddled. No problem there.

Carey’s voice came at him again, insistent: “Pull over. Here. Behind that van.”

He flicked on the signal, did as he was told. The gas station was a block behind them. Glancing in the rearview, he saw the white truck ease up to the pump there and one of the men — the one in back — jump out to flip open the gas tank and insert the nozzle before hurrying inside to pay, in cash, because what drug dealer, what grower, would use a credit card?

“Jesus, Sten, what are you thinking? You almost hit them.”

And now he began to feel the faintest tick of irritation. He hadn’t had his breakfast, his groceries weren’t getting any fresher, he was tired and fed up and here he was chasing phantoms while Carey Bachman barked orders at him. “But I didn’t,” he said, and gave him a steady look. “Did I?”

They waited there at the side of the road till the pickup was in motion again, its blunt hood and massive grill nosing up to the street as a clutch of motor homes lumbered by, and then, without warning, the pickup was cutting across both lanes and heading back in the direction they’d come from and Carey, his voice rising, jerked up so violently in his seat the whole car rocked on its springs. “Cut a U-ey, quick, quick!” he shouted. “They’re turning left. Hit it, come on!”

The Prius was built for gas mileage, not the Indianapolis 500, but it had enough acceleration to get you through a tight spot if your reflexes served you and Sten’s did. He was able to pull out front of the first creeping motor home and slash a U-turn with a minimal squeal of the tires and a single admonitory blast of the startled driver’s horn, and he kept his foot on the accelerator until he was fifty feet from the tail of the pickup, which continued half a block south before making an abrupt left back up the street they’d just followed it down. All right. He slowed, hung back, watched the pickup continue straight on up the road, the sun just beginning to poke through in the distance to illuminate the world in a soft wash of color, and did his best to keep up without being too obvious about it.

Carey had gone rigid but for the bounce of one agitated knee. “They’re heading straight up into the hills,” he cried, his voice thin with excitement. “Didn’t I tell you? Huh?”

Sten wanted to say, What does that prove?, but he was feeling it now too, more certain by the minute that Carey was right, that they were onto something. A load of groceries like that? There wasn’t much up here, once you got out of town — a couple of ranches, deep woods, the Georgia Pacific property he or Carey or one of the others hiked twice a week to make sure nothing like this was going on, to report it, which was what they were going to do now, just as soon as they saw where the illegal operation was. He didn’t say anything, just focused on the white gleam of the pickup ahead of him, which wasn’t doing much more than forty-five or so. He eased up on the accelerator. Held tight to the wheel. A car appeared around the next corner, coming the opposite way, followed by a battered pickup, its bed stacked high with baled hay — horses out here, a smattering of cattle, chickens, turkeys (and weed too, that went without saying, but that was different because what people did on their own private property for their own consumption — citizens, American citizens — was nobody’s business but theirs). The Prius shook ever so slightly with the motion of their passing, and then the road was clear but for the white pickup with the shadowy figures inside and the man in back propped up against the cab and looking straight at them, his gold-and-green hat flashing in the light like a homing beacon.

Weed. The great lure of the North Coast, the Gold Coast, Pot Alley. They grew grapes in the Anderson Valley, but they grew pot in the hills. It had been going on as long as he could remember.

“They’re signaling,” Carey said, and his voice seemed to come out of nowhere, startling him. He saw that the pickup had its right blinker on and that it was slowing now to pull over on the shoulder in a tornado of dust and it took him by surprise. His first instinct was to hit the brakes, not knowing what else to do. “No, no, no, don’t stop,” Carey hissed, “whatever you do, don’t stop,” and here they were, right on top of them, giving him little choice but to continue on past, staring straight ahead as if the pickup on the shoulder was no more significant than the trees, the rocks and the litter along the roadside. He was going slowly, too slowly, and he could feel their eyes on him, arrogant eyes, angry, suspicious. “Goose it,” Carey said, and he was staring straight ahead too.

They drove on up the road, Sten snatching a look in the rearview while Carey slouched low in the seat so he could study the side mirror. The white pickup just sat there, the dust dissipating, and then they were around the next turn and it was gone. “What now?” Sten asked, and he wasn’t really asking, just thinking aloud.

Carey was agitated, hyper, frazzled with the adrenaline running through him, the way it was in battle, when your glands pumped chemicals into your bloodstream and action was the only off-valve to bring you back down again. “Just keep on,” he said, his eyes swollen in their sockets. “Or no, pull over. Pull over and wait till they go past again.”

Sten flicked on the blinker, looking for a spot up ahead, and there it was, a patch of bleached-out dirt on the edge of a dropoff, and in the next moment he was swinging onto the shoulder, generating his own tornado of dust. Unfortunately, he was barely off the road, the turnout so narrow the driver’s-side wheels were still on the blacktop, and he had a fleeting vision of a logging truck roaring round the turn to peel off the left side of the car — and how would he explain that to Carolee? Not to mention the insurance company?

The engine shut itself off, dutifully. There was no traffic. He lifted his eyes to look into the mirror. “What if they don’t come by? What if they already went past their turnoff just to fox us and they’re doubling back?”

Carey turned a stricken face to him and jerked his head round to stare out the back window, where the road lay silent and the sun swelled to brighten the surface till it might have been freshly oiled. “Just wait,” Carey said.

“Wait for what? They’re gone, I tell you.” Another glance in the rearview. The bushes gilded in light. The soaring trees. Everything as still and innocent as the beginning of time. “I’m for turning around.”

And then suddenly the pickup was there, rounding the bend, looming huge in the rearview. It gave him a jolt. He could feel his heart going. He snatched a quick breath and kept his hands firmly on the wheel, as if it were in danger of breaking loose and disintegrating before his eyes. The truck was moving at a good clip, but it slowed abruptly as it came up even with them and both he and Carey turned their heads to stare into the faces of the four men, no pretense now, the truck twice the size of the Prius, big tires, big cab, and it came to a halt right there beside them. It was a staring contest, that was what it was, and he was thinking they would be armed and why wouldn’t they be because this was no church group and these were no ranch hands, thinking What have I got myself into?

The man behind the wheel, the older one, had a face that sucked up the light, his eyes red-rimmed and sleepy, but the look he gave Sten was unmistakable. Sten had seen it all his life, on the football field, in the service, from the punks at the high school who thought they were men when they didn’t have the faintest notion of what a man was, the look that said, Don’t fuck with me. Five seconds, that was all there was to it. Nobody said a word, though the windows were down and the one in the passenger’s seat was close enough to spit on, and then the tires jumped and the pickup shot up the road to vanish round the next turn.

“Call the sheriff,” Sten said, and in that instant he had the car in gear and he was lurching out onto the roadway, pedal to the floor, something gone awry in him now, the switch thrown, and he could no more have turned around and gone back home than cut off his own hand. This was America, this was his turf, where he’d been born and raised, not some shithole in the jungle somewhere. “Son of a bitch,” he said.

And Carey? Carey was clutching at the passenger’s strap with one hand and trying to work his phone with the other. “Slow down!” he shouted. “It’s not worth it. Jesus, Sten, you’re going to kill us.”

The trees careened past, tight turns here, the coast far below them now, dips and rises, timberland, better than fifty inches of rain up here on the slopes each winter and thirty-nine below, rain that swelled the streams and percolated into the soil and pushed the biggest trees in the world — living fossils — up into the sky. The tires shrieked. Air beat in the window to slap at his face. “I can’t get any reception,” Carey said, as if it mattered, and then the white flash of the truck’s tailgate shone through the treetrunks up ahead and he eased off on the gas, in control now, because they might have had the advantage on the open highway, but here the smaller vehicle was more than a match for them.

He settled in behind them, giving them space — fifty feet, as if the Prius was equipped with an invisible tape measure, as if it was one of those super cars out of a James Bond movie. The one in back, his face a sharp blade of light beneath the upthrust bill of his cap, stared right through them as if it was all nothing to him, as if he wasn’t a criminal, as if he wasn’t going to go out there and open up cans of tuna and sardines laced with carbofuran to poison the bears and raccoons and fishers and anything else that dared get in his way. Well, all right. He was past caring about niceties now. He was going to follow them till the wheels fell off — or they ran out of gas. Yes. Right. And that was another advantage of the Prius.

Carey said nothing. He kept fiddling with his phone, though it was futile, any fool could see that. There was no reception here — they were in the middle of nowhere, what did he expect? Ten minutes drifted by, fifteen. Sten focused on the shifting white tailgate so fiercely it began to blur, swelling and receding, a ghostly thing, almost illusory, a thing that floated out ahead of him, snaking through the turns, vanishing in the dips and emerging again, no rhythm, no logic, just movement. He kept hoping for some traffic, for another car, for anyone to signal to or flag down, but there were no other cars on the road, not this far up, not today. The road narrowed, became a channel through a sea of redwood and fir, and still the pickup rolled on and still Sten sat fifty feet behind it.

And then, abruptly, the Mexicans pulled off on the shoulder and Sten hit the brakes, put on his blinker — pointlessly, but it was an old habit — and followed suit. There was a logging road off to the left and a hundred feet on and he wondered if that was their destination, if they had their camp somewhere in there and didn’t want to give it away. They were stuck, that was what he was thinking. Couldn’t go forward, couldn’t retreat. Check and mate.

After a while, the driver of the pickup shut down the engine. The sun climbed higher by degrees. Shadows shortened. A jay called from the woods. “What are they doing?” Carey asked. “Why are they stopping here?”

“See that road up ahead?” He indicated it with a thrust of his chin.

“You think that’s where they’re headed?”

Sten shrugged. His stomach rumbled. “They’re in a spot now. They hadn’t counted on us being here, that’s for shit sure.”

Another fifteen minutes ticked by on the dashboard clock. And then finally, inevitably, the driver’s door of the pickup flashed open and the older Mexican stepped out and started back down the road toward them, his steps slow and measured, the cap still at the same jaunty angle. His face was flat, boneless, almost as if it had been scooped hollow, and his nose was flat too so that Sten wondered if he’d once been a boxer. Or a rodeo clown.

The man came up to the window and leaned down to look in at him. “You need help?” he asked, his accent slow and stopped-up so that “help” came out as “hell.”

“No,” Sten said, shaking his head for emphasis. “No, we’re fine.”

The man seemed to consider this a moment, his look unwavering, a hint of menace seeping like a tincture into his squinting brown eyes.

“How about you?” Sten said. “You need help?”

Sighing, the man drew himself up and said, “No, we doan need no hell,” and then he looked off in the distance as if to find the words there for whatever was to come next.

Carbofuran. It was one of the deadliest pesticides known to man. A couple drops of it would kill you. And what happened to the bears? They died clawing at themselves, their guts on fire.

“You sure?” Sten said.

Another sigh. The man bent to look in the window again, his eyes hardening. It was then that he let the flap of his shirt fall open so that Sten could see the polished wooden handle of the revolver tucked in his waistband, but that was a mistake and it was going to cost him because he didn’t know who he was dealing with here.

Sten shoved open the door so suddenly the man had to step back, and then he was out on the naked strip of pavement, unfurling himself to his full height so that now he was the one looking down. “You know what this is?” he demanded and he could feel it coming up in him all over again and there was no stopping it, though the man shot a look to his compatriots, who flung open the doors of the pickup even as the acrobat in back sprang out and began coming down the road toward them and Carey hissed, Sten, come on, it’s not worth it, let’s go. “This is America, you son of a bitch. The United States of America. You get that?”

The man rocked back on his heels, his eyes locked on Sten’s, and for a moment Sten thought he was going to spit at him the way the prisoner had in Costa Rica, but that didn’t happen and a good thing too because he was a beat away from losing it. Here was guilt. Here was the shit of the world come home to roost right here in the redwoods. The man scuffed his boots on the pavement, then swung round without a word and started back for the truck, his arms outstretched to usher the other three along with him. Sten watched them climb back in. The doors slammed. Sun glinted off chrome. And the truck sat there — and so did Sten — till the minutes became hours and Carey, in over his head, talked himself hoarse on the theme of giving it up, of getting out of there before somebody got hurt, because they weren’t vigilantes, were they?

Finally, and by now it was past noon, the pickup’s engine roared to life and the driver cut the wheels hard even as the man in back — the acrobat — leapt down and started up the road on foot. He was lithe, tall, rabbity, and by the time the driver had turned the truck around and started back down the hill, he was jogging up the road, the bill of his cap pulled down tight now, fashion sacrificed to exigency. “Where’s he going?” Carey wondered aloud.

Sten didn’t answer. He just put the car in gear, swung a U-turn and followed the pickup back down the road, all the way down, past the supermarket and back out onto the Coast Highway, where it turned north and kept on going. At speed. And here was where the big engine had the advantage, though Sten tried gamely to keep up. By Cleone, they’d lost them, but Carey got the 911 dispatcher on the phone as soon as they were in range. “What do I tell them?” he asked, his face blanched and the armpits of his T-shirt soaked through with nervous sweat.

Sten went silently through the list of crimes — Being Mexican; Driving a New Ford XLT; Buying Too Many Groceries; Acting Suspicious — but he was already signaling, already looking up the road for the next left so he could turn round and head home. It was one-twenty in the afternoon. The meat was rotted, the milk gone sour. And the eggs. Nothing worse than the smell of rotten eggs. He turned to Carey, Carey with his bouncing knee and too much white in his eyes, Carey in his jogging togs, Carey the vigilante. “Just tell them they were brandishing a weapon,” he said. “That ought to do it.”