Wild Instinct

43

Jesse buries himself in his phone as Daniela heads up the freeway for Orange.

She holds her red Corvette to five mph over the speed limit, feels that lovely powerful rumbling in her gut.

For the first time in her adult life, she feels happiness is coming to get her, just around the corner.

Almost literally.

Jesse hasn’t said much to her for three days now, since his arrest in the parking structure and bailing out. He’s been gaming in his room, texting with Lulu and three friends from school, according to TeenShield, which she monitors studiously, even when her son is in his room.

She feels his emotions strongly. His numbness and detachment and isolation. But he carries no rage that she detects. She expects him to disappear from home suddenly and completely, but quietly.

Just as she did when it became obvious that the almost Virgin Dani would be giving birth.

Simply a matter of moving from one world to another, enlarging her four dimensions into five.

Reconstituted, reconfigured, reborn.

Is there a ray of light in all his numbness and isolation? she wonders.

Yes, Jesse’s willingness to appear before a grand jury to answer questions about Bishop Buendia has taken Daniela by surprise. She thought that his fear of Buendia and the Mexican Mafia, and his apparent loyalty to the Barrio Dogtown Vatos might blunt his instinct for self-preservation.

Not so, she thinks.

Is Jesse finally learning to think for himself?

How can you think for yourself if you don’t know who you are?

But it would be a miracle, she thinks, one of the many that she has prayed for, regarding her only begotten son.

She pulls into the driveway of Father Tim’s tract home in Orange, stops at the gate. Notes that the high wall of white oleander is freshly trimmed.

The gate rolls open and Daniela parks in front of the closed two-car garage.

Jesse looks up from his phone, studies the neat fifties ranch-style house.

“What’s this? Why are we here?”

“There’s someone who wants to meet you. Come with me, Jesse.”

He sighs, sweeps his phone, searches for the Corvette door pull, which is inset and hard to see.

When he gets the door open, Daniela is waiting. She takes his hand and helps him unfold from the low, sleek cabin.

“What’s that smell?”

“Orange blossoms. The world used to smell this way.”

“Hmm.”

Jesse sees the tall man waiting on the porch, the front door open behind him.

Jesse steps onto the porch with his mother.

Studies the man’s somehow familiar blue eyes, his thick black hair brushed back and peppered with gray, his blue jeans and running shoes, his dumb-looking pink tennis shirt with the crocodile on it.

“Jesse,” says Daniela. “Meet Timothy Malone, your father.”

44

Gale and Dylan Deming throw the football back and forth on the Capistrano Valley High School field on a breezy Saturday morning in November.

He’s a chunky ten-year-old, straight black hair to his shoulders, five-feet two-inches tall already, a hundred and fifteen pounds. Baggy yellow shorts, a Cougars tee, red running shoes.

Gale’s impressed by his balance and sure feet, and his strong delivery of a regulation PACWest college football, which was Gale’s introductory gift to him just three weeks ago.

Handy with a football, indeed.

Nice spirals, occasionally.

“Put it out in front of me!” calls Gale, cutting across the deep green turf to snag the boy’s wobbling pass.

Gale pulls up and lofts the ball back to Dylan, who barrels forward and smothers it and hurls it back in a high, beautiful spiral.

Gale turns and runs under it, looking back over his shoulder, watching the brown ball descend through the blue autumn sky. He ignores the tug of his old scars, the fragments still there inside him long overgrown by his flesh, a part of him now.

Makes the grab.

They sit in the bleachers and swill athletic drinks.

“Next Sunday I can take you on patrol,” Gale says. “Show you my old beat, when I first got on with the sheriff’s.”

“Good.”

“Maybe get lunch after. Santa Ana’s got top-notch taquerias.”

Dylan Deming, a stout boy of few words, nods.

Gale, not much of a chatterbox himself, watches a silver jet climbing from John Wayne Airport, its white tail dissolving.

What is there to say?

“I like hanging with you.”

Dylan nods again, looking up at the jet.

Gale drives him home, watches the big boy lumber toward his apartment, on the porch of which his mother waits.

Dylan stops and turns and holds up his ball up for Gale.

A trophy, he thinks.

Gale sits on a hilltop boulder out near Caspers Wilderness Park, looking down at what was once to be the city of Wildcoast and is now a gaping cavity brimming with orange-vested, hard-hatted miners with battery-powered jackhammers.

They swarm in and out of the mine on four different staircases rather than the single one that Gale, Mendez, and Geronima used just a few short weeks ago.

From this distance they look like ants, excavating the earth one grain of sand at a time.

Beyond the huge pit, at the base of the mountains where Gale had looked into the tan eyes of the Killer Cat, enormous earthmovers and backhoes now rip the mine wider and deeper. Gale hears the distant roar of their diesels and the violent shear of iron on rock. Sees the black exhaust rising and disappearing into the gray sky.

He lowers his binoculars and pictures the cathedral of lithium crystals. He remembers the strange, almost silver light down there, the bone-littered beach of an underground ocean under his feet. It’s hard for Gale to convince himself he actually saw it. He wonders how far and deep it will prove to be, with the help of these industrious, well-equipped ants.

All the way to the Pacific, then under?

The cavern of crystals below the earth that is a resting place for spirits on their way to the afterlife.

Legend is truth, and truth is legend.

Sacred places, thinks Gale.

Full of fortune beyond measure, that will give us ants the energy to devour the world that gives us life.

A sleek silver helicopter lowers from the sky into the rising diesel exhaust of the excavators.

Through his binoculars Gale recognizes the Tarlow Company logo, a stout green oak tree standing alone on a plain of yellow earth.

The chopper circles and lands, and old Hal Teller hunches under the blades as he trots through the swirling dust.

Gale notes the wobble in Teller’s eighty-year-old body, pant legs flapping.

He glasses the boulder-strewn mountains surrounding the pit and sees the Killer Cat lying high in a patch of sun, not far from where he saw him that first day.

The age-bleached face and chewed ear, the tan eyes.

The big cat looks down at the excavators, then yawns and rolls slowly onto his back, wriggling his rump on the warm ground, tail flicking.