Angry Buddhist (9781609458867) (10 page)

 

I
t's after midnight and Jimmy and his former police force colleague Cali Pasco are seated on the sofa in his trailer listening to Waylon Jennings on the stereo
.
Cali drinking a beer, Jimmy sipping herbal tea. Their relationship has always been within respectful professional boundaries so, although neither will acknowledge what has taken place this evening as anything more than two former co-workers spending some time together, the hours have passed with the ease of a marble rolling down a chute. At Pappy and Harriet's, a barbecue joint deep in the hills north of the Morongo Valley, they had danced to a country band and ate and danced and drank, or, Cali drank and Jimmy wanted to, but didn't, then they danced some more before Jimmy started telling Cali about the
Book of Dogs
and Cali asked when he was going to show it to her
.
After stopping at a market to get one last beer, Cali followed him home in her Green Volkswagon Jetta. Now the book is on her lap and she's flipping through the pages.

“Tell me about this one,” she says, pointing to a picture of what looks like a Chow-Shepherd mix. A strand of hair falls over Cali's eyes and she delicately places it behind her ear. Jimmy notices her graceful fingers for the first time, the unblemished skin, clear polish on the nails, a thin band of silver on her thumb.

“Owner's house had been robbed.”

“How about this one,” pointing to an old beagle.

“Two guys have an antique store downtown. Dog's name is Oscar.”

“Why'd you start doing this, making the book?”

“Something to do after I left the force, help chill me out.”

Keeping the book on her lap like she doesn't want to let go of it Cali takes her boots off, first one than the other, places them next to each other on the floor. “What was it that happened with you and Hard, exactly?”

Jimmy exhales, thinks about whether he wants to get into it, such a pleasant night so far. He takes a sip of tea, leans back and considers. This is a barometer. The way Cali reacts will tell whether they're going out together again. Bruno wanders over and puts his head on Cali's thigh. She scratches behind his ears.

“I was doing a search and seizure in a joint operation with the Sherriff's Department at a meth lab in a trailer east of town and we got two dogs with us. One of the suspects, this wiry tweaker is cuffed. He's standing there all agitated and for no reason he kicks one of the dogs. Well the dog doesn't like that and he bites the guy's ankle, draws some blood. Just a flesh wound.”

“I remember when this happened. Didn't realize you were involved.”

“He was a citizen in custody and he claims the dog attacked him. Now Mr. Meth Dealer's suing the town and the lawyer for the city council is all over Chief Marvin telling him he needs to show he values the lives of everyone in his jurisdiction, and that means criminals, too. So word comes down from Hard that the dog is headed for death row. This didn't go over well cause I worked with the animal and I liked him, but I kept my opinions to myself. Some whiny please-sir-don't-kill-the-doggie speech wasn't gonna fly. Kind of surprised by Hard's attitude about this dog, though. The man has a Rotty he loves. So I tell him I'll take the dog on his last ride, bring him down to the animal control station for the trip to Dog Heaven. I pull into the Animal Control parking lot and park but I leave the motor running and I don't move. I'm thinking the only way to do this is do it fast.

“My wife left me, I'm living in a trailer, I got this dog and now I'm supposed to kill him? Before I know it I'm crying. Then I feel this cold wetness on my neck and I look over and see the dog's face right next to mine. So I take out my cell phone and lean back in the car seat to get a better angle. I snap the dog's picture before I slip the choke chain over his head and lead him across the parking lot and into the building. They got the walls decorated with framed posters of kittens and puppies if you can believe it. Lady named Coral works there and I hand her the choke chain.

“I could tell Hard was pleased when I put this cardboard box with the dog's ashes on his desk. He showed the box to everyone who came into his office, even took a picture of it and sent it to the Mayor and the Town Supervisor to show them Chief Marvin was on top of the situation. So it kind of bites Hard in the ass a few weeks later when he's going over some routine reports from Animal Control and he doesn't see the dog's name listed. I'm staking out another meth lab with the Sherriff's Department when Hard calls me, wants to know what the hell's going on, was the dog dead or alive? And he had better be dead, Hard says
.
I knew lying was pointless so I say I couldn't kill that dog, Chief. And Hard says What'd you do with him? I tell him I took the dog down to Anza-Borrego and set him free in the desert. You set that dog free? And I say In the desert, Chief. He's got to be dead by now.

“He's waiting for me back at headquarters, curses me out, says I'm suspended pending further investigation. That's when I tell Hard I'm gonna throw him out the window.” He pauses. “Here's something I read in this Asian philosophy book: wait long enough on the river bank and you'll see the body of your enemy float by.”

Cali nods, takes this bit of ancient wisdom in. Jimmy hopes to convey a sense of newfound depth, to make Cali understand he is no longer the guy she knew on the force but has morphed into someone more sensitive, someone with whom she could have sex and possibly not regret it in the morning. He's actually trying to become deeper, and it's a tricky transformation to convey. It wasn't something you could brag about without sounding like a fool. But to his relief, Cali doesn't pursue it. She wants to know: “What happened to the dog?”

“That's his head you're scratching.”

When Cali smiles he knows telling her every detail was the right decision. She gives a little laugh, looks at Bruno, then back at Jimmy.

“I'd like to think I would've done the same thing,” she says. “No way I could put down this handsome guy.” She rubs Bruno's head, nuzzles him. The dog licks her cheek, her nose, her eyelids.

Jimmy looks around the trailer, grateful that he straightened up before going out to meet Cali. The CD ends and he gets up and puts on Johnny Cash. When he sits back down he takes her hand and holds it. The stress and strain of his day-to-day are gone. To remain suspended in the night quiet of the trailer listening to the old school honkytonk music just looking into Cali's brown eyes.

“You're staring at me,” she says.

“Let's make a mistake.”

He kisses her and she kisses him back and then he gets up and they dance a little to Johnny Cash, Jimmy's hand on her waist, her palm on his shoulder, neither one of them saying anything, cheeks touching, sensing each other's warm breath. They kiss again and Cali's hands drift up and she slowly unbuttons the front of his shirt, one button, then another and Jimmy reaches under her blouse and unhooks her bra. He runs his fingers up the small of her back and around the soft curve of her hip and over her breast and she unzips him and takes him in her hand and then she says You got clean sheets? He tells her yes he does and keeping her hand where it is she leads him into the bedroom.

 

 

 

B
efore he gets to work in the morning Hard has to do some campaign business so he is out of bed earlier than usual. In the bathroom he locks the door. Dressed in cotton pajama bottoms, he turns toward the mirror. Twists his head to the side and delicately removes the bandage from his neck. Probes the distinctive tine marks of the still fresh wound with two fingers. Cursing Nadine once more under his breath, he shaves, taking extra care around the perforations. Then he showers and applies a fresh bandage.

He has distributed lawn signs to constituents around the district and has been disappointed by how few he has seen. This morning he intends to spend an hour knocking on doors and asking people whether they'd mind if he places Mary Swain signs in their yards. Vonda Jean is still pretending to be asleep when he walks into the kitchen.

Bane lays curled on his bed. Usually he is up scratching the door to go out but Hard assumes the unseasonable heat has tired him out. He pours himself a bowl of corn flakes, drowns them in milk and sits down at the kitchen table to read the morning paper. Out of habit, he scans the front page for some mention of himself. Nothing today. That will change on Elec­tion Day, he thinks with satisfaction.

At 7:30, the sun is already blaring. Halfway through his cereal, he looks over at Bane. The dog hasn't moved. He can sleep all day. Right now Hard wants some company. He calls the dog's name. Bane does not stir. Again, he calls, “Bane!” Louder this time.

Hard places the newspaper on the table and kneels by the dog. He rests his palm on the dog's chest. Instead of the steady rhythm of breathing, Hard feels a lifeless mass. Bane does not appear to have a pulse. He shakes the sleek body but the dog does not move. Places his ear to the ribcage. Nothing. Hard quickly gathers the dog up, a hundred and twenty pounds of flesh, sinew and bone, throws him over his shoulder, carries him out of the house and places him gently in the bed of his truck, jumps in the drivers seat, puts the cherry on top, and drives a hundred miles an hour to the animal hospital, dialing the vet's home number on his cell phone and telling the sleeping woman to meet him at her office right now, Bane Marvin does not appear to be breathing.

It takes nearly twenty coronary-inducing minutes to get to the Yucca Valley office of Dr. Amber Foyle, an attractive young woman with whom Hard would have been happy to replace Vonda Jean. But that is not on his mind this morning. Bane is his favorite member of the household and the dog's life must be saved at all costs.

Dr. Foyle has already unlocked the door and is waiting for their arrival. Hard comes dashing in like he's running an Olympic event, the large dog limp in his gentle arms. The vet tells him to place Bane on the examination table and he instantly obliges. The stethoscope is pressed to the dog's chest. Hard waits, his breath shallow and agitated. He cannot conceive of what could have happened. Bane is six years old and, at least until this morning, in perfect health. Hard has heard of puppies dropping dead but never an adult dog. They had taken a brief walk before dinner but nothing unusual had occurred.

Increasingly nervous, Hard watches as Dr. Foyle examines the inert animal. After nearly five minutes, she tells him Bane is dead. He has to sit down when he hears this. Although rough and insensate with humans, Hard genuinely loves his dog. Other than cheating on his wife, one of his few pleasures is taking Bane on long walks in the twilight, after the heat has died down, or in the dawn before the sun has lit the horizon. He doesn't need a leash, the dog walking along with him easy as water.

After a respectful pause, the vet asks Hard if he wants her to run some tests on Bane to learn what exactly has transpired, and he readily accedes. Hard is so downhearted by the morning's events, he neglects his plan for the lawn signs and instead drives straight to headquarters.

 

Every morning during the campaign, Randall and Maxon have breakfast at Rick's Restaurant and Bakery on North Palm Canyon Drive, a see-and-be-seen biscuits and eggs place popular with tourists and locals. Someone they know is always dining at a nearby table and the atmosphere is friendly and convivial. They review the day's schedule, share man gossip, and make plans to take over the world. It was during a conversation at Rick's seven years ago that Randall looked up from his breakfast
fajita
and told Maxon he was going to run for Con­gress. On the way out the door there are always hands to shake, backs to slap, and a day's worth of good feelings to be shared. These are all the reasons they are not there this Wednes­day morning but have gone instead to the Viceroy, an elegant small hotel a block north of downtown.

They are the only two diners eating breakfast in the pool area adjacent to the dining room. Randall is seated on a white leather banquette, Maxon opposite him. The pool deck is lined with yellow and white striped chaise longues, each with a rolled white towel at its foot. White flowers spill out of Roman urns mounted on plinths. Ornamental birdcages hang from trees. The Hispanic waiter arrives with their food—fruit salad for Randall,
huevos rancheros
for Maxon—and departs with a murmur and a nod. Maxon shakes a bottle of hot sauce over his plate
.

“What did you tell her?”

“I told her I'd take care of it,” Randall says.

His fruit plate remains untouched. Randall has not had much of an appetite since his wife's revelation the previous evening. He didn't sleep well and spent the dark hours envisioning different iterations of his career's end. Right now he's hoping the coffee will kick start his jangled system. Maxon glances around to make sure no one is within earshot. They're still on the early side of the breakfast rush.

Quietly, Maxon asks, “Is Kendra gay?”

“Hell, I don't know, and I don't really care.” This is expressed with a bravado that belies Randall's true attitude since no man so insouciantly accepts a wife's adulterous behavior unless it is for his personal delectation. Randall hopes Maxon does not see through his facade.

“Hey, brother, I'm just asking. Are we going to be dealing with a divorce?”

“No one's getting divorced.”

“Well, that's good. But you might want to think about leaving her after the campaign. No one gives a rat's ass about divorce. We just don't want it going on when you're running for re-election. It can get messy.”

“This flippin tennis teacher implies she has eyeball evidence of some kind of lesbo love session and I don't care how gay this town is, there's enough retirees and ex-military going to be freaked out that their Congressman's wife's gone to the dark side to cost me the motherflippin election.” Randall looks both ways, his features pinched in distress. Then he locks eyes with Maxon, says, “I mean, how's it going to look if one minute I'm hosting the Purity Ball and the next minute I'm married to a gay?”

This is not the kind of conversation Maxon was expecting to have when he left his perfectly restored mid-century modern rental in the Twin Palms neighborhood twenty minutes ago. A development like this right before Election Day is seriously bad juju. Not that it would have been better had the indiscretion come to light earlier. But he does not want it fresh in a constituent's mind as she reaches for the lever.

As a young buck Maxon had harbored his own ambitions as a candidate, but his inadequate hair, squint, and pasty Scandi­navian complexion are a hard sell in an era when the visual aspect of campaigning makes an attractive physical presentation a pre-requisite for high office. Voters don't want any leader. They want leaders who look like they play leaders on television, leaders like Randall. Maxon gazes in the mirror and sees a guy who sells menswear at Nordstrom's.

He was working as a political consultant in Sacramento when State Senator Randall Duke let it be known that he was looking for someone to run his first Congressional campaign. Maxon leapt at the chance. He had studied the masters of electoral hardball, those bare-knuckled, meretricious practitioners of evil for hire, and was keen to put the lessons to use on a broader playing field.

Six years ago, when Randall first ran for the United States House of Representatives, the seat was open because the incumbent had died in office. His opponent was a woman named Karen Niles. An attorney at a public interest firm who had successfully sued Riverside County to force them to provide better housing for the homeless, she was married with a young son. Her husband was a surgeon. Any political party would have been hard pressed to find a better candidate and she was viewed as a sure thing against Randall Duke who was thought to be callow and a little dim. But Maxon was able to turn a spotlight on a vacation to Egypt she'd taken with a woman friend ten years earlier and spin it into an Islamic-sympathizing fantasia that most observers believe caused her to lose the election.

“I do everything an incumbent's supposed to do. The Latino outreach, the domestic violence march, I'm leading the Desert AIDS walk for Pete's sake. And if anybody takes that the wrong way, I'm hosting a dang Purity Ball. I'm working on saving the Salton Sea, I'm a friend to the veterans, I visit every senior center in a hundred mile radius. And I don't just visit the seniors, Maxon, I visit the flippin gay seniors! Who else in Congress gives a crap about the gay seniors?”

“The gay seniors have great affection for you.”

The two men are silent for a moment. A party of four young male golfers wanders in and sits at a nearby table. Oblivious to Randall and Maxon, they're talking loudly of tee times and stock picks.

“Point is, I've been delivering the goods to my constituents for three motherflippin terms. I fly back from Washington every other week to listen to their problems. I do everything right and now I'm in this situation? With Mary Swain gaining on me and a lesbian snake lying in the tall grass waiting to sink her teeth into my foot?” Randall spears a pineapple cube and shoves it into his mouth.

“Somebody comes at you like this, you give them some money and they're right back with their hand out again,” Maxon says. He notices one of the golfers is looking their way. The man says something to his tablemates and they laugh.

“There aren't a lot of clean options,” Randall says.

“There aren't any clean ones. You want me to talk to her?”

“What's that going to do?” Randall asks, a streak of helplessness in his voice. Perhaps this really is the end. All political lives have an arc. Randall has always assumed his would be a long one, but it's an unpredictable business.

“Who is she?”

Randall takes a small spiral notepad and a cheap ballpoint pen out of his pocket, flips the pad open and jots something down. He tears the page out and slides it across the table. Maxon glances at the paper, the name written on it. There's also a place of business, a tanning salon. He's invested years of his career, prime years, in the Randall Duke brand and he won't see the brand damaged. No more House seat means no run for the Senate, no run for the Governorship. No good options. Play this wrong and Randall Duke winds up operating a couple of Baskin-Robbins franchises in Arizona, Maxon making sundaes. Maxon's not going to let this happen.

“I'll talk to her,” he says, folding the paper and sliding it into his shirt pocket.

“How're your
huevos
?” Randall asks.

“They're all right. Probably should have got the fruit salad, though. Don't need the carbs.” Then he gets the joke, smirks. “Don't worry about my
huevos
,” Maxon says. He digs into his pocket and removes his wallet.

“I'll get breakfast,” Randall says.

“I know,” Maxon says. He opens his wallet and shows Randall a gold law enforcement badge.

“What the flip is that?”

“Remember when you spoke to the California Law Enforce­ment Association? I got them to make me an honorary deputy.”

“You son of a gun.” Randall is still laughing about it when the waiter brings the check.