Down Solo (12 page)

There is no time. There is only another step into shades of gray, and another, the sun a quicksilver plate in the sky. I will the body to move. I drop the rifle; it’s useless to me now. I wear the backpack on my chest, my daughter on my back, my shoes squeak wetly. I trudge onward and try to retrieve the pieces to the puzzle. Tanya, the conflicting geologist’s reports, Ratboy at the restaurant, riding my bike, the gun in the Mustang’s window, waking up at the morgue. Jason senior and his obsession with gold. There is no thread of coherence to it all.

Mindy’s hand twitches where it rests against my elbow. A good sign, I hope. A mound appears to my right, and a structure, a giant can on stilts. I struggle to put a name on it:
water tower
. I pass the two shacks and arrive at the main building. The body wants to quit. I’ve driven on fumes and flat tires to get where I needed to go, but now the wheels are coming off and we’re not going to make it any farther. I fumble with the door and turn right and shuffle across the room to the nearest bunk, turn and sit and ease Mindy onto the mat, brush back her hair and stare. I am void of thought or feeling.

Her breathing is shallow but steady.

I find myself standing at the workbench, with no memory of walking to it, and no intention. There is light but it seems dark.

I’m sitting in the chair, facing the mirror. In my hand are the long-nosed tweezers from the work bench. I don’t know why. I squint at my reflection and try to remember what I am looking at. For some reason, I’m sitting in a chair at the beach, across a card table from a man with closed eyes. He opens them and stares into mine and says, “Commune with your spirit to begin healing.” The beach dissolves and I am staring into my own eyes, my ruined cheek sagging, my hair plastered to the dried dust on my forehead, blood caked from my nose to my upper lip.

I don’t know anything about communing with my spirit. What I see is the enormity of my neglect, the denial, the procrastination, the hiding behind a haze of opiates; dishonesty, grasping selfishness, and isolation. It hits me with a clarity unthinkable just a moment ago: the fact of my pathetic condition even before Ratboy shot me. I am back on my bike, approaching my driveway, the silver Mustang creeping up behind me, the shot, the sting, the clattering of my bike and the impact of my head on the asphalt, and Ratboy’s voice: “Fuck you, turkey.” The roaring begins.

As the Mustang drives off, a shape appears against the night sky. It’s triangular, like a giant stingray, dark as the space between the stars. It spirals down from above me. The roaring sound intensifies. It obliterates everything else; sound, sight, and sensation are subsumed into the tornado, at the center of which is a weird peace.

And now a new memory, the next part of the sequence. Underneath the roaring I can hear a calm, informative voice delivering instructions like a CNN reporter reading off stock quotes. It seems to be telling me the rules of my new condition, but because of the hurricane I can’t decipher every word. I barely make out something about “re-integration with and repair of the body . . . retribution is allowed” and “killing of innocents . . . permanent dissolution.” I wonder about that phrase, permanent dissolution. How bad can that be, really? Isn’t that what Buddhist meditation is about? Isn’t that what every junky is looking for? And who is an innocent, anyway?

The shape hovers and recedes. The roaring subsides. I hear police sirens and see flashing red and blue lights. And then, oblivion.

I turn my head to the right and with the index and ring fingers of my right hand part the hair and spread the bullet wound. The hole is a little over a quarter inch in diameter. With my left hand I slide the tweezers in. They’re eight inches long and go halfway in with no resistance. I poke slightly upward, trying to feel for the metallic resistance of a bullet and . . .

I’m poolside in Palm Springs, drinking an ice cold Dr. Pepper. It’s spring break and I’m seventeen. My skin is wet, the sun is fierce, and voices are chattering around me. The part of me that’s dreaming pulls back on the tweezers and I’m back in the wooden chair.

I try again. No bullet. I move the steel points slightly to the left. I’m sitting on my father’s shoulders, staring face to face at an ape in a zoo enclosure. He’s only eight feet away. He reaches a black hand toward me. My hand moves and I’m looking in the mirror.

One more try. This time I poke downward. My left-hand coordination isn’t great at the best of times, which doesn’t include right now. Once more I’m transported, this time to only a week ago, picking through apples at the Safeway. The sensation is so real I can feel the texture of the fruit. I wish I could go back to the first time I had sex with Joanie Bennett in college, but now’s not the time.

I once read an article about how memories are stored in the brain, and that every moment is stored holographically in the cells but that there’s no map or indexing system for finding a specific image or experience.

I have another idea. I lean back and leave the body. I hover in the upper corner of the room and look down at my body, then zoom in slowly until all my attention is on the side of my head. I concentrate and move forward and find myself in the tunnel that the bullet made. I have to go all the way across and make a u-turn where the slug bounced off the inside of my skull and backtracked. The walls of the tunnel are pink and glistening, with dried blood lining the bottom. The hole continues back and slightly downward and then—apparently another bounce off bone—makes a new start toward the center and upward before it stops. The lead slug is about two inches in from my skull and a quarter inch lower than the entry wound.

I re-enter my body and probe downward through tissue with the tweezers. A kaleidoscope of memories are triggered and probably erased forever as the steel slides through brain matter and meets lead. I grasp the slug and pull. The resistance is slight, like spooning jello, and, with a slight wet sound, out comes the prize, a .22 caliber bullet. Not much of a prize, but then I don’t even like metal fillings in my teeth.

I see my face as it was when I was a child, unlined and unblemished, weeping silently. I put my hand to my cheek and feel tears tracking through the caked dust. The voice that has been instructing me changes—like in a dream when a car becomes a bicycle—into a book with the words moving across the page, telling me about threads: my life, and Ratboy’s, and Jason Hamel’s, Tanya’s, Allison’s, all interwoven at this point in a tapestry whose greater image I cannot discern. One of the threads separates out and becomes an image on a page in the book. It looks like a brown smear of feces, Ratboy’s stain on my psyche. It shifts and the edges undulate and change like a Mandelbrot pattern. Brilliant colors and shapes emerge at the center and ripple out concentrically, mandala-like, and melt into the edges of the page. Each iteration is brighter and lighter than the one before it until, in the brilliant white of the paper, I am left not with the blot of Ratboy but the innocence of Jason Junior.

The book changes again, this time to a woman’s voice, an angel I could embrace forever, telling me that healing is my birthright, that the healed state is my natural inheritance, that atonement is the only prerequisite to claiming it. I am presented with a choice and I assent.

I leave the body again and slip back into the hole. As I follow the bullet’s original path, information wells up from an unknown source. Progenitors, directed tissue migration, mTOR pathways, PTEN inhibitors, growth factors, cytokines, all terms I’ve never heard of nor read about and yet now I know them as key terms in a set of instructions. I’m about to embark on a cellular repair project.

¤ ¤ ¤

I’m back in the body. I stand up and examine myself in the mirror. My nose is still too big, one eyelid still droops a bit, but the hole is repaired. And the one in my chest, as well as the shattered cheek and the back of my skull. There’s a bald spot I can fix later, but the baseball cap is history.

Mindy’s voice comes from the doorway. “Dad, please, they’re coming back!”

I get up and join her. A long cloud of dust trails a white pickup truck about a half a mile away to the south. My vision is crystal clear; there are more shades of green and brown than I ever dreamed of. The sky is a glazed-ceramic cerulean. The valley is almost in deep shadow so it must be late afternoon.

Herbie’s binoculars show me a Ford F-150 with a roll bar and a man standing in the rear bed. The muffler must be gone because the engine’s clattering roar fills the valley. Two men are in the cab. As they get closer I can see that they all have shaved heads with red marks—devils, I presume. The man standing in the rear is built like a stacked washer-drier set and is holding the roll bar with one hand and a shotgun in the other.

Mindy says, “These guys are really bad. We’ve got to get out of here.”

I ask her if she’s ready to run and she nods. We’re hidden from view. I glance around the door jam and wait. The Ford is about fifty yards away and I put two holes in the windshield. The driver stomps on the brakes, fishtails the truck into a hard right and roars over the flat desert toward the east. The gunner in back fires in our direction as they speed away.

I grab Mindy’s hand and we run toward Ratboy’s van. The Ford has turned around and stopped, its idling engine booming. When we reach the van I tell Mindy to keep running up the road until she sees the Saturn.

The luck I need now is that the van will start. I pull out Ratboy’s set of keys and find one that says Chevy on the black plastic end. I pull it off the keyring and put it in the ignition and turn it. The starter whines but the engine doesn’t catch. The Ford starts rolling toward me.

I pull the remote-control device and the cell phones from the backpack and throw the pack in the rear of the van. I twist the key and the engine catches. The Ford closes half the distance as I back the van so that it’s blocking the road. Boulders and shrubs extend outward on both sides so the van is impassable.

Gunshots erupt from the truck. The shotgun booms over the clatter of the engine. I exit the passenger side of the van and run up the hill after Mindy. The Ford stops at the van and the driver and the guy with the shotgun go to its driver and passenger doors. I can’t see the third man. At forty yards I turn around and fire the .45’s last two bullets, then I throw it away.

I catch up with Mindy at the gate and look back. The two Mexicans are back in the truck and are using it to push the van out of the way. Mindy’s hand is on my shoulder; she’s trembling. She says, “Dad, what are we going to do?”

I say, “Bad guys, right?”

Tears in her eyes, she nods.

I say, “Well, check this out,” and I hit the red button on the remote.

A double explosion, first the C-4, then the van’s gas tank, dwarfs the sound of the straining Ford. The smoke clears and we can see the charred hull of the van lying on its side about twenty feet from where it blew up. The Ford is butting heads with an immovable boulder, its engine screaming at redline. A huge, blackened corpse lies a distance back from where the Ford had been before the explosion.

We walk past the gate to the Saturn in silence.

When Mindy was six, and all was still well in my world, we had a long-established ritual of splashing around in the community pool at the condo complex where we lived, and then soaking in the hot tub. One day, lounging with me in the jacuzzi, Mindy asked me, “Daddy, how did everything get here?”

I asked her what she meant by “everything” and she made a sweeping gesture to include the sky, the buildings, the trees, and said, “Everything there is.”

So I told her there are two stories to explain it all. One is in the Bible, and it says that God created everything in six days. The other story is the one that science tells us, and it says that the universe popped into existence and kept getting bigger and that stuff formed over a really long time until it all turned into what we see today.

Mindy popped her head under the water and held her breath. When she emerged, she opened her eyes and said, “Well, which one do you believe?”

I said, “I’m inclined to go with science.”

She asked, “How come?”

And I said, “Because I don’t think God worked that fast.”

A week later we were back in the hot tub and out of the blue Mindy asked me, “Daddy, what’s the fastest thing in the world?”

“The speed of light, sweetie.”

“And how fast does it go?”

“A hundred and eighty-six thousand miles per second.”

“How fast is that?”

“It could go all the way around the world eight times between this . . .” I clapped my hands, “and this . . .” I clapped my hands again.

Mindy pondered this for a moment and said, “Dad?”

“Yeah?”

“If light can go around the world eight times that fast, why don’t you think God could make everything in six days?”

I didn’t have an answer for her.

¤ ¤ ¤

Now Mindy’s asking me a question. “Dad? What do you think happens to them?”

I don’t know what to tell her. That their threads have been snipped short in the weave? I know I’m not going to tell her my experience, partly because I don’t know what it means, and partly because it’s too much to lay on a fifteen-year-old who’s just been through what Mindy’s been through. I shake my head and tell her, “All I know is that now they can’t hurt you.”

We drive in silence. I want to get on the main road and put some miles behind us before the police come to investigate their second homicide by explosion for the day. At the creek bed, I stop the car and get out and fling DeShaun’s gun far into a thicket of scrub brush.

¤ ¤ ¤

A sign says we’re fifty-five kilometers from Ensenada, so we’re a few miles north of where I left my car. The Z was predictably absent from the roadside, but that’s all right. I’m Paul Cleary, with my nice brilliant-blue Saturn. Which reminds me to ask Mindy, “You don’t by any chance have any ID, do you?”

“Jesus, Dad, after all that just happened, you care about ID?”

“I care about ID because I want to get both of us across the border. I’ve had enough of Mexico, haven’t you?”

Mindy’s got her feet tucked up on the seat and her hands clasped to her knees. She says, “Hell yeah, but I could use a good meal pretty soon. And no, I don’t have any ID, is that a problem?”

“Yeah, but I’ll figure it out.” An idea is forming in my head. It’s awkward, but not nearly as much as having trouble at the border and going under closer scrutiny than the average returning Anglo tourist. I’m guessing that Paul Cleary is reported dead or missing somewhere. I still have my own driver’s license, but the new law requires a passport to get back into the States.

“The house is gone, isn’t it?”

“Gone.”

“Jason told me that they had you tied to a chair in a basement somewhere and were going to kill you if I didn’t come with him.” She says this apologetically, as if I expected an explanation.

“Sweetie, there’s nothing you could have done differently. I’m proud of you for getting through it, and that’s all.”

“Jason was pretty crazy. He didn’t touch me, though. He, like, got obsessed with me. He said he was going to marry me when his dad got to Mexico. Then we got there and those creepy guys were living there. They started shooting at us so Jason took us to the cave. His dad was some kind of minister or something.”

“I know.”

“How did you know? And how come you dropped me off at the house and just disappeared? I mean, what’s up with that? And, hey, when I woke up just before those guys in the truck came, you were staring in the mirror and for ten minutes I couldn’t get you to break out of whatever trance you were in.” Now she’s getting agitated, which is good—she needs to make it all make sense. Trouble is, I don’t know if I can help her there.

We’re approaching Ensenada. I tell her, “Let’s find a place to eat, and then I’ll tell you what I can.” In my new condition, I find the idea of eating to be appealing. The body seems to be operating on auto pilot, hungry, hot and sweating, alive. I turn on the air conditioning.

¤ ¤ ¤

Ensenada is a port town sixty miles south of the border. Cruise ships dock there and unload armies of tourists; rich attorneys from LA drive down in their Lexus SUVs for sport-fishing tournaments; surfers and college students and cheap honeymooners descend on the city for twenty-five cent beer and bargain hotels. On a hot August Saturday night, the place is crawling with
Norte Americanos
and the Mexicans who want their money; hawkers hawking weird tourist crap, barkers at the topless joints, pathetic looking six-year-olds selling Chicklets, drug hustlers, hookers, time-share salesmen, and cabbies handing out business cards for cheap dentistry and cosmetic surgery.

We keep passing restaurants that look like they are hosting frat parties, cross-streets too clogged to turn onto, and the occasional dark alley with plywood signs saying things like, “Steak & Lobstar $10.” Now we’re at San Miguel, the last stop, with its surf camp and tiny restaurant/bar and a crowd of people waiting outside to be seated.

I look at Mindy and say, “Another hour to Rosarito Beach. It might mellow out by then, what do you think?”

She lowers the back of her seat, stretches out, closes her eyes, and says, “I’m cool.”

¤ ¤ ¤

I spend an hour driving in the dark while Mindy sleeps. The road narrows and climbs; it twists and turns to a point nearly a thousand feet above the ocean and then gradually descends all the way to Rosarito Beach. I wonder what to tell Mindy, how to explain the unexplainable, what to leave out and how to string the rest together so it still rings true. I’m having trouble with the ringing-true part.

Just before Rosarito is an odd little enclave of about thirty restaurants and the same number of tourist shops, plus a handful of liquor stores. The restaurants all serve the same thing: lobster. The tourist shops sell wood carvings of dolphins, mass manufactured in China, bobbling bugs in walnut shells, glass sea horses, bongo drums and maracas, and unplayable guitars and ukuleles. I enter through the twin arches and find a place to park in a mud lot at the end of the main drag. Reaching out to Mindy, I massage her shoulder gently with my fingers and say, “Hey, time to eat.”

We pick a restaurant at random because it doesn’t matter. This one is up a narrow flight of stairs and probably has a great view in the daytime but now just looks out on darkness. We sit next to the giant window separating us from the darkness; the crowd has already eaten, chips and salsa arrive immediately, I am ravenous. We order our dinners with our mouths stuffed with chips. I can taste the salt and feel the heat of the chilies; could it be that I am really restored?

The waiter returns for our order. He looks us over and says, “Been camping long?”

I tell him that we have been exploring caves at a gold mine and that the amenities were minimal. He blinks and concentrates on his order pad. I ask him what he suggests and he says, “The langosta is very excellent, señor.” The last thing I ate was jail food, so nearly anything would be very excellent. Mindy and I both point to the same thing on the menu and ask for iced tea as well.

When we’ve crunched through all the chips, Mindy looks up and says, “Well?”

I say, “Let’s swap stories, one thing at a time, okay?”

“Fine, you first.” We should have stopped for a comb at a liquor store; Mindy’s hair is crazed and streaked with dirt, her face sunburned and thinner than usual.

“Okay. The thing about me and the mirror, back at the mine?”

“Yeah?”

“I can’t explain it. Sorry. It’s too weird.”

“Oh, so now it’s my turn?”

I shrug.

“Fine. Jason kept giving me some kind of drug to keep me quiet. It was a crappy high and then I’d fall asleep.”

I tell her how I left her at the house and went to Jimmy’s and that he had been shot and his place ransacked.

She says, “Isn’t he, like, your drug connection?” Allison leaves no stone unturned.

“He was, but I’m done with all that.”

“For real?”

“For real.”

“So then what happened?”

“I spent the next thirty hours in the LA County jail. It wasn’t fun. When I got out, I tried calling you. Then I came home and it was gone. My neighbor Cal told me he had seen you leaving with two guys.”

“So what did they want?” Mindy asks as the waiter comes with our food. We dive into it and I look for a short answer.

“They were part of a case I was working on. Stolen money. Jason’s father was involved, but he’s dead now.”

Mindy looks surprised. “Jason kept telling me his father was on his way.”

“Jason’s friend shot at me and missed. He hit Jason’s father instead.”

“Luke did that?” Mindy’s sitting there, open-mouthed, looking at me with an expression like I’m bullshitting her or something.

“If that’s his name, yeah. Jason’s giant friend.”

“Luke was really sweet. He took care of me and calmed Jason down every time he started to get crazy. What happened to them, anyway?”

I crack the shell of my lobster and pull the meat out. Mindy stares at me and says, “Dad?”

“We had a disagreement about your being in Mexico unconscious in a cave.”

“Yeah? Go on.”

“It wasn’t settled with words.”

We finish our meals in silence.

¤ ¤ ¤

We tramp through mud back to the Saturn. An August squall has hit the coast, and warm, fat drops of rain fall on us and make the air smell good. The backpack is in the rear seat. Of the three cell phones, only Jason Hamel’s has any juice left, plus bars so I can make a call. I fish in my pocket and pull out the card that my former neighbor gave me for Dave Putnam, the writing detective, and punch in the number.

“Yes.” Not a question, and not very friendly.

“Dave, Charlie Miner.”

“Well, Charlie Miner! I was just thinking, I love it when dead people call me.”

I have no idea what to say to that. Maybe I should have texted him instead.

“I would really like to hear the story of why you’re using a homicide victim’s cell phone.”

Okay, that’s easier to explain. In fact, I have a plan for that.

“Dave, I’ll do you one better and then some, but I need a favor.”

“I’m all ears.” Actually, he’s a really big guy with unusually small ears, but now’s not the time to crack wise.

“Here’s what I’ve got for you. I can help you close, count ’em, one, two, three murder cases. And I can give you a scam that maybe even you haven’t seen yet. You can write a whole book on the story I give you, but I don’t know how it ends yet.”

“Which three murders are you talking about?”

“I’ll give it all up tomorrow, after you help me out.”

“How about I just pick you up on suspicion, since you’re the guy with Jason Hamel’s phone?”

“Good luck with that. I’m in Mexico. Work with me here, I’m in over my head.”

“What do you want?”

“You know my house burned down—”

“Yeah,” Dave interrupts. “While you were in Central Booking.”

“I’m glad you know so much about me. Look, my daughter was in the house, and the creeps that torched it kidnapped her and brought her down here. Now I’ve got her but she’s got no ID so I can’t get her through Immigration.”

“And you want me to drive down there and get her? What am I, your goddamned shuttle service?”

“Three murders and a scam, Dave.” I remember Jimmy and say, “And an attempted murder.”

A long silence, and then a sigh. “All right, Charlie. When and where?”

“Rosarito Beach Hotel, ten tomorrow.”

We click off and I start the car.

¤ ¤ ¤

We’re heading north again.

Mindy says, “So I get a ride home in a cop car? Sounds like a fun way to end my vacation.” I’m not in the mood for snarky, but I let it go. We’re quiet for a minute until she says, “Sorry Dad. I guess we’ve both been through some pretty weird shit.”

“A whole new standard of weird.”

“You’re not sending me back to Mom’s, are you?”

“Got any better ideas?”

“Not yet, but something good better come up. She smacked me hard last time and you know what?”

“Tell me.”

“If there’s a next time, I’m fighting back and it won’t be pretty.”

“I hear you. I’ll see what I can come up with.” There’s a place in Venice we could probably camp out in, if we can get past DeShaun and his crew.

“You know, Jason didn’t kidnap me on his own. He was supposed to take me somewhere in Century City, but the whole time we were at his apartment he just stared at me. He was really high on something. And then he says, ‘Me and you, we’re Adam and Eve.’ Then he told Luke we were changing plans and going to Mexico. That’s when he called his dad and asked him to marry us. He took pictures of us together with his cell phone and sent them to his dad.”

“I know, I saw them.”

“So then he got this call and afterwards he’s all panicky and we got in his car and went to someplace in Santa Monica Canyon.”

“This is yesterday afternoon?”

“Yeah. We go up this long driveway and your car was there. So Luke and Jason get out of the car and tell me to stay put. I saw Luke fire a gun into the big window and then heard another shot from inside the house, and then they both came running back to the car. Jason’s shirt was all bloody. I was scared that you got shot.”