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  “I’ll get used to it again,” said Patrick.

  A few neighbors had gathered, and some of the church people. Patrick appreciated their smiles and hugs and handshakes but felt the discomfort he caused in them, their ignorant but heart-swelled gratitude. There was a table set up with food and soft drinks and more yellow ribbons and he wished he was back at FOB Inkerman eating an MRE, smoking with his battle buddies, just being necessary. Or maybe fishing out on Glorietta Bay.

  “You’ll want to see the damage immediately,” his father said. “I’ll make you an authentic drink. I take it you’ll be staying with us?”

  “Just a night or two, Dad.”

  “Oh, Pat,” said Caroline.

  “I need my own space, Mom.”

  “I wish your brother aspired to that,” said Archie. “Rather than living in the bunkhouse the rest of his life.”

  “Don’t start in with all that now, Archie,” said Caroline.

  Ted came down the hallway and into the sharp glance of his father. “I’m working on getting my own place, Dad.”

  “That’s good to know.”

  Patrick glanced at the awkward and uncertain friends and neighbors, then let his eyes wander the high-ceilinged great room. Nice to see the familiar white walls hung with his mother’s treasured paintings, the mullioned windows, the tile floor and stately area carpets woven in Afghanistan decades before he had gone and seen so much death there. The great room of his life. How could any of it seem so new? Sunlight came through the shutters and made crisp white slats on the walls. From the wet bar, beneath the oil portrait of his father and uncle gazing down as if they had foreseen all of this and more, Archibald studied his older son again. Patrick watched him. Then Archie returned with two large tumblers filled with ice and amber liquid and topped with lemon twists.

  “To the groves, then. Caroline, Ted, friends and neighbors—I need a few minutes alone with Pat.”

  * * *

  Patrick and his father walked a dirt road side by side through the scorched trees. Norris Brothers Growers was a second-generation concern begun by Patrick’s grandfather and great-uncle in 1953. As a child Patrick had learned that growing avocados was a risky business due to the vagaries of drought, water, wind, consumer demand, tree disease—from borers to lethal root rot—and competition from Mexico and Chile. He also knew that a third-generation Norris handoff would have to take place if the ranch was to remain in the family. But Patrick had not fallen in love with farming. His dispassion had cost him some portion of his father’s respect, which remained lost now. Ted’s early interest in growing had gone unremarked by his father.

  This was the best avocado country on earth, Archibald had always maintained. The hills stood almost eight hundred feet above sea level, picking off the river breezes and the rain clouds that watered the fruit. Much of it was steep terrain, the decomposed granite soil draining beautifully. Now the air was pale and rank. Norris’s father told him that three Fallbrook citizens had died in the fire—a dad and two young children. What kind of man stays behind in a wildfire with two young ones? he asked.

  “You can see where the fire burned through Big Gorge,” he said, gesturing with his tumbler. “It was really screaming by then. I watched a pair of coyotes try to outleg it. The gusts were fifty miles an hour, all bone-dry and straight from the desert, so you can guess who won that race. L.A. was burning. Orange County, too. And San Diego—terrible fires south of here. Ours broke out last so it took quite a goddamned while to get help. Fallbrook Fire says it looks like a downed power line way up in Rice Canyon, fanned by the Santa Anas. San Diego Gas and Electric, of course, they’re on the hook if that’s true, so they’re saying it had to be arson. Either way, like a lot of the growers, Norris Brothers doesn’t carry crop insurance. As you know.”

  Patrick looked down at the blackened swath of what they called the Big Gorge. He could see where the fire had jumped the dirt road and taken out ten acres of trees in a rough circle. It looked like a giant IED had exploded. Standing around the edges of the circle like witnesses were trees that had partially burned, portions of their trunks still carrying life and some branches untouched, their ash-dusted leaves fluttering in the breeze.

  “Patrick, I don’t know if there’s anything you can do for your brother. But if there is, please do it. I’m at the end of my tether with him.”

  “I’ll take him fishing. He likes that.”

  “He became stranger every month you were gone. First the dope. Then Evelyn Anders. Christ. I wonder if he’s back on the drugs. He seems either high or low, no functional middle. And he spends almost all his free time alone in the bunkhouse. God knows what he does on the computer. I can’t get him to see doctors anymore. They all threw their hands up on him anyway.”

  Patrick took a long swallow of the bourbon. He felt the same bottomless pull of it that he always felt but surrendered to only on occasion. Still, he felt that such an occasion would be soon at hand and it was something he’d looked forward to in coming home—a good peaceful bender. These people will miss the point of it, he thought, I’ll drink to remember the good things, not to forget the bad.

  “As you know, I let Miguel go. I just couldn’t afford him after this. Now I need help rebuilding our groves and our business. And of course someone to take it over someday. My first choice is you, as it’s always been.”

  “I don’t want it, Dad.”

  “I’m trying to make you want it.”

  “But I don’t. I know that’s an insult to you. I’m just not a farmer and never will be.”

  “I hear no insult at all. But you’re actually a damned good farmer. Ten summers teach a boy a lot. I’ve got another five years of muscle left in me, if we can make it through this thing. You know, you could help me get this place up and running again and chase your dreams later. Plenty of time in the future to buy that boat and guide those clients and catch those fish. How much money have you socked away for the boat?”

  “Eleven grand.”

  “That won’t buy much.”

  “If I start off in the bay I won’t need that much boat.”

  “So, you mean a panga like the Mexicans use?”

  “I need a center console, good decks for casting, and a trolling motor for stealth.”

  “And you think there are enough fly fishermen around San Diego for you to make a living?”

  “If I figured right.”

  “There’s what, three or four other guys already doing it?”

  “Two on the bay and two offshore for the big stuff.”

  “Eleven grand?”

  “A used boat for sure, Dad.”

  His father squinted out at the charred hills. “Farming isn’t a dream, Pat. It’s just a living. Business was bad enough before this. Ag water was cut back thirty percent because of drought, so I had to stump thirty acres back in May. Yield is down but prices are okay. It killed me to let Miguel go. I actually cried. You realize he arrived here without even one dollar in his pocket because the smugglers had robbed him? They’d even taken his shoes. But your grandfather liked the look in his eyes and hired him on the spot, got him papers. He was with us for forty years but I had to let him go. My watch. Me. Of course, there’s still goddamned Lew Boardman across the valley hiring one hundred percent illegals, so his bottom line doesn’t look half bad. He only lost a couple of acres. But even without the drought and the fire, this place isn’t worth near what it was before the recession. And I can’t break it up and sell it to a builder, not with the twenty-to-one zoning we’ve got. I don’t think I could sell it for that purpose anyway, in good conscience.”

  “I don’t think you could, either.”

  “I haven’t listed it but I told the realtor six months ago I’d entertain offers in the three million range. We had some interest. Then, three months ago, a two million dollar offer from a Newport Beach doctor. Of course I told his realtor to go to hell. A day after the fire came through, he dropped the offer to a million-three. It’s an insult off
er. It would cover our debt and leave us with very little. Our cash flow is down to almost nothing. We lost a big part of last season’s paycheck to the frost. And of course, because of this fire, our spring fruit probably won’t develop.”

  Archibald sighed and shook his head in the closest thing to defeat that Patrick had ever witnessed. In him Patrick saw himself some decades from now. He tried to imagine himself here in Fallbrook as a grower, but he could conjure to mind no more than rough sketches of this land and a small town, and the faint silhouettes of what might be a family. They seemed like the drawings of a child.

  Suddenly the artillery on Pendleton boomed. Patrick saw a blast of bright light and his ears roared as panic surged through him, then he fell. The roar grew and he was grappling with something, then everything disappeared—the fear and the sound, even the light. He lay on the burnt ground, breathing hard and covering his father. He felt his father’s heartbeat and smelled his aftershave as he disentangled from him and helped him stand. Patrick laughed quietly, partly in humor but mostly in embarrassment. His ears were ringing so loud he wondered if his father could hear. Sweat drenched his back and he tried to brush the soot from his uniform while his pulse settled. “Car doors slamming are the worst.”

  “It’ll take a while, Pat. It’s hard to come back. But few things in the world will ever mean more to you than what you did over there.”

  The “meaning” part still escaped Patrick but he knew that he had done his duty. And now it was time to do it again. Maybe this would mean something. “All right. I’ll do what I can here on the farm, Dad. But there’s a condition—we bring Ted on board. He’d love to pitch in. It’s what he needs.”

  “He’s not fit for it. I don’t mean to be judgmental.”

  “Then don’t judge. He knows you don’t believe in him. But it’s time to try again anyway.”

  “He posted hateful things about the mayor. I can’t go into Fallbrook without feeling notorious.”

  “If we work his ass off he’ll be too tired for nonsense like that.”

  “I’ve tried, Pat. A thousand times I’ve tried. I don’t need to catalogue his failures and his utter lack of attention.” Patrick considered the double meaning of “attention.”

  “We’re just putting him to work, Dad. It’s the right thing.”

  “Okay. He’s your responsibility. It shames me that I can’t pay either of you.”

  “Ted can drive the taxi evenings and weekends. I can probably deliver pizza again.” Patrick felt constricted, as if by a large snake, and he could see his dreams puff right out of him and vanish into the foul air.

  “You were just eighteen when you left. I’m very damned pleased with you, son. Very.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Archie retired early, tumbler in hand, leading his shadow down the long hallway past the sconces and the family photographs. Patrick sat with his mother, who laid out the dismal ranch finances. In the living room the windows were all open and the acrid smell of a burned world was made heavier by the damp ocean breeze that came almost nightly up the river valleys on either side of Fallbrook.

  “I can’t distract him from himself any longer,” she said. “It’s been like this every night for a year. He’s obsessed with the idea of loss, which of course creates loss. And he enjoys his gift of prophecy. Complaining. Drinking. He acts as if God sent drought, the frost, and the fire to ruin him. Personally.”

  Caroline was a tall, trim woman with a regal posture and a head of striking black hair. She usually wore expensive jeans, boots, crisp white shirts, and silk scarves with subtle patterns loosely knotted around her fine neck. Her face and nails were always done. Patrick had never seen her leave the ranch anything less than put together. Even at home she would rarely let herself be seen in work clothes or thoughtless combinations of casual wear, or any garment associated with exercise or sleep. Patrick found her less vain than simply dutiful about presenting the woman who she had chosen to be. Sometimes he wondered what she had given up for this.

  “But that may change now,” she said. “You’ve brought him hope. God bless you for that.” She sipped a glass of red wine and the dimmed overhead lights caught her hair and cast sad-clown shadows under her eyes. “Was it bad in Afghanistan? Your e-mails and calls were cheerful enough, though few and far between.”

  Patrick nodded contritely. “When I got there and saw it, I thought, ‘Well, there’s a good chance you’re not going home.’ So I tried to put some distance between me and everyone I might not see again. Does that make sense?”

  “Terrible, terrible sense.”

  “It’s good to be home but hard to talk. I have to get used to not being alert all the time. You get hooked on that. I get startled easy. I haven’t slept well. I get this feeling that snipers are lining up on me. I’ve got a temper now.”

  “I see it in your face.”

  “I didn’t have it over there. I was too busy trying to not get killed.”

  “I think I understand. Are you okay?”

  He nodded.

  “Pat, I’m glad you’re going to help us rebuild this ranch. But I want you to know that if you walked out of here tomorrow to seek your fortune in a larger world, I would support you. And your father would get over it, sooner or later. You are young. Personally, I find your dream of guiding fishing excursions at sea to be, well … attainable and romantic.”

  “I wouldn’t get shot at or have to kill anyone. But I think I need to be here now to help with the groves. I can get my old pizza gig and save the money.”

  She looked at him for a long beat. “If I had money I would help you with the boat.”

  “I have some money, Mom.”

  “It’s humiliating, not being able to help your own children. None of the calamities that have fallen on your father hurt him as much as that.”

  “None of it’s his fault.”

  “That’s irrelevant to him. He’s blamed himself for Ted since the day he was born.”

  “Ted’s a grown man now.”

  “We train our men to accept responsibility for everything, don’t we? Even things you can’t control.”

  “I see some truth in that.”

  “Hold tight to your dreams.”

  * * *

  Patrick poured a bourbon and took a flashlight and walked down the dirt road toward the outbuildings. The dogs trotted out ahead, noses down. The barnyard spread flat before him in damp moonlight and the sycamores towered into the sky. He saw the big barn, the metal storage buildings, and the long bunkhouse. He walked past the barn and into the grove to see how close the flames had come. In the flashlight beam he saw that Ted’s impressive brush clearing had kept the fire from jumping from the grove to the buildings.

  Ted had moved into the bunkhouse when he was eighteen, having announced that it was time for him to be out on his own. Patrick had helped him. They’d taken apart and stored the old bunks, then filled up the big open room with things of interest to Ted—small animal cages, movies on tape and DVD and a big-screen TV to watch them on, a computer and peripherals.

  Now Ted sat at a wooden picnic table in the center of the large room, playing a computer fantasy game. Patrick approached and looked over Ted’s shoulder at the monitor, where a massive upright humanoid with a bull’s head and horns loped through pleasant woodlands eviscerating wild dogs. Ted paid his brother no attention. Patrick knew that Ted enjoyed being watched as he played, and that his brother’s unacknowledgment was not rude but, oddly, somehow inclusive.

  “Level eighty-one,” Ted said after a while. His hands tapped the keyboard on his lap and the humanoid trotted and the wild dogs flew apart.

  “What’s the object of this game?”

  “To create the best character you can. It’s all about character.”

  “Why’s he killing dogs?”

  Ted turned. “Those are wolves, not dogs. Big difference. Dad seemed happier when you came back from your fire-damage tour. Bigger, somehow. Did you say you’d stay and help?”
>
  “I did, yes.”

  Patrick watched his brother in profile, his hands brisk on the keyboard, the big taurine creature gliding through the countryside. After a while Patrick went to the shelves of cages that lined two walls. This part of the bunkhouse was half-dark and most of the cage lights were off but he could see tarantulas stepping lightly and snakes both still and gliding, and the skinks and swifts peering out from cracks. Alligator lizards prowled. There were Pacific tree frogs and baby pond turtles no larger than golf balls. Patrick saw mantids and scorpions and black widows and pine sawyers. Ted only kept what was native and, as he said, “unlovable.” The high handsome oak shelves were built years ago by his father, who had encouraged Ted’s husbandry of creeping things and—strangely, Patrick had always thought—almost nothing else.

  Ted talked without turning. “Pat, you did good for our country overseas, no matter what you think. And I want to do something, too.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know yet. Something really big. And then, I think I’ll leave. There’s more to the world than Fallbrook. You should come with me. I’d like it if you came. Maybe if you get that boat we can take it and just head out like, for the territory.”

  “I think I’ll be here a while. And you know what? The big thing you can do is help put this farm back together.”

  “Dad thinks I’m stupid.”

  “He gets his mind wrongly fixed at times.”

  “Just like I do.”

  “I already talked to him about this. It’s up to us now, Ted. We’ve got to repair what we can repair, and when spring comes, hope enough trees make it. Otherwise we sell the whole place at a big loss and clear out.”

  Ted’s creature hooked a wolf and threw it high and it hit the ground a broken, snarling thing. “Got him, Pat!” Ted swung around, his expression grave. “Dad really said that? He wants me to work?”

  “He really said it.”