SUMMER of FEAR Page 8

  What made the grove important to Isabella and me was a Sunday evening six Septembers ago, after a day I had spent making the ranch rounds on horseback with my father—checking the irrigation, the fruit sugar levels, the poacher and pest damage.

  It had been a typical day for me and my father: polite, given mostly to the exchange of professional complaints, which for him always meant the shrinking acreage of SunBlesst Ranch. The day was, on my part at least, less than fully felt. I loved him, but there was a cynicism in my father that he cultivated as carefully as he did his citrus crop, a hardness that left him somehow both unlikable and untouchable. He had tried to pass along those things to me, as if they were gifts, and I accepted them—especially when I was with him. I always felt stronger when I left him, though a little smaller, too. But like most men who protect themselves with toughness, my father revealed his tenderness inadvertently, unbeknownst to himself. There were three things I never saw him handle with anything but deference and care: my mother, Suzanne; the oranges on his trees; and the men—mostly Mexicans—who worked for him. Looking back at him now, I will say that he was, and still is, the most fiercely paternal man I've known, paternal in the atavistic sense of protecting his mate, guarding his cave, commanding his pack of underlings, and treating outsiders with extreme suspicion— particularly males, especially, of course, those most like himself. I will say, too, that despite my efforts to rise above him in the way that all sons try to better their fathers, his imprint is upon me with all its faults and blessings. I am truly my father's son. It was that fact, more than anything, that left me mystified by Amber Mae Wilson's peremptory employment of my "pollen" and my subsequent dismissal, and that left me blindly, numbly, stupidly infuriated by the way that Grace had been removed from my life before ever really becoming a part of it. My father, needless to say, had been horrified by everything about Amber Mae, except for her astonishing beauty. They came to hate each other.

  Toward evening, my father and I shook hands outside the ranch house and I left. My mother sent me off with a boxful of food—Russell the bachelor, even at thirty-four still spoiled by his mom. But rather than heading home, I drove down one of the dirt roads that ran along the crest of a hill, wound along the edge of an emerald green grove, then ended in a place that had always been my favorite piece of ground in the entire SunBless Ranch. This corner of the grove was originally where the laborer: would gather for lunch and, on Friday evenings, dinner. At first--- years ago, my father said—there had been just a table that the workers had made of old upturned cable spools. The chair: were orange crates borrowed from the packing house. But a: time went on and—I found out later—with my father's help, a few trees had been relocated, a large palapa had been built, eight long picnic tables were set up around a square of raked and packed earth, and an impressive ceramic fountain featuring a creature-laden St. Francis of Assisi was placed near the road at the entrance of the "cantina." My father had T'd off of an irrigation pipe to divert enough water to keep the fountain full and flowing.

  As a boy, I had spent many hours there, some with the laborers, some on the weekends, when I could be alone to sit in the shade, listen to the water spill around St. Francis's sandaled feet, and look out at the green continent of citrus to the south or to the dry, tormented hillsides to the west. I danced with my first girl there, on the packed ground between the tables, on a Friday night some thirty years ago. I got drunk for the first time in my life there at that "cantina," the same night as my first dance, I believe. When my heart was broken in the fourth grade by a girl named Cathy, I'd spent weekends for two whole months in the shade of the palapa, writing her letters that I never mailed, feeling profoundly sorry for myself. You can leave me, I remember thinking, but I'll always have this. Boo-hoo.

  Of course, this corner of the grove had changed by the time I arrived that Sunday evening in September, after spending the day with my father. The shrinking SunBlesst Ranch meant fewer workers, and fewer workers meant less life. No one worked Sundays anymore.

  I'd parked and walked toward the now-tilting, algae-stained fountain and looked at the aging palapa.

  And to my surprise, someone sat at one of the tables in the shade, looking back.

  What struck me first was the whiteness of her blouse against the green background of trees behind her. The rest of her seemed to blend with those trees, as if she were a part of them and they had allowed her to stray just far enough to use the table, as if they could snatch her back at any second. As I walked closer, she came into relief: a young woman, her hair pinned up in a haphazard knot, an open book lying on the table in front of her, regarding me with calm, very dark brown eyes.

  "Sorry to bother you," I said.

  "No bother at all, unless you've got some planned."

  "Just a visit to one of my favorite places on earth."

  "Mine, too. Sundays are the best."

  I took my eyes off her, looked quickly around the "cantina," then at her again. She wore simple silver hoops in her ears, which shone subtly against her black hair and toffee-colored skin.

  "What are you reading?" I asked, strictly as an excuse to keep looking at her.

  "Wallace Stevens." She picked up the book, looked at me, then down at the page. I noted her ringless left hand with a thrillingly inappropriate satisfaction. She read:

  Slowly the ivy on the stones

  Becomes the stones. Women become

  The cities, children become the fields

  And men in waves become the sea.

  '"The Man with the Blue Guitar,"' I said. I'd never been so thankful to have known a poem in my whole life, and probably never will be again.

  She smiled for the first time, a small smile with something pleased in it. "I'm reading it with John Rowe out at the university."

  "I read it with Bob Peters. Same school. That was a long time ago."

  She set down the book. "Do you work here?"

  "My father is the manager."

  "Mine's one of the supers—-Joe Sandoval."

  "I've met him. Russell Monroe," I said.

  "Isabella Sandoval."

  Then a silence pried its way between us, and I couldn’t think of anything to say. She smiled at me again, then reached down to the bench and hauled up a rather large canvas to bag. Out came two beers.

  "I'd offer you a bite to eat, but all I brought was this,” she said.

  "I'd offer you a drink, but all I have is about twenty pound of food. I'll get some, okay? It's right there in the car. My mother made it. It's always real good."

  She suddenly pulled a serious face, then nodded. By the time I came back with Mom's generous box of provisions, Isabella Sandoval was laughing directly and undisguisedly at me.

  In that moment, I saw myself as she did: a big thirty four-year-old dope carrying around a picnic box packed by his loving mother, offering to share it with a pretty girl he'd met two minutes ago. I laughed at myself with her—red in the face, she told me later—and it came out strongly, that laughter, up from a place I kept hidden from my father's cynicism and from my own dull convictions about what it meant to be a man.

  I fell in love with Isabella's laugh then, and a few hours later, I had begun to fall in love with the rest of her. I, quite literally, could not take my eyes off of her. It was the purest, widest, most simple emotion I had ever felt, and I've never experienced anything close to it since. I believed then that it was enough to last a lifetime. But all that seemed—as we drove there from the hospital six years later—much, much more than a lifetime ago.

  I eased the car up to the grove and swung it around so Isabella's walk would be as short as possible. Her cane tips left two perfect rows of circles in the soil on each side of her. It seemed to take hours to go a few yards. She started to fall and I caught her.

  When we got her settled at one of the tables under the palapa, Isabella took off her baseball cap and I set out the food. She gave me an inquiring look when I brought my flask from the car and stood it on the old redwoo
d table.

  "You forgot the beer," I said, smiling.

  Isabella smiled back. I drank.

  We ate as the sun drew itself together over the western hills and started its slow summertime descent. The whiskey went straight to my center, then spread outward, suggesting velocity. Neither of us spoke. Few things are as agonizing in this life as a magical place bereft of its magic. The trees and hills around us assumed a fierce specificity in the evening light; each clod of earth and grain of soil seemed isolated, blindingly singular. Whiskey, I thought, blur this moment.

  "Are you okay?" Isabella asked.

  "I'm okay."

  "I don't need s-s-surgery, do I?"

  "No." I drank. A pair of doves split the sky above us wi the squeak of dry wheels—tight wings, diminishing shape gone. What speed, what motion!

  "I wouldn't blame you if you went away for a wall," she said. "For a while."

  "I don't want to be away."

  "If I were you, I would."

  "I'd still be with you, even if I was gone."

  "Anchored to be. To me."

  "No," I said quietly, while a voice inside me screamed Yes! Yes! Anchored! Buried! Chained! Drink!

  "Do you remember what you said the last time we talked about the... the... this?"

  I didn't.

  "You said that tay—taying, staying with me was the nob thing to do."

  "I didn't mean that in a bad way."

  "And I don't want it to be noble for you to stay with me I w-w-wanted to take care of you. Because you're a hard man and I know you need somebody. I want it to be me."

  "It is you, Isabella—only you." Liar! Cheat! Fool! Drink

  "I wish we could make love again."

  "It's my fault."

  "You could close your eyes."

  "I know."

  "I don't want you going somewhere else for it."

  "Never. I want you." I drank deeply. The sun inched dov in the sky. I looked for a moment at my hands, how dry and tough and veined they were.

  "You know what the w-w-worst thing is?"

  I shook my head. There seemed like so many to choose from.

  "Losing you."

  I stood up and, taking my flask, walked to the edge of the clearing, behind Isabella.

  "I won't let that happen," I said. "It cannot happen. It's the one thing they can't take away."

  Then my eyes were suddenly burning and I closed them, but the tears came scalding out. I lifted the flask and drained it. There was never enough.

  "Oh," I heard her say from behind me. "Oh, Russ...

  shit"

  When I turned to look, her head was tilted sharply to the right, her face twitching, and her right shoulder was drawn up, convulsing. Her eyes were wide. I could see her arm jerking as if wired straight into high voltage.

  It was the biggest seizure she'd had—bigger even than the first, a year and a half ago. I ran and stood behind her, wrapping her quaking body in my arms, pressing my face against her violent cheek. She felt, to me, as if she were possessed by some alien force. Her words were slow, scrambled beyond comprehension, "Sose oreo d-d-do tis to you... nebber won d-d-dis happt..."

  I timed it on my watch, as always: one minute and forty-five seconds. You cannot believe how long a minute and forty-five seconds can be.

  Then she slumped a little, settled down in her chair, the demons departing. Her heart was beating hard. She inhaled deeply and let the breath out slowly.

  "Am gin hab doot."

  "Going to have to do what, Is?"

  "Operation. I'm g-g-going to have them do it."

  On the way home, she seemed to become clearer. She asked me whether I'd understood what she'd said during the seizure. I told her I didn't.

  "It made p-p-perfect sense to me. I said I was so sorry to do this to you. That I never wanted this to happen."

  I put my arm around her and brought her close to me "I know, baby. I know."

  CHAPTER TEN

  That night, after Isabella was asleep, I went into my study and took out the stack of unpaid medical bills. It was a couple of inches thick, with plenty of red-edged envelopes and ATTENTION: OVERDUE stamps on the pages. Our insurance had been sufficient until the radiation-transplant procedure, which was not yet considered an approved treatment. I had paid out about ten grand, but the well was almost dry. Try as I did to ignore these debts, I was still aware that some eighty thousand was still outstanding, and my attempts to stall had been intercepted by a case manager, one Tina Sharp, whose telephone calls I routinely failed to answer. A sudden fury shot through me as I held this stack of demands, so I got out my lighter, set the corner of one on fire, and watched it burn upward. So what? I thought. Even if you burn them, you still owe, and what does a roomful of smoke get you? It would be harder to explain that to Izzy than it would be to just keep on lying about the insurance. I dropped the flaming paper to the carpet, mashed it out with my foot, and threw the rest of the stack back into the wastebasket.

  I turned on the news. There were Midnight Eye segments on two of the three networks and on three local stations. Stunned neighbors of the Wynns were interviewed, impaled on the cameras for close-ups to show their worry and fear. Karen Schulz looking amazingly composed and fresh for Channel 7, said that they were "investigating the possibility that the Wynn, Ellison, and Fernandez murders are related." But Karen's reluctance to connect the three events was ignored heartily by the report who mentioned everyone from Richard Ramirez (the Nig stalker) to Hannibal Lecter, exhuming whatever past terrors might magnify the present one. Assuming this was the work a serial killer, he asked Karen how long it would be until they caught him.

  "We're working on the evidence right now," she said. "The investigation is going very well, and that's all I can say."

  This segment was followed by a short feature piece on a Huntington Beach indoor gun range already besieged by CUStomers—mostly women—wanting to learn how to shoot large handguns. The instructor displayed in his beefy hand a nick plated .357 and said it would "stop any intruder in his tracks---if it's used right." His business was up 65 percent in one day.

  I went out on our deck in the dark heat and drank. I tried to pray, but the prayer turned into a tirade. I could feel the motion calling me, the world of speed and movement. I went to the woodpile, took the ax, and split stumps until my hands bled. I could see the outline of Grace through a window, watching me. Yes, I thought, your father has the seed of madness him. I grunted the blade into one last log and trudged up the trail that leads from my driveway all the way to the crest of the hills. I did not forget my bottle. I stopped halfway up to continue my challenge to the powers that be. I nearly fell. I picked my way down a narrow trail to the Indian caves where Isabella and I used to picnic—and sometimes sleep—on hot summer nights like this one. The sandstone walls were illuminated by moonlight, and the cave mouths yawned invitations I was tempted to accept. I finished the bottle, threw it into a cave, then climbed back to the main trail. When I made the top, I broke into a run through the low, fragrant sage, snapping through the dry branches until I hit the fire road. I ran faster, toward town. All I could hear, way up there above the city, was the leaden pounding of my shoes in the dust and the sharp rhythmic pattern of my breath. My legs began to ache, so I pressed harder. My lungs seemed too small, so I ran faster. The sage and manzanita took on bright red outlines—the same dire red that had come to me in Amber's bedroom two nights ago—a vibrant, scintillating red. The landscape throbbed with it. I rounded the highest point and the Pacific spread out below, a twinkling prairie of water and light. I made my way down toward town, running, skidding, braking until I hit the first paved streets and ran downhill now past the big walled houses and the peaceful aromatic eucalyptus, down into the quiet streets that feed into Coast Highway, finally to the highway itself—even at this hour a steady river of streaking, moaning cars. I could feel my heartbeat in my fingertips. I turned north on Coast Highway, tripped and fell flat in a crosswalk, labored upright, and
continued.

  I stopped at Ron's bar for a drink, but they wouldn't let me in. At Adolfo's, they did, and I downed two quick beers. Another one at the Sports Tavern, another at the Saloon, which left me downtown at 1:00 A.M., sweating, stinking, exhausted, drunk, and without immediate prospects for a ride back out the canyon to my house. I called Isabella, got Grace instead, told her breathlessly that I loved Izzy and everything would work out. "Tell her that," I demanded. Grace asked me where I was and I gave her my approximate whereabouts.

  At the intersection of Coast Highway and Forest Avenue the main corner of our little hamlet by the sea—I just stood a watched the cars go by. They all had slowed to that deliberate, negotiable speed perceived as actual by the drunken. The sound of their tires—just a few feet away from me—was of rubber swooshing through water. I wondered whether it had rained while I was in the phone booth.

  I put out my thumb and watched the cars pass. I was close enough to the highway to make eye contact with any driver who looked my way. A streetlight beside me cast each passing interior into cool, stark visibility, from which the faces stared back as from a stage. What their eyes offered me was smug refusal, nascent fear, and the overriding desire that I would go away.

  I did not. I stood my ground, thumb out, challenging every windshield face that passed by me.

  And that was exactly where I was standing a minute two later when the gray Chrysler K car—a body style so bland as to be noticeable—rolled up and made the right turn onto Forest, directly in front of my outstretched thumb. I was vaguely aware of a yellow rental-company sticker on the right bump But what I was most aware of was the driver's face, staring me in that moment of perfect enlightenment as the car slow, for the turn.

  In a heartbeat, I made a positive identification. It was not difficult, not even a little. The driver was—undoubtedly, assuredly, without any shred of doubt at all in my mind—no other person on earth than Amber Mae Wilson.