“Public service,” he said, and hung up, and, yes, he took a certain pleasure in it.
He drove Junipero Road, past the strawberry fields and the pickers bent in the sun, past the rows of orange trees blowing in the wind. The pavement ended where the hills began, and he eased the cruiser onto the rutted dirt road, snaking a low hill of needle grass clumped with cactus. The road ended at a chained gate with a NO TRESPASSING sign bolted to the metal. Ben parked the cruiser and scanned for ranch security, men with 12-gauge shotguns loaded with salt pellets who tended to shoot first and ask questions later, especially since the preservationists had gotten worked up over their bulldozing of the land. Ben scaled the fence and hoofed it through fifty yards of orange grove to an open field and the Loma Canyon hut.
It was nothing, really, a twenty-by-twenty square, the windows broken out, the front door long knocked from its hinges, an old cowboy camp neglected and falling apart, just like the Bommer Canyon place. When Ben was a teenager ditching classes in high school, sometimes he would hike up here and sit alone in the dark, enjoying the silence, soaking up the sweet stink of the leather cots and the dank musk of the adobe walls. The southwest corner roof was sagging now, the foundation badger-holed. He came up on the east side of the hut, the wind blowing swirls of dust into the grove, the early-afternoon sun slanting into his eyes. When he stepped through the door, something jumped in the corner.
For a moment, everything was confused—his pupils adjusting to the darkness, his sudden flinch and grasping for his revolver. The thing growled, a low guttural sound that blurred Ben with panic. When he got his vision back, the cat’s yellow eyes were zeroed in on him, his ears peeled back, teeth bared. It was a bobcat, manged and wiry, a gutted rabbit caught in the claws of its right paw. It growled at him again and lurched forward. Ben leveled the muzzle of the pistol between its eyes. The animal pressed itself into the corner, its back arched, its ears speared backward, the tang of fear on its skin.
Ben small-stepped it outside, knelt on the edge of the orange grove, and listened to the low growls from inside the hut. Five minutes, and the bobcat swung its body through the front door, eyeing Ben until it loped into the brush and manzanita of the hillside. Inside, Ben found the rabbit, clumps of sinew and viscera staining the cement foundation. He grabbed the animal by its hind legs, the dead weight of it swinging from his fist, and flung it to the edge of the hillside. The cat was there, he knew it, hunched in the needle grass, waiting for Ben to leave, waiting to claim its kill.
Back inside, Ben found little to go on—a mash and jumble of shoe prints, an empty Michelob 40-ouncer, Dulces Vero candy wrappers, X-rated graffiti on the walls, an ancient used condom folded and cracked in the corner.
And when he left the camp, the rabbit carcass was gone, just a few tufts of white fur snagged in the mustard weed.
—
IT WAS 3:23 and Ben was back at the high school. He hoofed it past the football team running sprints on the field, the cheerleaders stacking themselves into pyramids on the sidelines. The marching band ran drills on the baseball diamond, dressed like military officers who had never seen the battlefield. The whole thing, this Norman Rockwell crap, was hard to take after the morgue, after Neil. He wanted to tell these Santa Elena kids that safety was only an illusion, but who the hell would listen to him? How could you feel anything but safe with a tuba strapped to your body?
He stopped at the east fence of the swim complex and watched the lines of swimmers, five or more in each lane, cut through the water. Swimming, in Rancho Santa Elena, was a tradition. The school had produced three Olympians already. Two national-team water-polo players. Regular scholarships to big-name universities. Pictures of the complex were in the glossy brochures the new city had made up to advertise the town as the Shangri-La of Southern California. The pool complex had even hosted the pentathlon for the ’84 Los Angeles Olympics.
A kid hung his elbows on the edge of the pool, gasping air, and the coach—Lewis Wakeland was his name—got down on his knees in front of him. Ben was too far away to hear what he said to the kid, but he heard the coach’s voice in this head. I know, son. Your lungs are shredding, your arms feel like lead. It’s just your body, not your mind. Your mind is stronger than your body. Get out there and prove it. The kid spit a glob of mucus onto the pool top, slipped into the water, and pushed off.
The school bell rang and he left the pool to find Emma. No Lance the stoner today, just Emma’s dart eyes, her angry strut to the cruiser.
“You hid his sweatshirt, didn’t you?” she said, strapping herself into the passenger seat.
“Listen,” he said.
“You went to his house, Dad?”
“Listen, Em,” he said again, putting his hand on her shoulder. “You can scream at me later.”
She looked at him now—his face must have given it away.
“What’s wrong? You’re acting weird.”
He was. The last few days had turned him inside out. He wanted to tell her how dangerous the world was, how dangerous it was to be a teenager. He’d tried to hide the ugliness of the world from her, but it seemed the wrong tactic now, sheltering her like that. How could she keep herself safe if she didn’t know what she needed to be kept safe from?
“No matter what it is,” he said, “no matter how terrible it is, you can tell me, okay?”
“I haven’t done anything.”
“Just listen, please,” he said, squeezing her shoulder. He’d frighten her, though, telling her those things. And he didn’t want her frightened. Life would be full enough of fear; she didn’t need it now. “Anything, anything at all, you can come to me, all right? No sitting in your room alone, depressed. No cutting yourself in the bathroom. No overdosing on drugs. None of it, all right?”
“All right, Dad, okay. You’re freaking me out.”
7
IT WAS CHOCOLATE FRIDAY, AND on Chocolate Friday—the second and last Fridays of the month—they visited Margaret, Ben’s mother, out at Leisure World, armed with a box of See’s Candies, her favorite. This afternoon they were bringing two boxes, the second one compliments of Rachel. Ben knew he’d screwed it up with the sweatshirt stunt, so for atonement he let Emma tune the radio to KROQ, the “Roq of the ’80s,” on the way out from school. When they pulled up to the house, the DJ was playing some obnoxious crap by a pretentiously named British band. Guitar scratches and squeals and something about Bela Lugosi being dead. Jesus.
“Where have you been?” his mother said when she opened the door. “You said you’d be right back.”
Emma kissed her grandmother on the cheek, handed her the boxes of candies, and squeezed past her to turn on the television.
“I said I’d be back next week, Mom,” Ben said. “It’s been a week.”
“A week?” she said, her face stricken with terror.