T. Parker - Full Measure

“You did everything on earth for him,” said Archie. “I won’t let you take blame.”

“Five dead by his hand,” she said. “Including...”

The rain drummed on the truck roof. “When I was a boy I thought my father was the meanest man in the world,” said Archie. “I promised if I was ever a father I wouldn’t withhold the things he withheld from me. I did just that to Ted. I tried not to but I did. I became... what I set out not to become. Love is not enough. You have to use it correctly.”

Patrick set a hand on his mother’s knee. The wind gathered speed. Blood on hands, he thought. He always knew Ted was different. Always knew Ted had that anger, a secret streak of crazy in him. But what should he have done differently? Or his mother or father? What?

Where was your preview vision for Ted? Like your preview vision of what was going to happen to Sheffield and Lavinder? How come you couldn’t do that for your own brother?

Blood on all of us, thought Patrick, from Fallbrook to Sangin, and from Sangin to Fallbrook.

“None of us lit that fire or shot Cade,” he said, “or killed Ted.” With this partial truth Patrick privately and forever renounced the bigger truth, in honor of his brother, for the sake of his family and himself. It would be his secret forever, his portion of the burden Ted had left behind.

“No, we didn’t,” said Archie. “It just feels that way.”

“Can I just miss him for a while?” From the corner of his eye Patrick could see his mother snugging the black silk scarf she wore around her neck, fussing with the knot, flaring the ends, then wiping her eyes again.

Patrick and his father switched seats and Patrick guided the truck into the mounting wind and rain. Patrick figured if the forecast of four inches was correct, and it fell over twelve hours, they’d be okay. But with more, or a faster rate, they might have to reconfigure the sandbag walls to guide the runoff. And they might have to fill more bags, an onerous task when sand was mud. In a full deluge, the upper roads would wash out and Big Gorge could overrun or collapse, taking the mid and lower roads with it. At that point only the tractor stood a chance. Worst case was an earth slide, which would destroy everything in its path. But slides were rare on the Norris ranch, the last one bringing Frank Webster’s death, more than half a century ago. In that case even the tractor became an enemy.

Patrick stayed in first gear, looked out at the slanting rain and the black sky. Up high the clouds roiled and rose. He thought of Iris. He touched the cell phone in his pocket to make sure it was there. Pictured her face. Remembered her words just before he had left her to follow Ted from the concert. I can love you, Pat. But I don’t know if I can survive you.

Now he thought of Iris bursting into Pride Auto Repair and, against odds, prevailing. She was clear-headed and rational. The deputies asked her to stay outside but Iris politely refused and brandished her press credential. Over the next hour she not only got the story and cell phone photos for the Village View , but managed to comfort him. Patrick, as a possible suspect, was ordered to sit on an old paisley sofa back in the repair bay and so he sat, dazed, trying to keep the blood-drenched details of his story straight for both Iris and the cops, trying not to hear the final report of Ted’s gun thundering over and over. Even through all that, he had registered Iris’s clarity of mission, the way she was able to accomplish it even with a choked voice and a makeup-streaked face. She’d shuttled back and forth between him and the crime scene proper, part friend and part reporter. Grief-numbed as he was, Patrick was aware that the sum of his love for her was being added to.

The rain roared against the metal roof. Patrick imagined the tropical and Alaskan fronts colliding as on the weather maps. Maybe right here in front of us, he thought. “This is going to be a whopper,” he said.

“The road’s already boiling,” said Archie.

“Where’s the thunder?” asked Caroline. “I love thunder. Ted loved thunder, too. We tape-recorded it once when he was four so we could hear it whenever we wanted.”

The truck slid on the steep higher roads but Patrick countered with the four-wheel drive. They crept along, gear low and wipers high, watching the water cut runnels and splash up against the sandbag walls. Patrick noted that the walls now looked about half enough high. Radio reception was poor but the L.A. news said two inches of rain had already fallen there, with another two to four inches expected before noon. There were reports of wind damage in Antelope Valley. Orange County was getting blasted too, power out in parts of Huntington Beach and Fountain Valley. San Diego public radio reported widespread destruction in Tijuana, San Ysidro, and National City, and an inch and a half of rain downtown with more to come. Fashion and Mission valleys were already flooded and closed, and a downed tree up on Bankers Hill had landed on a car and killed a man. NOAA radio estimated winds at ninety miles per hour at the storm’s center, and upgraded it from a tropical storm to Hurricane Harley. Her center was now just off Todos Santos, a brief sixty miles from the border and winds were expected to increase closer to landfall.

Patrick goosed the truck around a snug downhill turn. The wall of sandbags in front of them broke away and a stream of black, ash-stained water flooded through the break. He slid to a stop on level ground and set the brake and they piled out and wrestled the bags back into place. The bags seemed twice as heavy to Patrick and even with the heavy leather gloves they were hard to hold. When the wall was up they used the sledgehammers to drive in the rebar.

Patrick grunted as the rain found its way past his slicker and on to him. Their hammers clinked sharply on the steel and with every blow Patrick imagined he was demolishing Ted’s long history of bad fortune, which had started in his own body in his own crib. What kind of a beginning was that? Maybe life wasn’t random at all, as he’d decided in the Sangin Valley, but something ordered and invariable, like a book that you have no say in the writing of and can’t revise. So that what happened inside Pride Auto Repair on Friday night was a closing chapter, long fixed and waiting to be read. Same with Boss and Myers and Zane, Dahl and Pendejo and Prebble and Adams and Sheffield and... well, it added up to a lot of books. But was this notion of a book of life any better than the idea of one big game of chance? And if so, how?

Suddenly the storm shifted gears and became a faster and less resistible thing. Even on high the windshield wipers were insufficient and Patrick had to lean close to the glass for brief snapshots of the way forward. Another sandbag wall had collapsed above them and he caught a snippet of the waterfall cascading proudly down. The runoff was clearer now that the rain had washed the trees and earth of ash. The truck slipped and slid down the road toward the Big Gorge.

Patrick rounded a curve and drove on. The wind tried to pry the vehicle from the ground and for a moment the truck shivered as if it might lift off and take flight.

“I always wanted to see Munchkinland,” said Caroline.

Tree branches whirled through the air and whapped against the truck. Patrick saw a section of the bunkhouse roof rotating corner to corner through the sky.

“Goddamn you!” cried Archie, looking up through the windshield. “This is how you answer me?”

By noon the sandbag walls were collapsing everywhere they looked. They couldn’t replace them fast enough to matter. The wind had backed off but the sky was even blacker and the rain seemed more solid than liquid, not drops but sheets of water stacked back to back as far as Patrick could see. Everywhere he looked the water rushed across the ground and it was no longer clear but brown with precious soil. Patrick saw this and his spirit sank even deeper: Norris Brothers Growers washing away to the sea, as in his father’s dream.