Elizabeth Tallent - Mendocino Fire

He pried her wet fists away, but she wouldn’t talk.

Fourteen-hour days for days on end, he worked. Let her work, now. Let her pick away at the crazy knot of resistance to him that had tied itself in secret. He didn’t know why it had, but it had.

Left over from the brief spellbound time that had followed his finding her in the café, she had one trick, and when their drought had gone on long enough — almost too long to permit backtracking — she used it, turning to Nate and saying, “What if it was the last time we were ever going to see each other and you knew it, how would you fuck me, what would you do?”

She had taken a chance. He rested rough hands — almost as gnarly as his dad’s — on either side of her jaw, and gazing past her everyday self to the deep-down soul-shelter where betrayal stirred — they both knew she was not entirely pretending — he said “I would kill you” with something like the ferocity she needed.

Petey Crews was back from Iraq, and Rafe said they needed to celebrate, the three of them, hit the beach, that little cove where they used to hang out, make a bonfire and get high and drink some beer.

Petey and Nate got an early start and were already drunk, so Rafe drove Nate’s truck, hauling hard at the wheel as if caught off guard by each curve. Jammed together in the cab they were not as easy as they had once been — they had lost the hang of shoulder-to-shoulder intimacy. Rafe kept wanting to know if he should turn now — was this the road to the cove? — and they all three squinted at the road snaking out of the dusk, their disorientation a fall from grace, each separately determined to ignore this failure and do what he could to regain the high school sense of rightness, because without it who were they, what had they become? This had been their kingdom — this crescent of nondescript beach, streamers of foam borne toward them, flung high, disintegrating, drained away in pebble-glittering rills. The moon. The companionable shapes of dunes embracing the dead end that served for a parking lot. Where there was, gradually looming into visibility, another vehicle, a black van with opaque windows and mud-obscured license plate. “Don’t fucking tell me,” Rafe said.

They got out and prowled around the van.

“Nobody in there now,” Nate said.

“How do you know?” Petey drank and wiped his mouth, drank again and flung the bottle away, but that was a good thing, not at the van, away into the dark.

“Tracks and scuff marks going away but none coming back,” Nate said.

“Tonto.”

“Let’s just leave it,” Rafe said. “Go further down the beach. Make our fire.”

Once the fire was sending seething mares’ tails of sparks upward, Petey said, “Isn’t it too dark for them to be out there?”

“Using lights, maybe,” Rafe said.

“If they were using lights, wouldn’t we see them?”

“Or they saw us, driving up.”

“Shug wants to go out early. I am so screwed. I haven’t been this drunk in forever,” Nate said.

They couldn’t help watching the surf while they drank.

“Here he comes,” Rafe said.

Ushered onto the beach by a gentle wave, the slender figure advanced with a hampered frog-footed delicacy, his raft rasping and hissing across the sand. Pausing, he slid his mask onto the top of his head, revealing a pale oval face rimmed in sleek black and aimed in their direction. When he moved, points and glimmers from their fire skidded across his oily wetsuit. He set down a bag whose clatter they could hear from where they sat.

Petey said, “Too heavy to carry, the greedy fuck.”

“Gonna be more than one of them,” Rafe said, but they waited and no others emerged from the surf.

“He’s alone,” Nate said.

“Dangerous diving alone,” Petey observed.

“You know, Fish and Game really messes with these guys,” Rafe said. “Hits them with these ridiculous fines, basically ruins their families. Bankrupts ’em. Five or more over the limit means they go to jail, and, Jesus, it’s not like they’re dealing heroin. They’re just trying to get by.”

“All I know is, Shug really hates them,” Nate said.

Petey ground his cigarette out in the sand and got to his feet. “This is for Shug.”

Rafe said, “Petey. Come on — who is he hurting.”

But Petey was already halfway to the black figure, who tried to run, tripping on his fins, curling up with his arms wrapped around his black bulb of a skull when Petey drove the toe of his boot once, twice, again into the small of his back, then moved around to the head clasped in slender arms, Rafe and Nate pounding across the sand, Rafe screaming, “Not his head,” Nate screaming too, unsure in the end whether the diver had made any sound at all, and when Petey backed off and Nate knelt with a flash of déjà vu, he believed that upward gaze was the one he had been waiting for all along, the dark gaze that had seen to the end and had nothing to report.

But the limp black frog-footed figure was hoarsely breathing, and it became a question of what to do. Petey stood off to one side while they tried to figure out whether they had to take him somewhere or whether he could be left right there in the sand. “Where he bleeds to death from internal injuries,” Rafe said.

“I dunno,” Petey said quietly. “It could be worse to move him. His back took some pretty hard hits. Maybe his spine.” As if he had nothing to do with it.

“We’re taking him,” Nate decided. “Count of three, we all lift. Petey, you get his hands.”

“This is how we get caught.” Adamant, but throwing down his cigarette.

“You get his hands.”

“I’m telling you, this is the mistake, not what I did. And fuck you pussies, I can carry him myself.”

Staggering over the sand with the diver cradled in his arms, Petey went down on one knee but didn’t drop the guy.

Rafe said, sliding his fingers down inside the black cowl, finding a pulse in the throat, “Still with us.”

“Now what do we do?”

“Drop him off in front of the emergency room. In that grass in front of the hospital,” Nate said. “Being careful not to get seen.”

They settled the unconscious figure on a sleeping bag in the camper — Nate remembered just in time that he should be arranged on his side so that if he vomited he wouldn’t choke on it — and were climbing into the cab when Petey said, “Wait, man. The goodie bag.”

“Leave it.”

Petey slogged back across the sand toward the raft and came back, listing comically to demonstrate the bag’s weight. “More money than any of us’ve made this year. Who wants it?”

“Put it in the back.”

Within a quarter mile Rafe had to pull over to permit another vehicle, a huge SUV none of them recognized, to buck and lunge past them with inches to spare, Nate swearing at the other driver for almost scratching his paint job, Rafe saying, “What the fuck, nobody used to come here but us.”

Before light, the phone rang, and Nate reached from the futon to answer, knocking it from the wine-crate nightstand and having to search across the carpet — sandy rumpled topography of his discarded jeans, the ringing chiming through the trailer, rabbit’s tail tuft of a balled baby sock, the ringing, slick foil of a condom package, when was that, ringing, constellation of glowing buttons that he held to his ear, scared, remembering, sick, life as he knew it over, a last importuning ring before he hit the right button.

“N Dawg. I fucked up.”

Nate said the first thing that came to him: “It’s gonna be all right.”

“Who was he hurting?” Petey was crying.

Ollie sat up, the T-shirt she slept in whiter than her nakedness would have been. “Who is it?”