Elizabeth Tallent - Mendocino Fire

“Nate.”

“Yeah.”

Boone said into the open window, “I’m gonna need to see in the camper,” and Nate said, “Yeah, okay,” but before he could get out of the truck Boone said, “Did you know that diver was a kid when you-all broke his ribs?” and Nate said, shocked, “It was not a kid,” and then, “How old?” Boone said, “Seventeen,” and then, “Well, now things get more problematic, because he’s hurt pretty bad,” and Nate figured he might as well ask, “How bad?”

“He’ll live.”

“That’s good.”

“Well, yes it is,” Boone said, “yes it is and I’m surprised you’re so damn calm in the face of important good news like this, but maybe you called to check on the kid during the night.”

“I didn’t know it was a kid and I didn’t call.”

“Been a night of interesting phone calls. A couple to the hospital during the night and an anonymous tip to my office a half hour ago. Christ, Nate, how could you get into shit like this, break your old man’s heart?” And then: “Look, I’m gonna do something I’m bound to regret, so don’t say anything and don’t give me any fucking reason to think twice. Just drive.” He slapped the roof of the cab. “Just drive away.” He stepped back. “This is for Shug. Now you tell him that the next time you talk.”

In the rearview mirror Boone Salazar was backlit by alternating flashes of crimson and blue, his hand lifted in a wave, but it took an hour of dark highway, winding through the woods with no lights whatsoever in his rearview, before Nate could believe that he was free, and more miles passed before, remembering what he was supposed to tell Shug, he began to laugh, seeing the beauty of it.

David Merson, heartsore in the way of old activists, a stooped, unkempt forty-eight, leafs through his so-called love life for precedent and finds none. (Waiting in a parked car overlooking an arroyo induces introspection.) The other guys in EPIC share the leanness of long outrage, frequent marathons, and enduring luck with women, but obsession has not been good to David’s relationships, his days spent tracking the toxins that bleed through watersheds, questioning children in hospital gowns printed with teddy bears, inking cancer clusters onto topo maps, bringing his peculiar skill set to bear, his milky mildness, what his second ex calls his anti-charisma, the hangdog air of bewilderment that makes even dying children strive to enlighten him, the harmlessness that glints through his wire-rimmed specs when he shakes hands with some CEO or other, except that mostly they know better, now, than to let a bigwig sit down with David. Don’t so much as nod when you pass him in the courthouse hall, they’re told. Despite his scruffiness — one judge told him to get a haircut — he is sleek in pursuit, righteous, relentless, a scorner of compromise, a true believer.

Whose own luck with women was flawed, leaving him grateful for joint custody. David loves his two sons with the appalled passion of a dad whose work acquaints him with small coffins. From his right hand to the hollow of a kid’s well-worn glove runs a taut thread of inevitability, the ball held aloft and displayed— Dad, look! In the making of a boy psyche this is the key phrase. It’s David’s job to arrange plenty of occasions for its happy proclamation: Dad, look! His rendition of Goodnight Moon is famous for the oinks, whistles, and cheek pops enhancing the line Goodnight noises everywhere . He’s fed trembling white mice Coca-Cola from an eyedropper for the sake of fourth grade science, though his coworkers’ connections in the Animal Liberation Front would rip his heart out and nail it to the front door— Environmental Protection Information Center —if they found out.

His abuse of white mice — with their teeny old-lady hands! their suffering docility! — is an unusual departure from the party line. Though they have long since abandoned ecotage, the five members of EPIC hew to the rituals of brotherhood, to their affinity-group habit of staying up until two or three, baring their souls, though they do so now under the harassing buzz of fluorescence, tipped back in ergonomic chairs, ties loosened, feet up on desks variously avalanched or anal (David’s: anal) when in the old days it was shirts printed with raised fists, army surplus sleeping bags, a high-desert campfire sucked toward the moon, shooting sparks. Ice may be melting out from under polar bears, breast milk brims with mutagens, but change hasn’t ever before touched EPIC, not deeply, not at the level where they are bonded. At David’s wedding last Saturday they slouched in attitudes of conscientious celebration. They kissed the bride, they told her when she was done with this loser to give them a call, they stuck orchids behind their ears, and David alone understood they were holding back, and why. Of the five of them, he was the reliable loser in matters of the heart, and the phenomenon of Jade, the fearful symmetry of teeth and cheekbones, plus the fact that she’s on the other side, the sexiness of her being, basically, the enemy, can be neither assimilated nor forgiven.

The wedding’s meticulously repressed question: What does she see in him? In his rented tux, David had shrugged, reading minds he’d been reading half his life. They could have had a little more faith, though. For a profoundly good man to find love shouldn’t strain credulity. David caught himself thinking profoundly good and palmed his thinning fair hair in a manner Jade recognized as embarrassed or sad. She’d lifted her brows: What’s wrong? He’d slung her over his arm, leaned in as if kissing were drinking, held her practically horizontal until people said Aww.

But it was a moment’s uncensored private felicity to have meant it: profoundly good .

He’s earned it.

What he regrets now is not that thought but the ruefulness of his gesture, palming his hair — the mild, contrite, revisionist embarrassment — so that she’d had to lift her brows, to wonder what was wrong when nothing was.

In the arroyo a couple of wrecked trucks sail past a rusted washing machine, a listing, doorless refrigerator, tires of various sizes and degrees of rottenness, a cathedral window’s worth of shattered glass and the jutting wing of a small plane. The boys love coming here because nowhere else are they permitted such an array of dangers — prickly pear, anonymous stained underpants, rusty nails, rattlers. Actually, the altitude’s too high for rattlers, but the boys reject this fact. Before he lets them out of the car, David lectures. Careful, careful, careful, the poisoned echo of small white coffins. Down in the arroyo, out of his sight, they look out for each other, a good thing for brothers to learn. They are step-mothered now, in fairy-tale jeopardy, though in taking them on Jade has shown an easy, can-do confidence. She read up on step-parenting, and it turns out that beauty figures even here, in the reconfigured family calculus, the boys defenseless as their father. Regarding love, David has always been a doubter, a holder-back, the lukewarm opposite of his passionate work self. As a husband he was often described as just not there , and he had accepted as deserved the amicable breakups of marriages one and two. Along came Jade: they had gazed, eaten, drunk, fucked, the usual plot, but then fucking took over, the great power of fucking had been awakened and they fucked themselves mutually transparent, fucked their way into a dazed adoration, discovering there this clandestine status in being the two of them, this insolent sexual satisfaction coexisting with the improvisational restlessness of genius, this safety, this bliss exempt from inhibition and nagging history, neither one bothering, neither needing to explain their hasty marriage, because it was natural to want to seal such transcendent fucking with that cultural kiss of approval, dubious though you were, otherwise, about that culture.