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  “You’re thinking about the raids up there around Garberville.”

  “Just partly.”

  “It doesn’t concern us.”

  “I agree.”

  “It’s a foreign-policy thing.”

  “I agree.”

  “Nelson, you surprise me a little bit. I mean, a number-one chance to be paranoid.”

  “Paranoia is a fond memory now. I’ve got plenty more to scare me than a few thousand troops of the National Guard.”

  Meadows sighed and the usual slanted, half-angry pity for Nelson Fairchild raked his brain. “Okay. I can’t delay you. Confess.”

  “Only panic would drive me to, that’s got to be obvious, only shitpants motherfucking fear, Clarence. My life is at stake. I face them or I face you—I’m down to two options, and you’re the less nauseating one.”

  “Who’s them?”

  “I don’t know exactly.”

  “Oh. That them. One of those them.”

  “Anyone who followed me around for twelve hours would understand—you’d be convinced. Just shadow me.”

  “I’ll shadow you if you go up to Fort Bragg.”

  “Okay.”

  “To the Redwood Lanes, okay?”

  “The bowling alley.”

  “I’m into that. It’s a new thing.”

  “It’s very old. Since the Egyptians I think.”

  “I’m taking it up.”

  Meadows uncapped the canteen and tipped a dollop into the bong’s water chamber.

  “Please take this seriously. These are real live hit men.”

  “Hit men have to be paid.”

  “Shit yes, Clarence. A body has to eat.”

  “So who’s paying?”

  “Harry Lally’s involved.”

  “Did you bone his wife?”

  “We were partners on a coke thing. It didn’t work.”

  “You wouldn’t expect it to.”

  “This was an arrangement for several pounds.”

  “Uh-oh. How deep did it sink you, Nelson?”

  “I owe him big bad money.”

  “Approximately what.”

  “Ninety-two.”

  “Sell your house.”

  “I don’t own the stupid, son-of-a-bitching, cunt-fucking house!”

  “Better not sell it then.”

  “You are impenetrably smug and deeply, deeply idiotic.”

  “Still—I’m not the desperate one.”

  “Profoundly! Radiantly! Do you think I’d admit all this if I saw any way out of this hole?”

  “Oh no, are we gonna cry?”

  “We’re going to cry, yes. And we’re going to beg. I’m begging you for help, Clarence.”

  “I’m not saying no right yet.”

  “For help secondarily. Primarily though I’m begging you for indulgence. I beg your forgiveness. Our own enterprise is threatened.”

  Clarence jumped up with a stick of kindling and laid it like a sword to Nelson’s throat. “The plants better be growing right in this spot at harvest time.”

  “They will be. It’s just that they’ve come into play in this ludicrous situation.”

  “And you think that puts me in play?”

  “I didn’t plan it like this.”

  “I refuse to be committed here. Shit. I’ll just dump your body in Lally’s pool.”

  “That would be something of a committed act, I think.”

  “The just punishment of a fuck-up.”

  Clarence loosed his weapon and dropped a bud in the bowl and set it going. Fairchild took a hit automatically, failing to savor, dragging it down where it wouldn’t hold. He coughed and strangled and then looked weepy-eyed at Meadows out of his true face, the face of a naked sinner.

  “Aah, Nelson. Nelson. Why don’t you just clear out?”

  “I live here.”

  “Maybe that’s the problem. Is it time to leave?”

  “I just can’t make it anywhere else. I’ve never lived anywhere but here and down in Carmel. I’ve never been anywhere but Carmel and here and Italy.”

  “You’ve been around L.A., haven’t you?”

  “Okay. Yes. And I’m not going back. It’s completely over for Southern California.”

  Clarence took a small hit and held the smoke down, and then an icy ridge seemed to congeal along his sinuses. He could hear and yet felt virtually deaf. “Well, I know what you mean.” He decided he’d better not take another toke and then did so anyway and blew it out, saying, “Destiny’s moving over this land. You just gotta ride it like a wave.”

  “Who made you the Surf City boddhisattva I’d like to know.”

  Meadows graced this one with no more than one-tenth of a shrug.

  “I’d like to know who told you the rules.”

  “The rules for what?”

  “For everything. How to get born and how to be cool.”

  Who knew what went on in that skull? Maybe a brain tumor beating like a jungle drum. Nelson was his brother’s brother.

  “Clarence, what are you going to do about all this?”

  His head floated in a cloud of smoke and he heard it say, “I’m handling all this fine. All that you describe. I go bowling, I stay close to the sea, I suck down a lotta tequila. It’s easy and short. It’s a skate.”

  “How groovy for you.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Stay as groovy as you are.”

  “I’m doing that.”

  “Thanks.”

  They’d smoked too much. The stuff was almost immeasurably potent—uncured, half-dried, bitter. Meadows suddenly understood what it would be like to turn into his own tongue. Was he lying prone or draggling down from above? Only a breathtaking surrender of his soul kept him floating upward and pressed against the capsized ground. Any slight failure of this abject unwilled movement and he’d plummet into the sky.

  He’d be thinking something and realize that this flotsam had been plying his mind untended for perhaps many minutes before cresting into view. He did not consist of his thoughts, did not even produce them, was just the nameless fact they drifted through.

  In a while—a half hour or a thousand hours—Nelson roused him, stirring around in Clarence’s own pack and putting on his blue enameled kettle for coffee and upending the canteen above the pot until it gurgled dry.

  Nelson dumped in the ground coffee at the boil, let it steep a minute away from the fire, then looped his belt through the kettle’s handle and, with shocking deftness and equilibrium, stood up and slung the brew in circles, driving the grounds to the kettle’s floor.

  “You’ve got moves to surprise a person, haven’t you?”

  “I was raised to this land. I can live off dirt. I can rope a tree, hunt the mugwump, all of that.” He poured coffee for the both of them into Clarence’s one big cup. Meadows breathed the steam and sipped. The day was already hot, and this made it hotter in a righteous and purifying way.

  “This bud,” Fairchild said. He couldn’t quite get his belt restrung through the loops.

  “This shit right here,” Clarence agreed, “is the explanation why they make us outlaws.”

  “I’d hate to see it fall to the possession of corrupted souls. Moneygrubbers, hit men.”

  “Lally never seemed all that serious.”

  “I owe him close to a hundred grand. I’m worried.”

  “If you told me I owed him money, I wouldn’t be worried.”

  “Clarence: if there were any action you could be persuaded to take, what would it be?”

  “Me? I’ve been blown off the map. I’m way uncharted.”

  “Could you perhaps, you know, frag these mothers?”

  “Don’t think in extremes.”

  “Or maybe just talk to Harry Lally. Talk to him in a way that frightens him.”

  “He’s frightened now. He leaves footprints of shit.”

  “And I’m no less a coward.”

  The tall coward plunged into a telling of some length and detail, reaching acro
ss the months and waters to Palermo a year ago July. At one point he jumped up and began weaving like a shaman and the soul of a wild boar entered his body. He snuffed and charged at breezes and shouted that false hunters had run him to bay in this secret garden of ecstatic herbs. Meadows was astonished by this primitive seizure. And made reverent. In silence he waited for the gusts of totem beings to cease storming through Nelson’s eyes.

  Later Meadows said of Harry Lally: “The guy’s a silly cocaine dealer. Everything about him is pointless. After a while he’ll get arrested or something.”

  “Arrested by whom? This is Mendocino County. People don’t get arrested here.”

  “His scene will crumble. Wait him out.”

  They paused, both looking upward until it seemed they were doing just that, languishing in this sunstruck abyss until their enemies should fail.

  “And your two buddies from Del Norte,” Clarence said, “do they know about Billy?”

  “What about him?”

  “Like the location of his residence?”

  “They’ll get around to everybody eventually,” Fairchild said.

  The coffee had cooled and Meadows took a big gulp and found that he was thirsty and that it was good to drink. He watched the buzzards totter in the currents.

  “Do you remember,” he asked Fairchild, “where it was we met?”

  “Everybody I’ve ever met I met in the Gualala Hotel bar.”

  “Well, that’s right. That’s where it was. We had a conversation, we sensed an opportunity, we struck an arrangement. Three years later it’s still in effect. That’s unusually lucky, when you think about it.”

  “Is this a farewell speech? Do I sense yet another divorce in my future?”

  “No, man, no. In fact exactly the opposite. I’m seeing that we have a past here, and I want to value it. I will do what I can to maintain our partnership.”

  “Clarence! You’re better than any shrink! What about the pig-men?”

  “What can they do?”

  “They’ll staple my penis to something, I think.”

  “They’ll leave. How long can they hang around? Didn’t you say they left once already? I’ll talk to them.”

  “Clarence, look: I’m happy!”

  The night’s heavens kept clear all the way to M-47, a galaxy lying some eighty billion light-years off and appearing over such unframeable distances no more impressive than an asteroid. In fact it would have swallowed the Milky Way and two others just as big. Meadows while at sea had learned to locate it. He and Billy lay now on a plastic tarp in a clear spot out front of the cabin raptly marking a pinpoint candescence’s course toward M-47 and praying for a collision. A weather satellite, most likely.

  “Oh lord, oh lord, so close,” Billy said as the bright little mover failed to pierce the galaxy.

  They’d put away a feast of venison sausage fried up with eggs and beans, and hard biscuits baked in a covered pan. Meadows lay there wedded to the deep basso pulse of all outer space and feeling only recently surfaced from total amnesia.

  —No matter how untrustworthy his sensations, interpretations, conclusions, the bare unnameable fact remained. You couldn’t know it. But you could be it. A relaxed but attentive attitude, nothing more was required. No need to push through to the next thing. It’s already here.

  As on the road that had taken him back this way. And he moving forward, blind and strangling, through the storm…

  Billy said, “Did you ever imagine, like, a guy who keeps hearing something from way out, way out, but it won’t reach down here where it’s all twisted and full of vengeance, and it’s like if he could get out there, he’d see—because he could look back down here—”

  “Twelve now,” Meadows said, counting yet another meteor’s trace through the northwest quadrant.

  “—and without all the boundaries cutting it up it would be made obvious—I mean like his unknown purpose, his not-to-be-revealed identity.”

  “His secret mission.”

  “Yeah. But don’t laugh.”

  “I’m not. I was thinking those very things while I was driving up yesterday. Have you ever seen these trick hats that look like Greek writing until you get far enough back? And then they say, ‘Fuck You’?”

  Billy seemed to hold his breath in the dark a minute, and then said…“No.”

  In a while Billy asked after the garden, and Meadows told him how if a person only walked along the rows and breathed the plants’ exhalations, he saw visions. “I got a couple crumbs, if you want a hit.”

  “I don’t think I should touch anything even remotely psychedelic.”

  “That’s what your brother said.”

  “Sometimes we agree. Not always.”

  “He’s jammed up some way, he tells me.”

  “It’s his buddy that he partnered with on a rotten deal.”

  “Lally.”

  “Harry Lally. He’s slick.”

  “Slicker’n a wet bean.”

  “That’s nothing. Nelson knows demons way past Harry Lally’s level.”

  “I believe you.”

  “Why doesn’t he try talking to a cop?”

  “A cop?”

  “Like the new guy. My instincts tell me he might be okay.”

  “Do you realize we’re criminals, Billy? We don’t think cops are okay.”

  “There are good ones and bad ones. Like any profession. The world is full of bad news. Anybody who’s not an asshole—thanked be fortune. Thanked be fortune, cop or priest or I don’t care who. The mayor.”

  “Thanked be fortune.”

  “Yes, you got it.”

  “Is this place getting crazier and crazier?”

  “Very likely, yes. You referring to the North Coast?”

  “Here. Here. Here, man. The entire western portion of the Milky Way.”

  Billy kept silent a minute and then said, “The whole age is turning.”

  “So they say.”

  “When you erase the lines, that’s God. God is all.”

  “You’re not gonna trip your wires now.”

  “Me? No.”

  “You haven’t been doing coffee.”

  “No. But wow. The stars.”

  He asked Billy, “Did you one time tell me you had a Coleman stove? Could I borrow it? I think I better start sleeping out by the garden.”

  “It’s in the Scout. Fuel’s there too.”

  “Okay. Remind me.”

  “Remind you what?”

  Clarence told Billy about the woman named Carrie, the woman with the kid named Clarence; of how he’d watched her calmly sleeping. “…but she’s awake, she’s penitent, suddenly wants to go chaste, all religiously deranged and messed up.”

  “Godliness isn’t bad, Clarencio.”

  “Did I say it was bad?”

  “Religion’s okay. But those highways. Some people just get rolling.”

  “And their scene boils down to looking for the one thing that’ll stop them. That’s why she was out there in her defunct evening dress laughing and pretending to be normal.” A thought came into Clarence’s mind and he laughed: “I got me a bowling ball, dude. I got you a hat, too.”

  “It was probably just highway madness,” Billy offered in defense of this godly woman he’d never seen.

  The same constellations lit the clearing when he came awake that same night, disturbed by movements in the cabin where Billy must have turned in. Meadows lay by the cold coals where he’d drifted off, his bag wrapped around him but his feet sticking out and paralyzed by the chill. He kicked his boots off and jammed his toes into the down-filled folds while a flashlight beam jerked and floated the cabin from inside. With the moon so low it wouldn’t yet be eleven; he’d only napped a little while.

  The light moved outside and the cabin door clapped behind it.

  “Something’s wrong!”

  “You sick or something?”

  “Something’s happening!”

  “It’s just a night on Earth, man.”
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  “There’s something happening, Clarence. I really—I gotta go.”

  “Are you about to disappear into the woods?”

  “I’m going to Dad’s.”

  “That don’t seem too smart.”

  But Billy was moving. “Something’s happening, brother.”

  The lantern swung west and Meadows could make out Billy’s form occluding it. Billy headed out under the glittering galaxies through the trees and toward Carter’s Landing Road, by which he’d find the coast.

  Clarence was at a loss here, but judged that Billy would probably make his way and if he foundered would get his bearings easily by daylight. Meadows sat up in the bag and wrapped his arms about his shins and then saw the full moon break the treetops: dawn not five hours off.

  He crawled from under his bag and pulled his boots on quickly, shivering against the breeze that stirred up around him that faint sweet fetid redwood smell like mystic yeast. He threw his things into Billy’s Scout, made certain of its fuel level and gave the gallon Coleman tin a shake—plenty for the stove—before trying the road up to the ridge. The headlamps lit the ruts undependably, but he knew his way around the big ones, and before the moon had made ten degrees of arc he’d topped the drive and the ridge and was making east on Shipwreck Road, passing through pockets of varied airs that signalled, but not clearly, something noteworthy in the weather. By the time he’d reached the garden and hidden the Scout amid coils of manzanita, the wind was treading over the evergreens on the canyon’s north, and he could smell the wet on it. He carried a flashlight but didn’t use it descending, just checked any plunge with the jacks of his boots and went down in the dark hugging his sleeping bag with the plastic tarp and the Coleman stove wrapped within it. By the garden he made his camp quickly—braced the tarp with twine and made an A-frame and lay inside it. During a half-minute’s eerie calm he breathed the pungency of the plants and also, with the higher air cooling quicker than the lower, a whiff of creosote just now rising from the valley. He could very nearly taste it in his throat.

  As the storm broke it drove in under his protection. More wrack than rain, it didn’t douse him badly. He sat with his knees drawn up and his head jammed between, heaving on personal seas, stunned and clinging, his life’s tremendous wheel turning over. He looked up at it and howled out loud, Who runs this scam? The words went under in the medium gale—thankfully, as they conveyed nothing of how privileged he felt to find his inner maelstroms matched by outer ones, as if all the powers endorsed and had even orchestrated his journey. For years now the weather hadn’t been typical. The drought through months that should have rained, and then the recent almost unprecedented August downpour, and now this one shooting tiny stinging drops that blew for three-quarters of an hour. Then it ceased, whisked itself away, bequeathing the calm of the morgue and a thin general mist. The silence rolled through him too, and he lay back to drift pleasantly down through his exhaustion. He’d brought nothing for breakfast, but he’d see to that briefly tomorrow, drop into the Anchor Bay Store and lay in some necessities and be back in an hour. He’d wake tomorrow and go down the hill and buy beans and eggs, bread and cheese, coffee and canned meat—and didn’t know it yet but he’d also learn of Nelson senior’s death and how everything was changed and how the sons, the brothers, owned ten thousand acres of California; and he wouldn’t return here for many days.