“Why are you selling it?”
“I bought my dream boat, a Triton. And a slip down in San Diego. I don’t need this one anymore.”
The boys stood along the port side of the skiff, brushing their hands along the railing and looking back and forth from their father to the skiff. “Why can’t we keep her, Dad?” one of them said. He looked at Patrick sullenly.
“The boys love this thing,” said Pangborn. An awkward silence followed. “Look, my listing price is thirteen grand but you seem like nice people, so I’ll let her go for twelve-five. Trailer, electronics, cover, everything.”
“No!” the boys hollered in unison. Pangborn pointed to the house and the boys marched up the walkway, muttering and clomping their athletic shoes loudly on the concrete. Patrick saw a tall blond woman gather them in and close the big wooden door.
Patrick thought of the fire, and his father turned down for Farm Credit loans, and the terrible financial shape the Norris family was in. How long would it take him to turn a profit on these eleven thousand dollars? In his mind he formed the sentence “I’ve changed my mind,” but when he spoke it came out differently. “I have eleven thousand.”
“Ouch,” said Pangborn.
“And another thousand in a month.”
Pangborn rubbed his chin and studied Patrick. “You served our country.”
Patrick said nothing.
“I’ll take your eleven. That’s more than good enough.”
Patrick felt his spirits start to rise and he heard an old-fashioned dial tone come from Pangborn’s direction. Pangborn pulled a phone from his pocket and checked the caller. “Patrick? Iris? I’ve got to take this. One of the elders. Give me five minutes, will you?”
Patrick backed the trailer and Fatta the Lan’ into the Norris barn. In the sideview mirror he could see Iris standing by the door, framed in the barnyard lights. Her golden hair shone. Jack and Spike were on scene by now, tails banging away, Spike sticking his nose up under Iris’s sweater. She nudged him away with one knee and a smile. When the boat was in place Patrick cranked down the steel wheel and unhitched the trailer. Iris helped him muscle it over and down.
“Let me guess,” she said. “Right now you want to tear into that engine and see how it looks.”
He smiled and shrugged. “I could wait.”
“I’ll help. I’d rather do something than not.”
“Take a walk with me, then. I’ll show you what’s left of the Norris Brothers groves. Just enough moonlight.”
They walked the dirt road up the hillside to higher ground. In the moonlight the trees below stretched before them, thin and black. They stopped and Iris took his arm in both her hands. “That’s a hard sight to see.”
“We’re hoping half of the burned ones live.”
“Is that realistic?”
“The fire was really fast. That was the one good thing about it.”
She leaned her head against him. “It baffles me that someone set it. What kind of person does that?”
“The Al-Qaeda magazine had instructions for setting forest fires in this country.”
“You’d think they’d take credit.”
“Other than a terrorist, I don’t know who would do it. A person who’s really pissed off? Totally crazy?”
“They say angry, yes. And sexually underdeveloped.”
“Hard to imagine how setting a fire solves that.”
She nodded and Patrick felt the weight of her head against his shoulder. He freed his arm and put it around her and they stood for a long while, awkwardly, neither seeming willing to break off.
Later, in silence, he drove Iris to her car downtown. Someone hustled down the sidewalk in the dark, hunched in a loose white wrap that for a second could have been a tribal garment, and Patrick’s heart jumped and his ears rang and his thoughts went AWOL, straight back to Sangin with Myers and Zane. He wished Iris would say something. Anything. Words in the air keep the devil gone. Sometimes. He stole a glance at her and caught her looking out the window, as usual, alert to who-knew-what? He was suddenly very aware of the space between them — he guessed it to be about twenty-two inches — and of the fine trembling in that air, which carried the weight of possibility in it, along with the chance, always present in his mind, that sudden violence would take it away.
Chapter thirteen
In the purple dusk of the next evening, after ten hours of hard labor that displeased his father, Ted drove to Pride Auto Repair. Earlier that day in the grove Ted had been reassigned to the tree-painting detail because Archie and Patrick could more quickly wire the new timers. Ted had gone to the barn to get a smaller, easier-to-carry sprayer, but had not remembered to triple rinse it before pouring in the paint and water. The triple rinse was mandatory, Archie always said, because some of the sprayers had been used for a powerful weed killer just this spring. Even a trace of herbicide residue left in the sprayer could kill an avocado tree. Ted had already painted eighty trees when he suddenly realized he’d forgotten to triple rinse the sprayer.
He ran and confessed the whole thing to his father. Ted could see the fury just behind the skin of his father’s face, and he waited for Archie to explode. But he didn’t. His father maintained patience. Archie put a hand on Ted’s shoulder and looked straight into Ted’s eyes and told him that all eighty of the newly painted trees were now much more likely to die. So, tomorrow’s first task would be to pressure-strip off the paint. His father had told him to “Get with the program, Ted. Please!”
Ted pulled into the parking lot. Pride Auto Repair was a big brick building, set well back from Oak Street. Parked near the front door Ted saw a familiar ’57 Chevy Bel Air, glistening white with aqua insets and abundant chrome. He remembered it as Cade’s car from ten years ago. The shop had been boarded up for those years but now Ted saw that the plywood was gone from the window frames and the new glass was clean and clear.
He got out and walked toward the front door on aching feet. The old neon sign was up again too, he saw, depicting a blue Ford Model T doing a wheelie, red flames coming off the rear tires. The letters over the car were white and said simply, PRIDE. As a boy he’d always liked that sign. Now it was lit up in the near dark and Ted watched its colors play across the polished hood of the Bel Air. The front door was wood and clear glass with blinds behind the glass. The blinds were rolled up. Ted looked through the glass and saw Cade Magnus looking back at him. Cade waved him in and Ted pushed through the door.
Magnus stood behind the old counter, which was strewn with a computer, printer, and other peripherals, a new phone-fax, an answering machine, knotted cords, and surge protectors. He wore a light blue short-sleeve shirt with “Cade” embroidered over one pocket, tucked into a pair of navy work pants. He was thick and muscular, as Ted remembered, and had the same smugly engaging smile. Through the windowed double doors behind Magnus, Ted saw the repair bay out back, the high ceilings and the parts racks and the big lifts resting at floor level. “Ted Norris,” Cade said.
“Are you going to move back to Fallbrook?”
“I already have. I heard you lost your trees in the fire. Sorry. Those Lamb Haas avos you guys grew were the best I ever had.”
“What about your father?”