Everyone was a kind of tree. Ramona a cypress. Doris an orange tree, no a lemon tree. Old Tom a gnarled Sierra juniper, hanging on despite the dead branches. Oscar, one of the El Toro sycamores. Hank a manzanita, nature’s bonzai, a primal part of the hills. Kevin? A scrub oak. Strong limbed, always shedding, looks like it’s falling apart.
Up the wet root-rimmed trail to the real peak, feeling his quads. Onto the broad top. Sit for hours. Watch the sunset. Watch the dark seep out of the earth. Watch the dark leak into the sky.
Back down the hill, through the avocado trees. He was too restless to go inside the house. He got on his bike and started to ride. The cool air of the night, the foothill roads.
Thoughtlessly he coasted down into the roundabout where Foothill met Newport, circling into it to head up Newport to Crawford Canyon Road; and there was Alfredo, biking through in the other direction. Alfredo looked up, saw Kevin, looked down again. But as they zipped by each other Kevin caught a glimpse of the expression on his face, and it was a mix, so much in it, but the dominant emotion was—triumph. Triumph, pure and simple, suppressed and then he was past.
And at that moment Kevin hated Alfredo Blair more than he had hated anything in his life.
He was astounded at the virulence of the feeling, its power to dominate his thoughts. He rode and rode but he couldn’t think of anything else. If only he and Alfredo could get into another fight on the softball diamond, what he would do to him. It was an incredible stimulant, hatred—a poisonous amphetamine, sending him into long wrenching fantasies of justice, retribution, revenge. Revenge! Fierce fights, both verbal and physical, all complicated (even in fantasy) by Ramona’s presence, which meant that Kevin could never be the aggressor. Unless he were to catch him out one night, alone—like tonight—crash bikes, leap on him, strangle him, leave him dead—so much for his look of triumph!
Then again it wasn’t hard to imagine scenarios where he was defending himself, or Ramona, or the town, fighting to save them all from Alfredo’s malignant, arrogant drive to power. Punching him in the face hard—the idea made him hunch over, in little paroxysms of hatred. Oh to do it, to do it, to do it! It really was astonishing.
At last, much later, he returned home. His legs were tired. He walked through the garden to the house—
And there in the grove, movement. That shape! Instantly Kevin thought of the patch of kerosene east of Tom’s place—arsonist, voyeur, intruder in the night (maybe Alfredo, there to gloat, there to be killed)—“Hey!” he said sharply, and was off running, jumping over the tomatoes and into the grove, movement out there, black on black. Between the rows of misshapen avocado trees, fallen avos like ancient grenades black on the tilled dirt, movement, movement, nothing. A sound and he was off again, trying to pant silently as he followed the weak clicks of dry avo twigs breaking.
He turned and saw it again, fifteen trees down, dark shape, still and large. A tiny sound, giggle-chuckle, and his anger shifted, an electric quiver of fear ran up his spine; what was it? He ran for it and it slipped left, downhill. He turned at the tree, looked down an empty row.
No movement, no sound.
An empty still grove, black in the black. Kevin standing in it trembling, sweating, darting glances left and right.
One day he climbed the hill and there in the copse of trees were Tom and Nadezhda, sitting under the tallest sycamore.
They waved him over. “How’s it going?” Tom said.
“Okay. And you?”
“Fine. Nadezhda’s ship has gotten its cargo aboard, and they’re under way soon. I think I’m going to go along.”
“That’s good, Tom.” He smiled at them, feeling low. “I was hoping you’d do that.”
“I’ll just keep him one voyage,” Nadezhda said.
Kevin waved a hand, sat before them.
They talked about the hill for a while. “You know I’ve been getting calls from my friends,” Tom said. “About the information from Avending we sent them, and some other stuff. I think I know now why Alfredo has done all this.”
“Really!” Kevin exclaimed. “And?”
“Well—it’s a long story.” Tom picked up a handful of leaves, began dropping them on the ground. “Heartech makes cardiac aids, right? Cardiac aids, artificial blood, all that kind of thing. Alfredo and Ed Macey started the company eight years ago, when they were finishing grad school at UCI. It was a way of marketing an improved heart valve they had invented. To start, they got a loan from the American Association for Medical Technology, which is one of the information associations that sprang up to fill the gap left in the thirties when the venture capital laws changed. In the years since, unfortunately, the AAMT has become the refuge for a lot of the greediest elements in American medicine. Bits of the old AMA, people from the profit hospitals, they all found their way into this AAMT, and started building their power base again.” Tom laughed shortly. “There are people in this country, as soon as you set limits of any kind, their only goal in life becomes to break them. Being a hundred isn’t enough—for a lot of them, the thrill is to have more power than they should. More than allowed! They love that.
“But Alfredo isn’t like that, as far as I can judge. He wanted to build medical devices, that’s all. You remember how he used to talk about it when they were beginning. And they got their start, fine. But like a lot of small companies beginning, it got rough. It wasn’t clear at first that their valve was an improvement over the other models on the market, and they were struggling. It got to the point where it looked like they would go under—and that’s where the AAMT stepped in again.
“They offered Alfredo and Ed another loan. This one would be illegal under the new laws, but they said they believed in Heartech’s product, they wanted to help. The AAMT would start a black account for Heartech, and then they’d have a place ever afterward where they could go for help, deposit funds they didn’t want to report—a whole program, a whole black bank. And Alfredo and Ed—they could have tried to find some other way out, I guess, but they didn’t. They went for it.”
Kevin whistled. “How did your friends find out about this?”
“First by looking into the AAMT’s Hong Kong bank, which covers a lot of this action. And my friends have a mole in the AAMT who hears a lot, and from her the stories get to my friends.
“So.” Tom spread his hands. “That was the start of it. Heartech got through its hard year, began to prosper. Some excellent evaluations of the new valve came in, and it became the standard for certain conditions, and then they expanded into other products. You know that part of the story. But all along, they were getting more deeply involved with the black side of the AAMT, using funds, and after they hit the size limits for a company of their kind, banking funds as well. They’re iceberging, it’s called. Most of their overprofit is going to taxes, but they’re hiding a part of their operation in the AAMT in order to be able to do even more.”
“But why?” Nadezhda asked. “Why do that?”
Tom shrugged. “It’s the same impulse that got Alfredo started, if you ask me. He believes in this equipment, he knows it saves lives, he wants to do even more of it. Save more lives, make more money—the two are all mixed up in his business, and if you try to limit the latter in any way, it looks to him like you’re limiting the former.”
Kevin said, “But he could have started up an association of his own, and farmed some of the profit out to smaller companies, right? The procedures are there!”