We walked side by side around the customers crowded at the eight open registers. Long bakery-style shelves were filled with products, many marked with handwritten Staff Picks recommendations. Much earnest chatter about taste, strength, and psychoactive properties. Farther into the store were sections for packaged edibles, extracts, CBD-only pain remedies and vitality boosters, an Our Daily Bread shelf featuring all-organic, whole grain, low carb, no sugar, gluten-free bread loaves with varying THC ratings. Vaporizer dosers and endcap stacks of canned High Country Brewers cannabis drinks.
Tola stopped and nodded. “Drinkables would put us on a level playing field with alcohol, but it tastes terrible and it’s expensive. The THC takes forever to get through the digestive tract into the bloodstream. I know, I know — you’ll stick with beer.”
I noted the grim-faced armed guards in the corners, and the customers still coming through the door. All around was our America — polyglot and poly-racial, from baggy aging stoners to the slim-cut young, techies to athletes, artists to engineers, students to moms, rich to poor, Democrat to Republican to independent to disengaged, from the simple sober to the complexly loaded, the eagerly present to the permanently gone.
Tola walked me to my truck. She was a tall woman but I slowed to match her pace. I felt a moment of authentic peace: a sunny day in May and a woman you’re happy to walk with.
“May I be a little blunt?” she asked. Then giggled.
“Please do.”
“Then you could smoke me anytime!”
I smiled as we continued.
“Sorry. It was on one of our Nectar Barn Valentine’s Day cards.”
“That’s quite an offer,” I said.
“It won’t last forever.”
We’d come to the truck. Tola Strait kissed my cheek and strode back through the lot, boots on the asphalt and sun on her hair.
Kissed and rolling down Highway 78, I got stuck in the same checkpoint the guards had been in. After examining my CDL, the burly, armored HSI agent pulled me into a makeshift secondary inspection turnout, where of course were discovered my sidearms, protection-modified 12 gauge, cameras, binoculars, flashlights, hiker’s headlights, ropes, pry bars, sleeping bag, brilliant disguises — from costume mustaches and hairpieces to a Rolling Thunder Security windbreaker — and two days’ worth of water and food, all neatly arranged in the oversized and locking toolbox in the truck bed.
Which went over poorly. In spite of my current enhanced PI photo ID card required by the state, my pocket license and valid CCW permits issued by the county, and my best manners, they made me sit and watch the near deconstruction of my beloved truck and its hasty reassembly.
I sat in the sun wanting to knock somebody out, but I couldn’t decide who.
Dalton Strait on the phone:
“Roland, I need your help. The feds just indicted me and Natalie for misuse of campaign funds, fraud, and conspiracy. They say we swiped hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations and spent them to live the high life. Completely fake news and I’ll prove it. It’s all political. They’re talking twenty-two counts and five years in the slammer for each of us. I’m having a press conference an hour and a half from now. I want you here at my house to take questions.”
“Answer your own questions,” I said. “I’m not talking to the press for you.”
“You’re on the payroll, Roland.”
“Not that I noticed.”
“Your money’s coming, man. Just be here. I need you. Semper Fi, dammit.”
And rang off.
Then, as if in answer to Dalton’s call, a YouTube video arrived, courtesy of Harris Broadman, innkeeper.
His message said, “Thought you might enjoy this trip down memory lane. This is just a few hours before we hit the IED.”
I hit the Play arrow.
A dusty Fallujah street of low, rectangular homes.
My beat for thirty days.
That soft glow to the dirty air. Bridges and sagging power lines in the background.
And resentful Iraqis watching the camera, which was moving along the road past them, apparently shot from a vehicle with some elevation to it. Broadman’s Humvee?
Then Broadman’s soft, calm voice:
“East Manhattan sucks, man. Here they are, thousands of people who hate us and want us dead. They cling to their customs and their sects and their ruined government because they’re confused animals. They don’t get that we’ll be gone soon. So they fight because they’re hardwired to fight. Like any animal. That’s not an insult. We’re all animals. I really can’t wait to get out of this shit hole. Home to some warm women and cold beer.”
I recognized Dalton’s voice:
“Boy, ain’t that the truth. I thought I was signing on to hunt terrorists. I didn’t think they’d be hunting me.”
“You’re an innocent, Dalton. An innocent blockhead.”
“Married to the prettiest woman in California.”
“Don’t lose your balls to a roadside.”
“Not me, Harris. That’s not in old Dalton’s cards.”
The clip ended and I played it again. And again, riding the video back sixteen years that seemed to have gone by in a moment. Back to my eager young man’s desire to serve his country, and the innocence quickly lost. Back to the idea that you’ve been fooled and extremely lucky to have survived it.
The past being not even past and all that.
I looked out at the pretty plains along the highway, temporarily greened by rain.
Okay. Maybe it wasn’t past, but it was behind me.
Nineteen
The Strait home stood at the end of a rural road south of Escondido. It looked to be 1960s construction, a modest stucco two-story with a wholesome face and brown trim. The yard looked uncherished and the hedges needed trimming. A flagpole mid-yard, no flag. A FOR SALE sign. Around the home were several unbuilt lots and a few similar structures, as if these homesteaders had led the charge only to be abandoned.
Dalton stood in the doorway, a beer bottle in one hand and an apparently just delivered handful of mail in the other. He had his air of disheveled nonchalance. A small Bichon mix wagged its tail at me eagerly. The press conference was almost an hour away. I wasn’t sure how hot a ticket it might be, given last night’s bomb. Every media outlet I turned to — from local to national to the BBC — was covering the bombing deaths of Representative Nisson and his aide. Would they have time for a humble assemblyman accused of financial misdeeds?
“I’m going to stand right in this doorway when the media asks questions,” he said. “That way, they’ll see I’m a just a humble blown-up war hero and family man, defending my home and wife against lies and slanted accusations.”
“Raise a flag, shave your snout, and lose the beer,” I said.
“Not a problem. There’s a flag here in the foyer, would you mind? I’m going to go get pretty. Beer?”
“No.”
“Come on, Freddie,” he said to the dog. “Let’s go get ready for the show.”
While Dalton prettified upstairs, I carried a well-weathered United States flag to the front-yard pole. The pole had a clothesline, three pulleys, and a tie-down. As I hoisted the flag I noted the top ornament, a toilet bowl float painted gold. I wondered if Dalton was more patriot or scoundrel.
I sat in the living room and waited. Heard voices upstairs, three, male and argumentative. Freddie barked briefly. The living room was oddly dated for someone Dalton’s age: Berber carpet, matronly overstuffed sofa and chairs, a black-lacquer-and-glass coffee table with untouched magazines and a faux Pueblan vase of artificial flowers. On the walls, framed floral paintings, mass-produced and mall-marketed, painful to look at. I wondered why the Straits’ eye-popping credit card charges for the finer things in life hadn’t included one item for their own living room.