Angry Buddhist (9781609458867) (17 page)

 

V
onda Jean is out teaching a jiu-jitsu class when Hard returns from work a little after seven in the evening. He knows she won't be home for a few more hours so he empties a can of chili into a bowl and puts it in the microwave. While it heats up he takes a bottle of beer out of the refrigerator and then he eats the chili and drinks the beer standing at the kitchen counter. It's been a day since Vonda Jean threatened to dump Bane on the side of the road but Hard knows her patience is limited. He finishes the dinner, puts the dishes in the sink and heads to the garage where he lifts the lid of the oblong freezer and gazes upon his friend. The folds of Bane's black muzzle are stiff and frost has formed on his eyelids. In his current condition he reminds Hard of a dog in one of the Yukon poems he loves so well. He only wishes Bane fell doing battle with a wolf pack instead of at the hands of an unhinged tanning technician.

Hard takes a red camp blanket from a shelf and spreads it on the floor of the garage. Grabs Bane by the front knees, hoists him out of the freezer and thuds him on to the blanket. The dog hits the floor with a force that makes Hard think for a second the corpse might crack in two, but Bane retains his structural integrity. Although Hard will not admit this to Vonda Jean, he is glad she insisted on not allowing Bane to be stuffed. Absent the spirit that animated him, Bane looks like nothing more than road kill. Hard upbraids himself for having been sentimental. Then he folds the blanket over his late companion and, heaving, grunting, muscles him toward the driveway and into the bed of his pickup next to a metal can that contains a gallon of gasoline.

Back in the house, he grabs an unopened pint bottle of bourbon and a Robert Service paperback. Tosses them on the front seat. Heads east from Twentynine Palms, then south on Gold Park Road and deep into the desert night. Hard turns on the radio to hear some music, but after a couple of seconds realizes music does not dovetail with the gloomy nature of his mission so he presses the off button and continues his journey in respectful silence.

Hard ruminates about funerals as the truck glides through the starry blackness. He did a little research on the Internet and now he knows a thing or two about how different cultures deal with the dead. He knows about Tibetan sky burials where the corpse is left on a rock in the Himalayas and birds dine on the remains until nothing is left but bleached bone. He read about Viking funerals where the dead warrior is placed on a boat that is then set aflame before being sent out to sea on the wind. And he learned about Egyptians who entombed their pharaohs in vast pyramids with gold and jewelry—and sometimes living slaves—to accompany them to the afterlife. Bane is deserving of a grand send off and Hard regrets not being able to provide one. He had thought briefly about doing the Viking version over at the Salton Sea and concluded that not only would procuring a small boat on short notice be challenging in the desert, but should anyone see him it would be difficult to explain what the police chief of Desert Hot Springs was doing there with a defrosting Rottweiler and a flaming dingy.

The road dead ends twenty minutes later and Hard pulls over. Throws a flashlight, the book and the bottle of bourbon into a knapsack, climbs out of the truck. Lashes the gallon of gasoline to the knapsack. Hard looks toward the mountains in the distance, their hulking silhouette rising from the desert floor. He fills his lungs with the cool night air and picks a spot on the mountaintop. That will be his point of reference. Then he hoists the corpse over his back and bending under the weight sets off into the night.

Hard briefly investigated pet cemeteries but concluded there was something effeminate about them, something sappy and weak. Bane was a masculine dog, a burly canine and Hard doesn't want him to spend eternity in Pet Heaven Park next to Fritzie the Labradoodle. Where was the dignity in that?

A pale crescent moon hangs over the rocky Mojave landscape. Juniper and mesquite trees cast shadows along the desert plain. Hard trudges along, stumbling occasionally under his burden, but he remains on his feet. He's already miles away from any living human but he doesn't want to perform his task near the road. He's calculated that he will cover a mile of this terrain in about twenty minutes, even with the mass he's carrying. Five minutes into his walk he begins to sweat. Bane's body is not only heavy, but unwieldy and Hard has to keep shifting his weight to keep the dog on his shoulders. Hard is breathing heavily, panting at the exertion. This kind of weight is a lot for a young man to hump through the desert and Hard isn't exactly a spring flower. He thinks back to basic training, brutal hikes under searing sun, toting packs that weighed what he's carrying tonight. Pleased he hasn't keeled over. Imagines that headline: “Local Law Enforcement Official Collapses While Burying Dead Pet.” Is he out of his mind to be doing this? Hard is brought back from contemplation of his potential humiliation by the strain in his lower back. Adjusts the weight again. Doesn't want to pull a muscle. Ten minutes more and he's sweated through his undershirt. Feels his heart drumbeating in his ribcage. Starts to worry that Bane could begin to thaw out before they reach the destination. What would
that
smell like? The breeze on his face reminds him of the coolness of the evening. He'd like to look up and see the stars but the weight of his cargo keeps his head canted forward. Maybe Canis Major is visible tonight, Hard's favorite constellation. To behold Sirius the Dog Star, brightest star in the sky and a stellar tribute to Bane.

Rivulets of sweat run down his shaved dome and down his face. Checks his watch. Twenty minutes of walking is a mile. Five minutes to go. Hard had told himself he'd walk a mile in to the desert and he'll be damned if he does anything less. He may ignore marital vows, laws even, but when he tells himself he's going to do something, he knows he'll do it.

Hard steps on a rock, loses his balance and recovers, hops lightly, a little dance, before straightening out with a grunt, re-orienting with the mountaintop. Deeper and deeper he walks, stumbling through the desiccated creosote bushes, the night breeze drying his moist face. Five minutes later Hard exhales through his mouth, gets down on his knee and with the aspect of Mary in the Pieta, lowers Bane to the ground. Takes a moment to catch his breath. Looks up at the sky, the stars. He spots Ursa Major, the bear. He's glad there's an animal up there. Likes the symmetry of it, the connection between stars and earth and it makes him feel less alone. Reflects on his good fortune at being born with a sense of direction or he might just wander off into the Nothing.

A little fortification is in order. Some consecration of the circumstances. Hard takes the bourbon out of his knapsack and unscrews the top. Puts it to his lips, tilts his head back and swallows. Relishes the burn in his throat. By the third belt he's a little lightheaded. Realizes he had better get down to business.

Hard places the bourbon gently on the ground, screws the bottle into the dirt to make sure it doesn't tip over and detaches the gallon of gasoline from the knapsack. He stands over Bane for a moment, remembers the joy he shared with the dog. Shared wasn't the right word exactly, since he had no idea if Bane felt any joy, although he did wag his tail whenever it was just the two of them. What Hard will miss most about Bane is how he feels when they're together in the desert, or in the mountains, beneath the measureless sky, man and beast in the primordial world. It's always just the two of them, no one else there, and it is beautifully uncomplicated. It was easier than being with Nadine who has become a goddamn unguided missile. And it was sure as hell more pleasant than being with Vonda Jean. Hard plain and simple preferred Bane to humans and now the pleasure of his company would be denied him until the end of Time. He really could kill Nadine for doing this. Nadine.
Goddamn
, why did he talk to her that night in the convenience store? Why couldn't he have just walked away instead of falling right into the honey pot? The woman jams a
fork
into his neck, would have bled to death if she'd hit the carotid, and then she poisons the one living creature he interacted with on a daily basis and still cared about.

Now Hard grinds his knees on the desert floor, a supplicant. And he's here because of Nadine. If he isn't going to kill the woman, at least he can put the fear of God into her, create a sense of the acute spiritual discomfort he feels, the sense that something wrong is happening and can not be stopped.

Takes another swig of the bourbon. Pulls out his cell phone and dials. One, two, three, four rings, then that voice, the one that makes him grind his teeth tells him to leave a message.

“Nadine, you fuckin cunt.” Hard turning on the charm. “I know what you did to Bane and I want you to know you're gonna spend the rest of your life looking over your pretty shoulder.”

That feels good. Emboldened and exhilarated by the liquor, the delivery of this threat has irrationally buoyed him. If nothing else that should make her worry. It's not like she can report him for it either, since she killed his dog. Let her try to explain that one. His anger at Nadine is an animating force, coursing through him, making his cells howl in wordless grief. Hard is most alive when he hates something. Right now it's Nadine and what he is feeling for her is positively vivifying. But the rage slowly subsides like a tide washing out to sea, and he's left with the sadness of the dead dog at his feet. Realizes that, as much as he'd like to, staying in the desert all night is not an option. There's work in the morning, responsibilities.

Hard pours the gasoline over Bane soaking the fur from stem to stern. Although he is drunk, he is not so drunk that he doesn't know he should place the container several feet away from the drenched corpse. That would be embarrassing—How'd you blow yourself up, Hard? Lighting your dead dog on fire?—Then he returns to the body and gets down on one knee. Thinks about praying—
God bless the soul of this dog—
but Hard isn't big on religion and since the feeling is more reflexive than real it quickly dissipates.

He removes a book of matches from his pocket, strikes one and drops it on the animal's flank. Flames immediately engulf the body and in a few seconds the acrid stench of burning fur fills the air.

From the knapsack he retrieves the Robert Service paperback and the flashlight. His face lit by his flaming pet, Hard opens the book. Fumbles with the flashlight but gets it aimed at the page. Then he begins to read the poem
My Dog.
In a ringing voice that carries over the harsh desert plain toward the dark mountains, Hard intones:

 

My dog is dead. Though lone I be

I'll never have another;

For with his master-worship he. . .

 

By the time he reaches the end Hard is weeping desolate tears. He is not the kind of man who will display any emotion other than anger in public and sadness, which he is capable of feeling deeply, is something he will never reveal to an audience. But alone, here in the desert under the eternal night sky, he lets the melancholy course through him and as flames consume his friend and boon companion, Hard is wracked with heaving convulsive sobs. He cries for his lost youth, and his grown sons, and his dead marriage. He feels weak, pathetic even, but the bourbon has done its job and he doesn't care at all so he lets it flow and then he raises his arms to the heavens and roars a low sound, rough and resonant, that is beyond words and thoughts and is grief pure and deep coming from a bottomless well he hasn't drank from in years and he yells and rumbles, the demons running free, venting, purifying, and the fire consumes the flesh and the glow dances on Hard's face and the sounds drift into the still desert night mingling with the smell of the fire and then Hard is suddenly exhausted and he sinks down near the pyre, his dead companion partially consumed now and he puts the bourbon to his lips and swallows deeply, feels the lightning down his throat and all the way to his heart which throbs in quick sorrow.

 

 

T
he white room is bright against the deep darkness of the night. Diablo sits on the bed, head canted to one side as he watches Nadine stuff her belongings into a pair of duffel bags. She wears a skin-tight short white tennis dress that she had chosen in the hope it would put her in better mood, moving never any fun and it's always worse when you're doing it because plans haven't worked out. Nadine wants to get back to the tennis world, wants to be optimistic about the chances of her life improving, so two minutes after the packing session started she found herself removing the tennis dress from the drawer and, rather than placing it in a duffel bag, decided to wear it. After squeezing into the sausage like casing of the dress, she pulled her hair back into a ponytail with a scrunchie. Her racquets were stacked against the wall. She would pack them last, placing them in the front seat next to her, charms to invoke blessings for a new life.

All of the windows are open but the house still retains the heat of the day. Nadine is looking forward to cooler nights. The thank-you note to the man from the bank that allowed her to occupy the foreclosed property she is now vacating sits on the bureau. She will track down his mailing address when she gets to Seattle and send it from there. Once she arrives in Seattle she will look for a tennis instructor job. A country club, a municipal court, she does not care. Right now she does not want to think about how difficult that will be, Seattle not being any kind of tennis capital. It is the cold and the rain that beckon her, and the vast ocean. Nadine wants to learn how to sail. She will have to meet a guy with a boat, but does not think that will be a problem if she puts an ad on a dating site. The pictures of the Pacific Northwest she has checked out on-line have captivated her with their nordic beauty. Gloomy weather and rolling, forested topography make it the un-desert, and for Nadine, who is looking to forget as much of the past two years as she possibly can, that is a major selling point. Her plan is to drive to San Francisco, spend the night, then power straight through to Seattle the next morning. She has mapped it out and figures the journey to be about twenty hours. She isn't thrilled to be doing it alone but she will have Diablo for company.

She zips the duffel bag shut and turns toward the laptop sitting on her desk against a white wall bleached from the sun. The house felt like a microwave oven for much of the six months Nadine has lived here and she will be glad to see the last of it. She settles into the flimsy desk chair and turns the computer on. As it boots up, she ponders her options. One: send the emails Hard wrote to several media outlets. Two: send a note along with a picture of her manga kitten tattoo and an admonition the reporters or bloggers ask Kendra about the matching one she has.

She tries to remember if Hard and Kendra know each other. Can't recall. And isn't Hard backing Kendra's husband's opponent? The two of them can't possibly like one another so it would certainly be amusing to see them yoked together in this situation.

Gazing into her laptop, smiling to herself, she creates a file stuffed with enough incriminating material to give a tabloid editor heart palpitations. If it isn't enough to ruin lives, it is certainly of a level to cause serious career problems. She is determined to bury Hard Marvin and whatever public future he has envisioned in that big gleaming head.

But what does she have against Kendra? When she asks herself that question and considers the answer, here's what comes back: Nothing, really. An affair that didn't work out is hardly news and it isn't as if she'd been driven cheetah wild with love. They had been sexually attracted, had acted on it, and then it had ended, just like the countless other American relationships that rose and fell simultaneously in this era of readily available sex that comes without warning, stays for the evening, and departs without consequence. And how many of those people are considering providing innuendo about their ex-lovers to the news media? Not many, Nadine guesses. Why is she even considering implicating Kendra? She hadn't intended to threaten her until they were seated across from each other at Melvyn's. That had not been the plan at all. The threat emerged as a result of Kendra's understandably upset reaction to Nadine's attempt to draw her into the scheme. The woman has done nothing to Nadine and Congressman Randall Duke is barely on her radar. The prevaricating brute of a police chief dishonoring his marriage vows is of interest to the media since he is in the middle of an election campaign and exposing his misbehavior can be morally justified in Nadine's mind, but the allegations about a Congressman's wife in a bawdy romp that rest on the skimpy evidence of matching tattoos on their respective nether regions? Kendra is a private citizen, so Nadine is already operating in a morally hazy area (that she is constantly operating in this area is not something that occurs to her). There is no doubt Hard deserves the veritable soufflé of indignity he will be forced to devour. But not Kendra. The ambivalence Nadine has been feeling comes into sharper focus now. Her loathing of Hard, complicated by her continuing sexual attraction to him, has dashed brain inhibitors designed to control extreme behavior. She has been on the verge of striking out indiscriminately at anyone within her range, and knows that violates one of her few deeply held principles. Nadine is well aware that she is not a particularly good person. But neither does she think she is the kind of black-heart who would try to obliterate someone purely from spite. In her view, Hard deserves it. He will reap the whirlwind, but Kendra will be spared.

She thinks about Hard: the trysts, the shooting guns in the desert, the assurances.

Baby, I'll be like a bad dream to you, Nadine promises as she types an address. She slides the cursor to the document file and attaches the Hard Marvin file to the email. Images of the day in the desert with Hard flood back, the feel of the gun in her hand, Hard pressing against her, the sun burning into her skin. Her sense memory of the Glock's powerful recoil is disrupted by a high-pitched buzz.

The doorbell.

Cleaved from her daydream, she has enough presence of mind to hope it isn't someone from the bank that owns the mortgage on the house. She briefly thinks about not answering but knows her presence has already been revealed by the houselights. Quickly she checks her reflection in the mirror. Thinks the tennis dress, which she has not worn in months, makes her ass look big so she slips a pair of jeans on under it and zips them up. Nadine opens the door and sees a young man holding a pizza and a check.

“You order the pepperoni?” Diablo is at her feet, lunatic barks tearing through his tiny throat.

“I didn't order any pizza.” She shushes the dog, smiles apologetically. The pizza smells good.

The man looks at the check, then back at Nadine. “This is your address, right?” He shows the check to Nadine, who keeps the yapping Chihuahua at bay with her foot as she examines it.

“Yeah, but I didn't order this.”

“You sure?”

“I'd remember. I didn't order a pepperoni pizza.” Nadine says she's sorry he had to come out here for nothing, shakes her head sympathetically. But this motion is arrested by the abrupt arrival of a hand over her mouth and what feel like rings clinking against her teeth. Jerked back, neck twisting, she flashes that it is Hard, and feels a perverse gladness for a moment—he's paying attention!—then remembers Hard does not wear rings. Nadine is dragged into the house. The pizza man follows, yanks the door shut behind him. Adrenaline fires madly and a powerful survival instinct kicks in. A writhing alligator, she digs an elbow in the abdomen of her unseen assailant and reflexively bites the hand covering her mouth and she hears him curse. The pizza man drives a fist into her stomach and she gasps for air as the man with the rings grunts and throws her to the floor. She kicks at him, connects with a knee. A yell of raw pain. Another loud curse as Diablo clamps his jaw on exposed flesh. The dog yelps at the kick he receives and Nadine can hear him whimper as if from another dimension. Unable to breathe she claws violently. Tackled, flipped on her stomach, panicking. She catches a glimpse of the ring man. Middle aged, with short, graying hair, his eyes flare as he rolls her. Palms on the floor, she pushes up, but her wrist is yanked away and the dead weight of the man's body on her back causes her to crash to the floor, her face grinding the carpet. She's suffocating now, can't draw breath. A knee jams into her spine. Then both men are on her and there is a stabbing pain as shoulders wrench sharply, hands yanked behind. A piece of duct tape seals her mouth. She can taste her own blood. Wrists bound, then legs. Another piece of duct tape ends Diablo's contribution to the noise level. Her cheek pressed against the floor, Nadine can see the pizza man toss the apoplectic dog into a drawer and boot it shut. A pillowcase slips over her head eradicating the room. With superhuman effort she forces a gasp of oxygen into her lungs. Nadine bucks and kicks until something blunt smashes into her head and she lies still. Throbbing, she again hears the sibilant hiss of duct tape being ripped from its spool and then it's wrapped around her neck, affixing the pillowcase. For a moment she thinks they're going to choke her with the tape and is relieved when she is able to resume breathing.