Full Measure: A Novel (35 page)

“I’m not afraid anymore,” said Ted.

For a moment they were one, cheek to cheek, heart to heart, and hand to hand. Together they pulled. The explosion cracked through the lobby and out the open door into Fallbrook.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

The storm lumbered in from the southwest early Monday morning, heavy with blessing and menace. At sunrise the sky was black over the Norris Brothers groves and the wind blew warm and strong. Patrick and his parents stood on the front porch in rain gear, the steam from their coffee cups rising, the dogs alert beside them. Patrick noted the porch thermometer at seventy-two degrees and the barometer was the lowest he’d ever seen it.

He glanced at his mother and father, then up at the black clouds, which covered every inch of sky in every direction as far as Patrick could see. Numbness had descended on Patrick and he couldn’t free his mind from what had happened. He felt weighted and sinking, a brute mammal caught in tar. He was exhausted by deputies, reporters, sympathizers, and mostly by grief itself. He had lied to them all, even to his mother and father and Iris, about his part in Ted’s death.

“I’ll die before I let this storm take the last of what I have,” said Archie. “Pat, do you think we should stage from the Big Gorge or the upper roads?”

“It’s up to you.”

“I’m asking your advice.”

“The high ground then. Is the tractor ready?”

“Gassed and ready in the shed below the gorge.”

“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,” said Patrick. He knew that his father’s vow to die trying was not made lightly. The Norris Brothers Growers had lost a man, Frank Webster, in the winter of 1957. A saturated west-facing hillside had broken away and buried him and his tractor under ten feet of mud. The spot was marked by a concrete cross, now fully exposed and blackened by fire. The tragedy was recalled only occasionally and briefly, as if there was shame on the family for letting it happen, Patrick had always thought—something in which they were complicit and maybe an accessory to. Like Ted.

“And we ought to lock the dogs in the barn,” said Patrick. “They can’t help and they might get hurt.”

“I’ll get them food and water,” said Caroline.

The wind lifted ash and straw from the grove and the air around them grew dark with soot. It looked like a dust bowl windstorm coming. From the kitchen Caroline brought steel containers of coffee and a cooler filled with food and drinks. Down at the barn they loaded shovels, a hundred empty sandbags, scores of four-foot lengths of reinforcement bar, and three sledgehammers into Archie’s truck. They jailed the dogs, who howled in frustration as Patrick climbed back into his truck.

He took the lead, the defroster on and coffee jostling over his fingers. The Norris groves were nearly all slopes, some gentle and others steep. He climbed the narrow road in long switchbacks, Ted hugely present in the seat next to him. Ted’s voice and some of the words from his letter to Lucinda Smith coursed through Patrick’s brain:
I am attracted to you like my dogs are attracted to birds, because of nature.… Now that I know your secret you make sense to me.… Too bad it had to happen to you.… I never felt like I was part of my own family, but they mostly tried to make me feel like I was, except maybe Dad.… It wasn’t the first fire either, I set others but none of them did what this one did.… I didn’t have any talent for fires.… I want to be famous for a few hours so I’m going to confess like you did.… Don’t want Ibrahim to sit in prison either.… He never did nothing to me.… I’ll make sure Patrick sees this letter and he will make everything right as he always does.

As he always does.
They parked the trucks side by side on the high peak near the center of the property. As boys, Ted and Patrick had nicknamed this hillock “Everest,” and climbed it using unnecessary ropes. They’d planted an American flag here. Now the eighty Norris acres flowed down from them in blackened corrugations spiked with scorched trees, their branches bare and sharp. When Patrick looked to the south he could see Lew Boardman’s adjacent acres, green and verdant and untouched.

He idly wondered if God had saved the Norris home. Wasn’t that Godlike? Roughly a year ago Patrick had wondered something similar, on his seventh patrol in Sangin, when Dahl had brushed up against an IED and been blown so high into a tree it took them a while to spot his body. Yet Sloan, Fortner, and Graff, all right there with him, were spared. Hand of God at the expense of Dahl? Things like that happened again and again, and Patrick came to believe that God decided everything by deciding nothing, that the specifics of your life and death on Earth were no reflection of you or God at all. You could call God luck, and though it might be a good approximation, it didn’t explain much. The most important truth he’d learned was the simplest too and it applied anywhere you went—get through the fucking day alive.

The rain started, blown in one direction and then another by the strong tropical wind. Patrick trotted to his father’s truck and squeezed in beside his mother. Archie set the wipers on low. They refilled their cups and listened to the rap of the rain on the roof and the hiss of the wind in the leafless trees. The rain had already turned the ground to gray-black slush, and the smell was strong.

They watched and waited a long while and the rain came faster. Beyond the bare and bloody facts of Ted they hadn’t talked about what had happened. Words were feeble and raw. Patrick still smelled the blood on himself. But now the silence was intolerable, made somehow obsolete by the coming storm. Patrick was about to speak but his father spoke first.

“I feel that he is here with us.”

“He was in my truck on the way here,” said Patrick.

“I keep waiting to wake up,” said Caroline. “And none of it is going to be true.”

“It’s the worst truth I’ve known, Caroline. To date.”

“And we’ll all be … like before. Right?” She wiped under each eye with a different fingertip. She sat bolt upright as always, shoulders back and chin up. “There was so much pain I didn’t see.”

“Me neither, Mom.”

“None of us saw,” said Archie.

Caroline stared straight ahead. “I still don’t know how I raised a boy tormented enough to destroy so much of the world around him. Then himself. There’s blood on my hands.”

“There most definitely is not,” said Archie.

“I didn’t see, but
I knew,”
she said. “They gathered up some moms on TV after one of the school massacres. From across the country. They all had boys who were wrong, they said. They were afraid their whole lives. Really afraid that their sons would hurt themselves or worse. They watched them and loved them and helped them. Talked to doctors, sometimes cops even. The boys didn’t commit crimes or serious violence that they ever knew of. The boys just kept plodding along, barely keeping in their lanes. And the mothers kept waiting for that terrible thing to happen, for their sons to make hell on earth for innocents. And that show hit me like an atom bomb because those moms were me.”

“You did everything on earth for him,” said Archie. “I won’t let you take blame.”

“Five dead by his hand,” she said. “Including…”

The rain drummed on the truck roof. “When I was a boy I thought my father was the meanest man in the world,” said Archie. “I promised if I was ever a father I wouldn’t withhold the things he withheld from me. I did just that to Ted. I tried not to but I did. I became … what I set out not to become. Love is not enough. You have to use it correctly.”

Patrick set a hand on his mother’s knee. The wind gathered speed. Blood on hands, he thought. He always knew Ted was different. Always knew Ted had that anger, a secret streak of crazy in him. But what should he have done differently? Or his mother or father? What?

Where was your preview vision for Ted? Like your preview vision of what was going to happen to Sheffield and Lavinder? How come you couldn’t do that for your own brother?

Blood on all of us, thought Patrick, from Fallbrook to Sangin, and from Sangin to Fallbrook.

“None of us lit that fire or shot Cade,” he said, “or killed Ted.” With this partial truth Patrick privately and forever renounced the bigger truth, in honor of his brother, for the sake of his family and himself. It would be his secret forever, his portion of the burden Ted had left behind.

“No, we didn’t,” said Archie. “It just feels that way.”

“Can I just miss him for a while?” From the corner of his eye Patrick could see his mother snugging the black silk scarf she wore around her neck, fussing with the knot, flaring the ends, then wiping her eyes again.

*   *   *

Patrick and his father switched seats and Patrick guided the truck into the mounting wind and rain. Patrick figured if the forecast of four inches was correct, and it fell over twelve hours, they’d be okay. But with more, or a faster rate, they might have to reconfigure the sandbag walls to guide the runoff. And they might have to fill more bags, an onerous task when sand was mud. In a full deluge, the upper roads would wash out and Big Gorge could overrun or collapse, taking the mid and lower roads with it. At that point only the tractor stood a chance. Worst case was an earth slide, which would destroy everything in its path. But slides were rare on the Norris ranch, the last one bringing Frank Webster’s death, more than half a century ago. In that case even the tractor became an enemy.

Patrick stayed in first gear, looked out at the slanting rain and the black sky. Up high the clouds roiled and rose. He thought of Iris. He touched the cell phone in his pocket to make sure it was there. Pictured her face. Remembered her words just before he had left her to follow Ted from the concert.
I can love you, Pat. But I don’t know if I can survive you.

Now he thought of Iris bursting into Pride Auto Repair and, against odds, prevailing. She was clear-headed and rational. The deputies asked her to stay outside but Iris politely refused and brandished her press credential. Over the next hour she not only got the story and cell phone photos for the
Village View
, but managed to comfort him. Patrick, as a possible suspect, was ordered to sit on an old paisley sofa back in the repair bay and so he sat, dazed, trying to keep the blood-drenched details of his story straight for both Iris and the cops, trying not to hear the final report of Ted’s gun thundering over and over. Even through all that, he had registered Iris’s clarity of mission, the way she was able to accomplish it even with a choked voice and a makeup-streaked face. She’d shuttled back and forth between him and the crime scene proper, part friend and part reporter. Grief-numbed as he was, Patrick was aware that the sum of his love for her was being added to.

The rain roared against the metal roof. Patrick imagined the tropical and Alaskan fronts colliding as on the weather maps. Maybe right here in front of us, he thought. “This is going to be a whopper,” he said.

“The road’s already boiling,” said Archie.

“Where’s the thunder?” asked Caroline. “I love thunder. Ted loved thunder, too. We tape-recorded it once when he was four so we could hear it whenever we wanted.”

*   *   *

The truck slid on the steep higher roads but Patrick countered with the four-wheel drive. They crept along, gear low and wipers high, watching the water cut runnels and splash up against the sandbag walls. Patrick noted that the walls now looked about half enough high. Radio reception was poor but the L.A. news said two inches of rain had already fallen there, with another two to four inches expected before noon. There were reports of wind damage in Antelope Valley. Orange County was getting blasted too, power out in parts of Huntington Beach and Fountain Valley. San Diego public radio reported widespread destruction in Tijuana, San Ysidro, and National City, and an inch and a half of rain downtown with more to come. Fashion and Mission valleys were already flooded and closed, and a downed tree up on Bankers Hill had landed on a car and killed a man. NOAA radio estimated winds at ninety miles per hour at the storm’s center, and upgraded it from a tropical storm to Hurricane Harley. Her center was now just off Todos Santos, a brief sixty miles from the border and winds were expected to increase closer to landfall.

Patrick goosed the truck around a snug downhill turn. The wall of sandbags in front of them broke away and a stream of black, ash-stained water flooded through the break. He slid to a stop on level ground and set the brake and they piled out and wrestled the bags back into place. The bags seemed twice as heavy to Patrick and even with the heavy leather gloves they were hard to hold. When the wall was up they used the sledgehammers to drive in the rebar.

Patrick grunted as the rain found its way past his slicker and on to him. Their hammers clinked sharply on the steel and with every blow Patrick imagined he was demolishing Ted’s long history of bad fortune, which had started in his own body in his own crib. What kind of a beginning was that? Maybe life wasn’t random at all, as he’d decided in the Sangin Valley, but something ordered and invariable, like a book that you have no say in the writing of and can’t revise. So that what happened inside Pride Auto Repair on Friday night was a closing chapter, long fixed and waiting to be read. Same with Boss and Myers and Zane, Dahl and Pendejo and Prebble and Adams and Sheffield and … well, it added up to a lot of books. But was this notion of a book of life any better than the idea of one big game of chance? And if so, how?

Suddenly the storm shifted gears and became a faster and less resistible thing. Even on high the windshield wipers were insufficient and Patrick had to lean close to the glass for brief snapshots of the way forward. Another sandbag wall had collapsed above them and he caught a snippet of the waterfall cascading proudly down. The runoff was clearer now that the rain had washed the trees and earth of ash. The truck slipped and slid down the road toward the Big Gorge.

Patrick rounded a curve and drove on. The wind tried to pry the vehicle from the ground and for a moment the truck shivered as if it might lift off and take flight.