Full Measure: A Novel (36 page)

“I always wanted to see Munchkinland,” said Caroline.

Tree branches whirled through the air and whapped against the truck. Patrick saw a section of the bunkhouse roof rotating corner to corner through the sky.

“Goddamn you!” cried Archie, looking up through the windshield. “This is how you answer me?”

*   *   *

By noon the sandbag walls were collapsing everywhere they looked. They couldn’t replace them fast enough to matter. The wind had backed off but the sky was even blacker and the rain seemed more solid than liquid, not drops but sheets of water stacked back to back as far as Patrick could see. Everywhere he looked the water rushed across the ground and it was no longer clear but brown with precious soil. Patrick saw this and his spirit sank even deeper: Norris Brothers Growers washing away to the sea, as in his father’s dream.

They huddled in the truck with the heater going on full and ate the sandwiches and drank the coffee that Caroline had made. Their heat condensed on the windows and the world outside was a dark roar. Archie started laughing—an accusatory, low-down laugh that had more defiance than joy in it. Patrick understood this sound and felt what his father felt and he laughed, just before Caroline started up too.

*   *   *

They stood on the road where it passed over a large galvanized culvert that marked the narrows of Big Gorge. From here Patrick looked uphill to see the runoff overflowing the sandbags, rushing down into the gorge, filling the culvert below. Sandbags broke away and fell into the dark current and vanished. An uprooted avocado tree tumbled over the falls and the water swept it across the gorge, pinning it against the culvert. “The pipe is twelve feet in diameter,” yelled Archie, though Patrick could hardly hear him.

“About two feet to go!” called Patrick. He knew that if the torrent overflowed the culvert it would take the road with it.

“If the water gets one foot from the top, you two get out of here,” said Archie. “Promise me. One foot!”

“I’m prepared to die with a shovel in my hand,” said Caroline, her shovel held fast between her legs as she rearranged her drenched hair.

“Get me to the tractor, son!”

The tires spun and the truck slid on the downhill slope but Patrick kept it on the road. He glanced up to see a raven pinwheeling across the sky before them, bouncing wing to wing as if on something solid. They passed another section of the bunkhouse roof lying in the grove nearby, the metal sheared violently away from its beam, some of the rivets still in place. “That bunkhouse was eighty years old,” said Archie. “I shall not be defeated. I utterly shall not.”

“God bless you, Archie,” said Caroline.

“I defy Him to bless me. Caroline? I love you very much. You too, son.”

Patrick slid to a stop. Archie pressed through the door and staggered into the wind. The tractor shed had been blown away leaving nothing but a concrete pad and two six-by-six uprights. But the Ford was there, staunch in the rain, the blue paint faded and touched by rust. Archie climbed on and started it up. Diesel smoke billowed black at first and struggled up through the solid rainfall. Patrick picked up his phone and sent a text to Iris:
Bad storm we fight I love you.
He dropped the phone back into the center console, glanced at his mother and aimed the truck up the hill.

At the culvert they bent to their shovels but they could lift little more than slurry to fortify the upslope bank. It was like using teaspoons of sand to hold back an ocean. Patrick saw that the water had risen since they’d dropped off Archie at the tractor. He stopped shoveling long enough to look at his watch: 2:44
P.M.
Almost eight straight hours of rain, he thought, and what—six, eight inches? Did it matter? He squinted up into the silver darts hurtling down from a black infinity.

“Another six inches in this culvert and we’ll be swimming,” said Caroline. She stopped working and handed Patrick her shovel and gloves. Standing straight, shoulders back and head erect she pulled back the hood of her poncho and straightened her bandana, which was soaking wet like the rest of her. Her fingers patiently loosened and retied the knot, then she slid the whole thing fashionably over to one side. Her hair clung like black plaster but she smoothed it down anyway. “In a true and awful way, the world is better off without Ted. But I’ll love him until my heart’s last beat.”

“You gave him every chance, Mom.”

“I didn’t know what to give him.”

The clank and groan of the tractor sounded downslope and Patrick turned to see his father guiding the old machine up the road. The front-loader was up and the tractor’s front tires skittered in the mud but the big, heavily treaded rear tires dug in deep and pushed the contraption forward while the diesel clattered and growled and belched smoke into the storm.

“Are you going to be okay, Pat?”

“Soon as we get through this storm.”

“Hurricane Harley is nothing.” Caroline yanked her hood back over her drenched head, slid the toggle tight, and took back her gloves and shovel.

Archie dumped the first load of tractor mud on the bank and tamped it down with the bottom of bucket. Patrick and his mother packed the earth down harder with their shovels but still the new rain washed away the berm almost as fast as they built it. Patrick, panting deeply, saw that the Big Gorge culvert was now only inches from being full and that their wall and their road, and everything below them, would soon be swallowed by the deluge.

Patrick watched his father bring another raised bucket load of dripping mud up the road, the front tires of the Ford gliding on the downpour, Archie up like a jockey in a crouch with his face raised. “You can take my son and trees! But you can’t beat me down! You don’t have the
balls!”

Suddenly from uphill came a thunderous
crack
. It sounded to Patrick like some violent thing had thrown its shoulders up through the earth. He saw the hillside shudder and break away and start downhill toward them, leaving behind a raw dry crater. The detached hillside gained speed. Even in combat Patrick had never seen death written so clearly. He looked at his father, still crouching in the tractor, speechless in the face of this. Patrick took his mother’s arm and pulled her away from Big Gorge, up the slick road. They slipped and fell and struggled up again.

Then Patrick was down without having fallen, swept swiftly away without leaving his feet. He clutched Caroline close and rode down, down, down on the great escalator of mud. Where they had been just seconds ago was far above them now. Below them he saw the blue tractor spinning downhill, Archie clenching the wheel his body midair, legs bicycling frantically. Then Patrick heard another sharp crack and he watched a second section of mud break off, roar down, and bury the culvert and the road finally and completely.

Surging downhill, he felt the clench of the mud around his legs and saw that he was waist-deep in it. Caroline’s slicker tore away, leaving nothing in his hands but rubber. She lunged and caught his jacket and they continued their rush downhill, locked in mud. They shot past avocado trees, black and sharp. Patrick sunk to his chest and his breath was cut to almost nothing. He struggled. Caroline gasped and flailed and Patrick saw the tree that they would hit. With a wild scream he pulled his arms free and when they crashed into the branches Patrick grabbed a heavy limb with both hands and held on with all the strength he knew. Somehow his mother got her arms around his middle and Patrick felt her weight and told himself yes, I can hold on to this branch forever if I need to, forever not a problem, hold, just hold …

Then, as if bored, the earth let go of him. Patrick looked downhill and saw the tractor on its side, moving with heavy, mud-bound momentum. It came upright and the seat was empty. Patrick’s heart dropped and he looked down at his mother, staring at the tractor, shock on her face. The tractor pitched upside-down again, surging away. Then Patrick heard faint words against the roar of earth and rain. He saw movement in one of the uphill trees, and then his father splayed awkwardly in the branches.

Patrick looked down and watched the wall of mud rushing past them just a few inches below his dangling boots. Archie clambered higher into the tree. He looked like a bug in a spiderweb. The mud blundered past beneath him. Patrick scanned the grove for the next earth slide but saw only the rain pounding down on the black windblown trees and on the wounded, treeless ground.

Then there was movement on the ridge above what had been Big Gorge. Patrick saw headlights, and, to his surprise, two vehicles. One was a passenger car and the other a minivan, neither suited for this. Patrick watched them swerve and slide, their headlights raking left and right. His first thought was that they were trying to outrun the storm and had gotten very lost. Then he recognized the car as it eased to a stop.

The lights went off and Iris Cash jumped out and hustled around to the trunk and threw it open. Natalie and Mary Ann spilled out and they all took up shovels. Iris slammed the trunk shut and the three women, buried in rain gear and using their shovels as staffs, came sidestepping down the hill toward them. The van picked its way along the high road and stopped well short of Iris’s car. Evelyn Anders and her husband clambered out, shovels at the ready, and followed Iris down the slope.

Patrick said nothing as a white crew cab pickup came across the ridge from the opposite direction. He recognized the logo on the door. The driver motored along at some speed, keeping the truck flush to the road with smooth corrections of the wheel. A moment later Lew Boardman climbed out and looked down and pulled a shovel from the truck bed. Two more men piled out and they found shovels, too. A moment later they were bracing themselves down the slope. “Well,” said Caroline. “Archie’s God might have totally forgotten us, but our friends and neighbors haven’t.”

Patrick, in some amazement, watched the little platoon moving toward them. When he dropped to the ground it was solid enough to stand on and when he looked up at Iris he could see her clearly. The rain lessened and he heard the faint cadence of her breathing as she hurried slipping and sliding down the slope toward him.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Just after sunrise Patrick was readying his boat at the Glorietta Bay launch.
I’d Rather Be
was an aged fourteen-foot aluminum skiff with a dependable Honda engine and an outdated Lowrance fish finder. His hours were complete, his license issued, his insurance current. He could guide two anglers. Salimony had kicked in five hundred and twenty dollars toward the boat and Messina four hundred and forty more—self-imposed fines for the rumble in Iris’s home. They’d helped him shake her down and rebuild the Honda and now she was sound.

The late March morning was cold, with wispy white clouds circling in from the northwest. Rain tonight, he thought, and a shiver wavered down his back. He was nervous enough as it was this morning. He checked the radio and the life preservers, the lunches, and the electric motor. Checked them again. The seat pads were new and had set him back nearly a hundred dollars, but he’d saved five times that by refinishing the casting decks himself.
I’d Rather Be
reminded Patrick of his older dog, Jack—youth gone but still some good years left ahead. Like Jack,
I’d Rather Be
was optimistic and can-do.

He sat in the captain’s chair and strung up the extra rods with fresh leader and flies. Ted was more present with water, boats, and fish. Patrick tried hard to let only the good memories squeeze in, and sometimes this worked. Sometimes he believed that he had done right by Ted. He told himself that he had helped Ted accomplish his one big thing, the thing he would be remembered for, and that Ted had made the world a small fraction better by this final act. Patrick also told himself that helping Ted be remembered for acting on his own was the best small dignity Patrick could give him. But sometimes he didn’t believe any of that at all. Sometimes he felt that he had never known or loved his brother fully. And became his murderer. And let Ted take the blame, thereby acquitting himself. At night his dreams broke him down and in his waking hours Patrick put himself back together.

Sangin still ran through everything he did, just more quietly. He flinched less, saw fewer ghosts, remembered less ugliness. But the only time he was really free of Sangin was when he was fishing or with Iris, or lost in thoughts of his boyhood, which, having ended at age seventeen, now seemed magical and important.

Sangin and Ted. Ted and Sangin.

The difference is Sangin meant nothing to you and Ted meant everything. Family was why you served. Family past and family present and maybe family future. And your own small glory: be a man. Get some.

His phone throbbed in his pocket and he braced himself for a last-minute cancellation.

“You’re working I trust,” said his father.

“Yep.”

“Rain tomorrow. A piddling half-inch.”

“Did you blade that one track on the north side?”

“Pat, listen to this. I woke up way before the sun this morning, like I always do. I got coffee, checked the plumbing, and the computer news. Soon as there was light I went out to the groves and did the standard drive through. You will not believe what I found there, Pat. You will not.”

Patrick checked his watch. “You better tell me soon because my sports just got here.”

“
Life.
I saw life in the trees that the good lord and his mud bath left us with. Of course, that’s only half of the trees I had before, but I’m pleased to still own that half, free and clear. Green on most of them, Pat, budding out and more to come! We can make it through this year cashing out the last of the investments, just barely. Then we pray for no late frost or high winds in early fall—neither of which would surprise me, given my reputation upstairs. And now the Farm Credit Bank will loan against my forty acres of life, believe me. My trees are going to get us through. Your mother, of course, is pleased. Got up early and dressed herself this morning very carefully, like she used to. She’s starting to seem like … Caroline again. I’ve won, Patrick. I have
won!
”