Full Measure: A Novel (7 page)

“I don’t think that’s true,” said Evelyn.

Gwen dropped the string cheese wrapper into the trash and bit the stick in half. “You can ask Cade Magnus if it’s true, now that he’s back in town.”

“There are thirty thousand other people in this city besides Cade Magnus,” said Brian.

“Yes. Half of them agree with him, and the other half are afraid of him.”

“That rings true in my heart, Gwen,” said her mother. “And I’m ashamed of it. My own city council. And Magnus wasn’t even there when we voted.”

“Oh, he was there, Mom. Just invisible, like biological warfare. Like his dad.”

“Aren’t you a cheerful little girl?”

Ethan ambled back into the kitchen, tapping a pencil on his leg. “Cade Magnus just wants fame. It’s the creepy losers he attracts that you have to watch out for. When’s dinner?”

“I’d pay fifty dollars to see Cruzela Storm,” said Gwen. “If I had fifty dollars.”

“Tell you what,” said her father. “If Cruzela Storm plays in Fallbrook, I’ll buy us all good seats. Good singer, good songwriter, and a worthy cause.”

Gwen glowered at her mother and walked out in her usual shoulders-forward, head-down kind of slouch. Ethan swiped an apple off the counter and followed her out.

“Can we leave our children with friends for a couple years and take a vacation?” Evelyn asked.

“Sure. Where do you want to go?”

“When I was in Rice Canyon today it made me think of Pala Casino. The hotel room, actually.” She looked up at him with a small smile.

“With two child-free years we can do better than an Indian casino.”

“Somewhere with room service and a good view of something.”

Brian poured her a little more wine, then another full glass for himself, and Evelyn saw the darkness cross his face. She had always loved his easy optimism but in the last couple of years she’d seen the growing frustration in him that he tried to tamp down with alcohol.

“Archie and Patrick Norris came by today for a big-picture look at where they stand,” said Brian. “What a mess.” He synopsized their plight. “And the Farm Credit Bank won’t loan for replacement trees. So we sold off some of their retirement investments that had finally come back since the crash. That was a breakeven. And some of the second-issue REITs we got them into—I had to dump them on the secondary market at a loss. That hurt. Evie? I’m getting really tired of watching our friends and clients take our advice then lose what they’ve worked for. The crash, the jobs, the drought, the freeze. Now the fire. It feels … endless.”

“It’s going to turn, honey,” was the best she could come up with. She suddenly felt exhausted.

He drank. “But the good news is I paid our fed and state quarterlies today,” he said.

“The ones due back in September?”

“Those very ones,” he said softly. “We’ll fall within the penalty grace period. Not worried.”

“Did you have to raid the college account?”

Brian studiously did not look at her. “Yeah. And I sold three Gibsons and two Gretsches to replenish it. The Hummingbird. Ouch. But it’s okay. How many guitars does one middle-aged bean counter really need?”

She came over and kissed his lips lightly and lay her head against his chest. “It’s going to turn, baby. For all of us.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Patrick, Ted, and Archie walked the reeking groves, trying to guess which of the damaged trees might live and which would die. Archibald said that if there was a blessing in this fire it was the speed of it, leaving, possibly, a number of trees still alive. By spring they would see new growth on the survivors, few as they might be. Those without life by April they would cut off at the ground and Norris Brothers would try again to get a Farm Credit Bank loan for replacement trees. Archie said if God smiled on them, which He rarely did anymore, half of the trees were still alive and would make it. A harvest from those trees was three years out now, but if spring showed at least half them alive, the bank would loan. The bank would
have
to loan on forty acres of good Haas avocados.

Patrick knew that if replacement trees were watered generously, and did not get Phytophthora root rot, or stem canker or sunblotch disease, or fall prey to looper worms, amorbia larvae, thrips, mites, or worms, they would produce fruit in three years.
Three years,
thought Patrick. And there had already been no pick earlier this year because of the March freeze. He thought of Pharaoh and wondered what his father had done to bring all of this down on them, knowing he had done nothing.

But in the meantime, there was plenty to do. First was to paint the southwest exposure of each tree with a fifty-fifty mix of white paint and water to prevent sunburn of the unprotected trunks and branches. This should be done quickly. Then they’d replace the damaged irrigation line, risers, sprinklers, valves, and timers. When that was done the whole system would need to be flushed to keep the mains clean. After that they’d need to circle each tree with straw, out to fifteen feet per tree, to keep the fall rains from washing away the soil. All the while, Archie would continue to make the rounds to the other Farm Credit banks, begging them to do their jobs, as he put it.

*   *   *

The brothers started with the irrigation and Archie began the painting. Patrick worked with his shirt off and enjoyed the mild autumn sun on his back. He ducked under the seared branches and walked the grids looking for melted line and sprayers. Plastic was no match for a wildfire. He was soon as black as the trees, the ash got through his bandana into his mouth and nose, and his safety goggles needed constant wiping. He saw that Ted was mostly black also, but he had some lightness in his step, in spite of his bad feet, and he was moving about with his shoulders back, attempting to hold his gut in.

Patrick’s phone vibrated in his pants pocket and he was pleased to see platoon-mate John Bostik’s name on the screen. “Boss.”

“Hey, Pat. What are you doing?”

“Labor.”

“Everything burned up?”

“Pretty much. You?”

“Maria kicked me out so I got my own place in Oceanside. You should come over sometime. Party.”

“That’s too bad about the girl.”

“It’s cool. I just met her and I was driving her crazy. I can’t sleep or concentrate. The littlest things freak me out. Fuckin’ car backfired yesterday and I just about lost it. Everybody around me just pisses me off.”

“Yeah, me too, the little things. I’m getting some sleep, a little. It’s weird not being crowded in. Maybe you should see a doctor, get some pills.”

“I already got more pills than I can take. Maybe we all could hook up after the Three-Five memorial.”

“We’ll do that. I’ll talk to Salimony and Messina. You hang in there, Boss.”

Bostic had operated a heavy explosives detector known as a Minehound for thirteen straight months. He had often been silent, Patrick remembered—silent as he listened for the sound of metal registering through his headset. Bostic was the platoon’s silent ears. Now Bostic was quiet again for a long moment. “I heard ‘Paint It Black’ in a bar and almost couldn’t take it. That’s how I feel. I hate this. I’d way rather be back in Sangin getting my ass shot at. At least I had something to do and training to do it. The only job I can get here is boxing groceries at the PX on base. And outside base, man, it’s just children and grown-up children. America doesn’t go to war, America goes to the mall. Everybody smiles and says thanks for what I did. They don’t know shit about what I did and they don’t want to know.”

“That’s a fact.”

“Okay, Pat. Eat the apple, fuck the corps.”

Patrick thought about Bostik as he and Ted took the truck down to the barn. They loaded up the valves, filters, water lines, PVC cement, cutters, insulated wire, sprinkler heads, shovels, and picks. With ten summers of such work behind him, Patrick could do this in his sleep. But Ted knew almost nothing about irrigation and he tried to do whatever Patrick did, then lost interest and turned over branches and rocks, looking for creatures he might move into the bunkhouse.

Back in the grove, the digging felt good to Patrick’s muscles and he was pleased by how many valves they had replaced by noon. It felt good to be necessary. “This isn’t bad work,” he said. “Nobody’s shooting at us and nothing’s going to explode. In Afghanistan you were either bored out of your mind or terrified. The thing I like about this work is it leaves my mind free to wander.”

“What was it like on your first patrol?”

“Just the usual.”

“There wasn’t much usual in what you were doing, Pat. You should at least tell me something about it, since I’m your brother.”

Patrick dug in with his shovel. “When we first got there, the Taliban knew there had been a change of guard so they wanted to welcome us new guys. First full day at FOB Inkerman we were told to walk a hundred meters down Route Six One One, then turn around and come back. Just our squad, twenty-one of us. One hundred damned meters. With that much gear, a hundred meters can smoke you unless you’re used to it. We were supposed to get used to our stuff and the terrain. Six One One was narrow and rocky. Off to the east there was corn, high corn that time of year, all the way back to the Helmand River. Then hills. On our right, to the west, was all brown zone—flat desert and no cover. That hundred meters just about killed us. I carried a SAW machine gun, which weighs twenty-eight pounds. Plus ammo, grenades, water. When we started back we heard motorcycles out in the corn. That’s a weird fucking sound—high corn with motorcycles revving inside it. We had ICOM radio intercepts and ’terps to tell us what the skinnies were saying to each other. They were setting up an ambush is what they were doing. But we made it back with no contact. We were disappointed.”

“Disappointed you didn’t get shot at?”

“Yep. We’d all gone there to fight.”

“When
was
the first contact?”

“The next morning. It was a full-on op, with an early gear check and a map and orders to recon a village farther up the Six One One. We were only five minutes out the back gate when we heard the motorcycles out in the corn again and the ’terps said it was Taliban again, a lot of them. They lit us up with machine guns, heavy fire, and we all hauled ass into the corn and dove in. Then everybody was firing blind and there was corn flying around but you could barely even see your own guys. Loud. It was amazing how we hardly ever
saw
the ragheads. But we were happy to be shooting. So after a few minutes everybody’s done and the air is full of dust and gunsmoke and everything goes real quiet. You could smell the shot-up corn. And goddamned Salimony screams out,
‘America! Get Some!’
We went another forty meters up the road and Messina saw a hajji in a man-dress digging in the rocks. Blew him onto his butt. It was our first kill.”

“How many did you kill personally, Pat?”

“Eight for sure. Probably more like twenty, realistically. We could only do death confirmations maybe a quarter of the time because the contact was so heavy. They’d drag out their dead and we’d never know.”

Patrick wiped the sweat and soot from his forehead then Ted did, too. “Wow, Pat. That must have been a rush. I wish I could do something like that.”

Patrick looked out at the burned world that they were trying to repair, one sprinkler, one tree at a time. “Yeah, it’s a rush.”

Ted nodded and took up his shovel again. “I had a gun pointed in my face just two days ago. Right here in Fallbrook. I thought I might get shot for sure. I was driving my taxi and it was one of my fares. A young Mexican guy. He lured me to his ’hood on Ventana so his homies could watch him jack me. He took all the money I’d collected, and all my tips except for ten bucks. I was really scared but really mad, too. I could feel those two things fighting it out in me for what I should do. Scared and mad. I got short of breath and my vision shrunk down to like a tunnel like it always did, remember? I chased him but you know how slow I am. I went to the cops then turned around in the station and walked right back out. I’d seen the Mexican guy before around town and I’m sure I’ll see him again. His gun was old and the bluing was rubbed off the end of the barrel.”

“How come you didn’t say anything?”

“I just did, Pat.”

“This happened the day after I got home?”

“Yeah, that day. I was thinking about you the whole time I was driving. And the next thing I know there’s a gun in my face. I haven’t told anybody but you.”

“You didn’t report it?”

“You know me and cops.”

“What are you going to do, Ted?”

“I don’t know what to do. I got robbed, so there’s supposed to be justice. On the other hand, I didn’t get shot and I’m only out some tip money. What do you think I should do?”

Patrick dug out a ruined valve as he thought. “Tough call. I’d go back to the cops. Report it. They’ll question him. Maybe he’s had other complaints.”

“Then I go to court and a bunch of people stare at me? And the judge dismisses the case for lack of evidence? And don’t forget, I’m the guy who got expelled for making fun of the mayor on the Web, so they all would think I’m a whack job.”

“That wouldn’t properly figure in, I don’t think. But this wouldn’t go to a trial. No witnesses except his buddies, and you know what they’ll say. But you don’t have to press charges to file a complaint, I don’t think. You just have to let the law put this guy on notice.”

“What if he robs me again?”

Patrick emptied a shovelful of good Fallbrook decomposed granite around the valve. “Then that’s a whole different story. If we’re out and about and you see him, point him out.”

“Sir, yes sir.”

“Stop that, Ted.”

“Okay. Should I get a gun?”

“No. Then things just escalate.”

“Would you say that to anyone, or just to me?”

“To anyone. Speaking for myself, I can’t tell you how good it was to check in my weapons in at the armory. I like being able to walk around without guns. It’s a privilege.”

They worked silently for a few minutes and Patrick wondered what would be the right behavior for Ted, given the young Mexican man, the gun, the money, the fear and anger. He’d seen that anger spike. A gun for Ted didn’t seem like the right thing. It struck Patrick that in many ways civilian life was more difficult than combat. In Fallbrook, things were not clearly divided into us or them, friend or enemy, kill or be killed. In Sangin, the things he had done as a fighting man were simple and clear, bloody though they sometimes were. Here, things were complex.