Donnally returned to the Mexican, gave him one of the painkillers, and dragged him to the front steps. He then walked to the outbuilding and broke a back window with a piece of firewood and climbed in. Sheets of dust jumped off the workbench and the stacks of boxes when his feet hit the plank floor, and then plumed into clouds as he scanned the room.
The first boxes he opened contained an archive of Berkeley in the sixties, seventies, and eighties: copies of the Berkeley Barb newspaper, antiwar handouts, Black Panther manifestos, books on colonialism and imperialism: evidence of Trudy’s past, stored away and sealed against time.
In a box on top of the third stack he found Anna’s decades-old lesson plans printed on the Berkeley Unified School District letterhead. He pulled it down and searched through the next and the next, setting aside everything handwritten or typed that didn’t seem related to her teaching. He extracted spiral notebooks, date diaries, and financial records, pausing every few minutes to listen for the sound of Bear’s truck. He piled everything into a suitcase, and when that was full, began a second.
A downshifting transmission broke the silence, then the vehicle accelerated. Donnally figured that the driver must have spotted Lucky.
It skidded to a stop. Two doors opened.
“What the fuck?” It was Bear’s voice.
Donnally peeked between the blinds. Trudy and Bear were standing over the Mexican.
“What’s wrong with him?” Trudy asked.
“Who cares?” Bear scanned the property. “What I want to know is how he got here?” He glared at the Mexican. “English?” He kicked one of the branches that formed the stretcher. The Mexican winced. “You speak English?”
The Mexican shook his head.
Trudy kneeled down and felt around and under the man’s back.
“I think he’s been shot,” she said. “We need to get him to the hospital.”
“You get him to the hospital. I’m gonna find where he came from.”
Bear climbed into the truck, made a three-point turn, and backed toward the stretcher. He propped the head end on the lowered rear gate, then pushed it in the rest of the way.
“Maybe you should come, too,” Trudy said.
Bear didn’t respond, just handed her the keys. He scanned the clearing until he spotted the scrape marks left by the stretcher when Donnally had dragged the Mexican from the forest, then pointed toward the hill.
“I’m gonna check the house, and then get a gun and head up there.”
T he ninety-minute hike that Donnally had taken down from his campsite turned into a four-hour struggle back up through heavy brush and rocky canyons, scraping his face and wrenching his hip along the way.
It wasn’t just the two forty-pound suitcases. It was finding a route that wouldn’t lead him back through the Mexican’s plantation, where he was sure Bear would be waiting.
Bear had impressed Donnally as a paranoid but patient man, and he knew that patient men, like deer hunters in tree stands, wait for targets to come to them.
Donnally wasn’t going to chance walking into Bear’s sights, no matter what the cost to his body.
Chapter 39
W hen Donnally drove into Mount Shasta, he found it quiet in the comfortable way that mountain towns get around midnight, especially when the ground is wet and the air heavy. He rolled down his window. The only sounds were the occasional shush of tires on pavement and the whoosh of pneumatic truck brakes, the surface water somehow canceling the low rumble of the gasoline and diesel engines.
The fog that had followed Donnally in from the coast haloed the streetlights and neon signs, rendering them three-dimensional. And his Lone Mountain Cafe seemed to him more lone than mountain, standing in the middle of its empty parking lot, locked up for the night, next to Mauricio’s junkyard, locked up forever.
After stopping at a pay phone to make an anonymous call to the Mendocino Coast Hospital to confirm that Lucky had survived, Donnally drove back across the freeway and north into the foothills to his house.
If a woman had been living there, the neighbors would’ve described it as cozy.
Without one, it was just small.
Detached garage. One story. Square. Shingled. With a hipped roof and dormers that brought winter sunshine into his attic office.
Donnally hauled the suitcases upstairs, then took a shower and made himself a sandwich. He stood in the kitchen as he ate, wondering how he’d strayed so far from fulfilling what had seemed a simple request: find Anna, show her the letter, and give her the money Mauricio had left. Instead he had committed one felony after another. Even the injury to Lucky happened because he was on his way to commit a burglary.
As a yawn came over him, he wondered who he was becoming.
And then the answer arrived: a vigilante.
He yawned again and stretched his arms high over his head, and then smiled. Until that moment, he’d always thought vigilante justice was a bad thing.
But as he undressed for bed, Donnally felt less like a vigilante than a viewer of one of his father’s early films, made after he had returned from Vietnam and had abandoned advertising to pursue his dream of becoming a new Truffaut or Godard or Chabrol or Rohmer. He had situated them in wartime France and Indochina and made the protagonists enemy collaborators and gangsters: antiheroes. Each film was riddled with irrelevant shots of manikins or garbage cans that were supposed to impart a mysterious meaning accessible only to the initiated, of which Donnally discovered he wasn’t one. It seemed to him, even then, that the stories were not reflective of great truths, or even a search for them, but of a psychotic break.
Now lying in bed, staring up at the ceiling, it struck Donnally that while his father’s fragmented films had been shot in the present tense, he himself had been wandering in a very imperfect past, one captured in a series of jump cuts by a handheld camera that never stopped moving, one that jerked him around in time and space like energy and matter in a physicist’s thought experiment.
Everyone he’d been thinking about seemed to be living parallel lives in two separate places, at two separate times-Mauricio, Charles, Anna, Trudy, Sherwyn-and he wondered whether he’d be any more successful in comprehending the universe in which they existed than his father had been.
But he knew he could do no worse.
Donnally remembered at age fifteen sitting in the Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood during the premiere of his father’s first mainstream Vietnam War movie.
And his own bewilderment.
It was a coming-of-age film in which maturity meant insanity, and the single soldier who survived the battle had gone on a berserk rampage, had been awarded a Silver Star, and then had returned home unable to remember what he had been fighting for.
Donnally now saw himself, felt himself, walking out of the theater, confused and distraught, wondering who the film was really about, for the only soldier he’d known during the war had been his brother, who hadn’t been insane, who hadn’t gone berserk, and who hadn’t won any medals while he was alive. Eventually, of course, like the character in the movie, he did come home, but in a body bag.
As Donnally relived his brother’s funeral, a side view of Janie’s face popped onto his mind’s screen. And with it a memory of one of their conversations prompted by a call from his father.
“Haven’t you ever wondered why your father always chooses a fool to speak the most significant lines in his movies, and always has him staring right at the camera?”
She’d been propped up in bed, sipping from a cup of tea.
“That’s just his form of ridicule,” Donnally had answered. “A way of painting a bull’s-eye on a pinata and hanging it in the middle of screen.”
“Not the doofus in Shooting the Dawn who says, ‘Wouldn’t it be weird if the best and the brightest confessed after we lost the war in Vietnam that they knew all along we couldn’t win it?’ ”
“I don’t remember that line.”
Looking over at him she’d said, “I’m starting to wonder whether you’ve ever watched one of his films, or paid attention when you did.”
“I stopped a very long time ago.”
“I think it’s time you started again.”
“I’ve seen the trailers on television. Nothing has changed. He’s still making self-indulgent movies about how Americans feel about war, not what war is really about and who it is we’re fighting and why they’re fighting us. His message that life is hell and only the insane survive doesn’t explain why my brother died. My father’s fool never seems to get around to answering those questions.”
Then his own voice speaking inside his head. Who’s the fool this time, Donnally? And what’s he saying?
And it was morning.