But then she had come back, and he had been happy but completely mystified.
An exit sign caught his eye and involuntarily he glanced to his right. He had told himself he wasn’t going to think about this, but Terry and Shannon were right up that road, right there in Sherman Oaks — and entirely beyond his reach. It wasn’t “his time,” not for another month yet. He got to see them twice a year as long as Debby didn’t make trouble, and otherwise missed them with a depth of feeling he hadn’t known he possessed.
North on 1–5; a giant amusement park loomed off to the left. Teenagers by the carful were lined up at the exit ramp, avid for the ecstatic release of the Tidal Wave or the Tornado or the Death Wish, or whatever it was. He could see their eager faces and imagined a hot white flare of adrenaline above each one, like gas burning off in an oilfield. Kids that age were like oil or some other explosive natural resource, pumping hormones into the culture. Even his own still-prepubescent boys were absolutely fearless.
He had been fearless once. Oh, he had wanted a lot he didn’t have — Glenda Cannon, for instance — but he had been without fear because he had believed he had nothing to lose. Then he had begun to lose things. His father, in high school. Then his mother. His best friend Frank, in the war. Debby and the kids — not dead, but lost to him, and he had grieved for the boys as if they had died.
And now there was Claire. He was coming to accept on faith that she loved him, but it made him uneasy. He was a scientist; he might act on faith, but he trusted in reason.
So now he seemed to operate against this constant background of low-level anxiety. What if something happened to the boys? What if Debby tried to keep them from him? What if Claire just didn’t come back one day? More to the point, what if his old Valiant, which he had nursed for fifteen years and which was right now overheating dangerously, didn’t make it over the Tejon Pass this time?
He grimaced in disgust. This was maturity — trading that fierce ache of adolescent desire for a cold knot of fear and self-pity. It was pathetic.
The Valiant made it, the country around him opened up and cleared out, and by the time he had coasted down the Grapevine into the San Joaquin Valley he was feeling a lot better. The sight of new-leaved cotton fields and vineyards cheered him; he was heir to a long line of people who had attempted to induce the earth to bring forth. One of the most upsetting things about cities was the use of land merely as a platform. It struck him as a perversion. Especially L.A., where the conversion was so recent. You could see it in the place names — “Orange Grove Avenue,” meaning, there used to be an orange grove here.
But even in the Valley there were, as always, the new “For Sale — Zoned Commercial” signs on productive parcels, especially as he neared Bakersfield. Didn’t they understand, he thought with something close to panic, that once you built a highway, or a high-rise, or a shopping mall, the decision was irrevocable, the land irredeemable — so compacted it could never bear again?
Suddenly his own righteous indignation amused him. Another sign of age: every change was for the worse.
He passed the turn-off for McMinnville and EastWind Farm — “Stallions at Stud, Horses for Sale, Glenda Cannon, Proprietor” — and that distracted him for a while. Soon the road signs showed the pockmarks of bullet holes, legacy of some long-ago wild Saturday night, and he knew he was almost home. It was past nine-thirty when, drained and stiff, he rolled up the drive to his house.
Hoping for some cool evening air, he opened a beer and walked out onto the porch, but it was still hot and humid. It felt like Thailand. Maybe the climate had changed for good. He would become Extension Advisor for Opium; they would start growing bamboo and teak down the hill, instead of cotton and grapes.
4.
Monday was still muggy and overcast and the weather was the main topic of conversation at the Station. Not idle talk, either — atypical weather could ruin a crop. Stone fruit were his concern, and while a little spring rain might seem a blessing to some, to him it meant increased risk of leaf curl, brown rot, crown rot. He needed to make a couple of visits to local growers to inspect their trees for problems — but first he was going to drive to the drainage pools and look for Sheep’s Loco.
He parked under the sign for the nature preserve headquarters and began to walk west along the barbed wire that marked the boundary with Lazy D land to the south.
The first mile was open and dry. He stayed as close to the fence as possible, stopping to examine the tough, drought-tolerant plants that would look exactly the same months from now when the tender green carpet of filaree and wild oats under his feet had turned stiff and yellow. So far no locoweed.
Then he passed a feathery tamarisk, and just beyond saw a low mass of lavender, irregular blossoms. Locoweed, for sure, though color and size suggested they were benign Spotted Loco, not Sheep’s Loco.
Closer inspection confirmed this: lentiginosus variety variabilis, he thought. What he wanted was a bigger, rangier-looking plant, with three- or four-foot-long stems. The flowers would be more white or yellow, but Sheep’s Loco wasn’t supposed to bloom until June. Too bad it was only spring, because the seedpods would be a dead giveaway: in both species inflated like little sausages, but in Spotted Loco a distinctive mottled purple — thus its common name — and containing papery valves that curved inward to form a septum, so that in cross-section the pod had two cells.
He chased after several likely looking specimens that proved to be oversized Spotted Loco that hadn’t yet begun to bloom. Suddenly a wall of rushes appeared a few hundred yards to the north, and beyond them gleamed a drainage pool. Here by the fence there was no standing water, but the ground was saturated by seepage. Soon he was sinking in up to his ankles with every step and sweating like a hog in the sticky air; still, this was exactly where a calf might have wandered into the preserve, attracted by the pond itself and the luxuriant foliage around it, so he slogged on, checking for broken barbed wire on his left and locoweed on his right.
He saw both simultaneously. A section of newly strung wire testified to an old break, and about twenty feet north of it a stand of locoweed started his heart beating faster.
These were definitely different from anything else he had looked at: branches almost twice as long, flowers-to-be clumped in a dense flower-spike rather than a loose raceme. Now if he could just find a dried pod from last year... ah! Here!
He took out his Swiss Army knife and delicately sliced through the brittle balloon. It was completely hollow — one-celled, with no evidence of a septum. Sheep’s Loco, he was almost positive!
In fact, all the locoweed in the muck edging the pool seemed to be Sheep’s Loco. Evidently it had found a niche for itself here; the Spotted Loco seemed to prefer the higher, drier areas. But had Patterson’s calves grazed here? Well, those round impressions in the mud looked like the hoofprints of cattle. And several branches of the locoweed appeared to have been gnawed and stripped by leathery bovine tongues. Hell, it was good enough for him.
He snipped a few leaflets and a flower-spike, out of long habit taking no more than was necessary for definite ID. Then, realizing that he should get a bioassay to test for selenium, he broke off a long branch. It had a pungent, bitter odor.
His field calls ended in the southeast part of the county, and on his way home he detoured towards Dwayne Patterson’s land. He cut west through the oilfields, holding his breath against the sulfurous fumes, and then headed north on the McMinnville road, which formed the eastern boundary of the Lazy D.