He again collected the TV box and walked to the opposite end of the big room, which was separated by sliding shoji screens. He used his foot to slide one open and walked in. This area was finished off with hardwood flooring and some comfortable furniture and a big-screen TV and a good stereo. There were bookshelves, mostly automotive pictorials and histories, and hundreds of car magazines, and many volumes of poetry, which Bradley enjoyed. Poems were the opposite of cars. Cars went fast, while nothing stopped time like a good poem. He had tried writing them. There were notebooks filled with them, almost one entire shelf of notebooks, but he had never written one he liked. Too much emotion. Not enough. Too much detail. Not enough. He kept trying. But he also knew that at his wedding to Erin, he would recite from Neruda and not himself, though she had asked him to read something written in his heart.
There was also a Ping-Pong table. He carefully set the TV box down on the floor, then took the paddles and ball off the Ping-Pong table and tossed them onto an old leather sofa. With the table clear, he hit the fob button. The concrete slab and the hardwood flooring that was cut away around the Ping-Pong table and the table itself, all rose six feet into the air and locked into place on four staunch hydraulic lifters. Bradley hustled down the steep narrow stairway with the JVC box and hit the fob again, which lowered the slab above him. He listened to the hiss of the hydraulics and then the final clunk of the concrete settling back into place. He smiled. He had built the door using the powerful lift assemblies from two trash trucks he had stolen in nearby Escondido. Driving the trash trucks away fast at night had been surprisingly good fun. It had taken him six backbreaking months to excavate the vault, using pick, shovel, and bucket. The labor and the thousands of trips up and down the ladder had left him ten pounds lighter and considerably stronger than when he’d last played football two years ago. And there was no feeling like the satisfaction of having done something with his own hands. Welding and cutting and working the steel had come easy to him, through his passion for working on cars. This trapdoor and the vault below were a secret that he had shared with no one.
He set the JVC box down and turned on the lights. The room was generous-twenty by twenty, eight feet from floor to ceiling. One wall was lined with three steel combination safes with a total capacity of forty-two cubic feet. The safes were bolted to the concrete floor and they were fireproof. There was a workbench along another wall, and a metal rolling shop chair. The worktop was orderly and sparse: two expensive digital scales, a vacuum packer designed for use on game, a rolled lariat, a Colt single-action revolver, an oily red bandana, a handmade Indian arrow with a small obsidian head, two rough-hewn wooden boxes in which Bradley could see the leather-bound book with no title on the cover and old clothes and old newspapers and photographs and a bandoleer with some of the bullets still intact.
Bradley picked up the TV box and moved it to the workbench amidst these oddities, then cut the packing tape with his switchblade. He folded open the top flaps and reached inside and pulled out a black velvet hood, which he set aside. Then he gently lifted out a heavy glass jar. He held it up to be face-to-face with the head inside, a man’s head, severed cleanly at the neck, a pale and lonely thing. The head was bald, and a layer of black hair lilted just off the bottom of the jar. The face could have once been handsome. Joaquin Murrieta. El Famoso. Bradley’s great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather. Although history said the bottled head was lost in the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906, Bradley had read in his mother’s journal that in fact it had been stolen from an exhibition hall one week before by Ramon Murrieta, one of Joaquin’s grand-sons. The leather-bound journal said that the head had been spirited down through the generations by Joaquin’s most kindred descendants. Now it was here. Bradley believed the head. He believed that it had had power over his mother, the power of the past, the power of blood. Now it had power over him. She had kept it right here in the Valley Center barn, stashed in a hidden attic space that Bradley had discovered when he was fourteen. She had never told him about it or how it got here, but she had tried to. He remembered her sitting him down for important talks that failed to contain the important. She would begin but couldn’t finish. The journal had told him more than its writer ever could, and Bradley had spent hours with it before and after her death. Now when he read the words, he heard them spoken by her voice. I anguish over my oldest son. He is clearly Joaquin’s spirit, as I am. But I don’t know if I want him to grow up Joaquin’s way or just be a normal boy, a normal man. What am I supposed to do with the legend of Joaquin? Does it continue through me to Bradley? Does it end with me? Do I give Bradley his truth? Do I hide it from him? Do I let him search for it? Talk about a pickle. I’ve thought about it and prayed about it and even tried to just forget about it but I can’t. Carrying history is a burden. I’d rather be robbing a fast-food place.
Bradley knew that she had died not knowing what to tell him of his history, but when he had seen the head and put the pieces together, he understood.
He set the big glass jar on the workbench beside the Colt revolver and watched the head bob slightly and the hair begin to settle.
“¿Cómo estás, el Famoso?”
He rolled the work chair over and sat in it and looked at the tableau upon the bench. He got up and took his mother’s journal from the wooden box and laid it down beside the head and the gun, then opened a drawer and took out a feather duster and swiped it over the bench top. He put the duster back and sat back and viewed again. As he thought about his mother and Joaquin and his coming wedding to Erin, Bradley’s heart felt full and sad and joyful all at the same time. These powerful emotions were exactly what all those notebooks were filled with, he thought, lame attempts all just to say what he felt.
Later he opened each safe and inspected the bales of vacuum-packed cash. He liked to run his hands over the packages. Because his payments from Herredia were often in small bills, they took up lots of space. He had laundered some of the money through Israel Castro, in Jacumba. Israel had several legitimate and illegitimate businesses and he was happy to work with Bradley and his money. Israel, as a notary public and a loan originator, had helped Bradley buy the Valley Center ranch for cash. Of the approximately one and a quarter million dollars that Bradley had earned in the last year and a half, only one hundred thousand remained in the safes. But he’d learned that fifteen grand a week, base pay, adds up fast. There was also money from stealing cars, but he had not been doing much of that with the wedding to plan and his new position as an arms procurer for Herredia. The deal for the Love 32s would earn him ninety thousand if everything happened like it was supposed to. Erin would be making better money now with the recording deal, but as Bradley had seen, musicians almost always either starve or succeed hugely. Clayton and Stone were freelance and they worked their asses off forging payroll checks and stealing cars, and as their land-lord and mentor and occasional muscle, Bradley took a nice tribute from them.
He smiled and shut the safe door and spun the locks. Proximity to cash and Erin made him feel secure and full of heart and wicked horny. He put the hood on Joaquin and took the empty TV box and hit the fob. He stood and proudly watched the door ascend into the barn light.
27
The seven hundredth Love 32 is finished and I sit at the bench beside Marcos and take the weapon from him and feel its wonderful weight and balance in my hand.