As Lucy is serving the hot casserole, the phone rings.
She answers it, says hesitantly, “Yes, he’s here.”
She gives the phone to Dennis with a frightened look.
“Hello?”
“Dennis, this is Ernie Klusinski.” One of Dennis’s long-lost colleague friends, now working for Aerojet in La Habra.
“Oh hi, Ernie. How are you?” Unnatural heartiness to his voice, he can tell.
“Fine. Listen, Dennis, we’ve heard over here about what happened at LSR today, and I was wondering if you wanted to come up and have lunch with me and my boss Sonja Adding, to sort of talk things over. Look into possibilities, you know, and see if you’re at all interested in what we’re doing here.” Pause. “If you’re interested, of course.”
“Oh I’m interested,” Dennis says, thinking fast. “Yeah, that’s real nice of you, Ernie, I appreciate it. Uh, one thing though”—he pauses, decides—“Lucy and I were thinking of taking a vacation up the coast. Given the opportunity, you know.” Ernie laughs at this feeble jest. “So maybe we can do it when I get back?”
“Oh sure, sure! No problem with that. Just give me a ring when you get back, and we’ll set it up. I’ve told Sonja about you, and she wants to meet you.”
“Yeah. That’d be nice. Thanks, Ernie.”
They hang up.
Still thinking hard, Dennis returns to the table. Stares at his plate, the casserole steaming gently.
“That was Ernie Klusinski?”
“Yeah, it was.” It’s been a strange day.
“And what did he want?”
Dennis gives her a lopsided grin. “He was head-hunting. Word has gotten around I was let go, and Ernie’s boss is interested in talking to me. Maybe hiring me.”
“But that’s wonderful!”
“Maybe. Aerojet has got those ground-based lasers, phase six of the BMD—I’d hate to get mixed up in that again.”
“Me too.”
“It’s a goddamned waste of time!” He shakes his head, returns to the topic at hand. “But they’re big, they have a lot of things going. If I could get into the right department…”
“You can find that out when you talk to them.”
“Yeah. But…” How to say it? He doesn’t understand it himself. “I don’t know… I don’t know if I want to get back into it! It’ll just be more of the same. More of the same.”
He doesn’t know what he feels. It’s nice to be wanted, real nice. But at the same time he feels a kind of despair, he feels trapped—this is his life, his work, he’ll never escape it. It’ll never end.
“You can figure that out after you talk to them.”
“Yeah. Oh. I told him we’d be off on vacation for a while.”
“I heard that.” Lucy smiles.
Dennis shrugs. “It would be good to see our property.” He eats for a while, stops. Taps his fork on the table. “It’s been a strange day.”
That night they pack their suitcases and prepare the house, in a pre-trip ritual thirty years old. Dennis’s thoughts are scattered and confused, his feelings slide about from disbelief to hurt to fury to numbness to bitter humor to a kind of breathless anticipation, a feeling of freedom. He doesn’t have to take the job at Aerojet, if it comes to that. On the other hand he can. Nothing’s certain anymore. Anything can happen. And he’ll never have to deal with Ball Lightning again; he never has to listen to Stewart Lemon boss him around, ever again. Hard to believe.
“Well, I should call Dan Houston.”
Reluctantly he does it, and is more relieved than anything else to get an answering machine. He leaves a short message suggesting that they get together when he returns, and hangs up thoughtfully. Poor Dan, where is he tonight?
Lucy calls up Jim. No answer. And his answering machine isn’t turned on. “I’m worried about him,” she says, nervously packing a suitcase.
“Leave a note on the kitchen screen. He’ll see it when he comes over.”
“Okay.” She closes the suitcase. “I wish I knew… what was wrong with him.”
“He doesn’t even know what’s wrong with him,” Dennis says. He’s still annoyed with Jim for leaving before dinner, the previous night. It hurt Lucy’s feelings. And it was a stupid argument; Dennis is surprised he ever let himself say as much as he did, especially to someone who doesn’t know enough to understand. Although he should understand! He should. Well—his son is a problem. A mystery. “Let’s not worry about him tonight.”
“All right.”
Dennis loads the car trunk. As they go to bed Lucy says, “Do you think you’ll take this other job?”
“We’ll see when we get back.”
And the next morning, at 5:00 A.M., their traditional hour of departure, they back out of the driveway and track down to the Santa Ana Freeway, and they turn north, and they leave Orange County.
80
By the time Tashi and Jim return to Tashi’s car, three days later, Jim is a wreck. He has several big blisters, three badly burned fingertips, a cut thumb, a bruised butt, a badly scratched leg, a knee locked stiff by some unfelt twist, a torn arch muscle in his left foot, deeply sun-cracked lips, and a radically sunburnt nose. He has also stabbed himself in the face with a tent pole, almost poking out his eye; and he tried to change the stove canister by candlelight, thereby briefly blowing himself up and melting off his eyelashes, his beard stubble, and the hair on his wrists.
So, Jim is no Boy Scout. But he is happy. Body a wreck, mind at ease. At least temporarily. He’s discovered a new country, and it will always be there for him. Both physically, just up the freeway, and mentally, in a country in his mind, a place that he has discovered along with the mountains themselves. It will always be back there somewhere.
He moans as they reach the car and throw their packs in the back, he moans as Tashi drives the car up the dirt road to the track, and heads down; he moans as he sits in the passenger seat. But in truth, he feels fine. Even the prospect of returning to OC can’t subdue him; he has new resources to deal with OC, and a new resolve.
“We should get Sandy to come up here with us,” he says to Tashi. “I’m sure he’d love it too.”
“He used to come up with me,” Tash says. “Too busy now. And…” He makes a funny moue with his mouth. “We’ll have to see how Sandy is doing when he gets back. He should be out on bail, I guess.”
“What?”
“Well, see…” And Tashi tells him about the aphrodisiac run, the stashing of the goods at the bottom of the bluff below LSR. “So with LSR’s security tightened, the drugs were stuck there, see. So, apparently the attack you guys were going to make on Laguna Space was supposed to serve as a distraction that would cover Sandy while he snuck in by sea and recovered the stash.”
“What? Oh my God—”
“Calm down, calm down. He’s all right. I called Angela the next morning when we stopped for food, to find out what had happened. Sandy was caught by LSR’s security forces, and turned over to the police. No problem.”
“No problem! Jesus!”
“No problem. Being nabbed by cops isn’t the worst thing that could happen. I was worried that he might have gotten hurt. He easily could have been shot, you know.”
That idea is enough to stun Jim into complete silence.
“It’s okay,” Tash says after a while.
“Jesus,” says Jim. “I didn’t know! I mean, why didn’t Sandy tell me!”
“I don’t know. But then what would you have done, anyway?”
Jim gulps, speechless.
“Since Sandy’s okay, it’s probably better you didn’t know.”
“Oh, man.… First Arthur, and now Sandy.…”