“Back early tomorrow.” A whisper. I try to laugh. Brings a wad of grainy debris into my throat. The cough is agony. A rib.
“Shame,” he says. “We could use a man like you. And we believe we can change the world one man at a time. One woman, too.”
Another whisper. “By date farming?”
“Hey, those Medjools blue-ribboned at the San Diego County Fair this year. Isn’t easy. See, Ford, your takeaway here is, don’t come back.”
“Okay.”
“I’d appreciate it if you don’t tell the Imperial sheriffs. We have a good relationship and we’ll deny even seeing you.”
I grunt.
“I thought you’d see the light. This thing still has a charge and two G’s — even way out here. I’d call a friend if I were you. Trying to drive yourself to the ER might be a little counterproductive right now.”
He drops the phone to my chest. Slides off on the wallet side.
Then the howl of ATVs. Close my eyes, feel the sharp rain of sand on my face.
I take his advice and call a friend.
Will be a bit of a wait. But water in the backpack, which they leave beside me.
Water of life.
Burt on the way.
8
Morning. Home. Neither had ever looked better.
After two hours of poor sleep, the Irregulars got me onto one of the padded chaise longues on the patio, in the shade of a large palapa, with a view of the pond and the rolling hills beyond. My place for convalescence. Liz put a formidable bloody Mary on the table beside me. Dick ordered me to drink it. This in lieu of the pain pills from the ER, which in my jarhead stubbornness I had refused to take.
But I hadn’t been able to refuse the El Centro Regional Medical Center diagnosis and treatments: a cracked lower rib, three stitches on the right eyebrow, four above the left ear, two more inside my lower lip, plus cuts, contusions, and abrasions galore. In the mirror I saw a swollen, half-blinded primate. Notes of plum and cherry. My insides ached, but no internal bleeding. The rib felt like a broken-off knife. Worse were the hamstrings and knee joints, well stretched by the ATV dragging, and my desert-flayed back. Ankle burns where the ropes had been tied. But worst of all was the stark humiliation of being reduced to this. Not just defeated but slaughtered in all but the dictionary sense of the word. It’s sobering to realize how poorly defended you really are. What a joke your well-being really is. How little your life means to some people.
What entertained the doctors most was not my injuries but my non-concussion, which they couldn’t square with the pronounced swelling of my head just above the hairline, courtesy of the fearless leader’s rifle butt. Now topped by a bristling five-stitch railroad. My explanation of an unusually hard head, coupled with a boxer’s ability to take a punch, meant little to the doctors. I didn’t mention the occasional moments of wonder I experience since being knocked out by Darien Dixon. During these moments I feel exactly as I did sitting in my corner on the stooclass="underline" dazed but somehow content, too. Post-KO wonder. The El Centro ER doctors asked me to check into their hospital for observation and I declined, and was eventually driven home by the capable Burt Short.
Now my tenants were fussing over me on the patio. I call my tenants the Irregulars because they are not ordinary people. Then again, is anyone?
I rent out the six casitas that face the pond because I enjoy occasional company, and because good affordable housing shouldn’t go to waste. I inherited this hacienda from my wife, Justine Timmerman, who died four years and five months ago. She was thirty-one. The estate was a wedding gift from her family. It has a name, Rancho de los Robles — Ranch of the Oaks. The main house is two stories of adobe brick and rough-hewn timber, and well over a hundred years old. Needs some work. The surrounding twenty-five acres are oak grassland.
The Irregulars are a changing cast. Three of the originals are still here. Some of them are forthcoming about themselves, while others reveal little. I post the house rules, laminated in acrylic, on one of the palapa uprights for all to see:
GOOD MANNERS AND PERSONAL HYGIENE
NO VIOLENCE REAL OR IMPLIED
NO DRUGS
NO STEALING
QUIET MIDNIGHT TO NOON
RENT DUE FIRST OF MONTH
NO EXCEPTIONS
Liz, my grandmother, lives in casita six. Grandpa Dick lives in casita number one, as far from his wife as possible. Yet close. Dick is mid-eighties, Liz younger. They spend most of their waking hours together. Tennis. Travel. They bicker incessantly and sometimes fight, fueled by alcohol and decades of marriage. I used to think they were textbook examples of how to erode a relationship, but now I’m not so sure.
Burt Short lives in casita five. He actually is short, with an open face and a swatch of auburn hair that looks like a toupee but isn’t. Merry eyes. He’s built like a bull, big-shouldered, small-footed. Comments about his size activate him. A passionate golfer. He came up my drive in a huge red top-down Eldorado three-plus years ago, my first tenant, with a likable cool and a preference to pay in cash, which he always has. His past comes out in occasional bits and pieces — various employment, travel, fluency in languages, and arcane violence — though most of it seems subject to change. There are few facts about his past that I can bank on. But Burt helped me out of a very bad predicament not long ago, which left one man dead and another terrified — I hope — into silence. Burt and I became something to each other that night, though I’m not sure what. More committed than friends. Closer than partners. We refer to the event sometimes but have never discussed it in depth. I’m half of a secret organization that has no name or charter, and only one rule: loyalty. Sometimes he calls me Champ and sometimes I call him Shark.
Now, lying on the chaise longue with a view of the pond and the hills, I turned my aching head to the sound of Burt pushing a wheelbarrow full of ice cubes across the barnyard toward us. I’d been listening to him and Frank — the youngest Irregular — over the last ten minutes, breaking open the store-bought bags of ice piled high in the trunk of Burt’s magnificent red Eldo, and dumping the clanging cubes into the wheelbarrow. The ice has formed a glittering mountain. Burt powers it across the barnyard. Now and then a few jewels slide off and land in the green late-summer grass.
Burt has a trauma remedy that he claims to have had great success with while helping to manage a stable of young boxers out of a gym in Oxnard. One of those men is now a WBC super-lightweight contender. Burt, Frank, and I watched him on ESPN last week. Driving me back from the El Centro hospital just a few hours ago, Burt said the ice bath wasn’t his idea at all but an old-school English treatment for a boxer’s broken bones, cuts, bruises, and — most important — spirit. He’d seen it work near miracles.
I was not looking forward to it. Rotated my swollen face in the other direction to view the antique claw-foot bathtub that Burt and Frank transported out here in the front loader of the Bobcat. It was already half full of ice, slowly melting in the September heat. One cold bath that was going to be.
Back to the Irregulars: the aforementioned Frank is one Francisco Cuellar, an eighteen-year-old Salvadoran boy I discovered early this spring, living down in a tree-shaded arroyo near the western edge of the property. A friend and I had been bird-watching and decided to follow some quail tracks from a wash down into a streambed. When we reached the bottom, fifty determined quail launched into the sky between the oaks and another fifty stormed into a thicket of wild buckwheat and prickly pear. Which left my companion, Wynn, and me and a skinny boy with a homemade quail noose in one hand facing each other wordlessly while the birds tore away.