“Look, I’m sorry.”
“I said it was nobody you know.”
“And I said I was sorry.”
She then picked up the pace, and I had to work hard to keep up with her. She didn’t look at me at all. We were in a nicer neighborhood now — well-tended gardens, chile ristras and rock lawns, wind chimes above doors, the spicy smoke of piñon wood rising through the air from backyard barbecues. Psyche was asleep.
“This way,” Irina said, her voice low. We were at a service entrance to a golf-course development that wasn’t far, if my geography was right, from the cemetery where my father was buried. She slipped through a gap in the fence — surprisingly agile, I thought, for a woman carrying a baby — and then skulked around the perimeter of a vast expanse dotted with huge houses. I thought I could see other forms moving around, but they might have just been shadows. It was very quiet. The air wafting over acres of thick, green grass smelled cooler and wetter — like a giant swatch of Connecticut now stranded, far from home, in New Mexico. Had I come across this place in the Northeast, it would have seemed pleasant and generically suburban, but now, after hearing all the talk about water, I saw it as decadent and even outrageous, ghastly as a fur coat.
Someone whispered my name in the darkness, and I almost tripped on my brother, who was crouching against the trunk of an elm tree. “Get down,” he hissed, and Irina and I kneeled down beside him. He kept glancing over his shoulder, craning his head to look down a nearby street and even up at the sky. I’d never seen him so twitchy. A car came through the gated entrance, its headlights bearing down as if on purpose on where we huddled together behind the tree. Wylie was pressed up against me, and I could smell the sour stench of his breath and his unwashed hair.
After the car turned the corner and disappeared, Wylie pulled out flashlights from his backpack and handed one to each of us. “You’re looking for glinting metal in the ground. Irina, go over to this side of the fairway. They should be spaced about twenty feet apart, okay?”
“Yes, of course,” she said, rolling the r, her voice dreamy and sweet. He reached again into his backpack and pulled out something wrapped in a towel that turned out to be a wrench. She took it and left immediately, keeping close to the fence.
“You’re ready?” he asked, as if I were a stranger he’d been assigned to buddy with. I nodded. After despairing of catching even a glimpse of him, it was strange to be sitting so close, and I held my breath for fear any movement might startle him. He unwrapped another towel and handed me a wrench. “Come on,” he said.
We jogged across the golf course, playing the flashlights here and there, though my eyes were fixed on his dark ponytail.
Then he stopped short and pointed to the ground. “Put the wrench around the nozzle. If possible, you want to pull out the riser it’s mounted on too, and the spring around it. But if you can’t, just the nozzle’s okay. Then go twenty feet and look for another nozzle with your flashlight.”
I looked down at the wrench in my hand. “Is that really going to work?”
“According to my study of the diagrams, it should work perfectly.”
“Wylie, this is stupid. Petty vandalism? Their insurance will cover the repairs, and it’ll all be back to normal in a couple of days. What’s the point?”
He glowered at me in the dark. His thin shoulders rose and fell with the swift rhythm of his breath, and his chest heaved in and out, almost too fast to see. “If you’re not here to do this,” he said, “then you should leave.”
He looked like he hated me. But he was my brother, and I missed him in the elemental way that you can only miss your family or your home. I bent down and started to struggle with the wrench, and Wylie ran off in the dark.
I had no idea what I was doing, and was able to accomplish nothing at all with the wrench. Every time it slipped uselessly on the nozzle, I shook my head in amazement. Somehow Wylie was able to extract sprinklers from the ground, keep a twenty-year-old car running, and live successfully in the mountains for days or weeks at a time. I had no idea how he’d come by all these skills. Neither of our parents was mechanically inclined. My father, the scientist, was rendered helpless by the sight of a clogged toilet or a blown tire; after inspecting such problems, he’d shrug vaguely and leave them to my mother, who would then call the appropriate professional.
After a couple of minutes I stood up, leaving the wrench on the grass. Then I saw Angus — even from a distance I could make out his red hair — running toward me in his military posture and knees-up gait. He grabbed my hands and pulled me into a spin that landed us with a thud on the ground.
“I can’t get the thing off,” I told him.
“I know. I’ve got a bolt cutter,” he said. He set to work, his hands fast and sure. A short while later the metal nozzle crunched and a small spray of water spurted from it onto the grass. He handed me the sprinkler head, then ran off to the next person.
I trudged down the fairway looking for Wylie. Down the slope ahead of me, a sand trap lay cut across the grass like a ditch, almost silver in the moonlight. Up by the green my brother was crouched over a sprinkler with a bolt cutter. His backpack was very well supplied.
“I’m done with mine,” I said. “Angus helped me.”
“You only did one?” he said. He ripped the sprinkler loose, an expression distantly related to a smile twisting his mouth, and ran off to find another.
For a few minutes I walked around the golf course without seeing anyone, still holding my sprinkler head, then found everybody gathered on the bank of a pond. We threw our confiscated goods into the water, where they splashed and sank, and Irina beamed at me and said, “Isn’t it wonderful?” There was a lot of manic, happy whispering. I would have liked to join but didn’t feel entitled, due to my total incompetence.
Stan led us to an exit road on the far side of the development, and Angus said, “Let’s all scatter and meet at the apartment.” Irina gestured for me to walk with her, but I shook my head and said, “I’m going with Wylie.” For a second my brother stood there on the sidewalk tensed on the balls of his feet. Then he just shrugged, and people started peeling off.
The moon shone on the reflective surfaces of signs warning of children playing, one-way traffic, resident parking only. Slouched under his backpack, Wylie soldiered on, his fists clenching and unclenching with the rhythm of his hurried steps. I kept waiting for the absolute perfect thing to say to appear in my mind, and the longer I waited, the more absolute and perfect that thing had to be. Meanwhile his silence was so conspicuous that I could practically see it surrounding him. When he was little, instead of refusing to eat food he didn’t like, Wylie just stuck it into a corner of his mouth, sitting at the table like a deranged gerbil, his cheek bulging with brussels sprouts until my mother, half laughing, ordered him to spit it out.
He went inside a 7-Eleven and came out with a bottle of Wild Turkey in a paper bag.
“Could we stop for a second?” I said.
“Why?”
“Because my feet hurt and I’m tired.”
He shrugged again. On the next block, a small, disconsolate playground occupied a patch of dirt. I sat down on the merry-go-round, and Wylie stood punching a tetherball around its pole. We passed the bottle back and forth. Then he pulled a joint out of his pocket and lit it, and we shared that too. I felt slightly better.
“So what’s next?” I finally said.
“Are you sure you want to know?”
“Didn’t I just ask?”
He thrust his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “We’ve got a whole summer’s worth of stuff planned. Our launch program will roll out activities on a regular schedule. A city experiencing escalating chaos will have to ask itself if its priorities are in the right place.”