26

The next afternoon, Bradley steered his Cyclone GT up the dirt drive toward his mother’s ranch house. It was now two years since her death, and his heart turned heavy and full as his old muscle car rumbled slowly along.

The ranch was in Valley Center, northeast of San Diego. It was eight acres of savannah and rolling hills, with a stream and a pond, a pasture and a paddock and a barn, and citrus and avocado trees loaded with fruit. It was wedged between two different tribal reservations. One road in, and this road was gated and locked. Upon his mother’s death, the ranch had become the equally held property of her three sons, Bradley, Jordan, and baby Kenny. Bradley had very generously cashed them out six months ago and made it very clear that they were welcome to come back and live there whenever they wanted, rent free, as his guests, in the home that the three boys had spent six happy months before their mother had been killed. He was in negotiations to buy twenty-five adjacent acres, beautiful acres, he thought, acres the color of lions.

He looked into the rearview and saw Erin in the Cayenne Turbo eating his dust. Her vehicle was loaded to the top with boxes of valuable things, as was his Cyclone, the bulk of their possessions to be coming later by moving van from their former home up north of L.A. Bradley glanced up again at his fiancée and smiled. Without trying in the slightest, she moved him.

He parked in front of the house, and Erin pulled in beside him. Clayton and Stone wandered in behind them in their own vehicles, also loaded with personal possessions. Two of the casitas at the far end of the barnyard were theirs. Always attuned to appearances, Clayton the forger had already painted his to match the barn-red with white trim. The other three remained pink as Suzanne had liked them.

Bradley climbed the stairs to the porch and unlocked the front door. This porch needs dogs, he thought. He swung open the door for Erin and he stepped in behind her. The new tiles were in and the house smelled of new paint. Sunlight barged through the windows, no drapes or blinds or curtains needed in this remote place. It had a rambling, open-floor plan thanks to his mother’s knocking out of walls. Her last live-in lover, Ernest, father of baby Kenny, was a full-blooded Hawaiian who was good with his hands and had converted the living room to a kind of tiki room with wood carvings and masks and torches and a bar and a corkboard wall displaying all manner of Hawaiian clubs and axes and spears and knives. She called it the party pit.

Bradley walked into this room and saw people in it, drinking and eating and carrying on until the early hours. Loud. He saw himself stealing beers and selling them to the other kids. He saw Ernest, on a bet, hurling one of the great spears through a beer can taped to the corkboard wall. Bradley had grown up enamored of the primitive weapons, and Ernest had left the tiki room intact as Bradley had asked him. Ernest was living in Oahu with Jordan and baby Kenny now, and on Bradley’s last visit, two-and-a-half-year-old Kenny was already getting the hang of the skimboard. They would all be at the wedding.

Erin turned and looked at him. “You okay, Brad?”

“Perfect.”

“She’s everywhere. This place has her crazy energy.”

Bradley found the spear slit in the corkboard, pushed a finger into it. “It came out the other side.”

“I know.”

“Mom was pissed. Not because of the hole but because she bet against him, that he’d miss the can from across the room. Lost five hundred bucks.”

“We’ll have good times here, too.”

“I wouldn’t mind if my brothers came back. Ernest, too, for that matter.”

“Just bet on him, not against him.”

They carried boxes into the big master bedroom in the back. They helped the movers get things into the right rooms, and for every box he carried and every possession the movers brought in, Bradley felt his old life in L.A. growing smaller and his new life in Valley Center growing larger. The only downside was Erin ’s long drive for gigs, but like Bradley, she enjoyed fast cars, and a performer’s hours would keep her out of workday traffic.

The movers were finished by evening. Bradley gave them beers and fifty bucks each for not busting anything. When Clayton and Stone headed out for dinner and gambling, Bradley and Erin ran naked down the dock and dove into the cool pond, then wrapped up in blankets and climbed into the tree house hidden high in the enormous barnyard oak tree. From here they could see the minor lights of Valley Center and part of an Indian casino miles away and the black foothills to the east. Along this skyline, the palms dissolved into the night. Bradley had had the foresight to cache a bottle of tequila and two glasses, so they sipped the agave drink and sat on the old tree house couch, watching an inverted quarter moon float up over the hills like a capsized dinghy.

Later they set up Erin ’s studio in one of the big rooms that Suzanne had made by knocking down walls between three smaller bedrooms. Bradley had installed skylights that opened and closed by remote, and screens to keep the bugs and birds and leaves out, so when they opened them, the warm summer air unfolded down on them, and looking up, they could see stars. The baby grand had been moved in and tuned the day before, so now came the guitars and amps and mikes and recording equipment and, as always in a musician’s life, the miles of black cord needed to energize them all. Bradley knew nothing of this gear, so he simply put things where she wanted them and stole looks at her and felt as he had felt a hundred thousand times before that he had been lucky in her, the luckiest ever.

“I’ve got some things to move into the barn,” he said. “I won’t be long.”

“Take your time.”

He unlocked and pushed open the sliding barn door. He turned on the lights. It was one big and mostly unbroken space, no stalls, his mother never having gotten the horses she wanted. She always used to say she was too busy for horses. She had been a hard worker, he thought with a wry smile. Two jobs: schoolteacher and armed robber.

Pigeons fluttered in the new light, and a handful of feathers sashayed down from the rafters. This would be his version of Erin ’s studio, a place for working on his cars and daydreaming and being alone. A place for hatching plans. Maybe a place for becoming a poet.

His phone buzzed on his belt. He took the call from Owens, listened to what she had to say, hung up. He pictured her face, the lunar eyes, the raised serpents of scars intertwined upon her wrists. She made him uneasy, but she had helped him before and now she was offering to help him again. Her father was an interesting little man, likely insane, but he raked Bradley’s nerves when he was around, and Bradley’s instincts told him the man could help him. He knew things Bradley couldn’t believe he knew. Bradley tried to trust people as little as he needed to, and Owens, with her vague history and uncertain circumstances, made this easy. He thanked her and rang off and holstered the phone.

Then Bradley looked at the floor where a double murder had taken place, and a sharp anger arose inside him. Bradley himself had discovered the bodies and in that moment had shed his boyhood. He was sixteen. His mother had been the target and the two men who had died, brothers, were men he had known and liked. Innocents, generous men. Later his mother had had the concrete replaced because the blood had soaked into it and left its eternal smudge that no bleach or broom or high-pressure hose could remove, but when she had seen the new wet gray concrete, she had them shovel it back out and replace it with the broken-up blood-stained slabs. Respect, Bradley knew, though his mother had never explained herself.