43

Bradley came home to Valley Center late at night after a ten-hour patrol shift in L.A. County. He parked his Porsche out front of the ranch house and stood for a moment on the deck. Erin would be home soon from her own L.A. gig.

He looked out at the three-quarter moon and heard the breeze hissing across the hills. The rodeo arena was still up from the wedding, and the bunting still dangled in places from the buildings, and the tiny lights still twinkled in the big oak tree in the barnyard. It was Bradley’s job to get the place back to normal, but he liked the wedding stuff, wanted it around for a while. What a great three days those had been.

Tonight he’d been assigned to a humorless old veteran named Spencer, and the first thing Spencer had said to him was Boy Scouts don’t touch my radio unless I tell them to. Boy Scouts being his name for Explorer cadets. Over the hours, Spencer had lectured Bradley on the dangers of female deputies, use of intimidation during citizen interviews, and the use of force in detaining suspects. I’m still quite fond of the old baton, he rhymed with an asinine grin. Spencer coached third base in the department slow-pitch league and took offense when he invited Bradley to try out and Bradley told him he had better things to do with his time. After shift, the big deputy wordlessly left Bradley with the car and gear check, then shuffled into the substation, headed for the shower. Bradley had stood in the parking area for a long moment, considered the substation and the deputies coming and going, the fleet of aging patrol cars, felt the cotton-poly blend of his uniform shirt on his skin and thought: I’m lucky to have more than this. He’d seen Caroline Vega in the lunchroom before shift again, always a good thing, and they had continued their ongoing dialogue about the bad guys having all the fun but being too dumb to enjoy it. Just kidding. Of course. He’d use her someday. He had the feeling their lives would cross, and he was almost never wrong when he felt this way. Draper had taught him that the power of one was one, but the power of two was many times greater, and the power of three many times greater than that. And so on.

He showered and changed, then went into the barn and cleared the Ping-Pong table and found the switch. The table rose and revealed the stairs. He walked down into the vault and hit the wall switch, and the floor/ceiling replaced itself over him, Ping-Pong table and all.

He opened one of the safes to look again at his ninety-thousand-dollar transport payment from Herredia. You bet it looked good, and Bradley felt that low-down grinning happiness of cash on hand. He uncovered Joaquin and poured himself a bourbon and sat down at the workbench. Beside the bottled head now rested the chain mail vest, Joaquin’s own, a gift from Mike Finnegan, delivered by Owens, on Bradley’s wedding day. Bradley knew the story of the vest, how Joaquin had commissioned it from an arrogant French armorer, and how Joaquin had not trusted the armorer, so before he would make payment on the allegedly bulletproof vest, Joaquin had made the Frenchman put it on himself, then drawn his revolver and shot him in the heart. The speechless Frenchman collected his payment, and Joaquin rode the rest of his brief life protected by this armorer’s art. Bradley loved the story, but he loved even more the mystery of how Mike Finnegan had gotten the vest. Owens wouldn’t say. He could see that she knew, but she protected her knowledge with armor of her own-her pewter eyes and her damaged beauty. Bradley believed he would see those most strange people again. He all but knew it. He’d have a crack at the little guy, maybe trade him something precious for the story of how he had gotten the vest, maybe just hold him up by his throat until he was ready to croak out the truth.

Bradley had been working on a poem down here for weeks now, but there wasn’t much on the page.

He looked up from his yellow notepad and down the bench to see what was left of his ancestor. He sipped bourbon and read what he had written:

If you were a map and I had drawn you

In my blood, who would know where

Your border became my border or where

Your…

What? Where your what became my what? And who was he talking to anyway, Erin or Joaquin or himself or the whole world or maybe no one at all? Why were emotions a flood but words to convey them a dry little creek? He wished he could think and write like Erin, wished he could write something as beautiful for her as the songs she wrote for him.

He looked up at Joaquin. “Thanks for your protection on a dangerous job, El Famoso. There were some moments you would have appreciated. The look on Hood’s face. Priceless.”

He turned back and reread his fragment. Bradley wondered if his problem as a poet was his age. At nineteen he felt huge tidal emotions about many things, not just Erin: the tawny hills around him, the great machinery of the stars at night, the way a river changed every moment, the goofy nod of the poppies in the spring, his mother. He was once brought to tears by a baby horned lizard, a miniature thorn-crowned dinosaur enjoying the warmth of his palm. And not just nature, either: He experienced strong feelings when he saw good paintings and read good poems or saw something physically beautiful like a black Stratocaster with a maple fretboard or a staunch Craftsman cottage in Pasadena or a red Sears Craftsman toolbox or an M5. The trouble with being nineteen wasn’t the feelings, it was the words. He hadn’t lived long enough to get familiar with them. They weren’t his friends yet. They were still formal, standoffish. He sipped the bourbon and wondered if there was a way to hurry things along without getting old. He’d seen old and it looked like hell. What was old if not finally having the words but no passions left to describe?

He looked up again. “They’ll catch me someday like they caught you. I don’t think they’ll get my head. I’ll have lawyers and appeals. You only made it to twenty-three. I’m hoping for ninety-three, Gramps. So, any advice, you just pipe up anytime you want.”

Bradley reread his three lines and one word. Maybe the whole map deal was the problem. Nobody drew maps now. You got them on a cell phone screen. Technology is the end of poetry, he thought. What bullshit.

He thought for a long while with the pencil in his hand and the notepad before him. He opened a workbench drawer and pulled out the shred of cover torn from his LASD Explorer class syllabus on which Caroline Vega had written her phone number. He considered it, then he put the paper back.

Then he covered Joaquin and hit the switch, and the ceiling rose, and he climbed the stairs from the vault toward the few acres of earth that belonged to him.