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  “You okay, Pops?” DJ asked.

  Diesel took a deep breath. “Yeah, I’m okay. You get all them bolts in?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good and tight?”

  “Yeah, Pops.”

  “All right then, lower down them jacks and get these tools put away.”

  DJ nodded, thin lips downturned, and did as he was told.

  They had been working on replacing the transmission on the F250 for over five hours. The truck was a present to DJ from Diesel. DJ was soon to be a daddy. All he had to do was help change the transmission and the truck was his. The thing was old, a ninety-six, but in damn-good shape: the rear end recently replaced, the four-wheel drive just worked on. And it had a Reunel bumper with a wench. A nice, big, reliable truck for a new family. Lately Diesel had been trying to make amends. It was no secret what a shitty father he’d been.

  DJ pulled the jacks out from under the truck and gathered up the tools. He was tall like his father—six foot three—but bean-pole skinny. Diesel studied him, and thought he dressed like a clown: baseball hat perched half on his head, the straight bill cocked at a goofy angle; several thick, gold chains hanging down over a shiny Lakers jersey; jeans slipping off his hips and exposing his boxers.

  Diesel nodded disdainfully at his son’s flashy basketball sneakers. “Where’s your work boots?”

  DJ pulled the socket off a wrench and placed it in the tool box. “Those things are heavy. Pain in the fucking ass.”

  Diesel grunted, puffed on his Marlboro.

  It wasn’t just the annoying clothes bothering Diesel. It was the boy’s attitude.

  That tranny had nearly fallen right on DJ’s head. Some seriously unprofessional shit. Diesel knew better than to be fucking around like that, with the tranny balanced up there on a couple of car jacks. He was a certified diesel mechanic and that was amateur hour.

  Crammed under the truck, knuckles ragged, no room to move, for a moment Diesel had seen it clear as day in his mind: the transmission tumbling down onto DJ who stared up stupidly at it, socket wrench in his hand, mouth hanging open, hat on all dopey. Diesel had pictured the boy’s face as the metal tore into it, crushing his head into a pulp of blood and bone in the gravel. But then Diesel had snapped back to the here and now, set his jaw, grunted, and hauled the heavy piece of metal back into place, ignoring the sting of sweat in his eyes as he aligned the holes and DJ drove home the bolts and wrenched them in.

  All’s well that ends well, Diesel supposed, slurping down the last of his beer.

  He watched his boy lug the heavy toolbox back to the shed, smudges of oil and grit on his fancy jeans. He should have been there more for him, wished he’d been there more for him. Maybe he could have gotten him to finish high school, train to be a diesel mechanic, like he had. Maybe. Maybe not. But he could have at least been there to see him grow up.

  Thinking about it left an emptiness in his chest, as if some inner part of him had grown hollow, like a rotten knot in a tree. He could remember holding him as a baby—so small, cradled in his thick mechanic’s arms—and imagining their future together: father and son but best friends, running a diesel-engine-repair shop together. Teaching him the dynamics of a motor, how the pistons moved, explaining the combustion chamber cavity. He saw them in the woods, side by side, chain-sawing rounds of firewood for the coming winter. Up in a tree-stand hunting deer. But that was before that damn excavator had rolled over, crushing his leg.

  What had he even been doing up in the cab of that thing? He’d been there to repair the hydraulics, but somehow decided to give it a test drive, drunk as hell. He was at the controls, spinning the house around, lifting the bucket up, and suddenly the damn machine was sliding down the embankment. Then toppling. Trees flashing by. There was the sky, blue and clear, then the ground, sky again, then the impact, and then pain. The pain that’d never really gone away. It took them two hours to get him out of that damn thing.

  Because of the alcohol in his system he got no compensation. It only got worse after that. The pain pills, the anger, the bottles of Lord Calvert, the DUIs. Then that damn shoplifting charge, so fucking embarrassing he was ashamed to show his face anymore.

  He’d been trying to smuggle a shopping cart out the back exit of the Safeway in Fortuna. And what had been in it? Hustler and Penthouse magazines, three bottles of Crown Royal, Pampers, a carton of Marlboros, and a remote-control helicopter.

  Drunk, of course, and fighting with the cops. Screaming his innocence, and smashing a young CHP in the face with his fist, crushing his nose. Then jail.

  That wasn’t a one-time deal, either. Happened not just once, but over and over again. The years slipping by. And the meth. Always the meth. Sometimes making him so damn paranoid he sat on the roof with his AR-15 assault rifle and a glass pipe for days, catching people lurking in the shadows from the corner of his eye, seeing bugs crawling over everything.

  But meth was a tool. It could be abused or it could be used wisely. It could help. It did help. It got things done. You just had to be careful with it.

  Diesel earned his release from his last stint in county five days before his fortieth birthday—14 months for DUI, possession of a controlled substance, and driving on a suspended license. While he’d been inside, his own father, DJ’s granddad, had passed on.

  He decided he’d had enough. He felt older. Not so stupidly self-destructive anymore. He’d ruined a marriage, destroyed a family, squandered opportunities. It was time to make amends.

  That was six years ago. Now he kept his partying in check, made sure he slept. Ate right. Kept the anger under control. Now his son was going to be a father. DJ’s seventeen-year-old girlfriend Katie was six months pregnant. I’m going to be a grandfather, he thought. Imagine that.

  5

  Rebecca gazed at the ancient redwoods lining the horizon, already obscuring the afternoon sun. She pondered over how they always loomed out there, a reminder of the deeper, primordial forest, all darkness and shadows. She could hear the neighbor’s dog barking out in the distance. It seemed to never stop.

  Barking and gun fire. A constant barrage of gunfire.

  When they’d first pulled up, what sounded like a machine gun was echoing through the valley. Coyote said not to worry about it, the neighbor—Diesel—was a gun freak. “But he’s totally cool,” he’d assured them with a lopsided grin. “It’s people like Diesel that keep these hills safe. Be grateful we’ve got a neighbor like him.”

  But gunfire didn’t made Rebecca feel safe. It made her feel uneasy and jumpy.

  Paranoid.

  And the worst thing was that she really had only herself to blame for being here. It wasn’t like she didn’t know what she was getting into. She’d worked for Coyote once before. Coming up here to join his crew of misfit hippies at harvest, trimming his weed for him: manicuring the pot, clipping off all the leaves so that there were only large clusters of female flowers, or buds as everyone called them.

  She could still hear his smarmy voice, purring from her cellphone when he had called her two months ago: “Just consider it a house-sitting job, Humboldt County style.”

  He told her he had to leave on urgent business and needed someone to watch over his “scene,” explaining how the main responsibility was simply getting diesel for the massive, car-sized, hundred-and-twenty-five-thousand-watt generator: driving the beat-up Dodge Ram to the gas station/general store once a week to fill up the custom hundred-gallon fuel tank bolted to the bed. That and keep the nutrient tanks in the grow room topped off and pH neutral. Make sure the place didn’t burn down. Keep the gate shut and locked.

  She had been skeptical and very hesitant—something about Coyote never seemed quite right. With his long, gray
ing ponytail and ever-present, tie-dye T-shirt, he gave off the vibe of a friendly old hippie, always listening to the Grateful Dead or Hendrix. But instead of drinking organic local beer and driving a Prius like so many of his cohorts, he drove a brand-new, gas-guzzling Lincoln Navigator with leather seats, ate at McDonalds, drank Coors light and smoked Camels. And he was always all business. He lived in the woods but he was just there to grow pot. It was all money, money, money. And there was something about his hooded eyes and arrogant swagger she didn’t trust.

  When Calendula heard about the offer, he was ecstatic and immediately began to pressure her to take the job. He had always wanted to live in the woods and grow pot. And so had she, but not like this: in the winter, with a stinking diesel generator and some crazy hydroponic system that used chemical fertilizers and pesticides, on a supposedly haunted piece of land people called Homicide Hill.

  “I can’t just drop everything and go,” she’d said, giving Calendula that dead serious, I mean it look.

  “Why the hell not?” He’d met her gaze head-on with those confident blue eyes, just a touch of a smirk to his mouth. “How many times have you said you want to move to Humboldt? Get out of Southern California? Be in the redwoods? Isn’t this the chance you’ve been waiting for? We can live off the land, be surrounded by nature, cash in off a crop we grew ourselves. You’re always saying how you want to live off-grid. Now we have the chance.”

  They were off the grid. No power lines, no phone lines, not even cellphone reception. No TV, no internet. If she wanted to look at Facebook or check her e-mail she had to take her smartphone and drive Calendula’s Outback up the bumpy dirt road to the top of the mountain where she could get reception.

  She hadn’t wanted to go, but Calendula could be so persuasive.

  Calendula with his short, spikey, blonde dreadlocks.

  Calendula, whose real name was Mark, who grew up in a nice Chicago suburb and used to listen to hip-hop before he went on Phish tour and decided to move to California and live the hippie life.

  Calendula, whom she claimed to love but really hadn’t even known a full year, who seemed so different when they worked together at the co-op, kinder and always concerned about the environment and all the other causes that meant so much to her.

  Calendula, who had grown strangely feral up here doing his mountain-man thing, always drumming his fingers, his eyes twitchy, no longer gazing into hers with that steady, confident gaze that had originally drawn her to him.

  With her almond-shaped eyes and dark lashes, full lips, high cheek bones and long neck, she knew men were attracted to her. She’d catch their stares, even with the thick, black-plastic glasses she wore, thinking they made people take her more seriously.

  At the co-op she’d felt their gazes latch onto her as she worked, their eyes lingering a little too long as she organized bundles of organic spinach, rearranged pyramids of mangos and guava. She’d look over her shoulder and see their eyes fall down to her ass, her legs. She’d even catch her boss, that hypocritical prick David, ogling her breasts as he talked to her.

  But she had a blunt, fierce manner that scared most men away. She had firm beliefs about what was wrong and right—what she ate, what she wore, what she spent her money on—and when these beliefs were called into question her eyes would go icy cold, her jaw clenched, thick lips pressed till they were thin and bloodless. But Calendula actually seemed to like her fiery nature, agreeing with her strongly about the inherent evil of corporations, the risks of genetically modified foods, the righteousness of vegetarianism, and he never stared at her tits.

  Most importantly, he had been there for her when she needed him: when all that shit went down at the Starbucks and those traitors called her crazy and threatened to call the cops or even sue her. During it all he stood resolutely by her side and even defended her.

  When it was first announced a Starbucks was going to open in the little seaside town of Ocean Beach, people had been up in arms against it. There’d been a lot of community meetings. She’d gone to them all, denouncing Starbucks as evil. Organized protests followed and she went door-to-door gathering signatures and explaining how a Starbucks would shut down the local mom-and-pop coffee shops, how it would not only destroy the charm of their tiny hamlet, but the economy as well.

  But even with all its surfers, bikers, hippies and punk rockers, San Diego was still a conservative, Republican place and she was met mostly with sneers or outright laughter. Once she even got called a terrorist before a door was slammed in her face.

  The grand opening of the Starbucks went along exactly as planned. She—and a handful of other protestors—showed up, picketing. No one paid them any mind. Soon the coffee shop was a bustling center of social activity.

  But the final blow came about a month after the shop had opened. She was walking down the sidewalk, coming back from dropping Megan off at preschool, and she looked in the large front window of the Starbucks to see some of her fellow protestors inside, chatting over their laptops, smiling as they sipped from steaming paper cups. And there was her boss David, that asshole who was always staring at her chest, sitting right there in the middle of them, stupid smirk on his face as he tapped away on his MacBook Pro.

  Traitors. They were traitors and she had told them so. Storming in, knocking over their drinks—their white-vanilla-decaf mochas or whatever the hell they were drinking—splashing them in their faces as she screamed at them. Which was wrong, she knew that, she was a pacifist after all. It was just, how could they? And she certainly didn’t mean for the coffee to get all over their laptops and tablets. She didn’t mean for the MacBook Pro to suffer a meltdown. And who doesn’t insure a laptop that expensive?

  But Calendula stood beside her during the whole ordeal. Defended her. And she let herself fall in love with him.

  Because she did love him, she told herself. She loved the silly banter they always engaged in, teasing each other in that funny, flirty way they had. And he was so good to Megan. So attentive and sweet, teaching her the lyrics to Grateful Dead songs so she could sing along with him while he played guitar. Already more of a father to her than that drunken redneck back home in Bakersfield who wanted nothing to do with his own child. That grease monkey changing people’s oil while she was trying to find a new way of living.

  So, when Calendula urged her to drop everything to come up here to Humboldt and take over Coyote’s indoor for him, she finally just relented and said yes.

  Now she wondered about that decision. She’d given up so much to come here. Could she hope to get any of it back if she decided to leave? Her job at the co-op, just when it was looking like she was going to get a managerial position and not have to work for that shit weasel David anymore. Her apartment. She’d worked so hard: moving from the city, finding an apartment she could afford that was walking distance from the co-op and the Montessori preschool.

  She’d made so many compromises. She missed being able to walk everywhere, the convenience and sense of community. Now the nearest store was twenty miles away, a grubby redneck hangout called the Last Chance Market: half gas station, half general store, it sold groceries, ammo, and fertilizer. They didn’t carry organic produce or the vegetarian foods she craved, like tofu and tempeh. There was a co-op in Arcata but that was nearly eighty miles away.

  And she felt lonely. So lonely. A constant, dull, aching loneliness that rested in the pit of her stomach like a rock.

  Not just loneliness. Paranoia. She was paranoid of cops. Paranoid of rip-offs. Paranoid that the generator was going to break down, that the hydroponic system was going to go screwy. Everyone at the Last Chance Market knew what they were up to, going down there once a week and buying all that diesel. They had to—all these weeks—it was obvious, and it must be obvious that they were nearly done, the crop just about rea
dy to harvest. They knew. She could see it in their eyes.

  She’d always wanted Megan to be surrounded by nature, in the forest, with trees everywhere. She loved teaching her about medicinal herbs, mushrooms and gardening. But the truth was Megan seemed to be getting weird out here in the sticks.

  Megan hated the outhouse. It was a stinky, claptrap little shack up the hill, behind the cookhouse, and Megan would refuse to go to it, even after Rebecca had scrubbed it clean and hung My Little Pony posters on the walls. They had to force her to go there before bed, walking her up and holding the lantern. Talking her into sitting on the old toilet seat. She’d even peed the bed a few times, something she’d never done before. She had potty-trained easily and very early.

  And then there was that strange thing she’d done the other night, sitting in the hallway, knocking on that locked door, in some kind of daze, a puddle of urine at her feet as she blabbered on about the ghost of a little boy.

  As the path twisted around the bend, a clearing revealed Coyote’s compound spread out in the valley below them: three small back cabins, and the large main house—the cookhouse they called it—where they lived with the big indoor-marijuana operation. There were also a couple of run down outbuildings, the generator shack, a trash-filled chicken coop, the cyclone-fenced, hundred-foot-by-forty-foot garden straddling the river, a broken-down Chevy Malibu up on blocks, the rusted-out hulk of a decrepit VW van, and the clay packed road leading off into the hills.

  As Rebecca and Megan descended, the path widening into a dirt road, the dull roar of the generator rose from the compound, that incessant drone which, mixing with the hum of the grow lights and buzz of the fans, seemed to permeate her consciousness. She hated that sound. She had come here to be one with nature, to listen to the birds and the whistle of the wind in the trees, not the grinding howl of a diesel motor and the whine of high-pressure sodium bulbs.