TWENTY-SIX

Chief drove in the slow lane, the truck sluggish with a jumbo load, quick-setting mortar in ninety-pound sacks, three top-of-the-line spa shells, three sauna installation kits, imported from Finland. We were rolling south, through the Santa Cruz Mountains, past Los Gatos toward Santa Cruz on Highway 17. The four-lane road was not big enough for the traffic it carried, even on this Tuesday morning, about ten-fifty-five, according to Chief’s Timex.

When we took the Scott’s Valley turnoff, Chief told me to watch for a road off to the left. “It shows up in two point eight miles,” he said. “I watch the odometer, you watch for the secret passageway.”

Redwoods closed in, brushing the side and top of the truck, a gentle scraping sound. “If we miss it we’re lost forever,” I said.

“You think it’s funny,” said Chief, like it was really very funny, but also true.

We caught the road without any trouble, a huge break in the trees. The highway from then on was small, a winding route that followed a creek bed, rising and falling. Chief fought with the wheel, keeping the truck on our side of the road, slowing to let the occasional car pass us in the other direction. Once a lumber truck loomed and Chief had to stand on the brake. The lumber truck driver held a hand out the window of his cab, sorry to cause so much trouble, and Chief waved back.

Chief levered the truck into reverse, the gears grinding, and back up to a wide place nearly half a mile behind us. Even then the lumber truck had trouble, air brakes gasping, hairy redwood trees so close we could smell them, green life and cinnamon.

“You don’t ever want to invest in a new truck,” I said. “You want to drive this until it’s ready for the Smithsonian.”

“She’s just getting broken in,” said Chief.

The verge of the road was rutted where trucks had strayed off the pavement, and the asphalt was tracked with dried mud and starting to crumble, potholes spreading, burger wrappers in the blackberry vines along the road.

“Inevitable signs of progress,” Chief said.

A creek lazed through boulders, the drought that made every summer dry cooking this water down to pools and dried scab, old algae, insects nipping the surface, a species I couldn’t make out from a distance, mosquitoes or gnats. I could imagine my father’s brisk insistence: a gnat is nothing like a mosquito, trying to be good humored about correcting me.

I spied a black-winged damselfly over a puddle, a tiny, darting needle stitching in and out of shadow. I imagined myself capturing it with the fine-mesh net and bringing the winged insect to his attention, crying, Look.

I could close my eyes and hear his voice. Whether he kept the insect for his collection or not, he would smile and say, “That’s a real specimen, Zachary.”

I drove all the way back from the construction site.

Chief lost a lens out of his glasses. After we both looked around among the boxes of ceramic tile and paper sacks of patching plaster, we gave up the search. I kept praying we wouldn’t meet any oncoming trucks on the narrow road, and we didn’t. By the time we reached stop-and-go traffic at the turn-off for the Oakland airport, I was getting used to the old truck, enjoying the feel, up above the rest of the traffic.

When I got to the hospital late that afternoon the first thing Perla Beach said to me was, “We have good news.”

I was a little tired from pumping the clutch all the way from the Santa Cruz Mountains, and I was unable to pick up her unspoken message, the brighter-than-ever way she talked. All I could think was: were her clothes new, or did she use bleach every time she did the wash?

My father blinked.

“Zachary,” he said.

The respirator made its constant, airy noise, oxygen in and out.

“Detective Unruh said his partner had a relapse,” said my father in a high, squeaky whisper. I put my hand out to a bright metal pole and a plastic bag of clear fluid swayed back and forth.

My father swallowed, a struggle, and said, “Her pins got infected.” A pause. “But she’ll be okay.”