Two

I HAD watched Alvaro pelt a mountain lion with a slingshot just for the sport of escaping from a riled mountain lion. I’d heard his confessions about robbing pimps when he was six years old. He earned three bronze stars in Vietnam though he viewed the war as a feud the locals ought to settle on their own. Alvaro was brave but not loco. He wasn’t going to stand and fight six armed men with badges.

He only grabbed the Browning and ran. He never raised it or turned, yet the two lead deputies fired. A bullet ripped through the tent while my brother dashed into the forest. Four deputies chased him, tripping and slashing with arms and pistols through the underbrush.

Off in the forest, Alvaro yowled. I waited in horror, one eye on the guns leveled at me, the other eye cocked in the direction my brother had gone. I didn’t breathe until I heard the far away shouts of deputies questioning which way he had run.

The sheriff stayed behind. I’m six feet, two inches, yet the badge and nametag on his chest were level with my nose. W. Willis. I gazed up at mold gray eyes, a nose that looked like a plum somebody had stepped on, and a mouth crimped into a look as sour as though he were about to tackle a skunk. He had narrow shoulders and a wide belly, like a bear.

Beside him, a deputy moved toward me, step-jumping side-to-side as though to dodge enemy fire, rage in his lean face. And like the sheriff, the deputy gripped a revolver with both hands, straight-armed and pointed at me. His gun-barrel traced circles in the air, even after he stopped two yards in front of me. “On your face! Spread eagle!” He sounded like somebody getting strangled.

I obeyed. The deputy holstered his revolver, dropped to his knees, wrenched my hands together and cuffed them. He adjusted the cuffs tight as tourniquets. Before he had finished patting me down, my fingers burned. Soon they tingled and went numb.

While the sheriff bowed his pistachio-shaped head, inspecting my wallet, he consulted with the deputy, whose name was Brady Barker.

Part of me doubted this scene was real. In that forest of giant redwoods and white-barked trees with zigzag branches, leaves like doilies, and flowers whose colors changed as the sun climbed higher, everything seemed dreamier than my dreams. Still, I wracked my brain for words that might prove Alvaro wasn’t dangerous, that no matter if they found his plot of weed or whatever they had come intending to find, they didn’t need to shoot him. But I only managed to sputter, “Alvaro won’t shoot anybody.”

Willis folded my wallet, stuffed it into his shirt pocket and hovered over me. “Clifford Hickey.” His voice was high as a chirp. “You and the Mexican are what?”

“Brothers.”

Deputy Barker rasped, “You don’t look like any Mexican’s brother.”

The sheriff said, “Just give him Miranda, Brady.”

“What’d I do?” I demanded.

The sheriff only mumbled something I couldn’t translate, but the clearly said, “Murder.”

I choked on the air. The word echoed inside me. I felt as if I had slipped and tumbled off a cliff. And I recognized “murder” meant the deputies chasing Alvaro would shoot on sight or at least not risk as much as a bruise to bring him in alive.

While Barker recited my rights, he stabbed my tailbone with his boot-heel whenever a comma-pause would be more appropriate, until the sheriff said, “Brady, save it for the one killed your boy.”

I listened for Alvaro. Every minute without a clue that they had captured him raised my hopes. He had been a speedy halfback at Mission Bay High, and a woodsman during our summers exploring the mountains around Lake Tahoe. In Vietnam, he had learned guerilla tactics. He might slip away.

Willis squatted beside my head, a small tape recorder in his jumbo hand. “You best give us the Mexican. Maybe you tried to stop him from killing Jimmy. We don’t know you. Maybe you a good boy. But the Mexican ain’t. We know the Mexican.” He pushed the record button. “Talk?”

I didn’t.

IN the caged back seat of the cruiser, parked at the junction of Highball Trail and the path to Alvaro’s camp, I bent and twisted my wrists and hands, seeking to allow enough blood past the cuffs to keep my fingers alive. I had asked them to loosen the cuffs. Twice. They had ignored me twice.

Willis and Brady came and went, waiting for their compadres to drag Alvaro’s carcass out of the forest and for the dog team Willis had requested by radio to arrive.

Somebody had murdered a boy named Jimmy Marris.

I tried to reason. Alvaro must have killed in the war, although he claimed firefights and skirmishes involved such a delirium of bullets, rockets, and grenades, nobody could ascertain who shot whom.

And no doubt any human could murder in a rage. But Alvaro didn’t rage. To survive as a Mexican street kid, he had learned while very young to keep his head, to think when most of us would only react.

One summer during our high school years, while we were living at our cabin on Tahoe’s north shore, an Incline Village girl jilted her rich boyfriend on account of Alvaro. The rich kid gathered his posse and jumped my brother outside the King’s Beach Burger Barn. They stomped his face, broke his nose, cracked a rib and a finger bone. Alvaro could have rallied King’s Beach boys, a far tougher crowd than Incline’s spoiled brats. Instead, my brother shrugged off the beating and even warned me to leave them alone. He said, “No reason for me to fight, hermano. I already won. I got Melinda.” She adored him for two years, at least until she graduated and flew off to Vassar.

I couldn’t imagine Alvaro murdering anyone, unless somebody harmed Mama or Pop. Then, he would pursue the offender even to Mars and deliver him to hell.

While I sat still in the cage listening for my brother, a pickup skidded to a stop beside the cruisers. A pack of red tick hounds bounded off the bed and up the path toward Alvaro’s camp, dragging their handlers.

Five minutes later, Willis and Barker came trudging out of the forest. They each flung open a front door then climbed into the cruiser and slammed the door. They had argued, I supposed, because they flashed each other dark glances while Willis drove.

He careened up the road, flying over ruts, sliding around bends, spewing a rooster tail of black dust. On the highway, he raced top-end using lights and siren. Not a word passed between the sheriff and deputy. Every mile or so Barker craned around and bared his gleaming fangs and his wolf eyes promised he would piss on my grave.

“Was the murder victim your son?” I asked.

The deputy only stiffened and shifted his eyes away.

Willis said, “Shut up, boy.”

On Manhattan Avenue, the willow-shaded, two-lane main drag of Evergreen, Willis slowed and switched off the whirling light and siren. School kids and hippies perched on benches outside the Dairy Queen and Foster’s Freeze. Pickups from primered Model As to shiny new Dodge Power Wagons and clusters of chopped Harleys filled the parking lot of the Napa Auto Parts, Sears Catalog Outlet, and Safeway mall. Every building I noticed on Manhattan Avenue and the dozen residential side streets was sided in redwood as if that was all the building codes allowed. Even the sheriff station and jail were redwood. As we pulled into the lot behind the station, I said, “You’re taking me to the judge, right?”

Willis spoke his first civil words toward me. “Magistrate’s got a business. He don’t sit till closing time.”

Brady Barker ordered me out of the cruiser, shoved me toward and through the station back entrance and into a room split by a pass-way and quartered into three usable cells and another serving as a storeroom. Willis pushed a buzzer. A bald and buck-toothed jailer stepped out of a room beyond the cell block. He wore a napkin as a bib. I smelled hot grease and onions.

Willis pointed at the cell on the east side, next to the storeroom. The jailer unlocked the gate and ushered me in while Barker strode out of the cell block and through a narrow hall to the big room with desks and the reception counter at the far end by the Manhattan Avenue door. As the gate shut behind me, I asked the sheriff to kindly remove the cuffs.

“Brady’s got the key,” Willis said. “I’ll send him in directly.” He yawned, turned, and left through the doorway we had entered. The jailer strolled back to the kitchen.

Each cell was furnished with two sets of bunk beds, a toilet, and a sink. An old-timer sat using the toilet in my cell. A small Indio squatted against the wall, beneath the high window. The concrete floor chilled my feet through the soles of my Converse sneakers.

From behind the bars across the pass-way, a tiny man, about the size of a fourth grader, stared at me with rabbit eyes set into an oblong head so small I guessed it could slip between the bars. Something like a maple leaf was tattooed low on his forehead so the stem touched the bridge of his nose. His sleek black hair was in a single braid like Chinese coolies in frontier days. He wore a scraggly goatee. Gripping the bars with two hands, a heavy ring on each of his fingers, he studied me like a mad scientist attempting to read my brain waves. After a minute, he said, “If the pigs don’t toast your ass, I will.”

I stared, wondering if I were still asleep by the river and only dreaming of murders, mean sheriffs, and tiny demons. “Huh?” I said. “Why do you want to toast me?”

He laughed like the bark of a Dachshund. Then he turned from the bars and joined his gang, four other bikers in a circle on the floor. They were throwing dice. They all wore greasy jeans and sleeveless Levi jackets lettered “Cossacks.” One of them stood and leveled at me a look that reminded me of a kid in my high school who, at any real or imagined insult, would go berserk and launch a vicious attack and not relent until he got restrained by at least four or five of us. Then, he would brush himself off and grin.

“So, Hound Dog,” the little man said, “any ideas how we ought to terminate Pretty Boy?”

Hound Dog only sniggered and continued leering at me. He stood only a head taller than the little man. He was shaped like a barrel. He looked so young I supposed only the stiff beard with one gray streak kept him from getting carded. His cheeks were round. His eyes glistened, maybe from allergies.

In the other cell across the pass-way, two hippies paced and one sat cross-legged on the floor, eyes closed and hands folded at what yoga practitioners call heart center.

The old-timer on the toilet pulled up his dirty khaki trousers. His matted hair was the same dark blond as mine. Out of his gaping mouth issued a litany of complaints. “Mexicans. Hippies pound nails for minimum. Communists. Miss a single paycheck, women give you lip. Don’t that beat all?”

I sat on the floor against the wall to the storeroom, beside the Indio. His name was Joaquin. For an hour, while he and I traded stories in Spanish, whenever the tiny biker caught me glancing his way, he bared his teeth and mouthed, “Dead!”

I guessed the murdered boy, Jimmy Marris, had been a Cossack.

Joaquin was Mayan. His stories of the journey from his Mexican state of Tabasco to Evergreen and of his arrest for recruiting other cherry pickers to join Cesar Chavez’s UFW allowed moments when I forgot to worry about Alvaro, the tiny Cossack, or my numb hands that still were cuffed and maybe perishing. Thoughts of a ruined hand sickened me. My ambitions required good hands.

During that hour I called for the jailer three times. Each time, when he looked over from the chair where he sat reading comics, I raised my cuffed hands in the air and said, “Just loosen them is all I’m asking.” The first two times, he left for a minute then returned and nodded at me. The third time, he didn’t bother.

A bondsman came and visited the hippies. One of them told him, “Go talk to Quig, maybe he’ll spring us.”

A few minutes after the bondsman left, Sheriff Willis came and spoke to the bucktoothed jailer. Then the jailer opened my cell, pointed to the old-timer and held the gate while he stumbled out. The jailer led him up the hall to the front. When the jailer returned, he opened the cell across from mine.

He pointed to Hound Dog, who held his wild eyes on me while he left the cell and followed the jailer down the hall. The jailer returned for another. When the tiny man left the cage, instead of turning toward the front, he came straight across and put his nose, sharp as a pyramid, between the bars. “Watch your back, Pretty Boy.” He looked me up and down and shook his head as he walked away, barking his laugh.

I stood clinging to the bars, stricken by a kind of fear I had only known a few times. It had first struck when I was about five and watching a movie called “The Bad Seed,” in which a little girl murders her innocent family. A few years later, it caught me while Mama and I sat in church. A visiting preacher was describing with cruel relish the elect basking in eternal joy and the others who writhed and shrieked in the pit of hell. Mama’s hand turned ice cold.

The last time I had felt the same dread, I was working nights in a foster placement for delinquent boys. Some of them were killers. But Reginald, a sixteen-year-old, was there only for minor offenses and because he had no other family, yet he was the evil one who ground out a cigarette in a retarded boy’s eye. When the boy screamed, I came on the run and Reginald flashed a grin whose demonic glee chills me even now.

I watched the tiny man saunter down the hall and out the front door. I was still clinging to the bars when Deputy Barker appeared, handed keys to the jailer and fired a glance of loathing my way.

After the jailer removed my cuffs, the fingers of my left hand tingled as they returned to life. On my right hand, nothing. I could only move the thumb.

The jailer led me to an interrogation room across the hallway from the kitchen. Sheriff Willis was sitting across a table next to a rosy-cheeked blond fellow not many years older than me. He introduced himself as agent Per Knudsen of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. He motioned for me to sit and asked the jailer to shut the door.

Knudsen loosened the collar on his dress shirt, folded his hands behind his head and leaned back into them. “Tell us about Alvaro.”

So they hadn’t yet found my brother. I smiled. "What about him?"

“Locals say he came to the woods to grow weed. True?”

I laid my hands on the middle of the table. “You guys knock me down and cuff me tight enough to do this.” I showed them my bluish wrists with red grooves like bracelets. “You tell me nothing. But you suppose I’ll help you catch and frame my brother. Strange.”

Willis covered his mouth and yawned. Knudsen kept staring at my hands. “If anybody abused you, it wasn’t me. Look, the victim, Jimmy Marris, was Deputy Barker’s sister’s only kid. Somebody snuffs a boy you taught to hunt and fish and all, you’d exhibit a little meanness. Right, Clifford?”

"I guess."

“You would, if you’re human. So I’d advise you to thank Sheriff Willis. If Brady had of caught you on his own, it’s possible your hands wouldn’t be of much concern anymore. So, now we’ve registered your complaint, would you like me to lay out the reasons we’re betting the shooter is your . . . is it half-brother or step-brother?”

“Brother,” I said.

He shrugged. “Look, Jimmy was shot with a Browning 30.06 like the model Alvaro bought shells for, here in town, on June two of this year. Second, what I hear from the sheriff, when he came calling, Alvaro went for the gun. You were there. Tell me if I’m wrong in saying he didn’t pause to reflect. Didn’t skip a beat. Just snatched up the murder weapon and ran. Why’d your brother do that, Clifford?”

“Murder weapon says who?”

“We’ll get to that. Anybody tell you why Alvaro’s camp was the sheriff’s first stop after the body washed up?”

“Nope.” I glanced at Willis. He was nibbling the back of his hand as though trying to extract a sliver.

Knudsen said, “Look, I hear Alvaro’s been around only a couple months but he already earned himself a rep and a record. Tried to pick up a local girl and got into a brawl with some townies over same. Sheriff, you talked to Alvaro that night. What was your impression?”

“He’s a mean one,” Willis said. After he wiped something off the back of his hand, he folded his arms.

“Want to tell Clifford who was the girl and who were the boys?”

Willis and I locked eyes. “Jimmy’s girlfriend,” he said. “The boys was Jimmy and a couple of his pals.”

Knudsen stood, stretched, and leaned against the wall. “One scenario, Jimmy might’ve come out to the woods looking for Alvaro, brought along a pal. Alvaro might’ve got spooked, thought self-defense was called for. Who could blame him, after a hitch in some Vietnam jungle? So, Clifford, your family rich?”

I gave him the stare such a question deserved.

“Why I’m asking,” he said, “your brother left a fat wallet behind. Fat as a pusher’s.”

“Or a guy who found a couple nuggets.”

He lifted his open hands. “Hey, it’ll be a damned shame, your brother getting shot down, which he most certainly will if he won’t stop running, when all he’s got to do is come in and cop a plea. Maybe he walks.”

“Yeah, maybe,” I said. “If I run into him, I’ll tell him these sheriffs are the kind of guys he can trust with his life.”

“Clifford, you’re going to feel responsible if the deputies have to kill your brother. That sort of guilt can be tough to live with.” He assumed a dark grimace and waited for his words to sink in. “Now, how about coffee or a soda while you’re making up your mind?”

“No thanks.”

The sheriff bolted up and marched out of the room. Knudsen observed, “The way this town’s going south, people want a scapegoat. I’m betting — if they don’t nab your brother — it’ll be you."