Unlike March, Healy wasn’t a California native. He wasn’t even a New York native, technically, since he’d been born aboard a U.S. military transport ship halfway across the Atlantic Ocean. Long story. But he’d settled with his mother and brother in the Riverdale section of the Bronx before his first birthday, and he stayed there until his eighteenth, and if you’d asked him then whether he’d ever move to the West Coast, he wouldn’t even have said no, he’d just have laughed, and then maybe decked you for good measure.
But the judge had offered him a choice: probation or jail. And probation meant The Program, and The Program meant California. If his father had been around, maybe that would’ve changed things, or maybe it wouldn’t, but anyway the old man was still stationed in Germany then, batting cleanup a dozen years after the fact.
So—it was California or bust.
He’d done two stints on a fruit orchard in Heritage Valley, picking lemons and oranges and avocados in the summer sun, back-breaking work that had built up his muscles and stamina, taught him enough Spanish to get into a fight but not out of one, and more than once made him wish he’d chosen jail instead.
That was college for Jackson Healy. That was how he spent years nineteen through twenty-one, and when he was finally finished, he swore (among other things) that he’d never eat a fucking avocado again. And he never had.
Why hadn’t he moved back east afterwards, when he had the chance? He’d learned the word for that from his Word-a-Day calendar too: inertia. It meant the tendency of an object at rest to remain at rest or an object in motion to remain in motion, which had confused him at first—how could the same word mean both that you can’t move and that you can’t stop moving? It was like a Thermos bottle, keeps hot food hot also but keeps cold food cold. What if you put an ice cube in one and boiling hot coffee in another? Why does that work? But the point became clearer when he thought about it this way: you keep doing what you’re already doing. You stay where you are and what you are. You wear the clothes that you’ve already got in your closet.
So what clothes were in his closet? California tough-guy clothes. Jackson Healy learned the art of persuasion from guys his size who’d been doing it all their lives, and he started doing it too, first as the backup guy on a two-man team, then on his own. He’d put on a few pounds since then, but you know what, that actually worked to his advantage. He wasn’t a fucking schlub, he still had muscle under there, but people tended to run away less when the guy knocking at the door looked a little softer around the edges.
And that was Jackson Healy’s story. He’d become a heavy, in both senses, and maybe that’s all he was ever meant to become. His big brother had become an Air Force engineer, chip off the old block, and speaking of the old block, his father had come back stateside and gotten himself stationed in San Diego, where in theory Healy could’ve seen more of him, maybe brushed off that old relationship and started over, but then there was the whole thing with June and his dad, and, well, that had been the end of that. Inertia. You keep doing what you’re doing, and the sun goes up and the sun goes down, just like March said. Nothing changes.
But then one day? You get out of a car and a man walks a fucking unicorn across your path.
A unicorn.
And the guy by your side is a private detective, a bit of an asshole, it’s true, and a bit of an idiot, but, you know, also kind of a nice guy, and he gets to work in this world while you’re beating up deadbeats and cradle-robbers. In the city you’ve lived in almost your entire life now, just over the hill and down the highway, there are unicorns. And you think to yourself, well, Jack, maybe once in a very long while there’s something new under the sun after all.