Light Action in the Caribbean Read online

  No one should have been killed—I didn’t even know Ed had a gun until he shot the guy. The other guy, he had no call to run Brett down, it wasn’t that sort of a deal. And Ed and Andy, they shouldn’t have driven off without me, but you never see these things coming. Maybe you don’t want to see it.

  I had met Ed and Brett that night in a restaurant in Redmond about seven-thirty. We had a few beers and some barbecue and Ed told me about the place. North side of 126, six miles out of Sisters. The horses were in a big pasture along the highway, but there was an access road farther north running parallel, the pasture between them. The only exposure for us, Ed said, was rounding horses up within sight of the highway, but at two in the morning there was no traffic and if there was, a guy could see it a long ways off and get off his horse so he wasn’t silhouetted. Ed had drawn us a map—where the road and fences ran, where the house was. It looked simple.

  I left my pickup at the restaurant and got into Ed’s Ford with him and Brett, their horses saddled in the trailer behind us. Andy was driving in on his own and he was there when we pulled in along the back fence. Ed and Brett unloaded their horses, and after Andy and I cut through the fence wire, they rode off into the dark. Ed thought it would take him and Brett about thirty minutes to bring the first horses in. We set up the ramp. Andy said we’d load ’em loose. “If they got room enough to fall down,” he said, “they got room enough to get up.”

  The only part of the night I recall without anger or sadness is loading the horses. Andy and I hardly had the fencing up before Brett came along with the first ten or twelve. We had no light, not even a flashlight out, so they weren’t easy to see, but I knew horses well enough to know what was there. Well-fed, spirited animals, good conformations. A couple of roans and an Appaloosa stood out in that first bunch in the starlight, and a bay with a roached mane. Then Ed brought up a second bunch, about fifteen, mostly dark but a palomino and two paints in there, I remember. Andy and I shooed them up the ramp, which clattered and thundered under their hooves. It was a cool night, still. I could feel the horses on my skin, their body heat swirling around us. I could smell their shit and hear their nostrils fluttering. I felt hard muscle ripple under my hand when I clapped a hip to steer them around. I felt their tails slap my back, and caught a glint in their bared eyes. They jerked their heads and tried to lunge past us, as if they aimed to bolt through the plastic fence. Their feet drummed steady, coming toward us on firm ground, feet shot down and pulled up so deftly I heard only the rare click of two hooves. They came up like a big wind in fall cottonwoods.

  We waited a good while for the third bunch. I was peering into the night, listening to the jostle and whinny behind me when I saw the headlights of a vehicle pop up, bucking across the uneven pasture.

  Andy just said, “Shit!,” slammed the trailer doors shut and raised the ramp. I guess he meant to drive away, but Ed’s truck was in front of him and he couldn’t back that trailer through the turns behind him.

  For a while I stood there not knowing what had to be done. I could see Ed and Brett, cutting wildly back and forth in front of the vehicle, then I saw the big Suburban hit Brett’s horse and him go down. The guy hit his brakes and dust just swallowed everything. Right then I heard a terrific crack—high-powered rifle—and then two quick, light pops from a handgun. Then it was just dust settling in the headlight beams. And silence. The next thing I saw was Ed galloping by. He yanked the horse around in the road, loaded him in the trailer, and him and Andy roared off. It took presence of mind to load that horse. I was just standing there, and they were gone, running for the highway with the lights off.

  Dammit! is all I thought. Damn! Now what? The guy in the Suburban is shot, I guess. Brett’s hurt, or worse. I don’t want to get caught here. All I could think to do right then was turn the horses back out. I dropped the ramp, opened the doors, and flailed my arms to spook them back to the pasture. I looped a rope, quick, in the gap where we’d cut the fence wire, and was thinking I should get to Brett when I spotted a vehicle just screaming down the highway, and I ran. I snuck along through the ponderosa and sagebrush ’til dawn, all the way back to Redmond, where I got my truck.

  The police put it together in no time, what with the Ellen truck being there. Andy and Ed had gone on to Burns anyway and got arrested there that night, somebody putting a few things together quickly. Brett had a broken leg, so he went nowhere after he was run over. And Ed, he did kill the guy.

  As well as I can understand what happened afterward, Andy and Brett and Ed agreed to leave me out of it. My turning the horses back into the pasture made for a lighter sentence for Brett and Andy, what with the lawyers’ bargaining, and they had Ed for murder, anyway.

  It never made the papers that I saw, but two years after they sent him up to Pendleton, Ed got killed. Andy and Brett did six years and have been out another six now. The murder, there’s no statute of limitations on that. One of them, I suppose, could still say something and they’d come after me. But I don’t expect it now.

  My life got different very soon after that. I moved to Florida, got a job, one I was ashamed of, selling real estate. Got a degree in finance from the University of Miami, and now I run a small business, industrial cleaning company. I have ten employees, meet a payroll, get to a few Dolphins games and am relatively happy, with two kids and all.

  I’ve never understood the economy. I read in the Oregon papers where the guy Ed shot had made a lot of money running a vitamin-packaging business on his ranch. My wife works with Cuban refugees teaching English, $6 an hour. My father, a few years back, took what he got for a quarter-section of our family land along the Deschutes, bought a $185,000 motor home, then lost the rest of it in Las Vegas, Reno. He lives in an apartment in Salem now, on what he got for the motor home and some Social Security.

  I haven’t been on a horse for twelve years, but I remember riding some fine ones. We loaded some that night, and when I see the paints and bays again in my mind I feel the pounding of their feet in my thighs, their body heat on my cheeks. I suppose they all got sold after that, then moved around again, and people made more money off them. Maybe somebody rode one of ’em once in a while. I recall those horses mostly, I believe, because they’re not involved in what I’m in. For them there was no place of drifting, trying to decide what would come next. I think about the four of us, young and dumb as fence posts, thinking we’d get ahead. Ahead of what? For three of us, it got very bad very fast. Ed, he paid the price, I’d say. Andy and Brett, after something like that, you’re almost always going to be behind, the rest of your life. And me, I know there’s that price out for me for what I did. I don’t know if I’m ahead or behind. I clean people’s offices now. I’m looking for no bill.

  Thomas Lowdermilk’s Generosity

  Thomas Lowdermilk had long hands the shape of garden trowels, as though he had been born to his work. He grew up on the Santa Rosa Reservation and then they all had moved after World War II, his parents, his sister, and two brothers, to Escondido, north of San Diego, where he married in 1957 and with his wife raised two daughters and a son. Rosamaria passed away early, at thirty-four—cancer of the lymph system. When his daughters married, they each moved to Texas, and his son followed. He had supported them all as a gardener, and he carried on this way, working at a variety of tasks with soil and trees and plants that gave him pleasure. He was a patient man, and thorough. His services, his ministrations, were sought by many people.

  He employed one man, David Cordera, and boys one after another, always bright, one or two at a time, to help with the onerous and tedious work of mowing and edging so that he might concentrate on planting and tending to flower gardens, to mulching, and pruning trees. It was rumored that he contributed financially to the college education of these young men, but he did not, beyond a bonus of $100 or so at the end of the summer if the boy was going back to school.

  In 1978 Thomas Lowdermilk employed a woman for the first time, and some of the things that went wrong seem
ed to date from that summer. She worked for him only that one time, after she graduated from high school. Her name was Lumera Sanchez. One afternoon, when they were working together in the extensive gardens of Marian Merrick, a taciturn widow of seventy-five—these were gardens thronged with roses and irises, in which Thomas Lowdermilk had planted an acre of native California wildflowers that swirled capelike in big winds that came off the ocean in the afternoon—on that day Thomas Lowdermilk had placed his hand for a moment on the small of Lumera’s back to pivot past her and avoid stepping on a pile of bulbs. Mrs. Merrick, whose constant vigilance bred suspicion, detained him in the front yard at the end of the day while the girl waited in the truck. She would hate to lose him, she began haughtily, but if ever again he touched a young woman like that in her presence she would be forced to let him go.

  Thomas Lowdermilk nodded blankly. He did not mention her words to Lumera or anyone else.

  The following year he again hired a young woman for the summer, Agnes Littlestorm. She and a high school boy worked with him and David Cordera in a pattern, according to what had to be done at different houses. If they split up, the girl always worked with Thomas Lowdermilk. At the end of the summer, Agnes Littlestorm left for California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo with $95 in her pocket from Thomas Lowdermilk. She worked for him every summer, and when she graduated with a degree in nursing in 1984 she returned home and was hired right away at Palomar Hospital in Escondido.

  Two sorts of stories circulated among the people who employed Thomas Lowdermilk. The oldest stories were about how he could make salt pan bloom, or about his genius for breeding roses, or how he had brought a diseased tree back to life. These stories were connected fittingly in people’s minds with stories about his generosity toward younger people, how he had helped Agnes Littlestorm, for example, stories that led to speculation about his wealth.

  The other kind of story, which started after he began hiring girls graduating from high school, alluded to flaws in Thomas Lowdermilk’s ways. Mrs. Merrick was the first to urge these perceptions on her acquaintances. Indeed, she fired Thomas Lowdermilk after she saw him boost a girl onto the lower limbs of one of her walnut trees. But others began to ferret from memory unresolved incidents of petty theft or to recall times when he was late, to warn their friends that Thomas Lowdermilk had changed, that he was subtle and had appetites.

  Most of his clients had employed Thomas Lowdermilk for more than twenty years. They regarded him with affection, though he returned little of this. He was more self-contained than aloof, however, concentrating more on his work than on his employers’ emotions. His reluctance to speak and the patience and industry with which he applied himself led some even to think him stoic, to regard him as a kind of poetic presence. The early death of his wife, the fact that his children lived far away, and stories of his generosity all contributed to this impression; and the stories told by Mrs. Merrick and her friends did not change the image these others had of him.

  He himself was aware of all these stories of wealth and talent and suspicion, often through David Cordera, but it did not occur to him to explain or clarify his life to anyone, especially a stranger.

  Thomas Lowdermilk rose each morning at four-thirty, worked every day but Sunday, and spent one or two evenings a week at a bar called Los Hombres del Sur in Escondido, where he drank beer and smoked small cigars with four or five friends who, like him, were employed by many people. A kind of fantasy they all indulged in was that their services as gardeners and repairmen gave them a true and also an enviable independence. They could drop any one of their clients in a moment, for any reason they chose. No one ever compromised the others by saying what each of them knew, that only Thomas Lowdermilk had this freedom. He alone was not constrained by the impressions he made on his employers.

  Thomas Lowdermilk did not say to his friends that they were not as independent as he was. The illusion shored up their dignity. And he was not certain of his own independence, of its source. He viewed the people he worked for simply as occupants of the plots he gardened; and the work fed an understanding of beauty and sustained his sense of worth. In all the years of planting and cultivating, of trimming and watering and weeding, he had lost access (as he construed it) to only a handful of plots. Someone moved and the ground around the house was subdivided. Or people lost their jobs and had to economize. A man Thomas Lowdermilk regarded as deranged accosted him one day in a supermarket parking lot, leaped from his car, leaving the door ajar and the tape deck blaring, and accused him of sowing his garden “with stupid Mexican curses and Indian crap!” “Brujo!” the man kept shouting at him, while Thomas Lowdermilk, who did not answer a word, put the remaining bags of groceries in his truck and drove away. Only Marian Merrick had fired him for something he knew he’d done.

  He loved the field he had planted with wildflowers below Marian Merrick’s house, forbs he’d spent a week on his hands and knees to plant, bulb by bulb. He was devastated when he learned that she had had the field plowed under and sodded. He went to her house before sunrise one morning, trespassing, and walked back and forth over the lawn as though searching for names in a graveyard.

  In the summer of 1984 Thomas Lowdermilk hired a girl named Luisa de la Paz. In the fall she went on to Pitzer College, where she majored in art. It was course work that made her parents anxious, but Thomas Lowdermilk supported her decision. He employed her the three summers she was there and gave her $125 each September when she went back. A year after she graduated, she and Thomas Lowdermilk married. Her paintings began to appear in art shows in Escondido, then in San Diego, and finally in Los Angeles. Three years after they married, she and Thomas Lowdermilk had a child.

  In the estimation of his friends at Los Hombres, the birth of his daughter, Lucinda, created a problem for Thomas Lowdermilk that he had not had before. He enjoyed the company of these men, though he did not crave it. He endured their jeers when he brought Lucinda to the bar one night. “So that Luisa can paint,” he explained. “And so that I can show all of you how to change a diaper.”

  Ignoring his humor, they tried to reason with him. An employer, they argued, does not want to be involved in what he regards as the scandalous behavior of an employee. He looked at them blankly. The men he gardened for, they continued, thought his employing young women to help him was amusing, a kind of fun to have; their wives thought his decision was courageous and right; or, like Mrs. Merrick, they were suspicious. This break with tradition by itself made no difference. Marrying young Luisa, that was something else. Certainly he could not show very much affection for her in the presence of an employer—if he kissed her passionately, he might be fired on the spot. The fact that Luisa painted, they all agreed, worked somewhat in his favor. It added to the mystery about him that people liked to make up. But having a child with Luisa, that, they thought, was going to prove very bad. They were not sure why—his age, her age—who could say. But they believed trouble would be coming.

  Thomas Lowdermilk smiled at them, these men mostly his own age, as though he were their father. “I do what I love,” he said calmly. “I grow flowers at other people’s homes. I make love with my wife. I spend evenings with my friends. I have gardens to show for this, a child, your companionship. How can you discuss the danger in this? These people do not care about me. Only the occasional lunatic to deal with, the man who thought I was a sorcerer. Or Mrs. Merrick.

  “No one will notice,” he said. “If they do, they will be happy for me.”

  But people were not. A woman who had never before spoken with Thomas Lowdermilk about his private affairs inquired one day whether he had sufficient employment with his other clients to cover the baby’s doctor bills. He had not told her he had had a child. She gave him baby clothes he did not need, as if he were a poor man. Another woman asked him if his kind of people had the same objection to men of fifty-four marrying women of twenty-two as hers did. A man he’d worked for only a year made a lewd gesture with his hips when Th
omas Lowdermilk told him his wife’s age, responding to a question he meant not to answer. Two teenage boys in another family, who gawked openly at his wife’s swollen breasts when she came to pick him up, would clap him on the shoulder now and say, “Radical score, Tombo,” a nickname he had never heard.

  Most all of this Thomas Lowdermilk was able to ignore. He quit working for one family where a pressing interest in his private life did not let up; and he felt a subtle change in his work, for he was now on guard against any inquiry—how many students had he sent to college? Was it true that Luisa had heard from the Elaine Horwitch Gallery in Palm Springs? Had his first wife died in childbirth? Did he find he had any more energy having sex with a young woman every night?

  The light and air around Thomas Lowdermilk’s life became more and more disturbed. He did not mention the insults or his anger to Luisa. He did not want to upset her. He feared, too, that somehow she would be angry with him. He mentioned a few incidents to his friends at Los Hombres, but even with them he was not entirely frank. The root of his worry was that for the first time in his life—that he could remember—he doubted himself. Against his will he considered whether he had married Luisa for good reason, whether, as some said, he was too old at fifty-seven to be a good father to Lucinda. He hated the way these questions now intruded upon him. And he was angry, finally, that after all these years of ignorance, people who knew nothing of him, who had never been to his home or eaten with him, were concerned, were judging him.

  An avocado rancher named Angus Clipper, who lived near Fallbrook and for whom he had worked for twelve years, was as respectful and sympathetic an ear as Thomas Lowdermilk might hope for. Once, some years before, he had returned to his truck at the end of the day to find Angus Clipper holding two hoes. He saw instantly that the edges had been evened and sharpened.