Casey’s brain feels crowded and directionless, like a raft full of refugees without paddles. So much ocean. He tries to consider things one at a time, and he’s good that way—one thing at a time—but there’s too many here right now.
They come to the traffic light at Horn, cross Sunset, and reverse course.
A long silence as they walk side-by-side but apart back toward the parking garage.
“We can stay just like this,” says Bette Wu. “Together but separate. Partners in a thriving, beautiful, very profitable business.”
“No. No, thank you. Partners is never gonna happen.”
“Well, damn, I tried.”
Bette stops him, pulls him to her by his shirt collar, and kisses his left ear. Lip-clamps and shakes it gently before letting go and stepping back.
Then reaches up and snaps his earlobe with a lacquered middle fingernail. Snick!
And walks away, hand up, finger raised.
18
Late that night, wired on coffee and NoDoz, Brock and Mahina leave sleeping Casey in the apartment above the Barrel, then head out for their church in Aguanga.
He drives pretty much as fast as the old Go Dogs Econoline will go to retrieve the supplies they might need if crazy Jimmy Wu tries to burn down the Barrel. Mahina naps with her head against the window, her crown of dark hair for a pillow.
Brock thought that Laguna Police sergeant Bickle was a nice guy, but awfully damned nonchalant for a cop, and no expert at threat assessment.
One of the things Brock learned years ago, in the messy business of illegal grass, is that you take threats at full face value. Just ask the seven Laotians recently murdered on a big grow not a mile from Aguanga. Sheriff investigators still have no firm motive nor suspects but Brock does: New Generation cartel soldiers from Tijuana suggesting that the poor, overworked, if not enslaved, Laotians vacate the greater Anza Valley dope industry and get back to cleaning rooms and washing dishes in LA and San Diego. What those Laotians needed was proaction, Brock reasons. Proaction, like, yesterday, dude. Do it now! Which goes against his laid-back surf upbringing—courtesy of his mother and his grandpa, the pastor Mike Stonebreaker.
And something else he learned, in Ukraine—alongside some of the Go Dogs’ finest—was that fools and showoffs like Jimmy Wu are dangerous, especially when armed and in charge. He’d seen the volunteer mercenaries outside Kyiv, swaggering and self-assured to the point of foolhardiness, even martyrdom.
And, from his aging Belfast relatives, Brock had absorbed the bloody tales of his forebearers and noted the important fact that families were the fiercest but also the most vulnerable fighting units on Earth. There was just no stopping them once they joined the battle, not until every last one of them was gone. Then you have the sons and daughters. And theirs. Irish, Chinese, Californian, Brock realized—it didn’t matter.
Now Highway 371 leads him higher in elevation, and in his headlight beams the rolling grasslands give way to boulder-strewn hills bristling with manzanita, wild buckwheat, and mallow. Brock saw a mountain lion right about here at the old Bergman Museum just last month, standing on the highway shoulder, looking at him steadily as he sped by.
Just past the tiny village of Aguanga—really just a US Post Office and a small market run by a soft-spoken Cahuilla Indian named Bill—Brock brakes, hits his brights, and follows a well-kept dirt road that descends along a creek, through sycamores and high cottonwoods shivering in the quarter moonlight.
“Not as beautiful as O’ahu,” says Mahina, straightening in her seat.
Brock comes to the gate, locked by a chain of heavy padlocks to which Mahina, Jen, Casey, and Mike and Marilyn Stonebreaker have keys. As do most of the Go Dogs, and the Breath of Life Rescue Mission elders.
Brock locks the gate behind him and drives onward, the Econoline’s rear tires skittering on the hard gravel.
The Breath of Life Rescue Mission compound is a mile in, past a cattail-ringed lake, built into the feet of the steep hills. Most of it went up in the fifties.
The chapel is cinderblock, charmless but huge. It’s got small windows, an aluminum roof, and a cavernous fireplace inside.
The ranch house and some of the outbuildings are white plaster, with terracotta barrel roofing, deep-set windows framed with Spanish tiles, and heavy wooden doors.
The redwood barn and stucco guest cottages are in decent repair, recently stripped and repainted in Go Dog bright green, with matte black trim. The buildings would be a shock to the locals, but they’re invisible from the highway and to the few, very distant, neighbors.
Brock could care less. When you see it, the Breath of Life Rescue Mission should wake your lazy ass up, is how Brock thinks of the jarring green-and-black color scheme.
Brock parks and steps out, hears the frogs down in the pond, and smells the fresh scent of sage. Sees the dark thicket of manzanita down by the creek. Loves this land. Checks that moon again. A quarter. Stands there for a moment, a grown man in shorts and a dumbass dachshund logo T-shirt, with tattoos of waves and suns and moons and fish and birds all over him—“Mom” inked on one shoulder and “Mahina” on the other—arms raised as he listens to his wife climbing the front porch steps, unlocking the security screen door, and banging into their home.
The house is a small two-bedroom built in 1915 by locals. River rock walls, heavily cemented, a newish aluminum roof. Vaguely Craftsman in design, with a peaked front porch under the roof extension and staunch beam caissons.
Brock and Mahina have furnished it in secondhand, mostly Pacific Island furniture—bamboo and rattan, bright floral padding, a glass tabletop on coconut-tree stumps, Hawaiian carvings of turtles and fish. White bamboo bookshelves. Masks. A humble tiki bar.
Inside, Mahina hands him a very cold Bohemia. They touch bottles and sip.
“We did good work today, Brock. We maybe saved Gail’s life.”
He nods. Imagines the sidewalks of tents and tarps, the slow-motion citizens eyeing them suspiciously, caught in squalor.
“And we got Mae back,” she says. “What do we need from here, for the Barrel?”
“Fire extinguishers, guns, and night-vision goggles.”
“Are you worried?”
“Yes.”
“That’s why you’re still alive.”
Brock looks through the windows facing east. Hidden down there are twenty-six trailers, some small and some large, most of them older. Last he checked, there were eighty-seven people housed there, including twelve children—six home-schooled and six who catch the bus at the Aguanga post office for the public schools in Anza Valley.
The Breath of Life Rescue Mission charges no rent, and supplies the electricity, propane, and water pumped in at some expense by the county. Random Access Foundation, which bought and donated the property four years back, chips in a little every month.
All the Breath of Life Rescue Mission asks of its once-homeless citizens is that they help each other as they help themselves, keep up the grounds and pick up after their dogs, obey state and county laws, attend Breath of Life services on Friday mornings when possible, help clear the brush, level the ground and pour the cement pads needed for more trailers. No recreational drugs except for marijuana.
Brock sets his empty bottle on the kitchen counter and looks out the window. Considers the faint shapes of new trailer pads being cleared, which is tough work in the tall, dense, iron-tough manzanita that thrives throughout the church property.
Back outside, they load the gear they’ll need if Jimmy Wu and his rough crew actually try to burn down the Barrel.
Brock sees a minivan parked across the big parking area in front of the big cinderblock church. He notes the crippled slouch of the van, and a stuffed, tarp-clenched luggage rack on top.
They crunch across the lot toward the church, pale in the moonlight. Brock likes the stout, secular, no-nonsense air of the church. No meddlesome gods there. It’s the opposite of spiritual. It’s functional: serving as chapel, schoolhouse, meeting room, kitchen and dining hall, concert theater and auditorium, and a half-court basketball venue when it rains. Plus an indestructible concrete floor, and a fireplace big enough to keep the whole thing almost warm on the cold, high-desert nights.
It was built in the 1950s by a San Diego utopian cult as a meeting hall, complete with a steel-reinforced basement bomb shelter. There have been various owners, squatters, and vandals since then. The entire property was purchased then gifted to the Breath of Life church just after Brock and Mahina founded it. Brock was just twenty-two, Mahina thirty. The gift was an unpublicized donation.
Brock and Mahina and their scant new “congregation” reroofed the building, cleaned out the massive stone fireplace, broomed away the lizards and field mice, rebuilt and refurnished the industrial-sized kitchen, bought enough folding chairs for a small army, and set up a good PA system so Brock could be heard.
Now, the congregation varies on any given Friday morning between ten and seventy worshippers. Brock chose Fridays for worship to distance the Breath of Life from the other churches, gods, and saints.
But he’s not at all sure this hasn’t hurt attendance, given that lots of people work on Fridays.
His very first Friday morning congregation?
One: Juana Flores, a young Cahuilla Indian woman who was living in one of the caves in the rough hills behind the compound, selling her handmade baskets and carved wild gourds from a blanket on the shoulder of Highway 371.
