Río Penitente, a novel of expiation

By Angus Brownfield

Río Penitente is the second book of The Libertine trilogy. It finds Robert Gattling, nearing fifty and taking drastic measures to avoid a slow descent into decrepitude. He abruptly leaves Berkeley for a second tour of Mexico. He sells his hilltop house to an old flame, real estate goddess Mardi Johnson, converts a Mercedes bus into a caravan and hits the road. Not far into Mexico, crossing the Río Penitente, he encounters two Mexican teenagers, Berto and Conchita, and, after a misunderstanding which has Berto trying to knife Gattling, the older man subdues the youth and then invites them to join him on the road. The pair debate robbing Gattling but settle for his hospitality. In a tiny village, Playa Los Cocos, Berto does attempt to rob his host, but fails in a humiliating way. Going south as far as Tepic, Gattling encounters several persons, Mexican and Anglo, who warn him that his wards will turn on him. Conchita falls in love with him, Berto grows increasingly envious of Gattling’s apparent wealth and his polish. Gattling comes to see the pair as an instrument of atonement, a way to balance a cosmic ledger which holds a handful of premature deaths he feels more and less responsible for. He will train the viciousness out of the pair, teach them transportable skills and save them from a life as losers. Returning north again, they stop in Mazatlán where Gattling meets his soul mate, Selina. They fall in love. Now he’s in a hurry. He will take his wards to Los Angeles, teach them how to flip houses, and hurry back to begin a life with Selina. Meanwhile, Conchita intensifies her attempt to seduce Gattling, Mardi Johnson, who supplies the fixer-upper, professes her love for him, and he ends up, at one point, with all three women under one roof. Mardi realizes Selina is the woman Gattling’s supposed to be with and gracefully bows out. Conchita, realizing she can't have Gattling, resolves to keep anyone else from having him. She winds up Berto and aims him at Gattling, but Berto’s final encounter with Gattling has unexpected results.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Angus Brownfield
• Release date: Apr 15, 2011
• ISBN: 9781458021038

Angus Brownfield

Write what you know. I know me and I'm talking to you, reader, in the first person, not the anonymous third person, because when I write I write about me and the world that thrives around me. I wrote decent poetry in college, I couldn’t get the hang of short stories. I finished my first novel so many years ago writers were still sending their works to publishers instead of agents. My first novel was rejected by everyone I sent it to. The most useful rejection, by a Miss Kelly at Little, Brown, said something like this: “You write beautifully, but you don’t know how to tell a story.” Since then I've concentrated on learning to tell a good story. The writing isn’t quite so beautiful but it will do. Life intervened. Like the typical Berkeley graduate, I went through five careers and three marriages. Since the last I've been writing like there’s no tomorrow. I have turned out twelve novels, a smattering of short stories and a little poetry. My latest novel is the third in a series about a man who is not my alter ego, he’s pure fiction, but everyone he interacts with, including the women, are me. My title for this trilogy is The Libertine. Writers who have influenced me include Thomas Mann, Elmore Leonard, Albert Camus, Graham Greene, Kurt Vonnegut and Willa Cather. I don’t write like any of them, but I wish I did. I'm currently gearing up to pay attention to marketing. Archery isn’t complete if there’s no target. I've neglected readers because I've been compulsive about putting words down on paper. Today the balance shifts.

Book preview

chapter 1: Crossing the River

chapter 2: Another Desert, Another Time

chapter 3: The August Berkeley Pang

chapter 4: Gattling Takes on The Vicious Tots

chapter 5: Blue Flame

chapter 6: A Night in the Rattlesnake’s Den

chapter 7: I Feel a Feat Coming On

chapter 8: Playa Los Cocos

chapter 9: The Perrys

chapter 10: When You Gotta Go

chapter 11: A Billion Stars, a Trillion Night Creatures

chapter 12: Rounding Up Jackrabbits

chapter 13: Striking Camp

chapter 14: The One-Eyed Jack

chapter 15: The Pang Reprised

chapter 16: Just Like Fishes

chapter 17: Northward, Apace

chapter 18: Conchita’s Dream

chapter 19: Beltway-Class Leakage

chapter 20: On the Road Again

chapter 21: By Guaymas Bay

chapter 22: Zona Torrida

chapter 23: Don Luis

chapter 24: So Long, Berto

chapter 25: Lover’s Revenge

INTERLUDE IN BERKELEY

Part II

chapter 26: Back in the USA

chapter 27: The Crossing

chapter 28: Firelight and Mersault

chapter 29: Sand and Seaweed

chapter 30: Meanwhile, in Los Angeles . . .

chapter 31: Don Luis’s Dream

chapter 32: The Beat Goes On

chapter 33: The Greatest Feat

chapter 34: The Worm Turns

chapter 35: Learning Selina

chapter 36: Divine Accidents

chapter 37: God Is A Joker

chapter 38: Gattling Ain’t Gettin’ None

chapter 39: Hanging Gardens

chapter 40: Winter’s Eve

chapter 41: Confessions of Pain

chapter 42: Ape-man

chapter 43: The Last Go ‘Round

Bonus Material, Chapter 1 of Monogamy

Part I

chapter 1: Crossing the River

I'm just breezing along with the breeze,

Trailing the rails, roamin' the seas.

Like the birdies that sing in the trees,

Pleasing to live, living to please. . . .

Gattling singing, Robert Gattling, bass-baritone with tarnished high notes. Mostly he sang to keep himself awake. Back in Berkeley this time of day he’d be taking a cat nap, a break between tasks or to make up for nighttime revels. The Mexican countryside through which the Ruta Pacífica was passing was just undramatic enough to start him drowsing.

He recognized the place from a previous Mexican excursion, motoring down through a gap in eroded hills into a valley not much wider than the river’s flood plain. Planted fields on both sides in wide places, down the center an upheaval marking periodic river rampages: twisted willows, gravel and stones strewn, a half dozen meandering, silted channels. He recognized the bridge that was really a causeway, the longest reinforced concrete bridge he remembered in Mexico. The visible waterway was the same sluggish river (bled upstream for irrigation) called the Río Penitente by locals.

The last trip, twenty years earlier, was in a camper mounted on a Dodge Power Wagon. This time, intending to stay on the road a long time—more affluent, too—he drove a converted Mercedes bus. It was a serendipitous offering from the factory when he wrote to inquire after such a rig. They offered him this one, custom-made for another American who, alas, died before taking delivery. He got a price break to take it as-is, and it was a good investment. He’d driven it from Berkeley, at a sensible pace, with layovers in Báhia Kino and Mazatlán; it was barely broken in.

I get along without you very well,

of course I do . . .

Winter still; near noon, mountain time zone. Robert drove with the window down, the hum of his sturdy German tires changing as he went from the blacktop of the Ruta Pacífica onto the old and pitted concrete of the bridge. The new pitch, at odds with the key he sang in, silenced him. He was heading south, no particular target in mind other than a stop in Tepic, which reminded him, for reasons he’d never bothered to analyze, of Berkeley, his hometown.

Entering the bridge from the opposite end at the same time was a large luxury class bus, the kind steered by two sets of articulating front axles, known popularly as supercruceros, bigger and more powerful than Greyhound buses in the States. He paid attention to its approach, having learned up in Sonora that bus drivers always assume the right of way, traveling at speeds creating wind eddies that rocked his smaller vehicle like a reed in a gale. Before the two buses closed the distance between them, a Pemex gasoline tanker started across the bridge, also heading north.

At a moment in time selected by the God of Randomness, the left front tire of Robert’s bus ruptured with a report like a shotgun.

Instantly drowned in adrenaline, he let his foot off the accelerator and fought the sudden veering to the left, into the path of the bigger bus. The Mercedes pitched left but steered back right, causing the rear wheels to break loose without doing a one-eighty, for Robert corrected again, praying the supercrucero driver was as frightened as he and had slammed on the brakes.

—Which he had, and quickly, too. Robert’s bus traced a path like a diminishing sine wave and was back in his lane when the other driver, almost opposite him, gave him a thumbs up. The Pemex driver, idling behind the bus, put his hands together in applause. Robert tried to smile but couldn’t.

At least he hadn’t wet his pants. He shook like a drinkless sot as he limped the final half of the bridge on the shredded tire and came to rest under a looming cottonwood.

In his glove compartment he carried an unopened pack of Luckies, so old the one he managed to pull out of the pack crackled. He hadn’t smoked in ten years but the pack had been in every vehicle he’d owned since—waiting for this occasion.

He walked back out on the bridge to calm his jitters, the northbound rigs now insects climbing into the gap he’d come down from. He could just hear the tanker’s diesel blat as the driver downshifted.

He pulled smoke into his lungs, the nicotine buzz counteracting the adrenaline. He turned, as he came to the center of the stream passing under the bridge, and rested his forearms on the rough concrete of the railing, facing downstream.

Thank God the bus driver didn’t think he was Juan Fangio in the Grand Prix of Monaco. . . . thank God the Pemex driver had good brakes. . . . thank God I didn’t hit the railing and go over.

He took another pull on the Lucky. The second jolt of nicotine made him dizzy and his stomach told him Not when I’m empty, sucker, and he closed his eyes. The world went round and round; his knees threatened to buckle.

Oh my gosh . . . ain’t breezing anywhere but I can and I will . . . just as soon as . . .

The river moved in a strange way. The river called to him, not like Bali Hai but in piping Spanish, some of which he could catch, though the wind blew half the words away. Then he focused on what had been ripples in the corner of his eyes, now two heads of black hair, young bodies the color of river mud entwined on a sandbar, a fist shaking at him. The wind died a moment and he caught the words for cut and for liver, he caught a universal imputation of baseness, one of the nasty words he knew in Spanish.

He was too woozy to run, and to what end, anyway? Run to his caravan? He might get the shouting youth’s rage in the form of a rock through his windshield. Run the opposite direction and hide out in the thickets on the far bank of the river? The river fornicators weren’t locals, else they wouldn’t be doing it in such a conspicuous place. So they might not know the thickets any better than he. But they were teenagers and might have nothing more important to do than to harass him the rest of the day.

He moved to the opposite side of the bridge and looked upstream, at clouds and hills and, far off, the blue-gray Sierra Madres, source and aimer of the river he was crossing, which held two bodies in fond embrace, one of whom would likely confront him soon.

Why had the tire blown? It was new, the pressure correct, the vehicle not overloaded, the manufacturer, Continental, though known for sluggish tires (he’d had them on a BMW years before and changed them for more agile Pirellis) at least had excellent quality control.

The whopping pothole in Hermosillo, he decided.

In the corner of his eye he saw the river rutters emerge onto the bridge, each carrying a bundle. Let’em come.

It occurred to him there might be a cosmic reason the tire blew. Just here, just now. I mean what are the chances in a Mercedes. The Universe testing . . . dredging up old scars old baggage.

And here comes the kid with his knife out . . . oh shit.

He turned away from the railing, remembering to modulate his breathing. Breathing in I observe the daily accident . . . breathing out I await whatever comes. The couple coming towards him—she came too, letting the boy lead but keeping pace—hadn’t the means to dry before dressing, so blotches of water showed through their clothes. Each carried a Huck Finn bundle in one hand, items in a flour sack, ears tied at the top. Her build and coloring indicated more Indian genes than European. The boy—slenderer, lighter-skinned, handsome of features—wore a scowl and walked with the businesslike gait of a boxer heading for the center of the ring to start round one.

It would be useless, Robert figured just before the boy closed the last few yards, to apologize. It might make things worse. Robert had boxed in his youth, so understood violence. Though he was almost fifty—his birthday a week away—he’d kept in shape practicing Aikido, and though he hadn’t a black belt, he understood what he had to do: bring the boy back into harmony with his universe without injuring him in body or spirit. (Because there was that cosmic reason for this confrontation which would, by and by, reveal itself.)

A sedan with California plates, going south, didn’t distract the boy. The driver slowed, he and his passenger gawked, but seeing the knife decided not to get involved and sped on.

At ten feet the boy dropped his bundle and repeated how he was going to cut out Robert’s liver. His eyes were blazing, lips pressed tight, nostril distended. It wasn’t the liver he aimed at. At five feet he swiped the knife in a horizontal arc at the level of Robert’s eyes. The knife would have missed by a hand’s breadth even if Robert hadn’t jerked his head back. It seemed the boy meant to scare him into running, meant to humiliate this gringo who’d violated his teenage honor.

The back swing was close enough it pumped up Robert’s adrenalin again, and this time he stepped in, caught the knife hand as it swung by, and closed his hand over the boy’s, pressing the boy’s finger tips into the knife handle until, with a grunt, he gave up the weapon and it clattered to the concrete. In the dojo he would have followed through and taken the boy down, but this wasn’t the dojo. He backed off.

The girl let out a yip as the knife hit the concrete.

The boy, frustrated now as well as dishonored, launched a kick and then another at Robert’s groin. At the third kick, the man’s back against the concrete railing, he caught the boy’s foot as it came up, lifting it higher than his waist, to a point at which the boy gave up his balance and pitched backwards, the back of his head hitting the pavement before any other part of him.

The girl screamed this time.

Oh shit I’ve killed him oh shit oh shit.

The girl picked up the knife before Robert could. She backed away from him, eyes and gasping breaths indicating how frightened she was.

Listen, let’s get him to sit up against the railing, Robert said in Spanish, in as soothing a voice as he could.

The girl moved their bundles out of the southbound lane. A truck full of tomatoes, heading north, slowed and skirted the trio. With a poker face and an inclination of the head, Robert indicated to the young driver that he had the matter under control and waved him on.

They got the boy sitting against a baluster, a person now, too, handsome if skinny, a featherweight, but unmarked on the face, nose straight and sharp, nostrils working as he breathed.

The first sign of consciousness was the utterance, That son of a whore sure bashed me, eyes opening and closing without focus.

Robert said, in English, Welcome back to the land of the living, champ.

Robert and the girl knelt on either side of him. The girl cooed at him, wet hair brushing his shoulder. She still held the knife but put down the bundles. She was tall enough she could have reached Robert if she chose to lunge at him.

He’s going to live he must . . . I will make him live.

"If we move him to my camioneta, yonder; I have pure water to wash the cut and a bandage to stop the bleeding."

She drew back; she stood; she stared at him through slit eyes. She said at last, We have to go, we are on our way to the border. A gesture with the back of her hand showed the way north.

Just then they noticed a group of campesinos coming towards them from the north, and the girl looked Robert in the eye for one brief instant, understanding they did not want to be in this tableau when the campesinos crossed their path. She handed him the knife. He tossed it over the railing into the river. The girl needed no further prompting: Robert showed her how they would hoist the boy, who shook his head as if to clear it, and support him between them.

With Robert bearing most of the weight, they pulled him up on wobbly legs and each draped an arm around his neck. Each grabbing a bundle as they turned, they guided the boy down the bridge to the caravan. Robert was puffing when they reached the cottonwood and rested the boy against the side of the caravan while he opened the door; the girl seemed for the moment drained. Robert hoisted the boy into the caravan and sat him in the passenger side captain’s chair. The campesinos, five men of three generations, were close enough Robert could hear conversation. The girl stood at the bottom of the steps.

Come, Robert said.

The girl, her face reflecting a difficult decision, hesitated.

Robert, who noticed for the first time she was barefoot, motioned towards the campesinos, who were almost upon them.

Come, he said, and left no doubt that she must do as he said.

chapter 2: Another Desert, Another Time

The tire’s big bang ignited a string of synapses that played like an obbligato to the Punch and Judy theme of Robert’s scrape with the river rutters.

Maybe the sounds weren’t all that much alike, but close enough: twenty intervening years made them seem almost identical. And, it happened in a place that could be just over the hill from the arroyo where he tried out the sawed-off shotgun that would become a major icon in his life.

What was going on in his life back then, he had a new wife, Lana, and they were going to take a sabbatical, roaming around Mexico. They’d met at the University on the last day of her employment as a secretary (they still called them that in those days) to the Dean of Admissions. Though both worked in Sproul Hall, he’d never met her. The President’s secretary, a mutual friend, dragged him to lunch with her, claiming no one else had done anything to memorialize her departure, a shame, because she worked hard and didn’t spread gossip.

It was also a shame, Robert thought, across the table from her at a new restaurant down on San Pablo, that they hadn’t met sooner; she was his type (or at least his type then): bright, perky, severe dimples framing a Marilyn Monroe mouth, honey blonde, zaftig. He guessed, afterwards, that the President’s secretary was aware she was his type, and the lunch was none too subtle effort to put them together.

In the restaurant, when the President’s secretary went to the restroom, Robert, aided by a Bombay gin martini, told her he was charmed, that he wanted to see her again, no matter the circumstance. On the way out he gave her his card.

You look too young to be an assistant vice president, she said.

He said, I’m twenty-eight.

She said, Guess what? So am I.

She went from the University to Reno, divorced her husband (a man she described, once she got to know Robert, as undersexed) and took up dealing blackjack, a romantic dream of her youth. Despite the bad taste from a recent failed relationship, she wrote Robert and invited him to visit. He came and slept on her couch the first time. Later he would go up and see her and things got serious. They were married.

He took an extended leave from the University, and they planned to go to Mexico. They were going to drive down there and camp out along the way, a romantic dream of his youth. They bought a Dodge Power Wagon with an Alaskan camper on the back and spent weekends pouring over maps and making lists of things to take.

Before they left, one of Lana’s coworkers, a pit boss and a gun collector by avocation, offered to sell Robert something to take along for protection when camping out in the wilderness. He had a sawed-off shotgun he was willing to part with at his cost, having acquired a much better specimen of this frontier relic. Robert had misgivings about the gun, its ilk being associated with robberies and assassinations, but the seller assured him it was as harmless—or harmful—as any firearm, reminding him it was people who killed people, not guns.

Robert proposed, by way of stalling, they take the gun out on the desert east of Reno and try it out. The seller not only agreed, he suggested they make a party of it the following Saturday, invite some of the casino crew along for a cookout.

On a day much like the day the tire blew on his brand new Mercedes bus, a convoy of cars and pickups left Reno before noon (the crack of dawn to casino workers) and proceeded towards Gerlach, turning north on a county road just above Pyramid Lake and entering the sage brush and bunch grass country where jack rabbits outnumber humans a hundred to one.

They found the perfect spot: no evidence of humans as far as the eye could see in any direction, an arroyo with walls tall enough to catch a stray pellet and soft enough to absorb them without ricochet. There was even a shelf in one wall where a beer can could be set up as target.

It was the in-between part of year. In some places it would be called Indian Summer. Around Reno it was pretty usual weather—hot days but not July hot; cold nights but not January cold. The desert plants wore a coat of dust patterned by the scant dew that settled on the leaves early morning.

They went out, Robert, Lana and a couple of other dealers and their sweeties, and naturally the guy selling the sawed-off shotgun. Lana, very fair and always conscious of too much sun, thought this good weather foray into the desert was a fine idea; she didn’t think buying a lethal weapon was.

You have it handy, sweetheart, you might end up using it.

"I don’t get in collisions just because I have auto insurance, do I?

Insurance is an abstraction, something that exists on paper.

Using the shotgun is about as remote an idea as getting in an auto accident.

Then why take it?

For that one chance in a million.

Stalemated, they let the matter drop. Robert didn’t want to sound like something out of a B movie; Lana was too much in love with him to issue an ultimatum, though she thought about it.

When they reached the ideal spot, the first thing they did was unlimber the gun. It was a side-by-side 12 gauge with the barrels shortened to thirteen inches. The stock had been cut off behind the comb and the comb reshaped to approximate a pistol grip. Total length: twenty-six inches, the seller said.

He hadn’t registered it with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, Or it would cost you two hundred more, he said. A gun made during the Civil War and carried by a gambler who was in Virginia City when Mark Twain lived there had become available, and he wanted to get rid of an illegal gun.

He took the weapon out of a gym bag, along with a handful of shotgun shells. He put a beer can on a shelf in the arroyo wall, waist high, and loaded the weapon. He came over to Robert and showed him about cocking one hammer and about the two triggers, and handed him the gun.

Robert looked at it, cleaned and polished, beautifully grained wood. A little bluing was gone from the barrels, hardly noticeable. It smelled of gun oil; he liked the smell.

How do you hold it? Robert asked.

The seller’s eyebrows jumped. I donno, I guess I’d hold it like this, and he held it down below his waist, the weapon firm against his hip, trigger hand behind, fore piece out ahead of him.

Robert imitated the stance, knees a little bent. Everyone moved back a step or two, falling silent. The hard scream of a high-flying red-tailed hawk filled the hush.

Robert looked up at the beer can sitting on the shelf and then down at his hand as he cocked the hammer of the left barrel.

Here goes, he said.

The blast brought gasps and then louder gasps as a portion of the sandy wall above the beer can, the size of an extra-large pizza, fell into the arroyo.

Jesus, someone said.

Robert cocked the right hammer and fired again, this time sending the beer can sailing back into the bank, more of which fell to the floor of the arroyo.

One of the men retrieved the can. He held it like a dead rat as he brought it over for the others to view. It was pierced in four places and almost cut in half. The one holding it said, You could shoot a guy in the knee with that thing and kill him.

Robert, Lana said, looking over at him with a plea in her eyes.

Robert shrugged. He hadn’t said no when he had the chance; he’d committed himself to buying the weapon. And, there was all this foofaraw about the cookout. He could always decide to leave it home when they set out for Mexico; there was a lot to recommend that, now that he’d seen its lethality. This wasn’t a gun to scare someone with: a varmint gun would do that.

There was plenty of time yet. They weren’t due to leave until the first of November.

The other men had to fire the shotgun. The blast and the excavated arroyo wall shrank in significance the more they fired it. None of the women would fire the gun, and after the seller, who had never before fired it, took his turn, they set it aside. The seller gave Robert the remainder of the shells he’d brought along, as well as a cleaning kit. The two men went up a branch of the arroyo, out of sight and exchanged money and a bill of sale.

Later, as the sun set, they built a fire and cooked steaks, baked potatoes in the coals, and drank beer. They talked, about work, about Mexico, about camping trips they’d taken. Everyone envied Lana and Robert their trip. The pit boss broke out a baggie of marijuana and rolled a joint and then another and there was a lot of giggling and half-finished sentences after that.

Lana and Robert decided they’d spend the night on the desert: the camper, like the shotgun, was new to them and demanded a tryout.

As he was leaving, the pit boss tossed Robert the remainder of the baggie, which also had papers and a book of matches inside. You kids have fun, he said as he made his way back to his car.

They did. They smoked a joint watching the fire die. They climbed up in the camper and made love, laughing about cramped quarters and how they’d have to experiment a lot to learn the best techniques for campers. Before they went to sleep they shared another joint and made love again. Lana promptly rolled over and zonked out. With a yawn Robert climbed down from the camper, and, following the yellow oblong of light cast by a flashlight, found a place to bury the baggy and another to urinate. When he climbed into the camper again he locked the door and sat on the edge of the lower bunk, intending to join Lana. But she was so sprawled, and so sound asleep, he unrolled a sleeping bag and climbed to the upper bunk. He unzipped it to use as a blanket.

The last thing he did was put the shotgun on top of the refrigerator, not bothering to check whether it was loaded.

*****

Robert recollected the events in images; he also remembered the words forming the statement he signed when Detective Manning of the Washoe County Sheriff’s Office finished his investigation of the death of an indigent, Ralph Delano Renwick, whom Robert killed with his newly purchased shotgun.

Robert told the detective everything. He admitted drinking a fair amount of beer and smoking what was for him and Lana a lot of dope, which was why, when Renwick broke in, he didn’t feel the camper rock, nor hear the rasp of the knife springing the door lock. When he woke he saw a silhouette, uncertain it was a man or a drug-induced hallucination. For a while he was frozen, like a cornerback by a quarterback’s pump fake, not knowing what to do. But then he came down from the upper bunk like a leopard pouncing out of a tree and grasped one wrist and the collar of a Mackinaw. His assailant turned out to be stronger and as determined as Robert, groping with his free hand in the dark and grasping the sawed-off shotgun atop the refrigerator to wield as a club. The second time he swung it he had the bad luck to put the pistol grip into the hand Robert had raised to fend off the blow. Using the gun as a lever, Robert pushed the man into the door of the camper, and because the thief—the sheriff had to have a motive for the break-in—had sprung the lock, the mechanism couldn’t withstand the shock of a man’s body slamming into the door, and it sprang open.

The two men fell out, although to Robert it felt like he’d been launched into space. It spilled them out into the cold silt and pea gravel of the arroyo floor, the downward flight illuminated by the burning powder leaving the barrel, punctuated by the gun's roar.

The assailant’s face, illuminated by the muzzle blast, is among Robert’s daily remembrance of things past. His shot-riddled features—granted restored by the plastic surgery of time—play like a video in his long-term memory, while his death rattle plays in the audio department.

His death, though legally justified, was not, in Robert’s mind, morally so. He was in the wrong place, so to speak, he and Lana needn’t have been out there blasting beer cans with a double-barreled canon. If he hadn’t drunk and smoked himself into a stupor he might have driven back to town. Likewise, he might have unloaded the weapon (the sheriff couldn’t resist lecturing Robert about gun safety, even though he confiscated the gun and turned it over to an ATF agent from the Sacramento field office) and taken his chances in a weaponless fight out in the arroyo.

The whole thing was based on frivolity.

Well, one mitigation he pointed out to Detective Manning, he didn’t threaten Ralph, he didn’t mean to do him violence. He thought he was protecting himself and his mate, just getting him out of the camper, certain Ralph meant them violence and thus was someone who must be met with like force.

Robert didn’t know Aikido then, hadn’t that Aikido philosophy of attunement with the Universe. He ran on pure instinct, a boxer knocked half cockeyed, thinking nothing of the consequences.

Often, remembering Ralph and his death, Robert wondered why a guy would . . . what? assume a well-maintained camper parked not far off a highway, east of Reno, was abandoned?

Robert figured detective Manning was helping him fight off the guilt of Cain by speculating that the shotgun reports might have attracted Ralph, he might have been watching them all day from some nearby hill: saw the cars and trucks arrive, watched everyone drinking beer. Maybe the beer and fire and sizzling steaks were what pushed the late Ralph Delano to break in. Maybe he figured he could turn the shotgun on you, scare you out of the camper with it, and be in California or Oregon or even Idaho before you could get back to civilization and report the theft.

The part of Robert’s conscience that beat him up for murdering a fellow human, no matter how foolish or desperate or plain stupid he was, said he wasn’t reckoning on a shotgun at all. He was looking for something to eat. Hunger tricked his judgment, telling it the camper was empty, the owner gone back to town in one of the other vehicles. His hand just fell on the shotgun as the closest thing to grab and fend off the body sailing out of the bunk at him. Ralph Delano Renwick was the mortal victim of hunger-induced bad judgment just as Robert Gattling was the lucky survivor of the bad judgment of buying that lethal weapon in the first place.

"Planning on going into bandito country, Mr. Gattling? You think Mexico’s a place you’re in danger all the time?"

"No, deputy, I hadn’t thought it through. It’s just that we were planning to stay clear of the beaten path."

"The real Mexico, not the tourist spots."

"Something like that."

"Son, if you’d taken that dang thing into Mexico and got caught with it, your ass’d been grass and some Mexican prosecutor would have mowed you down till you looked like a golf course green.

"What in the pluperfect hell were you thinking?"

Yes, Robert, what were you thinking? Where did youth’s thoughtlessness end and adulthood’s responsibility begin? It had to be after that fatal set-to in the desert. Once in a while you tell yourself the consequences: dropping out of the academic world, losing your dimpled Lana, wandering Mexico in a Tequila haze and aching inside the whole time–these molded the Robert Gattling who’s in Mexico a second time, to encounter an assailant bent on doing him harm, but unlike the first time, had done almost no harm back.

In twenty years things had gone from . . . what? Worst to better? Horrible to dicey? He’d think on that.

chapter 3: The August Berkeley Pang

After the serial killer is ferreted out, after the high school shootist who mowed down a dozen classmates commits suicide, there is always a question of when disillusion or disaffection set in. And so it was when Robert Gattling took up residence once again on Wiley Court in Berkeley, this time in the company of the woman he’d sold his house to the year before, Ms. Mardi Johnson.

It wasn’t Miss Dowdie next door saying he was the perfect neighbor, nor his friends in the Every Afternoon Mediterraneum Kaffe Klatsch saying he was a quiet guy but foursquare, there were some of the smartest persons in Berkeley speculating about what went wrong.

And no one was saying Robert was a changed man, except in this respect: he didn’t come around anymore, which was in itself a change for the guy who liked to wander into the Mediterraneum almost every afternoon and have an espresso with this or that friend and exchange gossip or try out a new bon mot. Who could say if he’d changed since his sudden decamping and the sojourn of a year in Mexico and Los Angeles? He stayed up on the little cul-de-sac with the million dollar view of the Bay and The City, and for some weeks Mardi didn’t show herself either, not in her company’s office nor in any of the haunts where friends and associates knew her to hang out. And when at last she showed herself, the questions were no longer fresh, the news gone stale, why Robert this or why Robert that, and there was no getting anything out of her anyway. She was still the knockout pixie with the mop like Orphan Annie, but no longer cocky. She was, rather, almost grim.

Everyone heard the stuff that was on the news, how Robert was expected to be called before a Federal grand jury respecting his alleged violations of immigration laws, how he had been attacked and wounded by one of the two Mexican nationals allegedly smuggled into the country, and how a third Mexican national, a woman visiting Robert on a tourist visa, said to be a love interest, had also been knifed