In his dream, David waited—for what seemed like hours—for the shocking roar of gunfire that would signal the beginning of the final stage of that deadly battle. But the gunshot never came. Instead, for no apparent reason, the door fell silently and inexplicably open, as though it had been unlatched by a ghost, or by a sudden stray gust of wind.
In real life, when the door had crashed open, the
A terrified Davy had fled that awful scene. He had escaped through the slick, grease-spattered kitchen just as he had been ordered to do. Pushing open the sliding glass outside door, he had opened the way for his dog to get inside. Bone, outraged and bent on protecting his humans from the intruder, had hurtled into the room, going straight for the injured
Twenty years later in David’s dream, the heavy cellar door fell open silently on an equally silent kitchen. And on the floor, instead of a defeated evil
He had awakened from the awful dream with his heart pounding and with his bedclothes soaked in sweat. He could barely breathe. For a while, he thought he was having a heart attack—that he was actually dying. Later that night, a jovial and not overly sympathetic emergency room physician told Davy that what had happened to him was an ordinary panic attack. Nothing serious at all, the doctor assured him. With the pressure of law school finals and all that, Davy was probably overstressed.
Nothing to worry about, the doctor said. He’d get over it.
The stress of those final exams was long gone. He had spent the last few weeks working around his grandmother’s place, painting the things that needed painting, refinishing furniture, clearing out dead tree branches, and generally making himself useful. He did it in no small part to repay his grandmother, Astrid Ladd, for the many kindnesses she had offered him during the years he had been in Chicago going to school. The whole time he had lived there, he had stayed in the small chauffeur’s apartment over his grandmother’s garage.
He had hoped that a few days of hard physical labor would help relieve whatever was causing the panic attacks, but as he lay in bed, gasping for breath that early Friday morning, he knew it hadn’t worked.
Brandon Walker was cutting wood. Cutting and stacking wood. Once a week—on Friday afternoons—a ramshackle old dump truck would arrive. Filled to the rim with a drying tangle of creosote, greasewood, palo verde, and mesquite, the truck would turn off Speedway, rumble down a steep incline, and then labor slowly up a rock-scattered sandy track that led to a house perched on a mountainside in Gates Pass west of Tucson, Arizona.
Out behind the house with its six-foot-high river-rock wall, the truck would disgorge another sorry load of doomed desert flora. For months now, Brandon Walker had waged a dogged one-man war, working to salvage the throwaway wood that had been bulldozed off the desert to make way for yet another thirsty golf course. He knew he was powerless to stop the burgeoning development that was eating away the beautiful Sonora Desert that he loved, but by cutting and stacking the wood, Brandon felt as though he was somehow keeping faith with the desert. In some small way he was keeping what the bulldozers destroyed from simply going to waste.
Late on those Friday afternoons, the empty dump truck would pull away, leaving behind its ruined mound of wood. Throughout the following week, Brandon would pull one log after another out of the snarl, saw it, and stack it. He had bought a gasoline-powered grinder that chewed up the smaller branches into chips. Someone had told him that those could probably be used as mulch, so each day he gathered the leavings into a growing mountain of shredded wood chips. The mound of drying chips and the stack of wood grew along the outside of the rock wall that stretched around the backyard perimeter of Brandon and Diana Ladd Walker’s secluded desert compound.
The hard physical labor was good for him. He had sweated off the flab that was the natural outgrowth of four four-year terms as sheriff. His blood pressure was down, as were his triglycerides and his cholesterol. He ignored the fact that some of his neighbors thought him peculiar. During the hours when other men his age and in his position might have been out whacking endless golf balls around artificially grassy courses, Brandon fought his solitary battle with himself and with that week’s messy jumble of wood, gradually bringing the dead mesquite and palo verde to order, even if he wasn’t able—with a chain saw and ax—to work the same miracle on his own life.
Brandon worked on the wood in the early morning hours while the sun was still relatively cool. He put in another shift in the late afternoons and evenings, just before sunset. During the middle of the day, he slept.
It was funny that he could go into the bedroom in the late morning after a quick shower, tumble onto the bed, and fall fast asleep. At night he tossed and turned, paced and thought, and did everything but sleep. At regular bedtimes, as soon as he lay his head on the pillow, his mind snapped into overdrive, tormenting him with every perceived or imagined flaw in his life. During the day, with the sun on his back and with the sweat pouring off his face, he knew how lucky he was. Diana’s increasing success meant that, after losing the election, there was no need for him to eat humble pie and go looking for another job. He’d even had offers. Roswell, New Mexico, had tried to entice him there with the job of police chief—a position he had been more than happy to turn down.
As soon as it was time to go to bed at night, however, his cup was half empty rather than half full. In the dead of night, Diana’s growing monetary success merely underscored his own overriding sense of failure, his belief that he had somehow not been good enough or provided well enough. Diana never said anything of the kind, of course. She never even hinted at it. In the cold light of day he could see that his nighttime torment was merely a replay of his mother’s and his ex-wife’s old blame-game tapes. At night, however, that clear-cut knowledge disappeared the moment he turned out the lights.
In the darkness he wrestled with the reality of being fifty years old and let out to pasture. On his fortieth birthday, he had counted himself as one of the luckiest men in the world. He had a wife who loved him and, according to his lights, a reasonably well-blended family—his two sons, Diana’s son, Davy, and the baby, Lani. The icing on the cake had been his job. The chance to be elected sheriff had fallen into his lap in a way he hadn’t anticipated, but the job had suited him. He had been damn good at it.
Now, ten years later, most of his “dream” life was gone, wiped out of existence as if it had never existed in the first place. The job had disappeared with the results of the last election. Bill Forsythe was the new Pima County sheriff now, leaving Brandon Walker as an unemployed fifty-year-old has-been. He still had Diana, of course, but there was a cool distance between them now—probably one of his own making and one he doubted they’d ever bridge again. Careerwise, she had moved beyond him—beyond anything either one of them had anticipated. She no longer needed him, certainly not the way she had in the beginning. As for the kids—the boys were pretty much lost to him. Tommy was gone—dead, most likely; Quentin was a lying, cheating, boozing ex-con; and Davy was off in Chicago being beguiled by his paternal grandmother’s money and the myth of his long-dead father. In this bleak landscape, Brandon Walker’s only consolation, his sole ray of sunshine, was Lani—the baby he had once argued
