Something for Nothing (28 page)

Martin laughed, and looked at Linda.

“Okay,” she said. “Yes, they surprised me. But are they going to keep doing that kind of thing?”

Martin shrugged. “I don't know,” he said. “We'll just have to find out.”

About ten minutes later, after they'd wandered through the jailhouse, they watched the sheriff have it out with the town drunk. They were hamming it up, going for corny slapstick, and people were laughing on cue.

All of it reminded Martin of his conversation a while back with Ludwig—the one about
Westworld,
and about a fantasy camp based on bank robberies. But now that he'd actually had guns pointed at him, and had actually carried large caches of money around (and over the Mexican border, no less), the whole idea had lost its appeal. In fact, what he really wanted now was some sort of fantasy camp in which he was a rich guy out in the suburbs with nothing to worry about. And with lots of friends. That was it—in his camp, he and Linda would be debt free, and they'd host a regular neighborhood cocktail party. Sometimes they'd invite Sal Bando and his family, but sometimes they wouldn't. But the Weavers would always be there . . . well, or Miriam would be. Sometimes Hal would be out of town, and on those nights
Miriam and Martin would exchange meaningful looks, maybe even sit, feet dangling in the pool, chatting and flirting. It would be obvious they wanted each other, but Linda would just roll her eyes. Because she'd understand it was something she had to put up with to keep her rich and charming husband happy.

Martin sighed, and looked back along the main street of the imitation Virginia City. That wasn't too much to ask, was it?

P
ETER READ OUT LOUD
from the sign that was affixed to the back of the wagon. It was handwritten, printed in neat capital leters.

THIS CONESTOGA WAGON WAS ABANDONED ON THE EDGE OF DONNER LAKE, LOCATION OF THE UNSUCCESSFUL CROSSING OF THE DONNER PARTY IN 1846. IT WAS REMOVED IN THE EARLY 30s WHEN THE LAKE WAS AT ITS LOWEST LEVEL, AND IS ONE OF FEW SUCH WAGONS TO HAVE SURVIVED.

“Huh,” Martin said when he finished.

“Wow,” Linda said. “Just think.”

“So did some of the people that got eaten ride on this wagon?” Peter asked. “Or did they eat people right here, right on top of it?”

“I don't know,” Martin said. He shrugged. “Maybe.”

Sarah shook her head. It occurred to Martin that Peter was saying all this stuff about the Donner Party to get under Sarah's skin.

They'd made their way past the big waterwheel, over to the Ponderosa Ranch area of the park. The guy who built this place was a real nut, Martin thought. But you had to admit that he knew what he was doing. There were now lots of people milling around, and they'd all paid their entrance fees, just like Martin had. This place was probably worth a fortune.

“So do you think we'll see any of the actors?” Peter asked.

“Probably not, honey,” Linda said. “But keep your eyes peeled. You never know.”

Martin and Linda walked ahead into the big ranch house. It was
where a lot of scenes took place in the show, and it was all there: the big stone hearth, the kitchen table, the map of the property that they showed at the start of the show. There was even a life-size wax figure of Ben Cartwright (or Lorne Green, Martin thought, remembering the actor's name). He was sitting at a table in front of the fireplace. He was wearing his usual ranch outfit, and he was smiling, his eyes fixed on a spot somewhere near the back of the room.

“He looks pretty pleased with himself,” Linda said.

“Wouldn't you be?” Martin asked. “He's got this nice house, and he owns a million acres of land up next to Lake Tahoe.”

“And all three of his wives are dead,” Linda said. “Isn't that part of the show? That he has one son from each dead wife? That's why they've got those three tombstones out in front of this place, right?”

Martin shrugged. “I guess so,” he said. “I don't know. I didn't see them.”

“Oh, they're there, all right,” she said, and then she laughed and shook her head. “And so now he gets to be Mr. Bachelor, and have everyone feel sorry for him. I'll bet he rides into Virginia City every weekend to see the ladies at Angie's House of Pleasure.”

“You might be right,” Martin said. “But that's never on the show. Or I don't think it is, anyway.”

“He actually looks a little creepy,” Linda said.

“Do you think so?” Martin asked. He looked at the wax figure. “My wife thinks you're creepy, Mr. Cartwright . . . or Lorne. What do you have to say to that?”

He stood there waiting, but there was no answer, just a frozen, waxy silence.

B
ACK OVER IN
V
IRGINIA
City, they bought some Hoss Burgers. “That's why they're so big,” Peter said, pointing to the sign. “They're the kind of burgers a guy like Hoss would eat.”

They sat down at a picnic table and relaxed for a while. It was a beautiful day. They watched a woman do a bunch of tricks with a big lasso and then with a whip. After that, the same woman picked Peter
and Sarah out of the crowd to be in a line of people that played “Home, Home on the Range” with cow bells.

“I can't believe I don't have a camera,” Linda said. “Oh my God. Look at Sarah smiling.”

A few minutes later there was another shootout in the street, this time between a bank robber and the sheriff. It was a different sheriff, and this time he captured the bad guy. “Looks like we're gonna have ourselves a little hangin' later on,” he said as he led the outlaw away in handcuffs. Martin expected the outlaw's pals to come riding up and save him, but he was on his own, apparently.

They were just getting ready to leave when Peter remembered the newspapers. Martin and Linda sat down on a big granite boulder and waited while he and Sarah ran back to the
Sierra News
.

“Well, Martin,” Linda said. “You know I hate places like this, but I have to admit this was fun. I think even Sarah liked it.”

“I know,” he said. “I thought she was going to kick and scream the whole time.”

“She's still got a tiny bit of little girl left in her,” Linda said.

They were sitting there like that when Peter came running up a few minutes later and slapped a fresh newspaper down on Martin's lap. He could see that the ink of the headline was still shiny and a little bit wet. It even smelled like fresh ink.

“Check it out, Dad,” Peter said. He was beaming.

Martin read the headline. It was printed in two rows of big bold letters.

WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE: MARTIN ANDERSON, OUTLAW

Martin read it through a couple of times, and then looked up at Peter. He was still standing there, smiling and waiting for a response.

“Well, what do you think?” Peter asked. “Isn't it great?”

“Yeah, Martin,” Linda said. “Come on, say something.”

Martin nodded, and forced a quick smile.

“Yeah,” he said. “It's great, Peter. Thank you. I'll put it up in my office.”

F
inding them had been pure luck. Martin had been saying yeah, yeah, it's all set, I just have to pick them up. But in fact he'd been worried. Since the announcement that Gaylord Perry was pitching on July eighth, the game had been completely sold out, and it was impossible to find tickets. It was a big deal: that's all there was to it. Everyone wanted to go, especially now that Perry might tie the American League record for consecutive wins. The record (according to Peter, who'd been reading the green sports page of the
Chronicle
every day and reporting to Martin about it) was sixteen.

“Are you sure?” Peter kept saying. “I mean, it's all set up, right?”

Martin suspected that Linda had planted a seed of doubt in Peter's ear—some indirect version of “Your dad's a screw-up, don't forget that.” But whatever it was, he'd known he was running out of time.

And then, out of nowhere, Ludwig said he had a guy—scribbled a name on a piece of paper, said he knew him from somewhere and that he was looking to unload some tickets. It was a huge relief.

So now it was the day before the Fourth of July, and Martin was in Berkeley with Peter. They were on their way to fetch the tickets.

Driving along Shattuck Avenue, he saw that the gas lines were really big. They were longer, even, than the ones in Walnut Station. People must be filling up for the Fourth, he thought.

He glanced down at the piece of paper Ludwig had given him, and that he was holding in his hand.

He knew the guy lived near Spenger's. The slip of paper said Eighth Street, just north of University.

“Okay,” he said to Peter. “We'll be there in a minute.”

“Are you lost?” Peter asked.

Martin glanced over at him. He was sitting in the front passenger seat. “No,” he said. “I'm not lost. I come over here all the time. And I grew up around here, remember?”

“Okay,” Peter said. “If you say so.”

Martin turned from Shattuck to University. The UC campus was right there, at the end of University. There were lots of students walking along the sidewalks, and it occurred to him that they must be holding summer classes.

He had to brake for a traffic backup, and leaning out the window he saw that it was because a crowd of thirty or forty people had waded out into the street. It was a bunch of hippie types—long-haired and scruffy-looking. They were waving signs around and yelling. He and Peter were at least ten cars back from the action, but they had a good view of what was going on. Jesus, Martin thought. Didn't they have anything better to do? Didn't you have to study at a school like Berkeley?

“Who are
those
people?” Peter asked. “What're they doing?”

“They're protesting,” Martin said.

“Protesting?” Peter said.

“Yeah,” Martin said. “You know, demonstrating.”

Peter looked at Martin, then back at the crowd. “About what?” he asked.

“Who knows?” Martin responded. “The war in Vietnam. President Nixon. Everything. Nothing. I don't know.”

“Oh,” Peter said. He paused, and Martin could tell that he was thinking, trying to connect the dots. “So Nixon's a bad president, right?”

Martin thought for a second. “I don't know. I guess. Or he got caught doing some stuff he shouldn't have done, anyway. And then he got caught lying about it. So yeah, he screwed up. He's a screwup, I guess you could say.”

Traffic started moving, but slowly. Martin thought about how his father would respond to Peter's question, about how he'd tell Peter that Nixon was a corrupt asshole, and that he was going to grow up in a world where everyone knew you couldn't trust politicians. And he'd
tell him that it would be better that way, that people would take responsibility for things, and not just blindly trust their leaders anymore.

Martin closed his eyes for a long second and wondered if he had a headache coming on. When he opened them, he saw that the protestors had made their way to the other side of the street. They were doing the same thing they'd been doing on the campus side—yelling and carrying on. From what Martin could tell, no one was paying much attention to them.

“But Nixon's going to get fired, right?” Peter asked. “That's what Mrs. Bishop said.”

“Huh,” Martin said. “I don't know about that. I think he might quit. Or resign, that is. I'm not sure.”

He tried to picture Mrs. Bishop out on the street with these protestors, yelling at cars and waving a sign that said resign now! She'd be wearing the jeans she'd sported for her visit to his house. Or no—maybe it would be one of the short dresses she wore on school days. Either way, he knew, she wouldn't fit in very well.

“Can the President get arrested?” Peter asked. “Or can they chop off his head, like they did to the King of France?”

Martin looked over at Peter. “No,” he said. He let out a laugh. “They won't chop off his head. That's definitely not going to happen.”

Jesus, he thought. This fucking kid.

But as he drove past the campus it occurred to Martin that Nixon's day of reckoning might coincide with his own. Nixon would get taken away in cuffs the same day Martin was hauled out of his house, hands cuffed and shackled behind his back just like the President (or the soon-to-be ex-President). The lights would be flashing on the cruiser sitting in his driveway (his circular driveway), and Alan Guthrie would be standing halfway up the drive, drinking it in. Maybe Miriam Weaver would see the commotion and come wandering up the street. She'd put a worried hand to her mouth, and she and Martin would make eye contact through the back-door window of the police cruiser. It would be the last time he saw her for a long time—but maybe the look on her
face (not just worried but heartbroken) would sustain him through his time in prison.

Martin drove down University to Eighth Street. The house was five or six blocks off University. Number 1640. Not a great neighborhood, but not as bad as he thought it might be. Lots of junky-looking cars on the street and in driveways, but the tiny front yards had plants and flowers (big clumps of rosemary, bright perennials, that kind of thing). And the little stucco houses were painted various colors. Yellow, blue. You could see that people had made an effort. Which was nice, because in general, the streets in that area between San Pablo Avenue and the bay were a little sketchy. A couple of people from Spenger's said it had gotten worse back there. More and more black and Mexican families had been moving into rental places, and there was more crime. Lots of break-ins, drugs, a few muggings.

“Okay,” Martin said, slowing down in front of a house with the number 1640 on the wall by the front stairway. “I think this is it.”

There wasn't any room to park along the street, and so he pulled his Cadillac up into the little driveway—or part of the way up the drive. There was a big Ford pickup blocking most of the space, and there were a couple of kids' bicycles lying on the ground by the open garage door. The garage was a mess. A table saw, ladders, boxes, a wheelbarrow with a green lawn hose sticking out of it. There were a couple of motorcycles taking up a lot of space (which made sense; Ludwig had said something about this guy and motorcycles). One of them was a dirt bike of some sort. It was up on milk crates and almost completely taken apart. The other one was a big street bike, a Norton or a Triumph.