Heads You Lose Read Free Page B

Darryl went straight into the Marines. “The few, the proud, the available,” Lacey said at the time, though Darryl, a former mathlete and an instinctive gearhead, was in fact a pretty smart guy.
    In the Marines, Darryl had worked on irrigation systems somewhere in the Middle East—maybe not really Qatar, but definitely not Iraq or anywhere too dangerous. He came back to take care of a family property up in Tulac. Now Darryl lived with his stepmom and worked for growers, including the Hansens, as a kind of overqualified freelance water consultant.
    One of the more persistent conundrums surrounding Mercer was that the residents of so rainy a place could be so preoccupied with the acquisition, storage, and allocation of water. Another one was that the natural serenity of the place seemed to foment 1 anxiety and despair more efficiently than any urban housing project. A third was that no one seemed to ever visit or even talk about Mount Shasta, although there it always was.
    Even before he enlisted, Darryl seemed to have a knack for getting water from one place to another. At one of Terry Jakes’s most remote plots, the property owner kept chopping up the hoses they’d run from a nearby spring. Darryl had the idea of buying an old waterbed mattress, filling it up, and taking it to the plot on old fire roads in the back of his Chevy LUV truck. Darryl had paid Paul twenty dollars and all the PBR he could drink round-trip, to help him machete a couple of thick patches so the truck could maneuver to the plot. After that, the yield turned out to be a monster.
    Paul remembered it so clearly because it was the first time he left the house after the cabin incident. He’d wondered at the time if Darryl had even heard about it. Bad news traveled fast in Mercer, but Darryl kept to himself. That made it easier to be with him than with any of Paul’s real friends, who didn’t have much experience hanging out with a seventeenyear-old whose parents had just died. And it beat hanging around the house with his comatose sister and the relentlessly nurturing aunt who’d come to live with them during “this challenging time.” Aunt Gwen put a lot of stock in the healing powers of chamomile tea; Paul found Pabst more effective.
    Paul and Lacey had both been relieved that they weren’t expected to accompany their parents to the family’s cabin down by Wallis, an hour south of Mercer. They needed some alone time, their parents said. Paul looked forward to a weeklong slow burn of a party. Lacey just welcomed the break in her mom’s surveillance.
    During the vacation, a generator under the cabin leaked carbon monoxide into their parents’ bedroom. When a week passed and no one heard from them, Lacey and Paul called the sheriff, who drove up to the cabin and found the bodies. It was a couple of years before carbon monoxide poisoning became a big public health scare. And that was it. Their dad’s sister came down from Bend, Oregon, to live with Paul and Lacey for the rest of the school year. Then Paul went off to college, and Lacey, with one more year of school remaining, moved in with her best friend’s family in downtown Mercer.
    Senior year Lacey met Hart, a sandy-haired rich kid from the Central Valley with a rebellious streak. Lacey was the only girl in school who didn’t seem impressed—a fact that drew him to her irreversibly. For Lacey, Paul thought, the appeal was just as simple. He was the one guy in Mercer who wasn’t of Mercer. Hart had been all over, even to Europe, and loved to talk about the trips they’d take. Within a month, he and Lacey were inseparable. In two years, they were living together on the outskirts of town. Paul noted that Hart seemed more intent on traveling inside his head, via whatever substance was available, than ever taking Lacey anywhere, but he kept his mouth shut. Once Lacey had made up her mind about something—in this case that Hart was what she needed—there was no point talking about