The Boys from Santa Cruz by Jonathan Nasaw

showed me the bathroom I was supposed to use. I pulled on my jeans, opened the door, and climbed down the short, steep staircase, but when I reached the hallway, I couldn’t remember to save my life which way I’d come, from the left or the right.
    You probably should have left a trail of bread crumbs,
I told myself.Then I eeny-meeny-miny-moed which way to go, and picked wrong. The door I chose opened on a rickety wooden staircase built along the side of the house. The
outside
of the house. But when you gotta go, you gotta go, and the great outdoors seemed like as good a place as any, so down the steep wooden stairs I went.
    The grass was damp under my bare feet. The river smelled fresh and new, and the night sky was amazing, with the stars scattered like diamonds across black velvet. I took a mighty whiz into the flower bed alongside the house. Just as I had finished and was shaking off, I heard a car or truck climbing the driveway and saw the beam from its headlights sweeping toward me across the lawn.
    I moved a few feet up from where I had pissed, flattened myself against the side of the house, and held my breath. The light kept coming and coming, stopping just short of my toes. It was so bright I could see the individual blades of grass casting shadows. Then it went out. Car doors slammed. I heard men’s voices. “Take him into the barn,” said one of them. I was pretty sure it was Rudy.
    From where I stood, I was staring straight at the barn in question, only fifteen or twenty yards across the lawn. I started edging my way around to the back of the house. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a cluster of dark figures crossing the lawn, and quickly crouched behind the nearest bush.
    A light went on in the barn. Rudy was standing under a swinging lamp hanging from the underside of the loft. The cluster of figures on the lawn resolved itself into two men half-dragging a third man by the arms. They hauled him into the barn and slung him onto the floor, and in the instant before Rudy slid the barn doors closed, I recognized the fallen man by the white feathers in his headband. It was Buzzard John.
    I crossed the lawn quietly on my bare feet and peeked through the slit between the two sliding doors.
“My…fucking…house,”
Rudy was saying, accenting each word as he stood over Buzzard John, whose headband had slipped down over one bleeding eyebrow.The other eye was all puffy and purple, and his thin blade of a nose was mashed sideways. “You bring a stranger to
my…fucking…house
!”
    “It was a kid,” Buzzard John said through swollen lips. “He didn’t have nowhere else to go.”
    “Then you take him to
your
house, you call me on the telephone. But you don’t bring a stranger to
my…fucking…house
!”
    I swear to god, part of me wanted to bust in and rescue Buzzard John. After all, where would I have been if he hadn’t stopped for me, or brought me here? But Rudy definitely had a point. My dad would have agreed with him. Big Luke had an under-the-counter business, too, and I wasn’t even allowed to bring any
friends
home with me (not that there was anybody especially clamoring for the honor), much less strangers.
    Anyway, what could I have said that would have made a difference? It wasn’t like Rudy owed
me
any favors. No, all I was likely to accomplish by sticking my two cents in was to get myself beat up and kicked out.
They were probably almost finished with him anyway,
I told myself as I turned away from the barn and headed back across the lawn to the house.
5
    Pender ducked out of Sheriff Ajanian’s press conference and caught a ride back to the lodge with a freelance photographer. The search-and-rescue effort had been suspended for the night, the lights were dimmed, and the sound of snoring emanated from the cots set up around the periphery of the main room.
    Pender’s intention had been to look for a motel in which to spend the night, but the Bu-car was blocked in by a fire truck. He decided he