Since Hunter could remember, his father, Hank, had always found himself in these situations, immersed in someone else’s problems, always at the wrong place at the right time, and he always helped them figure shit out. A Samaritan or savior in many ways.

“He’s dead.” Long pause. “I’m sorry.”

“What happened?”

Hunter tells himself the old man has passed from the salesman existence on earth to the picket fences of life above.

“Mysterious house fire. Won’t know anything until the fire marshal finishes his investigation. Coroner gets an autopsy. Why I called you. You’re his beneficiary and executor of his will. How soon can you get to California?”

JACK

JACK

Blood forked from Jack’s nostrils and crusted on his bulbous upper lip. Dancing at the four-way stop like a Yaqui shaman hallucinating on peyote, he felt the music flowing like a lullaby through his brain as he stomped the rubber tread of his heels into the baked orange dust of unpaved road. Nearby, standing in front of a run-down stucco bodega the same shade as their skin, two men in life-stained T-shirts and ragged dungarees fingered an armadillo-shell guitar and a panpipe, with a battered lard can between them for donations. From doors and alleyways, bodies slowly appeared, pausing to view this mad, crazy gringo.

Jack held his phone up into the sky, capturing his moment. Videoing himself. Not wanting to lose it as he had lost everything else.

The beatdown had been delivered by two men with flesh the color of a high-dollar medium-roast coffee bean. That was what went through Jack’s mind when local number one, whose face was covered with acne scars and patches of steel-wool beard, asked if he had a smoke. Smiling, with his thumbs hooked beneath the straps of the worn black-gray Osprey pack that hugged his pudgy frame, Jack had said, “Sorry, young man, I do not smoke.” That was when local number two mashed Jack’s foot. Man number one stole his wind with a fist to the diaphragm, and Jack’s knees had discovered the heated ground with a thud. Doubled over, salt-and-pepper locks stuck to the creases of his forehead, he’d reeled backward as his nose was introduced to man number two’s right knee.

Still dancing. More locals came to view this crazed ritual, pointing and whispering among themselves, shaking their heads.

Replaying the actions in his mind, Jack remembered how his nose got smashed, how his blood tasted rich with iron. He remembered feeling like a child who has fallen from his bed. On all fours, dazed, huffing for air, he’d searched for a way to calm his breath, to center his panic.

Another hand had groped his right butt cheek, relieved him of the leather shape that was his wallet. And like that, he was left to view the pair of holey Chuck Taylors sprinting away.