Against the Wind Read Online Free PDF Page B

founded a commune with a bunch of other urban back-to-earthers who wanted to ‘get back to the land.’ (A phrase you never hear anymore.) Unlike many of the other northern New Mexico communes that started at this time and are still alive, these city-folk eventually tired of breaking their backs trying to farm a piece of land Clarence Birdseye couldn’t have made a go of. Lucas hung in—he’s a tenacious S.O.B.—and bit by bit bought up their shares for ten cents on the dollar. He tried working it the better part of a year on his own before he resigned himself to the inevitable and walked into the county Environmental Planning Commission office, where with the aid of his good friend and ally Agnes Rose, the Land Resources chairman who was elected on a no-growth ticket, primarily with the help of Lucas and other rabid environmentalists, he divided up the property into five-acre ranchettes, making sure to keep the best quarter of the two thousand acres for himself. The ranchettes were rocky, barren land with but one saving grace: each had a fantastic view of the valley and Santa Fe. Within eighteen months they’d all been sold (except for one, which Lucas generously deeded over to Agnes), at an average of $60,000 per lot, and Lucas was overnight a thirty-one-year-old man of wealth and leisure. He and Dorothy (“don’t call me an ex-hippie I never was one to begin with”), his sexy, bitchy, funny, social-climbing wife, are among Santa Fe’s major art patrons, each year holding a big bash at their ranch to raise money for the promotion of Santa Fe art.
    I’m Lucas’s lawyer; for that, besides my fees, which are considerable, I get unlimited hunting and fishing privileges. (He’s one client I’m not going to give up easily; knowing him, a man as perverse as I am, he’ll probably tell my erstwhile partners to shove it, and stick with me.) The stream that rushes through the top quarter of his property is teeming with starving cutthroat trout from April until November; among other bait I’ve caught them with is tin foil, gouda cheese with the wrapper still on, and a busted tap off a cowboy boot. Claudia and I’ve been fishing here for years; for her sixth birthday I bought her a beginner’s fishing kit, and to my great surprise and joy she fell into it immediately. Now she has her own professional outfit and can land a lure on a twig that’s moving in a swift downstream current. We fish with barbless hooks, she takes maybe three or four trophies a year: she’s respectful of all living things, a characteristic I find exceptionally appealing.
    “I don’t want to move,” she tells me. We’ve been working around to this for about an hour. She flicks her wrist like a pro, watches her line arc lazily towards the middle of the stream.
    “I don’t either. Want you to.”
    “What can we do?” She reels in slowly; it’s too close to midday, all the fish are hiding out. “Why don’t you make her your partner?” she asks.
    Would that I could; anything to keep Claudia and me from losing each other. Even if things were hunky-dory that would be an iffy proposition; now that door’s closed and locked.
    “That’s not why she wants to go,” I say. I pop a brew, reminding myself that beer isn’t drinking. “She wants a new life with people who don’t know all her moves. Santa Fe can be a pretty small town.”
    “She’s got the middle-aged crazies,” Claudia says with certainty. “She’s talking about getting a boob job.”
    I look at her: she’s growing up way too fast for my taste. She looks back at me, unselfconscious.
    “How do you know about all this?” I ask, uncertain as to whether I really want an answer.
    “She told me,” she answers blithely. “She showed me the booklet she got from the doctor. It’s gross,” she continues, on a roll now, dissecting it. “They cut this little slit in your armpit (here she raises her arm, shows me exactly where the incision goes) right here, you can hardly see