"This highway is notorious."
       Ramon turned so that he was looking entirely away from the road. "What do you say, Craig?" Under the bill of the CAT hat Ramon's eyes were malignant; but a smile played on his lips. "Is this a bit fast for you?"
       "Fuck him, he's a buzz kill," Craig said. "He don't party. I'd hate to be that scared of shit."
       Ramon pounded the leather-bound steering wheel. "Word, dude. You go through life that scared of shit, you might as well be dead. So therefore, like, what's there to be afraid of going over? Understand what I'm saying, professor?"
       With a wave Ramon took in the craggy cliffline undulating northward under a gathering of low cloud. It was a moderate, reasonable gesture, like a guide's.
       "Like see Point Reyes and all? Pretty, ain't it? But what you got right there is a disaster waiting to happen." Ramon leaned on the horn and blew away a BMW whose startled driver was hugging her wheel. "That's where the two plates are going head to head, Olema Valley. They're both moving west but one's a little faster. Our house is right on top of enough pressure to move the whole peninsula twenty feet. All that stress two hundred miles down. Nobody sees it. You think you're safe. It makes the hills and all look so pretty. I learned this shit in fourth grade and it was one thing I kept." He looked at this brother. "Remember Miss Cava?"
       Raines waited for Marty to repudiate Ramon. To his disbelief, Marty nodded.
       Ramon said, "I broke my balls to make her like me. She was so beautiful. Butyou were the one who was a joy to have in class. But I'd lie in bed waiting for you and me and Mama to go down a crack two hundred miles into the earth."
       Ramon was nodding with the memory, rocking his upper body. They were surging again.
       "I know," Marty said. "You woke me up to tell me, asshole."
       "I woke you up. I forgot. You let me sleep with you."
       Craig jeered. Ramon answered him with an obscenity. Raines decided that it was all sentimental horseshit, confected like Ramon's indignation over his mother and Craig's son. But he was furious with Marty. The surge of anger made him carsick. On its surface rolled a scum that he unwillingly identified as jealousy.
       "So what's your point?" he said.
       With a violent headshake Ramon loosed himself from the memory. "My point, professor, is shit happens any old time. When you gotta go, you gotta go. The pressure builds up and you don't know when but it's gonna happen. It's definitely gonna happen. Like ... right ... now."
       The car swung across the highway into a turnout, the drop confronted them, and then the front wheels spun rightward in the dirt and they were back on the asphalt and Ramon and Craig were hollering rebel yells over the screams of a metal band. Thinking he might pass out, Raines heard Marty curse.
       "Cut it out, Ramon! You slow down!"
       It was a brother's scold-the brother who had been Miss Cava's joy in class, the good son of Mrs. Josefina Lee. To Raines it was music.
       Ramon snorted with displeasure. "You sound just like the professor. 'Cut it out, Ramon.'" The parody turned Marty and Raines both into hapless queers. "You on my side or his?"
       "I'm on my side," Marty said. "And we're in my car."
       "Yeah, and when the big one happens you won't be going down two hundred miles with me and Mama. You'll be diddling blonde pussy in Haight."
       "Don't be ridiculous. When it happens we're all going." Marty had his knuckles against the window and he gave a light rap. Raines heard him say, "Jones & Weisberg too."
       A mile later Raines realized that Ramon had slowed.
       Toward Stinson Beach the road began to straighten and level. They had passed out of the worst. For a while they drove along a flat estuary where herons were standing among the marsh grass and cormorants flew low over the water. The wind was coming over the finger of land between the estuary and the sea, riffling the grass and carrying a salt taste into the car. By now it was after five and the light was slanting in low under the bank of clouds massed over Point Reyes.
       When they reached the turnoff where a sign pointed to Bolinas, Ramon suggested that Marty try calling home again. "Maybe she was just out of the house."
       "You said she was zoned. Lying in the dark."
       "That's what-I think, but I've been wrong before, bro."
       Marty gave his brother a look of dark irritation. He bent under the seat and brought out his car phone. Beside Raines, Craig dropped his knees and sat up. Marty plugged into the lighter and punched buttons: Mrs. Lee was either out of the house or in an unavailable depression or already at the bottom of the pool. Marty placed the apparatus on the dashboard and sank back. Raines thought: Of course he needs it. With a brother like this. The way he needs the styling gel, the blondes, the new first name. They give him hope, and his life depends on it. So how could Raines be crate ice? Instead, he felt generous and knowing and accepting. It was almost a physical sensation-the being in which he was encased had expanded.
       Bolinas stood at the lower end of the peninsula, on the finger that formed the western side of the estuary, so that they were driving in the direction they'd come from when they rolled in. The town was a pleasant hideaway with a view down coast toward the city, the good life ninety minutes north. Old Volvos and VW buses were parked along the marina: the shabby glad look of the place and the people suggested that the migration had taken place in the sixties.
       Craig's woman and her son lived in a shingled cottage behind a hedge of flowering yellow acacia. The roof was listing crazily around a stone chimney and there was a splintered hole in the front door at about the level of a hard kick. Ramon parked at the broken edge of the asphalt: a hundred feet ahead the road dead-ended in a grassy bluff over the water.
       "Don't diddle the bitch," Ramon told Craig when they were all out of the car. "We ain't got time."
       "Shut up," Craig said. "You don't call Donna a bitch."
       Raines found himself light-headed and grateful for the feel of the earth underfoot, even though it was the San Andreas fault. "I could use a little walk," he told Marty.
       "Let's go look at the sunset."
       "It's a light show up here," Ramon said.
       "You coming?"
       Ramon was looking at the pavement. "I'll hang here."
       "Ten minutes."
       In their good shoes Raines and Marty made their way along a sandy ridge that divided the marsh. It was edged with dry pungent shrub; on the inland side of the marsh California cypress and a couple of live oak stood fantastically twisted by the ocean wind.
       Just over the bluff the beach spread before them, and the wind was blowing with wet violence. The clouds were stormy, darkening at the end of day; below them the sun cast long brilliant rays across the water that was about to swallow it.
       At the wetline of the sand they took off their shoes and rolled up their dress slacks and walked barefoot down to the tide.
       "Maybe we can see a gray whale," Marty said. "This is around when they go south."
       But among the rough waves there were no gray whales to be seen, nor even sea lions on the offshore rocks. Only gulls overhead, and batches of snowy plover that scurried from the tide and left prints all over the wet sand. But the Pacific sunset, a great dissolution of silver light, was up to Ramon's billing.
       "My brother's basically not a bad person," Marty said.
       "Believe it or not, we used to be pretty close. When I was seventeen he drove the both of us up to the Cascades on his Harley. It was pretty wild."
       "Well," Raines said, "I can't do that."
       "What are you talking about?"
       Raines knew why he'd said it but couldn't explain. They were standing side by side, facing the windy horizon and holding their shoes. Raines didn't know how to go on. He hadn't considered the possibility that Marty didn't want another brother.
       "You were quiet in the car," Raines said. "I thought you approved."
       "Of him? Why would I approve? I'm ashamed of him. And I'm still mad at him, and mad at my mother. I was quiet because it's been a rough day."
       "Hey, buddy, I know."
       "But we'll have a good time tonight," Marty said. "I promise."
       Raines was cheered to hear this. Then he thought of how Marty had slowly composed himself on the other end of the line in the middle of the night: and he realized there must be something in himself that Marty was compelled to live up to. It was a vision of the successful future, the life of the mind, the calm and order of green- upholstered library chairs and no mother running out of Prozac. Ramon had finally made him understand its power over Marty.
       Squinting into the sunset, Raines refused this vision. It diminished him and plagued Marty and put them out of each other's reach. If they were to meet it would be somewhere else, where they were only themselves and a day could be rough on both of them without the promise of a better night. Raines knew that he would never know how to calm someone through an earthquake, that his dreams would never take him two hundred miles down, that he would never be a brother. But he also knew that he loved Marty, and he turned to him in the last of the sun.
       "I don't care if we don't."
       It wasn't quite the right thing to say; and Marty didn't pursue it.
       "Actually, I was thinking in the car," Marty said. "I was trying to imagine my life without the car phone in it. Right around Stinson Beach it happened: I'd survive. I could still walk into an audition with some confidence. So I'm going to take your advice. That covers rent till March. By then I know the market will turn around."
       Is that really what you want to do?"
       Christ, Bill, weren't you just telling me I had to?"
       "You don't have to do anything. You should do what you want."
       "What I want," Marty muttered under the wind. "I wonder what that would be. Turn around and take 1 all the way to L.A. Be someone else. What I want!" Marty laughed at the very notion.
       "Maybe I will."
       They dodged a wave with the snowy plover.
       "Let's get back. This wind is crazy."
       With the sun gone and the storm lowering the light failed idly. And the emotion Raines had on the beach was contracting like a dying animal. It hadn't found life in a word or gesture; Marty's mood was elusive; and by the time they reached the car it was too late.
       He saw right away that the phone was missing from the dashboard. He waited for Marty to notice, but Marty was looking at the acacia hedge.
       "Where the hell is he?"
       "He left the doors unlocked."
       "I can't count on him for anything," Marty said vehemently.
       "Marty, I think someone got in and took your phone."
       Marty paled. He stared at Raines for a disbelieving moment as his lips went almost white. Then he was rummaging frantically under the driver's seat.
       "You left it on the dash."
       Marty's head shot up. He sprang from the car as if he'd received an electric shock. A moan wrenched from his lips.
       "Goddamit! " he cried. "Goddamit!
       He slammed his fist into the canvas roof. His gel- stiffened hair had fallen over his face where the wind whipped it. He looked at Raines trembling and wild-eyed.
       "It's gone. I'll never get it back."
       Raines only hesitated for a second. The whole day had led him to this. "I know where it is, buddy." And in a gesture as simple and clear as the one he should have made on the beach, Raines pointed to the rotten cottage.
       Understanding colored Marty's face. "Craig."
       Raines said, "Just Craig?"
       But Marty was already up the footpath to the wounded door. It opened and Ramon appeared, smiling desperately.
       "Let's blow, Craig's gonna hang here with Donna and Lance."
       Marty shoved his brother aside.
       "You can't go in there, man! The chick's naked!"
       Ramon swiped for Marty and stumbled behind him, and Raines went in after them both. The room was dark. It smelled of old laundry and baby shit. A narrow hall tapered to the back. Against the stone hearth Craig was sitting with a woman on the floor. He had a metal pipe half-raised to his mouth, something acrid, some thing other than mellow leaf burning in it. Donna was not naked.
       She looked heavy and old and she was cowering. Marty kicked the pipe out of Craig's hand.
       "Where is it?" he screamed." I'll kill you, you crackhead!"
       Craig watched the pipe scuttle away, and then looked up in outrage. Ramon slipped between them and tried to coax Marty, his hands lightly on his brother's shoulders. He was saying something about a mistake.
       Standing in the doorway, Raines was the only one to see the little boy wander in naked from the hall. Lance, no more than two and terrified, was clutching the car phone with the cord trailing between his chunky thighs.
       "Marty!"
       Marty saw, and went for it. Donna shrieked and the child shrieked and dropped his toy. Craig's body jerked up like a puppet.
       He lunged after Marty and Raines saw his friend go down on a crunching shoulder and then the two of them were grappling to their feet. Marty swung without covering up. The phone lay mangled on the piney floor. Violence was making Raines himself the only unreal thing in the room. He braved his way into the flail of fists and caught a hard punch on his mouth from one man or the other. He staggered away and waited for lucidity but it didn't come.
       The blow brought nothing but pain. He was on the outside and there was no way back in. Marty's linen jacket ripped through the shoulders. He was furious, yet he was losing.
       "Leave him alone-leave him alone!"
       It was Ramon shouting. Then somehow he and Craig were squared off by the hearth. They swung hard serious fists. Within the drug Craig was faster, crazily focused, and a punch to the eye wobbled Ramon backward. His head snapped off the stone chimney and he crumpled. As he fell his eyes startled open, glassy with fear, like a man going under water, like Marty's under the track light. With a shock of grief Raines saw that they were brothers.
       It wasn't until the paramedics had strapped Ramon to the stretcher that someone noticed a wad of money in his down vest pocket. He was carrying over three hundred dollars.

***

       They drove behind the ambulance into sheets of rain. At the hospital they were told that Ramon would be kept for observation at least overnight. The Bolinas police had taken Craig in for questioning. Marty finally reached his mother on a payphone and didn't seem surprised to learn that she had been at a flower nursery all afternoon. He shut his eyes and steadied his voice and tried to soothe her, saying "Mama. Mama," but Mrs. Lee was understandably hysterical. Then he made two more calls: one to cancel dinner with Hilary, the other for a cab to return Raines to San Francisco.
       "I can stay up here if you need me," Raines said.
       "I handle family stuff better by myself. Thanks, though. You did what you could."
       They sat in the MG while rain tattooed the canvas top. Marty's phone was irreparable, but he had stowed it under his seat anyway.
       "Here's the key to my place," he said. "Leave it under the mat, we might miss each other tomorrow. Looks like you'll be addressing the MLA with a fat lip."
       To his great disappointment, the thought of his speech still made Raines nervous.
       "What about you?"
       "I'll spend the night with my lying thieving brother. You knew from the start, right? It was obvious? But who could believe his own brother-" Marty's voice thickened; he was near tears. For an instant Raines thought that if he put an arm around his friend's shoulders he could still become a different man. But it would be an intrusive gesture; Marty was thinking about Ramon. "I wanted to tell the cops," Marty said, "that the three hundred should go to me."
       He laughed thinly. "There's got to be a payoff, right? Is just blood the only reason we do the things we do?"
       "There must be more to it than that."
       Raines meant more than blood, not money, but he feared he would be misinterpreted, and anyway he was wrong. Yes, he'd done what he could. It wasn't enough-he wasn't enough-but could one ever be, for anyone else? What if they wouldn't let you drop your conditions? What if you had nothing to do with what finally mattered? They would go on being friends as they'd always been. But the ride back was waiting for him like a crack in the earth.

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