He always liked the mornings in the fall. In the fall you got crisp air and sunrises with clouds and it smelled good outside. It was, what's the right word...invigorating? She said it was because he slept better with the cooler nights. That's all.

He should have just taken the freeway, but the night before, he'd decided to get up a bit earlier and take Kings Canyon out to the east side. He wanted to smell that air out there by Tivy Valley all mixed with the citrus blossoms and river water. It didn't matter how early he woke up anymore. It didn't matter if he tossed and turned, or snored, or went out to the couch and quietly played his guitar. She was at her mother's house now.

Turning south on Frankwood, he drove past the old Sherwood Inn. If she was in the car one of them would say "We ought to have dinner there one night." Then the other would say "It's not that long a drive." Then one of them would say "I've heard it's pretty expensive." and that would be that. He kept driving south and then east as the citrus gave way to grapevines and stone fruit.

His first stop of the day was a summons addressed to C&W Trucking on the outskirts of the small town of Dinuba. He'd looked through all his paper the night before just to get a feel for what he was walking into. The words Wrongful Death immediately caught his eye.

Flipping through the pages of the complaint, he fleshed out the details of a fatal accident on Hwy 99 up around Yuba City. A big rig had rear ended (probably rolled right up and over) a car killing the plaintiff's husband and son. He had paper for the trucking company, the truck's driver and some outfit called The Advantex Group.

These three were mixed in with the usual day's allotment of Worker's Comp. or personal injury subpoenas demanding medical records from a doctor or hospital. He was automatic on that stuff. Walk in, smile say hi, everybody knows what's going on. He was on a first name basis with records clerks all up and down the state. But these three civil summons were different.

These were personal.These weren't asking for a business to produce records within 15 days, they were telling somebody that they were in for a shit-load of trouble. You just had to adjust your technique a bit. First thing he did was drive by the address and looked the place over.

C&W Trucking was just a big gravel lot surrounded by a chain link fence. The office was a double wide mobile home, sunbaked white with a small redwood deck. Several cars were parked nearby. Further back, a couple tractor-trailer rigs were parked on a slab, sheltered under a tin roofed pole barn. More cars and a few people back there by a gas pump. He got a good vibe from all the cars. Cars meant witnesses and most of the time witnesses had a way of keeping things from getting out of hand. He decided against the pistol and windbreaker.

He drove on maybe half mile thinking things through before turning it back around. He figured he might get lucky and be able to serve all three summons right there. He could properly serve C&W's office manager...and if the truck driver was one of those guys back by the gas pump, boom! The Advantex Group was some kind of holding company and had somebody named Wayne Boatwright of Visalia, CA listed as their agent of service, maybe he was the office manager. Only one way to find out.

He stepped through the sliding glass door of the trailer wearing his usual khaki colored Dickies and a navy blue polo shirt embroidered with the Pembroke logo. The logo had changed recently from Pembroke Investigations to the much less intimidating Pembroke Information Management. Nice and vague.

He caught a lucky break when the receptionist/dispatcher, a nice looking, thirty-ish woman looked up from her desk, smiled and said "Wayne, the copier guy is here."

Wayne was a big man in his late 50s. The thing that that struck him first was Wayne's hair. Graying but kind of rockabilly hair, with big pointy sideburns that didn't match Wayne's sansabelt slacks and white shirt at all. Wayne was pissed off about something too, you could tell by the way he strode out of his office.

"So what did they do, fire that idiot that was out here last week?"

"Uh I'm sorry Mr. Boatwright, I don't know anything about that."

"He was here for three hours last week, said everything was fixed. He hadn't been gone a half hour when the machine started jamming up again."

"Well I'm looking at the paperwork here, It looks like you signed off on the repair. Is this(pointing to a page in his binder) your signature Mr. Boatwright?"

Wayne came out from behind the counter to look at the papers. "I might've signed but that doesn't mean..."

He handed Wayne the Wrongful Death Summons for both C&W Trucking and The Advantex group and said "Mr. Boatwright, consider yourself, C&W Trucking and The Advantex group served."

And then he got the hell out of there. He didn't want to listen to the words Wayne was trying to formulate through his shock and rapidly increasing rage. He tried not to kick up too much gravel on his way out of the lot. Back out on the street now looking in the rearview mirror, nobody came out of the trailer but he still wasted no time in getting down the road.

A twinge of remorse goaded his ego for not playing it straight up with Wayne. He'd had bad experiences trying to locate and serve shell corps. They were never that easy. And he'd gotten a reaal bad vibe off of that guy.

He also chided himself for not going back to the gas pump and asking about Ray Dominguez, the truck driver but his gut told him not to press his luck and he trusted his gut implicitly. In this business you had to. "Yeah how come your gut always plays it safe and easy?"

Bfore he could think about that too long, the road east pulled his thoughts up to the crystal clear Sierras rising above the foothills. This was the way the mountains looked in his dreams. The road was his lullaby. It put his mind at ease and let the daydreams flow. He'd been driving up and down and all around California for so many years, he dreamed about it at night, all compressed into idealized, manageable portions.

Different zones revolving around the San Joaquin Valley, all fruit trees and grapevines. Picture book farmhouses and small towns. Surrounded by the Sierras on the east and smaller dryer, hills south and west. The valley stretched north to the Sacramento where it became another valley. Sometimes he saw himself as a small creature in one of those Public TV nature shows, scrambling around the valley this way and that while Peter Coyote's disembodied voice explained the details and logic of it all.

Daydreams and night dreams seen through a windshield or a wall of sleep. He pulled CDs down from the visors and dreamed about guitars and bars. He'd listen to Rush Limbaugh until he got too agitated, until he realized he was just trying to keep from thinking about her sitting back over there at her mother's house.

They weren't really separated, it was just that her mother was so bad now, she needed constant care. Ther dementia got worse as the sun went down and she had taken to staying later and later until one night she said "Why don't you go on home. I'm going to stay the night."

He didn't argue with her about it he just said "OK, I'll call you tomorrow." Later they argued, fought bitterly actually, then they went out and had some drinks and came home and made love like teenagers. Then the next morning she went back to her mother's house.

The thing was he knew how much she hated it over there. Sometimes he'd come pick her up and realized she had braved the tweakers and cholos in the neighborhood to walk over to the Johnny Quick and buy a bottle. She was Irish/Chickasaw and had...more than a taste for the stuff. So they argued about that. Pretty soon what little time they spent alone together was not enjoyable.

He told himself he was too honest but the truth was he was just impatient. He thought that when she asked him for solutions to the situation she wanted an answer. What she really wanted/needed was for him to just listen to her blow off steam about her mom and brothers and sisters. What she didn't need was for him getting all blunt and obvious.

"Look you need to put her in a home." He said. "We can sell that house and use the money to pay for her care."

"Oh yeah and put Wanda and Dwayne out on the street? Like I'd do that to my brother and sister." Her jaw was set hard she was beginning to tremble a bit.

"Honey, Wanda and Dwayne have been living there rent free long enough. They can find a place." He said all this in calm reassuring tones but couldn't resist twisting the knife a bit by adding "That's what Section 8 is for. People like Wanda and Dwayne."

Whoosh!