The End of the Dream (9 page)

I’ll let you know.” When Scott did tell Kevin what he had in mind, it sounded innocent enough. He said he had rented some property south of Olympia, near the Mima Mounds. (The Mima Mounds are literally thousands of “blisters” of grass-covered earth that dot the landscape for miles.
 
No one knows where they came from or whether they were caused by some accident of nature or by human beings. ) Scott told Kevin he needed someone to watch the place for the summer. All Kevin would be required to do was sit by the swimming pool and paint pictures. Kevin Meyers was a bluntly honest man, and he made no effort to whitewash what Scott eventually proposed to him. He wasn’t naive enough to think Scott would give him a free summer just so that he could paint, he knew Scott planned to use him in some way. But that was OK, they would both get something out of it. Kevin wondered why Scott had had to “think about it.” Was he to be a front for something illegal and had Scott actually felt guilty about bringing him into what was going on? Or was it that Scott had to decide if he trusted him or not? “The thing about Scott was that, whenever he was involved with something that might rebound on him, he didn’t touch it himself. He was always the middle man’ between the middlemen between the middlemen, “ Kevin mused. “But his friends loved him enough that they didn’t want to know what he was up to and they really didn’t care.” Kevin had pressing problems himself that made it easier for him not to look too closely at what Scott was up to, he needed financial help that summer.

Despite his success, Kevin wasn’t making enough with his art to do the work on Springmale that he wanted to. s I just couldn’t get ahead because I couldn’t afford the building materials. Whatever money came in just evaporated.” There were other reasons that made Scott’s offer enticing. Kevin loved the Northwest in the summer, and he wanted to vault in a Masters’ track meet in Eugene, Oregon, in August. So it did sound like the answer to both Kevin’s monetary problems and like an adventurous summer to boot. Most compelling of all, Kevin loved Scott.

He remembered the halcyon days in Hawaii a decade earlier. “He and I laughed more together than any friend I ever had.” Shoving down any suspicion, Kevin headed west from Great Falls, Virginia. He saw that the treehouse was in the embryonic stage of yet another transformation.

He could appreciate the challenge posed in rebuilding the treehouse and the sheer fun in doing it. Even so, Kevin noted wryly that Scott still used his “cosmic carpentry, “ rather than any sound principles of building. It drove Kevin Meyers nuts to see Scott’s strongman approach to carpentry. If Scott wanted a tree limb gone, he was as likely to attack it with a machete as with a saw. Some of the structure was flimsy and unsafe, but Scott only laughed when Kevin pointed that out.

He shrugged scott had always taken shortcuts and that hadn’t changed.

But other things had. On this visit, Kevin was troubled as he sensed that Scott was heading down “a dark path.” Scott made no effort now to hide the fact that he was heavily involved in some kind of drug business, but he spoke of it euphemistically. He always referred to what he was doing as just another “experiment.” Lots of Scott’s experiments had failed. Kevin remembered when he had tried to grow marijuana using Gro-litesin a space he’d hollowed out beneath the old barn.

That had been a joke. Even though Scott hid the excavation with bales of hay, everyone along Overhulse seemed to know what he was up to. And then his cannabis plants were flooded out by underground water. He’d finally admitted that he couldn’t grow nearly enough pot on his own acreage to make any profit. Although Kevin never walked back into the Mima Mounds behind the house where he painted, he soon suspected what went on there.
 
He figured that Scott must have a huge crop of marijuana someplace back among the mounds and the wooded property. But what Kevin didn’t actually see for himself, he wouldn’t have to acknowledge. He spent his days painting canvases in the harsh light that reflected off the pool of the rental house. What he was doing gave him an uneasy feeling nevertheless.
 
So many times that summer, Kevin berated himself for accepting Scott’s offer. Scott made the mortgage payments on Kevin’s house in Virginia, but he never paid him so much as a dollar that summer that he could put in his pocket.

He was completely dependent, and he hated the feeling. Nothing Kevin painted was memorable or up to his usual standards. He knew why, he was corrupting the thing that meant most to him. Kevin would have been utterly lonesome if Scott hadn’t insisted he have some kind of a guard dog with him. “He gave me a couple of hundred dollars and told me to go buy a dog, “ Kevin said. “I bought this huge, long-haired Belgian Shepherd who had been a working guard dog, but he had been locked up in a cage at some kennel. His name was Max, but I changed it to B-I-G-D-O-G. That dog was supposed to be dangerous, but he was so glad I rescued him from the cage that he almost caused me to have an accident on the way home because he was sitting in my lap, licking my face.” Kevin made a point of not asking Scott specific questions.

When they were back at the place on Overhulse Road, sitting around a campfire, waking up to the pureness of dawn over Mt. Rainier, it was easy for Kevin to convince himself that Scott hadn’t changed as much as he feared. Scott still loved nature and their long hikes, he still railed against the wickedness of clear-cutting timberland.

They rented movies and cheered for the heroes. They forced themselves to be complimentary when Julie Weathers served vegetarian meals strange conglomerations of mushrooms and herbs coaxed into souffles that invariably fell flat. They winked at each other and laughed just the way they always had, forcing their expressions into innocent stares when she accused them of making fun of her. Scott and Julie drove Kevin down to Eugene for the Masters’ track meet, and cheered when he leapt over sixteen feet and narrowly missed taking a first-place medal.

Onlookers were amazed that he still had such power at the age of thirty-one. It was a good trip, and the three of them laughed a lot.

Even though Kevin Meyers grew disillusioned with his best friend, he had forgiven Scott many times. There was a bond between them that was far closer than that between blood brothers. Kevin loved Scott and hoped that one day he would change. Scott was just too special not to metamorphose into the kind of man he was fully capable of being. Scott continued to entice his old friend to join him in unplanned escapades.

They went to Mexico together in early 1985 and discovered Xalapa on Mexico’s eastern coast, just north of Veracruz. A decade fell away as they hiked through strange terrain, calling to each other with familiar crow caws, which signaled there was no danger ahead. They leapt off thirty-foot rocks into four feet of water, full of an almost forgotten derring-do. They explored the ancient Zempoala Ruins. “Scott had angels around him, still, “ Kevin remembered. “He was still so lucky.

Somebody had to be watching over him.” One day, they were racing through a thick forest where the tree roots were as thick as a man’s thigh.
 
Scott was leading the way. “He was about to leap over a cluster of roots, “ Kevin said, “when a hawk suddenly flew down right at him. He stopped in his tracks. I caught up with him and we looked past the roots to the spot where he was about to leap. There was a huge rattle snake coiled there.” Even Scott was pale and quiet for a few minutes. If he hadn’t been stopped, he would have landed on the snake. A few months later, Scott asked Kevin if he wanted to go to Nicaragua with him. “Come on, “ Scott urged. “We’ll be tourists. It will be cheap. We can do it on dollars.. ..” The trip to Nicaragua changed Kevin Meyers’ life, he had never seen such abject poverty and he felt guilty and helpless. The life of the poor in Nicaragua seemed so much worse because the rich had so much. For years after this trip, Kevin Meyers would become agitated at the memory of the injustice he saw during those days in March 1985. But the trip was Scott’s adventure, so it was fraught with danger and excitement. And Scott had been right when he said they could live like kings on very little money. “It was supposed to be a tourist scene there, but nobody else could afford to be there, “ Kevin said. They stayed in an ocean-front hotel for a week, paying $5 a night for a room.
 
Frugality was everywhere, toilet paper rolls were cut into fourths and the soap was carefully pared down into small pieces. They swam in the clear ocean waters of Nicaragua, wearing fins that had cost them $80 a pair. “A factory worker at Uniroyal down there was making $200 a year, for working ten hours a day, “ Kevin recalled. “But with a pair of fins like we had, he could have made a better living spear-fishing.” They were body surfing one day, and Scott didn’t like the way his fins worked, so he borrowed a butcher knife and began cutting them down. A little boy nearby watched with horror. He thought the crazy American was destroying something worth pure gold. Scott tossed him the fins and they watched the boy run home whooping with joy. The waves were so far out that Kevin and Scott were disappointed with the body surfing anyway, and, as the sun set, the wind churned the sand until it pricked their eyes. They walked back a hundred yards to where they had left their rented car and found it was locked tight. Neither of them had the keys.
 
“The closest town was ninety miles away, “ Kevin said. “We weren’t going to find a locksmith. I was blaming Scott for losing the keys, and he was saying I had them. Finally, Scott just said, Let’s go find the keys.”

“Look at it out there, “ Kevin said.

“The beach is twenty-five miles long and you can’t even see the tracks we just made. The keys are gone.” Scott grinned at him and walked confidently to a spot on the beach as if he could somehow hear the keys calling to him. “He reached downright by his feet and he came up with the keys. He had some instinct, something more than anyone else. He was the luckiest guy I ever met.” Long before the hawk that warned Scott of the snake and the keys in the sand, Kevin had become used to Scott’s incredible, uncanny luck. When he gambled, he never lost and he never won small. The first time he became aware of Scott’s startling luck was during a company poker party at Hawaii Plant Life.

“I wasn’t there, “ Kevin recalled. “I was still in college, and I didn’t have enough to buy even a beer, much less gamble. And I hadn’t started working for the company yet. But Scott went with the three bosses. He had his $25 paycheck and his lucky leather hat, his lucky shirt, his lucky pants. He cleaned out the bosses winning thirteen straight hands!
 
They thought he couldn’t win hand after hand but he did. They all went broke and quit. All he’d had going in was a bicycle, and he comes driving up to see me in a TR3.

He’d paid $2,400 of his winnings for it, and he still had money left over.” Scott claimed to have magical chants. And when he played pool or cards, he’d mutter things like “Ooomsha .. .

Ooomsha” and “Alligalla, Walligalla” and he managed to convince his opponents he’d hexed them. “I saw him once in Vegas after he’d put down ten bucks, “ Kevin laughed. “And he won $20.. .

$40 .. . $80, $160, $320, $640. And on and on. I was real proud because I’d won $180. He said, That’s pretty good, Bro.

I was so proud of my little $from the blackjack table. I was Don Knotts, saying Look, Andy! And here comes Andy, sticking out his chest and pulling $500 chips out of his jacket pockets. I’ve never seen anybody win like that. I guess he had $15,000 on him and all from one $10 chip.
 
That kind of money would have changed my life.” Scott often went to Las Vegas to bet “the parlay” on the sixteen football games slated to be played the 9following weekend. “It was like 100-to-odds, “ Kevin said.
 
“You put a hundred down, you get ten grand.

He won that thing five or six times.” The lost key episode in Nicaragua could have been a disaster, but, with Scott’s luck, it wasn’t. And their evening only got better, they ate at a local restaurant where a steak and lobster dinner cost a dollar, an ice cold Mexican beer ten cents.

They left dollar tips for their ten-cent beers, and the waiter was ecstatic. There was no doubt that Scott Scurlock was blessed with uncommon luck. He seemed then, and always, to be invulnerable to the forces that could bring an ordinary man down. And they both needed Scott’s luck later that night. They went out to jog in the moonlight, their bellies full of beer, steak, and lobster. They hadn’t run very far into the black, moonless night when they heard the boom of a high-powered gun. It was just one shot, and they didn’t think much about it, it could have been a family quarrel or some local feud. The second shot kicked up the sand near their feet, and a voice called “Halt a! “ Kevin and Scott were wearing shorts and their feet were bare. Kevin tentatively called out, “Turista, turista! “ They couldn’t see the man who called out, but then a flashlight followed by long shadows came closer to them.

“I counted thirteen shadows, “ Kevin remembered. “The oldest of them was about twenty-five and the youngest twelve, and they all carried machine guns. Russian-made AK-47s. They were really proud, and really poor. We didn’t know it then but the CIA had come in invading from the ocean just north of there and blown up a water treatment plant that they thought was an oil refinery. These people came down with cholera.

So many of them got sick .. .

and here we were, strangers, running in the night.” Scott signaled Kevin that they had to make friends. They didn’t have a passport and they were clearly Americans. Scott said, “Reagan” with disgust in his voice, and drew his finger across his throat.

Kevin spit as he too said, “Reagan.” The men with machine guns watched them warily. Finally, one of them said something in Spanish, and the others put their guns down. “We found out quickly that nobody jogs in Nicaragua, “ Kevin said. “You either walk or you run.” After every new adventure with Scott, Kevin headed back to Virginia, grateful to be home in his log cabin studio. There, he felt renewed as he worked.

Scott, who had never ended a relationship with a woman unless he chose to, lost Julie Weathers. He had had scores of women, but Julie Weathers’ beauty was recognized not only on the Evergreen campus but all around the city of Olympia. Together, they made an exquisite couple scott with his classic features, muscular body, and dark curly hair, Julie, tall and slender and as fair as Scott was dark.