[to start at Chapter One, click here]
Once a year my husband Lloyd Bluestone, sheriff of my heart's county, hikes up to this grove of oaks. The ritual’s at least twenty years old.
He goes up when fall rains first rinse canyons of the northern Sierra Nevada, sluicing the watershed, perpetuating a mighty forest of stately conifers and determined oaks.
This year it happens on a Thursday, mid-October. This time, the first ever, Lloyd invited me along.
* * *
My leg-muscles have cooled, stiffened. I'm tired from the hike--down to the river and across it on a rickety walking bridge, just cables and boards--up the difficult mountain to oaks. It is afternoon.
Lloyd isn't tired but sits anyway, still as a boulder, a broad-shouldered man with a brown face and black hair, brown eyes that aren't fearful but rarely seem anything other than wary.
Together we sit under a blue tarp he's tied to oaks.
The grove sits on a strange shelf consisting of some five acres that jut out between two ravines. "A geological anomaly," Lloyd calls it. Once he made a Lloydly slip and said "anemone."
Whatever it is, it is what it is a mile above sea level in terrain Humphrey Bogart and the Donner Party keep dying in each time you see the famous movie, read the macabre account.
Lloyd’s always said of the grove, "It shouldn't be there.”
The idea is this: Ancient glaciers, eternal erosion, simple gravity, or all three should have wiped that flat protrusion off the ridge like a smudge. Sheer mountains like the Sierra don't go in much for such ornamentation as a shelf between sheer ravines. Also, oaks don't normally grow up high where manzanita brush and big conifers dominate.
Because the hushed grove and what underlies it have persisted, Lloyd goes there to watch his woods fill up with storm.
Which isn't here yet. But it's a mean-looking afternoon—-the sort of day when mountains make you quiet, make you remember some of how incidental you are. The air is dark. Under the tarp, we have a Thermos of coffee, carrot sticks, bread, coats, hats, gloves. I want the storm to hurry. He doesn't. I'm grateful when he speaks. "Are you ready to die yet?" he asks.
"No, I don't think so. How about you?"
"Not quite.” He shifts to the other haunch, lets his lungs take a long draw on chill air. It is after 4:00 p.m. already. I'm not panicky or anything--I've lived in the mountains for twenty years--but I don't like being up on a ridge this late in the afternoon. I'm thinking tea at the kitchen table, followed by a hot dinner. I'm thinking I've seen rainstorms before and don’t need to be out in one to prove again I’m a nature girl. I'm thinking I'm too old for this nonsense. We are, Lloyd and I, middle-aged after all.
The canyon down there to the west looks black when usually it holds the last light of day. The reversed image disturbs me. It's too much like a tunnel--a tornado-tube set on its side--than the canyon I know. I pull the coat closer around me.
Lloyd continues. "But I feel myself getting closer. To being ready to die. It's so strange to see how few things I've done."
I start to speak.
"No," he says. "Don't reassure me. What I mean is, it's really strange to see how small and simple a life is-- any one life, not necessarily mine.”
"All lives."
"Right. Strange to admit that. This storm right here that's coming up the canyon is bigger than my life. Do you believe that?"
"No, but I’ll keep an open mind. I don't think I'll ever be ready. To die.” I'm opening the Thermos, wishing the storm would get with it and give the County Sheriff his climatological fix. Coffee massages alpine air with dark aroma. I continue: "I can see myself on a respirator, loaded up with drugs, fighting, gasping, clutching bedsheets, thinking of one more thing I ‘must’ do, never just rolling over and letting go, relaxing into the arms of death." What I'm saying surprises me.
Lloyd looks at me. He looks away again, down-canyon.
"I see what you mean," he says, saying it as if he doesn't see.
Through trees I catch a glimpse of our small Sierra- Nevada town, Claytonville; by small I mean a handful of corrugated-iron roofs thrown like spare coins onto a bedroom bureau. The vantage point makes the town look sad and embarrassed, an image I could accept with ease if it didn't also reflect on my life and Lloyd's, which have taken place there. Maybe people coming in for a landing in New York or Frankfurt feel differently. I wouldn't know. I've lived in Claytonville, California. Before that, I lived in Sacramento.
For Lloyd, hiking up here is to take a bath, washing off grubbiness of daily life; for me, it puts my life in relief that is too stark, as if I can't marshal enough "me" --enough spirit, memory, even physical strength--to keep the daily faith. These mountains sometimes scare the hell out of me. Sometimes I think they've taken the better part of my life already. They don't scare Lloyd; and he loves them.
* * *
It begins by tick-tacking off papery umber-and-orange oak leaves, staining gray-brown oak-trunks with dark blotches, like flung paint. I look at Lloyd and want to say, "Can we go now?" but he's not looking back at me. He sits up and looks hard. I sip coffee and listen to raindrops hit the tarp. I don't know why I want to cry, why I am perturbed by an urge to weep that comes up through my ribcage. Ever since the summer, I’ve been emotionally unpredictable, especially to myself. I'm glad when Lloyd distracts me.
"Watch," he says.
"What?" My voice cracks. He doesn't seem to notice.
He points, says, "Clouds, the low clouds."
Below ridge-level on the opposite side of the canyon, small, low, white clouds run at the storm’s front edge. Their speed's not quite believable.
From the town, the highway, or the river, no one will see them; the angle's wrong. There's an excellent chance Lloyd and I are the only humans to witness their sprint up-canyon. Some clouds move so fast they start tumbling: pups whose back legs overtake them. Others dissolve. Some remain sleek and quick. These power through the canyon and disappear into gray mass of other clouds where canyon melds with upper range. I’ve lived here a long time, but this is a fresh, startling image of weather on the move.
Now rain comes hard, slants in. Hard wind drives water into trees, under our tarp. The ridge opposite us, across the canyon, is overwhelmed in rain and cloud; it disappears. Claytonville disappears. I breathe harder, scrunch into my parka and try to center myself under the tarp. Lloyd won’t budge. His nostrils flare, taking in wet air. Odor of wet air washes over us.
He acts like he's in a cathedral. His Holiness, Lloyd Bluestone, Pope of Western Twigs. Rain comes now in a big wave. The tarp isn't working; rain's coming in under it and soaking my butt.
"Lloyd, get me out of here," I say, but the storm swallows my words. "Lloyd!"
He turns, as if he's been expecting me to complain.
"Find me some cover," I say. "I don't wanna get pneumonia--." Before I finish, he's pulled my hood up as if I were a child, then pulled his hood up, and he's up and taking down the tarp. I throw things in the pack and arise and follow him through oaks, off the flat-top, down into a creek-canyon that'll wall off the storm. He finds a well worn deer-trail right away and follows it. As usual there's something unhurried but efficient about the way he moves; he’s been taking care of himself his whole life.
We situate ourselves in the ravine, protected by a wall of blue rock and by a monstrous, overhanging ponderosa pine. This isn’t a lightning storm, so we’re safe under a tree. Lloyd rigs the tarp with big sticks so it functions as a porch roof. I assist. Away from the tarp he builds a fire; he thought to bring pieces of sapwood.
Hunkered under the tarp, I watch him feed fire larger pieces of pine. Smoke joins gray air.
I let my eyes drift across the creek. Through blur of smoke and rain--rain pounding the creek--my eyes search rocks and manzanita on the far bank; cold and fatigue and the sound of the storm hypnotize me. The image therefore seems to leap right out of Earth.
A bear.
I’d like to cry out--who wouldn't?--but sound gets stuck in my throat and comes out like a slow-motion squeak. Lloyd doesn't hear me.
The bear’s lying down near the creek beneath a high bank of clay and manzanita. Its cinnamon-brown fur is soaked; it's lying on its side. Its forearms and clawed paws are massive. The bear’s so startlingly big and out of place I actually widen my eyes and blink--it's like the damned thing fell out of the woods. And then I think: Yes, why not, a fitting way to end a hexed summer: a bear falls out of the forest and eats us, leaving us on back pages of American newspapers, an inch of filler in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. BEAR KILLS CALIFORNIA COUPLE.
I say "Lloyd" probably three times in ever-louder whispers--until I'm not whispering. He turns from the fire. I point. He looks. Straightens up. Stares.
Slowly he crouches again, picks up his pack, slides back to join me under the tarp. He removes a pistol from the pack.
He whispers, "This won't do much good if he charges, of course."
We sit and watch the bear through a veil of rain. It's one of those moments when you really don't know who you are, when your whole life seems so odd, so unlike everyone else's--not special, just strange, atomized--that you have trouble believing it's a life in any coherent way.
That feeling passes. I’m just cold and afraid.
"He's sick," Lloyd says.
"He?"
"She, he. She looks real bad--see?"
I look hard and see how moth-eaten the fur is—how, for a bear, she looks frail when she should be larding up for the Big Nap.
"No bear would lie next to the creek like that in a storm. She's real bad. She must have crawled to water. You don't see that pale cinnamon color much."
Sometimes the bear stirs, moves a heavy paw. We watch her for thirty minutes. Lloyd stokes the fire. The waiting agitates me no end.
Lloyd decides to cross the creek. I protest, but it's no use. He takes his pistol and wades across. I get out from under the tarp; the rain’s letting up. I wonder what in hell I'll do if the damned bear mauls my husband. Ludicrously, I look around for a rock to throw.
Taking one step every few seconds, Lloyd approaches the bear. She waggles her head. I want her to be a her. He stops. She picks up her head again, tries to sit up. A charge of adrenaline hits my heart. Lloyd is still.
He gets closer, looks hard at her. He raises the pistol and shoots her in the head. Twice. The gunshots are more terrible for being less sharp than TV shots; they seem matter-of-fact. A dull pup-pup.
Lloyd stands and looks at her and waits. Looking like a cousin of bear, he ambles and shuffles back across the creek. We stand beside the fire. His face is gray and slack.
"She was real sick. Real old, when I got up to her. Hardly breathing. Couldn't quite make it into one more winter. She was a she, too."
I smile. Lloyd smiles. We stop smiling.
"Goddamnit," he says, with honest-to-God bitterness. I know what he's thinking. He comes up here to watch his storm, show it to me from the box seats, and this year even the sedate private ritual won't go right. He has to shoot a bear he doesn't want to shoot.
Darkness insinuates itself into the main canyon. Lloyd and I in the side-ravine do what we are obliged to do. We yank and haul the bear's carcass off the bank, into the creek, across the creek, up, and out. It is hard work.
Her wet fur stinks wildly. Odors and oils of a whole bear life mix with rainwater. Her gray teats are withered and sad, mortified. I slip and fall and drop her once; my face brushes her rank, reddish-brown fur. This causes a weird convergence of wildness, revulsion, and intimacy. We get the body twenty yards from the creek where decaying flesh won't foul the water. Lloyd produces a hatchet and chops pine limbs. We cover her over: Her old, sad, open-mouthed, narrow-nosed face stares into a darkening sky, which drips water into her mouth, onto the pink tongue and brown, knobby, ivory teeth. Her black nose is nicked with scars. Her small eyes are ringed in black, weary fur. I can’t look at that face without believing she was a big brainy thing. A pained thing that died alone.
We cover the face last. Within twenty-four hours big-jawed coyotes, sharks of the woods, will undo our work and set upon her meat, with ants and maggots coming at her from down below, followed by relentless rot. It’s just a gesture, the placing of branches.
At 5,000 feet, I'm working hard at breathing. A sweet fatigue overcomes my arms and shoulders. I tell Lloyd, Shouldn't we be heading down the hill before dark? I'm the sheriff's wife, who’s always heard the sheriff rail against tourists who get lost wearing only sandals and shorts and stumble off a cliff in pitch dark.
No, he says, the trail's easy.
We go back and stoke the fire and eat our rations and get warm and dry.
* * *
There’s this problem of oddity I grapple with--of being nearly extinct, beyond the reach of the culture's radar. Of being, let’s face it, a hick. I know in theory I have a right to speak, but what good does talking about me, a dam, and Juanita do? Does telling matter?
For the stories projected on the walls of this our Grand Digital-Canyon, America, are so big and loud that to tell what’s happened to me, to Lloyd, and to me-and-Lloyd seems like murmuring next to a crashing waterfall or mumbling a child's rhyme at a rock-concert.
On this evening of the first Fall storm and the killing of a cinnamon bear that fell out of the forest, my life seems only my own. That’s good news and bad: It’s a satisfying task to wonder how many other women in America--in the world--just helped their husbands cover the carcass of a bear with pine boughs, smell of freshly-bled sap mixing in nostrils with odor of old bear. It’s an amusing way to accept my small, singular life.
I hold my husband's head in my hands and kiss him in dim firelight, long and deep. Cool air and presence of woods seem to come in through pores, demand awareness, tug me away from the center of the kiss. In a way I'm kissing my own life, kissing it hello and goodbye and go-with-God at the same time. When you greet the once-ness of your own life, you press your mouth against the mouth of death.
We get up, pack up. We trace deer trails back. I need to get the hell home and take a hot bath and drink hot cocoa, no tea, and sleep and sleep and hope for dreams in which cinnamon-colored girl-bears dance and sing.
From this October perch, I’m able finally to look back on the summer that has passed, when I tried to fight a dam but didn’t know how, when I broke the law and fooled myself but still managed, in my own haphazard way, to honor Juanita.
And so, yes, it is October, the dark evening of the day we hiked up the mountain to watch the first substantial storm of the Fall-and-Winter. We stand on the little walking-bridge that’s stretched across the North Meredith not far up-canyon from Claytonville. He is leaning on one of the cables. I’m standing. So we’re about at the same level. I’ve said a silent prayer to the water below on behalf of poor Carl Kelly, my jail-mate and the only person in our sphere of influence to die that summer.
Lloyd and I have been talking about the bear Lloyd had to shoot. It has made us morose. We look down into the waters of the river, dark now because the October evening has darkened and the moon is still down.
I turn to the old subject—no, not my obsession with Juanita, but our marriage.
“It’s a true fact,” I say. “We wouldn’t have gotten married, probably wouldn’t have even seen each other after that summer, if you hadn’t knocked me up, up there in Willow Canyon.”
“And as I always remind you,” Lloyd says, “we knocked us up.”
“And as I always mention, who delivered the baby out of her womb and between her legs?” No response.
I move closer to him, shoulder to shoulder, the thin bridge moving underneath us as I move, the sound of the river filling the air around us, water rushing over boulders and gravel. Bluestone has great shoulders.
I make a pronouncement. “And yet here we are still, married and in love, in spite of it all.”
“In spite of this summer and all,” says Bluestone, my Lloyd, sheriff of my heart’s county.
THE END.
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Chapter Nineteen
A Viet Nam veteran named Reuben Merck, later described, of course, as “troubled” by newspapers, was the pilot of the F-6 “Crusader” jet that skimmed the air just above our heads on the Fourth of July and exploded on the hillside near Claytonville. Merck had attended the Air Show in Reno, intending merely to indulge in some nostalgia for his pilot’s days past. But something apparently came over him, and he simply had to fly the F-6 one more time; or rather, he simply had to fly the F-6 immediately one more time.
In spite of all the alleged increased security after 9-11, Merck sneaked into a hangar, found a flight-suit and helmet, and probably seemed so comfortable in the suit that security on the tarmac paid him no attention. He removed the blocks from behind the wheels of the F-6, which had been flown in for display purposes only, but the cockpit of which had been left open. A mobile stairway-unit sat nearby. Reuben Merck drove that over, climbed up the stairs, got in the airplane, closed the cockpit, fired `er up, and pivoted deftly away from the stairway. To the consternation, to put it mildly, of those in the control tower, he taxied and took off. Soon military jets were scrambled. They followed Merck and his F-6 over the Sierra Nevada. They made radio contact. He told them who he was and what he was—just a vet wanting one last ride in the old Crusader. They believed him, but they also had orders to shoot him down once he got past the canyon of the North Meredith and was headed toward the foothills and the Valley—over populated areas. Fortunately, the F-6 was not carrying its rockets, or they would have shot him down once he got over unpopulated mountains.
Unfortunately for Claytonville but fortunately for Mr. Merck, maybe I should say Captain Merck, the F-6 was light on fuel. Out of gas, Merck did indeed eject successfully, though he broke his left arm by hanging it up in the cockpit on the way out and broke his right ankle when he hit a pine tree on his way toward soil, in a clearing overlooking the North Meredith. Federal agents got to him first, for Sheriff Bluestone and the rest of us were busy with a conflagration.
Merck ended up in a veterans’ hospital in San Francisco, where he recuperated from his physical injuries, received new medications to help control his impulses, and was interviewed by Ron Kuwara, the baritone-voiced newspaper reporter who’d been on the courthouse steps the day Carl Kelly went after me. The old Air Force veteran himself, Barker Updike, who’d gallantly thrown himself over me when Merck’s jet flew over, read the account by Kuwara, and, not without admiration, deemed Reuben Merck “a crazy sonofabitch.”
* * *
A wood-carver, I know a bit about the mysterious conflict between what the wood will be, is capable of being, what the carver wants it to be, and what the chisels can actually achieve. With limited success, I try to apply the carving analogy to the events that summer. How many of them had to do with my will or with the will of countless others? The will of a corporation and a construction company; the will of Lloyd Bluestone, sheriff of an obscure county, and his wife, a middle-aged woman who, in her mind, had welded together the idea of a dam and the memory of a lynched woman; the will of an ambitious district attorney, a drunken foreman, a drunken logger out of work, and a drunken novelist with writer’s block; the will of honest Rupert Williams; the will of wealthy Sybil Burns, her Buffalo Gals, and the lawyer Laura Klein whom Sybil could afford to deploy; the will of Reuben Merck to fly, and of the eccentric gaggle of people, there in the middle of Claytonville, to put out a fire.
On the contrary, how much of what happened simply was to have happened? Was it in the cards that Cannon would accost Juanita, that she would stab him, that they would lynch her, and that I would end up, against all laws of averages, pregnant, married to Lloyd, a resident of Claytonville, and therefore in a position to learn the story of Juanita? And of course, “in the cards” means different things to different people. To José the phrase didn’t mean luck; you play the players, not the cards.
If I hadn’t chained myself to Bar Rock, with Rupert’s help, how much of what happened wouldn’t have happened? I asked Bluestone this, and he reminded me that the world doesn’t revolve around me. But I told him I felt responsible, in a way, for everything, including the fire. He grew impatient. He said there’s a difference between taking responsibility and behaving as if you design the world. The difference, he said, might be summed up in the contrast between Sybil Burns and Rupert Williams, or between the retired, Buddha-like deputy, Ed Porter, and the politically single-minded D.A., Miles Ward.
Chastened, I still had to wonder if my jail-mate Carl Kelley, who had kept calling me a cunt that sweltering afternoon, would have died if I hadn’t gone up to the dam-site. Would Gary Stad Fromm have made the ultimate fool of himself in the sheriff’s office?
Would my son have been shot, nearly killed? I think he wouldn’t have been shot, and I think I’ll forever be ashamed of myself for acting on an impulse and going up to Bar Rock that morning—and getting my son shot, eventually. What saved Gabriel? The blind physics of a pistol in a drunk’s hand and the trajectory of a bullet? God?
What saved Claytonville from the fire? Quick thinking? Weather patterns? Why did no one die? One woman was burned, and one man had a heart-attack. Two firemen collapsed from the heat. A volunteer nearly cut her finger off preparing sandwiches. But no one died, not even Reuben Merck, not even Barker Updike and me, just a few yards, really, beneath the screaming, pilotless jet.
Who will finish the abandoned dam? Who will care for the river besides the river?
* * *
Judge Carstairs Peat threw out the felony charge against me. Laura Klein tried to work out a reasonable plea of guilty to a misdemeanor. The plea seemed sewn up until Miles decided to try to go around Carstairs. Miles took the felony “evidence” before the Grand Jury. Since Judge Peat was the only judge Miles would likely try cases before, this disrespect seemed like ego-assisted professional suicide, but Miles’ plans for total war were strategic, not tactical: Several of his buddies started recall efforts against both Carstairs and Lloyd.
The Grand Jury refused to indict me on a Friday in September; the following Monday Peat called Miles and me into his office, got Laura on the phone in Sacramento, asked if a $250 fine for misdemeanor trespassing were acceptable (it were), and, as Ralph Grimley, mountain editor, put it (in private, not in his weekly column), “Carstairs shoved that one up Miles’ ass as far as it would go.” The recall petitions didn’t get enough signatures. Miles Ward resigned and went to work for a conservative think-tank in Sacramento. He is getting ready to run for something now. I forget what.
The Board of Supervisors badgered Lloyd weekly about everything from overtime to the cost of dog-food for the county bloodhounds. It was their way of getting back at me through him, I think, or just a way of venting because the dam sat up there in the river, unfinished, steel re-bar sticking up like hairs. Bar Rock remained.
The Reicher Corporation filed for bankruptcy, pulling out of the site mere weeks after the 4th of July. The fish swim around the pilings. The Supervisors fish for someone to finish the god-damned thing. The environmentalists fight the Supervisors, and I send money to the environmentalists. Is anyone the wiser? No. Well, the fish, maybe. There were rumblings of the County suing Reicher and of Reicher suing the County, but neither can afford to sue the other. At Willow Creek, they’re having trouble with the turbines, so the dam really isn’t producing much electricity.
* * *
For Lloyd the Tamarack Jazz Society brought respite in the days between July 4th and October. Much of TJS’s early-autumn agenda concerned a running debate about which interpretation of “What Is This Thing Called Love?” was best. Lloyd voted for Charles Mingus’s. I have forgotten which version prevailed. I don’t care.
Lloyd and I joined the volunteer crew that helped Lordes Vestery repair her house, one badly damaged by the fire.
Lordes, now 85, had been County Treasurer many moons ago, and for many moonlit terms; when she retired, it was discovered that she had kept all county funds in a checking account, no interest. Her impeccable financial naivete represented, in one way, the ideal opposite of corrupt government even if it also displayed incompetence of a rare kind. And so it came to no one’s surprise that her house was insured for a mere five thousand dollars. Hence the need for volunteers. Myrna Lovetti often cooked spaghetti and meatballs, with the eternal sauce, for us volunteers. Gary Stad Fromm sobered up and helped pound nails. When he sweated he smelled like sweet bourbon. He kept referring to the Crusader jet as a deus ex machina. He said if he’d written it in a novel, no one would believe him. Barker Updike asked him what deus ex machina meant. Gary tried to explain several times and finally said, “It means the goddamned ending of the story is goddamned unbelievable.” Oh, said Barker. Then Barker disagreed. He said he read spy novels all the time that had stuff which wasn’t even in the realm of possibility but he believed it—because it was a novel. G.S. Fromm looked completely deflated. Not only had he allowed himself to get into a literary discussion with Barker Updike, but Barker didn’t seem to want to defer to the award-winning novelist’s expertise.
“I defer,” said Gary, “to your assessment of the novel as a form, Barker.”
“Thank you!” said Barker.
And back to work we all went, hoping someone would send down a machine to sort out all of Claytonville’s troubles.
* * *
In September Gabriel, who’d required no cosmetic surgery, announced he was going to take a break from college to play winter baseball in Mexico. We protested. He listened--and did what he damned well pleased. Our baby boy, conceived on that sultry afternoon at Willow Creek, had grown up with--I was about to say “a vengeance,” but no: He’d just grown up.
* * *
It’s been Bluestone’s policy for years to visit--as plain-clothed citizen, not badged sheriff--each of Claytonville’s two bars once a year. He encourages his deputies to follow the same policy, which springs from the idea that one or two well-timed, plain-clothed visits to the watering holes is good for community relations.
Bluestone paid a visit to Red’s in September--one of those brisk nights when the sky’s a riot of stars and every bar in the county, including Red’s, contains just a handful of customers, for the tourists all leave after Labor Day.
Carstairs Peat showed up that night. Because of the historical record, this gave Bluestone pause--until he realized that Carstairs was drinking only club-soda, and that he was “with friend.” With a special friend.
The man’s name (Larry Walker) was as ordinary as Carstairs’ was odd. This minor contrast proved to signal a larger pattern. Walker was wry, subtle, self-contained, and graceful--as over against the forced, obvious, impulsive, awkward attributes of Hizzoner.
“Happiest I’ve ever seen Carstairs,” Bluestone reported when he came home that night. “He introduced me to Larry, and I sipped my Wild Turkey at their table. Larry was having vodka martinis”—which (Lloyd did not need to add) at Red’s consisted of much chilled vodka poured into a dusty martini glass, over which the word “vermouth” was mumbled.
“Are you about to tell me what I think you’re about to tell me?” I asked Lloyd when he’d returned from Red’s.
“I guess,” Bluestone said, sleepy from the Wild Turkey and the walk home. “I wasn’t there but five minutes when I realized they were in love. I mean, in love like any old married couple in Claytonville.”
“You mean, like you and me.”
He ignored that. “Larry teased Carstairs--but without, y’know, wounding him. Carstairs kind of showed off for Larry--talking about hunting and fishing and weird trials we’ve had up here.”
“And?”
“And it was clear Carstairs was kind of displaying Larry to the home-town crowd. I mean, he bought two rounds for the whole bar. Introduced Larry to anybody who came within ten feet of the table.”
“Introduced him as. . .?”
“`My very good friend, Larry Walker.’ Larry’d blush a little. Then at one point Larry looks at me and says, `Well, Lloyd, aren’t you at least glad that Car didn’t bring the wedding album?’”
“What did you say?!” I asked Lloyd.
“You know me. Literal. I said, `You really got one?’ Larry howled. Cartairs turned red, then white, then something like yellow.”
“He calls him `Car’?”
“Yeah, anyway--`Car’ says he’s retiring after the first of the year, and Larry’s unloading his landscape business, and they’re gonna live in Monterey--when they’re not traveling.”
“How’d people in the bar react?”
“Well, you know, Larry was more at home there after an hour than Carstairs has been after thirty years. Everybody was themselves--Danny Del Ray ripped a big fart, for example.”
“--Wait. Is Carstairs selling the house?”
“No. They’re gonna turn it into a B&B and have somebody local manage it but keep the third floor just for themselves when they visit.”
“Aren’t you happy for Carstairs?”
“I’m happy he’s happy, if that’s what you mean.”
* * *
Our mothers, Betty Kjellstrom and Eileen Herrera, returned from their Alaskan cruise to tales of the 4th of July that would end all 4th of Julys, pax Juanita. My mother asked we, wasn’t I a little old to be protesting like a Hippie? Betty said she was proud of me. They both said it was just as well that Axel and Joaguin had passed on to the other side. They both wept when they heard how lucky Gabriel was to be alive. I wept, again, too.
* * *
About to retire, Old Boy Carstairs had a word with the State Attorney General, who had a word with the Governor, who appointed Laura Klein to fill out the remainder of Carstairs’ term as Superior Court Judge. Laura Klein in Tamarack County. Sheesh. Her poor Aunt New Edna Jersey—how she must worry about her niece. How long urbane Laura can stand Claytonville is anybody’s guess, but everybody’s guess is two years at the outside. There’s a betting pool based on months.
Mavis Everson, the court reporter, runs the B&B now housed in Carstairs’ behemoth Victorian; her husband does the handy-work; the kids got their braces. Myrna Lovetti cooks an Italian dinner one night a week at the cafe. G. S. Fromm’s novel shrank to one page, which he printed in a famous magazine as a serious joke. His son tried to live with him for a while, starting a rock band in Claytonville called “The Mucous Membrains [sic]” but the band and the bonding with Dad lasted just three months. G.S. is trying to stick to “beer only,” but of course it’s not working, if by “it” he means dealing with his alcoholism. No word about Wade Landers, who is in prison. Lloyd wrote a letter to the judge in Landers’ trial and suggested that Landers be sent to a medium-security state prison, as opposed to a hell-hole. The judge agreed, but Lloyd and I deliberately forgot what prison it is; we want to put Wade Landers in the past. We’ve kept in touch with Rupert Williams. I sent him a wood carving for Christmas.
* * *
Lloyd and I--quietly--have made arrangements with the Claytonville Cemetery Society (Myrna Lovetti, Chair) to build a little monument for Juanita. Lloyd will do the stone-work and help me inset a small teakwood carving encased in copper.
In spite of all the alleged increased security after 9-11, Merck sneaked into a hangar, found a flight-suit and helmet, and probably seemed so comfortable in the suit that security on the tarmac paid him no attention. He removed the blocks from behind the wheels of the F-6, which had been flown in for display purposes only, but the cockpit of which had been left open. A mobile stairway-unit sat nearby. Reuben Merck drove that over, climbed up the stairs, got in the airplane, closed the cockpit, fired `er up, and pivoted deftly away from the stairway. To the consternation, to put it mildly, of those in the control tower, he taxied and took off. Soon military jets were scrambled. They followed Merck and his F-6 over the Sierra Nevada. They made radio contact. He told them who he was and what he was—just a vet wanting one last ride in the old Crusader. They believed him, but they also had orders to shoot him down once he got past the canyon of the North Meredith and was headed toward the foothills and the Valley—over populated areas. Fortunately, the F-6 was not carrying its rockets, or they would have shot him down once he got over unpopulated mountains.
Unfortunately for Claytonville but fortunately for Mr. Merck, maybe I should say Captain Merck, the F-6 was light on fuel. Out of gas, Merck did indeed eject successfully, though he broke his left arm by hanging it up in the cockpit on the way out and broke his right ankle when he hit a pine tree on his way toward soil, in a clearing overlooking the North Meredith. Federal agents got to him first, for Sheriff Bluestone and the rest of us were busy with a conflagration.
Merck ended up in a veterans’ hospital in San Francisco, where he recuperated from his physical injuries, received new medications to help control his impulses, and was interviewed by Ron Kuwara, the baritone-voiced newspaper reporter who’d been on the courthouse steps the day Carl Kelly went after me. The old Air Force veteran himself, Barker Updike, who’d gallantly thrown himself over me when Merck’s jet flew over, read the account by Kuwara, and, not without admiration, deemed Reuben Merck “a crazy sonofabitch.”
* * *
A wood-carver, I know a bit about the mysterious conflict between what the wood will be, is capable of being, what the carver wants it to be, and what the chisels can actually achieve. With limited success, I try to apply the carving analogy to the events that summer. How many of them had to do with my will or with the will of countless others? The will of a corporation and a construction company; the will of Lloyd Bluestone, sheriff of an obscure county, and his wife, a middle-aged woman who, in her mind, had welded together the idea of a dam and the memory of a lynched woman; the will of an ambitious district attorney, a drunken foreman, a drunken logger out of work, and a drunken novelist with writer’s block; the will of honest Rupert Williams; the will of wealthy Sybil Burns, her Buffalo Gals, and the lawyer Laura Klein whom Sybil could afford to deploy; the will of Reuben Merck to fly, and of the eccentric gaggle of people, there in the middle of Claytonville, to put out a fire.
On the contrary, how much of what happened simply was to have happened? Was it in the cards that Cannon would accost Juanita, that she would stab him, that they would lynch her, and that I would end up, against all laws of averages, pregnant, married to Lloyd, a resident of Claytonville, and therefore in a position to learn the story of Juanita? And of course, “in the cards” means different things to different people. To José the phrase didn’t mean luck; you play the players, not the cards.
If I hadn’t chained myself to Bar Rock, with Rupert’s help, how much of what happened wouldn’t have happened? I asked Bluestone this, and he reminded me that the world doesn’t revolve around me. But I told him I felt responsible, in a way, for everything, including the fire. He grew impatient. He said there’s a difference between taking responsibility and behaving as if you design the world. The difference, he said, might be summed up in the contrast between Sybil Burns and Rupert Williams, or between the retired, Buddha-like deputy, Ed Porter, and the politically single-minded D.A., Miles Ward.
Chastened, I still had to wonder if my jail-mate Carl Kelley, who had kept calling me a cunt that sweltering afternoon, would have died if I hadn’t gone up to the dam-site. Would Gary Stad Fromm have made the ultimate fool of himself in the sheriff’s office?
Would my son have been shot, nearly killed? I think he wouldn’t have been shot, and I think I’ll forever be ashamed of myself for acting on an impulse and going up to Bar Rock that morning—and getting my son shot, eventually. What saved Gabriel? The blind physics of a pistol in a drunk’s hand and the trajectory of a bullet? God?
What saved Claytonville from the fire? Quick thinking? Weather patterns? Why did no one die? One woman was burned, and one man had a heart-attack. Two firemen collapsed from the heat. A volunteer nearly cut her finger off preparing sandwiches. But no one died, not even Reuben Merck, not even Barker Updike and me, just a few yards, really, beneath the screaming, pilotless jet.
Who will finish the abandoned dam? Who will care for the river besides the river?
* * *
Judge Carstairs Peat threw out the felony charge against me. Laura Klein tried to work out a reasonable plea of guilty to a misdemeanor. The plea seemed sewn up until Miles decided to try to go around Carstairs. Miles took the felony “evidence” before the Grand Jury. Since Judge Peat was the only judge Miles would likely try cases before, this disrespect seemed like ego-assisted professional suicide, but Miles’ plans for total war were strategic, not tactical: Several of his buddies started recall efforts against both Carstairs and Lloyd.
The Grand Jury refused to indict me on a Friday in September; the following Monday Peat called Miles and me into his office, got Laura on the phone in Sacramento, asked if a $250 fine for misdemeanor trespassing were acceptable (it were), and, as Ralph Grimley, mountain editor, put it (in private, not in his weekly column), “Carstairs shoved that one up Miles’ ass as far as it would go.” The recall petitions didn’t get enough signatures. Miles Ward resigned and went to work for a conservative think-tank in Sacramento. He is getting ready to run for something now. I forget what.
The Board of Supervisors badgered Lloyd weekly about everything from overtime to the cost of dog-food for the county bloodhounds. It was their way of getting back at me through him, I think, or just a way of venting because the dam sat up there in the river, unfinished, steel re-bar sticking up like hairs. Bar Rock remained.
The Reicher Corporation filed for bankruptcy, pulling out of the site mere weeks after the 4th of July. The fish swim around the pilings. The Supervisors fish for someone to finish the god-damned thing. The environmentalists fight the Supervisors, and I send money to the environmentalists. Is anyone the wiser? No. Well, the fish, maybe. There were rumblings of the County suing Reicher and of Reicher suing the County, but neither can afford to sue the other. At Willow Creek, they’re having trouble with the turbines, so the dam really isn’t producing much electricity.
* * *
For Lloyd the Tamarack Jazz Society brought respite in the days between July 4th and October. Much of TJS’s early-autumn agenda concerned a running debate about which interpretation of “What Is This Thing Called Love?” was best. Lloyd voted for Charles Mingus’s. I have forgotten which version prevailed. I don’t care.
Lloyd and I joined the volunteer crew that helped Lordes Vestery repair her house, one badly damaged by the fire.
Lordes, now 85, had been County Treasurer many moons ago, and for many moonlit terms; when she retired, it was discovered that she had kept all county funds in a checking account, no interest. Her impeccable financial naivete represented, in one way, the ideal opposite of corrupt government even if it also displayed incompetence of a rare kind. And so it came to no one’s surprise that her house was insured for a mere five thousand dollars. Hence the need for volunteers. Myrna Lovetti often cooked spaghetti and meatballs, with the eternal sauce, for us volunteers. Gary Stad Fromm sobered up and helped pound nails. When he sweated he smelled like sweet bourbon. He kept referring to the Crusader jet as a deus ex machina. He said if he’d written it in a novel, no one would believe him. Barker Updike asked him what deus ex machina meant. Gary tried to explain several times and finally said, “It means the goddamned ending of the story is goddamned unbelievable.” Oh, said Barker. Then Barker disagreed. He said he read spy novels all the time that had stuff which wasn’t even in the realm of possibility but he believed it—because it was a novel. G.S. Fromm looked completely deflated. Not only had he allowed himself to get into a literary discussion with Barker Updike, but Barker didn’t seem to want to defer to the award-winning novelist’s expertise.
“I defer,” said Gary, “to your assessment of the novel as a form, Barker.”
“Thank you!” said Barker.
And back to work we all went, hoping someone would send down a machine to sort out all of Claytonville’s troubles.
* * *
In September Gabriel, who’d required no cosmetic surgery, announced he was going to take a break from college to play winter baseball in Mexico. We protested. He listened--and did what he damned well pleased. Our baby boy, conceived on that sultry afternoon at Willow Creek, had grown up with--I was about to say “a vengeance,” but no: He’d just grown up.
* * *
It’s been Bluestone’s policy for years to visit--as plain-clothed citizen, not badged sheriff--each of Claytonville’s two bars once a year. He encourages his deputies to follow the same policy, which springs from the idea that one or two well-timed, plain-clothed visits to the watering holes is good for community relations.
Bluestone paid a visit to Red’s in September--one of those brisk nights when the sky’s a riot of stars and every bar in the county, including Red’s, contains just a handful of customers, for the tourists all leave after Labor Day.
Carstairs Peat showed up that night. Because of the historical record, this gave Bluestone pause--until he realized that Carstairs was drinking only club-soda, and that he was “with friend.” With a special friend.
The man’s name (Larry Walker) was as ordinary as Carstairs’ was odd. This minor contrast proved to signal a larger pattern. Walker was wry, subtle, self-contained, and graceful--as over against the forced, obvious, impulsive, awkward attributes of Hizzoner.
“Happiest I’ve ever seen Carstairs,” Bluestone reported when he came home that night. “He introduced me to Larry, and I sipped my Wild Turkey at their table. Larry was having vodka martinis”—which (Lloyd did not need to add) at Red’s consisted of much chilled vodka poured into a dusty martini glass, over which the word “vermouth” was mumbled.
“Are you about to tell me what I think you’re about to tell me?” I asked Lloyd when he’d returned from Red’s.
“I guess,” Bluestone said, sleepy from the Wild Turkey and the walk home. “I wasn’t there but five minutes when I realized they were in love. I mean, in love like any old married couple in Claytonville.”
“You mean, like you and me.”
He ignored that. “Larry teased Carstairs--but without, y’know, wounding him. Carstairs kind of showed off for Larry--talking about hunting and fishing and weird trials we’ve had up here.”
“And?”
“And it was clear Carstairs was kind of displaying Larry to the home-town crowd. I mean, he bought two rounds for the whole bar. Introduced Larry to anybody who came within ten feet of the table.”
“Introduced him as. . .?”
“`My very good friend, Larry Walker.’ Larry’d blush a little. Then at one point Larry looks at me and says, `Well, Lloyd, aren’t you at least glad that Car didn’t bring the wedding album?’”
“What did you say?!” I asked Lloyd.
“You know me. Literal. I said, `You really got one?’ Larry howled. Cartairs turned red, then white, then something like yellow.”
“He calls him `Car’?”
“Yeah, anyway--`Car’ says he’s retiring after the first of the year, and Larry’s unloading his landscape business, and they’re gonna live in Monterey--when they’re not traveling.”
“How’d people in the bar react?”
“Well, you know, Larry was more at home there after an hour than Carstairs has been after thirty years. Everybody was themselves--Danny Del Ray ripped a big fart, for example.”
“--Wait. Is Carstairs selling the house?”
“No. They’re gonna turn it into a B&B and have somebody local manage it but keep the third floor just for themselves when they visit.”
“Aren’t you happy for Carstairs?”
“I’m happy he’s happy, if that’s what you mean.”
* * *
Our mothers, Betty Kjellstrom and Eileen Herrera, returned from their Alaskan cruise to tales of the 4th of July that would end all 4th of Julys, pax Juanita. My mother asked we, wasn’t I a little old to be protesting like a Hippie? Betty said she was proud of me. They both said it was just as well that Axel and Joaguin had passed on to the other side. They both wept when they heard how lucky Gabriel was to be alive. I wept, again, too.
* * *
About to retire, Old Boy Carstairs had a word with the State Attorney General, who had a word with the Governor, who appointed Laura Klein to fill out the remainder of Carstairs’ term as Superior Court Judge. Laura Klein in Tamarack County. Sheesh. Her poor Aunt New Edna Jersey—how she must worry about her niece. How long urbane Laura can stand Claytonville is anybody’s guess, but everybody’s guess is two years at the outside. There’s a betting pool based on months.
Mavis Everson, the court reporter, runs the B&B now housed in Carstairs’ behemoth Victorian; her husband does the handy-work; the kids got their braces. Myrna Lovetti cooks an Italian dinner one night a week at the cafe. G. S. Fromm’s novel shrank to one page, which he printed in a famous magazine as a serious joke. His son tried to live with him for a while, starting a rock band in Claytonville called “The Mucous Membrains [sic]” but the band and the bonding with Dad lasted just three months. G.S. is trying to stick to “beer only,” but of course it’s not working, if by “it” he means dealing with his alcoholism. No word about Wade Landers, who is in prison. Lloyd wrote a letter to the judge in Landers’ trial and suggested that Landers be sent to a medium-security state prison, as opposed to a hell-hole. The judge agreed, but Lloyd and I deliberately forgot what prison it is; we want to put Wade Landers in the past. We’ve kept in touch with Rupert Williams. I sent him a wood carving for Christmas.
* * *
Lloyd and I--quietly--have made arrangements with the Claytonville Cemetery Society (Myrna Lovetti, Chair) to build a little monument for Juanita. Lloyd will do the stone-work and help me inset a small teakwood carving encased in copper.
Chapter Eighteen
I hung on to and squeezed my son so much and so hard between Loban’s vehicle and the house that Gabriel finally barked at me to leave him alone. When he got in the house, Lloyd hugged him, and both of them teared up. So did Laura and I. Rupert somehow kept his game face, although I saw him working on a biscuit especially hard. Gabe settled in and started eating. His neck was freshly bandaged.
Breakfast-talk turned to the demise of Wade Landers, Reicher’s money-woes, Judge Peat’s willingness to let me loose, and our close personal friend, the District Attorney, stocky, mustachioed, ambitious Miles Ward. Of whom Laura said,
“I almost feel sorry for him. These kids these days-- so political so early. He should be getting his trial-chops together, not messing around with corporate weasels. That can wait.”
“Enough about Miles, let’s talk about me,” I said. “Where does my case stand?”
“Considering Reicher’s red ink, Rupert’s statement, Peat’s improved mood, and so on, I’d say Ward’d be dumb to do anything but offer a misdemeanor plea. Light fine.” She waited a beat. “He’ll be extremely dumb.”
“I didn’t hear any of this,” Lloyd said, “and I’m off to work.” He said goodbye to Rupert Williams.
“Can’t you rest?” I said. “Your head . . .”.
“It’s the Fourth of July,” he said. “I got loggers, I got environmentalist, I got tourists. I got heat, and I got booze. Probably a little meth, too.”
* * *
I expected Rupert and Laura to take off then, too. Him to Lodi, her to the Buffalo Gals. But when I told them about Lloyd’s arrangements for July Fourth gab-festivities, they both said they wanted to stay in town until mid-afternoon.
It was close to noon by the time every one of the four of us--Laura, Rupert, Gabriel, and I--got ourselves put together to walk “downtown.” I tried to talk Gabe into staying home and vegging on the couch, but he said no.
I’ll always remember Laura asking, as we strolled, as she smoked, “What happened to those jets I kept hearing--not that I’m complaining or anything?” and Rupert chiming in, “Every time they went over, I liked-to jump outta my skin,” and Gabe saying, “They were just warming up for the Reno air show. They won’t come this way anymore.”
Also I felt a peace of sorts, looked forward to Sunday, the 5th, when Lloyd would be home, puttering around, and Gabe would be doing laundry, and trying to talk us into letting him to return to Reno for a baseball game (we wouldn’t let him, of course), and I’d be back in the workshop. . . . The humidity was down, my spirits up, the dam on hold.
Claytonville was clotted up but cheery--kids, dogs, tourists, and natives; a sidewalk sale underway; odors of barbecue joining the clean breeze. The first thing to be heard coming from the tinny P.A. system as we approached the flatbed-truck-platform was something about if we don’t re-center ourselves between the Sky Father and the Earth Mother . . . and then, from the crowd, you’re not even making any sense! What the hell you talking about! Soon we joined the crowd listening to speakers. The sky was bright.
Ed Porter, an absurd yet effective referee, sat in a chair on the flatbed, beneath a parasol propped up (wedged between) crates. Before him stood a large cymbal on a metal rod. He’d tap, first lightly then resoundingly, when a speaker’s five minutes were up. Brassy vibrations in July’s golden air.
If someone really tried to push the limit, Ed turned into a regular Buddy Rich. The crowd giggled. He’d smile thinly, point his drumstick at the next speaker waiting in line down by the portable steps they’d erected at the back of the flatbed. About when the line dwindled to two and Bluestone’s Speak-In looked like it would exhaust itself, two or three more people from the crowd would come out and get in line. The ratio of men to women speakers was about five to one.
Laura sidled up to me about that time--Gabe had disappeared for the moment. She’d fetched herself a Diet Pepsi from a makeshift hot-dog stand some Claytonville high-schoolers had set up at crowd’s-edge. She lit up a cigarette and gulped Pepsi. I gave the crowd a good once-over, thinking a July Forth thought: What made these creatures especially American? After all, they were out in the noonday sun--an English affliction.
They were arguing about The Land--an especially American riddle-maker. God gave us the Land: so say some. God gave us to the Land: so say others. We own it. We don’t own it. We steward it; it stewards us. It was made for you and me so we could do our manifold damnedest with our destiny. It’s inexhauible, God’s bounty. It’s unrenewable, our nest to foul. It’s doomed, it’s just fine, we know exactly what we’re doing (don’t worry), we know exactly what we’re doing (the wrong thing, but we do it anyway), we stole it, we bought it, God gave us to it/it to us/it to it/us to us, and round and round and back and over again, quarry of quandries.
In their scruffiness and gleaming-eyed righteousness, the Greens and the loggers, bikers the backwater natives were sometimes hard to distinguish from one another. There was a great deal of hair, just as there must have been in 1849.
A turn in the breeze ran some of Laura’s smoke under my nose. I coveted a sip of her Pepsi.
Then one of the little spectacles provided by mere life-itself showed that life-itself was in charge. The spectacle, I cringe to report, involved two dogs humping.
The couple in question was a black-and-tan hound (the male) and a retriever-mix (the female). Their passion was ignited at the periphery of the crowd. The female, and who can blame her, seemed ambivalent—-and put upon, not to mention set upon. While the hound thrust, staggered, and slobbered, she kept moving, walking into the crowd, which parted like the Red Sea.
The hound apparently belonged to a barrel-chested logger, who moved in to pull his charge off the female --”Mackie,” he yelled, “goddamnit, son, get off her! But a loose-limbed, pony-tailed, shirtless guy stopped him. “It’s cool with me, dude, if it’s cool with you. We don’t mind if Ribbon has pups.” Several spectators formed a human corridor. They clapped and cheered. Sybil, who had only just begun to speak from the platform, said, “Let the joy be universal.”
Mackie the male, poor devil, lost his concentration for a moment, and his penis, as pink as strawberry sherbet, disengaged. Earnestly, he remounted, his face displaying that heartbreaking canine mixture of sincerity, embarrassment, and resolve.
“Don’t tell me Lloyd arranged this distraction, too,” Laura said.
“Well, he is good with dogs, but . . .”.
Mackie finally discharged, shall we say, his duties. Ribbon seemed nothing if not relieved. The world was all before them. The crowd applauded; a truck-driver, predictably, yelled, “That’s just what the sonsabitchin’ environmentalists are trying to do to loggers!” Booing and laughter.
I said to Laura, “Now you know what we do for fun in our fair metropolis. Please join us in the spring when the trout spawn, won’t you?”
“To Ribbon,” Laura replied, toasting the air with her Pepsi can.
“Something tells me,” I said, “she won’t see a dime of child support.”
“I’ll give her my card.”
I was so relaxed, even cheery, at that moment, so glad to be out of jail and in the sunlight, that I was completely side-swiped by Sybil’s words, suddenly broadcast.
“I don’t know about all of you,” she said, “but I’d like to hear from the woman who’s the real reason we’re here today talkin’ about these issues and gettin’ our views out.” I hated the way she was dropping her g’s, all folksy and shit. “Mary? Mary Bluestone, come on up here!”
Greenies clapped, loggers and truckers booed, bikers . . . looked stoned, and I have to say I sided with the boo-birds. I didn’t particularly want to hear from me, either. But I knew I had to speak.
I was, graciously, allowed to go to the front of the line, which was represented by a grass-blade-thin young woman in a purple tank top and bluejeans. She greeted me with a smile--and an aura of body odor so massive as to be operatic and, like the aroma of alpine skunk-cabbage, not wholly unappealing. “Go get `em,” she said.
“Thanks,” I squeaked.
Out of the swamp of her b.o., I ascended the makeshift steps and hit myself with anxiety in the chest. Ed Porter rather obviously set down his drumstick, as if to say, “The clock’s off,” and Sybil engulfed me with a hug. She smelled of Chanel, of course. I stepped up to the mike and was terrified. Afraid that if I didn’t start speaking I’d never speak, I spoke.
“Well, I didn’t expect to come up here,” I said.
“Louder!” someone shouted. I moved my mouth closer to the mike. The loggers and truckers out there in the pond of listeners mostly folded their arms or slouched, whereas most of the Greenies turned their faces up to me expectantly, and the bikers . . . looked stoned. I gave it another whack.
“You know, going up there to that dam site--that was mostly a personal thing.”
“The personal is political!” a woman shouted, echoed by “Right on!”--which came, I think, from Ribbon’s owner.
“I didn’t go up there planning to cause such a stir. . . . For me”--my throat was already parched--”it’s just that --the dam never made sense. If we don’t need the electricity, why should we build the dam?” Scattered applause. “But even if we need electricity, should we be damming these small rivers? Now, I wanna say something to the truck drivers out there and the loggers. I’ve been around construction people all my life--my Dad--he built highways.” That got some applause. The Greens seemed to forgive my working-class roots. I continued. “The people from Claytonville here--you know I care about working people. Jobs.” I was sounding to myself like a politician. “And I know that if we keep building houses and using paper, we can’t very well turn around and say, ‘Don’t cut anymore trees.’”
The loggers loved that one. The Greenies looked like they’d caught a whiff of pandering. I guess they had.
“But you know, we have to work this out somehow. We tried every way possible to make our case against the dam. A reasonable case. To me it felt like, if you have the money, you can build whatever you want whenever you want it.” This perked up the Greenies. “Who does the river belong to? You? Me? Us? Reicher? I think we need to treat the river like it’s just on loan to us. Before Ed gongs me up here, I just want to say a couple more things. To the people from River Rescue and other groups, I’d say try to understand what loggers and construction people go through. They’re trying to make a living. And to the loggers and truck-drivers and such, I’d say, think about--well, generations to come. These so-called hippies and greenies--I know you don’t see eye-to-eye with them, but they’re trying to save the land and water for people not born yet. That’s not such a bad idea. To everybody, I’ll say, thanks for coming out; it’s a great day for Claytonville. Thanks.”
It’s a great day for Claytonville? I said to myself, trying not to fall off the truck. What the fuck does that mean? At least I’d sort of followed my high-school speech-teacher’s advice: “Stand up to be heard. Step down to be appreciated.”
Gabriel and Laura greeted me at the bottom of the steps. (Where Rupert had gone to, I didn’t know). From Gabe I expected a hug but got a pat on the shoulder and a “Way to go, Mom.” From Laura I expected a smart-ass remark but got a hug and a “You did fine--I expected you to bring up Juanita at some point.”
“Too complicated. History, and all that. I was awful.”
“Not awful. It reminded me of my first closing-argument--I mean the first I was paid for. When I got back to the table, the senior counsel said, `Heartfelt.’”
“Did you win that case?”
“Yes, as it happens, but not because of my closing argument. C’mon, I’ll spring for sodas, or do yousay `pop’? Mary, your lips look like chalk.”
We’d only just commenced to sidle over when a thin but cable-sinewy logger came up, brow darkened, and said quietly, “I have a question for you.”
“Okay.”
“Hear you’re a wood carver.”
“Yes.”
“So you’re saying it’s okay for you to carve wood and make a living but I can’t cut trees?” He was kind of trembly, as if he thought the question would devastate me.
“No, I’m not saying that. I’m not out to ban logging. I just think we need to be careful. I don’t think anyone should clog up a creek with stuff, whether it’s mine-tailings or logging debris. But I agree--if one group’s gonna be held accountable then all groups should be. Now, the real question is, can we get you something to drink? This is thirsty business.”
He smiled.
“Tell me where you guys are logging,” I said as we moved toward the hot-dog stand.
We got our sodas and talked for a while about where his crew was falling timber--cedars and doug-firs. Laura pulled out a cigarette for the both of them. Soon we were like old chums. His diesel-stained hands reminded me of my father’s, especially the squared-off thumbs, which Gabriel had inherited his grandfather Joaquin.
Because there was a break in the speechifying, the little crowd milled about and buzzed, then began gradually to thin out. I caught sight of a man from the Earth’s Shepherds Foundation--a well-endowed, Sierra-Club-like organization, lots more powerful than its saccharine name suggests, based in the Silicon Valley, of all places. We’d gone to ESF early in our work against the dam. They’d listened so caringly, like parents to children; had commiserated and promised to stand firm with us; had offered us auxiliary-group membership--with reduced dues: gosh!
Within thirty days we’d heard they’d sponsored legislation in Sacramento that would shore up the laws and regs keeping it easy for small hydro dams to spring up all over California. Their agenda was to make sure no more nuclear-power-plants were built. None were in the works, anyway. Our subsequent letters and phone calls to them dropped like pennies in a well.
I remembered this guy--oyster-shell specs, blue oxford shirt, chinos and penny loafers. Maybe I can’t hold my soda pop anymore, but with hardly a moment’s thought I decided to go over there and tell him off.
However, sight of Bluestone halted my progress toward Mr. ESF. Lloyd pulled up in a squad car, stopped at the edge of the thinning crowd, the sun roaring off his windshield in a molten glare. He and Andee got out, and I was about to go to them--when Barker Updike seemed to materialize out of nowhere: Barker, the Korean-War vet we’d run into up in Tamarack on our way back from Sheriff Arrests Wife.
“You sly dogs,” Barker shouted. “`I’d a-known Lloyd was really taking you to the slammer, I’d-a taken your picture, Mary!”
I smiled. “Hi, Barker. How’s things?”
“Good. Nice speech. I half-way agree with you. Which worries me.”
I was nodding and smiling and uh-huh-ing as Barker gabbed. I really wanted to slide over to Lloyd to see how he was doing.
A nagging protective urge had situated itself in my intuition.
Then Barker stopped talking. My back was to him and to the river.
I guess I’d halfway-heard the faint sound of a jet, but now I heard-heard it as Barker shaded his eyes and lifted them up over my left shoulder. I turned to follow his gaze and--there it was, a military jet, banking, heading down-canyon. Toward us.
“`Be a sum-bitch,” Barker said. “An F-6, looks like. Navy plane. Goddamn great plane. Last of the gunships. Got more kills in `Nam than the ones carryin’ rockets. Great--”
Jet-roar drowned out the rest of Barker’s elegy for ghosts of military-hardware-past. I sensed everyone was looking at the plane--and all of us there, so small in the small town, sensed what each other was sensing: Something’s not right: Too low, too slow.
The silver-gray beast labored. Its bank was arthritic. A dull pop in the sky, and I swear we all gasped, and I swear we all crouched like frightened cats. A lot of us sucked air to our toes when the plexiglass canopy--Sweet Jesus, the plane was so close to us now--peeled itself back, and the pilot shot straight up, then back, over the canyon like a vision from the Rapture, but I doubt if any one of us saw the chute open `cause the roaring, whining, smoking heap caught a last richochet of sunlight and headed straight for us. Was on us.
The kids at the hot-dog stand scattered, and Barker Updike clutched my shoulders and tried to push me toward the table--to get under it, I guess--but reflexively I resisted, looking for Lloyd, reaching for Gabe and Laura--but Lloyd was lost from sight now because of bodies running, diving under vehicles, staggering.
I looked again for Laura and Gabe, who I thought had been right beside me. They weren’t there. Now Barker yelled in my ear goddamnit, Mary, get down and I swear (we all swear, to this day) the shadow of the jet passed over us/I know for sure the shadow glided across every cowering, panicked soul/the noise of the thing was a blast shaking our bones/Barker on top of me now, his body loosely arched over my head/I didn’t have time or sense enough to squeeze my eyes shut/Remember getting a glimpse under Barker’s armpit at the plane as it somehow, some way, stayed up/Stayed up, stayed just up/above houses/
Slammed into the hillside/God the noise, God the noise/The ground shook/ it really did shudder.
The whole hillside above Claytonville seemed to take in a monstrously huge breath/Seemed to suck sense and fear not just air out of the canyon out of us/Stole one interval of time and held it/And held it/Then set it afire/The hillside exploded.
Whole huge pine trees flamed like torches/I don’t know how he did it/I don’t know how Lloyd did it/He made it from the car through a thicket of bodies/Stunned tangled-up bodies/Jumped up on the flatbed/Got to the mike/His voice--eery over the speakers:
Stay where you are, everybody. Stay still. Two firetrucks will be coming down this street--he pointed--soon, so don’t go in the street. Don’t try to drive anywhere, please. If--I say IF--we need to get people out of town, we’ll evacuate through the east side. It will be orderly. Stay calm--that’s the main thing. Don’t run.
Now we could hear the fire up there; now the town’s fire siren, situated on a derrick near the post office, began its long build-up to full-blown wail. It wailed and faded, wailed and faded for the next half-hour. It worked against the one thing on our minds: getting our wits together as the forest went up.
* * *
I’d never before been part of an event, and probably won’t be again, in which two so-different versions of Time seemed to operate both at once. It just depends on which version I look through, like a lens, when I remember all that happened.
Barker Updike looked over my shoulder into the sun--the crash, the fire. It all seemed either to move immensely slow, like an ice-flo crawling away from the North Pole, or to race, like the fire-on-the-hill itself: image overtaking image, action overtaking action, all in an incendiary rush.
Slow: I see faces of firemen on the truck. Grim, they seem to float. The grim faces float through town. I see the faces. . . . Near Bluestone’s car (the town-siren is wailing), I lift my hand to brush my hair off my brow, and the gesture . . . the gesture . . . seems to take forever, I feel the collective will of the crowd, the will to do something now--run, shout, fight the fire--but Bluestone holds back the will with his will, his focus, his relentless intent. I see his dusty boots, anchored to the bedrock beneath the town. I see flames, huge flames, mad-drunk with tree-sap and wood-fiber; sometimes they move so slowly, so gracefully, like dancers; strange physics of fire. . . . .
Fast: the hill above town ablaze, instantly a serious fire, murderous force-- bewildering, completely itself; the red volunteer-fire-department engines, quaint, even pitiful, steamed down main street (gears grinding), up the hill, disappearing right and up, along a backroad, volunteer firemen trotting after trucks, Mike Cussler on Lloyd’s orders following in a patrol car, his mission--paradoxically but sensibly--to tell the townsmen to slow down up there, to not attack the fire without a clear plan--and escape routes). Just try to keep it off the houses.
Loggers, Greenies, bikers, tourists, and all the rest congregated at Bluestone’s patrol car, where he drew a big makeshift map on a piece of butcher’s paper somebody had produced. His deliberateness, the crowd’s traumatized silence: both were eery in contrast to the noise and tangle of people around the storefronts. We heard the fire eating trees and brush like a massive animal.
Bluestone . . .identified and dispatched three men with “heavy equipment” (bull-dozer, loader, etc.) to a ridge-road above town accessible by looping around the other end of Claytonville; gave them a two-fold task: stay alive but try to cut the ridge road even wider. Everybody broke off into little commando units then, with minimal fuss--Andee Munro went up to close the west end of town to incoming traffic, Ed Porter went to close the east end to incomers but keep open the right lane, a couple groups made their way to houses just below the ridge to help people soak their yards and rooves and gather belongings and dogs and cats, others (with Sybil in charge) set up a place to tend to firefighters who’d be coming off the hill exhausted and smoke-choked if not more seriously injured, and still others (Gabe and Rupert and I among them) grabbed shovels and pick-axes and made our way up to the fire. The wall of heat rose collossaly.
Novelist G.S. Fromm and the D.A. never showed their faces or bowed their backs. Tom Crimpton, in his big boat of an old Chevy Impala station wagon, went around gathering up stray, scared, spooked dogs and cats.
Bluestone called the Forest Service office in Plumas County and told them to send a helicopter with a canister-on-a-cable (to transfer water from the river and dump it on the fire) and crop-duster planes loaded with fire-retardant. When they began to quiz him, as a Bureaucracy must, he repeated his request and hung up, cursing. But the helicopter and planes showed up eventually and made sure the fire was knocked down, and a Forest Service crew came, too, to work the perimeter of the fire, keep it off the houses.
And the day and its daylight seemed then to evaporate, and the fire-break worked, and houses were saved, and we were mopping up little fires into the night, our faces painted with ash and sweat, our bodies moving like shadows of primitive people against the flames and weird fire-and-smoke-shadows, and we took breaks and came off the hill and got water and food but had inexhaustible manic reservoirs of adrenalin and gab, and people started playing music on the flatbed, one Greenie playing a guitar, accompanied by a logger on banjo and a biker on harmonica, folk songs and hill-billy songs and Grateful Dead songs and Johnny Cash songs coming over the cheap speakers, filtering into strange, volcanic light and night-air, the helicopter now parked and silent in the middle of town, and people finally starting to relax enough to laugh and count blessings and say over and over again to each other to no one to themselves how amazing it was no one was killed, and only a few houses damaged, and wasn’t it lucky the wind didn’t pick up, and Bluestone was sure right about the fire break, and God, what if the wind had picked up? and then I was dancing with Gabriel and Rupert was up on the flatbed singing a Bo Diddley (and if that diamond rrrang don’t shy-yine) song and Laura was drinking Jack Daniels from the bottle with a biker and Carstairs Peat had his sleeves rolled up, spooning beans onto paper plates and Sybil actually had to lie down, she lay right down on a pallet, Buffalo Gals tending to her exhaustion, a scene from a seraglio, and somehow the sound of the river seemed to rise as the fire died and the moon rose and somehow we’d come out all right and Bluestone tapped me on the shoulder and cut in and danced with me and bandaged Gabe danced, impossibly!, with black-clad Myrna Lovetti and we’d come out all right somehow and I remember the water in the shower black with ash and I remember falling onto the cool sheets and holding Bluestone and falling asleep before I knew I’d (somehow) fallen (we’d come out) asleep (all right): secure.
Breakfast-talk turned to the demise of Wade Landers, Reicher’s money-woes, Judge Peat’s willingness to let me loose, and our close personal friend, the District Attorney, stocky, mustachioed, ambitious Miles Ward. Of whom Laura said,
“I almost feel sorry for him. These kids these days-- so political so early. He should be getting his trial-chops together, not messing around with corporate weasels. That can wait.”
“Enough about Miles, let’s talk about me,” I said. “Where does my case stand?”
“Considering Reicher’s red ink, Rupert’s statement, Peat’s improved mood, and so on, I’d say Ward’d be dumb to do anything but offer a misdemeanor plea. Light fine.” She waited a beat. “He’ll be extremely dumb.”
“I didn’t hear any of this,” Lloyd said, “and I’m off to work.” He said goodbye to Rupert Williams.
“Can’t you rest?” I said. “Your head . . .”.
“It’s the Fourth of July,” he said. “I got loggers, I got environmentalist, I got tourists. I got heat, and I got booze. Probably a little meth, too.”
* * *
I expected Rupert and Laura to take off then, too. Him to Lodi, her to the Buffalo Gals. But when I told them about Lloyd’s arrangements for July Fourth gab-festivities, they both said they wanted to stay in town until mid-afternoon.
It was close to noon by the time every one of the four of us--Laura, Rupert, Gabriel, and I--got ourselves put together to walk “downtown.” I tried to talk Gabe into staying home and vegging on the couch, but he said no.
I’ll always remember Laura asking, as we strolled, as she smoked, “What happened to those jets I kept hearing--not that I’m complaining or anything?” and Rupert chiming in, “Every time they went over, I liked-to jump outta my skin,” and Gabe saying, “They were just warming up for the Reno air show. They won’t come this way anymore.”
Also I felt a peace of sorts, looked forward to Sunday, the 5th, when Lloyd would be home, puttering around, and Gabe would be doing laundry, and trying to talk us into letting him to return to Reno for a baseball game (we wouldn’t let him, of course), and I’d be back in the workshop. . . . The humidity was down, my spirits up, the dam on hold.
Claytonville was clotted up but cheery--kids, dogs, tourists, and natives; a sidewalk sale underway; odors of barbecue joining the clean breeze. The first thing to be heard coming from the tinny P.A. system as we approached the flatbed-truck-platform was something about if we don’t re-center ourselves between the Sky Father and the Earth Mother . . . and then, from the crowd, you’re not even making any sense! What the hell you talking about! Soon we joined the crowd listening to speakers. The sky was bright.
Ed Porter, an absurd yet effective referee, sat in a chair on the flatbed, beneath a parasol propped up (wedged between) crates. Before him stood a large cymbal on a metal rod. He’d tap, first lightly then resoundingly, when a speaker’s five minutes were up. Brassy vibrations in July’s golden air.
If someone really tried to push the limit, Ed turned into a regular Buddy Rich. The crowd giggled. He’d smile thinly, point his drumstick at the next speaker waiting in line down by the portable steps they’d erected at the back of the flatbed. About when the line dwindled to two and Bluestone’s Speak-In looked like it would exhaust itself, two or three more people from the crowd would come out and get in line. The ratio of men to women speakers was about five to one.
Laura sidled up to me about that time--Gabe had disappeared for the moment. She’d fetched herself a Diet Pepsi from a makeshift hot-dog stand some Claytonville high-schoolers had set up at crowd’s-edge. She lit up a cigarette and gulped Pepsi. I gave the crowd a good once-over, thinking a July Forth thought: What made these creatures especially American? After all, they were out in the noonday sun--an English affliction.
They were arguing about The Land--an especially American riddle-maker. God gave us the Land: so say some. God gave us to the Land: so say others. We own it. We don’t own it. We steward it; it stewards us. It was made for you and me so we could do our manifold damnedest with our destiny. It’s inexhauible, God’s bounty. It’s unrenewable, our nest to foul. It’s doomed, it’s just fine, we know exactly what we’re doing (don’t worry), we know exactly what we’re doing (the wrong thing, but we do it anyway), we stole it, we bought it, God gave us to it/it to us/it to it/us to us, and round and round and back and over again, quarry of quandries.
In their scruffiness and gleaming-eyed righteousness, the Greens and the loggers, bikers the backwater natives were sometimes hard to distinguish from one another. There was a great deal of hair, just as there must have been in 1849.
A turn in the breeze ran some of Laura’s smoke under my nose. I coveted a sip of her Pepsi.
Then one of the little spectacles provided by mere life-itself showed that life-itself was in charge. The spectacle, I cringe to report, involved two dogs humping.
The couple in question was a black-and-tan hound (the male) and a retriever-mix (the female). Their passion was ignited at the periphery of the crowd. The female, and who can blame her, seemed ambivalent—-and put upon, not to mention set upon. While the hound thrust, staggered, and slobbered, she kept moving, walking into the crowd, which parted like the Red Sea.
The hound apparently belonged to a barrel-chested logger, who moved in to pull his charge off the female --”Mackie,” he yelled, “goddamnit, son, get off her! But a loose-limbed, pony-tailed, shirtless guy stopped him. “It’s cool with me, dude, if it’s cool with you. We don’t mind if Ribbon has pups.” Several spectators formed a human corridor. They clapped and cheered. Sybil, who had only just begun to speak from the platform, said, “Let the joy be universal.”
Mackie the male, poor devil, lost his concentration for a moment, and his penis, as pink as strawberry sherbet, disengaged. Earnestly, he remounted, his face displaying that heartbreaking canine mixture of sincerity, embarrassment, and resolve.
“Don’t tell me Lloyd arranged this distraction, too,” Laura said.
“Well, he is good with dogs, but . . .”.
Mackie finally discharged, shall we say, his duties. Ribbon seemed nothing if not relieved. The world was all before them. The crowd applauded; a truck-driver, predictably, yelled, “That’s just what the sonsabitchin’ environmentalists are trying to do to loggers!” Booing and laughter.
I said to Laura, “Now you know what we do for fun in our fair metropolis. Please join us in the spring when the trout spawn, won’t you?”
“To Ribbon,” Laura replied, toasting the air with her Pepsi can.
“Something tells me,” I said, “she won’t see a dime of child support.”
“I’ll give her my card.”
I was so relaxed, even cheery, at that moment, so glad to be out of jail and in the sunlight, that I was completely side-swiped by Sybil’s words, suddenly broadcast.
“I don’t know about all of you,” she said, “but I’d like to hear from the woman who’s the real reason we’re here today talkin’ about these issues and gettin’ our views out.” I hated the way she was dropping her g’s, all folksy and shit. “Mary? Mary Bluestone, come on up here!”
Greenies clapped, loggers and truckers booed, bikers . . . looked stoned, and I have to say I sided with the boo-birds. I didn’t particularly want to hear from me, either. But I knew I had to speak.
I was, graciously, allowed to go to the front of the line, which was represented by a grass-blade-thin young woman in a purple tank top and bluejeans. She greeted me with a smile--and an aura of body odor so massive as to be operatic and, like the aroma of alpine skunk-cabbage, not wholly unappealing. “Go get `em,” she said.
“Thanks,” I squeaked.
Out of the swamp of her b.o., I ascended the makeshift steps and hit myself with anxiety in the chest. Ed Porter rather obviously set down his drumstick, as if to say, “The clock’s off,” and Sybil engulfed me with a hug. She smelled of Chanel, of course. I stepped up to the mike and was terrified. Afraid that if I didn’t start speaking I’d never speak, I spoke.
“Well, I didn’t expect to come up here,” I said.
“Louder!” someone shouted. I moved my mouth closer to the mike. The loggers and truckers out there in the pond of listeners mostly folded their arms or slouched, whereas most of the Greenies turned their faces up to me expectantly, and the bikers . . . looked stoned. I gave it another whack.
“You know, going up there to that dam site--that was mostly a personal thing.”
“The personal is political!” a woman shouted, echoed by “Right on!”--which came, I think, from Ribbon’s owner.
“I didn’t go up there planning to cause such a stir. . . . For me”--my throat was already parched--”it’s just that --the dam never made sense. If we don’t need the electricity, why should we build the dam?” Scattered applause. “But even if we need electricity, should we be damming these small rivers? Now, I wanna say something to the truck drivers out there and the loggers. I’ve been around construction people all my life--my Dad--he built highways.” That got some applause. The Greens seemed to forgive my working-class roots. I continued. “The people from Claytonville here--you know I care about working people. Jobs.” I was sounding to myself like a politician. “And I know that if we keep building houses and using paper, we can’t very well turn around and say, ‘Don’t cut anymore trees.’”
The loggers loved that one. The Greenies looked like they’d caught a whiff of pandering. I guess they had.
“But you know, we have to work this out somehow. We tried every way possible to make our case against the dam. A reasonable case. To me it felt like, if you have the money, you can build whatever you want whenever you want it.” This perked up the Greenies. “Who does the river belong to? You? Me? Us? Reicher? I think we need to treat the river like it’s just on loan to us. Before Ed gongs me up here, I just want to say a couple more things. To the people from River Rescue and other groups, I’d say try to understand what loggers and construction people go through. They’re trying to make a living. And to the loggers and truck-drivers and such, I’d say, think about--well, generations to come. These so-called hippies and greenies--I know you don’t see eye-to-eye with them, but they’re trying to save the land and water for people not born yet. That’s not such a bad idea. To everybody, I’ll say, thanks for coming out; it’s a great day for Claytonville. Thanks.”
It’s a great day for Claytonville? I said to myself, trying not to fall off the truck. What the fuck does that mean? At least I’d sort of followed my high-school speech-teacher’s advice: “Stand up to be heard. Step down to be appreciated.”
Gabriel and Laura greeted me at the bottom of the steps. (Where Rupert had gone to, I didn’t know). From Gabe I expected a hug but got a pat on the shoulder and a “Way to go, Mom.” From Laura I expected a smart-ass remark but got a hug and a “You did fine--I expected you to bring up Juanita at some point.”
“Too complicated. History, and all that. I was awful.”
“Not awful. It reminded me of my first closing-argument--I mean the first I was paid for. When I got back to the table, the senior counsel said, `Heartfelt.’”
“Did you win that case?”
“Yes, as it happens, but not because of my closing argument. C’mon, I’ll spring for sodas, or do yousay `pop’? Mary, your lips look like chalk.”
We’d only just commenced to sidle over when a thin but cable-sinewy logger came up, brow darkened, and said quietly, “I have a question for you.”
“Okay.”
“Hear you’re a wood carver.”
“Yes.”
“So you’re saying it’s okay for you to carve wood and make a living but I can’t cut trees?” He was kind of trembly, as if he thought the question would devastate me.
“No, I’m not saying that. I’m not out to ban logging. I just think we need to be careful. I don’t think anyone should clog up a creek with stuff, whether it’s mine-tailings or logging debris. But I agree--if one group’s gonna be held accountable then all groups should be. Now, the real question is, can we get you something to drink? This is thirsty business.”
He smiled.
“Tell me where you guys are logging,” I said as we moved toward the hot-dog stand.
We got our sodas and talked for a while about where his crew was falling timber--cedars and doug-firs. Laura pulled out a cigarette for the both of them. Soon we were like old chums. His diesel-stained hands reminded me of my father’s, especially the squared-off thumbs, which Gabriel had inherited his grandfather Joaquin.
Because there was a break in the speechifying, the little crowd milled about and buzzed, then began gradually to thin out. I caught sight of a man from the Earth’s Shepherds Foundation--a well-endowed, Sierra-Club-like organization, lots more powerful than its saccharine name suggests, based in the Silicon Valley, of all places. We’d gone to ESF early in our work against the dam. They’d listened so caringly, like parents to children; had commiserated and promised to stand firm with us; had offered us auxiliary-group membership--with reduced dues: gosh!
Within thirty days we’d heard they’d sponsored legislation in Sacramento that would shore up the laws and regs keeping it easy for small hydro dams to spring up all over California. Their agenda was to make sure no more nuclear-power-plants were built. None were in the works, anyway. Our subsequent letters and phone calls to them dropped like pennies in a well.
I remembered this guy--oyster-shell specs, blue oxford shirt, chinos and penny loafers. Maybe I can’t hold my soda pop anymore, but with hardly a moment’s thought I decided to go over there and tell him off.
However, sight of Bluestone halted my progress toward Mr. ESF. Lloyd pulled up in a squad car, stopped at the edge of the thinning crowd, the sun roaring off his windshield in a molten glare. He and Andee got out, and I was about to go to them--when Barker Updike seemed to materialize out of nowhere: Barker, the Korean-War vet we’d run into up in Tamarack on our way back from Sheriff Arrests Wife.
“You sly dogs,” Barker shouted. “`I’d a-known Lloyd was really taking you to the slammer, I’d-a taken your picture, Mary!”
I smiled. “Hi, Barker. How’s things?”
“Good. Nice speech. I half-way agree with you. Which worries me.”
I was nodding and smiling and uh-huh-ing as Barker gabbed. I really wanted to slide over to Lloyd to see how he was doing.
A nagging protective urge had situated itself in my intuition.
Then Barker stopped talking. My back was to him and to the river.
I guess I’d halfway-heard the faint sound of a jet, but now I heard-heard it as Barker shaded his eyes and lifted them up over my left shoulder. I turned to follow his gaze and--there it was, a military jet, banking, heading down-canyon. Toward us.
“`Be a sum-bitch,” Barker said. “An F-6, looks like. Navy plane. Goddamn great plane. Last of the gunships. Got more kills in `Nam than the ones carryin’ rockets. Great--”
Jet-roar drowned out the rest of Barker’s elegy for ghosts of military-hardware-past. I sensed everyone was looking at the plane--and all of us there, so small in the small town, sensed what each other was sensing: Something’s not right: Too low, too slow.
The silver-gray beast labored. Its bank was arthritic. A dull pop in the sky, and I swear we all gasped, and I swear we all crouched like frightened cats. A lot of us sucked air to our toes when the plexiglass canopy--Sweet Jesus, the plane was so close to us now--peeled itself back, and the pilot shot straight up, then back, over the canyon like a vision from the Rapture, but I doubt if any one of us saw the chute open `cause the roaring, whining, smoking heap caught a last richochet of sunlight and headed straight for us. Was on us.
The kids at the hot-dog stand scattered, and Barker Updike clutched my shoulders and tried to push me toward the table--to get under it, I guess--but reflexively I resisted, looking for Lloyd, reaching for Gabe and Laura--but Lloyd was lost from sight now because of bodies running, diving under vehicles, staggering.
I looked again for Laura and Gabe, who I thought had been right beside me. They weren’t there. Now Barker yelled in my ear goddamnit, Mary, get down and I swear (we all swear, to this day) the shadow of the jet passed over us/I know for sure the shadow glided across every cowering, panicked soul/the noise of the thing was a blast shaking our bones/Barker on top of me now, his body loosely arched over my head/I didn’t have time or sense enough to squeeze my eyes shut/Remember getting a glimpse under Barker’s armpit at the plane as it somehow, some way, stayed up/Stayed up, stayed just up/above houses/
Slammed into the hillside/God the noise, God the noise/The ground shook/ it really did shudder.
The whole hillside above Claytonville seemed to take in a monstrously huge breath/Seemed to suck sense and fear not just air out of the canyon out of us/Stole one interval of time and held it/And held it/Then set it afire/The hillside exploded.
Whole huge pine trees flamed like torches/I don’t know how he did it/I don’t know how Lloyd did it/He made it from the car through a thicket of bodies/Stunned tangled-up bodies/Jumped up on the flatbed/Got to the mike/His voice--eery over the speakers:
Stay where you are, everybody. Stay still. Two firetrucks will be coming down this street--he pointed--soon, so don’t go in the street. Don’t try to drive anywhere, please. If--I say IF--we need to get people out of town, we’ll evacuate through the east side. It will be orderly. Stay calm--that’s the main thing. Don’t run.
Now we could hear the fire up there; now the town’s fire siren, situated on a derrick near the post office, began its long build-up to full-blown wail. It wailed and faded, wailed and faded for the next half-hour. It worked against the one thing on our minds: getting our wits together as the forest went up.
* * *
I’d never before been part of an event, and probably won’t be again, in which two so-different versions of Time seemed to operate both at once. It just depends on which version I look through, like a lens, when I remember all that happened.
Barker Updike looked over my shoulder into the sun--the crash, the fire. It all seemed either to move immensely slow, like an ice-flo crawling away from the North Pole, or to race, like the fire-on-the-hill itself: image overtaking image, action overtaking action, all in an incendiary rush.
Slow: I see faces of firemen on the truck. Grim, they seem to float. The grim faces float through town. I see the faces. . . . Near Bluestone’s car (the town-siren is wailing), I lift my hand to brush my hair off my brow, and the gesture . . . the gesture . . . seems to take forever, I feel the collective will of the crowd, the will to do something now--run, shout, fight the fire--but Bluestone holds back the will with his will, his focus, his relentless intent. I see his dusty boots, anchored to the bedrock beneath the town. I see flames, huge flames, mad-drunk with tree-sap and wood-fiber; sometimes they move so slowly, so gracefully, like dancers; strange physics of fire. . . . .
Fast: the hill above town ablaze, instantly a serious fire, murderous force-- bewildering, completely itself; the red volunteer-fire-department engines, quaint, even pitiful, steamed down main street (gears grinding), up the hill, disappearing right and up, along a backroad, volunteer firemen trotting after trucks, Mike Cussler on Lloyd’s orders following in a patrol car, his mission--paradoxically but sensibly--to tell the townsmen to slow down up there, to not attack the fire without a clear plan--and escape routes). Just try to keep it off the houses.
Loggers, Greenies, bikers, tourists, and all the rest congregated at Bluestone’s patrol car, where he drew a big makeshift map on a piece of butcher’s paper somebody had produced. His deliberateness, the crowd’s traumatized silence: both were eery in contrast to the noise and tangle of people around the storefronts. We heard the fire eating trees and brush like a massive animal.
Bluestone . . .identified and dispatched three men with “heavy equipment” (bull-dozer, loader, etc.) to a ridge-road above town accessible by looping around the other end of Claytonville; gave them a two-fold task: stay alive but try to cut the ridge road even wider. Everybody broke off into little commando units then, with minimal fuss--Andee Munro went up to close the west end of town to incoming traffic, Ed Porter went to close the east end to incomers but keep open the right lane, a couple groups made their way to houses just below the ridge to help people soak their yards and rooves and gather belongings and dogs and cats, others (with Sybil in charge) set up a place to tend to firefighters who’d be coming off the hill exhausted and smoke-choked if not more seriously injured, and still others (Gabe and Rupert and I among them) grabbed shovels and pick-axes and made our way up to the fire. The wall of heat rose collossaly.
Novelist G.S. Fromm and the D.A. never showed their faces or bowed their backs. Tom Crimpton, in his big boat of an old Chevy Impala station wagon, went around gathering up stray, scared, spooked dogs and cats.
Bluestone called the Forest Service office in Plumas County and told them to send a helicopter with a canister-on-a-cable (to transfer water from the river and dump it on the fire) and crop-duster planes loaded with fire-retardant. When they began to quiz him, as a Bureaucracy must, he repeated his request and hung up, cursing. But the helicopter and planes showed up eventually and made sure the fire was knocked down, and a Forest Service crew came, too, to work the perimeter of the fire, keep it off the houses.
And the day and its daylight seemed then to evaporate, and the fire-break worked, and houses were saved, and we were mopping up little fires into the night, our faces painted with ash and sweat, our bodies moving like shadows of primitive people against the flames and weird fire-and-smoke-shadows, and we took breaks and came off the hill and got water and food but had inexhaustible manic reservoirs of adrenalin and gab, and people started playing music on the flatbed, one Greenie playing a guitar, accompanied by a logger on banjo and a biker on harmonica, folk songs and hill-billy songs and Grateful Dead songs and Johnny Cash songs coming over the cheap speakers, filtering into strange, volcanic light and night-air, the helicopter now parked and silent in the middle of town, and people finally starting to relax enough to laugh and count blessings and say over and over again to each other to no one to themselves how amazing it was no one was killed, and only a few houses damaged, and wasn’t it lucky the wind didn’t pick up, and Bluestone was sure right about the fire break, and God, what if the wind had picked up? and then I was dancing with Gabriel and Rupert was up on the flatbed singing a Bo Diddley (and if that diamond rrrang don’t shy-yine) song and Laura was drinking Jack Daniels from the bottle with a biker and Carstairs Peat had his sleeves rolled up, spooning beans onto paper plates and Sybil actually had to lie down, she lay right down on a pallet, Buffalo Gals tending to her exhaustion, a scene from a seraglio, and somehow the sound of the river seemed to rise as the fire died and the moon rose and somehow we’d come out all right and Bluestone tapped me on the shoulder and cut in and danced with me and bandaged Gabe danced, impossibly!, with black-clad Myrna Lovetti and we’d come out all right somehow and I remember the water in the shower black with ash and I remember falling onto the cool sheets and holding Bluestone and falling asleep before I knew I’d (somehow) fallen (we’d come out) asleep (all right): secure.
Chapter Seventeen
While Rupert wrote—in block-print—his report, Bluestone hauled me into his cubicle and had me get on another phone as he rang Judge Peat’s house, catching the Judge on ring three, and broaching within moments the subject of my release. Lloyd’s tone was taut. He wasn’t used to asking for favors. And of course there was the history between him and Peat.
He told Judge Peat about the dust-up at the dam—Gabe and Landers shot, Lloyd battered.
Lloyd told of the brewing hubbub downtown, said he might need jail-space, promised I wouldn’t leave town, let alone the county. He discussed Rupert Williams’ statement.
Though I’d announced my presence on the other line, Carstairs spoke as if I weren’t there. He took on a courthouse-insider’s tone as he and Lloyd conversed.
He seemed to have company—-there were sounds of elaborate cooking in the background: sizzling, chopping, running of water, clanging of pots. The questions were few and terse from Hizzoner. Bluestone answered briskly.
“Sheriff,” Carstairs intoned, suddenly stagy, “your reasoning is entirely persuasive and characteristically pragmatic. I shall dictate a letter releasing Mary on her own recognizance for . . . seventy-two hours--but stipulating that she shall remain within town limits. And let me call Mr. Miles Ward, our D.A.”
Bluestone and I said, “Thanks, Judge,” in unison.
“You two have as restful a weekend as you can. Gabe is all right, you say?”
“Yes, Judge,” I said.
“You two are amusing me with this `Judge’ business. It’s usually `Carstairs.’ Take care.”
“Same to you, Judge,” Lloyd said.
We were about to ring off when Carstairs added, “Miles will not be amused by all of this, Sheriff.”
“I know, Judge.”
“There may be Hell to pay.”
“There’s always Hell to pay,” Lloyd said.
“Yes, isn’t there?”
End of conversation.
“You two sound so chummy,” I told Lloyd.
“Bunk.”
“You’d never know you once arrested the guy.”
“Yes, you would. Now get outta here--you’re free--on your own reconnaissance or whatever the shit that is.”
“Recognizance,” Ed Porter murmured.
Lloyd, out of the cubicle now, said, “Okay, Mr. Williams, I’ll take that statement, if it’s signed. Mary, take Mr. Williams--”
“Rupert,” Mr. Williams insisted.
“--Rupert--up home and make him comfortable.”
“You need to come home, too,” I said. “You were in a fight, you’re cut, and you’re exhausted.”
“No, Ed and I have something to do.”
Ed’s eyebrows raised.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“None of your business.”
“Tell me.”
“No.”
Rupert shrugged at me as if to say, Well, we kept our secret from him, after all.
* * *
Thus was I dungeon-sprung into lengthening shadows of July 3.
Rupert fetched some clothes, etc., from his pickup, which we advised him to leave near the courthouse. We set off across town.
Sybil had spoken truly: vehicular icons--log-trucks, with hauling parts unhitched and stacked over the cabs, and old mini-vans with curtains and lots of bumper stickers--had accumulated in Claytonville’s middle. Most of the owners seemed to have dispersed.
Rupert and I turned to make our way toward the wooden sidewalks of the “business” district—-and saw Haskins’ CHP car heading up the gradual grade and out the western side of town. Rupert and I were no doubt thinking the same thing, wondering if Wade Landers had made it alive to a hospital in Reno.
The tourists, as usual, looked tired, bewildered, hungry--anything but happy about vacating. Seeing them always made me wonder why more of them didn’t just stay “down below,” as we provincials refer to urban and suburban California.
Calculating the self-consciousness per yard, I swear it was the longest walk of my life, because who didn’t I see? Their hellos were slathered in meaning; their glances at Rupert the Black Man and me the orange-jumpsuited-one lingered on him and me like our own perspiration; the faces of some of my townsmen-and-women were often taut and grave, the most efficient small-town way of silently saying what I’d done at Bar Rock was out of bounds—and who are you, Mary Bluestone, who we thought we knew all these years?
We passed the one short street of shops, the post office, the lumber yard, headed up the mild hill along the North Meredith River . . . home . . . .
Got Rupert settled. Made him a sandwich, poured him a beer, read “nap” all over the report of his face and told him to go for it and showed him his guest room.
Took a shower, put on real clothes.
Went out back, saw what I knew I’d see--Bluestone hadn’t had the time to water or weed the vegetable garden, which I didn’t have the energy to water or weed, which would soon be fried.
Avoided going out into the workshop. Once out there, I’d never come back. In one way I wanted to carve, but in another the image of myself picking up a chisel depressed me, no end. Didn’t know why, didn’t want to probe the why.
Began to muck out the house:
The effect of Lloyd and Gabe on the house (of most men on most houses?) had been flood-like. Eddies of debris had formed. Things had been lifted, as if buoyed by a slow influx. What had been low, such as magazines on coffee tables, had been moved to a higher plane--countertops, windowsills, backs of chairs. What had been high--dishes, glassware, opened cans of food, cereal boxes--had sunk. Most of the mess was waist-high, that level at which men can work on stuff quickly, like bears, and leave it, sniffing and snuffling it out later when they return in hunger or befuddlement.
Got some laundry going.
Began cooking. Tried to keep my mind off Gabe lying over there in the clinic.
Realized, while cooking, that I hadn’t heard a jet rip across the sky since . . . when? Because of the air-show in Reno on the 4th, the frequency of jets usually increased on the 3rd.
Answered the door: And there stood my attorney Laura Klein, who didn’t like saying what she was saying, which was that Sybil had told her to stay with us one night and then come up to the Buffalo Gals’ Encampment; and which also was that she’d gotten to Sacramento, found that one of the legal aids had goofed up a batch of documents for another case, discovered that an old flame whom she emphatically did not want to fuel was in town and wanting to see her, and realized, with mortification, that something previously unthinkable had happened: Tamarack County suddenly seemed appealing.
I welcomed her warmly, told her she could find plenty of privacy in a den, where we had an extra bed (Rupert was in the guest-bedroom), found her towels and showed her the guest bathroom, told her to wash off the travel-dust, and--like Rupert--enjoy a precious gift presented to humankind, a nap. Told her a Mexicali smorgasbord, so to speak, of victuals would be ready for her and for all when she woke.
Laura had heard already from Sybil that Carstairs had let me out. Laura was too exhausted to be surprised, but not too exhausted to be amused. She found the bathroom, then the den, and collapsed.
I poured myself a glass of Merlot, went outside, listened to and looked at the river. I worried terribly about Gabe. Resisted calling Doc Loban’s clinic. Resisted calling the sheriff’s office to yell at Lloyd, Come home! Tried to calm myself. Sipped Merlot. Tried to process everything that had happened. Couldn’t. Sipped more Merlot. Hoped my house-guests wouldn’t want to come out and chat just yet. I knew that after dinner, I probably couldn’t keep myself from visiting Gabe once more.
I looked at and listened to the river. The blessed river.
Concluded that jail is bad and home is good, that Gabriel and Bluestone alive meant everything.
Claytonville Cemetery lies north of town. Like most actual “boot hills,” it’s where it is not because of gothic ambience but a mundane concern--drainage. It’s bad business to bury the dead in a hollow, a ravine, or a flat. Let souls go where they may, if not where they will, but bury their fleshly temples in firm, high ground.
In this case, ground over which black oaks and poised cedars preside, their deep root systems grasping, embracing, our entombments.
The oldest marked graves in the cemetery date from the early 1860s. The names include standard-issue Anglo-Saxon ones(Smith, Wilson). Also there are Cornish, Italian, German, and Swedish names. Of all the Chinese who moved through the Sierra Nevada--building flumes, cutting roads, laying rails, and doing other brutal work--only one secured a marked gravesite in Claytonville Cemetery. The stone reports only his nickname--“China Ralph”. Not dates. In vain I’ve searched for Hispanic family names there. None.
The infants’ headstones murmur implicit tales of diphtheria and whooping cough, influenza, cholera, pneumonia, and polio.
One miniature Washington’s-monument marks an empty tomb, so to speak, of twenty-three miners killed in the awful Bourbon Ridge Mine cave-in, 1903; once everybody knew no one could have survived, the fatal tunnel was sealed. To think of the bones still down there in the mine-tunnel cools the living marrow.
Axel Kjellstrom, Lloyd’s father in adoptive deed if not in biological fact, is buried in Claytonville Cemetery, was buried there on a hard February afternoon. North Wind raked the canyon. His stone reads simply, “Axel Kjellstrom,” with the dates, followed by “Stone Mason.” He lies next to Bryce Wyrdell, an eccentric’s eccentric, whose stone gives the name and the dates, followed by “I didn’t ask to be born.” Axel loathed Bryce for never working but also loved the man’s unapologetic dislike of life and the living; for some reason misanthropy lifted Axel’s spirits.
Who knows how many cups of coffee they slurped at the cafe, winters, when Axel might take a couple weeks off to let his cracked hands heal? He’d take young Lloyd with him, set the boy up at the counter for a piece of pie and a glass of milk, then go to Bryce’s table, where a misanthropic rant would already be at gale force. If only Bryce had worked, had done something with his hands, he and Axel would have been friends, not perpetual acquaintances.
We can’t see the cemetery from our house; a patch of woods blocks the view. Still we feel as though we’re connected to the graveyard, not just because we knew many of the residents when they were above ground, but also because when coyotes lope by our house, as they often do, they’re coming from or going to the cemetery. Nothing Transylvanian about this. It’s just the way the trails seem to be laid out, according to requirements of coyote commerce.
* * *
Thus graves were on my mind the morning of July 4, when I got up before everyone else and took a cup of coffee outside and savored the air. I looked hard across the river to a hill above Claytonville. It’s furnished chiefly with madrona trees. It’s ground in which Juanita’s body, supposedly, was buried. I thought of some things that should be true but aren’t and some things that shouldn’t be true but are.
I considered the sounds of the river, substantially the same ones Juanita would’ve heard and considered according to the matrix of her experience: That aural connection was the most specific link between me and Juanita. River-sounds, then and now.
I had called Doc Loban at home, and he said he’d already been over to check on Gabe, who was great except for some pain, so Loban had put a little more pain-killer in the I-V. He said he’d get Gabe home soon, with pill-versions of the pain-killer, and he suggested that we get him to a plastic surgeon sooner rather than later, for a consultation if nothing else. He said again how lucky Gabe was, how the scarring would be minimal, even without cosmetic surgery. I asked how Gabe’s spirits were, and he said fine—Gabe didn’t seem traumatized, just angry, when he wasn’t asleep. I offered to go get Gabe, but Loban said he wanted to check him one more time, and then he’d drive him up to our place, it would be his pleasure. A house call, in a manner of speaking. At such moments, Claytonville seemed prehistoric.
Then, finishing the coffee, I thought some morbid thoughts, not about Lloyd (home now and sound asleep), Gabe (how many prayers had I said the night before?), or Landers (we’d heard he was alive and stable in Reno), but about Juanita. I’m no shrink, but forcing myself to ponder the distant past was probably a way of coping with a bad July 3 that might have been a fatally catastrophic July 3.
I thought about how they wouldn’t have wasted precious lumber on a coffin for her; how they would’ve shrouded her in the most expendable hunk of cloth in the gold camp; how the men digging the hole, rolling her body in, and shoveling earth over her would probably have been drunk and may well have done something low such as open their trousers and urinate on her fresh grave.
A fine thing it is to be pulled back from grave-robbing thoughts by my husband’s arms. I leaned back against him.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey.” I turned, looked at him in his flannel robe. “How’s the head?”
“Fine, except for this nasty cut.”
“I’ll change the bandage after breakfast.”
“Think I’ll let the air get to it.
“Anybody else awake?”
“The lawyer. Taking a shower, I think. Wonder how she did in the tent.”
Laura had gotten a bee in her briefcase and decided she wanted to sleep outside in a tent--something she hadn’t done since she was 14, she said. Fine, we said, we have close to an acre of ground, just pick a spot and put on some deet.
I’d shown Laura and Rupert around my woodcarver’s workshop--sheepishly, like a teenager showing off her room. They we’d fallen on dinner. Finally went out and put up the little dome tent, gave Laura a flashlight, insect goop, and our most comfy sleeping bag (with a foam pad), wished her well.
Then at last Lloyd and I lay in bed and had a chance to talk, talking mostly about Gabe at first.
“So what were you and Ed Porter up to this afternoon—after Rupert and I left?”
“Nothing.”
“Come on.”
“We set up a big flat-bed truck with a microphone and speakers.”
“Where? Why? ”
“Middle of town, cheek-by-jowel with the vee-dub buses and log-rigs. It was Ed’s idea. All these people got a lot to say, so let them talk. We couldn’t find any bunting.”
“Not a bad idea.”
“Bunting?”
“The platform.”
“There will be ground rules.”
“Like?”
“Nobody speaks more than five minutes. Ed’s the timekeeper. No booze in the crowd or on the truck, of course.”
* * *
On my way back to the kitchen, next morning, I ran into Laura Klein. Her hair was wet, and she was dressed in sweats. She desperately slurped coffee and fumbled with a pack of cigarettes.
Such a spectacle of nerves was she that I couldn’t even say “Good morning”; it just didn’t seem right until she’d found one of our stone benches outside and lit up.
She took a drag, blew it out, gulped coffee. “That’s better. Hope it’s okay I made coffee.
`Morning.”
“`Morning. Sleep all right?”
She regaled me with tales of the tent, how every sound had kept her awake `til midnight, at which point she’d plunged into a sleep formidable enough for Jules Verne and his famous leagues. She woke herself up with a nightmare--something about a baby wailing. “Or maybe it was all those neighbors’ dogs yipping.”
“The baby was probably the dogs, and the dogs were the baby, and all of them were coyotes,” I said.
“Sounds like Freud on acid. What are you talking about?”
“The coyotes come through here about every night, summers. When they cry, they sound too human. Then they’ll yip-yip their way along the trail, up past the cemetery, `til they’re out of earshot.”
“You mean, I could have been eaten?”
“No. They go in for birds, squirrels--maybe a deer. Never lawyers.”
“I forget there’s a sort of wilderness beyond all the off-ramps.”
“Not much of one. Cable TV, cell-phones, four-wheel-drive cars, computers. I’m thinking the wilderness has become an interactive Website.”
“Nonetheless. Wait `til I call my Aunt Edna in New Jersey and tell her I slept in a tent and woke to coyotes. It will confirm her worst fears about the West. It’s okay if I smoke out here, isn’t it?
“Well, we are sitting on what they call a powder keg,” I said, gesturing at the mountains. “It’s all fuel, unfortunately. Just put it out in the sink, and Lloyd’ll be your friend for life.”
* * *
And there we were at the sink, my lawyer and I, washing fruit, scrambling eggs. She leaned against the counter and set her eyes. “Have to cross-examine you for a minute.”
“Go for it.”
“I’m not clear on what kind--or what tribe--I mean, Lloyd--what is he?”
“Washo. W-A-S-H-O. Some people add an E at the end. They were a really small group. Not really a nation, in the sense the Sioux or Shoshone were. But they had their own language and stories and way of doing things, so I guess they qualify as a nation. They lived mainly in the great basin on the other side of the range, south and east of Lake Tahoe.”
“First I’ve heard of them, not that I’m an anthropologist or anything.”
“I remember reading in a book once, something like, `The story of the Washo is very short and very sad,’. At least the last chapter of their story’s short and sad.”
“Meaning?”
“The silver strike hit in Nevada. Right in the middle of Washo turf. You can imagine how long it took for the silver-rushers to overwhelm a thousand Indians whose idea of conflict is to chase a squirrel and kill it. There’s a semi-reservation over there now, but you know, we’re talking about fragments of a people. Leaves in the breeze. It wasn’t that long ago.”
“Does Lloyd think of himself as `Native American’ or `Indian’”?
“I don’t think you can look like he looks and be treated by people the way people have treated him and not think, you know, at some level, `I’m Indian.’ On the other hand, his Ma was white, he was raised from six or so by white parents, and his great-great-grandfather might just as well come from Atlantis, for the all the sense of a past it gives Lloyd. I think he feels like Lloyd most days.”
The timer for the biscuits went off.
I took them out. “Want one?”
“You know,” she said, “I do. Maybe it’s the mountain air or those coyotes, but I’m starved.”
I slid one on a plate and found her a knife, butter, and home-made wild-plum jam, tart and ruby-colored. “So that was the cross-examination--Lloyd’s origins?”
“What about my origins?” said the original Lloyd, arriving from provinces of our oddball, self-built house. He’d become Sheriff again--khaki shirt, plus badge; green trousers, boots.
“She wanted to know about the Washos and all that.”
“The way of the buffalo,” he said, picking up a biscuit, “except the buffalo are making a comeback, if hamburger meat qualifies as one.”
Seated, we three became oddly reserved again: a lawyer and her reluctant clients. Laura spoke.
“The cross examination, part two, is--this Juanita person.”
I sighed.
“Forgive the lawyerly question, but what if she did murder the guy?”
Lloyd chuckled.
“The sheriff and I disagree on that point,” I said.
“And?”
“And I say it was at least self defense.”
“That’s certainly the case I would have presented. A man breaks and enters. There’d been a confrontation the night before. Afraid, Juanita defends herself. That’s the story I’d tell a jury.”
Laura continued. “Bear with me here--don’t get insulted. Self-defense versus murder aside, what’s the big deal?”
“In the end, I’m probably just sentimental, but I want her to stand for something. For a past gone wrong. They lynched her. When it’s in my head, it makes sense. When I talk about her, it sounds weak.”
I got up and pretended to putter with breakfast fixings. I decided to keep talking, to get it over with. “Okay. Look. If she wasn’t the only Mexican woman in town, she was one of the few. A gold camp full of rough white men. California’s steaming toward statehood `cause the Union wants the gold. Statehood as in more civilized, right? Rule of law? I don’t doubt Juanita wasn’t one tough chiquita. She defends herself. Against a thug. They do some kangaroo court thing and lynch her from a bridge, bury her in an unmarked grave. Rule of law, my ass. They cap off a July 4 celebration--we the people!--life, liberty, and the pursuit of a rope to snap a Mexican’s neck!”
Lloyd looked at me as if to say, “Feel better now?”
Laura had set her chin on her thumb and put her index finger alongside her nose. Professor Klein.
She said,“Aunt Edna likes to say, `It’s not what you remember, it’s that you remember.’ She didn’t mean that remembering somebody’s batting average from 1940 was the same as remembering Treblinka. She meant you needed to pick a piece of the past that’s right or wrong in some important way and remember it. Preserve its name.”
“Juanita is Mary’s ‘understory,’” said Lloyd.
“Okay, I’ll bite,” Laura said. “What do you mean?” Lloyd set himself.
“In a forest, like here, all the brush and some of the trees are what’s called the understory. The top story is the big trees--ponderosa pines, really old cedars, stuff like that. Before humans started suppressing wildfires, the understory was thick, full of lots of different species of brush and small trees.”
Laura sipped her coffee, seemed bemused by this little lecture bubbling out of the usually taciturn Bluestone. He continued.
“See, take manzanita for example--the nuts it produces won’t crack open unless they’re burned. Manzanita evolved with fire. It’s odd, but the understory depends on getting wiped out by fire, because the fire doesn’t really wipe it out--it helps it propagate. And the health of the forest relates directly to the number of species--lots of different growth. A rich understory.”
“What’s this got to do with Juanita?” I said.
“Well, for whatever reason, you feel connected to Juanita’s story.”
“And it helps her propagate?”
Lloyd giggled. “No, but it fills out Mary’s story.”
Professor Klein homed in. “And how does the fire work in your analogy?”
He was about to answer when Rupert Williams emerged along with Rupert Williams’ rather booming morning voice: “Are those biscuits I smell? Tell me those are biscuits I smell.”
“Those are biscuits you smell,” said Lloyd.
“Those are cold biscuits,” I said. “I have another batch coming. Sit. Coffee?”
“Yes, ma’am. Thank you.”
Now shyly, Rupert eased in between my sheriff and my lawyer. I heard what had to be Loban’s SUV pulling up, with my Gabriel. I ran out of the house.
It was the Fourth of July.
He told Judge Peat about the dust-up at the dam—Gabe and Landers shot, Lloyd battered.
Lloyd told of the brewing hubbub downtown, said he might need jail-space, promised I wouldn’t leave town, let alone the county. He discussed Rupert Williams’ statement.
Though I’d announced my presence on the other line, Carstairs spoke as if I weren’t there. He took on a courthouse-insider’s tone as he and Lloyd conversed.
He seemed to have company—-there were sounds of elaborate cooking in the background: sizzling, chopping, running of water, clanging of pots. The questions were few and terse from Hizzoner. Bluestone answered briskly.
“Sheriff,” Carstairs intoned, suddenly stagy, “your reasoning is entirely persuasive and characteristically pragmatic. I shall dictate a letter releasing Mary on her own recognizance for . . . seventy-two hours--but stipulating that she shall remain within town limits. And let me call Mr. Miles Ward, our D.A.”
Bluestone and I said, “Thanks, Judge,” in unison.
“You two have as restful a weekend as you can. Gabe is all right, you say?”
“Yes, Judge,” I said.
“You two are amusing me with this `Judge’ business. It’s usually `Carstairs.’ Take care.”
“Same to you, Judge,” Lloyd said.
We were about to ring off when Carstairs added, “Miles will not be amused by all of this, Sheriff.”
“I know, Judge.”
“There may be Hell to pay.”
“There’s always Hell to pay,” Lloyd said.
“Yes, isn’t there?”
End of conversation.
“You two sound so chummy,” I told Lloyd.
“Bunk.”
“You’d never know you once arrested the guy.”
“Yes, you would. Now get outta here--you’re free--on your own reconnaissance or whatever the shit that is.”
“Recognizance,” Ed Porter murmured.
Lloyd, out of the cubicle now, said, “Okay, Mr. Williams, I’ll take that statement, if it’s signed. Mary, take Mr. Williams--”
“Rupert,” Mr. Williams insisted.
“--Rupert--up home and make him comfortable.”
“You need to come home, too,” I said. “You were in a fight, you’re cut, and you’re exhausted.”
“No, Ed and I have something to do.”
Ed’s eyebrows raised.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“None of your business.”
“Tell me.”
“No.”
Rupert shrugged at me as if to say, Well, we kept our secret from him, after all.
* * *
Thus was I dungeon-sprung into lengthening shadows of July 3.
Rupert fetched some clothes, etc., from his pickup, which we advised him to leave near the courthouse. We set off across town.
Sybil had spoken truly: vehicular icons--log-trucks, with hauling parts unhitched and stacked over the cabs, and old mini-vans with curtains and lots of bumper stickers--had accumulated in Claytonville’s middle. Most of the owners seemed to have dispersed.
Rupert and I turned to make our way toward the wooden sidewalks of the “business” district—-and saw Haskins’ CHP car heading up the gradual grade and out the western side of town. Rupert and I were no doubt thinking the same thing, wondering if Wade Landers had made it alive to a hospital in Reno.
The tourists, as usual, looked tired, bewildered, hungry--anything but happy about vacating. Seeing them always made me wonder why more of them didn’t just stay “down below,” as we provincials refer to urban and suburban California.
Calculating the self-consciousness per yard, I swear it was the longest walk of my life, because who didn’t I see? Their hellos were slathered in meaning; their glances at Rupert the Black Man and me the orange-jumpsuited-one lingered on him and me like our own perspiration; the faces of some of my townsmen-and-women were often taut and grave, the most efficient small-town way of silently saying what I’d done at Bar Rock was out of bounds—and who are you, Mary Bluestone, who we thought we knew all these years?
We passed the one short street of shops, the post office, the lumber yard, headed up the mild hill along the North Meredith River . . . home . . . .
Got Rupert settled. Made him a sandwich, poured him a beer, read “nap” all over the report of his face and told him to go for it and showed him his guest room.
Took a shower, put on real clothes.
Went out back, saw what I knew I’d see--Bluestone hadn’t had the time to water or weed the vegetable garden, which I didn’t have the energy to water or weed, which would soon be fried.
Avoided going out into the workshop. Once out there, I’d never come back. In one way I wanted to carve, but in another the image of myself picking up a chisel depressed me, no end. Didn’t know why, didn’t want to probe the why.
Began to muck out the house:
The effect of Lloyd and Gabe on the house (of most men on most houses?) had been flood-like. Eddies of debris had formed. Things had been lifted, as if buoyed by a slow influx. What had been low, such as magazines on coffee tables, had been moved to a higher plane--countertops, windowsills, backs of chairs. What had been high--dishes, glassware, opened cans of food, cereal boxes--had sunk. Most of the mess was waist-high, that level at which men can work on stuff quickly, like bears, and leave it, sniffing and snuffling it out later when they return in hunger or befuddlement.
Got some laundry going.
Began cooking. Tried to keep my mind off Gabe lying over there in the clinic.
Realized, while cooking, that I hadn’t heard a jet rip across the sky since . . . when? Because of the air-show in Reno on the 4th, the frequency of jets usually increased on the 3rd.
Answered the door: And there stood my attorney Laura Klein, who didn’t like saying what she was saying, which was that Sybil had told her to stay with us one night and then come up to the Buffalo Gals’ Encampment; and which also was that she’d gotten to Sacramento, found that one of the legal aids had goofed up a batch of documents for another case, discovered that an old flame whom she emphatically did not want to fuel was in town and wanting to see her, and realized, with mortification, that something previously unthinkable had happened: Tamarack County suddenly seemed appealing.
I welcomed her warmly, told her she could find plenty of privacy in a den, where we had an extra bed (Rupert was in the guest-bedroom), found her towels and showed her the guest bathroom, told her to wash off the travel-dust, and--like Rupert--enjoy a precious gift presented to humankind, a nap. Told her a Mexicali smorgasbord, so to speak, of victuals would be ready for her and for all when she woke.
Laura had heard already from Sybil that Carstairs had let me out. Laura was too exhausted to be surprised, but not too exhausted to be amused. She found the bathroom, then the den, and collapsed.
I poured myself a glass of Merlot, went outside, listened to and looked at the river. I worried terribly about Gabe. Resisted calling Doc Loban’s clinic. Resisted calling the sheriff’s office to yell at Lloyd, Come home! Tried to calm myself. Sipped Merlot. Tried to process everything that had happened. Couldn’t. Sipped more Merlot. Hoped my house-guests wouldn’t want to come out and chat just yet. I knew that after dinner, I probably couldn’t keep myself from visiting Gabe once more.
I looked at and listened to the river. The blessed river.
Concluded that jail is bad and home is good, that Gabriel and Bluestone alive meant everything.
Claytonville Cemetery lies north of town. Like most actual “boot hills,” it’s where it is not because of gothic ambience but a mundane concern--drainage. It’s bad business to bury the dead in a hollow, a ravine, or a flat. Let souls go where they may, if not where they will, but bury their fleshly temples in firm, high ground.
In this case, ground over which black oaks and poised cedars preside, their deep root systems grasping, embracing, our entombments.
The oldest marked graves in the cemetery date from the early 1860s. The names include standard-issue Anglo-Saxon ones(Smith, Wilson). Also there are Cornish, Italian, German, and Swedish names. Of all the Chinese who moved through the Sierra Nevada--building flumes, cutting roads, laying rails, and doing other brutal work--only one secured a marked gravesite in Claytonville Cemetery. The stone reports only his nickname--“China Ralph”. Not dates. In vain I’ve searched for Hispanic family names there. None.
The infants’ headstones murmur implicit tales of diphtheria and whooping cough, influenza, cholera, pneumonia, and polio.
One miniature Washington’s-monument marks an empty tomb, so to speak, of twenty-three miners killed in the awful Bourbon Ridge Mine cave-in, 1903; once everybody knew no one could have survived, the fatal tunnel was sealed. To think of the bones still down there in the mine-tunnel cools the living marrow.
Axel Kjellstrom, Lloyd’s father in adoptive deed if not in biological fact, is buried in Claytonville Cemetery, was buried there on a hard February afternoon. North Wind raked the canyon. His stone reads simply, “Axel Kjellstrom,” with the dates, followed by “Stone Mason.” He lies next to Bryce Wyrdell, an eccentric’s eccentric, whose stone gives the name and the dates, followed by “I didn’t ask to be born.” Axel loathed Bryce for never working but also loved the man’s unapologetic dislike of life and the living; for some reason misanthropy lifted Axel’s spirits.
Who knows how many cups of coffee they slurped at the cafe, winters, when Axel might take a couple weeks off to let his cracked hands heal? He’d take young Lloyd with him, set the boy up at the counter for a piece of pie and a glass of milk, then go to Bryce’s table, where a misanthropic rant would already be at gale force. If only Bryce had worked, had done something with his hands, he and Axel would have been friends, not perpetual acquaintances.
We can’t see the cemetery from our house; a patch of woods blocks the view. Still we feel as though we’re connected to the graveyard, not just because we knew many of the residents when they were above ground, but also because when coyotes lope by our house, as they often do, they’re coming from or going to the cemetery. Nothing Transylvanian about this. It’s just the way the trails seem to be laid out, according to requirements of coyote commerce.
* * *
Thus graves were on my mind the morning of July 4, when I got up before everyone else and took a cup of coffee outside and savored the air. I looked hard across the river to a hill above Claytonville. It’s furnished chiefly with madrona trees. It’s ground in which Juanita’s body, supposedly, was buried. I thought of some things that should be true but aren’t and some things that shouldn’t be true but are.
I considered the sounds of the river, substantially the same ones Juanita would’ve heard and considered according to the matrix of her experience: That aural connection was the most specific link between me and Juanita. River-sounds, then and now.
I had called Doc Loban at home, and he said he’d already been over to check on Gabe, who was great except for some pain, so Loban had put a little more pain-killer in the I-V. He said he’d get Gabe home soon, with pill-versions of the pain-killer, and he suggested that we get him to a plastic surgeon sooner rather than later, for a consultation if nothing else. He said again how lucky Gabe was, how the scarring would be minimal, even without cosmetic surgery. I asked how Gabe’s spirits were, and he said fine—Gabe didn’t seem traumatized, just angry, when he wasn’t asleep. I offered to go get Gabe, but Loban said he wanted to check him one more time, and then he’d drive him up to our place, it would be his pleasure. A house call, in a manner of speaking. At such moments, Claytonville seemed prehistoric.
Then, finishing the coffee, I thought some morbid thoughts, not about Lloyd (home now and sound asleep), Gabe (how many prayers had I said the night before?), or Landers (we’d heard he was alive and stable in Reno), but about Juanita. I’m no shrink, but forcing myself to ponder the distant past was probably a way of coping with a bad July 3 that might have been a fatally catastrophic July 3.
I thought about how they wouldn’t have wasted precious lumber on a coffin for her; how they would’ve shrouded her in the most expendable hunk of cloth in the gold camp; how the men digging the hole, rolling her body in, and shoveling earth over her would probably have been drunk and may well have done something low such as open their trousers and urinate on her fresh grave.
A fine thing it is to be pulled back from grave-robbing thoughts by my husband’s arms. I leaned back against him.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey.” I turned, looked at him in his flannel robe. “How’s the head?”
“Fine, except for this nasty cut.”
“I’ll change the bandage after breakfast.”
“Think I’ll let the air get to it.
“Anybody else awake?”
“The lawyer. Taking a shower, I think. Wonder how she did in the tent.”
Laura had gotten a bee in her briefcase and decided she wanted to sleep outside in a tent--something she hadn’t done since she was 14, she said. Fine, we said, we have close to an acre of ground, just pick a spot and put on some deet.
I’d shown Laura and Rupert around my woodcarver’s workshop--sheepishly, like a teenager showing off her room. They we’d fallen on dinner. Finally went out and put up the little dome tent, gave Laura a flashlight, insect goop, and our most comfy sleeping bag (with a foam pad), wished her well.
Then at last Lloyd and I lay in bed and had a chance to talk, talking mostly about Gabe at first.
“So what were you and Ed Porter up to this afternoon—after Rupert and I left?”
“Nothing.”
“Come on.”
“We set up a big flat-bed truck with a microphone and speakers.”
“Where? Why? ”
“Middle of town, cheek-by-jowel with the vee-dub buses and log-rigs. It was Ed’s idea. All these people got a lot to say, so let them talk. We couldn’t find any bunting.”
“Not a bad idea.”
“Bunting?”
“The platform.”
“There will be ground rules.”
“Like?”
“Nobody speaks more than five minutes. Ed’s the timekeeper. No booze in the crowd or on the truck, of course.”
* * *
On my way back to the kitchen, next morning, I ran into Laura Klein. Her hair was wet, and she was dressed in sweats. She desperately slurped coffee and fumbled with a pack of cigarettes.
Such a spectacle of nerves was she that I couldn’t even say “Good morning”; it just didn’t seem right until she’d found one of our stone benches outside and lit up.
She took a drag, blew it out, gulped coffee. “That’s better. Hope it’s okay I made coffee.
`Morning.”
“`Morning. Sleep all right?”
She regaled me with tales of the tent, how every sound had kept her awake `til midnight, at which point she’d plunged into a sleep formidable enough for Jules Verne and his famous leagues. She woke herself up with a nightmare--something about a baby wailing. “Or maybe it was all those neighbors’ dogs yipping.”
“The baby was probably the dogs, and the dogs were the baby, and all of them were coyotes,” I said.
“Sounds like Freud on acid. What are you talking about?”
“The coyotes come through here about every night, summers. When they cry, they sound too human. Then they’ll yip-yip their way along the trail, up past the cemetery, `til they’re out of earshot.”
“You mean, I could have been eaten?”
“No. They go in for birds, squirrels--maybe a deer. Never lawyers.”
“I forget there’s a sort of wilderness beyond all the off-ramps.”
“Not much of one. Cable TV, cell-phones, four-wheel-drive cars, computers. I’m thinking the wilderness has become an interactive Website.”
“Nonetheless. Wait `til I call my Aunt Edna in New Jersey and tell her I slept in a tent and woke to coyotes. It will confirm her worst fears about the West. It’s okay if I smoke out here, isn’t it?
“Well, we are sitting on what they call a powder keg,” I said, gesturing at the mountains. “It’s all fuel, unfortunately. Just put it out in the sink, and Lloyd’ll be your friend for life.”
* * *
And there we were at the sink, my lawyer and I, washing fruit, scrambling eggs. She leaned against the counter and set her eyes. “Have to cross-examine you for a minute.”
“Go for it.”
“I’m not clear on what kind--or what tribe--I mean, Lloyd--what is he?”
“Washo. W-A-S-H-O. Some people add an E at the end. They were a really small group. Not really a nation, in the sense the Sioux or Shoshone were. But they had their own language and stories and way of doing things, so I guess they qualify as a nation. They lived mainly in the great basin on the other side of the range, south and east of Lake Tahoe.”
“First I’ve heard of them, not that I’m an anthropologist or anything.”
“I remember reading in a book once, something like, `The story of the Washo is very short and very sad,’. At least the last chapter of their story’s short and sad.”
“Meaning?”
“The silver strike hit in Nevada. Right in the middle of Washo turf. You can imagine how long it took for the silver-rushers to overwhelm a thousand Indians whose idea of conflict is to chase a squirrel and kill it. There’s a semi-reservation over there now, but you know, we’re talking about fragments of a people. Leaves in the breeze. It wasn’t that long ago.”
“Does Lloyd think of himself as `Native American’ or `Indian’”?
“I don’t think you can look like he looks and be treated by people the way people have treated him and not think, you know, at some level, `I’m Indian.’ On the other hand, his Ma was white, he was raised from six or so by white parents, and his great-great-grandfather might just as well come from Atlantis, for the all the sense of a past it gives Lloyd. I think he feels like Lloyd most days.”
The timer for the biscuits went off.
I took them out. “Want one?”
“You know,” she said, “I do. Maybe it’s the mountain air or those coyotes, but I’m starved.”
I slid one on a plate and found her a knife, butter, and home-made wild-plum jam, tart and ruby-colored. “So that was the cross-examination--Lloyd’s origins?”
“What about my origins?” said the original Lloyd, arriving from provinces of our oddball, self-built house. He’d become Sheriff again--khaki shirt, plus badge; green trousers, boots.
“She wanted to know about the Washos and all that.”
“The way of the buffalo,” he said, picking up a biscuit, “except the buffalo are making a comeback, if hamburger meat qualifies as one.”
Seated, we three became oddly reserved again: a lawyer and her reluctant clients. Laura spoke.
“The cross examination, part two, is--this Juanita person.”
I sighed.
“Forgive the lawyerly question, but what if she did murder the guy?”
Lloyd chuckled.
“The sheriff and I disagree on that point,” I said.
“And?”
“And I say it was at least self defense.”
“That’s certainly the case I would have presented. A man breaks and enters. There’d been a confrontation the night before. Afraid, Juanita defends herself. That’s the story I’d tell a jury.”
Laura continued. “Bear with me here--don’t get insulted. Self-defense versus murder aside, what’s the big deal?”
“In the end, I’m probably just sentimental, but I want her to stand for something. For a past gone wrong. They lynched her. When it’s in my head, it makes sense. When I talk about her, it sounds weak.”
I got up and pretended to putter with breakfast fixings. I decided to keep talking, to get it over with. “Okay. Look. If she wasn’t the only Mexican woman in town, she was one of the few. A gold camp full of rough white men. California’s steaming toward statehood `cause the Union wants the gold. Statehood as in more civilized, right? Rule of law? I don’t doubt Juanita wasn’t one tough chiquita. She defends herself. Against a thug. They do some kangaroo court thing and lynch her from a bridge, bury her in an unmarked grave. Rule of law, my ass. They cap off a July 4 celebration--we the people!--life, liberty, and the pursuit of a rope to snap a Mexican’s neck!”
Lloyd looked at me as if to say, “Feel better now?”
Laura had set her chin on her thumb and put her index finger alongside her nose. Professor Klein.
She said,“Aunt Edna likes to say, `It’s not what you remember, it’s that you remember.’ She didn’t mean that remembering somebody’s batting average from 1940 was the same as remembering Treblinka. She meant you needed to pick a piece of the past that’s right or wrong in some important way and remember it. Preserve its name.”
“Juanita is Mary’s ‘understory,’” said Lloyd.
“Okay, I’ll bite,” Laura said. “What do you mean?” Lloyd set himself.
“In a forest, like here, all the brush and some of the trees are what’s called the understory. The top story is the big trees--ponderosa pines, really old cedars, stuff like that. Before humans started suppressing wildfires, the understory was thick, full of lots of different species of brush and small trees.”
Laura sipped her coffee, seemed bemused by this little lecture bubbling out of the usually taciturn Bluestone. He continued.
“See, take manzanita for example--the nuts it produces won’t crack open unless they’re burned. Manzanita evolved with fire. It’s odd, but the understory depends on getting wiped out by fire, because the fire doesn’t really wipe it out--it helps it propagate. And the health of the forest relates directly to the number of species--lots of different growth. A rich understory.”
“What’s this got to do with Juanita?” I said.
“Well, for whatever reason, you feel connected to Juanita’s story.”
“And it helps her propagate?”
Lloyd giggled. “No, but it fills out Mary’s story.”
Professor Klein homed in. “And how does the fire work in your analogy?”
He was about to answer when Rupert Williams emerged along with Rupert Williams’ rather booming morning voice: “Are those biscuits I smell? Tell me those are biscuits I smell.”
“Those are biscuits you smell,” said Lloyd.
“Those are cold biscuits,” I said. “I have another batch coming. Sit. Coffee?”
“Yes, ma’am. Thank you.”
Now shyly, Rupert eased in between my sheriff and my lawyer. I heard what had to be Loban’s SUV pulling up, with my Gabriel. I ran out of the house.
It was the Fourth of July.
Chapter Sixteen
I rubbed away blood, dried and wet, from Lloyd’s forehead. The gash was actually a crooked cut an inch above his left eye. Face-cuts just keep bleeding. Lloyd’s a good coagulator, but the cut was damn deep so blood went on seeping. I went tried to soak it up with some tissues I’d grabbed. The deputies had laid him on the floor and raised his legs. I sent someone to get some ice to put on Lloyd’s neck. His uniform was splashed with blood, also his badge. Deputies and the dispatcher surrounded Lloyd and me. I was busy with Lloyd, who was conscious but stunned, so it took me a while to realize how quiet everybody was. No one had said what had happened, only something vague about Lloyd getting hurt up at the dam site. It took me more moments to jump to the right conclusion.
I looked up and asked, “Where is Gabriel?”
They just glanced at each other, like children in trouble, so I picked out big, brawny Mike Cussler and looked him the eyes. “Tell me,” I said.
“He’s okay—he’s—“
“Tell me!”
“He got shot in the shoulder, but he’s stable. He’s—“
I didn’t hear the rest. Lloyd held my arm. He said, “Mary, do you think I’d be here if Gabe wasn’t all right? I had them bring me here so—-.” --But I shook off his grip and stood up and screamed. I found words and screamed them. “Where is he?!”
Andee Munro said, “He’s over at Doc Loban’s.”
Lloyd started to speak again, something about his coming to the office, not the clinic, so Loban could concentrate just on Gabe, but I wasn’t listening.
I’d bolted. Nobody tried to stop me, but Andee followed me. I tore past county workers and citizens, me in my orange jump suit, and it had to look like a jail-break. I heard Andee murmur something like “It’s all right, folks” as she loped behind me, her pistol flopping against her thigh—odd that I remember that sound.
I got out of the building, flew down the steps, ran across the bridge that used to be the bridge that hanged Juanita. In blazing sun I ran across a dusty dirt-parking lot to Loban’s clinic, a remodeled old house, and bounded in there.
Inside I almost passed out, not so much from the run as from not breathing in the heat. Loban’s receptionist look stricken but recovered, got up, and met me as I was about to burst past her desk. “Stop, Mary,” she said.
“No,” I said, and pushed.
“Stop! He’s all right. He’s awake. Doc is with him. Just sit—“
“No.”
“Wait? A moment.”
“A moment.” I was out of breath and steaming with sweat. Otherwise I might actually have punched her.
She disappeared down the corridor, entered a room, didn’t bother to close the door.
Murmuring. I heard Loban’s voice: “Ask her to come on back.” I didn’t need to be asked.
I’m sure I screamed, instinctively, when I saw Gabe laid out on an examining table. I vaguely remember several “Oh Gods,” and I remember weeping and trying to fall on him and enclose him in my arms, but Loban held me back and said, “You don’t want to do that. Calm down.”
“Is he bleeding . . . ?”—I almost said “to death.”
“No, he is not. It is going to be all right.”
Eventually I calmed and took it all in. Loban had given Gabe something for shock, so he was glassy-eyed, stoned, and serene. “Hi, Mama,” he said, as if he were six. Of course, I wept more. His shirt was off, and Loban had cleaned a wound at the base of Gabriel’s neck. It seemed an awful ragged thing, and seemed somehow scorched, too. Loban told me to sit down, so I did. He checked Gabe’s eyes. The nurse—skinny, blonde Kathy Butler—came in and took Gabe’s blood pressure again. I felt as if I were watching it happen in an aquarium. I was in some kind of shock myself, of course, and a patina of unreality materialized. Finally Loban turned to me and explained.
“Your son is going to be fine. Miraculously. He was shot. A pistol.”
“Who?”
“Apparently the foreman up there. At the dam.”
The full force of unintended consequences struck me. I couldn’t speak. I’d gotten my son shot.
That was the result of my adolescent caper on Bar Rock. I would deal with myself and my stupidity later.
“How bad?” I asked.
“Miraculously, not bad. Basically, the shot creased his neck, without hitting an artery. A gunshot wound is a gunshot wound, mind you. But I don’t see any nerve, arterial, or vascular damage. I’m going to put in some stitches, the sooner the better. We’ll bring anti-biotics on board. Okay?”
“Okay. Thank you. May I--?”
“—Just wait in the office.”
“I love you,” I said to Gabriel. “I’ll be right outside.”
“O-kay,” he sang. “That guy shot me.”
“I know.” I broke down again, and got out of there so I could get myself together.
And as I was doing that, a sheriff’s cruiser pulled up, Lloyd got out of the passenger side, holding a towel to his head, and strolled into Loban’s clinic. Andee, who had trailed me, helped him up the few stairs.
When he came in, I went to him and hugged him, and we held each other for a very long time. Lloyd was holding on with one arm; he still had the towel to his head. Andee was holding back tears. We broke our embrace.
Lloyd said, “Gabe and I are fine. So are you. The rest is gravy.”
I agreed but broke down crying again. I think I would have broke down no matter what he’d said. He could have said, “Feathers,” and I would have cried.
Doc Loban got Lloyd set up for stitching in another room. In the outer office, Andee sat next to me. She asked me if I wanted her to hold my hand, and I said, Thanks, but no. I told her not to go anywhere, though. I liked having the well established Andee Munro sitting next to me. She told me what had happened up at the dam-site.
* * *
Before noon, someone driving down-canyon stopped in Tamarack--the town where Lloyd had let me out to pee that morning, which seemed ages ago. The someone phoned Lloyd anonymously with a heads-up: Log-haulers had parked their trucks at the dam site.
The truckers appointed themselves protectors of the site. Most of them weren’t hauling logs because the Forest Service shuts down logging over the July Fourth weekend--the highway slaughter is big enough without logging trucks being in the mix of traffic on a narrow alpine highway.
Not born yesterday, Lloyd had been content to let the California Highway Patrol handle the situation. The highway and its easements were the CHP’s business, whereas Bar Rock and any woman chaining herself to it, hypothetically speaking, were county business, unless the Feds had a vested interest, and in Tamarack County, they never did.
Lloyd knew he was just stalling, though, because there was only one CHP officer assigned to the county and if he--Harry Haskins was his name--thought he needed backup, Lloyd was both obliged and obligated, by honor and contract, to provide it. Not being born yesterday only postpones duty.
Haskins called, said he needed help. Lloyd took the sheriff’s SUV. Lloyd let Gabe ride along, a decision he will regret the rest of his life. On the way up-canyon, Lloyd radioed Andee and told her to come by the site.
Everything was calm when Lloyd and Gabe got there: Logging rigs parked just off the pavement, drivers standing around jawing with Haskins, construction-workers ambling back to work after lunch, a big crane swinging material up, over, out, and down to the dam-site below.
Haskins: “Just telling the guys here they need to move the trucks out.”
Lloyd: “Yeah, that’d be a good idea. So much traffic this weekend. Gotta give those tourists a wide berth.”
A truck driver: “Well, the foreman here doesn’t seem to mind us hanging around.” He hooked a thumb toward the dam, as if to point to Wade Landers. “Helps to keep the protesting freaks the hell out.”
Lloyd: “I’m glad he’s made you feel welcome. But this is really Officer Haskins’ call--a question of highway safety.”
Another driver: “Shit, Sheriff, you gotta be kidding.”
“I hope you’ll help us out, fellas,” Lloyd said, and I can hear him saying it with a bit of steel, just enough firmness.
That’s about as testy as things got because Haskins told them all what a citation would run them. Money talks, etc.
Wade Landers arose from the canyon. He wanted to know what the fuck the CHP and the sheriff were doing there. The CHP and the sheriff explained, said everything had been ironed out.
Landers was drunk. He sidled up to Lloyd.
When Lloyd lowered his head to spit in the dust, Landers took a big step and swung. Lloyd saw it in time to try to slip the punch, but it caught him hard above the eye.
“My feet were close together. I went down like a tree,” Lloyd reported. Before Haskins or Lloyd or anyone else could react, Landers took off for his pickup, some 25 feet away. Haskins assumed he was going to get in it and speed off, so he was going to get in the patrol car and get ready to chase him. Instead, Landers flung the door open, dove into the cab, and came out with a pistol. By this time, Lloyd was up, and Haskins was drawing his weapon. Gabe stood nearby. So did Andee, who had drawn her weapon. She told Landers to put the weapon down. He stopped. He hadn’t raised the weapon. Everybody stood still. One of the log-truck drivers said, “This is bad.” Andee remembered that.
According to Andee, she saw Lloyd out of the corner of her eye. He turned his head toward Gabriel, who stood just in back and to the side of Lloyd. Lloyd was about to tell him to get in back of a vehicle and to keep down. At that instant, Landers raised his weapon and fired it, everyone assumed later, at Lloyd. But Landers was drunk and probably had no actual experience with the weapon. The shot creased Gabe’s neck, though of course no one knew then it wasn’t fatal. Gabe went down. Haskins and Andee fired, just as Landers—perhaps horrified himself at what he’d done—flung the weapon down. Haskins’ shot missed. Andee’s was low, striking Landers not in the chest, where she’d aimed, but in the hip, shattering bone. Landers went down like a sack of gravel, howling with pain.
“Andee, get his weapon,” Lloyd said—automatically, I’d guess. Then he turned to see his son lying flat in the dust, motionless, bleeding from the neck. How the whole mountain range must have seemed to have collapsed on him then. Of course he believed the worst. Of course he got on the ground and staunched the bleeding with this big brown hand. Of course he spoke to Gabe—words that seemed to come from some other person, some other place. The blazing sun beat down on the site. Lloyd bled, too, blood streaming down his face, blood he didn’t notice until he tasted it. Blood of a father, of a son, nothing divine about it. A bleeding father, my husband, bending over a bleeding son, my son.
. . . In the stifling hot clinic, Andee finished telling me the story. I was sobbing. Sobbing because I saw how close I’d come to losing my one and only son, conceived accidentally but providentially in Willow Creek Ravine; and I could have lost Bluestone, too. I was sobbing because I was exhausted; because I felt as if God had spared me. Andee was crying, too.
“And Landers?” I asked.
“The bullet shattered the shit out of his hip. Haskins got him in the HP car, drove up to the Four Corners where the medi-vac helicopter can land. They got him to Reno. As far as I know, he’s alive.”
Moments earlier, when Andee had been telling me the tale, I’d wanted to kill Landers. Destroy him for hurting my baby. My emotions seemed to be careening. Now I heard myself saying a silent prayer for the recovery of Wade Landers, who had called me a cunt and shot my son. It seemed vaguely Christian of me. My hands were shaking, I noticed. Not just trembling, but shaking, like my grandmother’s, when she suffered from palsy. Andee got up and got me some water.
* * *
Eventually Doc Loban came out and said he didn’t think Gabe needed to be transported to a hospital because doing so would probably cause more stress than keeping him here. Gabe’s vital signs were normal and stable; there was indeed no arterial or nerve-damage. The wound was a bit like a scorch. Loban said he would transport him if I wanted it that way, but he said that with the July 4 traffic, he’d prefer just to keep Gabe in the clinic overnight. I went in and spent more time with Gabe, until he went to sleep. I held his hand.
By then Loban had stitched and bandaged Lloyd’s cut. Lloyd and I and Andee got in the sheriff’s car and went back to the courthouse. Apparently it was a day for farce as well as violence, for there in the sheriff’s office was novelist Gary Stad Fromm, drunk.
Some problems with living in remote small towns are obvious. The isolation. The hard winters. The tough terrain. The one that often gets to newcomers, however, is that in a very small town, people just show up at your place—your job or your home. So in the winter, for example, you might come down with cabin fever one day, but the next day you might be driven mad by people just showing up, dropping by and dropping in. Too much privacy and no privacy—that’s the vice that squeezes you in a town like Claytonville. So here Gary Stad Fromm was. He’d just shown up, precisely when everybody in the office was trying to keep the last nerves from fraying after everything that had happened.
Lloyd didn’t see the need to lock me up just yet, so most of us had found a chair. Lloyd looked . . . well, like he’d been slugged hard, stitched, and bandaged, but also like he was bone-weary. Standing, Mike Cussler said, “Gary, you look like you could use something to eat.” It was a kind way of suggesting he get the hell out, go home, and sober up.
“Thanks, no,” said G.S. “Haven’t eaten all day. Not about to start.”
Until then I don’t think I understood how deep the famous novelist’s self-loathing ran.
He was without the infamous leather bag but in possession of a typescript. His expensive designer-jeans were soiled; so was his collarless, vaguely “European” cotton shirt, out of which he pulled a pair of half-glasses. And put them on. And cleared his throat. And took no notice of Lloyd’s bandaged head or bloody shirt. So much for the novelist’s eye. Fromm looked at me.
“Mary, you asked me to draft some remarks. I have.”
All eyes on me. Gamely, I tried to halt the runaway genius.
“Oh, that was just an idea the lawyer and I were kicking around--before those TV people showed up. Turns out I don’t need a speech, Gary, but thanks anyway for--”
“--I think,” he said, “when you hear this you may”--his head bobbed slightly--”revisit and readopt your earlier, uh, stratagem.”
G.S. began to read the script. I don’t remember particulars, only the general thicket of it. There was a lot about honor and civil disobedience. Something about the slow apocalypse of technology, or something like that. He stumbled around in it—-a lost Boy Scout in a patch of manzanita. We all either turned or hung our heads or both. Bluestone finally spoke.
“Gary.”
G.S. kept reading.
“Gary.”
G.S. stopped reading.
I focused on the soiled jeans and soggy shirt.
“Well,” G.S. said, then jutted out his chin, grinning smugly as if he’d just unveiled the Mona Lisa, “that’ll give you the flavor of it, anyway.” He was prepared to surrender quietly. I was surprised Lloyd didn’t let him save face.
“Go home, Gary. If you brought your car, leave it. Walk. You’re drunk.”
G.S., though foggy, achieved enough clarity in his noggin to be surprised by Lloyd’s directives. I’ve convinced myself I saw a flicker of appreciation on his face. After all, how long had it been since someone had been straight from the shoulder with G.S. Fromm? At some un-soused level, even he had to be sick of unrelenting deference.
He tried to manufacture some dignity. His way was to drop the script and grind its pages with a boot. That would have been better theatre if we all didn’t think the pages had it coming.
“The Law-Giver has spoken,” G.S. sneered. His eyes found me. “If you’re in need of a speech, fair hobby-crafter, you know”--he gestured tot he floor--”where one lies. The rest, citizens, is silence.” He would have stomped out but out--stomping would’ve asked too much in the way of equilibrium. Finally, agonizingly, he was gone.
Andee picked up the script and tossed the pages in a recycling. I swear not five minutes passed before Sybil Burns, of the Buffalo Gals, strode in. The groans were all but audible.
“Hi, all,” said Sybil. “`Loggers’ve parked their rigs downtown & looks like some enviro-types, bandana-heads, are pulling in--should be quite a weekend in Sleepy Hollow. Mary--you’re out! Myyyyyyy gosh, Lloyd, what happened to you?!”
She put her hands on her hips, around which a turquoise belt snugged her jeans. I filled her in on the afternoon’s violence. The story actually made her quiet, pensive.
Lloyd dispatched Andee to have a look at Claytonville, now that loggers and environmentalists were adding to the crush of July 4 tourists.
“I wouldn’t worry,” Sybil said. “I mean, aesthetically, it’s not pleasant--Buffalo Gals milling about with old gnarly loggers, granolas, and touristas. Felliniesque. Frankly, I doubt if push will come to shove.”
“I’m paid to worry,” Lloyd mumbled. I wished devoutly that he would go home and rest. He added, “Milling around plus booze and politics and heat. Not good.” Sybil chattered away in response, I forget about what.
By the way, Lloyd then said, “I don’t know if all of you have heard. Carl Kelly—the guy who attacked Mary. He’s dead.” Even Sibyl stopped talking. In the reverent silence, Lloyd continued.
“They took him down to Grass Valley in the ambulance. He was doing okay. They were fixing to run some tests to see why he was bleeding inside, and he went into cardiac arrest.”
The sadness that hit me surprised me, I must say. It wasn’t so much that I pitied Carl Kelly. It was more like for a minute there I pitied everybody. Just like Gabe, Carl Kelly was somebody’s son. Lloyd went on, more quietly.
“So now I gotta write a long report about the scuffle out here, try to remember how hard I hit him.” His voice trailed off. “How many times . . . and such . . . .”
Sibyl and I stood very still.
“You mean,” I said, “they think one punch . . . did something?”
“I don’t know. I spoke with a doctor down there. He said they’ll do a full autopsy tomorrow. But he said there was some evidence of stomach and liver disease.” Lloyd shook his head remorsefully. “I’m pretty sure I hit him in that Heimlich place, you know--going after his air. Up high.”
Sibyl patted his arm. “Lloyd, it’s not your fault.” This embarrassed him. He hadn’t been fishing for pity.
I said, “Let’s us just wait for the autopsy. There were plenty of witnesses. Videotape. You didn’t wail on him. He was napping a half-hour later, sleeping like a pup.”
All the deputies got busy, and Lloyd headed out for the restroom. Over his shoulder, he said, “Mary, we’d better get you in your cell.”
Sybil said, “My lawyer, Laura, is on her way back up here, by the by--tonight. She just cell-phoned.”
I was about to ask why Laura Klein would drive down to Sacramento only to turn around, with hardly enough time to file a brief or comb her hair, and return to the hick- county that annoyed and bewildered her.
I didn’t get to ask because there, in the outer office, stood big, brooding Rupert Williams, my Bar Rock accomplice, who after we greeted him, said, “I’ve come to make a statement, but I don’t have all day.”
* * *
“So what kind of statement you want to make?” asked Lloyd, after he’d returned from the john and gotten Rupert settled. I could tell Lloyd’s head still hurt like a sonofabitch.
“Short,” said Rupert. “Not about the shooting. About what Mrs. Bluestone did up there. I helped her.”
Since Rupert kept glancing at me, I said, “Mr. Williams, you really don’t have to go to all this trouble.”
“Who elected you sheriff?” Bluestone said.
“S’all right, Mrs. Bluestone,” Rupert said. “I’ve thought it over.”
“Call me Mary,” I said.
“What do you mean you helped her?” Bluestone asked him.
Rupert took off his cotton cap, revealing the neatly trimmed, salt-and-pepper hair. He looked at his watch.
“I’m headed home. Home-home. Lodi. I quit up there.”
Instead of asking why, we just waited.
“It’s a mess. `Bout as organized as bucket full of eels. How’s your head?” Rupert asked.
“All right.”
“That was terrible. How’s your boy.”
“He’s going to be fine. Unbelievably lucky, all the way around.”
“Landers?”
“Haven’t heard. I expect the CHP guy to check in and let me know. I hope he’s all right, Landers I mean.”
“Back to why you quit,” Lloyd said. “It’s because of the shooting?”
“No. Reicher’s a week behind in payroll. Material’s not showing up. Landers has been getting drunk by noon. Shit, you can’t do that in construction. I was on a job like this before. We was redoin’ a causeway bridge near Marysville. Money ran out. Union lawyers went after the company. The company went Chapter 12. Ain’t gonna do that again. Plus I’m a long way from home. You know”--he turned to me--”we never did blast that rock of yours.”
“You’re kidding,” I said.
“I drilled it and was gonna set the charges, but then Landers said no. I heard Reicher’s lawyer’d been by. Rumor was, they wanted to save the rock as evidence.”
“That’s really silly.”
“Not so much evidence as something to point to when they sue the county.”
“Say more,” Lloyd said.
“It’s just a rumor. But I guess Reicher could say with Mrs. Bluestone being your wife and you a county employee, the county obstructed the job.”
“She represented her own little self up there, not the county.”
“I’ve heard similar rumors around the courthouse,” Lloyd said.
Rupert shrugged. “They’re outta money. It’s like, you know, they’re losing the game, so they wanna tip over the board any way they can. I ain’t gonna be a part of that.”
“Bar Rock--still in one piece,” I mused.
“And your statement?” Lloyd said.
“What I told you. Project was going down the tubes before Mrs. Bluestone showed up. . . . Besides, when she did show up, I helped her.”
Bluestone raised an eyebrow.
Rupert explained.
“If I were you, I’d think about this,” Bluestone said.
“What they gonna do--fire me?”
“What I mean is, as it stands, you’d be an accessory to a felony.”
“Way I see it, she wasn’t trespassing if I invited her to hang around.” He stopped short of saying that he’d helped me chain myself to the rock. That was all right by me.
“The D.A. may not see it that way.”
“Well, anyway, they hafta catch me first. I’ve made up my mind.”
“I’d advise you to talk to a lawyer.”
“`Preciate that. But I’ll make the statement.”
Bluestone sighed.
“Why don’t you sleep on it?” I said.
“No, sir. I’m gonna crash in a motel here and get on my way before sunrise.”
“All the motels are full,” I said.
“Stay with us,” Lloyd said.
“No--no way.”
I pressed him. “Look, it’s no trouble.” Easy for me to say. I’d be in jail, probably, not hosting Rupert.
Ed Porter answered a call. Lloyd applied ice to his stitches. Rupert spoke:
“All right. I believe I will take you up on your kind offer. I don’t feel like fighting the traffic. It’s getting late in the day.”
I looked up and asked, “Where is Gabriel?”
They just glanced at each other, like children in trouble, so I picked out big, brawny Mike Cussler and looked him the eyes. “Tell me,” I said.
“He’s okay—he’s—“
“Tell me!”
“He got shot in the shoulder, but he’s stable. He’s—“
I didn’t hear the rest. Lloyd held my arm. He said, “Mary, do you think I’d be here if Gabe wasn’t all right? I had them bring me here so—-.” --But I shook off his grip and stood up and screamed. I found words and screamed them. “Where is he?!”
Andee Munro said, “He’s over at Doc Loban’s.”
Lloyd started to speak again, something about his coming to the office, not the clinic, so Loban could concentrate just on Gabe, but I wasn’t listening.
I’d bolted. Nobody tried to stop me, but Andee followed me. I tore past county workers and citizens, me in my orange jump suit, and it had to look like a jail-break. I heard Andee murmur something like “It’s all right, folks” as she loped behind me, her pistol flopping against her thigh—odd that I remember that sound.
I got out of the building, flew down the steps, ran across the bridge that used to be the bridge that hanged Juanita. In blazing sun I ran across a dusty dirt-parking lot to Loban’s clinic, a remodeled old house, and bounded in there.
Inside I almost passed out, not so much from the run as from not breathing in the heat. Loban’s receptionist look stricken but recovered, got up, and met me as I was about to burst past her desk. “Stop, Mary,” she said.
“No,” I said, and pushed.
“Stop! He’s all right. He’s awake. Doc is with him. Just sit—“
“No.”
“Wait? A moment.”
“A moment.” I was out of breath and steaming with sweat. Otherwise I might actually have punched her.
She disappeared down the corridor, entered a room, didn’t bother to close the door.
Murmuring. I heard Loban’s voice: “Ask her to come on back.” I didn’t need to be asked.
I’m sure I screamed, instinctively, when I saw Gabe laid out on an examining table. I vaguely remember several “Oh Gods,” and I remember weeping and trying to fall on him and enclose him in my arms, but Loban held me back and said, “You don’t want to do that. Calm down.”
“Is he bleeding . . . ?”—I almost said “to death.”
“No, he is not. It is going to be all right.”
Eventually I calmed and took it all in. Loban had given Gabe something for shock, so he was glassy-eyed, stoned, and serene. “Hi, Mama,” he said, as if he were six. Of course, I wept more. His shirt was off, and Loban had cleaned a wound at the base of Gabriel’s neck. It seemed an awful ragged thing, and seemed somehow scorched, too. Loban told me to sit down, so I did. He checked Gabe’s eyes. The nurse—skinny, blonde Kathy Butler—came in and took Gabe’s blood pressure again. I felt as if I were watching it happen in an aquarium. I was in some kind of shock myself, of course, and a patina of unreality materialized. Finally Loban turned to me and explained.
“Your son is going to be fine. Miraculously. He was shot. A pistol.”
“Who?”
“Apparently the foreman up there. At the dam.”
The full force of unintended consequences struck me. I couldn’t speak. I’d gotten my son shot.
That was the result of my adolescent caper on Bar Rock. I would deal with myself and my stupidity later.
“How bad?” I asked.
“Miraculously, not bad. Basically, the shot creased his neck, without hitting an artery. A gunshot wound is a gunshot wound, mind you. But I don’t see any nerve, arterial, or vascular damage. I’m going to put in some stitches, the sooner the better. We’ll bring anti-biotics on board. Okay?”
“Okay. Thank you. May I--?”
“—Just wait in the office.”
“I love you,” I said to Gabriel. “I’ll be right outside.”
“O-kay,” he sang. “That guy shot me.”
“I know.” I broke down again, and got out of there so I could get myself together.
And as I was doing that, a sheriff’s cruiser pulled up, Lloyd got out of the passenger side, holding a towel to his head, and strolled into Loban’s clinic. Andee, who had trailed me, helped him up the few stairs.
When he came in, I went to him and hugged him, and we held each other for a very long time. Lloyd was holding on with one arm; he still had the towel to his head. Andee was holding back tears. We broke our embrace.
Lloyd said, “Gabe and I are fine. So are you. The rest is gravy.”
I agreed but broke down crying again. I think I would have broke down no matter what he’d said. He could have said, “Feathers,” and I would have cried.
Doc Loban got Lloyd set up for stitching in another room. In the outer office, Andee sat next to me. She asked me if I wanted her to hold my hand, and I said, Thanks, but no. I told her not to go anywhere, though. I liked having the well established Andee Munro sitting next to me. She told me what had happened up at the dam-site.
* * *
Before noon, someone driving down-canyon stopped in Tamarack--the town where Lloyd had let me out to pee that morning, which seemed ages ago. The someone phoned Lloyd anonymously with a heads-up: Log-haulers had parked their trucks at the dam site.
The truckers appointed themselves protectors of the site. Most of them weren’t hauling logs because the Forest Service shuts down logging over the July Fourth weekend--the highway slaughter is big enough without logging trucks being in the mix of traffic on a narrow alpine highway.
Not born yesterday, Lloyd had been content to let the California Highway Patrol handle the situation. The highway and its easements were the CHP’s business, whereas Bar Rock and any woman chaining herself to it, hypothetically speaking, were county business, unless the Feds had a vested interest, and in Tamarack County, they never did.
Lloyd knew he was just stalling, though, because there was only one CHP officer assigned to the county and if he--Harry Haskins was his name--thought he needed backup, Lloyd was both obliged and obligated, by honor and contract, to provide it. Not being born yesterday only postpones duty.
Haskins called, said he needed help. Lloyd took the sheriff’s SUV. Lloyd let Gabe ride along, a decision he will regret the rest of his life. On the way up-canyon, Lloyd radioed Andee and told her to come by the site.
Everything was calm when Lloyd and Gabe got there: Logging rigs parked just off the pavement, drivers standing around jawing with Haskins, construction-workers ambling back to work after lunch, a big crane swinging material up, over, out, and down to the dam-site below.
Haskins: “Just telling the guys here they need to move the trucks out.”
Lloyd: “Yeah, that’d be a good idea. So much traffic this weekend. Gotta give those tourists a wide berth.”
A truck driver: “Well, the foreman here doesn’t seem to mind us hanging around.” He hooked a thumb toward the dam, as if to point to Wade Landers. “Helps to keep the protesting freaks the hell out.”
Lloyd: “I’m glad he’s made you feel welcome. But this is really Officer Haskins’ call--a question of highway safety.”
Another driver: “Shit, Sheriff, you gotta be kidding.”
“I hope you’ll help us out, fellas,” Lloyd said, and I can hear him saying it with a bit of steel, just enough firmness.
That’s about as testy as things got because Haskins told them all what a citation would run them. Money talks, etc.
Wade Landers arose from the canyon. He wanted to know what the fuck the CHP and the sheriff were doing there. The CHP and the sheriff explained, said everything had been ironed out.
Landers was drunk. He sidled up to Lloyd.
When Lloyd lowered his head to spit in the dust, Landers took a big step and swung. Lloyd saw it in time to try to slip the punch, but it caught him hard above the eye.
“My feet were close together. I went down like a tree,” Lloyd reported. Before Haskins or Lloyd or anyone else could react, Landers took off for his pickup, some 25 feet away. Haskins assumed he was going to get in it and speed off, so he was going to get in the patrol car and get ready to chase him. Instead, Landers flung the door open, dove into the cab, and came out with a pistol. By this time, Lloyd was up, and Haskins was drawing his weapon. Gabe stood nearby. So did Andee, who had drawn her weapon. She told Landers to put the weapon down. He stopped. He hadn’t raised the weapon. Everybody stood still. One of the log-truck drivers said, “This is bad.” Andee remembered that.
According to Andee, she saw Lloyd out of the corner of her eye. He turned his head toward Gabriel, who stood just in back and to the side of Lloyd. Lloyd was about to tell him to get in back of a vehicle and to keep down. At that instant, Landers raised his weapon and fired it, everyone assumed later, at Lloyd. But Landers was drunk and probably had no actual experience with the weapon. The shot creased Gabe’s neck, though of course no one knew then it wasn’t fatal. Gabe went down. Haskins and Andee fired, just as Landers—perhaps horrified himself at what he’d done—flung the weapon down. Haskins’ shot missed. Andee’s was low, striking Landers not in the chest, where she’d aimed, but in the hip, shattering bone. Landers went down like a sack of gravel, howling with pain.
“Andee, get his weapon,” Lloyd said—automatically, I’d guess. Then he turned to see his son lying flat in the dust, motionless, bleeding from the neck. How the whole mountain range must have seemed to have collapsed on him then. Of course he believed the worst. Of course he got on the ground and staunched the bleeding with this big brown hand. Of course he spoke to Gabe—words that seemed to come from some other person, some other place. The blazing sun beat down on the site. Lloyd bled, too, blood streaming down his face, blood he didn’t notice until he tasted it. Blood of a father, of a son, nothing divine about it. A bleeding father, my husband, bending over a bleeding son, my son.
. . . In the stifling hot clinic, Andee finished telling me the story. I was sobbing. Sobbing because I saw how close I’d come to losing my one and only son, conceived accidentally but providentially in Willow Creek Ravine; and I could have lost Bluestone, too. I was sobbing because I was exhausted; because I felt as if God had spared me. Andee was crying, too.
“And Landers?” I asked.
“The bullet shattered the shit out of his hip. Haskins got him in the HP car, drove up to the Four Corners where the medi-vac helicopter can land. They got him to Reno. As far as I know, he’s alive.”
Moments earlier, when Andee had been telling me the tale, I’d wanted to kill Landers. Destroy him for hurting my baby. My emotions seemed to be careening. Now I heard myself saying a silent prayer for the recovery of Wade Landers, who had called me a cunt and shot my son. It seemed vaguely Christian of me. My hands were shaking, I noticed. Not just trembling, but shaking, like my grandmother’s, when she suffered from palsy. Andee got up and got me some water.
* * *
Eventually Doc Loban came out and said he didn’t think Gabe needed to be transported to a hospital because doing so would probably cause more stress than keeping him here. Gabe’s vital signs were normal and stable; there was indeed no arterial or nerve-damage. The wound was a bit like a scorch. Loban said he would transport him if I wanted it that way, but he said that with the July 4 traffic, he’d prefer just to keep Gabe in the clinic overnight. I went in and spent more time with Gabe, until he went to sleep. I held his hand.
By then Loban had stitched and bandaged Lloyd’s cut. Lloyd and I and Andee got in the sheriff’s car and went back to the courthouse. Apparently it was a day for farce as well as violence, for there in the sheriff’s office was novelist Gary Stad Fromm, drunk.
Some problems with living in remote small towns are obvious. The isolation. The hard winters. The tough terrain. The one that often gets to newcomers, however, is that in a very small town, people just show up at your place—your job or your home. So in the winter, for example, you might come down with cabin fever one day, but the next day you might be driven mad by people just showing up, dropping by and dropping in. Too much privacy and no privacy—that’s the vice that squeezes you in a town like Claytonville. So here Gary Stad Fromm was. He’d just shown up, precisely when everybody in the office was trying to keep the last nerves from fraying after everything that had happened.
Lloyd didn’t see the need to lock me up just yet, so most of us had found a chair. Lloyd looked . . . well, like he’d been slugged hard, stitched, and bandaged, but also like he was bone-weary. Standing, Mike Cussler said, “Gary, you look like you could use something to eat.” It was a kind way of suggesting he get the hell out, go home, and sober up.
“Thanks, no,” said G.S. “Haven’t eaten all day. Not about to start.”
Until then I don’t think I understood how deep the famous novelist’s self-loathing ran.
He was without the infamous leather bag but in possession of a typescript. His expensive designer-jeans were soiled; so was his collarless, vaguely “European” cotton shirt, out of which he pulled a pair of half-glasses. And put them on. And cleared his throat. And took no notice of Lloyd’s bandaged head or bloody shirt. So much for the novelist’s eye. Fromm looked at me.
“Mary, you asked me to draft some remarks. I have.”
All eyes on me. Gamely, I tried to halt the runaway genius.
“Oh, that was just an idea the lawyer and I were kicking around--before those TV people showed up. Turns out I don’t need a speech, Gary, but thanks anyway for--”
“--I think,” he said, “when you hear this you may”--his head bobbed slightly--”revisit and readopt your earlier, uh, stratagem.”
G.S. began to read the script. I don’t remember particulars, only the general thicket of it. There was a lot about honor and civil disobedience. Something about the slow apocalypse of technology, or something like that. He stumbled around in it—-a lost Boy Scout in a patch of manzanita. We all either turned or hung our heads or both. Bluestone finally spoke.
“Gary.”
G.S. kept reading.
“Gary.”
G.S. stopped reading.
I focused on the soiled jeans and soggy shirt.
“Well,” G.S. said, then jutted out his chin, grinning smugly as if he’d just unveiled the Mona Lisa, “that’ll give you the flavor of it, anyway.” He was prepared to surrender quietly. I was surprised Lloyd didn’t let him save face.
“Go home, Gary. If you brought your car, leave it. Walk. You’re drunk.”
G.S., though foggy, achieved enough clarity in his noggin to be surprised by Lloyd’s directives. I’ve convinced myself I saw a flicker of appreciation on his face. After all, how long had it been since someone had been straight from the shoulder with G.S. Fromm? At some un-soused level, even he had to be sick of unrelenting deference.
He tried to manufacture some dignity. His way was to drop the script and grind its pages with a boot. That would have been better theatre if we all didn’t think the pages had it coming.
“The Law-Giver has spoken,” G.S. sneered. His eyes found me. “If you’re in need of a speech, fair hobby-crafter, you know”--he gestured tot he floor--”where one lies. The rest, citizens, is silence.” He would have stomped out but out--stomping would’ve asked too much in the way of equilibrium. Finally, agonizingly, he was gone.
Andee picked up the script and tossed the pages in a recycling. I swear not five minutes passed before Sybil Burns, of the Buffalo Gals, strode in. The groans were all but audible.
“Hi, all,” said Sybil. “`Loggers’ve parked their rigs downtown & looks like some enviro-types, bandana-heads, are pulling in--should be quite a weekend in Sleepy Hollow. Mary--you’re out! Myyyyyyy gosh, Lloyd, what happened to you?!”
She put her hands on her hips, around which a turquoise belt snugged her jeans. I filled her in on the afternoon’s violence. The story actually made her quiet, pensive.
Lloyd dispatched Andee to have a look at Claytonville, now that loggers and environmentalists were adding to the crush of July 4 tourists.
“I wouldn’t worry,” Sybil said. “I mean, aesthetically, it’s not pleasant--Buffalo Gals milling about with old gnarly loggers, granolas, and touristas. Felliniesque. Frankly, I doubt if push will come to shove.”
“I’m paid to worry,” Lloyd mumbled. I wished devoutly that he would go home and rest. He added, “Milling around plus booze and politics and heat. Not good.” Sybil chattered away in response, I forget about what.
By the way, Lloyd then said, “I don’t know if all of you have heard. Carl Kelly—the guy who attacked Mary. He’s dead.” Even Sibyl stopped talking. In the reverent silence, Lloyd continued.
“They took him down to Grass Valley in the ambulance. He was doing okay. They were fixing to run some tests to see why he was bleeding inside, and he went into cardiac arrest.”
The sadness that hit me surprised me, I must say. It wasn’t so much that I pitied Carl Kelly. It was more like for a minute there I pitied everybody. Just like Gabe, Carl Kelly was somebody’s son. Lloyd went on, more quietly.
“So now I gotta write a long report about the scuffle out here, try to remember how hard I hit him.” His voice trailed off. “How many times . . . and such . . . .”
Sibyl and I stood very still.
“You mean,” I said, “they think one punch . . . did something?”
“I don’t know. I spoke with a doctor down there. He said they’ll do a full autopsy tomorrow. But he said there was some evidence of stomach and liver disease.” Lloyd shook his head remorsefully. “I’m pretty sure I hit him in that Heimlich place, you know--going after his air. Up high.”
Sibyl patted his arm. “Lloyd, it’s not your fault.” This embarrassed him. He hadn’t been fishing for pity.
I said, “Let’s us just wait for the autopsy. There were plenty of witnesses. Videotape. You didn’t wail on him. He was napping a half-hour later, sleeping like a pup.”
All the deputies got busy, and Lloyd headed out for the restroom. Over his shoulder, he said, “Mary, we’d better get you in your cell.”
Sybil said, “My lawyer, Laura, is on her way back up here, by the by--tonight. She just cell-phoned.”
I was about to ask why Laura Klein would drive down to Sacramento only to turn around, with hardly enough time to file a brief or comb her hair, and return to the hick- county that annoyed and bewildered her.
I didn’t get to ask because there, in the outer office, stood big, brooding Rupert Williams, my Bar Rock accomplice, who after we greeted him, said, “I’ve come to make a statement, but I don’t have all day.”
* * *
“So what kind of statement you want to make?” asked Lloyd, after he’d returned from the john and gotten Rupert settled. I could tell Lloyd’s head still hurt like a sonofabitch.
“Short,” said Rupert. “Not about the shooting. About what Mrs. Bluestone did up there. I helped her.”
Since Rupert kept glancing at me, I said, “Mr. Williams, you really don’t have to go to all this trouble.”
“Who elected you sheriff?” Bluestone said.
“S’all right, Mrs. Bluestone,” Rupert said. “I’ve thought it over.”
“Call me Mary,” I said.
“What do you mean you helped her?” Bluestone asked him.
Rupert took off his cotton cap, revealing the neatly trimmed, salt-and-pepper hair. He looked at his watch.
“I’m headed home. Home-home. Lodi. I quit up there.”
Instead of asking why, we just waited.
“It’s a mess. `Bout as organized as bucket full of eels. How’s your head?” Rupert asked.
“All right.”
“That was terrible. How’s your boy.”
“He’s going to be fine. Unbelievably lucky, all the way around.”
“Landers?”
“Haven’t heard. I expect the CHP guy to check in and let me know. I hope he’s all right, Landers I mean.”
“Back to why you quit,” Lloyd said. “It’s because of the shooting?”
“No. Reicher’s a week behind in payroll. Material’s not showing up. Landers has been getting drunk by noon. Shit, you can’t do that in construction. I was on a job like this before. We was redoin’ a causeway bridge near Marysville. Money ran out. Union lawyers went after the company. The company went Chapter 12. Ain’t gonna do that again. Plus I’m a long way from home. You know”--he turned to me--”we never did blast that rock of yours.”
“You’re kidding,” I said.
“I drilled it and was gonna set the charges, but then Landers said no. I heard Reicher’s lawyer’d been by. Rumor was, they wanted to save the rock as evidence.”
“That’s really silly.”
“Not so much evidence as something to point to when they sue the county.”
“Say more,” Lloyd said.
“It’s just a rumor. But I guess Reicher could say with Mrs. Bluestone being your wife and you a county employee, the county obstructed the job.”
“She represented her own little self up there, not the county.”
“I’ve heard similar rumors around the courthouse,” Lloyd said.
Rupert shrugged. “They’re outta money. It’s like, you know, they’re losing the game, so they wanna tip over the board any way they can. I ain’t gonna be a part of that.”
“Bar Rock--still in one piece,” I mused.
“And your statement?” Lloyd said.
“What I told you. Project was going down the tubes before Mrs. Bluestone showed up. . . . Besides, when she did show up, I helped her.”
Bluestone raised an eyebrow.
Rupert explained.
“If I were you, I’d think about this,” Bluestone said.
“What they gonna do--fire me?”
“What I mean is, as it stands, you’d be an accessory to a felony.”
“Way I see it, she wasn’t trespassing if I invited her to hang around.” He stopped short of saying that he’d helped me chain myself to the rock. That was all right by me.
“The D.A. may not see it that way.”
“Well, anyway, they hafta catch me first. I’ve made up my mind.”
“I’d advise you to talk to a lawyer.”
“`Preciate that. But I’ll make the statement.”
Bluestone sighed.
“Why don’t you sleep on it?” I said.
“No, sir. I’m gonna crash in a motel here and get on my way before sunrise.”
“All the motels are full,” I said.
“Stay with us,” Lloyd said.
“No--no way.”
I pressed him. “Look, it’s no trouble.” Easy for me to say. I’d be in jail, probably, not hosting Rupert.
Ed Porter answered a call. Lloyd applied ice to his stitches. Rupert spoke:
“All right. I believe I will take you up on your kind offer. I don’t feel like fighting the traffic. It’s getting late in the day.”
Chapter Fifteen
The voice of the dispatcher Brenda MacDonald alerted me. The door to the outer office opened. I heard her voice quaver when she said, “Hi, Judge”--then Judge was past her and on Laura and me, his limbs all gangly and garbed in tan chinos, pink Oxford shirt, topsiders.
“Have you no sense left in your head, Mary Bluestone? Is it sun-stroke from which you’re suffering?”
He waved a paper, just--I thought at the time--like a TV actor playing angry. “What,” he continued, “on God’s green Earth do you mean by this insidious, insufferable, insulting . . . document!”
I have to say, knowing Carstairs’ past, I was proud of him, marching in there, all downright snarly, packing some serious alliteration.
Personally if not legally, he had me dead to rights. Felony or no felony, he and I had lived in the same county a good couple of decades. When you share a long past like that with someone, even if the two of you are more eternal acquaintances than friends, and even if your husband arrested him once, you don’t haul off and go sending the person a letter like that--felony or not. Or maybe you do, in this day and age. But I don’t and didn’t think it was right.
Laura Klein got up to earn her fee. She didn’t know what to do with her cigarette--a trivial concern, but how refreshing to know she could be even two per cent not-in-control.
Laura and I were in the open cell, she standing, me sitting. Just outside stood Carstairs.
“Judge Peat, I must--”
“Who’re you?”
“Laura Klein, Mrs. Bluestone’s current attorney of record--”
“So I surmised. One isn’t supposed to smoke in this courthouse. Your idea?” He held up the offending document, which his rage made tremble like a dried flower. I looked hard at him and also sniffed, discreetly, to see if he’d fallen off the wagon. No. Good.
“Judge Peat. I must protest this confrontation--”
“--Must you?”
“Let me finish. My client is completely within her rights to petition for your recusal.”
“Yes, I’ve been around the California Code a time or two, Miss Klein. Mary, do you want me off this case?”
I said “No” and Laura said “Don’tanswerthat” simultaneously. Tie goes to the lawyer, I guess, for Laura plowed on.
“Your Honor, with all due respect, sir, you are now dramatizing the very reason I filed the petition. Personal involvement.”
“Counsel, there is a grand total of 3,000 residents in Tamarack County, one sixth of which live in this very burg.” Burg was a nice touch. I was rooting for him. “The odds against my not knowing visitors before my bench are extremely bad--or good, depending on one’s wagering vantage.”
Laura’s cigarette had burned down to her knuckles. She dropped the butt and crushed it. She lifted her chin a good half-inch. Highly carvable, that chin, I thought.
She said, “I’m willing to let the State Attorney General make that call.”
A twitch gathered the skin between the Judge’s eyebrows--a throwback tick, no doubt. Laura’s threat to “tell on” Carstairs to the State Attorney General probably brought memories of tortuous teen years--getting harassed by hill-kids while his parents got crocked on the mosquito-clouded veranda.
“Sit,” he said. “Please.” She sat. He put his arms behind him, truce-like. He lectured, quietly.
“When I do have occasion to step down from a case, Sacramento can’t usually find a replacement judge. What county court doesn’t have a busier docket than this one, after all? So they send a retired judge. For the past five years that’s been Granville Tuck. Granny, we call him. He thinks his mission in life is to nurture tender careers of young prosecutors. Like Miles Ward. And he doesn’t work summers. So, about when your calendar’s getting full in Sacramento—September, say--you’ll have to come up here. And if Granny’s on the bench, you’ll lose because he and Miles will be playing kissy-face. Granny’s brand of what you’re perceiving as small-town justice makes me look like gaw-damn Louis Brandeis. Am I making sense?”
“I’m managing to follow your take-the-devil-you-know argument, yes.” Her mouth was screaming at her to put another cigarette in it. “But a third alternative--pardon me, option--is a change-of-venue.”
“No, it isn’t.” This was me speaking. A word in edgewise. “My wood-carving isn’t portable.” I was hoping the way Laura looked at me signaled she was miffed, not that she was surprised I knew what change-of-venue meant. Carstairs tried again.
“Name `Buck Walters’ ring a bell?”
“Used to be with our firm,” Laura answered, resentfully, “--a partner--before my time. Investment banker now. Money-runner.” If she could have spit these words on his pink shirt, she would have.
“I went to Bolt Law with his brother, Stu. We both flunked the bar the first time around. Stu’s a senior partner in a cozy little Santa Rosa firm. He specializes in staying out of the way and fly-fishing.”
“I’m just sure this is going somewhere.”
“And Stu & Buck are about as close as two jealous, scotch-drinking, narrow-minded Republican brothers can be. I’m a Democrat myself.”
Laura sighed, dramatizing her boredom.
“Buck still golfs with your people, I’d wager.”
“My people?”
“The partners. Senior. Old farts.”
“I suspect so.”
“Well, Stu and I have kept in touch. I even invested in his winery.” (In more ways than one, said me to myself.) “Failing the bar’s a kind of foxhole experience, though I suspect you wouldn’t know. I can see myself in a week or ten days calling Stu and telling him what a fine lawyer you are, and asking him to lean on Buck to put in a good word for you. I tend to find the term `ball-breaker’ disgusting on several levels, but it’s part of Stu’s lexicon.”
“`Stu’ can shove it. I don’t need your old-boy network, Judge.”
Carstairs was unfazed. “Nor do I. And I don’t need Granny Tuck in my courtroom or belching green peppers in my chambers. If efficiency and going for the throat and knowledge of the California Code count for anything, then you’ve earned that partnership. Based on my limited knowledge of your work, that is.”
“Gee, thanks. How did you know . . . .?”
“Sybil Burns. There’s no business that’s not Sybil’s business, apologies to Miss Merman. My talking to Stu, who will talk to Buck, who will golf with your people--I consider it merely a professional courtesy. Courtesy has been the theme of my admittedly rambling oratory here, and I thank you for your patience.”
“I have to say I’ve never had a conversation like this in my entire professional life,” said Laura. “A judge, my client--in a jail cell--I--”
“Yes, yes, in Sacramento the legal life is as pure as the driven snow,” Carstairs said. “You’ve had plenty of these conversations. It’s just that up here we can’t afford the varnish. Right, Mary?”
“I guess, Carstairs. But I buy varnish all the time.”
“Blessed are the literalists,” Laura said. She and Carstairs shared a most superior chuckle, on my tab.
“Judge,” I said, “I’d kind of like to take that bail now.”
“And I would like to grant it to you, Mary. But that would require a hearing. It is a holiday.”
“The felony charge is ludicrous!” Laura said.
“Please!” Carstairs put up a bony hand. “Now we are treading on inappropriate ground.
Anymore talk of the charges will have to take place in chambers, with the D.A. present.”
Laura guffawed. Carstairs didn’t like it, but he took it.
“Ten o’clock, Monday morning,” said Carstairs, tearing up the letter, wadding it, tossing it into what had been Carl Kelly’s cell. Carl Kelly--what on earth had happened to him?
“Miles will be there,” Carstairs continued. “This will be resolved. I have vacation plans that don’t necessarily include turning Mary into a convicted felon.”
“A plea bargain?” Laura asked.
“That’s a Cadillac term for what I hope will be a Chevrolet conversation,” said Carstairs, concluding cornily. He left, a lilt to his gait.
Laura rolled her eyes, lit a cigarette, took a deep drag, blew it out. “Get me out of this goddamned county!” she said, adding, "He’s slightly more savvy than I thought. But what an ass.”
“Carstairs is an odd duck,” I said, “but he came by it naturally. The thing is, he has Miles’ number. For you that’s good. And for me.”
She shrugged. “By the way, is he gay--Peat, I mean?”
“He doesn’t live a `gay life.’ Or--well, you know what I mean. He’s been married a time or two, but that doesn’t prove anything. It would be just his luck.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning nothing bigoted. It’s just that he’s always led somebody else’s life. Carstairs--I can’t really think of anything important in his life that’s been his call. Every day I see him, somewhere back in my mind I’m thinking, this man should be somewhere completely different doing something completely different. Gay but staying in the closet would be just one more example of that.”
This seemed to get Laura thinking--about herself and her desire to be somewhere else. A glance at the watch. “If Sybil comes around, tell her I had to go to Sacramento. I’ll be back Sunday night.”
I must have looked curious.
“I’m not abandoning you,” she said.
“Oh, I’m not worried about that,” I said. “It’s that you’ll be driving against the traffic. Everybody and his dog’ll be coming out of the mountains Sunday. You’ve never seen anything like it. Think of L.A. traffic crossed with a Tamarack County highway. I know you don’t want to spend one minute more than you have to up here, but if I were you I’d leave Sunday morning.”
She changed the subject. “I’d like to see some of your carving sometime. Sybil raves.”
I gave her the name of a Sacramento gallery.
“You’re gonna make me go to a gallery?”
“Drop by the house Sunday morning. Have Lloyd show you my workshop.”
“I’m sure he’d be delighted.”
“Maybe I’ll be out of prison by then.”
“How?’
“I don’t know. I’ll think of something.”
She shook her head. The bewilderment seemed real. Between Carstairs and me, a fine legal mind had been turned, temporarily, into scrambled eggs. “I really have to get out of here,” she said.
* * *
I was sitting on my cot, staring at the Juanitaless wall. then staring into the bucket of I heard several men.
Heard several men enter the sheriff’s office--the door to out there, closed. I heard and knew, knew Lloyd was hurt. Gabriel, too? God, no.
Knew by how the group burst in; knew by a certain electrical current that passes between longtime loving partners. Knew.
Was out my unlocked cell and through the door. Did a stutter-step when I saw Lloyd--upright but book-ended by Andee Munro and another deputy. Blood all over the front of his shirt and across his forehead. Blood in his dark hair, darkening it more.
“Have you no sense left in your head, Mary Bluestone? Is it sun-stroke from which you’re suffering?”
He waved a paper, just--I thought at the time--like a TV actor playing angry. “What,” he continued, “on God’s green Earth do you mean by this insidious, insufferable, insulting . . . document!”
I have to say, knowing Carstairs’ past, I was proud of him, marching in there, all downright snarly, packing some serious alliteration.
Personally if not legally, he had me dead to rights. Felony or no felony, he and I had lived in the same county a good couple of decades. When you share a long past like that with someone, even if the two of you are more eternal acquaintances than friends, and even if your husband arrested him once, you don’t haul off and go sending the person a letter like that--felony or not. Or maybe you do, in this day and age. But I don’t and didn’t think it was right.
Laura Klein got up to earn her fee. She didn’t know what to do with her cigarette--a trivial concern, but how refreshing to know she could be even two per cent not-in-control.
Laura and I were in the open cell, she standing, me sitting. Just outside stood Carstairs.
“Judge Peat, I must--”
“Who’re you?”
“Laura Klein, Mrs. Bluestone’s current attorney of record--”
“So I surmised. One isn’t supposed to smoke in this courthouse. Your idea?” He held up the offending document, which his rage made tremble like a dried flower. I looked hard at him and also sniffed, discreetly, to see if he’d fallen off the wagon. No. Good.
“Judge Peat. I must protest this confrontation--”
“--Must you?”
“Let me finish. My client is completely within her rights to petition for your recusal.”
“Yes, I’ve been around the California Code a time or two, Miss Klein. Mary, do you want me off this case?”
I said “No” and Laura said “Don’tanswerthat” simultaneously. Tie goes to the lawyer, I guess, for Laura plowed on.
“Your Honor, with all due respect, sir, you are now dramatizing the very reason I filed the petition. Personal involvement.”
“Counsel, there is a grand total of 3,000 residents in Tamarack County, one sixth of which live in this very burg.” Burg was a nice touch. I was rooting for him. “The odds against my not knowing visitors before my bench are extremely bad--or good, depending on one’s wagering vantage.”
Laura’s cigarette had burned down to her knuckles. She dropped the butt and crushed it. She lifted her chin a good half-inch. Highly carvable, that chin, I thought.
She said, “I’m willing to let the State Attorney General make that call.”
A twitch gathered the skin between the Judge’s eyebrows--a throwback tick, no doubt. Laura’s threat to “tell on” Carstairs to the State Attorney General probably brought memories of tortuous teen years--getting harassed by hill-kids while his parents got crocked on the mosquito-clouded veranda.
“Sit,” he said. “Please.” She sat. He put his arms behind him, truce-like. He lectured, quietly.
“When I do have occasion to step down from a case, Sacramento can’t usually find a replacement judge. What county court doesn’t have a busier docket than this one, after all? So they send a retired judge. For the past five years that’s been Granville Tuck. Granny, we call him. He thinks his mission in life is to nurture tender careers of young prosecutors. Like Miles Ward. And he doesn’t work summers. So, about when your calendar’s getting full in Sacramento—September, say--you’ll have to come up here. And if Granny’s on the bench, you’ll lose because he and Miles will be playing kissy-face. Granny’s brand of what you’re perceiving as small-town justice makes me look like gaw-damn Louis Brandeis. Am I making sense?”
“I’m managing to follow your take-the-devil-you-know argument, yes.” Her mouth was screaming at her to put another cigarette in it. “But a third alternative--pardon me, option--is a change-of-venue.”
“No, it isn’t.” This was me speaking. A word in edgewise. “My wood-carving isn’t portable.” I was hoping the way Laura looked at me signaled she was miffed, not that she was surprised I knew what change-of-venue meant. Carstairs tried again.
“Name `Buck Walters’ ring a bell?”
“Used to be with our firm,” Laura answered, resentfully, “--a partner--before my time. Investment banker now. Money-runner.” If she could have spit these words on his pink shirt, she would have.
“I went to Bolt Law with his brother, Stu. We both flunked the bar the first time around. Stu’s a senior partner in a cozy little Santa Rosa firm. He specializes in staying out of the way and fly-fishing.”
“I’m just sure this is going somewhere.”
“And Stu & Buck are about as close as two jealous, scotch-drinking, narrow-minded Republican brothers can be. I’m a Democrat myself.”
Laura sighed, dramatizing her boredom.
“Buck still golfs with your people, I’d wager.”
“My people?”
“The partners. Senior. Old farts.”
“I suspect so.”
“Well, Stu and I have kept in touch. I even invested in his winery.” (In more ways than one, said me to myself.) “Failing the bar’s a kind of foxhole experience, though I suspect you wouldn’t know. I can see myself in a week or ten days calling Stu and telling him what a fine lawyer you are, and asking him to lean on Buck to put in a good word for you. I tend to find the term `ball-breaker’ disgusting on several levels, but it’s part of Stu’s lexicon.”
“`Stu’ can shove it. I don’t need your old-boy network, Judge.”
Carstairs was unfazed. “Nor do I. And I don’t need Granny Tuck in my courtroom or belching green peppers in my chambers. If efficiency and going for the throat and knowledge of the California Code count for anything, then you’ve earned that partnership. Based on my limited knowledge of your work, that is.”
“Gee, thanks. How did you know . . . .?”
“Sybil Burns. There’s no business that’s not Sybil’s business, apologies to Miss Merman. My talking to Stu, who will talk to Buck, who will golf with your people--I consider it merely a professional courtesy. Courtesy has been the theme of my admittedly rambling oratory here, and I thank you for your patience.”
“I have to say I’ve never had a conversation like this in my entire professional life,” said Laura. “A judge, my client--in a jail cell--I--”
“Yes, yes, in Sacramento the legal life is as pure as the driven snow,” Carstairs said. “You’ve had plenty of these conversations. It’s just that up here we can’t afford the varnish. Right, Mary?”
“I guess, Carstairs. But I buy varnish all the time.”
“Blessed are the literalists,” Laura said. She and Carstairs shared a most superior chuckle, on my tab.
“Judge,” I said, “I’d kind of like to take that bail now.”
“And I would like to grant it to you, Mary. But that would require a hearing. It is a holiday.”
“The felony charge is ludicrous!” Laura said.
“Please!” Carstairs put up a bony hand. “Now we are treading on inappropriate ground.
Anymore talk of the charges will have to take place in chambers, with the D.A. present.”
Laura guffawed. Carstairs didn’t like it, but he took it.
“Ten o’clock, Monday morning,” said Carstairs, tearing up the letter, wadding it, tossing it into what had been Carl Kelly’s cell. Carl Kelly--what on earth had happened to him?
“Miles will be there,” Carstairs continued. “This will be resolved. I have vacation plans that don’t necessarily include turning Mary into a convicted felon.”
“A plea bargain?” Laura asked.
“That’s a Cadillac term for what I hope will be a Chevrolet conversation,” said Carstairs, concluding cornily. He left, a lilt to his gait.
Laura rolled her eyes, lit a cigarette, took a deep drag, blew it out. “Get me out of this goddamned county!” she said, adding, "He’s slightly more savvy than I thought. But what an ass.”
“Carstairs is an odd duck,” I said, “but he came by it naturally. The thing is, he has Miles’ number. For you that’s good. And for me.”
She shrugged. “By the way, is he gay--Peat, I mean?”
“He doesn’t live a `gay life.’ Or--well, you know what I mean. He’s been married a time or two, but that doesn’t prove anything. It would be just his luck.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning nothing bigoted. It’s just that he’s always led somebody else’s life. Carstairs--I can’t really think of anything important in his life that’s been his call. Every day I see him, somewhere back in my mind I’m thinking, this man should be somewhere completely different doing something completely different. Gay but staying in the closet would be just one more example of that.”
This seemed to get Laura thinking--about herself and her desire to be somewhere else. A glance at the watch. “If Sybil comes around, tell her I had to go to Sacramento. I’ll be back Sunday night.”
I must have looked curious.
“I’m not abandoning you,” she said.
“Oh, I’m not worried about that,” I said. “It’s that you’ll be driving against the traffic. Everybody and his dog’ll be coming out of the mountains Sunday. You’ve never seen anything like it. Think of L.A. traffic crossed with a Tamarack County highway. I know you don’t want to spend one minute more than you have to up here, but if I were you I’d leave Sunday morning.”
She changed the subject. “I’d like to see some of your carving sometime. Sybil raves.”
I gave her the name of a Sacramento gallery.
“You’re gonna make me go to a gallery?”
“Drop by the house Sunday morning. Have Lloyd show you my workshop.”
“I’m sure he’d be delighted.”
“Maybe I’ll be out of prison by then.”
“How?’
“I don’t know. I’ll think of something.”
She shook her head. The bewilderment seemed real. Between Carstairs and me, a fine legal mind had been turned, temporarily, into scrambled eggs. “I really have to get out of here,” she said.
* * *
I was sitting on my cot, staring at the Juanitaless wall. then staring into the bucket of I heard several men.
Heard several men enter the sheriff’s office--the door to out there, closed. I heard and knew, knew Lloyd was hurt. Gabriel, too? God, no.
Knew by how the group burst in; knew by a certain electrical current that passes between longtime loving partners. Knew.
Was out my unlocked cell and through the door. Did a stutter-step when I saw Lloyd--upright but book-ended by Andee Munro and another deputy. Blood all over the front of his shirt and across his forehead. Blood in his dark hair, darkening it more.
Chapter Fourteen
Jennifer Rosamund was both “the talent” and the producer. Danny Little was the photographer. I was “the story.”
Friday, the morning of July third, I felt more left out than locked up. Ed Porter, in civilian clothes, brought me breakfast but left before the first munch of wheat toast broke the morning calm. There didn’t seem to be much activity in the sheriff’s office. Where was Sheriff Husband? I’d grown accustomed to a murmur out there beyond my bars & the one door--and to Bluestone’s ambling in when he got to work.
I’d made myself happy by imagining Lloyd and Gabriel joining forces to make themselves a breakfast in the kitchen near the river--Lloyd mumbling questions to his son about college and baseball and women, Gabriel mumbling noncommittal answers right back at the Old Man. Me not there to improve communication.
And of course, the parking lot out there was quiet because most of the county employees had started their long weekend.
The honeymoon phase of Protest was over, I noted, looking at cold scrambled eggs. Claytonville was at work or gone-fishing. The sluggish, massive onslaught of RVs, station wagons, mountain bikes, and yuppie-guided Harleys now inched its way, I knew, up from the Central Valley--a thick vehicular anaconda of vacationers. In just one of these weekends, more people would invade the foothills and mountain canyons than all of the Gold Rushers combined.
* * *
Someone over in the cafe--I heard the exchange with perfect pitch in a day-dreamed scene--was saying, “Mary Bluestone still in jail?”
“Don’t know. Think so. My understanding is she refused bail. But then someone--`think it was Bob--said, no, she posted bail.”
“I hear she got herself a lawyer from Sacramento. It’s what I heard, anyway.”
And the waitress would swoop down on that little formica counter, coming after gossip like an eagle diving to a lake’s surface, saying, “I don’t see Mary staying in there more than one night. You boys okay on coffee? I bet she’s home carving, or watering her squash.”
Then something else, some little beige tile in the village’s beige mosaic of conversation, would be reported or remembered, offered, contested, denied, put to rest, or recycled. Rarely a mention of the river, dam, or courthouse proceedings.
* * *
It’s about equipment, not news or entertainment or finding things out. Equipment. That’s what I learned, on July 3, about TV.
A short, swarthy guy with a rooster buzz-cut & L.A. casual clothes came through the outer door carrying silvery equipment cases and black nylon bags. Except for brushing me with a glance, he behaved as if I weren’t there. He dropped off a load, went for another, brought it back, and had enough stuff to halfway-fill the space in front of the cells. There coils of extension-cords, although I guessed they weren’t really called that. I thought ruefully of my obsession with the rope they used on Juanita.
Breathing hard, sweating (he had a paunch), hands on hips, he looked in my direction, then up, then down. I was on the cot.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi. You draw that?” The mural, he meant.
“Uh-huh. What are you doing?”
“Setting up. Boy, is the lighting weird in here.”
“Setting up for what?” I knew, but what the hell.
“Oh, Jeez, thought you knew. We’re from Cutting Edge. Shooting a story on you.”
“But why are you in here?”
He looked at me as if my family tree hadn’t ever branched.
“Uh, to interview you?” Suddenly, he’d become snotty. He started unpacking.
“I don’t think so.”
“That’s what they all say.” Unpacking. Grunting. His L.A. jeans were way too tight: cookie dough wrapped in cellophane. “Actually, almost none of `em say it anymore. Anyway, take it up with the talent. I just take the pretty pictures.”
On cue--why can’t I ever make entrances con brio like that?--the Talent arrived. Thin as a sunflower stalk. Black hair in a shortish cut that might have cost as much as one of my carvings. A wonderful pale-lemony linen suit--not wrinkled. Every piece of linen I’ve ever worn for ten seconds looks like a relief map of the Rockies. In my orange jumpsuit, I looked—-contrasted to the talent--like a highway caution-cone.
Jennifer Rosamund was her name, it turned out. She whipped off those Armani sun-shades. Her lip-lacquered mouth said, “Gawd, Dan-o, what an ugly room.” I felt like remind her it was a jail cell, but I didn’t.
“You must be Mary--is it Bluestone or Herrera?--I’ve heard both.”
“Buenos dias, senorita,” I said in a Tijuana barmaid accent, looking at her cow-eyed. Incredibly, she took the bait, looked at Dan-o the Grunter, who was getting a tripod on its legs like a newborn calf said. He paused and said, “She’s jerkin’ your chain, Jen.”
“Oh.”
“Bluestone’s the name on my driver’s license,” I said.
She introduced herself. We shook hands through the bars. Her hand was wet and hot. Overheated Talent.
“What we’re gonna do is,” she said, “--is that Danny will set up and then we’ll do an interview, but then, like, we’ll do some extra shooting, too.”
“I don’t feel like being on camera,” I said. “I feel fat and dirty. I think I’ll pass, if you don’t mind.”
It was as if, from the recesses of my county jumpsuit, I’d produced a pistol. Dan-o stopped what he was doing and looked at Jennifer. Jennifer looked back at him. Then came the old soft-shoe. Or is it soft-sell?
“Gawd, I know what you mean, I mean I’ve been doin’ this for seven-eight years, and I still get panicky about how I look.”
A little more twang had seeped into her speech. I thought I heard Texas in there, maybe Oklahoma or Missouri. You would have thought Jen and I were long-lost sorority sisters. But I thought, Not so fast there, Little Missy.
“I wouldn’t say I’m panicky about my looks. I just don’t want to be on camera.”
The twang disappeared. We were back to the California newspeak tones:
“But wouldn’t you like 35 million Americans to hear your point of view about this dam? And the—the woman?”
I waited. They waited. Dan-o wasn’t about to assemble one more blessed piece of equipment if he wasn’t going to be able to use it. The altitude had gotten to him.
“How do you know 35 million watch?”
“Is that a yes?”
“A maybe.”
“Contingent upon . . . .?”
“Upon a shower and makeup.” I felt superbly shallow. “Also, the story’s got to be about the dam and Juanita, not a hick sheriff and his wife.”
“Well, as a matter of policy, we don’t let subjects of our stories dictate content, but of course the dam will be a big part of the story. And the woman. Juanita.” A “yeah, right” grin touched Dan-o’s face, and he recommenced the screwing-together of aluminum tubes and cable connectors; several large black cords, I saw, snaked through the doorway: The little jail of Tamarack County was about to be up-linked.
“After my shower we’ll talk more.”
“Who do I see about this shower?” Jen had a whatever-it-takes-to-get-the-story bounce in her voice.
“Anybody out there in the office?”
“There hardly is anybody. Just the blonde girl.”
“Brenda MacDonald. Nobody else?”
“Just a funny little man in plain clothes.”
“Ed. Ed Porter. Jesus, where is everybody?”
By everybody I meant mainly my husband and my son. Why hadn’t they stopped in at least to say good morning? I should have known that I should have known enough to have been worried.
* * *
Ed Porter toyed with the idea of accompanying me to the shower--in an official capacity, that is. But I think he took a hard look at the situation and saw the silliness of it, got me a towel and a new jumpsuit, and (apparently) told Brenda the dispatcher to fetch me some underclothes from the stockpile Lloyd had brought from home--and from home Lloyd had, of course (husbands!), brought my least favorite, least comfortable underwear.
. . . .Having showered, walking back up toward the courthouse out of that little hollow where the outbuildings sit, I felt myself elevated into a classic summer day in the Sierra Nevada, every shade of green displayed on mountainsides, the air hot but clean and dry, the sky a blue so deep that if it went one quality-level deeper it would seem weird, not exquisite. I was aware of the North Meredith River’s narrow murmur and thought, naturally, of the dam site: Had Rupert Williams blown up Bar Rock? No one had said a word about it. I’d been so busy with lawyers & looney jailmates, Myrna Lovetti, Sybil Burns, the attorney Laura Klein, and the novelist Gary Stad Fromm, and murals, and memory and now Cutting Edge, that I hadn’t thought to ask this basic question. Had the famous rock been blown to bits?
A notion announced itself abruptly: Okay, enough. Let Juanita rest. Accept what you have not changed (the dam), get back to work, to Bluestone and Gabe, to morning weeding and evening reading and carving in between.
Back at the cells, the Talent and Dan-o were gone, but who should I spy on my cot but my lawyer, Laura Klein, asleep, with The Guns of August spread open on her chest.
She woke up because the cell door squeaked as I opened it further. . . .
“I feel like Goldilocks,” she said, “commandeering your bed.”
“Commandeer away.”
She looked not good--in the face, that is; pale, weary.
“Reading Tuchman—-`zat part of the torture in these parts?”
“It’s pronounced Tuck-man? Three pages is all I could manage. Seems more like a Winter book, in spite of the title. . . . What’s going on?”
“I couldn’t sleep--I mean, all night. It’s so goddamned quiet up here. How do you stand it?”
She wasn’t expecting an answer. “So I thought I’d drop in on my client. And dozed. The altitude.”
“Make sure you drink a lot of water.” I found a place to park my kiester. Settled, I asked, “Why did you take this case?”
The answer wasn’t snapped, but it was impatient. “Uh, money? Remuneration. Profit.”
“I meant this case. Surely you have a choice.”
“I do and I don’t,” she said. She sat up. “I don’t really want to go into it. I’m more interested in making an ounce of sense of why you chained yourself to a rock.”
“Oh, well, by all means, let’s talk about what you’re interested in.”
“My, aren’t we cranky.”
“Yes, aren’t we.”
One of those moments ensued--where both parties realize they’ve just had a miniature, immature quarrel, a spatlet, without setting out to have one.
“As I see it,” she said, recovering for both of us, “I’m technically the guest here, so I think I should apologize.”
“The host accepts and apologizes right back.”
“I took your case because I’m an associate who is first in line to be a partner, and because I work the criminal turf--as opposed to civil. The associate who’s second in line takes most of Sybil’s work, but he went on vacation. One of the partners kicked your case to me. Nothing personal, but I had better things to do than to drive up here and live in a shabby motel. Sybil offered her place, but I can’t stand those women. But I took the case cheerfully. It’ll seal the partner-deal. I could lie, if you want, and tell you it was your cause that attracted me, or the legal complexities, which aren’t very complex.”
“So, how is the case?”
“I’d characterize it as amusing right now. I wouldn’t call Miles Ward the most imposing adversary I’ve faced.”
“I’ll be darned.”
She yawned. “I’ve laid the groundwork to make the felony charge evaporate. I’ve petitioned Judge Peat and the Attorney General to remove Ward from the case because of his dealings with the Reicher Corporation.”
“Dealings?”
“When he ran for D.A., he accepted a campaign contribution. A small one--proving he’s both corrupt and stupid.”
“Holy shit.”
“Not the legal term, but I think you’re getting the drift. Which brings us to Judge Peat. I’ve petitioned him to remove himself from the case.”
“What?”
“He was arrested for DWI some years ago. Your husband was the arresting officer. Conflict of interest. If that doesn’t work, I’ll go for change of--”
“--You can’t do this!”--
“--venue. Why not? Besides, it’s done.”
“You don’t understand--it’s a small county--this’ll look so personal. It’s because Lloyd arrested him that you mustn’t do this. There’s a history there.”
“Oh, I know all about histories and counties where everybody knows everybody. Sacramento County’s the poster child, believe me. It can make Chicago look like a monastery. Although I have my doubts about monasteries.”
“You don’t get it--Judge Peat’s leaning over backwards for me. It’s the opposite of holding a grudge. When we met in his chambers--”
“It’s done.”
“Undo it, goddamn it!” I paced, I stalked. She lit a cigarette.
“Okay if I smoke?”
I shrugged. “Look, Lloyd and I have to live in this place after you leave. Carstairs isn’t just a judge. He’s our friend.” Admittedly, friend sounded hollow as it came out. He wasn’t a friend, but he wasn’t an acquaintance or family or an enemy, either. Most relationships in small towns can’t be categorized cleanly.
“All the more reason he should recuse himself.”
“Well, then say it’s because he’s our friend, not because Lloyd arrested him.”
She just laughed.
I said, “Has he read this petition-thing yet?”
“I doubt it.”
“It’s with the Clerk? Shit, I’ll just walk down the hallway and get it.”
“No, you won’t. this.
Jennifer Rosamund and camera-boy returned.
“Oh, God, cigarette smoke,” Jennifer mourned. “Could you put that out?”
Laura: “No.”
This exchange was among many reasons the two took an immediate dislike to one another.
“Okay, let’s get this thing over with,” I said.
“Thing?” Laura said.
“An interview,” I said. “Cutting Edge. Ten billion viewers.”
“Be vague in your answers,” Laura said. “I’ll stay to make sure you’re vague.”
Jennifer, attempting to ignore Laura, said to me, “I probably won’t ask this on camera, but isn’t there some irony in an environmentalist being a wood-carver, or vice versa?”
“Do you mean 'hypocrisy’?” I said.
“Yes.”
“I suppose so, if you stretch the point. All my exotic wood comes from plantations, not rain forests. From around here, I use oak that’s dead and down. Or fruit-wood from the old abandoned orchards.”
“Oh,” she said. She got out a compact mirror and looked at herself with a cold, hard eye.
* * *
Months later, when I finally looked at a videotape of the “piece,” I would marvel at how completely unlike the experience of the interview the tape was. To dispense with my vanity first, I’ll mention my face on tape looked like the mug of a submerged body. Then, to get more objective, I’ll say that “I” was a very small piece of the electronic story. The anchor of Cutting Edge crooned one of those melodramatic introductions, as--in slow-mo--the image of the sheriff my husband was superimposed over the image of me in the jail jumpsuit. “It seems even the most remote California communities are not immune to strange California justice”. . . .Husband arrests wife. . . .Jennifer against the backdrop of the dam site. . . .Jennifer on the bridge that was a stand-in for the bridge on which they hanged Juanita. . . .Me….Maybe ten seconds of talk about Juanita, “lynched during the historic Gold Rush”. . . .My puffy TV face saying, “If we don’t need the electricity, why do we need the dam?” And “The question is, do any other creatures have a right to live on the planet besides us?” I actually said that: how mortifying. My talking-point: “They lynched Juanita over the river, and now they want to lynch the river.” Jennifer Rosamund: “A spokesman from the Reicher Corporation declined to be interviewed on camera.” Not only on camera, but off. Borrowed footage of the scuffle with my accoster, Carl Kelly: This, it turned out, was the center of the story--a camera being bumped! Poor camera! Lloyd on top of Carl, me looking only mildly pained, as if I had gas. . . . Jennifer in a wrap-up, standing on the bridge, trying desperately both to include Juanita and make sense of my connection to the lynchee; she made it sound as if Juanita were my great-great grandmother, “roots in Old California.” And that was that.
* * *
Sometime after lights, camera, interview but before Judge Peat roared in, I remember chatting again with Laura Klein in my cell.
I could tell Laura was going to ask me about Lloyd. It’s a look people get, even jaded lawyer-people. A mixture of curiosity, patronage, and politeness.
And in that instant before Laura asked about Lloyd, I thought of what I might tell her; in such moments time stretches. Or maybe the mind just calls up memories all at once: You feel as if all of what you could say is laid out before you and there’s no rush to speak.
I thought I could tell her about “us”--the LloydandMaryness of us--Willow-Creek-teenage-sex and all that. Could explain how at age six Lloyd was orphaned, his Indian-carpenter-father and waitress-white-mother killed on a Nevada highway, which that night had been just one semi-trailer-truck from not being deserted enough to let Lloyd’s life go forward on its highway ordinarily: Where the highway curved ‘round a sage-brush hillock, the driver of the semi was just enough asleep to let his rig drift left, and around the bend came the Bluestones’ gray Chevy pickup. . . .Hours later, after the trucker had willed himself conscious and radioed for the Nevada Highway Patrol and the trooper showed up & looked at it--debris of the worst wreck he would see in his life--and after the trooper realized that he’d have to tarp over everything and have it hauled to Reno, bodies and all, and after he looked for skidmarks to measure and found none---only then was it clear Lloyd’s mother and father had rounded the hillock and died before they were surprised, force and light, awareness and death hitting them at once. The trucker, the state troooper, the Bluestones’ friends, the coroner of Washo County, the tow-truck operator, and--when he got a little older--Lloyd himself were left to return and return again in their minds to the mathematical purity, the pristine, horrific unlikelihood of the accident. Its “impossibility.” If the trucker had eaten one more french-fry at the grill in Wells, Nevada; if he’d shifted up or shifted down a little more or a little less efficiently fifty or sixty or two or eight miles away; if the Bluestones had left home sixty seconds--hell, thirty seconds--later; if they had almost hit a deer and stopped; if they had had a quarrel and stopped; if the trucker had popped some pills; if and if and if . . . . there would have been a swerve, or the semi would have already roared into the sagebrush (the Bluestones, alive, stopping to help the trucker who would not have killed them but who killed them in this non-hypothetical life), and Lloyd would have kept that father and mother and they him, and the changes flowing like a watershed, coalescing like springs into rivers, would have multiplied, engulfing me and no-Gabriel and life after life after no-life. But there was no swerve. There was death, a flash, and Lloyd, orphan of a flash, foster-parented by the Kjellstroms, who adopted him eventually, keeping him and he them; Lloyd, who adapted eventually, but who almost never utters the names of his real parents; --Betty Kjellstrom insisting that he keep his own name--virtually a legal impossibility in those days--and the name is now my name, Mary . . . Herrera . . ..Sacramento . . . .Willow Creek . . . .Claytonville. . . . . Bluestone.
I could, I thought, tell Laura how the Kjellstroms had not intended to keep Lloyd for long but were won over, if that’s the phrase, not so much by cuteness or brownness or orphanness as by a haunting calmness in the boy. Betty: “He was seven going on eighty-seven. Even when he cried, and cried for them, for his folks, there was something adult about it, as if he understood what he was crying about, making it even harder to comfort him. To tell you the truth, of all the reasons we had for wanting to adopt him, and there were lots, I think the big one was Axel and I wanted to watch this grown-up boy grow up. Something very special about the lad.”
Could tell her how Lloyd, a high-plateau, half-Washo-Indian kid, made friends with the Tamarack National Forest, or that piece of it which surrounded the Kjellstrom’s place. Betty said by the time he was 9, she’d pretty much let him wander anywhere, as long as he stayed away from the river. “He just knew his way around, and I let him play in the woods like I’d never let any of foster kids do. He’d bring back everything--salamanders, dead birds, praying mantises, arrowheads, old coins, you name it. He’d always hold it up, whatever it was, like a present. And his face shined.”
Could recall for my high-priced lawyer how Lloyd had entered, so to speak, my life, at Willow Creek--try to make her see how it was for us up here after that, how we were handed, had (not-meaning-to) handed ourselves, a life we didn’t know what to do with, how we just “did life” some days.
But in that jail cell, sitting across from her in a freeze-dried moment, before she was about to ask about Lloyd, I felt that if I wouldn’t be able to make her see Lloyd in a way she’d honor, I didn’t want to say anything--felt as if Lloyd’s life was, like the names of his real parents, better left unsaid.
“Your husband. . . .,” Laura said.
“Yes?”
“He doesn’t seem like most cops.”
I smiled.
Moments later, in roared silver-haired Carstairs Peat.
It was as if he’d been born again, sired by offences done him, his face ruddy-dark like pomegranate-meat.
Friday, the morning of July third, I felt more left out than locked up. Ed Porter, in civilian clothes, brought me breakfast but left before the first munch of wheat toast broke the morning calm. There didn’t seem to be much activity in the sheriff’s office. Where was Sheriff Husband? I’d grown accustomed to a murmur out there beyond my bars & the one door--and to Bluestone’s ambling in when he got to work.
I’d made myself happy by imagining Lloyd and Gabriel joining forces to make themselves a breakfast in the kitchen near the river--Lloyd mumbling questions to his son about college and baseball and women, Gabriel mumbling noncommittal answers right back at the Old Man. Me not there to improve communication.
And of course, the parking lot out there was quiet because most of the county employees had started their long weekend.
The honeymoon phase of Protest was over, I noted, looking at cold scrambled eggs. Claytonville was at work or gone-fishing. The sluggish, massive onslaught of RVs, station wagons, mountain bikes, and yuppie-guided Harleys now inched its way, I knew, up from the Central Valley--a thick vehicular anaconda of vacationers. In just one of these weekends, more people would invade the foothills and mountain canyons than all of the Gold Rushers combined.
* * *
Someone over in the cafe--I heard the exchange with perfect pitch in a day-dreamed scene--was saying, “Mary Bluestone still in jail?”
“Don’t know. Think so. My understanding is she refused bail. But then someone--`think it was Bob--said, no, she posted bail.”
“I hear she got herself a lawyer from Sacramento. It’s what I heard, anyway.”
And the waitress would swoop down on that little formica counter, coming after gossip like an eagle diving to a lake’s surface, saying, “I don’t see Mary staying in there more than one night. You boys okay on coffee? I bet she’s home carving, or watering her squash.”
Then something else, some little beige tile in the village’s beige mosaic of conversation, would be reported or remembered, offered, contested, denied, put to rest, or recycled. Rarely a mention of the river, dam, or courthouse proceedings.
* * *
It’s about equipment, not news or entertainment or finding things out. Equipment. That’s what I learned, on July 3, about TV.
A short, swarthy guy with a rooster buzz-cut & L.A. casual clothes came through the outer door carrying silvery equipment cases and black nylon bags. Except for brushing me with a glance, he behaved as if I weren’t there. He dropped off a load, went for another, brought it back, and had enough stuff to halfway-fill the space in front of the cells. There coils of extension-cords, although I guessed they weren’t really called that. I thought ruefully of my obsession with the rope they used on Juanita.
Breathing hard, sweating (he had a paunch), hands on hips, he looked in my direction, then up, then down. I was on the cot.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi. You draw that?” The mural, he meant.
“Uh-huh. What are you doing?”
“Setting up. Boy, is the lighting weird in here.”
“Setting up for what?” I knew, but what the hell.
“Oh, Jeez, thought you knew. We’re from Cutting Edge. Shooting a story on you.”
“But why are you in here?”
He looked at me as if my family tree hadn’t ever branched.
“Uh, to interview you?” Suddenly, he’d become snotty. He started unpacking.
“I don’t think so.”
“That’s what they all say.” Unpacking. Grunting. His L.A. jeans were way too tight: cookie dough wrapped in cellophane. “Actually, almost none of `em say it anymore. Anyway, take it up with the talent. I just take the pretty pictures.”
On cue--why can’t I ever make entrances con brio like that?--the Talent arrived. Thin as a sunflower stalk. Black hair in a shortish cut that might have cost as much as one of my carvings. A wonderful pale-lemony linen suit--not wrinkled. Every piece of linen I’ve ever worn for ten seconds looks like a relief map of the Rockies. In my orange jumpsuit, I looked—-contrasted to the talent--like a highway caution-cone.
Jennifer Rosamund was her name, it turned out. She whipped off those Armani sun-shades. Her lip-lacquered mouth said, “Gawd, Dan-o, what an ugly room.” I felt like remind her it was a jail cell, but I didn’t.
“You must be Mary--is it Bluestone or Herrera?--I’ve heard both.”
“Buenos dias, senorita,” I said in a Tijuana barmaid accent, looking at her cow-eyed. Incredibly, she took the bait, looked at Dan-o the Grunter, who was getting a tripod on its legs like a newborn calf said. He paused and said, “She’s jerkin’ your chain, Jen.”
“Oh.”
“Bluestone’s the name on my driver’s license,” I said.
She introduced herself. We shook hands through the bars. Her hand was wet and hot. Overheated Talent.
“What we’re gonna do is,” she said, “--is that Danny will set up and then we’ll do an interview, but then, like, we’ll do some extra shooting, too.”
“I don’t feel like being on camera,” I said. “I feel fat and dirty. I think I’ll pass, if you don’t mind.”
It was as if, from the recesses of my county jumpsuit, I’d produced a pistol. Dan-o stopped what he was doing and looked at Jennifer. Jennifer looked back at him. Then came the old soft-shoe. Or is it soft-sell?
“Gawd, I know what you mean, I mean I’ve been doin’ this for seven-eight years, and I still get panicky about how I look.”
A little more twang had seeped into her speech. I thought I heard Texas in there, maybe Oklahoma or Missouri. You would have thought Jen and I were long-lost sorority sisters. But I thought, Not so fast there, Little Missy.
“I wouldn’t say I’m panicky about my looks. I just don’t want to be on camera.”
The twang disappeared. We were back to the California newspeak tones:
“But wouldn’t you like 35 million Americans to hear your point of view about this dam? And the—the woman?”
I waited. They waited. Dan-o wasn’t about to assemble one more blessed piece of equipment if he wasn’t going to be able to use it. The altitude had gotten to him.
“How do you know 35 million watch?”
“Is that a yes?”
“A maybe.”
“Contingent upon . . . .?”
“Upon a shower and makeup.” I felt superbly shallow. “Also, the story’s got to be about the dam and Juanita, not a hick sheriff and his wife.”
“Well, as a matter of policy, we don’t let subjects of our stories dictate content, but of course the dam will be a big part of the story. And the woman. Juanita.” A “yeah, right” grin touched Dan-o’s face, and he recommenced the screwing-together of aluminum tubes and cable connectors; several large black cords, I saw, snaked through the doorway: The little jail of Tamarack County was about to be up-linked.
“After my shower we’ll talk more.”
“Who do I see about this shower?” Jen had a whatever-it-takes-to-get-the-story bounce in her voice.
“Anybody out there in the office?”
“There hardly is anybody. Just the blonde girl.”
“Brenda MacDonald. Nobody else?”
“Just a funny little man in plain clothes.”
“Ed. Ed Porter. Jesus, where is everybody?”
By everybody I meant mainly my husband and my son. Why hadn’t they stopped in at least to say good morning? I should have known that I should have known enough to have been worried.
* * *
Ed Porter toyed with the idea of accompanying me to the shower--in an official capacity, that is. But I think he took a hard look at the situation and saw the silliness of it, got me a towel and a new jumpsuit, and (apparently) told Brenda the dispatcher to fetch me some underclothes from the stockpile Lloyd had brought from home--and from home Lloyd had, of course (husbands!), brought my least favorite, least comfortable underwear.
. . . .Having showered, walking back up toward the courthouse out of that little hollow where the outbuildings sit, I felt myself elevated into a classic summer day in the Sierra Nevada, every shade of green displayed on mountainsides, the air hot but clean and dry, the sky a blue so deep that if it went one quality-level deeper it would seem weird, not exquisite. I was aware of the North Meredith River’s narrow murmur and thought, naturally, of the dam site: Had Rupert Williams blown up Bar Rock? No one had said a word about it. I’d been so busy with lawyers & looney jailmates, Myrna Lovetti, Sybil Burns, the attorney Laura Klein, and the novelist Gary Stad Fromm, and murals, and memory and now Cutting Edge, that I hadn’t thought to ask this basic question. Had the famous rock been blown to bits?
A notion announced itself abruptly: Okay, enough. Let Juanita rest. Accept what you have not changed (the dam), get back to work, to Bluestone and Gabe, to morning weeding and evening reading and carving in between.
Back at the cells, the Talent and Dan-o were gone, but who should I spy on my cot but my lawyer, Laura Klein, asleep, with The Guns of August spread open on her chest.
She woke up because the cell door squeaked as I opened it further. . . .
“I feel like Goldilocks,” she said, “commandeering your bed.”
“Commandeer away.”
She looked not good--in the face, that is; pale, weary.
“Reading Tuchman—-`zat part of the torture in these parts?”
“It’s pronounced Tuck-man? Three pages is all I could manage. Seems more like a Winter book, in spite of the title. . . . What’s going on?”
“I couldn’t sleep--I mean, all night. It’s so goddamned quiet up here. How do you stand it?”
She wasn’t expecting an answer. “So I thought I’d drop in on my client. And dozed. The altitude.”
“Make sure you drink a lot of water.” I found a place to park my kiester. Settled, I asked, “Why did you take this case?”
The answer wasn’t snapped, but it was impatient. “Uh, money? Remuneration. Profit.”
“I meant this case. Surely you have a choice.”
“I do and I don’t,” she said. She sat up. “I don’t really want to go into it. I’m more interested in making an ounce of sense of why you chained yourself to a rock.”
“Oh, well, by all means, let’s talk about what you’re interested in.”
“My, aren’t we cranky.”
“Yes, aren’t we.”
One of those moments ensued--where both parties realize they’ve just had a miniature, immature quarrel, a spatlet, without setting out to have one.
“As I see it,” she said, recovering for both of us, “I’m technically the guest here, so I think I should apologize.”
“The host accepts and apologizes right back.”
“I took your case because I’m an associate who is first in line to be a partner, and because I work the criminal turf--as opposed to civil. The associate who’s second in line takes most of Sybil’s work, but he went on vacation. One of the partners kicked your case to me. Nothing personal, but I had better things to do than to drive up here and live in a shabby motel. Sybil offered her place, but I can’t stand those women. But I took the case cheerfully. It’ll seal the partner-deal. I could lie, if you want, and tell you it was your cause that attracted me, or the legal complexities, which aren’t very complex.”
“So, how is the case?”
“I’d characterize it as amusing right now. I wouldn’t call Miles Ward the most imposing adversary I’ve faced.”
“I’ll be darned.”
She yawned. “I’ve laid the groundwork to make the felony charge evaporate. I’ve petitioned Judge Peat and the Attorney General to remove Ward from the case because of his dealings with the Reicher Corporation.”
“Dealings?”
“When he ran for D.A., he accepted a campaign contribution. A small one--proving he’s both corrupt and stupid.”
“Holy shit.”
“Not the legal term, but I think you’re getting the drift. Which brings us to Judge Peat. I’ve petitioned him to remove himself from the case.”
“What?”
“He was arrested for DWI some years ago. Your husband was the arresting officer. Conflict of interest. If that doesn’t work, I’ll go for change of--”
“--You can’t do this!”--
“--venue. Why not? Besides, it’s done.”
“You don’t understand--it’s a small county--this’ll look so personal. It’s because Lloyd arrested him that you mustn’t do this. There’s a history there.”
“Oh, I know all about histories and counties where everybody knows everybody. Sacramento County’s the poster child, believe me. It can make Chicago look like a monastery. Although I have my doubts about monasteries.”
“You don’t get it--Judge Peat’s leaning over backwards for me. It’s the opposite of holding a grudge. When we met in his chambers--”
“It’s done.”
“Undo it, goddamn it!” I paced, I stalked. She lit a cigarette.
“Okay if I smoke?”
I shrugged. “Look, Lloyd and I have to live in this place after you leave. Carstairs isn’t just a judge. He’s our friend.” Admittedly, friend sounded hollow as it came out. He wasn’t a friend, but he wasn’t an acquaintance or family or an enemy, either. Most relationships in small towns can’t be categorized cleanly.
“All the more reason he should recuse himself.”
“Well, then say it’s because he’s our friend, not because Lloyd arrested him.”
She just laughed.
I said, “Has he read this petition-thing yet?”
“I doubt it.”
“It’s with the Clerk? Shit, I’ll just walk down the hallway and get it.”
“No, you won’t. this.
Jennifer Rosamund and camera-boy returned.
“Oh, God, cigarette smoke,” Jennifer mourned. “Could you put that out?”
Laura: “No.”
This exchange was among many reasons the two took an immediate dislike to one another.
“Okay, let’s get this thing over with,” I said.
“Thing?” Laura said.
“An interview,” I said. “Cutting Edge. Ten billion viewers.”
“Be vague in your answers,” Laura said. “I’ll stay to make sure you’re vague.”
Jennifer, attempting to ignore Laura, said to me, “I probably won’t ask this on camera, but isn’t there some irony in an environmentalist being a wood-carver, or vice versa?”
“Do you mean 'hypocrisy’?” I said.
“Yes.”
“I suppose so, if you stretch the point. All my exotic wood comes from plantations, not rain forests. From around here, I use oak that’s dead and down. Or fruit-wood from the old abandoned orchards.”
“Oh,” she said. She got out a compact mirror and looked at herself with a cold, hard eye.
* * *
Months later, when I finally looked at a videotape of the “piece,” I would marvel at how completely unlike the experience of the interview the tape was. To dispense with my vanity first, I’ll mention my face on tape looked like the mug of a submerged body. Then, to get more objective, I’ll say that “I” was a very small piece of the electronic story. The anchor of Cutting Edge crooned one of those melodramatic introductions, as--in slow-mo--the image of the sheriff my husband was superimposed over the image of me in the jail jumpsuit. “It seems even the most remote California communities are not immune to strange California justice”. . . .Husband arrests wife. . . .Jennifer against the backdrop of the dam site. . . .Jennifer on the bridge that was a stand-in for the bridge on which they hanged Juanita. . . .Me….Maybe ten seconds of talk about Juanita, “lynched during the historic Gold Rush”. . . .My puffy TV face saying, “If we don’t need the electricity, why do we need the dam?” And “The question is, do any other creatures have a right to live on the planet besides us?” I actually said that: how mortifying. My talking-point: “They lynched Juanita over the river, and now they want to lynch the river.” Jennifer Rosamund: “A spokesman from the Reicher Corporation declined to be interviewed on camera.” Not only on camera, but off. Borrowed footage of the scuffle with my accoster, Carl Kelly: This, it turned out, was the center of the story--a camera being bumped! Poor camera! Lloyd on top of Carl, me looking only mildly pained, as if I had gas. . . . Jennifer in a wrap-up, standing on the bridge, trying desperately both to include Juanita and make sense of my connection to the lynchee; she made it sound as if Juanita were my great-great grandmother, “roots in Old California.” And that was that.
* * *
Sometime after lights, camera, interview but before Judge Peat roared in, I remember chatting again with Laura Klein in my cell.
I could tell Laura was going to ask me about Lloyd. It’s a look people get, even jaded lawyer-people. A mixture of curiosity, patronage, and politeness.
And in that instant before Laura asked about Lloyd, I thought of what I might tell her; in such moments time stretches. Or maybe the mind just calls up memories all at once: You feel as if all of what you could say is laid out before you and there’s no rush to speak.
I thought I could tell her about “us”--the LloydandMaryness of us--Willow-Creek-teenage-sex and all that. Could explain how at age six Lloyd was orphaned, his Indian-carpenter-father and waitress-white-mother killed on a Nevada highway, which that night had been just one semi-trailer-truck from not being deserted enough to let Lloyd’s life go forward on its highway ordinarily: Where the highway curved ‘round a sage-brush hillock, the driver of the semi was just enough asleep to let his rig drift left, and around the bend came the Bluestones’ gray Chevy pickup. . . .Hours later, after the trucker had willed himself conscious and radioed for the Nevada Highway Patrol and the trooper showed up & looked at it--debris of the worst wreck he would see in his life--and after the trooper realized that he’d have to tarp over everything and have it hauled to Reno, bodies and all, and after he looked for skidmarks to measure and found none---only then was it clear Lloyd’s mother and father had rounded the hillock and died before they were surprised, force and light, awareness and death hitting them at once. The trucker, the state troooper, the Bluestones’ friends, the coroner of Washo County, the tow-truck operator, and--when he got a little older--Lloyd himself were left to return and return again in their minds to the mathematical purity, the pristine, horrific unlikelihood of the accident. Its “impossibility.” If the trucker had eaten one more french-fry at the grill in Wells, Nevada; if he’d shifted up or shifted down a little more or a little less efficiently fifty or sixty or two or eight miles away; if the Bluestones had left home sixty seconds--hell, thirty seconds--later; if they had almost hit a deer and stopped; if they had had a quarrel and stopped; if the trucker had popped some pills; if and if and if . . . . there would have been a swerve, or the semi would have already roared into the sagebrush (the Bluestones, alive, stopping to help the trucker who would not have killed them but who killed them in this non-hypothetical life), and Lloyd would have kept that father and mother and they him, and the changes flowing like a watershed, coalescing like springs into rivers, would have multiplied, engulfing me and no-Gabriel and life after life after no-life. But there was no swerve. There was death, a flash, and Lloyd, orphan of a flash, foster-parented by the Kjellstroms, who adopted him eventually, keeping him and he them; Lloyd, who adapted eventually, but who almost never utters the names of his real parents; --Betty Kjellstrom insisting that he keep his own name--virtually a legal impossibility in those days--and the name is now my name, Mary . . . Herrera . . ..Sacramento . . . .Willow Creek . . . .Claytonville. . . . . Bluestone.
I could, I thought, tell Laura how the Kjellstroms had not intended to keep Lloyd for long but were won over, if that’s the phrase, not so much by cuteness or brownness or orphanness as by a haunting calmness in the boy. Betty: “He was seven going on eighty-seven. Even when he cried, and cried for them, for his folks, there was something adult about it, as if he understood what he was crying about, making it even harder to comfort him. To tell you the truth, of all the reasons we had for wanting to adopt him, and there were lots, I think the big one was Axel and I wanted to watch this grown-up boy grow up. Something very special about the lad.”
Could tell her how Lloyd, a high-plateau, half-Washo-Indian kid, made friends with the Tamarack National Forest, or that piece of it which surrounded the Kjellstrom’s place. Betty said by the time he was 9, she’d pretty much let him wander anywhere, as long as he stayed away from the river. “He just knew his way around, and I let him play in the woods like I’d never let any of foster kids do. He’d bring back everything--salamanders, dead birds, praying mantises, arrowheads, old coins, you name it. He’d always hold it up, whatever it was, like a present. And his face shined.”
Could recall for my high-priced lawyer how Lloyd had entered, so to speak, my life, at Willow Creek--try to make her see how it was for us up here after that, how we were handed, had (not-meaning-to) handed ourselves, a life we didn’t know what to do with, how we just “did life” some days.
But in that jail cell, sitting across from her in a freeze-dried moment, before she was about to ask about Lloyd, I felt that if I wouldn’t be able to make her see Lloyd in a way she’d honor, I didn’t want to say anything--felt as if Lloyd’s life was, like the names of his real parents, better left unsaid.
“Your husband. . . .,” Laura said.
“Yes?”
“He doesn’t seem like most cops.”
I smiled.
Moments later, in roared silver-haired Carstairs Peat.
It was as if he’d been born again, sired by offences done him, his face ruddy-dark like pomegranate-meat.
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