“That’s where they had the steamboat tied up and that’s where Buster was standing while we watched them make the movie,” said Fran, gesturing toward the rotted pilings on the riverbank and pointing with his cigarette. A handful of winos in stained clothes and battered hats approached the slowing De Soto, but Fran sped up and they scattered to make room for the sedan, cursing as Ram and Fran passed. Ram held his nose and his eyes widened at the sight of the grisly looking men, two of whom were punching and kicking a third one lying face down on the cobbled street. Fran turned left, away from the water, turning on Second Street, the main thoroughfare through the West End, the street its denizens called “The Deuce.”
The Deuce was a metropolis of lost souls. Throngs of men—young, old, and somewhere in the middle—milled about the old Gold Rush storefronts between Front and Fifth Streets, with evangelists on every corner and battered cars from the thirties and forties lining the curbs, inside of which, more winos moved about. Saloons every fifty feet or so, a couple package stores. “This is where the Gold Rush began,” Fran said, pointing to the two-story building where Charles Le Doir’s Paragon Meat Market once stood.
Charles the first, the first Le Doir in Sagrada, parlayed the Paragon into an empire, Ram having heard it from the old man more times than he could count. But if this was where the Gold Rush began—here in the heart of the West End on The Deuce with its battered cars and two-dollar whores and bottle shops—and if the Gold Rush was what made Sagrada great, as not only Ram’s father, but also every other California historian, every other authority of the moment agreed, then Ram wondered what had happened in the interim to cause the core’s decay? How did the blooming heart of sweet-smelling Gold turn to foul-smelling shit? What caused it and when? That was part of the story Ram was trying to unravel; these were the questions that Ram wanted answered…
…Now, these remembered artifacts and heirlooms were in Ram’s care, and though they didn’t amount to much more than a stack of newspaper clippings and the yellowed windwhistle bone that he retrieved from a trunk at his mother’s house a few years before and kept in a drawer alongside Vera’s letters and photos, what they amounted to was a history that Ram felt could be told. And where that skein unraveled back to was an Irish dairy farm outside the town of Inch.
“…Honey, get me a beer,” she called from the living room. The house was empty except for the two of them. Yick was at work at the rendering plant, a place that smelled even fouler than The Deuce did. Yick owned the plant and this was where Ram was supposed to work summers as soon as he turned sixteen. “Ram, get me a beer, please,” Hazel called again. Ram put aside his model airplane and put on a pair of shorts and T-shirt. He was feeling better now, the fever had passed, but he was still restricted to bed rest by the doctors after his release from St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. The doctors told him to take it easy until they were sure that whatever he had had passed, and they hadn’t conclusively determined what that was. Yick had left Ram in Hazel’s care, telling his sister to watch him carefully. Now Ram was being summoned by her, not to check on him, but to bring her morning beer. Ram knew there would be others before she switched to screwdrivers.
From the moment he met her after his family moved to Sagrada, what Ram most remembered of Hazel was the strong cherry-like smell that Ram assumed most adults smelled like. When Hazel first kissed and nuzzled him upon their arrival, Ram noted the smell, noting it too on his Uncle Charles when he did the same and kissed Ram, also noting it on his old Uncle Fred, and on Father Brooke, the priest who was Hazel’s boss and who was there at her home every Christmas with all the other Le Doir’s. It was a smell sweet and not unpleasant, until it became overpowering…
“Honey—”
“—I’m coming, Aunt Hazel.”
Ram ran to the kitchen, buttoning his cutoffs as he did. He looked at the clock on the wall—the clock that Yick loved that kept time by running backwards—and saw it was almost 10:30. Ram took a cold can from the six-pack holder and ran down the hall to the bedroom where his Aunt slept and knocked on her door. “Come in,” Hazel called. Ram entered and his Aunt was still in bed, propped up with pillows all around her and lit by a bedside lamp, with the drapes closed to shield out the light. Her eyes were too sensitive for bright light, she told Ram, but as Ram entered the room, Hazel’s eyes brightened and her smile widened at the sight of him.
“You’re looking fit as a fiddle,” she said cheerily. “Come over here so your Aunt Hazel can have a closer look.”
Ram did as he was told and approached the bed. When he was close to her, Hazel took the beer from his hand and opened it with a can opener. The beer foamed, and she gulped some of it.
“Well, you seem to be on the mend. Come over here and let’s check,” she said, putting down the beer and drying her hands on the sheet before putting one on Ram’s forehead. “Um-hmm, um-hmm, nice and cool, and that’s good. That’s what we want, yes. How do you feel?”
“Okay, I guess.”
“Not sick to your stomach at all?”
“Nah, I’m fine.”
“Well, you sure weren’t, young man. You had us scared to death there for a while. You nearly gave your old Uncle Yick a heart attack.”
“I didn’t mean to,” Ram countered, never wanting to do anything that might be considered harmful when it came to Yick. He was Ram’s adult ally and protector, the only one of the Le Doir clan whom Ram believed and trusted.
“Of course, you didn’t, honey,” Hazel said, noting Ram’s reaction. “Of course, you didn’t. He was just scared, Ram, Yick was. He didn’t know what he could do to help.”
“I’m sorry I got so sick. Maybe it was that steak I ate.”
“That’s what we thought too. Your Uncle Yick went back to the Red Barn and got some of those steaks and took them to the hospital so they could be tested. Uh-huh, that’s what he did, your old Uncle Yick,” Hazel said, laughing and wheezing as she did…
…During that summer of his unexpected, undiagnosed, near-fatal illness—the doctors first suspected appendicitis, then hepatitis, then a glandular infection, before giving up and admitting that they didn’t know what it was—Ram started asking his Aunt Hazel about the Le Doirs and their past during the Gold Rush. While Hazel didn’t have the family history committed to memory like her brother Fran seemed to, her stories and reminiscences of the formal dinners and Sunday afternoon teas at the grand mansion that Charles the First built across from the Capitol, had a color and flair to them that Fran’s historical and analytical sermons to Ram lacked. With his dad, Ram felt that he was being lectured to, or at, really, and that he would be quizzed on the lecture later, which he often was by his father. But with Hazel, the tales were human-scaled and colorful: of what the rooms in the mansion looked like, what their furnishings were, what people wore at the parties and what was said, and what Hazel and her three brothers had seen firsthand.
She was reticent at first to say much to Ram, but as the season wore on, with only she and Ram in the house until Yick returned home in the evenings, she began confiding more to her nephew, seeing the riveted look on his face, a look of wonder approaching rapture, or sometimes, depending on the tale, of horror.
Ram would wait until she’d switched from the beer to the screwdrivers before asking for the stories, and always when he did, they would be in the den where the old family pictures were hung on Yick’s wall that Hazel would point to and refer to from time to time as she spun the tales back to her nephew.
There was a sepia-toned oval photograph of five young men standing in a large room posed by a massive marble fireplace. It was taken in 1919 of the five surviving Le Doir brothers of that generation, one less Le Doir that survived from the generation before, when six of seven survived—all of them male. In the picture on Yick’s wall, the young Le Doir’s were dressed in Prince Edward suits and wing collars, all but one of them looking away from the camera, the one in the middle who stared directly ahead but seemed to be looking at some point beyond the p
hotographer. The eyes of the one staring straight ahead were pale and watery, his mouth slightly parted as if in recognition of something or someone, as though he were about to say, “Ah,” or “Yes, that’s it.” That was Ram’s grandfather, Stanford Francis Le Doir Sr. It was there with that portrait of the young men on Yick’s wall where Hazel spun stories about her family…
…Before Ram realized, it he was on the outskirts of Red Bluff. The motel he was staying at was one he remembered from that long-ago summer of his undisclosed illness. It used to have two piers standing over the Sagrada River, but they were gone now.
The last time he was here, a lifetime ago quite literally, that summer when he and Fran built a house here when they were still close, the Crystal, Yick’s favorite hangout and where Ram was supposed to meet Hazel for dinner at six, had gone to seed and become a shithole. When Ram called to check on motels, he was told the Crystal was still in transition so he booked the room at The Lassen. He looked at his watch. It was almost four, still enough time to make a few calls to San Francisco and Los Angeles on the Barry Bailey story. Ram pulled out his Week at a Glance, pulled the business cards out of his pocket, and began dialing.
For the next hour-and-a-half, Ram did phone interviews, talking to old friends of Barry’s that Ram had been referred to and who expected his calls, asking them questions about the mercurial ex-Governor and his political views and practices, asking them how his politics has changed or evolved since his gubernatorial term and whether or not they thought his run for the Senate would prove successful. He noted his interviewee’s responses in his reporter’s notepad—the second one on Bailey so far. By 5:30, Ram had finished four phone interviews—two with friends of Barry that were of a more personal nature and two with former officials within his administration, whose responses were more confined to the arenas of politics and policy.
When he was nearing the end of his last interview with Paul Mulligan, a friend of Barry’s since boyhood, he asked Mulligan if there was one single attribute of Barry’s that was most remarkable. Mulligan hesitated before responding. “The one thing about Barry is that he has absolutely no street sense. He never had a clue what real people thought or felt or cared about because he never had any contact with people like that because of his upbringing. Barry never worked a day in his life—except as a politician, so the only life he knows is politics. He can talk with politicians or fundraisers or party chairman or precinct organizers and understands what their lives and concerns are. But talk to a plumber? A fireman? A housewife? A divorced mother working at KMart? Barry Bailey doesn’t have a clue what their lives and concerns are, and I’ve seen plenty of them try and talk with him and watched him squirm whenever that happens; they might as well be speaking Greek, because that’s about how much he understands these people and how much street sense he has: a little. I’d say that’s the thing that’s the most remarkable thing and it’s also his greatest liability.”
Ram looked at the time and saw that he had to get ready. He asked Mulligan if he could quote him and Mulligan said, “Sure, just don’t burn me.”
In the shower, Ram thought about the interview and what he had been warned about not burning him. It was something he’d never done, betray a source, and Ram’s published work with unnamed sources attested to that fact.
On an assignment for Golden State, Ram’s editor Michael Gates pushed Ram to the wall. It was an investigative piece focusing on the drugs and sex scandal on Capitol Hill in Washington D.C. involving Congressmen, one of them the front runner in the gubernatorial primary of 1982. Llewellyn had passed Ram a note during a legislative session, asking Ram to meet him at Mulcahy’s, a downtown Sagrada bar, at 4:30. Ram made eye contact with Wesley, then out on the floor, conferring with his boss, and signaled okay. When he got to the bar, Llewellyn gave Ram a bombshell: the front-runner had a coke habit and a thing for male pages. Wesley had the goods on him, through a back channel directly involved in the investigation. “This is for your eyes only,” Llewellyn warned Ram, before he brought out the typescript he composed of the meeting he’d witnessed between three major fundraisers and the congressman who was being confronted with the charges and asked if they were true. The congressman denied it, but shortly thereafter, his once seemingly insurmountable lead in the polls began eroding, with two challengers on his coattails. Two weeks later, the congressman was in third place and his money was drying up. When the primary was held that June, the congressman finished fourth in a field of five. His career was over, and it was the scandal that caused it, which Llewellyn had first-hand knowledge of and now wanted to pass along to Ram. They sat there in the afternoon light while discussing the terms of the story and Llewellyn’s contributions to it. “I’ll talk to you, and I’ll only tell you, and it’s on the record but not for attribution exactly what happened at the meeting I went to and who was there and what was said. But I will not talk to anybody else, Ram, not anybody, and you’d better know that going in. Any other confirmation about this meeting is something you’ll have to get on your own.”
Nobody else who Ram interviewed would confirm what had happened, other than to say that there had been the meeting at the place where Llewellyn said it was, in Vienna, Virginia, and that the race for Senator had been discussed. Whenever the topic of drugs or sex was mentioned, the interviewees clammed up. Ram managed to scrape up some supporting documentation with published news stories alluding to the congressman and reporting that he had been questioned by the FBI. Still, in the end, it was a single-source story, meaning that the only person who would say what happened was Wesley Llewellyn, and he wouldn’t say it to anybody but Ram.
When Ram turned the story in, Gates loved it and assigned it the coveted center spot in the magazine. Ram was sitting in Gates’s office, working on the edit, when the call came in from the lawyers in Los Angeles. “We’ve got a problem with Le Doirs’ story,” they said. “Do you think you and he could get on the next plane and come down here? Tell him to bring all his files with him.”
A limousine was waiting for them at LAX when they got in. The driver took them to a thirty-story tower in Century City where the magazine’s lawyers’ offices were. They took the elevator to the nineteenth floor and entered a suite. The receptionist escorted them through the warren-like cells until they arrived at the double doors of the firm’s main partner, Charles Hillburn. She seated them in the outer office and got them coffee. “Mr. Hillburn should be ready shortly,” she said, handing them their drinks. Ten minutes later, the double mahogany doors opened. Charles Hillburn sat at a massive desk, motioning them inside.
“Which one of you is Le Doir?” he asked.
“I am,” said Ram.
“You’re going to have to give us your source. We won’t burn him; but we have to question him. If he says the same things that you report, then we have no problem. We run with your story.”
“He won’t talk to anybody but me,” said Ram.
“Are you sure?”
“Pretty sure.”
“Why don’t you call him and see what he says. You can use the secure phone in the outer office if you’d like.”
Ram did as Hillburn suggested and called Llewellyn. He told him he had a problem with the story and explained the situation. Wes listened patiently until Ram finished, then asked, “You remember what I said about this in the beginning? I said I’d talk only with you, and after that, you were on your own?”
“Yeah, I remember, but—”
“—But nothing. Don’t give me up. Don’t do something you’ll regret.”
When Ram re-entered Hillburn’s office, he sat down next to Gates. “I’m sorry, my source will only talk to me.” They wrangled back and forth for close to an hour before Hillburn threw his hands up. “You leave us no choice. We kill the story.”
On the flight back to San Francisco, Gates barely spoke to Ram. When the magazine was published, a fashion story ran in the hard news well, causing Golden State readers great indignation. Ram was in the doghouse because
of it for almost a year.
Those were the early days for Ram at Golden State, maybe six years and thirty stories ago, before his career took off with the piece in The Stinger on the terrorist attacks, just before Vera’s career took off on its meteor ascent. Standing under the shower now, the water pouring over him, Ram began to wonder what had become of him, and the arc that described his history, his story—from poet exile to junkie remittance man, to exile again, to Endymion carpenter, to poet again, to political reporter. No identity seemed to have any relation to the other, a series of skins put on and molted and shed; a progression of masks; an amalgam of mummeries.
Now, he was working two dissimilar stories that seemed somehow intertwined, although he couldn’t say exactly how or why; one, a story on his pioneer family of Californios, the other, on a former Governor who sought a Senate seat, and Ram, here in Red Bluff to personally unravel the one while working the phone long distance on the other, and confident that he could deliver publishable pieces on both, was uncertain as to whether either of them amounted to anything more than a mild amusement, a couple of paychecks, and an additional couple of bylines.
It was foolish for him to entertain such thoughts, Ram told himself as he washed his hair, for he’d achieved respectability among his peers and also within his family, and he’d soon be seeing all of them—his brothers, his mother, her boyfriend, and all their friends and families on Easter as soon as he returned from Los Angeles and filed his Barry Bailey story. They would gather at Ram’s brother Peter’s house in Sagrada, with cocktails and hors d’oeuvres, all save Ram who was now sober in AA and cheered on by the family for his sobriety. And like his friends in Sagrada, the family would ask Ram what he was working on and he would tell them, and they would want to know what Barry Bailey was really like and what he said to Ram and did Ram really think he would win, and Ram would have his say, and then the conversation would shift to Peter and football, or Fran and his buildings, or Kelly and her catering business, or the kids and their studies and extracurricular activities. And in the middle of it all would be Ram’s mom, Alena, now nearly deaf but still directing the show, offering a barbed comment pointed toward Walter, her boyfriend, and his fondness for four-wheeling adventure, which she found juvenile and boring, entertaining her sons with ridicule of him until it was uncomfortable, then asking Fran to refill her bourbon, and Ram, sitting there on the sofa, taking it all in and registering little of it.
Windwhistle Bone Page 40
