For the rest of the morning, I wandered the river bank by Johnson’s Beach before settling in to that little nest of willows that Shaughn showed me that summer many years ago, when we were whole and vibrant and brimful of life’s possibilities.
Besides the bravado that most of us display to each other at the time of our youth, there is, at its edge, a sense of anxiety also attending it. We say we will do this, be that, have such and such and all, but the threshold of adulthood has yet to be reached and we don’t know what that will mean, or if our dreams will survive the responsibilities thereof.
Not Shaughn, though. He was absolutely sure he would do as he said then. He would finish high school, travel to Europe, come back and go to college, marry well, and enter law or business and make millions. Sitting there, smoking in that reedy little nest, I thought of him and all that he had said and been and done. Again, like Jaime many years before, I wondered what it was that caused so streamlined a locomotive as Shaughn’s to come off the tracks and gain headlines not for the speed record it had set, but for the human tragedy it had left in its wake.
I sat in the willows tossing pebbles in the river, watching clouds scud in until I got hungry. I drove to River’s End, ate steamed mussels and cornbread, then re-crossed the river and parked in the lot, sitting on the bank at the mouth of the Russian River above Goat Rock watching seals play. The hillside grasses were that brilliant emerald of early spring, and wildflowers waved in the soft winds: purple lupine, yellow jonquils, golden poppy, and white jasmine, their perfumes filling the air with promise as they always did.
Soon, the window of spring would close. The hills would go sere brown and the air would become heavy with heat as summer rolled in, and given that fact—that spring was so short a time here—I wanted to savor it as much as I could, remembering Shaughn in his spring years, those years so ancient that to any save his friends they might be regarded as a hieroglyph.
Hours passed, nothing marking the time. Then I became aware of others gathering in the dunes to watch the seals play.
A couple of families had come on bikes. They were dressed in formal protective attire—shin guards, elbow pads, helmets and the like, their children looking like toy soldiers arrayed as they were. The little ones laughed and squealed and pointed at the seals lolling on the bank, not a hundred feet away, while the parents shouted instructions to them—don’t get too close, and don’t get in the water, and stay together so they could be watched. The parents uncorked a bottle of wine and regarded their offspring from a nearby knoll as their kids clambered about in the thirty-yard-long zone of the bank they’d been restricted to.
I became aware of a presence behind me. I turned to find a teenage boy sitting there. I said, “Hey,” and he nodded. He was scowling.
“What’s the matter? You don’t like the beach?”
“It’s alright.”
“What’s the problem then?”
“I was supposed to go to the mall and hang with my buds.”
“Your parents made you come here?”
“Yeah.”
“And you think that sucks?”
“Duh!”
I laughed and he scowled harder.
“You think that’s funny?” he asked.
“Yeah, I do.”
We sat there while the chattering seagulls wheeled about feeding on bread scraps the little ones were tossing them. Out at sea, a freighter was passing south.
“I wish I was on that ship going somewhere,” he said.
“Where would you go?”
“Who cares? Anywhere.”
“Anywhere but here, anywhere where they’re not, right?”
“Something like that.”
I laughed. He scowled some more.
“Now what’s so funny?”
I drew a breath and began remembering. “I was thinking about someone from a long time ago, something that happened a long time ago. Right here in this same spot… We were about your age—what are you, fourteen?”
He nodded.
“We were talking about what we would do when we got out of school and got out of our parents’ houses. That’s just what he said—what you said—he’d get on a boat and go somewhere, anywhere. And that’s what he did.”
“Then what happened?”
“He stayed awhile, then he came home again. That’s what happens to everyone who travels that way and for that reason. Eventually, you come back home.”
“Not me.”
“Yeah, you.”
“How do you know? You don’t know me.”
I turned and caught him looking disdainfully at me, which I knew he’d be doing and was hoping to find. I locked eyes with him and held him there.
“Yeah, I do, kid. Yeah, I do. You’re him, thirty years ago. You’re me, a few years later. Same reason, same thing, same result. Eventually, you’ll come home too.”
After a moment, his gaze softened.
“You went away on a ship too?”
“Not on a ship but, yeah, I went away.”
“How long?”
“A few years. Long enough.”
“And your friend. What happened to him?”
I shook out a cigarette. I thought about offering him one but didn’t. I lit mine and exhaled while the sun hid behind a screen of clouds.
“My friend?” I said, finally. “My friend—Shaughn was his name—my friend stayed away awhile and then he returned. But somehow, he never came all the way home, and now, he never will.”
We sat looking out on the Pacific as the sun reached down to meet it.
“He’s dead, isn’t he?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, he’s dead.”
“Shaughn,” said the kid, giving the abstract a name.
The kid’s father came up. He introduced himself and said he hoped his son wasn’t bothering me. “Not at all,” I told him. I got up and said goodbye to him and his son, and thanked the kid for the respect that he’d paid Shaughn by naming him.
“Hey, what’s your name?” I called out as he was leaving.
“It’s Todd, my name is Todd,” he said facing me.
“Alright, Todd, you take care and remember what I said.”
“Yeah, thanks, mister. Sorry about your friend.”
I drove the fifteen miles home with the reddening sun on my neck. In Guerneville, the boys were filtering back into town from wherever it was they went during the winter. Soon, the place would be festive and filled to capacity with them and the gay crowd, although sometimes they didn’t seem so gay to me in the other sense of the word. They could be a mean bunch, quick to turn on one another at the slightest provocation and rude to the straight Guerneville residents at the bank or the supermarket. Was it something they did for amusement? Sometimes it seemed so. Then I remembered my own crowds in Sagrada and Refugio, and concluded we weren’t much different. It must be part of the human condition that makes us do this—to deride everything outside one’s immediate circle and thereby provide the soldering compound that welds your band together.
On the other side of town, such thoughts dropped away as I drove through the orchards in blossom. The whiteness of the flowers against the green of the forest was almost blindingly psychedelic, and I remembered that first acid trip with Shaughn; how we went outside at dawn, the peach trees in the backyard of my mom’s house seeming to bloom right in front of us, and for us, and how Shaughn said, “Look, Ram, they’re talking to you.”
I smiled, and then remembered another time when I was driving the mountains in Refugio, which wasn’t so different a day as this, not long after I met Vera. We were happy then, and my poetry was going well and giving me fulfillment. I remembered what I had said to myself as I drove the snaky road, saying that if this was all there was—meaning Vera and poetry and a life that was two steps above poverty—that it was enough. I remembered how happy I was at that moment; that it had a luminous glow to it. Then I listened to that other voice that pointed me to journalism and the eventual train wreck I
became, just like Shaughn and Jaime had. I thought about that and wondered how it came to such a pass. I hadn’t thought about it until then and no answer would come. Maybe this was another stone that was best left unturned.
…at Icebox Canyon, I turned right and headed through falling light whose shafts through the branches seemed like hundreds of roads themselves. When I turned into the driveway, there was a green SUV parked out front. When I got out of the car, someone got out of the SUV and hailed me.
“Mr. Le Doir? Ram Le Doir?”
I stood up straight and looked back at the man standing just off my property line, along the hedge. He was in his early thirties, bearded and tall, maybe six foot four, and held something in his hand, which I couldn’t see.
“Who wants to know? And what’s that you’ve got in your hand?”
“My name is Kevin Steadman. I’m from Golden State Magazine… I’ve heard about your dog. It’s pepper spray,” he said, holding up the can so I could see it.
I gazed hard at the reporter, considering the possibilities. For the past few years, my old magazine had been pressing me, and this was the third reporter they’d sent out so far. I weighed the options.
“Put that thing away,” I said finally. “Help me with these groceries.”
The reporter and I packed the bags inside. After putting things in order, I put the kettle on the stove. The reporter watched me. I broke the silence.
“Look, you’re inside now, and I know how the game works. So call your boss and tell him you’ve got me, and then you can take a look around the house and see who I am. Then we’ll talk and you can find out more.”
“Thanks. That would be helpful.”
The reporter stepped outside onto the deck and made a call on his cell phone. Then he came back inside to look the house over. He looked at the books and records in the bookcase, making occasional notes.
“I note that you don’t have any pictures on the wall,” he said.
“No.”
“Why’s that, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“They’re inside my head.”
The reporter made a note. “Can I use that quote?”
The kettle whistled and I prepared a tray to take outside on the deck. I pressed the French press plunger down, walked outside to the picnic table and motioned for the reporter to sit opposite me.
“Listen, Mr… excuse me, what was it?”
“Steadman, Kevin Steadman.”
“Okay, Mr. Steadman.”
“—Kevin.”
“Sure… Kevin. Let’s get on a first name basis, right?”
The reporter laughed and nodded.
“Standard Golden State practice,” we both said at the same time and laughed.
“Alright,” the reporter said, removing his sunglasses and trying to look me in the eye. “What was it like for you in the beginning? How did you get started in this business?”
“…how I got started… in this business… was purely by fluke—an accident that was meant to happen, you might say. I was working as a carpenter and writing poetry. I met this guy who was a kind of artist and a jack of all trades: writer, conceptual artist, standup comic, you name it. He came to one of my poetry readings with an editor from San Francisco—Michael Gates… So they listen to one of my alcohol-fueled readings from that time and approach me some weeks afterward and tell me how great it was and ask if I would have any interest in writing journalism for Golden State Magazine… Then Vera gets interested… Then Gates starts phoning and I eventually began to get interested.”
I took out a cigarette, lit it, inhaled, and blew a skinny stream of smoke skywards. I offered one to the reporter. He declined. I closed my eyes, smiled at him and nodded. “What can I say? Pretty soon. I was off to the races… First was that story on Wesley Llewellyn, and, bam, a $10 million lawsuit as a result of it… Then the next one on Marty Arabella and, boom, he’s forced to resign… And so on… My thinking then was that I was doing good. I thought I was the people’s watchdog, their last line of defense, at least that’s what I told myself. And people would come up and tell me how great this or that story was, and how great a job I was doing, and all sorts of other smoke they were blowing up my ass… I bought it lock, stock, and barrel. I remember, one time, Wesley Llewellyn and I were standing near the fountain in Plaza Park smoking a joint, and he passes it to me and laughs and says ‘If they only knew. The most dangerous man in California politics and the most influential investigative journalist in the Capitol press corps, smoking a joint in front of City Hall…’ It was like that for a while—a sort of innocent pastime with an altruistic angle, part public service, part self-amusement, and part excuse for returning to Sagrada to attempt to come to terms with unsettled business… The comet took off with the terrorism story. Then I was in demand. Everybody couldn’t wait to have a Ram Le Doir byline in their magazine or newspaper… It went that way for maybe ten years or so, I really don’t remember; it was a blur,” I said, pausing to inhale and shaking my head before continuing. “But then, when I finally got to know the business and became good at it, I couldn’t get my work out at all… It was like a black hole that consumed everything—my time, my money, my energy, I don’t know. But back then, that was what it was like in the beginning. It was a learning process, but it was a good time then. It was a more decent class of people that were around back then.”
“Do you ever hear from any of those people anymore? Ever run into them again?”
“No, I never hear from them, and many of them are dead—Wesley and Tommy B. and Chicken Rick—”
“—Michael Gates, too.”
“I didn’t know that. When did he die?”
“About four years ago, cancer.”
“That’s too bad. He was a good man… Anyway, not that long ago. when I was down in The City visiting my friend Tim Shaughnessy, I thought I saw my old colleague Blackeck O’Toole, a reporter with the LA Times, walking into a supermarket. At least it looked like him. I thought it was him.”
“Did you find out if it was? Did you say something to him?”
“No. Look, just imagine for a minute that you’re me, Ram Le Doir, the looned-out wife murderer… What would you do in that situation?”
“I see your point.”
“Ask some more questions.”
“Tell me about your life now. You know, your work, what you do in your spare time, that kind of stuff.”
I stirred some honey into my coffee, leaned back, and looked across at Mount Armstrong. The crown was still lit, but its base was in shadow.
“My work is nothing special. I’m a circuit assembler. It’s simple, boring, and repetitive, and it provides me a livable wage. My spare time is pretty much what you see. I sit on my deck, drink coffee, smoke cigarettes, split wood, play with my dog, go to the beach, and travel when I have to.”
“Do you miss reporting?”
“Nah, not really.”
“Not any of it? You were one of the top investigative reporters on the West Coast, according to Les Beak. You had a lot of influence and power.”
“No, I didn’t, not really. I only had the appearance of power, the illusion of influence… Although, if you’d have asked me then, I’d have said that I did.”
“What do you mean?”
I leaned in closer and nodded at the tape recorder.
“Maybe you’d better turn that up so you get all of this.”
“Sure,” said the reporter, boosting the volume on his recorder. “Go ahead.”
“What you have to understand about this business, Kevin, is that when I was successful at it, it was only because I was allowed to be. I was indulged my time and space to speak my piece and I was allowed to do that only so long as I wasn’t a threat to the power structure that runs the show… So long as I was just a sometime nuisance, that was okay, but when I got too close to the heart of the beast, they pulled the plug on me and shut me up.”
“Louie Verde?”
“Precisely—”
> “—and that Sagrada developer. What was his name?”
“Solozzo.”
“What can you tell me about him?”
“Well, what I can tell you and what I will tell you, aren’t the same things.”
“Whatever you’re comfortable with.”
I told him how it all began after I came home from France and took on the landfill story… I stumbled onto it unwittingly. Something about the contracts smelled strange and familiar to me almost from the beginning. But it wasn’t until the following year that it began to get clear. And when it did, it became dangerous. My old research papers from the Orange County airport affair substantiated my hunch, and every subsequent record search confirmed it even further.
“I don’t know what you know about all that… what you know about me and my life during that period, but I was pretty wrecked. My marriage had fallen apart. I was just lying around my mom’s house watching TV, O.J., Susan Smith and all that… Then I get a call from Emile Donner, a friend of mine who was working with this Orange County developer named Owen Slipp, and he asks me to write a story about this Foreign Consulate project and get it into The Stinger… So I take the gig, needing the money, and then I realize, after a while, that I’ve been set up in a developer war between Solozzo and Owen Slipp. Pretty soon, I find out the Stinger’s also in on it and they’re on Solozzo’s side. Then one night when we’re out having dinner, Emile tells me more than he wishes he had. I take that and begin unraveling the knot that eventually leads me into the heart of darkness himself: Louie Verde Esquire. It’s too complicated to explain how all that was, just trust me, it was… All this takes me months to figure out. And I’m chasing around up and down the state between trips abroad where Vera and I are trying to work out the terms of our divorce… or so I thought. And then that starts to further unravel. She’s having an affair with another leading man and well, you pretty well know the rest of it, so I’ll stop there.”
“My editor said that you had Louie Verde dead to rights.”
“I guess not. He’s still walking around isn’t he?”
“You don’t know?”
“I don’t know anything. I don’t read newspapers. I don’t listen to the radio, and I don’t watch TV. I don’t know who the Governor is or who my representatives are.”
Windwhistle Bone Page 66
