Hank, of course, had finally gotten busted, but beat the rap. It scared him so he quit everything. He bought an airport and last Maggie had heard he was selling Ultra-light airplanes. She was happy for him. He’d found a woman who could evoke a positive sense of Hank; someone other than a Maggie.
Maggie stretched her arms tiredly, sensing the men were about to leave, and glad since she was tired and would have to arise early. They all walked out to the porch, and Patrick hugged Maggie, walking ahead to the car. Charlie thanked her for the bowl, and mentioned he’d be back through, and could he stop, and Maggie said that he was welcome if he could find his way back. He laughed but she wasn’t sure why and was uncertain whether she might see him again.
Charlie thought the summer sky was as lovely as he had ever seen. The tall palms that distinguished this part of California from the rest of the world rustled above him, speaking a language he hadn’t heard for the longest of times, something, in a common memory, mysterious sound forming itself in the breeze. The woman was in his thoughts, stuck there, like a lump of clay spinning on a wheel but not yet centered, simply there, as if to annoy him, thumping around his brain, trying to form herself like a thought, an idea, a dialect, a different language. She had never answered him, would she die for love? If she would might he still want her? No. He liked the wholeness of her. He liked the whole in one. Alive and interesting and mysterious. Charlie got in the car and closed the door, setting the bowl carefully on the seat.
Maggie watched them pull away from inside the house; she was tired from the work, and the excitement, and walked outside to the porch and listened to the cicadas chirp. The smell of peppercorns and orange-leaf scented the night and she took a deep, quieting breath, letting her mind settle, withdrawing from the evening’s chatter, traveling inside herself, letting the calm replenish her energy. The major work of the renovation was nearly complete, and the spirit of the house had risen, under the careful attention, to meet the form, yielding to the transformation. But Maggie looked to moving beyond the project, into usefulness of another kind, as if her spirit, too, were making a new form. The spirit herself rising to a place that was sensed rather than recognized. This rising creating a form that had seemed vacant without this slow melancholy motion of her very own. She stood on the porch of the house alone, absorbing, as if by osmosis, the new context opening to possibility. She felt rather than thought how in some of her earlier environments the movement was backwards, and in another it moved only to the left, while yet, here, in this place, this structure rebuilding itself, the energy rose like slow steam after a summer rain. The form itself meant little without the mystery of it, and the mystery of it included the willingness to move sideways, or backwards, or upside down. And she’d done that, but she wasn’t thinking it: she was feeling it deep in her bones. This house, somehow, enabled her to find a sense of herself that she had lost along the way, yet, she liked this new combination, this felt sense of old and new better than blank innocence, yes, this was a better place for Maggie, this house, like the way the soil had spoken to her grandfather, was a medium, a conductor, the raw energy of change, the point in time where chaos coheres. This place, she felt, was hers. And the future? Oh, she wondered about it, naturally, but it could only be had by one small step after another, her own decided steps, her own decided choice based on her own sense of place and value. Maggie’s own definition of Maggie. Perhaps her job was simply that of example and perhaps this mysterious creative energy she felt deep inside her would merely touch the few people in her immediate world. And would that be enough? Yes. It was as much, she felt, as any of them might do. And what if she didn’t fit conventional forms? Might she build a convention around her own? Her own view of the world? Might that be her gift? Perhaps. And were they important? The little ideas, feelings, thoughts, resolutions? Yes. They were her definitions. How she felt about her world. The value she put in it and how she put it. But how did she put her value? Where did she put it? Was it only vested in Maggie? No. The value of an individual act was expansive, she thought, like the spawn of a complex organism caught in a lingering wind and traveling great distances before rooting itself. A breeze trembled around her and she looked up at the stars set in the bright summer sky, and thought it was as lovely as she had ever seen. The tall palms that distinguished this part of California from the rest of the world still rustled their fronds above her, speaking a language she hadn’t heard for the longest of times, something in a common memory, a mysterious sound forming itself on a breeze. The man was still in her mind, stuck there, like a lump of clay spinning on a wheel but not yet centered, simply there, as if to annoy her, thumping around her brain, her heart, trying to form himself from the moment, like a fragment of felt-thought, a blurry dialect, a different language. She had never answered him, would she die for love? Would he? If he would, might she still want him? No. She liked the wholeness of him. She liked the whole in one. Alive and interesting and mysterious. Whatever spun inside her was releasing great chunks of the past, like floating debris from another galaxy, orbiting, yet no longer in focus, turning in slow time like relics from another universe, yet all was still expanding. At more than a certain rate, her mind, too, might wander, gather, and expand outward. With great luck and great heart, she might uncover, yet, somewhere in this universe, the form she needed to live by, the blurry one spinning itself into existence. A summer breeze gathered into a gusty wind, moving through the starry night into the citrusy leaves of the trees, twirling the corroded weathervane on top of the house into a sudden dance.
About the Author:
Marlena Evangeline is a Southern Californian: she grew up in the town of Redlands, California. She earned a B.A. and M.A. at California State University, San Bernardino and an M.F.A. in Fiction at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. In an earlier version, The Orange Blossom Express was nominated for the Pushcart Press, Editor’s Book Award, under another title. Along with poetry, fiction, essays and non-fiction, Evangeline has written several screenplays … among them an adaptation of this novel. Her poetry has been published in The Pacific Review and Poetry Motel.
Other Works:
Publications:
The Whiskey Eaters, MiddleMarch Publishing, Alpine, Wyoming, 1999. A collection of short fiction.
“A Deconstructive Analysis of Plato’s Phaedrus,” Anthology of Classical Antiquity, Pig Iron Press, Youngstown, Ohio, 2008. May be Ordered at Pig Iron Press, 330-747-6932.
The Orange Blossom Express, The Carapace Publishing Group, LLC. Henderson, NV, 2008. May be ordered @ orangeblossomexpress.com or carapacebooks.com.
Author’s Note
THE BURDEN OF TRUTH EQUALS a harsh taskmaster in telling of a story: fiction allows one narrative freedom and the lesser burdens of fancy seem far more agreeable than any absolutes—what one might perceive as reality from one singular point-of-view. When spying through the lens of time, perhaps we might, in truth, only be able to create fictions of our memories.
I graduated from Redlands High School a few years earlier than my heroine, Maggie Morrison.
Maggie Morrison graduates in 1965 to place her in the midst of the Boomer Generation to which I feel most connected—and this book, in many ways is a tribute and memoir for that generation specifically—for all the Flower Children then and those yet to come—a tribute to the sheer tenacity of human survival in ever-constant times of change.
When I got pregnant while attending Junior College in the nearby town of San Bernardino, I went to the border town of Tijuana, Mexico for an abortion. So that particular scene in this narative is rendered quite specifically from my memory of that traumatic event; a time when abortion was illegal.
The Hippie Hotel existed in Big Bear Lake in 1967 and did have a Lionel Flyer careening through all the rooms controlled by the owner train geek, who lived in the attic apartment. I did not meet my ex-husband in Big Bear Lake, but moved with him there in 1967; later, after he was evicted from town for being a long hair we moved to the very real
house that had once been the Rough Riders Club in Devore, California and began to build a life there while I attended California State University in San Bernardino. I worked as a fry-cook at Pic’s Coffee Shop in Devore while I attended the new university, and my ex, cut firewood and continued his illustrious career of dealing a few kilos and lids here and there.
The Santa Cruz farm described in this novel is actually reminiscent of the farm my ex and I lived on after moving to Soquel, California in 1969, and right after I graduated from Cal State. We met the man who became my ex’s partner, described in the novel as Patrick Fairchild, right before that when we lived on Pleasure Point, in Santa Cruz. The three of us moved together to the rural farm on Old San Jose Road, outside of Santa Cruz, not in Devore; and while our experience may have been similar to what I have captured in these pages, it was not the same. The novel is a fictional construct.
We were all vegetarians, and way into health food at the time, and so were our friends—for narrative purposes, in this story, the farm belongs to Lucy Pointer and Gary Merchant who are fictional characters. Lucy Pointer’s physical description matches that of a good friend of mine in the early seventies, but Lucy’s experience is mostly narrative fiction although what is not fiction in my narrative is always the most surprising. Spy with me then, focus your lens to mine, decide for yourself, what may or may not have been.
The real drug smuggling began in Santa Cruz, California sometime around 1969 and on after that. My ex was first arrested in 1976, when he lived in Bonny Doon, California, in the hills above Santa Cruz; later, we watched the evening news on TV as the Feds burned around a ton of marijuana on the beach in Monterey. At the time, a sad sight! He had several other scares with the law. Once the Feds confiscated one of his twin engine Grand Commanders after it was suspected of holding a smuggled load: the suspicious contraband that was described as a marijuana seed turned out to be a small pebble and the case was luckily dismissed.
After I left my ex, I grew crops of my own to get by; marijuana at the time was a profitable crop and my bachelor’s degree didn’t really prepare me for much. And too, at the time, I’d been living outside the law, and it seemed a way of life. In October of 1979 I was arrested on my 320-acre ranch in Lake Country, California with a large crop of marijuana. I eventually did 40 days in the Lake County Jail for that offense. Shortly after, I ran away from the whole scene to raise my daughter far away from the California drug scene in the small town of Wilson, Wyoming, right outside of Jackson’s Hole.
A few years later, much to my annoyance, my ex moved to Wyoming to be near his daughter, with a pilot friend, Keith, but in so doing, complicated my life once again. After being there a few months, the two flew a few thousand pounds of pot onto a dry lake in Utah and got caught once again.
In an attempt to protect my daughter, I called the small town newspaper editor, and begged him not to print the story. The next morning, I borrowed two hundred dollars from a friend, and began buying papers at one end of town, and a girlfriend of mine did the same from Wilson and Teton Village. By noon we had bought out almost the entire first edition of the paper and dumped it in the dumpster behind the Stagecoach Bar, in Wilson, Wyoming.
For the first time in its history, The Teton Valley News printed a second edition of the weekly paper, and the AP Press picked up the story, not of the drug bust, but of some crazy chicks trying to quench freedom of the press. And so it goes. My daughter instantly forgave her father anyway—I was the one who was furious that he’d moved a thousand miles to disrupt my life once again.
Earlier, in 1978, I had flown to Nicaragua with a Nicaraguan friend, to try and adopt a baby so my daughter would have a brother or sister. The men I had had relationships with by then, had let me down terribly, and I wanted another child, and men always seemed to be obstacles to my wishes not enablers. I decided to try and adopt a child myself. Much of what happens in the Mexican scenes in this story is forged from that experience.
So my novel is true and false, memoir and fiction, autobiography and fabrication. My aim is to open a window on the drug scene of the late 60s and early 70s from a women’s point-of-view. All was not love and peace, at least not in my world, but my world was and still is well-lived each vivid moment—and even amongst the difficult times there were and always will be moments of sheer wonder and grace and goodness. My daughter grew straight and strong and tall in spite of it all.
I embrace all aspects of my younger self as part of the woman I have become today, and acknowledge all aspects of my journey as a gift, a difficult gift, perhaps, but a unique and distinct one. Perhaps someday, a young person will open these pages and find some well-placed word, forged from the depths of my mis-steps that will help that person make a decidedly safe, centered, and meaningful decision for herself—something that will point her towards her own true north, her own definition of herself.
Table of Contents
Prologue
CHAPTER 1Redlands, California 1954
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3Devore, California 1969
CHAPTER 4Enroute 1945
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6Woodbine, Iowa 1946
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8Omaha, Nebraska 1945
CHAPTER 9San Bernardino, California 1946
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11Las Canas, Costa Rica
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13Lydia Junction, Nevada
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15Las Canas, Costa Rica
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17Las Canas, Costa Rica
CHAPTER 18LAX
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21Balboa Island, California
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23Santa Cruz, California
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24Costa Rica: Two years earlier
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26Santa Cruz, California
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29San Bernardino, California
CHAPTER 30Los Angeles, California
CHAPTER 31Santa Cruz, California
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33Oakland, California
CHAPTER 34Tijuana, Mexico
CHAPTER 35Huntington Beach, California
CHAPTER 36Redlands, California
The Orange Blossom Express Page 35
