I Love You but I've Chosen Darkness

by Claire Vaye Watkins

  This was the scene when Little Paul embarked on a mystical scavenging expedition to Las Vegas that would eventually cleave him from Charlie. In Vegas he stole a motorcycle and three live chickens, a rooster, two watermelons and two dozen eggs. Struggling to carry his loot up Goler Canyon on the motorcycle, he wrecked deep in the canyon. It was 125 degrees.

  When at last Paul limped back up to Barker Ranch, dehydrated and deranged, the surviving poultry squawking under his arms, something strange happened. Big Paul healed Little Paul. Crockett laid his hands on Little Paul’s busted body and talked the pain away. My father felt his hurt evaporate into the dry air, a mist of agonies that belonged, he saw plainly now, in the past.

  * * *

  —

  He was in Death Valley during the murders. He returned to Spahn’s soon after, unaware, and asked to be released from his agreements. Charlie said, Sure, Paul.

  Snake crawled into his sleeping bag that night to say goodbye. I knew Charlie had sent her but it didn’t matter.

  * * *

  —

  The Family followed Paul into the Panamints. Little Paul, Big Paul, Brooks and Juanita could hear them coming all night, war whoops and the engine screams of dune buggies echoing up the canyon walls. The Family moved into the Barker Ranch while Crockett and his apostates stayed a quarter mile down in the Myer bunkhouse.

  Charlie started in on his creepy crawlies, saying, You ain’t released from nothing.

  Saying, we cut him up real good.

  Saying, had they heard about Bobby and Mary? They’re in jail, man . . . for murdering Gary Hinman.

  Did they do it?

  Sure they did it . . . you did it, I did it . . . we all did it.

  * * *

  —

  Juanita split. Brooks wanted to. Crockett wouldn’t be run off his claim. Charlie sent Snake to Paul again. It was August in Death Valley, 120 degrees by eight a.m. Someone brought the mail from a forgotten post office box. The U.S. Army had summoned Paul to Los Angeles for a physical.

  After a well-thought-out spiel on the virtues of drugs in expanding consciousness and his arrest record got him classified as unfit for service, Paul hitched a ride back to the desert with Brenda and Clem. Brenda sat in the middle. Clem drove. He drove and he talked. All night driving into the desert Clem talked about killing Shorty Shea. Yeah, it was a trip, you know. I never seen so much blood.

  So when Charlie told me, I took the machete and chopped his head off so he’d stop talking . . . and it just rolled off the trail, bloop . . . bloop . . . bloop . . . into the weeds.

  Paul did not tell Crockett or anyone what he’d heard from Clem. If he told it he would have to hear it again, would have to know it and live it. The Crockett camp feuded with Charlie through the summer of 1969 and into the fall, when leads on Tate–LaBianca ran dry. Charlie and Tex took to bringing their guns down to the Myers place for target practice. Nights, Brooks or Paul would open the door of the bunkhouse to find Tex and Charlie crouched in the darkness with knives between their teeth.

  At last, the apostates decide to scoot. They hike fifty cold miles through the night to Shoshone, population thirty. Gas station and post office on one side of Highway 127, a bar, restaurant and an Inyo County sheriff’s substation on the other. Paul and Brooks tell the deputy everything they know. The deputy tells them to stay put. He asks the patriarch of Shoshone for a favor. Find these boys a place to live—somewhere secret. The man’s wife leads the boys out to the tufa caves at Dublin Gulch, a place still mistakenly called the Manson caves. (Manson himself never set foot there.)

  Dug originally by itinerant miners, prospectors, and other vagabonds, who, over the years, found the town a convenient oasis in the scorching lowlands of the Amargosa Valley, the caves were for a long time the site of a thriving hobo jungle. The patriarch puts them to work. They are not particularly useful, wracked as they are by shock and withdrawal. When the Amargosa jumps its banks, Paul is ordered to hose mud away from the gas pumps. He stands catatonic, hose running, staring at nothing in awe and terror. Periodically someone takes Little Paul by the shoulders and turns him a bit, so the water from the hose might wash away more mud.

  Eventually Charlie was arrested, charged with murder and indicted. Sadie and Leslie too. More bodies surfaced.

  Sometime around Christmas, shortly after Charlie had been granted the right to defend himself, I felt the urge to go to LA and see the Family.

  When I told Crockett, he said it didn’t surprise him. He said it would take a long time to get free of Charlie’s programs and my ties to the Family, and I wouldn’t ever do it by avoiding the issue.

  I wanted to see Charlie. I wanted to see the others. At a deeper level perhaps, I wanted to extricate some meaning from all the horror and carnage, to step back into the nightmare and find something worth salvaging.

  Once in LA, Paul tried to reach Snake at the Patton State Hospital. They said Diane Lake was there but that I couldn’t see her.

  Next he went to the LA county jail. I’m just here for Christmas, Charlie told him. I always come for Christmas. Charlie wanted to talk about Crockett and the album. He wanted Paul to come back. “We’re getting the album out. You got to help them out, keep things together.”

  Paul had already made full statements to the Inyo County sheriff and the DA. Yet he went back to the Family. He met with Charlie, discussed strategy, helped the girls secure new lawyers; I spoke to Sadie and Leslie and conveyed Charlie’s messages. Meanwhile, . . . I reinstituted therapy sessions and love therapy and began indoctrinating the new guys in the arts of sex. For a time I did become Charlie . . .

  Paul moved the Family back to Spahn’s. They had an acid trip and orgy to celebrate their return. The next day Paul went to court to help Clem change attorneys. The day after that, unaware that documents including his statements had been delivered to Charlie per his motion for discovery, Paul himself went to court for a traffic violation. Brenda and Squeaky went with him. After receiving his sentence—sixty-five dollars or five days in jail—Paul sent the girls outside to get the cash from his stash under the dashboard. The girls left and never came back.

  Paul went to jail for five days. Charles Manson had spent 23 years in prison. To me, five days seemed an eternity, particularly since I knew I’d pushed my own games to their limit. Released, delirious and exhausted from five nights of insomnia and searching, Paul hitchhiked back to Spahn’s, where the girls waited with copies of his statements. They threw him out, calling him Judas.

  I had reached the end and the beginning at the same time, Judas said.

  Exiled from the ranch, Paul slept up the canyon in a van that night. More accurately, he lit a joint, lay down on the bed in the back of the van, and I guess that’s when I fell asleep. When he woke the van was full of white smoke, flames melting the seats like wax.

  Paul threw himself from the burning van and called for help. Someone drove him down the mountain to the emergency room. Before the hospital did anything they wanted to be certain I had medical insurance.

  Blisters swelled his throat closed, more pain than I could ever remember having felt. Pop the bubbles! he begged, but his vocal cords were charred. No one could understand him. At last he grabbed a surgical instrument from a tray and jammed the handle down his throat, bursting the blisters.

  Three days later, he woke in Santa Monica Hospital, without a voice. His mother, my grandma Vaye, was beside him, cutting his hair.

  She said everything was going to be okay and for me to rest.

  When he was well enough, he went to Big Sur. I wanted to sit on the edge of the cosmos and watch the sea in silence. From Big Sur he went back to the desert to look for gold and grow his voice back. Brooks and Big Paul took him for a steak dinner in Vegas his first night back. The Gold Dollar was off-limits, the whole of Goler Canyon now state’s evidence. The men lived in the Manson caves and did whatever
work they could find, bussing tables, maintenance, fixing roads, construction, mining talc. They laid pipelines, played music, wrote songs and scripts and poems, cooperated with the prosecution, told and sold their stories in various ways over the years. Crockett met a woman and moved on down the road. Brooks, too. That’s the lay of the land when Paul finds an abandoned shack in Tecopa.

  * * *

  —

  1980, the beginning of the end. See my father naked in a hot spring, mask of bentonite mud tightening on his face. He has followed the Amargosa from China Ranch—formerly “The Chinaman’s Ranch,” after Quon Sing, according to Loafing Along Death Valley Trails: A Personal Narrative of People and Places by William Caruthers, originally published in 1951 by Death Valley Publishing Co. My mother had a copy. She left it to me. Well, she left it and I took it. It was not really an inheritance scene.

  The land was in the raw stage, with nothing to appeal to a white man except water. . . . The industrious Chinaman converted it into a profitable ranch. He planted figs and dates and knowing, as only a Chinaman does, the value and use of water the place was soon transformed into a garden with shade trees spreading over a green meadow—a cooling, restful little haven hidden away in the heart of the hills. He had cows and raised chickens and hogs. He planted grapes, dates, and vegetables and soon was selling his produce to the settlers scattered about the desert. From a wayfaring guest he would accept no money for food or lodging.

  After the Chinaman had brought the ranch to a high state of production a white man came along and since there was no law in the country, he made one of his own—his model the ancient one that “He shall take who has the might and he shall keep who can.” He chased the Chinaman off with a shot gun and sat down to enjoy himself, secure in the knowledge that nobody cared enough for a Chinaman to do anything about it.

  The Chinaman was never again heard of.

  Having pilfered Quon Sing’s dates and figs, Paul filled his canteen at an irrigation pump and pressed on to this secret spring. Now, his mud mask dries to cracking. He scrubs the crust from his face, emerges, dresses. He wets his handkerchief and ties it around his neck. Rivulets of water stream between his shoulders and evaporate as he picks his way into a slot canyon, where the trail disappears. Paul pauses to eat a gooey date in the canyon shade, spits the velveteen pit into the dirt and doubles back, finding the tracks of the old railroad. He follows these deeper into the canyon.

  Cliffs of calving sand rise on either side of him. Soon he can no longer see even the tallest date palms at China Ranch, their seeds ordered from a catalog by a pioneer daughter and mailed from Iran. He scurries up the canyon and emerges onto a treeless plain. Before him rises a hill of crenulated ore of a curious burnt-orange color, where the other hills are dun, pungent green-gray after rain, pink at sunset, splashed with yellow verbena in spring. At the base of this peculiar mountain a hole opens into darkness—a mine.

  Paul ducks inside, in search of opal, lapis, gold. The mine is cool, not deep enough for him to stand. Yet, stooped there in the darkness, he sees a thousand promising glints. He emerges sometime later, his knapsack heavy with finds. Giddy, he continues until stopped by an unambiguous omen: black volcanic boulders arranged in a somber ring, a cross made of scarce timber blackened by the sun, an untended grave shimmering in the heat. The mine’s previous owner, presumably.

  Did my father kneel? Did he pray?

  Let’s say he prayed. Say he said sorry to the body, sorry that it did not get more time on this rock. Say he whispered, “God keep him,” though he does not right then know God. That’s another thing he’s looking for out here.

  Lapis is the original blue. When I am in the emotional place my mother called no-man’s-land I wear a pendant of lapis from this mine, a specimen rutilated with an oxbow of mica, the stone pulled from the earth by my father, ground and polished by him, set by his hands in ropy gold cooled by his breath. That’s how I like to tell it.

  It is the hottest part of the day now, Paul’s canteen light. He takes leave of the grave and hikes up the sandy wash toward shade. A clump of salt cedars. (Tamarisk, says my biologist, invasive.) Around the trees Paul discovers a broiling boneyard of heavy equipment: broken-down mining rigs, water tanks, rusted oil drums, gutted cars and a shot-to-shit dump truck with tires crumbling like old cake. At the heart of the junkyard he finds an abandoned shack. He cups his hands at the shack’s one window, spies a sink, a shitter, the springs of a burned mattress.

  Another thatch of green beckons Paul up the hill, which he finds bristling with technicolor stones splotched with lichen, barrel cacti, sage, horny toads and Gilas. Canyon views at the summit, a wink from the river. China Ranch is to the southeast, a mile as the crow flies, and if that crow kept flying it would cross a mountain range and a Joshua tree forest, the site of a future solar array, and then a larger mountain range on its way to Las Vegas, the meadows.

  As I’ve said, it’s the eighties. There is not yet an industrial solar array in the valley between Tecopa and Las Vegas. No surveying bird will mistake the array for water only to combust upon descent and streak flaming to the ground like a daytime comet. We have not yet whizzed gasping through certain deadly thresholds. The cane grass has not yet overtaken the spring at the top of the hill, the tamarisk has not yet brined the earth below.

  For now, a desert miracle: a spring. Paul does not yet know this is Tecopa’s old stamp mill, only that someone has installed an iron catchment pool and it is full of clean-enough water. He fills his canteen, drinks, rewets his handkerchief and lays it across his burned neck, envisioning the pipe he’ll run from the pool down the hill to the shack beneath the salt cedars, the place he already thinks of as mine.

  * * *

  —

  The tamarisk is a racist tree, a well-documented instrument of redlining. Lines of the shaggy, deep-barked trees were planted to cut off Black neighborhoods from golf courses, mountain views and other desirable features of desert living in Palm Springs and without a doubt beyond, thereby redistributing wealth to whites, says my biologist.

  * * *

  —

  Paul moves nine miles down the road from the Manson caves to Tecopa. He works the mine and expands the house with whatever he can find, adding a bedroom of scrap plywood and railroad ties from the Tonopah and Tidewater, a greenhouse of chicken wire windows from the old borax mill. He masons a fireplace from rocks he finds on the long walks he takes in the canyon when he’s trying not to drink. He installs plumbing of sorts—scorpions come up through the drains and soon there is a soft, stinky depression behind the house.

  The house, the stars, the astonished earth’s absorbing. Tecopa becomes his salvation, the love of his life. In one version it remains so for a decade, until a girl walks into a bar.

  * * *

  —

  The Crowbar in Shoshone. Paul has worked his way up to bartender. The girl is leggy, freckly, a redhead. Bright coppery hair feathered out from brown, wide-open eyes. Huge glasses, huge boobs, beige smock top with puffy sleeves, no bra. Younger than him but not at all a girl. She is wearing a ring but not acting married. Paul asks where she’s from.

  “Vegas. My ma and stepdad took a ride out here yesterday. Said the bartender was a good-looking hippie with no friends.”

  Paul remembers them immediately, the old bikers who came in on a hog and dry-humped on the pool table until last call. He nearly had to pry them apart with a cue. The man’s white belly bulging from beneath the snug leather vest, the parting insults as the hog peeled out, spitting rocks, the other barflies grunting in admiration from the parking lot.

  “It’s true I’ve got no friends,” Paul says. “Half the locals don’t like hippies and the other half don’t like narcs.” He studies her face, wondering how much she knows.

  She smiles, says, “Sorry Joe called you—what was it?—‘Pinko flower power pussy’?”

  He shrugs. “I’m not ev
en all that pinko.”

  “Fuck him,” she says, burning suddenly. “He’s a bad man. I know a thing or two about bad men.”

  She gets up, plays Carole King on the jukebox. Joni Mitchell. Elton John. He asks what she does for work.

  “Camera girl at the Sands,” she says. “Where you from?”

  “LA.”

  “I got a cousin in LA.” She shrugs and ashes her cigarette on the floor. “Used to be real apeshit about the place. Now I’d rather be out here.”

  Paul pours himself a beer and Martha another. There is definitely an orb forming between them. She says, unprompted, “I’ll be a friend to you.”

  He can’t think how to respond. She’s suddenly very pretty. “What’s a camera girl?”

  “Vegas for photographer. Souvenir photos. Skeezeballs and their mistresses get dressed up to see a show on the Strip, we take their picture before curtain, run downstairs and develop them in the darkroom in the basement, rush our asses back upstairs and sell them at intermission. All in heels and basically underwear.” Makeup too, lots of it. She’s always getting written up for not having enough on. That’s why on her days off she wears none, no bra, no socks. She slips off her Keds and rubs her bare feet on the barstool—pretty loaded all of a sudden. “. . . then I lived with my sister in the Haight for a while.” By “lived with” she means “visited.” How did she get on this?

  “You weren’t a hippie,” he says. “You’re too young.”

  He notes the freckles across her collarbones, splashed down her shoulders, neck and breasts. She notes him noting and smiles. Maybe she doesn’t care about Manson. Maybe she just likes coming out here. A city girl but a sympathizer, a new convert to the Old Testament scene. An honorary desert rat, like him. Paul reaches across the bar and rubs her bare arm, smooth and sparkling with minerals.