The Onion Field

by Joseph Wambaugh

  “Now, don’t let that bother you, Karl,” his wife said. “Don’t let it hurt your confidence.”

  “I can’t help it, Helen. It’s like stealing for a grade.”

  He anxiously awaited the mailman after that school term. He was sure that he would get a less than average grade. He was bitter, felt once again betrayed. He had been honest, and they had stolen for their grades. He finally convinced himself that even a failing mark was more than a mere possibility. When the mail arrived, he saw that he had earned two A’s and a B.

  It was the first success he had tasted in nine years. It was glorious. A triumph.

  Other changes were taking place as the months passed and time further separated him from the horror of the last trial. The dreams came less frequently. More potency returned. He still walked round-shouldered, but he didn’t dig his nails into his palms, and he didn’t sit hunkered forward with his hands between his knees.

  Karl Hettinger began talking about truly striking out into a more challenging life. It would have to be something to do with the land, of course. He loved the sun and the earth and living things too much to ever leave them. Finally, in 1972, he heard from an old college friend who had lived with him in the dormitory at Pierce College so many years ago. It was a job offer. A real job. A hard, sixty hour a week job in the fields supervising other workers, managing a huge plant nursery. Supervising other men!

  Karl almost turned his friend down. He had frightened skirmishes with himself. He tossed in the night. But it wasn’t the same kind of debilitating fear, it was just a fearful excitement now, a bearable kind of anxiety. There was so much to think about. He began talking to Helen.

  “Well, if you want to do it, Karl, then do it. Do something. Take a first step. We’ll be with you. We’ll be with you whatever you decide.”

  One evening during dinner he offered a wishbone to his son. “I have a riddle for you,” he said as they each tugged at an end of the wishbone and Karl ended up with the winning piece.

  “What’s that, Daddy?”

  “Tell me how your dad can wish for something that makes it impossible for either wisher to lose.”

  All three of his tow-headed children giggled and offered some guesses, and even Helen joined in as they all pondered the father’s riddle.

  “Give up?” he said finally.

  “We give up, Dad.”

  “I wished,” he said slowly, “that each of you,” and he looked at his wife, “would get your wish. Now, since I’ve won, that means you will get your wish. We all win.”

  The remote little lake would have been almost too clear to fish, even had the bluegills been big enough, but they weren’t. They were stunted because there were so many fish and not enough food in that clear water.

  The lake was near Donner Pass in the High Sierras, near the place where George Donner and his party met their horrible destinies a century before. The Donners hadn’t been able to plunge forward through the blizzard to the lake, but it was early summer now and there was no snow on the ground. The pine needles were very long and rubbery, the moss was fragrant from the dew.

  Each day Karl felt more confident, and now, here where your breath snapped in your lungs, and the moss was dappled with sunlight, he felt that almost anything was possible. He shucked his light jacket and Helen sat down and plunked a few pebbles into the pool.

  “What in the world are you up to?” she asked as he peeled off the T shirt and rubbed his arms and chest, smiling up at the piny evergreens. Next he opened his belt and in a second was out of his pants, shoes, and socks. He whooped into the lake, lunging forward, sending ripples far out across the quiet water. He dove beneath the water, surfaced happily, perhaps even joyfully, and turned just as Helen dove naked from the bank, coming up screaming with excitement and shock from the cold.

  Karl struggled forward in the cool mud and splashed her with icy water, rubbing her arms and back as they knelt in the mud. “It feels like the fish’re kissing us,” she said.

  “What?”

  “The bluegills. Look at them.”

  They were surrounded by stunted bluegills, whose tiny mouths, much too small to bite a hook, were pressed against their hips, backs, arms, legs.

  “They’re nibbling us,” said Karl. “They’re hungry. They nibble anything that enters the water.”

  “I say they’re kissing us, damn it,” said Helen, brushing her hand over his cheek, touching the pearly drops of mountain water, seeing no fear in his eyes.

  “Okay, Helen, they’re kissing us,” said Karl.

  They were pressed together in the clear water. The sun had touched the High Sierras and there wasn’t a flake of snow left on the ground.

  Karl took the job with his friend. It meant great decisions in 1973, like selling his house. He did it. It meant uprooting the family and moving away. They did it. Most of all it meant going to live near a place he had tried to escape for ten years.

  Karl Hettinger was destined to face his devils. He could never escape irony. The friend’s acreage was near Bakersfield, just a few miles from a place where onions grow so thick you can smell them from the Maricopa Highway. Just a few miles from that place where a policeman ran through the fields with a farmer one cold and bitter night under a late and lonely moon near the foot of the Tehachapi Mountains, near a place called Wheeler Ridge, near a place they marked with a blood red arrow.

  TWENTY-TWO

  During the same year, another man, a slender man with deep, close-set eyes, took a wristwatch to a jeweler for repair and cleaning. It was a stainless steel, fifteen-dollar watch, not worth repairing, once seen on the wrist of a dead man. The slender man thought of good things when he looked at the watch: of a young piper atop the bowsprit of a bug-eyed ketch called Jolly Roger, of playing in Hancock Park, or of bicycling all the way to Griffith Park and hiking up to the observatory when they were children together.

  “This is just a cheap watch,” said the jeweler. “Why waste money on such a watch?”

  “I’ve been wearing that watch ten years, since 1963. I like it.”

  “It’s your money,” said the jeweler, writing up a ticket. “But what a waste. I could sell you a new watch twice as good and save you money to boot.”

  “I want that watch. Now please give me a ticket so I can go.”

  During that year there were several young lads growing up in the San Fernando Valley of California, ordinary boys, unknown to each other, who had all derived their Scottish name from the same source.

  There was an Armenian obstetrician practicing in that valley, a former piper, who seldom played his pipes anymore, and who, when asked by expectant parents to suggest a suitable name for a child, would invariably answer: “Yes, if it’s a boy I have a suggestion for you. It’s really a fine name. My favorite, I guess. And very short. Three letters. It’s from the Gaelic. It means John.…”

  And there were two girls on a holiday from northern California visiting their grandmother in Hollywood.

  It was exciting to visit their grandmother. There were surprises. They might go to the Music Center to a concert. Or to a ballet. The grandmother still believed in culture and discipline for children, but of course could not teach discipline to grandchildren.

  The grandmother was over seventy now, and lived alone, but was an active woman, handsome, with a throaty chuckle, far younger looking than her years. She was still self-employed as an auditor and bookkeeper, and did not own a car in the world’s most mobile city. She was content to ride the bus which was relaxing and afforded her time to read. Everyone secretly admired her self-sufficiency and great strength.

  The adolescent girls were very tall and long-legged like their parents. The younger, Lori, had a resolute chin and jaw, and held her mouth in a way that was very familiar to the grandmother. And strangely enough, she had familiar mannerisms, a way of answering, a shrug of the shoulders. Her sister, Valerie, the darker of the two, did not have that mouth and chin and jaw, but she had blue-gray eyes and a brooding lo
ok when thoughtful or troubled. Yet the grandmother could always say something which she knew would make it vanish and then the face would brighten magically. That too was very familiar to the grandmother.

  On a quiet day while in her grandmother’s bedroom, Valerie glanced at the framed portrait taken in olden days of the man she knew was her grandfather. He was in a graduation gown with the gold sash of the Manitoba Medical College.

  And on the other wall was a larger picture of a smiling young man, not the most representative likeness perhaps, but one of the few he had taken in his later years.

  She looked at the picture and it was hard to remember him. There were just glimmers. Very faint. Some memory perhaps of an event, a moment. It reminded her of something she wanted to tell her grandmother so she ran into the kitchen.

  “Guess what, Grandma Chrissie? I forgot to tell you. I’m going to take clarinet lessons.”

  “That’s marvelous, Valerie,” said the grandmother, placing a pan on the stove and turning to face the girl. “But whatever made you choose the clarinet? I thought you might play piano.”

  “I decided on the clarinet because I think it’ll help me later when I learn to play the pipes.”

  “The what?”

  “Bagpipes. Don’t you think it would be nice if I could play the bagpipes?”

  “Well, Valerie,” Chrissie said, and she faltered. There was a sudden tightness in her chest. Instantly. Without warning. And her breath shortened. Chrissie looked at the eyes, now dove gray, and for a moment lost the thread of the child’s remark. Then she thought she heard them: piercing, wailing—now plaintive, then majestic—the skirl of pipes! She could almost smell the grass in Hancock Park and the tar from the great pits. She wanted to rush to the window to catch a glimpse of a tall boy marching.…

  “What’s wrong, Grandma Chrissie?”

  “Well, Valerie … I …”

  Chrissie Campbell turned her back to the girl and put her palms to her face under the glasses, which was her way, and massaged her eyes and sighed heavily until it was gone. No one had ever seen her weep. Not ever.

  “Don’t you think it would be nice to play the bagpipes, Grandma Chrissie? Don’t you like the idea?”

  “I like the idea, Valerie,” said Chrissie Campbell finally, taking careful measured breaths until it all stopped. She turned, calm now, only a little pale, and held the child’s face in her hands and smiled. And like another child’s face of years past, the brooding look vanished and the face became lighted and the eyes went more to the blue.

  “Yes, darling,” said Chrissie. “I think that’s a lovely idea.”

  Afterword

  Gregory Ulas Powell and Jimmy Lee Smith were originally sentenced to death, but the sentences were reduced to life in prison with California court decisions that temporarily barred the death penalty during the 1970s. Gregory Powell, who remains in prison, has been denied parole several times. Jimmy Lee Smith was released from prison on charges relating to Officer Ian Campbell’s death in 1982, and died in April 2007, after spending the remaining years of his life in and out of prison on various other charges.

  Karl Hettinger died in May 1994 of natural causes.

  About the Author

  JOSEPH WAMBAUGH worked for the Los Angeles Police Department for fourteen years before turning to writing full-time. He is the author of seventeen books, and he lives in southern California.