The Boys from Santa Cruz

by Jonathan Nasaw

  I crossed the Marshall County line late in the afternoon. Traffic slowed to a crawl where the state highway merged with Marshall Street, running through the heart of Marshall City. The main drag had stoplights every few blocks, the better to snag the summer tourists. I couldn’t help thinking that the last time I’d seen these buildings was from the back of a squad car. Who was that kid who’d sat up half the night in a segregation cell in Juvie, waiting for his milk and cookies?

  Normally it was about a forty-five-minute drive from the city to what was now my place. For it was just beginning to sink in for me that with Big Luke having owned the property free and clear, and me being his only child, it probably belonged to me now. Still, I knew better than to just waltz up to the front door. Instead I cut off the county road half a mile before our driveway and circled around, coming in from the north, via a neighboring parcel known as Murphy’s farm, despite the fact that there hadn’t been a Murphy there, or a farm, for nobody knew how long.

  Murphy’s house had collapsed long before my time, but the barn still stood. When I was younger, I’d spent hours swinging from the rope swing attached to the rafter over the hayloft. Grab the rope, jump off, swing out into thin air, try not to smash into the side of the barn on the return swing. What a rush!

  Leaving the van hidden in the barn, I walked the rest of the way home, through the woods. It was nearly dark when I reached the northern edge of the property. I wanted to cry when I saw what the cops had done to the place. My bus was torn up like it had been hit by a tornado. My clothes and belongings were scattered all over the place, they’d unraveled my cassettes and taken my priceless vinyl records out of their sleeves and tossed them around like Frisbees, and slit my mattress and all my pillows. What a fucking mess!

  Down the hill things were even worse. The shed and the trailer were completely trashed, the trailer jacked off its moorings and the ground dug up underneath it, and the yard looked as if they’d gone over it with a rototiller or something. They’d dug up the fire circle, too, but at least Teddy was gone, trunk and all. Which made sense. It was only my subconscious that had half-expected to find her still there, rotting away along with the turkey vultures I’d shot.

  I returned to my bus feeling kind of raw and sad. I restuffed my mattress as best I could, dragged it up to the roof, and spread out my sleeping bag on top of it. Dinner was a warm can of Mountain Dew and a package of cheese-and-peanut-butter crackers from a vending machine at a highway rest stop, dessert was a spliff-size joint, and on my last night as a free man, the night sky framed by graceful pine boughs was my bedroom ceiling.

  4

  I woke in the middle of the night, chilled and wet. The sleeping bag was damp and the flashlight batteries were dead. By moonlight, I climbed down from the roof and cleared a space at the front of the bus. I dragged the mattress inside, unzipped the sleeping bag, and covered myself with the half that was still dry.

  After a few hits off the roach from my bedtime joint, I had no trouble falling asleep. When I awoke again it was daylight. I was lying on my right side with my head pillowed on my arm. Opening my eyes, I saw a skinny guy with fading reddish brown hair grinning down at me from the bus driver’s seat.

  “He lives, he wakes—’tis Death is dead, not he!”

  I started to sit up, but my right arm, the one I was lying on, jerked me back down. The guy, it seemed, had handcuffed my wrist to the railing above the front stairwell. “Sorry about that,” he said. “You were snoring away so peacefully I didn’t have the heart to wake you.” He stuck out his hand like he expected me to shake it. “Skip Epstein.”

  I rattled my handcuff. Epstein, who was wearing shorts and an old green T-shirt, chuckled at himself, then changed hands and we shook lefty.

  “You a cop?” I asked him.

  “Bounty hunter.” I could tell from the way he said it how much he liked saying it. “Like Steve McQueen in Wanted: Dead or Alive. Your grandfather hired me to find you before the cops did.”

  I knew who Steve McQueen was from The Great Escape, but I’d never heard of Wanted: Dead or Alive. The title did fit in with what Big Luke had told me about bounty hunters. They worked for bail bondsmen, he’d said, and actually had more powers than real cops did. They didn’t need warrants, they didn’t have to read you your rights, and they didn’t have to face a review board if they shot you.

  Epstein, though, didn’t look nearly as tough and mean as the bounty hunters Big Luke had described. “How much is my grandfather paying you?” I asked him.

  “Enough.”

  “I’ll give you twice as much to let me go.”

  Epstein shook his head slowly, like he really regretted having to turn me down, then reached for the gun in his belt holster, and racked the slide to jack a round into the chamber.

  I thought he was going to shoot me then and there, but he only used the gun to cover me while he removed the handcuffs so I could take a piss and get dressed. After recuffing my hands behind my back, Epstein marched me down the hill. That’s when I realized he was a cripple, with a withered left leg, a built-up shoe, and a head that bobbed up and down like a yo-yo with every step.

  Epstein had parked his car, a black Camry, at the bottom of the driveway, in the blazing sun. By the time we reached it, the interior was so hot you could have baked bread on the dashboard, then toasted it on the vinyl upholstery. I got in first. It wasn’t so bad for me because I was wearing jeans, but Epstein, in his cheap cotton shorts, would have seared his ass good if I hadn’t warned him. I wasn’t going to at first, but I guess I felt kind of sorry for the guy.

  Once the air-conditioning kicked in, we had a pretty nice ride, considering the circumstances. We bopped along shooting the breeze, admiring the scenery, stopping at fast-food drive-thrus when we were hungry. You know, just two buddies cruising the Golden State, except that one of us was wearing handcuffs.

  Epstein never did say where he was taking me. All he told me was that I was blind-ass lucky that he had found me before the cops did. When I asked him how he’d found me, he said that in order to catch the prey, Grasshopper, one must think like the prey. I laughed and told him he was full of shit, then he laughed and admitted that he’d just gotten lucky. It turned out he was a private investigator from San Francisco who’d been hired to find me by my grandparents. He’d driven up to the old homestead this morning just to take a look around, hoping to find some clue as to where I might have gone. Instead, lo and behold, there I was, snoozing away like a complete idiot.

  We crossed over Pacheco Pass late in the afternoon, continued north and west on 152, then north on Highway 1. When it became obvious that we were heading toward Santa Cruz, I found myself indulging in a pitiful fantasy. I imagined that Fred and Evelyn had hired Epstein to bring me back to live with them. Internally, I made a shitload of promises. I’d get clean and stay clean, find a way to get along with my grandfather, work hard in school, make them glad they’d changed their minds.

  After which world peace would be declared and everybody would shit ice cream in their favorite flavor. Because instead of heading into town when we reached the infamous Highway 1 fishhook, Epstein swung around to Graham Hill Road, and on into the growing darkness we drove, onward and upward until the Santa Cruz Mountains closed around us, swallowing me up like a haunted forest in a fairy tale.

  5

  You know how people are always joking about the men in the white coats? Guess what—sometimes it’s not a joke. Somewhere around Bonny Doon, Epstein pulled up to a pair of high wrought-iron gates set into a stone wall that stretched off into the deep, dark woods in either direction as far as the eye could see. MEADOWS ROAD, read the sign affixed to the wall.

  Next to the gate was a square stone cottage. A uniformed guard leaned out the window, Epstein gave him our names, and the gates swung open. We followed a winding driveway uphill to an ivy-covered three-story brick building with green awnings and a white portico.

  From the front it looked like a very nice retirement
home, the kind rich folks wouldn’t feel bad about sending their aged parents to. But we didn’t go in through the front, we drove around to the back of the building, where the windows had security grilles an anorexic hamster couldn’t have crawled through, except on the third floor, where they were bricked up entirely.

  That was when I made the acquaintance of the men in the white coats. Two of them. One white, one black, both big. They came around to the passenger door. Epstein leaned over and unlocked my handcuffs. It felt strange, having my hands free. The door opened. I unhooked my own seat belt, but somehow I couldn’t bring myself to step out of the car. I think I must have been waiting for Epstein to say something. Nice meeting you, good luck, something like that. But he said nothing, just gave me a big phony wink. Then one of the orderlies, the white one, grabbed me by the arm, and yanked me roughly out of the car, sending me sprawling across the hard concrete.

  I went absolutely apeshit, so apeshit I don’t know how long it lasted, or what happened in what order. My memory of that time is more like a shoe box full of random, black-and-white snapshots. Some are blurred and some are dark and some are shot from crazy angles. This one was taken from the ground, looking up, and that one from above, looking down. Another one’s kind of surreal. Is it a trench? Is it a…canyon? No, it’s an extreme close-up of the nose of the white man in the white coat, which was split wide open down the middle. Then there’s a picture, kind of streaky and overexposed around the edges like it’s from the end of the roll, of a hypodermic syringe sticking out of a blue-jeaned thigh. My blue-jeaned thigh.

  And at the bottom of the imaginary shoe box there’s one last, dim snapshot of the traitor Epstein waving good-bye as they drag me away. On his face is a sickly grin; in his waving hand is a sheet of paper he had one of the whitecoats sign. It’s a receipt for the delivery of yours truly. A receipt he can bring back to show my grandparents in order to claim his thirty pieces of silver. A receipt that earns him a privileged spot on my all-time fantasy revenge list.

  Oh, and one more thing. The date on the receipt? It would have been October 31, 1985. Halloween, of course.

  CHAPTER NINE

  1

  Darkness. Dreams. Teddy, burning. Dusty, falling. Rudy, staring. A round bed afloat in a black sea, jagged flashes of lightning on the horizon. Big balloon faces, bending low to mine. Voices, inhuman voices like running water. And terrible creatures, obscene, impossible creatures, turkey vultures with human faces, humans with feathered arms and long curved talons instead of hands…

  A windowless room. A nurse holding a syringe to the light, tapping it delicately a few times with her finger. We both watch the bubble rise to the light. “I want to go home now,” I whisper hoarsely, through dry, cracked lips.

  “Sure thing,” she says. “Home you go.” A prick, a sting, a falling away…

  Sometimes darkness and dreams, sometimes the windowless room. Sometimes a tray of food is in front of me, sometimes pills in a tiny paper cup. And sometimes a whitecoat with a bandage on his nose takes me into the bathroom and twists my arm behind my back and hurts me and I pray for the darkness to swallow me up again…

  There comes a time when, instead of the whitecoat with the bandaged nose, it’s a whitecoat with a long scar down his nose who takes me into the bathroom and twists my arm behind my back and hurts me, but then one day another man in a longer white coat and one of those things with black tubing and a silver disk around his neck rushes in yelling at him to stop, and after that I never see either the man with the bandage or the man with the scar again…

  Over time, the darkness and the dreams begin to fade, until one morning I awake to find myself in a new room, one with a window. And when I look out the window I can see a small garden with flowers, pink flowers and red flowers and yellow flowers, and sometimes I see a bird, one of those blue birds, the name is on the tip of my tongue but I can’t quite remember it.

  Slowly my world opens up. Now there are other rooms, other people. I learn to braid shiny plastic strands into something called a lanyard, I have no idea what it’s for. And sometimes a new, different whitecoat, a much nicer one, leads me out into a garden that I think is the same one I can see from my new window, and I see that blue bird flying by again, and I discover that I know its name now, it’s a jay. A blue jay. Duh!

  Not long after that, maybe even that same afternoon, I’m back in my room, washing up in the bathroom after using the toilet, when I notice an oddly familiar-looking fellow in the mirror over the sink. He has dark brown hair and dark brown eyes, and a little brown mole next to his eye, just like me. But he also has hair on his face, like he’s growing a beard, which I’d never been old enough to do.

  As we stare into each other’s eyes, a confused look comes over his face. He reaches up and rubs his chin wonderingly, with his fingertips, like he’s wondering why it’s all stubbly. And when I realize that I’m rubbing my chin, too, and feeling the stubble, the other man’s eyes fill with tears. “Luke,” he says, with the tears rolling down his cheeks now. “Your name is Luke.”

  2

  Chemical restraint. That’s the official term, in case you’re wondering. A marvelous thing, really, at least for jailers. Couple bucks a day worth of medications, sedatives, antipsychotics, combinations thereof, and lo and behold, there’s no need for bars, armed guards, straitjackets, or razor wire. Why, just think of all the money the state could save if only CR were adopted throughout the correctional system. No need for a supermax prison like Pelican Bay—a little chemical restraint and you could house them bad boys in pup tents and guard them with Cub Scouts.

  But that’s never going to happen. Can you imagine the outcry? The lawyers, the ACLU, they’d be all over it like stink on shit. And why? Because it’s INHUMANE! It robs an individual of the very things our society claims to value: his personality, his individuality. His humanity, for God’s sake, his simple humanity.

  Unless, like me, he’s been deemed mentally ill by a competent, or at least licensed, mental health professional. Then he can expect to spend the rest his life in darkness and dreams, serenaded by a babble of inhuman voices and visited by a bestiary of obscene, impossible creatures.

  I was approaching my twenty-fifth birthday when the boy I had been looked in the bathroom mirror and saw the man I had become. While I’d like to say it was due to my willpower or strength of character that I was able to overcome the effects of the powerful drugs they had been pouring into me all those years, the truth, I suspect, is that I probably had something much simpler to thank: my weight.

  I’d been around five-six, maybe a hundred and thirty pounds when I entered Meadows Road, but after a late growth spurt I was closer to six feet tall, and weighed somewhere around one sixty-five, one seventy. They were probably still medicating me as if I were forty pounds lighter, though. And while my higher faculties were as yet nonexistent (I couldn’t have spelled fuck if you’d spotted me the uck), something deeper and more basic was starting to surface inside me. You can call it my personality or my identity if you want to, but I prefer to think of it as my soul.

  Whatever it was, it told me not to swallow the pills in the little white cup that the nurse brought me that night. Instead I stashed them between cheek and molar. I guess I’d been a good boy for so long that she didn’t bother, on that night or any other night, to make sure I’d swallowed them down. All I had to do was keep my head turned until she left, then spit them out and flush them down the toilet.

  I suspect it was that long slow detox that saved me from going into withdrawal when I stopped taking my medications. But since the meds I was spurning also included a nightly sleeping pill, I found myself lying awake hour after hour, night after night, trying to force my poor, benumbed mind to think, to reason, and most agonizingly of all, to remember.

  My childhood memories were still there. But they weren’t the problem. I could remember most of the stuff that had happened to me up until the day my father called from Marshall City to say the FBI had him su
rrounded. Everything after that, except for a few wispy fragments of sense-memory, like walking through a field of pot plants seven feet high, lacy green light filtering through the leaves, was either blank, or so confused and conflated with my CR hallucinations and nightmares that I couldn’t separate the real from the fantastic.

  Somehow, though, after a few nights of struggling, I managed to stumble upon a solution to my problem. Write it down, something told me, you have to write it down. Which led to the next problem: how to obtain writing implements without giving away my secret?

  Pens were easy, there were plenty of them lying around the nursing station desks. All I could find to write in, though, was this 1995 Pocket Pal notebook-calendar. I found it in a drawer in the nurses’ station. It’s one of those pocket-sized drug company giveaways with the name and address of the local Pfizer sales rep printed in fake gold leaf on the fake leather cover. Not a lot of room for writing, obviously. But by printing in microscopically tiny letters, jamming the lines infinitesimally close together, and making use of every available inch of space including the margins around the “Useful Information” pages (first aid instructions, a metric conversion chart, zip and area code listings, etc.), I have managed to squeeze ten full years of my life into these cramped and no doubt barely legible pages.

  It worked, too! My marbles and my memories, they are back. I know who I am, and I know what happened to me. And thanks to my psychiatrist, who left me alone in his office with my records and charts the other day while he went off to attend to some emergency, I even know how they got away with doing what they did.

  It all started with a diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder. In other words, according to the shrinks I am a total psychopath. That’s why, they say, I helped Big Luke and Teddy rape and kill at least three women. No mention of the fact that Judge Higuera dismissed all the charges against me.