by B. E. Scully
Rachel laughed and nudged him in the arm. “Shhh, Cal, they might hear you. I just hope they’re friendlier than our other next door neighbor.”
A plump, jolly-faced woman with long gray hair pulled back into a thick braid appeared in the doorway, wiping her hands on the edge of a lavender-colored apron.
“Come on in! I’m Mary Dell,” she said, offering first Rachel and then Cal one of her freshly wiped hands. “And yes, there are two of us that run the farm, and we are sisters. Twins, in fact. Our parents started this place when we were born, and they decided to name it after us. In fact,” she said, pointing at the doorway, “that sign you’re talking about is the original one all the way back from the 1960s. Only the darn sign-maker wasn’t too up on his grammar, as you folks noticed, and he painted the name wrong. Our parents couldn’t afford a new sign back then, so the name just stuck the way it is. I’ve come to think lately that maybe that sign-maker knew what he was doing all along, though,” she said, laughing. “Maybe there only is supposed to be one of us running the show around here.”
Oh, great—a talker, Cal thought, trying to catch Rachel’s eye and give her the “hurry it along” signal.
But after weeks of nothing but cleaning and repairing, Rachel was eager for conversation with anyone other than Cal and Jackson. “What do you mean?”
“Well, our mom’s been gone about ten years now, and then our father passed away three years ago, I guess it is. Not too long after Mel Stockton passed, come to think of it. Me and Mabel—that’s my sister—we took over the place after Dad died, but it’s been like cats and dogs between the two of us ever since. Don’t get me wrong—I love my sister more than the world, but trying to run a business with her is another story altogether. O.K., speak of the devil—Mabel, this is Rachel and Cal. They just moved into the place next door.”
A leaner, tougher-looking version of Mary edged in through the shop’s back door and nodded in their direction. On her feet, in complete incongruity with the staid rest of her, was a pair of hot-pink gardening clogs with yellow butterflies all over them.
“And don’t worry,” Mary added, “we are a whole lot friendlier than old man Crampton. Not like that’s saying much.”
“So that’s the guy’s name?” Cal asked. “Crampton?”
Mary nodded. “That’s right. Roy Crampton. I take it you’ve met him.”
“Unfortunately,” Rachel said. “He’s a bit, well, cranky.”
“Cranky!” Mary repeated, throwing her hands in the air in mock exasperation. “The man’s certifiable. I suppose he told you that ‘no one’ walks behind his house?”
“He told us,” Cal said. “So far we’re walking out on the highway to get to the canal pathway, but it seems kind of ridiculous.”
“Oh, it is, and it’s been that way for as long as I can remember,” Mary said. “Since our father died and we expanded the place—I should say, since Mabel expanded the place, since I was fine with things just like they were—anyway, since then we’ve hired workers to help out with the harvest—you know, young people who work in return for room and board.”
Rachel and Cal exchanged a smile—must be the hippies and potheads.
“That’s what the little yerts you see all around the property are for,” Mary continued. “They live out here until the rainy season comes in and then most of them move on until summer rolls back around, though a handful of full-timers stay on to help out year round. Anyway, at first some of them tried taking the back way to the canal path, past your house and then Roy’s. But he kicked up such a fuss, it’s just not worth it.”
“Trouble with the neighbors is bad for business,” Mabel spoke up from the doorway.
Mary went on as if her sister hadn’t spoken. “You know, our father went to school with Roy. He was on the baseball team, played drums in the school band. Was just as normal a kid as you could find. But something went wrong somewhere along the line, with him over there in that house all by himself. After Mel died, old Crampton was hoping like hell that Blood House would just stay empty until it fell down. We tried to buy it, you know—or Mabel did, anyway. Would have doubled our property, right, Mabel? But we just couldn’t afford it, what with all the other expenses from expanding.”
“I take it Mel and Roy got along,” Rachel said.
“Oh, I don’t know if ‘got along’ is the way I’d put it,” Mary said. “They had their fights, you’d better believe it. Lord, I thought they were going to come to blows that one time over that damn apple tree! But they made their peace, I guess—called a truce. After a while Mel got just about as reclusive as Roy, though never as nasty. So I think they kind of relied on each other to shore up their end of the canal—to man the barricades against invaders, I guess you could say. Funny thing, though—if everyone wasn’t too scared to walk behind Roy’s house, Mel might still be alive.”
“What do you mean?” Rachel asked.
“Mel had some kind of stroke or heart attack right on the back porch. I guess he didn’t have strength enough to reach the door handle and get outside. When someone finally came to check on him after the bills started piling up, they found him on the floor right in front of the back door. A bunch of bones in his right hand were shattered. He must have lay there pounding on the door with the last of what was in him, hoping someone would come by and hear him. I don’t know how long it took him to die, but I heard he was dead at least two weeks before someone found him.”
They bought some lavender honey and walked home in silence until Cal couldn’t contain himself any longer.
“Crampton?” he roared with laughter. “His name is Crampton? You couldn’t pick a more cramptony guy for a name like that!”
“Reminds me of Krampus—you know, Saint Nicolas’s goat-demon alter ego who punishes naughty children at Christmas.”
Cal made his hands into hooks and raised them over his head, causing Jackson to launch into a barking frenzy. “I am Roy Krampus, come to punish all naughty children—and adults, too!”
“Jesus, Cal, your hand looks terrible.” Rachel took hold of Cal’s right hand, the one he’d torn on the fence their first day. The zig-zagging scar was red and livid, the skin around the cut swollen and shiny.
“The better to grab naughty adults with, my dear.”
“Guess we’ll just have to watch out this Christmas,” Rachel said, laughing.
As it turned out, they didn’t have to wait that long.
That evening they set out for their usual walk along the canal path, but they lingered a little longer than usual, misjudging the quickening dusk of late September. By the time they made it across the bridge and back to the highway, it was getting dark fast.
Even so, when they got to the corner of Roy Crampton’s property, they paused to listen like they always did. Pushed right up against the barbed wire fence was a row of three clap-trap wooden sheds without a window or square inch of open space to let so much as one ray of light or gust of fresh air into any of them. That alone wouldn’t have caught their attention, but the first time Rachel and Cal had passed by the sheds, the noises coming from them definitely had.
“Is that…some kind of grunting?” Rachel had asked.
“Sounds like it,” Cal said. “He’s probably got dogs in there.”
“That’s cruel. But usually Jackson goes crazy when he smells strange dogs.”
They stood there listening to the grunting. It was slow and steady, and the more Cal listened the more he thought he heard a pattern to the grunting—a pattern that seemed to be repeating over and over again—
“Oh my god, I think the dogs are having sex in there,” Rachel said.
“Could be,” Cal said. “He could be breeding dogs or something.”
After that, they always paused in front of the sheds to listen. Sometimes they didn’t hear anything going on inside, but just as often they heard that strange, rhythmic grunting—always the same pattern, as far as Cal could tell.
But tonight the sheds were silent.
Rachel started toward their driveway, Jackson bouncing along beside her. Because the rural highway had almost no shoulder, they had to walk single file, with Cal bringing up the rear like a rag-tag military platoon.
He heard the tractor trailer approaching before he saw it.
Even though the speed limit was sixty-five, most of the traffic went much faster than that. Cal turned around to see a monstrous logging truck headed straight toward them. Neither of them were wearing reflective clothing, and Cal yelled ahead to catch Rachel’s attention.
“Rachel, move to the side! The truck’s too wide!”
But Rachel kept right on walking, head and eyes on the road ahead of her. She was walking fast, outpacing Cal by a good twenty feet. Jackson was far out at the end of his leash, veering dangerously close to the white line. Behind him, Cal heard the truck’s compression brakes let out a surly belch.
He broke into a light jog, and then he started to run.
By the time he reached Rachel, the truck’s engine was the whole world. He grabbed hold of Rachel’s shoulder and pulled her off the road just as the truck roared past in one blinding, deafening blur of diesel and wheels.
Without a proper shoulder, the side of the road gave way to a steep ditch filled with weeds and brambles. Rachel had no more recovered from the truck when she lost her footing on a pile of loose stones and tumbled into the ditch. As she fell, Jackson’s leash flew into the air, and Cal had to scramble for it before Jackson realized he was free.
Back in the safety of their living room, Cal gave Rachel the once-over. “Some bumps and scratches, including this really nasty one on your left ankle, but nothing broken.”
“Great, and I start work soon.”
“Just rest until then. We’ve got the place pretty much cleaned up, and I’ll take over the renovations until we can get a proper contractor in here.” Cal hesitated and then went ahead and said what had been on his mind ever since their first day. “And I’ll tell you another thing that’s going to change around here—from now on, we’re walking to the bridge on the goddamn public access path behind the property that we pay taxes and a mortgage to own. And if the Crampus doesn’t like it, I’ll send him my lawyer’s name the next time we’re run off the highway.”
“You don’t have a lawyer.”
“I’ll get one. You’d better believe I’ll get one.”
“Cal, it’s not a big deal. Listen, we said we weren’t going to have any hassles up here—a new start and all, after what happened—”
She broke off, avoiding the argument that finishing the sentence would start. Cal knew that “What Happened” was Rachel-code for “that time you punched some poor stranger in the face for nothing more than cutting in front of you in traffic.” Cal and Rachel had never sat down and agreed not to talk about it, and they never had to—it was just understood to let the entire incident alone, as if not saying the thing somehow erased it from having happened.
“Rachel, that highway is dangerous. You could have been killed. You or Jackson or both.” When Rachel bit her lip and looked away, Cal added, “Look, the people at the farm want to use the public access path. We want to use the public access path. And no one does, just because of some rotten old man who thinks the world stopped moving forward somewhere around nineteen-fifty-nine.”
“You think he’s that up to date?”
“Okay, maybe nineteen-sixty-nine, just to squeeze J.F.K. in there.”
They sat there on their living room couch looking at each other and then burst out laughing.
“Tomorrow we use the access path,” Cal said. “The Crampus be damned. Agreed?”
“Agreed. Because you know how it is—once a place starts changing, before you even know it, it’s not the same anymore,” Rachel said. “And tomorrow, things are going to start changing along canal way.”
3
Positioned at just the right angle at just the right spot, Rachel could see out but no one could see in. At least, they couldn’t see her, which was exactly how she wanted it. After moving an old over-stuffed rocking chair into one of the tiny upstairs turret rooms, Rachel had discovered the ultimate spy position just to the left of the back window—or what she preferred to think of as her “observation post.” From there she could see quite a ways down the canal path in both directions.
She could also see a big corner chunk of Roy Crampton’s property, though that part of the view was far less desirable.
High up in the turret room looking down on people going by with their dogs and their baby strollers, Rachel imagined herself as a princess imprisoned in an enchanted castle. No one else knew she was here—in fact, she could perish and no one would know. Her mummified corpse would remain sitting in the exact same position in the exact same chair for decades before some new couple moved in and found her. Then she’d be one of their bizarre discoveries, right along with the “nail closet.”
Cal seemed to love the idea of just the two of them sequestered away from the world in Blood House (despite her best efforts, Rachel never could think of it as Love House). Their once-a-week trip into town for groceries seemed more than enough socializing for him, but even though she’d never tell Cal, Rachel was counting the days until she started work. She missed the lunch breaks gossiping with her co-workers, or popping into the café next door for her mid-afternoon latte. She missed having a reason to put on make-up and wear something other than sweat pants and work boots. She missed people. She missed her old life.
Or most of it, anyway.
She didn’t miss the soul-sucking traffic jams and the hour-long commute to work. She didn’t miss the heat or the hordes of people that made L.A. feel more and more like an ant-heap of freeways and endless cheap stucco apartment buildings. She didn’t miss the L.A. version of Cal, either—some high-strung nut job who barely resembled the man she’d married.
Because she definitely hadn’t married a man who punched people in the face out of nowhere and ended up arrested for assault and battery.
Rachel could still remember the exact moment when she found out what happened. She’d been arguing with her dry cleaner over a stained silk shirt when Cal called and told her to come to the police station on Wilcox “as soon as possible if not sooner.” She’d never even been in a police station before let alone to bail someone out of one, and as she’d walked through the chaotic maze of uniformed men and women and the lost, broken souls they arrested for a living, she felt as if she’d stepped into someone else’s life.
Even though the man Cal had assaulted decided not to press charges, something had changed that day. The supposedly solid ground beneath their feet had shifted and cracked. Or maybe the fault lines had been there all along. If so, Cal’s job had been the first noticeable tremor.
Rachel knew he’d been unhappy at work, but she hadn’t realized how bad it had gotten until the night she’d suggested dinner at their favorite Middle Eastern restaurant.
“Pick somewhere else,” Cal said. “I get about all I can stand of hummus and Allah all day at work. I don’t need any more of it on my downtime.”
For months Cal had been complaining that the insurance company had started hiring “a bunch of Middle Easterners who’ll work for less money and put up with any kind of crap because it’s still better than whatever sand hole they came from.”
Rachel figured that an attitude like that probably wasn’t helping, but she hadn’t wanted to push it. She could deal with Cal griping about coworkers, but not even wanting to eat Middle Eastern food anymore was taking things too far.
“Well, maybe you can suggest some nice Anglo-Saxon restaurant filled with white people. Except the Mexican dishwashers, of course.”
“Spare me the righteous P.C. rage, Rachel. When the first couple of Middle Eastern guys got hired, did I even mention it? No, I didn’t, and you know that. But then it was another, and then another. Then one of them moves up into management, and guess who starts getting all the promotions and big projects? And then one day I look arou
nd and I’m the only white guy left in programming. All of a sudden, I’m going to lunch by myself because I don’t speak Arabic and no one else will speak English. If the situation was the other way around, I could probably win a nice fat discrimination lawsuit. But who cares if the white guy gets shut out?”
“Amazing,” Rachel said, shaking her head. “For, oh, just about the entire course of human history, ninety-percent of the world’s population have been hoping the white alpha kings would someday start caring about things like discrimination and inequality. But be careful what you wish for, right? Because as soon as the other ninety-percent start getting even a teensy-weensy piece of the pie, then lo and behold! The alpha kings suddenly do start caring about discrimination—against them.”
“Fine. If you want to live in a world with people who think you don’t have a soul and force you to dress up like the Grim Reaper every time you leave the house—oh, wait, that is if they let you leave the house—that’s fine by me.”
“Wow. When did you become ‘that angry white guy,’ Cal?”
“Well, let me see—I’ve always been white and I’ve always been a guy, so I’m not sure where the sudden confusion is coming from on those two points. As for the angry part, I’m not angry. I’m frustrated. The most backward-ass shit gets justified in the name of some sort of ‘diversity’ and ‘equality’ that is actually anything but. Listen, I’m not arguing the system hasn’t been rigged in one direction for way too long. But what, now white men should just go away and live in sack-cloth repentance for the rest of time?”
Rachel had wanted to argue, but hadn’t she been the one to blow up in the middle of a hardware store after failing to find even one employee who spoke English well enough to answer a simple question about repairing a sink? Or what about the time one of her friends from college quit her job at a cushy private high school in order to “do some good” in one of L.A.’s embattled public schools—anywhere, that is, except “a black school”—had Rachel spoken up or nodded her head in silent empathy? And remember that homeless guy passed out right in front of her car door, so that she couldn’t even open it? After trying a few times to rouse him, hadn’t she actually taken the toe of her three-hundred dollar boots and rolled him out of the way, more pissed off about being late for work than concerned that the guy might be sick or even dead, for god’s sake?
