A Safe Place for Dying

by Jack Fredrickson

  I snailed north on 101, one more clot in the afternoon rush hour. To the north, San Francisco was invisible in the soup. After an hour, and maybe ten miles, 101 dissolved into a maze of city streets. I kept on for another ten minutes, following the traffic and looking for a gas station to ask for directions, when the Golden Gate Bridge came out of the mist like a ghost ship, not gold at all but a rusty red-orange, almost the same hue as Willadean the Electric Lady’s hair.

  I drove across the bay, into the green haze of hills in Sausalito and Mill Valley. By now, the traffic had thinned and the rain had stopped. It was six thirty. And it was California. Fifty-five degrees or not, I pulled over, dug a sweater from my duffel to put on under my windbreaker, slipped on my Cubs cap to alert the Californians I was a tourist, and dropped the top of the Sebring.

  I cut west, over to Highway 1, the old two-lane blacktop that chases the crags of the California coast. The airline magazine said it was all hairpin turns and switchback curves, offering views of protected land and undeveloped shoreline that were not to be missed. The airline writer was no romantic, but she was right. I got stuck behind two flatbed produce trucks lumbering through gear changes and a vanload of gawking tourists, their heads stuck out their windows like pigeons begging for peanuts, and I didn’t mind at all. In the mist, the rock formations down in the froth along the shore looked like herds of prehistoric dinosaurs, hunkering down in the shallow waters for the night.

  The road curved inland, and I drove through farmland that looked like Iowa until it curved back again to the sea. I got to Bodega Bay at dark. Clarinda was due north, and Santa Rosa, boyhood home of Michael Jaynes, was east. I opted for neither and pulled off in front of an old frame motel right on Bodega Bay.

  While the dark-haired teenaged girl processed my credit card, I thumbed through a guidebook for sale on the counter. It said that Bodega Bay was the film site of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. I remembered three scenes in the movie: a house that was attacked by birds, a school that was attacked by birds, and a café where a tweedy old lady, who resembled a bird, opined that doom was in the offing. The guidebook said the house had been extensively modified with plywood by Hitchcock and had never been a recognizable tourist site once the plywood was removed; the school wasn’t in the town at all, but several miles to the east; and the café had been expanded so often it no longer looked like the place in the movie. Welcome, film buffs, to Bodega Bay, site of The Birds.

  The girl handed me my room key and told me that the restaurant across the street would close in half an hour. I have that kind of face; it always looks hungry. I left my bag in the car and ambled across Highway 1, deserted now, in the dark, of trucks and tourists. The restaurant was old and paneled and apparently had not been featured in The Birds, but it was serving sea bass and lime pie, and I had both, with coffee, although it was late for caffeine, past ten o’clock. I was the only customer, and the waitress, a nervous woman without much of a smile, left me alone. At eleven, having successfully fended off starvation for another night, I walked back across the highway. My room was old enough to have windows that opened all the way, and I fell asleep listening to the water lap at the pier pilings, remembering another such place, on an inlet off Lake Michigan, where Amanda and I stayed once when we were married.

  I was up at seven the next morning, but that was Chicago time. It was only 5:00 A.M. in California, and the roosters in Bodega Bay were still chilling in their rooster haciendas. The restaurant across the street was open, though, and as I went to a booth, I eyed the lime pie sitting in the glass case. There was plenty left—my piece last night was the only triangle missing—and fruit is always good for breakfast. But it was a new day. I had whole-wheat toast and black coffee and felt the leaner for it. I did get a slice of the pie to go, though, in case I got stranded in the desert, should a desert appear along the ocean coast highway.

  I walked back to the motel. As I paid my bill, I asked the counter clerk about Clarinda.

  “Not much there,” she said. “Mostly it’s a hub for practitioners of the therapies.”

  “Therapies?”

  She walked around the counter to the tourist brochure rack, picked out a directory the size of a small phone book, and handed it to me. “They’re all in here. Whatever problems you’re having with your aura, your pet, your living room furniture, or if you just want to get more intimate with your plants, these people can take care of it.” She smiled a good, sane smile. I thanked her for the book and walked out.

  The sun was brightening the sky behind the rolling hills to the east. No rain today. I put the top down on the convertible and drove out of Bodega Bay, site of the film The Birds.

  Highway 1 was still empty of tourists and truckers. Clarinda was less than an hour away, even if I poked along, so I drove slow, and stopped at most of the observation points to watch the rising sun color the monstrous stone humps in the water first red, then orange, then yellow. I lingered at one particularly spectacular vista, listening to the ocean pound below, watching the colors of the coast change, second by second, before my eyes. I forced myself to remember the wires under the lamppost, and how likely it was that others just like them connected dozens, maybe hundreds, of highyield explosives throughout Gateville. It seemed impossible that something like that could exist on the same planet that offered the beauty I was seeing along the California coast.

  Even with poking along, I got to the brown molded plastic sign welcoming me to Clarinda at eight thirty. The town was a hundred yards up, not much more than a wide place in the road, with a green two-island BP gas station, a small general store, and, fifty yards past those, a long white frame building with green shutters and another molded plastic sign, also brown, saying it was the Clarinda Inn and Convention Center. I swung into the B.P. and filled up. The young girl inside was Asian and didn’t understand English. She gave me correct change for my twenty, but when I asked her about the Clarinda State Bank, she giggled and tried to give me the key to the men’s room. I smiled back and left.

  The gravel lot in front of the Clarinda Inn was empty except for a rusted old Plymouth Reliant and a faded tan Volkswagen Microbus that looked straight out of the sixties. The bus was painted with red flowers and round blue peace symbols and had a POLLUTION—IT’S EVERYBODY’S WORRY sticker on the back bumper. I’d seen television images of the sixties, of dark swooping helicopters, bright flashes of ground fire, and men running with stretchers in Vietnam; of girls flashing their fingers in a V, for peace, as they put daisies into rifle barrels held by stiff-faced, trembling National Guardsmen; and of hippies, rolling down the road in Volkswagen buses adorned with flowers and peace symbols. Apparently, some were still rolling, and one had rolled to a stop right in front of the Clarinda Inn. I parked next to it, stepped around the oil it was leaking, and went in.

  There was no one at the desk. The sign above the dining room entrance said to seat myself, so I did, at a small table by the window that looked out over Highway 1 and the ocean inlet just beyond. Only two of the other tables, both by the window in the long, dark hall, were occupied. A young girl, fresh-faced without makeup and wearing a red-checkered apron, came over. “Breakfast?” she asked.

  “That would be great.” I was thinking of scrambled eggs, crisp bacon, and hash browns. Surely no one would count the dry piece of whole-wheat toast I’d had earlier as anything but a crouton.

  “Coming right up,” she said, and left.

  I sat and looked out the window while I waited for her to bring a menu.

  There were four middle-aged women at the next table, dressed to varying degrees in faded denim and flowery blouses. None wore much makeup. As they chatted, first one, then another would get up and go to a small table in the corner, to return with a glass of cranberry juice. Being tack-sharp from the top-down drive in the morning air, I looked around and noticed the coffee was kept elsewhere, on a sideboard, alongside glass pitchers of orange juice. I got up and poured myself a cup of coffee.

  In a few min
utes, my waitress returned, carrying a plate. She set it down in front of me. It held two little stacked pancakes, topped by a lone, shrunken raspberry.

  I smiled up at her. “I haven’t ordered yet.”

  She looked at me as though I’d said I left my lunar orbiter idling on the roof. “You said you wanted breakfast, sir.”

  “I don’t recall ordering this.” I looked down again at the two tiny cakes and the puckered berry. If they continued to serve food that looked that small, they ought to start using smaller plates.

  “We don’t cook to order,” she said. “We offer one entrée for breakfast. Today, it’s granola cakes with raspberry.”

  I caught the singular on “raspberry.” “I’ll eat it,” I said. California was making me healthier by the minute.

  She left, and I ate the poor raspberry in one bite, sparing it from further isolation atop the two griddle cakes. I cut the pancakes into tiny squares to make them last and looked out the window while I ate.

  “I’m thinking of getting into reflexology,” one of the women at the next table said, as she returned with another glass of cranberry juice. Either my hearing was improving in the California air or the conversation at the next table was getting louder. The woman speaking was pretty in a natural way, blond hair with streaks of gray, and a rose blush on her cheeks. “Things are becoming so competitive, I can’t just do aromatherapy and massage. I’ve got to find another niche to survive.” I snuck a peek at the other three women at the table. They were nodding enthusiastically in agreement.

  Another of them, this one red-haired, drained her glass with a flourish, got up, and walked over to the corner table for a refill. I wondered again why they kept the cranberry juice on one table, the orange juice next to the coffee on another. Then again, I was in California, and perhaps that was explanation enough.

  I looked around the room. The only other occupied table was shared by a bearded fellow with a ponytail and an overweight girl in desperate need of a bra. They were also drinking cranberry juice. I caught my young waitress as she walked by. “Why do you keep the cranberry juice on one table and the orange juice on another?”

  She looked where I was pointing. “Oh, no, sir, that’s sherry. We serve it during afternoon tea, but it’s there all day.”

  “How convenient,” I said, sneaking another glance at the blond-gray lady at the next table. The rose blush on her cheeks had deepened. Nothing like a little toddy to give a glow first thing in the morning. I turned back to the waitress. “Can you tell me where the Clarinda State Bank is?”

  “There’s no bank in Clarinda. I’ve lived here all my life, and there’s never been a bank in Clarinda.”

  “Might there be someone here who’s been around longer?”

  “I’ll ask,” she said, and bustled off.

  “I try to build up slowly, ease in the ecstasy with my fingers,” the red-haired woman at the next table was saying.

  “Absolutely,” the blond-gray lady with the flushed cheeks agreed, bobbing her head. Or maybe it was that her head was wobbling. “Building for the whole hour is the only way.”

  When I was in high school back in Rivertown, the hookers who worked the parking lot behind the bowling alley had a different name for it, but they built ecstasy with their fingers, too. They didn’t go slow, though; they went real fast, and they only charged five bucks, less if they wore gloves. And it didn’t take an hour, not with high school boys.

  “You were inquiring about the bank?”

  The man had come up behind me so quietly I hadn’t heard him.

  I looked up. He had a full gray beard and was wearing a white chef’s jacket and hat. “Yes. I’m looking for information about the Clarinda State Bank. It was here in 1970.”

  “Indeed it was, though it wasn’t much of a bank. It closed sometime in the midseventies, torn down for that gas station.” He gestured out the window at the B.P. and smiled. “You can see Clarinda isn’t really ripe for commercial development.”

  “Is there a city hall, or a telephone company office? I’m looking for someone.”

  “Might I inquire who?”

  “Nadine Reynolds. She used to live here, or at least bank here.”

  “Can’t say as I know the name.”

  “Is there anyone in town who might have known her?”

  “There’s old-timers around, but they’re mostly retired loggers or sixties people farming little plots up in the hills.” He didn’t pause to explain what kind of crops “sixties people” would be growing in small plots in the hills. “Your best bet is to go across the street, ask at the post office.”

  I looked out the window. All that was across the street was the little general store.

  “It’s got postal boxes inside,” the chef said. “Ask Betsy, she runs the place. She might remember your Nadine Reynolds.”

  The waitress brought me my check. Eighteen bucks, which was nine bucks a cake if they threw in the raspberry gratis. Of course, that included all you could drink of the sherry. I left twenty-two dollars on the table and walked outside, a healthy man.

  The sign on the store said it opened at ten, leaving me an hour to kill. I got in the car and drove north a couple of miles, but there was nothing there but more hills and craggy cliffs. I pulled off at an observation point and leafed through the therapist directory I’d picked up in Bodega Bay.

  The counter clerk at the motel had been right: There were advisors, therapists, and counselors peddling every kind of assistance, from tantric sex instruction, avatar training, and radical forgiveness to polarity therapy and shamanic counseling. I didn’t understand any of it; the ailments that were plaguing people in Northern California had not yet struck Rivertown. One ad in particular caught my eye. Some fellow was offering help in “Getting Right with Your Colon,” which sounded like it might be popular as a postlunch seminar topic outside Kutz’s Wienie Wagon. I tossed the directory into the backseat and drove back to Clarinda.

  A tall woman with braided gray pigtails was hauling out wire display racks from inside the store. I pulled in and parked.

  “I understand this is also the post office,” I said from the convertible.

  “It is.” She set down a round contraption full of T-shirts on hangers.

  I got out, followed her inside, and helped her carry out a rack of brightly colored inner tubes.

  “Inner tubes?”

  “The Russian River is great for tubing,” she said. “Can I help you find something?”

  “I’m looking for a Nadine Reynolds, used to live around here.”

  “Still does,” she said, disappearing into the store. She came out with a shelf rack stacked with beach towels. “She in some kind of trouble?”

  “I need to talk to her about an insurance matter.”

  She nodded, satisfied.

  “But Nadine Reynolds still lives here?”

  “Think so.” She paused. “Still gets mail, mostly junk, ten, twelve times a year.”

  “Where does she live?”

  “Don’t know. I’ve never seen the woman. Her mail comes general delivery. I hold it until Lucy comes in.”

  “Lucy?”

  “Lucy Vesuvius. When she walks down for her mail, she always asks if there’s anything for this Nadine Reynolds and says she’ll bring it up to her. Got a letter in there right now for Nadine.”

  “Do you have an address for Lucy Vesuvius?”

  “She lives up in the hills, Runnelback Road.”

  I pulled my cell phone out of my shirt pocket. “May I use your phone book?”

  “Pay phone’s inside.” She turned from straightening the T-shirts on the round rack and saw the cell phone in my hand. “Those things don’t work around here,” she said. “Too many hills, not enough towers. The Zen folks say that’s the natural order, the hills keeping cellular out. Me? I’d like to have one. Anyway, Lucy doesn’t have a phone, regular or cellular. If you want to talk to her, you have to go on up.”

  She grabbed a small brown paper b
ag from a stack on a seed table and sketched a map. “I expect she’s at home. Lucy doesn’t seem to get around much, except for a hike down here once, twice a month for provisions.”

  “What does she do?”

  “She’s one of them in touch with her inner spirit. Sometimes I think I’m the only one’s got a toe in the real world around here.” She paused. “You sure this Nadine isn’t in some sort of trouble?”

  “No. Why do you ask?”

  “Because I been running this place for twenty years, and excepting one other guy, you’re the only one’s asked for Nadine Reynolds.”

  Good news, I thought. Till had mobilized one of his San Francisco agents. “The other fellow, was he a government type, in a suit, came up in the last day or so?” I asked.

  She laughed. “Not hardly. First off, he calls, never comes here. Second, he sure doesn’t sound like a government man. He’s a little too soft-spoken, a little too polite. He always asks if I know how Nadine’s doing. I always tell him what I just told you: I don’t know her, but somebody comes down periodic for her mail, so she must be doing all right. I always ask if I can pass on a message. He says no, and that’s pretty much it until he calls again a few months later.”

  “How long has he been calling?”

  “Ever since I’ve owned the store. When I see Lucy afterward, she always gets real excited about it and promises to tell Nadine right away.”

  “This caller, he doesn’t leave a name?”

  “Sure he does. Michael. His name is Michael.”

  “Michael Jaynes?”

  “He never has said his last name, but Lucy seems to know who it is.”

  “I think I’ll head up there,” I said, starting for the car.

  “Hold on a minute.” She went into the store and came out with a small packet of mail. “Might as well bring the mail up, if you’re going up to see Lucy.” She handed me the rubber-banded bundle.

  I opened the car door and set the mail next to me on top of the bag map. “Where I come from, they’re not this trusting with the mail,” I said.