by David Hirst
Naturally, I stopped off at The Palace, and even more naturally ran straight into Adam Edwards.
‘I thought you’d have moved in by now.’ Adam had fronted up in the otherwise deserted Palace, and roused me from my musing.
‘So did I,’ I said forlornly.
Adam’s aunt Saundra — a Playmate calendar girl of 1958 — had owned Boulder House when it was a small cottage. Adam had played in the rocks as a child, and slept in the house many times. I understood his desire to return, and felt he had had every right to be interested in the house’s destiny.
‘Tell me about Saundra,’ I said.
Bill had remarked that she was ‘a damn fine-looking female’, and any time her name was mentioned other men shook their heads ruefully.
‘My dad tells it best,’ replied Adam, beckoning for the older Edwards to join us. ‘He’s the one who built the house.’
I told John I was intrigued by why such a beauty as his sister had left a Hollywood career that included biggish parts in biggish movies to settle on Coyote Road.
‘She had some kids to this big, burly guy,’ John began, as I settled into hearing how Boulder House came into being.
‘He was a friend of lots of movie stars — his best friend was Steve McQueen. She was living on Laurel Canyon and I was living in Hollywood, and the guy was violent. She called me one afternoon, and said that he was going to kill her and the two children, and she wanted me to come and look after things. I said I couldn’t because I was bowling that night, but I took her a 12-gauge and told her, “When he comes, give him some of this.” Then I went bowling.
‘Well, he came. He couldn’t get through the front door, but he smashed his way through the back — screaming how he was going to kill her and the kids. She emptied the 12-gauge into his chest, blowing his heart right out of his chest. A 12-gauge can make a mess, especially from a few feet.’
It appears the authorities were aware of the deceased’s propensities, and as it was clearly self-defence, Saundra was examined, counselled and, after a few weeks, given her freedom.
She fled to the desert.
‘And you joined her, and built her a home,’ I said, thinking this a fitting, all-in-the-family end to a tragedy.
‘No,’ John replied. ‘There already was a house. One of her boyfriends blew it up.’
An ex-marine, a munitions expert, had been living with Saundra and the kids until he began behaving weirdly. She asked him to leave, and he told her he’d fight her with hate. That hate was stronger than love.
‘Hate can never win over love,’ she replied, and he said, ‘We’ll see.’
Saundra, fortunately, was away on a trip when the angry boyfriend laced the place with explosives. He lined the fuse to the telephone line and, late at night, assuming she was home, made a phone call that set off the charges.
‘The fire brigade arrived in time to hose off the concrete slab,’ said John.
Lying on the ground amongst the ashes was the old painted peyote wheel that had marked the entrance to Coyote Road.
It still had the rope tied around it that Comanche, an old Indian who wandered the desert, had found and given to Saundra. She chewed on the rope to stop the pain, and only then was she able to look at the destruction. All that was left was an old iron fireplace. Someone had even stolen the crystals that hung from the Ten Years Ago Tree.
Then, visiting one day, she spotted a sprout of green — a Joshua tree — coming up through the ashes. She told her kids, ‘As long as we can stand in that yard feeling love and goodness for one another, it will never be gone.’
She decided to rebuild. John, a fine builder, agreed to do the job. It took him six months and cost $712. Saundra worked right alongside him, and at the end of the day she washed off the grime, put on a long dress, and drove into town to work as a cocktail waitress. The kids slept in a big tent, and Saundra dragged a double mattress up onto a huge flat boulder for her own bed. When we moved in, we christened it Playmate Rock. But that was still a long way off.
‘It seems,’ I said miserably, recounting just one of our escrow nightmares, ‘that Bill Lavender somehow managed to build his kitchen into the property of his neighbour — a guy called Salazar. That’s the house where someone got shot.’
‘I know,’ Adam replied with laudable nonchalance. ‘It was me.’
He proceeded to draw back his blond beard, and even in the thin light of the bar I could see where a hole had healed.
‘What happened?’ I inquired.
‘The asshole had been fighting in the bar, over there,’ said Adam, pointing to where the pool tables lay. ‘He got thrown out and went to his truck to get his gun. I followed him. I was trying to stop him.’ Adam sounded aggrieved.
‘I had some beer, and the bar was closing, so I talked him into going home, and went with him.
‘We were just sitting in the cabin shooting at stuff and I said, “You couldn’t hit the fucking wall,” and he said, “I can hit you,” and put the gun up to my face and shot me point blank.’
‘Shit,’ said I.
It is next to impossible to ascertain the exact truth about events minor or major in the high country, but it appears the bullet proceeded to bounce around Adam’s mouth and then exited to lodge against his spine. Adam was somewhat sobered by this development, and staggered out of the shack, blood streaming from his lips and from the hole in his lower left jaw.
The bullet seemed to have done its damage. The question was where it now resided. Adam was spitting blood, but seemed to have stabilised by the time he reached Ernie and Carole’s, insisting he didn’t want a doctor, and would just lie there and die. Danny was, by all accounts, a small but troubled Latino with strong Hopi Indian roots, and had informed Adam that if he went to the cops he would finish him off.
Adam was reluctant to go to the cops for reasons of his own. So he did what any half-sane lunatic would do under such circumstances — he woke up Ernie and Carole at the motel. It was Carole, not Ernie, he was seeking. She had once worked for the AAA, and although that wonderful organisation exists to help repair cars, there was a widespread local belief that anyone with such a background (be it clerical) could be trusted with things like a bullet that had gone missing somewhere in Adam’s head.
Carole could not find the bullet, and considered the task of removing it slightly beyond her skills. At 4.00 a.m., Adam took some beers to bed, and Ernie contacted his father. John Edwards was no stranger to bullets or wounds or cops, and found his way to the motel, where Adam was adamant he would not go to hospital.
Thereupon, Jerry Edwards, John’s brother and Adam’s uncle, an extremely competent ironworker and former LAPD officer, was summoned. He brought his tools, and, as Jerry does fine and delicate ironwork, it was hoped that he could remove the offending slug. But even Jerry could not track down the bullet that seemed to have disappeared without leaving an exit wound.
So John went to the police, and negotiated on his son’s behalf. When the cops heard the story, they assured John they were more interested in Danny.
Adam was finally taken to hospital, where a lot of surgeons passed on removing the bullet. It was right on the spine, and no one wanted to make the handsome young man a paraplegic. Finally, a young female doctor opened him up and took out the slug. Danny hadn’t had the sense to leave the shack, and when the cops arrived three days later, he was found in the possession of chemicals that the police and the courts found to be used in the production of methamphetamine.
‘When,’ I asked Adam, ‘is he likely to be released?’
Adam stared at his beer. It was a subject that had obviously occupied him.
‘Next October.’
‘With any luck, we should have moved in by then,’ I said in a carefree tone, while thinking that we had signed an agreement to buy a house at the end of a very lonely road with a psychopathic neighbour who was c
ompleting his fifth year in prison. All this to get away from a psychotic neighbour.
From the frying pan of Venice into the fire. Vicky, The Palace barmaid, made a rare appearance, and I ordered a rare whiskey.
10
The next day, I journeyed out to Boulder House to placate Bill, assuring him that after the Christmas delay a cheque would be in his hands — remembering I had told him the same thing the previous Christmas. I returned to LA. In that tiny prism between Christmas and New Year, a time when no one expects anything to happen, especially in Beverly Hills, the bank called to inform me the boat had come in, and I was free to pay Bill. I turned around and headed straight back to what would be, in a few days, our home. So keen was I to take possession that when I slowed for the sharp turn onto Pipes Canyon Road, a police car managed to catch the speeding Jetta, and I was booked for doing 89 mph in a 55 mph zone.
‘But the locals said there were no cops,’ I told the cop. The cop nodded, and admitted I was unlucky.
Bill was packing. Like almost everyone within eighty kilometres, he carries a faith in guns that borders on the religious. Bill is hardcore NRA, and proudly showed me his distinguished membership award — a beautiful limited-issue duck decoy that was far too grand to ever grace a stream or a lake. Bill was moving out, and we were moving in, when I noticed seven or eight rifle butts protruding from a blanket on the big cypress bed.
‘I see you’re right for arms, Bill,’ I remarked.
‘I’ve moved my guns already,’ he replied.
‘Then what’s all that on the bed?’ I asked.
‘Oh, them,’ Bill said absently. ‘Just a few I haven’t moved.’
He then recounted the details of his armoury. Most of the weapons were rattled off at such pace and with such detail that I merely caught words like magnum, hollow-point, semi-automatic, and the like. I did, however, count, and Bill, I reckoned, owned a total of twenty-one guns. ‘You expecting royalty?’ I inquired.
After a year of nothing happening, the New Year brought an explosion of activity. Just by moving in, I had set off a series of events most people don’t experience when buying and taking possession of a new house.
Strangers arrived, bearing gifts.
Tony immediately joined me in renovating, and we were pulling down interior walls when a bearded man — the rule rather than the exception in the desert — arrived to present me with a dreamcatcher. This was a long stick with eagle feathers hanging like scalps, some beads, and a woven, net-like device that was supposed to catch dreams. A very useful object indeed, I thought, after the necessary ritual of gift-giving had been observed and I could return to a furious Tony, who seemed to think that being polite to the locals was merely a way to avoid work.
Tony had taken to staying at Boulder House, even though he had a free room at Ernie and Carole’s.
‘This way,’ he said ominously, ‘we can get more work done.’
While many of the residents of the High Desert seem committed to the eight-hour week, Tony works because he loves working, and is bewildered by the fact that others suffer work and some abhor it. Tony was further incensed when, an hour later, two prominent local hippies arrived to ‘cleanse’ the house by wandering through it waving burning branches of sage. They then wandered through the property as well, and declared it to have ‘very good energy’, on account of it being situated in a vortex. I wasn’t exactly sure what a vortex was, but was prepared to agree with their hypothesis that the bowl-like shape of the land could well have been caused by the crashing of a meteorite many millennia ago.
The cleansing of the house reminded me that the house was more construction site than home, and that I was to be picking up Boo once again and soon. Some physical cleansing was in order.
I had momentarily met a small, pretty, dark-haired girl called Lil Debbie, who had slipped a note into my pocket with an assurance that she was the best house-cleaner in the High Desert.
Lil Debbie arrived with some unusual props: a mop, a quart of vodka, scrubbing brushes, orange juice, 409 all-purpose cleaner, and such. But soon, like Tony and me, she was hard at work. Tony has that effect on some. He makes one feel guilty about not working. This is a feeling not shared by Adam, or by most of the locals, but Tony is from Wisconsin, where work as defined by Marx (labour) is looked upon differently than in Southern California, where work is the accumulation of other people’s capital.
Although I was the owner, and therefore the boss, Tony had decided that he was the foreman and I was a very junior apprentice. We had spent the day dragging immense boulders onto an old Ford truck I had purchased from, inevitably, Adam Edwards, driving them across that small part of the property that the truck could manage, and then barrowing them through the house where we laid them in one of the courtyards. It was not pleasant work. The flat ‘rimrock’ boulders all weighed more than seventy kilograms. Some weighed over a tonne, but Tony had a knack for moving boulders.
It was the laying of the stone that we found the most offensive. We were paving one of the courtyards where Bill had let the dogs go for their ablutions, and as we dug into the decomposed granite dust we were greeted by the smell of twenty years of urine from some of the best Rottweilers ever bred. We employed lime in vast quantities, sixty-pound bag after bag, but it was only when the great rocks were finally cemented into place that the smell passed.
Some of the local handymen made their appearance. These were the work-shy, looking for work. Tony was like a bantam rooster, small but protecting his turf — my turf. This was his job, and none would come between him and work.
I discovered that he lived in a forest in Wisconsin, and that even his father did not know exactly where. Dad, if he needed to contact Tony, would walk into the woods and leave a sign explaining himself. Every winter, when the ground froze in Wisconsin, Tony packed a small bag and headed out to California. No one ever knew when he was coming. He liked to just appear, and surprise them, like an attack of poison ivy. Officially, he stayed at the motel with Carole and Ernie, but took any opportunity that presented itself to sleep outside, preferably on the hardest rock he could find. Sleeping bags were for sissies. When the first signs of summer appeared back up north, Tony would vanish from Pioneertown as quickly and unobtrusively as he had arrived. The trick was to nab him while he was here, and make sure no one else got him.
Gina, a close friend of Tony, and a neighbour of ours, arrived next, bearing a mint-condition 1950s pinball machine as a house-warming gift.
‘I couldn’t possibly,’ I protested, plugging it in and watching the scuba-diving motif with attendant mermaids light up and start zinging.
‘If you don’t want it, I’m taking it to the dump,’ Gina insisted. ‘I’ve wanted the damn thing out of my house for two years.’
It was a beautiful machine. A classic. Even Tony paused momentarily to admire its silvery wonder.
‘Is he always like this?’ I asked Gina. ‘A maniac?’
‘The thing about Tony,’ she replied, ‘is we’re always pleased to see him arrive, and we’re always pleased to see him go again. Not that you actually see Tony arrive. He materialises. Nor does he leave. He disappears.’
Gina and Debbie, old friends, were chatting away about a party Gina had attended down in San Bernardino sometime back. What caught my ear was Gina saying that of seventeen women at the party, only she and her boss had not been in jail. Lil Debbie nodded sagely.
Gifts continued to appear. Deeming that we needed better eyes, Krystoff arrived from Poland, via LA, with an excellent set of field glasses made in the old East Germany for use in the defence of Warsaw Pact nations. It seemed odd that a house built with a view to defend itself against forces of the Soviet Union and her allies would be protected in part by an offering from that nation’s most important military alliance.
It was 11.00 p.m. when I threatened to call the police. We had been working since the break of a frosty mo
rn, and Tony seemed determined to enter some record book for the longest continued bit of what Australians call ‘hard yakka’ since the forty-eight-hour week had been passed by the House of Commons in the 1800s. I had tried being polite, informing Tony that I was employing him, and therefore could determine when work started and stopped. After all, I was footing the bill. As a journalist I had earned many a friend in the trade union movement, exposing bosses who drove their workers half as hard as I wasn’t even trying to drive Tony. There was one weakness in my brilliant scheme to capture Tony and exploit him. It was a simple but unusual dialectic. The boss assumes that the labourer will work for his pay and do his allotted hours. I had stumbled onto a new dialectic the first time I had ever seriously employed someone. That someone, Tony, had no interest in money. He had whatever he needed, and was only interested in work. For work’s sake.
Years before, when I was covering the building industry, I had heard whispers of people like Tony, people who liked to work. At first, they were given subtle warnings to the tune of ‘Get off the fucking site. It’s three o’clock.’ If that didn’t work, veiled threats followed, often accompanied by something falling from a crane and landing near the offending member of the workforce. Failing that, the union official would approach the employer and threaten to ‘pull the lads off the job’ if nothing was done. If that didn’t fix the matter, and it usually did, there would be a terrible accident, something horrific enough to ensure that word would spread throughout the industry about the perils of pushing oneself and therefore, possibly, one’s workmates too hard.
During that very day, we had moved and laid some tonnes of rocks, and only when I had refused to continue working by torchlight had Tony consented to come into the house. Then he proceeded to launch an all-out assault on some pretty substantial walls that I had suggested, some days before, the house might do without.
Lil Debbie, who had decided it might be best to stay overnight, looked askance as drywall dust flew and walls fell to our hammers and saws. Apart from the occasional cigarette that I stole with Debbie (Tony does not approve of smoking), the only breaks had been to receive guests and presents. I felt that I was being unfaithful, not only to my friends in the trade union movement, but to those who had fought to end slavery. The irony was that I was in charge and was unable, due to my disposition, to allow others to work on my house while I was idle. Finally, I hit on a plan, which I sprung a few moments before midnight.
