by Thomas Perry
Late the next night they crossed over into California. She saw the place on the road where the painted lines changed from white to yellow with raised blue reflectors, and soon there was a sign about not bringing fruits and vegetables. She said, “I’m waking up. I’m about ready to drive. We’re in California, aren’t we?”
“Yes.”
“Thank God. I’m getting a little tired of travel. When I take over, where do you want me to drive to?”
“I think I’ll keep driving for a while. I have a place I want to check on while it’s dark.”
The night was amazingly huge in the eastern California desert, but the roads were not empty. They were in the Mojave, on the route between Las Vegas and Los Angeles. Every twenty or twenty-five miles a sign announced how far away Los Angeles was. And there were lots of trucks sharing the road with them, grinding along at a steady speed, while dozens of cars swarmed up behind them and shot past like projectiles. It didn’t matter that it was long after midnight. The traffic in both directions was constant.
Near dawn they were northeast of Los Angeles. The land was still desert, but there were clusters of houses that looked identical from a distance and sat on their own grids of streets. Some of the developments had brick fences and metal letters that said something oddly out of place: Estancia de la Playa, Rancho del Mar, Villas di Firenze.
“What do people way out here do for a living?” she asked.
“They commute. Houses got so expensive around LA that people kept building new, cheaper houses farther and farther out. People were willing to drive a couple of hours to work—a hundred miles, sometimes.”
They came to an exit onto a road leading straight into the desert. A hundred yards along the road a metal sign reading welcome to sierra loma reflected their headlights, but the blue on the sign was faded and weathered. Sharon could see that most of the dirt along the road was the same as the desert. It was tan, not the black moist dirt under people’s lawns back in Illinois. This dirt was a mixture of sand, pebbles, and hard cake with cracks in it like a dried-up pond bed.
When the road ended in a network of residential streets, she began to feel a bit more hopeful. Most of the houses were twice as big as the one where she had grown up. They had roofs made of pink tiles that looked like drainpipe split down the middle. They were just about all stucco, but some of them had facades of flagstone or brick. Nearly all had a two-story section in front, and double wooden doors the size of the church door at home. Above the door was always an oddly shaped window—an octagon, a fan, or a circle. There were often a few gables to make the houses’ silhouettes look more complicated. Nearly every house had, on its dried-up lawn, a sign on a pair of thick, sturdy posts.
“Are they all for sale?” she asked.
“They’re way beyond that,” he said. “Most of the houses in this development got foreclosed on three or four years ago.”
“Why?”
“For a long time the price of houses anywhere near Los Angeles went way up. It had been about twenty years since the last price drop. People got bigger and bigger loans to buy them. Houses were selling, so the developers built them farther and farther out. This was probably one of the last developments built. The houses are big and flashy, but they’re in the middle of nowhere. All of a sudden one day, the whole world realized that houses couldn’t keep going up forever. And then they realized a lot of people had borrowed a whole lot more to buy them than the houses were worth.”
“Sounds pretty stupid.”
He shrugged. “They were doing what everybody told them was the smart thing to do.”
“This place looks like everybody left the same day. Like a ghost town.”
“It took a couple of years. Some people held out because they thought house prices would go back up. They didn’t. Some people lost their jobs, and they were so close to the limit that they stopped paying their mortgages the first month. There were a whole lot of foreclosures. Other people didn’t wait. They stayed for as long as the bank let them, and then walked away. The people who bought their houses last had bought for the highest prices and borrowed the most, but they hadn’t had the time to sink much into payments. Near the end they had a loan called the ‘liar’s mortgage,’ where you didn’t have to prove you had a big enough paycheck to pay.”
“Everybody did the same things at the same time?”
“Pretty much. The value of your house is what somebody will pay for it. If the guy next door walked away from an identical house, nobody would buy yours. Eventually even the holdouts left.”
“Then all these houses are just sitting here empty?”
“I’m guessing there are a few people in some of them,” he said. “Squatters. We’ll have to figure out which ones.”
“Why?”
“So we can avoid them.”
“Do you mean we’re going to stay here?”
“For a while.”
“Why?”
“I think we need to know how hard the police are looking for you before we go into a city where a thousand people a day will see you.”
Sharon was silent for a couple of minutes, then said, “Okay. What are we looking for?”
“We want a nice house. It doesn’t have to be big, but pleasant. I like the ones with brick or stone on the front. We want a garage, not a carport. We want a house in the middle of a row of five or six empty ones. And look for sale and foreclosure signs with the names of big eastern banks. They won’t be sending anybody out here to look at all the properties in foreclosure. They’ll leave them empty and untouched until the year comes when they can get something for them.”
They drove up and down the deserted streets, past houses that looked like little Spanish haciendas and houses that looked like little Italian palazzi. Now and then Sharon would get tired of looking at houses and look instead at the high, dark mountains that had not even the smallest electric light on them, or look the other way at the vast desert, where the only life she could see was the distant freeway. Occasionally a set of headlights would make its way across the horizon to become a set of red taillights. Then she would say, “How about that one?”
“It’s got the right kind of signs up, but there are squatters in it. See the corner of the house? Right behind it is an SUV.”
Another time when she asked he said, “No. The plants aren’t dead. That means somebody’s been watering them.”
Another house that had the right silhouette made him slow down, but he didn’t stop. “The windows are boarded up. The copper hunters have been here, I guess.” He sped up and went by.
“What are copper hunters?”
“Scavengers. They come in and take everything they can—sinks, toilets, pipes, light fixtures, anything you can tear out and carry off. People call them copper hunters because copper pipe is their favorite.”
Sharon decided to keep quiet and wait. After nearly an hour he said, “This looks good.” He turned into the driveway of a house with a high silhouette, stopped in front of the closed three-car garage, got out, and disappeared. After a few minutes one of the three garage doors opened and he stepped out of the garage and drove the car in. He turned off the car and then pulled the garage door down to close it.
“The power isn’t on, but you can disconnect the electric motor and it opens easily.” He stepped to the door that led into the house, and Sharon got out of the car and stood watching. He reached into his pocket, took out a knife, and then jimmied the door lock. Once he had the blade in, he gave the door a bump with his shoulder and it opened inward.
He stepped in and felt his way around. “Sharon, get the flashlight out of the glove compartment.”
She was torn between her fear of being alone and her fear of the dark. She decided it was best to obey, and so she got the flashlight. She resisted the strong urge to turn it on, because he hadn’t told her she
could.
He took the light, switched it on, and swept the beam around the room. Off the foyer and down a short hall was a big kitchen. There was no refrigerator and no stove or dishwasher, only a space for each. But there were two big stainless steel sinks, and there were light fixtures.
Moreland left the kitchen and she followed the flashlight. There was a big living room with a fireplace and a lot of built-in cabinets and shelves. No furniture. She wondered about the fireplace. Did it ever get cold enough here to light a fire?
She followed him to a grand entry. The floor was a pattern of black and white squares that looked like stone. She slipped off one sandal to step on them. She felt the cold of stone. There was a big, thick wooden door with stainless steel hardware on it like the outer door at her doctor’s office—a kind of lever that came out of a big steel plate, and a dead bolt with a bar that went into the floor. Far above the door was a circular window with struts in it that made it look like a pie.
Moreland turned off the flashlight. The high windows and the skylights in the ceiling let a dim gray glow of moonlight into the house, so they could see where they were walking.
He went to the circular staircase and climbed, so she climbed too. The second floor had three small bedrooms and one huge bedroom with a couple of walk-in closets, each with an island in the middle and built-in dressers and shelves. He said, “Not bad.”
“Not bad,” she agreed.
He looked around the room, opening drawers and closing them. Finally he found some padded movers’ blankets on the floor of one of the bedrooms. He took one, sniffed it, seemed satisfied, and handed it to her. “It seems okay. The movers just forgot them, I guess.” He spread one on the floor, then the second. “You like a blanket on top?”
“Sort of.”
He spread the third, then rolled the top one down a bit. “Should be fine. We’ll sleep here.”
They slept, and in the days that followed, they fell into a routine. Every night he wandered. Every morning he made improvements. He found a hibachi and a big bag of charcoal in a garage in an abandoned house nearby, so they could cook. Then he drove to Bakersfield for groceries, and brought back lots of things—a cooler and ice, two thin twin mattresses, sheets, and two pillows. On the first night they had used the toilet by putting a big plastic trash bag in it because there was no water to flush it. The next day he used a big wrench to turn on the water in the meter box at the curb. He filled the downstairs bathtub with cold water and then he carried buckets of boiling water to it so they could take a bath. He had bought candles and flashlights, so they didn’t miss electricity much. Once they could cook, bathe, wash clothes, and sleep, she wasn’t unhappy. And every day, he seemed to think of new ideas.
He ranged through the empty houses in the development, looking for things that the families who had been evicted left behind. On the fifth night she said, “Can I go with you?”
He stood very still and stared at her for a moment, as though he were actually considering it. Even though she knew he would say no, she appreciated his making it look like a decision. Then he said, “Okay.”
She was so happy she jumped up and kissed him. “What should I wear?”
“Something dark. And sneakers, not sandals. We shouldn’t be bumping into people, but if we do, we’ll want to avoid them, or even run.”
“Okay,” she said, and hurried to get ready. She wore black jeans and a blue T-shirt, put her hair in a ponytail, and pushed it over the strap in the back of a baseball cap he had bought in Bakersfield.
Today he had found a set of keys to their house. They had been hidden in the garage on a horizontal stud over the small window. When they left he locked the doors.
The night was hotter than usual, with a faint breeze that felt like the blast out of an open oven. “East wind. It’ll be hot tomorrow,” he said. “I’ve been hoping it would stay cloudy and cool.”
“We’ll just have to get through it.”
He smiled. “Do you have any idea how hot it gets out here?”
“Not really.”
“You’ll see tomorrow.”
Sharon loved walking along the dark, deserted streets exploring the development. He had already found a few streets where there were no people at all, and five houses with stubborn people still living in them.
The swimming pools were a problem. The yards were dark, and most of the pools were still half full of tepid water even months after the houses had been abandoned. It would be easy, if she wasn’t paying attention, to step into one. Once she caught the reflection of the moon and saved herself, and another time she smelled the dead water and began to search for it.
As they walked they searched for treasures. After a couple of hours he found a very long heavy-duty extension cord in the garage of an abandoned house. He carried it over his shoulder. Later he found most of a set of hand tools. But the best thing he found came at dawn. They were nearly home, coming along the backs of houses on their street, when he stopped.
“Ssh,” he whispered. “Listen.” He held his hand up and put down the treasures he had found.
Sharon froze and stood there for a time while he moved slowly toward the back fence. Then she realized what he was hearing. It was a pool motor, running at very low speed. He went behind a section of the wooden fence, found the motor, touched it to feel the vibration, then stood up and pointed at the roof.
The roof was covered with solar panels. “Here are the keys,” he said. “I’ll be home in a little while.”
“Can’t I stay and help?”
“Okay,” he said. “Go to the corner of the house and act as a lookout. If anybody comes, run to get me. We’ll hide by the pool motor.”
“All right.”
She found a good vantage point and watched the nearby streets and the cars passing on the distant interstate.
He walked from the pool motor to the back of the house. He found the circuit box, turned off the power, and then took out his knife and began to splice the wire from the extension cord into the circuit for the pool motor. Then he began to walk toward the house he and Sharon occupied, uncoiling the electrical cord as he went. When it ran out, he went into the house, where there was another cord plugged in. He unplugged it, took it outside, plugged it into the first cord, and kept going. “Dig a trench and bury the line,” he said.
Sharon found the work wasn’t difficult. She could have done it with a stick. The ground was loose sand and pebbles. While she worked, he was at their house splicing the extension cord into the circuit box. She worked until every bit of extension cord was buried, and nothing could be seen except the cord running up the side of the house a few feet. When she was finished he turned on the switch at the other house.
Later, when the sun climbed high and the middle distance in every direction was wavy with mirages, and the ground was too hot to touch with bare hands, he turned on the air-conditioning. It ran slowly and quietly, but they closed all the vents except the two in the master bedroom and shut the door. They made love on the mattresses and then lay there peacefully, feeling the cool air tickling their sweaty skin, and then fell asleep until dark.
29
Nobody in Carbondale remembered the man who had gone to the state fair with Gabe and Sharon. One waitress at Denny’s remembered seeing Sharon and Gabe talking to someone seated nearby, but had no memory of who it was. She thought he might have been Gabe’s brother.
Sharon’s relatives were difficult to interview. She had a father named Walt who had pretty much given up on her shortly after she had reached puberty. When she was twelve he had put her to work in his hardware store for a few hours every Saturday, sweeping up and washing windows. By the time she was thirteen she would breeze in for an hour or so in the morning, take an advance on her pay from the register, and then come in on Sunday when the store was closed to make up the time. That way she didn�
�t have to do as much actual work. She spent her evenings on the phone, not doing homework.
Sharon’s mother, Matty, was essentially the opposition. When Walt said the girl was lazy, Matty said, “Sharon is a dreamer.”
Till had learned many years ago to ask questions and then show nothing but attention to the answers.
Walt said, “She did inherit one thing—her mother’s looks. She’s a very pretty girl, but it wasn’t a great advantage for her. When she was really young, I could see older guys had an eye on her. With some of them, you could see all they were waiting for was for me to stop watching.”
Matty said, “Sharon had to work in the hardware store as soon as she was in middle school. She had to learn to get along with grown men, understand what a torque wrench was and a socket wrench, and still learn to grow into a fine young woman.”
Behind Matty, Walt was rolling his eyes. He said, “Sharon grew up. We had great hopes for her. We wanted her to go to college, but what she accomplished was to be Gabriel Tolliver’s girlfriend.” He sighed.
“What do you think happened in Springfield?” Till asked. “They met this man and went to the fair with him, and then what?”
“I don’t know,” Walt said.
Matty said, “We’re not so sure there was a man. Where do we get him from? Gabe’s brother says Gabe told him there was a man who would drive them to Springfield. Who does that?”
“You doubt the story?”
“I mean it doesn’t sound likely. Gabe had a car.”
Till said, “Gabe and Sharon apparently left it at Gabe’s brother’s house while they were gone.”
“Did they? Who saw it there?” Matty said. “I mean besides Gabe’s brother.”
“It’s still there,“ said Till.
