Love Story: In The Web of Life

by Ken Renshaw

  "I'll suggest that. Now, I have to get going."

  I walked Dore to the lobby, shook hands and said, "Thank you for selecting Bracken and Stevens to represent you in this matter. This is a good change of subject to me and I am quite excited about it."

  Dore looked at me without blinking (I was being 'read' again) and then smiled her professional smile and said, "We are very pleased with our selection."

  I walked her to the elevator and said goodbye. As I walked back into the lobby, Carolyn gave me her 'You are such a wonderful man' smile.

  ****

  Chapter Five

  ROCKY BUTTE

  I drove into Rocky Butte late on Wednesday afternoon, across the bridge over Butte Creek, which was swollen with the spring runoff from the snowmelt, and saw about what I expected. One main street with one cross street surrounded by pine forests. I was seeing small town America, only modestly changed from the 1950s: a sporting goods store, a grocery store, the River View and Rocky Butte Inn motels, two restaurants, a post office, drug store, a hardware store that advertised "Gold Pans and Mining Supplies" and "Satellite Dishes," two gas stations, an auto repair shop, two real estate agencies, a bank, and two saloons.

  After six it was quiet and most of the businesses were closed. Only the saloons, The Claim Jumper and Diggings, seemed to be doing a good business judging by the variety of pickups parked in front, some looking as though they might be from the 50s. On the outskirt of the town, I saw a school, probably grades K-8 judging by the playground equipment, and then a little farther a Tasty Freeze, the kind with a service window, shaded parking areas in the back, and picnic benches on a small lawn.

  I U-turned and went back to the center of town and turned onto the only cross street. In the next block, I found a funeral home, the Butte News newspaper, and Courthouse Square, which appeared to be the civic center. In the center of Courthouse Square, I saw the white courthouse, a Greek Revival Style building, a much smaller version of the Supreme Court Building in Washington DC. A granite staircase led up to a portico, at the second story entrance, a colonnade of four two-story columns supporting a triangular roof, with 1922 engraved above the colonnade. The four windows on each side of the portico suggested that one half of the second story was the courtroom, and offices were in the other half. I noticed a county office annex added to the back of the courthouse, a plain building, probably built when the county offices overflowed from the courthouse in the 1950s. There was a Sheriff's office with a separate entrance in the annex. Two patrol cars were parked outside.

  The library sat on one corner of Courthouse Square, a red brick building, two stories high, with steps going up to the second story main entrance. It looked to be from the era of the 1920s, when Carnegie libraries were built.

  Next to the courthouse block was a Pioneer Museum with an adjacent park with playground equipment, picnic tables, and an old locomotive, apparently from a logging train, at the side. A granite slab, engraved with eighteen names, stands memorializing those killed in the earthquake of 1872.

  As I looked farther, I saw a white, old–fashioned church with a steeple. It looked like the pictures that I had seen of churches in Vermont, having a sharp steeple perched on a bell tower in the front, several gabled windows along the side.

  In the Gold Rush days, Rocky Butte had a population of ten thousand or so. It was a booming place proving hotels, saloons, and ladies to absorb the miner's gold. It became the county seat during that time. The town burned down twice in the 1800s. Now, the sign at the bridge said its population was 687.

  It didn't take long to see all of Rocky Butte.

  My first stop was about a half mile beyond the church at the Sodastroms', the parents of Lucy, the girl who was lost. They lived in a small white house, surrounded by pine trees, with an unpaved driveway to a garage behind the house. A small barn and corral were behind the garage. A dark brown mare, I guessed it had been Lucy's, grazed, on the spring grass in the corral.

  Ann Sodastrom met me at the door, and I introduced myself. Ed who was sitting in a recliner watching TV, got up and introduced himself. Ann was skinny, and looked as though she had lost more weight than she should have. Her print housedress hung on her. Ed was also slight and lean, had a hollow look to his face and stooped shoulders.

  I didn't want to add to their grief by discussing the case. I simply introduced myself and gave them assurances that their case would be successful. I asked questions about Rocky Butte, the church, what they liked about the area: I made small talk to get to know them and for them to get comfortable with me. I left after a polite amount of time.

  I went into Bob's Cafe on Main Street to for dinner and gossip. I sat on a swiveling stool at the counter. The only other customer was a man with a white beard sitting in a booth reading a paper over his dinner.

  A waitress came over, looked me over carefully, and said, “what’ll-y-have?"

  She was about fifty, grey haired, wearing a pink, starched waitress uniform, the kind with a little tiara-like hat, a kind I had not seen since I was in high school. She had a name badge that said Agnes.

  "Can I see a dinner menu?"

  "Same menu all day, honey, special tonight is pork chops."

  I looked at the bottom of the menu, and it said, "Free Wi-Fi for customers."

  "You have Wi-Fi," I added.

  "We're up-to-date around here," she boasted. "We even have cell phone service so visitors won't feel disconnected. You're not from around here, are you?"

  "No, I have a little business at the courthouse tomorrow and then I will visit someone up the hill."

  "If you are trying to beat a speeding ticket, forget it. Judge Jeremiah Cartright, we call him 'The Hanging Judge,' doesn't have much tolerance for speeders. You might end up spending the night in jail."

  "Where is the jail?" I asked.

  "Over in the basement of the annex at the courthouse, behind the sheriff's office. The main county jail is up in Pine Mountain, where the county sheriff has his office. They need it more up there with all the tourists and skiers."

  "I'll try to keep out of both places. How long have you lived here, Agnes?"

  "All my life. My great-grandfather had a mining claim here, and my family has come and gone over the years. I was raised on a farm down the valley. I seem tied to the place somehow."

  In a few minutes, Agnes brought me my dinner.

  "You must be the fellow from LA that is staying over at the River View motel."

  I was somewhat taken aback, but then I realized, in this slow season, before the vacationers arrive, anything was news. Everyone in town probably knew my motel reservation.

  'Lesson number one,' I thought.

  "That's right," I said. "I'd better get over there and check in. See you later, Agnes."

  I could tell I was being carefully watched as I left. As I got in my car, I saw that Agnes was on her cell phone.

  'This is like a police state,' I thought. 'Except the tyranny comes from the rule of boredom. The trial will give them something to talk about.'

  After dinner, I decided to enjoy a walk on this fine Sierra evening. The late-day yellow sunlight made the green of the pine trees glow as I walked through the woods on what must have been a game trail through the brush and manzanita. The forest was quiet, the birds were having their evening rest, and it was perfectly still. I smelled the pines and kicked the pinecones lying in the yellow dirt as I walked. I heard Butte Creek tumbling down rapids and followed the game trail to the bank. I sat down by an eddy in the water, caused by a fallen tree and looked into the pool for small fish, maybe trout. The bottom of the pool was lined with polished, water-worn pebbles. I noticed a glint of light on one, which turned brighter as I watched.

  Then I heard, "We bring you greetings on this evening as you believe time to exist."

  "Uriel?" I asked.

  "Yes, it is our pleasure to talk with you again."

  The glint on the rock got very bright and turned into an intense blue-white spot, di
ffusing through ripples in the water.

  "Uriel, get out of there, you will get wet,"

  "Ha-ha-ha....ha," came the reply, a full minute of infectious laughter.

  "You made what you call a joke. Your planet is one of the few we have explored or studied that has a language that allows the joke. Tell me another."

  I was dumbfounded and thought for a long time because I don't get exposed to many jokes in my work. Then, I said, "One time there was a man talking to his young son. He said, 'There once was this man with a wooden leg named Smith.' His son interrupted and asked, 'What was the name of the man's other leg?'"

  There was a long pause and then Uriel started again, "Ha-ha-ha....ha, what was the name of his other leg! Ha-ha-ha....ha," he went on. "But, It takes much energy for us to hold onto your location in space-time. We must get on to our reason for contacting you before we run out of what you would call time.

  "Now that you have some understanding of space-time, we would like to tell you about a vacuum in your culture's understanding of human nature. You are actively connected to other people in space-time and continually share information. You are communicating, at the subconscious level, with people in what you call the present, the past, and the future.

  "Your people sometimes acknowledge part of this as Déjà Vu. Some people acknowledge part of this as saying they have 'remembered' past lives, which should be other lives in space-time, since time is only an illusion, a coordinate in space-time.

  "Your mind is made up of many levels. You have your conscious mind where you believe your rational thought and factual information exists. There is also a layer of subconscious thought and problem solving that generates your ah-ha moments. Your psychologists, ethnologists, and anthropologists have studied the subconscious mind in limited areas of culture, behaviors and values you have learned from being a member of a family, tribe, or gang, nation or race. Others have studied instinctual behavior, those wired-in behaviors of you as an animal or biologic system.

  "Your western scientists, unable to think beyond the limitations of Newton and Einstein's four-dimensional paradigm, have missed your subconscious connection to other experiences and learning from other individuals living in other space-time coordinates. The medical establishment cannot conceive of the information transfer between your body functions and those of bodies at other space-time coordinates.

  "However, some people on your planet have created healing practices or pseudo–religions based on subconscious connections. However, since these ideas don't agree with your dominant scientific four-dimensional paradigm, the people are often dismissed as quacks. They are ignored or persecuted by the establishment.

  "The implications of eight-dimensional space-time are not limited to the narrow area of what you call space-time."

  "Wait a minute. You have just overturned a couple of centuries of scientific thought. I need more time to assimilate this, or write it down." I said with some desperation.

  "Don't worry, our friend, this information will be coming from sources you will encounter. Be open to the ideas as they come to you. Then, try to think outside the four-dimensional box."

  "Don't leave me hanging here with all these questions. Give me some examples, please!"

  Uriel paused. "I am scanning through space-time on your planet for examples." After another pause Uriel continued, "You have on your planet the idea of child prodigies. A child, at an early age, might go to a piano and start playing melodies and, with lessons, become very accomplished. Your Mozart might be an example. He wrote his first opera at an age of eleven. Prodigies are connected to other individuals in space-time and drawing on their abilities.

  "Your planet has many students who are attending college at the age of eleven. Many go on to great accomplishments in their fields, they are born with the ability to draw on several lifetimes of experience and learning.

  "Many students are credited with being gifted, or 'naturals' who have great acting or vocal abilities. They are applying many lifetimes of experience.

  "In your culture you have the idea of linear time, and you might say that these unusual children have past lives from which they are drawing experience. Maybe Mozart had been playing the keyboard instruments for several lifetimes. It would be correct to say he is playing the keyboard instruments in several simultaneous lifetimes.

  "Some people have incurable fears. A person might get attacks of anxiety from seeing even a picture of a tiger and hate cats. They may be drawing on the experience of being attacked and eaten by a tiger in another life.

  "In your medicine, doctors find ailments for which there is no cure. Suppose there is a man with a painful, chronic backache. They try medicines and find nothing works. They do surgeries and it does not work. It could be he is connected to another person, in another lifetime who died in an accident where his back was broken. That idea is positively not scientifically allowable in a four-dimensional paradigm."

  "We do not expect you to understand all this in, how do you say, a flash. Treat it as a hypothesis and see whether you find data to support it. We leave you now to your search.

  "Ha-ha-ha....ha, what was the name of his other leg?" he laughed as he faded away.

  "Wait!" I shouted, but he was gone.

  I sat and stared at the pool for a while as I tried to grasp what I had just heard. Then, I went back to the River View motel, sat in a lawn chair, watched the sunset, and wondered about my life. I had been a mainstream science guy; believing in the truth of science I was taught. Now, I am caught up in an obscure idea of space-time, with contacts with spiritual entities, and events dragging me in directions I didn't plan. I certainly had put my career in a vulnerable position. Surprisingly, I was beginning to feel comfortable with it.

  I watched the sky grow dark, and then I said, 'Good evening Hesperus.'

  ****

  After leaving the motel on the drive to court, I had an idea. Why not introduce some false signals into the gossip grapevine? I stopped by the hardware store. Inside, I could tell the middle-aged lady behind the cash register knew who I was, and was watching me carefully as though I might be shoplifting. I picked up two $4.95 plastic gold panning pans, one red and one green, and two plastic vials. I paid for them with cash and wondered what the grapevine would report.

  As I walked up the granite steps of the courthouse, I stopped, turned around and looked out into the square and thought to myself, 'this place has a different feel than the courthouses I have been in. Wait, that's a psychic observation. There is a solemnity about this place instead of the usual hustle and bustle.'

  I entered the courtroom, sat down in the third row and waited for the session to begin. The clerk called the court to order and announced the judge.

  Judge Cartright appeared, a short, balding, slightly obese man in his sixties. His jowly face remedied me of jowly cartoon bears. When he spoke, I knew he was no Yogi bear: he was firm and his presence emanated control. Ours was the third case on the docket, after a DUI and disturbing the peace case. The judge called my case and I went forward, filed my papers and made the necessary motions. After the defense had done the same, the judge recessed the court and asked us to join him in chambers.

  I introduced myself to the defense counsel, Dean Buttress, a slight man with a baldpate, hair combed over the top from the side. His face was puffy and had an alcoholic look. He was slightly stooped in a rumpled suit. He had a Hitler-style mustache that wiggled in a funny way when he talked.

  In chambers, the judge was very abrupt. "I don't want you big city lawyers to turn this trial into a circus. I would prefer you not give interviews to media before or during the trial. Our economy depends of vacationing families, and we don't want this to be seen as a place where we lose children. We also don't want to attract New Age weirdoes. People around here make their living in the summers and will be inconvenienced by jury duty. So, I am fast tracking this case to get it over by the tourist season. I am scheduling the trial for one month from today."

  I h
ad the distinct impression that Judge Cartright was, indeed, a "hanging judge."

  "Any objections.?"

  We both said, "No."

  "Then, I'll see you both in a month. I don't want to see any pretrial publicity. I can take care of the Butte News. Thank you, gentlemen." The judge rose and we both hurried out of the chambers.

  I turned to exchange pleasantries with Mr. Buttress. He tuned his back and walked away.

  I drove to Bob's Cafe for a cup of coffee before the trip up the hill to Steve Manteo's. Agnes greeted me with a big smile, as though I was a local now.

  "Coffee?"

  "Yes," I said as I sat down on the same stool. "I didn't get sent to jail."

  "I put in a good word for you," Agnes replied.

  Then, a cowboy–hat-wearing man in a rusty pickup drove up. As he came in he said, "Agnes, I just came across the creek bridge and guess what I saw. Downstream, on the motel side, where there is that fallen tree, Otis Wilson and Bud Johnson are panning for gold. That claim belonged to old man Williams' and he gave up on it years ago."

  The next morning I drove toward Steve Manteo's place, passing Courthouse Square, going beyond the old church, and admiring the few scattered homes that gave way to forest. I briefly stopped by the Sodastroms' house to tell them of the trial schedule.

  About fifteen miles out of town on the winding mountain road, I came to the Rawhide Cafe, the place where the Sheriff's search and rescue operation had set up headquarters when they searched for Lucy. It looked like an old fashioned roadside diner with a counter and a row of booths along one side. Next to it was a two-pump gas station and a small office that had signs in the window that said 'Fishing Gear' and, in neon, 'Beer and Wine.'