16
PETER TURNED LEFT onto Parker Street, which was named after the rancher who had lived at the top of the hill and had once owned most of what was now Trabuco Oaks. Back in the twenties, according to Beth, Parker’s son had been murdered when a jealous husband had found his wife and young Parker together in the ranch bunkhouse.
Only a few years ago, the old, long-abandoned bunk-house was torn down and the bloodstained floorboards hauled away with the rest of the debris. A new house sat on the property now, the lot overbuilt, expensive cars in the drive, all of it an example of the kinds of changes that were threatening to turn the canyons into suburbs.
A few years back the village was a Sleepy Hollow sort of place, with dogs dozing under the live oak trees and lots of vacant land. Now it was built up: old houses renovated, new houses selling for two and three hundred thousand dollars. There were still a few dogs shambling around, bit they were wary, as if they knew that times had changed and things weren’t quite so sleepy anymore.
Parker Street itself was only a half mile long, ending against a chaparral-covered hillside where the terrain got steep and wild enough to discourage casual development. Sometime in the future they would find a way to blast it into submission, but for now the hillside marked the point where civilization ended at the edge of the wilderness.
Beth rented one of the houses at the top of the street, the last house but one. It was unlikely that she would rent it much longer. She was thirty, nearly ten years younger than Peter, and was a graduate student in cultural anthropology. Bobby was six. Unless something compelling kept them there, they would almost certainly move on. Peter had isolated himself in the canyon in order to avoid moving on.
Bobby laughed a lot and acted silly. He couldn’t sustain anger at all. He preferred a world in which things were cheerful and easy, starting with himself. Better to play than to sulk. Peter had learned more from Bobby’s philosophy than from all the preachers and teachers he’d ever heard. But like all wise-sounding philosophy, the knowledge was nearly impossible to apply—easier for a kid, maybe.
He saw Beth’ s bus in the gravel parking lot of the daycare center, an old house that had been painted schoolhouse red and fenced with chain link. It was a cheerful-looking place, half the playground shaded by a pair of enormous sycamores. Plywood cutouts of Winnie the Pooh characters decorated one long wall. Peter pulled into the lot, cut the engine, and set the brake, but he didn’t get out.
He watched the wind rustle the leaves on the playground trees. Five kids, one of them Bobby, burst out of the back door of the center, followed by a teenage girl in a ponytail who pulled a soccer ball out of the high grass alongside the fence and kicked it at them. The five kids chased the ball, pushing each other out of the way, and soon all of them were kicking it back and forth, using a set of parallel bars as goalposts.
Bobby wore his black cycling cap backward over his blondish brown hair, which dangled over his collar in back. He had on a pair of black sweatpants and an oversize black T-shirt with a skeleton on it, riding a skateboard up a concrete wall that folded over the skeleton’s head like a breaking wave. The words “Bone to Skate” were scrawled on the wall in hatchet lettering.
Wind buffeted the quiet sun-warmed car, and the kids’ voices, muffled by glass and metal, came to him as if from a great distance as he watched them play. They were completely abandoned to that business. He envied that kind of talent. A few more years and they’d trade it for a handful of beans, and they’d have to make do with the memory of playing soccer in a schoolyard on a windy autumn afternoon.
Bobby spotted Peter’s Suburban, waved at him, and shouted something that Peter couldn’t understand Peter shrugged and shook his head. Bobby made eating gestures, then rubbed his stomach like a fat man contemplating a meal. Peter gave him the okay sign, and Bobby ran off, chasing the soccer ball.
Feeling almost cheerful, Peter picked up the spud guns from the backseat, took one of them out of the bag, and put the other one into the glove compartment. Then, thinking about it, he climbed out of the car and tossed the first gun back inside onto the passenger seat before shutting the door. It wouldn’t be fair to give it to Bobby in front of the other kids. He didn’t have a potato for it anyway. They could pick one up down at the general store later.
He stepped into the relative darkness of the day-care center. The low tables were covered with cut-up construction paper and scissors and glue. An aquarium bubbled against the wall, a half dozen rubbery-looking newts bumping their noses against the glass as if they were anxious to see who had come in. Beth stood in the kitchen doorway with her back to Peter, talking, probably, to Julie, the director and teacher. Their talk sounded serious, and so Peter waited in the empty room, not wanting to interrupt.
Beth’s long hair was pulled back casually and caught with a clip of Navajo silver. She was wearing dark green jeans and hiking boots and a khaki, long-sleeved shirt like a ranger would wear. Peter sat down on one of the tables and stared at the linoleum floor.
THREE WEEKS AGO Beth had taken him on a hike, over the south ridge and down into Bell Canyon. She showed him a big granite rock full of metates—smooth holes where Indians had ground acorns hundreds of years back. Once she had found a few pottery shards back in there and a fragment of some sort of stone tool, treasures that were no doubt well worth the hours of scrambling around through scrub oak and sage and prickly pear.
On their hike they had discovered fresh mountain lion tracks along the streambed and Beth reacted as if she’d seen a Hollywood celebrity in a café. She insisted they follow the tracks up a little perpendicular canyon, just to see if they could catch up with the lion, and Peter went along without complaining because he didn’t want to look like a city boy.
Tirelessly, she told him all about how California grizzlies with three-inch-long claws used to roam the Santa Ana Mountains, coming down into the ranchos and crippling full-grown cattle with a single blow to the back, then dragging the hundreds of pounds of meat miles up into the scrub to devour it. She seemed to think it was a terrible tragedy that the grizzlies had been hunted to extinction, and Peter agreed that it was a dirty shame, that he’d been looking forward to being devoured back in the scrub.
Bell Canyon was wild and empty. The north-facing hillsides were shaded by immense old oak trees, and the deep green heads of new ferns pushed up through the dark oak mulch. The trail finally more or less disappeared beneath a carpet of autumn leaves, and Peter lost all sense of direction and time as he followed Beth uphill, content merely to watch her move against the backdrop of rocks and trees and sky.
“Here we are,” Beth had said to him finally.
They had come out of the woods onto a sunny patch of meadow grass that grew right down into the waters of a clear spring. A succession of mountains and ridges rose one behind the other in the east until they disappeared on the horizon.
Clearly she had led him on the hike with this lonesome destination in mind. She opened her daypack and pulled out a checkered tablecloth, unfolding it on the grass. The two of them lay down on their backs, listening to the silence. A distant pair of vapor trails materialized in the blue sky, the jets moving so high and fast that no sound at all fell to earth.
On the hike, Beth had been talking about bears and lions and edible shrubs, about how you could make soap out of yucca plants and leach the tannic acid out of acorns with lye and water. But as they lay in the grass there was nothing at all worth talking about, and they watched the vapor trails slowly turn into cloud-drift and move off down the lazy afternoon sky.
To Peter she looked a little like a character out of a book, lying there in sunshine—maybe a princess who as a baby had been switched with a woodsman’s daughter. She was five ten or so, and had a model’s slender build. Her shirt, unflattering as it was, couldn’t hide her figure, and when she rolled onto her side as if to say something to him, the top three buttons of the shirt were loosened, although they hadn’t been only a short time ago.
He lay still, waiting, almost afraid to touch her. When he felt the pressure of her hand on his thigh, suddenly it was unavoidable. Unhurriedly he traced the curve of her breasts above the lacy fabric of her lingerie. He unbuttoned the fourth button of her shirt, and then the fifth, and she sat up, shrugging out of it entirely, and then tugged his shirt out of his jeans as he knelt beside her. She pushed him away and untied her hiking boots herself, pulling them off and pitching them ten feet down the hill. He threw his after them, and both of them stood up, scattering their clothes around the meadow. He pressed against her, lost utterly in the warmth of her body, in the feel of her flesh against his, warming him while the breeze blew down off the wild hillsides at his back.
Leaves drifted down onto the meadow from the solitary trees, the ferns and high grass waved in the wind, the afternoon wore on slowly. Once a red-tailed hawk swooped down over the spring and snatched something up from the edge of the water, and for a moment the air was full of the sound of beating wings. …
HEARING HER VOICE, he looked up now. She was saying something to him, looking at him a little oddly from the kitchen doorway, wearing the same shirt that he had helped unbutton that day on the meadow. Recollecting it had dragged him partway up out of the depressing rut his mind had been in all afternoon. At the same time it complicated things utterly, and he understood that despite his resolutions, there were some things he didn’t want to lose. On that afternoon in Bell Canyon everything had been easy, but he knew that nothing that good ever stayed easy.
“You okay?” she asked.
“Sure.” He managed a smile.
She walked out into the room. “Julie’s been telling me that they’ve had some trouble here today.”
“What sort of trouble?” Peter asked, forcing a look of interest onto his face.
“A strange boy hanging around,” Julie said to him, following Beth out of the kitchen. She gestured toward the window. “Out there in the brush.”
Through the glass Peter could see the trail that led up the hill and onto the ridge. It ran for nearly four miles before meeting up with the Holy Jim Trail. A couple of miles up the ridge, it skirted a hillside right above Peter’s house. He and Bobby had hiked home that way from he day-care center once, racing with Beth, who drove down the canyon along the dirt road. Beth had beat them home, but not by much.
“He threw part of the carcass of a fawn over the fence,” Julie said. “Hit Betty Tilton with it. She wasn’t hurt, but it was pretty traumatic for her. We had to call her mother to come pick her up. He’d been hanging around this morning, I guess, making noises, mostly. Throwing rocks at the kids. One of the kids lost a glider over the fence, and the boy apparently picked it up and ran off with it. Then about an hour later he just rushed at the fence and pitcher this dead fawn over.”
“Do you think he killed it?” Peter asked. “What do you mean, part of it?”
“Doesn’t look like he killed it,” Beth said. “It’s in the trash can out there. I’d guess a cougar killed it. Left the head and shoulders. Bones all splintered up. It’s been dead for days, dried out from the wind. The boy probably found it up on the ridge and hauled it down.”
“I tried to talk to him,” Julie said, “but he just ran off. Later on I heard him crying off in the brush.”
The term “crying off in the brush” was startling. For a moment Peter could almost hear the crying, and he thought briefly about Falls Canyon, picturing the face of the boy now, lying beside his mother.…
He clipped the thought short. Probably there was nothing in this. Just a kid messing around.
“Couldn’t have been foxes?” Peter asked, looking at Beth. She rolled her eyes at him.
“I guess it was him crying,” Julie said. “Why he was out there on a day like this I don’t know. The wind must have been blowing fifty miles an hour.”
“What can you do about it?” Peter asked. The story had made him uneasy. There was something strange about it, something dark and suggestive. More coincidence.
“Nothing,” Julie said. “It’s just a prank. Still, it was such a nasty one that it wrecked the whole day. Kids couldn’t even play outside most of the morning.”
“Well,” Peter said. “Probably it’s nothing. I remember we used to throw earthworms at girls when I was that age.”
“The world’s changed,” Beth said. “Now it’s dried-out deer carcasses.”
Julie walked to the door and shouted for Bobby. In a couple of moments he appeared, out of breath and smiling.
“What’s up?” Peter asked him.
“The moon,” Bobby said. “Did Julie tell you about the dead deer head?”
“Yeah,” Peter said. “She told us.”
“It’s really gross. Can we keep it, Mom?”
“I don’t think so,” Beth said.
‘I wasn’t here,” Bobby told Peter. “I would have kicked his butt if I was.”
“He’s lucky you didn’t get at him,” Peter said, “but you shouldn’t be talking about kicking people’s butts anyway. The world’s already too full of butt kicking. Probably he just wants a friend.”
“A friend?” Bobby said, clearly unconvinced.
Nodding good-bye to Julie, Beth held the front door open, and the three of them went out.
“So what are you doing tonight?” Peter asked Beth as they walked to the cars. He winked at Bobby, who pretended to cut up food on a plate.
Before she could answer, Bobby said, “Want to eat at the steak house?”
“Sure,” Peter said, answering for them both.
“I’ve got a load of stuff to do,” Beth said doubtfully. “I should have gotten more done today, but nothing went right.
Peter shrugged. “You’ve got to eat.”
“That’s right,” Bobby said. “We’ve got to eat. I’ m as hungry as two dogs.”
Beth looked hard at Peter. “You look beat,” she said. “What’s wrong?”
“Same thing,” Peter said. “Nothing went right today.” His throat constricted, and he suddenly found himself on the edge of tears.
“Then let’s eat at the steak house,” Beth said. “I’ve got nothing in the house anyway but frozen macaroni and cheese. And it’s Saturday, we better get over there now, before the rush.”
“Hey,” Peter said, forcing himself to be cheerful, “I bought something in town today.”
“For me?” Bobby asked, raising his eyebrows.
“Uh-uh,” Peter said. “It’s for your mother. A cooking tool.” He pulled open the door of the Suburban and picked up the spud gun, showing it to Bobby and Beth.
“What is it?” Bobby asked.
“Potato laser,” Peter said. “It’s from a planet in Milky Way called Idaho. They shoot potatoes there instead of bullets.”
“Idaho’s not a planet,” Bobby said. “It’s a state.” He took the gun from Peter and pulled the plastic away from the cardboard, waving the gun around like a gangster and pretending to shoot his mother’s car. “What does this shoot?”
“Potatoes,” Peter said.
“You’re kidding, of course.” Beth took the cardbord backing from Bobby. She turned it over and scanned the instructions, then fixed Peter with a withering look. “It does shoot potatoes,” she said flatly. “Pieces of them.”
“Zucchini, too,” Peter said.
“I think we can buy a potato at Emory’s,” Bobby said, opening up the passenger-side door of the Suburban and climbing in. “I’ll drive down there with Peter, Mom. We’ll meet you.” He pulled the heavy door shut, and Peter shrugged helplessly at Beth, as if the world and its crazy affairs were beyond his control.
On the way down to the steak house Bobby talked rapid-fire about the deer head in the trash can and about holy he wanted to take it and hang it on the wall like hunters did. But he said nothing about his flight back home from visiting his father or about the week he had spent then about having to come back early because his father was a busy man.
Perhaps he had already bottled it up and put it away in the cardboard carton that people used to store that kind of thing, shoving it out of sight on some back shelf of their minds. Peter had been dumping stuff into his own carton for too damned long, closing the lid over it, carrying it around until the bottom had fallen out. If he could help it, he wasn’t going to let Bobby do the same thing.