I had to laugh. "I guess I won't need my sunglasses, after all."
I pulled out back onto the road and headed the way we had come. Such a glorious evening. Off to my right, I could see silhouettes of the surfers in the setting sun. The long white beach, now glowing like a wide phosphorescent highway, streaked on forever.
There was still a lot of summer activity on the beach. I looked, but not with any particular notice. I wouldn't want to insult Julie by appearing too interested in other girls. Just an occasional glance out the window; an appreciation for the passing parade.
As we wound back down the coast, I gave Julie the grand tour. I pointed out each attraction: The Sea Lion Inn (good fish), the old Getty Museum (great art), and far off in the evening mists, the Santa Monica Pier (lots of fun).
"Have you ever been on the Santa Monica Pier, Julie? No? It's something special. And even better at night. They've got arcades, fast foods, fancy restaurants, even a merry-go-round. Or is it a carousel? I never could tell the difference. You know, I've seen that merry-go-round in so many movies. It's almost like a character on film.
"Do you like movies, Julie? I love them. In fact, for someone who loves movies as much as I do, I have the ideal job. I'm the projectionist in a movie theater. The Mayfair. You know, the one out on Wilshire, in West LA. Great place. You should see the projection booth. It's my home."
Julie sat quietly, listening. She was a good listener now. I liked good listeners. Such a rare pleasure.
Near the Santa Monica Pier we paused, overlooking the Pacific swells, enjoying the sea breeze—the one that blows the smog off the coast, deeper into the basin, so even the communities high in the San Bernardino Mountains can share the pollution.
"That was so nice," I said, patting Julie's bare knee. "Let's drive it again. Are you getting cold?"
I took a blanket off the back seat and tucked it around her legs. Of course, she'd be cold where she'd wet herself.
"Have you ever seen or felt such a night? No, of course you haven't. How could you? This day is unique, isn't it? Something very special. Very, very special. For both of us. You ready to go 'round again?"
I felt like giggling, I was so delighted with myself and my companion.
I could tell that the other drivers and their passengers were jealous of me. They could see Willie in his sexy Mustang with good-looking stuff in rapt attention next to him. Cruising down the coast. They had to be jealous. We made a most handsome couple, Julie and I. The California girl and her California fellow.
I'm nothing to turn your nose up at. A little over six feet tall from stocking feet to the top of my crew cut. One hundred and eighty-five pounds ever since I got out of the Navy. I don't work out, but I keep myself in shape. It's not all brains here. There's some good looking brawn, too.
I tooled my muscle machine back up the highway toward Malibu. I had the luxury of time now, to be spent like pennies in a candy store. All of the time in the world to see and be seen on this promenade of youth.
Let the creeps know I was as good if not better than any of them!
There was plenty of time to relax and enjoy the delightful silence of my companion: a communion of souls. Words were no longer necessary. We understood each other so well. We understood the world around us and its needs.
The beauty of the night swallowed us up into the darkness.
A FAINT COLD FEAR
For Byron Carmona, a miasma of dread seems to emanate from the old Cornwall house next door. Three years previous, Billy Cornwall tried to rape Byron’s 12-year-old sister, Shelly. And then in the winter of 1963, the Cornwalls all died by carbon monoxide poisoning when Billy‘s father was crushed while putting snow chains on the car in the garage. The Gebhardt family has moved into the Cornwall place and strange things have begun to happen. Byron's 16-year-old world should have been filled with the wonder and awe of young love when he falls for his new neighbor, Ali Gebhardt. Instead, that summer of 1964 becomes the culmination of a series of horrors that began in 1849, when survivors of the ill-fated Donner Party and their children died under bizarre circumstances in the small mountain community of Glenoaks.
A FAINT COLD FEAR (CHAPTER ONE)
Closure is important.
That's the real reason I'm going back. I'm old enough now, with almost-grown children of my own, so you'd think I should be able to look back on it all with a different perspective. But I still can't shake the memories of that summer, the summer of 1964, when I was surrounded by death.
Kennedy's assassination was as fresh in my mind as the cold black and white television pictures of Jack Ruby killing Lee Harvey Oswald. They broadcast it over and over until it became a surreal morbid curiosity.
Winter memories of dead neighbors were as tangible as the spring bodies of small birds on our front walk. Even my father, who should have been my rock of understanding in this world of seemingly casual extinction, also lay dead and buried for five months already.
Mother had grown fragile and childlike from her inability to reconcile the remainder of her life with the eternal absence of her husband, and all-too frequently I felt as if I were the only sane person in a world gone strangely mad.
* * *
"There are more dead birds on the porch, Byron."
Cigarette smoke blossomed upward and wreathed Mother's reflection in the streaked glass of the kitchen window where she stood, her back to me.
I buried my face in a bowl of Wheaties.
"Did you hear me? You need to clean up the mess on the porch again."
"Uh-huh." I ate fast, before the cereal got soggy, before Mother thought of more chores for me to do.
"I'm putting up a screen next year."
"Uh-huh."
Dad had said that every spring. Now Mother took up the refrain none of us took seriously.
"Those birds are filthy. They mess on the porch and the steps--and every year we get dead chicks all over the walk."
Each spring a flock of mountain blue jays built new nests in the trees around the front porch. Occasionally, we'd find small, naked hatchlings on the steps, probably plucked out by the mother bird protecting her brood from the weak or dead sibling. Or some little chick had become too anxious to try its fledgling wings and had plummeted to the hard ground and inevitable death.
Although nature's scavengers, the cats, possums and raccoons, usually devoured this unexpected bounty, whenever they didn't it became my responsibility to dispose of the tiny corpses.
Mother squinted through a stream of smoke and spoke softly. "We're getting new neighbors."
"Oh yeah?"
"Someone's moving into the Cornwall house."
I felt a chill.
"It isn't right." Mother shook her head, her voice still early-morning dry, scratchy from smoke and restless, drugged sleep. "The bank must've sold it. There aren't any surviving relatives that I know of--except Ellie, of course. And she's..." Her voice trailed off.
Mother was talking about the big house down the street, the one on the corner, the Cornwall place--a house of recent, tragic death.
* * *
It had been the week before Christmas last. Tom Cornwall had roused his family--wife Mary, seventeen year-old Becky, twelve year-old Ellie, and Billy, who had just turned eighteen--for Sunday services at the Episcopal church. With the first big freeze of winter hard upon our mountain valley, and snow piled in five-foot drifts, Cornwall had gone to put chains on their old Ford station wagon in the dry, relative comfort of the cold garage.
Afterward, no one could believe that he had been so foolish as to leave the engine running while he laid out the chains behind the rear wheels. But he had. Somehow--though the auto dealer said it was impossible--the transmission had slipped into reverse and the car rolled backward over Cornwall, crushing his head.
For weeks after, visions of the horror in that garage kept me awake at night. My fertile imagination conjure
d up images of Tom Cornwall, behind the old Ford, struggling with the latches of the cumbersome metal chains. Had he moved the vehicle back and forth to get the tires positioned over the them? Was that why he'd left the engine on? Concentrating on his task, had he even noticed when the worn transmission slipped into reverse? And, if he had, was it the last sound he ever heard before the sharp crack of his own shattering skull had echoed through the garage?
Unfortunately, Cornwall's final act had set an even greater catastrophe into motion. The snow packed against the garage door trapped the car's exhaust in the garage, where the central heating unit's intake vent--illegally placed, according to the newspaper--sucked deadly carbon monoxide into the whole house. The rest of the family had been overcome in a matter of minutes. Mary Cornwall and Rebecca were found at the bottom of the stairs in their Sunday clothes, purses and prayer books in hand. Billy was sprawled in the doorway between the garage and kitchen. Ellie--I remember she was always late for everything--was still dressing in her upstairs bedroom. She hadn't been killed outright, probably because she was so far from the source of the deadly gas. But by the time the fire department arrived she was unconscious and barely alive. Now, six months later, Ellie was still in a coma. Mother told us that her friend Martha Flaherty, a local medical clinic nurse who worked in a hospital down in San Bernardino on weekends, said that Ellie was a vegetable. They could find no relatives to authorize the doctors to pull the plug and release the girl into the communion of death with her family.
* * *
"That house shouldn't have been sold," Mother persisted.
Finally I got up to look out the kitchen window where I could see the distant, large red letters of a moving van through the trees.
The four houses that made up our isolated neighborhood were far apart, scattered in a forest of pines and Douglas firs above a steep gully. Our house and the Cornwalls' stood at the two ends of the street. Across the way, buried in the trees, were two more homes. All four lots at the top of our wooded hill were grandly named "Ridgecrest Hollow."
"I suppose you can't let a perfectly good house go to waste," I said.
I couldn't muster up any enthusiasm for what would at any other time be the exciting prospect of new neighbors.
"There's nothing good about that place," Mother muttered.
"What place?"
I turned at the sound of my sister's voice. At fifteen, a year younger than I was, Shelly had even more resentment and anger about the Cornwall place than either Mother or I.
I pointed toward the window. "We're getting new neighbors."
"Fuck 'em."
Shelly and I both turned to look at Mother, expecting her normally sharp retort to any use of profanity in her hearing, especially the dreaded "F" word. But Mother stood quietly looking out the window as if my sister hadn't said a word.
I shook my head, reminding Shelly that we had an unspoken agreement not to aggravate our mother unnecessarily. Since Dad's death, things had changed drastically and both of us had been forced to grow up a hell of a lot faster than we'd wanted.
Shelly rushed on to needle me and fill the void her obscenity had left in the smoky air. "Hey, Percy, maybe there'll be some girls you can actually meet and date."
Calling me "Percy," a literary companion name to Shelly, Byron and Keats (our cat), was my sister's annoying response to my silent admonition. She knew I hated the nickname. What she didn't know was that Billy Cornwall had overheard it one day and used it whenever he wanted to harass me.
"I've got more than I can handle already," I lied self-consciously. Both of us knew very well that I was so shy when it came to girls that I had never had a real date. "Besides, if they look anything like you, I don't think my eyes could take the strain."
My sister was not a morning person. Her ratty terry-cloth bathrobe complemented a tangle of sleep-spiked blonde hay still matted with yesterday's hair spray. A fold in her pillowcase had left a long red crease across her soft cheek. It was hard to believe that this early-morning gargoyle could turn into a beautiful girl whose social calendar was as full as mine was empty.
Shelly glanced at Mother to make sure she wasn't watching us, and then flipped me the bird.
"Oh, that's just lovely," I said. "How ladylike!"
Shelly ignored this feeble comeback when she saw that Mother's distracted gaze still hadn't wavered from the window.
I shrugged helplessly at her puzzled look. Moments like this, when Mother seemed to slip away into a world of her own, were becoming more and more frequent.
Although we could bicker with the best, Shelly and I shared a real concern for our mother. Ever since my father's death four months earlier, this warm, loving, assertive woman who had always seemed so strong and self-sufficient had become a lost soul.
* * *
Dad's last assignment had been at Norton, a Military Air Transport Services base near San Bernardino. "San Berdoo" was about ninety miles east of Los Angeles, and the minute he saw it, Dad said, "Not on your life!" He wasn't going to have his family live in that “cesspool of pollution!”
One of his new buddies on the base told him about the small community of Glenoaks in the mountains above San Berdoo, and it was the first place he looked for a home before he brought the rest of us out to California to join him. It was a ninety-minute drive down the steep mountains to the air base, but Dad said he'd rather drive "the hill" every day than have us all live in the "brown air of the flatlands."
Although he always tried to get home every night, occasionally, in the winter, snow storms closed the mountain passes and he had to stay in the bachelor officers' quarters on the base until the current storm passed and the county crews could clear the roads.
But the prospects that February of spending the long 1964 Washington's Birthday weekend by himself on the base was probably too much for him. He decided to drive home after dark, even though snow and ice had plagued the mountain passes for two weeks. The biggest storm of the season had almost isolated Glenoaks from the rest of the world, and even school had been suspended, much to our--mine and Shelly's--delight. We might not be able to go to school, but we didn't have to remain indoors. Snow was a novelty. It was also a killer.
And snow isn't the only thing that can kill on a mountain road. Black ice is worse. Black ice spreads a clear glaze of treachery across the road. It looks like clean, dark asphalt, but it's not.
Dad called about six o'clock to say he was leaving the base. He assured Mother that the roads were fine, all cleared and very passable, and he should be home in about two hours. But the two hours passed and the wind began to whip new snow through the trees.
"Your father should have been here by now," Mother finally said around nine-thirty.
"Maybe he decided not to try the drive, what with the storm and all," I suggested feebly.
She shook her head. "He would have called again."
I picked up the phone, expecting nothing. Service was never reliable in the mountains. It was especially erratic in the winter when ice coated the lines. But the dial tone was loud as ever.
"It's working," I said, wishing that the silence from my father had been justified by downed telephone lines.
Mother called the air base. "B.O.Q., please, extension thirty-six."
The base operator put her through and Shelly and I sat quietly while the phone rang in an empty room on the other end.
Mother hung up and dialed the base again. "May I have the Officer of the Day, please." Mother was soft spoken and polite, even when she looked like she was about to cry. "This is June Carmona. My husband is Tech Sergeant Walter Carmona. I wonder if you could tell me if he's on base. We expected him over an hour ago. Glenoaks. Yes, I know, but he..." Mother began to shake. "...He said the roads were clear. Yes I know there's a new storm. But it's just begun. He should have been here by now. Maybe he turned around and signed back in."
The Officer of the Day said that D
ad had signed out hours earlier and had not checked back in.
As Mother put down the receiver, Shelly began to cry.
Mother pulled her close and hugged her. "Don't worry, baby. Just because our phone's working, it doesn't mean that he's not stranded at some gas station or restaurant where their phone isn't."
I could see the expression on Mother's face. She was more worried than she sounded.
"Byron," she said, "Maybe we'd better call the Highway Patrol, just in case..."
This brought fresh sobs from Shelly.
"Yeah. But I'm sure it's okay," I said wanting to cry too. I forced a laugh for Shelly's sake. "Dad's probably sitting in some restaurant on his tenth cup of coffee, just waiting for the plows to clear the road."
I called the highway patrol. They had no reports of accidents, but the weather had turned so bad, they had been unable to patrol most of the mountain road between Barton Flats and Glenoaks. Yes, of course, they would keep an eye out for my father's Chevy and notify the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department if they found him.
Desperate to be doing something, I got the phone book out and, trying to remember every rest stop, restaurant and gas station along the winding mountain road that led to Glenoaks, proceeded to call them all. Without success.
My father had disappeared.
And then began the most miserable week of our lives-- until the Highway Patrol finally found his car, overturned in a steep canyon filled with snow and ice and deep brush.
Black ice had probably been the cause.
That's what they said at the time.
At first, no one could tell us how long Father must have lain, still alive, pinned beneath the crumpled steering wheel of the old Chevy. The County Coroner eventually said it could have been hours before the freezing fingers of the mountain cold finally reached in and turned his heart to ice.
The Coroner's Report, a little sheaf of papers filled with all kinds of horrors, said that by the time the Highway Patrol had located the wreck, winter-hungry scavengers had gotten there first. Birds had pecked out Father's frozen eyes and ripped his face to shreds. Wild dogs or coyotes and mountain lions had feasted on his flesh. His bones had been gnawed and cracked so that even the frozen marrow could be sucked from them.