“Sounds like you’re getting new neighbors,” Dierdre said. She and her husband owned the Sunrise, the only restaurant in Manzanita, and my father and I were ordering breakfast. We were here most Saturdays. After eating, my father usually sat for a few minutes with the other ranchers who gathered at the big table near the windows, trading pleasantries, talking cattle. In collared shirts, their hats on wooden hooks near the door, these men liked to complain about the price of gas, and alfalfa, and what they considered lowball contracts from the slaughterhouses. “They got us by the short hairs,” they said. My father nodded and smiled, but he wasn’t much for complaining. He loved life up here, loved ranching.
This was in 1981, three years after my mother died. I was nineteen.
“Somebody bought the old Henderson place.”
“Is that so?” my father asked.
The Henderson place was a fifty-acre parcel about a half mile east of us. Like our land, it was a rolling plain of scrub and dry grass that sloped down from the foothills. It had been sitting empty, abandoned, for years. There were a few outbuildings on the property, and the remnants of a house, but these were weathered shells with no doors or windows. The floors were littered with rusty beer cans and broken glass. The dirt driveway that led up from Perkins Road was overgrown with weeds and washed out in three or four places by flash floods.
“A family, it sounds like. They’re coming up from Pomona. Somewhere around there.”
“Ranchers?”
“Doesn’t sound like it. People looking to get out of the city.”
“Good for them. Good for us. New blood.”
“They’ve got money. The husband started an electronics company and sold it for a tidy little sum.”
“How old are the kids?” I asked.
I was hoping they had a daughter close to my age. The girls I’d known in school were either looking to leave or already gone—to college, to jobs down the mountain. I’d dropped out of high school after the tenth grade, so college wasn’t an option for me. And leaving would break my father’s heart.
“Just one kid, I think,” Dierdre said. “I can’t remember boy or girl.”
My father pointed at me. “Could be a new friend,” he said, with a wink.
#
Within a month or two of Dierdre’s news, a demolition crew arrived and tore down what remained of the old Henderson house and the outbuildings and hauled away the lumber. A full road crew with dozers and sand-transfers followed. They regraded the driveway, installing drain pipes and run-off culverts, and covered the whole thing—a distance of maybe a quarter of a mile—with asphalt. At the foot of the driveway, they built stone columns and installed a wrought-iron gate with a keypad. Where the property ran along Perkins Road, the old barbed-wire fence was replaced with horse fencing. On the other three sides, the wooden posts—nearly all of them rotting and falling over—were replaced with steel stakes. The new barbed wire was higher, with tighter gaps.
“It’s looking like a fortress over there,” I said to my father. I’d just come back from Palm Desert with groceries. “Looks like they’re prepping for an invasion.”
“It’s their money. Some people like to feel secure.”
In the years since my mother died, my father’s hair, once brown and curly, had faded to a lumpy brillo pad of gray, and his wardrobe had shrunk to T-shirts and overalls. He only shaved once a week, so he often looked like a man recovering from a bad bender or days lost in the woods. But he was still a thick barrel of a man, heavy through the shoulders and neck. Part of his nature was a reluctance—almost an inability—to speak poorly of others. You could tell him about a man batting a hornet’s nest with a stick or trying to pick up a rattlesnake with his bare hand, and the worst he’d say is, “Probably didn’t know any better.” Or, even more maddening, “Well, that’s a shame.”
As the work on the property continued, we heard more about the family. Their name was Tuttle. The information about the electronics company was true. The father had started it as a teenager, in his garage, and built it up over twenty years. The “tidy little sum” was north of two million dollars. Their child was a boy of fourteen or fifteen.
We also found out they were religious people. Pentecostals. We had other Pentecostals in the valley, two families of them. Their church was twenty miles west of Manzanita, about halfway to Temecula. Their kids attended the one-room school that was part of it. Around the valley, they were seen as suspicious of outsiders and a bit backward. They saw themselves as holding the line against the rising tide of materialism and divorce, and seemed to have particular disdain for people who believed in a softer, more forgiving God. To their way of thinking, these people had a big surprise coming in the afterlife. Their own God, the Pentecostal God, was stern, demanding, a punisher.
Work got started on the house itself. Like the original Henderson house, it was far up the property, too far to be seen from the road. But from the high corner of our ranch, a few steps above the pasture fence, looking east, you could see it well out in the distance. Given what they’d spent on the driveway, I expected a mansion. But the house that went up was just one floor, not much bigger than ours, with an awning and a large porch facing the valley. When this was framed and roofed, they started on a second building. This made me think the first building was not the house after all, but a garage or workshop. But the new building was much smaller, a cube with a pitched roof.
When the Tuttles finally moved in—there were lights on in the evening—my father insisted we go say hello. Before dinner one afternoon—we usually ate at five—we climbed into his truck and drove over. Pulling off Perkins Road into the driveway, my father pressed the button on the speaker at the gate, and a woman answered. “Hello?” She sounded irritated. I wondered if they ate earlier than we did, and we were interrupting.
“Good evening,” my father said. He introduced himself and explained that we were neighbors. “We’re just hoping to offer a welcome.”
“One moment, please.” After a silence, the woman was back. “My husband and I will be glad to meet you,” she said, in the same irritated tone. The gate opened.
Up the steady slope through the scrub, we followed the new black driveway over a rise to a wider parking area where a cream-colored Monte Carlo and a light-green station wagon were parked to one side, their front tires on dirt. Work was still being done on the house and the outbuilding. Here and there were compressors and step ladders and work tables set up on sawhorses. The siding on the house—slat plywood—was painted, or at least primed, but the windows were still masked with plastic sheeting, some of it torn and hanging loose. The outbuilding was still bare wood.
The father emerged from the open bay door, wiping his hands with a rag. Behind him, you could see an array of workbenches and tools, spools of wire. He was tall and thin, with round shoulders and horn-rimmed glasses. Instead of work clothes or a painter’s jumpsuit, he was in a short-sleeve dress shirt and slacks. His shoes were the kind a janitor or shop teacher might wear. He stopped a few feet away and glared.
My father climbed out and offered a hand. “Ward McBain. I’m your neighbor. Next property down.”
“What can I do for you?”
“Just introducing ourselves. This is my son, Danny.”
I waved from the truck.
The wife emerged and stood on the patio, watching. Long hair parted in the middle and pulled back, she wore an old-timey gray dress that fell to her ankles. My father nodded and said hello. I waved at her as well, but she didn’t acknowledge me. The door opened behind her, and the son emerged. Pants low at the waist and bunched at the shoes, shirt untucked, he was a lankier and more disheveled version of the father. He leaned against one of the support posts with a smirking expression.
Mr. Tuttle eyed my father. “Step up onto the porch. My wife will bring us lemonade.”
The wife immediately went inside.
Mr. Tuttle pointed at his son. “Bring chairs.”
Slouching and looking aggrieved, the son followed his mother into the house.
On the patio, my father introduced me again, and Mr. Tuttle nodded. I got the sense that Mr. Tuttle believed treating a young person as a full adult was impertinent. There were other adults around the valley who held this view.
Through the open doorway, I could hear the mother giving quiet but insistent direction to the son. “Yes, ma’am,” the son said, an edge to his voice.
Mr. Tuttle moved cans of paint and boxes of caulk to make room for the chairs. When they arrived, he took the first chair and nodded my father toward the second. I stood back, keeping the way clear for the third, but it didn’t come. The son returned to his support post and leaned against it, watching. The mother emerged with two glasses of lemonade—no ice—and handed one to her husband and one to my father. A third one of these didn’t arrive either. The son wore a wry smile. He knew I wouldn’t be served and was entertained by my disappointment.
“House looks good,” my father said. “We’ve kind of been watching from afar as things have come together over here.”
Mr. Tuttle seemed suspicious of my father’s interest. “We’re still in process. As you can see.”
“Sure. Of course. So how are you finding things?”
“Our congregation has been very welcoming.”
My father didn’t begrudge anyone their religious beliefs. Down in San Marcos, the town in north San Diego County where he grew up, his mother—my grandmother—still regularly attended church. He had nothing against the Pentecostal families in the valley. But neither did he have an interest in religion. If someone started talking about Jesus, or sin, or living properly in the eyes of the Lord, he waited until they finished and politely excused himself.
“Well, good. That’s good.” My father looked at the son. “And how about you? Getting settled in at school?”
“Gabriel is homeschooled,” Mr. Tuttle said. “He takes Bible study at the church.”
“Oh, how about that?”
Gabriel offered a slow, brooding nod. I could see he found Bible study as enjoyable as a root canal and wondered if he’d done something wrong, gotten arrested for drugs maybe, and Bible study was his punishment.
“I understand you’re an engineer,” my father said to Mr. Tuttle. “Electrical work.”
“Self-taught,” Mr. Tuttle said. “My parents weren’t educated. My father was a butcher and didn’t care about bettering himself. But I worked hard in school and learned from technical manuals at the library.”
“That’s impressive. I’m not sure I’ve been in a library since I was a kid.” My father chuckled at himself.
Mr. Tuttle looked at him with pity.
My father’s normally generous store of optimism and geniality quickly depleting, he glanced around for something else to talk about. “Well, like I said, we just wanted to introduce ourselves. If you ever need anything, come on by. Don’t hesitate.”
We stood and nodded—it was clear by now that Mr. Tuttle was not a shaker of hands. The son, still leaning against his post, gave a sarcastic salute.
As we picked up speed away from the house, I chuckled. “That went well.”
Normally, when I made little comments like this, my father gave me a look or said something mildly scolding. But now he only shrugged. “I think they thought we were angling for something. They’ll be all right.”
#
For months after, we only saw the Tuttles in passing. They never repaid our visit, never stopped by for a tool or a cup of sugar. If it were a Sunday, they were all together in the Monte Carlo—the father’s car—heading to church or on their way back, Mr. Tuttle and the son in shirt and tie, the mother in a buttoned-up blouse or dress. Other days, it might be the mother and son in the station wagon, the son looking sullen in the passenger seat. Mostly, it was the mother alone, out on some errand. When she drove, she wore driving gloves and oversized black sunglasses. She sat forward, face up near the steering wheel, as though on high alert for obstacles. If you waved, she might wave back or flash a smile. When the family was in the car all together, no one waved.
We had three stores in Manzanita: Ace Hardware, Murphy’s General, and Cullen’s Books & Antiques. The prices at Ace and Murphy’s were higher than what you paid down the mountain, and Cullen’s wasn’t much of anything. (Full of musty hardbacks and chipped glassware, it was mostly for the tourists from Palm Springs who passed through on the weekends.) But nearly everyone in town did at least some of their shopping locally. And everyone ate at the Sunrise now and then. This was true even of the Pentecostal families. Some of the older folks around the valley ate there every day. But not the Tuttles. They did 100% of their shopping out of town.
As word got around about this, and the stories piled up about their unfriendliness on the road, they came to be seen as a disappointment. All the talk about them buying the Henderson place, and the house going up, and the new driveway and fancy gate, turned to comments about arrogance, about being holier than thou. Not everyone in Manzanita got along. We had gun nuts, anti-government types, people who put up signs threatening to shoot trespassers on sight. At the south end of the valley, we had a hippy commune still hanging on with eight or nine members. We had a nudist. Everyone agreed that people were free to do what they wanted, but most people, not just my father and his rancher friends, felt a sense of community. We were out here, isolated, and had to rely on each other. The Tuttles, with all their money and their outbuilding full of tools, were seen as too stingy to ever lend a hand.
On top of all this, word went around that the son was a troublemaker. At church, he made noises during sermons, loud coughs and sneezes. The other parishioners thought they sounded fake. When he dropped his Bible—something he did too often to be accidental—he was slow to pick it up. He said things to some of the younger female parishioners that their parents didn’t appreciate.
Six or seven months after the Tuttles moved in, there was an altercation on their property. Not between them and a neighbor, or someone else in town, as you would have guessed, but between father and son. They got into a fistfight. A bad one. So bad that the mother called one of the other Pentecostal families, crying for help.
Several people from the church showed up. By the time they got there, the violence was over, but Mr. Tuttle had a gash over one eye, and a swollen cheek, and the son looked about the same. His shirt had been ripped nearly in half down the back. There were broken plates and food and silverware on the floor, and the glass of a cabinet had been smashed.
These days, a father punching his son might result in felony charges. At minimum, someone would be removed from the home, at least temporarily. But, back then, at least in Manzanita, this kind of thing was considered a family matter. Particularly among the Pentecostals. There was no talk of calling the Sheriff.
For a week or two, the fight was the main topic at Deirdre’s. More than a few people took pleasure in it. “Sounds like trouble in paradise.”
Despite what people felt about Mr. Tuttle, no one sided with the son. They were sure he was the problem. “They spent all that money keeping people out, and the real trouble is sitting right there at the dining room table.”
Having met the son, I understood the sentiment. But I also felt sorry for him. As far as anyone could tell, he had no friends and lacked the temperament to make any. Outside his hours at church, he spent all his time with his parents or alone at home. I wondered if he wasn’t going a little crazy over there.
Washing up after dinner one night, I shared this thought with my father.
As a rule, he shunned gossip. “Not my place to judge,” was his standard line. So we hadn’t talked much about the fight. But he agreed I had a point. “I think he just needs something to do,” he said. “Some purpose.”
“Sounds like the parents think that’s what the church offers. Purpose. But he ain’t buying.”
“Some don’t. I never did.”
“I’ll bet we haven’t seen the last of the problems over there.”
My father gave me a sideways look. “Don’t wish that on them. They’re a family. They’ll work it out.”
#
Isolation was something my mother had worried about. She grew up in Escondido, a bigger town just east of my father’s hometown, in a regular neighborhood with a park and plenty of kids. Her house was directly across the street from her elementary school and a few blocks from her high school. As much as she loved the open space of the valley and building an independent life, her concern was that, as an only child living miles from my school and from other families with kids, I wouldn’t learn to socialize. We’d inherited our land from my father’s Great Uncle Joe, a recluse who’d lived on it in an old pull-along trailer, hunting rabbits and growing his own food (and a good amount of marijuana) in a ramshackle garden. By the time someone from the post office noticed he wasn’t picking up his mail and thought to go check on him, he’d been dead for two or three weeks. My mother feared that, without conscious effort or countermeasures, the impulse that drove Great Uncle Joe to withdraw from society might take hold in me. I did, after all, share his blood, and was being raised where he’d lived, was walking the same ground.
If there was anything organized for the kids in town, my mother made sure I was there. These were small rodeos, 4-H meetings, town picnics. Once in a while, there’d be bike races in the field beyond the big corral that fronted the highway and carnival games in the community hall. The prizes were donated toys and dolls, old pocket knives, a paper sack of fresh cherries.
My best friend at school was a boy named Ty Murray. If nothing was going on in town, I’d be dropped off for the day at his house. We’d get up some game in the yard with his brothers and sisters, kick-the-can mainly, or dodgeball. If his father was changing the oil in his truck or jumping a dead battery, we’d stand watching. Or we’d just walk around the property, looking for arrowheads, maybe hang around in the barn, climbing hay bales. If Ty was told to check on a trough, or feed chickens, or gather laundry, or water the garden, I was expected to help. When my mother came to pick me up, she always stood for a few minutes talking with Ty’s mother. “Thanks again. I hope he wasn’t too much trouble.”
After Jefferson Elementary, which went to the eighth grade, I started at San Jacinto High. To get there, you had to be driven fifteen miles to Mountain Center to catch a bus that took you the remaining twenty miles to Hemet. My mother joined the group of mothers who carpooled, driving around the valley every morning, picking up kids or meeting the bus in Mountain Center to bring us home. She knew everything about the other kids, knew their parents and siblings, knew the classes they were taking and the kind of grades they got. When kids whined about their teachers or homework assignments, she offered gentle advice. “She’s doing her best. Teaching’s not easy.” Or, “You may not think you’ll ever need algebra. But who knows? May come in handy someday.”
On the day she died, in the middle of my sophomore year, one of the counselors stepped into my classroom and spoke quietly to the teacher. I was brought into the office and told that my mother had had an accident. My father was coming to pick me up. I was moved to a separate room to wait.
When my father walked in, accompanied by Mr. Edwards, the principal, he was pale, blank, and wouldn’t look me in the eye. I asked if my mother was okay, and he turned his head slightly, not quite a No, but not a Yes. He patted my shoulder. In the moment, I took this as a request for patience, to not ask more questions. But later I realized it was all he could do to keep from crying in front of another man.
On the way out, Mr. Edwards shook my father’s hand. “We’ll have you and your family in our prayers.”
My father, courteous as ever, forced a smile and nodded. “We appreciate that.”
My mother had been on her way down the mountain to get groceries in Palm Desert when she hit some ice on 74 and slid off. The crash wasn’t much of anything, but this was in the days before seatbelt laws and, in the case of her old Scout, seatbelts. They found her body about thirty feet from the vehicle, wedged into some rocks.
The next Monday, and every school day for the rest of the year, I was picked up at the foot of our road by one of the mothers and driven with the other kids to the Mountain Center bus. My mother was rarely mentioned. No one ever spoke of her accident. Mostly what I got were sorrowful smiles. The mothers sometimes asked how I was doing, and I would answer with “All right,” “Okay,” or something equally meaningless. I was dazed, dumbfounded. The world could walk right up and slap you hard across the face for no reason. You had no recourse.
My father’s reaction was to carry on. We had animals to tend, delivery contracts to honor. Other than being assigned some of my mother’s old chores—helping with the afternoon feeding, checking on chicks, cleaning pens—there was no talk of making big changes. We split the housework about evenly.
In the spring, I took over the garden. It had been my mother’s big project. When she and my father inherited the property, she spent days pulling weeds and dragging out old squash vines and dead corn stalks, and then months rehabilitating the soil with a compost of chicken manure and kitchen scraps. Pestered by frost and rabbits and the occasional rattlesnake, she cultivated lettuce, beans, tomatoes. In winter, she did broccoli and kale. I threw myself into fertilizing, choosing seeds and getting starters in. I didn’t go two days without weeding. I suppose the work was a way of keeping my mother’s memory alive. But I didn’t think of it that way, and certainly never said anything like that out loud. I was just focused on keeping it going, continuing to make good on all that she’d put into it.
“What would you think about not going back?” my father asked. We’d eaten dinner and washed up and were in the living room, watching a rerun of Hee Haw. Spring had bled into summer, and a new school year was approaching, so I knew what he meant.
I’d mentioned to him here and there that I wasn’t too happy at school. Ty Murray had dropped out—his father owned Murray’s Propane, and he was working full time, learning the business—and the kids who remained in the carpool were either a grade behind me or a grade ahead. Among all the Hemet kids at San Jacinto, who knew little of Manzanita or even where it was on a map, I felt like an outcast. I had a buzz cut and wore dress shirts from Penney’s. The popular Hemet boys, closer to the influence of the rest of Southern California, wore bell-bottoms and embroidered chambrays with long baggy sleeves, turquoise rings and silver medallions. They were trying to be Robert Plant or Gregg Allman. The girls ironed their hair straight to look like Joni Mitchell or Cher. Since my mother’s death, the sense of not belonging had gotten worse. I walked the halls in a private bubble of sadness.
“I hadn’t thought about it,” I said. This was true. I knew that one day I would have to make a decision about my life: whether to stay on the ranch forever and take it over when my father got too old, or head off and do something else. But I assumed that would happen after I graduated.
“It’s just been a real help having you around. Everything you’ve been doing. I’d start paying you a regular wage.”
Ty Murray’s dad had made the same offer to Ty. I wondered if he and my father had talked.
As unhappy as I was with school, I hadn’t given up on it. I thought the new year might bring a turnaround, that I might find a sense of connection and make new friends. “Can I think about it?”
“Of course. Big decision. Take a few days. I want you to be sure.”
I spent a week weighing things, but still couldn’t decide. My impulse was to continue with school. It’s what you were supposed to do. With a diploma, I’d have more options if I wanted to do something different one day. But I didn’t want to disappoint my father. I knew he was still hurting, that he needed companionship. Going back to school and leaving him to work the ranch alone five days of the week, returning that burden to him, seemed cruel.
“I think I’m going to stay home and help,” I said quietly, putting the dishes away one night after dinner.
“You sure?”
I shrugged.
He smiled and pulled me in for a hug. When he finally let go, he had tears on both cheeks.
#
I was on Perkins Road when I saw something on the asphalt, a pile of what looked like thin black branches. A few days earlier, we’d had a big rain. All across the valley, roads were flooded out, and vehicles were door-deep in mud. A woman on Werdmuller Hill lost her trailer home. My father and I got through it okay, but some rocks and debris came down the hillside above our property and took out a chunk of fence. We needed some two-by-six and a box of nails and a few other things, and I was headed down the mountain to the lumber yard. I’d driven the road a couple of times since the storm, so I knew the black branches were from something else. When I got closer, I saw they were pieces of the Tuttles’ gate. Someone had come blasting out from the inside. About two hundred yards up ahead, the Monte Carlo was pulled to the shoulder.
Steering around the metal, I drove forward. The Monte Carlo’s front left tire was flat, the windshield was smashed, and the front end was gouged and crumpled. Initially, I thought Mr. Tuttle must have had a brake malfunction and couldn’t stop at the gate. Or not noticed that the gate was closed. But, to do all this, he would have been going sixty or seventy, if not more. And the gate was always closed. I pulled ahead of the car and stepped out. As I approached, I saw that there was nobody in it. It seemed that, whatever had happened, Mr. Tuttle had either walked back up his driveway or been picked up by his wife.
Something moved in the scrub on the other side of the road. A figure emerged and came walking across the asphalt. It was the son. Gabriel. He had his hand out toward me. It took me a moment to realize he was pointing a pistol. His lip was split and still bleeding, and his nose was swollen. He was shaking, his eyes as wide as could be.
My hands were already up. “Easy, easy.”
“Give me your keys.”
I nodded toward my truck. “In the ignition.”
The pistol was a new-looking revolver, a .38 or a .357. He waved me toward the truck, and I walked ahead of him and opened the driver’s door.
He peered inside and saw something he didn’t like.
“Just take it,” I said. “It’s all yours.”
Gabriel locked eyes with me. “I can’t drive a stick. You drive.”
“Come on, man. Don’t make….”
He raised the revolver and pulled the hammer back.
I climbed in.
Holding the revolver on me, he walked around the front and got in on the passenger side. “Get me out of here.”
“To where?”
“Just go.”
I turned the ignition and pulled onto the road. Where Perkins meets North, I started to make a right toward town, toward the possibility of finding someone I might signal for help, but Gabriel yelled at me to stay straight. We continued on Perkins until it connected with 371, then turned left and climbed the ridge to the intersection with 74. I told myself he didn’t mean me any harm, that I was just a means to an end. But this didn’t slow the sweat coming out of my palms or quiet the pounding in my chest. “Can you stop pointing that thing at me? I’m doing what you want.”
“Shut up.”
Still not sure where we were going, I turned right on 74, aiming us down the mountain. A few cars passed in the opposite direction, but the highway, as usual, was mostly empty. Gabriel alternated between watching me and watching out the windows. Every minute or two, he whipped around and looked back, the hand with the revolver swinging with him, the barrel coming inches from my face.
Mr. Tuttle was dead. I was confident of that much. But it seemed the wife was likely still alive, just out somewhere. If not, Gabriel would have walked back up to the house and driven away in her car instead of waiting beside the road.
In the forested area just before the drop into juniper and creosote, we reached the spot where my mother went off the highway. After the funeral, my father and I placed a wooden cross and hung a wreath. The wreath was long gone—stolen, who knows why?—but the cross was still there, fading in the weather.
In the three years since my mother’s death, I’d passed the cross a hundred times. Either riding with my father or alone in my truck. We passed it on our way to get gas, or supplies for the ranch, or to see a movie, or get our teeth cleaned. We could have gone the other way out of Manzanita, west down to Temecula or Murrieta. They had grocery stores, at least, and gas stations. But not much else. And they were further away. So we always went down this way, to the desert and the places we knew. Sometimes we stopped at the cross and stood before it in silence. “We miss you,” my father might say, touching the center post. She wasn’t there, in that spot. He knew it, and I knew it. But it felt like she was. The air around the cross held images of her—laughing at something on television, putting pancakes on the breakfast table, waving at me as I walked toward her Scout after school. These and a thousand more. This is where she’d taken her last breaths. Where she’d left this world and gone on to whatever is next.
A week or so after her death, I was called into my counselor’s office at school and given a pamphlet about the stages and process of grief. It listed the stages—shock, anger, sadness, etc.—and described how each one might feel. After the final stage was acceptance and a renewed focus on the future. The last few times I’d visited the cross, I had the vague sense that I was lost in the stages, drifting between them in a fog but not getting through anything. The thought of leaving Manzanita, of creating a different future, still felt like a betrayal. Not just of my father but of my mother too. Of the life they’d dreamed up together.
“That was my mother,” I said. “The cross. That’s where she died.” I wanted Gabriel to know that my family had suffered tragedy, that we didn’t deserve more.
He glared as though I were trying some trick.
We passed through the last of the turns and coasted down the long sloping plain of wash and creosote into Palm Desert. The air was warmer here, heading for ninety. We approached the stoplight on Highway 111, the main east-west route, where other cars were waiting. I still didn’t know where Gabriel wanted to go, but on most of my trips down the mountain, I went left here—before the light if I was turning into the Safeway parking lot, or at the light if I was heading for the lumber yard, or the dentist, or Gemco. So I followed habit and coasted in behind the other cars in the left lane and stopped. Without a word, Gabriel climbed out, stepped to the car next to us and opened the driver’s side door. He pointed the revolver at the woman behind the wheel. “Out!”
She stumbled from the car, shrieking.
Gabriel climbed in, jammed the car in reverse, smashing into a red Datsun behind him, and used the right-hand shoulder to accelerate past the waiting cars. The Datsun driver, a forty-ish-looking guy with a heavy mustache, watched it all in shock. “What the…?!” At the light, Gabriel made a squealing left, just missing a pair of cars coming through from the east. A siren started up. It was a cop who just happened to be in the Safeway parking lot, watching for speeders. He bounced out onto 111, cutting off traffic, and raced after Gabriel.
I got out and checked on the woman. She was older, maybe fifty, in a sleeveless flowery shirt and matching shorts. Shaking and crying, she was taking odd limping steps as though she’d injured her leg. “Hot, hot,” she said, breathlessly. She’d come out of the car so fast that she’d lost a sandal, and the asphalt was burning her foot. As I helped her into my truck, the Datsun driver came striding over. He’d seen Gabriel climb from my truck and wanted answers.
I spat the story out in a rush.
He eyed me skeptically as I spoke, but when I finished, he nodded. “Get her over to the store and call the police. Tell them about the pistol. This might go all to hell.”
As I drove the woman across to Safeway, another cop car went by on 111, siren blaring.
Inside the store, a manager brought us into an office, dialed the police and handed me the phone. I explained my connection to the incident that had just happened—was still happening. When I mentioned the revolver, the dispatcher put me on hold while he relayed this out to the patrolmen. “He’s just a kid,” I added. Whatever Gabriel had done, I was feeling strangely protective of him. I didn’t want more violence. “Sixteen at the most.”
The woman took the phone from me and told her part. “Oh, thank God,” she said. She put her hand over the mouthpiece. “They got him.”
Gabriel had crashed the woman’s car about a mile away, at the intersection of 111 and Fred Waring. The dispatcher asked if we could drive to the scene.
When we arrived, a handful of cars were stopped in the lanes ahead of us, unable to pass through. I pulled to the shoulder. The woman was still without a shoe, so I told her I’d go find a cop and bring him back to the truck.
Approaching the intersection on foot, I saw the woman’s car. It had been hit hard on the rear passenger side and sat crossways in the intersection. Out a few yards from the front bumper, Gabriel lay on the asphalt, not moving. An officer stood near him, holding the revolver upside down by the trigger guard.
My body was pulsing with heat, my mouth was dry. I stood for a moment, trying to recover.
When I thought I could speak again, I raised a hand at one of the officers and explained who I was, told him I had the owner of the crashed car waiting in my truck. He asked me to hang tight, and a new cop arrived, this one in a shirt and tie. I repeated what I’d already told the dispatcher, and he asked a few more questions, getting the details straight and writing them in his notebook. He confirmed my name and phone number, explained that I’d likely be called for a longer interview, and then we walked to my truck so he could talk to the woman. As they sat, going through her story, I drifted back to the intersection.
Small crowds had gathered at each corner. Someone had covered Gabriel’s body with a sheet.
“You should have waited,” I said quietly. I meant that if he’d held on for just a couple more years, he could have walked down the driveway of his father’s house and hitchhiked off the mountain, down, away. To wherever he wanted to go. He could have taken a job, any job, picking oranges, working in a store, mowing lawns. He would have been on his own, and it would have been hard. But he would have been alive. Doors would have been open to him. He could have found out who he really was, separate from his parents, from their religion. He could have grown up and become his own person.
The day was growing hotter. Two officers were standing near me, doing nothing, watching the scene and chit-chatting. I asked them for the time.
11:30.
My father would be expecting me home soon, but I hadn’t even gotten to the lumber yard. I pictured him out in the pens, throwing feed, wondering what was taking so long, if something had happened to me.
