Windwhistle Bone

by Richard Trainor

  Now you were in an atrium-like chamber with a glass ceiling fifty feet above you. In the center of this room was an oval tiled fountain with water burbling out the top and lily pads floating in the pool at its base. Inside the pool were koi and frogs and crawdads and newts. On the walls of the atrium room were stuffed marlin and swordfish and barracuda and tarpon from San Luis Rey’s heyday, when it was the favorite resort of sporting fishermen and big game hunters. In the corner of the atrium, between the men’s and women’s bathrooms, and presiding over all this, was an eight-foot tall stuffed polar bear in full growl with paws upraised in a menacing gesture—“Old Icy” the Lotus regulars called him. And the regulars would be starting to assemble now at tables alongside the fountain, burning sticks of incense to camouflage the scent of the other things they were smoking. Soon, the Lotus ladies would begin strutting in, in groups of twos and threes throughout the afternoon, until the place was swelled to overflow capacity by 5:30, becoming an absolute din, with the tile amplifying the alcohol-infused laughter and conversations of the crowd, who’d party and plot and scheme under The Lotus dome until last call was called at 1:30.

  Ram remembered the first time he’d come here with Tor, right after he’d gotten back from Amsterdam. They were standing at the counter, sipping cans of Vernors, when a couple of scantily dressed twenty-year-olds sauntered by swinging their hips. “I love this place,” Tor said, grinning. “It gives me a perpetual hard on.”

  Ram got a cappuccino and bagel to go. As he was passing through the atrium, Milo and Phil were coming in through the hallway door.

  “Yo, Ram. Where you off to?” asked Phil.

  “Bracero. Tor has something he wants me for.”

  “You just get back in town?”

  “Yeah, I was in Mexico for a while.”

  “I heard about your old man. I mean, I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Thanks, Phil. Listen, I gotta go.”

  “You know about the party?”

  “I ran into Cisco. He told me.”

  “We’re gonna get together at The Union and shoot some pool first.”

  “If I can make it, I’ll be there. Are you coming, Milo?”

  “Wouldn’t miss it,” said Milo, pulling on his beard.

  “So until that time then, later, Milo.”

  “Later, Ram.”

  Ram sipped his cappuccino in the Roacho and watched the street scene on Meridian. The guy that locals called The Walker was out, barefoot, mumbling, and gesticulating. His hair and beard were getting long again: his clothes shabby and gritty. He’d be institutionalized again in a matter of weeks and when he reappeared six weeks later or so, he’d be freshly barbered, well-dressed, and shod. That would last for a few weeks, then he’d go off his medication and start his habitual descent into whatever hell it was that possessed him. Some said it was Vietnam. Others said it was drugs, manic depression, or schizophrenia. Whether he was harmless or not, nobody could say. The Venutian woman was out too, sitting in front of the bookstore, tarot cards at the ready, with a handful of crystals for sale on the table in front of her.

  Ram fired up the Roacho, put it in gear, and turned left on Mission heading north. He still had half an hour to kill and headed up the mountain road, past the tannery into the redwoods to the old logging towns like Deer Creek and Coyote, where Fran lived when his son Eli was born.

  There were maybe half a dozen towns in the south-facing canyons along the creeks draining the shaggy mountains and emptying into the San Gregorio. They weren’t really towns as such, for there were no community centers to speak of in them, although they were well-populated and the people who lived there shared certain beliefs and practices that qualified them as a community of sorts. Mostly, it was the dope-and-welfare crowd up there—a time-lock from 1970 or so, misfits and mal-adjusts, mavericks and malcontents, bizarros of one stripe or another from the Beat Generation on down; bikers and hippies, teachers and disciples, healers and dealers, scammers and schemers, disinherited heirs and heiresses, day laborers, craft workers, entrepreneurs and idlers: Canyon people. They lived in homes face-flush to narrow winding streets stepped back into the hillsides—tall narrow houses, eighty-foot three-story structures with four-car garages underneath and five flights of stairs running crazily up one side. Most of them were like that; others less so but similar. Gathered close to one another and looming above the creek-winding roads like they did, the hamlets had a certain hangdog look to them. Their range of expression ran from sunny melancholy to blissful morbidity to utter horror, depending upon the season and weather and the psychological chemistry induced by the chemicals or the communities’ collective energy, or even the redwoods themselves. That’s what another San Gregorio Indian told Ram one night at The Lotus. “Our people never lived up there,” he said. “We believe that the redwoods are holy, but they produce a gas that poisons the spirit.”

  Ram remembered the string of serial murders that took place in the San Gregorios in the late sixties and thought there might be something to the Indian’s theory. Three strings of murders in less than four years—all savage jobs. A doctor and his wife and daughter were the first ones, strangled to death and eviscerated, then thrown into their swimming pool with entrails trailing. The murderer was their handyman, blown away on acid and speaking in tongues of the Apocalypse to come. He showed up in court as a literal two-sided creature: shoulder length hair and long beard on one side, straight razor down to the skin on the other. Next up was the lumberjack killer who dismantled hitchhikers into cordwood-sized pieces and kept them stacked in a stinking pile in front of his altar in an abandoned mine shaft. Then it was the honors student who left the groves of academia for the advanced post-baccalaureate degree in rape and ritual torture, capping the spree with the decapitation of a baker’s dozen of coeds. All of them plied their trade along these roads, up in these canyons that now seemed sweet and benign with birds singing and sun burning dew off the leaves with the bright promise of spring.

  Ram drove the back way to Rancho Bracero, down the Empire Grade to Brigadoon and out through Willard Creek, pulling over past the bluffs above China Flat and watching the last of the salmon coming upstream to spawn. The once mighty runs had nearly played out but an occasional rose-colored back could be seen in the turbid waters.

  It was now in the spring and in the fall, when the light was most magical, that Ram liked it best up here, and in the summers when the temperature got up into the nineties, the deep shaded canyons were a mercy: cool and dappled and gladelike to the point where you almost expected fauns and naiads to appear. With the glorious and exalted light—shafts and motes and prisms refracted to pastel dots—it was an infusion of Redwood filtered honey.

  But in the winter, it was a different realm: misty and rainy, gray and smeared, points without reference in space, places that seemed placeless or misplaced; smoke rising from chimneys or open fires drifting into and darkening the migratory fogs and mists. The mountain chain itself seemed somehow unmoored from the earth, adrift in a world of mist and fog and smoke. Ram remembered from his history that it was in the winter when the settlers lost it and wandered up here to enter into madness. Perhaps it wasn’t coincidence that the serial murders always happened in the winter as well.

  But winter was behind him now, thought Ram to himself, as he looked upon the sparkling water and green-fronded banks of Willard Creek where a pair of salmon struggled toward their spawning grounds, up high on the creek’s headwaters.

  Fifteen minutes later, Ram was turning left off the highway into the driveway of Rancho Bracero. At the bottom of the drive, he pulled in next to Tor’s El Camino, killed the engine, and went up the steps to the old mess hall.

  Ram turned the dial on the combination lock on the front door and entered through the kitchen. There was a huge eight-burner gas stove and double oven with a stainless steel hood above it. Above the triple well sink was a shelf lined with canned food from Mexico that the Bracero residents found in one of the storage sheds. It was
dead quiet except for an occasional squawk from Clive, the African gray parrot, sequestered up front in Bill Bochs’s bedroom. Ram called out for Tor. He wasn’t here.

  It was called Rancho Bracero because that’s what it was—a complex of four simple warehouse-type buildings that housed and fed Mexican migrant farm workers during the 1950s. Then they outlawed the braceros and the complex was vacated, falling into ruin until some friends of Tor’s managed to get a hold of it a few years back. Now the mess hall had been converted into living quarters, with bedrooms and modern bathrooms, and a spa with a hot tub. The giant living room in this building was dominated by a vintage pool table with webbed leather pockets. Ram walked all the way through the converted mess, calling out for Tor, and when he was done, he went outside and around the building to the workshop in front where a Dodge Power Wagon caked with mud was parked. Through a crack in the door, Ram could see the arc light of the welder. It was Michael Dietrich working on a hologram and Michael hated disruptions, so Ram walked southwest to the rise and looked out over the fields of brussels sprouts on the headlands. The winds skirled a bit, and listening hard, Ram could hear the rhythmic sets of waves breaking on the beach. After a minute or two of concentration, he eventually heard a series of loud booms and walked off toward the cliffs where they seemed to be coming from. When he reached the path down to the beach, he saw Tor and another man far below him.

  By the time he reached them, Ram could see what was causing the booms. Tor and the other man were shooting pistols. Ram called out to them and waved so they’d stop shooting. When he was satisfied that they heard him, he ventured forward.

  “What are you guys doing?”

  Tor looked over at Ram and smiled. “Just a little target practice, trying out these new pistols of John’s here. Come here, man. Let’s take a look at you.”

  Ram approached across the sand, and when he reached them, Tor gave him a bear hug followed by three claps on the shoulders, his customary greeting for close friends.

  “Good to see you, Ram. You’re looking good. Bigger than the last time I saw you.”

  “That was Mexico.”

  “So how was it?”

  “Okay, I guess. I wasn’t really all there.”

  “I can imagine. You holding up okay?”

  “I’m all right.”

  “Hold on a minute. We’ll do one more round and then take it back to the house.”

  “What are those things?” Ram asked, in reference to the giant revolvers.

  “Dirty Harry Specials,” said the other man, a relative Endymion newcomer named Sam Candelaria. “Long-barreled .44 magnums.”

  Ram backed off to the side and watched them reload the revolvers. They stepped to their marks and discharged them at a human silhouette target fifty yards away.

  Candelaria was a burly, bleach-blonde surfer type and was mostly quiet although there was an unquiet air about him that was most apparent in his calibrated watchfulness. He stood apart and observed, rarely venturing comment…

  …Like Fran and Ram, Tor was from the south side of Sagrada, a suburban latchkey kid without a Dad. By the time he was ten, his two elder sisters were married and long gone. When he met Fran, Tor was wiry and red haired with a temper to match, and the world he’d been handed, of suburbia, with all its attendant dysfunctions, was so unpalatable to him that he turned aside from it and sought something other. He found it in Laurel Park, Sagrada’s black ghetto, where he met a black hipster named Neil Smith who befriended him and gave him reefer, a foil, and a Lenny Bruce record. After that, Tor found his own way until he met Fran.

  They were classmates at Sam Brannan High School, and when they discovered they had mutual affinities, they became inseparable. Ram remembered coming home from junior high school finding Fran and Tor and Conrad Neuer and Dale Hewitt and their girlfriends drinking Red Mountain burgundy and playing Bob Dylan, Dave Van Ronk, Sonny, and Terry and Ledbelly records, disappearing into the Le Doir family garage from time to time and coming back giggling.

  Unlike Conrad Neuer and Dale Hewitt, who tended to treat Ram as the annoying little brother whose presence was suffered when not exploited to serve them, Tor treated Ram more like a junior partner, which, in the Endymion Mad Dog group, Ram actually was. For this alone, Ram was grateful and it had been so for years now since long before Endymion came into being. Ram always felt he could talk to Tor, and he would listen to him, leaving his seniority out of the discussion and giving him sound advice whenever Ram asked for it. It was Tor whom Ram went to when he was seriously considering exile in Canada. They were sitting in the back of the cannery, above Monterey Bay, on the second-floor landing where the roller coaster began, watching Jaime and Jonas and Shaughn as they rode the Flyer down the ramp and across the floor. Ram confessed to Tor the confusion and anxiety he was feeling about the impending decision of exile, and Tor looked Ram dead in the eye and gripped his shoulder tightly. “I know just what you’re feeling. I felt the same thing when I went there in 1968. It’s not easy and there’s nothing I can tell you that’ll make it easy for you. There’s really nothing anybody can tell you. But it is simple, and I trust you’ll make the right decision for yourself.”

  Ram remembered when Tor came home to face his particular music. It was a bitter cold and rain-dreary December day in 1968, and Ram was sitting in his mother’s house on Goya Parkway when he heard an incessant beeping outside. He went out to see what it was and found Tor, seated on an idling Honda Dream 300, dressed head to foot in helmet, leathers, and poncho. Tor motioned for Ram to remove his helmet and turn off the motorcycle’s ignition, and Ram pried the helmet off. He had been riding all night, he said, in a sort of living rigor mortis that paralyzed him in place. Ram had to help Tor off the bike and out of his clothes. After Tor took a hot bath that allowed him to thaw out and become mobile again, they sat at the kitchen table and smoked a joint. Tor said he’d had enough of that rain forest on Salt Spring Island and he’d come back to turn himself in. The draft board sent him to a psychiatrist who certified Tor as mentally unstable. He was reclassified 1-Y, exempting him from military service.

  The following spring, Endymion got started with the Refugio store and Ram didn’t see Tor for two years until the time when Ram was about to go north…

  …Ram thought about this as they climbed the cliff and headed back up the inclining fields on the way to the ranch. It was good to have Tor back again, for Ram now felt he had a natural ally, uncomplicated by familial blood connections like it was with Fran. Tor had been on a six-month-long honeymoon in France with Suzie and was staying at the Rancho while he was looking for a new house for he and his bride. Suzie was still in Bandol with her father and wouldn’t be coming back for another six weeks, Tor said when they got back to the mess hall. Ram was getting restless, wondering why he’d been summoned back to Refugio and forced to cut short his Mexican sojourn.

  “So what’s this about? Why’d you send for me?”

  “Not yet, Ram. First, we feast and drink. Candelaria, bring it on.”

  For the next two hours, Tor, and Ram and Sam sat at the oil-skinned checkerboard mess hall table, drinking 16-ounce Budweiser’s, eating pickled peppers and dolmas, and chasing it down with shots of Mezcal. After three rounds, Tor produced a Vicks inhaler imitation filled with cocaine and they passed it about. The conversation was becoming looser, more animated and free-associative, the laughter more uproarious. They told out of school tales of all the Endymion mad actors and players, from the beginning on down—from Sagrada to Refugio to Cannery Row and up to the present; of Bochs and Doc and Lowball Joe and all the hot ladies and the dearly departed; the history of the whole renegade band and many of its darker secrets. As Ram sat opposite Tor and watched him, he thought this was one of the things he most appreciated about Tor and how unlike Fran and more like himself Tor was. Both Tor and Ram had an affinity for openness and expansion, unlike Fran’s penchant for privacy and contraction.

  Tor rose from the table, went to the cold storage locker
and retrieved three beers.

  “Candelaria, we’re in need of reinforcements. Here’s a twenty. I buy, you fly.”

  Sam groaned, got up and put on his Levi jacket. He looked between Ram and Tor trying to read something more into this than being dispatched on an errand. Ram and Tor looked back and smiled. Candelaria went out the front door, started his Jeep, and peeled away up the rocky drive.

  “Here,” said Tor, firing two blasts from the Vicks inhaler and passing it to Ram. “Let’s shoot some pool.”

  Ram racked a triangle of nine-ball, grabbed a cue and chalked it. Tor knocked in the four-ball on the break and kept shooting.

  “I got some good news for you,” he said.

  Tor knocked the one into the corner and lined up a cross bank on the two. “It’s two things really. Your brother’s coming in this afternoon. We’re meeting him at four at the new shop and then heading out for Mexican. The other news is that I’m making you crew chief and giving you a raise. Fran says you’ve earned it and I agree. How does $7.50 an hour sound?”

  Ram was stunned. He looked at Tor, mouth agape, wondering when Tor would start laughing at the practical joke. Tor looked back evenly.

  “Sounds great,” Ram said finally.

  They shook hands on it, hugged, and passed the Vicks inhaler in celebration.

  “Okay. You’re crew chief now. Don’t make me regret it, Ram.”

  Later that afternoon, they drove back to Refugio in Tor’s El Camino. They passed the chewing gum factory and were almost inside the city limits when Tor turned right and entered a parking lot in front of a two-story industrial building. He stopped at one on the end. A new Cheyenne pickup was parked out in front. Tor got out and slid one of the two large metal doors to the side and entered.

  It was a cavernous space of maybe 5,000 square feet, framed with old 8/4 redwood sheeted over in corrugated tin. The concrete floor was so old and worn that it had been polished smooth and shiny. The roof was thirty-five feet above their heads, and from the ceiling joists, dangled a number of pneumatic tubes for nail guns and air drills. A giant De Walt radial arm saw was against one well with twenty-foot wooden tables to either side. Along the opposite wall was a drill-press, a doweling machine, and a brand new six-foot-long joiner. In the middle of the large room, a hum was coming from a giant Oliver band saw, in front of which stood Fran adjusting its guide fence and tapping it into place. When he was satisfied with the measurement, he picked up an eight-foot-long redwood 1 by 6 and re-sawed it to half its thickness. He checked the width of the new slats with his tape measure as Tor and Ram looked on quietly. Fran was completely absorbed by his task and lost to everything else.