Windwhistle Bone

by Richard Trainor

  “Louie has a big foundation and he’s a lobbyist.”

  “That’s right up his alley. He goes where the green grows.”

  “Why have you become so disinterested in politics?”

  “That’s a good question. Let me think about that for a second while I pee.”

  I excused myself, went to the bathroom, and returned a minute later. It was beginning to grow dark, so I went back inside, lit two large candles, brought them out to the deck, and placed them between me and the reporter.

  “Let me tell you why that’s a good question,” I said finally. “I think that in the end, it was because I came around to the conclusion that it didn’t really matter, that in the end, it’s always the same, always was the same, always will be the same. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity and a chase after wind—you know the verses.”

  “Ecclesiastes.”

  “Exactly. That’s what I eventually concluded, and that’s why I don’t pay any attention anymore. In the end, what does it really matter? Last year’s Pontius Pilate becomes this year’s St. Just and the following year’s Rasputin and last year’s Louie Verde. It just goes on and on, and there’s never an end.”

  “So you don’t care anymore, and it’s hopeless?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Explain what you mean then.”

  I got up, walked to the corner of the deck, and looked across the canyon.

  “It was while I was on the Verde hunt that I became aware that, somehow, the whole equation had changed. A quantum shift had occurred. Maybe it happened in those years when I was down in Hollywood, chasing around after Vera and being a movie reporter or a pundit and entertainment industry groupie, or whatever it was that I was in those years. Maybe it happened while I was in France. But anyway, when I got onto the Verde trail, it became apparent to me that this kind of reporting was no longer encouraged. It had gone out of fashion. There’s a certain irony in that whole affair, because in one sense, I sort of came to while it was happening. Here I was knee-deep in muck and mire of every description—personal, marital, career, you name it—and this old sense of justice and righteous indignation and seeking after truth somehow gets reawakened… and, really, what was this big story really about? It was about garbage and how you can mine it to make billions of dollars… and this is my big story, and nobody else in the press corps is onto it, and then I found out why that was when I’ve already showed my hand. An old reporter named Tim Durkee, of the San Francisco Chronicle, and I are having lunch one day, and I tell him what I’m working on and that I’ve never seen many stories on the trash business before, and he tells me this,”There’s a good reason for that, Le Doir. Everybody in the press corps knows that waste removal is something you don’t touch because it can get you wasted and removed," but for me, it was like what I was telling you earlier about what motivated me to become a journalist in the first place—of being the people’s last line of defense… But the people had quit caring, and when I re-donned my crusader’s cape, my fellow crusaders had all fled the field—either that or joined the infidels or been killed in battle. Anyway, something happened. It changed, or I changed, something had anyway. I wasn’t sure what it was and I don’t know what it is now, because I haven’t thought about it since then. So, to get back to your original question of do I care anymore and is it hopeless, I’d say no. I cared too much and, no, it’s not hopeless, but it seems so sometimes… It’s somebody else’s turn now. It’s your turn, Kevin. You be the guy. I mean, look what happened to me when I took up Excalibur or, as we used to say, spoke truth to power. I lost everything I had and loved when I did that. So it isn’t really that I don’t care anymore. It’s more a question of: who else does?"

  “From what I understand, you put everything on the line with that story, all your money went into it, a whole lot of time, three years, right? And nobody would publish it, not the legitimate press anyway. You were alone on this, right?”

  I thought for a long moment before answering him. “Right.”

  “What kept you going?”

  “Faith,” I immediately answered.

  “Faith in what?”

  “In faith itself… What do you know about faith? Not what faith is by definition in Webster’s, but real faith.”

  “Well, I have faith in my sources, and I guess I have faith in my editors… most of them, anyway.”

  “I think you’re talking about trust; you trust your sources for the information they provide you; you trust that your editors will keep what you write and present it in the context you meant it… That’s not faith, that’s not what I’m talking about… Faith is something that defies logic; it has no rational basis, you can’t quantify it, and I don’t know if you can even define it in the way that I know it… It’s just a feeling, no, more than that, it’s an absolute certainty, and whether it’s in your God, or your wife or girlfriend or your golf clubs or your baseball glove or that the sun will come up tomorrow, doesn’t matter… You believe in those things, whatever they might be, because you have faith in them… Maybe you might not think you have it, but I’ll bet that somewhere deep inside Kevin Steadman, there’s a little well of faith… That’s what kept me going, on the Verde story and even more when I was in Misericordia… You can’t fake your way out of there; you have to earn your way out, and they’ve seen every trick in the book; some of the guys I met in there had been there ten years… I only had to do three before they transferred me to Fremont; they knew I was broken from the moment I got there, but I didn’t know that they knew that, didn’t even know how zeroed out I actually was… But somewhere inside me, I thought I would be free again… Why? It was because I had faith that I would be; no factual or rational basis for why I believed that other than my faith… In what? I really don’t know, but I had it.”

  He paused after making a note. “I think I see what you mean.”

  “You do? I wish I did, but it’s ineffable. I mean, if I was still reporting and I was asked to write a story on faith as I know it, it wouldn’t be an assignment I’d be eager to take on… kind of the spiritual flip side to the Louie Verde/landfill affair.”

  The reporter laughed and I joined him.

  “…garbage… fucking garbage that was hiding a multi-billion-dollar gold mine, who’da thunk it?” I said, shaking my head.

  The reporter and I waltzed around casually for the next half hour—him asking me lollipop questions about different personalities I’d known, places I’d been, stories I’d covered, and all such like. I could tell from his tone and the change in his body language that we were near the end of the interview and that he was out of questions except for the big ones. I let him twist a bit before bringing it up myself.

  “Look, I know why you’re here and what you really want to ask. And why Golden State Magazine sent you here. And that’s to ask me about Vera and how that happened and why I did what I did.”

  “Well, yeah, in so many words.”

  I was sitting down opposite him again. I got up, walked over to the railing, shook out a cigarette, lit it, and watched the stars.

  “Okay,” I said. “It’s like this, and you can do with this what you like. The facts are all established—based on court documents, public testimony, and police and forensic reports. Vera Dubcek and her lover died at the hands of yours truly in a rather brutal and ritualistic fashion. I was tried for it, found guilty, sent to prison, and subsequently set free on parole. Those are the facts and here are some of the leftover questions that really weren’t answered during the trial: Why did I do it? What was it that finally pushed me over the edge? If I had it all back to do over again, would I do the same thing? …was justice served? Why should I be allowed life when I took the lives of two others? …and a thousand questions more. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think of all these things, though for so long until recently, I pretended that I didn’t. What got into me? What was I thinking? Why did I kill the person I most loved and valued above all else and all others? Why a
m I still drawing breath? …I’ll be damned if I can come up with anything. But I’ll just say this and leave you to sort out what you want to do with it… That whole night is a long and frozen moment that every day begins repeating itself again; and it’s also a nightmare that never really happened. How can that be?—something that dogs my every move and clouds my consciousness and a movie that I heard about whose subject matter so revolted me that I chose not to see it? And it is truly both these things, and I was there and knew every move that I was making and made those choices and decisions, and the next moment, wasn’t there at all and can’t even imagine someone doing something that terrible. Which is it? And why is it both? Why did I let things go so far? Why didn’t I stop it?”

  “Well, since you asked, why didn’t you?”

  “I don’t know. I was exhausted, teetering on the edge of a nervous breakdown. Maybe I needed someone to blame for my total wipeout, and when I came on Vera and Jimmy, maybe saw her as the beginning of it. I don’t know. I spent years in Misericordia thinking about it and I never came up with an answer.”

  I took a drag and tossed the cigarette into the butt can. The reporter stood beside me at the rail. I took a breath, closed my eyes, and continued.

  “You know, it wasn’t until that happened that I found out something about myself, and I don’t know if there’s any greater application to it, or if it’s just a personal thing. But what I learned was this: that there comes a point where you really just can’t take anymore and you do lose control. There’s no way of knowing what that point is and when you’ve reached it. Why is it that last straw that breaks the camel’s back? Couldn’t the camel have sensed it three straws beforehand? Why is it now that I feel it and shouldn’t I have felt it before during that whole Louie Verde fiasco? …I’d pushed too long and too hard and had been running on fumes for what seemed like forever before the tank finally exploded. So, to get back to one of your other questions, or was it mine? There’s so many… Anyway, there’s no way she deserved it, that they deserved it, no way. Neither she nor Jimmy Shivers had it coming… And I wasn’t some righteous avenger that some of the right-wing tabloids seemed to suggest… But it’s something that I can’t take back, either; it’s done now and I have to live with it… Living with that is a hard thing to do; an almost impossible thing to do… Was justice served? You tell me, Kevin. It’s you and Golden State Magazine who get to be judge and jury now. And five years on, or five months after your story comes out, it’ll be someone else’s turn, and you’ll be on another story. But for me, it’s forever… So those are the facts and you can assemble them how you want to and write whatever story it is that you want to write and whatever you and your editors at Golden State Magazine want to publish. I won’t complain but I probably won’t read it. Use everything I gave you or use nothing, or make up your own version. It’s all the same to me. And it’s of no real significance anymore. I know what I did, and I know that I’m going to be judged for it by a far higher authority than Golden State Magazine. But you’d be doing me a big favor if you’d honor one request.”

  The reporter was looking down the dark hillside below us. He seemed to be sagging, his energy sapped.

  “I’ll consider it,” he said. “What’s that?”

  “I’d appreciate it if you kept the focus on me and what I did, and leave whatever grime you have on Vera out of the story. Her family has been through enough. They deserve the respect you can show them… Am I making myself clear?” I said, giving him the best around the bend creeper leer I could summon. It snapped into him just enough to register my intent, which I didn’t truly intend.

  “Sure,” he said. “I think I can do that.”

  I walked him out to his SUV. We stood alongside it and chatted. It was a moonless sky, the air wet with mist drifting in from the sea.

  “Will you be going to Tim Shaughnessy’s funeral?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t decided yet,” I lied. “Will you?”

  “I don’t know either. I don’t know if I need to. I mean, what’s here is plenty,” he said, waving the recorder.

  I laughed, smiled, and drew a breath.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “The recorder and what you have on it. I was thinking about this old interview I remembered reading and being really affected by… It was in Rolling Stone, a long interview with Keith Richards way back when—in 1972 or something like that. Anyway, the interviewer asked him some questions about the responsibility of artists and their lyrics. He asked if artists were accountable for what they said… something like that anyway. Keith had an interesting response. He referred to Dylan and ‘Visions of Johanna,’ and said something along the lines of, ‘Maybe the tape recorder didn’t pick up what Dylan said at the end of that take,’ and maybe he might have said, ‘Well, I don’t know or I don’t really mean that. Or maybe I’m wrong, or maybe I’m joking or something like that…’ In other words, how can an artist be responsible for the observer’s subjective reaction to a phenomenon whose motivation is uncertain, that maybe lacks sincerity or conviction? Maybe it was all a bad joke… I was thinking what you said about what you have on the tape recorder and what you saw and catalogued while you were here. Maybe what you’ve got is an accurate portrait of me or maybe it’s not. When I was in your shoes, I used to think about that when I got assigned to write a profile… I remembered one time at The Arbor, when I began to come around to the realization that I’d made a bad bargain by getting into journalism, that I was maybe in the wrong game for the wrong reasons. I was writing that profile of Barry Bailey, the boy wonder who was then about fifty or so and off on another crusade for the grail, running for some new office—Senator, I think. By then, journalism had become a by rote exercise for me; I knew how to do it professionally and could do a yeoman-like job of it. Anyway, what I did was I started the story in the middle and worked both ways—toward the lead and the close—at the same time. It worked, and Golden State ran the story just as it was after they had me insert some nonsense about how Barry would become president, which was absolute horseshit as far as I was concerned. It was never going to happen. When I made my deadline, I got up and walked around The Arbor and looked at all these wonderful possessions I had that journalism had given me—big stereos and TVs and artwork on the walls, a closet full of designer clothes—and I thought to myself: ‘What a load of shit. What does any of this have to do with my original motivation to write in the first place?’ I was thinking about that today as I was driving in from the beach.”

  The reporter was making notes while I talked. He stopped and turned on the recorder’s red light again and asked me to continue.

  “Okay, it’s like this,” I said, leaning down to draw a diagram in the dirt. “I was first a poet, and this was where I was and this was where I was going,” I said, drawing two points in the dirt and pointing to one. “And this was journalism over here,” I said, pointing at the other. “What I did was go off in this journalism direction, thinking that it would somehow get me closer to where I wanted to go, which was over here. So, instead of proceeding in a straight line—the shortest distance between two points—I went off at an angle to try and reach it… All that it did was take me farther and farther down that road into a wilderness that had nothing, or at least little, to do with my original destination. I wound up paying one hell of a price for going against my original intent… I got lost in that wilderness and I’ve struggled for years to get back to the place where I took the wrong fork, and I regret having done so. That’s about all I have to say.”

  The reporter shut off the recorder, gathered his things, and we walked to the door. We proceeded up the road to the bluff overlooking the canyon. When we got there, we stopped and I turned to look the reporter full in the eye.

  “Earlier, you asked me if there was anything that I missed about my days as a journalist, and I told you that there wasn’t. But now that I think about it, honestly, there are some things I miss. And here they are. I miss the cachet and ego
strokes that came from my being perceived as a hotshot. I truly do. I really liked that, and who wouldn’t? I miss the excitement of being on a big story that you had all to yourself. And I miss the freedom to travel about and come and go and do as I pleased, answering to no one—which was maybe not such a good thing for me in retrospect. I also liked the illusion or conceit, or deceit if you will, of believing that stories provided an accurate portrait of what really was, when, in essence, all they are is but one of many possible answers or portrayals. But what I miss most of all are my friends from that time, and the laughter we shared. I miss Wesley and Tommy B. and Phil Le Gris and Carl Buford, that old Welsh horse thief… God, did we laugh then… And, my, did we have ourselves one hell of a time… But in the end, meaning now, I’m grateful that it ended, that it’s dead now, because it was an unhappy time for me. It was based on falseness and delusion and I’m glad that it’s over. Maybe something else is possible for me again… but I wish it hadn’t come at so dear a price.”

  A few days later, I drove the back way to Sagrada that Shaughn first showed me thirty odd years before. I pointed east on River Road, driving through the Petrified Forest on St. Helena’s flank, then on through Calistoga and down the Silverado passing Fran’s old house along the way, the one I’d worked on during the Louie Verde story. “Adios,” I said aloud as I passed the house. Vaya con Dios, Fran."

  At the 128 for Berryessa, I turned left and drove east into the soft hills, rolling upwards as the road traversed them, cutting through the gullies and rising to the crests to dip yet again into another pocket, where beyond them, sheep and cattle grazed. I stopped at the Montecito Dam suck hole and watched it for a while, remembering the nights in college when we used to come here to drink beer, wondering if Shaughn had ever been there with us. I couldn’t remember if he had. Through Winters and Deerville I drove and then across the causeway above the fat brown river into Sagrada, its boxy, towered skyline now obscuring the Capitol dome almost entirely from view…