Annie could spin dreams, and she soon had them dreaming that they had won the lottery.
There had been Franklins in the house for a long time—for California, damn long. In 1856, great-great-great-grandfather Franklin bought two thousand acres of the old Rosa Castilla Rancho from a man named Mr. Suiter. He didn’t own the Rosa Castilla, but that sort of thing mattered less in those days than it does now. He made sure that no heirs of Juan Ballesteros were going to be in any position to challenge the deed he’d had run up at the engraver in Los Angeles.
For the next hundred years, the Franklins had made efforts to make money with the land. They’d farmed it, raised cattle on it, raised sheep on it, and rented pieces of it out to others who couldn’t figure out how to make money on it either.
Juan Ballesteros had made money on it because, being a Spaniard by ancestry and a Sonoran by birth, he knew a few things about running cattle on dry land, which he had declined to convey to the thieves who had stolen his rancho.
He packed up his family and left, moving slowly southward along the cruel roads. Reaching Monterrey at last, so tired and forlorn, he died. They buried him deep, but the coyotes dug and dug.
The second generation of Franklins had ended up sitting in their great house staring out at the rolling hills covered with dry, pale grass and stubby little trees, drinking bourbon and spinning poetry.
Money, which had been plentiful in 1856, grew very slowly tighter and tighter. Professionally speaking, the Franklins thought of themselves as poets. They were cultured in the sense that they read magazines like Harper’s and Leslie’s. They thought their poems very good, but the editors thought them very bad. The bourbon helped with this. Then they died and another generation came along who did the same thing. One of them published a poem, fantastically enough, in California Verse.
During the next generation, the automobile was invented and Los Angeles began to creep toward the ranch, bringing with it a mixture of hope and horror. In the 1950s, the value of the land began to increase. Here and there, the line of the rolling hills far to the west changed. As the sun dropped down behind them, their lines were no longer smooth, but ragged. These angles were the rooftops of the housing developments.
Every few years now, the Franklins reviewed the official valuation of their property. It was always higher, then higher still.
They waited, wrote in the bulging family poetry journals, ate as little as they could and sold furniture, jewels and the now valuable antique clothing of their ancestors, which was kept in cedar trunks in the basement.
In 1977, young Tom and his apple-faced new wife, Norma, began selling off the ranch not just in lots but by whole sections. They bought Oldsmobiles with the proceeds, new clothing and jewelry, and they ate more elaborately. They hired a cook, Gloria Williams, but she quit on the theory that they were insane.
In June of 2001, building began on the last section, right up by the old pumphouse. This section of forty houses—or “homes” as developers so absurdly call them—was the last of Franklin Ranch.
One might have thought this a relief—the income and all—but how were poets like the Franklins going to write poetry in the middle of a housing development? Cars glided past, voices rose and fell, children shrilled, dogs careened around barking and the whole place smelled like barbeque. Worst of all, faces, blankly smiling, peered out of the car windows as they went past the enormous old house with its wide porches and tall windows. Once, horribly, a woman who smelled like the interior of Nordstrom’s and dressed like one of the Avon ladies who sometimes hiked up the hill, came simpering along and asked if she could see “the interior.”
While Norma stood in the doorway blocking the woman, who kept trying to peer around her, Tom went and put on his great-grandfather’s gunbelt, which still hung on the hat rack in the study. The hundred-and-fifty-year-old Colt Peacemaker was gigantic. Intending to settle the woman’s hash, he went stomping down the great central hall roaring, “Norma, who in hell—” But at that moment, his voice was drowned out by a series of thunderous reports.
As he lurched around screaming, wreathed in smoke and surrounded by fountains of sparks, Norma didn’t know what to do, so she offered the woman coffee. There was too much noise and smoke for her, though, and she stayed on the porch, still peering in, now trying to take a picture of the inlaid ceiling (clouds and angels) with her cellphone.
The gunpowder in the ancient bullets had long since become unstable, and the shaking involved in Tom’s stomping down the stairs had caused it to explode.
When the woman pointed the camera at her, Norma threw a spittoon. The woman caught it and offered fifty dollars for it. Norma then ran past Tom, who was collapsed in a chair smoldering and bleeding, and got the poker from the hearth. As she went at her with it, the woman offered two hundred dollars for the whole fireplace set that had been in the family forever.
Norma did the deal on the spittoon but not the fireplace set, and the woman left.
Tom never fully recovered from his injuries which, while not grave, were disquieting. One of the bullets had grazed his cheek, ripping out an inch-long gap that exposed his teeth on the left side. Once he was back from the emergency room, he had to carry a sponge to keep the teeth moist. When the bandages were removed, he looked as if his face had been partially skeletonized. You could see all the teeth stretching back from the corner of the lips to the wisdoms.
He was very fastidious and so very upset. He tried covering it with duct tape, but then he couldn’t chew. Finally a plastic surgeon called Dr. Chou decided that he might be able to help. Four grafts and six surgeries later, he appeared to be wearing a permanent ecstatic grin, but only on the left. He hated that woman so much that he bought a new gun and prowled the streets with it, peering into windows late at night, doing “prep,” as he called it. He never saw her again, though. Norma was privately convinced that it had been Angelina Ballesteros, the wife of the man from whom the ranch had originally been purchased. A ghost.
Not only had they spent like the dickens, Tom and Norma had also invested unwisely, buying at the top and selling at the bottom with the inevitability of a misfiring piston. So, despite the income from the new development, they were again pinching pennies.
Broke, oppressed, partially dismantled and completely disgruntled, they began searching for a way out.
A year passed, then two, until one day they found that they had no money at all, not a cent, and no credit. They were done. With tears in his voice, Tom told Betsy Flagg, the Franklin Ranch realtor, to sell the homestead.
People trooped in for a week. One of them, in fact, was Annie. She went through the whole house peering and sniffing. Nobody saw her steal one of Norma’s scarfs and one of Tom’s hankies. She was very quick about things like that. From behind the banister of the great staircase, she peered at the Franklins a long time. They were in the living room drinking and writing as usual.
The next day, of all the damned things, Norma won a hundred and fifteen million dollars playing Mega Millions. The night before, Annie had laid on the roof with Sister Mercy of God and discussed the application of salt to flayed skin. It had been a fascinating discussion—for her, that is. Sister had gone politely off to her cell and vomited. Annie had gone down and cradled the scarf and the monogrammed hankie as if they were a pair of baby Franklins.
That night she spread the scarf and the hankie out on her dresser, then once again wove on the loom of life with her quick fingers. She did this each night for a week. During this time, Tom and Norma became increasingly disconsolate. They should have been ecstatic, but their acquisition of infinite wealth seemed to have exposed a deeper need, which was the desire for children.
The Franklins appeared at the Home. The girls were paraded before them, each one putting herself on display to her best advantage. They recited their academic accomplishments, revealed their sensible and noble ambitions and sparked their eyes with hope.
Every human being wants to go home, and orphans even m
ore. But where is that? To the orphans, any place with one’s own room and two parents—not a flotilla of nuns who were becoming more eccentric by the day, as witnessed by the fact that they had decided to go into cheese making and were having a cheese house built on the grounds, and bellowing at each other over dinner about the relative commercial merits of cheddar, gouda and Stilton.
Annie came in. She had as always a cigarette between her fingers. She was wearing a slash of lipstick. When she saw Tom with his fantastic grin, she laughed raucously and blared out, “Boy do you look like an asshole! What’d you do, eat a cherry bomb?” Annie enjoyed firecrackers. She believed, like the Chinese, that they scared away evil spirits. Actually, she knew. They scared the hell out of her, anyway, but she couldn’t stay away from them. Love hate.
Even while the adoption went forward, Annie moved in with Tom and Norma.
The sisters had begged her to stay, but she had been resolute. She was just a kid. She needed parents, a home, a future. The other girls, wild with jealousy, had plotted to hang her by the neck. She had gotten out of there on the afternoon before the plan was to have been executed.
The Franklins knew without even inquiring that Annie was not going to work out in public school. They hired a tutor called Mr. Thomas Thomas (not his real name, of course).
Annie and Mr. Thomas Thomas spent hours whispering and snickering together in the library where there were prized books of poetry, two more spittoons, and a cat called Catatonic because she so infrequently stirred. There was also a canary that shrieked in terror, but at what?
They proposed a plan to the Franklins, who clapped with delight and nodded eagerly. Mr. Thomas Thomas began going from house to house, striding along in his best black sharkskin, ringing bells and generally being let in.
Now, these were nice homes. Comfortable. Some of them were pocket mansions complete with faux marble floors in the foyers. In the driveways were Lexuses and Mercs and Beamers, even a Bentley here and there. Couple of Maseratis. The local schools regularly won everything.
Gradually, as the smiling man went round, the houses emptied. No hurry, one by one.
It seemed rather curious to Jake and Mike and Terry and Merry that so many properties were being abandoned.
When they looked in the local real estate listings, they did find a few sales—not many—which were also rather curious in one particular respect: the dollar figures had to be wrong. People were selling million dollar plus situations for the low hundreds. In fact, because of the low comps, both of their own houses had dropped in value by more than half in just a year.
Who the hell was this guy, coming in here and ruining lives?
Mike and Merry had been counting on pulling out some cash with a refi. Now, that would be a no.
Was some cartel going after folks? The Chinese mob? Who in the world would cash out and walk away from a million dollar home in a seller’s market, as this one certainly was?
The conclusion was inescapable—the owners were being leaned on by the sharkskin suit. Homes were being stolen.
Naturally, they were concerned, Jake the most. But not because he feared the suit. He could sell a man his own watch. No, his concern was that he wanted to steal homes, too. How was it managed? What was the smiling man’s secret?
“Hey, holy shit, look at this one,” Terry said as the windy evening was turning into a windy night. She handed her phone around. The Upchurches had just sold 10 Sylvan Lane for eighty grand. This was a four-bedroom five-thousand-square-foot masterpiece. The garage held one of the community’s Bentleys, in fact.
They’d been toking and so were feeling both affable and kind of spinny. They were not in anything even approaching what might be called a confrontational state. Nevertheless, Mike said, “Let’s walk the hell over there and see what we can find out.”
Franklin Ranch was not a sidewalk sort of place. Fifty miles from downtown though it was, this was still in Los Angeles and the city was not going to be dropping sidewalks into a new development where everybody drove everywhere anyway.
But this was different, so they walked. Tell the truth, it was a little scary. A listing like that had to have major coercion behind it. There are plenty of gangs in LA, well organized, intelligently run and extremely dangerous. And then, of course, there were the scurrying rats.
Then they stopped. Stunned. “What in hell?” Mike said.
They hadn’t even gotten to the end of their own street, but this was just damned incredible. The Pearson place, four thousand square feet, pool, three beds, worth about a million two, was being torn down, and right now, right in the middle of evening.
To get to shopping and work, they all turned left on Yucca Valley Road, but now looking to the right beyond the Pearsons, they saw that the entire block, all the way up to Republican Lane, had been leveled.
A few of these houses were thirty years old, true, a few even forty, but most of them were much newer and all were in great shape, or had been. To add to the group’s discomfort, the wind was becoming annoying, blowing dust along the street from the teardowns.
“Fuckin’ A,” Jake said. “No way. Just no way.”
“Is this the gummint,” Mike asked the wind. “Gonna build some kinda rocket base out here? Beatin’ up people…”
“Mob,” Terry said.
As they returned to Mike and Merry’s backyard, the guys noticed that the girls had become uncharacteristically quiet.
Merry brought out lemonade and crullers, and Mike rolled some more tokes.
Everybody sat around smoking and eating and drinking and watching the stars race in the clouds.
They were right at the edge of the development, and their yards backed onto a slope and went down to Franklin Creek, which was lined with willows. It was a breezy, high spot, very pleasant when the Santa Anas weren’t acting up. You could get fifty mile an hour gusts then.
“Confession,” Terry said.
Mike and Jake looked at her. Merry’s lips went into a set line. “Terry,” she said, warning in her voice.
“No, it’s time.”
“Don’t!”
“What,” Jake asked. He reached toward his wife. She leaned away from him. He dropped his hand.
The four of them often did it together. In fact, they were more a foursome than two separate couples. Golf, too. Golf and sex. But the marriages were managed separately.
“We sent him away,” Terry said.
“With our pistols,” Merry added.
“Holy Christ,” Mike said, “who?”
“And what pistols? We have no pistols.”
“Yeah we do,” Merry said lightly. “We bought Casull Raging Bulls.”
Jake toked deep, held it, then released in a slow cloud. “What kind of bulls? What?” The cloud drifted off on a wind that was now just short of a gale.
From off down by the creek, a voice drifted up, a little girl’s voice. She was singing in a reedy tone, “Blow ye winds of morning, blow ye winds hi ho, blow ye winds of morning, blow, blow, blow.”
Terry leaped to her feet. “NO!” Both girls rushed into their separate houses. They reappeared immediately with huge chromed cannons in their hands. The Casull Raging Bull is a very serious weapon. It’s the sort of thing that will make a predator with a .357 Magnum fall to his knees and gabble for mercy.
They raced past the guys to the end of the yards, scattering rats as they ran.
“Jesus! Hey, Merry!” Mike got up so fast his chair flew into the side of Jake’s Merc in the driveway.
“You nicked me, buddy!”
They both ran after their women.
“Blow ye winds of morning, blow ye winds hi ho, blow ye winds of morning, blow, blow, blow.”
The women stood on the brow of the hill, took stances, braced their weapons and began blasting away.
Birds burst up out of the shattered quiet.
“Holy God, our little crazy kid’s down there, Orphan Annie!” (Now that she was no longer an orphan, that’s what everybody in
Franklin Ranch called her. This was because she used to wander around in a red dress. In fact, maybe she was the real Orphan Annie. If there ever was one.)
The kids in Franklin Ranch had tried to befriend her, some of them. When she smiled, they saw spiked teeth.
“Hey, what’s with the spike job?”
“Go fuck yourselves.”
They decided not to befriend her. At night, wandering the development, she would peer in windows. Pissed off residents would try to chase her away but they couldn’t because she was always gone.
As the guns fell silent, Merry cried out, “Did we get her?”
“Blow ye winds of morning, blow ye winds hi ho, blow ye winds of morning, blow, blow, blow!”
“Oh, God, oh, God,” Terry wailed.
Jake caught up to her and whirled her into his arms. “What in hell’s the matter, girl!”
“Yeah, hey! Come on, give us those cannons, Jesus Christ, where’d you get ‘em?”
“Walmart,” Merry said.
Terry moaned. “Just like he said, you kill her but she doesn’t die.”
“Who wants to kill a kid, honey, holy moly! Thank God you missed!”
“Sharkskin said she was unkillable.”
Terry looked the husbands up and down. “You’re just a couple of innocent boys.” She took her husband’s slack-jawed face in her hands. “Poor guys.”
Merry announced, “The Sisters of the Holy Sepulcher are corrupted and the Catholic Home is an outpost of hell. Annie’s not human. Annie’s something else. The Franklins sold themselves to her.” Merry folded her arms.
“What?” Jake said. “They adopted her.”
“Somebody make fucking sense,” Mike yelled. “One of you!”
As the evening light rose into the howling sky, Annie could be seen sitting like a Buddha atop one of the trees that lined the creek. She was mostly silent, just laughing a bit from time to time. She had stopped with the tuneless singing.
Terry gazed up at her. “It doesn’t matter. She can do whatever she pleases. It’s why kids used to see her looking in their bedroom windows even though there was no ladder.”
The Demons of King Solomon Page 10