by James, David
Alex looked at me as if I had told him that our family ate bugs.
“Noooooo!”
“I never told you about that one? I took a picture of her with my Brownie camera, but my mother tore it up when I got the prints back from the developer. She thought it was in bad taste.”
“And climbing into a coffin to pummel your dead husband isn’t?”
“Grandma was a little headstrong. Grandma once told me she killed a Cossack with her bare hands. . . . Well, to be precise, she claims she hit him in the head with an ax, which split his skull in two . . . just like a melon . . . she would say, cackling. Every time she sliced open a melon for us for breakfast, she would tell us that story, laughing as the melon parted under the blade of the knife and the two sections rolled around on the table. Sometimes she put the two halves back together in front of her face, then parted them suddenly to reveal her face. It’s no wonder I would wake up screaming some nights.”
“Are you sure your family name wasn’t Manson?”
Coyote Woman, having had a short time to recompose herself, continued asking for energy from every conceivable planetary body, rock, animal, insect, and multicellular creature, then admonished us to feel the positive energy of the universe, which I felt was about the same as asking someone to visualize whirled peas.
Coyote Woman, the handprint of her attacker still visible on her left cheek, sat down and was replaced by a white boy with Rastafarian hair who launched into a tirade against developer Marvin Sultan as being responsible for the death of Doc Winters. This utterance was greeted with nods from many of those in attendance. The idea wasn’t lost on me. Or anyone else in town, either. Marvin seemed the natural assassin, since he and Doc Winters were thorns in each other’s proverbial sides. Doc had caused endless delays to Marvin’s plans to develop a neighborhood in the Chino Cone. Doc’s pièce de résistance was getting enough signatures to place the issue on the ballot in the November elections, just a few weeks away.
Marvin’s troubles began long before he announced his plans for Marvin Gardens, his prize neighborhood of three-million-dollar-plus homes in the Cone. Marvin had a long history of being associated with heinous crimes that benefited him greatly. Besides razing a historic Richard Neutra home in Rancho Mirage in order to build a hideous tract mansion in its place, Marvin engineered a dastardly coup that gave his Bel Air home unfettered views of downtown Los Angeles, when previously it had limited vistas blocked by the trees on the property of one Edward J. Lamston, and his wife, Claire. By a mere coincidence, when the said neighbors were away in Barbados with their servants, a crew of gardeners chopped down all the trees that stood in Marvin’s way. When the Lamstons found out about the deforestation of their property, the lumberjack gardeners defended their actions by claiming that they received a call from none other than Edward J. Lamston himself. Indeed, the police, when investigating the matter, looked on the cellular phone call log on the head gardener’s phone, and lo and behold, the call had been placed from the Lamstons’ home phone number. Stranger still, the payment for the gardeners’ job was left in a potter’s shed on the grounds—all $25,000 dollars of it—in cash. The papers had a field day with the incident, with the majority of its readers rightly coming to the conclusion that Marvin paid a telephone lineman to place a call from a neighborhood switching station to make it appear as if the call came from the Lamstons’ home. Someone also opened locked gates to the Lamston estate, beckoning the gardeners in to do their dirty work.
In the end, the gardeners took the fall for the deed and Marvin got off scot-free. Well, Marvin got his view, but most of Southern California had made up their minds about Marvin. In fact, readers voiced their opinions in countless letters to the editor pages, placing guilt squarely on Marvin, and with most making the logical change in his last name, from Sultan to Satan. The name stuck.
Our Rastafarian eulogizer went from castigating Marvin to calling for the abolition of all Humvees in Southern California. When our speaker mentioned Hummers, I recognized him immediately. He was none other than Lance Talbot, the head of the People’s Army for the Liberation of the Earth, or P.A.L.E. for short. His organization spent their time liberating animals from testing labs, handcuffing themselves to trees in Northern California and Oregon, and throwing pies in the face of industry CEOs like Bill Gates of Microsoft and CEOs of oil firms. Mostly, P.A.L.E. got minor news coverage, but when thirty-six Hummers were torched at an Orange County car dealership in Newport Beach, the spotlight was directed at Lance and his cohorts—all of whom denied any involvement in the act. The police and the FBI built a flimsy case against the organization, but somehow, this ragtag group of eco-terrorists hired high-profile defending attorney David Stuart, called the Great White Shark because of the way he tore apart his prosecutor’s cases, and the fact that his hair was a shocking white, even though he was just barely 43 years old. How a grass roots group like P.A.L.E came up with the money to hire Stuart is still a mystery, but soon after the case was dismissed, people began to realize that ecologists now had well-heeled friends in high places. This led me to scan our well-dressed mourner in the front row. The connection seemed to strengthen in my mind.
Our speaker was replaced by a succession of people, all pretty much spouting the same idea: that Doc was killed by real-estate developers, namely, Marvin Sultan. What I found interesting was the ferocity of the speakers. These were passionate people, people who were clearly angry and more than capable of committing just about any act to defend their beliefs. Would they kill for them? I wouldn’t put it past them.
“I feel like a lamb amongst the wolves,” Alex whispered to me.
I knew how he felt. Here we were, two real-estate agents, whose main income derived from selling land and houses. We both belonged to the Sierra Club and the Nature Conservancy and donated heavily, but some of the friends surrounding us might not think us so sympathetic to their causes. In actuality, both of us intended to vote against Marvin Gardens come that first Tuesday in November. Why not? The one thing that made Palm Springs so special was its small-town feel and its pristine mountains. If we didn’t do something soon, Palm Springs would look like Phoenix.
Alex continued his train of thought, “Let’s just keep the fact that we’re Realtors our little secret, huh?”
“Good idea.”
The last speaker was introduced as Monica Birdsong, Doc’s “life partner.” This was a surprise to me since I was told Doc didn’t have girlfriends. Monica was not what I’d picture as the quintessential girlfriend of an activist environmentalist. This woman shaved her armpits. She wore tight spandex that wasn’t stretched over bulging stomachs like sausage casings. And her hair was, well, big and brassy. And her tits were so rounded and prominent, they were like two flesh-colored grapefruits glued to her chest. Monica fell squarely into the category of bimbo. Hands down.
“I think I’ve developed a buzz from all the secondhand pot smoke.” Alex pointed. “I’m seeing things.”
“Do you see a bimbo?”
“Yes, I do. I don’t get it,” Alex remarked. “What’s wrong with this picture?”
While we were sitting there in stunned amazement, Monica dropped another bomb: She opened her mouth. Not that what came out was any different that what we expected, but when we heard it, we were still stunned. Monica’s voice fell somewhere between a terrified parrot being stomped to death and Betty Boop.
“My ears must still be pretty good. I would’ve bet that only dogs could hear her.”
“Oh my God, I don’t believe it,” was all I could muster.
Monica, after thanking everyone for coming to remember the life of Doc Winters, said that there was little she could say. She then unfolded a piece of paper and told us all that she had written a poem that expressed her feelings. I wished I had brought a tape recorder, and after I heard her verse, I kicked myself that I hadn’t.
Today, I’m sad,
When I should be glad,
Doc’s spirit is free,
&n
bsp; To soar among the breeze,
Oh birds, take care of him,
Let him spread his wings,
Like the dove
To fly, to see things
That I can only dream of.
So fly, fly away,
Across the mountains, across the sea,
I’ll think of you each day,
As I watch the birds and sip, my coff-ee.
What I did next surprised even me. I starting snickering—I just couldn’t help it. Monica was the classic bimbo reading a classic bimbo poem. In fact, Monica’s verse was better than anything in Suzanne Somers’s poem about bedwetting in her seminal book of poetry entitled Touch Me. I fought the waves that convulsed my body, but it was a lost cause. I decided to try and steer the snickers until they sounded a little like crying. Indeed, the tears were streaming down my face, but they came from the way Monica broke the word coffee for dramatic effect. Shakespeare would have been proud.
I was attracting some stares from our neighbors, so I hung my head and dabbed at my eyes with a tissue to give the effect of being devastated. From the moment Monica finished, the crowd fell eerily silent, which I chalked up to her poem. I couldn’t look up, because if I saw Miss Birdsong again, standing there in her spandex, the floodgates would have turned into gales of laughter . . . there would be no stopping me. So I chose to keep my head down and try to make my shudders look like out-and-out crying. Just as I thought I had the situation under control, the chorus of drums thundered up again, causing me to laugh all over again.
And that was it. The memorial service was over. Not with a bang or a whimper, but with a guffaw. Alex stood up and surveyed the crowd.
“How did you keep from laughing all that time?” I asked Alex.
“I thought about dead kittens.”
“Cheater.”
“I’ve been watching the crowd and I think we should meet with one or two people.”
“Monica?”
“Check . . . if you promise to behave yourself. Remember, think of dead kittens.”
“I got it . . . something to make me sad. Me, I’d like to talk to Coyote Woman. I want to know if that crazy woman who slapped her is Eagle Feather. Come to think of it, since I’m going to have this woman cleanse my house of evil spirits, I think we need to know a little more about these cactus huggers.”
“Just what I was thinking. And I want to know who that woman is with the million-dollar wardrobe.”
“Why don’t we split up, Alex? You hit the bimbo and I’ll get the woman with the crystals. We’ll meet back here at eleven hundred hours. Check?”
“Check. Watches synchronized.”
Alex trundled off in search of his prey and I pounced on mine. As I approached Coyote Woman, she stepped back suddenly, raising her arms slightly. Coyote Woman was gun-shy, and rightly so.
“Coyote Woman?”
“Yes?” she replied, sounding halfway between a smile and a grimace.
“I’m Amanda Thorne . . . the Realtor . . . you called me the other day, offering your services to cleanse the evil spirits from the home where Doc was killed.”
“Negative energy.”
“Negative energy . . . right.” I forgot that even psychics had to move with the times. Levitating tables and Ouija boards were a thing of the past. Today’s modern psychic had to adapt New Age parallels to scientific principles in order not to be thought quaint. “I need your help. As soon as possible.”
“We’re scheduled for next Thursday.”
“I need to see you sooner. Tomorrow, if that’s possible.”
“That will have to do, Miss Thorne. My schedule is very busy. My services are very much in demand,” she replied, tipping me off that she was going to play hardball on price. “I have four house cleansings, a full-moon drumbeat, and a highlighting to do on a lady in Yucca Valley.”
“A highlighting? Is that some sort of spiritual illumination ?”
“No, it’s when you dye portions of a person’s hair. I’m a hairdresser too.”
“Cleansing hair and homes!”
“I just couldn’t imagine doing a cleansing any earlier than next Thursday . . . .”
“I’ll pay you six hundred if you manage to fit me in sooner.”
“I’ll be there tomorrow. Is ten A.M. fine?”
Alex was busting with information on the ride back to my house after the memorial service.
“So there’s quite a mix of people opposing development in the Chino Cone. Environmental lawyers, old hippies, several heiresses, society women, even a coat-hanger mogul. And there’s a whole rash of reasons why they’re against building up there, from environmental to aesthetic to economic reasons. They’re smart, they’re political, and lots of them come from areas of the country that had strict limits on building and growth: Seattle; Portland; Boulder, Colorado; San Francisco. You see, in the past, the old city councils just rubber-stamped development and the developers just ran over the opposition. Now, the opposition is connected . . . all the way up to friends in the state capitol.”
“Why do I feel like I’m standing between author Stephen King and a mound of coke?” I asked dryly.
“And someone’s bound to get hurt.”
“And you can be sure it ain’t gonna be me.”
CHAPTER 11
God Is Kinda Dead
I wen t home and organized some things around my house in a blind attempt to impose some sense of order in The Curse. I was putting a box full of photographs up on a high shelf when the bottom of the box burst open, spilling forty-odd years of photographs to the bottom of the closet. Shit!
I grabbed a photograph that had gotten lodged in between the vacuum cleaner and its hose attachments. It was a picture of Alex and I and my mom and dad, all mugging for the camera in my parents’ backyard in Michigan a few weeks after our wedding.
Of course, they say that while you’re marrying the man, you’re dating the family too. In Alex’s case, things couldn’t be better. I fell in love with his family as much as I did with him. They were everything my family was not: funny, intelligent, able to communicate with each other and offer true emotional support, and best of all, essentially drama-less. Alex’s dad, Martin, despite attempts to look uncaring about his looks, was still as handsome as he was in the college photographs that lined the fireplace mantel in their family room. Martin’s ace in the hole was his silvery hair, worn long for a man his age. The length of his hair caused him to be constantly pushing it back out of his eyes, like the captain of a sailing ship crossing the finish line of the America’s Cup or a man who just yesterday finished testing his Lotus on the winding roads of Provence or the Amalfi coast.
Alex’s mother, Zara, was too cool for words. Her name was the cool and impressive door that opened to the fascinating person who went on and on, room after astonishing room in the fascinating house that was Zara. Translated, her name meant “yellow desert flower” in an African dialect. Even cooler was the fact that she had spent much of her childhood in Kenya, playing next to her ultra-cool-before-her-time mother, Katkja. It was here that Zara learned to paint, had a mad affair with the rakish bon vivant Peter Beard, personally knew Karen Blixen, who wrote Out of Africa, and went on camera-only safaris and painted the animal life there in violent, colorful canvasses that littered their Bohemian home in Franklin, Michigan.
Alex had one sister, Cosima, whom I had never met until Alex and I wed. Cosima was wed to a wealthy German count and spent most of her time with Fritz at their home in Fiji, studying the native fish population when they weren’t working on killer tans.
People like these didn’t live in Michigan. They lived in Paris or Bombay and spent their time circumnavigating the globe, seeking to help the world or, at the very least, seeking to advance their creative talents through Zen meditation with Buddhist monks or clear their nasal passages through ancient yoga routines. How Alex’s family managed to survive in Michigan was beyond me, but having a sizable income was a great part of the solution. Alex’s grand
father had invented a gravity backflow valve that revolutionized irrigation and, through the patent he secured, allowed his descendants to live comfortably and indulge themselves in just about anything they fancied.
When Alex and I had been dating for a while, the dread of his family eventually having to meet mine began to raise its ugly head. Alex had already met my family, which he did with absolute grace and decorum. The circumstances of that first meeting were as carefully orchestrated as a Met production of Aida. I spent weeks choosing the restaurant, agonizing in finding one that didn’t reek of banal Midwestern suburbanism, yet one that wouldn’t cause my father to squawk out loud when seeing the menu prices: “Thirteen dollars for a piece of cheese? What’s it going to do, sleep with me?”
The meeting went as well as a Noel Coward play, with a host of social gaffes played out on the table like cards from a casino dealer on speed. But Alex, cool as if he had suddenly found himself staring into the face of a starved lion, spoke in a calm voice, backing away only where there was no option available. There was one exception, however.
My mother brought up the subject of religion, feeling that this was an appropriate topic for driving a wedge into what looked like a perfect exterior, a perfect match for her daughter and splitting Alex wide open to show all the ugliness she suspected festered beneath.
“So, Alex, what religion were you brought up in? You’re Presbyterian, aren’t you? I can always tell!” she gushed.
“No, Mrs. Kazulekis.”
“Oh, please, Alex, call me Mildred. Then you’re Methodist, aren’t you? That’s what you are, Methodist.”
While Alex tried to avoid an answer that wouldn’t set well with my mother—I had already warned him beforehand of her usual battle plans—my mother became increasingly worried as she worked her way down the list of religions she loathed, starting at the nondescript Presbyterians and working her way down to those she considered the left hand of Satan.
“No, not Methodist.”