Sweet Caress

by William Boyd

  ‘Just be cautious, Mrs Farr,’ Cole had said. ‘Up there you’ll be in the middle of a very remote, hot nowhere. The local sheriff is miles away in Bishop. I talked to the cops. None of them had ever been out to Willow Ranch. Never been any trouble, they told me. But it’s clear that the place, and what exactly goes on there, is something of a mystery.’

  With that in mind, I had formulated a plan, of sorts, that I hoped would afford me entry to the place. Before I’d left LA I had ordered some business cards to be printed up. ‘Amory Clay. Staff photographer. Global-Photo-Watch.’ I was making the assumption that most people were flattered when professional photographers offered to take their photographs, for a fee, moreover – even, perhaps, publicity-shy people like Tayborn Gaines.

  The next day I loaded up my two cameras with film, filled a gallon plastic container with iced water, bought a ham and coleslaw sandwich at a diner and drove out the few miles to Line Lake.

  The lake itself didn’t really exist any more, apart from some shallow briny pools. Like most of the water in the valley it had had its inflow diverted to feed the Los Angeles aqueduct and was now a dry alkaline flat, cracking up in the relentless sun like a pottery glaze in a furnace. The hamlet managed to survive on passing hikers and there was still some freelance mining going on in the deep incised arroyos in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada – miners needed food and fuel and a place to drink. Line Lake boasted a bar, a gas station and a general store on the one street of brick, wood and plasterboard shacks. It was the twentieth-century version of a one-horse town.

  I pulled into the gas station, had the attendant fill up the Dodge’s tank and asked the way to Willow Ranch.

  ‘You don’t want to go to Willow Ranch, ma’am,’ the attendant said, a raw-boned, deeply tanned man who could have been thirty or sixty. ‘You got nothing but pothead hippie freaks out there.’

  ‘I’m a photographer,’ I said and gave him my card – record of my passing. He read it carefully. ‘Oh. You should be OK, then.’ It always worked.

  The dirt road out of Line Lake ran up the middle of a wide wash where the heat seemed even more intense. I saw a broken sign that said ‘Willow Ranc—’ and persevered. I was stopped by a pine log across the track and beside it sat a wheelless VW Combi with a tarpaulin awning rigged off its side to give shade to a ramshackle stall selling home-grown produce – pots of honey, squash, corn cobs, long thin avocados and an assortment of various-sized straw baskets. A young man, shirtless, stepped out, hands in his pockets, with the unfocussed, blinking gaze of someone just roused from sleep or massively intoxicated.

  ‘Hey. Nothing down that road for you, ma’am. Ah . . . Like private property, you know?’

  ‘I’ve an appointment with Tayborn Gaines. I’m a photographer.’ I showed him one of my cameras.

  ‘Oh. OK. Sure.’ He dragged the log away and I drove on to Willow Ranch only to pause, a hundred yards down the track, at a kind of crude gateway. On a rickety arch made of hewn timber and bits of planking there was a message, written in black paint, below the now familiar stylised eye: ‘THERE ARE NONE SO BLIND AS THOSE WHO WILL NOT SEE’.

  I drove on under it, slightly more apprehensive. And after a few turns in the dirt road, Willow Ranch was revealed to me. I paused to take a quick photograph.

  Willow Ranch, Inyo County, California, 1968.

  The abandoned dude ranch was bigger than I expected, with a strange assortment of ramshackle wooden buildings spread over a two- or three-acre site, most of them semi-derelict, some roofless, with, at the centre, a three-storey western ‘saloon’ and a corral overgrown with mesquite bushes. Parked here and there in the shade of scrub oak or stunted cottonwood trees was an assortment of vehicles, sun-bleached cars and trucks and one ancient school bus. There must have been a water source as I saw a generator pump by a well head with black hoses winding out to those various buildings in better repair and to irrigate small vegetable allotments scratched out between the buildings. Here and there were other signs of semi-permanent habitation: a rubbish dump, washing hanging on lines – and graffiti, lots of graffiti. I slowed to take the slogans in – Ban the Bomb signs, flowers, and amongst them, carefully painted and stencilled messages: ‘BRAINWASHERS ARSONISTS SADISTS KILLERS – ENLIST TODAY IN THE SERVICE OF YOUR CHOICE’; ‘GIRLS SAY YES TO BOYS WHO SAY NO’; ‘RICH MAN’S WAR’; ‘WAR IS NOT HEALTHY FOR CHILDREN’; ‘MAKE ART NOT WAR’; ‘WAR IS GOOD BUSINESS INVEST YOUR SON’; ‘GIVE PEACE A CHANCE’.

  Young men and women looked on in vague curiosity from doorways, canvas awnings and porches as I bumped along the track in front of the saloon and halted the car in the shade cast by its facade and stepped out. There were advantages to being a woman in your sixties with grey hair – sometimes – you posed no obvious threat, but I noted that my hands were shaking and my throat was constricted. I smiled breezily at a couple of guys wandering towards me. They were smiling. The natives were friendly.

  ‘Hello,’ I said as calmly as I could manage. ‘I’ve an appointment with a Mr Tayborn Gaines.’

  ‘Tay!’ one of the guys shouted towards a purple and white bungalow with an ex-army jeep parked outside, and more graffiti above the front door: the big stylised eye and the message ‘CLARITY OF VISION = THOUGHT = PURPOSE’. Then he sniggered as he added, ‘Old lady here to see you, man!’

  After about a minute a tall, fit, good-looking man in his thirties emerged from the purple bungalow. He was bare-chested and wearing sawn-off jeans and had a red towel draped round his shoulders. His long, shoulder-length hair was damp, as if he’d just taken a shower, he was wearing sunglasses and had a droopy Mexican-style moustache.

  ‘Hi there, ma’am, I’m Tay Gaines, what can I do for you?’ he asked me in a friendly open manner, unfolding his towel and drying his hair.

  ‘Let me give you my card,’ I said. I had put my camera bag on the ground and as I started to rummage in it I covertly snapped a photo, quickly, hoping I’d managed to catch him in the frame. Evidence that might be useful. I stood and handed him a card.

  ‘Global-Photo-Watch. I don’t understand.’

  ‘We have an appointment,’ I said. ‘Don’t we?’

  I don’t know quite what I’d been expecting – some kind of low-life down-and-out, I suppose – but Tayborn Gaines was a handsome well-built man and clearly proud of his lean, muscled body. And something of a full-on narcissist, I suspected.

  ‘No, I don’t recall any “appointment”,’ he said politely, looking around at the small crowd that had gathered. ‘I think you must have made some kind of mistake.’

  ‘My editor told me to come here,’ I said. ‘He told me everything was arranged.’

  ‘I’m sorry, ma’am, but I’ve had absolutely no contact with’ – he glanced at my card – ‘any Global-Photo-Watch.’ He smiled. ‘I stopped talking to the press a long time ago.’ He handed his towel to another girl – a pale-faced black girl with a huge Afro hairstyle – as she wandered out of the bungalow, curious to see what was going on. He put his hands on his hips and stared at me, head on one side.

  ‘Crossed wires, I guess,’ he said.

  ‘We’re doing this piece on alternative Californian communities,’ I said. ‘You know, the Esalen Institute, Hog Farm, Drop City, the White Lodge Commune in Marin County.’ I smiled apologetically. ‘I’m just a photographer, I go where they send me. I was told everything was arranged.’

  Gaines smiled apologetically too, and then glanced again at my card.

  ‘I was also told a permission fee of two hundred dollars had been agreed. Sorry,’ I said and handed over an envelope containing $200. It was an old trick: cash usually overcomes the camera-shy. Gaines took out the money and riffled through the notes, $20 bills – I could see he was more interested now. I took the opportunity to turn and look around me. A dozen or so people had gathered, curious. All young, unkempt, grubby-looking. No sign of Blythe or anyone that looked like Jeff Bellamont.

  ‘I’m afraid it’s not convenient today,’ Gai
nes said, smiling broadly. His smile revealed poor teeth with visible gaps and one incisor was black. The handsome, fit man revealed the malnourished youth when he smiled. ‘Where are you staying? Close by?’

  ‘The San Carlos Motel in Glenbrook.’ I would have preferred not to tell him but there was no alternative.

  ‘Well, if it’s OK with you, I’d suggest you go back to your motel and we’ll call you when we’re good and ready.’

  ‘Yes, of course. I apologise if there’s been a mix-up but, as I said, I’m just the photographer.’

  ‘Yes, sure, I know what it’s like. Carry out those orders,’ he said. ‘And, by the way, would you mind telling me the name of your editor? You understand – I have to be a little careful.’

  ‘Mr Cleveland Finzi.’

  ‘I have to talk to my friends here – see if it’s something we’re prepared to consider – but I promise I’ll give you a call in the next twenty-four hours.’

  I climbed back into my car and drove away from Willow Ranch, my hands sweaty on the steering wheel. I felt a tremble of high tension in my body but also a curious sense that – however strange the set-up at Willow Ranch was – it didn’t seem sinister. Perhaps, it struck me, Blythe was indeed safe and well, just as she had said.

  Tayborn Gaines. Willow Ranch, Line Lake, California, 1968.

  One day went by, then two. I spent a lot of time in my room waiting and hoping for Gaines to phone, not wanting to miss him. I went for a stroll on the morning of the third day, a Wednesday, and when I returned the receptionist told me that a Mr Gaines had called and it would be convenient for me to call on him at 4 p.m.

  I prepared another envelope with $200 – just in case more financial incentive might help – but I drove back out to Willow Ranch with low expectations. Maybe Bellamont and Blythe had moved on and Gaines was just using this for what he thought would be an opportunity for more publicity. But there was no log across the track and no one in the VW Combi, nor any parched vegetables set out on the stall. I drove warily under the ‘NONE SO BLIND’ archway and parked outside the saloon again where a young guy with mutton-chop whiskers was waiting and led me into the purple bungalow.

  He left me alone in what passed for the sitting room. The walls had once been white but were now smirched and foxed like old parchment with that greasy handled sheen you find on much-thumbed banknotes. There were four stained and sagging mattresses pushed back against the wall and the worn emerald-green carpet made quiet sucking noises as I shifted about nervously. There was that incipient smell again of neglect: dampness, smoke, body odour. I was reminded of Blythe’s room in Notting Hill.

  Then Gaines pushed open the door and came in. He was wearing an olive drab field jacket with a grey T-shirt on beneath it and faded denim jeans. Over the left breast pocket ‘US ARMY’ was written, but over the right – where his name, ‘GAINES’, should have been – was a paler patch, as if it had been ripped off. As he shook my hand I noted the insignia on his shoulder: an embroidered red square containing a blue circle with AA curved into the diameter.

  ‘Eighty-Second Airborne,’ I said. ‘All American.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am. Third Brigade.’

  ‘I was with some of you boys just a few weeks ago. That’s how I know.’

  ‘I’ve got nothing against the division,’ he said, evenly. ‘They just shouldn’t be in this corrupt war.’

  ‘So I noticed,’ I said.

  ‘I hate this game, war,’ he said. ‘Decided I didn’t want to play it no more. So I moved to Willow Ranch. All like-minded folks seeking clarity are welcome.’

  ‘Would you let me take some photographs?’

  ‘I’m afraid not. We had a vote and you lost.’

  ‘Oh. Right.’

  ‘But before you go, I’d like you to meet someone.’ He turned and called out. ‘Honey? You there?’

  We waited a moment and then Blythe walked into the room.

  I felt a bolus of vomit rise in my throat. She looked very thin, her hair was longer than I’d ever seen it, almost down to her waist, lank and heavy. Her eyes were tired and she had a freckling of pink spots at the corners of her mouth. She was wearing a long white T-shirt, almost down to her knees, with the number ‘3’ on it. She had bare feet, filthy bare feet.

  ‘This is my wife. Mrs Tayborn Gaines.’

  ‘Hello, Ma,’ Blythe said, calmly. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’

  ‘Hello, darling. Are you all right?’

  ‘Never been better. I told you.’

  ‘See, “Lady” Farr,’ Gaines interrupted, sternly, all his polite bonhomie gone, ‘your daughter is happily married to an upstanding American man. I resent your subterfuge, your duplicity. You are free to see Blythe any time you want. Assuming she wants to see you.’

  I was hearing a kind of fizzing in my head, a constant effervescence as if my blood had turned to soda. I was, I realised, at a total loss.

  ‘Do you think I’m so stupid, Lady Farr?’ Gaines went on, almost pleadingly. ‘Do you think I’m so dumb that I can’t make a phone call to Global-Photo-Watch and ask if they’ve got some English lady photographer out on a shoot in California?’

  I ignored him.

  ‘Come home with me, darling,’ I said to Blythe, gently. ‘Everything will be fine. We miss you. Annie sends her love. We want you back home with us.’

  ‘I’m happy here, Ma. Happy with Tay. I love him, he loves me,’ she said with a small monotone laugh. I suddenly thought she might be drugged in some way. Gaines put an arm around her and squeezed her shoulder.

  ‘You made what our Mexican friends call a cálculo equivocado, Lady Farr-Clay. A real mal paso. You thought there was something wrong going on but you can see there isn’t. We’re a close community here. Self-sufficient as much as we can be. We want nothing to do with the world out there—’ He gestured, widely, grandly, as if taking in the whole of California, the entire United States. ‘This is our world. Willow Ranch. Blythe was looking for it and she found it.’

  Blythe opened her arms and I stepped into her embrace. She smelt sweaty, unwashed and her body seemed too thin as I hugged her, all ridged bones and starved muscles. I had the presence of mind to slip the small many-folded square of paper with my room number and the name and address of the motel into her hand. Gaines saw nothing and Blythe didn’t react as her fingers closed around it. I felt a thrill of complicity – all was not lost. I stepped back.

  ‘May I come back and see you again?’ I asked, failing to keep the tremor from my voice.

  ‘Of course,’ Gaines said. ‘You’re more than welcome.’

  I turned and left the room.

  3. MRS TAYBORN GAINES

  I felt cold, rather than upset. Inert, rather than panicky or angry, as if I hadn’t fully taken in all the complex implications of what I’d seen – or didn’t want to. Back at the San Carlos I called Cole Hardaway and told him I had found Blythe – but I couldn’t see how I could extract her from Willow Ranch and her new life.

  ‘She’s married to this Tayborn Gaines,’ I said. ‘Or so they both claim.’

  ‘I can find out in an hour or two.’

  ‘It would be good to know for sure,’ I said, feeling a little queasy. Then something else struck me. ‘Gaines says he was in the Eighty-Second Airborne Division, Third Brigade. But I’m not sure I believe him.’

  ‘I can check on that, as well.’

  ‘Thank you, Cole.’ I thought further. ‘Is there any way we can get the police involved?’

  ‘We’d need a reason.’

  ‘What if I say I think she’s being held against her will?’

  ‘Sounds to me like that won’t fly. Especially if she’s married the man.’

  ‘It just seems wrong, somehow. The whole place seems sort of fake.’

  ‘Nobody’s complained, that’s our problem. Everyone who’s there wants to be there, I guess.’

  ‘So what can we do?’ I asked, more plaintively than I meant.

  ‘Why don’t I come o
n up there tomorrow, talk to the sheriff in Bishop and see what I can set up. Any sign of Bellamont?’

  ‘No. I didn’t see him. I think he must have gone.’ I had studied Bellamont’s mugshot and I would have recognised his slumped resentful handsome face – long fair hair, with a General Custer blond moustache – had I seen it.

  ‘Well that may help – could be our pretext,’ Cole thought out loud. ‘We could ask the police to locate Bellamont. Say he’s stolen your daughter’s money, or something. I’ll see you tomorrow, Mrs Farr. Don’t worry, don’t do anything, we’ll figure this out.’

  I hung up and closed my eyes. Trying not to think of Blythe in her grubby ‘3’ T-shirt and her filthy feet. What had happened to my little Blythe? What had led her down this road? I began to blame myself. Why had I gone off to Vietnam? Why had I thought only of myself? Stop. Think. Your children are free individuals – they can decide to become anyone they want and you can’t prevent it. And she was twenty-one. It was no comfort.

  I went into Bishop that night and found a diner where I ate half a plate of meatballs and spaghetti. I pushed it away; I wasn’t hungry. I bought a pint of Irish whiskey in a liquor store and took it back to my room where I watched television in an aimless unfocussed way, changing channels back and forth whenever the advertisements appeared, sipping my whiskey from a tooth-glass. There was nothing I could realistically do, I just had to wait for Cole Hardaway to call back.

  I was a bit drunk and unsteady by the time I took to my bed but I wanted unconsciousness and could hardly rebuke myself after what I’d witnessed today, so I reasoned. I lay in bed letting the room tilt and fall, listening to the hum of the air conditioner, and thinking how perplexing and strange life was, how complicated it was in the way it suddenly threw you these ‘curveballs’, as the GIs used to say in Vietnam. Sometimes it seemed to me as if my life had been made up entirely of curveballs and unwelcome surprises. No daughter expects her father to try and kill her by driving the family car into a fucking lake. No young photographer expects to be prosecuted for obscenity – or beaten half to death by fucking fascists . . . I ranted on profanely in my drink-fuelled, self-pitying outrage, railing futilely against all the injustices; the mistakes I’d made and mistakes that had been thrust upon me . . .