California Girl

by T. Jefferson Parker

  A porch light went on and the door opened. Nick saw a small woman, then a tall man with overalls and no shirt. The woman’s hair was dark and pulled back tight. She looked older than his mom, but Nick figured they must be about the same age. Mr. Vonn had long, active muscles that bunched when he shook Nick’s father’s hand. A dark triangular face, small chin. He looked to Nick like a man from another country.

  Nick listened to their voices through the open window of the Studebaker, but he couldn’t make out much. His father gestured back to the car, canting his head inquisitively. Then Mr. Vonn disappeared and Mrs. Vonn turned and watched. She brought her hand to her collar. A minute later the three Vonn boys came single file onto the porch—Lenny, then Casey, then Ethan. Casey’s eyebrows and cheeks were covered by white tape.

  “Oh my gosh, boys—what did you do to that poor Ethan?”

  “That’s Casey,” said Clay.

  “Don’t confuse the issue, Clay.”

  “They started it, Mom,” he said.

  She snapped around and caught his face in her big hand. When she was angry her voice went to a throaty hiss and her lips pulled back around her big straight teeth and Nick thought she was scarier than his dad. “You started it, Clay. You started it with the baseball cap and your arrogant attitude. Don’t you lie to me.”

  “No, ma’am, no.”

  “Someday someone’s going to rain on your parade in a big way, Clay. That, I guarantee. And when it happens we’ll see how tough you are.”

  Then Max Becker turned to wave them out of the car.

  Monika locked eyes with each of them in turn. “Do not disappoint me, boys. Do exactly what we talked about.”

  They stood behind their father on the porch, spread in the pool of light. The Vonn boys faced them from a few feet away. Nick saw that Casey’s face was swollen badly and Lenny’s nose was huge and red. Their big ears were backlit pink by the porch light. He saw that Mrs. Vonn’s knuckles were big where she held her collar and stared at him with shiny black eyes.

  Clay apologized unconvincingly but handed Casey a dollar to cover the baseball cap. Said to give him the change at school.

  Max Becker cleared his throat.

  David and Andy said they were sorry.

  When it was Nick’s turn he was looking not at the Vonns but beyond them, into the living room behind the open door, at the peeling walls and sagging brown sofa and the floor lamp with the dented shade and the fraying braided rug and the cheap lighted china hutch with nothing inside it but a few coffee mugs and votive candles and a collector’s plate with the face of the Virgin Mary on it displayed upright in the flickering light.

  He had never seen such failure before. And he understood in one instant that it could be his someday.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. He meant it for Lenny but couldn’t take his eyes off the room.

  The Vonn boys didn’t say a word. Nick figured they were thinking revenge.

  Just then the Vonn daughters hustled into his vision, the older one still in her dirty pink blouse, holding a cob of corn and glaring at him. Then Janelle Vonn, changed into a white dancer’s tutu that hung almost to her knees, clunked across the floor in her cowboy boots with a small guitar slung over one shoulder. She had the same inquisitive look she’d had out in the orange grove, and one eye swollen shut and blackening.

  “I’m sorry,” Nick said again.

  Mrs. Vonn turned back into the house and the girls scattered away like chicks. The door slammed.

  His parents said nothing on the drive back home. Nick could tell that a new worry had taken ahold of them. Not the rumble. That was over now. Their dad had locked their shotguns in the gun cabinet and told them there’d be no bird hunting this year. Said that boys who couldn’t control their fists couldn’t be trusted with firearms. Pretty goddamned simple. Backhanded Clay hard above one ear, sent him spinning. Would have taken a belt to them like the old days, but even Andy was too big for that now.

  No, the new worry was Janelle, and how she’d gotten her eye closed. Nick was pretty sure it was connected to him hitting Lenny. And Clay hitting Casey. And Ethan hitting David. Maybe even his father hitting Clay. Each hit causing the next one until there was no one left to hit but a little girl with a tutu and a guitar.

  4

  1960

  ANDY STEERED THE SUBMARINE up Red Hill Avenue, into Lemon Heights. Meredith sat close beside him, her hand on his knee. Through his jeans he could feel the exact shape of her palm and thumb and each finger. He tried to open his leg a little, invite her hand to go farther up, but he had an accelerator to work and she’d never moved much north of his knee anyway. Wasn’t going to in the middle of the day, heading home from school. That was for sure.

  “Lots of homework?” he asked.

  “Not really.” She wore a pleated skirt and a sleeveless white blouse. It was almost Thanksgiving, sunny and warm.

  “I’ll come by after work if you want. We can go to Oscar’s.”

  “Okay,” said Meredith.

  “After that, there’s a meteor shower,” said Andy. “We can watch it from our spot.”

  “Sounds fun.”

  Andy downshifted and made the left onto Skyline. Meredith had removed her hand from his leg but he could still feel it there, warm and soft and a little damp. He was preposterously aroused now, as he was every time he drove her home. Every time he sat in a car with her. Held her hand. Thought about her. Dreamed about her. Smelled the sweater she had let him borrow—Heaven Sent perfume mixed with Meredith. She was sweet and bright and the most beautiful girl Andy had ever seen.

  Lemon Heights was where the rich people lived. The heights were rolling foothills with eucalyptus and avocado and sycamores, even a few lemon trees from the old days. The houses were big and each one was different, not like the tracts expanding below, where two or three floor plans repeated themselves up one street and down the next. Some had swimming pools and tennis courts. There were horse stables and garages big enough for two cars. A color television set in every house, and Andy had heard that the Boardmans had two.

  He pulled into the Thorntons’ driveway. It was a large semicircle lined with sycamore trees that were just starting to turn yellow with fall. The house was brick, low and large, with white trim and the window glass darkened for the Southern California sun. The driveway circled around a knoll of deep green dichondra. In the center stood a thirty-foot flagpole. Dr. Thornton flew the stars and stripes every day except when it rained.

  “No one’s home,” she said. “Would you like to come in?”

  They stood in the cool shadowed kitchen and kissed. The swimming pool threw wobbling crescents of light through the sliding glass door to the walls.

  He grasped her wrist and tried to pull her hand down but she broke it loose with a soft laugh and put her arm back around his neck.

  “No,” she said. “I more than like you but I’m not ready.”

  “I know. I understand.”

  Andy did understand, and the decision was hers. They kissed for a few more minutes. She pulled her lips away from him just as the warm slick issued into his briefs.

  “I have to use the bathroom,” he said.

  THE TUSTIN TIMES office was back across town, by the high school. Andy sat at the editor’s desk and used the big black Royal to write the obits for the week.

  Joe Cannon, Former Engineer and School District Trustee Dead at 77

  Early Tustin Needlepoint Artist Remembered—Lacemaker Commissioned by Eleanor Roosevelt

  Dr. Richard Riley Healed Congolese Every Easter

  Beth Stevens sat at the Arts and Culture editor’s desk across from Andy. She stared at the paper in her machine, tapping her fingers on the keys but not hard enough to engage them. Like him, she was a high school senior hired for eight hours a week, after school was out. She was tall and freckled and moved quickly.

  “What’s another word for blue?” she asked.

  “What shade?” he asked back.

  “No,
blue as in unhappy.”

  “Melancholy.”

  “I already thought of that.”

  “Sad,” he said.

  “I already thought of that, too.”

  “I’m trying to write, Beth.”

  “But all you can think about is Meredith.”

  He looked up. Beth’s unpredictable and direct assaults always caught him off guard.

  “I don’t care if you don’t like her,” he said.

  “Name one intelligent thing she ever said.”

  The Linotype roared into action in the basement. Andy felt the vibrations and heard the rattle of the Royal’s ribbon spool.

  “She read Les Misérables in French and wrote a paper on it.”

  “And the paper was in French, too?”

  “Yes. It was good.”

  Beth was quiet for a while. She typed furiously, stopped, then typed furiously again. Andy was always amazed at how fast she could type with hardly any strikeovers.

  Beth ripped the paper and carbon from the platen, straight up so it would make lots of noise but not tear. From the corner of his eye he saw her place the original in one tray and the copy in another.

  “She’ll be fat someday, like her mother.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “You’re sickening, Andy. When it comes to her.”

  He shrugged, felt the cool spot down in his pants, but didn’t look up. Thought of Carol Thornton’s calves, the alarming bigness with which they disappeared into her skirts. And her arms above the elbows. Meredith looked nothing like that.

  Andy found Gunnar downstairs working the Blue Streak, setting the week’s editorial. The room smelled of hot metal and machine oil. Gunnar was a small, pointy-toothed Swede with fingers blackened by decades of typesetting and printing the Tustin Times. Andy thought that Gunnar looked old and somehow permanent sitting before the big machine. He’d seen Gunnar, sitting right here, almost every week since getting a paperboy’s route five years ago. When he had just turned thirteen.

  Andy watched him touch the keyboard, then saw the brass letter molds drop from the magazine to the travel belt on their way to the holder. Then the spacebands falling into place at Gunnar’s deft, strong strokes.

  Gunnar swiveled out of his chair, crouched across the room, and locked the door. Then to his desk where he removed a bottle of vodka and two small glasses. He poured them half full and gave one to Andy.

  They clicked the bottoms and sipped. “Andy, I liked the Garcia story,” he said. “He was a mean old man but you made him tolerable.”

  “Thanks,” said Andy. He’d been worried about the Garcia obit, wondering if he’d gotten enough truth into it. “Maybe a little heavy on the creative writing.”

  “You know, he advertised with us for twenty years, always paid his bills. We can afford to let you polish him up.”

  Andy nodded and sipped more vodka. His father and mother were liberal drinkers and Andy felt at ease with the stuff, like it was natural for him to drink it. Actually liked the flavor. Never felt thick or out of control. Just stabilized. With a slightly lower center of gravity. Sometimes a little goofy. Though J. J. Overholt, the Times publisher, would fire them both in a heartbeat if he walked in on this. Overholt didn’t drink.

  “Nixon was in again yesterday, talking with J.J.,” said Gunnar.

  “Amazing that the vice president of the United States has time for the Tustin Times,” said Andy.

  “He wants to be president. Badly. He’ll do anything.”

  “Stoltz with him?” Andy asked. “Stoltz is the guy who’s going to be president.”

  “No, no. Stoltz just wants to make money and fight Communists.”

  “Stoltz got Nixon this far,” Andy said with conviction.

  Andy wanted to know things. He read the Los Angeles Times and the Santa Ana Register and every magazine he could get his hands on. Listened to the L.A. radio news while he did his homework. Liked the politics. Thought he was getting to know the way things worked.

  “No, no he didn’t,” said Gunnar. He smiled his pointed smile. “He just wrote some speeches for him during Ike’s campaign. Nixon will court the extreme right wing privately, but he can’t afford to be seen with them. If you know what I mean.”

  Andy thought about this, sipped more vodka. The Linotype machine cycled through, fresh slugs cooling in the bin. Andy looked at the hard lines of type, wondered again how Gunnar could read so well backwards. Gunnar would catch mistakes the editors didn’t see. Things even Overholt missed. Collected a quarter each for them, which kept his secret bottle full. The amazing part was that when he was done with all the physical and mental effort of setting type, Gunnar ran the press, too.

  Upstairs Beth pounded on her Royal. Sounded like a machine gun. Gunnar looked up, shook his head, and smiled.

  Then his smile subsided and he locked his cool gray eyes on Andy. “You haven’t heard about Alma Vonn?”

  Andy waited.

  “Killed herself with gin and rat poison. Dead when the girls came home from school today.”

  Andy thought of flying through the air and into Lenny Vonn six years ago. Of the blood running down Casey’s face, of the girls on the tracks by the packinghouse. He remembered how shabby the Vonn house had been and he remembered his father saying later that trouble had chased the Vonns to California and trouble would probably find them here again. He could still picture how tightly Alma Vonn’s hair was pulled back that night. He’d seen her since then, peddling his J. C. Higgins past their house on his paper route. The Vonns had never subscribed. And Alma Vonn had looked at him plenty of times but never once shown him any recognition.

  “I’ve never written a suicide obit,” Andy said.

  “Some papers admit the suicide, and some cover it up,” said Gunnar. “J.J. decides for us. If the person wasn’t noteworthy, J.J.’ll usually just leave out the suicide part.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  Andy raised his glass and finished off the vodka. Wondered if J. J. Overholt and the Vonn girls might have different ideas about who was noteworthy.

  Gunnar finished his, too, and collected Andy’s glass. “Did you like The Dwarf?” He’d loaned Andy the book a month ago.

  Andy had grown up believing that written words were to be respected. That some were even sacred. An enthusiasm for words was in his blood but he didn’t know how it got there. The Beckers had a big bookshelf in the living room but his mother and father had never talked directly about writing. It was just something natural, like his taste for alcohol or his limitless desire for Meredith Thornton.

  “It was great, Gunnar.”

  Gunnar smiled, pointed teeth in a lined and somewhat wicked old face. “I knew you would like it.”

  AFTER BURGERS Andy parked on the street and took Meredith into the little orange grove not far from her house. The night had cooled sharply and she wore her long red overcoat. They came to their clearing and Andy spread the blanket. He lay down first, then Meredith arranged herself next to him with a kind of gentle formality. They could see the house lights of Tustin scattered below, and the black acres of the groves.

  “I really like you, Andy.”

  “I like you, too.”

  “It’s nice to be up here with you.”

  A meteor with a tail sailed across the sky, left to right, the tail dissolving behind it. Then another, in the opposite direction. Some were just short flashes, like sparks.

  Andy watched the meteors drop and skate through the darkness, thought of Alma Vonn and her daughters. Wondered how it had happened, who had walked into the bedroom, had she knocked? Or maybe Mrs. Vonn was in the bathroom or the garage. How old were those girls—ten, twelve? He wondered what type of rat poison it was, where she’d gotten it, how much of it she’d taken. When did she decide to do it? What was she wearing? Anything playing on the radio? Was it painful? Did she turn a color? Did she regret it? What finally made her do it? Did a vision or some review of her life take place?

  He was looking
forward to writing this obit more than he’d looked forward to writing anything in his life. Alma Vonn was a door to the world, and he could push through it with questions and words. He would be closer to understanding. Closer to wisdom. The power and strangeness of this made his heart flutter, then gallop.

  “What are you thinking about?” asked Meredith.

  “I don’t like it when you ask me that.”

  “I know you don’t. But if we’re together I have a right to know.”

  Andy wondered why thoughts weren’t private. Weren’t you just a prisoner if you had to surrender your thoughts on demand? “Alma Vonn killed herself today.”

  Meredith pushed up on one elbow. “That’s so terrible! Absolutely terrible, Andy. I feel so bad for those little girls.”

  He watched two meteors fall side by side like sparks from the same firework. She settled one arm across his stomach and her head on his chest. She began crying.

  Andy watched the meteors race and fall. Eighteen. Nineteen. He listened to Meredith’s sobs and wondered at her capacity for joy and sorrow and empathy. He wasn’t sure if it was larger than his or if she just had more noticeable ways of expression. He felt the wholeness of her. Thirty-five. Thirty-six. So what if he’d written most of her paper on Les Misérables? Meredith had labored through every word of the novel in French, and language didn’t come easy to her. Like it did to him. Or his brother Clay. Fifty. Fifty-one. But she had understood it. Her emotions had been genuine and exactly what the author had intended her to feel, in his opinion.