California Girl

by T. Jefferson Parker

  Andy had heard Roger Stoltz use that sentence before: You watch, you’ll see. Stoltz’s voice was clear and not loud but the timbre of it cut through other voices and bored straight into Andy’s brain. Marie looked ten years older than her husband. Something preserved about her, thought Andy—something halted, like a photograph.

  Meredith led him outside for some fresh air.

  He followed her off the porch, away from the light and windows. In the darkness of the grove they kissed. Andy felt a determination he’d never felt from her before, the same thing he’d seen in the look she gave him before Clay had tried to claim her attention by embarrassing her.

  “Ready to do all this again?” she asked, breaking away, almost breathless.

  “Yeah, sure.”

  The agreement was they’d do the Becker family get-together early and the Thornton family dinner later.

  “I love you, Andy. I realized it, just sitting there watching you and your family.”

  She’d never said “I love you” to him and he knew that these words made all the difference in the world. For the second time that night Andy’s words failed him. He was aware that his mouth was partly open and something hard was lodged between his chest and his throat.

  “I’m ready now,” she said.

  “Where?”

  “The Serenade. Nobody’ll know if we park the Submarine in back.”

  “I’ll get a bottle of wine.”

  “Fantastic. I’ll say my goodbyes. I’ll hurry.”

  WHILE MEREDITH waited in the Submarine Andy signed the register as Mr. and Mrs. Neal Cassady. He hoped the name would mean nothing to the middle-aged Mexican woman at the desk. He had placed his Tustin High School class ring on his left hand and spun the black face of it inward so it looked like a wedding band. She did not meet his eyes as she handed him the registration card or handed him the pen or took his cash.

  A few minutes later Andrew James Becker pushed open the door to paradise: four walls, a painting of a Mexican casita in a desert, a bathroom, and a bed.

  To be kissing Meredith while standing next to that bed was almost too much for him. He went very slowly, helping her with her clothes and letting her help with his, all while his penis seemed to be bellowing at him to hurry up. When she held it for the first time Andy bit his lip and shot immediately. Almost cried with embarrassment but she held on to the shocking thing and laughed in a way that made him feel better. He kissed her everywhere while she shivered and shook. He had never imagined such wonderful, powerful tastes and smells. Like he’d wandered into a secret garden.

  A little later when she took him inside Andy could tell she was tense and afraid. But she was wet and eager too as she pulled him in hard and got it over with with a faint yelp. She cried in his arms so Andy cried, too, then they found themselves laughing. They held each other and made love again.

  Later Andy got his watch off the floor and gave Meredith the bad news.

  “I don’t want to go,” she said. “We didn’t even open the wine.”

  “Let’s have a glass,” he said.

  “There’s no time. But please come here, Andy. There’s time for you to hold me.”

  6

  1963

  DAVID STOOD ON THE crumbling asphalt of the old Grove Drive-In Theater in Orange and looked up at the movie screen. It was early summer and the screen shimmered down at him with white heat.

  “What would your church do with this property, Reverend?” asked the realtor. His name was Bob. He was sweating hard. A small American flag was pinned on his lapel.

  “We have some ideas,” said David.

  Bob smiled uncertainly. Wiped his forehead with his jacket sleeve and looked up at the screen again. “It’s been sitting empty for five years. Ten acres. Speakers and speaker stands, playground for the kids, snack bar and kitchen, projection room, everything. The property taxes killed it and the walk-in theaters ended up with most of the business. A management group owns it now.”

  The last movie David had seen on that screen was ten years ago, when he was seventeen. Burt Lancaster in From Here to Eternity. He and some buddies had climbed the wall just after dusk, run to one of the empty parking spaces and set up their beach chairs, turned the speakers around them all up high, and sat in the chill night while the bullets flew. The theater manager found them half an hour later. Let them stay because most of the spaces were empty anyway.

  “You wouldn’t have to sweat the taxes if it was church property,” said Bob.

  “No, I wouldn’t.”

  “How large is your congregation?”

  “Measure not faith by the bushel,” David said flatly. It sounded biblical and he figured Bob would get the gist of it. The fact of the matter was he had no real congregation of his own. Except for the inmates he ministered to at the county jail. Nick had helped him get that gig.

  David had been driving past the old drive-in theater almost every day for the past three years, on his way up to First Presbyterian in Anaheim. First Presbyterian kept him busy with the youth group, let him do some weddings and funerals, but that was about it. David felt the minister was threatened by him. He hardly ever got to preach. Felt like he was wasting his time.

  But when he drove past this old theater he always wondered. The speaker stands like rows of neglected crops. Three of the four original screens destroyed by weather and neglect. Nothing but the skeletons of the frames. The one big blank screen still standing, a pointless miracle. Pigeons along the top. The snack bar with the windows broken out. And the sign out front with the GROVE DRIVE-IN THEATER letters busted down through the years to GROVE DRI -IN HEATER, to G OVE DRI N EATER, then finally to nothing at all.

  And the blank marquee over the entrance. Something about that blank marquee got to David, more than the empty screen. It was what he saw when he considered his future as a Presbyterian.

  “It’s on city sewer?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “And the hundred-year floodplain ends just south of here, right?”

  “That’s true—no extra flood insurance to pay.”

  And the zoning was right, thought David, and the seismic activity was negligible and the orange groves to the north were going under for tract homes next month, and so were the orchards to the east, and busy Beach Boulevard was one block away and the population of Orange County would double in the next ten years.

  And he had the capital commitment from Roger Stoltz’s people.

  “I’ll have an offer on your desk by noon Friday,” he said.

  “That was easy,” said Bob.

  “It won’t be what you’re hoping for.”

  “The owner in Pasadena is motivated.”

  “So is God in heaven.”

  EIGHT WEEKS later the Reverend David Becker broadcast his first sermon from the leased podium in the Grove Drive-In Church of God. Four worshipers sat on folding chairs in the chapel proper—the former snack bar—to see the first “drive-in sermon” in person. More important to David were the thirteen automobiles parked outside on the pleasant August Sunday, speakers hooked over their side windows to carry his voice into each vehicle.

  “My dear friends,” he began. “I thank you all for attending this first service of the Grove Drive-In Church of God. God loves you. This is my primary message and it will always be the primary message of this ministry. Please, wherever you are—here in the chapel or out in your station wagon or sedan or maybe in that beautiful Corvette I saw just a minute ago—bow your heads and pray with me. Dear God in heaven…”

  David had accepted the counteroffer on a Tuesday, arranged his financing the next day through Stoltz’s friends at Orange Savings & Loan, resigned from the ministry of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) on Thursday, and spent the next seven weeks scraping, painting, carpeting, slurrying the lot, tearing down the old movie screen frames, repairing and replacing faulty speakers and wiring, hiring an organist with her own portable instrument, erecting offering boxes accessible through the windows of exiting cars,
and creating a series of marquee announcements designed to bring them in by the carload.

  When he was finished with his first sermon David stood out by the exit to watch the cars go by. He gave each driver an open and sincere smile. He didn’t mean to pressure them into offerings, but if they took it that way, fine. Sometimes that’s what it took to coax a little faith from a tight wallet. Dressed in khaki trousers and loafers, with an open-collared dress shirt under a sky blue sweater, David felt more genuine than he’d ever felt inside the Presbyterian robe. And he felt somehow closer to his congregation, too.

  All twenty-seven of them, he counted, while he waved and the cars drove away.

  When they were all gone he paid the organist. Then he sat on one of the folding chairs in the former snack bar and said a long prayer of thanks. David now suspected that he would not waste his life. He understood that he had answered a risky and unusual calling. He felt that he had just barely, by the grace of God, gotten away with something. It was the happiest day of his life. He heard a car engine growl to a stop next to the snack bar.

  After amen he reached down to the offering boxes, which he’d made portable by way of two-piece stanchions and removable hinge plates welded to the uprights outside. He opened them and with one hand removed all of the bills.

  “That was a very good message,” she said.

  He recognized her immediately. She was petite, with dark red hair cut short. Mid-thirties. Capri pants and big sunglasses and a snug red sweater.

  “Funny to see a minister with a big handful of cash,” she said with a canny smile.

  “In a drive-in snack bar chapel,” said David. “But you’re not exactly dressed for the Resurrection.”

  “The whole point of drive-in worship, correct?”

  He smiled and nodded and looked at her. No ring.

  “But your message was still good, Reverend. The sermon is everything. If you can’t deliver on that, they’ll just go to the next place. I’m Barbara Brewer.”

  David dropped the bills back into one of the boxes. Stood and smiled. “David Becker.”

  “There’s hardly enough there to buy a week of groceries with,” she said. “For one.”

  David studied her. Rested a finger on his mustache and pursed his lips. Furrowed his brow but his eyes were bright with humor and faith. “I’m very content and thankful right now,” he said. “It’s hard to explain.”

  “It shows. And you should be. You just left the Presbyterian Church of America in the dust and nobody knows it but you and me.”

  “True. How about breakfast? The Sambo’s up on Beach has good pancakes.”

  “We’ll go dutch. I was the one in the new Corvette.”

  “I know.”

  AFTER A BREAKFAST that lasted nearly two hours and a frighteningly revealing walk on the beach in Laguna, David took Barbara to the old family house on Holt Avenue.

  He pulled the Corvette into the driveway and parked. The house had turned old suddenly, like a once-pretty aunt, as the tract homes grew up around it. The porch looked out of style and the slat construction seemed old-fashioned next to the stucco walls of the subdivision. A year ago groves of Valencias and a walnut orchard had surrounded the old house. Now Barrington Woods.

  David made no move to get out. Even the Submarine—waxed and polished as always—had become an eyesore amid the snappy new Ford wagons and Chevy sedans parked in driveways off the freshly poured streets. Barrington Woods smelled of cooling asphalt and sawdust and new-lawn fertilizer. He thought of the way all those years ago the Vonns’ house had seemed ugly and futureless to him.

  “We don’t have to do this now,” she said.

  “I want you to meet them.”

  “I believe I should.”

  Monika smiled when she opened the door and saw them on her porch. It wasn’t the big carefree smile that David had grown up with, but a controlled one. In the last year David had sensed in her a new conservation of energy.

  While Max, as if siphoning his wife’s fuel, got more expansive and adamant by the month. Max spread his arms and hugged them both. He was wiry and strong as always. David smelled the usual gin and Canoe and Lucky Strikes. Heavy on the gin today.

  Monika cut her son a look when he introduced Barbara Brewer as his fiancée.

  “Fiancée?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll be damned!” said his father.

  “I’m happy for you both,” Monika said with another measured smile. “But David, you should have given me a chance to get ready for this. I mean—”

  “It happened quickly,” said David.

  “When? This morning?” she asked with pleasant sarcasm.

  “It was one-twenty this afternoon,” Barbara said cheerfully.

  A brief hesitation while his parents waited for him to say something and David wondered exactly what.

  “The greatest of these is love,” he said.

  “I’m just awfully goddamned happy for you two, son.”

  “Thanks, Dad.”

  Max spread his arms and hugged them both again.

  7

  JANELLE VONN SHOWED UP for David’s service on a drizzly Sunday in mid-November. She slouched in a chair at the back of the snack bar chapel. He recognized her immediately but still couldn’t quite believe it was the smart little eleven-year-old he’d invited to Thanksgiving dinner almost three years ago. He’d seen her a few times since then, around town. Each time a little older, bigger, a little more sure of herself. He’d always thought of her as unfortunate.

  She was dirty and poorly dressed—jeans with holes in them and a T-shirt dyed in competing colors. Barefoot even in the chill. Hair long, no style. Same black eye that had been swollen nine years ago when he stood on her porch and apologized for his brothers beating up hers. She looked worse than the inmates he counseled at the jail. At least they were clean. In spite of everything she was startlingly pretty and obviously drunk.

  After the service was over Janelle wobbled up to him and plunked herself down in one of the folding chairs. She almost missed.

  “I need to talk to you,” she said.

  “What’s wrong, Janelle?”

  “I took some reds and don’t feel too good.”

  “Red whats?”

  “Pills. Downers.”

  “Stand up and come with me.”

  David helped her up but she folded into him. He got an arm around her and towed her back to the office. The girl smelled strange—human body odor undercut with something green and pitchy and new to him. Her feet were dirty and she wore a toe ring.

  Barbara was at the desk making phone calls. She hung up hard and stood. “What’s this?”

  David explained as best he could and lowered Janelle onto the big green Naugahyde couch where he napped and wrote his sermons. Got a pillow under her head.

  “Can you drink some coffee?” asked Barbara.

  Janelle shook her head no. David saw her pupils were large and he smelled the funny green smell again.

  “She’s high on marijuana,” said Barbara. “I can smell it.”

  “That’s what I thought,” said David. He’d read about the stuff, knew it led to heroin addiction, but had never once seen or smelled it.

  He put a blanket over her. Barbara stood beside the sofa with her hands on her hips, looking down.

  “God, that feels good,” said Janelle. She shivered once and looked up at the ceiling.

  David snugged the blanket around her feet, then sat and felt her forehead. It felt cool. “When did you take the pills?”

  “This morning early.”

  “Why?”

  “Just for fun.”

  “When did you smoke the marijuana?” asked Barbara.

  “On the way here.”

  “You drove?”

  “Hitchhiked. He had some. A cool guy. The thing about these kind of ceilings is all the shapes. I can see an octopus on roller skates and a flower growing out of a clown’s head.”

  David glanced up at the
old acoustic ceiling, two decades of shapes and stains.

  “What happened to your eye?” asked Barbara.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s black.”

  “Oh, that. Casey came over.”

  David looked at Janelle’s dreamy expression, then up to Barbara’s sharp, assessing face. Barbara had turned out to be six years older than him and wiser.

  “Why hit you?” she asked. “What did he want?”

  David had never heard a silence say so much.

  “Nothing,” Janelle finally said.

  “But you said no,” said Barbara.

  “Yeah. That’s all I did.”

  David looked at Barbara but she was focused on Janelle.

  “Was your father there?” Barbara asked.

  “Casey wouldn’t a tried that with Dad there.”

  “Tried what?” David asked.

  Barbara glanced at him quickly but said nothing.

  “Just the old thing. No big deal.”

  “Does your father know what Casey does to you?” asked Barbara.

  “He beat up Casey and Lenny for it. A long time ago.”

  “Lenny, too?” asked David.

  “He started it.”

  David felt a great anger rise up in his chest. He thought of that day by the packinghouse, how he’d ended up on the ground covering up against the blows. How he’d let his man get away to bash Nick with the branch. Wished he could go back, beat the living shit out of Lenny and Casey all by himself. He thought of the long prayers he’d said the night before that rumble, for the courage and strength to fight. Wondered why the Lord had not given him those things.

  “We should call the Albert Sitton Home,” he said.

  “No,” said Barbara. “You should call Nick.”

  “No cops,” said Janelle. She slapped one hand onto the sofa back to pull herself up. Barbara removed it.