Digging James Dean

by Robert Eversz

  “Who?”

  “Theresa.”

  “I thought we were talking about your sister.”

  I struck off across the lane, away from the steps where my sister had died, toward the mausoleum that rose, like an acropolis, from the island in the middle of the lake. My attention shuttled between my dead mother, my thieving sister, Theresa’s arrest, and the dread that not only couldn’t I properly grieve, I couldn’t comprehend what had happened or why. Frank chased after me, donuts and coffee clutched against his chest. “I’m sorry about the girl,” he said.

  A spray of wildflowers attracted my eye and I glanced down at a very simple headstone marking the grave of John Huston, then over to a towering, rocketlike spire beyond the lake. Huston’s films were his legacy; he didn’t need a big memorial. “She trusted me,” I said. “And now she’s in jail because I was a fool and believed the law. Can you believe I was stupid enough to take her in for questioning? They haven’t even told me the truth about my sister’s death—just half-truths. The law screwed me so many times I should know better, I should have known they’d play me both sides against the middle.”

  “You’ve been a real model citizen, no doubt about that,” Frank said. “Two months ago you wouldn’t have given snaps of a killing to the cops. No way. You would have swallowed the roll first.”

  “I still owe my lawyer for the last time he got me out of jail and now I have to take care of Theresa’s legal expenses, too. Where’s that money going to come from? Her dad is a drunk who thinks she’s going to be his ticket to riches. It’s my fault she’s in jail. I walked her right into a cell and slammed the door.” The law wasn’t my friend and never would be. I gazed across the tombs of Cecil B. DeMille and Janet Gaynor to Jayne Mansfield’s cenotaph across the lake, then picked out the memorial to Hattie McDaniel not far from the steps where my sister had died. “All these dead people, maybe they have the right idea. No worries when you’re dead, no disappointments either.” I grabbed a donut from the box and bit down, the glaze swirling around my tongue like the sugary froth on a wave. At least I could eat. At least I could still do that. “Maybe the shrine doesn’t exist,” I said. “Bartlet said it was only a rumor. I feel like we’re chasing ghosts here.”

  “I don’t know about ghosts but I do know Steve Reeves Ranch exists.” Frank settled into the grass next to Huston’s headstone. “He took up horse ranching when he retired. Only two problems. Mr. Reeves was very much alive until this year and the ranch is near Escondido, in San Diego County. Bartlet said Canyon Country.”

  “Then why him? Was he an actor or something?”

  “You don’t remember?” He shielded his eyes from the sun and looked up at me. “He was the first Arnold Schwarzenegger.”

  I sat on the grass opposite the headstone and took one of the coffees, asked, “What do you mean?”

  “A bodybuilder who turned to acting. Won all the big competitions. Mr. America, Mr. World, Mr. Universe. As though he was competing against muscular space aliens for the Mr. Universe title, right?”

  “Didn’t he do those sword-and-sandal flicks?”

  “That’s right,” he said, chewing and nodding. “Lots of muscular, sweaty guys in togas. Got his break playing Hercules. Did a bunch of sequels that practically invented the genre, became so popular they named a missile after him.”

  I looked at him like, you’re kidding.

  “No, I’m serious,” he said. “The Hercules, one of the first antiballistic missiles. Okay, maybe they named it after the original Greek myth, too. But the first Hercules missiles were deployed the same year the movie came out so there was a connection. They had a bunch of them stationed in silos up and down the coast.”

  “Is that the same thing as the Nike missile bases, you know, the ones in the mountains around here?”

  “Sure, same thing,” Frank said. “The military abandoned them years ago, in the 1960s, I think. Sometime after they discovered missile defense systems don’t work against other missiles.” He pantomimed pointing a rifle to the sky. “Like a bullet hitting a bullet.”

  “What are they now?”

  He shrugged, like he couldn’t speak for all of them. “They’re all different. Some torn down and paved over entirely, like the one in, where is it, Long Beach, I think. Some taken over by the forest service. Others leased out for television and radio transmission towers, you know, because the bases were generally built on mountaintops.”

  “Could someone lease the entire base, maybe buy it from the government?”

  “Sure, I think that’s been done, but why are we talking about this? I know you’re looking for a place to live and personal security is important, particularly after someone burned down your last pad, but a Nike missile base? Isn’t that a little extreme?”

  I swallowed the last of the donut, wiped my hands on the grass, and stood. “Luce said the word Nike when she died. Everybody thought she was talking about running shoes.”

  “Nike? That was the missile before the Hercules.” He stared up at me, piecing together the connections. “You think it’s called Steve Reeves Ranch because it’s a former missile base?”

  I held out my hand to help him up. “Can you think of a better place to set up a shrine to dead celebrities?”

  “You mean because it’s remote, out of the way?”

  “No,” I said. “Because rockets shoot toward the stars.”

  Thirty-Seven

  THE ROUTE to the abandoned Nike base came back to me as Frank and I drove the granite slope of the San Gabriel Mountains some thirty miles north of Los Angeles. On the penultimate night of her life my sister had talked about the times she had slipped out the bedroom window to drink and kiss boys in the weird isolation of the base. At the time it seemed my sister had wanted to say more but held back out of what I thought to be reticence. Maybe she had already known about the role the base played in the Church of Divine Thespians or at least suspected it. I felt as though she had known things at her death that I had yet to discover, that I still trailed her, just as I’d followed in her footsteps when I too slipped out the bedroom window at the age of fifteen to play adolescent games involving boys and alcohol in the abandoned landscape of the Nike base.

  We swung off the freeway at Lost Canyon Road and wound through sharp-backed ridges to clusters of oak and wild-grass fields below Angeles National Forest. I’d always ridden to the base by the light of headlamps and in daylight almost missed the faded red graffiti on the roadside oak tagged to mark the dirt road branching up the hill to the base. Frank talked to an editorial assistant on the phone as I drove, jotting facts into his notebook. I steered to the side, left wheels down the ridged center of the dirt road to keep the Caddy clear of rocks.

  “The site is no longer owned by the government,” Frank said. He’d dispatched the assistant to research Nike missile bases. “It was bought years ago by a communications company to use as a microwave relay site, then sold again. Current owner unknown, but we’re working on it.”

  NO TRESPASSING signs appeared on the oaks to the left of the road just before it split again. A V-shaped gate swung across the fork heading up to the base, metal bars padlocked to a post. I parked the Cadillac at a turnout a quarter mile up the road. “How do you want to do this?” I asked.

  “I thought I’d walk up and ring the bell,” he said.

  “I don’t think there is one.”

  “No bell? Then what’s up there?”

  I laid it out for him, the way it had been when I was a teenager, dirt road leading to a chain-link fence topped in barbed wire. Not much remained on the surface of the base back then, just a few padlocked outbuildings, a radar tower, concrete launch pads, and welded-shut doors descending to the munitions magazines. We’d snuck through gaps in the chain-link fence cut by a previous generation of teens. A private owner would have patched those gaps. Frank levered open the door and stepped outside. He lit a cigarette and stretched out the kinks the ride had put in his back, asked, “Are you coming with?
”

  “You’re going to walk up there, just like that.”

  “That’s the way you get a Pulitzer Prize.” He puffed his cigarette a little too vigorously, smoking and smirking through his nerves. “If you’re too chicken to come with me, I understand.”

  I opened the trunk, fished the boot cam from my camera bag. “They know who I am. I show my face, they might shoot us both on sight.” I handed the point-and-shoot camera to Frank. “You, they might not recognize.”

  Frank slid back the lens cover and pointed the viewfinder at my head. “You plan to stay here?”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll call 911 if I hear shots.”

  He lowered the camera. The expression on his face, he didn’t look all that confident. “You’ll help scatter my ashes too, I bet.”

  I pointed to the right of the barred road. The base had been built where the ground leveled out below the crest of the hill. “There are some trees up there, if I remember right.” I pulled the telephoto lens from my bag and attached it to the body of the Nikon. “I’ll cover you with the telephoto from there. It’s going to make a more dramatic shot in telephoto, the courageous journalist braving death alone.”

  Frank smoked his cigarette down to the filter, his smirk fading to a grimace. “You have cell-phone coverage up here?”

  I checked my phone for a signal, nodded.

  He crushed the cigarette beneath his heel. “Battery charged up? Remember how to dial 911?”

  I strung the crowbar through a belt loop and affixed a pair of wire cutters to the opposite side. “Smoke another death stick, give me time to get in position for the shot.” I called the Rott to my side and struck off between a couple of NO TRESPASSING signs, glancing back once to see Frank dip into his pack of Winstons like a condemned man offered a second last cigarette.

  I skirted the perimeter of the base, my trail screened from the casual eye by a line of oaks standing fifty yards distant. The San Gabriels to the north are different from the Coast Range, enough rain falling to support oak, buckeye, and walnut trees among fields of wild grains and grasses. The occasional prickly pear cactus breaks through the soil, a reminder that the desert is never distant in Southern California, but thickets of chaparral and sagebrush are absent and the hills are easy to hike. I put the telephoto to my eye and scanned the wide swath of land, cleared to chickweed and thistle, that separated the line of trees from the perimeter fence. Fresh razor wire topped the chain-link and the fence stretched taught, uncut. Orange and black PRIVATE PROPERTY signs alternated every dozen yards with those declaring NO TRESPASSING. I’d never before seen an unguarded fence in the hills that hadn’t been cut by hikers and wondered who guarded this one.

  The Rott loped ahead, where he found the scent of old horse droppings so irresistible he rolled in them, wriggling on his back as though he bathed in ambrosia. I looked for a tree with an unobstructed view of the base and selected an oak at the edge of the field. Camera strapped around my back, I boosted myself on a knothole to the lowest branch, then vaulted to the next, which hung, thick as a dolphin’s torso, over the field. I straddled the branch and aimed the telephoto down the road. Frank marched into view a minute later, not-so-discreetly scanning the trees in an attempt to spot my position. The Rott hunkered low in the grass. I was all but invisible at that distance, shielded by the branches and dry, barbed leaves of the oak. Frank stepped up to the chain-link gate blocking the road into the base and shook it. A length of steel chain looped both sides of the gate, secured by a thick padlock that looked Kalashnikov-proof. He wasn’t going to break through the gate by shaking it.

  I panned across the base looking for surveillance cameras. Rubble from the base’s decommissioning and the refuse of teenage beer busts had been cleared from the grounds and the cylindrical-roofed outbuildings glistened with fresh green paint. A giant satellite dish hung from the radar tower. No cameras, dogs, or security guards in sight. If Sven had set up operations here, he counted on the remoteness and innocence of the location—and a good security fence—to keep out intruders.

  I ran off a few frames of Frank at the gate and slid down the trunk. The Rott jumped to his feet, relieved to have me closer to eye level. I gave him the hand signal for down and he reluctantly obeyed. He was a good dog but I didn’t need him bounding around the grass, not where I planned to go. I signaled him to stay and crawled toward the fence on my belly. The Rott thought that was a peculiar thing to do. He watched, intensely curious while I covered the first dozen yards, then, conflicted between the needs to obey and to see what I was up to, crawled after me. He’d done that before, technically obeying one command while ignoring another, thinking maybe I wouldn’t notice.

  I slipped the tin snips from my belt when I reached the fence. Frank shouted his name and profession as he aimed the lens of the point-and-shoot through the chain-link. If he saw me, he didn’t give any indication. I trapped the bottom wire between the blades and squeezed until it popped, moved to the next link and the next. A slim black figure stumbled from the outbuilding nearest the gate. I twisted the camera toward my eye, distracted by a rustling to my right and then the flick of something warm and wet on my arm. The Rott. His glance imparted more than a little worry, as though he feared I’d scold him. I repeated the signal for down and twisted the focus ring until the figure of a thin young girl dressed in black came into clear view, walking toward Frank at the front gate. A girl whose skin looked powdered white and whose eyes and lips had been painted in shades as purple as a bruise. A Goth girl. Cassie Bogle. My niece.

  My finger stilled above the shutter release.

  She stopped a few feet short of the chain-link fence, her hands wedged into the back pockets of her black jeans and her eyes fixed to the ground at her feet as she listened to what Frank had to say. I couldn’t take a picture that exposed her face not only to the readers of Scandal Times but to a legal system that cared little for the welfare of juvenile offenders. In California, a killing committed during the commission of a felony is first-degree murder, and anyone participating in the original felony can be charged with murder, whether they hold the weapon, give the order, or merely go along for the ride. If the police obtained evidence that she’d been at Hollywood Forever Cemetery the night of the grave robbery, they could charge her with the murder of her mother. The state could even try her as an adult. I couldn’t trust the law to treat her leniently. Theresa’s arrest proved that. I couldn’t risk the same happening to Cassie with far more serious consequences.

  I auto-dialed Frank’s number and watched through the telephoto while it connected. He ignored the rings, lacing his fingers through the chain-link at his shoulders while he talked. Cassie shook her head, shrugged, and turned toward the outbuildings. She was sorry, the gestures said, but she couldn’t help him. Frank shouted something as she walked away, then thought to answer his phone.

  “Call her Cassie,” I whispered.

  “Why would I want to do that?” He scanned the trees again for my position. “She says she’s the daughter of the caretaker. Nobody’s home except her.”

  “Don’t fight me on this. Her name is Cassie. Call her name.”

  He shrugged and shouted her name. She turned a long and suspicious look over her shoulder. Her high, thin voice wafted through the receiver. “How do you know who I am?”

  “Look back behind you,” I whispered. “Toward the car.” I didn’t want him to glance toward my position. I wanted Cassie to think whoever called spoke down the hill from them. “Tell her you have a message from her mother. Not her foster mother, but her real mother, Sharon.”

  I snipped higher up the chain-link fence while he repeated my message, then folded the sharp edges away to make a gap in the fence about two feet high. “Tell her that you’re talking to someone who knows her mother, that her mother sent me to Los Angeles to talk to her.” I held my hand flat toward the Rott’s snout, ordering him to stay, and slithered through the gap in the fence. “Keep looking behind you, like you expect me to come that
way.”

  “I don’t know what’s going on here,” Frank whispered, turning toward the road so the girl wouldn’t hear.

  “The girl is my niece,” I whispered, moving silently forward.

  “Wait a minute, you mean your sister, the one who was—”

  “Do not mention anything about her mother’s murder. She may not know anything about it. But keep talking. Keep her distracted.”

  I wedged the cell phone into the hip pocket of my jeans. Frank pretended he continued to talk to me, gesturing so wildly he looked like a crazy man. I closed enough distance to hear her voice as she questioned him, a voice thin and scratchy, much like her mother’s. Her jeans hung low over hips so thin the twin bones of her pelvis jutted out like wings, and the skin of her lower back, visible in the gap between her jeans and bare-midriff top, stretched emaciation-taut around the vertebrae. I said, “Hi Cassie.”

  She turned and backed toward the fence, her hair short and blond at the crown but dyed black and worn long at the bangs, like the tonsure of a rebellious priest. Her eyes flicked from my boots to dyed-black hair, judging not just my style but also my speed in case she decided to bolt. She asked, “How’d you get in here?”

  “I cut through the fence,” I said. No reason to lie. “I’m your mom’s sister. That makes me your aunt.”

  She blinked hard, jolted.

  “It was news to me, too,” I said.

  “You’re Mary?”

  “A long time ago, when your mom lived at the house.” My sister had told her about me. That surprised me. I glanced back at the Rott. He’d crawled through the gap in the fence. My glance caught him creeping forward again. I slapped my thigh, the way I called him to me. “I go by Nina now.”

  “I’ve seen a picture of Mary. She had blond hair.” She looked at the dog running up and shifted her feet, uncertain what effect the dog would have on a decision to run.

  “I suspect you and I get our hair from the same bottle.” The dog bounced against my leg. I told him to sit and he obeyed. “I talked to your mother a week ago. She asked me to get you out of trouble, so you should know that’s what I’m here to do.”