by David Hirst
More than anything, the shootout, enacted by a score or so locals in front of the old Western props and houses, epitomises the difference between the search for meaning and meaning itself, even though it’s all an act and the bullets are duds. But the act is real.
Ernie goes to incredible lengths to ensure that the guns and clothing of his gunslingers parallels those of the Old West. So do the movies and the theme parks, but that’s all for money. The shootout is free. If no one comes to watch, the show goes on. It exists for the participants, not the tourists. Ernie, the good guys, and the bad guys, and the townsfolk who act out the shooting, are playing out the fantasy of the West. But it’s their fantasy, and they do it for free. And when the show is over for the day, the actors resume lives not unlike those of the common folk of the Old West. They tend to their animals, dig post holes, mix concrete, yarn endlessly on the street or by the post office — the smallest in America — barter, have affairs, tinker and talk of machinery, and lend and borrow small amounts of cash. And when they change out of their fancy Old West clothes, they put back on cheaper versions of the same.
Everyone knows everything about everyone else in this town with no secrets. At the same time, they know nothing. There can be no ultimate truth, because there are so many versions of any event, or collective suspicions about it, that no one can be sure of anything. They police themselves, enforcing reasonable, if not decent, behaviour through a code of estranging those who cross the line. Sexual harassment is dealt with not by the courts — for there are none — but in the court of public opinion. Which is worse: paying out the costs on a charge in cash, or, by being shunned and despised, by having heads turn away, by emptying a bar with your presence, being judged by one’s peers every day?
It’s the code of the West.
8
The source of all evil, the filthy lucre, was the next summit we had to face and, never having owned much more than a lot of books, we were not the sort of people who are given money by financial institutions while still pushing through the bank’s revolving doors. On top of that, we didn’t want enough. Money, that is. Land and housing were cheap in the High Desert, but a cross between a very large house and a fort, set on fifteen or seventeen or seventeen and one-quarter acres — no one was sure of the exact size of the Boulder House property — a place replete with five garages and two extra living units by the pool would, in LA, cost somewhere between $15 million and $30 million.
But two hours from LA, in beauteous surrounds, we were talking a few hundred grand. That alone was a problem. People don’t lend such tiny amounts for houses in LA, especially when one’s bank is based in Beverly Hills. Asking for $200,000 for anything but an extension to a toilet was akin to saying we were poor. The Californian property market, following well behind the heels of such cities as New York, London, and Sydney, was taking, as they say, off. The slow start was a product of the city’s neglect by the first Bush administration, which had caused riots, mudslides, and even earthquakes, and left the city gasping, her reputation terribly sullied. But the Clinton years had, brick by brick, and with infinite care and wisdom, turned languish into hope and eventually a robust return to what one might call wholesale recovery. Especially in the property markets.
News of these events had not filtered through to the High Desert, and did not until after the fateful few hours when those who cherish democracy above all things, five members of the Supreme Court, found it appropriate to stop the counting of votes in Florida and declare another Bush the winner and president-elect.
But in the bright and shining, if last, days of President Clinton’s second term, a nice little cottage with views that stretched almost to Mexico could, in the High Desert, be bought for $5,000. To the south, Palms Springs was booming; to the north, even places like Palmdale, a city bereft of palms or any redeeming feature — save a dog pound from which I had rescued our last springer spaniel, Sailor, in the winter of 1999, when the city was still considered a slum — were flourishing. At least the housing prices were returning to and surpassing those set during the George Herbert Walker Bush recession.
So low were the local expectations that the fact, or even the very possibility, that we might spend anything more than $7.80 on a home there set idle desert tongues a-wagging, and soon it was reported to us that we were suspected drug lords; later, winners of some super lotto; and later still, rich Australian ranchers. The land is close enough to LA to be in its sphere of influence, but the vales of Pioneertown, Rimrock, and Pipes Canyon remained unnoticed by the men with bulldozers in their employ and golf courses in their souls. We were, I was convinced, on a cusp that would soon crumble, sending prices as high as the sky, and ending our hopes of ever owning more than a shoe box, leaving us swinging on the rent rope, flying faster and faster and getting nowhere. In fact, all we had was a conviction that this place, though overlooked by the developers, was finer than all the homes in Beverly Hills combined.
It was time to visit Kurt.
Kurt is an accountant whose Wilshire Boulevard firm looks after the money of people who have so much of it that they don’t bother to do so themselves. We were paupers compared with his rock-star regular clients, but Kurt had a life outside his plush office — a life dictated by his passion for pool. For years, we had shot together in The Circle Bar on Main Street, Santa Monica, and had become good friends. Kurt was fourth-generation Japanese–American. His family had once been extremely wealthy, but had been caught up in the frenzy of Jap-bashing, perhaps the greatest blight of the FDR presidency. They had been interned in the wasteland of Manzanar Camp in Inyo County, just outside Lone Pine, below the frozen wastes of Mount Whitney and due west of the boiling wastes of Death Valley. Kurt was impressed by the fact that Boo and I had taken time, years before, to wander across the remnants of the internment camp where his family, and thousands of other loyal Americans, had suffered so cruelly for three years. He had been hardened by the family’s misfortunes.
He had joined a Japanese street gang as a kid, and had been toughened in a way few accountants ever get to be before donning the designer suits of his profession. He had joined the gang for the same reason all kids do — survival on the hard streets of LA. That life was long behind him, but he had steeled himself, and all that remained of those days was the steel of the knives he kept as mementos from the time when a knife was part of his attire. He had scores of knives, and would sometimes covertly bring them into The Circle, when I would study them in the illicit darkness of the bar.
I went to him for money, telling him of the wonders of the High Desert with the same one-sided passion I had used to sell the idea to Boo.
Kurt was sceptical. He was a city creature through and through. His family had seen enough of the wilds of California, and he was puzzled by why I would seek what to him must have been a comfortable version of the internment camp. He probably didn’t relish the prospect of losing one of his regular opponents at the pool tables, but seemed more astonished that someone he believed to be moderately sane would consider abandoning the pleasures and comforts of life by the beach for the wilds.
I explained our explorations of the West and how it had long held a certain fascination for me. Australia once had its own Wild West or, to be more accurate, East, but somehow the colourful killers and cannibals of our lore didn’t match up to the untamed madness of the Western United States throughout the 1800s, and especially in the period that followed the formal cessation of the hostilities of the Civil War.
Every week in the tiny town southwest of Sydney where I grew up, we would file into the cinema and be transported to the West as the battle for hearts and minds took place. Down would go the lights and up would come the Movietone News, followed by that week’s Western. This was the fifties, and the Ruskies and Americans were locked in a propaganda war. One had Sputniks; the other, Wyatt Earp. It was people enclosed in tiny metal boxes in space versus the lone man against lead-hungry, fast-gunning bad guys
. For me, the Sovs never really had a chance.
Australia began as a jail, and never seemed to entirely cease being one. The first Gulag, settled by men in irons, had to compete in my imagination with a land that for one hundred years scarcely knew the rule of law. We had our Rebs, at least a Reb, in the form of Ned Kelly, but the US had a whole army of Johnny Rebs captained, in my childish mind, by Jesse James. Ned Kelly’s fight against the English was a debacle. The Americans beat the greatest power on earth about the time Ned was being born.
I had devoured the screen version of the Wild West from my first childish glance, and though I saw through the glass or cordite darkly, what I saw — Maverick, Gunsmoke, The Rifleman — sure seemed a lot more fun than the jaunts of our bad men: a few highwaymen and a family of Irishmen destined to hang or die in obscurity.
About the time Bob Dylan was writing John Wesley Harding, and my father was praying that one day I might find the time to read and even emulate his hero, John Wesley, I was digging around discovering what I could about one of America’s first serial killers. How our generation’s greatest poet could have written that Hardin never killed an honest man would later puzzle me. His first killings (when he was twelve) were of two Negro kids he found swimming in his favourite water hole in Georgia. Georgia wasn’t the West; laws even prohibited the wanton murder of blacks, and Hardin took it upon himself to ride — west — to Texas. He was proud of having shot twelve men dead before he commenced shaving. He killed another forty (not counting Negroes and Indians) before settling at the tender age of twenty-one in a Texas town called, inevitably, Comanche. Comanche was one of the first long words I learnt. At that time, I doubt a soul in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales could name an Aboriginal tribe or people.
I knew far more about the Apache and the Comanche than the Aboriginal when I encountered my first black Australian on a football field. I was nearing fourteen when I found myself playing on a young black, and I remember not wanting to tackle my opponent. I think I was scared. I sure was ignorant. I tried to learn more, but the subject was taboo. Red Indians, as we called them, were, through film, TV, and books, almost family friends. Geronimo was a household name. At night, I would wait for sleep, either yearning to be an Indian or inventing an Indian army I would lead against the white eyes in mythical places such as Arizona and New Mexico.
About this time, I read that back in Comanche, Texas, Hardin had promptly shot the local sheriff. Comanche, I discovered, had six saloons and little else. I wasn’t sure what a saloon was exactly, but yearned to wander into that age and through the batwings. Hardin was deliciously shot in the back of the head, and, inevitably, the slug landed in the Wigwam Saloon in a wondrous place called El Paso. The radio about that time was playing a song about the ‘West Texas town of El Paso’, and I figured it was the same place. Hardin, even more delightfully, had just thrown four aces in a dice game at the saloon. I had no idea what a dice game was, but how could a failed Irishman, Ned Kelly — roaming across, of all places, northern Victoria — compete with such men?
Even Hardin’s killer, ‘Old John’, was good enough to bite the dust before his trial and right before the same Wigwam Saloon. That was in 1895. More than one hundred years later, I delved a little deeper into Hardin’s fate, and discovered that ‘Old John’ was out on bail after Albert Fall, later to be president Warren G. Harding’s secretary of the interior, and even later the central figure in the Teapot Dome Scandal, got him off.
Like me, Wesley was the son of a preaching man, as was the other sad and lonely figure of the West, Billy the Kid. Both men terrorised Texas. Both, like Jesse James, were Johnny Rebs, and all three died from a coward’s bullet.
As part of my ambition to join the Red (Indian) army, I spent a good deal of time, often with my cousin Bill, crafting bows and arrows from the willows and the poplar trees of the Southern Highlands. The arrows never seemed to fly with the tenacity of the Cheyenne’s. They scarcely flew at all. Bill favoured the role of the cowboy, his parents being richer than mine, and capable of providing him with bright, shiny six guns similar to those favoured by Roy Rogers. It never occurred to me that, thirty-five years later, I would sleep in Roy and Dale’s old bedroom, and possibly in their old bed.
It was a cowboy prank that got me expelled from the Boy Scouts on my first night. Horace Isedale, escaping my coming arrow, threw himself through the scout hall window and landed on his front teeth, both of which were found under a chair. Horace didn’t mind terribly, but his parents objected to the cost of providing him with false ones. Horace grew to love his false teeth, and would play tricks with them to scare the girls at school. He would remove them with a swipe of his hand across his mouth and then leer at the ladies, who would scream in fright. Horace, with teeth, was not the most handsome of boys.
He must have done his trick too often, as the teeth grew loose. One day, when he was diving into the muddy waterhole that served as our swimming pool, the teeth disappeared when he hit the water. His parents drew the line at a second set, and Horace spent the winter frightening girls without drawing his hand across his mouth. Fatefully, that winter coincided with the purchase of a pool cleaner, and Horace landed the job of sucking the mud from the pool floor and disturbing the habitat of the tortoises that had taken up residence. To his eternal delight, some twelve months later, his teeth appeared in the huge mud-filled bag where the filth of the pool was deposited. Such was his joy that the teeth returned immediately to his mouth, without so much as a scrub.
About the time Horace discovered his teeth, I had discovered the joys of Shakespeare, Dickens, Orwell, and all the other prescribed works for a young man growing up in Australia’s version of England’s pastures green. Our house groaned with books. The classics, the great works of the Greeks, were merely a grasp away. But other towering literary feasts also caught my eye. I absorbed Dead in Texas, The Bloody Spur, Their Guns Were Fast, and Montana Dead Shot, usually from the tranquillity of the lavatory seat, and they were to prove a great preparation for our move, many winters away, to Pioneertown and Boulder House. Through them, I learnt the difference between a Colt and a Sharps, which was to be of some value in a place where guns are far more prevalent than books or even newspapers, and where the sound of gunfire is so common that it causes no alarm.
9
Kurt, our accountant, shook his head with something akin to dismay when I suggested he find a bank that would pony up a few hundred thousand dollars for us. Though the banks couldn’t give money away fast enough at the time, Boulder House was a most peculiar property, and Bill a most peculiar man. The combination was about to get volatile. The initial problem was Bill. In his unfettered confidence, he had extended the house into his neighbour’s land, and we soon discovered that a portion of Boulder House, including part of the kitchen, was actually on land owned by one Floyd Salazar. Right slap-bang in the middle of this parcel of land stood the ‘murderer’s cottage’, usually inhabited by Floyd’s son Danny when he wasn’t serving time in prison. Normally, the matter could have been resolved for a small sum, the land itself being worth a few hundred dollars at the most. But nothing was normal here in the desert, and things tended to get less so as the months passed.
The differences between the violent Wild West and the carpeted canyons on Wilshire Boulevard were getting wider. And so began the longest escrow in the history of Yucca Valley and environs.
I might have anticipated the banker’s problems. They were of the sort that city bankers have when dealing with highly unusual buildings in the middle of the High Desert.
At first, the suits were unhappy with the well, as I would grow to be. The paperwork on the property showed it pumping thirty litres an hour, which is a pitiful amount of water, but better than none, which was what it actually pumped. The banker called from his office in Beverly Hills and informed me that we would need to pump more water.
‘The amount of water that can be pumped,’ I told him, ‘is d
etermined by forces even more powerful than banks — God.’
I pointed out that the water, which seeped from the mountain into the cracks and fissures in the granite over a period of many years, was all that could be pumped. There was little that I, or even the world’s largest bank, could do to speed it up. But such problems were cropping up with every aspect of the house, and the sale was moving at the same pace as the water. And with the question of water came the question of fire. We were miles from the nearest hydrant, and county regulations stipulated that we had to have sufficient water to put out a fire — a difficult thing to calculate indeed. Thirty litres an hour would scarcely put out a barbecue. In endless tedious conversations, days of telephone tag, I argued that the property consisted almost entirely of rock, and that rock didn’t burn. The threat of brush fires was minimal, as there was very little brush. And, if the house caught fire, there was little hope that 80,000 litres of water would put it out. It had burnt once before, and it had burnt fast.
Bill, in the meantime, was getting toey. He had found the exact place he wanted to move to, and he wanted the money. A year had passed since escrow had commenced. It was again Christmas, Boo was again in Australia, and I decided to head for the high plains and personally assure Bill that we were doing all we could.