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Behind the town the hills rose sharply, not mountains by any stretch. They were rugged, without trees, hospitable to wildlife but uninviting to hikers. I could see power lines looping from house to house, and a series of telephone poles stretched away from me like hatch marks on a pencil drawing. We parked and got out, ambling down the middle of the cracked blacktop road. There were no sidewalks and no streetlights. There was no traffic and, therefore, no traffic lights. “Not exactly bustling,” I remarked. “I take it the auto-repair shop went belly-up.”
“That belonged to Ta
“Not much of an advertisement for auto repair.”
“Yeah, well he was bad at it anyway. Once he moved, he hired a couple of mechanics and now he’s doing great.”
Daisy pointed out the house where Chet Cramer lived with his current wife. “The Cramers were the only family with any sizeable income. They had the first television set anybody’d ever seen. If you played your cards right, you could watch Howdy Doody or Your Show of Shows. Liza took me over there once, but Kathy didn’t like me so I wasn’t invited back.”
The Cramers’ house was the only two-story structure I’d seen, an old-fashioned farmhouse with a wide wooden porch. I’d stuck a pack of index cards in my jacket pocket, and I used one now to make a crude map of the town. I’d be talking to a number of current and former residents, and I thought it would help to have a sense of where they’d lived relative to one another.
Daisy paused in front of a pale green stucco house with a flat roofline. Up came the hand so she could gnaw on herself. A short walkway lead from the street to the walk-out porch. A chain-link fence surrounded the property, with a sign hanging from the open gate that read NO TRESPASS. The yard was dead. Raw plywood sheets had been nailed over the windows. The front door had been lifted from its hinges and left leaning against the outside wall. The house number was 3908.
“That’s where you lived. I recognize the porch rail from the photograph.”
“Yep. You want to come in?”
“We’re not trespassing?”
“Not now. I bought it. Don’t ask me why. My parents rented from a guy named Tom Padgett, who sold it to me. You’ll see his name on the list. He was in the bar on a couple of occasions when the two of them pitched a fit. Daddy worked construction so sometimes we had money and sometimes not. If he had it, he’d spend it, and if he didn’t have it, too bad. Owing people money never bothered him. Bad weather he’d be out of a job or else he’d get fired for showing up drunk. He wasn’t exactly a deadbeat, but he operated with a similar mentality. He’d take care of the bills if he was in the mood, but you couldn’t count on that. Padgett was forever pounding on him for the rent because Daddy tended to pay late, if he paid at all. We’d be threatened with eviction, and when he finally coughed up the rent, it was always with the attitude that he was being abused.”
I followed her through the gate. I knew she must have been back a hundred times, but looking for what? An explanation, a clue, an answer to the questions that were plaguing her?
Inside, the layout was elementary. Living room with a dining cove, a kitchen with just enough room for a table and chairs, though those were long since gone. The kitchen appliances had been removed, pipes and wires sticking out of the wall. Blocks of relatively clean linoleum indicated where the stove and refrigerator had once sat. The sink was still there, along with the chipped Formica counters with metal rims. Cabinet doors stood open, revealing the empty shelves where paper was curling up from the corners. Without even meaning to, I moved forward and closed one of the cabinet doors. “Sorry. Things like that bug me.”
“I’m the same way,” Daisy said. “You wait. Leave the room and come back and the door will be open again. Almost enough to make you wonder about ghosts.”
“You’re not tempted to fix it up?”
“Maybe one day, though I can’t imagine ever living here again. I like the house I’m in.”
“So which bedroom was yours?”
“In here.”
The room was barely nine feet by twelve, painted an unpleasant shade of pink that I supposed was meant to be girlish.
“My bed was in this corner. Chest of drawers there. Armoire. Toy box. Little table and two chairs.” She leaned against the wall and surveyed the space. “I felt so lucky to have a room of my own. I didn’t know from tacky. Most of the people we knew were as bad off as we were. Or that’s what I realize now.”
She moved from her room to the second bedroom and paused in the door. This one was painted lavender with a wallpaper border of violets along the low ceiling line. I backtracked three steps and checked the bathroom, where the sink and bathtub were still anchored in place. The toilet had been removed and a rag was stuffed in the hole, which still emitted the spoiled-egg smell of flushes gone by. This was possibly the most depressing house I’d ever been in.
She moved in behind me, perhaps seeing the house as I did. “Believe it or not, my mother did what she could to pretty things up. Lace curtains for the living room, throw rugs, doilies for the furniture-stuff like that. One of the last fights I remember, my dad went berserk and tore down one of her precious lace panels. I don’t think he could have done anything worse. That’s how they were, always going to extremes, pushing each other over the edge. She tore down the rest, ripped them off the rods and threw them in the trash. I could hear her screaming she was finished. Done. She said he destroyed everything beautiful she tried to do and she hated him for that. Blah, blah, blah. That was a couple of days before she left.”
“Did it scare you? The fights?”
“Sometimes. Mostly I thought that’s just how parents behaved,” she said. “Anyway, the upshot is I’m a chronic insomniac. Shrinks have a field day with that. The only time I remember sleeping well was when I was a little kid and my parents went out. It must have been the only time I felt safe, because Liza was in charge and I knew I could trust her to take care of me.”
“You remember anything else from those last few days?”
“A bubble bath. It’s the little things that get you. I was sitting in the tub and she was on her way out. She stuck her head in the door… that little yappy dog in her arms… and she blew me a kiss. If I’d known it was the last one I’d ever get, I’d have made her come back and kiss me for real.”
4
Daisy took an alternate route on our return to Santa Maria, swinging north in a wide loop that, according to the map, encompassed the townships of Beatty and Poe. In point of fact, I didn’t see either one. I squinted, saying, “Where’s Poe? The map says it’s right here close to a little town called Beatty.”
“I think those are company names. Poe, I don’t know about, but there’s a Beatty Oil and Natural Gas. If there were ever towns in those spots, they might’ve left the names on the map so the area won’t seem so desolate.”
The surrounding countryside was flat, entirely given over to agriculture: fields of lettuce, sugar beets, and beans as far as the eye could see. The air smelled of celery. Bright blue port-o-potties stood like sentinels along the road. Cars were parked along the berm adjacent to some fields. Wooden crates were stacked high on flatbed trucks, and migrant farmworkers bent above the rows, harvesting a crop I didn’t recognize on sight, flying by as we were at sixty miles an hour. The road made a wide curve north. Oil rigs dotted the land and in one section, there was a small refinery that threw off an odor reminiscent of burning tires. In sections, I could see a line of stationary boxcars that must have stretched for a quarter of a mile.