“And you said they were all over Laguna now, those vans.”
“You see them a lot. Different colors.”
“And the curtains?”
“White with dark circles. Oh, of course — they were peace signs. Pretty sure, peace signs. Perfect for a hippie van, right?” The man opens his eyes. “I’m Myron Kandell.”
“I’m Matt Anthony. My sister has been kidnapped by the men you saw, in a late-model white-on-green VW van with peace-sign curtains. I witnessed it with my own eyes.”
“Holy shit, Matt.”
“The cops don’t believe me. I want you to tell them what you saw.”
“I already did.”
“But not the curtains. The peace signs are important. They’re critical evidence, Mr. Kandell.”
“You mean go downtown to the cop house?”
“I’ll drive us. I know which cops to talk to.”
Brigit Darnell takes Kandell’s statement in the same interview room Matt has just left. Matt waits in the lobby. Detective McAdam strides through, gives Matt a surprised look with his big magnified eyes, keeps going out the door.
When Matt drops him off at Thalia, Myron Kandell invites him in for a smoke again.
“I’ve got papers to deliver.”
“Good luck with your sister.”
“Don’t say anything to anybody about the curtains. The cops don’t want that getting around and tipping them off that we know. What you saw is very important.”
“I’ll guard our secret. Porch those papers, Matt.”
And porch them he does. His legs are strong, his scabs are thick and healing, the delivery bag feels light. His aim is true. Ozzie, the German shepherd on Wilcox, doesn’t charge, and Jamaica, the cocker spaniel on Los Robles, is chained to a magnolia tree. Old Coiner cheerfully waves at Matt as if he’s never seen him before.
When he gets home, his mother is loading boxes into the Westfalia.
“You’re just in time, Matt! Our Dodge City home is ready early and I just gave Pedley notice. Help me load this in, and I’ll show you your new place. God, I hope you like it.”
23
Matt drives because his mother’s feeling a little spaced. A touch of the flu, she says, nothing serious.
Matt steers out Broadway, passing the pageant amphitheater on his left, then picks up the Laguna Canyon frontage road. Putts past the new Sawdust Festival, where Christian is selling his psychedelic paintings and his bodacious wrought iron sculptures of desert animals. Makes a right onto Woodland Drive and a left on Roosevelt.
The houses here are small and old, some stucco but most of them the same wooden clapboard as the Third Street bungalow. Their front doors and windows are mostly open and the smell of dope rides the air. The streets are dirt, with cars parked chaotically. Long-haired young people stand around smoking, eyeing Matt and his mother. Children and dogs. Matt sees a skinny black monkey chained to an oak tree in a brown front yard. And an aviary that takes up half of a vacant lot, filled with bright red macaws and green parrots. A bunch of barefoot boys in swim trunks run alongside the Westfalia, lunging up toward his open window, for what reason Matt does not know. He slows to a crawl to avoid running over someone’s foot.
Matt knows from his mom that this area — made up of Woodland Drive, Fairwood Lane, Roosevelt Lane, Victory Walk, and Milligan Way — had been a black neighborhood until the hippies and dealers and artists took over. Cheap rent, walk to town and the beach. A few of his schoolmates live out here. Christian told him Johnny Grail had started calling it Dodge City because of all the cops raiding and hassling him and his Brotherhood of Eternal Love, chasing them around with guns drawn.
“There, Matt! The red one.”
It’s a small barn. The paint and white trim are faded and he can see space between some of the slats. The sliding door is open, chickens fussing in the sunshine. Matt has always liked barns. His Grandma Mae and Grandpa Elmer lived on a farm near Dayton, Ohio, and Julie took all three kids there one summer for two weeks. He remembers that barn clearly, from the rusted hand-crank corn husker that had taken off a man’s hand in 1921, to the pigeon feathers wafting down in the dusty light, to the livestock-and-hay smell of it.
This barn sits on its lot, weirdly angled and somehow apart from the other buildings on Roosevelt Lane. Like it’s been dropped here. Matt thinks of Dorothy’s house in The Wizard of Oz, the way the tornado just picks it up and sets it down.
Like most of Dodge City, the barn looks a little long in the tooth.
“Do you like it, Matt?”
“I’m not sure. It’s bigger than Third Street. What’s the rent?”
“Less than Third Street! Plus I’ve got some canning and kitchen work.”
“Kitchen work?”
“It’s kind of communal. You’ll see.”
The boys tear into the barn ahead of Matt and his mother. There’s no walkway or porch or entryway, just a footpath that leads through the dead-grass barnyard to the sliding door.
Inside, it’s an odd mix of barn and home. There are enough windows to let in some sun, but not a lot. Matt stands just inside the door, his mother beside him. There are no stalls or pens, tractors or tools. Rather, a main room with a beaten linoleum floor with a white-on-purple fleur-de-lis pattern. In the center of the room is a large, upturned wooden utility spool with six mismatched bar stools around it, some with backs and some not. Against the rough slat walls are a wooden chair and three thrift-store sofas that look like they’ve supported generations.
The kitchen is spacious, with a four-burner stove, a stainless-steel sink, and an oven. Two refrigerators: a bulbous white Frigidaire with a Grateful Dead poster of a skull smoking a cigar, and a newer one with hundreds of surf stickers and peace signs on it. There’s a wood-burning stove for heat. The barn smells of woodsmoke and skunky marijuana.
The boys peer down on them from the hayloft, point and laugh and disappear into the darkness. Matt looks at the stairway and the handwritten DO NOT ENTER sign hung across the handrails with twine. Suddenly the boys come flying down the stairs, jump the twine, and pound across the old linoleum and out the door.
“Welcome!”
“Welcome!”
“Butts!”
Through open doors, Matt can see a “master” bedroom and three smaller ones. He steps into each momentarily, because a moment is all it takes. They all have mattresses on their linoleum floors, defeated dressers, and saloon-y wooden furniture that reminds Matt of Gunsmoke. Each room has one window and a sink. The master has an old-fashioned clawfoot bathtub and a toilet. Matt, skinny and prone to his garage drafts, feels a shiver just imagining this place in February.
“There’s no shower.”
“Right next door, Matt — Don and Connie Schwartz — the owners of this place. They’re Brotherhood. And they’re hardly ever home. At least Don isn’t. He travels a lot.”
Smuggling in hash from Afghanistan, Matt assumes. “And we share our kitchen?”
“With one other family only.”
“Is the rest of it ours?”
“The barn is all ours! Except the kitchen, sometimes.”
Matt can’t stop himself. “I hate it. I’d rather have the old garage and my own kitchen and a decent shower. Your room at home is better than this one. And we’d freeze here. The canyon’s cold in fall and winter.”
“But warm in spring and summer. Except for, you know, the June gloom...” A tear rolls down Julie’s cheek and she brushes it away. A catch of breath. Then another tear.
“Why are you doing this, Mom?”
“I thought I could... you know...”
“No, I don’t know.”
“I feel very sad inside.”