The Do-Re-Mi Page 19

  “I did,” Knudsen said. “A picture of each of three kids and one of a wall.”

  After Willis replaced the radio handset, he gazed at Barker, who stood kicking dirt. The sheriff scratched his lip again, as though trying to decide something urgent, before he turned and walked back to us. “Hickey, I don’t suppose you coulda helped out, grabbed Van Dyke and brought him in. I expect you forgot how to do that part of police work.”

  Pop looked up and down the road. “We didn’t think you’d approve, Sheriff. When you were deputizing everybody else in town, you passed us by.”

  “Yeah, well things woulda gone better for your Mexican boy, ‘cause at least till we talk face-to-face with Van Dyke, Alvaro’s our man.”

  As Willis turned toward his car, Pop said, “Find the pastor. He’ll give you the same story we gave you.”

  “Hickey,” the sheriff said, “we got a whole town to protect, and a few thousand tourists. You want me to talk to this pastor, you bring him to me.”

  Barker shuffled to the rear door of the Cadillac. “Get out, Delene,” he yipped. “You’re coming with us.” But his sister stayed put between Ava and Mama. After scuffing his feet like a bull, Barker stomped to the cruiser and climbed in beside the sheriff.

  Knudsen led the caravan back to the highway. He turned south, toward the airport. Willis switched his siren on and zoomed toward Evergreen. We lagged behind. On Manhattan Avenue, we saw Willis going into his office while his cruiser whipped a U-turn and sped east toward River Road.

  We fell behind again but kept the cruiser in sight. As it passed the jamboree, Pop pulled to the side of the road by the entrance. “He’s going to the church. My son and I will keep him company, if you gals would kindly go in here and tell whoever needs to know that Clifford will return in time for his set. And keep an eye out for Pastor Bob.”

  “WHAT if Barker’s going to kill Pastor Bob?” I said.

  “You know Barker better than I do. Maybe he thinks Roy’s going to hole up in the church, claim asylum or make a stand and wait until dark to make his getaway.”

  We sped past McNees Park, which looked deserted, and skidded onto the dirt shoulder about fifty yards from the church. Barker was already out of his cruiser and half way across the meadow.

  The musicians who had performed that morning stood outside the locked sanctuary. We kept our distance, about twenty yards, close enough to hear the woman holding the tambourine call out to Barker, “Is Pastor okay?”

  Barker didn’t speak until he reached the musicians. “Why do you ask?”

  “He’s supposed to be here, and he’s not. When we saw you, we got worried.”

  “Nobody seen him?”

  They all shook their heads or said no.

  “Where’s he live?”

  The tambourine player pointed to the sanctuary. The guitarist said, “Upstairs.”

  “He shows up, tell him to call me.” Barker handed each of the musicians a business card. Then he wheeled and strode past us wearing a look I hadn’t seen on him before. It was almost serene, which spooked me more than his blazing eyes ever had.

  Twenty

  AT the jamboree, the concessions were closing. Six or seven hundred people lounged on grass or blankets in front of the main stage. All that remained of the thousands who had trekked to Evergreen.

  Ava, Mama, Delene Marris, and Steph the waitress were together on a Mexican blanket at the outer edge of the crowd. Mama saw us first. She waved and nudged Ava who then convinced some hippies around her to get chummier and make a place for us. Pop stayed back where he wouldn’t have to sit on the ground and where he could stand without blocking anyone’s view and smoke his pipe without fouling as many people’s air.

  While I taped my hand, Ava finished telling Steph the true story of Jimmy’s death, all except for the last piece of the mystery. She didn’t know that piece and I hadn’t told her my guess about who had turned honest Jimmy into a marijuana poacher, accompanied him to the woods, and maybe shot at Roy Van Dyke. Pop always said guesses were dangerous, too easily confused with fact. Besides, I was occupied with pre-show jitters.

  Ava told Steph, “We don’t know if the person who took Jimmy into the woods and the one who dragged him to the river were the same or two different people.”

  “Cossacks,” Steph declared.

  This was Sunday, Woody Guthrie day. The gospel singers called Faith, Hope, Charity, and Mavis clapped, stomped, and sang:

  “This Land is Your Land, this land is my land,

  from California to the New York island

  from the redwood forest...”

  I asked for and got good luck kisses from both Ava and Mama. Pop gave me a thumbs-up. I picked up my guitar case and walked around the crowd to backstage.

  THE stage manager had decided to send us out in the order we showed up, which placed me last. He and the other musicians stared at my hand but didn’t question or commiserate. They might have supposed I was some nut who thought he could play better with his index finger and thumb taped together and a flat pick wedged between them.

  In the twenty or so minutes before I went on, I didn’t worry about Alvaro. Instead, I imagined forgetting every word of my songs or my bandage unraveling and getting stuck between the strings.

  The stage manager pointed at me. I froze. He came over and pinched my arm. “You’re on, Hickey.”

  I considered bolting out of there but decided I would rather die than run. On my way out front, I barely managed not to trip over cords.

  The crowd looked three times the size it had when I was part of it. But as soon as I found and focused on Mama’s loving eyes, I saw no reason to fear anything.

  I teared up while I told the crowd it was my brother who wrote and had lived my first song, a ballad about the day his platoon’s rotation would’ve put him on point except the previous day shrapnel wounded him. His best amigo took his place and got shredded by machine gun fire.

  I sang:

  We called him Chattanooga,

  we called him Elmer Fudd,

  but his real name was Ernie Dupree...”

  No doubt most of the crowd had heard about Alvaro probably killing Jimmy Marris and shooting at Phil Ochs. At the end, when they clapped loud and hooted, I didn’t know if it was for my performance or out of pity.

  My next and last number was a favorite of Mama’s, which my brother and I used to bellow around campfires mariachi style.

  De la sierra morena Cielito Lindo vienen bajando.

  Un par de los ojitos negros Cielito Lindo de contrabando

  Ay yi yi yi, canta y no llores . . .

  While I sang, I felt Alvaro watching me.

  I WAS backstage packing my Hummingbird when Big Dan Mills lifted his guitar overhead like a weapon and roared, “Everybody have a good time?” The crowd whooped and whistled. “Coming back next year?” The cheers multiplied.

  “All right!” Dan shouted. Then, while I ripped the tape off my fingers and walked around the crowd to my folks, he sang:

  California is a Garden of Eden,

  A paradise to live in or see,

  But believe it or not, you won’t find it so hot

  If you ain’t got the Do-Re-Mi.

  When I reached my folks, Mama clung to my good hand. All the last couple hour's performers but me had gathered on stage alongside Big Dan. One of them gazed into the sky. Others joined her. Soon all of us stared at Agent Knudsen’s Cessna, which came from southwest as though tracing the route of Whiskey River. Passing over the sun, it circled the jamboree twice before it climbed toward the mountains.

  We took Delene Marris home and went back to Quig’s. Mama and Ava were freshening up, Pop and I were sitting beside the river waiting for them, when he told me they would leave Evergreen tomorrow morning.

  “What about Alvaro?” I demanded.

  “Kids grow up. Decide their own lives. If your brother chose to throw in his lot with a killer, all we can do is trust him, hope, and count on your mama’s prayers.”<
br />
  “Whoa,” I said. “Alvaro threw in with a killer?”

  “I guess you didn’t see the X and the date on the wall above the sofa bench in Roy’s A-frame.”

  “So Alvaro helped him do something and Roy let him scratch his nickname on the wall to commemorate. So what?”

  “The date was August twenty-six, nineteen and seventy-two.” He let the number sink in before he said, “Yeah. Yesterday.”

  “So . . . it was a message to us? Meaning he was going to help the Van Dykes escape.”

  Pop only nodded.

  “And that’s why Van Dyke snapped a picture of the wall.”

  “You bet it is.”

  “And it’s why, when we went back with the sheriffs, you let the women ride along. You knew they’d be gone already. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I should’ve.”

  “Yeah, you should've trusted me like you’ve been pretending to.” Ashamed, worried, and bitter, I stood and walked alone upstream.

  Twenty-one

  THE sun is dropping below the trees and the forest beginning to darken when Agent Knudsen in his Ford meets Willis and Barker at the Van Dyke place. The sheriff has brought a search warrant. He knocks. I see Barker kicking the door near the knob. It flies, smacks the wall, and knocks down a watercolor of Ophelia in a peasant dress with a dozen tiny bows in her curly hair.

  Searching mostly for weapons, ammunition, drugs, paraphernalia, notes or anything written, they empty the kitchen drawers, pull them out and stick their heads into the cabinet framing. Knudsen gets so impressed by the carpentry, he’ll tell me later, “If we catch up with this guy, I may go his bail and have him build me a house.”

  From the walls they remove dozens of Sara Van Dyke’s sketches and watercolor portraits. They roll aside the hand-loomed rugs and the futons in the bedroom and loft so they can check beneath for anything stashed there or for secret compartments. All they find that might incriminate Roy is on the porch in a box of garden supplies — a sack labeled Crook Neck Squash half full of marijuana seeds.

  Willis finds a letter written to somebody named Bob. In it, Roy admits that if he didn’t have his kids to look out for, he would go gunning for Hound Dog. On top of a heap of other evidence, the letter could certify that Roy’s frame of mind was murderous enough to make him shoot at poachers thinking they were Cossacks. But alone it means zero.

  Knudsen remarks, “Van Dyke could’ve gone to hide out with this guy.” He waves the letter. “You men know anybody named Bob? Yeah, okay, everybody knows a Bob or two, but the one I’m talking about might be what — a hippie, or what?”

  “How about a pastor?” Willis says.

  Though at first the place hadn’t looked deserted, even Barker finally agrees the occupants have fled. In the bathroom they find no tooth brushes or paste, razor, aspirins, or ointments. Hardly any bedding remains. The only men’s or children’s clothes in the closet, the dresser, or the trunk on the loft are dressy. The Van Dykes have left no jeans, sneakers, jackets, or T-shirts behind.

  Nobody takes note of the X and the date on the wall behind the sofa bench, except Knudsen, who had developed a photo of that wall and who knew my brother’s middle name.

  MAMA and Pop disappeared into the A-frame early that night. The light that stayed on clued me they were reading. Pop’s current book was a history of ancient Rome. Mama was sifting through the Bible in case she missed something the first hundred times.

  Ava and I went to sit by the creek a grassy bank. We could hear the music from the party at Big Dan’s and pick out the voices or guitar licks of performers we recognized who had stayed over.

  The moon looked like a gash in the sky. The stars appeared as bright clusters. Every minute or so, a meteor flashed from east to west.

  Ava was barefoot, with a beaded leather thong around her ankle, a long black skirt, and a loose top. I glimpsed a bra strap. Among hippies, the bra indicated a Christian as clearly as a fish or cross did. Her hair shivered in the ocean breeze that followed the course of the river. In the starlight, her eyes were pure silver. “I’ve never met people like Wendy and Tom,” she said.

  I shook my head, meaning I hadn’t either.

  “If you’re a cross between those two, strong like him and gentle as her, and wise as either of them, I ought to sell everything I own, give it to the poor, and follow you.”

  “Compared to them,” I said, “I'm a rat. But don't let that stop you from following me.”

  She gave my shoulder a soft punch.

  “How much can you get for everything you own?” I asked.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “I'm thinking about those poor people.”

  “Including my car, maybe two hundred.”

  “That’s not much for a rich kid. Tell me about your folks?”

  “My real dad, Paul McNees, he’s got more money than the rest of Evergreen put together. Still, even after six divorces. He just built a resort on Trinity River.

  “And he’s pretty cool, in some ways. He knows every joke ever told, and he’s always telling them. I guess that’s one reason he got so rich. Makes people laugh while he’s sticking it to them. But he remembers my birthday and buys me Christmas presents. Every couple weeks, I meet him for lunch. Which is a lot, if you think about it, for a guy who has nine kids, at last count.

  “My mom’s a travel agent sometimes. She’s sweet, but she can flip out when things go wrong. This year she turned forty and landed in the hospital after a drinking binge. But when I saw her last time, she looked okay.”

  “You’ve got a step dad?”

  She grimaced. “He’s the reason I live in a yurt. He likes me more than he likes my mom.”

  Even among star clusters, meteors, the starlit river flashing past and hills spiked with redwood and pine against a background of silver sky, of all the sights, Ava was the masterpiece.

  If she was as bright, loyal, deep, and loving as I thought, I’d have to be loco to just move on and leave her here. But unless one of the folks who applauded for me yesterday showed up soon and asked to become my agent or offered a record contract, I was on my way to law school. Odds were high that with me in L.A. and her elsewhere, even if she chose to love me, I would lose her. I imagined marrying her and moving home, renting a shack in King’s Beach, working security or dealing baccarat at Harry’s Casino, giving my folks a grandkid or two. But Pop had always wanted me to succeed at the college he’d chosen to leave after two years on account of money, when my Aunt Florence needed him more than the Trojans did.

  When people, like his sons, dared to question the wisdom of his dropping college, he argued, "Hey, they won the pennant without me."

  At USC, he imagined I could become somebody with the power and courage to back the humble and whip the bullies and big shots in their own ballpark. Even if I chose to follow my own dream, to write songs and make music, it would mean a vagabond existence that didn’t seem to fit Ava. I couldn’t imagine her following any man around. But here I sat, becoming ever more enchanted. I said, “Now that we know who really killed Jimmy, and why, do you feel any better?”

  She grabbed a clump of grass and tossed it to the breeze. “Clifford, mostly all day I’ve been trying to believe Roy’s story.”

  “And...?”

  “I don’t. See, Jimmy obeyed the law, mostly. He wouldn’t risk hurting Delene like it would if he’d got busted for dealing weed. There’s no way he was out there poaching.”

  “Maybe he was there for something else.”

  “What?”

  “Hunting?” I suggested.

  She sighed, pulled her hair back off her shoulders, and stood. “Jimmy didn’t hunt.”

  While we walked toward the yurt holding hands, I told myself Ava must hold some wrong ideas about Jimmy Marris.

  And I coached myself to trust Pop’s assumption that Alvaro had proved he could evade the pursuers, that he would deliver the Van Dykes to some sanctuary without anybody but us knowing he’d helped them esca
pe. Pop had proven his judgment so often, Alvaro, Mama, and I used to consider him infallible.

  Now I wasn’t sure.

  BEFORE 7:00 a.m., Pop rapped on the tailgate window of my Chevy. In the bathhouse I used the sink and urinal while a girl about sixteen showered, dried off, and beamed at me. I told Pop about her. “Wake up to a sight like that,” I said, “who needs coffee?”

  He nodded. “I got an eyeful in the bathhouse yesterday. Since then, I’ve been going off to pee in the woods. Cut my odds of keeling over from a heart attack.”

  Something in his tone of voice kept me from laughing at his remark.

  We stopped at the jail and got told the sheriff was at Babe’s. We found him there, in a booth across from two loggers. When he saw us, the loggers turned to view the object of his interest, then straightened their caps and tossed greenbacks onto the table. They ambled toward the door and scorched us with looks they might use on a visiting ball team who had skunked the locals.

  Pop led the way to Willis’ booth and pointed at the vacated bench. “You mind?”

  Willis shook his head and sipped coffee. Pop and I sat. The sheriff had already eaten. He shoved his plate aside. “Found the preacher’s truck.”

  “No preacher?”

  “Somebody ditched the junk-heap at the Sacramento Airport.”

  “How about Van Dyke?”

  He scowled. “You holding something over Knudsen?”

  “Never met the man till yesterday. Why?”

  “It’s him you can thank.”

  Pop raised his hands, palms up. “Elaborate, would you?”

  “Time being, till we apprehend Van Dyke, we called off the search for your Mexican boy.” With a final contemptuous glance at us, he slipped out of the booth and left the cafe.

  I moved to the seat across from Pop. “If they find Van Dyke,” I whispered, “they find Alvaro too, and bust him for harboring a fugitive or something.”

  Pop said, “They won’t be looking in the woods anymore. Who sets out hiking through wilderness with three little guys?”