“Just closer. Geographically. My son was in Washington; Kelly was in La Jolla.”
“And you were in Lompoc.”
“I was in Lompoc.”
“What business was he in?”
“Paul? He was a lawyer like Kelly and I, but he was never in private practice. By the time he was eighteen, maybe nineteen, he’d already decided on a career with the Federal government.”
“Your going to jail couldn’t have helped his career much.”
“Didn’t hurt it. Right after I was sentenced he got jumped up from the civil service equivalent of light colonel to brigadier general.”
Huckins’s full mouth went into its wry smile. “Washington must’ve liked his politics.”
“The current brand and Paul’s made a snug fit.”
“And yours?”
“In my family the politics of the sons has always been opposite their fathers’. My grandfather, who won the cane off the gambler, was a Debs socialist. His son-my old man-sat down and cried when Taft lost the nomination to Eisenhower in ’fifty-two.”
She leaned back in the leather chair. “So when did the vote bug bite?”
“In high school. I was a pretty fair debater and I got the notion of becoming a lawyer and maybe going into politics after I discovered how good winning made me feel. Winning anything. Later, I discovered there’s nothing like winning an election. Absolutely nothing.”
“How old were you?”
“When I first ran? Twenty-seven. I got elected county attorney, served a couple of two-year terms, sent some rich crooks to jail, got my name in the paper and then went back into private practice where I made a nice living defending the same kind of rich crooks I’d once prosecuted. When I thought I’d made enough money, I ran for the supreme court and won.”
“How much was enough?”
Adair shrugged. “Two or three million, around in there.”
“How’d you get to be chief justice?”
“The members of the court elect one of their own every four years.”
“Sounds weird.”
“It’s a weird state. After I’d served on the court four years, they always elected me for some reason.”
“For some reason,” she said.
Adair nodded and leaned forward, elbows on his knees. He made no attempt to hide his curiosity when he said, “I’m obliged to hear about it.”
“About what?”
“How you really got elected mayor.”
Huckins examined Adair dispassionately, as if he were some just-caught fish that she could either keep or toss back into the lake. Finally, after almost twenty seconds, she said, “All right.”
Adair edged forward on the couch and used his gravest voice to say, “When you come to the part where it gets nasty, Mayor, as it always does, just keep on going and don’t worry about my sensibilities.” He gave her a small smile. “Such as they are.”
B. D. Huckins said there were nine of them in the Day-Glo General Motors school bus that pulled into Durango that night in 1968. The next morning, four of them decided to stay. The other five wanted to keep heading for the Rocky Mountain Durango in Colorado. A coin was tossed. Those who were Colorado-bound called heads and won both the toss and the psychedelic bus.
Staying on in the California Durango, she said, were herself, then sixteen; her twelve-year-old half sister, Dixie Venable; Sid Fork, eighteen; and a twenty-year-old nut case who some days said his name was Teddy Jones and other days Teddy Smith.
Huckins said Teddy was a drinker and a doper who fried and pickled his brain with acid and gin and anything else he could inhale, swallow or stick in his arm. But Teddy was also the only one who had any money. When he rented a four-room house (more shack than house, she claimed) on Boatright Street out on the eastern edge of Durango in what even then was a rural slum, the other three moved in with him.
She said the communal living lasted three weeks, maybe four. It ended when she and Fork came back from the beach one afternoon. It was a real beach then, she said, with plenty of sand and not anything like it is now. Anyway, she and Fork went in the house and found the twelve-year-old Dixie naked and tied to the bed. Teddy was equally naked and drunk on gin and apparently trying to do it to Dixie with the gin bottle because, Huckins said, he probably couldn’t do it any other way.
Sid Fork picked up something, a sash weight, she thought, and knocked Teddy down with it and kicked him senseless. When he woke up, Fork had all of Teddy’s money, which she remembered as being about $300-almost a thousand in today’s dollars. Fork told Teddy he could have his money back after he got the next bus out of town. She said there were still two bus lines serving Durango then-Greyhound and Trailways.
So that’s what Teddy did, she said. Sid Fork walked him into town, bought his ticket, put him on the bus, gave him back his money and told him if he ever saw him in Durango again, he’d drown him in the ocean.
Although that was the last of Teddy Jones or Smith, she, Fork and Dixie still had to eat. So she and Fork got jobs-he in a gas station and she in a drugstore where the owner-pharmacist, a nice enough old guy of about forty- five, started hitting on her until she told him if he didn’t cut it out, she’d tell his wife.
The three of them managed to get by until late August of 1968 when the gas station where Fork worked was burgled. The owner suspected Fork, of course, she said. But being a class-A shit, didn’t accuse him or fire him or even go to the cops. What he did, she said, was worse. Much worse.
Huckins thought it was two or possibly three weeks later when two FBI suits from Santa Barbara drove up to a gas pump. Sid came out and they asked him for his draft card. That tore it, she said. The gas station owner had turned Fork in for draft evasion and three weeks later he was in the Army and four or five months after that he was an MP in Saigon.
After Fork left, Huckins said she went to the owner of the drugstore and told him if he still wanted to go to bed with her on a regular basis, it would cost him $200 a month on top of what he was already paying her. The pharmacist-owner said he’d like to think about it. Three days later, he asked her to stay after work.
The pharmacist told her he’d maybe come up with a solution. There were these two friends of his, both real nice guys, one of them a lawyer and the other a CPA, and both of them, like him, members of the Durango City Council. And they, all three of them, he meant, were willing to set up a kind of cooperative.
What they wanted to do, she said, was pay her $150 a month each. The pharmacist would get Monday and Wednesday nights; the lawyer, Tuesdays and Fridays; and the CPA, Thursdays and Saturdays. Huckins said they thought she ought to have Sundays off.
Huckins said she made the pharmacist a counterproposal. She told him she’d agree, providing they’d fix it so Dixie could enter school in September without any hassle about a transcript of previous school records. Her second condition was that since she didn’t see any future in selling aspirins and Kotex, she wanted a job with either the lawyer or the CPA so she could learn something practical.
She said it took a week of negotiations before they agreed. The CPA gave her a job as file clerk and relief receptionist and Dixie enrolled in the seventh grade. Later, she said, when the CPA noticed his new file clerk’s head for figures, he started teaching her basic bookkeeping and even sent her to shorthand and typing classes at the Durango High School’s afternoon continuation program that, due to Proposition 13, got discontinued nine years ago.
After she’d been with the CPA for about three years, Huckins said, he made her office manager. And it was just about then that Sid Fork came back from Vietnam.
“This would be when?” Adair asked. “’Seventy-one?”
“Late ’seventy-one.”
“And you were nineteen or twenty then?”
“Just turned twenty.”
“So how’d it go after he got back?”
“We had a talk and after that it went okay.”
