'Not exactly Yale,' he said, as if reading me. 'I keep telling them a few trees would help. But I like being on the cutting edgebuilding something from scratch. This whole area's the high-growth region of the L.A. basin. Come back in a few years and it'll be teeming.'
'Despite the slump?'
He frowned, tugged on his beard, and said, 'Yes, I think so The population can only go one way.' Smile. 'Or at least that's what my demographer friends tell me.'
He turned toward the students, who were staring at us, and held up a hand. 'Do you know how to get to the house from here?'
Approximately.'
'let me tell you exactly. Just get back on the freeway-on the One-eighteen-and get off at the seventh exit. After that you can miss it.'
'Great. I won't keep you,' I said.
He looked at me but seemed to be somewhere else.
'Thanks,' he said. Another backward glance. 'This is what keeps me sane-gives me the illusion of freedom. I'm sure you know what I mean.'
Absolutely.'
'Well,' he said, 'I'd better be getting back. Love to my ladies.'
The ride to the house wouldn't take more than fifteen minutes, leaving forty-five to go before my two-thirty with Cassie.
Remembering Cindy's odd resistance to my coming out any earlier, I decided to head over there right now. Do things on my terms, for a change.
Each exit on the I-18 took me farther into the isolation of brown mountains, deforested by five years of drought. The seventh was marked Westview, and it deposited me on a gently curving road of red clay darkened by the mountain's hulk. A few minutes later the clay turned to twin lanes of new asphalt, and red pennants on high metal poles began appearing at fifty-foot intervals. A yellow backhoe was parked on a turnoff. No other vehicles were in sight. Baked hillside and blue sky filled my eyes. The pennant poles flashed by like jail bars.
The asphalt tabled at a hundred square feet of brick, shaded by olive trees. High metal gates were rolled wide open. A big wooden sign to the left of the aperture read WESTVIEW ESTATES in red block letters.
Below the legend was an artist's rendition of a spreading pastel-hued housing development set into too-green alps.
I rolled close enough to the sign to read it. A timetable beneath the painting listed six construction phases, each with 'twenty to a hundred custom estate homesites, 112 to acres.' According to the dates, three phases should have been completed. When I looked through the gates I saw a sprinkle of rooftops, lots of brown. Chip's comments about population growth, a few minutes ago, seemed a bit of wishful thinking.
I drove past an untended guardhouse whose windows still bore masking-tape Ks, into a completely empty parking lot fringed with yellow gazania. The exit from the lot fed to a wide, empty street named Sequoia Lane. The sidewalks were so new they looked whitewashed.
The left side of the street was an ivy-covered embankment. A half-block in, to the right, sat the first houses, a quartet of big, bright, creatively windowed structures, but unmistakably a tract Mock Tudor, mock hacienda, mock Regency, mock Ponderosa Ranch, all fronted by sod lawns crosscut with beds of succulents and more gazania. Tennis court tarp backed the Tudor house; peacockblue pool water glimmered behind the open lots of the others. Signs on the doors of all four read MODEL. Business hours were posted on a small billboard on the lawn of the Regency, along with the phone number of a real estate company in Agoura. More red pennants. All four doors were closed and the windows were dark.
I kept going, looking for Dunbar Court. The side streets were all 'Courts'-wide, squat strips ending in cul-de- sacs, and ribbing eastward from Sequoia. Very few cars were parked along curbs and in driveways.
I saw a bicycle on its side in the center of a half-dead lawn, a garden hose that lay unfurled like a somnolent snake-but no people.
A momentary breeze produced sound but no relief from the heat.
Dunbar was the sixth Court. The Jones house was at the mouth of the dead end, a wide, one-story ranch, white stucco trimmed with used-brick. In the center of the front yard a wagon wheel leaned against a young birch tree too thin to support it. Flower beds edged the facade. The windows sparkled. The loom of mountains behind the house made it look like something constructed from a child's kit. The air smelled of grass pollen.
