My father sounded annoyed when he answered. I felt lucky to catch him. I’d never gotten along with him. He was a child of the Depression and the son of a strict Ohio Calvinist minister, a workaholic who was troubled that my generation was not as respectful or strong or hardworking as his. Growing up, I would not see him for weeks at a time. He worked sixteen-hour days, taking only Christmas off. He’d been married five times. His first wife, my mother, had left when I was seven and I barely remembered her. I never liked any of his other wives, and I don’t think any of them liked me. He had taught me a lot about horses, hoping I would join him on the backstretch one day, but I preferred the front side, the gambling element, the frivolous, lazy, parasitic element, as my father regarded it. Journalism was another pursuit he didn’t support. There were the people who did things, he liked to say, and the people who talked about them, the second group having, in his opinion, no value. More and more people every day paid to do nothing but talk, he liked to say. When Fang-Hua left me and my life fell apart, I was only reaping in his view what I had sown. Though he had hired me several lawyers, he had come to visit me on only three occasions the whole time I was at Napa, all three brief side trips from his primary business at Bay Meadows or Golden Gate Fields.
“Dad,” I said. “This is Eddie.”
“Yeah, Eddie,” he said.
“Well, I’m out,” I said.
“That’s what I heard. They called me last night. What do you think you’re doing anyway?”
I felt boyish when I replied, “They had no right to keep me.”
“So, what are you going to do now? They catch you they’ll throw away the key.”
“They’d already thrown away the key. Have you got a place I can stay?”
A long pause followed before he said, “Should be a couple of cabins at the Island. Go talk to Beatriz. Do you remember Beatriz?”
I said that I did.
“They’re all fugitives up there, so you should be safe.”
“Do you have a vehicle I can use?”
“Sure, there’s an old truck in Del Mar backside, parked in a shed. We use it to haul hay. The key’s in the ashtray. Good luck finding someone to let you in.”
“Thanks, hey, I know you’re busy, so I’ll catch you down the way, we’ll have dinner or something.”
“If anyone asks, I never heard from you.”
That was about as close to kind words as I could ever expect from my father.
7.Island of the Butterscotch Beast
A ROUND, BANDY-LEGGED LITTLE FELLOW WEARING A PONCHO and a wide tooled belt with a silver buckle on it as big as my fist rolled up to me as I wandered around the backstretch looking for the shed where the truck might be parked. The entire area, like the main track facility itself, had been reconfigured and I had no idea where my father’s stables might be. I asked him in Spanish if he knew Calvin Plum. He pointed to a row of stalls, one containing a horse, the name plate on the bridle of which read “Bug Eyed Joe.” I explained that I was going to get the truck and asked him which of the sheds he thought it might be in. The key, I told him, as if this were some special password, was in the ashtray. He shrugged as if I’d told him I had decided to breathe now. All the shed doors were unlocked and on the third door lifted I found the truck.
The clutch was longer than I thought it should be, but other than that driving returned naturally to me. The guard at the gate gave me a funny look as I rolled past him probably thinking that I was a member of the antique car show who’d gotten turned around. I went up the boulevard slowly, my eyes sweeping from mirror to mirror and fixing repeatedly on the crack in the windshield. It was early enough in the morning and late enough in the season that there wasn’t much traffic. I drove under the interstate bridge and headed inland up into the bluffs to the Island, as my father called it, or Isla Escondida (Hidden Island), as most of the Latinos who resided there preferred.
Back in the 1950s my father had bought this isolated parcel of land for a few thousand dollars (it had to be worth millions now) and put up a few casitas for his hired help, 99 percent of whom were Mexican. My father was a great admirer of Mexicans, principally for the small wages and low maintenance they required. He also had some flower greenhouses built for my mother. Horticulture was all the rage in the sparsely populated north county then. He bought extravagant gifts for all of his wives, trying to make up for never being home. When my mother left him the poinsettia houses went untended. I had many memories of running through their hot feral and earthy halls, lying sedate in the filtered green sunlight when it was cold outside. Very young, I’d been warned that the poinsettia was poisonous, and since then I’d mysteriously associated the scarlet Christmas flower with Babar the Elephant and the death of his mother.
From the road below, you would not have known that this little outpost existed. It had perhaps been Spanish missionaries who’d planted a windbreak of oaks on the west side that through their tangled branches on a clear day you could see the spangled blue-gray prairie of the Pacific Ocean. On the eastern side was high bluff. To the north were the empty hothouses, beyond that the Spanish colonial ceramic-roofed and beige stucco monotony that constituted the new architecturally conformist southern California as far as the eye could see. The southern end was open but occluded by citrus, avocado, and eucalyptus trees. I
