“Got it,” I said.
“You going to the wedding?”
“Sure,” I said. “Wouldn’t miss it for a dozen tacos and all the Pepsi in Ventura.”
CHAPTER 4
The Graysons had a phone, but there was no answer. It took me five minutes to find Plaza Del Lago on the Mobil Oil map I kept in my bottom drawer. After two more minutes I decided that the map was just too old, that Plaza Del Lago was one of the hundreds of new towns that had sprung up in the last decade, a period my map didn’t cover.
I found it at about the point where I was going to give up, climb in my Buick, and make what would probably be my final fruitless attempt to pull a teardrop of affection from Anne. Plaza Del Lago wasn’t on the coast where I had been looking. It was inland, beyond Palmdale, almost touching the Mojave Desert, maybe sixty miles from Hollywood off of State Highway 138.
Shelly was absorbed in his dental journal when I walked out. I don’t think he heard me say that I’d be gone till Monday. It didn’t matter; I wasn’t expecting any calls.
The damage to the Buick wasn’t too bad: a dent in the roof that cut through four or five layers of paint and a broken window. I fished out fragments of glass, placed Alcatraz gently on the front seat, and drove to No-Neck Arnie’s. He was working on a recent Caddy.
“Arn, this is an emergency,” I said, getting out.
He sighed, the sigh of the put-upon mechanic, a sigh that Alexander the Great probably got from his blacksmith when he came in with a battle-battered chariot.
“I see,” he said, touching the dent. “Bombed by an eagle with kidney stones.”
“No,” I answered. “Alcatraz fell from the sky.”
Arnie didn’t care whether I was joking or not. He fixed cars, took a few bets on the side, and went through life without a sense of humor, which is probably located somewhere in the neck.
“Forget about the dent,” he said. “Live with it. There’s a war on. This car ain’t going to make it through it. I’ll fix the window or give it a patch, some clear, thick see-through stuff. If I fix the window, it stays here two, three days. I can put the patch on in five minutes for five bucks. You want my advice?”
“No,” I said. Five bucks was a hell of a lot for some tape and see-through stuff.
He decided to give me the advice anyway, but he looked around to be sure no one was listening. To do this, Arnie had to turn his entire tub of a body.
“Let me junk the parts on this carroodi and you can subtract it from the cost of that ’38 Ford we were talking about the other day. It would only run you two hundred and twenty bucks.”
“The other day you said I could have the Ford for two hundred with no junk parts. No questions.” I reminded him.
“There have been other bidders,” he confided, looking down at his grease-black hands and rubbing the tips of his fingers together.
“I’ll keep the carroodi for a few days and think about it,” I said. “Meanwhile, try to keep the price on that Ford from hitting three hundred.”
“I’ll try,” he said laying a hand on my shoulder and doing something with his mouth that resembled a smile.
I had never considered Arnie a friend, and he wasn’t bringing us any closer together, and I could give lopsided smiles with the best of them. We could have stood there grinning like baboons in Griffith Park for an hour or so, but I had no time for such jollity.
“Put the stuff on the back window, and here’s five before the price goes up.”
Ten minutes later I was on my way to Plaza Del Lago after Arnie told me that I still had time to put a few bucks on the Kentucky Derby, which was scheduled to start in an hour.
“Put two bucks on Shutout,” he confided, leaning into my window.
“Next year,” I said, glancing back through the blue thickness of my double-layered rear window.
I drove for an hour, listening to the radio. A big battle was going on at the gates of Mandalay. I tried not singing “The Road to Mandalay,” but it came out anyway. The sports news came on around one and I was told that Willard Marshall was expected to be a big gun for Mel Ott’s Giants. I remembered seeing Ott a couple of times in exhibition games, that bottle of a bat and that foot up in the air when he moved into the ball. Next weekend I’d get my nephews Dave and Nat and take them to a ball game somewhere, if my sister-in-law Ruth would let me. She didn’t really trust me with them since the last time I had taken the boys out, promising to take them to see
The land went flat about two minutes past Dot’s Dixie Gas Station, just inside Antelope Valley, where I had stopped to fill the tank and buy a candy bar.
Antelope Valley was named for the herds that roamed there a few hundred years earlier at the edge of the Mojave. Low hills, the Lovejoy Buttes, separate the valley from the desert. The twenty-five-hundred-square-mile valley is supplied with water from a giant natural reservoir underground and runoff from the mountains.
In April and May tourists from town come out to see the desert flowers, particularly the California poppies that sometimes stretch like a red blanket for twenty miles. I had gone slowly behind tourists for much of the way.
Dot was a skinny guy with a bad leg and no interest in conversation. A mongrel dog, which was stuffed, dead, or in deep meditation, lay next to the pump where Dot filled me up after looking at the dent in my roof and the rear window.
The flat land turned to desert brush and stretched on dry and far past Palmdale. I was somewhere near Plaza Del Lago or what once had been Plaza Del Lago, but it wasn’t there. Then the narrow road took a sudden dip, and I saw the town sitting in a basin. It was bigger than I expected and sprawled out. A narrow part of town lay in front of me on both sides of the two-lane highway with wooden storefronts and old houses. Beyond the street on both sides stood larger, more substantial houses with grounds and an occasional pool. Face-to-face off the highway, about a block in to the left, were two big sprawling buildings both with large pools.
Five minutes later I was on Plaza Del Lago’s main street and pulling into a parking space in front of Cal’s General Store and Gifts. I went in, plunked down a quarter and got a box of Wheaties and a quart of milk and two cents in change from a woman I supposed was Mrs. Cal, a thin-haired knot of a woman dressed in overalls. I’d worry about a bowl and spoon later.
“Could you tell me where the Grayson place is?” I said, hoisting my bag of groceries.
“Could,” said Mrs. Cal and turned back to stacking Gold Dust Cleanser.
“Will you?” I went on.
She looked at me in a way that would have put Arnie’s sigh to shame.
“You got business?” she said. Her voice had a desert dry rattle, resulting I imagined from eating nothing but crackers from the cracker barrel and conserving her voice for the opera.
“I got business,” I said, getting into the swing of things.
“They’re new, practically everyone is here,” she said, looking at me in a way that made it clear that I would not be a welcome addition to Plaza Del Lago.
“Why’d they all come?”
“The springs,” she said, pointing at a display across the aisle behind me. The store wasn’t big, and the two aisles were narrow and filled from floor to ceiling. The display she pointed to was bottles of something called Poodle Springs water. The labels were yellow with a white cartoon poodle on them, standing on its hind legs, with its tongue out. The water inside the bottle was a little murky.
“Spring under the town,” Mrs. Cal explained, growing talkative. “Been there since God created it.”
“That a fact?” I encouraged.
“Stuff tastes like turkey piss,” she said, shaking her head.
Never having tasted turkey piss I said, “No kidding.”
