Burn Coast Read online

  AN UNNAMED PRESS BOOK

  Copyright © 2022 by Dale Maharidge

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. Permissions inquiries may be directed to [email protected]. Published in North America by the Unnamed Press.

  www.unnamedpress.com

  Unnamed Press, and the colophon, are registered trademarks of Unnamed Media LLC.

  ISBN: 978-1-951213-18-3

  eISBN: 978-1-951213-21-3

  Maharidge, Dale, author.

  Burn Coast : a novel / Dale Maharidge.

  Description: Los Angeles : Unnamed Press, 2022.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021041170 | ISBN 9781951213183 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781951213213 (epub)

  Subjects: LCSH: Country life--California, Northern--Fiction. | Counterculture--California, Northern--Fiction. | Missing persons--Fiction. | Marijuana--Growth--Fiction. | LCGFT: Noir fiction. | Novels.

  Classification: LCC PS3613.A34928 B87 2022 | DDC 813/.6--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/202104117

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are wholly fictional or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Cover Photograph by Danielle Starkey.

  Designed and Typeset by Jaya Nicely.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  First Edition

  BURN COAST

  a novel

  DALE MAHARIDGE

  The Unnamed Press

  Los Angeles, CA

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction about a special place that may never have existed. Any resemblance to living or dead persons, including the author, or their actions, legal or illegal, is coincidental. Thanks to the Corporation of Yaddo, where much of this novel was conceived, and to editor Chris Heiser.

  To the Cottage

  CONTENTS

  1

  METHOD LIVING

  2

  1943–1980

  3

  CROSSING THE LINE

  4

  THE POINT BEYOND

  5

  1996–1998

  6

  SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL

  7

  JUSTICE

  8

  1963–1979

  9

  IF SIX WAS NINE

  BURN COAST

  Burn Coast (n.): A region of California where three tectonic plates meet to form a triple junction fault zone. The Athapaskan people arrived here during the Ice Age, when one-third of the planet was frozen and it was a treeless land except for tan oaks in the canyons. They netted salmon and harvested mussels. Carbohydrates came from acorns, ground in stone mortars and then boiled to remove tannins, for flatbread.

  With the retreat of the ice starting ten thousand years ago, two aggressive species of fir migrated south, century by century, from the boreal regions. When the fir reached the triple junction, they began overtaking the valued tan oak. In late summer the low dead branches of the invading fir curled down as the trees struggled to conserve water, marking the time for the Athapaskans to set fires. For generations, infernos swept the coastal hills, incinerating young Douglas and white fir. The dominant feature of the landscape, thanks to the diligent burning, was grassland. In the spring the hills were as bright green as rock kelp; at late summer sunset, the color of ripe persimmons.

  And so it was until 1857. In that year, Elwin Edwards and the Jones clan rode horses over a ridge and set sight on the triple junction’s grasslands. They invoked God and praised Him for creating so much natural bounty for their cattle. By 1861, the men had exterminated most of the twelve hundred indigenous people. A band fled south. In one account, they were driven by white pursuers into the sea and drowned. In another, they were buried or tied down in the sand amid the rocks and then the tide came in. In both versions a woman about to die issued a curse: “The white man is doomed to never prosper here.”

  Flash-forward 110 years: On June 27, 1971, pilot Les Hall revved the engines of a DC-3 for takeoff from a new landing strip, created for a subdivision under construction by R. J. Beaumont and Associates and World Leisure Time interests on the coast south of McGee Ridge. Three crew members and twenty-one executives and salesmen were aboard. They’d come for a weekend tour. It was a scam. Most lots were too steep to build on. Insiders called the operation “the Show,” and they flew in the salesmen to avoid having them experience the horrible roads leading to this wild coast. The aircraft wouldn’t lift. It careened off the runway, crashing into a rock offshore. The DC-3 split open, spilling its passengers, some of whom were beaten to death against the reef by the savage surf—the same rocks where the last band of Athapaskans perished at the hands of Edwards and the Jones clan. Only seven people survived.

  1

  METHOD LIVING

  She spent the afternoon playing the tuba, seated on the rusted springs of what remained of a couch perched at the edge of the bluff nine hundred feet above the surf, as an emerging cold front blackened the Pacific sky. When daylight began its retreat, the wind picked up; gusts shot her long white hair straight back as she stood and faced the coming storm. A ritual of purity was needed. At the forest edge she harvested dark green stringers of yerba buena poking through the winter-browned rattlesnake and velvet grasses. She chopped the tiny spade-like leaves of the herb on the Ark’s worn Douglas fir plank countertop, boiled water, made tea from it. After burning sage, she sat in the dark sipping the hot drink, usually calming. Yet tonight she remained deeply troubled. Rushes of Arctic wind slammed the Ark. The eleven buckets that captured drips from the leaking roof each had a unique pitch, a tempo that accelerated or diminished with the intensity of storm surges as night came on. She struck a Diamond match, put flame to the charred wick of a kerosene lamp, replaced the globe. In the maturing orange glow, she stared at the long white rectangular box set atop the Steinway. The previous day the box had arrived at the post office, down in the hamlet. Before she even opened it, the name on the shipping label was upsetting: “Arden Vanderlip.” A handwritten note on a large yellow Post-it was inside the box:

  Dearest Arden:

  I was cleaning out the hall closet and found these

  things. I thought you should have them.

  Warmly,

  Richard

  When they’d talked by phone ten days earlier, Zoë insisted that Richard have the co-op, but she reluctantly agreed to take what remained of the investments from that poisoned money. She had not, however, agreed to take these things. Why Richard insisted on calling her Arden, a name she had disavowed fifty years ago, was beyond her. And yet its contents were already pulling her back.

  Zoë went to the piano and again peered inside the box; among the items were a white parasol, white gloves, and a white ball gown. She stripped and put on the gown, carried the oil lamp to the bathroom, and stood before the mirror. Decades of being a billy goat on the ridge had kept her trim, her body the same shape and weight as at seventeen. Not that the gown inspired any sense of longing for another time in her life, even if it fitted perfectly. She returned to the piano and slipped on the gloves, which reached her elbows. Clutching the parasol, she plunged out the Ark’s front door and into the squall, neglecting to bring the Petzl headlamp with her. Opening and twirling the parasol, Zoë stumbled down the steep, harrowing untrailed route to the ocean. The dress flapped in the gale, and the parasol was shredded to its wire frame. When she reached the beach she waded into fifty-two-degree surf. She curtsied to the fierce sea, tossed the parasol against the wind onto a cresting breaker, where it was lost in the crashing foam that surged around her waist. The po
wer of the withdrawing water and the force of the moon pulled her out to sea. She fought the current, fought to regain the shore, fought for life. Then she let go. For once, she gave up. The moon replied, No… and the Pacific thrust her back into the shallows. She gasped and spat, crawled crablike with numbed clubs for limbs to the cold reaches of the highest wet sand. She cursed the heavens. It had been so peaceful, letting go.

  Zoë climbed her way back up the near-vertical headland, difficult to scale even in daylight, doubly so with the onset of hypothermia. Rain prickled her flesh. Her tongue drank the ancient waters from coyote bushes, salal, and fir saplings. It was just before eleven o’clock when she made it back to the Ark. The gown was caked with mud, torn by thorns of blackberry and wild rose; the white gloves, blackened from clawing at the earth where she needed to pull herself up. She shivered violently while making a fire in the cast-iron stove. She stripped and hovered next to the flue pipe, taking in the emerging warmth. When a substantial bed of coals formed, she stuffed in the gown and gloves, leaving the door open as the damp cloth smoldered and smoked before igniting. At the piano, she played Wagner’s Lohengrin, eyes going between the keys and the wet cotton crackling in the firebox. She had failed.

  Lara called to say she couldn’t get a hold of Zoë. It had been four days since anyone in town had seen or heard from her. She asked if I would go check on her. Things like this you never wanted to handle alone, and my first instinct was to telephone Likowski, but the last time I tried that, he slammed the phone down when he recognized my voice. Instead I called Eddie. His truck wasn’t running, but he said he could ride Buck the back way through the woods. I hurried up my road on foot, out of breath by the time I reached Zoë’s gate. The shiny stainless steel shackle on the brass combination padlock was open. Zoë never left the gate unlocked, especially now with Klaus in jail, J.D.’s lawyer hassling her, and the spate of violence between the Bulgarian mobsters and Mexican cartels. I hiked up the rutted track until her house, called “the Ark” because it was built to resemble a ship, came into view over the crest of a hill. Her black 1994 Volvo hatchback was parked in front of the barn. “Zoë!” I called out.

  I peered through the porch window and saw nothing, went to the ocean side of the Ark and looked in those windows. I didn’t immediately enter for fear of what I’d find, but everything appeared in order. I opened the lockless door and stuck in my head: “Zoë?”

  The place was empty. I went out to the barn. The heavy door’s bearings squealed as it rolled back. A flock of startled bats blew past my face as my eyes adjusted to the dark chamber: tack hung on wall hooks, piles of moldy boxes, rusting equipment in the corners, plus an ancient Brush Hog, a posthole auger, a fire dripper, a discer from Helmut’s failed attempt to start a quinoa farm. But no Zoë. I opened the unlocked driver’s door of the Volvo. Escaping heat rushed into the fifty-degree air—the sun had been out all morning. The keys were in the ignition, which was where most of us normally left our car keys.

  I went back to the Ark. It struck me that the interior appeared exactly as it had early Wednesday morning—the last time I’d been here. I pulled on the stove’s heavy iron door. The stubs of burned branch wood ends were those that I’d placed on the embers. It was clear another fire had not been built. I’d used the last of the wood that night and more had not been brought in. In the bathroom, Zoë’s robe hung on a hook. I inspected the rest of the Ark, climbing a ladder to a hatch leading to the roof deck. The faux mast had snapped off in a storm a few years earlier. Behind the splintered trunk was a cabin patterned after a ship’s bridge. Access to it was disconnected from the rest of the house save for the route I’d taken. It had been Klaus’s bedroom. I’d never been inside. The walls were covered with fading yellowing posters for metal groups. The recognizable ones: Motörhead and Slayer. The room appeared unchanged, either in homage or due to neglect, since the mid-1980s.

  Hooves on the road. I went to the rail and spotted Likowski atop AOC, his new mare, a quarter mile distant. Likowski’s fiancée, Lara, must have called him. He was in full cowboy mode, wearing a white ten-gallon hat and boots; still, he wore dark sunglasses with small square lenses. AOC was at a gallop. Likowski was inside by the time I made it down the ladder. His still-blond hair fell straight almost to his shoulders and his face was narrow—at this point in life he resembled Tom Petty. We didn’t utter a word. I stood next to the stove while he made his own search: on the roof, out to the barn. When he reentered the Ark, he removed the sunglasses and stared at me for an uncomfortably long time, as if on a dare to see who’d speak. He broke: “Is her purse here?”

  “Haven’t seen it.”

  We searched under the bed, in cupboards, everywhere. No purse. But then it was hard to remember the last time we’d seen Zoë with a purse. We ended up back in the main room.

  “Her cell phone?” Likowski asked.

  I shrugged. “Tried that too. No luck.”

  It was then I noticed a glaring absence: Zoë’s tuba, which usually hung on the wall, was missing. I asked Likowski if he’d seen it in his searching. He hadn’t. He glanced out the window at the Volvo. “Have you tried starting it?”

  Likowski went out, got behind the wheel, and turned the key. Nothing happened. He pulled the hood release. The positive terminal from the battery had been disconnected. We stared at the dangling cable.

  “We should report this,” I said.

  “They won’t do shit.” His tone was withering, just as it had been weeks earlier when he’d told me to fuck off and kicked me out of his sweat lodge. The anger in his voice made me wince.

  “I’ll check out the Hildegard cabin,” Likowski said, turning abruptly. The cabin was a tiny (and, frankly, creepy) house deep in the canyon south of the Ark. I went to the bluff where Zoë always played the tuba, walked through brush on the steep downslope. After half an hour of searching the acreage, I had one more tense exchange with Likowski before he wandered away again. I ended up back inside the Ark at the piano and the box, some three feet long, two feet deep and wide. I pulled it down, sat on the floor, and started going through it. Objects were scattered beneath tissue paper, fancy department store gift wrap: a U.S. Army dress blues jacket with one star on each shoulder and a billboard of service ribbons from campaigns in Italy and Germany. The jacket smelled of age, motor oil, and wet dog. Beneath were Italian lira and German reichsmark notes. A menu and bill for dinner in 1943 at a restaurant in Palermo, Sicily. Other menus, train schedules, camp rules for German POWs. A swastika flag with a handwritten note in a cellophane wrap paper-clipped on to it: “From ruins of Gestapo HQ, Prinz-Albrecht-Straße, Berlin.” A distinguished service award signed by General George S. Patton; clipped to it, a picture of Patton with another military man in the bombed ruins of Berlin.

  Zoë’s father.

  He was handsome and tall. The men, arms around each other, are smiling.

  A packet of letters bound in string, all in German, in thick blue or black fountain pen, addressed to “Herr Gen. H. S. Vanderlip” from various addresses in the United States, postmarked between 1950 and 1961. A program from the Debutante Cotillion and Christmas Ball at the Waldorf on the night of December 22, 1959. Near the bottom was a note on a contemporary Post-it, in ballpoint, apparently from the sender: “Arden, we had someone cut open the safe in the office. It took the man hours to do it. That safe was built like Fort Knox! There was just this inside. You had better be sitting down when you read it.” I peeled off the wrapping paper. An inch-thick hardbound volume was inside. Written on the front: “Diary—General H. Spellman Vanderlip, 1942–1958.” By the way it was still wrapped, Zoë had not even tried to look at it. She seemed to have gone no deeper than the top of the box.

  I knew Zoë’s father had died years earlier. Why was this stuff just being sent now? A stack of unopened mail was piled next to the box. I riffled through it. Mostly it was junk and bills, but there was a registered letter from Allianz Global Investors in New York City. I stared at the letter. Had I been th
e last person to see her?

  She had called me Tuesday night, weeping, asking me to come over. I was surprised—she never showed emotion like that. Zoë was total WASP, a stoic East Coast blue blood regardless of her outlaw hippie trappings. I stayed with her until dawn. Two days ago. I wondered if she’d killed herself, but I shook off that thought partly because I didn’t want to believe that, partly because she’d had a habit of ghosting herself before, and partly because I didn’t want to think the worst. I pocketed the letter just as I heard someone ride up and yell, “Hello?”

  Eddie was dismounting his very large frame from Buck, an appropriately massive black stallion. I always admired the beast for bearing Eddie’s weight. I hoped Eddie was all right. He had been on haloperidol, then graduated to new antipsychotic medications, and he was clearly keeping to his regimen because one of the side effects was weight gain. Easily pushing 240 pounds, Eddie was now a wire-haired Russian razorback boar of a human. He nodded at me standing on the porch.

  “Saw Likowski,” I said. “He walked home for his truck, went to talk to the cops in person. They wouldn’t do a damn thing if we just called it in.”

  “They won’t do a damn thing either way,” Eddie mumbled.

  “He said we should go to the beach, look there,” I said.

  I hadn’t been on a horse since Likowski taught me how to ride in the early aughts. I knew enough about the animals to be scared of them, and I vowed never again to get on one, but AOC was gentle. I mounted her and followed Eddie up the road. We went north to where an old brushed-in jeep route jagged off the headland to the beach. The plan was to double back south on the sand; it was too steep for horses in front of the Ark. Regardless, I was in for a sore ass. In moments like this I was critically aware that I wasn’t actually one of them. People like Eddie and Likowski had always been here, it seemed, along with their saddle-hardened buttocks. I had an ominous feeling as AOC followed Buck through the brush of that old jeep trail that was still navigable only because a rancher’s cows used the route as a path.