Burn Coast Read online

  “If she did get caught up down there, she’ll wash up, just like that girl we found last year,” Eddie said over his shoulder. The woman, who’d been killed by a gunshot to the head, remained unidentified. Authorities believe her body was dumped in the ocean at the beach trailhead, but nothing had been published about the case in months. “Vultures were on her,” Eddie continued, his stutter springing up momentarily. “There’s a m-minus tide this afternoon. We should look for vultures.”

  I stared at the shiny rear end of Eddie’s black horse and the large form of the rider atop the animal, and we continued on our way to the beach.

  It was the week before my water tank was delivered. I’d fetched the mail from my post office box in the hamlet. On the way back up to the ridge I stopped at the road edge directly in front of Eddie’s place. I faced a colossal rock henge and two massive eucalyptus trunks, amputated fifteen feet off the ground. He’d carved the three-foot-diameter stumps with a chain saw and ax into faces that resembled mo’ai, those big-eared Easter Island monoliths, and painted them bright green. Their elongated blank eyes unsettled tourists who braved the miles of winding roads through the dark redwood and Douglas fir forests of the coastal mountains. Behind the rock wall were two other stump artworks. Both had flat-topped heads and were painted turquoise. One had ghostly eyes, the paint having dripped as if crying. The second was reminiscent of a native person, with a red face and blue-black eyes.

  I drove on. At the bridge, I spotted Eddie wading across a shallow pool out to the river bar, an expanse of cobblestones silver white in the high noon sun. I parked on the far side of the bridge where the truck wouldn’t be seen and, binoculars in hand, scrambled down the bank where I sat in the Pacific willows. I rested my elbows on my knees and trained the glasses on Eddie a good quarter of a mile downriver. A red-winged blackbird alighted on a branch and began singing. There was the pleasant sound of flowing water. The bird flew off. Eddie was bent over, studying the rocks. He picked one up and then summarily dropped it. Eddie waded into the channel and found a wet boulder, hoisted it atop his shoulder. The stone was the size and shape of a compact automobile’s transmission. Sixty pounds was my guess. I knew the weight because of hauling rock when I developed the springs on my land. Eddie struggled beneath the boulder. He staggered a few steps, stopped to rest, then resumed a slow march. He was stout. Yet it wasn’t an obesity of the type one sees in city people. It was the beastly manner of a rural creature that eats excessively to sustain toil. His gray-brown beard hid a round and what would have otherwise been a plain face if not for his dominating eyes—they burned with an intensity like that of a person who’d just discovered a lover had cheated on them. Eddie reached a pool of knee-deep slack water at the edge of the north bank. The oxbow channel was about two hundred yards from the main stem of the river and carried current only during the winter rainy season. The water was muddied from the trips he’d made that morning across the pool; he picked up speed to propel the rock atop the shoulder-high bank. The rock rolled backward. He pushed hard against it, forcing it to come to a rest. He dropped into the water, panting, legs against the bank and beads of sweat running down his face. A breeze came upcanyon from the ocean. His gaze fell upon Edwards Mountain, rising to the south. When his lungs ceased heaving, Eddie grabbed the exposed root of a Pacific willow that jagged from the earth like a twisted human elbow and pulled himself up the bank to the boulder next to a deep-bellied wheelbarrow, rusted and dented, patched with plates of welded steel. There was a booming metallic thud when it dropped into the wheelbarrow, loud even from a distance. He grabbed the gray and splintered handles and propelled the cart down a trail through a spindly riparian forest of red alder and vanished. I imagined him emerging in the meadow south of his house. The weather-beaten dwelling belonged in a Walker Evans photograph from 1930s Alabama. The house had been visible from the main road just out front. But now it was hidden behind that arcing wall comprising thousands of river rocks. A dozen feet tall, ten wide at the base and tapering to a foot or so at the apex, it more than half encircled the house.

  The notion to build the wall came one night in 1989, six years earlier. It was just after two o’clock in the morning. Eddie was seated next to a wood-burning stove, an Uzi in his left hand, his eyes on the ceiling. This time they’d gotten inside the house. He loudly chambered a round, and the scuffling ceased. “B-bastards,” he stammered, and held his breath in the ensuing silence. Then he grabbed the phone and spun the rotary dial frantically to call Doc Anderson, who sleepily answered.

  “They’re up there, D-Doc! They’re up there! Come help!”

  “Who? Eddie, who?”

  “Indians! They’re—”

  Now they were dancing.

  Eddie screamed. Gunshots filled the doctor’s ear as Eddie blasted rounds into the ceiling. The Uzi wasn’t on full auto. He didn’t want to waste ammo in case they came down the stairs. The doctor tried to keep Eddie on the line, but Eddie hung up. By the time the doctor arrived, perhaps trusting a bit too much that Eddie would recognize the sound of his voice as he cautiously entered the house, he discovered that Eddie had pushed furniture against the door of the stairwell leading to the second floor. The Uzi remained pointed at the ceiling. Doc got Eddie to put down the weapon, tried to calm him by inviting him to come sleep at his place. Eddie declined. He had to deal with the Indians. There was no running from them—they wanted revenge for his great-grandfather’s part in the massacre of the Native Americans who were driven into the sea and drowned. If he left, they’d simply follow him to Doc’s house, putting him and his family in danger. Worry filled Eddie’s face in response to Doc’s continued skepticism.

  “I’m not on meth, I promise! Not on nothin’!” he pleaded. “I’ve been doing good. Don’t tell Kow!”

  “V-vultures,” Eddie stammered, pointing to the southern sky beyond a jutting headland.

  We dismounted on the soft sand at the bottom of the old jeep road. I squinted. A distant raptor and then another came in and out of view, riding thermals, hidden now and then by the thousand-foot-tall gray belly of the Franciscan rock formation from the Jurassic period.

  “Looks like they’re right below Zoë’s place,” I said.

  We hurried, not that getting there rapidly would change anything. I flashed on the last words I had with Zoë days earlier, seated on the edge of her couch that dawn. She locked eyes with me and said, Thank you for coming. I still didn’t want to admit this had happened—that she had called me and I’d gone to the Ark that night. As far as I knew, I was the last one who had seen her alive.

  Eddie’s stallion was much faster than AOC, kicking up clumps of wet sand as we galloped down the beach, though she made a good effort. The blue plain of the Pacific was on our right; to the south, headlands stretched into an unpeopled, roadless mist. A series of canyons, each like a knife cut, were forested and dark in sharp contrast to the golden ridges, which resembled yeasty challah bread in the midafternoon sun. The tide, at minus 1.2 feet, was nearing slack. The reef before us was an expanse of mussel-crusted rock stretching out nearly a quarter of a mile.

  “There!” I yelled, pointing to movement: a vulture perched on a sea stack. We tied the horses off on coyote brush and ran across the sand to the tide pools. I hit the reef ahead of Eddie. The rocks were slick with kelp and other seaweeds, thick with blue and horse mussels, patches of drooping sea palm. Thank you for coming. My heart raced as I went around a large tide pool filled with hundreds of turquoise sea anemones. The vulture flapped its wings; two others ascended from the other side of the sea stack that was an island at high tide. I slipped and caught myself, nearly face-planting in a bed of razor-sharp mussels. Finally, I went on all fours across the top of the rock, white with the shit of buzzards and cormorants.

  The body was mostly eaten. Bones glistened in the sun. I sat, panting; my chest heaved.

  “Sea lion,” Eddie said nonjudgmentally from behind. I hadn’t realized he had caught up with me. We picked our way slowl
y back across the reef. “So you two still aren’t talkin’?” Eddie asked as he went around a tide pool.

  “I’m talking. It’s him who’s not talking. He’s still mad at me for listing my place.”

  “Kow says it’s more than that. Says you weren’t being honest.”

  Irritated by his echoing what Likowski had turned into a mantra, I took it out on Eddie because I could: “You don’t think I’m honest, Eddie?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “I’ve always been straight with you guys.” I itemized my defenses, in particular that I was really no different from Likowski and most of the other hippies who came here two, three decades before I showed up. “Except for you, Eddie, we’re all on the run from someplace else,” I said with an edge in my voice.

  “I wish I was from someplace else,” Eddie said plaintively. His burning eyes softened for a moment. His wistful gaze melted any anger that I had, as Eddie shook his head. “Likowski just thinks that you didn’t say what you were actually doing.”

  “Come on! I told you all exactly why.”

  “That’s not exactly the same as what. He says you were keepin’ things secret.”

  I laughed tiredly. “You could say the same thing about him.”

  Eddie chuckled. He knew as much as I that Likowski was the one with the actual secrets. Difference between me and Eddie? I was nosing around, while Eddie didn’t care about Likowski’s past. Eddie was like a puppy in the best way possible—he lived in the moment, something I envied. I’ve always seemed to be living for the future, a week, month, or year beyond where I am in life, a distant point in time when I’d be content, satisfied with my career, and not having to worry about money. But for one very important portion of my existence— moving to this wilderness coast—the problem was that I wasn’t thinking far enough ahead. After almost twenty-five years of being here, in a sudden rush of existential crisis, I realized I had to leave. Likowski had been the first person I’d told. I counted the days—it had been nearly three weeks before Zoë vanished.

  The vultures circled a thousand feet above the sea lion corpse. We were directly below the Ark now, though it wasn’t visible from the reef. I studied the headland and tried to imagine how Zoë negotiated the thick chaparral in the dark. Something now told me she didn’t come back to the beach Wednesday to drown herself. Yet we did due diligence and spent the next two hours searching the high tide line. “That girl’s body drifted south,” Eddie said. “That’s where the current goes.”

  We dismounted to inspect each driftwood pile and tangle of kelp, rode along the brush line where the sand dunes met the palisades. We didn’t talk, absorbed in the search, and ended up nearly three miles down the coast. The rolling marine layer thickened a mile or so offshore, and the sun, an hour from setting, was a dull orange globe. Suddenly, the fog raced in and enveloped us as if it were nearly night. Eddie called it “Black Fog.” Somewhere out on the reef, a colony of sea lions barked desperately. The incoming surf sounded like Midwest thunder.

  We galloped north. Eddie drove his horse hard as if specters were chasing him and was soon lost from sight. Fog billowed past my ears. My hands were numb, spine sore. AOC slowed to a steady canter. I had no idea where we were until Eddie and his horse materialized before us.

  “That’s the trail up,” he said, pointing. Then he rode off, and I was alone.

  AOC picked her way up the cow path. It wasn’t unusual on such paths, at certain times, to feel less than alone, watched, even followed. You got used to it. But now, I kept looking back, a tingle prickling my neck until we reached Zoë’s gate. There was a fenced five acres where AOC could graze, and I topped off the water trough. After that, bowlegged, exhausted, I went home, lit a few oil lamps to conserve power in my L-16s, and pulled the letter from Allianz Global Investors that I’d pocketed from the Ark. Why had I taken it? Because, as Likowski would tell you, I’m a snoop. I arrived here a snoop, and I’ll leave as one. It’s all I know to do, no matter who my friends are.

  I slid a finger along the seal of the letter. Inside was a statement outlining Zoë’s share of her father’s estate along with a notice imploring her to contact the company for it to complete its fiduciary duties. It was so strange. Her father had died in 1999, so the estate should have been settled twenty years earlier. I thumbed through the pages, adding up the accounts, nearly $3 million. I knew Zoë had money in other banks—she’d told me about the accounts that summer we were lovers. She had whispered it like a confession, a source of both shame and willful pride. Zoë, it turned out, was rich—or, at least, rich in comparison to most of her neighbors, and at the time I must admit I had felt a little privileged to be taken into her confidence.

  If something bad happened, only one person stood to gain financially. He was in jail. But that didn’t mean that others couldn’t do the work on his behalf. It was a shitty thing to think of someone’s own son, but then I’d come a long way in my opinion of Klaus.

  Soon after, I fell asleep, the letter from Allianz Global Investors still in hand.

  Long before we met, I heard Zoë.

  It was weeks after I bought my fifty acres on that brittle edge of the continent, a late summer afternoon in 1995, when the anemometer registered zero during one of those atmospheric inversions that locks over the California coast, when the temperature climbs into the high nineties on the normally cold Pacific headlands and time seems suspended and the rush of air from a faraway raven’s wingbeats can be heard. Surf strikes the ear as if it’s yards away, not one thousand vertical feet below; all sound carries for great distance in the stillness.

  I took a break from shoveling dirt to sit in the shade side of the new water tank, the day after it was delivered from town by flatbed truck. My flesh dripped sweat that mixed with dust; the sunscreen was wearing off and my arms were turning red. I was exhausted from digging a massive hole in the meadow to partially bury the five-thousand-gallon poly tank so that during an earthquake it wouldn’t roll down the mountain in a direct line to the cabin site. I calculated the weight and the math was terrifying: over twenty tons of water would reside in the cylinder on which I rested my back. As I imagined the crushing force of that mass—plenty of justification for all the shoveling— the distinct sound of a tuba emerged from the south. (I later learned that it was Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee.”) A tuba? I began tapping along with the beat, and then a grower a mile higher on the ridge joined in with bongos.

  To better hear it I walked out to the western edge of the meadow, where the land fell steeply toward the ocean. Clambering up on a split rail fence corner at the outer line to my property, at the rusted gate where my easement went across Lauren McGowan’s place, I got a 160-degree view of the Pacific: some four and a half thousand miles due south was Easter Island; west, mainland Japan. The headland plunged steeply to the beach. It was a favored spot. I couldn’t see the sunset from my house site—it had a north-facing sea view— so the fence rail was an excellent perch for watching the sun dip into the ocean or, more commonly, becoming lost in the mist of the marine layer that hung miles offshore. This day the horizon was a sharp deep blue line. I closed my eyes and listened to the tuba and bongos, now going at a crazy pace—nothing less than free-form jazz and a marvelous hippie moment in the wilderness.

  When I opened my eyes, I spotted a man on a white horse far below. A brown pack horse trailed behind, tethered with rope to the first; that animal was laden with supplies. The lead animal picked a course amid the coyote brush and juvenile fir dotting the grassland, coming up the mountain against the deep blue of the Pacific, right in my direction. The man never looked up. The horse chose the route. The rider wore a black cowboy hat, black shirt, and leather chaps abraded by years of assault against chaparral. Nothing about him said it wasn’t 1888, until his face lifted and I saw the mirrored sunglasses. He was ruggedly handsome, could have been a Marlboro Man in one of those old 1960s television commercials. His beard stubble was tinged with gray, though most o
f the hair sticking out from the hat was dark blond. The man raised his head when the horses came to a halt about twenty feet from where I sat. The rider and I were at eye level because of my elevation on the fence rail.

  “You’re the newbie. The writer,” the man announced in a tone that was curt, possibly hostile. He took no joy in pronouncing the word “writer.”

  “Will Specter,” I said, giving as friendly a little wave as I could.

  “Likowski,” the thin man, who was easily over six feet, replied. In the long silence that followed, I stared at my reflection in his shades.

  “Nice-looking horses,” I said in a grasp for small talk.

  “Abbie.” He nodded to the horse on which he sat.

  “Great name.”

  “After Abbie Hoffman. And that’s Malcolm,” he added of the young brown horse.

  “After X?”

  “Yep.”

  With that, Likowski flipped the reins to continue on his way.

  “Hey,” I said. “Who’s playing the tuba?”

  “What tuba?”

  Which is when I noted that it had gone silent, along with the bongos. And a moment later, Likowski was gone as well.

  I had assumed I would get a chilly reception when I moved here, though the previous owner of my land, a man named Baker, seemed to think otherwise. I was concerned about being the outsider amid a self-exiled group of sixties refugees who had built their off-grid homesteads in the early 1970s and survived in the underground weed economy. Before signing the final papers, I asked Baker, “What about my neighbors? I’m not going to grow. You think they’ll accept me?” And Baker replied, “Won’t matter if you grow or not. That ridge is full of outlaws. You’re gonna be one of ’em just by being there.”