They questioned him for a long time.
He was James Horton Jr. He’d been born in Keithville, Louisiana. He was forty-two. He’d been riding the rails since he was twelve.
I pictured the arm throwing the rock at my Nova.
“When I was little, I never had no time to play. I never had a chance to get into mischief, like Dennis the Menace. That’s what I was doin with the rocks.”
But why throw them at cars?
“The cars were going so fast. They made me mad, because they were going so fast.”
Why did he live in the canyons?
He didn’t want to be around people.
He ate black walnuts in fall, lemons and oranges, the goat he found dead, and food from the trash.
“You coulda killed someone,” one of the deputies said, and I felt the hammering again, lighter, but still there.
“I quit, I quit,” he said again softly.
They tested him for insanity, and he pleaded, and I never heard anything about him again.
My father had a heart attack in 1979, and we buried him next to my mother. Our house was empty for a year and then it burned down. They said transients were living there, but Bryant Ranch was already sold by the grandson of the woman who’d built the place and planted all the pomegranate trees.
Last week I saw an ad in the newspaper. Executives Prefer Bryant Ranch, it said, with pictures of huge houses. Close to Brush Canyon Park, Box Canyon Park, and Golf.
I left my apartment in Santa Ana and drove up there in my old Nova. I’m in the Old Farts Car Club and we restore classics.
I drove along La Palma. The river was much calmer now because of flood control. I used to imagine the phantom in some locked room in a mental ward. No river in his sight. Back then, I kept thinking Louisiana — he must have grown up beside the Mississippi. Huck Finn and shit like that — Dennis the Menace. But I looked up Keithville, and it was near the Red River.
He must have spent years looking out a window somewhere, waiting until he wasn’t insane. No rocks. No water. No hiding except under a bed, when people came and scared you and said, “I’m not done with you yet.”
I drove up to Bee Canyon, but it was just a scar in the hills. There were bones in every canyon of the world.
The big gray and beige and rust stuccoed houses, the roads and sidewalks and the same plants over and over. Purple agapanthus, society garlic that stunk up the median, and fountain grass, which my father always thought was a weed. The only people walking were two women in workout clothes with iPods.
It was late morning, and I still worked the evening shift, so I drove as close as I could to the Santa Ana River, off and on the freeways. The water was wild and free in the canyon, and then corralled with cement banks, tamed by the time it got to Newport and emptied into the ocean.
I drove around Fashion Island, and the South Coast Plaza. No island. No coast. Just rooms. Big rooms. Asphalt like black carpet around them.
On the way back, I drove up into Santiago Canyon, Modjeska Canyon, and I ended up in Santa Ana. The canyon turned into flatlands covered with rooms. My three rooms. The same number my father had.
I didn’t want people around me either.
I liked working at night.
I partnered with Carl McGaugh for the last three years. He was only twenty-five. Didn’t say much. His dad was Irish.
I drove. Driving the freeways was like swimming in the river, the currents and the way you had to move. But the freeways were choked with traffic all the time now. The phantom wouldn’t have any trouble getting onto the median. He could walk through the stopped cars easy. But if he stood up with a rock, somebody would shoot him. In a heartbeat. Because what people cared most about was their vehicles. Their Beemers and Hummers and Acuras. Their property. No room for mischief when someone would pull out a semiautomatic weapon from the passenger seat for any reason at all.
Down in Capistrano
by Robert S. Levinson
San Juan Capistrano
Ondel Cream, the chief deputy working the overnight shift at the Orange County Central Men’s Jail in Santa Ana, owed Judge Oliver Wendell Knott a favor, which is why the judge was able to slip in after hours without a security search or a need to sign the visitor’s log, a phony Vandyke beard and wraparound sunglasses sheltering his identity from the security cameras.
“Least I can ever do for you, Your Honor,” Ondel said for the third or fourth time while guiding the judge to one of the second-floor Module-R conference rooms reserved for pretrial maximum-security inmates and sexual predators, where he’d stashed Quentin Lomax twelve minutes earlier, wrists cuffed to the anchored cast-iron table, ankles secured to the castiron chair.
Ondel said, “What you went and done for my baby brother Marcus, a righteous act not another judge woulda done,” his hoarse baritone echoing in concert with the squeak of his rubber-soled combat boots along a dimly lit corridor that reeked of a disinfectant not strong enough to entirely eliminate the layers of prisoner sweat insulting the judge’s nose.
Judge Knott smiled benignly, wished the deputy would shut up, but he knew better than to destroy the mood or otherwise disrupt the bond that grew between them after he’d sized up the deputy as somebody he could manipulate to his advantage and dismissed the drunk driving charge hanging over Ondel Cream’s brother.
He said, not for the first time, “Marcus struck me as a young man who deserved a second chance more than a third strike,” and, adding a fresh bit of friendship massage, “especially given an upstanding, God-fearing sibling like you to keep him grounded on the road to good citizenship.”
“Amen, Judge, sir, amen to that, and you seeing it for the truth. Marcus, he ain’t had nothing hard to drink ever since, but only once where I needed to slap him around some to keep a shot-a the hard stuff from cursing his lips.”
They reached the conference room.
Before turning the key in the lock, Ondel assured him, “You’ll be safe as my own son in there, Judge, what with Lomax secured tighter than a virgin’s precious jewel. It’s a precaution worth taking, since no telling what all could happen if that murdering cuss was crazy enough and free enough to go for your jugular.”
“Lomax hasn’t been tried and convicted yet in my courtroom, Ondel, so fairness dictates we withhold judgment until all the evidence is in and a jury renders its verdict.”
“What you say, Judge, but you might sing a different song if you saw him up close here, days in and out, and listened to his mouthings. Ain’t for no reason at all he’s kept in solitary, in the block reserved for the worst of the worst. And even the worst of the worst, they scared of Lomax just being so close to themselves. Mark my words, no jury is ever not gonna escape seeing that... Fifteen minutes, you said you need?”
“Maybe twenty, but certainly no longer.”
The deputy raised his wristwatch to his eyes and squinted after the time. “Need to get Lomax back where he belongs before the next bed check, so that works out fine. I’ll be outside keeping guard, so knock if you finish up your business early or need me any reason at all, Your Honor. A shout and I’ll come running.”
Quentin Lomax eased back as far as the security restraints allowed and studied the judge through deep-rooted black eyes fired by a mixture of curiosity and contempt. They seemed a mismatch with the oversized features of his pockmarked face and a wrestler’s body stretching the limits of his orange jumpsuit.