I gave up walking when the heel of my right foot began to bother me. The work shoes were too heavy for one who had spent such a chunk of his life barefoot. I wished I had taken the bus.
I found a good place to hitch a ride. I hate to see the damn fools on the highways hitching in the wrong places. It is a waste of energy. You have to be where they can see you a long way off, and where you stand out well against the background. They have to be able to see a lot of highway beyond you, and they have to spot a place where they can pull off. You have to make a gesture at each car, a big sweeping one. You leave the duffel bag at your feet and you take your hat off, and you smile wide enough to show some teeth. An animal will roll onto his back to demonstrate his harmlessness. A man will grin. It is better to trust the animal.
A gaunt old man in a rattle-bang Ford pickup stopped at high noon and picked me up. He wore banker's clothes and a peaked cap that said Oakland Raiders.
"Only going as far as Lake Mendocino, friend," he said.
"Is that past Isaiah?"
"Next door. I can drop you off before I make my turn. Get in." He looked back, waiting for a hole in the traffic, and when one came along, he jumped into it with surprising acceleration.
"Don't know this country, oh?"
"Don't know it at an. This is the ilrst time for me."
Hunting work?"
"Well, I might have to do some to keep going. But mostly I'm trying to get some kind of trace of my little girl. I think she's out here somewhere."
'`There's a lot of young girls out here somewhere. There was a time in the sixties when they'd come drifting up from San Francisco. Communes and farming and all. What they call alternative life" styles. Potheads, mosey. No offense. I'm not saying your girl is one of those. She missing long?"
"Six years."
"Hear anything from her in all that time?"
"One time, and that was four years ago. She'll be
The Green Ripper twenty now. Peg and me, we married young. Kathy was sixteen when we got those cards from her. They came over a month or so. They never gave an address we could write back to. They were mailed in San Francisco, and then the very last one was from Ukiah. It said she was joining up with some kind of church and we should forget about her forever. You know, when you've got just the one kid, you don't forget like that. It took the heart out of Peg. She died a while back, and after I sold off a little piece of land and the trailer and an old skiff, I thought I might as well use the money trying to find her."
"Friend, this state is chock-ful1 of religions. You can find any kind you are looking for. There's some that'll take you to Guyana and teach you to raise oranges and how to kill yourself quick. They start in the north and go all the way down to the Mexican border, and to my way of thinning, the further south they go, the crazier they get. People are hunting around for something to believe in these days. All the stuff people used to believe in has kind of let them down hard. You'd have to know the name of the religion first, I'd say."
"I learned it by heart. The Church of the Apollo rypha."
"I've lived pretty close to Ukiah for ten years, and I can't say I ever heard of it. But I've seen some strange ones drifting around the streets there, selling flowers and candy and wearing white robes."
"I can ask around there, I guess. Big place?"
"No. I'd guess maybe twelve thousand. What kind of work you do?"
"I fish commercial. Net work, mostly. Mullets usually. When they're hard to find, it pays good. When they're easy, it isn't hardly worthwhile going out, you get such small money. What kind of business are you in?"
"Investments."
"Oh." From the way he said it, I knew that was all I was going to learn. He moved the pickup right along, tailgating the people who wouldn't move over into the slow lane.
"Where would be a good place to ask in Ukiah?"
"Maybe the police. Police usually }now about the crazies and where they live."
He dropped me off at the Uldah ramp. The wind felt cool and fresh. I found one gas station that wouldn't let me use the rest room, and another one that would. I shaved off the stubble and put on my wire glasses and looked into the mirror. In the hard fluorescence, my deepwater tan looked yellowish Deep grooves bracketed my mouth. The gold glasses did not give me a professorial look. I looked like a desert rat with bad eyes.
He was an officer of the law. Not too long ago he had been a fat, florid, hearty man. The balloon was deflating. He had made a couple of new holes in his belt. His color was bad. His chops sagged. He
The Green Ripper looked me over with a listless competence. And he listened to my story. "Apocrypha. Kind of rings a bell. Short dirty-white robes. Beards. Sister this and Brother that." He dialed a three-digit number and leaned back in his leather chair and began murmuring into the phone, listening for a time while he stared at the ceiling. Then he hung up and took a sheet of yellow paper and drew a crude map.
"Where that outfit was, McGraw, they were over in Lake County. They had a pretty good-sized tract. What you do, you take Twenty East and go over past Upper Lake, maybe two miles, and there's a little road heads off to the east, unpaved but a good surface. You go along that road, mostly uphill, and it winds around and there are little roads heading off it, smaller still, and that encampment is off at the end of one of those. You'll have to ask around."
"Thanks. I appreciate you taking the trouble."
"Afraid it won't help much. Seems they've pulled up and moved off someplace. Might be nobody left there at all."
"It's the only clue I've got."
For the moment he forgot his own woes. "Listen, McGraw. There's thousands of kids took off. A lot of them don't ever show again. It's a sign of the times. What I mean is, don't expect too much. It's a good thing to look around, to satisfy yourself you did all you could. But don't expect too much Okay?"
"Thanks. I won't. I mean, I'll try not to."
By Sunday noon I had found it. I had spent the night in a small rental trailer under giant ever- greens. I had hitched three rides, walked through two monstrous rainstorms, and climbed what seemed to be several mountains.
So now I stood where Gretel and her husband had stood. The signs were large and explicit. Red lettering on white. PRIVATE PROPERTY. NO TRESPASSING. The wire gate she had described blocked the road. Beyond the gate the road curved up and to the right, out of sight behind the trees and brush. There was a lean-to on the right, just beyond the gate. The last people I had asked, the ones who had given me the final directions, had said that they thought there were a few left up at the encampment, but that most of them had gone away. They said that sometimes they saw a van on the road. Black, with a gold cross painted on the sides.