Travels with Lizbeth Page 7

  The night turned chilly and again Lizbeth abandoned her more usual popliteal position and climbed up into the down jacket with me. Fortunately Jack Frost was precisely one dog stouter than me.

  At first light I left the gear as it was and we went about exploring.

  We had slept about halfway down a footpath that led to a convex-lens-shaped field of smooth rounded rocks, each about the size of a flattened tennis ball. Beneath the rocks, evidently, were more rocks of a similar kind with the result that trying to walk on the rocks was not very different from trying to walk on several layers of ball bearings. A little of this and Lizbeth insisted on being carried, or at least, on not moving voluntarily.

  At the upstream point of the lens, the road we had walked the night before bridged the creek. I kept the bridge in mind in case of rain, though the area under the bridge was even steeper than the incline on which we had just spent a restless night.

  Near the bridge, but not quite under it, was a large block of concrete, evidently poured on the site. I could never tell why it was there. It was no structural part of the bridge that I could determine. The top was square, about nine feet to the side, and roughly level. The top surface was ten feet above the ground on the downhill side, but the block could be mounted easily from the uphill side. Lizbeth and I sat on the block for a while.

  That it was flat and above the ground seemed to recommend it as a campsite, or at least as a place to sleep. It was exposed to the sun. I thought I might work under the bridge in the daytime and that we could sleep on the block at night. I considered that an object thrown from the bridge might fall on the block. But I saw no broken glass or cans in the vicinity. I am not sure why I decided against our sleeping on the block, but I did so decide and thus I am here to tell the tale.

  We found a very large rusty object that looked to me to be a sluice of some kind. I developed the romantic notion that it had something to do with panning for gold. Later I was told this notion was not so far-fetched.

  Nearer the water the rounded rocks got smaller and supported several grassy patches, some shrubs, and two or three small trees. Here I found signs of picnickers and campers. The signs of the campers were not recent but, to judge by the many empty bean cans and the soot on the rocks of the fire circle, several of the campers had remained a long time. The small rocks gave way to gravel and, at the edge of the water, to coarse sand.

  On the far side of the creek, a steep cliff rose from the water. A few boulders and a narrow ledge formed all there was of the far shore.

  Whether we were on public land or not, I thought lying low Lizbeth and I might remain the week I figured would be required to finish Jack Frost’s script. One willowy tree among some shrubs seemed to offer good cover from every direction. I tied Lizbeth to this tree and went after our gear.

  The rounded rocks under the tree were very discomforting. I gathered several large pieces of cardboard from abandoned camps and found these made a good base for my pallet. No doubt that was why I found them where I did.

  I opened a can of Spam and gave Lizbeth all of the jelly. Eventually she also got most of the meat. I was prepared to be adult about the texture of Spam, but I had forgotten—or I had not realized when I had eaten Spam as a child—how very salty it is. I wonder whether I am not merely more sensitive to the salt now that so many other products contain less of it.

  I set to work on Frost’s script.

  Several groups of picnickers came along. Some went into the water and some just looked at it. One of these groups gave me the opportunity of observing the Valley girl—as I never visited a Southern California mall, this was as near her native habitat as I would get.

  Two girls and a boy, all of high school age, I would guess, arrived in the afternoon, dressed for bathing. I found it hard to believe her accent was not a conscious parody when one of the girls, having stalked the shore skeptically and stuck a toe in the water, exclaimed, “Ricky, we have got to talk. This water is gur-reen. Gur-reen water is not one of my favorite things!”

  The water, of course, was quite clear, but the rocks and boulders were covered with algae.

  No one spoke to us or bothered us in any way, and the variety of visitors seemed to confirm that this was some kind of public area.

  A few of the men and boys went into the water nude or in their underwear, but not so many that I was convinced the practice was accepted. I had nothing to wear into the water, so I waited until sunset to bathe. By then the others had left the area and I let Lizbeth off her leash, confident she would not cross the field of rocks voluntarily. I hoped to coax her into the water.

  Lizbeth is supposed to be half Labrador retriever and she has swimmer’s paws. As a puppy she would beg to get into the bathtub with me, and always seemed to enjoy splashing around when I hefted her in. But as an adult she refuses to go into the water, however still the water or gently sloping the shore. She watched me in the water but would no more than get her forepaws wet. She drank the water, with no apparent ill effect, and then wandered off out of my sight. I was concerned about her, but when I came out of the water I found her curled up on our bedroll.

  The creek had a few deeper holes but mostly was less than waist deep. In several places anyone able to maintain footing on the slick boulders could wade across.

  Despite the NO PARKING signs, the wide gravel shoulder up on the road across from the abandoned tavern turned out to be something of a lovers’ lane. After dark, cars came and parked and left at various intervals. But none of the cars came down the graded road to the field of rocks.

  I did not sleep very well. I spent much of the night watching the stars. Although there were occasional headlights up on the road and a few distant security lights, this was by far the darkest sky I had seen since I had arrived in Southern California. There were two bright objects in Sagittarius where there is no fixed star of comparable magnitude, but it had been months since I had known the positions of the planets and I could not guess which two these were.

  The following day was a Friday. Many more picnickers came, especially in the afternoon. I spent the day alternately working on Frost’s script and reading Field’s book. Field, of course, had no specific advice for the writer of an adult video. But I enjoyed the way he expressed himself and, as I had never given any thought to the structure of screenplays, it was all news to me. As an exercise I began to put Frost’s script into screenplay form. Frost would not have liked that, but as he had never learned to read I could prevent his knowing how I had formed his script.

  At sunset I went in the water again. By the time I got out, a party was forming up on the road among the parkers, but I had not slept well in two nights and I soon fell into a dreamy sleep.

  I believe I dreamt a whoosh. For a few moments I was neither asleep nor awake, but I do recall thinking how peculiar it was to have dreamt whoosh. I was soundly asleep again when Lizbeth began licking my face. Without opening my eyes, I tried to quiet her, but she was very insistent.

  Then I supposed she had the runs—all the salt in the Spam would have had that effect on me. I had extended her leash with the shoulder strap from the rollbag. But no matter how much I ever extended her leash, Lizbeth would not relieve herself unless she was being walked. When she had to go urgently at night she would lick me awake, and I supposed that was why she was licking me then.

  I sighed, sat up, and opened my eyes. I saw Lizbeth had a very different reason: fire.

  Upstream, near the bridge, was a huge fireball that seemed to be growing larger every instant.

  “Good dog, Lizbeth. Good dog,” I said. By the orange light reflected by the cliff on the opposite shore I could see Lizbeth’s face. I thought she was at once both worried by the fire and relieved that I was awake at last.

  I led her from our willowy cover, taking the beach towel with me, thinking we might have to escape downstream with the wet towel over our heads. Indeed, the fireball had expanded until it seemed a wall of flame. The fire seemed to be upon us, but then I realiz
ed—from the silhouettes of the intervening shrubs and saplings—that the fire was no nearer than a hundred yards. Even so the fire was hot on my face and it stirred up strange air currents in the canyon. By watching the intervening objects I became convinced that the fire was coming no nearer, and then that it seemed slowly to recede. Without additional fuel I saw no way it could jump the field of rounded rocks. My theory was that a gas line under the bridge had ruptured. This I supposed accounted for my dream of whoosh, for the whoosh I had dreamt was the whoosh of lighting a gas oven with a match, only very much louder. I noticed the cars were gone from the shoulder of the road above and I deduced that either the hour was very late or the lovers had fled. I tried to reassure Lizbeth. We returned to the bedroll.

  Then the screaming vehicles came.

  One of the emergency vehicles up on the road shined a powerful spotlight. By watching the cliff on the far side of the creek I could see the shadows of the people and things up on the road. Some of the equipment I could not recognize in shadow form.

  Suddenly Plato’s cave came to life for me as it never had before, proving—or so it seems to me—that one pertinent experience is worth more than a volume of commentary. I had read the cave passage dozens of times—the central analogy of idealism—and I had got no more than a tenuous grasp of the general drift of the argument. Now although I recognized the shadows of people as the shadows of people and the shadows of police cars as the shadows of police cars, I saw also the shadows of many things I could not identify and I would not recognize the things that cast the shadows if I saw the things themselves in daylight. I was wonderfully excited by this new light on an old text, but then too, the event was exciting in a grim way.

  Several of the emergency vehicles had piped the radio traffic to their public address horns. Because of the echoes in the canyon and the various dispatchers speaking at the same time, I could only understand a little of it. The main question was whether there was one victim or two. The answer to that question I never discovered, but the gist of the situation was that a car had not made the turn onto the bridge and had plunged off the road.

  The remains of one victim had been seen in the car, but evidently there were reports that the car had taken a pedestrian with it as it left the road.

  Despite the excitement I dozed off and on and finally fell asleep again just before dawn. I slept late in the morning.

  I heard the wrecker come down the graded path and cross the field of rounded rocks, sometimes spinning its wheels. It returned with a horrible scraping noise and I sat up to take a look. The wrecked vehicle was being dragged upside down across the rounded rocks. The roof was crushed. No one could have escaped.

  * * *

  LIFE GOES ON. Lizbeth and I needed to return to town to buy water—I still had some change. I also wanted to mail some letters and postcards. I stashed the gear except for the empty water bottles. I decided we would investigate the crash site as we went.

  From the scorch marks and the broken glass I could see that the car had pancaked onto the flat concrete block I had considered sleeping on. This provided me with a vivid mental image, but I supposed we would never have known what hit us.

  To judge by what I had seen of the fire I would have sworn anything remotely inflammable in the car would have been reduced to cinders. But as we followed the drag path I found a remarkable number of things intact and unmarked by the fire, shed from the wreck as it was towed away.

  There were a couple of pairs of jeans that had been worn too long without underwear by a beer drinker, and several shirts that smelled strongly of alcoholic body odor. I found one unmarked Western boot, not custom-made but of the more expensive kind of ready-made. From the cut of the clothes I guessed the victim was a tall, slender young man.

  He lived in his car.

  Lizbeth and I had accepted a ride with a young man who lived in his car and drank too much. If we might have been sleeping on the flat rock, then we might have been pedestrians on that side of the road, or we might have been riding in the car.

  I found a shaving kit: pomade and an Afro comb with coarse curly black hairs in its teeth. The driver had been black.

  There were other things: the rear-view mirror, coat hangers, and an empty suitcase, evidently broken before the crash.

  Then I found the railroad book. I thought at first it had been singed in the fire. I put the book in my pocket. When we had got the water and returned to camp, I read the book through.

  It was a rule book for the staff of passenger trains. Much of it concerned keeping correct time, reading signals, and placing emergency signals in case a train is delayed on the tracks. A number of rules pertained to assisting passengers in various kinds of emergencies. In these, women were classed with the insane and feeble-minded.

  It began to dawn on me that this book had not been issued to the victim of the wreck. Age, not the fire, had made the pages brittle and yellow.

  I had an education in ethnic studies and for once it cast some light. There was a time when a literate young black man without a well-connected family or money of his own had but a very few chances to avoid a life of back-breaking labor and miserable poverty. One of those chances was to get on with the postal service. Another was to work for the railroad. There was a limit to how high he might rise in one of these positions, but he might live in relative comfort, educate his children well, and give them a base from which they might aspire to the professions.

  This was not the victim’s book. It was his father’s or his grandfather’s. It had been that one and only ticket out of hard times. Treasured and handed down, here it was, the progenitor’s book.

  Here it was.

  And here, perhaps with only Lizbeth as a witness, this line whatever its aspirations and accomplishments had come to its fiery end.

  FOUR

  San Gabriels and Hollywood

  Late in the afternoon, when the last of the picnickers and bathers had left, a large new pickup came down the graded road and stopped at the far edge of the field of rocks. The driver was in Western attire. I estimated that he was the foreman of one of the nearby estates; he negotiated the field of rocks in his boots better than a weekend cowboy could have, but his clothes in spite of many washings acknowledged no recent acquaintance with hard work.

  He could not have seen us from where he parked, but he knew we were there. He came directly to our camp. When he was near enough to see us anyway, I got up to meet him.

  “You weren’t planning on camping here overnight?” he asked. The only possible response was, “No, of course not.” This, he said, was private property. The owners looked the other way for the picnickers, but camping was another thing. I began packing our gear as soon as he left. I still needed a couple of days to work on Jack Frost’s script. I thought we would not have to remove much farther north to reach the national forest and I foresaw no problems. But there is no twilight in the canyons and it was quite dark by the time we reached the road.

  First there was the matter of getting across the bridge with Lizbeth and the gear. The bridge was very narrow and for the twists in the road I could not see the traffic coming from either direction. Bridges were a problem. Lizbeth always wanted to pull us to the middle of the road, and it was often difficult to restrain her when we were overtaken by vehicles.

  Beyond the bridge the road was on a very narrow ledge. The left side of the road was rockbound. There was no shoulder and the pavement often was no more than a foot or two from the boulders. On the right there was a drop-off that seemed considerable, but the grassy shoulder was sometimes two or three yards wide. We came to a marker sign I could not read in the darkness.

  When I saw the sign in daylight it proved to be the Azusa city-limit marker. My map was quite inaccurate on this point.

  I laid us down on a somewhat wider part of the right shoulder. I could see ruts that indicated this was sometimes used as a turn-around. But I could not find a safer place and as it was too dark to see the ground I was walking on, I th
ought walking on would be no safer.

  * * *

  AT DAWN I saw that the road overlooked a vast reservoir. There were many NO CAMPING signs; no doubt we were near the intake valves of some public water supply. I could see, at intervals as it wound around the cliff, portions of the road ahead. I was glad we had not walked on in the dark. The bridges ahead were more treacherous than the one we had crossed and in places the right shoulder did not exist.

  Before long we were picked up by a blond-bearded man who, without his old station wagon, I might have taken for a forty-niner. His hobby, he said, was exploring the canyons. There were many things up the canyons, he said, that no one would guess: abandoned mines, ghost towns that had been cut off by flash floods, ruined bridges, wrecked wagons.

  I explained that I just wanted to camp and work on my script undisturbed for a couple of days. Potable water was a consideration.

  The driver had a place in mind.

  As we went he pointed out a naval reservation on the reservoir. This was for torpedo testing. He said the reservoir had been used in World War II also to perfect the technique of skip-bombing, which was used against the German dams. I recalled seeing a motion picture on that subject. Indeed this was an excellent place, even in nuclear times, for a military installation. It would be invisible except from directly overhead and invulnerable to anything short of a direct hit.

  After we crossed the river the driver pointed out what he said was the entrance to a gold mine. It was a box of chain-link fencing that appeared to go right into the hillside. He said the mines opened and closed as the price of gold fluctuated. Gold mining was now a business and the ore remaining in the mines was marginal. Lucky people still turned up sizable nuggets from time to time, but so rarely that no one could make a business of it. This all was put plausibly enough, but as it seemed to me the major gold deposits in California had been found far to the north of where we were, I never was sure whether to believe the driver.