Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway (17 page)

She looked at me and Tracy for validation. We both nodded. This was a clear violation of the rules.

“So what did you do?” Tracy asked.

“I went home,” Cathy said. She looked sad, like she was living it all over again. “And the next day there’s like five long messages from Chloe on my answering machine when I get home from school. I’m so sorry, please forgive me, all this shit. And then I hear from, like, a million other people that they went home together that night. And a few days later I heard it from Hank himself. They fooled around. A lot. They totally fooled around and maybe even fucked that night.”

“Wow,” Tracy said.

“So, Chloe,” I said. “Chloe said that he was fair game . . .”

“Right right right,” Cathy said. “She was saying all this crazy shit, like he’s just a guy, why was I getting so upset, I was being stupid. And I looked at her—and it was like . . . like her voice was all different but also her face. Her face was like—like it was disappearing. Like it wasn’t Chloe at all. Or like the other person, the Chloe I knew,
that
was never Chloe at all. Does that make any sense?”

Tracy looked at me and we both nodded. It made sense.

Cathy had nothing else useful to say, although that certainly didn’t stop her from talking. Finally we got ready to leave.

“Screw you, cunt,” Georgia muttered as we were walking out, her voice slurred and drunk. “Just screw you.”

I went over to her and bent down next to her chair so we were on the same level. She flinched a little.

I reached up and took a piece of her hair in my hand. Everyone had grown quiet around us, reactions dulled and intoxicated.

“Don’t fucking touch me,” Georgia slurred, tensing. “Don’t you fucking—”

I pulled hard on her hair. She stumbled toward me with an open hand but she was fast and easy to evade, and in a quick second we were rolling around on the filthy floor, hands in each other’s hair and my nails on her face, until Tracy and Cathy jumped in and pulled us apart.

San Francisco

T
HE NEXT DAY
I called Josh, Paul’s friend who I’d spent the night with after the funeral.

“Claire,” he said. “I’ve been meaning to call you.”

“Why?” I said.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I thought we could get a drink or something.”

I wanted to say
why
again but I didn’t.

“Sure,” I said. “Can I ask you something? Something about Paul?”

“Yeah, of course,” he said, but his voice held back.

“I’m not asking this out of judgment. But I need to know. It’s like a doctor. Total confidence. You just have to tell the truth, okay?”

“Are you really like a doctor?” he asked.

“Absolutely,” I said. “It’s practically the same thing.”

I was nothing like a doctor.

“Yeah,” he said. “Okay. I mean, it depends on the question, I guess.”

“I think you just answered it,” I said.

“Fuck,” he said.

“Who was she?” I asked.

“Man,” he said. “Claire. Come on. It was nothing. It was so nothing. It was like, once or twice. Paul loved Lydia. You know that.”

I sat on top of my kitchen counter and emptied out what was left of my cocaine and cut it with a business card from Jon’s store in Marin. I started to roll up a five for a straw but felt cheap and instead found one of the crisp new hundreds I’d tried to bribe Bix with.

“Claire? Are you there?”

I sniffed a line through a rolled hundred.

“Once or twice with one person?” I said. “Or with one or two different women?”

He didn’t answer. That meant
both.

“The whole time?” I said.

“Oh, God no,” he said. “No, not until the last year or so. And I don’t think any of it was serious, at all. Just, you know.”

“Just what?”

He sighed. “You know. Him and Lydia were fighting a lot.”

I didn’t know that.

“Did they fight about anything in particular?” I asked. “Or just fight?”

“I don’t know. I think it started over real things and then it was just fighting.”

“Do you know who any of the girls were?”

“Dude, you can’t go and, like, interrogate her. I’ve known her forever. She is an old, old friend.”

“I promise,” I said. “No interrogations. The three of us grab a cup of coffee. She doesn’t even have to tell me her name.”

“Would you tell Lydia?” he asked.

“Of course not,” I said.

I figured she probably already knew.

That night I felt restless. I drove to the Tenderloin and bought some more coke from a girl I knew named Rhonda. She was high and not doing so well when I found her, teetering on her high heels in the rain.

“It’s gettin’ tough for girls like us,” Rhonda said. We stood in the rain. Our transaction was completed but you can’t leave these things until you’re dismissed. That just isn’t how buying drugs works. “No one knows how to feel anything anymore. No one knows anymore. Ain’t no one care. People have, like,
experiences.
Everything just another
experience.
They do things, but they don’t feel it. It just all goes right through them. Like they a ghost. Like we all ghosts.”

“They sure are,” I said. “
We
sure are.”

“You ain’t one of those girls,” Rhonda said. “Those feel-nothing people. You feel every little thing right down your bones. You feel everything, just like me.”

“I’m working on that,” I said, cool rain on my face. “I don’t want—”

“Uh-uh,” Rhonda said. “You ain’t gonna change. Girls like us don’t change. We just keep going till they get every last drop out of us. Then they pretend they miss us when we gone.”

S
IXTY-TWO DAYS AFTER
Paul died, I drove up north to check on the miniature horses and to see Lydia at Paul’s house, now her house, on Bohemian Highway in Sonoma County.

East Sonoma County is famous for its wine. West Sonoma County isn’t famous at all. It’s somewhat well known, though, for its fog, its redwoods, the wide and ever-flooding Russian River, and being the home of the Bohemian Grove, the large parcel of the county owned by the Bohemian Club. The Bohemian Club was an all-male club that started in San Francisco as a private club for artists and writers of the upper class and demimonde. Now its members included presidents, ex-presidents, and a litany of shadowy men like Henry Kissinger and Alan Greenspan, men I knew I was supposed to think were important but didn’t. They met at Bohemian Grove for two weeks every year, and no one knew exactly what they did there. Conspiracy theorists claimed the club drank blood and worshiped Satan, or at least had unauthorized discussions about the federal reserve and tax schedules. Defenders claimed it was just a fun outing of a very selective club. The Bohemians themselves weren’t talking.

Paul’s house was adjacent to the Bohemian Grove property, at the end of a long private road in the town of Occidental. Although the land around it was owned by the Bohemian Club, their actual camp was at least ten miles away, and there was no path or road between the two, just thick redwood forest.

By the time I got up to the house, it was dark out. I’d spent the afternoon at the Spot of Mystery. No news on the miniature horses. Jake had his very best men on the job, which may not have been the same as someone else’s best men, but what can you do. Lydia greeted me from the porch. She wore a pretty white dress and her hair was long and freshly colored black. She had dark circles under her eyes, and her hands shook badly, but she looked better than she could have.

Life goes on. Nothing is permanent.

The air smelled like redwoods, a woodsy, piney, smoky smell.

“Come in,” she said. “I’m glad you’re here.”

I couldn’t tell if she was glad or not. Her mouth was curled into something kind of sardonic and kind of like a smile.

“Paul told me,” Lydia said as she showed me around, “sometimes at night, when they would come here in the summer, if the wind was right they could hear the music from Bohemian Grove. You’d be surprised at who’s in it—all these old hippies like Steve Miller and Jimmy Buffett.”

The house was in a private clearing of a few acres in the woods. It was a craftsman-inspired “cottage” from the thirties, with a stone base and wood and plaster above, sloping eaves and a big porch. A stone chimney made it look like a witch’s house.

“Paul said he and Emily tried to sneak through the woods a couple times. But these guys in suits would always find them and escort them back to the border.”

Lydia frowned. She knew about Emily.

“Anyway,” she went on. “Thanks for coming.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s going to be fun.”

But something in me turned and I had a sour taste in my mouth and suddenly I wasn’t sure about that.

It was late and we decided to get dinner. We drove to a fancy-ish place in Guerneville where they knew Lydia. Lydia told me about trying to get the utilities and bills switched into her name. She seemed absent and a little off—I wasn’t sure if she was exactly talking to me, or to whoever happened to be sitting across from her.

“It’s like no one ever died before,” she said. “It’s like you call the phone company or the gas people and they’re completely unprepared to deal with a customer dying. As if it doesn’t happen to everyone.”

I had less to drink than Lydia so I drove us home, back down Bohemian Highway.

“You want to come in?” Lydia asked. “Maybe watch a movie or something? Spend the night?”

I glanced over at her in the blue dark light. She looked lonely and sounded a little desperate. Must hurt to be alone if you’re not used to it.

“Sure,” I said. “Sounds fun.”

We were almost at Lydia’s long driveway when suddenly something was in front of the car and I slammed on the brakes.

A giant black vulture stood in the road in front of the car, lit up against the blacktop by my white headlights. I looked around. On the right side of the road a gang of five more vultures, presumably its family, were eating a deer. A doe. The doe had likely been killed by a car; she was on her side, glassy eyes staring toward the road, mouth open. The vultures worked on the deer’s soft center body, leaving the bony head and legs for last.

Lydia stared at the scene like she’d seen a ghost. He face turned pale and her mouth formed a perfect O.

“Oh,” Lydia said. “Oh, I—”

I looked at her in the rearview mirror. Her face was turned toward me but her eyes were going the other way, toward the window. Her mouth was open the tiniest bit and her eyebrows were drawn together.

Suddenly the vulture jumped up on the hood of the car, talons scraping on the metal. Its face was red and wrinkled, ugly and angry. It stood on the hood for a second and then spread its wings as well as it could.

Then it jumped up as if to fly and slammed into the windshield, shaking the glass in its setting.

Lydia screamed.

The bird wobbled and pulled its wide wings in, stunned. It stumbled and then spread its wings again. One black wing slammed against the windshield. A smear of blood smudged the glass. The bird made a sound like a hiss or a growl, high-pitched but from deep in its throat.

Lydia stared at it, transfixed.

“Oh my God.” Lydia said. She looked like she was going to cry.

The vulture opened and closed its injured wings a few times. It didn’t leave.

“Please,” Lydia said, voice shaking. “Please.”

I looked at her. She looked terrified, broken.

The vulture stood on the hood of the car, tending to its injured wings, confused and scared. I tapped the horn lightly.

After a mean look it hopped off the hood and landed, unbalanced, on the blacktop, lit by the bright white headlights. It made another hissing, grunting sound and then half walked, half flapped off toward the woods. Once it was out of the headlights I lost track of it. The rest of the vultures kept working on the deer, undisturbed.

I drove us home.

Lydia stared straight ahead the rest of the drive to the house. When I stopped the car she got out and went inside without a word. She went in the bedroom and shut the door. A few minutes later I heard the bath running from the attached bathroom.

After a while Lydia came out of the bedroom, hair wet, body wrapped in a big white robe. She smiled a feeble little widow’s smile.

“Sorry,” she said. “That totally freaked me out.”

“Oh, hey, yeah,” I said. “Don’t worry about it. That was weird.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Doesn’t that mean something? Like isn’t there some thing where you see a certain bird and it means something? Like to Indians?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe.” But I did know: There are lots of things like that, Indian and otherwise.

Lydia frowned but tried to shake it off. There was a cabinet full of DVDs and Lydia opened a bottle of wine and put on
Born to Kill.
I got the drift that this was what she did every night, alone or with company: an old movie and a bottle of wine. She curled up on the big sofa next to me. About halfway through the movie she dozed off. In her sleep Lydia grasped and groped and squirmed, like she had the night Paul died. She began to mutter and make little sounds—grunts and squeaks.

After midnight,
Born to Kill
over, I woke her up with a nudge. Lydia, drowsy in a way that made me guess she’d taken a pill or two, pointed me toward a guest room and then went to bed. I wouldn’t have known, if Lydia hadn’t told me earlier, that it had been Paul’s room when he was a kid. His family used to come here often, at least four times a year, when Paul and Emily were little. In the eighties, when Paul and Emily were teenagers, their father died. Then their mother picked them up and moved them back east, to be closer to her own family. Paul had moved back to California for college a few years later and stayed ever since. As an adult, he’d had the house lightly redone, moving out the children’s furniture and turning his and Emily’s old rooms into guest bedrooms. When he stayed here, with Lydia or anyone else, he stayed in the master bedroom. After all, he was now the master of the house.

The day before Josh had called and asked if I wanted to meet his friend who had dated Paul. I did, but not right before I saw Lydia. Carrying around the knowledge that Paul had cheated wasn’t so bad; like I said, I figured Lydia knew. If she asked me about it I would tell her the truth, but I wouldn’t bring it up.