33

Being able to see the stars wasn’t something that affected property values until people around America began noticing that the stars had gone out. They are actually still there, but only 10 per cent of US citizens can look to the firmament and see same. Pollution and reflected light from the cities now deprive most of our fellow citizens of a right that might have found its way into the Bill of Rights had anyone imagined that much of the population might one day be deprived of such a right. Children growing up in inner and not-so-inner cities may spend their lives as ignorant of the heavens as they are the waves of the sea. When we lived in Venice, Boo and I would often entertain kids from South Central LA, and I would take them to the beach.

It was a harrowing experience as the kids, as old as thirteen, had mostly never seen the sea, even though they lived a mere fifteen miles from it. Their knowledge of waves was limited to watching sporting events, and at first they were all terrified of the things, even though the waves at Venice are mostly just large laps. Had they been introduced to the ten-footers common at Sydney beaches I would have lost the lot. But soon, kid by kid, fear by fear, they would be frolicking in this wondrous new world as I stood in their midst counting, always counting. In numerous trips I never lost a child, and it is possible these excursions did some good.

The stars are another matter. Throughout history, people have lived and died without seeing the sea or even a large lake, but the stars have been in evidence for all humanity for the best part of eternity. No longer.

In the High Desert, the stars shine so brightly that after many months I still would stare in wonder at their brilliance. The Milky Way in the southern hemisphere, the canopy that Boo and I had grown up under, is a mite thin compared with that of the north, and as a kid I sort of resented being deprived of its glories. I guess kids like stars more than adults do, but it’s hard to tell if they can’t see them. One of the main causes of this deprivation is street lighting, which is supposed to give us a sense of security, and help us find our way about. But as John Edwards, who lives in Yucca Valley, where there is some street lighting, points out, he and his neighbours are never robbed, while the section that is lit constantly suffers from theft on such a scale that he fears members of the Bush cabinet may have moved in. So much for safety. As for guiding folk home, surely it has been the stars that have achieved that purpose since men and women had the sense to look up. An Indian and a coyote are never lost.

Why there is no mass political movement to ‘bring back the stars’ is surprising, given that people will spend their lives fighting for the right to have a larger handgun or a more automatic rifle. Perhaps my fellow DILLIGAF members, who can spend an entire afternoon discussing the attributes of the most obscure of armaments, can be excused from not fighting for the right of kids to see the heavens. They can see all the stars they like if they remain sober until dark. In fact, we are in one of those special parts of the world where the stars can be seen more brightly than in those less special areas where they can’t. This is due partly to elevation; partly to the existence of the San Bernardino Mountain Range, which blocks all light from LA; and partly to air movements that sweep pollution off to less fortunate places.

So much is this the case that photographers from the Los Angeles Times and even The New York Times trek out here for the regular meteorite showers that turn the night sky into something more like a racetrack. Boo was, inevitably, away for the first night of the Triffids, but Ed and Candace had come to stay, and though the night was as cold as a nun’s bosom, out we went, armed only with a bottle of Jack to brave the waves of falling stars.

The land around is pockmarked by meteorites that made it to earth, so the act took some courage. But the greatest problem was in the watching. Candace would cry, ‘Look at that one,’ but by the time one swung one’s head around, it was fading or gone, and Ed was yelling, ‘Look, there goes two.’

The trick, we soon learnt, was to identify that part of the sky where most of the shooting stars seemed to shoot, and ignore the distractions. The show went on for hours. We huddled together with blankets and more Jack until the early hours, when the squeals of delight began to mix with yawns, and sleep called.

We staggered into the house. Below us were the lights of half-a-dozen other homes dotting the flats far below.

If they get water up here, the developers will come and put in street lighting and thousands of houses, and take out the stars. When, I wondered, is it appropriate to take up arms or dynamite against such a sea of troubles?

An alert reader might recall that we made this momentous move away from the world of coffee houses and outlets for such exotica as The New York Times, in part, because we were threatened by a neighbour — The Man with No Brain.

It was not until we had said goodbye to our little piece of Dodge City and settled at Boulder House that we discovered the prison system would soon disgorge one of its millions of minions almost onto our front doorstep — Danny, the man who had shot Adam, who, with his father, John, his uncle Jerry, his brother Brandon, and the countless wives, cousins, sons, and daughters made up the tribal alliance I came to call The Adams Family.

News that Danny would soon be getting out began to spread until it became, after the preparations for the DILLIGAF Christmas party, the most talked-about coming event on the social calendar. Being the closest neighbour, in fact the only neighbour, I was constantly asked whether he had been sighted — and what plans I had in mind. Except to play things by ear, I had no plans.

But a would-be killer coming home was a matter that could not be ignored, and it played on my mind more than I would admit.

The Blade Runner took Boo aside, and told her what to expect from Danny.

‘I am warning you,’ he said. ‘I am serious.’

The Blade Runner was nothing if not serious.

‘He is dangerous, and I am not joking. Be very careful, and don’t ever be alone with him.’

These and many other threats fell upon our ears.

The DILLIGAF consortium suggested we collectively write to the authorities informing them that Danny was not welcome in the community. It was widely believed that such a letter would have him released but banned from San Bernardino County, and prevent him from returning to our tiny part of that immense domain. Naturally, given the nature of an organisation that concentrates its activities on preparations for the Christmas party, the discussion of the attributes of firearms, and the need for greater enforcement of the death penalty (I once suggested it be retrospective), nothing was done.

One sunny morning, I noticed Ed Edge, a fine fellow who had given me some help with the well, working on some pipes at Danny’s little cabin. I went over for a chat and maybe an update on what was on everybody’s mind — Danny’s homecoming. There had been considerable activity around the cabin, and Danny’s father had replaced the chimney the previous week.

There was then the unmistakable sound of a motor car and the equally unmistakable evidence of a small white truck moving up the almost sheer incline to what had been, until this moment, our secluded world.

I recognised immediately old man Salazar, and knew that the figure beside him was Danny. Adam’s would-be killer.

It was a tricky moment. Danny jumped from the truck and was formally — by local standards — introduced by his father.

We shook hands in a pregnant pause. Danny stood a full foot below me and had an innocent, almost childlike, look. I grasped his hand and welcomed him home. Another pregnant pause.

‘I believe you are a poor shot,’ I suggested, hoping to cut the ice about Adam from the very start.

He grinned nervously, and seemed to agree, being in a friendly mood. I did my best to be friendly, but I wasn’t over the moon, and saying I had work to get on with, left. Danny, who represented something of a potential date with destiny for the occupants of Boulder House, moved into his cabin.

At first, the small Mexican-Indian was on his best behaviour, and we were convinced that the warring parties would no longer seek to do battle. I even arranged a peace conference where Danny and John Edwards agreed to a formula that, in retrospect, might have been drawn up by Neville Chamberlain.

The tiny hamlets of Pioneertown, Pipes Canyon, and Rimrock responded to the return of a man who had, for no apparent reason, shot a well-known member of the community, as one would hope they might. With detached consideration.

Boo met Danny, a few days after his return, while walking the dogs. He approached her warily, no doubt knowing that a strategic alliance would be helpful to his cause, which seemed to be, in principle, not returning to prison.

‘I guess you have heard some bad things about me,’ he remarked.

‘Well, I heard you shot Adam,’ she replied.

Danny admitted he had.

He told Boo he was sorry for what he had done, that he had done his time, and done it hard.

‘I did it like a man,’ he added.

Soledad has earned its reputation as being one of California’s hardest prisons, and Danny was treated in the spirit of redemption by what passes as a community. As usual, Ernie and Carole led the way, putting him to work at the motel, and were delighted with the results. Cathy, his former girlfriend, and the regular cleaner at the motel, moved into his cabin, and Danny, when not doing the yard work at the motel, began improvements on his own yard, and began lining the cabin with cedar.

Soon he had saved enough to buy a nice motorcycle, a road bike, but one suited to the desert. We had him over for a few beers, and in return he helped me with the pool.

I soon discovered there was something childlike about Danny, and had to remind myself that the thirty-three-year-old was definitely no child.

My attempts to befriend Danny were at first moderately successful. He came over again to help me with the pool. Having more knowledge of plumbing than Gordon Liddy, he was of some use. As we did battle with the filtration system, he told me he had spent his childhood on the Hopi Indian reservation in northern Arizona, not far from the Grand Canyon and even closer to Monument Valley. Perhaps they are the most filmed and photographed places on earth. But the film crews rarely make it to the dusty Hopi reservation.

As we struggled in the sun, I tried to remember our brief visit to the tiny reservation ten years before, hoping to better place the man by knowing the world of his childhood. I remembered its barrenness. The red hues of Monument Valley were evident in the clay-like earth and, at least when Boo, I, and Harry the dog made our brief inspection, red earth and ramshackle housing were about all there was. A few stalls sold hand-crafted goods — jewellery, turquoise inlaid in silver, rugs, and pottery — some of the best that will ever be made. A few hungry dogs wandered the baked streets of a settlement not unlike those found in Australia’s ‘red centre’. The reservation, which is about sixty-five kilometres square, does not have rivers but washes. Nevertheless, it is home to one of North America’s oldest cultures, and the pueblos atop the mesas date to the ninth century — making them the oldest continuous human communities in North America.

Danny had lived there twenty years before our visit, when the reservation was even more isolated and primitive.

The Hopi Indians call themselves Hopitu, meaning ‘peaceful’ or ‘the peaceful little ones’. But while Danny is indeed little, one had to question his peaceful nature.

Danny informed me he was eight years of age when his parents went to LA. Danny’s father hailed from Yuma, a forlorn town a few hundred miles south of the Hopi lands.

Again, I tried to reconstruct Yuma from a brief visit years before. The town existed mostly because it was the site of the West’s first federal prison. The federal authorities built a jail with walls so thick (three metres) that Saddam himself might have felt safe in one. Yuma Prison was also the first in the West to employ steel reinforcing.

I recalled that only one man ever escaped from Yuma, and he was thought to have drowned in the Colorado River, which in those days flowed wide and strong past the prison and into Mexico.

Prisons are a recurring theme in Danny’s life, I thought, as we finally got the pool’s water level right.

He had stripped off his top, revealing the mandatory prison tattoos. Some mystified me, but he explained, in his high sing-song voice, that inside he had joined a Native American gang. Imprisoned African-Americans have usually been members of gangs before graduating to prisons, as have most Latinos. Whites often join the Aryan Nation soon after incarceration, even though they might have no affinity with its racist creed.

Danny told me of the sweat lodges that he and his Indian brothers enjoyed in Soledad. It seemed incongruous, yet uplifting, that such a freedom could still exist.

Moving to the metropolis of Los Angeles from an isolated reservation, with his father, from a town that only existed because it provided the last chance to steal Mexico’s water and was a suitable place for a prison, might have unsettled Danny. It led, he said, to his desire to return to the desert, and somehow to the end of Coyote Road.

The pool had iced over. The swamp cooler had been shut down. Wood had been delivered in great quantities, and the fire blazed constantly. Tony, the word was going around, would be heading back any day now — as soon as the ground back in Wisconsin froze.

Christmas would soon be upon us. People were making each other gifts. Lil Debbie was busily creating her little ‘desert Christmas trees’, made from the tops of dead yuccas and decorated with exquisite tiny ornaments.

Pioneertown was aglow with lights. Cactus and wagon wheels sparkled with what we grew up calling fairy lights. Even Danny’s cabin was lit up, and twinkled in the dark, cold night.

As the days and weeks passed peacefully, I saw more of Danny. His skin, where not covered in tattoos, had turned a coppery colour. He had taken to blackening the area around his eyes, and invariably wore a headscarf. The effect was handsome. But Danny had used the gun and the knife before, and as the weeks passed it seemed increasingly apparent that an unwillingness to bury the hatchet — as it could not more appropriately be described — existed in his heart. Of the one hundred and twenty thousand persons paroled in California each year, seventy thousand return to prison, and it was reasonable to expect that Danny would find his way home if relations with Adam went south.

Danny’s parole officer, I soon learnt, was a Mr Smith, reputedly a hard man. He seemed to visit Danny sporadically for the spot checks and whatever else parole officers do as they make their rounds. And being in the desert, Mr Smith’s rounds were extensive. I was working in the yard adjacent to Danny’s cabin with Art, a local who professes some knowledge of trees and gardening. I like to work with Art, because if I don’t, things can go wrong fast. Art is not given to contemplating the consequences of his actions — a fact that had brought him to the attention of the same Mr Smith.

According to Art, the cause of his incarceration had been a misunderstanding over the dumping of peculiarly noxious poisons, and Art had been grievously wronged and jailed. This had rather impressed me, as I had never heard of an American being jailed for dumping toxins. Had Art been skippering a supertanker while drunk, and lost a few million barrels of crude, he would have walked free. But the amount was small, and Art did sixteen months.

When Mr Smith bounced up Coyote Road, we were applying Henry’s — a tar supposed to seal roofs — to the garage. Art, who is probably the least criminal of all Mr Smith’s parolees, was delighted to see his officer in charge, and hollered loudly — no doubt to draw Mr Smith’s attention to the fact that though he was disposing of a noxious tar, he was doing it atop my garage. That is, not only was he working, but working legally.

Mr Smith waved back and disappeared into Danny’s cabin as Art beamed at me. At their next meeting, the coming Tuesday (Art, not being a drug offender, was not subject to random tests), he would be able to tell his parole officer of his new position as foreman at Boulder House. A reputable position indeed, if it existed.

About this time, Danny’s girlfriend, Cathy, brought home a small pup, a pit bull that had been mixed, it seemed from its growth, with an elephant. The creature had been left in one of Ernie and Carole’s motel rooms, and was dubbed LD — short for Little Dog. It grew, and within months was twice the size of Sailor — and still a pup.

Sailor, convinced he was top dog, decided to bring this usurper down to his own size. But his efforts were forlorn at best. LD was friendly to all, as pups invariably are, but Sailor took a dim view of this challenge to his mastery of the hill, and soon tempers flared. We repeatedly appealed to our neighbours to have LD’s private parts removed, knowing that one day it would finish the issue of who was top dog, and Sailor would inevitably lose badly, suffering an inevitable mauling and possibly death. We even offered to pay for the surgery.

But Danny seemed to consider any attempt to reduce the conflict an assault on the few rights he possessed as a parolee. Bitter words were exchanged, with me informing Danny that he was a ‘fucking imbecile’.

People, noting that Danny’s disposition had grown increasingly aggressive since his release, suggested he was — like a goodly proportion of the denizens of the desert — on speed. But I argued that this was unlikely, given the random urine tests. Speed hangs around in the system for days, and Danny was in reality still in jail, parole being jail without the bars. Any such infringement would put him back in complete confinement, and the job of the penal system was to get as many back as possible. Institutions exist to perpetuate their existence, and the prison system was coming close to perfecting its purpose. If Danny was on speed, he’d likely be behind bars already, I argued.

But I began to find Danny’s soft, sing-song tone sinister. As I stood more than a foot above him, I doubted he would attack me with his fists. But as his record was for the use of that great equaliser — the handgun — this was small comfort.

We found ourselves in the midst of hostilities far more deadly in potential than the one that had us flee to the mountains in the first place.

Danny, being on parole for the shooting of Adam, was, under law, prevented from being in Adam’s company. The conception of such ideas — that warring parties be separated — was admirable enough, but it became apparent far too quickly that in such a tiny rustic world only UN peacekeepers could ensure that the demarcation lines would be respected.

Trouble began at the home of Vietnam Bob, a man not averse to gunfire after enduring a long and unpleasant sojourn in the rice fields and jungles of Vietnam. Bob may not be the best-armed man in the High Desert, but he has definitely made every effort to protect himself and his loved ones. He is not trigger unhappy, and has a personality that can range from mild-mannered to seriously ferocious.

Bob and Adam are friends and neighbours of many years’ standing, and Adam would frequently drop by for a visit. On one such day, ensconced in the living room and enjoying a cold beer with them sat Danny. Adam offered his hand in friendship some five times, and each time it was slapped away. Hugs were not exchanged, and Danny told Adam he had been thinking of him — for five years — every day.

Adam took this as something of a declaration of intent. Presumably, Danny had not lain awake in Soledad prison wishing him well. In fact, Danny was of the opinion that Adam had let down the side by going to the police over the matter of the bullet that had bounced around his head and found its way into his spine. Adam found it difficult to explain to his old adversary that once one is admitted to a hospital in California, even with such a minor infliction as a bullet to the head, the arrival of the police is a formality. The hospitals are required by law to inform their servants of such matters.

Danny was of the opinion that Adam had betrayed him, and was further incensed by the fact that the police, on arrival at his cottage next to Boulder House, had also uncovered what they believed, and the courts agreed, was the basis of a methamphetamine laboratory — something common to these parts.

Rumour had it that Danny’s time in jail was rendered less pleasant because the expensive ingredients of the speed lab were confiscated by the authorities, causing chagrin to the criminal fraternity that had invested in the materials.

That Danny’s time in Soledad and other such places had been difficult was attested to by the absence of his top and bottom front teeth. Locals recalled that those teeth had been firmly attached to his gums before his incarceration.

Teeth are not regarded as a necessity in the High Desert. Buzz is of the opinion that teeth are best replaced, and a standing joke in these parts runs along the lines of ‘What have you got when you line up thirty-two Pioneertown women?’

‘A full set of teeth.’

Such a joke might be lost on Danny.

His response to Adam’s outstretched hand was the sort of diplomatic gesture one might expect from a refugee from the prison system, or, for that matter, from the current incumbents of the White House. A unilateral act from a man with an increasingly small power base.

Then, late one Saturday night, Adam rang.

‘Have you seen a white Chevy low rider at Danny’s?’ he asked, alarm in his voice. We hadn’t.

‘Cholos, three of them, drove around my house this afternoon, in a white low rider. They are connected to Danny. They were real threatening. I could tell they were packing.’

Boo did recall hearing a vehicle, but in the middle of the night she could only see the lights.

I thought that Adam, sometimes Pioneertown’s prima donna assoluta, might be using a product other than his faithful companion, Budweiser, and promised to drop around the next day. Cholos were from the gangster world of East LA, and though Yucca might have a few would-be gangsters of the Chicano variety, it was hard to imagine them driving all the way out here, and hardly believable they would threaten an Edwards.

But when I arrived at Adam’s tiny cottage on Sunday morning, the clans had gathered. The living room was full of automatic rifles and beards, and it seemed there was cause for alarm. From a babble of excited rushes of conversation, I pieced together the events that had led to this drama.

A criminal who had been released from jail at the same time as Danny, and who had since managed to get himself 86’d from the bars of Yucca — no easy task — had arrived at Adam’s in the aforementioned white Chevy Suburban and driven around his house five times. Then the criminal had entered, and as Adam knew him vaguely, he had welcomed him. But the ex-con was not polite, and instead told Adam he had brought some friends from East LA to ‘party with hillbillies’. He added that he expected Adam to be wearing overalls, an item not in Adam’s wardrobe. As there were two women in the house and the gangsters had clearly ‘scoped’ the place, Adam could not find recourse to his guns. As soon as they left he called his dad, John, who had by now arrived with Uncle Jerry.

Jerry and John are both mountain men, and fools might think them hillbillies. Jerry had spent some time with the LAPD, and both were competent trackers.

The boys in the low rider might not have figured that driving on dirt roads left tyre tracks. The roads of East LA might be bad but are not dirt, and they hadn’t reckoned that unique low rider tyres would stand out, especially after five passes. But Jerry and John had already tracked the tyres, and had done so to Coyote Road.

If anything was guaranteed to bring fury to the clan, not to mention the general community, the arrival of outside gangsters was it. Word was spreading, and people who had long dreamt of defending their town were arriving. More could be summoned, but as I went out to inspect the still-fresh tyre prints, I imagined we had enough facilities to handle a few city gangsters driving a vehicle not exactly designed for the ruts that pass for roads in these parts. I detected three submachine guns in the back of one of the trucks, and my confidence grew. The Cholos might have similar weaponry, but they were self-taught, and usually ended up killing the wrong target. These rednecks had mostly been trained by the US army. Some had used guns, year in and out, against the people of Vietnam. Adam himself had been put in charge of twenty-eight men when he was a young ranger.

In these enlightened days, killing is done by either depraved individuals or the state. But community killing, vigilante killing, is something that has passed into history. In California and the West, death without trial at the hands of a mob or a posse has a rich history. A few generations ago, men were hanged from the nearest tree — if there was a nearest tree — partly on the grounds that the jails were so poorly constructed that a stick of dynamite could free a comrade who might have stolen a horse. Better to hang him on the spot. Mob murder was first introduced in San Francisco, and reputedly its first victims were Australians. These were the Sydney Ducks: a gang of ex-cons who found their way to the town with plunder rather than work in the goldfields on their minds. Such were the crimes of these men that, given the absence of law, the vigilante killings were understandable, even though it irks me to say so of fellow countrymen.

Perhaps you could say I was privileged to be in a room where the fevered excitement that comes with the lust for blood was evident. But evident it was. Even Boo, who had seen her fair share of human folly since we’d met twenty years before, was worried. I found myself reminded of Pat Buchanan, who, in the 1996 presidential campaign, cried, ‘When you hear the sound of the guns, ride, boys, ride.’

Had Danny or someone in a white low rider appeared that Sunday morning, they could have expected a hail of bullets. Fortunately for Danny, they did not. By the time we left, it was agreed no action be taken. The passion for killing had, for the moment, passed. Instead, as we lived opposite, it was agreed we would keep an eye on things.

I saw Danny, and he asked me if his life was in danger.

We were in The Palace, and a few hours had passed. He seemed a mite nervous, as befitted a man who had a lot of gunmen keen on finding him in their sights. He himself, on the other hand, would return to prison for a long time if found in possession of a single gun.

The question was rather a ‘curate’s egg’ one, in that, while telling the truth was unpleasant and might make matters even more dangerous, lying was also unacceptable. I told him I was doing my best, and tried to put a decent spin on the fact that I had just left some of the hardest men in the hardest country in a hard nation, and they were all oiled up and looking for bear.

Danny didn’t thank me for my efforts, and I moved to other, friendlier drinkers, reflecting that, while he had a lot on his mind, he was doing a poor job of saving his own neck by not even appreciating that I was constantly trying to construct a peace.

A rough barricade was erected next door. A heavy chain was slung across the driveway. Windows were boarded up.

In this cauldron, the problems with the Man with No Brain seemed like days of innocence and hope. Whereas in that other life I had brushed aside the .45 that my Venice neighbour John had offered, I now embraced a pump-action shotgun and some other deadly items. Whereas once I had told the cops it was their job to kill the Man with No Brain, I now found myself and my loved ones in a world where the cops scarcely existed.

Today, we endured tense times at Coyote Road. Sure, Danny had lived here before us and had every right to return home. But the things that might threaten our safety had been, up until now, the rare mountain lion and the not-so-rare rattlesnake. A human with a violent record was a great invasion, and Danny’s presence was an ever-present cloud over our sunny home. If not paradise lost, it was definitely paradise flawed.

But there are other equally pressing matters at hand. Soon I must off to the Friday meeting of DILLIGAF, and with another Christmas only six months away, some other vital decisions must be made. Who, for instance, will play Santa? Last year’s Santa was hired in, and didn’t quite fit the bill. Some are suggesting Mike Bristow — the hardest of all the hard men — the man who for seven years kept a mountain lion as a pet. Not exactly a reindeer, but it’s a mite hot for reindeers in these parts.