Last Light in Paradise: Chapter 4

Editors note:

Every now and then, a story comes along that refuses to stay put. It lingers on your nightstand. It sneaks into conversation. For us, Last Light in Paradise is one of those stories, and we’re delighted to let it loose, one chapter at a time, in the pages of the Montecito Journal. Well, at least the first six chapters for the time being – then you can purchase the book at one of our local beloved bookstores (Chaucer’s, Tecolote, and Godmothers).

This book marks a first for us… Last Light in Paradise is the inaugural book published by MJ Media Group. Yes, we’re dipping a toe – perhaps a barefoot run – into the world of book publishing, guided entirely by our belief in a novel that is as cinematic as it is soulful, as local as it is timeless.

Set against the luminous backdrop of 1930s Santa Barbara, this is a tale of love and loss, mystery and reckoning, populated by unforgettable characters and infused with the kind of atmosphere that feels both dreamlike and deeply true. We invite you to settle in, turn the page, and join us at the edge of paradise… just as the light begins to change.

CHAPTER 4

He was standing across from the judge seated at a big, dark, leather-top desk. Through a window, Creek saw the swift moving clouds and the return of sun to a wet town. The judge was a 60-year-old man named Delbert Warren, and the spray of capillary traces mapping his face told Creek that booze had probably produced the weary but kind eyes, the soft voice, and the sense that Warren had seen too much disappointment in the human race for way too many years. Still, Creek didn’t trust him.

“What’s your last name?” the judge asked.

“Don’t have one.”

“Must have.”

“Never.”

“Your born name.”

“Born Creek. Called Creek. Fought a war under the name Creek.”

The judge leaned back and appraised him. Maybe Creek had the kindness wrong, or maybe the judge, too, had had enough with the spoiled brass in this town.

“That so?” the judge said.

“No matter how eagerly people try to hitch a follow-up word to my name, it stays one word. Creek. Use it like it is or stop talking to me.”

“Jesus, you’re a sensitive man.” Warren said it without smiling.

“I’m respectful. I don’t call you more than what you proffered. I don’t try to rearrange it to suit my fancy. I work with what you give me without presuming you’re lying, withholding, or covering up. I need a piece of paper, so I can get legitimate.”

The judge stared at him, shaking his head like he just added one more thing about human beings to the circus roster. Still, a smile was slipping into his eyes.

“You talk to a judge like this?”

“Thought we were all equal in God’s eyes.”

“No hard feelings, but you ain’t God. In these robes, I might as well be.”

“Don’t believe God would have a problem calling me ‘Creek.’”

Warren finally shook his head. “You’re a hard rock to push.”

Creek let it sit.

“Well Mister ‘Creek-with-No-Last-Name,’ you don’t back down, and you got a flare for the joust. We got a lot of spoiled fruit in this town, and you might bring something to the mix. I wouldn’t mind that. Knew your father and your mother. Knew them better before the judging days. Won’t ask why you didn’t take his name.”

“He didn’t give it.”

Delbert Warren studied Creek some more then looked away and began filling out forms as he spoke. Warren had summoned Creek by phone that morning to come and explain the fracas with Chief Wade. Having listened, Warren said the question of his badge, of his inactive but still-operative function with the Army, might fix itself, if Creek chose to obtain an investigator license to accompany his temporary sanctioning as a court deputy.

“One question,” Warren said now. “You took unscripted leave from soldiering, and nobody court-martialed you when you returned.”

“You read my transcript?”

“I did. I’m a patriot. I wanted to know about you. I won’t mention you pulled an expired federal badge on a man too unlettered to know it had no validity. So, I’m curious about your nature, this unorthodoxy you seem to bring to things.”

Creek thought about his words with Wade.

“It’s a body, accident or not, minus a head. There’s a respectful way to come at it. Your man Wade – ”

“He’s not my man – ”

“… and his boys,” Creek said, “pissed all over the site, me, the dead man, and the man hurting most over the death, John Penbrook. I think Wade got off easy. But thanks for overlooking the jurisdiction thing.”

“Looks very much like an accident to me,” Warren said.

“Yup. Was probably up the mast and fell. A long fall. The wire was thin and sharp. Would just like a clean finish to a messy scene, was my feeling. Like to find the boat. Like to find the head. Push me, and I’m apt to bristle. Get bully about it, and I’ll take it up a notch. A lifelong flaw.”

“And the thing in Europe?”

“It’s a long story. Involved the cousin of a prominent French woman. Some trouble in Paris. Some decisions I made might not have held up under too much scrutiny, but I brought her back in better shape than I found her. My captain knew some of it, and all was forgiven.”

Judge Warren waited in silence, but nothing more was offered.

“Marie Souvestre? The prominent woman, and fairly old at the time?” Warren asked.

Creek remained silent.

“Eleanor Roosevelt’s teacher, in England?”

Creek showed nothing, trying hard to stop the memory. He was getting good at not thinking about any of it, but the mention of the name Roosevelt put Sandrine in the room now. Creek had twice discreetly helped the young assistant secretary of the Navy with situations that held potential for political as well as private embarrassment. Both occasions, though nearly a decade apart, had involved the distant cousin of the famous headmistress, a girl named Sandrine. The most recent, a request to prevent any possibility of an election year scandal for the man who was now his president, had allowed an errant husband to return six years after the war’s end to resume a marriage to a woman and child he had abandoned – a woman and child Creek had loved and supported for many years. The feelings around it stung.

When Creek gave him nothing, the judge turned to the paperwork, finished, and slapped the desk.

“All right, Mister Creek. You change your mind and decide to clarify what happened to John’s boy, you’re legit. My police force is homegrown weeds, no ‘intelligence officer, first class, European theater, United States Army,’ with six stars and eight years and some hefty bonafides for references.”

“What’s that mean, exactly?”

“Be patient with them. You’ll get a lot further.”

The judge stood up now and went to the upright wooden file cabinet. He unlocked a drawer, pulled out a long black box and brought it back to the desk. He opened it, and Creek saw the solid silver star, and a Smith & Wesson .38-caliber revolver. The badge had raised lettering that read: Deputy Sheriff, Santa Barbara County. He slid it across the desk.

“You keep this on you. Most people respond with much better manners when they see it.”

“I don’t want a badge.”

The judge stared at him, smiling at how hard a case Creek must be. “Keep it. It’s grease. Lot of ‘to the manner born’ in this town. A big, shiny star cuts right through.”

“No thanks.” Creek slid it partway back across the table.

“Damn it, son, it’s a tool is all.” The judge picked it up and tossed it to Creek, who caught it. “Take the fucking thing. And take this. Makes you valid as a temporary servant of the court.” The judge ripped out a check, and passed the form sheet with it to Creek. It was made out for three hundred dollars. Creek took it. And then the judge held out the pistol.

“And this. Use it if you wish. Our issue. It’s accurate, good balance, expensive.”

“I’m heeled,” Creek said. He opened his coat a little to show the handle. “And more at home.”

Judge Warren just stared at him, shaking his head.

“Alright. I’m finished. You’re hard work, son. But let me say, I hope we’re finished with any discord, here. If you decide to jump back into the crime business, you’re a welcome addition. Lot of sad people in this damn Depression. A lot of drifters. Many of ‘em broke, many of them get drunk. A lot of them angry as badgers underneath their pathos and their plight, especially if cornered any worse than they already are. That hard bark will serve you with them.”

He stared at Creek a long while.

Creek said, “If you’re trying to say something, Your Honor, by all means say it.”

“Well, there’s a small fracas brewing up there on the reservation. Couple of the Indians tried to walk onto Diamond’s production lot and were denied access. They all want to be in the movie, see. Tribal Chief Charlie Sweden can be an obstreperous and willful man, so he dug up a moth-eaten piece of cloth he claims is a presidential deed to Diamond’s land. He then hired a fearless hound dog named Neil Chumpsky, and the upshot is a pending lawsuit and a court date on the day prior to the day Johnny Diamond set for the filming of the movie to start. It occurred to me that one thing might have to do with the other.”

“Pony and the lawsuit?”

“Or the trespassing.”

“You know something I should know?”

“No. I don’t. But our town elders are rapacious and wily, and if they had their way, they’d buy the entire coast of California and charge admission just to peek at the water. The ‘deed’ is a joke, a letter with reference only. It will never hold up unless they find a source document in Washington, D.C. But the idea of anything or anyone threatening this movie might be enough to get a body lynched.” He held Creek’s look to see how this registered, then continued.

“For what it’s worth, the thing you did in Europe, for this country, was really something. It’s a big honor to have you with us. Only …” He hesitated getting to it, “you had a body count. That was Europe. This is Santa Barbara. It’s a place where the rich don’t like, well, interruptions in their soft lives or too much press or attention from the common world beyond their tall hedges and tightly laid stone walls.”

“Meaning?”

“Please try not to shoot everybody you don’t like.”

Creek smiled and then nodded. He liked this man.

“FDR comes to Santa Barbara to campaign, you know,” the judge said.

“Honest. It’s a long story. Europe is. And nothing I can ever talk about,” Creek said, wondering how much was known or not known.

They shook hands, and Creek took the check and badge and walked out of the office. As he stepped out into daylight, the steel bands that had begun to cage his chest and shoulders – an effect all office walls had on him – loosened. School was out. Some daylight left. River still runnin’.

He crossed the empty street wondering, not for the first time, why his parents had never given him another name. He had asked for one repeatedly. Every year before school. Every time they moved. But his birth mother had chosen a first name that caught what she most loved of the boy – his frolic in creeks every time the rains came. His father, who had the superstitions of a North Sea Scot and was stubborn as walnut burl, had let the one name be the only name. Having defended it too many times, Creek saw the foolishness in all of it and got surly about it every damn time someone pushed it. He ought to grow up. Invent one. Go ask his father again. He decided he would ride up to Painted Rock and bring the old Scot some bourbon and ask him one last time why he was truly never given the last name “McQueen.” Yes, he had been in love with creeks and woods beside their house, and never came home till dusk, but damn, it was a stupid name for a grown man and had set up contention now for 30 years.

• • •

The police station was a box adobe with some fancy windows and red tiles and a lot of sunlight. Palm trees lined the walkway to the big front door. A clean and happy building, like the town its occupants protected.

Creek went up to the long counter, and a large, bigheaded man in uniform got up from a desk and walked over to him.

“John Wade, if he’s in,” Creek said.

“No, sir, he is not. Out with the Hollywood crowd this afternoon. Talking about giving the Chumash chief a walk-on in Big Red Sunset. What can we do for you, young fella?”

“Sent a body your way for autopsy yesterday. Wondered if anyone got to it yet?”

The big man understood now who Creek was, and while he remained jovial, his eyes said he’d been forewarned.

“Why, you must be Creek, the service marshal helpin’ out ol’ John Penbrook. Name’s Hank.” He produced a ham paw to shake. Creek took it and suffered the big man’s grip as he tried to smile back.

“Caught steer with John years back, in the old days. Cagey as mice, them big things. Met that Indian fella back then. Said hello whenever I seen him since, here and there, in town. Ran the light tower and the grain silo out on that island. He let me flip the shield on the big arc lamp one time. Thirty feet up. Highest I ever took a set a stairs.” He looked down forlornly, then back up at Creek. “It’s the oddest thing I ever heard,” Hank said.

“Odd, how?” Creek asked.

“Twice in one lifetime, washed up from the ocean. Left on a beach.”

“So who’s your coroner, and what’s he learned so far?”

The big man seemed perplexed, turned to look for help, found none, and turned back to Creek, not looking forward to what he had to say.

“Don’t think it’s happened yet, son,” Hank said.

“Not yet, huh?” Creek was studying him and knew what was coming.

“Pretty sure not.”

“Truth is, Hank, there probably isn’t a body anymore, is there?”

“Well, Sheriff Wade probably figured, with our skimpy bankroll here, we couldn’t afford an autopsy.”

Creek held his cards close, thinking. He watched the young lieutenant Billy emerge from his office, knowing the bad news was coming.

“A chance that man was murdered,” Creek said to the big man.

“Ah, Mister Creek, that ain’t too likely. He was a loved man. He just got foolish out there, fouled his lines or something.”

“Wade don’t like color,” Billy said from his doorway. “Don’t like anything but white and Mexican. He’s a good cop, just a bigot.”

“Where’s the body?” Creek wanted them to say it out loud.

The big man instinctively moved down the counter. “Cremated him this morning, Mister Creek,” he said. “Called over from the island and left word they gonna put a memento in the ground someplace he can be remembered.”

“On Santa Rosa,” Creek said.

“Yes, sir.”

“Nobody took a good look at the bone cuts?” Creek asked.

“No, I guess not.”

“Billy?” Creek looked over at him.

“I’m just hearing this, like you,” Billy said.

“And all this movie hobnobbing? Where’s that going on?”

Neither man answered.

“I hear there’s a famous schooner, damn near 200 feet long, parked at the harbor. Movie people?” Creek asked.

“Mister Creek,” Hank said, “Indians and Chinese don’t usually own a plot of land here, let alone claim a hole to die in. Most of ‘em get shipped up into the hills and sunk up there. We never, not in 50 years I been in uniform, ever saw a Japanese or Filipino or Chinese or Indian man, woman, or child get an autopsy.”

The big man looked hangdog, and Creek saw how it was; you made your peace with policy.

“I’m sorry about your boy, honest,” the lieutenant said.

“I respect that. But it’s your chief I need to hear it from.” Creek said. “You tell that parsimonious fat white man, if I find out Pony was murdered, I’ll make him dig up the ashes and swallow them. Make him put the head up on this wall, so Pony can see his way back in death to the family he lost in life. You tell him that. For me.” He turned to the kid, “If I decide to bird-dog up north any time soon, will you show me the way?”

“Hell, yes, sir.”

Creek turned and walked out of the station thinking, absurdly, that nobody asked to see his shiny, new credentials. 

• • •

He drove back along the coast, too lost in thought to notice that the storm had passed. Thinking, little Charlie Russell. Wasn’t bad enough he lost his head to a bad sea. Fate took it further, like the man said, had again in one lifetime flushed his wounded body onto shore rocks. Left him nearly naked flopped like a skinned fish in broad daylight. And now, in a final ignominious gesture, stolen all means of an honorable passing by feeding him to an incinerator.

And yet, no matter the grotesque thoughts, Creek’s picture of Charlie Russell remained indelibly of a memory from a day when Pony, as a small boy, rose out of the common ranks to a place of high glory.

Creek had known of Pony and of this story since childhood. Norman and Magdalena had witnessed it at a state fair in Santa Maria and told it more than once. On a day of serious bull and bronco riding, the man on the loudspeaker interrupted events to call forth six eight-year-old boys, hyping the crowd on their pedigree as cowboy “mutton busters.” As he introduced them, coaxing each to strut his sequined shirt and smile for the fans, the kids acted out their part, waving hats and bowing like born showmen, all except for one. The last boy was a recalcitrant, pint-sized Indian. The announcer introduced him as Pony Russell and began to tease him because he refused to budge, smile, or wave or doff a hat so large it nearly sat on his brows. Nearly half the size of the others, he remained immobile in his too-large boots, as defiant as he was baffled by the big crowd. He was here to ride mutton, not gloat, and said so in how he stood.

One at a time, the terrified sheep burst out of the hole below the stadium, each with a boy spread-eagle and tight as a tick upon its wooly back as the animal raced to shake free of him. The sheep were ripping fast and wily, and every boy fell within twenty yards, drilling into the soft ground fill only to rise, dust his denim, bow to the clapping, and walk proudly back to the starting block.

The last to ride was Pony. The crowd waited a long five minutes as the boy vacillated, so picky about his ride that he scratched three times, renewed four, and finally settled on one that was, the announcer broadcast, thornier and larger than the pint-sized cowboy himself. But nobody was joshing when Pony blew out of the starting hole going faster and straighter and farther than any of his competition had even dreamed of. The crowd came roaring to its feet as Pony rode that lightning ball past the 20-yard mark, past the 50-yard mark, across the entire arena and out the opening at the other end. They waited in stunned silence for long seconds until the new champion reemerged, clothes crumpled and dusty and that black hat still consuming most of his head. They had never seen anything like it and cheered to prove it. And he never bowed or waved, but he did grin as he walked the full length of the arena to collect his trophy.

That was Pony Russell. A year later, the boy and his folks got lost at sea and Pony washed up on Santa Rosa, to become someone else’s son.

A few miles past the flat crop fields of Refugio, the cliffs rose to give a long view of the sea. Creek could see the curved rim of the planet, and he nodded, grateful for open country, wondering who despised or feared open space so deeply that they needed to hack it apart and sell it off like a cord of wood or the body parts of an animal.

Creek wondered why there was so much burr and so little sweet with the people he’d met since coming back. Men coming on his land trying to buy it. Townspeople looking at him askance. And now the big shrug over Charlie Russell. Was it squawk over too much attention to a man of color? Or was it Creek – a stranger who had come home from abroad with enough money to buy a piece of land by the sea without getting social. An unmarried man, too private. A rogue wolf always puckered bungholes and closed the family ranks. And people had a hard time with veterans. Afraid to ask, afraid not to. Especially with the wounded ones. Creek wore a scar on the side of his face with so little apology that people presumed it as a measure of defiance, when he was merely unapologetic. He was a reminder of a lot of things that other men weren’t, like any man who goes to war when others don’t. They look at him with a mixture of repulsion for the stupidity of going in the first place and envy because he had the story that he went there and survived, and they didn’t.

He came up to his house on the back road, cruising past the sublet fields, then following the bluff road to his barn. The goat named Tables stood on a table watching him. Spinnaker and the horse named Psycho were both up against their corral planks watching the goat. The goat was hopping up and down on the old wood table Creek used to work on his motorcycle and his imported vintage Crossley 20/25 ambulance.

Fifteen minutes later, Creek was standing at the kitchen sink looking out to sea, wondering about the goat. It was nervous. The horses were nervous. And then he heard a silence, and from it remembered sounds he’d missed – the bleating of the goat, snorting from the horse. And then he knew why.

He grabbed his rifle, jacked it loaded and went out through the front porch. He came quietly around the back and managed to surprise her. The young goat was head-deep within her jaws, the big cat sideways to Creek and caught staring halfway between the man and her meal. Creek was about to raise the gun when the cat jacked sideways, twisting the dead goat, her eyes burning squarely at Creek. The goat’s head was apart, hinged by a line of ligament, blood spread over its bone-white hair and all about the puma’s jaws. The lion chose not to bolt, and Creek chose not to raise his gun to shoot. Both were somehow frozen in amazement and curiosity.

He felt pierced with the beauty of the cat, by her size, her golden coat and how her muscles moved, by the brilliant examination of her stare. The two of them seemed caught within this forbidden hesitation, mesmerized yet ready as trip wire for the first telltale that would signal a fatal burst of movement.

Creek had her in his sites but was unwilling to pull the trigger. Knowing she would be thinking about her unfinished meal and confused by the confrontation, he wished not to kill her but to notify her and keep her shy and well out on her twenty-mile range with a few close shots.

She stood, slowly, her eyes peeled to Creek, the goat forgotten at her feet, then sudden as a bird, she was gone.

He had hunted men and game much of his life. He had studied killers. No wild animal, not man and not beast, had ever behaved like this one. If she was rabid, or addled, she needed to be put down, but he thought otherwise.

Later, he found an onionskin log and carried it to the porch. It was a fresh book, and he looked at it for a long time, unsure if he wished to begin a new biography of a possible crime. He had filled many such volumes in Europe but had sworn, in this new life, not to do it again. He looked out to sea, to the fog moving like a slow wall toward land.

He had arrived in Europe the summer of 1916, stayed on after, and had left in the fall of 1933, sailing from Le Havre on the freighter Pedro Cortez bound for New York City, a 10-day crossing during which he thought long and hard about what a man might do back in California at a time when the Depression still had half the nation in a death rattle with no end in sight.

The government had paid him well. He had banked the money and the fees two private clients had paid him as percentages of retrieved goods, one for a box full of deeds, the properties of a man from Marseille; the other for the return of six boxes of promissory notes stolen from La Banque de Bordeaux.

On the freighter, Creek had time and space to try to account for his life and to imagine a new one. In a chair beneath a blanket on a sunny deck, the words of his closest friend in the French police came back to him. Gary “Say-No-More” had said during their last shared meal in Paris: “Cowboy, you must not leave the profession. You are a natural. You are unbribable and so stubborn. You use chess-style thinking. You laugh at the pompous, and you hate the bully. You are heroic. Ugly, but heroic. Don’t leave it. Punish the evil. Help the helpless. If you go private, you won’t have the hindrance of the always pesky, always nosey bugle boys of the government. You will have the open prairies. The big skies. Yes? Isn’t this the cowboy, eh?”

Now Creek answered what he had withheld over the meal: No, there are no open prairies or big skies in the trade. It is a lonely, unhappy way to make a living. And it is infectious. To think upon evil is to wear some of it. To stalk it, examine it, plot against and confront it is to become absorbed within its boundaries. You begin to live within the circumference of a criminal’s mind. After a time, it owns you. You live where the rats live and smell like a rat smells. And your knowledge of the rat doesn’t go away when you finish your job. It never goes away. You never go back to innocent. The lucky do a lot of forgetting. On that deck, in the sunny breezes, he wondered how much luck lay ahead for him. He was thirty-five, a man of the new century, and he had seen all he ever wanted to see of evil. He wanted lots of luck in this new life and lots of distance from his old one.

The day the Spanish freighter came into the Verrazzano Narrows and he saw the gray island of Manhattan rising out of the sea like the cement slabs of a cemetery, Creek knew he would not go back to crime. He did want the prairies and open skies, and it struck him as if a picture had popped into the air before him – he would buy a small ranch by the sea and grow something. He would sell that something. There would be only him and his horses and some livestock and the something growing out of fertile California soil with a little sea fog to caress its leaves. He would plant his disappointed bones in a soft chair out on the porch facing the rows of the something he planted and watch it grow up into the crisp sunshine – the least evil thing he could think of.

So here he was staring out the window of his kitchen to where his lima beans had died, his basil had failed, his tomatoes were overwatered and shriveled, and he was stuck churning over the whereabouts of a dead man’s head.

Anyway, who had ever heard of a plant dying from too much water? Who would even know this about a tomato? He would give back the money and the badge in the morning. No more cop meant no more cop.

He returned the investigation book to its drawer, showered and dressed within minutes, and headed down a foggy highway into town, wondering if his musings were the misgivings of a poor farmer or the inability of a man to switch directions at midlife.  

Read Chapter Five of Last Light in Paradise here.