Last Light in Paradise: Chapter 9 Part 1

Editor’s 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 Nine: Part 1

Creek had left Billy at the station. He knew there would be words, in private, over the use of firearms. Whites on the rez. Boys working for the council. A deputized nobody named Creek pushing the river until some powerful people wind up embarrassed.

It was three in the afternoon. The sea was dark teal now, and the sky above it scrubbed so clear Creek thought he could see wild boar on the beaches of Santa Cruz Island twenty miles distant. When a storm clears out in this country, he thought, it leaves a paradise.

He drove past his ranch, past the billboard with the gunshot Tom Horn and the blank-faced ingenue. He drove past the ranches of the land barons, three of whom had owned big acreage in these lion-hide and chaparral hills since the days of Spanish land grants. He hadn’t been this far north since Big West Productions put up its public gate. What he saw now shocked him. A few miles out from the movie lot, the markers appeared. Starting at the edge of the highway and spreading up the sloping foothills, down the following valleys and up again to the base of the mountains, was a sea of half-acre parcels marked by grids of wooden stakes, capped by bright cloth flags. Wild land, he thought, mile after mile of it, had now become a circus track of flags and hucksters.

Creek slowed as he saw a dirt road cut away from the highway, curl up to a bench a quarter mile inland, and end in a tiny shack Creek knew to be a sales kiosk. He pulled his truck to the roadside and shut it off. He hopped the fence and began walking through the lots. It was tumbleweed and lupine, shrub, manzanita, and random clumps of sage and poppy. But for the occasional eucalyptus and oak groves, it resembled high desert with its hard clay and ocher shale flecks.

And then, of course, standing at nearly any point, lay the final punch to any sales pitch: The Pacific Ocean, spread broader than any dirt plane, reaching to infinity.

He stood in the mock town of sticks and flags, trying to imagine how the developers might persuade a family to move away from the amenities of a town to live upon barren fields of cookie-cutter houses. Clearly the idea was to build a civilization tauntingly close to the new Hollywood with the Wild West burning in Technicolor right outside your door. He knew what would follow: stores, restaurants, hotels, gas stations. And lots of people. This view, he thought, this golden earth, to be carved up and offered for money by men who despised the idea, the feeling, the fundamental soul of open country.

He saw a bus coming up the highway and walked toward it, waving. It pulled over and cruised to a stop by his truck. The door opened, and Creek walked up to the driver.

“Dee Lambert. Hello,” Creek said, smiling.

“Mister Creek. You need a lift?”

“No. Just surprised by all this. Wanted to look at it.”

She looked out at the miles of markers. He knew by her face how she felt about it.

“You bring a lot of ’em up here?”

“No. They like to drive the customers up here. Big shot-like. Harder to say no when you’re not so certain the salesman’s giving you a lift back to town.”

Creek had an idea.

“A question,” he said, and she nodded. “You ever bring an Indian named Charlie Russell, or Pony, up this way, maybe to the reservation, maybe Santa Ynez? Man had a bad foot, and a half-lame arm.”

She smiled. “Several times. Funny you should ask. He and this lovely woman, they would ride up, and I’d let them out just north of here, up past the new park. Two of them came up once or twice a month for, oh, a couple of years. Stopped coming about six months back, when the movie construction started and all those no-trespassing signs began to go up. They stopped taking my bus. Haven’t seen either one since.”

“You pick them up on the return run?”

“Yup, when I came back through on the night run, they’d be there on the side of the road by that big magnolia, standing in the dark. ‘Charlie Russell.’ I never knew what he was called.”

“The woman with him. Did you know her?”

“No. She was Indian. And kind of sickly. She had a kid with her, not always, but sometimes. That man was a gentleman. I knew that, and he was good to her. Sort of sweethearts, I think. I never saw a wedding ring. Creek, I’m running late and need to push on. Say hello to that big Scot of yours.”

“Thank you, Dee.” But Dee hesitated after Creek stepped out.

“He still with that rez woman, Missy?”

“I think so, Dee.” He knew she’d held feelings for Norman.

She smiled, pulled the door lever, beat the tall shift into first, and drove back onto the main road headed south.

As he turned to go back to his truck, Creek noticed two men standing off in the distance. They framed both corners of the back border of the lot, a quarter mile apart, and both men looked posted, rifles in hand, as if for patrols. He wanted to walk up to the salespeople and ask why they needed guards on scrub dirt with no houses, but he figured he’d been pest enough for one day. One of the men was looking over at him, his gun across his shoulder. The bluster of a job in the Depression, Creek thought. And a wealthy employer.

He saw the hare stand up, twenty yards distant, sniffing something. The man who’d been staring at him suddenly leveled his rifle. The hare bolted. The man tracked it, gliding the gun ten feet past Creek, then fired. The rifle pops missed the hare, spit dirt randomly, and the hare went to ground alive.

Creek stayed where he was, shaming the fool for bad shooting just by his witness, then went to his truck, turned it around, and drove homeward.

There was a nasty atmosphere in this town. Maybe it was the times, the desperation of a broke country. Maybe it was men shamed so long that the lift of any sponsorship gave them an excuse to brag or bully or get even. Pony was a quiet man, but he was no fool and no quitter. Then again, he was anything but worldly. But there was a woman. That was a high note. Maybe his. That was something, even if he had to die before anybody seemed to know about it.

• • •

Late that evening, he began thinking about the man-boy Charlie Russell; about the woman called Ranny Starbuck who might be sly as well as beautiful; about the crack of lightning that flashed through Creek’s heart when he saw that he had brought to his aging father and a small neighborhood of Indians the blue car with the three lanky
hopheads and two heavy thugs. Had one of them killed Pony, or had Pony done something rash, some echo of his parents’ foolish streak, and died by a harsh sea?

After dinner, Creek had dug up the scrapbook and taken it to the porch. He turned to the photograph of Pony standing beside Creek out on Santa Rosa Island in the summer of 1914, the protean hulk and frazzled face of the boar that might have killed them staring at the lens between them.

Creek thought the most glamorous time of his life was that first summer on Santa Rosa. John Penbrook had put him in the main house those many years ago because Norman had saved Sonora’s life and had refused John’s money, asking only if he might one day take on his son as a worker. A few years later, Creek had been invited over. He’d been told at the outset that he was to be a guest of the family, not some kid sent across to learn “cowboying” like he was at a dude camp. Creek had said camp was just fine and anything about horses and steer was even finer. Knowing he would take some licks from the regulars who bunked at the huts down by the corrals, Creek had gone at his chores jaw set and head down. The men had taken to him, seen him work past quitting time, never whimper or grouse when the splinters went deep or the skin bubbled up on his hands from rope burns. He rode better than most because he had never not been with a horse. He saw how cows thought because he had spent hours with his mother among her animals. He knew how they drifted, how they forgot where they came from when the sweet grass clouded out all memory of impassable thickets.

The men saw this. And then, on the proudest day of his life, they took him completely into their pack. Tingo Silver told the story of the day six men and Pony and Creek had been taking coffee and biscuits on a flat patch of grass beside an arroyo when they heard the huffing. Fast as lighting and too fast for any man to register how it got there, a rogue boar came over the lip at full speed. It came straight at them, and Creek had his gun out so fast, they flinched at the roar of his shot.

They had watched slack-jawed as he nailed the animal four feet from them. The tusks locked in soil, and the fierce body looped up over itself and landed on his boots. Without hesitating, Creek had leaned in and held the barrel an inch from the boar’s head but saw no twitch or sign of life, so he let off the hammer and holstered his gun without another shot. Neither fear nor boast nor uncertainty had prompted another shot. Not once had Creek let go of his hold on Pony whom he had grabbed and slung behind him in one move. Not one man had so much as cleared his weapon, and here was this fourteen-year-old, who drew his pistol with the speed of a whipsaw, put the shot in the beast’s forehead, and still didn’t shift when the damn thing cartwheeled nearly on top of him.

That’s how Tingo Silver told it for the hundredth time, and every time Pony was nearby, he would look proudly at Creek. Creek knew from that day forth that there was an unspoken obligation between them—the one to protect, the other to love—and in the intervening years Creek had let that slip away.

He listened to the night waves booming below him. He had willed himself to begin a different life, simpler, maybe a little nobler. Here he was, in the summer air above a glimmering sea, upon his simple patch of land, and goddamned if that boy whose life he saved wasn’t trying to drag him back to the swamp.  

Read Chapter Nine: Part 2 of Last Light in Paradise here.