Last Light in Paradise Chapter 10: Part 2

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 ten 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 10: Part 2

He looked a last time at the rising sun as it bled through the trees. Then, he closed his eyes and went to sleep and fell directly into the dream.

He tried to be still. He felt disoriented and tried to remember why he was here. He knew he was standing at the place where they said the great king was buried. A special mound formed in the middle of the south sloping field of his property. How did he know this? Had he taken his stepmother’s “Witches Weed,” also called the Moonflower – that delicate balance of just enough hallucinogen to meet your animal spirit? He remembered thinking that he could fly, if he chose to, and that he was waiting for something. He studied the trees off to his right, a small grouping of eucalyptus, their shed bark-rolls papering the split trunks and ground below. He saw a coyote passing among the trees. It was carrying something in its mouth, a large shaggy ball. Creek ran to get a better view, moving only when the animal vanished behind tree trunks. He felt as though he could move as fast as a puma, all spring and haunch and retractable claws.

The coyote turned and moved toward the mound, and Creek saw what the animal carried: it was a head, the head of a man with long, black hair. He sensed that the coyote carried it not as prize, but as vessel, and he watched it move toward the grave of the ancestors, to the grave of kings. It was Pony’s head. But the coyote locked in mid-step, still as an egret, sensing men in the woods. The animal lay the head on the ground and slipped away in the tall grass, swift and fleeting as vapor.

After he awoke, Creek knelt above his stepmother’s grave and said some words. Then, he drove to the reservation and told Norman about his dream. Norman listened as if with his whole body, and when Creek was finished the old man stared into the morning until Creek knew he had found something.

Norman said, “Your stepmother was telling you about the Western Gate. The path a Chumash has to travel to take his soul home.”

“Thought that was up by Point Conception. Or down near Los Angeles. Thought that was a myth.”

“I think your mother knows more than you do.”

Creek had heard of the Western Gate, a long-ago place up the coast where the dead had once been buried. It was not on his land. Wittingly or unwittingly, some “coyote” might have wished to help Pony die properly as recompense for how some bad people had done otherwise. Creek would listen to his mother. He would listen to Norman’s interpretation. He had returned to his ranch, stacked the rakes, machetes, and shovels, to be ready as Norman had ordered, even though his rational thinking found it to be a foolishness. His father, he thought, was merely playing the know-it-all mystic. Then again, Norman was rarely wrong about trouble coming.

• • • 

It was as if there were four distinct countries within the famed haven of Santa Barbara. The first belonged to the dreamy estates and villas and occasional ranches of the very rich. Most of the land lay in this country. The second belonged to the Mexicans, poor whites, Indians, and Chinese who worked for the rich and lived in cobbled rooms and presto-board shanties on backstreets, like Salinas and Salsipuedes, or tucked into bamboo groves by the creeks. The third country belonged to everyone else, and these lived slightly higher up the fancy chain in adobes or Craftsman bungalows with a postage stamp lawn, some trees, and a car. They sold things to the rich and to each other, owned businesses and services, and they filled the wide divide between the other two countries.

And then there was the sea, the fourth country.

The big cove that was Santa Barbara faced south. The ocean moved down the coast from the Aleutians, mingled with waters driven across from Japan, and was then tempered by warm currents that flowed up from Mexico. After traveling thousands of miles, the big seas hit a chain of islands off the Santa Barbara coast, broke the swells into beautiful waves, and left the bays and beaches of the mainland gorgeous and florid as tropical resorts.

The sea country could be every color; it could be warm or cold, calm or lethal, foggy or sunny, windy or still. It drove forces of weather that shaped land and vegetation all the way to the hot basins of Sacramento and Bakersfield. And it fed the rich, the middle, and the poor countries from things that lived within it.

Atop it, within it, or beside it were the only places Creek felt to be holy in this world. He stood at the rail of the boat at sea feeling at peace as he studied the mainland and the diminishing scale of the search party trawling his land for a severed head. Only minutes ahead of a frame-up, Creek was escaping into the fourth country. A blessing he owed to a dream.

He looked over at the square wooden box with the hinged top he had placed out of view on the stern deck. It was a beautiful box, two feet wide, the words Motocicletta Agusta playfully painted on the sides. Creek thought it a proper vessel for the final passage of a man going home.

Six Indians and four Mexicans, packed like a circus troupe in the back of a fruit truck, had come with Norman. They had fanned out with rakes and sticks and walked his land, from high ground to the shore. It was an odd sight and a solemn one, the soft rasp of dry, beaten oat grass being the sole morning sound as each man looked to the earth for a severed head.

Two men found it beneath a dislodged yucca plant in a shallow hole that had been quickly dug and loosely filled. It was a fresh grave made by guilty men, planted a few dozen yards from Creek’s front field above the sea. It was conspicuously centered within his view of the ocean, beneath the dislodged yucca, which remained the sole object on that stubby meadow. Norman told him to put Vaseline on a cloth and wrap the head in it, to curb the smell, protect the cuts, and honor poor Pony.

Norman had urged him to catch the cattle boat before the charade of fools came to arrest him. Creek had packed the head and made it to the dock as the boat slowed for boarding. Harvey had them a mile out when Creek saw the first of the six police cars come over the horizon. He knew they would have a warrant to search and some dogs. And he knew they wouldn’t find what they had been told, anonymously, they would find. Thanks to a dream and a father who believed in its purpose.

As Creek looked back at the mainland, his eyes fell inevitably upon the light cliffs and the pink mansion and the tall trees around it. He thought about her and how brilliant and alive she had seemed when she took her horse into the shallows, her smile as wide as a saucer and her eyes bright, alive, and real. And then, her eyes cold and accusatory and sore, as she saw that he could not deny the litany of his actions.

It irked him that Diamond would be at her place today. He knew Diamond would get the villa eventually. She would say no, never, repeatedly and harshly. But in the end, he would offer her something so enticing or threatening that she would soften on the “never” part and then, one day, just sell it to him.

Creek wondered what the offer would be and how long it would take for the “never” to become, “Sure, what the hell.”

Then again, maybe it was all another way. Maybe she did know something about the Indian. Her estate man had flinched at the mention of the gimp. And, the damn body lay smack-dab at her doorstep.  

And that’s it! But not quite… This ends our serialization of Last Light in Paradise. If you like what you’ve read and want to finish the tale, then buy a copy at Godmothers, Chaucer’s, or Tecolote!

Read Chapter 10: Part 1 here.