CANADA LARGA
by Caroline Allen
The road into Canada Larga winds past a dusty avocado orchard, a row of cumquat trees, a colony of trailers hidden behind a tall hedge, a small orchid farm of three greenhouses and more trailers, a barrel-chested guard dog barking through a fence, a riding stable where horses stand around in their corals, waiting to be trained or groomed or taken for a ride, a bunch of yapping horse-herding dogs in small wire pens, three acres of rusty farm equipment, aging trucks and abandoned trailers, a row of small clapboard houses where a couple of Mexican ranch-hands and their families live with a very skittish brown Dalmatian bitch, then fields of grass and oak trees, sloping up the hills, cut by a winding creekbed and scattered with cattle and cow-pies. At the end of the four-mile road is a perfect wooden farm-house, porched on two sides, with a swing-set in the yard, a flower bed planted in a circle of granite rocks, an American flag waving on a pole, and two more barking dogs. Old walnut trees planted several house-widths apart from each other form a sparse grove about a mile long and a half a mile wide. They look like fat umbrellas, leaves shorn flat across the lower edge of the foliage, arcing symmetrically above the trunk in an upside-down semi-circle. Their autumn leaves change from bright green to yellow and the ground beneath them is cluttered with fallen walnuts, their tan shells encased in thin black skins.
I like to walk this road for exercise and sometimes just to get out of the house, to air my mind out a bit. This one afternoon in early November, I felt restless and wound up. I'd been reading student papers and stories, making comments in the margins, and in the back of my mind was the lingering awareness of how much the bathroom counters needed scrubbing. Sitting in one place trying to concentrate and be intelligent makes me edgier than anything else. So as soon as I'd finished the last paper, I leapt off the couch, tugged on my special new walking shoes, and headed out the door. "I'm off to Canada Larga to take my afternoon constitutional," I shouted at my husband as I crossed the front porch and bounded down the stairs.
"Alright baby, I'll be right here," he shouted back. He almost never comes on walks with me. I usually have to bribe him. A few days before this, I'd helped him write a short biography of himself for an upcoming exhibit of his photos, so he kind of owed me the company when I asked him to go. This time I didn't even ask.
As soon as I pulled onto Canada Larga road it was time for the first decision. Should I park here, at the beginning of the road, under the overhanging avocado leaves, and walk my usual mile and a half? This would take me past the yapping dogs at the horse stable all the way to the marker where a dead woman's family set up a roadside memorial to her, a wooden cross decorated with horse statuettes, toys, plastic flowers, and real cacti. I usually walk that far, stare at the photographs of the woman, one as a baby with a bow on her head, the other as a grown woman with a big smile and long blonde hair teased up high. I read the message, "We will never forget you Sherri, our beloved daughter," see if they've left anything new, and then turn back. I sometimes feel that I knew her, that I'm actually walking there on purpose to spend time with her memory. She was born the same year as my younger sister, 1961, and she died in 1996. Not that long ago. I wonder how she died. The plastic-covered poem written by her mother says she was "brutally taken from them," which made one of my friends think she'd been murdered and that her body had been dumped there. I've never believed this. I don't think you'd want to visit the place where your daughter's body had been dumped after a murder. I bet it was a car accident and that "brutally" refers to her being taken away at all, not the manner of her death. But still, the words, the pictures, the cross—they always make me pause and wonder. Two of the faded toys on the memorial, a plastic horse and an energizer bunny man, I've wished I could borrow for awhile to put in a still-life painting; but I've never dared touch anything. The sacred resides in even these plastic monuments of affection, no matter how humble or tacky.
I decided against that walk this time. Instead, I'd do the new walk, which means driving four miles to the end of the road, then walking two miles back to the cattle-guard, then turning around again. A little past the memorial for Sherri I saw a car parked on the side of the road with a man standing near the open hatch-back holding a large rectangular panel. I wondered if he was a landscape painter. He was parked right where I had parked to work on a painting several years before. I slowed down to take a peek but couldn't see anything. The man was short and burly with grey curly hair, thick dark eyebrows and chubby cheeks. He seemed familiar. I knew I would see him again on my walk back and looked forward to it.
I drove on, passing a couple of big brown cows with white faces, their nervous little calves standing wide-eyed beside them. There were more cows in the road the further I drove and other ones standing right next to the barbed-wire fence: black cows with their young, even a black de-horned bull, strong and manly with his broad chest, humped back and testicle sack hanging halfway to the ground. I drove past the white house with the porches and the flag, past the walnut trees and the last horse stable and parked between a telephone pole and a No Trespassing sign. I locked the car up, and turning into the rays of the bright sun, walked back the way I had come. The first few steps I took made me think, "Yes, this is exactly what I needed." I took a deep breath and enjoyed the faint animal smell of cattle and horses mixed with the sweet scent of fallen leaves and dry grass. The low, late day sunbeams as they swept past the walnut trees cast long purple shadows along the fields. The hills to one side of me were backlit, their dark forms edged with the golden light of sun-drenched grass. The light would've been great for painting. I held my hands up and framed the hills between them, making compositions everywhere I looked. Why wasn't I out there painting? Shouldn't I be? Wasn't I a painter any more? Oh heck, it was great to be out here at all, I thought. You can't always be doing the thing you do.
The light changed suddenly, the way it does when a cloud drifts across the sun. A thick fog floated in, softening the bright clear blaze, and darkening spots on the hills. It was wondrously strange how the fog poured into the canyon and the sunlight bounced off it and peeked around its soft, ever-changing edges. The fog seemed to play around, putting on a show of light, the distant hills disappearing and reappearing, now yellow and pink, now grayish blue. My skin tingled with the dazzling spectacle. It lasted just a few minutes before the fog settled in and the air grew thick, the light dampened to a uniform grey. I pushed on, wanting to see the painter, if that's what he was, and maybe catch a glimpse of his painting. I stopped short when a cow standing in the middle of the road refused to move. She was a big sturdy thing, brown and white, staring at me with shiny dark eyes. Why wouldn't she move? We just stared at each other across a space of about twenty feet. Afraid to come nearer, I picked up a palm-sized rock from the side of the road and tossed it at her. My throw lacked conviction. It landed with a small bounce in the space between us. I gestured at her with my hands, as if shooing small children out of a room." Go on, go on," I pleaded in a high sing-song voice. Cows are supposed to be fearful, so why didn't she move? I took a few timid steps toward her, still shooing and chattering, "Go on, go on." One of her ears lowered as she stared at me skeptically then turned around and scurried off, her pink utters jiggling beneath her. When I reached the spot where she'd been standing I suddenly spied a small calf hidden in a bush by the side of the road. "Hi little guy," I chirped reassuringly, though I felt like something of a hypocrite. I adore the cattle on Canada Larga and feel some kind of creaturely affinity to them—but someday I'll probably eat one in a hamburger or a stew. This disparity between how I feel and how I actually live my life is never more troubling than when I'm looking at a cow and its baby. I've got the appetite of a killer and the sentiments of Saint Francis.
I saw the painter from a distance, though the fog blurred my vision. I was no longer sure it was a painter or even a man. The clothes suddenly looked old ladyish—grey sweatpants, white sneakers, a loose jacket. The grey curls could've been a woman's hair-do. What was the set up near the car—a table? The person seemed to be packing up. I noticed my stomach tighten in anticipation and wondered if it was because I envied the painter for being out there painting or I was glad the day was ending in disappointment for him or her, the fog rolling in and changing the look of everything. Was it a comradely feeling or a rivalry? It was both. Plus, I liked having another person out there.
As I walked up closer I saw a water-color set-up, a table and a chair. The person was indeed a man and he seemed to be packing up to leave. It looked an awful lot like the man I'd seen almost two years before, only that time I'd been painting down the road a ways and he walked up with a younger guy, maybe a teenage son, and asked if he could look at my painting. I said sure and he stood in front of it and said, "Very nice, very crisp." Then he pointed at the clouds in my painting and said, "I don't know what's going on up here, but this field is very nice." As he turned to leave, he added, "Thanks for the eye candy." I had been addled by that encounter—the eye candy bit seemed especially condescending and I live in constant fear of being condescended to; but I did change the clouds because of what he'd said and the painting was better for it. As I drew nearer to him I wondered if I should bring up that last encounter and tell him I'd changed the painting and maybe even thank him for the helpful criticism. But then, there's always the worry that you're interfering with a person's private time, especially a painter's, when you come up to them, so I was resolved to just walk on by with merely a nod in his direction. Yet as I was in the process of nodding, our eyes met and something eager in his expression told me he expected me to stop and look at what he was doing. He stepped closer to his car and motioned toward the open hatchback. I walked up and peered into it. There was a small water-color painting, just a sketch really, the river-cut, the willows growing out of it, and the hills and mountains beyond.
"It's just a beginning," he said. "I lost all my light."
"You sure did. It happened all of a sudden, didn't it?"
We both gazed out at the landscape he'd been painting, its once bright, clearly defined forms and spectacularly long shadows now flat and grey. A few years ago, on a hot summer morning, I had painted that scene when the light was harsh, the grass yellow, and the mountains glowing pinkish purple in the background. I hesitated before telling him. It's always a little weird to talk to strangers about painting. I guess it's the putting oneself out there as a painter, being defined in that way with all the silly poses it might suggest and the questions it invariably incurs about career, shows, galleries—in other words, one's seriousness. But it seemed somehow dishonest to stand there with the evidence of his interest and activity and not say something about my own. This hyperactive sense of honesty is a trouble-maker, and if I could only learn to trust that twinge of doubt I get right before acting on the honesty impulse I'd be a lot better off. But, ignoring the twinge, I blurted, "I painted this scene once."
"You're a painter?" He raised his thick black eyebrows as he stared at me. His eyes flickered with interest.
I nodded yes.
"Watercolor?"
"No, oil."
"I paint in oil too," he said. "I just started doing these little watercolors."
Then the question I hate came up. "You show anywhere?" he asked. My urge to self-deprecate and cringingly offer up a meek "not really" was stifled this time by the equally compelling urge to stand up for my small successes.
"I had a little show in Santa Barbara last summer," I said.
"Oh yeah, what gallery?"
"Frameworks." The thing about any gallery with the word "frame" in the name is that it's obviously a frame shop that shows art on the side, not a prestigious venue for the selling of important, cutting edge, possibly good investment type art. But I liked the people who ran the shop and they liked my work and it felt really good at the time to have a show; though now it seemed so small, not worth bragging about at all, just a bunch of paintings in a frame shop.
"Do you show work at the Ojai Art's Festival?" he asked.
"No," I answered. "We moved here from Santa Barbara almost three years ago and I keep meaning to get involved with what's going on, but I just haven't yet."
"There's not much going on here," he sighed. "But you might consider it sometime. It's a good event."
I nodded sympathetically, as if yes, certainly I would be joining the arts' festival, though my experience in Santa Barbara of that kind of thing had been full of small horrors. You open your studio up to strangers, and in my and my husband's case it happened to be our home, and they shuffle in, glance around, make a comment about the interesting architecture, and then shuffle back out. That's if you're lucky. Sometimes they come in, sit on your couch and talk to their friends for twenty minutes, maybe ask you how much you paid for your home, raise an eyebrow, and then use your bathroom on their way out. And then half the other artists showing work are really pretty bad, and though I do feel that making art is one of the great pleasures in life and that when you're painting or sculpting or doing whatever it is that you do, it's really about the process and not about the product, when you're showing the work it's another thing. Questions of value, of judgment, of skill, of your powers of expression apply when you're showing. It makes you want to be good and be seen with other good people.
I explained to him that my life was still centered in Santa Barbara, since that's where I worked, and that it was taking me a while to settle into the area.
"Where do you work?" he asked.
"The university."
"You commute?"
"Yeah, but it's only two or three times a week."
"You teach?"
"Yeah."
"What do you teach?"
"Literature and writing." I haven't learned how to say this without feeling somehow inadequate or fraudulent. I'm a part-time lecturer, not a professor, and as much as I love to read and talk to students about books, the title "Literature Teacher" seems high-falutin' and serious, more focused and career-tracked than I've ever been.
"Literature, huh?" he said." I used to write. What kind of literature do you teach?"
Thank God he didn't ask me if I published! That was probably coming.
"I teach all kinds of things. I'm lucky, I can teach whatever I like."
"What do you like?"
I had to pause for a second to think about it. My mind went blank. I stumbled through a list:" Jane Austen, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope." I don't know where George Eliot came from—I hardly ever teach her, and when I do it's only one book, Middlemarch. My first impulse, one I wasn't even aware of until it happened, was to make myself out to be a specialist, to fit into a recognizable professional category, when really I'm just an avid reader of whatever strikes my fancy, and if I read enough books that seem connected by a theme, or if I get interested enough in one writer, I teach a class. What could be better than that? But it sounds so dilettantish, especially coming from what I think I must look like to others—a sloppy, frizzy-haired woman, no longer young but lacking the poise of the mature.
"Jane Austen, eh? That's morals and manners. My first wife liked Jane Austen. She was a teacher. She was into that morals and manners stuff too—not me. I like Kafka."
I nodded. It seems like every man you talk to about books tells you he likes Kafka.
"I went to Prague and visited the castle wall he used to live in," the man said. "You had to duck to get in the door and the windows were really small."
"It's funny how many writers chose strange places to live in," I said. He looked at me quizzically, about to say something. "I mean Yeats lived in that old tower, Joyce lived in a Norman tower for awhile, right? And Chaucer lived in something like a wall—what was it, the gate of London? I think he lived right above the gate of London."
"I lived in an amazing apartment owned by the Ukrainian consulate in Manhattan," the man said. "Back when I was writing. It was in a gothic building overlooking the park. I could see gargoyles from my window. I lived there for a year on a grant.
"Back then I was combining narrative with art. I made installations that you had to walk into and there'd be a story I'd written on the walls, so you had to move through the piece in time. One piece I did was a painting of the interior of a house. I did everything—couches, television sets, refrigerators—each room had what you'd find in a house painted on the wall." As his description went on I was pretty sure I wouldn't like the pieces. Did it matter? Not to me, not then. There I was in the middle of my idyllic old west landscape listening to somebody talk about the kind of cerebral, somewhat pretentious art I've turned my back on, and I actually enjoyed his company. Not that I thought I liked him or ever wanted to see him again—I didn't—but still, in that moment, for all my awkwardness and unpremeditated dishonesty, I was taking pleasure in him and his conversation. I liked looking at his stout figure, his pink jowls, black eyebrows and curly gray hair.
"I got written up in the L.A Times for my last exhibition down at Art City." he said.
"That's great! When was it?
"About a week ago."
"Then I can still look it up on their website."
"Actually, I've got some copies with me." He walked to his car, opened the passenger side door, and picked up a xeroxed copy of the review. He handed it to me and said, "The reviewer got my name wrong. He's written about me before, I don't know why he keeps getting my name wrong."
I looked at the name of the reviewer. "Oh, no wonder!" I said, "It's Howie Fairfield."
"You know him?"
"I used to work with him."
"What's he like?"
He stared intently at me as I thought about it. I did not consider my words very carefully, and when I popped out with, "He's a nice enough guy, but he's something of a pretentious hack," I saw the man's jaw drop and instantly regretted having spoken my mind so recklessly.
"I guess if I asked him about you he might say the same thing," he said.
Ouch! That hurt, but I was ready. "Well, he might. But he's actually been very kind to me. I shouldn't have said that about him, but he was the first person to tell me he was a hack. Fifteen years ago when I worked with him I used to be really impressed with his writing and I told him so. He was older than I was and used a lot of big words and I kind of looked up to him. He said to me, 'I'm not a writer. I'm a generator of copy.'"
"How old is he?"
"About 50, maybe 55."
"My age," the man said.
He must have caught a look of surprise in my face, because he quickly added, "Or a little younger."
"Maybe I shouldn't have been so harsh about Howie," I said. "He even wrote favorably about my show, but he's not very good and I didn't want you to feel bad about his getting your name wrong. He's not even an art critic. He doesn't have an art education. He's a musician, that's his real love. He just writes this stuff for money."
"I was wondering about him, because like I say, he's written about me three times and twice he's gotten my name wrong."
I looked at the copy of the review he'd given me. Two sentences of a group show had been circled, "Piotr Chenkos' installation fuses thanatotic visions with pop culture emblems utilizing plastic skeletons in an ironic dark comedy of self-awareness. Chenkos' work wryly questions the separation between the dead and the living, the viewer and the viewed." The review was what the editor at the paper we worked for called, "Howie Fairfield's Around the Gallery in 80 seconds," in which Howie goes to a large group show and writes a descriptive sentence about each piece.
"What I've learned about any kind of success, as an artist or a writer," the man said, pausing for a moment in solemn reflection," is that at a certain point you're never going to make it big—but if you hang around long enough, they've got to give you something." He seemed sadder, less open and sure of himself.
I almost said maybe the whole idea of professional success as the big ideal for living was a bit limited. It seemed to me that anybody who got to live in a Ukrainian Gothic building in Manhattan or visit Kafka's apartment in Prague or be out here at Canada Larga painting a landscape was getting a pretty big share of the good things in life, no matter how his art was received critically. At least, that's how I liked to put my own lackluster career in perspective while I still hoped for something better.
Then I saw them. Way out on the edges of the lower field by where the river cut ran and a few high sycamores rose above the lower brush and river willows, small dark shapes skittered in a row toward a lone oak tree. The cows in the field ignored them.
"The pigs are back," I said. "Look over there—those are pigs, right?"
He turned around and squinted into the distance. "Oh yes, I see them. Pigs, yes they're pigs. They eat the walnuts."
"I saw about ten of them with my husband here a few days ago," I said. "You could hear the nuts cracking in their jaws." I remembered how delighted we'd been by the sight of pigs running wild. We had stopped to watch the cows, when five pigs, four small ones led by a giant mottled grey and black one seemed to glide across the field. Their big square bodies scooted forward in a smooth run, levitating on hidden legs in the tall brown grass. Bob and I had stood there a long time admiring the pigs when another group came to join them, their lowered heads scanning the ground for nuts and whatever else they might find. They wound through the cows, some of whom stood singly, others grouped in clusters of two to five, all of them standing motionless, unflustered by the roving band of energetic pigs. The cows appeared so elegant and tall on their long legs, regally calm compared to their squat, big-headed, voraciously eating neighbors. Even the baby cows with their small heads and slender knock knees looked coltish and nubile. It was a pleasure to see cows in such a light, like the surprise of an ordinary girl suddenly blooming into a great beauty. It cast a romantic glow on the walk with my husband, as if the transformation of the cows had transformed us as well. And it was the pigs that did it. The pigs we could not take our eyes off. As we walked back to our car we caught sight of a single pig standing under a walnut tree. We were so close we saw the open and closing of his mouth as he cracked the walnuts. My husband was fascinated by this. "Look," he said, "I like how you can see the space between his jaws when he opens his mouth." He imitated the movement with the fingers and thumb of one hand, like a shadow-puppet when it's talking. Why do some small things a beloved does call forth such affection from the heart? His noticing of the pig mouth was one of those things. I wrapped my arms around him for a quick hug. "Careful," he whispered. "Don't scare the pig." We stared at it for a long time, marveling at its huge head and nut-cracker jaws, its large square body held up on short, stiff, awkward-looking legs. The pig finally noticed us and ran off squealing.
I didn't tell the man about how wonderful it had been for my husband and me to see those pigs together. I just held onto that pleasure like a secret picture I could pull out anytime and savor again.
"The birds are onto them," said the man, pointing to hundreds of black birds, flying close together, like a net blowing through the air, then clumping in a dark assembly on the distant field. "Whatever they're eating, the birds want some too." The pigs sprinted toward the river again, disappearing into the bush. The fog-dimmed landscape grew darker as the sun dipped behind the mountains.
"I better be off," I said to the man.
"And what was your name again?" he asked, putting out a hand.
"Caroline," I said. I didn't want to give him my whole name in case he was going to meet Howie someday and tell him all about this woman he'd met who'd bad-mouthed him.
We shook hands and he repeated, "Caroline. Okay, I'll put that in the B file of my brain computer. I always like to come out here. You often meet people who are a little more "aware" if you know what I mean." His eyes opened wide when he spoke the word aware and he shook his head for emphasis.
Lacking any real response to that odd statement, I just smiled. If you had asked me where I was least likely to run into someone who'd care to talk to me, surely Canada Larga would've made the list. That's one of the reasons I go there. I only ever see a few regulars: the grumpy white guy on the bicycle, the dignified Mexican foreman and his wife, the beautiful woman horse-trainer, the skinny, scraggly-haired cowboy in the giant white pickup truck. Occasionally a group of bird-watchers. Occasionally a teenage couple out for a drive. And almost always a few men in Southern California Gas Company trucks. But as I walked away I felt that talking to him was less strange than seeing wild pigs, that wild pigs really were the thoroughly unexpected element in this scene that had become so much a part of my world. My world easily accommodates older men who like to talk about their art and writing—but throw a wild pig into it and I'm thrown off balance, I can't stop looking, I'm thrilled.
It grew dark more quickly than I expected, as purple crept into the foggy twilight grey. I felt chilly and a little afraid. I'd never felt frightened out there, but then I'd never been out in the dark before. I trusted that road. I'd never seen anything weird on it. Whenever I walked and a car drove by, the driver would almost always wave and I'd wave back. You could be alone there without being all alone. As I walked back toward my car that evening I felt different, jumpy. My heart skipped a beat when four tiny red pigs crashed through the underbrush, scurried up the bank of the ravine, and sped across the road in front of me, screeching in fear. I watched their frantic short-legged run as they beat a path, single file, down the field and into the walnut grove. They disappeared behind a ripple of higher ground. "They're more frightened than you are," I said to myself. I bent down and grabbed a nice-sized rock though just in case.
I picked up my pace and remembered a woman I'd brought out here with a group of painters. She told me she could never feel safe alone on a country road like this; she was afraid of being attacked by men. Something like that might cross my mind once in awhile, but I'd push it right back out. Like I said, I never felt all alone out there, except for now, when it was almost night and I was still a mile from my car. Walking under the branches of a big oak tree, one of the few oaks still growing right up next to the road, I saw something horrible, a dead animal, like a mole or a gopher, lying stretched out on its back. I jumped at the sight of it, then slowly caught my breath, bent over, and examined it. It was an eight- inch piece of wood, a chunk off a fallen limb with little twigs sticking forward and back that I'd mistaken for legs. "Okay, Caroline, you're really losing it now," I said to myself, but it didn't lessen my growing sense of panic.
I stared into the fields where I'd first seen the pigs. Nothing moved. A few dark shapes seemed cow-like, and one little spot could've been a pig but probably wasn't. I stared at it for what seemed a long time, willing my eyes to make sense of it. But the dusky purple of evening seemed to smear the outlines. We were all blending together, the cows, the pigs, the bushes and trees and weeds and cowpies. A pair of headlights appeared from around a curve in the road. An old truck with chipped paint, two men sitting in the cab, the driver wearing a baseball cap. I prayed they wouldn't stop and bother me. Please God, Please God, Please God. And they didn't. They just drove right by me, a little glance in my direction, not even a nod, and they were gone behind another curve. I turned around to watch them disappear. When I saw the truck again it was about a quarter of a mile away, slowing down a narrow bridge. The driver had had a thick droopy mustache. His passenger was bald, with a thick neck and broad shoulders. Okay, they were scary, I admitted, but still, nothing happened, nothing's going to happen.
I wasn't wearing the right shoes or bra for running, or I'd have been back at the car by then. I lengtened my stride, each step shooting out farther than the last one. In the ravine to the right of the road there was a snorting and huffing, accompanied by the breaking of twigs and rustling of tall dry river cane. It sounded like something big and strong. Jesus Christ! What if it runs right into me? Ten steps later it broke through the bushes, a giant grey pig with black spots. It caught one look at me and high-tailed it back into the ravine with a crashing and squealing to make your hair stand on end. "I'm convinced," I cried to the universe, "I can see this is no place to be after sundown. No more, please, no more!" As if in answer to my plea, a family group of pigs, two big ones and three little ones of all different colors, gray and black, red, came sniffing and snorting down the hill from the left, completely oblivious to me. They rallied together round a walnut tree, their noses sweeping the ground in a quick side to side movement. These guys weren't scary. They were just pigs looking for food. I stood still and watched them for a few minutes till they caught on to me and ran back up the hill.
I reached my car, opened the door as fast as I could, jumped in and finally felt safe. But as I drove back the four miles of Canada Larga I felt a sense of danger I'd never felt before. Trees and bushes seemed to shift, the old familiar landmarks never appeared. My headlights caught a rabbit as it dashed across the road and my heart leapt out of my chest. I stopped the car and thought for a moment. What a peculiar few hours this had been! My bright sunny walk transfigured by the eerie spectre like shapes of the fog, the man turned into a woman turned into a man again, the sweet cattle giving me the evil eye, the pigs squealing with alarm one minute, munching peacefully in family groups the next. My own lack of solid outlines seemed to fit right in, but it was scarier to live in a world of constant flux, much easier, or at least preferable, to find a shape and fit things to it. But I never could, not in my life, never could be just a writer or a literature teacher or a painter or a wife or a gardener or somebody's girlfriend or a straight person or a gay person or a truth-teller or a liar. In the world of my identity the fog rolled in, the lighting changed, a pig became a stump, a cow turned its head and winked and a rabbit flew off on wings. My own head was a changeling, so why not the rest of the world?
The next day I walked by Sherri's monument and saw an envelope among the plastic toys and flowers. Dare I open it? Oh yes. It was hand-written in beautiful cursive lettering with the kind of graceful, thick and thin lines that mark the expert use of a fountain pen. The letter was addressed to the family of Sherri and said that the letter writer understood that he could never actually know the pain they must feel having had their daughter taken away from them in such a horrible manner, but that the love in their hearts and their faith in God and Jesus would help them carry on and that the letter-writer wanted the family to know that he thought of them often and they were always in his prayers. It was signed simply, "Pavel."
After my scare of the night before, and the disintegration of my sense of knowing this dear place or anything, myself included, this letter seemed a portent. I had to know what happened to Sherri. If she was murdered by some thick-necked rapist or a man with a cowboy hat or a bald head or any of the other demons of the night we women conjure up in our worst fears, I had to know so I could face it. I walked quickly, drove home, and looked her name up on online. There were several articles covering two court cases. Did I really want to know? How could I not? I clicked on one article and read about the trial of her husband. A former manager of a supermarket in Oxnard, he'd been accused of conspiracy to murder his wife but he pleaded innocent, claiming that his girlfriend carried out the murder without his knowledge. "I was in love with two people at the same time. I loved my wife," he was reported as saying, "and if she killed my wife then I don't love her." But the prosecution pointed out that he'd been spending the night with his girlfriend for the two weeks following the murder until his wife's body was found. The girlfriend admitted her guilt and claimed that he had helped plan the murder. Sherri had reportedly said, when she'd heard that the girlfriend wanted to steal her husband, "Over my dead body," and the girlfriend had taken her at her word. She snuck up on Sherri in the parking lot of the Buena Ventura mall, kidnapped her, stabbed her to death, "almost cutting off her head," the newspaper noted, and then dumped her body into the steep overgrown ditch at the side of the road on Canada Larga.
I was struck by many things in this story, not all of them grisly, though grisly the story certainly is. For one thing, how shockingly ordinary the few details are—that the man worked as the manager of a supermarket, that the kidnapping took place in the parking lot of a mall. For another thing, the murder was carried out by a woman, not a man—and this was shocking and comforting at the same time. Yes, my friend had been right, a body had been dumped at my beloved Canada Larga, but the murder didn't fit the almost universal fear of wome, that of being attacked by a man in a lonely place. I liked this murder for that reason. It proved something about fear, or if not proved, at least said something about it—that the creepiest thing you see may not be the most dangerous, that you might be safer alone on a country road than surrounded by a bunch of cars in the parking lot of a small town mall, that it may not be the stranger in the pick-up or in windowless van who kills you, but your nearest and dearest and the wicked wretch he's been sleeping with. You are, when you look at it straight on, in a constant state of vulnerability and the things to be afraid of are continuously changing shape. I could go on walking on Canada Larga, by myself, I could paint there, by myself, without being haunted by the image of some brute chasing me into the barbed wire and strangling me for a quick thrill. Here was another of my changelings, the murder of a woman by a woman, the murder at the mall, the murder over the love of a supermarket manager—there was no lesson about danger to be learned by it (avoid men who wear a nametag to work. Do not shop at the mall?). Because it didn't fit the shape of my fears, it was as spectral as the fog blowing in and out of the canyon; it changed the light, but it didn't really matter. That a premeditated act of murder should be somehow comforting is surprising to me, but there it is, another case of the unpredictable taking shape in the place of the predicted.
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