Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg (27 page)

What if he never comes back?

As he crosses the den to the front door with his hastily packed suitcase, he glances at the boarded-up hole in the living room (walls coated with primer, floor stripped to the cement slab foundation–all bloodstains gone). With tingling ears, Gordon senses an invisible presence–something like a swooping, spectral mummy–rushing toward his back from the darkened bedroom hallway. He’s out of the house in a split-second and he can’t get the door locked behind him fast enough. Slamming it, he jogs over to Janice’s car and climbs in, glad to be in the company of the living again.

They drive back through town to the
Western Auto
store across the train tracks at the far end of Draper Street. Jimmy has informed Gordon that he’ll need to buy some fishing gear and a sleeping bag. “And what about a fishing license? Do you have one?” Gordon doesn’t. He’ll need that, too. He wonders if there will be a test. He tries to remember how many whiskers there are on a catfish; how a male trout differs from a female trout
(is it just coloration, or is there such a thing as a trout penis
?). Also: is it illegal to fish near a beaver dam; and if not, is it legal to fish for beavers? Gordon envisions a thrashing brown pelt, yellow buckteeth, a wooden bass lure being chewed to pieces. His imagination is getting away from him again.

The image of protruding yellow teeth reminds Gordon of Mike Shriver. Was that what came rushing down the hallway after him–Mike’s furious lost soul?
Go toward the Light, you moron….

As they park in front of the store, Gordon is reminded that his parents considered
Western Auto
a rival of
Swannson Lumber
because they both sold tools and gardening supplies. He had been told not to shop there. But when he was old enough to ride his bike unsupervised and go into stores on his own, Gordon discovered
Western Auto
to be the far superior retail outlet, because they also carried toys, sporting goods, and custom bike accessories–things he was keenly interested in. So he occasionally shopped at
Western Auto
on the sly, and once, when he’d been feeling slighted as an employee of
Swannson Lumber
, he’d even applied for a job there.

He remembers how it happened. He was around ten at the time. His Uncle Gerald had caught him painting a mural on the side of one of the big plywood dumpsters out in back, using several half-empty spray cans of Rustoleum that someone had mysteriously thrown away (Metallic Copper seemed to be quite popular). Gordon had spent a dull morning inside the hardware store stocking shelves and he considered himself on his lunch break. His uncle considered otherwise. When he saw what Gordon was doing, he started shouting: “Are you on the payroll?
Are you?
Because I sure don’t pay you to do that! Get back to work!”

At least, Gordon thought, his uncle might have shown some appreciation for his artistic labors. He was trying to make the lumberyard a more culturally enlivened place. The mural depicted a group of six Picasso-like sea-monsters staring at a naked French woman’s bulbous behind. People could tell the woman was French because she wore pearls and smoked a Gauloise from a long black cigarette holder.

Gordon has long since forgotten whatever profound metaphysical concepts he’d once hoped the Horny Sea-Monsters With Naked French Lady mural would express, but he remembers quite well how his capitalist uncle’s reaction to it had made him miffed. He got on his bike and rode straight over to the
Western Auto
store, where shyness overtook his indignation shortly after he walked in through the aluminum framed doorway. A wide woman with a toad’s glum face sat at the cash register. Actually, she looked like a toad that had just been told she had to pay down a mountain of debts run up by her shiftless toad husband. Gordon didn’t know if she owned the store or only worked there. Timidly, he walked over to her. Summoning all of his courage, he said in a voice barely above a whisper: “I have a friend who’s looking for a job. He has a lot of experience in this line of work. Do you have any openings?” Gordon didn’t know how he would go about explaining that the friend was actually himself if a job offer was to be tendered, but the toad woman simply said to him: “No. We don’t have any openings now–or ever.” So that was that. Rebuffed, but still seeking a Marxist sort of vengeance, Gordon went back to the lumberyard and tried to organize Johnny Hoss and his crew to strike with him for higher wages.

That didn’t work out too well, either.

Three years later, the toad woman still sits behind the cash register. Gordon waves to her as he and Jimmy head for the aisle with all the fishing poles. Selecting the proper pole is the first order of business. Gordon is initially attracted to the mellow amber glow of a tall bamboo surfcasting rod with iridescent green thread wrapped at the guides and ferrules–but when he sees the $139.99 price tag he’s dissuaded. Jimmy tells him it’s the wrong pole for trout fishing, anyway. They pick up a few of the others and swing them above their heads in the narrow aisle, testing to see if the rod’s “action” is fast or slow. Gordon can’t tell the difference, but apparently Jimmy can. Finally, they settle on a nifty maroon telescopic rod that slides into itself like the shafts of a folding umbrella. When whipped overhead with a snap of the wrist, the rod impressively extends from a length of about fourteen inches to a full seven feet or so. It’s like a gadget that M might have designed for James Bond in his spare time. Plus, it’s relatively cheap.

Next they select a reel. Spin-casting reels, with wedge-shaped plastic thumb-release triggers at the back of enclosed spools, are for kids, Jimmy claims. He tells Gordon to go with a spinning reel, which has an open spool with a metal half-hoop called a bail arcing across one side of it. Learning to cast with a spinning reel will be a little trickier than just hitting the trigger on a spin-caster, but in the long run, Jimmy assures him, spinning reels are less trouble to maintain. They also look cooler–and Gordon has always been a sucker for cool aesthetics. He selects a professional-looking platinum-and-black model made by Shimano. At forty-eight dollars, it’s the most expensive thing he’ll be buying that day and for a long time to come. He hopes those fish are worth it.

Fishing tackle is on the next aisle over. Gordon is fascinated by the wide variety of lures: the Ubangi-like lips jutting in front of the cartoonish fish eyes painted on the crankbait; the exotic spotted and colored plumage of the dry flies; the shiny metal blades riding opposite the barbed hooks covered in Dr. Seuss hairdos on the V-rigged spinners. He wants to buy one of everything, but Jimmy tells him Dinkey Creek is stocked with trout raised in a hatchery, where they were fed food pellets every day. They’ll strike best at something similar. He hands him a squat little jar of Balls-O’-Fire salmon eggs. Seen through the glass, the eggs are stacked as tight as a beehive’s honeycomb, almost glowing with a florescent reddish-pink. They also come in natural orange and a cheddar cheese flavor. Gordon decides to get all three. Then Jimmy helps him pick out some Golden Eagle fishing hooks, a spool of Stren 6-pound-test monofilament line, and a plastic box full of assorted split-shot lead sinkers. Despite Jimmy’s advice, Gordon decides he also needs at least one of the lures: a sort of modified spoon displaying red and white stripes on top and chrome on the bottom, trailing a wicked little silver treble hook. It’s called a Number Two Dang Samuel Gill-Buster. Gordon buys it for its name as much as anything else.

On the way to the front counter they pick up an army green canvas creel (sort of an over-the-shoulder purse for carrying fish) and a navy blue nylon sleeping bag. When they set everything down in front of the toad woman the total comes to just over one hundred dollars, a shocking amount for Gordon. But as he’s getting his wallet out, Janice steps in front of him and sets down a credit card, saying, “Don’t worry. Your mother told me she’d pay me back for everything.” Gordon has a hard time believing Cynthia would ever say anything like that. She must have been in shock or something.

“Hey, I almost forgot,” Jimmy says. “We still need a fishing license.”

The toad woman nods her head. She gives Gordon a little card to fill out with his name and address. There’s no test–just a twelve-dollar fee, which Gordon pays, with money from his already open wallet.

“Hope you catch something,” the toad woman says on their way out. Coming from her, it sounds ominous.

□ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □

There’s a delirious sense of freedom, riding with Jimmy in the back of his father’s Ford F-150 under the camper shell, huddled between sleeping bags, rolled up tents, and Igloo coolers on their way up to Dinkey Creek. Gordon has never ridden in the back of a pick-up before, and he thinks it’s great. He can watch the scenery pass in a novel way, everything receding in the camper shell’s rear window. There goes the old brick mansion fronted by two-story Doric columns on 18th Street, once the home of Samuel Draper and now a showplace for the pianos and electric organs of
Erickson Music
. There’s Kimmie Swenson’s place, on the corner where 18th turns into Academy Road. Kimmie’s a year younger than Gordon and Jimmy, but she already stands about 6’-3". She looks like a freak–you’d practically need a ladder to climb up and kiss her (Gordon, waiting for a growth spurt, is only 5’-4" and Jimmy isn’t much bigger). Now the houses start to drop away, replaced by drainage ditches and vineyards and wide-open fields of strawberries where the dirt is packed down into the herringbone patterns left by tractor tires. A peeling billboard in the shape of a gigantic blue Dala horse with yellow flower reins announces: “
Velkommen to Kingsburg! The Swedish Village
” but they’re actually leaving it, going the other way.

Meanwhile, Jimmy is busy taking inventory, opening coolers and rooting through brown paper grocery bags. “Okay… we’ve got Froot Loops, Cocoa Puffs, six cans of Shasta Root Beer, eleven Diet Cokes, two jumbo packs of beef jerky, a spray-thingy of Cheez-Wiz, some old Ritz crackers, baked beans, barbecued potato chips, and some licorice whips. Want anything?”

Gordon takes a licorice whip, but he’s more interested in what’s going on outside the windows. They pass an orchard where fat orange fruit dangles like Christmas tree bulbs among the dark green leaves–
peaches
, he thinks, although they could be apricots, for all he knows. Then more vineyards, growing Thompson Seedless grapes–
that
he knows for certain. In a few more weeks, migrant workers will swarm the vineyards to pick the grapes and lay them out on brown paper sheets so they can dry in the sun and turn into raisins. All that dehydrating grape juice creates a sickly sweet stink. By late August the smell of grape funerals will blanket Kingsburg, a funky, cotton candy musk there’s no escaping. Gordon much prefers the pungent tang of manure from the cow pastures, like the one coming up on his left.

The sky is blue-gray above the barbed wire. There isn’t another car on the road anywhere. A regiment of flat-bellied cumulus clouds fades to a haze above the foothills in the distance. They drive several more miles, passing old barns and a defunct grocery store (where a rain-stained butcher paper sign still reads:
ICE COLD BEER / MUST SHOW I.D.
). Then, suddenly, the pastures give way to junkyards and cyclone-fenced lots full of foxtails, trash, and star thistle as Jimmy’s dad pulls the truck into a sun-blasted Texaco station on the edge of Parlier to fill up.

Through the side window of the camper shell, Gordon sees a service bay, its oil-stained concrete floor strewn with spare tires and the guts of some poor AMC Gremlin’s transmission. Dusty fan belts and air filters hang from hooks on the pegboard walls. On top of a smudged red toolbox, a mariachi tune trumpets from a portable AM/FM radio with a bent coat hanger for an antenna. Next door, there’s an abandoned
taqueria
with cinder-block walls painted prison blue, now a canvas for graffiti. The spray-painted messages (“
Los Vatos Forever
” “
Amores Perros
”) strike Gordon as both artistic and depraved. He notices fine black soot-marks near the tops of the broken window frames. Was there a fire, or just a lot of grease smoke from frying taco meat?

A middle-aged Mexican man with a Fu Manchu mustache and an enormous beer gut startles Gordon with a shout of “
Hola!”
He walks over to the pick-up wearing a black pearl-buttoned cowboy shirt with red piping at the sleeves. His tooled leather belt is weighted down with a rodeo buckle as big as a baby’s face, holding up a pair of grimy jeans. The man looks dangerous, like someone who might stick you with a switchblade while you’re playing pinball, just because you’re winning. Maybe
he
set the fire next door. If he tries anything, hopefully Jimmy’s dad will put him in jail.

“Some gasoline-o,
amigo
,” Stan says to the Mexican man. “Fill’er up,
por favor
.” Turning to Janice after the man goes about his business, he says, “Can you believe these prices? Even out here, in the middle of nowhere, they’re still stickin’ it to us. At least we don’t have to wait in line, though.”

There’s a gasoline shortage this summer–something to do with OPEC and the Carter administration wanting America to economize, as near as Gordon can make out. Unleaded is over a dollar a gallon for the first time he can remember and in most places there are long lines to get to it. There’s been talk that gas rationing will be the next step, which has everyone pissed. He just hopes it’ll all blow over before he turns sixteen, so he can still buy a gas-guzzling Corvette.

“About how far do you think we are from Kingsburg?” he asks Jimmy.

“Dad, how many miles have we come?” Jimmy asks his father through the little sliding window space between the camper and the truck’s cabin.

“About eight,” Stan says.

“Okay, thanks.” Jimmy slides the window shut. “About eight,” he tells Gordon.

“I heard.”

Eight miles and it’s already as if they’re in a different universe. Parlier seems decrepit and strange and somehow menacing–also exciting, and even kind of glorious, exactly
because
it’s decrepit and strange and menacing–while at the same time it’s just like any number of hick towns that dot the San Joaquin Valley. There’s really not much to distinguish it from Selma or Fowler or Dinuba or Reedley–or even Kingsburg, for that matter (minus the Swedish theme). Big, shabby houses toward the center of town, rows of nearly identical ranch homes in the subdivisions further out, and tenant farmer shacks beyond that. A Rexall drugstore on the corner, a Napa Auto Parts store close by, one beat-to-crap movie house (or maybe an old bowling alley or a tacky roller rink), a few used car lots with prices soaped on the windshields of homely Pontiacs and Buicks, and lots of churches. More churches than restaurants, actually–as if God is more important than eating.