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We took our vacation that year in California and stayed with Elrod in his ranch home built on stilts high up on a cliff in Topanga Canyon, overlooking the Pacific Coast Highway and the ocean that was covered each morning with a thick bluish-white mist, inside which you could hear the waves crashing like avalanches into the beach.
For two weeks Alafair acted in a picture out at Tri-Star with Mikey Goldman and Elrod, and in the evenings we ate cherrystone clams at Gladstone's on the beach and took rides in Mikey Goldman's pontoon plane out to Catalina Island. As the late sun descended into the ocean, it seemed to trail ragged strips of black cloud with it, like a burning red planet settling into the Pacific's watery green rim. When the entire coastline was awash in a pink light you could see almost every geological and floral characteristic of the American continent tumbling from the purple crests of the Santa Monica Mountains into the curling line of foam that slid up onto the beaches: dry hills of chaparral, mesquite, and scrub oak, clumps of eucalyptus and bottlebrush trees, torrey and ponderosa pine growing between blue-tiled stucco houses, coral walls overgrown with bougainvillea, terraced hillside gardens filled with oleander, yucca plants, and trcilises dripping with passion vine, and orange groves whose irrigation ditches looked like quicksilver in the sun's afterglow.
Then millions of lights came on in the canyons, along the freeways, and through the vast sweep of the Los Angeles basin, and it was almost as if you were looking down upon the end point of the American dream, a geographical poem into which all our highways eventually led, a city of illusion founded by conquistadors and missionaries and consigned to the care of angels, where far below the spinning propellers of our seaplane black kids along palm-tree-lined streets in Watts hunted each other with automatic weapons.
I thought in the morning mists that rolled up the canyon I might once again see the noble and chivalric John Bell Hood. Just a glimpse, perhaps, a doff of his hat, the kindness of his smile, the beleaguered affection that always seemed to linger in his fac
e. Then as the days passed and I began to let go of all the violent events of that summer, I had to accept the fact that the general, as Bootsie had said, was indeed only a hopeful figment of my fantasies, a metaphorical and mythic figure probably created as much by the pen of Thomas Malory or Walter Scott as the LSD someone had put in my drink out at Spanish Lake.
Then two nights before we returned home, Alafair was sitting on the coral wall that rimmed Elrod's terrace, flipping the pages in one of the library books Bootsie had checked out on the War Between the States.
"What you doing in here, Dave?" she said.
"In what? What are you talking about, little guy?"
She continued to stare down at a page opened in her lap.
"You're in the picture. With that old man Poteet and I saw in the corn patch. The one with B.O.," she said, and turned the book around so I could look at it.
In the photograph, posed in the stiff attitudes of nineteenth-century photography, were the general and seven of his aides and enlisted men.
"Standing in the back. The one without a gun. That's you, Dave," she said. Then she stared up at me with a confused question mark in the middle of her face. "Ain't it?"
"Don't say 'ain't,' little guy."
"What are you doing in the picture?"
"That’s not me, Alf. Those are Texas soldiers who fought alongside John Bell Hood. I bet they were a pretty good bunch," I said, and rubbed the top of her head.
"How do you know they're from Texas? It doesn't say that here."
"It's just a guess."
She looked at the photograph again and back at me, and her face became more confused.
"Let's get Elrod and Bootsie and go down to the beach for some ice cream," I said.
I slipped the book from her hand and closed it, picked her up on my hip, and walked through the canopy of purple trumpet vine toward the patio behind the house, where Bootsie and Elrod were clearing off the dishes from supper. Down the canyon, smoke from meat fires drifted through the cedar and mesquite trees, and if I squinted my eyes in the sun's setting, I could almost pretend that Spanish soldiers in silver chest armor and bladed helmets or a long-dead race of hunters were encamped on those hillsides. Or maybe even old compatriots in butternut brown wending their way in and out of history—gallant, Arthurian, their canister-ripped colors unfurled in the roiling smoke, the fatal light in their faces a reminder that the contest is never quite over, the field never quite ours.
