whirled and tumbled along the windswept streets. Dust devils spun out
of the east, as the Santa Anas-named for the mountains out of which they
arose-poured down through the canyons and across the arid,
scrub-stubbled hills that Orange County’s industrious developers had not
yet graded and covered with thousands of nearly identical wood
and-stucco pieces of the California dream. Trees bent to the surging
oceans of air that moved in powerful and erratic tides toward the real
sea in the west. The previous night’s fog was gone, and the day was so
clear that, from the hills, Catalina Island could be seen twenty-six
miles off the Pacific’s distant coast.
Julie popped an Artie Shaw CD into the player, and the smooth melody and
softly bouncing rhythms of “Begin the Be guine” filled the car. The
mellow saxophones of Les Robinson Hank Freeman, Tony Pastor, and Ronnie
Perry provided strange counterpoint to the chaos and dissonance of the
Santa Ana winds.
From Orange, Bobby drove south and west toward the beach cities-Newport,
Corona Del Mar, Laguna, and Dana Point. He traveled as much as possible
on those few of the urbanize county’s blacktop byways that could still
be called back roads They even passed a couple of orange groves, with
which the county had once been carpeted, but which had mostly fallen to
the relentless advance of the tracts and malls.
Julie became more talkative and bubbly as the miles rolled up on the
odometer, but Bobby knew that her spirited mood was not genuine. Each
time they set out to visit her brother Thomas, she worked hard to
inflate her spirits. Although she loved Thomas, every time that she was
with him, her fear broke anew, so she had to fortify herself in advance
with manufactured good humor.
“Not a cloud in the sky,” she said, as they passed the Irvine Ranch
fruit-packing plant.
“Isn’t it a beautiful day Bobby?”
“A wonderful day,” he agreed.
“The wind must’ve pushed the clouds all the way to Japan piled them up
miles high over Tokyo.”
“Yeah. Right now California litter is falling on the Ginza.”
Hundreds of red bougainvillea blossoms, stripped from their vines by the
wind, blew across the road, and for a moment the Samurai seemed to be
caught in a crimson snowstorm. Maybe it was because they had just
spoken of Japan, but there was something oriental about the whirl of
petals. He would not have been surprised to glimpse a kimono-clad woman
at the side of the road, dappled in sunshine and shadow.
“Even a windstorm is beautiful here,” Julie said.
“Aren’t we lucky, Bobby? Aren’t we lucky to be living in this special
place?”
Shaw’s “Frenzies” struck up, string-rich swing. Every time he heard the
song, Bobby was almost able to imagine that he was in a movie from the
1930s or ’40s, that he would turn a corner and encounter his old friend
Jimmy Stewart or maybe Bing Crosby, and they’d go off to have lunch with
Cary Grant and Jean Arthur and Katharine Hepburn, while all kinds of
screwy things would happen.
“What movie are you in?” Julie asked. She knew him too well.
“Haven’t figured it yet. Maybe The Philadelphia Story.
By the time they pulled into the parking lot of Cielo Vista Care Home,
Julie had whipped herself into a state of high good humor. She got out
of the Samurai, faced west, and grinned at the horizon, which was
delineated by the marriage of sea and sky, as if she had never before
encountered a sight to match it. In truth it was a stunning panorama,
because Cielo Vista stood on a bluff half a mile from the Pacific,
overlooking a long stretch of southern California’s Gold Coast. Bobby
admired it, too, shoulders hunched slightly and head tucked down in
deference to the cool and blustery wind.
When Julie was ready, she took Bobby’s hand and squeezed it hard, and
they went inside.
Cielo Vista Care Home was a private facility, operated without
government funds, and its architecture eschewed all of the standard
institutional looks. Its two-story Spanish facade of pale peach stucco
was accented by white marble corner pieces, door frames, and window