A Thousand Steps Read online

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  For brother Matt Parker—artist, inventor, and inspiration—thank you for the years, the letters, and the laughs. And for the way we write our histories.

  1

  Laguna Beach

  June 1968

  New morning on a waking city and a heaving dark sea. And on a boy, Matt Anthony, pedaling his bicycle up Pacific Coast Highway.

  His fishing rod, strapped to the rack behind him, whips and wobbles in the air. A tackle box rattles and bounces beside it. He’s pedaling hard for Thalia Street, where the cop cars and a fire engine and an ambulance are clustered, lights flashing.

  He skids to a stop on the sidewalk and props his bike against the wall of the corner surf shop. Hustles past the vehicles to the stairs leading down to the beach. Jams his hands into his poncho against the chill and joins the T-Street Surf Boys, who have gathered to watch the cops. Matt recognizes two of the surfers as just-graduated seniors from his high school—cool guys, friends of his sister—but they ignore him, wet suits slung over their shoulders and boards at their sides, all their attention on the dark beach below. The waves break almost invisibly, with overlapping echoes that end abruptly then repeat.

  It’s hard for Matt to see what’s going on down there. But he’s a curious sixteen-year-old, so he clambers down the stairs to the beach, his rock-worn sneakers slapping on the concrete then thudding in the sand. He gets up close. Where he sees, through a knot of Laguna Beach cops standing in a loose circle, a pale girl lying faceup on a slab of rock. Her arms are spread and her hair is laced with seaweed. A black bomber-style jacket covers her middle.

  Matt’s ears roar as they do when he sees something that causes strong emotion. It’s like rushing water.

  A young officer jogs past him, his holster and duty belt clanking, and a blanket tucked under one arm. One of the other cops yanks the blanket from him and spreads it over the girl. Then he looks over at Matt. He’s Bill Furlong, the big LBPD sergeant who badgers and busts the hippies in town, cuffing and herding them, sometimes six or eight at a time, into a windowless white prisoner van the locals call Moby Cop.

  The ambulance team trudges across the beach with a stretcher, pausing for Furlong, who advances on Matt with all his large authority. He’s got straight dark hair, heavy brows, and tan eyes. There is something bear-like about him.

  “Matt,” says Furlong. “Is that who I think it is?”

  “That’s Bonnie Stratmeyer,” says Matt. He feels as if the blood has drained from his face.

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Since just now.”

  “How’d the fishing go?”

  “Two bass.”

  Furlong almost always asks about the fishing, and about Matt’s mother, brother, and sister. Less so about Matt’s father, Bruce, a former cop himself. Now Matt hears the waves slapping and watches the ambulance guys lift Bonnie Stratmeyer onto the stretcher. Facing each other they rise together, balancing their load.

  Another wave pops sharply and the blanket slides off. Matt sees Bonnie’s yellow bikini and her hair spilling over the stretcher like a drowned animal. Two uniforms put the blanket back over her, then lay the black bomber jacket on top to keep it down. The roar in Matt’s head is back.

  “She’s been missing almost two months,” says Furlong. “Did you know that?”

  “Everybody knows that.”

  Matt has seen her posters in the shop windows, read a story about her and other runaways in the News-Post. He’s never talked to her and now he realizes, with a strange recoil, that he never will. Bonnie was a brainy one, like his sister—honor roll students.

  “Is Bonnie the type to go out swimming in the dark alone?” Furlong asks.

  “I don’t know. She’s two years older than me.”

  “Was she in-crowd, or more to herself?”

  “Herself.”

  “Was she a head?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But do you suspect she used drugs?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “Matt, I want you to look behind you up at the landing where the surfers are standing. And tell me, do you think if you jumped from there it would kill you?”

  Matt turns and considers. “If you hit a big rock I think it could.”

  “Well, just yesterday a hippie chick tripping on LSD thought she could jump from the El Mar Hotel balcony, fly all the way across Coast Highway, and land on the sidewalk. She’s in the hospital now with more broken bones than you can count.”

  Matt doesn’t know what to say. He purses his lips and nods.

  “You still delivering the newspapers?”

  “Every day.”

  “How’s your brother doing over in the jungle?”

  “He’s still alive.”

  “Say hello to your mom, Matt.”

  Matt nods. Years ago, divorced Furlong tried to date his mom, but Julie Anthony would have none of him. Matt thought it was uncool to treat his mom like a potential girlfriend. Any mom. Furlong wears a wedding ring now. Matt has never liked nor trusted the man, and senses the sergeant knows this.

  “I saw Julie out in Dodge City yesterday,” says Furlong.

  Dodge City being a nickname for a few narrow streets out in Laguna Canyon where the rents are low and the hippies and artists and surfers and young freaks have taken root. The houses are mostly small and rickety, clustered amid the eucalyptus trees. At school, Matt hears tales of drugs being smuggled in and out, and of cops and the FBI staging stings and raids, making arrests, shooting at smugglers running into the canyon brush. He’s heard there’s a monkey chained to a tree. Dogs running wild and children running naked. The newspapers he delivers have Dodge City stories all the time.

  LAGUNA POLICE RAID DODGE CITY

  Pot, Hashish Recovered

  So, naturally Matt wonders what his mom was doing out there.

  2

  At home, his mother sits at the dinette in a green silk kimono, working on her morning coffee. The smell of weed has wafted in from under the closed door of her bedroom because Julie Anthony will not be seen smoking grass by her own children. Matt wishes she didn’t get high so often.

  Home is a clapboard bungalow that huddles in the shade of the phone company building at the bottom of the Third Street hill. Three tiny bedrooms. It was built just after World War II as a summer home for a Pasadena banker. Or so says the landlord, Nelson Pedley, who sometimes tries to shame Julie into paying her rent on time by complaining to Matt about people meeting their obligations first and their pleasures second. Pedley claims to be the banker’s son-in-law. But, a banker’s second home or not, this is a drafty and uninsulated one-bath box held together by loud plumbing and temperamental electricity, dwarfed by two-story apartments on three sides, and the looming General Telephone & Electronics building across Third. The rent is remarkably cheap, for Laguna. Julie gets the tiny “master,” while Matt’s sister Jasmine gets one of the bedrooms, and Matt—beginning with high school two years ago—has moved from his and brother Kyle’s room to the garage.

  “Honey!”

  “Hi, Mom.”

  “How’d you do?”

  “Two good bass. Bonnie Stratmeyer washed up on the beach early this morning, Mom. She’s dead.”

  “Oh my goodness,” she almost whispers. “Why? How? Was she swimming?”

  “It only just happened. Nobody knows anything yet.”

  “What a terrible thing. Jasmine is going to be seriously blown out!”

  Matt says nothing. He dislikes his mother’s sometimes antic behavior while high.

  Matt puts the bass fillets in a baking dish and pours in enough milk to cover them. It isn’t a lot to eat but it’s fresh and free. He sets the fishy newsprint in the trash can outside and washes his hands in the groaning kitchen faucet.

  “I’m freaked out,” says his mother. “Bonnie’s been missing two months, now this? Her mother will be so totally bummed.”

  “Probably her dad, too.”

  His own dad being a sore spot around here, Matt dries his hands on his shorts and goes to wake up his sister, maybe break the bad news about Bonnie, and see if she’s up for the beach later.

  No Jasmine, which is a bit of a surprise. First time she hasn’t come home after a night out, Matt thinks. She left last night in Julie’s old hippie van. Which wasn’t in the driveway when Matt left to fish early this morning, and isn’t in the driveway now.

  In her room he looks at h
er senior portrait, crookedly thumbtacked to the wall above a big psychedelic pink-yellow-and-orange Dr. Timothy Leary lecture-in-Laguna poster. Flanked by her Buffalo Springfield and Sandpiper nightclub flyers. On the bedstand is her diary and The Tibetan Book of the Dead. No cans or bottles in the wicker trash can.

  Jazz. They’re close in the friendly-enemies way that brothers and sisters are close. If Matt had to answer Furlong’s nosey questions about Bonnie Stratmeyer on behalf of Jazz, he’d have to say his sister is more in-crowd than a head, though he has seen empty beer cans in her trash. She’s also an effortless straight-A student, a former cheerleader, wiseass, and an all-around bitchen teenager. Plays a ukulele and writes her own songs. She makes ugly faces that crack him up.

  Back in the dining room, little more than a windowed alcove off the kitchen, he asks his mother where Jasmine went last night.

  “Miranda’s, I think. She took the van again. We, um, had some words about her attitude towards her mother.”

  Not the first time for that, thinks Matt. “She’s never not come home.”

  “She’s also just graduated and blowing off steam,” says Julie. “She was angry. Feeling her oats, though I’m not sure what ‘oats’ are in this situation.”

  * * *

  Out in the garage Matt stashes his fishing gear and takes off the poncho for the warming June day. He leaves the big door up to let in some sun. The garage has two windows, the heavy spring-loaded door for cars, and a narrow convenience door for people.

  His mattress, sleeping bag, and pillow are on the floor. There are orange-crates stacked for his books and painting supplies, a desk and a chair. One overhead light operated by a wall switch. There’s a pulsing blue lava lamp, a gift from Jazz. His current painting is a mess of a seascape, half-done if that, propped on a wounded thrift-store chair. Matt keeps his garage clean but creatures get in under the doors, mice sometimes, earwigs and spiders, and once in a while, a scorpion.

  Now his mother stands just outside the garage, framed in sunlight. Julie’s wearing her Jolly Roger Restaurant waitress uniform—a red wench’s blouse with a plunging neckline and off-the-shoulder sleeves, black pantaloons, red socks, and hideous black buckled slippers. Her dark hair up. Matt thinks she looks too young to be his mom.

  “I’m off to work, Matty. Are you copacetic with what you saw?”

  “I’ve never seen a dead person before.”

  The dead frogs in biology were bad enough. The smell of formaldehyde. Bonnie looked so cold.

  Julie strides into the garage and throws her arms around her son. “I know, Matty. I know.”

  Then she backs away, takes both his hands and looks up at him with teary eyes.

  “You said Miranda’s,” Matt says.

  “Miranda’s?”

  “Jazz, Mom. You said she went to Miranda’s last night.”

  “I think that’s what she said. Miranda lives on Cress.”

  Matt has delivered newspapers to Miranda Zahara’s driveway every day for two years and four months, so he knows exactly where she lives. He knows exactly where hundreds of Laguna Beach’s thirteen thousand people live. He also knows which customers give him bonus money at Christmas. Which last year helped to get him the new black Schwinn Heavy-Duti delivery bike with the cantilever frame, heavy-duty saddle, drop-forged crank, and pannier rack.

  “Matt, don’t worry about Jazz,” says Julie. “She’s just testing her freedom. And me. She’ll be home any minute with a big old hangover.”

  Julie lets go of her son and heads down the driveway, the buckles of her slippers twinkling in the sun.

  * * *

  Cress is a short bike ride. Miranda’s mom says that Miranda was supposedly at his house last night. Matt thinks of the double-reverse play in football. Very much like his sister to pull something like that over Julie’s eyes.

  “Miranda came home late,” says Mrs. Zahara. “She’s still asleep.”

  “Do you know where they went?”

  “The Sandpiper maybe? That singer they like was there last night, and the bouncers usually let them in.”

  Matt nods. He knows what singer she’s talking about and doesn’t like him. Jasmine has a crush on him. He also knows that Jasmine’s fake ID is pretty good because he made it for her, carefully doctoring the date of birth and expiration date numerals after she had reported her CDL stolen and gotten a replacement. The fake is pretty obvious in sunlight but indoors or by flashlight you had a chance of getting away with it.

  “Is everything alright?” asks Mrs. Zahara.

  He thinks of Bonnie Stratmeyer but nods anyway. Wonders why moms don’t keep track of their kids better. “Pretty much.”

  She says that Miranda would probably be out of bed by the time Matt came back here to deliver the paper. He could talk to her then if he wanted.

  3

  Matt sits on an upended red bucket in his driveway, folding and rubber-banding the Register afternoon final editions, two heavy bales of which have just been muscled to the ground by his supervisor, Tommy Amici. Tommy brings the papers no later than one o’clock and they must be delivered no later than five. If he delivers the papers later than five, he’ll get complaints, which make collections harder. Matt is enrolled in a shortened day work-study program at school to make this possible. The route earns him twelve dollars and fifty cents every other week.

  Collections are the first and third Sunday mornings of the month. Sundays he doesn’t deliver: the Register morning final is too heavy for kids on bikes to throw.

  And, Matt has learned, the houses that complain are less likely to pay a Christmas bonus. So he tries his best to porch the papers. Just last week Mr. Coiner had cussed Matt out for a late delivery. Ten minutes after five! A month ago, an older teenager had told Matt that his dad was sick of his paper being late, then beaned him with an orange.

  Matt has come to understand that people—especially older people—want their news like, immediately. Just hours after it happens. They don’t want to wait for the evening TV. So, newspapers aren’t just important, they’re vital. And when they’re late or soggy or come apart and get blown around, the paperboy is the one to blame.

  Tommy kneels, cuts the twine ties with a pocketknife, and Matt carries a thick load of papers back to his bucket.

  Tommy asks what he always asks. “Jasmine home?”

  Matt answers what he always answers, that he doesn’t know where she is. He sits again and begins folding today’s papers, twice over, and slipping on the rubber bands. After doing this every day for two years and four months, he barely has to think about it.

  Tommy is recently arrived in California from New Jersey. He’s not one of the hippie freaks who’ve been pouring into town since last year’s Summer of Love in San Francisco, the ones Matt sees tripping on acid on Main Beach, or hitchhiking Laguna Canyon with joints in their mouths, or washing their skinny white bodies with people’s garden hoses, or hanging around the Mystic Arts World head shop, or scoring drugs across the street in front of Taco Bell, freaks for sure, all hair and tie-dye, sandals and headbands and dope, dope, dope. No, Tommy smokes cigarettes and has the Jersey accent, wears his T-shirts tight with the sleeves rolled up, and his hair in a pompadour. Drives a white Chevy Malibu with a Register logo on the door. Stares at Jazz like a hopeful dog. He’s at least ten years older than his sister, which Matt thinks is too old.

  “You hear about the high school girl dead on the beach?” Tommy asks.

  Matt feels so bad about Bonnie he can’t put her into words. “No.”

  “Bonnie Stratmeyer,” says Tommy. “This morning the cops said she probably got caught in a riptide and drowned. Then washed up. Later they said she didn’t have any history of taking early morning swims in a cold ocean so they weren’t ruling out a fall from the cliff above where they found her. No witnesses. She’d been an official missing person for two months. The autopsy will give them a lot more to go on.”

  Tommy stands and slips his knife back into his pocket then wraps the cut twine around one hand. “I got another call from Mrs. Coiner,” he says. “Try to keep the paper out of her sprinklers.”