Devil House(103)

I have to say, I said, I hope this isn’t too weird, but this is kind of special. Those letters about the monster movies, they were a connection for me back then.

Yeah, he said. We looked at the old duplex through the windows of the car. It was kind of ratty, but no worse than that. You learn to find the stories you need when you’re a kid, right? You learn to find the stories you need.



* * *



I CAN’T SAY what that moment meant for Gage—maybe something, maybe nothing—but for me it positioned us in relation to one another. For him, Milpitas had, until recently, been a place he’d only known about from secondary reports—secondary reports from the distant past, at that—and from the one time it made national news. For me it was a childhood home, albeit one inhabited only briefly. To gaze upon a childhood home through adult eyes is to engage in an act of disenchantment. Great doors grow small. Turrets vanish. Emblems fray. Even if the time spent within any given set of walls was, when the days are reckoned together, brief, it’s in the nature of childhood to gild all surfaces it touches, to magnify things. One should revisit such places only after having done some hard calculations: What are we willing to trade for a clear view of things? What are the chances we’ll regret the bargain later on?

These were my thoughts as we hit the highway again, bound for San Luis Obispo. Three hours to go. Three hours is a long time to spend in close company with someone you haven’t seen since you were six, and if we hadn’t taken the detour through Milpitas it might have been weirder: but now we had a nexus through which to direct our conversational passes, and the time flew by. We spent the hours establishing timelines, trying to trace a coherent arc across our paths. When Nixon resigned, were you still in Milpitas? No, that was during that weird summer when I was back in SLO, I only saw you two or three times: but was that the same summer when Evel Knievel jumped the Snake River Canyon? No, that was before you left. Before I left! I said. We saw that together? Neither one of us saw it, it was closed-circuit.

But I could swear—

Gage appeared to be listening for a specific frequency as he waited for me to finish my sentence.

It’s weird, he said, how many things you might swear to, right? When it was actually different from what you remember, when you don’t really know at all.



* * *



GAGE DIDN’T LIVE ON OUR OLD STREET. He had his own place now; his mother lived a short drive away, still lived in their childhood home after all these years. He lived in a part of town of which I had retained no childhood memory: maybe I’d seen this neighborhood back then, but it wasn’t part of the San Luis Obispo I carried around in my mind, so it seemed oddly unreal to me, like a simulation of a place I knew, a place newly hewn from a known quarry and dressed up to look vintage.

Behold the, uh, perilous keep of Chandler Castle, in all its, you know, pomp and splendor, he said as we got out of the car, in the same dry tone that seemed to be his governing note as an adult. It was somewhere between self-deprecating and grandiose, and his sentences tended to run together, riding a speech rhythm always a little ahead of its own beat. I’d noticed, as we spoke on the drive down, that I tended to agree with him reflexively whenever he came to a stop. Some combination of tempo and register seemed, tacitly, to demand this. It was a neat trick, if that’s what it was.

I didn’t really have a sense of what sort of pay scale a true crime writer could expect, but the job seemed to have panned out all right for Gage. Two bedrooms, a big living room with stone walls and redwood beams, and a backyard with a firepit. The movies buy this or do they pay writers better than I think? I said, kidding a little but also a little jealous. It was a nice place.

He laughed. Well, he said, I got this between booms, I guess, anyway it wasn’t worth as much then as it is now, property’s nowhere near as expensive here as it is in the city, but you’re right, I do all right, they start cutting you bigger checks after you write a book that gets made into a movie, for sure, that’s where the real money is, those guys get to call their own shots.

Still, I said, California real estate, the way I understand it there isn’t really any cheap California real estate.

He sat down in one of his modern but comfortable-looking chairs and gestured for me to do the same. Yeah, that’s about right, he said, on my beat people tend to stay close to home base, it’s like there’s a home field advantage to keeping your focus on places you already know a little. I got lucky with this place and my agent gets me pretty decent advances, we’ll see if that trend continues if we ever come to an agreement about the monster over there. He pointed at his desk, nestled up against a window that looked out onto his backyard. Atop it were big piles of paper—printouts, it looked like—and several mini-towers of bulging manila envelopes stacked four or five high.

The monster, I said.

The thing I’ve been working on, he said, it’s a whole thing, I’m at sixes and sevens, really, I was kind of hoping to talk to you about it, maybe get a, you know, second opinion. He made quotation marks in the air when he said “second opinion”; they drew me in.

I don’t know if I’m really qualified, I said, but I’m curious.

Who’s not qualified, he said, his tone still suggesting some familiarity I didn’t yet share. I ought to have felt suspicious, I guess, but either I’m not sufficiently guarded about things, or Gage’s disarming demeanor had a way of preempting my defenses. You want to go get a pizza?