Devil House(15)

What’s your life like, where’s your family: we took care of the basics first. He’d been born at the hospital in San Jose; his parents still lived in the house he’d grown up in. He said the place had seemed palatial to him as a kid, but that he could see, now, with all the new construction, that it had been incredibly modest. I thought about how every town this near San Francisco must have experienced some measure of seismic change almost the minute the information economy cranked into high gear, and how this was still going on, my own lodgings being just a single example.

He had a sister at Mills, and both his parents were college graduates: but they cared more about their children’s happiness than about status, and he’d been good with tools since he was young, so he worked at an auto shop.

“I wouldn’t have guessed,” I said: leaving in the mornings, he looked like he was heading for a desk job.

“I only wear my uniform at the shop. Old habit. Leave my work at work, you know?” I cracked open a second beer; it was dark outside, but inside it felt hotter than it had in the daytime. “How about you?”

“I’m a writer,” I said. “Mainly books.”

“There you go,” he said, raising his can like a champagne glass. We toasted my profession. Then we sat quietly for several minutes, each of us sort of staring into space at the end of the day, beers in hand.

It’s pretty rare to meet someone who’s comfortable just sitting quietly with you before you get to know each other better. Sometimes quiet people are trying to let you know they don’t actually want to talk to you, but this wasn’t that. It was easy. I’d meant to start asking questions—you never know if you’re getting an opportunity you won’t get again, or won’t get again for a while—but I chose to wait. There was a gentle, blurry quality to the scene. I relaxed into it. You get susceptible to environments when you don’t keep much company.

“So you came here to write?” he said eventually; the stillness resolved. I wasn’t sure what to say in response: how much of the truth to tell him, I mean. He was an adult who’d lived here all his life. There was no way he didn’t remember the murders at Devil House. That he hadn’t already commented on the former life of the house in which we were sitting together drinking beers was, by itself, a clue of some kind—a sign of something delicate to be navigated, like a prison record or a death in the family.

“I came here to write,” I said. “That’s sort of what I do, I go places and write.”

“About what?”

There was a beat. “Crime. I write true crime.”

“I figured,” he said. “I don’t know if you know this, but when people saw somebody was moving in, the first thing everybody wondered was if it’d be somebody who knew.”

“That was all a long time ago,” I said.

“Here in town…” he said, looking for the right words. “Here in town it doesn’t feel like a long time to a lot of people.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I tried to let the quiet open up again. It didn’t work. Ken was looking at the beer in his hand, trying to think of how to say something.

“I don’t know if you know this, too, but everybody mainly feels like they dodged a bullet when nobody wrote a giant story about it like with the other thing that happened here.”

“Sure,” I said. I decided to go ahead and hit the ice with a hammer. “River’s Edge didn’t go over real well around here?”

“Man, no,” he said. “People are still mad about it. Almost none of it was actually true, the way they wrote it up. None of those kids were really like that, they were from families people knew. Normal moms and dads, you know. They didn’t like feeling like everybody from the outside was going to be looking at them funny forever.”

“I always try to be fair to the people I write about,” I volunteered, “but it’s always going to be different for the people who lived through it.” I was a little surprised; among the crowd I ran with, River’s Edge had always been seen as a good example of how to get a story right.

“I guess,” he said. “You saw the movie?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah. But that’s a movie. Writers have a little more headroom to work with.”

It was quiet for a minute, and maybe for two minutes; an easy quiet, but not, I thought, without some meaning to it.

“But if you write a book, maybe somebody makes a movie.”

“That’s true,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. There was another moment, a break—not enough for too much discomfort to gather, enough to let him ask directly if I was going to write about that other case, the one that had happened in my house before it became my house: the one hardly anybody remembered as of yet.

“Probably, yeah,” I said.

He raised his can; I joined him in his toast before he delivered it.

“Well, good luck,” he said, and then he told me a story about a guy who’d brought in a 1951 Mercedes for repair that looked like it came fresh off the production line, original paint and everything, and I took this as an indication that he’d said what he came to say and was winding things down; but he stuck around for another twenty minutes, which seemed very gracious to me, if I’d understood the point of our earlier conversation.