Oso Vista Canyon Road

Posted on May 31, 2003 in Book of Days Prose Arcana

Note: This is part of a series based on exercises from A Writer’s Book of Days. It’s something of a rebellion against the Friday Five and similar tupperware content memes.

Today’s topic: You hear a siren.

Her haunting song unnerved him. The waves of wordlessness dipped and crested from her tongue, matching the movements of the sea which was as dark a green as the spring leaves of a buckeye. “She’s calling to me!” thought Chester Ludland as he broke from his dream into the small spare caretaker’s bedroom. He scanned the room, fearful that the technicolor-blotched maiden would be sitting at the foot of the bed or atop the unfinished dresser, kicking her feet as she sang her undulating vocalise.

Red light flickered across the bedroom wall, outlining the arthritic shadow of the live oak that had stood in the Fever’s front yard for centuries, before the government surveyors came up this canyon with their yellow transits to set benchmarks to show that the land was no longer wild, that it was partible into number quadrants. Properties that only the rich could afford. The Fevers occupied the uppermost of the Oso Vista Canyon lots, the house least passed by motorists who came for the parties at the properous, broad Prairie Style home of the Rossmans or to clean the trachea tube of Mrs. Waxman as she wheezed in earshot of a constant nurse, fifty five years after she’d taken up smoking in grief for her much older husband.

No one, save a few hikers bent on straining their calves and lower backs for a glimpse of an unreachable redrock face where condors had nested before ranchers fed them poisoned carcasses, came past his house. Chester’s job was to fend off those who set off in the wrong direction from the trailhead. They knocked at his door instead of the Fevers, believing that a working class man would sympathize with their plight. If they wanted a drink of water, he sent them away. If they asked to use the telephone, he let them use his cordless on the porch. The intestinally panicked received detailed instructions to a ring of covering greasewood while they danced their toilet dance and whined at his exactitude.

Once the sheriff’s search and rescue used his driveway to park while they tramped two miles past the last sycamore in the canyon bottomland and well into the chaparral to rescue a barefeet-loving earth child who’d stepped on a Western Diamondback.

All these visits happened during the day. Chester checked his alarm clock and saw that it was 3 am. He looked out the window. Five tannish prowlers, a bulky paramedic, and a full length firetruck crowded the tiny National Forest lot. All blinking blood and untanned skin colors. Two deputies leaned against the cars, answering the gesticulations of Mr. Rossman with crossed arms. Rossman had braved the road beyond the estate gates in the company of a gigantic chow who thought of Chester as just another food. Chester scried the scene and waited for the troop of rescuers who would present the near cadaver whose discovery had precipitated this visit. Rossman saw him and pointed past the oak towards the house. A deputy nodded and walked to Chester’s door. Chester came promptly to the knock. “Mr. Ludland?”, the deputy asked. “Have you killed again?”

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Tomorrow’ topic/prompt: Write about something to hold on to.