S Is for Silence

tone, long and gently wavy. She was small and pretty in a 1950s kind of way, more voluptuous than we’d consider stylish in this day and age. Over one arm she carried a straw tote from which a tiny fluffy pup appeared, staring at the camera with bright black eyes. “When was this taken?”
    “Early June, I think.”
    “And the dog’s name is Baby?”
    “Baby, yes. A purebred Pomeranian everyone hated except my mom, who really doted on the little turd. Given the chance, Dad would have taken a shovel and pounded her into the ground like a tent peg. His words.”
    A two-by-four porch post appeared to be growing from the top of Violet’s head. Behind her, on the porch rail, I could read the last two house numbers: 08. “Is this the house where you lived?”
    Daisy nodded. “I’ll take you by when we’re over there.”
    “I’d like that.”

    We were silent on the drive to Serena Station. The sky was a flat pale blue, looking bleached by the sun. The hills rolled gently toward the horizon, the grass the color of brown sugar. Daisy’s was the only car on the road. We passed abandoned oil rigs, rust-frozen and still. To my left I caught a glimpse of an old quarry and rusting railroad tracks that began and ended nowhere. On the only visibly working ranch I saw, ten head of cattle had settled on the ground like brawny cats in the slatted shade of a corral.
    The town of Serena Station appeared beyond a bend in the two-lane road, with a street sign indicating that it was now called Land’s End Road. The street ran in a straight line for three blocks and ended abruptly at a locked gate. Beyond the gate, the road wound up a low hill, but it didn’t look like anyone had traveled it for quite some time. There were numerous cars parked in town—in driveways, along the streets, behind the general store—but nothing seemed to move except the wind. A few houses were boarded up, their exteriors bereft of color. In front of one, the paint on the white picket fence had been stripped to the wood, and portions of it sagged. In the small patchy lawns, what little grass remained was dry, and the ground looked hard and unforgiving. In one yard, a camper shell sat under an overhang of corrugated green plastic sheets. There were tree stumps and a tumble of firewood. What had once been the automobile-repair shop stood open to the elements. A tall, dark palm tree towered above a length of chain-link fence that extended across the rear. A stack of fifty five-gallon oil drums had been left behind. Weeds grew in dry-looking puffs that, in time, the wind would blow free, sending them rolling down the middle of the road. A hound trotted along a side street on a doggie mission of some kind.
    Behind the town the hills rose sharply, not mountains by any stretch. They were rugged, without trees, hospitable to wildlife but uninviting to hikers. I could see power lines looping from house to house, and a series of telephone poles stretched away from me like hatch marks on a pencil drawing. We parked and got out, ambling down the middle of the cracked blacktop road. There were no sidewalks and no streetlights. There was no traffic and, therefore, no traffic lights. “Not exactly bustling,” I remarked. “I take it the auto-repair shop went belly-up.”
    “That belonged to Tannie’s brother, Steve. Actually, he moved his operation into Santa Maria, figuring if someone’s car broke down, the owner would never manage to get it out here. He wasn’t about to offer to go get them. At the time, he only had one tow truck and that was usually out of commission.”
    “Not much of an advertisement for auto repair.”
    “Yeah, well he was bad at it anyway. Once he moved, he hired a couple of mechanics and now he’s doing great.”
    Daisy pointed out the house where Chet Cramer lived with his current wife. “The Cramers were the only family with any sizeable income. They had the first television set anybody’d ever seen. If you played your cards right, you could watch Howdy Doody or Your Show of Shows. Liza took me over there once, but Kathy didn’t like me so I wasn’t invited back.”
    The Cramers’ house was the only two-story structure I’d seen, an old-fashioned farmhouse with a wide wooden porch. I’d stuck a pack of index cards in my jacket pocket, and I used one now to make a crude map of the town. I’d be talking to a number of current and former residents, and I thought it would help to have a sense of where they’d lived