There are only seven small streets that intersect Laguna Canyon Road, most of which branch into still smaller tributaries that narrow and wind and finally disappear into the rough hills above. The people who live there are an admittedly oddball lot, and I can say this with no sense of denigration because I am one of them. There is a history of lawlessness in the canyon, going back to the days when bandits on horseback preyed on the travelers who used the road, which was then just a wandering dirt path that was the only inland route into the city. Much later, in the 1960s, Timothy Leary's Brotherhood was headquartered on Woodland, moving many thousand of tabs of LSD outward to the continent. (Leary was finally arrested by a Laguna Beach patrolman, which led to the discovery of his operation and a prison term. The patrolman went on to become a very fine chief of police here; Leary, of course, is now a counterculture gadfly popular on the college lecture circuit.)
In more recent years, the outlaw heritage of the canyon evolved into a quiet suspicion of authority, a prickly tone independence and pride at not living "in the city" at all. It was only four years ago that we canyon people allowed the city to annex us into its domain, a move not made without endless dickering for "concessions" and seemingly interminable meetings. The canyon is one of the few places in Laguna where artists can still afford to live, an irony in an upscale town that prides itself, profitably, on being an art colony. The canyon a hodgepodge place, by Orange County standards: a cave house stands beside a Jehovah's Witness temple, trailers hide on flattened pads hidden by eucalyptus and near mansions; artists live next door to tax attorneys, there are families, gay couples, horse people, bird fanciers, bonsai growers, snake collectors-the friendly, the meddlesome, the isolated, and the bizarre. There are also littered along the narrow roads a number ramshackle cottages no larger than rooms, really, that are rentable, cheap, and private.
All of which is to say that as we climbed the steep, winding road called Red Tail Lane, I saw the houses and people in them as neighbors; I felt a sense of kinship with the dwellers there; I believed that so far as the word community went, we had fine one; and I was already wondering whether the Midnight Eye had chosen this place because of its proximity to my home, whether it was his way of showing how easily he could strike in this, my virtual backyard. No victim is faceless, but anyone of this canyon was of myself, too. I felt responsible. And I also felt in the pit of my stomach the soft, shifting reflection of dread as I pictured Elsie and Leonard Stein, proprietors of the Pampered Pet Palace. They were two very kindly people who ran the place, and they had taken fine care of Isabella's beloved dog one summer when we were away in Mexico. I remembered very specifically, that Mrs. Stein wore a small Star of David on a chain around her neck.
Much can be said for the mercy of forgetfulness, although I have actually forgotten very little of what I saw inside the Pampered Pet Palace, 1871 Red Tail Lane, Laguna Beach, at 2:35 p.m. on Wednesday, July 7. Forgotten, no, but… well, edited. Organized. Arranged.
I still own every detail of that scene, but they are far from useful in everyday life, in fact they are counterproductive. Occasionally, one detail-for example, the wall calendar in the lobby, picturing the July dog (a papillon) with a piece of human brain matter stuck to its surface, obliterating the dates 17, 18, 24, and 25-slips from its appointed place and I have to guide it like an escaped mamba back into the box. Sometimes-rarely, so far-they all manage to get loose at once, and I have a situation best described as untenable.
So bear with me now, if you choose, some of the particulars-trapped but relentlessly active-that I will carry to my deathbed, such as the body of a woman (Elsie Stein, fifty-one) strewn raglike in the lobby corner behind the desk, face gone, head open and emptied, the gold Star of David necklace still attached and dangling in a red-black pond that rippled in the currents of a ceiling fan, all illuminated by the desk lamp, still on; such as the lobby calendar marred with her brains and the comet of fluids that struck the wall around it; such as the first room on the left down the hallway, the door to which said vipooches only and contained in the very center of its floor an actual arrangement of small canine bodies stacked in opposing threes like firewood, the top row of poodle, miniature dachshund, and Pomeranian having slumped out of alignment and rolled off; such as the sweetish gag of urine and blood in that place; such as the room marked cat house, in which all six guests ended their six or fifty-four lives in one corner-two tabbies, Siamese, two calicoes, a black, draped with such feline grace as to appear asleep if not for the heads; such as the outdoor row of kennels, six on one side of a cement walkway and six on the other, over the gates of which hung the larger dogs, like towels, drying on the chain link, shattered, leaking audibly-each drop distinct and resonant-into the narrow drains that ran along the front of each row and deposited by invisible slope their contents through circular screens at the end of the row each drain clogged red and black and stagnant; such as the guest house beyond the kennel run, squatting quaint and yellow beneath the eucalyptuses, potted pansies, and carnations on the steps, this small cottage, door open, housing sprawled and naked in the bedroom Leonard Stein (fifty-six) facedown and still clutching a long-barreled. 38, a large, plump man with thin white legs bowed even at rest, the trail of black ants scintilla but orderly from his head to where they vanished cargo-laden through a corner crack in the floorboards; such as Dorsey, mixed-breed toy that had dodged the slaughter and wailed alone from the narrow space between the wall and the refrigerator the kitchen and had to be pried out, trembling, with a broom handle by none other than stoic Martin Parish, who announced in a voice almost a whisper that the sound was going to drive him crazy but that was understood by us others, given the context, as a brief escape from the helplessness of death to the terrified demands of the only thing left living there; such as, an hour later, the largely mute crowd that gathered at the crime scene tape suspended across the road between a crepe myrtle and a cottonwood, these faces bereft of everything but fear somehow fully understanding the scene behind the tape-old gray couple dispirited and solemn, a boy of perhaps ten who sobbed and inquired repeatedly after the condition and whereabouts of "Tiger," his mother with one hand pressed lightly to her face in an extended signal of tragedy while the other rested on the corn-silk pale hair of her boy: such as, almost astonishingly, the group of youngish women and older men arriving en masse, each bearing a walkie-talkie, each wearing the blue T-shirt marked citizens' task force and sporting the silk-screened face of Kimmy Wynn, each conspicuously aware of and silently acknowledging how unsuitable he and she had been to the task, how superfluous and minor and absurd they were, what a great and unintended insult was their presence-you could see the profound shame on their faces mixed with the one faintly redeeming conviction they had left: to stick this one out, at least do what they could, even if nothing more than to bear witness to their own gross ineffectuality and confirm the terrible lopsided rout in a battle that their God was supposed to help them with because they believed He would; such as the ashen faces of Winters and Wald; such as Karen Schultz on the steps of the rear porch, her head resting on her arms resting on her knees and her back shaking; such as the chopper fiercely cutting the sky to little effect on the vultures who simply lowered their orbit so their shadows met the ground clearly and you could see the dark shapes of wings gliding across the road and angling without effort up the walls of the old house and finally into the trees, only to circle and pass again; such as the Labrador I nearly tripped over at the far end of the compound where the small yard met the canyon scrub, an animal beaten but still breathing, very rapidly, too damaged to do more, his smooth old dog's teeth red in his panting mouth and drops of blood still shining around the base of a staunch native oak; such as the fact that I sat down near that oak finally because my legs felt aching and old, sat there for a long while because it was the only thing I was absolutely positive I could do, and do well.