The Irresistible Muse of Jack Kidd Read online

  I turned off La Palma Avenue and traveled along a private road that ran the length of the southern perimeter of the ranch. To the south was the Santa Ana River and to the north were the Santa Fe railroad tracks, two very old landmarks that will no doubt remain long after my remaining trees become just another strip mall or housing tract.

  I stopped alongside the road, got out of my car and walked to the edge of the trees. This was where the lion’s share of my family’s assets once stood: two-thousand acres of Valencia orange trees. The other thousand acres were avocado groves, planted both profitably and pristinely along the surrounding foothills.

  I knelt down and raked my fingers beneath a tree. I lifted a handful of topsoil and examined it, smelling first that distinct microbial odor of freshly plowed earth; I then allowed its cool, loamy texture to sift through my fingers.

  Since it was early summer, the trees were set with a crop, and so I picked an orange and dug my thumb into the thin rind and sucked out the juice to review its flavor. My eyes scanned the treetops that were now just a fraction of what they once were. A red-tailed hawk, circling high above on a thermal of warm air, screeched out its distinctive call, and miles away stood the bluish backdrop of the San Gabriel Mountains. Behind me in the not-to-faraway distant was the irritating drone of the 91 freeway.

  My relatives grew many crops here, so long ago that nobody cared anymore. Open land is what they saw first, and what the Native Americans saw before them, vast grasslands dancing in the afternoon breezes with live oak trees, God-like and centurion, spotting the horizon. I finished peeling the orange and ate most of it. Another two weeks of tree time, I thought, as I savored the near-perfect juice in my mouth.

  I often wondered if I could’ve made it in that time, a hundred years ago when my family settled this land. Neither running water nor a toilet they had. No, I reminded myself. You couldn’t have made it then. It was an age of pure practicality and sacrifice, of brawny, hands-on work. I have their name but was born the brat I am to merely live off the backs of those pioneers, those rugged mavericks. I tossed the handful of shredded orange peel onto the ground and stared at the fractured pieces.

  “One last look, huh, Jack?” I grumbled to myself. “One last feel of the land, a whiff of clean air—a taste of golden nectar?” I shook my head. “You staked the whole damn thing, you idiot.”

  A sudden gust of wind swept in, skipping sunlight against the trees. As if I had to I turned my head toward a certain direction I try never to look. A hundred yards away in the center of the groves stood the house I grew up in, a two-story Victorian with its distinctive gabled roof and clapboard siding. Along with the surrounding trees, it was one of the last remaining relics of old Yorba Linda.

  The house had a style more appropriate for a plantation home nestled in some balmy, South Eastern state rather than here in this semi-desert climate. But it stood old and germane, and before I could turn away from its haunts within, it all began to turn in my head.

  I had the best of both worlds when growing up, life in an open rural setting with all the modern conveniences. I was lucky in other ways too; I never really had to work the farm. We had plenty of migrant labor to do the bulk of the picking and loading, which meant I spent most of my time doing what I wanted to do as a young man, including many hours of joy riding my bicycle through town and along the dirt roads that crisscrossed our groves.

  It was a summer day that I remembered the most, the day I moved on from reading comic books and my regularly scheduled gapes of undivided attention at my prized stash of Oui and Penthouse magazines. Like most fifteen year old males I lacked any purpose in life other than sports, hanging out with friends, and imaginary journeys atop nude centerfolds. Our house servant Maria, a twenty-five year old Mexican-migrant worker who spoke broken English and kept our house in top condition, both inspired and accommodated my desires.

  And so it happened. After months of catching her glances and the telling signals of her hair and fingers brushing explosive nerve endings along my arms, shoulders, and freshly sprouted leg hairs, we finally surrendered to the urge. It began with tender lessons that eventually turned into romps of hard-core schooling throughout the house. Those lovely, cocoa eyes, that long, soft raven hair...she was all things woman.

  During the evenings my parents were usually away from the house, and so Maria and I got away with it easily. But not my father. Wives always know these things, and sons too when they walk into a certain bedroom unannounced and find the master of the house on top of one subservient maid.

  The scene exposed too much for me to understand; the very underpinnings of my life, of who I was and what I was to become liquefied inside me. The gulf between me and my two parents became even more so, but not until my father severed it for good.

  Even after his butt-naked exposé in front his son, dear Dad still couldn’t resist Maria’s room. And what was once my feverish romp through a candy store of sexual awakening turned instead into a lonely stupor of confusion...a Greek tragedy.

  After months of knowing about Maria, not to mention years of knowing about other compliant maidservants of years past whom my father had tucked into bed at night, my mother did what any doting, devoutly Methodist wife whose heart had been eviscerated beyond repair would do: she doled out revenge.

  My father was a stoic type and able to fool people easily into believing that he was a well-mannered, well-read, all around nice guy. In truth, he was an uneducated, self-taught dreamer to anyone who honestly knew him. Along with his skewed notions of history and butchered quotes from literary greats, there were other romantic idioms and proverbial sayings my father was fond of babbling: “They’re like golden nectar on leaves of wintergreen in this desert I call my garden,” he would spew out in ad nauseam regarding the cash crop that hung on his trees.

  As a young man I respectively listened to his ignorant ruminations, yet I knew then, as I know more now, that it was all bullshit. Many, mostly family and other like-minded ignoramuses, called his words charming or even profound. But the Freudian, Jungian meanings simply revealed a sodbuster reaching for the stars.

  Besides his obsession of harvesting golden nectar from trees of wintergreen and other hourglass shapes of desire he wasn’t supposed to have, he was also a collector of things foreign and exotic, especially knives and swords. And so a prized sword, a nineteenth-century French saber, supposedly one of Napoleon Bonaparte’s, was snatched by my mother one summer night from inside father’s lair of collections.

  In her hands that evening was a gleaming blade of silvery vengeance, razor sharp with intended malice, and at the other side of the house was the dishonorable maid’s chamber.

  The door opened quietly, revealing first and then answering all the questions that had blistered inside my mother’s head for years. And like the whipping of wayward children, Mother unleashed the punishment, lashing the sword against my father and Maria until the symptom was gone and the disease had stopped and all that was left were two corpses lying in a blood-splattered bedroom glistening in ghostly moonlight.

  After the investigation and the trial, made all too easy by her loving, mitigating confession, my mother received only a life sentence. There were weekly visits I had with her at first, then monthly visits until I went off to college on the other side of the country. I became lost in my studies and in safer parts of reality while my mother remained lost in the past. A once loyal matron who cared dutifully for a farmer’s homestead had been reduced to a disheveled hag doing laundry detail in the morning, then allowed to do nothing more than gaze out a prison-cell window for the remainder of every afternoon.

  After fifteen years of unsuspecting duty, the guards mistakenly took their attention off her routine. She had found the means, fresh linens tied in knots, to hang herself from a rafter in the prison. It took only five minutes for the asphyxiation to occur and for my mother to escape…

  The distant sound of a vehicle moving through the groves broke the silence. A pickup truck with
the name Kidd Ranch stenciled on the door traveled slowly along a road that cut through the small grove. The truck stopped several yards away, seemingly hiding behind the trees.

  Two of my farmhands, Ricardo and his son Fernando, got out of the truck. As if not to break any of the crisp, dry leaves that laid beneath their feet, the two men sauntered carefully toward me along a wide furrow between the trees.

  The young one, Fernando, like his father, was short in height with a wiry build, and they both wore straw, cowboy hats that shaded their faces.

  “Hola, Señior Kidd,” Ricardo said. “Just visiting today?”

  “I am. Needed some air. The trees are in good shape, Ricardo, another two or three weeks and the crop should be ready.”

  Ricardo nodded. A pleased look formed his face as he panned his sight along the treetops. “The trees have wonderful fruit this year, Señior Kidd. It will be a good harvest.”

  “How’s the crew? Will there be enough hands?” I asked.

  “Si. More than enough,” Ricardo replied.

  The young man, Fernando, turned and looked at the distant house and then at me and asked, “Señior Kidd, why do you not live in your house?”

  Ricardo gave his son an abrupt look.

  “It’s too old and too far away from everything,” I said. I smiled, appeasing the young man’s curiosity.

  “It’s not as old as you think, Señior Kidd,” Fernando said. “I have been inside it many times.” He paused, aiming his eyes toward the ground, as if his intrusion inside my house were a crime, seemingly forgetting that one of his duties was to keep watch on the house. He steadied his eyes on me again. “You know, to check on things and to keep the animals and vagrants out. I can tell you honestly that it would make a fine house to live in. It has years of dust inside and the paint is gone but nothing that couldn’t be fixed.”

  “I’m sure you’re right, Fernando.”

  “You never go inside, Señior Kidd. Why not?”

  “Cállate, hijo,” Ricardo said, telling his son to be quiet. Ricardo was old enough to know the history of the house.

  “It’s all right, Ricardo,” I said. “I have no more need for the house, Fernando.”

  “Then what will become of it?”

  “I’m saving it as a gift.”

  The two peered at me as if a door to a forbidden vault had just been teased open.

  “Vamonos, mijo,” Ricardo said to his son. “We have much work to do. Adios, Señior Kidd, may you enjoy the air some more.” Ricardo maneuvered himself and his son back toward the trees.

  “Adios,” I said.

  I took a deep breath and panned my sight along the treetops one last time, then turned around slowly, noticing the sterile gleam of my silver sport car and how ridiculous it looked parked on an earthen road next to a backdrop of beautiful trees.

  5

  “I’m only here because I need your help,” I said.

  “You’re here, Jack, because you’re a misogynist who hides from intimacy by getting his rocks off on compliant women,” my psychoanalyst replied. Her name was Dr. Brenda Murphy, retired MD. She was also my dance instructor, as well as adequately compliant.

  “I am a sick individual,” I said.

  “Welcome to the club called humanity.”

  It was late afternoon, and the good doctor and I reclined naked on a portable futon inside her office.

  “They’re finally gunning for me,” I said.

  “Who’s gunning for you, dear?”

  “Some greedy bastards.”

  “And how can I help with these greedy bastards?”

  “I need help sketching out some nightmares I’ve had lately and some recent events.”

  “Are you saying your nightmares have something to do with these greedy bastards and recent events?”

  “Not sure, but I think there’re connected.”

  Brenda eyed me for a moment, then reached for a pack of cigarettes on a nearby table. The futon we reclined on took up half the office, which wasn’t an analyst’s office at all but a converted backroom in a ballroom dance studio that Brenda owned. She opened the pack and pulled out a Virginia Slim, then probed her hand under the linen in search for a lighter. She said, “What happened this afternoon stays here, tomcat.”

  “As always.” Brenda sometimes tagged me with cutesy terms of endearment; tomcat seemed to be her favorite.

  Still searching for a lighter, she raked her fingers along the floor, all the while contorting her fifty-year-old nude, lanky body, a work in progress from a prominent cosmetic surgeon, into some erotically weird angles. After collecting only a handful of dust bunnies, she stopped her search and sat upright on the futon with an unlit cigarette wedged in her fingers.

  “Actually, Jack, if you really want to sketch out who’s gunning for you, a wise start may be that famous supermodel, Michelle Brigham, you murdered a year ago.” The look on my analyst’s face switched to a scavenging voyeur, one eager to resume nibbling on rotted carrion.

  “It was an accident, not a murder,” I said. The same way I’ve grumbled that lame retort to myself at least a million times. So here I lay in classic, supine position, Jack Albert Kidd, gigolo extraordinaire, counting freckles on a lover’s ceiling and confessing my haunts that I knew if weren’t un-kinked soon would be the ruin of me. And one haunt in particular, the peppery, sweet fragrance Michelle Brigham wore the evening I killed her, Giorgio Armani, to be exact, haunted me nightly. That musky, floral fragrance wafted through my mind like a nagging stench, reminding me always that I was a killer on the lam, holed up in purgatory. And along with that haunting stench was the twitch and swell of her neck muscles and the throbbing of her heartbeat against my hands as I squeezed her throat and pounded my hips on top of her. Get her to climax, I kept thinking—a near-death climax?—Shit, I’m going to kill her! Cum, cum, cum—already! Pounding, squeezing, pounding....

  “Jack? Oh, Jack?” Brenda’s voice crooned in the nearby distance. I lay quiet, mooring my gondola of the underworld back to terra firma.

  “I lost you for a moment,” she said. “You wanted to tell me about a dream, or was it greedy bastards?” Along with Brenda’s graying hair and watery-green eyes, eyes battle hardened by years of head shrinking, I had a hard time deciding if she was just too old for her age or too fallow and fruitless for her years.

  I replied, “I have two dreams. One takes place in a farmhouse I grew up in, the other is about me as this aged-out guy surf fishing on a foreign beach. Both dreams always end the same, badly.”

  She sighed. “Let’s start with the beach first, shall we?”

  “Brazil, Rio the Janeiro. I’m dressed like a beachcomber, and I’m wearing a Panama hat with a silk, blue band around the crown. Anyway, along comes this woman.”

  “And why does that not surprise me?”

  “This woman is strolling along the beach toward me. She’s young with long dark hair, a cocoa butter complexion, and nice legs. She’s wearing a bikini with a red, silk sarong around her waist.”

  “Hmmm, a blue band around the crown of a man’s hat suggests loyalty and honor; a red sarong around the waist of a woman begets passion and danger. You’re a high-brow who enjoys living on the edge.”

  I paused for a moment, pondering Brenda’s summation. Voices began building to a rumble outside the office. I said, “Shouldn’t we get dressed now?”

  “Relax, Jack.” She lofted the unlit cigarette between her fingers and probed on, “You killed Michelle Brigham in a Rio the Janeiro hotel room, didn’t you?”

  “I’m here to talk about my dreams.”

  “I am talking about your dreams. Describe for me more this man, yourself, on the beach.”

  “I’m middle-aged with gray hair and a gray beard; got a little bit of a pooch for a belly, too; there’s this Ernest Hemingway look about me.” I huffed out a laugh. “Anyhow, there’s a tote bag on the beach with a bottle of Sangria on ice inside next to a nice-sized Red Snapper I’d caught.”

  �
�A Red Snapper, did you say? My God, this is too easy.” After she finished her artless chortle, then mistakenly pulled a drag from her unlit cigarette, she asked, “That seems to be how it always happens with you, Jack…women always luring you into the wrong place?”

  I glanced at the door. “Sounds like more students outside waiting to use the futon.”

  Ignoring that, Brenda went on, “Didn’t you tell me last session that you entertained yourself by altering Jack Kidd into real-life alter egos, where you traveled the world to find an irresistible muse or to research a novel or some lame-ass pursuit?”

  Without answering I lifted myself from the futon. At that moment I had a distinct awareness that someone from out there was watching me. I turned and saw an elderly woman with cotton-white hair standing in the doorway staring at my bare ass. I shuffled to a nearby desk and lifted a binder to cover my manliness.

  “I’m done with the books, Brenda,” the woman said, “anything else?” This woman, an employee of some kind, acted as though she had busted in on this kind of scene regularly.

  “That’ll be all, Gertrude. Before you go, say hello to Jack Kidd, one of my newest students.” A broad smile gleamed across Brenda’s face as she watched me squirm.

  “Oh, yes, Mr. Kidd, you’re just the man I wanted to see.”

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  Brenda coughed out a laugh.

  Gertrude said, “I don’t mean to intrude, but I have a question regarding the real estate market. I understand you’re a Realtor.”

  I glanced at Brenda for a way out of this, but all I saw was her teasing face.

  The old woman continued, “My husband and I plan to retire soon and we need to sell our house. Could you escort us through the sale?”

  “Of course, Gertrude,” Brenda said, “Jack is one of the top escorts in town.”

  I gave Brenda a stiff look.