Verdugo Hills

VERDUGO HILLS

                                               By Deirdre Fryer Baird

Jimmy hasn’t slept well lately. His dreams disturb him and fill his body with apprehension, making him wander through the night. He feels as though he is being watched, he knows it.  He sits on the edge of his bed feeling discombobulated about his dream of longing and lust that turned to fire. His gray mane of hair hangs in his face. He can’t seem to remember the day or the date, and he is tired. When he wanders the house during the night, he lights a candle so he won’t disturb others in the house or stub his toe. He and his wife Annie stopped sharing a bed years ago because she said he drove her crazy. She now sleeps in what was their daughter's bedroom who moved away ten years ago. To keep him from her, she locks her room at night. But he can still hear her moaning and laughing in there at night like some weird ghost. She is so stupid, she doesn’t know he has a key.

Age is a wonderful thing.

He tries to ignore the whisperings and bells ringing in his ears at night. It means nothing unless someone from the past was trying to tell him something. Maybe, it is a ghost. That ghost of the girl he still lusts for.

He had heard and seen the aftermath of the spirits who had lived in this house before. They would find broken plates in the dining room and garbage moved from the can to the floor. Hate and anger permeated the walls. He and Annie used to think it was thrilling and funny. But he could hear them now too. Mumbling their angry words from the past. Violence and dark things had happened in the house before they bought it twenty years ago, whole lives lived.

He pattered through the house that was situated at the base of the Verdugo mountains near the forest of Angeles Crest. He breathed in the clear air with a tinge of crisp pine in the bright of the early morning from the open window. The floors were tile but were never cold due to the radiant heating – the hot water pipes that had been built into the floors of this house back in the forties.

Jimmy moved from the bedroom through the living room into the kitchen for his cup of tea. He was surprised to find Annie with her caregiver, Susan, at the table laughing at something. “He had a bunch of newspapers, but I hid all the lighters,” Annie chortled in her mixed-up way. They shut up when they saw him. Annie was usually sleeping at this time in the morning, always sleeping in the morning. Before he could cope with her, he backed out of the kitchen and opened the front door to gaze upon the bluish Verdugo mountains where the Angeles Forest tinged with green and purple was so close and overwhelming that he could almost be smothered by it. It was like that corny patriotic song about the majestic purple mountains when they were illuminated by the sun as they were now. But he couldn’t remember the song or the name of the song.

It seemed as though they had lived in this house forever. They made it theirs; as much as anyone can make an old house theirs, but it was never theirs. The others had never left. There were always stories and secrets in the walls. Rumors from neighbors about violence between the adults and little children and dead babies, but that was only gossip. Their kids had grown up and moved on and found reasons not to come home, but that was the way of the world.

He stood outside his front door looking up at the mountains and his eyes moved down, distracted by a beautiful girl standing across the street leaning against a car. She was small and didn’t look old enough to drive, budding in adolescence. He felt that stirring of his manhood, a distant clarion call that had deserted him many years ago. He could take her, subdue her, have her and no one would know. She was staring at him and he reformed his thoughts before he confronted her knowing that she was looking at the house.

He put on his happy face and waved at her.

As he ascended the driveway, he felt that she was familiar. That sense of having heard a song before, but you couldn’t remember the words. She was small and pretty at that age between childhood and adulthood. She had longer brown-reddish hair, a petite figure breasts had formed, and wore aviator sunglasses that made it hard to discern her thoughts or expression.

“Hi. Good morning. Can I help you?” He wiped at the saliva from the corner of his mouth.

Her head turned slowly as though she had only now noticed him. She removed her sunglasses, and he was disarmed.

Behind those glasses were beautiful crystal eyes of blue-green with yellow tinges. Thousand-year-old eyes rolled around in his head. If times were different, he would have taken her in his arms kissed her hard with passion, and filled her on the hood of the car.

She interrupted his thoughts and pointed at the house with the stem of her sunglasses.

“Do you live in that house?”

He wanted to give her something. A special answer or an armful of flowers.

“Yes, we do,” was his only reply.”

“My father built that house.”

He touched her arm to convey his want. She gave a gentle shrug to get him off, like a bug.

“We love it here. The house with the warm floors there is nothing like it.”

She looked directly at him, saw through him, knew what he wanted and why he lied.

“That house was built with hate and full of vengeful spirits. Burn it to the ground.”

“No, no,” he said, with a small laugh turning from her and pointing at the house. “There aren’t any spirits. It’s a great house.” But she knew he was a liar. She knew that he heard the whisperings at night.

“After you burn it down, salt the earth so the spirits can never return.”

Jimmy turned and she was gone.

He returned to the house and he ignored what he knew was there. It was more difficult to ignore his wife.

“We saw you talking to yourself again in the street. You are an embarrassment. I will have you put in an asylum.” 

He was now a non-husband; a partial caregiver. He had sold his business and he was only able to afford a part-time nurse for Annie. She would have to go to a facility soon. Sometimes, he thought he was losing his mind.

Now, this girl from his past had appeared out of nowhere to tell him his house was haunted. “Burn it to the ground and salt the earth,” she said. Like he was going to do that.

He remembered her but wanted to forget. Her father was a builder of houses and he now remembered Susan was not truly a caregiver but that girl’s mother. They were horrible parents, more interested in burning down the marriage and rejecting their child. The girl, Lisa turned to her best friend and was at Jimmy’s house so often it was as though she lived there. He liked her because she was smart. He taught her how to play chess until, by the age of eleven, she could beat him. Periodically, her parents would reconcile and want the unwanted child back. They were pals of a sort, until she entered high school and everything changed.

Jimmy woke that night and wandered the house with a candle in his hand. He entered the bedroom where his daughter had once lived and saw the two old women encircled in each other's arms. He was appalled.  The two women morphed into his older self with long hair and a child. A child-woman who was friends with his daughter. That night they were alone in the house and it wasn’t his fault, he couldn’t help it. She had started it and flirted with him, teased him, and sat on his lap. Daring him to do what he did. When he took her it was like glory. She screamed and when he covered her mouth somehow, she died. He never meant it to happen because he liked her. He threw her body into the trunk of his car and drove her up to the forest, then dug a fire pit in a ravine. He burned her body and clothes like trash, then chopped off her head and hands to bury them at separate locations like he had seen in the movies. He covered the remains in the hole with dirt. When his daughter asked about her friend Lisa, he said she was crying when she lost the chess game and left.  She had been known to run away.

His daughter mounted a search and put up fliers. Lisa’s parents divorced and Susan moved into Jimmy’s house to keep his wife company. No one asked him about Lisa ever again. As fall morphed into winter and snow covered the forest, and in the summer fires blazed eating trees there, year after year no one found the remains of the burned, murdered girl.

He looked upon the two old women in their disgusting embrace. There was ringing in his head and a whispering in his ear. “They are evil, burn the house to the ground, and salt the earth.” He turned and the beautiful Lisa of his sin that had seen before was there. She was so near to him that he could smell her sweetness. He tried to grab her and dropped the candle in his hand. It rolled toward the bed where the women were deep in sleep. He wanted to pick up the candle but the bedding was in flames and he was afraid. There were flashes of blue and red like those Verdugo Hills in the sunlit mornings. He ran back to his room and hid under the covers. He could smell the bitter smoke and ash and could hear the rancorous screams of the dying ladies. but he did not wake. The whisperings in his ears said; “Burn it down.” He peeked out from the covers and the small beautiful Lisa stood over him.

Light burnt through her hair and her eyes. He felt the desire in his loins.

“Annie, Annie,” he cried before he realized that his house was in flames and the firefighters pulled him out of the burning house through the window.

Annie and the caregiver had both died.

Only earth remained of that house with warm floors. Jimmy was going to live with his daughter in cold Chicago. His daughter drove him to where the house once stood before they went to the airport. He stood on the dirt with a blue vessel of salt. But she was already there.

The enchanting Lisa of his desire who drove him to ravishment and murder swished salt back and forth over the earth. She took him by the hand and they salted that wicked ground together.

“They are at peace,” she said. His arm encircled her waist, and she pushed him away. “Not in this life.” She smiled and she knew he had set the fires for her, and for what was once a young man’s desire.

She let go of his hand and took the salt canister from him.

Jimmy’s daughter calls to him. It is time for him to go. He turns for a last look at the Verdugo Hills which are purple in the evening sunlight.

As spirits must do, I finish the work alone.