Round Rock - Michelle Huneven [14]
RED RAY rose from that curb a sober man. He spent three weeks in the VA hospital in San Diego, then six months in an alcohol recovery house in Los Angeles. He underwent two operations to repair the splintered bones in his left leg. Except when he was bedridden, he attended AA meetings three times a day. He wrote letters to his accountant and creditors and straightened out his finances. He ate three squares, gained back some of the forty pounds lost on his three-month liquid diet. He lifted weights, read mystery novels, and talked endlessly with his fellow drunks.
In September, he signed himself out and drove north in a rented car. In the Tehachapis, he heard on the radio that a band of anticommunist and anti-Japanese Koreans had met in a plaza in downtown Seoul, chopped off their little fingers, packaged the digits, and mailed them to the Japanese premier. The premier, however, was in Mexico donning sombreros for reporters. And the Pope was in the Southwest donning feathered headdresses for other reporters. Red snapped off the radio. Finally sober and the world stays drunk.
The pale blond hills were dry and shiny with dead grass. He was on his way to Rito to check on his property before putting it on the market. He planned to return to San Francisco, join up with his old law firm, be a weekend father to his son. The sky was a soft talc blue. He drove west on the tiny two-lane blacktop that meandered like a dry river through the Santa Bernita Valley. Rounding a bend, he was suddenly, unexpectedly charmed by the vista of orderly orange groves, blue foothills, and distant purplish peaks. He’d been steeling himself to come here, to return to the scene of his consummate alcoholic crimes, where he had systematically relinquished and destroyed everything that was precious to him. He’d feared a relapse of fiery thirst, helpless remorse, clouds of pure pain. Instead, he was enchanted. A man could live peaceably in this valley. He could work outside in the air and the trees and soak up strength like sunlight.
Red spent weeks cleaning up after the last siege of vandalism in the mansion. He drove to Rito for meals at Happy Yolanda’s, but he drank only 7-Up or tomato juice. Nights, he drove to Buchanan or Ventura for AA meetings. He asked Doc Perrin, a gruff old-timer with eighteen years of sobriety, to be his sponsor. Red called Perrin every day, sometimes twice. “I’m thinking of letting rooms to drunks,” Red told him. “Turning the place into a kind of halfway house.”
Perrin laughed and wheezed into the phone until Red worried for his health. “There’s an idea,” Perrin gasped.
“You think it’s a bad idea?”
“Not if it keeps you sober. Better get yourself a good strong board of directors just in case….”
Red moved into one of the bungalows in the workers’ village on the far side of the estate. He made his intentions known at AA meetings, and by mid-October a volunteer work crew was showing up daily. By the middle of November, the job was done. The mansion was not the restored gingerbread castle of Yvette’s blueprints; historical societies would strike it from their records. The repairs were basic, sound, institutional in flavor, heavy on stainless steel and pre-waxed linoleum.
A neighbor filed three appeals to halt the zoning changes, but the court threw them out. So Red hired a full-time cook, a local recovering alcoholic named Ernie Tola. He sent word to all the jails and hospitals, detox centers and halfway houses in a fifty-mile radius that Round Rock Farm for Recovering Alcoholics would open its doors on December first. Over the Thanksgiving weekend, Red drove down to San Diego to pick up the first and only permanent resident that Round Rock would ever have: a speechless, witless, barely ambulatory