Winter Moon

shaped like hot dogs and derby hats, churches, automated car washes,

and so much more. Deep beneath parts of the metropolis, those

fossilized monsters lay in eternal sleep. Through September and

October, Jack felt the city was still a pit in which he was mired.

He believed he was obligated to give Lyle Crawford a thirty-day

notice.

And at the advice of their Realtor, before listing the house for sale,

they painted it inside and out, installed new carpet, and made minor

repairs. The moment Jack made the decision to leave the city, he'd

mentally packed and decamped. Now his heart was in the Montana

highlands east of the Rockies, while he was still trying to pull his

feet out of the L.A. tar. Because they no longer needed every dollar

of equity in the house, they priced it below market value. In spite of

poor economic conditions, it moved quickly. By the twenty-eighth of

October, they were in a sixty-day escrow with a buyer who appeared

qualified, and they felt reasonably confident about embarking upon a

new life and leaving the finalization of the sale to their Realtor. On

November fourth, they set out for their new home in a Ford Explorer

purchased with some of their inheritance. Jack insisted on leaving at

six in the morning, determined that his last day in the city would not

include the frustrating crawl of rush-hour traffic. They took only

suitcases and a few boxes of personal effects, and shipped little more

than books. Additional photographs sent by Paul Youngblood had

revealed that their new house was already furnished in a style to which

they could easily adjust.

They might have to replace a few upholstered pieces, but many items

were antiques of high quality and considerable beauty. Departing the

city on Interstate 5, they never looked back as they crested the

Hollywood Hills and went north past Burbank, San Fernando, Valencia,

Castaic far out of the suburbs, into the Angeles National Forest across

Pyramid Lake, and up through the Tejon Pass between the Sierra Madre

and the Tehachapi Mountains. Mile by mile, Jack felt himself rising

out of an emotional and mental darkness. He was like a swimmer who had

been weighed down with iron shackles and blocks, drowning in oceanic

depths, now freed and soaring toward the surface, light, air. Toby was

amazed by the vast farmlands flanking the highway, so Heather quoted

figures from a travel book. The San Joaquin Valley was more than a

hundred fifty miles long, defined by the Diablo Range on the west and

Sierra foothills to the distant east. Those thousands of square miles

were the most fertile in the world, producing eighty percent of the

entire country's fresh vegetables and melons, half its fresh fruit and

almonds, and much more.

They stopped at a roadside produce stand and bought a one-pound bag of

roasted almonds for a quarter of what the cost would have been in a

supermarket. Jack stood beside the Explorer, eating a handful of nuts,

staring at vistas of productive fields and orchards. The day was

blessedly quiet, and the air was clean. ..- Residing in the city, it

was easy to forget there were other ways to live, worlds beyond the

teeming streets of the human hive. He was a sleeper waking to a real

world more diverse and interesting than the dream he had mistaken for

reality. In pursuit of their new life, they reached Reno that night,

Salt Lake City the next, and Eagle's Roost, Montana, at three o'clock

in the afternoon on the sixth of .. November.

To Kill a Mockingbird was one of Jack's favorite novels, and Atticus

Finch, the courageous lawyer of that book, would have been at home in

Paul Youngblood's office on the top floor of the only three-story

building in Eagle's Roost. The wooden blinds surely dated from

mid-century. The mahogany wainscoting, bookshelves, and cabinets were

glass-smooth from decades of hand polishing. The room had an air of

gentility, a learned quietude, and the shelves held volumes of history

and philosophy as well as lawbooks.

The attorney actually greeted them with, "Howdy, neighbors! What a

pleasure this is, a genuine pleasure." He had a firm handshake and a

smile like soft sunshine on mountain crags.

Paul Youngblood would never have been recognized as a lawyer in L.A. and

he might have been removed discreetly but forcefully if he had ever

visited the swanky offices of the powerhouse firms quartered in Century

City. He was fifty, tall, lanky, with closecropped iron-gray hair.

His face was creased and ruddy from years spent outdoors, and his big,

leathery hands were scarred by physical labor. He wore scuffed boots,

tan jeans, a white shirt, and a bolo tie with a silver clasp in the

form of a bucking bronco.

In L.A. people in similar outfits were dentists or accountants or

executives, costumed for an evening at a Country-Western bar, and could

not disguise their true nature. But Youngblood looked as if he had

been born in Western garb, birthed between a cactus and a campfire, and

raised on horseback.

Although he appeared to be rough enough to walk into a biker bar and