South of the Pumphouse. Les Claypool
the hell, hon?”
“It’s that little prick across the street shooting his BB gun at the street light again.”
“It’s not a BB gun.” The words were muttered in a groggy fog. “It’s a wrist rocket.”
“Rocket?”
“Slingshot, hon.”
THWAP. PLOINK-A-CHINK!
“That little prick! I’m gonna call a cop,” she said, leaping up to look out the window.
“He’s just a kid horsin’ around. Leave him be.”
THWAP. CHINK-A-POP, followed by the sound of glass shards hitting the asphalt.
The woman looked out between the curtains at the newfound darkness.
“There it is. The little prick killed it,” she fumed, and shook her fists at her side. “I’m calling a cop.”
Half asleep, the old machinist responded inadvertently with a gentle fart.
The little neighborhood went unnoticed by the good folks at the city maintenance yard, as far as regular upkeep was concerned. The streetlamp, as of two years later, remained just as shattered as it had been on the night it was hunted down and executed. It wasn’t a bad area by any stretch of the imagination, but still far from the best that Contra Costa County had to offer. Twenty years earlier, it had been a good alternative to the cookie-cutter tract housing that was readily available throughout the area. Indeed, the decision to purchase—or not to purchase—a tract home was based less on personal taste than on finance in the little town of El Sobrante.
Calling it a town might have been something of an exaggeration. El Sobrante was more of an annex-village striving to be a town. It had neither a city hall nor offices, neither mayor nor city council. There was a fire station but no police department, with law-enforcement duties falling under the jurisdiction of the Contra Costa sheriff’s department. The term “semi-rural” would be fitting, if such a term actually existed. At one point, El Sobrante was known to have had more horses per capita than any other town in Contra Costa County, which was not an area known for horses. Spanish for “the surplus” or, as it was more commonly translated, “the leftovers,” El Sobrante had for many years lived up to this title.
Triangulated uncomfortably within the borders of the more industrial city of Richmond, the suburban valley town of Pinole, and the more upscale village of Orinda, El Sobrante had always been a cultural enigma. Most who moved there did so because it was cheaper than Pinole and less, for lack of a better term, “ethnic” than Richmond. In the ’70s, forced bussing of African-American kids from Richmond may have changed the complexion of the local high school, but it was at least a decade before it made much of a difference in the racial imbalance that existed in the neighborhoods. One semi-notorious account of conflict occurred when the ex-mayor of Richmond, who happened to be black, moved with his family to one of the nicer homes in El Sobrante. Shortly after settling into their new neighborhood, the family awoke one morning to find a large cross etched into their front lawn by an extra-potent mixture of fertilizer. The story earned “headlines” on the third page of the back section of the West County Times, provoking ominous whispers about a rogue element of the KKK lurking in the area, waiting for their chance to over-fertilize the lawn of anyone potentially posing a threat to the pure El Sobrante way of life.
Eventually adding to the ethnic diversification of the region was the addition of a rather large Sikh temple to the hillside overlooking the main area of commerce, known as San Pablo Dam Road. Once the “brown kids with the black hankies in their hair,” as the more outspoken citizens described them, started showing up in school and the “bearded rag heads” began running the local Pit-Stop, the more aggravated elements of bigotry tended to move northward to less Anglo, heritage-threatening regions such as Solano and Lake counties.
As the decades passed, cultural change found its way into the neighborhoods of El Sobrante, but in 1995, the defining elements of typical blue-collar, white suburbia still remained.
On the aforementioned darkened corner, next door to the retired machinist and beneath the long delinquent streetlamp, stood a modest two-bedroom, channel-ply sided, tar-and-gravel, flat-roofed house. It belonged to Earl Paxton, a man who proudly called himself an “El Sobrantian.”
It was the wee hours of the morning, and Earl was once again about to watch the sunrise—but not without a slight feeling of discomfort. While seeing the sun come up may be a wondrous sight for many, for Earl it was a reminder of days not long past when he would stay up all night polishing his ’78 Trans Am or rebuilding a carburetor or cleaning his garage. Funny thing about tweakers, they always seem to have the cleanest garages. Methamphetamine will do that to a man. Just as the impending birth of a child may instinctively prompt an expectant father to “nest,” methamphetamine— or “crank”—can also be the motivator of many an addict’s most meticulous tendencies. Though tweakers’ houses are sometimes in a state of utter disarray, the more industrious tend to have impeccably clean garages and work spaces. While this particular day’s early stirrings might have had a more innocent motivation, the fact remained that, for the first time in his short bout with sobriety, Earl had once again forgone sleep under suspicious circumstances.
SNIFF.
The refrigerator light illuminated Earl’s face as he began poking through the shelves, moving items, searching. While he rummaged, he continually sniffed and pinched his nostrils as if to clear his sinuses.
SNIFF.
Earl hovered from shelf to shelf moving downward. He reached the bottom, shuffling some items out of the way, eventually finding what he was looking for.
SNIFF. SNIFF.
It was a large plastic Ziploc bag containing a medium-sized whole fish. He removed the bag, opened it, and smelled the contents. He then closed his eyes, flaring his nostrils and inhaling abruptly.
SNIFF.
He paused for a moment, contemplating the freshness of this particular fish, a modest specimen of striped bass caught a few days earlier off the Brothers Islands in San Pablo Bay. Just how “few” days had passed since he’d caught the fish, Earl was now trying to calculate.
The trip itself had been all but a wash, as far as fishing goes. The target fish of that journey was, as usual, sturgeon. Failing to produce anything in the mud flats, Earl had decided to stop off at the Brothers on the way back, with hopes of catching a striper or two. The Brothers are two islands—more like grand rocks—that sit a couple of miles north of the Richmond Bridge at the south end of San Pablo Bay. The more easterly of the two hosts a small lighthouse that was converted to a bed and breakfast in the early ’80s. The other is barren, apart from the layer of seagull shit that projects not only a dull white color but also quite a pungent stench for anyone who ventures close enough downwind. After a handful of drifts between the two, Earl picked up the one and only fish of that day’s journey. As modest as it may have been, it was still a game fish, and one modest striper beats a skunk-fishing trip any day.
Earl stepped up to the sink and poured the contents from the bag. The striper plopped into the sink, staring with its dead gray eye out of the slimy pink film that continued to drip from the bag. Earl grabbed his special filet knife from the rack on the wall. Most of the knives in the house were kept in the drawer, but the few that Earl deemed his special fish-cleaning knives resided on a magnetic strip tacked onto the side of a cabinet above the sink. His personal favorite wasn’t one of the more expensive but an old Russell carbon-bladed filet knife that had belonged to his father. It wasn’t so much the sentimental value that drew him to it time and again but purely a matter of function. It was a good knife. One thing about the