Deep in the Valley

  “Not really!”

  “Really. His vanity is almost a reverent thing.”

  She chuckled in spite of herself. But then she said, “I don’t think it would hurt to have a word with him, Tom. You, better than anyone, know how volatile and unpredictable these domestic situations can be. His roving eyes and slippery hands are going to cause some real trouble one of these days. What the boys say is true—Mrs. Wickham’s wrath could do some actual damage. What if she gets her fill of his antics and flirtations? She seems a little…I don’t know…high-strung.”

  “I know you’re right in what you say, June. And maybe I should say something. It wouldn’t hurt for him to know we know.” Tom shrugged. “Might even serve as a warning. But when I think about those hair plugs, I just don’t think I could say something to him with a straight face.”

  June lifted an eyebrow. “I bet if he patted your ass and blew in your ear, you could.”

  Tom’s eyes widened briefly. He cleared his throat, drained his cup and said, “You may have a point. I believe I’ll take a drive. See if I can overtake the Mull family in their old truck.”

  When June Hudson was a little girl, she’d thought she would grow up to be her father’s nurse. Even then she knew that Doc Hudson held the life of the town in his capable hands. She went off to college to become an R.N. This might have come to pass, but she was intercepted by a chemistry professor at Berkeley who recognized in her a special ability in the sciences. So, with the blessing of her father, she switched her major from nursing to pre-med.

  During vacations and school breaks she worked with her dad. At Elmer’s side it was more than family medicine she trained to practice, it was country doctoring. And there was a distinction. They often had to make do on less, by way of supplies and technologies, and frequently had to improvise to successfully treat a patient. It was more stimulating and challenging than any big-city specialty. What San Francisco doctor would be called out to the highway at 2:00 a.m. to try and hold together the victims of a car accident until a helicopter could be summoned? Or drive out to a logging camp to haul a man and his severed limb to the nearest emergency facility?

  She returned to Grace Valley permanently twelve years later, a fresh-faced, idealistic young doctor. But in her time away, she had forgotten a few things about her town.

  First, the people were slow to trust her—a new young doctor, a woman—even though they’d known her forever. She had to work beside Elmer for a few years, acting as his apprentice. It wasn’t until she had performed a few of what the locals perceived as medical miracles that she was trusted enough to see a logger with his boots off. Even now, with Elmer mostly retired, there were still men who wouldn’t bring their ailments to June until Elmer had seen them first and insisted. Half the time he saw them in the café or filling station or post office. Yet for most who lived in the valley, June was the official doctor. And she still relied heavily on her dad for professional and personal support. Since June’s mother’s death nine years earlier, they had been very dependent on each other.

  Second, if you’re going to stay in Grace Valley, live and work there all your life, then you’d better have picked out a husband in the ninth grade. What had she been thinking when she’d chosen this life, this town? That some handsome young bachelor would trip and they’d fall in love while she wrapped his ankle? June was thirty-seven now, and her two best friends were her dad and Tom Toopeek. She had close ties to her quilting circle, the Graceful Women, and kept up with friends from school. She wasn’t exactly lonely, but she hadn’t had a real date in about five years. Elmer seemed to think she was a virgin—a dubious if not ludicrous distinction. It wasn’t true, thank God. But it was true she was now dangerously set in her ways. Perhaps too independent to become the prettier half of a couple. Still, she wouldn’t mind a little romance.

  Grace Valley had originally been a fishing and farming village. It sat on the corner of three counties, just barely more on the Mendocino side than Trinity and Humboldt. There was a small hospital in Rockport, a larger one in Eureka, and when June and Elmer had opened the clinic ten years ago, it had been considered an extravagance for a town of nine hundred. Now it was a necessity for a town of fifteen hundred and sixty-four…with Julianna Dickson about to make it sixty-five.

  June parked behind the clinic, next to Charlotte Burnham’s car. Charlotte, aged sixty, had been June’s father’s nurse. As nurses went, it would be hard to find one tougher or more efficient. Or grouchier. The only person Charlotte ever seemed to make a real effort to be sweet to was Elmer, even though her husband, Bud, fairly doted on her. June had been the doctor here for some time now, but Charlotte had never quite made the transition. Oh, she’d take orders, but she always treated June more like the girl who hung around her father’s office than the boss. It was past annoying. June had enjoyed no act of vengeance so much as hiring Jessica Wiley, the bane of Charlotte’s existence, to work in the clinic.

  Charlotte was just making her way out the back door, shaking out a Marlboro, as June got out of her Jeep. There was no smoking allowed in the clinic. Charlotte would smoke the extra long cigarette, cough, get back to work, and need another one before long. There was a coffee can half full of butts beside the back step. June had begged her for years to quit.

  “Having your spite smoke?” June asked.

  Charlotte inhaled deeply. “I need it more today than usual,” she replied shortly.

  “Ah. Jessie dress up for you?”

  “Wait till you see.” She puffed again.

  Jessica, age twenty, was the clerk-receptionist. Despite the fact that she had cut her formal education short by quitting school, she was the best office person June had ever had. A brilliant girl, resourceful and quick, she was also odd as a duck—a fashion extravaganza who never wore a dull outfit. June felt a surge of excitement as she entered the clinic. Stodgy Charlotte and avant-garde Jessica made for interesting days. They did not exactly get along like mother and daughter.

  Or…maybe they did…

  June knocked the caked mud off her boots and left them by the back door where the sun would dry them. Old Mikos Silva’s place was on her way to the clinic, and she had stopped by to check his blood pressure. His idea of “taking it easy” was to sleep in till 4:30 a.m. and do only half his chores, so she’d had to slog her way out to the barn to find him. Old farmers like Mikos were typically afraid that if they sat down for too long, they might drop dead, doctor’s orders notwithstanding.

  She slipped on her clogs and headed for the front of the clinic. She would have said good morning, but she was frozen silent by the dizzying sight of Jessica’s hair.

  The girl was some kind of Goth, as she called herself. Black clothes, lots of piercings in oddball places, black nail polish and lipstick. There was no evidence she did any of the scary things her appearance seemed to imply—like take human sacrifices. But today she had reached a pinnacle. Her head was shaved but for the multicolored Mohawk plume that stood up proudly on top. Bold stripes—purple, blue, red, orange, yellow—waggled as she moved.

  June wasn’t sure how long she stared, but it was long enough for Charlotte to return to her post. June met her nurse’s eyes and saw only grim misery. And a warning: Don’t give her the satisfaction. When June looked into the small waiting room, she saw that all six eyes were focused on the colorful Mohawk, in slack-jawed, fascinated stares.

  “I’ll be just a few minutes,” she said to the waiting room. “Good morning, Jessie. New do?”

  Jessica looked up from her filing, smiled beautifully, for she was a beautiful girl, and nodded. The action set her many pierced hoops in motion—on ears, eyebrow, nose and places June didn’t want to think about.

  June picked up a stack of charts Charlotte had set out and made her way back to her office, her nurse on her tail. Charlotte closed the office door behind them.

  “I’m at the end of my rope,” Charlotte announced.

  “Take it easy. It’s only hair.” June bit her ton
gue against the temptation to remark on Charlotte’s own hair, a dark red with a purple hue that always looked two weeks overdue with its telltale quarter inch of gray against her scalp.

  “You cannot let this go on!” Charlotte insisted.

  “Charlotte, she’s a very sweet, very efficient girl.” June struggled not to laugh out loud. “She lends color to the place.”

  “How can her father allow this…this…insanity?”

  Charlotte and Bud had raised six children, none of whom would have dared part their hair on the wrong side, much less shave and color their heads. But Jessica’s father, Scott, a good-natured, broad-minded artist and widower of only forty-two, chose to let his daughter find her own way. June approved more of the latter parenting style, though she wouldn’t dare admit that to Charlotte.

  “What did you say to Jessie?” June asked.

  “I am committed to not reacting.”

  “You have a lot of unnecessary stress over Jessica’s clothing and hairstyles, Charlotte. Maybe you should talk to someone about it. Have you given any thought to seeing Dr. Powell about this?” Jerry Powell was the local shrink—a Ph.D. psychologist with a specialty in family counseling. He had relocated to Grace Valley in search of a quiet, peaceful life, after a stressful, twenty-year Silicon Valley practice.

  “Why would I talk to that nutcase?”

  Jerry Powell was probably an excellent counselor…with an unshakable belief that he had once been abducted by aliens.

  “His beliefs are not so different from some of our own townspeople’s,” June pointed out.

  “We don’t any of us believe in spaceships, for God’s sake!”

  “Oh no,” June laughed. “Not spaceships! Angels, buried treasure, Indian spirits, hidden caverns and Big Foot. But not spaceships.”

  Charlotte pursed her lips. “I think you’re enjoying this,” she said, and left June’s office in a huff.

  Jerry Powell took his coffee to his office, where he would wait for his first client of the day, Frank Craven. This was an emergency intervention—the boy had been in a fight at the school bus stop.

  Jerry had lived in his three-bedroom rambler for just a few years, and while in one sense he would be a newcomer for at least twenty years, in another sense he was already accepted in Grace Valley. That was not to say he’d been pulled into the warm bosom of the town and cherished, but rather accepted as the San Jose shrink who’d admitted to Bay Area media about twenty years ago that he’d been for a ride in a spaceship. The Spaceship Shrink, they called him. Some, he knew, called him the Gay Spaceship Shrink, though no one in Grace Valley knew for sure whether he was gay or straight. There were undoubtedly lots of valley residents who thought he was delusional…but there were plenty of people who availed themselves of his services. He made a much better living in the little town than he’d ever expected to.

  He had converted his garage into an office, and had a brick walk directed to the side door so that he wouldn’t have to escort people through his living room and kitchen to their therapy sessions. Half the garage served as private office, half as waiting room, and he’d had a large picture window installed so he could see his clients as they pulled up to the curb in front of his little house. Through that window he saw the police car, a beige-and-brown SUV. Lee Stafford was at the wheel and Frank Craven was getting out.

  Jerry might have been looking at himself thirty-five years earlier—skinny, lanky, feet as big as snowshoes, arms too long, hair badly cropped and askew, head down and gait clumsy. And not so different now, Jerry thought, for he was six foot five, wore a sixteen shoe and had never been able to manage his wavy blond hair. And though he tried to stand up straight, it was hard when nine-tenths of the world was under his chin.

  “Come in, Frank, come in,” he said, holding the door. “I don’t think we’ve ever met. I’m Jerry Powell.”

  “The spaceship guy,” Frank said sullenly and thickly through his swollen lip.

  “The same. You’ve had a rough morning. Want some juice? Water? Soda?”

  “Naw.”

  “Come back to my office, here. And if you change your mind, just say so.”

  Frank followed Jerry into the office. Jerry stood at the door and waited for him to choose a seat, either in the conversation area, where a couch was separated from two chairs by a coffee table, or in one of two chairs before the desk. But Frank stood just inside the door and waited. “Have a seat, Frank,” Jerry said.

  “Where?” he asked.

  “Anywhere.”

  “Where?” he asked again, unwilling to select their seating.

  “How about here?” Jerry suggested, indicating a chair in front of the desk.

  The boy flopped down, slumping. “This going to take long?”

  “Probably not. Let me just tell you a couple of things first. I’m going to make a few notes because I don’t trust my memory, but they are completely confidential. Even though this visit was prompted by the high school assistant principal, I’m not required to tell him anything about our session. Okay?”

  “I don’t really care what you tell him,” Frank said meanly. “He’s a cocksucker.”

  “I am only obligated to tell him that you did, in fact, have your required meeting with me,” Jerry continued, as though he hadn’t heard the boy’s comment.

  “I had two choices. Expelled or counselor.”

  “Yes, well—”

  “If it had been suspended or counselor, I’d have taken suspended.”

  Jerry pulled a yellow pad onto his crossed knee and wrote April 17th at the top. “Why not take the option of being expelled? You like school?”

  “Not really. But my ma wants me to go.”

  “But you could have an excuse…if you got expelled.”

  Frank started to pick a thread on his jeans. They were in pretty bad shape. Not only were they old, they were now dirty from having rolled in the dirt at the bus stop.

  “Your mother’s been through enough today, I suppose.”

  He looked up. “What do you know about it?” Frank wanted to know. There was such rage in his eyes. He was one angry kid.

  “I know you got in a fight at the bus stop because someone said something about your dad being taken to jail and you were…what? Offended? Embarrassed?”

  “How about pissed off?”

  “Yeah?” Jerry asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Pissed off because?”

  “Just because…”

  “Do you want to tell me about it?”

  “Naw. I’m over it now. It’s finished.”

  “We gotta do something, Frank. We have fifty-five minutes to go.”

  He was met with silence.

  “I’m not obligated to say anything to anybody about our time together, but that doesn’t mean I won’t want to.”

  Eye contact. Unhappy eyes.

  “For example, if I thought you could benefit from more counseling, I don’t have to say why, I just have to recommend. It could happen that way.”

  Unhappier eyes.

  “So, let’s talk. See where we are. Huh? At least tell me what it takes to get you to punch me out. What do I have to say to get slugged at the bus stop?”

  “Man…”

  “I’m patient. I get paid by the hour.”

  “Who pays for this hour?” Frank asked.

  “In this case, county funds provided to the school district. When a kid gets in trouble and the school wants counseling, there are two ways to pay. The parents’ medical policy, or the school. What’s up, Frank? What are you so mad about?”

  He squirmed a little, inhaled noisily through his nose like a bull and finally spoke. “How about if we make a deal? If I answer your questions for a half hour, you answer one question for me?”

  This was a remarkably unoriginal barter. Jerry had this proposed to him regularly. And he knew all the tricks. “Go,” he invited.

  Over the next thirty minutes he found out a lot about Gus’s binges, the beatings, the rages
and the regular visits made by the police. Jerry found out how much Frank hated his father, how much he loved but disrespected his mother, how fragile he was with his own rage and how frustrated he felt over his complete inability to protect his mother and younger brothers. Jerry wished he were hearing this story for the first time, wished it didn’t happen this way so often. In the end he knew what he would do—try to get Frank to commit to an anger management workshop and a group for battered teens. But he’d have to tread slowly and carefully. And keep his part of the bargain.

  “So,” Frank asked, leaning forward in his chair. “What’s the inside of a spaceship like?”

  “Well, it looks like shiny metal, but it turns out to be something like glass,” Jerry began.

  Four

  Christina Baker was sixteen and pregnant. Married, too, which gave her one advantage over many a pregnant sixteen year old. She was also anemic, underweight and probably depressed.

  “Is the morning sickness over now?” June asked her.

  “Oh yes. I haven’t been sick in a long time.”

  “And you feel the baby move?”

  “Uh-huh. For a couple of months at least. Gary is so excited, he can’t stand himself.”

  But when she said that, she was unconvincing. Her blue eyes were flat.

  June didn’t really know Christina or her family. They came from down valley—another way of saying they were rural, lived off the beaten track. That could mean a farm, a shed, a collection of trailers, just about anything except mountains. That would be up valley. But it likely wasn’t a farm. The girl wasn’t in school and the handwriting on the new-patient paperwork belonged to Jessica. That would mean the girl couldn’t read. It was surprising this was her first child. But to give them credit, her young husband had accompanied her; he was in the waiting room. Maybe they’d do better by their kids than was done by them.

  “And Gary is helping you a little? Around the house and such? Because I’m worried about your weight and your anemia. It might be you’re working too hard.”