Hidden Valley Road - Inside the Mind of an American Family - Robert Kolker Page 0,64

and the Galvins’ house to visit one of her other friends. The trail was technically on the Skarkes’ property, but no one had ever talked much about it until Carolyn started to use the motorbike on it.

One day, Carolyn was riding down the hill on the trail and had almost made it to the bottom and home when, by a stroke of luck, she noticed a cable, thin as a wire, strung across the path, blocking access to the Hidden Valley Road cul-de-sac. She was able to veer away from the cable at the last second, just before she got clotheslined. Frightened nearly to death, Carolyn told her mother, who, as soon as she determined what had happened, marched out of her house, past the trail, and toward the Galvin house, searching for Mimi.

Carolyn remembered watching the two women, who had always been civil, standing outside on that little road, facing off like a fuming baseball manager and a stubborn umpire.

“Why did you do this?” her mother shouted.

“I don’t like the noise,” Mimi said.

That was all that Carolyn’s mother could take.

“We put up with all the sheriff’s cars coming to your house? And you don’t like a Honda 90??”

Everyone knew something was happening at the Galvins’. Their closest neighbors pulled out of their driveways with care because they knew there was a good chance that Donald would be loitering on the cul-de-sac, offering prayers to everyone who drove by. The younger boys were becoming well known, too. Matt got caught taking things from a neighbor’s house when the family came home in time to see him. And Peter had developed a haunted, menacing look that some of the girls would comment on. Soon enough, it was more than his looks that worried them. Once Peter stuffed a girl’s face in the snow and kept it there until she couldn’t breathe, then insisted it had all been just a joke.

Practically no one visited anymore. The Hefley kids weren’t allowed to come and play there. And anytime anything happened in the neighborhood—if someone’s mailbox was vandalized, or a house broken into—plenty of people were ready to blame it on the Galvins.

Mimi made a practice of denying everything. “My boys would not do anything like that.” No one believed her. She was silently drowning, left alone to manage a situation for which she had no tools and no training and no natural aptitude. Both she and Don had taken to falconry because it made sense. Their children did not make sense. They had tried to instill procedures and routines to train their children. But children aren’t falcons.

What did change was that Mimi became embittered. If a child stepped out of line now, she was no longer the happy warrior—she was the angry general. Her frequent refrain to Michael or Matt or Richard or Peter, whenever they disobeyed, was, “You’re just like Donald.” She might not have realized how lethal that phrase could be. To accuse the boys of being like Gookoid was probably the worst thing she could say—a reminder that they shared blood with this man, this stranger, who was turning their home into an unbearable place, who was ruining all of their lives.

* * *

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THERE WERE STRETCHES, a week or a month, when Donald would show flashes of lucidity, and even hold on to jobs—dog catcher, land salesman, construction worker. In 1971, he was switched to a related antipsychotic drug, Stelazine, and his outlook dramatically changed. “He realized in the space of one weekend that much of his spiritual musing was simply his imagination and not reality,” a Pueblo psychiatrist named Louis Nemser wrote. “He described how his desire to build a church was related to him being more like his ex-wife’s father—and the magical wish that if [Donald] were more like him, she would take him back.”

His progress lasted several months, until, in April 1972, after yet another failed mission to see Jean in Oregon, Donald visited a priest at the Catholic chancery to talk about his marriage. The priest told Donald in no uncertain terms that his union with Jean was now null and void in the eyes of the Church—a pronouncement that sent him straight back to Pueblo, where, Dr. Nemser