white silk short-sleeved shirt and then the T-shirt underneath it. It wasn’t cold at all but the air made his skin ripple. He pulled on the stretched-out Sears undershirt from the bag and unbuckled his slacks and dropped them and slipped into a pair of faded, patched-at-the-k nee Levi’s. He folded his suit pants and sat on the rear bumper and changed his socks and put on a pair of black hightop Converse All Stars.
He’d bought the clothes at the Salvation Army in Palm Springs. Everything came to a couple of bucks less than what he’d paid for the socks he walked in wearing. He wasn’t in any hurry, knew where he was going next, so he spent some time talking with the woman behind the register. She had that look in her eye, that recovered look, a little shaky but she was going to be all right, had managed to get in the present, to just read the page in front of her. Maybe she could tell Jimmy how to do it.
The shirt felt good. He wondered about the man who’d worn it last. Angel had told him about a preacher who made a thing of only wearing the clothes of men in his congregation who’d died, clothes bundled up and handed over by widows and grown children, after they’d buried their faces in the shirts one last time. Jimmy buttoned up the plaid shirt and closed the hatchback. Clothes with a history, it fit.
In Idyllwild, he bought ten dollars’ worth of gas and paid cash. The attendant, a high school kid, looked him over good, though he didn’t get up out of his plastic chair to do it. The Mustang was a little too cherry to really match the driver in the knockaround clothes, but the kid and the locals walking by didn’t seem to notice, didn’t seem to be thinking much of anything when they looked at Jimmy. Which was the idea.
Idyllwild was a collection of log buildings on both sides of the highway on the flat part of the summit. A pair of Alpine A-frame gift shops, almost identical, stood across the road from each other, each with an eight-f oot redwood bear out front, chain-saw carved. There was a restaurant. There was an ice cream parlor. There was a bar. There was a little brown wood church up the highway. And a “creekside” motel with cabins.
Jimmy drove across the highway from the gas station to the restaurant and parked the Mustang and got out. A slice of a giant sequoia, taller than he was, was leaned against the wall on its edge, like a big coin. It was polished, the rings clear. Events in History were marked with little flags on pins, nine hundred years of history, if they had it right, fires by blackened rings, droughts by thin rings, Columbus setting sail, Lincoln dead, Kennedy dead, a man on the moon.
It was late enough in the day that Jimmy decided he’d stay over, go at it in the morning. This was where Barry Upchurch had retired, probably moved into what had been a weekend place before. Jimmy had found the lawyer’s name listed in a “Mountain Areas” city directory in the library down in Palm Springs. Then he’d found an article in the microfiche about an Idyllwild No Growth! committee Upchurch had served on when he first came up the mountain ten years ago. Retired So-Cal lawyers seemed either to go to the mountains or the beach, the size of the house and the acreage determined by just who you kept out of jail or bankruptcy. The lawyers who put people into jail, when they retired probably just stayed in their houses in the Valley or out in Santa Monica, grandfathered in.
Upchurch wasn’t a government lawyer but from what Jimmy had heard and read he hadn’t had a big client practice either. His house was likely a cabin on one of the roads heading up into the low hills above town, nothing fancy, a couple of bedrooms, or maybe a glass-fronted A-frame, if the seventies had made a bit too much of an impression on him. Jimmy had an address but he wasn’t just going to walk up to the door, at least not yet.
There was snow on the shady side of the cabin, a short foot of it banked up against the stone foundation. Each cabin had a cute wildflower name. The key to “Star Lily” had a green plastic fob, old style.