The Falcon and the Snowman Read Online Free PDF Page A

two years later—fatally burned by blazing hashish oil he was preparing for sale. He lingered for three days in the hospital before dying; he left behind a wife and children—and Chris’s respect.
    There was an article in the paper about the fire and the young drug pusher’s death, which Chris’s father showed him. From then on, falconry was anathema to his dad.
    Robin had clearly been an important factor. But what about Rick?
    Rick was the archetypal California surfer—big, wiry, glue-footed on the boards, a potential South Bay champion. He spent every hour he could on the waves beneath the Palos Verdes bluffs, locked into curls, practicing his kickouts and coming up smiling even when he was “wiped out.” Rick was outgoing, happy—and before he had really begun to shave, a Marine.
    Rick hadn’t been in Vietnam long when a land mine blew off most of his right leg. After he came home on a creaking artificial leg, he and Chris sometimes went down to the bluffs to watch the surfers and check out the size of the combers. Eventually Rick managed to learn how to walk pretty well, without much sign of a limp, but his missing leg—and the nationalism that, in Boyce’s mind, had removed it—sickened Chris.
    â€œNo cause or ‘just’ war for peace, for honor, for freedom, for the people, for property; not Crazy Horse’s charge at the Little Big Horn, nor Pickett’s nor the Tet Offensive, nor Thermopylae, nor the Inchon Landing, nor the Alamo, nor even Château-Thierry and the Bulge, nor any of them were worth tearing off Rick’s leg and his manhood,” Chris would say many years later. “I didn’t believe it then and I don’t believe it now, and someday everyone won’t.”
    At sixteen, Chris had decided to reject nationalism and everything for which it stood.

5
    There was not much for young people to do in Palos Verdes. The calculated isolation from the freeways of Los Angeles was a virtue to those who sought its serenity, ocean breezes and unpolluted air. But for adolescents, the town offered no youth clubs, bowling alleys or skating rinks and not even a movie theater until the early seventies. There was little public transportation on The Hill. Kids growing up there, for the most part, were left to their own resources to find entertainment and excitement.
    Marijuana had been around for decades in Southern California, popular among some of the people who worked in the movie industry and in the Los Angeles Mexican-American barrio . But in middle-class Anglo communities, pot had been a taboo, especially so in a community like Palos Verdes that perennially voted Republican, went to church on Sundays and didn’t experiment with new life-styles because most of the people there had already found what they wanted. Sharing a quick cigarette in the school rest room or a can of beer on a Saturday night was an acceptable forbidden fruit, but not drugs. This began to change in the middle sixties.
    Robin hadn’t been the only son of Palos Verdes to wander off The Hill and disappear into the Haight-Ashbury, the mountains of Big Sur or some other enclave of dropouts and return with full beard, long hair, a drug habit, a drug business with which to support himself and a falcon on his wrist. There was a small cult of people like him; there were Leroy and Weird Harold and Jon and a dozen more. Jon was Robin’s partner, and he could make leather hoods for falcons as fine as any crafted by the artisans of Elizabethan England.
    They were a nomadic breed, mostly from wealthy families—contemptuous of many of the indigenous values of Palos Verdes; hedonists who loved the wilderness for its solitude and marijuana for its psychic solace and who found a curious way of banking the money they made from selling marijuana, hashish, LSD and cocaine: they invested it in rare Oriental rugs from Turkey, Persia and the Caucasus Mountains of Russia. Prices