The Realm of Last Chances Read Online Free PDF Page B

“That’s good ground,” he’d say. “
Damn
good ground.”
    What he saw that others missed was anybody’s guess. All Cal himself saw was the kind of vacant space where you and your friends, if you had them, could pull off the road, drive a hundred yards or so into what should have been the desert and drink a little beer or get high. On an exceptionally good night, he guessed, you might even get laid, but back then he’d never had any nights like that.
    His father had known quite a few of them when he was Cal’s age, a fact he didn’t ever bother to hide. He’d grown up ona farm in Oklahoma, but to hear him tell it he’d spent most of his time harvesting something besides corn. “In high school,” he said on one of the evenings when he forced his son to sit with him in the wood-paneled room he called the bar, underneath the head of an elk he’d shot in Montana, “my best friend was a guy named Walter. He played tailback, I played fullback. He was number twenty-one, I was twenty-two. About halfway through our sophomore season, we made a bet on who could get to his number fastest. You know what I mean?” He didn’t wait to find out if his son knew this. “I’m not talking about touchdowns,” he said, poking him in the ribs so hard he gasped. “I made my number after the third game my junior year. Poor old Walter didn’t hit twenty-one till just before Christmas.”
    At the time they were living in a mission-style house with smooth stucco siding, a red-tile roof, clover-shaped windows, a covered archway and dark interiors. His mother referred to it as “the dungeon.” She hadn’t liked the design and didn’t want his father to build it, but what she wanted never mattered much. It was big, it was showy, it had all the right coordinates. It was a good place to entertain the people his father had decided to buy.
    Every member of the Bakersfield City Council eventually showed up there—sometimes singly, sometimes in the company of two or three other councilmen as well as several young women who worked at his dad’s company. The head coach of the Bakersfield State football team was a frequent visitor as well. On one memorable occasion he brought four of his players along—huge, beefy guys—and the high point of the raucous evening came when he ordered each of them onto the enormous dining table to perform push-ups for the pleasure of the other guests. His father accompanied these “friends” on trips to places like San Juan, Cabo and Puerto Vallarta, all of which he paid for, and while he never took Cal’s mother on those junkets, he did sometimes invite one or more of hisfemale employees. He also financed hunting trips to Alaska and once took the mayor to Belize.
    The whole time he was doing those things, he was also buying cheap land north and east of the city, and all of it was quickly rezoned. “Time’ll come,” he’d predict, “when Bakersfield’ll run clean into Sequoia. You’ll be seeing strip malls in Bearpaw Meadow.”
    That never happened, but over the next twenty years his father’s firm built a third of all the new homes in town. Most of them, unlike his own, were poorly constructed, but they looked good on the day the new owners moved in and offered a lot of space for the dollar. “Coat a turd in chocolate,” he liked to say, “and folks’ll smack their lips.” If occasionally some irate homeowner filed a lawsuit because seams had developed in the stucco, or the foundation was cracked, or the sewers failed to drain, or the ventilation system was circulating mold through the house and making the kids sick, his father could always hire the best lawyers. And if by chance they failed to prevail—well, judges liked to go to Cabo, too.
    The indictment didn’t come until 1998, by which time Cal was living hundreds of miles away and had already been married for almost three years. In 1985 he’d legally changed his last name, so when the story broke nobody who knew him could have