A ROYAL WELCOME
Evelyn Gates saw the damage as soon as she pulled up to the curb, but it was too late for excuses; Buckler was riding in the passenger seat. Where, before, he’d seen a porn store that reminded him of the parts of Southern California he generally tried to avoid, he now saw something wrecked, grubby, despoiled. There was an enormous pile of broken bottles on the sidewalk just in front of the store. Down the walkway, an assortment of empty tin cans, used diapers, old cereal boxes, and the contents of ashtrays: someone had emptied one or several trash cans behind them while walking out to the street. Where a person might have placed a welcome mat just in front of the door, crushed pieces of another bottle or two had been mounded into a shining amber heap. The jagged edges caught the late sun like low tide.
They approached the door, its chalk-white text successfully framing for them the bottles and the broken glass, a story behind the squalor. The lettering was neat, and tall enough to be read from a distance; its message was brief enough to be taken in quickly, even by eyes hastily surveying the scene to scan for present danger. Buckler looked around, and then at Gates: he was trying to gauge how aggressive a tone he should take when, at the end of all this, he lowered his offer.
But she was in shock; the hallmark of any Gates property was its constancy over time. These lots she’d inherited from her father had relaxed into shabbiness and disrepair, but they resisted substantial change. Their motif was neglect, the subtler cousin of outright abuse. The sense of ownership, of entitlement, that she’d been raised to feel about her family’s holdings was a world apart from pride of place, but the sight of the entrance to Monster Adult X both outraged and intimidated her. Somebody was trying to assert their own claim to her land, in terms to which she had no ready response.
“Neighborhood kids,” she said, turning the key in the lock while trying to affect, despite herself, a tone of clarity amid the murk and disorder of the scene before her.
LODGED
In later years, establishing the whereabouts of a person would be a lot easier—cell phone records, browser histories. If you needed something more specific, you might seek a special warrant compelling an ISP to release their data, but after 2002 resistance on that front was pretty weak. You could snoop in broad daylight without your target ever even knowing he’d been under surveillance.
In any case, though, then or now, you’d try to find probable cause, or something you could frame as probable cause; and to get that, in the absence of any direct evidence, you’d have needed a previous record, something you could point to that backed up your suspicions. As of the afternoon of November 1, 1986, there were no crimes on record involving any of the people who’d been spending their spare time, and sometimes sleeping, inside the building formerly known as Monster Adult X.
If you are questioned as to your whereabouts on a given day, you should immediately ask if you are being arrested. If you’re not being arrested, you should invoke your right to remain silent. What you were doing with your time on a given day is nobody’s business but yours, but I want to state for the record that Derrick Hall spent the afternoon and the evening of November 1, 1986, at home with his parents, both of whom can account for his presence in the house at dinner and aver that they all dined at the table together that night—turkey sandwiches with gravy; Derrick had seconds. More importantly, a few days later, neither Bill Hall nor his wife, Diane, allowed the detectives who’d arrived unannounced on their doorstep to “have a word” with their son.
“I don’t know anything about any of this, but my son is not available for anything without a lawyer, and neither am I. You have my phone number,” Bill Hall said, in as amiable a tone of voice as he could stand to feign while closing the door. “Have a nice day.”
THE STRONGHOLD AT CORNWALL
Alone in the store, he found a copy of The Last Starfighter among several general-release movies in the supply closet near the counter. Seth had left the store’s usual fare playing in all the booths—the light was needed to showcase all they’d done to the walls, and the seats, and the screens, and the floors—and had hand-selected the most unpleasant fare he could locate. But Seth wasn’t here now, and he wanted to watch something fun. He’d seen The Last Starfighter on the big screen two years ago; it felt like an eternity now.
The comfort of a story line he knew and could follow without difficulty was profound; before long, he dozed off, awakening only during a loud battle sequence. When the tape ended, it automatically rewound; he watched it again, staying awake this time. Known quantities help situate us in contexts that anchor us to ourselves; he’d had very few chances to confirm this over the last several months, but the second run-through of The Last Starfighter made him feel alert, undistracted, palpably alive to the present moment. Even when he reflected, during a lull, that the present moment found him in a wrecked porn store with almost all his worldly belongings in a backpack—not much to brag about—the clarity of that moment’s particulars felt like a triumph. He’d read once, in one of those books you always find in the lone bookcase in a corner of the overnight shelter, that your mind could be your best friend or your worst enemy. It was true. By himself in the booth with a movie whose plot he already knew, he felt on good terms with his mind. It was a good and comforting feeling, one whose integrity went slack and then unraveled completely the moment he heard voices outside in the store again: speaking, this time, not in the voracious tones of buyer and seller but in registers of shock, and panic, and fear.
He readied himself to defend his home. He felt steady in his resolve; the moment held great clarity for him, as if all this time in the store by himself, drifting in and out of sleep until day and night became a smudged continuum, had been necessary for the gathering of strength, for the conservation of energy. The time of gathering was at its end, and the energy would now find its purpose.
A person has a right, perhaps a duty, to protect himself and his stronghold from invaders. There are laws on the books about this, very old laws. They’re there for a reason.