Anderson pulled in behind them and parked. Ignoring the girl, both he and Rider went across the road and checked the Volkswagen bus inside, with the help of the deputy there. Then they came back across the road and began talking with the other deputy and the girl, who looked like a 1935 Okie with her ravaged young face and bamboo limbs sticking out of a bulky feedsack dress.

After a while Hook wandered across the road toward the minibus, but stopped short of it when he saw the body lying inside on the floor. It reminded him of Greenwich Village drunks two decades before, scrawny bearded little men lying under newspapers in alleys and street gutters and stairwells.

“You a reporter?” the deputy asked.

“No. I’m with Sergeant Rider.”

The deputy was about thirty, all spit and polish except for a scraggly mustache. He shook his head in disgust. “Christ, you should smell it in there. And they call us pigs.”

“Bad, huh?”

“Foul is more like it. Just plain foul.” The deputy pulled a pink ticket out of his pocket. “Look at this. I got half a parking ticket wrote up on them. I mean when I pulled up this morning and seen the vehicle parked there—well, I just got out my pad and started writing—you know, make, model, license—’cause you can’t park here, see? Not overnight. Then I walk over to the vehicle to lay the ticket on them and what do I find? The chick is sitting in the driver’s seat stark naked and plucking on this guitar, real slow-like, about one twang every thirty seconds. And the kid’s just laying there on the floor, already stiff as a board. Probably O.D.’d early last night. And you know what she says to me? She says ‘I tried to love him back to life.’ Can you beat that, huh? I tried to love him back to life. That’s what she said. Can you picture it? This stinking godawful wreck parked out here at night in the boonies, and inside is this spaced-out chick going down on a stiff, trying to ‘love him back to life.’ I tell you, man, I’m thinking of having a vasectomy. I don’t want no kids. Not this kind anyway. And I’m beginning to think they’re the only kind anymore.”

As the deputy finished his tirade, a pale-blue ambulance arrived, followed by a press car carrying two men who got out and headed for the minibus as if it were a factory gate they entered every day of their lives. The deputy met them with a laugh.

“You’d do better with gas masks,” he said.

Hook walked back to Rider’s car. He lit a cigarette and waited there, leaning back against the front fender while the professionals went about their business of tidying up the mess of a lost life. The photographer got his pictures and the reporter his story and the ambulance men their body. And the girl, smiling dreamily in the back seat of the patrol car, did not even bother to go over and see it off or say a word of goodbye. Watching them, Hook realized that beyond his grief as Chris’s father and beyond his rage at the suicide lie, was another, smaller hell, and it was simply that his son had died here, in this land of sunshine and desperation. For it struck him that to die in California was to fall not on foreign soil so much as in a foreign time, an alien and brutal and loveless future that he despised as well as feared.