Long Shot by Paul Monette Page A

it was so much dead-end dust, boxed in by mountains too steep to pitch a tent on, and not a cup of water as far as the eye could see. Though it lay between Bel-Air and Beverly Hills, those heavily gardened districts turned their backs on nature in the raw, as if it were faintly embarrassing. But an old deed-trader like Abner knew a good deal more about land than how to turn it into the south of France. Long after everyone else had subdivided madly, he kept all his bottom land in orange trees and beehives, biding his time for twenty years, and never so much as breaking even on a crop. He put off deciding where to build his house, preferring to ride up all alone and living out of a sleeping sack.
    In 1935, he convinced the county water district to use his canyon for the west-side dam and reservoir. He sold it back to the public at better than half a dollar’s profit on the acre—a six-hundred-percent return over twenty years. Considering that he had a thousand back for every dollar he sank in Orange County, the canyon deal was next to philanthropic. Besides, if he’d charged the county any less, they would have been suspicious—maybe his canyon leaked, or it sat on a hairline fault. He couldn’t have been more accommodating, frankly. All he was after was the view out over the water, with a bowl of hills around it. A wilderness all his own within the L.A. city limits.
    He used to say he’d got a little corner of Wyoming. Doubtless no one from Wyoming would have seen it quite that way, but more and more, this was how Steepside came to see itself—wild as the last frontier. Abner Willis stood on his empty hilltop, pointing down the canyon toward the dam, and said to Mr. Wright, his architect: “Pretend this canyon’s the middle of nowhere, and build me a house on top of it. Make sure it’s open all over, so the Willises never forget it’s the West down there.”
    Abner knew full well where the Mediterranean lower third of the state was headed. The people were pouring in so fast you couldn’t count them. It wasn’t going to end till every vacant lot was taken up. In twenty more years, Los Angeles wouldn’t remember how far west it used to be. By then, as Abner saw it—turning to point the other way, east along the ridge of the Santa Monicas, high above the endless city—by then, the people here would all be living in the future. And barring some catastrophe—say an earthquake seven-five or better, which Abner knew was an old wives’ tale—who was going to protest the future’s being here? The rest of the world, as far as Abner Willis could ascertain, preferred to stick to the past.
    On Tuesday the fourth, when Vivien Cokes, the last of the Willis line, came back to the hilltop she called home, she had to do the final leg in a company helicopter. She could have sworn the seats were upholstered to match the jet. But she had no choice. A crowd of upwards of a thousand was jammed so tight at the Steepside gate, it would have taken a car a good twenty minutes to inch its way through. If the widow herself had turned out to be in a given car, they probably would have flattened it. Just to get a close-up of her, red-eyed and bereft.
    The helicopter whirled up over the dam and into the canyon, crossed close to the water, and then rose up the side of the hill, touching down on the west lawn. Vivien jumped out first. She ignored the half-circle of downcast types who waited to tell her how sorry they were. She threw her arms around Artie and tugged him away to the house. But he wasn’t any help at all. He couldn’t stop sobbing and asking her why—the very thing she’d counted on him knowing. As to where the blame should fall, he didn’t leave an opening big enough for anyone but him. It was all his fault, he told her over and over. The mortal flesh of Jasper Cokes had been given into Artie’s care. In the bodyguard line of work, a man