The Thin Veil
Starlene Justice
I have heard it said that Cabazon is a place of demons. It’s true that when I lived there as a child, I could feel eyes on me while I played imaginative games in the trees as night approached. But being a child, I thought it was normal to feel this way. Years later, I know better. Eyes don’t watch from the blackness. Not everywhere. Only there. Is this proof, then? No—yet it presents a faint ripple in my consciousness, an uncertainty about the exact nature of things.
A place full of demons attracts many churches, and I had lived in one of those churches. Understandably, the church, itself, was full of demons. My brother—older than me and now a bipolar, schizophrenic alcoholic—both saw and heard the demons, but I merely felt a strange presence, a non-aloneness, a feeling of being watched in perpetuity. Some other child might have assumed those eyes to be the eyes of God, but not me. Even then, I wasn’t particularly religious. And even then, I suspected the eyes of God should not have a sinister quality to them.
I came by my childhood place of residence honestly: my dad was a pastor. In those days, churches were sometimes built with attached living-quarters for the pastor and his family. Like a shepherd, he could live where his flock came to take sustenance. It should be noted, though, the nature and location of the flock was not his to choose. Anyone who rolled the dice and landed on Cabazon, California, must have had to pause a moment to question their calling. Regardless, my dad put his head down and accepted his fate. A divorced and remarried man who also wanted to be in the ministry did not have a lot of options in those days. A church in Cabazon was, to his way of thinking, better than no church at all.
I went back to that haunted place after many years. I slipped across the border that separated the past from the present and wondered if it would feel sinister—like pushing through cobwebs. It didn’t, but it didn’t feel like going home either. Instead, a strange déjà vu brushed against me. It manifested as a feeling of anxiety and a subtle concern that nothing had changed in 25 years except the quality of the light—which is the one thing that shouldn’t have changed.
Main Street has two lanes in each direction, as if someone once thought this town would be booming one day and built a road to accommodate all that anticipated traffic. Though crowds converged north of the freeway, this was south, and no one else was on the road. I pointed the nose of my shiny, black car east then turned north on a dead-end street ironically named Broadway. A church stood at the end of the road whose pastor happened to be my mother. She had taken it over from my father when he died—an unusual move by any measure—and, though she no longer lived there, she had been the pastor for nearly 30 years.
The church was situated, like an afterthought, on a street that gave way to a dirt road and long rows of pepper trees. Almost every building in the vicinity (except for the gleaming white post office) was either the washed-out color of concrete or the sad, splintered brown that lurked beneath paint long-since peeled away. The church was no exception. Made of concrete and wood and painted white, the church sat beside a low block wall and was as inspiring as a Soviet-era apartment building.
In a place like Cabazon, inspiration matters. Unless one can envision higher things—greater possibilities and potentials—stagnation and the resulting inertia can settle like dust in a parched soul. Unfortunately, The Church of the Living Waters imparted not lofty thoughts but instead the feeling of being inside a bomb-proof fortress. Less than 50 yards to the north, a wide ribbon of black and gray—known as Interstate 10—cut through the region, carrying a steady stream of cars and trucks spewing noise and pollution 24 hours a day. The parishioners looked at it with accidentally-greedy eyes when they came for the Sunday morning service. They forgot they weren’t supposed to be thinking of escape routes.
There was a filter through which I had once viewed this place, a filter that made unbearable things seem tolerable—even normal. Now these things stood out in stark relief: the unremitting decay, the endemic poverty, and the hopelessness that hung in the air and clung to one’s psyche. Non-judgment fell away with childhood. Blessedly, perhaps, because without the revulsion that got under one’s skin, what would propel a person out of there? Still, something had remained from the early days. It was my desire to lift my eyes above the town and dwell, instead, on the splendor of the nearby peaks.
The people who once wandered this land called it “Big Head”—the dome-shaped mini-mountain that dwarfed the region, but which sat in the enormous shadow of Mt. San Jacinto. “San Jack,” as my dad referenced this monolith affectionately, is a majestic peak rising from the ground almost at a right-angle and rearing up to a height that approaches 11,000 feet. About 20 miles to the southeast of the brooding hill called Big Head—whose Cahuilla word is “Cabazon”—the San Jacintos coalesced along a jagged backbone to a peak christened “Tahquitz.” The Soboba Indian tribe named this place of granite boulders and regolith after a great chief who revealed himself to be—what else?—a demon.
In Cabazon, the dust blows in stinging gusts, courtesy of the Santa Anas that are funneled through the pass as inexorably as the mile-long freight trains. These latter—massively loud and black—screeched their way past the crossing about 200 yards from where the church sat. When I was young, I admired their mighty power and singularity of purpose. Simultaneously, I despised these same characteristics when they were embodied in the “Devil winds,” as the Santa Anas were sometimes called. The prevalence of oleanders, eucalyptus, olive, and pepper trees seemed only to accentuate the colors of dust that blanketed every street, driveway, and building. Even as a child, I noted that particular tendency of these trees and hated them. Later, when I learned it was the Israel-like Mediterranean climate that spawned such vegetation, I became enamored of them, respecting their stubborn fortitude.
Aside from the trains, though, my eyes were loath to linger at the surface. This was, perhaps, my saving grace. I never paid much attention to the transients, drug-addicts, and crack-whores who populated the alleys between the Cabazon Market and the short-lived pizzeria and who crouched against the fractured concrete of the pale pink walls of the Moose Lodge. Always my eyes searched the upper reaches of the troposphere, craving the lavender-blue mountains and the billowing clouds. If you could lift your eyes high enough, there were few places on Earth as beautiful as Cabazon. For me, the choice was apparent: never look down. Tahquitz Peak notwithstanding, the demons lurked in the low places.
And it was so easy to notice the demons, so obvious to anyone who passed through the south side that this was a den of iniquity and its beautiful landscape was a false prophet. Anyone with any sensitivity at all could feel the suck of a vortex while in Cabazon. It sucked in people who were on their way down and saw to it they never recovered their footing. If you were on your way up, it was because you were fighting with every bit of hard-won fortitude to not let the slightest wobble veer your course into the churning whirlpool. An unexpected pregnancy. A stolen car. No money for college. The reduced levels of ambition that sometimes came from finding Jesus.
After nearly 10 years, my dad pulled us out of the vortex—not out of the church, just out of the need to live in it—and moved us to a mobile home perched on a cliff halfway up the nearby mountain. High enough not to get sucked under again. It wasn’t his idea, though. He lived in a world inside his mind, and all he needed to sustain himself was prayer, the right books, and a beautiful landscape. I was like him, dancing blithely along the narrow trail between heaven and hell, blissfully ignorant of the chasm that could swallow me up. I could feel the eyes of the devil, but they had no power over me.
It was my mother who wanted out. She wanted out from the mouse-infested dwelling with the moldy walls and visiting snakes, which she was bold enough to pick up with her bare hands and carry outside. She wanted a berth far away from the marauding drunks and transients who knocked on our door at all hours looking for money or food always rousing our 5 dogs into a cacophony of furious barking. She had also grown concerned for her teenage son, whose tendency toward blinding rage caused her to speculate aloud whether or not she needed to have someone “bind the devil and cast the demons out.” They were both too visceral for that place—but my mother, at least, had boldness and God on her side.
The exodus from Cabazon cost my dad two heart attacks, which he recovered from only to succumb—later—to the insidious after-effects of medical malpractice. A case could have been made, but no one wants to blame doctors for the death of a man who had so many physical maladies he was rejected by the Army when he offered his services at the start of World War II. At the time, he was disappointed he couldn’t serve his country, but he needn’t have wasted precious energy on it. A few months later, in spite of his problems, he was unapologetically drafted.
After my dad died, my mom put herself behind the wheel of the family car—though she hadn’t driven in over 15 years—and drove herself down to the Foursquare Church to hold the Sunday service. She had never questioned her duty to God, only the need to perform it from the belly of the serpent 7 days a week. She eventually obtained her credentials, got ordained, and has been the pastor at that church to this day. At age 84, people remark that she bears a strong resemblance to the Queen of England, an elegant juxtaposition to the homeless people who populate the surrounding streets and who often wind up planted in front of the doors of the church. Those who aren’t drunk or high usually have a more permanent form of altered consciousness. My mother believes there is the Lord’s work to be done in a community that needs a spot of brightness and stability, so she soldiers on. She, for one, has never feared the demons.
On the day of my visit, the building was in riotous disrepair: broken doors, peeling paint, and water seeping into the hallway from God-knows-where. I noticed the piano wasn’t tuned and the congregation could not tell whether to follow the song leader—who was too fast—or the untuned piano which was played in proper time but failed to consistently represent a proper melody. It was a small and motley crew and included a few retirees, a couple of alcoholics, an ex-convict, a Jew, and a dog. I sat next to a middle-aged woman who leaned over and whispered to me, “I just love your mother; she’s so sweet.”
My mother presented her sermon, sitting down, from behind a table draped with a white cloth. Her Bible lay open in front of her at her right hand, her concordance and lexicon to her left. She wore a gold dress with tassels on the front and a large cross on a silver chain. Her mahogany-colored cane was propped against the wooden altar that stretched out behind her. Seeming to exude a visceral delight in the fact of existence itself, she delivered her message with a disarming mix of authority and casual familiarity. Who could avoid being charmed by her glowing persona?
Later, after visiting with her for a bit, I walked outside. I stepped over some large boulders into a weed-choked field and accessed the dusty dirt road that still snaked behind the church. A hundred paces from the building, a charred pepper-tree—still green and alive on one side—stood where it had stood when I was a child. I walked past it and felt eyes on me. A chill crept down my spine. I no longer possessed the ignorant bravery of my child-self who believed eyes watched from everywhere, at all times. This place was not “everywhere,” and these eyes were not benevolent.
According to sheriff’s reports, it was in this stand of trees that a mentally-challenged woman was brutally raped and then tied up in such a way that she slowly suffocated to death. She was a parishioner in my mother’s church.
“Well …” my mom had said, slowly, deliberately, when she first told me this story over the phone. “The sheriff came out more than once. That woman wouldn’t leave. She stayed in those trees. She said God wanted her there.” My mom said it in a way that betrayed her skepticism. For too long had she dealt with the underbelly of Cabazon. It was soon after this incident that someone or something set fire to the pepper trees, destroying half of them and reducing the rest to distorted versions of their former selves: green and black with a trace of brown and the pungent odor of burnt peppercorns permeating their foliage.
Two miles down the road in the opposite direction stood the two iconic dinosaur sculptures that put Cabazon on the map long before Morongo Casino Resort and Spa became a coveted destination. They showed up—to the pride of nearly the whole San Gorgonio Pass area—in “Pee Wee’s Big Adventure,” circa 1985, a movie that allowed those of us who lived in Cabazon to stop saying we lived “twenty miles west of Palm Springs.” I had heard it said that nothing south of the freeway in Cabazon would ever yield anything worthwhile. Notably, the dinosaurs, the casinos, the outlet malls, and the new In-N-Out are all north of the freeway.
After my eerie reintroduction to the diminished pepper trees, I came back and ducked in a side door that led to my former living quarters. The walls were rotted, and the air stank of mildew. I pushed open the door to my brother’s old room. It had always been the coldest room in the house, in spite of having the furnace situated in the corner, right near the door. Fractured light bent through the glazed windows, a blue light that reflected the color of the walls. My brother stopped sleeping in that room within the first year we lived there; he slept in the living room instead. It was one thing to battle the demons in daylight but quite another to face them in darkness.
He mentioned it to me several times—furtively, almost with embarrassment. “I used to see demons in that room,” he told me. I never knew what to say to that, though I never doubted the validity of his admission. The only question that burned in my mind was: What do they look like? I remained silent, though, because it was a question I didn’t really want answered. For him, people and places held too much information. Most people were happily oblivious to the vast majority of it, but not him. His life was a bombardment of sounds, feelings, and images that permeated an energy field he was unluckily plugged into. Unable to switch off this antenna, he drowned the signals in alcohol.
Not too long after the visit with my mother, I was sitting across a dark green table from a friend of mine. She had a deck of tarot cards spread out in front of her, arms on the table, her hands wrapped around a cup of coffee. In spite of the serious tone of our conversation, she radiated an aura of brightness. We had just discovered we both lived in Cabazon around the same time—each completely unaware of the other’s existence—and there were similarities in our experience of watchful eyes that stalked us at night. Smiling and regarding me from behind brown-rimmed glasses, she said, “I’ve heard it’s an energy vortex. Dark energy.”
I glanced away from her, dropping my eyes so that my gaze floated on my coffee. It was not difficult to believe. My brother laughed when I told him she had said this. He had known, all along. It was, nevertheless, not Cabazon’s only truth.
With what words could I tell my card-reading friend of the countless walks I had taken with my dad, south to the railroad tracks, then east? Across flood-born plains strewn with boulders, picking our way through the sand and gravel of white-gray alluvium to find the wildflowers? They were a rare excuse to cast my eyes downward. Delicate red Indian paintbrush. Proud purple lupine. Seas of orange poppies with the softest petals. I would pluck them from their sandy beds and brush them against my cheeks until my compulsive affection disintegrated the blossoms.
My dad knew the name of every flower. He knew why the mountains were there, how old they were, how high, how they rose from the desert floor. He knew where the wind came from, and why it blew. When we walked outside at night and looked up, he could name constellations, star clusters, planets, and galaxies. Maybe one out of every twenty people who passed through the doors of his church cared about his brilliant mind or that it was seemingly wasted in a place like Cabazon. But, again, what do I know of the exact nature of things? After he died, all I ever wanted was to find another person who could, once again, make the world seem so imbued with wonder.
Cabazon is full of juxtapositions: north of the freeway was where business boomed, and south was decay. South of the church was the beautiful part—the mountains and wildflowers and alluvial fans. North of the church were the demon-populated pepper trees, and on the north side of our childhood residence was my brother’s room. I had the sun-soaked south side in the house, where I slept in a room colored yellow and bathed in bright light.
Life is full of juxtapositions, too. My dad was an Einstein-loving amateur physicist and astronomer who happened to be a pastor. My mother was an English-bred Queen Elizabeth look-alike who cast out demons and placed “anointing oil” in a sacred circle everywhere she went.
My brother is profoundly underemployed, drinks every night, and buzzes with a psychic sensitivity he can’t calm down. I live a normal life of husband and kids, a teaching job that alternately fulfills and frustrates, and the writing that pivots and pulls and swirls me into its own vortex.
What do I do with the demons? It’s easy, and I learned it in Cabazon. Don’t go in the pepper trees. Stay out of the cold, blue room on the north side of the Foursquare Church. Hear the aliveness in the train whistle and ignore the devil winds (“We don’t speak their name,” my husband and I say of the Santa Anas). Walk through wildflowers and pretend the ramshackle town of brooding despair half-a-mile behind you doesn’t exist. Whatever you focus on expands. Keep your eyes raised. Don’t look south. Don’t look at the small, dark mountain.
We all live with demons.
Starlene Justice is a professor of geography at Norco College in southern California. In addition to her BA in Geography and MA in Social Sciences, she holds an MFA in Creative Writing from National University. She has won prizes in both local and international writing competitions for fiction and nonfiction work and is currently working on her first novel.