A Dove Descending

By lee king

At thirty-three Len Kane is suffering from a painful divorce.He starts a tree trimming company and contracts a large job from a young married lady named, Via.Over the course of five days Len and Via become dear friends.One year later, on a solo hike up Bear Mountain to join his daughters at a church camp, Len discovers his worst nightmare, Via and her family and plane wreckage in a ravine.

• Language: English
• Publisher: lee king
• Release date: Jun 11, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476143545

lee king

Wildlife photographer,paddel boating, golf, and writing books.

Book preview

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A Dove Descending

Published by Lee King at Smashwords

Copyright 2012 Lee King

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This book is for Via.

Back in the mid-80s I read a newspaper story about a woman I call Via, who was a rodeo queen. She lost her two sons and her husband in a wilderness plane crash in which she was badly burned. She spent three days on a remote mountain before the search and rescue people found her. A year later the same reporter did a follow-up story; what happened to her later was even more horrific than her first ordeal.

Somehow I could not get her off my mind, so I wrote a novel on the notion, What if I was secretly in love with Via, and then I was the one to find her on the mountain? Writing the novel proved cathartic, and I left it sitting in my briefcase for all the years—a love letter that never got sent.

Then, on April 8, 2012 I read a profile in Parade magazine about 27-year-old Stephanie Nielson. The story was eerily similar to Via’s: her age, her demographic, her deportment, and so much more. Mrs. Nielson’s story prompted me to dig out my novel

This story is for you, my real life Via. I pray that you are alive and well, and found hope, faith, and love through the Holy Spirit washing over you like…A Dove Descending

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Chapter 1

On The Streets of Bakersfield

It was late September in the southern San Joaquinn Valley. The Golden State was still in the grip of a sweltering summer. Dirt devils danced on my quiet street as tumble weeds gathered in heaps at the chain-link fence lining an irrigation canal; in conjunction with the railroad tracks they cut through our old neighborhood, and formed a small quadrant shaped village at the outskirts of Bakersfield. Across the street a band of clever crows were stealing my neighbor’s English walnuts off his tree and sailing the Santa Anna winds nearly straight up—tree top high—to drop the walnuts on the sidewalk, sending out cracking reports like stepping on dry twigs, then racing down to caw the sparrows away from the fruit. My neighbor Tex told me, Bad luck travels on the wings of a crow. Now as bad luck had pounded down on me in growing waves, I wondered if there might be some truth to that myth.

This was Thursday and I was hosting a yard sale—laid up on a lazy boy recliner under our orange tree—looking worse than a blue tic hound after an all night hunting bout with a wild hog. I had a thirty-stitch trauma between my eyebrows; as a result, my swollen shut peepers limited my field of vision as though I were peering through the hole in a straw. The previous day I’d accidentally clubbed myself with a four way tire tool while trying to bust a rusty lug nut loose on my truck.

What hurt more though was my broken heart. My wife Rochelle had split the sheets with me two weeks earlier, said she’d grown tired of me working from can till can’t, seven days a week and never getting ahead. Bless her cold heart. She was my first, and I still loved her madly even though she’d never tried to be my soul mate. But, I would have spent the rest of my life with her just the same. Maybe some sweet nothings from her like the one Billie Holiday once told her man, Don’t threaten me with love baby. Let’s just go walking in the rain, wouldn’t have hurt nothing. Still, for all intents and purposes we got married. To hear my mom, a divorced, truck stop waitress, tell it through shattered nerves when she first got the news, Len and that milky blonde got yoked up at a shotgun wedding in Las Vegas.

The best part of our marriage though was the four beautiful daughters she and I produced over the years. Rochelle and I both came from broken homes and like me, I think she suffered most from what this split would do to our girls. My mother-in-law who lived alone in a large house and worked as a registered nurse at the state hospital took my wife and kids in and got my wife a job at the hospital.

Later that afternoon—about the same time the crows returned—a sales tax lady showed up at my place. She was meandering through the yard sale while the crows over at Tex’s house carried on like those flying monkeys around that witch in the Wizard of Oz. I could almost hear Tex say, I told you its them damn crows fault. I still owed her agency—The Franchise Tax Board—money from my failed insulation company, more money than the yard sale would’ve covered and I feared I’d have to pony up what little I had made from the sale.

The tax lady was an imperious looking woman with x-raying blue eyes, bobbed hair, and an imposing physique, no doubt a veteran but far from retirement. She was wearing a gray pants suit with a white blouse and clenching her shoulder strap purse like there was an Uzi machine gun in it. When she bent over to examine some old books, her cleavage flashed out; I could see blue blood vessels bulging from the rims of her bra. I imagined how Tex would’ve spent an afternoon going on about this classy tax lady to his beer buddies if he’d seen her, Her blood was bluer than the mountain oysters on a summer opossum.

Afterward the tax lady zeroed in on my hunting equipment, displayed on one of the tables. She’d worked her way over to that table, a few feet from the Lazy boy I was in and slid a photograph out from under my hunting knife. She winced with shock when she saw what was in the picture, and then recoiled as she rolled her eyes down her nose at me.

It was a picture of a button buck, with all his spots, and me holding him up by his hind legs. You killed Bambi, the children at the bus stop in front our house had chanted. Another hunter killed the mother doe and had wounded the buck. I’d tracked Bambi for over a mile, certain from the blood he was losing that he’d be dead when I got to him. There in a clump of bushes with a golf ball-sized arrow hole through his chest, shivering and crying like a war orphan, I found him. The horrible memory that followed after I’d found Bambi, stewed with the memory of a surprise visit from the pistol-like-pencil pointing, tax auditor and his handcuff rattling cronies, spurred me to lash out at this tax lady.

I stabbed him four times.

But…why?

To make him stop crying!

Was that really necessary?

I don’t know…but I’ll give you a bargain on the knife and that other thing.

This bow?

Yes…I don’t need them anymore. I gave up hunting.

He still had his spots…he had little buttons for horns…he wasn’t even big as my dog.

Are you all right? She asked.

You mean am I drunk. Not yet, but I’m working on it, and I won’t be all right till I get to Pismo Beach.

I mean do you need any medical attention?

Thanks, but I have all the medical attention I need in this ice-chest.

What’s waiting for you at Pismo beach?

It’s where my excursion begins. When I finally realized things were hopeless here, I loaded up my wife and kids—at her request and drove them over to her mother’s, in Atascadero. That’s a town near Pismo.

I know where Atascadero is.

They won’t be living with me any more.

Why?

My wife knows I’m broke and she thinks I’m broken—she wants a divorce.

No offense but…what is your name?

Len Kane.

Well, Mr. Kane you appear to have broken something.

Does it look that bad?

My goodness yes—how can you see?

I can’t, I have to open one eye with my fingers, like this.

May I ask what happened?

I was changing a flat on my one-ton, jumping on a long handle four way, when the tool slipped off and came chopping through the air like a boomerang—POW, right between the eyes. Lucky for me I live next to that freeway ramp, where there’s a hospital at the next exit. I had to close one eye so I could focus to drive. At the hospital a doctor was sitting in the nurses’ station, reading a journal. When he saw me stagger through the door, he sprang from his chair and ran to me. He was Marcus Welby right down to the glasses.

How harrowing Mr. Kane…well I should be going.

Do I scare you that bad?

I’ve seen worse.

She’s probably done worse.

Good luck Mr. Kane, I’ll pray for you.

Thank you kind lady, I appreciate that. Don’t you want the knife and that other thing?

I’ll pass, weapons sell best at yard sales, and it sounds like you’ll need all the money you can get for them.

After she’d gone, I found a five-dollar bill under my hunting knife, but no photograph.

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The following Monday I drove over to Pismo Beach and soon rediscovered that tourists are the happiest people on earth. I spent six weeks right on the beach, living in the camper shell on my truck. I had to pile some carpet cleaning equipment—my new business venture—to one side and set a few things outside on the ground so I could make a cubby hole big enough to sleep in. I was cramped up in there like a bobcat in a fox’s den but I soon got used to it.

The first night I slept on a folding chair and woke sopping from the mist off the waves. That was my second lesson on beach bumming. The first one was, not to drive on the soft sand; you drive on the wet sand and park on the soft sand. A local couple was beach cruising in their monster truck looking for sand-slinging beach rookies like me, and pulling their vehicles out free of charge. Pass it on brother, before the under-handed, dirty-dealing, hook crooks could get a tow-hook in them.

As soon as I got my beach head established, I was able to start eking out enough money from carpet cleaning to support my children and hold the line against an inland attack from my wife.

Motor homes and campers came and went from every state and the provinces of Canada, most of them offering all the beer, food, and entertainment I could stand. Although my life was a beach, and those sunsets and moonbeams glittering on the waves were breathtaking, I longed for something more—like the creature comforts that make taking a dump, shower, and shave a damn pleasure. I had sand in my hair, sand in my food, and sand in my underwear. My six week excursion had to come to an end. So I pitched my carpet cleaning services to the manger at a budget motel. He was so pleased with my work that he gave his reference to nearly all the motels on the central coast. I got a free room in addition to more carpet cleaning work than a one-man show like me could keep up with.

After a few months I realized I had larger ambition. I wanted a more challenging job, one with an element of danger and decision-making. I had trimmed palm trees to get through the hard times when I started my first business—the insulation company. I think it was in memory of my dad who had been a logger, me marrying into a tree trimming family, and my snake oil peddling cousin Shorty common lawing his way into a different tribe of tree trimmers, was why I decided that tree trimming should be the career to pursue. So I moved back to the southern San Joaquin Valley, to take up my new vocation.

Chapter 2

Via’s Tree Job

Three superficial years later, I had sawdust in my hair, sawdust in my food, and sawdust in my underwear, but I loved the work. In the tree business, if the thrill bar isn’t high enough then you can always raise it, and almost every decision has to be made around possible mayhem. Lately I’d been picturing those summer opossum colored blood vessels—wrapped like vines around eggplants—on what nestled inside that pistol-packing tax lady’s blouse. I took that to mean I should get a girl friend.

On Fridays I eat lunch at my grandma’s house, soft fried potatoes, sweet corn bread, beans, country ham, turnip greens with a splash of vinegar, fried okra, sliced white onions, saw-mill gravy and fresh tomatoes. In addition to that generous helping of soul food, I pick up my starched jeans and khaki shirts with the ironed in military creases from her, a barter she felt she owed me for cutting her grass. My grandmas—this could be my swan song, Len—went something like this, Len Lighthorse Kane you’re only thirty-three years young, tall, slim, handsome as Robert Redford and have my brown eyes. Promise me you’ll ask God to find you another wife, then take your lumps like the rest of us do. Her send off number usually kicks in while I’m outside on the porch, putting my Wolverine boots back on.

Anyhow this was Friday and on Fridays I round up money that’s owed me, then tool around looking for more work.

Eureka, I spotted a job. Please Lord, I thought, let me win that tree job. I pulled to the side of the road a half block from the job and started counting palm trees. Sixty at twenty-five dollars each, twelve per day for five days—perfect. They had one year growth, that's one dead ring hanging down, and they were tall enough to keep the land lubbers, who work from ladders from bidding them. I wrote my price on the back of my business card, then drove back to the house with the palm trees. I parked in front across the street.

My tree trimming solicits were fairly obvious since my truck’s camouflage paint job was meant to imply I’m a tree man for hire. I sprang from my truck and headed for the sidewalk like a U.P.S. man at Christmas time.

I followed the sidewalk along a picket fence and stopped at the gate. Out of habit I rechecked the price on my card while I raked my boot across the slats in the gate to flush any waylaying dogs out, though I could tell in a glance that there weren’t any dogs at this house.

I entered the yard, and took an implicit little stroll to the door on an S shaped, used brick, walkway, while keening my eyes at all the clear and present factors that suggest the money for my services is in their budget: a well-kept yard, a new Oldsmobile in the drive, as well as the most important factor—the trees being kept up annually. I rang the bell and waited.

A lady with long