The Lost Coast

PART 1
EUREKA TO DOWNIEVILLE
1
COOKIE--COWGIRL, line cook, wife--strode into her kitchen and, standing straight and happy, strung a beautiful arrow in her hunting bow. She aimed it at all the world. It made her grin. Her husband, Kenny, though, thought she was going to shoot him. He was feeding on thick strips of bacon that Cookie had fried in her demure and obliging manner; and his cowboy's appetite, which had roared like a lion, now mewed like a kitten.
He had to admit she was smooth when she drew an arrow.
"Honey," she said, "I've never felt so good."
"You want to let that arrow down?"
"Sure!" she said, and--shining in the morning light, with a zip and release that matched the incorrigible velocity of her soul--the arrow sang from the bowstring and passed lovingly just to the right side of his head; the feathers on the shaft kissed his cheek, leaving a fire-mark that would make him a rakish figure in the barrooms--a mark whose heat he felt all the rest of his life.
Kenny sighed. It looked like Cookie was in a mood.
She strung another arrow.
"As I was sayin', Kenny my boy, I have made me a discovery. Lemme tell you about it."
"I ain't never been one to shut you up, sweetheart."
She relaxed the bow, but kept it at the ready.
"Well, this is it: number one--we're through! Now you got some flame-throwin' ways in bed, and that soft wind-chimin' way of makin' love-talk, but ... Kenny, we're like most married folks: gone from party-and-slambang springtime, to steady sweaty summer, and on to look-back-what-the-hell-happened-anyway autumn, to winter cold that froze my goddam eyes solid. It's springtime again, Kenny."
Cookie loosed the second arrow, which picked up a loaf of bread and fixed it to the wall in a place convenient to the toaster.
"But let me get to number two, which you have got figured by now. Kenny, I'm takin' my ass on the road--"
"It's just the goddam full moon again, Cookie," argued her good husband.
"You know how I love cookin'," she went on. "I am the best fry cook ever was in all of Nevada, but this little town, this little town ..."--she strung another arrow--"now we got a nice hundred acres, but it's land."
"Land?" said Kenny, not understanding. He thought of her outside in the middle of winter, digging postholes and spitting tobacco, grunting and smiling.
"It's just too solid," mused Cookie.
Kenny crinkled up his brow at that one.
"Well, I can't just stick around here, all solid, you and me one more solid bumpety-bump man and wife, damn it all!"
"Bumpety-bump?" he inquired.
She brandished her bow alarmingly.
"And so I'm just going to cook and buck my way west, from right here in Eureka all the way to the coast. A girl can go far on chicken-fried steak. And there I'll be, no land, no husband, light off the sea like wind in my face. Kenny, I want to get there, stand and praise--all that crap, you know?"
She gave him a long look: "You know you cain't win, you men--if you're lousy, we leave for something better; if you're good, we leave 'cause we feel so fine."
"You are one strong pretty bitch," he said.
"You bet I am," she said.
"And number three?"
"Three is: I love you, Kenny!" she said, as she loosed the third arrow.




And it was as the arrow left the bow that Chiara drove into Eureka. At her side, her sixteen-year-old daughter, Isabella Boccaccio Acappella Mandragora Palmieri, known to all as Izzy. And Izzy, with hair like obsidian and eyes like opals, had her demands.
"Mom, stop the car so I can get out and dance!"
"You danced in the last town," replied her Mediterranean mother, who insisted on recounting how in Ely, Nevada, her daughter, satisfied and lickerish, breaking all laws regarding the comportment of young women, had danced in the whiskey-scented rambunctious bars of the little town until three in the morning.
"I wanted to give you your chance with that blue-eyed cowboy," said Izzy primly, taking the high ground, though even she regarded the night as a kind of splendid disgrace.
"Oh, I need your help to take home anyone I please?" gibed her mother with delicious good reason.
"OK, maybe I'm a little cocky."
"An excellent thing in a woman," said Chiara, smiling.
"So how long are we going to be on the run?" asked Izzy as with languor she stretched her lanky young body and pulled behind her ears her glossy hair.
"Well, it's not exactly on the run, it's just that after ten years teaching in New York, I felt like the two of us should roam around for a while. Do you feel pursued?"
Izzy thought for a while.
"Yes. But who cares?"
As a matter of fact, they were being pursued. Chiara was a onetime mathematician with a love of physics and a passion for exploring the hinterlands of general relativity; then, at the university, because of her firm grounding in classical studies, and her fluency in Italian, French, and Spanish, she had switchedinto literature, which she studied with a rare sumptuous rigor, a supple passionate exactitude.
And why on earth were she and Izzy being pursued? Chiara had during the amorous months of Izzy's conception taken as lovers the leading men of her university, with some savory amendments--for example, a gentleman who overhauled diesel engines, and a piano tuner of many a playful note; a potter with hands of such strength he could glaze her in her own sweat; and a vintner who licked his wine off her breasts. At the close of this happy period, pregnant, she had informed her lovers that, though anything was possible, none of them need feel responsible--the arithmetic was just too confusing.
For if there was anything Chiara rejected, it was paternity. All the ridiculous fixity of the world could be attributed to this absurd institution, in which the transient donor of seed took on airs, huzzahed right and left, went round to be congratulated, and swaggered like a giant all the years of his child's life. Chiara wanted a child of her own.
Among the gaggle of potential fathers, however, the university men never forgot the slight, and coveted Izzy. Besides, none of them especially liked being cast as the hoodwinked, the educated chuckheads, the lustful dupes of the wily Chiara. They of course were none of these things: but as usual, not all the answers in good books, not any number of heart-polishing sonatas and star-making sonnets--none of this mattered a fig compared with one hard thing: their very own offended selves.
Upon this rock, wondered Chiara, how many would break the world?
They were not so bad as they thought: Chiara had loved them, one and all. But could they not see? What would they have her do? Keep them? And so she had approached them, she met with them every one, and in order to explain her departure had issued a list of queries:
1. Does a shooting star linger in the sky?
2. Would we stop the day in its tracks, pin the sun at its zenith?
3. The garlic, onions, butter, and spices in the pan, whose aromas make us sit up with excitement--do we let them simmer forever?
4. If we love wine, does this mean we should put nothing else in our mouths for all time, in all places, with every company?
5. Soil may have our praise, for it grows roses; but will that good soil grow nothing else, forever?
6. We stand before a painting, our souls acrobatic with its beauties; but do we honor the work by standing there, dumb as a post, all the day?
Her lovers had listened to this hot-blooded rhetoric, and in fact many of them had come round already to the idea that if a man would truly love a woman he must love her leave-taking. And so Chiara's piano was always tuned, her diesels ran superbly, and she had a cellarful of wines at the ready.
Others of her beaux, after having attended to her with loving patience, dewy-eyed attentiveness, and erudite confidence, had proceeded naturally to old-fashioned homicidal vengeance. So had commenced sixteen years of threats, teeth-gnashing midnight phone calls, legal skulduggery, and custody battles.
At present, two of these men, acting in a rational way to influence the upbringing of the girl--that is, not content to be fools, they resolved to become meddling fools--had hired private detectives to trail Izzy and Chiara through the West. They were to report on their activity, so as to build a case against the mother for not providing the proper moral environment for the incontrovertible child.
In other words, they were afraid she would turn out like Chiara.
--As though providing any environment for Izzy would make a difference: a mother might as well try to put a dress on a lioness.
Each of the detectives had instructions to kidnap the girl, if it seemed as though she was endangered--whatever that meant--by her caterwauling brilliant mother.
Chiara, though, knew all this, and thought the whole plan was just too crude to consider.
All the same, she was startled to see, as she went to park near the beautiful old courthouse in Eureka, an arrow whiz diagonally over the hood of the car and head up the street.




Muscovado Taine was surprised, too. He was there on the sidewalk and had just taken out a match to light a cigarette, when the steel arrow came winging toward him; he did a twist-and-slide dance step to rescue his stomach from ruin.
Dance has its uses.
He went ahead and lit up, thinking with satisfaction that he was reversing usual practice, and having good tobacco just after his attempted execution. And, sitting on a street bench, he asked himself what on earth he was doing in Eureka, Nevada.
He thought through his thirty years: upbringing in Kingston, Jamaica, many years of dreadlocks, his studies with his strict grandfather, a wrathful minister; his dancing (the grandfather was also a lead guitar), his lovers like waves falling on a hidden Caribbean beach--women, he thought, are the constant wilderness of the world; a surprise scholarship to a university in Boston, where he was treated as the Hope of the Useless Malodorous Third World; gigs working as a journalist on big newspapers in Miami, New York, and Philadelphia, where he wrote with a lilt overlying a solid prose rhythm--a reggae prose.
He missed the Caribbean, its islands like a bracelet of jewels, like the curving line of a song sung to the woman in whose pleasure you live; like the spirit-curve of the woman you love as she comes round in bed to the irreproachable honey of her own soul.
Kingston to Boston to the big cities--he knew what he was up to: go where you shouldn't, do what you can. He had picked Eureka off the map: central Nevada, not next to anything, set there within a land inhabited only by sage, light, animals, and a laudable incivility to all of us.
It was a land whose welcome was surly, secretive, promising, difficult.
It looked good to him, just because it didn't look like Jamaica, or any other place he loved. In fact, there was nothing here he recognized. He liked it, this crash landing--he liked the wreckage of himself. It made him want to sing. But he thought that might be unwise.
He began to sing immediately.
He was, officially, on leave: he could send in a thoughtful dispatch now and then, and get a check back in the mail. In the meantime, he wanted to see the big dry valleys--after a few shots of white rum. And, cigarette lit, he was headed his melodious way for a bar when in front of him there emerged from a dusty car two lustrous dark-haired women who looked almost as if they could be mother and daughter.
But that, like the world, would be too good to be true.
Izzy and Chiara looked at him: swarthy, singing--like a night sky full of music. He had soft heat in his hands and salt waves in his step. The two women looked and smiled.




There is a choreography working deep in the days--at all times, in all places: a bright pattern within events.
So, in Eureka, we have: Cookie coming forth from her house into the somersaulting light of the morning, and thinking she would like to hear a jukebox jam some music; Muscovado moving in his own memory, feeling trade winds bearing jasmine and pepper as he faced Chiara and Izzy on the street; and, sitting in the bar toward which the gravity of the day was calling all things--a bar famous among mustangs and cowboys, the Owl Club--we have our friend Juha of Juha General Contractor, Inc. Juha built houses; not surprisingly, he was himself built like a house--a man so burly that giant sequoias wanted mistakenly to pollinate him. His voice was so deep he was sometimes called upon to stand in as a bass fiddle.
It was Juha's secret that, even though he was built for amorous undertakings (according to the ancient formula mas oso, mas hermoso), he was exceptionally shy with women, and so he was not himself able to pollinate nearly as often as he wanted.
With him was the couple whose ranch house he had just finished building. Juha, in his businesslike way, was presenting the final contract for payment.
Hansel and Gertie, the two ranchers in from the country, were mad.
"In the first place, you're a prick," said Hansel, as he worked over his gums with a juniper twig. "And in the second place, we ain't payin' shit to a half-breed newfangled rusharound scumbag like you."
"You screwed up the porch, and how am I going to do any shootin'?" added Gertie. "All this hammering and fuckin'around, and now if I sit myself on the porch and lay my rifle on your goddam railing the barrel points too damn high for me to shoot anything out front! What if there's a cougar out there? What if there's one of them big ugly badgers diggin' holes so as my horses will break their stupid legs, you know there's badgers out there who eat horses alive, they jes' lie in wait picking dirt out of their claws, in the meantimes coyotes are comin' for us in the night to eat us, you know some coyotes will ambush a house and if they can't get live flesh they'll go for the closet and eat up your clothes, tha's right, your clothes so they got your smell and the rest of their lives they hunt for you and for you alone and if they have pups the pups have your smell too till there's whole families of coyotes thinking of nothing but chowin' down and on who? On who? On me, that's who, and you are telling me you do all that work to our goddam ranch"--Gertie pounded her big fist on the table--"and we can't even shoot straight off the fuckin' porch and if we do shoot we shoot high--what are we goin' to shoot, the stars?--are we going to shoot the goddam stars whiles coyotes eat the hem off my goddam dress and the owls fly straight into the house hootin' back and forth and kill us and carry us out the window off into the night, the big-horned owls will jes' eat us out and use our goddam hollow bodies for nests, hear that? Nests!"
But Hansel and Gertie had underestimated Juha; he loved ranchers, and knew what to do.
Juha stood up, enormous. He was silent. He looked Hanselin the eye, he looked Gertie in the eye. He winked aggressively. And then, standing very still, he began to make the little snorkeling noises of a piglet; next, the chortling of a foal; he passed brusquely on then, his lips drawn back from his teeth, to the foam-fed breathing of a stallion approaching the back of a mare in heat--this breathiness Juha mimicked with excellent fidelity; then he baaed like a sheep and lowed like a mother cow after her calf. And was Juha to be stilled? No. Head thrown back, he turned loose the throaty yowl of the white wolf; and very irresponsibly roaming farther afield he sang like a cheetah, gabbled like a turkey, clanged like a bell-bird, cheecheed like a cheechee bird; finally then he stood close to Hansel and Gertie and, as he howled, walloped himself repeatedly on the chest like a great ape.
Juha sat himself down. "I'll lower the railing on the porch," he said.
"I'll have the check ready in the morning," said Hansel.
"Could you do the cheechee bird again?" asked Gertie.
Muscovado, Izzy, Chiara, and Cookie swept into the bar--it was a foursome that could, just by standing there, run amuck. The bartender, who was entranced with Izzy and had concerns about the progress of the girl's soul, demanded she step outside away from the plenteous enticements of alcohol. He wanted to explain privately to her the dangers to physiology and mentation; in other words, the bartender lusted after our Iz.
The girl, however, had her strategy all worked out. "I can't be in here? Well, I don't want a drink anyways, I'm not here as a customer--I'm here to take your job."
Izzy muscled her way behind the bar and stood there expectantly, waiting for orders.
The bartender, who had never seen a sixteen-year-old girl muscle her way anywhere, retreated to the corner and stood there like a broom.
Muscovado sauntered up to the bar. "A shot of white rum, please, ma'am."
Cookie stepped up to the bar. "A shot of Jose Cuervo, some salt and lime," she snapped out.
Juha piped up from his table. "A margarita for me, beer for Gertie, whiskey for Hansel."
The bartender, whose motor skills had an automatic response to such utterances, tried to move. But an arrow (the citizens of Eureka were afterwards to swear that the projectile had made a right-angled turn in front of the bar) flew in the door, thudding into the wall beside him.
Izzy proceeded with great suavity to serve up the drinks.
"It just goes to show!" philosophized Cookie.
"Show what?" asked Izzy.
"That when the time is right, put your arrow in the air, go find the party: you'll get your OK sign, a double thumbs-up, the whole world comes to tickle things up a little."
"Tickle?" asked the terrified bartender.
"Could I get you a drink?" asked Izzy of the displaced fellow.
"A glass of soda water," he said.
"Soda water!" cried everyone in the bar at once.
"With a side of pretzels," said the bartender with dignity. And he took in hand the insipid combination duly served him by Izzy, and stalked out the door, warily, in case any more arrows should come his way. Sipping his contemptible water, he leaves our story here.
And yet, as he leaves, who should be passing him on the way into the bar? Who on earth? Renato, that's who: a local painter of landscapes, portraits, still lifes, miniatures--and, in a pinch, a house painter. He was here to meet with Juha and get paid for painting the ranch house whose construction the contractor had finished with such resounding success.
And why would so skilled an artist set his canvases aside for the coarse plebeian work of house painting? Easily answered: Renato loved coarse plebeian work. And in addition, he held the view that the world portrayed in the paintings of our heritage--that is, taking all the Duccios, the Vuillards, the Kandinskys and Rousseaus, the Picassos, Fra Angelicos and so on, together--the world there was not just a matter of imagination. Of course not. Rather, these paintings depicted a real omnipresent restorativeecstatic available world, which any of us could visit; it was the world within this one, the place we find when our minutes flower within our vision, and we can see where we are, how to live, what to do--in other words, see how to quit being such bimbos.
And so, why paint houses? Given his theory, he could not help but expect it to be amusing to paint entire houses: for he was painting on the canvas of the world. In fact, here in Eureka, he had gone to the mayor and offered to paint the whole town. He wanted to paint it as it really was. He figured he could bring the appearance of Eureka into alignment with its real metaphysical station in the world. The mayor had listened; and he had risen from his chair and thumped Renato on the side of the head.
Gertie, discomfited because she had not done any pounding for so long, glared at Renato and Juha and slammed the table five big resounding wallops. "This wimp! And you asked this wimp to paint our house? Huh? Why didn't you just come by the ranch and ask a sack of pigshit to stand up and take the brush! Huh?"
Both Renato and Juha thought how much they liked Gertie.
Cookie, taking Muscovado roughly by the arm, sounded off at the bar:
"I'm going on the road. Mebbe I don't even need to take my bow and arrow. Don't need any weapons. I'll be my own weapon."
"You don't think you'd need protection from me, I hope," responded Muscovado.
"Are you kidding?" Cookie laughed. "A boy like you, I'd fry you like a handful of hashed potatoes."
"What exactly do you mean by that?" asked Izzy, and they both swiveled around, happy to give Izzy an introduction to the art of the aggressive sexual innuendo.
Renato, too, swiveled, to gaze at Izzy and remember the origins of his love of painting: he was sixteen, in bed with his first lover, after a romp that left both quiet because of the tornadoes in their souls--and it was just then he had reached over to a table, taken up his softest brush, and in bed, using only the colors of love, began painting the inner thigh of his girl. In that softpassage he found his work; while she found as he extended his brushwork that tornadoes can travel more widely than she had theretofore considered.
Ananda, her name was. She was blond: she had hair the color of pale honey; she had hair whose gold drifted down like autumn cottonwood leaves; she had hair like light--on moonless evenings they had made love in her plain female radiance.
That was twenty-five years ago.
And we have to ask (who could hold back?): What on earth happened to the generous Ananda? Well, it had been a while since her inner thighs had been painted with the colors of love. After a stint as a jazz trumpeter, she had cruised into law school. And then spent the last fifteen years as a Los Angeles securities attorney, taking companies public, advising on mergers and acquisitions, being responsible for the minutiae of the law that governed the florid unanswerable desires of commerce. For years there had been nothing that made Ananda happier than working eighteen hours a day, reading boxes of documents with enthused exactitude, so that on the trapeze of language, she was the linking intelligence whose midair spins, backflips weightless under the lights, and one-handed landings after unbelievable soaring brought the show to a climax and a closing.
And after a closing, she would go off to a little bar with blue lights and play the trumpet a few nights.
After such labors, she was, by a course of nature, rich. But unlike so many of the newly wealthy, she had decided, against the advice of all her colleagues who sounded the klaxon of disbelief, that she should absent herself for a couple of years--to take stock. Why? and Why? they had all asked her, honking and sniggering.
To see if the work was killing her, she had replied.
People examine their sentences to see if their grammar is correct. Should we not stop to see if our lives make any sense?
Her plan had an amusing beginning: in an amorous coda to her life in Los Angeles, she had been taken by her lover, a young director of films, to dinner and then to bed, where they had played parts in a long adventure of devil-may-care stunts, dramaticturns of phrase, surprises having both languor and pepper; and so to an inclusive finale that resolved the baroque plot of the evening.
In other words, they were both too tired the next morning to lift even a single little spoon.
Just the same: she wanted a change of story, some new story--something, to see if love would come and listen.
She had left the next day, with her cat, Tupelo. With a cat like that, purring on her lap through the long drive, Ananda had decided to navigate by whimsy. In fact, loving language as she did, she made her decisions for travel based solely on which names on the map she found most seductive. Given such an eccentricity, it was a cinch she would head straight for the town--you guessed it--of Eureka, Nevada.
It had taken her three days to get there; she stopped in Death Valley, she stopped in Big Smokey Valley, and all through the Great Basin, in the barely--and then, curiously--inhabited parts of North America. And driving along, she more than once had occasion to ask herself, My, oh my, what is that soft brushing?
So it was that the unforgettable Ananda came to walk though the door of the Owl Club.
"One thing I know for sure," said Renato, "there's no way you could be Ananda. Not a chance in the world, nothing so good could ever happen, no man could be so lucky as I would be if standing right there before me was Ananda my sometime lover who just this moment in my memory I was holding."
"Hello Renato," she said.
"For heaven's sake!" he exclaimed. "What in all the world?" And he jumped up, wanting to embrace her, wild with the strange momentum of the day, and shy as he had ever felt in his life.
"Ya come into town to do some business, and the place fills up with bitches!" said Gertie.
"Speak for yourself, you old battle-ax!" cried Izzy from behind the bar.
Huge, Gertie towered out of her chair, stamped over to the bar, slammed her way behind the counter; and enclosed thepetrified Izzy in an embrace of remarkable gentleness and affection.
"My kind of girl!" said Gertie, and she went over to Chiara and gave her a few explosive pops on the back.
"Did a good job with the wild thing!" she cried.
Hansel looked admiringly at his wife. Then he looked skeptically at Juha, whom he had come to like; more, even, than a hog he was sending to slaughter. Not as much as his old saddle, his three-year-old palomino mare, Hallelujah, or his bullwhip, with which he could pick horseflies off a pad of butter, leaving no mark; at the same time, though, he liked Juha more than the ranch's billy goat, who smelled like week-old haddock in hot sun; and more even than his own brother, who was no more articulate than a cow's udder.
Ananda and Renato stood out by the door of the bar, looking at each other with astonishment. Their teenage love affair each of them had carried within, like a peach always ripe that they could at any time reach for and take a taste of sweet juices--to remind themselves that happiness is not trivial, just because it is easy.
Ananda and Renato stood, wild with stories.
Chiara and Gertie fell to chattering about pigs and calculus.
Hansel decided on the spot that Juha was screwing up his life; he was sure that Juha, like everyone, needed some advice from him.
"You know, Juha," he said, chewing his cud, "I blundered around, taking my own sweet time, I done me my share of wrongs, but now everything is jes' dandy. Most days I feel pretty chipper, know what I mean?" Hansel looked appraisingly at Juha. "I feel like a helluva lot better man than you, fer instance." Hansel slugged down some Wild Turkey. "Juha, you're startin' to get that musty smell of thems that work too much, it's the grave-smell, a lot of folks is buried alive. Dead from workin'. You want to see it--go to a city, it's weird: you ring a bell and presto! all these zombies come out and dither around. Amazin'!"
Hansel hacked and spit and swung back around, bellicose and happy.
"Let me give you a tip, Juha: take the money from this job, and get the fuck out."
Juha looked over this fifty-year-old rancher with a body tough as the wood of an old bristlecone pine. He could hear Gertie talking to Chiara.
"I can see it, I can see what you mean," Gertie was saying, "it sounds like all them numbers an' words is jes'like living out here in Eureka. I live out here so's what I have is my own, nobody can jes' barge in, they got to follow old country roads to come to me." Gertie, brightening, paused to spike home her logical conclusion. "Now with you, to come near, they got to go 'cross a field of numbers an' words, they have to see what you love, to get to you. You're protected, jes' like I am. Goddam! It's good! It's always good to meet another smart-ass bitch!" she thundered, shaking the glasses and ashtrays. She looked at Chiara with big fiery appreciative eyes.
Chiara saw she was right, and she felt like kissing Gertie on her frizzy bull's head.
Izzy, from her post behind the bar, looked upon the two: Gertie, she of the calluses, the gristle, the capacious voice that in its volume could gather entire rooms, there in company with her willowy mother, she of the sharp dark graces, sassy, quick-firing, mercury-minded. Gertie stomped her feet, stroked Chiara's hair with her hamlike hands and gave her big winks that sounded like windowshades being lowered and snapped back into place; the two women went on talking like some strange female equation of mass and energy.
Izzy settled into the noon: Renato and Ananda strolled over to the bar, and their talk swept like currents, spilling over the banks of the years.
Ananda told of her journeys to madcap harlequin cities; he of his journeys inside his own vehement canvases. She described her midnight work sessions, high in a skyscraper over the home-grounds of her city, setting paragraphs spinning; he recounted his beloved habit of going to the desert with palette and brush to work in the mint of the dawn.
"Let's do some shooting!" suggested Cookie.
"Another round!" cried Juha.
"It's a bar, ain't it? Why shouldn't we all pick each other up!" Cookie went on.
"Feelin' cantankerous is a good thing. Has to be. Ain't God cantankerous? You bet he is. Should we stay in here all day? You bet we should," mused Hansel, who had always liked answering his own questions.
"This is a good-lookin' pack of animals," commented Gertie.
"I've got to bring Tupelo in to see this," said Ananda.
"I'd like to do a little shooting myself," said Juha, looking around.
"You talkin' to me?" asked Cookie, who could not help but wonder, given his mastery of animal calls, what hooting she might do with him.
With all this, Izzy was hardly surprised when Muscovado Taine leaned over the bar and asked for her hand in marriage.
THE LOST COAST. Copyright © 1996 by Steven