Dark Edges of a Bright Morning

Beaumont, Saturday morning: Framed by the peaks of the San Gorgonio Pass, the sun seems to climb straight off the desert floor. The desert winds that blew so hard for two days straight have settled down. The dominant sound is the howl of freeway traffic on Interstate 10, which forms the town’s southern border. By 6:30 a.m., more than a few early risers already have turned on the lawn sprinklers.

At the Country Junction cafe, near the town center, the waitress and a silver-haired woman swap bowling league stories.

“How’d you do?” asked the customer.

“Not too good,” said the younger waitress, a working mother. “I was tired, as usual. And it was Monday, and with, you know, everything going on . . . “

“Everything going on” is one of the euphemisms that would be employed on this Saturday morning to describe the same events. Others would speak of “the episode” or “that deal with the boy” or, simply, “Anthony.” No elaboration needed, or wanted. By now everybody in the state knows about 10-year-old Anthony Martinez and the stranger with a story of a lost cat, about the daylight abduction and the shallow grave just up the freeway from here, buzzards pointing authorities to the nude, bound corpse.

That deal with the boy.

*

Beaumont, Saturday morning, and by 7:30 a.m. about 30 volunteers are at work at the San Gorgonio Catholic Church, sorting boxes of apples, lettuce, chicken, cereal--part of a community food program they’ve been running here on Saturday mornings for almost a decade.

“This isn’t our normal spot though,” says Gene Crudo, one of the volunteers. “Normally we’re at the Senior Center downtown. But they got all that tied up today for the funeral. You’ve heard about the thing with our missing boy, haven’t you?”

As the sun rises, so does the rest of Beaumont. Newspapers are fetched from driveways. Lawn mowers fire up. The Beaumont barbershop fills, with the barber in the second chair--”I’m just a little left of Attila the Hun”--leading a lively discussion on lawyers and vigilante justice and what the husband of a woman who works for the district attorney hinted about the condition of Anthony’s corpse. Here and there, yard sales are set up.

“We like to say,” Rick Hawkins explains with a smile as he stocks a card table with fishing tackle, glassware, knives, amber sunglasses, “that we have just the thing you don’t need.”

His smile vanishes at the mention of Anthony: “There is a lot of violence everywhere, even here. We are not the virgins on that score that they make us out to be. But it’s just that he was such an extraordinary kid, upbeat, real bright. My girl played with him all the time, my own daughter, my baby girl.”

It could have been her, he seems to be saying.

It could have been anyone’s child.

This, of course, is what has made the thing with the boy so universally terrifying.

*

Beaumont, Saturday morning, and a boy pedals by on his bike, a blur of braces, freckles and 12-year-old curiosity. “You FBI?” he shouts out. “No, press.” He skids to a stop, an eager source. “I’m gonna be carrying a gun soon. What else can you do? Channel 13, my dad says they are snobs. I’ve been interviewed by the FBI, twice. They ask you: ‘Do you know what pinstriping is?’ That’s what the man had on his car.”

The man. His face is everywhere, in storefront windows, stapled to trees. “Have you seen this man?” the posters ask. He is the man who snatched Anthony, the bogeyman who haunts the children of Beaumont still. “Is that the man?” a little voice cries out from an apartment on the same street where Anthony lived. “Is that the man?”

No, just someone headed toward the memorial service at the Civic Center. By 10:30 a.m., seemingly the whole town is walking there. They come dressed in suits and Sunday dresses, in shorts and tank tops, in the uniforms of gas station attendants. Some carry Bibles, others clutch bouquets of handpicked roses. The service, conducted outdoors under the shade of California Christmas trees, begins at 11 a.m.

They sing “The Gates of Hell Shall Not Prevail” and hear some fine eulogies, about Anthony going to a better place, about tragedy bringing a town together. What moves these people most, however, what brings the tears, is when the pallbearers shuffle out with the platinum coffin--such a quiet, cold, final compartment for a boy. The children in particular cannot keep their eyes off that coffin as it is carried to the hearse. It is now noon and no longer Saturday morning in Beaumont.