David Holt wasn’t all bad. There were only a lot of bad things about him. To outsiders, they saw a young man who was often drunk and unruly. He did some drugs. But nothing he thought was too dangerous, though crystal-meth turned out to be more dangerous than many folks thought. It gave him tempers, which landed him in jail. But he didn’t do anything too bad.
Outsiders saw the bad things, like the time in Niland when he messed up the face of another local degenerate. David used a knife to cut a line from this fella’s ear straight down to his shoulder. The man bled a few quarts of blood, and from what I gathered, he was near death, until a blood transfusion in Desert Mirage replenished what he had lost.
David got a night in prison for that one. When the local authorities heard who he was -- you know, the son of an Imperial County Commissioner -- David was let go. A half-hearted effort was made by the Imperial County Sheriffs to figure out what had happened that night in Niland. The Sheriff decided that David acted in self defense and that the other fella was as much to blame for the broad-and-deep cut along the left side of his face that slid down his neck to his torso as David was. The matter never went before the District Attorney.
They concluded that David was provoked and so he acted. Was that so bad? Was that not natural? If he overreacted, was that not simply a consequence of action to begin with? So be it. It was done, folks were going to think what they’re going to think.
And the man with the broad-and-deep cut did not pursue any legal avenues.
But David couldn’t stay out of trouble in Niland. He stole a dirt bike there only a month later -- well, it was more like he borrowed the dirt bike. It was left unattended near Salvation Mountain in Slab City. David was only going to take it for one ride around the dunes. At least that’s what he told everybody.
David even had a bike of his own. That’s why he went out to Niland to begin with. He and his friends went out there to ride around the dunes. The dunes were complemented by the man-made obstacles (or should we say Holt-made? David and his father made many of the dirt-bike obstacles in Niland). It was a much better location than Glamis ever was. Niland was a local spot, a place where you didn’t have to deal with the coastal brats or the “IE” trash from Riverside and San Bernardino County.
I heard that David drank too much before going on a ride on the unattended bike, which wasn’t really unattended. He found it propped against a trailer in a gas station. The bike’s owner was in the convenience store buying a cup of coffee and flirting with the clerk, a fair-skinned latino woman with eyes brown enough to spill your hot coffee over and not notice any difference except pain, when David set aside the brandy-and-coke soda bottle he was nursing.
Only for one ride, David said.
Except, David crashed the thing, breaking his leg and sliding a disk in his vertebrae. The bike was totaled. David spent two weeks in the hospital. The owner of the bike, who was a fork-lift operator from Colton, demanded that the Holts replace the bike, which prompted the Holts to threaten to press charges of negligence ... or something. And though there was nothing to be said for those changes, David certainly stole the bike, the whole thing was dropped.
But people remember things. A clever colleague of mine on the college faculty nicknamed David the nihilist of Niland. I don’t think that title quite fits David, an appreciation that there’s no meaning to anything might be giving David too much credit. He’s more of a narcissist if anything.
But like I said, David wasn’t all bad.
You see, he fished.
And there are few things more noble than to fish and then to eat the fish caught by a fisherman. David was a part of this fraternity. Calipatria told me he believed in it too. Which is to say; first, he was no nihilist; and second, he was responsible on the waters, studied the waters, cared for the waters, ate the fish he caught and perhaps even thought there was something larger than him in the world that created the waters. I thought this was an interesting side of David, because it showed that he wasn’t so unlike me. My earliest memory was a summer vacation when I was a four-year-old in the Missouri wilderness. My father and uncle fished the entire day at one of the tributaries that fed the Mississippi River. That evening, as the sun set over the small Missouri hills, which were covered by a forest of oak trees, covering the land not unlike the green sweater that hugged my mother's curves as she cooked the fish the men had caught later that night, eating in the dark and smelling the aroma of our food as it hung over the campsite until it was time to go to make camp and go to bed. We were happy. That moment lingering and lingering and lingering into the night and onto the morning.
So the sight of a man fishing made me not only think of the fraternity of fishermen, but my parents too. My father worked hard, fishing was his pastime. He was a professor of ecology at University of Findlay in Ohio. My mother was a school teacher, educating the farmers’ children at the elementary school. She was not too pretty, but when she flashed her hazel eyes and smiled her fat Polish-Catholic smile at my father he did what he was told. They were good like that, exhibiting all the stuff midwestern relationships were made of.
What my mother saw in my father when he returned to the campsite with a pale full of fish was what Calipatria may have seen in David.
She was beginning to tame him during their final days together.
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