The Wine Red Road

The Wine Red Road 

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ISBN #978-1-4497-4478-6. The softcover version sells for $12.56. Or buy an autographed copy here direct from the author.

Chapter I

A man of the cloth should not commit suicide. But my wife Cindy was dead of cancer. After 33 years of marriage my life felt empty and without purpose. 

At least I never ruined my marriage by committing adultery or murder. My father, if he were still alive would counsel me to be thankful for that.

I learned my lesson about the horrific consequences of adultery when I was not quite 17 and accompanied my father to a double homicide on the Del Valle Dam Road, the Amador Valley’s infamous Wine Red Road. In fact, that incident had a lot to do with me becoming a priest.

 Still, I seriously considered smacking my car head on into the speeding 18-wheeler coming the other way. I wanted to forget what I’d always preached about loving God first and then your spouse. It was far easier to harp on other people about the need to put their faith into action in times of grief than to do it myself.

I had always said, “Give your pain to God. Call on your faith to sustain you during your tribulation.”

Shouldn’t the same advice apply to me?

***

My parents owned a small weekly newspaper at the time of the Del Valle Dam Road murders. My dad kept a police scanner in the kitchen of our home, in his office at work, and in our car. A scanner was a radio device that “scanned” police and fire calls. By listening to one, my dad kept track of all calls to which the local firefighters and police officers responded, and decided if he wanted to drive to the scene to get a story for his newspaper.

It was a hot Friday night in August, just after 11 o’clock. The family was still up. We often stayed up late toward the end of the week because that’s when a lot of news stories occurred. My mom, dad, brother, two sisters and I were just finishing a family game of Crazy Eights at the kitchen table when we heard the call asking the California Highway Patrol to respond to a traffic accident. The accident had occurred on Interstate 580, just east of Livermore.

“25-584, Oakland, 11-83, Altamont Pass, three miles east of the Vargas Road truck scales.”

“That’s the Oakland dispatcher telling a CHP unit, 25-584, that there’s a crash on the Altamont Pass and it’s unknown if there are injuries,” dad explained to our family.

“Are you going to go out on that?” my mom asked.

“I don’t know,” dad said. He listened intently to the scanner. “Let’s wait and see if it sounds serious.”

A couple of minutes went by without 25-584 responding to the Oakland dispatcher.

“25-584, Oakland,” the scanner squawked again. “Do you copy? 11-83 in the Altamont Pass, three miles east of the Vargas Road truck scales.”

“584 copies,” Oakland,” a male voice finally responded. “We were out of the car. We’re rolling Code-3 from 580 and El Charro Road.”

Code-3 meant with red light and siren, I knew. But I didn’t totally understand all the numbers the dispatcher had rattled off. “What’s 25-584 stand for?” I asked my dad.

“Each CHP area office has a number and each office divides highways they patrol into beats,” my dad explained.  “25 is the Hayward area office number and 584 is a beat somewhere on Interstate 580 between the CHP’s Hayward office and the Alameda, San Joaquin county line.”

“It’s late at night and the CHP is short-handed, so 584 might be patrolling the entire Amador Valley, including Interstate 580 and 680; that’s roughly four hundred square miles. On the other hand, it’s Friday night so they may have one or two other cars out here, but I’m not sure.  Their swing shift ends at 10 p.m. then their graveyard shift comes on and I know they don’t have a very big graveyard shift.”

“So, if that unit was just patrolling Highway 680 their call sign would be 25-680 something,” I surmised.

“You got it,” dad said.

“Well, I’m going to bed,” mom said.
She stood up from the table and stretched and yawned.

“I’m not quite ready for bed,” dad said. “Maybe I will take a quick drive up on to the Altamont to see what’s going on.”

“Can I go too?” I asked.

“Sure,” my dad said.

“Jack.” Mom protested.

“He’s old enough Nancy,” dad said. “Come on Brad, he said to me.

“Okay,” mom said. “But the rest of us are going to bed.”

It did not sit well with my brother Bobby and my sisters Janice and Janine that I got to stay up and go on an adventure with our father when they had to go to bed. But I was the oldest of us kids and rank did have a few privileges.

Dad and I jumped in the family van and headed up the Altamont. It was only a couple miles from our home.

Before we traveled very far, however, the CHP unit called its dispatcher to report no luck finding an accident.

“Oakland, 25-584.”

“584, Oakland. Go ahead.”

“11-83 appears GOA. We’re almost to the county line and there’s no sign of anything.”

“Copy 584. 11-83 is GOA.”

“GOA means gone on arrival?” I asked dad.

“It does,” he said. He seemed somewhat disappointed.

“Guess we might as well head back home,” he said.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” I said. “Can we pull into the rest area at the top of the pass?”

“Sure,” dad said.

We exited the eastbound lanes of 580 at the summit of the Altamont Pass, and pulled into the rest area there to use the bathroom. Several semi-trucks and eighteen wheelers were parked at the rest stop.  Their refrigerator compressors shattered the stillness of the night, rattling noisily to keep their cargos of California produce cool. Their exhausted drivers dozed fitfully in stuffy padded sleeper cabs.

A couple of Ford pickup trucks towing Airstream travel trailers and bearing Iowa license plates were parked at the rest stop too. I noticed lights on in one of the trailers. After I used the bathroom my dad decided he needed to go, so I had time and opportunity to see what was happening in the lighted trailer.

Two women and two men were seated at a table playing cards. From their action with the cards, taking tricks and that sort of thing, I deduced they were playing pinochle or bridge.

I watched from a puddle of dark shadow near one of the semis as a thin, wiry-looking man with white peach fuzz on his head and bifocals perched precariously on the end of his nose, led off a round of taking tricks. A plump, matronly woman seated to the leader’s left, adjusted a shawl around her shoulders, sipped something from a flowered tea cup then followed the man’s suit. The second man, a robust, outdoors-looking type, dressed in flannel shirt and coveralls, and smoking a pipe, briefly pondered the discard pile then made his play.

The second woman, a skinny, silver-coiffed minx with sun-abused skin, placed her half-empty glass carefully on a coaster, slapped her trump card triumphantly on the outdoorsman’s card and laughed gleefully. The outdoorsman let out a bellow of rage that could be heard from the trailer’s open door clear across the highway. The outdoorsman threw his remaining cards on the table and huffed out onto the parking lot and cursed loudly.

I ducked back out of sight beside the semi. I wondered briefly why it was taking my dad so long to come out of the men’s room and thought I should probably get back into our car. Dad wouldn’t like me eavesdropping like I was. Still, I couldn’t resist.

The plump woman joined the outdoor man outside and I could hear them talking.

“You okay Charlie?” the woman asked.

“I’m sorry I walked out like that,” Charlie said. “It just ticks me off the way she takes so much joy in beating me.”

“I know,” the woman said soothingly. She put her hand on his arm and looked into his eyes.

“I wish we were free to be together like we want to be,” she said. “It’s just . . .”

“I know. We’d lose too much if you divorced Don and I divorced Jeri-Lynn. If we were both younger it might not be such a financial hardship to start over again. But at our age . . .”

“It doesn’t matter,” the woman said. “We can spend as much time together as we want.”

“You’re right,” the man said. “Besides, if we were married we probably would wind up hating each other too.”

“I could never hate you Charlie,” the woman said. “You’re my soul mate. If only I had met you forty years sooner.”

“I love you Grace,” Charlie muttered.

The couple kissed. At that point I became too embarrassed to watch any longer and scurried back to the car. My dad was just coming out of the bathroom.

“Sorry I took so long,” he said. “I ran into Lorne Roberts in there and we got to talking.”

“Who’s Lorne Roberts,” I asked.

“He’s a retired Alameda County Sheriff’s deputy,” dad explained. “I knew him when I worked for the East Bay Chronicle. You were pretty young so you don’t remember him. He and his wife divorced a few years ago and he moved to Modesto. He’s just on his way to Oakland to visit his kids.”

On the ride back home I pondered the dilemma of being married to one person and wanting to be with another. How did that happen?  Was it because you didn’t wait long enough for the right person to come along? Did your marriage partner suddenly turn ugly after a few years so you fell out of love? Why did people live lives of quiet desperation and cheat on each other? Why did they divorce?

I wondered if my mom and dad were ever unhappy with each other the way other married couples were. I guess they had been once, at least dad had been. But why, I wondered? Fortunately, he got religion and mom forgave him. They didn’t look unhappy now.

Actually, I didn’t want to know if they were unhappy. I just wanted them to be okay.

I vowed to keep looking for a wife until I found just the right person, no matter how long it took.

Dad often said, “You have plenty of time Brad,” and he was right.

I had to go to college and start a career. I was a long way from marrying anyone. Still, I couldn’t help wishing I had a steady girlfriend. Most of the guys I attended school with had steady girlfriends.

I thought of Cindy Carson. I met her at a school play last year, our sophomore year. I had even walked her to class a couple of times. But nothing much had happened after that.

The problem was she was dating Derek Montrose, the junior six-foot-nine center on our basketball team. Derek was so cocky. I didn’t like him to begin with, but the fact that he was dating Cindy made me dislike him even more. My dad advised me many times to pray for my enemies, but ever since I found out Derek was dating Cindy, I found it almost impossible to pray for him.

Still daydreaming, I found myself thinking about Mr. O’Brien who had recently been executed for the murder of his wife, her lover, and a Livermore police officer.

Chapter II

I had always considered my dad to be a little schizophrenic and Mr. O’Brien’s execution was a case in point. Maybe I shouldn’t say schizophrenic. Maybe I should just say my dad was kind of weird.

He wasn’t weird in the usual sense - totally nutburgers or anything like that – because generally speaking, he was a pretty cool guy. He was ruggedly handsome like his Scandinavian ancestors, possessed an athletic build and had big honest blue eyes. His hands were long-fingered and he had kind of big ears and his nose was a little bit larger than it really needed to be. But receiving a bear hug from my dad was an uplifting experience since he was a fairly brawny newspaper man who usually smelled like printer’s ink and after-shave lotion.  Best of all, he was kind and patient, and his wry, appreciative wit was difficult to ignore. 

But dad’s job made him a little crazy sometimes. He published a weekly newspaper – which could drive anybody crazy, he said.

“The human side of me wants to believe that people are basically good and worth saving,” he once told me. “But the journalist side of me is always highly skeptical.”

Sometimes, he became so conflicted when he worked on a story, he just got, well, weird.

Like I said, dad had a soft heart. He really wanted to believe in people. He said he felt like it was his job to promote justice by revealing injustice.

“But as a journalist I constantly meet people who seem totally incorrigible and absolutely not worth helping,” he said, “people who just flat deserve their punishments.”

Dad felt pretty sorry for Mr. O’Brien even though Mr. O’Brien deserved to die for what he did. Mr. O’Brien had been executed recently for the murder of his wife, her lover, and a Livermore police officer. Dad had called me from San Quentin Prison after witnessing the execution and I could hear the depression in his voice because he felt so bad for Mr. O’Brien.

“We don’t hang people anymore which is a good thing,” dad said. “But I’m not so sure the gas chamber is any better.”

Dad described the San Quentin gas chamber to me then. He said it was a green octagonal metal room about 6 feet across and 8 feet high. There was a tall chimney outside to take the gas away.

“The entrance to the chamber is through a rubber sealed steel door closed by a locking wheel,” dad said. “There are windows in five sides of the gas chamber so witnesses can view the execution.”

“Watching an execution doesn’t sound like much fun,” I said.

“It isn’t,” dad said. “Two guards strapped Mr. O’Brien into a chair with holes in the seat. They strapped his upper and lower legs, arms, thighs and chest so he couldn’t thrash around.

“Then they taped a stethoscope to his chest so a doctor could monitor his heartbeat and pronounce him dead. Beneath his chair there was a bowl filled with sulphuric acid mixed with distilled water. Sodium cyanide pellets were suspended in a gauze bag just above the bowl. When the pellets were released into the bowl, the chemical reaction released hydrogen cyanide gas which rose up through the holes in Mr. O’Brien’s chair.”

“It was horrible Brad,” dad said. “Though Mr. O Brien lost consciousness in less than two minutes and was pronounced dead in less than 10 minutes, apparently, people executed in the gas chamber experience a lot of pain and agony. I’m told it’s like they’re experiencing a really bad heart attack.”

Dad told me Mr. O’Brien’s eyes popped out, his skin turned purple and he began to drool once he breathed the cyanide then his body spasmed like he was having an epileptic seizure.

“This was the first and last time I ever witness an execution,” dad said.

Mr. O’Brien, a physicist at Lawrence Livermore Radiation Laboratory, shot his wife, her lover Ed Vargas and a Livermore police officer when he came home early from work one day.

He caught Mrs. O’Brien and Mr. Vargas, Sunday school teachers at Livermore Valley Four Corners Church, committing adultery - getting to know each other in a more biblical way, so to speak.

Dad knew Mr. O’Brien pretty well, because Livermore Valley Four Corners Church was where we attended services.

Mr. O’Brien shot Chad Brown, the Livermore police officer who tried to arrest him, after shooting Mrs. O’Brien and Ed Vargas. Shooting Chad Brown was what got Mr. O’Brien the death penalty. In California they took a pretty dim view of killing cops.

My dad said, “Mr. O’Brien probably would have spent only a few years behind bars for shooting his wife and Ed Vargas, because he was in a jealous rage when he shot them and the jurors probably would have sympathized with a temporary insanity plea. But killing Chad Brown proved to be a fatal mistake.

“Mr. O’Brien said during his trial that he was real sorry for killing Chad Brown. He said he didn’t know what came over him, but when he caught his wife and Ed sprawled on his living room couch, committing adultery, he was just so overcome with rage, killing them was all he could think of.” 

“Then that cop came busting through the door and I just turned my gun on him too,” Mr. O’Brien said.

“I never cheated on my wife,” Mr. O’Brien told the jury. “I never stayed out late carousing with my friends. I came home every night right after work. I always gave my wife my paycheck. I didn’t gamble or drink too much. I let her decorate the house however she wanted. We traveled places.”

“She could have done so much worse than me but no, she couldn’t be satisfied. She had to go and commit adultery.”

Adultery. My dad had told me many stories about the terrible consequences of adultery. In his business, he came across examples all the time of what happened when people violated God’s seventh commandment. They seldom thought things were going to turn out as badly as they did when they decided to cheat on their spouses, but something bad always happened.

The most famous story of adultery, of course, is about David and Bathsheba. It’s in the Bible.

Dad knew the consequences of adultery first hand too, because that’s what almost broke him and my mom’s marriage up. He committed adultery when she was pregnant with me and they almost divorced after I was born. Dad never forgot the hard lesson he learned.

Mrs. O’Brien surely didn’t think she was going to die when she took up with Ed Vargas! I remembered her as a real pretty woman. She was tall and blonde and dressed real sharp. She was smart too and had a pretty voice when she sang in choir. I saw her legs once when she wore shorts to a church picnic.

I gotta’ tell ya’ I could understand why a guy would want to mess around with Mrs. O’Brien! I admit I had occasional lascivious thoughts about her myself. I had to pray real hard about that.

But it was a huge surprise at Livermore Valley Four Corners Church when we found out that Mrs. O’Brien had been committing adultery because she didn’t seem the type. At least that’s what most people said. She was an accountant for the firm of Landenberg and Lily in town and served on the church board to help keep an eye on the church finances.

She usually attended Sunday services dressed in a prim suit or skirt and sweater with pearls, wearing no makeup except a little lipstick. You wouldn’t have called her flashy or flirtatious at all. In fact, she was fairly quiet. She had a nice smile though and I always thought she was a sincerely nice person. She talked to me once about baseball and seemed genuinely interested. She didn’t have any kids of her own.

Ed Vargas was plain and quiet too. I wouldn’t have called him handsome - not like Mr. O’Brien -because he was only about five foot nine and was partially balding, but apparently he was a good listener.

Maybe being a good listener is what got Ed Vargas into trouble with Mrs. O’Brien. Ed often helped people in church who were having problems. They all said, “Ed’s such a good listener.”

His wife Esther left town shortly after his death. All I remember about her was that she was fat, bossy and meddlesome. A lot of men at church whispered to each other that they could totally understand why Ed had been attracted to Mrs. O’Brien.

As tough as the O’Brien affair was on my dad though, the one involving the California Highway Patrol officer would prove to be even more traumatic.

Chapter III

“Look at all those windmills,” my dad said, momentarily pulling my attention back to the present. It was like he had ESP or something.

Hundreds of windmills dotted the landscape here, all of them producing little bits of kilowatts to make up large chunks of megawatts to feed the energy gobbling cities of the San Francisco/Oakland Bay area.

“You remember what these hills looked like before all these windmills took seed and sprouted?” dad asked me.

“You mean before roads cut through the rolling green fields and houses spread up all over the surrounding farm land like a bad case of cancerous warts,” I said. “I only vaguely remember because I was pretty young.”

But I wondered, since photography was a hobby of mine, how I could artistically photograph the windmills. The tall towers with their airplane-type propellers and the squat little “egg beaters” suddenly made me feel like I was on some distant planet.

I imagined what it felt like to be alone and unloved. The windmills became angry, grotesque girls – girls I wanted to love but who didn’t want to love me – rising up out of the earth like mob feminists ready to lynch me just because I was born a man.  Whoa! Daytime nightmares.

Well, actually, it was night time. The digital clock on our car’s cassette deck said it was not quite midnight. I fell back to daydreaming about a date with Cindy.

I was thinking of asking her to go out with me again. We were juniors now and we attended several classes together, so I was getting to know her better and I really liked her a lot. I’d gotten my driver’s license too, so I wouldn’t have to ask mom or dad to drive us anywhere. I was thinking of asking Cindy to go to the Junior Prom with me.

Some friends of mine, who also knew Cindy pretty well told me,” Cindy and Derek aren’t together anymore.”

Trouble is, I didn’t know that for sure. I didn’t know if I should ask Cindy point blank if she was still dating Derek and if she said no, ask her out or if I should just ask her out and not even bring Derek up. But what if Cindy agreed to go to the prom with me just because she wasn’t dating Derek anymore and she wanted somebody to take her and it didn’t matter whom? 

Some of the girls at school were like that. I didn’t think Cindy was, but I wanted her to go with me because she liked me, not just because Derek might not be taking her.  Of course Cindy might not want to date me because I was considered pretty straight. Most high school kids think of Christians as nerdy, verse-spouting goody-two-shoes.

I liked to think of myself as pretty normal, but I don’t know, maybe I wasn’t. I played football and baseball at school, and I was president of the Key Club, which was an athletic club sponsored by a local service organization, I sang in the choir, worked on the yearbook staff, got good grades and was liked by my teachers. Still . . .

Dad, of course, always said, “Worry more about what you think of yourself and what God thinks of you. Don’t worry so much about the other kids.”

But sometimes that was tough advice to take. I couldn’t help wondering how the other kids, especially girls, really perceived me.

Surely Cindy knew I was a Christian. I probably had told her myself. It didn’t seem to bother her. She even appeared to be flirting with me in class sometimes. I wrote her a couple of goofy poems in French class once and she really seemed to like them.

I pictured Cindy and me at a movie together, sitting close in the dark, holding hands. We would make a nice looking couple, I thought. I was 6-2, weighed 195 pounds, and had blond wavy hair and blue eyes. Cindy was about 5-7 and slim, with long dark hair and big brown eyes with long eyelashes.

She kind of reminded me of Shelley Fabares, whom I’d seen in old reruns of The Donna Reed Show. Shelley was in an Elvis Presley moving once too. I wondered if Cindy would like being called Mrs. Andrews if she married me.

The police scanner squawked to life again. “25-584, Oakland,” it said. “11-83, burning vehicle, Fire Trail Number 16, just off Del Valle Dam Road, approximately two miles north of the dam. Off-duty officer standing by.”

“An 11-83 on the Del Valle Dam Road with unknown injuries and a burning vehicle could be serious,” dad said. “The CHP refer to the Del Valle Dam Road as the Wine Red Road because it twists through several vineyards and it’s so steep that sometimes people who drive up to the lake to picnic crash and burn coming back down to town – usually because they’ve had too much to drink. If you run off the road up there you can easily end up dead in the bottom of the canyon.”

“Could just be another false alarm though,” dad mused. “But I must have been right about 584 being the only unit on duty right now.”

“Are we going to go up there?” I asked.

“Let’s wait a minute and get a little more information.”

“25-584, Oakland, 11-83 . . .”

“584 Oakland.  Please notify Livermore P.D. we’re coming through town Code-3.”

“681 is rolling from 680 and Sunol Valley Road to assist, Oakland,” a female CHP officer notified the dispatcher.

“By golly there is another unit working out there tonight,” dad said.

“681, Oakland copies. Responding from 680 and Sunol Valley Road. 584, 681 rolling to assist.”

“10-4 Oakland. 681, 584.”

“Go ahead 584.”

“681, 584. Be advised, if we beat you there you owe us a hamburger.”

“You’re on 584,” the female CHP officer said. “Hope you got a big overtime check this month. My partner says he’s hungry enough to eat a horse.”

“That’s because he is one,” the 584 officer retorted.

The sound of a siren wailing came over the scanner. Then there was silence.

“Why’d the CHP guys ask their dispatcher to notify Livermore P.D.?” I asked. “Is the wreck within Livermore’s city limits?”

“No. It’s in the county. It’s a courtesy thing,” dad explained.

“Livermore P.D. has received a lot of complaints from people about late-night sirens so they asked the CHP not to use them going through town.

“If a CHP unit is going to run through Livermore with red light and siren, they’re supposed to let the P.D. know so the P.D. can tell people it wasn’t them making all the noise.”

“Boy, you’d think people would be happy that the police are on the job,” I remarked.

“You have a point,” dad said. “On the other hand, Livermore is primarily a residential suburb. People don’t enjoy getting blasted out of a good night’s sleep by wailing sirens. I know I don’t.”

“Are we going to the crash site?” I asked hopefully.

“Why not?” dad said. “Mom’s probably asleep in her bed already, it’s Friday night and we’re two young men in quest of adventure.”

“Yeah!” I said happily.

I liked my dad’s sense of adventure. I guessed that’s why he chose to become a newspaper reporter.

“I hope this isn’t another wild goose chase,” he said.

We swung off the freeway at Vasco Road and headed back into Livermore. Dad explained as he drove, the reason the CHP was responding to the crash call, and not Alameda County.

“The CHP has jurisdiction over any vehicle accident that occurs on unincorporated roads and state and federal highways,” he said. “The Sheriff’s department would only respond to non-vehicular-related crimes. They enforce the Penal Code and the CHP enforces the Vehicle Code.”

About the time dad finished his explanation, I realized we would have to drive right by the subdivision Cindy lived in to get to Mines Road.

Mines Road turned into Del Valle Dam Road a few miles out of town. I hadn’t driven through Livermore this way since our family picnic and water skiing trip to the lake last summer.

Del Valle Dam Road was a two-lane serpentine of asphalt and gravel rising gently upward through the grape vineyards and oak-covered foothills southwest of Livermore.

Sheep grazed contently beneath the oaks alongside the road, their fleece bleached fluorescent by the nearly full moon - their bleating calls to each other sounded like chimes rustled by a breeze.

The scene would have been romantically pastoral except I couldn’t stop thinking of Cindy and Derek together and I was so filled with jealously. But then I remembered Mr. O’Brien.

Mr. O’Brien told dad that catching his wife and Ed Vargas together made him so jealous he totally lost his ability to reason.

“I come in the house,” Mr. O’Brien had said, “and I catch the two of them together . . . you know. They were . . . you know . . .

“I remember fetching my shotgun out of its cabinet in the spare room. I remember loading the shotgun. I think I remember hearing my wife and Ed Vargas scream. Somebody screamed anyway. Maybe it was me.

“I guess I reloaded my gun . . . afterward . . . you know . . . to shoot myself. But the next thing I know, I’m sitting at the kitchen table drinking a beer – trying to work up the courage to do what I had to do - then that cop comes crashing through the front door and I am still so angry I just let him have it instead.”

My dad told me a guy named Jose Marti – he was a writer or philosopher or something – once said, “Life on earth is hand-to-hand mortal combat . . . between the law of love and the law of hate.”

The thing I couldn’t fathom was why that had to be true. Why did people who seemed to love each other so much in the beginning of their relationships wind up hating each other so much in the end? I sure didn’t want to wind up like Mr. O’Brien.

“My life will never be the same,” Mr. O’Brien confided to my dad. “One moment of jealous rage ruined everything. Now, I’m at the end of my road.”