We stopped to relieve ourselves in El Centro. No offense to the local chamber of commerce, but that seemed all it was good for, even though the town now had a Starbucks. The air was hot and hazy and smelled of agricultural chemicals.
Ahead were Plaster City and the startling escarpment of the Laguna Mountains. San Diego had one of the finest natural harbors in the world, but the railroads couldn’t easily get there in the nineteenth century because of that mountain range. Instead, they went to Los Angeles and that was that. We passed over one track at Plaster City and it reminded me of the railroad that was finally built to San Diego from the east. If memory served, the sugar baron John Spreckles underwrote it, and the San Diego and Arizona line was one of the most ambitious engineering accomplishments of its day. But it never made money and the land it traversed was so harsh, including a perilous crawl through Carrizo Gorge, that maintaining the railroad was prohibitive.
The wall of mountains and its forbidding canyons beyond did not intimidate Dwight Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System. So I-8 was built in the mid-1960s and San Diego finally had its connection to the east. Every year it brought more Phoenicians to the coast in search of relief from the summer heat.
None of this would have interested Peralta.
We started the serious grind uphill and then we were climbing through terrain strewn with giant boulders, the marble game of the gods. Behind us, the Imperial Valley spread below like a dry seabed. The Interstate twisted and curved, an unwelcome intruder. The sun was on his side, glinting off his thick hair and bringing out the aristocratic profile. I knew this highway well, but the majestic land never ceased its ability to move me.
“So we’re going to San Diego,” I said. “Do we know if anything this guy told us is correct? He lied about who he was. How do we know this Grace Hunter even existed or killed herself?”
“We don’t. We’ll find out.”
Robert Caro writes about how Lyndon Johnson was a reader of men. Nobody could read Peralta, not even LBJ, and certainly not me. Only occasionally did a “word” reveal itself to a careful observer of his professional mask. As I studied him, I could see an unusual determination in the set of his thick jaw. To be sure, “determination” with Peralta was like saying “deep” about the Grand Canyon. It was always there and spectacular to behold, much less try to hinder. Now, however, the canyon of his tenacity was unusually on display. But I saw something else, too, another word. Concern.