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airport. He could wake up in Olympia, fly the roundtrip across America,
and return to sleep in his own bed. Sometimes, though, Scott stayed
longer in Reston, visiting his parents and sisters, catching up with old
friends.
He visited Kevin and saw that he had performed miracles with the
dilapidated house he had bought in Great Falls for $45,000. The original
log cabin beams were exposed now, and he had remortared so that there
were no chinks to let in the winter wind. And the snake nests under the
roof were all gone. Kevin's Great Falls home, which he called
"Springvale Studios" had the most serendipitous ambiance for painting
that he had ever found. His work was going better than he could have
dreamed. His paintings of the sea and sky were selling almost as fast as
he could finish them. The Washington Gallery of Fine Art sold one of
Kevin's canvases, which depicted a mighty, crashing white wave rolling
over a beach of black sand, for $2,000. By 1984, Capricorn Galleries in
Bethesda had featured Kevin's paintings in two shows.
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Both of them were immediate sell-outs, and the gallery urged him to
return with more paintings. Kevin saw Scott fairly often since he
usually came by Kevin's studio when he was visiting Reston.
During one of Scott's visits, Kevin's older brother Steve happened to be
home too, and the two were finally introduced. Kevin bragged about what
a skilled sculptor and carpenter Steve was and Scott invited Steve to
come work on the property in Olympia that he hoped to buy soon.
Steve's income was sparse at that period in his life, and he seemed
interested when Scott suggested he come out to Washington State for a
few months. The compensation he offered was attractive, and the project
sounded good. It didn't concern Scott that he didn't even own the
acreage on Overhulse Road, the owners were several states away.
Scott shared the rented gray house on Overhulse Road in Olympia with his
friend Mickey Morris. "I'd been looking around for a place to build in
the woods, " Mickey recalled. "Scott had the same dream, so we put our
heads together and came up with this idea to build a platform in the
trees." They had seemingly endless space on the acreage, and Scott
thought it would be fun, and profitable, to build a treehouse in a
cluster of evergreens. He had walked out in the woods and noted a circle
of cedars, a natural location for the treehouse he envisioned. "It
started out as a really small idea, " Mickey said.
"We built this massive platform, and while we were doing it, we just
kept getting more and more donations of wood.
People would say, Well, we're tearing down this house, and you can have
the wood. We ended up with this huge stockpile of wood.
"We built with all hand tools. Essentially, we were squatters.
It started off very innocent and low-key .. . we just never planned on
building this major structure." Scott and an assortment of old and new
friends carried on the building project.
Some of the materials for the first treehouse were paid for with meth
money, but Scott confided to a friend that he had also stolen lumber
from deserted old houses, tearing the places apart to take what he
wanted. If anyone cared, they never heard about it.
That first treehouse proved to be a highly successful project, so much
so that Scott and Mickey moved into it as a full-time residence. They
sublet the little gray house to a young woman named Julie Weathers. *
Julie Weathers was also an Evergreen student, but she was very different
from many of Scott's friends.
She was one of the "Greeners, " the members of the student body who
embraced health food and the preservation of all things natural.
Vegetarian, of course, Julie wore clothes made only of cotton, linen,
and wool. She smelled of clean soap and fresh air.
Moreover, she was the perfect embodiment of the kind of woman Scott
Scurlock had sought all his life. She came from Montana, and she was a
tall, slender girl with flaxen hair that fell straight and gleaming to
the middle of her back. Her body was absolutely perfect. Julie wore
Levis and cowboy boots and Guatemalan shirts. She had a Bo Derek or
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Linda Evans face, clear-eyed, openand beautiful. It was probably
inevitable that Scott would fall in love with Julie Weathers. He let her
keep her horse on the property, and he loved to watch her ride bareback.
She was all grace and fluid movement, this was a woman that even he
could be faithful to. It might seem that a man could not make his
fortune manufacturing a pungent-smelling, forbidden drug, and, at the
same time, be consumed with a love for nature and personal fitness.
But Scott was always a man who believed that he could have it all, he
didn't see that many of his activities were at cross-purposes, that if
one succeeded the other must fail. His personality, always bifurcated
into diverging loyalties, developed deeper fissures. He saw himself as a
true friend, a protector of the weak, a loyal son, and as much an
advocate of natural resources as any "Greener" at his college. A large
part of Scott Scurlock really wanted to be good. At the same time,
Scott's pursuit of worldly wealth continued undiminished. He was
catering to the weaknesses of his fellow human beings and dealing with
some of the sleaziest members of society. Any one but Scott would have
had great difficulty reconciling the two sides of his nature but he was [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]