Beep beep beep, we all suddenly heard. Beep beep beep.
Everyone checked their pockets—but along with writing implements and paper, we hadn’t been allowed to bring our phones either. The Administrator glared at us for a moment before he realized that the noise was his own. He grabbed his phone from his belt and looked at it. Then he walked swiftly out of the room, followed by a spasm of guards.
“Okay!” Clarissa said in a leadership voice after a half-second delay.
“Okay!” Mike said at the same time in a louder voice.
Clarissa stood up and smoothed her skirt. But Mike was quicker. He moved silkily toward the podium and began booming at us while Clarissa sat awkwardly back down.
“The Administrator will be right back, and until then, welcome! Let’s get started here. I really want to thank everybody for coming today and for all the amazing work you’ve been doing. We’ve been able to dial back on the overreach from the prior administration, and now environmentalism can truly partner with industry and growth and regain the faith and confidence of the private—”
Sitting directly behind me, a forty-something white woman from the Air and Radiation Law Office named Lisa Beasley began hiccupping loudly and violently.
Mike continued talking. “And what we’re excited to tee up this year is a full coordination of the lead, emissions, and particularly pesticides strategies so that this office remains on message at all times about the synergy between clean water, clean air, and the New Federalism.”
Lisa’s hiccups were loud. She’d whipped up her wispy brown hair into an untidy bun, and it shook like an abused puppet on the top of her head.
Mike ceased talking and smiled at her.
“Sorry, I’ve just been having a little anxiety,” she said.
“Well, just stop,” Mike said.
“Okay,” Lisa said, jerking.
The Administrator and his killers now came striding back into the room.
“All right,” the Administrator said, beaming genially while coursing with sweat.
“I was telling them about all the success that we’re having with the chlorpyrifos case,” Mike explained, drifting an inch away from the podium.
“I have to get out of here,” Khaled murmured, while still fetally curling in his seat.
“Who’s running point on that?” Clarissa practically yelled out.
“On—what?” Mike asked, as he’d been squinting at Khaled.
“Chlorpyrifos,” Clarissa said.
“Marta,” Mike said.
I began to lightly touch my eyes as if fending off a small horde of wasps while Khaled looked at me sideways.
“Uh,” the Administrator said.
“Wait, what’s happening with chlorpyrifos?” asked Brenda Ortiz, a forty-odd-year-old black female water-law expert and breast-cancer survivor sitting four rows back on the far left side. She wore a pussy-bow blouse, recently had adopted the constantly outraged expression of a high school algebra teacher, and two years previous had nearly put me in a headlock while trying unsuccessfully to bond with me over our similar medical problems. “Are you talking about the PANNA petition? I thought we were yanking that crap.”
“We’re pivoting,” Mike said.
“We’re switching gears,” said Clarissa.
“Um,” the Administrator said, looking at his phone.
“And Marta’s doing that?” Brenda asked.
The Administrator’s phone suddenly rang again. He glared at the screen. Gingerly, he poked at it. We could all hear a man screaming. The man was Donald Trump. The Administrator sighed and walked out of the room once more, followed by the security ghouls.
As Mike began lecturing us again, I turned around and saw that every single miserable Bartleby in that room stared straight at me. I smiled weakly back at them and then looked at Khaled for help. But Khaled’s face had turned red and tight, and he started quietly sobbing.
“And what’s going to be great about the dynamic we’re developing between oil and air, and coal and water, is how we’re going to be able to harness corporate ingenuity and states’ rights to develop a healthier planet for everybody,” Mike said.
I stood up and made a vague gesture toward my pelvis that indicated “women’s emergency.” Mike and Clarissa pretended not to notice anything. I walked hastily out of the meeting, stiff-leggedly hurrying through the Reagan Building’s intestinal series of corridors. Once out of sight, I ran through the halls, across Twelfth Street, and dashed into WJC North.
I entered my office and shut the door behind me. I trembled and grabbed the silver-framed photograph of my parents off my workspace. I did not look at it. I only pressed it to my abdomen and sat down hard on the floor, next to my chair. I rested my back uncomfortably against the various knobs and angles of my desk.
I closed my eyes.
It’s important to be a good person, I thought, and to do good things that are not bad. But grudgingly doing something that you are told to do by a superior, after you make a sophisticated cost-benefit analysis and complain in a sarcastic tone, is different than doing a bad thing wholeheartedly, which could actually make you such a bad person that you’d be a stone-cold killer of other human beings, innocent human beings with fragile nervous and pulmonary systems, who are a lot like you are, or like you used to be.
It’s important to be a good person and to not be a bad person, I explained to myself. Being a bad person, though, is different than just doing one’s job in a socially approved way with the endorsement of high government officials and a huge proportion, if not actually a majority, of American voters. If a person is directed to do things that are legal, then that is okay, because the laws have been vetted by reasonable people who are by definition not foaming-lipped homicidal maniacs. If a person rebelled against fulfilling their legal duties, say, by quitting their job and entering an uncertain labor market or burning down government buildings or racing naked through administrative offices shrieking dissents and obscenities, then that would seem unreasonable and like an overreaction, and unreasonable overreactions are stigmatized in this society as the deranged acts of the mentally ill.
At that moment, I wished that I had not wanted to be a writer and read all of those good books when I was young. I remembered that authors like Herman Melville and George Orwell and Jean-Paul Sartre and James Baldwin and Langston Hughes said the opposite thing from what I had just told myself, which is that you are bad if you do something that seems good or at least debatable but that you know in fact to be awful, the worst, the most evil, even though everyone else seems to like it. And if you do that bad thing, then you are the bad thing, you are the heinous one, you have committed a treason against some higher principle that cannot be cured by simply quitting and apologizing for past ill-judged actions. No, instead, you would deserve a terrible punishment.
In the hospital, I now understood with a stab of lifted blankness, I had learned a lesson that I later rinsed from my mind with legal training and lackadaisical adulting. Yes, in the cancer ward I had been filled with the crazed fury of the powerless and the murdered. I had tasted death, and I had known death, as if it had crawled up to me and smiled.
I clutched the photograph to me tighter as I remembered my parents’ clenched faces, the sounds of their stricken praying. The past came rolling back to me in a hot, clear wave. It was almost as if my mother and father had returned from their vanishing and were accusing me of forgetting them, that I had ever loved them and that they had loved me. Within the midst of a total recall that felt more like a hallucination, I begged them to understand that I had done the best that I could in an impossible, horrible situation. But they wouldn’t listen. Instead, their savage voices continued yelling at me from across hell. They sounded angry, disappointed in me, and somehow still very much alive.*
Several law clerks to Judge Alex Kozinski resigned Thursday, after the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals launched an inquiry into allegations of sexual misconduct lodged against the judge.
KEVIN DALEY, “Clerks Resign as 9th Circuit Launches Harassment Probe of Kozinski,” Daily Caller, December 14, 2017
Draft of a Letter of Recommendation to the Honorable Alex Kozinski, Which I Guess I’m Not Going to Send Now
Californians recovering from wildfires in 2017 and 2018 will be able to apply for up to $12 billion of that aid, including farm assistance, highway money and flood infrastructure, according to an analysis from the office of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. Efforts to pass the bill dragged on for months. The Democratic-controlled House passed a bill in January and another last month that included billions of dollars for Californians recovering from wildfires. The holdup had been in the Senate over Trump’s refusal to consider additional money to help Puerto Rico recover from Hurricane Maria, which killed an estimated 3,000 people in 2017.
TAL KOPAN, “House Sends Long-Stalled California Wildfire Relief Bill to Trump,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 3, 2019
Paradise
“I THINK WE SHOULD GO, DAD,” I said, shielding my eyes from the wind. The sheriff had tweeted an evacuation order for Pulga twenty minutes before. It was quarter to eight in the morning, and the sky didn’t look right. Ten minutes ago it had turned from bright blue to a thick, light, orangey-gray.
“I’m not going anywhere,” said Wesley, my father-in-law. He looked eastward with his face crinkling up. He’s a big bull of a man, about five foot eleven now. He’s white and bald and wears glasses. He has a chipped front tooth and his son’s blue eyes. He wore a Cowboys T-shirt and blue nylon shorts and black flip-flops. Eighty years old.
“That sky, though,” I said. I am five foot two with a big ass and strong arms. I’m forty-four. My black hair frizzed all around my head. I wore black nylon shorts and a pink nylon top and no shoes.
We stood in the front yard of the house, which was on Edgewood Lane. Wes’s huge black Yukon sat in the driveway. I’d parked my little green Prius by the curb. The winds whipped down the road. The crape myrtle bushes I planted on the sides of the house right after Mike died flattened and splayed from the hard gusts. The cottonwoods fringing the road shook like they were getting slapped by a huge hand. Dead, gold grass and dried leaves crawled along our front yard instead of a proper lawn. Back inside, Jessie still dawdled, drinking her milk in the kitchen and playing with Henrietta.
“Shelly,” I said. Our neighbor, a hefty yellowed-haired woman, had just walked fast out of her house wearing flowered shorts and a white T-shirt.
“Fernanda, they’re evacuating Pulga,” she said. Pulga’s a little town maybe fifteen miles away from Paradise as the crow flies.
“I know,” I said.
“You got Jessie?” Shelly asked.
“Yeah, I think we’re going to go in like ten minutes,” I said.
Wesley shook his head.
“Wes,” Shelly said, grimacing. “Sonny boy, smell that air.”
Already, it smelled like burning, just like that.
“Fires here every year,” Wesley said, tilting his head my way. “She can go.”
“She is the cat’s mother,” Shelly said, pulling her phone out of her shorts pocket and jabbing at it.
Ten or twelve other neighbors came hurrying out of their houses. Martin, Tillie, Babs, Fred, Nancy, I can’t remember. Already, Serena Hammer’s Honda and Joe Tate’s Chevrolet chugged down Edgewood toward Pearson and Skyway. The rest of us stood out there gawking for probably too long, making clucking noises and talking about the Carr fire in Nor Cal last August.
“Concow lines are down,” Shelly said, gripping her iPhone. Concow’s another town, closer to us than Pulga. “Can’t get hold of my mother.”
“Evacuation for Paradise,” Martin suddenly hollered, from two houses down. He’s another white man—but they’re all white except for me on this street, so why keep saying it. His nose practically touched his iPhone screen. “They’re telling us to haul out.”
Shelly hustled indoors. People started moving back and forth between their houses and their cars. They lugged clothes, water, lamps, pillows, makeup cases, books, pictures, all this unnecessary crap.
I looked at Wesley. He sniffed.
“I’m not running,” he said. “I built this house in 1982.”
“Wes,” I said. “Look at the color of that goddam sky.”
“This is my house. You just live here,” he said. “You and Jessie can go.”
He started walking toward the myrtles on the left side of the house, where the hose was.
I ran inside.
Wes didn’t want his son Mike to marry me. It wasn’t a secret. I’m Pomo and Mexican and grew up in the Evergreen Mobile Home Park with my parents, Lupita and Ben. Mike and I knew each other from around. We’d seen each other at Paradise High, where we graduated in ’92, and then later at Butte Community. But Mike had been raised up on Edgewood. When he was young, he dated girls like valedictorian Renee Henson and cheerleader Willa Miller, whose parents lived on Pentz and Mountain View. I stuck to a crew of Native, black, and Mexican kids who played video games and got sent to detention when they shrugged at the white teachers. Mike was a blockhead back then anyway, and I wasn’t interested. He played football, and I’d seen him soaking wet and drunk at house parties on Saturday nights.
Mike was above me because my parents worked as janitors at Paradise’s Best Western and Chico’s Oxford Suites. But his pa, Wesley Noonan, was one of the best lawyers in town. Wes set up a three-man outfit, Noonan, Gump & Penzer, up on Skyway, where he did estate planning for folks from Paradise to Chico. Wes was a big man, and not just physically. When he’d walk into Tattie’s Café, where I bused and then waitressed during high school, diners would look up at him in an eager way. Tattie herself (she’s now dead) would run up to him, wiping her hands on her apron and seating him, his pretty red-haired wife, Laura, and Mike, right away.
“I’ll have the steak and a scotch,” Wes would say to me, on the nights when I took his order. He looked me over once and then never again.
“Would you like that rare, sir?” I’d ask him, though I knew.
He’d sit there and sniff, like he was mad that the scotch wasn’t in front of him already.
“He likes it well,” Laura said, smiling. Mike would gawk at me a little bit and then blush and look down.
The twentieth time I pretended to forget that Wes liked his meat scorched, he set his jaw and smacked at a water glass so that it went flying.
“How many times do I have to tell you the same thing?” he snapped, while the water dripped.
“Dad,” Mike had said.
Laura had begun to mop up the spill with her napkin.
“What’s my name?” I’d asked him then.
Wes’s face darkened with puzzlement. “What?”
“What’s my name?” I asked again. I pointed to my nametag, FERNANDA. “Come on, I’ve been getting you steak for a year. You must know it by now.” I just didn’t like the way he did business.
Tattie came running over, wailing, “We’ve got this covered. The whole bill for tonight’s taken care of, Wesley.”
To do penance, Tattie made me keep bringing the table complimentary olives and fried cheese bites that came out of my check. But even though I fed that mope to the gills, I still got fired later that night.
Mike and I started dating eight years ago. I’d gotten a divorce and come back home from Dublin, Georgia, where my first husband, Scott, lived. Mike hadn’t gone to law school like his father wanted but instead became a police officer for the PDP. He did K-9 patrol first with a German Shepherd named Logan and then with Henrietta. We were both in our midthirties around this time and so more free from our parents. My folks had moved back to Sonoma, where my dad’s people were, and so I could stretch my legs a little. And Mike had become a grown man a world away from the drunk dummy who blushed and stammered at restaurants with his pop. He’d learned CPR, community policing. He was married for seven years and then divorced Willa in ’01. He rented a little red house with Logan on Ma
galia Street and kept it tidy as a tea kettle.
I lived back in the mobile-home park in Evergreen where my parents had raised me, so we were still in two different worlds. But once I returned from Dublin, I joined a Facebook page, “Life in Paradise, Ca.,” and I guess he saw me on it. We messaged back and forth about the “good old days” in PHS as if we’d known each other better than we had. After a while he asked me out.
“I always had a crush on you,” he said, on our fourth date. Jesus, but had he grown up into a strapping sonofabitch with these biceps on him and thick, hard thighs. He hadn’t turned my head back in the day, but at the age of thirty-six, after the rejection from my husband, I got sort of frantic for him.
“Do you remember that night at Tattie’s with your dad?”
“Yes,” he said and cracked up. “Hot diggity, I thought, watch out.”
“I’ll bet he was mad,” I said.
Mike had green eyes with long lashes. He nudged up onto me, and I felt the sweet heat coming off his mouth and his face. “He’s always mad,” he said.
The reason why I know that Wes didn’t want Mike to marry me was because on our wedding day he sat in the front pew, just shaking his head. I didn’t care. I was the happiest I’d ever been. Mike and I had our baby, Jessie, a year and half later. The first German Shepherd, Logan, died, but then we got smart-as-a-wizard Henrietta. We four lived like queens and a prince in that ugly little red house. Laura would come over Sundays to see the baby, but Wes kept himself to himself except on Jessie’s birthday and on the holidays.
The second Thanksgiving we were married, Laura hosted the meal. I remember how I got Jessie dressed up in blue velvet with a little Peter Pan collar. I wore a white-lace dress, which I’d found at the Goodwill on East Avenue and spruced up by bleaching it and mending the torn slip. Mike wore green sweatpants and a brown sweatshirt and said that belts weren’t for turkey. We all bustled into Wes and Laura’s huge house admiring the figurines and the Chinese whatnots. I worried that Jessie would totter around screaming and break something, but when Laura kissed her all over and Wes started laughing at her antics, I let myself relax a little bit.
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