Now I’m terrified to hear the rasp, rising and dying, of tires on the gravel above. I’ve been an idiot. Anybody from around here knows the yellow Porsche. They all suspect I have a garden. Clarence would destroy me if I ever signaled, to use his demented combat parlance, his military phrasing, our position. Could be Harry Lally’s boys. Yes, “Harry Lally’s boys”—my life now spoken out of the side of the mouth in a gangster drawl.
The dust of a vehicle showed around to the north, where Shipwreck Road switched back. They’d passed on.
“Melissa!” I screamed.
I was always afraid she’d vanish when my back was turned, off in some strange, fast car to a new affair.
Her voice drifted down from above me. “I don’t want to smoke any of your drugs because I’m already completely, wonderfully drunk!”
I climbed up slowly, clinging to the occasional manzanita root, trying not to leave a trail of torn vegetation. When I stopped to rest, blotting the dusty sweat from my face with a bandanna, I heard her singing something in German, a folk song, maybe a fairy tale, something from very far away, where she lived always.
“Who was in that car? Who was in that car?” I cried breathlessly as I climbed up over the rim of the draw.
And there she was, my love: Melissa, sideways in the open door of the convertible, skirt blown up over her wan, destructible legs so that I wanted to weep. Everything. If these idiots force me I will trade it all for this woman.
“Look at me,” I ordered her.
She stared at me with a question, a smile, and a sweetness in the hesitation of her eyes.
“Don’t you see I’m going crazy?”
Nights are cold but we drive with the top down for the oxygen. The cypresses on the cliffs high over the sea, dragged sideways by the wind over centuries into permanent blurs, whizzes, smears, seem to be part of a comic strip as we, drunk and dangerous, scream past in the heartstopping blue twilight. Offshore, the small lights of fishing-boats float in the dark: if you let them they’ll start symbolizing everything. I slow way down to light the reefer I’ve rolled, sucking in the smoke along with the damp clean ocean air. Melissa shakes her head. I jam the pedal.
Making love to Melissa is a dangerous blessing. It’s almost all I ever want to do. But when we’ve been on a party like today’s we generally forget to sleep together. I just drive her back to Acorn Road, to the woolly barnyard where she lives in her shocking trailer, and let it go at that. Anyway you won’t too often catch me entering that little home of hers. She takes in stray cats, the place is just a litter box.
She’s organic. I described her as drug-demented, but she eats only untreated vegetables and gets high only on natural herbs and plants, which include most wines and certain very expensive brands of scotch whiskey and tequila; sometimes also marijuana, when it’s baked into pastries—she refuses to take smoke into her lungs. She says she once had cancer of the liver but cured it with her mind.
I took her to the bottom of Acorn Road. The river mist met us less than halfway down. Not visible, but everywhere. “Good night, I’m going to sleep in my clothes,” she said, “and I hope I dream I’m not drunk,” and didn’t even kiss me.
When she’d gone into the trailer, one of the rounded, aluminum ones, a Silver Stream, I laid my head, which was suddenly full of sorrows, against the steering wheel. The night wind stirred through the treetops on the ridges. The distant commotion got the sheep bleating—a word that just doesn’t invoke the aged, human grief in their voices. Across the drive the owner of this property—the Sheep Queen, a Mediterranean-looking woman in her fifties, a nice enough person, but perfectly crazy—sat eating dinner in the kitchen of her ranch-style home, feeding bites from her plate to a big dog that loomed over her, standing up, as it were, with its forepaws on the table.
It’s sad to love a woman who won’t love back—it tears at a man—to love a woman who gives herself to others and uses his good intentions and sets his meaning aside. But I have a feeling that this stupid torment is the nearest thing going, for me, to what life is all about. I don’t just sense it dimly. The feeling is overpowering that this is the closest I can get to the truth behind the cloud.
Dreaming of one woman, I drive home to another.
Actually Winona wasn’t here lately. The ranch lay dark, the oaks like cut-outs against the smeary stars.
And actually Winona lived here alone. We’d been separated many months, beginning just a few weeks after the house was finished. But as Winona didn’t have a lover, at least nobody anybody knew of, I wasn’t in the way, I came and went, and in her absence I tended the stables, though I rarely crossed her threshold and this would be the first night I’d slept here all summer. She’d been travelling lately up and down the coast, visiting people she didn’t, in my opinion, actually know well enough to be visiting. On some kind of pilgrimage: Going Through Changes we call it in our region, where the Haight-Ashbury dialect flourishes unevolved.
I parked the Porsche out of sight in the stables because I expected, sooner or later, a visit from Harry Lally’s boys. I hadn’t set foot in my own apartment since I’d heard they were in town. Eventually they’d locate me here. But I’d see them a mile off and be down the hill, walking into the forest—my father’s forest, where my brother lives—long before they reached the house. They’d never know for sure that I’d even been here, unless they searched through all the outbuildings and found the car.
I come and go, but this is decidedly not my home anymore. None of my stuff is here. In the bedroom Winona sleeps in a single bed now. My office, a shed out by the barn, has been put to a better use, she says. As a matter of fact spiders live in it.
There was a note from her, three weeks old, run through a nail on the house’s front door. Red’s got worms—feed store has the stuff—give him a full syringe—and I tore it off and put it to my lips and inhaled, trying to catch a whiff of the woman I’d married. A woman I’d loved then. But that woman was gone. A man told me—this in the Gualala Hotel bar one night—that if I were only older, I’d have seen by now that people pass through ages, and I’d have learned that when they’ve changed and been lost, you find them again somewhere in the next age. But later that night this same man got mean under the liquor and had to be restrained. He lunged at me, raving—the meaty arms of salmonmongers and the greasy hands of big-rig operators yanking him back. Eyes fixed, he gave meaning to that old phrase in his truly psychotic, really animal state. His eyeballs scorched and chilled me across space. He raised blisters and goose bumps, even through the window, as I stomped off the hotel’s wooden porch into the dark. So much for the wisdom of our counselors. That madman wasn’t going to help me find Winona, not in her current age or any other. Don’t ask me who this woman is, walking around in my wife’s body with a decisive air.
I woke up in the bed I didn’t belong in, woke up smelling my wife, but it wasn’t the same smell I remembered. I stood by the railing upstairs and marked how much the place had changed since the last time I’d spent a night here. My hands shook this morning. I’d slept in my clothes. My foreignness overwhelmed me. Only the thought of leaving right away held any cheer. I decided to take Winona’s old pickup and get coffee in town.
The ridge road parallels the coast for dozens of miles, wagging down into draws and crossing creeks and climbing out again. This isn’t the Coast Highway, but a much narrower route, better suited to my kind of car and my kind of driving, but not so well to Winona’s looming Dodge. No shoulder, the trees crowd right against it. Ordinary, happy people live along here in nice houses you can’t see from the road. Often they report me for speeding past. I sense them back in those woods tending to their animals and their gardens. For them the darker alleys of thought have been clearly marked at the entrances. Everything’s fine, maybe a little guano has to be cleaned from the left boot, something dropped by one of their innumerable geese. Sun-shot California mist in the morning. A stirring of wind chimes, their cats rolling on their sides and stretching i
n the ripe greenness while New Age Muzak, what I call Electronic Obvious, sprinkles down over everything. My good neighbors. When I hear my good neighbors at the drugstore talking about pamphlets from the Government Printing Office, pamphlets about horticulture, free pamphlets—I want to kill them. I suppose we all feel that way sometimes. We all who? Ah, we who probably should be hunted down and jailed I suppose.
But today no chats in the pharmacy. Today I stop at the feed store for one bale each of oat hay and alfalfa. Since she was a child my wife Winona has kept a red horse named Red. Red is more than twenty-five years old now. He does nothing but conjugate hay and consult with the large-animal vet about his stomach ailments. And hadn’t there been a note? Something about medicine? In my shirt pocket I found it: Red had worms.
I ran into one of Winona’s friends. “Hel-lo.” It was Yvonne.
“Yvonne! Hi! I’m getting some stuff,” I said, talking more than I wanted, as I always do to people I don’t like.
“Nelson, how are you?”
“Fine! Great! Getting some birdseed?” I said for no reason at all.
She held up a small cardboard box. “These are white rats.”
In our part of the world people may do, say, or become whatever they feel like without apologizing. And tomorrow its opposite.
“White ones, are they?”
“I haven’t seen you since you and Winona split up. How is that working for you?”
“Working?”
“How is that working for you?”
“How is the breakdown proceeding? How is the malfunction functioning? Briefly, I’m confused and sad and pissed off.”
“The restructuring of the relationship,” she said, not without humor.
She reached out and squeezed my hand. Imagining herself some kind of healer probably.
“Well, see you.”
“See you.”
I went inside without looking back.
“Yvonne bought two rats,” the lady behind the counter told me.
“Why do you sell rats?”
“She buys small animals but never buys cages. Does she let them go?”
“Who knows. Who cares?”
“Some people feed hamsters and things to snakes.”
“And is that why you have hamsters and things at a feed store?”
“Well, I don’t know. It’s not my store.”
“It’s not my store either.”
“Didn’t I see you selling fruit the other day?”
“Anything’s possible.”
“You were drunk, and you were selling fruit.”
“I was just helping the guy out. We got to talking and I—you know.”
“I always get my fruit at the fruit stand. It’s better than the store. Cheaper.”
“I don’t want to talk about fruit, actually.”
Or anything else with you, Feed Store Lady. I’d known her for years—long red hair and glazed blue eyes, possessor of a marshmallowy intellect. Chipper, coping, as in the early stages of some unbelievable catastrophe. She’d emigrated from Los Angeles so long ago that by now she’d be an imbecile in its streets. She barely managed among a few bales of hay. “I need wormer,” I told her.
“Oh,” she said sympathetically, “Red’s sick?”
Sick? The animal’s been teetering at the grave’s edge for years. His mistress gives him enemas regularly, cooing. His master’s in the feed store with the staggers and jags, standing before you as the fibers of his reality tear loose. “The wormer’s for me,” I said. She laughed. We in California show anger and pleasure the same way, by a little California laugh. You need an ear for the difference. And things aren’t “good,” and things are never “bad”—no, in this lush eternity by the sea we measure our moments by two other words. Everything on the spectrum of undesirability, from minor annoyance to universal tragedy, is okay. Anything better to any degree, all the way up to a colossal lottery jackpot or the return of Jesus—that’s neat.
“This’ll get those critters,” she said, handing me Red’s medicine in a little white sack. “Can you get the hay on board yourself?”
“You bet.” Another most useful rural California phrase.
Outside I saw the two strangers who’d been looking for me, probably to kill me, and that was okay. Then they passed by in their big camper. They headed south, they didn’t find me, not this time. And that was neat.
Not a half hour later I was having a sort of breakfast five miles north, in Anchor Bay. It wasn’t that pleasant. Too much cinnamon in the apple pie, and now the cook had spilled chemical cleanser on the griddle and we were all asphyxiating swiftly here in the Full Sails Cafe.
The patrolman from Point Arena, a new man to our part of the coast, had already been making me nervous, sitting in full uniform at the counter and spying on the restaurant’s gangly brunette waitress, looking bored and hopeful of making an arrest. “I really would like to get a date with you,” he told the waitress.
“What do you mean?” she said.
“Go to the movies or something.”
“You mean the movies in Point Arena?”
“Or the submarine races.”
“I’ve heard of them,” she said.
“We could rent a video.”
“I don’t mind videos.”
“How about nasty ones?”
She didn’t say anything.
“You want to rent a nasty video?”
“Okay,” she said.
“Do you like cops? Do you like uniforms?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Yeah. Most of the time.”
“I’ll get a show about a cop.”
“You don’t waste too many words, do you?”
“Maybe I’ll just skip the video completely.”
“There goes our entertainment.”
“Maybe we could rehearse our own video, and I could play the cop.”
“Well,” she said, “you have the uniform, obviously.”
“Maybe I could be the hero, sort of.”
“Then who would be the criminal?”
“Well, I could be the criminal too.”
“I guess you’d have to be.”
“A rapist.”
“I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
Right then I lost interest in their talk because the two hunters turned up outside. They pulled their rig in next to Winona’s, and one of them went into the Anchor Bay store. They’d come here by coincidence, couldn’t have known Winona’s old pickup by sight, but I died. Their truck was a long-bed Chevy Silverado.
I paid up as quickly as I could, and on the way out I said hello to the cop, whose name was, I thought, Navarone. He nodded. “What time do you have there?” I said, just to be seen talking with him.
“Ten-fifteen,” he said. “Why? There’s a clock on the wall.”
“Oh, that clock,” I said.
Naturally I’d seen him around. He was a big-city boy who just didn’t get it and was stepping on everybody’s feet up here, enforcing the petty ordinances but failing to track down loose livestock.
I caught the two hunters outside as the driver fired up their stupid Silverado. I could hear the dogs scratching and yelping in the camper shell. The passenger had just gotten back in the car with his purchase.
I shouted: “You men!” I pointed toward the cafe. “I’ve made you known to the police!”
There wasn’t much to see of them, except that both seemed big and strong and neither wore a cap. Hunters, it seemed to me, should be wearing bright red caps so as not to be shot by their friends.
They pulled away carefully, hardly glancing back at me.
For a minute I wondered if I hadn’t made a completely silly mistake. I stood there feeling embarrassed and thinking, Who is anyone, excuse me but who are we all supposed to be? and looking back in through the cafe’s big window.
And I suddenly experienced the gladness of seeing people walled off behind glass: the cop and the waitress, now without voices…each heart quive
ring in its gossamer of falsehood. His swagger was sorrowful. He had a look of dawning pain, as if he’d just finished telling a story that trailed away with the words, “I was happy then…”
I drove back to Winona’s with the tottering hay bales, also the horse goop, making sure I wasn’t followed by anybody who could murder me. If anybody wanted to. Wild pig, wild pig—maybe they only wanted game pork after all. Of course they hadn’t done anything sinister except lie about knowing me. But when you think about it, that’s sinister enough.
Gualala had been covered in clouds, but the ridge was clear, the house burned whitely in the sunshine. I hadn’t finished my breakfast. The sight of those two had sent me scurrying here. I sat out on the deck behind the house—hidden from anybody coming up the drive—with a liter of wine and a skinny cigarette rolled out of last season’s sinsemilla.
From the height of this ridge I looked this morning down on the cloud bank. I saw nothing of the sea, only this fluffy oblivion under the blue sky. To the westward no land, no peaks, nothing higher than my property. I might have been standing seven miles above everything. Actually the elevation is about 2,200 feet. Higher ridges lie to the east of us. We’re six miles back from the ocean.
I deeply enjoy spending time here alone, looking out over the Northern California morning, drinking Northern California zinfandel and blowing on a Northern California reefer. To my left I see our pond, nearly three acres of blue-green water, and below me the fuzzy sea of my father’s treetops, all that timber, and all the land it stands on, going down into the clouds. To the right, to the north, glimmers a tiny orange dome: the temple of a Tibetan Buddhist monastery far up in the hills. On the highest ridge east of here you can see two brilliant white structures, quite similar in shape to the Tibetan one and even, when you think of it, related to it in the tilt, so to speak, of their thrust: a U.S. Air Force radar station, stroking the aether with receptors.
I used to sit out here while my wife talked to me, with my mind five miles out to sea.
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