Boonville

by Anderson, Robert Mailer

  “I always meant to talk to your grandmother,” Sarah said. “I sometimes work with wood too. I’m applying for a grant to sculpt an exact replica of every citizen of Boonville and then stick them on crosses to line the downtown on both sides of 128.”

  “That’s creepy,” John said, biting a stale biscuit. “I’m not sure everyone would want to see themselves and their neighbors up on the cross.”

  “A lot of people didn’t want to see Christ up there either,” Sarah answered. “It’s not the point of art to show people what they want to see. It’s important to make them examine themselves and reflect what the artist sees. I’d like to do their pets too if I got enough money. I doubt I’ll get anything with Bush in the White House. See how they treated Mapplethorpe?”

  John wondered what Grandma and Sarah would have talked about if they had been given the chance. Art? Emily Dickinson? Divorce? The future of the Women’s Movement? Her grandson in Miami who was just about Sarah’s age?

  Grandma had never met Christina, although they had spoken on the telephone.

  “A woman has got to see something beyond her house, husband, and children,” Grandma had told her more than once before Christina could hand over the receiver to John. “And a boutique’s not good enough.” Grandma would have liked Sarah though, might have even noticed her in the market or on the street, commenting to herself that there was still hope if that was the next generation.

  “How many have you finished?” John inquired, trying to estimate the hours of work involved in such an undertaking, the fevered nights of sawing and sanding, shaving and chiseling, living with something trapped inside you until it finally manifested itself outside your mind: an entire town crucified. Nails pounded through their pets’ paws too. Not only would Sarah’s project offend the religious right, the animal activists would shit bricks. They’d flip for the honor of crucifying Sarah, not in effigy either.

  “Just one, of myself,” Sarah said. “Before I decided to go life-size, I made 715 three-foot crosses; then it occurred to me the project was about scale. I photographed those as a model to submit with my proposal, so it wasn’t a total waste. But the funny thing is I don’t live in Boonville. Technically, I’m a resident of Elk. But if I used Elk, I’d lose scope, metaphor, and audience. Everybody on 128 will be forced to look if I use Boonville. Tourists will think they’re approaching Dracula’s castle. And I’m sure there would be an excess of reds left in the tasting rooms, especially if I used the tentative title for the exhibit, ‘The Blood of Christ in Wine Country.’”

  “You should do it whether you get the funding or not,” John told her.

  “Yeah,” Sarah agreed, her attention drifting to a corner of the cabin containing the picture of Grandma on the front steps of the Arizona homestead.

  She sipped her tea and said nothing for a while, reached for a biscuit, and then thought better of it. Her enthusiasm had disappeared faster than fuel in a jet engine. She looked at John with the same sullen introspection he had seen at the Lodge when she had stalled in her speech on “sneaking away from the inevitable.”

  “Is there anything I can do?” John said, laying his teacup aside.

  “No,” she answered. “I just had another fight with my mom, that’s all. I have to get out of here before I go totally berserk. I can do my projects somewhere else, L.A., New York, San Francisco, somewhere people can’t enter my life unless I invite them.”

  Sarah’s statement reminded John of his reasons for leaving Florida. But he had learned, the first person you meet at the airport is yourself and the first thing you do is claim your baggage. Nobody traveled light.

  Sarah elaborated on her problems, filling in specifics for the generalizations she had alluded to at the Lodge. Real specifics: abuse, neglect, addiction. Who, what, where, when, how. Observations on her childhood, relationships, orgasms, periods, parents, constipation, the afterlife. John listened, thinking how true it was what people said about Californians sharing their private lives like other people discussed the weather. When Sarah got going, it was difficult to do anything but say “Uh-huh.” She locked in on you with her eyes, then fired her ballistic confessional, only pausing to rhetorically ask “You know?” or “Ever feel that way?”

  John learned they had a lot in common. Not the specifics, apart from not having siblings, but a compatibility of chaos in their lives because they had both been raised in the “Me Decade,” which had been followed by the “Me Again Decade.” During those twenty years nobody had wanted to do much parenting. The television transformed itself from entertainment to baby-sitter and educational tool, fostering an inability to express even the simplest idea without referring to a sitcom or ad campaign. Then there was the day-in day-out dilemma of “paper or plastic?” Do I weaken the world through destruction or debris? No plans to create a third option. Landfill. Despair. Tucked into bed with the feeling that everything had been done before, better. The inescapable attitude that it was coming to an end anyway. Searching for love in an age of nuclear proliferation.

  “The thing for me was a day up in Oregon,” Sarah confessed. “It’s not as if my mom didn’t come back, she couldn’t have been gone any longer than five minutes before she turned around in the car and came back. But she did leave me.”

  Sarah told John that when she was thirteen, she and her mother had headed to Eugene, Oregon, for a job interview. Her mother had recently split with her boyfriend who had been taking daily doses of LSD for the past year, and she was thinking of shucking the commune for a career in civil engineering. Mom had a degree, and oddly enough, an interest in traffic flow theory. A meeting had been scheduled on the basis of her resume. Sarah had been delighted at the prospect of leaving the Waterfall.

  “Everything was fine until we left the motel,” Sarah explained. “We turned onto a street that had three names. We couldn’t figure it out, every time we crossed this certain intersection, the road had another name. If we followed it for awhile, it changed names again. But I noticed there wasn’t a break in the address numbers, they kept increasing, so I told Mom to drive further and see if the office wasn’t where the address would be if the street had one name.”

  Sarah said her mother would follow her advice for a few blocks, then turn around before the numbers were large enough to be in the area of the office. Mom started screaming, “I’m late! Where the fuck is 2036 State Street?” Sarah could only reassert they shouldn’t worry about the name of the street but follow the numbers. Swerving through traffic, her mother asked Sarah one more time, “Where the fuck is it?” When Sarah repeated that she didn’t know, her mother wheeled the car to the curb, reached across Sarah’s lap, and unhitched her door. “Get the fuck out!” she demanded. “You’re no help at all!” Sarah protested as her mother kicked her out of the vehicle with her feet, yelling, “Get out! Get out! Get out!”

  “And there I was on the sidewalk, watching my mom pull away,” Sarah recalled. “I didn’t think she was ever coming back. I had thirty bucks in my pocket because I carried my life savings with me whenever we took a trip, and I went into a store and bought a sandwich, a carton of milk, and a map, and asked the cashier for directions to the Greyhound station. For the first time in my life everything seemed clear, I was going to buy a ticket to Tahoe and live with my father. I was free.”

  John could tell Sarah remembered what kind of sandwich she had ordered, whether she had taken a left or right after leaving the market, and what time the bus had been scheduled for departure. She was there again on the streets of Eugene, formulating a conclusion about the universe: what she could depend on, what she couldn’t. Her mother had dropped the pretense of taking care of her. Sarah could move forward now without constraints. A street with three names wasn’t that complicated.

  “I smelled the Ghia before it screeched to a halt in front of me,” Sarah said. “She honked the horn and I didn’t move. The passenger door flew open. I would have never come back, I swear to God, not in a million years. I heard her say, ‘Hu
rry up, get in.’”

  John had run away from home when he was fourteen, after being grounded for a C on his report card, even though he had received A’s in the rest of his classes. His father told him he had to come straight home after school until the next semester, no extracurricular activities or hanging out like a punk. If he didn’t like it, he could leave. John did leave, and a squad car picked him up six hours later, depositing him on the front steps of his house. His mother cried. The neighbors peeked through their windows. His father grabbed him by the scruff of the neck, promising the officers he would take care of things. It was the first time John had felt he could escape the pull of his procreators. But the parental magnet had clicked on and he slid back, helpless as a bobby pin.

  “It feels like my mom’s pushing me out of the car again,” Sarah said. “This time I want to hit the ground running.”

  That had been John’s mistake. He had walked to a friend’s house, misjudging the field of influence. John was proud that this time he had put enough distance between himself and home base. But he remembered another saying, “If you get far enough away, you’ll be on your way back home.”

  “What’s your plan?” he asked, feeling he was about to be involved in something he could never have conceived of a week ago.

  “I started fasting,” Sarah said. “I haven’t been feeling right lately. I know I’m full of toxins, so I’ll go a week or so without food and do a few café bootés.”

  “Café booté?” John asked.

  “Coffee enemas,” she clarified. “You never heard of a crappuchino? The caffeine stimulates peristalsis of the intestine, flushing you out. The only problem is if someone asks you how you take your coffee, you have to say, ‘Black, and up my ass.’”

  John didn’t know if she was kidding; the last bit may have been the only part intended to be funny. Medical trends were reverting to primitive states, acupuncture, herbs, homeopathics. Everybody had a remedy for lower back pain and the common cold. Some of it made sense, in theory, but it sounded as if sick people had an overactive sense of adventure.

  “What are you going to do after you cleanse?” he said, the thought of pushing Folgers up the down poop-chute giving him a new slant on the coffee jitters.

  “I need money,” Sarah said. “I can’t leave here if I don’t have cash.”

  John changed his position on the couch. He didn’t have much money. He was in marketing. Sarah couldn’t possibly believe he had excess funds to lend a woman he had met in a bar because she had divulged some secrets and had a violent ex-husband. He needed his nest egg for future hospital bills. Grandma’s inheritance wouldn’t last long. He was worried about his own finances. But he wanted to help out. If Sarah needed it, he would see what he could do.

  “If I asked you something and you said ‘No,’ would you promise to forget about it and not tell anyone?” Sarah asked.

  “Sure,” John answered, thinking, how much do you need and who would I tell?

  “Would you help me harvest my crop?” Sarah said. “I wouldn’t ask, but you seem like a nice guy and I’ve got to get it out of the ground. I’m not supposed to have it.”

  “Nobody is,” John responded, somewhat shocked. “It’s illegal.”

  “Yeah, but I’m really not supposed to have it,” Sarah explained. “We got rules where I live on private patches, even though everybody’s got one. The weather’s been weird too, and people are getting CAMPed. I need the cash.”

  John put down his cup and reached for a biscuit. He didn’t know a thing about marijuana and now he had been propositioned twice to get involved in the industry. Maybe he was being set up? Blindman or somebody needed a fall guy and had selected him. Maybe a sheriff’s election was nearing and the incumbent wanted to boost support by busting an outsider. Or was he being paranoid? It was grass, not crack. Boonville, not Miami. What was the danger in helping a friend pull a few weeds?

  “You’re not a Republican, are you?” Sarah inquired.

  “No,” John replied, uncertain if his liberalism was being goaded to the point where he would have to respond with action. Man or mouse? Mule or elephant? Did he believe in personal freedom, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights? Who was the government to tell adults they couldn’t smoke marijuana when alcoholism was rampant, when they did nothing to stop the influx of cocaine, when the tobacco trade was legal and killed tens of thousands every year? When little Johnny can’t read?

  “Look, if you help me out, I’ll give you two hundred bucks,” Sarah said. “That’s not bad for a night’s work. And I’ll check into something that might mean big money for you. Something you ought to know about anyway.”

  “What would that be?” John said.

  “Don’t worry,” Sarah told him. “I feel bad about the way Daryl treated you, so I’ll look into it anyway. But I have to know, John, can you help me? Otherwise, I have to find somebody else.”

  John looked at one of the squirrels on the coffee table. He was getting used to their scowls. Sarah’s blue eyes were another matter. Half the town had probably fallen in love with them. Even amidst the rubble of his relationship with Christina, he could feel himself giving something to Sarah based on faith and the distant promise of a kiss. He knew it was irrational, a reaction to being alone for the first time in his adult life, but it was happening, however untimely and inappropriate it seemed. Maybe if he ran around the block and jerked off a couple of times, it would go away.

  “Do I have to fast?” he asked. “Hunger isn’t a prerequisite for a life in crime, is it?”

  “No,” Sarah said. “In fact, I’ll buy you dinner.”

  “That’s all right, I’ve got a few things to do,” John said, thinking, like run around the block and jerk off a couple times, and I don’t want to push the envelope by showing up in town with you just yet. “When do we have to do it?”

  “Tonight,” Sarah said, excited with conspiracy. “I’ll bring everything we need, just wear black. I’ll pick you up at midnight, like grave diggers.”

  Tonight didn’t give John much of a chance to think about consequences. How many plants were they talking about? What were the personal consumption laws in California? What was the sentencing for possession of marijuana with the intent to simply help out a friend? How good was his lawyer?

  “Who’s grave are we digging?” John said to himself, but Sarah heard him.

  “My mother’s daughter’s,” Sarah replied, putting her cup on the table and gathering her jacket. “Are you sure you want to do this? I wouldn’t blame you if you backed out.”

  Of course you would, John thought, everybody else did. He had been backing out of things for so long, he had finally cornered himself into a place where no more backward steps were possible. He had to take the consequences of his actions, however impulsive and idiotic. Maybe he would have better luck writing prison fiction than haikus.

  “I better get things ready,” Sarah said. “I don’t know why, but I knew I could count on you.”

  John walked her to the door, standing on the porch as she got into her truck. The bird that had been circling had repositioned itself closer to the cabin, joined by a couple of cohorts who seemed to think it was a good day for something below them to die. The squirrels in the driveway looked as if they smelled the carcass. Sarah waved goodbye. John realized he had forgotten to ask her what they had done after he had blacked out during his first night in town. Apparently reading his mind, Sarah applied the brakes and stuck her head out the window.

  “Sorry about your car,” she yelled. “It won’t happen again.”

  There was something about Sarah’s earnestness that elicited hope. John believed she wasn’t talking about the car, but telling him their future wasn’t going to be nearly as destructive. The squirrels disagreed. The birds continued to circle.

  Of course it won’t happen again, John thought. How could it?

  10

  It was time to run. John grabbed his jogging shoes, threw on a pair of sweatpants, a Speed Racer
T-shirt, his University of Miami baseball cap, and began to hum the opening bars to the Beatles’ “Revolution.” He had a plan, and if it held firm, he would be back in the cabin in forty minutes with the codeine and alcohol purged from his system, leaving him plenty of time to take a sulfur shower, make dinner, eat, masturbate, and prepare himself to harvest Sarah’s dope.

  Laced up and stretching against one of the squirrels in his front yard, John realized what a contradiction the lyrics to “Revolution” were in comparison to the music. What seemed to be a call to arms had the underlying message that everything was going to be all right. He remembered what Hunter S. Thompson wrote in regard to another of Lennon’s political odes: “When punks like that try to be serious, they just get in the way.”

  John hit the driveway repeating the refrain anyway, understanding that most things in life didn’t hold up under analysis, functioning strictly on an emotional level. He had always been vulnerable to pop music’s seductive hooks. Once Neil Diamond’s “Forever in Blue Jeans” had lodged in his head for a week like elevator music caught between floors. At least “Revolution” had a good beat and a cathartic scream, he could go the length of a jog with that tune, but Neil Diamond was torture, one song segueing into a medley, “Sweet Caroline,” “Song Sung Blue,” “Coming to America.” All songs he knew word for word, but couldn’t specifically ever remember having heard.

  John’s favorite workout music was Phil Spector girl group stuff, Ronettes, Crystals, Marvelettes; “Da Do Run Run,” “Be My Baby.” The rhythm punctuated his breathing, kept him pounding the pavement. Sometimes he would make up his own Motown doo wap ditty. “Well, she walked up to me and she asked me if I wanted to dance…” Gasp, gasp. “…Something, something, something else that rhymes with dance…” Wheeze, wheeze. “…When we danced she held me tight…” Pant, pant. “…All the stars were shining bright…” Puff, puff, okie-blow, cough, snort, hack. “…And then she kissed me.”