Boonville

by Anderson, Robert Mailer

  Sarah hadn’t realized that since standing there she had been scraping her upper lip with her bottom teeth, causing a tag of dead skin to curl free. Her lips had already been chapped from drying her dope in the heat of the wood-burning stove, not to mention the countless trips to and from the main house. She licked them with the tip of her tongue. They dried instantly. Wetting them only made it worse, but she couldn’t restrain herself. It made her long for the fog of San Francisco, the city’s consistent, reasonable weather. She would be there soon if she continued to make smart choices.

  “No, I don’t want to go inside,” Sarah said.

  The Double-Dumb’s interior was more depressing than the exterior, with its logger motif, dishes in the sink, reeking chew-spit containers, crumbs and hair balls accumulating beneath garage sale furniture. Empty bottles: beer, bourbon, tequila. It was like living in an alcoholic’s pancreas. Television droning sports or pornography from the satellite dish, Daryl’s primary source of information. Then there was his armoire of firearms.

  “I’d rather have twelve men judge me,” Daryl used to quote Evel Knievel, who also had a penchant for Colt pistols, “than six of them carryin’ me to my grave.”

  Sarah could handle guns, but it made her nervous when other people did. And no different than any other redneck, Daryl was armed to the teeth. Open boxes of bullets, shotgun shells, and casings were scattered throughout the trailer. The Double-Dumb was the only place where Sarah felt claustrophobic.

  “You want to climb down into the work pit?” Daryl asked, Sarah sympathizing with those women who married men on Death Row. “Wouldn’t be the first time.”

  It would be her last though, she thought, the equivalent of hurling herself into her own grave, the Camaro for a headstone, the rattle of a busted timing chain for a eulogy. What did I ever find attractive about this man? But she remembered their walks in high school, beyond the special ed domes; Daryl quiet at her side, not asking any questions, holding her hand in a way that made her feel safe. He would listen to her for hours, going on about Mom and Dad, the Waterfall, how someday she wanted to be the next Gertrude Stein. When she showed him her poems and sketches, he would look from her to them and back again, saying in a gentle voice, “You’re good, Sarah.” That was the sum total of his criticism. Sarah believed him, catching him looking at her with proud wonder.

  Having relocated to the Waterfall from Palo Alto at thirteen, Daryl knew the players in Sarah’s life intimately. His father was a business hippie, a sub-sect of the experimental hippies, but Daryl managed to escape the hippie influence by aligning himself with the locals and staying away from the main house. Few linked him to the Waterfall, except fiscally. They knew his father, Wesley, owned the outback, on paper, and everyone on the commune, including Daryl, grew pot. But at sixteen he moved into town, renting a house with Billy Chuck’s older brother Buck. After marrying Sarah, he came back to the commune. Following the divorce, he returned to town.

  Because of Daryl’s intimacies with the Waterfall, Sarah hadn’t felt as embarrassed about her upbringing as she did with other men. Daryl protected her from the freaks, including the Poobah, who he once smacked in the head with a post-hole digger. At night in bed, when he was asleep with his body cradling hers, nothing felt more secure. But the division between them became greater, the art vs. ESPN split, and he more than anyone began using the Waterfall against her.

  “You and your hippie mother!” he’d say, a whole subtext of uncomfortable knowledge carried with it. Daryl had seen Mom naked, watched her have sex with a number of different men on a number of different occasions. Mom had tried to seduce him. He knew all the drugs Mom had done. How horribly the Poobah treated her. How insane everything was in Sarah’s life. The more Daryl condemned Mom and the Waterfall, the harder it became for Sarah to separate herself from them. And through his attacks, Daryl managed to sequester himself from the other residents and actions of the Waterfall, elevating his status to mainstream American.

  “I’m moving,” Sarah told him.

  “You want to park your car out back?” Daryl asked, still hoping for a tumble, acting as if he didn’t hear her, or worse, didn’t believe what she was saying.

  “I’m leaving for San Francisco tomorrow, and I’m not coming back,” Sarah said, firmly. “Except maybe for holidays.”

  Why was she hedging? What holidays? They didn’t celebrate Thanksgiving or Christmas on the commune. There were a couple of Hanukkah holdouts, lighting menorahs on the sly, but the only holiday the Waterfall observed was May Day, and that was a drug-filled orgy with everyone dancing naked around the May pole, gobbling laced baked goods. Except for the May pole, no different from any other day. And not exactly why you come home for the holidays.

  “What’s in San Francisco?” Daryl asked.

  Sarah surveyed the flat behind the airport, the Double-Dumb, the satellite dish, the Camaro up on blocks. Daryl in his hole. Describing what was in San Francisco was having to redefine everything, not simply a semantics argument between a hole in the ground and a work pit.

  “I’ll be in San Francisco,” Sarah said, and it seemed the clearest explanation.

  “This ain’t because of that yuppie, is it?” Daryl asked. “I’d be willin’ to apologize for kickin’ his ass, unless you’re fuckin’ him.”

  “This has nothing to do with him,” Sarah said, knowing that wasn’t entirely true, but Daryl wouldn’t understand if she admitted that John was even one-one-thousandth of the reason for leaving or inserted that he was cute and she could date whoever she wanted. This wasn’t about John, it was about her future as the unnamed presence grew inside her and expanded out in front.

  “I didn’t want you to hear it from someone else,” Sarah said.

  “You got a phone number or address?” Daryl inquired, but he was really asking if this were more of her unthought-out bullshit.

  They would be fucking again in two months, Sarah saw him thinking. Three tops.

  “I’ll be where I’m at,” Sarah replied, but she had let a beat pass.

  “San Francisco, huh?” Daryl said, and flashed that smile again. “You know the difference between a guy from San Francisco and a faggot?”

  He usually attempted to clean up his act around her. If he wanted to get laid, Sarah demanded he be on good behavior. There were rungs of a ladder to be climbed carefully, flattery, drinks, reminiscence. He was daring her to leave.

  “No,” Sarah said. “I’m sure you don’t either.”

  “A faggot puts on a condom before fuckin’ his pets,” Daryl said.

  “Am I supposed to laugh?” Sarah asked.

  “I don’t know,” Daryl said. “You don’t take me serious, maybe you think I’m funny.”

  He disappeared for a second, returning with another beer, which he opened by placing the cap’s edge on a flat part of the Camaro’s engine and slapping it with his fist. He sucked greedily at the foam. Sarah was thirsty. She waited for him to offer her a sip. Daryl took another long drink.

  “You look like you’re puttin’ on weight,” he said, and the insult passed because its tone held a casual observation. Sarah had put on weight, something Daryl used to pester her about. He preferred her with “some cushion for the pushin’” as he put it, and no doubt remembered her bulimia, the big meals and short trips to the bathroom. Diet pills, anemia, cottage cheese. Binaca spray for dessert. Back then he wanted her to be healthy and had helped her feel attractive enough to stop vomiting. Now he just wanted her.

  “You retainin’ water or Twinkies?” he said.

  “I’m trying to retain a friendship,” Sarah said. “But you’re being a prick.”

  Daryl let his gaze wander to a place on the Camaro’s engine. Without setting down his beer, he reached over and attended to it. Substituting a wrench for a screwdriver, he pried at the chassis, leaning into it with his whole body, but making no discernible progress.

  Force things until they break, Sarah thought. That’s how Daryl tried to fix everyth
ing.

  “Whatever,” she said, knowing that “whatever” was California passive-aggressive for “fuck you.”

  Maybe in the back of her mind she had hoped Daryl would say the right thing instead of everything wrong. But now she felt sad, bloated, and nauseated, the same way she felt in her bulimia days after eating her favorite meal of meat loaf, mashed potatoes, and a chocolate milkshake. Comfort food that never brought her any. Her eyes welled with tears, body mutinous. She felt like barfing on Daryl, right there in his fucking hole.

  “You want to be my friend?” Daryl asked, looking up from under the Camaro. “Because I’m a good conversationalist? Because we read the same books and like the same movies? Bed buddies is more like it. And look where that leads.”

  He knew.

  “You married me for better or worse, until death do us part,” Daryl said, recapping what Sarah believed to be the worst verbal contract of her life. “How many deaths you willin’ to rack up?”

  Daryl was telling her that this was her decision. If she was willing to scale down her expectations of life, they could work things out. Or maybe that wasn’t the point. Maybe they were meant to suffer.

  Sarah could see him thinking she would be back after it was over. He could work on his Camaro and drink his beer. They always come back. She had, too. Sarah was as predictable as he was, her pattern just slightly more elliptical. She couldn’t blame him for being upset either, having been excluded from the decision when he was willing to father the child. Or do his version anyway, teach it football and how to spit. But Sarah knew she would be the one changing diapers and worrying for the next twenty years, waking up at age fifty wondering who she was and who she could have been. Daryl didn’t care, as long as there was beer in the fridge and the Camaro in the driveway.

  Sarah had thought about adoption, but she wouldn’t be able to give up a baby after carrying it inside her for nine months and then experiencing the pain and elation of pushing eight pounds of life from her own flesh. She didn’t want to think about it, or the possibility of never taking part in something that made her fundamentally human, that admitted her into the secret society of her gender. She saw how other women without children were looked upon, sad and incomplete, despite any accolades they achieved. But she had already been a parent, raising herself, and knew she didn’t have a taste for it or want her identity, her life’s work, to be that of “mother.” It was fine for other women, but not her. She wasn’t going to have children. She wasn’t sure this world deserved more babies, and unlike most women, had no great urge to procreate except around her period, and then she did what she was supposed to do, cry and bleed.

  The screen door on the Double-Dumb rattled. Sarah’s lips burned. There would be no good-bye kiss. She had no intention of crawling into Daryl’s hole. He wasn’t going to climb out. There were no halfway points in these matters.

  Sarah headed for her truck.

  “You’ll be back,” Daryl said, and threw his beer bottle to the back of the hole.

  And there was a moment when Sarah couldn’t imagine a life beyond Boonville, the Waterfall, growing dope, good ideas and poor follow-through, drinking with Lisa, Mom blaring the feminist hits, the Poobah and Future Primitives, grapes and rolling hills, rednecks and migrant workers, rendezvous at the Double-Dumb. Feeling trapped. Her life had been full of these paralytic instances, an ammo clip of misfired momentum, shooting out in rapid succession a series of blanks that kept her pinned in no man’s land.

  “They always come back,” Daryl said.

  “Fat fucking chance,” thought Sarah.

  13

  Waiting. Between the slamming of a car door and the next visceral response to the Earth’s indecipherable spinning was a lot of waiting. John had called Blindman and set up a meeting for him to purchase Grandma’s gin-scented homegrown, but recalling their prior conversation about the importance of time and how the over-the-counter drug addict was clockless, internally and externally, it came as no surprise that he was late.

  In Miami, John’s marketing colleague Bean Bean used to say “What could be better?” whenever he was left in the lurch. Most of Bean Bean’s waking hours seemed to be filled with what John called DMV moments, stuck in traffic, lines at the bank, getting stood up by dates. But Bean Bean claimed the best experiences in life came unexpectedly at baseball games between innings or riding the bus watching the humanity parade pass by.

  “How long can you come?” Bean Bean was fond of asking anyone unfortunate enough to be cornered by him, everyone finding him as dull as the tedium he reveled in, the lectures he gave near the water cooler on peasant uprisings in Spain from 1647 to 1683 or something equally without context or applicability: rainfall in the Eastern Bloc, the muffler size of foreign cars during the sixties, Brazilian tax law. “You better enjoy the foreplay, eh muchacho.”

  “You have to believe the small truths over the big lies,” was the way John’s grandma had put it, adding, “Only boring people get bored. Life may be tedious, but not if you brought a book.”

  Taking Grandma’s advice, John flipped through her Emily Dickinson, and read “There’s a certain Slant of light.” That was the reason people hated waiting, the somber time it allowed for reflection. It wasn’t just the lack of substance surrounding an incident, but the insufficiency of the event itself. The event of their lives. John realized that most people enjoyed being preoccupied, doing the mental equivalent of folding laundry, stuffing hours full of neat piles. The doubtful and difficult kept at a distance. Idle hands may be the tools of the devil, but John was convinced an intentionally idle mind was the work of a higher force for evil, mediocrity.

  Grandma claimed everyone had an invisible lightbulb above their heads waiting to shine when they got an idea, just like in the cartoons. For most people, it never turned on. Some flicked the switch after losing a loved one or having a near-death experience, others discovered themselves in unbearable straits, and, tired of themselves and their situation, they groped in the dark for the switch, trying to engage. Then there were those that always had the tungsten burning, churning amperage into light and purpose, constant as Venus in a summer night’s sky. Often you could see infants crying from the brightness in their eyes, predestined to do great things, already wanting to know reasons. Their problem would be storing the stimulus, finding outlets, and the magician’s maxim, which John thought Blindman would agree with, if he ever arrived, “The more you see, the less you know.”

  John himself was often overwhelmed by flashes of light that froze him against walls of information like an atomic shadow. The worst for him was “the third day sober.” After his binge and hallucinatory experience on the side of Greenwood Ridge, he had again experienced the phenomenon that occurred when his mind was done occupying itself with survival, leaving him with a calm that carried with it the sorrow of every Sunday evening that ever pointed toward the confusion and emptiness of another Monday morning, and the time in between, when the rent was coming due, and unmade phone calls piled up, letters were left unwritten, sentiments unspoken, conversations that only occurred in his head, and somebody else had moved away across town or into another way of life, or marriage, or divorce, or a dead-end job, or financial duress, or addiction. The third day sober was a summary of those things, namable and unnamable, that had caused him to pee the bed and suck his thumb as a child, create imaginary friends, and talk to himself. The desire not to get up in the morning, to fake sickness. It was a dark spot in the back of his brain that floated forward across his mental health. The sum total of himself that didn’t add up.

  In a way, the third day sober was like experiencing Grandma’s squirrels; individually they were negligible, their stern disgust dismissible as a minority opinion, but as an army they were crippling. Why else would someone carve so much scorn into so many pieces of wood unless they too were paralyzed by the tremendous amount of evidence flooding in, fingering them as guilty of some unidentifiable crime, the continual chant of insufficiency that become
s the song you can’t get out of your head? You begin to believe in it, rely on it, hum it while you work. Your mantra of inadequacy.

  Each squirrel also seemed to be a science experiment for Grandma, a frequency exercise in which she charted the same answer of quantum guilt. The only way to cope with the eternal accusations was to make peace with the known facts. And on the third day sober you had to do something constructive: jog, write, clean the toilet. Make a beginning. Otherwise, you would be back counting the days all over again. Maybe for that reason, every third day sober Grandma had created the habit of whittling a squirrel. But looking at the plague of wooden vermin, the psychosis etched into their expressions, John doubted Grandma had ever lined up that many sober days.

  John checked the closet where he had stored the bags of Grandma’s dope, stems and branches poking holes in the green plastic. According to Sarah, everyone in the valley grew dope. It was as common in Mendocino County as planting grapes. No big deal. Maybe not for her, John agreed, but it was a leap for him. And you couldn’t deny the presence of a criminal element in this particular growth industry, guys like Balostrasi lurking about, whether you thought hemp should be legalized or not. He didn’t know why he was obsessing about Balostrasi. He guessed it was because the only people who didn’t worry about breaking the law were criminals.

  At first, John didn’t want the twenty plants in Grandma’s patch. But then Sarah had told him it was worth thirty grand. She would confirm the quality with a telephone call to Blindman. On that basis, they had set a price. Of course, with Blindman, it was sight unseen. Blindman would get his wifeback to do the tiresome work of drying and sorting while she was making his No-Contact. Maybe lace a few joints for himself in the process. John couldn’t imagine anybody wanting a more enhanced high from the marijuana. When he had returned home from the harvest, he had spent the remainder of the night contemplating his cleaning products, stacking his Wisk bottle on his box of Tide, and then his dishwashing soap on top of that, along with a teepee of green and yellow scrub pads, and a bar of Irish Spring soap. He rearranged the cleaning agents until secret messages began to appear. Then he scrubbed the grout in his bathtub, fighting an overwhelming desire to hear the Allman Brothers. The next morning, he thought about dumping the stash or giving it back to Sarah, but finally he drove to the hotel and asked Hap for Blindman’s real name, Jerry Parish, which John thought was surprisingly normal. He called Information for the number, and kept a bud for a day when he was bored and the cabin was dirty.