He’s got the whole world in his hands,
He’s got the whole world in his hands.
I picture two hands as big as mountains cradling the world like a bowl with everything in it: all the plants and animals and trees and people and buildings with giant ghostlike fingers stretching around it. Tony and I name the things we see out the window, placing them in the song, singing at the top of our lungs:
He’s got the mountains and the trees in his hands,
He’s got the mountains and the trees in his hands,
He’s got the mountains and the trees in his hands,
He’s got the whole world in his hands.
He’s got a broken-down truck in his hands,
He’s got a broken-down truck in his hands,
He’s got a broken-down truck in his hands,
He’s got the whole world in his hands.
And it feels like maybe Oregon will be something new, something better. We’re all singing and Grandpa made us lunches to eat: ham sandwiches with cheese and mustard on rolls with beef jerky. It’s salty and sweet and I even get an Orange Crush soda which I’ve never had, because we aren’t allowed to eat sugar. Mom says sugar is a drug and it’ll kill you just the same as alcohol, which is why no one in Synanon was allowed to eat sugar so we usually have water or milk or an apple or yogurt for a treat but since it’s not every day that you move to a whole new state, she lets us drink the Orange Crush.
The window is down and I’m drinking pop and we’re all doing a silly dance where we move our shoulders up and down and back and forth in our seats there in the mountains that separate Oregon from the bad men and the bad things in Berkeley. Then Tony sings,
He’s got the mommies and the daddies in his hands,
He’s got the mommies and the daddies in his hands.
Mom stops singing and stares out the window with her hands gripping the steering wheel. She stays silent for a long time. I give Tony a punch on the shoulder from the seat behind him. “What?! I was just singing.”
“I know you were, sweetie,” Mom says. “It’s all right.” Tony turns around and gives me the look he gives when he wants me to know he’s going to get me later, which he always does, pinning me to the ground with his knees and pounding on my chest while I scream.
“Why are you crying, Mom?”
She puts her elbow on the ledge of the window and leans her head into her hand. A big green sign on the side of the highway says, “Welcome to Oregon.”
“Are you sad?”
“No, honey, I’m happy we’re moving to a new place where we can be together and it’ll be clean and we can breathe.”
“I’m sad,” I say. “I miss the School and Bonnie and Dmitri and macaroni and cheese.”
She says, “No you don’t.” She tells me I’m happy we’re moving. It wasn’t safe there so we left and we’re all together now and I’m happy I can be somewhere safe and clean where a person can breathe. She says I’ll make friends and they’ll be good plus I get to be with my mom now.
I remember that a “Mom” is supposed to be a special thing, that’s what I was told one time she came to visit us in the School: “This is your mom. She would’ve been your parent if you weren’t a child of the universe. You belong to her.” She tells me I’m her son and she wanted kids so she wouldn’t be alone anymore and now she has us and it is a son’s job to take care of his mother.
“I’m so glad we’re all together,” she says from the front seat. She reaches a hand back toward me with a palm open for me to hold. I put my hand in hers and she closes her fingers around it. The hand feels bigger than I am, bigger than the car, the road, the mountains and the sky.
* * *
AFTER DRIVING ALL day, stopping only at a diner where Tony and I got our own hamburgers even though I didn’t finish mine, just as the sky is turning a dark blue, we see a sign on the side of the highway that reads, “Salem, Oregon, Population 89,233.”
It’s been raining since we left the mountains. It rains as we drive through town. The heater in the Vega puts out a lukewarm, gassy air that smells like stale oil and burned rubber as we listen to the steady thwup thwup of the wipers on the windshield. The gray streets are filled with old cars and overgrown bushes, leaning fences, collapsing porches, mobile homes, gravel alleys overrun with weeds and blackberry bushes twisting between the power lines, storefronts, donut shops, hunting supplies, churches, wooded parks and a strange smell that stings the nostrils we later find out comes from a mushroom cannery on the edge of town.
Every few blocks there is a house with boarded-up windows and overgrown lawns, some covered in black streaks from fires that burned the houses which were left to rot. Everywhere are trees, pine trees with pointy green needles, some taller than buildings with branches fanning out in all directions. It looks like a place that was built by trees and conquered by people.
We pass a white marble building with a giant golden man on top holding a big golden ax, a cape slung over his shoulder. The man stands legs apart, looking off into the distance. I wonder if this man saved the people from the trees or the trees from the people. I wonder if the giant golden lumberjack will protect us from the bad men. If they’ll see him and be scared of the giant ax so they’ll leave us alone.
I picture him stepping down from his marble perch and picking up our car in his big hands, carrying us on his back across the rivers and lakes, over the mountains and valleys and highways, back to Tomales Bay where we can sing songs and play games with the other kids while he stands guard if the bad men come with their masks and clubs.
The houses are farther apart on the edge of town so it feels more like we’re driving through a forest. Fields of green grass and bushes run right up against the black rain-slicked street as we cross a small bridge over a stream and come to a sign that says, “Battle Creek Lodges,” our new home.
The building looks like a big green gingerbread house with a curved roof. There’s a crisp quiet even in the light rain when we get out of the car, the feeling of being hidden among mountains.
Tony yells, “Deer!” pointing toward the field. We see it, hunched and cautious, taller than we are with its antlers bobbing over the tall weeds. Mom takes a deep breath, closing her eyes as if to savor the air while Tony and I carry the cardboard boxes of Goodwill dishes and hand-me-down clothes into the apartment. It’s got an electric wall heater, an actual kitchen with a stove, and a stained mattress turned sideways on the floor of the bedroom where we fall facedown to sleep. It seems as good a place as any to hide.
In the morning, the sun is out and there is steam rising from all the puddles in the parking lot. We see squirrels, chipmunks, even a prairie dog in his hole as Tony and I walk through the tall grass field next to the gingerbread building looking for sticks and rocks to throw. It reminds me of the fields next to the compound in Tomales Bay, except wetter and colder. The Battle Creek runs beneath the road and every now and then a car breaks the silence as we watch it speed away, wondering when the world got so quiet.
“I bet we could go fishing in there if we wanted to,” Tony says. We’ve never fished, only seen the flow of water as it disappeared into a two-foot concrete pipe in Oakland, a dirty river of paper trash and cigarette butts. “I think all we need are earthworms and maybe a string or something.”
We walk back to the apartment to hunt for supplies as the sun falls behind a cloud and the air gets thick with mist. It starts to rain. It rains all morning. First in a cloud that springs up like fog, then in sheets that pound the concrete as we watch from the front window. Finally it settles into a steady rhythm, the sound of water falling off the roof, flowing in the gutters, the drip drip drip around the windows, raining all afternoon as we wait for it to stop in the front room with our Legos and crayons. We hear it falling outside the bedroom window when we go to sleep, wondering when it will break so we can explore the field, to get lost in the grove of trees like the golden pioneer on the marble building downtown.
Mom gets
us raincoats and rubber galoshes from Goodwill and we promise her we’ll stay dry when we go outside in the dark afternoon. The water runs along the highway in a stream, muddy with whitecaps. We see the shadow of a river rat the size of a small cat in the creek below our feet where we hoped to fish. The water gets in our socks, our shoes, our skin, our pores and we soon realize that the sun was a dirty trick and we are destined to be wet.
“Maybe it’ll just rain forever,” Tony says.
CHAPTER 6
THE COWBOYS WHO LEFT
Tony starts school and Mom starts her job at the state mental hospital. I go to day care at an apartment two buildings over run by a mean woman with black hair pulled back on her head and a hairy mole on her top lip. Tony joins me there after school. We sit with the other kids and watch The Electric Company. We’re not used to the TV or the other kids who scream at it when the letters come on: “E! F!” We already know our letters because all the kids at the School knew their letters. At the end of the day we watch Bonanza which is the best show because of all the outlaws and heroes and cowboys, all those men on their horses.
We don’t like the mean woman who runs the day care because she lets her kids make fun of us for the holes in our shoes and jeans. Her daughter, who is about my age, says, “Your sneakers are talking to me,” because the rubber on the front comes apart when I walk. When we play hide-and-seek, she says, “You two should hide in the trash. No one would even notice.” The other kids laugh at us or they keep their distance.
The mean woman says it’s not right to make fun of people less fortunate than you. “But for the grace of God go you, honey.” She shakes a finger with a hand on her hip. But her daughter doesn’t get in trouble. Not really. None of them do. And I don’t think the woman likes me because I don’t understand the way she talks to all the children like they are babies.
When I say, “I’d prefer not to do crafts. Is there another activity?”
She says, “What’s wrong with you? You talk like you’re thirty, ha-ha!” And dumps the box of matchsticks on the floor in front of me.
Mom is gone nights when she goes to meetings at a place called Al-Anon. She says it helps her to understand what happened to her. She’s always telling us how she just needs to cope, needs time to “figure out answers to the questions life keeps posing to her.” There’s a poster on the wall of the apartment that reads,
God grant me the Serenity
To accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference.
It’s written in curvy white letters over a picture of a wave crashing against a rock. I see her saying the words to herself. Her lips move with her eyes closed as she leans against the wall and says the prayer, waiting for the water to boil for the noodles.
Mom is lonely. We know that because she tells us, “Your dad already has someone else. He was the love of my life.” Then she disappears in her mind for a while. Her eyes get glossy as she blinks, shakes her head and says, “You look more like him every day.”
I hear her talking on the phone when she comes home at night, when she thinks we’re asleep. Just bits and pieces: “Well, he seems nice, but I think he hates his ex-wife … A beard? I guess I don’t mind a beard … Jesus, Diane, I don’t know. Is he a good man?”
I know that she’s what you call a “single mother” and I know she wants to stop being one which is why she is growing her hair out.
The mean woman at the day care has a husband who comes home at the end of the day in work boots covered in sawdust. He stomps right into the bedroom and the woman who ignores us, who lets her kids tease us, who yells for us to clean up or come inside for a snack with her deep husky voice, just flattens her hair and brings him a beer from the fridge, saying that she’s sorry she forgot to put it in the icebox earlier. She’s one person with us and another with him and it seems like a magic trick, this power that he has over her. I wonder if Mom was like that with Dad or anyone because she’s always alone.
When Christmas Eve comes and Mom makes hot apple cider in a big pot with cinnamon sticks, the smell fills the apartment. We have a small tree we decorated with construction paper and the antique glass bulbs Mom got from Grandma and Grandpa. She says it’s going to be a great Christmas, that it’s us against the world, the Three Musketeers.
A man knocks on our door and Tony and I run to answer it. He has a clipboard and a tie. He says, “Hi. Can I speak to the man of the house?”
We look at each other.
“Is your father home?”
“No. But our mom is.” She pushes us inside and talks to the man who is trying to get her to sign something and I wonder, Are we the men of the house? Is Mom? I didn’t know we needed one.
The men on Bonanza look out for the women, defending their honor, picking up their handkerchiefs when they drop them, like cowboys are supposed to do. Little Joe sits on a golden green hilltop next to a lake with Alice. He told his brothers he’s going to ask her to marry him. Who are these men? They have something we don’t. They seem rare, like wild dogs or birds you capture and put in a cage, something fleeting and hard to spot.
One night Mom walks out of the bathroom with makeup on her face. Her eyes bright, red powder on her big Dutch cheeks. She’s even put lipstick on. Her straight brown hair has started to grow out. It falls down almost to her shoulders. She parts it in the middle, pulling the long bangs back behind her ears. She’s wearing a gold necklace and gold earrings with red stones, a long flowery green-and-white skirt and a red blouse. Instead of her usual leather sandals, she’s wearing green shoes.
She does a turn. “Well, how do I look?”
Every kid knows the answer to that question.
She says she’s going to meet a friend. She hugs us and smiles and tells us to be nice to the girls someday. Even the quiet ones. This is her constant plea to us. “Make sure you ask the quiet ones to dance, okay? They want to dance too.” She makes us promise her. It sounds nice, all this dancing with different people.
The men seem like cowboys to me, like the ones on TV. There’s no talk of sharing or “serenity” or makeup or brushing your teeth or the “questions life poses.” They have big boots and guns and horses and cigarettes. They walk into town with their hats pushed forward, an unlit match hanging from their teeth. The women say, “Don’t leave. Please. Stay.” Or they say, “Get out! Just get out, you no good rascal!” So you wonder which one you’re going to be. Because she is standing in the doorway in her makeup and fancy clothes and you know how much she just wants someone who will stay, with his beard or his mustache, his cowboy boots and his horse lassoed to the front porch. And the thing that he can promise her is the thing we can’t as we pretend to be the men of the house, with no gun and no horse, like fighting lions with a stick, lighting an enormous fire we hope someone will see so he’ll ride here and find this anxious, tired and lonely woman standing in the doorway with her gold earrings on.
“You look really pretty Mom.”
* * *
WHEN SPRING COMES, it’s still raining. Mom says the apartment is too small for a “family” and we need to live closer to a real school so she found us a house at the bottom of a hill, between the graveyard and the state mental hospital. She says it’ll take her thirty years to pay for it but damn it, the Three Musketeers will have our own house. Mom’s job at the state hospital is secure at least as long as Thatasshole Reagan “doesn’t shut it down to build more bombs.” When we drive by, the hospital grounds are huge, with cream-painted buildings covered in safety-glass windows behind high fences topped with barbed wire and endless green fields going all the way out to D Street. It’s impressive. Tony says One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was filmed there which makes us feel important.
The day we move in, Mom rents a U-Haul truck and mentions that her friend Paul is going to help us. She leaves us alone at the apartment at Battle Creek and when she comes back there is a big white-and-red van
parked next to her Vega. Behind the wheel is a man with thick glasses, a mess of thinning hair on his head and a thick bushy black beard that goes all the way down his neck. He looks exactly like a hairy human turtle.
When he gets out, we see that he is hardly taller than Mom. He’s wearing a black velvet striped collared shirt and baggy jeans that sag at the butt. “The damn thing keeps sticking. I don’t think it knows its job. I tried to reason with it. It didn’t listen.” He cracks a smile at Mom who smiles back with her crooked yellow teeth.
“Hey guys, this is my friend Paul.” Tony and I look at him then at each other. I know he knows and he knows I know that we’re both thinking the same thing: this guy is funny looking.
Mom’s new friend Paul cocks his head sideways to look at us. “Looks like we got a lot of work to do. Which one of you is older?”
“I am,” Tony says.
“Okay, good, good. Maybe you can drive the van.” Tony smiles despite himself. “I can’t make heads or tails of that thing. You guys got any orange juice?” He walks right into the kitchen and opens the fridge. He says there’s milk but it needs Hershey’s syrup to make it chocolate.
“We’re not allowed to have sugar,” we say in unison.
“Are you Mikel?” He kneels down next to me. His wrists and knuckles are covered in dark strands of black hair like a Labrador. He talks fast and makes lots of jokes. “Are these your Legos? How many do you have? Do you have the ones where you can make a spaceship? Those are my favorite.”
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