Without taking his eyes off the road, Dad gave a slight nod and hummed softly through his nose. I studied his face closely. He was a big man, tall and broad through the shoulders, with a beard of graying whiskers and a mostly bald head that rose to a point at the peak of his crown. Owing to his size, he was capable of imbuing his smallest gestures with the weight of hidden significance, and from the time I was little I was always prepared to try to interpret what he really meant by them, even if there was nothing there to be found.
He said, “The valley’s lush, no doubt, but if you had to live here a month you’d wind up suicidal.”
I turned away and leaned my shoulder on the window. “The families who live here must have found something to like about it.”
“That’s different. They’re country people. Simple folk. It doesn’t take much to keep them happy.”
“You’ve spent so much time out here. You don’t consider yourself a country person?”
“I’m an entrepreneur. An educated man. We come from a long line of educated people. Your great-grandfather was a University of California regent.”
We drove in silence for another several minutes before reaching the hotel. Pulling into the parking lot, the Ramcharger wasn’t the only antique to be found, though it was certainly the best maintained. I didn’t know much about Dad except that he insisted on maintaining a certain image and lifestyle; classic cars, custom suits, prime cuts of meat slathered in French sauces. Everywhere he went, he made inquiries into the best places to eat and sleep, and after nearly twenty years on the road, his knowledge of room and dining accommodations was enough to rival that of any agent or travel website in the Republic. For our trip to the valley, he had booked us a room at the Caravan Hotel, a comparatively high-end establishment that catered to out-of-town visitors and others who shared Dad’s means and tastes but happened to find themselves stuck momentarily in that otherwise desolate part of the state. On the way inside, he caught his reflection in the window and stopped to adjust his tie. He said, “You and I are going to celebrate tonight, Junior. It’s not every day a son of mine graduates high school.”
His words struck me as funny at the time, on a couple different levels. I was, as far as I knew, the only son he had, and he hadn’t even bothered to attend my graduation. He just showed up out of the blue one day a couple weeks after the ceremony and said he wanted to take me on a trip to see the rest of the country. “It’s your choice,” Mom told me before we left, “but don’t come crying to me if he lets you down.” A part of me, the spiteful part, hoped I would have the time of my life with Dad just to prove her wrong. But the reasonable part knew I shouldn’t get my hopes up; I’d been disappointed too many times before.
After checking in at the front desk, I thought we were going to go to the room, but instead Dad paid the valet to take our bags up so we could have a pre-dinner drink in the hotel restaurant. A heavyset girl with brown hair and orange highlights greeted us at the door with a stack of menus in her arms. Her name was Kylee, or at least that’s what it said on the nametag hanging crookedly over her protruding and lopsided breast. She saw us coming and immediately stepped forward to touch Dad’s shoulder and smile up close in his face.
“Been a long time, Elliot,” she said in an upspoken, questioning sort of way. “We never see you around anymore.”
“Good to see you, Kylee,” Dad said. “Sorry it’s been so long. I just got into town today after a long stay up north.”
“No worries. I figured you were keeping busy.”
“You know it. Say, we don’t have a reservation, but any chance you could get us a table? We’ve been on the road all day.”
“Sure thing. I’ll seat you in my station over by the bar. It’ll be quieter there.”
“Thanks. You’re a peach.”
Kylee led us to the back of the restaurant and past a varnish-stained mahogany bar without a single patron or employee on either side. For as much as Dad made it seem like a testament to his charm that we managed to get a table, there was hardly another soul in the place. Dad took off his jacket and draped it over the back of his chair. With no one else around for reference, I couldn’t tell if I was underdressed or not.
“Can I get you boys started with something to drink?” Kylee asked. Dad looked at me from across the table and replied, “Kylee, this is my son, Elliot Jr. Today’s his twenty-first birthday.”
Kylee’s face beamed with false surprise. “Well, happy birthday!”
“The thing is, I was all set to buy him his first drink tonight, but then the big dummy went and left his ID at his mother’s house.”
“Ah, what a shame.”
“Shame is right. We drove all this way before he realized what he did.”
Now she put her hand on the crease of my arm and addressed me directly. “You know what I do? I keep my apartment key inside my wallet. That way I make sure I have my money and cards with me whenever I leave home.”
Dad pointed his finger at me. “You hear that? The lady’s got good advice.”
“You’re lucky you have him here to vouch for you. Next time you might not be so lucky.”
Dad said, “I hope it’s no trouble. Any other day and I wouldn’t have even asked.”
Kylee winked. “It’s fine, boys. I’ve got ya covered.” She took out a pen and flipped her tablet open to the top page. “What can I get you?”
“Junior?”
To say I was unsure what to order was putting it mildly. I’d never ordered a drink in a restaurant before, nor tasted alcohol beyond a few stale beers at a house party. I remembered having brunch one time with Mom and her ordering a Bloody Mary, so I decided to go with that. “I’ll have a Bloody Mary.”
Kylee started to write down the order, but Dad raised his hand to stop her. “Bring him a Stoli on the rocks,” he said. “I’ll have a double bourbon. Neat.”
As Kylee disappeared behind the bar, Dad leaned across the table and looked at me sternly. He said, “You want fruit, order the fruit salad. Don’t embarrass yourself and me by asking for a liquor smoothie.”
“Sorry. I didn’t know.”
“Learning to drink responsibly is an important skill to acquire. Your mother’s father used to have a full Martini set that he’d bring out on summer evenings or whenever he was entertaining. That was back when British gin was easy to get a hold of. Vermouth as well.”
“Must have been nice.” I took a sip of water and looked down at the pristine white tablecloth. Half a day on the road with Dad and I was learning more about the older generation than about him. “How old were you when you decided to marry Mom?”
Dad waved his hand in front of his face dismissively. “Who can remember? My mid-twenties, sometime around there. I had already been out of college several years.”
“Mom says you graduated from the Cal State system.”
“Fullerton,” he said. “International Business program. With a minor in Chinese.”
“Get out. You speak Chinese?”
“Everyone was studying Chinese in those days. It was practically a prerequisite for any halfway decent MBA program.”
Another revelation. “You went to business school?”
“Almost. I had just started my applications when things began to get difficult. Disbandment was still a few years away, but the economy was already in the toilet. Couldn’t afford to take on any more debt.”
“So you took the job at the assessor’s office instead.”
Dad stared at me with his shoulders suddenly raised. We had been making steady progress up to that point, and I worried I had driven him back behind the walls of his garrison. “Your mother talks a lot about me, apparently.”
I unfolded my napkin and laid it out smooth across my lap. “I don’t know. Not really. Sometimes I want to know about you and she’s the only one around to ask.”
“That doesn’t mean it’s her place to provide you with answers.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“Right. We
ll. I’m here now. What do you want to know?”
“Well. Were you working for the assessor’s office when you met her?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact, I was. Up in San Joaquin County. Local government was one of the few stable lines of work in those days. I did have some private sector jobs before that, though. But they were all dead-end, entry-level positions with a hundred people above me. So I quit them, and never looked back. Even then, with the entire country falling apart, I was determined to make my own way in the world.”
Kylee returned with our drinks. She set each glass down carefully with a paper napkin between it and the tablecloth. “This first round is on the house. Happy birthday.” I watched Dad raise his glass and sip the lukewarm bourbon. He didn’t react to the taste beyond a few gentle smacks of his lips. His eyes weren’t even on me, and yet I felt compelled to compose myself in the same way, as though I had been drinking hard alcohol every day of my life for years. There was a lime wedge on the rim of the glass, but, remembering Dad’s stern warning about mixing liquor and fruit, I ignored it and took my first drink of vodka with only ice to dull the edge. Somehow I managed to fight through the burn and swallow the entire mouthful without gagging. By the time Dad looked at me again, I had already wiped my tears off on the napkin.
He said, “While we’re on the subject of life decisions, I would hope you’d let me in on what you plan to do with yourself now that you’ve finished high school.”
It was the last thing I wanted to do, but I took another drink to buy some time. As the vodka settled inside my otherwise empty stomach, a radiating numbness spread out from my chest and down through my fingers and toes. “I haven’t really decided what to do next. Most of my classmates are going away to college, but I don’t know if it’s right for me.”
“You didn’t apply anywhere?”
“Stanford. To get Mom off my back.”
Dad nodded slowly. “She’s proud of her alma matter. She should be.”
“She suggested I take the summer to work on my applications and reapply in the fall.”
“Right. But what do you really want to do?”
Instead of drinking this time, I raised my glass and held it off to the side with the ice rattling against the edges. I was already learning that drinking came with a performative aspect that could ease the tension in the room as effectively as the drink itself. At that age, thinking about the future not only strained my nerves, it distorted my whole sense of being, as if the very idea of some older, more perfect future-self negated the realness of whoever I was at the present. What I could never admit to Dad, or to any of the adults who took it upon themselves to judge the scope of my ambitions, was the same secret that made my heart race and chest tighten any time I thought about it for too long; namely, that I could not and could never conceive of myself as a grown adult, that I had no more desire to establish a career than to spend another four years inside a classroom, and that no matter how old I got or how healthy I remained, I saw no reason to expect I would ever live beyond my youth. That certainty of my own evanescence informed every other area of my life, such that I could never take questions like “What do you want to do with yourself” even remotely seriously. I was a transient in this world, in my own body, and as such there was no point in trying to plan for a future I knew would never come. All I could hope for was to arrive at a better understanding of the world, and of the limitless mysteries it contained.
I said, “I want to find God. I want to hear Him call my name.”
Dad took another drink. He looked at me without speaking. He drank again. “Have you fallen in with the end-of-days crowd since we last saw each other?”
“No. Nothing like that.”
“Hippies?”
“No, never.”
“So where’s this coming from?”
“I can’t articulate it properly. Or at least I can only describe it as an absence. I never had any real idea of God growing up. Mom’s never been religious, and hardly anyone I knew in school ever prayed or went to church. You’d think it wouldn’t bother me, since I don’t even know what I’m missing. But it does. Always has. It always feels like there’s an emptiness inside of me. I don’t know any other way to explain it.”
I watched Dad as closely as I ever had, looking and hoping for some small expression or gesture that I could latch onto and interpret. But he remained stone-faced right up to the end, right up until the moment he reached for his glass and, realizing there was nothing in it, started looking around for Kylee so he could order another round. He said, “Emptiness. You feel an emptiness inside.” He shook his head and slid the glass to the side of the tablecloth. “I suppose you think it’s my fault.”
I closed my eyes and held out my hands. “Dad, I never—”
“Empty. My own son tells me he feels empty. That’s a fine how do you do. I gave you everything. Even after the divorce, I continued to send your mother child support every month.”
“I know, I wasn’t—”
“You should try growing up around here. See how empty you feel then. Most of these kids never get beyond the ninth grade. Our waitress was living in a state camp before she started working here. She had two miscarriages in a single year. You want to ask how empty she feels?”
“Dad. Please. I didn’t mean it like that. I appreciate everything you’ve done for me.”
“No, you feel empty. In spite of all the advantages you’ve been given.” Dad looked over his shoulder and, finding the bar still abandoned, sunk forward in his chair with his arms crossed over the table. He grumbled something I couldn’t hear and didn’t particularly want to. “You probably think I abandoned you. As if it was easy for me, putting up with your mother and all her abuse. And trying to start a business at the same time. Oh, yeah. It was real easy.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. I was talking about how I feel about God, not you.”
“That’s no excuse for going around saying you’re empty. You have more to be thankful for than most. You have a good father and a mother. That should be enough. Love us and show some gratitude.”
“I know. I will. I’m sorry.”
“I try to do something nice, share a drink with my son to celebrate his achievements, and this is what I get in return.”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
I could have gone on apologizing a while longer if Kylee hadn’t decided to check on us.
“How we doing? You ready to take a look at some food menus?”
Dad pointed to his glass and then at mine. “Sure, and let’s do this again. Less ice for him this time.”
She grabbed our glasses off the table and left us in the same strained atmosphere she had found us in. It was all I could do to look at him directly, to feel the judgment in those eyes that were the bluest I had ever known. Other eighteen-year-old boys might have stood up and walked away, but I wasn’t driven to indignation as easily as them. There was still something I wanted from him. After all those years without him, I still wanted my father’s approval, and longed to know him as a part of myself, as any namesake would. To get there, I would endure his bitterness as best I could. I saw judgment in his eyes, but also a chance for enlightenment.
For a man who worked at a glass desk in a glass office in a mostly glass building, Mr. Russert wasn’t as transparent as I would have preferred. Not that he needed to be given all the attention he had garnered since his startup in Watsonville, aptly dubbed the Russert Growers Company, grew into a successful business seemingly overnight. The character of agriculture on the coast was different from that of other places in the Republic. Rather than relying on a nomadic underclass of poor whites and Latinos to do their picking, coastal growers brought in foreign laborers from Indonesia and the Philippines, spry little men with their own languages who worked on guest visas for ten months at a time, flying home once a year to check in on their families and reapply. With no parcel program in place, the arable land of every county eventually came
to be split among the same half-dozen or so large ag companies. Mr. Russert owned one of the newest and most controversial operations in the country; before I met him, he had made waves in Santa Cruz for buying up twenty thousand acres in just over two years. Now he was beginning to expand into other territories. On the morning of our first meeting, I found him sitting alone in his scantly furnished glass sanctuary, clad in a simple ash-colored shirt with no tie and the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. My initial impression of him offered nothing substantial by which to gauge his attitude, but I remained optimistic that he would confirm my earlier suspicion; that, in his role as upstart newcomer, he would be more willing to accept the kinds of propositions his competitors might deem too risky, and therefore unsound.
He looked me once over and said, “All right. Now that you’ve got my attention, maybe you could go ahead and tell me who you are.”
“My name is Elliot Temple, and I’ve just come from the State of San Joaquin. That’s all I’ll say for now. You understand I have to be careful about compromising myself.”
Russert shot me a confused look that lasted until the moment he adjusted the almost invisible frames of his eyeglasses. “Where did you graduate?”
“I don’t have a degree.”
“Interesting.”
“I entered the job market early. The classroom environment was too stifling for me.”
“Interesting.”
I recognized the look he was giving me then. It was one I received often, living in the Bay Area, whenever it became known that I was somehow traversing this globe without the benefit of a BA. Often incredulous, occasionally envious, but always baffled that a species such as me was not yet extinct in this part of the nation.
He said, “Well, Temple. What can I do for you?”
“As I explained over the phone, I’ve recently come into a situation where I would be able to facilitate the sale of a large tract of quality farmland. In an area of the country where no private enterprise has flourished since before disbandment. And I believe I could negotiate a very reasonable price for you. Much less than you would normally pay for a hundred and twenty acres.”
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