Lord of California

by Andrew Valencia

  The boy came up to the edge of the porch and stood with his fists clenched at his sides. There wasn’t much in the way of resemblance between him and Dad, and wouldn’t have been regardless of age, weight, or race. He said, “That money won’t do you any good. Not if you come by it like this.”

  “That’s not how it works. Money, in my experience, tends to be fairly objective.”

  He shook his head. “God will judge you. Even if you get your way and drive us off the land, He won’t let you find any happiness because of what you’ve done. Everything you touch will turn to shit in your hands. He’ll see to that.”

  I watched the boy closely. There was no sarcasm to be found in his demeanor; the way he talked, it was obvious he believed what he was saying, that some paternal entity from on high was prepared to seek justice on their behalf, and on behalf of all the Temple women who continued to be hoodwinked long after Mr. Temple was gone. I couldn’t help but laugh.

  But he clearly didn’t appreciate my levity. “What’s so funny? I’m talking about divine retribution here.”

  I said, “I used to be like you. Back in high school, I got really into theology and western philosophy. Yes, I was that big of a nerd. I was looking for answers, and I thought I had found some writers who could lead me in the right direction. Thomas Aquinas. Kierkegaard. Saint Augustine, most of all. You ever hear of him?”

  The boy adjusted his posture in a way that seemed oddly indignant. He said, “I’ve been raised in the Catholic Church my entire life. So, yeah, I’ve heard of Saint Augustine.”

  “Well, then you must be familiar with his concept of the city of God.” I gave him an appropriate amount of time to respond, but he just stood there squinting and trying to look tough. And so I went on. “After the fall of Rome, most people, Christians and pagans alike, were baffled that God would let something like that happen. Rome had been a Christian nation for three hundred years, after all, so it didn’t make sense that God would let a bunch of heathen barbarians sack the place. Saint Augustine had a different idea, though. In his view, no city or nation on earth could encompass the entirety of God’s infinite grandeur. The real city of God, according to Augustine, was a spiritual place, without physical borders, abstract and immaterial. No vandals or barbarians could ever sack the city of God, and all real Christians, in his view, should pay no mind to earthly cities when building up the spiritual city is the most important thing we can do on Earth. Eventually, people started listening to him, which is one of the reasons so many intelligent men wound up sequestered in monasteries in the centuries that followed.”

  While the boy stood pondering the ideas I had just unloaded on him, Ellie took the opportunity to interject with a few thoughts of her own. She said, “That’s some pretty deep stuff. But what are you trying to say? That we should hand over the farm and go live as nuns and monks in some far off monastery?”

  “No. That’s not my point at all.”

  “Well, then I don’t understand you.”

  I set my hand on the railing to steady myself. The headache had subsided for the time being, but every so often a disorienting dizziness came over me, upsetting my sense of balance.

  I said, “There’s no city of God because there is no God. There’s no retribution, no universal justice. There’s only what we do with ourselves and the one life that we’ve been given. In that sense, only the material matters, only what you can make for yourself with the time you have left. You’re an intelligent girl, Ellie. I can tell you don’t go in for your brother’s piety. But even you would have me forfeit my chance to make something of myself based on some vague, altruistic notion that I should care more about your sake than my own. All because your mother and my mother happened to get impregnated by the same man. I know it’s not a popular outlook, and it places me in the ethical minority of just about every society that’s ever existed, but I don’t care. As far as I can see, there’s nothing to connect me to you or anyone else on this farm. Nothing except for the transaction at hand.”

  Ellie’s eyes turned cloudy. She said, “We share the same blood.”

  “Billions of people all over the world have bloodlines that intersect. That’s basic human genealogy. But it doesn’t make you responsible for anyone else, unless you accept the burden to begin with. Having a common ancestor, even a father, doesn’t bind your soul to mine, or vice versa. To think differently is just a primitive form of religion; blood worship, the church of the genetic fallacy.”

  She said, “We share the same pain.”

  I shook my head resolutely. “No one shares my pain.”

  Ellie looked away. Through all my editorializing, I could see the fire inside of her beginning to dim, though her brother appeared to grow more incensed with each new word.

  He said, “You’re wrong. God made us to live in families for a reason. Even when there were only two people in the whole world, they lived together as one. That’s the real city of God. That’s what binds us together.”

  I edged my way closer to the steps. “Some bond. It’s been fifteen hundred years since Augustine and the city of God is still nothing but a dream. It will never be built. It can’t be built. And if the city of God can’t be built, then the cities of men are all that matter. That’s why I’m leaving here as soon as this contract I’m carrying is signed. I’m going to live a long life and make a lot of money, but first I’m going to move back to the city and build something amazing from the ground up. Finally there will be a Temple worth remembering.”

  Ellie wiped her eyes on the back of her hand. She said, “You’ll remember me. You’ll remember me and all the rest of your brothers and sisters. You’ll remember this farm and what you did to us until the day you die. We’ll haunt you, you fancy-ass son of a bitch. We’ll haunt you while we’re still breathing. I swear it.”

  “You’re not my sister. Stop pretending.”

  “You’re the only one pretending here. You’re so warped you’re even lying to yourself.”

  “All right, I’ve heard just about enough from the kids’ section. It’s time for me to talk to the adults now.” I clutched the manila folder close to my side and tried walking past her to ascend the steps. If anything, I expected her to go for the contracts. So it caught me off-guard when she reached up and scraped her short fingernails down the center of my forehead, tearing the sunglasses from my face and leaving me momentarily bewildered. There was no pain at first, only the sudden near-blindness of the sun’s unfiltered rays hitting my corneas for the first time in days. But then I felt the stinging from where her nails had broken skin. I touched my face and my fingers came away red. I whispered, “Little bitch,” under my breath and lunged at her before she could do any more damage.

  “What’re you doing? Get off me!”

  Getting her to the ground was easy; she couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and ten pounds. But once I had her there, wedged between my knee and the porch steps, she proceeded to claw and kick like a feral beast. I had to hold her by the neck just to keep her still. My hands tightened their grip until the flow of air was cut off completely.

  I said, “You should have listened. There was no reason for you to make me do this.”

  My blood was pumping so fast I was practically seething. Particles of saliva sprayed from my lips and settled over her straining face. She was starting to turn blue when a shadow fell over us and something hard struck the back of my head. I rolled onto my back and lay gasping with Ellie beside me in the inverse position. She coughed hoarsely and held her already bruised throat. The boy came and stood over me with the rifle barrel pointed at my chest and the butt end pressed into his shoulder. I finally noticed the color of his eyes.

  He said, “No one would blame me if I pulled the trigger. Not after what you did to her.”

  The blow to the head had left my senses scattered; I was having trouble understanding which “her” he was talking about. And as I looked up at the fearsome length of metal being aimed at me, the barrel seemed so close tha
t I imagined I could grab hold of it and wrestle it from the boy’s grip. My thoughts must have been more apparent than I realized, because he caught on almost instantly. He said, “Don’t even try it,” but I wasn’t in the clearest headspace at the time, and his threat only heightened my feeling of resolve.

  My fingers brushed the edge of the barrel before he jerked it out of reach. I expected him to fire, to put a bullet so deep inside of me that it would come out the other end through my back. But instead he executed a sort of quick rotating maneuver to bring the butt end around to the front. He struck me with enough force to shatter my nose cartilage and loosen two teeth up top. My head slumped back against the wood, blood trickling down the sides of my face. Before sleep overtook me, I felt Ellie’s feet once more on the steps, and then I saw them both together, girl and boy, sister and brother, standing over me with the most fearful, critical look in their eyes. What I would have said to them, had I been able to speak, was this: that not even our father had been able to make me lose consciousness; that as far as Temples went, they were some pretty gruesome little shits.

  Five years is a long time to go without seeing a parent, especially when you’re just a teenager. By the time I managed to track him down, I had grown into full manhood, and Dad had been out of touch with his Porterville friends for quite some time. Kylee put me in contact with one of his old associates, a shipping manager out of Paso Robles, who informed me that Dad had fallen off the map in recent years, and that he hadn’t heard from him personally in the past two or three seasons. He referred me instead to a grower in Turlock, who in turn gave me the number of a boarding house in Modesto. A woman with an almost unintelligible country twang answered and went on for ten minutes about what a gentleman he had been before finally admitting that she hadn’t seen him in over a year and didn’t know how to get a hold of him. It didn’t frustrate me, hitting a dead end. I figured Dad probably kept tabs on the various circles he ran in, and that eventually word would reach him that someone claiming to be his son was looking for him. Sure enough, he called me up one evening on the same number I had given the guy from Turlock. Hearing his voice for the first time since our altercation, I wasn’t sure if he had grown gentler in middle age, or if my memory of him was distorted by my sense of victimhood.

  He said, “This call has been a long time coming, son. That’s my fault as much as yours. I’d like to see you if you’re willing. Thought that might have been why you were hunting me.”

  I counted down five seconds and said, “You’re right, Dad. I do want to see you. That’s part of why I came back to San Joaquin. To have a talk.”

  “You say you’re in the valley?”

  “In Porterville. At the place where you bought me my very first drink.” I waited through the silence, convinced that Dad would speak again whenever he was ready to do so. But as the seconds counted down without so much as a loud breath from his end, I finally accepted the possibility that we might have been disconnected. “Dad? Hello?”

  “I’m here. Just thinking. I got into an argument with the manager the last time I was down there. Afraid I may have burnt that bridge. If it’s not too much trouble, would you mind coming up to San Jose tomorrow? That’s where I’m living now. That’s my base of operations.”

  I set the phone down and considered whether making such a trip was even possible given my present capabilities. San Jose was a six hour drive almost all the way back the way I had come. I was using my mother’s old ride, a twelve-year-old Korean SUV with over two hundred thousand miles on the odometer. But seeing Dad was the whole point of my journey, and passing up the opportunity, whatever the hardship, was not an option. I said, “Give me the address and I’ll be there sometime tomorrow afternoon. I’ve got a satellite phone with me, so I’ll be in touch if anything comes up.”

  “Good, good. Let’s plan on meeting up tomorrow, then.”

  Dad gave me directions to a bar in San Jose and a number where he said I could reach him most hours of the day. Driving north was slow, dusty, and anesthetizing right up to the moment I crossed the state line, at which point the road smoothed out and the seemingly endless fields and orchards finally gave way to the Spanish tiles and beige stucco of civilization. There was no need to call Dad on the road; the bar was fairly easy to find. In a heavily Hispanic neighborhood dominated by small shops full of lime candy and glass-bottled Pepsi, the place Dad had led me to was the only building around with tinted windows and a mounted air conditioner on the roof. I walked with the gift cradled under my arm and found Dad already seated at a table across from the bar. He looked to be drinking tequila on the rocks, or something similar that necessitated the salt and lime arranged before him. Upon seeing me, he stood and shook my hand with an affected and almost dainty grip—squeezing the lower halves of my fingers between his thumb and palm—as if he were already working to erase whatever brutish impression he thought I had of him based on the beating he gave me the last time we were together. We sat down facing each other across the table.

  He looked me over and said, “I see you’ve finally filled out some. That’s good. You were very thin the last time we were together.”

  An unexpected move. Right out the gate, he was criticizing my appearance as well as bringing up last time. I smiled and slid the package across the blue tiled tabletop. I said, “This is for you. It’s a special reserve bourbon all the way from Kentucky. Very hard to find this far west.”

  Dad held the box up to the light and squinted as he read the label. He said, “That’s very generous of you,” which after five years of mutual silence was still the closest he could bring himself to saying, “Thank you.” He set the gift on the edge of the table and took another drink from the dripping glass at his side. His hair had receded since I last saw him, bringing the bullet shape of his skull into full prominence, a long-awaited prophecy finally fulfilled. He was still imposing even in his graying years, though the strength and energy he once exuded was now offset by an obesity that brought to mind images of old Parisian men at street tables, quaffing wine and soup by the vat until their faces were as red as those of the hypertensive aristocrats of Baroque portraiture. He didn’t appear to be very comfortable with his new build. For the first few seconds we were sitting together, in fact, he seemed to be holding his breath, and when he finally did exhale, it caused him to wince while holding his hand against his bloated stomach. His eyes were even watery.

  I said, “You don’t look so good, Dad. A bit under the weather, maybe.”

  He inhaled slowly through puckered lips. He said, “Think it’s a hernia. Woke up yesterday with this pain in my side and it hasn’t let up since.”

  “You should get it looked at. Might be something more serious.”

  “I don’t trust doctors this far inland. If it’s still with me tomorrow, I’ll head into the city.”

  “I could drive you. If you need a ride.”

  His eyes opened wide. Whatever pain he was in had either subsided or didn’t matter as much to him now. He said, “When have you ever known your father to need a ride?”

  “I just thought—”

  “Well think again. Better yet, go out to the back parking lot and take a look at my ride. Brand new Lexus convertible, straight off the factory line.”

  “Wow. You must be doing well, then.”

  “I don’t have any complaints. And if I do, they melt away when I get behind the wheel.”

  “You’re not worried about leaving it out there in this neighborhood?”

  “I have a clamp. Old school, but still the best security available.”

  “Right. Well, I’m happy for you. Sounds like things are really coming along.”

  He nodded graciously and filled his fat face with more liquor. “And yourself? What are you up to these days? I assume you have a job of some sort. Or at least I would hope so.”

  I glanced at the bar behind him. The waitress had seen me come in, but she was taking her sweet time getting to my drink order. Perhaps she was already
well acquainted with Dad, and thus trying to limit her face time with him. “I earned my real estate license a couple years ago. Been doing some mid-range work here and there, mostly around Hayward and Oakland. I know, the East Bay is shit, but I’m hoping to break into some higher end properties before long.”

  Dad smiled and patted my arm. He said, “Bigger deals will come in time. You’ll see. Right now, the important thing is that you’re staying hungry and alert. You’ve got ambition. That’s good. I was afraid, years ago I was afraid you were never going to find a sense of purpose. The way you talked the last time we saw each other, all that stuff about God, it had me worried you were going to be a daydreamer forever. Glad to see you’ve finally made up your mind about wanting something out of life.”

  “I didn’t really have a choice, Dad. Having to fend for yourself forces you to make those kinds of decisions.”

  His smile disappeared. He stared into his glass of tequila and shifted his sitting posture. Either the pain was on the upswing or the discomfort caused by my response was manifesting itself physically. “No one said you had to wait all this time to contact me. Unless you think I’m so petty as to hold a grudge for—”

  “Dad. Stop. You’re the one who keeps bringing up the past. If it were up to me, we’d agree to put that awful night behind us and concentrate on the moment at hand. Doesn’t that sound like a better course of action to you?”

  “It does. It really does.”