The Central Valley of
California that we drove through had been, in an earlier time, a sea of
fl
owers. John Muir describes how it used to
be a
‘
continuous bed of honey-bloom, so marvelously
rich... your foot would press about a hundred
fl
owers at every step.’ And at times the
region had resembled a sea. ‘The whole Valley was turned into an ocean. Most of
its people were drowned. Some tried to swim away but frogs and salmon caught
them and ate them. Only two people got away, swept into the Sierras,’ says a
Maidu myth on the birth of the Great Central Plain. Explorers came and gave the
Sacramento and Merced rivers their names.
Sacrament.
Mercy.
The trapper Kit Carson hunted along the ‘shaggy
river-beds.’ It was raw, unstable country then, with gun
fi
ghters and thieves—Joaquín Murrieta (who
claimed to have eaten ostrich), Johnny Sonntag, Tres Dedos (Three-Fingered
Jack), the Daltons. They camped around Visalia, now a sleepy atonal town.
Succinct histories tell us something—that anything peaceful has a troubled
past.
Nowadays this
fl
attened stark land is etched by railway
crossings and a remarkable symmetry of river channels, as if God has impressed
a circuitry down onto the earth and given it reason. So we have the low hill
civilizations of Pixley and Porterville, the lights of Buttonwillow and Tulare.
Coop once slept with a girl in Tulare, that tense, frantic night of his
remembered with a coy term. He had ‘slept’ with the girl in Tulare as he had
‘slept’ with me. The damnation that came down on us is not quite extinct.
Someone from the past might still say of me, ‘There’s a black
fl
ag in that woman
’
s life.
’
But this is unlikely to happen. A
family keeps its secrets. Just as all that remains from the Central Valley
’
s past are muted rumours of anarchic
outlaw girls and the furious Eugene Key, who took over as sheriff in Tulare and
cut off the left hand of Three-Fingered Jack, and sent it to Visalia by Wells
Fargo as evidence, to celebrate a victory of sorts.
Our truck that day crossed
that antique seabed. We slipped past fruit farms, entered brief bouts of rain.
I have read up ever since on the history of the Great Central Plain, about
cattle in Fowler’s Junction, and about the beautiful and haunting Allensworth.
I
’
ve read
The Octopus,
in which Tulare is
renamed Bonnerville, and read about the waves of immigrants who came here with
their music of languages—Tagalog, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, and Japanese—to
cut open the ditches for irrigation, to turn swamps into fruitland, or to mine
asphalt in the intense heat, as my maternal grandfather did, working
practically naked, coated in that oil they used for
fl
ux for what they were mining near the
spur line of Asphalto. Just another place named after a mineral on the map of
the world. How many are there? A greater number, I suspect, than named for
royalty.
I was sixteen the year I
took the roads travelling south, running away from my father, with Coop’s heart
in me. And I kept travelling it seemed for another ten years among strangers,
alone, never intimate, slowly building a con
fi
dence in my solitude. But during that
fi
rst journey, I sat in the spacious cab of
that commercial refrigeration truck and stared and stared, swallowing
everything I saw, so that whatever existed in me would be washed away. KUZZ-AM
played Buck Owens singing ‘Under Your Spell Again,’ and I swallowed that as
well. I had run out and jumped into the driver
’
s cab
at the truck stop on I5, and he, luckily, was going inland
fi
rst, to Merced,
Mercy,
and then
south on 99. It was a route separate from my father’s. We continued to Dinuba,
where he ate Mexican food, then Cutler and Visalia. It began to darken and my
mysterious new friend headed south and west to a place he said we could stay.
We drove alongside orange groves and a state prison in the moonlight, and
fi
nally entered the deserted town of
Allensworth. He said it had been abandoned for more than forty years. We would
be the only ones there.
All I could see at that
hour were the outlines of a score of houses. We drove beyond them till we were
in a campground, and he climbed out and left me the cab to sleep in. I
stretched out on the old leather seat. It would be the last night of my youth.
And I kept my eyes open for as long as I could. I heard the night birds.
Then the trains that shook the earth under me all night.
In the morning I walked
among the beautiful pastel-painted houses of Colonel Allensworth’s abandoned
town. The two of us climbed the steps up to each home, walked along their
verandahs, reading the plaques that described the general store in 1912, the
hotel, a school, a library. We peered in the windows and saw an old player
piano, a picture of Lincoln. He said he always stayed in Allensworth on his
journeys, a former depot town settled by blacks. We returned to the truck,
which he had parked under the trees, and soon we were on the highway again. It
was early and we were in one of those valley fogs called ground clouds. We
could hear birds through the open windows, and we saw red-winged blackbirds
dart out of the whiteness across the road.
He kept talking to me in
English, but I still returned mostly silence. If I spoke, I spoke my mother’s
Spanish, or my tentative French. He knew I was raw with something, that I had
some poison within me. He spoke to me anyway, telling me about Colonel Allensworth
and the trains that since 1916 had refused to stop at the depot run by the
black community. He must have known I could understand everything he said, for
he spoke openly, and had stopped waiting for answers. At some point during that
last morning with him, he went on about books and how they signalled the
possibilities of our lives, and he recited to me what he said were the most
beautiful lines. ‘Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or
whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.’ I
know where those lines come from now, but I didn
’
t
then, and when I did eventually stumble on them I froze and burst into tears
for the
fi
rst time
in my adult life.
At Bakers
fi
eld he dropped me off, and slipped some
money into my pocket. I started to walk through the sparse town, my life ahead
of me. He had never touched me that whole time. I gave him a kiss at the truck
stop. My last good kiss. I kissed no one for a long time after that. I have
come to believe he was Mister Allensworth guiding me south.
This is the story I wished
I could have someday told Coop— perhaps in a letter, perhaps in a phone call.
But he, my
fi
rst darling, was lost to me, and I was too far away by then, in
another life.
took Aldo Vea two days to locate Coop from the phone number that Claire had
read out to him. ‘It’s a chalet, along the south shore of Tahoe,’ he said. ‘He
must be renting the place.’
Claire parked at the foot
of the hill. ‘Chalet’ was perhaps too grand a word. Halfway up the steep walk
she called his name. When she reached the deck she saw the front door wide open
and the body, face-down, a cane chair taped to his hand. Coop had always been
strong, but it looked as though someone had beaten half the blood out of his
face. He was conscious and he glared up at her. Turning him she saw dark
bruises on his neck. This hadn’t just happened.
When the medics arrived,
when they asked questions—
Who
had done it? Where did
it hurt most? Was there still pain in his head?—he waved them away. She told
the medics she would stay with him. Then he’s lucky, they said, he’s going to
need help. They left and she remained beside him, waking him every few hours,
as they’d told her to do, to check on him. Later he woke on his own and she fed
him soft-boiled eggs. He could talk, but he was essentially re
fl
ecting the questions awkwardly. She
remembered that
embarrassed
smile of his when she
accused him of walking like a gangster. That had been only two days earlier.
What happened? Was this
connected to your work? Work, he said in a monotone. Then,
What
work?
The poker.
She watched him searching
for an answer, as for a misplaced thing, a pencil, a lighter. He doesn’t know
what I’m talking about, she thought.
You play
poker,
Coop.
There was a grimace of a laugh then.
You are a gambler. That’s what you do. Do you know my
name
?
He said nothing to her.
Do you remember me? Do you remember Anna? ‘Anna,’ drawn out as if it were a new
word he must learn to
pronounce
.
Thank you,
Anna,
he said when she took away the tray
and the bowl that had held his eggs.
Gotraskhalana
is a term in Sanskrit poetics for calling a loved one by a wrong
name, and means, literally, ‘stumbling on the name.’ It’s a familiar occurrence
in the Restoration-like fables of marital life and love affairs collected by
the scholar Wendy Doniger. What these verbal accidents do is aim a
fl
ashlight into the brain, reveal its vast
museum of facts and desires. So when Coop assumed quite logically that her name
was
‘
Anna,
’
a bulb lit a
surprising pathway Claire never would have believed could be travelled. Just
for now, she thought to herself, just for a thrill.
Coop’s memory, the Coop
she knew, seemed to have sunk without trace. Only his motor skills remained
adept. When she went for groceries, she bought a deck of cards and a Sharpie
pen. Deal, she said when she returned to the chalet, and he immediately and ef
fi
ciently slid
fi
fty-two playing cards out of his
fi
ngers into four piles. But there was no
knowledge of the game until she explained the basic rules. Then he knew where
he was. Whatever Claire said to him he learned, though if she gave an
alternative possibility he became confused. When she tried, on the second day,
to correct Coop about her name, it proved too dif
fi
cult. We remember the
fi
rst things we learn.
With forgetfulness, what
remains of the desire that consumed Coop? Where does it go? Obsession, so
fi
nely tuned, is misplaced with this
dramatic loss of autobiography. So that someone watching him on his hands and
knees on the thin chalet carpeting is perhaps witnessing a frantic search for
that physical half that longed to lock itself like a claw in the body of
another. A few hours later he is no longer aware of what has left him, the
body’s role muted, the brain refusing to give any clue as to what he once
wanted so badly. He falls into a relieved sleep in the single bed, unaware of
the panorama of his week, unaware of a motive for these wounds, unconcerned
with the need to avenge himself.
Desire and obsession so
slight.
One organ, the hippocampus, closes down, and we are redirected
into
an emptiness
.
Faces become anonymous to
him now, like shadows in the grass. Who is this woman who is here with him?
Another woman rises from a bed. When does that happen? He sees himself pulling
her into the spray of the shower, her yellow hair turning brown around her
face, he cannot connect this person with anything— a house, a street. He likes
being in the small bathroom with her, and her lazy strength. Flecked with
water, she opens a drawer and pulls out a hair dryer, tests it on her arm, and
lets it blow into her hair, lightening it, tossing it like wheat. Her face
changes as she does this, her head surrounded now with a texture. She diverts
the cone of hot air across her body and pulls the cord out of the wall, and he
hears that subliminal sonar
tumble
in its dying sound.
She would wake in the
night and go to kneel beside his bed and listen for his breath, stare at him.
She kept trying to recognize the young face she had known, beneath the bruises
and the stubble. Coop. She had spent half of her life with Coop and Anna, and
now there was only this unclear shadow of him in the moonlit room. As she
watched him he opened his eyes, and she could tell he recognized nothing. It
was as if she did not exist in the room. Do you want some water? Yes. Here. She
held the glass to his dry mouth.
They took slow walks on
the trails above the chalet. If Coop went alone, Claire would write her mobile
number on his arm with the Sharpie. One night, when he had been gone for a
while, she looked down from the deck and saw car lights at the foot of the hill
and then three men struggling their way up the chalet stairs. They were
surprised by her presence. When they asked for Coop, she pretended no knowledge
of him. The previous tenant skipped town, she said, left a few things behind.
She was leasing the place now. She gave them the owner’s name, which Vea had
mentioned. They took Coop’s things and said they might return, in case he came
back. She called Vea then and told him what had happened, what she had found
when she got to the chalet, that she was sure the three were the men who’d
almost killed Coop. ‘Okay, Claire, the two of you leave now. Just drive.
Wherever you feel like, don’t make it logical.’