The Golden State

“There’s this rule you have to spend six months of the year in the U.S., and Engin—that’s my husband—went to do a course thing back in Turkey that was six months long, and when he came to visit us halfway through the course the border guys convinced him he was violating U.S. law by going back and forth, and that if he didn’t voluntarily give them the green card he would be banned from the U.S. for five years, none of which was true. And since we had a baby, he got scared and gave it to them and signed the form they gave him. And it was illegal. And now he has to reapply a completely different way through a different agency since he’s outside the U.S. And there’s not a lot we can do now except wait for a new one which they are apparently too incompetent to get done.” This seems almost to move Cindy, in some direction. She rolls her eyes.

“It’s not very comforting,” she says. “If they could do that with some normal person who’s just trying to be with his family imagine all the terrorists they could just let in because no one was paying attention.” Jesus Christ, I think. “Yeah,” I say. “But I think the reason they did that to Engin is because some people think anyone with a possibly Muslim name is a terrorist, and now he can’t be with me and our baby, so that’s not a good policy either.” Nonetheless I allow myself to agree without difficulty with her assessment that the Federal Government is a godawful bureaucratic clusterfuck and can be counted on to heartily fail at many things it undertakes. I suspect I don’t want to hear whatever else she has to say about the Government, what she has to say about Barack Hussein Obama. I’m sure that’s how she says his name, emphasis on Hussein like that is A Sign of Something and not one of the most common names in the entire goddamn world.

I gesture at the sign in her lawn. “What’s sort of the main thing?” I ask. “About the State of Jefferson?”

“The ‘main thing,’” says Cindy, subtly rearranging herself as though to start a recitation, “is that the people in Sacramento and Los Angeles don’t know damn anything about the North State, not to mention the feds. They take our water for down south, and tax the hell out of us, and then they keep us from using our timber and land and tie us up in regulations. The feds just told Ed’s cousin Chad Burns up in Oregon he owes eighty-six grand for grazing his damn cattle.” I am curious about the “us” since if I have chosen correctly from my small and dwindling store of local knowledge Cindy does the books at the Flintlock, Paiute County’s unexpected tiny municipal golf course where the clubhouse is a trailer and antelope run across the ninth hole. I can’t imagine this is a full-time job but maybe it pays whatever bills you are likely to accrue here. Or maybe it doesn’t, and that’s why Cindy is so fired up about the return of extractive industries to the North State. My grandmother played at the Flintlock until she was eighty-four years old, in visor and immaculate white socks with little pom-poms.

But then Cindy says “Where’d you meet him, your husband I mean?” and I laugh and say “In a bar” and she laughs in her throat and says “I met my sweetie in a bar too.”

She finishes her cigarette and grinds it out in a polished shell on her deck railing and says “Well, see you later” and I wave.

I sit down in a deck chair under the shaded part of the deck and light another cigarette and remember the fateful bar. Engin was the upstairs bartender and he had a lot of blurry tattoos and a proto-hipster mustache and he was rather tunelessly singing along with the Smiths who were blaring from the speakers into the summer night. We made desultory chitchat in my struggling Turkish and when I left I gave him a piece of paper with my phone number on it, the only time in my life that I have done this. I was thin and attractive at that time so I received an SMS from him the next day, and we began a relationship that mostly involved sitting in bars in the little tributaries that flow off İstiklal. I spent most of the time asking him what words meant and writing them down in my notebook. We had rather awkward sex and then sat in the living room with his friend Ali, a Kurdish guy who slept on Engin’s couch and the rest of the time discoursed vigorously about politics, and I nodded along although in reality I had almost no idea what he was saying.