The Golden State

“We need a horse,” I say to Honey, strapped to my front and sitting heavily. “Horse.” “Hone,” she says. “That’s right!” I say. She is lulled by the heat and silence and motion of my body and I wonder like I wonder every time whether it is harming her that I keep putting her in these long-walk situations where she has no verbal stimulation, just her mother, a big silent broody anchor that she is attached to like a barnacle. But it is hot hot hot and my head and my eyebrow throb and I turn us back around and finally we are home and it is 3:45 and I give her milk and put her into the crib to see if she will take another nap and she seems to be thinking about it and I go on the deck and smoke a cigarette and collapse.

Cindy emerges onto her deck with a terrible look on her face and then she sees me and we say Hi.

“What happened to you?” she says, “My god, your face is all busted up.”

“Took a little tumble down the stairs,” I say breezily. “Nothing serious!” She shakes her head. “What’s new with you,” I ask. “Did you all howl at the moon?”

“We went over to Manny’s.”

“You don’t look too happy.”

“They arrested Chad Burns over that eighty-six grand.” There are so many things about this I don’t understand that I just say, “Wow.” “He’s sitting in jail right now, they’re trying to humiliate him.” “That’s too bad,” I say.

“It’s fucking criminal, is what it is,” Cindy says. She puts out her cigarette and moves inside the house purposefully, the conversation disappearing with our smoke in the hot still air.

* * *

“Can I ask how your husband died?”

We are in the car with Alice, having navigated with reasonable success and minimal badness the end of the nap the dressing the loading into the car of Honey and the drive to the motel to collect her. She looks over at me with a peculiar expression and says, “He wrote a long letter, packed up his briefcase, took the bus over to the city courthouse, sat down in front, opened his briefcase, poured kerosene all over his flannel, and set himself on fire.”

I am stunned and I swerve the Buick as I look over at her and then back at the road.

“Jesus,” I say. “Was he… protesting Vietnam?”

“No,” she says. “Then… why,” I ask, and she says, “No, I mean, no, what I said isn’t true.” I glance over at her again and then back at the road.

“Okay.”

“He just died,” she shrugs. “His heart gave out when he was a young man.”

“That’s so sad,” I say, and immediately start misting up because there’s so much sorrow sloshing around the world. “But why the new version?”

“He was so good, it seems sad to me that he didn’t go out in a blaze of glory. He just worked and fretted himself to death.” I can see her look over at me out of the corner of my eye. “He was a very special person.” I make a sort of bullshit sad smile where your mouth extends flat across your face.

“Anyway, there’s no one left now who knew him or the girls. I can test out all kinds of wild stories.” I look over again and she has an owlish expression.

“I could see that,” I say. “I know it’s not equivalent but that’s sort of how I feel in Paiute. Everyone’s dead or moved on and I don’t trust the people who stayed behind with the historical record.”

“But I can’t do it,” she says, as though I hadn’t spoken. “The things that happened, happened.” I feel brave enough to ask what I have been wondering.

“And your kids?”

“Oh, they really died.” Okay. Honey blats in the back.

To get to Antelope Meadows you drive out past the bird refuge out past the dump to the side of town where the rim rocks grow. Big brown rock formations shot through with pale and glimmering veins, they pop dramatically out of the flat earth here and there, sometimes a mantle of soil and grass draped along the top of them. I point at them to change the subject.

“Rim rocks,” I say. “Pretty,” she says.

“Somewhere around here there’s a set of them called Squaw Rocks”—I feel suddenly obligated to provide some kind of local representation and look around the horizon helplessly for the rocks in question, which I don’t think are actually anywhere close to here. “There’s a legend that the Pit River tribe came over and menaced the Paiute tribe—or maybe it was the Modocs, or maybe it was the other way around, the Paiutes menacing the Pit River—anyway the chief of the tribe that got menaced turned the opposing warriors into rocks as punishment.” Not only have I bungled the story like a horrible colonist but I am not even selling the bastardized version. But I liked the story because it’s sort of like Daphne and Apollo and the laurel tree, ostensibly without the rape, although I’d like to know why the rocks are “squaws.”

“Hmm,” she says.