I allow Honey to run around a little outside Sal’s on the wide empty sidewalk and then I hold her hand and we slowly walk to the little town park which is farther down the road from the hotel, just before the turn to the Desert Sunrise casino and which I had forgotten about until now. She runs into the grass and back in the trees is lo and behold a tiny playground and she screams, actually screams with joy and runs clumsily toward it and I laugh at the transformation and then immediately think Christ what an asshole I am that we haven’t just gone to the damn playground. I get her into one of the baby swings and push her and first she looks thrilled but then as she feels her stomach drop her face crumples and she cries and strains her arms toward me and I feel sad that she might be a physical coward like me consigned to hate amusement parks and I give her another little push to see if she will acclimate but she wails and I pick her up and hold her close and we stand together looking at the slide and agree we will try that one next time.
I put her back in the Ergo and we start the walk home and I remember the library, a teeny-tiny cheerful brick-fronted building near the cemetery, and we detour there. An elderly woman with short white hair is sitting at a cramped desk inside and she greets us pleasantly and asks what we are looking for. I ask whether I can use my San Francisco library card and she says she’ll have to make up a new one for Paiute which takes five seconds since it’s a piece of paper she fills out with a pencil. I scan the bulletin board with notes about job placements and the “Tour of Europe” evening program. I check out some board books for Honey, so worn they feel like fabric, and I find Anna Karenina and check the line and I was right it is Tolstoy and I get that and Jurassic Park because I want something my brain can just kind of ooze over without effort.
We get home and I want to give Honey a nap but she had the weird morning nap and she appears now to be full of beans so I let her run around the yard, and I sit against the base of the deck, immobilized by boredom and desperate for a cigarette. I remember my new books but I’m not feeling up for the unhappy families different in their own way so I start in on Jurassic Park darting my eyes up at Honey now and again and then I see Cindy come out of her house looking unusually spruce in a jacket and purple blouse tucked into her jeans.
“How’s the baby’s finger,” she asks me, and I point to Honey on the grass, proof of life. “It’s fine. We cleaned it out and she has a nice Band-Aid. She’s being a big girl.” Cindy nods. “That’s good,” she says. “Nasty cut.”
“Thanks again for helping us with that,” I say. “I was terrified,” and she just grunts.
“Where are you off to looking so nice?” I ask. “Board of Supervisors,” she tells me. “It’s the vote today.”
“Are they actually voting to leave the state of California today?” I was too interested in the letters in the paper to apprehend this fact. “No,” says Cindy. “This is the first in a series of steps,” sounding like she’s reading off a cue card. “It’s not a resolution or an ordinance, just basically the Board saying they will support our efforts this way and take it to the legislature and hopefully get them to pass a bill.”
“And so they’re going to vote to see if they all agree to do this?”
“That’s right.”
“Down at the courthouse?” The courthouse is a rather incongruous temple on a street parallel to Main Street in the middle of town, visible from the playground we grumped around in earlier.
“That’s right,” she says. I feel flickers of curiosity and concern. I have the rogue thought that I’m a property owner and thus have rights in this decision. Then I feel unconsulted and obscurely furious. “Maybe I’ll come too.”
She looks impassive. “Well, I’m driving and I don’t have much room.” She’s so rude.
“Oh, I don’t mean with you. I’ll just wheel her in the stroller, it’s only twenty minutes.”
“Well okay then.” I do not feel any particular warmth from Cindy and wonder if it’s the drinks and the blood at the Golden Spike or my crypto-Muslim husband or if she’s just not a very warm person or if it’s a reflection of the warmth that I am directing at her. I always forget that I am walking around and can be seen and heard just like everyone else. I remember how Sal said “She’s not nice but we love her anyway.”
I get Honey into the stroller and it only takes us twenty-two minutes to get to the courthouse moving at a brisker pace than I can really handle. I’m panting when we get there and worried we’re late but I behold Cindy again, seated on the front steps smoking and looking impassive.
“Hi again” I say, with the feeling of being at a party and clinging to the one person who will talk to you.
“Smoke?” she says. “Later,” I say, gesturing at the baby. Honey wants to get out of her stroller so I take her out and set her on the lawn in front of the courthouse and give her a string cheese, how many string cheeses has it been today, I try to figure, too many in any event. She toddles and bites hunks off the cheese and then lets the macerated pieces tumble out of her mouth into the grass, from which she retrieves them.
“Are you going to give a presentation?” I ask Cindy, who has the look of someone who is getting ready to give a presentation. “Not me,” she says. “Bruce McNamara’s supposed to say something. We’ve been writing ’em letters and I don’t know what all for weeks, as you know.” “Like your letter in the paper.” “And to the supervisors, and everyone else.”
People are coming up the walkway now, and Cindy trails off. More people than I’ve ever seen in one place in Altavista—more people than I’ve seen, total, in the whole time I’ve been here. There is a group of elderly women with very short hair, and a group of middle-aged women with very long hair. Most everyone is white, there are four or five people who are brown but no one who appears to be black. Cindy nods hello to a clump of three gray-haired men in cowboy hats and mustaches who seem in a hurry to get into the courthouse.
“There are so many people I don’t know here,” I say, because I can’t think of anything else to say.
“Well, you know,” says Cindy. “Not everyone lives in town. Lot of ranchers came from Rigby and Sundown and those places”—tiny towns beside which Altavista is a metropolis.
“Also I doubt you’d know many people in town now,” she says, not unkindly. “Haven’t really seen you up here that I can remember. Since your mom died, I mean.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I guess you never met my husband’s family when I brought them up last year.”
“Can’t recollect I did,” she says, sounding awfully like a cowboy for someone from San Bernardino. She pulls on her cigarette.
A Ford truck pulls up and discharges a very tall, very thin woman in a red blazer with a sportswomanlike braid down her back. “Goddamn,” Cindy sighs, “it’s that cunt” and I visibly startle. “Sorry,” Cindy says.
“What cunt?” I ask superfluously, just to feel the word, the little charge of tongue meeting teeth as the word goes out into the air. “She’s from way over the coast, big ranching family.” “Why is she, uh, a c-word?” I ask.
“She was helping us to get organized for Jefferson but she won’t stop talking about the UN and some agenda they have that they are planning to do that she says is gonna have us all in chains by the year 2030. Don’t get me wrong I hate the damned UN but it’s a distraction when we need to be talking about our state.” “Oh,” I say, idly wondering why she hates the UN, my mom looked askance at the UN because the UN representatives always had the nicest house and biggest car of whatever posting they found themselves in. Honey runs toward me laughing, a sunburst, a comet, barking her shins on the first step and falling into my knees, still more or less laughing. I pull her up into my lap and kiss the top of her head with the puppy smell that she has after a while with no bath. She is writhing to get down and play again. She coughs and Cindy holds her cigarette up over her head. I’m desperate for a puff.