This is awful, I said.
Jimmy Darling put his arm around me and said that he liked to think of it as the very best California had to offer. We walked over to the skateboard park because Jackson wanted to watch the teenagers riding around in its concrete pools. When we got there an argument was erupting between two skateboarders. One cracked the other over the head with his board. People came out of nowhere, and suddenly there was a crowd of shirtless men, fighting.
Jimmy picked up Jackson and ran. I followed them. We found our car and got in it and sat. I was upset. That crack, board to skull. Jimmy calmed me down. We took Jackson into a bar away from the beach, ate hamburgers and watched a Dodgers game. After the game, as we said goodbye, it felt like I had someone I could rely on. We kissed through the window of Jimmy’s truck until I pulled away and said goodbye.
I drove home. Jackson fell asleep in the backseat. It was probably nine p.m. when I parked on my street. I know it was nine p.m. because every minute was later accounted for.
I mounted my stairs, carrying my slumped little boy over my shoulder.
On my porch, in my porch chair, sat Kurt Kennedy. Kennedy, with his dented and bald head, the square freckles, the neckroll, the hoarse voice, the persistence, here he was.
To have moved away, and felt free of him for the first time in months. And to come home and find him waiting for me.
I had the bad luck, too.
19
Candy Peña made baby blankets with the yarn Gordon Hauser had brought her. The blankets were collected by a unit officer and placed in the office of receiving and release. Whenever Gordon passed the office he saw them there, in a giant leaf bag, the colors of the yarn that he had chosen peeking out, garish and sad. One day he asked the officer in R and R about their status. The officer was a scalded blonde with a tight ponytail, brusque, ex-military. She snorted. “These? Nobody wants ’em. I keep forgetting to tell the porters to take them out to the trash.”
That same officer supervised family visits, when inmates got thirty-six hours in the prison’s version of an apartment, with blood relatives.
Blood relatives. It sounded so violent. Or was Gordon losing perspective, everything warped by what was around him.
Was it difficult to watch them say goodbye? Gordon had asked the R and R officer, before he knew better. He had witnessed, passing family visiting, small children clinging to their mothers and crying hysterically. Someone had painted a lavender hopscotch pattern on the walkway outside the family units.
“You grow a thick skin,” the officer said, her mouth pulled into a frown, as if to demonstrate: this is thick skin. “Especially when you know it’s the mother’s own fault.”
It would have been better if the baby blankets had gone to the trash. Instead, one of the unit cops had redistributed them to the women on death row who had made them. When Gordon was next back there, Candy Peña had patched together her two baby blankets into a large vest, a sort of poncho, in soft, gauzy blue and yellow. She held it up. “I hope it fits?”
Knit was the past tense of knit. And no one wanted what Candy Peña knit, not even Gordon, who put the vest in a paper bag deep in the trunk of his car and tried to forget about it.
He let whiskey pad his brain at Baressi’s one night and was overcome by nostalgia for Simone, the woman he’d dated in Berkeley. Recently she had called and left a message, wondering if he’d plugged in his refrigerator. That had been her joke when they’d dated, meant to imply he was a work in progress, not ready yet, but eventually headed for, life with a plugged-in refrigerator. It was a way of equating his lack of domestic instincts with his rejection of her, which made him guiltier than she knew, because it wasn’t quite right. It was Simone he’d had reservations about, not parting ways with bachelorhood. He had not called back, and why not? Now that he was drunkish and lonely he could not think of the reason. The young bartender, with her big smile, her fake breasts pressing against the buttons of her shirt, kept asking the assembled but separate drinkers, all male, if they needed anything. “Y’all have everything y’all need?” She asked it like this was Appalachia and not the Central Valley.
On the TV above her was handheld footage of a city taken over by a Shiite militia, men and boys in white face masks ripping past the camera on motor scooters, piles of debris burning casually in the background. Someone asked the bartender to put on minor league baseball. Gordon would read about the militia when he got home. The war was private. It was between each man and his computer. Gordon might have opted for a more ascetic life and skipped getting DSL, but the previous tenant already had it installed. The landlord said he was one of the lucky ones. Many addresses on the mountain could not get service.
I’ll send Simone a postcard, he thought. Be oblique. Not disclose that he hoped to make her cry out like that puma on his mountain, in the scene he imagined. Simone, having come down to his cabin in the woods, his books in little stacks along the dirty floor, his bottle of whiskey on the kitchen counter. A woman there to witness his solitary life, his acquired taste for valley beauty—to the untrained eye, not beautiful. The valley was a brutal, flat, machined landscape, with a strange lemonade light, thick with drifting topsoil and other pollutants from farm equipment and oil refineries. It was a man-made hell on earth but then again a real valley, with mountain ranges on either side. It was the size of industrial agriculture, scaled for that. It was difficult to imagine what it had looked like before it was farmed. It was hard even to imagine what it had looked like farmed in the old-fashioned way, by people. Machines shook the almond trees in synchronous violence. Their fruit fell to the ground with every mechanical jolt. Other machines swept the unhulled almonds into furrows, and yet other automated contraptions sucked the almonds up chutes and into hoppers. That all happened very quickly once a year, the September harvest. Most of the time the huge parcels of almond orchard were empty and quiet.
He paid his tab and walked to the gas station next door. The gas station was the main booze outlet in town and there was a line, men and boys squinting under the harsh lights as they waited to buy their malt liquor and Mad Dog. Gordon retrieved a small Perrier from the refrigerator cases, for the trip up the mountain. The carbonation helped him stay alert while driving. The kid in line behind him gazed at Gordon’s drink as he set it on the counter. “What is that?” he asked. The green, pear-shaped glass bottle looked suddenly comely and exotic. Gordon understood the kid had mistaken it for something alcoholic. “It’s uh, this French water.”
“French water.” The kid tsked. “I thought it was some new kind of drank.”
They had no postcards at the gas station. Try the Dollar Tree, the cashier suggested. He found no postcards of Stanville. Apparently it wasn’t a place you commemorated and if he wanted to be in touch with Simone he could just send her an e-mail like a normal person.
That Christmas, his week off, he drove up to Berkeley to sleep on Alex’s couch.
“How’s your one-room life?” Alex asked.
Gordon did not contact Simone. He and Alex made the nostalgia circuit: the used bookstores, the Irish cafeteria in the flats, the coffeehouses on Telegraph that were filled with good-looking women who worked hard at appearing effortless and natural. The barbecue place on Shattuck and the blues club next door, which could have had a sign, when they were in college, Smokiest Tavern on Earth, but no one smoked in bars now; it was illegal. Alex and Gordon talked about the war. They both checked the same websites obsessively, Informed Comment for analysis and iCasualties for metrics. Found the same things funny and the same things heinous. It was all heinous, but some of it was funny. The way Bush talked about “Mr. Maliki,” whom the CIA had installed as president. “I’m trying to help the man!” Bush said with real but clueless desperation, at a failed press conference.