Boonville
Robert Mailer Anderson
For Nicola and Dashiell and Lucinda and the memory of Joyce Hurley
The power of an event can flow from its unresolvable heart, all the cruel and elusive elements that don't add up, and it makes you do odd things, and tell stories to yourself, and build believable worlds.
Don DeLillo,
Underworld
Which proves again how no man can cause more grief than that one clinging blindly to the vices of his ancestors.
William Faulkner,
Intruder in the Dust
Boonville. John couldn't believe the town was actually named Boonville.
“I'm a feminist, but I can still have fun!” aâ¦
John's grandma had always smelled of gin and vaginal infection.
“Busted flat in Baton Rouge⦔ Music radiated from the mainâ¦
John felt the tip of a steel-toed boot. It rolledâ¦
John wondered if waking up in Boonville was the worstâ¦
“â¦Honey, when everybody in the world wants the same damnâ¦
John could tell this wasn't a good connection, even beforeâ¦
John was trying to write a letter to Christina, butâ¦
It was time to run. John grabbed his jogging shoes,â¦
There was no time to masturbate. John had arrived homeâ¦
“Hold on! Hold on!”
Waiting. Between the slamming of a car door and theâ¦
John made his way up Greenridge Road toward the Waterfallâ¦
“I'll give you something to scowl about,” John said, drivingâ¦
“The road don't even end in Katmandu,” Sarah reminded herself,â¦
John was dreaming when he heard the knock on hisâ¦
This is a work of fiction; any character's resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental. Although the town of Boonville is real and I did live there and graduate from high school and drink beer and play sports and read Dos Passos and write for the local paper there and my first girlfriend (although I never really called her my girlfriend) tried to kill me there by driving into oncoming traffic at the intersection of Highway 128 and Mountain View Road and my heroes have always been cowboys and I do truly love the Anderson Valley, there's no way to accurately portray this place. Nobody would believe the real truth. It's too violent and weird. And this is not some thinly veiled autobiography. I repeat, this is a work of fiction. I tried my best to get at some “higher truth.” I think we all know the inherent problems in that undertaking. So, any of the local residents who can read, and do read this novel, and take offense at the descriptions or content, instead of sucker-punching me while I'm in town trying to buy groceries with my wife and son, let me just buy you a drink and we'll call it even. As for the hippies in the county who may be upset at the depiction of hippies, I say, “Tough shit, hippie.” Anyone willing to identify themselves as a hippie here in the 21st century has their head up their ass and gets what they deserve.
B
oonville. John couldn't believe the town was actually named Boonville. It wasn't just an expression, a private joke among his family describing where his whacked-out, alcoholic grandmother had lived and made squirrel sculptures from driftwood. This place existed. He was driving his dead grandmother's '78 Datsun down the main strip, eyes wide with disbelief as the principal attractions shot past: gas station, video store, bar, market, bar, hotel, drive-in, health-food store, open highway. He continued along the two-lane road expecting the rest of the town to appear, more buildings, street signs, traffic, a Burger King for Christ's sake. But there was nothing, a slab of concrete wedged between trees and hills, winding away from what he thought must have been a mirage. Two more miles of pastoral landscape and he flicked on his blinker, signaling for the hell of it, checking his rearview mirror and seeing nobody coming or going in either direction. He steered the car to the skirt of the road, engine coughing and wheezing, dieseling and then farting a cloud of carbon monoxide into the country air. The motor made a mechanical ticking sound. John sat motionless behind the wheel. Tick, tick, tick.
“I'm going to put this as nicely as I can, John,” he remembered his girlfriend saying, two weeks before he booked his flight from Miami to San Francisco. “Your grandma was a spent bitch!”
Born a communications major, Christina had a flair for tact. She had recently told John on a crowded bus, within earshot of at least twenty Cubans, she felt like a potato chip dunked into a can of black bean dip.
“Completely fucking gaga,” she elaborated. “Growing marijuana at age seventy, shooting a guy in the leg because he had a bad aura. Woodchuck sculptures? Your father said she lived in a shack, and that town Boonville, I read somewhere it's so backward they have their own language.”
John had read the same piece on the town's odd lingo, Boontling, which had sprouted around the turn of the century at “hop-pickin' campaigns,” a mish-mash of slang that used English as its base. Grandma had said it was as dead as Latin. Only a fistful of locals spoke it, transplants from Arkansas, hard-drinking, tobacco-chewing bullshit artists. In the article there had been a picture of two such men, dirty workshirts, rifles in the gun racks of their pickup trucks, a half-mouth of teeth between them, conversing in front of a restaurant called the Horn of Zeese, which was Boontling for “cup of coffee.” Quaint or disturbing, John couldn't decide.
“Christina,” he pleaded, unable to recall the last time they had done something spontaneous together, aside from switching long-distance carriers. They never did take those tango classes or learn to salsa. He'd suggest weekend trips without a destination, renting scuba gear, exploring the Everglades. She would agree, and then find an excuse to stay home. Queen of the twenty-four-hour flu. If he argued, she changed the subject to their careers or lack of cash flow.
“Think about it,” Christina demanded, with her usual single-mindedness. “Until she died, that woman was living in the sixties. It wasn't even her generation.”
Grandma had kept John updated on her protests, weekend attempts to save the spotted owl, the coho salmon, the giant redwoods. The endangered-species cause célèbre. She had been arrested a dozen times in towns he couldn't find on a map, Albion, Covelo, Laytonville, and, of course, Boonville. She had once sent a postcard from the jailhouse of Point Arena that consisted of two Thoreau quotes, “I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows.” and “What are
you
doing out
there
?” John had found his grandmother's radicalism endearing, transforming her lifelong bitterness into something useful. Christina said, “If she really wanted
change
, she'd pool her resources with other hippies and hire a lobbyist.”
Christina had grown more conservative since their college
days at the University of Miami, developing a low tolerance for anything that didn't increase their savings account. It was beginning to dominate the details of their life, the food they ate, the jokes they told, the plays and museum exhibitions they missed. She even dressed differently, skirt suits, hair pulled back and set with a clip. Sensible shoes. Before it was loose T-shirts and loud Bermudas, hair falling unevenly onto her shoulders, eyes that asked, “What next?” She would go braless, sometimes sans panties. “Easy access,” she would coo, and they would make love in elevators, parking lots, on the beach. Now it was predictable, clothes, conduct, conversation. And sex only occurred in bed, if they had scheduled a “sex date.”
“The sixties are over, the seventies are over, and the eighties are closing fast,” Christina told him, demonstrating how history could be disposed of in neat packages. “Your grandma didn't realize that, and now she's dead.”
“What does that have to do with anything?” John wanted to know.
He looked around their apartment, pastel furniture and white carpeting. Carefully selected chrome and glass accessories. Television, front and center. A stack of coasters on a coffee table with magazines spread out just so,
Glamour, House Beautiful, Vanity Fair
. Mood dimmer halogen track lighting, an Italian floor lamp that took six weeks to be delivered, all ordered from one of Christina's catalogs. Over the sofa, a framed Ansel Adams print of a forest of white-trunked trees.
What compromise had led to that purchase? John wondered. It must have been the day he wanted to buy the Diane Arbus photograph of the retarded girl touching her toes.
“Muerto!” Christina spit, and even in another language her point was still unclear. “Her whole way of thinking is done.”
Outside the apartment, Florida air hung as hot and tight as a sunbather's butt thong. Through the window, John watched palm trees droop with the weight of the afternoon, Coppertone bodies flashing Rolexes, boutiques and half-empty high-rises. Miami, city of greed and vanity, cocaine and implants, varicose veins and mambo. He had grown up, gone to college, spent twenty-seven years in the Sunshine State trying to believe fun was a large body of water and a pink drink. Whenever you built a city in a place without seasons, he observed, people got strange. At least as a child
he was able to walk the beaches barefoot. Now you couldn't take a step without cutting yourself on a broken bottle or syringe. Miami had become an hourglass. Time run out.
“What about rednecks?” Christina asked. “Have you given a thought about rednecks?”
Christina was on a roll that a fancy dinner and a pitcher of piña coladas couldn't stop. Forget trying to make it up to her with flowers, he wouldn't hear the end of this one for weeks. It was as if he had suggested they move straight to hell.
“Remember, I lived in Tallahassee for five years,” she reminded John. “Rednecks might be worse than hippies.”
Of course he had thought about rednecks, recalling the saying in Miami, “The farther north you go, the farther south you get.” But the question on the floor was, “What about west?” California was supposed to be the final frontier for personal expression, especially the San Francisco Bay Area, an enclave of born dissidents. By Grandma's account, Boonville was only a hundred miles north of the Golden Gate Bridge, in Mendocino County, a region known for its stunning coastline and wine grapes. There were rivers and forests, a fertile valley with acres of scrub oaks and apple orchards. Everybody knew everybody by their first name. They still rode horses and raised livestock. People didn't lock their doors at night.
But you never knew what was fact or fiction until you experienced it for yourself. Grandma had also warned, “If you travel fifty miles outside any city in America, it's Faulkner country.”
“I need to move,” John told Christina.
“Selfish,” Christina chided. “Mr. Selfish.”
“I can't live here anymore,” he tried to explain. “I don't want to start a family in Florida. They'll grow up to be surfers, realtors, lawyers, or worse. There's nothing else here.”
“We're here,” Christina said.
“That's right,” John said, conceding the obvious, but not knowing exactly what to make of it. “And I don't want my kids getting skin cancer or believing life imitates L.A.”
“What's wrong with L.A.?” she said.
Christina compulsively reached for one of the bottles of sunscreen left around the apartment, squirting a dollop in her palm and rubbing it onto her arms as if the lotion offered a layer of protection not only from the UV rays, but from her life.
“It could be great,” John said, ignoring her question because answering it would begin another conversation about the same thing, and he was trying to build momentum. “We could take the forty grand she left me and fix her cabin. You could work in a gallery. I could take a break from marketing. You said yourself I need a career change. It would be an adventure.”
“How about doing the same thing here,” Christina suggested. “Use the money for a down payment on a place in Coral Gables?”
“I'm sick of living this close to my parents,” John said, thinking, if she didn't understand that, who had he been sleeping with all these years? “I'm starting to wonder how much influence I have over my own life.”
“I'm starting to wonder how much you want to be involved in mine.” Christina replied, sealing the lid back on the bottle. “You go to Bumfuck, John, you're leaving your job, your family, your friends. And me.”
Not quite believing it, John looked at Christina and saw seven years of devotion culminating in a decision that took all of two seconds. Then he told himself a joke that he had always found more frightening than funny, one passed around ceremoniously by his buddies after breakups with wives and girlfriends, inserting their former partner's name for the punch line:
Knock, knock.
“Who's there?”
Not Christina anymore.
The dying California sunlight shredded trees, spreading Fritz Lang shadows across John's face and the Datsun. With each gust of wind, leaves and brittle sticks departed the main to the mulching roadside. Moss covered branches, mistletoe clung in clumps to inner limbs. There were no mangroves or sand. No coconuts or dates hanging oblong and edible, ripe for the picking. No Key Biscayne shimmering through the windshield. This wasn't a Sunday drive to contemplate sailboats and pink flamingos, a down and back to Sloppy Joe's to sit on Hemingway's stool and sip Cuba Libres. John smelled rotting apples, sweat, motor oil. He felt his universe imploding, boundaries pulled in and tucked around his neck like a plastic bag. California didn't feel laid back.
Something compelled him to look out the passenger's window to the drainage ditch running the length of the highway where he spotted the carcass of a decomposing animal. Deer, goat,
dog? There was a trail in the dirt leading to where it had collapsed, probably with the hopes of somehow escaping. Every animal believes in immortality, John thought, if only in the moment before they die. He wondered if the thing knew where it was when it took its last breath. Euphoric adrenaline shock of a child falling off a bicycle. Did the rest of the pack so much as pause? He had heard that when dogs had litters in the country, their owners put the puppies in a sack and threw them in a river to drown.
Looking at the dead animal, John thought, What have I done?
“Don't do it,” his father had warned, standing in the center of the living room where John had spent countless hours hunkered down on the rug doing his homework and listening to his parents fight.
The Gibson house was a steel-shuttered bungalow in the center of a middle-class block. Hurricane-proof, inside and out. The furniture consisted of cheap antiques and worthless heirlooms. It seemed that in decorating their home, John's parents had pledged to make the same mistakes as their parents, not just with the furnishings but across the boardâfear-infused alcoholism with a Republican chaser. Grandma was the exception, departing from the fold. But they refused to acknowledge her second life as a senior citizen and sculptor because it didn't fit into their perspective of appropriate behavior. She was a skeleton in the closet, dead and bone-rattling.
“The devil you know is better than the devil you don't,” his father continued. “They got cults out there, Moonies, Bhagwans, Manson, Jim Jones, feminists. Weird alliances.”
John hadn't told his father that his bags were already packed. He had splurged on a one-way ticket in business class, paying last-minute prices for a hot towel and a shot of Courvoisier. Christina wasn't coming. Tomorrow he would be on the West Coast alone, manifesting his destiny.
He had just gone through the motions of saying goodbye to his mother. No tears there. She was sherry-glazed and doing the laundry.
“Take care and write,” she said, the same farewell speech she had given John when he had moved fifteen minutes away to Coral Gables for college.
His father was more verbose. John was almost enjoying the
alarmist concern. It was a perverse power, knowing that whatever his father said, he could no longer stop him.
“You make a decision like this,” his father said, trying to relate to him the dire consequences of embracing the unknown, “and you have to live with it, forever.”
John knew his father had once dreamed of his only child becoming an investment banker instead of a manager in the marketing department of a public relations firm. He envisioned his son tearing entire economies a new asshole, not fucking around with pamphlets. John was supposed to own an apartment in Manhattan by now, a house in the Hamptons, a condo in Boca Raton. There were supposed to be brief visits and expensive dinners, beautiful women on his arm, so his father could have something worth looking at across the table from him. How would John get laid without money? Christina was fine, but his father was convinced she was going to leave him if John didn't claw his way into a higher tax bracket. His relationship with Christina had always been a mystery to his father, a wrinkle on a clean pressed shirt.