Boonville (21 page)

Sarah wiped her nose on her shirtsleeve and picked herself up off the floor. She decided if she was strong enough to have survived her past, she would make it through this calamity too. Endure, that's what she did best. She would sell her dope, find an apartment in the Bay Area, check out Cal Arts, fill out the grant applications, and follow through. Finish something. She had a hollow feeling in her head and a heightened sense of her surroundings. She splashed water on her face and looked into the mirror to see Mom and Dad staring back, their overlapping image creating a new wrinkle.

Bummer days, Sarah thought, exasperated, reminding herself of Dad during a coke jag, Mom after a run with the reefer and Chablis; “Down on Me Days.” There was no need to intentionally repeat this unhappiness. She wanted to find Daryl right away, give him a final fuck-off while she still had the conviction. He'd say something stupid, and it would be easier to leave. She could pack and have her dope ready to go by morning, forgo Ukiah, and set up an appointment on Haight Street where they didn't treat you like a criminal. A reservation at the St. Francis sounded nice for a
couple of nights, hot baths and room service. Before departing, she would swing up Manchester Road to see Squirrel Boy and say goodbye, make sure he was in better spirits, not having paranoid visions. What a lightweight. But she should talk, she used to see things in the woods too, sober. Maybe she would invite Squirrel Boy to visit her in San Francisco and have a drink at Tosca. She could use someone to talk to, someone who at least pretended to listen. Sarah wondered what kind of father Squirrel Boy would be. Would it be different if she were carrying his child? She felt guilty for thinking about Squirrel Boy, thinking about anything other than the operation in her immediate future.

Sarah dried her face with the last of the clean towels, then spied the dipstick from the pregnancy test poking from the debris in the wastepaper basket. There was an unborn child curled inside her. She was too old for excuses. The doctor had told her that because of the scar tissue a third abortion would be dangerous if she wanted to have children in the future. She gathered the trash to take out to the garbage. Her decision had been made. Nothing in Sarah's world had ever been pink.

“It's the color of weakness and submission,” she said, defending herself from invisible forces. “There's nothing feminine about it.”

She drove to the Double-Dumb and found Daryl in his carport underneath his car, a '78 Camaro painted primer gray and held together by Bondo. If Daryl was home, he was either asleep, watching TV, or working on the Camaro. Same as it ever was. The car was more than a hobby, it was a way of life. Every year he bragged about entering it into the open-class race at the county fair, but when the entry date came the car was either up on blocks or out of commission from some “deer swerve,” an expression that meant he had an accident while driving drunk, but had been sober enough in the morning to file an insurance claim. The Camaro wasn't a racing car to Sarah, despite the black stripe running the length of its dented body. She used to tell Daryl that instead of an oil company he should find a Scotch tape factory to sponsor him. Once they had made out in the front seat, but she couldn't remember going for a drive. On the occasion when Daryl did get it running, he'd take his dumb-fuck friends to Ukiah with a cooler of beer. He would have another “deer swerve” on the ride back, which would mean six more months of carport. He used to say, “The difference between a Jehovah's Witness and a foreign car is
that you can shut the door on a Jehovah,” but it was his Japanese truck that got him around, the Camaro remaining as reliable and American as Daryl.

Speak of the devil, Sarah saw his head pop up from beneath the muscle car. After she had got the restraining order, Daryl bought the Double-Dumb, and, in an attempt at home improvement, dug a hole in the driveway in front of it so he could stand while he worked on his car instead of having to lie on his back. But it was just a hole. He hadn't laid cement or put in a set of steps or beams to secure the sides or any amenities other than some planks stolen from a lumber site to stand on. And a shovel to bail sludge. There was no runoff and the hole was deep enough to create a pool of freestanding water in its bottom from rain and seepage. Frogs made comfortable homes. Daryl peed with them. The walls sporadically caved in and Sarah used to worry he would be buried alive. Sometimes she feared he would fill in the hole with her at the bottom of it, the next local to hit national headlines. Each month the hole grew bigger, inching closer to the front steps of the Double-Dumb. Sarah had never spent the night in the trailer even if they had sex until the rooster crowed. The Double-Dumb was not a place she wanted to wake up.

Daryl looked excited, the way he did when he thought he might get some. The grin on his face was wide enough to carve into three pumpkins, the same cross between silly and spooky. He wore a work shirt and held a screwdriver in one of his greasy hands, a beer in the other. There was a rash beneath his eyes, reminding Sarah that he had mixed it up outside the hotel with Squirrel Boy and Pensive Prairie Sunset. Sarah would have enjoyed watching him get stomped by Pensive. There was something untamed in that smile of his, a certain amount of pleasure to be exacted from someone else's suffering that Sarah had always wanted to see knocked off his face. It was his half-smile that she had fallen in love with, the less assured boyish smirk.

Daryl finished his beer, tossing the empty to the back of the hole, pushing up his “T for Texas” baseball cap with the screwdriver, letting his head tilt to the left as if that side of his brain had gotten an idea and the weight of it had thrown off his equilibrium.

Go with your strengths, Sarah thought, even if they're also your weaknesses.

She couldn't help finding him sexy, his strong hands and transparent intentions. She hated to admit it, but men in holes trying to fix things turned her on. Not to mention Daryl's sturdy arms and husky back, his pliability, their heated past, the way he wanted to protect her, his willingness to kill one or both of them in the name of love, and how easy it was to flood his senses by just showing up. She knew most of her affection for Daryl was based upon his need for her. Instead of working on herself, she could focus on maintaining him, her own shortcomings never coming into question. There was always something wrong with Daryl to tinker with, pound out, and polish. He was Sarah's Camaro.

“They always come back,” Daryl said, as a greeting.

Sarah knew it, he'd open his mouth and the first thing he said would piss her off. Which
they
was he referring to? The long line of girlfriends that didn't exist? And “always come back”? It was humiliating to think he had taken her visits as personal conquests.

Looking at him, Sarah realized how nice it was going to be to leave Boonville and not have an emotional investment in an ex-husband. The lyrics from an old country song came into mind and she dedicated them to the memory of Daryl, “I've been a long time leaving, but I'll be a long time gone.”

“You want to crawl out of your hole?” Sarah asked, standing in the driveway, close to the front end of the Camaro. “So we can talk.”

“It ain't a hole, Sarah,” Daryl corrected her. “It's a work pit.”

The wind blew across the open field of the airport where planes seldom took off or landed. The windsock pointed directly at the Double-Dumb. Only affluent tourists and wine-industry heavies used the strip, with the exception of a couple of old-timers who flew in WWII and Dwight Duchamp who dive-bombed the high school, usually around graduation time, to protest his denial of a diploma from that esteemed institution forty years prior, once dipping too close and taking out the metal shop. Like most events in the valley, it was called an accident, even after Dwight walked away from his flaming craft without apology, saying, “That's my present to the class of '48!”

Daryl's Double-Dumb had been tied down on a cheap plot behind a grove of pine trees planted to shelter a community of suburban-type homes from this very current and the bleak view of the airport. But his trailer was parked too far beyond the hopeful
enclave and the prevailing westerlies hit it straight on, causing the screws of the Double-Dumb to rattle like a frightened man's teeth, as if Dwight Duchamp might be flying in on this vindictive draft to claim his diploma.

“You want to go inside?” Daryl asked. “You look nervous.”

Sarah hadn't realized that since standing there she had been scraping her upper lip with her bottom teeth, causing a tag of dead skin to curl free. Her lips had already been chapped from drying her dope in the heat of the wood-burning stove, not to mention the countless trips to and from the main house. She licked them with the tip of her tongue. They dried instantly. Wetting them only made it worse, but she couldn't restrain herself. It made her long for the fog of San Francisco, the city's consistent, reasonable weather. She would be there soon if she continued to make smart choices.

“No, I don't want to go inside,” Sarah said.

The Double-Dumb's interior was more depressing than the exterior, with its logger motif, dishes in the sink, reeking chew-spit containers, crumbs and hair balls accumulating beneath garage sale furniture. Empty bottles: beer, bourbon, tequila. It was like living in an alcoholic's pancreas. Television droning sports or pornography from the satellite dish, Daryl's primary source of information. Then there was his armoire of firearms.

“I'd rather have twelve men judge me,” Daryl used to quote Evel Knievel, who also had a penchant for Colt pistols, “than six of them carryin' me to my grave.”

Sarah could handle guns, but it made her nervous when other people did. And no different than any other redneck, Daryl was armed to the teeth. Open boxes of bullets, shotgun shells, and casings were scattered throughout the trailer. The Double-Dumb was the only place where Sarah felt claustrophobic.

“You want to climb down into the work pit?” Daryl asked, Sarah sympathizing with those women who married men on Death Row. “Wouldn't be the first time.”

It would be her last though, she thought, the equivalent of hurling herself into her own grave, the Camaro for a headstone, the rattle of a busted timing chain for a eulogy. What did I ever find attractive about this man? But she remembered their walks in high school, beyond the special ed domes; Daryl quiet at her side, not asking any questions, holding her hand in a way that made her
feel safe. He would listen to her for hours, going on about Mom and Dad, the Waterfall, how someday she wanted to be the next Gertrude Stein. When she showed him her poems and sketches, he would look from her to them and back again, saying in a gentle voice, “You're good, Sarah.” That was the sum total of his criticism. Sarah believed him, catching him looking at her with proud wonder.

Having relocated to the Waterfall from Palo Alto at thirteen, Daryl knew the players in Sarah's life intimately. His father was a business hippie, a sub-sect of the experimental hippies, but Daryl managed to escape the hippie influence by aligning himself with the locals and staying away from the main house. Few linked him to the Waterfall, except fiscally. They knew his father, Wesley, owned the outback, on paper, and everyone on the commune, including Daryl, grew pot. But at sixteen he moved into town, renting a house with Billy Chuck's older brother Buck. After marrying Sarah, he came back to the commune. Following the divorce, he returned to town.

Because of Daryl's intimacies with the Waterfall, Sarah hadn't felt as embarrassed about her upbringing as she did with other men. Daryl protected her from the freaks, including the Poobah, who he once smacked in the head with a post-hole digger. At night in bed, when he was asleep with his body cradling hers, nothing felt more secure. But the division between them became greater, the art vs. ESPN split, and he more than anyone began using the Waterfall against her.

“You and your hippie mother!” he'd say, a whole subtext of uncomfortable knowledge carried with it. Daryl had seen Mom naked, watched her have sex with a number of different men on a number of different occasions. Mom had tried to seduce him. He knew all the drugs Mom had done. How horribly the Poobah treated her. How insane everything was in Sarah's life. The more Daryl condemned Mom and the Waterfall, the harder it became for Sarah to separate herself from them. And through his attacks, Daryl managed to sequester himself from the other residents and actions of the Waterfall, elevating his status to mainstream American.

“I'm moving,” Sarah told him.

“You want to park your car out back?” Daryl asked, still hoping for a tumble, acting as if he didn't hear her, or worse, didn't
believe what she was saying.

“I'm leaving for San Francisco tomorrow, and I'm not coming back,” Sarah said, firmly. “Except maybe for holidays.”

Why was she hedging? What holidays? They didn't celebrate Thanksgiving or Christmas on the commune. There were a couple of Hanukkah holdouts, lighting menorahs on the sly, but the only holiday the Waterfall observed was May Day, and that was a drug-filled orgy with everyone dancing naked around the May pole, gobbling laced baked goods. Except for the May pole, no different from any other day. And not exactly why you come home for the holidays.

“What's in San Francisco?” Daryl asked.

Sarah surveyed the flat behind the airport, the Double-Dumb, the satellite dish, the Camaro up on blocks. Daryl in his hole. Describing what was in San Francisco was having to redefine everything, not simply a semantics argument between a hole in the ground and a work pit.

“I'll be in San Francisco,” Sarah said, and it seemed the clearest explanation.

“This ain't because of that yuppie, is it?” Daryl asked. “I'd be willin' to apologize for kickin' his ass, unless you're fuckin' him.”

“This has nothing to do with him,” Sarah said, knowing that wasn't entirely true, but Daryl wouldn't understand if she admitted that John was even one-one-thousandth of the reason for leaving or inserted that he was cute and she could date whoever she wanted. This wasn't about John, it was about her future as the unnamed presence grew inside her and expanded out in front.