Boonville (25 page)

“That's why people have children,” Aslan explained, tightening his grip on the weasels whose mouths popped open, tongues hanging agog. “So they have someone to do things for them. Now do as you're told.”

Raven looked at his shoes.

Aslan's remark reminded John of his own father once calling him “a sorry excuse for a milk bill.” He would have done anything to hurt him in that moment, but he too could think of nothing else but to remain defiantly silent.

“Do it on the paper!” a woman screamed from inside the main house. “You primitive motherfucker! Not my prayer rug! Not my yoga mat!”

John was having trouble believing this had begun as a neighborly visit.

“Would you mind getting Sarah's mother for me?” he asked Raven, thinking it was a way out for all of them. “I could relay your father's message for you.”

Raven thought it over. Aslan was walking in place as if to dramatize the fact that time was wasting, then he started shaking his hips and flailing his weaseled hands above his head, moving to the beat of his own drum. He was unable to respond paternally to his son. In this way, John could tell, Raven knew his father would always be consistent; he could be counted on not to be counted on. With the proper perspective, it was a foundation to build on. John's parents were also consistent in their behavior. If they hurt your feelings accidentally, they went back and did it again on purpose.

“Is that all right with you?” John asked Aslan.

“I'm having problems with the flavored ones,” the giant answered, straightening his sarong the way a businessman fixes his tie. “The French Tickler's fine, a hint of truffle and champagne, but the rest taste like chicken.”

John didn't know what Aslan was talking about. He caught Raven's attention, signaling him to retrieve Sarah's mother and anyone else inside who might be wearing white and carrying a butterfly net.

“Bring me a glass of water too,” Aslan told his son. “The rainwater from the purifier, not that slimy Evian. I'll help you with your math if you help me clean cages.”

“Clean your own shit,” Raven said, before slipping inside.

Shockingly, the giant didn't become violent. Instead, he bent over and scattered the rest of the rodents who loped away like fat kids in a game of hide and seek, resigned to poor concealment. They didn't look like weasels to John now, too small and furless, tailless and short-limbed. Not that he had seen a weasel before, but these were something else. He knew it the same way he would know a hyena was not a Saint Bernard even if a sign at the zoo claimed it to be true. Each of these animals was unique in their body and markings. They weren't lemurs or chipmunks. Marmots, voles, mongoose? John noticed what he had mistaken for the animals' hair were quills. Dwarf porcupine?

Fox food now, John thought, certain none of them would survive a night in the forest. One was already dead.

“It isn't easy playing God,” Aslan said, his zoological explanation.

John looked at the giant. It all seemed like science fiction, their names, the main house, the space mammals. But while Aslan stood before him, a futuristic Hun ready to ransack the planet, all John could think of was how people tended to vote for the tallest candidate in a presidential election.

“Marty,” the woman's voice called from the main house, and Aslan bolted into the woods, “don't leave that fucking dead hamster on the deck, they're attracting skunks!”

The woman walked onto the deck wearing a pair of jeans and a blue cableknit sweater. Her eyes were somewhere between the two hues and locked on John with the same intensity that he had felt from her daughter. Her hair was held in a bun at the top of her head by a pair of chop sticks, a few loose wisps. Experience had
drawn lines to accentuate a portrait aimed at flattery. There was something in her body language, straight back and high chin, that John recognized in Sarah. Greta was also the first hippie John had met to wear a bra.

“Men always want someone to clean up their messes,” Greta said, telling John in advance she wouldn't be granting him any favors. “I hope Marty didn't scare you. It's close to harvest and we tend to get provincial if not downright paranoid around here. We've had our share of problems. I'm sure Sarah told you.”

“Not exactly,” John said.

“Well, she has a penchant for exaggeration,” Greta said. “You know, water signs.”

The Janis Joplin music inside the main house stopped. Greta turned to stare back through the open door. She told someone to be careful with her vinyl. John saw she was holding a glass of wine and a cigarette that wasn't hand-rolled.

“So, what brings you to this neck of the woods?” she said, pulling on the cigarette and taking a swig of wine.

“I'm looking for your daughter,” John said.

“She's leaving tomorrow,” Greta said, and there was something in her statement that seemed to be offering herself as a substitute.

“That's what I heard,” John said.

“If you so much as think something in this town, everybody knows it by lunch,” Greta told him, taking another drag of her cigarette, flicking an ash toward the dead animal that Aslan had left behind. “It isn't yours, is it?”

John could tell that Greta was the kind of mother friends probably admired for her no-shit attitude, not to mention her looks, which couldn't have escaped Sarah's suitors. But if you were her offspring, it would drive you insane. The tonal quality alone. Constantly trying to rattle your confidence with false concern. For all Greta knew, John could have come to the Waterfall to borrow a book or to see Sarah's art work. But she had chosen to believe the worst-case scenario and deal with it flippantly. He heard everything Sarah's mother had to offer in the question, “It isn't yours, is it?”

“I don't know what you mean,” John said, wanting to put the conversation into a less casual arena. Everyone in California might be comfortable with airing their dirty laundry, but he wasn't there yet. It would take him longer than two weeks to ascend to local custom. He believed there were topics you didn't discuss with
someone's parents the first time you met them. John thought it was inconsiderate and rude of Greta to bring up the delicate subject of Sarah's pregnancy, let alone pry into his involvement.

“I'm just trying to find your daughter,” John insisted.

“Really?” Greta said. “I think she's trying to find herself too. Good thing she's formed a search party.”

“She wasn't expecting me,” John said.

“I have a feeling you weren't expecting her either, the messenger always appears before the message,” Greta said. “If Sarah took the time to center herself, she'd be easy to uncover. I keep telling her, ‘You become what you most resist.'”

John knew another old adage, “If you want to know who you're marrying, meet her mother, and add the father's worst trait.” Greta was a flashing warning sign.

“You look like you're searching the more conservative routes,” Greta said, giving John a once-over as if she were considering buying him a new aura. “I don't think you'll find her there. Ask yourself where your grandmother would hide.”

“If she's not around,” John said, “Could you point me to her cabin, so I could leave a note?”

“You sure you wouldn't rather com e inside?” Greta asked, gesturing with her wine to the main house.

“Yes, thank you,” John declined. “I'm sort of on a mission.”

“A man on a mission,” Greta repeated. “What in the course of history has caused more harm?”

How about a woman without direction? John almost answered. How about jealousy, spite, and fear?

Her suggestion about Grandma irked him. It was a dangerous question, one John continued to pursue despite the upsetting answers he received. But he didn't want to get into it with Sarah's mother. He felt lucky to survive the giant and wasn't up for picking a fight. It wouldn't serve him to be branded a sexist either, not with Sarah, Pensive Prairie Sunset, or Grandma's ghost. The only place it would help was at the Lodge where they would buy him a beer if he could relay his story in the form of a lesbian joke.

“We're all on a mission,” Greta said, taking her last drag of her cigarette and letting the butt drop from her fingers, squishing it with her foot, then picking it up. “Then we come to Boonville. That does us all in.”

From what John had seen of Boonville, there was nothing
inherently evil in the hills, woods, or vineyards, except maybe the residents. If these people had become sick, it was in spite of their surroundings.

“You should be happy your daughter's leaving, then,” John replied.

Greta fixed him with her blue eyes.

How long had the women in Sarah's family been using the suicide calm of their eyes so effectively? John wanted to know. The Gibson females had no such trick, no way of rendering men docile with the mere omission of a blink.

“It's not such a bad thing having a child, you know?” Greta said, still holding her crushed butt. “You get to relearn everything, tying your shoes, learning how to walk, the pleasure of ice cream.”

Greta patted herself down in a search for more cigarettes, coming up empty.

John wished he had one to offer her for a distraction. They would both feel better.

“People are less judgmental if you don't have children,” Greta said. “You can go on forever as an eccentric if you do it by yourself. Once you make a bond with someone or have a child, that's when you're subject to society's scrutiny.”

John felt Greta's eyes again. She wanted him to agree with her. He realized that despite her apparent confidence, she was the kind of woman who didn't believe in her existence unless a man was nodding at her.

“Nobody judges you on what you were like before you gave birth,” Greta said. “Sarah doesn't care who I was as a young woman. What color my demons came in.”

John looked from Greta to the dead animal. He doubted if the little beast knew whether to shit or go hibernate when it was alive. He wanted to miraculously jostle it back to life. Sprinkle holy water. John the Baptist, patron saint of genetic mutation.

“Even if I had been a bad person, everything would have been forgiven if I was a ‘good mother,'” Greta said, slashing physical quotation marks in the air with her fingers. “Who knows what that means?”

John didn't want to hear any more of this woman's State of the Union address on parenthood. He wanted to know where her daughter had gone, physically, not spiritually. Did every request for information in California have to become a share session? He was
one step away from singing “The Bear Went over the Mountain,” which was what he did as a child when his parents fought.

“Nobody has the answer until it's too late,” Greta stated. “After they've had children and have been allowed to be children.”

She checked her pockets again for cigarettes out of habit or extreme need. John didn't know how long it would take for a full-on nic fit to take hold of her. Some people needed constant self-medication.

“That's the thing about having a baby and watching them grow up, they surprise you.” Greta continued, hands still searching for a cigarette. “And you can't do a thing about it, except try to accept their choices and forgive your own.”

In his head, John heard himself singing, “The bear went over the mountain, the bear went over the mountain, to see what he could see, to see what he could see, and he saw the other side of the mountain…”

“Being a grandmother is your second chance,” she added. “I hope Sarah lets me have it.”

John tried to brush that statement aside, but couldn't help wondering if Grandma had regarded him as a second chance. Was he supposed to redeem three dead children and his father? Grandma obviously hadn't felt good about herself, her marriage, child-rearing, facing the squirrels, discovering a kind of life she didn't have the tools to fully create. Would it have been worth it for her if John came out the other end? Was it enough that he had come this far?

“I hope she does, too,” John said, and Greta smiled with wine-stained lips the way some girls do when you tell them they look pretty.

“I have to find a cigarette,” she said. “Are you sure you don't want to come inside for a drink or something?”

“I just want to leave a note for Sarah,” John answered.

He almost told Greta she should be looking for someone ten years her senior, not twenty years younger. John could picture her on a sailboat in the Keys with an older man, retired and searching for answers himself. He'd have an interest in untying knots and he'd view her idiosyncrasies as kinked rope, excited by her energy, responding to her Earth Mother monologues with amusement and a spin that expressed that he took her seriously, happy to end each evening in bed with an attractive, complicated woman. John thought Greta needed to leave the commune more than her daughter.

“I don't know if I'll see her before she clears out,” Greta said. “Sarah's having exponential mother issues. I'm low on her list of confidantes.”

“Where's her cabin?” John asked.

“Did you see the glass house down in the flat?” Greta said.

“That's where I parked,” John told her.

Greta said there was a path on the left-hand side of the glass house that headed down the mountain; a quarter-mile down was Sarah's cabin. He couldn't miss it. And, if Sarah was home, she asked John to tell her that her mother would appreciate it if she dropped by to say goodbye. Not just because of the electricity bill. She had something for her.

John said he would and thanked her for the directions.

“All you can do is all you can do,” Greta said, walking back inside the main house but checking over her shoulder to see if John was watching her, testing her powers.

John was watching, trying to figure out what promise could have lured a woman like Greta up to a place like this. He almost wished he was an old burn-out able to follow her inside to dissolve into something larger than himself. Janis Joplin music filled the air again. John doubted love had ever been free, even in the sixties. It certainly had become costly in the seventies and eighties, especially when it splintered into divorce. There was always a price. Sometimes you just paid in installments.