Boonville (26 page)

Layaway, John thought, amused by his pun, turning away from Sarah's mother and the main house, saying goodbye to the prickly lump of flesh left lying in the dust.

Returning to his car, he wondered if he should report the giant to Cal as a suspect in Balostrasi's disappearance. He seemed a prime candidate and had practically confessed to a killing: “I've put travelers' bodies into the ground without ceremony.” What more did you need to warrant an investigation? If not Balostrasi, somebody else was taking a dirt nap in these hills, tucked in by the giant's hand. But maybe nobody cared. More than likely, Cal knew more about the case than John. The newspaperman at the softball game also seemed to be tracking it. Hap, Blindman, Sarah, all probably had information they hadn't disclosed. Everybody seemed to know more about everything than John. He just wanted to synthesize the conflicting stories into something tangible to avoid further trouble. But he realized that in order to do so, he'd
have to adopt Boonville's two unofficial mottoes: us vs. them, and, live and let die.

John found his way back to his car. His sense of direction was improving. Light was emanating from the transparent house, despite the drawn shades. As he approached the Datsun, the front door of the house opened and an old man appeared with a pair of goggles pushed back on top of his thinning head of hair. He wore work gloves and a mechanic's jumpsuit. His face was slug-lipped and sweaty as he stood with large forearms and a chin that sprouted from his barrel chest. He couldn't have been four inches taller than five feet. If Aslan was the first giant John had met, this gentleman was the first troll.

“You lost?” the troll said, and John saw a crowbar in his hand.

“Not anymore,” John answered, cautiously. “I got directions at the main house.”

“That doesn't mean you have any more idea of where you're going than before,” the troll said, leaning the bar of steel against the door frame and taking off his gloves. “They're not the best at giving directions. Where you trying to go, young man?”

“I'm a friend of Sarah's,” John said. “I'm trying to find her cabin to leave a note.”

The troll tilted his head, indicating he had a neck tucked somewhere behind his stalactite chin. Then he recited the same directions as Sarah's mother had given, adding that there was a reflector on a broken bit of fence on the opposite side of the road from the turn for Sarah's place. It was the only way John would spot the break in the trees, otherwise he'd drive too far or turn at the next left, which would lead him to the Teepees, which were worth avoiding at all cost, giving a bad name to hippies, naturalists, and Native Americans alike.

“Only dumb white people would live in a teepee when they didn't have to,” the troll said, patting the sweat on his head with his gloves. “These days even Indians think of a group of teepees as a Native American trailer park, without the kitsch.”

The troll told John if he ventured into the Teepees, he'd have to powwow with someone he called Chief One Man Slum, the leader of a sect of Indians from Newark, New Jersey, and the self-proclaimed last member of “the lost tribe.” The troll believed “lost” described Chief One Man Slum and his minions to a T. He
was certain The Chief was lying about his heritage and “the lost tribe” was a group of Puerto Ricans. In the troll's opinion, The Chief was another fat slob with a Joisey accent and an East Coaster's enthusiasm for Devil Dogs. Every six months the Waterfall had to pay a cleanup crew to scour their compound so garbage and disease didn't overflow into the rest of the commune.

Having met enough legends in the forest for one day, John said he would keep an eye open for the reflector.

But the troll continued talking, telling John his name was Francis and he was eighty-two, a welder and a sculptor. When he was young he'd worked on the Golden Gate Bridge and punched out Orson Welles in a bar fight in Sausalito during the filming of
The Lady from Shanghai
because Rita Hayworth had given him the eye. He'd drunk all the Beats under the table in North Beach during his day, which wasn't a boast because although they were lushes and Benzedrine addicts, none of them could hold their liquor. He had drunk his fill now and didn't drink anything anymore except a glass of red wine with dinner, along with eating half a raw onion.

“Bernini was my god,” Francis said, because John didn't know how to excuse himself and the troll had a quality that made you want to listen, something more than his age or plainspokenness. John felt that something important might be discovered that would otherwise remain hidden if he didn't pay attention, that certain information had an expiration date that was coming due. He had felt the same way listening to an interview of Henry Miller that had been aired on the day of his death, the last words of a dying era that pertained more to you than the one you were living in. He had sat in his driveway until the radio show had finished – Miller teaching him a thing or two about art and Paris and being alive – well aware that Christina was upstairs in the apartment burning dinner.

All the answers to life could be found in Rodin's hands, Francis told John, who wished he had a tape recorder. Christo was a chump who relied on cleverness, and clever didn't have any place in art that was going to last. But nothing lasted, so maybe Christo was onto something. But he was no technician, and an artist had to know his craft. There was nothing better than melding two objects together and having their sum total equal something greater than their separate parts. He said his friends called him Franny, and
they all said he worked and talked too much, but he was a Greek and healthy as an ox and had lived through two world wars and a depression and had never married, though he'd had plenty of opportunities, and it was tough bananas if people didn't like it. He identified the Datsun as having once belonged to the Squirrel Lady, and he pegged John as the Squirrel Boy. He said he admired the old broad's work. She was tough and a survivor and any grandson of hers could call him Franny.

“Your grandma helped inspire the project I'm working on now,” Franny said, with a broadfaced grin, happy to have an audience. “We were both interested in quantity and repetition and taking everyday objects and transforming them into something startling with the subtext of a preexisting language that shapes an object as masculine or feminine. Releasing what is already trapped inside. Road signs are masculine. I'm turning them into giant penises because subconsciously they are orders to obey male power.”

Franny said Edna had believed that there was a force behind large quantities and repetition that made people uncomfortable because of their direct link to time and its fleeting nature. She called it the nostalgia pool and thought it could be filled with the liquid of positive or negative experience, triggering emotions of loss or hope.

“Never underestimate your own ability to repeat yourself,” John's grandma had advised Franny. “Or your inability to see the variation within that repetition.”

As an exercise to demonstrate an aspect of that point, Franny had welded a dozen baby carriages from abandoned refrigerators, one for each month of the year, filling them with the smashed remains of his wine bottles and Edna's gin bottles that they had emptied during each month of that year. The same kind of bottles held different experiences within the same action of containing spirits and being used to imbibe from, he explained, and they fragmented into different-sized pieces and patterns when they were broken in the carriages. And the carriages, which were the same vehicle of the same size and design, also carried dissimilarities because of the materials they had been forged from and the variables of being produced by human hands. Just like memories.

John was trying to visualize the project and follow Franny's
explanation, also thinking about the wheelbarrow of broken glass back at the cabin and what that could possibly mean.

“It's also eerie to see something other than a baby inside a pram,” Franny said. “There is a sense of violation if the object you replace it with isn't its equal or in some way at least equally cute, a stuffed bear or doll. Overall, the installation emanated a sense of futility and vulnerability. It was purchased by a winery in the Valley and transported to an estate in Kyoto, Japan. The Japanese understand tragedy better than Americans. They know it's not supposed to teach us how to create a perfect world, but how to live in an imperfect one. Maybe the bomb did teach them something, the second one anyway. The deliberate consideration behind repetition.”

Franny divulged other projects he had undertaken that involved filling various transparent containers or cages he welded into different shapes, a giant hole, a cow, a lung, with used toilet paper rolls, milk cartons, and empty cigarette packages. One project included constructing a see-through dumpster loaded with the debris he had found on a hundred-foot strip of highway over the period of a year. Each day at five o'clock he would collect the “tourist flowers” in bags. If what he discovered was too cumbersome, an engine block, a mattress, a 1932 National cash register, he piled it into his car after enlisting a passing motorist's support. On completion, he rolled the dumpster to the strip he had patrolled, erecting a sign that read, “You dropped something!”

Franny thanked John for contributing road signs to his latest effort. John saw the sheets of metal stacked near the pile of Sarah's discarded crosses, which were next to Franny's glass yurt and the metal Atlas standing on top of the world, keeping watch, holding his imaginary burden. He also spied the wooden replica of Sarah discarded in the found-art heap. John realized it was one thing to have inspiration, another to complete your undertakings.

“The process is more important than the result,” Franny said, as if reading John's mind. “We often make art to purge ourselves. It's not the end product that relieves us but the work. Picasso once said, ‘When I'm painting, I'm God, and when I'm not painting, I'm not.' It becomes an easy choice. The problem is that sometimes, as much as we want our art to be personal, it becomes co-opted, a collaborative effort, even if it's just someone stretching your canvas, developing your film, etc. It's impossible for an artist
to organically create all the tools and means for his medium. Not to mention the lack of control over the audience or its ability to interpret meaning, an object's spatial context and the question of why it exists in a certain place and time.”

John looked at the found-art pile and thought if you could transport it to a museum, it could be an art piece in itself.

“It's a conversation spanning man's existence,” Franny said, and he could have been describing the heap of discarded material before them. “Starting and stopping, backtracking at junctures and occasionally synthesizing wholly in a painting, sculpture, or single sentence. That's if we're lucky. Nothing stripped to its core meaning hasn't been done before. All we're doing is trying to make it new. That's what Ezra Pound said.”

John noticed something crawling in the pile of crosses. It was one of Aslan's hybrid weasels, dragging its hind legs, pulling itself up and across each piece of wood, blood trailing from its head and feet, climbing until it reached the cross at the top of the heap. It stopped where the two pieces of wood intersected. In the light from Franny's house, John could see its thorny body expanding and contracting with each breath. After a pause, it stretched its front legs forward to climb higher, only succeeding in clawing one last inch. Then it died, front limbs collapsing at its sides.

“Ultimately, you have to chose life, which is the work, pursuit, and creation, instead of death, which is inactivity, stagnation, and decay,” Franny said, unaware of the weasel's plight. “Better to be a ghost proper, than a shadow of a man.”

John stared at the dead weasel spread out on the cross.

And it hit him, not like a bolt from the blue, but like something that had lumbered out of the forest to show itself in daylight. He knew what he had to do. He wasn't sure what it meant, but he knew all the elements involved, the pieces that had been left behind for him to put together. The first steps of his own life.

“Franny, would you help me with an art project I inherited from my grandma?” John asked. “It might be illegal. Unfortunately, I need to finish it tonight. But I think it's right up your alley.”

The old Greek smiled, obviously amused by the Squirrel Lady's straight-looking grandson suggesting that a stranger in his eighty-third year on the planet help him with an illegal art project, when minutes earlier, he was getting into his car to deliver a
message to the hippie girl, Sarah McKay.

But Franny seemed to feel the force and sincerity of John's urgency, and maybe felt partially responsible for that enthusiasm after his speech. He had said he respected John's grandmother as an artist and understood how artists work, striking while the iron was hot. It didn't matter how crazy the idea, ultimately it was action that mattered.

“Sure, I'll help,” Franny said. “What do you need me to do?”

“I
'll give you something to scowl about,” John said, driving the first nail through a squirrel's forehead and pinning it firmly to one of Sarah's three-foot crosses.

He set the crucifix upright and pounded it into the ground so it stood by itself. The dirt was hard and didn't give way easily. He brought the sledge down again, the base of the cross wedging another half-inch into the earth. They would have to make stands for the crosses in the section of Highway 128 where there was a sidewalk, in front of the Lodge, drive-in, AV Market, and fairgrounds. But it was cathartic to see even one of Grandma's squirrels up there on the cross, cooling his heels, looking alive and pissed off. The icon of a new faith. Now the expression carved into its face seemed to stem from the nail cleaved through its forehead.

John paced off twenty steps and banged another crucifix into position. Franny was making another trip in his truck to the Waterfall for more crosses. Pensive had been telephoned and was on her way with a “lifetime supply” of nails. So it was just him, the squirrels, and an empty stretch of asphalt leading two ways into the darkness. He didn't care if the crosses were equidistant, it wasn't an exhibit that hinged on accuracy. As long as there were 715 of Grandma's squirrels, crucified and lining the main strip of Boonville from the turnoff for Manchester Road to the dented population sign on the south side of town, with half the crosses on one side of the highway and half on the other with the life-sized replica of Sarah at the end, everything would be fine. That is, if they managed to complete the project before Sarah left and Cal didn't bust them for creating a public nuisance.

John regretted that Grandma wasn't alive to offer input on the overall schematic. It was why he had called Pensive. Aside from wanting protection from Daryl, if he should happen out for a drive, John felt one of Grandma's friends should be involved for the sake of her spirit and the benefit of a woman's touch. Rightfully, Grandma should have been the one to crucify the myriad of her critics. But it wasn't her battle anymore. She had done her part, leaving behind the weapons to fight the war, even if there was no plan of attack or well-defined enemy. After death, John decided, and this included Christ too, you weren't responsible for anything done on your behalf. Wills were written before people died, in their daily movements and influence. What Grandma had bequeathed John was an instinct for the grand gesture and a longing to see it manifested. The pioneer spirit. “Come west, young man!” All formal instructions were open for interpretation. What the dead left behind was what you chose to acknowledge; objects and money were token symbols of a legacy. The final wealth was dispersed in memory.

If she were alive, Grandma might not have sanctioned this project, taking offense at John converting her whittlings. Nobody had been struck by her ability to collaborate. In her mind, the squirrels were probably autotelic, each a study in the discrepancy within mass repetition. A testament to her inability to belong. Perhaps the missing link between mother and child. But John didn't care anymore; that was Grandma's cross to burn. He hammered another squirrel to a cross and into place along the roadside. He was deep into his own creative process.

He looked at the squirrels stacked next to the Datsun. It was nearing midnight, light spilling from street lamps and the insomniac signs burning in shop windows. The handful of homes on the downtown strip were quiet, a television glowing in a second-story window. Sleepy time in sleepy town. The Buckhorn was closed, as was the drive-in. John saw the Lodge around the bend in the road, trucks parked out front waiting for their owners to stagger out and fumble with keys, in defiance of the rest of the valley. Lonely time in lonely town. By last call, none of them would notice or care what John was doing with his squirrels and crosses. No designated drivers in that group, or art critics. Nobody would cry sacrilege tonight.

John decided the best approach to the job would be to create an assembly line and work crews, one to do the crucifying, the
next to lay the crosses in place, the last to erect them in the hallowed ground. They would need all the materials and artisans present to run the drill efficiently. He would be the foreman, although he wasn't sure he had the skill set for the position. Organization and authority outside the office were not his strong suits. There were already problems. He didn't know if he had brought enough squirrels. He had started counting at the cabin, but decided to pack the Datsun full, accuracy giving way to speed. Grandma's supply was inexhaustible, so he didn't have to worry about running out, but they would have to build more crosses if Waterfall residents had taken any from the found-art pile for personal projects. Sarah said there were 715, but who knew how many remained? They were as suitable for kindling as the squirrels.

What else had he overlooked? Franny would no doubt be better suited for the supervising role, although he was an invaluable line-worker, the Golden Gate Bridge a strong bullet on his résumé. But where were the Mohawks when you needed them? Maybe Franny could send a smoke signal to his old Native American welding cronies? Otherwise, John figured they had seven hours before morning traffic or someone called Cal, if everyone was willing to work through the night.

The one thing they had going for them was that Sarah didn't strike John as an early riser. She wouldn't be leaving town at the crack of dawn. So the trick was going to be maintaining the exhibit after it was finished, keeping locals and tourists from running the crosses over with their cars or tearing them down with their bare hands. Art involving the cross tended to cause a stir. Christians always welcomed something to crusade against. He wasn't sure about the Moonies and Krishnas, none of the squirrels were bald or passing out flowers. Still, they would have to stand guard; Franny with his crowbar, Pensive with her Mace, John with his ability to take a punch. They were going to need lots of coffee, and maybe the Kurtses.

John saw headlights. Whenever a set approached, he thought it was Cal's cruiser and his body stiffened. Given the opportunity, he felt he might be able to convince Cal that there wasn't anything wrong with the project, maybe even enlist his support. This was anarchy, right up Cal's alley. And the deputy had a sense of humor, John was sure of it, but more often than not the joke was going to be on you.

The car reduced its speed, steering to the side of the road and parking in front of John, who squinted as he stood in the overlapping center of the headlights, holding an armful of crosses. There was no siren or flashing lights. The headlights cut and John couldn't see anything until his eyes adjusted, forming objects around the smears of color burned into his view. Then he saw Pensive unstick herself from the front seat of her Pacer.

“I am an instrument in the shape of a woman trying to translate pulsations into images for the relief of the body and the reconstruction of the mind,” she said, getting out of the car. “We recite that at the beginning of every meeting at the Radical Petunia. Edna loved it. She said for artistic women, it should replace the ‘Our Father.'”

Pensive was wearing another culturally unspecific outfit, a purple caftan large enough to double as a banquet tablecloth. In her arms she juggled a cardboard box, an extension cord, and a nail gun. She set down the box. Catching John off-guard, she gave him a hug. He tried to shake loose, but Pensive's body had swallowed him alive. When she finally spit him out, John was convinced he had experienced what they called in California “rebirthing.”

“I'm so glad you telephoned,” she said. “I tried to enlist Margaret Washington but she said the project left her open to bad publicity. She has to go on NPR in a week to promote her new book,
The Altar of What I Know
, but she wanted you to know Edna would have been proud. Although she didn't want to be quoted.”

Pensive scrutinized the squirrels that John had finished the way a victim identifies a perpetrator in a police lineup. She nodded. Justice was being served. She set down the nail gun to lift open the hood of the Pacer, propping it wide with a metal rod.

“I rallied a group from the Albion Nation,” she told John, connecting the extension cord of the nail gun to the car battery with a makeshift adapter. She seemed pleased with the hookup and returned to the driver's seat. There was a burst of sparks. She waddled out of the car holding a pair of protective goggles and made her way to the cardboard box that she had placed next to the squirrel pile. The box was full of nails.

“I had to tell them the squirrels were all male,” she said, slipping on the goggles and loading the nail gun, test-firing a shot through the crotch of a squirrel with a resounding pop.

John winced.

“They're sticklers for those kind of details,” Pensive said.

John wasn't going to argue. Hippies, dropouts, inbreds, lesbians, everybody was invited. No undertaking had ever turned out the way he had planned by the means that he had planned them. As the gamblers used to say at the track in Hialeah whenever a long shot came in, “That's why they run the race.” Pensive's contribution of a nail gun was already a fast start out of the gate. It would subtract hours and blisters from the first leg of the project, as long as she didn't point the thing at him.

Pensive began nailing squirrels to crosses, making a stack out of the completed crosses. Some of the wood had rotted from exposure to the elements outside of Franny's yurt, splintering as the nails bit hard against the grain. John didn't know what kind of wood it was, having never set foot in a lumberyard. He knew palm trees, walnut and oak when he saw it in furniture. Formica. But once a tree had lost its leaves and been processed into lumber, it was anybody's guess. Pensive doctored the damaged crosses as best she could with an extra nail or piece of wood, then moved on to the next. She had a flair for carpentry that must have come from years of living in the country, doing-it-herself. John had wanted to create a series of How-To-Fix-It books for guys like him; the first volume would be entitled, “
Jostling, Jiggling and Jerry-rigging
” the next, “
Coat Hangers and Spit
.”

He loaded Pensive's finished product into the Datsun and drove down the road, setting each crucifix in its appointed spot. He tried to keep a count so he would know when to switch sides and decided not to erect any more until he had laid them all out, not wanting to give passing motorists any reason to notice the spectacle until it was done. With the crosses lying flat, drivers would breeze by the way they normally traveled through Boonville, holding their breath and counting to ten.

In no time, John had placed close to three hundred crosses along the strip. Franny arrived with another shipment of crosses. He inspected their progress. Pensive had created two stacks of squirrels near her Pacer, those she had nailed to crosses and another pile waiting to be sacrificed. She got another box of nails from her car. John wondered what she was doing with so many nails, but was afraid to ask. Meanwhile, he had made it three-quarters of the way to the fairgrounds without incident. Another
trip in the Datsun, a recount, a slight realignment, and he would start on the other side. To his surprise, after a rocky start, he had estimated the spacing fairly accurately. But they were going to need more squirrels.

“Looks like the Judgment Day is approaching,” Franny said, clapping John on the back. “Come hell or high water.”

They took a break. John bought coffee at the Pic 'N Pay, making no conversation with the cashier, who was cleaning a rifle and hardly looked up from the firearm, which was laid out in pieces near the register on a towel. He was oiling parts when John entered the store and wiping the stock clean with a chamois rag when John left, only pausing from his work to ring John up and point with the disassembled barrel to the sugar and creamer on the condiment stand. John grabbed a fistful of pink and blue packets, never looking back. He doubted the Pic 'N Pay lost much profit to shoplifters.

Outside he stopped himself from peeking into the Lodge, hearing the jukebox and patrons whooping at whatever was passing for excitement inside, missed pool shots, bad jokes, Melonie bringing the next round. He noticed the Kurts' truck in the lot and had the feeling that his drinking buddies would find him before the night was through. The project was becoming a Tower of Babel. He had forgotten how that undertaking had ended, except in rubble. God or the Assyrians or somebody had gotten pissed. Bad architecture? Attacking Mongols? Maybe he should have tried to enlist the cashier from the Pic 'N Pay; they could use a sentinel.

Sitting on the tailgate of Franny's truck, the three laymen caught their breath and sipped coffee. There were few stars in the sky, but the trio looked toward the heavens as if they were scheduled to light up like the ceiling of a planetarium, perhaps looking for a sign, or something that could be interpreted as a sign.

Franny said that working at night gave him the feeling of getting away with something, a predatory energy. Pensive confessed that she had gotten hooked on reading with a flashlight and a Judy Blume novel for just that reason. She felt she was having a naughty conversation. That, and as a child nobody would play with her. She blew into her Styrofoam cup.

Franny said he had had no use for school after the eighth grade himself. He had jumped a northbound train one night in
1919, back when the stars really knew how to shine and the horizon was full of promise instead of fluorocarbons and a man with a strong back wasn't afraid to work an honest day for an honest dollar and he could always find that kind of work and get an education on the railroads and in the timber camps of Oregon and Washington making fortunes for other men who sent Pinkertons to do their dirty work, busting heads and unions, while he spent his sweat and script on women and bathtub gin. Another night, when he'd had enough of the rain and trout fishing and train whistles and the felling of trees, again under the cover of darkness, he left to come home to his parents' coldwater flat in the Mission District of San Francisco, which wasn't all Mexicans then, and watched his parents die of consumption while he learned to weld from the auto-body mechanic who ran a garage down on the corner of 19th and Folsom.