Boonville Read online

  When her figure took shape at sixteen, it isolated her even further. Occasionally, a teen smelling of pomade and puberty would cross the cafeteria, eyes of the school upon him, and ask her to a movie. “Are you kidding?” she would say, unsure if the boy was being sincere, thinking to herself, “Wasn’t he making fun of my breasts in gym class?” Her confusion sounded like a refusal and the boy would slink back to his lunchtable pals, cursing, “Stuck-up bitch!” High school ended. She didn’t go to prom. She didn’t care. She got to go to college, the other girls didn’t.

  She matriculated at Arizona State to study teaching like her mother. The girls in her dormitory compared her looks to Myrna Loy’s and were shocked that she had never dated. Edna was astounded that they had no intention of pursuing a career outside of being a rich man’s wife. They called her “the last suffragette.” “We already have the vote,” they’d say. “What else do you want?” Edna didn’t know, something. But to appease them, she dated Wayne Gibson, a business major from Honolulu who kept his tan year-round as captain of the A.S.U. golf team. She went along with the relationship like a guest served burnt food, forcing a look of satisfaction, never asking for seconds. They graduated, Edna with honors, Wayne a scratch golfer. They married and moved to Hawaii where Wayne was handed the family fortune, which he dropped in a series of bad investments. After selling their beachfront property, stating, “Nobody’s going to want to vacation here anymore, not after Pearl Harbor,” he invested in a chain of miniature-golf-course-Laundromats. They moved to Florida. Babies came, one after the other; Wayne named them, Edna raised them. They bought twin beds. Too late.

  “None of it was my idea,” Grandma revealed to John after his grandfather had died. “I never wanted to teach, I never wanted children,” she paused, taking a pop from her glass of gin. “And I never wanted your grandfather. The only thing he knew how to do was play golf and lose money. I used to sit in our house and pray to God he’d die of heatstroke on the tee of the eighteenth hole. I’d take over the finances, and he wouldn’t get to finish his round.”

  “Imagine,” she continued, John transfixed, “We had once owned acres of Waikiki Beach and then there we were in the concrete squalor of South Florida sitting behind that ‘Putt and Dry’ with only a pocket full of quarters. And once we had children, your grandfather disappeared. I’ll tell you, his absence became the only thing he had to offer me. This is a man’s world. They don’t even let women think about the possibilities. Now that he’s really gone, I’m doing as I please!”

  She took their bank book and her dog-eared copy of Emily Dickinson and flew to the self-actualizing confines of the Left Coast. The answer was obvious.

  For the bartender’s benefit, John briefly explained how Grandma had moved from Florida when he was fourteen, communicating through letters and telephone calls. She sent books for his birthday: Grace Paley, Edith Wharton, Dawn Powell. It was part of a deal that hinged on the understanding that he would never visit and she would never return. In fact, he still had to get the keys to her cabin from a friend of hers named Pensive Prairie Sunset.

  “Aw shit!” the bartender let loose. “Is your grandmother’s place up on Manchester Road?”

  “I think so,” John answered, reaching into his pocket for a slip of paper ripped from a pad of Leggiere and Philips stationery, the scrawl close to illegible, as if he had hoped to get lost from his own directions.

  “I’ll be a sonofabitch,” the bartender said, when John confirmed the address as either 312 or 317 Manchester Road, unable to decipher the last digit. “Your grandma’s the Squirrel Lady!”

  “She’s just Grandma to me,” John replied, but could see the bartender recognized something in his features.

  “I know folks come here to get weird, but the Squirrel Lady must have started way before she hit Boont,” the bartender insisted. “I never had no problems with her, except winnin’ one of her squirrels in a raffle. Pissy lookin’ thing, eight-feet tall, still settin’ in my backyard, not worth a shit. But that’s my luck, same old six-then-seven.”

  “So you knew her?” John said, wondering if her reputation was going to prevent him from being anything more than Edna Gibson’s grandson.

  “Everybody knew her,” the bartender told him. “But I don’t talk about nobody’s family to their face. Folks are more sensitive than they care to admit, and quicker with their fists than you’d care to imagine.”

  “What about Pensive Prairie Sunset?” John asked.

  “See for yourself,” the bartender said. “But I’m guessin’ she’s number three in your cycle of bad luck.”

  John tried to imagine his luck deteriorating more than it already had, clicking along like the insides of Grandma’s pocket watch, running neither fast nor slow but at its own unpredictable pace. As a child, he had opened the gold timepiece because he had wanted to survey the works, gears gleaming, gunmetal efficient. He replaced the back and it never kept time again. Sometimes, tapping the crystal, it gave a few irregular seconds. False hopes. Nothing to be counted on. After Grandma pronounced it worthless, she gave it to him as a gift. Later in life, John carried it as a charm to the dog track. Jai alai matches. If I can get it to work, he’d say, shaking it roughly, I’ll win. More superstition. There was only one cycle of luck, he had decided. And it was all bad.

  “Here’s one on the house,” the bartender said, setting a fresh beer in front of John. “Welcome to the valley, Squirrel Boy. Bahl hornin’. Drink up though, this place is shut at 9:30 and I’m home with the wife yellin’ at me by 9:35.”

  “How come you close so early?” John asked.

  “In case you haven’t noticed,” the bartender replied, “this is a small town.”

  John thanked him, but as he drank, his fears reasserted themselves. Everything was becoming treacherous; the bar, the patrons, his buzz. He worried that Grandma had been more than a crazy alcoholic. Even the bartender could tell something else was wrong with her, anyone with common sense, a semi-normal nervous system, could see that. John’s father had said Edna Gibson was mean enough to fake Alzheimer’s. “Are you sure I have a son who is alive?” Grandma would ask if John mentioned his father, “Well, tell him I said, ‘Hello,’ and that I’m dying.” She had been kind to John, but now he wondered if Grandma didn’t resent him too, plotting to destroy her grandson because she could reach him in a way she couldn’t her own son. Boonville could be a trap. Her love the bait.

  John stared at the bubbles in his beer. He tried to remember the last time he had had a drink without waiting for Christina or a friend to join him. He didn’t like to drink alone. But it was on occasions that he did the unexpected that he felt the most alive. Time seemed to stop; hours slowed to minutes, separated into seconds, halted into pictures. Still-life image of emotion. Perfectly framed as any flicker of Citizen Kane, only not running reel to reel. It was a slide show his mind flashed to make sense of the shifting world. And in these gluts, John felt he revealed himself, every beer bottle and doubt, cobwebbed corner and regret, shadow and memory in deep focus. This was who he was. This was life. Everything else was in-between.

  John held tight to the vision of himself in the Boonville Hotel, a stranger in a strange land. The modern-day frontiersman. Compared to his parents or Christina or the paper-shufflers back at Leggiere and Philips, he was Daniel Boone. Grandma had said Boonville had been named after Daniel Boone’s cousin, so it was appropriate. He’d find a coonskin hat to fill out the role. Grandma was on the right track. He knew what he had to do. In a few minutes, he’d call her friend to get the keys and directions to the cabin, and then get a good night’s sleep.

  Resolved, he glanced around the bar at the art on the walls, a series of watercolors of dilapidated barns. Unobtrusive as shopping music. He smiled at the red-winers giddy with their outing, happy at how friendly people could be when you spent money. They raised their glasses in his direction and the bald man said, “Cheers.” John could tell they thought they made friends wherever they went, the
kind of people who used name tags to create one-way intimacies with waiters, bellhops, gas station attendants, ice cream scoopers, whoever had the misfortune of working for minimum wage and with the public.

  Pricks, John thought, wishing the couple would gather their coats and drive off to whatever bright corner of California they had come from.

  Then he saw her.

  She was waiting by the exit, shouting something about how homosexuals were going to be “the negroes of the nineties,” AIDS awareness replacing the Civil Rights Movement as a political focus for liberals. She wore a man’s dress shirt, showcasing her femininity within a shroud of the masculine. John flashed on Christina, undeniably beautiful, but always searching for center stage. This woman the spotlight followed like a celebrity in rehab. She tossed back ringlets of brown hair with fingers that belonged on the hands of a cellist, then returned to the dining room, possibly having forgotten something. But before she was gone, John caught a glimpse of her eyes. Blue. Sea without wave, sky without cloud.

  “Squirrel Boy,” the bartender said, “Put your tongue back in your mouth and piss on a fire hydrant outside. Don’t fool with her. She was the one doin’ that squawkin’. Not to mention, her ex is crayzeek. Make your Grandma seem stone sane. Been six years, and if it weren’t for lack of pussy, he wouldn’t know they was ever divorced.”

  The bartender told John how the woman’s ex-husband had recently made a visit to her intentional community, drunk and demanding entry into her cabin. She said, “Fuck off!” He produced a chain saw, yelling, “Nobody locks me out of my house!” Then tried to cut a new door in a side wall, forgetting she was the sole resident on the commune with electricity. He hit a power line. Deputy Cal found him unconscious fifty feet away, still holding the Stihl, hands burnt to the color of forgotten toast. She had a restraining order, but nobody had the death wish to enforce it.

  “Mr. Cooper the English schoolch took her here for gorms once,” the bartender said. “I’m settin’ up horns when I hear this racket and go to the window to see what I can see. There’s her ex, takin’ swings at Cooper’s car with an ax. Loggers got a thing for their equipment. Then he punched in the windows, bare-fisted. He said he’d kill Cooper if he saw them together again. Nobody doubted him. He may be jimheady, but he’s also a man of his word.”

  “Why did she marry him?” John asked.

  “Why does anybody get married?” the bartender replied. “He’s good lookin’, makes a decent wage. Around here even the hippies marry young.”

  “What’s her name?” John said.

  “Sarah McKay,” the bartender told him. “She’s prettier than the gene pool of Anderson Valley, but I’m tellin’ you stay clear ’less you want to go the way of your grandma.”

  That said, the bartender began to collect coasters, wash glasses, and busy himself with the procedures of closing time. Fair warning.

  “Ever seen a redneck in the city?” a voice asked.

  In the reflection of the bar mirror, John spotted a man standing behind him wearing black and smiling like he might leap on him with his teeth. He was of average height but pumping-iron stocky. He had a big nose and his hair was slicked back with gel. There was a scar running across his left cheek. John could tell he wasn’t from Boonville.

  “They look scared,” the man hissed.

  John turned his shoulders to face the man, noticing at once the earring in his lobe previously obscured by the angle of the reflection – a silver hoop engraved with skulls, much larger than the diamond studs John’s friends had started sporting, and obviously having more to do with piracy than fashion.

  “Can they stop a bullet?” the man asked, opening his leather jacket and revealing a gun tucked into his belt. “I came to help these hayseeds harvest early, if you know what I mean. I checked it out, hippies and rubes, that’s all that’s here. Too stupid to have money, not tough enough to keep it if they did. Don’t sweat these hillbillies, they’d last two minutes on concrete. It’s a whole different ball game.”

  Startled by the gun but having enough street smarts from watching reruns of “Baretta,” John tried to stay calm and agree with whatever the man said. Despite the firearm, the man seemed friendly; the gun flash wasn’t so much a threat, but a confidence.

  “The name’s Balostrasi,” the man said. “See you around.”

  “Take care,” John offered, wondering if anyone else had seen the gun and just how long it would take Deputy Cal to answer a distress call.

  “I will,” Balostrasi promised, swaggering his way to the exit, earring swinging like a canaryless perch. “Go Hurricanes!”

  “Go Canes!” John responded out of habit, realizing Balostrasi must have heard him tell the bartender he was from Miami.

  And Sarah McKay appeared again, reclaiming her space with a rail thin woman in blue jeans and cowboy boots. They were both laughing. Sarah stuffed a wad of money into her pocket. The rail said, “Thanks again.” Sarah answered, “No problem. I’ll be flush in another month when the season’s over.” The rail responded, “Sorry I can’t help.” Sarah said, “No worries.” Balostrasi held the door open for them, but instead of leaving, the two women filled stools next to John. Balostrasi smiled, giving John the thumbs up sign. Then he was gone.

  John believed in the “no blood, no foul” rule of inappropriate behavior. If someone crossed the line of social etiquette, then walked out of your life to wreak havoc somewhere else, it wasn’t your problem. Especially when Sarah McKay was gesturing at your beer, and asking, “Doesn’t Boont Amber make you feel like you have to shit?”

  John stared through the question and into her eyes. Balostrasi, concealed weapons, and idle threats were quickly forgotten. Sarah was even more beautiful up close. She had a distinctive 1940s quality to her, as if she were stopping off on her way home from the munitions factory, or if she held her hands behind her head, posing for a painting to be imprinted on the side of a bomber. She was why men fought wars. Her skin was creamy white, smelling of pine trees, and doobage?

  “I guess by your expression it does,” she said.

  “No,” John answered, more flustered by her voice than Balostrasi’s gun. “I always look this way when I drink.”

  “Then I’d hate to watch you shit,” she replied, turning to her friend and the bartender, who was explaining that the bar was closed.

  John regarded the back of her head, only Beer Nuts and ashtrays between them. He thought about the bartender’s warning and his own limited knowledge of logging tools. Even stacking blocks as a child, he never built a structure that didn’t topple. That seemed to be the point, the elastic moment before collapse and watching the pile crumble. But he was beginning to feel good, real good, and perhaps subconsciously infected by Balostrasi’s confidence, he decided conversation couldn’t hurt anyone.

  Sarah was talking to her friend about herbal medicine, running her hand through her hair again.

  “I can’t do that with my hair,” the bald wine connoisseur commented.

  “You can’t do it with mine either,” she replied.

  The bald man laughed and his partner wrapped her arm through his, trying to regain his attention. She gave Sarah a nasty look.

  “What do you suggest?” John asked, realizing his timing was awkward, on the heels of the bald man’s remark.

  Sarah swiveled toward him, sizing him up, making sure she had previously pegged him correctly. The rail peered past her, intrigued. Attractive women made John nervous. Their beauty seemed to give them standing to pass judgment on his manhood. Not that he thought of himself as inadequate, but there was always the chance of changing his mind.

  “Since this bar is closed,” she said, more for the bartender’s benefit, “I’d change venue. Maybe the Buckhorn, except that’s where the closet pervs congregate. If you do go there, remember the faces. Their regulars hot-tubbed with Leonard Lake and Charles Ng, waiters from Philo who hacked up bodies and buried them beneath their house, proving again that closet pervs are the worst,
especially if they have video equipment. Guaranteed, somebody eating pretzels over at the Buckhorn will be the next Kenneth Parnell or Treefrog Johnson, digging pleasure pits in their basements with passages of the Bible plastered to the walls. It’s true what they say about born-agains, they’re even more fucked up the second time around.”

  “Huh,” was all John could muster.

  “Huh,” Sarah mocked him. “It probably wouldn’t be your scene.”

  None of this was his scene.

  “Why do you go?” John asked, trying to regain his balance.

  “I take a risk once in a while,” Sarah answered.

  I bet you do, he thought, the smooth bend of Sarah’s neck reminding him of the C plus he received in art history. Postmodern abstract? Preindustrial deconstructionalist? Flemish realism? It definitely reminded him of something chiseled from marble and then rubbed to an erotic luster. Le Baiser? To this day, he didn’t understand texture, tactility, works of art that you could touch.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “I wasn’t through,” she said. “What are you, some sort of a tourist?”

  “No,” John said, trying not to appear to her like one of the red-winers or as out of place as Balostrasi. “I’m a local.”

  “Sorry, but I know everybody in this town,” Sarah said, holding back her laughter. “Besides, just a tip, around here locals don’t wear Dockers.”

  The rail giggled.

  “I’m trying,” John said, pretending his feelings were hurt. “I just moved here.”

  “Whereabouts?” Sarah inquired.

  “Manchester Road,” John said.