Boonville Read online

  “The Squirrel Lady’s place?” the rail asked.

  “That’s right,” John answered. “I’m her grandson, the Squirrel Boy.”

  “Are you a rodent sculptor too?” Sarah asked.

  “No,” John said, half-wishing he was because he could see that it might score points, and anything was more interesting than marketing.

  But he told the women the truth, apologizing for his former vocation. He said he didn’t know what he was going to do now. That’s when Sarah’s tone changed from someone giving a grocery clerk a hard time to someone speaking to a lifelong friend.

  “I was going to suggest a ‘horn of skee,’ as they say in these parts, down at the Lodge,” Sarah said. “Then me and my friend got a baggie of something that will make you feel real local. You smoke?”

  John knew he smelled doobage.

  “I stick to the family drug,” he saluted with his glass.

  “Every drug is my family’s drug,” Sarah replied.

  “Sorry to hear that,” John said.

  “You know,” she looked solemnly at John, reaching for his beer and taking a sip, a foam mustache appearing above her lips. “You can’t pick your relatives.”

  John was struck with the uneasy feeling that Sarah had been to his house, played in his yard, experienced his family’s tension first-hand. It sent him spinning to another time and place. He was seven years old again, standing in the living room of his parents’ home, his father reading the paper, scotch and soda, his mother fixing dinner, white wine, entering from the kitchen.

  Mother: “Does your friend want to stay for dinner, John?”

  Father: “We can’t be feeding the whole damn neighborhood. We don’t send him to anybody’s house at dinnertime.”

  Mother scowls. John feels the weight of her anger.

  Father: “What the hell are you looking at? Are you making dinner? Make it. Let me read about the nigger riot in Overtown. Unless you want to invite them too?”

  Mother: “I don’t know why you talk to me that way.”

  John, head pounding, tries to leave the room with his friend.

  Mother: “Did I say you could go?”

  John, no response, returns.

  Mother: “You can just stand there. Next time you’ll ask to be excused. And what’s the matter with you, Sourpuss? Did your mother call? The new office manager giving you a hard time? I told you ten years ago that company would get you nowhere.”

  Father: “I’m nowhere? Then where are you? You taking us somewhere? You going to watch soap operas and cooking shows to get us somewhere? Sitting on your fat ass, on the couch I bought, watching the television I bought, in the house I bought, here in the middle of nowhere? I worked for all of this, paid for it with my check. Your name’s not on anything. Remember that!”

  Mother: “You want to take credit for the twin beds too, Mr. Provider? What else? The refrigerator that can’t keep anything cold? The promotion to senior vice-nobody you’ve never gotten? While we’re on the subject, how about the reservations at the Travelodge under the name of Johnson? Didn’t think I knew? Next time push the twins together, I’ll leave for three minutes, and we can spend the money we save, excuse me, you save, to fix the refrigerator.”

  Friend: “John, I gotta go.”

  Father: “Tell her she can stay, John, as long as you don’t marry her.”

  John, no response, wishing it all away.

  “That certainly is true,” he said to Sarah. “You can’t pick your relatives.”

  “Or your relatives’ noses,” the rail added.

  John snapped back to the conversation. He was having difficulty concentrating on more than one thing at a time. He blamed it on circumstance.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, trying to conceal his somberness. “I was somewhere else.”

  “Really?” Sarah asked. “Where?”

  “No place you’d want to spend much time,” John replied.

  “Sounds like Boonville,” Sarah said.

  “I wouldn’t know,” John said, wondering if she had been raised here.

  “You will soon enough,” the rail assured him.

  John wasn’t sure he wanted to, knowing there were experiences in which people consumed too much information all at once, leaving them bloated and immobile, chewing on the indigestible facts for the rest of their lives. A last supper of knowledge. He didn’t want this move to overwhelm him.

  “I don’t think I introduced myself,” John said, trying to change the subject. “My name is John Gibson.”

  He shook Sarah’s hand. She watched him, one eyebrow lifting into a lock of auburn hair. The top three buttons of her shirt were unbuttoned and John could see the curve of her breasts. He had to tell himself to look away.

  “I’m Sarah,” she said. “This is my friend, Lisa.”

  “I’d shake your hand too, Lisa,” John told her. “But I’m afraid I’d fall on my face if I tried to reach that far. I’d like to avoid a scene on my first night in town.”

  “Then you can’t come with us,” Lisa answered. “I’m searching for that warm sunken feeling and might need a scene to get there. It’s been a long week.”

  “It’s only Tuesday,” John said, taking the bait.

  “I told you it was dragging,” Lisa said, reeling him in.

  “Drink up, cowboy,” Sarah laughed. “If you want to play the home version of ‘Wild Kingdom’.”

  “You two ready?” he asked, rising unsteadily.

  “Is anybody ever really ready for anything they do?” Sarah replied.

  John tried to remember when he had been ready for something he had done. In every instance, there seemed to have been a curve catching him off guard, school, puberty, work, sex, reading The Brothers Karamazov, leaving home. Never really ready. Even the easy stuff, geography tests, ordering in a restaurant, smiling for the camera. None of it.

  He held open the door for his two companions, both jacketless and shivering from the cold air outside. Sarah led the way down the hotel’s steps and across the street to the Lodge, Lisa grabbing her arm after a few chilly steps. John brought up the rear.

  “I hope we don’t run into Daryl,” Lisa said.

  “Yeah?” Sarah snarled. “Fuck him.”

  The Lodge was a squat brick building attached to a defunct restaurant and a convenience store called “Pic ’N Pay.” There were closed blinds covering the bar’s one window, which was lit by a beer sign. Inside was a dark room filled by a pool table and a crowd of drinkers. It took John a moment to adjust to the lack of light, and when he did, he saw nobody was smiling. Cowboy hats and giant belt buckles. The men wore wool shirts and muddy work boots. The women, tight jeans. Cigarettes burned between fingers, in ashtrays or left dead on the edge of the bar. Lower lips bulged from chewing tobacco. Bottles of spit rested near open cans of beer. Dead animal heads hung as decorations while country music played on the jukebox. There were two tables in the back near the bathroom, shimmed with matchbooks.

  Sarah made a beeline for the bar and John followed. Lisa stopped to say hello to a few people. Eyes squinted in John’s direction. He could tell they were interested to find out who he was and what he was doing in here; a distant relative, a tourist, a dead man walking? When she rejoined them, John could see that Lisa was in her element, more so than at the Boonville Hotel. The Lodge’s patrons seemed wary of Sarah. They were outright leering with malevolence at John.

  “Don’t worry, Squirrel Boy. I talked to Larry and Danny,” Lisa said, claiming a stool. “I don’t think anybody’s going to kick your ass.”

  John bought the first round of beer and whiskey, thinking it would end right there, “Goodnight, nice meeting you. Maybe we could do this again sometime?” He’d once followed a Cuban cutie into a similar situation in Little Havana. One mohito and he left without asking her name. But his companions immediately ordered and paid for another setup. And another. Then it was his turn again. He didn’t want to be a wuss. Nobody had harassed him so far. He was starting
not to care as much either. He’d been in fights before. Blood dried. A couple of women from the sticks weren’t going to drink a Miami Hurricane under the table. He ordered another round, fumbling with the bills in his wallet, urging himself on with the U of M cheer, “We’ve got some ’canes over here! Whoosh, whoosh!”

  Their conversation started out light, 70s television, favorite foods, mutual appreciation for the film Badlands. Lisa didn’t say much once the libations had been served, content to drink and listen. But as the alcohol took effect, Sarah switched into a confessional mode, offering unsolicited information about her divorce, dropping out of college, an unhappy childhood, a self-centered mother, an absent father, and living on a commune called “The Waterfall.” She had been born in San Francisco and uprooted to Mendocino County by her mother when she was eleven. That’s when she had met Lisa. They toasted their friendship. Sarah had moved away from the area several times, for a year, six months, to pursue art, men, a career. She said she hated the hypocrisy of the hippies she lived with and everyone “knowing your shit in this redneck town.” But, for some reason, she had always returned.

  “Everyone here is a failure, it’s just a matter of degree,” Sarah said, looking away from John and into the menagerie of bottles behind the bar, as if the truth were something that couldn’t be met straight on. “Success is simple, leave and don’t come back.”

  John could tell Sarah was trying to swim free of something tangled in her mind, past the waves of melancholy that rolled over your finer senses when you drank. They were pounding drinks fast. He had been caught in the undertow of alcohol many times and understood that to escape its influence you had to float in the seam of the pull, ignoring the weight of yourself, until it let go of you.

  “Step one is not being pregnant for prom,” Sarah explained.

  “Numero uno,” Lisa agreed.

  “Number two, never fall in love with a local,” Sarah said.

  “Dos!” Lisa chirped.

  “And three,” Sarah turned back to John, “No matter who you are, wherever you’ve come from, get the fuck out!”

  “Tres flores por los muertos!” Lisa slurred. “Y tres cervezas mas. Melonie, otra vez, por favor!”

  “Your head has to be on straight if you’re sneaking away from the inevitable,” Sarah said, taking a drink of her beer. “But if you stay, you’ve got to understand our kind of insanity. Guys like Jim Jones had to fly to Guyana to get it done. The Kool-Aid group slaughter thing doesn’t cut it here. We go for the slow burn: wife beating, child abuse, molestation. Take people down, but do it slowly. Make them wish they were dead.”

  Sarah leaned toward him, her breath on his face: beer, bourbon, the faint scent of peppermint. He watched the space between her lips forming each word. He wanted to kiss her, to tell her he understood, to reduce their confusion to some kind of identifiable conflict. Nature vs. nurture. Inserting tab A into slot B. Then he could fly back to Miami and beg for Christina’s forgiveness.

  “My advice, Squirrel Boy,” she said. “Eat as many meals at the hotel as you can, listen to country music, drink heavily, and drive home fast and fucked-up out of your mind. Boonville is for losers. And we hate outsiders because they have an option we don’t, the chance to leave.”

  She finished her beer and searched down the bar for the next round. John noticed she was blushing. He wanted to believe it was from the embarrassment of revealing intimacies, but it was more likely the rouge of whisky. The result was the same, the color of her cheeks accenting her milky skin and the red hidden in the curl of her hair. Somewhere in her lineage, not too far back, John thought, were a crew of hard-drinking Irishmen who sang loudly and died young.

  “It’s best not to get too involved with anybody,” she added, facing the dull light of an Olympia sign. “Just be nuts and blend.”

  “I resemble that remark,” a voice announced.

  John peered over his shoulder into a face that could have been featured in a book on the Stone Age, the words “hunter” and “gatherer” written throughout the margin. It was a face familiar to Boonville, John had already seen four or five, one had spilled a drink on him and bumped him with a pool stick, not apologizing for either transgression. But for that matter, it was a face recognizable in any small town. He thought if you could shake out the bars in deep east Texas, the paper-mill towns of Georgia, the swamps of Louisiana, the hog farms of Arkansas, or the coal mining camps of West Virginia, you could produce a thousand men able to pass for this man’s brother or identical twin. And accounting for promiscuity in the jerkwater, they quite possibly were.

  “Billy Chuck,” Sarah said, glass and spirit replenished, “This is John ‘The Squirrel Boy’ Gibson, the Squirrel Lady’s grandson.”

  “No shit?” Billy Chuck whistled.

  He stuck out his hand for John to shake, the malice in his grip covered by a thin veneer of friendship. Dirt magnified the wrinkles of his palm. Blistered fingers, calluses, cut knuckles. John knew he was shaking the hand of a man who made his living outdoors.

  “Don’t let these hippies sour you on our town,” Billy Chuck advised. “Lesbians are always bustin’ balls cause they ain’t got any.”

  “Prince, you are so charming,” Lisa said.

  Billy Chuck grinned, exposing his teeth, yellowed bits of calcium that had played out their usefulness. He licked his tongue around his extended gum line, seemingly proud that he had any teeth at all. Under her breath, John heard Lisa called him a “crank junkie.”

  “John does marketing,” Sarah said. “I’d tell him what you do, Billy Chuck, but jerking off is more of a hobby than an occupation, isn’t it?”

  “When in doubt, whip it out,” Billy Chuck answered. “You ought to know, Sarah. Must be lonely at the commune without Daryl, havin’ a boat on and no oar to paddle.”

  “You’re such a child,” Sarah said. “I can’t believe we’re the same age.”

  John couldn’t believe it either. Bad teeth aside, Billy Chuck was aging like picked fruit. John had gauged him to be at least twenty years older than Sarah, one of her friends’ fathers. His hairline was receding, temples gray. Maybe he had that accelerated-growth disease that turned children into old men. John tried to catch a glimpse of the younger man trapped inside Billy Chuck’s skin, but didn’t want to be caught staring.

  “We went to school together,” Sarah told John. “Junior high and high school, not to mention the quality time spent drinking at the gravel pits, the Indian caves, and right here. If I didn’t know you so well, Billy Chuck, I’d have to kill you.”

  “I can’t believe he was my prom date,” Lisa offered.

  “Hard to believe I would have asked a dagger,” Billy Chuck admitted. “But you were pretty, Lisa. And it’s hard to spot a lesbian when they’re young.”

  “It’s easy to spot an asshole,” Sarah replied.

  She told John that when they had attended Anderson Valley High School, the student body was ninety. Forty boys, ten in special ed. Certifiably retarded. That didn’t include the shop crowd, which straddled the line between retarded and dull-normal. Girls went to dances with their cousins and brothers. In her English class, combining all the juniors and seniors who had the scholastic aptitude to maybe take an aerobics class at the junior college someday, there was only one boy. And she married him.

  “I was against Lisa going to prom with you, Billy Chuck,” Sarah recalled. “I fixed her up with a Mendo boy, but he canceled. What was his name, Lisa?”

  “Todd Chambers,” Billy Chuck said, surprising both women. “Mendocino’s the next real town north, Squirrel Boy, and everyone there’s named Todd or Morning Starr. Spelled with two D’s and two R’s. Buncha fuckin’ yup hippies. Never did an honest day’s work in their lives, growin’ dope, sellin’ seaweed, spendin’ their money fuckin’ up the valley. Goddamned tourists. And their kids are second-generation tourists.”

  Billy Chuck told John that Mendocino used to be good country when his father was young, but tourists had brou
ght in their tourist shit, wine and cheese, art and whale T-shirts, retreats and inns, and now they were overrun by Todds and Morning Starrs who thought they were better than the people who built the county, who did the living and dying before any of them had ever heard of the Redwood Highway. His eyes rested on John, who was tempted to point out that he spelled his name with one N.

  “I knocked his dick in the dirt,” Billy Chuck said, spitting tobacco onto the floor, smearing a string of saliva across his stubbled chin. “Whenever we played football against Mendo, we picked out who we were gonna hit on the kickoff. Didn’t matter if they ran the ball back all the way for a touchdown, the point was to stick somebody. Hopefully someone would choose the ball carrier. I picked Todd, number 82. Hit him so hard his whole family said, ‘Ouch!’”

  At this point, Billy Chuck reached for a cocktail napkin to make a diagram of “The Play.” John knew every man had their own version of “The Play,” a last-second shot, called third strike, diving catch, where in their minds they became the testosterone-dripping center of the universe. “The Play” after which lightning flashed, women fainted, headlines were printed, and children were named on your behalf. John’s “play” had come prematurely on a game-winning, check-swing single in Little League, leaving him quiet during conversations about sporting glories.

  “See, I was over here,” Billy Chuck drew an X on the napkin. “That yup was way on other side of the field.” He drew an O. “I ran straight at him.” He drew a line connecting the two. “I was low like you’re supposed to be. Neck up, arms in close. I put my shoulder so far into that pretty boy, I thought they were gonna have to surgically remove him from me.” He scribbled over the O, tearing a hole in the napkin. “He flew about six feet. I told him, ‘Stay there son, I’ll be right back!’”

  Billy Chuck chortled. John laughed too, not at the joke so much as Billy Chuck in general, at being drunk in the Lodge in Boonville. John could tell Sarah and Lisa thought Billy Chuck was pathetic and if it weren’t for the size of the town and their shared experience, they wouldn’t piss on him if he were on fire.