After driving miles along a road that ran close to the ocean at times and at other times far from it, we discovered a big log cabin that was used as a restaurant. All they served there was fried fish and I’d never eaten fish in my life. When she found out, Susan asked me why, but I had no idea. Because it was fried, the fish didn’t taste so bad. Also for the first time in my life, I had wine in a place that wasn’t a bar or my room or my car. Susan smiled between every mouthful, which I soon found tiresome. There was a salt water lake below the restaurant and the water was as still as ice. Some fishing boats were moored to a landing stage that led to a little wooden house on piles. A man was living in that house. From the restaurant, you could see him bustling about in his little kitchen. Then he came out wearing high plastic boots. He was completely bald, but made up for it with a long white beard that went down as far as his chest. In a flash, the thought came to me that it might be good to swap my life for his. I dreamed for a short moment that nature might trap me in a place I couldn’t leave, where relations with other people would be limited to a polite nod of the head when I went to buy matches from the corner store and nobody would ever ask me the slightest question. The dream was shattered when the waitress brought the check. I had never seen such a big one. It was a major chunk out of my expenses, and I wondered how I could justify Susan’s meal. Then I told myself that as far as I was concerned she was a kind of informant, and that was how I’d present her. In the car, I rinsed my mouth clean of the smell of fish by drinking the last bottle straight down. Susan fell asleep before I set off and the journey continued in silence. I drove slowly because it was the hour of the day when the deer think they own the place. Not so long ago, just a hundred years, the men and women who had won the West had ended up here, next to this unfriendly sea, and I imagined them, exhausted but happy to be at the end of the trail. Then they’d had to retreat inland, toward more fertile land. The coast unrolling in front of my yellow headlights seemed strangely deserted. Sometimes we drove for miles without seeing a house or passing another car. I thought about my family leaving Germany for New York. I didn’t know what had driven peaceable farmers to leave their lands and set sail on a ship full of wild-eyed emigrants. We’d never talked about it, on either side of the family—my forebears on my mother’s side had left their native Bavaria at the same time as my father’s grandparents. Neither family had been driven by starvation, I’d have bet my life on it. There must have been a few skeletons in their closets, not the kind of thing you boast about to your children, sitting by the fire as night falls on an isolated farm in Montana or the Sierra Nevada. It’s the kind of secret that blows up in your face eventually, and the explosive is me. I’m the American nightmare of those two families, the dead end their adventures led to. With each generation, by a tragic chance that nobody can explain, there was only one person left to continue the line. I’m the last of the Kenners just as my father was and my grandfather before him. I’m also the last of the Hasslers. My mother’s two sisters died without leaving any children. My older sister died in pregnancy. She was too fat to get any bigger, her heart gave out in the third month. My other sister also died, but I don’t really remember how even though I preferred her to the other one. Preferring her doesn’t mean I loved her.
The road wound too much for a tired man who had knocked back four bottles of wine, but I was still clearheaded. I vowed that when I got back from this escapade I’d look for my father again. He must have been somewhere. I couldn’t imagine him out east, let alone in the southeast. He couldn’t stand Texans. Florida, with all those old people who came there to get a tan, scared him even more than the cemetery. Louisiana was like a laundry. He hated the climate, and even though he wasn’t a racist, he claimed that the blacks there had too many children. I should point out that he’d never actually set foot in any of these states, it was just the idea he had of them. He certainly hadn’t gone back to Montana. I had the premonition he wasn’t living very far from me with his new wife, who wasn’t so new anymore. When the sign saying we were entering Tomales showed up in my headlights, Susan was fast asleep with her head on her chest. I shook her. For a moment or two it was obvious she didn’t know where she was or what she was doing there. I parked outside a hotel, under a street lamp. At that late hour, the citizens were sleeping behind their thick curtains. I got out of the van and walked up and down the nearby streets in the hope of meeting someone. A car suddenly appeared out of nowhere and drew up near us, and an old guy got out and walked to his house, which was on a corner. He gave us a funny look but didn’t seem scared. I went up to him and he turned to face me and tipped his hat back over his ears.
“Excuse me, sir, we’re looking for a commune around here.”
He didn’t seem pleased about that. “You planning to join those degenerates?”
“Oh, no, we’re just looking for someone.”
He liked that answer. He pointed to a street going off to the left. “That’s Ocean Avenue and as you’d guess from the name it leads to the ocean. After three miles the country changes completely, it’s like the Highlands of Scotland.”
I had no idea what the Highlands of Scotland looked like, and it was dark anyway, as I pointed out to him.
“O.K., let’s just say that after three miles that are pretty flat, the road suddenly turns hilly and there are big bends. Keep going like that for two miles and then on the left, if you’re lucky and there’s a moon—mind you, even if there is a moon the fog hides it—you’ll see a farm, quite an impressive one, though the first few buildings are dilapidated.”
Susan had joined us and she made a bad impression on him. He didn’t respond to her greeting.
“That’s where they live and breed. They copulate like rabbits in there, so I’m told. You often see the women roaming around here, and they’re always pregnant. We don’t like them, but we don’t do them any harm. Now, if you get to a village made of little wooden houses, that’s Dillon Beach, and you’ll have gone too far.”
All at once, realizing I wasn’t one of those people, he turned pensive.
“Look, I don’t have anything against these poor kids, but I’m from a generation that worked hard to get somewhere. When I see them using firewood for heating and oil lamps for light, that’s kind of an insult to people like us. Seems they don’t wash in hot water, and in spite of that they swap their women. You got to understand, we try to be tolerant, but it isn’t always easy. I’ll give them this, though, they have guts. It’s two years now since they took over that land. It’s some of the worst soil in the county and they’ve somehow made a go of it. If you want to criticize the bad things, you have to admit the good things. But I don’t like them and there’s nothing I can do about that.”
Then he said goodnight and went into his house.
We set off again, driving slowly. The night was dark, and the drizzle made for poor visibility. Then we hit some fog patches, which slowed us down even more. We drove at a crawl without finding the entrance to the farm. We came to something that looked like a toy village, about twenty clapboard houses surrounded by tiny gardens on a sandy ridge, each one with a pickup truck and a small boat. We couldn’t go any further and there was no point turning back. I decided to wait there until daybreak. Susan fell asleep and I sat there thinking. Drink and drugs are the only way to get away from yourself a little. Otherwise you’re always with yourself and that can weigh you down, especially for people who find it hard to get to sleep. I thought about Wendy.
Wendy was a good sleeper. She’d have liked for us to sleep together, but I couldn’t see myself sleeping with her in her father’s house or taking her to my mother’s and having my mother tell her all about my past. She had suggested I take her to a hotel but I’d never set foot in a hotel in my life and I’d have felt as if I was treating her like a whore. I couldn’t understand why she didn’t get tired of me.