It’s a long drive to Lakeport, more than two hours. Wine country, vineyards sprung up along the highway north of Santa Rosa. Small redneck towns transforming into boutiques. Not complete yet, old shacks and beaters remaining next to the mansions and Porsches, but all Jim knew is being erased, the pear orchards and apples, old pickup trucks and gun racks and bowling and diners.
Cloverdale is a holdout, though. Same crappy shops and houses interrupting the highway, all traffic forced to crawl through. The reassuring feeling of nothing happening, meaningless lives still plodding along small and predictable, the sawmill still here and all the industrial supplies and no sign of progress.
They stop at Fosters Freeze, as they always have. This is where Elizabeth handed off the kids to him every weekend when he was still living in Lakeport. The halfway point. He’s had the chocolate chip shake a million times, just that chocolate coating blended with vanilla ice cream and a bit of milk, big clumps of chocolate always left in the bottom. And corn dogs, two each.
“Their bounty was unmeasured,” Jim says. “Foods from many lands, the most exotic spices.”
“Yeah, that’s the way I think of a corn dog.”
“We have the same thoughts these days, brother. We’ve never been closer.”
“Yeah. How’s your shoulder after running into the window?”
“The crease mark will be there for a while.”
“I can’t even think of the dumb shit you might do. Running into the window. What the fuck was that?”
“I was going to fly.”
“Well that’s not going to work.”
“Good to know.”
“We shouldn’t be eating here. Mom’s fixing venison for lunch.”
“I wanted to see this place one last time. Where I picked up my kids every weekend, one of the signs of how my life went.”
“It’s not gone. It’s still here.”
“I feel like I’m looking back on it already. Maybe that’s the afterlife, just pure nostalgia, neither good nor bad. No heaven or hell, just some tug from what was.”
“Enough.”
“You’re not curious?”
“No.”
Jim examines his corn dog, the layers in the pressed meat. It could be peeled like an onion or calve like a glacier. And somehow this dog has become loose in its shell, a gap developed all around and the shiny smooth walls of the corn exposed, subterranean. “Look what the corn does to the light,” he says. “Cave adventure. We could sell tickets.”
“Fuck,” Gary says.
“What?”
But Gary just shakes his head and stares into the parking lot.
Each part was intolerable. The marriage or the divorce, having a family or being separated from his kids, working or not working, his parents and brother close or far. And every decision limited to the options available. When was there ever a choice?
His shake is close to the end and his gut overfull with that sick feeling of sugar overdose. The promised chunks of chocolate at the bottom, like scabs with their odd rough shapes formed when lava hit cold. Scalloped edges broken by the beaters. “I really am looking back already. I know I will never see this shake again. Last time. It’s not a what if. I’m already gone.”
“Just hold it together for a quick visit with the parents. Two nights in Lakeport and then we’ll be back down to see the therapist again.”
“You don’t know how long two nights are.”
“Yeah, because I’ve never lived a day and night. Only you have done that.”
“That’s right. A night without being immersed. A night not in your life. You haven’t had that yet.”
“Neither have you. No one can have that.”
“Mysteries of despair. Whole new lands opening up, just like the cavern in this corn dog. You may visit these lands someday yourself.”
“I won’t.”
“How do you know?”
“Same as knowing things fall down not up. Or knowing the ground is made of dirt.”
“I’m jealous.”
“No you’re not. You’ve always looked down on me. Not an A student like you.”
“I mean it. I’m jealous in every way possible.”
“Well let’s hit the road,” Gary says, and with that they rise and dump their trash and climb aboard. As they pull onto the road Jim is still thinking of the trash can with all its smears of ice cream and chocolate, everyone ordering exactly what he ordered, the cream gone thick and yellow in previous sun.
They’re out of town quickly, passing the sawmill with its piles of pulp and angled conveyors and rising into hills so green at this time of year, all the sugar pines settled on new grass and even the oaks budding new leaves, springtime already and only March. Winter just finding its depth in Fairbanks.
Old railroad tracks rarely used now, the highway cut along the river, Jim craning for a look at the water to see the level but the gorge is fairly deep in most places and he gets only glimpses. Lover’s leap, one of many in California, a common thing among earlier natives to go soaring off a cliff whenever love went wrong.
“They had something there,” Jim says.
“What?”
“Jumping off the cliff. Does make a statement about how the whole thing feels.”
“That’s just a legend. Probably no one’s ever done it.”
“I bet a hundred have done it, right there. So high above the water, exposed rock, really beautiful. You’d want it to be there.”
“So you can see the past now.”
“Yeah. Our Cherokee blood. Allows me to have visions of the ancestors. And just think how far they go back. Maybe ten thousand years.”
“Please none of this horseshit with Mom and Dad. They’re worried. They might believe you actually have visions. For some reason they’ve always just believed anything you say.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, and nothing I say. I hate it.”
“Wow. I had no idea.”
“Yeah. The world outside your head. Surprise.”
“I’m sorry,” Jim says. “I really am sorry for being oblivious to so much. But of course no one can ever do anything about not noticing. They didn’t notice.”
“It’s okay. I really don’t mind. I just want you to get well now.”
“Thank you.”
They take the turnoff for going over Hopland, just before the bridge. Narrow road and the feeling of lift on the dips. Small vineyards and then a town of maybe fifty people where they’ve always had a speed trap. Crawling along at twenty-five and still it takes only a minute to get through town.
“Small towns,” Jim says. “Not one of us has ever tried a city. I wonder what that would have been like.”
“Awful. Too many people. Can’t even park your car.”
“But think about who we became. We supported Nixon. Without a thought but just because everyone else from our town did too. And you actually put down ‘uprisings’ as you called them, beating up Indians at school before finding out we’re part Cherokee, and Dad said nothing about that at the time.”
“That has nothing to do with city or small town.”
“But it does. We own guns, and the only vacation we ever took as a family was to hunt or fish. All our spare time spent killing. The people who live in cities don’t do that.”
“Who cares?”
“This all matters. All this is part of my suicide.”
“There is no suicide.”
“But there is, coming soon, and I just want to understand it first. I want to know why when I pull the trigger.”
“Goddammit.”
“Yeah. Why let me talk. And why think. Better just to drive fast for a while.”
They’re winding now into hills, tight switchbacks and Gary going too fast, accelerating so much he has to brake at each curve even though they’re climbing. Throaty sound of the engine.
“Punch it,” Jim says. “Hard as you can. See if we can fly off one of these drops. Easier for the parents that way, even though they lose two sons instead of one. Too much shame in suicide.”
Gary gone silent again, clutching the wheel and not slowing down. Some of the drops are fairly sheer and onto rocks and would do the trick. Others they’d just get caught in the trees.
“I guess our best chance is from a head-on,” Jim says. “Someone coming fast down the hill. Otherwise the chances actually seem pretty slim.”
It feels like they’re crossing over to something more, not just over the mountain to Lakeport. Gary a ferryman taking him across the river to hell, but even that’s too simple. Gary wanting him well and thinking these visits and crossing miles will help, that the gaps in Jim’s mind can be traversed externally. But for Jim it’s all more like sitting in a waiting room.
“There’s no rush,” he says to Gary. “We’re not getting anywhere, and we’re no further away from my future.”
Thin canyons forested but the wider, drier hillsides are covered in short brush that looks bluish in overcast light. Scanning for bucks out of habit. The road widens toward the top and Gary goes even faster until they summit and see the other side, Clearlake stretched out with hills all around. Largest natural lake in California.
“Stop for the view?” Jim asks, but Gary is concentrated, having to brake hard now on the downhill hairpins and still stomping the accelerator anyway.
“It’s nice I won’t have to kill myself,” Jim says. “Thanks for being willing to go with me. It won’t be bad on the other side. I promise. Just nothing and more of nothing, which is better than the minus we have now.”
The lake always looks like it’s sitting too low, the mountains on the far shore higher and bending toward the water making a sort of crease that pushes everything down, the whole valley under pressure. But the view doesn’t last long, especially at this speed. They descend into the prettiest small vales, all pale green ghost pines in here, sparse and plenty of open space between. Idyllic hillsides that make you want to hold a rifle or shotgun low in one hand and just hike for hours, crossing the easiest terrain. The ground scabbed with small outcrops of black rock crumbling or the smoother gray stone. Flecks of red and green everywhere and the occasional Lake County diamond or arrowhead but all of it so easy your boots leave almost no mark and you don’t have to scrape through brush. Small streams you can hop across. Gray squirrels taking flight, their tails in arcs, and the rough call of jays. Jim could hike here forever.
Then the flats and Gary accelerates, lofting over rises, the truck feeling like something too heavy being dragged along by an asthmatic engine.
“Your truck isn’t going to make it,” Jim says. “We’ll be walking the last part.”
But Gary of course says nothing. “Buddha Gary,” Jim says. “What worlds inside his head.”
A long straightaway before the highway, a few houses widely spaced, and Gary opens it up, the needle pushing past a hundred. Jim feels a thrill, rolls down his window to get the blast of cold air. Sticks his arm out and bangs on the side of his door, like when they see a buck, hoots and hollers at the hills and random folk hidden away in their cozy homes.
But Gary has to slow around the bend and stop at the light for the highway, speed and thrill so quickly gone, and then they cross and crawl through town, new businesses at this end but then everything familiar.
“So small,” Jim says. “So fucking small. Seriously a one-street town, called Main Street in a burst of imagination. The other side streets are only for houses and go nowhere.”
Through the center and glimpses of the lake, the park, a left hook and on to the most familiar stretch with his former dental practice right across the street from Safeway, where he worked all through high school. A kind of joke to make him work his whole life within a few hundred yards. Prisons we don’t even see. God’s plan, each with our own invisible thumb pressing us down. “Sky thumbs,” Jim says. “I’ve had a vision. Let me tell you what god is, little brother.”
“Almost there,” Gary says. “Can it. You can be crazy with me, but don’t do that to Mom and Dad.”
“Yes sir.”
Houses along the water and their own coming into view, long narrow lot with hedge and lawn out front, the small sturdy white house with its bay window for breakfast, where his father always sits and is sitting now, fat blank face staring at the lake.
They roll in the driveway along pansies and petunias his mother plants constantly, and the pomegranate tree. Side entrance up red concrete steps. Large two-story garage ahead where a hundred antlers are stored, hung in the rafters. The house and the garage places that refuse to be only that, storing too much time and memory.
“I feel like my brain is going to break from all the memories here,” Jim says.
“Nothing like that,” Gary says. “Say nothing like that to them. I mean it.”
“What do I say then?”
“I don’t know. Say it was good to see your kids. Talk about what Fairbanks is like now. Just play pinochle and talk about our usual whatever.”
“Well that all sounds solid. Should get me through a couple minutes.”
“Time isn’t this thing you have to get through. It’s nothing. Just live your life.”
“But that’s the whole thing. Right there.”
“Just can it. Seriously.”
“Yeah, you should be a therapist.”
“No thanks.”
“What a loss to the world of therapy.”
Gary is up the steps and has opened the creaky screen door. Not one of them ever bothering to give it a bit of oil over the last forty years. It made the same sound when Jim was a kid.
Pavement uneven beneath him, cracks and the steps threatening to shear off. Ants everywhere, even in winter. His memories of them are only in summer.
The small entryway, like a pantry off the kitchen painted yellow and never used for anything. Then the green beans on the stove in a pot, where they’ve been cooking for hours or days. Just beans and water, no effort at flavor, sodden mush that could be swallowed without chewing. Direct nutrition. The same stainless steel pots from his childhood, same stovetop, nothing ever changing here. Same dark green linoleum, all overwhelming. Long narrow kitchen with his father sat at the end in the bay window and his mother at her station at the sink, hands resting on a dish towel.
“Hi Mom,” Jim says, because it’s silent and they all seem to be waiting.
“Well,” she says.
“Yeah,” he says. “That about sums it up.”
Her lips tight, worried, and so many wrinkles now in her face. His own mother grown old. And so he’s been here long enough. It’s not early, really. Thirty-nine was old in earlier times.
“How have you been, Mom?” he asks, making an effort, and her lips open a bit, her head tilting to the side in worry and love.
“Oh we’re fine,” she says. “Busy with the church. Easter.”
He doesn’t know what to say in response to that. What do you say to nothing?
“Wow,” he finally says. “Preparing early.”
She’s wearing a blue floral pattern, something she’s had for decades now. You could call it a shirt except it’s too thick and goes too low and has a kind of ruffled collar, almost like in Shakespeare’s time.
“What do you call that kind of shirt?” he asks.
She clutches at the fabric between her breasts with one hand and looks worried. “Just a blouse I guess,” she says.
“You’ve had it for so long.”
“Yes.”
“I think my head is going to split from how nothing has changed here. I could be fifteen years old and everything looks the same. You look old now, and you’re bigger, and you have that loose neck, but otherwise you could be the same. You have the same hairdo as then, seriously the same hairdo you had in 1955.”
“Jim!” She says it in her sharp way to discipline. Leaning back slightly, as if trying to see him from a distance.
“Sorry,” Jim says, and he wonders why Gary has said nothing, not stepping in to tackle him or shut him up. His father is watching, fat hangdog cheeks and bald head, only tufts of white on the sides, sun spots and red-brown skin. Hands hanging, one over the back of the seat and the other off the edge of the table, thick fingers like potato wedges sat too long in the display. “Well?” Jim asks. “Anything to say, Dad?”
“You don’t talk like that,” his father says.
“Yeah,” Jim says. “Yeah. And what was the point of that?”
“We stopped in Cloverdale on the way,” Gary says. “Had a corn dog, but we should still be hungry enough for lunch. It was a while ago.”
“Well good,” his mother says. “Go take a seat at the dining table and I’ll serve the food.”
“And Dad, you’re wearing the same thing.” A zippered thin green sweater, but not loose knit. Made for hunting, a bit of camo. “I don’t know what that’s called either. It’s not a sweater, not a jacket, not a vest. What do you call that?”
“That’s enough,” his father says.
“Have you been fat that long? When did it first happen? Because I remember you stretching whatever that is since I was a kid. And is it really the same one, or did you just buy the same thing over and over?”
Gary has a hand on his arm now. Another wrestling match is necessary, apparently, right here in the kitchen tossed in with the overcooked green beans and the hidden stock of a hundred worn green hunting sweaters and a hundred blue floral blouses burying them until they’ll disappear into the sinkhole that’s opening up right here. Jim can see himself falling through eternity wrapped in the clothing of his parents, a kind of birth vision, arms and legs ruffling.
But Gary doesn’t do more. Just holds his arm, and somehow that has stopped Jim at least for the moment, because of the vision.
“Camo in the kitchen,” Jim says. “Because you wouldn’t want anyone to see you here. Have to remain invisible.”
And his father does that, on cue. Doesn’t say a thing or change his expression, which is of nothing, bovine.
“Cud,” Jim says. “All cud. This house, this life and family and all our years. I would shoot you just to get a reaction.”
“Jim!” his mother says.
“Sorry,” he says. “You’re right. Everything is fine. It really was fine. Empty but that’s okay. I don’t know why it stopped being okay.”
“It’s just the pain in your head,” his mother says.
“Yeah. And more than that.”
“Just the pain in your head,” she says. “You need to get sinus surgery or better medication, or some pills for your mood, something. It’s just a chemical imbalance.”
The earnest look on her face, believing all this and wanting to help. Isn’t our mother going to be the last person we think of, right at the end, however we end? Why isn’t it in her power to do more? Why can’t family stop anything or reach anything? “I wish you could do more,” Jim says. “I wish you could help. I need help. I really do. I can’t find my way back, and I don’t know what happened.”
“We’re here to help you,” Gary says.
“Like the trees.”
“What?”
“The trees want to help too. They’re trying their best. Just can’t talk and don’t have arms and can’t go anywhere because they don’t have legs. But they’re doing what they can.”
“It’s just the pain,” his mother says. “Can’t they give you something for that?”
“I’m on pills now for depression or whatever. The roller coaster. Trying to re-lay tracks on flat ground. A coaster that just goes round and round but you don’t need any restraining bar because it’s not going to do a loop or roll or climb.”
“How can the doctor talk like that?”
“He didn’t. He just said the pills will make everything worse for two weeks, and good luck to you pilgrim.”
“None of this makes sense,” she says.
“That’s right.”
“You were always so bright, and so happy.”
“I wasn’t happy.”
“Yes you were.”
“Okay. I was happy all the time.”
“Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Talk like that.”
“You mean agree with you?”
“This isn’t you.”
“It’s all that’s left, whatever it is. What else could be called me?”
She looks down, turns back to the sink, folds a small dish towel and then smooths it, over and over, with one palm and then another. Floral pattern again, but pink, small imaginary flowers, more perfect than real ones but faded from so many washings. Her mouth open just a bit.
“You look so worried,” he says.
“Well I am.”
Her breath slow and labored, her whole body tense. Her chin a kind of loose bulb but even that looks tense.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “None of this is something I’m trying to do to any of you.”
“Well we should have lunch,” she says. “Before the venison is cold. You can carry the platter to the table.”
So Jim lifts the yellowed ceramic platter with its pilings of venison breaded and fried, dark crumbed shards. Simple food but good, and he’s ready to try. Just sit and eat and chat about nothing and think nothing.
The dining room so small and carpeted, low ceilinged and dark, one curtained window looking out to the lake. Sideboard with glossy plates and cutlery, a tray of photos and knickknacks in front of the window, too many things loading this place. Small bedside table holding a thick yellow phone book and the old green phone. A step down to the living room through an archway. California architecture, small but with archways after the stars.
“Looks good, Mom,” Gary is saying, and Jim has somehow already sat and has a piece of venison on his plate. He missed a few moments of transition, not sure where they went. He wants to agree but can’t say anything, only nods his head.
Green beans wet and exhausted beside the meat, and scalloped potatoes thick with cheese.
“Dear Lord,” his mother says, her hands clasped together in prayer. “Thank you for this food and our family joined together, and please help my boy Jim. Help guide him and comfort him and make your love clear. Help get us all through this difficult time. Please Lord, and thank you. Amen.”
“Amen,” Gary says. Jim and his father remain silent. Jim hasn’t thought even to fold his hands.
“Do you believe, Dad?” Jim asks. “Did you ever believe?”
“You don’t ask that question,” his mother says.
“I want to know, Dad.”
“Do you believe in god. Did you ever believe in god. That’s what I’m asking.”
“I know what you’re asking.”
“Well then?”
“Because you have a problem doesn’t mean I have a problem.”
“But I come from you.”
“A long time ago.”
“You made me. And I want to know what made me. Where do I get this feeling that I’m a piece of shit? Is it from you or is it from Mom?”
“Jim,” his mother says. “You were in the church all your life.”
“That’s what I mean.”
“Well you make it sound like it was bad, like we hurt you.”
“That’s what I’m saying.”
“You need to take some responsibility,” Gary says. “You made your own choices. Cheating on your wife. Divorce. Rhoda. Living on your own. Not seeing your family. And even not going to church. Your choice, as I said yesterday. I don’t go to church, and I don’t feel guilty about it.”
They’re all still cutting pieces of venison to eat. Somehow the meal is still happening, knives and forks working. He can taste the butter. Fried in butter, everything they eat, with these same breadcrumbs. Catfish, crappie, bluegill, steelhead, venison. Only the birds are cooked differently, basically just stuck in the oven plain.
Jim chews and chews, rubbery and gamey, blood in the butter, and finally swallows. “You’re right,” he says. “It is my fault. I guess that’s the problem. Somehow the fact that I destroyed my own life makes me feel sorry for myself, and that’s even more dangerous, the self-pity. I don’t know how it works or how to stop it. I want it to be someone else’s fault because then I’d be fighting on my side at least and might get somewhere.”
“How can you talk like that?” his mother asks. “That doesn’t even make sense.”
“It does. If I can’t fight for me there’s no way out. And for some reason I haven’t been able to for a long time.”
“All you have to do is stop.”
“That’s what Gary says.”
“Well he’s right.”
“Shut up for just a sec. I’m thinking. I feel like I’m close to something.”
“Telling your mother to shut up,” his father says. “You leave now.”
“Stop being small for just a minute. Just shut up and let me think.” Jim is barely holding on to some recognition, something true about how he might find a way to fight for himself, some spatial sense of that riding alongside his current self, only an arm’s length away, something he can almost touch.
“Leave!” his father yells, and this is so rare, so unbelievably rare for him to raise his voice, to respond or care about anything, all they can do is stare at him, all of them.
“It’s you, Dad,” Jim says. “You’re finally here. Welcome to the family. We last saw you about thirty years ago.”
His father rises and comes around the table faster than Jim would have thought possible, more nimble, a fist grabbing the back of Jim’s collar, knuckles against his spine, hoisting. He doesn’t resist, finds his legs under him and is marched through the kitchen out the screen door and down the cracked concrete steps and still that fist pushing him forward along the driveway toward the road. So hot here in summer, baking, so many years of memories of this concrete, cold and wet now, and his father stops the moment Jim’s boots hit the dirt and gravel portion.
His father lets go and walks over to the gate, swings it closed now, a gate wide enough for the whole driveway, never used, and Jim had in fact forgotten about it. But now he’s on the other side. The gate blocking him from the driveway, and the hedge blocking him from the lawn. A small no-man’s-land before the road. He never realized until now that this small turnaround area was not part of the home. Anytime he played here as a kid he was in foreign territory without even knowing it and could have been lost.
His father has not paused for conversation but has gone back inside. No surprises there.
So Jim traverses the no-man’s-land and then the road, not even looking for traffic, not caring, but of course is not run over, and when he reaches the other side he wants to continue to the lake, the small beach and tules, but a wire fence has been put up by the association just recently for insurance concerns. Someone might fall or drown and sue the local homeowners, because that all makes sense. So he climbs the fence, feeling like a convict on escape day, struggles at the top because the toes of his boots are too big and rounded to get any grip in the links. And the wire thin and hard on his hands. But he gets his legs over and jumps down. One hand catches a bit and he can imagine a finger popping off but it stays intact for now.
Chunks of concrete here before the beach, and maybe that was the concern. His son has a long scar on one shin from them.
So much litter along the water’s edge, blue and red soda cans and white Styrofoam making a kind of flag in the tules, and the stink of green scum and rot, bloated dead carp. The lake was always putrid at the edges but the water itself was clear. Now huge mats of algae are clogging it up and turning it all green even in winter.
He makes divots in the rough sand, what there is of it, remembers a beach and swimming, but how could he ever have thought of this as a beach? He shot ducks from right here back when there were ducks and it was legal. He remembers the spray for mosquitoes, also, all the poison spread on the water. Remembers waves, very rare, and flooding over the road and lawn and up the first two concrete steps to the house. Remembers how brown the water was then. Remembers kissing Jane Williams right here, standing in this same place how many years ago on a summer night, trying to feel under her bra, because hunks of fat are everything.
The water farther out, with the light reflected, looks cold, one of a thousand shades of gray that water and sky can do. This day not the same as any other, resistant. It won’t be shaped by his memories. And he has no idea what to do. Stand here or go back inside or walk somewhere else and leave. How is he supposed to decide?
All he can think of is Rhoda. Whenever there’s a moment not filled with something else she comes flooding in, unstoppable. The ache for her. She’s somewhere in Lakeport. She’s purposely not told him where, but he can find her. He knows where her sisters and brother live, every one of their houses, knows the restaurant they own, the pool company, knows where they eat and drink. No one can hide in this town.
So he climbs the fence again, wire digging into the back of his leg when he straddles the top, and jumps down onto the safe side. The horrors and dangers of the waterfront escaped, the homeowners breathing their collective sigh. He’d like to slip a giant butter knife under the town, just at the water’s edge, and then flip the whole thing into the lake.