Dear B——,
Questioning your impulses is where the trouble begins; this might be your family’s creed. Your grandfather never stopped to question whether driving an ancient black steel Ford through the mountains was a viable method of emigrating to California or not. He simply did it, all the way from some terrible all-American town in Kansas, like Superman, except his only power was that drought and eerie heat had combined to kill his crops with super-speed. So he moved his family west. Your father remembers the headlights like the eyes of a dim insect expelled from its hive, your grandmother and your unknown, theoretical uncles asleep beside him on the board. Your dad only tells you about it once, maybe twice in your memory. It’s not a place he wants to visit often.
Everyone lived together on the beach—temporarily, your grandfather assured everyone, until he was on his feet, until the dream could start to move beneath them. Your dad tells you about the sensation of waking up hacking ocean grit out of his nostrils—his skin desiccated, bruised, the monotony of blue-black waves with enough power to splinter bones that taunt him every few seconds with their seductive roar, striking around his feet like an angry cat sinking the tips of her fangs a few cells into your skin to remind you that she is wild.
Your dad and his dad and your grandmother and some of the uncles that he never speaks about all slept in a tent, really a sheet of canvas riveted to the roof and stretched off the side of the same Ford that had brought everyone here, its black paint now slowly staining white from salt and sun. Nothing shut out the roar. Your dad tried to build dirtheap sand towers that wouldn’t fall down, but they did. Who needed the ocean? Glowering, he thought that.
Every morning but Sunday, a truck pulled up the dune road that ran beside the boardwalk. Your grandfather climbed onto its running board, and he and all the other heads of beach families went to the groves to pick oranges. He came back late at night with money and liquor, singing, and the family would gather around the fire for bread and hunks of blackened potatoes floating in broth, and to sing with him.
Your dad liked it when your grandfather sang. He tried to do it too. He found out quickly that he had no power to carry a tune. Instead he beat the sand with his feet, echoing the rhythm of the death waves.
He don’t plant taters, he sang. He don’t plant cotton.
The next morning your grandfather woke your father in the dark.
Today, he announced.
There was no choice. They got dressed in the dark, gulped a cup of coffee each from the pot on the still-dying coals, and made their way shivering up the road to where the truck would arrive. Your father half expected one of the other laborers to recognize the ring of purple bruise around the lower orbit of his left eye, maybe deduce the link between your grandfather’s ring and the red nick carved into his own skin. He didn’t try to hide any of it, even turned to make the wound more obvious in the predawn gloom. But none of them cared, even if all of them probably noticed. It wasn’t unusual.
As they sat together on the back of the truck, your granddad held your father around the shoulders to protect him from flying loose.
There was one long break for sandwiches—your grandma had packed some kind of fish-and-lard salad—and there were a few shorter breaks for coffee, at least formally. But there were also ten million tiny halts, passings of the bottle, your granddad singing. Your father hated these breaks. If the adults wouldn’t screw around, he reasoned, everyone could be done so much faster. The bosses might even reward them for being fast, though being fast and skillful was its own reward. His arms would barely move, but what were his arms? Weak, useless, babies, disgusting. The more he moved them, the more they hurt; he kept moving them.
He tried to work through the second formal coffee break to make up for the others’ slack until a drinking friend of your grandfather’s came up to him. The man was as large around as he was tall, like a top, eyes forlorn above his blond stubble, his red roasted cheeks.
Stop making us look bad, he said to your father, and things will go easier for you.
Your father tried, as best as he could with his teen rhetorical skills, to explain that he had no intention of stopping, that if the other workers felt this made them look bad, that was their own business to resolve. The worker punched your dad hard in the stomach, throwing all the wind out of him, and your granddad was the first to laugh and encourage the other old men to pile on top of him. He sat out the next hour, aching and whimpering and trying to recover enough to stand up, to want to stand up, and the boss, furious, wanted to dock him the hour’s pay, but your granddad furiously talked him out of it.
He’s my son, he blustered. —It’s his first day. You be good to him.
And again he kept his arm around your father’s shoulders on the truck ride home, the other workers sighing and singing and hooting in slow sunset relaxation all around them.
As he lay there on the sand, your father imagined owning a newsstand. He’d sell different papers, magazines, comic books; he’d fill out purchase orders and take shipments and negotiate the rent down with the landlord; he’d let the dimes and dollars accrue until he could buy a second newsstand, smaller but on a better intersection. Eventually he would have newsstands around the globe, at which point he’d begin purchasing newspapers themselves. He’d publish stories in them about how he and his family had once needed to sleep on the beach, how they had to go without food, how sometimes he looked at people in clean clothes walking up and down sidewalks and how he’d want to lie down and let them walk over him as he slowly liquefied in the sun, drizzling into dank asphalt cracks. But he had saved his family from all of that, and everyone who read his articles would know it. The president would read his articles. There would be a statue of your father erected by the seashore, staring out at the waves. In the bottom crook of his eye he’d acknowledge the ocean, its secrets, which only powerful forces like your father and the ocean knew. He’d forgive them. They couldn’t touch him anymore.
We love you, he imagined the president saying to his statue. He shook it off, feeling furious at having had a thought like that.
That night, your grandfather returned. Your father watched his family, squatting on the dunes while they cooked around the fire that night and your grandfather drank and sang. When he thought they wouldn’t notice, he walked further along the dunes, skirting the ocean.
He watched them eating the food his grandfather had earned, the food even now in his stomach, building his adult body. He thought about where the truck might take him tomorrow, how much stronger he might become. He thought, and he thought, and he tried to hold on to his dream: that one day, everyone could see just how good he could make things, just how well he could love them.
Love, Gala