Painting Their Portraits in Winter

by Myriam Gurba

  After a week of enjoying a snake in our trashcan, we put her back in the box and drove her back into the hinterlands, beyond camel-colored mountains whose names I didn’t know. We traveled beyond the dump, the wineries, the vineyards, and the Satanic Church. The Satanic Church wasn’t really a satanic church. It was a lone whitewashed Victorian chapel led to by rows of poplar. No one worshiped there. It was abandoned so everyone said Satanists worshipped there. It did look like an ideal place for child sacrifice. It was a landmark. One of those fake-dangerous landmarks every place has. A good place for losing your virginity.

  At the creek, we parked. Sycamores shaded the minivan. Dad opened its sliding door. My foot pushed the box. Its mouth plunged forward. With a stick, Dad wrangled the snake out. She squirmed, plopped to the dirt, and slithered into poison oak. Rustle. Wildcats stopped to listen. Acorns sat silently. Chumash Indian ghosts quit being recluses. They emerged from the chaparral and put their ears to the homecoming.

  “Welcome, ssssssssssssssnake…” I imagined them saying. The women were topless. Ghost tits absorbed the afternoon sunlight.

  I saved a snake’s life once. Mom had taken out the trash. I realized a snake we’d caught and dumped in a can must’ve been gasping under the weight of her mistake. I left the TV, sprinted down the front porch and past Mom’s diseased roses, and hoisted out the sack. I set it next to the gas meter. The snake hissed, “Thank you, human…”

  Two-thirds of our property we called “the hill.” A third had no name. This part was the housey part surrounded by the patio and lawn and stuff. On our lawn, Dad raged against gophers. They fucked with him like furry Viet Cong. They fucked with us, too. Playing soccer in the front yard, your ankle plunged and twisted down a hole. Mom’s rhododendrons browned. Gophers were nibbling things roots first. Mounds bumped the grass. Dirt measles.

  On his garage worktable, Dad stockpiled traps, bait, and poison. The bait looked like trail mix. I was a hippo. Eat it? I considered it.

  I followed Dad to a hole. I studied him as he knelt to set traps. Squatting so that he got fatherly camel toe, Dad pulled back metal pieces and eased a contraption down into a gopher lair but not too deep. His stubby fingers lifted poison and bait sacks. Trail mix and death sprinkled into the black hole. What would happen if I rolled a golf ball inside? A white string tied Dad’s trap to a six-inch wood stake he stabbed it into the grass. He could’ve been Van Helsing. He had a beard and Slavic eyes. Dad was half Polish. Close enough. Close enough to Transylvanian.

  Everyday, standing beside the brick column supporting the porch overhang, Dad watched his stakes. He was checking: were they up or crooked?

  Finally, one was twitching.

  “We got one!” Dad sprinted to the stake. He pulled it out of California and pulled the trap from the hole. The gopher was squirming. His claws scratched at the air. He was a rhododendron fat ass. Metal clamped his neck but he struggled to churn his head. He raged. Dad smacked his Viet Cong against the grass. It was like slapping a gopher with a pillow. Too fun. Dad needed something to really euthanize him. We speed walked across the lawn, past the garage doors to the trashcans. Rainwater filled the chocolaty one. Dad dunked the gopher into the deep and held the stake a foot above the liquid. How deep the gopher went, I don’t know. Gopher bubbles popped along the surface. Rodent raged against the dying of the light. Sloshing, the rainwater grew carbonated, then flattened. Dad pulled the string up. Tunnel rat sleek, plump, dead. Defeated. Water dripped from claws. Awesome.

  Lawn was necessary evil. It looked suburban and cushioned spills. You could play croquet or Indians scalping settlers there.

  Maybe lawn mowing turned me gay. Since I was the eldest, Dad handed me the mower. I pushed it forward and right, forward and right, losing some hearing, losing my heterosexuality as grass bled onto my sneakers. My calves, hips, and ass grew toned. I shed blubber. I shed any attraction I had to boys. Jelly stained my underwear. I mowed the lawn with cramps. I weedwacked hard-to-reach tufts. I wielded the leaf blower, pointed it at tree skirts. Have you even seen a twelve-year-old girl with a leaf blower? It’s butch. The lawn mower is la podadora in Spanish. The blower is el blower. Mom taught me that. She disliked el blower. She told me, “It’s a shortcut.” She hid it from me and forced me to sweep the back patio with a push broom. Sweep around her barrel cacti. Her wisteria made a delicate mess.

  The hill intimidated. You got a sense that ancient tragedy lived there. Dad’s most terrifying threat? “Keep it up and you’ll have to weed the hill.”

  Sisyphus laughed.

  Front hill, back hill, one hill. We moved into the hill house when I was ten and Dad had plans for plants. The people who’d owned the house before us had their lawns, rabbits, crab apple trees, rosebushes, and foreigners living on the hill. Foreigners included pampas grasses from South America and cape daisy from Africa. Bushwhacked birds of paradise. Gross. These uglies encouraged erosion. Their idiot roots made the hill spit and crumble. Mini-avalanches rolled past the backyard retaining wall, shitting onto backyard lawn. Out front, more dirt slid into the street. It turned mud. Dirt that Dad had paid more than a hundred thousands dollars for washed down asphalt and into gutters. It poured down sewers. It emptied into the Pacific Ocean. It wedded sea floor.

  California native plants know how to keep California from disintegrating. They have the roots to hold our shit firm. Dad bought books about this native power and took us on excursions to see native plant power at Santa Barbara’s botanical gardens. We hit the native plant nursery circuit, too. Dad was also open to stuff that grew well in Mediterranean climates. Things that flex their muscles in places like Turkey or Greece. Because of my upper body strength, Dad elected me his botanical wingman.

  Driving along the 101 freeway, which is deadly picturesque, I looked at herbaceous clumps clouding barbed wire fences. Blonde cows chewing. “That,” Dad said, “is Coyote Brush. It’s an ingredient in our local chaparral. Deer hate it.”

  “What’s chaparral?”

  “That bushy layer you see everywhere.”

  Learning the names of my state’s native plants vibrated my spirit.

  “Ah, see the forest on those hills?” Dad asked. The foliage looked blackish. Mossy canopies shaded crevices where hills rubbed together. Trunks curved, hot women and crones. Hot crones. Barky crones. Branches cast twig reels, fishing. Foothills existed for oaken conquest.

  “Yes.”

  “They’re Quercus agrifolia. Coast Live Oak. We’re going to get some for the hill.”

  I pictured myself bent and scooping acorns off the hill. I held up my suede loincloth’s flap. I dropped nuts into it till it was full. My bare feet carried me to potholes carved into a boulder. I emptied my pile into a hole and picked up a rock. Pounded my acorns. My efforts made meal. Spreading it across the rock, I looked up. Felt droplets. Rain was washing my cheeks. Rain purged acorn tannins and washed my flat chest. Tannin is poison. Ghghgghghghghg, I hocked a loogie onto my meal. It congealed, turning doughy, and I plopped onto my nalgas. I kneaded tortillas and johnnycakes on the stone. I dangled them over oak twig campfires I willed into existence with my mind. The possum bone in my septum reflected the flames. My fantasy hybridized Aztec and Chumash, acorn and human sacrifice. I disposed of my acorn trash in the midden. Archeologists would find my refuse and piece together my identity. Acorn Aztec. Acorn bitch of the hill.

  “See that?” Dad pointed at a flowering plant creeping along roadside. It was a gourd patch without fruit. Large white flowers, fluted Victrolas.

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t ever touch that. It’s poison. Every piece of it. Somebody should get rid of it.”

  “What is it called?”

  “Jimson weed.”

  “What happens if you eat it?”

  “If you’re lucky, you’ll see God and only get a little brain damage.”

  “What else?”

  “You vomit. You shake. You stop breathing. You have seizures. Die. Same thing that happens if you feed
me banana.” I already knew the dangers of feeding Dad bananas. He kept his distance from the lunchtime fruit. He also warned us that if we picked at the moles that looked like kernels of hamburger meat clinging to his neck, he’d bleed to death. I wanted to at least try.

  We hoofed muddy nursery aisles. Dad pointed at rows. “Sugar bush.” “Coffee berry.” “Lemonade berry.” My stomach growled. I loaded the smallish things on our shopping list into a smallish wagon I pulled behind me. Dad loaded the biggish things into his bigger dolly. We dragged our carts over dark dirt to this hut-type thing. Dad handed a hippie cashier a check, and then said, “To the Batmobile, Robin!”

  Gravel crunched under my velcro shoes. Gravel felt a rain of leaves and flower buds that chafed against my sweatpants. Buckwheats. Ceanothus. Flannelbush. Wild grape. Monkey flower. Opuntias. Firs. Baccharis. Quercus agrifolia. Dad left our backseat in the garage so that we could pack the minivan floor. My hands ferried black plastic containers to him. I passed him fragile Howard McMinn manzanitas. I ogled the California jungle we filled the backseat with. Dad slid the door shut. We hopped back in, pilot and wingman. We headed back to the hill, two native sons.

  We pulled shit out of the hill. Eviction time, bitches. Hoes, pickaxes, and shovels callused our palms and fingers. We dug foul roots from our soil and sent foreigners to the guillotine. Machete. We dumped stupid plants in the trash. There weren’t any snakes in there.

  Dad and I planted our natives on the hill. I loved them but they looked disappointing. The natives in the canyons looked mature and permanent. They were ethereal. They knew Chumash Adam and Eve. These natives acted shy. They were contemporaries of call waiting. Some didn’t like their new home and committed suicide. Most remained. Where something failed, Dad substituted. He’d find something that worked with the soil. He’d flip through his native plant guides and talk to the men at the nurseries — it was all men — hippie men sold plants, trafficked in chlorophyll, and Dad experimented until he found the right native. Dad had vision. His brain performed time-lapse photography to age the hill. He saw the beauty it would be twenty years in the future. I had no vision. I hated the hill’s underdeveloped look. The hill didn’t even need a training bra. Its oaks weren’t women. They weren’t ready to swim in the deep end. They were barely climbing out of the baby pool.

  I grew bitchy towards plants. I just wanted to hang out at the country club and flirt with the lifeguard. It made me feel proud when he looked at me. His eyeballs felt the short climb was worth it. My feet gripped the sunbaked edge stenciled with the words 8 FEET. The lifeguard strutted past. Red shorts went swish, swish, swish. I didn’t see his hands but I felt them. My balance fled and I plunged. Opening my eyes, I saw kids from their necks down, dog paddling, and my limbs scrambled to break through the surface.

  “Pwwwwwwwha,” I exhaled. My fingers reached for the edge. I was gasping, climbing out of the blue like a girl in a music video, my hair slicked back, my t-shirt dripping. Water dripped from the tip of my nose. My eyebrow hairs dripped. I shivered beside the white diving board. The lifeguard watched from his high chair. Junipers shaded him. He wore sunglasses. His legs hung open like a ghost was giving him a lap dance.

  Antonio and Ixchel tattled to Dad how the lifeguard had shoved me into the deep end. Dad called the country club president. She waddled from her end of the block to ours. In her brown muumuu, the big gray-haired lady stood at the bottom of the hill. I was pushing the broom. Sweeping the driveway was my punishment for coming home wet. I was working in stretch pants. At least I looked presentable in them now, no longer like a baked potato.

  Dad was standing beside me. He was wearing gardening gloves caked in California. His beard bristled.

  “Tell her,” he commanded.

  “I was standing by the diving board,” I told the president. “I was watching my brother and sister swim. Then the lifeguard came up from behind. I think he was just tickling me but I lost my balance and fell into the water.”

  “Okay,” she said. “That’s all I needed to know.”

  The president turned. She waddled back up our street. Dad headed towards his newly planted avocados. The hill and I watched the woman. We both knew the lifeguard was about to get a phone call. The president would tell him, “You’re not a lifeguard anymore. But it’s not like you ever were.”

  Antonio was chasing a toad across the grass. I was supervising. Something was humming. It seemed like it was coming from the hill. We weren’t supposed to walk there. It had a fancy drip irrigation system. Thin plastic tubes lined its soil, feeding water crumbs. “No playing on the hill.” Dad knew our feet would tear up his tubing. We’d be clumsy, puppies playing with Ming vases, and he’d have to put everything back together which would be painstaking, like using a starved mosquito as a voodoo doll.

  Yes, the humming was coming from the hill. Fuck the drip; I tiptoed from grass to dirt. I tiptoed past immature coffee berry to where the sound was coming from. Wings clouded air. From the stick branch of a Quercus agrifolia hung a beehive. It was khaki and dainty. A sack lunch full of honey.

  “Antonio!” I called. “Come here!” He appeared at the lawn’s edge. His glasses were two lenses of pure sun. “Come here!”

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “Bees.”

  I hiked back to the lawn.

  We went inside and found Mom.

  “There are bees on the hill,” we told her.

  She told Dad. He opened the phone book on our kitchen counter and flipped through the yellow pages. He grabbed the phone receiver off the kitchen wall, pushed buttons, and spoke. Very professionally, Dad introduced himself and got to it. “Do you handle bees?” Laughter roared. I didn’t know how the bee person answered but Dad arranged an appointment.

  The next afternoon, the beekeeper came. He drove a white van uphill, parked, and the white man emerged. He looked like a beekeeper. He walked towards us, stork-legged and wearing a chambray shirt and gray work pants. His hair had been white for a long time. He wore a pith helmet. The kind of hat that you wear when you kill a rhinoceros. It charmed me. When was the last time we’d had an old white man in a pith helmet on our property? Never. He strode like an herbivore who enjoyed top floor leaves. He was going to take our bees. Mom and Dad made small talk about how dangerous it was to mix kids and bees. Pith helmet nodded. As a clump, the six of us traveled down the driveway. At the street, we continued along where the sidewalk should’ve been. After the mailbox and some lupines, Dad pointed at the oak.

  “So this is what the buzz is all about?” asked the beekeeper.

  Dad chuckled. “Yup,” he answered.

  The beekeeper became God. His hiking boots stepped into dirt. He strode past coyote brush, Manzanita, and monkey flower. He arrived at the oak. With his face, ears, neck, and hands exposed, he grabbed the hive. He tore it from its branch and whipped open a green sack. The sack ate the hive. A few stragglers made constellations, polka-dotted his shirt, then disappeared.

  We were riding country roads. Gardeners drove past in their pick up, accordion music blaring out their windows.

  “If I had a gardening business,” said Dad, “I’d call it ‘The Marquis de Sod’.”

  We got home from running errands. All of us were carrying grocery bags. I saw something on the porch. I set my bag down on the cement and ran to it. I knelt before the brick. Two jars gleamed in Saturday afternoon light. They half-sat on a small note that read, “Your honey.”

  Lawns spread from bay windows to curbs. Palms towered beside wrought iron mailboxes. English gardens colonized little chunks of California. Our neighbors recreated London. They could afford the water bill. Conspicuous consumption through landscaping. Look at my roses. Behold, my foxglove.

  It was Sunday. I went outside to mow. The hill seemed funny. I walked down the driveway to the street to check it out. I stood in the middle of the lane. Toilet paper blanketed the hill. It looked dumb. In a traditional American yard, with its lawn, lawn jockeys, elms, daises, and as
ters, toilet paper reads as disrespect. On our natives, it hardly read. Oh, look, it snowed, maybe. Summer gloom wetted and was melting the TP. It was composting right in front of my eyes.

  While I pushed the lawn mower, Dad, red-faced, crouched in the dirt, checking his drip irrigation. I know he wanted to do to the toilet-paperers what he did to the gophers.

  The toilet paperers had used sugar to spell the word BITCH down our driveway. Guess whose job it was to sweep BITCH into the street. Sugar BITCH.

  I was wearing tight black pants and a black shirt and was flopped on my bed, reading Queen of the Damned. Screaming interrupted the story. I sprang to my window, pulled my yellowing drape and looked. Nobody was on my lawn. Was the screaming coming from the hill? Was the sound coming from an effigy mound? No, the wail was Ixchel’s. I ran outside and across the lawn and peered over the edge of the hill.

  By cedars guarding the house where the one-eyed widow lived, some shithead was pinning Ixchel’s arms behind her back. She screamed, but not actual words. In the middle of the street, three bullies were crowding around Antonio. The blondest one, the dentist’s son, punched his fist into my brother’s stomach. Antonio founded his school’s chess club. He had to wear goggles to play soccer because his retinas were barely attached. People like him can only be hit with feathers. I saw red. I am a Taurus.

  Boys and Ixchel watched me emerge from the hill. Bitch born of hill.

  “Let my brother go!” I boomed and stepped into the street.

  The dentist’s son laughed. His fist rammed into Antonio’s chest again.

  My skin could feel the heat coming off the dentist’s son. My body was in flight. My feet were off the ground and my black wings were spreading. They were expansive. A California condor’s. Boys watched with their mouths open. My wings turned back into hands and reached for the dentist’s son’s neck. They gripped as though his neck was a Louisville Slugger. Fingers squeezed and I swung the dentist’s son in a circle. He rode the bitch carousel. The one-eyed widow’s cedars and the white barn at the end of the road and the optometrist’s house with the palm tree and boring hedges, a zoetrope telling landscape stories over and over and over. I watched the dentist’s son’s face redden. Purple. Blue. I wanted him to match the sky and then I wanted to watch him rot. Turn into broccoli.