by Ruth Ozeki
He nodded like he already knew this. After a while he pulled himself up and made room for me on the mattress. I went over and sat down next to him. He draped an arm around my shoulders, the way you might comfort a pal. “Calm down, Mom,” he said with a sigh. “I love you.”
By the time I got back to the kitchen, Will had left, but Cass was still there, so I brought out the whiskey. I sat down and raised my tumbler.
“Here’s to our right to bear arms.” I drank, then let my head drop to the table. I rested like that for a bit. Crazy thoughts were running through my mind.
“You okay?” Cass asked.
“We used to smoke behind that maintenance shed, remember?” My hands were shaking. I could see my son kneeling in the knapweed and thistle with a gun muzzle in his mouth. “You know what Will said, about how if Phoenix had a problem he should tell a grown-up? That really got me. Poor kid. He hasn’t had many grown-ups around.”
“Don’t be silly,” said Cass. “You’re grown up.”
“No.” I lit a cigarette and got up to find an ashtray. “Will is. He handled that well. He made Phoenix feel safe and looked after.”
“He’s good with kids,” Cass said, shrugging off the compliment, but I could tell she was pleased.
“I’ve never been able to make them feel safe,” I said. “Maybe that’s what happens when you run away from home. You get older, but you never grow up.” I held out the cigarette to prove my point. “See? I come back to this house, and it’s like I’m a teenager again. Smoking. Sneaking out to sleep with Elliot. It’s like time just folded and my whole life between then and now never happened.”
“How can you say that?” Cass asked, waving her hand in front of her face to dispel the smoke. “For goodness’ sake, Yummy. You teach college. You’ve got three kids. You don’t know how lucky you are.”
“I dropped out of grad school. I can barely pay for health insurance. If my kids grow up into intact adults, it’ll be a miracle.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. They’re growing up just fine.”
Thinking about them, I softened, or maybe it was the whiskey. “They are great kids, aren’t they? And you’d think it would make Lloyd happy. Three wonderful grandchildren ought to more than make up for one lousy abortion, but no . . .”
“Oh, Yummy,” Cass said, exasperated now. “He’s put all that behind him.”
“Bullshit! He’s never forgiven me.”
“He’s an old man. It’s hard for him. Keep your voice down.”
“Don’t make excuses for him!” I emptied the tumbler and poured another large shot. “It’s fine. I haven’t forgiven him either. You know what I don’t understand? He never wrote to me. All those years. Not once. Momoko wrote. Not a lot, but she wrote, and she sent money when she could. But not Lloyd. You’d think he could have cut me some slack, even if I was a sinner. Wouldn’t you, if you had a daughter?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Cass said, scraping at a speck of food that had hardened onto the tablecloth. “Anyway, it was different for that generation. They didn’t have any interpersonal skills. My daddy thought love was something you did with a belt.” She stood and went to the sink. “I’m going to make a pot of coffee. You want some?”
“No thanks. I’m fine with this.” I tapped the whiskey bottle. “He’s a righteous old bastard. Prideful, you know?”
“Uh-huh.” Cass measured the grounds into Mr. Coffee’s filter. She filled the water reservoir and pushed the button. She turned and leaned against the counter and looked at me. “And you’re his daughter.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing.” The water in Mr. Coffee made a muffled sound that built as it came to a boil. It sounded like an engine approaching from far away.
Cass spoke again. “You know, that’s something I never could understand. Why did you run away?”
The question took me aback. “You know. You were there. I got knocked up by Elliot. I had the abortion. Lloyd hit me. . . .”
Cass shook her head. “My daddy did worse to me. There were times when I hated him at least as much, but I never left. I just put up with it.”
Something she said wasn’t right, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. “It wasn’t only that he hit me. It started way before. It was like I had this wildness inside that was driving me, and I was looking for an excuse. If it hadn’t been Elliot, it would have been someone else. Billy Odell . . .” I shuddered and made a horrible face.
Cass smiled. “Too bad. You could have been the sheriff’s wife.”
“Or whore.”
“Don’t say that.”
“It’s the truth. Sex was a big part of it. The wildness that was pushing me. I don’t know why.” Dark coffee started to trickle into the pot. I heard the words, then corrected myself. “No, that’s not true. I do know why. It was a way of getting back at Lloyd. Punishing him, you know? The only way I had.”
“But why did you hate him so much?”
“I didn’t hate him, Cass. I loved him!”
And there it was: the unbearable truth, popping out of my own damn mouth. Slowly, I put it all together. “I ran away because I loved him. I ran away because he used to love me, and then somewhere along the line, when he couldn’t control me anymore, he just stopped, you know?” Bewildered, I looked up at Cass. “I couldn’t stand that.”
I blame the whiskey. Straight whiskey, soaking a desiccated heart until it swelled like an old sponge. The salt and pepper shakers jumped when I pounded the table. Clenched my jaw until it ached, but the tears just kept coming. Again. Twice in a night. What a loser.
“Shhhh . . .” said Cass.
“Oh, God, Cass! I loved him so much. . . .”
fifth
Man alone of all Nature’s children thinks of himself as the center about which his world, little or large, revolves, but if he persists in this hallucination he is certain to receive a shock that will waken him or else he will come to grief in the end.
—Luther Burbank, The Harvest of the Years
lava
The irrigators walk the earth in summer. Like huge aluminum insects, they inch across the contours of the land, sucking water into their segmented bodies from underground aquifers to rain back onto the desert. Rainbirds, they’re called. Robotic and prehistoric, mechanical yet seeming so alive, they span the fields and stretch to the horizon. Emitters, regularly spaced along the length of their bodies, spray a mix of water and chemicals into the air, which catch the light and create row upon row of prismatic iridescence, like an assembly line of rainbows. The spitting hiss of the impulse taps is as incessant as a chorus of cicadas. Tss, tss, tss—This is the sound I remember from summer.
If you stoop down and examine the sandy soil, taking up a handful and letting it run through your fingers, you’d wonder why anyone would ever try to grow anything here. The wind sculpts a newly planted field into small, rippled dunes, which the rainbirds pass over, trying to saturate the sand before it all blows away. Bunchgrass and bitterbrush lurk at the edges, waiting to reclaim the land.
They say intense igneous activity occurs in zones of high stress, and believe me, Idaho is one of those. It’s a fairly modern landscape, formed by volcanic eruptions occurring as recently as 10 to 20 million years ago, when expanding molten rock squeezed up through crustal fractures, to vent and reconfigure the surface of the earth. Imagine all the infernal popping and spluttering, the oozing and seeping, as the magma welled and the lava flowed! From cones and fissures it spread, filling up the Columbia Plateau, where it pooled, and when the fire left the rock, it hardened into the lava plain that you see today, high and youthful, with rich deposits of volcanic ash that proved to be ideally suited to the growing of potatoes—in particular, the Russet Burbank.
The Burbank is a finicky potato and requires enormous precision on the part of its farmers. It has notoriously poor disease resistance and must be coddled with fertilizers and fungicides and other pharmaceuticals like an overbred poodle. But becaus
e of its ability to produce a whopping ten-ounce tuber with excellent fry color, from which the three-inch golden french fry standard evolved, the Burbank quickly became the industry’s prima donna of potatoes. And once the industry calibrated itself around the Burbank, no other spud could compete. And that’s why, in any Idaho summer, the rainbirds shower their mixtures of water and chemistry onto uniform fields of Luther’s progeny. Hissing and spitting. Leaching through the porous volcanic rock back down into the aquifer.
Who says I don’t know shit about potatoes?
The summer I was ten, I found a lava tube. I stumbled across it one day when Lloyd had taken me and Cassie with him to a farm auction, just north of Idaho Falls. Nowadays auctions are a depressingly frequent event, and every growing season seems to end with a spate of them as the smaller farms go under, but back then auctions were fun. After the initial carnival excitement of the caller and the crowds wore off, Cass and I began to wander, threading our way among the tractors and balers and pickers and cultivators for sale, toward the perimeter of the farmyard and out into the sage. For a long while we just walked, talking about nothing really, while the caller’s voice grew faint, then faded beneath the chirp of the birds and the buzzing hum of the insects. We stood on a slight rise under the baking sun. Way off in the distance we could see the windbreak of poplars surrounding the farmhouse. The in-between air shimmered.
“We ought to go back,” Cassie said.
I was kicking at rocks with the toe of my sneaker. “We can be explorers,” I said. “Maybe we can find something. Some bones or fossils . . .”
“There’s no fossils here.”
“Artifacts. From an ancient civilization.”
The parched earth crunched beneath our feet. The ground was blackened here, and littered with lava bombs and other erupted materials: smooth, ropy coils of pahoehoe, and the rough, shattered, crusty a’a—the Hawaiian names that only vulcanologists used, or real estate brokers selling cheap lots on the lava flows of the Big Island. When I was ten, though, rocks were rocks. The ground was the ground.
“Arrowheads,” I said. “Fishhooks.”
“Are you nuts? There’s no fish around here. There’s no water anywhere. I’m thirsty. I want to go back.”
There were sodas at the auction. Hot dogs and potato salad, too.
“No, Cassandra. We must push on.” I was an archaeologist. An adventurer. We were studying these things in school. The stiff sagebrush scratched our shins.
There was a dip in the contour of the ground in front of us. I followed it down, clambering over a pile of boulders, then froze. “Cassie! Come here!”
Cass scrambled down and stood next to me.
“Can you feel it?” It was a coolness, circulating around our ankles.
“It’s like a wind or something,” Cass said.
“It’s not a wind. It’s like a refrigerator when you open the door.” I dropped to my knees and crawled across the rocks, running my hand over them. “Here!” I pressed my cheek to an opening. “It’s coming from here.”
A small, dark crack, an orifice, the mouth of the earth. It exhaled cool, damp air. I took hold of a rock and started to pull. “C’mon, Cass. Help me!”
Cass joined, and together we dislodged one so that it rolled out of the way, enlarging the hole.
“Don’t put your hand in there!” Cass cried, grabbing me as my arm disappeared inside. There were critters who lived in holes. Bull snakes and rattlers.
“It’s a cave!” I pressed my cheek against the rock, up to my armpit in the hole. “I’m sure of it. It opens way up inside.”
Cass shivered. “It’s creepy.”
I withdrew my hand. “Come on,” I said, pushing at another rock. “We can move more of these.”
We shifted a few more small boulders, and then I wriggled, headfirst, through the crevice. Cass had always been chunky. She couldn’t have followed even if she had wanted to. I heard her call out, “Yummy? Are you all right?”
“Either come in or go out,” I told her from inside. “You’re blocking all the light.”
It was cool and humid, even though outside it was the hottest day of the summer. I curled up in a ball, just beyond the reach of the light that streamed in from the opening like a shining pillar. I hugged my knees and pressed against the damp rock. It felt good through my T-shirt. The cave wall smelled delicious. I turned my head and sniffed, then stuck out my tongue and gave it a lick. It tasted metallic and cool. I was pleased. It was important for explorers to be observant.
“Yummy,” I heard Cass holler. “Answer me!” Her voice sounded muted from above. Inside I could hear the faint sound of bats, twitching and chattering. I stayed very still. I wasn’t scared of the bats, because I knew what they were. Lloyd had showed me a colony hanging in the eaves of our house before he poisoned them.
“If you don’t answer me this second, I’m going back!”
She sounded scared, and I knew I should call out and reassure her but I couldn’t bring myself to disturb the womblike quiet of the cave. It would be wrong somehow. Plus, I liked the power that not answering gave. I hoped the bats wouldn’t start to fly.
The interior of the cave stretched on into darkness, but as my eyes adjusted, I could start to see the shape of the wall, the rubble that lay on the floor, the vaulting arch of the ceiling. Near my feet there was a pile of pale, white, sticklike shapes. I poked at one of them, and it broke free, so I picked it up. It was a bone. A clean bone. From a heap of bones. I wondered if I ought to be scared. It was obviously the remains of a meal—suggesting what? A fox’s den? A cougar’s lair? But these bones were old and dry, so I decided to relax. I couldn’t wait to tell Lloyd I’d found a tomb of sorts. I fingered a jawbone. I pocketed a tooth.
“I’m going back now! I’m going to get your daddy!”
I didn’t want him worrying, so I decided to reply, and that’s when the bats took off. They spread their leather wings and dropped, a huge black cloud, swooping through the stream of sunlight and out into the day. The light from the hole flickered like crazy as they flew past. I heard Cass scream, muffled and far away. There were still more bats hanging there, twitching and chirring, and I was afraid to climb toward the opening, because it might trigger another flight, and the last thing I wanted was to be swarmed in the narrow passage, so I sat there, shaking, for a long, long time.
When Lloyd finally arrived, pried away a few more rocks, and dropped into the hole, my legs were stiff with terror and cold. He called my name, and fear made his voice sound hollow. Or was it the echo of the cave? I saw the beam of his flashlight playing wildly across the stone walls, and I tried to answer—Daddy—but my voice shriveled. Still, he located me in the dark with the radar of a father, as sure and keen as any bat’s, and he crouched down, took me in his arms, and held me away from the cold rock until I thawed against the heat of his chest. His heart was pounding hard and strong. He didn’t raise his voice or say a word. Just held me while I shivered. After a while I pointed to the bones.
“Something got eaten.” My voice came out in a whisper.
“Looks that way,” he whispered back. “Little bones. A fox maybe. Or a rabbit. Happened some time ago.”
“That’s what I thought, too,” I said, my voice stronger now as I bragged a little. “That’s why I wasn’t scared.”
“Good for you,” he said. He turned the beam of his flashlight into the darkness. “It’s a fine cave you’ve discovered. A lava tube, and a mighty big one. Want to go a bit farther in?”
With Lloyd by my side I was afraid of nothing! I jumped to my feet and walked behind him, clutching his hand. We followed the beam of light as it danced across the wet rock walls, pausing to examine a stalactite that hung from the knobby ceiling. The tube went on and on, but eventually he turned back. Secretly I was glad.
“I guess we’ve seen enough for today,” he said.
I nodded and followed him around the twists and bends, toward the small opening of light.
squash patch
The words of the Proverbs ran through his mind: It is better to dwell in the corner of the housetop, than with a brawling woman, and in a wide house. But the house was not wide enough, Lloyd thought, and Yumi’s vexation ran through it like the persistent hum of an out-of-kilter appliance. It was there in the slam of the cupboard and the clatter of cookware—baking sheets and mixing bowls, pots and—
“Where is that damn pan?”
“Which damn pan, Mom?”
“The damn no-stick frying pan.”
“The damn no-stick frying pan is in the cupboard under the counter.”
“What’s it doing there?”
“That’s its home. That’s where it lives.”
“Don’t be cute, Phoenix.”
“I’m not cute, Yummy. I’m never cute.”
Lloyd looked toward the window, trying to judge the condition of the day by the light that leaked in past the drawn shade. Mornings used to be a peaceful time, and breakfasts were delicious when the French girl was cooking. Melvin would come in quietly and raise the shades, then take him to the bathroom, where they’d change the bag and have a sponge bath, while that girlfriend of his tidied up the bedroom so that the bed would be nice and fresh, ready for Lloyd to crawl back into and have some of that good breakfast.
Now the days started with commotion.
“What are you making?” he heard the boy say.
“Eggs.”
The girl piped up. “Grandpa’s not supposed to have eggs. It’s too much cholesti . . . you know.”
“Cholesterol. He can have an egg now and then. Where’s the butter?”
“You shouldn’t fry it. He’s not supposed to have fried foods.”
“For God’s sake, Ocean. Just shut up and eat your granola. Where’s the salt?”
“Grandpa’s not supposed to have salt. He’s on a low-sodium diet.”
“Shit! Now you tell me?”
The boy had gotten into trouble at school and had to stay home. He spent all of his time in front of the television set playing some infernal game his mother had bought him to keep him amused. Lloyd sat in his chair in the living room and watched, but the whole thing moved too darn fast to get a fix on. His heart leaped at the sudden noises, and all the flashes and careening made his stomach upset and gave him a headache. At least the girl knew how to play by herself out of doors. She had joined the 4-H and was raising a chick, which followed her around even into the garden. When the damn bird started eating the pea sprouts, Momoko chased it out with a rake.
