by Mark Slouka
It didn’t seem like an unhappy place. No different from all the other houses lost in the Sierra foothills, houses with driveways as rocky and pitted as old riverbeds, the Seikaly place, at first, seemed just fine. Busy as a summer camp even on those long November Sundays when the fog dropped through the pines all day, it looked like the kind of place where everyone takes turns saying grace and washing the dishes, where everyone knows his role and pulls his weight—in short, a decent home. On winter weekdays, just after dawn, you’d always see three or four of the Seikaly kids waiting by the road in the rain, their raincoats hunched up from the packs underneath, two more crashing through the manzanita above the shallow, clattering river that used to be their drive.
It should’ve worked out. A new home, another life, the road unfolding like it should.
Whether Ron Seikaly was actually a cruel man or just a scared one doesn’t really matter. Something about Carl just set him off—the way he’d never speak up so you could damn well hear him, the way he was always lookin’ at you. The way he’d always hang back, livin’ in his own head. While the other kids always snapped to—even Ramon, who could hardly speak a word of English—Carl couldn’t seem to get away fast enough. The truth is, there was something about the boy—that weak voice, the thin wrists, the bad attitude—that made you want to wipe that judging look off his face.
Ron liked things to work the way he liked them to work—who didn’t? He ran a tight ship—so what? It’s not like he didn’t explain his reasons. None of the others had a problem with it. Anyway, sparing the rod hadn’t done much good since the days of the Bible.
People didn’t really understand about Seikaly, men least of all. Seikaly was just the guy with the big forearms standing around telling bullshit stories about expertly decapitated rattle-snakes and Texas boar hunts so crammed with detail—“And there he is, squealin’ like a stuck pig, my arrow stickin’ outta his ass . . .”—that even those who knew better let it go. Though they didn’t like him, though sometimes it felt like another, smaller man was hiding inside that big body, they gave him space, figuring that like a scared dog in a crowded room, he might bite for no reason at all.
Ruth was another story. A waitress at the Pine Grove Lodge, where she worked year-round, Ruth was a big woman with work-roughened elbows like peach pits and strong, doughy arms who didn’t take shit from the tour operators or the murderous-looking cooks with their hair nets and their see-through gloves. In the winters the delivery guys would sit at her counter in their shirtsleeves, feeling good about themselves having just driven all the way up from the valley, and one and all, if you asked them, would tell you that Ruth—tough, shrewd Ruth—was a decent woman. A little hard, maybe, and not much on the jokes, but God-fearin’ and decent.
WHO KNOWS WHAT went wrong, exactly? Or whether the trouble was the result of one accident or twenty? Maybe it had to do with the fact that Ron and Ruth were never Mommy and Daddy but always just Ron and Ruth, or that Carl, sitting on his bunk that first afternoon, started crying for no reason and kept on long after he should’ve stopped so that the rest of them, following Ron, went down to dinner without him. Maybe it was the way, from the very first, he was slow to answer Ron’s questions, or the way he always lagged behind while the rest of them ran ahead. Maybe it was his stubbornness, or his laziness, or the way he’d bring home some dog-eared picture of a house or a pig and stand there, long after they’d said it was fine, wanting more, making himself pathetic. Maybe it was the way he looked at Ron the first time Ron smacked him across the face for having a smart mouth.
“Of all the kids, Carl was the only one gave us trouble,” Ruth would say, wiping down the counter at the Pine Grove Lodge, bearing down, her left hand braced on the counter’s edge. “We did everything we could, but after he got suspended for showin’ off the knife Ron gave him for Christmas—after we’d told him about bringin’ it to school—we’d had enough. Some kids, there’s nothin’ you can do—it’s just one thing after another. So me and Ron, we made it very clear there’s only so much we’d put up with, that he could either shape up or ship out, with our blessing.”
Act Three
THE FIRST TIME CARL RAN AWAY HE WAS BACK before Ron even went to look for him, creeping past the chicken coop in the dark without the dogs barking and somehow sneaking into the house and up to his own bed as if hoping no one would notice he’d been gone. It was this last thing in particular, that he’d just crawl into his own bunk like nothing had happened, that set Ron off, and if he maybe came down a little heavier with the belt than usual, and kept goin’ a little longer, his right arm rising and falling in short, quick strokes, raising welts like tic-tac-toe until the others, watching from the doorway, began to squirm and even Ruth started to say something, it’s because when Ron’d swept his blankets aside he’d just laid there in his underwear, because he’d been expecting it, because he had no spunk, because he was ungrateful.
The second time he ran away he was gone almost four days. He was almost eleven by then. On the afternoon after they found he was gone, Ron called down to Fresno to report it, and the State Police came by and took a description and the next morning some Mexican woman from the agency came by and asked a lot of questions. Late that same night he was back, except this time Ron had had the kids lock all the doors and windows. He crept from one to the other like a thief, trying to find a way in, then curled up on the porch in his Padres jacket with the dirty collar and fell asleep.
Early the next morning Ron, alerted by Cody and Juanita, found him sleeping on a bed of newspapers that he’d pulled out of the garbage, his hands caught between his legs for warmth, and without a word grabbed him by the back of the neck, marched him across the yard and shoved him into the truck—or tried, because Carl grabbed the rim of the open door so that Ron had to tear him off and heave him in. According to Ruth, by the time they reached Fresno, the boy had worked himself into such a fit of remorse—babbling on about his room and his bear and how he’d be good now, please, just let him stay—that Ron, realizing it wouldn’t look good to bring him in in that state, and worried about running into the same woman who’d come up the day before, relented and drove back.
And for a while, it almost looked like it might work out. Carl made his bed, he did his work, he said yes sir to Ron when Ron told him to do something, even smiled at the dinner table when one of the others said something funny. He tried to speak clearly, and to overcome his natural sullenness. And then one morning, while going through the kids’ rooms, Ruth found a weird collection of fourteen glass jars filled with small, hard berries hidden in the back of his closet—some white, some brown, some as red as pomegranate seeds—and threw them out. That night, the rains came. The next morning he was gone.
IT WAS STILL dark when he came out on the two-lane below Badger holding the flashlight in the dripping sleeve of his jacket and sloshed through the cold brown water running down the road. He turned south toward the town of Lemon Cove, sixty miles away. The water in the ditch was moving fast with bits of bark and pine needles. He knew the rain would last for days, that having waited for so long, it would keep on till the hills swelled and burst and every gully showed to the bone. At first light he passed a hay barn and, cutting across the marshy field, crawled between two old bales that rose on either side of him like huge, protective beasts and fell asleep.
He spent the next day in the barn, huddled under a layer of straw. Around noon he took out the squares of cornbread he’d tucked under his T-shirt in a Ziploc bag to keep them dry. They’d gotten wet anyhow, so he ate half the yellow paste he found there, scooping it out with two fingers, then slipped the bag back in his shirt next to the smiling bear and fell asleep again. When he woke up it was dark, and he got up and pulled on his hood and walked out into the rain. He turned right at the road, stepping carefully around the slippery washouts where the mud fanned out, ducking off the road whenever headlights came over the rise or around the curves, too cold to think that somebody checking on their stock mig
ht see a small light walking in all that darkness and know or guess who it was and put in a call to Ron.
WHEN HE HUNG UP the phone she tried to stop him, shouting, “Ron, call the agency, Ron, he’s not worth it, Ron, let him go,” shouting from the porch as the truck’s headlights opened up the dark, the rain coming down thick and straight, shouting till the tires bit the muddy gravel and he was gone. She watched the lights turn at the road like a beast turning its head, and started to shiver.
Whether it was because of the rain or the turn in the road or both, he didn’t hear the pickup until it was behind him, its lights turned off, the sound of its motor familiar and terrifying and he was running into the dark hearing his name yelled like he’d never heard anybody’s name yelled before, hearing the truck door slam and the quick sound of boots on gravel, running until a branch took him hard across the neck and his flashlight went flying and a heavy hand grabbed his shoulder and lifted him straight off the ground. Something hit him across the face, then hit him again, then a third time, and kicking out into the exploding dark he was suddenly down and plunging blindly over the dirt.
And then he felt them, and dropping to all fours he plowed straight into that field of brambles, burrowing in, feeling the vines closing up tight behind him, their thorny arms as strong as wire. Behind him he could hear Seikaly, snared in inch-thick ropes cutting into his scalp, his throat, his face, stumbling and cursing like a man fighting somebody he couldn’t see. When Carl couldn’t go any farther he curled into a ball and lay very still. After a while the cursing turned to whimpering, then pleading, then stopped.
A warm breath of air brought the smell of earth and mildewed wood, touched his face and was gone.
The Angels Come to Panorama Heights
I NEVER BOUGHT THE HARD-MAN ACT—the pissed-off voice, the gunslinger walk, the harelip that stuck out his jaw like he was giving you one free shot before he broke your face, “C’mon, right here” . . . I just figured he’d been doing it so long he believed it himself. I had a PhD in frauds, all that dick-swinging bullshit, the arm around the shoulders: You’re gonna teach me how to be a man? I don’t think so.
In ’69 I was twenty-two, a year older than Jackson Browne, and the Central Valley was still all John Birch and Jesus and the Skoal seal of approval stamped on your ass, but at least it wasn’t Scranton. I had a job babysitting seventeen-year-olds who hadn’t made the right life choices, and after a week of character building with a mattock and a twelve-pound sledge I’d drive them up to Panorama Heights, where Don Kinch, the owner, put a hole in one of them with a cigarette just two weeks before fate decided to pay him a visit. Kinch, I mean.
But Wayne Senior, formerly of Scranton, PA, now retired to Florence (supermax federal pen) would say you need to set up a story like you would a joke, and I’ll give him that—he knew about jokes—so let me get this right. Do the old man proud.
FIRST OFF, THERE was no panorama—you can call anything anything—just an old, converted house with a double-deep porch five thousand feet up in the Sierra foothills and two hours out of Bakersfield. Except for the bar, there wasn’t much: a cold, little pool with bugs, a couple of outbuildings, a horse mowing the weeds. You’d step out of your truck, your shirt sticking to your back, and the first thing you’d hear over the knocking of the engine would be the dogs on the porch staking their claim—the second thing would be the quiet. The sun smelled like sage and pine. A cool breeze moved the shade over the busted recliners on the porch. Twenty yards past the dirt parking lot was a turnaround. From here, going on meant going back.
The bar wasn’t that different from any other in the Sierra: walking in you’d see a half dozen white shirts sitting in the dark, sleeves bent forward at the elbows, then the old guys inside them, bootheels hooked on their stools. After that maybe the diamondback skin pegged to the wall above the cooler, the eight-point mulie looking stupid in a sombrero—the usual crap. There was a pool table, a jukebox. A map of all the whorehouses in Nevada. Tacked to the ceiling was a poster of Wile E. Coyote with his hand around roadrunner’s neck and his dick up his butt. BEEP, BEEP, MY ASS, it said.
I liked the bar, the chill, sharp smell of wood and beer. I liked the porch. I came up by myself the first time—my day off. When I walked in, everybody got quiet. I nodded, took a seat at the bar, the sweat cooling on my back. I felt like I’d walked into a redneck skit. A handwritten sign above the bottles said, IF YOU HAVE SOMETHING TO SELL, LEAVE. Another, scotch-taped to the cash register read, DON’T EVEN ASK.
The old guys to my left had gone back to the pros and cons of driving down to the valley when a small, sharp woman wearing a pair of man-sized glasses came in from the kitchen and started rearranging the bottles. I was looking at a man’s dress shoe hanging from a nail by a wire when somebody started yelling somewhere out back. Roaring might be a better word.
Nobody seemed to notice.
“Somethin’ to eat?” the woman said to the mirror.
The voice was closer now, throttle open, fuck-me-blind furious.
I asked what I could have.
“I can warm up a chili side if you want it.”
“Gotta figure in your gas,” the guy to my left said.
A door slammed, then slammed again, making the bottles tink like this brass contraption my mother used to set up on Christmas which used the heat of the candles to turn five angels hung from little hooks. I used to watch them go in circles. Each angel had a thin gold wand dangling from a hole in its leg that tapped against a tiny triangle as it came around—tink, tink, tink.
“Five bucks a tank, that’s a bag of feed right there,” the other guy said.
It hit like that crack of thunder that makes you jump sitting at the dinner table: “Goddammit, getyerheadouttayrerassthen!”
“You’d have to take that in account,” the first guy said, like he was deaf.
“Here, gimmethat, dumbass.” A loud bang came from somewhere in the kitchen, followed by a solid crash and a satisfied grunt. “There. How’s that?”
The woman with the glasses came in and set down my food.
“Hot sauce?”
“You call that a wrench?” There was another bang, another crash, followed by the sound of something metal ricocheting around a small room. “Jaheezus Christ!”
Presently a man—graying, fiftyish, solid six feet—strode in from the kitchen and turning his back on the room, began to shuffle the bottles the woman had just finished rearranging.
“Don,” mumbled the men at the bar, almost at the same time.
There was no response.
“Breakin’ in the new kid, huh?” said the man to my left, and two or three others down the line chuckled carefully.
No answer.
I smiled to myself: no better way to fuck with you than don’t answer: Soon it’s Daddy, what did I do? Daddy, what’s the matter? A little more of that and it’s Daddy, please, Daddy, say something, Daddy, I’m sorry.
“You want another?” He was standing in front of me, jaw out, hands on the bar like he was holding it down. His voice, rough as a rasp, seemed to explode past the harelip and up through his nose.
I tilted the glass, thought about it. “Sure.”
He took the beer, turned to the tap. He had it down: No give, no take. Zero interest in you. No wasted motion. He scooped a handful of peanuts and threw them in his mouth. With the thick chest hair, the flannel half out of his jeans like he’d just won a wrestling match, he seemed like something made to go off, hoping for a match.
“Heard you have a swimming pool up here, man,” I said, because I’d be the match.
He snorted. “Who told you that?”
“Some guy in Glenville.”
He wiped down the counter, threw the rag into a bucket. “And you believed him?”
The room—his audience—was following along.
“No reason not to.”
He put the beer down in front of me. “To believe that you’d have to be from Glenville.” He leaned forwa
rd, still chewing, indicated the room with a jerk of his head. “Let me ask you somethin’,” he said, the words coming out in little explosions: “This PLACE look like it’d have a POOL to you?”
I looked around, let him wait. “Not really,” I said.
“Well, there you have it,” he said, and walked down the bar.
The woman with the glasses came back in and took my plate. “Be somethin’ else?”
I shook my head.
“Buck even.”
“How come?”
“Seventy-five for your food, quarter for the pool.”
I nodded slowly.
She rang the register open. “Don’t have a suit, there’s some cutoffs somebody left might fit you—you look skinny enough.”
Kinch was drawing another beer. “And shut the gate or the horses will shit on the grass,” he said, not looking up.
IT WAS A good joke—I didn’t mind. I started bringin’ my crew on Saturdays, climbing up from the valley to that huge shaded porch, that ratty little pool. It was a mutually beneficial arrangement: The pool was good for my guys, and when I tired of listenin’ to kids going on about shit they knew nothing about I’d take a beer to the porch and read a book—I had a year of junior college under my belt. As for Kinch, we were big business. He recognized me now, exchanged a few words.
“College, huh?” he said, after he asked and I told him.
I wanted him to say something ignorant about intellectuals having their heads up their asses. “That’s right,” I said. “I’m gonna finish my degree when I get back east.”
He scribbled something on a pad, put the pencil behind his ear, punched open the register. “Good for you,” he said.
THE THING WITH the cigarette didn’t happen till the third week. By then I’d heard all the stories from the locals who drove all the way from Oildale just to be crapped on by the big man: How Kinch had done this, how Kinch had done that, how he’d hit a guy so hard once he looked like a movie running backward before he crashed through the window and onto the porch.
