Lord of California

by Andrew Valencia

  “You know Kylee told me all about the bridges you burned down in Porterville. Turning a knife on a sixteen-year-old girl fresh off the bus. Makes me wonder if there’s any evil you wouldn’t sink to given enough time.” He had stopped fighting against his constraints; he had stopped rustling altogether, in fact. Crouching above the dresser drawers, I glanced up briefly to see that he was still breathing. There was nothing I could have done, of course, if his breath had given out, but the longer he remained confined, the more gratifying it became to feel myself in control of such matters. “In case you were wondering, I told Kylee all about my plan before coming up here. She wished me good luck; compared to what you deserve, she said, being drugged and robbed is getting off easy. That’s the sort of close friend I have in her. Been a better source of support to me than you ever have.”

  Though I was looking everywhere around the room except back at Dad, I listened closely for sounds of distress from where he lay. The thought of him feeling acute shame and rage as well as pain was blissful to me at that moment; otherwise, I never would have gone so far as to label Kylee a “source of support.”

  I said, “I wonder if you would be so obvious as to keep your important documents hidden in the closet.”

  The groan he let out just then told me my intuition was exactly right. I threw open the door of the small closet and proceeded to dump plastic and nylon-wrapped suits onto the floor three, four, and five at a time. I had never seen so many clothes crammed into such a tight space. Over the years he must have spent a small fortune on his wardrobe, and now he was so fat he probably couldn’t have fit into any of his old suits without spending a second fortune to have them let out. Suddenly I noticed a shelf up top with a plastic container that appeared to be precisely what I was looking for. I tore off the lid and right away discovered a plain white envelope resting on a stack of folded papers. I counted the money inside; a few hundred dollars, and nothing more.

  “Where’s the rest of it? There has to be more than this.” I dumped the papers out over the pile of suits. One of the first things that caught my eye was an old American Social Security card, a badly creased and faded artifact the likes of which I had only seen on historical websites. “Who’s Elias Francis Rabedeaux? Is that your real name? Is that the name of our family?”

  No response from the old fraud, nothing but the ongoing sounds of sickness. Faced with one illuminating piece of evidence, I decided to go through the rest of the papers one by one and see what other information revealed itself in the process. While his identification cards were almost all pre-Republic and in generally poor condition, the more recent documents (financial and property records from at least four different counties) were all but pristine. And the story they told was deafening. Endeavor by endeavor, failure by failure, they illustrated the chronological landscape over which, in the course of twenty years, Dad had waged his losing war against the forces of poverty and mediocrity; an online travel agency out of Santa Clara, a winery that never made it past the investment stage, a seafood import business with operatives on both sides of the Pacific. All these ideas and more he had tried to turn into successful businesses, and without exception they had imploded on him, fallen into the red, failed to get off the ground, or otherwise disintegrated from sheer incompetence. I held the papers, the proof of his life’s failure, out in front of me. I held the papers in my hands as a stinging pain grew behind my eyes. Then I tossed them all into the air and watched them float and fall over the bed and his massive body like so many birds falling dead upon the sea.

  I said, “Is this where it all went? Is this what you sunk all your money into, you fat, pathetic hypocrite?”

  The great entrepreneur had no words by which to vent his outrage, the first time I could recall such a thing ever happening. All that remained of the contents of the storage box was a roll of rather official-looking documents that differed from the others in that they were scanned copies instead of originals. I unfolded one of them and immediately noticed the name “Dawn Temple” typed in block letters across the page. I was going to ask him if this was some aunt he had never told me about, but then I realized the page I was reading was actually a marriage certificate, and that attached to it by a staple in the upper left corner was the lease agreement to an agricultural parcel way out in central San Joaquin.

  “Why didn’t you tell me that you got remarried? Unless she was very ugly, I would think you’d want to parade your new wife in front of me. Isn’t that the type of man you are?”

  His breathing had changed since I started going through his personal files. His whole manner, in fact, seemed oddly subdued, as if he had put the pain out of mind for the time being, replacing it with something more pertinent or troubling.

  I looked at the rest of the pages. At first I thought they were all photocopies of the same two documents, the marriage license and the lease, until I looked closer and saw that each of the certificates had been issued by a different county, and that they each had a different date and wife listed beneath his signature. Five certificates, five wives in total, each with a different parcel of land on which to lay the foundation of the marriage. It was almost funny to me at first, the thought that he had failed at six marriages and five government farms on top of all his business failures, but from the start I could tell that something wasn’t quite right. It didn’t feel like a discrepancy exactly, but more like an absence or omission of something critical. And then it hit me: there were no divorce certificates, no evidence that the leases had ever been cancelled. He hadn’t been failing at marriage; he had been capitalizing on it. These documents weren’t proof of his failures; they were the deeds to his fiefdom. Once again I felt my hands go numb as electric needles danced across my spine. My tongue itself seemed paralyzed inside my mouth, but somehow I managed to make words.

  I said, “Five wives. You have five wives. That’s where your money went, isn’t it? That’s what you’ve been doing all this time. Buying land for your broodmares to graze on.”

  He puffed air onto his soiled mattress. He would not look at me. “Let me ask you one more thing. How many children do you have? In total. How many sons and daughters do you have besides me?” I jammed two fingers into his side, where I thought the appendix was, and waited calmly for his screaming to dissipate. “How many children do you have? How many of us have you brought into this mess?”

  I raised my fingers again and made sure that he could see them. He struggled briefly against his straps, and then broke down. “Twelve. I have twelve children. And you.”

  The feeling in my hands returned, at least enough so that I could take hold of the pillow and press it over his face. It’s an unpleasant business, suffocating a human being. It’s not like in the movies; even when immobilized, the victim can still thrash his head in such a way that, together with the sweat, water, and vomit on his cheeks, makes it extremely difficult to form a tight seal over his mouth and nose. I had such a hard time, in fact, that he was able to fire off some final words as the pillow slipped. “Filth. You’re filth.” That was the last thing he said, the final insult to cap off a perfectly malicious life. I got up on top of the bed with my knees dug into the mattress and pressed the whole weight of my body against him so that eventually his thrashing changed to twitching which in turn lessened by degrees until he finally stopped moving all together. And even then I remained fixed in that position far longer than reasonable caution required, scrunched up against the side of the headboard, enveloping his entire face with my body, like a fetus attached to the mouth. By the time I uncurled myself and took the pillow away, more than twelve minutes had passed. Sometime during the struggle, as the fire of his life prepared to flicker out, the whites of his eyes had turned red from all the burst blood vessels, and whatever power or mystery those eyes held for me when he was alive, it flickered out as well.

  ANTHONY

  Father. My father. What did I do? What did I ever do to cause you such shame? Is it in me, or is it me? The heart of me?
/>   My mother only drank when taking Holy Communion, or when the pain of the moment became too much to handle on her own. Either way, I think she liked the ceremony, the ritual of it, priest and incense with one, stemmed glass and candles with the other. She only drank alone, and always in the dark, the wax light glowing against the dark of the bottle, and the dark of the room always on the outer edge, always waiting. The night word reached us of Dad’s death, she put my brothers and sister to bed early and hid away in her bedroom with a jug of cooking wine, which was the only wine we had in the house. Around midnight I looked in to make sure she hadn’t gone to sleep with the candles burning. I saw her lying there in the dark with glowing tears falling down her face and the jug of wine on the nightstand. She slipped her finger through the small glass handle and swung the jug over her lap. She pressed the cork into her palm and pried the cork loose and refilled her glass and shoved the cork back in. She raised her hand and beckoned me to come closer. I dropped to my knees beside the bed. It was one of the few times in my life when I saw her without makeup. In the dim light, only one half of her face was visible.

  Mijo, she said. What I’m about to tell you, you must promise to keep to yourself. Your brothers mustn’t find out until I figure out how to explain it to them. And there are other things I’m going to tell you, deep and shameful secrets, things I’ve never told anyone, not even your father. No one must know these things, mijo. Not your brothers, not anyone. Promise me, mijo. Promise before God that you won’t tell a soul.

  She kept calling me mijo and I didn’t know why. Spanish wasn’t spoken in our house, not even while Dad was away. I promise, I said. I promise to God I won’t.

  There are things about my past I’ve hid from you until now, because I was ashamed, or because they were too painful to speak of. I was born in California, back when it was an American state, but my parents came to this country from Mexico, escaping the violence that had destroyed their families and so many others like them. Before I was even born, boy cousins on both my mother’s and father’s sides had been killed in the fighting down south. The only way to escape the savagery of the cartels was to run, and so that’s what my parents did. They came here, to the valley. I went to school in Orange Cove just a few miles away. But they were faithless people, my mother and father. All their belief, all their faith in God, had been buried in pieces alongside their murdered loved ones, sacrificed on the altar of an Aztec pretender clothed in the red and blue of the blessed Madonna. I grew up attending mass only on holidays, and without ever hearing the Bible read aloud in our house. I’m not telling you this to make excuses for myself, but so you will understand where I came from and why it was easy for me to make the mistakes I made when I was young.

  You’re seventeen years old now. Practically a man. In my heart, I still see you as a little boy, but when I was your age I was already pregnant and determined to spend my life with the man I loved. That man was not your father. I hope you won’t think less of me for admitting this. So many girls my age were already having babies, and when I fell for a boy from school, who had graduated two years ahead of me, I felt like I was an adult who could make my own choices. Your grandmother tried to convince me to have an abortion, but I was in love, and I thought I was ready to handle being a mother. And so I gave birth, in the final year of American history, to a baby boy, your brother, who I named Oscar, after the grandfather you never met. There was no way I could have known what troubles lay ahead or what tragedies were in store for us. I was only a girl. My pride told me I was ready to handle the responsibility of caring for another life, but God Himself told me I wasn’t. And He told me in the cruelest way possible.

  Your brother was the best thing in my life in those days. His father went out with friends and got drunk, but still I kept faith in our little unwed family. He cheated on me with other girls, and brought disease into our house, but even then I couldn’t make myself leave. It wasn’t until the very bad years that followed, when everyone was suffering and your grandparents decided to take their chances back in Mexico, that I realized we were all doomed from the start. At fifteen months, Oscar was taken from us, dead from measles along with so many other little ones. If he had been born a few years earlier, he could have received a vaccination. But all the doctors were leaving the valley by then, and anyway, there was no way we could have paid for it on our own. My sins, mijo. I blamed myself for your little brother’s death, as I blame myself now for failing to have him baptized. I hope you know I say a prayer for him every day. Same as with all of you.

  I should have seen then that God wanted me to turn to the correct path, but I was still young and foolish, and the pain of losing a child is worse than anything you can imagine. As Jonah tried to escape God’s command, I tried to escape the pain of a grief so terrible it stayed with me even when I was asleep. I started drinking all the time. Wine, beer, whatever I could get my hands on. When that didn’t work, I started smoking weed, and eventually the man who sold it gave me my first taste of methamphetamine. That was all it took, just a taste. Like the fruit of forbidden knowledge. From there, things got so out of control so fast that even Oscar’s father deserted me. I was alone for years, working one awful job after another just to feed my addiction. There were times when I prostituted myself, mijo. I’m sorry if that’s difficult for you to hear. Selling her body is one of the lowest things a woman can do, but I can talk about it without guilt now, because I know I’ve been forgiven. But at the time I thought I was the most wretched creature in existence. I even thought about killing myself, I was so lost. It’s only by the grace of God that I’m here at all. He saved me from the nightmare of my own mind. That’s what the mind is, a nightmare, and to live day after day inside a mind as tortured as mine was a hell worse than anything death seemed to offer. I can say without exaggeration that, if I hadn’t found salvation when I did, I would have succumbed to despair a long time ago, mijo, and you and your brothers and your sister never would have been born. So you see, it was all worth it in the end. It was all a part of His plan. Even marrying your father, and all the pain and loneliness I’ve suffered over the years, even that was worth it because it gave me my children. I know what you’re thinking, but before you say anything, let me explain.

  I was working as a waitress at a diner in Coalinga when I first met him. I’d been clean just over a year and most of the young men I knew through church were working as laborers for the farms in the area. They were rough and ordinary men who only wanted a wife because they had never learned to cook and clean for themselves. But your father was different. He was educated. He was successful. When I saw the car he was driving and how expensive his clothes looked, I figured he must be someone important. And when he took an interest in me, when he asked me out on a date, it made me feel like the girl in a movie, who catches the eye of a rich man who takes her away to a better life. It felt like my sins had finally been forgiven and good things were starting to happen for me again.

  But it all started to feel very different once we got married and moved out here to run a farm. Faithless as they were, your grandparents were devoted to each other. I don’t think I ever saw them spend a night apart. That was the example they set for me of married life, of how a husband and wife should be together. Then I get here and, as soon as the farm’s up and running, your father announces that he’s going away, and that I can only expect to have him home again two or three times a year. Business, mijo. That’s the reason he gave for why he was away all the time. To make more money for us, to find the best prices for our crops, and to provide us with a better way of life. Even then it sounded suspicious to me, but I accepted my burden the same as if I had married a traveling soldier or migrant worker. I told myself it was the way it was done, that my parents had been an exception to the norm. But in my heart I knew better. I knew he was keeping something from me. What it was, if I’m to be honest, I admit I didn’t really want to know. It had to be something bad, and I’d already had more than enough badness to last me the
rest of my life. All I wanted was peace and security and a home to call my own, and if that meant being alone for months at a time, then so be it. I thought I could learn to accept it.

  Having children changes everything, though. You no longer think of your own needs alone, or even first. One by one, I found myself with three boys to take care of and no man in the house to help me bring them up. A boy needs a father in his life to teach him what it means to be a man. I could never do it on my own, mijo, for you or any of your brothers. It’s just not how God made us. That’s why it made me happy when you started spending time with the men of the farm, and when you became interested in hunting and being out of doors. These are good things for a boy to spend his time learning. It upset me that your father wasn’t here to help you learn, that he never had time to give to us except when he was passing through, and that even then it was always about business. The business of the farm, the business of keeping an eye on his sons, the business of making me pregnant. That’s all that brought your father home to us year after year. It got to the point where I would lash out at him sometimes when he was here. I was careful to hide it from you and your brothers, but there were times when I would beat my fists against his chest and curse him for leaving us alone for so long. I wasn’t strong enough to hurt him, of course, and so he never really got angry. He used to laugh at me, in fact, and hold me by the wrists to watch me struggle. That’s another way your father was different from other men—only words could ever really hurt him.

  There was a night some years back, mijo, when I was pregnant with Karina. You remember how worried we were then. We were all expecting him to come in January, but he made us wait a month because he said he had important business on the coast. On top of the pregnancy hormones, that was the final straw. I waited until you and the boys were asleep and asked him to follow me out to the packing shed. It was cold and empty that time of year, so I knew no one would walk in one us. I didn’t yell so much that time, I had carried the anger inside of me for so long. I told him if he didn’t make an effort to be home more often, if he didn’t show through his actions that he still cared for us, then sometime when he was away I would pack up the house and take you and your brothers far away from here. I promised I would find another, more loving man to be with. For all he knew, I said, I had already been with other men who were better lovers than him. I said that last part just to be cruel, just to make him angry, and it worked. It worked too well. Before I understood what was happening, he was coming at me through the dark, and the next thing I knew he had me by the wrists again, and I was lying with my back pressed to the cold, hard ground. I was seven months pregnant, and still he forced me to the ground. I hope you know I wouldn’t lie about something like that, mijo. I swear to God that’s what he did. Then he held his face over mine, with his hot breath beating down, and he said that if I ever tried to leave him he would find me. He would find me and he would take you and your brothers away. He said he knew lawyers and judges all through the valley, and that getting full custody would be no trouble for him. Not after he told them about my past.