Boonville (20 page)

“One last stop and we're done.” Sarah said, tossing her bags alongside John's.

“What?” John said, his body beginning to stiffen. “A little reggae, some rolling papers, we've got ourselves a party.”

“I've got to dry, separate, and clean this shit before anybody takes toke one,” Sarah told him. “Maybe in two weeks, but I don't torch the profit. And you're cut off.”

“That's fine,” John said, rubbing his hand across his face but hardly feeling it. “I feel weird.”

“Don't worry,” Sarah said, seating herself in the truck. “It's a short ride and a potentially big profit. You'll thank me later.”

“Can I curse you now?” John asked.

He climbed into the cab, tempted to let his head fall onto her shoulder. But the road was too rocky for a snooze and he became transfixed by the squid mating in the headlights, eight legs times two, tentacled and intertwined with a slick of ink floating between them, drifting into shapes of hearts and diamonds. For a minute, he thought he was having an out-of-body experience, then realized he was staring into the side-view mirror.

Sarah was telling him about a science fiction story she was writing about an alien zoo where humans were kept in a cage that resembled a 7-Eleven. At feeding time, microwavable burritos were dropped into the cage with hot dogs and nacho fixings. The humans lined up and paid for things without knowing why; one guy played cashier, an old woman was a compulsive shelver. But the aliens had gotten things wrong, there were refrigerators full of books, crates of soccer balls, religious artifacts stacked next to cereal boxes and jars of peanut butter. It was similar to apes given a tire to play with instead of indigenous vines. The humans began to understand that they were trapped somewhere other than Earth. The first line was, “The Slurpee machine had been broken for as long as anyone could remember.”

It freaked John out. The whole thing. It had to mean something, that the eyes he had seen existed. Sarah was trying to tell him Boonville was an alien zoo. It would explain the inbreeding. But what about half-shirts and Juice Newton? What could explain them? Viruses? Mind control? Was he thinking these thoughts or just thinking he was thinking them? What about the expression “second nature.” What was “First nature,” or “third nature?” How many natures were there? And why was everything being numbered, “the fourth estate,” “fifth column,” “seventh heaven?”

John noticed they were outside, walking through another forest, not as dense this time. When did they get out of the car? Dawn was breaking. He could see in front of him, but he had no idea where he was. It was a pattern for him in Boonville, disorientation like a morning cup of coffee. He followed Sarah out of habit. She had her pack and knife and continued to move forward with a purpose. It was enough to warrant John's submission. He smelled something familiar, diluted by the open air. Someone's perfume. Something crunched beneath his foot. He
looked down to see he had stepped on a Christmas tree ornament. Why would a tree be decorated in the woods? Especially this time of year? Then he noticed he was standing in another marijuana patch, but in this one the plants were drooping with red bulbs to resemble wild tomatoes. It seemed someone had staked, fertilized, watered, decorated, and then left the weeds to their own demise. The stalks had been hindered by other foliage, but there were still an abundance of buds.

“Whose garden is this?” John asked, disregarding the broken ornament.

John saw something else in the dirt, a mud-caked bottle. He kicked it with his foot. There were several in a row, quart-sized, made of sturdy frosted glass, all covered with dirt. He assumed they had been used for watering purposes.

“Yours,” Sarah told him.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

But before Sarah could respond, light caught a label, and John identified the bottle, Gilbey's. Then the fragrance, gin. And finally the gardener, Grandma.

“H
old on! Hold on!”

Sarah couldn't help hearing Janis as she urinated on her fingers during her third attempt to fill the metrically-marked plastic beaker that came with the home pregnancy test. She wiped her hands on a washcloth and transferred her pee into one of the test tubes set on the toilet tank in the fold-out cardboard stand. The color was definitely pink. Not a hazy reddish-brown or indeterminate Rothko blotch like the first two. This was irrefutable Science, independent from emotions, unerotic and cold as bathroom tile.

“Hold on! Hold on!”

Sarah remembered how Daryl twisted in ecstasy or whatever it was that filled his body when he came, malice, longing, temporal adequacy, last month when she saw him on the sly for only the third time this year. Not bad for her. They had fucked in his pathetic double-wide trailer – the Double-Dumb, she called it – parked behind the airport. The night had been unbearably lonely before and after they had done the deed, everything pointing her to his trailer, the bourbon she had been drinking, the music on the radio, the wide spaces between the stars. It was inescapable, the destiny of a small town.

Sarah had needed someone to say the words that night, even if they didn't know what they meant or how to express them in a way that she or any other woman in the Western Hemisphere could understand. “I'm gonna cum a huge load for you.” What kind of dead-fuck language was that? She wished Daryl could just follow the bouncing ball, kiss her with the kind of passion he had when they were newlyweds. At least he knew half how to touch
her, that was better than some anonymous body on top of you, needing to turn off the lights and take one last swig from the bottle before they kicked off their boots. Or didn't. But they had been condomlessly careless, and now Sarah stood in her bathroom like she had been shot and had forgotten to fall down.

Pink.

She slapped the test tubes off the toilet tank and they broke with a tinkle. Urine splashed the shower curtain. The wet facts dripped. An alternate universe unembraced. Nobody whispered sweet nothings into the ear of Science, Sarah was sure of it, amidst her make-shift laboratory of failed results. Daryl would want her to have it too. Just like the last time. There wasn't a chance in hell she was going to tell him, she decided right then and there. This one would have to be taken care of solo.

A hard-to-breathe feeling entered her throat, the first sign of a panic attack. She had been fighting them off for the last few months, nearly fainting when she stepped from a hot bath or stood up too fast. She even borrowed one of Mom's books on the subject and knew to run through the H.A.L.T. list: hungry, angry, lonely, tired? Of course, she answered each question yes. Does it ever stop? She tried to take deep breaths and think about some better place, Hawaii, the Kona Coast, an uncrowded beach at sunrise. A room with a ceiling fan, a well-made bed, and clean sheets. One in a major hotel, not a hospital.

“Hold on,” she told herself, reaching for a towel. “Hold on.”

She began cleaning up her mess. The test tubes had broken into large enough pieces she could handle with a swath of toilet paper. She crumpled the rack constructed from the box of the pregnancy test and threw it in the wastepaper basket. Her hands were shaking. She wondered why they never showed this on the package. How come they always depicted an antiseptic couple who looked as though they had never had sex, smiling like they had won a new car? Just once she wanted to see a woman in the advertisement, upset and alone. A 16-year-old girl in a high school bathroom, crying. That was the way it had been for her the first time.

With a shudder, she cut her finger and flashed onto an intuitive moment: It would have been a girl. Sarah was struck motionless. She knew this as well as she had ever known anything: a little girl. With Daryl's stupid mouth and her blue eyes.

Sarah collapsed, hyperventilating in a heap of helpless tears. This was three. Too many futures to be stillborn. Sarah remembered the last time she had gotten pregnant, four years ago, and how Daryl had wanted to use that as an excuse to get back together, as if having a child would somehow solve their problems. She was so lost then, she had said she would think about it if he went with her to Planned Parenthood in Ukiah.

“It ain't football, there ain't no strategy,” had been his sensitive, rural response. “You have babies and raise 'em. Nobody plans it.”

“They do when they're not ready,” Sarah had replied.

He said he was ready, and what their relationship needed was a “rally point.”

“I'm not ready,” Sarah had told him. “Not now. Not with you.”

That's when Daryl smacked her. And Sarah forgot he had ever made her happy, that he possessed a good side, and that this violence was nothing other than learned behavior. His father wasn't a redneck, somewhat outdoorsy, but he came from Palo Alto with a degree from Stanford in ecology. He was a gentle man. Daryl was a first-generation redneck, self-taught. He had learned it from Boonville, by choice.

“Tell me when you get your abortion,” Daryl had said, as Sarah held her jaw. “I'll go to the Lodge and pass out cigars that say, ‘It's dead.'”

She didn't talk to Daryl for a year, except to curse in his general direction. Then the work of Susan B. Anthony, Virginia Woolf, and Mom's whole generation of women's libbers went out the window. Crime of crimes, Sarah kissed the man who had struck her. Even Lisa had a hard time swallowing that one. But nobody knew about their trysts these days. Lisa wouldn't believe her predicament, especially since she had escorted Sarah to the clinic that day of the slap four years ago. Although Sarah had returned the favor previously, when Lisa's boyfriend from Calistoga refused to take her to the hospital for her abortion.

“Ninety-nine percent effective when used correctly,” Lisa had lamented the entire trip to Ukiah, leaning against Sarah's truck door, hoping it would accidentally open. “I don't think we even fucked a hundred times.”

“It almost makes you rethink abstinence,” Sarah replied,
patting Lisa's knee. “Don't worry, you're making the right decision.”

To get to the clinic, they had to walk through the Burger Churchers and what seemed to be the entire religious right waving signs and blocking the sidewalk, screaming murderer, baby killer, slut, promising eternal damnation for them both. Sarah didn't know which denomination the Burger Churchers belonged to, but their church was behind the Burger King just off the highway – The Church of Jesus Christ Crucified with a Side Order of Fries. One held a Ziploc baggie of blood and threatened to sully their path, thinking better of it when Sarah closed her fist. There were no volunteer escorts. Sarah had decided long ago “Ukiah” was the Pomo word for “wasteland.” Another Burger Churcher with a brood of mayonnaise-faced children, future panty sniffers and dentists, held posters of a mangled fetus with a caption that read, “Why are you killing me?”

The Romans had the right idea, Sarah thought, feed these assholes to the lions.

“Let's talk,” a protester offered, holding out his hands to show there was nothing up his sleeve but the Scriptures. “If you don't love your baby, we will.”

“How do you know I'm not just getting a checkup?” Sarah asked.

The protester looked from the two women to the rectangle building that seemed to be designed by an architect weaned on Legos, pondering what care the staff inside might be administering, tending to the ailments of the working class, gonorrhea, herpes, a yeast infection that untreated would lead to sterility. He only knew Sarah and Lisa were seeking medical attention probably for something caused by sex, and by the looks of them, out of wedlock!

“You're going to burn,” the protester said, matter of factly.

Joyless pains-in-the-ass, Sarah thought. Instead of doing something productive, helping out underprivileged children or checking into the Kama Sutra for themselves, these fanatics were self-prophesying a hell on earth.

“Concubine!” one howled.

“Keep your cross out of my uterus,” Sarah responded. “Why don't you go home and make Jell-O.”

“Harlot! Whore! Sinner!”

“Ohhh, talk dirty to me some more,” Sarah goaded.

“If God made you in His image,” Lisa jeered, as a parting shot, “then He must be one ugly son of a bitch!”

They ducked toward the clinic. But the door, painted a daunting shade of orange like it was the threshold of something scientifically unnatural, was locked. There was a note printed on computer paper directing them to an intercom that appeared to have been broken and fixed. Sarah pressed the buzzer.

“Who is it?” a disembodied voice asked.

“Sarah McKay,” she answered.

“How can I help you?” the voice said.

“We would like to see a doctor,” Sarah said, spotting a surveillance camera's blinking red light.

“And what would this be regarding?” the voice asked.

“This would be regarding health and medicine,” Sarah said, not wanting to have this conversation within earshot of the protesters. “This is a clinic, isn't it?”

“Do you have an appointment?” the voice said.

“Yes,” Sarah said, beginning to wonder about the volatility of the crowd, feeling their unspoken support for someone going too far, the rhythm of heartbeats inaudibly chanting for a single purpose. More importantly, she was worried about Lisa. This process was uncomfortable enough without reactionary mob hysterics or getting the fifth degree from a Radio Shack speaker. Sarah could tell Lisa was resolved in her decision, although her body seemed to be cringing, eyes filled with hangover sadness. She was no doubt wishing this experience would be over. But Sarah knew it would always be there, bringing weight to her future choices. Good decisions resonate throughout your life as pervasively as bad ones, and with just as much regret.

“Check under the name Lisa Johnson,” Sarah told the voice.

“Who are you?” the voice asked.

“I'm a friend,” Sarah said, reaching out to put an arm around Lisa's shoulder.

Sarah was ready to leave, pay the extra money, and call a private practice, but the buzzer sounded and she pushed open the door, hearing the hermetic suck of a broken vacuum seal. They walked through a windowless hall to another formidable door where they again had to wait to be buzzed in, this time without further inquisition. The place was one gun turret shy of a fortress.
When they finally entered the waiting area, Sarah was surprised the gauntlet hadn't led them to a police station questioning room: one chair, a bright light, and a pack of cigs. On the contrary, the waiting room was cheery with plants and comfortable furniture. Along the far wall was a coffee table offering a selection of magazines including what had to be the only copy of
The New Yorker
in Ukiah, and ironically,
Woman's Day
.

Sarah was about to give the receptionist a raft of shit for the way they had been treated outside, but saw her workstation was enclosed in bulletproof glass. Cut into the glass was a double-sealed slot for returning the forms clipped onto the clipboards stacked on the counter.

“Sorry about this,” the receptionist said. “We've had bomb threats.”

“That's all right,” Sarah said, certain the secretary must endure harassment on a daily basis. Religious whackos were nothing if not organized, with plenty of gilt crucifixes and bake sales to prove it. They probably had a file on this woman full of information most people wouldn't find the least bit significant or incriminating, lists of movies she had attended, photos of men who had spent the night at her house, suspect toiletries. For sure, the progressive forces out front knew her address, what make of car she drove, and the license plate number. That would be enough to scare Sarah. People who believed in Sodom and Gomorrah, Adam and Eve, and Jonah being swallowed by a whale were capable of anything. Except logical thought.

“Thanks for being here,” Sarah said, by way of her own apology.

Forms.

Still sprawled on the bathroom floor, Sarah remembered the paperwork patients had to complete on each visit to the clinic, requiring you to recall every sexual encounter and to linger on all the bad ones, if not actually call the formally consenting partner with the not-so-great news that you had a painful rash or cluster of warts. It was no
Cosmo
quiz. When it had been her turn to fill out the questionnaire, Sarah checked off the methods of birth control she had used; sponge, foam, diaphragm, everything from condoms to “pull and pray.” Each scratch of ink recalled memories of awkward moments and broken promises. Sarah realized it was difficult, if not impossible, to kiss someone with your eyes and
heart wide open.

One question read, “Has someone ever touched you in a way that hurt, frightened, or made you feel uncomfortable?”

Sarah wanted to know, “Are they asking me if I've ever been in love?”

She wondered if having someone turn out the lights when you wanted them on counted. What about probing fingers? Stalkers? Lying about your name after a one-night stand? Receiving the wrong number on a cocktail napkin? Saying “I love you” and getting a grunt in return? Faking orgasms? The occasional grab-on-the-ass, copped feel, insults from construction workers. The Poobah would definitely qualify as a “yes.” So would the Future Primitives, most of Mom's boyfriends, as well as a number of the Waterfall's rituals: drug fests, harvest parties, summer swims. But what about when the moon shone behind the Golden Gate Bridge in the early a.m. radio hours of the Marin Headlands after she had danced with the vaqueros and transvestites at Caesar's Latin Palace in the Mission and some beautiful boy who had never called her again mouthed the lyrics to Bobby Vinton's “Blue Velvet” between bites on her neck and single malt-scented kisses that stung like paper cuts? All she thought was, “Please don't put your disease inside me. Don't love anyone but me.”