Ultimate California Highway 1 Road Trip
CATHERINE BARNETT
Yes, perhaps like yours now my father is old.
He looks at me through agatey eyes
with a laymanâs dread, I cut his meat for him,
play some early Stones and ask him to read Frost
because I donât want him to pour another Tanqueray.
Back out of all this now too much for us,
back when he could repair anything,
it was as if heâd made us solely so we could stand there
and hold the screws and listen to the Accutron
humming on his wrist.
We marveled that the watch didnât tick, you could see
clear through to its insides, it would work, he told us,
in any gravitational field, and we could see it glow
even as we sped down Highway 1 at night when the cliffs
dropped all no-man-fathomed to the Pacific and we begged him
slow down but the radio played on
âTime, time, time is on my side, yes it isâ
and he sped up, said he was following the taillights
just ahead of us and that when they started to fall
heâd know it was a good idea to turn the other way.
Â
TOMMY ORANGE is the author of the New York Times bestselling There There (Alfred A. Knopf), winner of the 2018 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction, and longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction, the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and the 2019 Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. It was deemed a Top Five Fiction Book of the Year by the New York Times, won the John Leonard Award for Best First Book, and was nominated for the NCIBA Golden Poppy in Fiction in 2018.
Copperopolis
TOMMY ORANGE
On my days off, I walk the narrow blacktop roads of an area called Diamond Twenty in the small town of Copperopolis. Weâre in the foothills of the Sierras now, just barely still in what can be considered Northern California. The sunâs right above me, pressing on the back of my neck. I reach back and cover itâkeep my hand there. Itâs the middle of the day, in the middle of summer, which out here means itâs hot as hell. Iâm just coming back from one. A hell. Or Iâm still in one and Iâve gotten so used to it I started calling it something else. No, this isnât hell, itâs just fucking hot.
The heat here is dry and mean and everywhere. It crushes, seeps, floats up in waves like smoke from the pavementâgets into the brain. Slows thinking. I pass under the shade of an oak and look down at my shadow, which is joined by the shadow of a tree, so mangled by or mingled with branch shadows it becomes a new thing, a shadowed object like and not like me or the tree, the blending of images only possible where light canât be.
The shine of gold in the tall dead grass makes me think of the people who came to these hills for gold. The rush to get it. And then thinking of that time, thinking of those miners, makes me think of Indiansâwho would have been here and been seen as: in the way. Iâm thinking of Native people here because I am one, not full-blood but enough. We Natives are always looking for our presence in the absences. I look up on my phone whether there were ever Native Americans in Copperopolis. Thereâs a small entry on an abandoned website about signs of human settlement dating ten thousand years back. Human remnants, it says. This makes me think of remains and how we use that word to describe people who havenât remained at all but left what time didnât get at all the way. I look up as if to get out of the gloom of that thought and see turkey vultures circling what must be something dead or dying nearby. I think about how things must stink worse in the heat. Thereâs a big field of tall dead grass the vultures are circling above. The stalks of yellow move a little from a hot wind that, instead of cooling me, just reminds me of how hot the heat is. I find that I am swaying a little like the grass. I look down and watch my mangled shadow sway.
My four-year-old son Alex isnât old enough to know to be afraid of me the way the rest of my family is afraid of me. He still runs up to me when I come home and I bend down and he holds my big head in his arms. Heâs just learned to say I love you. He knows what it means to say it and uses it sparingly so that it keeps its meaning. As for my ever-understanding wife, Anne, we havenât talked about what happened very much because when weâve tried, something between us opens up too wide for us to know how to speak across it. My mother- and father-in-law, and my sister-in-law and her two girls, they either talk about me like Iâm not there, or they donât talk about me at all. Never mind talk to me. Iâm a haunt theyâre afraid to be afraid of in front ofâbecause of what it might do to me. I donât blame them. I wouldnât wanna talk to me either.
Iâd tried for a voluntary exit before my time had come with a razor. Voluntary exit is too clinical or noble-sounding a euphemism here of course. Before my time had come isnât right either. Time and its length, the one weâre given, is an elusive thing. There are exits everywhere for those of us whoâactively or notâlook for them. A train or approaching bus, twenty-two too many drinks, a sharp object. Anywhere. Much less common are entrances. Ways in. Like the day we had our son, there in the hospital on my knees holding the bedrail and listening to the machines and my wifeâs breathing; there was paper constantly being printed out that showed the contractions, their size and length, like we were measuring earthquakes. There was something that made sense to me about how acute the pain seemed to be for my wife. Why that was part of birth. Like a blow to the body from within. A magical wound from which a human boy came out. Things were good for the first several years of his life. Everything he did was a miracle. Sure he was incapable. A mouth. But I didnât know what love was before he came. Not that kind of love anyway.
Before Copperopolis, those first few years after he was born, I was still telling people I was a poet. And then to the expected follow-up question, No, but what do you do for a living, Iâd say: videographer, which wasnât a lie, but it wasnât exactly true eitherâI hardly made a living at it. Iâd been ready to sign a significant contract with a Native nonprofit to produce promotional videos for their website. Then that job, and a psychotherapist position my wife had lined up at the same organization, fell through at the last minuteâafter a sudden tribal leadership change.
When we moved in with my wifeâs family in Copperopolis Iâd just been released from the hospital after going at my left wrist with a razor in the bathroom I was supposed to be cleaning in order to move out of our house in Oakland. Iâd thought about suicide plenty before trying itâas it goes. It was the razorâs angle in the bathroom, that little blade on the sink, square and flat against it like a self-destruct button Iâd just then realized I could press. So I pressed it in deep then across. A dark purple circle appeared in the middle of my vision as I went to the ground. Later that spot would return, only white and not dark purpleâthe bright white of stars away from cities in a new moon sky, or like the sun looks with your eyes closed after having stared at it too long. When I was on the way to the hospital, I felt untouched by the dark purple spot, and yet maybe about to enter it at the same time. Levitating above its graspâits gravity.
When my wife found me on the bathroom floor she told her mom, who was there to help us clean and move out, to take our son for a walk in his stroller. It was time for his nap anyway. The ambulance ride seemed buoyant to the point of pleasant before I passed out from losing too much blood. I donât remember any of what happened in the hospital. When I came to my wife was rolling me out to the parking lot in a wheelchair. I felt refreshed, born again, as if into a new life.
I got a job as a sandwich artist at the local Subway. Itâs the first time Iâm being paid and acknowledged as an artist. The Subway is in a sort of shopping complex designed to look like an old-fashioned town like maybe from the fifties. Except everything looks brand new. Thereâs a giant clock tower in the center of the town square everyone calls new old town.
Iâve recently taken to sucking on pennies and contemplating bank robbery. The pennies because there was an especially shiny one brand new out of a roll I broke to make smaller change for an impatient man with a sandwich Iâd just made in his hand, lightly slapping the sandwich against his palm like a copâs baton, like if I didnât hurry heâd hit me with it. As he left I popped the penny in my mouth and sucked on it. It didnât taste like I thought it would. It tasted good to me. Thoughts of robbing the local bank came to me after I made a cash drop for the first time the other day and noticed there was no bulletproof glass between the customer and the teller. I didnât know they still had banks like that. Robbing a bank didnât seem crazy when I thought about it. It seemed reasonable. I need to provide for my family more than I need the discounted sandwiches and day-old cookies I get to take home for free. My son loves the cookies and says it wrong like the Cookie Monster says his own name wrong on Sesame Street. Cooky.
In the new life everything seems allowable. The star-white hole is there every time I close my eyes. Iâve started to think of it as a cell. Iâve been thinking if I could split the cell something important might happen. I close my eyes more now, fascinated by the details I can sometimes make out inside the hole. It sort of shimmers at its edges. Or the edges blur if I stare too long like itâs reacting to my staring at it. My co-worker Sam caught me with my eyes closed and accused me of sleeping on the job.
âLate night?â he said, smiling and lifting his eyebrows like people do to suggest you got into trouble or something.
âNo, I wasââ I started. He was laughing. âI get headaches and it helps when I clench my eyes shut.â
âOh,â he said, his smile gone. He went to the back to make more bread.
Iâd requested for my green name tag to say Thomas, which is my author name, Thomas Blaine, but my manager told me theyâSubwayâliked to use shorter names on name tags. So it says Tom on my name tag. I didnât know if this was to save money on letters or because shorter names indicate a casual kind of friendliness and familiarity.
Do I take putting sandwiches together as seriously as I do my poems? The scaffolding is similar. You begin the build in order to begin to build the order. What kind of bread? Toasted? No two sandwich orders are the same. Variance is the constant. Of course poems arenât asked for or ordered. And how do you build a life? My life had felt like it was building to something that came apart, which Iâm now attempting to rebuild behind sneeze-guard glass.
Iâm lying in bed awake because I canât sleep. Itâs too hot. Thereâs no AC here. It doesnât cool down at night at this point in the summer. Iâm with my wife and son. We just have a sheet over us. I think theyâre asleep but then hear them both shift in bed in a way that feels to me like theyâre awake. I donât know though and donât want to wake them if theyâre asleep. They might be awake thinking the same of me.
âTom?â my wife says. She can always tell when Iâm awake.
âYou canât sleep either,â I whisper.
âItâs that damn fly,â she says, with real, actual hatred in her voice. I havenât noticed the fly.
âMe too mama,â our son says. So heâs been awake too. All of us lying here in silence. Something about it is so sweet and sad at the same time. I start crying without meaning to.
âWhat happened to Dada?â our son asks his mom.
âI donât know, maybe he really loves flies,â Anne jokes, and this makes the boy laugh harder than Iâd have expected. We all laugh and Anne gets up and turns on the light, carefully stepping around the room listening and looking for where the fly might land. I wipe my tears and sit up, looking for the fly too.
âThere!â the boy shouts and points to the mirror, where half a dozen flies are squashed from earlier in the day. My wife is an excellent fly hunter. You have to be still then swiftâwithout hesitation. She gets the thing and it doesnât squish but gets knocked against the glass then falls to the ground. She steps on it and I see the boy in my periphery look to me for a reaction to the death of the fly.
âItâs okay Dada,â he says. âFlies donât live long anyway.â
I smile at him in a way that tells him Iâm not sad about the fly. It goes silent after that. Something about not living long anyway. Something about it being okay to die because of a shorter life makes me and his mom remember.
I look up on the internet how to rob a bank without a gun. I watch a YouTube clip about a guy who robbed twenty banks by just writing a note, and learn that bank policy requires that they give over the money, be compliant, no questions asked even if no gun is present. I write several drafts of the kind of note I might write. This is a bank robbery. Put ten thousand dollars in the bag and no one gets hurt. I analyze the note. Wonder at its faults. I want it to be plain and clear what is happening and how much money I need. But this: no one gets hurt. Thereâs something beautiful about the idea of no one getting hurt. Also delusional. I want to strike that part of the robbery note and save it for a future poem called âNo One Gets Hurt.â
This is a bank robbery. Put ten thousand dollars in the bag and no one gets hurt or else. I canât help but question this: or else. A threat as vague as it is trite. And this else, else isnât specific enough, else can be so much else. Do I need to declare this a robbery? I research more about bank policies, about gun-less robberies. There is a strict adherence to nonviolence being the most important possible outcome even if no gun is present. Sometimes customers donât even know what is happening while a robbery is happening. Bank policy and training ensures th...