The Last Days of California: A Novel (2 page)

Elise took the check from him and looked it over. “It’s right, Dad,” she said.

He paid with cash, counting out the bills carefully and probably leaving a bad tip, and led me to the door with a warm hand on my back. “My girl,” he said, patting. Whenever he put a hand on my body, it went up and down and up and down like it was difficult for him to touch me for more than a second at a time.

In the trees,
birds made sounds like dogs whimpering. They flew down to pick through a patch of fresh dirt.

“What are those?” I asked.

“White-winged doves,” he said.

“Like the kind you hunt?”

“Cousins.”

“They sure are fat,” I said, looking up at him, my eyes landing momentarily on the sun. He hunted doves every fall, brought them home by the sack for our mother to soak in Wish-Bone and wrap in bacon, and I was always scared I was going to bite into a pellet but I never did.

My father unlocked the Taurus and we got in. He was about to back up when he noticed the rearview mirror had fallen off. Our mother picked it up off the floorboard and handed it to him without comment. She had become suddenly, suspiciously quiet. I didn’t know what was going on with her. I hadn’t asked. She took her clip-on sunglasses out of the glove box and cleaned them with her shirt. They were blue-tinted and held onto her regular glasses by a magnet.

My father swore as he tried to stick the mirror back on, and then he handed it to my mother and started backing up.

“Is there anything behind me?” he asked, already out of the parking spot.

Elise and I collected wrappers and bottles and handed them up to our mother, stacked the magazines and placed them on the hump between us. Elise moved the bag of snacks to her side of the floorboard. It was full of things we’d never buy at home: Cheddar & Bacon Potato Skins, peanut butter wrapped in pretzels, squares of fudge that appeared homemade but had probably been made in a factory like everything else. I wasn’t going to look in the bag because I was sure the fudge had leaked out of its plastic and made a mess of everything. I liked having these snacks—they felt like protection against something. I could conjure up all sorts of scenarios in which they might save our lives.

Our father rolled to a stop at a red light, and I watched a one-legged woman hobble down the concrete median. She was slim and youngish with shoulder-length hair and a sign that said
ON MY LAST LEG
. I socked Elise in the arm and she pulled a twenty-dollar bill out of her purse and handed it to me. I pushed the button on the door; my window went down, stopping not even halfway.

“What are you doing?” my father asked. He didn’t like it when anybody rolled down the window. He hit the door-lock button.

“We’re giving the woman some money,” Elise said.

“She’ll just use it to buy drugs,” he said.

“It’s possible.”

“There are services for homeless people,” my mother said. “They don’t have to stand out here in the heat all day begging.” She looked at my father and I studied her profile. My mother was a plain woman who didn’t do much in the way of improving herself. She wore very little makeup and black or khaki pants with oversized shirts. She dyed her hair, but only the flat medium brown that was her usual shade, which she hid from my father as if he wouldn’t be able to go on loving her if he found out. She reminded me of Marcie from
Peanuts
, compact and nondescript with round glasses that hid her eyes. I wanted her to be more like some of my friends’ mothers, who wore jewelry and nice dresses with heels; even the fat ones seemed regal, proud.

“Give her a tract, Jess,” my father said, his arm swinging back and forth at my legs. He got a weak hold on my ankle and I yanked it away.

The woman hobbled over on her crutch and took the bill.

“God bless you,” she said, shoving it into the good-leg pocket of her jeans. It reminded me of the times homeless people had said this to me when I hadn’t given them anything, how nasty it could sound. The woman looked almost normal close-up, her face dry and brown but pretty.

My father cracked his window. “It doesn’t take God any time at all to save someone,” he said. “In the last hour of a terribly sinful life, the thief on the cross was saved by Christ.” She gave him the finger. The car behind us honked.

“Go,” my mother said, leaning forward.

My father stepped on the gas and the car jerked into motion. He viewed the bad reactions as a spiritual test. Otherwise, he wouldn’t compare a woman he didn’t know to the thief on the cross, he wouldn’t be such an asshole. He followed the line of cars merging onto the interstate and I wondered if anyone missed the woman and wanted her to come home. I didn’t know how people survived if there was no one to miss them.

“ ‘And he said unto Jesus, Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom,’ ” our father continued. “ ‘And Jesus said unto him, verily I say unto thee, today thou shalt be with me in paradise.’ ” He repeated “paradise.” In paradise, he wouldn’t have to work or worry about money. In paradise, he wouldn’t have to take insulin shots, pinching the fat on his stomach and stabbing himself before meals. Half the time he didn’t do it and we didn’t remind him. He had an Asian doctor he called Woo who always sent him home with pamphlets about diet and exercise, which only pissed him off—he ate more ice cream and drank more Coke now than ever. He had also started drinking alcohol, which wasn’t something he would have ever done before. It seemed to represent a terrible shift: a complete resignation, all hell breaking loose.

Ten minutes later, he was still thinking about Elise’s donation to the one-legged woman. “How much did you give her?” he asked.

“A fiver,” Elise said. She flipped a page in her magazine, stopping to look at a woman lying on a floor in a matching bra-and-panty set, her rib bones sticking out severely. The woman was reading a book, advertising glasses.

“That’s a lot of money,” he said.

“She needs it more than we do, and her sign was funny.”

“It wasn’t funny,” I said, “it was sad.”

“You have no sense of humor.”

“I have a sense of humor,” I said, but I thought about it and decided that my sense of humor probably wasn’t very good. People had to explain jokes to me and I’d say they weren’t funny and the person would say of course they weren’t funny—you had to get them right away for them to be funny. I didn’t understand that, either, how getting them right away made them funny.

I watched the mile markers pass and then picked up one of Elise’s magazines. I liked them because they arrived in the mail full of slick colorful ads, smelling like perfume, and they told you how to do everything without even trying. I left it open on my lap and looked out the window again. Interstate miles were boring, though the font on the signs changed by state and sometimes it was hilly before it was flat again. I watched for Starbucks and Love’s gas stations. Starbucks had the chocolate graham crackers I liked, and Love’s had a good selection of baked goods and ripe bananas. I saw a sign for Chick-fil-A and wondered why I only wanted it on Sunday, when it was closed.

I readjusted my seatbelt and propped my feet on the tracts. We had passed out dozens of them, but the bundle didn’t seem to be getting any smaller and I wanted to throw them out the window: they’d get stuck in the branches of trees; prisoners would stab them with their pokers. I picked up one—the picture garish, Technicolor—a man and a woman sitting in a field surrounded by cows and horses and chickens. There were barrels of apples and pumpkins in the foreground. In the background, a nice house and lots of trees and a blue, blue sky. In a nod to multiculturalism, the man and woman could have been Mexican or Middle Eastern or Native American. I reread it for the thousandth time: God made Adam and Eve perfect, but He didn’t want them to be mindless robots so He gave them free will, which they used to disobey Him. As a result, God was letting us see how poorly we were able to rule ourselves by allowing this experiment with total freedom to continue, but it would soon come to an end because we’d messed it up big time—thousands of years of war and poverty and suffering.

I thought about it, God holding us accountable for something we hadn’t done and then letting us continue to rule ourselves so badly for so long in order to show us that we needed Him. I hadn’t ever thought about it before, really. The logic seemed sketchy.

I had handed out these tracts in shopping malls, left them between the pages of books in libraries and bookstores. I’d handed them out at parades and street festivals and I’d once gone door-to-door with an older boy from church but our pastor said door-to-door wasn’t our territory—we weren’t Jehovah’s Witnesses, we weren’t LDS. For all my time and efforts, I hadn’t saved a single person. Even the believers didn’t want to talk to me. They wanted to shop for blue jeans and summer reading books in peace.

Elise rested her head
on my shoulder, and I smelled mint from whatever shampoo she’d used this morning. Then she took her makeup bag out of her purse and spread the bottles and containers around. I wanted to touch them, smell them. I loved going through her things. “Would you hold the mirror?” she asked.

I tried to hold it steady as she put on her base coat. She applied blush, eye shadow, eyeliner, and mascara, stopping every once and a while to adjust my hand or tell me I was holding it too low.

“I can’t believe you wear all that stuff. Doesn’t it feel like your face is melting off?”

“It makes me feel pretty,” she said, screwing the tops back on and putting everything away. “You want to play poker?”

“Not really,” I said, but she took the deck of cards out anyhow, shuffled them on one knee. A few fell to the floor. I counted out pistachio shells because we weren’t allowed to gamble with real money, not even pennies. Sometimes we gambled with the good bobby pins we were always swiping from each other, the ones you could only find at Sally’s, but we were running low.

I had a crap hand—2 of clubs, 10 of clubs, 6 of hearts. I put mine down and she put hers down, but then she picked hers back up and checked them again. She wasn’t good at cards, wasn’t good at games in general, but it didn’t make her not want to play.

A motorcycle gang roared past and we stopped to watch them go by, only one with a woman on the back, her long hair whipping itself into knots. I imagined the woman Indian-style on a bed, combing out her wet hair, and then I imagined the man combing it for her. He would tell her how beautiful she was even though she was old and had eye bags, even though her stomach was flabby from having his children. I wanted to sit on a bed with a man who would comb out my hair and tell me I was beautiful. No one ever told me this except for very old women who thought all young people were beautiful.

After the motorcycles passed, I spotted something large and headless in the road, a swath of bright red like a can of spilled paint. There were scavengers circling above, waiting for a lull in traffic so they could swoop down. Their shadows on the pavement were all wingspan.

I popped a pistachio shell into my mouth. It was still salty. I picked up another and another and tossed them in.

“Think of all the things those have touched,” Elise said.

I thought about the pile of them on the motel bedspread, right after I’d seen the pregnancy test, and spit them into my hand. One pink line and you’re okay. Two pink lines and your life is over. My sister was pregnant. I’d forget and then I’d remember and be shocked all over again. Not only had she had sex, but she had gotten pregnant. Months from now, we could be sitting here with a baby between us, its little baby hands and baby feet, its baby mouth trying to latch itself onto our breasts.

Our parents didn’t know, of course. Our parents were oblivious, Elise said, and quite possibly stupid, but I didn’t agree. I thought our mother might be psychic.

Elise picked up the bag of snacks and flung it at me. I tied it in a knot and closed my eyes. I hadn’t been sleeping well again. I wasn’t a good sleeper, my mother had said once, and I liked the way it sounded—as if sleeping was a talent, or a skill I had yet to learn. I’d wake up in the middle of the night from a bad dream or because I had to pee and lay there for hours thinking about things that didn’t bother me at all during the day. Other times, I forgot I was a bad sleeper, but I hadn’t forgotten since we’d left Montgomery. The secret to a lot of things was to forget, but I was always remembering.

“Welcome to Texas,” our mother said.

“The great state of Texas,” said our father.

Elise showed me a picture of an RV on her phone. It said
HAVE YOU HEARD THE AWESOME NEWS? THE END OF THE WORLD IS ALMOST HERE!
“Listen to this,” she said. “‘Greta Burrows, an obese, middle-aged woman who spent the morning leaning out the window shouting on a bullhorn, picked up some Visine and a box of Kleenex at the local Rite Aid.’ I bet she also picked up some Cheetos. And probably some MUNCHIES, too.”

“Which leg of the tour is that?” I asked.

“Florida. Greta’s the one that left the door to her house open—not unlocked, but
wide open
. And she won’t say how many kids she has or if she has a husband because the only thing that matters is warning people.”

“That’s hardcore.”

“I know, right?”

“I should get y’all a bullhorn,” our father said.

“I’d use a bullhorn,” Elise said. She tried to roll down her window, but it was on child-lock, so she cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted into the front seat: “Repent or die! The sun’ll turn red and drip blood! Your neighbors will perish in grizzly accidents!”

“Elise!” our mother said.

“They won’t be accidents,” our father said, “oh no, they won’t be accidents at all.”

Our father pulled off
into a combination Pilot/McDonald’s truck plaza. He put the car in park and sorted through the maps on the side of his door. In a field next to the gas station, an oil derrick pumped lazily.

“What are we doing?” I asked.

“Change of plans—I know there’s one in here somewhere. Here we go.” He handed the map to our mother and put his elbow on the back of his seat, turned around to look at us. “I need to apologize,” he said. “I’ve been doing y’all a disservice. You can’t experience this great land of ours from the interstate. It’s all Taco Bells and Targets.”