Текст книги "Palo Alto Stories"

Автор книги: James Franco

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Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 11 страниц)

Jack-O’

I sit in the driver’s seat of my grandfather’s old DeVille. It is night out and cool. Me and Joe, we just sit.

We’re out in front of the Unified Palo Alto School District office, a dead one-story building where old people work. I think of all the boring English teachers I have ever had, and I think they were all born in this building.

We sit here because it’s dark, and there are no lights outside this building. We’re stopped for no reason except that the night is still going and we’re drunk, and who wants to go home, ever, and this spot is as good as any to just sit in the shadows and let life slow.

My window is cracked, just a bit, and the air plays on my forehead. I often think about driving off the side of freeway overpasses, just plunging Grandpa’s old blue boat through the cement guardrail. The sculpted posts crumbling about me and Grandpa’s blue machine: a great moment of metallic explosion and heavy ripping and jerking and then release: a soft, slow dive of arcing color through the windshield, into a hard second of impact, just before the black. What an adventure lies behind one quick turn of the steering wheel. A great screaming, and then, slip away.

Joe and I sit and stare at the wall of the building. The building is beige, but the shadows make it shadow-color. Joe smokes. His window is all the way down, and he breathes his smoke out the black gap.

There is not much to talk about with Joe because he’s such a moron. I don’t know what he thinks he is, or why he thinks he exists. I guess in some people’s lives, no one tells you what to be, and so you be nothing. In the olden days you were born into it, all decisions made, and you farmed until you died, or cleaned the royal toilets.

I guess they didn’t have toilets. Just stuck their asses out and shat in the moat. But someone had to wash out the hole.

“If you lived in the olden times, what would you do?” I ask Joe.

Joe has to think about it. He is large, and his weight spreads from his belly across the seat, like it was a plastic sack full of liquid, rolling in layers upon itself.

“Which olden times?” he asks, and it’s like a boar’s grunt, a deep thing, from the thick part of his throat.

“Like, King Arthur, with knights and horses.”

Fat-ass thinks. I can hear it, like rust-flaked gears groaning slowly into motion, even smell it, yellow smoke emanating from his skull.

“I’d be the king,” he says.

“You can’t be the king,” I say. “No one is king. That’s like winning the lottery.”

“If I went back, I’d be king. And I’d fuck every virgin in the kingdom.”

“You can’t be king, asshole. You can’t even be duke. The fact that you even said that shows you’re not royalty. You’re a peasant.”

“Whenever people time travel, they go back and they are friends with the king, or they arethe king.”

“Because those are stories. When people tell stories, they’re alwaysabout the king; it’s Aristotle crap. But it’s not real.”

“Neither is time travel.”

“There are very few kings, and you certainly wouldn’t be one of them.”

“Fuck you.”

“Fuck you, Joe, you’re an idiot.”

“You’re an idiot.”

“I know,” I say. And I am. I am friends with a slug, and my other friends are pigs and wolves. I never make friends with nice things, just the shit.

“If you were king, I’d kill myself,” I say.

Joe sucks off his cigarette. It looks like the point of a golf tee in his fat, clenched paw.

He looks at me and the blue shadow-smoke drifts over the gate of his teeth like fog over a graveyard.

“Then you better die, mo’fucker, cuz I’m the king round these parts.”

He smiles with rotten teeth like busted shingles, all climbing over each other, and I think, Why don’t you get some braces, motherfucker, and brush those dang things? But I don’t really think about that too much because I’m thinking about something else, or at least getting ready to do something else, or already doing…

And before I even know it, or can enjoy the new look on Joe’s face, like a blubbery peekaboo face, so surprised, I’m driving us right toward the vague beige shadow-filled wall, and I can only see and hear Joe’s voice for a second, a high-pitched thing that cracks for just a second, and for that second I’m with his voice on a plateau in the black of space, wherever it is that noise cracks like that, and decibels live, and then it’s gone because there’s the metal sound so loud and it’s how I had always planned it to be, crunching, and a jerk, and the front of my head fills with the cold hollow sinus pain, the surprise punch in the nose that takes you back to childhood, and there’s an immediate link to every other time you ever had your nose hit, by a ball, by a head, by your own knee, and after the surprise, it doesn’t go away; but I’m still there and the tires behind me are screeching because my foot is still on the gas, and the car has gone a ways into the wall but it ain’t going any farther, and I look over at fat shit, and there is blood rolling out of a slice in his forehead, and some blood coming out of his mouth, and I think that it’s from the head gash until I see one of those teeth is now a black gap and he looks like a fat something-awful: hockey-player-pumpkin-cartoon-shithead, and he says, “Why the fuck did you do that, Manuel?”

I laugh like crazy, a laughter that explodes like popcorn, because he looks so fucking silly, and because my name isn’t even close to Manuel. That’s his brother’s name.

Joe just looks at me with that stupid look, covered in flowing blood, going onto his shirt like ketchup randomness, so much messier and more random than I could ever plan.

But I did paint those swirls, because I drove Grandpa’s car into the wall.

For six months I drove around town with that busted car. The front was smashed. I replaced the lights, but they were crooked and looked in different directions like Peter Falk’s glass eye and real eye. I didn’t care, and the cops didn’t catch me or pull me over. For a while.

I’m at school and when I pass Joe in the breezeway, I say, “Hey, Jack-O’, we doing this thing tonight?” because we’re friends again.

“Yeah,” he says. “Hector has the good shit.”

Everyone calls Joe “Jack-O’” now because he didn’t get a replacement tooth. He kept the hole because he thinks it makes him unique, and he stopped being mad at me after he figured out he wanted the gap, and then we would laugh about me being so crazy driving into the wall, and I smile when people bring it up, but really it was a failure. If only I had driven right through into some other reality, but the DeVille was sturdy, and yes, it was busted in the front, but not really as much as it could have been, and not so much that my parents got too suspicious when I said that another car backed into me.

Now me and Jack-O’ are driving down the dark 280 freeway. Me and fat boy cruising. And I think about that missing tooth, and that gap, and how there was never a gap in that place before, and about three dimensions, and how the gap was on the inside of his mouth unless he opened his mouth, and how things, shapes, folded in on themselves, and four dimensions, and if time is variable, then how do I vary it, and why do I want to? Because everything just focuses in on me and I hate it.

“If you were an Egyptian, what would you do?” I ask Joe.

“Don’t start this shit again, Michael.”

“Remember when you called me Manuel?”

“I never called you Manuel, idiot. I would be Pharaoh.”

“No, you’re too fat. Pharaohs are skinny,” I say.

“I don’t want to be an Egyptian: pyramids and mummies and shit, and sand, and all that, fuck it, it’s boring, man. I would be an Aztec, or a Mayan, like my peeps, and I’d cut your fucking heart out, homes.”

Joe is Mexican. His skin is an ashy light brown and his lashes are heavier than mine, and he has short, fat eyebrows and shit brown eyes, and thick hair that flops about his fat pumpkin head.

I wish I was Mexican, or Hebrew, I mean Jewish, I mean Israeli, or Mexican Jewish, or Mexican Jewish gay, because it can be so boring being you sometimes, and if you were the most special thing like that, it could be really great, but maybe some people say the same thing about you, and you want to tell those people: “No, you’re stupid, it’s no fun being me.”

“Maybe we should try it,” I say.

“Michael, I’m serious, don’t do something crazy just because we’re talking about your olden-time things again. Just let me the fuck out if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“No, man, I’m just saying that maybe those Mayans were onto something. Maybe if we take someone’s heart out and sacrifice it, then something special will happen.”

Joe looks at me like he wants to figure me out, and I know that he can’t figure me out because he isn’t laughing and he isn’t arguing, he is just staring.

“Maybe we could take Hector’sheart,” I say.

We are going to see Hector over at Foothill, the junior college. He lives near there and sells us shit, and we’re supposed to meet him in the corner of the parking lot. Hector isn’t a scary guy, he has a nice-guy face, but he could probably fuck somebody up if he wanted to.

“Hector would fuck you up,” says Joe.

“Not if I stabbed him in the stomach,” I say, and I’m reaching under my seat with my left hand as I say this, and I pull out a foot-long kitchen knife and then I point it at Joe while I’m still driving.

“Fuck you, Michael. Fuck you, Mike– al!” He screams and I laugh because he has funny inflections when he gets excited. “Why do you have to be like this?” he says. “Why do you have to be Jack the Ripper psycho? Why do you have to be so crazy? I just want to buy some weed, I don’t want to kill anyone, and I don’t want to take their heart!”

“You said you wanted to, puta,so I’m just saying, then let’s doit!” I’m talking with a phony accent.

“Don’t call me puta,bitch! And put that fucking knife down! And watch the road!”

I poke the knife at him, at his fat stomach, lightly poking at it with the tip of the knife, but he’s wearing a puffy North Face jacket, so it doesn’t stab him.

“Stop it!” he says.

I love driving down an empty dark freeway, lit up intermittently by the lights at the side of the road, and when I see the lights, I think of all the little worlds out there, all the little animals living in their habitats out there, and how we could pull over and have an adventure at any one of these forgotten pockets of the world, just nothing zones, backwash refuse property in the wake of the great freeways, and I like passing all of them, racing down the freeway, like a tunnel into the night, and racing but still being able to carry on a whole action scene with Joe, and I think it is like life because I am racing, and time is pushing me forward and it’s not going to stop and I will have a few passengers in the vehicle with me, and it’s either enjoy the scenery together, or listen to some music we both like, or maybe just have a little poking knife game because you want to know if the other person is really there.

We smoke with Hector and get so high. Finally he has sold us some good shit. We smoke out of his mini dragon bong, out in the lightless corner of the Foothill parking lot. It’s a pretty great spot—you just walk up the hill a little ways, and it’s under some weeping willows, and there is a small stream, and brick buildings, and a faux altar constructed out of stones.

We smoke more and we cough every time. I think about the little dragon that the bong is and I so wish that dragons were real, because it would mean that none of this shit was the end of everything, because this world sucks, and even if you are high it only lets you escape a little bit, it lets you escape enough that you know there could be something better, but it won’t let you intothat place; like standing on the cloudy threshold of heaven and seeing something so bright and tantalizing and warmy-womby feeling but not being able to enter, just feeling the heat a little on your face, and you want to cry and smile, but instead you just stare and you can’t do anything.

“Hector,” I say. I am lying on the altar thing and staring up through one of the willows, whose drooping, arcing branches are like jagged fissures in the sky. Hector is sitting against the base of the willow’s trunk. “Would you rather be the pope or Pablo Escobar?”

Hector doesn’t think long.

“Escobar, bitch, he gets to have all the fun.”

“Pope gets to live in the Vatican, see Michelangelo all the time,” I say.

“Escobar,” says Joe. He is superhigh. He hogged more of the weed than Hector and me and he is hunched like a pile of trash against the base of the altar. His head hangs forward like a sleeping mule’s.

“Shut up, Joe,” I say. “We know what you want. You want the knife.”

“What knife?” says Hector.

“This putawanted to cut out your heart with this knife,” I say, and hold up the knife for Hector to see. It reflects a little in the dark.

“If you try, I will fucking kill you, homes,” Hector says to Joe. It seems like he’s angry, but he’s too tired and high to get really angry.

“I didn’t say I wanted to… ,” says Joe, but he doesn’t finish.

“Fuck you, lard-ass,” says Hector, and Hector and I laugh, and Joe shifts a little because he is angry, but he is too lazy to get up, so he just shifts around.

He’s still looking at the ground, but he says, “No, Hector, this fucker is always asking me stupid questions and trying to kill me. He wanted to cut out your heart, homes. That’s how I lost my tooth.”

“No,” says Hector. “You lost that because you are Jack-O’ the jackoff.”

Me and Hector laugh.

Then we all sit for a while not saying anything. I can feel their mind-killing slime thought rubbing on me and corroding me, and killing me.

“Hector,” I say.

“Yes,” he says without looking up.

“Would you rather be gay or be a girl?”

He chuckles a little. Hector can be cool sometimes. Sometimes he is wise.

“Neither,” he says.

“Just saying,” I say. “If you had to choose because a genie said so, what would you choose?”

Joe, still looking at the dark dirt, says, “Both of ’em still have to suck dick.”

“Exactly,” says Hector. And Joe laughs a little. A chuckling pile of trash below me.

“Would that be so bad?” I say. “Don’t you ever get jealous of those girls in pornos that get to be on their knees in the middle of all those dicks?”

“Are you fucking serious?” says Hector.

“Don’t,” says Joe. “This faggot is always asking stupid questions and giving stupid answers; he don’t mean it.”

“No,” says Hector. “This faggot is serious.” He’s looking at me now, I can tell.

“Yeah,” I say. “Don’t you like the idea of an around-the-world blowbang?”

“I like to have a girl suck my dick, but I don’t want to doit,” says Hector.

“Me neither,” says Joe, but he is mumbling.

“Why not?” I say. “What’s the difference?”

“What’s the difference?” says Hector. “Because I am going in, and she is being got inside of.”

“And why is one better? Why does going inside make you better? Aren’t you, like, on her turf inside her, isn’t she in control of you? Like a mommy with her little baby making him feel good?”

“Because,” says Hector. But he doesn’t say anything else.

*   *   *

On the way home Joe and I are driving down the empty freeway. It’s like two thirty in the morning and we’re still pretty high, and if I look up, directly at the road lights above us, I can see kaleidoscopic rainbows building and turning on top of each other in the core of the bulbs.

And I feel like I’m remembering all this from somewhere, but I’m not sure where, and everything is a little hazy, and I remember that there is an angel named Michael, and he had a flaming sword, and…

And I say to Joe, “Let’s drive the wrong way down the other side of the freeway.”

Joe is almost asleep, but he says, “Wha?” and I can see the black gap just to the left of the center of his mouth.

“I’m going over to that side,” I say.

And I think of the olden times, when knights would aim huge lances at each other and you would feelthat when it hit you, feelthat force of the momentum of the horses’ pumping, channeled into the lance, and for a second you might know that you were really alive. And a little ways down the freeway there is a gap in the center barrier, and I turn the wheel and cross over.

Yosemite

The drive up to Yosemite was long. My father played Bach the whole first half. We drove through Milpitas, Pleasanton, Dublin, Manteca, Escalon, and Oakdale. We had been to Yosemite before with my mom, but that was when it was snowing. There wasn’t going to be snow this time and it was just me and my dad and my brother.

At the turnoff for the Old Yosemite Road, the sun turned tangerine and my dad took out the Bach and put in a tape of his meditation lady. My brother and I chanted with her using funny voices, but that lasted only a few minutes, then we were quiet again. My dad drove and hummed quietly to himself. My brother and I would trade the front seat at every rest stop. I was two years older, but I got carsick more easily, so I got the front longer. I had been in the front since East Oakdale. The Old Yosemite Road was crooked and my dad drove slower. Soon the sky was getting gray, but there was purple above the mountains. My brother was asleep in the back. He was slanted over with his face in all the puffy jackets.

“Dad, can I turn the heat up?”

“Yup.” I did and cupped my hand over the grate until it was too hot and I pulled it away. I wasn’t tired even though it was dark outside and we’d been driving for hours. I leaned forward but my seat belt held me, so I undid it and leaned again and picked up my father’s old, thick Bible with pages falling out and a rubber band around it.

“Put your belt back on,” he said.

“I know,” I said. I clicked it in place. “I was just picking this up.”

“My Bible.”

“I know,” I said. “Why are the lines colored?” There was yellow, and pink, and green highlighter, all faded, all over the pages.

“Those are passages I like.”

I asked him why.

“Because they help me.” I read a little. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.It meant nothing. I closed it.

“You go to church?”

“No,” he said. The lady and the people on the meditation tape were chanting softly.

“Why do you have the Bible?”

“I just open it when I get in the car. Whatever page it opens to, I read.”

“Why?”

“I told you, it helps me.”

I put the rubber band back around the leather cover and held the thick thing in my lap. We went through a town with only a few lights and my dad slowed. The headlights bounced off some signs into my eyes. One said Yosemite thirty miles. Then we were on the windy part going up the mountain. The tape came to the end and my dad ejected it and left it sticking out of the player. It was white. The Bible tried to slip down my leg and I held on to it.

“Adam and Eve,” I said.

“Yup,” my dad said.

“Noah.”

“Yup.”

“Moses, Abraham. Jesus, David. The flood, killing the ram, the plagues, first there was light, then darkness, then water, then land, then the Garden of Eden.”

“Where did you learn all that?”

“At Sunday school, where Mom takes us.”

“Unity?”

“Yeah.” We got quiet as we wound up the mountain. The car went so close to the sides and there wasn’t always a barrier. Last time we did this part of the drive in the dark too and I hated it. I secretly held on to the side of the door with my right hand. There were pennies in the handle and I pushed them back and forth in the holder with my index finger. Dad’s AA medallion was in there too.

I hoisted up a little and tried to look over the side of the cliff but there were just trees and black, and there was too much back and forth, so I sat back. I tried to pretend we were going into the Misty Mountains and there were goblins around us, but I felt dizzy and I stopped. We kept going and I couldn’t sleep, all I could do was sit there.

“You want to know what my dad did with me when I was little?”

“What?” We were talking quietly because of my brother in the back.

“Nothing.” He laughed a little. “My dad was a son of a bitch.”

We were quiet for a while.

“Why do we go to Yosemite all the time?”

“We’ve only been a couple times. You don’t like it?”

“No, I do. I like the Ahwahnee. But why do we go?”

“I guess because nature makes me feel good. And I want to spend time with you and Alex.”

“Because you love us?”

“Yeah, because I love you, and I’ve missed you.”

At the Ahwahnee there was no one around. We parked and followed the footlights along the stone path. My dad carried Alex in one arm and his suitcase in his other hand. I followed with my heavy backpack. The lady at the desk gave my dad a card key and I followed his footsteps down the red carpet with the boxy Indian designs.

In the room, my dad lay Alex on one of the two beds and told me to get into my pajamas. He got some things from his suitcase and went into the bathroom, then the water started running. I took off my shoes and socks and jeans and put on my gray sweatpants and took my toothbrush into the bathroom. I was barefoot and the floor was cold. My dad was in his T-shirt, sitting on the toilet in the corner.

“You should knock.”

“Sorry, I heard water.”

“It’s okay. Brush your teeth.” I did and looked only at myself in the mirror. “There’s some toothpaste in my toiletry bag there.” The square black bag unzipped around the whole side and opened like a mouth. There were two gray Bic razors, and a black and red can of shaving cream that said Barbasol, and a small white and green tube of toothpaste with a Roman column on it. The toothpaste was grainy on my brush and chalky in my mouth. If I looked at the border of the mirror I could see a slanted version of my dad wiping. He stayed on the seat and put the toilet paper between his legs. I always stood up to do it. He wiped for a long time and I mostly looked in my own eyes. Then he was behind me.

“If you brush like that you’re going to ruin your gums.”

“No I’m not.”

“Do it like this.” He took his brush and did strokes in only one direction at a time, starting from the gums he went down on the top teeth and then up on the bottom teeth. My dad’s teeth were long and nice, except one was a little yellow. He also had heavy eyelids that made him look a little evil.

We went to bed. I lay in the bed with Alex but he didn’t wake up. My eyes got used to the dark and I wandered them down the red band of Indian patterns at the top of the wall. The design was like one long zigzagging tunnel. The room was dark and quiet and full of bodies and I fell asleep.

In the morning we ate in the great hall. The walls were made of stone and there was a fire in the huge stone fireplace in the center. The pillars around the room were huge, made out of real trees.

“Pancakes are good for hiking,” my father said. “Try to eat all of them.” I tried. I had pancakes and orange juice and hot chocolate and Alex had French toast and hot chocolate and my father ate scrambled eggs and bacon and black coffee. It was all stuff that we didn’t usually eat; we usually had cereal at home. There were also little circular plastic jelly containers with pictures of fruit on them, dewy orange slices, a huge glistening strawberry, two raspberries, side by side, plump and wet. I didn’t have any toast because of the pancakes, but I lined the jellies up at the top of my plate. Five colorful circles.

“Alex only ate half of his French toast,” I said. Three halves of the French toast were soaked in a swamp of syrup.

“He’s smaller.”

“Why do I have to eat all my pancakes?”

“You don’t. But they’re good for energy. That’s what hikers do, they eat a bunch of carbohydrates and your body keeps them inside as spare energy when you need it. If we’re going to go to Yosemite Falls, then you’ll need your energy.”

“Can we go down the waterfall?” said Alex.

“No, stupid, you’d die,” I said.

“Don’t say that. Yes, you would die. The waterfall is very powerful and there are rocks at the bottom. But every once in a while someone gets trapped in the current at the top and they go over by accident.”

“And they die?” said Alex.

“Yup.”

“I don’t want to die,” said Alex.

“ Everyonedies,” I said.

“I’m not going to.”

“You have to,” I said. “You’re going to freakin’ die.”

“Chris, stop.” My dad didn’t get loud but he took my hand and squeezed. “Alex,” he said to my brother. “You might have to die, but it will be okay.” Alex shook his head. “Dying isn’t bad, it’s just another trip. Like our trip here, to Yosemite. It’s like going to another Yosemite.”

Alex said, “I hate Yosemite and I hate dying.” My dad was done with his eggs and had only half a piece of bacon left neatly at the side of his plate. He had put his knife and fork in the center to signal that he was finished. I put my knife and fork the same way on top of the last downy pancake.

My dad sipped his coffee then put the mug down and said, “I know you boys don’t like coming to Yosemite. But I think when you’re older you’ll appreciate it. I never had a place like this when I was young. And if you really don’t like it, we never need to come again. Okay?”

“I want to never come again,” said Alex.

“I like Yosemite,” I said.

“You can go on the waterfall and die,” said Alex.

“Shut up,” I said. I mashed one of his French toasts with my thumb. Alex whined and it looked like he was going to cry.

“Alex, stop. Chris, stop.” We both sat still. “Listen. Neither of you is going to die for a very long time. I promise. And when you do, you can go anywhere you want. It doesn’t have to be Yosemite. It can be any place.”

“Round Table,” said Alex. He meant Round Table Pizza.

On the trail we walked in a line. I was last. We had our puffy jackets on but it wasn’t too cold. Mine was brown and lighter brown, Alex’s was red and blue, and my dad’s was all blue, bigger and less puffy. I told myself brown was better than red and blue.

The sun was low and shot shafts of gold at an angle through the trees. From far away I could see insects and atmosphere dancing, but when I walked through the light it was warm and the insects were gone. The ground was dry. No one was around. It was just us walking.

Our first stop was supposed to be a bunch of caves. My dad pointed up off the trail and we walked up an incline. After a bit, as we walked up the hill, I could see some people standing in front of the caves. When we got closer, I saw that they were a man and a woman in their thirties, wearing shorts and hiking boots and backpacks. The man had light curly hair like mine but his was down to his ears, and the woman had long, straight brown hair. Her legs were thin like a horse’s, and on her knee there was a purple brown scab.

“How’s it going?” my dad said.

“Not bad,” the man said. “Some candles here.” We walked up closer and saw that there was a large circle of white candles in the dirt. The circle was large enough for a person to lie in the middle. “There’s another one in there,” the man said and pointed up toward the cave. My father said nothing, but he took Alex’s hand.

Not long before, I had gone to see The Little Mermaidwith my mom and Alex at the Old Mill Theater. Seeing movies was one of our traditions. In the middle of the movie I got up and went to the bathroom. On the way back I looked into another theater and saw a few minutes of a movie called The First Power. Lou Diamond Phillips was in it. I loved him as Chavez in Young Gunsso I watched. I knew that it was about the devil and I wasn’t supposed to watch. The killer had tied up a woman and put her in the middle of a circle of candles. She was gagged and scared. The killer told her to relax and said he was going to say his prayers backward.

“Heaven, in art which father our are father which art in Heaven.” I left and went back to The Little Mermaidbut I couldn’t forget what I saw.

My father didn’t let us look at the candles in the cave, so we kept walking. He held Alex’s hand and I walked a little behind them. My father and brother both had straight brown hair. The sun was above us and it was hotter. My dad took off his jacket and I took off mine. Alex took his off and we stopped to wait for him to tie it around his waist, but he couldn’t do it so my dad carried it for him.

The next stop was El Capitan. It was a tall, boxy mountain that shot straight up out of the ground. In my mind I always thought of it as yellow-orange because I thought of all the mountains in colors: Half Dome was white and gray; Mount Lyell was green; Mount Dana was pink; Matterhorn Peak was blue; but up close El Capitan wasn’t yellow-orange, it was just dirty white and chalky.

“Look at that tree,” my dad said. It was a tree with reddish bark. High up, some of the branches had been ripped away and in places the bark was skinned off revealing the pale insides. “That’s fresh. It’s from rocks falling off the mountain.”

There was a little stream going almost next to the base of the mountain. My dad gave us time to explore on our own. I told him I didn’t want any rocks to fall on me and he promised that they wouldn’t. I had nothing to do so I found a place with some sun and I sat with my back against the mountain. I took my shoes off and let my feet feel the air. The water was very close and it trickled and sparkled. From somewhere close I could hear my brother’s voice, high and demanding, and my father’s voice, deep and calming.

Sitting in the sun I felt empty. I was a black center in the middle of all the nature. I was nothing but I could do anything. I could fill myself with anything. I said a prayer. I asked God that I would never be like my father. I told God that I didn’t want to have sons. I said that if I died I would like to have done something good before that happened. I prayed that my brother would die, and then I took it back.

Later, on a large, flat oval rock we had our lunch. The hotel had packed us sandwiches and Cokes. I had turkey on wheat with sprouts and cranberries. It was the best sandwich I’d ever eaten. The Coke washed it down and the sugar stuck to my teeth.

* * *

To get to Yosemite Falls we walked through a very green and wet part of the park. The ground was full of mud and damp needles. All the rocks were wet and had a blue gloss. Soon the noise of the falls started growing, and after a while the sound was all around us. A steady rush of horror saying, “You are small and insignificant,” and getting so loud that you just wanted to see to get it over with and get out of there. Some people were walking back from the falls toward us. A couple with dark hair and dark clothes. They said nothing as they passed.