Divisadero Read online

  I was sixteen the year I took the roads travelling south, running away from my father, with Coop’s heart in me. And I kept travelling it seemed for another ten years among strangers, alone, never intimate, slowly building a confidence in my solitude. But during that first journey, I sat in the spacious cab of that commercial refrigeration truck and stared and stared, swallowing everything I saw, so that whatever existed in me would be washed away. KUZZ-AM played Buck Owens singing ‘Under Your Spell Again,’ and I swallowed that as well. I had run out and jumped into the driver’s cab at the truck stop on Highway 101, and he, luckily, was going inland first, to Merced, Mercy, and then south on 99. It was a route separate from my father’s. We continued to Dinuba, where he ate Mexican food, then Cutler and Visalia. It began to darken and my mysterious new friend headed south and west to a place he said we could stay. We drove alongside orange groves and a state prison in the moonlight, and finally entered the deserted town of Allensworth. He said it had been abandoned for more than forty years. We would be the only ones there.

  All I could see at that hour were the outlines of a score of houses. We drove beyond them till we were in a campground, and he climbed out and left me the cab to sleep in. I stretched out on the old leather seat. It would be the last night of my youth. And I kept my eyes open for as long as I could. I heard the night birds. Then the trains that shook the earth under me all night.

  In the morning I walked among the beautiful pastel-painted houses of Colonel Allensworth’s abandoned town. The two of us climbed the steps up to each home, walked along their verandahs, reading the plaques that described the general store in 1912, the hotel, a school, a library. We peered in the windows and saw an old player piano, a picture of Lincoln. He said he always stayed in Allensworth on his journeys, a former depot town settled by blacks. We returned to the truck, which he had parked under the trees, and soon we were on the highway again. It was early and we were in one of those valley fogs called ground clouds. We could hear birds through the open windows, and we saw red-winged blackbirds dart out of the whiteness across the road.

  He kept talking to me in English, but I still returned mostly silence. If I spoke, I spoke my mother’s Spanish, or my tentative French. He knew I was raw with something, that I had some poison within me. He spoke to me anyway, telling me about Colonel Allensworth and the trains that since 1916 had refused to stop at the depot run by the black community. He must have known I could understand everything he said, for he spoke openly, and had stopped waiting for answers. At some point during that last morning with him, he went on about books and how they signalled the possibilities of our lives, and he recited to me what he said were the most beautiful lines. ‘Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.’ I know where those lines come from now, but I didn’t then, and when I did eventually stumble on them I froze and burst into tears for the first time in my adult life.

  At Bakersfield he dropped me off, and slipped some money into my pocket. I started to walk through the sparse town, my life ahead of me. He had never touched me that whole time. I gave him a kiss at the truck stop. My last good kiss. I kissed no one for a long time after that. I have come to believe he was Mister Allensworth guiding me south.

  This is the story I wished I could have someday told Coop— perhaps in a letter, perhaps in a phone call. But he, my first darling, was lost to me, and I was too far away by then, in another life.

  Stumbling on a Name

  It took Aldo Vea two days to locate Coop from the phone number that Claire had read out to him. ‘It’s a chalet, along the south shore of Tahoe,’ he said. ‘He must be renting the place.’

  Claire parked at the foot of the hill. ‘Chalet’ was perhaps too grand a word. Halfway up the steep walk she called his name. When she reached the deck she saw the front door wide open and the body, face-down, a cane chair taped to his hand. Coop had always been strong, but it looked as though someone had beaten half the blood out of his face. He was conscious and he glared up at her. Turning him she saw dark bruises on his neck. This hadn’t just happened.

  When the medics arrived, when they asked questions—Who had done it? Where did it hurt most? Was there still pain in his head?—he waved them away. She told the medics she would stay with him. Then he’s lucky, they said, he’s going to need help. They left and she remained beside him, waking him every few hours, as they’d told her to do, to check on him. Later he woke on his own and she fed him soft-boiled eggs. He could talk, but he was essentially reflecting the questions awkwardly. She remembered that embarrassed smile of his when she accused him of walking like a gangster. That had been only two days earlier.

  What happened? Was this connected to your work?

  Work, he said in a monotone. Then, What work?

  The poker.

  She watched him searching for an answer, as for a misplaced thing, a pencil, a lighter. He doesn’t know what I’m talking about, she thought.

  You play poker, Coop.

  There was a grimace of a laugh then.

  You are a gambler. That’s what you do. Do you know my name?

  He said nothing to her.

  Do you remember me? Do you remember Anna?

  ‘Anna,’ drawn out as if it were a new word he must learn to pronounce.

  Thank you, Anna, he said when she took away the tray and the bowl that had held his eggs.

  Gotraskhalana is a term in Sanskrit poetics for calling a loved one by a wrong name, and means, literally, ‘stumbling on the name.’ It’s a familiar occurrence in the Restoration-like fables of marital life and love affairs collected by the scholar Wendy Doniger. What these verbal accidents do is aim a flashlight into the brain, reveal its vast museum of facts and desires. So when Coop assumed quite logically that her name was ‘Anna,’ a bulb lit a surprising pathway Claire never would have believed could be travelled. Just for now, she thought to herself, just for a thrill.

  Coop’s memory, the Coop she knew, seemed to have sunk without trace. Only his motor skills remained adept. When she went for groceries, she bought a deck of cards and a Sharpie pen. Deal, she said when she returned to the chalet, and he immediately and efficiently slid fifty-two playing cards out of his fingers into four piles. But there was no knowledge of the game until she explained the basic rules. Then he knew where he was. Whatever Claire said to him he learned, though if she gave an alternative possibility he became confused. When she tried, on the second day, to correct Coop about her name, it proved too difficult. We remember the first things we learn.

  With forgetfulness, what remains of the desire that consumed Coop? Where does it go? Obsession, so finely tuned, is misplaced with this dramatic loss of autobiography. So that someone watching him on his hands and knees on the thin chalet carpeting is perhaps witnessing a frantic search for that physical half that longed to lock itself like a claw in the body of another. A few hours later he is no longer aware of what has left him, the body’s role muted, the brain refusing to give any clue as to what he once wanted so badly. He falls into a relieved sleep in the single bed, unaware of the panorama of his week, unaware of a motive for these wounds, unconcerned with the need to avenge himself. Desire and obsession so slight. One organ, the hippocampus, closes down, and we are redirected into an emptiness.

  Faces become anonymous to him now, like shadows in the grass. Who is this woman who is here with him? Another woman rises from a bed. When does that happen? He sees himself pulling her into the spray of the shower, her yellow hair turning brown around her face, he cannot connect this person with anything— a house, a street. He likes being in the small bathroom with her, and her lazy strength. Flecked with water, she opens a drawer and pulls out a hair dryer, tests it on her arm, and lets it blow into her hair, lightening it, tossing it like wheat. Her face changes as she does this, her head surrounded now with a texture. She diverts the cone of hot air across her body and pulls the cord out of the wall, and he hears th
at subliminal sonar tumble in its dying sound.

  She would wake in the night and go to kneel beside his bed and listen for his breath, stare at him. She kept trying to recognize the young face she had known, beneath the bruises and the stubble. Coop. She had spent half of her life with Coop and Anna, and now there was only this unclear shadow of him in the moonlit room. As she watched him he opened his eyes, and she could tell he recognized nothing. It was as if she did not exist in the room. Do you want some water? Yes. Here. She held the glass to his dry mouth.

  They took slow walks on the trails above the chalet. If Coop went alone, Claire would write her mobile number on his arm with the Sharpie. One night, when he had been gone for a while, she looked down from the deck and saw car lights at the foot of the hill and then three men struggling their way up the chalet stairs. They were surprised by her presence. When they asked for Coop, she pretended no knowledge of him. The previous tenant skipped town, she said, left a few things behind. She was leasing the place now. She gave them the owner’s name, which Vea had mentioned. They took Coop’s things and said they might return, in case he came back. She called Vea then and told him what had happened, what she had found when she got to the chalet, that she was sure the three were the men who’d almost killed Coop. ‘Okay, Claire, the two of you leave now. Just drive. Wherever you feel like, don’t make it logical.’

  They left as soon as Coop returned, and drove deep into Nevada, into the desert. They stopped whenever they were hungry or tired, sometimes at night, sometimes during the blazing afternoons. She bought a Polaroid camera and took a picture wherever they stopped. She thought it would help him remember the present. She balanced the camera on the hood of her car, set the timer, then ran to where he was, and waited for the click to release them from their pose. The extra seconds felt long, falsely intimate, their eyes half closed because of the bright sunlight around them.

  Do you remember how to drive?

  It looks easy.

  Yeah, sure. You can deal cards, you can drive.

  They climbed out to switch seats. In the driver’s seat he twisted the rearview mirror so he could see his bruised face, the marks of iodine, then repositioned it to look behind him, as if he could now clearly see where he had come from. She leaned against the passenger door and watched him handle the clutch and the gearshift with ease. She was fifteen years old again, and he was teaching her to drive.

  She began to think where they should go. A danger had focussed itself on Coop, and she did not know whether it was only Tahoe that was unsafe for him. She had no knowledge of the extent of his world. She remembered Vea’s remark about randomness and made Coop double back, and they entered California and went north through the old gold towns. She bought a local map and discovered a place called Hass, nestled in the hills. They arrived there in the afternoon and checked in to a two-storey brick hotel. There was one room available, so they shared it. When Coop removed his shirt, she saw that the bruises on his chest and arms were now an ugly yellow. He had not complained of pain since they’d left Tahoe. She recalled the Absorbine horse liniment that she and Anna used to rub on each other as kids, its smell—cowboy perfume, they called it. Claire gave Coop the bed and took the sofa. They were silent and separate in the attempted darkness of the hotel room, knowing that outside it was still bright daylight.

  You okay?

  Yeah.

  The hum of the drive was still in her body.

  So tell me about yourself, Anna. How do we know each other?

  She was silent.

  You knew I could drive.

  What?

  You said I knew how to drive.

  Well, yes, most people do.

  I was a gambler.

  Yes, you said that, the day we met.

  There was a pause, and Claire tried to slip him back, into the past. Do you remember the day with the fox?

  The fox …

  Then they were silent. He must have fallen asleep. Coop’s ‘How do we know each other?’ burned in her. Anna and Coop and Claire. The three of them, she had always believed, made up a three-panelled Japanese screen, each one self-sufficient, but revealing different qualities or tones when placed beside the others. Those screens made more sense to her than single-framed paintings from the West that existed without context. Their lives, surely, remained linked, wherever they were. Coop had been adopted into the family in much the same way that she had been taken from the hospital in Santa Rosa and brought home beside Anna. An orphan and a changeling … they had evolved, intimate as siblings, from that moment. She’d lived one of her essential lives with Coop, and she could never dismantle herself from him.

  She went over in the dark to his bed and saw his face; it was sallow in the shut-away afternoon light. Once more he opened his eyes and looked at her, looked, she thought, at nothing. His lips were dry. There was no water in the room. No tap. The shower was down the hall. She spat onto her fingers and rubbed them over his lips and saw him trying to swallow. He took her wrist before she could withdraw it, and held it for a moment. Anna, he said. No, she said. No, not Anna.

  Claire went back to the sofa and sat across from him in the dark, trying to retrieve any other details he’d mentioned that day when they had met in the diner. He’d suggested there was a problem. ‘Things are difficult for me right now,’ he had thrown out, almost too casually.

  Do you gamble always? she had asked him then.

  One or two games a week now. I used to play endlessly.

  I don’t understand such a world … what its blessings are.

  It’s no different from any compulsive work. Some live a full life. I had one friend who was a Deadhead, but he was also involved with local politics. He’d play cards socially in a casino in Grass Valley.

  Is he your friend still?

  Unfortunately no.

  Sounds like you should have stuck with him.

  Then she had said, Do you ever think of our farm? And he had not said anything. And she had let his silence fall between them.

  What is your mission, do you think? Vea had asked her once. And she didn’t know. In spite of her desire for a contained universe, her life felt scattered, full of many small moments, without great purpose. That is what she thought, though what is most untrustworthy about our natures and self-worth is how we differ in our own realities from the way we are seen by others. What Claire later remembered, for instance, of her walk with Coop back to her hotel in Tahoe that day was her pleasure in his presence, and how invisible she believed herself to be in their brief hour or two together. She was simply happy to be walking beside him, nursing her tiredness, listening to him talk about the world he lived in. This extraordinary recurrence of him back into her life, the grandness of the names of the towns—Vegas, Grass Valley, Nevada City, Tahoe—seemed iconic, something discovered on an adult’s map. If she had been told that Coop mused on her brown shoulders, that he had been remembering how she had saved his life in that ice storm, that somehow she was perhaps the heroine of their meeting, she would not have believed such a truth. We relive stories and see ourselves only as the watcher or listener, the drummer in the background keeping cadence.

  There was sunlight in their room when Claire woke. Coop was waiting for her, already dressed. ‘We need to visit Grass Valley, to find someone,’ she said. ‘We need to go back the way we came.’ So they headed towards Nevada City and the neighbouring town of Grass Valley, where there might still be the casino in which Coop’s friend, the Deadhead, used to play. She had no idea if the man still lived there or even what his name was.

  They reached Nevada City and had a meal, and afterwards Coop sat in a chair in the foyer of the National Hotel, while Claire went out and bought some poster board. That evening she stood outside the Gold Rush Gaming Parlor in Grass Valley, with a sign in front of her that said ARE YOU COOPER’S FRIEND? At about ten o’clock a man with shells around his neck walked up to her and asked her who she was.

  Dorn got into the car and looked at Coop. He pu
t his palm up to the bruised face. A gesture, not a touch. He suggested they leave her car in Grass Valley. Dorn helped Coop into his station wagon. There was a hound, alert in the front passenger seat with no intention of moving into the back.

  Dorn’s home was a modest bungalow a mile or two from town. He began cooking a meal he called ‘broccoli surprise,’ and a short while later Ruth arrived with their six-year-old daughter to find the house busy with strangers. Ruth walked over to Coop and embraced him. Dorn explained the situation to her, and they moved some of their daughter’s things out of her bedroom so Coop and Claire could use it.

  After the broccoli surprise, in which no broccoli could be found, Ruth began to examine Coop’s wounds. She turned to Claire. It’s been a long while since I’ve seen him, she said.

  Did you know him well?

  Yes, I was one of the boys, then. And Coop was ‘The Untouchable.’

  Claire was enjoying watching Coop, now in the context of his old friends, even if the affection and concern flowed only one way, towards Coop’s unawareness. Dorn lit a joint, passed it over to Claire, and spoke of the incident with The Brethren, and then moved to various anecdotes in which the well-dressed Dauphin drifted in and out. Then Claire told Dorn and Ruth about their childhood in Petaluma. The three were slowly piecing together Coop’s life as he sat there uninterested, studying the small movements in the room, the billow of a curtain, the leather sole of Claire’s brown shoe, tapping whenever there was music. ‘If we can stay with you a couple more nights, that would be good,’ she said. ‘Then we’ll go.’ ‘Fine, stay longer if you wish,’ Dorn replied. The dog was sitting on the sofa beside Dorn, listening to him with a concerned and dutiful look. His Master’s Voice. Claire was finally beginning to feel safe, with Dorn, this family man. He must have at one time been a lean hippie, she thought, a lovely elder brother for Coop.