dead and make some more money off of them.”
Dad snorted, an air-through-the-nose sound, and waggled his head. On the way home, we passed the liquor store and the Chevron
station and the McDonald’s with the clay Grimace sprouting from the flower bed like a purple shrub. At a traffic light, Mom
flipped the visor down and checked her hair, tucking a few wayward strands behind her ears, fluffing the back with quick pushes
of her hand.
“How much money do you think the drive-in takes in on a busy night like this one?” Dad asked.
“Hell, I don’t know. How should I know?”
“There must have been two hundred cars tonight. Two hundred cars at three dollars a car. It’d be like picking an apple. That
easy. There’s just the one guy sitting by himself in the ticket booth, and he can’t be more than eighteen.”
She exhaled a mushroom of smoke, flipped the visor back up.
It was its own twilight, that moment. No click and pause, no “watch this,” just dark getting on with its business. My dad
couldn’t stop what he was about to do any more than he could unthink a thought. He would go back to the drive-in with a butcher
knife wrapped in newspaper to pick his apple — but since he wasn’t Butch or Sundance, not fast or lucky or clever, nothing
would go right. The police would catch him before he was even out of the drive-in, and he’d spend weeks in the Fresno County
jail, waiting for the trial, wearing an orange jumpsuit that looked like pajamas and eating, not hunks of stale bread, but
regular food, things we had at home, like baloney sandwiches and pork ’n’ beans and oatmeal. At the trial, the judge would
give him the least-harsh sentence: two years at a work camp in New Mexico, where he was born. He’d be a slave for the state
there, clearing brush, building roads and ditches. Given phone time, he’d call our mom to say in fourteen different ways that
she’d better not be having an affair, by God, she’d better not be or he didn’t know — “shit, please, baby, please” — what
he’d do.
B EFORE THE LINDBERGHS, ALL of our placements were in the suburbs of Fresno or in town proper. To get to the Clapps’, you had to drive through the country,
but the Lindberghs’ house
was
the country. Our bus stop at our neighbors’, the Abels’, mailbox lay beyond one barbed-wire fence and two electric ones.
For the first few weeks of crawling under and through these, my sisters and I snagged T-shirts and felt the tingle — hot and
icy at the same time — as electrified wire grazed one of our shoulder blades or the tops of our heads. Then, suddenly, we
were naturals, stooping to the right level automatically, like knowing the steps of a dance not in your head but in your body,
which doesn’t forget.
The Abels raised cows and pigs for slaughter. Several barrels used for catching blood and entrails stood in their barn, and
though they washed them out after every use, we could smell the barrels clear from the side of the road where we waited for
bus number six to take us to Jefferson Elementary. I couldn’t imagine the Lindberghs ever keeping animals like that, for food.
Bub was too soft. You could hear it when he talked to the horses and our dogs, Bear and Badger, and even to the chipmunks
that ran around on the woodpile. Baby talk, low and combed with honey. When the man came out to castrate our two male calves
so they could be sold at auction for beef, Bub had to walk in a circle as soon as the first clamp went on. I felt a twinge
too, when Twister started to bawl, but I watched everything — it was too weird and disgusting not to. The man obviously knew
what he was doing and was quick with his knife, slitting the outer sack like the skin of a fig, then gripping the exposed
testicle between his index and middle finger. It was as pink as a tongue.
Living on a ranch meant we had chores: a flake of hay for each of the horses, morning and night; fresh
Dad snorted, an air-through-the-nose sound, and waggled his head. On the way home, we passed the liquor store and the Chevron
station and the McDonald’s with the clay Grimace sprouting from the flower bed like a purple shrub. At a traffic light, Mom
flipped the visor down and checked her hair, tucking a few wayward strands behind her ears, fluffing the back with quick pushes
of her hand.
“How much money do you think the drive-in takes in on a busy night like this one?” Dad asked.
“Hell, I don’t know. How should I know?”
“There must have been two hundred cars tonight. Two hundred cars at three dollars a car. It’d be like picking an apple. That
easy. There’s just the one guy sitting by himself in the ticket booth, and he can’t be more than eighteen.”
She exhaled a mushroom of smoke, flipped the visor back up.
It was its own twilight, that moment. No click and pause, no “watch this,” just dark getting on with its business. My dad
couldn’t stop what he was about to do any more than he could unthink a thought. He would go back to the drive-in with a butcher
knife wrapped in newspaper to pick his apple — but since he wasn’t Butch or Sundance, not fast or lucky or clever, nothing
would go right. The police would catch him before he was even out of the drive-in, and he’d spend weeks in the Fresno County
jail, waiting for the trial, wearing an orange jumpsuit that looked like pajamas and eating, not hunks of stale bread, but
regular food, things we had at home, like baloney sandwiches and pork ’n’ beans and oatmeal. At the trial, the judge would
give him the least-harsh sentence: two years at a work camp in New Mexico, where he was born. He’d be a slave for the state
there, clearing brush, building roads and ditches. Given phone time, he’d call our mom to say in fourteen different ways that
she’d better not be having an affair, by God, she’d better not be or he didn’t know — “shit, please, baby, please” — what
he’d do.
B EFORE THE LINDBERGHS, ALL of our placements were in the suburbs of Fresno or in town proper. To get to the Clapps’, you had to drive through the country,
but the Lindberghs’ house
was
the country. Our bus stop at our neighbors’, the Abels’, mailbox lay beyond one barbed-wire fence and two electric ones.
For the first few weeks of crawling under and through these, my sisters and I snagged T-shirts and felt the tingle — hot and
icy at the same time — as electrified wire grazed one of our shoulder blades or the tops of our heads. Then, suddenly, we
were naturals, stooping to the right level automatically, like knowing the steps of a dance not in your head but in your body,
which doesn’t forget.
The Abels raised cows and pigs for slaughter. Several barrels used for catching blood and entrails stood in their barn, and
though they washed them out after every use, we could smell the barrels clear from the side of the road where we waited for
bus number six to take us to Jefferson Elementary. I couldn’t imagine the Lindberghs ever keeping animals like that, for food.
Bub was too soft. You could hear it when he talked to the horses and our dogs, Bear and Badger, and even to the chipmunks
that ran around on the woodpile. Baby talk, low and combed with honey. When the man came out to castrate our two male calves
so they could be sold at auction for beef, Bub had to walk in a circle as soon as the first clamp went on. I felt a twinge
too, when Twister started to bawl, but I watched everything — it was too weird and disgusting not to. The man obviously knew
what he was doing and was quick with his knife, slitting the outer sack like the skin of a fig, then gripping the exposed
testicle between his index and middle finger. It was as pink as a tongue.
Living on a ranch meant we had chores: a flake of hay for each of the horses, morning and night; fresh
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