Lydia Kiesling - The Golden State

“Are you going to give a presentation?” I ask Cindy, who has the look of someone who is getting ready to give a presentation. “Not me,” she says. “Bruce McNamara’s supposed to say something. We’ve been writing ’em letters and I don’t know what all for weeks, as you know.” “Like your letter in the paper.” “And to the supervisors, and everyone else.”

People are coming up the walkway now, and Cindy trails off. More people than I’ve ever seen in one place in Altavista—more people than I’ve seen, total, in the whole time I’ve been here. There is a group of elderly women with very short hair, and a group of middle-aged women with very long hair. Most everyone is white, there are four or five people who are brown but no one who appears to be black. Cindy nods hello to a clump of three gray-haired men in cowboy hats and mustaches who seem in a hurry to get into the courthouse.

“There are so many people I don’t know here,” I say, because I can’t think of anything else to say.

“Well, you know,” says Cindy. “Not everyone lives in town. Lot of ranchers came from Rigby and Sundown and those places”—tiny towns beside which Altavista is a metropolis.

“Also I doubt you’d know many people in town now,” she says, not unkindly. “Haven’t really seen you up here that I can remember. Since your mom died, I mean.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I guess you never met my husband’s family when I brought them up last year.”

“Can’t recollect I did,” she says, sounding awfully like a cowboy for someone from San Bernardino. She pulls on her cigarette.

A Ford truck pulls up and discharges a very tall, very thin woman in a red blazer with a sportswomanlike braid down her back. “Goddamn,” Cindy sighs, “it’s that cunt” and I visibly startle. “Sorry,” Cindy says.

“What cunt?” I ask superfluously, just to feel the word, the little charge of tongue meeting teeth as the word goes out into the air. “She’s from way over the coast, big ranching family.” “Why is she, uh, a c-word?” I ask.

“She was helping us to get organized for Jefferson but she won’t stop talking about the UN and some agenda they have that they are planning to do that she says is gonna have us all in chains by the year 2030. Don’t get me wrong I hate the damned UN but it’s a distraction when we need to be talking about our state.” “Oh,” I say, idly wondering why she hates the UN, my mom looked askance at the UN because the UN representatives always had the nicest house and biggest car of whatever posting they found themselves in. Honey runs toward me laughing, a sunburst, a comet, barking her shins on the first step and falling into my knees, still more or less laughing. I pull her up into my lap and kiss the top of her head with the puppy smell that she has after a while with no bath. She is writhing to get down and play again. She coughs and Cindy holds her cigarette up over her head. I’m desperate for a puff.

The Cunt walks up the steps and into the courthouse, nodding coolly at Cindy who raises a surprisingly regal hand in its purple sleeve. “Hi, ladies,” says the Cunt. “Howdy,” I say for no reason I can name. “See you inside, Cindy?” she says cheerily. I gather Honey and hold her wriggling like a big trout while I collapse the stroller which doesn’t fold over the diaper bag so I have to unfold it get out the bag throw it over my shoulder collapse the stroller while Cindy heaves herself up from the steps and straightens herself out. We walk up the stairs behind the Cunt, who strides purposefully up to the imposing paneled door.

“Is she gonna do a presentation?” I ask Cindy. “That’s what I’m worried about,” says Cindy. “She doesn’t live here and she wasn’t at our last meeting when we planned out who was supposed to say what. I’m not good at public speaking so it was never gonna be me, but McNamara’s real good, and Donna Elkins, and Chad Burns.” I don’t think Cindy is really even talking to me—she’s muttering, and I don’t know who Donna Elkins is and have only the faintest awareness of Chad Burns, someone’s cousin.

The courthouse is nice and cool under its friendly little rotunda. I unfold the stroller and put Honey back into it and wheel it after Cindy into one of the beige rooms in which municipal business is conducted and we see already fifteen or twenty people seated. Cindy spots her group and goes to join them. “We’ll just sit over there,” I say, gesturing to the back of the room.

Honey is the only small child here except for a very young baby sleeping in a Snugli, and Honey is starting to rustle and moan. I do my customary calculation of suffering whereas X is the suffering of those around me and Y is the suffering of Honey and Z is the suffering of me, and I assess each component suffering as it is affected by the available scenarios, where A is taking her out and wheeling her back to the house toward the looming dark to sit on the porch under the enormous purple sky with her morose mother drinking screwdrivers, and B is staying here and observing democracy taking place as is her and my constitutional right. I find yes, another string cheese in my bag, and peel it open and give it to her and pick her up and bounce her and together we cast an eye at the Board of Supervisors.

The Board is six people, four men and two women, white like the assemblage of people filling the space in front of them. One of the supervisors I recognize; she was in Rodney’s class in school I think and then went down below to get a business degree and start some kind of import-export thing with her husband in one of Sacramento’s sprawling suburbs. At some point she came back up home and took up residence on her family’s ancient ranch, where she breeds border collies. I am considering what might have compelled her to leave her Granite Bay McMansion her local-interest fundraisers her cardiobarre to come back to Altavista to live. Her name is Cheryl Clabbers and I only know anything about her because Mom used to get the Paiute Recorder even in Sacramento and they ran a profile thing when Clabbers came back, wherein Clabbers said she was “born Republican” and talked about her dog-breeding concern. For some reason these tidbits killed us. All the way up until Mom died I could say “Seen Clabbers lately?” and she’d laugh helplessly.

There is a lot of shuffling and clearing of throats and one of the male supervisors ventures a modest joke. “I wonder what the big crowd’s here for,” he says, and everyone laughs but particularly Clabbers, who has a laugh like a brass bell being struck. “So let’s go ahead and get started,” he says. “I’m sure we’re all eager to get to the main event.

“First I want to make sure that everyone has a chance to speak. We’re going to do things the right way here and everyone is going to get a chance. If you do want to speak you got to fill out one of the comment cards. Everyone has three minutes and we do have the clock here to keep track.” Honey is grabbing at my thumb and pulling it up to her mouth as though to kiss it. I smooch back on her and she hugs my neck and there’s some preliminaries I miss and then Bruce McNamara strides up. He’s a nice-looking man, a man’s man, the upper end of middle age with trim hips and a slight paunch and aquiline nose bristly hair and jeans and plaid shirt impeccably tucked. He says “I was born here in the North State in the forties and anyone who was here knows it was a paradise back then. There was no better place in the entire world to live. We had booming industries. We had wonderful schools. We minded our own business.” Honey, who has been rapt since he began speaking in his big rich voice, starts pointing and saying “Hey! Hey! Hey!” and the room looks at me and I do a little wave and try to appear worthy of a modicum of indulgence and pity.