• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

My uncle’s place hasn’t changed at all since my sister and I explored every hollow and gully of the weedy acre and climbed the sycamores along the back fence so many years ago—our carved initials are still visible on the trunk of one of them, I discover, still only a yard above the dirt, though my sister isn’t interested in seeing them now. There’s a surprising lot of our toys, too, old wooden Lincoln Logs and Nike missile launchers; I’ve gathered them from among the weeds and put them near the back of the garage where my uncle supposedly keeps his beer, but she doesn’t want to see them either.

Always in San Bernardino you see women on the noonday sidewalks wearing shorts and halter tops, and from behind they look young and shapely with their long brown legs and blond hair; but when the car you’re in has driven past them, and you hike around in the passenger seat to look back, their faces are weary, and shockingly old. And at night along Base Line, under the occasional clusters of sodium-vapor lights, you can see that the bar parking lots are jammed with cars, but you can generally also see four or five horses tied up to a post outside the bar door. My uncle says this is a semidesert climate, right below the Cajon Pass and Barstow in the high desert, and so we get a lot of patches of mirage.

I’11 let my sister drive me as far as the Stater Brothers market on Highland, though that doesn’t cheer her up, probably because I mostly shoplift the fruits and cheese and crackers that are all I can keep down anymore. She flew back from France after I hurt myself, and when she can borrow an old car from a friend she drives out to visit me. She keeps trying to trick me into coming back to live in Santa Ana again, or anywhere besides my uncle’s house—she wants to drive me to a hospital, actually—but I don’t dare. I’ve told her not to tell anyone where I am, and I’ve taken a false name, not that anyone asks me.

Her family, I have to admit, has given her a lot of grief. Her husband was born in a part of Iran that was under British jurisdiction, and when he tried to go back there after going to school in England the Iranians said he was an enemy of the Shah; they took his passport and gave him some papers that permitted him to leave but never come back, and he got as far as Charles de Gaulle Airport, but France wouldn’t let him in without a passport and Customs wouldn’t let him get on another plane. He’s lived on the Boutique Level of Terminal One now for decades, sleeping on a plastic couch and watching TV, and Lufthansa flight attendants give him travel kits so that he can shave and brush his teeth. My sister met him there during a layover on a European tour my mother bought for her right after high school, and now she’s got a job and an apartment in Roissy so she can be near him. I keep telling her she’s going to lose her job, staying away like this, but she says she has no choice, because nobody else can get through to me the way she still can. I’m backward, she says.

My uncle makes himself scarce when she drives up the dirt track out front in one beat old borrowed car or another; so does everybody. When I hobbled off the bus at his warped chain-link front gate, all scorched and blinking and hoarse and dizzy from the radon, he was waiting for me out in the front yard with his usual straw hat pulled down over his gray hair; all you really see is the bushy mustache. The house is empty now, just echoing rooms with one old black Bakelite telephone on the kitchen floor and a lot of wires sticking out of the walls where there used to be lights, but he told me I could sleep in my old room, and I’ve carried in some newspapers to make a nest in the corner there. I’m thinking about moving the nest into the closet.

“Don’t bother anybody you might see here,” my uncle told me on that first day. “Just leave ‘em alone. They probably live here.”

And I have seen a very old man in the kitchen, always crying quietly over the sink and wearing one of those senior