Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [55]
Nowadays this flattened stark land is etched by railway crossings and a remarkable symmetry of river channels, as if God has impressed a circuitry down onto the earth and given it reason. So we have the low hill civilizations of Pixley and Porterville, the lights of Buttonwillow and Tulare. Coop once slept with a girl in Tulare, that tense, frantic night of his remembered with a coy term. He had ‘slept’ with the girl in Tulare as he had ‘slept’ with me. The damnation that came down on us is not quite extinct. Someone from the past might still say of me, ‘There’s a black flag in that woman’s life.’ But this is unlikely to happen. A family keeps its secrets. Just as all that remains from the Central Valley’s past are muted rumours of anarchic outlaw girls and the furious Eugene Key, who took over as sheriff in Tulare and cut off the left hand of Three-Fingered Jack, and sent it to Visalia by Wells Fargo as evidence, to celebrate a victory of sorts.
Our truck that day crossed that antique seabed. We slipped past fruit farms, entered brief bouts of rain. I have read up ever since on the history of the Great Central Plain, about cattle in Fowler’s Junction, and about the beautiful and haunting Allensworth. I’ve read The Octopus, in which Tulare is renamed Bonnerville, and read about the waves of immigrants who came here with their music of languages—Tagalog, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, and Japanese—to cut open the ditches for irrigation, to turn swamps into fruitland, or to mine asphalt in the intense heat, as my maternal grandfather did, working practically naked, coated in that oil they used for flux for what they were mining near the spur line of Asphalto. Just another place named after a mineral on the map of the world. How many are there? A greater number, I suspect, than named for royalty.
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