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  What next?

  He lists the two solid options. There is the Bank next door, where they have a decent pint, and the old bartender knows all the trivia: the annual rainfall of Botswana and the width of a lion’s paw. Or they can drive up the hill and take a look at the sun going down.

  There is really only one option. Now that his mind is made up, he wants to impress her. If he can show her some things he’s learned, well, that might mean something. But she continues the game.

  A sunset is not a good idea, she says.

  No, he nods gravely, a sunset isn’t good.

  They stand on the evening sidewalk. The sun goes down every day, she says.

  They sit quietly with brown bottles between their thighs driving up the curving mountain road. He loses track counting the curves somewhere after forty. Still, they reach the summit in good time. They’ve finished their beer and the sun isn’t yet gone.

  He knows a good spot called Goat Rock, where on a clear day you can see clear to the Farallon Islands. To get to Goat Rock they climb over a dry meadow, the dry hills like golden lions’ haunches. Finally, they climb to the smooth granite top of Goat Rock, and they are a long way from anything.

  The sun has a few feet yet to sink, and the marine layer is rolled out like gauze over the green and golden hillsides. They sit together on the rock outcrop, apart at first, then leaning in, pretending accident, this the first touching. Below, a buzzard catches a thermal, and the green hills turn into blue waves descending past China Grade and out to the sea. They watch as the sun melts into a gilded puddle on the gauze horizon.

  Be careful, he says, when she starts to sway.

  It happens more swiftly than seems appropriate, and the edge of night rises opposite the sunset. As they move past the accident, he’s full of the things he’ll tell her: the angle of jet from LAX, the night fishing of the squid boats, and how the moon and the sun are the same size, just as big as a thumb.

  They watch the sky change colors. Sure enough, above the twinkling lights of Pacifica, the dark serrations of the Farallons erupt from the fog.

  I can’t see anything, she says, holding tightly to his shoulder.

  No, he says, and closes his eyes. You’re right. There’s nothing to see.

  High Hope for Fatalists Everywhere

  I hear Santa Head sing Ho Ho Ho, so I know someone is at the trailer door. I get up from my recliner to find blind Esther, come round again to ask if the cat trappers have come.

  Is that Tootie? she asks when I open the door and set Santa Head off again. Ho Ho Ho. One Ho for each night until Christmas Eve, or until Doom’s Eve, as I’ve been calling it, when my black task must be complete.

  No, it’s just me, Big Coyote, I say. I can feel Esther’s disappointment hang over the threshold like a valley smog. But Tootie’s home, I say. Just you wait.

  I take her arm in my left arm—I have just the one—and lead her into the trailer. I seat her in her special armchair by the fake tree and wait for Mom to bless us both. I don’t tell Esther that I am the cat trapper. Everyone wants the cats dispatched, sure, but who in Phoenix, Arizona, wants to take the executioner by the arm?

  Mom, I call, it’s Esther. Mom is somewhere in the rear of the Landola folding our clothes.

  The feral cats have been plaguing Hacienda de Valencia since we arrived in late September. We had first noticed a few strays last winter after Dad died, but over the summer they multiplied like prickly pears, and by the time the park filled up again this fall, we had a regular epidemic. The cats keep the snowbirds awake all night with their fighting and rumpusing, their noisy loving. The old, dry folks don’t want to hear any violent love at night, and who can blame them?

  I used to be a mere son of a snowbird, but now I am the special assistant to the manager of Hacienda de Valencia. This is an age-qualified community, but I got an annual age waiver from my boss, Anton, on account of the cat job and because I live with Mom, who used to be a snowbird herself but now foregoes the annual migrations with Dad gone. In September I said good-bye to my boyhood home in a deep Wisconsin coulee and hello to this 1965 Landola Gold Seal single-wide, where I hope to park my rusty carcass until I die. If Mom lives five more years, then I will be fifty-five and can qualify to live in Hacienda on my own. I have a deep yearning to be on my own, yet it is complicated by the love I feel for Mom, who birthed me and suckled me and protected me these fifty years. My independence, which I crave, depends upon her death, which I cannot fathom.

  For now I need this annual age waiver—I think of it as a green card—to keep me from being deported. My age waiver expires the first of the year, and Anton says renewal depends on a cat-free Hacienda.

  Mom walks through the kitchen, and even before she says a word, blind Esther turns to her like a sunflower turns to face the light. Christmas, to see it. Mom has that effect on people. Once Walt Zummer in 59A—he’s one of the rude Canadians—told me how my mother lights up a room. I knew just what he meant. She has this double-wide smile even despite her falsies, and her open generosity makes folks feel alive and worthwhile. I wish I had that. I’m selfish and quiet and glum and don’t touch anyone, and no one smiles when the cat killer stalks into the room. Even old Esther, who can’t see her hand in front of her nose, who tips protein shakes mixed with blush wine, seems to take Big Coyote for some kind of a bummer.

  The old folks here have all taken to calling me Big Coyote on account of my frequent border crossing. At least once a month nowadays I run down to Old Mexico to smuggle in their prescriptions. Down to Naco they got a turnstile at the border and you can park your car in the U.S. of A. and walk right over to Mexico way. The turnstile is too skinny for me, though, and they have to open up the swing gate when Big Coyote comes across. Naco, Mexico, is just crowded with pharmacies, and I go from one to the next to get the best deals on Zedia, Flomax, Accupril, and the like, until I fill my order.

  You would think it might make you feel like somebody, exercising your right to come and go at the border turnstile, exploiting the free market. But it don’t. It makes you feel ashamed that you can walk across both ways, but for other folks that northbound lane is closed for business. Driving back north through the grass desert with my trunk full of booty, it’s not hard to imagine being a real coyote, hiding out there on the landscape with a freight of live cargo. It’s a long haul back to Hacienda, anyway, and not much traffic, so you can squander plenty of time thinking. Anton says the old-timers are just making fun. Says they call me Big Coyote on account of I resemble a coyote about as much as a water buffalo. Either way, it’s a name I admire.

  Good morning, Esther, Mom says. How does the sun shine on O-hi-o this morning? Esther’s from Ashtabula, outside Cleveland, and by her smile, the sun is big as pie on O-hi-o. Mom put it there. That’s what she does for folks, even without trying. Sometimes the old snowbirds call each other by their hometowns or home states instead of their first names, for endearment and because it’s easier to remember hometowns than first names. All these old-fashioned Walts and Millies and Hanks slip the mind, but who can forget a name like Moosejaw or Ladysmith or Thief River Falls.

  But when I say, Hello Mississauga—just like I’ve heard other people do—to Jack Getchel from Ontario, he says, It’s Doctor Getchel to you, Big Coyote, even though he’s only a horse doctor, and retired. I hold with Ruth Gim from Prairie du Chien that the Canadians fancy themselves a cut above the Americans at Hacienda de Valencia. In any case, the one thing we all have in common here is that we arrived from someplace north, all flown south to recline in the sunshine. Each of us might have brought a little pot of dirt from our home state or province, but mostly we hope to adapt to our new environs. No one was born on the moon after all, and if you can still climb to the top of Camelback and look out over the dried-up Salt River Basin, you see that this place might have been the moon, until the Bureau of Reclamation turned a hose on it.

  Mom, who sees the best in everyone, walks right to Esther’s chair and gives her a big m
omma hug. Esther’s a brittle stick of woman turning to grass, but Mom’s still fat and full of life and unlike the other oldsters seems to get bigger every year. She doesn’t coddle the old, frail ones but handles them roughly, reminding them that they’re not breakable after all, reminding them of how they used to like to be touched, back when the old river still flowed.

  I don’t know, Tootie, Esther says from beneath Mom’s ample embrace. Those cats kept me awake all night. I didn’t think I was going to get up this morning at all.

  Esther sings this doom tune most times she comes over. At ninety-three, she should go up on a billboard as High Hope for Fatalists Everywhere. She’s right, I suppose. Some morning she won’t get up at all, but I wonder how many years she’s been saying it. Esther may be going downhill, Mom says, but we can’t let her know it. We have to help her think she’s as good as she ever was, just like we did with Dad.

  Esther calls Mom Tootie. That’s Mom’s nickname given to her by some relative of ours when she was a baby, and it took. She even signs her name Tootie on the notice board at the Hacienda clubhouse. The o’s in Tootie are pronounced just like the o’s in foot. Tootie.

  Oh, you’re doing fine O-hi-o, Mom says. How about some sweetcake now?

  Nothing finishes off an old woman’s heart after a rough embrace like sweetcake, my mother seems to know. I have to learn from her. She won’t be around to take care of me forever.

  Between mouthfuls of sweetcake, Esther complains about the cats. Says she’s phoned the Russian again—that’s Anton—and even signed the petition. Esther says if the cat trapper don’t do his job, he ought to be sacked. Mom says she’ll see about it, and she cuts me with a look. She’ll place a call to the trapper just as soon as the hour is decent. Esther says the cats don’t keep decent hours and any cat trapper worth his trousers would have to ply his trade at night.

  Oh Esther, I do ply at night, I want to say. But I keep silent. I excuse myself to go water the citrus. Soon it will be time for me to make my daily rounds, and I want a little peace before I start my work day.

  I should be fair and say it’s not just the noise that condemns the Hacienda feral cats. I don’t want to make the residents of Hacienda seem crueler than they are. These cats gut our songbirds and cause carnage among our quail. They do capital damage to our mobiles. They claw behind our trailer skirts and drop their bastard litters in our floor joists. Soon they’ve ripped out our insulation and dragged in all manner of dead carcasses to ripen and fester with maggots and fleas. If you remember the childhood odor of the Great Depression like most of these old-timers, chances are you have a small heart for soft furry creatures. Here reside hard pragmatists, even if they are free with a hug, like Mom.

  Since it was the cats that led me to this posh special-assistant-to-the-manager gig, I should be thankful for their nuisance. In September, when I first suggested that I trap the cats, Mom laughed. That would be like sending a marshmallow to put out a campfire, she said. Is my mother cruel to me? Cruel only if you don’t know Mom, who knows me and my soft mallow insides better than anyone. It was more than twenty years ago she called me a wimp for complaining over a broken heart. That smarted for a long time, but I now believe she got it right. I am a big softie, just not as sturdy as most people, especially not Mom. That’s why she found it so funny when I took this job.

  You might wonder how it came to this. What fifty-year-old covets an age waiver to live among the Liver Spots and quiet their nights? I never was cut out for life among my peers, who were always cruel, especially in my youth. Instead of Big Coyote they called me Tractor Path or Just Plain Lard. In Wisconsin, there is a boy in every small town who is rumored to have been kicked in the head by a mad Holstein or had a Farmall run amok over his melon. In Blue River, that unfortunate boy was me.

  True story wasn’t nothing like that, of course. Yes, I lost my best arm in the PTO of an old Deere, but all my other faculties were intact, Mom said. I wasn’t even that slow, just big, and a big body looks to move slower, anybody knows. Sure, I always took my time to answer a question or to make up my mind, but that’s just because I was a tad more pondering than your average boy. You could call me slow or you could call me unhurried or even deliberate. Mom said folks always will choose the easy answer first.

  Wasn’t no big calamities led me here. I just never did find a place apart from my folks, but that’s a thing known to happen. A one-armed man ain’t exactly cut out for the working life, but I got fairly handy choring around the coulee, thanks to my dad. I knew the love of a woman once, but that didn’t take, as they would have said back in Blue River. Not much takes, according to what I’ve seen, which I admit is not a very great deal.

  I made my choices, now I aim to live them out. Took me a few winters in Arizona with my folks to recognize this place as the utopia it’s cracked up to be. Anton uses the word to advertise the Hacienda in his flyers. An Egalitarian Paradise, the literature reads, which means that things are pretty much Even Steven around here. Everything gets cooked down to either a single-wide or a double-wide, with a sedan in the carport. It’s a sort of reduction for the home stretch. Big ideas like church and class and color and policy don’t hold truck against the daily how-do-you-do of goiters and gout and piles and polyps. Even the prickly moral concerns are overlooked here. Often a churchy widow tucks herself into a neighbor’s bed but wouldn’t dare remarry and lose her dowager’s pension. Living in sin, she’ll call it, but it’s just minor peccadillo this time around.

  You can see how this arrangement would suit a man like me, a one-armed hombre with little to show for his life but a well-kept mother. You live alone in the only trailer park in Blue River, well that’s about as low to the grass as a body can get. Here folks choose a trailer on purpose. Who’s to say Big Coyote didn’t make the same choice? Maybe I’ve got money in the bank and a regular estate back east. No one would know. But even here there are distinctions. The old-timers remind me I am a youngster yet, and not a rightful citizen. You wasn’t even born yet when Truman sacked MacArthur, Doc Getchel says to me once. Doc Getchel can lord it over me, but the years have a way of filling themselves in, and I aim to stick. Just get that green card renewed, I tell myself, one stray at a time.

  Some days I even allow myself to dream that one of these younger widows will take a shine to Big Coyote and make him a regular fixture in her single-wide. That would solve my residency status. But dreaming is a dangerous occupation, as Dad taught me, and most days I don’t allow it.

  It was last winter Dad died in the home called Alta Mesa. Every Alzheimer’s story you’ll ever hear starts the same and ends the same. You can switch out the details. One detail that sticks the most in my dad’s Alzheimer’s story is the cucumber sandwich, the one that stuck in his throat on the very first visit day at Alta Mesa. They have this rule where if you take your dad to Alta Mesa, you have to leave him there for thirty days before you can visit him. That’s just a rule they have. It was day thirty that the sandwich stuck. Mom and me was coming in for lunch, but I was farting around the trailer that morning and put us late. We never saw him. I guess the very last thing my dad forgot was how to swallow his food.

  Coming back to Hacienda this fall without Dad to worry over, Mom and me had plenty of time on our hands. For Mom, it was on to the next problem, and she got tough on the cats straight off. She called animal services, and they trapped and dispatched the first cat for free. After cat number one, however, animal services charged a minimum of one hundred dollars to process a feline. What pensioner could afford that, and with the dozens of cats needing processing?

  Those animal services are like the chiropractors, Mom said. They sucker you in with their special deals, but they bleed you dry if you come back for seconds.

  Hacienda de Valencia had a pair of live-catch traps for resident use, and Mom said she would trap the cats her own self. In Blue River they would open season for such a pest, but Mom reckoned Phoenix, Arizona, was no place for such rifle work.

 
What will you do when you trap one? I said from my recliner. It had been Dad’s recliner, but now I saw fit to claim it as my own.

  Club it, I guess, Mom said. Or drown it.

  I didn’t doubt Mom’s steely nerves—I had seen her go to work on pen-raised rabbits and chickens back in the coulee—but how could you club a cat in a wire cage? And how would you drown it?

  Good for her word, next day Mom trapped a cat with a bit of tuna bait, a cross-eyed Siamese, the first cross-eyed cat I ever saw. She let it out and tried to club it with a hacked-off sand wedge, but the cross-eyed cat was a quick devil, and she ended up just grazing its hinder parts. She tried again next day with an old, gray tom she snared. This time she had a barbeque fork and intended to skewer it. She stuck that old tom on its haunch, but he must’ve been all gristle or the barbeque fork wasn’t sharp, because Mom couldn’t manage to impale the cat, and it squirmed off the fork with just a flesh wound.

  Seeing Mom flounder like that reminded me that if I could occupy Dad’s recliner, then maybe I could do some of his other jobs, too. His dying and her failing somehow sparked my ambition, first I ever had. That’s when I said I would see Anton about taking over the cat trapping, and she made the nasty marshmallow remark.

  But I showed her. I showed everyone. It was the first job in a long time I was any good at, and with a wink and nod from Anton, I moved quickly up the ranks—in just these four months—from cat trapper to lawn maintenance, to tree repair, to pool tech, to clubhouse hospitality, to Hacienda Special Assistant to the Manager. I never shed any of my tasks along the way to the top. They all fall under the purview of Hacienda Special Assistant to the Manager, that’s me, and for the first time in long years I feel like I have a reason to be. All of us want for a crowd where we both fit in and stand out. I found mine at Hacienda. Anton says he prefers a big leering beef like me to work backstage, so I don’t perform much hospitality. He reminds me that all the other jobs are contingent upon the cat job. That’s our deal. I figure if I have to trap cats to keep my high station, well, small penalty.