Acts of God (2 page)

“It will be boring and probably sad,” I told them but they continued to protest.

“You might have a good time; you'll see everyone again. Besides,” Jade said, giving me a wink, “you never know.”

For years now they'd been trying to get me to go out, meet someone new. We live south of Santa Cruz, where a cool, winter mist makes this the artichoke capital of the world. It is true our house looks on to the sea and I can tell you a million things to do with an artichoke, but it's not as if I live in the Bay Area or even Marin or Sausalito, where I might get a chance to meet someone new. I've had a few relationships since my marriage ended, but nothing has really stuck.

I suppose the end of my marriage stunned me. Charlie sat across the table one evening while I was clearing the dishes away and said he wanted a divorce. It was a Thursday night in summer and the kids were playing outside. I could hear their voices, calling to friends in the yard. A ball bounced in the street. When I asked him why, he replied, “Because I don't really know you. You don't give anything away.”

I looked around, thinking for a moment that he meant my stuff—the hats and jewelry and antique coffee grinders that cluttered our house. “We could have a garage sale,” I said.

Charlie shook his head. “That's not what I mean at all.”

We went back and forth, breaking up, staying together for several months, and then it was over. There have been a few others—briefly—since. I dated a psychologist from UC Santa Cruz the longest. When he drove off after our last date, a pebble hit me in the head. Since then, when the kids ask how a date was, I reply, “Pebble in the head.” Now I can just point to my forehead and they know what I mean. I suppose Charlie was the one I really loved. At least, looking back, I recall it as a true passion. The kind where you think about this person all day long and when you lay down beside him at night you feel like you've been plugged into an electric socket. But in the end Charlie saw it more accurately than I. It was never quite right. There was something missing. There always seems to be.

I have no idea what has drawn me to one person and away from another. I've never been the most insightful person about myself, not like some people I know. Once or twice I've gone for counseling, but it never added up to much. It helped me get some new hobbies, though, that sort of thing. But it didn't enable me to understand what pulls me in one direction as opposed to another.

Probably what I do with my time doesn't help either. I always seem to be running around. First there's the kids, the house, and my plans, once the kids are out on their own, to turn it into a bed-and-breakfast. A few days a week, to make ends meet, I work for my friend Shana, a real estate broker, where I show time-shares and seasonal rentals in Carmel. And in my spare time I volunteer for a wildlife rescue league.

I didn't go to school to learn how to do this, though I have studied on and off. Before I had a family, I worked for Fish and Game. They sent me to some remote locations where I counted salmon swimming upstream. I watched them shattering their bodies against the rocks to feed their young; this gave me lots of ideas. I even began to write a little book of aphorisms about this experience called
Reflections from the Salmon Counting Tower,
but nobody wanted to publish it.

After a while mammals became my focus. I seem to have become a kind of local expert on beached things—whales, dolphins, orphaned otter pups. They bring them all to me. The whales I can do little about, but I've been surrogate parent to a number of sea otters. I am convinced that what makes a creature beach itself isn't a suicidal tendency as some experts claim. I think it's a blip on the radar screen, a sonar misfiring that sends the wrong message.

Who knows why the message goes wrong—a virus, noise pollution, a genetic flaw—but the animals turn mysteriously in the direction of their ruin. I am left with the remains, with what has washed up on the shore.

*   *   *

I had no intention of going to the reunion or anywhere else, for that matter. Over the years I have tended to stay put, not to wander far from this coast. Besides, I didn't want to see people I hadn't seen in thirty years and would probably no longer recognize. Or open the proverbial can of worms. But the morning of the reunion Jade and Ted appeared at my room with my bags packed, a plane ticket which they'd charged on my Visa in hand. “Surprise,” they said.

“I'm sick,” I told them. I'd been fighting a cold. But they had the Tylenol ready. They looked to me as they once had when they were small on my birthday or Mother's Day, standing with a breakfast tray in hand, a pleased look on their faces.

“You're going,” Jade told me. “We want you to.” It was a fait accompli, they said.

2

As I flew home for
the reunion, it was the summer of the great floods. The Missouri and the Mississippi had left their banks, burst their levees. So much for the Army Corps of Engineers, my father would have said. Below me, what had once been a great river appeared as a series of lakes with channels connecting one to the next.

From what I'd read in the newspapers I knew that people had drowned. A family went for a boating expedition as the waters rose; all were lost. Two boys had tried to go fishing; their bodies were found in a tree. Houses sat like little islands in the midst of these pools. As we flew over them, it was a clear day and on the roofs of some I could see the numbers of their insurance policies scrawled. This would have driven my father wild. He'd be racing from farmhouse to farmhouse, helping the farmers file their claims.

Before I was ten, I knew how to read a disaster, how to calculate the loss of life and limb. I understood what landfall meant, what an 8.2 on the Richter scale was; I knew the damage an F5 tornado (inconceivable) versus an F6 (unimaginable) could do. Debris paths, flood basins—none of this was news to me.

And I'd learned a few things about odds. “What are the chances?” my father used to say. “If it's three to one a tornado will blow through southern Illinois during the tornado season, then what're the odds it will blow through the Loop?” Actuarial statistics were the subject of family dinners. The death of a child wasn't worth a fraction of the death of a working spouse. Loss of income was greater than loss of consortium (the word my father used when he referred to companionship). Property costs more than grief. Dollar signs lurked behind every heartbreak. Over dinner I heard tales of farms foreclosed, policies lapsed.

From an early age I came to associate my father with bad weather. I developed a fear of oncoming storms—a phobic dread of wind and rain. I can't say I've ever gotten over it completely. When thick black clouds gather over the Pacific, I have to brace myself. When my father was on the road or even when he was home, I listened obsessively to weather reports, scanned the skies for that blue-gray sky that threatened snow, a yellow-green cast that foretold a tornado touchdown. It all meant claims. It meant that once again my father would be taken from me. I had no idea how much or how far, though in the end it wouldn't be the weather that took him away.

Now as I flew home, the flooded plain stretched below me. My father had always been opposed to the levees. He knew the rivers. He'd been born near them, grew up along their banks. He said when it came to rivers, and I suppose to anything else, for that matter, let them flow. Don't try to contain them.

A river will find its own shape and direction. There are two hundred sunken steamboats from the Missouri River that now lie at the bottom of plowed fields. This is because the river has chosen to go its own way. You can't trust the river; you never know when it will burst its banks and reroute itself.

My father knew better than to tell the farmers not to live on the silt-rich soil that lined the floodplain. Along the riverbanks you could reach your hand into the dirt and pull up the richest black earth in the world—fistfuls—and my father wasn't one to tell anyone to live elsewhere. But he did try to convince them to build on higher ground.

If my father were flying in this plane, looking down at this water-clogged land, if he were looking at what I saw from this height, he would have felt very sad and very vindicated. He would say, “They should've asked me. I would've told them.”

3

I spy, what do I
spy, something that is yellow. Is it a truck? I asked my brother Jeb. Is it my father's shirt or that yellow jacket that flew into the car? A freight train car, a street sign, that stripe down the center of the road? It's corn, Jeb shouted back at me. It was the summer I turned nine as I gazed at fields and fields, but I didn't see any yellow. All I saw were flowing carpets of pale green. But it's in the husk, I said, and Jeb just threw up his hands.

It didn't seem quite fair, the rules my brother played by, but still it was all around us. Miles and miles of corn. I'd never seen it before. For years I'd waited for this. My father was letting me go with him for the first time to the floodplain. Jeb was twelve and he'd been going with for the past two years. You had to be ten to go along, that was the rule. But since I was almost ten, my father made an exception for me. That was how he put it, “I'll make an exception for you, Squirrel,” and even though I didn't know what an exception was at the time, I was happy to have one made for me.

Art cried because he was only six and had to stay home and Lily tried to explain to him that when he was bigger he'd go. In the end she had to pry his fingers from the car door. “Another year or two, Squirt,” our father said, but Art just screamed that it wasn't fair and in the end our father had to agree with him. “You're right, son,” he said. “Life isn't fair.” Lily stood in the driveway, in an apron, holding Art back with one hand, blowing kisses with the other as we drove away. Her skirt caught in the wind and she pushed it down.

My father blew kisses back, a smile on his face, but the minute we turned north on Lincoln and drove under the railroad trestle, he put the radio on loud and started to croon. My father sang at home, but never loudly. Lily came from a big family and she didn't like noise. “But it's music, Lily,” he'd argue with her, but she didn't agree. No shouting; no doors being banged. No music played loud. If you slammed a door behind her, my mother jumped in the air.

My father moved silently through our lives, but as soon as we were past the railroad tracks, heading west, he was tapping his fingers, humming along. We weren't half a mile from the house before we were all singing along to “You Ain't Nothing but a Hound Dog.” We sang for miles at the top of our lungs.

When we stopped for gas, I slipped into the front seat, but Jeb complained. “Trooper,” our father said, “you always get to sit there. Give Squirrel a chance.”

It was hot even with the windows rolled down. The air smelled of pigs and fertilizer. The sun was boiling, heating up the vinyl seats of the car, but I didn't care. This was an adventure. Where we were going there had been a flood. Last year it was drought; this year it's flood, my father lectured us as we drove. Now the Everly Brothers were singing “Dream” and my father sang along. Though he was a little off-key, I was surprised he knew all the words.

My father had a deep baritone voice that would sound good on the radio, I thought. I could imagine him announcing things—the weather, the news, sports. Sometimes when I listened to the radio, I pretended it was my father's voice coming to me from far away. Now it almost made the car shake. I had only heard that voice at night when he sang to put me to bed, but it wasn't this big. It seemed to take up all the farmland that stretched before our eyes. For the first time I saw the land as he did—wide and empty and flat. Every Monday he drove out this way and every Thursday he came home. “Get a whiff of this, kids.” He rolled down his window as we passed a pig farm. We held our noses, groaning, and our father laughed.

There were dozens of things my father could have done with his life besides sell insurance and settle claims. He had a keen sense for business and as he grew older, he constantly chastised himself for the mistakes he'd made. He was always kicking himself for not giving a few thousand bucks to the friend who came to him with a new invention—a little spray gadget you put on the top of bottles for hair spray and household cleaners. He and Lily had sat, watching the little demonstration. “No,” she'd said afterward, “we can't take the risk.” Aerosol cans. My father missed his opportunity to invest in aerosol cans. “I could've made millions,” he muttered as he patched the roof or fixed the plumbing on Saturday afternoons.

His ambition once had been money—to make lots of it and get rich, then do what he wanted with his life. But he fell into the insurance line through a distant relative of my mother's, a man who said that insurance was a good, steady way to lay your foundation. In the end all the schemes for getting rich fell through and insurance was what he did. He learned to take pleasure in it as he took pleasure in most things.

Though he was a city boy by birth, he came to love the loamy smell of soil, the rich, earthy odor of dirt being overturned, of the freshly planted fields. Even the piquant odor of fertilizer or the stench of a pig farm was somehow pleasing to him. It was not what he ever expected to come to love, but then there were other things Victor Winterstone had not expected he would love. For example, our mother, Lily, the plain, freckle-faced girl who made a beautiful home and ran it like a tight ship.

He was a claims adjuster who adjusted. That's what he was, my father who chuckled to himself as he drove; that's how adjustable he'd become. He was happy as he drove, whistling, two of his children at his side. Head tossed back. He listened to the radio, tapping out the rhythms. Rolling down the window, he got a smell of the fetid earth. Compost. Dead things decaying out there in the fields. The promise of new life.