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All the apartments were full when we took title to the place, so we lived in the mail truck for a while. Mom and Jim told the Riders, who lived in the back half of the big house, that they would have to move out, but there was no hurry. We were happy to live in the truck until they found a suitable place.

The front half of the big house was rented by an elderly woodcutter named Floyd Root, who sat around in his undershirt drinking gin. In the evenings, he had a lot of visitors: Indians from the reservation up in Covelo, old logging buddies. Floyd lived amid heaps of moldering newspapers, dirty underwear, and assorted chain saws, but his guests would pull up a stack of magazines and make themselves easy, playing cards into the night.

When Floyd heard that we were living in the truck until the Riders resettled, he called my mother to his porch. "They don't have to move," he told her.

My mother explained that we were in no rush to force them out.

"There's no need," he said, giving her a rheumy-eyed stare. "I'm going to die soon, and then there will be a place for you folks."

Mother brushed this off, but his flat tone spooked her.

A week later, Floyd invited his friends over and made great ceremony of giving away his saws and gap-tongued logging boots. The next morning, Jim saw Floyd's papers untouched on the porch and, after knocking didn't rouse him, went in to find the man lying cold in his bed, three empty gin bottles lined up neatly on the floor.

It took us a week of scrubbing to make that place fit to live in. There was standing water in the sink that the neighbor told us hadn't been drained for six months. Mother snaked the drain, lined the musty drawers with butcher paper, and sewed batik curtains for the windows. In the bedroom, the wallpaper hung in thick tatters, a yellowed flowery print laced with ribbons. We pulled that down and found a layer of cheesecloth tacked beneath it, and when that was stripped away, solid foot-wide redwood planks, rough-planed from trees that must have been over five hundred years old.

I was given Floyd's bedroom. Mother and Jim slept in the living room on a platform bed that doubled as a couch. I was not yet five, and it was summer, so I had to go to bed before the sun went down, which felt like exile from the world of light. While the air outside turned gold, I would press my face against the screen and watch the older neighborhood kids playing kickball in the street. One evening, not long after we had moved into the house, Mother and Jim came to tuck me in, and the two of them lingered for a while. Mother sat on the edge of my bed and sang to me. Jim stood in the middle of the room with his hands in his pockets, looking out the western window at the torn-up yard, the bristle of cattails in the ditch, and the corrugated roof of Earl's welding garage across the street, where he went every afternoon to buy glass bottles of Coke from the vending machine.

The novelty of the two of them tucking me in together in my very own bedroom set me humming with pleasure, and I wanted to say something in honor of this, but I didn't dare break their reverie. Even as I lay there, mute with happiness, I was conscious of the fragility of the scene: two parents, one child, pausing for a few moments together under one roof at the day's end.

 

We soon got to know our neighbors, who through Floyd's gentlemanly exit were allowed to remain in the back half of the house. Jackie Rider was full-blooded Choctaw, with unnerving composure and striking beauty that she didn't make much of: hair as shiny as obsidian, high cheekbones, and almond eyes. She padded around the house barefoot and wore faded Levi's that hugged her narrow hips. Jackie was in nursing school, and worked a night-shift job. Her husband, Roger—whom my parents called Roger Dodger—was blond and bearded and worked as a lumberjack. Roger often spent his evenings at the bar down by Hunter's Store, where men stopped by during deer season to load up on beer and bullets, their four-wheel-drives spattered with mud, their gun racks full.

The Riders had two kids, a son named Jacob and a daughter, Alison, who was my age. She and I became instant friends. In the scorching afternoons, we would walk down to Madge's Motel and pay ten cents to swim in the pool. When Madge wasn't upstairs sleeping off a bender, she would lean her head out of the snack door and peddle stale Fritos and orange pop. We'd spend change filched from our mothers' purses on red licorice, splash around the shallow end, and then dry ourselves facedown on the hot concrete until our bodies were dented by pebbles. On Saturdays, Alison and I would walk farther down Spring Street and lean into the smoky bar, listening for Roger's voice amid the clack of pool balls and high laughter. After a few beers he was a soft touch for candy money.

Once in a while, Alison and I would get in a nasty spat and run to opposite ends of the house. It was hard, though, to hold a grudge in such close quarters. Our bathrooms were divided by a flimsy wall, and when we were on good terms we shouted conversations through the plasterboard until our mothers told us it was not allowed. Since we had to play in the same yard, we developed a ritual for mending our rifts. When boredom got the better of fury, one of us would signal to the other with a knock on the bathroom wall. Then we'd pace the narrow concrete sidewalk beside the house, stand back to back, and take turns saying we were sorry. This system worked because we each had to travel the same distance, and we didn't have to look at each other while we ate what Jim called "humble pie."

Once, after we had made up and were leaning against the garden fence, Alison told me that her father had suggested a better way to finish the conflict: she should walk the path as planned, wait until I turned around, and then hit me in the side of the head with a roundhouse. Alison was a scrappy little thing, but she was smart. By ignoring his advice, she had proven her loyalty, but at the same time she put me on notice that she had official permission to clean my clock.

I regarded Roger with a certain suspicion after that, but not long after we moved in, he lived up to his nickname and disappeared. Jackie had her nursing degree by then, and was pulling night shift in the emergency room. The kids were left mostly to their own devices. Alison found Jacob a nuisance and tried to keep him at bay, but she cooked him breakfast every morning while her mother slept in, and dinner every night after her mother left for work. I was in awe of her easy competence with the gas stove; she would stand on a chair and grill slice after slice of perfectly browned French toast. Walking in her mother's shoes actually sustained her for a while—she had a grownup's common sense, which I noticed and paid its due—but eventually it exhausted her. Late at night, after dinner was eaten and the dishes washed, she would curl up on the couch with her dirty flannel blanket, one hand tucked deep in her armpit, the other curled at her mouth. That thumb, wrinkled from spit, forced her front teeth out over the years into a hungry overbite.

Jacob was molasses eyed and docile. He often wore a look that I can still see now: so full of uncomplicated faith in whatever was befalling him, I couldn't decide if I wanted to take him under my wing or do him some senseless harm. He was stocky, but his hair was fine and curled at his neck. His little hands, when I held them, were damp in the creases. I remember thinking no one should be that sweet, and of course he didn't stay that way. He grew to over six feet, stopped talking to us, and spent his days shooting squirrels with a BB gun. But when he was little, Jake circled us like a dark moon. Because he didn't say much and never objected to our ministrations, he became the prized son in our daytime games of house. I would trade Alison a pack of gum for the right to be his mother, because he would actually eat small portions of the mud pies I baked. He sat on the dirt pile, a tin pan in his lap, and chewed methodically, delicately spitting pebbles into his palm and placing them at the edge of his plate like fish bones.

When Jackie was home, I often read her silence as annoyance at my presence, always aware that I was the child of the rent collector. Alison once dared me to sneak us a piece of bacon from the oven, while her mother sat reading in the next room. She squatted next to me grinning encouragement while I eased open the oven door and picked out a slice, then ran and told her mother what I'd done. Jackie ordered me home, steely fury in her eyes, and I saw it like a headline as I raced around to my mother's kitchen: Landlords' Kid Steals the Bacon!

My other yard mates, the Chapmans, lived in the stucco house beside ours. Like the Riders, they were another fatherless family, Mr. Chapman having run off years before. Mrs. Chapman, or Tillie, as everyone called her, was an enormous woman who lived in a housedress and thongs and never went out except to go to church. She had three kids. Daniel, the oldest, hulked about in discomfort at their diminished situation. He worked nights even while in high school, and since we all acknowledged he would not be long with us, he became a kind of vaporous presence. Tillie's two daughters, Charlene and Jill, spent their summer afternoons out on the rickety picnic table in the yard. Charlene, the older one, was curvy and slow moving. Her hair fell like a brown pelt down her back, full of lights. Jill was wound tighter. She had catlike reflexes, buck teeth, and a quick laugh. After school I would find them side by side on the picnic bench, combing their feathered hair and pressing their eyelashes back so they stood up for a few seconds like black tiaras.

Tillie would not let them wear mascara, but she would let them do just about anything else. On their birthdays, she banished them from the house and spent a whole day in the kitchen, emerging around sundown with her face spackled a moist rose, holding a tinfoiled board high above her head. Down on the picnic table came her creation: a cake with a bas-relief bunny rabbit fleeced with coconut, lifting one paw above a patch of candy corn. The frosting was vivid with food coloring. (She kept those tear-shaped vials lined up in her spice rack, as handy as sugar or salt.) We all sighed with admiration, and Tillie beamed and cut us each a huge slab. Beautiful as it looked, the cake left a bitter clog on the tongue.

These creations were only an elevated version of the Chapmans' staple fare: sugar and starch. Even though my mother plied Tillie with vegetables from her garden, I never saw a green or living thing pass through that family's lips. The girls often took their dinners outside and ate under the shade of the old walnut tree. Dinner might be tuna casserole topped with crumbled potato chips, or one slice of bologna on a hamburger bun, held together by a deep slick of mayonnaise. I sat on the end of the picnic table, slavering over those sandwiches, until Jill said I looked like an urchin and shooed me off. The day my mother let me buy the ingredients at the corner store and make one for myself stands out as a moment of singular gustatory pleasure: the sweet tang of white bread and fat and processed meat.

I realized then that I had been snowed by my mother, who had convinced me that powdered vitamin C mixed with water was a fitting dessert. One glass made the glands at the back of my jaw ache, but I begged for that stuff, and didn't even ask for honey to cut the sting. That was before Charlene and Jill gave me an education of the palate. When we played house they fed me spoonfuls of "baby food" from their mother's Tupperware cups: powdered sugar and cocoa mix, which dissolved slowly on my tongue like sweet ashes. Once they'd gotten hold of me, I couldn't look at our home-cooked meals in the same way. Mother grew most of our food in the garden—broccoli and kale, corn and green peppers—and served it up with steak and lamb chops and liver. And she made our bread—dark, of course, and studded with grains of whole wheat—and bought our milk from the local dairy. We'd take glass gallon jars down to Conway's Farm and wade through the cow shit and into a room with a huge silver tank where the milk flowed from a tap. Back home, Mother set the jar on a chair in the kitchen for a few hours, then dipped a length of rubber tubing into the risen cream and siphoned it off into a bowl. It all seems the picture of prairie virtue now, but at the time I wished for macaroni and cheese, cabinets full of potato chips and cookies, breakfasts of Lucky Charms.

I
N THE SUMMER
of 1971, when I was nearly five, my father was released from prison. (He had been given six months off his sentence for good behavior.) Friends of his were living on a commune in Oregon, and they invited him to spend some time there sorting himself out. He came west, as soon as he was free, and picked me up from my mother's house.

We took a bus up to Eugene, and a friend from the commune gave us a lift out to the property—acres of dry grass and scrub oak. The commune members were roughing it—no running water, no electricity, just a few dilapidated houses at the end of a long dirt road.

My father's attempt to unwind in the woods was a disaster. The sudden move from a cell to the wilds seemed to leave him nervous and unsettled. The first day, he tried to play the hip nudist and got a terrible sunburn. Then he drank some "fresh" spring water and spent three days heaving in the outhouse. I stayed indoors with him while he recovered, making him tell me stories. "Me and nature never got along," he said.

But as the days drifted on, we settled into the place. My father taught me to use a BB gun in the field beside the commune's main house. Arms around me from behind, he cheered when we shot the faded beer cans off the stump. "Sock it to me," he said, holding out his enormous olive-colored palm. We ate homemade bread and black beans, and swam naked in the creek flowing through the property.

One afternoon we wandered into one of the many rough-framed buildings on the property to take shelter from the heat. Cinder-block and knotty-pine bookshelves lined the walls. A sink and countertop unit pulled out of a remodeled kitchen shored up one wall. There was no running water; spider webs stretched from the tap. On the drain board sat a propane stove, and beneath it, on the floor, were jugs of cooking fuel and water.

My father moved to the open door, raised his arms up to the door frame, and stretched like a cat. He was there in body—a body honed by hours in the weight room, on the courts playing ball with the other prisoners—but in another way he was fitfully absent. He circled the room slowly, traced a pattern in the countertop's dust—not pent-up, but aimless, as if he had lost something and didn't know where to search. I squatted near the sink, playing with a set of plastic measuring cups, and watched him closely. He moved through the doorway—for a moment framed by light, a dark cutout of a man—then passed out of view.