SURFACE ROOTS

KENNETH SCAMBRAY

SURFACE ROOTS

 PROSE SERIES 66

GUERNICA

Toronto – Buffalo – Lancaster (U.K.)

2004  

CONTENTS

Historic Hollister

Chickens that Dance

The Wooden Fig Press

Walking the Line

Bishops, Generals, and Donkeys

For Vincent and Justin

HISTORIC HOLLISTER

I

The castle rose almost three feet out of the sand. One side had carefully molded battlements and even windows that allowed a small shaft of light into the interior of the thick walls. The other side of the castle was crude. Its crenels and merlons were irregular and misshapen. Tim had watched as its construction had taken the better part of the afternoon. Now as it dried in the mid-day California sun, the two children flicked water on the drying walls from their fingertips that they dipped into the red bucket the young boy held. They stood on the white sand as the surf crashed and rushed up the beach and then hissed its retreat behind them. A wisp of clouds, like sheer chiffon, filtered the mid-afternoon sun and caused the air to hang thick and humid. Anthony stepped away from his older, taller sister and circled the drying, crumbling castle and continued to flick water on its walls. His sister directed him while she kept an eye on the advancing surf. Just to the south of them, dividing one half of the beach from the other, a pier the length of a football field stretched out beyond the surf into the bay. On its starboard side several fishermen’s slack lines looped into the sea like the anchor chains of a ship.

Tim got up feebly from the short aluminum beach chair sunk in the sand, ducked from under the green umbrella, and walked down to the castle and surveyed the work his children had done over the previous two hours.

Fine job, Tim said.

Risa, her nose smeared with white sunscreen, looked at Anthony, her junior by two years, as he began flicking water on the more refined forms of his older sister’s side. Risa turned and looked toward the surf pounding behind them.

The water took another stick, she said.

Risa, in a striped one-piece bathing suit, looked up at her shirtless father, with his flowered trunks hiked high on his waist and his green clip-on sunglasses covering his eyes.

You look like a dork, she said to him.

She abruptly turned and walked down to the water’s edge where the stick disappeared. Tim watched her and shook his head. Earlier she had spaced a series of five small pieces of driftwood about a foot apart to monitor the rush of the tide back toward the castle. Risa grimaced and wrinkled her white nose and screamed. She hopped in the foamy surf on one foot then another as a dead gull, tethered to a thick brown line of seaweed, swirled around her ankles. With its wings spread it circled her in the receding surf and disappeared under the foaming white water of a wave. She ran back up the sand and stopped at the castle.

Chicken, Anthony said. 

Shut up, she said.

Tim walked back to the family encampment and pulled

his chair out from under the green umbrella and flopped down into it. He adjusted his shorts and dug his heels into the sand. He looked over at Allison, in a two-piece red suit, lying on the other side of the green umbrella. She lay flat on her stomach, toes sunk in the sand over the edge of the beach towel. Though it was the high season, the beach was sparsely occupied. Behind them were two yellow catamarans safely pushed up clear of high tide with their aluminum masts down and wrapped with their sails.

You and your brother did a fine job. Tim tried yelling above the crash of a wave. It’s like the one in Bolsena. Remember?

What? Risa yelled to him. She looked back at the castle. Anthony ran up next to her from the water and she spoke to him. He looked blankly up at his dad and back at the drying crumbling castle.

They don’t remember that trip, Allison said.

They don’t remember I’m their father, Tim said. It must be the generation gap. I don’t think I communicate with these kids anymore. She even called me a dork.

They had taken the children with them to Italy three years before on a small grant that Tim had received to finish his long-suffering dissertation on the Colonna family. He finished it just under the wire. The grant and the trip were the incentive to revive the project, nearly dead, if for no other reason, just to get it done once and for all. Not that a Ph.D. in history from UC Irvine mattered to him anymore. There were no university openings and little need for historians. There hadn’t been for years. In his frustration he sometimes would tell Allison that she was right. History had, in fact, ended. But at other times, like this vacation, he seemed to be on a single-minded crusade to revive it. Over the years of his struggling with his dissertation, he vacillated between chucking his research in the garbage and diving in to finish it. He lived in between the reality of his job and his hope to be a university professor. Allison feared the consequences if he never finished and encouraged him to apply for the grant. The time spent in Italy rekindled his interest and maybe even hopes just long enough for him to complete it when they returned. His committee even liked it, which only deepened his dilemma.

As Tim watched the children, Risa knelt next to the castle and Anthony turned and ran back to the water and began pushing the dead gull back into the surf from the sand where it had settled. In the middle of the bay two single-hulled sailboats pitched in the rough sea. Their steel masts swayed erratically above the horizon line like inverted metronomes gone mad. Near them a small fishing boat with its net rolled on a spindle on the aft deck bucked in the rising swells. Out to sea an oil tanker sat lifeless and high in the whitecaps that surrounded it.

Allison rolled onto her back and lifted herself on her elbows and looked at the children. A big wave suddenly crashed at Anthony’s feet and swept up the sand to Risa. Anthony ran back up to his sister’s side. They began digging furiously with their hands to form a moat around the perimeter of their doomed castle.

Are they getting too much sun? she asked. 

No. But you are, he said.

I can take it, she said curtly.

She turned over on her stomach again and spread her novel, like a downed bird, flat against the blanket. She turned her face away from Tim and closed her eyes.

How long we gonna stay? Anthony yelled up at his father.

We’ll go in the morning, Tim yelled back. 

Where? Risa asked.

Yeah, where? Allison repeated without raising her head.

My cousins, Tim said.

Allison lifted her head from the blanket and looked at him. Just to see a lousy photograph. She put her head down again. Besides, you don’t know this guy from Adam.

Just for an hour, Tim said. Besides, you and the kids will get to see the Salinas Valley.

Like they give a damn Allison said. I grew up on a farm. Remember?

It’s just a short detour, Tim said.

This is my vacation too, Allison said.

Tim returned to his thick novel. Allison lay back down in the sun and turned her head away from him. She was still miffed. The night before they had argued over Tim’s insistence that they detour on their way north, just for a few hours, to visit a cousin – a very distant cousin – near the town of Hollister. Allison said it would add hours to an already long, tiresome drive up the coast to Carmel, their destination. His vocation had turned into a passionate avocation. The surf crashed and rushed up the sand and filled the moat surrounding the castle as the children both looked on helplessly.

II

They had arrived at Carpinteria only the day before after a short drive from the San Gabriel Valley. Their Suburban crammed, they drove west toward Los Angeles out of the valley on the San Bernardino Freeway. The Santa Ana winds had raged for nearly a week before their departure for Carmel and their much-needed respite from work and the oppressive summer heat. When they left, the inland valleys were parched. The brown foothills above the valleys, from Rancho Cucamonga to Los Angeles, were covered with tinder just waiting to be set off. The Santa Anas provided a break from the inert brown haze that daily besmirched the air above the valleys during the summer months. But as the wind blew from the high desert toward the sea, it super heated. By mid day its gusts were like blasts from the open door of a kiln. It withered everything in its path and scorched the spring grass and sage that covered the foothills. Spent yucca stalks, their white flowering tops long since gone, spiked the air like the masts of sail boats run aground in the dry washes below the canyons. Allison studied the hills to her right through her window as the a.c. in the Chevy Suburban whirred cross drafts before her face. The children played quietly in the back seat.

The psychos are out there, Tim said, trying to make conversation. He took his eye off the car in front of him and glanced at the mountains to his right. They’re parked on a dirt road somewhere in their pickup trucks. Looking for the right spot. You know, waiting for the right moment when the wind is up. Then they set their matchbox fuses.

Hush, Allison said. You’re going to scare the kids, Tim looked at the road ahead and then glanced at his wife’s face. She was still miffed from their argument the night before.

It’s just part of the history of the area. He was trying to fill the void. It’s inevitable. Like the San Andreas fault. 

But Allison didn’t want to talk. There was a commotion in the back seat, and she turned and glared at the children. Anthony suddenly turned his attention to his two rubber dinosaurs on the seat next to him, and Risa turned her eyes down and disinterestedly began flipping the pages of a book on her lap. The morning rush hour traffic stalled and then started, inexplicably.

By degrees, they inched forward and then the traffic loosened again and they passed green signs at the side of the freeway announcing the ill-defined borders of El Monte, Temple City, Monterey Park, and Alhambra as they headed west to Los Angeles.

At the junction they took the 101 north and by-passed Hollywood. As the traffic flow began to cooperate with their stated goal of Carpinteria by noon, Tim sped through more indistinct cities – Calabasas, Agora Hills, West Lake Village, and others – whose existence is only justified by their proximity to Los Angeles. The historical resonance of their names was drowned out by the flood of traffic that rushed by their frontage roads lined with inarticulate commercial buildings. Just north of Ventura they came over the