The Golden State полностью

“Well okay then.” I do not feel any particular warmth from Cindy and wonder if it’s the drinks and the blood at the Golden Spike or my crypto-Muslim husband or if she’s just not a very warm person or if it’s a reflection of the warmth that I am directing at her. I always forget that I am walking around and can be seen and heard just like everyone else. I remember how Sal said “She’s not nice but we love her anyway.”

I get Honey into the stroller and it only takes us twenty-two minutes to get to the courthouse moving at a brisker pace than I can really handle. I’m panting when we get there and worried we’re late but I behold Cindy again, seated on the front steps smoking and looking impassive.

“Hi again” I say, with the feeling of being at a party and clinging to the one person who will talk to you.

“Smoke?” she says. “Later,” I say, gesturing at the baby. Honey wants to get out of her stroller so I take her out and set her on the lawn in front of the courthouse and give her a string cheese, how many string cheeses has it been today, I try to figure, too many in any event. She toddles and bites hunks off the cheese and then lets the macerated pieces tumble out of her mouth into the grass, from which she retrieves them.

“Are you going to give a presentation?” I ask Cindy, who has the look of someone who is getting ready to give a presentation. “Not me,” she says. “Bruce McNamara’s supposed to say something. We’ve been writing ’em letters and I don’t know what all for weeks, as you know.” “Like your letter in the paper.” “And to the supervisors, and everyone else.”

People are coming up the walkway now, and Cindy trails off. More people than I’ve ever seen in one place in Altavista—more people than I’ve seen, total, in the whole time I’ve been here. There is a group of elderly women with very short hair, and a group of middle-aged women with very long hair. Most everyone is white, there are four or five people who are brown but no one who appears to be black. Cindy nods hello to a clump of three gray-haired men in cowboy hats and mustaches who seem in a hurry to get into the courthouse.

“There are so many people I don’t know here,” I say, because I can’t think of anything else to say.

“Well, you know,” says Cindy. “Not everyone lives in town. Lot of ranchers came from Rigby and Sundown and those places”—tiny towns beside which Altavista is a metropolis.

“Also I doubt you’d know many people in town now,” she says, not unkindly. “Haven’t really seen you up here that I can remember. Since your mom died, I mean.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I guess you never met my husband’s family when I brought them up last year.”

“Can’t recollect I did,” she says, sounding awfully like a cowboy for someone from San Bernardino. She pulls on her cigarette.

A Ford truck pulls up and discharges a very tall, very thin woman in a red blazer with a sportswomanlike braid down her back. “Goddamn,” Cindy sighs, “it’s that cunt” and I visibly startle. “Sorry,” Cindy says.

“What cunt?” I ask superfluously, just to feel the word, the little charge of tongue meeting teeth as the word goes out into the air. “She’s from way over the coast, big ranching family.” “Why is she, uh, a c-word?” I ask.

“She was helping us to get organized for Jefferson but she won’t stop talking about the UN and some agenda they have that they are planning to do that she says is gonna have us all in chains by the year 2030. Don’t get me wrong I hate the damned UN but it’s a distraction when we need to be talking about our state.” “Oh,” I say, idly wondering why she hates the UN, my mom looked askance at the UN because the UN representatives always had the nicest house and biggest car of whatever posting they found themselves in. Honey runs toward me laughing, a sunburst, a comet, barking her shins on the first step and falling into my knees, still more or less laughing. I pull her up into my lap and kiss the top of her head with the puppy smell that she has after a while with no bath. She is writhing to get down and play again. She coughs and Cindy holds her cigarette up over her head. I’m desperate for a puff.

The Cunt walks up the steps and into the courthouse, nodding coolly at Cindy who raises a surprisingly regal hand in its purple sleeve. “Hi, ladies,” says the Cunt. “Howdy,” I say for no reason I can name. “See you inside, Cindy?” she says cheerily. I gather Honey and hold her wriggling like a big trout while I collapse the stroller which doesn’t fold over the diaper bag so I have to unfold it get out the bag throw it over my shoulder collapse the stroller while Cindy heaves herself up from the steps and straightens herself out. We walk up the stairs behind the Cunt, who strides purposefully up to the imposing paneled door.