Divisadero Read Free Page A

night. We counted out the seconds between meteor showers
slipping horizontal across the heavens. When thunder shook the house and horse
stalls, I’d see Claire in her bed, during the brief moments of lightning,
sitting upright like a nervous hound, hardly breathing, crossing herself . There were days when she disappeared on her horse
and I disappeared into a book. But we were still sharing everything then. The Nicasio bar, the Druid Hall, the Sebastiani movie theatre in
Sonoma, whose screen was like the surface of the Petaluma reservoir, altering
with every shift of light, the hundred or more redwings that always sat on the
telephone wires and chirruped out loud before a storm. There was a
purple flower in February called shooting star. There were the sticks of willow
that Coop cut down and strapped onto my broken wrist before he drove me to the
hospital. I was fourteen then. He was eighteen. Everything is biographical, Lucian
Freud says. What we make, why it is made, how we draw a dog, who it is we are
drawn to, why we cannot forget. Everything is collage, even genetics. There is
the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known brie fl y. We contain them for the rest of our
lives, at every border that we cross.
    Who was Coop, really? We
never knew what his parents were like. We were never sure what he felt about
our family, which had harboured him and handed him another life. He was the
endangered heir of a murder. As a teenager he was hesitant, taking no more than
he was given. At dawn he’d come out from one of the sheds like a barn cat,
stretching as if he’d been sleeping for days, when in fact he had returned from
a pool hall in San Francisco three or four hours earlier, hitchhiking the forty
miles back in the darkness. I wondered even then how he would survive or live
in a future world. We watched as he muttered, thinking things out, while he
stripped down a tractor or welded a radiator from an abandoned car onto a ’58
Buick. Everything was collage.
    Somewhere there is an
album made up of photographs our father took of Claire and me that provides a
time-lapse progression of our growing up, from our fi rst, unconcerned poses to feral or vain
glances, as the truer landscape of our faces began to be seen. Between
Christmas and New Year’s—the picture was always taken at that time—we’d be
herded into the pasture beside the outcrop of rock (where our mother was
buried) and captured in a black-and-white photograph on a late December
afternoon. He insisted on modest clothing, although as we grew older Claire
would arrive in chapped jeans or I would reveal a bare shoulder, causing a
twenty-minute argument. He found little humour in this. The yearly episode was
something he needed, like a carefully laid table that would clarify the past.
    We would study ourselves
in this evolving portrait. It made us secretly competitive. One became more
beautiful, or reclusive, one became more self-conscious, or anarchic. We were
revealed and betrayed by our poses. There was the year, for instance, that
Claire lowered her face to hide a scar. In spite of having been almost
inseparable, we were diverging, pacing ourselves privately into our own version
of ourselves. And then there was the last photograph, when we were both
sixteen, where our faces gazed out nakedly. A picture that I
would rip out of the album a short while later.
    Claire recalls whistling
as she entered the horse barn, and reaching for a bridle when she heard a
bucket kicked over somewhere in the darkness. A bucket would not be left loose
in a stall, so it meant someone was there, or it meant a horse was loose. She
stepped forward with her uneven walk, the bridle still in one hand. She didn’t
call out. She reached the corner of the passageway, peered around it, and saw
my body lying inert on the ground in the dark silence of the barn. Then, as she
approached me, the horse came loud out of the blackness and smashed against
her, throwing her down.
    There