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of pigs about to be gutted. Sometimes I wake up terrified that I will die in Iowa, although I’m only thirty-eight. Jean Seberg died at forty, and when I was a teenager that seemed like a good long life—who wouldn’t want to die upon finding herself forty? Now I’m close enough to smell the blood. I lie in bed and listen to the hogs, and I count all the bad choices that forced me back to Edna.
    On the night of the Iowa caucuses, Edna seemed like a good idea. I was living in Russian Hill and had been handed my eviction notice, and calculated how far east I’d have to go to find a place my proofreader’s wages could afford. There on the TV was our mayor; there was our town, and our state that put Obama into play. I left California in the afterstink of Proposition 8, heading for something brighter, same as I’d once left Iowa for San Francisco. Someplace spacious, quiet, a chance to write the book on Jean Seberg I’d always wanted to, the unburdening of her legacy.
    This morning in May I turned on my computer and struggled with Jean’s story, getting hung up in the place I always got hung up. Her friendship with Hakim Jamal, such an itchy self-promoter even the Black Panthers ejected him. Jean met him on a plane. Now, to most people, the very fact that he was flying first class would be enough to trigger a note of caution. Or later, when he accepted her offer of a ride in Sammy Davis Jr.’s Learjet, or when he lounged in Davis’s Lake Tahoe retreat, claiming it as his safe house, hectoring Jean about his several enemies.
    Yikes, Jean. Try (and I do) to see this misstep in its historical context, the heady lure of Black Power, this is the moment she betrays herself. I just can’t channel her intentions. What I channel is a powerful thirst for a caramel macchiato. Lucky for me, one of Edna’s new acquisitions is a Starbucks. Not an actual Starbucks, but a Starbucks kiosk in the supermarket, with a couple of the trademark burgundy comfy chairs adding authenticity. I wouldn’t have been caught in a Starbucks in San Francisco, but I’m grateful there’s one in Edna. When I was in high school the only place to get “gourmet coffee” was a Christian tchotchke shop that kept a thermos of lukewarm hazelnut and a sleeve of Styrofoam cups amid the doilies and angels.
    At one time elms and oaks lined the streets of Edna, but they have been dismantled by disease and by guys in orange vests, bobbing overhead in cherry pickers. Trash trees—hackberries, locusts, Arizona ash—have replaced them; the sidewalk is littered with spongy green pods and the yolky innards of cardinal eggs. I moved into a cottage five blocks from downtown; walking, and maybe someday bicycling, was part of the vision of my small-town repatriation. I’d forgotten how clammy and cold a Midwestern spring could be, crystallized fog bearing down hard. Already the cherry pickers were out, amputating limbs still in bud. The thrum of a bass came from somewhere, it got louder and louder, and then, there was a tattoo of horns.
    I turned the corner of Decatur Street and ran into a parade, led by three brown-skinned girls in white spangled leotards, chubby girls with sincere smiles. A few dozen people, old people and little kids, stood about the sidewalk, waving. Rows of trumpeters, twelve or thirteen years old, marched while they followed the music on their lyres. A few trombones, a lone girl in a French braid blowing a tuba, and then, five men in dark shirts with embroidered yokes playing mandolins.
    I had forgotten. It was Cinco de Mayo.
    Then came the floats, a truck from Mama Rosita’s, a ragtop Caddy from Esquivel’s, the fire engine and a couple of squad cars, strobes flashing. At last, in a white Ford pickup, our mayor, Charlie Burt, waved both arms, wildly, as if he were drowning, followed only by a couple of farm tractors dragging Porta-Johnnies.
    Charlie Burt was not your typical