IMPALA by David Goguen
The news shows the northeast fields, the lettuce in little green dabs on the rows, pretty late for August. You can see the leftover rail spur on the easement, which means our houses are just off to the right, so of course I lean that way like a moron, thinking the picture will move too.
I mute the TV, listen for the echoey thump of the news helicopter, but there’s only the sound of the kitchen set, Mom and Wade watching the same thing in there. They show the aqueduct running two-thirds full easy, and I know I just got suckered by old footage.
Mom makes a show out of clearing her throat. “Joy, hon, we’re not lepers in here,” she says, stretching it into a melody. I make another knot in the strings of my work apron, watch the bright sunlight underline the curtains, bake the grit in the sliding glass door track. The window AC has basically quit, just turns the hot air humid. I’m already pitting out pretty bad.
I can hear the newswoman on the kitchen TV. “Water rights are last in, first out under the charter. But the newest growers want a lottery, and they’re petitioning the county for it.”
I turn the set off. In the reflection of the empty screen I watch myself get the postcard out of my back pocket. The creased front shows the Hollywood sign, with the sun setting orange and pink through the letters. After six days I know the back by heart. Lindy’s bubbly handwriting fills the space so quick. “The real sunset is the other way, plus the smog actually makes it way prettier.” She says she almost went to a Spinanes show at the Palace. She doesn’t even listen to the Spinanes, just knows I’ll be jealous.
I go in and plop down at the kitchen table. Mom watches me, sips her coffee. The mug says Do I Look Like a People Person? A chip on the rim shows like bone in the blue ceramic. Her eyes dart around above it like they’re trying to find a place to land. When we’re in different rooms I want to tell her Lindy left, then when she’s in front of me I don’t feel like it anymore.
On the TV they’re interviewing a pissed-looking grower. “Every week I get carried over,” he says. “It’s a broken record.” The reporter asks what about groundwater pumping. The guy tips back his Fresno State cap, looks around for somewhere to spit, then does. “Go back and ask the district what they want per acre foot,” he says.
“Your granddad would be getting a kick out of this,” Mom says. I can tell from her voice that her eyes have a wet gleam. My grandfather had a contract to find water for the Central Valley Farmers’ Alliance, digging wells and pump lines into the aquifers that run under the county.
“Bigger than the kick he’d get out of you giving all his stuff to the Goodwill.” My nails peel skins of white paint from the chair arms.
“You don’t have to be such a you-know-what first thing, kiddo,” she says, laying it on for Wade. She uses the spoon like an oar to stir the mug, and I wonder whether it’s just the coffee, but I haven’t found any bottles around for a while.
With his mouth full Wade nods at the TV. “All I know is, I saw that reporter gal buying toilet paper in the Food-4‑Less one time.” He tilts his head back to keep the waffles in.
The TV shows jumpy black-and-white footage, men leaning on the front of the Farmers’ Alliance building. They squint at the camera, smiling with their hands shading the sun. My grandfather probably found water for half those men, before they voted to dredge the aqueducts and till practically right up against the Elk Hills. I look at the cribbage board hung on the wall. Mom and him used to play right here almost every night. He’d study his cards, let me run a peg through the deep creases the sun rutted in the back of his neck. I loved the way he said the scores. Fifteen for two, four, and a run is eight. Sometimes I still feel his hand on my back, trying to get me to quit slouching.
“I swear I’m done with this heat,” Mom says. She has never lived any place but here and every summer she acts like it’s her first. She fans herself with one of Wade’s study booklets. He works for a garage door company and he’s going for his electrician’s license, bettering himself all over our furniture. They were in the same Thursday night league over at Rocket Bowl. That’s all it took. Lindy would tell you that’s because everyone around here just gets pulled into whoever else is close by. One is a light bulb and one is a moth, and neither knows any better. I remember her propped on her elbows next to the register a few weeks ago, huffing a sigh up into her bangs, saying, “No offense, but working here weekends is one thing, just plain working here is another.” I was drawing a poster for a Sleater-Kinney concert. I said technically neither one of us was working, and chucked a tasting spoon at her. I showed her the poster, with the three band members in silhouette like in the Charlie’s Angels logo, but I swapped a guitar and a microphone for the gun and the walkie-talkie, put drumsticks in the karate-chop hands. I made the concert that night at You Say Gelato. I even put Lindy as the opening act. “You crack me up,” she said. No smile.
I watch Mom watch Wade pinch the last of a waffle through a copper puddle of syrup. She isn’t eating in front of him yet, says he is too brand new still. Meanwhile the hall bathroom has smelled like one of his dumps or his knock-off Drakkar from day one, and I’m the one who gets to stand in it and get ready for work.
Even with the house closed up I can hear Benny’s Pontiac before he makes the turn off of Arroyo. Since he took the muffler off it’s like the car is talking shit to our whole street. The engine idle is deep with wide gaps in it.
Wade glares at the blinds over the window. “I’d give my kid a .22 before I gave him the keys to a V‑8,” he says.
I hear the engine cut out and the car door shut, so I grab my apron, say bye. It’s just a ride to work. I don’t need Benny coming up the porch steps like it’s prom.
The New Harvest Credit Union sign says it’s 91 already. Benny hits the gas, the blue and gold tassel leans back under the rear-view, and I get nudged deeper into the bucket seat. He’s got an Iron Maiden tape in, and I wonder whether he even listened to the Heatmiser bootleg I gave him.
We pass the VA where my grandfather drove himself, with the heart attack probably gripping him harder every second. I tell Benny how my mom lost it after my grandfather died. She closed down Randy’s Lounge every night for weeks, would walk the mile home while the Impala just sat in the hospital parking lot. She ended up selling it to one of her exes, but she won’t say which one. It’s been six months and I still look for that car around.
“That’s some shameful shit, selling an Impala,” Benny says. “He had custom wheels, hubs that matched the paint, right?”
“British racing green,” I say.
My grandfather promised the Impala to me as a graduation present, but I’ve never brought that up once. Good old Joy, not making a fuss.
With his gearshift hand Benny hooks at my pinky with his, asks me if I feel like heading up to the High Spot for a few. I say sure. Down Centennial the asphalt shimmers a watery mirage. I look out at the kids’ toys and the grills in the front yards we pass, the low cinder block fences between the identical houses. I think about how far Lindy got on just that little motorcycle, holding onto Ethan’s skinny shoulders, putting her feet down on the asphalt behind his at every red light. Everyone in the cars around them thinking she’s just doing her part to steady the bike, when really she’s making all these separate decisions to keep going.
On the catwalk that circles the water tower you can see under the roller marks of new white paint on the metal siding, make out the leftovers from where someone spray-painted “Izzy Loves Anything.” Last time we were up here Lindy cracked me up making up stories about who Izzy was. Another month and the tower will be a rainbow mess again.
“I keep telling myself it isn’t like she died or something,” I say. “I mean, she’s coming back.”
“Poor baby,” Benny says, with his overboard sad face. All these dents show in his chin, then disappear. “At least you got a goodbye, Brainy, because I didn’t get shit.” It sounds like he has been waiting a while to say it. The unlit joint bounces like crazy under the words. I pretend not to notice, but I can almost feel the first bite of smoke in my chest. I wonder whether him and Lindy ever hung out up here just the two of them.
The Elks look like desert dunes except for the oaks that spot them. A few morning shadows still hang out in the folds. Across the valley the coastal range is craggy and purple-black. Fingers of fog drape the gaps, stuck there until the heat burns them off, and I try to picture the whole valley like the lake bed it was. The Kings used to flood it for centuries at a time. Where our houses are used to be marshlands. My grandfather has marine fossils to prove it. The years he spent finding water, he also found mollusks, white coral. A hunk of shale with a kelp formation printed into it like a peace sign. He made wood frames and bought Lucite cubes for some of them. Others he kept in baggies taped with different-colored labels depending on the period. It’s all in sagging boxes in a corner of the garage, but it will be gone soon. I’m probably next. When Wade moves in, Mom has all but said they’re not sharing a wall. One time I said I could just move into my grandfather’s room. They looked at each other like I just told their favorite joke, then Wade got his serious face together and told me I have a lot of things to learn.
Benny brings the lighter up and thumbs the wheel. The flame stands tall in the still air, then buckles into the joint. He drags with every part of him wrapped around it, eyes shut. Veins slant tight on his forearms under the sleeves of his t‑shirt. It’s one of the blue ones they handed out with our caps and gowns in June. On the front it says “Kiss Our Class Goodbye.” On back it has all of our names printed tiny, making up a ’96.
“Check it out.” I pull the postcard from my pocket, hand it to Benny. He looks at the front, snorts a quick laugh, takes another drag. You can’t even see the glow of the cherry, the sun is so bright.
He holds the postcard up to his forehead like a fortune teller. “Let me guess. The sunset is the other way, followed closely by some bullshit about smog.”
His voice is pinched, holding the hit in. I grab the joint and take one too. So much for trying to lay off. In the quiet I hear the burn of the paper peeling back slow while the smoke finds its way in.
A hawk glides above the crop fields, tilting his wings on the hidden currents of air. He’s on the lookout for gophers or field mice on the scamper in the furrows. I found some obsidian out there last year, smooth as black glass but heavier, with the edges chipped sharp into a double arrowhead. It glinted in the kitchen light when I handed it to my grandfather. He grinned down, turned it over. He pegged it for Chumash. It was still warm from his hand when he gave it back. “How about we eliminate the middleman on this one?” Now I get what he meant. Maybe he wanted me to have the Impala, but he also wanted someone to take custody over all those artifacts he kept. No wonder I’m dragging Lindy’s postcard around after nearly a week, counting the exclamation points and hoping it’ll eventually say when she’s coming back. It must be in my blood.
Benny asks what my plan is. “Kill Me J.C.?” That’s what everyone calls Kolby Junior College. High school with ashtrays.
“I don’t know yet,” I say. Through the heat and the weed my voice sounds like it’s coming from under pillows, through walls.
Haven’t thought about it is more like it, I hear my grandfather say.
I ask Benny if he’s sticking around.
“Hell yes. They want me at the garage full time.” He smirks down at the joint in his hand. “Bumping my hourly up too.”
Benny doesn’t just sell weed, he’s also a whiz at tricking out cars. You can always see paint or blown fiberglass around his fingernails, sunk in horseshoe outlines from doing a ground kit or a spoiler.
“Plus this limo is legit. All it needs is an engine dropped in.” He says it like it is the same as putting air in tires. Benny and his brother Ray just bought the limo at the sheriff’s auction. It’s on blocks taking up the whole curb between their house and the neighbors. Benny will tell you staple crops are played out. When the wineries open, him and Ray will pull up in the limo to chauffeur all the tipsy tourists.
“Just like Napa Valley, Brainy.”
“Yeah, if you squint real hard,” I say. I wish he would cool it with the nickname. At least he has never once lectured me about my potential. I love how everyone just sees this magical thing sitting there in the gap between what I do and don’t do, but they never say what it is.
He steps close, leans down to kiss me. I let him, even if he smells like the garage and says so many horndog things about Lindy I usually have to punch him in the arm to get him to quit.
I duck away after a few seconds, feel the catwalk bounce under my feet. I look down over the railing, at the tire tracks in the silty dirt of the turnout. Benny’s windshield reflects the bright sky, bends the tower. It will be fall before I know it, and in the mornings the tule fog will sit low and even, trick the valley into looking like the lake it used to be.
“Ditch that thing, will you?” I say, nod back at the roach. “You’re making me late for work.”
At the First Street light we pull up next to one of the new signs that say Historic District in a little brown rectangle. We’re stuck behind a hitched tiller. The dusty spades are caked with dried mud. I watch them spin slow, think about my grandfather taking me on rides on the access roads between the crop fields. The furrows spoked past out both sides of the car. If the sprinklers were on you could see rainbows in the arcs of water. He always had his elbow hooked out the passenger side window, shaking his head, him and the fields in some silent argument. He was born here, and by the time he was my age he left to work the Union Pacific yards all up and down the coast. He made it to section foreman, but there was way more money in finding water, so he came back for good.
I tell Benny that I can walk from here. He says it’s too hot to be out, that I’m too hot to be out. It’s such a cheesedick line, but all my good comebacks just scatter.
“Almost forgot,” he says, and takes a cassette out of the glove compartment. He hands it over, pinched between his thumb and finger, like the Heatmiser bootleg is some putrid thing.
“Whatever. It rocks a little.” I look at the cover I made. I stenciled “Heatmiser” onto a Band-Aid and stuck it to the front, then drew a prescription pill bottle and wrote all the song names on it.
“Not enough.” He turns up the Maiden, offers to pick me up after my shift, but I pretend not to hear and shut the door. He guns it in neutral, chirps the tires at the green. I stay close to the shade of Rose & Sons Cannery, the faded red bricks that last the block. Just a few cars are parked around Hollis Square. Past the tall oaks you can see dark smoke plume straight up on the bright blue, someone burning off a field. I cross Center Street, make it to the honeycomb tiles, cooler under all the trees.
Some boys are pulling skateboard tricks off the lip of the empty fountain and the cement benches, slamming their boards and talking shit. If Lindy was walking with me the sounds would cut out while the boys took a break to watch. Yellow trumpet flowers droop from ivy on the low brick walls. I look at the Californio statue in the middle of the fountain. The bronze is greened over and his hands are empty. He used to be holding this lance that stretched past the horse’s nose. There’s a photo of me as a kid, reaching out on tiptoes trying to touch it, my grandfather bending down just about to pick me up.
The empty fountain echoes the slams of the skateboards. Just from the sounds, you can tell the tricks that work from the ones that don’t.
“What took you?” Ellie asks. “I need to go get a Subway.” She looks like a mother hen with her gray hair and the way she puffs her chest out reaching back to undo her apron. I go in back to punch in.
The whole Rattlers t‑ball team comes in, single file. The bell rings about thirty times in a row. Everyone smells like sunscreen, picking out their scoops from the freezer case. They expect you to keep up with them like you’re their reflection, until they see what they want. Then they point and look at you like if you don’t hurry the whole tub will book away. Ellie keeps asking what’s eating at me, even after I keep telling her nothing.
It slows way down before dinnertime, and I try working on another concert poster. The manager lets me put them up as long as they’re not too weird, and as long as they’re for shows at the shop, even though the only music in here is the oldies tapes we have to leave on. There’s just the two tapes, so it’s the same songs over and over. When one song finishes the next one starts in your head before it starts out loud.
Ellie wags her pack of cigarettes at me and goes out front. I come around and prop the door open. The bell rings, can’t tell staying from coming or going. Even between the AC and the freezer case, you only shiver coming out into sidewalk heat. Reverse goose bumps, Lindy calls them.
Ellie taps a half-smoked Winston out of a soft pack. If her break gets cut short she’ll spit the glow dead and save it. I gave her a look the first time I saw her do it. She stared back and asked if I ever heard of a fixed income. But now her eyes have a tired kindness.
“For what it’s worth,” she says. “All she took with her was that little purple backpack.”
I feel my throat shrink up like I might cry, so I just nod and watch the low sun glow orange through the trees in the square. The morning after Lindy left her mom called over to our house asking me, “What did you girls do?” like I had taken off too. She started listing off all the stuff Lindy left behind, and you could hear in her voice how thankful she was for every last thing still lying around.
The street lights give off a soft buzz, getting ready to come on.
We were standing right out here when Lindy first told me Ethan wanted her to come to L.A. He has been down there at his dad’s since right after graduation. She had a letter he wrote, but she only let me see the P.S. It said, “You are a comet, and a comet only has one path.” He put in a photo of him on the little Yamaha, wearing this goofy grin with the kickstand down. I said something dumb like what kind of princess lets herself get rescued on a 250, but she just tilted her head at the photo, kept smiling back at him.
Ellie punches out and it’s just me until closing. I’m cleaning the icy rainbow of gunk from between the tubs when the phone rings.
“You Say Gelato, how can I help you?”
Lindy says, “Well, you can tell me what’s new and exciting in Sucktown.” She doesn’t wait for an answer, just asks me to guess how many different swimming pools she’s been in already. I guess two, she tells me three, all bouncy like she is in a Clearasil commercial.
“How long do you think you’ll be down there?” I ask her.
She doesn’t say anything at first. In the quiet I grind the heel of my right sneaker into the top of my left, where the bones are like bird bones.
“Um, I have a job and everything.” She tells me she’s working at a Music Plus in the mall, how the neighbor from Blossom came in and bought a bunch of CDs just like a normal person. I take my right foot off the top of my left. The toes sting with the blood coming back.
She doesn’t ask me a single question, and I stop listening after a while, but I don’t want to hang up either. I look around the empty shop, double the phone cord around my hand until the coils don’t show in it.
“I should probably go.” I say, before she can. “We’re pretty slammed.”
“Cool.”
“Cool.”
I hang up, pace laps behind the case, picture Benny coming by in that limo some night, holding the shop door open for me, then the door for the back seat. He acts all official, doesn’t look at me in the rear-view. But he doesn’t ask where we’re going either, because he’s only driving me to his place.
“Chantilly Lace” is playing. I can’t stand the goofy voices. I go in back, swap the oldies tape for an Elliott Smith one. You can hear him start the four-track on the first song. His hushed voice sounds so sweet and so close, even through the shop speakers.
Lindy’s apron is hanging on the last peg above the time clock, with her name tag still pinned to it. She’d always run them through the laundry together, so the white letters of her name are bled pink and worn down on the strip of red. I ball the apron into the drawer next to the extra rolls of register tape, take the post card out of my pocket and shove that in too, let it crumple a little on the way in.
The after-dinner rush starts. “Which are the fat free?” a woman asks, looking at the tubs, rubbing her Jane Fonda arms in the cold. I point the scoop at the last four tubs. “What’s there to see in an artichoke museum?” asks a man, reading the newspaper article taped to the freezer case, where the Beacon listed You Say Gelato as the fourth of five things to do around here. The museum is number one. “I’ve actually never been,” I say. Meanwhile I have had more field trips over there than he would probably believe. Little kids smudge the glass pawing at it, thinking the flavor labels are on the outside, and I try to imagine all my stuff already in a backpack, knowing once my shift is done I won’t stick around long enough to Windex a single thing. “We’re on I-5,” another woman says, like they’re on it right now.
The cold curls like smoke out of the tubs, and I feel the ache in my hands from scooping all day. I listen to the lines of “Condor Avenue” where Elliott Smith sings about just driving off. In the song the car’s an Oldsmobile, but I always pictured me and Lindy in the Impala.
Outside, the shop lights make it past the sidewalk and gleam the rims of a car that’s cruising slow. No British racing green on the hubs, just chrome that glides past the window and disappears. I think of the aquarium up in Monterey, all those huge fish swimming past while I just stood there. I remember picking one out, waiting for it to circle the whole building and come back around, thinking it worked that way.
Just before closing, a woman and a little girl come in. The woman has on a Melvins t‑shirt with tattoos poking out the short sleeves. She’s looking at a poster I did, showing the High Spot at night. The water tower gleams almost as bright as the full moon above it. It says “The Dandy Warhols” like a graffiti tag on the tower, with the show date and “You Say Gelato” stretched out on the landscape, like the words are made of moonlight.
The little girl is hopscotching in the squares of red and white tile.
“I guess this is a local artist?” the woman asks. She gives me a sly smile, and I feel my face get hot, but I just shrug, grab the scoop from the hot wash, and lean into the case to get their orders.
“You know, he’s doing a show at La Luna in two weeks,” she says, points up at the speakers, where the last song on the Elliott Smith tape is playing. I only know La Luna from the bootlegs I get on mail-order from the backs of fanzines. My grandfather used to tell me about working the Union Pacific trestles over the Columbia or the Willamette, how the rivers are wider than the freeways. But she makes it sound like Portland is three exits from here.
“That’s on Pine Street, right?”
“You got it.” She looks impressed, but I only know that from a Replacements tape I have from when La Luna was still called the Pine Street Theater.
“I probably have to work,” I say.
The little girl hopscotches back over with a pink tasting spoon in her mouth. I hand the cones over the counter, give them about fifty napkins apiece, watch their eyes ditch me for the ice cream.
I do the register quick and hang the closed sign, knowing Benny will probably come back around soon, see if I want to cruise Centennial for a while.
I walk home the long way, down Arroyo to where it dead-ends. It’s where my grandfather let me wear out the clutch on the Impala, teaching me to drive stick. You can see the right-of‑way, the old levee of gravel from when freight used to run through here. There are still two container cars on the spur, rusted out, the colors long gone. On the walk home from school Lindy and me would watch the cars rattle past. We looked for men riding the couplings the way my grandfather said they did, and thought up this game where if you spotted three of the same names in a row on the container cars, you made a wish. I can still see the names in my head. Matson, SeaLand, Evergreen. The empty flats were wild cards. I know I won a few, but I only remember watching the train curl north, how the wheels left a ringing sound in the tracks. It hung there after I couldn’t even see the train anymore, for longer than I could hold my breath. Now the black shapes of the old cars look as far off and permanent as the Elks.
A breeze comes from off the coastal range, picks up the sweet of the crops, the earthy soil. I know there are tides right underneath me, aquifers that pool up and seep back down around the rocks and the fossils. I’ve seen the proof of those plants and animals, but I never could picture all that water.
A little red Honda pulls up slow, gives a polite beep.
“We’re all turned around,” the Melvins t‑shirt says, poking her head out the driver’s side. “Which way is I-5?”
“Right down there,” I point to the blinking yellow light for the on-ramp. You can hear the northbound big rigs squeal their brakes slowing for the weigh station scales.
“Thanks. You okay, kiddo?” she asks.
“I’m actually going to that La Luna show,” I say. It just comes out. The night is just sitting there. Maybe the Impala is long gone, and there are no couplings left to hop. There’s always the Kolby bus station, or I can walk over to the BP, stick my thumb out at the decent-looking cars, ones with Oregon or Washington plates.
The little girl is sucking on a pink tasting spoon, watching me out the window like I’m something good on TV. I swear she’s going to take the spoon out and say how full of shit I am, so I wave, head home. But a block over on Centennial they gun it in neutral at the reds, show off their engines, and I don’t even try picking out the sound of Benny’s.
David Goguen’s stories have appeared in Glimmer Train and Zoetrope: All-Story.