White Oleander

But now Ray had a job doing finish carpentry in a new subdevelopment. I was used to him being home all day and missed him. He hadn't had steady work since he'd quit his job as the shop teacher at the high school over in Sunland. He 'd gotten into a fight with the principal when he wouldn't stand up for the Pledge of Allegiance at assembly. "I fought in fucking Vietnam, got a fucking Purple Heart," he said. "What did that asshole do? Went to goddamn Valley State. What a goddamn sterling hero."

 

The owner of the development lived in Maryland and didn't care about the Pledge of Allegiance. Ray knew someone who knew the subcontractor. So I was stuck at the height of summer in the trailer watching Starr knit a gigantic afghan that looked like a rainbow threw up on it. I read, drew. Ray bought me some kid's watercolors from the drugstore and I started painting. I stopped trying to persuade my mother to accept Jesus. It was hopeless, she would have to come to it herself. It was God's will, like Dmitry in The Brothers Karamazov, one of the books from her reading list.

 

Instead of letters, I sent her drawings and watercolors: Starr in shorts and high heels, watering the geraniums with a hose. Ray drinking a beer, watching the sun set from the porch. The boys wandering the wash in the warm tender nights with flashlights, surprising a horned owl. Ray's chess set. The way he studied the board, fist under chin. The paloverde trees in the cool of early morning, a rattlesnake lying across a rock at full length.

 

I painted pictures for everybody that summer, lizards for Peter and children riding white giraffes and unicorns for Owen, raptors for Davey, both perched and in flight, from pictures in magazines: golden eagles, red-shouldered hawks, peregrine falcons, elf owls. I painted a head-and-shoulders portrait of Carolee for her to give to her boyfriend, and some for Starr, angels mostly, Jesus walking on water. Also her in different poses, wearing a bathing suit, in the style of World War II poster girls.

 

Uncle Ray just wanted a picture of his truck. It was an old Ford, high and aqua green, with a feather roach clip hanging from the rearview mirror, and a bumper sticker that said, This Property Protected by Smith & Wesson. I painted it against the mountains in the clear morning, aqua and salmon and pale blue.

 

THE SUMMER climaxed in Santa Anas like nothing I'd ever seen before. Fire came up over the ridges and burned down the flanks of the mountains a mile away. This was no mere smudge on the horizon with miles of concrete separating you. We could see a thousand acres burning off the Big Tujunga. We kept our things packed in Ray's truck and in the trunk of the Torino. The winds blew like hurricanes and the burn area was being reported in square miles and there were riots down in the city. Uncle Ray took to cleaning his guns on the patio after work, as the ash from the fires sifted a fine powder over everything. He handed me the small gun, a Beretta. It was like a toy in my hand. "Want to shoot?"

 

"Sure," I said. He never let the boys touch his guns. Starr hated to even look at them, though now the riots were going on, she'd stopped asking him to get rid of them. He took a can of green Rust-Oleum and spray-painted a human figure on a board, and for fun made it carrying a TV. He set it up against an oleander at the far end of the yard. "He's taking your TV, Astrid. Plug him."

 

It was fun, the little Beretta .22. I landed four out of nine shots. He put tape over the bullet holes so I'd know which were old, which were new. I got to try all the guns eventually — the rifle, the short-nosed .38 Police Special, Smith & Wesson, even the twelve-gauge pump-action shotgun. I liked the Beretta best, but Ray insisted the Smith & Wesson was the thing to shoot, it had "stopping power." He 'd put it in my hands, showing me how to sight it, how to squeeze the trigger with my mind. The .38 was the hardest of the four to shoot and be accurate with. You had to use both hands, and keep your arms very straight, or it came back and hit you in the face.

 

Each gun had a purpose, like a hammer or a screwdriver. The rifle was for hunting, the Beretta for potentially touchy situations — a bar, a meeting with the ex, a date, what Ray called close-in work. The shotgun was for home protection. "Get behind me, kids!" he'd say in a grandmothery voice, and we'd all run behind him as he demonstrated, spraying the oleanders with buckshot.

 

And the .38? "Only one reason for a thirty-eight. And that's to kill your man."

 

I felt like an Israeli girl soldier, in shorts and the hot wind, sighting down the barrel of the rifle, holding the .38 with both hands. It was a strange feeling, him looking at me as I aimed. I found I couldn't quite lose myself in the target. His eyes split my attention between the C in Coke and my awareness of him watching me.