Richard Wadholm - Orange Groves Out to the Horizon.pdf

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O RANGE G ROVES O UT TO THE H ORIZON
R ICHARD W ADHOLM
T HE WAY THEY WORK IT , the prison calls ahead of time. This robot voice says,
“You are about to receive a call from an inmate of the federal prison
system.” They ask if you are willing to accept the call, and that’s a question
you want to think about.
Ken called while I was crawling around behind our network server,
testing ports on a flaky router.
I knew he would call me. All his other friends had invested their futures
in wives and children, and could not be imposed upon. Who else did we
have but each other?
I tried to picture him the way he would be now, with a little gravity to
the eyelids. An aging marsupial, anxious and friendly. But all I could see
was the way he was in the tenth grade. His earnest sarcasm. Long hair,
washed furiously, the way boys do - without conditioner, so that it hung
straight and dry as late-summer grass.
In my mind, the greetings come and go—How are you holding up? No,
too brave. Are they treating you right? Right according to whom?
And before I could settle on what to say, he was there, singing Time is
on My Side . I’m sure he thought that was hilarious.
“Jesus you’re stupid sometimes,” I said.
“You sound like my last performance review at work.” He laughed—
Phoo phoo phoo , like he was laughing around a cigarette.
“Is that the way they talked to you at work?”
“Come on, man. Like it matters now.”
“Look, I can call you stupid. I’m your friend. I don’t like it your work
called you stupid.”
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“Reliant Pharmaceuticals, those fucks. They wouldn’t know E. coli from
mi culo , you know what I’m saying, Hoss?”
Yet they knew the recipe for ricin when they found it on his computer.
They recognized its traces in his one-cup coffee maker. How stupid could
they be? A bad thought came to me, like a craving. It gnawed at me,
wouldn’t leave me alone. “You sure you had nothing, you know—personal
in mind for anybody.”
“You mean, was I going to poison their lame asses? You know I don’t
believe in that revenge shit. I wasn’t going to hurt anybody.”
“Ricin. The hell were you thinking, anyway?”
“Gophers. You know.”
I could tell you what happened. Ken had seen the recipe on a web site
somewhere. He wanted to know if it worked. Does that sound stupid? Not
if you’re Ken Rafael, who had been a child prodigy in chemistry, (ask any
kid in our high school, they’ll tell you.) who had taken a low level job at
Reliant Pharmaceuticals, thinking to work his way up, and then found
himself stuck there.
I said, “When did you start smoking?”
“You sort of have to in here. Cigarettes are like the medium of
exchange. Either that or some things I’m not about to give up.”
I couldn’t help wondering what he had to do just to use the toilet. Jesus.
“Isn’t there anything you can do?”
“Doesn’t look like it. Federal sentencing guidelines say 136 months. I
like to think about it as 136 months. Doesn’t sound so bad that way, does
it.”
It didn’t until I added it up. Then I raged for awhile. I think Ken was
amused. Or, maybe he just appreciated the pity.
My mouth got ahead of me. I heard myself talking bullshit. How I’d talk
to his family, we’d file an appeal. We’d do more than that—we would sue
the government for malicious prosecution. Anti-terrorism laws, my ass.
Some ambitious prosecutor saw the word ‘ricin’ in Ken’s arrest report and
got all stage struck.
“Bad enough that the government steals thirteen years of your life. But
they stole your last year with Katy, and that’s unforgiveable.”
Did I cross the line, talking about Katy? I liked her. Ken had always
been a sport about it. She was one of those girls you don’t notice till you
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notice her, and then you can’t look away.
So maybe my rhetoric got a little over-heated. Maybe I said more than I
intended.
“They did give me bail,” Ken pointed out.
“The judge did.”
“Can I tell you the truth? Just me and you?”
I imagined a CD burning on some machine somewhere, a technician
gently jiggling a microphone.
“Me and you,” I said. “Sure.”
“That last year with Katy was the best year of our marriage. I know how
it can be for some people. I know with your father it was unexpected, and
shocking. And I’m real sorry about that. But for Katy and me, it was magic
time. Every moment was cast in this sweet light of mortality. Every day
mattered. Even the days in court. Even the days when she was really sick.
And the rest of the time—if we wanted to go some place, we went. If we
wanted to spend money, we spent it. It was the end of the world, Hoss! All
the rules were lifted.”
“I don’t mean to intrude here.”
“You’re like your dad.” He said it like I was supposed to laugh.
“Really? Like my dad, huh?”
“Your dad, man. He would make people fidget. He had that gift.
Remember when we lost your rat? That funeral?”
“I don’t want to talk about Butter, man.”
“I’m just saying, that funeral was too much.”
“He did it for me, ‘cause I was in mourning.”
“Mourning.”
“I felt like a rat murderer.”
“I told you not to launch him. Didn’t I tell you? The space program is no
place for pets or relatives.”
When we were eight, we launched model rockets from the orange grove
at the end of the street. I was the chief engineer. Ken, with his empathy for
bugs and rats, was the mission payload specialist.
We built our rockets in the old fallout shelter that my dad had dug in
the backyard. We called it our “Launch Complex.”
My father wanted me to use the garage for all our gluing and painting,
because the ventilation was better. I explained to him, with eight-year old
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gravity, that the fallout shelter was protected by sandbags. You know— in
case of an accident .
We didn’t expect any accidents. We’d been launching vermin into space
all summer. I was confident enough to launch my pet rat, Butter. The fallout
shelter just seemed like the place to do military things with rockets.
“Your dad, was it his idea for the funeral?”
“His idea for the flag-draped shoebox.” Though he would have settled
for a military honor guard.
We buried the shoebox in the orange grove, where Butter’s capsule had
disappeared. Ken had a sandbox shovel. He was in charge of digging the
hole. I was in charge of the interment. The whole time we’re burying the
shoebox, My father is coaching us on how we should live up to Butter’s
example. Practical stuff: “Do your homework. Don’t watch too much TV.
Never use hair oil in a pure oxygen environment, like a space capsule,
because that’s how we lost the Apollo 7.” You know—life lessons.
When we were finished, and the shoebox was covered over, he gripped
me by the shoulder. He became reflective.
“We used to wander though here every evening, your mother and I.
This was all orange groves.” He waved his arm. “From Mechler Street to the
Towne Center Plaza. We felt like pioneers of a new frontier. I can’t think of a
better place for an explorer like Butter to end up.”
This is my favorite dad-memory of all time, you want to know the truth.
For all the times he embarrassed me, I think of him, standing over Butter’s
grave, and no cool father will do.
We were silent a moment, Ken smoking, me watching the calls stack up
on my phone. “Do they still make movie posters where you work?”
“That was at Warner Bros. I’m at Chiat Day now.”
“Do they make movie posters? I got some guys in here want movie
posters.”
“We’re working on a recipe book. For the Jelly Belly people. You want
to hear my favorite? 2 lemon lime + 1 spearmint = gin and tonic.”
“Gin and tonic! We likes, we likes. I’ll tell you, I could use a G-and-T
right now.”
“Let me send you some Jelly Bellies.”
Phoo phoo phoo . Ken had gotten used to smoking, I could tell.
“You remember that last day before you went off to San Diego State?
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Your father caught us in the fallout shelter? That speech he gave us?
Cracked my ass , man. When he gave you that cream depilatory, I thought
you were going to shit.”
“I really don’t want to talk about this.”
“Aw, what? You make it sound so terrible. That was the first time I
heard the Crosby Stills and Nash album, remember that? Great fucking
record, wasn’t it?”
“It was a pretty good album.” Probably not the cultural watershed that
Ken remembered, but pretty good. Parts of it make me just cringe to listen
to now. All those twee little pop tunes from Graham Nash. David Crosby in
his yowza-yowza voice, almost cutting his hair.
But there was the one song at the end, Wooden Ships . A song to the
apocalypse, full of autumn light and sadness. I remember it was the first
pop song I’d ever heard in E-minor. In a few years, every song would be in
E-minor, but Wooden Ships summed up the grave romance of the age.
That whole week before I left for college, I was under its spell. Who
knows what I might have said to my father if I had been listening to Tommy
James, say, or Sly and the Family Stone. Rock and roll records, full of
cigarettes and dope and nasty sex—but forgiving, where poetry is
remorseless.
“Still brings tears to my eyes, that song. Don’t it bring tears to your
eyes?”
Ken was playing air guitar with the phone, so that our connection
crackled in time to the beat in his head. He hummed the guitar solo: “Nu-
nu- nu , nu-nu nu , nu-nu- nu . Come on, motherfucker. Don’t get shy on me.
Sing along!”
“I’m singing on the inside.”
“You’re shy. Like your dad. I swear, Hoss, if you end up like him,
hanging from your automatic garage door, you only got yourself to blame.”
“That’s not funny, talking about my dad.”
“You know what Katy always said? That your dad would’na been mad
if we’da let him join us. Can you see your dad, talking all his future-shit
while he’s blazing on mushrooms? Showing us all his Popular Science
magazines and shit? Can you see it?”
He was banging on the table at his end, in giddy happiness. I could hear
it over the phone. I wanted to say something to bring him around, because it
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