on the cover / By Crawdad Nelson

California Improved

Fiction Issue

(Feb. 7, 2008)  Lobo woke about noon, or maybe a bit later, feeling as if he had spent the night inhaling poisonous gases. He checked his tobacco pouch. Nearly empty, just a dry pinch or two left to roll. He realized at some point he had vomited, but he couldn’t see it, so he didn’t worry about it. Maybe it was outside or in the toilet. He wasn’t that drunk the night before — it was more the long day that had preceded it. It had been promising for a while. Things had gone well, but he’d ended up back on his cheap rack: Bleary, dazed and exhausted after sleeping half the day. He had no money, few prospects — nothing to get excited about, other than having finally come to a place where he could save the world. His first thought was to write a poem about it.

His next thought was to keep his head down. He was beginning to feel conspicuous and vulnerable. His room wasn’t much: Just a sagging dresser with a flimsy bed and a used mattress. Some chairs he had dragged in off the street. A dilapidated government issue desk of particle board and chipped veneer and a few books and periodicals. He had a window, one door opening to the common kitchen, shared with three other tenants, and another door to the bathroom, shared with one. The carpet was worn and had felt damp since the day he moved in.

GALLERY >

He felt trapped in a world which violated many of his values, although, strangely, he lived in it because of a dispute with the values of his home town. To be frank, he wasn’t at all clear on what his values consisted of. He suddenly felt conservative and old-fashioned, but he had felt stifled among the farmers.

His most visible and persistent problem, Harry Dupree, was about mid-sized, with a barrel shape, bowlegs, a pronounced limp and prominent, hairy forearms. Lobo recognized things about him that were familiar. He was agricultural in nature. There was something of the corn about him. But different. He walked around the apartment complex directing repairs, issuing commands, posting overdue notices and talking, sometimes at great length. When he got excited about a subject, his face reddened and his posture tilted forward. Inevitably, he steered things toward a punch line based on, for instance, a flock of sheep and a traveling salesman. He saved his best lines for all-male audiences, out of a sense of propriety. Around the women, he deferred in a gracious but servile way to those of better upbringing than himself, compensating by being cold with those he deemed beneath him.

Alice Dupree was a good deal haughtier. She knew anybody with a decent family would never let their young female student live in such a place. A good girl stood a good chance of going bad, and bad ones went rotten. It was best not to get her started on the subject of men: They disgusted and appalled her. She was cool and dismissive to everyone, running the front office tarted up in snug suit dresses and lipstick. She was a big woman but with a good, solid shape, motherly without the temperance of affection and professional without the gloss of civility. She demanded attention with smoldering blue eyes and a power of observation that kept people checking their flies and adjusting jewelry. She scared people, but they couldn’t look away.

With his new, Buddhist view of things, Lobo’s only regret was that he had not yet been arrested. He was sure he would be the day before, at the demonstration. Tension had built during the non-violence workshop, with its dark feeling of potential calamity, and at the vegan lentil dinner, with the lovely camaraderie among the Purple Irises and the forest defense tribe, but nothing actually happened at the actual demonstration.

They stood around in the road, but no news cameras were there. One TV station had arrived early in the day, but departed abruptly after the company security boss stopped by to visit with them. After that, it was just a bunch of activists, with signs and funny hats, standing on the county road, milling around and arguing over who was behind it. They looked for conspiracies against them, intrigues, betrayal. Some eyed Lobo narrowly. It was boring but not entirely without suspense. There was the sense that a secret was about to be revealed. Perhaps a vision.

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