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Story: James Claffey

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Holdfast

From the crest of the hill the ocean spreads blue to the far hills, whitecaps crest on sandbars, pelicans skim the cliffs, and clouds are nowhere to be seen. I have returned from five weeks spent in Joshua Tree National Park, camping in the stark desert beneath towering yuccas, watched by the hundred million stars that nightly blanket the world.

A park ranger told me the yuccas were dying and that soon they’ll disappear altogether. We sat and drank coffee early one morning and he told me about the Shasta giant sloth and how the prehistoric creature used transport the Joshua tree seeds in their feces, spreading the range of the Yucca Brevifolia all across the Southwest United States. As I drove out of the desert I imagined the slow-moving sloth crossing the dried earth of Arizona and New Mexico and depositing new growth along the way.

Like the giant sloth, I’ve come home to Summerland, the tiny stretch along the Pacific outside Santa Barbara, a ten second mirage for travelers on the 101 as they whiz by headed for points north and south. My mother runs the drugstore opposite the post office, assisted by her new husband, Edward, who, I imagine, sorts shelves and stocks empty spaces in-between watching baseball games on the TV suspended above the front door. I know enough about my mother to know she hates my father so much she married the polar opposite of the man the first opportunity she had. Back in the day she’d have been done for fraud by the church, but now it seems they’re so starved for new congregants they’ll overlook most sins on the spectrum.

“He’s a good man,” she says, riffling a hand through her wavy brown hair. “Give him a chance. He’ll grow on you.”

Like a cancer, I thought, but didn’t say. After my father went out the back door one night, weeks before my eighth birthday, and never came back, she took every opportunity to drag his name across the hot stones of her memory, scathing at all times, despite knowing how deeply I missed him.

“I suppose so,” I say. “He’s a permanent addition, then?”

“Married,” she replies, holding her hand out, a large diamond set in a spindle of silver on her ring finger. “He treats me right. More than your father ever did.”

There’s a silence in my bedroom I don’t recognize, given how many nights I’d played Springsteen, Queen, and Cream over and over until the grooves were worn away. Edward’s turned it into his “meditation” room. The cloying scent of patchouli and incense makes the space claustrophobic. I take the stairs two at a time back to the shop where Edward stands beside my mother, waiting.

“Great to meet you,” Edward says. “Your mother tells me you’re interested in Buddhism, too?”

I shrug and mutter something about Hesse and change the subject to the weather. I can tell my mother is nervous because she twines her hair in her fingers and bites her lip with the right side of her mouth.

“I’ll be back in a bit,” I tell her. “I’m going to take a walk.

“What would you like for dinner? Edward was going to barbeque a brisket.” She slips an arm around his waist and smiles.

“Fine,” I say. “Be back in an hour or so.”

I pull my collar up around my ears, as a cold breeze attacks from off the ocean and the sun has ceased to be. I keep my head down and plod through soft sand in the direction of the stairs.

Burnt brisket and too-hoppy IPAs, Edward’s hosting is less than successful. My mother tries to engage us in topics of mutual interest. He has no idea who Norman Fisher is (I already saw his ignorance in the too-expensive Buddha statue in his “meditation room”). My father’s old armchair has been reincarnated in blue serge, and the television updated to one of those flat wall-hanging ones. Still, where was he, I wonder? Nailing beams together in Zihuatanejo for Habitat for Humanity, wearing Jimmy Carter’s face on an old T-shirt in a picture was the last I’d heard from him two Christmases ago.

A ripple of indigestion travels across my stomach. A memory of empty bottles in the cold storage behind the shop and my mother screaming at him, the customers inside exchanging looks with one another as I attempted to run the register and take care of them. I’d been the one to sell the local guy his winning lottery ticket. $15 million he got. My father took the sixty grand bonus we got for selling the ticket and off he went, my mother’s tears never enough to contain him. He wrote me weekly letters from his new place in Oceanside, close to Camp Pendleton, where he’d spent a few years in the Marine Corps. Mostly, the letters spoke of his missing me, how he wished he’d spoken to me more, how his own father hadn’t to him, and so on, and always the letters closed on the same note—“Your loving father.” Sometime around my sixteenth birthday the letters stopped coming and my mother said, “I told you so. I told you he’d grow tired of trying to stay in touch. No staying power, your father. No staying power at all.” I kept to my bedroom; the one Edward now mediates in, and reread the many letters he’d sent me.

At twenty-one I got a birthday card and a crisp $100 bill. The card said nothing more than the Hallmark rhyming couplet and bore his scrawled signature. Not even a, “Your loving father.” The birthday card was postmarked Boise, Idaho, and I pictured him driving the many miles of highway from Oceanside in a Camaro, or Thunderbird, or whatever car he spent the lottery cash on.

Awake at 3AM, a flashing blue-green comet sweeps low across the sky and disappears into the ocean, but I know that’s an optical illusion and most likely its sped past our slow-turning planet bound for disintegration.

I anticipate no sleep, so I tread the sands of the beach once again and attempt to unravel my conflicted feelings about my father, as to whether or not he ever loved me, or had all his letters been rote exercises in absentee fatherhood gleaned from some self-help book from a nondescript Crown Books.

I come across a large kelp holdfast and when I try to roll it over, a cloud of sand flies rises in a mist about my head. The greater mass of the holdfast is hollowed out and contains myriad creatures happy to survive in the kelp forest. Maybe I am similar in a way to the holdfast, in that I’m inextricably attached to my parents, yet have been eaten away from the inside by the disappearance of my father in my teens? I push the kelp away and move along the beach, the long wail of a goods train drowning out the crashing of the waves.

A pair of board shorts lie on the sand, forgotten by some surfer, as he hurried to gather his things and join his friends on the climb to the car park at the top of the stairs. Billabong, “34 waist; I’d have a bit of room, but a wash in the machine and they’ll be fine.

The traffic on the highway is sporadic, the odd big rig rushes by, beams on high, and I imagine my future as a long-distance driver crossing the country for days on end, cruise control engaged, picking at my earwax and thinking of far-off Idaho and the father I barely remember. Maybe my travels will take me through Boise and I can seek him out, spend a morning at breakfast with him, eating bacon and ask the questions I don’t want answered. I snap out of my daydream and listen, as into the night the train thundered, its dark carriages rattling along the tracks, the intermittent howl of the conductor’s whistle moving into time and space as impersonally as my father had withdrawn from his own family.

I’ve always imagined my father would have reconciled with my mother and made his peace, and that he’ll come back and make up for the years I went through without him in my life, but now Edward lures my mother to her bed each night reciting koans and haikus to her broken heart. I run into the darkness, towards the breaking waves, the sky frozen like so many pieces of shattered glass on an inky tablecloth, my future as uncertain as that of the dwindling yuccas. High above Ursa Major blinks, and across the sand to the north the slow, bumbling shape of a Shasta giant sloth pauses to plant another yucca seed in the ground. Such is the nature of the world, the rise and fall of relationships, the formation and disintegration of stars and species.

 


James Claffey hails from County Westmeath, Ireland, and lives on an avocado ranch in Carpinteria, CA. He is fiction editor at Literary Orphans, and the author of the short fiction collection, Blood a Cold Blue. His work appears in the W.W. Norton Anthology, Flash Fiction International, and in the Queensferry Press’s anthology, Best Small Fictions of 2015.



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