Today I want to look at the idea of “global fiction” from a more domestic angle, with an excerpt from the amazing Charlotte Gullick’s ONE–MAN RESERVATION. Her novel is set entirely in the United States, and yet because of the subject matter, it also explores how domestic events and decisions are interconnected with and affect lives in other countries, in this case Afghanistan.
Zane Larkin, at a crossroads with her boyfriend and in her graduate work, makes a rare trip home to the rural California landscape of her childhood for her brother’s high school graduation. During the ceremony, Zane’s estranged father Will, collapses at her side. Following emergency surgery, Will Larkin extracts a promise from Zane to stay and help him die. She agrees, unaware that her father has become a marijuana producer. ONE–MAN RESERVATION explores the intersection of loyalty and family, legacy and love set in the middle of Northern California’s marijuana landscape.
In this short excerpt, Zane has just groomed marijuana buds with a potential lover, and follows him into the night.
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They again moved into the dark, the blanket and loaded backpack on Logan’s shoulder. On the way, Logan paused and Zane bumped his arm.
“Sorry,” she whispered. He didn’t respond but she felt that his head was cocked, ears expansive, a sonic awareness, much like a spider, waiting for the some vibrational change. He put a hand on her wrist and a jolt thundered through her arm.
“Someone’s walking on the road,” his words carried across the small space between them. Perhaps Will started growing dope as a way to remain in the wild, as a means to not return to the city. Her father’s vision of a one-man reservation was a complicated mix of impulses: greed, land acquisition; how very American she thought and allowed herself to lean toward Logan. She wasn’t afraid of whatever doom might travel the road, only feet away. Logan pulled her closer, his hand warm through her shirt. The crickets stopped and the silence carried her across the years, before she’d seen Will with the dead horse and the gun: eight years old and she had to run to the barn in the moonlight to get Will’s leather punch. Bats skittered above the creek as she raced the five-hundred yards in the gathering dusk. The oak trees along the road were losing themselves, and her heart surged at the thought of returning in the deeper night. Quickly, quickly, she ran to the barn, found the hole punch hanging amongst the tack and tools. She stepped back into a world suddenly shifted from one she knew to one swimming in shadow and meaning. She made herself plunge into those shadows toward the beacon of the house, step by step. Halfway back, she stopped, realizing the crickets had ceased, and it was the absence of soothing sound that made the dark so sinister, so capable of utter change. Now, next to her student, she knew enough to remain silent, to listen to the quiet like the insects hidden around them: alert, tuned. Will must’ve known that she’d need to learn to navigate the dark and her own colossal fears within it. Perhaps this is why he’d sent her to the barn that night.
She heard the steps now, a careful gait. She imagined tennis shoes, maybe even moccasins, someone who learned to carry his weight lightly. The steps stopped. Logan moved slowly and she felt him lift his shoulder; he’d withdrawn a pistol, heard the safety’s slide. She hadn’t realized he’d worn a gun, nestled it between his skin and the top of his pants. She forced herself to care, to be at the ready, to adopt the mental alertness of both hunter and prey. She counted her breaths, making sure each one was deep, silent. The rise and fall of her chest steadied her, and finally, the person moved forward, more sensation than a sound. Logan shifted his weight, turning his body as the person walked.
After sixty full breaths, he relaxed. She expected him to return to the cabin and hunker down. Instead, he tucked the pistol back into place. Again, the questions came like arrows and she forced herself to simply to breathe, to only be a body next to another body in the vastness of Northern California’s mountains.
He continued toward the sleeping structure in the middle of the next field, and they climbed it easily. After he spread out the blanket and handed her the wine and brownie, he said, “It’s almost harvest. Everyone gets jumpy, and the Mexican mafia has infiltrated lots of places. Illegals who have to produce a crop, even if the ones they’ve been growing get busted. People get desperate, you know?”
He ran a hand through his short hair. “Imagine it. You’re in this country illegally and some coyote or higher up can snuff your family if you don’t deliver.”
Zane’s head reeled. He rendered the story so coolly, so full of insight, aware of the immediate implications for him and others around him.
She chewed, surprised at the brownie’s richness and slightly pungent taste, different than last night. She felt a slight chill but remained on the blanket studying the night sky. Constellations wavered, and she realized she was on the edge of tears. The brownie gone, she closed her eyes and tried to spread her senses outward, casting a wider net than usual. She remembered a picture printed in one of Joaquim’s parents’ New Yorkers: it showed an Afghani family of four on a single motorcycle, mother, father, their daughter, and son under the age of ten, holding on to each other and various points on the bike. She didn’t remember the article, but she understood that the photo was meant to capture a gritty slice of life, one that her own parents had lived at different moments in the early years of their marriage. She’d heard the stories of Will and Holly, Miranda and Angela all piling onto to Will’s small-engined motorcycle, sometimes even a large plastic garbage bag full of dirty laundry added so they could go to the Laundromat.
“You all right over there?” His voice sounded so close to her ear, as if that small distance didn’t even exist.
“Just thinking.” She didn’t want to reveal what her neighbor Clifty had said about the first soldiers into Afghanistan after nine eleven bringing back a new strain of marijuana, and how that strain needed more time. Zane didn’t understand where and why her brother-in-law Raymond was deployed either; she just knew it had to do with what the news liked to call the War on Terror. Words like Mullah Omar, Al-Qaeda, Taliban, Mujahideen, Kandahar rolled through her head but she didn’t how to put the pieces together.
A star shot across the sky. She looked toward Cygnet the Swan, knowing a black hole of gravity sat somewhere in the middle of the swan’s belly. On the other side of the planet, other families were touched by the same drug trade she now courted, danced around. Lying in an open field next to her own student, her small role in the global marijuana market suddenly felt like a hand, pressing down on her chest. She needed to find a way out from under it, even if that meant giving up her father’s dream of land, his self-proclaimed reservation. Somehow, she needed to get through the next sixty days without getting shot, arrested, or worse, and she needed to keep the same from happening to the rest of her family back at the ranch.
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