The Mayor and the Folksinger
by lisa Alvarez
The last thing the embattled Mayor needs is the famous lady Folksinger, sitting up in a tree.
But the tree-sitting musical legend is, apparently, the last thing—or damn close to it today, or tomorrow—which is why he finds himself driving alone across the city in the early morning hours. His Honor has perhaps just enough time to act before the police move in, supersized in riot gear like some kind of cartoon fighting force. Their dawn raid will target the defenseless Folksinger, armed only with her acoustic twelve-string guitar and her famous nonviolent convictions. There is time yet before the men with roaring chainsaws surround the tree and the TV cameras roll. The Mayor, sleepy, can’t stop the cops but feels confident he will persuade Madame Folksinger. Years ago, he listened to her LPs in his bedroom, kneeling beside the portable turntable that opened up out of a tiny blue suitcase. She’ll have to listen to him now. He needs her.
The Mayor has decided against calling Javier, his driver, which would alert his security detail. Instead, he’s slunk out of the house wearing jeans and his teenage son’s black hoodie, pulled up and over his head to hide his trademark hair, the dark wavy thickness of which once telegraphed vitality and youth to the voters. Silvery human skulls adorn the hoodie, cascading over each shoulder and spiraling down the arms. He’s even put on his son’s new shoes, $200 Nikes weirdly marketed as “retro huaraches,” but which look more like the kind of protective foot- gear needed to walk on the moon or tread cautiously around a hazardous waste site. He still can’t bring himself to call them sneakers. Two hundred bucks. Perfect, he thought when he saw them waiting obediently by the back kitchen door, their placement the evidence of household rules his wife had instituted since their arrival at the residence. No shoes inside the house. “No one,” she retorted when their son complained, “is going to call us dirty Mexicans. Shoes off.”
His son’s beloved Camaro—1968, Rally Sport, primer gray, its guts torn out and rebuilt—starts right up and, as the Mayor backs out of the long driveway of the residence, he notes that no one, not security, not photographers, not lurking late-night media, follows. The dark empty street in the oval of the rearview mirror relieves him. If he is going to succeed, if he is going to get the Folksinger out of the tree, he has to go it alone.
Forty years earlier, when he was his son’s age, he had himself worn the strange costume of that rare bird, the Mexican hippie: bell bottoms, fringed leather vest, beads, squeaky huarache sandals—real sandals, bought cheap at the swap meet— and smoky patchouli oil. He’d taped a poster of the Folksinger high on the wall over his teenage bed. She stood alone on a boulder by the blue Pacific, cradling her guitar, a foggy coastal pine forest rising beside her. He knew her bare feet, her downcast brown face, and that luminous smile—knew it as well as he knew his mother’s smile or, yes, the Virgin’s. It was that same singular smile that the best women in his life had given him at one time or another. That smile he works for still, the one he pledged to himself he would never betray.
He was sixteen, the hot asphalt of the city summer and his driver’s license weeks away. His mother had promised him the keys to the old Plymouth in exchange for As and Bs on his report card. It was powder blue and laced with rust, but it was a car. She stood in the doorway to his room, tapping her foot, the same foot that worked the sewing machine at work and the gas and the brakes on the old car. She wasn’t smiling.
Listening to the Folksinger, he explained to her, was like being at Mass, except—he searched for the difference.
Before he’d tacked up the poster, nothing had hung on his bedroom walls unless placed there by his mother: a few certificates from elementary school (Good Citizen! Best Speller! Perfect Attendance!) and a studio portrait of mother and son, taken shortly after his father had left. Hopeful evidence that the two of them were family enough. They smile in front of a generic woodland backdrop of his mother’s choosing: fir trees, blue sky, fleecy clouds. Her hands clasp his shoulders like a pair of parentheses. He is eight, all crew cut and big front teeth.
Listening to the Folksinger’s voice was like riding a cool pure river to heaven, thought the future Mayor, though he couldn’t admit that to his mother. Even thinking it made him nervous, caused him to recall poems in English class. He had never even seen a real river except for the paved gutter next to the freeway. When it rained, it filled with churning water. Nothing cool about it, nothing pure. Junked cars and abandoned appliances floated in the tumbling dirty current. Kids who’d never seen it like that fell in and were carried away. Every year or so, one of them drowned and was memorialized at the water’s edge in puddles of dripping candle wax, stuffed animals, and plastic flowers.
No, the Folksinger’s soprano was nothing like that river. And heaven? A happy ending promised to people at the conclusion of lives spent kneeling in church and at work. But he couldn’t tell his mother that either.
Her singing was like church, the boy-who-would-be-Mayor finally said, except no priests.
Church?
His mother winced. She stood framed by the hallway light, disapproval in her crossed arms, her deep judging silence. His mother was a different kind of body of water, he thought, the kind that never stopped moving, never dried up. She wasn’t the Folksinger’s cool mountain ride or the city’s seasonal gutter flood. She was something else.
She knew it could have been worse. Her boy was a good boy. You might only look next door and see Rigo, Monica’s boy, to understand what might happen to a kid in this country, growing up without a father in this city, in this time when girls took off more than their shoes and boys, well. Rigo was responsible for the pregnant fifteen-year-old who lived downstairs. They would get married soon enough, and though there would be a church wedding and a party in the apartment complex’s courtyard, the future Mayor’s mother knew the end of that particular story. Everyone did, though they pretended to believe something else was possible. Possible, but not likely. Yes, she could have worse problems than a poster of a braless barefoot guitar-playing girl who let her hair hang down like she didn’t care.
The Mayor’s mother didn’t have to worry for long. When his friends saw the poster, their snickers, their disapproval, carried more weight than hers. It’s one thing to listen to her, ese, his friends said. It’s another thing to put her on the wall. After all, this is the seventies and the folk scene is so, so sixties. Sure, she’s fine, but she must una vieja by now. Think about it. Do the math, brother. They drove him to the local record store where he’d bought her poster and let him choose her replacement, the pulsing beat of rock anthems percolating from the FM car radio.
So down came the barefoot Folksinger. She was briefly replaced with an ecstatic Carlos Santana crowned with a cosmic psychedelic halo, followed by a not-yet-iconic Che in his jaunty beret, a saintly Cesar on the march, then a stylized Ruben Salazar, and finally Zapata, his mustache broad as an eagle’s wingspan, his sombrero even broader—a parade of men, fully clothed and shod; men in formidable attire; men, living and dead; men with ideas, guitars, guns, pens; men with armies and bands; men with other men standing behind them. When the Mayor finally left to go to the big university on the other side of the city—brick buildings, marble floors, windows that looked out onto the leafy trees, bright green sycamores, purple flowering jacarandas—he imagined he’d left the Folksinger behind in the dark closet, rolled up, secured with a rubber band that through the years must have dried out, frayed, then snapped.
But now she was back. Not hanging on his bedroom wall, not lying unfurled on the floor of his teenage closet, not headlining oldies shows at the famous amphitheater in the foothills, but sitting high in, of all places, a walnut tree in a blighted neighborhood, refusing to move. The Folksinger had answered the call and allowed herself to be hauled up the tree by ropes and pulleys. Tierra y libertad.
The Mayor had seen the same aerial photos everyone had: a square of dense verdant green erupting in the otherwise bleak city grid, not unlike how a scene in a pop-up book defies the predictable flat page. For over a decade, people cultivated the lot, doing what the desperate do when no one is using something as useful as land. And the land, as in one of those magical tales where ordinary beans grow into trees that climb to heaven, came back to life.
Then the cranky absentee owner appeared, like a stingy storybook monarch, to reassert his rights. What was now garden— the largest urban farm in the country, claimed its supporters— would be converted into a long-term self-storage business where people who had too much stuff could pay to store their excess and visit it on weekends.
And so the Folksinger stood on a platform nestled high in the tree’s limbs and sang on the local news: “No nos moveran.” All the old hits. “De colores.” “Solidarity Forever.” Her black hair had grayed but her large brown eyes and her brilliant smile were the same. The farmers, mostly working-class immigrants, gathered about the trunk of the great walnut tree and sang along. “No, no, no nos moveran. No, no no nos moveran,” they sang, “Like a tree growing by the water, we shall not be moved.” The unmovable singing farmers led the news night after night during this, the city’s slow news season, with tragically few tragic celebrity deaths or sleazy political peccadilloes. Today the farmers’ final appeal had been lost.
*
At times, the Mayor hears his life story via the Grand Biographer, the whispering narrator who has taken up residence in his head, the person who puts it all together, who sees where the Mayor has come from and predicts where he’s going. The crafty and cool voice of one who sees his past and future in terms of chapters in a best-selling book, the Mayor’s life like the arc of a rainbow: one end in the hood, the other behind the shining desk of power beneath the white dome of a civic building. Tonight, the Grand Biographer rides shotgun in the Camaro, slouched down low, eyes alert, looking for the story. The Grand Biographer is so cool that sometimes the Mayor forgets he’s there, the murmur of his familiar voice-over narration purring like a public television documentary turned down low.
He isn’t a moony teenager any longer; he is the Mayor, serving one of the nation’s largest cities and a leading, no, the leading Latino leader. But two years into his term, his lauded potential and shiny charisma are beginning to dull, to crack. It hadn’t taken long. Resentment and hostility exploded from the predictable quarters: the ascendancy of a mayor whose parents were born south of the border was played as a threat. Those people questioned everything: his birth certificate, the sketchy residency status of his now long-dead mother, his father’s disappearance. The affiliations and political causes of his youth were distorted, exaggerated to make him a traitor, a radical agent bent on returning the American Southwest to Mexico. Even the people on his side were forgetting his victories—their victories—didn’t understand the position he found himself in, with- drawing their affection, suggested the Grand Biographer, like betrayed lovers pulling away blankets during a chilly night of confession. Inevitable corruption scandals and compromises- slash-sellouts tarnished his once-growing promise. Some seemed to be waiting, even eager, for his defeats.
Now the Folksinger in the tree and the lost urban garden make just two more items on a growing negative list in the newspapers. Even the Mayor’s adjectives are changing, warns the Grand Biographer. He is no longer “pioneering,” “visionary,” “fearless” or his own favorite, “Kennedy-esque.” He is dangerously close to resembling his pudgy Anglo predecessor: “weak,” “ineffective,” “beleaguered,” “embattled.” That wasn’t supposed to happen. Everyone knows he is meant to be governor in four years, senator in ten and then . . .
But maybe, just maybe, if the Mayor can get the Folksinger out of the tree, that would be something, like the night he negotiated the settlement of the longshoremen’s strike, wading into the sit-in protest that had halted rush-hour traffic on the Harbor Bridge, or the time he stood vigil at the burning ruins of an inner-city high school auditorium, refusing to leave until he’d raised enough money on the spot to ensure its swift reconstruction. An impromptu impassioned telethon that the cameras ate up. Pledges came pouring in. Yes, he thinks, he needs something like that, something he can sell. He needs the Folksinger to take his hand and climb out of that tree.
The night air is cool, but the city sidewalks are doing their alchemical thing, so that even in the early morning hours, the Mayor feels the heat of the summer day stored up, the smell of hot concrete mixed with asphalt, dust, and oil. He approaches an empty intersection and slides into the left-turn lane, waiting for the arrow. He waits as the signal lights up for first one direction, then the other, running through its short rainbow: green, yellow, red. The cycle begins again, but without ever flashing him a green arrow.
The Mayor backs up the Camaro, then drives forward, then back again, trying to trigger the motion sensor embedded beneath the asphalt. It is there somewhere. A little to the right, perhaps, maybe to the left. He’s seen charts, diagrams. He knows how the city works. It is, after all, his city.
*
The Mayor does his best thinking at night. Even as councilman and before, as a community organizer, a student, a young man with too much time on his hands cruising in that wheezing ancient powder-blue Plymouth. He loves driving around the city in the early hours. Lights smear the dark streets. At night, the gum-pocked sidewalks, stained with spit and littered with trash, glitter; the tiny sparks of quartz and broken bottles catch the streetlights, the headlights of cars like his. Somehow, the sleeping city—the quieted streets, the absence of that pressing population that chokes it during the day—gives the Mayor ideas of what can be done. Awake and asleep, you need really to see the city both ways, he believes.
It took a while to get used to a chauffeur, just as it took Javier, his night driver, time to adjust to the Mayor’s nervous insomnia, his desire to drive and just keep going until, sometimes, the eastern sky is brightened with the light of the rising sun, and then, instead of returning to the residence, they head toward City Hall where the Mayor keeps extra suits, changes of clothing. One night, not long after he took office, he directed Javier to drive by the old apartment building where he’d last lived with his mother. It was nearly 2 in the morning, but a trio of teenagers lingered, hanging out on the front stairs, smoking cigarettes. They stretched their lanky bodies down the steps, reclining on their elbows.
“Slow down,” the Mayor had instructed. The kids noticed the slow crawl of the shiny town car and tensed, but not too much. They’d seen it all and this fancy car cruising the hood wasn’t much. Not the cops. Not INS. Not ICE. Just a curiosity. The Mayor’s impulse was to get out of the car and join them, make the pitch for an earlier bedtime and school, the usual pep talk, if perhaps delivered with more authority considering he could claim the place as home, could tell them a few things that would have proved it. He was, after all, El Homeboy Mayor. Say, he’d ask them, does the laundry room on the ground floor still make the second-floor units sweat? Who lives in number 8? Miss Monica’s Rigo? Not likely. More likely Rigo’s ex-wife and her grandbabies. Does the number 44 bus still keep the folks in front up all night?
“Used to live here,” he told Javier.
“Better not, sir,” Javier replied, as if the Mayor had asked a question. No doubt Javier got his own directives, and letting the Mayor approach unidentified teenagers in violation of curfew was definitely not among them. Javier had his own job to think of, his family, his first wife in Riverside, his mortgage on a house in Paramount. This was the best job he’d ever had.
The kids didn’t look dangerous, but then they never did, the Mayor thought. They just looked like who they were—kids growing up where no one wanted to be, not other kids, not adults. This made them do things that they shouldn’t just to show that they could. Most of the time no one noticed because few cared and, if you were careful, you could sneak past those adults who did, whether they were your parents, your teachers, or the cops. It wasn’t that hard. They were all too busy. The Mayor understood this. It had been the same for him. It took a long time to become something different. It helped if you met people who were different, or if you could get what is still called perspective. But it was hard.
The Mayor had begun to understand a lesson he had avoided learning ever since taking office. He could no longer be who he had once been, not promising scholarship student or visionary community organizer, not even idealistic councilman. He couldn’t even get out of his vehicle to talk with kids who needed talking to, not anymore. He had to keep driving, or rather, riding, because he couldn’t even drive himself.
That makes tonight’s journey to the farm particularly exhilarating. The Mayor is back behind the wheel, doesn’t need a map, knows exactly where he is going. And when he gets there, he will park the car and get out and talk to some people who still need talking to—they will hear him, he is certain, and so will the Folksinger. After all, he is, he believes, one of them. Still.
*
The Mayor worries that he’ll be recognized, his cover blown. He’s famous, a household name, his victorious post-election face once smiling handsomely on the glossy covers of two— two!—national newsweeklies. At the chain-link gate to the farm, two young men tend a campfire contained in a squat metal half drum. One pokes at the embers with a long stick. The other lounges on a low-slung yard chair, a tin bucket in his lap, apparently shucking something he picks up from the ground. The unidentifiable product falls into the bucket with a ping. As the Mayor approaches, the young man tosses an object into the ashy cauldron and the flames sizzle and leap. A sharp odor rises. It makes the Mayor suddenly feel his accumulated sleeplessness, the chronic weariness that lurks in his joints, ready to let him stumble. The one with the stick points it silently to the hand-lettered sign leaning against the fence: NO WEAPONS, ALCOHOL, OR DRUGS. The tip of his stick glows. Back in his own days of sit-ins and protests, the Mayor and his young comrades scoffed at such measures. Later he accepted the rules and even enforced them like these two do, standing guard and playing peace cop. He draws a steadying breath. He allows himself to be patted down, lifting his sweat-shirted arms up and away from his sides.
“Nice shoes,” says the one in the chair.
The Mayor thinks he’s caught the other one swallowing a smirk, but he can’t be sure. Like him, they have their fleece hoodies pulled up so that their hoods fall forward like the cowls of devout monks, shadowing their faces. One wears weathered leather work boots while the other is shod in rubber sandals that show his broad brown feet, toenails like thick shells. They wave him on, and so he goes, leaving them to stir their fire, shuck their mystery harvest into the tin bucket. His son’s fancy shoes bounce him down the path, fine dust powdering the broad black toes.
The farm is crowded with bright domed tents pitched between plots, glowing with lantern light, sleeping bags, lying on the ground like fat wrinkled worms, rolled out between rows. The urgent whisperings of the still-awake rise. The night air is sharp, heavy with the industrious smell of growing crops, tilled soil, the prickly stench of pungent fertilizer. The plants seem to join the murmurs of the wakeful people: the corn stalks, the leaves and vines rustling with life. A line of poetry he memorized in college presents itself, unsolicited, full, and whole despite the years that have lapsed since he buried it: “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower / Drives my green age.” The green fuse, he thinks, my green age. He can’t remember the poet’s name, but he can feel his green force, even under the night sky. The city has vanished. The farm rises on all sides of him, lush, leafy green. The brown dirt path narrows.
The Mayor waits for someone to recognize him as he first bounces, then trudges along. Lanterns and strings of lights illuminate the path between the plots as if for a backyard party. All they see is his jeans, the oversized hoodie with its ghostly calaveras, the ridiculous shoes—a strange, harmless kid. He receives a few welcoming nods, half smiles already seeming to concede the defeat that awaits them in the morning. The young ones, their faces pinched in righteousness and weariness, assume he is just one of them, showing up for the inevitable showdown, with emergency phone numbers of the legal team written in ballpoint pen on his forearm.
Then, around a bend, a trio materializes, two men and a woman. They appear already ancient in their middle age, like the women and the men of his old neighborhood who’d observed him as he walked to school, as he carried groceries home from the store, as he hung out on the corner or in the park. When he was growing up, these strangers greeted him as if he were one of theirs—hijo, mijo—and whispered or called in passing, mostly in Spanish, sometimes in English: “Portate bien.” “Be good.” “Cuidate.” “Stay out of trouble.” They passed on wishes and warnings to him and the children like him with worried but hopeful eyes—smiling. The Mayor wondered what they had to smile about, these people who, like his mother, worked two and three jobs, jobs that took it all out of a person so at forty they seemed sixty, these people who never had a vacation, who seldom even slept in, who woke up tired and went to work anyway. Tonight, these three look up and smile at him like he is the boy his clothes suggest he is. They pause with their tools in their hands—the two stout men with machetes, the woman with a shovel. At their feet, the plot of garden earth is turned as though for a grave. They harvest under the night sky, taking what they can, while they still can. Cactus paddles, corn, beans, hard green tomatoes like tiny fists. The waxy pale globes of the onions seem to glow, crushed stalks seeping pungent juice.
The Folksinger is, he knows, settled in comfortably in the famous black walnut tree somewhere in the center of the farm. All week the Mayor has been reading about the age and size of the goddamn black walnut tree. It is, apparently, extraordinary, over 120 feet tall. It is not merely a walnut tree but a California black walnut tree, a Juglans californica, to be mercilessly exact. The black walnut has, it seems, many medicinal qualities. It can cure maladies ranging from ringworm to psoriasis. Its oil is prized. To cut down the black walnut tree would be a crime, charge the hundreds of letters, emails, and calls his office has received and he, as the presiding mayor, would seem to be lumberjack-in-chief. To cut down the tree would bring a curse upon his head, threatened one letter, printed in all uppercase and signed CARYA. Carya was the name of the Greek nut tree goddess the young intern who delivered his mail informed him.
“Sounds like a pretty minor goddess,” the Mayor had joked.
“Not really,” the intern, named Eva, had replied, her beautiful mouth unsmiling, “Her priestesses are those women who hold up the Acropolis on their heads.”
“Ooh,” he teased, “where did you go to school?”
“Same place as you,” she said and turned to leave but then turned back, her long dark curls bouncing the way he liked, her thick dark eyebrows drawn low. Was she Greek? he wondered. He tried to recall her last name.
For what it was worth, Eva told him, she didn’t want to see the tree cut down or the garden razed either.
“Is that all?” he had asked. He had stopped smiling too.
Now the walnut tree looms over him, taller than the telephone poles and as wide at its top as a house, spreading its branches as if it were posing for a centerfold in Nut Meat Monthly. Walnuts. Walnuts? He looks on the ground to see if any have fallen, but he doesn’t really know what he’s looking for. He imagines walnuts as he once saw them in the big open bins in the pro- duce section at the grocery store, their knotty, woody shells like knuckles. When he was young, he’d play at the bin, plunging his hands deep and making the walnuts move in pleasing noisy waves. His mother never bought walnuts, never used the big pewter scoop to fill up a brown paper bag and weigh it on the swinging silver scale that hung from the ceiling. He never actually saw anyone buy them ever. And those were husked walnuts, processed for the market. City boy that he is, the Mayor has never seen one still on a tree.
A floodlight switches on from above and there she is, perched like a bright bird on a platform of two by fours and plywood, a treehouse raft hanging thirty feet above the ground, a canopy of blue hardware store tarpaulin strung above her. The Folksinger has spied him. Her eyes meet his with raptor-like certainty.
He’d half expected her to still be that barefoot girl-woman in the blue jeans, but tonight she wears the kind of clothing called “gear” in the slick adventure eco-tourism catalogs his wife leaves out on the coffee table, pages decorated with hopeful Post-it messages about adventures they could take if only he would tear himself away. A scarf, bright as a flag from a happy faraway country, is wrapped around her neck, and above that her proud head; her hair, now entirely silvery white, falls like a shawl woven from tinsel. She is smaller and older, a surprise. He does the math. As old, he realizes, as his mother would be. As old as she ever was, even when she hung on his bedroom wall. His mother’s age, in fact.
“You missed the show,” she says. Her legs swing free below the platform. Her feet are encased in boots that might climb mountains or leap over rocks at the riverside, laces as brilliant as ribbons. She pats her closed guitar case at her side.
“I’m mighty sorry about that,” he says, flashing his trade- mark smile, “I’ve always wanted to hear you sing.” This is true, but it oozes out like a bad pickup line. The “mighty” may have been too much. Sometimes he doesn’t know when to stop. She is beautiful, elegant, strong. He is dressed as a teenage boy.
“I’m not hard to see,” she replies. “I’ve come through this city every year for the last forty. Where were you?” She smiles but it’s not the smile he wants. And her voice, the one he once had imagined as a heavenly river, is not giving him anything but dry rock bed.
The Mayor has worked it all out in his head, in the car. The Folksinger will recognize him. As indeed she has. Then he’ll explain. He is good at that, explaining tough situations. There is only so much a mayor can do between the landlord and the law and he’s done that and, well. She’ll understand. The Folksinger is probably looking for a way out that dodges handcuffs and jail time. After all, she is no longer who she once was either— and he, the Mayor, the hero again, is there to provide her the graceful way out. He’ll even give her a lift, perhaps back to the official residence where she can freshen up and spend what is left of the night in the fancy guest room. In the morning, they’ll breakfast together. His wife might like that. This might score him some badly needed points at home too. He could make his famous huevos rancheros, squeeze fresh orange juice.
He reinvigorates his smile again, pulls down the hood to free his hair, and is about to launch into the plan when she speaks. “You’re not here to help,” says the Folksinger. “You’re not going to climb up this tree.” Her legs keep swinging like she’s a schoolgirl, not a sixty-something woman. Her boots bounce against each other. In her tone, there’s the sound of a schoolyard taunt. “Are you?” she asks. “Are you?”
He has to look down now, away from her cascade of white hair and her swinging legs, her bright wise brown eyes that have seen it all: the firehoses in Birmingham, the dusty Central Valley picket lines, the bombs in Vietnam and in all the wars since then, hot and cold, at home and abroad, but when he does, all he sees are his son’s stupid shoes poking out from under his blue jeans. Two hundred dollars of what the Folksinger would probably call sweatshop blood, shoes made in Vietnam by young women earning 25 cents an hour, bought by American kids who wouldn’t bother to pick up a quarter on the ground. That war is long over but its grandchildren fight in another. Those easy equations still come to him quickly. Today’s napalm is a sweatshop. He knows how she sees it. How she adds it all up. How she must now see him, once someone like her. He is about to say something that isn’t exactly true or right, something he would never have said before he was elected: Give up. Climb down from the walnut tree. Follow me. Please. Please. He’s about to work the moment—the pragmatic versus the ideal, the big picture. It’s what he does now.
He hears their breath, their feet shuffling through the dust, the crunch of fallen leaves. They have an audience. The encampment gathers behind him. Young people. The three elders, with shovels and machetes. His private time with her is over now and what he might have done or said becomes even more impossible.
“You should really see what I can see,” the Folksinger tells him. “From up here.” Her voice has turned up a notch.
From up there, he thinks, she can see how his hairline has begun to recede like a slow tide, how it thins at the crown so that the scalp shines through. From up there, she can see what he can’t say.
She pushes a pile of coiled rope over the edge of the platform and it unfurls like a question mark. A rope ladder. An invitation, a challenge, the nightmare of the Mayor’s absent staff unable to advise, to caution, to feed him words that will make it all better. As had happened a week ago, when he was almost shouted down at a Skid Row press conference. Mid-speech, he was handed a card with ghostwritten retorts: The protesters don’t live here! Don’t know what they are talking about! But the Mayor knew, as did his staff, that those protesters had fed the hungry poor for decades. As a young community organizer, he’d sat at their hospitality soup kitchen table and eaten their nondenominational food. They had attended coalition meetings in church basements and college classrooms together, marched in picket lines, gone to jail. Anyone who had done the political work he had done in the city knew the people with the Feed the Hungry placards. But in that moment at the street-side podium, the Mayor denied them to the cameras.
Were his handlers here tonight, they would advise him to stay clear of the ladder and the beautiful woman at the other end. Hell, his staff would go nuts if they knew he was simply standing here, shuffling his feet in the dust. He reaches reflexively for his cell phone but, of course, his son’s pouch pocket is empty. His cell phone is at home, in the inner pocket of his suit. The skulls on his sleeve grin.
The Mayor walks closer to the tree, and as he moves forward, he feels the crowd move with him. But he keeps his eyes on hers. He doesn’t turn around.
“Mr. Mayor, I want to tell you a story,” she says, leaning over the edge.
“Rapunzel?” he suggests, hoping for a laugh, a flirt of her eyes.
“No,” she says. “True story, not a fairy tale. We are not children.” She pushes her hair back with one hand.
The crowd titters.
“You know this one,” she continues. “Once upon a time. Concord, Massachusetts. Ralph Waldo Emerson, famous American writer, visits his friend Henry David Thoreau, not-so-famous writer.” She pauses. “Thoreau was locked up in the local jail. Do you know why?”
The Mayor answers without hesitation. “Thoreau refused to pay taxes that would have funded the Mexican-American War.” He had learned that much in the university he and Eva had attended.
The crowd murmurs approval. “See, I do know this story,” the Mayor says. “But it’s been a while, hasn’t it?” the Folksinger chides him affectionately, flashing a smile, luminous. She is speaking to him like his wife might, or his mother, an intimate, someone who knows what he has forgotten.
“Why do guys like that always have three names?” he asks. “Ralph Waldo Emerson. Henry David Thoreau.” He doesn’t like where this is going. He wants to play to the crowd, be the clown.
The Folksinger ignores him. Her voice grows louder as she addresses the people behind him. She leans forward, bracing herself on either side with hands that grasp the edge of the platform. “Now, the younger Thoreau often irritated his friend and patron. Emerson liked to think big thoughts, radical thoughts about nature and humanity. Transcendentalism. Thoreau agreed with Emerson but did more than just think. Thoreau took action, what we call today direct action. That made Emerson uncomfortable.”
The crowd hisses at Ralph Waldo Emerson, with his three names and his Transcendentalism.
She continues, “So Emerson hears the news and goes down to the hoosegow to see his friend, to see what he can do. Perhaps he’s thinking that Henry will hit him up for bail as Henry has, in the past, found Waldo’s wealth easy to accept. When he sees his friend behind bars, Emerson asks, ‘Henry, why are you in there?’ His friend doesn’t hesitate but famously answers: ‘Waldo, the question is, why are you out there?’”
The Folksinger looks pleased with herself. Her cheeks pink up. There’s even a little applause. She acknowledges it with a bow of her head, a sweeping embrace.
“I get it, Henry,” the Mayor says.
The crowd laughs.
“Do you?” Her smile is wide now, but sad too.
There’s a hush behind him.
“It’s not that simple,” he says. He looks behind himself for the first time, sees the dozens of people gathered, some wrapped in bedroll blankets or leaning on shovels, rakes. They’re listening. Maybe he still has a chance to turn this his way. He turns back to the Folksinger, who is shaking her head ever so slightly. “It’s not that simple,” he repeats. “This farm, this garden, is not the Mexican-American War. It’s not. It’s . . .”
His smile falters into what he hopes passes for a sheepish grin. And the shiny words he had planned to use, his graceful way out, his poetry, stay where they are. In his head. Twirling like a mobile of what might have been. He should have known better. What he wants to ask her to do she cannot because she is sitting in that tree for others and he, the Mayor, is asking only for himself. He had known this and forgotten it somehow along the way. Nothing he can say will budge any of them, especially her.
*
When the Mayor reaches the gate and its lookout fire, burnt now to glowing coals, he thinks he hears the Folksinger beginning to sing. The two young sentries, still at their post, look up. They’re both in chairs now, but their hands are busy, peeling, shucking, tossing. Ping, ping, ping into the bucket.
He feels their eyes on him, his uncovered head, the humiliation in his downward gaze. He nearly trips over something that rolls in his path. He kicks it out of the way, but it rolls back. He hears a snicker. The two guys at the fire again. He stoops to pick it up. A pod, palm-size, slightly oval, pale green. As he examines it, another rolls by. Then another. And another. They’re playing with him. It could be worse, he thinks. They could be pelting him.
“Walnuts, man. They’re everywhere,” one calls out. The voice is surprisingly cheerful, warm.
“The tree,” the other one says. “Take a piece with you before they take it down.” His voice too is friendly. “Souvenir of the struggle.”
The husk is firm, slightly furry, has a nice feel in his hand. The Mayor pockets it.
The Folksinger’s voice soars. She sounds amplified but she’s just taking advantage of what’s left of the quiet night. Others join in, a chorus rises. It’s a song he knows all the words to, an old hymn about being lost then found. She leads and the other voices follow and the garden with her singing becomes the church his young self imagined her voice created, one that Thoreau and his pal Emerson would have happily prayed in, knees in the dirt, hands digging, harvesting. The Mayor keeps his mouth shut. He doesn’t look back.
His wife, he knows, must be waking up, stretching her arm across the white bed linens to feel for him, only to discover the pillow fresh, the tight sheet still tucked in on his side. She wears her long dark hair undone at night and he imagines how she pushes it out of her eyes and how her face tightens into worry. “Don’t,” he’d say if he could only get home in time but really, she should worry. His nights aren’t always spent cruising the streets. Sometimes Javier takes him to an upscale apartment in the Valley where the Mayor doesn’t have to knock, where his boyish gifts of Chinese takeout and supermarket flowers are received with exaggerated affection.
In the Camaro, he punches the radio on. Pre-set. His son’s music blares, the urban hip-hop scene. He knows he should respect it, should be able to locate the healthy youthful rebellion in the music’s rhythms and lyrics. He finds only his middle age, a sour mixture of impatience and intolerance. Though there is no one else to notice, he feels his shame spread. He hopes that the oldies station is still where it always was on the dial. He could use some good music to get him home, something familiar. But the oldies station with its soothingly predictable playlist of Top 40 is, of course, long gone. The Mayor considers his mistake even as he twists the dial. In place of Otis, Aretha, and Elvis, a shock jock rages, exhorting all-American blood donors to boycott blood donation because the Red Cross gives blood to all, including “illegals.” The host declares that American blood should flow only in the veins of American citizens. This, he roars, is yet another example of America overrun by the alien swarm.
The Mayor switches off the radio, the Camaro backfires. He jumps, as does the cool young blond woman in the car in the lane next to his. Her cell phone wraps around her ear, its mouthpiece extending like a stage microphone. She speaks intently into it. Her lips seem to form obscenities directed at him, his loud car, the space he takes up on the road. She glares, pulls forward, and cuts in front.
The Grand Biographer, he notices, has ditched him, bailed. The Mayor misses his commentary, the reassuring way he sees events, his big inspirational picture. It could be that he stayed back at the farm with the Folksinger. Maybe the Grand Biographer preferred her story to his. Who wouldn’t? Maybe he is now writing another kind of story entirely.
For a while the Mayor just drives, like he used to. Surface streets. Finds a pleasing avenue, one with an encouraging green signal pattern and smooth flow of traffic and follows it until it hits the hills. Then he turns back, heads homeward. The sky is lightening, exposing the city. It’s all strip malls and power lines, liquor stores and billboards, cinderblock walls layered with looping graffiti hieroglyphics. If the city at night is full of possibility, dawn is bleak, the bald light of the rising sun revealing all its limitations. The Mayor drives without sunglasses because he left in the middle of the night and hadn’t foreseen this dawn. The morning sun shines directly in his tired eyes with its singular blinding glare.
He can’t see a thing. He misses first one turn and then another. He circles around, trying to position the car in the correct lane, which requires a quick diagonal jump across the broken white lines, but the traffic is growing thick, slow. The morning commuters are not charitable to the driver in his hoodie in a ’68 Camaro. Once more he fails. One driver leans on a horn. Another flips him off. He becomes stuck behind a bus that pauses for one signal change and then another as it labors to discharge passengers and load up new ones. The bus is not one of the sleek, clean-fuel fleet that he championed. It’s ancient, large, and lumbering, like the number 44 that kept him up at night in his mother’s old apartment. Once, from the second-floor window, he watched his mother disembark, both hands weighted down with soft brown grocery sacks. This was before such bags had handles before they were reinforced or cast in the plastic that kills marine mammals. She held one sack in each arm, balanced high on her hips. She waited for the traffic to pause so she could make her way across a street without a marked crosswalk. It was already dark, the end of a short winter day, and she was coming home from work. He had let himself in using the key she made him wear on a chain around his neck. His afternoon had been full of comic books and homework, rock ’n’ roll played on the tinny radio that sat on the Formica kitchen table. He hoped that she would look up to see him, a good boy, framed in the kitchen window, and smile, but she didn’t. She was too tired. Her arms were full. She kept watching the traffic, waiting for her turn. He had wanted to help her but he wanted more for her to see him there in the window. And so he stayed, poised, posed, smiling his good-boy smile until he realized that she was never going to look up, that she couldn’t look up and keep going forward at the same time.
The squat back end of the bus shudders and exhales black diesel exhaust. He is blocked in. He can’t do anything but wait and try again.
The Mayor thinks about his wife, his son, Javier, the security detail, his staff. His cell phone must be ringing and ringing then going to voicemail. So many people, he thinks, must be looking for him.
for Elena Popp