THE FOX

 

 

She gets a call from her cousin Enzo while she’s gleaning the news. It’s her Zia Giulia; why else would he call. “Pina,” he says, “Mamma went to the hospital last night. I think she caught this bug. She got the fever and the shortness of breath. I don’t know about the dry cough. Allison wouldn’t even let me go in her room. We called the ambulance. Who knows, maybe it’s a blessing in the end. You know, her quality of life, you had to wonder.”

A blessing for you, Pina thinks, but surprises herself with her restraint. “I’m so sorry, Enzo. Zia Giulia wasn’t going out was she?”

“No, no. At least she wasn’t supposed to go out. We can’t keep her under lock and key. She wakes up before either of us and goes down to the beach—an old lady with a cane—before it’s even light. And you know what she does? You’re not going to believe what she does. We have evidence. She feeds the homeless. I’m not kidding, Pina. She feeds the homeless like she’s feeding ducks. The dementia . . . the dementia. A couple of weeks ago a half chicken was missing from the fridge, all the bread gone, a five-pound sack of apples. I’ve been telling her for years, You stay away from the homeless, mamma, those people are bathed in germs, those people aren’t people anymore. What am I supposed to do, put a lock on her door?”

Pina has disliked her cousin Enzo from the time they were children. Three years older than her, he was a fatso, and that’s what she called him, if not jelly belly. He’d chase her around the block in Redondo Beach, but he couldn’t catch her and he couldn’t climb trees like she could.

She and her mother spent two whole weeks down there, the year her father started getting sick. Two weeks playing with Enzo. It was the summer she turned eight. She’d just cut her hair herself. Real short. Went into the bathroom with a scissors and clip, clip, clip. She left hair all over everything. Her mother had a fit and marched her down to the beauty shop, where the beautician did what she could to calm her. “We’ll have her looking like Audrey Hepburn in no time.”

Pina was angry all the time that summer. Her father had stopped being her father. He’d become this unshaved block of a man spending the whole day in bed propped up by a thousand pillows.

Enzo started taunting her as soon as she got down to Redondo.
“You look like a boy, Pina.” And then he’d chase her around the block: “Pina, Pina, she’s got a wiena. Pina, Pina, she’s got a wiena.”
She did her best to respond: “Enzo, Enzo, with a missing wiena.” Even though her version didn’t have the rhyme, it set Enzo in motion.
“Sure do have a wiena,” he’d holler. “You want to see it?” And then he’d unzip his jeans and pull out his peewee.
“Put it away, Fatso. You’re a disgrace.” Pina was usually up a tree by then, doing her best to hang a long loogie on Enzo’s head. She’d learned the language of the neighborhood from the Eichorn’s, next door. Five roughhousing boys, age four to thirteen, who adopted her, miraculously, when she was six. On weekends and when school was out, she played with the Eichorns from morning until the streetlights came on. Tommy Eichorn, the oldest of the brothers, built a platform in the backyard that they turned into a pirate ship.

Enzo coughs into the phone. “Now Allison and I are probably going to get sick with this Chinese virus.”

Ah, evidence of Trump killing his supporters. She wants to gibe Enzo again, like she did forty-odd years ago. Do you believe it’s real now, Enzo? Are you still wearing your MAGA hat and jammies? But she doesn’t want to soil Zia Giulia’s demise with eight-year-old behavior. “Thank you for letting me know, Enzo. I’m very sorry. Your mother and I have had a special relationship.”

 

It’s not a surprise that, a couple of hours later, she wants to walk up Second Street East to the Mountain Cemetery, her sacred ground in Sonoma. Vince introduced her to the cemetery, but refuses to hike up there anymore. “I’m gonna hang among the living,” he says, which generally means, I’d rather stay here, drink wine and watch golf. She’s glad to go off by herself. Who needs his haggling? Come on, Pina, enough’s enough. How many graves do you have to see?

The Mountain cemetery is historic, opened in the 1840’s. Few fresh bodies are buried there any longer, maybe one or two connected to the old families. Governor Vallejo and his wife are there, as are a survivor of the Donner Party, lots of Italian pioneers, early winemakers, founders of nearby towns, and old Sonoma common folk: stone cutters, carpenters, barbers, school teachers, dentists. The only descriptive attached to women is wife or daughter.

Pina finds solace amid the shifting terraces of graves. She loves scampering off trail to remote burial spots, many with cracked gravestones, their chiseled lettering blurred with moss or eaten by the mists. Humble wooden markers stand like crooked teeth, no longer bearing identification. Earthquakes and erosion have shifted whole outcroppings of graves downhill.

And yet the cemetery is alive. Palm trees, black walnut, live oak, olive, bay laurel, California buckeye, horse chestnut, willow, and all manner of ferns. Volunteers grow sideways from crevices and complex stone formations, spotted with lichen. And the flora: lupine, wild cucumber and radish, golden poppy, Mariposa lily, blue dick, mule ears, and the Toyon bush, make a mockery of the plastic flowers, rising like a toxic species from odd vessels and strewn haphazardly across graves. Pina has seen deer roaming through the cemetery, wild turkeys, lizards, snakes; she’s been circled by butterflies, and heard that coyotes and cougars have been spotted on the hillside.

It’s a quick, steep hike from the condo and she’s cheered to not be winded at all when she reaches the top, but then she notices the sign—the cemetery has been closed, along with everything else in town. What could be more ominous than a shuttered cemetery? Are they trying to keep the dead from getting out or the living from slipping in? Doesn’t matter to her. She’s going to risk a citation. Beg off in a loopy Italian accent in the unlikely event that an authority sees her. I dida not knowa.

Pina slips around the gate and, on Willow Walk, stops in front of the tombstone of Francis Thornton Seawall, a native of Gloucester County, Virginia, born 168 years, less a day, before her. Time has split his stone into vertical halves and she thinks of the Ten Commandants. Yes, she does honor her father and mother, in her way.

Up weaving Cypress Way, a fox darts past her, not even separation distance away. She leaps in the air as if she’d just beheld a pod of whales spouting, and tries to spot the fox on its downhill dash, but it’s long gone. What does a fox in a cemetery mean? It has to be portentous. A fox is a form of trickster, so in a cemetery he must be outfoxing death.

She heads up Cedar and down Sea Breeze, past graves she’s known for years, and has affection for: the pipe fitter, whose colleagues at PG&E in the 1920s, had his tombstone crafted out of a fat pipe; the guy, nicknamed Jazz, lamented as a fine gentleman; the seaman, as his plaque attests, who served as a mate on The Hazard in the Colonial Navy, later becoming the captain of a merchant ship, The Albatross, and sailing around the world seven times, to be buried, not at sea, but on a hillside in Sonoma nearly 175 years ago.

She passes mausoleums branded with family names, rough stone sepulchers, cracked, canting from their foundation, the Druid tombs of Sonoma.

Pina climbs a boulder atop an outcropping of rocks. Today she is a trespasser, a breaker of the code in a time of plague. Her justification is that she’s come up here to mourn the recent dead, and the whole scourge of death that blankets us. The problem is she’s not in the mood for mourning. The air’s fresh and she’s walked past more than one almond tree, in blossom, bursting out of a side hill. She saw a fox rush past. Everything is alive. She has no need to mourn her mother and father, her husband Marcello—Marco. She’s done that. Neither will she mourn her Zia Giulia in advance. When there is so much gone, so many lives and ways of life lost, she stands with the living. Up here, she is alive, she and the fox. It is important to remember that she, too, is a part of nature.

 

Her phone’s marimba interrupts her just as she’s sparking a joint. She drops it into the abalone shell on the deck. Shouldn’t be smoking anyway. The whole business is respiratory and, with her past, it’s a death wish. She takes a deep breath and answers.

“Pina, Pina, Pina.”
“Yes.” She’s curt. Why does he insist on repeating her name like she’s a trained seal? He sounds like a guy, swallowing his words, trying to sell a bag of peanuts. Pina, Pina, Pina.
“Vince gave me your number. Hope that’s all right.”
What if it’s not?
“I thought I could do some shopping for you. I go shopping pretty much everyday.”
“You’re crazy,” she says.
“Yeah, I think I am.”

His agreement disarms her. She wants to tell him to fuck off, but instead, says, “Toilet paper.” She’s down to her last roll and starting to eye the stack of newspapers.

“Not a problem. I’ve got a fortress of rolls. Anything else?”
“No, the toilet paper will do it.” That strikes her as the perfect line for the end of a flirtation, but rather than hanging up, she holds onto phone long enough for him to ask: “So, how are you, Pina?”

He says her name so warmly this time that she feels obliged to finesse an answer, but something else happens. She becomes garrulous, chatters on endlessly about her afternoon in the cemetery, profiling the cabin boy on The Hazard who became captain of the Albatross, as if he were a member of her family. Somehow she even spouts lovingly about playing pirates with the Eichorns.

“Was that recently?” he asks, deadpan.
“I wish. It was forty odd years.”
“Why did you quit? Who grew up first, you or the brothers?”
“You call it growing up? I would have kept on playing. I saw a fine future in being a tomboy, but when my father died my asthma kicked in, and then I got my period. I was that girl that screamed, I don’t want it, I don’t want it, I don’t want it, when I realized what had happened. I’ve been devastated ever since.”
“Hmm,” Charlie says.

She has no idea why she’s saying all this. Is she so lonely, so desperate for talk that she ends up telling a stranger about her first period?

“Pina, can I ask what it was that devastated you?”
“All of it. As an eight-year-old, playing pirates, I was indestructible, impervious to fear. I had everything I wanted. Even my father.” She plucks the joint from the abalone shell. She’d like to take a toke right now.
“You would have scared me, Pina,” he says. “I was what you’d call a nerd. My parents couldn’t get me outside. All I wanted to do was stay in my room and build things. I had no friends; I had no need for them. It’s funny how you can see in your childhood, the person that you’ve become all these years later.”
“You seem sociable enough.”
“Yes, I’ve learned to live among people.”
“So, you must be thriving with the isolation.”
“Let’s just say it’s reminded me of who I am.”
She thinks of his once calling himself Raoul. “Aren’t we all a multiplicity of people?”
“A multiplicity of people,” he echoes. “Hmm. I have trouble enough being a single person. But Pina, may we pause for a moment so that I can tell you how much I love hearing you speak. On the phone, without seeing you, your voice is a treasure.”
Now, he’s playing with her. Or is he for real? She lights the joint and takes a deep toke.

Charlie says: “Your diction is a revelation, and I tell you that as a former animator with a keen interest in vocal fidelity. And one more thing, Pina, you shouldn’t forget that you’ve retained some of your fearlessness. You broke into a cemetery today.”
“I know, in the middle of a plague. Doesn’t that sound gothic?”
“Indeed. Good night, Pina.”

So, now he cuts her off. She should have known it.

“The TP will be on your doorstep in the morning.”