Carl

Right after the war ended, Carl came up to Herlong to visit Richard for the day. They took the greyhound bus into Reno. Richard doesn't remember anything about what they did. What he remembers is that later, when he met Carl again as adult, Carl chortled about how he had given Richard a "swat on the butt." He did tell Richard that he had a new wife. When Richard duly repeated this to Lillian she responded, "He'd better not or he's a bigamist." It must have been during this visit that Carl and Lillian negotiated their legal divorce. Carl was mandated to pay ten dollars a month in child support which he ever did.

Herlong part 2

Herlong was heaven for a kindergartener. Lillian and Richard came up in the late summer '44 on the train that came from Oroville, passed under the long tunnel around Table Mountain and then steamed up the Feather River Canyon to Portola where they stayed with Lillian's sister for the time it took for Lillian to line up the soda jerk job and find base housing.

Richard loved everything about Herlong, the fact that he could wear dungarees and striped T-shirts, the school, the other kids, living with Lillian, and the desert with its mysterious horned toads, blue bellied lizards, and busy black beetles. He loved the sudden dust devils and torrential showers. The sage brush and rabbit brush. The moptoped sage hens. And the mountains that surrounded Herlong like a bowl, especially Turtle mountain that looked close enough to walk to with its strange towers and crenellations.

By the fall of '44 Richard had started kindergarten. He felt so secure that he wasn't even flustered when one afternoon Lillian did not arrive to pick him up. He just sat at his desk watching the light fade and the school building empty. His teacher sat at her desk paying him no great attention. Richard remembers just sitting there quietly feeling somewhat amazed at his being there with nothing to do but sit at his desk. It is the first time he can remember experiencing pure existential peace.

Another night he remembers just sitting on the steps outside the flattop with Lillian listening to the coyotes just barking and barking to each other across Honey Lake Valley, once a giant bathtub to an ancient lake.

Herlong

Carl, Lillian and Richard, the baby, moved up and down the State of California as Carl followed one job after another. Pearl Harbor was attacked, and Carl enlisted in the Navy, leaving Lillian for good or ill. Lillian had to work, placing her toddler in foster care and working a series of low paying jobs until she ended up at Alcoa which was a good job monetarily. She herself lived with a couple, the illustrious Hallmonds, who had taken her in after a fight she'd had with her roommate, Clara. The Hallmonds' had a dignified house in a good neighborhood. They offered consistent hospitality the whole time with she was with them, and Lillian would show her lasting gratitude by keeping in touch with cards and letters for years afterward. She was pretty well situated had she not had her boy. She'd landed on her feet after Carl had disappeared. Except for Richard, stuck in that terrible home, which was the only reason she took a tip from her sister in Portola to move back to the middle of nowhere, to a job at a remote military base, a munitions depot stuck way out at the Eastern edge of the state in a desert as dusty as the dust she had tried to leave in the dust bowl called Kansas, to the town of Herlong an oasis only because there was a job and daycare. She went to work as a soda jerk by day and a scullery maid when she got home to the flat-topped duplex where she and Richard were housed, sweeping outside all the desert grit that had gotten in during the day, even from between the sheets.

background

Lillian was his mother and Carl his father. They were married in Iola, Kansas in 1937 then moved directly to California where Carl had a job logging in the mountains outside Portola. When Lillian got pregnant, Carl paid 200 bucks to have a shack built in a little logging camp call Spring Garden. Two things Lillian told him about that period. One, Carl drove them off the road before he was born, while he was still tucked up like a bean inside Lillian, on the way from Spring Garden to Portola to visit her sister. Probably drunk. Two, that when, after he had been born for sometime, and Carl and Lillian had left Portola for LA, he was in his crib and Carl started beating on Lillian, he stood up, grabbed an alarm clock off a layette nearby, and threw it at Carl. That's the sum total of what he knows about Carl and Lillian's marriage. Life before the foster home where he remembers being resented for his presence and eating beans.

foster care

His pretty mother had to leave him in foster care because there was no childcare provided by Alcoa, Aluminum Company of America, which was part of the defense industry, then, in '42 or '43, right in the middle of the War. She was in the most unfortunate position of being both a divorcee and a single mother, the sole support of the little boy lying on the floor who would not breathe.

She got to visit him on Sundays, take him out on the trolley car, all dressed up in the little suits she bought him, little gentlemen's suits where the wide shirt lapels laid neatly over the suit jacket, or sometimes in his little woolen Navy Uniform, a miniature of his father's who had joined up and was a crewman on the Bunker Hill. On the trolley, men back from war or soon off to war flirted with her and the cute little boy who was all dressed up.

But evening always came, and she had to take him back to the family of hillbillies she's had to leave him with for the next week. She was desperate to leave LA, to not have to leave him with people who only wanted her ration stamps, for bananas and oranges, which she gave them for her son but which he never remembered eating.

"What did  you have to eat this week?" she always asked. His answer was always the same. "Beans," he'd answer. But she never dared to question what had happened to all the fruit she provided. They had her son in their clutches all week. Who knew what people like that were capable of, they and their own dirty little ragamuffins. He was the ultimate hostage and she had to mind her manners, treat them with the respect they little deserved. She was desperate to leave LA.

He had thrown himself down on the floor at the downtown May Company, on the first floor right next to the escalator, and started holding his breath. His mother was stooped in her heels, causing a commotion, desperately trying to get him to breathe. It was the sight of his pretty mother in obvious distress that attracted the small crowd of on lookers. He says he remembers even then that no one seemed very worried about his physical condition. Someone in the crowd said, "Leave him alone. He'll breathe."