A Schedule of Drugs in the Valley of Death Read online

  A Schedule of Drugs in the Valley of Death

  Sarah Reith

  © 2018 Sarah Reith

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be

  reproduced or transmitted in any means,

  electronic or mechanical, without permission in

  writing from the publisher.

  978-1-945805-62-2 paperback

  Cover Art

  by

  Sarah Reith

  Cover Design

  by

  Bink Books

  a division of

  Bedazzled Ink Publishing Company

  Fairfield, California

  http://www.bedazzledink.com

  For my grandmother, Suzanne Reith,

  who left me the riches of her wit, her letters, and her love of books.

  Acknowledgments

  I took so many shiny things and tucked them into my nest. I don’t know who I’d be without Foxglove, and Lisa, and everyone who came through in those days when we all needed a place to heal our wings.

  Elizabeth Raybee shared her workshop full of broken things, and showed me how to make a beautiful whole with jagged edges, missing pieces, and a deft hand with a hammer.

  Cynda Valle taught me faces, and colors.

  Michael Charnes showed me that life can be a poem, with lots of false starts and rough drafts. Thanks to Amethyst and Rosie, for some of the best lines.

  Noel and Carol Hale gave me a safe place to land, whenever I fell. Danny Sheehan put things back together, every time.

  The Black Oak writers, Kristana Arp, Kate Gaston, and Roberta Werdinger, are daring and strategic. I’m lucky to have them.

  Sadie and Harriet always make sure I get my walks, and Stuart Campbell is the nest I keep my heart in.

  Part One

  Portraits of Ancestors

  MY NAME IS Isobel Reinhardt, and I am living more dangerously than I ever have before. I am a portrait painter, which may not seem especially daring, since it means I spend my days listening to podcasts, dipping my brushes in water-based oils, and cleaning them in non-toxic odorless mineral spirits. I no longer listen for the footsteps of angry men with guns. I can trust my colleagues not to place me in harm’s way—unless you count the occasional comment from those who have accorded themselves the privilege of judging other people’s work. But painting human faces is riskier than anything, because it takes a jeweler’s precision and a constant awareness of the savagery of human beings.

  Since we as a species have always had the regrettable tendency to bash each other’s brains in, we have also developed a hair-trigger response to the slightest sign of a possible threat in other people’s faces—especially those that are just the tiniest bit different from our own. For this reason, people have powerful reactions to portraits, even if they are fully aware that an oil painting is not about to raise a rock and cave in their skulls. But I know for a fact that if I paint a nostril half a millimeter too small or too wide, I am guaranteed to set off a family feud that lasts for generations. I could give a lip a certain curl and provide a man’s descendants with an ancestor who sneers.

  It’s generally best to avoid smiles.

  Smiles, like butterflies and sharks, do not do well in captivity, which is the whole point of painting. Painters exist to capture a moment, an expression, a condition of the light. We are here, with our solvents and our pigments, to capture the look on your face and pin it to the wall. To make it stop moving, so we can look at it forever. And if there is one thing no one wants to look at forever, it is a fleeting moment of joy. Eternal joy is a dreadful thing to catch sight of in the corner of your eye as you are walking down a hallway lined with portraits of your ancestors.

  People want a painting that hints at crimes and madness, but preserves the nobility of line they know their forebears possessed. Therefore, if a customer’s grandmother ran for her life in the middle of the night, you can paint her toiling along a lonely road, but not scrambling over a wall with her panties showing and dirt in her teeth. If a client’s mother was notorious, paint her as an Italian courtesan, of the honest, poetic variety. And if her father was a wire-walker and a convict and a connoisseur of obscure enjoyments, well. It’s as good a place to start as any.

  Paternal Ancestors

  MY FATHER GUSTAVE named me Isobel for a fine, if slightly abstract, ancestral reason: he thought Isobel Reinhardt was linguistically perfect, considering that we are native speakers of a Germanic language with a largely Latin vocabulary. If Gustave Reinhardt had been a medieval Italian poet, he would have written love poems full of puzzles and acrostics and heretical commentary on obscure theological texts. I am sure the twentieth century was a terrible disappointment for him.

  However, I am not at all sure why the name Isobel represented all things Latin to my Spanish-speaking gringo father. I’m a little more solid on the significance of Reinhardt, because onomastics, or the study of proper names, is an actual discipline with books and papers and Wikipedia entries, rather than a whimsical decision on the part of someone I haven’t seen for more than half my life.

  I happen to know that Reinhardt, in German, is full of pre-Christian warrior qualities. It is a name defined in terms like brave counsel, sound decision, manly virtue, and, suddenly, fox.

  Wait a minute: how did a fox wind up in this thicket of square jaws and grim determination? His presence is a violation of parallelism. His call is a wild scream that sounds like puppies being disemboweled by a night heron. He is cunning and lovely and entirely unsympathetic, as we can see by how eagerly his hunters pursue him.

  On May 15, 1992, The Washington Post reported that Gustave Reinhardt of San Francisco, California, had been indicted by a grand jury. He was wanted for questioning. And he was “at large.” That is a matter of public record. There is also a public record stating that my father was a “drug kingpin,” with “lieutenants in the field.” (The Baltimore Sun, an inferior paper, demoted him to “Middle Man,” and reported that he was “lurking.”) It was boilerplate, but it made me feel like I came from somewhere, like there was a place for me in the succession of some enchanted kingdom ruled by outlaw royalty. I was fourteen years old. I was heavy and slow, like the lumbering young of quick-moving prey, in a year when the hunters are fierce.

  The truth is, I liked those Penny Dreadful articles. As long as they lasted—which wasn’t long at all—they brought some flair to the hardship of losing my dad. There was a lighthearted quality to their casual viciousness, like hidden limericks in a document full of tax codes and severities. I read them again and again, soothing my sorrow with their badly-drawn caricature.

  And that’s the thing about missing parents. They give their children a reason to grieve, as if reason were a bulwark against all the pointless sorrow in the world. In this way, the absentee father provides his heirs with something to hold onto. At last, you who are gone. Let us be thankful, let us say grace, for all the missing fathers.

  My dreams about my father are as dark and deep as organ meat. The colors are muted, like illustrations from a favorite children’s book, crumpled and smeared and left outside in the sun. There is to them an emotional texture of forgotten birds’ nests and the basements of abandoned ruins. The limited palette makes them feel like woodcuts, illustrating a fable about being lost in an ancient city, in a magic field, in a clearing peopled by fairies at certain phases of the moon.

  Gustave Reinhardt was so many things, in the short time that I knew him. He was a wire-walker in a gold lamé jumpsuit. He was a Hari Krishna in a saffron robe, a cardsharp in a cheap black suit. Finally, he was a fugitive with a profusion of facial hair; and then he was gone. Just gone. He is,
now, a swashbuckling ancestor, like the preacher who built a canoe and traveled alone through some rivery region, trying to convert the heathen. He, too, left a family behind.

  Before he was a fugitive, my father served several short sentences for various infractions. You could say he lost his enthusiasm for the incarcerated lifestyle. He spent years of his youth requesting permission to read certain books; receiving pawed-over packages; trading stamps and cigarettes for girlie magazines. More than anything else, he cleaned his cell. He even invented a special way of scrubbing the floor that maintained the suppleness of his dan tien, so essential to a wire walker’s balance. In his experience, tidiness was the direct result of brutal control.

  Just not his. I think he was humiliated by how zealously he cleaned his cage, because in freedom, he cultivated a slovenliness that had a vengeful quality to it. He was like a man deprived of meat for years, gorging on bacon and beef until his sweat smells like dead bodies, all the time. “I want my home to look like I walked in with everything I own in my arms,” he would say, “and then I just spun around with my eyes closed and let it fly all over the place.” The way he said it, he made it sound like a wise old proverb.

  But this is only possible if you have a place of your own, and belongings to clutter it with. It’s the easiest thing in the world to be neat if all you have are a few second-rate goods from the prison commissary. Being a slob was an expression of freedom, but it could only be practiced with proper equipment, which my father sought out like a man who believes the Platonic ideal can be paid for in cash.

  He bought strange machines made with little-known alloys. He bought a whistle synthesizer. He bought recordings of classical music at prices only the listeners of classical music expect to pay. He wore long-sleeved cotton T-shirts because he could not endure the sun on his skin, or the way synthetic fabrics rearranged the hairs on his arms. He wore them until they were frayed at the cuffs and stained at the pits, and he wore them to specialty stores where people could only bear to be dressed by their tailors in Tuscany. He would demonstrate his knowledge of the specialty product with such tremendous expertise that people assumed he was a genius—and then he paid with a wad of hundred dollar bills that made them think he might also be an eccentric millionaire. He may have been. He didn’t keep very good records. His quarters were cluttered with objects he paid for with money he earned, doing exactly what he felt like doing.

  There was something majestic to the disorder that reigned wherever he lived, like the most advanced principles of science that can only be explained through chaos theory. There was no one else like him.

  My father, I used to say. My dad. I think now, with some disgust, how obvious it must have been that I was in love with him. I have so little gentleness for all my younger selves, my poor, eager younger selves who were so doggishly in love.

  That said, any story about him should be about love. But I find myself looking for some deeper meaning in the words and actions of an elusive genius, trapped by stupid passion like anybody else. It is impossible to believe the humiliating fact that brilliance, like beauty, signifies nothing.

  When I realized my knowledge about him was as puny as the hole he left in my life was vast, I called my grandmother, who had been born Lisette Saulé. She, too, had a string of unrelated anecdotes about a man who was clearly a stranger to both of us.

  She began at the beginning. When my father was in daycare, she told me, a young woman who was studying child development wrote her thesis on little Gus. He was such a remarkable child. An outlier, as they would call him today. She remembered that he was very obedient, which rings true because she is not a woman who considers it high praise to describe someone as eager to obey.

  The little Gus I knew left a suitcase full of psilocybin mushrooms next to a security guard in an airport—on purpose—while he went to the bathroom. He ambled out, nodded amiably to the officer, and strolled off with several life sentences’ worth of smuggled contraband.

  “Do you know why I nodded?” he asked me, as if this single act were the only questionable element in the entire story. Of course I knew why. I was also old enough to understand that there is no one in the world more pedantic than a man who considers himself a criminal mastermind. If I wanted to avoid a lecture, I would have to come up with something that sounded insightful. I would have this feeling often in college, as I struggled to convey the impression that I had understood some complicated worldview, some work of genius beyond my comprehension.

  “Because if you made a big deal out of thanking him,” I sighed, “he would notice you and remember you.”

  “But if I just walked off without acknowledging him,” he added, “he would think I was afraid of him and want to know why.” Chances are, he did this instinctively, and analyzed it afterward, so he could admire his strategic brilliance as well as his daring.

  “I know,” I whined, fidgeting. He would have reprimanded me if I had said Duh, because duh is not a proper part of speech, and only dullards allow improper utterances to escape their lips. In some ways, little Gus was still the obedient son of a woman as scrupulous in her grammatical correctness as she was in her convictions.

  Miss Lisette Saulé left the Catholic Church, after what sounded like a bracing, cerebral, excessively unconsummated affair with a priest. She was beautiful, like a dark-haired Faye Dunaway, with broad graceful bones in the plains of her face. In 1940s America, this daughter of French Catholic immigrants was unaffectedly bewildered by the ability of intelligent adults to go on believing in God. “I don’t know why he was always looking for spiritual explanations,” she said of my father. Maybe “always” is overstating the case a little, but no mother is likely to forget about it soon, when her son spends a season canvassing the airport with the Hari Krishnas.

  It’s true that Gustave Reinhardt was not a proper atheist; which is to say, he didn’t make his way to unbelief through finely argued logic, as his literary mother did. Many years before she was married, Lisette Saulé had tea, two times a week, with a handsome priest who was always pressing her to have just one more nibble of his housekeeper’s excellent scones. He marveled at the elegance of her arguments against the existence of God and promised that when he finally won her over, he’d arrange for her to speak at Catholic retreats to those whose faith was wavering.

  Instead of rejecting the barbarity of dogma in a civilized setting, my father took peyote. He saw the Virgin Mary weeping, in a desert that cried out for prophets and visions of saints.

  He asked her what she wanted, and she raised her tearstained face to him.

  “Follow my son,” she replied. My father reported this encounter with the kind of scorn he levelled at children who use made-up words like duh.

  “Get outta my trip!” he told her angrily.

  It is always permissible to use contracted adverbial prepositions when communicating with drug-induced hallucinations. One does it for effect, particularly if one is a showman with an unerring sense for the importance of breaking the rules appropriately.

  The rules were subtle and intricate, involving parts from several decks, like Gustave’s favorite card game, Pan. We read Coleridge, but we were not under any circumstances to discuss this. It wasn’t shameful, exactly: more like a minority religious practice in a regime known for sudden repressive crackdowns.

  “Have you read Rime of the Ancient Mariner?” I asked a friend excitedly; and my father, ordinarily so sympathetic to pedantic urges, took me aside to lecture me about the importance of not being a snob. It was like he knew there was something about our lives that should be kept secret; but he couldn’t quite work out what it was.

  He took me to R-rated movies, during the last few years before every school kid in the country was yawning with boredom as the victims of bizarre murders littered every movie screen. I think this was his idea of a continuing education program on the inexplicable values of the puzzling culture we found ourselves stranded in. A typical post-viewing session went something like this:r />
  “Daddy,” I began, as we sat cross-legged on the floor, unwrapping burritos at ten o’clock at night. We were bachelors at Daddy’s house, and I loved it. “I don’t understand the joke that one guy told. Where he goes, geez, you got a big pussy, geez, you got a big pussy; and then something about an echo?”

  My father chewed calmly, then swallowed.

  “A lot of people think a woman’s vagina loses its elasticity if she’s promiscuous,” he explained, with a very slight smile of even slighter pity for such ignorance. “So the joke is that this guy’s girlfriend has a lot of sex partners, and he’s such a loser, he can’t find a woman who will have a monogamous relationship with him. It’s very self-deprecating.” He killed that joke decisively, but I will remember it forever.

  He was always careful not to condescend to me or make unnecessary mysteries of things. But I always suspected that he was disappointed at my failure to demonstrate any sign of being a prodigy. I still can’t tell you, off the top of my head, how to convert a fraction to a decimal, in spite of how often it’s been explained to me. I had a tutor one time—yes, and I had ballet lessons, too, if you really must know—who made paper cylinders and cubes with graceful, intelligent hands in an effort to explain geometry. I preserved my immunity to this instruction fiercely. I think I believed it would rearrange the way I was trying to organize my brain at the time, but now it seems I was just a spoiled child with no inkling of what I was about to lose.

  My grandmother told me that my father’s IQ was in the high 150s, which is genius level, but only professor genius, not Nobel prize-winning genius. Of course, it doesn’t take brains to be a criminal. It takes brains to be a fugitive for twenty-five years.

  And fugitives run in my family. There is a maddening historical determinism to this, as if free will and logic were among the cumbersome heirlooms left behind in yet another wild midnight flight. I don’t know when it worked its way into the gene pool, but even when we’re not actively committing crimes—and every family has its slackers—we Reinhardts are a flight risk.