The handcuffs were unnecessary. I was subdued and harmless. Also you were a little too pleased, like a gambler on a lucky streak. You’d pulled me over because I was going too slow on California’s I-5—or so you said. Then you’d run my driver’s license through the computer system, and—presto!—my name popped up with a ticket that had gone to warrant on a car I no longer owned. I’d neglected to repair a broken taillight. My papers were not in order. The republic would not be safe with me roaming free. For the first time in my life I was told, “You’re under arrest. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you . . .” My wife, five months pregnant, stood on the shoulder, shivering in the January darkness, the Central Valley fog closing around the three of us like a gray cloak. My blue heeler, Emmie Lou, barked and bared her teeth at you. I didn’t tell her to stop.
A decision had to be made about my twenty-year-old truck: a 1960 Ford F-100 with a short bed that held all of our belongings—Guild guitar, journals, cast-iron skillets, too many books of poetry, the teak nesting tables my wife’s grandfather had brought back from “the Orient.” You called a tow truck.
“We’re on our way east to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to take a dairy job,” I told you, as if the sheer distance ahead of us would cause you to take pity and release me. To avoid further suspicion, I did not tell you that first we would stop in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, where my best friend lived. “Coming from Astoria, Oregon,” I added. Where it rained all the time. Where I had planted trees in a clear-cut moonscape for twenty bucks on a good day. Where one morning our landlord had unexpectedly taken away the refrigerator, so we’d made a pretend one out of empty boxes. Even painted a handle on it. Foggy, coastal Astoria, where we’d had cats named Chairman Meow and Mousy Tongue. For some reason I wanted desperately to tell you all of this, as if the specifics might cut through your militaristic authority and reveal our shared humanity.
I didn’t. You patted me down roughly, went through my pockets and pulled out three crumpled twenties, some guitar picks, my stepfather’s pocketknife. “You got drugs, son?”
“No, sir.” I had enough problems already. This here being a great example.
The cuffs hurt my wrists, but when you placed me in the back seat, you were considerate enough to bend me over so I wouldn’t hit my head. You allowed my wife, my dog, and the Guild to ride in the front on the way to the county lockup. The warmth from the squad car’s heater felt soothing. You drove above the speed limit—who was going to stop you?—the amber dashboard lights illuminating your face in the rearview. I could see you were satisfied with your catch: your quota for the night had been reached. The radio crackled with a robbery in Grimes, a bar fight in Yuba City, another robbery in Gridley. I felt strangely relieved to be shackled in the back. For the first time in months I was safe. Later in the trip there would be flat tires, shot bearings, ice storms, and an ugly scene with a mechanic in Wendover, Nevada, but for the moment my wife, my dog, and I were all together in a car that ran smoothly.
You turned off I-5 at the Colusa exit and radioed ahead that you were bringing in a lawbreaker. After we arrived, I was told to strip and then given an orange jumpsuit and sandals two sizes too big. I would spend the night in a cell with two other men, migrant workers who also did not have their papers in order and, unlike me, probably never would. The toilet didn’t work, and I was too embarrassed to use it anyway. The pillow on the cot smelled like semen. I waived my right to an attorney. I didn’t eat the breakfast of oatmeal, white toast, and thin coffee. I was twenty-four years old.
In our usual raggedy fashion we would eventually make it over the snowy Sierra and across the plains to our new home in yet another new state, where sixty cows with full udders waited to be milked twice a day. Seven days a week I would spread manure in fields ringed by hardwood forests and carry wet, newborn Holstein calves in from the field. My daughter would be born at home during a gentle rain. The land would eventually overwhelm me with its rawness: the clear creeks whose water tasted like iron; the fat pine snakes, thick as ropes, curled under porch boards; the dancing northern lights and the electrical storms that swung down from Canada. We would live in a drafty old farmhouse, get our milk and meat for free, and have a little cash left over at the end of the month to treat ourselves to eggs over easy and home fries in Escanaba. No one should ask for more.
