Light on the Devils: Coming of Age on the Klamath

Liz and Mark

139 Liz and Mark at fourteen, liz was slight and slender, her chest still flat, her hips narrow. Her blonde hair hung to her waist, held back from her high forehead with a headband that made her look even younger. She weighed about eighty-five pounds and was so pale that in some lights her face looked slightly green. Liz often complained that middle children got no respect. I didn’t see that then,for the long armistice between us,brought on as we stood together against our stepfather, was showing cracks.As I passed out of what Jane Austen called “the most trying age” and Liz entered it, she woke one day to find that her older sister had drunk the Kool-Aid of self-righteousness.I only knew that somehow the formerly burdensome rituals of school and home had become rewarding. I discovered in myself the happy ability to absorb material and regurgitate it back onto test papers.In class,I was quiet and diligent and most teachers looked on me with approval.At the same time, I was competent enough in sports to be readily picked when we chose up sides for volleyball or basketball or soccer, which saved me from total social oblivion. On an emotional level, to be in love with Robert—or rather, to attach a vague idea of romance to the cute ass of a boy who might speak to me once a week,if that—was both titillating and safe.But even if Robert had actually lusted after me, being alone with him would have been a challenge: he didn’t have a car. Few boys on the river did, in those days. The parental pressure that had once rendered Saturday nights horrible to me, as I dressed for dances I didn’t want to attend, vanished and showed no signs of returning. I spent my Friday and Saturday evenings en famille, playing records, throwing Monopoly dice across the kitchen table, reading aloud to Tommy. Mother knitted, Dad read the newspapers, and the rhythms of Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass blared from the record player.The house was suffused with warmth and the peace of gentle amusements.We lived twenty miles from the bright Light on the Devils 140 lights of Happy Camp, and even after I got my driver’s license, the last thing our stepfather wanted was to have us navigate the river road on a rainy night. Besides, a forty-mile round trip in the new station wagon cost money, and he was not about to drive us himself without a very good reason. The new routine contented me, but not Liz. She had loved the dances in the grade school gym, and just as she had graduated to the more sophisticated pleasures of high school, she had to miss them. While her friends slid across the music room floor where I had spent so many martyred hours, Liz argued with Tommy over the rent for Ventnor Avenue. On Monday morning her friends talked about who had done what to whom at dances and beer busts, and Liz laughed at the stories and pretended she didn’t care. She missedVern, her eighthgrade flame, missed dancing slow dances with him in the dimness under balloons and crepe paper. But sinceVern didn’t have a car—or a license,for that matter—she saw him only at school,and knew he often fell under the spell of other girls and held hands with them in the dark depths of the Del Rio Theater. Ever practical, however, Liz looked for other options. To this day, when Liz walks into a room, males trip over themselves to reach her side.They did it when she was six, and thirty-six, and they will still be doing it when she’s eighty-six.Men want to wait on her—to take her coat, fetch her drinks, pull out her chair.Their faces light up with goofy and willing servitude,even as she fixes them with a superior stare that promises nothing. It isn’t just that she’s a slender blonde with wide and mischievous eyes, although that helps. Something else—sheer charm—brings the willing prey to her feet. One morning in October of that first year in Seiad, Mark sat down by Liz, opened his binder, and began to draw a motorcycle. Liz lit up and talked, rattling on “like a sewing machine,” as I wrote that night. Donna Robinson leaned...