MARIGOLD: I don’t know. A long time.

DAD: Why did you come home?

Pause.

Old Paco…He must’ve had a head like an anvil.

Pause.

When John was an infant…

Pause.

When your brother was an infant, I myself was no more than a terrified teenager. John, your oldest brother. My two friends would come over after work, and we’d sit around the place listening to rockabilly records and drinking beer and smoking reefer, baby-sitting little John. God knows what poor little John did—listened to records and drank beer and smoked pot, probly, just like we were doing. Then around ten at night your mom would come home from work, and we’d leave her with the baby and go down to this burger joint and take turns banging on the pinball machine…me and my friends. Ron Parker and Snooky Styles. The friends I knew when I was nineteen were the most important friends I ever had. Good Lord, that reefer. We got it from the Meskins. It was all over South Texas. You could buy it by the stick for ten cents a piece. After we all left Texas I’ve never smoked it since. But it must’ve got in my blood and into you all, because my children certainly came out into this world with an unmanageable taste for contraband. (Pause.) Ron and Snooky and yours truly…we wanted to be poets and writers and cool cats.

Pause.

MARIGOLD: Well, I guess I better—

DAD: Don’t leave me.

MARIGOLD: I won’t.

DAD: Stay.

MARIGOLD: I’ll stay.

DAD: Stay. Watch the TV with me.

MARIGOLD: Whatcha watchin’?

DAD: Who knows. Who can make sense of it these days…

He hits the mute.

TV: Huge establishing helicopter shot taking in several blocks of the South State Street area of Ukiah, California: three intersections, two shopping malls, the life of our moment…where a guy pushes a long train of shopping carts toward the Safeway and a team of tiny white-garbed Little Leaguers trails out of the Taco Bell while two trucks crash at a corner and the two men driving get out and start to quarrel, one throwing the other up against his hood, and three hawks glide down out of the yellow hills and a fifth grader sets a fire in a trash can behind the movies and his two laughing friends douse it with their giant Cokes and our strange, strange captain sails us deeper down toward the unfathomable springs of the sea. THE END.

DAD: No. It’s not the end…

Pause.

Lights dim as DAD cries out:

DAD: Sad! Beautiful! Beautiful! Sad!

BLACKOUT

Act II

SCENE 2

The downstairs as at the close of Act I. A couple of hours have passed.

A wedding.

PASTOR ROCK presides, bravely and tolerantly grinning whenever he gets the chance to. GIB and SUZANNE face him, standing hand in hand more or less in the kitchen.

GRANDMA stands by the counter and stares.

BRO, in the recliner, sits and smokes a Kool and stares. The Chihuahua dog looks on, too.