Out in the craters, far from the men at the canteen truck, some children are playing. Young boys, using the craters as foxholes to play some simple war game. The craters are new, they’re exciting, they show what orange roots look like, something the boys have always been curious about. Cars pass by. The shadows lengthen. One of the boys wanders off alone. Tire tracks in the torn dirt lead his gaze to one of the cement mixers, still emitting its slushy grumble. He sits down to look at it, openmouthed. Cars pass by. The other boys tire of their game and go home to dinner, each to his own house. The men around the trucks finish their beers and their stories, and they get into their pickup trucks—thunk! thunk!—and drive off. A couple of supervisors walk around the dirt lot, planning the next day’s work. They stop by a stack of wood next to the shredder. It’s quiet, you can hear the freeway in the distance. A single boy sits on a crater’s edge, staring off at the distance. Cars pass by. Eucalyptus leaves spinnerdrift to the ground. The sun disappears. The day is done, and shadows are falling

across our empty field.

Chapter 83

83

When Jim is done, he types a fair copy into the computer. Prints it up. He sticks it in with the taped-up pages. No, those poor tape-up jobs won’t do. He types them all into the computer again, filling them out, revising them. Then he prints up new copies of each. There we go. Orange County. He never was much of a one for titles. Call it Torn Maps, why not.

Much of the night has passed. Jim gets up stiffly, hobbles out to look around. Four A.M.; the freeways at its quietest. After a bit he goes back inside, and holds the newly printed pages in his hands. It’s not a big book, nor a great one; but it’s his. His, and the land’s. And the people who lived here through all the years; it’s theirs too, in a way. They all did their best to make a home of the place—those of them who weren’t actively doing their best to parcel and sell it off, anyway. And even them … Jim laughs. Clearly he’ll never be able to resolve his ambivalence regarding his hometown, and the generations who made it. Impossible to separate out the good from the bad, the heroic from the tawdry.

Okay, what next? Light-headed, Jim wanders his home again, the pages clutched in his hand. What should he do? He isn’t sure. It’s awful, having one’s habits shattered, having to make one’s life up from scratch; you have to invent it all moment to moment, and it’s hard!