The Orange Line

I. RUBEN

The hills east of Bakersfield are the color of a sick dog. Blond grass gone to wire over red dirt, the kind of ground that cuts your boots and doesn’t care. October and no rain since April. The oaks stand like they’re thinking about dying but haven’t committed. Heat comes off the asphalt in sheets you can see, bending the air, turning the road into something liquid at the horizon. A red-tail rides a thermal over the ridge, tilting, adjusting, patient as geology. Below the ridge the San Joaquin Valley opens like a bowl that someone set down and forgot, flat and enormous and shimmering with the effort of producing things — almonds, pistachios, cotton, oil, grapes, beef, the whole extractive pantry of a state that has never met a resource it didn’t want to monetize.

Ruben Loya parks his truck at the gate of the old Kern County Fairgrounds, where the fence has gone to rust and the padlock is a suggestion. Beyond the gate the grandstand sits empty, bleachers warped by thirty summers of valley heat, the announcer’s booth dark as a socket where a tooth used to be. This is where they held the Indian rodeo until 1994. Ruben’s father rode bulls here. His father’s father ran the chute gate. Three generations of Loyas on this dirt, and the dirt has outlasted all of them, which is what dirt does. Ruben has never ridden anything more dangerous than I-5 at rush hour in a truck with bad brakes, but he can feel the ground under the arena the way you feel a bruise under clothing. Something happened here that the dirt is keeping.

He is Yokuts on his mother’s side, Mono on his father’s, though the BIA cards say Tule River and that’s what he writes on forms. He is thirty-seven. He works pipeline inspection for an oil company whose name is printed on his truck and on his hard hat and on his paychecks, which is to say the company owns his surfaces. Underneath he is something the company doesn’t have a form for. He tells people he’s checking a line. It’s true — there’s a gas line that runs under the fairgrounds, and it’s his job to walk the corridor with a methane detector, marking any readings above threshold. But the line he’s really checking is older than the pipe.

The wind comes off the Sierras carrying the smell of sage and hot stone. It hits the valley floor and flattens. Everything here flattens. The Yokuts word for the valley, the one his grandmother used, means something like “the place where the sky presses down,” though his grandmother also said that translation was wrong, that the word contained the sky’s weight and the people’s persistence under it simultaneously, and English couldn’t hold both. She said this in English, which was the only language she had left, which was the point.

He walks the corridor. The detector reads nothing. The ground reads everything.

What his father told him about rodeo: that the bull wants to kill you, and the crowd wants to see if it will, and the eight seconds between the chute and the dirt are the only seconds in your life when everyone is watching a Native man and hoping he stays upright. His father said this on the porch of the house on the rez, drinking Coors from a can he’d crushed and then tried to un-crush, the aluminum scarred with his thumbprints. 1986. Ruben was seven. His father’s knees were already gone — two surgeries, the cartilage stripped out like insulation from a wall — and he walked with the careful, wide-footed gait of a man crossing ice, though there is no ice in the San Joaquin Valley, not ever. His father weighed one-forty and had hands that could palm a basketball and a face that looked like it had been carved with a tool that wasn’t quite sharp enough. Handsome from a distance. Up close, damaged. Like the bleachers. Like the fairgrounds. Like the valley itself, which looks golden from the air and threadbare from the ground.

His father died in 2003 of liver failure that everyone called liver failure and nobody called alcoholism, because what would be the point. The death certificate listed the cause. It did not list the cause of the cause, which was a country, or the cause of that, which was an idea about a country, the one that needed the Yokuts gone so the valley could become the valley, which is to say: productive, which is to say: someone else’s.

Ruben walks the corridor. The detector beeps once, faintly — a pocket of methane seeping up through fractured shale, gas from formations laid down fifty million years before anyone stood on this ground. He marks the spot with orange spray paint. The orange is vivid against the blond grass, an interruption, a wound in the landscape’s determined monotone. He will file the report. Someone will come dig. Under the dirt they will find pipe, and under the pipe they will find more dirt, and under that dirt, if they kept going, they would find the bones of the people who named this place before it had an English name, but nobody keeps going. Nobody is paid to keep going.

II. JOLENE

Jolene Bitsilly drives a 2011 Nissan Sentra with 212,000 miles and a dashboard crack that runs from the defroster to the glove box like a dry riverbed, the kind you see crossing Highway 65 south of Porterville — not a real river anymore but the memory of one, the scar a river leaves when the water has been taken somewhere else. She is Diné, born in Flagstaff, raised in Fresno, educated at Fresno State where she studied communications, which means she learned to talk about things without saying what she meant, which is a skill her grandmother already had, though her grandmother called it “being polite to white people” and the university called it “strategic messaging.”

She is twenty-nine. She runs the social media accounts for the California Indian Heritage Center, which does not yet exist as a building but does exist as a concept, a set of architectural drawings, a fundraising campaign, and a website she maintains from her apartment in Visalia, where the rent is possible and the commute to anywhere useful is not. The Center will be built — she has been told this with confidence by people in offices whose walls are hung with art made by people who will never sit behind those desks — on a parcel of land adjacent to the old Kern County Fairgrounds in Bakersfield. There will be a groundbreaking ceremony. She is driving to the site to take photographs for the website, and to see the ground before they break it, because she has learned that grounds, once broken, tend to become something other than what was promised.

The highway south from Visalia runs through orchards — almonds, pistachios, the irrigated grid of a valley that was once a lake, then a marsh, then a grassland, then a desert, and is now whatever four billion dollars of water infrastructure says it is. The trees stand in rows so straight they look mechanical, and between them the drip lines run like dark veins on the pale dirt. Jolene thinks about water the way her grandmother thought about rain: as a promise that has been broken so many times it’s become the breaking. The California Aqueduct runs parallel to the highway, a concrete trough carrying northern water south, and it occurs to her, not for the first time, that the water is doing what her family did — moving because someone decided it should be somewhere else.

Her grandmother, Hosteen Bitsilly, walked from Hwéeldi back to Dinétah in 1868. Not her grandmother. Her grandmother’s grandmother’s grandmother. But Jolene says “my grandmother” because that’s how the story was given to her — not as history, which implies distance, but as family, which does not. The walk was three hundred miles. The women carried children on their backs. The U.S. Army, which had starved them at Bosque Redondo for four years, let them go not out of mercy but out of accounting: the cost of feeding prisoners had exceeded the value of the land they’d been removed from. This is what Jolene knows about America — it is a spreadsheet with a flag on top.

She pulls off the highway at the Bakersfield exit. The fairgrounds gate is open. There is a truck already parked there, white with an oil company logo, the chrome catching sun. A man in a hard hat is walking the perimeter with some kind of device, moving slowly, head down, like a man praying or looking for something he dropped.

III. CALVIN

Calvin James hears about the gathering from his cousin Darrel, who heard about it from a woman at the Indian Health Clinic in Porterville, who heard about it from a flyer stapled to the bulletin board at the Tule River tribal office. The flyer says: COMMUNITY GATHERING AND CULTURAL SHARING, KERN COUNTY FAIRGROUNDS, OCTOBER 18TH. Potluck. Drums welcome. All relatives. The flyer is printed on yellow paper and the ink is faded, which means it’s been up for weeks, which means other people have read it and decided not to come, which means the gathering will be small, which means Calvin will be visible, which is the thing he’s afraid of.

Calvin doesn’t know what he is relative to. He is twenty-two and Wukchumni on paper, though the paper is an enrollment card he got when he was four and hasn’t looked at since. He grew up in Bakersfield, in the houses off Chester Avenue where the lawns are gravel and the fences are chain-link and the language everyone speaks is the language of getting by, which is not Wukchumni. His mother spoke some words — greetings, the names of animals, a prayer she said before meals that she translated for him once and then never again, as though the translation had cost her something she couldn’t afford to spend twice. His mother’s mother spoke more. Calvin speaks English and enough Spanish to order food and enough silence to fill the spaces where a language used to be.

He works at the Amazon warehouse on Lerdo Highway, pulling product from shelves for ten hours, four days a week, his body a logistics problem the algorithm has solved. The warehouse is the size of seventeen football fields. He knows this because it says so on the poster in the break room, as though bigness were a virtue rather than just a fact about a building full of things people don’t need being moved by people who do. He moves through the aisles with a handheld scanner that tells him what to pick and where to go and how long he has to get there, and the scanner is, he thinks, not so different from what the old agents at the boarding schools used — a device for directing a body through a space someone else designed, making the body efficient, making it useful, making it forget that it knows how to move on its own.

What Calvin wants is simple and impossible: he wants to feel something when he stands on this ground. He has been to powwows in Fresno and Sacramento and once in Albuquerque, and at each one he watched the dancers and the drums and felt the thing he always feels, which is the outside of a feeling. The edge of it. Like standing at the window of a house where people are eating and you can see the food and hear the voices but the glass is between you and the warmth. He blames no one for this. The glass was installed generations ago, by people with policies and budgets and the best intentions, which are the most efficient tools of destruction ever devised.

He drives to the fairgrounds in his mother’s car, a Camry with a tape deck and no tapes. The road crosses the Kern River, which is not a river in October but a wide bed of white stones with a trickle of water threading through them like thread through a loom that’s missing most of its frame. Calvin thinks that the river is doing what he does: performing the shape of what it used to be with insufficient material.

At the fairgrounds the gate is open. A white truck is parked to one side. A silver Nissan is parked near the grandstand. A woman is taking photographs of the bleachers with her phone, holding it in both hands, framing each shot carefully, the way his mother frames the family photos on the shelf above the TV — deliberately, as though the frame itself could keep the contents from disappearing. A man in a hard hat is standing in the middle of the old arena, looking at something on the ground — a spot of orange paint on the dirt.

Calvin parks. He gets out. The wind hits him and he understands, physically, in his chest, what his mother meant when she said the valley holds you down. It does. The sky is enormous here, and the flatness of the land means there is nothing between you and the horizon in any direction, which should feel like freedom but feels like exposure. Like being on a stage with no wings to exit into. The grandstand stares at him with its empty rows, the bleachers ascending in tiers of peeling paint and warped aluminum, and he has the feeling — absurd, persistent — that the grandstand is waiting for something, has been waiting for years, the way the arena waits for the bull, the way the chute waits for the gate to open.

He walks toward the arena. The woman with the camera lowers it and watches him approach. The man in the hard hat turns. For a moment the three of them stand at the vertices of a triangle on the dirt of the old rodeo ground, and the wind moves between them carrying sage and dust and the faint chemical sweetness of methane, and nobody speaks, because what would they say, and to whom, and in what language, and with what authority. The silence is not awkward. It is the silence of people who have come to the same place for reasons they cannot yet explain, and that is a kind of kinship, even if none of them would call it that.

IV. CONVERGENCE

Jolene speaks first because that is what she does — manages the silence before it becomes structural, translates the gap into language, which is her job and her inheritance and her exhaustion.

“You here for the gathering?” she asks Calvin.

“I think so,” he says, which is the most honest thing he’s said in months.

Ruben watches them from ten yards away. He’s taken his hard hat off, and without it he looks younger, or maybe just less employed. The methane detector hangs at his side like a pistol in a holster, though it detects rather than destroys, which may be the most useful distinction a person can make about tools.

“There’s supposed to be a potluck,” Calvin says.

“You bring anything?” Jolene asks.

“No.”

“Me either.”

They laugh, and the laugh crosses the dirt to where Ruben is standing, and he walks toward it, because laughter on this ground is rare enough to investigate.

“I work out here,” Ruben says, by way of explanation, lifting the detector. “Gas line runs under the arena.”

“There’s going to be a heritage center,” Jolene says, pointing at the parcel beyond the grandstand. “Right there. They broke ground in concept. Not in dirt.”

“They’re good at that,” Ruben says, and Jolene nods, because she knows what he means — the difference between the announcement and the shovel, between the rendering and the building, between the promise and the land. Indian country runs on that gap. The gap is so old it has its own weather.

An hour later six more people have arrived. Darrel, Calvin’s cousin, with a cooler of Cokes and a bag of chips and a grin that makes him look twelve though he is twenty-six and has two kids and a welding job that is killing his back. A woman named Vivian who is Chumash and drove up from Santa Barbara with her daughter, who is eleven and bored and sitting on the bleachers drawing horses on her phone screen with her finger. Two men from the Tule River rez, older, one carrying a hand drum wrapped in a flour-sack towel, the other carrying a folding chair, which he sets up in the shade of the announcer’s booth with the practiced ease of a man who has spent decades finding shade in a valley that offers almost none. A woman named Donna, Yokuts, Ruben’s mother’s age, who brought fry bread wrapped in foil and who greets Ruben by putting her hand on his face and saying his father’s name. Just the name. It hangs in the air between them like smoke from a fire that went out years ago but still smells like burning.

The gathering is not large. It is not the powwow that used to fill these bleachers, the one in the photographs at the tribal office where the arena is packed and the dust rises in clouds behind the horses and the announcer’s voice crackles over speakers bolted to the light poles. It is a small circle of people on a Saturday in October, eating chips and fry bread on the dirt of a place that used to be theirs, that still is theirs, that is also a fairground and a gas line corridor and a future heritage center and a parking lot and all the other things that have been laid on top of what it was without ever fully covering it. The dirt remembers. Ruben knows this because the detector told him — methane rises from deep formations through fractures in the rock, following paths that were established millions of years before anyone built anything on the surface. What’s underneath comes up. It always comes up.

The man with the hand drum — his name is Elwood, and he is Calvin’s mother’s uncle, though Calvin doesn’t know this yet and won’t learn it today but will learn it in three weeks when his mother, hearing about the gathering, will say “Elwood was there?” and her voice will crack on the name like a foot through thin ice — begins to play. The sound is not loud. It doesn’t need to be. It crosses the flat ground the way the wind does, unobstructed, meeting nothing that would stop it. The drum is elk hide stretched over a cottonwood frame, and the stick is wrapped in deerskin, and the sound it makes is lower than you expect, a pulse more than a beat, something you feel in the bones of your feet before you hear it in your ears.

Calvin stands at the edge of the circle and listens and feels the thing he always feels, the outside of the feeling, the glass between himself and the warmth. But today the glass is thinner. Or he is closer. Or the drum is doing something to the distance between himself and the thing he cannot reach, narrowing it by fractions that are too small to measure but large enough to notice. He does not dance. He does not sing. He stands on the dirt of the old arena with his hands in his pockets and his boots on the ground his great-grandfather ran chutes on, and the drum moves through him the way the methane moves through the shale — finding fractures, following paths that were always there, rising.

Jolene photographs the gathering. She frames a shot of the fry bread on the foil, the bleachers behind it warped and peeling, the valley light turning everything the color of a memory you’re not sure is yours. She frames a shot of the hand drum, Elwood’s knuckles against the hide, the stick blurred mid-strike. She frames a shot of the view east toward the Sierras, the mountains still holding snow in their upper creases though the valley is hot and dry and pressing down. These are the photographs for the website. But she also takes one that is not for the website: Calvin standing at the edge of the circle, his face turned toward the drum, and on his face an expression she recognizes because she has worn it herself — the look of a person trying to hear something that is almost, almost audible. The look of a person standing in the riverbed when the trickle starts, not a flood, nothing dramatic, just the first suggestion that the water might come back.

She will not post this photograph. Some things are not content.

V. THE LINE

At five o’clock the light changes. The valley light always changes at five — the sun drops behind the coast ranges to the west and the sky goes from white to gold to the color of a bruise, purple and yellow layered in bands that look painted but are not, that are just the atmosphere doing what it does when the angle is right and the dust is up and the valley holds the light the way a bowl holds water, cupping it, letting it pool. This is the light that the painters came for, the ones who made California into a picture before it was a place. They got the colors right. They left out the people.

Vivian loads her daughter into the car. Darrel crushes the Coke cans and throws them into the truck bed with the ease of a man who has been throwing things into truck beds his whole life. The older men fold the chair and wrap the drum in its towel and drive away in a truck that is older than Calvin and sounds it. Donna touches Ruben’s face again, says his father’s name again, and leaves. The dust her tires raise hangs in the changed light, amber, suspended, not settling.

Ruben is the last to leave. He walks back to the orange mark on the dirt — the methane reading, the spot where what’s underground is leaking through. He stands on it. He puts both boots on the orange circle and looks at the ground and thinks about what a line is. A gas line. A bloodline. A line on a map drawn by a government that needed the land more than it needed the people on it. A line of dancers at a powwow, moving in a circle, which is a line that refuses to go straight, that insists on return. The orange paint under his boots is already dusting over, the wind working at it, the dirt reclaiming the mark the way dirt reclaims everything — slowly, without effort, because dirt has more time than paint.

He gets in his truck. He files the report on his phone — methane reading at coordinates such-and-such, level: low, action required: monitoring. He does not file a report on the other thing, the thing that happened when the drum played and the fry bread was shared and three strangers stood on the dirt of a rodeo ground where their fathers and their fathers’ fathers had stood, and the ground held them the way ground holds anything — without opinion, without mercy, without forgetting. There is no form for that. There is no line item for the moment when a twenty-two-year-old man stands on his great-grandfather’s ground and feels, for the first time, not the outside of a feeling but the feeling itself — faint, partial, riddled with fractures, but rising. You can’t file that. You can only stand on the ground where it happened and know that it happened, and drive home, and come back.

The orange mark on the dirt will fade. The sun and the wind will take it. Underneath, the methane will keep rising through the fractures, following the paths the earth made long before anyone drew a line on it. This is the thing about lines: they are human inventions, and the earth does not respect them. The earth has its own lines — fault lines, the lines of aquifer and bedrock, the lines of migration that animals and water and people followed for ten thousand years before the first fence went up. Those lines are still there, under the pavement, under the pipe, under the dirt of the old arena where the bulls ran and the riders held on and the crowd watched and the dust rose into air that was already ancient.

Ruben drives north. Jolene drives north. Calvin drives to his mother’s house and sits in the driveway with the engine off and the window down, listening to the valley, which is not silent, which is never silent, which is full of the sound of wind and highway and irrigation pumps and the distant industrial hum of a country that was built on the ground where he is sitting. And under all of it, if you are quiet enough, if you have been quiet your whole life in the way that dispossession teaches you to be quiet — not by choice but by subtraction, one word at a time, one name at a time, one dance at a time until the quiet is what you are — under all of it, the sound of something rising through the fractures. Faint. Persistent. The underground finding its way up. The line holding.