My father once told me on a camping trip: You don’t need the courts.
You need me, he said.
No moon, no stars up through the thin canopy, only what my father called The Literal Heavens Above as an opaque blanket tinged with a faint ghostly sheen.
You can’t see them, he said, but they’re watching us.
He’d driven me far from our small Oklahoma town. This was more than a decade before it was leveled by the quake. We were crouching by the quick campfire he’d created with lighter fluid on a paper grocery bag full of my mother’s old magazines, holding sweating hot dogs speared on hatchet-sharpened hackberry twigs. He’d been telling me how lucky we were to be enjoying such dry, stable weather, how on nights like these, when he was in the Air Force in Vietnam, he’d flown for Project Popeye, summoning intense monsoons where they weren’t supposed to happen. Manmade flash floods, he said, grinning. Wiped out villages.
It was almost summer. I had school the next day.
Who’s watching us? I said.
Spy satellites, he said, looking up.
This was twenty years ago. My birthday had been the day prior and I was no longer a tween. At breakfast, my mother gave him an ultimatum: Leave the house forever. She could care less who was on the deed. Walking home from school that day, everything was bright, the air uncomfortably warm. My mother wasn’t due home from the Historical Society office in the center of town for another few hours. My father’s tattletale-gray SUV was there in the driveway. He was in my bedroom, shoving my clothes into new suitcases. He said we were going camping. Somewhere different. We drove for hours until the day was gone, the perpetually empty two-lane highway stretching toward nothing, the terrain on both sides scraped roughly flat save for the distant shadows of blossoming smokestacks and boxy factory compounds speckled with compact arrangements of orange and white floodlights. We passed clusters of trees like spears jutting from acres of wasteland, rotting sheds, ruined silos. I opened my window and the hot rushing air tasted like smoldering compost and plastic. Don’t, he said, his face lit a sickly lime by the dash.