Hook Man Speaks
by Matt Clark
a.b.e-book v3.0 / Notes at EOF
Back Cover:
It's been a
while since my last activity. I've almost entirely lost the urge.
I shut my eyes and try to awaken the memory inside me. The
darkness. The moonlit bumpers. Interiors lit by radio dials.
Crickets. Branches breaking under my creeping step. Sepulchral
organ chords that only I can hear. . .
Is anybody
out there?
The Hook Man is.
He is born from nightmares and wild imagination, from the dark,
from the guilt of teenage lovers, from panic. His name is Leonard
Gage, and this is his story.
Exceptionally
unusual, corrosively funny and touching, and completely
unpredictable, Hook Man Speaks is both a self-dissection
of one man's demons, and the demons of the world that created
him. In exposing our fears of being outcasts, of being forgotten,
of being ignored by those we love, Matt Clark has let us in on a
dark secret in American pop culture, turned it inside out, and
given it a heart -- and a voice like no other you've ever
heard.
"Clark's language may be playful and inventive, his premise
unabashedly absurd, but the moral intent and gracious humanity of
his Hook Man will earn him a spot among the most beguiling
characters in fiction." -- Elizabeth Gilbert, author of
Pilgrims and Stern Men
"Deftly written, funny, at times heartbreaking, Hook Man
Speaks is a brilliant novel." -- Josh Russell, author of
Yellow Jack
"Matt Clark's writing is illuminated by a child's sadness and by
a young man's sensual hunger. . . a terrific book." -- Andrei
Codrescu, author of The Blood Countess
Praise for Hook Man Speaks
"Knowing that this wonderful and affecting book is the only novel
we shall ever have from Matt Clark is heartbreaking, but it's the
kind of heartbreak we're grateful for." -- Elizabeth
Gilbert
"Matt Clark has concocted a story that's part picaresque, part
urban folklore, part bildungsroman, and like no other novel I've
ever read. The confidences of the specter who haunts lovers'
lanes offer amazing surprises -- a love affair with the Kentucky
Fried lady, an employee discount at a funeral home, a Rosetta
log. Just as surprising is the emotional and intellectual depth
Clark gives to his characters and their bizarre situations." --
Josh Russell
"Matt Clark attempted to hold on to the uncontainable world by
memorizing it, listing it, surveying it, savoring it, while
satirizing and loving it. . . It's hard not to see in the embrace
and naming of so much of the anonymous but real world, an attempt
to hold on to it and a premonition, perhaps, that it was not
possible." -- Andrei Codrescu
A Berkley Book
Published by The Berkley Publishing Group
A division of Penguin Putnam Inc.
375 Hudson Street
New York, New York 10014
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and
incidents either are
the product of the author's imagination or are used
fictitiously, and
any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,
business
establishments, events, or locales is entirely
coincidental.
Copyright © 2001 by The Estate of Matthew Clark
Book design by Tiffany Kukec
Cover design by Erika Fusari
Cover illustration by Tsukushi
All rights reserved.
This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any
form
without permission. BERKLEY and the "B" design are
trademarks
belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.
PRINTING HISTORY
Berkley trade paperback edition / October 2001
Visit our website at www.penguinputnam.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Clark, Matt, 1966-1998.
Hook Man speaks / Matt Clark. -- Berkley trade pbk. ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-425-18162-6
I. Title.
PS3553.L28734 H66 2001
813'.54 -- dc21 2001025810
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love
her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
-- PABLO
NERUDA
I think I ought to inform the reader
that there has just been a long interval.
-- VLADIMIR
NABOKOV
Part One
Most dreaded
nightmare. Specter haunting campfires, slumber parties, freshman
floors, treehouses. Supreme boogeyman. Me. The Hook.
Alive. Semi-whole. Contemplating my place in culture and
history.
Boo.
"Do you ever
recall being on Old County Line Road not far outside of Decatur,
Georgia?" Dr. Brautigan says, Mont Blanc twitching above his
yellow legal pad.
"Was it raining?
Lots of lightning? Scary shadows?"
The good doctor
consults his notes. "Um. Yes."
I weigh the
facts. "I'm not positive," I say, "but I think so."
He lowers his
pen, scratches the paper with it. "How about the River Road,
south of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1972?"
"Hurricane
weather? Smell of roadkill? Levee to the left of me, moo-cows to
the right?"
Note checking.
"I'm not sure," Dr. Brautigan says.
"Me,
either."
"Think,"
Brautigan urges. "Think hard."
And I try. I
really do. But all I can find in my mind is the inside of my
mailbox. All is blackness. I can't see, can't tell if there's
anything there waiting for me to come home and drag it out into
the sunlight. I smell and smell, hoping for a trace of Rosemary's
perfume. Is that it? Hovering over the doom-sweetened scent of
just-mowed grass? I can't tell.
"I can't," I say
out loud. I get up and leave the room without a good-bye, sprint
from the building, don't stop until I'm at my front door, at my
mailbox, heart pounding, hopeful, flinging open the tiny tin
door, pawing inside, dragging out a Piggly Wiggly flyer (Whole
Fryers 98 Cents!), VISA application, carpet-cleaning ad. That's
it.
My spirits crash
around my chigger-bit ankles.
It is forever
until the mail carrier's next approach.
At our next
session Dr. Brautigan says, "The Dan Dee Cabins, Ruidoso, New
Mexico. Fall of 1969?"
I don't recall
ever having been in New Mexico, but I almost say yes. I want
badly to help Dr. Brautigan; he's been so terribly nice. "The
very air smelled of thunder and tequila?" I venture.
"It did?" Dr.
Brautigan says, jotting, nodding, smiling.
Dr. Brautigan is
a folklorist at the University, engaged in an intensive study of
me. For the last twenty-five years he's collected Hook Man
stories from all over North America. Several months ago an
article in Harper's prompted me to contact him. "I
remember the sound of coyotes, possibly wild dogs," I tell him.
"A gila monster had just bitten me on the toe, so I was really
quite insane."
In addition to
myriad psychological profiles, Dr. Brautigan is trying to
ascertain how many times I actually struck, in light of how many
unjustified reports exist about my exploits. "Now," Dr. Brautigan
says, "the young woman -- a Miss Lorena Hidalgo -- says she saw
you in the rearview mirror over her boyfriend's shoulder."
"Ah, yes," I
say, and I actually feel for a moment that I truly might be
recalling this, "I never got close to the car. The young woman
squealed, and they drove off in their -- was it a Camaro?"
"Mustang," Dr.
Brautigan corrects.
"Red," I
pronounce.
Brautigan checks
his notes. "It doesn't say."
"The color of
poppies," I continue.
"Like in The
Wizard of Oz," Dr. Brautigan says.
"Devastatingly
red," I say, even though I remember the poppies in Oz being
orange. Orange poppies, blue gingham dress, white snow. In the
distance, emerald towers. Overhead, broom-spun terror.
"So this is
not a case in which you lost your hook in the door
handle?"
"No. The hook
was only detached forcibly once. And that was at a root-beer
stand, actually."
"Fascinating,"
Brautigan says. "Tell me all about it."
I subscribe to
these magazines: Newsweek. GQ. Harper's, as I have already
pointed out. Southern Living, for the recipes. The New
Yorker. Mad. Men's Fitness. Southwest Review. Architectural
Digest. Premiere. The Southern Review. The Atlantic Monthly.
Esquire. Spy. The Nose. Rolling Stone. Vanity Fair. I was a
Time subscriber until their last format change. (You will
notice: No People. No Us. No Reader's Digest
.)
When Dr.
Brautigan moved me to the University from Tallahassee, I called
all the subscription departments to make them aware of my new
address. Although each said it would not be a problem, the March
issues of Esquire and Southern Living have never
found their way to me. I am currently composing stinging letters
of complaint.
When I first met
Rosemary she impressed me by immediately asking what had become
of my hand. We were sitting on neighboring stools at a cafe in
Wichita Falls, Texas. "What happened?" she said.
"To me?" I was
unused to such honest curiosity. In general, people ignore my
hook completely. In general, people -- excepting certain children
and, of course, my "victims" -- ignore ME completely.
"To your hand."
She reached out and touched my hook. It was not, by most
standards, a special touch. It was not slow and charged with
erotic intention, nor tentative, like that of a frightened
schoolgirl dared to touch a newly captured garden snake.
Rosemary's touch was remarkable only in its normalcy, being no
more aggressive than that of a grandmother reaching out to test
the ripeness of a grocery store tomato.
It shocked
me.
"I lost it," I
told her, blushing.
She stared at
me, waiting for an explanation.
"It was an
accident."
"I should hope
so," Rosemary said, turning back to her scrambled eggs.
"And you are how
old?" Dr. Brautigan asked during our first session.
"I'm not sure,"
I said, smirking.
Brautigan didn't
write anything down. He sat, staring at me, pen held cigarlike
between his lips.
I gave him the
Miracle on 34th Street answer: "As old as my tongue and a
little older than my teeth." I smiled -- showed him my perfect
set of teeth -- but Brautigan continued to just sit. People do
this with me quite a bit. They assume I am leaving things out,
that my incompleteness isn't just physical but verbal, possibly
even mental.
Brautigan came
at me from another direction. "What," he asked, "do you remember
most vividly from your childhood?"
I remember
saying, "I remember. . ."
When I was in
fourth grade, my family moved to a farm near Alvarado, Texas.
That was the year we studied dinosaurs, and were urged to search
out fossils in our afternoon wanderings, ordered to present our
finds to the class for examination and identification.
One day,
rambling through a rocky cow pasture, I came upon a number of
heart-shaped rocks, each stamped with an elaborate and beautiful
design. The best ones I gathered carefully, cautious of the
melon-yellow scorpions that were so plentiful -- sometimes even
in our bathtub -- in the early fall. Selecting the three most
perfect specimens, each a chalky-gray, fist-sized miracle, I
carried them home to delicately bathe and dry them, wrapped each
in a bed of toilet paper and set them next to my completed
homework.
At school I
presented the fossils with pride, announcing that I had found a
veritable elephants' graveyard of hearts. A valentine quarry. But
my discovery was not nearly so romantic or awesome as I had hoped
it might be. The foundations of science did not
quake.
"They're sea
urchins," Mrs. Custer told me and the rest of the class. "From
when this whole area was covered by an ocean millions of years
ago. Not hearts. Just sea urchins. Common in virtually every area
of North America," she concluded.
At that point in
time, I was still whole. I ate my meals with two hands. Rode a
bike like a normal boy. Played outfield, dreading the approach of
any fly ball that might take me away from my contemplation of the
turf and rocks and sprouting bluebonnets. When Mrs. Custer came
to stand in front of me, I blushed and held both hands out,
cupped to receive not a communion wafer but the shower of
petrified sea urchins that tumbled from my teacher's upended
palms.
Brautigan passes
out questionnaires in his freshman survey class. From these, he
determines the local spots most likely to harbor high school
students' most ardent bursts of backseat passion. Of the
forty-two students who complete the form, thirty-six are from
Alpine or the surrounding area. Of those thirty-six, twenty-nine
agree Indian Lodge State Park is a hotbed of hormonal tension and
release. Twenty of those twenty-nine admit to losing their
virginity there. Sixteen of those twenty are male. Seven of those
sixteen are named Mike.
"Have you ever
been?"
I have not, and
I tell the doctor this.
"Would you like
to go? That is, do you feel the desire to visit the area for your
usual purpose?"
It's been a
while since my last activity. I've almost entirely lost the urge.
I shut my eyes and try to awaken the memory inside me. The
darkness. The moonlit bumpers. Interiors lit by radio dials.
Crickets. Branches breaking under my creeping step. Sepulchral
organ chords that only I can hear.
"Well," I say,
"I don't. . ."
But then I get
an idea.
This is the
first time I've seen Dr. Brautigan not wearing chinos, a denim
shirt, beautiful silk tie. Instead, he sports jeans, my favorite
flannel shirt (dollar-bill green and black with a few threads of
red mixed in). He crouches in the bushes next to me. We've been
here since dusk, sitting on our haunches, watching the skies
darken, the ocotillo turn into hydras, the saguaro into Martians.
I am just about to ask Dr. B. what he thinks about The New
Yorker' s new image -- its new smell -- when I hear the
murmur of an approaching vehicle. The murmur turns into a growl.
Headlights sweeping past us like dragon eyes, a pickup truck
rolls to a stop under a live oak twenty yards away.
"What if it's a
drug drop-off?" Dr. Brautigan says.
"Shhh." The
pickup's windows are down. An Eagles song wafts out to us. I give
Brautigan the thumbs-up.
We wait.
"Don't watch," I
whisper to Dr. Brautigan when I notice he is straining to see
inside the truck. "That's not the point."
He nods.
Take It
Easy.
Witchy
Woman.
Lyin'
Eyes.
Already
Gone.
Desperado. I
nudge Brautigan. "OK. Do it." Before he creeps out of the brush,
I take off my hook and hand it to him. "You'll need this," I
say.
As if he were in
a cartoon, he gulps audibly. Takes the hook, grips it in his
right hand, pulls the cuff of his sleeve down around it. "Good
man," I hiss.
Hunkered close
to the ground, lurching like an ape, he moves toward the pickup.
I try to send a psychic command to him. "Limp!" I think.
He either gets the message or remembers how we rehearsed this,
because he pauses for a moment, shakes his head, then proceeds,
dragging one leg like dead weight. I get a shiver watching
Brautigan do this. It's like watching myself. A memory. But in
3-D. Tangible.
He's close to
the pickup, only a few feet behind the tailgate. My heart races,
claws its way up my rib cage into my esophagus, where it cowers
behind my uvula, watching, waiting for the inevitable
scream.
Brautigan inches
to the target, carefully reaches out toward the door handle and.
. .
. . . drops the
hook. It hits the ground with a dull clang.
Brautigan
stiffens. Waits to be caught. But nothing happens. Turning to
look at me, he shrugs, holds his palms out like, "Now what?" I
return the gesture. He reaches down slowly and gets the hook,
then scurries back to where I'm crouching, my mouth agape.
"I can't do it,"
he says in a normal voice.
I clamp my hand
-- my good hand -- over his mouth.
"What was that?"
the girl in the pickup gasps, coming up for air.
"What?"
"I thought I
heard something. Somebody talking."
"Nah," her date
brays.
"Yes. I'm
sure."
They argue for a
few moments. Then he starts the pickup -- you can hear his
frustration in the growl and roar of the engine -- and they speed
away.
Brautigan
relaxes. Sits back in the leaves. "Wow," he says. "So that's what
it's like."
"No," I contend.
"That's what it's sort of like. If they tell their
friends what happened, the mysterious sound will be attributed to
a mountain lion. A lost Pomeranian, maybe."
"A Pomeranian?"
Brautigan says, disappointed.
"Possibly
rabbits."
"Rabbits?"
"Bunnies," I
elucidate.
"How
embarrassing," Brautigan murmurs.
"Hey," I say.
"It's my reputation at stake."
I arrived in
Alpine by train. Dr. Brautigan sent me enough money to travel by
air, but I chose to ride the rails, to see the land, all the
crossings with their flashing lights and zebra-striped arms. I
sold all my possessions in a garage sale that -- even though it
wasn't much -- seemed to thrill the college students and old
ladies who milled around my cast-off clothes and books and
mementos. I suspect they were excited mainly because everything I
owned had originally been bought from garage sales. I occupied a
home composed entirely of refuse from Tallahassee's spring
cleanings. My yard became a clearinghouse of thrift and kitsch
for the most discriminating.
My bamboo couch
and end table and bowling trophies (not really mine) and Fiesta
ware and all of it -- all of it -- went and went fast. I
had lettered my signs FRIDAY SATURDAY AND SUNDAY ONLY, but on
Saturday morning there was so little left that I decided it
wasn't worth setting up the tables to display the measly
leftovers. Nevertheless, by 9:30 A.M. a horde of eager shoppers
clamored at my doorstep.
"Open up," they
demanded.
"It's all gone,"
I said through the screen door.
"Impossible,"
one man said.
A woman who was
probably his wife honked, "What're you, holding something
back?"
"I'm looking for
salt and pepper shakers," an old woman at the rear of the crowd
crooned. "In funny shapes. Do you have any of those?"
"It's all gone,"
I repeated. "Yesterday was a sellout."
The crowd
quieted, but began to edge closer to the porch. I grabbed a box
half full of forks missing tines and matchless socks and set it
outside the door. "There," I said. "You can have it."
A representative
of the group advanced and dug through the box. "Trash," he said
to the people behind him. He looked up at me and, shaking his
head, hissed, "Trash."
Once again the
mass of people began to crowd the porch. "You give us trash?" the
salt-shaker lady squeaked.
"Stop!" I
commanded. "Stop right there." They did. "That's it. That's
everything I have. Now go away." I raised my hook next to my
face. "Before something bad happens." I drove my hook through the
flimsy screen and ripped it from top to bottom.
Screaming, the
shoppers fled, leaving me to finish packing, positive my security
deposit was now forever lost. But happy to be rid of my earthly
possessions. And with a pocket full of cold, hard cash earmarked
for the train-station newsstand, a tabloid utopia.
A train affords
so much to its passengers, so much more than airplanes do. The
comfort is superior: Legroom. Food. The absence of sickening
turbulence. No attendants who hate you but are unable to speak
their minds. No fluctuating air pressure, ear popping, head
aching. Trains allow one to revel in the passage of time and
trees and cities and magazines. On a train, I can wallow in
magazines, piglike, rooting out truffles of well-researched
health articles, stylish photo essays, revealing profiles and
delicious short stories. There are treasures to be found in
periodicals, but one must search carefully, without haste. On a
train, I can hunt lazily and savor my finds languorously.
"What a mess of
magazines," the woman sitting to my right said in the middle of a
bridge. "What are you? Rich?"
"No," I
explained. "I had a garage sale."
"A garage sale?
Oh, I love garage sales."
"Me, too,"
interjected the woman on the other side of her.
"You can find
the most incredible bargains. On priceless items
sometimes."
"How was your
garage sale?" the first woman asked.
"A
sellout."
"Yes," she said.
"But how was it? Did you put your wares on the front porch, back
porch, sidewalk, driveway?"
"Or did you
actually have it in your garage? Maybe your carport?"
"Carport garage
sales are nice."
"A little
shade."
"In case of
rain."
"Or a day too
bright to see through."
I broke in. "It
was just in my front yard."
"Oh, a yard
sale. Well, that's really quite different. In subtle ways."
"You
advertised?" the first woman asked.
"Of course he
did!"
"But how,
exactly?"
"In the
paper?"
"More likely
just signs around the neighborhood. Hand-lettered, or printed by
one of those Quick-Sign places?"
"You can get
them at hardware stores, too. Signs. About garage sales and
vicious dogs and solicitors."
"Too bland,
though, those. Too generic."
"But
recognizable. Easily spotted on telephone poles. Pros know the
signs."
"Word of mouth.
That's a fine way to promote yourself, don't forget."
"I," I said,
"made signs and put them up around the neighborhood."
"But no
newspaper advertisements? Quite a risk you took, Mister. The
media is a powerful tool. You ought to know that."
"My niece's
boyfriend once bought a Porsche through the paper."
"You can find it
all in the paper."
"He paid bottom
dollar for it."
"People
advertise to sell. That's the point."
"Car was worth
fifty thousand. He got it for five hundred."
"He did
not."
"Did. Answered
an ad. Went to the address. Woman sold him the car for five
hundred. Perfect condition. Low mileage. Practically new."
"What
luck."
"Woman told him
her husband had run off to Mexico with his secretary. Phoned from
Acapulco and told her to sell the car and send him the cash.
Everything else was hers."
"The cad!"
"So she sold the
car. For five hundred dollars."
"Serves him
right."
"Wonderful car.
Drives like a dream, my niece says. Like a dream."
"My dentist
bought a Ferrari once. Cheap. Got it from a used-car
dealer."
"My
brother-in-law sells cars. New. Not used."
"Just as much
money in used."
"No
doubt."
"Can't live
without a car these days. And if you're a dentist, you can afford
a nice car. But my dentist got this Ferrari cheap."
"Saved a bundle,
did he?"
"Thought he did.
But the truth of the matter is, he sold the car right back to the
used-car lot."
"Didn't like the
car?"
"Loved
the car. From a distance. Inside it smelled like rotten
meat."
"You don't
say."
"Tragic. He took
the car back, and the salesman told him the car just wouldn't
stay sold. He kept lowering the price, and people kept buying the
car and bringing it back. Man died in it."
"My word."
"Wasn't found
for days." She paused, lowered her voice. "Summertime. "
"My word!"
"Late
July."
"Horrible."
"Too terrible
for words."
"I hate to think
of it."
"Car's still
there," the woman said to me. "Man with a wad of cash and a
strong stomach might could tame her. You ought to look into
it."
"I'm afraid my
sense of smell is very sensitive," I said.
The women both
noticed my hook. One looked away. "Only natural," the other one
said. "Mother Nature takes care of her children. The Good Lord
provides. Stevie Wonder can play the piano like an angel. Blind
as a bat and he plays like an angel."
"I'm not
especially musical," I offered.
"It's never too
late to learn," she said.
"A student told
me about this," Brautigan says.
We're driving
away from town, south, past the abandoned Rock Shop, past
creaking University Stadium. Alpine falls behind us like a toy on
a sandbox hill, Fisher-Price village, Lilliputian college-ville.
Midget post office, five-and-dime, movie theater, barbecue joint,
halls of learning, all of them shrinking behind me until they are
gone. (Or maybe I'm getting larger, like a fifties monster-movie
radiation victim grown to dwarf loved ones and enemies, finally
falling dead amongst a mob of olive-green tanks and
colossal-boot-flattened bazooka shooters.) The city evaporates.
Ahead of us, sunburnt mesas glow red in the waning daylight,
monsters bigger even than myself.
"How come you've
never invited me to your class?" I ask.
"What? Class?
Why would you want to do that?"
"You could
introduce me. As an artifact or witness or text.
Something."
Brautigan shakes
his head. "We'll see," he says, then changes the subject. "This
particular phenomenon is not uncommon. I've read a number of
reports placing it in almost every midwestern state. Big in
Missouri for some reason. But I had no idea it was here
until this student told me about it." Brautigan steers with his
left hand on the wheel, right resting on the stick shift,
comfortable, at ease, relaxed, like it feels good to drive that
way.
"I like it," I
mumble.
"What? The
Volkswagen? Thanks. Had it forever."
"My father, he
really would have liked it."
"Ah, yes, wind
in his hair," Brautigan acknowledges. "The open road."
We roll over a
snake warming itself on the asphalt.
"Ooops,"
Brautigan grunts.
I turn around
quickly to see if the snake has survived or if it lies segmented
and writhing, hopeless. But the road behind us is empty; the
snake has either hightailed it onto the shoulder to take
inventory of its squashed parts and curse us, or it's hanging on
to the bumper even now, slithering up over the downed ragtop,
tongue-flicking, spine-sore, hungry for revenge.
"They don't
completely die until sunset," Brautigan says. "Snakes."
"It is sunset,"
I remind him. "And that's not really true. That's a myth."
"Really?"
"Really."
The car slows to
a stop. "I guess," Brautigan conjectures, "this is it."
We're parked in
front of a railroad crossing. There is no flashing light or
jerkily lowering arm. Just identifying X signs on either side of
the road. The landscape is so unencumbered by anything you'd have
to be blind and deaf to miss a train bulleting through the desert
here. On top of that, this road is spectacularly lonesome. I
suspect it peters out no more than a mile or two ahead, the black
tar and weather-cracked cement dissipating into sand,
hardscrabble and the occasional Apache arrowhead. "Iron Horse," I
say.
"What? Oh, yes.
Well. Here we are."
"So now
what?"
Brautigan gives
the car a punch of gas, rolling us up onto the slight rise where
road and rails mesh. "We pull up here like so, turn the motor
off" -- he does -- "and wait for the dead kids to push us off the
tracks to safety." He reaches behind my seat and begins to
rummage around. I can hear a slight splash of water, ice against
glass, glass against glass, glass and ice and water against
Styrofoam, skin against glass, water against water. "I have been
told some level of intoxication is advantageous in conjuring
them." He pulls his arm back into the front seat holding two
beers. "Drink 'em if you got 'em."
The cooling
engine clicks and creaks, groans, settles, hisses. It's dark out.
The cloudy sky shields us from the stars and whatever moon is up
at bat. When my eyes finally adjust to the headlights' absence,
the road ahead becomes almost visible. A jackrabbit, its fur
vaguely luminous, plops onto the center stripe, stops, sits up on
its hind legs to sniff the air.
"Ah, peace at
last." Brautigan sighs, taking a long pull on his beer. "Kids're
having a sleepover at the house tonight. It'll be crank calls,
water balloons and Ouija board hysteria till two at least."
"What dead
children?" I ask.
"What?"
"What dead
children? Will push us to safety?"
Brautigan nods
and belches. "Oh, the ones from the school bus that got stuck on
the track when the train was coming and couldn't stop in time.
They push us to safety. The ghosts, that is."
"Wow," I
say.
"Well, in
reality it's just the tilt of the road. It looks like we're
sitting on perfectly level ground here, but that's an illusion.
We're imperceptibly rolling right now. Eventually we'll gain
momentum and roll on over to the other side. Saved."
"How do you know
we're not on level ground?"
"Good point,"
Brautigan admits. "I brought a carpenter's thingy. We'll get out
afterwards and do some measuring. When we look for the
fingerprints."
"What
fingerprints?"
"The kids'
fingerprints. That's the best part, and a fairly recent
development in this particular activity. After we're safely
across we get out and -- according to legend -- find dozens of
little fingerprints all over the trunk and bumper."
I think about
the snake we ran over and wonder if he's anticipated our mission
and is coiled patiently, nuzzled up against the license plate,
waiting for us to investigate our mysterious source of motion.
"Creepy," I say.
"You betcha.
Another beer?"
I gulp the last
of my first before accepting another. We take turns gulping and
wiping at our mouths with the backs of our hands, careful not to
move in unison, fighting the rhythm our car-bound union nudges us
toward.
"I feel like
we're waiting for me to show up," I say.
"What?
Huh?"
"Like we're
waiting for the Hook Man to come get us," I clarify.
"Oh. Yeah.
Scary. Yikes! You're in the car with me!" Brautigan laughs. "Ever
take on a convertible before?" he asks.
I think back
through the sundry vehicles in my history, the quarterbacks'
nifty Firebirds (black with gold trim), the borrowed family
wagons (baby seat strapped in the back), ailing Plymouths,
Suburbans, Impalas, souped-up, customized farm trucks, Fieros
(ripe to crash and burn), Mustangs (always red), ridiculous
Gremlins, Corvairs, Pintos, stout Broncos, Jeep Cherokees, Chevy
Blazers, fathers' AWOL Oldsmobiles, Lincolns, Cadillacs, Volvos,
Audis, drug-money Jaguars, hand-me-down Skylarks, thoughtless
Corvettes, Thunderbirds, Chevettes, sick-making Good Times Vans.
"No convertibles come to mind," I tell the doctor.
"Really? Yes.
Well, they're probably difficult to approach correctly. You'd
risk observation before the ultimate moment."
Silence
again.
"How many
children are there?"
"I've got two
boys and a girl," Brautigan answers.
"No. The ghosts.
How many are there supposed to be?"
"Good question,"
Brautigan says. "I don't know for sure. Some research might be
done on that. 'How many children would your average Joe expect to
die in a school bus/railroad crossing tragedy? How many baby
ghosts does it take to make a good story?' "
"What are their
names?"
"The
ghosts?"
"Your
kids."
"Oh. Oldest is
Kyle. Next is Amelia. Then Thad. It's Kyle's sleepover, so
--"
I hold my hand
up to stop Brautigan from saying anything more. We're rolling. I
can feel it. After Brautigan's voice stops, I can hear the tires
humming, crunching gravel against the road. The speed we attain
is unmeasurable in terms of miles per hour: faster than a snail,
slower than a fire ant. A couple of yards beyond the tracks, we
settle to a stop.
"I'll be
damned," Brautigan says. He reaches beneath his seat and pulls
forth a carpenter's level, then a flashlight. "Let's check it
out," he suggests, sounding more Hardy Boy-esque than
professorial.
We get out and
walk back to the tracks. Brautigan crouches with the level, sets
it down; then he's on his stomach next to it, eyeing the bubble
of air trapped and searching for an escape. "Oh, it's there all
right. Just barely there, but there." He gathers himself and
stands, turns the flashlight up under his chin, throwing shadows
onto his face. "Gravity's a bunch of ghosts," he says
Karloffishly.
I'm considering
the back of the car from a foot or two away, examining for snakes
and fingerprints. Brautigan's flashlight beam clarifies.
"Nothing," I say.
"You sound
disappointed," Brautigan snorts.
"I feel like the
Easter Bunny at a court-martial."
"I didn't get
that."
"You don't
believe in me," I moan.
Brautigan is
flabbergasted. "Come again?"
"I watched you
get off debunking a pretty nifty story that sounded perfectly
plausible to me. Am I next? What kind of hardware will it take to
exorcise me from your office into the vault of silly legerdemain?
Will you tape-measure my conscience, then hacksaw my ego and sand
down my id?"
We stand a long
time then. Not talking. Me breathing hard. Brautigan's mouth
agape. We're a weird tableau hinted at, then revealed by, then
bathed in and dazzled with the headlights of an approaching car.
Out a sunroof a boy's voice snipes, "Hey! Quit hogging the dead
kids. Give somebody else a chance."
I check my mail
and find a lone postcard. From someone named Rusty to someone
named DeeDee Eastep, who this person named Rusty believes for
some reason is living at my address. This is not true. I have
never heard of DeeDee Eastep. Not even from neighbors who have
related to me the recent and distant history of my abode. Uncle
Sam forgive me, I will keep the postcard -- it shows a beach and
a sunset and a sailboat -- and I will pretend that it is
addressed to me and signed, Love, Rosemary. I will invent
a message better than the one Rusty wrote to DeeDee, except I
will leave the last line alone. It reads, "See you soon."
On Halloween I
dress up like a pirate. Children approach my door holding out
bags bursting with Milky Ways, Snickers and Pixie Stix. Candy
corn, Baby Ruths, Twizzlers and Three Musketeers. Circus Peanuts,
Red Hots, ChocoLotta Crunchies, Milk Duds, Raisinets, Jujubes,
Butterfingers, Sticky-Lickums, Cherry Bomms, Blow Pops, Sugar
Daddies, WhamZ!, Good-n-Plenty, Spittoonz, Yummy-Mummies,
Monkey-Doodles, Bytz-o-Hades, Watermelon Yeehaws, Woolly-Booger
Sugar Sticks, Goopyloopies, Mount Caramels, Tootsie Rolls, Big
Fat Logs, Gooey-Goony Moon Fruities, Frog Boogers, Newtonian
Apple-Bombs, Slug-Bumpies, LavaLumpos, Butternutty Yumdumz,
Slimy-limey Leper Tongues. Bubble Gum. They're supposed to
bellow, "Trick or treat!" but many of them swallow their voices
when they see my hook. Even other pirates are intimidated. Their
timbers shiver.
"Oh, don't be
silly," mothers coo. "It's only a costume!" They push their
children toward the bowl of SweeTARTS I hold out, cupped by my
good hand and brightly polished hook.
"Trick or
treat," they gasp, before grabbing a handful and scrambling
away.
They know.
Somehow, they know.
At a little
before ten, the doorbell rings yet again. I'm almost out of
candy, but the torrent of clowns and skeletons has diminished to
a wee trickle of older children, some of them students from the
University, belching laughter and asking for beers. I put down my
Esquire and go to the door.
"Trick or
treat," Dr. Brautigan says. He's dressed like me. Like me.
Not like a pirate. Like the Hook Man. He even has a hook, which
he holds up to show me. "I didn't think you'd be home," he says.
"I thought you might be out. Somewhere. Doing something."
"I've just been
reading," I tell him. "Would you like to come in?"
Brautigan stoops
down to examine my jack-o-lantern's crossed eyes and goofy teeth.
"Nice," he observes. "No. No, thanks, I just dropped by to say
Happy Halloween." He stands up and shakes his head. "I was
positive you'd be gone."
"Well," I say,
"here I am."
"I just thought
maybe this was sort of a special day for you."
It hits me what
Brautigan is getting at, and I take a step back. "You thought I'd
be out doing what? Scaring people? Skulking in bushes? Leaping
out at toddlers?"
Brautigan looks
at his shoes, ashamed.
"Is that what --
is that what you've been doing?"
"No!" Brautigan
insists. "Not really. I've been handing out candy at home. Just
like you."
I sigh and turn
around to go back inside. I'm right in the middle of an
unbearable Jay McInerney story. I swear, Esquire would
publish his canceled checks. "I'll see you tomorrow, Doctor," I
say. "Happy Halloween."
"And some
nights," I whispered to my brother, my voice rising to bounce off
our ceiling and back down to his bottom bunk, "some nights,
nights when the moon is full, I hear it."
"You do?" he
said, near tears.
"Against the
screen. Scratching against the window screen. You've never heard
that?"
"It's just a
branch," my brother said. "Or a bug."
"No," I
contended, "it's my hand. It clawed its way up through the earth,
past all the rocks and worms and around the little tombstone, and
it's come to find me."
"They didn't
bury it, though, did they?" my brother argued. "I thought the
hospital did something with it?"
"They threw it
out with the trash," I explained. "And I went and dug through all
the shit and bloody sheets until I found it. And I took it. And I
buried it."
"Where?" my
brother gasped.
"If I show you
or tell you, it might come looking for you," I said.
Silence.
"I don't think
any of that's true," my brother insisted.
"Believe
whatever you like," I told him. "But look out the window. The
moon is full. And there's not a lick of breeze. If you hear
anything scratching against the window tonight, it's no branch.
No bug. So lay very still. Be very quiet. And hope that it
doesn't get in."
Dr. Brautigan
meets me at the door of his office holding a bottle of cognac
with a black ribbon around its neck. "I am so sorry," he says.
"Really. My behavior was offensive. I realize that and hope you
will accept this and my apology."
"No problem," I
say. I take the bottle and measure its heft in my good hand.
"Thanks. I like cognac."
"Are you
Catholic?" Brautigan says.
The non sequitur
confuses me. "Well, yes. I am a little. That is to say, I was
brought up Catholic."
"Because today's
a holy day, right? A feast of some kind?"
"Something like
that. I'm afraid to say -- well, I guess I'm actually a little
ashamed to say I've forgotten."
The last time I
went to confession I knelt outside the confessional and looked at
the way people's fingerprints could be seen on and around the
handle. On the frame of the door there was a whole palm print
pressed ghostlike onto the wood. I was the only one waiting a
turn. Without thinking I reached up with my hook and made the
tiniest scratch in the middle of the palm. "Just a moment," the
priest inside the booth said. Finally a young woman -- mascara
Niagara'd chin-ward -- came out, and I crept inside to hunker
behind the mysterious screen.
I confessed
everything but the scratch on the confessional. That wasn't a sin
to me, but a signature, like all those fingerprints, all those
whorls of flesh and oil and dirt. The scratch was the sound of my
one hand clapping.
I finally bring
the subject up myself. "Why," I ask Dr. Brautigan, "have you
never asked me about my hook?"
"About your
hook?" He sounds startled. "That's all we've talked about for
months now."
"No. I mean,
you've never asked me how I got my hook. You've never asked me
how it came to be that I am the Hook Man."
"Oh," Dr.
Brautigan says. "I guess I've been a little reluctant to broach
that subject. Afraid the memory might be too painful."
"That's funny,"
I tell Brautigan, "because it didn't hurt at all." It was sore
afterward, of course, despite all the painkillers. But when it
happened, I felt nothing.
Rosemary lived
in a little house just behind the Wichita Falls Drive-in. We
couldn't see the movies from there, of course. They didn't seep
through the heavy wooden screen. And because the car speakers
were so small, we never heard the soundtracks, either. But the
laughter. That we heard. And the screams. We could sit out
on her back porch, and the back of the screen towered above us,
part billboard, part plywood roller coaster. The light from the
projector leaked around the edges, giving the whole affair a
shimmering corona. It was weird and beautiful and exciting to be
sitting out there listening to the bullbats squeak, waiting for
people to ha-ha all at once on account of some poor sap getting a
pie in the face, or yelp and squeal when the spaceships landed
and let loose with a barrage of ray-guns. Rosemary had a big
metal porch glider that always seemed cool, as if just taken from
a freezer. She'd sit, and I'd lay my head on her lap so she could
stroke my hair with her slow-moving nails while we eavesdropped
on the drive-in patrons.
That's what we
were doing the night she told me who she really was.
"I'm the
Kentucky Fried Rat Lady," she said out of the blue. We hadn't
been talking at all. She just blurted it out.
Uncertain, I
held my tongue. The way my head was turned, I couldn't see her
face. In a car hidden by the colossal screen a girl screamed,
then laughed like a donkey braying.
"I mean, I am
the Kentucky Fried Rat Lady. The one you've heard
about."
Long
pause.
"I'm not sure
I've heard about you," I confessed.
"Oh, you know.
The lady who took her family to eat at Kentucky Fried Chicken and
ended up taking a bite out of a rat that had fallen into the
batter and been deep-fried."
I waited a beat
or two. "So you're her," I said, even though I'd never heard that
tale before. "I didn't know you had a family." With my ear
pressed against her thigh, I listened to my heart beating wildly.
"Do you have a family?"
"Well," she
said, "the story has been perverted a little bit. The truth is,
I've got diabetes. And I lose feeling in my extremities, my hands
and my feet sometimes. And I was sitting right here one summer
day eating fried chicken with my shoes off. And I fell
asleep."
She paused. "I
see," I said.
"There's more.
The chicken fell down on the porch and a bunch of rats -- from
the drive-in, I imagine -- came over and ate the chicken, and
then ate my feet. My feet were right there by the chicken.
They didn't know the difference. And I couldn't feel them
chowing down. So when I woke up, they'd devoured my toes and the
balls of my feet and my soles and my heels. Gone, gone, gone. I
was completely without feet. Still am, for that matter. Story
made the papers, as you would probably guess, but people took the
story and made it a little less gruesome -- or a little more
gruesome, depending on how often you eat out -- than it already
was. Making me the Kentucky Fried Rat Lady."
"Sort of like
I'm the Hook Man."
"A little like
that," Rosemary said.
"I've been
written up," she continued, "in journals and magazines. All kinds
of places. Not the real story. The fake one. According to these
articles, I get punished in the story because I was too lazy to
cook for my family. I'm supposed to serve as a warning to
mothers. Don't feed your kids fast food. Cook!"
"So, do you have
any kids?" I asked.
"Nope. Just a
couple of fake feet."
"Weren't you
angry?" Dr. Brautigan says.
"What makes you
think I would get angry?"
"She seems to
have waited quite a while before telling you she was herself not
complete. She seems to have let you think for quite some time
that you were the deformed one in your relationship."
"Who said
anything about being deformed? Or not complete? Our relationship
had nothing to do with existence in the physical plane. Our love
was -- is -- cerebral. That's why I'd never noticed her feet were
prosthetic. It never occurred to me to look."
Another postcard
for DeeDee. This one shows a jellyfish sprawled on a pristine
beach. The photographer stood just above the creature. Light hits
its electric-blue body in such a way that it radiates an aura of
magic, a shimmering halo of colors more appropriate for a Looney
Tunes short than a stranded monster. Its long white tentacles,
Tannenbaum-topping angel-hair, are arranged neatly, model-like.
Above it and to the left, at the edge where a postal phantom has
stamped a few red numbers, a tiny shell, perfect, unbroken,
awaits the coming of a toddler's chubby digits. The shell and the
jellyfish work together (good cop/bad cop, sweet and sour, beauty
and the beautiful beast) to ensure each golden day at the shore
includes a brush with pain and danger. Will the mother get there
in time to thwart the jellyfish's stinging? Will the father have
taught Baby the no-no's of beachcombing? Will the photographer
stand there, like a wartime Pulitzer-hound, finger poised to
press and catch the dreadful ouch and swelling
flesh?
On the back of
the postcard, the lovesick Rusty has scrawled above his signature
a gawking eye, a bulging heart, a puffy sheep.
I tell Dr.
Brautigan about my father, about how he worked on our farm and
did maintenance at the Niblett Funeral Parlor in town. This extra
job sounds a great deal more morbid than it actually was. The
fact of the matter is, my father never -- not once -- set foot
inside the Niblett Funeral Parlor. The entirety of his duties lay
outside those quiet marble halls. (Oh, yes, I do know they
were quiet. My father never went in, but I did.) My father kept
the grass neat. He carefully edged the sidewalks and driveways.
Polished the model tombstones -- markers, they're called. He
painted the shutters and detailed the discreet sign on a regular
basis. Planted flowers in beds and pruned crepe myrtle trees into
neat, vertical lines. Kept the hearse and black Cadillacs in good
running condition, too. But he didn't go inside. This was part of
his contract with Mr. Niblett. My father had a deep dislike, not
for death or corpses or embalming fluid, but for coffins. He
hated tight spaces period. Couldn't abide riding in cars that
weren't convertibles. Kept -- much to my mother's dismay -- all
his clothes hanging out in his bedroom, fearful as he was of
closets. Shirts on bedposts. Socks on a lampshade. Underwear
slung across a picture of my mother's mother. Pants neatly folded
over a ladderback chair. He insisted there always be at least one
open window in any room he entered. So when he ran over my hand
with the riding lawnmower one day -- I was lolling in front of a
marker, having just scrubbed out its engraved letters with an old
toothbrush, pretending I was, as I was about to become, a victim
of some horrible accident -- he carried me only as far as the
door to the Funeral Home. From there Mr. Niblett took me -- made
me walk on my own -- into the embalming room, where I lay on a
metal table waiting for the ambulance to show up. A radio was on
full blast. Mr. Niblett was a Billie Holiday fan, and he whistled
along with Lady Blue ("I Cover the Waterfront") while he wrapped
my stump up good and tight and put a tourniquet around my arm.
From the entrance, several rooms away, my father hollered, "Is he
okay?"
Mr. Niblett was
combing my hair, parting it on the wrong side. He wiped the sweat
off my forehead with a little white towel. "Dandy," he called
back. "You want to come in?"
"No. That's all
right," my father said. "I'll just stay out here."
"Will they be
able to sew it back on?" I asked Mr. Niblett.
He seemed
surprised to hear me talk, as if he'd forgotten I was still
alive, as if I was one of his usual customers. "Oh. Well, they
might be able to. If it's not too chopped up."
"If they can't,
will it get buried?"
Mr. Niblett
smiled. "Thinking of that employee's discount, aren't you?"
Dr. Brautigan
says, "So what was your relationship with your father like after
the accident?"
"That sounds
more like a therapist's question than a folklorist's."
Brautigan hums
to himself for a moment. "Yes, well. I'm actually curious." He
puts his pen down so that it balances on the pad, which is
balancing on his knee. Clasping his hands in front of him, he
says, "Did you ever talk about it? Did he apologize?"
"He died," I
say.
Silence. "I'm
sorry," Brautigan murmurs.
"He had a heart
attack one day while walking the fenceline; we had some calves
missing. When he didn't come in for supper, my mother sent my
brother out to look for him," I explain. "The doctors say it
happened very quickly, that he was in no pain. Which may be true,
even though it seems that doctors always say that. 'This is going
to hurt just a little bit. You won't feel a thing. He went
without suffering.' "
"I'm sorry," Dr.
Brautigan says again.
"It was a very
bad summer for us," I conclude.
The worst
occasion in the history of magazine publishing -- the very nadir!
-- must be the invention of the perfume-strip insert. I've taken
to tearing them out as soon as they arrive. In a box in the hall
closet I've deposited every reeking one, anxious to know how many
will accumulate in a year. Eternity, Passion, Opium, Joop, Polo,
Poison, Diamond, Idaho!, Montezuma, Aspen, Mr. Pierre, Black
Scorpion, Grand Teton, Flying Dutchman, Dominator, LMNOP,
Stetson, Lola!, tsunami, Spellbinder, Soliloquy, Atlas, Logjam,
Caribou, Ludwig, Samba, Mambo, Rhumba, Chatterley, Vladimir,
Lava, Bliss, Torquemada, Flint, Devil-May-Care, Whitewater,
Winter Morning, Vernal, Equinox, Mesa, Calliope, Grandstand,
Olivia!, Hyacinth, Fascinating Rhythm, Glacier, Canyon, Cousteau,
Mantle, Antlers, Diva, Clover, Buddha, Sinfonia, L'Unacy, Sabre's
Edge, Antigone, Misty Glade, Debauchery by Flynn, Huntsman, Two
O'clock Phantom, Favorite Stranger, Cavalier, Centripetal Force,
Chanteuse, Gershwin, Tumbleweed Memories, Voyeur, Shark, Vox,
Zen, Yu, O!, Etc. I mean, etc., as in "and so on." I have yet to
see an ad for a cologne or perfume called Etc., but I have faith
in the industry. Every time I open the hall closet to deposit
another strip into its fragrant cage, I am careful to cover my
nose and mouth. The fumes, I suspect, may well be mustard-gas
deadly. Like toxic waste or mercury, the perfume strips must be
handled cautiously. As with an experimental strain of virus or a
maniacal pachyderm, their captivity is of the utmost
importance.
"You know
something," Dr. Brautigan says, interrupting me, "I find it very
curious that you are so terribly interested in coming to my
class. It occurs to me that you've spent a large part of your
existence lurking, skulking, avoiding light and recognition. And
now, suddenly, you want to be introduced. You want to be
showcased. You want to be in the spotlight. I don't get
it."
"So you don't
want me to come to your class?" I ask.
"I want to know
why you want to come to my class."
I think for a
second. "I want," I say, "to see them. Their faces and baseball
caps and Mickey Mouse watches, their manicured fingernails and
expensive tennis shoes, their fraternity shirts and high school
class rings and rat-packed purses. In the daylight. In a normal
setting. I want to see them breathing regularly and thinking
sensibly and taking notes."
"Few, if any of
them, take notes," Brautigan says. "But is that really what you
want? Couldn't you do that sitting on a bench near the
library?"
"I want to see
them still," I say. "Motionless. Like models posing for a
sculptor."
"And what about
you? Do you want them to see you?"
"I want to sit
among them. I don't want to stand out from them. So, in answer to
your question, yes and no. I want to be seen and not to be seen.
At the same time."
Brautigan taps
his pen against his teeth. "I don't know what to say," he says.
"We'll see."
When I tell you
I read every word of every magazine I get, I mean it. How else
could you account for me finding this item tucked under the
change-of-address information in the most recent Texas
Monthly? "Subscribers preferring scent-free issues," the copy
read, "may call 1-800-NOS-SAFE."
Did I
call?
I did not. I'm
not entirely sure why, but I didn't. I memorized the number, of
course. (I doubt I'll ever forget it. How could I? I couldn't
tell you the starting date of any war in recorded history, but I
can recite a litany of noisome telephone "numbers.") Even as I
reached for my phone's receiver, it occurred to me that I might
be making a grave mistake. I shut my eyes and pictured myself
opening my mailbox to find a Gentleman's Quarterly reeking
of nothing more than that same mailbox's steely innards, or
worse, my mail carrier's gratuitous Brut.
By necessity, I
avoided my phone for the duration of the afternoon.
1-800-NOS-SAFE,
indeed.
When Dr.
Brautigan doesn't show up for our morning appointment, I think
nothing of it. We all have mornings that go in directions we
never anticipated or desired. I wait around his office for an
hour and a half, leafing through folklore periodicals, trying to
imagine the tunes that accompany the ballads transcribed therein:
"Tom Dooley," "Mary McCree," "Hinkey Poteet," "The Blue Fire Coal
Mine Murders," "Lucy the Serving Girl's Secret." Finally, I
wander to the lecture hall where Brautigan's survey class meets,
figuring he'll show up there, at least. Students drift in like
dazed shipwreck survivors. I sit at the rear of the room,
watching the boys kick back in their seats, boots up on the row
in front of them. The girls laze about in groups of two and
three, sighing and pouting and doodling in spiral notebooks.
After ten minutes of waiting for Brautigan, they grow restless
and begin to gauge each other's patience with blank stares,
raised eyebrows. Eventually one brave youth in a denim jacket
rolls out of his makeshift recliner and lumbers to the door.
Without looking back he leaves. Slowly at first, then in a tide
of grins and whistles, they all follow the first cowboy's
lead.
His Pied Piper
routine is capped by my own disappointed and unwitnessed
exit.
At home, my
answering machine blinks to let me know I've been away too long.
"Dr. Brautigan here," the recorder reports. "I was wondering if
maybe you could come down to the police station and help me clear
up a little problem."
Dear Dr. Brautigan: (the letter I wrote in response to his
article began)
/ read with
great excitement your recent piece in Harper's regarding
the antics of the "Hook Man" character. I found your prose style
fresh and straightforward and your method of organization and
presentation entertaining without being lackadaisical.
It was with
some concern, however, that I studied your observations on what
sundry neuroses the Hook Man may possess that drive "him" to
attack helpless lovebirds. You see -- and I hope you will believe
me when I tell you this is not a joke -- I am
the Hook Man and am in no way whatsoever like the
psychological profile you fabricated. For one thing, my sexual
history is hardly bizarre. I have never been "involved" with any
of the deviant types you list. Furthermore, my adolescent
family life was exceptionally normal and healthy. My mother and
brother can and will attest to that should you need corroborating
witnesses.
Please do not
think that I am chastising you for your mistakes. I am only
trying to help you better understand your own research. Indeed, I
am flattered by your interest and would be happy to help you in
any way I can.
Sincerely,
Leonard Gage
(The Hook Man)
My money comes
from the settlement with the lawnmower company, of course. It
wasn't much to begin with, and dwindles perilously, wasted on a
life of skulking and magazine perusal. But it lets me live, if
somewhat frugally, in a world of leisure. And when I need to bail
a friend out of jail, I can do so. Actually, Dr. Brautigan is the
first friend I've had reason to rescue from the calaboose. (I've
known other friends, certainly, but can count no criminals among
their ranks.)
"Says you could
explain," the detective mumbles, nodding at where Brautigan sits
slumped in a straight-backed chair, wearing his Hook Man getup.
The plastic hook, preserved in a see-through evidence bag, rests
amid a collage of coffee-stained Styrofoam cups and tattered
sugar packets. "Says you could explain why it is we found him
loitering in the oleanders at City Park. Says he's a scientist or
something."
"Professor," Dr.
Brautigan corrects.
"Right.
Professor. Says he's doing research." The detective
notices my own hook and pauses. "That real?" he asks,
gesturing.
"Genuine
article," I admit, thumping the table so the cups and sugar
packets and fake hook all bounce.
My first
time.
It's a national,
possibly universal obsession, firsts. The first man to do this.
The first woman to do that. The first hog to swim the
Mississippi. First dogcatcher to apprehend a zoo-wayward anaconda
alone. Guinness has made a name for himself cataloguing firsts.
People risk their lives and souls for his attention, for one line
in his thick, ridiculous book. "My first time." The beginning of
a titillating and most probably embarrassing story told over
cocktails to someone the teller doesn't know well enough to tell
anything to. "My first time." The point of too many movies
starring too many hard-bodied nobodies shown on cable television,
Friday nights, just past prime time: The Last American Virgin,
Private School, Losin' It, Corky's Hot-Tub Adventure, My Favorite
Weekend, Ski Patrol IV: Moguls!, Mommie's Italian Chauffeur,
Dad's Swedish Masseuse, Beach Shak Summer, 555-LOVE, Flesh Flood,
Initiate This.
My first
time?
Suffice it to
say diere was one. Although I can't for the life of me remember
it.
Rosemary's
brother showed up unexpectedly.
He answered
Rosemary's door one day when I went over for dinner. "Can I help
you?" he asked from behind the chain.
Confused, I
faltered. "Rosemary? Uh, is she here?"
"Yes, I'm here,"
I heard her say. "Good God, Duncan." The man was pulled back, the
door unchained and reopened. Rosemary beamed at me.
"Hello."
"Hey," I said,
uncertain if I should stay or leave.
"Well, come in,"
she boomed, happily. "I want you to meet my brother."
Duncan, it
turned out, was the family's black sheep. He appeared
unexpectedly from time to time, bursting with stories of his life
as an itinerant blackjack dealer. He'd left home immediately
after Lee High graduation to attend gaming school in Las Vegas
and since then had been employed by casinos and backdoor card
clubs across the nation. Over a six-pack of Shiner he told me he
himself had never gambled. "Not once," he insisted. "Not on
anything."
"You know the
odds too well," I ventured.
"Hell no. No
such thing as odds. I'm the world's most unlucky man. Why stir up
misfortune?"
At the time,
Duncan was traveling from Atlantic City to an Indian reservation
somewhere "out West."
"Thought I'd pop
in for a stay. Catch up on old times and all that. Say, what
happened to your hand?"
"Accident," I
said.
"No duh. You're
not by any chance the feller that got his hand chomped by a
Doberman while robbing an old lady's house, are you?"
"What feller
would that be?"
"You know. That
feller. You've heard the story, surely." Rosemary came in with a
bowl of queso and a bag of corn chips. "Oh, boy," she groaned.
"Here come the stories. Duncan gets the best dumb gossip from
around the globe," she explained.
"People have to
do something while they piss away their dough," Duncan argued.
"How do you think I learned my sister was the Kentucky Fried Rat
Lady? I've heard about her in every gambling town I've worked.
You're Colonel Sanders's worst nightmare, the bane of every
working mother north of the equator." He leaned over to pinch
Rosemary's cheek.
"That's not me."
Rosemary sighed. "You know the truth."
Duncan took a
long sip of beer. "Truth is, the truth's a deadly bore. Always a
disappointment. You can bet on it."
Brautigan's wife
has driven the kids over to Corpus Christi for their spring
break. They're staying in a neighbor's condo.
"It could have
been worse," Brautigan whines. "I could have gone out and had an
affair."
"That wouldn't
have gotten you arrested," I say.
"No charges were
pressed," Brautigan mitigates. "And everyone believed I was just
doing research."
"Not me. I
know what you were doing."
There is a long
pause. Brautigan doodles on his pad. Finally he says, "I'm afraid
I'll do it again."
"This town isn't
big enough for the both of us," I drawl.
My freshman
year, my homeroom was homeless. That is, we didn't have a regular
classroom to call our own. Instead, our teacher, Mrs. Holloway,
held court in the massive theater that took up more than an
eighth of our WPA-built school but hadn't been used in a number
of years due to rotted planks on the stage. (Rumor had it the
auditorium was condemned by a former principal immediately after
he was fitted for casts on both legs, broken after plunging
through the stage floor while delivering a dramatic reading from
A Christmas Carol the day before Winter Break. He --
allegedly -- had just finished a sniveling redneck rendition of
Scrooge's poorhouse rant when, crash, down he went.
Students and teachers, ill-read, uncaring, mistook the accident
as part of the performance, departed amidst a smattering of
applause. When the janitor found him late that afternoon, the
principal, confusing his salvation with the Ghost of Christmas
Future, begged for another chance.) Each morning Mrs. Holloway,
wary of the stage, stood at the front of the auditorium and
begged us to remain seated and quiet for the duration of our stay
with her. Then she walked to the back of the auditorium and read
detective novels while my peers ran wild in the aisles. It was
not difficult to get up on the stage, despite a fence of hastily
erected barbed wire, and if careful, one could trod the area
without fear of broken limbs or impalement. I would venture to
say that, of the twelve girls in my homeroom, five of them lost
their virginity to Buzz Henry in the upstairs dressing room of
that auditorium. While the rest of us studied and copied homework
due in the next class, Buzz was led -- very willingly -- into
that lofty nest to perform the act he'd allegedly perfected in
sixth grade with a nymphomaniacal cheerleader from the nearby
Junior College. The girls were not competitive or catty in their
use of Buzz. Strangely, they seemed to have worked out some kind
of schedule by which they abided. We'd hear them sometimes, their
faint moans haunting the dank and shadowy room like a forgotten
phantom (or feverish principal), ecstasy muffled by the molding
velvet curtains and cooing pigeons nesting high in the rafters.
When the vocal demonstrations were especially operatic, I would
turn to see if Mrs. Holloway had noticed, if she'd vacated her
world of dames and private dicks long enough to sniff out the
drama being performed above and in front of the entire homeroom.
But, despite the giggles and whispers and occasional "Attaboy,
Buzz" from a fellow footballer, Mrs. Holloway remained oblivious.
On mornings when Buzz was allowed a period to rest, according to
the schedule's odd calendar of celibate holidays, the rest of us
prowled the stage like cat burglars. Alone usually, we'd run into
one another in the dark, start, then continue creeping from one
shadowy corner to the next. I firmly believe we all wanted to
play hide-and-seek but were afraid to suggest the game, for fear
of being branded a child, though that is precisely what we
were.
The day I
climbed the stairs to the upper dressing room, curious to see
what the mysterious seraglio contained (a mattress, a couch, a
pillow-filled gondola, what?), it was raining. It drummed the
roof above me, growing louder as I climbed higher and higher into
the cobwebs and shadows. The wooden stairs creaked and trembled
beneath my tentative steps until at last I stood in front of a
wooden door whose knob had been pulled out. Resisting the urge to
bend down and look through the hole before entering, I pushed the
door wide and, like the hero of some preposterous melodrama,
strode through the doorway, chest stuffed full of air, head held
high, ready for anything.
But.
There was
nothing much. A window through which filtered bluish light. A
dozen or so stove-sized wooden boxes. Several balding mops and
brooms. Some crudely drawn set pieces: a sitting room, window
looking out on a snowy hill; an Old West saloon; a jungle
clearing, monkey eternally swinging down from a banana tree;
Grecian columns; a ship's wheel manned by a fading chalk
navigator, sopping from the storm against which he leaned. In the
center of the room, a chaise lounge, wine-colored, springs
blooming from its seat like rusting daffodils -- Buzz's altar, no
doubt -- balanced on three legs. Condoms littered the floor, as
did de-labeled pint bottles of Jack Daniel's, long empty. A
bird's skeleton rested on a bed of its own feathers. This was no
seraglio, no Turkish harem strewn with scarves and elephantine
silk pillows. This was grim. This was dilapidation itself.
I turned to go,
but the boxes caught my eye. There was writing on them that
seemed to speak to me, almost summon me. Careful to avoid the
shriveled rubbers, I crossed the room to investigate. "A NOBLE
EXPERIMENT," one box read. I opened its top and rustled through a
pile of time-yellowed lab coats and a convict's striped shirt.
The box next to it, labeled "LAST NIGHT ON KRAKATOA," contained a
number of grass skirts, innumerable coconut shells, a wildly
feathered headdress and an eyeless stuffed parrot. "CHERRY TREE?
WHAT CHERRY TREE?" held four pairs of seven-league boots, a pink
dress the size of a circus tent, thirty-six powdered wigs, and a
little hatchet, its rubbery blade painted a bright gold. "FANGS
FOR THE MEMORIES" was furnished with a thin black cape, a brass
candelabrum, an enormous rubber rat (its snout beginning to
crumble), and fourteen bloodstained white nightgowns. The writing
on the last box was different from the simple block lettering on
the others. In elaborate calligraphy, someone had written "JOLLY
ROGER FOLLIES."
Among other
things, of course, the box contained it.
It.
It, a crescent
moon.
It, a midget's
scimitar.
It, a
silver-plated croissant, ill-conceived boomerang, serious
question mark.
It, tarnished,
but not rusty beyond hope.
It, mounted on a
leather sleeve, looking comfortable even at first sight, even
there, in that dingy love shack, even in pigeon-shit-tinged light
and air, even so looking like a part of me, missing and restored
by luck, by Jove, by fate.
It was love at
first sight.
Duncan had a
briefcase full of scratch-off lottery tickets from across the
country. Since he didn't gamble, they were all untouched. "I give
them out to people I meet around. You know, in restaurants, at
laundromats. Here," he said, handing me one. "Try it." I looked
at the ticket. It featured a square of silver latex imprinted
MATCH THREE next to a cartoonish pirate straddling a treasure
chest leaking strands of pearls. The chest rested on a bed of
doubloons whose sparkling was represented by three lines
radiating from the edges of certain coins, like the sun's corona
stylized by a seven-year-old. The pirate, of course, had a
green-orange-yellow parrot on one shoulder, a patch over his
right eye, and (surprise) a hook on his left hand. Behind the
pirate, a tiny ship, its cannons, crow's nest and death's-head
flag just barely distinguishable, floated amongst flea-sized
whitecaps. BUCCANEER BILLIONS, the top of the ticket read in
scarlet Barnum letters. "You may already be a winner," Duncan
teased.
I scratched at
the dull silver area with the tip of my hook until it was
revealed that I had won nothing.
"Too bad,"
Duncan said. "You had two twenty-five thousands, though. What it
was, was: it almost was." He sighed. "That's the way it always
is."
Brautigan's
office is darkened, shades pulled to reduce the glare off the
framed diplomas, citations and pictures of Brautigan -- sunburnt,
mosquito-bothered -- posing next to Aztec pyramids.
"I don't know if
I would have done anything," Brautigan says. "I think I just
wanted to sit out there, watching it get dark, imagining what it
would be like to jump out and scare somebody. But would I have
actually done it? If somebody had pulled up, radio blaring Ravel,
Tchaikovsky --"
"The Eagles," I
add.
"If somebody'd
done that, would I have lurched from out of the shadows
brandishing my hook?" Brautigan takes off his glasses and
polishes them with a handkerchief he pulls out of his rear
pocket.
"Well, the hook
you have is plastic." I'm trying to find a way to counsel
the doctor without sounding know-it-allish, do-gooderian,
hypocritical. "So it wouldn't have flashed in the moonlight. And
I think that's something you need to consider."
"I could get a
metal hook," the doctor whispers to himself.
"And, of course,
you need to keep in mind that a lot of people carry guns
nowadays. Even teenagers. Even the girl teenagers. You never know
when you might find yourself -- unarmed -- at the mercy of a
nineteen-year-old with an Uzi."
Brautigan
shivers. "I hadn't thought of that."
"It is le
hobby dangereuse ," I conclude.
My
Backpacker arrives, thick with a "First Time Tent Buyers'
Complete Guide" and the scent of a new cologne, Trekker. Musky.
Fertile. According to the ad, which is unusually copy-heavy,
short on men with smooth, sculpted chests, Trekker is the only
cologne approved for camping use by the National Park Service.
Bears, it seems, possess incredible olfactory senses. Attracted
to anything not smelling like pine trees or dirt, they are keen
to attack women wearing perfume, men sporting Old Spice,
menstruating co-eds, deodorantized birdwatchers, love-making
newlyweds. "Trekker," the ad states, "is Nature." Men
wearing the stuff come across to your average ursine snout as
nothing more than a stack of rocks and birdshit. But women -- ah,
les femmes -- perceive Trekker as the odor of the gods.
"Trekker. Because sometimes a good campfire just isn't good
enough."
It occurs to me,
as I peel back the scented strip to whiff Trekker, that these
magazine ads, scintillating as they are, would drive a bear
insane. Pity the unlucky newsstand owner who sets up shop too
close to a wildlife preserve. I picture a grizzly barging up Main
Street, drawn to the new Zsa Zsa Gabor fragrance emanating from
the March Panache, a black bear wreaking havoc at the
drugstore, driven mad by Cher's Tatu! in the April Outlaw,
a polar bear mauling a mail plane carrying five dozen October
Floridians and their cargo of Conch: by Mennen. A parade
of koalas descends on Madison Avenue, demanding more pungent
solicitations. Zoo bears clamor and reach between bars not for a
passing tourist's cotton candy but the copy of Tr è s Tr è s
stuffed in her Dooney & Bourke. Circus bears howl in the
night as their freight cars pass sticky-sweet post offices and
the waiting cache of Cache.
Before I get
down to my perusal of Backpacker's monthly Trail RunDown, I
tear the Trekker ad out and take it to my own bear-calling
closet. The stack of strips has grown out of its box and rises
like a pillar toward the empty coat rod. Trekker's scent mingles
with the aroma of its brother ads, is engulfed, disappears when I
shut the door.
And then, as I
turn, I think I hear someone call my name. That is I think
I hear someone. The voice, if that's what it is, is inside my
head and familiar. Neither female nor male, tenor, bass, soprano,
alto, it takes me by surprise. I pause to see if it will
continue, but it does not, and I am left wondering if it was ever
there at all, if it was just the creak of the closet's door, the
squeak of my turning soles. "Hello," I say aloud. Then -- inside
my head -- hello. . .
But I am, so far
as I can tell, alone.
While Duncan
went to the store to get an eggplant for ratatouille, Rosemary
and I lounged on the front porch, listening to the last cars
pulling into the drive-in for the night's double feature. It grew
quiet, except for a few slamming doors, an occasional bleating
horn. The edges of the screen began to glow with coming
attractions and snack-bar flirtations. A grasshopper pounced onto
the middle of the porch, sat for a moment, then hopped off into
the Bermuda and invisibility.
"Orchelimum," I
said.
"What's
that?"
"Orchelimum. The
scientific name for the meadow grasshopper."
"Pretty
word."
"Means, 'I dance
in the woods.' "
"Mm," Rosemary
hummed. "I like that."
We sat in
silence for close to a minute. Over at the drive-in, a boy's
voice -- lost -- hollered, "Audrey!"
"Duncan thinks I
should go with him." She said it in one breath, expelling it like
it was something held inside too long, a pearl-diver's
gasp.
My heart
shuddered. "What? Where to? What do you mean?"
"West. To the
casino at the reservation. He thinks I could maybe get a job
teaching there. On the reservation. And he says I would like it a
lot. He says it looks like an old John Ford western. The
landscape, he means. It would be real different. Mountains and
rivers and Indians."
"Well," I said,
but I didn't know what to say after that, so I just kept
quiet.
"What do you
think?" Rosemary said, trying to pull it out of me with a
whisper.
"Duncan's
crazy." I coughed, half laughing. "You two would kill each
other."
"He's my
brother."
"Siblings have
been known to murder one another. Biblical precedents, once set,
breed crimes like those plague locusts lay eggs."
That brought
about another long stretch of silence, broken only by the lost
boy's now-cracking voice, a mixture of anger and fear. "Audrey,"
he called, snipping the name short, embarrassed to be howling it
like a rancher calling the cows home to dinner.
"Do you want me
to go?" Rosemary said. "Or do you want me to stay?"
"Audrey!"
"I think she's
gone," I said, raising my voice a bit, not really expecting or
wanting the stranded boy to hear me, but needing to say
something, wishing somebody would tell him to give it up, break
the bad news to him, give him a beer, a joint, a ride home.
Rosemary: "Do
you want me to go? Or stay?"
"I want you to
do whatever you want to do," I tried, knowing that wouldn't
suffice.
"Dubois,
Wyoming," Brautigan says.
"Been there. Had
a beer at the Rustic Pine Tavern."
"Activity?"
"None. Lonely
place that."
"Deadwood, South
Dakota."
"Lovely place.
Gambling's legal there now, I'm told."
"Activity."
"Yes."
"Lexington,
Kentucky."
"Done it."
"Activity."
"Done it."
"Coral Gables,
Florida."
"Prettiest
beaches I've ever seen. Activity, yes."
"Cupertino,
California."
"Never got
around there."
"Luling,
Texas."
"Home to the
Watermelon Thump. Last weekend of every June. Nicest people in
the world. Couldn't bring myself to do it."
"Nashville?"
"Missed that
one."
"Memphis."
"Yes.
Yes."
Brautigan
pauses. He's been working like an automaton lately, unwilling to
give up the project but deeply afraid of becoming too involved.
He crosses his legs, and I notice he's sporting mismatched socks.
"Maybe we could take a little break," I suggest.
"Yes," Brautigan
agrees. "A breather." He gets up to fetch us Dr Peppers from the
machine down the hall. When he comes back in he says -- as if
completing a thought he'd started before leaving the room -- "I
never went parking as a kid. Maybe that's it."
"Maybe."
He grimaces. "I
can't stop thinking about it. How do you stop thinking about
it?"
"Read a good
magazine," I suggest. "That helps for a while. Gets your mind off
things."
"It's like an
addiction." He sits down and leans toward me, lowers his voice.
"Last night" -- he looks around as if someone may have snuck in
without our noticing and sits crouched on the shelves behind his
chair -- "last night I ordered a pizza, then went outside and sat
behind our gardenia bushes, watching cars go by. When the
delivery boy came, pimpled gangly lummox, I rustled the leaves a
bit, then hopped out like an insane gardener. Boy jumped like a
jackrabbit. I told him I'd been looking for my wallet, then
pulled it out of my back pocket to pay for the pizza. 'Oh, look,'
I told him. 'Found it.' "
"Man alive," I
say. "You've got it bad."
"Yes," Brautigan
hisses. "And listen to this. . ."
But I can't. I
can't focus. While he talks about sneaking up on his own car
parked in his driveway -- "practice" -- I begin to think about my
mail. How it's probably just now being slid into my box. A couple
of magazines, ripe with perfume strips. A sewage/garbage bill. An
Ed McMahon come-on. And a letter from Rosemary. Definitely. Today
will be the day. I convince myself it will come today, carrying
Rosemary's past with it, into my lonely presence.
What I did
mainly in junior high was fade. Fearing that my new disability
would make me visible to the point of distraction, I undertook a
plan to make myself as unremarkable as possible. I was forced to
eliminate sports from my daily agenda. I also cut out talking in
class, hanging out in the locker areas before or after school,
wearing anything that wasn't bland. Indeed, by the time I was a
senior in high school, I had become a sort of invisible man,
neither popular or unpopular, almost imperceptible. I made
straight B's to avoid the closer scrutiny of teachers worried or
excited about my grades, shunned dances, attended athletic events
incognito, standing at the rear of crowds or beneath bleachers.
The only luxury I allowed myself was a leather jacket, which I
kept slung over the offending limb in even the most stifling
weather. At the time, those leather jackets were all the rage,
allowing me a convenient and believable rationalization. If any
of my old classmates still happen to own their yearbooks, and if
they should ever have occasion to peruse those glossy pages, they
must wonder at my picture. Unable to see the hook in my grim mug
shot, they may have no grasp on who I was, who I am. My face,
unlike Quasimodo's in that dreadful joke, does not ring a
bell.
I recall -- now
with humor -- the boy and girl, class president and
vice-president, who approached me one day outside senior English,
yawn-making Ivanhoe clutched in my good hand. "Hi," they
said simultaneously.
"Hello."
"I'm Tricia,"
the girl said. She spoke a little louder than was necessary, and
very slowly, as if talking to a deaf person or an immigrant new
to the language. "And this," she pointed to her partner, "is
Jimmy."
"Hi," Jimmy said
again.
"We're seniors,
too," Tricia sang, as if identifying herself to me as a fellow
Jehovah's Witness or poodle owner.
"Yes," I said,
trying to avoid eye contact with either of them. "I know."
"And," Jimmy
boomed, taking over, "we're in charge of making The Banner for
graduation." The Banner was an enormous stretch of canvas that
hung outside the gymnasium where the graduation ceremonies were
held. On it, each senior's nickname was lovingly graffitied under
a scarlet "CONGRATULATIONS!" just above a piss-yellow "CLASS OF
(whatever) RULES!"
"And the thing
is," Jimmy continued, "we just suddenly realized --"
"Time has
flown!" Tricia suddenly exploded.
"And we just
realized that you don't really have a nickname. And we thought
maybe you had some idea. . ."
"Maybe you have
a nickname for yourself!" Tricia chirped.
"I don't have a
nickname?" I said, amazed.
"How about
Lefty?" Tricia suggested. She repeated the name several times to
herself while tossing her hair from side to side.
"That's good,"
Jimmy said.
"I don't
have a nickname?" I repeated.
"Nope," Jimmy
and Tricia choired.
"But I always
just assumed. . ."
"Do you have
something you'd like to be called? Like a name you always wished
your parents had named you instead of what they did? Like I
always wanted to be named Pete or Andy."
"Really?" Tricia
drawled. "That is so weird, because I always wanted to be called
Andrea!"
"I guess. .
."
"Yes," Tricia
breathed. I could smell her cinnamony breath.
"I guess you
should just put 'The Hook.' "
Jimmy and Tricia
remained perfectly still for a moment, each searching the other's
face to be sure it was neither of them who had said it.
"Yeah," I
concluded," 'The Hook' will be fine."
"She's taken the
kids to San Angelo to shop for school clothes," Brautigan says.
We're in his car headed to his house for dinner. This is the
first time I've thought about his home, even though it's only a
few blocks away from my own. He, in fact, owns my home. It's a
rent house he invested in several years after he took his job at
the University. For the duration of my stay, he's given me a
substantial reduction on rent. "They're staying with her sister
tonight. And then shopping like mad tomorrow."
We pull into the
driveway of a two-story Victorian monster. "Here we are,"
Brautigan says while we wait for the door of the garage secreted
behind the house to finish its automatic rise. "I guess I should
warn you about my wife's wigs," Brautigan begins while he guides
the car into the garage. Before he can explain further, I gasp.
We're surrounded. The walls of the garage are furnished from
floor to ceiling with metal utility shelves. And each shelf,
every level, is occupied by featureless white Styrofoam heads,
and each Styrofoam head is crowned with a wig. In every color,
every texture, every imaginable coiffure, wigs.
"Your wife, she
likes wigs?"
Brautigan gets
out of the car and reaches through a wall of blond hair flowing
off one wig head down in front of the wig head below it. When he
pulls his hand out again, he's holding a key. "Well, yes," he
says. "These aren't all her wigs, though. She originally intended
to set up a mail-order wig business. And these are sample wigs.
Some of them she made herself. She took a correspondence course
in wig-making. A lot of these are made from horses' manes and
tails," he points out.
I look around to
see if I can identify the equestrian models. I cannot, although
one dreadlocked nest of fiber calls to mind Black Beauty in one
of his less flattering moments.
"It, uh, never
really got off the ground. Her business. But she couldn't bear to
get rid of the wigs, and nobody seemed interested in buying them
as a lot. I thought she might offer them to some wig museum. The
interesting ones, that is. She grew one of them in the backyard.
Cornsilk, or hemp, or something like that."
"It's a very
striking tableau," I say.
Brautigan nods,
then lowers his voice. "Scary as hell at night."
Using the key he
fished from behind the hairy waterfall, Brautigan lets us in the
back door. "It's sort of a mess," he apologizes. "But it always
is. It's not just that the wife and kids have left me here to
bach it." He switches on a light and reveals a realm of
pinecones. Everywhere. Hundreds of them. In piles on a card
table. Scattered across kitchen counters. Hanging from threads
taped to the ceiling fan. Following Brautigan as he makes his
rounds -- checking phone messages (none); fetching the mail (a
dry cleaner's coupon) -- I discover pinecones in every imaginable
nook and cranny. The house is awash in them.
"Pinecones."
"What?"
Brautigan is poking around under the sink for charcoal lighter
and matches. "What? Pinecones? Oh, yes. They're like Tribbles.
You ever see that Star Trek? Good one. Kyle collects them.
Pinecones, that is." He stands up with a squeeze-bottle of
Flame-Now and a box of matches. "Each one is tagged. Place
collected. Date. He's been picking them up for years and has pen
pals all over the world who supply him with the truly exotic
varieties."
I look around
trying to see if I can distinguish the exotic varieties from the
domestic. They all look so familiar, so pineconish, I am at a
loss. Noticing one preserved under a glass globe, I say, "Wow.
There's a nice one," and nod at it.
"That's the
first one," Brautigan explains. "He picked it up in the front
yard when he was a baby and carried it around for four years
solid. They were inseparable. Some babies bond with their
blankets, some with pinecones. If you look closely, you can see
where one of his baby teeth broke loose and is wedged between two
whatsits." Brautigan leans toward me a little, grinning. "He
named it Ollie."
During the
course of the evening I manage to excuse myself several times
from our vigil at the barbecue pit. Under the guise of
pea-sized-bladder discomfort, I set off for "the bathroom" again
and again. Behind various doors I discover a number of incredible
collections. In a bedroom painted shocking pink I find
bookshelves o'erflowing with soup cans, all unopened.
In the cavernous
attic rumpus room, floor a logjam of Tinkertoys and LEGOS, the
walls are covered in Polaroid pictures, hundreds and hundreds of
them, closeups of people's faces, each individual sporting
reading glasses and a broad smile. One room is stacked high with
canoe paddles; another swims in ceramic fishes.
It is only
during my last expedition that I discover the good doctor's
study, wherein grows a forest of his legal pads and spiral
notebooks, stacked one atop another from the scratched hardwood
floor to the creamy stucco ceiling. Taking one pad from the
nearest stack, pulling it out gingerly, giving no thought to how
I might reinsert it, I open it to find a transcription of a
conversation we'd had early in our work together, when Brautigan
was obsessed with finding out if the position of the stars had
anything to do with my actions, if the moon affected my stalkings
as it affected the tides and werewolves.
Brautigan: What can you tell me about the Big
Dipper?
Subject:
No matter where I look, I find it.
Brautigan: So, it's your special
constellation.
Subject:
No, I just don't know any others. Hell, I don't know if I'm
seeing the Big Dipper right. It's like playing connect-the-dots
on a dalmation; if it stands still long enough, you can find
anything you want.
Brautigan: Anything?
Subject:
Sure.
Brautigan: Could you find a rooster?
Subject:
A rooster? Is that supposed to mean something? Is that
supposed to say something about my mental state?
Brautigan: No. It's just the first thing that came to
mind.
Subject:
What made you think rooster?
Brautigan: I don't know. What do you think that
means?
Subject:
Are you asking me for real, or is this some kind of trick?
Brautigan: For real.
Subject:
Roosters don't lay eggs.
Brautigan: And?
Subject:
Foghorn Leghorn is a blithering fool.
Brautigan: Meaning?
Subject:
(thirty seconds of silence) You know, now that I think about it,
once, while skulking -- unsuccessfully -- near Lawrence, Kansas,
I'm almost positive I found Orion.
Notepad tucked
in the waistband of my underwear, at the small of my back, I go
out to find Brautigan standing in the middle of a roped-off area
at the rear of the yard. "We're putting in a storage building
back here. Nothing big."
"Oh, really," I
say. "With a nice big house like you've got?"
"It gets a tad
crowded sometimes. Hence the need for a little extra
space."
"Your family has
an interesting collection of. . . collections." I watch
Brautigan's face to see if he can tell what I've been up to, what
I've witnessed, what I know.
"Yes. We all
have our own interests."
"I'll say. You,
yourself, what exactly do you collect?"
Brautigan's brow
descends to hood his eyes. "I suspect," he says, spitting a
little, "the steaks are done." Like a count welcoming guests to
his castle, he sweeps wide his arm, ushering me toward the
heat-spitting fire. "Shall we dine?"
Rusty's latest
postcard to DeeDee appeared today, sandwiched between a phone
bill and a True Value Dollar Daze flyer. On it, a girl in a hoop
skirt, lavender parasol resting lightly against her milky
shoulder, poses in a garden crowded with magnolias and oleanders.
In the background, cypress trees curtained in Spanish moss tower
spookily. The girl's eyes, a lab-doctored blue, blaze out of the
postcard like the pilot light on my stove. Her hair, Andalusian
eddies, swirls, waves and dips, glistens like black ice. The
gargantuan dress she models is polar bear white, trimmed with
snowflake lace, swooping satin w's, veins of glacial ribbons from
which tinkle and sparkle pea-sized bells. Her waist, narrow as a
champagne flute, rises stiffly from the Monticelloish hoop. Her
bodice swells to showcase an ample bosom, adorned with a galaxy
of sea-stolen pearls. Sleeves billow like cumulonimbus. Her
smile, a knife blade of hospitality, demonstrates an upbringing
lousy with visits to the family orthodontist. Is there a Civil
War cannon hidden under the belle's bulky skirt? Does the family
rottweiler crouch there in that musky tent, eager to rip the
balls off a marauding Yankee? Are alligators poised, teeth
glinting, to attack, signaled by her sweetly drawled "Chee-eeese"
and the camera's minuscule click? Does a hurricane lurk just
behind the photographer's sunburnt neck, charitably delaying its
onslaught for the sake of Beauty's capture?
"DeeDee," writes
Rusty, "Be glad you're in West Texas where an occasional breeze
comes up. This here is some kind of hell. Ready to come back home
to you. Always yours."
We drove to
Dallas to shop for a hand. On Main Street just east of downtown,
in an area called Deep Ellum due to the locals' pronunciation of
nearby Elm Street as Ellum, a simple, neat storefront housed (and
may still house) "Lemon's Prosthetics."
"Are you
nervous?" my mother asked me as we drove through downtown Big D.
My left foot stamped an allegretto tatoo on the muddied
floorboard of our faithful Ford.
I didn't lie.
Between my mother and me even bravery was no excuse for a
maltreatment of truth. "Yes," I said. "But excited, too."
My doctor had
given us the address of the place, had phoned ahead and spoken to
Mrs. Delia Lemon, proprietor, explained the situation and needs
and limited budget on which we survived. "I hope they have
something we can afford," I said.
"They do," my
mother assured me. "We're not leaving until we've haggled our way
into the most extravagant and marvelous fist in existence." She
reached over with her free hand (such luxury, two hands) and
stilled my thumping foot, knee, leg. "Maybe we'll get one with
diamond rings built into it."
"Yuck," I
said.
"Or maybe one
that, at the push of a button, will constrict to squeeze a cute
girl's elbow --"
I blushed and
smiled. "Nah."
"Or a beer can.
You could flatten beer cans without batting an eye. Think how
handy that might be in college."
We both knew I
wouldn't be going to college most probably, unless I stumbled
upon some deluxe financial aid. But I laughed anyway. "Maybe
they'll have a hand that heats up. I could warm rolls and cook
eggs in my palm."
"Or a foreign
hand, one modeled on the reigning extremity of an African king.
Or a Japanese hand, designed to excel at judo. I bet they make a
million kinds of hands. Dainty, French manicured hands for
debutantes. Slender but masculine hands with long fingers for
piano players --"
"Former piano
players," I amended.
"Piano
players," my mother insisted. "Rough, burly lumberjack hands --
probably a huge market for those."
And then,
suddenly, we were there, pulling up to the curb at a store whose
windows were so clean they appeared to be not there at all. The
dust-free sidewalk was shadowed by a bright yellow awning that
extended away from the building all the way to the street.
Lemon's Prosthetics. The words floated on the door's glass. From
where I sat, I could see a woman with red hair standing behind a
desk, waving at us. Smiling.
"I think I
expected something less bright," my mother said.
"Someplace dark
and dank, below street level," I added.
The woman inside
picked up what looked like a mannequin's hand off her desk and
waved it at us.
"Something
nearly invisible," I said. "Someplace secret."
Things get out
of control quickly.
Like
second-graders defending their favorite superheroes or most
lovingly despised comic-book villain, the students have worked
themselves into a cursing tizzy. The threat of violence exists. I
am sitting at the back of the room again, observing the
frantically expanding hostilities and Brautigan's seeming
enjoyment of the whole shebang.
It started out
simply enough. A pair of students gave a short presentation on
two modern folkloric characters: myself and the dreaded Axe Man,
a killer who dresses up like a little old lady to wait in
mall-shoppers' darkened parked cars. The presentations were, in
my opinion, entertaining, but -- at least the parts about me -- a
tad sketchy. The conclusion met with patchy applause and
foot-stomping.
"Good,"
Brautigan allowed, "insofar as you related the tales fairly and
included relevant regional variations. But you've neglected a
fairly obvious means of delving deeper into the meanings behind
the men. How do they compare?" Silence. "Anyone?"
"The Hook Man is
better," a girl in the front row announced, inducing a smile on
her very hero's lips.
"Not," a
Hispanic youth sitting directly behind her countered. "The Hook
Man is lame. He doesn't do nothing."
"Yeah," the boy
sitting next to him added. "Plus, I've heard that story ten
million times. I'd never heard about the Axe Man before."
"So, what? Are
you guys saying new is better?" a girl with frizzy black hair
asked. "Like New Coke was better than Coca-Cola Classic? Get a
grip."
"I think the Axe
Man is better because he's real clever, you know."
"Like, if the
Hook Man put on a dress then he could compete with this
flake?"
"What makes
transvestitism clever? Hello?"
"Definitely Hook
Man," a boy in a backward baseball cap pronounced. People stopped
to listen to him, but he just shrugged. "Definitely Hook Man," he
repeated.
"Hook Man is
perverse, though. He gets after couples doing it, man. At least
the Axe Man just gets consumers."
"But the
consumers are always women. He's sexist."
"Like he can
tell what kind of car a woman drives and that's the one he gets
into? Who's being sexist now?"
"The Hook Man
wins because he doesn't actually get caught, you know."
"Yeah, but he
loses the Hook, man."
"The Axe Man
doesn't get caught, either."
"Well, he must
have gotten caught once, because we know he's a man,
right?"
"Maybe he
got somebody, and they lived to tell that it was a
man."
"As far as I
know, the Hook Man never actually got anybody."
"Then why was he
in an asylum for the mentally criminal, or whatever?"
(By the way, I
have never been in a home of any kind.)
"Axe Man is more
urban. That's one thing. The Hook Man hangs out on country roads
and shit. He's, like, a nature boy. Axe Man is just a crazy
mall-walker, when you get right down to it."
"How come
they're both men? Why no Hook Woman or Axe Girl?"
Things went
along like that for quite some time. Then they got worse.
Name-calling was introduced into the arena. Sides began to be
drawn up. The room polarized. One side for me, the other for Axe
Man.
Oddly, I'm
sitting on Axe Man's side.
And it's very
tempting to leap up on top of my desk, brandish my piece and let
havoc rule.
But no.
"Ladies and
gentlemen," Brautigan half yells. "I would like to introduce one
unthought-of theorem into the pudding." The class quieted to
mumbles and growls. "What if Hook Man and Axe Man are the same
man?"
"No!" I
exclaim.
The class is
turning toward me as one. Their faces are in profile when (O!
joyous clich é !) the bell rings and they return to their normal
lives as boys and girls eager to get outside and toss Frisbees,
mix margaritas.
Brautigan and I
are left alone. He sits at his desk, chair leaning back against
the chalkboard. I'm halfway out of my seat. "No," I tell him in a
firm voice, the voice I might use to train a dog. "No."
After a solid
hour of measuring the circumference of my wrist, elbow, biceps,
the length of my forearms, the width of my shoulders, Delia Lemon
said, "I've got cotton-mouth. Do you want a Coke?"
I was so caught
up in the feel of her skin against my own, her fingernails
whispering across my scarred flesh, the smell of her perfume and
sound of her kittenish voice reciting the numbers aloud before
writing them down, I scarcely heard her. I was hypnotized.
"I would love a
Coke," my mother said. I started in my seat, surprised by the
sound of her voice, embarrassed to have been thinking the
thoughts I was.
"How about you?"
Delia Lemon asked, her breath breezing up my nostrils to
immobilize my brain. "A Coke?"
I nodded.
"Uh-huh."
"Well," Delia
said to my mother, "if you don't mind, there's a little grocery
just a couple of blocks down. If you tell the man at the counter
it's for me, he'll put it on my tab."
"Which way?" my
mother said, standing.
"Turn right
outside the door. Toward downtown."
"Be right back,"
my mother promised. And left.
The night of the
day my hand came off, I slept in the bottom bunk. This was not
the norm. Being the older brother, I had always commanded the
privilege of sleeping in the top bunk. In the winter, the heat
from our gas stove rose to the ceiling, then settled in layers
from the top down; the top bunk was warmer. In the summer, the
drafts from the fan that rotated high above the floor were more
effectively felt from the top bunk; it was cooler. The top bunk
afforded a better, eagle's-eye view of the room. Lounging in the
top bunk could lead one to believe he was aslumber in India, in a
monkey-filled banyan tree.
Sleeping there
was slightly more dangerous than sleeping in the bottom bunk; one
might roll out of bed in the course of an enthusiastic dream and
dash one's brains against the hardwood floors. The top bunk, by
the very nature of its name, was better. It was mine.
My little
brother tried to make his bottom bunk into a more desirable
locale by transforming it, using sheets and blankets, into a cave
accessible only to him. Rather than allow him any sense of
victory, I shunned the whole idea of the cave and never attempted
to enter when he took refuge therein. It was "stupid,"
"retarded," and "baby stuff," I recall saying.
Nonetheless, my
first handless night, my mother insisted my brother and I trade
beds. She was convinced I would be more comfortable in the bottom
bunk. Although climbing into the upper bunk was by no means a
treacherous feat, my mother worried I would be unable to make the
ascent successfully and, once there and sleeping, suddenly, by
virtue of my wound, the most likely candidate the world over for
tumbling mid-snore from the bunk's daredevil height.
Surprisingly, my
little brother did not lord his lucky acquisition over me with
nearly the amount of glee I expected. He did, in fact, whine that
he would be unable to rest at ease in the top bunk. He was too
used to the bottom bunk's womblike embrace. To sleep in the top
bunk would be like sleeping outdoors, atop a hill, without tent
or sleeping bag. Naked. Vulnerable.
He argued well
but unsuccessfully.
When I was
comfortably ensconced in my brother's former nest, I smelled him
on the sheets and pillows, the sour scent of his nightmare sweat
and lemonade breath. "Hey," he said a few minutes after we were
alone, when our parents' voices adjourned to their muffling
bedroom.
"What?"
"You know my cow
skull?" he said, referring to a recent discovery he'd made that I
silentiy but obviously coveted. It was stashed in an old trunk in
the barn's tack room where my brother kept the treasures he
considered too valuable for public viewing or too gruesome for my
mother's approval.
"Yeah."
"You can have it
if you want it."
I knew what he
was doing, of course. And I was honestly touched. We'd always
gotten along, my brother and I. But his offering was the first
time I knew that he felt any affection for me or I for him.
"No," I said.
"Thanks, though."
Delia Lemon
said, "This is not a very fun way for a thirteen-year-old boy to
spend a nice fall afternoon. Cooped up with me. Getting poked and
prodded and felt up like a piece of meat."
"I'm twelve," I
said. "And it's not so bad."
Her hand was
warm against the inside of my elbow. I could feel her pulse
thrumming against my own.
"You're doing
real well," Delia cooed. "Very brave." Her hand wandered up the
inside of my arm to rest on my shoulder. "And you're very
handsome. Did you know that? That you're very handsome?"
I felt like I
might pass out. It was not like romance novels would have you
believe, all sounds stopping but for the melody of the beloved's
voice and the thunderous boom of one's heart. Indeed, sounds
became so loud I thought my head might explode. The air
conditioner, hidden somewhere behind and above me, roared.
Fluorescent lights buzzed like a plague of wasps. Cars passing on
the street revved and whooshed, dragsters and missiles.
"No," I said. I
didn't know I was handsome. I don't think for a moment, actually,
that I was. I'm still not.
"But you are,"
Delia insisted. "You're going to be a very dashing man. And this"
-- she didn't need to look down at or point out my handicap --
"doesn't make you any less attractive. For some women, maybe for
all women, it makes you even more exciting. Virile.
Adventurous."
Delia's hand
floated up to caress my cheek. I shut my eyes, afraid to see what
might happen next.
My mother
entered the store like a sonic boom. "I'm back," she announced. I
didn't realize I'd been holding my breath, but I had, and it all
rushed out of me at once, as if I was one of those old woodcuts
you see, where the wind, lumpily personified in a cloud, blusters
at a many-masted galleon. "What?" my mother said, her right arm
cradling three sweating sodas. "Are you in pain?"
My mail carrier
did not come today.
This is no
holiday. It's a Monday.
I put a
subscription renewal card for Texas Monthly in my mailbox
early this morning, and it's still there. Frustrated, downright
angry, I take the envelope out of the mailbox and walk it down to
the post office. It slides into the empty box with a short whoosh
and drumlike thud.
On the way home,
I get the strangest feeling that I'm being followed, like in the
movie version of To Kill a Mockingbird: I think I hear the
whisper of footsteps behind me. And when I stop to listen, they
stop, too, only a millisecond behind my stopping, so the
disparity registers audibly. It becomes a cruel and spooky game,
me walking then suddenly stopping, ears poised.
When I'm passing
the park, with its tall, thick wall of oleanders bordering the
sidewalk, I feel certain the footsteps rush to catch up with me.
My heart, in turn, races. Someone's in the oleanders, not more
than five feet away from me. I'm sure of it.
I stop. "Hey," I
say and wait for a response of some kind, a yelp, a war cry, a
raspy breath. "Cecil Jacobs is a big wet hen," Scout called in
Mockingbird. The same dangerous silence answered
her.
One oleander
leaf brushes against another. A pink bloom bumps through a maze
of branches to the ground. Dirt squeaks under a shifting
loafer.
"Who's there?" I
ask.
Far off I hear
two cars racing down the town's main drag.
"Brautigan?" I
ask. "Brautigan? Is that you?"
But there's no
more motion. No more night-sounds. My heart slows, and I turn to
walk again. Toward home. I don't look back, not once, not even
when I'm at my door. I go inside and straight to bed. Without
checking closets or nailing a loop of garlic to my headboard, I
undress and slide beneath the covers to sleep.
I find Dr.
Brautigan in the bathroom, leaning on a washbasin, gazing into a
mirror as if remembering a Shakespeare sonnet. "I've been
reading," he says when he notices my reflection. "About our
ancestors." He waits to see if I will question him. "They were
called highwaymen for a time, when people used to travel by
carriage or stagecoach. Sometimes. . . they just leapt out at
passing vehicles with no intention of robbing them. Sometimes
they would just leap out. Like the Boogeyman."
"No," I say.
"There's no such thing as the Boogeyman. Or if there is, he is
something else entirely."
"There are lots
of us," Brautigan suggests. "I've been trying to figure out why
there are hundreds of reports of you in the Northeast when you
claim never to have gone any further north than Ohio. And it's
because there is, there has been, there will be more than one
of you. There's more than one of you in this bathroom."
"There's the me
in the mirror and the me in that other mirror and there's just
plain me," I say.
"And there's
me," Brautigan finishes. "And my reflections, too."
"There's a gang
of us," I note. I look at the wall above Brautigan's head, where
someone has penciled in large, neat letters, "I THINK, THEREFORE
I SPAM."
Brautigan
follows my eyes and reads the sentence out loud, then half
laughs, half gags. "Where would I be now if I'd decided to
concentrate on latrinalia?"
"Same place," I
answer. "Everybody ends up here."
There's a note
on my mailbox when I get home. The UPS man has been here and in
my absence left a package across the street at my neighbor's. I
turn and look at where she stands in her yard watering the
impatiens that fashion a thick pink-white-green margin around her
home. She waves. "Hellooo!" she moos. "I have a box for
yoooo."
I wave back and
smile. "Can I come get it now?" I ask. Adrenaline begins to pump
in my veins. What is it? A gift from Rosemary? A handmade afghan
or tray of divinity? Portrait? Pottery? Elderberry wine?
She beckons to
me with her hose, the spray of water fanning out under a rainbow.
"It's heavy!" she announces. "Can hardly lift it."
I trot across
the street, grinning. "Thanks," I say. "He probably could have
just left it on my porch."
"And have some
klepto dog-walker make off with it? No." She puts her hose down
and dries her hands on the front of her shirt, confiding, "Garden
duds."
I hold her front
door open for her. "Thank yoooo," she says. Then, "Have you ever
seen my house?" I shake my head no. "Well, you'll just have to
let me give you the grand tour."
The box is just
inside the door, brown cardboard, the size of a small carry-on
bag. Before I can bend down to examine it, my neighbor's tugging
at my sleeve. "And I just made up a big pitcher of Texas Tea. Do
you imbibe?"
"Yes, I do," I
say, craning my neck to look back at the diminishing package. The
handwriting on the label looks familiar, but I can't make it out.
"On occasion."
"My husband was
a bartender immediately after we finished college," my neighbor
-- it occurs to me that I don't even know her name -- informs me.
"And he taught me the secret to mixing a perfect Texas Tea. Just
before he died." She stops. We're in the kitchen, in front of a
counter empty but for a tall pitcher of what looks like tea, two
glasses, and a wood-grained ice bucket heaped with Texas-shaped
cubes. My neighbor points at the pitcher with one hand, shields
her mouth with the other, as if keeping a secret from the waiting
refreshments. ("Waiting?" Was she waiting for me? Has all this
been arranged? Is she aware of my schedule? Am I watched by those
around me? Am I paranoid?) "Just a little less tequila than
vodka. And a teensy bit less vodka than gin. And a little bit
more of everything else, equally. Have you ever been to the
R&R Toltec? That's the bar my Rudy tended way back when. And
do you know who was the bouncer there at that time?"
"No, ma'am," I
say.
She busily
begins putting little Lone Star ice cubes into the glasses. "Dan
Blocker," she says reverentially.
"Oh,
really?"
She hears the
confusion in my voice and turns to give me a bewildered look as
she pours my tea. "Hoss. Hoss Cartwright. On
Bonanza."
"Oh," I say,
giving the syllable the proper inflection.
"That's right,
'Oh.' He could toss a drunkard out the door like shooting socks
into the laundry hamper."
She hands me my
drink and promptly picks up her own to clink it against mine.
"Cheers," she chirps. "Now. This is the kitchen, of
course."
"Nice," I croon,
because it's the right thing to say and it honestly is
nice, bright and clean and lived-in.
"And through
here," my neighbor scurries away, motioning for rate to follow,
"is the den."
We've already
seen the entirety of the downstairs and admired two of the
children's old upstairs bedrooms (livestock trophies and
twirler's ribbons intact and dustless after more than thirty
years) when I begin to realize what is odd about the decor. In
every room -- every single room, including the laundry and huge
walk-in pantry -- there are framed, wall-mounted photos of the
house itself, sometimes of the very room in which we stand. Going
up the staircase a series of photos, some in black and white,
others in bright Kodacolor, stagger upward, Stygian. In some
rooms, the photos are almost imperceptible, tiny, three by five
or smaller, tucked away next to calendars and mummified
Homecoming corsages. In other areas, most notably my neighbor's
colossal peach-shaded bedroom, the pictures are prominently
displayed. Over her well-fluffed pillows, my neighbor has hung a
billboard-sized watercolor depicting her and (I assume) her late
husband sitting in bed, legs and waists buried under a tangerine
comforter, torsos, arms and heads erect, stiff, and elegantly
pajamaed in full view of the painter and subsequent witnesses. A
cat's haunches and tail sneak in at the bottom left corner. In
the master bath a child's finger painting of the shower,
portrayed at full blast, a roaring waterfall, midnight blue, is
under glass above the toilet. In the study the bookcases are
beautifully arranged in both real life and the bizarre
photorealist mural that spans one entire wall. On the landing, an
antique stitchery ("Home Sweet Home," of course) is side by side
with an eleven-by-fourteen glossy of that same stitchery.
Downstairs again, in the foyer, glass empty, ready to claim my
prize and leave, I look up to see a last photo above the door,
this one of the yard, from the viewpoint of the porch. Across the
street, my house and -- in the front window -- a shadowy figure
caught against the drapes like the villain in a magic lantern
show, me.
"Thanks for the
Tea," I say, the drink's potency thickening my tongue. "And the
tour. You have a beautiful home."
My neighbor
lowers her head to beam at her feet. "Do you really think
so?"
"I do. I do," I
assure her, like a stuttering groom. Bending, I gather my package
and find myself grunting under its weight.
"It's heavy, I
told you," my neighbor reminds me. "Can you get it? Should I get
a dolly?"
"No," I say,
face reddening with strain and anticipation for when the package
is in my home and I can have my way with its taped lid. "I got
it."
My neighbor
holds the door open for me. "Come back anytime you get thirsty,"
she gurgles as I stumble past her, out onto her soaking lawn. My
shoes sink in Bermuda, and I fear losing a shoe. "I'll make us
some more Tea. Or a Scorpion. Do you like Scorpions?" she calls
to me as I cross the street.
I'm at my front
door, fumbling with the knob, which I was wise enough to unlock
before my across-the-street adventure. "I love them," I holler
back. And then I'm inside. And the package is before me on the
floor. And I'm pushing the sharp tip of my hook under its
taped-shut skin, ready to rip and behold and revel. . .
. . . When I
notice for the first time the addressee is not yours
truly. DEEDEE EASTEP is scrawled across the mailing label in a
hand I thought was familiar because indeed it was. Rusty. It's a
package from Rusty to DeeDee.
I pause. Should
I continue? It's a federal offense to open somebody else's mail.
The postcards I haven't had to open. They were postcards. The
writing was open-air, alfresco, naked for all the world, all the
mail carriers, all the snooping neighbors and lurking landlords
to see and read and, if the mood hit them, memorize, as I have
memorized all of Rusty's maudlin doodles. But this, this box
before me, its lip in my pointy clutch, is another matter
entirely. It is a cocoon, secreting a message, one meant to
blossom and fly in the face of its intended only.
"Fuck it," I say
out loud. I tear the box top up without a second thought, without
a pang of guilt. I delve my hand and hook deep into the box's
tissue-paper entrails and dredge for treasure. When my hand
brushes something at once soft and hard and my hook knocks
against an object definitely hard I am confused. But rather than
indulge myself in any silly guessing games, I clutch and lift and
pull into daylight first a large black rock, then a thick slice
of tree trunk. Then my hand goes back into the box, feeling for a
third treasure or a note of explanation, long-winded epistle of
love.
But there's
nothing else.
I sit back to
contemplate my plunder.
"I've heard them
all," Duncan revealed to me one evening pre-late show. Rosemary
snoozed on the sofa. "Standing behind a half-moon of evergreen
felt, shuffling decks, throwing aces, scooping chips, awarding
silver dollars, changing green bills to yellow, purple, black,
red, orange wafers, sporting bow ties, tuxedo shirts, ruffled
cuffs, lacy garters, lime eyeshades, winking at bejeweled wives
and know-nothing newlyweds, dreamy brides, show-off grooms,
eating all-you-can buck ninety-nine buffets, sucking smoke and
bad cologne and coffee breath and spilled Amaretto sours, ankles
bitching, hands cramping, stomach rumbling, ears ringing from
jackpot cacophonies, squealing call girls, cursing grandmaws,
bellowing drunks, hissing pit bosses, eyes flooded from
retina-stinging neon, running lights, spangles, sparkles,
rhine-stones, lame, cubic zirconia, nine-carat diamonds, rubies,
opals, have I mentioned lame, worldview lashed to shreds by
marble juggling roulette, hypnotic slots, boisterous craps
crowds, cover bands, microphones, mirrors (one-way two-way
marbleized), video cameras catching nothing but my hands and the
hands of the marks I serve. Over all that I've heard them all. In
the midst of the orgy, the circus, the chaos, I have listened and
heard, like I said, them all." Duncan paused to breathe. "That's
not where they start, but that's where they spread, see, the
terror tales and goofball epics: poodles in microwaves, roaches
in pop bottles, maniacs on the upstairs extension, spiders in
bouffants, cobras in cloth coats. Listen: girl goes to a store,
buys a new dress, classy black for the senior prom, feels dizzy
during din-din, drops like a rock during an erection-crushing
slow dance. Is she pregnant? Brain-tumored? Overcome by teen
angst? No. Listen: turns out the dress was worn by a corpse, then
exchanged at the last minute by a lunatic undertaker.
Formaldehyde soaked into the dress from the corpse, into the girl
from the dress. Boom. The mystery is solved. But more
importantly, the gross-out is complete. Heard that one from the
girl's brother's college roommate's mother-in-law, I shit you
not. Harrah's, Lake Tahoe. People gamble. Talk. Try to one-up
each other. Later they get on a plane to go home and tell their
barber the story they heard. He tells it to another schmo later
that afternoon getting his locks lopped for a business trip to
St. Louis. He tells it to the guy sitting next to him on
the plane, who tells it to his kids, who tell it to their dealer,
etc. These stories, they're like a harmless but unstoppable
virus. Everybody is susceptible, even the skeptical. Sometimes
I'll hear some cockamamie gang initiation baloney between hands,
and the next week it gets printed in the newspaper as truth.
Except the gang's name is changed. Maybe it's a different body
part they have to chop off. Casinos are the breeding ground for
more than greed, amigo. And you, with your silvery death grip,
are old potatoes, greasy kids' stuff, not so hot these sun-crazed
post-atomic days, I'm telling you. Tired but not retired, you're
a well-loved golden oldie, daddy-o, a cobwebby Tomorrowland
attraction people refuse to let go of, but pass up in a minute if
the line's short at Space Mountain. But hey, no offense meant.
Like they say, keep on trucking."
Rusty's rock is
riddled with scratches reminiscent of cave paintings, primitive
stick-figure men, women and four-legged beasts. The men thrust
spears at the beasts, the women thrust their pointy breasts at
the men, the beasts -- what are they? buffalo? horses? one
appears to be a giraffe, another an orangutan -- run at the
women, away from the spears, toward a crude crescent moon curving
around the rock's top, bottom, side; there is no way to tell
which way is up with this thing. I roll it end over end on the
floor, looking for some pattern, some way to read the chase that
will explain why Rusty would want DeeDee to have this.
Giving up for
the moment, I turn to the chunk of wood, bark whittled away.
Every inch of it is covered in words burned into it with --
presumably -- an electric pen. Holding it like a scroll that
refuses to unroll, I attempt to read it, but can't. The words --
if they are words -- are scrambled, letters apparently
rearranged, sometimes smushed together in front of a reddish
knot, some huge capitals, some tiny lowercase.
EstaNochEfuerademiventanalosOSosCazanelnectardepicafloresLaLUZDELASEStrellasempolvalaseSpaldastrompasorejasdelicadasAPreTOlaMANosobrEELpechoaTRAPadoelcorazonqueseHAFORzadoporlasCOSTillaspideelpezondeLIBRARlolososohusmeanenlasVENTanasMORDISCANELPINOQUEHACEcentlNelaenmipuertaelcorazonmeDICEqueteoyellamarminombreMEDICEquetepuerdeencontrartellevaraaquiparaverlossenalesdelosososenelpinoparaquelaluzdelasestrellasempolvelasespaldasparaoirlasALASdepicaFOresestaesmicorA
ZONE
elrioquehoINVENTadoyquecorreycorreporlasmontanacontANDOnuestrahiSTORiaclamecOrAzonesilencioDUEremelounicoqueoyescorazonsonlosososcazandoNEcTARBAjolasEstreELLascomEtonOIsywatERandrePLacEthesunSCOldarMSwiTHYOuroWN
What the
hell?
It was, before
it was a lake, an oil field dappled with licorice-black derricks,
elongated steelwork pyramids named Bub's Gusher #3, Old Faithful
South, Woody's Crude Heaven 77. Rosemary and I paddled from one
derrick to another, gliding like the water moccasins all around
us under the struts and joints and rusting machinery. "I love
this place," Rosemary said again and again, turning to smile at
me. I sat in the rear, steering, my hook locked onto the paddle
like a vise. It was new to me, this paddling and steering and
splashing. I hadn't had much to do with water since my accident
and my father's death. For fear of rusting my prosthesis, and
without the old man's insistence on sitting like mannequins on a
muddy bank, cane poles in hand, hands stinking of bloodbait, I
had abandoned swimming and fishing and wading and tadpole
harassing. On my forays into the American wilds, I had seen much
water: rivers, lakes, ponds, puddles of every dimension and
color. Indeed, one late July eve I surprised two employees of a
waterpark -- Wet Dreams, USA -- only moments before they would
have shimmied out of their skimpy red uniforms. (My hook, framed
in the triangle of a rear passenger window, my adrenaline pumping
like mad, the shriek echoing over and over across the asphalt
parking lot, the smell of chlorine permeating it all, giving way
to the pungent aroma of rubber burning: a successful venture, in
every regard.)
"Over there,"
Rosemary said, pointing her paddle at a derrick that loomed just
right of us, twenty yards away. I struggled to maneuver the canoe
around. My shoulders ached, my back ached, my chest ached, but I
was happy nonetheless to bring even more pain onto myself;
Rosemary's smile wooed me like a snake charmer's penny whistle. I
was careful not to splash too much, careful to keep the paddle at
the side of the canoe, to bring it up and out of the water slowly
and put it back in gently, to keep the water quiet, to maintain
the "peace" Rosemary praised so highly every five minutes or so.
A trout or bass, some mysterious lake-dweller, somersaulted after
a mosquito behind us, his splash so much different than my own,
his splash belonging here, a part of this wild puzzle, my own
being unwanted, an intruder's. "What was that?" Rosemary said,
turning around.
"Bass," I
answered, pretending great knowledge of things masculine and
scaly. "Largemouth."
"Slow down,"
Rosemary bid me, turning back to her position as scout.
I held my paddle
still in the water, dragging us slower and slower as we
approached one derrick. "I think this is the tallest, don't you?"
Rosemary asked. Without waiting for an answer, she threw the rope
around the rig's algaed leg and began to clamber up onto the
ladder of crossing iron bars. Though footless, she was as
surefooted as a bighorn sheep. Halfway to the top, she stopped
and looked down at me. "Come on."
Wary of the
boat's shifting center of balance, I made my way to the same spot
from which Rosemary had begun her ascent. I dislodged the paddle
from my hook's grip. My shoulder ached with relief, unaware of
the coming new challenge. "Careful," I called up to Rosemary, a
warning meant as much for myself.
"You, too," she
sang back.
My hook clanged
against the metal like a drumstick against a fine Turkish cymbal.
Each gonging signaled another step up, like the tintinnabulations
of an elevator moving from Bargain Basement to Sporting Goods to
Lingerie.
Clang. Clang.
Clang.
By now, Rosemary
had reached the top of the derrick. She'd swung herself astraddle
one wide beam, cowgirlishly, her shorts a nightmare of rust
stains. "What can you see?" I asked her, half hoping she would
declare the view unsatisfactory and begin her descent.
"Everything,"
she said. "Come up here."
Clang. Clang.
Clang.
I stopped again,
several feet short of where Rosemary perched. "Can you see water
moccasins? I bet you can see lots of water moccasins."
Without looking
down, Rosemary grinned. I couldn't see it, but I could hear it in
her voice. "Come on up," she said, the space between each word
like a finger curling, beckoning.
Clang. Clang.
Clang.
"I think maybe
I've climbed high enough. I think I can probably see everything
just as clearly from right here," I said, even though I'd looked
at nothing but the canoe below me and the iron rails I
clutched.
"Get up here,"
Rosemary said, perturbed.
Clang. Clang.
Clang.
And then, at
last, I was there, face to face with Rosemary. I swung my
leg across the same beam on which she sat and balanced myself
carefully.
"You're not
looking at where I'm looking," Rosemary complained.
"I'm looking at
you."
Rosemary grabbed
my shoulders and twisted me around. "Turn," she said, meaning it.
I cautiously raised myself up so that I could rotate to look at
whatever it was Rosemary found so important for me to see. It was
the setting sun, of course, as red and yellow and orange and gold
as any painter or poet ever described it.
"Look at the
water," Rosemary said. She put her hands on my shoulders again
and pulled me toward her, so that I had to scoot backward to keep
from being pulled down. When I felt my back meet her bosom, I
stopped. She took her hands from my shoulders and clasped them
around my belly, like a pulsing, luxurious belt. "Look at the
water," she said again. "See."
"I don't feel
very well balanced," I said. "I'm not sure this is safe."
"Relax,"
Rosemary urged me. "I've got you. Relax," she said. "I'm not
going to let go."
And I did.
I let myself
fall limp in her arms and forgot about the danger all around us,
the perilous height, the squirmy water moccasins, the lightning
storm that was no doubt boiling up somewhere nearby. I relaxed
and looked, as Rosemary had insisted, at the water, which was
dyed like a volcanic rainbow from the horizon line to just in
front of my eyes. In some spots, it was so red it suggested a
valentine heart, slick with the leavings of a kiss. In other
spots, at the base of some tiny waves, the blackness was as
complete as the oil these derricks once methodically sucked up
from the earth's heart. I relaxed and leaned back into Rosemary
as she leaned against a sturdy iron leg. I closed my eyes and saw
that sunset dance on the inside of my eyelids. I relaxed and
breathed deep, felt my heartbeat slow, rose and fell like a life
raft on Rosemary's chest as it rose and fell, our breaths
aligning themselves until like a single person we sat on top of
the derrick in the waning light, sighing and eyeing the day's
brilliant end.
When we finally
climbed down into the canoe, the sun had almost completely
disappeared: only a band of neon crimson marked the horizon, like
a racing stripe. The bullfrogs, a legion of tireless
sousa-phones, began to choir and splash amongst the whistling
reeds. "Can we find our way to shore?" Rosemary asked. "Is there
enough light?"
"I think so," I
said.
"I bet the canoe
man has left," Rosemary suggested. "I bet he's gone home to his
wife and kids."
"I paid in
advance," I told her. "And he said we could just leave the canoe
next to the others if he wasn't there when we got back."
"What if
somebody steals it?"
"I don't think
he's worried about that," I said, although it would certainly be
easy enough for some teenagers with a pickup to haul the thing
away.
"You know,"
Rosemary said, "I think we should do this a lot more."
"Uh-huh."
"Definitely
every year on this day," she said. "An anniversary canoe trip.
Every year."
My paddle
thumped against the canoe. "As long as I'm around," I said,
knowing even as I said it that it was the wrong thing to say, but
having no way to take it back without it sounding even worse than
it already was.
Rosemary was
silent for a minute or two. She paddled hard. So hard that I was
forced to steer more than paddle. "Well, of course," she finally
managed, and I could hear the hurt and anger in her voice. "Every
year until you're gone. Of course."
"Mrs. Lemon
called," my mother said when I got home from school and wandered
into the kitchen to get a snack. "The prosthetic lady," she
clarified unnecessarily; scarcely a moment passed in the day or
night that I didn't think about Delia Lemon's fingers, her warm,
soft palm against my face. "She said your hand is ready. Your
hook, that is. And we can come pick it up anytime."
"Tomorrow," I
said.
"Well. No. By
the time you get home from school and we get over there, they'll
be closed. I was thinking we might go on Saturday. She said it
would take a while to explain how everything worked and you might
want to spend some time there getting used to it, making any
necessary adjustments." My mother turned back to the kitchen
counter, where she was rolling chicken parts in flour for frying.
"I was thinking I might drop you off -- I'd come in with you for
a few minutes, of course -- and then go to the mall to get my
Christmas shopping done. If you promise to behave yourself, that
is."
My mind was
reeling with images of a long afternoon spent in the back room of
Lemon's Prosthetics. I imagined Delia and myself sprawled on a
bed that was mysteriously, inexplicably there, if only in my
mind, her manicured nails running up and down the inside of my
arm, her breath in my ear, her lips pressed hard against my
own.
"Could you?
Behave yourself?" my mother asked.
I fumbled.
"What? I don't know what you're --"
"If I go
Christmas shopping. Promise not to get in the bags while I'm
driving home? I don't want you to ruin any surprises."
I smiled at my
mother's back. The grease in the frying pan popped and hissed.
"Scout's honor," I said, raising my stump as witness.
"I've been
thinking about Rosemary," Brautigan says at our next
meeting.
"You and me
both," I say.
"And I have to
admit I'm a little concerned about something. A little
confused."
I begin to feel
uncomfortable. Brautigan has been a wonderful ear in regard to
Rosemary. He has listened and kept his mouth shut, grunting at
the right times, knitting his eyebrows when appropriate. I feel
my stomach churn a bit, afraid that Brautigan is finally going to
say, "Enough!" and declare my obsession ridiculous. I fear he's
going to chide me, to stop humoring me and insist that I "move
on." I resettle myself on my seat, clear my throat, try to make
myself sound as normal as possible. "What?" I say.
"I'm not
entirely convinced she's who she says she is."
"I beg your
pardon?" His suggestion sounds like a line from some ridiculous
old movie, one packed full of private eyes, femmes fatales, fat
villains, and simpering stool pigeons.
"I don't fully
believe that she is the actual Kentucky Fried Rat Lady. It seems
to me that, while her history is certainly tragic, it really,
except for the rats and the chicken, has very little to do with
the KFRat legend. For one thing, she was eating the chicken at
home. There was no family involved. And the chicken was a
chicken, not a rat." Brautigan stops to nod at me, as if his
bobbing head will convince me he is right, even if his words
should fall short. "The fact is, your Rosemary suffered horribly.
The true story is so much more gruesome than the legend, I'm not
convinced the two are connected at all. Legends usually
exaggerate things, make them bigger and more exciting. In her
case, if Rosemary is the basis for the legend, the circumstances
have been altered so that the legend is less gruesome. The
rumor mill has minimized the trauma, sanitized it for public
consumption. Does Rosemary have any proof that she is the real
live victim upon whom the Rat Lady is modeled? Is her name
mentioned in any newspaper articles, scholarly reports?"
I am shaken.
"Well. No. I don't think so. But I don't know why she would make
something like that up."
"Yes," Brautigan
agrees. "But delusions of grandeur are rarely easily explained.
Why would someone choose to believe themselves Napoleon when they
might just as easily be Buddha or Hank Aaron? Catherine the
Great? Nefertiti?"
"So, you're
suggesting Rosemary was -- is -- mentally unbalanced?" I begin to
get a little angry.
"Well. No. Just.
Mistaken." Brautigan smiles at me.
I lean forward
in my chair. "Look, pal, if you think I'm going to sit here and
let you insult and psychoanalyze my friends -- who aren't even
present to defend themselves -- then you're. . . well, you're not
even a therapist or analyst or anything. You're a folklorist,
remember?"
"And you're a
folkloric character."
"I'm a person.
And so is Rosemary."
"Right. She's a
person who thinks she's a folkloric character."
"Well, so am
I."
"No. You
are a folkloric character. You're the genuine article.
I'll certify that. Rosemary only thinks she's a folkloric
character. That doesn't make her any less of a person. Or a
crazy. It just makes her of little real use to my studies. In
terms of the Kentucky Fried Rat story. She's still useful in
terms of you, though. In terms of how she affected you. Since you
left Wichita Falls for Florida, how many times have you struck?
Not counting the time you took me with you."
"Um," I say,
doing the math in my head, although there is no real math to be
done. "Um. None. I haven't struck once. Since then."
"Since the last
time you saw Rosemary. Since you fled and she moved and the two
of you have been out of touch. Not once?"
I sink back in
my chair, uncertain if I should feel ashamed or cured. "No. Not
once."
My brother and I
stood awestruck beneath the flapping canvas posters, ashamed for
our curiosity but unable to move. GONGA THE GIRL-RILLA, QUEEN OF
THE APE-WOMEN! hovered above us, her announcing letters choked
with jungle vines. The cartoon figure, a gorilla with supermodel
breasts and an angel's face, stamped the ground beneath her
ferociously. To her left, a neon-bright poster touted the creepy
courage of TARSEM!, who slept, ate and danced in a viper pit,
cuddling needle-toothed pythons like teddy bears, like feather
boas plucked and soaked in venom. Next to those dangerous
curlicues, hateful s's, the poster my brother and I looked at
only on the sly, catching firefly glimpses, blinking at the
atrocity painted there in horrific detail: LEON THE HUMAN TRUNK!
Sans arms and legs, stumps recalling my own singular,
still-healing misfortune, he smiled down at us like a Thalidomide
Jesu, blissful, at peace with his unlucky lot in this
incarnation. Though we both itched to pay the exorbitant price
required to allow one an audience with these and countless other
FREAKS! (The banner "said" that word like a prospector might
shriek Eureka!), we fought the urge valiantly, commenting
now and again on the number of corny dogs that might be purchased
instead for the same shameful dollars.
"Hey," a boy my
age said, coming up to where we stood admiring GONGA's gargantuan
nipples. "Hey," he said, quite honestly, without a bit of
meanness in his voice, "are you part of the show? Hey, are you?
One of the freaks?" He pointed up and over at LEON. "Is that you?
You LEON?"
In the last few
blocks, I'd begun to develop butterflies in my gut. Sweat,
despite the excess dose of deodorant I'd applied that morning,
trickled down my sides. My mother, upon first sealing herself in
the truck's cab with me, had sniffed a bit, but didn't comment on
the deluge of cologne I'd slathered upon myself. (I had planned
an excuse in the event she did say something: "That Lemon lady
wears so much perfume, this is the only way I can stand to be
that close to her.") Once on Main Street, I was near frantic with
desire.
"It'll feel
weird at first, I imagine," my mother said. "But don't fight Mrs.
Lemon. Just let her tell you what to do, and you'll get used to
it in no time."
We pulled up in
front of Lemon's Prosthetics, and I was out of the door before my
mother had put the car fully in park. "Calm down!" she said, but
I scarcely heard her over the sound of my slamming door and
roiling hormones. If all went right, my mother would stay for a
minute or two -- no more than that, surely -- and then it would
be just me and Delia, alone and unencumbered.
I stopped before
opening the door, drew a deep breath and suppressed -- or tried
to, at least -- my grin. "Think 'suave,' " I reminded
myself.
"Can I help
you?" the man behind the counter asked.
I didn't say
anything, but looked behind him for Delia. She was nowhere to be
seen.
"Can I help
you?" the man repeated, raising his voice a couple of
decibels.
My mother came
in behind me. "Yes," she said. "We're here about his prosthesis.
We have an appointment, but we're a little early."
I could stand it
no longer. "Where's Delia?" I demanded.
The man cocked
his head and wrinkled his brow. "My wife? She's not working
today." My hopes fell in shambles. "But I can take care of you,
no problem." He came out from behind the counter to shake my
hand. He was wearing shorts, making it easy to see that his left
leg was made of plastic and metal joints. His grip was firm,
practiced, intimidating. "We'll have you fixed up
chop-chop."
I turn Rusty's
infernal crypto-log over and over, like a pig on a spit, like a
player piano's spooled tunes. I read it backward and forward,
diagonally, like a crossword puzzle. I rearrange letters to make
new words, copy the sequence on paper again and again, omitting
all but the capital letters in one instance. I go to the library
and check out books on cryptography, soak the whole damned thing
in lemon juice and hold it close to the flames of my gas stove. I
buy a black-light bulb and try to read the log in its spooky
purple glow. I sleep with it near my bed, hoping those last
moments before slumber will surprise me with a new idea. I
blindfold myself and feel the grooves and knots and scarified
letters with my good hand, hoping for a trace of Braille. I
consider having a bonfire and tossing the log in, standing close
over it to sniff its smoldering secrets. I hate it for its
apparent meaninglessness and despise myself for my inability to
crack its code.
I don't know
exactly what the JOLLY ROGER FOLLIES were, a play, a musical,
operetta or evening of vaudevillian antics. I scoured the box,
digging through eye patches and hoop earrings, crumpled swords
and broken spy scopes, looking for a program or flyer or copy of
the script. But there was nothing. Nothing but the cheap costumes
and props and incredible, impossible, real pirate hook was left
of the FOLLIES. That afternoon, when I got home, I dug through my
mother's address book until I found the phone number of Lemon's
Prosthetics. I hadn't been back in years, hadn't seen Delia Lemon
since the time she'd touched my face and told me I was handsome
and desirable. Each time, every two years or so, I'd gone back
for adjustments on the straps that went from my hook up around my
shoulder blades, Mr. Lemon and his strong arms and sexy fake leg
had been in the office alone, and he greeted me as a fishing
buddy, regaling me with tales of fantastic prosthetics he'd
fitted on amputees in the space of time since last we'd met. I'd
given up on seeing Delia again, convinced myself that she was a
figment of my imagination, her voice and touch made more smooth
and erotic by my mind's unstoppable tendency toward romanticism.
I thought now that I might take the pirate hook to Lemon's and
let Mr. Lemon (he forever first-nameless) see it, adjust the
leather straps and rawhide laces so it would be not just wearable
but comfortable.
"Hello. Lemon's
Prosthetics," she answered after two rings. She -- of course,
she: Delia Lemon -- still sounding as throaty and exotic as she
did years ago, when I was so overwhelmed by the concept of sex
and my proximity to its possible occurrence I fairly
swooned.
"Hi," I said.
"I'm a client, and I was wondering if maybe you'd have time to
see me about a new prosthetic I'm interested in. I found it in a
box of pirate stuff."
I go home to a
mailbox bursting with magazines and nothing else. No bills,
flyers, ads, postcards, letters. I carefully rip all the perfume
strips out and walk to the closet to deposit them. When I open
the door, I realize things have gotten way out of hand. The
accumulated strips, a fragrant tower of paper grown wild out of
its box, leans, lurches, tumbles outward, onto me, all over me,
knocking me to the ground like a dim-witted cartoon character
opening a closet full of water. I am swimming in odors, my eyes
watering from fumes, brain reeling from olfactory overload. As if
in the grip of some religious experience, I am suddenly
transported back to a last afternoon with Rosemary -- a picnic --
and the smell of her hair and skin, talcum powder, perfume,
honeysuckle, grass, mustard on the sandwiches, watermelon sugar,
beer, sun, wind, earth. Over that cinematic memory, a soundtrack
plays. Our last conversation:
"Love is not a
monster," Rosemary is saying, angrily. "It's not. Yes, it creeps
up on you and pounces, but you don't have to shriek and run away
from it."
"Or drive off,
tires squealing," I add, recognizing the scene all too
well.
Rosemary: "If
they didn't drive off, what would you do?"
"I don't know.
Talk to them, I guess."
"And they'd
realize that you are the nicest guy in the world, Leonard. They'd
probably fall in love with you. Like I have. Like I am." She
wraps her arms around me and squeezes.
I didn't know
what else to do but squeeze back. So I did.
But I was not
the monster at hand. It was something else. And in the end, I
sped away like a scared kid, heart racing, head spinning. Leaving
Rosemary by herself, forced to contend with the monster alone, in
the dark, miles from civilization.
"Good
afternoon," Delia said when I came into the store. I'd parked the
truck in the same spot I always did, a space that mysteriously
seemed to be reserved for me.
She stepped from
behind the counter.
I had prepared
myself, of course, to be disappointed. I had told myself -- aloud
even -- during the drive over that I was certain to find her far
removed from the vision I'd first encountered and had
subsequently dreamed of as the ideal for so many years.
But I was wrong.
She seemed unchanged, as if she herself were wholly synthetic,
emerging every half-decade or so from a crate hidden deep within
Lemon's Prosthetics' warehouse of arms, legs, feet, eyes, God
only knew what else. If when we'd first met she seemed to be no
more than twenty-three, she appeared now to be not a day older.
Whereas I, in uncharitable spurts and countless grueling
metamorphoses, had changed dramatically. I was hardly the same
person. I doubted Delia could recognize me, but could not find
the power of speech anywhere in my head to announce my identity,
to reintroduce myself and make small talk, chatter. As a last
resort at communication before turning tail to flee, I held the
pirate hook up in front of my noisy heart.
"Come with me,"
Delia said, moving toward the back offices where her husband and
I had spent so many painful afternoons, testing the strength of
new cables and stiff leather. "Let's see what we can do."
When Brautigan
doesn't appear for our Friday appointment, I decide to nix
waiting around or searching for him and take a walk instead. I
head south on the road going out to the Railroad Tracks and
car-pushing Dead Kids. Next to the abandoned rock shop, a group
of students in a Jeep pass, honking and waving. I don't imagine
they're going out to try their luck with the ghost kids, not at
noon, so maybe the road does go somewhere, out to the Rio
or some secret green canyon. A sign on the rock shop door says,
"Gone fishing for good." I look in the window, where all is, as
you might expect, dark and dusty. It was a bad idea from the
get-go, this place. Who needs rocks here? Not a big tourist town,
Alpine, and one need only bend down to pick up a rock for free.
On a whim I try the door, which opens smoothly, without the
requisite haunted-house creak. "Hello?" I say.
There is no
echo, no scurry of mice or bats or sharp-beaked goblins. No
transient has taken to using the place as bedroom. No kids have
broken in to smash glass cases or spell out foul words in amber
and geodes. It is museum-quality quiet and, excepting the dust,
neat.
I pick up a
piece of petrified wood off a table marked "Final Clearance," and
consider its heft in my hand. If one subscribes to a postmodern
philosophy, it is reasonable to believe that some of the tree
this wood came from did not petrify. It rotted, and each atom
went its own way, taking up residence in the earth, joining a
group of like-minded atoms intent on forming a truffle, potato or
orchid, being gobbled by a gopher, perhaps a sniffling aardvark.
All the other atoms moved on, made something of themselves, went
with the flow, rolled with the punches, changed with the times.
But not these atoms. These atoms are stuck. These atoms are going
nowhere fast.
"I don't know,"
I say out loud. And I shock myself, because I don't know what I
mean by that. I don't know what?
And then it hits
me. I'm re-answering Rosemary's question about what I would do if
I caught the parkers I stalk. I don't know, I told her. Talk to
them, I guess, I said.
What would I
do?
I would not bust
a window, headlight or windshield with my hook while uttering
some witty movie-bad-guy one-liner.
I would not
slash, stab or strangle.
I would not
chase them away on foot, then come back and take the car.
I would not
torture them mentally, emotionally or physically.
I would not, at
any point, laugh maniacally.
I would not
sneer lecherously.
I would not bite
the head off a passing dove.
I would not
quote liberally from Richard III.
I would not
metamorphose into a wolf, demon or bloodthirsty Venusian.
I would not make
my eyes glow hypnotically, my canines extend abnormally or my
nails turn clawlike.
In truth, I
don't know what I would do.
Maybe I would
ask for a ride back to town.
Or maybe I'd
say, "Oh, sorry. I thought you were somebody else." Maybe that's
what I'd do.
I try it out.
"Sorry," I say out loud. "Sorry," I say to the petrified wood. "I
thought you were somebody else."
Brautigan drives
me over to look at the Marfa Ghost. Lights. I've been here
before, on my own. We stand in front of the historical marker,
reading silently, then move, like mirror images, away from it,
behind it, into the dark expanse where the Lights dance and glow
wildly, daring people to explain their existence and
simultaneously disbelieve all offered explanations. (Frankly,
there's an article framed and posted in the lobby of the Marfa
Waldorf that concludes scientifically and undisputably the Lights
are nothing more than ordinary headlights from many miles away,
distorted and transported to the empty desert by the earth's
curvature and some curiously intense heat waves rising off the
sun-baked sands. The Hotel staff doesn't acknowledge the article
and will not point it out to curious visitors eager to buy an I
SAW THE LIGHTS bumper sticker. Only the most determined and
unlucky tourist happens upon the truth, time-faded and half
hidden behind a dusty potted palm. Woe unto him or her. I myself
have struggled mightily to shake the teeth of science from my
need to believe the Lights are something more than the product of
Ford or Chevrolet.)
"I'm going to
take a semester's sabbatical," Brautigan says to me and the
darkness. He stands with his hands in his pockets, somewhat
adrift without the comforting weight and mass of his pad and
pen.
"A vacation," I
say, calling it what it is.
"Partly. I'm
compiling a book of legends concerning the Los Angeles
sewers."
"What about
them?"
"Oh, about the
things that people think are down there. Animals, people, potent
varieties of albino marijuana."
The Lights blink
and change colors like a Christmas display viewed from across two
football fields.
"Well, be
careful," I caution.
"Oh, yeah. I
will be."
On the highway
behind us a pickup whizzes past without slowing.
"Does this have
anything to do with your newfound habit? The lurking thing? Think
L.A. will deter you?"
"No, no,"
Brautigan says. "I've been meaning to do some work on this
project for quite a while. Started it in grad school and never
got back to it." He hums for a moment or two before asking me,
"Will you be here when I get back? Maybe we could finish up
then."
"Yes," I say.
"Barring miracles and catastrophes, I'll be here a long time." I
think of Rusty and DeeDee's mystery log in my living room,
imagine my mail carrier at home, dozing in front of the
television, resting up for tomorrow. "A long, long time." I hold
my good hand up in front of my eyes and try to catch a Light in
the silhouette of my trembling grip. It scoots away over and
over, as if aware of my long-range safari, impervious to capture.
"I'll be here until further notice," I say.
Part Two
We're driving --
Brautigan and me -- to El Paso. North on 118. It's mid-afternoon,
the sun high above us, out of sight; we may as well be lit by
overhead bulbs. The landscape we traverse is monumental, but
widespread. On either side of us, an indistinguishable distance
away, mountains run like cutouts, like a dentist's nightmare of
an alligator's bottom jaw, perpetually open, forever aahing.
There is nothing about the mountains that marks one from another.
None is so much higher than the others that it stands out. None
is shaped so much more like a crowing rooster or rutting
elephants that it deserves its own name and postcard. (Rusty
would be devastated.) The way they run beside us, they may as
well be on a giant revolving canvas being pedaled by a Cyclops to
match Brautigan's desperate speed. The valley floor we cross is
as desolate as any planet visited by any astronaut on any given
episode of The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits.
With the exception of a charred gas station every forty miles or
so, and the phone and power lines, the very road we're on, there
is no evidence humans have ever passed this way before. Indeed,
we've seen only a few farm vehicles, ancient chugging Dodge
trucks and Ford flatbeds, during our quest. Their drivers
dutifully raised a left hand from the top of the steering wheel
to acknowledge our momentary presence. Faces flash by so quickly
it's difficult to determine their sex, much less their demeanor.
"At night," Brautigan says, pointing left with his right hand,
"if you drive this road at night, those saguaros look like people
sometimes, off to the side of the road, hitchhiking or just
standing there. And once, my wife almost hit a panther."
I raise my
eyebrows.
Brautigan
shrugs. "Well, she said it was a panther."
Brautigan and I
said our good-byes over the phone last night. He planned to be
off to Los Angeles in the morning, alone but for his tape
recorder and notepads. I was far behind on my reading; a stack of
magazines the size of a sofa awaited my attention, and I'd just
put on a pot of coffee when my doorbell rang. I halfway expected
it to be the UPS man bringing another crazy offering for DeeDee,
a stained-glass atlas or toothpick log cabin, each tiny sliver
whittled with algebraic equations. "Who is it?" I asked the
chained door.
"They got him,"
Brautigan exclaimed, breathless.
"Is that
you?"
"Did you hear
me? They got him."
"I thought you
were leaving at dawn?"
Brautigan
pounded his fist against the door three times. "Goddamnit, open
up. They got him. In El Paso."
I unlatched the
chain and opened the door. "What in the hell are you talking
about?"
"The Axe Man.
Remember? Your evil counterpart? Hangs out in mall parking lots,
stows away in station wagons dressed up like a little old lady.
Sits on his axe to hide it. They caught him. In El Paso. Outside
a Service Merchandise. He mistakenly took refuge in a Marine
recruiting officer's Chevette. Sergeant Slaughter came out with a
new wok and wasn't having any of the granny-in-distress act.
Veteran of too many drag queen come-ons in port-of-call bars.
Coldcocked him, the bad guy, the faux little old lady from
Pasadena. The Axe Man cometh to in jail, and he's going to
sing."
I noticed that
Brautigan had his bags with him. "What's with the luggage?"
Sighing, he
barged past me, heading for the kitchen and the smell of coffee,
suitcases slapping against his legs like saddlebags. "I went by
my office on the way to the airport, had to pick up a couple of
journals, and there was a message from a friend of mine who works
at the El Paso Beacon. So I came straight here." He looked
down at his bags, dropped them on the floor at his side. "I don't
know why I brought the suitcases in. I could have left them in
the car, I suppose."
"The trip's
off?"
"The trip's
different. We're going to El Paso." He rummaged around in my
cupboards until he found the cabinet with the coffee mugs and
pulled out an official souvenir of Beavers Bend State Park,
Oklahoma.
"What do you
mean 'we'?"
Brautigan
dragged a chair back from my kitchen table and sat down. "How
long would it take you to get ready?"
"Ready for
what?" I was becoming perturbed, not yet having had my own
coffee, brushed my teeth or used the John. The linoleum floor was
cold against my bare feet.
Brautigan
reached for the packets of sugar I keep in a bowl in the center
of my table, took four, doused his coffee liberally. "To go. To
El Paso. To interview him."
I was uncertain
how Brautigan expected me to react; I myself didn't know how to
respond. It would have surprised me less if my dead father,
wielding a harp and my long-ago-buried hand, had materialized on
my doorstep in a flutter of angel's wings, announcing the arrival
of Armageddon. I was, it's true, glad to see Brautigan; the
thought of being without his ear and shoulder and friendship had
weighed heavily on my mind since he first announced his sudden
leave-taking. I was also a little jealous; he felt no guilt in
abandoning me in Alpine to pursue another folkloric interest, and
now that another exotic urban-legendary character had appeared,
he dropped everything for him. In addition, I was a tad sickened,
knowing nothing of the Axe Man but what Brautigan's students
talked about in class that day several weeks ago. My connection
to this criminal, tenuous as it is, leaves me feeling a little
slimy; Brautigan had no problem linking us in that class, and the
fact that the students chose to examine the Axe Man and myself in
tandem suggests that we may be, despite the huge differences
between our exploits, lumped together in the mass psyche. (I must
reiterate here that I have never had occasion to be picked up
even for questioning by the authorities. The Axe Man's police
record lies somewhere closer to Brautigan's than my own.) "I
don't know," I told Brautigan, "that I want to be or should be a
part of this particular expedition. I mean, the
Dead-Kids-at-the-Railroad-Tracks outing was one thing, but this
seems a little crazy."
Brautigan blew
on his coffee and frowned. "Crazy? How?"
"I mean, you're
the doctor. The researcher. I'm just the Hook Man."
"Bushwa! If
anybody should be in on the ground floor of this one, it's you."
He sipped at the rim of his cup. "Come on," he whined. "Don't
make me go alone."
My jealousy and
anger flared a bit, brought out of hiding by Brautigan's
admission that he wanted me around. I had the upper hand. "You
certainly didn't have a problem going to Los Angeles alone," I
sniped. "I thought you were through with my 'project' for the
time being. I thought I was 'on ice.' "
Brautigan put
his mug down and looked at me, eyes wide and brimming with
honesty, like a spy or a lover challenged to test his loyalty to
the cause. "I was wrong," he said. "I was leaving for all the
wrong reasons. We can talk about them in the car, if you feel the
need. But the fact of the matter is, fate or destiny or
coincidence has dropped this guy in our laps, and we would be
fools to ignore the opportunity we have. Yes, 'we,' " he said,
holding my gaze like Rasputin charming the czarina to de-panty in
the wine cellar. "You know as well as I do that this project
stopped being 'mine' some time ago. It's about us now. I'm not
suggesting we continue in order to discover some vaccine to save
ourselves or those who follow us, but that we delve deeper into
your story and my story and his story in order to understand.
It's not a lot to ask, I don't think.
"Listen," he
said, and for an instant I thought he was going to reach out to
take my hand or my hook. "I need you. With me. In El Paso. We're
not talking about a fucking exorcism here. An interview or two,
that's all." He picked his mug up and raised it to his lips.
"That's all," he said.
"Can I have some
time to think about this?" I asked.
"No. I'm going
to go gas up the car, tell the wife the change in plans and dash
by the library to check a fact or two. I'll be back in two hours
to pick you up." He stood. "Do you have a paper cup or something
so I can take this with me?" he said, indicating his
coffee.
I went to the
cabinet and pulled out a plastic tumbler emblazoned with Darth
Vader's face, faded now to an almost invisible gray after many
years of washing.
"Something
smaller?" Brautigan asked, but I shook my head no and he took it.
Holding it in his teeth by its edge, he stooped for his suitcases
and headed for the door. Before it shut behind him, I heard him
grunt and assumed he was saying again that he would be back in
two hours.
He knew me. Knew
what my decision would be.
I went to my
room to begin packing.
What does one
pack for an expedition to confront a maniac, one penned like a
chicken-eating cur or a tiger with a taste for tender, cooing
babies? Clothes, yes, but how many shirts? Pairs of pants? Socks,
underwear, T-shirts? Is it a formal occasion, sucking the marrow
of truth horrifique from the blood-lozenged mouth of a
cross-dressing madman? Does one need a jacket, a tie? An ascot,
cummerbund, boutonniere? Am I expected to look like myself, or
like Dr. Brautigan's equal, his assistant? What does a witness
for the inquisition wear?
I opened my
closet to find an infestation of flannel and denim.
Is it an insult
to dress like a lumberjack (albeit one whose career has already
been cut short not by Axe! or Chainsaw! but lawnmower) on an
occasion such as this? I thought back to what Brautigan wore the
first time we got down to business: chambray shirt, pressed khaki
slacks, a tie so colorful it appeared to be a crevasse leading
into a cartoon world. It seemed, his outfit, appropriate then.
Official, but not overwhelmingly so. He looked comfortable, and
in appearing so he put me at ease.
"I don't," I
told my closet, "have a thing to wear."
And so I found
myself jogging down to what passes in Alpine for a department
store.
Moving quickly
from department to department, each the size of a closet,
Wissler's being absurdly tiny, I picked out a pair of trousers, a
plastic-packaged button-down white dress shirt and a tie
featuring paisleys that hunted each other's squiggly tails like
amoebas on vacation, on the make, in pursuit of love. "Job
interview?" A young girl walked up behind me as I made my second
tie selection. HEATHER, I her name tag read.
"What?"
"You must have a
job interview. You're getting all spruced up."
"No, actually,"
I said, "I'm just, um, going away and need to look nice."
"Oh," Heather
moaned, smiling. "I just got some new clothes. For interviewing.
And graduation." She took the shirt out of my hands and held a
blue-and-green-striped tie in front of it. "That looks nice," she
said, turning to look at me, gauging my reaction to her creation.
The stripes were obscenely wide.
I felt myself
blushing, needing to get out of here as quickly as
possible.
"Are you
graduating? Are you going somewhere for a graduation trip?"
"I'm sorry," I
said. "Am I graduating?"
Heather put down
the green-and-blue tie and picked up a red one with cherry-sized
white polka dots. "Right. Are you?"
"No," I
admitted. "I'm not."
"I was just
wondering. What do you think of this one? This red, I think, is
nice. It's like clown's hair, you know. It says, 'Hello!' "
"Right," I said.
" 'Hello!'"
"So, you've got,
what? Another semester? Then you'll start shopping for
interviews."
I was trying to
keep up. I really was. But I was not sure we were involved in the
same conversation. "I like that tie," I said, reaching out to
touch one of the polar-bear-white dots. When my finger touched
the silk, I suddenly remembered the hook, tried to shift the
packages it held to disguise its pointy nature. It was, for the
first time in so many years, an embarrassment.
"Yeah. You know
what it reminds me of? That Beatles movie. Yellow
Submarine? Remember when they get lost in that land of holes
with Jeremy the Nowhere Man? The guy they sing 'Nowhere Man' to?
And then at the end, when the cartoon stops and the real Beatles
are on-screen? And Paul -- or maybe it's George, I'm not sure --
says, 'I've got a 'ole in me pocket.' " Heather paused to
breathe. "That's what this tie reminds me of a little bit. So,
what'd you do your paper on?"
"What
paper?"
"For Brautigan."
She saw that I didn't get her and continued: "I'm in your class.
Folklore. I know I've seen you in there. So what'd you do your
paper on? I did the 'Mexican Pet' thing. About the giant wharf
rat that eats the two girls' little dog. Or cat, depending on who
tells it."
"I," I said,
"didn't do a paper."
Heather looks at
me like I just admitted to shooting Kennedy.
"I didn't have
to."
"Oh," Heather
drawled. "You were auditing." She held the polka-dot tie up
against the shirt again. "You have to get this one. I think red
is your color."
I'd never
thought of myself as having a color, but I was flattered to think
that Heather would have such an opinion, assuming that she wasn't
just trying to sell a tie. "Yes," I said, "I'll take it."
"You know."
Heather sighed. She took the cuff of my shirt and began to pull
me into the next department. It was the first time a woman had
touched me since the night before Rosemary and I said our
farewells. The feel of her fingernails touching me through the
flannel around my wrist literally shocked me, but in a most
pleasant way. It was like being hypnotized. She pulled me along
after her, and I could do nought but follow. I was in her
command. So much so that she could say practically anything
without my balking or disagreeing or even thinking. "You know,"
she said again, "I couldn't believe how cool it was of you to sit
through that whole Hook Man debate/presentation thing. You must
have been really itching to get in on it. I mean, it's like,
everybody was so intent on generalizing. I mean, I saw you back
there and I wanted to say, 'Hey, everybody. Clue in. It's like
telling racist jokes right in front of somebody who's, you know,
part of that race. The one being made fun of. But then, I
thought, no, he's probably getting off on this because he's
probably doing his paper on Hook Man and this is the best kind of
research possible. I mean, if you had to do a paper, you'd have
to pick Hook Man, right? You've got the inside scoop."
"What?" I said,
coming out of my trance for a moment.
And then we were
waltzing past the perfume and cologne counter, and I was
flabbergasted. I stopped, shocked by the scents that fell upon me
like campfire smoke, amazed at the sight of bottle after bottle
caged like statuesque tarantulas in glass cases. My sleeve
slipped out of Heather's grip. I felt on the verge of swooning --
my father's cologne, late summer hay, Rosemary's neck, grass,
just cut, still pungent, green, my closet, persimmons at midnight
-- when Heather retraced the two steps she'd taken away from me,
lightly took hold of my cuff again and pulled me after her, out
of the dangerous zone of aromas.
"I want to show
you these great shoes," Heather said. "They just came in day
before yesterday, and they are very, very you."
"You. Do.
Some-thing to me. Some-thing that simp-ly mys-ti-fies me,"
Rosemary sang. She was sitting on the ground next to her porch,
pulling weeds out from between the sunflowers that were just
beginning to sprout. "Look," she said, looking up at me. "Look at
this." She held a tiny stone up close to her eyes, then, smiling,
rose and carried it to me on the glider. I put down my
Harper's and leaned forward. "Look," Rosemary said. "It's
a heart. It's a fossilized heart."
I held my hand
out, and she placed it gingerly in the center of my palm, as if
it were something delicate, still alive, not a sea urchin dead
many thousands of years.
"It's
beautiful," Rosemary said. She reached out and brushed it gently,
petted it where it lay just below my own heart line. "It's a
fossilized heart," Rosemary said. "Isn't it?" She looked up at
me, her lips turned upward into the faintest smile.
The drive-in
wouldn't begin to fill with cars for another hour or so. I could
hear the concession stand workers beginning to get started. The
first kernels of popcorn popped, echoed like tiny gunshots.
"Yes," I lied.
"It is."
"I think it's
great, somebody your age coming back to college to get their
degree," Heather cooed. "Not that you're old or anything." She
began to ring up the purchases I'd selected, including a belt she
insisted I buy and a pair of suede bucks that I "couldn't
possibly live without."
"I mean, my dad,
he didn't finish his degree. Mom got pregnant, and he had to get
a serious job. But he's always regretted it." Heather held the
polka-dot tie up against the white shirt yet again and nodded her
head. "I mean not finishing the degree. Not Mom getting pregnant.
He doesn't regret that. I guess. That was my oldest brother, and
he's kind of a loser, so maybe he does. I don't know." She
shrugged. "My point is, just because you're older than everybody
else on campus, the students, I mean, doesn't mean that you
should feel weird or out of place or anything. I mean, there are
lots of professors a lot older than you running around, and they
fit in fine."
"I like campus,"
I said, and it was the truth. I meant it.
Heather finished
entering the prices. Before she hit the total button, she put her
hands on her hips and frowned at me. "But I never see you around.
You should hang out more." She turned, hit the total button,
then, seeing my credit card out of the corner of her eye, took it
and ran it through the security check. When she handed it back to
me, she held it tight so I had to pull to get it away from her.
"When you get back from your mysterious trip, we should get a
beer sometime." She winked at me. "Really. You could wear your
new clothes."
Dear Sir: (Dr. Brautigan's letter in response to my letter
regarding his article began)
I am, as you
might imagine, genuinely intrigued by your claim. Would you be
interested in meeting with me? I can be reached by phone through
my departmental office. Call collect.
Sincerely,
Peter Brautigan, Ph.D.
PS: Where were you on the night of October 22nd? (A
joke.)
"Come on, come
on!" Brautigan hollered at me when he saw me. He leaned against
the door of his car, hands clutching a map. My Darth Vader cup
sat on the roof of the car, as if reading over his shoulder.
"Let's go!" he insisted, superheroesque.
"I'm almost
finished packing," I told him. "I had to run to the store to pick
up a few things."
"Christ. You
think they don't have stores in El Paso?"
"Hold your
horses." I went inside and stuck the Wissler's bag in my
half-empty suitcase, filling it. And then, seized by the urge, I
put Rusty's rock and log in a duffel bag awarded to me by the
people responsible for Sports Illustrated. Lugging my
suitcase and the weighty duffel outside, I locked the door and,
turning, noticed that my mailbox hung a tad loose from its wall
mount.
"We can't go," I
announce.
"What?"
"We can't go.
Yet. We have to do an errand."
The Alpine post
office, a square apple on an ocean of limeade grass, looks from
the outside like a property designed and maintained by the Walt
Disney Company. Inside, its very air is stained brown with the
smell of paper and time. A mural spanning the wall above the
teller windows shows clouds like cotton balls suspended over a
valley of mesquite and Rorshachian cattle. A bulletin board, like
a magnet for flyers, hangs in shadow next to a desk where boys
turning eighteen can fill out a form committing themselves to a
supporting role in any upcoming military adventures. WANTED
WANTED WANTED, the bulletin board's posters screech over scowling
murderers' grimy foreheads, evil fingerprints. I WANT YOU, Uncle
Sam lusts in bold serif type, his finger almost
three-dimensional, coming at me like the claws of Vincent Price
in House of Wax. "Want something?" the teller said to me
between high-pitched hiccups.
"I need," I
announced, "to have my mail held. I'm leaving town."
The teller
raised his caterpillarish eyebrows. "Are you now?" he said,
leaning forward to inspect my face closely. "I'll be right back."
He spun and disappeared behind a screen that masked, I imagine, a
workroom of drug-slowed octogenarians bungling their way through
the day's delivery piles.
What did that
mean? "I'll be right back"? Where the hell was he going? Did I
need special permission to leave town? Was a notary public
required?
REMEMBER, a sign
behind the counter cautioned, MAIL THEFT IS A FEDERAL
OFFENSE.
Someone passed
close behind the screen. I heard the jangle of keys on a belt.
Possibly handcuffs?
There was a long
silence.
Then scuffling
feet, and a face peeped around the screen to gawk at me a moment.
It withdrew suddenly, like a spook-house phantom awaiting its
next carnival victim.
What is this? A
sting operation? I pictured Rusty's postcards sitting in a drawer
in my kitchen, secreted beneath a tray of silver. His words,
trapped under a pile of tines and dented soup spoons, echoed in
my head.
The teller,
returning, hiccupped thrice. "Now don't you go anywhere," he told
me before returning again to whatever limbo the screen
camouflaged. "Hurry," I heard him hiss at a cohort. "Hurry,
damnit, before he leaves."
Slowly, like a
virgin suddenly aware that she's stumbled into a coven of
black-hearted witches, I began to walk backward toward the door.
Adrenaline pumping, I became hyperaware; I heard a clock ticking;
an air conditioner rumbled to life above my head, animating the
bulletin board's thumbtacked gallery. When my back touched the
glass doors, I turned and pushed, walked briskly to the
Volkswagen and, sliding in, commanded, "Drive."
"Do you know a
girl in your class named Heather?" I ask Brautigan.
"Who? Heather?"
He drums his fingers in contagion against the gear-shift knob.
"No. Why?"
"She did her
paper on some killer rat or something."
"The Mexican
Pet. I remember five papers on the Mexican Pet. Heather." He runs
the name through his memory and out his mouth. "Heather. Heather.
Heather. Mexican girl?"
"No."
"Heather.
Heather. Heather." Brautigan looks at me and shrugs. "Survey
classes. Too damned big. Why? Do you know her?"
"Yes," I say,
then reconsider. "No. I just met her. She helped me at
Wissler's." There's a long pause that requires me to continue.
"She was very helpful."
"Heather.
Heather. Heather." Brautigan chants the name like a mantra.
"Heather.
Heather. Heather." I join him.
We leave Alpine
behind us, moaning the name like an incantation, a spell we're
casting. Except we don't know what it is we want, what it is
we're conjuring, what desperate magic rises up in our wake.
"Who are
you?"
"What?"
"Who," I
correct. "Tell me who you are."
Rosemary and I
were sitting -- for the first time -- on her delicious glider.
We'd had dinner at the Waffle House, again, and she'd asked me
back, enticing me with a promise of homemade ice cream riddled
with Butterfinger crumbs.
"I'm just me,"
she said, laughing. In retrospect, I think I can find some
discomfort in that laughter. "I'm nobody special," she
lied.
"Who are
you?"
"What?"
"Who," I
correct. "Who are you?"
"I'm Peter
Brautigan, Ph.D. Remember?" Brautigan chuckles and shakes his
head like I'm crazy.
"No. I mean. You
know a lot about me. About my past. What about you?"
"Peter
Brautigan, Ph.D." A patch of gravel sputters beneath us as we
pass. "That's me. That's all you get."
We drive for
close to two hours in silence before Brautigan says, "I was born
and grew up very happily until I was thirteen and my mother and
older sister died in a plane crash going to visit my grandmother.
Afterwards I tried to take their place. That is, I tried to keep
the house clean. And cook. I cooked. This infuriated my father.
He said it was unmanly of me. But -- at least I hope this is true
-- I think he just resented me trying to be them when they were
dead, hated me for reminding him. I think he thought it would
have been easier for him if I'd died with them. So he forbid me
to use the kitchen. Or to clean any room but my own. And if I did
clean my own, he wanted me to do it while he was at work. He
didn't want to hear a vacuum cleaner or a trash can being emptied
or the hiss of a dust rag on the shelf of a bookcase. The house
grew so dusty it became hazy when you moved through it, rousing a
trail of motes behind you. We started eating out every meal.
Together, at first, then apart. Occasionally we'd run into each
other coming into or leaving the same diner. Even on the
occasions when we were both going into the same place
simultaneously, we sat at different tables. I stayed out of the
living room, where he watched television. I stayed out of the
laundry room, doing my clothes at a neighbor's house, who
somehow, without ever asking, understood exactly what was going
on. I started studying at school until the janitors made me
leave. I took out twice as many library books as I was supposed
to and, when I was home, hid in my room without stereo or radio
to entertain my ears that ached at the stillness of our house. I
read, which, when my father discovered that I was using my dead,
sister's library card to take out more books than I was supposed
to, led my father to call me every name in the book. Sissy.
Ghoul. Grave-robber. Girly. That sort of thing. Then I went to
college on scholarship, met a girl who was wealthy through no
fault of her own, married her, lived on her trust fund while in
the throes of grad school, further infuriating my father. Not
being the breadwinner, I deserved nothing but his scorn. He died
five years ago and left everything to the Humane Society, if you
can believe it. I enjoy my job very much. I love my wife as much
as I did when I first met her, but understand her less, somehow.
My kids are very bright and not afraid to hug me in front of
their friends, but they don't have much to say to me over dinner.
I've published two not very exciting books about sheep-farming
lore and the history of license plates. Lately, I've become
obsessed with hiding in bushes and imagining myself leaping out
to terrorize young adults. My student evaluations are usually
mediocre to good." Brautigan paused and looked over at me for
such a long time I felt the need to look away out my window. When
I knew he had turned his attention back to the road in front of
us, I faced forward again. "That's my story," Brautigan said.
"That's who I am. It's a little pathetic, isn't it? As narrative,
it's hopelessly maudlin. Wouldn't make a good movie or book or
anything. Nothing exciting in it. Nothing legendary. I didn't
have a great reconciliation with my father before he died. I
didn't spend exorbitant amounts of money on his tombstone. I
don't visit his grave or the grave of my mother or sister on
special days. Except, and this should tell you how much the study
of folklore has warped me, on el Dia de los Muertos I always buy
one of those tiny sugar skulls they sell outside the languages
department, and I take it back to my office and sit in the dark
and eat it and remember a Halloween when I was very little and my
sister went as Little Bo Peep and dressed me as a sheep. She
covered my white pajamas with cotton balls and painted my nose
black and put a little leash on me and I crawled around the
living room going 'Baa! Baa!' I remember my parents laughing
until they cried. That's how I remember them. That's how I
remember all of them, on that night. Looking up at them from the
floor and seeing them laughing. They all seemed very tall, and
even as the sidewalks outside swarmed with ghouls and witches, I
felt perfectly safe and secure."
We pass a sign
that says, EL PASO 15.
"That's it. The
end. Now you know my life story. Feel better?" Brautigan sounds a
little sad, a little bitter.
"I don't know,"
I tell him. "Do you?"
"I don't know."
He shakes his head, genuinely puzzled. "I just don't know."
El Paso, I'm
sorry to report, is one of the world's ugliest cities. When we
come over a hill and see it stretched out before us like a
riverside landfill shrouded in turd-brown smog, I feel like the
reluctant hero of a sword-and-sorcery epic laying eyes on the
lair of the dragon he must vanquish with nought to aid him but a
toothpick. "It's hideous," I say to Brautigan.
He sighs. "Wait
till you see it up close."
We drive into
downtown as the office-building traffic is leaving. It's as if we
are headed into the heart of a disaster that everyone else has
the good sense to flee. The further we venture into the shadowy
canyons, the fewer people we encounter in cars or on the street.
Some of the signs, the bright billboards mounted on walls, are in
Spanish, some in English, some in both like a textbook
lesson.
"Did you ever
see that Charlton Heston picture, The Omega Man?"
Brautigan nods.
"I saw it in the theaters when it came out, and it scared the
shit out of me."
"This reminds me
a little of that," I say. "The empty streets and all."
Brautigan stops
at a yellow light and guns the engine. "I saw it again, not too
long ago, actually. It really sucked this time. Typical sixties
movie. Too groovy for its own good. A lot of bad clothes, bad
hair, hippie mumbo-jumbo. Hollywood just never caught on to
hip."
We pull up in
front of a building that I know to be the jail even before I read
the sign declaring it so. It is neat, stark, yellowish bricks
devoid of the graffiti that mar its neighbors' walls. "Here we
are," Brautigan announces.
"Are we going
right in?"
"Why? What? Did
you have somewhere else to be?"
"Well, I sort of
hoped to freshen up a bit."
"To talk with a
possible murderer?"
"Well, I don't
know. It just seems that maybe we should find a place to stay
before we take this on. Maybe we should call first. You hate to
just drop in."
"I called this
morning before we left," Brautigan informs me. "The sheriff said
we could come by whenever, stay as long as we like, sit in on any
interrogations. Jesus, we're not coming for dinner."
"And that's a
good point. Maybe he's eating dinner. I'm hungry myself." I rub
my belly with my hook.
"So what you're
suggesting is, we should go check into a motel, grab some chow
and then come back? By then he'll probably be asleep."
"So we could
come back in the morning. When he's better rested. You know how
when I'm tired I don't feel much like talking and we get
absolutely nothing done."
Brautigan, hands
resting on top of the steering wheel like it's the back of a pew
in church, sighs. "OK. We'll come back in the morning."
We check into a
hotel, Eden, which promises FREE breakfast, FREE HBO, FREE local
phone calls, FREE airport shuttle, FREE Juarez tourist
information and FREE cocktails at happy hour. From the outside,
it looked like a plain, uncomplicated, though somewhat gigantic
inn. Once past the check-in, however, things become surreal. The
Atrium, a word capitalized by the signs directing us to it and
the desk clerk's rolling Latin tongue, towers and sprawls like a
massive terrarium, replete with slender palms, innumerable ferns,
an absurdly white gazebo floating on a pond lush with koi and
gurgling waterfalls. Somewhere, a piano player, buried perhaps
beneath a canopy of ivy and orchids, serenades the paradise with
a high-pitched rendition of "Embraceable You."
Brautigan and I
stand like caravan castaways stumbling upon a mirage so fantastic
we dare not move lest we upset its spell.
"Excuse me," a
passing bellman announces, his cart heavy with our bags.
"Can we afford
this?"
"The
department's picking it up," Brautigan says. We don't look at
each other, but stand a moment longer. I crane my neck to see the
rainbow prisms that dangle one hundred feet or more above our
heads, suspended from the glass roof like giant icicles.
Finally,
Brautigan, shaking himself free from his revery, says, "Come on.
We're on the seventh floor."
When Brautigan
knocks the next morning, I'm already up and dressed. The tie
feels strange around my neck. I haven't worn one in so long, it
was difficult for my fingers to remember how a knot is tied. My
hook was of little help; it threatened to snag the silk and tear
a gaping hole in the polka-dot landscape.
"Free
breakfast," Brautigan says when I open the door. "In the Atrium."
Noticing my outfit, he does a double take. "Nice," he said. "I
like the dots."
"I thought maybe
I should try to look official."
"For who?"
I usher
Brautigan out the door and shut it behind me. "For whoever. The
police, I guess." The smell of bacon and eggs wafts up from the
Atrium Caf é . While we wait for the elevator to come fetch us, I
peek over the railing. A buffet near the gazebo overflows with
fruits and pastries. I still can't see the piano player, but he
or she is there all right, wiggling through "Flight of the
Bumblebee."
Seconds before
the elevator dings its arrival, Brautigan says, "You've got a tag
showing," and moves to help me fix myself. "We don't want you
looking like an official mannequin."
We drive in
absolute silence, don't say a word getting out of the car in the
jail's cavernous parking garage.
In the elevator,
I can hear the cables whirring, pulling the car next to us up,
lowering us deeper and deeper into the lair of what? Who? The
police? The Axe Man? Never before and I'm sure never again will I
crave the depravity of Muzak.
I hear his voice
before I see him. Indeed he isn't, except for his voice, even in
the room. His words echo between the cinder-block walls, flat,
unmusical, sounding too much like a NASA voice counting down to
liftoff. In the room we occupy, two men sit at a table eating
breakfast burritos, listening to the voice. When Brautigan and I
came in, they hardly looked up, but continued squeezing packets
of hot sauce onto the rolled tortillas, the red picante
brutalizing the pale yellow eggs. Occasionally, one of them
pricks up his ears, listens a moment, then makes a quick notation
on a yellow legal pad. The other one nods slowly while he chews.
"I prefer a nice hatchet," the voice says. "Or a tomahawk. Like
you can get at a five-and-dime. Except with a real blade. But
painted Injun-style. Maybe a few feathers on the handle."
Finally, one of
the men, the nodder, says, "You Brautigan?"
Yes."
"Come have a
look." The nodder jerks his head to the side, beckoning us
closer.
We move
carefully, unsure of what it is we're supposed to look at. When
we're both directly behind the man, looking over his shoulder, he
motions his head backward. "That's him," he says. "He ain't
shy."
Where?"
Brautigan asks.
"In the box.
Through the window. He can't see us. You know, the old mirror
trick. You're familiar with it from television, movies, I'm
sure." The nodder jerks his head back again, lifts his
half-eaten, well-sauced burrito up and, using it as a pointer,
motions behind him.
When we turn,
the disembodied voice suddenly finds its master. There he is.
Sitting, slouching really, in a sturdy wooden chair in a tiny
bright room. A man in a gray suit sits across from him, smoking a
cigarette.
"That's him?" I
ask.
"Not the one
smoking. That's Detective Mesa. The other one. That's him."
I expected more.
From myself, that is. I expected some sort of psychic-link
feeling, a shortness of breath, a dizzy sensation, maybe just the
hairs on the back of my neck tingling. But looking at him, I feel
nothing special. I may as well have been watching a talk show on
television. Even the officers in the room with me seem bored
silly. There is no sense of raw, infinite evil emanating from the
man, filling the room and dimming the electric lights. Nobody
sports a lei of garlic or, that I can see, a thrice-blessed
crucifix.
"Slote
Mashburn," the note-taking detective says.
"What?"
Brautigan's voice, for some reason, is lower in pitch suddenly,
sounding very manly and rough.
"His name. Slote
Mashburn. Male Caucasian. Age: forty-two. Height: five two.
Weight: one forty-four. Occupation: unknown. Place of birth:
Topeka, Kansas. Favorite color: blue. Takes his coffee with sugar
and cream. Doesn't mind if we smoke, but has never touched a cig
himself, 'not ever' he says. Graduated from high school. Two
years of college. Would prefer that we call him Slote rather than
Mashburn. Says we sound like cartoon characters otherwise. Speaks
in complete sentences most of the time. Just to dig at us, I
suppose. You can go in if you want."
Brautigan turns
to me. "You want?"
"Yes," I say.
"Why not?"
When we go in,
we carry two chairs with us. I'd expected them to make Brautigan
leave everything possibly dangerous outside the Box, but they
don't even search his briefcase. As we enter, Detective Mesa
stands and excuses himself. "Bathroom," he whispers.
I look at
Brautigan, wondering if he feels as strange as I do about being
left alone with Slote Mashburn, the alleged Axe Man, terror of
America's mall shoppers. Brautigan doesn't return my gaze, but
opens his briefcase and takes out his tape recorder.
"No, I don't
mind it a bit, Professor."
"I'm sorry.
What?" Brautigan says, trying to sound in control.
"I don't mind
being recorded. But I must warn you, the tapes won't come out.
Everything I say will be garbled, backwards-sounding. Sorry,
Prof."
"I'm not sure I
understand."
"What, how do I
know who you are?" Slote shuts his eyes tightly. "Brautigan.
Doctor. Peter. Of Alpine, Texas. Lecturer in folklore. Sul Ross
State University." He opens his eyes again and smiles, showing a
mouth full of teeth that are somehow too small for his face,
giving him a rodentine appearance. "My detective imitation." He
looks past us and waves at the mirror on the wall. "Hello,
boys."
"You're
psychic?"
"No, Swifty.
They told me you were coming."
"So, that, what
you said about the tapes being worthless, that was a farce, as
well?"
"What do you
think? That I'm evil? The devil incarnate? Are you a researcher,
my friend, or an exorcist?" Slote leans back in his chair and
stares at the ceiling. "For I am the Alpha and the Omega, man."
He quickly looks down and finds my eyes. I heard what he said,
recognized the Omega Man reference, but keep a straight
face. "Tapes. Tapes. Tapes. Why don't you just rewind to see if
you can hear me? Or hear if you can see me."
Brautigan stares
at him,
"Do it," Slote
says. "It'll drive you crazy otherwise, wondering." Brautigan
leans to the recorder and rewinds. Slote keeps his eyes glued to
my own. He's very thin, gangly, balding a bit on top. He has
perfect skin, however, skin that appears never to have been in
need of a shave, little boy skin. His cheeks are rosy, like an
ice skater just coming in from the cold. I can see how, if you
were to put a wig on him and a dress, he might easily pass for a
woman.
Brautigan
presses play.
"For I am the
Alpha and the Omega, man," the tape recorder bleats
tinnily.
"You," Slote
says to me, "were not mentioned by the boys in blue."
"My assistant,"
Brautigan says.
"Yes," Slote
says, slowly, as if he is speaking to a child or inferior. "And
does your assistant speak? I hope so. Sign language would be a
mighty chore with just one hand and a hook. You'd have to move
twice as fast to be heard."
"I'm Leonard," I
say, proffering my good hand.
Slote doesn't
move. "As a young boy," he says, "Leonard wandered the fields of
the garden and never feared the snake that crawled there
murmuring secrets and prophecies." Suddenly he lunges forward to
grab my hand and pump it furiously. "You know why he brought you
here, don't you?" Slote hisses at me. "You're Rikki-tikki-tavi,
and I am a very nasty cobra." Still holding my hand in his own,
he states calmly, "We're supposed to fight to the death, you and
I." His voice becomes loud, raucous, ridiculously emphatic.
"Announcing the world-champion bout of the century, a
one-time-only confrontation to shock the nation: Hook Man versus
Axe Man, live and in person. At last, two boogeymen, one event.
Godzilla meets King Kong. Goliath meets Goliath. Winner takes
all. Get ready to r-r-r-r-r-r-rumble!" Slote lowers his voice to
a humming buzz, leans forward a bit. "How do you cure the man who
thinks he's Jesus? Introduce him to the real messiah; that'll fix
him or fuck him up but good."
I pull my hand
away from his. "I don't know what you're talking about." I try to
keep my voice steady, but know, somehow, that he felt my pulse
race as he clutched my hand in his own.
"Denial, Doctor;
that's what it looks like to me," Slote says, turning to
Brautigan. "Of course, I'm not university-trained like
yourself."
"So," Brautigan
says, "you are the real Axe Man."
"Genuine. One
hundred percent."
"Tell me,"
Brautigan requests, moving directly into what I now realize is
his routine, "what is your earliest memory?"
"Excuse me," I
say. "May I have a word alone with you, Dr. Brautigan?"
"Yes, of course.
Will you excuse us?" Brautigan stands, nodding and bowing like a
too-gracious host.
"Certainly. Your
absence will give me time to decide upon a suitable earliest
memory. I don't want to disappoint you with some lame story about
fishing or goat-herding. This type of question requires an answer
hinting at the spectacular or supernatural. A speck of Freud is
often advisable in these situations, as well."
In the hall
outside the Box I say to Brautigan, "Jesus. How did he know?
About me being who I am."
"He doesn't,"
Brautigan says, smirking. "He's just playing with us. He saw your
hook and decided to improvise a bit. He's really quite
theatrical. Fascinating."
"I think there's
something crazy going on here."
"Oh, yes. Sure.
He may in fact be insane. There's always the possibility that he
isn't really the Axe Man, but a knockoff of the Axe Man. A
copycat Axe Man." Brautigan moves to open the door again. "Just
try to act like you're humoring him. Go along with it. See what
he says."
When we go back
in, Brautigan eyes his briefcase. I do the same. Was there
anything in there he may have snatched and squirreled away as a
potential weapon?
"No need to
worry," Slote says, allaying our fears. "Don't you think" -- he
waves a hand at the mirror -- "the blue boys of Wonderland would
have jumped all over me if I'd made a move for your
briefcase?"
Slote rattles on
for several hours about his exploits, none of which the police
can confirm. Once or twice he mentions places and dates that
would mean he and I were in the same location at the same time.
Do I imagine that he looks at me when he mentions these
shenanigans? Does he waggle his eyebrows, sneer in my direction,
give me a psychic high sign?
The policemen,
for their part, remain so calm they may be perched on the
precipice of hibernation. Their slow, deliberate movements
suggest a ballet choreographed to represent the dinosaurs in
their final days, as the Ice Age overtook them and hung Popsicles
off their scaly snouts.
But Brautigan
and I are alert. I feel the sort of awakeness one is gripped by
in the moments just after a car wreck, when every instant is like
a Viewmaster slide, the colors too bright, the third dimension
dancing like a chorus girl. Brautigan's tapes whirl and whirl.
When one I clicks off, finished, full, Slote stops and allows
Brautigan to change sides or tapes before continuing.
"Listen," Slote
says to me just after Detective Mesa slips Brautigan a note
explaining he needs to wrap things up and come back tomorrow.
"You believe me, right? You know what I'm talking about here." I
don't move, don't nod or blink or swallow to indicate any
increment of agreement on my part.
"I know that you
are who are, Popeye. I know where that dirty hook has rested,
what car windows it's scratched at. I know the waiting game you
play. We've got lots and lots in common, right? But let's get
this straight, you and me, we're different beasts entirely.
Different sides of the zoo. Different zookeepers bring us similar
meals, but we eat differently and digest differently and sleep in
ways that in no way resemble one another. Got it? You can take
this two ways: as insult or absolution. We both have a thing for
cars, true. And skulking, yes. And there are certain sharp
objects you and me both keep close at hand. But. You feed off of
dread, big boy. The creeping fear that surfaces at slumber
parties and the like. You fuel the campfire-red faces of boys and
girls just beginning to sprout hair and wants down there. But
you're impotent. In this sense: you are harmless. You are
nothing. You are a phantom in the end. A specter. A shadow rising
from the earth, wielding a what? A prosthetic? Bushwa and humbug.
Poppycock. Most of what they say about you isn't even true.
Insane asylum escapee? You can't outrun the hum of everyday
boredom, much less a top-notch security system. Dehooked again
and again by Quarterback Andy's swift Camaro? Hardly. Rotting
teeth, bloodshot eyes, maniacal laugh? Not applicable. You're a
victim, my friend, of a nation's overactive imagination. You've
spread like a contagion, like a plague of bad dreams. People
dread you. But they never face you. They don't see you. You see,
you don't match the perception. You can walk the streets safely
and stalk the night happily and and and and and and. Your work is
done. You're in. The big club of legends. We've given up on Paul
Bunyan and Johnny Appleseed. They don't work. Do-gooders don't do
it for anybody anymore, don't cut the mustard, make the grade. We
want villains. We couldn't give a flying fuck about Disney's
white-taffeta heroines, dickless Prince Whosits. But those bad
guys? Delicious in black! Evil-filled truffles: buy them by the
dozen, gulp down two at a time. Milquetoast-Duds? Pointless.
Tasteless. Hopeless. Chocolate-covered Scaries? Yum-yum. Ah, yes.
You made your mark with dread. But how long does dread last?
Forever? Hardly. Dread dies, too. Dread is mortal and mortally
wounded by time, and time moves now like the Concorde. We used to
have dreads that lasted centuries. Death. Hell. All that rot. Now
they come and go. Polio. From dreadful to dreadless to extinct in
no time. Out with a whimper. Cancer? We used to dread it like
there was no tomorrow in its cellular wake. Now it's everyday.
Even movie stars can get it, and we don't care as much as we
might about what chemo horrors call Betty Boop to come on down to
the lab for another hair-stealing adventure. New diseases come
along, yes, bringing with them their dread-lined luggage,
brimming with symptoms and benefit concerts. But scientists,
those flaky saints, treat dread like a puzzle and, after much
chin scratching and wallet snatching, solve for X, Y, Z and VD.
Dread is dead, amigo. Your reign, even as it is made more
gruesome with gooey details and budget-bulging special effects,
nears an end.
"So, what's up
next?
"The networks
have canceled dread's prime-time slot and brought in some fresh
young talent. Terror. That's my line. That's my slop. On the
small scale, of course. I do it one to one, one on one, one foot
in front of the other, one day at a time. Sweet Jesus, those
pheromone explosions reek sweetly. Old bag shops hard, comes out
to her lemon-fresh Caddy, thinking of an easy recipe to whip up
quick for Dad and the lads and lassies, simple but tasty so
they'll think she loves them more than to spend all day at the
mall twirling sale racks like hula hoops. 'Dearie,' I say when
they get in. Boo! Explosion one. Shock. Heart-racing,
breathtaking. 'My daughter left me here by mistake,' or 'I'm
lost. Could you give me a ride?' I say. But before they can put
the old gas guzzler in gear, before their little pitter-patting
coraz ó ns have slowed back down to a nice leisurely stroll, I'm
up off my axe and shaking it like a tambourine, like the
instrument it is. Listen: You don't hear the tinkle of coins, a
gypsy cacophony, some Partridge-girl hip-shimmy. But the screams?
Just as lyrical. Tiny little voices they have at teatime, these
darling suburbanites. In the cocoon of doom I've spun, they
bellow like cows gone too long without a salt lick, screech like
the Emergency Broadcast System. Terror, thick, like ketchup -- a
good brand, not generic -- soaks me. And I get a hard-on. In my
little old lady suit lurks the dick of an elephant. I'd show you,
but you might find me perverse. Now, here's the question. What do
I do with them? Do I swing hard and fast and leave Mr. Rent-a-Pig
a nice surprise for his midnight rounds? Or do I let them leap
from the car, and make a swift getaway to my motel room? Do I
stay in a motel? Do I sleep in my car? Is it a van? Is there a
sunset painted on the van's sliding door? A seascape? A desert?
Or do I go home? Do I live with my mother still? My grandmother?
Are those her clothes I'm sporting? Maybe I'm married. Maybe I
have a wife and children. Maybe I'm a CPA. Maybe I live all
alone. Maybe I have a collection of cigarette lighters from all
the cars I've sat in. Maybe I take them out and roll around on
them until I have an orgasm. And then maybe I'm okay and don't
feel the need to taste terror again for a month. Or a year. Or a
week. Or never. Maybe I've only done this once. Maybe I'm a
copycat criminal. Maybe I read about the real Axe Man in the
paper one day late, sitting at a bus stop. Maybe I've got an
overactive imagination. Maybe I'm the only one left with an
overactive imagination. Maybe I'm the only one left with an
imagination, period.
"Terror. It
lives in the heart and head and adrenal glands and that marvelous
sphincter muscle.
"Dread? Dead.
Movie monsters like Dracula? Nailed shut beneath a filmography
that includes Plan 9 from Outer Space, Bride of the Monster,
Dark Shadows. The new breed? Terrorists. Hit a building with
a bomb, an airplane, a subway, a tourist-packed cellar at the
Tower of London. We nuevo monsters need more than what you settle
for, Hook. We need screams plus. We need to reach out and touch
the victim, be she Ma Bell or Mabel from Cleveland. The only
glass we like to scratch on is the TV screen during the five
o'clock news. We need the scream pure, without filters, better
yet amplified by the best RCA money can buy. Pump up the volume,
etc., etc. You find your thrill in a blueberry patch, goosing the
sexual anxieties of little Mary Jo and Billy Bud as they chug
toward the end of what little innocence they retain. They're safe
in their Chevy-sphere, like a snowman hunkered down next to
Heidi's house in a snow globe. Let me in the snow globe.
Let me grab that snowman's carrot nose and chase Heidi 'round
Grandpa's bed. Let me set the snowman's coal eyes and teeth and
button on fire. Let me turn that snow globe into hell. Then I'll
be happy. I won't sit on the outskirts of Shitville
imagining the grief I can bring. I'll drive in and make
myself at home, read the inside of your glove compartment while I
screw up the electronic positioning of the driver's seat, the
passenger's seat, the rearview mirror. Gremlin shit. Maddening,
but not lethal.
"Your
newsworthiness is without value these late-century days. You may,
like Bigfoot, our grand legendary grandpa, find five minutes on
some silly variety show, sandwiched between an Aztec ceremonial
knife and an infant mathematician. You oddities! Museum
pieces!
"But terror?
Terrorism? Front-page stuff! Special logos on CNN! For us they
will interrupt sitcoms, soap operas, Star Trek!
"Retire, old
man. You've had your day, your scary, starry nights. Your frame
in legend's Hall of Fame awaits. Throw in the towel. Hang up your
hook.
"Hand the reins
over to me."
Slote paused for
the first time in this rant. "Aw. But listen at how I do go on.
Lord help me, I'm a rambling man. Shall we call it a day?"
We return to
Eden. Happy hour is commencing, and over the sound of the
trickling waterfall, quacking ducks and tinkling piano ("A pretty
Girl Is Like a Melody"), the blither of men and women ordering
FREE cocktails and lying about their individual successes in life
flourishes. "Shall we join them?" Brautigan asks, sweeping his
arm in a grand gesture, like we are playboy millionaires perhaps,
strolling into the casino at Monte Carlo, ripe to dazzle
heiresses with our witty repartee and impossible luck at
baccarat. I think of Duncan, standing somewhere behind a felt
crescent even now, hands full of cards, bantering with a
conventioneer who has just doubled down on eleven in hopes of
replenishing his stake.
"I need," I say,
"to freshen up first." The tie around my throat, no matter how
much I loosen it, has begun to feel like a noose.
When I visited
my brother once, his little girl -- precious, tiny, red-haired
miracle of honesty -- clung to my neck like a monkey hiding from
tigers in a tree. I shifted her from arm to arm while we stood
outside, her father flipping steaks on the grill. "I saw a show
on TV," she whispered in my ear.
"Really?" I
asked.
"If you dipped
your hook in a big bowl of frozen liquid nitrogen, it would be
real easy to break. Like a china plate."
"Is that
right?"
"On television
the man did it with a banana and a hammer. He shattered the
banana with the hammer. Then he frozed the hammer and shattered
it."
"Do you like
science?"
"Uh," my niece
said. "If I were you, I'd be really sure not to get my hook
around any frozen liquid nitrogen."
"I'll be on the
lookout," I gasped, her arms choking the breath from me. "I'll be
extra careful."
The red light at
the top of my phone's dial pad blinks like a heartbeat. In the
stillness of my room, it commands my attention immediately, as if
a siren. While I pull the tie from my neck (sweet relief), I pick
up the phone receiver with my hook and cradle it between my
shoulder and ear. "Is there a message for me?" I ask the desk
clerk when she picks up.
"Yes. It's on
your voice mail. One moment and I'll connect you."
I wait,
listening to the strange electronic silence, until there is a
sudden high-pitched beep.
Music. Guitars.
"Remember me to one who lives there," a familiar voice croons.
"She once was a true love of mine." It's Paul Simon and Art
Garfunkel. Calling me? No, it's a recording. The song continues.
I listen, fighting the urge to hum along, until the song is over
and the same high-pitched beep signals the end of
transmission.
I hang up the
phone and think a minute. Is this a joke, a new kind of phone
prank; has the old Prince Albert in a can bit been retired and
replaced by song lyrics?
"Yes?" the desk
clerk says. "Can I help you?"
"Um, yes. I just
called and got my voice mail. How do I go about hearing that
message again?"
"I'll call it
back up for you," she says. "Then, if you need to hear it again,
just press three and the star sign. Hang on a moment."
After the beep
-- the roadrunner's clipped swan song -- "Scarborough Fair"
starts up again. Toward the end, I think, despite the poor sound
quality, a third voice joins the duo's close harmonies.
Pushing three
and the star sign as directed, I listen once again. There's
definitely something there. A voice that is slightly familiar, a
tad clearer than the song recording, someone adding his own
tongue to the tune. "Parsley Sage Rosemary and Time," Simon and
Garfunkel drawl like Gregorians. The third voice, though, seems
to be saying something quite different.
After pushing
three and the star sign several times more, I begin to imagine
that I can tell exactly what the third voice is saying. It
separates from the other two, stands out, speaks directly,
clearly.
"Hurry Gage
Rosemary There's Time."
Beep.
"Leonard,"
Brautigan says to me when I come into the bar feeling a little
woozy, a little shaken by the phone message, "I want you to meet
Isadora Lechuza." He indicates a woman sitting to his left,
young, Hispanic, eyes bright and large behind a pair of thick
glasses. "An old friend of mine."
Isadora stands
and extends her hand. "Mr. Gage," she says. "Very nice to meet
you."
When her fingers
are about to meet mine, a spark of electricity jumps between us.
"I'm sorry," I say. "I guess the carpet. . ."
"No," she says,
taking my hand in her own and pressing lightly. "It's me, I'm
afraid. It happens all the time."
"Isadora is a
curandera," Brautigan tells me. "She's spoken to several of my
classes."
"I live in
Presidio," Isadora explains, taking her seat again. "But I wish I
lived in Alpine. I have some relatives there."
"It's a lovely
town," I say. "A curandera. That's a sort of healer, isn't
it?"
"You win a
prize. Most people don't know anything about it, and those who do
don't know much at all. Usually, people think it's a sort of
witch doctor. A Mexican witch doctor. People who come to see me
for the first time, gringos at least, expect to find a house full
of shrunken heads and pincushioned Barbies."
"What a pleasant
surprise to see you," Brautigan says. He reaches across to pat
her on the back of her hand. In the shadow made by his hand I see
a spark, blue, twinkle at his touch. Brautigan's flinch is
infinitesimal. "Oh, Leonard. Let me get you a drink. What would
you have?"
"Just a beer," I
answer. "Shiner, if they have it."
"Be right back,"
Brautigan assures us.
"So you live in
Presidio," I say. "Are you here to visit relatives?"
"No," Isadora
says. When she blinks, it's very slowly. I find myself watching
her eyes, waiting for her lids to drowse and bow and close and
rise again. "I'm giving a talk at UTEP tomorrow. On herbs."
"Oh," I say,
trying to sound interested, but knowing nothing on the subject. I
might mention that I subscribe to no gardening magazines and
usually skim those articles in Southern Living that deal
with planting magnolias or harvesting gardenias.
"Do you lecture
much?" Isadora says.
"No," I admit,
with a laugh, "I'm not a professor. I'm a --"
"I know who you
are," Isadora cuts me off.
I watch her eyes
grow even wider behind her lenses and find myself nodding,
remembering about the spark that leapt between us.
"No," she says,
smiling. "I mean, Peter told me about you. I hope you don't
mind."
I'm surprised to
find that I don't mind at all, that, in fact, I feel relieved
that I don't have to act the part of academic. That I don't have
the secret identity of a superhero, or supervillain or
super-anything to hide.
"I have heard so
much about you," Isadora says. "For so long."
"Really," I say.
"I guess I'm flattered."
"Growing up in
Mexico, you were mentioned every now and then, but when I came to
the States, for college, you were the talk of the campus. It was
said you struck there yearly. On campus. On the anniversary of
the day you killed your wife. Soon after Valentine's Day, as I
recall."
"Oh," I say.
"Well, I've never been married, actually."
"Right," Isadora
says, lifting her drink to take a dainty sip. "Where would you
wear the ring, after all?" She waits to make sure that I'm not
offended before laughing at her own joke.
"Well,"
Brautigan drawls, rejoining us, "I see you guys have found some
way to amuse yourselves." He sets my beer down in front of
me.
"Peter," Isadora
says, "why don't you have Leonard talk to your classes, at least
your graduate seminars? They'd love him."
Brautigan balks.
"Well, I don't see how. I mean, I don't think Leonard would much
care to."
"Would you?"
Isadora asks me.
"I don't know,"
I say, looking at Brautigan to see if he might direct me toward
the right answer. Then my desire to be in his classroom comes
back to me, the need to be surrounded if only momentarily by the
students. I nod. "Yes. I would love to speak."
Isadora laughs.
"So. There you go. Peter, you must have him. And every guest
lecturer you have is simply one less day for which you are
responsible. You know," she whispers, leaning across the table
toward me, her necklace, a tiny black stone on a cord of rawhide,
swinging forward to ping against her glass, "you're all they want
to talk about. The students. I've never been in a class where you
didn't come up. What you mean. Where you came from. Why you do
it. They love you. You're the rock star of folklore, I would say.
Topping the charts for much longer than any Beatles ballad that I
can think of."
"I guess I'm
flattered," I say, trying to shut out the sound of the piano,
still hidden, tinkling like mad. My mind supplies the words to
its melody: parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme; Hurry, Gage,
Rosemary, there's time.
"We could,"
Rosemary said, "have a perfect child."
We'd spiked a
smallish watermelon in celebration of an all-night horror-movie
festival at the drive-in. After only a slice, I felt a little out
of control. "Huh?" I said.
"They're not
genetic," Rosemary explained. "Our misfortunes. We're not
destined to have children missing digits. We might -- we would!
-- have beautiful children."
"Destiny!?" I
thundered. "You and me, the Hook Man and the Kentucky Fried Rat
Lady, we're not destined to bear a new generation of
monsters?"
"Monsters?" Rosemary shrieked, spitting seeds. One landed
on my cheek and stuck there. I flicked it off with the point of
my hook. "We're monsters?"
I stumbled.
"Well. No. But."
Rosemary
propelled herself upward off the porch glider, spilling
watermelon rinds on the floor around her ruined feet. "No buts
about it."
"No hands," I
said, knowing I should shut up, but unable to, my tongue so
addled by rum it may as well have been the tongue of someone
else. "No hands. No feet, maybe, but a butt he would have. He'd
have a fine butt, our son!"
"Our son!"
Rosemary sputtered, turning from the screen door to glare at me.
"Our daughter, you mean."
"Our son!" I
shouted. "Our son! No doubt decapitated at some point in his
young adulthood, left to wander a pumpkin patch, searching for
his beautiful head, fumbling about with hands his father
worships, scrambling in the dirt and pulpy tendrils, desperate to
find his gorgeous noggin. Fated to haunt a rumor-laden lovers'
lane forever, alone, unloved, feared." I stopped, fought back the
stinging tears. "They fear him! Our son! Our beautiful
boy!"
Rosemary said
not a word more, just shook her head and went inside, leaving
behind a half-eaten watermelon, a swarm of flies feasting on its
sugary pink innards, and me.
When Brautigan
excuses himself to go to the bathroom, Isadora scoots her chair
over close to mine so that we're sitting side to side, like
theatergoers. She leans close to my ear and, her voice deep and
calm like a hypnotist's, says, "You're going to drive yourself
crazy."
"What?" I say. I
try to turn to face her, but she holds her hand cupped around my
ear so that I would have to fight her to move at all.
"You're a mess.
All this pain and worry and confusion. About -- good God --
everything. Let me come up to your room later. I can fix
this."
"I don't know.
What would Dr. Brautigan think?"
"He never has to
know," Isadora says. She moves her hand away from my ear so that
I am free to move again, but it takes me a second or two before I
can bring myself to face her.
Later, after
Brautigan and I have walked Isadora to her room -- on a much
lower floor -- and said our own good nights, I sit on my bed,
wondering if she was serious, if she would be coming to my room.
Wouldn't it be easier if I just went to her room? As it was,
Brautigan might still be awake when -- if -- she showed up at my
door. He'd hear her. Then, too, what did that matter? They're
clearly friends and nothing more.
I get up and
look at myself in the mirror. A bead of sweat rolls out from
under my arm down to my elbow. I think about changing shirts.
About taking my clothes off completely and getting into bed,
feigning sleep. About kicking off my shoes. About peeling off my
socks. About going to the bathroom and brushing my teeth. About
opening one of the magazines I brought and rubbing a perfume-ad
strip across my wrists, behind my ears. I think about all of
these things but do none of them. Instead, I back up and sit on
the edge of my bed, dreading and hoping for the rap of Isadora's
fist against my door.
When the phone
rings, I jump. "Hello?"
"Remember me to
one who lives there. . ."
"Hello?
Hello?"
"She once was a
true love of mine."
Click.
Isadora's knock,
like a raven pecking at the brass plate on which my room number
is engraved, wakes me. I sit upright and look at the phone. I
don't remember putting the receiver on its cradle. I don't
remember leaning back on my bed. I don't remember falling asleep.
"Just a minute," I half say, half whisper at the door. "I'll be
right there." I run a hand through my hair, hoping to calm it
from its struggle against the pillows.
When I open the
door -- with the chain on it -- and peek out, Isadora says, "Open
up. It's me."
Looking down, I
note that she's holding a burlap sack.
"Hang on," I
say, closing the door and unchaining it.
"What were you
doing?" Isadora says. She hasn't changed clothes or re-fixed her
makeup, and my nose tells me that there is no change in the way
she smells, no perfume was spritzed on for my benefit. She
bustles past me.
"I fell asleep,
I think."
"Jesus," she
says, setting her bag down on the dresser. "You'd think you were
expecting a boogeyman the way you had that door locked and
chained." She turns to face me, knits her eyebrows. "Hey, this
sort of reminds me of an old Abbott and Costello movie. Remember
the one where they meet the Wolf Man?"
"I don't think I
ever saw that particular film."
Isadora begins
to take things out of her bag and arrange them on the dresser
top. "It's a good one. And there's this scene where the Wolf Man,
whatsisface, Larry Talbot. Wait." She stops and bites at a long
red nail. "Is that the character's name or the actor's
name?"
"Dunno."
She nods and
shakes her hands in front of her like she's drying them off, then
goes back to rummaging through the bag, pulling out several
candles, then putting them right back in. "Doesn't matter.
Anyway, he knows he's the Wolf Man, right? And there's a full
moon, and he knows he's going to go, you know, lupine at any
minute. So he tells Abbott and Costello to lock him in his motel
room and not let him out no matter what they hear happening
inside."
She
pauses.
"Right," I say.
"And?"
"And what? That
reminded me of you holed up in here like you were. Sort
of."
I don't know
whether I should approach her or wait for her to finish and
approach me. I try not to stare at her or the bed but at my feet.
They don't look real. They look, for some reason, like they are
someone else's feet, like they are not attached to my own body. I
look away from them and focus my attention on a mosquito --
hatched no doubt from the lobby's ridiculous lagoon -- that has
somehow gotten in the room. It fumbles around the dresser
lampshade, tickling the lightbulb.
"What is all
that?" I finally say, driven to speech by my discomfort.
"Tools," Isadora
says. "We're almost ready to get started." She fishes a large
hotplate out of the bag and plugs it into a wall outlet. Then,
wetting her finger and feeling to make sure that the burner is
getting hot, she reaches into the bag and pulls out a shallow
cobalt-blue bowl, which she sets on top of the burner. "Be right
back," she singsongs, waltzing into the bathroom. She doesn't
close the door behind her.
Is she getting
undressed? I wonder. Should I do the same?
"I'm back,"
Isadora sings immediately. The ice bucket sloshes in her arms.
Pouring the water into the cobalt bowl, she says, "Okay. Now we
sit down and talk." She dries her hands on her sleeves. "Give
this a chance to steam up."
"You're looking
at me funny," Isadora says.
"No. I'm just.
Not sure how this works."
"Well, you've
never done it before. You can't know."
Taken aback,
insulted, I blurt, "Hardly. I'm experienced." Immediately I
realize how much I sound like a boy defending himself against the
truth of his inexperience. I look away from Isadora, cough into
my fist.
Isadora cocks
her head to one side so that her hair falls like a black wave
over her left ear. She blinks her strange slow-motion blink, then
squints at me. "I see. You think. You think something that is not
quite right."
"I beg your
pardon."
Isadora smiles
at me, gets up from her chair and moves to kneel beside mine. She
takes my hand in both of hers -- two little sparks -- and
squeezes. "I don't want you to be embarrassed."
"I --"
"No," Isadora
insists. "Just listen. This isn't about sex. Not between you and
me, at least."
I try to pull my
hand away from her, but once again she holds tight, so that I'm
left no choice but to sit still.
"I'm sorry if
that's what you thought. And it's not that you're unattractive.
You're quite handsome. But I had something else in mind.
Something more important."
"Oh, God," I
say. "I feel like a dope."
Still holding my
hand, she stands. It's the first time I realize how tiny she is.
The stone hanging from her neck is level with my eyes.
"Listen,"
Isadora says, "we've got work to do, and there's no room in this
line of healing for shyness or discomfort." Letting go of my
hand, she turns and moves back to her chair. "I'm going to show
you something," Isadora says. She holds out her hands. I hadn't
noticed her picking anything up off the dresser or taking
something out of her pockets between the time she held my hands
and now, but there is indeed something there, cupped in her
joined palms. Dark, tiny, it begs me to lean forward for a closer
inspection. "Do you know what this is?" she asks me.
I do, but am
unable to speak. It's a fossilized sea urchin, the same kind
Rosemary found in front of her house in Wichita Falls, the same I
kind I took to school so many years ago, when Mrs. Custer told me
I'd (found something quite common, something unremarkable.
"It's a heart,"
Isadora says, her voice a ghost voice, the echo of a
rattlesnake's tail wag. "A heart."
"It's. .
."
"A heart,"
Isadora says yet again. "Fossilized. Millions of years
old."
"Are you sure?"
I ask.
"Take it,"
Isadora tells me, leaning forward. I hold out my palms just as I
did in that hot fourth-grade classroom and Isadora tilts her
hands so that the sea urchin/heart rolls forward, end over end,
until it perches at the edge of Isadora's fingertips like a
miracle of nature, a hanging rock, a boulder balanced on the lip
of a desert canyon. Then, gravity taking hold, it tumbles into my
grasp, carrying with it a spark from Isadora. "Hold it tight,"
she says. "Hold it tight like it's your own heart, like its
presence in your hand is all that's keeping you alive."
I do as Isadora
instructs me to. My hands wrap around the sea urchin/heart like a
child holding tight to a kiss thrown by a favorite aunt. I feel
its ridges and markings on my palm, against the fleshy pad at the
base of my fingers, the hard muscle at the bottom of my
thumb.
"Do you feel
it?" Isadora asks.
"Yes."
"No. Do you feel
it? Its life? Its beat?"
I start to shake
my head no, to tell her that what I hold in my hands is not a
heart but a water thing turned into stone. I start to open my
hands to drop the sea urchin on the sculpted shag carpet at my
feet.
But.
But then I feel
it. I do. Its beat. The thud of its life force.
"It's warm," I
say.
"It will get
warmer still," Isadora assures me. "It will get hot. But you
can't let go. It won't burn you."
"I can feel it,"
I say, amazed.
"Yes," Isadora
says. "I know."
"I can feel it
beating like my own heart."
Isadora walks to
the dresser and her bag. "Close your eyes." She looks at me. When
she blinks, in slow motion, my eyelids follow her lead. But they
don't open back up. They stay sealed shut.
"I can feel
--"
"Shhh," Isadora
says. "Shhhh."
When I feel the
spark of Isadora's touch against my hands, I don't jump; I open
my eyes. Some time has passed since I closed them, but I can't
say how much.
"What do you
feel now?" Isadora asks me.
"It's not quite
so warm now. And I can barely feel it beating."
"Keep holding
it," Isadora says. "Close your eyes again."
"Now what do you
feel?"
Isadora kneels
before me again.
"I feel," I say,
and I am suddenly on the verge of tears, "nothing. It's
gone."
"Give it to me,"
Isadora says. She presses on my hand so that it gives a little.
My fist softens, and the stone falls into Isadora's right palm.
With her left hand, she takes my fingers and pulls me up. "Come,"
she says.
Isadora holds
the stone a few inches above the bowl on the burner. The water is
boiling. Steam rises in wisps. "Relax," Isadora says.
I'm standing
beside her, shaking a bit.
"Close your
eyes," Isadora says.
In the darkness,
a few flashes, like heat lightning. Then, a redness swells up to
overtake the blackness. It's hard to breathe for a moment. Then
the redness fades. Everything is black again.
"Open your
eyes," Isadora says.
The stone is
gone. Isadora dusts her hands the way a cook does after rolling
dough. "Lean forward," Isadora tells me. "Breathe normally." She
puts her hand in the middle of my shoulders and presses me down
toward the steaming bowl.
The smoke
recalls something I haven't smelled in some time. I can't put my
finger on what it is.
"Should I close
my eyes?" I ask Isadora.
"It doesn't
matter," she answers.
Persimmons. I
have to move a bit. Away from the tree. Its branches, like the
bones of a bird's wings, a hundred birds' wings outstretched,
are dotted here and there with persimmons. Not yet ripe.
Bite down on one and your mouth will pucker and cry out for
water. Persimmons. Sour little apples. They hang like tiny moons,
obscuring my view. Where is it? Orion? Where are you?
Like a movie
star, she moved through the halls followed by a retinue of
servant peers. Glowing. Yesterday she moved through the light of
a projector in science class. The Milky Way stretched across her
smile. A nebula spiraled in her eye. Halley's Comet flamed
against her lips. A meteor shower washed her hair before she sat,
disappearing in the classroom's oblivion.
My brother
had a box of Playboys secreted in the barn. We looked at them
cautiously, afraid every stomping horse's hoof was the boot of
our father come to kick our asses. "She's beautiful," my brother
said of every month's bunny. He shut his eyes to kiss Miss
May.
When I shut
mine, I saw Audra.
Homework for
tomorrow: Find Orion.
She rarely
rode the bus home. Most days her mother picked her up in their
gleaming Jeep. Its very mud spatters looked perfect, perfectly
placed, colored, textured. But when she did ride the bus, those
afternoons were cast always in golden light. No clouds could
dampen the aura that surrounded her. She got off just before my
brother and myself. After a second or two of readjustment, the
school bus and its riders became itself and themselves again.
There was nothing glowing or beautiful about any of us. Behind
us, however, receding in our vision, diminishing, shrinking, she
gathered the mail from her mailbox and moved like an angel to her
front door.
I find the
Big Dipper. And the Little Dipper. No problem there. Cassiopeia
provides little resistance. Perseus. There he is. Just above and
to the right of that highest persimmon. But Orion? AWOL, for all
I can tell.
They'll give
you the shits, them persimmons. Not ripe like they are. Don't go
eating too many. Never mind too many. Don't go eating none. Wait
a while. Keep your shirt on. All good things to the boy who don't
cry wolf.
Leonard, she
whispered in the library. I was looking for nothing but privacy.
She surprised me; I expected her glow to precede her, announce
her arrival like a herd of trumpeters calling heaven down to
earth. Leonard, do you think I'm pretty?
She's pretty,
my brother said. He kissed Miss July.
Look for the
tip of his bow.
The bus
smelled like ammonia. Do you smell that? I asked my brother. Some
planets that's all there is. No oxygen. No water or nothing.
Ammonia, that's all. And there may be life there anyway. Things
that live in ammonia.
Smells
terrible. Smells worse than persimmons.
I stood in a
corner next to the water fountain. The bell for Homeroom ached to
ring over my head. Buzz stood next to me, counting condoms in the
pocket of his jacket. When they passed me, Audra and her minions,
she sparkling like a firework, they basking in her glittering
wake, she turned to smile at me. I blistered to step out of the
corner and join, not them, but her, to have her take my arm and
the two of us lead the whole crowd off to a picnic, a football
game, a Valentine's dance.
Miss December
tastes bad, my brother said.
I was the
oldest boy on the bus, the only male in my class not to get a
vehicle for some teenaged birthday. No hand-me-down farm
trucks were available for my use. No ailing family wagon
retired to the service of the kids was presented to me. No
recently passed relatives bequeathed lemon-yellow Plymouths to
this youth. I rode the bus like a well-respected spook. The
younger kids, in deference to either my age or my prosthetic,
avoided me, provided me with a moat of open seats to aid in the
isolation I desired. When Audra rode the bus, she made it a point
of sitting in front of me. I watched the halo above her head, the
plumb line of her ponytail, like a fakir watches his snakes, with
concentration so great it evokes headaches, begs for the
admiration of tourists.
Just below
that one. Is that a satellite? It moves so slowly. Too slowly to
be a shooting star. When it comes out from behind that persimmon
I'll know.
I heard it
coming, the car, heard its slow approach, heard its engine growl
as it climbed the hill.
Would you
like to go out with me sometime, I said. My head hurt so much I
thought I might pass out. My heart thudded in my chest like a
jackhammer. I wished it might find a fault in the wall of my ribs
and break out, ending my misery. We could go to a
movie.
They're still
green. You eat 'em while they're green like this, you're asking
for trouble. Asking for it.
What do you
think about her? my brother asked me.
Shhhh.
What? Do you
hear Daddy?
No. I guess
not.
Where'd it
go? It never came out. I lost it. Was it a satellite? It moved
behind that persimmon, and that was that. That was that. Was it a
satellite or not?
The brightest
star is in his belt. Note its coloration. What does that tell us
about this star?
Heard the
growl of its engine over the growl of the oil wells, their arms
chugging, noses dipping, calling more oil to the surface, pulling
it up out of its home, charming it upward, day and night.
Oh, Leonard.
You are sweet. You are. But I can't. I'm sorry. My mother and
father won't let me date yet. They're a little
old-fashioned.
Maybe you
could ask them. Maybe they'd say yes this time.
I could. Yes. I
will. I'll do that. But I don't expect they'll say yes. Daddy's
such an old sourpuss.
Heard the
rustle of a footstep but didn't say anything this time. My
brother held Miss October to his puckered lips. I closed my eyes
and saw her moving down the hall, like a queen.
What are you
boys doing? my mother asked.
Heard the
engine's growl grow close. Saw the satellite move suddenly,
unexpectedly from behind another much lower persimmon. It swept
across the sky like the second hand of a clock, smooth, fluid.
Heard the engine's growl.
Stars die
sometimes. We can tell the age of a star by its color. What star
in Orion do you suppose might die first?
Heard my
brother gasp. But I didn't open my eyes. Heard my mother turn and
leave.
It missed my
head by not much. Its tires crept through the grass like a squad
of rubber snakes, hissing against each blade, every cow
patty, moving slow. Its headlights preceded it, searched
the ground in front of it for rocks and trees too tired to stand
up anymore. Its engine's growl became a murmur as it stopped and
idled. The headlights slunk back to their caves, leaving all dark
again.
Just one
bite. Just to see what it's like. One bite. One time. Let's try
it, my brother said.
You go
first.
No, together,
my brother insisted, handing me a fruit. Ready? On three.
Heard them
giggling. Heard them crawling over the front seat into the back.
Heard them breathing, like the rig pumps, deep, steady, pulling
something up from its home.
You boys get
your chores done? my father asked at dinner.
My mother
stopped eating to look at me.
Yes, sir.
Yes, sir, my
brother said.
I think
mine's ripe. It's not that sour. It's sweet. It's like it should
be.
Mine's terrible.
Mine's like a lemon. Worse.
Mine's
good.
Rolled over
and crawled so slowly through the grass. Rocks scraped at my
belly. My hand felt the edge of a hardened cow patty. Moved
slowly. Careful. Don't make any sounds. Listen to see if they
hear you.
Which star in
this constellation do you think is the youngest? Why?
Heard them.
Laughing again. Heard them. Say my name. Heard them. Laughing
harder. Heard them.
We should
burn them. We should get rid of them. We should take them to town
and put them in the Dumpster behind the grocery store.
We could hide
them someplace else.
Pulled myself
into a crouch beside the rear wheel. Heard my heart beating so
hard in my chest I feared they'd hear it, too. Held my breath.
Looked up. Saw another satellite moving into the arms of the
persimmon tree.
Here. Drink
this. I know; it tastes bad. But you'll feel better afterward.
What did your daddy tell you about those things? Wait. Wait till
they're ready.
Bright
hubcap. In its reflection, the persimmon tree. The satellite. The
tip of a bow. The point of my hook.
The bus
stopped. Come on, my brother said, it's time to get off.
Heard them
breathing. Heard them making sounds. So loud they couldn't hear
me stand up, slowly, unfolding myself. Looking in through the
rear window. Her face, eyes closed, her hair spilled behind her,
falling off the seat, piling in the floorboard. His back, naked,
muscled. His hands holding her hands above her head. Pinning her
down. His two hands pressing hers against the seat. Her lips,
moving. The glint of her teeth. Him pushing himself up off her.
Her breasts, the nipples. Her opening her eyes, smiling up at
Buzz. Her not seeing me. I'm there. Right there. But she doesn't
see me.
I crouch
again and move away. Into a maze of mesquite and cacti. Sit in a
clearing, a circle of dust made by cows placing themselves in
sleep. Miss December. Miss June. Miss March. Miss September. Look
past the thorns at the car, still idling. The persimmon tree,
peppered with sour fruit. Miss November. Miss April. The
bright hubcap. Heard them. Saw them. Shut my eyes and see nothing
now. Nothing at all. Hear them. The car idling. Smell the
persimmon tree. Smell the satellites. Smell the oldest star in
Orion, preparing itself for death.
Part Three
I see the first
hitchhiker just before I cross into New Mexico. Highway 54 is
lonely, stretching straight through the Fort Bliss Military
Reservation. Much of south central New Mexico is NOT OPEN TO
PUBLIC, the map I buy at a Chevron tells me. The gray screens
used by the cartographer to designate these areas suggest a
certain ghostliness, as if, were one to wander mistakenly into
such a taboo landscape, one would find one's vision blurred with
the passing of specters and phantoms. This is exactly what I
think I see on the road in front of me, a ghost escaped from the
military's zoo, a mirage, a trick of the eye and mind. She stands
like a statue of Athena, arm and thumb outstretched. When I pass
her, I slow just barely, not by hitting the brakes but by simply
letting up slightly on the gas. She's pretty, young, not
grizzled, not tanned leather-hard by the sun and a lifetime's
experience on the road. She looks like a runaway, a girl grown
tired of life under her mother's thumb, determined to escape the
drudgery of homework, even after countless TV movies or
school-assembly filmstrips detailing the horrors of
hitching.
She looks
vaguely like Heather from Alpine.
It's best not to
get involved in these type things, I think to myself.
When I first got
in the car, I could feel the outline of Brautigan's body
underneath my legs. "It's not going to be easy driving a
standard. Not with this." I waved my hook a bit, tapped it
against the steering wheel.
"You're through
with the easy ways," Isadora told me. She handed me the keys --
pickpocketed from Brautigan in the bar last night -- and shut my
door, turned to go, sparks flying from beneath her heels. What
will she tell Brautigan? I wondered, watching her walking back
into the hotel's absurd lobby. When will she tell him? After he's
been to the breakfast buffet for the second time? After he's
heaped his plate with waffles and cream? Will he say, "I wonder
where Leonard is?" Will she walk back inside now and go to his
room? Will she wake him up and tell him I've stolen his car to
get away from him and the Axe Man? Will she tell him what I've
told her, what I've just remembered myself? Will she mention the
petrified heart, its warmth and rhythm in my palm? Will Rosemary
come up? Will Isadora make unexpected love to him before breaking
the news of my getaway, affording me a few moments more before he
considers his first step in the direction of my recapture?
Too many
questions. I wiped them all out of my mind, all but one: putting
the car in first gear, I asked myself, which way does one turn
leaving Eden? Right or left?
Left.
El Paso fell
behind me suddenly, suburbs thinning into a sea of heat waves
washing over bare desert floor. The city and all its smells
dissipated; the air grew clearer at every mile marker. In my
rearview mirror, I could see, beyond my bloodshot eyes, a pall of
smog squatting like a hen on a pile of rotten, shattered eggs. I
was surprised to find that my hook feels remarkably at ease on
the steering wheel. With the slightest pressure, I can move to
pass cars, or swerve -- ever so gracefully -- past the occasional
unlucky jackrabbit or turd-brown tumbleweed.
Once on the
highway, car safely tripping along at sixty-five, I turned on the
radio. There were no special songs on that I could find, no
Willie Nelson anthems honoring travel or Boxcar Willie hobo
serenades. I pushed the scan button and drove, smiling, listening
to a three-second snippet of each station, one after another. For
the most part, I caught the middles of commercials, ads for cars
and Coca-Cola ("Muy Fresca!") and nightclubs proud to sponsor Wet
T-Shirt Night, special appearances by male strippers imported
from sunny, muscle-toned Los Angeles. I listened to the radio
scan until the stations began to die out, one by one, until there
seemed to be only two, battling for supremacy in the desert. Both
featured accordion-heavy, Mexican tunes. I opted for the one that
announced upcoming artists in Spanish and English.
And then I saw
the hitchhiker.
Although she is
so far behind me now I would be foolish to consider turning
around in the middle of the highway and going back for her, I
can't help but feel a little guilty. I wonder if she's cursing me
for leaving her stranded like that. Of course, she's probably so
used to the passing -- and not-so-subtle slowing -- of cars, I
may not even be a memory. I may be so average as to be
invisible.
I drive.
Judging by my
map, I'm passing twenty miles or so to the east of White Sands
National Monument when I see her again. The hitchhiker. She
stands as before, on the road's gritty shoulder, patient,
unassuming. Her hope dances on the tip of her thumb like a lone
angel, cursing the philosophers who have driven away the rest of
her heraldic crowd. I slow -- same routine as before -- sure that
it will be a different girl, that her similarity to the nymphet I
saw seventy-two miles ago is only just that, similarity. But even
at the reduced speed of fifty, I can tell it is her. Once past
her, I don't increase my speed, but slow even more, relishing her
in my rearview mirror, simultaneously confused and somewhat
spooked. When the heat waves engulf her, when her legs and
breasts and head are so distorted by the sun's shimmer she might
as well be a magician's assistant, boxed and rearranged by
legerdemain, I turn back to the road in front of me. It's past
lunchtime, but I am reluctant to stop, fearing that she will
catch up to me with the aid of a more responsive motorist, afraid
that she will come waltzing into whatever roadside diner may wait
ahead, spear me with those eyes -- clearly emerald even at high
speeds -- and leave me cold over a plate of onion rings.
I drive.
Once past
Alamogordo, the hunger leaves me. I don't need to stop. I can
careen further north, into the mountains my map promises.
I don't yet know
where I'm headed. If I'm even headed anywhere. It would be
possible to turn around right now, in the middle of the highway,
and drive back to El Paso and Brautigan and Eden. I could lie and
tell him I spent the day relaxing at a multiplex cinema or
crossed the border to examine the wealth of pi ñ atas Juarez
offers its visitors. Still, my foot doesn't budge from its perch
on the gas pedal. And my hook hesitates not a bit, but remains at
the top of the steering wheel, like the maiden on a ship's prow,
pointing, leaning, lusting for the unknown ahead.
I drive.
I drive into
foothills of the aforementioned and much-anticipated mountains.
The valleys are yellow sand dotted with scrubby mesquite, like
the earth here is the hide of a jaundiced dalmation. I drive past
innumerable rock shops as desolate as the one in Alpine. I drive
through a tunnel as black as any night I ever stalked. I pass
tiny oases of homes and trailers gathered around a stream that
seems more trickle than water source, a dowser's good cry
dribbling reluctantly downhill. I pass crosses placed roadside to
commemorate the spot where someone, some unlucky James Dean,
roared off into oblivion. Streamers hung from the arms of these
crosses rustle only slightly as I pass. I cruise behind a
convertible Cadillac driven by a man so short he might be a
successful jockey; he turns off into a road that, for all I can
see, goes nowhere. I motor behind a Volkswagen van with three
"Eat Bertha's Mussels" bumper stickers and a license plate that
reads 1 PEACE; when I pass they wave and smile and give me a
thumbs-up; their stereo's vibrations push me ahead of them. I
shadow railroad tracks that recall for me the chill of dead
children pushing this car -- this car I'm driving, the one I
stole, Brautigan's car -- to safety. I pass billboards
advertising the availability of accommodations shaped like
tepees, the impending opportunity -- Don't Miss It, Pardner! --
to visit Billy the Kid's cavernous hideout. I see mule deer
running through fields recently plowed. Yellow road signs warn of
falling rocks and the possibility that mountain goats may be
crossing just ahead. I meet cars coming toward me with canoes
strapped to their roofs, canoes every bit as bright as the one
Rosemary and I paddled across a derrick-sprinkled lake some time
ago. I face approaching highway patrolmen, merciless behind the
armor of their mirrored sunglasses; my heart races every time I
spy their cars and sharklike demeanor -- do they know I'm on the
lam? I pass stands advertising apples and apple cider, a gas
station that proudly displays a flag from every state in the
union and the chance to see a "real" rattlesnake nest or sample a
rattlesnake taco while an attendant squeegees your windshield. I
pass a tank around which are crowded a dozen or more cattle and a
boy holding a cane pole in one hand, a can of beer in the other.
I maneuver around curves echoing the yellow signs preceding them,
over turtles day-tripping to the legendary other side, through
cloud shadows that pound the convertible's roof with threats of
rainfall. I drive.
I drive past the
hitchhiker a third time. She's leaning against a sign indicating
the peak immediately to her right is named Tularosa. This time,
when I take my foot off the gas pedal, I remove it completely.
The car slows.
In my rearview
mirror, I see her walking toward me, her thumb still held out,
but now close to her denimed hip.
It's not too
late. I could still speed up, leaving her to rage at me in a
cloud of xanthic dust. I could turn around and head back the
other way, back to El Paso, back to the interrogation of the Axe
Man, his interrogation of me.
But, instead, I
take the car out of gear, lean over to unlock the passenger's
door.
Third time. A
charm.
Third time.
You're out.
Third time.
Impossible.
"I can't help
but wonder," I say to her -- Juanita Dark, she calls herself --
after we're rolling again, "how you did it."
"Did what?" she
says. She's lovely. Even her smelly feet, freed from hiking boots
and resting lightly on the dashboard, are lovely, toenails
painted a glossy pink.
"I passed you
three times. I mean, this is the third time I've seen you. Did
you get a ride from somebody who passed me?"
"I've never seen
you before," she says, nonchalantly.
"Well, no. Of
course not. I mean, it was easier for me to notice you than for
you to notice me."
"Based on
what?"
I don't know how
to proceed, so I retrace and begin again. "It's just somewhat
weird. I passed you just after leaving Texas, then an hour and a
half later, and now, just now. How'd you do that?"
Juanita smiles.
"You know."
"No. I
don't."
She smiles
harder, showing her teeth, perfect but for one incisor's
exceptional length. A vampire? I wonder. Does she turn into a bat
and fly the miles? In daylight? "Yes, you do," Juanita
insists.
I laugh
halfheartedly. "Really," I say, "I don't."
"So, where'd you
get the hook?"
I blush a bit.
"In an accident. When I was young."
Juanita nods.
"Right. So. Get it?"
"No."
"Oh, come on,"
she says. "I know who you are. I knew when I got in the car.
Surely you've got me figured out."
"I don't," I
tell her.
She pauses. Out
of the corner of my eye, I see her reach up to brush back her
hair. "You don't?"
"I don't," I
admit.
"So, are you the
Hook Man, or what?"
"Who?" I
lie.
Juanita frowns.
"OK. I guess I was wrong. Sorry."
We ride for some
time in silence. Finally I give in. "Yes," I tell her.
"Yes
what?"
"Yes. I am the
Hook Man."
Juanita holds a
hand out to me. "Congratulations. On coming out." When I take her
hand, I halfway expect a shock, like Isadora's. But it's a normal
handshake. "I'm the Vanishing Hitchhiker," Juanita tells
me.
I remember now.
Brautigan's students, immediately before their discussion of
myself and the Axe Man, spoke about the Bigfoot legend, and
immediately before that about the Vanishing Hitchhiker. I was
under the impression, however, that the Vanishing Hitchhiker was
a ghost, not an actual person. I tell Juanita this.
"Right. Well,
surely you know how these things get out of control, these
legend-things." She pulls her feet off the dashboard and sets
them on the edge of her seat, so her knees are pressed up against
the fine down of her cheek. "The legend is -- well, one of the
legends is, there are, like, ten million variations -- some guy
passes me on the road a few times, and stops to pick me up.
Sometimes it's close to a bridge or on a bridge and when I get in
the car, I'm soaked. And I tell this guy where to take me in a
ghostly voice, one of those you expect Mia Farrow to have based
on how she looks. And when we get to the address, he gets out,
this guy, and goes up to the door of the house, right? And my
mother or father, one or the other, answers, and he says, 'Hey,
I've got your daughter in my car, and she's wearing wet clothes,
some kind of ball gown.' And my mother or father or maybe even
both say, 'That's impossible. Our darling little girl was drowned
ten years ago tonight. Her car went off the road, the bridge, the
dam, whatever, and she was killed. She was on her way to the
prom.' "
"Spooky," I
say.
"You betcha.
Sometimes they drive us to a graveyard. That's the address we
sometimes give them, supposedly."
"Who's
us?"
"Us. My sisters
and I. That's the true part of the story, actually. Or the truth.
Whatever."
I don't say
anything. I don't look over at her picking the scab on her left
knee, or adjusting the sunshade so she can see herself in its
mirror. I drive.
"We're
triplets," Juanita says. "See?"
"No."
"We're identical
triplets." She pauses, apparently hoping that I'll jump on the
truth with this added snatch of information. "Okay," she finally
says, sighing. "We're identical trips, and this is our hobby. We
race. From place to place. By thumb. Never together. It's like a
scavenger hunt a little bit, or a grand prix. The Tour de France.
It's like that."
"The
Indianapolis 500," I try.
"No," Juanita
corrects me. "That's a circle. We go places. We pick someplace on
a map. Then we go. First one there gets to pick the next
place."
"That sounds
dangerous. Three girls hitchhiking."
"All races are
dangerous. That's what makes them worthwhile."
"Okay," I say.
"But I'm not sure I understand the whole Vanishing Hitchhiker
story in light of the race motif."
"We're her. All
three of us are her. Rolled into one. You thought you passed me
three times. But you didn't. You passed Vivian, then you passed
Delores. Or maybe you passed Delores, then Vivian. Then you
picked me up."
"Oh," I say, the
picture brightening so that I can recognize what's going on.
"Very interesting."
"Yeah. It's a
hoot."
I nod. "So you
don't really disappear. And you don't really give anybody an
address to your parents' house or a cemetery. You just
hitch."
"Right," Juanita
says. "I mean, I guess maybe it's possible that there really is a
hitchhiking ghost somewhere, but it's not us. I figure people see
us and make up the story to go with it. You have to admit, this
conversation would be a lot more exotic if I were wearing a
drenched prom dress."
"It's weird,
isn't it?" Juanita says, smacking her gum.
"What?"
"How we grow.
How our legends grow."
I think. "It
doesn't really have much to do with us."
"No, it doesn't.
We're like the spark that starts a fire. It gets out of control.
You can't see the spark anymore for the flames."
"The forest for
the trees."
"I guess,"
Juanita says. "But I wonder. About the second spark. Who is it
that says more about us than there is to be truthfully
said?"
"I don't know,"
I say.
"Are they
paranoid? Really creative? What? To make something from nothing.
It's sort of like magicians, kind of."
I think back to
my experience at the Alpine post office, the bizarre Simon and
Garfunkel phone call at Eden, the assumptions I made, the stories
I might have concocted to explain the unlikely or impossible. "To
make something from something else," I amend.
"They're more
important than us, I think," Juanita says. "The second sparks.
They notice us and make others notice us."
"Do we exist
without them?"
"Does anyone
exist without the acknowledgment of another?"
I think of
Rosemary, how I've felt since she left, how my own existence
without her has seemed less real. Still, I've had Brautigan at my
side almost constantly, his interest in me incessant, unwavering.
Is there a quality to acknowledgment that affects one's very
being? "If a tree falls in a forest," I say.
"But what if
there's a whole convention of lumberjacks there? They all hear
it. Then they go home and tell their wives and kids about the
sound.
"They'll each
describe it differently.
"They may, some
of them, embellish the story, say a giant pushed the tree down,
that the sound they heard was the earth groaning at the
impact.
"It could become
mythical."
"Yes," I say,
jumping in. "Civilizations might base their whole belief system
on one lumberjack's extravagant account of a toppled maple." I
remember my neighbor's home, each room bedecked in images of
itself, the wall space above the front door holding a picture of
the well-watered lawn, the asphalt street, my house, my shadow in
the window. Is that how my neighbor sees me, as a shadow? Did my
quick tour of her house affect her concept of me? Did the
enormous drinks she made affect that concept even further? When
Juanita got in the car she knew immediately who I was/am. Or at
least she thought she did. "You know me," I say to her.
"No," Juanita
admits, offering me a stick of Juicy Fruit. "I know the nine
millionth spark. I see the flames of your imaginary past, feel
them flutter against my face like moths, but I don't know you
from Adam."
When we cross
over a cattle guard -- set mysteriously in the middle of the
highway -- the sudden vibration knocks something loose in the
backseat. It hits the floorboard with a thud. "What's that?"
Juanita says, waking up from light slumber.
"I don't know,"
I say.
Juanita turns
around and looks down, then reaches back and, grunting, hauls the
log Rusty sent DeeDee up into the front seat with us. She turns
it like a player piano reading its musical scroll. "Cool," she
says. "Paolo Polio."
"What?"
"Did you make
it?"
"No. It was sent
to me."
"So somebody
made it for you? That's really sweet. They must really love
you."
"I don't know,"
I tell her.
"Oh, no. They
do. This took hours."
"What," I ask,
"was that you said? Paolo Polio?"
"Right, yeah.
Some of this is a Paolo Polio poem. In Spanish. And some of it is
I don't know what. Gibberish. Doggerel."
"What does it
say?"
Juanita turns
the log to what I assume is the beginning, although in all my
examinations, I couldn't tell what was what, beginning, end,
middle. " 'Tonight outside my window,' " Juanita reads.
Tonight
outside my window bears stalk hummingbird nectar.
Starlight dusts
their backs, snouts, delicate ears.
I hold my
hand over my breast, trapping the heart
that has
squeezed through my rib cage, begs my nipple to set it
free.
Bears sniff
at my windowpanes,
leave love
bites on the pine that guards my door.
My heart
tells me it hears you calling my name,
tells me it
can find you,
will bring
you here to see the bears' signatures on my pine,
to let the
starlight dust your shoulders,
to hear the
hummingbird wings,
my heart, the
river I've built to tell our story,
again and
again down the mountain.
Be still, I
tell my heart. Be quiet. Sleep.
All you hear, I
tell my heart, are bears in starlight, stalking nectar.
"You speak
Spanish?" I ask.
"A little."
Juanita sighs. "But mainly I just know this poem. It's one of my
favorites. Like I said, whoever sent this to you has got it
bad."
"It may have
been sent by mistake," I admit.
"I can't imagine
that would be true," Juanita says. "Listen. There's more. After
the poem, there's what sounds like Paolo Polio, but it isn't part
of the poem. I don't recognize it at all."
"What does it
say?"
"It's in
English, but the letters are like the stuff in Spanish, all run
together. 'Come to noisy water and replace, sweet captain, the
sun's cold arms with your own.' Any idea what that means? It's
not Paolo Polio."
I think about it
for a moment or two. "No," I say. "I don't think so."
After another
thirty minutes or so, I stop to get gas. Juanita leans against
the car whistling while I pay. When I come out, she says, "You
can leave me here if you're sick of my company."
"No," I say,
walking around to the driver's side. With my door open, I lean
across the roof and repeat myself. "No. Please. Let me take you
where you're going."
"It's not much
further," Juanita says, stepping back to open her door.
"It's
not?"
She points to a
road sign twenty yards ahead of us. "RUIDOSO," it says in
reflective letters, "67."
"What prompted
you to pick Ruidoso?"
"I didn't,"
Juanita tells me. "Delores did. My next choice is
Missoula, Montana."
"That's a long
haul."
"Yeah. Well.
Ruidoso could be very nice actually. My guidebook promises lots
of mountains and bears and a horse track and pine trees and
streams. That's how it got its name. Ruidoso."
"How?"
"The streams.
They run all through the town. And they're very loud. You know
how little streams running over rocks and stuff make more noise
than big, stupid rivers? They can be very musical."
"And that's why
Ruidoso is Ruidoso?"
"That's what the
guidebook says. Ruidoso means, in the Indian dialect, I guess,
'Noisy Water.' "
When she says
it, she stops. I look over at her. Her mouth has dropped open. My
heart is pounding. "Noisy water," she says again.
"Where's your
guidebook?" I ask.
Juanita rummages
around in her knapsack. "Here," she says, pulling out a dog-eared
Your Us & You.
"Find Ruidoso,"
I tell her. "Read me everything."
There's a casino
there, of course. Run by the Mescalero Indians on their
reservation. Doubtlessly the place Duncan had talked about going
to. This must be it, the next stop on his blackjack tour of North
America. By the time I've told Juanita the whole story, all the
details of mine and Rosemary's relationship, we're pulling into
Ruidoso, passing the first of the adobe tourist shops. We roar by
the horse track, empty but for a single horse and rider trotting
leisurely across the infield.
"Go straight to
the casino," Juanita says. We've kept track of the billboards
touting the good fortune to be found at the Mescalero's Inn of
the Mountain Gods casino. "Find Duncan."
"Maybe I should
stop somewhere," I suggest, "and get cleaned up. I don't want to
look road-weary."
"Screw that.
Road-weary is precisely what you want. You want to look like
you've been driving maniacally for God knows how long, searching
endlessly for your true love."
I'm nervous, of
course, almost sick with excitement and uncertainty. "What if she
doesn't want to see me?" I ask. "What if she refuses to see
me?"
"Listen,"
Juanita insists. "Anybody who wood-burns a Paolo Polio poem onto
a log is hoping for some results. This," she raps her fist
against the evidence, "is no message in a bottle cast out on the
ocean's eternal facelessness. This was delivered by civil
servantry's finest."
"But it wasn't
really addressed to me," I remind her.
"Don't be such a
stickler for details." She points out my window, her arm reaching
under my chin. "Turn here," she commands.
The resort --
that's what the Mescalero Inn of the Mountain Gods is, not just a
casino but a full-fledged resort -- is stunning. The buildings
are dark wood, low, blending with the dense forests that press up
against them. The lake, massive and blue, is dotted with
fishermen casting lines into the mirrored surface. A golf course,
its surreal green lawn fairy-tale perfect, stretches into the
trees and disappears.
"There's the
casino," Juanita says. "Pull up and park. I'll wait in the
car."
"What if he's
not here?"
"Then ask where
he lives."
I hesitate
turning the car off.
"You're wasting
gas," Juanita says, reaching over to kill the ignition.
"Go."
I look at her,
imploring her to let me sit a moment or two longer.
She smiles.
"I'll be here when you get back," she says. Leaning toward me,
she kisses my cheek. "Go," she says again.
I've been in
casinos before.
This one throws
me for a loop. Instead of bright flashing lights, preening
showgirls, hollering Texans at blackjack tables, there are only
hundreds of slot machines. Where most casinos look packed to
exploding with glitter and glitz, this casino is strangely empty.
It's nothing more than a room, like a high school cafeteria.
Indeed, instead of splashy neon Buddhas and Roman chariots, the
decor resembles a halfhearted New Year's Eve party; tinsel
garlands hang like vines here and there, strands of
Christmas-tree lights snake from hook to hook in the ceiling
tiles. Where most casinos are deafeningly loud, this one is no
more cacophonous than a convenience store. A few women stand in a
row at one wall of slots, each occupying two machines, plying
them with quarters and yanking their bandit arms. In the center
of the casino -- the place is so sparsely furnished it can be
taken in all at once -- a cashier's cage is occupied by an obese
Indian woman wearing a red vest; she pops bubblegum and flips the
pages of a fashion magazine.
"Hi," I say,
moving in front of the wire screen that separates her from the
gamblers. Without looking up, she holds her hand out. Not knowing
what she wants, I just stand until she moves her gaze from HOT
PROM LOOKS to my face.
"What?" she
says. "You want change?"
"No," I say.
"Actually, I'm hoping to find someone who I think may work
here."
She doesn't
smile or nod, but stares.
"Maybe you know
him. Duncan Swift? He's a blackjack dealer."
"We don't have
blackjack," the cashier tells me. "Only slots. And video poker.
Only machines. No wheels. No dice. No cards. Just the
machines."
"Oh," I say,
even though it's perfectly clear to me that the casino is bereft
of such luxuries as wheels, dice or cards. "Well, I'm pretty sure
he may have applied for a job here in the last year or so. Is
there somebody, a manager or something, who I could speak
with?"
"Yes," she says.
Reaching down below the counter where her magazine rests, she
pushes a button. "He'll be here in a minute," she says.
"Thanks."
"Can I help
you?" the manager says, appearing suddenly behind me. He's an
Indian, too.
"I don't know. I
hope so." I begin to realize how silly this sounds, my questions.
If Duncan came here, there was nothing for him to do, so he
probably left immediately. "I'm looking for someone who may have
applied for a job here about a year or so ago."
"Yes. Well," the
manager says, "we don't take applications from outside the
tribe."
"Oh, right. Of
course."
"But I could
check our files for you, if you'd like. We would keep a record of
this person's interest. Why don't you come with me."
The manager's
office is no bigger than a closet. We sit in chairs, knee to
knee, while he talks. "Duncan Swift. I do remember him, actually.
He wanted to deal for us. But we have nothing to deal."
"I noticed," I
tell him.
"He had his
sister with him. Wanted to get her a job, too."
"That was
Rosemary."
"Yes. She dated
one of our boys for a while."
I can't have
heard him right. "What?"
"Duncan left.
For Vegas, I think."
I suddenly feel
very dizzy, foolish, ashamed to have worked myself into a frenzy
of hope.
The manager
continued, "And she, Rosemary, she got a job here in town. She
works at the movie theater. Taking tickets. Selling them, too, I
would imagine. I don't go to movies myself, but that's how she
met Wes."
"Wes?"
"He's a
Mescalero. I think she found a place to stay, in addition. A
caretaker's cabin. She gets extra money in the winter, looking
after a family's big cabin. A lot of people in town do
that."
"Is she still
dating him? Wes?"
"I don't know,"
the manager tells me. "You can ask him, though. He tends bar at
the hotel. He's on duty now. Walk on over."
When I go out to
the car, Juanita's gone. I should have guessed. Vanished. She's
left a note, painted in nail polish, that reads, "Took the Paolo
Polio log -- couldn't resist. Will you ever forgive me? Good luck
and drive safely."
"Hello,
Leonard," Wes says when I walk into the bar.
He's a miracle,
as model-perfect as any young Adonis who ever stood glistening in
a damnable cologne ad, and I'm even more afraid of him and his
relationship with Rosemary than I was a few minutes ago. Tall,
dark, handsome in the most Hollywood sense of the word, he wears
the white shirt and bow tie of a bartender with real style, like
Tyrone Power or Cary Grant. He should be serving Nick and Nora
Charles, not me.
"Hi." I stand in
front of the bar, uncertain whether I should sit down or not.
Holding my hook up, I wave it a bit. "The hook give it
away?"
"The hook," Wes
says, nodding. He sets a coaster in front of me. "Get you
something?"
"Just a glass of
water," I say.
"No problem."
Wes picks up a tall Pilsner glass and fills it.
"You were
expecting me?" I ask him.
"Months
ago."
"What about
Rosemary? Was she expecting me?"
Wes sets the
water in front of me. "No," he says. "At least she told me she
didn't."
I take a long
drink. I haven't yet eaten any lunch, and it's way past
dinnertime. Suddenly I'm starved. Reading my mind, Wes sets a
bowl of pretzels in front of me. "Thanks."
"Listen," Wes
says, leaning against the bar back. His white shirt, duplicated
in the mirror behind him, swells and writhes with muscles. I look
at myself in the same mirror and cringe. I look like shit, like a
madman, wild-eyed, stubbled chin, hair a nest of greasy worms. I
am as terrifying as any description an adrenaline-addled teen
ever offered to french-fry-munching compadres. "Let's not be coy
or manly about this. We're not seeing each other anymore. I'm far
too young for her, she says, and she's probably right. Plus,
she's still not over you. Frankly, I could not have stood another
discussion of your bastardliness." He smiles. "You do sound like
a bastard," he says. "But after every good cussing she ever gave
you, I could tell she meant none of it, she'd take it all back if
you were here, if it was you on her couch, not me."
I sigh,
relieved. "Where is she?" I ask.
"My chivalry
astounds me," he says, leaning away from the bar back. "I'll give
you directions." He pulls a pen out of his apron pocket and
writes on a coaster.
A tree grows
through the front porch. Or, rather, the porch is built around
the tree. It rises up through the wooden floor, up through the
rafters and roof, rises higher still to tower over the dark,
pine-needle-covered shingles. A hummingbird feeder hangs from the
rain gutter, its ruby liquid calling a dozen or more of the
minuscule birds to hover and buzz around the four feeder tubes.
As I sit, summoning up the courage to walk up the stairs of the
house whose address -- written in perfect penmanship -- I now
hold in my good hand, one of the hummingbirds zips away from the
feeder and alights on a telephone wire. I'm surprised, having
been told at some time in my education that the poor birds never
stop flying, that they live their entire lives airborne,
fluttering. It sits only a moment or two; when another bird tries
to join it on the wire, it flies away. The second bird,
presumably an acquaintance of some kind, follows, like lightning
chasing a kite.
"Here goes
nothing," I say, and open the door of Brautigan's car.
Rosemary opens
up before I have the opportunity to knock. "No," she says.
"You're not coming in. Not yet."
She's beautiful.
Tanned. Looking very strong in jeans and a khaki shirt with red
epaulets. Her work uniform, probably.
"I," I say,
"thought we might talk."
Shutting the
door behind her, Rosemary nods. "We might."
But I can think
of nothing to say. I spent hours driving up here, a long time
listening to Juanita tell me what I should say to Rosemary, how
to go about reassuring her that our love is nothing short of
supernaturally predestined by gods. That kind of stuff. But I
never thought about exactly what I wanted to say, how I could say
it, how I could tell her what had been happening to me, what I'd
been doing, what I'd been thinking.
"Okay," Rosemary
says, filling the void I've created, "here's the deal. I've got
to go to work." She walks to a moped I hadn't noticed before.
"And when I get back, you can either be ready to talk, you can
actually talk to me and say whatever it is you need to say, or
you can be gone. Those are your choices."
I nod, like a
student being given a homework assignment. "I can do that."
Rosemary gets on
the moped and puts on the helmet that hung on its handlebars.
When it's strapped on tightly, she says, "You can wait on the
porch. Or in your car. But you're not going in my house. Not yet.
Maybe not ever." She turns the ignition. Surprisingly, it makes
very little noise. I'd expected a roar. "Be sure to look out for
the bears, though." She revs the engine with the
handlegrips.
"Bears?" I say,
raising my voice a bit to be heard through her helmet.
"We're having a
bear problem. They come after the trash. So when it gets dark,
you might want to sit in your car. Or on the porch, you should be
okay on the porch. Just don't screw with them if they come up.
They'll take your head off."
She backs the
moped away from me and turns it around to face the road. "It's
good to see you," she says before she rolls forward, out of the
driveway and into the road.
A minute or two
after she's gone, I'm sitting on the porch when I hear the sound
of the moped coming back.
"I've changed my
mind," she says when she pulls up next to the porch.
I stand up,
awaiting further orders, perfectly willing to do anything she
asks.
"When I come
back, you can either be long gone for good, or you can tell me
you want to stay. I'm not going back with you. Wherever it is you
came from. I like it here, and nothing's going to make me leave.
You either disappear or you tell me 'Honey, I'm home' and mean
it."
"I," I
say.
"You think about
it," Rosemary says. "You think about it and watch out for the
bears."
I'm trying to
decide what to do. But I can't get things to slow down long
enough for me to look at them carefully. My thoughts, that is.
Even though I know Rosemary won't be back for several hours,
until the movie theater has closed probably, after all the
couples have dragged themselves from the comfort and dark of the
back row into the bright lobby and chill night air, I feel the
need to rush. Did I come here to get Rosemary back? Did I come
just to see her? Did I come to bring her back to Alpine? Did I
know what I was doing when I let her leave with Duncan? She sat
in his car, not speaking, while Duncan and I loaded the last of
her things into the carrier on the car's roof. When I tried to
get her to roll down the window to kiss me, at least to say
good-bye, she sat very still, looking straight ahead. "Sorry,"
Duncan told me, opening his door to get in. "Sorry about all of
this."
"It's not your
fault," I said. I had a stack of magazines, some of my favorites,
the ones I kept while on the road, the ones I didn't throw away
but kept to thumb through again and again. "Here," I said,
passing them over the top of the car to Duncan. "I thought you or
she might like to read something while you drove. I don't know
how far it is to where you're going."
"Well, I've got
orders to tell you nothing more about that." He took the
magazines and put them in the front seat, then leaned across to
shake my hand. "I hope things work out for you."
"They will," I
told him. "You take care of her."
"I'll
try."
Then he got in
and they drove away and I was left to pack my things, deposit the
key under the doormat for the landlord, and hit the road, going
east, going away, running for what I thought was my life.
It sounds a
little like a calliope. I realize what it is almost immediately
after I first take notice of its voice. A stream nearby is
talking, singing, reminding Ruidoso why it is called what it is:
noisy water. Looking around for bears even though there's still
plenty of daylight, I walk down the porch steps, down the drive,
and cross the road in the direction of the river's sound. Down a
steep bank, through a thick screen of trees and brush, I catch a
glimpse of blue-green motion. Carefully, using tree branches for
support, I descend into the ravine, along what looks like a
trail. It levels off and leads me to a clear area overlooking a
bend in the water's path. It's wider than I'd imagined it would
be, the river, and deeper-looking, too. I'd expected to see the
bottom, the reason it gurgled so, expected to see the rocks,
rounded and mossy and circled by trout. But a few feet away from
the gravel shoals, the water deepens, turns dark and fast.
There's a large rock nosing out of the river's middle, sliding up
and out like a slate tabletop with legs cut too short on one end.
From where I stand, someone -- some Herculean engineer -- has
carefully placed assorted boulders in aline that jigs and jags
from the gravel shore to the big rock; a brave or stupid soul
might step cautiously from one to another to reach the large
rock. Clearly there is enough room to sit on it, to stretch out
even and, given the sun's cooperation, bask.
The temptation
is too much to risk.
Step by step,
stone by stone, I proceed, aware of the shifting my weight
induces in every rock. The frightening sensation of having one's
footing shiver in unexpected ways produces in me a state of
euphoria not unlike that I've read (in God knows what magazine)
occurs in temporarily lost spelunkers. When I reach the rock (the
spelunker spots the lantern of a fellow adventurer or the bread
crumbs Hansel left for Gretel's sense of security, or, yes sweet
Lord, the light of day) I almost throw myself upon it, hug it.
Instead, I stand for a second facing each direction. In front of
me, downriver thirty or forty yards: a tiny, guardrail-less
bridge just big enough for one car to traverse safely. To my
right, the way I just came: the stepping-stones, the trail to the
ravine's wall, Rosemary's house, invisible now behind so many
pines. Behind me, upriver: more river, bending away into nothing,
mountains peeking over sharp treetops. To my left: a wide stretch
of deep water, then a gravel bank not unlike the one I left a few
minutes ago. Pleased at my situation, my feat, at standing in the
middle of the deep river, I can't help but feel good.
When I sit, the
seat of my pants grows cold quickly. The rock is refrigerated by
the water rushing around it. Testing the temperature with my
finger, I'm surprised at just how close to ice the water is.
Nevertheless, I can't help but take my shoes and socks off and
dip, gingerly, each foot's toes in. Then I pull them out. When I
stick them back in, this time a little further, the toes seem not
to mind at all. Where they winced at first before, they seem now
not to care, not to mind.
Again I remove
and reinsert my feet, this time all the way to my ankles. Within
moments, they've become totally numb. They are simply not there.
They've been erased, like a cartoon character savaged by a gum
eraser.
Over the sound
of the river I hear a car approaching. It pulls onto the bridge
and stops. The engine dies. Incredible: without hesitation, the
boy driver leans over to kiss the female passenger.
Passionately.
Without further
ado, they abandon the discomfort of the front seat, the gear
shift's threat and steering wheel's unyielding nosiness, for the
roomy expanse of the backseat. Incredible.
Ignoring them (a
feat, I must admit), I lean down and roll up the legs of my
trousers, the ones I bought to be more like Brautigan, to be more
real, more professional, more a part of the normal, daylight
world. Then I stick my feet back in, this time to midway up my
calves.
It is not long
before my lower legs are virtually nonexistent.
So this is what
it's like to be without feet.
So this is what
it's like to be without legs.
So this is what
it's like to be without knees.
I lie back
against the rock. It would be no problem to simply slide down
into the water, a little at a time, until there is nothing left
but my head, bobbing disembodied above chill currents. How long
would it take to die that way? Is this water cold enough to give
me hypothermia? Would drowning be easier? I know it's difficult
to drown one's self, that the body's will to live ensures that,
given a chance, it will not succumb without a fight. I could
retrace my steps to the gravel shore, scoop up enough
river-rounded rocks, rocks looking from here curiously
heart-shaped, place them in my pockets, then come back out to
this rock, take the last stepping-stone up from its place,
assuming that it can be lifted, and -- holding it close to my
chest -- sink into the water's dark grip. If I can't lift the
last stepping-stone, I could go back to Brautigan's car and get
Rusty's mysterious cave-painting rock, ride it to the river's
bed. I'm thinking all of these ridiculous, melodramatic things
when I hear something rustling in the brush across the river to
my left. Bear, I think. Shit, can bears swim?
I pull myself up
out of the water slowly, as quietly as possible, fearful of
attracting the attention of whatever animal -- what sounds like a
very large animal -- skulks through the ivy, willow and pine. I
catch glimpses of it, of its progress: a branch moves, a squirrel
leaps suddenly treeward, an occasional bit of shaggy hide peeks
between maple leaves. It moves at a relatively quick pace, not
the glacial lumbering one expects from bears sniffing for honey.
And it smells. That is, it reeks. Of every cologne or perfume
ever devised, mixed and -- on creamy white paper -- stapled into
a magazine's spine.
Before long,
it's near the bridge where the necking couple sits parked.
Although I can't see it, I can hear its movement, its struggle up
the slippery slope to the road, the sliding rocks, giving dirt,
snapping twigs.
When it moves
out of the trees, onto the bridge, I catch myself, stop myself
from yelping aloud.
This is no
bear.
No bear walks
upright with such grace.
No bear has arms
so long, with hands so perfect, fingers so sublime.
No bear has a
face so gentle, so much like an angel's, albeit one in need of a
serious shave.
No bear inspires
such awe or raises hackles as this creature does.
When it gets to
the car, it pauses and looks in, shielding its eyes to get a
better view of the backseat performance. Unlike me, it offers no
excuses for its observation, tries not at all to disguise its
presence. When it looks up, I see it -- I swear this -- I see it
smile, its yellow teeth almost luminescent in the gathering
gloom.
When it walks
across the bridge and disappears into the brush on the other side
of the river, I realize I've been holding my breath.
"Jesus Christ!"
the boy screams, leaping out of the car.
The girl,
clinging to his naked chest, is dragged with him. "What was
that?"
"That was a
Bigfoot! That was a goddamned Bigfoot!"
The boy looks
around, spots me in the river below him. "Hey!" he hollers at me.
"Did you see that?"
"I did!" I yell
back at him.
"Fucking-A," he
says, his head swiveling between me, his girlfriend and the place
where the Bigfoot disappeared into the forest. "That was a
fucking Bigfoot!"
"No, it was a
bear," his girlfriend insists, her arms wrapped tight around him.
Is it my imagination that the necklace around her neck, a
necklace I couldn't possibly see from this distance, reads, in
gold cursive, "DeeDee"?
"You saw it,
right?" he yells at me. "You did?" Although it is impossible for
me to read his license plate from this angle, I swear I can.
RUSTY 1, it says. "You saw him, right?"
"I did," I say,
because I did see it. And they, they saw it. And now they see me.
They see me and my hook balanced shoeless on a rock in the middle
of a river. They see me and they don't run, they don't scream,
they don't tear off into the night, leaving a cloud of sex, panic
and burning rubber. They see me and I say, "I did. I saw
it."
The boy looks
down at the ground in front of him. "Holy shit!" he says. He
hollers at me again. "Come check this out! His fucking
footprints! He left his rucking footprints all over the place!
You've got to see this!"
Indeed I do.
I've been invited to investigate, to see DeeDee's necklace up
close, to check out Rusty's license plate, to smell their
respective, liberally applied perfume and cologne. Putting on my
shoes, stringing my socks on my hook's point, I move toward the
first boulder bridging the river back to the shore.
I slip.
Go down hard,
hitting on my back and tailbone. My head slams against the rock
so violently I see double for a moment. I'm losing
consciousness.
And then I'm
slipping, sliding off the rock, being pulled into the river by
the water, being pulled out into the current, being pulled out
while my vision fades to black. Flipping onto my belly, fighting
to stay awake, I begin to paddle as hard as I can, aware that I'm
making no headway, but trying desperately.
And then.
My hook strikes
the rock, the tabletop rock on which I'd just been sitting. And
stays. Hung in a crack, stuck, sunk in like a mountaineer's pike,
it holds. Slowly, beginning to cry, I pull myself up, back up
onto the rock, pull myself up by my hook until the water's
fingers release me, and I'm prostrate, laid out, basking in the
shadows of the trees.
Not dead. Alive.
Breathing hard. Heart galloping. Head throbbing. Back screaming.
Hook aching. Alive. Not dead.
"Hey," the boy
hollers down at me. He's halfway out of his trousers, standing
bent over, apple-red boxers blowing in the wind. His girlfriend
jumps up and down beside him, arms crossed in front of her
brassiered chest. Her necklace is gone. "Hey," he says. "All
right? Are you all right?"
"Yes," I
whisper.
"You going to be
okay?" he screams, standing straight, pulling his trousers back
up, relieved no doubt not to be jumping in to my rescue. "Hey,"
he repeats, "you going to be okay?"
I don't have to
think about it. I know the answer. I know what to say. I know
what I'm going to say. I know what I want to say.
"Yes," I tell
him, rolling over, waving my hook at him as best I can, in a way
that can only be interpreted as friendly. "Yes." I pull myself up
into a crouch, shake my throbbing head, clear the shadows from
the corners of my vision. I stand, wave my hook at him and his
girlfriend and holler, "Yes."
About the Author
A prolific short
story writer and editor, Matt Clark worked for Andrei Codrescu's
Exquisite Corpse before becoming the director of the
graduate writing program at Louisiana State University at the age
of twenty-nine. He died of liver and colon cancer at the age of
thirty-one. Hook Man Speaks is his only
novel.
Scan Notes, v3.0: Proofed carefully against DT.
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