Desolation Angels (2 page)

Late afternoon long ago home, and even recently in North Carolina when, to recall childhood, I did eat Ritz and peanut butter and milk at four, and played the baseball game at my desk, and it was schoolboys in scuffed shoes coming home just like me hungry (and I'd make them special Jack Bananasplits, only a measly six months ago)—But here on Desolation the wind whirls, desolate of song, shaking rafters of the earth, progenitating night—Giant bat shadows of cloud hover on the mountain.

Soon dark, soon my day's dishes done, meal eaten, waiting for September, waiting for the descent to the world again.

4

Meanwhile the sunsets are mad orange fools raging in the gloom, whilst far in the south in the direction of my intended loving arms of señoritas, snowpink piles wait at the foot of the world, in general silver ray cities—the lake is a hard pan, gray, blue, waiting at the mist bottoms for when I ride her in Phil's boat—Jack Mountain as always receives his meed of little cloud at highbrow base, his thousand football fields of snow all raveled and pink, that one unimaginable abominable snowman still squatted petrified on the ridge—Golden Horn far off is yet golden in a gray southeast—Sourdough's monster hump overlooks the lake—Surly clouds blacken to make fire rims at that forge where the night's being hammered, crazed mountains march to the sunset like drunken cavaliers in Messina when Ursula was fair, I would swear that Hozomeen would move if we could induce him but he spends the night with me and soon when stars rain down the snowfields he'll be in the pink of pride all black and yaw-y to the north where (just above him every night) North Star flashes pastel orange, pastel green, iron orange, iron blue, azurite indicative constellative auguries of her makeup up there that you could weigh on the scales of the golden world—

The wind, the wind—

And there's my poor endeavoring human desk at which I sit so often during the day, facing south, the papers and pencils and the coffee cup with sprigs of alpine fir and a weird orchid of the heights wiltable in one day—My Beechnut gum, my tobacco pouch, dusts, pitiful pulp magazines I have to read, view south to all those snowy majesties—The waiting is long.

On Starvation Ridge

little sticks

Are trying to grow.

5

Only the night before my decision to live loving, I had been degraded, insulted, and made mournful by this dream:

“And get a good tenderloin steak!” says Ma handing Deni Bleu the money, she's sending us to the store to get a good supper, also she's suddenly decided to put all her confidence in Deni these later years now that I've become such a vague ephemeral undeciding being who curses the gods in his bed sleep and wanders around bareheaded and stupid in the gray darkness—It's in the kitchen, it's all agreed, I dont say anything, we go off—In the front bedroom by the stairs Pa is dying, is in his death bed and practically dead already, it's in spite of
that
that Ma wants a good steak, wants to plank her last human hope on Deni, on some kind of decisive solidarity—Pa is thin, pale, his bed sheets white, it seems to me he's dead already—We go down in the gloom and negotiate our way somehow to the butcher store in Brooklyn in the downtown main streets around Flatbush—Bob Donnelly is there and the rest of the gang, bareheaded and bummy in the street—A gleam has now come in Deni's eyes as he sees his chance to turn tail and become a con man with all Ma's money in his hand, in the store he orders the meat but I see him pulling shortchange tricks and stuffing money in his pocket and making some kind of arrangement to renege on
her
agreement, her
last
agreement—She had pinned her hopes on him, I was of no more avail—Somehow we wander from there and dont go back to Ma's house and wind up in the River Army which is dispatched, after watching a speedboat race, to swim downstream in the cold swirling dangerous waters—The speedboat, if it had been a “long” one could have dived right under the flotilla'd crowd and come up the other side and completed its time but because of faulty short design the racer (Mr. Darling) complains that that was the reason his boat just ducked under the crowd and got stuck there and couldnt go on—big official floats took note.

Me in the lead gang, the Army starts swimming downstream, we are going to the bridges and cities below. The water is cold and the current extremely bad but I swim and struggle on. “How'd I get here?” I think. “What about Ma's steak? What did Deni Bleu do with her money? Where is he now? O I have no time to think!” Suddenly from a lawn by the St. Louis de France church on the shore I hear kids shouting a message at me, “Hey your mother's in the insane asylum! Your mother's gone to the insane asylum! Your father's dead!” and I realize what's happened and still, swimming and in the Army, I'm stuck struggling in the cold water, and all I can do is grieve, grieve, in the hoar necessitous horror of the morning, bitterly I hate myself, bitterly it's too late yet while I feel better I still feel ephemeral and unreal and unable to straighten my thoughts or even really grieve, in fact I feel too stupid to be really bitter, in short I dont know what I'm doing and I'm being told what to do by the Army and Deni Bleu has played a wood on me too, at last, to get his sweet revenge but mostly it's just that he's decided to become an out-and-out crook and this was his chance—

… And even though the saffron freezing message may come from the sunny ice caps of this world, O haunted fools we are, I add an appendage to a long loving letter I'd been writing to my mother for weeks:

Dont despair, Ma, I'll take care of you whenever you need me—just yell.… I'm right there, swimming the river of hardships but I know how to swim—Dont ever think for one minute that you are left alone.

She is 3,000 miles away living in bondage to ill kin.

Desolation, desolation, how shall I ever repay thee?

6

I could go mad in this—O carryall menaya but the weel may track the rattle-burr, poniac the avoid devoidity runabout, minavoid the crail—Song of my all the vouring me the part de rail-ing carry all the pone—part you too may green and fly—welkin moon wrung salt upon the tides of come-on night, swing on the meadow shoulder, roll the boulder of Buddha over the pink partitioned west Pacific fog mow—O tiny tiny tiny human hope, O molded cracking thee mirror thee shook pa t n a watalaka—and more to go—

Ping.

7

Every night at 8 the lookouts on all the different mountaintops in the Mount Baker National Forest have a bull session over their radios—I have my own Packmaster set and turn it on, and listen.

It's a big event in the loneliness—

“He asked if you was goin to sleep, Chuck.”

“You know what he does Chuck when he goes out on patrol?—he finds a nice shady spot and just goes to sleep.”

“Did you say Louise?”

“—I doant knaow—”

“—Well I only got three weeks to wait—”

“—right on 99—”

“Say Ted?”

“Yeah?”

“How do you keep your oven hot for makin those, ah, muffins?”

“Oh just keep the fire hot—”

“They only got one road that ah zigzags all over creation—”

“Yeh well I hope so—I'll be there waitin anyway.”

Bzzzzz bzgg radio—long silence of pensive young lookouts—

“Well is your buddy gonna come up here and pick you up?”

“Hey Dick—Hey Studebaker—”

“Just keep pourin wood in it, that's all, it stays hot—”

“Are you still gonna pay him the same thing as you did ah pay him comin out?”

“—Yeah but ah three four trips in three hours?”

My life is a vast and insane legend reaching everywhere without beginning or ending, like the Void—like Samsara—A thousand memories come like tics all day perturbing my vital mind with almost muscular spasms of clarity and recall—Singing in a false limey accent to
Loch Lomond
as I heat my evening coffee in cold rose dusk, I immediately think of that time in 1942 in Nova Scotia when our seedy ship put in from Greenland for a night's shore leave, Fall, pines, cold dusk and then dawn sun, over the radio from wartime America the faint voice of Dinah Shore singing, and how we got drunk, how we slipped and fell, how the joy welled up in my heart and exploded fuming into the night that I was back to my beloved America almost—the cold dog dawn—

Almost simultaneously, just because I'm changing my pants, or that is putting on an extra pair for the howling night, I think of the marvelous sex fantasy of earlier in the day when I'm reading a cowboy story about the outlaw kidnapping the girl and having her all alone on the train (except for one old woman) who (the old woman now in my daydream sleeps on the bench while ole hard hombre me outlaw pushes the blonde into the men's compartment; at gun point, and she wont respond but scratch) (natch) (she loves an honest killer and I'm old Erdaway Molière the murderous sneering Texan who slit bulls in El Paso and held up the stage to shoot holes in people only)—I get her on the seat and kneel and start to work, French postcard style, till I've got her eyes closed and mouth open until she cant stand it and loves this lovin outlaw so she by her own wild willin volition jumps to kneel and works, then when I'm ready turns while the old lady sleeps and the train rattles on—“Most delightful my dear” I'm saying to myself in Desolation Peak and as if to Bull Hubbard, using his way of speech, and as if to amuse him, as if he's here, and I hear Bull saying “Dont act effeminate Jack” as he seriously told me in 1953 when I had started joking with him in
his
effeminate manner routine “On
you
it dont look good Jack” and here I am wishing I could be in London with Bull tonight—

And the new moon, brown, sinks early yonder by Baker River dark.

My life is a vast inconsequential epic with a thousand and a million characters—here they all come, as swiftly we roll east, as swiftly the earth rolls east.

8

For smoking all I have is Air Force paper to roll my tobacco in, an eager sergeant had lectured us on the importance of the Ground Observer Corps and handed out fat books of blank paper to record whole armadas apparently of enemy bombers in some paranoiac Conelrad of his brain—He was from New York and talked fast and was Jewish and made me homesick—“Aircraft Flash Message Record,” with lines and numbers, I take my little aluminum scissors and cut a square and roll a butt and when airplanes pass I mind my own business although he (the Sgt) did say “If you see a flying saucer report the flying saucer”—It says on the blank: “Number of aircraft, one, two, three, four, many, unknown,” reminds me of the dream I had of me and W. H. Auden standing at a bar on the Mississippi River joking elegantly about “women's urine”—“Type of aircraft,” it goes on, “single—, bi—, multi—, jet, unknown”—Naturally I love that unknown, got nothin else to do up there on Desolation—“Altitude of aircraft” (and dig this) “Very low, low, high, very high, unknown”—then
SPECIAL REMARKS: EXAMPLES:
“Hostile aircraft, blimp” (bloop), “helicopter balloon, aircraft in combat or distress, etc.” (or whale)—O distressed rose unknown sorrow plane, come!

My cigarette paper is so sad.

“When will Andy and Fred get here!” I yell, when they come up that trail on mules and horses I'll have real cigarette paper and my dear mail from my millions of characters—

For the trouble with Desolation, is, no characters, alone, isolated, but is Hozomeen isolate?

9

My eyes in my hand, welded to wheel to welded to whang.

10

To while away the time I play my solitaire card baseball game Lionel and I invented in 1942 when he visited Lowell and the pipes froze for Christmas—the game is between the Pittsburgh Plymouths (my oldest team, and now barely on top of the 2nd division) and the New York Chevvies rising from the cellar ignominiously since they were world champions last year—I shuffle my deck, write out the lineups, and lay out the teams—For hundreds of miles around, black night, the lamps of Desolation are lit, to a childish sport, but the Void is a child too—and here's how the game goes:—what happens:—how it's won, and by whom:—

The opposing pitchers are, for the Chevvies, Joe McCann, old vet of 20 years in my leagues since first at 13 age I'd belt iron rollerbearings with a nail in the appleblossoms of the Sarah backyard, Ah sad—Joe McCann, with a record of 1–2, (this is the 14th game of the season for both clubs), and an earned run average of 4.86, the Chevvies naturally heavily favored and especially as McCann is a star pitcher and Gavin a secondrater in my official effectiveness rulings—and the Chevvies are hot anyway, comin up, and took the opener of this series 11–5 …

The Chevvies jump right out ahead in their half of the first inning as Frank Kelly the manager belts a long single into center bringing home Stan Orsowski from second where he'd gone on a bingle and walk to Duffy—yag, yag, you can hear those Chevvies (in my mind) talking it up and whistling and clapping the game on—The poor greenclad Plymouths come on for their half of the opening inning, it's just like real life, real baseball, I cant tell the difference between this and that howling wind and hundreds of miles of Arctic Rock without—

But Tommy Turner with his great speed converts a triple into an inside-the-park homerun and anyway Sim Kelly has no arm out there and it's Tommy's sixth homerun, he is the “magnificent one” all right—and his 15th run batted in and he's only been playin six games because he was injured, a regular Mickey Mantle—

Followed immediately back to back by a line drive homerun over the rightfield fence from the black bat of old Pie Tibbs and the Plyms jump out ahead 2–1 … wow …

(the fans go wild in the mountain, I hear the rumble of celestial racing cars in the glacial crevasses)