"You were singing to yourself."
"Yeah? I was singing?"
"What's the matter with you? Clean out your fucking ear holes."
"What was I singing?"
"Some stupid crap. How the fuck should I know?"
The Bic was in her hand, clicking like castanets. "Where's the shit?"
He tossed her a loaded plastic bag. "Getting bad," he said, trying to ignore the inner chafing of metal parts. "I was almost killed."
"Yeah?"
"New beatmaster took me for a narc."
"Terrordome," she said, attending to the drama of the pipe.
"I thought I was gonna have a fucking heart attack."
"That would be bad." Her rocks and trees, her clouds and clods, were starting to sparkle like enchanted-wood special effects in old black and white movies.
"Fucking-A, twinkletoes."
He was still reworking the incident atop his lonely hill in the living room overlooking the valley of the shadows. Death. It could pop up on you at any time like a shooting gallery target, only it was the one that was armed. He was wearing just his chains, eighteen-karat gold, a St. Christopher's medal, and a healing crystal given him by daughter Lindsay on the last of his birthdays to be celebrated around the faux brick hearth. If he passed now, who would bury him? Who would mourn? Frail and failing, strung upon a web of tubing and wire, unable to move, unable to speak, waiting hopelessly for the same spider that ate Benny, struggling with his eyes to tell the nurse, an immaculate vision in white, to touch, warmth to warmth, just once, before the cold envelops us all. Hold my hand, Latisha! he shrieks, a voice in a mannequin. The shuddering ventilator clicks on and off. Save me, he whispers to the walls, who wouldn't tell anybody, even if they could.
When he came to, he was facedown on the living room floor. He didn't know whether he'd fallen asleep or fainted or worse.
In the bedroom Latisha was hunched over the ratty copy of
TV Guide
she perused with biblical fervor. "
Jaws
is on now," she announced.
"So?" He was wiping his damp face with a musty towel.
"So I want to see it, it's my favorite movie."
"I'll rent it for you tomorrow."
"Gonna rent a generator, too?"
"Maybe Mister Horny Dinosaur next door will let you watch it with him."
He had come into the room to either retrieve an object or relate something important to Latisha, neither of which was apparent to him now; he returned to the bathroom to see if what he had lost could be found there. Then he was back, staring at the clothes at his feet and a strange pair of black briefs. Men's. Holding the article daintily aloft between two curled fingers, he searched through the house. Latisha was nowhere to be found. In the kitchen he checked and rechecked the locks on the windows, then became absorbed in cleaning the panes with a homemade mixture of ethanol and the juice of four lemons purchased weeks ago as a preventative against scurvy. He stood at the back door for the longest time. He swept the floor. Passing through the living room, he was diverted by the black oak out there on the lawn. There was a man hiding behind the trunk. While he waited for the man to show himself again, he took his pulse. The beat seemed rapid, rapid but not excessively so, steady perhaps, steady and strong, certainly lacking the telltale squishy note of a perforated chamber or malfunctioning valve or clogged artery. He had to stop the smoking tomorrow. He couldn't go on like this.
He discovered Latisha in the bedroom lying on her back, executing a surprisingly brisk set of leg-lifts. "I've been right here," she said. "Are you nuts?"
He jiggled the briefs before her nose. "What's this?"
"What's what?" She was counting reps in her head and could hardly be bothered. "Fucking underwear. So what?"
He poked her ribs with his foot. "It ain't mine, cupcake."
Her legs thumped to the floor. She stared at the ceiling. "So what the fuck you want me to do about it?"
He was on her before she could get completely to her feet, seizing a clump of unwashed hair in his hand and carrying her back against the wall to warn her, nose to nose, "Don't you dare sass me, you little cross-eyed bitch." An effort to maneuver her knee sharply up into his groin was met by a hard slap, then another, and snorting contemptuously, he pushed her entire head away as if discarding a particularly nasty piece of trash. She fell to the floor, assuming the doodlebug position, body curled into a tight ball, a helmet of hands to shield her head. He whipped her with the offending underwear and, when his arm tired, kicked with his bare feet, stopping to curse her bones when he bruised a toe. Flushed and wheezing, he towered over her, contemplating her evil egglike form, and discovering he was not yet finished, no, he must drop to his knees and with upraised fists seek to damage, if not break, the protective cage that held the poisonous mess of her heart. This she endured without complaint.
He collapsed like a depleted athlete across the mattress, wiped his face on the sheet. "Honey, honey, why do you make me do this to you?" There was no response. Slowly her reddened body unfolded, rose up away from him. "Hey, where ya going, huh? Answer me, answer me right now."
She returned from the kitchen bearing lightly above her head one of the two scraps of furniture in the whole house, a cheap wooden chair that he watched, transfixed, as it approached and descended without pause across his shoulders and defending forearm. She was readying for a second blow when he yanked the thing from her grip and, eyes loose and inflamed in their sockets, came growling to his feet. "Is this what you want? Huh, is it?" and he slammed the chair against the floor until the joints spread and cracked, sticks falling from his hands, while she bolted for the John, evading the slashing chair leg (now a club) by inches. The door banged, the lock snapped shut, he on the outer side, flailing away in an explosion of paint chips, the gouging magician, one-two-three, relishing his power over wood, she on the inner side, huddled trembling over the bowl like someone who has been or is about to be violently ill, fingers buried to the first knuckle in the ringing tunnels of her ears.
When the pounding stopped, she tentatively lowered her hands and listened. First, to the clump clump of his thick graceless feet up and down the narrow hallway, then from the bedroom the click Click CLICK of the lighter, then a pervasive swarming silence that drew her from her tiled sanctuary to stand shyly at the bedroom door, a watcher with big spaniel eyes. Surrounded by pillows, Mister CD was lounging upon the mattress, his back propped against the wall, his expression slightly strained with the effort of holding in a breath blended with sweet additives. He nodded genially in her direction, the apple-cheeked country squire savoring his evening brier. When he finished, he placed the stem in a saucer on the floor and, casually interested, looked up at her. "Now, what'd you go and make me do you like that?" he asked. "I coulda had a bad heart attack."
She mumbled out a reply.
"What? Speak up. You look like one of Dracula's wives."
She mumbled on.
"I can't understand a fucking thing you're saying. What is it?" He held a cupped hand to his ear, pretended to listen. His arm made a quick dismissive gesture. "Fuck that." He labored to his feet with elderly caution, plodded past her without a glance or a touch, to resume his ongoing study of the moonlit still life framed in his front window. There was a preordained method for scrutinizing the scene, an obligatory review in unvarying sequence of certain trees, shrubs, poles, shadows, reading the pattern for the anomalies one surely, at this point, expected. Across the desolate street the familiar houses, perpetually dark, not even a forgotten table lamp to share the vigil of these abandoned hours, their duplicate faç
ades presenting the same enigmatic expression, the solitary streetlight shedding its pinkish pallor over the ornaments of suburbia, throwing into further relief those cliffs and pools of deepest shade, teeming with potentialities, the moon a crescent of chrome among an intimidating array of icy studs where a single rivet had come undone, a communications satellite in decaying orbit, hurling itself into the oblivion of home. Then he noticed the hole in his view. His own Galaxie, it was missing. He peered through disbelieving eyes at the empty space in the driveway. He scanned the dark row of cars parked along the curb. He opened the door and rushed out onto the lawn, a frantic naked man utterly unable to comprehend -- his unmonitored pulse galloping headlong toward the finish line without him -- the rather unexceptional fact of his victimization by the forces of modern life. Someone had dared to steal his fucking car.
In the bedroom Latisha lay sprawled halfway across the disheveled bedding, her legs lost in a welter of CD wreckage, the slovenly pose, she imagined, of the final police photograph. She had found the pipe and the bag and now shell after lofting shell was breaking in coarse splendor against the high vaulting of her skull, launched from a busy mortar battery at her center, where the warm stem nestled pleasingly between her thighs, a snug axis around which her proffered body, gently at first, then with quickening vigor, began to move, up and down, side to side, churning up new worlds, one after another.
Three
BLACKWORK
The rain caught him in the dark by surprise, a cold finger at his cheek, tapping him awake to night and storm and the confusions of consciousness. He dared not move; he could recognize neither the place nor himself; the sudden uprushing of emotion he grabbed by the neck, squeezed its jester head back into the box, and waited for memory to find him again, as it always had. Then he sat up into a high wet wind. Evil clouds collided and sparked. At the foot of the hill the same silly cars raced along in their tracks like toys without drivers. He wore no watch to tell him how long he had slept. There was no hurry. He got to his feet carefully, as if movement were a commodity to be parceled and judged by unsympathetic eyes. He reached down in the grass for the backpack, swung its weight easily onto his shoulder, and, tilting his head, bared an incomplete set of discolored teeth to the quickening rain. He let it come down.
He descended the field in a lively sideways trot, catching himself on the gravel just short of the road surface, where the thrashing vehicles stampeded past like spooked beasts and the rain in their lights boiled furiously on the dark pavement. Here he turned a spatulate thumb into the oncoming glare, pausing now and again to wipe the water from his eyes. Twisted strands of hair black as fissures pasted to a skull of skin lab-specimen white. The iron filings of his unshaven beard. Under the left eye a single, dramatic eruption of swelling color, origin indeterminate. Sodden clothes. Scarecrow body. Who was there to stop for this solitary figure drowned in night and set in dripping supplication at the borders of a nation's commerce? Backward he walked, unsteady on broken-down boots of cracked lizard skin, right sole bound in a thick wrapping of silver duct tape. Rainwater snakes slid down his ribs slick as refrigerated oil. He had been in rain before. He would be in rain again. It all dried out, everything dried out, eventually.
In the shelter of an overpass he stood shivering between loud curtains of cascading water, overworked cars passing through backstage here on their way to another show. Fresh puddles around him deepened and began to move. He clambered monkey-style up the steep concrete slope to a small ledge underneath the flaking girders. Traces of an old roost: a scattering of frayed butts, toppled beer cans, empty matchbooks, an accumulation of names, dates, maledictions scratched into the supporting steelwork. He made a pillow of hands against the backpack on which to rest his damp head and he slept, unburdened by dreams. Accustomed to the periodic intrusions of harsh light, he knew at once who they were, even before the loudspeaker began barking out its orders. He slipped the leather sheath from his boot, left the knife behind in the dark. He took his time coming off the incline, dragging the backpack behind him. The driver, who hadn't bothered to get out of the cruiser, kept the spot in his face all the way down. The other one was posed near the front fender, hand resting meaningfully on the grip of his holstered revolver. Uniform head on a uniform body. Groucho Marx mustache smudge under his nose. "You can hold it right about there."
He stopped with the light speckling in his eyes, lowered the pack delicately to his feet. He understood well the instability of the ground moments such as these were built upon. A gray cloud of cigarette smoke lifted up out of the cruiser's window, dispersed like frightened ectoplasm in the humid air. From the height of the leaking bridge a single drop of water broke against the crown of his head. He blinked, waited for another that did not come, the wind from each passing car hitting him at staggered intervals like the draft from the blades of a giant fan turning just out of reach.
"Got any ID?"
He glanced down at the bulging blue sack between his boots. He paused, one-two-three. He looked up. "Don't believe so," he said.
"Want to empty the contents of your pack on the ground in front of you, sir? Just pick it up and dump it out. Slowly. You got a name, sir?"
In the lengthening silence, one-two-three-four-five . . . the officer's eyes began to crinkle, the mouth came open, neck veins engorged with disbelief. The bland countenance before him offered the assumption of complete cooperation. . . eight-nine-ten. "Well, you want to let me in on the secret?"
"Bill," he said at last. "Billy Clay." The officer was close enough for him to read the name tag on the shirt, which he wouldn't forget, to hear the threatening creak of the thick cop belt, which tickled the hairs of his amusement center.
"Kind of a kid's name, isn't it? You aren't a kid, are you, Mr. Clay?"
He shrugged, goofy-faced.
The driver called out from the idling car, did George need any help out there? No, George did not.
"You want to empty your pack, please."
He leaned down and brusquely dumped onto the wet concrete, the dark puddles, a semester's worth of college textbooks, some wadded clothes, some packaged food, a pathetic pile of sophomore junk. The polished black toe of the state poked among
Introduction to Western Civilization, Othello, Modern Biology.
"You know there's no hitchhiking permitted on the interstate."
"I wasn't hitching."
The officer picked up
General Accounting
and read on the inside cover: B. Clay. He tossed the book back onto the pile. "What's this?" Nudging a squat metal container.
"Sterno can."
"This?"
He peered, as if examining the object for the first time. "Rubber mouse," he said.
The officer watched him. "All right, I'm not even going to ask." The officer stepped to one side. "Okay, Mr. Clay, would you mind assuming the position, please?"
He came forward, planted his feet, and leaned out over the warm hood inches from the smoking driver behind the windshield with shiny Raisinet eyes, under damp clothes flesh cringing at the touch of another's hands, the blue ice and baby powder scent of the officer's cologne. He endured.
The officer stopped and stepped back. "Thank you, Mr. Clay. Please retrieve your personal items and I'll tell you what my partner and I are gonna do. We go on down the road now to the Valetown exit, where we turn around and come back, and when we do we expect that you and your yo-yo will be gone from our highway. Don't disappoint us."
The officer stared back at him as if unbroken sight were a singular expression of will, the truest form of comprehension, the movement beneath the skin of their faces mirrored closely, face to face. A moment lengthened, thinned, broke apart into something new, less dangerous, a crediting of the unacknowledged in one another. The officer touched the brim of his cap and returned to the waiting cruiser, where he said something to the driver, who laughed until both laughed, watching him collect his belongings, restuff a tattered University of Florida backpack he slung over one rounded shoulder, to head out into the driving rain. But when the lingering patrol car at last glided on by, taillights slowly dissolving in the black solution of night, he turned around and went back, went back for that knife.
The empty light of dawn found him posted with extended arm on the grade of an approach ramp. A fine mist blew down out of the clotted sky; the sealed cars hurried past, regular as the motion of the wipers scraping at their windshields, the sound of tires on wet pavement like tape being ripped off a bandage. The pads of his fingers were drained and puckered, and the nail of the thumb he offered the world this gray morning was gnawed to the quick and badly tarnished, a chip of metal, indifferently applied. He had maintained his station through hours of clammy darkness and heedless traffic and was neither surprised nor grateful when a gleaming tanker, clean as the milk it carried, slid to a long sighing halt simply for him. He trotted up to the cab, where the door was flung open on a driver leaning across a cracked leather seat and inviting him to "hop in" over the pounding bass of an elaborate stereo system.
The driver was wearing a Cleveland Indians baseball cap and a red flannel shirt faded to a fleshy pink, one sleeve rolled neatly above the elbow, the other flapping unbuttoned at his wrist. His dark hair hung in a thick braid down his back. His hands were encased in an old pair of gardening gloves. Scores of naked women posed and pouted from every angle, their impossibly perfect bodies having been scissored and taped to each available inch of the cab's interior, a modern photographic variant of the forms drawn on cave walls by ancient unimaginable hands.
"You looked worse than a kicked dog out there," remarked the driver. He checked his mirror and eased the grumbling rig back onto his lane.
The hitcher shrugged. "I've been better." In an instant he knew all there was to know about the driver, the body's conformation, the soul's tensile strength -- the rest was irrelevant detail -- and none of this special knowing was contained in, or concerned with, words, neither the saying nor the thinking of them. His curiosity was satisfied. There was no particular need for talk. He watched the road running up under the hood with exaggerated interest, as if too shy or too embarrassed to expose the character of his glance to the examination of another. His small dangling hands trembled between his legs from the vibration of the engine. He thought no thoughts. His mind lay perfectly open to the impress of the moment. It was important to be calm.
"Rain from here to Chicago," said the driver.
"Ugly day."
"Ugly days, ugly nights, that's the tune we sing in this business." The driver kept turning to present him with a large, expectant look as if he knew him or had seen him before and was awaiting a matching sign of recognition.
"Whistle while you work," said the hitcher.
The driver realized he didn't know how to respond to that comment, so he let out a small laugh that could have been taken for an assenting snort or the noise of someone clearing a throat, and this brief introductory scene between two human strangers had come into being, run its course, and quietly expired, along with a good deal of possibility, now forever unknown. Their encounter was assuming its specific shape.
"Where you headed?" asked the driver and discovered his passenger staring boldly into his eyes with a look like dirty fingers pawing through his secret things.
"West," came the response. "Way out west."
"Okay," answered the driver. "Believe we can manage that."
"Hey." The hitcher indicated the flashing level meters of the CD player mounted underneath the dash. "Would you mind?"
"But that's Madonna. You don't like Madonna?"
The hitcher pointed at his head. "Sensitive ears."
"Wouldn't mind fucking her, though, huh?"
The hitcher shrugged.
"I don't do this for anyone," declared the driver, hitting the Off button with his fist, "so I sure hope you're a good talker 'cause I require entertainment, megadoses of entertainment, to move my load up the road." He kept glancing sideways, searching for the vaguest affirmative sign. "I ain't joking." He kept glancing. "Yo!" he shouted.
The hitcher looked at him. "You say something?" His clothes, as they dried, were emitting a steady quiet odor, something like bad bacon.
The driver shook his head. "How long you been loose out in this?"
The hitcher sat silent, either contemplating the question or not.
The driver sighed. "The road, man, don't nobody belong on it." He reached out an arm. "Randy Sawyers."
"Billy Clay," replied the hitcher, shaking his hand.
"Well, Billy Clay, talk to me." He waited to see if a response would be forthcoming. It wasn't. "I ain't kidding, what I said. I won't have nobody, not even my own brother, who hasn't spoken to me in twenty years, fermenting on the seat there for five hundred miles without now and again tossing a chip into the pot. Makes me nervous, you know? Real nervous. No talk, you walk." The driver stopped, pleased by his words.
"Yeah," said the hitcher. "What's with the hair?"
The driver made a sound, uncertain he had heard correctly.
"Your hair. Haven't seen a crop like that since the days of the dinosaurs."
"You don't cut it, it grows."
"A hippie truck driver."
"We're everywhere."