Lit Riffs (15 page)

Goddamn Blake, man.

I’ve been sitting here listening to his Roy Acuff records. They remind me of him.

touré

B
ob knew they’d catch him when dawn came. Now, after midnight in the forest, he could hide. But there were footsteps all around, passing right by him, the bodies stinking of rum. And there was a sinewy line of smoke leaking from his pocket, floating out from the gun buried inside it, the rickety gun that just hours ago had spent a single bullet with the same miraculous precision that David had used to fell Goliath long ago. In a few hours a floodlight called the sun would ease on and the rummy bodies would surely find him and rush him off to a sham trial and a public hanging. But in the forest, in these last moments of earthly freedom, he had the stoic, chin-high courage of a man marching to the gallows for an act he believed in, for this murderer knew that heaven awaited him. Bob shot the sheriff. But he didn’t shoot no deputy. Bob was a simple man who grew the sweetest sugarcane in all the county. But each dawn he awoke looking forward to nothing but the hour the sun closed up shop and he could be alone in his candlelit shanty with a good book. Reading a book, he felt, was like planting a seed in the mind. After many years he’d read every book he could find and felt his head brimming with sweet cane. He decided everyone in his hometown had to know this joy, and soon all his profits from sugarcane went to buying books for his neighbors. After each harvest he walked through town giving books to adults and children, dazzling them with stories of the wondrous places the books would transport them to. As sweet cane began growing in minds all over town, everyone came to love Bob. Everyone but Sheriff John Brown. No one could recall how John Brown had become sheriff. No one had ever even seen anyone in the government from which he claimed to derive his authority. But they knew he never went anywhere without his gun, a solid hunk of gleaming black steel so large it looked like a mini-missile launcher. He came round to collect taxes quite often, even though many suspected his badge was homemade. It was a flat slab of gold fashioned, he said, into a five-point star. Most saw five little daggers pointing away from his icy heart. And in the center of that so-called badge someone had stamped the words
Sheriff John Brown
. When he wasn’t collecting taxes, he was making overproof white rum that he drank straight from a label-less bottle. Whether he was collecting taxes, making rum, or doing anything at all, Sheriff John Brown was drunk. He’d been drunk for years on end, so long no one could recall what he was like sober. Even he couldn’t remember what he was like sober. He had a little moonshine business but he never made money because he drank all the potential profits, and what’s more, his overproof rum was so strong even the numbest livers in town refused to process that liquid fire and sent it right back up to the throat. Men said drinking Sheriff’s home brew felt like sucking on Death’s own nipple. The old ladies wondered how anyone but the devil’s spawn could drink rum that toxic all day, every day, and not die. Sheriff thought if he could just take one or two harvests from Bob, with all that free cane he could finally turn a profit, or at least be assured of having plenty of rum for the winter ahead and the one following. But only Bob knew just when to harvest the cane, and each season, before Sheriff could begin moving in to snatch Bob’s crops, he was at the market imagining all the books he’d buy for his people. Oh yes, Sheriff John Brown hated him. One day Sheriff waddled into town to collect taxes and saw everyone reading. He didn’t know what was inside those books for he couldn’t read, but he could see in their eyes that seeds were taking root in all those minds. “Kill them before they grow,” he told his men. “Kill them before they grow.” His men snatched every book they saw and promptly burned them all. Bob was crushed. He wanted to fight, but no one had ever challenged Sheriff and lived to tell the tale. So Bob went back to raising his cane, and after the next harvest he returned with a stack of books double the size of the last one. But on tax day Sheriff came and took their wages and their books. Men carted off books with children still attached to them, children dragged through the streets while clinging to their books as if to life rafts. Bob saw all this and returned to his land in a fury, planting his biggest crop ever. After the next harvest he’d buy so many books there wouldn’t be enough men to find them all, wouldn’t be enough fire to burn them all. But one dawn months later Bob awoke to find his crops gone. Sheriff had come in the night and stolen his world. He went inside and stuffed a bag with some clothes, a candle, and a book he could read over and again because his journey would be long. He was going to walk as far away from Sheriff as his feet could stand, because if he stayed he knew one of them would end up dead. On his way out he stopped to say good-bye to his friend Gabriel. Gabriel tried to talk Bob into staying, but they both knew leaving now was prudent. So Gabriel gave Bob a gift he could use on his long, possibly dangerous journey. Bob tried to refuse but Gabriel wouldn’t hear it. He gave Bob a gun, but it was the lamest little gun in the world. It was so small you could close your fist around it. It was so rickety it looked as though it had Scotch tape holding its insides together. It was so old it was basically a high-tech slingshot. Gabriel had only one bullet to give Bob, but a bullet from that old thing was likely to slide out of the barrel with less force than you could muster throwing it. Gabriel told Bob if he had to fire it, he should first pray God was on his side, because without His help that bullet just might peek out of the barrel and fall right at Bob’s feet. Bob took Gabriel’s supposed gift just to avoid being rude, but he knew the little contraption couldn’t possibly hurt anyone. Bob hugged him good-bye and turned to go. Then, all of a sudden, he saw Sheriff John Brown, twenty paces away, aiming to shoot him down. There was no time to think, no time to pray. Bob aimed his little gun at the man with a half-spent bottle of rum in one hand and a gleaming missile launcher in the other, and pulled the rusty trigger with no idea what would happen next. But the hammer kicked Bob’s one bullet in its ass with all the force it had and that bullet took wings, for that day God was with Bob as He’d been with David long ago, and that blessed bullet flew straight and fast and ripped right through Sheriff John Brown’s toy badge, through his sagging tit, and plunged right into his heart, dragging one of the badge’s daggers into that Grinchly organ, leaving him on his back, spouting blood like a geyser, soon to be dead. Bob shot the sheriff, and soon he would die for it, but one day he would be pardoned, for the ultimate deputy is God.

author inspiration

1. Bob Marley is the most important recording artist in the world. Chris Martin, the lead singer of Coldplay, a Brit and thus a Beatles fan, told me once, “Everyone goes on about the Beatles being the most important artists of all time, but they’re not, Marley is. If you go to any country in the world, you’ll be fine if you know how to play some Bob Marley songs. No one in Angola is gonna be impressed if you play ‘Paperback Writer,’ but if you play ‘No Woman, No Cry’ …”

2. “I Shot the Sheriff” is a story song, and one with a good, dramatic climax that allowed room for some backstory. Many story songs have good characters but no climax or the action takes place offstage.

3. Nearly everyone knows “I Shot the Sheriff,” and unless you lack a brain, you love it.

victor lavalle

S
he was half in the water, on her back, stained with beer and drowning. A man had grabbed her, dragged her, brought her out to this lake. She coughed a lot. It wasn’t even voluntary. He pulled her head up and forced it down. The back of her skull cut on rocks each time. She vomited underwater, but as he pulled her out again, she gasped, sucking the bile into her throat once more. Her sweater was wet, but her pants were dry. While her face was in the green water, little black fish swam past her eyes.

Some kind of stunt fish maybe. They’d come in a school of a hundred, right up to her face, then jolt away. Oodles of these tadpolelike, dust-mote-sized fish. Inconvenient as it seems, she struggled with the fish even as she fought against dying. She blinked defensively. She kicked her legs so hard. The man was kneeling on them. Her body gasped even after she was unconscious. The man held her under for three minutes more.

This happened between green mountains. Not that far from a popular roadway. Right near a modest town of about two thousand. In the shadow of a large device that was built in 1992.

Five enormous vats had been constructed on a hill overlooking the town. They held and heated water. They were different colors: two orange, two yellow, and one red. They were even beautiful, incongruous with the wooded hills. Travelers, on their way to ski, often saw them from the road and stopped to take some pictures.

The five tanks were arranged in a circle on the hill. Rising from the earth in between them was an enormous metal stem with a translucent dome on top; this looked like a toadstool and it made a spectral snapping noise. At night it cackled, too.

When the day was sunny, the dome shone silver. Under a bright moon it turned white. But it was actually clear, the rest just messy false perception. The dome was a device for stealing water from the air.

It was built because the groundwater was terrible. Underground wells had been good to the people here for more than fifty years, and then suddenly all the water that came up smelled like tiger breath. Water with a rancid aftertaste and often burning. They tried decontamination through various chemical means, but it stayed gamy. The townspeople couldn’t even trust drinkable Tardash Lake anymore. Every trickle from the earth had curdled.

To condense water out of the atmosphere, the inside of the dome was filled with nearly frozen water. Just above zero degrees. One of the five tanks, the red one, was a refrigerated unit that supplied the inside of the dome with a chilled stream. The cold water sat around inside, filling the apparatus, and this caused the outside of the dome to bead, sweat, collect whenever wind rushed across it. As the moisture turned to drops, they slipped down the outside into gutters at the base of the raised dome. That newfound water went into the five tanks. Four were stored for winter while the fifth was refrigerated and pumped back inside the dome.

The shape of the surrounding mountains had turned this valley into a wind tunnel. On the hill the air came constantly, and all the machine had to do was squat there and accept.

In the coldest months, January through March, the machine slumbered. Otherwise the water chamber inside the dome would freeze and crack. And for those twelve weeks the people of the town would bathe with some frugality.

Now he stops touching her. She lies faceup in the water. The man who killed her stands by a tree in privacy.

The town is steps away. Boys often come through here to play among mice, worms. The town was doing bad before the mayor proposed the moisture condenser. Every summer they thank him on the street, at restaurants. It dies down only when the cooler days make everybody moody.

Faceup in the water. The way her head is tilted she was looking back, seeing the dome upside down. A bright day, and because of the shining glass she mistook it for a piston valve, like on the trumpet she played for six months in grade school. What enormous music, if played correctly! She regretted that she’d never hear the note.

The man plans to weigh her down in the muck by putting stones in her jacket, but there are boys in woods. Loud kids jumping on twigs, or is that snapping the water condenser? Either way, it makes the murderer panic; he’s a worthless coward who runs away.

But the kids are actually far off. They’re moving in the other direction. Wouldn’t have found these two for hours. It’s just that in these woods sounds shimmy directly up a tree from the other side of the valley. A fox can seem to be on your lap when it’s howling in the next county.

The noise of boys provides time alone. If there were any wiggle left in her, this would be her chance to run. Flies tickle her fingers, but she can’t itch anymore.

The rocks right by the water smell of turpentine because two days ago a local artist wanted to put stones around his doorstep. He came here and chose fifteen. His clothes stank of the turpentine he’d been using to thin his oils. That smell will camouflage her decomposition. It’ll take even longer to discover her in this position. It’ll take all winter, because soon there will be snow.

In a few weeks.

Today there’s a dead woman, faceup, half in the dirty water, with sunlight warming her exposed skin. The sun is also changing the water. Turning the surface to mist. Into an invisible gas that supplies the device just yards away.

Why do you think we get buried?

Or burned, or otherwise hidden away. No one wants to see the corpse, that’s true; your loved one’s yellowing eye. But also, we evaporate. She evaporates. Right now, it’s begun. She dissipates through her pores. From there a breeze catches on to her newly released ether, then traps it flat against the dome. Otherwise the day is uneventful.

The three prominent mountains around the town are called Redrush, Ici, and Cloak.

The woods ran yellow and orange just months ago. Mothers received bright leaves pasted on poster board from their children. But now the most appealing thing about the woods is made of metal moving parts because the condenser sure looks prettier than naked maple trees.

The town is used to the device, it’s been there for years, so the technicians, the schoolteachers, dairy farmers, and shop foremen don’t look at it. Even the kids aren’t spooked by the condenser’s sounds, they find other ways to get scared in the woods.

So the woman is slapped flat against the outside of the dome, but goes unnoticed. Though what would anyone have done? It’s not as though there’s the outline of her body in full view. It’s her soul up there, which, relative to a person’s figure, is rather small.

The outer surface of the dome shows these millions of smattered water drops, in no discernible pattern, simply dripping down the sides, but she has condensed into a perfect oval of gray liquid amid them. She slides down as one flat, gray, soggy disk.

She weighs forty-four grams. Water that drops into the gutter to be drawn down into the second yellow vat. In there she’s no longer a disk, more of a gray bubble. Floating in the town’s drinking water.

She floats for such a long time.

The water in the first orange tank drains, and then the next orange tank is tapped, and so forth around the circuit. When the land begins its thaw in April, seven months from now, the machine will be reinvigorated and condensation begins again.

She doesn’t know where she is in the yellow vat because she isn’t thinking anymore. There isn’t any point where she imagines, I’m in a tub, I’m floating in water, I was killed, I had nice toes.

Eventually she won’t hold. That little sphere of soul is going to dissolve by and by. Definitely by the time her yellow tank is tapped. Once it is, her ether will be pulled in all directions. Fifty houses flush toilets simultaneously. Two hundred people brush their teeth. A woman washes dishes and grunts that the work is tougher than usual today as she tries to get these new gray streaks off her plates. Where did they come from? she asks her husband.

A young boy refills the ice tray in his home. For nights and nights the dead woman will cool his pop. He never much notices the little gray center of each ice cube. Have you? That foggy imprint is like a signature. It’s more accurate than any given name. The young boy takes a cube to bed. He chews it. He would like to drive a truck when he gets older. She’s the last taste in his mouth before he sleeps.

author inspiration

I chose “Aluminum” by the White Stripes because it sounded a lot like Black Sabbath to me. Since I was raised on heavy metal—Metallica, Iron Maiden, and Anthrax were my top three—it made me feel nostalgic. There are no lyrics, just Jack White’s voice (highly distorted) crying out again and again. As the music shifts, the single line, “Aaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh,” takes on different meanings. At first it sounds ominous, then pained, then sad, but finally, triumphant. At least that’s how it sounded to me.

I’d been to Iceland recently, camping in the countryside for a month. While there, I’d seen an emormous water tower in which water is kept and heated to help the people of Reykjavik get through the harsh winters. The look of it stayed with me. For a long time I’d wanted to write a little fable that explained why ice cubes have that little gray ball in the middle, because when I was a kid, I never understood how it happened. The look of that gray blob always seemed eerie to me. So when I heard “Aluminum,” a few stray pieces clicked together: the water tower, the gray blobs in ice, a song about transcendence, and another image that had been on my mind, a dead young girl facedown in dirty water. So then I wrote this.