Louisa conducted the old pearl Chevrolet from the hospital parking lot, stopping short when an ambulance turned in front of us and flew back toward the building. I checked the back of it for Mr. C. B. Borkanida, and my eyes crossed Louisa’s who had been peering in the ambulance for her father.
“He could have fallen jumping Caesar’s Palace, right?” I said.
“We won’t check just now.”
Then we cruised across the downtown section of Las Vegas, a hundred minor clubs marked by a hundred bright light arrows. Arrows spinning into broad thousand-light-bulb arrowheads, flashing pulses twenty times a minute:
RIGHT THIS WAY
!
THIS WAY IN
! All those brilliant signals and none for me.
“Fucking electric city!” Louisa said, rocking in her seat.
I scanned the tacky marquees:
LOOSEST SLOTS IN TOWN
!;
NUDE GIRLS NUDE
!
FREE KENO, KOCKTAILS, KISSES
!;
AL WEINER’S ALL STAR PORN VENTRILOQUIST SHOW
!!!—$$$EXXX-Rated!
Louisa entered left, followed the ramp to the right, under a green freeway sign reading:
North
and
Salt Lake City
. Louisa was wired, moving in the seat as she drove, her mouth open, excited as always to be leaving one place. She was singing a new disco hit of her own composition, evidently entitled “North,” because that was its every lyric and refrain. My head ached, my face, my brain. The pain was symptomatic of deep-seated emotional problems and telephone assault and battery. This must be the next thing, I thought, and I sat back, along for the ride, north from Las Vegas, Nevada, 89114.
North. The midnight highway was littered with the inevitable minor landmarks of raggy hitchhikers, like a forlorn stringy suburb of Las Vegas. Some of them stood by the road without shirts on, having lost it all, even the ranch, in the bright city behind us, the electrical center of the universe. I could imagine Russian cosmonauts lusting after the spiny star below them on the dark desert backcloth, wanting down and into the heat for a while, so they could bet—and lose—their apartments in Minsk.
At intervals through the night, I checked on old Will. He slept heavily, not moving, and it worried me how small he could look at times, how his body folded into the seat. I was tempted to shake him, to make sure he was still alive with us, and capable of kicking, but I didn’t. Louisa asked me all about our session with Robbie et al, and I recounted the whole thing in my new voice, slowly stroking the bandage on my nose, back and forth, until the light began to come.
We were in Utah, and by dawn we had the old heater on full. The night had changed the season. After we climbed along the winding Virgin River, it started to get cold, and in the early light we could see that it was fall. Most of the farmers were already at work, two pickups and a rick in every field.
In the milky light I could see the heavy dew, near frost, on the fence posts. The cows, brown and white, down and back, stood around smoking cigarettes, breathing steam into the new day. I thought of my old male associate, Hippo, the monster bull trapped in the largest body in Arizona. How he’d drool helplessly over these spotted beauties, their large wet eyes, the sensuous patches of brown which ran across their flanks like floating continents. The fields lay in steam rising around the standing cattle. My mind drove on, the driver sodden with fatigue and glazed by the scenic underwater dawn.
Every cow has a skull. One for every front yard in the Gadsden Purchase. What would you like in your yard, Mrs. Reach? A skull, please. Keeps the visits short. To the point. Acres of bones before the house, salesmen stumbling. The boneyard. That’s what they call the reserve stack in dominoes. Hello, come in. Did you see the bones? Yes, we can’t stay long; our cattle are at home dying. Steele would cheat Rawlins at dominoes, as in everything else, a dollar a game. He’d change the rules, sometimes the whole sense of the game. First person out of dominoes wins; then, perhaps: if you run out you lose. Rawlins would lose three, four times and then throw the bones, the table too, at the laughing Steele. Once, in a post-game rage, he bit the double-six in half. Three weeks later he would forget and they’d play again. It was always hard for me to decide which side to take. I’d sit with a raggy copy of
People
magazine in my lap, all the movie stars exchanging recipes for quiche, and wonder if all teenage parties were like this. Two drunk friends eating the dominoes.
Will sat up after Cedar City, Utah; it must have been five in the morning. “Not Arizona,” he said.
“No,” Louisa said. “Not Arizona.”
We stopped for gas, and getting out of the car in the chill was exciting. Everything smelled wonderful: the water on the cement, the air full of harvest molecules. Will traded Louisa and drove.
When we were under way, Will said to me, “Sorry about last night. It was my fault.”
“Bullshit. You didn’t do a thing. I wrecked it for you.”
“No, I did. I knew it would be like that.” He looked at me. “I didn’t know you’d get your nose broken, but I should’ve known the rest.”
Louisa, like me, was now wide awake in this fresh light, and she leaned over the seat between us. The day warmed, just like Will said it would, turned yellow at the center in the yellow hills under the yellow sky.
“I didn’t stay around long enough for any of this stuff to happen,” Will said out of nowhere, from a long driving silence. “When I was sixteen and my brother George was eighteen we left.”
“Where?”
“Grand Junction, Colorado.”
“I grew up forty feet from the Colorado River in Grand Junction. Learned to swim in it. My dad worked for the railroad and before he could throw us out, we left. Big plans we had. We just wanted to get out and see the world, I think. He could be mean, but it was just him. His way. He worked for the railroad all his life. Killed on the job two years after we left, by a load of lumber.
“My brother George and I just got in a boxcar in the middle of winter … headed for … Durango. Anyplace. There was only one boxcar open, and there were already four guys in it.
“George didn’t like it at all; I told him we didn’t have much choice. The four guys just sat on one side and we sat on the other. It was cold.
“At the junction the train stopped to put on the extra engines for the climb to the summit, and George said he was going to look for another car. We could barely get the door back open, and those guys didn’t help us. I stayed behind to keep them from shutting the door on him.”
Will was smiling, his eyes far ahead, as he drove. It was as if he were remembering it more vividly as he told it to us.
“George didn’t come back. The train started to crawl and I reached out and hollered but he didn’t show. When we got speed, two of the guys in the car stepped in front of me and slammed the door.
“I was sure they were going to jump me and take the few dollars I had, so we rode and I watched them. I’d been in fights with two guys, but never four. I knew they could stomp me good, and I knew if they did, they’d probably throw me out of the car. So I stood against the wall eyeing them all. I kept my hand on my hip and the other out of my pocket, trying to look tough. God, my hands got cold, but I didn’t move all the way to the summit.
“When we stopped to let off the extra engines at the top, I moved over and somehow slid the door open and jumped down. I found George two cars up, frozen around the brake behind a tank car. I was sure he was dead; he was stiff as a board.
“Well that loosened me right up and I went back to the boxcar and said, ‘Look, you bastards, my brother’s dead. Give me a hand.’ One of them came up with me and lifted George off into the snow. We loaded him back in the car where those other guys came over and stared at him. I mean, he was blue. I rubbed him with snow until the train started moving, and he started to stir. A minute later he was up, shivering and swearing.
“Well, I’ll be damned if he didn’t jump out again while the train was walking down. He said, ‘Come on, I found a place and was coming back to get you.’ But I couldn’t budge. I hollered after the fool, knowing that if he got frozen out again with the train going downhill, he’d die for sure. He could be a crazy man. But he was running ahead and then I couldn’t see him.
“Now I had to deal with the punks in the car. They’d been waiting to start something, and with George gone it started. The biggest one, dirty as a miner, came over and started pushing me around. I knew I’d have to fight him. The drop into Durango takes over an hour; I couldn’t stall that long. I tried! I told him I didn’t want to fight. Finally I had to say okay, I’d fight them one at a time, calling for fair play.”
Will laughed again: “Fair play in a boxcar!” He shook his head. “Anyway, we fought. It wasn’t so bad once I started slugging back. Before, I was scared as hell of the big guy. He was so dirty; it made him look like he knew what he was doing, I guess.
Some nights my dad would come home that dirty, and smear up everything in the kitchen, my mother just taking it, wiping up after him. This guy in the train finally pushed me into the corner where I fell down, and when I got up I was fighting back. It was a good fight, really, not one of these wrestling matches where some drunk pulls your head off. We stood almost against one wall and punched each other, one for one. It was going to be whoever had the hardest head.”
Will turned to Louisa. “I did,” he said. I hadn’t expected anything, but when he went down, I knew he wouldn’t get back up again.
“I turned to the other guys. They just stared at me. No one made a move to help the big guy. We stood like that the rest of the way. I didn’t put my hands in my pockets. In Durango, the three of them got out, leaving their pal, and I jumped out and found George sitting in the third class, warm as a muffin, telling lies to two young girls who were traveling alone. I found out the next day, when we applied for work in the mines, that I’d broken my left hand. Anyway, the point is, that’s how I left home.
“We worked in Durango for six weeks, paid for my hand and made a little money. I was a driller’s apprentice and George hauled the honey wagon. Ha! He hated it.
“We worked in Price, Utah, in the coal mines after that for a while. And Park City. And two years later, I was a journeyman plumber in Salt Lake; George and I had bought a tavern there, when we heard that dad had been killed. And we went back to Grand Junction for the last time.”
Will guided the Chevy onto the Beaver, Utah, off-ramp and we sailed down into a gas station. As he got out, he said to us, “That was all a long time ago.” It was meant as a disclaimer, but Louisa said, “I’m not so sure, cowboy.”
And it was odd about Will. He could look very old sometimes, old to the bones and used up. His eyes would go bluish underneath, wasted. Other times, such as when he told us the story, he could look fit and firm, about to be forty, his eyes bright and moving. Those times it was as if he were living through the ages in his life, his heart devolving through the years, his mind luminous in health.
*************
We had fried chicken for lunch at a new cinder-block café run solely by distracting high school girls. They sat gossiping over their schoolbooks at the corner table. I recognized one text,
Eons of Literature
, as one we had abused with LaVar, our crazy English teacher, at Noble Canyon. There was a black and white drawing of Hamlet on the cover having a discussion with that skull.
Our waitress, like all the other girls, wore a dirty piece of string around her neck, and when she asked us if we were ready to order, I asked her about the string. In one of the most disarming gestures anywhere, she gave the string a little tug and a huge gold ring with a blue stone popped into sight from the cozy lodging in her brassiere.
“My boyfriend’s ring; we’re goin’ steady,” she said.
In the interests of lapidary science I cupped the ring. It was still warm.
“How nice.”
She took our order, and tucked the ring and my imagination back into the dark.
“How nice … ” Louisa mocked me.
“Did I say something wrong?”
“Does the bear shit in the woods? You should have asked her to unbutton her dress.”
Will made us write a card to Leonard on the back of one of those cartoon postcards which showed two boots, boiled and set out on a plate.
“Dear Leonard,” we began. “Out of state is not out of mind! Is there any crying? Is there any spilt milk?” Then Will wrote: “No losses in Las Vegas, though Collin managed to break his nose.” Louisa wrote: “Lenny! We taught Collin to drive! Look both ways when crossing the street!” And I wrote: “Leonard! Utterly harassed! Wish you were here!” On the bottom, Will penned a short recipe for breaded chicken which he copied off the back of the menu, and we all signed it.
We also sent Ardean the news of the day and a dotted-line map of our travels on the back of a picture card of the salt flats. The card had a little bag of salt affixed to one side.
Louisa was further annoyed by a young girl at the counter who was eating soft ice-cream during our lunch, holding the spoon upside down, and staring at me. It was really quite flattering and I savored Louisa’s disgust.
When we left, I asked Louisa if she wanted to wear my ring, but she declined claiming to have no string, adding she thought the whole business uncomfortable.
“Well,” I said. “That’s okay. I don’t realy have a ring, yet. But,” I added, “I could get one.”
“You be careful with rings,” Will said.
“Drop me a card,” was all Louisa replied.
I started to drive for the next while, but faded fast and Will took over. The sun in the windows, as the day warmed, was suffocating in that lovely way, and sleep sounded like tires on pavement, wind over fenders. I was swung awake by a drumroll beneath us as we rapped across a metal cattle-guard in a wide turn off the highway. We dropped onto a two-wheel dirt road, and Will drove us through a sunny, green pasture which narrowed into a pink stone canyon.
“Jesus!” Louisa said. “Where is this? Where are we?”
“Just going up here to a lake I remember,” Will answered.