“Where you going?”
“Just a minute,” I told Steele. He wasn’t moving too fast, hearing the recent inferno replayed in his stoned head. I jumped, fell, crawled through all the sludge, down into the gorge, putting my hand once on the oily skull of an old toaster, until I found a bear cub’s paw protruding from the cliff of waste. By pushing over part of a sink and part of a picket fence, and then lifting a television tube, I looked into the bear’s face. I wanted to see it as a fact. A dead bear. It was the first bear I had ever seen.
Standing there in Arizona, in heat shimmering and humid with the tangled melting fumes of a county’s garbage rising around me, the very planet throbbing under the heavy urging of a forty-ton bulldozer, I thought again about the basis of things. Were we upside down? Soon above me, fathers and sons would toss frisbees back and forth in pre-picnic horseplay, and they would not have a single inkling, and what a word inkling is, not a faint whisper of what slept below. It’s just a planet, I was trying to think: leave it alone. It’s just a planet.
Then Steele, moving into his own version of acute paranoia, a feeling he always traveled through on his way up from marijuana poisoning, called from above, and I ascended. On the way up I fell only once, gouging my palm on the broken end of some hero’s javelin.
*************
Okay, it had been an August afternoon in Phoenix, the heat flat, the sky doing a reasonable imitation of Los Angeles, not blue, not gray, the color of a squint, and Steele, conducting a dump truck full of only me now, was driving maliciously through the shiny traffic, intimidating cars in all the lanes. He always sweetened to meanness on his second joint, his rancor emerging from the corners of his head the way bushes become snakes in the desert. I wondered if he got high just to glimpse his own rage at the series of accidents which composed his life.
So Steele, merging left and right, as he pleased, to cut off all cars, drove us over to Right Way Lumber where we were to accept a load of sawdust for the horsebarns. He negotiated the driveway with shortsight, as always, and I felt the rear wheel rise over the curb, lawn, and crush out a sprinkler mid-spray. When the wheel reassumed the parking lot, I looked back and noted the throttling geyser where the rainbird had been. Steele, however, was not looking backward, or forward, as far as I could tell. He maneuvered the truck under the sawdust chute and clamped the hydraulic brakes shut; I hit the dash. He looked over at me, his eyes all pupils now, dead glass, and he pointed. This meant I should climb up and unfold the canvas funnel on the chute.
He was supposed to wait for me to knock on the roof of the cab. But when I was in the swimming-pool-size bed of the truck, unpinning the funnel,
Steele didn’t wait
. He was on the ground pushing the load switch, and I felt the canvas chute gorge and ship straight out of my arms, taking skin, as the sawdust cascaded down in a nostril rush. It swept me down and into the corner of the bed swarming to my waist, neck (I couldn’t breathe!), before I reached up in a panic for the lip of the truck bed and pulled myself up and over.
I jumped to the ground, jamming my ankles on the pavement, and walked in circles spitting sawdust. It was in my eyes, my ears, my throat. As I spat and circled, I thought: this is drowning; I am finally drowning. There was blood in it now and I knelt between two cars, keeping my arm on one for balance, and my stomach rose with the insistent twist that completed the loveliness for me. I could see my spoony reflection in the hubcap of one car, my hair and eyebrows white with dust, my earless head distorted in a nauseous balloon. I sucked on my fist trying to settle, while my stomach parachuted to safety.
I stood up. The rancorous Steele was still leaning on the load switch by the cab of the truck, and the sawdust spilled over the bed like soapsuds. He was utterly gone. When I could feel blood in my knees again, I walked carefully over to where he stared at the snowing sawdust. I grabbed his shoulders and pulled him off the button. Before the last flake could fall, I set him up, knowing it was taking unfair advantage, so that he stood like a mannequin before me, his palms open, as if to say, “What?”; and I punched him as deeply as I could, right below the breast bone. My fist went in four inches, and he folded around it like the wet-shirt assassin that he was.
As he moved through the phase: dead man in the fetal, dead man with spasms, dead man with only eyeballs and sucking noises, alive man with genuine retching, I didn’t feel a twinge. I wanted to kick him—I think you’re supposed to kick the first guy who tries to kill you—but I didn’t. I climbed in the driver’s seat and waited for the remnants of Steele to join me in the cab so that we could return to the fair. In a fair fight, Steele would make rags out of me, but I knew he wouldn’t get a chance. He wouldn’t come in for a landing now until midnight, maybe later, and by that time I would be in California having a leisurely dinner with my father. Something like that.
The return trip was four times, exactly, as acidic and morose because of my inability to shift the gears or time the clutch. I jerked us fairwards in a thousand stalling heaves, the truck squealing in leaps at such punishment.
I dropped Steele off by our gate and told him to go back in orderly fashion and resume the shoveling. The cows, having had an afternoon, would have created a backlog that would take some seeing to. Inexorable as time, cattle continue their wet organic discourse in the universe. Steele was subdued, his eyes pulsing a little from the stroke I had delivered his way, and he went into the barn wordlessly.
I drove over to the horsebarns and backed to the diminished sawdust pile. Ramirez, the fair foreman who ran those barns with his son, Hector, came out to direct traffic. He always called me the “orphan” which, coming from him, did not disappoint me. As we untied the canvas, in preparation to dump, he called from across the truck:
“How goes the little orphan today? Did you have a good lunch?” Ramirez was always checking to see what people had eaten. He felt that being well fed was to be well in all the ways. Both he and Hector had wonderful stomachs, like hubcaps in their shirts, and they talked food all the time. We threw the canvas down to Hector who began folding it, and I opened the cab and pulled the hydraulic dump lever.
The three of us unloaded the last bits with shovels. When we were finished sweeping the truck, Ramirez jumped down and said, “Our skinny orphan!” Then he signaled me with a wave. “Come on, Orphano, it is an opportunity to break now.”
I followed them over to the shack adjacent to the raceway. Ramirez opened the little round-shouldered refrigerator where the men kept their lunches, and he withdrew a paper bag. He handed Hector a wrapped package, and then handed one to me. They were burritos his wife had prepared. We sat on the two couches in the office, which were really old bus seats, and ate the moist and spicy burritos passing a quart of sharp cold beer among us.
“This makes you better. Though you will never be well.” When Ramirez said the word
well
, he patted his stomach.
“Very good,” I said. “Your wife makes excellent burritos.”
“Excellent everything,” he said.
“What will you do after the fair?” Hector asked me as he rose to open another quart of beer. “How much time do you have at the Orphanage?”
“Not long,” I said. “It’s not really an orphanage. I’ve just been staying there while my father gets settled in California. I’m going to see him.”
“Wonderful!” Ramirez said. “You will go home, then?”
The beer had done a little to my arid head, and I told them I was leaving that night. We went through the old discussion then. They offered me the job with them, traveling north in the spring to shear sheep. They spent the summer finally in Montana (“A fine place!”) before returning to Arizona in midsummer for the fair. I declined and Ramirez put his arm around me as always, and instructed me in the value of education and told me that running away was not a good thing.
“It’s not running away,” I said. “I’m just going to meet my father.”
He smiled.
“A noble ambition,” he replied, “but you should wait and go with us to Montana.”
When I rose to leave, Ramirez told me that he would be around until three in the morning, supervising part of the night shift. “Orphano, before you go, come by for lunch with me.”
I shook hands with Hector whom I really liked and envied, I suppose, and Ramirez refused my hand, slapping it away, and instead took my face in one hand and said, “Stop by tonight; we’ll eat.”
They were good people, and maybe they had it all figured out: the sun, the seasons, following the good weather, working with animals, but I would have to see for myself. People who need advice are always least suited for it.
On my way through the midway, where the citizens went through the ritual of being bilked, I thought of Steele who by now would have had his munchies seizure. He would have leaned on Connie for every taco she could offer. I stopped by the stand, but there was a new girl with incredibly golden hair, so I didn’t stay. When I arrived back at the barn, Hippo was gone, his stall a glaring vacancy in a world of cows.
Captain Fowler was there, though, shouting fifty orders from the platform of his golf cart. Two or three flunkies stood around wondering what to do, wondering if maybe they should look under the straw for the missing monster. When I walked up, of course, I was the recipient of both barrels.
“Where the hell’s this cow?”
“Bull, sir. I don’t know. We just got back from the dump run.”
“Goddammit!” he screamed, dismounting the golf cart dais, “I want this cow found, and
now
, or it is your ass!” Also forthcoming was the interesting financial news that Hippo was worth about seventy thousand dollars. The Captain delivered this among other items in an oration which nearly turned him inside out. It didn’t surprise me very much, as I already knew that grown men could be jerks. When he finally let me go and motored away in search of a bull the size of the Arc de Triomphe, I checked the barn for Steele.
No sign.
He would be passed out somewhere, dreaming of revenge.
I cleaned my aisle, pushing the manure into a pile the size of a school bus, parking it all just outside the door where Hector could reach it later with the lift. Like a good detective, I checked the fossilization of Hippo’s most recent deposit. It was a monster turd, the size of a police car and it was fresh; two plus two tells us he hadn’t been gone all that long. When the cement floor on my side was a clean slate, I strolled off through the fair at twilight, trying to think where I would go were I a white behemoth worth seventy thousand dollars.
Twilight in Arizona those days was more a vast polluted smear in which light caught the dark dust that has been raised all day by men cheating each other. When it failed and fell into the arms of darkness, letting the carnival neon hold up the tent, I was relieved. I walked around the midway like the free American citizen and son that I was. It was a laid-back form of hunting. I asked a few of the ride and booth operators whom I recognized if they had seen a white bull stroll by, but gave that up as ludicrous. If anyone had seen Hippo, his face would still bear the print.
I ran into Hector and told him the news, and he got a pretty good laugh out of it, saying, “Rustling! Ha Ha Ha. And a whole herd in one!” We leaned against one of the tin rails by the Tilt-a-Whirl, which ran in loopy circles with the same reluctant fluency all railroads now exhibit. Every once in a while some kid would let his ice-cream cone fly out into the gay atmosphere and it would alight like a bird in the nest of some passing cleavage. While Hector was laughing, I could hear the distant Ring Holz thunder, and I imagined his daughter’s silver buttocks on that bar. It was a little reverie, I thought then:
this must be reverie
. I liked that girl and this was the last day I’d know her; I’d have to catch the midnight show.
Rawlins came by carrying an oil well, or something to hold up part of the raceway grandstand. Hector put a finger under one end of the structure Rawlins held, and they walked off toward constructive futures. I’d never see Rawlins again either; he was okay.
I stayed on the midway awhile watching the couples lie to each other, eating their cotton candy. Then I sauntered off as if I didn’t have to find the largest mammal in the state.
I checked underneath the raceway grandstand which groaned with ten thousand individuals who had come out to witness Harry Barnes or Barry Harmes or someone else, maybe Barry Harmes’s wife, jump from a helicopter into a passing convertible full of water. It was a motor-vehicle act, and I could hear the helicopter fop-fopping overhead. I found ninety thousand cigarette butts and, among the crushed paper cups, one quarter. But no Hippo. I didn’t blame him. It was depressing under there.
I checked the men’s room.
Wandering through the Crafts Building, I stopped to examine a quilt in the window. A fierce turquoise Phoenix bird had been stitched into a quilt; the bird’s eyes were flashing sequins, and for somebody rising from the ashes, he looked moderately angry. Around the border was the alphabet, which I didn’t get at all.
The crafts part of the fairgrounds was dark by now, the ground an unending constellation of litter. A few derelicts walked their little walk, checking out the crafts, and in the distance, over the Game and Fish Building, I could see the red and yellow lights of the ferris wheel.
“Hippo!” I called at intervals to remind myself who was lost. “Hey, Hippo! Here boy!”
Further on, the quiet held itself unusually still. Beside the vacuum cleaner Home-Arts Building, it was ten o’clock or later, and all was well. Not a soul stirring, and not a person doing anything else either. I walked through the grassy square pausing to read the “Arizona State Fair” sculpted in a little hedge near the Administration Building. Looking at the hedge and hearing the gentle whadawada of the helicopter, and seeing the flickering colored lights on the horizon, it seemed like a pretty good fair. You needed to get away to see it. I mean it was hard to tell that any bears had died.