Day Out of Days (10 page)

My passport keeps falling to the ground. Maybe it’s trying to tell me something.

The long haul from Rock Springs to Grand Island, Nebraska, starts out bleak. After two runny eggs and processed ham I hit the road by 7:00. It’s hovering at around nineteen degrees; light freezing snow and piss-poor visibility. Eighteen-wheelers jackknifed all along the high ridges between Rawlins and Laramie. Tow trucks blinking down into the black ravines. Through wisping fog, things loom up at you with chains and hooks and cranes; everyone inching along, afraid to drop off into the wide abyss. Just barely tap the brakes and the whole rear end slides out from underneath you. I’m trying to keep two tires on the shoulder in the chatter strip at about five mph hoping the ice will get dislodged between the treads. Only radio station is a preacher ranting from Paul—something
about the body as a tent; “this tent in which we groan.” Same preacher segues into a declaration that, for him, 1961 was the absolute turning point where the whole wide world went sour. I don’t know why he landed on that particular year—1961—the very year I first hit the road, but he insists this is the date of our modern dissolution. He has a long list of social indicators beginning with soaring population then family disintegration, moral relaxation, sexual promiscuity, dangerous drugs, the usual litany. But then he counters it with the imperious question: “What must the righteous do?” As though there were an obvious antidote which we all seem to be deliberately ignoring. If we could only turn our backs on this degeneration and strike out for high ground, we could somehow turn the whole thing around. It seems more political than religious. “What must the righteous do?” An “Onward, Christian Soldiers” kind of appeal. I’ve lost track of the centerline. Snow boring down into the windshield so fast the wipers can’t keep up. Your heart starts to pump a little faster under these conditions; not knowing what might suddenly emerge. Not knowing if the whole world could just drop out from underneath you and there you are at the bottom of crushed steel and spinning wheels. What
must
the righteous do?

I am stuck now in a town of backyards. This is not a dream. There are no houses to speak of so it can’t really be called a town, certainly not “Our Town” or downtown Milwaukee or something identifiable like that. There is no center; no Main Street but the people stroll along as though they had somewhere to go; some destination or another—purposefully but without any urgency like they would in a Big City, hustling and bustling just because everyone else is, as though caught up in a fever they can’t escape. More like a walk in the park; meandering but not really wandering so much; not really lost like me who seems to be the only one the least bit bewildered. And it’s not as though I don’t recognize certain signs; not signs like stop signs or signals because there are none. No advertising of any kind. Very much like the East Berlin of old, before the wall came down. (Hard to believe I once drove through there in a gray Ford Anglia, reading Brecht quotes below the barbed wire while they wheeled a mirror back and forth under the axles, searching for something I might be bringing across illegally.) But now I do recognize certain backyards from years and years ago; certain fallen fences, single-track dog paths worn down through the cooch grass connecting immense vacant lots where vague footprints of very large warehouses once existed and there must have been a great traffic of oxen teams and black mules coming and going, throngs if you will; blacksmith hammers ringing down the broad avenues. And beyond these lots, fields stretching
right out to the highway with volunteer oats and blue timothy undulating in the prairie breeze. And the highway itself, now broken up with tall yellow weeds and potholes deep enough to kill a Ford of any kind and, what’s even more revealing, is that now the dead highway seems to be returning to the ancient buffalo trace beneath it where someone must have tried to copy the migrations of vast herds that once blackened the landscape. Maybe they felt the buffalo knew where they were going even if they themselves didn’t have a clue.

“Our dwelling is but a wandering, and our abiding is but a fleeting, and in a word our home is nowhere.”

—Separatist leader at Plymouth, 1620

Now, I’ve heard this story before, bandied around, about “original sin.” The Adam and Eve deal. The snake in the garden and all that shit. She bites the apple. He goes along with it. They take the plunge and fuck their brains out. The spare rib syndrome. The pains of childbirth. They have to start hiding their genitals with fig leaves. The guilt and remorse. I’ve heard that one. My grandmother read me that story while I balanced on her knee. I’ve heard about the Pilgrim Fathers and how we descend directly down from the
Mayflower
folks and the Plymouth Colony and those same Puritans tramping around on Cape Cod in their funny hats, digging up Narragansett burial mounds and stealing their ceremonial corn when they’re supposed to be doing God’s work. I’ve also heard how Jesus died on the cross for our sins and rose again from the dead. The Holy Ghost. The roll away the stone. How we need to constantly beat ourselves up for being such miserable thankless Godless creatures, crawling around on our bellies like a bunch of reptiles. But how in the world are you supposed to make a living? That’s my question. How are you supposed to scrape two nickels together? I’ve tried everything: busboy, waiter, fence painter, wrangler; raking up chicken bones from fancy picnics. Nothing pays as
good as shooting some fool in the head and moving on down the line. Believe me, nothing. With a check like that I can lose myself down in the Yucatán for months on end. Live like a damn potentate. Brown beauties all around me. Tequila up the ass. Float on my back in the green Caribbean. Are you kidding? One less tyrant in the world is the way I look at it. Jesus might have died for somebody’s sins but they sure as hell weren’t mine.

The Comanche were known to plunder English Bibles in their raids on westering wagon trains; ripping out the onionskin pages and stuffing them into buffalo hide war shields emblazoned with blue horses, red hawks, and running dogs.

I can hardly believe I was a choirboy once. There it is. Evidence. Picture of me in the fifties. Back there in the fifties. Innocent. Or so it seemed. Snapshot: Ike and Spot. Frigidaire gleaming. Picture of me in black robes. Puritan floppy white collar. Butch haircut. Waxed and perky. Look at that. Crooked squinting smile, unsure what it’s projecting exactly. The smile. Pinched lips. What’s it trying to say? What’s it hiding? I can’t remember being there, to tell the truth. But something must have been. Some other one. Not me now. This me now. Not this one here. Some other. Watching. Staring out. Watching very closely. The proceedings. Rituals. Nothing escaped me, if that’s what you think. Wafers and wine. Flesh and blood of our Lord. Cannibal congregation. Swarming sex. Submerged. Fever. Bulging behinds. Crotches rock hard. Christ on a stick. Blood of the feet. Dripping nails. Mothers of friends. Sisters.
Girls’ rear ends. Sex. Chicas. Lipstick so thick it crumbled right off into their steaming black laps. Fingernails of the Virgin Mary. Raw smell of pussy. Right through the cotton. Singing. Chants. Incantations to the one and only. The Holy of Holies. The Triple Threat. Voices praying. Knees buckled. Going down on the velvet. Rustling thighs. Silken calves. Going down on Jesus. Crucified. Bleeding through and through. Then gathering back up. Struggling to the surface. Gasping for air. Back up to the Lord. For mercy or what? Echoes off the stone walls. The droning voice. Sermon. Protestant. Certain. The whole effort of it. The jaw. The teeth. The distance from life. The great distance. Outside. From here to there. Out there. Where the hot cars sit parked. Waiting. Steaming black top. Outside in the heat. Hot air. Just waiting to roar off to anywhere but here. Tonopah. Wichita. Anywhere but right here.

If you go to shoot a cat in a barn late at night and you want it quick and sudden so as not to wake the children; whatever you do don’t use a pistol. You’ll never get it done. The son-bitch will run howling all up and down the rafters with a slug right through his skull and you’ll never find him in the dark. I’m telling you. Don’t even think about using a handgun. If you can manage to catch the bastard, drop him in a burlap oat sack and tie it shut with baling wire. Don’t forget to use mulehide gloves and long sleeves or he’ll slash your white skinny ass to ribbons. Hang the sack to a stout beam and back off no more than five foot. Shoot the sack point-blank with a full choke twelve-gauge loaded with steel goose pellets and have a whole boxful on hand in case the bag keeps twitching. I’m telling you. Don’t even think about using a pistol.

He lost his head completely. I don’t know what set him off. Just started firing and firing and firing. In a circle. Gas pumps exploded. People fell. People ran for cover. I don’t know what set him off, tell the truth. They closed the Cenex—the feed store—Dairy Queen. All those little shops around there. They just folded up and went away after that. It’s like a ghost town now. I’ll take you down later if you want to see it. Shocking. Completely deserted. Weeds. Broken windows. Nobody. I don’t know what set him off. I really don’t.

Fear of clouds? Why? Out of the whole panopoly of phobias, why that? There was a name for it. He looked it up. A title. Something reassuring about it being named. Someone’s had it before him. He thought. It’s already in the world. He thought. Someone else is or has been already possessed by clouds. Succumbed. In this way. “Nephophobia”—that was it. Possibly Greek? Clouds. Antiquity. Ticking away. All across the naked Alleghenies that day. Driving the twisted 64. The “Veterans Highway.” There they were. Extremely close. Hanging above the mountains. Piled up faces. Clouds misshapen. Faces in the heavens. Horrible. Bloated cheeks like those old cherub angel paintings. Medieval. Caravaggio. Gouged-out eyes. Gigantic demons from on high. This was going
to be a difficult trip. Just getting across. Just getting over to Stonewall Jackson’s old stronghold where he bled to death from “friendly fire.” (It’s not such a modern term.) Could he make it? There was no stopping now. No pulling over. He tried his best to not look up. Keep his mind on the road. What was left of it. Hug the rumble strip. But there they were—sucking his attention. Seducing him up into looking. And now they’d change—the eyes, the cheeks. Like flesh sloughing away. The heads sliding off. Joining other heads. A whole family. None of them looking related. But then they’d melt; one into the other. Becoming others. Ancestors, maybe. Could he make it across? Could he make it through this? Just stay between the lines. Grip the damn wheel and stay between the lines. It’s not that big a deal.

Queens Motel, with a dull green plaster brontosaurus, all chipped and peeling from the desert sun, standing tall on its hind legs in front of a huge black satellite dish facing the Roy Rogers Mountains. I hadn’t realized they’d actually named some mountains after Roy. I’d never heard of the Roy Rogers Mountains and I grew up here. I grew up with Roy. He was one of the first television cowboy heroes I can remember watching. I watched Roy in the flesh too, riding Trigger down Colorado Boulevard in the Rose Parade alongside Dale Evans. I had no idea he got some mountains named after him. That must have happened long after I left. I wonder who decides that, anyway. Who decides to give mountains a name—or streets? They must do that by committee or something. I know a guy down in Texas who got his dad’s name put on a freeway outside Dallas because his dad owned the asphalt company that poured the road. Then there was a little side street in New York City called Thelonious Monk Place. It might still be there. I thought that was cool. Somebody must have really had to lobby for that one. And then, of course, they’re always renaming stuff too. Taking the old name down and putting a new one up. That happens all the time. Dictators like to do that. Have you noticed that? Totalitarian tyrants. You never know how long a name is going to last from one regime to the other. Like, for instance, the Roy Rogers Mountains could have a Chinese name in fifty years. You never know. Roy could be long forgotten by then if he isn’t already.
Monk might last a little longer than Roy but you never know. Of course you can’t really compare East Coast idolatry to West Coast and it’s probably not fair to allegorize fifties cowboy heroes with iconoclastic Jazz Legends but there you go. In fact fairness isn’t even part of the issue. I don’t know why I brought it up. Maybe there won’t even be any mountains left at all, let alone streets. Nothing left to name.
I’m
not going to be around, that’s for sure. Still, I wouldn’t mind seeing some of these names changed but it’s not going to be in my lifetime. The Richard Nixon Library, for instance. Bob Hope Airport. Ronald Reagan Drive. How about having a Joaquin Murrieta Boulevard? He got his head cut off and paraded around the streets of Los Angeles on a stick and they don’t name shit after him.

Drag my saddle in and prop it up on the wine-stained carpet. Slight smell of pizza puke coming from the curtains but too tired to care. Crash, sitting on the edge of the mattress. Stare at the perfect acorn oak-leaf pattern carved swirling into the bullhide skirts by gnarly Mexican hands. Always brings some sense of order. Riding the Great Basin for days now, following Jones. Always following Jones. Some grand far-flung plan of his to trap mustangs in canyons. So far all we’ve seen is their dust. Wiped out. Sore and raw through the knees. Toilet in here keeps moaning and whining like some distant ambulance that will never arrive at the scene of destruction. Forlorn. Flip on CNN just to pretend I’m still in the world. More lies about the war. More exploding roadside goat carcasses. More bodies piling up. I’ve seen this before. Right next door the casino keeps ringing like churches gone wild. Clanging and churning away. Circus music. What am I hearing? What am I seeing
from this far edge of the bed? Talons, nicotine-stained fingertips digging quarters out of plastic cups. Oxygen running through green tubes, up the noses of the dead, the already dead. Righteousness ringing its head off. Jackpots of stone. Saddle-soap my tack. That’s it. A job. Give me a job. Glycerine and water. Sip Jack. Tomorrow we’re supposed to meet up with some rancher named Valmy, west of the Rubies. Unload a Gooseneck jammed with pipe corral. Panels. Chains and stakes. Rawhide hobbles. Nylon rope. I’m just not sure about Jones. This whole scheme of his. Whether he’s still got his wits about him. Never was a real market for these in-bred mongrels. Why mess with them at all when you could start with a real horse. Quarter horse or at least a grade. Then you’ve got all that hauling out to California. Halter-breaking. Round-pen time. Blindfolds. Scotch hobbles. Sacking them out. Throwing them down. Canvas tarps. Why go through all the torment? Hospitalization. What’s the point? Eighty bucks a head? You’ve got more diesel in them than that. This room’s forty-something right off the top. What’s he thinking? Something romantic maybe.
The Misfits
. Days gone by? Give me a break. I asked him about it this morning over black coffee. Just faced him up with it. Asked him what’s the story? Why persist? You know what he comes up with? Some crazy-ass limerick ditty that he spouts through this raw hangover twinkle of the eye. Goes like this: