Day Out of Days (14 page)

That’s what he called himself, if you could believe it—The Perpetual Warrior. Bragged about it in all the bars. Said, now that there was perpetual warfare he ought to fit right in. Then he’d laugh and spit into the sawdust floor; fire back another shot of Jameson. He’d elaborate on something he called “a carefully developed spell” against sudden pain. That’s how he described it to all the women. The kind of pain that comes unannounced and shocks the entire body, mind, and spirit. Unimaginable pain. Then he’d go on in detail about how the power of this spell was contained inside the rhymes and rhythms of an ancient Icelandic poem called
Song of the Spear
, handed down for centuries from the Battle of Clontarf. According to legend, on the morning before the conflict, twelve Valkyries sat astride their war ponies chanting the poem in unison. The wind off the Irish Sea blew their braided bloodstained hair. The severed heads impaled on the tips of their lances spun in a ragged counterclockwise harmony. The sound was like the humming of a distant hurricane. Huge ravens floated in and out between the shoulders and shields of the warrior women. When they had finished their incantation they rode off through the air toward the battlefield to ordain the ones to be slain.

He would go on like this for hours, in a whiskey reverie, somehow always managing to seduce some stray wild-eyed girl, vulnerable to epic exaggeration.

“Now, try not to be abrupt with her,” she says to me on the phone, already coaching and getting me on the defense. “She’s a very nice woman and she’s just trying to help us out.”

“Help us what?” I say. “Where the hell are you, anyway?”

“I told you, we’re at the airport and this woman—Mrs. Adams is her name—she just wants to verify with you that Jackson is our son and that you’re allowing him to travel with me to Mexico.”

“Who is she?”

“She’s one of the customs officials here. She just wants to know whether you’ve given permission for him to go out of the country.”

“How does she know for sure that I’m his father?”

“You’re going to tell her.”

“But I could be anyone.”

“But you’re not. You’re his father.”

“But you could have called up anyone and told her that I was the father when I might not be.”

“Try, for once, not to be so difficult and just cooperate with me, would you? Just this once.”

“I am cooperating.”

“All right, now I’m going to put her on. Her name is Mrs. Adams.”

“Mrs. Adams. Right. Put her on.”

“Try to be nice.”

“Just put her on.”

“Here she is.” A very flat, public-servant voice announces herself
through my tequila haze as I swing both legs out of bed and stare at the blank wall of the Masonic Temple across the street.

“Good morning, Mr. Noland, my name is Becky Adams and I’m the Notary Public here at Newark Airport and we need to have your approval that Jackson Noland is your lawful son and that you’ve given full permission for him to travel out of the country to Mexico with his mother, Jasmine Macey.”

“Who?” I say, fumbling for my lighter by the digital clock.

“Jasmine Macey,” she repeats.

“Never heard of her.”

“You’ve never heard of Jasmine Macey?”

“That’s right. Sounds like a fake name to me. A made-up name, doesn’t it?”

“She claims to be the mother of your son, Jackson Noland, and she intends to take him with her to Mexico.”

“Well she’s lying and I’m not giving any kind of damn permission. Put her back on—this woman, whoever she is. I want to speak to her.”

“What’s going on?” the mother of my son says. “What did you tell her?”

“Why are you going to Mexico?” I ask her.

“What do you mean, why am I going to Mexico? It’s Christmas. We’ve already been through this. I told you months ago I was going to Mexico for Christmas.”

“No you never did.”

“What did you tell Mrs. Adams?”

“I told her I never heard of you.”

“Oh, great. That’s just great! You son of a bitch! What is the matter with you? What kind of a fucked-up mess are you, anyway?”

“I’m pretty fucked up.”

“It’s your son! This is about your son!”

“You don’t need to go to Mexico for Christmas.”

“We’ve had this planned! I bought the tickets, you asshole!”

“Why don’t you come out here instead? You’d like it out here. Jackson would—”

“I’m not going out to the wilds of Montana in the middle of winter! Are you nuts?”

“Why not? It’s nice. The air is crisp.”

“It’s freezing out there!”

“Just come out and give it a whirl.”

“So, you’re refusing to give permission? Is that the story?”

“I don’t know why you have to be going to Mexico for Christmas.”

“You know what?” she says. “I hate you. I hate everything about you. I always have.”

“That figures,” I say, as she slams the phone in my ear. The sun brightens the plaster wall of the Masonic Temple. I’m thinking about getting to my feet. I’m thinking about telling my legs to straighten up and climb into my jeans. Sending the signal from my soggy brain to my swelly feet. I’m fishing for my cigarettes. Her voice goes off in my head like a PA system from a squad car: “YOU KNOW WHAT? I HATE YOU! I HATE EVERYTHING ABOUT YOU! I ALWAYS HAVE!”

Him? No. Are you kidding? He’ll wind up just like his father. You wait and see. Babbling away to himself in the corner of some motel lobby in Lubbock. They’ll wonder where he came from. How he arrived. What he was doing in the middle of the day with no ID, no phone, no recollection whatsoever of who he was or where he was headed. They’ll give him a bowl of soup and a job washing windows with a squeegee but he won’t even last a day. You wait and see. He’ll wind up just exactly like his old man. Dead on the side of the road with no witness. I can see it clear as day.

We stop in a place called Smith’s in Paso Robles and order turkey gumbo soup and lemon meringue pie with black coffee. This ensemble somehow fits together although it sounds as though the tastes might clash. The theme from
Godfather I
is playing on the jukebox; very dreary and always reminds me of that shocking scene with the decapitated horse head. What goes on in Coppola’s mind? How could a guy come up with that? You must have to be Sicilian or something. The skinny waitress here has the worst skin I’ve seen in a long, long time. She seems to be drowning in Clearasil, poor thing. Already suffering and she’s barely sixteen. The decor in here is very weird: old-time meat hooks hanging from the ceiling, unless maybe they’re ice hooks. Either way it’s incongruous for a roadside café, it seems to me. After blowing laboriously on his gumbo soup, Dennis, out of the blue, starts telling me how his aunt had a stroke recently and can’t remember the names of things. Some sort of aphasia or something. She seems to recognize the object itself but can’t remember the correct name for it. Like
door
might become
key
in her mind or
dog
might turn into
bug
. Close but way off. I remember that happened to me once when I was a kid—not a stroke but the confusion about naming a thing. My mother became very alarmed about it and marched me over to the icebox. She threw the door open and began hauling out things like a cube of margarine, for instance, holding it up close to my face and demanding that I pronounce the name of it. I knew it
wasn’t butter because we never had butter but I couldn’t remember the other name so I called it “majesty.” I remember the panic on her face; as though she suddenly thought she had a cabbage-head for a son on top of everything else she was worried about like the old man and taxes and the price of milk. I think it may have also been the extreme heat back then. We were having one of those desert heat waves that summer where it would sit and swelter around a hundred and twelve at midnight for days on end. No rain. And this was in the time before air-conditioning was even thought of. The hills were all black and smoky from wildfires and when you breathed in you could taste the ash on the back of your tongue. At night I would have dreams where the clouds would just ignite into flames. Anyway, I don’t know why it was I suddenly had this little spell of not knowing what to call things. It didn’t last long but it was as strange to me as it must have been for my mother. I absolutely could not remember the name for margarine. That’s all there was to it.

Yet another frantic futile car alarm. Shrieking sequence. Vacuumed up the street. A long hollow moan like you’re listening just after your heart stops cold. Somewhere above the body, looking down. Maybe on the ceiling. Sometimes I picture bright spots on roads way west. Clearings. Round bales and barns caved in from nothing more than time. That’s all. Nothing more than wind and rain. No telling why these fleeting spots come surging up. Could be just the eyes aging. Spots and wriggles. Little white worms projected on the retina. Or maybe it’s the mind hunting for another way out. Just seeking the blacktop once again. Flight, is all.

It got pitch black on the highway and the moon was cut in two. Dennis said it had to be right in between full and new; a kind of
High Noon
moon. Dennis has studied these things. We turned off 101 at El Capitán Beach, went under a viaduct, but couldn’t find the ranch sign we were looking for. We stopped by a Little League baseball diamond and took a leak. (It must have been for Little League because the fences seemed short.) We pissed in silence. The moon was the only light around. We could hear the surf crashing out past the wooden bleachers but couldn’t see the white breakers in the dark. I could picture them though and that seemed enough. The wind smelled like seaweed and dead fish. We piled back in the Chevy and finally found Doug’s ranch two miles farther down the road. Doug was one of those guys I’d known from high school who’d wanted to train Thoroughbreds but wound up running a beat-up boarding stable out here on the edge of nowhere. We went into his kitchen and asked Doug’s wife who had won the 49er-Giants game since we hadn’t seen a TV in days. She was fixing salad at the sink and told us she was not a fan of baseball. We tried to explain it wasn’t baseball but then quickly gave up on her. You could tell she already had her mind set against us and the bad influence we were about to bring on her husband. Then John and Dennis got involved in a card game with Doug around a heavy iron table with blue and yellow Moroccan tile on top and a bottle of light amber bourbon set next to a candle. I think it might have
been Woodford Reserve. I’m sure it wasn’t whiskey though because Doug made a big distinction between the two. He was quite the connoisseur about bourbon, saying it was in an entirely different class because of the Kentucky springwater it was made from. Same water that made the strong-boned racehorses that won the Kentucky Derby; fed from deep limestone aquifers that pulled calcium and mineral nutrients up through the bluegrass where the horses grazed and switched their long black tails. I remember as a kid wondering why in the racing program, every horse that seemed to win a major stake at Santa Anita was bred and raised in Kentucky. I’d never been east of the Mississippi, back then.

I had no interest in blackjack so I walked down to the stable under the cut moon and visited Doug’s horses. A barn owl looked straight down at me from the rafters with his big white bib. A Tibetan monk once told me that the owl was a portent of death but I’ve never felt that way about owls. As I stared at the bright yellow eyes I realized it was a dummy, planted to scare away mice and varmints. It fooled me, that’s for sure.

Next day, in L.A. we check into the Tropicana and call home. “Home.” I’d forgotten about home. Reporting in to the women on our whereabouts. I’m not sure how curious they’ve been, to tell the truth. Quite possibly they were glad to get rid of us for a while. Here we are, the three of us in a room the size of a shoe box, taking turns on the phone; staring out through the sliding glass doors at the steaming swimming pool and the palm trees. My wife tells me that Marin and Sonoma counties have completely flooded. Three straight days of torrential rains. They’re calling it a disaster zone in the news. Hard to believe since we hadn’t experienced even a drizzle the whole way down. All the women and children are totally stranded on the second floor of the house with all the dogs. The basement is under three feet of water. After we hang up, John remembers his collection of rare pornography, his Time-Life historical photography books, and, of course, his precious Ansel Adams sitting on pine board shelves below the water level. He calls
back and asks my wife to move them to a higher shelf since his wife would refuse to go anywhere near them. She tells him she’s going to have to put on rubber boots and a bikini to get this done and what if the books were already completely ruined? She’d be wasting her time. John tells her he thinks they’ll eventually dry out if she’d just please make the effort. He even offers to pay her. After he hangs up I suddenly remember the flood we’d had up there two or three years ago where one of the neighbors had been instantly electrocuted when she swung out of bed and hit the water with bare feet. An electric fan plugged into the wall was sending out a deadly current. I call back and tell my wife to make sure she checks the water first before stepping into it. She asks me how she’s supposed to do that without getting a shock and I suggest she throw one of the dogs in and see what happens. Very funny, she says, and hangs up on me just like the Mexican women up in San Juan. Now Dennis calls home but there’s no answer. He lets it ring for a long, long time. Now I remember that my family album from my dad’s side of the family is also in the basement, probably well below flood level. Why would I suddenly feel this strange attachment toward these ancient crumbling brown photos of my great-grandmother sitting on a buckboard wagon behind two dark plow horses, struggling through deep mud somewhere in rural Illinois; my father as a little boy, no shirt, smiling brightly with a string of perch; my mother feeding pigeons from an army Jeep? But then I pull myself together and drop all these pictures in my head and see exactly what’s right in front of me: our white feet on the green synthetic carpet, our empty hands, and our fatherless faces.