Little Bastards in Springtime (38 page)

“Well, no. There was a before of that.”

“A before
of that.
I like it. A before
of that.
”

“Yes. It wasn’t bad before. For me, anyway. I have to start with World War Two, and the liberation of our country—many stories start there.”

“Yes, there is always World War Two. Many stories do start there. So true. So true.”

“Or maybe World War One, I don’t know.”

“Or you could go back to the dinosaurs, to fallen angels.” Jim looks over at me and winks. He’s steering with one finger. “You should start your story where you think it starts. But you are aware, my dear Yevy, that all stories are connected.”

And this is how I tell everything to Jim like it’s a story, while we drive eastward through the night at hair-flattening speeds. I throw in everything I can think of, plus a whole bunch of Papa’s ideas.

Jim murmurs, mutters. He nods. “Yes,” he says. “Empires, Cold War end-games, economic collapse, geopolitical interests, expanding capitalist markets, cheap labour, access to natural
resources, power grabs. A familiar tale to a creature like me, too familiar. The angels weep for us, yes they do, and also wonder why humanity, so well-endowed with brains and hearts, puts up with the same BS over and over again like a glut of brainless, heartless jellyfish.”

And I keep going. Half of our family killed, I tell him.
Killed.

“My papa,” I whisper, “is more than a name, a place he came from, a list of things that he did in his life. He has this smell, sweat, cigarettes, soap, cologne. And a laugh, warm hands, a voice. Do you understand?”

“I do understand, Yevy,” says Jim. “I understand perfectly.”

“He was around for quite a while, but now he’s floating away. Down that river.”

“Down that river,” Jim repeats and nods his head like he knows what I’m talking about, like he’s had people float away too.

“And I had a brother. An older brother. We did a lot of things together.”

And after that Jim lets me sit without saying anything until I fall asleep. Hours go by, I sleep, I dream. In my dream, Jim is a general disguised as a peasant. His hair is feathers, his nose is a beak. We’re back home, and he’s riding his cart filled with sweet-smelling apples along a narrow, winding track, he’s asking me how to get to the top of the mountain. That way, I say, and I point to a white peak glinting in sunlight. When I wake, we’re driving straight into a pale, unavoidable sunrise. I sit up and blink at the wild landscape on either side, empty bush spreading around us like it’s taken over the world, like it’s decided to crowd out human pests like us, like we’ve died and are driving through the unpopulated part of heaven to get to the gate. I see hints of colour washing over the brown branches
of winter, light green, yellow, pink, orange. The trees are wearing the palest of their spring halos, I remember this from home.

“We came to this country in an airplane, we came here like tourists with suitcases, like people who decided to go somewhere, who planned and bought tickets, but that’s not really how it felt. It felt like running blindly into the dark and ending up anywhere, any random spot. It’s a nice, good place, I know that, it’s obvious everywhere you look, but for some reason I just couldn’t act like a normal boy when I got here.” I feel like I’m confessing to Jim. “I just couldn’t do it. Things
weren’t
normal—why was everyone pretending they were?”

The sun climbs free of the trees in front of us and I see nothing but glaring white light. Jim drives with a hand shielding his eyes, a knee steering the wheel.

“Thank you, my friend,” Jim says, “for telling me your tale. So, here’s a simple observation for you. Our world suffers from unnecessary, intended scarcity, my boy, which leads to submission, which cultivates fear and insecurity, which leads to suggestibility and suspicion of others, which leads to cruelty and lack of compassion, which engenders all the rest of the terrible messes we humans get ourselves into. But none of that has to happen, none of it is inevitable. Remember this, it’s important, it will affect how you live the rest of your life. You, yes,
you
, can avert world-historical catastrophe. A tidbit of advice. Learn, explore, be curious, be open, be playful, fall in love with humanity and the universe, be more open, be more playful, notice the connections, then learn some more.”

This is the truth, that’s really what he says. I think of everything that’s happened in my life, and how I don’t know a thing about it all, not really. Not enough to understand. The highway keeps unravelling, we keep driving. Then I’m asleep again, and
wake when the sun has risen properly and is hanging overhead. We’ve stopped, and Jim is standing beside the car, smoking a cigarette, meditating on the new day. I see now that he wears a flowing Jesus shirt and several necklaces with colourful stones, he’s a real original hippie from back in the day.

I get out and stretch, rub my eyes, brush my dirty fingers through my bristly hair.

“Where are we?”

“This be the place, Yevy. This is it, my fork in the road, where I turn one way and you go the other.” Jim’s voice has no sleep in it. It’s as high and bright as ever.

He pulls out a cigarette, lights it for me. “Smoke,” he says. “Not good for the lungs, but good for the spirit. The thing is, all the terrible things you’ve experienced, all the terrible things you’ve done,
learn
from it, draw the conclusions, help to make things right. It’s a plan, at the very least.”

I smoke, I nod. I feel like a character in a movie, important enough to run into saints and seers, important enough to have wise words chanted in my ear. I want to keep going with Jim for the rest of time, I want to meet the people he knows, but he says no.

“I have fish to fry,” he says. “I have fateful promises to keep. I have cosmic errands to run.”

“I could do that stuff with you,” I say. But I know he won’t give in. After only a few hours together I know he’s the most steadfast person I’ve ever met. Jim looks closely at me to see if I’m going to burst out crying, crumple to the ground in despair, or anything like that.

“Do you have people to go to?” he asks quietly.

I stare over the hood of the car at birds on a wire.

“People?” I ask.

“Anyone who will say, ‘Oh, there you are, Yev, my friend, I’ve missed you,’ when they see you?”

I think for a moment. “I have an uncle,” I say. “He’s in Hollywood or something, producing movies. Or maybe he’s a businessman or a thug for the mob. I’m not too sure.”

“An uncle on this continent, occupation unknown. Well, that seems like a definite destination possibility.” He hums a tune, sings a few words, “
Every song I sing, I’ll sing for you
,” looks up at the sky, tests the wind with his forefinger. “Yevy, my friend, I am proud of you. You are a true traveller. Many do not travel the path of their own life, and that’s the sad truth. They do no wrong, they make no noise, no dust is stirred up by their feet, but they don’t go anywhere either, they don’t do a damn bit of good to anyone. You get the direction of my tongue? You see where it’s pointed?”

Jim grabs my hands and holds them between his, which are huge and dry and warm.

‡ ‡ ‡

I
SIT IN THE SHRUBBERY ON THE HILL OVERLOOKING
the gas station. Cars and trucks drive in, pause for a few minutes, drive out again. Fat people and thin people and midsize people walk into the station, stay for a few minutes, walk out again. Coffee, chips, chocolate, Coke, cigarettes, windowwasher fluid. It’s a constant stuttering stream, like widgets on a conveyor belt.

I’m waiting for a sign.

Every minute is a thousand centuries, but the day goes by anyway. A breeze blows in all directions, clouds stand still in
the sky, grasses scratch against each other, the dirt is hard and dusty. And I’m hungry, but I don’t get up to hunt for food. I keep sitting, like a boy looking out to sea for ships, until hunger goes away and I’m nauseated and that goes away and I’m dizzy. Then come crazy visions and weightlessness. I’m a wraith up on the hill. I hear voices, right up close, beside my head. They tell me stories and remind me of memories. I re-dream dreams, I rethink thoughts, I hover six inches above the ground while the sun drills sunbeams into my forehead. I can live here forever, I think. I can float tall and raise my arms and a vapour-bright light will appear all around me, and I’ll be the sign I’m looking for, a roadside attraction, like the Virgin Mary who appears all over the world giving directions to the end of time. The Virgin Mary, who I don’t know anything about, or Mohammed, or any of the others. My family wasn’t religious. Baka said, they’re a fantasy and a spectre, the kind that people believe in to feel better about their hard, senseless lives. She said, Jevrem, the war taught me, Tito my hero taught me, it is much better and easier to remove the cause of suffering for all and be happy and contented than to change nothing, suffer, fight each other for crumbs, kill each other over pride, then plead with phantoms in the sky for forgiveness.

I watch the grasses flutter, I stare at my hands, I imagine drifting high into the sky so I can see the whole of the land, so I can spot arrows that will show me where to go, and little message-bubbles that will tell me why. The sun sets. The sky is purple, then blue, then black. Stars really do appear one at a time, until they’re suddenly all there like a curtain has lifted. I sit in the dark with the people of the planet, I think of the lives they live, I wonder why they live them. I think
about happiness, what it’s for. I see ordinary scenes of work and learning. I watch my life flow backwards. I’m a newborn on my mother’s belly. I watch it flow forward, but my mind won’t be tricked into reading my own future like a psychic at a summer fair.

I sleep. I wake.

I keep watching the station as people arrive and leave, walking an identical path through the station’s white cloud of light. They move without thinking, life is easy for them, they’re travelling from A to B and they know where B is. They never look up to where I’m sitting. The moon rises, the sky goes milky grey, the stars fade one by one, there is no curtain now. Traffic stops and silence takes over, with its hollow echoes. I hear dogs howling, or maybe it’s coyotes, or the wolves in my dreams, or the animal that lives in my mind. Warmth seeps out of the earth. The ground is an arctic surface, it has no sympathy for me. So finally I stand, my knees, my back, my ass burning, I rub my belly, sagging like a hammock between my ribs, tight and cramped with hunger and its nightmarish memory. I stretch like a man risen from the dead. Then I pace back and forth like a thinking man, but I have no more thoughts or memories, I’m sending and receiving static.

B
AKA
is next to me.
It’s going to be a cold night
, she’s saying.
Are your clothes dry?

“Yes, they’re dry.” My jaw is tight, it’s hard to talk.

Good
, she says.
Dry clothes win the war. That and gasoline.

“There is no war anymore,” I mutter. “It ended.”

Baka slaps me on the shoulder.
You were always such a rascal, Jevrem.

“But,” I say.

As long as your clothes are dry, you can survive the cold. It won’t go below freezing.
Baka has her hand in the air as though it’s a barometer.
We survived for three years in the mountain forests
, she says. I mouth the words along with her.

“I know,” I say. “You told me about fifty thousand times.”

And it was because we knew what we were doing there, and we worked with the forest, not against it.

“I know,” I say.

When I was young and I walked up into the mountain forest to begin the rest of my life, I was waiting by the side of the road for my guide. When the sun set I heard footfalls. I listened with anticipation. I was told to expect a man when night fell. I knew what he would say to me once he came upon me. I knew how I would respond. I stood before he arrived and shuffled in small circles, letting blood circulate to my legs and feet. Then the man was at my side. I sensed him as much as I could see him. He was a dense breathing presence undulating in the blue and purple night. Do you wish to continue with me? he asked.

Baka stares down at the glowing gas station but she’s in a completely other outdoor nighttime of her life.
Do you wish to continue with me?
she repeats, her voice quiet and serious, like she’s reciting an epic poem that reveals the meaning of all life. Then she shakes her head and gets back to giving me survival advice.
So, if you think you’ll be cold, look around you and see what you can find to keep you warm. It’s all here. Everything you need is always right in front of you. Always.

I look around half-heartedly. The shrubbery is ragged, dirty, highway-swept.

Look farther back
, Baka directs.

I stare in the direction of her pointing finger. “It’s dark,” I say. “I can’t see a thing.”

You don’t have to see
, she says.
Just walk in that direction. Half a mile back, beyond the fallow field, is a forest. There are pine trees, and also deciduous trees, their branches still naked except for seed-size buds.

“I’m not eating things I pull out of the ground,” I tell Baka, but she’s not here anymore, she’s wandered off. It’s just me and icy gusts of wind.

I
STARE
at the floating gas station in a huge expanse of cosmic blackness. The temperature keeps dropping. The moon sets. I tremble, I vibrate. Finally, I do what I should have done hours ago, I listen to Baka. I turn, push through the brush away from the station and the highway, and walk into nothingness. The field, the forest, are invisible. But I can feel the ground rising to meet my feet, and cold air pressing up against my face like water, thick strong-smelling, of grasses, earth, manure, worms. I walk for some time, my ankles twisting on crumbling, lumpy furrows, and then I run into the forest as into an impenetrable wall. I push forward with all my might, and cracking, splintering, the forest reluctantly lets me in. I bend down and feel the fallen branches and twigs, how brittle and light they are, and below that a spongy, springy layer of pine needles, just sitting there ready to burn. I’m inside, I stand and listen. The forest is hushed but alive with scurrying, rustling, running, and climbing. I hear sniffing and snorting. I hear flapping, and licking, sucking, chewing. I know I’m hallucinating with my ears, that my mind is inventing, taking me places, that it’s brought me back home, to the forest of our vacations, to my overnight adventure, when the dark was like moth wings caressing my face, my hands, neck, wrists; crawling into my ears and nostrils. I let myself believe, for one moment, that I could walk
out of this place and back to Papa, Dušan, Berina, Aisha, and Mama, all sleeping soundly in their hostel beds until morning and another ordinary day.