Little Bastards in Springtime (43 page)

Samuel’s friend is named Big Red. Another movie name, but then, this is the U.S. of A. I say, you’re tall but you’re not big, and he tells me about losing two hundred eighty-one pounds in the past year, how he did it by learning to meditate. This explains why he looks kind of baggy around the face and neck, but his eyes are bright, icy blue, the whites clear icy white. You can live on light and air, he tells me, pulling on his cigarette like it’s the source of life itself. You can eat the sun with your eyes. It’s very nourishing, believe me. I ask him about the Red part of his name, and he says it’s from a long time ago when he used to go to the same bar every night on the same street in the same small town. This was in the days when he worked in a factory that made metal bits for another factory that made tools for another factory that made many different things at different times for different factories. In the bar, every night, he and his so-called friends would have drunken discussions about the way people in this country live their lives. Everything that came out of my mouth, Big Red tells me, seemed red to those guys, yes, red as in communist, but they weren’t exactly students of political science, if you know what I mean. I’d say, it’s too bad that Frankie got fired after he mangled his hand in that
faulty machine, and they’d turn on me. I’d say, wouldn’t it be better for employers if their employees had enough income to cover expenses and lead healthy, happy lives, and they’d turn on me. Every night they’d hound me out of the place, tell me to get my fat ass to Russia, and every afternoon after work they’d welcome me back and tell me to buy a round for my sorry-ass working-class friends, too poor and exploited to do anything but drink and act stupid. You know what’s interesting to me, boy, is when people think and act against their own cause.

But other than conveying this little bit of his history, Big Red doesn’t talk that much. I tell him my baka was a committed communist, Death to Fascism, Freedom to the People, and he looks at me, nods, but doesn’t ask any follow-up questions. So I slide down in the seat and close my eyes, and the combination of sitting still and rolling through the landscape puts me into a deep, peaceful daze.

I wake from deep dreamless sleep to see a sign for Dayton sail by. I sit up and stare out the window.

“Where are we?” I ask.

“Almost through Ohio. Two-and-a-half days to the coast.”

I look carefully at the fields, the stands of trees, the subdivisions that pass us by. They seem so innocent, so ordinary. Somewhere around here is the air force base where Bosnian fate was decided, signed by our three tribal warlords and some random European and American politicians. I think of telling Big Red how weird it is to be passing by this place just when I’m escaping to a new life, something different. I think of asking him to find it on the map so we can drive by and I can see what it looks like, this place that produced such a fucked-up new country. It made Mama so depressed she could hardly breathe.
So many died for this? No democratic citizenship can arise out of it. Not
for anyone.
But I feel exhausted just thinking of talking about it, so I don’t say a thing. I let the truck carry me away from it and all the sad, suffocating memories.

Big Red is solar-powered. He gets his energy from nuclear fusion, just like a plant, and doesn’t ever seem to tire. He drives straight all day and into the night, through flat farmland, past huge brown fields ready for planting, North American barns and squat fat silos just like in Canada, small towns with churches of all different shapes and sizes, peasant farmers in carts and buggies pulled by horses like back home. When the sun goes down and the vast sky is streaked with the red and pink of an ending day, I settle in for the night with a blanket and a pillow Big Red pulls out from behind his seat for me. The temperature is falling, he says, but I hear him from my dreams. I’m already asleep, my mouth is open, my bones are humming, my legs twitch like a dreaming animal’s. When I wake again with drool on my cheek, it’s already another day and I know I haven’t slept this well and long and uninterrupted since I was ten. We’re charging through Oklahoma, that’s what Big Red tells me, vast and flat, overarched by the biggest, palest dome of a sky I’ve ever seen.

Heaven is roadside diners at regular intervals. Big Red doesn’t mind sitting opposite me while I cram in the food as fast as I can, giant hamburgers, the ribs of half a pig, mountains of french fries, soup bowls full of gravy, though he eats almost nothing himself, an apple, a few spoonfuls of yogourt.

And he pays for my meals too, like benevolent Samuel, without asking why I have no money, where I’m going, where I’ve come from, what I’m doing on the road. Back in the cab, legs stretched out and head on the pillow, I imagine saying hi to Ujak Luka, saying, I’ll just crash for a few days, a week maybe,
and I imagine him asking me to become his side kick gangster, pimp, movie star, drug lord, or whatever it is he’s up to these days. I picture guzzling drinks with him by the pool, snorting eight-balls in backrooms, flirting with porn stars and their giant straining tits in Hollywood mansions, and being a badass whenever he needs me to be one. But as I think of these things I don’t feel a fizzing rush of adrenaline, I don’t feel a bursting gust of excitement. I feel a cramp in my gut and flashes of white in front of my eyes and greasy sweat all over my face.

‡ ‡ ‡

B
IG RED IS A GOD OF A MAN, I KNOW THIS NOW. HE
can sit in the same position for days, staring at the infinite highway with the alert attention of a tennis player who’s just served, who’s waiting for the return, who’s relaxed and in position, who knows he’ll win the point, who doesn’t care who wins the game. As the endless hours go by, I twitch and fidget, I chainsmoke, I pass out and sleep for who knows how long, deep but on guard, like a drunk man on a park bench over a subway line.

I wake up groggy, with a million shards of rainbow jumping all over my body. I sit up fast, peer around, and spot a triangular bit of glass hanging from the rear-view mirror.

“Refracted light,” Big Red says.

He’s still there at the wheel, motionless as a statue, eyes on the vanishing point.

“And I’ve also wanted to ask you about how you live with what’s stored in your unconscious,” he says to me, as though we’ve been talking for hours about the state of my mind. The truth is, we’ve hardly said anything to each other at all.

“What are these lights?” I ask, mesmerized by the jittering brightness of the cab. It’s like we’ve taken off and are cruising at thirty thousand feet, or maybe higher, climbing toward heaven.

“It’s my prism,” Big Red says. “And the desert light. Colour is refracted light, did you know that? Buried within the physics of that phenomenon is the answer to the question.”

“What question?” I reach out and steady the prism.

“Whatever question you feel the need to ask.”

Oh, I think, he’s one of those Zen guys, where nothing is something and something is everything and everything is nothing. But as I’m thinking this, I look outside and my eyes pop wide, my mouth cracks open, and my head is suddenly clear of everything. We are in the desert and it’s something I’ve never seen before, not even in my mind’s eye. My mind’s eye, which has seen quite a lot of things, hasn’t even tried to come up with something like this, a landscape without stuff in it, no clutter, junk, buildings, people, just a vast, hot, gold and lavender open space, with red jutting rocks, scraggy grass, and peaked mountains as serene as monks on opium in the distance. Our truck speeds along its surface like a tiny metal beetle voyaging outside of time.

“… and it lives on in your body, that’s what I’ve learned from meditation. So, how has witnessing life and death occupied your body, Jevrem?”

“My body?” I ask. I hold up my busted hand, but I see that it’s better now, the swelling almost gone.

“Trauma stays stored in the body unless it’s intentionally released,” Big Red continues.

But now I’m distracted by what I see outside the window. “Where are we?”

He laughs quietly. “Oh, we came into New Mexico a while ago. Spiritual landscape, takes your breath away, and all the garbage in your head with it. You Europeans don’t taste that kind of spiritual much. Maybe ever.”

“Can we pull over for a minute?” I ask.

I think I’m going to explode, I’m so shocked that life has given me this astounding sight. I guess I’ve stopped expecting to be impressed.

“I want to feel the heat,” I say.

Big Red likes this idea, he’s going to be my tour guide into the landscape of the soul, or some such thing he talks about as we stop and get out and crunch away from the truck past brittle scrub into the baking, shimmering emptiness.

“This is Native land,” he says.

We walk and walk. It’s hot and dry and dizzying. After some time, we stop in front of two beat-up car seats sitting by themselves facing west in the middle of nothing, and we sit on the car seats, side by side, and look out at the desert. We’re in front of a monstrous piece of rock, red and jagged, lunging all by itself out of the desert like a whale flinging itself out of the ocean.

Big Red doesn’t seem to be in a hurry, in fact, he’s turned into a rocklike entity himself, maybe enjoying a fresh meal of sunlight, his face tilted, his eyes wide open. I lean back and let the sun shine down on me as hard as she wants. It feels so good I tingle and shiver and shake all over, it’s that strong, that complete, without shadow feelings of any kind. My muscles untwist, and my head opens its petals for the second time in my life like a flower on a magic mountain.

Big Red sits. I sit. Hours go by. The sun travels her arc, then sets.

W
E ROLL
through the night desert, a big half moon riding right beside us in the clear sky. I see my dead people, they’re all here, in this moment, drifting about like breezes and dust clouds. Here, they have space, or maybe my mind has space. I watch them out of the window, I think about them, I go over memories with them, the details of moments and places I don’t remember noticing, and we’re swinging past Santa Rosa, Moriarty, then Albuquerque, and I’m sure I’m in some kind of sun-trance watched over by the moon, and I sense that Papa, Dušan, Berina, and Baka don’t worry about this planet anymore, all the terrible things that can happen here; they just eat light, like Big Red, and sway around the cosmos as much as they want, feeling the bliss that exists beyond time and space, wishing everyone on earth would just freaking relax and feel it too. I ask Big Red if he slipped something in the bottle of water he bought me, and he shakes his head like he might have but didn’t this time.

“The desert is like that,” he says, “you think thoughts you haven’t thought before and you feel feelings that you’ve always believed are someone else’s feelings.”

I daydream, doze off, lose track of time. I wake and see the sign for Flagstaff going by. And I let the landscape flow through my eyes and mind and imagination and out the back of my head.

“We’re in Arizona,” Big Red tells me at some point. He lights me a cigarette. “We’ll stop at the next service centre for feeding and watering, and then we’re in the final stretch to the coast.”

“That’s good,” I say, and I really mean it. I’m feeling excited, even cheerful. And if I look back through the second chapter of my life, it’s true, these feelings were almost always someone else’s feelings.

In the service centre, I find a pay phone and stuff it with coins. I dial Mama’s number and wait for her voice. For once, I don’t feel nervous, angry, depressed or crazy. I’m getting used to this parallel universe, the one that’s always on the move, where everyday life is daydreaming on the open road. As I listen to the dial tone, I eye the panel of pop machines against the opposite wall humming like a giant U-boat getting ready to dive. So much extra of everything here, on this continent, I think, that twenty huge lit-up machines run all through the night in case one thirsty driver with a giant gut wants a Coke at three in the morning.

“Hello?” Mama answers. She’s so close she’s inside my head.

“It’s me,” I say.

“Jevrem, Jevrem, Jevrem.” Mama sings my name like it’s a jingle she can’t get out of her head. “Jevrem, Jevrem, Jevrem.”

“Yes, it’s me.”

“Oh, Jevrem! Jevrem, Jevrem.”

“I’m okay,” I say, in case that’s what she wants to ask me. There’s a pause, I hear her snuffling.

“Where are you, Jevrem?” Mama asks, finally.

“I’m really okay. I think everything will be better.”

“Where are you?”

“I don’t want to say, Mama, in case the police try to torture it out of you.”

“They don’t do that in this country, Jevrem.”

I can hear a smile in her voice, and I feel so relieved my eyes suddenly sting with tears.

“How are you, Mama? How is Aisha?” I’m wiping my face with my sleeve like an exhausted street kid.

“We’re fine, Jevrem.”

“Did they come and ask you questions?”

“Yes, of course.”

“What did you say?”

“What could I say?”

“Have they bugged your phone?”

“Come on, Jevrem. They don’t want you back that badly.”

“Soon, I will be where I’m going, Mama. Maybe you and Aisha can come and visit.”

I don’t know where that idea came from, it popped out of my mouth without asking my brain. I think of Ujak Luka and his glamorous outlaw lifestyle and can’t see how that will ever work.

“Oh, um, Mama? Can you give me Ujak Luka’s phone number?”

“Luka? So.” Mama’s voice has that tone.

“Yes.” I know it’s a risk, but I’m sure he’d be unlisted.

Mama goes off to find the number and I feel my pulse picking up speed. What if the cops were waiting in the house with Mama until I called? What if they’re letting time go by so they can trace the call?

Mama recites a number. “That’s what I have for him. I don’t know if it’s still good. When will you go to him?”

I repeat the sequence of numbers five times, since I don’t have pencil or paper, with Mama patiently following along.

“Mama, I have to go but I will call again.”

“Jevrem. Where are you now? When are you planning to be at Luka’s? Give me something to work with, please.”