Postcards (40 page)

Once, in the rain, the three of them cramped inside the Hat Man’s rolling house. Kosti and Paula sat on the bench. The Hat Man sat on his bunk. Everywhere objects hung and dangled, frying pans, ropes, coil of wire, a coffee can with a wire bail, filled with nails. The only clear place was on the back of the door where Mr. Blood had pasted a creased cowboy movie poster that Kosti coveted.

CARL LAEMMLE
PRESENTS
HOOT GIBSON
IN
‘CHIP OF THE FLYING U’

It showed a peach-faced man with blue idiot eyes, gap teeth and red, red lips in a smiling Cupid’s bow.

In the corner was the Hat Man’s television. Looked like the dog had been licking the screen. Cupboards and shelves and hooks, magazines, deer horns. Hats. He had some hats he never wore.

‘This one,’ he said to Kosti, turning a wilted black brim around and around in his cracked hands like a prayer wheel, ‘this one might be valuable. This might be Paul Revere’s hat that he wore the night he done his ride. It might be valued at a thousand dollars.’ Paula noticed the smell of moldering wool and fur and old sweatbands that filled the trailer like invisible gas.

‘See this one?’ He held up a brown cap, the rotting crown so soft it lay flat on the brim. ‘Belonged to Dillinger. You know I can’t get insurance on this hat collection. I started out to collect them about three years ago. The widow of a friend gave me the first one, but I’ve worn hats most of my life on account of I got a few scars. You want to know why?’ he said, voice racing between coughs. He picked up a white cowboy hat with a snakeskin band, I bought this off somebody out in California. He had a sign nailed up on the telephone pole, “Good cowboy hat, been in the movies, too big for me, $20.” I took one look and paid him what he was asking, didn’t even try to bring his price down. You know who wore that hat? Hoot Gibson, up on that poster, that’s who, Hoot Gibson in
The Bearcat
in 1922. They made Hoot Gibson into some kind of hero, but he was just a knock-around when he got started, just a guy bumming around from one rodeo to another, doing stunts, picking up small change by fooling around. Drifted to the movies. Got hired as a stuntman after somebody rented him for a day to handle some rough horseflesh. Couldn’t act his way out of a paper bag. Movie stars was smaller in the old days. Their heads was bigger. That’s my hobby, the old movie cowboys. Two years ago I watched most of them on TV. I was hooked up to some good electricity. Bought that TV set.’ He pointed to the corner. ‘Never paid attention to movies before then. But I’ll tell you, I could go on one of those trivia shows now. J. Warren Kerrigan in
Covered Wagon,
Antonio Moreno in
The Trail of the Lonesome Pine
and
The Border Legion,
Christ, I know a lot of them. Tom Mix in
anything he done. You know who used to stand all stiff and puffed up like those old boys? Mussolini. World War Two. Like the old movie cowboys. You know what else is funny about them?’ They waited through a storm of coughing, waited until he had his breath back and wiped his wet eyes. ‘Where their waists are. They all got their waists right up there, their pants’re hauled up, up to their chests, gives a short look to their bodies. These are the silents I’m talking about. You can’t see them at movie houses. I see
The Bearcat
every time I get a chance. Watch the TV listings. Film festivals sometimes, so I read the papers. I have seen this
same hat
right here that I’m holding on the head of Hoot Gibson in that movie. Gives you a funny feeling to look at a hat you own up on the television. It’s like he’s dead, but the hat’s still alive.

‘The reason I can’t get the insurance on my collection is because I don’t stay put. A few months here, then move on. I have to keep moving along. Got my house-wagon, got my truck, got my dog, I can find work anywhere because I am not too proud. I’ll run a garbage truck. I’ll carpenter. I’ll build you a wall or a doghouse or a observatory. I’m not in that social security system, though. Never paid a penny of it, never collected a penny of it. Made my own way through thick and thin.’ Paula looked half asleep, leaning back against the wall. Her knees glittered with fish scales.

‘I got good hats that way, not out of the garbage, but asking people, “You got any old hats you’d like to part with?” That’s how I got this ski hat, a lady’s husband was goin’ down the street in Dog Boil, Manitoba where I was for the wheat harvest once. The husband was going to the hardware store to get window caulking. A geode rolled off a windowsill of the hotel room of a geologist who was doing oil exploration and the geode hit the husband on the head. This hat saved his life. You wouldn’t think to look at me that I could build a observatory, would you?’ But Kosti and Paula were tired. They’d split wood all day and now sleep was coming down like a numbing spell.

On Saturday night they were back again with green tomato pie. It tasted a little like apple pie, but that was because of the spices, Paula said. The same spices, cinnamon and cloves. Green tomatoes had no taste of their own. The Hat Man boiled water for coffee, Paula got
out their tea flask, pineapple weed and dried strawberry leaves. A healthy drink.

‘The biggest trouble with building an observatory,’ old Blood said, ‘was in deciding where to put it. There’s things you wouldn’t even think about. You don’t want it near a big city or even a shopping mall. Light pollution, dirty air. Find some place that’s dark at night. Like around here. Not many places left that’s pure dark. I used to sleep out on the prairie at night, see those stars. Highway lights, streetlamps, yard lights, they all throw their light up on the bellies of airplanes. Ruin the sky.’ He coughed. ‘This would be a good place to put an observatory.’ Paula looked at the black window, clouded on the inside with a film of moisture.

‘A dark spot’s only the first thing. Any fool could think of that.’ He shuffled his chair closer, looked into their faces to see if they were getting this. Ticked off the points on cracked fingers.

‘You can’t pick a cloudy place. So, number two, the sky has to be clear most nights. Here you got your dark, all right, but you also got cloudy nights. But even if there wasn’t clouds, then, see, your atmosphere has to be steady. The air is like a river, like a thousand rivers stacked on top of each other, and the way the currents of the air rivers run, smooth or rough, depends on the shape of the ground below.’ He could hear Ben telling him in the mountain night. ‘See, it’s like stones in a river. Hills and canyons and valleys and mountains make the air up over us rough. Like river stones rough up the water. The more stones in the river the rougher the water gets. And you go out to your observatory that’s built up in the mountains, say, like here, to look at the stars, and it’s all twinkly and bleary and you can’t see dog-shit on a plate. It’s better to set your observatory up on the top of a lone mountain. Even better if the mountain’s on an island or along the coast. Air smooths out when it crosses water. Oh, there’s a lot to know,’ he said, looking Kosti straight in the eye. ‘Haven’t even begun to tell you. I’ve seen it when it was fine. We’ll get to it some other time. I got to change the bandage on the dog’s back.’

Paula spoke in the sad voice she used for crying babies and conversations with her bad-news sisters, the words drawn out mournfully in the vowels. ‘Poor old thing, what’s the matter with her?’

‘I believe she had a fight with what used to be my winter income. You hear that?’ Outside under the wavering starlight a coyote pack called with pitched short cries like the cries of hens running for lettuce leaves. Paula leaned against Kosti. Presently an exquisite thin note rose off the hill across the road.

‘That was my getaway money in yesteryear,’ said the Hat Man. ‘Oh, fur prices were good once. They’ll probably come back up. Maybe this season. I might try it around here. I might trap some this winter, maybe, get enough money to move on. There used to be good money in trapping. But it’s rough on you. A rough life.’

Paula’s face was cold. She thought of innocent animals cruelly pinned, their mouths dry with fear while this old man with the hard blue eyes crept toward them, talking, talking, but carrying a bloodstained stick.

But he was already in new stories, a prospecting story where in the dark he stepped on a rattlesnake in his bare feet, jumped in the air and landed on the snake again. She did not want him to tell the story about the wild ducks with the string through their guts, the trailing ends tied together so that they jerked against each other, the string sawing at raw tissue, or the pack rats thrown alive into the campfire.

Kosti and Paula rolled up on their futon in the yellow kerosene light playing hand-spider. ‘Creep, creep, creep,’ whispered Kosti, thinking Paula smelled pretty ripe, burned cheese and skunk, but as soon as she grasped his hoe handle his nose went blank.

‘Hope you don’t turn into a talker when you get old.’ She huffed in his ear.

‘In my family the men die young. You’ll never know what stories I might of made up. Big elk hunts! Mine disasters!’ They laughed, but the thought of the Hat Man’s reeling, loose-mouthed age drove them to a panic of kissing, of slamming each other with their springy pelvic bones.

49
What I See

He’s not sure where he is. So many roads look the same, the repetitive signs, the yellow stripe to the horizon. The same cars and trucks are repeated over and over. But in the early morning when he is not jostled by traffic he finds a way to the back roads where he sees box elder, sumac buds showing green tips.

He comes on a few landmarks, unchanged since he drove along this road a long time earlier. Through the pink rocks, through the stunted oaks the wind roars, the crane shrieks from the swamp. In the morning light the sky comes alive with birds. He remembers the smell of cave-riddled rock. A fox moves over the matted grasses.

He takes the turnoff that runs along the foot of the cliffs. The old rig beats along. The greasy stone is bored with tiny caves the size of stick ends. Travelers have cut their names in the rock in footed capitals and florid ampersands. The dates flood past him July 4, 1838, 1862, 1932, 1876, 1901, 1869, 1937.

The cliffs darken. Words well out of the rock in burning colors, ‘Epiphany H.S. ’67,’ ‘Bobby loves Nita,’ ‘Christ Will Come,’ ‘Fedora.’ ‘Write Belerophon.’ Pheasants fly over the truck trailing stringy tails. On the edge of the fields ruined farms, slatty buildings weak and ready to go. The land heaves, crawls in great, undulating rolls. Tumbleweed banks the fences,
LAKE FEDORA. KNIGHT CRAWLERS. FOR A GOOD NIGHT’S REST SLEEP AT THE CUCKLEBURR MOTEL. SEND $60 FOR THE COMPLETE SET
.

Now he’s seeing horses, the goddamn beautiful hones he never could ride. Indian singing from the Rosebud reservation, singing like the howling of the wind. The woman announcer’s voice, breathy, quick cadenced, ‘And this for Johnny White-Eyes, died
in 1980, he would have been thirty-two today, his mother and all the rest request this, “I’m Proud to Be an American.”’

And when he stops and gets out the silence roars.

He thinks he is going east but does not cross the Missouri. Instead, turns west-northwest on an old man’s reckless hunch. What difference does it make?

Gets to Marcelito, California, stands at the Stars & Moon bar telling them about the real uranium days, about Bullet Wulff who would be a stranger to these times, while in the dark someone uncouples his trailer hitch and makes off with the old round-topped wagon. There go the traps, the Indian’s book, the hat collection, the frying pan and tin dishes, the forever-smiling face of Hoot Gibson.

But he still has the truck, rust starring through the paint. Busted, broke, he drifts to the orchards and fields, into the Stream.

The Stream of migrant labor flows north and east, south again, then west, splitting and doubling back in cranked-out buses and throbbing Cadillacs to the avocados, oranges, peaches and frilly lettuces, beans like alien fingers, potatoes, beets, hairy dirty beets, apples, plums, nectarines, grapes, broccoli, kiwi, tangerines, walnuts, almonds, gooseberries, boysenberries, strawberries. Gritty strawberries, sour and rough in the mouth but as red as fresh blood. It’s easier to get into the Stream than out again.

50
The One Only One

RAY TOOK SO LONG TO DIE, was so unwilling to give up life, that Mernelle thought of plastic bags, sleeping pills, thought of disconnecting his oxygen or crimping the tube until he had to let go. He twisted in death’s gripping hand like a drowning cat in the scruff-clenched fingers of a farmer, yet the hand did not open. The cancer gnawed inside him, sometimes quiescent enough to let him smile, say a few sentences, his guileless eyes fixed on her, his thinness stretched under the sheets. She imagined it in him, a wet maroon mass like a cow’s afterbirth, pulling his life into its own.

Ray’s doctor told her to go to a special counseling group. ‘Coping with Death.’ They met in the doctors’ lunchroom. A room with a
thin carpet, maple chairs around a long maple table. A nurse handed her a blue plastic folder. Inside she found a photocopied poem, ‘The Fading Light’; a list of seven types of dying people; stapled pages of practical advice on wills, organ donation, undertakers, funeral costs, tombstone cutters, cremation parlors; lists of nursing homes and hospices; telephone numbers to call for home help; a pamphlet, ‘Dying At Home’; a roster of clergymen, rabbis and priests; advice on choosing a cemetery. She read through the seven types, looking for Ray. The Death-Denier, The Death-Submitter, The Death-Defier, The Death-Transcender. That was Ray, The Death-Defier.