Sophia (3 page)

No reading, says Dick Dickerson.

OK, says Finger.

Then Dick throws the book at the wall.

Become a better person on your own time, he says.

Eli, we find a note Boom wrote you when you were young:

There are not many true sunflowers and you are one of them. You are a small bird with small wings. For you there is music that no one else can hear. Yes, you are a bird with tiny, tiny wings. You follow the sun like a soul reaching to heaven. There is music that only you can hear. You are Eli
.

Today I’m viciously attacked by BB gun fire. Is there a sniper in the trees? Then an all-out ambush of twelve-year-olds. I run back onto the boat.

Finger, thank God you’re here. I’m being attacked.

You must have crossed them, Maloney.

More tornadoes in the Midwest clearing whole towns flat, but the streets of our little town are peaceful. The little shops and houses and churches and schools.

They have popcorn at the bank on Fridays. Sorority girls are near black from the tanning bed, cashing checks from their daddies. A scout in new boots does
The New York Times
crossword puzzle on a bench in front of the courthouse. A boy calls him Charlie Cheeseburger from across the street. He does tricks with his butterfly knife. Back on the boat, Finger is laughing at a bad sitcom.

It’s not that funny, I say.

Yeah, he says, but everyone else is laughing.

There is a man, a born again Christian, on TV who draws perfect circles on a chalkboard, a metaphor for Christ’s love. But there is no such thing as perfect, Eli. Someone said once the sunset was perfect and I told him to shut his stupid mouth.

I wish I had a chance to be brave, an opportunity to be a hero. This morning I cared for a sick dying squirrel I hit with my car but it wasn’t good enough. I have never delivered a baby in a cab or saved an old man from a river. I want to continue life in a noble way.

A dream: Darling and I are together riding jet skis on Lake Norman, near my childhood home. You are on the shore, Eli,
beating Finger in chess and waving the Bonnie Blue. This is a dream but could be life someday.

St. Joan of Arc is raped by an English lord then tied to the stake. She asks the executioner to give her a cross to die with and he fashions one with two twigs.

She was just schizophrenic, you say, Eli.

One man’s mental illness is another man’s sainthood, I say.

I wonder what she’d been like in the sack?

Definitely a screamer.

She’d bite your head off, man.

Eli, your chess abilities are sharp and we hustle in the park. I’m your barker and manager. I only take 10 percent.

Don’t outright beat them, Eli. Let them win a few. That’s the hustle.

No mercy, you say. I don’t throw matches.

Two wizards watch. You win blitz games against a couple of park regulars and one long game with a twelve-year-old upstart.

People start to huddle around your matches.

One of the wizards climbs a tree.

Are you on the Holy Ghost hit list? Will you be taken down to her river of milk and honey? Darling sighs in the orchard of my dreams. She laughs in that way of hers. The Holy Ghost tickles her toes. We feed each other peaches and moonshine. I gain knowledge of her.

Let’s talk about the moon, Eli. There are the phases, wax and wane. We sit on the highest hill in town and watch the airplanes.

Ever wish one would crash, I ask.

You got a weird head, Maloney.

No souls lost, Eli, just something to break the silence.

Listen to the words coming out of your mouth, you say.

A bloom of smoke and fire and everyone lives. What a beautiful thing.

You need to go to church Maloney.

I am church, I say.

Finger is doing jumping jacks on the dock. His health is better and he is eating meat again.

I even started smoking, Maloney.

Why?

It makes you tough.

Those things will kill, I say.

All the good people smoke, says Finger. Puts you in touch with death.

I’m in touch with death, I say. It’s life I can’t get together.

I’m at the Starlight watching Darling pour hot coffee with her perfect pitching arm. She comes over and says there’s a call for me. It’s Tuesday on the line.

I’m in Bhutan seeking the light, she says. How is Eli?

He is fast on his way to becoming a chess master. Next week we go to the big tournament.

I sent him a wisdom prayer.

Do you pray for me?

It was good to talk to you, she says. Goodbye.

St. William is tied to the stake, strangled and burned. He coined the phrase
Give up the ghost
.

Eli, do you feel alive?

Most of the time.

What about now?

I would say yes. And you?

Can’t rightly say.

Another gin?

Why not.

This is what passes for conversation here on the boat.

Eli, you’re in the chess club destroying the journeymen. Lots of old wood in this place and paintings that follow you with their eyes. There are some masters here sizing you up. You win one pretty easily but the next one sneaks up on you. Nono is coming to all your chess matches. The tournaments and exhibitions, even park games. She is a small lady with a wild smile. I see her talking to you as I collect your winnings.

What did she want, I ask.

You jealous?

Don’t like her moving in on our arrangement.

She’s got something, you say. Something unadulterated about her.

Finger is fishing off the boat. He is living with the weather and sun. He’s turned away from his freegan principles.

I’ve forgotten how wonderful money is, he says.

You can be happy without it, Finger.

With cash and a large truck, some diversified assets, a nice little nest egg, I could be happy.

Eli, the couple in my office are the worst parents in the world. They have three children ages one, two, and three. Both are out of work and he wears his boots tucked into his jeans. She wears Playboy bunny pajama pants. She tells me how she dropped two of the babies down some stairs and one is seriously damaged. That’s what she says, Eli. Seriously damaged.

In the Starlight, Darling is sweet to me. She serves a man in a neck brace blueberry ice cream. Her hair is cut short for the summer like a French New Wave movie star.

Your legs are graceful, I say.

Thank you.

You have the best kind of eyes.

Thank you.

I want to take you somewhere.

I want to go somewhere.

But we don’t move.

We’re on the train to California for your first pro tournament, Eli. There are all kinds of folks here on the Sunset Limited. Black mothers out of New Orleans, Mexicans and Mennonites from Texas, air force recruits from Nebraska. These people play Go Fish as the nation goes by. Hipsters with tattoo sleeves eat peanut butter sandwiches. Out here, Eli, windmills in the desert do whatever windmills do. I’m filled to the brim today with Jesus and America and Vitamin C.

Should I get beer in the dining car, you ask.

Of course.

You drink sixteen and put them on my tab while I’m asleep. We play chess in the morning and go over your openings. You’re in good shape to beat some ass, Eli. We are in America and you will be the greatest.

St. Margaret is of noble birth. A rookie executioner’s first blow slices her shoulder rather than her neck. Wounded, she runs. Ten additional blows are required to complete the execution. A wolf licks the blood from the road and stalks
the body all the way to the graveyard where he smells the freshly dug earth and runs away.

News from back home. Finger stabbed Dick Dickerson at the pawnshop over the price of a sword. Dick Dickerson saw a woman needed cash.

I’ll give you two hundred for it, says Dick Dickerson to the woman.

That sword is worth at least a thousand, says Finger.

Finger, why don’t you go do some stocking, says Dick Dickerson.

Well, I need the money, says the woman.

I’ll buy it off you for five hundred, says Finger.

You’re fired, says Dick Dickerson.

Finger stabs him and walks out.

At least that’s how Finger tells it.

There is a voice mail from a man with the U.S. Embassy. Something is wrong with Tuesday. I call back.

Tell it straight, I say.

We’re working it out, he says.

What happened? Where is she?

She’s in India. Sick.

What kind of sick?

We don’t know. They’re putting holy candles on her.

Holy candles are the best you got?

Best we got.

There are good people in the world and a few bad, but the bad ones get all the coverage, Eli. This is Hollywood. We listen to Sunday church music on the radio. I climb a palm tree and watch the sunset and Tuesday is in some country with no God. The seasons are grinding away and the Holy Ghost is bored. I’m hoping for a miracle or at least a woman with a nice ass to cross the road.

Eli, get your body as ready as your mind. The tournament money is keeping us alive. You drink beer during and wear shades like the poker players on TV. I hold your hat and cigs.

In L.A., there is sad beautiful Hollywood light everywhere. Everyone desperate for something to happen. The pools and drugs. All the cliques inside of clichés. People complaining about how perfect it is. Yoga. Soy iced coffee. Massage and marijuana. The celebrities are boring. The homeless are boring. I love it all, Eli. Great America, ho!

Eli, you’ve won first place and we hold the trophy high. This newspaperman wants to do a story on you.

Eli, what is your overall strategy?

To kill the king.

What do you say to all those kids out there who want to be a chess champion like you?

Kill the king.

Back on the train out the window fireworks bloom from the little towns as we cross through the night, Fourth of July. Look at the lemon groves and the kids playing soccer. The Buckville, Texas, train station is an art deco palace with red stained glass windows. High-back leather chairs in the main waiting room. Birds fly in, sometimes stopping by your chair. A finch on your lap as you wait for the train, maybe you are drinking a martini.

There is a man who claims he’s Cherokee. He walks with a stick with a skull on it. He’s like Bruce Springsteen when he talks. He has that look of fear.

What do you say there, mister, he says.

I’m here with my friend playing some chess.

Chess, he says. That’s all?

Yeah, I say. What do you do?

I find people, he says. I search and I find them.

St. Anne is bound with chains to the stake by her ankles, knees, waist, chest, and neck. She is burned slowly. She does not scream. There is music in her ears from a small boy practicing his flute on a roof in the distance. His mother would not let him go to the execution until he finished his scales.

There is an announcement that a man has offered to entertain the children in the observation car. He is a fat man in a car mechanic’s shirt. He’s a special effects makeup guy or he wants to become one some day. He paints big gashes and scars.

I was a PA on the movie
Gremlins
, he says to the children.

What’s a PA, says a kid.

Gremlins
was a very important movie, the man says.

Can you make it look like I killed myself, says a little girl.

Her dress is Wedgewood blue.

A Buddhist monk and a black French Messianic Jew in the dining car. I say, We’re like the beginning of a joke. Miles out the window. Miles and miles. No one laughs.

It should be required of every young man and woman of America to travel terrestrially across our great country. Forests to desert to plains to mountains to coast. Night comes quicker out here in the Badlands. One sweet girl in the observation car reads a book I’ve read. I want to talk to her but she gets up before I can sit down. I change my shirt. Have a fantasy about her. We meet. I have a hotel room in New Orleans. Order room service, then get dirty in the shower with her. She has short hair and glasses. A tiny white scar below her mouth. I fall asleep and dream of Darling dressed as the Statue of Liberty.

The special effects makeup man is having a heart attack. They call for a doctor. Then they call for a doctor or a nurse. They call for the defibrillator. We back up to the last station and an ambulance comes. The man is on the stretcher. The sky is van Gogh chrome yellow. He smiles trying to reassure us, this makeup man, but he grabs his chest.

The man is dying, says the girl in the Wedgewood dress.

A woman is doing a crossword puzzle and asks, What is the word for “orange” in Spanish?

Gremlins
, says the dying man. Was a very important movie.

There is a pregnant woman. She asks other passengers to watch her kids while she smokes. Down in the café car she has a Miller Lite at two in the morning. We are the only two idiots awake.

My husband left me, she says. I’m looking for a strong man with hot hands.

I see.

Hot hands to hold me while I sleep.

I will pray for those hot hands to find you, I say.

What if those hands are yours?

They’re not.

The rain’s stopped, Eli. I’m in a fog of fantasy. When there is nothing left to do there is memory. All the books read and everyone asleep you can stare out the window and have memories. A woman came in the bookstore I worked at years ago and asked for books on Kenya. She was going on safari. We talked for a while about her son who was a Rhodes scholar and her husband who was an architect. I found her a book and wished her good luck on her trip. That was twenty-five years ago, Eli. I imagine sometimes what her safari was like. I picture her wearing a pith helmet in a jeep watching a lion sleep. Or her eating cantaloupe in a garden served by black men in white uniforms. The sounds of lions killing elephants in the
night. I think of her making love to a stranger for the first time in her life and sometimes the stranger is me.

I ask the waitress in the dining car about the white wine. We discuss cork versus twist off. I listen to a sad song on my headphones and dream of a sad movie about two brothers who love the same girl. My belly is full and the green farms go on forever.