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Authors: Eric Dezenhall

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Fly Like an Iggle

“Maybe he's a little God.”

Irv the Curve knocked on the cabin door the following morning at an obscenely early hour. It was still dark out. Mickey answered.

“Didja hear?” Irv asked ominously. “Carter sent helicopters into Iran to save the hostages. The copters crashed in the desert.”

“Oh, the
putz,
” Mickey snapped. “He'd screw up an invasion of Bayonne.”

Irv came in and showed us the cover photograph in the
Bulletin
. All I could make out was sand and metal. And a quote from Carter beneath declaring the mission an “incomplete success.”

“Do you think they'll ever get the hostages out?” I asked.

“Not at this rate,” Irv said. “Khomeini doesn't fear us. Without fear, he sits there and says this is the will of God. It makes him look…mystical.”

After breakfast, Irv the Curve gave me a few numbers where I could reach him over the summer. A few of the “panic numbers” were in New Orleans, but I didn't ask why. Irv and Mickey told me that I shouldn't be surprised if the Polks weren't happy to see me, especially since Claudine did not know I was personally coming, and had used subterfuge to get there. The Ku Klux Klan, Irv cautioned me, was born in Pulaski, Tennessee, not far south of Rattle & Snap.

“The Polks are not in the Klan.”

“Well, they're not singing ‘Hava Nagila' either,” Irv said.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Get me down there.

Mickey, Deedee, and I climbed into a van that was attached to a horse trailer bearing Shpilkes. Deedee was dressed all in black. “I'm in mourning because that girl is
killing
you!”

Carvin' Marvin drove the van to the Thirtieth Street train station in Philly. Irv the Curve tapped on the window and handed Mickey his
Bulletin
.

Deedee was sniffling, her head against the window.
“I'm in mourning over here!”

“Now, Jonah, I took care of things with the school. They know about the special circumstances,” Mickey reminded me. “You'll get your diploma.”

Deedee: “Your grandfather with all of his magical
connections. Woooo!

I started to laugh. I couldn't help it. Carvin' Marvin bit his lip. As America fell deeply in love with the Mafia, Deedee saw the Life as a pathetic joke. I was inclined to agree. If these guys were so powerful, why were they being chased all over the place by cops in polyester suits?

As we drove through the indignities of Camden's Admiral Wilson Boulevard—strip joints, quickie motels, booze shops, and warehouses praying for gentrification—I read on about Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and President Carter. Carter's inability to save these hostages meant that even powerful men could be chained down by their times.

“Do you know who Issac Bashevis Singer is?” I asked Mickey.

“Do I know? Of course I know. Gimpel the Fool,” Mickey said. “Why?”

“I read an interview with him. Somebody asked him how he could believe in God when all these awful things happened. You know what he said? He said, ‘Maybe he's a little God.'”

“Little is right,” Deedee said.

“Carter's a little president,” I added.

“Where's this going?” Mickey wondered. “Do you want to be a big president?”

“Yes, I do.”

Deedee, rolling her eyes: “Listen again to Jonah
Godol
.”

Mickey, flicking his wrist: “Go, fly like an eagle.” Mickey pronounced it
iggle
. “And when you're with that girl, you be careful. You know about the condos, right?”

“You're building condos?”

“No—
condos,
in case something happens with that girl. You know, private matters. The things from the drugstore.”

Unbelievable.
Condos.

“Yes, Pop, I know about condos.”

“There are consequences,” Mickey reminded me.

 

The train rolled impossibly heavy past the piles of junk strewn beside the tracks of West Philly. These scraps had once been automobiles, I thought—cars that someone had once been proud to drive home and show off to bouncing children. A collective sigh echoed through the car as we passengers who did not know each other mourned our soldiers twisted beneath metal in a desert.

I walked back to the rear of the train and patted Shpilkes's nose as she stood in her vented car. Her eyes bugged out humanly.

Where the hell am I going exactly?
Shpilkes's eyes asked, young, smart, and bitchy.

“I'm taking you to a place called Rattle & Snap. To a girl who calls you Spilled Kiss.” I turned around, paranoid. No one could see this. But I had a gun—if they saw me talking to the horse, I could shoot them and dump them near Baltimore.

That's not my freakin' name.
This from the animal.

“I know, but you should see her.”

I did. They're all the same. They're buttocks and legs as far as I'm concerned.

“This one's more than that.”

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Pbhpbhpbh. Hruuuhhhh.

I couldn't take much more of this, so I returned to my seat, upset with myself for letting a horse talk to me this way. We were approaching Wilmington.

An old man with a yellow mustache, white beard, and a Western hat looked me up and down. His eyes sparkled like saltwater.

“Saw you back there talking to that horse,” the old man said.

Nailed.

“Me? Talking to—no—I mean, I was—”

“T'sall right. I talk to 'em myself.”

I threw my arms up. “I felt bad about leaving her back there.”

“I understand. Horses is people, too.”

I laughed. He didn't.

“Where you headed, son?”

I felt around at my backpack. The cold steel of the gun was in there. Lie here, Jonah. At least be vague.

“Delivering the horse in Nashville and then going to visit friends out west.”

The old man winked at me. “You got a crowded head, I'd say. I seen plenty of crowded heads in my day. You're thinkin' thoughts, talkin' to animals like Doctor Dolittle.”

“Uh-huh.”

“How old are you, eighteen?”

“Yes.”

The old man smiled showing a few stringy teeth. “Only one thing at that age can turn a man's head to such chaos. What's she like, son? Tell Easy.”

“Tell easy?”

“Easy. That's my name. Easy.”

“How'd you get that name?”

“'Cause I just listen. Don't make nobody listen to me. I make it easy. Let people tell their story. Learn more than all the college boys in the world put together.”

“Easy, I don't think my life will ever be the same.”

“Won't, son.”

“Is it stupid to even go?”

Easy hit my knee. “You got to go. T'swhat this whole time-a-life's about. Goin'.”

“How will it turn out?”

“The way it's supposed ta.”

“That doesn't tell me much.”

“I dunno much.”

“I thought you knew more than all of the college boys.”

“I do. They don't know pumpkins.”

I shook my head. “Then what will happen?”

“The beginning will happen. Beginnings always start with some sign or some woman. Right now, you're thinkin' 'bout how you'll be received, how it ends. What you'll know someday when you're my age is this is how it begins.”

“Just what do you think is beginning, Easy?”

“Findin' the Promised Land. Makin' your own home.”

“You think I'm getting
married?

“Sure, someday.”

“To Claud—”
Damn.
“To Claudine?”

“To some girl. You leave. You find. You begin. You return. You go home. You go home once you leave, you find, you begin and return. It's easy.”

“It sounds hard.”

“It is, boy.”

“But you said it was easy.”

“It's easy for me to understand.”

“Why?”

“Because I'm old and I'm Easy.” He howled, self-satisfied. I stared at the old man worshipfully throughout the steely roll into Nashville. When we stopped, the workmen unloaded an uncooperative Shpilkes from the rear.

I shook Easy's hand. He rose, strangely tall, angelic.

“Boy,” he whispered, “you'll be received different where you're goin', but you'll be all right. There're some folks who ain't exactly happy 'bout how things turned out. You know. Civil War.”

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“Everywheres. I go wherever somebody keeps a candle.”

As I guided Shpilkes down a ramp toward a huge warehouselike room, I turned back toward the train. Easy stood between cars. He tipped his hat as the train vanished in the direction of the burning Delta.

Part Three
Funhouse

2005

No more fair play. From now on it's dirty pool and judo in the clinches. The savage nuts have shattered the great myth of American decency. They can count me in. I feel ready for a dirty game.

—Hunter S. Thompson

At Home with Wonderboy

“I thought when you were done, you were done.”

I called Edie as I drove across the Delaware Memorial Bridge because the kids liked to ambush me upon my arrival home. I could see them bouncing like music notes on the covered porch from a few hundred yards. This was our house on Edie's parents' farm in Cowtown, New Jersey, home of the famous Cowtown Rodeo. That's right, a rodeo in New Jersey. People from other parts of the country (like New York) can't believe it, but it's only minutes after crossing the Delaware River from Philadelphia that a soul will find himself in the middle of the prime farmland that encompasses much of South Jersey.

It was spring break, and Ricky, seven, and Lily, five, were off from school. Edie was thrilled I was leaving the White House. She was the only person I've ever known for whom power held no allure, and it was one of the reasons I was still so fascinated by her. I had the intangible sense I had betrayed her—and my children for that matter—but outside of working too hard, I had not, to my knowledge, committed any of the conventional sins. When I was away from them, it pained me physically, especially behind my eyes.

Edie had to restrain Lily, who, having no sense of a universe outside her own thoughts, would have run right in front of my car. Edie released both of them as soon as I cut the engine, and they draped themselves against the driver's side door, not understanding that they were preventing me from getting out.

“Come out, Daddy! Come out!”

“He can't get out when you're up against the door,” Edie explained with characteristic patience, pulling both children back with some difficulty.

I spent the first twenty minutes at home flat on my back because Ricky and Lily felt it was important to sit on me in order to show me the pictures they had drawn. There was a policeman with a huge pumpkin head (Lily shared my fascination with big-headed things) and a psychedelic car with wheels like marbles (Ricky used color to convey speed). The pièce de résistance was a black horse—pooping, of course. Edie shook her head in resignation at this picture, knowing that the joint effort was likely to be validated with a paternal laugh. It was.

No mention had been made of my career implosion.

“They miss you so much, Jonah,” Edie said after Ricky and Lily ran into another room.

“How about you? Do you miss me?” I asked.

“Of course. What kind of question is that?”

“You know me. The whole abandonment thing.”

“When do you have to go back to Washington?”

“Tomorrow morning. I have to finish out a special project, and then I'm done.”

“I thought when you were done, you were done.”

“I wish it worked that way.”

“It works that way if you want it to work that way.”

I had decided in the car that I could not tell Edie yet about Claudine having made contact. She vaguely knew that I had had a Southern girlfriend a long time ago, but we never discussed old romances. I had never inquired about her history, not because I didn't care, but because I cared so much that I felt the slightest detail might destroy me. I had heard stories of people hearing news so traumatic that they would just fall over and die. More likely, I was afraid that any such knowledge would become a thorn of obsession: I am not a progressive man, I do not
LET GO
,
MOVE ON
,
GET CLOSURE
, or
PUT THINGS IN PERSPECTIVE
. I obsess, I ruminate, I grieve, I overanalyze, and I ache.

For Edie's part, she knew that I had never been one to troll around. I had never drawn that postmodern line dividing sex and love. She intuited that despite the erotic impulses I might feel toward other women, my puritanical superego would beat my id down like a Republican in Malibu.

The success of my grandparents' long marriage (my only model) taught me the limits of communication. In an age when “sharing” was considered the panacea, I believed that thrashing around alone was preferable to forcing Edie to swim around with the livid salamanders in my soul. Deedee dealt with her “issues” through delusions of having had a pedigree in show business. Mickey went for walks. Perhaps they had other ways of managing the is-ness of life, but I'll never know what they were.

“Do you think that whatever it is you have to wrap up will redeem how things ended?” Edie asked.

“You mean losing my job in front of the whole world?”

“What else would I mean?”

Stupid, Jonah.

“There's a part of me, Edie, that's afraid of coming home notorious.”

Her great squaw's brown eyes blinked (Edie is one-quarter Lenape Indian). “Like your grandfather.”

“Right.”

“We don't see it that way, Jonah. Notoriety is your…mental fixture.”

Mental fixture. It was an apt term—a thing that becomes a permanent part of a person's psyche, the way a landmark cannot be separated from its physical landscape—the Grand Canyon or Devil's Tower. We get these notions lodged in there, and can't shake them loose.

On an intellectual level, I knew Edie was right, but this storm was raging in a different part of my brain. The part postmarked Atlantic City. I felt as though my family saw me as a fugitive, and I couldn't face them just yet. I had to clean things up. But now I've been dealt this gorgeous joker outside the White House gates with some kind of prophesy from Mount Pleasant, Tennessee.
You know you've got to go down there before you can come home, Wonderboy.

Edie's hands were long and warm. When I ran my fingertips over them, I remembered how I needed to be within her reach.

“I know you don't see it that way. It's why I want to make things perfect. Because that's what you deserve.”

I leaned in toward her, but rapid footfalls stopped us. Ricky and Lily, freshly changed into pajamas, dive-bombed onto the sofa pinning me against their mother. It hit me that the scent of a child's hair was Revelation.

BOOK: Spinning Dixie
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