A foul unseasonable cold was hanging in the air, rain which was almost sleet falling steadily. Boston lying out there, a dead wet cod with buggy eyes. The suitcase was heavy and cumbersome to carry; I shouldered it, then tried holding it in front of me as a buffer against the wet wind. Full of dirty clothes and too many books. I felt like pitching it in the gutter and starting clean. I caught the trolley for Park Street and was happy when it descended out of the ugliness into the dark hole at Kenmore Square. I got out at Copley impulsively and glanced up Huntington at Storyville which had gone out of business, a club where all the jazz greats had given their drugged and frantic hearts to the sybarites, sets so grand that hearts should have broken openly and blood poured to the floor. I crossed Copley Square against the traffic—everyone beeped but I somehow didn't care whether I was hit or not. Giant lawsuit frees man forever from financial grief headlined the Globe. An airport limousine pulling up before the Plaza barely missed me. I had been in there only once, proposing marriage to a girl while we sat at an ornately canopied bar that revolved like a merry-go-round. I'd too much to drink and had asked the bartender if he couldn't pull the plug and stop the god-damned thing. And we were asked to leave and she cried not because we were kicked out but that my proposal had been so flip. I shifted the suitcase to my shoulder again and stared at the public library where I had spent so much time reading magazines and writing my history of rain and grief. So many freaks in libraries. Same in New York and Frisco. They shit on the toilet floor and blabber incoherently, pestering everyone. Once I saw a young man yell look” in the lobby and let his prick hang out; he closed his overcoat then and tried to run out the door, rather swirled clumsily in the revolving door. One woman screamed but most people shrugged. Depressing. He needed help. A lock on his zipper for beginners.
Down Park Street to the bus station where I sat on a bench and waited for the hourly New York shuttle. No spiff here. Those most likely to spit or vomit ride buses; inmates of any institution, freshly released, crisscross the country in buses, all stations with the stink and mumbling woven in, the smell of diesel exhaust and free exchange of terminal viruses at the lunch counters, drinking fountains and rest rooms. I sat next to a black soldier and we talked about the Bruins and Patriots; sports are a common harmless interest in waiting rooms. And all the pointy loafers cruising past with eyes on crotch bulge, hanging around to find a friend in need. Pop goes the weasel.
I had a cup of wretched acidic coffee, then finally boarded. A lovely girl got on at the Newton stop but there was no way to get near her so I looked at her neck until we reached the Connecticut border and I fell asleep. Then, further on, at a lunch stop near Hartford I got a closer look and saw that her face was covered with an even sheen of pimple hider. On certain days it seems that all loveliness has fled the earth. Upper lip over her teeth but one protruded with a suspicion of fang and vampire far in the past, a predisposition not to be changed by the sociology text she read in half-sentence snatches before looking up again. The poor are broke, they say. The upper class tends toward tennis and expensive water sports. And air travel while the poor ride buses. Immigrants tend to learn the language. Finally down Ninth Avenue to the beige colonic Port Authority. New York. I intended to stay for only a few days; see some people, and there was a very wan hope that I might collect a debt from an old friend. Then I would go home to Michigan, work up a grubstake, and perhaps head out for San Francisco where I would start another new life.
III
THE WEST
If you look at a map of the American West closely (I mean by West all land on the far side of Kansas City) you'll find an unequivocal resemblance to the topography of Siberia or the Urals. But television of course has proven this notion untrue—those thin blue and black and red lines on maps indicating rivers, roads and boundaries tell less than the whole story as we say. I'm not talking about the grandness of the Louisiana Purchase, the trek of Lewis and Clark, the endless string of wagon trains, the Donner party (quite a party) or the TV program Low Cheapwhorehole. Or even that dead bird Route 66, not the road but the program. And I'm not dealing here with the vicious average, the West as the result of a genocidal march, or the Turner Thesis with the West rolling up finally into a ball of tinsel glued with the blood of Chicanos and Indians. This is all the job of historians. Universities are littered with them and their disputes over what area belongs to which prof; there are the usual mimsy slap and molasses quarrels about who is going to teach Louisiana Territory 503. But then they deserve their own trifling smegma quarrels. We will wait until one of them tells the true story in a monumental ten-volume study, The Drek Trek: The Westward Surge of Pigshit to the Pacific's Watery Lip. You must note that academic book and paper titles uniformly own full colons. This fact can be considered a key to what they are teaching our children. Inflation is eating up our savings. The colon is both full and empty. An implosion rather than explosion is due. Perhaps deep in the bowels of Montana in a vast cavern the absence of buffalo prepares a non-stampede. Crazy Horse watches over them, still digesting Cluster's heart.
Hard to be bitter with the warm evening sun dappling down through the birches, mottling tent and ground with yellow. I would shoot a doe and eat fresh meat but much of it would rot. Better to eat roots and leave deer for the necessary sportsman. A sweet story of how one booster type, rich, owned a small herd of buffalo, raising them as a hobby and culling (selective killing) when there were too many. Buffalo steaks for sale and not bad tasting, somewhat like old moose, better for pot roast than steak. Anyway an archer bought an animal “on the hoof to kill a trophy. After shooting over thirty arrows into the beast from fairly close range the buffalo failed to die and resembled a giant sparsely quilled porcupine. The state police were called and a trooper fanned his .38 into the slumping body, down on the front knees. The buffalo then rolled over in its death throes crushing many valuable arrows. End of anecdote. Suggested punishment? Devise your own. Anyway the great outdoors must have shrunk visibly and if you were an astronaut looking down from a half thousand miles some sort of tremor or shudder must have been apparent. This is dead-end romanticism of course. Nothing happened. The trooper trooped home after work and told his wife. The owner shook his head and said “golly.” The archer told his friends that buffalo were tough, dangerous ole hombres and hard to bring down.
When I first reached Laramie I bought a cowboy shirt and a high-crowned hat. My boots were still stiff, bought back in Fort Morgan, Colorado, where I got off the bus. End of the line—with my money low I thought I could hitchhike from there to California, only fourteen hundred miles down the road and this was my second trip. Seasoned. On the first trip I had taken a bus to the Michigan border and spent all day getting to Terre Haute. I had to walk across most of Indianapolis; the roads confused me and when I finally got them straightened out a young couple picked me up and gave me a ride to Terre Haute. I stood about three hours before anyone stopped. This time it was a mechanic from Pittsburgh who said he was going to L.A. They never say Los Angeles—they say L.A. I intended to go to San Francisco, or I had the day before, but the long ride was tempting. By Joplin we knew each other well and he admitted the car was “hot” and that he was a bigamist and would disappear in L.A. Maybe go to Mexico until things cooled off. He shared his cache of little white pills and we stayed awake from Indiana to California, losing control of the car only once in the Panhandle and then it was a harmless short screaming trip out through the mesquite and back onto the road without stopping.
I put all my food that wasn't tinned in an onion sack and tied the opening with a rope which I threw over a tree limb and secured. When I had gotten back to the tent there were raccoon tracks all over and I didn't want all my remaining food hauled away while I hiked back to the lake. I thought of my wife for a few moments. Fine girl who strangely didn't want to be married to a drunk. She wasn't, however, jealous of tents. I had been by now four and one half full days without a drink—certainly my most extended sequence in ten years. I
t wasn't so bad as long as there weren't people around. I put some fishing line, hooks, sinkers in the pouch I carried at my waist. No need for the canteen.
The hike to the lake was easy and familiar. I saw my tracks on the sand bar from which I had shot the turtle. Hadn't carried the gun lately, useless heavy baggage. Smarter to carry it in Oakland. I shaded my eyes and looked at the far shore toward where I thought I had spotted an osprey nest; the nest was there and I wondered what would be the shortest, easiest way around the lake. If I had been smart enough to bring binoculars I could have glassed both shores and found out but then I had left in a hurry. Crazy guy flees. I chose left, walking along the lake's edge with a wary eye cocked for water snakes. I can bear almost any sort of snake except rattlers and water snakes though I'm not partial to blue racers either because of their agility. Often while trout fishing I've seen them fat and thick and blue ten feet up in a cedar tree. I came to where a swamp abutted the lake and sat down and took off my boots, tying their laces together and slinging them around my neck. I waded gingerly at first but the bottom was solid though my feet were numbing from the cold water. I came around a point of firs jutting out into the water, by this time thigh deep in a patch of lily pads with their huge white flowers and smaller yellow flowers. On the far side of the point a creek emptied into the lake and even next to shore it was too deep to wade. Probably good fishing here but I wanted to reach the nest before noon. I pulled myself up into a thicket and sat down on a fallen tamarack and put on my boots. It was hot and I was sweating and the sweat washed the mosquito dope into my eyes which felt red and stung.
I stayed over night in Laramie in a fleabag hotel down near the railroad yards. Cowshit in the air and switching diesels all night. The hotel apparently doubled as the local cut-rate whorehouse. The room clerk, as usual tubercular and middle-aged, had looked at me inquiringly. Then there was laughter and drunken shouting throughout the night. I was going to go back to Cheyenne the next day to see the big rodeo I had heard about in a bar that evening. When I got into bed I slid my billfold down into my shorts. Then I got up and propped a chair under the doorknob kicking at the rungs until the wedge was solid. I smoked for a while and then got up again and looked out the window and watched the switching engines with their single headlights bobbing and the cars banging together, “Route of the Eagles” and “Route of the Phoebe Snow” and “Lackawanna” were my favorite car names. I took the pint of whiskey from my bedroll and drew heavily on it. Only half left and no chaser. I drank again until it was gone then slept peacefully to the varied noises, only discomfited by the cattle bawling in their cattle cars. On the way to the knife in St. Louis or Chicago.
Let's admit that Cheyenne is a cow plot. And Denver too for that matter. They were dropped on earth from a particular height and spread as a cow plot does in the grass. Plop plop plop. Deranged and headless, oil poured on still water; the skirt of the city with the motels, car lots, hamburger driveins, gas stations with hundred-foot-high signs visible from the freeways, and thousands of indefinable small businesses in one-story brick or cement-block buildings. In the latter dark purposes are carried out. Real estate and unreal estate. Toilet fixtures. The House of a Thousand Lamps. Brad's Steak ‘n’ Egg Stop. But we know all about this and there's no way to start over again.
About five A.M. I walked out to a Route 90 interchange after having a good breakfast at the Switchman's Cafe with the stools lined with railroad men in blue-and-white-striped bib overalls and engineer caps on. Pancakes with a slice of ham on top and three eggs on the slice of ham. Insulin shock and drowsiness barely after whippoorwill's rest. I stood for only a few moments with my thumb out before an Oldsmobile, late model, fishtailed crazily to a stop. I trotted about a hundred yards and got in the open door without looking. There were three young men, two in the front and one in back, the air heavy with liquor fumes and the radio blaring Patsy Cline's “The Last Word in Lonesome Is Me.” As the car shimmied and approached a hundred miles an hour it became obvious that no one had been to bed. The driver had his Stetson pulled down to the ridge of his sunglasses, driving full blast into the morning sun which was a round red ball at the end of the road. Johnny Cash sang “I Walk the Line.” Nobody had spoken to me yet.
—You going to Cheyenne? I asked, voice slightly wavering.
—Yup, said the driver.
The cowboy next to me awoke with some drool coming out of the corner of his mouth which he wiped off with his shirt-sleeve. Some puke on his car window. He began singing or droning, “The last time I seen her and I ain't seen her since, she was jackin’ off a nigger through a barbed-wire fence, singa kiyiyippee,” etc. Over and over until the driver turned and said shut up and he went back to sleep. His boots were blue and heavily tooled with an American eagle near the top. A month's wages for boots.
We reached Cheyenne in less than an hour and I jumped out at the first stoplight and saluted with my bedroll. Jesus I might have been killed. Like the droll Yankees they watch movies of themselves and take it from there. After I saw The Wild One with Lee Marvin and Marlon Brando I rode a bike inadvertently through a cornfield. Enough for me. Stop this goddamn thing Oh please. I stuck with my James Dean red jacket and perpetual sneer, a ‘49 Ford with straight pipes and Hollywood mufflers that would do seventy-five in second.
I walked up the creek until it began to narrow passing a small beaver pond with its lodge of sticks jutting above the water line. Active, many small trees were cut and their branches stripped. Symmetrical cuts as if someone had wielded a miniature but very sharp ax. On the way back from the nest I would stalk the pond in hopes of sighting the beaver at work. I had seen them swimming before but had only watched them cut trees from a distance through binoculars. Alarming how fast they fell a tree. At my great-uncle Nelse's we had once eaten fried beaver tail, a great delicacy he claimed but Nelse was a functioning hermit and would eat nearly anything. Drink anything too. Some loathsome homemade raspberry wine. Maybe runs in the family. Flavor of a popular mouthwash.
I crossed the creek on some rocks, slipping and getting one boot wet, and sought higher ground in order to approach the nest from deep in the woods. I looked up—if the osprey were soaring I could be spotted from a distance of miles. Read somewhere that if our eyes were as large as a hawk's proportionately they would be big as bowling balls. And have three smooth holes in them. I suffered now from a pussy trance. They come without warning in everyone's technicolor memory—in the woods, the taiga, the Arctic, to fighter pilots and perhaps senators and presidents. Homosexuals no doubt are struck by cock trances. No relief in trees. A high school girl pumping at a movie, a drive-in movie with two six-packs of beer bought with false ID. Had expected the real thing but she had her period. A friend's class ring on her finger with tape wrapped around it and painted with nail polish so it would fit. That tape rubs me the wrong way darling. A change of hands and very awkward. She sips from a can and watches the movie. Hand knowingly speeds up to groans. Oh argh. Messy isn't it. She used my handkerchief without taking her eyes off the screen. A rerun later but no “head” as it was once called. I see this repeated over a nation with all those girls in pale blue summer dresses. Not any more perhaps. They all fuck like minks with the pill: revolving sexually. And are criticized as if fucking cheapens fucking. Wait until you can enjoy it in your own home with your own car in your own driveway on Elm or Maple or Oak Street.
I was forgetting to stalk in my reverie and reverence for glorious girl bum pie. Should sit and wait and listen now, not a quarter mile from the nest. Most of my sightings of animals have been accidental and caused by exhaustion—I sit down and doze or daydream until I catch my breath and often after an hour a deer or several of them appear. I saw a fox once this way playing with a mouse he had caught, tossing it into the air then pouncing on it again. And a bobcat approach a stream during a lunch break while trout fishing. Four sandwiches and as many swigs of brandy on a cool day only to awake and see this large cat gently licking water a hundred yards do
wnstream. I lit a cigarette and looked at my hands closely. They were blackened by pine gum and the dirt it accumulates and smelled of gin, the only form of alcohol I despised. Caused by drinking a fifth and washing my hands with pine-scented soap the next day, vomiting rather forcefully against my image in the mirror. If I order a vodka gimlet or a vodka martini and am brought gin instead I suffer temporary nausea. Very temporary though. Please return and make as directed quickly quickly.
If the osprey is there I'll salute God and report it to the authorities. Few of the eggs survive; DDT has somehow affected the reproductive cycle and the eggshells are too thin to withstand the weight of the parent. Might have looked into the fact before marketing. Maybe human children with thin skulls in the future shattered by an errant marshmallow or Ping-Pong ball. Preferably stockholders’ children but not possible. I put the cigarette carefully out in the damp humus beneath the leaves. A blue jay was shrieking above me but then I noticed it was a Canadian jay. They serve as an air raid siren in the woods. A few red squirrels scampered around having decided I was harmless. I never felt more harmless in my life. Not consciously killing myself with booze anyway. Wish I had some hash to make the stalk timeless. Or a moderate two peyote buttons to remember the veins in the osprey's eye or make it a pterodactyl. Even a little grass would help—I could float over the noisy twigs and leaves and brush and my stalk would be noiseless and perfect in my imagination anyway. But fuck drugs and alcohol. This brain expands by itself and sees enough ghosts. For years now I've found the earth haunted. Azoological beasts rage in untraceable configurations. They are called governments. Wounds made that never heal on every acre and covered with the scar tissue of our living presence. The argument at bedrock: I don't want to live on earth but I want to live.