She sat there smiling at him, answering his questions more or less, but not letting him get between her and the open door. “Are you serious?” she asked. “Or just crazy?”
Serious? he thought, brain spinning like a flywheel. Testicles connected to the ventricles; ventricles connected to the frontal lobes; frontal lobes connected to the eyeballs. And am I serious? I’m in love, that’s what I am, sick with love. And Henry should know, he’d fallen in love thirty-five times in the last twenty-five years. Ever since he came to understand the limitations of masturbation. “Crazy?” he said. “Here I’m yammering like an idiot and you just sit there smiling. Don’t let you get in a word edgeways. So why don’t you say something, don’t let me do all the talking, drink your beer like a good girl and give me a piece of your mind, such as it is, what the hell, I can take it, didn’t I make a professional study of detachment, disinterest, the powers of intellectual withdrawal from the mundane and the material? Of course I did. And by the way we still haven’t treated that wound of yours, let me see.” Getting up again, knocking over his chair, he felt about in the blackness of the cabinet above the sink. “—I think we’ve got some bandage compresses here, Band-Aids, a hemostat or two, yes, here we are, now let me see that calf again.”
Smiling, she turned her leg about, pulled up the hem of her skirt and exposed the injury. Henry went down on one knee and in the guttering light of the dying candle unpeeled a Band-Aid and applied it to the cut. Manfully he resisted the impulse to lick at her knee like a friendly dog. Heroically he fought back the urge to bury his face between her thighs, crawling onward and upward with his tongue for a foot.
“Thank you,” she said, withdrawing her limb.
“You’re welcome,” he said, lurching back into his chair. They stared at each other in sudden embarrassed silence. Now what? “Drink your beer,” he suggested. “It’s good cheap Blatz.”
“I hate Blatz.”
There was another short silence. She hates my Blatz, he thought.
Half sighing, she glanced at her wristwatch. “Well, I suppose I ought to go….”
“Oh no, no, wait a minute.” O stay, thou art so fair. Jumping up, he fumbled around in the fridge again. “Let me see, maybe there is a Coke in here, a Pepsi or something. You like tomato juice?”
“Only in the morning.” She stood up. “I’d better go. My mother will be having a fit. She wants to get off early tomorrow.”
He straightened, stared at her. Her words struck hard. She was looking out the open doorway at the spray of stars beyond the silhouette of a phallic pinnacle. “Claire?” She made no reply. “Look, Claire, I have an idea. Let’s—make love.”
That got her attention. “I’d better go.” She stepped toward the doorway. He grabbed her wrist. “Don’t,” she said, “please.” Ashamed, he released her. She stepped outside and stopped, looking up at him. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know I kind of led you on. I just wanted to—see what you were like.”
“I’ll marry you.”
“Oh God,” she laughed. “You are crazy. Anyway you’re already married. Aren’t you?”
“That’s neither here nor there.” He grinned at her, somewhat relieved, having opened the raincoat and exhibited himself frankly. At least he’d made his overture. “But I’m not. Not anymore.”
“Aren’t you serious about anything?” But she was smiling. “You’ll walk me back to camp, won’t you? I’m afraid of rattlesnakes and I don’t have a flashlight. Okay?” She gave him her prettiest smile. “You could come and see me in Denver sometime, maybe, if you want to. It’s only four hundred fifty miles away. That’s nothing for you rangers, right?”
He walked her back to the campground, arm around her waist. They stood face-to-face in the starlight before her mother’s tent. Is that you, dear? Yes Mother. It’s late. I’ll be right in, Mother. Whispering, she gave him a phone number. He gave her a kiss. One final hot clasp of hand and she was gone. Forever, probably.
Henry shuffled homeward through the sand, among the junipers and the prickly pear. Don’t let it bother you, he told himself. Girls are like buses; miss one, another will come along in five minutes. And then despised himself for entertaining so cheap and false and vulgar a thought. Not another like her, you fool.
His heart ached, his balls ached, his head ached. Back in the trailer he undressed, masturbated, popped three aspirins, drank a deep slug of Jim Beam and lay down naked on his bunk. Goodnight, Claire, I’ll get you in my dreams. But could not sleep. He got up, pulled on socks and a pair of boots, nothing else, and went for a long nude walk into the desert, sucking on another can of Blatz.
He walked and he walked. He watched the Big Dipper swing past midnight. He saw Cassiopeia and Taurus the Bull and the Pleiades and the vast sprawl of Scorpio across the southern horizon. A shower of meteors punched holes through the ozone umbrella. He heard a rattlesnake wagging its tail, like a friendly dog, as he walked past its hiding place under a ledge. Heard a great horned owl call his name: fool…fool…fool…. He thought of Claire, Miss Claire Mellon—Honeydew!—and his heart rose and swelled like an unfolding hydrangea. My God I’m in love again.
Not again. Yes, again. The time bomb of romance had been planted and was ticking away. He knew the power of the uncompleted act. She’d be thinking of him. It might take a week, a month, a year, but sooner or later, probably later, she’d be writing to him, care of the National Park Service, Greasepit, Utah. Henry knew, he allowed no doubts and he was right.
He was always right. Only his means were wrong. Always wrong. But if the end don’t justify the means, what can?
17
Heart of the Heart
I
Eastward, homeward, deep in the heart of Kansas, downhill most all the way.
The old Dodge chugs along like a stout but foundered Belgian plow horse, hitting on five maybe six out of eight. Not bad. Not good. We might be going up hills in reverse by the time we get to eastern Kentucky. My dog’s not worried. Solstice she stares straight ahead, gaunt face and hollow eyes solemn, serious but unafraid. Looking death, old debts, billboards and nothingness straight in the eye, steadfast, unblinking. Heart beating within that rack of rib beneath that lusterless coat of hide and hair. Good dog, brave dog, braver than me.
Morning sun in our eyes. Dodge City lies ahead beyond those towers of grain, beneath that yellow eastern haze. Then Kinsley and Larned and Pawnee Rock. Then Great Bend on the bend of the Arkansas River.
Wind in my hair, dust on my sun goggles. Like the dog I ponder the question of annihilation. So easy to grasp the extinction of others, so hard to apply that theorem to oneself. Before I was conceived I was nothing. An eternity of nothing reaching back into nothing forever. Then a glimpse of light, a taste of consciousness, a heart-wrenching spasm of fear and a return to absolute nothing. Out of nothing we come, into nothing we go. The bird that flies from the night into the lighted banquet hall, circles twice around the blazing candles and then flies out—out of the light and back to the darkness. The world is a horrible place, said Bertrand Russell in an interview. After death, said Schopenhauer on the “Today Show,” you will be nothing—and you will be everything. He was interrupted by a station break and four commercials and never had a chance to explain the difference.
Consider the Christian alternative. Life after death in a world beyond time, beyond space. Where there is no time there can be no change, no motion or movement. No space implies no dimension. And yet we would be conscious—of what? Of God, they say, of His Love. We shall bask forever in the Love of God. (Forever is a long time.) Like staring at the sun with hands bound, head in a vise, your eyelids taped open—but in this case without even the hope of blindness or the salvation of shrieking insanity.
Suppose what survives bodily death is the disembodied soul—an ethereal consciousness lacking flesh, limbs, sense organs. Now imagine a living brain removed by clever surgeons from its familiar housing in the skull. Imagine this living, functioning, conscious brain afl
oat in a tray of sustaining liquids, racked among others in a laboratory incubator, thought flashing through the billions of neural synapses like sheet lightning in a gray cloudbank—mind aware of itself—imagine this brain without connection to eyes, ears, nose, tongue, touch, but awake and thinking, reworking over and over again its finite storage batteries of memory—for memory is all it has. Isolated, cut off from contact with any world but its internal self, this blind brain this floating bodiless consciousness would have no present, no future, and nothing to hope for but a lucky accident: a power failure, a clumsy move by a lab assistant that dashes the containing tray to the floor, the explosion of an overcharged electrode inserted deep in the cerebrum. But even this dim hope could be based on nothing but surmise; for the detached and living brain would have no means, no way whatsoever, to investigate and determine the nature of its horrifying predicament. What nightmares then might come half so hideous as its actual and immediate and inescapable situation?
The man-made world is a horrible place. Most of it. But not a tithe so horrible as the existence imagined for us beyond the grave. Given such conjectures, old-fashioned death—the decomposition of the body and the obliteration of consciousness—begins to assume a comforting aspect. A deep sleep in cool darkness among the cold stones, the grains of soil, the earthworms, the probing tendrils of the roots of trees. Don’t sound so bad. But never to awake? Never? Even so—better that than the Hell of Christian Heaven, the torture chamber of spiritualist immortality. Picture a culture in which suicide is not only forbidden but effectively, scientifically prevented—and then we recognize the reassuring options of the anarchic slum we inhabit. Ours may be a horrible world; it is not the most horrible of all possible worlds. Cheerful thought: at once I feel much better.
Entering Dodge. Near the outskirts we pass through a few acres of natural unplowed unimproved prairie, one remnant of that sea of grass which formerly stretched from the Mississippi to the base of the Rocky Mountains. The open range. Where the buffalo roamed, where the deer and the antelope played for twenty thousand years. And then up from Texas came the mass herds of stinking shambling fly-specked dung-smeared bawling bellowing bulge-eyed cattle. Followed by cowboys, beef ranchers, barbed wire, cross fencing, locked gates, private property, whores, bores and real-estate developers.
Dodge City still looks more western than eastern but not by much. Where the East begins. Transition zone. Sign for NU OLD STUFF—an antique store. Another offers KANSAS OXYGEN (welding supplies). WAREHOUSE CARPET SALE. GAS & GO—GAS, BEER, DIESEL, GAMES! COOPER MUFFLER SERVICE. GOFF MOTORS LIKE NEW USED CARS. GOODWILL PRE-OWNED CARS. DILLON’S DOUBLE COUPON FOOD MARKET. BOB’S CAFÉ—HOME COOKED MEALS. MALCO GAS, REG 1.09. RIVER MOTEL—on the banks of the trickling Arkansas River. More gigantic grain elevators. The road to Boot Hill.
We leave the plastic highway strip and enter old town, downtown, the decayed and dying core of Dodge City. Two-and three-story buildings of red brick with square false fronts. An empty department store For Rent, Sale or Lease. Pawnshops full of unredeemed and burgled goods. The Santa Fe depot—locked and boarded up. A century-old hotel now a flophouse where abandoned cowpunchers sit staring at a TV set in the lobby, waiting for their Old Age Survivor’s Insurance checks. Departing historic Front Street, three blocks long, we return to 1980, rumbling on rough asphalt past huge tractor and farm implement emporia, through another gauntlet of Big Boy, A&W, Kentucky Fried, Dairy Queen, Whiting Bros gas stations, Honest John used-car lots and Crazy Bill truck stops and into the suburbs—a half-mile-long feedlot in which imprisoned Herefords, Charolais and black Angus beefburgers, on the hoof and more or less alive, standing room only, mill about under the sun on a carpet of mud, urine and manure. Past the Liquid Carbonics Corporation—fertilizer. Androgynous ammonia. Carbon dioxide. Fertilizer tanks stand parked in rows of four-wheel rubber-tire caissons. This is not farm country but an agricultural factory where not only the soil, air and water but living animals themselves, kine and swine, mammals like us, mothers with emotions similar to ours—love, lust, fear—are treated as raw raw-material for packaged meats. Enough to make a man a bloody vegetarian if he lets his mind dwell on it. Best not to dwell on it. Think of death not life next time you stuff your chops with veal, sirloin, ham, bratwurst…. I tremble for us Christians if there is a Christian god.
Me and my dog. We think this way sometimes.
I pet her bony shoulder. She twitches her tail. I twist the top from a jug of Big Mouth beer and sluice the stumps of my tonsils. I check the view in the rearview mirror, empty the bottle and let it hang for a moment from one finger on the outside of the door. Dispose of with care. It dangles in the cool wind, it whistles, carefully it falls, a splash of green glass brightens the pavement.
Time to clear out of Dodge.
Onward onward into the wind and the sun and Kinsley, Kansas—midpoint USA. Halfway, says a billboard, between New York and San Francisco. New York: 1,561 miles. San Francisco: 1,561 miles. We’re getting there. Getting where? There. Somewhere.
I pause at the city park to give the dog a roll in the grass and a drink of water from her bowl. She laps it up with a tongue the color of salmon eggs, an unwholesome pallid pink. I give her another pill in a bite-size ball of longhorn cheese. She won’t take the pill straight and probably has good reason.
I lift hood of truck, pull dipstick from crankcase. A quart low already. I punch two holes with a screwdriver in the top of a can of Yellow Front’s 40-weight nondetergent economy brand (“For Motorists With Oil Consumption Problems”) and pour contents into thirsty filler pipe. The oil gurgles out of sight, the engine’s hot head smokes and gasps and sighs, the radiator drips a few drops of green diluted coolant on the gravel. Check fanbelt: taut but not tight. Jiggle clamps on battery terminals: corroded but firm. Inspect fuel filter: looks clear. Screw down air filter a couple of turns. Reset distributor cap, pull and resnap cable to sparkplug heads, four on each side. Nothing wrong with this old rig—318 cubic inches of failing power—that a simple ring-and-piston job wouldn’t help. Will could rebuild this motor in two or three working days. All I got to do is get it to Stump Crick for the overhaul before it burns out, blows up, seizes tight or throws a rod.
A chilly west wind boosts us on. Under a hazy yellow sky we steam through Garfield, Larned and Pawnee Rock, outposts on the original Santa Fe Trail. Flat plains lie on either side, relieved only by the continuous growth of alder and cottonwood that marks the course of the Arkansas River, if it is a river anymore. There by Pawnee Rock, sole natural landmark in this segment of the long route west, the Indians dallied between buffalo hunts, jerking meat (etc.), and sallied forth from time to time to harass travelers on the Trail. A danger point on the central plain. Pike, Doniphan, Webb and Gregg mention this place in their journals. Kit Carson, in 1826, made a bid for fame here, shooting his own mule while standing guard for a wagon caravan. He was a green scout in those days, only seventeen years old. He mistook the mule, he explained, for two Pawnees in mufti.
Not much left of Pawnee Rock today. Most of it removed by local road builders. In fact from the highway you can’t even see it. So much for historic monuments.
Approaching Great Bend. Gas and oil territory. Black iron pumps rise and bob at scattered gas wells in the fields. I pass a shop called Mountain Iron & Supply. Mountain—the word, the simple easy bisyllabic denotative, sends a little pang of nostalgia through my central nervous system: homesick—I am sick for home.
Wherever whatever that may be.
Great Bend Drive-In Movie Theater: an imposing edifice of six Corinthian columns with bell-shaped capitals feigning support of a towering façade of painted aluminum. Black letters on the white marquee announce the current attraction: FOR SALE 12 ACRES. Death of another passion pit. No more necking, no more heavy petting in the cockpit of Dad’s LTD.
Again, as in Dodge City, we pass through the nineteenth-century heart of town, vivid with the beauty of mellow brick, serene with the dignity of elm trees and broa
d shaded sidewalks. But the store-fronts are vacant, the drug stores closed, their tile floors and soda fountains under dust. I pass the county courthouse and a grassy park with iron-wheeled artillery piece, its trails down and spread among dandelions, violets, buttercups. Two old men in pearl gray Stetsons sit on a green iron bench. One whittles on a stick of wood. The other coughs and spits. A mottled mutt with dragging ears slinks behind them. The clock on the courthouse dome speculates on the time of day and guesses wrong—four hours slow or eight hours fast and ninety years behind.
The compass on my dashboard trembles, does a forty-five-degree turn as we leave Great Bend and head due east for Ellinwood, Little River, Strong City, Emporia, Homewood, LeLoup, Gardner, Lenexa and Kansas City.
Temp 180°. Oil pressure 30 psi. Tach 1900 rpm. Ammeter neutral. Fuel one-half. Speedometer 65 mph. Odometer (1) 98944.6. Altimeter 1800’. Cab temp 75°. Compass E. Stewart-Warner gauges, all too honest.
Reaching out, I stroke old dying Sollie. Thinking back, I fondle memories growing always younger….
18
1940-70:
The Lost Years
Me and those girls, those girls….
There was Candy, sweet as her name. She loved to make love in a tent. There’s something extra sexy about a tent, she explained. A tent makes me feel like a harem girl, hot for the camel’s hump. She draped my red bandana over the lamp. Puts the right glow on naked bods, she said, makes them look warm and fruity and full of fun.
Les girls….
Joy Galore (as she called herself) writhing like a python beyond the footlights, the crazed cocaine glitter in her seagreen eyes. She stared at herself with love, with adoration, with envy, in the mirror behind the bottles of the backbar. The nipples of her splendid breasts covered with little pink pasties. Stick ’em on peel ’em off, she said, that’s the law. She wore a black G-string beneath a fringed miniskirt, a lacy black garter around one thigh, a bracelet high on one arm and a silver chain around each ankle. What else? Yes, a thimble-size zircon set in the navel of her plump blond belly. And a tattooed butterfly on her rump. Her skin was the color of clover-bloom honey and so soft to the touch you could scarcely feel it, so kissed, caressed and lufa-rubbed smooth it seemed to lack the quality of friction; his fingers glided over and upon it like oil upon butter, meeting no resistance until socketed deep in the succulent quivering core of her apex. I want it all, she said, all of it now and I don’t mean that I mean this. She had no talent for patience. He loved her madly urgently desperately, Henry did, every Friday night for hours, until the day she thundered off to California on the buddyseat of a Harley Hog, arms wrapped around the waist of a bisexual thug in black horsehide, her sweet knees clasping his flanks. She departed Henry with four hundred of his dollars in her purse but left him for keepsake a flimsy bit of black nylon and a note, a billet-doux, a sweet letter saying