The Fool's Progress

  He lived alone in various cities after the women left (slamming doors) and walked the streets by himself and sat at tables by the window in underclass cafés, drinking hot thin black coffee out of thick stained mugs. He walked half the length of Manhattan, from Ninety-second Street to the Battery, seven times. He walked from the edge of Albuquerque over a ten-mile stretch of mesa, through prickly pear and staghorn cholla, and up to the crest of the Sandia Mountains, once. He walked twice across the Cabeza Prieta Desert of Arizona, along the Mexican border, 120 miles of gravel, sand, volcanic cinder, with forty pounds of food, water and a gun in the pack on his back. He descended into the Grand Canyon of the Colorado by one trail, five thousand feet down, and emerged by another, six thousand feet up, five weeks later.

  The flowing river. He lived for three seasons in a plywood housetrailer in a hoodoo land of voodoo stone—pillars, pinnacles, arches, windows, balanced rocks, eighty-foot phallic erections—patrolled the trails by foot, the dirt roads by pickup truck, and at evening cooked his supper over an open fire outside the trailer, watching the creeping lights of automobiles on the paved highway twenty miles beyond his private sea of dunes. He lived in one room in a crumbling adobe fort on a desert plateau where the Rio Grande makes its big bend into Chihuahua and Coahuila. Behind him stood the Chisos Mountains like the crenellated ramparts one mile high of an abandoned, forgotten city. In the corral beside his adobe hut he kept two saddlehorses, each with the U.S. brand on its left hip. He worked for a winter in the Everglades, patrolling at night the empty highway between Long Pine Key and Flamingo, herding alligators out of the restrooms at the Park Visitor Center, staking out poachers at the side of snake-infested mosquito-clouded sloughs. He lived and worked for an eight-month season in Death Valley, driving a school bus by day and at night still-hunting girls in the bar of the Furnace Creek Inn. He worked as a backcountry ranger in the Gila Wilderness, Glacier Park, the Superstition Wilderness, Canyonlands Park, and again in the mile-deep trench below the Funeral Range and the Panamint Mountains—Death Valley.

  Not always alone. The girls came, the women left, old friends arrived for a visit and stayed for a week, two weeks, three. But half the time he lived by himself in the luxury of his aloneness, in the rich tragic romance of solitude. Rising in the morning before the sun he found himself again at one with nobody but himself. Ate lunch in total silence in a clearing in the cactus forest, in the aspen forest, in a formation of mudstone hobgoblins. Walked alone at evening down a sandy road toward a flamboyant sunset he never reached, turned and returned through the dark waving a long stick across his path to brush the rattlesnakes aside. Played cowboy tunes and hillbilly folk songs on his flute from the catwalk of a fire tower: the forest repeated each clear-cut phrase. Fed the chipmunks for entertainment. Trained the docile mule deer to lick at his salt block under a board platform in a sycamore tree. Sat by the fire in twenty different cast-iron stoves on rainy days, on snowy mornings, through blizzard afternoons, through howling storms at night, to read the complete (or incomplete) works of B. Traven, Jack London, Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, Leo Tolstoy, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, Henry Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Arthur Rimbaud, Ferdinand Céline, Robert Burns, Manuel Azuela, Knut Hamsun, Arthur Schopenhauer, Henri Bergson, Lewis Mumford, Michel de Montaigne, Will Shakespeare and Bertolt Brecht, Titus Lucretius and J.-P. Sartre, struggled through the suffocating entrails of James, Dante, Sophocles, Plato, Melville, Hardy, Dostoyevsky and others, many others, too many others, and what did all that laborious reading gain him?

  Couldn’t say.

  He remembered best not the development of character or the unraveling of plot or the structure of an argument—philosophy is an art form, not a science—but simply the quality of the author’s mind. That part remained and by that standard alone he finally judged his author and either threw the book aside or read it through and searched out more by the same writer.

  And that drive also, the mania to know and understand, it too waned somewhat with the passing of years, until he found himself again alone, far out on the rim of some awful desolation of forest or desert with a red sun descending in a blood-soaked carnage of clouds toward the apocalypse of night, jags of lightning overhead, thunder crashing, nothing in his hands but a wedge-shaped maul and a chunk of stovewood set upright on a stump waiting for the splitting blow. Raising his weapon high, he stared at the flames in the west, remembered the first or last woman he had won and lost, thought of the corpus mysticum he would never embrace, the home by the river he could not find, and howled—howled at the sky:

  You up there—God.

  This is me, Henry.

  Henry Holyoak Fucking Lightcap the First.

  And I challenge you, oh God—

  J’appelle de ta rigueur—

  Speak to me or strike me dead!

  He waited. (No clear reply.) You die then! he bellowed, and swung from high above his shoulders—while thunder rumbled—slashing down with all his strength, cleaving the aspen billet in two with a single mighty blow, and sank the head of the maul so deep in the green fir stump he had to pry it loose next day with a log chain and a high-lift truck jack.

  He hugged his solitude to his heart, regretting (much later) not one hour of the pain and loneliness or the long days dreamed away in a stupor of meditation. He could not imagine a single moment he would choose to alter, for better or worse, and when the long cycle came round again—as Nietzsche and Heraclitus and hosts of squatting Hindus said it must—he was prepared to repeat each detail every nuance all the cheapest gags of the entire performance verbatim.

  Wearisome prospect. But it was his. But was it true?

  On that river, lonesome river, mudbrown golden western river searching for its snotgreen foamcapped western sea.

  Thinking: Claire Claire Claire my Honeydew, if I don’t find thee again I will surely die….

  He did not die. He never went back to Turkey Creek Canyon, he never again worked for the wildlife sanctuary, but he did not die. Not yet. Men die, worms eat them, but not for love. He found instead, walking toward him with her father, through the twilight of a Tucson Arizona evening, another girl too young fair slim and beautiful for so weak and foolish a rogue as Henry H. Lightcap—

  Dad, she said, as they passed him by with only a glance, let’s get out of here.

  Sure, Elaine, the father said, why not?

  Street fairs attract so many—you know—nothing but bums.

  True, the father said. Bums and bandits.

  21

  To the Mississippi

  Routine and repetition is the secret of survival. I wake, I reclose my eyes—must I face reality again so soon?—and attempt to sleep, to dream, for another five minutes more. But I cannot, the light is breaking through the trees, the dog is mumbling at my feet, the noise of early motor traffic comes toward me from the highway two miles north.

  Routine: arise, piss, pull on pants—always the left leg first, then the right. If I attempt even as an experiment to reverse that sequence I find my legs, arms, nerves and thoughts getting hopelessly muddled. Button or zip fly, buckle belt, stuff in shirttail. Feed and water dog. Light up camp stove, place pot of water on to boil, make cup of tea. Dunk in a few doughnuts, cookies, Fig Newtons, whatever available. Take bamboo stick or agave staff or blackthorn shillelagh and go for a little walk, no more than a couple of miles, return and fry the bacon, galvanize the eggs, prepare my grease fix for the day. No wonder my stomach feels so queer. No wonder that gnawing nagging agenbiting crab deep in my guts won’t go away. The swine. The son of a whore. The sneaking puke-faced stalk-eyed side-scuttling slime-covered worm-hearted spawn of a cast-off two-bit three-legged hairless Mexican dumpster-diving dog. And so on.

  On to Hannibal, by christ. We steam out from swamp and woods, me and my Dodge and my worthless mongrel, and hit the asphalt trail again. Past the Pisgah Baptist Church—DO WE HAVE GOOD NEWS FOR YOU!—and into fields of glowing iridescent windswept April grass where lonesome nags, forgotten by their
masters, stand hock-deep in Heaven and stare with twitching ears, dark winsome eyes, at a man and a dog rolling by in a gray plus rust-colored 1962 Dodge Carryall truck. Empty canvas waterbag flapping on the grille. Duct tape peeling from the parking-light frames. Oil smoke venting from the exhaust connections and a trail of water dribbling from the dangling tailpipe. Muffler split and braying like a jackass.

  We follow the Missouri River as far as a town called Brunswick. There the river turns southeast toward St. Louis; we head on east and east northeast toward Keytesville, Huntsville, Paris, Monroe City, Wither’s Mill and—Hannibal.

  Spring advances to meet me: the trees leafed out, the dandelions set to seed, the smell of damp raw earth from plowed fields, the distant puttering noise of tractors when I stop beside the road to take a leak, to make a peanut butter sandwich, to pick a sprig of dogwood and some wild irises for the water-filled beer bottle at rest in my dashboard beer-bottle holder. I open a fresh bottle of Budweiser, ignoring the twitch of anguish in my pancreatic gland, drink hearty and drive on.

  Solstice the dog stares straight ahead, watching the road while I watch the passage of rural Missouri. She looks bad, bleary-eyed and melancholy. I know she’s clear of ticks but she could have worms. Will have to make inspection next time she takes a shit. Unpleasant duty but I’d rather look at hers than mine.

  We roll through the towns, the franchise strips, the Sonic Happy Eating and Radio Shacks and Pizza Huts and Serve-Ur-Self Gas and Good Will Pre-Used Cars and the candidly usurious glass-boxy banks with no pretense at anything but money. As usual the most stately and dignified house in town has become a “Funeral Home.” Smells of formaldehyde and greasepaint follow us down the red brick street. Everything that’s beautiful decays from neglect; the cheap false synthetic transitory structures inspired by greed spread along the highways like mustard weed, like poison ivy, like the creeping kudzu vine. The vampires of real estate, the leeches of finance, the tapeworms of profit, have fastened themselves to the body of my nation like a host from Hell. No wonder the land, the towns and villages, the old homes and farms and so many of the people wear that worn-out used-up blood-sucked bled-white look. Ill fares the land. The aliens are here. The body snatchers have arrived.

  We reach Hannibal in midafternoon. Once through the gauntlet of commerce that leads to the original town, as everywhere else, I find myself within the familiar necrosis of the center. I park my truck on the waterfront by a gaudily painted steamboat with fake stern wheel—the Mark Twain of course—and take a schooner of draft Bud at the nearby B & G Bar. Not a tourist joint: this dark damp dingy dump reeks of piss and beer, tobacco smoke and sweat and rotting duckboards behind the bar. A row of old men in khaki work clothes straddle wooden stools, peering and jabbering at one another from beneath the bills of St. Louis Cardinal baseball caps. Two fat women in holey sweaters, beer-stained dresses, stockings rolled to varicose ankles, screech at one another by the shuffleboard table. Unemployed hoodlums in black T-shirts lurk in the back room shooting pool. The TV set winks and blinks above the far end of the bar: nobody watches the thing and its plaintive bleats sink beneath the general clamor. From an opposite and apposite corner booms the roar of a vibrant jukebox—Merle Haggard singing “Jailhouse Blues.” Good man, Haggard. Good song, that “Jailhouse Blues.” Like they say in Muleshoe, Texas, there’s only two kinds of music—country and late Bartók.

  A good bar, the B & G. A Henry Lightcap kind of bar. Buzzing finely, chromatically from three more brimming schooners, I wander the streets for a while, looking into the windows of the Becky Thatcher Bookstore and contributing my dollar for a visit to the Sam Clemens Museum. Here I see the expected first editions, the photographs, Sam’s cap and gown from Oxford, the Norman Rockwell paintings of top scenes from the stories, the author’s riverboat pilot’s certificate, the towering “Orchestrelle” machine. I drop my quarter in the slot and set off a jerky medley of 1890s dance hall tunes. But somehow I find no shade of the great old man himself in this place. Not in this room, not in this building, not in this town.

  I leave and walk the streets till evening, treat myself to a catfish supper at the Missouri Territory Restaurant, a grand echoing hall of stone that was formerly Hannibal’s main post office. The meal is good, the atmosphere baronial—but where are the people?

  I walk back to the waterfront, feed my dog, take her for a short walk with a rope for leash. Darkness settles in, the cool night of April, the endless twilight of the humid lands. We return to truck and drive south, out of town and under the stony bluffs that line the river on the west. Tom Sawyer’s cave is up in there but I haven’t the heart to search for it this evening. I’m now on the Great River Road and the compulsive pull of homeward suction keeps me bound to the asphalt for another twenty, thirty miles. Finally we pull off the highway onto the kind of narrow winding dirt road that looks good to me, friendly, comfortable, hospitable, leading into dark woods and the smell of leaves and mud, the music of tree frogs, mosquitoes, screech owls, the feel of rain on the air. My sense of safety and relative well-being is always strengthened by the sight of forest, hills, rocky dells, valleys, undammed and meandering watercourses.

  A place for rest, for sleep….

  Morning comes, once again. One more time at least. We perform our ritual, the dog and I, and carry on through the fogs on the riverbank and into the villages of Calumet, Elsberry, Foley and Winfield. At Winfield I turn east and wait near Lock & Dam #25 for the ferryboat across the Mississippi to the state and condition of Illinois. From there to New Harmony and Louisville. Kentucky today! West Virginia tomorrow! Rest and peace, simplicity and order thereafter. Such is the master plan.

  The ferry comes, I drive aboard. No other vehicle appears. The ferryman in his little off deck cabin pulls the throttle and the ferry churns toward the shore of Illinois, three hundred yards away. A pretty red-haired girl, the assistant ferryman, comes to me and takes my two-dollar fare. I take her picture with my Kodak Instamatic and ask her why she’s not in school today. Playing hooky? She has freckles, green eyes, bountiful breasts, small waist, a round compact heart-shaped bottom like an inverted valentine. Yes, my type.

  “I’m twenty years old,” she says. “Ain’t gotta go to school no more.”

  “What’s your name?” Always was my type.

  “Anna-May McElroy. What’s yourn?” From her lovely lips the word comes forth as “urine.”

  “My name is Henry Lightcap and I’m in love.” Always will be. “Do you like this job?”

  “It’s boring. All we do all summer is go back and cross and back and cross. Who y’all in love with?”

  “I’m in love with you.” Why do my girlfriends all look alike? Because they all look like the type I like.

  She eyes me briefly. “You need a shave.”

  “Always do. Come with me. Come with me and be my love.”

  She smiles and looks across the golden sun-glinting waters of the great river. The wooded banks of Illinois float toward us. “My gee,” she says, “if you only knowed, mister, how often you men say that. Seems like ever day I hear them say that.”

  “I believe it, honey. You look ’em over and you make your choice when you feel like it. Don’t let nobody like me sweet-talk somebody like you.”

  The landing board of the ferry grates onto the graveled ramp. The girl unlinks the chain, smiling at me but thinking of somebody else and who can blame her. “I’ll send you a picture,” I say as I climb in my truck. “Winfield, Missouri, right? Lock and Dam Number Twenty-five?” I drive away into the woods and cornfields.

  Will I ever see Anna-May again? No. Will anyone ever see Anna-May again? Not me. Will she ever again exist? Who knows. These are the questions that drift across my mind as I bear south and east for Alton, Granite City, East St. Louis. The memory of sweet flame-haired Anna-May will haunt me forever for at least a day or two. Roused a flicker of the old Lightcap there. I might be old I might be sick but I ain’t dead. Not yet I reckon.

  We paus
e by a grove of trees to contemplate pigs in a pasture, robins in the grass, a redheaded woodpecker drumming on a hollow snag. Crows, blackbirds, cardinals busy in the foreground. The pigs are black-and-white Berkshires, the kind I raised and loved when I was a boy. Inside a board fence weathered to silver-gray, they romp like happy kids, rooting up the clover, snuffling for acorns under the red oaks, cheerful clever little beasts. Never knew a pig as stupid as a sheep, as goofy as a horse, as mean as a dog. Or as greedy as a man. Furthermore they’re good to eat.

  Bunch of milk cows yonder. Holsteins—they look strangely clean, long-legged and elegant after my years of seeing nothing but the squat stumbling shit-smeared Hereford beef cattle of the West. A rooster crows near the barn. Two-story white farmhouse nearby, shaded by maple trees. Lilacs blooming at the door. A black cat scampers from barn to house, pursued halfway by the rooster. Bees murmur in the flowering dogwood. Poison ivy sweats in the ditch. The pang of April pierces my heart. I think of the mourning dove that calls from the forest on the side of Noisy Mountain, across the valley from Stump Crick, when the sun begins to burn away the mists of daybreak.

  We cross the Illinois River on another ferry—no Anna-May here—and bear southeast past the Mark Twain National Wildlife Refuge (a crane rises up and sinks down beyond the screen of trees) and the Père Marquette State Park. I stop in the little town of Grafton for coffee and a doughnut. The café is full of cigarette smoke, shouts from the kitchen, the soft talk and gentle laughter of a dozen men in bib overalls and visored caps fueling up for the day’s work, packing down scrambled eggs, hashbrown potatoes, grits and biscuits and redeye gravy, pink ham and red bacon and brown sausage. Getting ready for a day in the mill, they gulp down the hot black coffee, slap backs, roughhouse around. A huge man over six feet tall and 250 pounds heavy sits in the center of the group, red-faced, smiling. Naturally everybody calls him Tiny. An old skinny gent with gappy grin gets up to leave, pushes Tiny’s cap down over his face, squeezes his shoulder and lurches to the cash register.