Mishkin-Miller? She’s married another goy?
“Collect call,” the operator says, “for Myra Mishkin from—” The operator hesitates.
“Yes yes,” says Myra, “collect from whom please?”
“—collect from Robert Redford will you accept?”
“Not him again.”
“Will you accept?”
“Okay, put him on. I accept. Hello, Bob.”
“Hello, Myra.”
“Where are you this time, Henry?”
“I’m in Ezel Kentucky bound for Stump Crick West Virginia.”
“Sounds like the place for you.”
“Who’s this Miller interloper? I thought your name was Mishkin hyphen Weasel or something like that. What happened to poor old Weasel?”
“The name was Weisel, you shithead. We made it final two years ago. On friendly terms. I see him now and then. I’m Mrs. Mishkin hyphen Miller now.”
“You didn’t marry another goy?”
“Miller is a fine old Jewish name.”
“Of course.”
“You WASPs are on the way out, Henry. An idea whose time was always premature. What do you want?”
“How are you, Myra?”
“I thought you’d never ask. I’m fine. I’m having a one-woman show at the Y.M.H.A. this fall. Had my face lifted last fall. Dyed my hair purple. How’s your liver?”
“How’s your father? How’s Sam?”
“Dad’s back in the hospital again. As if you ever gave a damn. The doctors give him one more month. And Sam’s my handsome darling. What do you want? I have work to do.”
“Just wanted to say hello, Myra.”
“So?”
“Hello and goodbye. Ave atque vale, as they say.”
“Such melodrama. And that’s all? Good.”
“Still love you, Myra, you know. Sort of. In my peculiar twisted fashion.”
“Fuck you.”
“Should I interpret that as a cry for help?”
“You never helped anybody, Henry. You never loved anybody but yourself. I pity you and I hope you end up in an oxygen tent like my father, because maybe then you’d become a human being. Goodbye, Henry.”
“Goodbye, Myra.”
I wait for her to hang up her phone. But she doesn’t. I hear her breathing—or maybe sobbing—five hundred miles away (by airline) on the Upper West Side of Manhattan Island. Forgot to ask about her mother—Leah—that poor crushed subterranean wraith. I smell chicken soup. Matzoh balls. Sewer gas. The story of her life. A frightening thought that probably half the American population has never seen sunlight on a pasture stream, never heard a rooster crow, never smelled the tang of skunk on an autumn night at the edge of the big dark woods. Not even on the Tee Vee.
“Christ, Myra….” She fails to reply. “Leave that guy. Take his money, meet me in Pittsburgh, we’ll fly to L.A., Fiji, Sydney, Perth, sit on the beach at the western end of the civilized world and watch the sun go down over Africa. Where it all began.” No answer. “What do you say, kid?”
“It’s too late, Henry.”
“It’s never too late.”
“It’s too late. You’ll understand someday. Goodbye.” She hangs up.
The storekeeper stares at me from behind his meat display case. He has a bald head like Brother Will and a red skinny turkey neck like my father would have developed if he’d only been quick enough to dodge that last widow-maker. I buy a pound of longhorn cheese and a box of soda crackers—no beer in sight, this is a dry county in the heart of Baptist country. Back to the Babble land. There’s a big picture of the Reverend Jerry Falwell smiling at me from above the canned goods. The old man hands over my change.
“Got any beer?” I ask him.
He looks at the cap on my head. My cap says NRA. With eagle and crossed long rifles. His cap says Westmoreland Coal Co. No illustrations. He says, “How come you got Arizona plates on your truck?”
“That’s where I’m from.”
“Where you headed?”
“Shawnee West Virginia.”
“Never heard of it.”
“Nobody there ever heard of Ezel Kentucky.”
He looks me over once more, glances out the front window and says, “What kind you want?”
“Six bottles of Iron City Pilsener.”
He opens a door to his rear and returns with a six-pack of Old Milwaukee in cans. A lager, so-called, and one of America’s worst beers. Old Milkweed. That’s all he has. I pay and leave.
I know I shouldn’t drink this stuff anymore but we’re approaching Big Sandy River and the West Virginia line, seventy miles away, and I aim to force myself into a celebratory mood. And I mean force. If it won’t come voluntarily then I’ll force it. Anything for a laugh, as the trapeze artist said when he dropped his partner.
Opening the first can, I enter the village of Mize. Any relation to Johnny Mize, I wonder, one-time first baseman for the New York Giants? The second can brings me to Grassy Creek and Index, the third to Elkfork, Crockett, Moon and Relief. The road becomes ever more narrow, winding, crude, as we snake upward deeper into the hills. The road has no shoulder. The creek below is sulfur yellow. The hillsides left and right are scarred with the lifeless trenches of unreclaimed strip mines.
Two cans left. I don’t feel so good. We chug through Redbush, Flat Gap, Keaton and Martha, tailpipe smoking. The people around here have a sullen, peaked appearance. They live in frame shanties covered with rust-brown asphalt shingles. Each little hovel has its pile of coal in the backyard, an overturned automobile in the frontyard and a nest of yellow curs and/or tick-ridden hounds under the front porch. That porch wherefrom the master of the house, at night, before retiring, discharges upon dust and dogs below a golden arching stream—often tinged with blood—from a coal miner’s bladder, a truck driver’s kidneys.
I open the fifth can and gear down into low, grinding up a grotesquely steep hill toward the blue of evening. A huge coal truck, exhaust pipes smoking, looms against the sky, topping the summit, and rumbles down the grade toward me. I pull to the right as far as I can, brushing the branches of the trees. Not far enough or else I’ve miscalculated for the coal truck, rushing past, clips my left-hand rearview mirror, knocks it loose. I pull to the top of the hill and park across a dirt side road. My mirror dangles by one broken strut. The coal truck vanishes below, snorting into Martha, diesel smoke spreading above the green. I finish off the fifth can of beer, then double up, clutching my stomach. I’ve got to vomit, defecate, both at once. I stagger into the elderberry bushes, tramping over the customary carpet of crumpled tin, broken glass, rotten plastic, and kneel with my head against the trunk of a tree. A gush of pink and green fluids pours from my throat, out my mouth and nostrils—Christ I must be dying already—and leaves me gasping for breath, eyes stinging with tears. And then the other end demands attention. Barely in time I lower my pants as an explosive outburst shakes my bowels. Sweat pours down my face. When the eruption seems completed I clean myself as best I can with handfuls of moss from the base of the tree, with a damp and soggy swatch of yellow newspaper from the garbage nearby. Compelled by habit I glance at the paper before putting it to my rear: some old-time movie actor, it appears, has been exhumed from Forest Lawn—rouged cheeks, redyed pomaded hair, Lucite teeth, duct-taped jaws, formaldehyde and all—brought back from the living dead—to run for national office of some kind. The caption blurs before my eyes, the paper disappears, I find myself vomiting again.
The spasms pass. I lie facedown on dead leaves, on tiny gentian violets, on a bed of crushed mayapple stems, and wait. I hear traffic climbing up the hill. I roll aside and haul my pants up to my hips and lie on my back, staring through a thin April canopy of leaves toward a vague, clouded sky. Don’t feel too bad at the moment, in this position. Half dead but half alive. Cars and another heavy truck roll by. I am left unnoticed, or disregarded, and for that kindness I am grateful. I close my eyes and doze off for a moment—to be awakened by flies crawling on
my lips, probing my nose, investigating items of interest on my chin and neck. I open my eyes to find one shit-eating blue-green bottle fly perched on my right hand, rubbing its dainty forepaws together like a pawnbroker computing the profit he’ll make on your pitiful collateral—your last handgun, your only camera, your final binoculars, your ultimate brass trumpet in its case of purple velveteen.
I sit up and wipe my mouth and chin with my faithful red bandana. Over there not three feet away is a pile of something dreadful, a black pudding of excrement. Whose? Whose indeed? And why black? In the name of Jesus, Mary and God, why that tarry black? But I know very well what that grim complexion means. The color black is not a color at all but the absence of color, the withdrawal of every color, the extinction of light, the perfection of darkness. And so on. I dig dirt from between the exposed roots of the nearest tree and spread the dirt over my dropping. No one should ever have to look upon such loathsome efflux as that. My vomit I ignore; some dog from the neighborhood will come by soon to make a meal of it—yes, and he’ll no doubt root up the other as well.
After a long while I grab ahold the tree I’m sitting against, pull myself to my feet and tread slowly, carefully, back to my truck. The nausea has passed, the bowels seem emptied for the time, but that sharp cramp in my middle stomach stabs as deep as ever. Time for Dr. Morpheus. Dr. Laudanum. Dr. Feelgood. I get out my pill cache and pop a Demerol. Then, what the hell, I’m a sick son of a bitch today, I pop a Dilaudid. Let the two of them get together down in there and mess around; maybe they’ll come up with a new formula for chemotherapeutic happiness.
There’s one can of Old Milkweed left but it looks wrong. I kick it, with its empty plastic collar, out the open door and lie down across the front seat, closing my eyes. I hear my dog outside, snuffling about in the weeds and refuse, searching for that bone she buried here, ages ago, in a far-off former life. I listen to her wheezing breath, her limping gait and speculate: which goes first? The dog, the truck or me? Lightcap old buddy you simple shit you knot-headed pisscutter you sure fucked up royally this time.
The light is fading, my eyelids sinking. I sit up, shaking myself awake, and slide behind the wheel. We’re pledged to be sleeping in West Virginia tonight. That’s for a fact. Only twenty-five miles to Big Sandy and the border. Let’s get out of these hard-luck hills. I call the dog, start the engine, ease over the pass and drive down into the woods on the other side. Two more hamlets and into farther woods. Dark in here. I brush the cobwebs from my eyes. The pang in the gut seems farther away, unpleasant but lending itself to varied interpretations. Lights glare in my eyes as another coal truck passes. My broken mirror flaps in the wind. An owl swoops across the road, through my headlight beams, from darkness into darkness. Sollie the dog stares straight ahead, watching the road, while I note the dusty green of the passing trees, the depth of the night within the forest, the flight of dark birds here, there, everywhere. Very strange.
But then—what’s this? A constellation of lights ahead and I’ve reached a town called Louisa and U.S. Highway 23.
Dumbly, humbly, I follow the main current north along the Big Sandy, cross the river in the glare and stink from a fire-belching smoke-pumping petrochemical plant and roll eastward into West Virginia. A solemn exultation charges my heart as we race down the four-lane highway toward Charleston. Hang in there, ride the draft from the freight trucks till we reach the hills and woods again. From Charleston it’s only seventy-five miles—by country road—to Shawnee County, Shawnee Town, Stump Crick and Lightcap Hollow.
We cross the Kanawha, broad beautiful river heading northwest toward the great Ohio. Tugboats and barges glide on the water. Yes, I always wanted to be a tugboat captain tugging a barge full of traprock downriver from Hometown West Virginia to Triumph Louisiana. Now I guess I never will.
Rain streaks the windshield and I set the worn blades to sweeping back and forth. No moon tonight. Black clouds illuminated from below by the blaze of Charleston—the sky resembles a rumpled mattress full of bedbugs and urine stains. Coming home. I feel pretty good, despite signals of distress from some remote internal organ.
We sweep through Charleston in a shifting maze of lights, every wall every rooftop shining from the rain. Down into the cup of the hills and up the other side, northeast, where my engine labors, labors hard, and I gear down into second then first to keep her chuffing up the long grade. A hundred cars and trucks blast by on my left, horns blaring. Should I shift into granny gear, my compound low? Am I going to have to turn around and back up this here mountain?
No, we make it, sort of, with radiator boiling, and wheel down the far side and take the next exit east at Big Chimney, finding the poor boy’s road into the hills again. Kind of groggy at the wheel here and I’ve got the notion the definite notion I should pull off soon and take about a twenty-four-hour nap. I pass more shacks, shanties and trailerhouse slums, junked automobiles, trucks with the hood up, dogs creeping through the rain. I note a revival in progress at The Temple of the Burning Bush Primitive Baptist Church. I hear the faithful shouting as I steam past, see the dark shapes dancing before a fountain of candles. Should stop. Should go back. Should join them, lay on hands, purge the last of my evil demons. But I don’t.
I turn right at somebody’s pigyard, find a muddy dirt road under the trees that leads over a wooden bridge, around a hill past two abandoned barns and into another forest. I drive through a tunnel of trees following the dim beams of my headlights, of my intelligence, of my hopes, into deeper darkness. Rain blears my windshield, rattles on the roof, pummels the puddles on the road ahead.
The road bends around the black ruin of a cabin and dips into what looks like a ford across the wide stream before me. I can see at a glance that the water is not more than a foot deep. I step on the gas, we drop off a cutbank and plunge into the water with a belly-whopping crash. The engine goes dead. The headlights wane to a yellow glow then die to nothing. We’ve shorted out. My truck shudders to a halt in the middle of the creek. Steam rises from the radiator.
What now? I sit there in the dark, my old sick dog beside me, and wonder what if anything I should do. I attempt to restart the engine but nothing reacts. Apparently the whole electrical system has been stricken lifeless by that one big cold splash of muddy water. I think of the tape, electrical, friction, duct, that I’ve wound and rewound through the years about so much of the wiring under the hood, and for what? It’s no laughing matter but I laugh.
The rain patters on the metal roof, a pleasant and soothing noise. I roll down the window at my side and listen to the suck and gurgle of the creek as it rushes beneath the frame of my truck. From the woods on either side of the water—out of the dark—comes the surging chant of fifty thousand tree frogs, the song of springtime in Appalachia, of sexual love in the night, frantic with joy. I smile and slide deeper into the seat, feeling warm, comfortable and tired, very tired. Those difficult snaky miles through the mountains among children, chickens and dogs, between cabins set so close to the road their doorsteps adjoin the asphalt, have left me weary. And that drastic purging of belly and bowels near the trash dump on the hill sapped my vitals to the core. I feel a great peace in my head, a blank oblivion in the lower regions, an overwhelming desire for rest in everything. I close my eyes. I am going to end this day, this chapter in my life, in sleep. Blessed sleep…
Sinking into a coma of bliss, I hear the whining of a dog, the faintest of mosquito cries. But the sound persists, comes closer, louder. Clumsy feet step on my arm, stomach, pass over, return. A hot dry muzzle pokes me in the nose.
I open my slow heavy eyes. Looking out the window I can see only falling rain, no lights, no stars. I shove the whining dog from my lap and sink back into unconsciousness. But the dog tramps over me again, back and forth, and again I open my eyes. Now I become aware of the gentle rocking of the truck, from side to side, like a cradle in the stream. A sweet and lulling motion. But the noise of the water is stronger than before, much louder, rushing agains
t the door panel on the upstream side.
A little red nerve of alarm penetrates my sluggish brains. Better move. I turn the key in the switch, step on the starter. No response. Sloshing about, I realize that my feet are underwater, that the well of the cab is flooded.
I pull the flashlight off the dash. At least it works and by its slender beam my eyes confirm what my flesh has felt: we’re sinking. Or the river is rising. Or both.
Time for some careful, patient thought. I switch off the light and think, well, what the hell, let the water rise, we’ll float away with it, stay warm and comfortable on the seat of the truck and float down this creek to the Kanawha, down the Kanawha to the Ohio, down the Ohio to that Old Man River, down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, float out on the great blue sea like a beer can from a sewer pipe and greet the morning with upraised arms, a shout of joy, a chorus of eternal exaltation—
Welcome back my son, says a voice like God’s trombone, beaming down from Heaven as we sink, me and my Dodge Carryall, my dog, my crackers and cheese, my bedroll, ax, toolbox, Buck knife, firearms, loading kit, spare tire and empty flapping canvas waterbag, into the realm of the great white shark.
—and why not? Hart Crane did it why not us?
But Sollie the dog has another opinion, won’t let me be. “All right,” I growl, “all right, let’s get out of here,” and again I try to start the motor, knowing it’s futile, and it is, and then attempt to open the driver’s door. I cannot do it; the power of the stream is too much. I clap my hat on my head, take the .357 from the glove-box and tuck it in my belt, grab flashlight and open the door on the downstream side. This too is difficult, with a vortex or hydraulic keeper forming below, but not impossible.
We stumble out, my light on the swirling black waters, where I find myself crotch-deep in the flood. The dog, paddling desperately, head high, drifts away. I lunge and catch her by the collar. We struggle toward the shore, a jungle of shrubs leaning over the stream. The current startles me with its strength. But we reach the bank and drag ourselves up the mud into the thicket.