They walked slowly back toward the original scene of confrontation, holding hands. After the battle of the bulldozers the world seemed strangely quiet in Love’s ears. “So they all got away? Every doggone last one?”
“Got two, that long one you planted in the mud and that big one threw rocks at you.”
“Who are they?”
“We’ll find out.”
They shuffled through sand and over bedrock up the wash, emerged from between the sheltering mudbanks into the open terrain of sagebrush and survey stakes, pickup trucks and four-wheel-drive Ford Broncos.
The Bishop stopped. “Where are they?”
The ranger stopped too. “Had ‘em handcuffed together. Locked ‘em in your Bronco.”
“The Bronco’s gone.”
The ranger nodded. “So it is. Well …” She indicated her BLM pickup. “Least they had sense enough not to steal Federal property. Come on.”
They reached the pickup. All four tires were slashed. The teenage operating engineer sat on the sunken hood looking discouraged. Also anxious. She held a long shining dipstick in her hand; her Mitsubishi XLT was nowhere in sight. Her story too was fairly simple. Tears in her eyes, she told it:
“Oh Bishop Love, I’m sorry. I’m awful sorry, Bishop Love, and I sure hope it ain’t my fault. I almost got that old beaknosed media man, Bishop Love, he sure could run fast but I almost got him and then my engine started to smoke and then it froze up, Bishop Love, seized up tighter’n a Spandex saddle on a corn-bloat cow and wouldn’t run no more a-tall, Bishop Love, there was blowsand in the crankcase, and I had to walk all the way back here nigh on to half a mile and my feet are sore as snakebit pups.”
“Where is it?”
She pointed. They looked, looked hard, and sure enough there it was, a tiny blur of dusty yellow half buried in a gully deep in the sage and gama grass. The ranger checked with her 7x50 binoculars. Far past the defunct bulldozer she saw golden dunes of sand, aeolian sand, the singing sands of the leanest part of the loveliest region in the whole long wide high-lonesome land of horny toads and soaring buzzards and melancholy coyotes. Coyote, she thought — the prairie wolf. Staring at the sands and the blue mesas beyond, she thought she could hear the wolf, its cry, its call, its wild defiant song. She stared, stared, and saw a horseman ride slowly up the dunes, pausing on the summit to peer about, then passing on. He led a second horse, saddled but riderless. They disappeared.
13
Bonnie and the Bag Lady
Doc was gone, off to the trauma factory for an early morning bone marrow transplant. Another poor kid, a little girl only ten years old, from the St. George area. Acute leukemia again. Plus cancer of the lymph glands. Rather common down there in the southern part of the state, considering the relatively small human population. Not enough numbers, of course, to serve as hard proof of anything, though the region lay downwind from the military proving grounds. The Federal government denied responsibility and the Federal judges, appointed to their lifetime $89,500 a year jobs by the Federal government, decided — always — for the Federal government. Nobody knew why.
“Of course,” explained Doc, “could be like they say only a statistical anomaly.”
“How come children keep dying of these statistical anomalies?”
“Don’t take care of themselves. Don’t understand probability theory. Mathematical illiteracy all too common in our society. Can be fatal.”
“I think mathematics is a fatal disease.”
“See what I mean?”
She was glad he was gone. And Reuben still asleep. In nightgown and robe she descended the staircase, opened the front door and rescued the morning newspaper from what looked like an ongoing drizzle. Doc hated to pedal home for lunch and find his Salt Lake Tribune in dampish condition. Bad enough, he would say, when it’s dry; worst morning paper in the whole state of Utah. It’s the only morning paper, she’d say. That’s no excuse, he’d say, adjusting his eyeglasses and opening first to the Letters column on the editorial pages. When looking for wit, wisdom, knowledge or intelligence in a newspaper, any newspaper, your only hope is the Letters column.
She carried the paper through the quiet old frame house to the kitchen, made herself a pot of tea, turned on the radio to her favorite soft rock station — Doc could not bear the sound of any music more recent than that of that ancient creep Gregorian and his dreary “chants” — and sat down to enjoy her only hour of solitude before the boy awoke.
She unfolded the newspaper and spread it open on the table to dry. Not even glancing at the front page — for what could be older than the “news”? — she opened Section C, “Accent on Living,” which followed “State & Local” and preceded “Sports,” to Ann Landers, Joyce Brothers, and the astrology chart. Under Aquarius, her favorite sign, she found this wise counsel:
Danger. Avoid your regular haunts today. Contact old friends. Reconsider your financial affairs. Beware of strange men wearing big hats, dark glasses and raincoats.
Why? she thought. What regular haunts? This house? The baby’s room? The supermarket? The new car dealer’s service shop? And what financial affairs? And strangers in raincoats? Sounds like my husband. She conjured up the mental vision of Doc, at that very moment, emerging from the recovery room in his greenish surgical scrubs, loosening the drawstring on his pants to show the young nurses in Pediatrics what an uncircumcised penis looked like when half erect. Absurd.
Well, she had to go to the goddamned store sometime this morning, danger or no danger. And Reuben would raise unholy hell if she didn’t take him for his regular after-shopping marshmallow fudge ice-cream sundae. Children believe in ritual, ceremony, custom, tradition, and children are right. Children keep in touch with the ancient underlying rhythms of organic existence. Yeah — like sitting in a pool of their own piss on the elegant white wicker chairs of Snelgrove’s Ice Cream Parlor.
They entered the place at eleven, beating the lunchtime rush. Nobody there but a few Mormon matrons with their squalling litters, those large hippo-shaped women with their snot-nosed blue-eyed towheaded brats. Why are Mormon mothers always so fat? They make such cute teenagers, such rosy sexy leggy golden pom-pom girls, and then, a mere ten years later they’re all a bunch of buffalo butts, why? Grand multi-parity. Too many babies. Don’t believe in birth control and don’t understand the mechanical principle of mandibular sex, the auxiliary function, that is, of what you might call the oral hatch. When a fella needs a fellatio, said Doc, he won’t get it from a Latter-Day Saint. Female, that is. From the other half, on the other hand, especially if a Congressman, you might get anything. Like genital warts.
Was there no end no bottom to a medical man’s crude gross vulgarity? There was not.
Folding her umbrella, Bonnie led Reuben to a table near the window, away from the matriarchs and their bawling vermin. Nobody sat nearby except a couple of tidy fair-haired young men in dark suits, red ties, umbrellas neatly furled at their feet. They looked like returned missionaries — or Soviet functionaries. They wore black rubbers over their black shoes. Nobody wore rubbers anymore, black or any other color. On shoes. Nobody but returned missionaries.
In the corner reading the morning paper through purple sunglasses, floppy wet hat on her curly head, sat a broad-shouldered blonde in a filthy greasy military-surplus rainjacket. Her cheap cotton dress was hiked almost to her knees, revealing thick hairy ugly legs in “flesh-colored” support hose. Her shopping bag, stuffed with God only knows what garbage, rested on the floor at her side. Her overloaded shopping cart, stolen from Safeway, waited outside the entrance. Snelgrove’s did not encourage the patronage of bag ladies but this one evidently carried the price of a cup of coffee somewhere on her person. As long as she nursed her coffee they could not legally throw her out.
Bonnie looked at the window, holding Reuben’s hand, and watched the spring rain streaming down the glass. Cynical on the outside, soft as mush at heart, Bonnie wept inwardly for the harsh life of a bag lady, whether here
in Snelgrove’s, Salt Lake City, or under the sewer gratings of midtown Manhattan. (And what’s the difference?) She wept for all of the poor, everywhere; she was, as Doc liked to say, the only non-professional anywhere who actually lay awake at night thinking about starving Ethiopians. Who actually worried, at least once a month, about the fate of the Third World’s colored people.
“Not ‘colored people,’ ” she corrected him, many times; “people of color.”
“Oh? What’s the difference?”
“ ‘Colored people’ is racist.”
“Sorry. People of color, I mean. Of course. Our swarthier, duskier brothers and sisters, as it were. Okay?”
“Doc, you’re asking for trouble.”
“Sorry. Was only asking.”
The waitress came, she ordered the hotdog & beans and the sundae for little Reuben, a cup of coffee for herself. Surrounded by ice cream in two dozen flavors, Bonnie refrained from the indulgence. She was secretly proud of her trim neat female figure and she meant to keep it. At least for another ten years. Although, as she sometimes worried aloud to Doc, she thought her breasts too large, her buttocks too fleshy.
“You’re a woman not a whippet,” Doc reassured her. “You stick out in front and you stick out behind like a woman should, for the love of Christ. There’s a purpose to it. What more do you want? Anorexia? If you were built like a boy I’d never have noticed you. Probably.”
“I want a body like Jane Fonda.”
“That old wombat? Listen, you’re a hell of a lot better looking than she’ll ever be. Or rather, than she ever was.”
“My hips are too wide.”
“You’re Jewish.”
“Half Jewish.”
“That’s the half. You’ve got a Jewish ass and a colleen’s brain. Too bad it didn’t come out the other way around but, well, we all have our private tragedies.”
“Doc, you’re asking for trouble. Someday you’re going to go too far. Nobody loves a weisenheimer.”
“You do.”
“That’s not love it’s only pity. If I didn’t feel sorry for you I’d leave.”
“You can’t leave me, I’d die.”
“That’s right. It’s an unhealthy unilateral relationship and it’s called co-dependency and there’s a new therapy treatment group for people with your problem and if you weren’t so old and stubborn you could go there and get the help you need, his name is Doctor Maharishi Zit, he’s from Nepal.”
“Santa Monica more likely. Isn’t that the mystical podiatrist who was trying to get us all to walk barefoot on hot coals? If we paid him a hundred bucks.”
“That was last year. You’re thinking of Swami Prabhavananda.”
“Also, this Dr. Zit fellow, why does he call it co-dependency if it refers to a one-sided relationship?”
“What kind of a question is that?”
She had him there. He couldn’t answer.
Reuben nibbled at his hotdog and beans, under his mother’s pressure, then gobbled up the ice cream when she looked out the window again.
Shark-nosed automobiles streamed in endless caravan through the gentle acid rain, spraying one another with a film of insoluble filth, a vicious servility oozing by in grease. Bonnie’s heart sank when she considered the horror of the lives that most men led, trapped for nine ten hours a day in the slave gangs of traffic, the uniformed peonage — suit and tie and digital wristwatch — of the office galleys, the nerve-wracking drudgery of the on-going never-ceasing destruction and reconstruction, backhoes, front-end loaders, jackhammers, wrecking balls, freight trucks, nailguns, concrete culverts, asbestos insulation, I-beams, hardware, software, application forms, medical claim forms, auto insurance forms, income tax forms, garbage, mud, dust, sludge, whole monoclines of paper and anticlines of carbon (press hard) and synclines of silent despair. The world of “jobs.”
Koyaanisqatsi!
And not only the men. Progress proceeds. Now the women too, driven by need or madness or by simple greed, were plunging into the same nightmare world, unsexed by unisex, becoming office-persons, waitpersons, chairpersons, cowpersons, truck driverpersons, coal minerpersons, machine-gunnerpersons. With their children abandoned all day five days a week in pink and blue Day-Glo Tee-Vee Jailhouse Kiddie Kare storage centers. That is, if the women were lucky enough to be able to afford it. Those mothers, that is, who had their “jobs.” The cruelty of it sickened her. Reaching out, she placed one hand on Reuben’s curly hair.
Powaqqatsi!
It occurred to Bonnie, and not for the first time, that she was a fortunate woman. She patted her belly. A lucky woman, though stuck with an aging curmudgeon like Doc Sarvis. Her ball and chain, at least, was chocolate-coated. Velvet-lined. Made of hollow aluminum. If I didn’t want to be a mother, she thought, I would never have had a baby. I absolutely would not be having a second.
“Momma,” said Reuben, “that old woman forgot her bag.”
Sure enough. The bag lady, lumbering out the door, had left behind her giant plastic shopping bag. Staggering into the rain, pushing the cart, she seemed preoccupied with her thoughts. Bonnie covered the waitress’s check with a five-dollar bill (over-tipping again, spoiling the natives) and rushed out after the bag lady, pulling Reuben with one hand and toting the woman’s bag in the other.
The bag lady had drifted two doors down the street, in the direction of Bonnie’s parked car, and was now leaning against a wet wall mumbling to herself.
Bonnie approached, holding forth the bag. For so bulky an object it seemed strangely light, as if filled with nothing but the crumpled wads of paper visible on top.
Apparently unaware of Bonnie and her child, the woman glowered at the rain, the traffic in the street, or perhaps at nothing at all, and gibbered to herself, lips moving. “Fuckin’ rain,” she seemed to be saying, “fuckin’ traffic, fuckin’ nothin’ at all …”
How does one address a bag lady?
“Ma’am,” said Bonnie politely, clearing her throat for attention, “madame, you forgot your bag.”
The creature glared at Bonnie, little red eyes squinting behind the dark shades. Rain dripped from the wide brim of her big sagging Goodwill fedora. Six inches taller than Bonnie, she was indeed a massively constructed female, with the thick neck and heavy shoulders of a steamroller fullback. She must have weighed at least 180 pounds. “You talkin’ to me, sister?” Her voice was deep, rough, familiar.
Bonnie stared, dropping the bag on the wet sidewalk.
The bag lady grinned, a wide and savage rictus revealing powerful teeth well-honed for gnawing on the spareribs of a buffalo or cracking the thighbone of a bull elk. The bag lady said nothing; the grin was sufficient.
Bonnie said, “What are you doing here?” Instinctively she tightened her grip on Reuben’s little hand; instinctively she looked over one shoulder to see if they were being observed. No pedestrians in sight except the two young R.M.s emerging slowly, casually, from the ice-cream parlor, stopping under the awning to open their umbrellas.
“Need some help,” he mumbled, still grinning like a wolf. He held out his big right paw. “Spare ten, lady?”
“Ten? Ten what? You’re supposed to be dead.”
“Fuckin’ papers. Exaggerate everything. I mean ten thousand.” He looked over Bonnie’s shoulder at the missionaries, malingering at Snelgrove’s entrance. Couldn’t tear themselves away from the smell of ice cream. The Mormon vice: reject alcohol, you plunge into sugar.
“You mean ten thousand dollars? Dollars? Now? Today? In one lump?”
He looked down at the little boy, who was gazing up at him. “So how you doin’, Reuben? Gettin’ bigger all the time, ain’t you? Don’t even look like a fuckin’ sandwich anymore.”
“Momma, he said — “
“We’re all sick of that joke, George. And watch your language. You want to be a garbage-mouth all your life? Obscenity is a crutch for —”
“For crippled minds, yeah, I know, Jesus, how many times I got to hear that? And y
eah, I mean ten thousand dollars. If you can spare it, what the f—— fork. Also —” He grinned again, peering at her through the sliding droplets of rain on his dark sunglasses. “Also, Bonnie, I need your body. Bad.”
“Those days are gone. Gone forever, Hayduke. I loved you once, when I was young and crazy, you had your chance and you blew it and now I guess you’ll just have to make love to your fist or your horse or whatever you do for recreation out there in the rocks, because things change, you know, things change, George, and maybe it’s time for you to grow up anyhow.”
He seemed pleased. Still grinning (not smiling), he said, “Good old Abbzug, sweeter than ever. Good lookin’ too. But I don’t mean exactly what you think I mean. I mean I need your body but not for me.”
She glanced down at her boy, whose attention was drifting toward a sycamore leaf floating, like an elfin boat, down the flooded gutter. She glanced back at the men under the awning: still there.
“Don’t look at those fuckers.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I got this special project. You know where. You know what about. And you know why. And I need some special expert help. Something you can offer that I can’t and you know what I mean.”
She paused, staring at his dark wind-burned face under the hat, his thin grin, his little red porcine eyes behind the misted glasses. “George … George, there’s something you’d better understand, once and for all. We’re married now and we have Reuben and I’m pregnant again and, George, we just don’t do that kind of thing anymore, we have responsibilities now, though I don’t suppose you could understand that, and we just don’t intend to take chances anymore.”
“We. We. Who the fuck’s all this we?”
“You know what I mean. I mean Doc and myself. We still care but we can’t afford to take chances and so we just don’t want to get involved in your kind of … activity. Ever again.”
“You care, huh? What do you do about it?”