At that moment we heard the AK-47 begin to chatter from under the hill. Burst followed burst—the sound was loud enough and unexpected enough to cause Bo to stop crying.
“That’s Muddy,” I said. “I wonder what he found to shoot at. There’s not much below the hill except some oil tanks.”
A moment after I spoke, sound hit us like a tremendous slap. The sound the training jets made was as nothing compared to this sound. “Slap” sounded right as a description of its sudden arrival, but slap hardly did justice to the force of the sound—even to call it “the sound” seemed wrong. Life, the world, were briefly nothing but sound—all other sensations were obliterated. We all instinctively turned our backs and hunched over, mute and hopeless before it. I closed my eyes, unable to think or move at all. When I opened them I felt detached from myself, as if I and my thoughts—if I had any—had been blown in opposite directions from one another. I noticed Bo clinging tightly to his mother’s legs. T.R. had her head in her arms. Godwin, hunched over, was still smiling insanely, not to mention toothlessly.
I saw T.R.’s lips moving, but the normal speed of sound seemed to have changed; it had slowed and been made deliberate by the force of the great sound.
“I think it’s the end of the world, Daddy,” T.R. said. “Don’t tell me if that’s what it is.”
A huge, tar-black pillar of smoke foamed up from the plain below the hill. It shot straight into the sky as if fired from a gigantic smoke pistol.
“It’s not the end of the world, T.R.,” I said. “It’s just the end of the oil tanks.”
“You better be sure, I ain’t opening my eyes unless you’re sure,” T.R. said, her eyes tightly closed.
I watched the black smoke pour into the sky; it rose over the hill like black foam.
“I’m sure, honey,” I said.
2
It was definitely the end of my oil tanks and almost the end of Muddy Box as well. Fifty-eight thousand dollars’ worth of West Texas Intermediate Crude, representing most of the monthly milking of my several little oil wells, went up in smoke—a lot of smoke. By the time Godwin and I had persuaded T.R. that the world had not come to an end, half the pumpers, cowboys, and fire companies from two or three surrounding counties had gathered in my lower pastures. There was little they could do but scratch their heads and look awestruck. Fortunately one of them found Muddy, unsinged but also unconscious, in a chaparral bush. Local efforts at resuscitation failed, so an ambulance helicopter was radioed for. T.R. refused to fly in it or to take any responsibility for the unconscious Muddy at all. Somehow she and Godwin persuaded me that I was the logical choice to accompany Muddy to Dallas, where better-equipped resuscitators waited. I didn’t feel really right about going—I couldn’t rid myself of the haunting sense that events were sweeping me far downstream from where I wanted to be—but for all I knew poor Muddy was dying; someone had to go, so I climbed into the helicopter and we swirled up into the sky.
Most of the next three days I spent in a little waiting lounge at Parkland Hospital in Dallas, waiting for Muddy Box to regain consciousness. He was not brain dead, I was assured. When I phoned home to pass this good news on to T.R., she snorted.
“You can’t be brain dead if you don’t have a brain,” she remarked, “and nobody with a brain would shoot at an oil tank with a machine gun.”
Behind her I could hear quite loudly the sound of post-New Wave rock and roll.
“How’s everybody getting along up there?” I asked nervously. I felt depressed and left out.
“Well, it’s a long story, I’ll tell you when you get back,” T.R. said.
“I don’t have anything to do but wait,” I pointed out. “Couldn’t you tell me some of your story now?”
“Nope,” she said, just before she hung up.
The lounge, being a hospital lounge, was full of gloomy, apprehensive people waiting to find out if their loved ones were living or dying. Muddy wasn’t really a loved one; I didn’t know him and really didn’t have much of an emotional investment in his recovery; as one day wore into two and two into three I began to feel gloomy about my own lack of true gloom. No man is an island, according to Dr. Donne, but I felt very much like an island; the hospital lounge itself seemed like an island, midway between the continents of life and death, the archipelagos of hope and hopelessness. Some of us islanders would pass one way, some another.
After quickly working my way through the National Geographics, Sports Afields, and Texas Monthlys in the waiting room, I called a taxi and went to a bookstore. All during the ride I felt guilty; I felt I had left the island without permission; by the time I got to the bookstore I decided to keep the taxi waiting so it could ferry me immediately back to the island. I became too nervous and guilt-ridden really to think clearly about what I might want to read; I hastily scrambled together six books about Wittgenstein and a biography of Alexandra David-Neel and rushed back to the hospital.
It was an immense relief to discover that Muddy had not died in my absence; he was still snug in his coma, his brain rhythms as strong as ever.
My relief was soon tempered by depression as I read, alternately, about Ludwig Wittgenstein and Alexandra David-Neel, two people capable of a purity and a concentration it was evident I would never attain. By comparison with either of them I was no more than a fumbling dilettante. On the other hand, reading about them in that hospital waiting room made me feel like a snobbish freak. Everyone else in the waiting room was either making do with the ragged magazines or reading Sidney Sheldon or Danielle Steel. Why was I reading about a tough mystic and an even tougher philosopher? I began to develop an urge to hide the books or to pretend I wasn’t really reading them; at the same time I had a compulsive need to race through them, sucking up whatever clues I could find. The key to achievement was what I sought. Did it really require one to be so selfish? Or was it merely that being as smart as Wittgenstein or as obsessed as David-Neel produced a focus so intense that ordinary notions of selfishness and generosity no longer applied?
I didn’t know, but I did have a need to know; reading the books made me nervous and discouraged, though I couldn’t really define the nature of my discouragement. After all, I didn’t want to be a philosopher or to travel in Tibet; I just wanted to write a book that I could feel represented me. “Al and Sal,” for all its success, didn’t seem to represent me. Maybe it represented the American family, in some sense—I had only had an American family for three or four days, and my modest beginnings as a paterfamilias bore no resemblance to anything that had happened in the series.
As always, when I reached a certain stratum of discouragement, somewhere around the Pleistocene stage, I went to a phone and called Jeanie Vertus. I had convinced myself, on no evidence whatsoever, that she was in Europe, and was expecting to get her machine. I had prepared a doleful monologue about my experiences, as well as my doubts and fears, and was startled when Jeanie herself answered before the phone even completed its first ring.
“Hi,” she said. Moodwise she didn’t sound far above the Pleistocene level herself.
“Why were you sitting so close to the phone?” I asked, my gloomy monologue forgotten in the delight of hearing her voice.
“Sometimes when I’m depressed I call, and if people don’t get it on the first ring I change my mind and hang up,” she said. “I figured you’d be depressed by now, and your mind works like my mind so I just stuck my porta-phone in my bathrobe pocket, just in case.”
“So why are you in your bathrobe?” I asked. “It’s not morning and it’s not night.”
It was a silly question—I was so startled by the fact that she was actually there that I hadn’t quite regained a grip on myself.
“Is there a law against wearing your bathrobe at other times?” Jeanie asked apprehensively. Jeanie was always hoping to do the right thing; even the slightest suggestion that she might be doing the wrong thing, or even just something slightly unorthodox, was often enough to dash her hopes. In fact she almo
st always did do the right thing, but no one, least of all me, had ever been able to convince her that that was true—even my stupid question about the bathrobe was enough to activate her doubts.
“Of course not, I was just being stupid, I didn’t expect to get you,” I said. “I was all set to leave a monologue.”
“Oh,” Jeanie said. “Well, you still could. I could hang up and go in the other room. You could do the monologue and I could come right back and listen to it.”
“No, that’s ridiculous,” I said.
“It is ridiculous, but we could still do it that way if you prefer,” Jeanie said. “You sound fragile. Maybe you’d feel stronger if you were just talking to the machine.”
“No, that’s absurd,” I said. “The machine doesn’t care anything about me, and you do.”
“It’s true, but it’s not the whole story,” Jeanie said. “Sometimes when I’m feeling fragile I’m just not up to anything as unpredictable as a human conversation. It’s because I’m a coward. I guess you have as much right to be a coward as I do, although in my heart of hearts I’d rather you just did talk to me instead of the machine. If I have to hang up with you sounding like that, I’m gonna cry, and I’ve already been crying about this.”
“About what?” I asked.
“You said there was a jailbreak, why wouldn’t I cry?” Jeanie said in a shaky voice. “You didn’t even tell me why you were in jail. I didn’t even suspect you were a criminal. I got upset trying to imagine what kind of crime you committed. You could have just put it on the machine, you know, so I wouldn’t have had all this suspense. I can imagine all kinds of crimes, I just couldn’t imagine you committing any of them, unless you’ve gone crazy, and if you’ve gone crazy you might end up in a bin somewhere where I couldn’t call you, or you could be arrested again, how would I know? You don’t tell me anything but then you expect me to get out of my bathrobe and go on as if I had a normal life when I didn’t even have a very normal one before you called me up and got me worried.”
Then she began to cry. I was horrified. I tried to remember the exact words of the message I had left from Arlington—I had only left it a few hours earlier, not time enough for Jeanie to have become so haunted with worry. But I felt guilty anyway. I couldn’t really remember the Arlington message clearly. Perhaps I had inadvertently implied that I was the one in jail; anyway, such a melodramatic message had been inexcusable, given the fact that Jeanie’s emotions traveled at the speed of light, besides which she also had an imagination at least the equal of mine when it came to conjuring up improbable catastrophes.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I said, perhaps a dozen times, as her sobs became snuffles and finally faded into silence. When she was silent I explained that it was Muddy Box who had been in jail.
“You know how my imagination works, though,” she said. “You shouldn’t frighten me. Life’s scary enough without you frightening me.”
“I know it, I’m sorry, I promise absolutely I’ll never do it again,” I said.
Jeanie snorted—her sense of humor was awakening. “Baloney,” she said. “You’ll do it again this afternoon if you can think up a good story.”
“Well, I’m just trying to make my life sound more interesting than it is,” I said. “It’s an old habit of mine.”
“Yeah, but now you’ve found T.R. and you have grandkids,” Jeanie pointed out. “Your life’s gonna be really interesting anyway—you won’t have to invent stuff.”
“Even if it is interesting I may not be able to stop inventing stuff,” I said. “It’s a habit, like salting my eggs.”
There was a sudden silence. I immediately realized I had made a misstep.
“Danny, I thought you were eating better,” she said, shocked. “I didn’t think you were even eating eggs, much less eating them with salt!”
“Jeanie, it’s just a pinch of salt,” I said. “It’s not like it’s opium.”
“I don’t know which is worse, the salt or the egg,” she said, as her shock deepened.
“Neither’s very bad,” I said. “It’s not as if I’m Hitler just because I eat eggs.”
“Maybe you’re not Hitler,” she admitted grudgingly, “but this is definitely a negative turn of events. Distinctly negative. You’re just gonna make me mad and then die.”
“I’m not going to die,” I said. “I’m in a hospital right now and I’m perfectly fine.”
“You’re in a hospital?” she said, her anxiety soaring again. “No wonder you’re in a hospital if you’ve been eating salty eggs and concealing it from me.”
“I mean I’m making the call from a hospital,” I said, corrected. “I’m not the one who’s sick.”
Desperately I began to explain about Muddy, the AK-47, and the oil tanks. For several minutes Jeanie listened in sullen, skeptical silence—she knew I was just trying to distract her from my faux pas about the eggs. But gradually, by using all my dormant wiles as a storyteller, I got her interested. The turning point came when I mentioned the girls’ shopping sprees—Jeanie was a devotee of the shopping spree herself. Her curiosity soon out-paced her skepticism and we relaxed into a long chat, in which I was prodded to try to remember exactly what clothes and radios and CDs the girls had bought.
While I was producing this catalogue, much of it fictitious, a young doctor tapped me on the shoulder.
“Your patient’s waking up,” he said.
“Did you hear that?” I asked her. “Muddy’s waking up.”
“Now why did they name him Muddy?” Jeanie asked.
“I imagine it’s just a nickname,” I said.
“I wonder if it’s because he has a muddy character, or what,” she mused.
“Well, you can come down and meet him if you want to,” I said.
“I might,” she said. “On the other hand I hate to think how mad I’d get if I actually saw you put salt on an egg.”
“I doubt if I’d be rash enough to actually do that in your presence,” I said.
“You better not be rash enough.”
“It must be nice to be so nutritionally virtuous,” I said, it being a subject about which I was very reluctant to yield the last word. “I guess it’s taken the place sexual virtue once held.”
“Yep, it has,” Jeanie agreed. “You know why? Because it makes you feel immortal, and sexual virtue doesn’t. Sexual virtue just makes you feel so bored you don’t care about being immortal.”
“That’s an interesting thought. I’ll sleep on it,” I said.
“Don’t you hang up, I have one final instruction,” she said.
“Which is?”
“Forget the eggs,” Jeanie said. “Also forget the salt, or forget it, period.”
“Forget it?” I said. “Forget it as in what?”
“Forget it as in us,” she said crisply.
“Oh, stop it,” I said. “I don’t think you should threaten me with dismissal just because I ate an egg.”
“Now, now,” she said happily. “Let’s have no defiance. You’ve been trouble enough for one day. It wasn’t just an egg, it was a salty egg. Unforgivable, almost. Bye.”
3
The doctors insisted on keeping Muddy in the hospital for a week—the fact that he was awake did not mean that he was well, they explained. Complications might still develop.
I in turn explained this to T.R. in several brief conversations from the hospital pay phone. Her attitude was skeptical, to put it mildly.
“That lazy little fuckhead just likes to have people wait on him,” she informed me impatiently. “If it ain’t a hospital it’s a jail. He don’t like to do nothing he’s supposed to do. Tell him to get out of that bed and get up here and help me raise his daughter, she’s driving me crazy.”
“How could Jesse drive anyone crazy?” I asked. “She’s not even two.”
“What do you know about it? Two-year-olds have driven millions of people crazy,” T.R. asserted. “L.J. taught her to play checkers and now that’s all s
he wants to do. She’s wore us all out, playing checkers. Tell Muddy to get out of that hospital and come on home. I guess he ain’t too brain damaged to man the checkerboard. Anyway, Jesse don’t like to play unless she wins, and Muddy’s one person she could beat. He’s only got the mental powers of a one-year-old, anyway.”
“Wait a minute, who’s L.J.?” I asked.
“What do you mean? He’s your friend,” she said. “Your English friend.”
“Godwin?” I asked.
“Yeah, but who wants to say a name like that?” T.R. said. “We’re just calling him L.J. now. I like to try and be normal.”
“Lots of luck, if it’s Godwin you’re trying with,” I said meanly. Probably I was just jealous because he was with her and I wasn’t.
“I know, but life ain’t perfect,” T.R. admitted. “You got to start somewhere, so we started by giving him a normal name.”
I told Muddy T.R. wanted him to hurry home. I thought it might cheer him up but instead it prompted him to feign another coma. His amateurish efforts to pretend that he had returned to his coma amused the doctors and nurses—they responded by giving him shots every hour or so until he gave up and started watching television. Naturally the first thing he watched was a rerun of “Al and Sal,” the famous episode in which Sal moves out of the conjugal bedroom and installs herself on the family diving board; she decides that since Al is a total dud as a lover she might as well get in the Guinness Book of World Records as the woman who lived the longest on a diving board. In fact, she only holds out on the diving board for one night, just long enough to make for a hilarious episode. Muddy and half the nurses on his floor were laughing at it, but I left the room shortly after it started, depressed by the sense that my past was following me around. I went back to the waiting room and made an unsuccessful attempt, perhaps my tenth, to read the Tractatus Logico-philosophicus. This failure left me more discouraged than the previous nine failures; this one seemed tinged with hubris—ill-defined hubris, but hubris nonetheless. I decided that not having written “Al and Sal” was probably a precondition for being able to read Wittgenstein—even though the latter had had a fondness for silly movies and might himself have liked “Al and Sal.”