Then Clevenger left by a side door. I went after him and got my suitcase out of the car. He said he’d be back in half an hour. I watched him drive around the test track. He went around three times, almost twice as fast as the trucks and other cars. I looked at that huge circle of asphalt, nine never-ending miles, something left behind by a crazed or childlike people. It made me think of Warburton for a moment, his final memo, and I began to juggle the alphabet, to fit it together finally, three names from two, anagrammatized, a last jest from corporate exile. I went back to the garage and got my shirt. Then I ran across the track and across fifty yards of dirt and out the gate onto the road. Clevenger was still circling the track. I put on my shirt and walked for about half an hour. It started getting warmer. Dead coyotes were hung on wire fences. A car stopped for me then, an old Studebaker. The driver started up again before I had the door closed. He was a one-arm man wearing the dress blues of the United States Navy. Along the road and spread out across the desert were hundreds of oil drills, their black shafts stroking, triangular heads and lean frames, slave colonies of gigantic worker ants, the science fiction of prehistory and hereafter. Black smoke came gusting out of a refinery and covered the land and sky. I asked him where he was heading and he said Midland. On the radio Bob Dylan was singing “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” We came out of the smoke and I asked him how long he had been in the navy. He appeared to be in his mid-twenties, a slight wincing man with the thin mouth and white-blond hair of a secret planner of bank robberies.
“You think I’m not navy because of the arm. You find me incongruous. That’s always been my strength. I project a mystery that a lot of men and women have tried to unlock. But maybe the mystery is in themselves. You’re wondering how I know so much about people. I’ve been places all my life.
I’ve been to China, one of the few. I’m a voracious reader. I studied at the sore bone in Paris. That was before the arm.”
“No offense meant. I was just asking.”
“Everybody’s interested in the arm. There are other parts of me, deep down, that nobody has succeeded in reaching. I have an insatiable curiosity about people from all walks of life. The way to learn about people is to keep your eyes and ears open and your lips sealed. I roamed the streets of Paris like a cat. I was silent and watchful. Nobody messed with me. I carried a knife all through my Paris days. I had only one intimate friend, a writer-painter from Harlem. He was sleek and wiry. He was the coolest spade in Paris. He was the ace of spades. We were like two cats prowling the Left Bank. I carried my knife at all times. Mess with either one of us and the other’d cut your throat.”
“What was his name?”
“Whose name?”
“The writer-painter,” I said.
“You’re being polite because you’re afraid of me. Fear impels people to ask ingratiating questions. I’ve been noticing that for quite a few years. It’s an intricate thing, fear. I’ve been making a study of it during my travels. There’s a whole literature of fear in the libraries of the world, just waiting to be read and synthesized. It’s the arm that worries people. Mystery is the white man’s enemy. I’m one of the few with soul. Let me take a gander at what the hell you look like.”
“How far is Midland?”
“I’m taking a gander,” he said. “First billboard we come to I’ll park this vehicle behind it. Then we’ll see how much mystery you have. I’m hung. I’m hung like a fighting bull. I’m yea big. We’ll see who’s more man. Bigger gives it. Smaller takes. Them’s the rules of the road.”
“That’s it,” I said. “Let me out.”
“Rejection is one of the banes of our time. People should never reject each other. You think this is nothing but vulgarism on my part. What I offer is more than merchandise Men have paid plenty for my sexual gifts and proclivities. But my mystery isn’t for sale.”
“Stop the car.”
He slowed down and pulled over to the side. I grabbed my suitcase and got out. And then, a delighted child reciting a rhyme, a child remembering word for word some old lesson or torn bit of lore, he leaned toward the window and said victoriously:
“Good little boys do not accept rides from strangers.”
A deaf-mute couple took me the next forty miles. They looked enough alike to be twins. I sat in the back seat next to a guitar. Then I rode a short stretch with a man who sold rat poison and had once been a delegate to a political convention. A former stripteaser picked me up then and took me into Midland. She used to play gin rummy with the Duke of Windsor. I got a room, shaved, showered, checked out and rented a car. I drove all night, northeast, and once again I felt it was literature I had been confronting these past days, the archetypes of the dismal mystery, sons and daughters of the archetypes, images that could not be certain which of two confusions held less terror, their own or what their own might become if it ever faced the truth. I drove at insane speeds.
In the morning I headed west along Main Street in downtown Dallas. I turned right at Houston Street, turned left onto Elm and pressed my hand against the horn. I kept it there as I drove past the School Book Depository, through Dealey Plaza and beneath the triple underpass. I kept blowing the horn all along Stemmons Freeway and out past Parkland Hospital. At Love Field I turned in the car and bought a gift for Merry. Then, with my American Express credit card, I booked a seat on the first flight to New York. Ten minutes after we were airborne a woman asked for my autograph.
Don DeLillo, Americana
(Series: # )
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