There were many moments in the Vine like that one—where you might think today was yesterday, and yesterday was tomorrow, and so on. Because we all believed we were tragic, and we drank. We had that helpless, destined feeling. We would die with handcuffs on. We would be put a stop to, and it wouldn’t be our fault. So we imagined. And yet we were always being found innocent for ridiculous reasons.
Hotel was given back the rest of his life, the twenty-five years and more. The police promised him, because they were so bitter about his good luck, that if he didn’t leave town they would make him sorry he’d stayed. He stuck it out a while, but fought with his girlfriend and left—he held jobs in Denver, Reno, points west—and then within a year turned up again because he couldn’t keep away from her.
Now he was twenty, twenty-one years old.
The Vine had been torn down. Urban renewal had changed all the streets. As for me, my girlfriend and I had split up, but we couldn’t keep away from each other.
One night she and I fought, and I walked the streets till the bars opened in the morning. I just went into any old place.
Jack Hotel was beside me in the mirror, drinking. There were some others there exactly like the two of us, and we were comforted.
Sometimes what I wouldn’t give to have us sitting in a bar again at 9:00 a.m. telling lies to one another, far from God.
Hotel had fought with his girlfriend, too. He’d walked the streets as I had. Now we matched each other drink for drink until we both ran out of money.
I knew of an apartment building where a dead tenant’s Social Security checks were still being delivered. I’d been stealing them every month for half a year, always with trepidation, always delaying a couple of days after their arrival, always thinking I’d find an honest way to make a few dollars, always believing I was an honest person who shouldn’t be doing things like that, always delaying because I was afraid this time I’d be caught.
Hotel went along with me while I stole the check. I forged the signature and signed it over to him, under his true name, so that he could cash it at a supermarket. I believe his true name was George Hoddel. It’s German. We bought heroin with the money and split the heroin down the middle.
Then he went looking for his girlfriend, and I went looking for mine, knowing that when there were drugs around, she surrendered.
But I was in a bad condition—drunk, and having missed a night’s sleep. As soon as the stuff entered my system, I passed out. Two hours went by without my noticing.
I felt I’d only blinked my eyes, but when I opened them my girlfriend and a Mexican neighbor were working on me, doing everything they could to bring me back. The Mexican was saying, “There, he’s coming around now.”
We lived in a tiny, dirty apartment. When I realized how long I’d been out and how close I’d come to leaving it forever, our little home seemed to glitter like cheap jewelry. I was overjoyed not to be dead. Generally the closest I ever came to wondering about the meaning of it all was to consider that I must be the victim of a joke. There was no touching the hem of mystery, no little occasion when any of us thought—well, speaking for myself only, I suppose—that our lungs were filled with light, or anything like that. I had a moment’s glory that night, though. I was certain I was here in this world because I couldn’t tolerate any other place.
As for Hotel, who was in exactly the same shape I was and carrying just as much heroin, but who didn’t have to share it with his girlfriend, because he couldn’t find her that day: he took himself to a rooming house down at the end of Iowa Avenue, and he overdosed, too. He went into a deep sleep, and to the others there he looked quite dead.
The people with him, all friends of ours, monitored his breathing by holding a pocket mirror under his nostrils from time to time, making sure that points of mist appeared on the glass. But after a while they forgot about him, and his breath failed without anybody’s noticing. He simply went under. He died.
I am still alive.
Dundun
I went out to the farmhouse where Dundun lived to get some pharmaceutical opium from him, but I was out of luck.
He greeted me as he was coming out into the front yard to go to the pump, wearing new cowboy boots and a leather vest, with his flannel shirt hanging out over his jeans. He was chewing on a piece of gum.
“Mclnnes isn’t feeling too good today. I just shot him.”
“You mean killed him?”
“I didn’t mean to.”
“Is he really dead?”
“No. He’s sitting down.”
“But he’s alive.”
“Oh, sure, he’s alive. He’s sitting down now in the back room.”
Dundun went on over to the pump and started working the handle.
I went around the house and in through the back. The room just through the back door smelled of dogs and babies. Beatle stood in the opposite doorway. She watched me come in. Leaning against the wall was Blue, smoking a cigarette and scratching her chin thoughtfully. Jack Hotel was over at an old desk, setting fire to a pipe the bowl of which was wrapped in tinfoil.
When they saw it was only me, the three of them resumed looking at Mclnnes, who sat on the couch all alone, with his left hand resting gently on his belly.
“Dundun shot him?” I asked.
“Somebody shot somebody,” Hotel said.
Dundun came in behind me carrying some water in a china cup and a bottle of beer and said to Mclnnes: “Here.”
“I don’t want that,” Mclnnes said.
“Okay. Well, here, then.” Dundun offered him the rest of his beer.
“No thanks.”
I was worried. “Aren’t you taking him to the hospital or anything?”
“Good idea,” Beatle said sarcastically.
“We started to,” Hotel explained, “but we ran into the corner of the shed out there.”
I looked out the side window. This was Tim Bishop’s farm. Tim Bishop’s Plymouth, I saw, which was a very nice old grey-and-red sedan, had sideswiped the shed and replaced one of the corner posts, so that the post lay on the ground and the car now held up the shed’s roof.
“The front windshield is in millions of bits,” Hotel said.
“How’d you end up way over there?”
“Everything was completely out of hand,” Hotel said.
“Where’s Tim, anyway?”
“He’s not here,” Beatle said.
Hotel passed me the pipe. It was hashish, but it was pretty well burned up already.
“How you doing?” Dundun asked Mclnnes.
“I can feel it right here. It’s just stuck in the muscle.”
Dundun said, “It’s not bad. The cap didn’t explode right, I think.”
“It misfired.”
“It misfired a little bit, yeah.”
Hotel asked me, “Would you take him to the hospital in your car?”
“Okay,” I said.
“I’m coming, too,” Dundun said.
“Have you got any of the opium left?” I asked him.
“No,” he said. “That was a birthday present. I used it all up.”
“When’s your birthday?” I asked him.
“Today.”
“You shouldn’t have used it all up before your birthday, then,” I told him angrily.
But I was happy about this chance to be of use. I wanted to be the one who saw it through and got Mclnnes to the doctor without a wreck. People would talk about it, and I hoped I would be liked.
In the car were Dundun, Mclnnes, and myself.
This was Dundun’s twenty-first birthday. I’d met him in the Johnson County facility during the only few days I’d ever spent in jail, around the time of my eighteenth Thanksgiving. I was the older of us by a month or two. As for Mclnnes, he’d been around forever, and in fact, I, myself, was married to one of his old girlfriends.
We took off as fast as I could go without bouncing the shooting victim around too heavily.
Dundun said, “What abou
t the brakes? You get them working?”
“The emergency brake does. That’s enough.”
“What about the radio?” Dundun punched the button, and the radio came on making an emission like a meat grinder.
He turned it off and then on, and now it burbled like a machine that polishes stones all night.
“How about you?” I asked Mclnnes. “Are you comfortable?”
“What do you think?” Mclnnes said.
It was a long straight road through dry fields as far as a person could see. You’d think the sky didn’t have any air in it, and the earth was made of paper. Rather than moving, we were just getting smaller and smaller.
What can be said about those fields? There were blackbirds circling above their own shadows, and beneath them the cows stood around smelling one another’s butts. Dundun spat his gum out the window while digging in his shirt pocket for his Winstons. He lit a Winston with a match. That was all there was to say.
“We’ll never get off this road,” I said.
“What a lousy birthday,” Dundun said.
Mclnnes was white and sick, holding himself tenderly. I’d seen him like that once or twice even when he hadn’t been shot. He had a bad case of hepatitis that often gave him a lot of pain.
“Do you promise not to tell them anything?” Dundun was talking to Mclnnes.
“I don’t think he hears you,” I said.
“Tell them it was an accident, okay?”
Mclnnes said nothing for a long moment. Finally he said, “Okay.”
“Promise?” Dundun said.
But Mclnnes said nothing. Because he was dead.
Dundun looked at me with tears in his eyes. “What do you say?”
“What do you mean, what do I say? Do you think I’m here because I know all about this stuff?”
“He’s dead.”
“All right. I know he’s dead.”
“Throw him out of the car.”
“Damn right throw him out of the car,” I said. “I’m not taking him anywhere now.”
For a moment I fell asleep, right while I was driving. I had a dream in which I was trying to tell someone something and they kept interrupting, a dream about frustration.
“I’m glad he’s dead,” I told Dundun. “He’s the one who started everybody calling me Fuckhead.”
Dundun said, “Don’t let it get you down.”
We whizzed along down through the skeleton remnants of Iowa.
“I wouldn’t mind working as a hit man,” Dundun said.
Glaciers had crushed this region in the time before history. There’d been a drought for years, and a bronze fog of dust stood over the plains. The soybean crop was dead again, and the failed, wilted cornstalks were laid out on the ground like rows of underthings. Most of the farmers didn’t even plant anymore. All the false visions had been erased. It felt like the moment before the Savior comes. And the Savior did come, but we had to wait a long time.
Dundun tortured Jack Hotel at the lake outside of Denver. He did this to get information about a stolen item, a stereo belonging to Dundun’s girlfriend, or perhaps to his sister. Later, Dundun beat a man almost to death with a tire iron right on the street in Austin, Texas, for which he’ll also someday have to answer, but now he is, I think, in the state prison in Colorado.
Will you believe me when I tell you there was kindness in his heart? His left hand didn’t know what his right hand was doing. It was only that certain important connections had been burned through. If I opened up your head and ran a hot soldering iron around in your brain, I might turn you into someone like that.
Work
I’d been staying at the Holiday Inn with my girlfriend, honestly the most beautiful woman I’d ever known, for three days under a phony name, shooting heroin. We made love in the bed, ate steaks at the restaurant, shot up in the john, puked, cried, accused one another, begged of one another, forgave, promised, and carried one another to heaven.
But there was a fight. I stood outside the motel hitchhiking, dressed up in a hurry, shirtless under my jacket, with the wind crying through my earring. A bus came. I climbed aboard and sat on the plastic seat while the things of our city turned in the windows like the images in a slot machine.
Once, as we stood arguing at a streetcorner, I punched her in the stomach. She doubled over and broke down crying. A car full of young college men stopped beside us.
“She’s feeling sick,” I told them.
“Bullshit,” one of them said. “You elbowed her right in the gut.”
“He did, he did, he did,” she said, weeping.
I don’t remember what I said to them. I remember loneliness crushing first my lungs, then my heart, then my balls. They put her in the car with them and drove away.
But she came back.
This morning, after the fight, after sitting on the bus for several blocks with a thoughtless, red mind, I jumped down and walked into the Vine.
The Vine was still and cold. Wayne was the only customer. His hands were shaking. He couldn’t lift his glass.
I put my left hand on Wayne’s shoulder, and with my right, opiated and steady, I brought his shot of bourbon to his lips.
“How would you feel about making some money?” he asked me.
“I was just going to go over here in the corner and nod out,” I informed him.
“I decided,” he said, “in my mind, to make some money.”
“So what?” I said.
“Come with me,” he begged.
“You mean you need a ride.”
“I have the tools,” he said. “All we need is that sorry-ass car of yours to get around in.”
We found my sixty-dollar Chevrolet, the finest and best thing I ever bought, considering the price, in the streets near my apartment. I liked that car. It was the kind of thing you could bang into a phone pole with and nothing would happen at all.
Wayne cradled his burlap sack of tools in his lap as we drove out of town to where the fields bunched up into hills and then dipped down toward a cool river mothered by benevolent clouds.
All the houses on the riverbank—a dozen or so—were abandoned. The same company, you could tell, had built them all, and then painted them four different colors. The windows in the lower stories were empty of glass. We passed alongside them and I saw that the ground floors of these buildings were covered with silt. Sometime back a flood had run over the banks, cancelling everything. But now the river was flat and slow. Willows stroked the waters with their hair.
“Are we doing a burglary?” I asked Wayne.
“You can’t burgulate a forgotten, empty house,” he said, horrified at my stupidity.
I didn’t say anything.
“This is a salvage job,” he said. “Pull up to that one, right about there.”
The house we parked in front of just had a terrible feeling about it. I knocked.
“Don’t do that,” Wayne said. “It’s stupid.”
Inside, our feet kicked up the silt the river had left here. The watermark wandered the walls of the downstairs about three feet above the floor. Straight, stiff grass lay all over the place in bunches, as if someone had stretched them there to dry.
Wayne used a pry bar, and I had a shiny hammer with a blue rubber grip. We put the pry points in the seams of the wall and started tearing away the Sheetrock. It came loose with a noise like old men coughing. Whenever we exposed some of the wiring in its white plastic jacket, we ripped it free of its connections, pulled it out, and bunched it up. That’s what we were after. We intended to sell the copper wire for scrap.
By the time we were on the second floor, I could see we were going to make some money. But I was getting tired. I dropped the hammer, went to the bathroom. I was sweaty and thirsty. But of course the water didn’t work.
I went back to Wayne, standing in one of two small empty bedrooms, and started dancing around and pounding the walls, breaking through the Sheetrock and making a giant racket, until the hammer got stuck. Wayne
ignored this misbehavior.
I was catching my breath.
I asked him, “Who owned these houses, do you think?”
He stopped doing anything. “This is my house.”
“It is?”
“It was.”
He gave the wire a long, smooth yank, a gesture full of the serenity of hatred, popping its staples and freeing it into the room.
We balled up big gobs of wire in the center of each room, working for over an hour. I boosted Wayne through the trapdoor into the attic, and he pulled me up after him, both of us sweating and our pores leaking the poisons of drink, which smelled like old citrus peelings, and we made a mound of white-jacketed wire in the top of his former home, pulling it up out of the floor.
I felt weak. I had to vomit in the corner—just a thimbleful of grey bile. “All this work,” I complained, “is fucking with my high. Can’t you figure out some easier way of making a dollar?”
Wayne went to the window. He rapped it several times with his pry bar, each time harder, until it was loudly destroyed. We threw the stuff out there onto the mud-flattened meadow that came right up below us from the river.
It was quiet in this strange neighborhood along the bank except for the steady breeze in the young leaves. But now we heard a boat coming upstream. The sound curlicued through the riverside saplings like a bee, and in a minute a flat-nosed sports boat cut up the middle of the river going thirty or forty, at least.
This boat was pulling behind itself a tremendous triangular kite on a rope. From the kite, up in the air a hundred feet or so, a woman was suspended, belted in somehow, I would have guessed. She had long red hair. She was delicate and white, and naked except for her beautiful hair. I don’t know what she was thinking as she floated past these ruins.
“What’s she doing?” was all I could say, though we could see that she was flying.
“Now, that is a beautiful sight,” Wayne said.
On the way to town, Wayne asked me to make a long detour onto the Old Highway. He had me pull up to a lopsided farmhouse set on a hill of grass.