The road we were lost on cut straight through the middle of the world. It was still daytime, but the sun had no more power than an ornament or a sponge. In this light the truck’s hood, which had been bright orange, had turned a deep blue.
Georgie let us drift to the shoulder of the road, slowly, slowly, as if he’d fallen asleep or given up trying to find his way.
“What is it?”
“We can’t go on. I don’t have any headlights,” Georgie said.
We parked under a strange sky with a faint image of a quarter-moon superimposed on it.
There was a little woods beside us. This day had been dry and hot, the buck pines and what-all simmering patiently, but as we sat there smoking cigarettes it started to get very cold.
“The summer’s over,” I said.
That was the year when arctic clouds moved down over the Midwest and we had two weeks of winter in September.
“Do you realize it’s going to snow?” Georgie asked me.
He was right, a gun-blue storm was shaping up. We got out and walked around idiotically. The beautiful chill! That sudden crispness, and the tang of evergreen stabbing us!
The gusts of snow twisted themselves around our heads while the night fell. I couldn’t find the truck. We just kept getting more and more lost. I kept calling, “Georgie, can you see?” and he kept saying, “See what? See what?”
The only light visible was a streak of sunset flickering below the hem of the clouds. We headed that way.
We bumped softly down a hill toward an open field that seemed to be a military graveyard, filled with rows and rows of austere, identical markers over soldiers’ graves. I’d never before come across this cemetery. On the farther side of the field, just beyond the curtains of snow, the sky was torn away and the angels were descending out of a brilliant blue summer, their huge faces streaked with light and full of pity. The sight of them cut through my heart and down the knuckles of my spine, and if there’d been anything in my bowels I would have messed my pants from fear.
Georgie opened his arms and cried out, “It’s the drive-in, man!”
“The drive-in …” I wasn’t sure what these words meant.
“They’re showing movies in a fucking blizzard!” Georgie screamed.
“I see. I thought it was something else,” I said.
We walked carefully down there and climbed through the busted fence and stood in the very back. The speakers, which I’d mistaken for grave markers, muttered in unison. Then there was tinkly music, of which I could very nearly make out the tune. Famous movie stars rode bicycles beside a river, laughing out of their gigantic, lovely mouths. If anybody had come to see this show, they’d left when the weather started. Not one car remained, not even a broken-down one from last week, or one left here because it was out of gas. In a couple of minutes, in the middle of a whirling square dance, the screen turned black, the cinematic summer ended, the snow went dark, there was nothing but my breath.
“I’m starting to get my eyes back,” Georgie said in another minute.
A general greyness was giving birth to various shapes, it was true. “But which ones are close and which ones are far off?” I begged him to tell me.
By trial and error, with a lot of walking back and forth in wet shoes, we found the truck and sat inside it shivering.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said.
“We can’t go anywhere without headlights.”
“We’ve gotta get back. We’re a long way from home.”
“No, we’re not.”
“We must have come three hundred miles.”
“We’re right outside town, Fuckhead. We’ve just been driving around and around.”
“This is no place to camp. I hear the Interstate over there.”
“We’ll just stay here till it gets late. We can drive home late. We’ll be invisible.”
We listened to the big rigs going from San Francisco to Pennsylvania along the Interstate, like shudders down a long hacksaw blade, while the snow buried us.
Eventually Georgie said, “We better get some milk for those bunnies.”
“We don’t have milk,” I said.
“We’ll mix sugar up with it.”
“Will you forget about this milk all of a sudden?”
“They’re mammals, man.”
“Forget about those rabbits.”
“Where are they, anyway?”
“You’re not listening to me. I said, ‘Forget the rabbits.’”
“Where are they?”
The truth was I’d forgotten all about them, and they were dead.
“They slid around behind me and got squashed,” I said tearfully.
“They slid around behind?”
He watched while I pried them out from behind my back.
I picked them out one at a time and held them in my hands and we looked at them. There were eight. They weren’t any bigger than my fingers, but everything was there.
Little feet! Eyelids! Even whiskers! “Deceased,” I said.
Georgie asked, “Does everything you touch turn to shit? Does this happen to you every time?”
“No wonder they call me Fuckhead.”
“It’s a name that’s going to stick.”
“I realize that.”
“‘Fuckhead’ is gonna ride you to your grave.”
“I just said so. I agreed with you in advance,” I said.
Or maybe that wasn’t the time it snowed. Maybe it was the time we slept in the truck and I rolled over on the bunnies and flattened them. It doesn’t matter. What’s important for me to remember now is that early the next morning the snow was melted off the windshield and the daylight woke me up. A mist covered everything and, with the sunshine, was beginning to grow sharp and strange. The bunnies weren’t a problem yet, or they’d already been a problem and were already forgotten, and there was nothing on my mind. I felt the beauty of the morning. I could understand how a drowning man might suddenly feel a deep thirst being quenched. Or how the slave might become a friend to his master. Georgie slept with his face right on the steering wheel.
I saw bits of snow resembling an abundance of blossoms on the stems of the drive-in speakers—no, revealing the blossoms that were always there. A bull elk stood still in the pasture beyond the fence, giving off an air of authority and stupidity. And a coyote jogged across the pasture and faded away among the saplings.
That afternoon we got back to work in time to resume everything as if it had never stopped happening and we’d never been anywhere else.
“The Lord,” the intercom said, “is my shepherd.” It did that each evening because this was a Catholic hospital. “Our Father, who art in Heaven,” and so on.
“Yeah, yeah,” Nurse said.
The man with the knife in his head, Terrence Weber, was released around suppertime. They’d kept him overnight and given him an eyepatch—all for no reason, really.
He stopped off at E.R. to say goodbye. “Well, those pills they gave me make everything taste terrible,” he said.
“It could have been worse,” Nurse said.
“Even my tongue.”
“It’s just a miracle you didn’t end up sightless or at least dead,” she reminded him.
The patient recognized me. He acknowledged me with a smile. “I was peeping on the lady next door while she was out there sunbathing,” he said. “My wife decided to blind me.”
He shook Georgie’s hand. Georgie didn’t know him. “Who are you supposed to be?” he asked Terrence Weber.
Some hours before that, Georgie had said something that had suddenly and completely explained the difference between us. We’d been driving back toward town, along the Old Highway, through the flatness. We picked up a hitchhiker, a boy I knew. We stopped the truck and the boy climbed slowly up out of the fields as out of the mouth of a volcano. His name was Hardee. He looked even worse than we probably did.
“We got messed up and slept in the truck all night,” I told Hardee.
/> “I had a feeling,” Hardee said. “Either that or, you know, driving a thousand miles.”
“That too,” I said.
“Or you’re sick or diseased or something.”
“Who’s this guy?” Georgie asked.
“This is Hardee. He lived with me last summer. I found him on the doorstep. What happened to your dog?” I asked Hardee.
“He’s still down there.”
“Yeah, I heard you went to Texas.”
“I was working on a bee farm,” Hardee said.
“Wow. Do those things sting you?”
“Not like you’d think,” Hardee said. “You’re part of their daily drill. It’s all part of a harmony.”
Outside, the same identical stretch of ground repeatedly rolled past our faces. The day was cloudless, blinding. But Georgie said, “Look at that,” pointing straight ahead of us.
One star was so hot it showed, bright and blue, in the empty sky.
“I recognized you right away,” I told Hardee. “But what happened to your hair? Who chopped it off?”
“I hate to say.”
“Don’t tell me.”
“They drafted me.”
“Oh no.”
“Oh yeah. I’m AWOL. I’m bad AWOL. I got to get to Canada.”
“Oh, that’s terrible,” I said to Hardee.
“Don’t worry,” Georgie said. “We’ll get you there.”
“How?”
“Somehow. I think I know some people. Don’t worry. You’re on your way to Canada.”
That world! These days it’s all been erased and they’ve rolled it up like a scroll and put it away somewhere. Yes, I can touch it with my fingers. But where is it?
After a while Hardee asked Georgie, “What do you do for a job,” and Georgie said, “I save lives.”
Dirty Wedding
I liked to sit up front and ride the fast ones all day long, I liked it when they brushed right up against the buildings north of the Loop and I especially liked it when the buildings dropped away into that bombed-out squalor a little farther north in which people (through windows you’d see a person in his dirty naked kitchen spooning soup toward his face, or twelve children on their bellies on the floor, watching television, but instantly they were gone, wiped away by a movie billboard of a woman winking and touching her upper lip deftly with her tongue, and she in turn erased by a—wham, the noise and dark dropped down around your head—tunnel) actually lived.
I was twenty-five, twenty-six, something like that. My fingertips were all yellow from smoking. My girlfriend was with child.
It cost fifty cents, ninety cents, a dollar to ride the train. I really don’t remember.
Out in front of the abortion building picketers shook drops of holy water at us and twisted their rosaries around their fingers. A man in dark glasses shadowed Michelle right up the big steps to the door, chanting softly in her ear. I guess he was praying. What were the words of his prayer? I wouldn’t mind asking her that question. But it’s winter, the mountains around me are tall and deep with snow, and I could never find her now.
Michelle handed her appointment card to the nurse on the third floor. She and the nurse went through a curtain together.
I wandered over across the hall where they were showing a short movie about vasectomies. Much later I told her that I’d actually gotten a vasectomy a long time ago, and somebody else must have made her pregnant. I also told her once that I had inoperable cancer and would soon be passed away and gone, eternally. But nothing I could think up, no matter how dramatic or completely horrible, ever made her repent or love me the way she had at first, before she really knew me.
Anyway they showed the movie to two or three or four of us who were waiting for women across the hall. The scene was cloudy in my sight because I was frightened of whatever they were doing to Michelle and to the other women and of course to the little fetuses. After the film I talked to a man about vasectomies. A man with a mustache. I didn’t like him.
“You have to be sure,” he said.
“I’m never getting anybody pregnant again. I know that much.”
“Would you like to make an appointment?”
“Would you like to give me the money?”
“It won’t take long to save the money.”
“It would take me forever to save the money,” I corrected him.
Then I sat down in the waiting area across the hall. In forty-five minutes the nurse came out and said to me, “Michelle is comfortable now.”
“Is she dead?”
“Of course not.”
“I kind of wish she was.”
She looked frightened. “I don’t know what you mean.”
I went in through the curtain to see Michelle. She smelled bad.
“How are you feeling?”
“I feel fine.”
“What did they stick up you?”
“What?” she said. “What?”
The nurse said, “Hey. Out of here. Out of here.”
She went through the curtain and came back with a big black guy wearing a starched white shirt and one of those phony gold badges. “I don’t think this man needs to be in the building,” she said to him, and then she said to me, “Would you like to wait outside, sir?”
“Yeah yeah yeah,” I said, and all the way down the big stairs and out the front I said, “Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah.”
It was raining outdoors and most of the Catholics were squashed up under an awning next door with their signs held overhead against the weather. They splashed holy water on my cheek and on the back of my neck, and I didn’t feel a thing. Not for many years.
I didn’t know what to do now except ride around on the elevated train.
I stepped into one of the cars just as the doors closed; as though the train had waited just for me.
What if there was just snow? Snow everywhere, cold and white, filling every distance? And I just follow my sense of things through this winter until I reach a grove of white trees. And she takes me in.
The wheels screamed, and all I saw suddenly was everybody’s big ugly shoes. The sound stopped. We passed solitary, wrenching scenes.
Through the neighborhoods and past the platforms, I felt the cancelled life dreaming after me. Yes, a ghost. A vestige. Something remaining.
At one of the stops down the line there was a problem with the doors. We were delayed, those of us who had destinations, anyway. The train waited and waited in a troubling sleep. Then it hummed softly. You can tell it’s going to move before it moves.
A guy stepped in just as the doors closed. The train had waited for him all this time, not a second longer than his arrival, not even half a second, and then it broke the mysterious crystal of its inertia. We’d picked him up and now we were moving. He sat down near the front of the car, completely unaware of his importance. With what kind of miserable or happy fate did he have an appointment across the river?
I decided to follow him.
Several stops later he left the train and went down into a section of squat, repetitive brownstone buildings.
He walked with a bounce, his shoulders looped and his chin scooping forward rhythmically. He didn’t look right or left. I supposed he’d walked this route twelve thousand times. He didn’t sense or feel me following half a block behind him.
It was a Polish neighborhood somewhere or other. The Polish neighborhoods have that snow. They have that fruit with the light on it, they have that music you can’t find. We ended up in a laundromat, where the guy took off his shirt and put it in a washer. He bought some coffee in a paper cup out of a coin machine.
He read the notices on the wall and watched his machine tremble, walking around the place with only his sharkskin sports jacket on. His chest was narrow and white and hair sprouted from around the small nipples.
There were a couple of other men in the laundromat. He chatted with them a little. I could hear one of them say, “The cops wanted to talk to Benny.”
??
?How come? What’d he do?”
“He had a hood up. They were looking for a guy with a hood up.”
“What’d he do?”
“Nut’n. Nut’n. Some guy got murdered last night.”
And now the man I was following walked right up to me. “You were on the El,” he said. He hefted his cup, tossing a sip of coffee between his lips.
I turned away because my throat was closing up. Suddenly I had an erection. I knew men got that way about men, but I didn’t know I did. His chest was like Christ’s. That’s probably who he was.
I could have followed anybody off that train. It would have been the same.
I got back on to ride around some more above the streets.
There was nothing stopping me from going back to where Michelle and I were staying, but these days had reduced us to the Rebel Motel. The maids spat out their chew in the shower stalls. There was a smell of insecticide. I wasn’t going back there to sit in the room and wait.
Michelle and I had our drama. It got very dreary sometimes, but it felt like I had to have her. As long as there was one other person at these motels who knew my real name.
Out back they had all these Dumpsters stuffed with God knows what. We can’t imagine the shape of our fate, that’s for sure.
Think of being curled up and floating in a darkness. Even if you could think, even if you had an imagination, would you ever imagine its opposite, this miraculous world the Asian Taoists call the “Ten Thousand Things”? And if the darkness just got darker? And then you were dead?
What would you care? How would you even know the difference?
I sat up front. Right beside me was the little cubicle filled with the driver. You could feel him materializing and dematerializing in there. In the darkness under the universe it didn’t matter that the driver was a blind man. He felt the future with his face. And suddenly the train hushed as if the wind had been kicked out of it, and we came into the evening again.