In the morning his bedroom was muffled. He sat up, looked at the watch on the bedside chair and saw half past seven, full day and yet the room was dim. He could barely hear the wind, but he could feel it in the tremor of the bed. The window was covered with something, something like a choke of willow in spring runoff. He went to it and stared, drawn face reflecting in the glass, recognized tumbleweed, tumbleweed massed up against the second-story window.
All across the open land the wind had driven the balls of weeds, herding them until they hung up on barbwire or jammed against buildings and corrals, extending out into barrier reefs. He went downstairs. Pitch dark. He could not get the kitchen door open. He threw his weight against it. It gave an inch or two, then bounced back like a rubber door. He turned on the radio but the power was out.
Back upstairs a clearer light came from under the door of the spare room. This window, on the lee side of the house, was empty. He looked out. The wind was still streaming across the prairie, tumbleweed vaulting through dust. Tumbleweed was packed up ten feet and more below him, forced around the corner of the house from the weed-flooded yard at the front. He didn’t want to shinny down a rope of sheets into the tangle below, then fight to where the front door had been the night before and wrestle tumbleweeds as big as trucks, but he couldn’t think of another way. Take down part of the fence, maybe, so the weed could pass through.
Coming down the sheets he heard the sirens off to the west. Somebody hit one of those things at speed on the road and it would turn you over he thought. The sheet twisted on its knots. Never get them knots undone, he mumbled under his breath, and felt the hump of tumbleweed quiver beneath his feet.
The yard was filled with tumbleweed balls as big as chairs, as big as cars. The fence was down. The fence was the problem. It had funneled the weed to the house. His truck was in the weed. He could see the glint of glass, but couldn’t work through the wiry Turk’s head knots of twisted stems. The wind still rolled them along. He saw the great balls bound on the highway. He heaved at a cluster on the edge of the yard but they were knit together, springy and resilient. And dry as a bone. The brown stems cracked in his hand, powder spilled from the pith.
‘I’ll need a goddamn backhoe to get out of this.’ The dog was barking inside the house. ‘Unless you’re smart enough to climb down a knotted sheet that’s where you’re going to stay for a while,’ he called. The sirens wailed again and he looked west in the direction of the sound. There was a pillar of smoke. Was Shears on fire? Was Jase gone wild? He started to run along the road, looking back over his shoulder to flag a ride when someone came along.
It was a stake truck from Wallace Doffin’s dude ranch, the Walldolf Astoria. Wally himself, seventy years old, clenched the steering wheel, peered at Loyal from under his ruined Stetson.
‘Well, where’s your truck, Mr. Blood? She break down on you?’ His jocular voice boomed.
‘Damn tumbleweed’s jammed all around it, jammed the front door, jammed the yard out to the fence.’
‘I’ve always favored a door that opens in, Mr. Blood. It seems best in heavy snowfall country or when you’re under attack by the tumbleweed. I take it you are offering succor?’
‘I’m offering to find out if that smoke is coming from Shears.’ The pale smoke writhed in the wind.
‘Oh, it’s not Shears’s place, Mr. Blood, not yet, anyway. In about half an hour perhaps it will be. It’s the McDonald’s.’ The milky eyes peered forward at the shifting haze, ‘If I was you, I’d be worried, Mr. Blood. Your place is due east of Shears’s. But then, you have no stock.’
‘Three miles east. Like to hope it’s not coming that far. And I got fifty leghorns.’
‘Oh, leghorns. Prime stock, I imagine. Hope and pray, Mr. Blood. She could be at your place in an hour.’ He slowed as they neared Shears’s turn-in. A cacophony of squeak swelled from the hogs. Old Shears and his two wheat-farmer sons were goading the animals into a truck as fast as they could work. Orson ran over.
‘Jesus Christ I’m glad to see you Wally, you too, Blood. We got to get ’em out as fast as we can. The goddamn fire’s all over the place.’
Jase and old Shears prodded the panicky hogs up the ramp. Loyal looked at Jase. He glanced up, nodded.
‘Hurry up, hurry up, hurry up!’
‘Dad, might have to let the rest go, let them take their chances.’ The wall-eyed Pego, his face transformed by the seriousness of the danger into a red mask glazed with sweat.
‘Chances? Unless there’s a pig here can run sevendy mile an hour, his chances is fuck-all he roast while he run. I ruther get ’em down to the pond. I seen pigs come through a fire by going in a pond. You go open that pond gate, we’ll see if we can’t get them down there by the truck. They can make it in the pond. If they can make it anywhere.’
‘Mr. Shears, I sent word down the line that you needed trucks here. We will see reinforcements soon.’ Doffin’s courtly voice.
Loyal was puzzled by the Shears’s mad haste, the hogs ricocheting off the walls of the pens. He looked west again toward the smoke, saw a brown wall and at its base dots of sparking fire.
‘There’s one!’ shouted Shears, pointing. One of the dots rolled obliquely across the highway and hit the fence. A string of smoke rose from it. Loyal saw that the tumbleweed was on fire, globes of flame running before the wind.
Under the sound of wind and crackling they hardly heard the two stock trucks come in from the east, the biggest one driven by Pearly-Lee, Dirty David’s cigar-smoking wife.
‘Hey, I heard you got some hogs you might want moved?’ she screeched at old Shears, laughed. As soon as Jase moved the filled truck out she began maneuvering the truck into place. Dirty David slid out of the cab while the truck was still moving.
‘We’n carry most of them hogs. Dunno about your buildings. Fire department’s spread kind of thin this morning. Son of a bitsie manager over to the McDonald’s found the weed all bunched up in his parkin’ lot, throwed some gasoline on, tried to blowtorch the suckers. Blew his clothes off. They hauled him over to the hospital, more dead than alive, goddamn easterner.’
A third truck pulled in, a pickup with flanks scarred like those of an ancient bison, windshield pocked with stellate bullet holes, shotgun and rifle in the window rack. It dribbled oil, curved across the yard with a drag of blue smoke. The back rattled like the traps of hell, two empty pails knocking against the snarl of chain, crowbar, toolbox, spare tire worn down to the fabric, empty wheel rims, broken bottles, come-along, posthole digger, oil cans, dented gas tank, loose hay, wads of feed sacks, rope, all on a bed of caked manure. Loyal recognized two of Jase’s crazy VA hospital cronies, Wee Willy, the size and shape of a refrigerator with a matted beard like a floor mop and Albert Cugg who seemed fashioned from bleached mud. They were drunk and enflamed with the excitement of peril, absent too long from their lives. Wee Willy steered the truck through Shears’s gates and out onto the prairie, northwest toward the point of the fire’s advance. The line of fire slanted like the edge of a guillotine blade from the McDonald’s lot out onto the open ground to the northeast.
‘See what them bastards are doin’?’ shouted Dirty Dave without sailing his jerking wrist, the limber rod urging the hogs up the ramp. Half a mile out the pickup bounced north across the ruts, lingered, turned and cut southwest, turned and wobbled north, working closer to the fire with every run.
‘Them nuts is havin’ a roundup!’ bellowed Dirty Dave, pushing the gate closed on the last hogs. ‘They gonna get that one!’
In the distance a burning tumbleweed rolled out ahead of the fire. The pickup swerved and ran alongside the fiery mass. Albert Cugg hung out of the window, something in his hands. A plume of vapor blasted the tumbleweed. The weed poured out sullen smoke then dared again as the wind breathed through it. The pickup turned and came for another pass. They could hear Wee Willy booming ‘Olé!’ and pounding on the door with the heel of his leathery hand. Cugg screamed victoriously.
More fi
reballs leaped out of the wall of flame. The pickup wheeled. They saw Cugg toss the extinguisher away and come up with another from inside the cab. Wee Willy drove daringly, swooping between tumbleweeds, forcing them apart, then herding each to a good position for Cugg to drown its fire.
‘Hell good is that gonna do,’ said old Shears, turning his back on the pickup and flapping his hand at Dirty Dave to haul the hogs. He missed the sight of Wee Willy’s too-tight turn that faded to butt a tumbleweed the size of a baby’s playpen off the port fender and instead brought the truck squarely over the burning mass. It hung up underneath, and for a few seconds they saw the underside of the truck transfigured with pointed flames like the spinal plates of a stegosaur, saw Albert Cugg’s door open and his leg extend, before the gas tank exploded.
‘Ju-HEE-sus!’ Dirty Dave saw the black and orange chrysanthemum in his rearview mirror. Loyal jumped in Wally Doffin’s stake truck and turned it around. The old man did in beside him. Jase leaped onto the running board on Loyal’s tide, his right arm behind Loyal’s shoulders, gripping the metal rim of the seat back, his chest filling the side window. If Loyal wanted, he could bite the buttons off Jase’s shirt.
‘Now take it easy, Mr. Blood. If they’re dead, they’re dead, and if they’re alive we’ll get there. This truck is old so take it e-e-easy.’
Cugg was not dead. The clothes on his left side smoldered and stank, his hair was charred and he said he was deaf, but in a few minutes he was able to stand up and wet his pants.
‘Somehow I knew the day was gonna go like this,’ he said, staring at them with eyes full of tears and fumbling for a cigarette where his shirt pocket had been a few minutes earlier.
Wee Willy, on the far side of the truck, had shoved the door open, jumped and rolled the second he knew he’d cut it too close. The blast set the soles of his boots on fire and rained metal fragments onto him. A hot valve spring burned into his cheek and branded him with a scar that gave him the new nickname ‘Springs.’
‘I been needin’ a new truck anyway,’ he said hoarsely. Jase began to laugh, then Loyal and finally Wally Doffin, crazy, uncontrolled laughing. They loaded Cugg and Willy into the back of the stake truck and bumped back to Shears. Jase rode in back with Cugg and Willy, his head down against the wind, passing a joint to the wounded. The fire turned with the shifting wind and pointed now like a long arrow almost due north where tractors were plowing a firebreak.
‘I’d almost be tempted to unload them pigs again,’ said old man Shears. ‘That fire won’t come down here now unless the wind shifts all the way around full circle. I don’t know what we was in such an all-fired goddamn rush for, anyhow. On the other hand, you can’t never be sure, so maybe I ought to just ship them out now. I was goin’ to do in a few weeks anyway. But I’m sure to lose some of them hogs. They ain’t been fed up and watered the way I want, and of course their weight is not what it should be.’
‘Mr. Blood.’ Old Doffin tipping his frazzled hat with the snakeskin band, watching the hogs surge in the stock truck compartments, I suppose, on the way to dropping these boys off we could go and haul your truck out of the weed now, rescue the leghorns.’
‘Obliged to you,’ answered Loyal. ‘There’s a dog as well. Stuck in the house unless she’s learned to fly.’
‘Many dream, few manage it,’ said Doffin.
They dragged tumbleweed away from Loyal’s truck for twenty minutes until the back bumper of the truck was in reach. The dog was barking hysterically inside the house. As he looped the hook of the chain around the bumper and shouted at old Wally to ease it away, Loyal caught the smell of smoke, stronger. The wind had been hitting obliquely at his left side as he worked, but now it was coming against his face; he had not noticed the shift.
He looked north. The tractors plowing a firebreak were turning back. The fire had jumped the line and was sending advance scouts of tumbleweed curving past them to the southeast, cutting around Shears’s place in a great arc, but sailing toward Loyal’s bean fields like great fiery bees. The closest were half a mile away.
‘Wally! It’s comin’ this way again.’
The old man got out of his truck and stared.
‘I hope you got insurance, Mr. Blood. I believe it’s going to get into your beans. Let’s give a yank on that truck and see if we can get it free. Then you better skedaddle out of here and pray. You can stay over with us if you want. Plenty of room.’ He dragged the pickup out of its weed nest.
‘The keys are in the house. I got to get the dog out.’ The first flames were in the bean fields, crackling strips of fire starting to run down the rows, rows of white smoke puffing up behind the flames. Tumbleweed still jammed the door. The old man was impatient.
‘We don’t have time. Put your pickup in neutral and get in here with me. I’ll pull it.’ The crackling of the bean field was a roar. Loyal could feel the heat a quarter of a mile away. He threw the pickup in neutral.
‘I got to try for my dog. If you have to go, then go, but I got to try.’
The old man pulled onto the highway, ready to step on it. Loyal was at the back of the house staring up at the open window with its dangling sheets. A veil of smoke enveloped the house.
‘Little Girl! Come on! Little Girl.’ She barked crazily, but the barking was muffled. He thought she was down in the kitchen at the front door.
He picked up stones and threw them into the open upstairs window. If she heard them that might bring her up the stairs and to the window.
‘Come on! Come on!’ He whistled. She stopped barking. Wally lay on the horn and raced the stake truck’s motor. He shouted something Loyal could not hear. The dog was at the window.
‘Come on, Little Girl. Jump! Jump. Come on!’ She would not come. He saw her black front paws on the sill, heard her whine, then she dropped back to the floor and disappeared. The stake truck was creeping along the highway now, fading and reappearing in the smoke, Wally pounding on the horn with the side of his fist. A fiery bean stem and leaf floated past and touched down on the far side of the house. Loyal went for the truck, calling Little Girl as he ran.
He had the passenger door open and was up on the running board when Wally hit the brakes.
‘Sweetness and Light! After all that be a shame if I was to run over her, wouldn’t it.’
The dog was in the cab, trembling, working her tail like a windshield wiper.
‘She sailed outa the smoke like she was shot out of a slingshot.’ The old man put his foot to the floor and the stake truck picked up speed. Loyal craned around, looking out the rear window, but they were two miles east before he saw the flame of the house shoot up in the smoke. He kept his hand on the dog’s neck, quieting her tremors. Down to a truck and a dog. Not even a change of clothes.
‘Yes, a man works from can see to can’t see and this is what he gets,’ intoned Wally. ‘I guess you had some kind of insurance, didn’t you, Mr. Blood?’
There wasn’t much to say.
35
What I See
The gopher shell yuk-chop-a-lund-kies hissing, the shrill whistles, the needles, blood, blood, O Chief Billy Bowlegs, still undefeated, the Seminoles, decked in the crimson vests and spangled capes, still dance the Green Corn Dance. But cowboy it up, too, blat through the saw grass with airboats, lure tourists with colored beads from Taiwan and alligator wrestles. Flat black eyes watch back.
Poling through the Green Swamp on a clay’s outing, Pala’s unbraided hair shimmering in front of him, her brother Guillermo – Bill – the man of action, behind him, Dub feels the canoe slip through the tea-colored water, sees the water ruptured by iridescent gas bubbles, patterned by the checkerboard backs and wood-knot eyes of alligators, clouds of egrets slanting out of the choked trees. He breathes this stench of decay and the green light, the hanging moss, the spiderwebs stretched across the channels. Orchids. He shivers still at the sight of the fleshy blossoms in the end of his binoculars. The plangent call of rain crows under the long layers of clouds like pressed b
lack linen. Bill slaps at mosquitoes.
‘Pala, you like this?’ He has to hear it.
‘Yes. It’s beautiful, and very strange.’ She turns and smiles at him, mosquitoes are enmeshed in her hair.
‘I must of come here a hundred times.’
This swamp is still itself in the red wilderness of development. Once he has heard a panther cough. Here, no men in mango beach pants, women with gasping mouths, nor bulldozers, drop-jaw technology nor the plastic fantasies. He’s been in on the years of secret negotiations, the meetings in motels with purchasers disguised as traveling salesmen or graduate students in environmental studies. The Reedy Creek Improvement District. Disney World they will call it when it’s done. Expensive plastic shit, he thinks. But winks and says to himself, thanks a million.
Later they slide back into the dangerous city, dodging along the highways, back to the smell of coffee and sweet cigars, the yellow sign ‘BARRA ABIERTA,’ the colored lights, rich smell of palomilla steak. Along the streets Dub sees the parade of bright dresses, gold chains and sequins. Above the city a fan of clouds like crimson knife blades, below, marble sidewalk. He passes a window, and in it an antique gramophone horn with painted morning glories surging out of its throat. I love this, he thinks, the shriek of jets, statues with flowery garlands, the front yard layaway saints lit with pink neon and the flashbulbs of tourists, windows heaped with conch shells, the raw bars and imitation shrunken heads, fish baskets and painted textiles and the funky music, the wild toughs, the deals and dirt, the eroding beaches, the sense of being in a foreign and lethal place. Home.
This dark urb, the hot slums of Liberty City and Overtown and the Black Grove. Yet he loves even the demonic riots that erupt like boils, does not shrink from the photographs of bloody corpses. All of it, the stinking money jammed into orifices, the street music and street food fading, fading into creamy women, dark hair, hands weighed with opal cuffs, and men wearing handmade shoes, delight or rage twisting their burnished faces; if he looked until his eyes crossed he could hardly take in all that was there.