It was at that moment that he heard someone exclaim in a loud, southern American voice, “See ya later, alligator!”
Shielding his eyes, Dickie, still singing, squinted at the front door to see what fellow countryman his horrid rendition of “Blue Christmas” was driving from the premises—praying all the while that it was not a man who might have recognized him. As it turned out, the remark had issued not from someone departing the restaurant but from someone entering. Specifically, from a monk in a saffron robe, with a strange saffron silk scarf around his head.
With a theatrical gesture, the newcomer tore off the scarf, revealing long sideburns and a puffy black cumulus of pomaded hair. In a flash, he slipped out of the monk robe, beneath which he wore a tight-fitting jumpsuit as sparkly and white as frozen milk. (He left on his monk sandals, but they happened to have been painted silver.) The diners’ murmurs escalated when a boy came through the door and handed over the guitar that, out in the streets, he’d been pretending was his.
No longer incognito, Elvisuit sprang onstage, nudged Dickie aside with a bony elbow (except for his hair and sideburns, the skinny little Thai resembled the late Mother Teresa as much as the late Mr. Presley), and bellowed out what was apparently his signature greeting: “See ya later, alligator!”
Then, as Dickie shambled back to his table, Elvisuit commenced crooning “Blue Christmas,” taking up right where Dickie had left off. It was obvious that he was singing it phonetically, comprehending scarcely a word (for him as for the Buddhists in the audience, Christmas was one of the peculiar American preoccupations—such as handguns, lawn care, and psychoanalysis—about which the Thai maintained a minimum of curiosity), yet he sang it so flawlessly, so exactly, so note-perfect, one could close one’s eyes and believe that the Memphis King, like his rival, the King of the Jews, had risen from the tomb.
Dickie’s pent-up laughter evaporated without a single snicker. Did he feel chagrined? Somewhat, and embarrassed, as well. That, however, was not the worst of it. He noticed that Elvisuit kept a beeper attached to his guitar strap—so that he could be instantly summoned to the next gig.
This cat, thought Dickie, must play ten venues a night. Hell, twenty! As a means of locating Xing, Elvisuit was about as useful as a pocket road map of Venezuela.
No sooner had he suffered that realization than it occurred to Dickie that since he’d requested Elvisuit’s performance there, the restaurant was probably going to charge him for it. Such a fee could easily run as high as a hundred dollars (or its equivalent), not including tip. And this on top of the dinner and the drinks. Should he object, management would call the police, and that would never do. It was then that he decided to bolt.
Waiting until the owner and the waiter had their backs turned, he rose unsteadily and made as if he were going to the toilet. Elvisuit had segued into “Blue Hawaii,” and Dickie swayed unintentionally in time to the music. When he came alongside the front door, he rushed it. Whump! Unfortunately, he had run head-on into a customer who was entering.
For a moment, the two seemed entangled. Dickie tried to break free, but the man had grabbed hold of his bush shirt. Unable to pull away and complete his escape, the normally mild-tempered Dickie, in full panic now, drew back his arm to throw a punch. It was then that, for the first time, he looked at the man’s grinning face.
It was his border guide. It was Xing.
Knock! Knock!
“Who’s there?”
“It’s me. I lost my key. Let me in quick! I have to tinkle.”
Pru opened the door. “Tinkle?” Pru asked, scowling. “That’s a preschool potty word.”
“Who cares?” said Bootsey, brushing past her sister and heading for the bathroom, where she remained for what seemed an inordinately long time.
Knock! Knock!
“Who’s there?”
“Now who you think would be knocking on our bathroom door? Edgar Allan Poe? What’s taking you so long?”
“I’ve got other issues. Something I ate for lunch.”
“Well, I’ve got some stuff to tell you. I got the job.”
Through the door Bootsey asked, “What job?”
“At the circus. They called this morning. It doesn’t pay much, and it’s only for a few days, but it ought to be fun.”
“That’s great. Maybe you can get me a pass. I wouldn’t mind seeing those adorable little animals, the funny ones with the snouts, those katoonies.”
“I think they’re called tazukies.” Pru paused. “There’s something else. A man stopped by. From the government, apparently. He wants us to come to San Francisco. Right away. I think it’s about Dern.”
On the other side of the door, there was silence. Then, finally, the familiar sound of water being strangled by a jealous lover. The old-fashioned flush.
Knock! Knock!
“Who’s there?”
“It’s me.”
“Pardon?”
“Stub, it’s me. It’s Dickie.”
“Ah, Goldwire. Back so soon from the numinous nexus of nirvanic nookie, Buddha’s boisterous bordello?”
“I had to get back. There’s a reason.”
“Lan, unlatch the door for Monsieur Goldwire. You can come in, Dickie, but you’ll have to be quiet. You’re interrupting us here.”
The door was heavy, fashioned from reddish tropical hardwood into which had been carved folk heroes and a procession of pachyderms, a reminder of the time when Laos was known as “The Land of a Million Elephants.” On its huge brass hinges, the door opened slowly, gracefully, almost luxuriously, gliding open despite its weight, like a beefy dowager who hasn’t forgotten her finishing-school drill.
Coming in from brilliant sunlight, Dickie was momentarily sightless in the dim, cavernous parlor. “This is important, Stub,” he said, directing his words into darkness. “It’s urgent.”
“Now, Goldwire.” Dickie couldn’t see Stubblefield’s serene, sagacious yet somehow ever ironic smile—but he could tell it was there. “You know well enough that nothing’s ever urgent in our little green mousehole in the opium closet of the world. I’m just winding up my lecture. Go to my study and I’ll be with you shortly.”
If you had any idea what I went through to get here when I did, thought Dickie. On his behalf, let us list the highlights of his ordeal:
1. Xing had coerced him into returning to his table in the restaurant, where he drank more whiskey and did, indeed, end up paying a considerable amount of Elvisuit’s command performance fee.
2. Riding to the Green Spider on the back of Xing’s motorcycle, he spotted Miss Ginger Sweetie on a corner and made Xing pull over. She looked so pretty, so demure, so vulnerable, so tired—and drunkenly, he gave her the little that remained of his bankroll, bidding her to go home and sleep. Miss Ginger Sweetie threw her arms around him, nearly knocking the motorcycle over in the process. “Okay, Dickie, I go sleep. No problem. Thank you, darling. You sleep, too. Okay? No go dream school.” He watched her until the bike carried him out of range.
3. Early morning, broke now, he crossed the lobby as nonchalantly as possible, his belongings stuffed in his guitar case, his backpack abandoned, aware that running out on the bill meant he could never stay at the Green Spider again.
4. With a hangover that could have been productively employed in the Inquisition, he spent the next fourteen hours aboard Xing’s speeding Yamaha, a spine-chattering, hemorrhoid-inflating experience that, itself, might have been put to torturous use by a Church with a novel interpretation of the Sixth Commandment.
5. Next to a water buffalo and her calf, he tried to nap for a few hours in a shed in Xing’s village while waiting for the moon to set.
6. He handed over his prized new guitar to Xing when the irate smuggler refused to extend him credit for the border crossing.
7. Lying on his back beneath a blanket that smelled worse than the buffalos, he was rowed across the Mekong River and dropped off, wet and reeking, at a spot where he was assured there would be no bo
rder guards.
8. Jittery to the bone at the prospect of stepping on a cobra, he walked for two hours over marshy terrain to the place where he’d hidden his own small motorbike.
9. Having run out of gas after thirty or so miles, he pushed the bike for another five miles to a gas station—a “gas station” in rural Laos consisting of a low wooden table behind which a woman sat, watching over maybe a half-dozen plastic Evian bottles refilled with low-octane petrol. Dickie traded the woman his leather belt, his empty wallet, and his high-school graduation ring for two quart-bottles of fuel, then putted off on another long ride.
10. The last four miles to Fan Nan Nan (or “La Vallée du Cirque”) had to be covered on foot, as the trail was too steep and rugged for even a motorbike. When at last he arrived at the lovely little hill town, he did not even stop by his house to wash, eat, or change clothes, but set out immediately for Villa Incognito, a matter of only a few hundred yards, yet, from Dickie’s perspective, the most harrowing part of the entire journey from Bangkok.
During the monsoon-enforced lull in the Southeast Asian circus season, many of the more famous or unusual acts, such as Madame Ko and her tumbling tanukis, had taken jobs with European or North American shows, but a few performers, primarily old-timers, had returned to the cooler, drier elevations of Fan Nan Nan to relax or work on their routines. It was one of those veteran aerialists who agreed to push Dickie in a wooden wheelbarrow across the slender cable that connected Fan Nan Nan with Villa Incognito.
In many respects, Dickie Goldwire was a devil-may-care sort of guy. Put him in a warplane in a combat zone and he was as cool as a popsicle. When his own base had come under attack, he had usually been the last to take shelter, and he almost always dove into the bunker with a song on his lips. Ah, but that wheelbarrow ride was quite another story.
The wire over which the primitive vehicle rolled was no wider than a child’s wrist. Ratcheted as taut as physically possible under the circumstances, it nevertheless would sway gently in the wind. From wooded promontory to wooded promontory, the cable ran nearly the length of a football field—above a yawning chasm, a gorge so deep its bottom could scarcely be seen for the mist that rose from the rock-strewn torrent that coursed through it. There was said to be a plethora of cobras down in that gorge, and even a tiger or two, but incidence of wildlife would have been of no concern to anyone unlucky enough to topple off the wire. One unexpected gust, one misstep by the aerialist, and the passenger would spend his last seconds of life learning how it felt to freefall without a parachute.
The odd thing was, Dickie longed to experience that feeling. It wasn’t any kind of death wish: there was not a suicidal cell in his body. Rather, it seemed that the very sensation, the inner force that made Dickie’s scrotum tighten, his throat constrict, and his eyeballs swim in dizziness also made him want to tumble into the precipitous void. And ultimately, his fear of longing to fall was greater, more disturbing, than his fear of falling.
When there were no circus performers in Fan Nan Nan, no wirewalker available to pilot the gayly painted wheelbarrow, one either crossed the gulch hand over hand, commando style (Dickie had done it only once), or waited for Dern to get his old Russian helicopter running. Of the two reasons (three, if you counted his fiancée) that Dickie seldom visited Villa Incognito, the dread of traversing that chasm was decidedly paramount.
On this particular afternoon, though, he had no choice. He couldn’t send a messenger, for both the gravity and sensitivity of the predicament demanded that he confer with Stubblefield promptly and in person. Their situation might very well be desperate. Thus, he climbed into the little red-and-yellow wheelbarrow and with his long legs and arms hanging out of its box and with his eyes squeezed shut like a six year old at his first horror movie, allowed himself to be wheeled along a swaying steel thread in the sky. Taking one short, deliberately measured step after another, never once wavering or altering her rhythm, the aerialist delivered him limp but alive to the opposite side of the abyss where, after a slow, grateful trot through the trees, he presented himself at the villa.
He presented himself in sorry condition. Filthy, smelly, unshaven, unsteady, red-eyed, and agurgle with hunger, Dickie looked like something the proverbial cat refused to drag in, looked worse than Tanuki at the end of a sake saga. Stubblefield took no notice—partly because of the insufficient light, partly because of the odor-camouflaging incense, but chiefly because he was preoccupied with furthering the education of his servants and concubines.
Now,” said Stubblefield, “just before we were interrupted, I used an English term—soul—that neither those of you who are Buddhists nor those of you who are Hmong animists probably understand. That’s perfectly okay because very few Westerners really understand it, either.”
His audience was rapt. It consisted of six concubines (four were Stubblefield’s, two Dern’s), about ten male servants, and two or three village elders. Sipping tea, they squatted on opulent Oriental carpets, rare and expensive rugs stacked two or three deep in places. Over the years, Stubblefield had taught most of his “students” to speak English, and not the tenseless singsong baby-talk version, either. They might not comprehend a lot of what was said, but they were attentive—and so was Dickie, who stood in the doorway to the study, not about to leave the parlor. Dickie loved Stubblefield’s pedantic discourses, always had, and were it not for the wire and certain business activities, would have attended the lectures at the villa on a regular basis.
“What are we talking about when we talk about the soul?” It was a rhetorical question, of course, but Stubblefield paused, as if he expected his cook or that night’s designated bedmate to reply. The big room was shuttered against the sun as well as the incongruous mixture of daily-life village noises and shiny toot-toot-jingle-jingle circus music that periodically drifted across the gorge. As Dickie’s eyes grew accustomed to the dimness, he had the impression that Stubblefield’s bulk, already considerable, had increased since he saw him last.
For some time now, the perimeters of Stubblefield’s silhouette had been steadily encroaching upon the world at large. His corpus had expanded to the degree where those who cherished the popular image of Buddha must have felt reverential in his presence, while the hill-tribe animists surely saw in his massively bushy beard and the hair (still mostly brown) that reached down below his shoulder blades, some reflection of the god—or the ogre—of the gorge. That impression doubtlessly was enhanced by the prowling tiger tattooed across his chest. He wore, without a shirt, a Western-style suit of glossy, lightweight purple silk. Save for the tattoo, his chest was bare, as were his feet, the toenails of which one of the girls had playfully painted scarlet. The nail polish, Dickie thought, made Stubblefield’s long, meaty toes look like the nosecones of a lilliputian space agency.
“What are we talking about when we talk about the soul? Well, pop culture to the contrary, the soul is not an overweight nightclub singer having an unhappy love affair in Detroit. The soul doesn’t hang out at a Memphis barbershop, fry catfish for supper, and keep a thirty-eight Special in its underwear drawer. Hard times and funky living can season the soul, true enough, but joy is the yeast that makes it rise.
“On the other hand,” Stubblefield continued, “the soul is most definitely not some pale vapor wafting off a bucket of metaphysical dry ice. For all of its ectoplasmic associations, it steadfastly contradicts those who imagine it to be a billow of sacred flatulence or a shimmer of personal swamp gas.
“Soul is not even that Crackerjack prize that God and Satan scuffle over after the worms have all licked our bones. That’s why, when we ponder—as sooner or later each of us must—exactly what we ought to be doing about our soul, religion is the wrong, if conventional, place to turn. Religion is little more than a transaction in which troubled people trade their souls for temporary and wholly illusionary psychological comfort—the old give-it-up-in-order-to-save-it routine. Religions lead us to believe that the soul is the ultimate family jewel and
that in return for our mindless obedience, they can secure it for us in their vaults, or at least insure it against fire and theft. They are mistaken.”
Stubblefield was pacing back and forth, striding now like that tiger in the tattoo, but his face was completely at ease. “If you need to visualize the soul, think of it as. . . .” He paused to ponder. “Think of it as a kind of train. Yes, a long, lonesome freight train rumbling from generation to generation on an eternally rainy morning: its boxcars are loaded with sighs and laughter, its hobos are angels, its engineer is the queen of spades—and the queen of spades is wild. Whooo-whooo! Hear that epiphanic whistle blow.” The audience giggled at the sound effects. “The train’s destination is the godhead, but it stops at the Big Bang, at the orgasm, and at that hole in the fence that the red fox sneaks through down behind the barn. It’s simultaneously a local and an express, but it doesn’t transport weaponry, and it certainly ain’t no milk run.”
If his students were bewildered by this, their expressions didn’t betray it. Nevertheless, the big man said, “I may be waxing too fanciful here, and I apologize. I do. Let’s look at it this way, friends: the soul is nothing more, probably, than the authentic vibration of the biosphere, registered and amplified within the human sensorium. Think of it as that somewhat lumpy cloud of indefinable energy that is generated when human emotion and human intelligence interface with the larger body of nature.
“‘How then does soul differ from spirit?’ you’re probably asking yourself,” although he must have been reasonably sure nobody was. “Well, soul is darker of color, denser of volume, saltier of flavor, rougher of texture, and tends to be more maternalistic than paternalistic: soul is connected to Mother Earth just as spirit is connected to Father Sky. Of course, mothers and fathers are prone to copulation, and in their commingled state, soul and spirit often can be difficult to distinguish the one from the other. Generally, if spirit is the fresh air vent and ambient lighting in the house of consciousness, if spirit is the electrical system that illuminates that house, then soul is the smoky fireplace, the fragrant oven, the dusty wine cellar, the strange creaks we hear in the floorboards late at night.