Now at noon a breeze blew up from the southwest and the day became warm and humid. I sat against a stump and watched the small lake rippling. When I reached the lake I shot a turtle off a distant log in disgust and fatigue, the sweat dripping down into eyes and in the swamp I passed through, clouds of black flies and mosquitoes, an eye nearly swollen shut with bites. The turtle had exploded with the force of the 180-grain bullet. Pointless cruelty. In the family, or the choking I felt was not consistent with the past. Hounds in the dark leaping against the tree and in the beam of the flashlight a raccoon looks down, is blasted from the tree and torn in pieces by the hounds. Whets their appetite to let them eat one once in a while.
I shot five times into a bee swarm once, hanging clotted in a tree, a huge cluster of small moving grapes and the queen deep in the center being fed and protected by them all. They closed around the shots, the dead falling to the ground. The cheapness in my family, to spend your first fourteen years in the nineteenth century, and then be swept into the twentieth; and at shock point to become a Baptist and study to be a preacher. Many are called but few are chosen, they said. Two years in a church the soul swollen and bitten by it. The black woman sang, “I'm going to tell God how you treat me.” In Philippians or Ephesians. Paul taught us. Purify my thoughts O Christ. Better to burn than to perish, holding the unloaded shotgun across the lap in despair of becoming pure. We didn't come from apes to act like gods, the world was born six thousand years ago Bishop Ussher proved and only Satan would have us think otherwise. Our Country had gone wrong and when the Hoover Dam was built eight or nine men died and were buried in its cement from our lust for money. Christ don't let these pictures tempt me. Brains rot with self-abuse. Euclidean it was and an absorbed millennium of cruelty; the shame for my family and relatives, only my father had been to college and he studied agriculture and had bad grammar. How could anything come to this, rather from it, with years spent on milking cows, cutting down trees or eating herring. A whole stretch of them quit school at sixteen out of religious conviction, wanting no more than the law required; Mennonites, ignorant and harmless, they kept to themselves and refused to seek the law with one another. They invented crop rotation and the women wore black and black skull caps. That is all that could be said about them.
It was warm and breezy enough for the mosquitoes and flies to disappear. I shed my clothes and walked into the water, gingerly stepping on the lake's soft bottom; at chest depth I began swimming, the water icy and clear, toward the log. There were a few pieces of the turtle flesh and then one large chunk of turtle shell I could see on the bottom by shading my eyes. Put it back together. My heart was in the egg and it dropped to the floor. I floated on my back and saw one still cloud. Where would the turtle have died otherwise? In winter deep in the mud. As bears do, dying in their sleep from age. There were thousands of undiscovered bodies in America, on railroad sidings and in rented rooms, in culverts, in the woods.
When I got back to the tent I dozed in the late afternoon sun. I wanted one place. Lost all character in travel; in one thousand miles, even less, one could become something because there was nothing to displace. Stay here. The streets of Laredo, Texas, festered and kept to themselves. You were sure that everyone would start shooting if they could do so with impunity. But maybe that was true of any state. A sailor on the sidewalk in a circle of the curious on Saturday night in Scollay Square in Boston, the handle of a screwdriver sticking out of his cheek. They tore it down, Scollay Square. In the West Forties near Ninth Avenue the policeman clubbed the Puerto Rican on the felt hat. The hat dropped bloody in front of a $1.19 steak house. Another policeman stood by the squad car watching the Puerto Rican on his hands and knees dripping gore. Then they took him off in the car. The small crowd left and I looked at the hat for a moment. What happened to it? A friend who had been shot said it felt like being slugged though not too hard. A safe place in Utah, where I worked for a farmer for a week. Ate with the family. They were impressed that I had been to college. I said my wife had died and they were very nice to me. This will to lie gratuitously is handy.
The night was liquid and warm. I threw a handful of green ferns on the fire to smoke away the mosquitoes and the smoke curled and hovered over the fire and the tent and finally sought out the roof of boughs above me. A moonless night. In Spain where I had never been I slept under a lemon tree with a viper nestled in my lap for warmth. Smelled like a muskmelon I broke over a tractor fender, the juice and seeds dripping on the ground. I took off all my clothes and walked around the fire in my boots, staring past the perimeter of darkness. A thin dog bark in the distance. Coyote. Might be quite close as the creek's steady rush hid noises. I shivered and moved closer to the fire, standing in the plume of smoke until my eyes watered. If there was fire in the middle of earth why wasn't the ground warm. No brain for science or perhaps anything else, only what stuck like a burr to clothes. Or was sufficiently bizarre. I ran my hands over my body as a doctor might looking for something awry. In the new world muscles would be freakish. Nothing for bulges to do, no mindless labor but something of another kind. Work. Helping my dad and grandfather get in the hay. Pitch it with forks onto the wagon until the pile looked huge and unsteady, then the horses would pull the wagon to the barn where the hay would be pitched into the mow. So young the fork felt heavy to lift. After supper I would follow my grandfather to the barn and watch the cows be milked. Four tits. Milk would never come for my own fingers, though I had secretly tried. My grandfather would aim the tit and squirt me in the face or squirt a stream of milk into the mouth of a barn cat which would always be waiting. Throw some hay down, spread it in the long trough in front of the stanchions, and some for the horses. I hated to walk behind the horses but the one hoof cocked was to rest. There were stories of the killed and maimed, one lack did it, knocked through the side of the barn. The bull tethered, led by the ring in its nose was safe. Work dulled the brain, left the brain elsewhere seeking a sweet place to forget tiredness. Had to fill in around the foundation by hand as the bulldozer might buckle the wall, a week's worth of shoveling. The well pit kept caving in until we dug a hole ten feet by ten by ten. No timbers to shore it. Laying a thousand feet of irrigation pipe when it was brutally hot, a dollar per hour and no overtime, or unloading a fertilizer truck in the metal Quonset shed with a gas mask on as the bags sometimes broke. And the hardest work, handling twelve-inch cement blocks, seventy pounds apiece, for a house that would have brick facing, perhaps a thousand of them in the walls. Unloaded in a day thirty-five tons by hand. Too tired to screw or go fishing or to the movies, the hands numb and raw. Someone has to do it. Not me again. Near Stockton the bean field stretched out past seeing. We picked in rows for two cents a pound. I made seven dollars in a twelve-hour day while the Mexican girl I met in Salinas averaged fourteen dollars a day. Found a job running a forklift in a cannery in San Jose.
In the sleeping bag the smell of smoke on my body was overpowering. Asleep on the skin and awake at center I thought of the drive up past Toledo and Detroit and Lansing, finally reaching the country I liked north of Mount Pleasant and Clare where I turned left to drive the eighty miles through Evart to Reed City. Past the road that led to the cabin. Where a witch, a true one, lived in a shack in the woods and lived on berries and boiled opossum or any animal found freshly run over by a car on the road. Three hundred and fifty million animals dead on roads each year. I counted eighty once on a summer night on a stretch of road west of Clare. They could not learn the world wasn't theirs. Over the earth perhaps a billion a year struck down. I hit a fox years before in Massachusetts, swerved to a halt and saw it scrambling in a tight circle on the shoulder of the road. And beat its skull in with a tire iron because its back was broken and one hind leg dragged askew. The fox snarled then whimpered trying to retreat. Couldn't let it take days to die—they ran about freely, less wary than usual, in February and March when they mated.
Reed City where I had spent my best years seemed crabbed and ugly and small
and I drove quickly through it. Nothing more tiresome than the idyll of someone's youth. The world from three or four feet high with all things remembered in unique wonderment, pored over in late years, confessed, hugged, wrung of their residue in disgust with the present. How hopeless to live it over and over again, to savor only the good parts, forgetting the countless wounds which seemed to lie deeper and were kept masked with force. Though the one clinical psychologist I had been to persuaded me I lived like a child. That was why I didn't need my childhood to assuage or heal present griefs. I was still a child with small chance of being anything else, perhaps. Fine. Always quitting, schools, jobs, hunting or fishing or walking, as a child gorges on candy or new games. On occasion I even climbed trees when I was sure I wasn't watched. Novelty they called it, a victim of change, a new street to walk down in a new city to a new bar or new river with a new bridge to look off and a new author to read late at night in a new room. In Waltham by the Charles it had been Dostoevsky for weeks on end after I finished work as a busboy in an Italian restaurant. Boston became St. Petersburg with two feet of snow in a single night. I moved to St. Botolph street and quit my job after saving a hundred dollars. The room was so ill-heated I wore my father's cast-off overcoat the entire month, even to bed, and when the heat came on intermittently I would take it off and hang it out the window to air. The wino in the next room pissed out the window to avoid walking downstairs to the toilet. I wrote down my thoughts on two pages of a yellow law tablet and moved again to New York City in the spring where I hoped to leave for Sweden when enough money had been saved. After five months of unemployment and Tokay in New York I left for Michigan where in another four months I was able to save seventy dollars and hitchhike to California. All drifters dream of mountains of gold hidden in the greenery of Peru, Lafitte's treasure in some coral reef off the Tortugas, finding a thick billfold in a gutter or becoming an overnight movie star after someone had discovered their interesting face or becoming a rich woman's lover. She was beautiful but until she had him no man had been able to satisfy her whimsical tastes. Then he saw the world by sheer cock power—Biarritz, Marrakesh, Saipan, Hong Kong. Through the draperies he looked out on the Avenue des Cochons, his body pillaged but happy. Behind him on a Louis Quatorze bed she held the now dead duck to her breast. Then she plucked the feathers from the duck with her teeth as a falcon would, in quick jerking motions. He only endured such perversities for the thousand dollars a week allowance she gave him and sometimes the small pleasures which she offered in return. He would sell her to some Bedouins when they reached Somaliland for the fall shooting, first taking her jewels and as much cash as possible. Back in my room I felt drugged with fantasy. I wanted to find a real muddy billfold in a real gutter. Flushed with sauterne I felt my life about to change. You will cross an ocean or a body of water and find love with a woman who speaks a strange tongue, said a girl who read my horoscope. Or as the president of a giant corporation I would institute fair employment practices. Widows of those accidentally killed by being sucked into the blast furnaces of my steel mills would blush at my generosity, often bend over the desk for a quick one. All fantasies ruined by the errant detail. Early in high school I entered a UAW (United Auto Workers) essay contest on labor history: “Eugene Debs sat mutely in his jail cell. Whither labor? he queried himself.” My brother had won the American Legion contest for the “best essay on a theme of patriotism” and had read it from a stage in a school assembly, the setting symmetrical with two uniformed men on each side of the podium and two flags. I thought success at writing might run in the family and had waited anxiously for the mail to bring news of my trip to Washington (first prize) and then my predestined rise through the ranks until I was an equal, then a successor to Walter Reuther. Reuther would say, “Glad to have you aboard,” or something like that with misty eyes. No one could see the scars the shotgun blast had left, fired by goons through the kitchen window. Goons would stop at nothing, not even murder. The Ford, Dodge and Mott families and others lived in porcine splendor on unpaid wages while the Leader lay bleeding on the linoleum. Years later at a socialist meeting in New York City short, homely people read from L'Humanité and laughed. I didn't know French and the poster said it was supposed to be a social occasion. Orange drink and doughnuts. It was to be my only political meeting though I signed petitions and protest statements around Washington Square daily. I heard rumors about Eisenhower and Madame Chiang and how the oil depletion allowance financed private Texan armies which would eventually take over the country. Or that the Rosenbergs were framed and that serious people, especially young men, should try to join Fidel Castro in the Oriente Province. I believed everything and even attended a secret meeting of Castro sympathizers in Spanish Harlem, though the plotting was in Spanish and I understood no Spanish save vaya con Dios, gracias, and in my adobe hacienda. After five months of New York I weighed thirty pounds less and after four months of California, ten pounds further down the scale. Ideally I would have weighed nothing in a few more years.
There were scars along the creek bank from the spring runoff, scattered driftwood and uprooted yellow beech in piles and clots, and watermarks on trees. Late winter here would be strange, the local record was close to three hundred inches of snow, with temperatures running if rarely to forty below zero. The deer would yard up deep in cedar swamps and scour the limited browse and often if there were a spring blizzard, starve to death by the thousands. Even the bobcats would deplete the supply of snowshoe hares; a few years back an estimated fifty thousand deer died, driven into submission by a March blizzard when they were at their weakest. In spring all creeks would become torrents, heaving and turbulent, fed by melting snow and ice and rain. I wanted to see it but the country would be impenetrable in winter, except by snowmobile, a machine that horrified me and seemed to accelerate the ruin of all places not normally reached. There were no inviolate places, only outposts that were less visited than others. The Arctic was drilled for oil, great pools of waste oil seeping through glaciers. The continent was becoming Europe in my own lifetime and I felt desperate. The merest smell of profit would lead us to gut any beauty left, there was no sentimentality involved. We had been doing so since we got off the boat and nothing would stop us now. Even our instincts to save were perverse; we made parks which in fact were “nature zoos” crossed by superhighways, and in the future large areas would be surrounded by narrow gauge fence so that the animals wouldn't be harried and stared to death. It was almost a comfort to think of how many people the grizzlies with their sense of property might take with them in their plummet to extinction. I had read a story about a woman who proudly told of shooting one while it slept. Small pocket of fur flew, a .375 Magnum slug tearing through the beast in a split second. Odd how they know when they're being hunted, even as a fox does when he doubles back to watch his pursuers draw close. They run fox to exhaustion with snowmobiles then club them to death. Moose in Ontario killed at close range floundering in the snow, also run to fatigue by machines. Elephants know that they're being shot at as the Indian women did at Cripple Creek and whales are familiar with the fatal accuracy of the modern harpoon. And the wolf was destroyed because it killed game animals from hunger, perhaps fifty left in the Upper Peninsula, rarely seen as they had the wit to recognize their enemy. The feral dogs living in swamps returning to their ancient home in a single generation understood when they were shot for killing deer. But there were a few places like this one that would yield up little profit and was at least temporarily safe since the rivers had recovered from the widespread mining fifty years before and the cutting of pulp fed deer with new growth.
Of what use was a mountainside blotched with chalets, and ski people, certainly the most insensate group of chichi morons I'd ever met. They had their “right” as did the lumber and mining and oil interests. But I did not have to like them for it. There was an amusing irony in the fact that the land would be fucked up before the blacks would have the leisure to enjoy it, one more piece of subtle genocid
e.