In the Land of Good Living

by Kent Russell

  “All right, man,” I said, patty-caking Noah back out the door.

  No rain was falling. We didn’t know it yet, but no rain would fall here. Matthew was churning alongside the central coast of Florida, his eyewall brushing St. Augustine—but the hurricane would come no farther inland.

  We wandered into a room in which bikers or biker cosplayers were engaged in a game of Twister, denim scouring denim. Their costume suggested that these men and women were looking to retain youth, or perhaps youth’s rebelliousness. But youth’s pliable rebellion had turned brittle, from the sun maybe, and inelastic rebellion appeared to be something they could no longer stretch beyond without breaking, as with a dried-out rubber band. Noah accepted a strange concoction from one such man on the sideline of the game. Noah eyeballed it, swirled it, sniffed it. Then he threw it back, as dispassionate as an engineer performing an integrity test. The same man then offered Glenn and me a few bumps of cocaine, which we took. When the game of Twister threatened to devolve into a more ignominious entertainment, we got out of there.

  We retreated to our room to swap out batteries for the film gear. There, Noah collapsed the way an imploded building collapses, sliding toward the center of the earth with no loss of upright bearing. Glenn and I threw a duvet over him, returned to the movable feast. We plopped onto lawn chairs at the lip of the empty pool, Miller Lites bulging our pockets. Glenn rolled film.

  GLENN (O.S.)

  How would you describe the people at this party?

  KENT

  Like they’re ten minutes from horking.

  GLENN (O.S.)

  Take two.

  KENT

  They are grown-up adults behaving as…as basically everybody in Florida is presently behaving, on the macro level.

  GLENN (O.S.)

  Better. I like it.

  KENT

  They’re telling themselves, The wagon has not yet reached the guillotine. Until then, we are immortal.

  GLENN (O.S.)

  Print it!

  Glenn powered down the camera, laid it on his lap. “Zero part of me believes this movie is going to be my big thing,” he said, a little giddy from the coke. “But that just means I’m more committed! More committed, and less confident!”

  “Fuck your confidence,” I said, my knee joggling at three hundred beats per minute. “You’re in an empire, bro! And when empires act, they create their own reality. We are history’s actors.”

  “You are Rome, I’ll give you that!” Glenn agreed, pinching the bridge of his nose while rocking in his chair.

  “So let’s start acting like it!” I said. “For the doc’s sake.”

  “Art is not truth,” Glenn said, recalling our writing classes. “Art is a lie that enables us to recognize truth.”

  I gestured expansively with my beer can ringed between two fingers. Around us, motel doors started shutting. “It’s all in the art,” I said. My skin prickled to gooseflesh. I was certain that the first girthy raindrop was about to hit. “We’re gonna get no credit just for living the thing.”

  “To us,” Glenn said, offering his can in a toast. “Nobody’s heroes. Everyone’s fools.”

  “For Florida,” I countered.

  —

  MILE 358 — BRANFORD

  THE TRUMPET SOUNDS, AND THE SLEEPERS WAKE

  We rasped drawn-out, fetid moans the next morning, our throats like sepulchers opening. To steady ourselves, we took analeptic swigs of flat beer from the cans scattered about our motel room. We stepped into a dry but unceasingly windy morning. Torn clouds flew overhead like the last shavings of a buzz saw nicking through wood. The greater St. Augustine area had seen some damage, but on the whole, the state was spared. Again. For now.

  We walked off our hangovers in the space of a few hours. My newly bare toenail bed was raw, pink, puckered. Staring at it poking out of my sandal, I was put in mind of schizophrenics who self-enucleate. We camped behind a fenced-in power station. We woke up and walked some more.

  Glenn has developed open sores on his hips and shoulders from bag-related chafing. Still he maintains that he positively cannot push a buggy against traffic. It’s a psychological thing, he says. He likes to be that many extra feet away from the oncoming lane, in case he needs to dodge an out-of-control car.

  Wasn’t much to see alongside the shimmering ribbon of asphalt: uncrushed beer cans; snakeskins; the agonized death masks of squashed varmints; teak-colored dip spit trapped in water bottles. The pine barrens had given way to farmland and open pasture. We were drawing nearer to the plains of Alachua County. If I knew anything about breeds of cattle, friend, I’d be more specific than black, white, brown, and tan cows munched on grass whilst little birds pecked at their backs. I admired the scene. More, I gave thanks to God that we’d made it through the long canyons of whispering trunks. At last! We were on ruminants’ ground.

  I frog-walked Rock-a-bye Thunder the wrong way down landing-strip-length right-turn-only lanes, Glenn and Noah flanking me. We passed big-box stores whose approach ways and parking lots were themselves a quarter of a mile long. We passed prefab homes under construction. Ads for accident and personal-injury attorneys. Churches whose signs trucked in automotive metaphors. “God accepts trade-ins,” read one. “A bad attitude is like a flat tire,” read another. “You ain’t going anywhere ’til you fix it.”

  I wore a sloppy, ecstatic smile. To the west, the sore orb of sun was suffusing the prairie with golden-hour light. This light is the color of thin dreams and conquistador obsession, I thought. Then I laughed and thought, That thought is ridiculous! So, too, was the one that followed. But, hey, I had it. In this moment, I thought, with my body worked to exhaustion, I feel as if I am leaping into the infinite with every step. And, every step after that, I feel as if I am falling surely back to the finite.

  I was beginning to attend to the road—to the world around me—in a new way. I don’t know if it was the lifting of the heat, the retreating of the pines, the shitcanning of the walking shoes in favor of flip-flops. Whatever it was, I found myself able to disport centrally in mute calm, even as cars sped past and sprayed me with grit. Deep down and deep inland I bathed in a mildness that was something like joy. I was freed from the mental demons and smart-phone-enabled gremlins that would have otherwise tugged at me like fiends did Saint Anthony, layering the moment and keeping me earthbound. Achieving this state at my desk in my “home office” would have required superhuman self-restraint. Here, though—pulled out of time, road placid—I was able to direct my attention fully. I could scrutinize the integrity of each hour as though beholding it through a jeweler’s loupe. Here, I had no choice but to master the habit of attention, which is the substance of prayer.

  “Something in our soul has a far more violent repugnance for true attention than the flesh has for bodily fatigue,” the great mystic Simone Weil wrote. “This something is much more closely connected with evil than is the flesh. That is why every time that we really concentrate our attention, we destroy the evil in ourselves.”

  Then there’s also W. H. Auden, who said: “To pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself. Whenever a man so concentrates his attention—be it on a landscape or a poem or a geometrical problem or an idol, or the True God—that he completely forgets his own ego and desires…he is praying.”

  I had slipped the surly confines of the cell between my temples. I’d achieved a state of perfect receptivity, of exuberant compassion toward all around me. In these few moments, I was intimately conscious of my condition on this earth—that of a pilgrim. I became deeply aware of the fact that I have here no lasting city; that my stability and security consist in being rooted to something deeper. This ecstasy was what all the walking narrators of the past several centuries have been writing around, I realized then. This and not confession or self-discovery was the point of a
long walk: to explore the sacredness of the world around me, and to find my self-expression in expressing exactly that. The wonder of loving and living beloved.

  While appreciating this, I happened to glance downward. I saw that midges had breaded my bleeding feet like a couple of veal parmigianas. I stopped, screamed, and kicked. My detachment arrested, I overheard Noah talking.

  “Three of us, and we need a room tonight,” he said, holding his speakerphoned phone flat on his palm.

  “Like a husband and a wife and a child?” an ancient-sounding man drawled.

  “No. Like friends.”

  “Man-friends?” the proprietor asked. “I can’t be having no three man-friends having a time tonight.”

  “I don’t think we’ll be having ourselves a time.” Noah sighed.

  “Call me back later. I got a married couple in one of my rooms. Turned out they was having some kind of spree in there. With strangers. I gotta run them off. Call me back later. You can have that room.”

  “An orgy, huh?” Noah said, pocketing his phone. “On the banks of the Suwannee River. At the one-star Dive Inn.”

  “The end of every day feels like the bus scene at the end of The Graduate,” Glenn said.

  —

  MILE 372 — ALACHUA

  ANOTHER LOUSY DAY IN PARADISE

  Outside Gainesville, we entered a long gully of fast-food franchises and home-furnishing superstores, the kind of miracle mile spoking into every medium-sized city throughout America. These strips are ugly and exhausting to drive through—to say nothing of walking through—because they assault with a dissonance of messaging. They’re the visual equivalent of several dozen radio ads blaring at once.

  “I think I finally understand the obsession some people have with finding the real America,” Glenn said as we passed a Captain D’s Seafood Kitchen. “This is it. If you’re trying to look deeper than this, you’re missing the point. And that’s probably unacceptable for some.”

  Heavier flows of traffic zoomed by as rush hour neared. Peering into these windshields, we saw countless examples of the blank forgetfulness that an ever-moving perspective affords. That is: One-half of the driver’s brain was occupied by the immediate and almost automatic decision making of driving; the other half was in a peculiarly distracted and suggestible state, sort of like a channel surfer’s. When any of them noticed—suddenly, although it was sudden only for them—the trio of drifters staggering eighteen inches from their lane line—they spasmed behind the wheel, reacting as though they’d seen some ghosts.

  After a while, the commercial strip petered. We followed the highway as it cut through pastureland that was in the process of becoming suburban developments. Here the shoulder narrowed considerably, leaving me no room for error as I piloted Rock-a-bye Thunder against the flash-flood current of rush hour. Glenn and Noah walked with a foot in the dry drainage ditch to our left.

  Double-barreled waves of tightly packed cars pulsed at us from the other side of a low hill. Whenever their surge was sluiced by a red light, we jogged for a few seconds, trying to gain ground. We hoped to obtain the relative safety of a sidewalk before the sun dipped lower.

  Very often I had to slalom off the shoulder onto the lip of the drainage ditch in order to avoid Rorschach blots of roadkill. Glenn gloated: “This is why I said no to that buggy.” “Smells like a literal killing field,” Noah said, covering his nose while running.

  Though I am neither a veteran of foreign wars nor a doctor without borders, I know what death smells like. Thanks to the many, many pulped critters encountered along this journey, I can pronounce with authority that death smells musty, and that mustiness has depth as well as presence. Within it, hot like a filament, is a hint of latex. Redolent of, say, gloves that have been used to locate and remove an abscess, gloves which were then locked in the trunk of a car abandoned in the rainforest. “Sickly sweet” will do in a pinch.

  Noah stopped short when he noticed an amphibian in his path. “Tiny frog,” he said, still with his hand over his nose and mouth, “how did you get here?” I paused alongside him. “Tiny frog,” I said, “did you just sit down to die?”

  Glenn walked over, said, “Tiny frog, get out of here before you get run over by a mobile movie theater!”

  We amused ourselves with this frog for, oh, ten seconds while traffic streaked by. As we did so, a sense of dereliction of duty crept over me. I glanced up. I noticed a champagne-colored GMC truck screaming downhill toward us. Its right-side tires were riding the line on the shoulder. Then, as if noticing my noticing, the truck drifted back to the center of its lane.

  “Heads up,” I alerted. “Got an erratic one here. Gold truck.”

  Noah and Glenn paid heed. Instinctively, they leaned forward on the balls of their feet. The three of us attempted to Care Bear Stare the truck into remaining in its lane.

  The truck’s windshield was darkly tinted, however. We couldn’t make pleading and/or disapproving eye contact with the driver. We couldn’t see if there even was a driver. The Duel-ish quality of this standoff froze us with dread for the three Mississippis it took the gargantuan truck to close the distance. When it was about thirty feet away, the truck jerked suddenly to the right. It now straddled the shoulder and the lip of the ditch. It accelerated.

  “O why did we fear him,” the poet Robinson Jeffers wrote, “for Death / Is a beautiful youth and his eyes are sleepy.” A nice sentiment, Robinson, to be sure—but for us Death manifested as a five-thousand-pound crew cab intent on touching grille to brow and transmuting our consciousnesses into rose Jell-O. Yet like the bard, the three of us were entranced. Fixed in place. I even tilted my head forward a bit, as if to catch a whisper.

  “Holyshitjump!” Noah screamed, freeing us from our enchantment. I shoved Thunder into the roadside ditch. The three of us followed after it, leaping like stags. The truck missed us by inches, sounding its horn as it passed. The wake of displaced air seemed to propel us that much farther. We rolled to a stop in the dry bed amid spilled gear. Glenn scrambled to check for breakage. Noah clambered to the shoulder in order to take down the license plate number of the truck, which had glided smoothly back to the center of its lane. He couldn’t see the leftmost characters.

  The questions came tumbling out of us at once: Why? What the fuck? What was he doing? What did he think we were doing? Mad-dogging him? Wishing a motherfucker would? Who’s that funny to? How had we shaken this fragile man? Surely he was a man? What did we represent to him? Did he think we were making some kind of political statement? Did he see our powerlessness and say to himself, “Now I will teach them a lesson about the world’s relationship to powerlessness”?

  We walked on, humiliated and seething. We were officially twice shy. I forgot to check if the tiny frog was OK.

  * * *

  —

  Glenn ducks into our tent nimbly, whereas I hurl my body through its threshold like a fish passed between mongers. I make my bed against the far wall; Glenn rests by the zippered, semicircular entrance. Our tent is long enough that we can store some valuables at either end and still be comfortable.

  It doesn’t matter to me where we camp, since I have an inflatable mattress pad. Glenn brought along no such thing and so demands that we bed down on only the mossiest of grasses. He bitches nightly about my pad. Not because he is covetous of it, but because it has been grimed black by my feet. It looks like an expressionist charcoal drawing drafted by a primate, except, again, it was my unsandaled feet. There are also a few calligraphic strokes of blood and pus, from my wounds.

  In the tent, sleep comes fast and bereft of dreams. My own stink—the arch smell of lactic acid stripping the finish from my brain—no longer wakes me in the night. It wakes Glenn, though. He likens the sourness rippling from me to a ribbon tied to an oscillating fan. For his part, a piercing fetor opens around him like a popped umbrella whenever he removes his shirt.<
br />
  Exhalations and personal vapors get trapped in our tent, causing it to warm considerably throughout the night. Were it made of clear plastic, it would fog like the windows of a car parked at a lovers’ lane. Glenn and I fart with abandon, is what I mean to say. We are as at ease around each other as a crabby old couple. And, like an old couple, what we do together is less important than the fact that we do it together.

  The evening of our brush with the GMC truck, Glenn set up the gear inside our tent to film a little unbosoming.

  —

  FADE IN

  INT. TENT UNDER A BRIDGE—DUSK

  Glenn is lit harshly in a spotlight’s glare.

  KENT (O.S.)

  Looking like you’re in The Blair Witch Project.

  GLENN

  (exasperated)

  Right. Feeling like it, too, under this bridge.

  KENT (O.S.)

  Nobody’s gonna see us. If you’d just ducked under the gate that I spotted on Google Maps—

  GLENN

  That’s private property!

  KENT (O.S.)

  It’s an empty lot behind a strand of trees along an unlit highway! You’re not going to get deported, man.

  GLENN

  It’s not the deportation I’m worried about! I’m worried about all these nutjobs running around with all kinds of guns, or attempting to run us over for points like it’s a video game.

  A couple of cars pass over the bridge. One of them drifts onto the rumble strip that fronts the guardrail, producing a sound like a romance-language tongue roll.

  GLENN

  See?

  KENT (O.S.)

  It’s an adventure. You can’t have a paper asshole on an adventure, man.