by Roman McClay
Page 233 to 610, and each piece of paper folded into a little origami piece, white swan, she first made, with the bad writing on it, Norma Jean geese -next were made- and what the hell happened to your dress? was written upon their paper flanks. Cats, she made five of them; all one size and then she made kittens with one big one and they all had, hey look at a mouse, typed from tail to snout; and she made some squirrels that had heads too large to call squirrels if anyone asked, but nobody did. She thought of the Gabon snake and she counted 144 vertebrae -of one page each- as her hands refused to make what her mind imagined from the pages that stacked up each day as she plotted.
It was a book she found among his things, and when she asked him why he had such a book, he had laughed and said that Tess, Teresa Preston, had given it to him alongside some other banal modern fiction with no soul. And while he found these books abominations, he had said, he hated to ever throw a book out, even bad ones, and so there it was with all his boxes that the police and Feds had gone through and stacked up back in the garage.
Technically it was not his property, but the corporation’s now, with the inmate’s father having had the Power-of-Attorney and all; he had sold it to them after the cops had searched it. They could keep only what they could directly use for evidence. Everything else was returned and 18 years later she had her little white and red hands on it, each book upon her shelf at what she had assumed was her and Blax’s home; her with scars up her arms like lines waiting for someone to tattoo bars of music on them, and give her a song to sing in the dark and the light, in the day and in the night, in the noise and the quiet.
Tess was on her list, but not tonight; tomorrow , she thought; because she did not want to do two murders in the same district or even the same county if possible. She was trying to do things softly and get away with it. She had plans after this. But, this had to be done, and it was the least she could do, the man had given birth to her for christsake, she thought, and the only thing, literally the only thing, he ever wanted was loyalty; and he would give everything he had for it.
But , she thought, nobody thought of him that way; which if anyone would understand, it would be -it was- him; he always understood his enemies, even if it was a step too late . But she, The Bust, did not understand it; she still expected more from even common men. He was exactly the kind of man to be loyal to; he would be as honest as any frail and fucked up creature could be, and sure women don’t like honesty, but men sure do and that should have won him all kinds of friends . But no; he was already too intimidating, he sacred people; so, honesty was considered threatening too; another weapon in his arsenal.
He was not well liked; real men never are, she acknowledged; she had heard Tupac say that once. His own friends thought he was demonic and untrustworthy. Bugzy -a guy who raped women and gave them herpes- had accused him of practicing black magjick ; and Chen had said he ought to be locked up. His own father had plotted with his foils and seen to his destruction; his resurrection , she added with a grin.
And , she would think, you could see how handsome he used to be , it was there like a beautiful cameo broach beneath a lock of long black hair and years -generations- of patina and fade; a million dollars behind the over-built vault and the cheap teller’s smile at the bank; like her double-action gun in that no-action book beating like a black bird half asleep and half awake under her arm. He -in a time not that far away- was beautiful beneath that black beard and scarred eye, and ruddy, vivisected, face with fractal lines and hair inching away from his high -arrogant- brow. He was once able to be looked at under all that packed on muscle that made his traps pinch his neck & head like a butterfly knife with the blade awkwardly out and pointed right at you. He was beautiful too, if one knew where and how to look , she thought. “And when,” she said aloud.
He was once regal, beneath the age and miles, and the - who gives a fuck?- ethos that he had adopted however long ago. And let’s face it, prison was not good on the skin or hair at all , she thought. Those teeth of his though, what a crack up: who has $30,000 worth of veneers amongst all that entropy and poverty; who but he? It was, she supposed, like his IQ: a true jewel in the broken ring and mold-greened, tarnished nickel setting, of a prison.
He would be an enigma wherever he was, that was one of those things decided by the Greeks’ Gods 10,000 years ago; he stood out no matter what; he didn’t belong anywhere, nowhere, fuck , she thought, that dude was born to not belong . He rebuked life in a way; while embracing its parts others threw away. In luxury his scars stood out, in bourgeois domains his tattoos glared; but in prison, and amongst the hoi polloi, the canaille, his teeth and erudition stuck out; these traits were sore thumbs and no matter what crowd he was among, he was all alone.
He was the gourmand who eats the colon or gizzard of the turkey but tosses the breast over his shoulder like a guy looking for something at the bottom of a sailor’s trunk loaded with crap he doesn’t want or need. He looked for crow to eat.
When he had a chopper -the most hostile and agile of one-off bikes- he hated bikers; when he was more and more tattooed, he more and more hated people with ink on their skin. Shit, he owned a tattoo shop and he hated the whole industry , she thought. In the oil field he hated roughnecks too; when skydiving? yup hated those that fell from the sky of blue. Books sure he loved them, but the people who read books? Oh, he had no use for those people at all. He said they were all talk, no action. Weight lifters, nope, meatheads, he called them, even as he benched 355 lbs. He’d deadlift all alone outside at 0300 -8,700 feet up- and yell at silver-lined clouds and piss off the sleeping fowls.
Snowboarders then? Are you kidding, he wouldn’t say two words to a snowboarder, well, except maybe fuck and off, she thought. When he was a radical Leftist he hated Marxists and Anarchists the most; and when right leaning? Well, those geeks he wouldn’t even approach. He was a vegetarian for a year and didn’t like one vegan he met. When he was an atheist, he might still be, but I don’t think so , she thought, he hung out with fundamentalist Christians the most of anyone . He hated atheist art and music and all his favorite authors and artists were fanatical religious zealots even as he cursed the Holy Ghost; for he knew that was the one -the only one- unredeemable sin. He dared the Lord to condemn him even as he carried out God’s plans. He loved only that which hated him; he hated all that sought to get along.
I mean , she thought in her musing head, from Blake to David Eugene Edwards, Flannery O’Connor he loved the religious; and The Author was his own special kind of pious sicarii, and Old Testament prophet with dagger under robe . She thought like this and waited for this bitch to come home.
When he grew the best weed in the world, he hated pot heads, man he couldn’t stand to even have the sexy one’s in bed . But she did not like to think about that. He was a womanizer of the first order. Then he went totally celibate at 44. That was it, he quit. Now, she asked, who -what kind of fanatic- does that? She shook her head and waited.
She was glad for it, she didn’t like thinking of him with anyone but her. And that was just what it was; it was axiomatic, and she didn’t feel the need to explain. Although, he technically was never with her, technically, she repeated. She conflated him and Blax now that she knew the layer upon layer that Isaiah had laid down and pressed with his large hands upon. She thought of leaves pressed on pages, themselves called leaves in a feuilleton .
Well, she kept thinking, now that he was among other outlaws and murderers he hated them all too. He would not speak for days, weeks; he accused criminals of being conformists and dorks. He was a man apart. He truly saw prison as a monk’s retreat, a time for reflection, the natural ending place for a man of principle. He accepted insouciantly what most men fear the most. And he feared what most men did 10 times a day. He had anointed himself the paccekabuddha . She looked that word up and thought that sounded close to true.
Most men fear prison, he welcomed it. He said it was the place for men who refuse to play the cheap games weaker men play to
get along. Prison was for the truly Great Man , he had said, and the fact that 99% of prisoners were weak and stupid and dissolute men did not injure his point at all. Not to him. He made anything fit; even if he had to jam it in a bit.
He had not killed his paramours; he had not killed the women that had betrayed him. And he had explained why to The Bust, and she had vowed to keep that rationale to herself forever. She thought of this and waited.
And she had vowed -to herself, not him- to get those whores herself . He and she would never be, although they -in a just world- would be man and wife. Not for her, but for him. She had her man and was glad for it. But this man deserved better than he got, she thought. He was a king beset on all sides by betrayers and mutineers and brigands of the worst sort.
She hated this apartment, hated its cheapness, and that had nothing to do with money, she added as if she might misunderstand herself. She hated how this woman -this Ms. Smith, and what a name for such a fraud- she hated how she arranged her rooms, her walls, her boundaries between her and the world. She hated how little this woman cared for the soft parts of the insides of a man, and how one could -The Bust could- see this insouciance reflected, recapitulated, revealed, on the goddamn walls of this trashy and ignoble domain. The inmate had once told her that a man’s aesthetics said all you needed to know; that one could read a man’s character on how they dressed and looked and comported themselves; the evidence was all there if one would only look.
He told her of the way fox coats had changed as their personalities had as well as the Russians bred for one and got the other too.
The Bust looked around at this apartment of trashy, blinky, cute-as-fuck, stupid-ass commercial, as-seen-on-TV nonsense and knew Sarah had no inner life, no core. She was whatever was on TV, whatever was popular, whatever would get her fangs in the world to suck out its blood while the poison -her poison- flowed into what was once alive. She was a virus, she thought, not alive, undead. She was an American; the worst race of men.
So, since she would have to give this up and not be with him, and since he would not gain the one thing he truly deserved: a virginal and loyal bride; then she -The Bust- she would eliminate his feminine enemies; his abusers; each of these witches who had thought they had gotten clean away with their crimes. That was her gift to him. His gift to her would be the permission he later gave, but she wouldn’t know that yet. She did it without any promise of future gain. She too had honor.
II. 2024 e.v .
They were riding into a dry lightning storm at 90 miles an hour, any faster in 6 th gear made the seat vibrate too much for the distance they had to go; it gave him a feeling not just in his body but his soul. But something was happening inside that part of him that didn’t care about corporeal existence at all. What it was he was barely aware of; it was far below what can be named by that part of the brain.
Bolts exploding now, he saw and thought, to the side -not just in the fore- like white blood vessels of God’s black eye as she -your passenger- whispers in the pocket of air you’ve created and rode into at this speed , “ you have the oddest kind of courage,” as she squeezes you from a thousand years ago. You travel 50 miles a day upon a mare on the Mongolian steppe; the body assumes this much; it has not adjusted yet to the iron horse.
You are on the modern warrior’s horse, the iron chopper, not some larded republican Roman bagger; ferings and supplies and clean clothes and all that crap, no, he thought. The chop is a bomb under your balls and you drink from small cuts in its tank and let it break ice on the road to Wyoming and be beaten like war drums by the wind; all against you as your woman hides behind a wide and protective back you’ve built over decades as the whole modern world dismissed the need for such atavistic things.
The black ended in your head and then appeared in real life; the sky and road both were made of mammoth black as the throttle was twisted back . You knew your speed by the wind resistance and the cars and civilians that fell behind, he felt.
He awoke with the dream still in his head, more in feeling than imagery now. He had remembered that ride north, on the Flat Black Ink chopper, with Melannie Martsolf on the back in her small body that she tried to stretch out and make big with pure will. Never trust a woman who hates the feminine, no more than you can rely on a man with no pride in manhood , he thought.
She had sinisterly rebelled against nature that way; he should have seen the evil coming. But without understanding what is not data -but mere noise- modern men -a cohort he used to be among- took all information in as equally useful. What did the fatuous atheists say, all facts are of the same value? It’s just facts all the way down? The modern man has no knowledge let alone wisdom; he has been abandoned to women to raise him, and they lack the words of manhood to impart, he thought.
He looked out at the night and saw only black; the moon was under the earth for 3-days like a sounding leviathan, 5-miles down and with a head full of requisite gases and with time on its side. His mouth was dry but he ached enough at joint and hamstring that he refused to move to slake his thirst. He’d had no fluids for 7.3 hours his body reported.
He thought of the night that his dream had reconjured up. That night was real, and they had rode in a weird storm to the border and back. She had loved him then, he felt, and he had deserved it then too.
He had a black and white painting he had done of Julee Rae on his wall seen from the bed, it was cold, but well-wrought; he had composed it at 25 and here at 50 he still had it. It was that and the coyote bones from Turkey Creek Canyon and one pair of camo BDU shorts. All else he had acquired and lost since then. He owned just three things from his first phase change at age 25.
But that night, on I25N, riding in 6th and final gear of the Baker transmission, all 121 horses of the S&S 113inch V-Twin employed at around 4500rpms -an exact account is unknown as the bike had no tach, no speedo, no fuel gauge- the open primary drive, a 3” belt, like an unclothed barbarian’s horse with flesh cut away from its haunches -the leg and hip bone’s torque-source revealed- churning in black and slap and anger, that night he rode. And the mare’s eyes were unshielded from fire, that night, on that steed, because they felt no fear, and she loved the chaos of her riding an arrow into the bête noire brimstone of the storm and her place behind the modern savage with that odd courage she did not need to understand to benefit from.
He had too much to lose and yet was reckless, he had capacity to enter the bourgeois world if he wanted it but chose to lay down in the barn. He didn’t need to prove anything to anyone, and yet felt each choice imbued with the spirit of God and Satan, and he was certain that to fail to choose was the only blasphemous thing.
It was madness and yet the rain stayed fore and aft and outflanked them, and its daggers hit low at the shins. When the rain came, his face took icepicks of drops that made him reflexively blink, but he absorbed no wetness, and the road itself was dry. All they saw was the lighting and still images of what it illuminated ahead. Back bursts of the rearguard threw their shadow ahead of the chop; the road was the grey, the shadow black and the sky instantly, purely, white, and the other cars began to pull off the road, and men lay in ditches in sane fright of what the AM radio warned of. The sky returned to what the road was now too: black.
A tornado was not seen, but the black turned green when the bolts connected the energy between air and ground; it had been reported from the east to people with radios or people who gave a shit. And people still in their cages on the road looked at them -he and her- as they passed at nearly twice their speed. She felt his pistol in its holster, her arms were low on his waist. Her hands migrated up to his chest, it hung over his taut midriff like cornice, like his event horizon brow hung over his singularity of eyes. She pinned her elbows in at his hips and he accelerated like a charger will with the subtle squeeze of the thighs on their flanks. She felt she was the rider and he and the chop one thing: the horse on the atavistic -and infinite- steppe.
She turned her head sideways to the west and la
y her Greco-Franco face on his back, the latissimus dorsi that sloped on forever on both sides from his spine. She saw the Rockies light up with the lightning that moved sideways now as it was being pulled by the fast-moving clouds, high up the gulf stream at 30 or 40 knots. The high-volt-bolts were ragged and mapped onto the continental divide like a chart, a graph of two phenomena that matched, he looked straight ahead and saw the border dark and light like a strobe, with bridges and 18-wheelers under them, and cell towers with one lone red light.
She saw the divide with early September snow on the peaks above 12 thousand feet. She wondered if the bolts would melt that snow and flood the plains before they arrived. Her questions were apocalyptic and fantastic; both wrong and right. The bike was fat at the rear tire -a 230x16- and yet the ferrous machine’s rear was stripped of all but her pillion-pad and two stubby pegs on the rear axle; the final drive doubled as the rotor for the chain-brake by Exile .
The bike was denuded of all that didn’t make it go faster or hear clearer the Stop, on orders from its God. It had nothing extra, it was as lean and martial as her man. He had said, and she’d remembered then, all life is metaphor, up or down the level of analysis, and thus man chooses machines that he approves of and mimic him, foreshadow him, or he becomes that which he despises .
His father rode a red bagger, all garish and comfy and soft and balless and ugly and wrong .
But Blax was a poet in ways that offended her, he was full of hate for what she hated too; but he didn’t offer to help her become closer to him, his rebuke was all he allowed to escape. She wondered why his heart beat in a red chest but when cut only black blood of some pericardial tamponade was revealed. Was it the air? Was it alchemy?
Was he dying with each beat of that chambered organ? She guessed they all were, but he was a chimera of man, and thus a beast. He was no man, no human, he was something the gods created on accident, malformed, and tossed down into the mountains to die. The dream was now somehow conscious memory, he noticed. He let the story carry on. She had vowed revenge in places inside her he would not see until it was too late.
