by Edward Lee
"And McKully's runners make a hunnert cash a day and that's only drivin' one run."
Balls was thinking again... "And with a partner helpin' ya out you could make two runs a day, and split it with yer partner... "
Dicky's expression soured. He could smell shit just as well as anyone. "Just 'cos we growed up together'n all that don't mean nothin'. You want me to cut you into my deal? You gots ta bring something to the table, brother."
Balls put his arm around Dicky. "Way I see it, Dicky-Boy, is you need somethin'—a $1200 transmission—and I need somethin'—a job fer a month—"
"Why just a month?"
"I tolt ya," Balls reasserted. "In about a month, I got this score—a big score—but I don't wanna eat garbage till then."
Dicky hemmed and hawed. "Well, dang, Balls, I don't want to see ya starve but I ain't gonna be able to run no moonshine fer six, eight months at least. Workin' this job?" Dicky pointed to the bloated plastic bags. "That's how long it'll take me to git up them twelve hunnert bucks."
Balls had a very characteristic grin: like a weasel's face morphed into the face of guy who sells "Rolexes" from the inside of a raincoat. "Just you listen, friend. I'se walkin' back to my Daddy's place now but you be sure ta meet me at the Crossroads at midnight tonight, ya hear?"
Dicky looked confused. Had Balls given up working him for a cut of his future moonshine-running job? "The Crossroads? What fer?"
"Fer a coupla beers"—Balls winked—"and fer you ta pick up the twelve hunnert bucks I'm gonna give you ta git that new trannie," and then Balls' boot heels snapped down the pavement as he headed for the side road out of town. He was tossing chicken nuggets from the Wendy's bag into the air and catching them in his mouth as he proceeded.
Well ain't that some shit? Dicky thought. Then he sighed and dragged the big plastic bags into the laundry...
(II)
Now I know how Roquentin felt in Sartre's NAUSEA, the Writer thought. The Greyhound rattled as it soared scarily around the backwoods bends. He'd gotten the seat in the very back—it was his karma—which even the bums didn't want. Used condoms had been stuffed in the window crack, while on the floor lay several used hypodermics.
The Writer had vast experiences on Greyhounds; he needed to travel, to follow the call of his Muse, and this was the cheapest way. Besides, he needed to see. He fancied himself as a seer, and, hence, a seeker.
And what was he seeking?
The verities of the human condition.
It was a very real world—and often a beautiful one—on the other side of those panoramic windows complete with the plaque that read PULL RED HANDLE UP TO ESCAPE.
The bus stank. That was the only part he could never get used to. It was the smell of life, yes, and in a sense the smell of truth—indeed, of verity!—which was what the Writer craved beyond all else. Most people had personal mottos, like: Another Day, Another Dollar, or Today is the First Day of the Rest of My Life, or Every Day I'm Getting Better and Better in Every Way. But the Writer's motto was this:
How Powerful is the Power of Truth?
Not a motto as much as a universal query. It was the fuel for his existence... or the excuse.
The truth of what I write can only exist in its stark, denuded words, he recited to himself. Black ink on white paper... and the million subjectivities in between...
It was all he lived for as an artist, and most would credit him with having a noble goal.
Nevertheless, the bus stank. They all did, of course, but this was the worst. It was a smell he'd tried many times to delineate with words, and the best he could come up with was this: unwashed hair-oil mixed with unwashed armpit mixed with unwashed prostitute's vagina mixed with something vaguely sweet.
It was that sweetness he could never isolate and identify. Candied papaya chunks? Figs? Crystalized ginger?
It was something like that but like wasn't good enough. Not being able to define the smell was one of the Writer's innumerable failures, and though he viewed failure as something more important in his field than success, it was a particular failure that would always infuriate him.
He joggled in the seat as the bus rocked on. A woman of indeterminate race sat next to him, and she must've weighed three hundred pounds. The side of her arm pressing against his possessed the same girth as the Writer's leg. Every seat on the bus was full—naturally. Off and on, he tried to read, either Visual Thinking by Rudolf Arnheim, or The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. by George Steiner, but whenever he opened either book, the woman—as if prodded by a Pavlovian trigger—pulled out her one-pound bag of pistachios and started eating, quite noisily. Between the eating sounds, the overall not-quite-definable stink, and an encroaching claustrophobia that made him feel like a Girondin Royalist stuffed behind an oubliette during Robespierre's Reign of Terror, the Writer was at his wits' end. He looked at his watch, a Timex Indiglo, and saw that it was 6 p.m.
God knew when they'd be in Lexington.
On the plastic seatback in front of him, someone had magic markered: THE PERFECT MATCH: YOUR WIFE, MY KNIFE, and in worse script just below it: GANG BANG ALL WIMMIN TO DETH AND KILL ALL WHITE PEEPLE, NIGGERS, JEWS, MUZLUMS, INDIUNS AND SPIKS!
Curious, the Writer thought. At least the Asian-Americans can rest easy...
The massive woman next to him had stopped eating and fallen asleep, her maw agape below the sagging face. The Writer couldn't resist; he extracted his Sharpie and applied a graffito of his own: NATURE, THOUGH AN APPEARANCE, IS NOT MERELY THE IMMANENT MIND'S ISSUE OF CONSCIOUSNESS BUT A MANIFESTATION IN ITS OWN RIGHT OF A SUB-TOPICAL SPIRITUAL REALITY.
There, the Writer thought.
Just then the threat of a potential symbology pressed to his face like a clammy hand. My watch! the thought, unbidden, occurred to him.
But why would he think that?
He looked again at his Timex Indiglo. On the back it read "8-Year Battery," and he knew he'd bought it eight years ago. Hmm, he thought.
What could that mean?
Time's up, he guessed.
Like when the narrator of that Bergman flick says "At midnight... the wolf howls." Did it mean something pontifical? A deep-seated literary allusion that was clear only to the most astute?
Or was it just pretentious poop?
The intercom crackled, then the driver's voice boomed, "Next stop, Luntville."
The Writer had never heard of the place, and was glad of that when he looked out the window. It reminded him of that show he'd seen on cable about an Appalachian family: rusted trailers, dilapidated houses that were visibly leaning, cars up on blocks. Many houses had CONDEMNED signs on their front doors while obviously still occupied. The road wound through wild woods with vast breaks of scrubby farmland pocked by tractors scarlet with rust. When they passed another ramshackle house, the Writer noticed an entire family sitting vacant-faced on the bowing front porch: an older man in overalls sipping clear liquid from a jar, an obese woman with a masculine face pulling leaves from a bag of Red Man, a teen daughter in cutoffs and stained white bra smoking something from a glass pipe, and a dirty tot sitting naked on the bare wood, shuddering as if from Parkinson's.
White Trash Gothic, the Writer mused.
Eventually the road drained into what was apparently the main drag of a township, this Luntville. Closed storefronts lined either side. The driver swore in some kind of an accent when the street's only stoplight turned red; the bus squealed to a halt like a train slamming its brakes.
No vehicles were seen in the perpendicular lane.
Then the thought sparked, a delicious aesthetic fire in the Writer's head. WHITE TRASH GOTHIC! Suddenly he wanted to cry out in joy.
That's my next book!
Hence, on the Greyhound bus, no less, his next creative calling had struck, a veritable lightning bolt of the truth that was his aesthetic blood. He'd left Ipswich on this self-same bus three days ago and prayed he'd leave his writer's-block as well. But a new book idea had never occurred to him.
Until now.
Oh my God... It will be my most genuine novel... I'll win the National Book Award!
In a split-second, then, like a death-flash, the entire novel appeared before his mind's eye...
Moments later the bus roared into the front of a convenience store. A tiny sign on a streetlamp read GREYHOUND DEPOT: LUNTVILLE.
One old man with a beard and white hair hobbled down the aisle. The Writer grabbed his two carry-ons and followed him, after, of course, the arduous task of asking the behemoth next to him to get up so he could squeeze by. The woman's walrus face fixed on him; she had a Big Dipper of moles on her forehead.
"I saw you writin' that dirty shit on the seat," mouthed the walrus-faced woman. Green pistachio-mush was caked between her inordinately large teeth.
"It's Wilhelm Leibniz," the Writer replied. "Pluralistic objective monadism."
When he tightrope-walked by, the driver said, "I thought you were going to Lexington," but the man pronounced the word as "Rexington." He was Asian-American.
"I've experienced a creative advent, a new variance of my Muse has arrived," the Writer replied. "And, I'm sorry to point out, your bus is too fetid."
The driver's slanted eyes looked cruxed. "Fetid?"
Someone from the seats cut in, "He means your bus stinks!"
"Oh... "
Next, a passenger with a more distinct voice appended, "Yes, it smells like B.O. mixed with the smell of dried apricots. You know, that uncanny way you taste the smell right as you're eating one? The sapor?"
The Writer stared back as if into a glittering chasm. The person who'd made the simile was a gaunt-faced man with spectacles and a slight malocclusion of the jaw. He looked about as happy to be on the bus as the Writer had been.
Thank you, sir! the Writer thought and hopped off the bus.
The Greyhound tore off in a deafening roar mere seconds after the door had flapped closed behind him. The Writer felt siphoned within a dervish of dust and noise; a final glance at the bus showed him a smear of faces, like apparitions, inducing him to recall Ezra Pound's "In a Station of the Metro." Like petals on a wet, black bough... The old man who'd gotten off with him fell down from the roaring vacuum drag.
The Writer helped him up. "Are you all right, sir?"
"Blammed dink driver!" the old man railed. "Bet'cha he was VC, I shorely do! Wants to get back at us fer blowin' his shit country up'n that Ho Chi Minh fucker!"
"Actually I think he was Japanese, but then... we blew their country up too."
The old man waved an irate fist in the air. "And I just had me some Hin-doo doctor at the hospital in Pulaski tell me I gots some blammed disease called dye-ur-beetees."
"Oh, sorry to hear that. Type 1 or 2?"
A cockeyed glare. "How the fuck do I know? I tolt ya, the fucker was Hin-doo, could barely understand his swami jabberin'... . A'course, maybe he wasn't Hin-doo on account he didn't have one'a them dots on his head. What's that make him, then? A fuckin' A-rab?"
"I'm sure I don't know, sir."
"And looky there!" the old man continued pitching his fit. "I'se in a swivet, I am!" He pulled up a pant leg to show a swollen ankle purple as an eggplant skin.
Ew, the Writer thought.
"Swami fucker says I ain't got no cirkalayshun no more on account'a this dye-ur-beetees ‘so's if I wanna live, I gots to have my fuckin' feet cut off! And ya knows what else? Says I gots ta pay him to do it! Eight hunnert bucks, and the fucker had the balls ta tell me that's the poverty discount!"
The Writer's heart went out to the old man...
Rheumy eyes peered back below bushy white brows. "You ain't from ‘round these parts, are ya, boy?"
"No, sir. I'm from—" but then the Writer faltered. I'm the man who came from nowhere, he answered in thought. He picked a random city in his head. "I'm from Milwaukee."
The old man tensed. "Same place that fella in the news is from?"
"Pardon me?"
"It's been on the blasted news the last three days straight!"
I've been on a Greyhound bus for the last three days straight... "I hadn't heard. Something happened in Milwaukee?"
"Dang straight. Cops caught some fella with dead bodies in his apartment, had cut-off heads in the fuckin' refrigerator. Said there was even a head in a lobster pot! One'a them homo fellas, probably chugged more cock than I'se chugged moonshine. And he hadda pair'a cut-off hands hangin' in his closet."
"How... macabre... "
Now the old man seemed to give the Writer a disapproving once-over. "What's a city boy like you doin' here?"
"I'm following my Muse, I guess you could say."
"The hail?"
"I'm a speculative novelist," the Writer said. "I infuse relatable modern fiction scenarios with charactorial demonstrations of the existential condition. Allegorical symbology, it's called, rooted in various philosophical systems."
The old man smirked. "Fuck." Next, the rheumy eyes shot down to the Writer's sneakered feet. "Where'd ya git them shitty shoes, boy? K-Mart?"
The Writer was surprised. "Actually, yes."
"Well, they look like shit, son, and if you're a writer then you must have money—"
The Writer laughed.
"—so's you just come ta see me. I'm a mile off County Road One, take a left at the deadfall, the big ‘un. Jake Martin's the name, and I'se the best shoemaker in the county just as sure as rabbits can fuck. Just you come to see me fer some real shoes'n I'll give ya a deal."
The Writer was waylaid by the stunning irony. A shoemaker... soon to have no feet... "I'll be sure to look you up."
"You do that," and then the oldster began hobbling away.
"But if you could spare a minute, sir. Where might I find some suitable lodgings?"
A big black vein beat beneath the purple ankle. The bony hand pointed somewhere unfixed. "Ya might try Annie's bed ‘n' breakfast couple miles yonder, and then there's the Gilman House, but a fella with money like you—a writer—ain't gonna wanna stay there 'cos it's a shit-hole full'a dirty cunts." The bony hand pointed down the street. "Alls they charge is ten bucks a night so's how good kin the rooms be?"
That's my kind of price... "Thank you very much for your time, sir."
"Shee-it," the old man hobbled away, waving his arm.
My first significant verbal exchange with the local populace, the Writer realized. A block down he noticed a row of stores, most showing CLOSED signs, but one—PIP BROTHERS LAUNDROMAT—looked open for business because a young fat man with a buzzcut was dragging large plastic bags inside. The man didn't look happy yet the Writer couldn't have felt more relieved. Three days on a Greyhound, or three minutes—it didn't matter. An obligatory sanitizing was mandatory, and all the clothes he wore right now would have to be washed. Twice. More closed shops stood across the street from the laundry but one establishment (whose sign read merely RELAX AT JUNES) appeared to be open, for a man in a plaid shirt and cowboy hat exited the front door wearing quite a grin. A moment later, a woman in cutoffs and large breasts straining a halter came out the same door, then sat down on a bench to smoke. Did she inadvertently sniff her finger? Peculiar, thought the Writer. But what he noticed first was the misspelling on the sign. I should tell them, he considered. It needs to be possessive.
At the next intersection stood a Wendy's fast food restaurant, with only a few customers observable in the windows. He'd never been to a Wendy's. Someone had told him once that this chain served square hamburgers. Why not rhombuses? the Writer questioned the prejudice. Why not cordiforms and dodecagons?
Down the street in the opposite direction he spotted a rundown tavern. Thank God, a bar... No writer worth his ink didn't drink. Hemingway, Sartre and Beauvoir, Poe... Then he noted the tavern's wooden sign: THE CROSSROADS.
How curious...
The Writer couldn't count how many taverns he'd happened upon which bore the same name. It was a name rich with allegorical promise, and he liked that. He needed to be surrounded or even besieged by it...<
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But profound allegories can wait a moment or two, he prioritized. He needed some cigarettes and some food. Then, contemplating what the first word of his new novel would be, he grabbed his bags and trudged into the Qwik-Mart.
"We're closed," snapped the old crank of a proprietor behind the counter.
The Writer rechecked his 8-year-battery Timex. "Really? What kind of convenience store closes at 6 p.m.?"
"This one!"
The old crank had the face of an elderly Heinrich Himmler but wore overalls and a long sleeve shirt, and one of those visors like bankers wore in days of old. The Writer thought: Mr. Drucker, in Green Acres... There was a cane with a dog's head propped behind the counter.
"I don't mean to be an imposition, sir," the Writer began, "but I've just traveled a considerable distance in... less than savory conditions, and I really need some cigarettes and food. It would only take a minute of your time."
The old crank made a psst! sound, flapped a hand, and belted "Fuck! Go ahead! Ever-one else's shittin' on me today! Why not you too?"
An amiable old chap, I'll give him that. The Writer grabbed some instant coffee, sugar, and Saltines. The dinner of champions... Besides, he'd read somewhere that these three ingredients were primarily all that academic horror writer H. P. Lovecraft consumed for the majority of his career. (And what he hadn't read was that these same three ingredients had probably been the cause of the colon cancer that had killed him in 1937.) Back at the counter he asked for a carton of cigarettes as well, then withdrew his credit card from the velcro pouch he wore around his ankle whenever he traveled.
