by Don Bajema
A mule regains its feet, its forelegs buckle, it falls on its face. The slaves scatter in a tangle of falling children. The garrison spurs the terrified horses in a starburst from the center of the mayhem, wheels them around and in the near distance reloads the muskets.
The priest and commander are kicking the ribs of their mounts, purchasing several yards from the grizzly turning in a slow circle and charging indiscriminately into mules and slaves. The circle widens around the beast and lariats spin in the air above him. A salvo of musket shot thuds into his back. He immediately charges the smoking barrels and the men in panic behind them. A horse falls, knocking a second rider to the ground. The rider hobbled by a broken ankle is caught in a sudden surge and slapped to the dust. The grizzly windmills his claws through the rider’s stomach and chest, then leaves him in spasms. The bear lumbers toward a knot of wranglers, a lariat falls over its crimson head wet with the blood of its victims and its own wounds, oblivious to self-preservation. The grizzly runs in a tight circle around the rider. The rider’s rope tangles over his shoulder and wraps around his waist. He is pulled to the ground and trails the path of the grizzly as it swats the air, charging the nearest enemy. The grizzly retraces its path and finds the rider struggling on his back, kicking the dust beneath him and screaming for God to save him. God does not save him.
The procession moves on, less six slaves, dead or escaped, three riders dead, two horses and one mule dead. The party moves down the trail for four miles under flickering torches before it builds a base camp around a fire as a chill sets in on the night. A large stake is pounded into the ground just outside of the firelight. Two wounded slaves are left as bait, bound and bleeding. The others are placed in a tighter ring of three or four at intervals which form a large circle around the horses. Between the slaves and the horses, the garrison and wranglers sit talking quietly before their small fires, their muskets in their hands. The churchmen sleep nearest the large fire; slaves are brought for warmth in the night.
August tenth, two hundred and three years later, is again hot. In less time than it has taken to dream, the rutted trail has become a highway of eight concrete lanes. The hot valley is toxic, mixing with sunlight and acrid breezes collecting over the endless malls, furniture warehouses, fast-food troughs, burger franchises, a race track, an airport, all within a brown horizon, rising, swirling, then raining silently over the valley floor.
Shasta stands white to the north. Jet trails crucifix the sky above the cold white peak, conquering and reducing geology until it is a dead language, and what is heard, but not understood, is the skyward hiss of the out-of-time passing of those strapped-in and aloft. Everything below a din of meaningless dramas, screeching, imploring, justifying, excusing and deceiving.
The low afternoon sun glares off thousands of car windows; drivers go blind. Panicked arms wave before burning eyes. Lane changes, accelerations, brakes tossing drivers at their windshields. Grim, gray faces, spruced up in latest style of goatee, Shanghai girls, the inevitable business suits, baseball caps, suburban moms, junkies, professors — vapid, empty, and alone behind their wheels. Jaws clamped tight in end-of-millennium psychosis. Each face and utterance cloned from an image provided by profiteers mindless of the penalty for robbing souls. Liars beyond not telling the truth. Oracles reaching below the belt, into the viscera and yanking the same blood and guts out for those seated and processed to see, to understand, to nod their heads in acceptance of their own fate at eighty miles an hour. They glare in Eddie’s rearview mirror, their insolent wrists riding the steering wheel, their faces mouthing obscenities.
Like that Mazda cutting in front of the green Volkswagen bus.
Automatic. Precise. Mindless. One of the zealots behind the wheel, high as God, stamping to the radio bass line, fighting to gain a foot on a slow Volkswagen bus containing a family returning from a camping trip. Dad, balding and wearing his 49ers hat. His wife is in the back seat with their daughter’s baby, the younger kids and his ancient, sleeping father. His mother sits beside him, a live-wire although withered by living eight decades, chattering along with slow stories of her childhood in Dublin.
The Mazda hits its brakes.
Dad panics. Tires slide. The bus noses over, hits the guard rail and bounces high, its doors ajar and twisting in the air, falling over the divider and onto coming traffic. The old woman loses her last breath on first impact. From then on she is an amazed participant in a ten-car pile-up one hundred miles north of San Juan Bautista. Her thoughts fade from the exact and blur into riddles and clues. Sifting her life’s final magnificent epiphanies. Her vision dims while dying images run like ghosts through her memory. A church. Two shadows running. A graveyard. The stairs to a funeral home. A man in her bed. Her body feels inflated, light, amniotic, swimming in the dark. Her pain is real, and as it is her last pain, she finds the power to transcend it and observe it all, floating high above it. Her fingers splayed, pressed on hard transparency, cold and then shattering into a thousand cracks. Her family having to fend, this time, for themselves.
What appears to be a fastball coming over the center divider is a baby shoe careening off Eddie’s windshield. The green Volkswagen bus follows, end-over-ending nine feet in the air. Inside an old woman flies weightless her fingers splayed against her window.
The baby shoe shoots over the sunroof.
Fighting the steering wheel everything is falling silent. Slow. Motion. A trumpet peals high over exploding gas tanks and collisions like mini-bombs cascade in spinning circles, metal eggshells collapse and occupants flail in flames slowing in stunning crunches hissing coolant and smoking tires.
Surviving it. Skidding and braking-then-flooring-the-pedal. Nudged and bumped, hit-but-not-hard-and-then-skidding-again with French horns heralding the state of grace it takes to still be alive here. When Eddie finds his voice, it is praying between his gritted teeth for the chance to remain, alive-here-and-for-tomorrow-to-be-here-again.
This strange internal music drowning out the clutter of television commercials, film soundtracks, thumping radio. This din normally blurs his instinct, robs him blind, leaves him sunstroked in a windstorm swirling amongst the debris of this inane culture, all the while skidding over the bones of entire tribes he comes alive, immune for a moment.
Eddie’s front tire wobbles and blows, slapping until the rim plows a trail of sparks against the concrete. He’s fishtailing, his brakes lock, his tires squeal. People around him howl.
A half mile away, Eddie knows a fifth grade teacher is standing on a school playground noticing grey clouds rising from the direction of the freeway. His windshield shatters.
To his left, a hipster in a Galaxy is rocking past on two wheels. The driver’s face is contorted and snow white, his mouth is wide open and he is silent, his eyes are rolling. He pulls to the far lane untouched, sliding along the bumper wall catching the cyclone fence with his rear fender, peeling grey wire diamonds off their posts until it trails him like a thrashing eel.
It all begins to slow. It stops. The Volkswagen slides past on its side spraying sparks. A terrified cartoon spins wildly past, centripetal force pushing him over his seat, his jacket climbs his neck, white cuffs rise to his elbow. He slams into an empty station wagon, its radio playing a gospel choir at full volume, rhythm exploding in clapping hands applauding God’s will being done. His head smashes against the dashboard, face spraying mucus and blood, his neck snapping back in forth in time with those ecstatic heavenly wails.
Eddie’s car rights itself. He wobbles a few hundred yards and pulls into the emergency lane. A woman with a baby in a car seat pulls in behind him crying hysterically. Sirens wail from someplace. Another car pulls over, a middle-aged man stares straight ahead, paramedics will have to pry his fingers from the steering wheel. Eddie walks back through the chaos and sees a yellow dress fluttering like a butterfly and a family crying beside her.
The sun sets beyond circling lights and crackling radios. The night falls with a line of traffic stretching over the rolling horizon for miles, headlights blazing like torches along a king’s highway.
Finally arriving at his apartment at 16th and Dolores, Eddie can’t shake the sense that the old woman has not finished yet, or has not finished with him. He turns the key of his empty apartment, finding yesterday’s heartbreaking weeks of abandonment foreign, from a different world. If she loves him, she should have him. The guy is a mindless lowlife, a simpering whiner. Snaking into a friendship, then moving on her.
You’d have to kill the guy for it to complete itself, and she must not be worth it. Or it would be done already. But it lingers on.
But inexplicably Eddie is filled with the desire to live. Fueled with a rage to get back into life and find what is there for him. Like a choral climb inside his head, imbuing everything with a fresh sense of anticipation. Such a stunning change from black, mean hate. To this sense of relief, as those prayers he does not remember saying are being answered anyway. In just a matter of hours. He thinks about the old woman — she spins in the air above him again.
The world opens up. The travel section jumps at him from the coffee table. Laughable to rehash the split, the tears, her beauty, weighing the chance she might come back.
Face it, the best sex was behind you anyhow, all that remained was habit. Eddie, she lied to you anyway. Your appreciation of her beauty was, after all, narcissistic, some tribal resemblance, some link to auburn hair, blue-eyed Irish fantasy. Your kind. Blood lines or something. Weird how simple it is when its power is removed.
In an hour, music reappears in Eddie’s apartment. Three hours later, the floor is slick with album sleeves — he’s drunk, stoned. It’s time for a walk.
Outside. The clear air carries distant sounds. Echoing parts of conversations, cars clearing intersections, dogs on tinkling leashes. A drunken shout. Breaking glass. Eddie forgot his jacket and the fog is streaming over Twin Peaks. A mist descending. Past the mission cemetery, all the McNamara headstones. Duggans. Kennedys. O’Briens. Eddie lays on his couch. The glass. Her old face behind the glass. Shattering. Asleep. Her fluttering dress in the highway. The gurney, the disconsolate son, the confused grandchildren.
Just sixty years ago someone else was holding absolute possession of her body, and certain that much of her mind, and parts of her soul were also his to keep in what was becoming an eternity. Aroused beyond what he thought possible, he gave himself away. He saw her face more beautiful, and then almost horrible, in her release of love.
What he was thinking was wrong, what he felt was misleading, what he hoped for was futile. She wasn’t on the bed with him, not really before him, laying loose and lost within the close, hot room. It was her sweat and her ragged breathing, her muttered sputters. The nails in his back were hers. But she was not there. Her senses were within her mind; her eyes saw nothing open or closed. She was gone and didn’t know how she had done it. He never guessed the intensity he felt within her was not sourced in her body, but in her complete absence. She was betraying him. She violated him further, taking him into a chamber he would see just once, an ancient treachery coming over her like an echo, unwanted, undeniable. Coming over him like a sunset on a distant horizon. A sight, which at that moment struck him as indescribably beautiful, although strangely familiar.
In the next moment he fell into a panic, sensing exactly what the problem was, and unable to contain his accusation. She wiping tears off her face; her lips pulled tight over her teeth. Her tentative denial driving him crazy.
She turned her face to the wall as he raved in the hallway. She saw thousands of women choosing black, pleading with the Virgin for relief, finding a faint recognition and communion in her downward gaze.
Dawn at 16th and Dolores. A wagon rattles along the corner, horses tired and rocking voluptuously, hips swaying, halters creaking. Four longshoremen jostle easily in the wagon bed, smoking and complaining. Two automobiles compete for the right of way. The intersection clears into a right angle of fate timed with a closing alley bar and the end of a late-night card game. The two men recognize the identity of each other. They stride the gray walkway with an increasing pace, each in the path of the other, as though hurrying to pray beyond the marble stairs of the towering Mission San Francisco de Assisi, turning harsh in the reddish light above them.
One of the turning points in violence is in fear’s pause, providing second thought’s first grab at irresolution, provoking the leap into action by the foolishly brave. A hand reaches into a jacket and removes a fishing knife. A man stoops and snatches a beer bottle, cracking it on a stone curb.
The first swipe with the knife misses. The fist juts under his swing and glass rakes deep along his wrist and over the forearm, torn veins gushing and splashing. The bleeding man steps back, amazed at the damage. His bellow echoes off the plaster walls above him. The bottle gashes him again, tearing a red belt around his waist. He snatches the knife clattering along the ground and moves into the man who’s standing with his head tilted as though he were drawing a conclusion. The knife drives into his thigh and would have run up into the groin if they hadn’t slipped, the blade glinting downward leaving a line to knee. The pant leg changes color. If they didn’t know one of them would be dead at first, they knew it now.
They circle each other, shuffling and scraping. Eyes fixed with cold purpose and forlorn sadness at the result of it all gone hopelessly out of hand. They spit in muttered taunts. They levitate above a half-dressed crowd standing in shafts of sunlight, unable to take their eyes off this passion making death entirely tangible before them. The spectators protest, then reconcile. Eyes dart from one to the other wondering who will stop it, until they realize they do not want it stopped. The figures flail in the muck until one dies and one lives. The mute crowd turns away, their thrilled faces glancing back, their shame driving them home. A voice calls in protest, a choir responds in kind. The crowd vanishes.
A man lying face up twitches for twenty minutes as shock and blood loss lift his ghost. The other stands for a moment over him, then walks four blocks to find an empty horse stall at his brother’s livery and collapses. His arm is amputated ten days later at the shoulder. Convicted of murder a month after that. No chance for parole.
She moved out of town to a place on the outskirts of Shasta, married a milkman. Had four kids. Never had a love again that came close to either man. Never wrote the prisoner. Visited the grave every year, until she turned eighty-two and died in a ten-car inferno. Never lost her Irish accent.
SOUTH
Crickets outside. Dew on the grass. Dogs asleep. Dawn coming.
Walking down the stairs into the foundry of his dreams. Figures shimmer in the heat, staring at him — old men, black and sweating, heroic Rivera renderings. WPA posters come to life. Huge Soviet women with thick-soled boots, bare-breasted, laboring, surrounded with flames, pausing momentarily, leaning on the handles of their shovels, watching Eddie dreaming of them.
A woman is doused. She steams and draws an artifact from the fire, passing it to a crippled man who fixes it on an anvil with a series of deft and practiced maneuvers in a dance. His tongs ring like bells as the women’s hammers clang, waking him in full adrenaline spasms.
The radio alarm gives news of thunderstorms and murder. Eddie’s middle age moves part by part. The bedsprings creak. His feet hit the floor; he stands up unsure of his balance. Dizzy and nauseous, he totters to the bathroom. His face in the mirror looks like an astronaut breaking through gravity’s pull.
He splashes his face — eyes tired and empty.
The radio drones on. Washington is moving to Salem. Maniacs are devouring children. Playmates are beating each other to death. Mothers are tossing their newborns off bridges. Racism and misogyny are holding hands in the back of the hall.
Someone’s body is w
homping against the wall. He waits until he is sure no one has yelled for help.
The newspaper hits the front porch. Chronicles of the worst the city can offer, huddled in blankets in doorways, breathing in the sidewalks littered with condoms, tubercular oysters, piss, blood, grease and shit. Old men flapping in their jackets to keep from freezing to death. Enraged youth menace the street looking for the chance to prove that they really don’t give a fuck about anything, no more than anything cares about them, which is, let’s face it, not at all.
Eddie grimaces in the mirror and begins to examine his teeth. A clap of thunder rolls over the house.
Pausing, rubbing the warm terrycloth under his balls, he stands there in vapor, naked and beginning to sweat. Stunned by a memory beginning to take shape, he waits.
A throbbing BMW filled with junior high warriors shakes the bathroom walls — blunts, a chorus of psychotic lyrics, fingers on the trigger, eyes cold for anyone outside their set.
Maybe the Vikings were right. Maybe you want to die in battle because you know every succeeding battle is worse. If we’re heading toward Armageddon anyway, why not get it over with?
Eddie had his chance. The roar of automatic fire drowned in the whomping blades above him. Hugging his weapon, burping rounds at anything moving. Buffaloes collapsing where they stand, peasant kids splattering, grandmas face down, shreds of vegetation spinning in the air. ’Cause he is getting his ass back to the world.
