Love and Other Ways of Dying

by Michael Paterniti

  Now picture Bev Hooker in bed just after her encounter with the Asiatic. It’s five minutes past three in the morning. She is a good woman, a woman full of the earth itself, who a moment ago was sleeping soundly and is now wide awake and jittery. She is listening for a bump or a bang or a window being forced open, but all she hears is something distant and indistinct—maybe the lowing cows in Jack’s dreams. And still she is afraid, feels hunted. It’s hard to know what drives certain folk, what chemicals are inside people. Occasionally you find syringes in the next-morning rooms of the Astro. And there are people out there right now spooking and shooting bullets at one another. There are people next door—your neighbors—who’d sooner devour you than bring you cookies anymore. Somehow, they’ve entered the same bloodstream that keeps you alive.

  So have you really listened to Bev Hooker’s story? Have you figured out what she’s really trying to tell you, herself? There’s an Asiatic selling wind chimes at 3:00 A.M. out on the darkest edge of Dodge City, where the streetlights end, and no one, no one at all, can be trusted anymore. But what scares someone like Bev Hooker, what scares someone like you most, is this: Maybe the person you can trust least of all is yourself. See, when the Asiatic rang at the door jes grinnin’ like a kook, you pushed back the dead bolt, and then you—you yourself—let him in.

  Donna, behind the reception desk, in Dwayne Price’s tennis shirt, the headlights off Wyatt Earp Boulevard flooding the Thunderbird lobby with pale white light, then emptying again, the colors and the things of the room—the oversized blue couch, the bubbling aquarium full of rosy barb and tigerfish—resuming their prior lives. Donna sits here now, will be sitting here this winter and spring and fall, as the pots rumble into town, ten thousand cows a day to the slaughterhouse, even as the wheat grows and is shattered and threshed and made into bread and bought at the store. To make bologna sandwiches, to put some hog between Wonder Bread for Donna’s family. This place—this beautiful Thunderbird Motel—is home.

  Wasn’t at first. Was a pit, a bug-infested hole, cockroaches the size of your pinkie, crawling on your body at night. Dirty white folk sold it for $225,000. They angry, says Donna. Went belly-up. They never show us how to do nothing—how to register people, how to clean. They leave one day, lock the door, and go to Oklahoma. Had to spray the place for months to get rid of the roaches. Then Donna was full of sudden doom, thinking: It all a mistake. No matter what, we end up back in the slaughterhouse. No matter how hard we try, we live the rest of our lives inside the cow. But Dwayne, he just holds everyone steady. The pool fills with litter and red dirt every day. Pour concrete in, says Dwayne calmly, get rid of it. Save on insurance, too. The gospel. Shows them how, one small step at a time. Work the arms. Clean the toilets. Get up and do it again.

  Very hard at first. The former owner’s daughter is still in town, works the night shift at another motel. When the rooms are full, she recommends the Astro Motel. Locally owned, she says, a nice white woman works there—Bev. We get lots of bad reports back from the other one, the Thunderbird. Dirty. When Donna hears this, her smile fades, anger rises, clouding her face. She big woman, fat, short, go with black guy, she says. Let’s say compared to young girls, she not so pretty. She pretty ugly. Everyone have dirty words for me. Say my motel is dirty. Bev and Jack, they grouchy and old. Everyone say, Don’t stay at Holiday or Thunderbird, but people come here and see how clean. People come here and say they saw sign next door—AMERICAN OWNED. Then ask, Are they American? If so, why need sign?

  That’s what boggles Donna. She’s an American citizen, and she owns the Thunderbird. It’s American owned, right? No, not even close. See what’s happening here? Can you feel something building? Make someone feel dirty and eventually they’re going to outclean you. Tell them they’re not like you and they will become you. Put up a sign that says you’re American and they’ll already have a sign up that says we are, too: SINGLE, $26.95.

  Out-American the Americans. Start with nothing and eventually you have a Trinitron TV and a new gold shag rug. You have a Jeep Grand Cherokee and an Acura Legend and a twin-cab Ford pickup truck. And yet something keeps you up at night. You’re an American in Dodge City, grossing more than $300,000 a year from two motels, and you can’t sleep. In the graveyard, talk to Dwayne about it. What’s eating you? What? It’s this: Frightened for your kids. Frightened even to let them go up to town. Gangs and kids spooking. Kids up there right now with gold-flecked nostrils, crazy-eyed, like they’re from some long-lost tribe of the world. A Laotian just broke out of the county jail—in for killing another Asian. Tomorrow, they’ll find him hiding under a trailer home, two snake eyes staring from the dark. Out at the slaughterhouse some years ago, three Asians were shot and killed in the parking lot with a .380, killed by another Asian over a four-dollar gambling debt.

  That’s what keeps you up at night. Almost helps to have a job like this, behind the desk at the Thunderbird Motel. People coming and going. Late, a white man from Ohio stops in with his son. Driving America on summer vacation—New Orleans, Big Bend, all over. Stopped in next door at the Astro, but prices are a little higher over there, will take a room here. Donna likes talking, talks to them. Pots rumble outside the window. When it comes out that Donna’s from Laos, the man tells the story of some Cambodians in his Ohio town. The Tran family. Don’t speak English, but they came to Thanksgiving dinner. Before eating, someone stood up and told the story of the Pilgrims: how they came on the Mayflower, nine weeks at sea, arrived starving and homeless and learned to grow corn and pumpkin from the Indians. The story was translated for Mr. Tran, and when he heard it, he smiled and exclaimed delightedly, Ah, you’re boat people, too!

  When Donna hears this, she breaks out giggling, beams a big smile. Seems as if a great weight has been momentarily lifted from her shoulders. That right, she says, shaking her head, slapping the counter. We all boat people here, isn’t that right?

  Drive with Jack Hooker. Away from the Astro Motel. Away from Dodge City and the stench of a town stuck between a slab of meat and a frying pan. Forget the broken Coke machine, the futile phone calls to the distributor. Forget about the million decisions, ones that led to each room being outfitted with, say, the electric-pink Astro Motel flyswatters that read YOU’RE ON TARGET WITH US.… KILLS 25 PERCENT MORE FLIES. Leave it all and drive. Drive until you’ve driven beyond yourself. Into the heart of something else. Wheat fields and John Deere 9500 combines—all of it giving way to cows. To the amazing throw of feed yards across the plains, to the sharply cut pens and four thousand head of snorting, farting cattle. And the thing buried beneath it all, the secret of it.

  On the way, look out at the wheat—a late-spring freeze and above-average rain have delayed the harvest. But these fields are a week away, golden and waving in a breeze. Their beauty fills Jack Hooker with a flicker of sadness. No such thing as the American Dream anymore, he says. You used to do business on your honor and good name. You could spend half a life building your good name, and the IRS takes it away. You know the story about the ten Indians? Then there were nine, eight, seven.… There’s no American Dream left.

  See, before you had anything, you had the Indians—the Kiowa, Comanche, Arapaho, and Sioux—and then the cowboys turned it all into America, made this country great. After that, you had the railroads and the bankers and then the feed yards and the slaughterhouses. If there were differences, it wasn’t about skin color. But see how it’s changed now? America, the thing itself, is in bed with all the special interests and the conglomerates and the outsiders. In bed with people like Donna. Rather help her than its own kind. Look at these Asiatics in Dodge City: Got their Asiatic restaurants and markets, got their own pool hall, their own gangs. Drive Japanese cars. Damn shame.

  Remember a day at the Astro three years ago, when a big Continental pulled in bearing Dwayne and Donna. Dwayne rolled down the window and asked how much for the motel. Owner was there, said $450,000. Can have it if you can afford it. But didn’t really take kindly to the idea
of a white man and his Asiatic buying the Astro. Window went up, and they left. Then Dwayne Price helped her buy the other two places—$550,000 for both of them—and went for the Astro’s jugular. Sold out his own people. That’s the difference between Dwayne Price and Jack Hooker: never occurred to Jack Hooker to sell out his people. Suspicion is that Dwayne Price was keeping Donna as his girlfriend and worked out some underhanded deal for her, and now Donna doesn’t pay taxes. When Dwayne Price died, the joke was that he died because he knew the authorities were closing in.

  Still, do you know how it feels to have a hundred years on this land, a hundred years of Hookers buried in this ground, then have it taken from you, just ripped away by people who washed up yesterday? Makes you feel sick, powerless. Feel like an Indian, on a reservation somewhere. No American Dream left. Jack, at the steering wheel, ponders a moment, wheat blurring in his side window. Been thinking about joining the Peace Corps, he says. Know much more than some college kid. Go to South America, out on the pampas there. Could teach them a thing or two about cattle. Wouldn’t get near the Asiatics, though. Wouldn’t share information with them. The Cambodians and their kind are worthless. First, there’s too many of them: one in three people of the world. Second, don’t like jungles.

  As soon as the yards appear, as soon as cows materialize on the horizon—Jack Hooker lets go. Seems as if a great weight has been lifted from his shoulders, exhales. His son walks out to meet you. Wears brown cowboy boots and a collared button-down and Wrangler jeans. Uncanny. Looks a bit like Bev in the face, but everything else is Jack. Father and son both stand with their elbows cocked, both have slight paunches that place equal pressure on the buttons of their shirts, both have pens in their left breast pockets, and both have the same sun-stroked, grooved skin on the back of their neck that shows an honest day’s work. Except that the son may be a bit broader across the chest and has a full head of silver hair, you feel as if you’re looking at Jack Hooker twenty-five years ago. Walks with a slight swivel of the hips. Out in the yard, lost in a sea of cattle.

  Nearly a third of America’s meat comes from southwest Kansas, says Jack Hooker. Now, a hundred years ago, maybe five million head come through Dodge City in as little as a decade. Part of the natural Santa Fe Trail. Old cowboys drove the cattle slow so the cows wouldn’t lose weight, then loaded them on the railroad and sent them east for slaughter. Today, they leave on pots, go right from this yard, past the Astro Motel, to the slaughterhouse. Look at the country now, says Jack Hooker. The beautiful part is that it’s still so strong, still so full of grass. You know why? Do you know the secret? Deep down in the earth, there’s water running under all this. The Ogallala Aquifer. See, it starts with water, all this clear water running beneath the earth from South Dakota to Texas. Beneath rock and sand and gravel, millions and millions of gallons’ worth. Running of its own sweet will.

  Jack Hooker’s son is the man who goes to Texas and Kentucky and wherever else and buys these animals—British Whites and Herefords, Charolais and Simmentals and Black Anguses. Huge, lowing creatures. Twelve hundred pounds off the hoof. Some of them have the face of Christ himself. Drink seven gallons of clear water a day, eat corn and hay. Creatures of habit. Like us. Pick out a spot in the yard and never leave it. Pick a place at the trough to eat and always come back to it. Rub up against the same exact cows every day. Get in their way and you might take a horn. Some of the cattle get sold to the Japanese. Those folks have a slightly different standard for their meat, says Jack Hooker’s son. Like theirs with a little more fat. Sometimes they come over to Kansas, to the yards, and handpick the ones they want, cameras looped around their necks. They’re the picture-takingest people, says Jack Hooker’s son, chuckling at the thought.

  In the late afternoon, go up to the ridge with Jack Hooker and his son. On a rise at the edge of the yard. Blinding sun and blackflies, but they don’t seem to touch the Hookers. They just stand there, the two of them, looking down on it all. Have you ever looked on miles and miles of cattle in a cast of orange light? Four thousand of them. Big, lumbering, beautiful things—mentality of a five-year-old. Have you ever seen the way the light plays on a herd, the way clouds come rolling in from California, and every one of them turns a different color? Looks like a museum painting of the Old West. Something behind glass.

  Purdy, purdy sight, says Jack Hooker.

  That’s right, says his son. They’re breathing in unison, and then Jack looks at you looking at the cows, then looks back at the cows himself and says to no one in particular, Don’t get more real than that, does it?

  It’s been a long day at the Astro Motel. Bev’s black man had a visit from his wife and child, or girlfriend and child, or whatever they are, and the three of them frolicked in the pool to escape the 100-degree heat. The white man in 109 saw them out there splashing around and came in and said to Bev Hooker, I see you let your help in the pool. Thought this was an American place. Both Bev and Jack know they have a problem now—they can’t afford to offend their few paying customers—and Bev has suggested that they raise her black man’s rates if he’s going to have outsiders come visit and use the pool. It’s only fair, right? Or am I prejudiced? she wonders. Don’t think I am, but am I? Problem is this, says Jack, settling her: You let one in, then they just keep coming. Most colored folk make a lot of noise, he says. But now this man, he’s a good man.

  Sent Bev to bed with tornado warnings on the radio. Told her they’d work it all out tomorrow. Sleep well, Momma, he said. Now he’s on the night watch. If someone comes in at midnight, one o’clock in the morning, he’ll open the door and give him a bed. It won’t matter what race or color, won’t matter what he thinks about him in the bright noon of day, because he knows what it’s like to be tired, knows what it’s like to be without shelter on a stormy night. There are dead hogs hanging in the trees; there are kids spooking. When guests come through the front door of the Astro Motel, Jack Hooker will hand them the keys to one of his rooms and welcome them. Whoever they are, they’ll sleep under the same roof as Jack Hooker tonight.

  But no one comes. Wind starts up and blows the rain sideways, so fierce it feels like some kind of Old Testament storm. Cars keep passing, but no one stops. On their way to other motels. The bullet holes in the window have pooled with darkness now, and everything reflects back. Can’t see the outside world, just hear it roaring. Look at Jack Hooker now, in the haunted lobby of the Astro Motel. Can you see him looking at himself? Do you see what he sees? Just a man—a man who hates and knows he is hated—turned ashen in the lobby light, standing with his calloused hands at his side, waiting and watching.

  Meanwhile, behind the desk over at the Thunderbird, Donna registers a trucker, a short, speedy white guy, and hands him the keys to 228. Clean room, she says, smiling. If you have problem, you come back and talk to me. Got ice machine right over there, too. You sleep well, okay? Al Bundy is on TV, and Donna laughs with the laugh track. She is wearing another one of Dwayne Price’s short-sleeved shirts. Kids in bed. Boun in his room, watching a movie. Look at this weather, she says excitedly. Tonight, I bet we full.

  She comes around to the front of the desk and tidies. Puts away the photo albums of His image. Goes to the aquarium, where she begins to feed the fish. Look at this woman Donna. She is now on her tiptoes, reaching her hand into a tank full of rosy barb and tigerfish. Can you see her? Clear water flows somewhere in the earth beneath her feet, and she has her hand in the aquarium, among the psychedelic fish, so that part of her is in the water, too. Can you feel how cool it is? Can you see how clear? Outside, the wind is ripping her American flags, and there are more cars pulling into her parking lot, an endless wave of refugees washing out of the storm tonight. Look at Donna, Bout Sinhpraseut. She is smiling, feeding the fish. There are people with money coming to her door. She lets them in.

  THE GIANT

  ONE DAY WHILE LOITERING AT MY desk, I happened upon a news-wire story about a giant. The story was of the variety that appears from time to ti
me, offering a brief snapshot of the oldest/smallest/fattest person on earth, a genre in which I take a keen interest. But there was something else about this one. The giant was reported to be thirty-three years old, residing in a small village with no plumbing in a very poor region of Ukraine. He lived with his mother and sister, who happened to be tiny. How he’d gotten so huge wasn’t entirely known, because the giant wasn’t interested in seeing doctors anymore. Something inside him had been broken or left open, like a faucet, pulsing out hormones as if his body presumed that it still belonged to that of a proliferating pubescent boy. This apparently was the result of an operation he’d had as a child. Under the knife that saved him from a blood clot in his brain, his pituitary gland had been nicked. Now he was more than eight feet tall—and still growing.

  In the article, the giant was pictured sitting at his small dining-room table, reaching up to change a lightbulb at a height that a normal-sized person couldn’t have reached standing. Another picture captured the giant in an unguarded moment, staring in astonishment at his hand, as if he’d just picked an exotic, oversized starfish from a coral reef. Near the end of the article, he said something that killed me. He said that his happiest hours were spent in his garden, because only the apples and beets don’t care what size you are.

  Beyond my admittedly voyeuristic interest in the facts of the giant’s life—his huge hands, his constant search for clothes that fit, the way he traveled by horse and cart—that one comment brought with it the intimation of something heartbreaking and even a bit holy. It began a story: Once upon a time, there was a giant who kept growing.… And yet this was a real life. And what kind of life was it when you had to find solace among fruits and vegetables? Maybe he was an angel. Turned out of heaven, or thrown down to save the world. What other explanation could there be?