Still, passing the airport didn’t feel right. None of my possibilities felt right. As I was passing Palo Alto I suddenly turned off. I had never gone back to see the New Americans and meet Teddy Blue. I thought I might as well. There was no knowing if I would ever return to California. Perry Lane was almost as hard to find in a car as it had been on foot. My thoughts kept going back to the airport and to Jill.
I found Teddy Blue’s house, finally. When I got there things were very quiet. I knocked and went in and found Pauline and Leslie and Sergei sitting on the floor playing Monopoly. They greeted me as if they had known me for years.
“How’s your awful wife?” Leslie asked. “Has she had a baby yet?”
“Don’t be so personal,” Sergei said. He was wearing a maroon sweater. Leslie had on the same green dress she had worn the first time I saw her, and Pauline was in her nightgown and a blue terry cloth bathrobe.
“Are you hungry?” Pauline asked.
“She can’t stand not to feed people,” Sergei said. “Play Monopoly with us. Everyone’s gone to Tijuana.”
“It was Teddy’s idea,” Leslie said. “He can’t stay out of Mexico.”
“I’m on my way to Texas,” I said.
“Oh, we have mushrooms tonight,” Sergei said. “Bring him some of the mushroom shortcake, Pauline. The mushrooms are from Mexico. They’re great. Monopoly’s a lot more fun when you’re high.”
“He ought to eat first,” Pauline said. She got up and went and made me a baloney sandwich and brought it to me on a plate. She also brought me a boiled egg and some milk. While I was eating Sergei and Leslie argued about how they would divide the properties already acquired with me, so I wouldn’t be unfairly handicapped by starting so late. Sergei already had two hotels on Park Place. I thought we ought to divide with Pauline too, since she had practically nothing. What she did have was lovely calves. Nice ankles too. Sergei explained to me that the mushrooms in the shortcake were vision-inducing mushrooms. Mexican Indians had been eating them and having visions for centuries.
“I’m not having any mushrooms,” Leslie said. “Visions always make me cry. I’m too unstable. I have visions of myself unraveling.”
I ate the shortcake, which was good. I had no reason to refrain from having visions, that I could think of. Perhaps I would see Jill in a vision and know what to do about her. But instead of having visions I got into a very competitive Monopoly game. Leslie and Sergei competed fiercely and I competed fiercely too. Pauline smiled and looked lovely and palpable and quiet. Occasionally she bought a cheap property. Long before we finished she dropped out of the game and went over and took off her robe and went to bed. “Night,” she said. “Stay for breakfast if you want to. You might have a wreck, driving at night.”
Sergei was bold with his capital, but he was also lucky. He was keen and zestful and awfully intelligent. Leslie groaned often and wrinkled her brow, trying to decide what to do. She was essentially cautious. I was reckless and did about as well as Sergei.
Pauline had gone to sleep. She was so lovely that I kept wondering why Teddy Blue kept running off and leaving her. I ate some more shortcake and began to feel effects. I was not having visions but I felt the distances of things begin to alter. Both inside me and outside me the distances altered. It was a little like being drunk except much dryer and lighter and all in the head. My hands and feet felt distant from one another, and the pieces on the Monopoly board seemed larger, the size of dollhouses. At moments we seemed to be right by the bed, watching Pauline sleep. At other moments the bed seemed miles away. At two in the morning we stopped playing Monopoly. We went out in the yard so Sergei could identify constellations. While we were out in the yard the desert shrunk. It seemed to me that Texas was only a few miles away. I would ease down the road and be there soon. It was absurd to go to the airport, with Texas so close.
“He ought to take some mushrooms with him,” Leslie said. “I can tell they make him feel good.”
I did feel very good. I was delighted I had stopped by to see them. It was wonderful to feel Texas so close. I thought of Emma. I could have breakfast in her kitchen. She’d be very pleased to see me. Sergei gave me a brown paper bag with some mushrooms in it. I stuffed it in my parka.
“Save them for sometime when you’re playing a game,” he said. “They improve all games.”
I thanked them and got in the car. Leslie said she would read my book as soon as she could get a copy. I drove away. When I got to the freeway I slowed down very slow, so I could read the exit signs clearly. I was looking for familiar names. I expected the first exit to be El Paso. Then there would be Van Horn. Then San Antonio. But that wasn’t the way the exits read. It didn’t bother me, though. I felt wonderful. I expected to be arriving in front of the Hortons’ house in a few minutes. I had keen dry light visions of everybody. If I missed the Hortons’ I could just go on and see Jill. I imagined her sitting on a big bed in a hotel, in her bathrobe, solemnly watching TV. There were many homes where I could spend the night. Jenny Salomea would let me in. All the exit signs kept saying San Jose, which was a little odd. Then they began to mention Salinas. I saw Mr. Fitzherbert drive right through my room. He drove right through it with a lovely splintering sound, and the apartment flew everywhere. Pieces of it settled lightly and quietly to earth, as I was passing San Jose. Emma kept hugging me while she was fixing breakfast. There wasn’t much traffic. Then a bad vision came: Sally. She loomed out of a bathtub with her belly like a whale’s back, a little spout of water coming from her navel. She looked contemptuously at me, for being so distanced from myself. She made me feel guilty for being spaced out. While I was looking for hotels I noticed that two of my wheels were not on the pavement. Jill said I was a dummy, speaking kindly. I let the Chevy drift off the road and stop. I had many cushions and pillows in the car and I piled several of them in the front seat and got the green Indian rug and huddled under it. Sergei had not noticed any constellations. It was very dark. I didn’t want to drive anymore. That would be stupid. I felt very wise, much too wise to do stupid things. I covered myself with the green rug and shut my eyes. I had never felt so wise, or so nicely sleepy.
When I woke up I felt great. The world had become absolutely white, not only the earth but the air as well. I was in a thick, milk-white fog, the whitest, milkiest fog I had ever seen. It was like the Chevy was at the bottom of a lake of milk. Actually it sat somewhere in the Salinas Valley, as I realized when I got my wits about me. The old man and old woman of the Berkeley hills had had a long argument about Odysseus’ visit to the underworld, the day we had had the picnic. They had argued about the spirits that came out of the fog, and I had gone right home and read the chapter they had argued about. The spirits came out of the fog and approached the pool of blood at Odysseus’ feet and he kept them back with his sword. It seemed to me I was in such a fog. The spirits of the dead ought to be moving in it. If I went and found a heifer and slaughtered it and got a club to fight the spirits back with perhaps the spirits would come. I could talk with Granny and Old Man Goodnight and ask them if I had their stories right. I got out and walked across the ditch to piss. No real spirits came but to my surprise I had a faint intimation of Godwin Lloyd-Jons. It was unlikely he was abroad in such a fog, and anyhow he was in Austin, but I thought anyway that I heard him say my name.
I got back in the car and eased along in the fog, scared to death that someone would run into me from behind. When I finally ran out of the fog the green country was beautiful and I was starved.
I drove on to Bakersfield in the bright morning sunlight, feeling extremely fresh and extremely happy. Being on the road was wonderful. By the time I had been driving an hour I could understand what had been wrong with me for so many months. I should have taken Jill on the road. I loved watching the land as I passed through it. I stopped at a filling station and had a Coke and some peanuts. The filling station was far out in the Valley, and flat green fields stretched all around. While I was stopped I called Bruce a
nd told him I was going home and would be at an autograph party if he wanted me to.
Bruce was all business. He had already arranged a party, and had been about to call and tell me. I felt generally aimless and happy. Bruce read me a review from Publishers’ Weekly, which said I was very sentimental. That struck me as fair enough. I got in the car and drove on and before I had driven fifty miles I had forgotten that I was having a book published, or even that I was a writer. All that day I was just a happy driver.
That night I slept in my car, just east of Las Cruces, New Mexico. The swish of the trucks and cars that passed me put me to sleep, and when I woke up there was no milk-white fog, as there had been outside Salinas, but only a cold, absolutely cloudless desert sky overhead, with stars still bright in the west. I huddled under my rug and covers for a while, watching the sky change. It was very cold in the car. I remembered driving toward Las Cruces on my way to California, with Sally waking up in the back seat, smelling like a warm sleepy girl. I didn’t really want any more of Sally, but despite myself I missed the way she smelled when she woke up.
Finally I shook myself out of the covers and drove on toward El Paso. Ahead of me, forty miles away, the sun was about to come up, over Texas. The rims of the desert had all been dark when I woke up. Then, to the northeast, a line of pink edged along the rim. Slowly the pink became red and widened into a band. Soon the band stretched itself in both directions, north toward the Staked plains, south over Mexico. The curve of the sun appeared and the red became orange. As I approached El Paso the whole great spread of sky in front of me shaded from orange to yellow.
Texas was there, beyond the sunrise, looming as it had loomed the day I left San Francisco. “It is your land,” Wu had said, but Wu had never seen the great sky that opened above me. It was the sky that was Texas, the sky that welcomed me back. The land I didn’t care for all that much—it was bleak and monotonous and full of ugly little towns. The sky was what I had been missing, and seeing it again in its morning brightness made me realize suddenly why I hadn’t been myself for many months. It had such depth and such spaciousness and such incredible compass, it took so much in and circled one with such a tremendous generous space that it was impossible not to feel more intensely with it above you. I wanted to stop at the first filling station and call Jill and get her to come to Texas. No wonder I hadn’t been able to make her love me in San Francisco. I couldn’t feel anything in a place where I hadn’t even noticed the sky. Maybe I hadn’t been very loving—I couldn’t be sure.
Below me, to the south, I could see Juarez and El Paso, nestled in their crook of the Rio Grande. I was almost home—at least I was almost to some part of home. It was an odd feeling, because I had no real idea what I had come home to do. Perhaps I had come home to be a father, but that notion was very confusing. I had no sense of what being a father might be like, and of course if I even went near Sally I might be put in jail. All my prospects were nonspecific, indeterminate.
That being the case, it was nice to be just on the rim of home. At the very least I had another whole day to drive. If I stopped to see Uncle Laredo, as I had promised myself I would if I ever came back, I could put off getting to Austin for two or three days. I wanted to see Uncle Laredo anyway. He was ninety-two years old and there was no telling how many more chances I would get to visit him. Once he was dead I would never get a chance to visit anyone remotely like him—that was certain. There was no one remotely like him.
In Van Horn I stopped at a dusty filling station and asked the attendant if Uncle L was still alive. He was only an in-law, and my family wouldn’t have bothered to tell me if he had died. The filling station man was fat and wore a dirty green baseball cap. He looked at me as if I were a freak, and when he found out whose nephew I was he almost stopped putting gas in my car. He was about forty and he chewed tobacco.
“If that old bastard ain’t alive he’s the stinkinest ghost I ever met,” he said. “We got a barbershop downtown, if you’d like to get a haircut. Must not be no barbers where you come from.”
“I come from Texas,” I said. “I just like hair.”
“Aw yeah?” he said. “If a feller was to drop a match on your head it’d go up like a haystack.” He gave me a mean wink. He didn’t want me to ignore the fact that he was insulting me. I ignored it anyway.
“I could squirt a little gasoline on it,” he added. “Might help it burn.”
“You could mind your own fucking business, too,” I said, stung. No one had commented on the length of my hair in so long that I had forgotten about it. I was home again, and I didn’t feel like being trifled with, especially not by fat rednecks in green baseball caps. He hadn’t bothered to check my water, so I got out and checked it. Then I went around to the trunk and checked the air in my spare. I had forty-seven miles of dirt road to cross. The man pitched my gas cap about ten feet in the air, and caught it when it came down.
“You oughtn’t to sass around and use your goddamn profanity with me,” he said. Suddenly he hunched over, made a fierce face, and gave the air a hard karate chop.
“See that?” he said. “I just finished a karate class, up in Midland. These hands is lethal weapons. I’d about as soon give a curlyheaded little fart like you a chop or two, for practice. Hai! Karate!”
He concentrated on what must have been an imaginary brick and gave it a terrific chop. Then he looked at me to see if I was properly intimidated. I wasn’t. I was back home. Nobody had the right to push me around. Also my trunk was open. All I had to do was reach down and pick up my tire tool. The minute I did the look on the man’s face changed. He looked forty, and foolish. I shook my hair at him and smote the air once or twice, for effect.
“Hai!” I said. “Tire tool!”
“Let me get them windshields for you,” the man said. I put the tire tool in the front seat with me and it had a wonderful effect. Not only did the man clean my windshields, but he chased me halfway down the driveway as I was pulling out.
“Say, young feller, you must not be awake good,” he said. “You’s about to drive off without your green stamps.”
13
UNCLE L was my most colorful relative, but there was no denying that he had his drawbacks. Ninety-two years had not mellowed him at all. The minute I stepped out of my car and heard his rasping old voice I began to remember his drawbacks, and to wonder why I’d come. The voice came from somewhere in what he called his kitchen pasture—a little twenty-acre pen north of the house, where he kept an assortment of animals he planned to eat.
When I walked up he was down on his knees, stabbing at a hole in the ground with a big crowbar. It was a hot morning and he was sweating like a Turk. Three bedraggled Mexican cowboys sat on the ground nearby, looking unhappy. Uncle L still had freckles, at ninety-two. His little blue eyes were as clear and mean as ever. The ground was so hot it was burning my feet through my sneakers.
“I still got ever goddamn one of my teeth,” he said, opening his mouth to show me. His teeth looked perfect. While he was showing them to me his mean little eyes scrutinized me inch by inch. He was not a man to pass lightly over one’s faults.
“What the hell, you got the mange?” he asked.
“I don’t think so.”
“Your hair’s a foot long,” he said. “Thought you must be hiding the mange. How old are you?”
“Twenty-three.”
“That’s old enough to remember to go to the barbershop,” he said.
He spat in his gloves and went back to stabbing at the earth with the crowbar. Holes were one of his obsessions. Over the years he had scattered some three hundred corner postholes about the ranch, to the peril of every creature that walked, including him. The theory behind them was that if he ever got around to building the fences he meant to build it would be nice to have the corner postholes already dug. But he had lived on the ranch fifty years and it only had two fences, both falling down. My own theory was that he dug the holes because he hated the earth and wanted to get in as many
licks at it as he could, before he died. The earth might get him in the end, but it would have three hundred scars to show for it. Uncle L was not the kind of man who liked to be bested in a fight.
“Hey, Pierre,” he yelled to the cowboys generally. “Get off your asses and strangle one of them goats. We got company for dinner.”
The kitchen pasture held a motley collection of edible animals, all of which were standing around in a half-circle behind the Mexicans. Perhaps they hoped to be fed, rather than eaten. They managed to look disheartened and desperately belligerent at the same time. There were six or eight goats, a yearling camel, a scruffy young buffalo cow, a flock of malign-looking guinea hens, five spotted pigs, and a dozen molting turkeys. All of them looked as desperate as the cowboys—on Uncle L’s ranch it was an open question as to who would eat whom.
The three cowboys all scrambled up and made a run for the animals, shaking out their ropes as they ran. The animals immediately scattered to the four winds, all except the pigs, who formed a tight little phalanx and stood their ground. Uncle L hired only Mexicans and called them all Pierre—by accident the first man he had ever hired had been French. Pierre was a generic name for hired hand; only old Lorenzo, the cook, was exempt from it.
The three Pierres were not charismatic ropers. They never got a loop within ten yards of anything. The goats, most of whom had looked half-dead, fled around and around the pen with the fleetness of gazelles. The buffalo cow lowered her head and bellowed and pawed the ground. Pierre, Pierre, and Pierre left her alone. They ran wildly after the goats and caught nothing. One accidentally ran behind the young camel, who kicked him flat. The minute he fell the five pigs started for him, squealing horribly. His companions rushed over and got him to his feet. They beat the pigs back with their lariat ropes. Everything on the ranch seemed to be starving. The three men picked up rocks and began to throw them at the guinea hens and the turkeys. They were clearly desperate to kill something quick, before Uncle L’s temper rose. It seemed to me it was rising. His face was turning red.
All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers Page 16
