Y. started to say something but stopped himself.
B. pretended not to notice.
Y. spat.
B.’s watching self sighed, proud of the puke on the shoes of the self it had walked out on.
Y.’s at-the-bottom-of-himself self listened to the sound of the puking crazy-echo into howls.
B.’s watching self practiced the story the self it had walked out on would tell for years to amazed others, the story of what was being watched: a rescue.
Y.’s at-the-bottom-of-himself self crouched. It listened between the echoes for the beating of its heart. Instead it heard the echoes.
It sat down: echoes.
It curled up: echoes.
They hurried, sweating and panting. Their talk had dried up.
Near the base of the little mountain they tripped on tree roots and fell.
B. rushed to his feet. His shorts snagged on a yucca and change tinkled from his pockets. Y. lay sprawled on his back, very still, his eyes fearsome. Creases of pain folded his face. Where he’d cut his arms was pink with dust. B. leaned so that his shadow shaded Y.
Y. turned his awful stare to B.
B. wanted to look away but didn’t.
Y. held his breath for what seemed to be too long, as if strangling it. He inhaled with a gasp.
B. shivered, spooked. For a moment he was the self that had walked out and the self that had been walked out on, all at once. He felt a tightening of guilt and panic. His body ached.
Y. shivered too. For a moment he was only at the bottom of himself.
Neither was where they were as they looked at each other.
“Up,” said B., reaching out.
They left the little mountain’s base for flat land. They pushed on through the grasses toward the trail. The distances they knew had lengthened, widened, thickened. Y.’s mouth smacked dry. He talked about pain, his voice caked and pasty.
“As if it’s just in your head! As if you’re just in your head. You’re also in your thigh,” he said, pointing. “You’re in your blood, you’re in your blood on somebody else, your puke on somebody else. Your sweat.”
“Fact,” said B.
“I should have pissed on you too.”
B. agreed.
“I should have pissed on you when I had the chance.”
“Yes,” said B.
Y.’s face was as pale as B.’s was red. He licked his teeth. “How about a drink.”
The bottled water was in the backpack they’d left behind. B. said, “I’m pretty sure there’s extra in the trunk.”
Y. said, “Fact.”
They reached the trail, the familiar view from its bend, the familiar crunch of its gravelly stones. B. tried to punch through to 911. “Almost there.”
Y. broke from B. and yelled in pain. He thrashed his arms about.
B. held out his hands but didn’t touch Y.
Y. unbuttoned. He jerked down his jeans, and by accident, his boxers. His thigh and hip and abdomen were bloated, mottled dark with ugly swelling. Purple-green rashes crosshatched the bite marks. Looking at them, he felt high and whole with fury, with a wanting to go back to before he’d been bitten and a wanting to stop wanting to go back. There was no before to go back to. The snake was a dusty blink, a dark lashing and unlashing. He wanted to stop and he wanted to go, he couldn’t go, he couldn’t stop.
“You know?” he said, though he hadn’t said any of this out loud.
B. nodded, staying where he was, hands out. He wanted to say and do the right thing, and at the same time, to say and do nothing. He wanted to be stronger than he was.
Y. tried to tug his boxers and jeans back up but couldn’t without clenching his teeth and fighting a scream.
“Wait,” said B., moving forward. He helped Y. to pull his boxers and jeans all the way off—the flash of Y.’s white skin and black hair and penis, half-erect—and he wrapped the jeans around Y.’s waist. He tied the legs together. He squatted and said, “Get on.”
They lumbered down the trail, Y. piggybacking on B.
Y.’s arms around B.’s neck made the both of them run with sweat. Their steps were firm and thoughtless.
B. asked Y. a question.
Y. answered, “When?”
B. tried to answer this answer but had forgotten the question he’d just asked. His face and beard dripped. His legs quivered. In him rose a jagged annoyance. He felt a bit like he was being studied, like his actions would be used against him by know-nothings he’d never meet. The annoyance sharpened into anger. In his ear Y. began to breathe strangely, poppingly.
B. asked him another question.
Y. said something that sounded like, “Who.”
“What?” said B.
Y. said something that sounded like, “Who-ohw.”
Y. said it again.
Y. said, “Ohw-how.”
B. dropped to a knee and sat Y. on the trail. He held him up. A more pale paleness was pooling in Y.’s face.
Terrified, B. fireman-lifted Y.: he helped him to his feet from behind, crouched in front of him, and raised him onto his shoulders. He’d learned this lift in a high school summer camp he’d hated, where his helpless partner, his size, had dropped him on his head. B. gripped Y.’s arms with one arm and Y.’s legs with the other. His spine flared. He hustled down the trail—he shouted things and forgot them, all of them, and shout-sang a running cadence he’d learned at the same hated summer camp, a lewd one, and searing hands of pain made fists inside his body but he didn’t feel his body, not truly, and in this contradiction he came into the presence of some still greater pain, a trembling too big to be known in any one present, and on his shoulders Y. went twice as heavy.
Twice as heavy was the only way he’d ever say it.
B. set Y. down. The jeans had fallen off. B. checked Y.’s wrists for a pulse and his mouth for a breath, but his own hard breathing was in the way and he checked without looking Y. in the face. He fireman-lifted Y. Shit smeared from Y. onto B.’s shorts and shirt.
In the lot he lay Y. out on the hood of the car. Y.’s bare legs squeaked against the metal. B. leaned on the hood to rest, to catch his breath, but jumped back—the hot surface burned his hands. He looked at Y., who hadn’t moved. He lifted him off the hood and rolled him into the backseat, facedown. The black wound oozed.
He took a bottle of water from the trunk and drank it, shaking. At this moment the too-big trembling was the only thing he felt. Later, out of the canyon, he would try to understand this feeling. There were Y.’s parents and siblings and nieces, and Y.’s girlfriend, and Y.’s other friends, and B. There were the times that they would never have, all of them, yes. What was worse, though, what really fed the feeling, were the times that they would have never had no matter what, even if, the times they had misled one another into imagining as sure. These were the times B. hoped he could forget. It would take work.
He started the car. He drove down the nameless causeway and the nameless road. The second his phone flickered a signal he pulled over, just before the entrance to the half-finished subdivision. This close he could see the rows of partly built houses, the piles of bricks, boards, and stones, the dirt roads that would be paved. The call went through.
— POST-WEST —
Big Lonesome
Endings
The Train to Pennsylvania
The cowboy boarded the train to Pennsylvania. He pushed into an empty compartment, took a window-seat, and bunched his bag behind his head. In it were the clothes he couldn’t sell.
For three days sleep sat and stood inside his body.
He reached for what he could remember of Pennsylvania, where he’d come from years ago, and then for what he would remember of the southwest, where he’d come from now. The reaching led to aching. Mostly he watched the land through the window.
The land tripped through splintered desert-mountains.
The land fell flat against the fertile boards of Illinois, Indiana, Ohio.
The land tum
bled across green hills and into valleys, the purpled rock of low piney mountains, the rivers long and wealthy, Pennsylvania.
At times men in suits of a sort the cowboy had never seen would clunk open the door to his compartment, take one step in, then one step out. After they’d left, the cowboy would touch his face: still swollen.
In him, sleep itself began to reach and ache.
On the ride’s last evening he squinted at a puddle of a sunset. He’d told the woman who’d touched him last that Pennsylvania was where he’d come from way back when. This no longer felt true. Pennsylvania was where he’d been coming from at all times, wherever he was, even here, in it again.
Whenever he woke it was with his face against the window.
Pennsylvania
The station had been renovated and neglected, built up and let go. On its sooty ceiling pilgrims and tribesmen traded without touching. The cowboy followed two old men across the cracked marble floor and to the exit. He sniffed himself as he went. He stank.
His hometown and homestate opened all around him all at once—the smell of mud and spring, the hustling squat-limbed loggers, the square women with scarred hands, the packs of frowning children playing games he knew. Sorry horses drank from troughs. Trucks loaded with tree limbs guttered by. Every breeze brought pollen, woodsmoke, sawdust. The cowboy took off his hat. What he saw here wasn’t the same, it was true, but it wasn’t different either, and these opposing facts, horn-locked, kicked up the choking cloud he found himself inside. On that street his mother had slipped in sideways rain. At that corner his sister had given a man who’d loved her a piecrust packed with horseshit. In that alley his older brother had tried to open his own throat with a broken bottle. In this saloon his father had tapped the cowboy’s chin with his bad hand and said, “What all’s here?”
“All’s yonder now,” his father had answered, speaking through his son to his younger self, offering his younger self too-late never-woulds and never-weres, no more maybes, somedays, somehows. The cowboy had seen then that this was how the man had always been. It had made him want to leave more than everything else. Their barkeep set out another shot, another beer, the evening on the house. They drank that evening down.
The cowboy sat on the curb outside this saloon that was saloon no more. A tidy tailor shop. Through the warped window a young man dressed like an old man wiped a magnifying glass and sneezed. The cowboy touched his face—he’d forgotten his bag on the train.
“Poet,” said a longhaired man.
The longhaired man stood behind the cowboy, close enough to touch him with a cane he didn’t have. Not old, he was aged, his folded face as stained as the suit he wore, as once-fine, a suit of the sort the cowboy knew.
The longhaired man tipped his hat, which matched. He said, “Words in you.”
From the curb the cowboy stared back, hoping to give the impression of holding his ground. He didn’t know if he should know this man.
The longhaired man opened and closed a cigar box as if it were a timepiece. “The words in you are, ‘There is a place.’”
The cowboy thought that might be right.
“The place,” said the longhaired man, walking now. Both his feet bare.
The Woods
They went into the heavy woods that walled the town. The longhaired man touched certain trunks in a knowing way. He said that every man he’d ever met had many names, and the truer a man worked to be, the more of his names he learned. He himself knew all his names but two. The name he was the most was Push Back, he said, owing to how the many peoples who’d made him had been pushed back, how pushing back was what his many peoples needed most to know.
The name he was the second-most was Pipe Hawk, owing to how he hawked the pipe or the pipe hawked him, meaning, Who filled and emptied who?
The name he was the least was Bill.
“It costs me,” he said.
The cowboy asked him just who his peoples were because he sure looked awful white.
He said, “Cherokee, Choctaw, Chinese, Negro, Italian, Polish, Irish. In the summer, English.”
They came upon a cave: a tremendous neckless rock licked with moss, foreheaded in saplings and shrubs. A slope led to its mouth where lips of fog slow-rolled. The fog stayed level, looking magic.
At the top of this slope Push Back unfolded a quilt the cowboy hadn’t seen him carrying, in which was wrapped a lantern. He spread the quilt and sat facing the cave. “This place is for words,” he said. He opened his cigar box: a pipe lay on a bed of strange black tobacco. He filled the pipe. “This place does not know words the way we know words.”
He lit, drew a dry crackle, and passed the pipe, saying with smoke, “When you are in it you are its words.”
The cowboy inhaled—smoke spread into his throat, a hot rash. He leaned into the feeling that followed. Not pleasure, but an oozy weakness near enough.
“The words already in you make you the words you are when you are in this place,” said Push Back. He polished the lantern with his sleeve. “None of them words you know.”
The cowboy held close to what he felt.
Push Back told a story about where the words that weren’t known came from, how these words felt about where they came from, and under what conditions these words, without knowing why, turned into other words meant for other places. The story was long and lewd. It ended in a question the cowboy didn’t hear all the way.
The cowboy answered that he didn’t know about that but all the same was just sure as hell there was a way to make it right as he was about not knowing where that way was spending all its time like time was something free you didn’t worry you’d run out of.
They passed the pipe four times.
The Cave
In lantern-light the walls revealed their stores of wealth: sparkling beads and strings and coins, cones and silver straws, ribbons, drapes, all of it cut in and by the breathing rock. The cowboy shivered in the cold. Push Back signaled to the standing figures that without moving rose, accidental statues massed by mineral drip into shapes the size of men, horses, train engines, struggling to look like what they weren’t, and growing still.
The Words
Push Back squatted by the hissing lantern, visible in its golden slashes. His hat gone, his hair oily.
The cowboy stayed some distance off in untouched darkness, sitting or standing, he couldn’t say—he’d scrabbled further into the feeling of the pipe.
“What have you been?” said Push Back, his breath clouding. He sounded like a mad young man.
“A cowboy,” said the cowboy.
“Where, where have you been?”
The cowboy touched his head, his hat gone too.
“Why?” said Push Back.
The cowboy patted his face. It was no longer swollen.
“Who, who, who?” screamed Push Back, bare-chested now.
The cowboy tried to point at himself.
Push Back stood, naked, his skin a being sprung from rock.
The cowboy tried to see any part of himself, his hands, his arms, his legs.
Push Back backed up. His mouth mouthed a word.
The cowboy touched himself all over—he wore nothing too, not even boots. He didn’t feel that he was where he was, but not being where he was was where he’d been, he remembered.
He felt the entrance of a long and mumbling fear. It reached for him.
Push Back, small and sucked-away, stopped. He raised the lantern. It went out with a whisper in the air.
The Veteran
The soldier was told, Go home.
He went home. On the way he became a veteran.
At home the veteran found sameness. This sameness was the same sameness he’d known before he’d left home for the base and the base for the war. Only now, the sameness no longer fit him. He tried to make the sameness fit him by tugging and squeezing it. He tried to fit the sameness by tensing and relaxing himself. Family, friends, girlfriends, and strangers tried to help him by declaring that
the sameness fit him just fine, that he fit the sameness just fine, or by admitting that neither fit the other, not yet, and that if they could help, or help him help himself, please, let them know, tell them when or where or how.
Some never noticed his not-fitting. Some noticed but were afraid, angry, or disgusted.
He drank a glass of cold water in the kitchen. It was morning—morning in the glass of water, on the kitchen’s tiles, and on the sliding glass door that opened to the green backyard where it was also morning, sparkling like crushed gems. His mother sat in the other room, trying not to listen. He set his empty glass next to other empty glasses in the dishwasher. Either his size had changed, or the size of the sameness had changed, or both, he decided.
He closed the dishwasher. In the other room, his mother turned the pages of the newspaper.
The veteran moved in with his girlfriend. His girlfriend changed her size to try to fit him, adjusting her dimensions every day, every hour, every moment. They made new or favorite meals for one another and ate at new or favorite restaurants. They watched or rewatched TV and movies. They read the same books. They rearranged her apartment. She asked about his not-fitting or didn’t, depending on what she sensed he wanted, and later, on what she sensed he needed. Depending on what he sensed she wanted him to want or need, he responded with words too tight or too loose, a story or a statement that didn’t match what either of them wanted. I love you, she said, when she hoped it might fit, but the veteran sensed that everything she did and didn’t said I love you, and that it never fit.
He drank a glass of cold water in her kitchen. It was afternoon—afternoon in the glass of water, on her kitchen’s tiles, and on the small window that looked into the alley where it was also afternoon, as long and flat as a map. He set the empty glass in the empty sink. His girlfriend sat upstairs in bed, making phone calls. It was his size that had changed, he decided.
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