St. Sebastian is tied to a tree and archers shoot him full of arrows. He is buried, rises from the dead, heals a woman. Then is beaten to death by an emperor and left in a ditch.
Pretty good story if it were true, you say, Eli.
There’s no truth anymore, I say. The truth died in 1865.
Darling pours me black coffee at the Starlight. She thinks I should spend more time on the water. That is where I am happy.
Have you ever been to Greenwich Village, she says. That’s where all the poets lived.
Once. Long ago, I say. Before the Lord got me.
Eli, I want to sail around the horns and never quite arrive at a final destination. We can visit islands so remote they don’t have names. Live among natives. Yet as we age the possibilities grow less endless. The windows of opportunity don’t slam, they shut quietly in the dark. We’re always another cup of coffee away from the end. I’ll be damned if my adventures are spent sitting in this boat. We are out floating in space, the earth our ship. Riding round the big star. There is too much chattering about the end and not enough shutting up about the now. Out on the sea, Eli, me and you and the ones we love. We could leave the harbor with a little push.
Eli, we snort heroin and go to the bookstore. You ask for art books. I want abstract art, you say. I only like art that is abstract. I give you a book. Is this art, you ask. I don’t know, I say. This is fantastic, you say. This is fantastic! I show you another book and you ask, Is this art? And I say, I don’t know. And you say, This is fantastic! The girl at the counter (the one with nice breasts) says, You might like Dalí. Dalí was a pornographer, you say and throw the book in her face. On the ride home you say sometimes I remind you of a panther.
Tuesday overdosed during the fifth encore of the Red Rocks show. I pick her up at the airport and she looks clear after her hospital stay. The wizards are at the back of the cotton field throwing the football. The Rebels lose to Bama.
Eli, can you clear the hospital room? Boom and I need to speak.
What do you want done in your absence, I ask him.
I want you to take my saddle off the wall and strap my bones to my pony and set her free, Boom says.
OK.
I was happy in my life, he says, there was a lot of pain but I enjoyed that, too.
I know, I say.
There are reports of Satan in the physical world, Eli. A cub scout saw eerie boot prints near the roller skating rink.
Was there a smell of patchouli and blood, I ask the scout.
It was exactly that odor, sir.
Never cross your heart and hope to die, I say. Always step on a crack. You can never break your mother’s back.
I carry this here pink foot of a rabbit for luck and good graces, he says.
I give him fifty bucks and send him on his way.
Eli, Nono found your bike in a ditch.
She’s a very sexy woman, you say.
She’s sixty-five years old, I say.
She’s an artist, you say.
Are you sleeping with her?
Maybe I am and maybe I am.
St. Juan is scourged and pressed to death with weights. His brothers, Felix and Philip, are beheaded. Their mother, too, with the same sword.
Boom dies on a Friday, like Christ. We send him off in the following way: I hire the Confederate drummer boy from the local Civil War reenactors group, he plays light taps throughout. I give a reading from the Holy Bible. Valley of the shadow, etc. We strap Boom to the pony. I give the Eucharist. Weed brownies as the body, moonshine as the blood. I shoot a pearlhandled pistol in the air. Eli, you slap the pony and it runs toward the moon.
3
The fair comes to town with its psychedelic lights and expensive corn dogs. Dick Dickerson, the mayor, is a bald man who owns a pawnshop. He’s a loudmouth in love with Tuesday. A prideful atheist, he hands out the ribbons in the ugly dog contest. We ride the Ferris wheel up to the highest point and drink from the whiskey pint and the whole town smiles below us.
The sun is pouring down those sweet UV rays. Tuesday is leaving for Bangkok tomorrow. We go to a bar. She bends over in tight jeans to put a quarter in the jukebox.
She’s a keeper, says the bartender.
She’s so much better than me, I say.
They all are, he says. Trick is never let ’em know it.
We visit Boom’s grave.
Why are you wearing two watches, Eli?
This one is on our time, this one is on Hollywood time.
You didn’t really answer the question.
In Rome thirty-nine saints are forced into a freezing lake but after three days they still show signs of life. Unable to be killed by freezing, they are burned, their ashes thrown into the air.
What’s the point of these saint stories, you say, Eli.
I’m trying to find a way to die with honor.
How ’bout trying to live with honor?
One thing at a time, I say. One thing at a time.
Tuesday calls from Thailand.
There are many wild dogs, she says.
Have you found any truth?
I have orgasms when I touch my belly button.
When are you coming home?
I have no home.
I thought you might say that.
The man at the pharmacy wears a ponytail and a Ghostbusters T-shirt. We get Xanax for the fear and Oxy for the existential pain and some gin to add a bit of flash. Then to the Starlight with the pink flamingo wallpaper for BLTs, then to the harbor. Eli, with Boom gone you sleep on my boat.
How does it all end, Maloney?
Good night, Eli. I have no answers.
Eli, we must go to the south side of town to find my missing bandmate, Finger. The people in this filthy squat wear flea collars, it’s that bad. Finger is freegan, which means he doesn’t care for money. He rides comically large bikes and has a homemade sailboat tattoo over his heart. I find him on the floor, flies on his face. We take him to the boat.
Don’t you have anywhere to go, I ask.
Somewhere maybe, he says, someplace.
I give Finger some heat from my bottle of gin.
My mother died in a city by the mountains, he says. I never wanted to sleep under a roof.
The Holy Ghost visits my sleep. She tells me a story. It is a story about gold bricks and blow jobs. I wake up drunk at the Starlight.
You were talking in your sleep, says Darling.
An angel in the wild, I say.
You’re high.
Will you come to my boat?
No, she says.
I’m sorry, I say. A very sorry saint.
Eli, let’s ride your new motorbike and sidecar out to the countryside. There are foggy pastures where we cruise. A barefoot man rides a horse bareback. A teenager does a doughnut on a four-wheeler. Whole fields of white cotton grow. We go to Wise Jane’s. A former Delta debutante turned intellectual redneck. She once slow danced with Matthew Barney and he gave her a piece of the Berlin Wall. We take golf carts to the lunar surface, a patch of sand in the middle of the cotton field. We howl at the moon and say wild toasts and confess sins. Eli, you are screaming at the huge moon like a banshee.
St. Lucy’s eyes are gouged out. But she regains her sight. Then is beheaded.
When do they get saint status, you say, Eli.
I don’t remember, I say. Pass the wine.
I’ve been putting tiny ships into bottles. You cannot know the ancient secret of the ship bottlers. Don’t touch. View it on the mantle as the mystery it is. Out the window the carnival truck leaves town. We eat astronaut ice cream from the children’s museum.
You’re a son of a bitch, Maloney.
What’s that you say?
You heard me.
Lord, you give us tornadoes and purple sunrises. We praise your beautifully illogical ways. You performed great miracles long ago and nothing since. Why such confusion? We love you, wonderful idiotic Lord.
Eli, I counsel a woman who resembles Sig
ourney Weaver in the movie Aliens. I’m drunk at the session.
Are you saying your prayers at night, I ask.
My mother told me I should quit the prayers and do yoga, she says.
Yoga, I burp. There should be a jihad on yoga.
Finger gets a job at the pawnshop. One night he is sitting behind the counter reading Lolita and Dick Dickerson comes in and slaps him with his antique cane.
No reading, says Dick Dickerson.
OK, says Finger.
Then Dick throws the book at the wall.
Become a better person on your own time, he says.
Eli, we find a note Boom wrote you when you were young:
There are not many true sunflowers and you are one of them. You are a small bird with small wings. For you there is music that no one else can hear. Yes, you are a bird with tiny, tiny wings. You follow the sun like a soul reaching to heaven. There is music that only you can hear. You are Eli.
Today I’m viciously attacked by BB gun fire. Is there a sniper in the trees? Then an all-out ambush of twelve-year-olds. I run back onto the boat.
Finger, thank God you’re here. I’m being attacked.
You must have crossed them, Maloney.
More tornadoes in the Midwest clearing whole towns flat, but the streets of our little town are peaceful. The little shops and houses and churches and schools.
They have popcorn at the bank on Fridays. Sorority girls are near black from the tanning bed, cashing checks from their daddies. A scout in new boots does The New York Times crossword puzzle on a bench in front of the courthouse. A boy calls him Charlie Cheeseburger from across the street. He does tricks with his butterfly knife. Back on the boat, Finger is laughing at a bad sitcom.
It’s not that funny, I say.
Yeah, he says, but everyone else is laughing.
There is a man, a born again Christian, on TV who draws perfect circles on a chalkboard, a metaphor for Christ’s love. But there is no such thing as perfect, Eli. Someone said once the sunset was perfect and I told him to shut his stupid mouth.
I wish I had a chance to be brave, an opportunity to be a hero. This morning I cared for a sick dying squirrel I hit with my car but it wasn’t good enough. I have never delivered a baby in a cab or saved an old man from a river. I want to continue life in a noble way.
A dream: Darling and I are together riding jet skis on Lake Norman, near my childhood home. You are on the shore, Eli, beating Finger in chess and waving the Bonnie Blue. This is a dream but could be life someday.
St. Joan of Arc is raped by an English lord then tied to the stake. She asks the executioner to give her a cross to die with and he fashions one with two twigs.
She was just schizophrenic, you say, Eli.
One man’s mental illness is another man’s sainthood, I say.
I wonder what she’d been like in the sack?
Definitely a screamer.
She’d bite your head off, man.
Eli, your chess abilities are sharp and we hustle in the park. I’m your barker and manager. I only take 10 percent.
Don’t outright beat them, Eli. Let them win a few. That’s the hustle.
No mercy, you say. I don’t throw matches.
Two wizards watch. You win blitz games against a couple of park regulars and one long game with a twelve-year-old upstart.
People start to huddle around your matches.
One of the wizards climbs a tree.
Are you on the Holy Ghost hit list? Will you be taken down to her river of milk and honey? Darling sighs in the orchard of my dreams. She laughs in that way of hers. The Holy Ghost tickles her toes. We feed each other peaches and moonshine. I gain knowledge of her.
Let’s talk about the moon, Eli. There are the phases, wax and wane. We sit on the highest hill in town and watch the airplanes.
Ever wish one would crash, I ask.
You got a weird head, Maloney.
No souls lost, Eli, just something to break the silence.
Listen to the words coming out of your mouth, you say.
A bloom of smoke and fire and everyone lives. What a beautiful thing.
You need to go to church Maloney.
I am church, I say.
Finger is doing jumping jacks on the dock. His health is better and he is eating meat again.
I even started smoking, Maloney.
Why?
It makes you tough.
Those things will kill, I say.
All the good people smoke, says Finger. Puts you in touch with death.
I’m in touch with death, I say. It’s life I can’t get together.
I’m at the Starlight watching Darling pour hot coffee with her perfect pitching arm. She comes over and says there’s a call for me. It’s Tuesday on the line.
I’m in Bhutan seeking the light, she says. How is Eli?
He is fast on his way to becoming a chess master. Next week we go to the big tournament.
I sent him a wisdom prayer.
Do you pray for me?
It was good to talk to you, she says. Goodbye.
St. William is tied to the stake, strangled and burned. He coined the phrase Give up the ghost.
Eli, do you feel alive?
Most of the time.
What about now?
I would say yes. And you?
Can’t rightly say.
Another gin?
Why not.
This is what passes for conversation here on the boat.
Eli, you’re in the chess club destroying the journeymen. Lots of old wood in this place and paintings that follow you with their eyes. There are some masters here sizing you up. You win one pretty easily but the next one sneaks up on you. Nono is coming to all your chess matches. The tournaments and exhibitions, even park games. She is a small lady with a wild smile. I see her talking to you as I collect your winnings.
What did she want, I ask.
You jealous?
Don’t like her moving in on our arrangement.
She’s got something, you say. Something unadulterated about her.
Finger is fishing off the boat. He is living with the weather and sun. He’s turned away from his freegan principles.
I’ve forgotten how wonderful money is, he says.
You can be happy without it, Finger.
With cash and a large truck, some diversified assets, a nice little nest egg, I could be happy.
Eli, the couple in my office are the worst parents in the world. They have three children ages one, two, and three. Both are out of work and he wears his boots tucked into his jeans. She wears Playboy bunny pajama pants. She tells me how she dropped two of the babies down some stairs and one is seriously damaged. That’s what she says, Eli. Seriously damaged.
In the Starlight, Darling is sweet to me. She serves a man in a neck brace blueberry ice cream. Her hair is cut short for the summer like a French New Wave movie star.
Your legs are graceful, I say.
Thank you.
You have the best kind of eyes.
Thank you.
I want to take you somewhere.
I want to go somewhere.
But we don’t move.
4
We’re on the train to California for your first pro tournament, Eli. There are all kinds of folks here on the Sunset Limited. Black mothers out of New Orleans, Mexicans and Mennonites from Texas, air force recruits from Nebraska. These people play Go Fish as the nation goes by. Hipsters with tattoo sleeves eat peanut butter sandwiches. Out here, Eli, windmills in the desert do whatever windmills do. I’m filled to the brim today with Jesus and America and Vitamin C.
Should I get beer in the dining car, you ask.
Of course.
You drink sixteen and put them on my tab while I’m asleep. We play chess in the morning and go over your openings. You’re in good shape to beat some ass, Eli. We are in America and you will be the greatest.
St. Margaret is of noble birth. A rookie executioner’s fir
st blow slices her shoulder rather than her neck. Wounded, she runs. Ten additional blows are required to complete the execution. A wolf licks the blood from the road and stalks the body all the way to the graveyard where he smells the freshly dug earth and runs away.
News from back home. Finger stabbed Dick Dickerson at the pawnshop over the price of a sword. Dick Dickerson saw a woman needed cash.
I’ll give you two hundred for it, says Dick Dickerson to the woman.
That sword is worth at least a thousand, says Finger.
Finger, why don’t you go do some stocking, says Dick Dickerson.
Well, I need the money, says the woman.
I’ll buy it off you for five hundred, says Finger.
You’re fired, says Dick Dickerson.
Finger stabs him and walks out.
At least that’s how Finger tells it.
There is a voice mail from a man with the U.S. Embassy. Something is wrong with Tuesday. I call back.
Tell it straight, I say.
We’re working it out, he says.
What happened? Where is she?
She’s in India. Sick.
What kind of sick?
We don’t know. They’re putting holy candles on her.
Holy candles are the best you got?
Best we got.
There are good people in the world and a few bad, but the bad ones get all the coverage, Eli. This is Hollywood. We listen to Sunday church music on the radio. I climb a palm tree and watch the sunset and Tuesday is in some country with no God. The seasons are grinding away and the Holy Ghost is bored. I’m hoping for a miracle or at least a woman with a nice ass to cross the road.
Eli, get your body as ready as your mind. The tournament money is keeping us alive. You drink beer during and wear shades like the poker players on TV. I hold your hat and cigs.
Sophia Page 2
