Sophia

by Michael Bible

  In L.A., there is sad beautiful Hollywood light everywhere. Everyone desperate for something to happen. The pools and drugs. All the cliques inside of clichés. People complaining about how perfect it is. Yoga. Soy iced coffee. Massage and marijuana. The celebrities are boring. The homeless are boring. I love it all, Eli. Great America, ho!

  Eli, you’ve won first place and we hold the trophy high. This newspaperman wants to do a story on you.

  Eli, what is your overall strategy?

  To kill the king.

  What do you say to all those kids out there who want to be a chess champion like you?

  Kill the king.

  Back on the train out the window fireworks bloom from the little towns as we cross through the night, Fourth of July. Look at the lemon groves and the kids playing soccer. The Buckville, Texas, train station is an art deco palace with red stained glass windows. High-back leather chairs in the main waiting room. Birds fly in, sometimes stopping by your chair. A finch on your lap as you wait for the train, maybe you are drinking a martini.

  There is a man who claims he’s Cherokee. He walks with a stick with a skull on it. He’s like Bruce Springsteen when he talks. He has that look of fear.

  What do you say there, mister, he says.

  I’m here with my friend playing some chess.

  Chess, he says. That’s all?

  Yeah, I say. What do you do?

  I find people, he says. I search and I find them.

  St. Anne is bound with chains to the stake by her ankles, knees, waist, chest, and neck. She is burned slowly. She does not scream. There is music in her ears from a small boy practicing his flute on a roof in the distance. His mother would not let him go to the execution until he finished his scales.

  There is an announcement that a man has offered to entertain the children in the observation car. He is a fat man in a car mechanic’s shirt. He’s a special effects makeup guy or he wants to become one some day. He paints big gashes and scars.

  I was a PA on the movie Gremlins, he says to the children.

  What’s a PA, says a kid.

  Gremlins was a very important movie, the man says.

  Can you make it look like I killed myself, says a little girl.

  Her dress is Wedgewood blue.

  A Buddhist monk and a black French Messianic Jew in the dining car. I say, We’re like the beginning of a joke. Miles out the window. Miles and miles. No one laughs.

  It should be required of every young man and woman of America to travel terrestrially across our great country. Forests to desert to plains to mountains to coast. Night comes quicker out here in the Badlands. One sweet girl in the observation car reads a book I’ve read. I want to talk to her but she gets up before I can sit down. I change my shirt. Have a fantasy about her. We meet. I have a hotel room in New Orleans. Order room service, then get dirty in the shower with her. She has short hair and glasses. A tiny white scar below her mouth. I fall asleep and dream of Darling dressed as the Statue of Liberty.

  The special effects makeup man is having a heart attack. They call for a doctor. Then they call for a doctor or a nurse. They call for the defibrillator. We back up to the last station and an ambulance comes. The man is on the stretcher. The sky is van Gogh chrome yellow. He smiles trying to reassure us, this makeup man, but he grabs his chest.

  The man is dying, says the girl in the Wedgewood dress.

  A woman is doing a crossword puzzle and asks, What is the word for “orange” in Spanish?

  Gremlins, says the dying man. Was a very important movie.

  There is a pregnant woman. She asks other passengers to watch her kids while she smokes. Down in the café car she has a Miller Lite at two in the morning. We are the only two idiots awake.

  My husband left me, she says. I’m looking for a strong man with hot hands.

  I see.

  Hot hands to hold me while I sleep.

  I will pray for those hot hands to find you, I say.

  What if those hands are yours?

  They’re not.

  The rain’s stopped, Eli. I’m in a fog of fantasy. When there is nothing left to do there is memory. All the books read and everyone asleep you can stare out the window and have memories. A woman came in the bookstore I worked at years ago and asked for books on Kenya. She was going on safari. We talked for a while about her son who was a Rhodes scholar and her husband who was an architect. I found her a book and wished her good luck on her trip. That was twenty-five years ago, Eli. I imagine sometimes what her safari was like. I picture her wearing a pith helmet in a jeep watching a lion sleep. Or her eating cantaloupe in a garden served by black men in white uniforms. The sounds of lions killing elephants in the night. I think of her making love to a stranger for the first time in her life and sometimes the stranger is me.

  I ask the waitress in the dining car about the white wine. We discuss cork versus twist off. I listen to a sad song on my headphones and dream of a sad movie about two brothers who love the same girl. My belly is full and the green farms go on forever.

  They can’t get the fire started to kill St. Rowland. He sees this as a miracle. Heaven above will wait for me, he thinks. My prayers are answered. A guard strikes him in the head and kills him instantly. His body is burned anyway.

  We finally make New Orleans. All gloom and jazz. New Orleans is the only place left that you can listen to jazz without feeling silly. A coffee shop, Eli, late afternoon. A doctor reads his case files aloud. What disease are you trying to cure?

  He shrugs.

  All of them, he says.

  The day drags on and the place fills up with mysterious people with painted faces. Newlyweds down from Baton Rouge for the weekend to do some shopping mingle among the whores.

  I see the girl from the train on the street.

  Hey you’re from the train, right, she asks.

  Yeah, I say.

  Would you like to go somewhere and fuck, she says.

  Do you believe in God, I say.

  No.

  I drill her behind a Waffle House.

  I hoped for something better, she says.

  Don’t get much better than that, I say.

  Home again. What time is it? Is it time to relax? We shall lift our spirits with some gin and a large left-handed cigarette. Let’s throw a party on my party boat. A light cruise up the jetty under the serious stars. Invite all the ridiculous wives and their scotch-smelling husbands and Dick Dickerson and his swinger friends. We will hire a Vanna White look-a-like woman to tend bar.

  Where are the people, you ask, Eli.

  I wouldn’t have come to this party, says Finger, if I weren’t already here.

  We drive to the all-regional chess tourney in Jackson. There is a man following us in a blue Astro van. When I pass, he passes. He has a small sombrero dangling from his rearview. I try to lose him in my Saab but he keeps coming. We get off at a Wendy’s and the man gets off, too. I take a look around. He is wearing a suspicious coat. He’s coming toward us.

  Eli, get the hatchet.

  What hatchet?

  Hey, the man says. Hey.

  I roll up the window. He taps the glass.

  Leave us alone, I say. Get away from the car. I have a hatchet.

  You got a damn gas hose stuck in your tank, stranger.

  It seems I do.

  At the tournament in Nashville, Nono is in the gym eating nachos. She watches your genius with the knights and rooks. This is good money, but this is for the pride, too. A man here with a skull cane and black glasses looks familiar. He nods at me. My spine shivers. I see Nono at concessions. She is beautiful, sixty-five but could be thirty.

  I know what you’re doing and I don’t like it, she says.

  What?

  You’re using him for money.

  And what, exactly, are you trying to do?

  You’d never understand.

  You have no idea how little I understand.

  The first rounds are tense. Big dough on the line,
old boy. Nervous, Eli? Something is wrong. You blunder in the first round. Why move the knight to king’s bishop three? And then again, Eli. You go down in an early mate.

  I can’t shake it, Maloney.

  Shake what?

  It’s not the same.

  This is the match of your damn life, Eli. You can win the big prize and be a master.

  I lost it.

  Lost what?

  All the beauty.

  Back home the man calls again about Tuesday.

  Things are worse, he says.

  What do we do?

  There’s no way to get back to that remote an area.

  What about the army?

  They’re stretched too thin as it is, Reverend.

  What can I do?

  I mean short of hiring a helicopter pilot and flying into remote India I don’t know.

  The Holy Ghost sits on my face. The laws of the spirit, the laws of the dead. Boom wakes me. He is a deputy angel with a bad goatee and elegant shoes. I am needed abroad.

  Do you still love her, Darling asks.

  Does it matter?

  No.

  The pilot’s name is Snowball, an albino Nigerian. We meet him in a bar outside New Delhi where the cattle roam free as gods. His place is themed as a Wild West joint. The barman wears a ten-gallon hat and pictures of black and white whores line the walls.

  Come to my office, Snowball says.

  His office is a shrine to Jack Daniel’s. Posters, signs, license plates, playing cards, a bar stocked only with the Tennessee sour mash.

  We will fly in with an extraction team at zero nine hundred and we’ll be in Hamburg by dinner, he says. I charge ten thousand for a day’s work.

  And what about Jack Daniel’s, I ask.

  Don’t touch anything, he says.

  St. Dirk escapes from prison and stops to rescue his pursuer who has fallen in a frozen lake. Then is captured, tortured, and killed.

  We fly into the Indian village but the sky could be Texas. A healer meets the helicopter with his palms out, a snake around his neck. He is with a tiny blond missionary who looks like Jane Fonda. We find Tuesday in a sweat lodge in a long robe, so thin her bones are sticking out.

  The ghost won’t leave her, says a nude villager.

  She’s been at 103 for five days, says the missionary. She will not last the night.

  Snowball says, We leave in twenty minutes. Get her ready.

  We load her onto the helicopter. Then the healer flags us down.

  Kill the engine, I say.

  As the blades come to a stop the healer points his palm toward a cow on the other end of the village. The cow starts to tremble. The healer’s hand shakes in the air and then the cow drops dead. He walks to the chopper and lays his hand on Tuesday and she wakes. She steps from the stretcher, walks to a fountain, and takes off her clothes. Bathes to the sound of the villagers cheering. The women cover her in soft linens. Her skin is tan and her eyes are blue again. Healed.

  Why couldn’t he do that two weeks ago, I say to Snowball. That asshole owes me ten grand.

  5

  Eli, you’ve gone to the doctor. You’ve got high blood pressure, a bad gallbladder, and you need to shed some pounds.

  Life’s too short, you say, to live too long.

  A woman I council orgasms while riding her horse and sitting on her washing machine.

  Is this a sin, she says. Am I damned to hell for this?

  Not in my book. Jesus was a man who once and a while pleasured himself.

  Did he tell you that personally, Reverend?

  Yes, ma’am, he did.

  Eli, more and more each day I admire your chess. With each match you grow. Your confident openings and elegant endgames. But only in private do you play this well. We play a game.

  Who are you, Maloney?

  I am a very sick man.

  Why do you think so?

  Because it’s hard to be me.

  That’s bullshit. Checkmate.

  It’s spring. The bright golden endless everything. Eli, we have a picnic in the cemetery. There are travelers on their way. We wave and tip our hats to these passersby. We have long lives to live, but some are dealt a shitty hand. Sweet delight, endless night. People died in this town yesterday, but no one died today.

  The town is abuzz tonight with boring people. Drunk lawyers talking slow about nothing. A teacher and student laugh about Ernest Hemingway. Two kids play cops and robbers. I notice a book on my shelf that I read all but the last page because I never wanted it to end.

  Fly in my coffee so I get some quarters for the paper. There are some town scandals. A greedy billionaire blackmailed a cross-dressing judge. A man grabbed another man in the rain. A disturbed teenage gunman is loose on the streets. All the peace and quiet is gone and I like it.

  Eli, Tuesday is coming home today. At the airport she wears a dashiki with her blue eyes. We take the Saab home, Tuesday riding shotgun. The parking lot attendant has teardrop tattoos but a kind face. We go to the good chicken place in the bad part of town. Lone Wolf Spurns Angst, reads a headline in the box. The waitress has a beautiful burn on her neck.

  I can get Finger and Eli out and we can have the boat to ourselves, I say.

  Finger, Tuesday asks. Who’s Finger?

  Nono holds a blue umbrella. She is sending you postcards from around the country. What is she trying to pull? I put a pin in the map of each city they come from and it spells out: Eli I love you.

  Eighteen monks are hanged, disemboweled while still alive and quartered. The one thing they have in common is their doubt just before the act. We are strangers here, they say. Pilgrims and sinners. Why, oh why, they pray. No one comes to help them.

  Eli, how ’bout we go to a wild jungle wearing only loincloths? We can sit and listen to the murder in the trees. Some native girls might swing by. Pineapple umbrella drinks and other delights. We shall raise sails south, ride the river and make New Orleans in two days. Catch a cruise ship to South America. Oh, the birds and the snakes.

  Why do we never go, you ask.

  You and your questions, I say.

  You and your pipe dreams, you say. Castles in Spain.

  I keep thinking of driver’s education class. My driving teacher was a white man named Jesse Jackson. He chewed Red Man and spat out the window. Jackson would say, Slow up. I took us over the hump on Center Street and Jesse Jackson nearly shit himself. He was a bald man of forty-five and his wife did not love him and she went to the airport parking deck and killed herself with a garden hose attached to the exhaust. Memories flood my head. There was the old lesbian librarian that ate alone everyday at Wayne’s Restaurant. My weed dealer’s name was Clown and he had diabetes. The man-made lake and the bad Chinese buffet. The gone times. I’m too exhausted to sleep.

  I am drunk in the doorway of the sanctuary. Ham, the janitor, picks me up.

  Maloney, he says. I’m gonna drive you home.

  I was good to you, Ham. I brought you and your wife back together.

  Then she had a baby with that blind man.

  Take me back, Ham. I need to help people.

  There is a fine line between suffering and sorrow.

  I know, I say. I taught you that.

  I watched Satan hand wash his seersuckers in the dark creek near Dead Branch at dawn. Saw the bastard in my scope but couldn’t get a clear shot, he was a mile away. We ride, Eli, in Dick Dickerson’s Triumph TR3 I hotwired. I’m dreaming we’re in Arkansas and Iowa. I bang the Holy Ghost in the hotel bar bathroom.

  We should go back to the boat, says Eli.

  Let us ride a little longer, I say.

  I don’t like it here. There’s too much mystery in the sky.

  Eli, this is the heartbeat of America, long may you run.

  This is the shittiest highway in the shitty state.

  Take a Xanax, for Christ’s sake.

  I already took two.

  I walk home from the bar in the rain. Ham picks me up again. We ride by my
old house, lights are on. I find Finger between Tuesday’s legs, eating her. They are on the old piano bench. This was my home with my rundown pool.

  Maloney, Tuesday says.

  Finger does not stop.

  Why this, Tuesday?

  We both love you, Maloney, she says.

  Finger holds up the love sign. Pointer, pinky, and thumb.

  I suggest a threesome but I’m denied.

  There is an amazing number of dragonflies out today. Hovering in the yards. A woman won’t stop smoking in the nonsmoking section of the Starlight. There is much trouble in the world. Listen to the news for ten minutes. But the beer still is delivered and the cars are waxed and people still fall in and out of love. Dick Dickerson is cutting his grass in a puffy blouse.

  St. Magdalene is suffocated to death suspended upside down in a pit of animal guts on a giblet. She lived with wolves and broke horses in the desert and was a whore in the court of the evil kings of Arabia. She cries at her death and how she had more things to do.

  Eli, the chess has come down to the wire and you’re all in. I have a lot of cash riding on this, play smart. I see Nono at the back of the gym. She comes over.

  What do you have against his happiness, she says.

  What do you have against minding your own business?

  A family conned my father. This con man was a poor contractor with an ugly, skinny wife. They came to our church and his daughter shit her pants. He drew up blueprints to redo our kitchen. My father wrote him a check for supplies and the guy took his family and left town. But I saw this man again. He had no family anymore. I took him to my chapel. He said his wife died and his daughter ran away. His son was in jail for drugs. He was sorry for everything he’d done to my father. He is now the man at the end of the bar with shaky hands and back pain hitting on the last fat girl in the place.

  Eli, where have you gone? Where is the moon? What day of the week was I born on? I’m down in the cabin of the ship playing chess against myself. Trying to think where you would move.