Backland Graces; Four Short Novels

by Hal Zina Bennett

  Cal leaned back. “Roll the fucking window down,” he whispered.

  “I can’t,” T.J. said. “The door is fucked up. I can’t even open it.”

  “I’ve gotta get out of here,” Cal said. He reached across Whalen’s still form and popped open the driver’s door. Then he wrestled Whalen’s body out of the cab and eased it to the ground in the dark, holding onto the steering wheel to steady himself.

  Cal slipped to the ground, with T.J. right behind him. The two of them lifted Whalen up from the pavement and carried him to a grassy area. They set him down at a picnic table, folding his arms and resting his head upon them like he was sleeping.

  “Just like that,” T.J. said, his voice hushed, in awe and breathless from the effort of carrying Whalen’s lifeless form from the truck. He let his right arm linger over Whalen’s shoulder, his head turned as if to speak to confide a great secret to him. “One moment we’re alive, next moment gone. I hope you had a good ride, old man, that’s all I hope.”

  Cal began pacing back and forth beside the picnic table. “I’ve been thinking,” he said, his voice a loud whisper. “What do they do back there when they discover he’s gone? They’ve probably discovered he’s gone by now.”

  “Maybe they figure he’s wandered off. Why are you asking me?”

  “I never should have listened to you.”

  “Aw, fuck you,” T.J. said. “Have a little respect. Your old man is dead.”

  “You think anyone ID’ed us?”

  “How can you be thinking about stuff like that at a time like this?”

  “We’ve got a dead body on our hands!”

  “You worry too much. We’ll go on, that’s all. We’ll bury him like we planned. Out there on the desert, we’ll drive way out, cremate him, then bury his ashes. Who’ll ever know the difference? I seen this movie once....how Indians do it. Big bonfire. Drumming. Singing. You know, a whole thing, releasing the soul, etcetera, etcetera.”

  Cal strode over to the table, placed his hand on Whalen’s back, patted it, then turned away and spoke as if only to himself. “My old man didn’t have a soul. But if he did, shit, I don’t know.” He turned back to T.J. “Does he seem like someone that had a soul?”

  “Sure, Cal, sure he had a soul. Still has it, hovering around here, waiting. You don’t feel it? When we die we lose our body, not our soul. You never use your soul. Even the most evil assholes, most of them, they have a soul.”

  “Do you see it?”

  “Sure,” T.J. lied. “I see it.” He did not want to disappoint his friend but it was true. He saw nothing. Still, it was dark, and then, back in the truck, when it hit the wall, maybe Whalen’s soul slipped out of his body then and they had missed it because of all the excitement.

  “You’re sure you see it.”

  “Not now, I don’t,” T.J. said. “I meant back there when he died. You probably didn’t notice because you were trying to drive.”

  “I would think I would’ve seen something…”

  “You’ve gotta be watching for it.”

  “Since when are you such an expert on the soul?” Cal asked.

  “I’ve been reading up,” T.J. said. “It’s a man’s essence, that’s what I read. Essence is like, well, shit, I don’t know how to explain it to you. It’s who you are, only different because some people never let it come out much. What it is, see, it’s the part you can still feel in the air after a person dies, when they aren’t there, something about them that is about them and nobody else in the whole world. It’s something that isn’t there after death, so that’s why it’s so hard to talk about. You understand what I’m saying?”

  Cal reached out and patted his father’s head. “There’s nobody home no more, that’s for sure.”

  “Yeah, that’s it. You see? What isn’t there no more is what’s gone. You can feel it, or can’t feel it, that’s the thing.”

  Cal laughed, two short, guffawing laughs. “That much is sure, something is gone that was there before but what do you call it?”

  “You got any good memories of him, Cal? I read that when a man dies you should hold onto any good feelings you’ve got about them. It helps him make the journey.”

  “What journey, man? He’s dead meat.”

  “We’re talking about the soul. I thought we were talking about the soul, Cal. Where are you at, anyway? The soul lingers. It could be here right now only you wouldn’t see it ‘cause you’re not allowing yourself to. It’s like in the bible, you know, when Jesus dies and his buddies see him again, even talk with him.”

  “T.J., you’re so full of shit. You’ve never even been inside a church. Since when do you know about Jesus?”

  “My great granddaddy was a preacher. Shows what you know,” T.J. said. “There’s a part of you and me and everyone, which lives outside of time—that’s the words in this book I read—it’s ageless and timeless. That’s what it says. Ageless and timeless. You know, look at your old man now, sitting there where we set him, not moving. There’s no life inside him. He’s like, you’d say, dead meat. Where’s that part gone to that once made him move like you and me? Where’s it gone to? What makes him different than he was an hour ago? I tell you what up and left. It’s his soul. Soul is like.... well, it’s the energy, for one thing. Geez, I don’t know. What was in there, driving the truck not an hour ago? You know what I’m saying? What’s the before and after?”

  “He’s dead meat and we got to do something with what he is now. That’s all I know.”

  “You can’t hear a goddamn thing I say to you, can you?”

  “We gotta take him back to the hospital,” Cal said. “We’ll carry him in, say we found him wandering around outside when we came to visit. We picked him up and then he died.”

  T.J. shook his head. “You’ve got the brain of a piss ant. Who’s going to believe that?”

  “We could end up being charged with murder.”

  “We didn’t murder him,” T.J. said. “He was dying. We were with him, let him be hisself for a while, not a guy lying in bed with a bunch of strangers.”

  “He was getting cared for.”

  “By nobody who’d ever known him.”

  Cal sat down at the picnic table across from T.J. “Man, I don’t know what to do. I wish he wasn’t dead. Why didn’t they tell him he was dying?”

  “It’s policy, not to get the family upset, something like that.”

  “He was pretty sure he wasn’t dying.”

  “If you was dyin’ would you admit it to anyone?”

  “If I knew for sure, yeah, I would.”

  “You don’t know. You won’t know until you see death holding the door and waiting for you.” T.J. thought about this, wondered if it would be the same for himself. Then he had a turn of thought. “Cal? I say we still take him to the desert. I know a place. Burning Man. It’s a real place, way out there. It’s the perfect place. Come on. It’s not going to do no good to take him to the hospital.”

  “Burning Man ain’t a place. They have a festival out there named that. When I was going with Honey Baker, she and me went out there once. It’s Black Rock, that’s what it’s called. Black Rock. That’s the name of the place.”

  “Whatever. I say we take him there.” T.J. leaned over Whalen, grabbed his left arm, passed it over his own shoulder and hoisted him up. As he did Whalen’s body made a strange croaking sound and T.J. nearly dropped him.

  “Holy shit, I thought he’d came alive,” T.J. said, laughing nervously. “Just gas, I guess. Give me a hand.”

  Back in the truck, with Whalen strapped into the seat belt between them, they moved east toward Gerlach, then north into the Black Rock Range. The desert was pitch dark, made even darker with so little traffic and so few headlights in either direction. Stars dotted the slightly overcast sky, and the thick-treaded tires of Cal’s truck sang on the rough macadam. Cal had fallen asleep with T.J. behind the wheel, guiding the truck through the night with his fingerless hands. T.J. had tried many times to ge
t Cal to buy a spinner knob, a big oversized knob clamped to the wheel to help a fingerless man drive.

  T.J. wondered what the old man’s last thoughts had been. His last words had been a big disappointment: “Hot stuff. Potato chips and a coke.” Those were not only his last words but also his last meal. Not much to go out on. Not much to leave the earth on. There’d been so much T.J. had wanted to ask Whalen, like did he see it coming? Did death have a face? Did he see faces of anyone he knew coming out to escort him to wherever he was going—heaven or hell? When T.J.’s aunt Ruthy died, she lay wide awake for three days and nights, talking with someone she saw on the other side. T.J. would’ve loved to be there, to get her to tell him who she was talking to. It hadn’t been Jesus or any of her relatives or loved ones. She’d been very clear about that, people said. Then who was it? Maybe it isn’t anyone that we know here on earth. Maybe none of the preachers even know, nor the priests, nor anybody! The old lady had spoken to those on the other side in a language nobody around her had ever heard before. “Maybe,” T.J. said aloud, “there is a different language over there. Maybe when we are going to die we learn it instantly, like something transmitted to our brains, like radio waves.” He turned to the right, wondering if Cal was still asleep. He was.

  Whalen’s body had stiffened up a bit and he’d tipped against Cal. T.J. turned his attention back to the road, looking out into the endless desert, the twin beams of the headlights burning into the darkness like two long pillars of light. There was something magnificent—he loved that word, had discovered it in one of the books he’d read—about racing through the night, through the desert, the only vehicle for miles around. Of course there was Cal, but he was sound asleep. And Whalen dead beside him. T.J. wondered if Whalen’s soul followed his still body or if maybe it had already departed. He imagined it hovering over the cab of the pickup like a cloud following along, perhaps waiting to find out the fate of the body where it had resided some fifty-plus years. Maybe the soul, for a time, has a sentimental attachment to that body, the way a man clings to a happy memory from his childhood or to a car or truck he has owned and loved.

  Far out to the left T.J. caught a glimpse of a single dim light and imagined it might be a mobile home way out there, away from the whole world, maybe owned by an old couple who kept a light on to discourage the coyotes from coming too close. But did light attract or discourage the coyotes? He couldn’t remember.

  He decided to talk with Whalen, asking him, like in a dream, if he was still aware of anything? Was a part of him still in his body? Would that be the soul or some rag-tag piece of him that would not give up? He imagined the old man’s soul hovering over the cab, not in any particular form any more, just there, a presence that still had enough connection to the world T.J. knew to remember something about talking with living beings and doing it without ever making a sound.

  “Yes and no,” Whalen’s presence seemed to say, as though answering a question T.J. had only held in his mind. “It’s like nowhere you’ve ever been, even in your wildest dreams.”

  “Try me,” T.J. said, saying it out loud.

  “You know, sometimes when I was driving,” Whalen said in T.J’s mind, “I’d look way down the freakin’ highway, maybe I’d be all alone on the road, and I would have strange thoughts rushing into my mind, you know, like when you see a cloud of bugs or maybe a bat or night bird in the beams of the headlights, rushing at you...and the thoughts would splatter around in my head, and I’d be thinking, shit, what is this? I’d be thinking, what is this about, that the freakin’ world seems to be like it is right now, how maybe everything I ever seen or did or knew was nothing but me, my own dream, and something inside my head had made up everything around me, made it all that way for me, everyone and everything in it...and that’s what it was all about, this ride we’re on, seeing this really is how things are, dreams, dreams, but we never quite get to see it clearly while we’re still drawing breath on this earth. But it’s all so damn clear in that moment, crystal clear...and you wonder why if I am creating it all did I want to create it like I did? I never much wanted it like it was, except only now and then when things was working out pretty nice, and when you ast that question you’d say to yourself, yes, it’s all true, and why didn’t you know enough to have changed it if you didn’t like what was, ‘cause that’s how it really is. Lord knows there was times that was just plain shit, just shit, but then you actually get your answer which was, ‘cause you can’t change it, because all the people and things you see out there also created it with you...and it’s all one giant, fucking, stuck together dream that we’re all making together…that’s what this damn drunk boozy preacher told me once...and if anybody is so damn smart…aw, what the fuck good is it to even think how it was or is!”

  T.J. glanced over at Whalen’s body, slumped forward against the seat belt. “You talk too fucking fast,” he said, wanting to pull over to the side of the road and write it all down.

  “Shut the fuck up, I’m tryin’ to sleep,” Cal mumbled.

  “Never mind,” T.J. said. “Never mind.”

  The sun rose at 3:47 AM. Eagle soared two hundred feet overhead, greeting the sun, then turned his attention to the speeding truck, cutting across open desert, chased by a great snake of billowing dust. Eagle followed for several miles, curious, wondering if there’d be anything in it for him, and then, the great snake slowed, shrank down, flattened itself into the desert floor and disappeared. Eagle circled, lifted another fifty feet in elevation, playing in the updrafts.

  “This is the place,” T.J. said. “I can feel it in my bones.”

  Slowly awakening, Cal squinted at the eastern horizon, watching a red tongue of fire licking the edge of the earth.

  “Jesus, where are we?” He pushed Whalen’s body up straight and leaned it back against the seat. His father’s eyes were glazed and cloudy-looking now and Cal thought how much they reminded him of the eyes of the big buck mounted over the stone fireplace at Stacey’s Bar & Grill up at Mount Shasta. He reached out and made a “V” with two fingers, pressed them to his father’s cold eyelids and pulled them down shut. The flesh resisted his touch, but with a little coaxing closed over the soft eyeballs.

  “Death stinks,” T.J. said, opening the driver’s door and dangling his legs over the edge of the seat. “You ever notice? I don’t mean the piss and shit. I’m saying death itself. I think it has a regular stink to it, don’t matter if it’s a deer, a human or anything else. It just has a stink.”

  T.J. jumped to the ground and moved around to the side to haul the ladder out of the bed of the truck. He rested the top of the ladder against the seat and climbed up until he could reach in and grab the dead man’s legs. As he pulled them around, Whalen wobbled and tipped against the dashboard, caught behind the steering wheel so that T.J. couldn’t pull him any further.

  “I could use some help here,” he told Cal. “Can’t you straighten him out?”

  “I was just thinking,” Cal said, lifting Whalen’s shoulders so that he cleared the steering wheel. “I had this dream while you were driving. I dreamed he was okay and you was the one that died. We were taking you somewhere. You’d given us directions before you died only I couldn’t remember what you’d said, and neither could Whalen. It was a bad fucking scene, T.J., You know? I hardly ever knew Dad, hardly at all except for what others told me about him. So, like I was real sad about your dying, T.J., I really was. But it was good being with Dad, with Whalen for a while.”

  T.J. shrugged. “Let’s get him took care of before it’s too hot.”

  “This is crazy, T.J. We made no preparations...”

  “Don’t worry about it. While you was sleeping I took care of everything.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Cal and Whalen gently lowered Whalen across the seat and then down the ladder until he was on the ground and T.J. was able to take the dead man in his arms, like a baby, his head tucked against T.J.’s neck. Teddy carried Whalen out a hundred yards o
r so from the truck. Then he dropped to his knees and eased Whalen to the ground, where the corpse resumed the same sitting position it had held in the truck.

  T.J. rose to his feet again and turned back to see Cal, now sitting behind the steering wheel, driver’s door open, his arms crossed over the wheel, his face buried in the muscular flesh of his forearms. T.J. stopped, sat down on the ground and waited, staring at the earth between his crossed legs.

  “What the fuck you plan to do?” Cal grumbled, his voice hoarse, cracking, half-angry maybe to cover the sadness he was feeling.

  “I know this ain’t easy,” T.J. said.

  “Never mind. Never fucking mind.”

  “While you were sleeping I got some wood, branches and shit, and a can of gasoline. I think it’ll do.”

  Cal slid from the cab of the truck, down the ladder, and looked back into the bed. T.J. wasn’t lying. The bed was piled high with dry branches and there was a red plastic can of gasoline tucked against the tailgate. “Where’d you get that shit?” Cal asked. “You didn’t have no money.”

  “I picked ‘em up along the way. Don’t worry about it.” T.J. dropped the tailgate, reached in for the gasoline can and then set it on the ground. He gathered branches in his arms and carried them up to where Whalen was sitting.

  T.J. arranged the branches on the ground. Cal brought more, and after several trips back to the truck the pile of branches was four feet high, densely woven together so the fire would burn hot. They gently lifted Whalen’s body to the top of the branches and let the weight of him nestle in, his face pointed up to the sky.