My God, chocolate chip cookies.
I was there sitting, watching things, I Spy a guy who’d had his hands for almost seventeen years, watching things go by, go by, on my second, on my third, on my fourth chocolate chip cookie. John and Paul and George and Ringo dressed up in shiny blue and red and gold. I just knew it, at any moment, marijuana was going to crack my world open, and the foreign alphabet would make sense, and finally I would be shiny too and free.
Just as I looked at Billie and her mom, from out of both of them the laughter came from inside and went up and out. Mother and daughter, the same smile, the same teeth, the same way they held their heads but differnt.
Such a weird sound, laughter.
The reason laughter sounds weird is because laughter is weird, man. I mean, can you tell me what laughter is?
Then inside me down deep, something inside that had to come up and out, and when it did, my weird sound coming out of me, laughter mixed up with Billie’s and Mrs. Cody’s, and all of us all of a sudden all sitting in this sound that we were all making from the inside, and we were looking one another in the eyes as we were making the sound. Three totally differnt people, as fate would have it, all sitting together around the green Serengeti Plain of Formica and a red flaming candle and a red-blue blood vase with exploding lilacs and the secret alphabet of light from the cut-glass ashtray, with John and Paul and George and Ringo, Mrs. Cody, Billie, and me in a kitchen in a house in Bannock County.
Born in a trunk in the Princess Theater in Pocatello, Idaho. Every one of us.
Which makes us laugh even harder.
The rest of the night, it’s hard to remember. I mean, I can remember everything — I mean, I think I can — but the way of remembering is differnt. Usually when you think back, you think, Well, this happened and then this happened and then this happened. Things happened and then after they happened, you make sense of them. But that night with the marijuana, it wasn’t this and then this and then this. It wasn’t consecutive. The way I remember it, it all happened at once. You didn’t have to wait for it to happen and be over for it to make sense. It was always just happening, and as it happened the sense of it was going on at the same time.
That’s why we laughed so much. Because things were constantly making sense, and we didn’t have to wait till they were over.
So as the night went on, that was the way it went, more tokes, more cigarettes, more beer. Talking and laughing, everything just going by and going by, making sense. Then all of a sudden, for some reason, Mrs. Cody wanted to be shiny like George, Paul, John, and Ringo. The next time I looked up it was Mrs. Cody in her old wedding dress. She was twirling and twirling to Sergeant Pepper’s. It made perfect sense.
But that wedding dress, and what that wedding dress contained for me, I had no idea what I was in for.
At first Mrs. Cody’s wedding dress was just another white dress. Silky and shiny and the sound silk makes. Twirling and twirling, shiny white, how white can be so many colors in the candlelight.
Then Billie tried the dress on. Billie’s boobs, pushed up and out, looked like they were going to burst over the top of the dress, but she got the dress to fit. We were laughing, and Billie was twirling, and white was all the colors you could imagine, and everything was going just fine. Then “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” came on, and things started getting weird. Something about Billie in the wedding dress. Shit bunched up in my chest, and I felt like I was going to throw up or shit my pants.
Billie in a white wedding dress, like my sis in a white wedding dress, the way Billie’s mother, my mother, was in her white wedding dress.
A simple shiny white dress and all it stood for. All the heartbreak it brought.
In a moment, how clearly I saw: the shiny white wedding dress was a prison, a way for women to make themselves cold and faraway and unhappy, and then, more than anything, above all, make you be the one who has to pay for their suffering.
In nothing flat, the world went away, and I was dizzy and alone with my breath coming fast and my heart beating loud in my ears.
Everything was making sense, but now it wasn’t funny.
Be careful what you go after.
I wanted to go outside, get some air, breathe deep, run far away. But I didn’t run. I sat. So still. Me on the chair with my fear.
After a while, an eternity, after more smokes, more beers, Billie took the dress off and laid the dress on the kitchen chair beside me.
The next thing I remember was I was in the bathroom.
You have to be careful in other people’s bathrooms when you’re stoned. There’s all those things in a bathroom that have smells and stains in the sink and leaky toilets and shower curtains and bath soaps and creams and makeup and deodorant and medicine, but most of all the mirror is what you have to watch out for.
Don’t look in the mirror. Just say, Hello, how are you, nice to see you, glad you’re doing fine, then get the fuck out of there.
But that night I was looking for answers. The answer in the mirror.
Staring back at me was a spineless ass, a momma’s boy. The guy with a yellow tulip up his ass who wasn’t strong and sexy like Chuck diPietro.
In my hands, somehow in my hands, in one hand, the album cover. Sergeant Pepper and all the color, blue sky and famous people, dressed up fancy in hats and jewels and shiny dresses. Edgar Allan Poe, Tarzan, Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando, John in lime yellow, Ringo in pink, Paul in robin’s-egg blue, George in red, everything bright and shiny.
In my other hand, the white, shiny, smooth wedding dress.
Something snapped. My black Converse tennis shoes and white socks and Levi’s and T-shirt on the bathroom floor, my big pink feet and my big white hairy Idaho legs stepping inside something so soft and shiny, a bull stepping into a china shop. Then I pulled the dress up, tried to get the dress up above my nipples, but the dress would go only as far as my nipples. No way I could even think of zipping up the back.
The only way the dress stayed up was if I smashed my elbows into my sides.
In the mirror. My mother’s steamer trunk. Scintillatingly gorgeous.
See how my son plays.
Differnt. I was differnt all right. Not a man the way most men were. I might as well cop to it. Fuck you and the stud horse you rode in on.
Either I had to change, or that dress had to change. One or the other. I figured it was the other. I was going to take that dress and change the meaning of the dress, break it out of its prison into something completely new.
Into the kitchen, when I jumped out in the shiny white wedding dress, Mrs. Cody, Billie, their blue eyes so open wide, like they were seeing one of the wonders of the fucking world.
Well, they were.
The Wizard of Oz going from black and white to color. I twirled in, shiny white, all the colors in the candlelight. John, Paul, George, Ringo, and Rigby John. Lovely Rita meter maid. He’s leaving home. Bye-bye. I was scintillatingly gorgeous.
Billie and Mrs. Cody, my audience at their feet, yelling and screaming and whistling, jumping up and down and clapping their hands.
Liberation. It was a step. If only for one tiny stoned moment.
The way I looked in their eyes, I loved.
Bravo! Bravo!
As fate would have it, then in a moment, Mrs. Cody’s blue eyes went dark, the way my mother’s go from gold to green. And I could see, Mrs. Cody understood what I was doing. She saw the suffering in that dress. For me, and for her. And before I knew it, Mrs. Cody’s hand was around the red candle and the red candle was flying through the air. The red candle hit me in the balls, a big splash of red wax all down the front of the white wedding dress, aimed at my crotch.
Mrs. Cody yelled: This dress ain’t no virgin no more!
And there we were laughing again. That strange sound coming up from deep inside. So hard, all of us, laughing, even while I held my balls, laughing like laughing was a place you went off to, a place totally somewhere else, and all you could do was hold
your sides and try and breathe.
And from out this place, something else.
The last song on Sergeant Pepper’s was playing, “A Day in the Life,” when the music gets real loud and it isn’t music anymore but chaos, noise of a symphony gone haywire.
Mrs. Cody, the way she looked, might as well have been my own mom right then. Migrained, when it was too much and God the Father was settling into her skull. Mrs. Cody, out of the blue, like she was possessed or something, ran up to me and grabbed the dress by the bodice and ripped the dress down off me. She was still pulling, and I managed to step out of the dress. Then Mrs. Cody was screaming fuck and shit and was running out of the kitchen with the dress into the garage.
Billie and I didn’t know what to do. We didn’t figure on Mrs. Cody to be the one who freaked out. I quick pulled my pants on and my shirt.
In the garage, I pulled the gas can out of Mrs. Cody’s hand just before the gasoline hit the dress.
It took us awhile, but me and Billie got Mrs. Cody settled down. Mrs. Cody kept saying she was sorry over and over, and that it wasn’t me that made her angry, it was the dress. The fucking dress.
After Mrs. Cody went to bed, Billie put Simon and Garfunkel’s Bookends on, and we cleaned up the house.
When everything was wiped down and put away and we’d scraped the red wax off the floor and everything was clean and the lights were back on and I had my shirt back on and my shoes and socks, I stood by the kitchen table and looked at things. Where had that other world with the flickering red candlelight and the green plains of Serengeti Formica and red-blue vases and exploding lilacs gone?
Billie laid the white wedding dress across the kitchen table. The white of the dress was so white in the bright light. The red stain at the crotch bright red.
At the front door, Billie looked tired. She took my chin in her hand and squished my cheeks together.
Rigby John Klusener, she said. There’s no one like you.
In Billie’s eyes. It was great to be inside there in Billie’s eyes again.
I’m glad we’re back together, I said.
Billie knew what I meant. Things had been weird since Chuck diPietro.
You know, Billie said, you don’t have to worry. I don’t want to marry you. That would ruin everything.
No doubt about it. This girl was psychic.
Our good-night kiss was two lips against two lips soft with a kind of suck, tobacco, and the taste of pink. Up in the sky was a place of endless dark. The same damn moon a slice of silver ball up there hanging in the firmament. Stars like you’d paint stars.
I closed the aluminum door.
The C not for Cody, but for cunt.
Women of weddings, lashed in shiny wedding white, blood of cunts, have mercy on us.
PART III
Thunderbird
8 A Day in the Life
I HAD NO idea the events of the summer of my seventeenth year would blow my ass clean out of Bannock County, three hundred miles out of Pocatello, and I’d be out here on Highway 93, alone with the moon, my thumb stuck out, a full feeling in my soul, and my heart broke. So much happened in a year, too much to comprehend. It’s only just over a year ago Mom and I’d finished the novena for chrissakes. Then last summer, Flaco and Acho. Then Billie. Not to mention Sis’s wedding fiasco and Dad’s threat of divorce and Billie going off with Chuck diPietro.
Smoking marijuana.
That’s a lot. And it was nothing compared to what was about to come my way.
In the meantime things had settled down. All the shit people had been feeling got stuffed back in the closet, and everyone, as usual, was going about his business as if nothing was up. I was fine with that.
The only thing I knew for sure was it was haying time again. And this summer, it was even more hay than last summer. And this summer, no Flaco and Acho. This summer, the actual haying part wasn’t even going to be a family affair. Mom just flat-out said no. Sis was married and pregnant, and Dad always had some other damn business to do when it came to haying. So it was just going to be me and some hired man for both the haying and the hauling.
The first sign that things weren’t going according to plan was Dad announced we wouldn’t start haying on the Saturday, the day he’d planned. So I had a day off. Didn’t know what to do with myself. Then Sunday off too.
Sunday night after supper, when I got the water changed up in the pasture, when I came back into the house, no one was sitting in the love seat in front of the TV waiting for Bonanza.
Mom and Dad were in their bedroom with the door closed. That’d never happened in the daytime before, or even early evening. Inside in their bedroom you could hear them talking, sometimes talking loud, but not yelling.
I thought perhaps it was more divorce.
When the Bonanza music started, Dad came out of the bedroom. He sat down on the love seat alone. Pretty soon Mom came out. She went into the kitchen, made Dad some tea, and brought the cup of tea in with her and sat down.
It was an episode where the Cartwrights were having troubles with the local Indians. We just sat there, staring at the TV, Dad stirring and drinking his tea. I tried to get a sideways glance at Mom, but she was on the other side of Dad, so I couldn’t tell what was going on. Plus Mom was doing her disappearing act, and when she did her disappearing act, it was practically impossible to find her.
Only I could do it. But she and I had to be alone.
Mom was doing her disappearing act because Mom was dead set against hiring who Dad was hiring. And when Mom didn’t get her way, one of the things she did was disappear.
That night there was no chance in hell finding Mom anywhere.
Later that night, as I was lying in my bed, Dad’s footsteps started down the stairs. You could always tell Dad’s footsteps. Dad’s footsteps were like the scariest movie. Lead foot.
The turn of the doorknob. The feeling in my arms that means I’m helpless.
My bedroom door opened. Just Dad’s silhouette in the doorway with the light on in the hallway behind him. You could see his legs sticking through his blue jammies.
The covers were up around my neck.
Dad’s voice. Moses on the Mount. This is the law.
Tomorrow, Dad said, you will be baling hay with George Serano. He’s the only hired man around here I could find. He’s promised me he won’t be drinking, but you know about Indians. If you catch him drinking, you tell me. I won’t stand for drinking. Hay crop or no hay crop.
Dad’s legs looked like X-ray legs.
George is a strong buck, Dad said, so he’ll be riding the slip.
My eyes stayed on Dad’s ankles and knees, nothing up higher.
You drive the tractor, Dad said. I’m counting on you to get some good work out of him, you hear?
Bone silence in the night all around us in my bedroom. I waited to be sure Dad was done talking.
I said: George Serano?
That’s right, Dad said, George Serano.
Dad turned and pulled the door back across the hall light. Then the door stopped.
Now for hell’s sake, Dad said. We don’t want no trouble like those Mexicans last year. We’re differnt from those people. Don’t go getting mixed up with ’em. Especially George Serano. Believe me, you don’t want to know what that man’s got going for him. You stay on the tractor, and he stays on the slip. If the baler breaks down, you fix it or come get me. Let him sit on his ass.
To each his own, you hear me?
Promise your mother you’ll keep your distance.
You keep your distance, you hear?
Monday morning, Mom was bent over some bowl, hair flying, stirring up a storm. No mush or eggs this morning.
Pancakes.
Pancakes meant Mom was sorry I had to work with George Serano, but she couldn’t do anything about it.
I put extra butter and syrup over the pancakes because I knew I could.
Outside, it was already bright. Across the yard, a tall, lanky man in a cowboy hat
, Levi’s, cowboy boots, and a bright white shirt leaned up against the baler. He lifted a cigarette to his lips, then let his hand fall to his side.
There he was, George Serano.
The battle had begun.
A dark and dreary night, the last time I’d seen this guy. We were in hospital gowns, rolling around in a dark hospital room, hammering on each other.
He was spouting off some shit about a Thunderbird.
The storm of ’66.
The screen door slammed behind me. The slam bounced all over the yard. My boots were planted firm on the cement sidewalk. The morning sun was already hot. I pulled my cowboy hat down over my eyes. It was weird. For a while there, I couldn’t move.
It’s funny to look back on it now.
In his cowboy hat and cowboy boots and Levi’s and a white shirt, leaning up against the green John Deere baler. Smoking one of his Camels. George Serano.
Across the yard, in my cowboy hat and cowboy boots and Levi’s, my blue chambray shirt, on the cement sidewalk, keeping the sun out of my eyes. Me.
Him and me.
All we needed were the holsters and the six guns and the theme from Bonanza, and it would be a Sunday night.
My boots stepped off the sidewalk and started walking. Not toward him, toward the baler. I couldn’t imagine walking up to him, but I had to walk, so it was to the baler I was walking.
The crazy Indian with the spacy eyes, his wild hair, and the weird way he talked, was what I expected.
That sunny Monday morning, though, there was nothing crazy about the man leaning against the baler. Something gentle about his face and the way he moved his hands.
The closer I got to him, the less I knew English.
I didn’t shake his hand, didn’t say hello. Perhaps on another day, I would have said to hell with Dad and been nice to George Serano, but you got to remember, this was the guy who stole my madras shirt and my wallet.
Now Is the Hour Page 29
