Americana

by Don DeLillo

  The movie functions best as a sort of ultimate schizogram, an exercise in diametrics which attempts to unmake meaning. I like to touch the film. I like to watch it move through the projector. This is my success. Sullivan and Brand, in their surgical candor, taught me to fear and envy the artist. (Brand, of course, as it turned out, was a writer of blank pages. That’s how I think of him, definitely a novelist, by all means a craftsman of high talent—but one who chose words of the same color as the paper on which they were written.) I wanted to become an artist, as I believed them to be, an individual willing to deal in the complexities of truth. I was most successful. I ended in silence and darkness, sitting still, a maker of objects that imitate my predilection.

  From this window I can see the ocean, far out, rocking in that blank angry sheen which foul weather sets upon all waters. Later I’ll walk on the beach for an hour or so. If the weather has cleared by then I’ll be able to see the coast of Africa, the great brown curve of that equatorial loin. But right now it is a pleasure to anticipate slipping once again (a paragraph hence) into a much more filmworthy period of my life.

  There will be no fireworks when the century turns. There will be no agonies in the garden. Now that night beckons, the first lamp to be lit will belong to that man who leaps from a cliff and learns how to fly, who soars to the tropics of the sun and uncurls his hand from his breast to spoon out fire. The sound of the ocean seems lost in its own exploding passion. I am wearing white flannel trousers.

  * * *

  Clevenger’s paleolithic lavender Cadillac was equipped with air conditioning, deep-pile carpeting, padded instrument panel, stereo tape system and a burglar alarm. Behind the wheel he seemed a veteran jockey not at all awed by the magnificence of his own colors. He was about fifty, a small man with a neck of Playa clay traversed by wide deep ridges. Clevenger was a Texan. He had picked me up somewhere in Missouri where he had been visiting his sister and her family. When I told him I was heading nowhere special he had grinned and told me to get in. He kept grinning through most of Kansas and I could only guess that his own youth held some dry secret of thumbing days and freight cars and nights spent with songless men in the crouched light of fires. We stayed at the most expensive motels and Clevenger ate steak and home-fries for breakfast. He was superintendent-in-chief of a test track for automobile and truck tires just outside a town in West Texas called Rooster. This was the last week of his vacation and he was seeing to some private business interests which were apparently fairly lucrative and certainly well spread out. After Kansas we tore off a corner-piece of southeastern Colorado and went charging across New Mexico. The journey was very boring. We kept moving toward the seam of earth and sky but never got there, and nothing was undiscovered, and time was confused. Jet trainers skimmed over the mountains and desert. The past returned in plastic. Ecological balances were slipping and things seemed not quite the sum of their parts. Troopers bulged with sidearms. There were neat reversals of the currents of history and geography; the menu in a frontier-style restaurant included a brief note pointing out that the main dining hall was a replica of the main dining hall at the famous Cattleman on Forty-fifth Street in New York City. People fished, hunted, took their sons to visit the inevitable new military installation and talked about places like Phoenix and Vegas as if remembering some telescopically distant moment, some misty green leaflet of childhood on the planet Earth. All those days in fact were not far from one’s idea of life on a lunar colony; everywhere we went Indians ranged across the landscape like workers thirsty for oxygen, men sent to move stones in a place which is nothing but stone. Kenneth Wattling Wild (of Chicago, River Forest, the U.S. Marine Corps, Leighton Cage College, Chicago, Insomnia and, no doubt, River Forest again) had once written:

  Death came in twos in the night

  with whisky vengeance on its breath.

  Our carbines lay by the river.

  This too, then, moon and painted ponies, seemed the coming and going of time set free from whatever binds it. Literature is what we passed and left behind, that more than men and cactus. For years I had been held fast by the great unwinding mystery of this deep sink of land, the thick paragraphs and imposing photos, the gallop of panting adjectives, prairie truth and the clean kills of eagles, the desert shawled in Navaho paints, images of surreal cinema, of ventricles tied to pumps, Chaco masonry and the slung guitar, of church organ lungs and the slate of empires, of coral in this strange place, suggesting a reliquary sea, and of the blessed semblance of God on the faces of superstitious mountains. Whether the novels and songs usurped the land, or took something true from it, is not so much the issue as this: that what I was engaged in was merely a literary venture, an attempt to find pattern and motive, to make of something wild a squeamish thesis on the essence of the nation’s soul. To formulate. To seek links. But the wind burned across the creekbeds, barely moving the soil, and there was nothing to announce to myself in the way of historic revelation. Even now, writing this, I can impart little of what I saw. The Cadillac averaged close to ninety and its windows were tinted bottle green for the benefit of Clevenger’s sunbaked eyes.

  But he never tired of driving. We stopped only to sleep and eat. He made quite a few phone calls, met some people now and then, and several times parked for a moment at the edge of a town and gazed with an appraising eye at vast pieces of real estate. But these delays were timed to coincide with the sleeping and eating stops, and we were always on our way again soon enough. Clevenger loved the road. It was a straight line of marked length and limits, and progress could be made upon it only in the most direct of ways; some snug lane curling through highest Bavaria would have destroyed his mind. He let me take the wheel only as a matter of form. When he was not driving he talked hardly at all and I thought the wheel might be his secret vice, the only circle in his life, and he was close to being lost without it. Time slipped forward and back, and nature was off-center, and I listened to the radios. We switched from car radio to stereo tape to Sullivan’s world-shrinking portable. Sometimes I was able to work out a lively mix and statesmen or commercial announcers chanted beneath whoops of soul-rock. Clevenger got a kick out of that and would tickle the accelerator and jab an elbow into the padded door. Most of the time I stayed with the portable and the car was filled with the sounds of big beat, gospel, ghetto soul, jug bands and dirt bands, effete near-lisping college rock, electric obscenity and doom, wild fiddles of Nashville, ouds and tambourines and lusting drums, and then with night I would twirl the dials to hunt for jazz, and with luck I’d catch a scrap of catatonic Monk, or Sun Ra colliding with antimatter, and some note would pin together pieces of the spreading night and it would all make sense for a moment, the mad harmonics bringing most of what was sane to those who ran with death, and we would head into the gulf of early light with that black music driving over me and I would feel a stranger in my love of it, for I did not run with anything.

  At breakfast Clevenger eyed the waitress, a slow-moving woman wearing a white uniform and no stockings, a woman who knew so well the tensions of her own body, its points of firmness and elasticity, and how to make the most of walking and standing, that after a few minutes the uniform became more or less superfluous. Clevenger ordered his steak well-done and ran his thumb and index finger the full length of his cigarette before lighting it.

  “Some women you lay,” he said. “Some you screw, some you bang, some you hump. That there is a royal hump and a half. That is a camel ride to a place well below sea level. One-night stand to beat the band. That there is stuff.”

  “It’s the no stockings that gets me,” I said.

  “Only one thing better than no stockings. That’s stockings. They get you coming and going. It’s a good old world as long as the little baby girls keep growing up.”

  “When do you have to be back?”

  “Three days,” he said. “I have to sneak up on Phoenix first. Come on down with me, Dave. Wife’ll be glad to have some company. She gets lonesome way out there. Coy
otes and Mexicans. She’s a San Antonio girl and if things turn the right way maybe I can get us back to San Anton. That’s a real nice city. Little woman doesn’t get along with my sister or I’d have had to take her along on this tour of ours. Everything works out for the best if you wait around long enough. Look at the legs on that thing. They are awesome. She is one awesome thing.”

  “I don’t think I should tag along too far. I’ve already abused your hospitality.”

  “Hell, don’t worry about that, Dave.”

  “I’m practically broke. I’ve got to make some kind of move.”

  “I can put you on for a while. Hell, you can drive a car. You come on down with me and take a look at the track. It won’t pay much but at least you’ll be making yourself some cash while you’re deciding what your next move is.”

  “Maybe I’ll do that.”

  “No maybes now. And from here on, keep your money in your pocket. No need for you to be laying out. I got everything in hand. We’ll have us some belly laughs before this thing is over.”

  On his way to the toilet he said something to the waitress and she smiled, full mouth and narrowing eyes, a nice warm sendoff and maybe a sly ticket for a return trip. Then we were on the road again and Clevenger was never happier. That woman had started some rotary pool of low blood going, a fine mean leveling at the edge of his mood, and he talked well into the afternoon, cruising at close to a hundred and hunched forward around the wheel so that his bottom rode up slightly and he was sitting on his thighs. He told me he had two divorces to his credit, bobbing his head and flashing a victory sign. His first wife was part Mexican, part Apache, part Welsh, a slug or two of French Canadian. He was nineteen years old when he met her and she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. Their troubles began when she tried to bite off his right ear during an argument about another man. Clevenger pointed to the side of his head and I leaned over for a closer look; there was nothing very distinctive about the ear but I nodded anyway. His second wife was a salesgirl. She never bothered him. She spent all day at the five-and-dime selling toys and things. At night she cooked, cleaned, ironed and mended. Clevenger began to beat her.

  I wore my magic plaid rallying cap. Clevenger pushed hard into Arizona. I asked him where the big Navaho reservation was and he said we were well south of it, which was fine with me. We ate lunch in a powder blue saloon and I went into the men’s room and looked in the mirror. My hair, uncut since New York, had thickened considerably and I liked the way it was massed behind and below the hat, which I wore low over my forehead and cocked just a shade to one side. I hadn’t shaved in two days but it looked all right. In fact I had been told several times in the past that blond stubble is rather attractive. I checked for dandruff. The next day we began the last leg to Phoenix.

  “You have to keep them down,” Clevenger said.

  “Who?”

  “Whoever’s closing in on you.”

  We passed a young man on the road but he wasn’t carrying a guitar and in any case it would have been impossible for Kyrie to have walked this far in so short a time. Beyond the windshield all the earth was pale green lymph as if something had gone wrong with the sun, leaving this invalid civilization submerged in aqua-light. Good wombs and bad wombs. The earth curved. I visualized my apartment then, empty and dark and quiet, furniture from John Widdicomb, suits from F. R. Tripler and J. Press, art books from Rizzoli, rugs from W&J Sloane, fireplace accessories from Wm. H. Jackson, cutlery from Bonniers, crystal by Steuben, shoes by Banister, gin by House of Lords, shirts by Gant and Hathaway, component stereo system by Garrard, Stanton and Fisher, ties by Countess Mara, towels by Fieldcrest, an odd and end from Takashimaya. We had lunch in a huge glass cafeteria that stood just off the highway; about a dozen trailer trucks were parked outside. After we ate I called my home number, collect, and listened to the phone ringing in the empty rooms. It was a sad and lovely experience and I was able to see dust settling on the tables and books and windowsills. Everything was still and I could walk through the rooms, touching the edge of the mantelpiece, turning the pages of a book left open on the coffee table. With my index finger I rubbed a thick line through the dust on the radio. I blew at the shower curtain and looked into the mirror above the wash basin and I listened to the phone ringing. I had been reading that book not too many weeks ago and it seemed possible that some small odd ether still clung to it, making an eternal moment of what had been a wet finger turning a page. Then the rooms were empty again, even in my mind. I was not there and nothing moved. There was only the sound of the telephone.

  The truck drivers sat over their cups of coffee in a sort of contained delirium, men who had done a thousand times what had to be done, understanding it too well. We got going again. Clevenger, at the wheel, pointed to a group of ten or twelve small dwellings located in a shallow valley about three hundred yards off the road. They appeared to be huts of wood and clay. He slowed the car and pulled over.

  “That’s where they are,” he said. “A year ago they were maybe three or four. Now I hear it’s up to twenty.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Bunch of kids. Younger than you. Living down there with the Indians. Hell, I don’t know what they’re up to. I hear they claim some kind of agrarian squatter’s rights. That’s government land they’re on, so it’s only a matter of time.”

  “I think I’d like to take a look. Do you mind?”

  “It’s a free country, boy.”

  “Maybe I should take my stuff. I’ve been enough trouble.”

  “Tell you what,” he said. “You go on down and have your look. I’ll run into Phoenix and pick you up soon as I can. Have two Jewboys to out-hustle. Take me no more than a couple of hours. Then we’ll be on our way.”

  “I’ve been enough trouble, Mr. Clevenger.”

  “Get your ass on down there, son. And get used to calling me cap’n. That’s what the boys at the track call me.”

  I slid down the embankment and walked across a field of flat stones and sagebrush. The huts were arranged in no discernible pattern and there did not seem to be any village square or center. A few people sat on the ground—two young men, a white girl holding an Indian baby. I sat next to one of the men. He wore no shoes or shirt and his pants were tan chinos cut off above the knees.

  “Dave Bell,” I said. “Just having a look around.”

  “I’m Cliff. This is Hogue. That’s Verna and the baby’s name is Tommy. Or is that Jeff?”

  “That’s Jeff,” the other man said.

  “So you’re living with the Indians. What’s it like?”

  “It’s the total thing,” Cliff said. “It outruns all the other scenes by miles. We all live like persons. There’s a lot of love here, although it gets monotonous at times.”

  “Are these Navahos or what?”

  “These are Apache. Exiles from an Apache tribe about a hundred miles east of here. Misfits more or less. They refused to become ranchers like the rest of their people. There’s only eleven of them here but we expect more to come. There’s eighteen of us. We’d like to have more of them than us. It’s an emotional factor.”

  “I don’t want to sound like a critic at the very outset because you’ve probably had plenty of those coming around but I don’t think I understand what you expect to accomplish.”

  “We don’t expect to accomplish anything. We just don’t want to be part of the festival of death out there.”

  “Here comes Jill,” Hogue said.

  She was very thin and seemed to be coming at us sideways in small skips and bounces. She couldn’t have been more than seventeen years old. Her hair was reddish brown and there were several dozen muted freckles swarming about her nose. After introductions and further commentary, she offered to give me a tour of the village. I liked the way her gums showed when she smiled.

  “I’m from Trenton, New Jersey,” she said.

  “I’m from New York.”

  “Neighbors!”

  She wore a man’s
white shirt, tails tied around her middle, and blue jeans cut off above the knees. We went into one of the huts. It had a dirt floor with a carpet on it. There were several straw mats, a sleeping bag, some rolled-up blankets, a Matisse print propped against a wall, and that was it. A man with blue hair was asleep on one of the mats. It was hot and dark. We sat on the ground.

  “Are you happy?” I said.

  “We’re all happy. This is the happiest place in the world. I mean that really seriously.”