by Hob Broun
He grips me like a priest, winces with goodwill. “You gonna be all right.”
It is neither a question nor a statement, only a small collection of sounds.
We push cold mist in front of us as we walk, mist we will find condensed on the chrome of Sonny’s four-by-four, squeezed down to its heavier essence. We walk in the long shaft of Sonny’s flashlight until, chuckling, he snaps it off. Even then I can make out the strip of his bumper, white Gothic letters, one word: BLESSED. Sonny inserts the ignition key slowly, as though apprehensive of a wired bomb. Gold eyes flash and a low shape wheels away when he clicks the headlights on. Exhaust hangs in the air, condensing on my skin.
49
HAWKS RIDE HIGH ON the thermals, drifting in lazy loops. Their wing adjustments are so slight, their head swivels so quick, and they can spot a rodent’s eyes from so far. But for now they’re only passing time, floating under the sun.
I sip frugally from the canteen, just enough to smooth the burr at the back of my throat. Wouldn’t want to run short on a day like this, have to make it through to sunup, when I could lick dew. This air is so thin and dry that it seems to become powder in the lungs. Sweat disappears in an instant, leaving the pores tight. Kalahari bushmen bury water in empty ostrich eggs along their routes of travel. Saharan nomads drink the urine of their camels. Specialization comes easily to a man without choices, and tends to elude those whom choice has covered like the measles. So we consult texts, carry compasses, shield our eyes behind darkened plastic. And we sip frugally.
According to my compass, a northeasterly diagonal will lead me home. This feels wrong, but I must rely on instruments. My head is a heavy melon and my blurring eyes might be etched with dark spirals like the props of a hypnotist. Far too easy to become a subject of this flat land of mirage. Like right now. What I take for a watchful man couldn’t be more than a slender branching bush. I’ll be seeing Rommel in his command car next.
It must be time for a drink. I swirl water in my mouth, dribble it into my hand, spread it across my face. The pause that refreshes. And yet the bush has moved, is moving, draws closer. Under a felt hat, a hem of white hair, the face is the color of sand. A wary face.
“Hey!”
I wave but he doesn’t wave back. His expression is stern and distant both, and it makes me remember.
“Dobbs,” I say. “The gentle hangman.”
He folds his arms. “I know you, bub?”
“A few months ago at the hot springs.” I flip my sunglasses up. “We had some beers.”
“Don’t fancy the new beer. Tastes like mop water.”
“You wanted the cans for scrap.”
He grunts, tipping back, as if memory is a well bucket he’s pulling up. “Had a weedy little gal along. Wouldn’t leave you alone.”
“Dobbs.”
“Dobbs,” he confirms.
After which there’s nothing else to say. We could be in line for food stamps or waiting on the platform for a train. Afternoon is well along, but the sun feels perpendicular. The gentle hangman, humming, strikes the pediment of his chin. He declines when I offer the canteen.
“Best way to clean out the system is leave it empty awhile. Don’t let your minerals build up.”
The bandanna round his neck has faded from red to pink with countless washings, but the felt hat and the checked shirt are improbably crisp, store-fresh. Here he’s shaped in my mind as a natural growth on the land when the mirage could easily stretch as far as a nursing home he walks out of all the time.
“I don’t just pick things up from the funny books,” he says, reading my thoughts. “It’s a way of things sticking to me as I go. Like when the Baxter twins was running sheep all through here, eight, maybe nine hundred head, this was before they shot each other about a second term for Senator Mack, but at the same time there was a lady worked at the hotel who wore her own teeth on a bracelet. And I remember all that together.”
All right. Dobbs, in his time and place, is as true as parthenogenesis.
“Gonna take a whole lot of past with me. And soon.”
I can’t help wanting to be briefly vivid, another deposit in his alluvial mind. I invite him to come and see my spot and warily, conditionally, he accepts.
“Long as that little gal won’t be present. Her and her temper.”
He motions me impatiently ahead, but his pace is slow, wandering, and it’s hard not to distance him. He stoops over rocks, examines the roots of some weed he’s pulled, not out for scrap today, but reassurance instead. And, of course, he’s disappointed when we get there.
“This ain’t no layout, bub. Where’s your damn corrals?”
But he seems glad of the shade under the awning, settles into my director’s chair with a comfortable exhalation. Watching me gobble jerky, all the gentle hangman asks for is a little sugar to lick from his hand. He nods; his tongue is quick as an anteater’s.
“Don’t got even an outhouse,” he grumps, surveying from under his brown hat. “What are you, one of them bag-packers?”
“Backpackers.”
“Anyhow, something for nothing.”
I correct him again. “Nothing for nothing.”
He’s slack in the canvas chair; I’m stiff on the ground. His face, lined like river mud, is steady on me. It isn’t the wary face, nor the stern one, but I have to answer it.
“Things that stuck to me I want to be rid of, see.”
“On the house.”
He fishes out a pack of mentholated filtertips, the gentle hangman preparing a victim. He snaps the match alight on his teeth and holds it for me. I blow a solemn chain of smoke rings.
“A thing I can tell you—and it ain’t for me, since to do it I always felt fine—is I never once pulled the trap on somebody wasn’t just as glad at the very end to go.”
To believe in a man who’s known only clean cases all his life is something I couldn’t have done before. Today I can let hard facts go soft, become tractable as a bosun’s dream of the Mojave.
Dobbs says, “Maybe you could wrap up a little more sugar in a bag?”
I take time with the old man’s bundle, folding corners precisely, but he’s gone when I bring it outside, gone without telling me there is nothing to find here.
Birds are low and loud in the sky. Their noise bends around me like water. I take heart. I unfold corners precisely. Wind billows up out of its troughs and blows white grains away, leaving the paper clean.
50
ISOLATION DISTORTS AS IT toughens. It shrinks and magnifies, reroutes, subverts the normal controls. I recognize in myself certain disturbances, reactions that are powerfully wrong. Misplaced objects infuriate me. The faint trail of a jackrabbit fills me with wild, hopeless panic.
But now, I think, I have the sort of companionship that will steady me and smooth me out. Three days ago clanking woke me and I tumbled out the Airstream door to face a scrawny goat with a bell around his neck. I gave him water, and called him Rosing, after the inventor of the cathode-ray receiver. I didn’t know how to remove the red plastic clip in his ear that marked him as someone’s property, but I cut loose the bell. We shared a tin of sardines and slept in the shade of the awning like comrades of a prolonged desert campaign.
Scarred and underfed, a battered range refugee, Rosing is tranquil. He is unperturbed to the point of hospitality by flies that crawl along his snout, so incurious that only repeated yelling will cause him to turn his head. He consumes cactus methodically, with a nearly circular chewing motion that causes him to resemble a fastidious mandarin. I take comfort in his exemplary resignation. Aid and comfort.
Chuff-chuff-chuff: the soundtrack for embassy evacuations. A bulbous black helicopter passes over our heads, carrying, with equal probability, soldiers or hunters or survey geologists. Or eager Japanese in rayon cowboy shirts, satraps of the company that hopes to feed its reactors with what it can extract from this land. I’d like to take them out of the air with my slingshot, then sit and watch black smoke plu
me, listen to the sounds of melting. Righteous glory, a boy’s idea. These two-legs, eh, Rosing? Fucking parvenus. One blink of biologic time and they zip around as if the place were theirs to own, strewing dead certainties like the rest of their garbage. Sunlight glints and blurs on the rotor blades. Chuff-chuff-chuff.
I lift Rosing’s damp muzzle from my lap, probe his expressionless gray eyes. Comrade, is there still time to get away? He blinks. He dips his head. He lifts and lowers one little black hoof, a hoof as cleanly split as any dialectic proposition. It’s not my fault they picture Satan with a goat’s horned head, then talk about the lamb of God. White woolly innocence versus rancid concupiscence? Not my idea. Everything works together—tendon, ligament, and bone—as Rosing subsides into a drowse. Different genotypes, comrade, different protein codes. It’s none of my doing.
I brew chili pod broth on the stove, hot vitamins. The generator’s low on fuel, not too many viewing hours left. I dial rapidly around and around, a pinwheel of incoherence, maximum heat load. I stop on the prettiest face.
“Call our eight hundred number now and help us feed the world. Call right now.”
A nisei flower with hair to her hips in a tank suit with peekaboo cutouts. Rear projections flash behind her. Bounty of the ocean, kelp farming, krill-based soft drinks. Metal rings hang from her nipples.
“Take an all-important support posture. Please call right away.”
Images recycle, coral and spume, begging bowls. I’m right in my place. Her eyes, shiny as bits of ormolu, as piercing as nipple rings, are fixed on me and me alone. Why do you stay away? they ask. We miss you so. Her tongue slides around the roof of her mouth, waiting for me to open up so she can slip me guilt to suck, grit wrapped in mucus. Women always want to haunt. She speaks of the internment camps so far from water, the dusty barracks, the glare, the heavy stink of trucks.
“I wasn’t there, but I can feel the pain,” words leaking through her heavy lips. “Pain, if only you’ll call right this minute.”
It isn’t really me you miss. Inviting and inflicting pain are insufficient. You want to understand, to pursue every forensic detail.
“Call.” She tugs hard on the rings. “Help us feed the world.”
Porpoises leap and plankton luminesce. Poor men pull nets by torchlight. I wasn’t there, but…She tugs. Her eyes insist. She raises and lowers one open hand, a hand as rigidly flat as any technician’s rule.
Drinking heat from a tin can, squatting in front of a pretty face, who am I to refute those eyes? I wasn’t there, but I want to see her lap up cold rice, rinse shirts in a bucket, weep beside the wire fence. So I give in, match point conceded. All tracks converge; feast and famine, solitude, solicitude, appearance made weightless, expectation pared—all finish up in pain. Then I click her off.
Getting away like a bug down the slot of a toaster, and staying away. All women want to haunt. Every kiss contains a gift. Each joy may be the last.
51
OCEANIA. I WAKE UP more hounded than haunted. The taste in my mouth is like jetty sludge. Hard sun thuds away, saying the same to me as to someone stranded on an atoll: Here again, here forever. No breeze, no breakers, ground zero only. I swallow aspirin dry. I say to myself, You really ought to be keeping a diary. In there you could be thorough. You could talk about animal companionship or bitter women or great blind sea depths impenetrable by light. You could write in a forbidden alphabet, with charcoal.
Unfathomable. And just when I thought everything was under control. Law of the desert: Don’t turn around. Anyway, I ought to have suited myself enough by now to the waiting game so as not to need an audience to play to, a little book to fill.
Treading water. I move through the hard, comfortless sun with no determination other than to be on the move. My arms hang limp. Green surgical pants hang low on my hips. I start to remember my sister crying on the beach, stung by…But I click that off. The atoll man goes crazy from too many swipes at an irretrievable life. Forever here, nowhere else—hold on to that and don’t let yourself sink. White clouds hang at the edges of the sky. Shadows hang in abeyance. I press calluses on the soles of my feet, pleased by their thickness. I feel droplets sliding down my neck like seepage from vestigial gills.
Red tide. Drink from the ocean, so it goes, and you thirst forever. Without thinking, I’ve veered over onto the path leading to the well. In a hounded condition, you gravitate to the familiar, and this is a route I can navigate in the dark. How far could I walk without resting? How long could I rest and still be able to stand up? Already I can smell the cows who loiter near the well like cleaner fish around a reef. Scarred and scrawny like Rosing (part of somebody’s write-off herd, I assume), they approach expectantly, with lolling, pebbly tongues, as I climb the fence. I read “help us starve the world” in their eyes; tight gray hide under my hand…But now there is an evil, uncow smell thickening the air, and I’m drawn along like a cartoon hobo by the fumes of a cooling pie. Corpses swollen with gas float in the well water, coyotes beheaded and skinned.
Undertow. My fear is an approximation, the way barnacles resemble teeth. What would the atoll man do, his one water source poisoned? Would he shrug and take another backward swipe? Dusk eddying around the patio, my sister uncorking Moselle and saying, “Do we really need glasses?” Click. Click click. This one doesn’t want to be turned off. Fine. I’ll just climb back over the fence then. Fine. I’m dry all over. My feet break through crusts and the earth below is cool. Continue down and down, immeasurably, unsoundably down, and there will be the last pit where marine debris once landed, layers of shell and bone compressed by the vanished ocean, dry all over.
Sandbar. Rosing greets me with a soft, appealing butt. His waiting ears are angled forward. Under the awning we nibble at air and I describe for him the sabotage of our well.
“Gangrene soup.” I shrug. “Nothing for it now.”
Rosing shuts his eyes, picturing the culprits, no doubt. A couple of sporting boys, welders on a weekend.
“So I asked myself, what would the atoll man do? And I thought, well, maybe he’d hunt for it scientifically.”
Rosing’s eyes remain closed. Probably as he works through variations of goat revenge.
“Dowsing. Hydromagnetism.”
Forking my hands, I demonstrate. Rosing stays slumbrous as a bivalve, but bears study. I note the angle of his horns, their theoretical point of convergence, and plot therefrom at ninety degrees a line to the damp end of his snout. He’s the dowsing rod come to life, far more receptive than any stick. Nose to the ground, comrade! We’ll open the ocean.
Immersion. Charlie Manson promised his children underground fountains of chocolate soda to nourish them during the prophesied race wars. If you can posit buried rivers and caverns of porous rock, then why not a favorite flavor too? Posit a Cambrian implosion. Posit the sucking action of a whirlpool.
Rosing wambles, lacking aim, failing to keep his nose to the ground. He is not to be urged or coaxed. I keep my distance, whirling through one liquid supposition after another. How agile my brain, light as cork on a fast current. Shrivel me timbres. I’m smiling buoyantly. I’m smiling a challenge to the atoll man, cell for cell. I’m ready to drown him.
Neap tide. The spot Rosing indicated was a depression between two ocotillos. I bent over the entrenching tool with ceremony. As I dug—patiently, pacing myself—I noticed compositional changes in the earth, sandwiching of a kind. Sun poured; it was thick. The hole, while it got wider, wasn’t much deeper. Ants bit my legs. Rocks felt numb. I didn’t hear echoing. I didn’t feel the big suction. Following after Rosing again, I lost my shovel on the way. I thought about pants made of seaweed.
Unless glare deceives, I’m back on the well path again. Missing heads and the smell of cows. My sister wiping Moselle off her chin. Footprints that fit. Surf in, surf out, the comforting repetition we keep trying to regain, as though to be babies again with our sea in a sac. Pull back and push in. Never quite arriving but forever here: floating bod
ies.
52
THIS IS THE HEADLINE I have furrowed deeply in the sand, in letters so huge it can only be read from aircraft passing overhead: MALAYSIA BANS VIDEO GAMES.
Q: Why is this information important?
A: Because the letters are big.
I shrink; I peel myself. I dig up quail eggs and slurp them down. I dream of tomato-flavored icicles and midair neon and wake up with an erection that won’t go away. Or I strike poses in the indistinct mirror of silver Airstream skin, imagine my own skin as a page and the tracks of sweat as something to read.
Nothing moderate or tentative allowed. I am clean. I am decisive as a surgeon. Video games banned, outlawed. I have pulled the circuit boards, yanked the wires. All intervening, interfering material removed. Pure signal only. An unbroken arc from source to target.
Discovery: I can control the air.
It is necessary to set myself out of motion, to disremember the automatic commands I have followed for so long, so many years of willfulness and waste. No more deconstruction or synopsis. Only pure unbroken signal. I open wide and it comes in so loud and clear that I twinge all up and down.
Programming notes: There is viscous, circular music layered like currents of the wind. There are different frequencies of sleep, a reptilian buzz filtered through rock or the slow tick-tock of bats. Most of all, there are the elliptical intimacies of the moderator, her ugly whims and many surprise guests. No topic out of bounds. Always a challenging format.
But still I take up tenuous space, like a razor blade floating on water. Balance is lost on days and nights when nothing comes at all, but suspension hones me for the next time. It’s like the difference between an insect’s chitinous exterior and the liquid essence held within, two discrete forms, each sustaining each. Shadow wrapped around pure signal.
Rediscovery: The air controls me.
