They passed headstones which were the living heads of their teachers. They walked down paths paved with the teeth they had grown out of. They were guided along their way by moons with huge silly grins spread across their pale yellow faces.
And so all the dead children– Cal and his good friends included– passed one by one into the arms of the Heavenly Savior, who looked very much like the local sheriff. Who apprised them of all their mistakes and reassured them that they were not dead at all, but had become pages in the scrapbooks of their parents’ lives, free to be turned and turned over again and again.
DEC. 4
1984: four men hijack a Kuwaiti airliner and force it to land in Tehran, killing two American passengers in the process.
Cal had been out of food and other supplies a day and a half before he even noticed it. Worse, he really didn’t feel like doing anything about it. Using his few remaining survival instincts, however, he was able to throw some clothes on and climb into his car. The car whined and labored as he attempted to start it, so that for a while he thought he might die right there, because he couldn’t imagine himself getting out of the car and going back into the cabin without any food, but then the engine sputtered to life and he was on his way down the road with no memory of having put the car into Drive.
A few miles from town he approached a hitchhiker. The young man was in his teens, had long blond hair, and not enough clothing for the weather. Cal eased past him, looking at his face, thinking how much the boy reminded him of Parker, who when older no doubt would be prone to similar stupid stunts. A few yards past the hitchhiker Cal pulled over and waited.
“Thanks, man.” The boy’s voice was laconic, his movements slow as if he didn’t want to be there.
“Sure.” Cal thought about telling him to buckle his seatbelt, but didn’t. Close-up, the boy’s face had that stormy look of the child who felt wronged by life. “I can take you as far as town.”
The boy said nothing. Cal turned on the radio, left it on the country music station. After a couple of minutes the boy leaned over and turned the dial, then folded his arms across his chest.
Cal said nothing for a while, then cleared his throat and added, “Mad about something?”
“Not particularly.”
But he kept his arms folded, and Cal was thinking more and more about his son, who so many times had looked the same way. So finally he looked at the boy and said, “There’s a hunting knife in the glove compartment. You could pull it on me and hijack the car. I really wouldn’t mind and it might make you feel better.”
The boy turned to him in surprise, sudden fear on his face. “Hey, no. You think I’d do that?”
“Go ahead, get it out of your system.”
“You’re crazy, man. This is far enough. Let me out now!” The boy looked as if he was going to cry.
“Well, then, let me hijack you. I’ll take over your life, see what I can do with it, see where it takes me. Better still, I’ll climb inside your body, see how it fits, see how it feels to be young again and without kids who I’m just going to let down, probably like your dad thinks he’s let you down. I’ll just climb inside and take your body to some distant paradise, and your dad will no doubt offer a king’s ransom for your return but I won’t accept it of course because my motives are purely political and spiritual and I need another life a lot more than I need the money.”
The boy started to jerk open the car door and Cal slammed on the brakes so he boy wouldn’t hurt himself and then the boy was out of the car and running the other way.
Cal closed the passenger side door and drove on toward town.
DEC. 5
1791: Mozart dies in Vienna.
1901: Walt Disney is born in Chicago.
Cartoons made him sad: these crude representations of freakish creatures endlessly hurting each other in almost cannibalistic frenzy, endlessly in four-color pain. Other times they actually frightened him: he would ready himself for the four-fingered paws to reach out of the flickering screen for him, eager to pull the child in so that they could set fire to his feet, shoot him out of a cannon, flatten him with a steam roller. Sometimes a babysitter would set him in front of a cartoon show as a special treat, and she would be quite surprised when he screamed.
Child prodigies gave him much the same feeling now. He’d watched his kids carefully, praying he would see no signs of great, latent talent. Child prodigies were much like cartoons, he thought, entertaining but nothing like the rest of us. Brilliant and dazzling and colorful and full of pain. Playing their pianos with their four-fingered white gloves. Screaming when someone slammed the lid down on their wriggling fingers.
Cartoon figures lived in their own world of beautiful music and pain. Somewhere under the layers of decay left behind by human beings and yet informed by dream. Cal’s nightmares often took the form of nightmarish cartoon figures with their genius minds, taking over the world. The commander-in-chief with the big ears, rotating like radar dishes so that he might hear of any plots against him, would first send the cartoon dogs out to roam the streets where they would be brought home and adopted by gullible children. Once inside these homes they would sneak their brethren the black cartoon cats whose bodies fell apart at the strangest times and the little yellow loud-mouthed birds into the house and then one night the cartoon children with their huge misshapen heads would crawl through the windows and eat the real children and the next day the parents, having no real sense of their children as human beings at all, would accept them as their own.
DEC. 6
1886: poet Joyce Kilmer, author of “Trees,” is born.
1969: four people die at a concert by the Rolling Stones at the Altamont Speedway in Livermore, Calif.
At the bottom of the hill, where the graveled road that led to his cabin joined the main road into town, was a giant tree called “the devil’s tree.” Some people said it was called that because a witch had been burned there in the old days– they said you could still see the scorch marks up along one side of the trunk. Others said it was because so many people had piled up their cars there, most of the drivers killed outright, and the rest laid up suffering the remainder of their lives. The ones who told that particular story could point to the chips and scars that decorated the bark and assign an accident and the name of a corpse or an invalid to each one. And still others– the shrunken ones, the laughing and staring-off ones– said it was because the roots of that tree travelled so deep, they went straight down through the devil’s own heart.
Cal had to admit his anxiety went up every time he neared that tree. Every time he swung his car onto the graveled road he felt it pulling his car toward it, and it was a determined struggle to keep the car in the road. Every time he walked by the tree he sensed it looking at him, ready to say something, but not saying anything after all, leaving him to imagine what it might have said if it only chose to.
But he never saw an accident there, not until today.
He’d been walking, and crossed out of that road onto the main road on the side opposite the tree. He could not prevent himself from looking over at the thing, its arthritic posture, the way the upper branches curled downward and the proliferation of young twigs up there even though most of it should have been deadwood, the way the knots in its surface protruded like boils, the way sap oozed from its pores as if to declare its hunger.
He heard a raucous noise coming up the paved road behind him, and for some reason he thought to slide away from the pavement and into the graying grass. That’s what saved him.
Over the slight rise of asphalt a big yellow Ford came thundering, its windshield glittering, the Rolling Stones “Sympathy for the Devil” blasting from its open windows. Cal thought he saw twin crescent grins shining from inside. He turned to the tree, and could see the uppermost branches beginning to stir.
Suddenly the yellow Ford began to swerve, and the music altered, as if it had changed pitch, and the tree raised its branches as if in exaltation, and the car roared over
the place where Cal had been standing a few minutes earlier, and then launched itself, the grillwork catching fire in the sun, leaping for the tree as if to tear out its throat.
ooh hoo hoo ooh hoo hoo
But the branches came down as if to embrace it, twisted it up with a deep-throated kiss of dried wood and fragrant leaves, and dropped it like an emptied tin can.
And then the tree seemed to unbend, preening its upper branches, easing bits of shiny metal and broken glass into its inner boughs where they remained hidden, smothered in green.
DEC. 7
1941: Japanese warplanes bomb Pearl Harbor in a surprise attack.
1963: instant replay is used for the first time, during the televised Army-Navy game.
When Cal left his family he didn’t say goodbye. He didn’t even leave them a note.
When Cal left his family there was a full moon, and the black grass outside the back door was thick with damp, making him think of tiny eels sleeping in oil.
When Cal left his family there were unwashed plates in the sink: Parker had sat up eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich while he watched Shock Theatre. Vampire movies were his favorite.
When Cal left his family the upstairs hall had reeked of perfume. Jenny had taken some of her mother’s and washed her doll clothes in it.
When Cal left his family Jenny’s room was hot and warm with tears– she’d been sent to bed without a story.
When Cal left his family Linda had been so still, her head wrapped in a shroud of her own hair, that he was afraid at first that she was dead, and all because of what he was about to do.
When Cal left his family he kissed Linda on the cheek just to make sure she was alive, and she stirred and said I love you to her dreams.
When Cal left his family the dog needed to be let out.
When Cal left his family there were a hundred little repairs to be done.
When Cal left his family three sleeping forms would wait until the morning to be betrayed.
When Cal left his family the air inside the car smelled sadly of trash and cigarette ash.
When Cal left his family the house was swallowed slowly by the dark.
When Cal left his family the dashboard glowed green.
When Cal left his family.
DEC. 8
1854: Pope Pius the Ninth proclaims the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, to wit Mary, the mother of Jesus, was declared free of Original Sin from the moment she was conceived in her mother’s womb.
1943: Jim Morrison of “The Doors” is born.
The lizard stretched across the highway was certainly the largest he had ever seen. He stopped the car, afraid to go on, not because he didn’t want to run it over in particular, but because he was a little afraid of what it might do if he made it angry. It lay there like a lizard king, its belly broad and its claws outstretched to protect that belly. As if it were immune to natural law, as if it could be run over a thousand times and still be quite content, a blessed lizard deity whose narrow eyes were doors into perceptions alien and superior to those of other creatures in the world.
Cal turned his car to drive into the flat grassy area on the side of the road in order to avoid the lizard, but suddenly the great lizard had moved– far more quickly than Cal would have thought possible– and now blocked that way as well. It appeared, in fact, that the lizard had stretched, and was even larger than before. The lizard moved when the car moved, effectively stopping Cal’s forward progress. What does it know that I don’t, in that lizard brain? Cal considered turning the car around, but was anxious about what the lizard might do in response.
The lizard stretched itself out some more, and Cal was thinking it appeared to be at least three times the size it had been when Cal had first approached. The lizard flicked out its tongue and ate some of the asphalt.
The world was full of anomalies, Cal thought. He had read about a number of them in Fate and the Weekly World News. They made us think about spiritual matters, the forms of things, the consequences of unregulated research. Something, or someone, had told this lizard in the egg that it need not follow any of the rules, and, so informed, it had evolved.
The lizard smiled and ate several more square yards of pavement. It belched a cloud of oil. Now it was so large its belly spread over the width of the road, its legs– a bit short for its size– digging at the grass and dirt on both sides.
The lizard wiggled its pale belly sensuously, its eyes drooping, drunken. Cal started the car again and began backing away slowly.
The lizard howled like a banshee and was suddenly as big as a house. Things grow large in the mind, Cal thought, both wonder and guilt, and the lizard shrank to the size of a cat. If you don’t take them out, take them for a walk now and then, they expand prodigiously. And then the lizard was gone.
DEC. 9
1905: Dalton Trumbo, author of Johnny Got His Gun, is born in Montrose, Co.
Every summer the carnival came to town, the only outside entertainment that did so regularly. There was always a Freak Show– which was what interested Cal most. One year the sign on that particular tent had been changed to “Curiosities of Nature.” You could only get into that tent if you were accompanied by an adult, and both Cora and his mother refused to go to the carnival in the first place, so that left them out, and every other adult in town seemed to have this understanding that they wouldn’t circumvent a particular parent’s authority. Some boys had older brothers who would get them in, but not Cal.
But one summer Cal got lost in the twists and turns of the dirt carnival lanes, and found himself behind the “Curiosities” tent, right outside a smaller tent, and then inside.
Jars and cages and pens were everywhere, holding all manner of sleeping and drunken creatures, none of whom he recognized from their colorful pictures out front. But then he focused on a slightly raised platform in the middle of the tent and the black-draped figures there, whom he recognized as the Curiosity tent’s star attraction: PATTON’S ARMY.
Although you couldn’t see into the Curiosities tent itself you could sure stand outside its thin canvas walls and listen to the barker blabber on about how special this group was, how they should appeal to true Americans everywhere because of their bravery and their patriotism. He’d work the crowd up pretty good before exposing the ex-soldiers of Patton’s Army.
Seeing them now, Cal knew pretty quickly not all of them could have come from the actual ranks of Patton’s command, perhaps not any of them. It would be too much of a coincidence. But that didn’t make them any less fascinating.
As Cal walked down the rank of them he saw:
A squarish shape draped in black with but one eye peeking out of a hole in the cloth, and that eye jerking about crazily as if seeking an exit, before focusing on Cal’s face and trembling.
An oblong shape draped in black with one ear showing. The ear was raw and blackened along the edges, as if it had survived a fire.
A roundish shape dressed in black with one hand protruding from a ragged hole in the cloth. The hand worried at the edge of the opening.
A bulbous basketball of a shape with a wide base draped in black, a mouth wide open in the middle of the mass. The mouth opened and closed but no words came out. The pale tongue licked the lips as if they were dry.
A pitcher of water and some glasses sat on another table. Cal went over and filled a glass and tried to pour water into the mouth but the mouth sputtered and there were choking sounds from somewhere deep under the cloth.
Then the eye began to cry and the hand to clench into a palsied fist.
“What are you doing here?” cried a loud voice from the front of the tent. Cal turned– it was the barker. Cal ran to the other side of the small tent and went out a slit in the canvas. But he hung around just outside, peeking back in.
He saw the barker stroll sadly over to Patton’s Army. He was in his T-shirt, and Cal could see that he wore a set of dog tags around his neck. Slowly, gracefully, he saluted Patton’s Army. And the
palsied hand saluted him back.
DEC. 10
1830: Emily Dickinson is born in Amherst, Mass.
Cal’s mother spent her last few years alone. Thinking about that, he felt terrible, but he also wondered sometimes if she’d had that same need for solitude which he had now, the need for a quiet place away from the living, in the comfortable arms of the past, the missing, the dead.
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain –
He’d felt that a dying was taking place in his mother as early as his last year in high school. She would spend hours by herself out in the woods, and a couple of times she spoke of his father as if he hadn’t been the evil incarnate she’d always told him about before. He’d overheard some of his friends’ parents speak of her “breakdown,” but he did not believe there had been a breakdown. For a time she left him emotionally, and he’d resented her for that, but came to see it as a process she had to go through. He supposed it was a kind of practice for dying, for that final separation.
Hope is the thing with feathers –
And a generous bird it was. During his mother’s last few years it was a large blue bird who perched outside her bedroom window. She would sit in a chair and watch that bird and think about her past life and the bird would ask for nothing. It would sing its simple three note song and sometimes she would sing with it and years later when Cal leaned over her death bed hoping for a few last words of motherly comfort it was those three notes, whistled softly, which preceded her death rattle.
Presentiment – is that long Shadow – on the Lawn–
She complained about that shadow a lot during those last days of life, as she lay on the bed and stared out the window. She said it spoiled the grass, lingering across the green and turning it gray, creeping toward the house a few more inches each day. Once, Cal thought he saw the shadow himself, just the edge of it moving across the window sill, but he turned away, and would not look in that direction again.
The Book of Days Page 14
