American Spirit: A Novel

by Dan Kennedy

  In the checkout line, a couple of pretty young girls giggle and wait to pay for a couple of candles and stupid novelty hats; cocktailing or dealing, no doubt, starting their twenties and splitting an apartment somewhere around here. Matthew tries not to stare at them, wondering what years of this place will bring; the head racing with this refrain: It starts off cute and then it gets ugly. Out comes the little phone and email thing, the tiny keyboard on the screen takes the refrain, the thumb finds Matthew’s email address, it cc’s Tatiana on this, the index finger clicks on Send. Then, more cash to a cash register, via Matthew’s hand and then the hand of the pockmarked kid wearing a red smock and trying to stay on track in this place.

  Out the door with a little white plastic bag of fortified blood nourishment to keep the eyes open. Foot hits the mat, and the door jerks and hums open. Just out the electric door, the Audi is still there, but the bleached smile, boobs, and sequins are not in the passenger seat. That’s because, holy shit, she’s across the lot leaning up against the Taurus. Matthew does a fast and seamless U-turn without breaking stride, head down, bag in hand, and goes right back into the store. Upon reentering the store in the same breath that he exited, the security guard by the door perks up instantly, eyes on Matthew, and seems to be reviewing in his head whatever manual they sent him home with in night school; Okay, I can’t use unnecessary force because the perpetrator hasn’t done anything yet, and I can’t mace or Taser him, because I don’t have probable cause to believe he’s a threat yet. But he has just reentered the store with a bag trying not to look at anyone, and he’s done this only seconds after leaving, so we’ve definitely got a situation on our hands. I can’t believe I did crystal meth continuously from 1993 to 2003. I am glad I have this job. I cannot afford to screw this up.

  Matthew immediately makes like he’s browsing, takes a minute of fake browsing to think, damnit, think: Why the hell is the hooker standing by the rental Taurus? He shivers at the thought of what thug must have the keys to that Audi she was sitting in; what twitchy reprobate is in this store right now waiting to take the driver’s seat of that thing and hear about the john that led her on, then backed out and stiffed her? Between the bloody towels all over the hotel in Los Angeles, the hooker situation here in Reno, and the ghost of the marriage back in Connecticut, it seems like girls are nothing but trouble. There is giggling coming from the checkout line. It’s the two girls buying the novelty hats, looking at Matthew, and laughing. Matthew looks down to realize he has basically, to anyone unfamiliar with his hooker situation, just walked out of a store, then run right back in, sped over to an aisle with every ass-centric product a pharmacy stocks, and stood entirely too close to the rack, terrified and staring at it, muttering the phrase, “What the hell am I going to do? What’s my plan?” over and over again. He looks up at the girls giggling, he looks at the rack and realizes where he’s standing, he turns and walks past the guard who is now slowly walking toward him, and he heads out the door again to handle this.

  On the walk across the parking lot to the Taurus, the head stays down, and inside it, conversation reels and rallies up some sensible confidence, then undermines it; build it, burn it down, build it, burn it down: Fuck it, it’s your car for the remainder of the rental period, it’s not like she’s even on the contract, why are you so afraid to approach what is technically your car? Just ask her what she misunderstood; why she’s waiting for you; what she thinks is happening or what she thought you meant. Yeah, but this could get really bad, this could come off like one of those things where it looks like you’re trying not to pay a hooker. You see that in movies and television every so often, the thing where a guy is beat up, and it looks like he was trying to get out of paying a hooker. Look, it’s not like you had sex with her.

  I know, but it doesn’t have to be about sex. In the shows and movies, that’s often the way it goes down; nobody had sex, but then the hooker tells some backup muscle that the guy’s not paying, just taking up her time, and then the backup muscle guy starts beating up the confused man who didn’t even have any sex. The head looks up in the last five or six steps of walking up and then it says: “Hi, so, I’m not sure what we arranged there when I was walking in.”

  “You said you’re dating. And if you’re looking for a date in front of Walgreens in this town, I’m it,” she says with the stale cheer of salesmanship.

  “I just meant I’m dating, that, you know, I have a girlfriend. She’s not my girlfriend per se. I think you’re great, I’m not saying I…” And this is cut short by laughter. Matthew tries to join in the laughter, but is maybe too humbled by the experience of a hooker pointing and covering her mouth and laughing at him and slapping her thigh as she does it, as if this is the funniest stupid misunderstanding ever; all in the parking lot of a chain drugstore next to an interstate. It is, in fact, pretty humbling.

  “Oh, sweetie, that’s fine, that’s all right,” all these words making their way through a smile that’s turned maternal. “You got more driving ahead of you tonight, baby?”

  “Yeah. I’ve got a bunch. I’ll see how much I knock out tonight before I get too tired to drive,” Matthew says with too much smile and relief.

  “You gotta sleep. That’s the thing. You can’t push it like people try to, honey.”

  “Oh yeah, I’m pretty safe about it.”

  “Okay, baby, you be safe.”

  And with that she walks back to the Audi. Matthew stands at the Taurus, a forty-five-year-old man having taken mothering where he can find it, a ten-year-old having promised a hooker to be safe while driving—thirty-five years just vanishing for a minute, and without the help of the Age Defying Cream with Botafirm advertised on the billboard towering over them on the near horizon. He unlocks the wintergreen sedan, crams in, pays attention only to ignition, first his own ignition by way of a couple of slammed skinny cans, then the car’s, by way of key. He quickly opens the brittle plastic wrap on the heating pad and tosses the wrapper in the back, holds up the chemical pouch, giving it five or six fast shakes the way they do in emergency room dramas on television. He tucks it back between the right kidney and the seat.

  Back on the road, and the eyes stay open until a ways into Idaho, and a night of sleep is in order at a motel someplace near Boise; one of those off-ramp junctions clustered up by absentee owners of the tiny franchises of big chains—Holiday Inn Express, a Dunkin’ Donuts kiosk stuffed inside a Hardee’s or Carl’s, a Baskin-Robbins jammed inside a Subway, stapled onto the side of a Shell or Arco gas station. Someday in America it will all be one place, one brand, owned by one corporation—everything will be called McFridayBucksExpress&Things, and that’s where people will go no matter what they need.

  The full-size bed is just enough room for Matthew to fall asleep with a few false starts where he wakes up in a fast twitch, convinced he’s dozed off behind the wheel on 80. The lull finally comes; a silent montage of Tatiana and Los Angeles; romantic little clips fading on and out with thirty-frame dissolves, the standard mainstream movie stuff until the interruption of bloody towels, which leads to sleepy, inexplicable thoughts of skeletons on fire playing bluegrass music on banjos made of trash at a combination wedding/race riot. Waking up in time for the free continental breakfast passes as having one’s act together; a bright little linoleum room with single-serving oatmeal, black coffee, and orange juice. All of it is surprisingly good; it’s easy to think one has been missing out all these years—how long has this stuff been sitting on counters in little rooms for free like this? And they’re effective and substantial, these whole oats, this coffee, this orange juice. The oatmeal sticks to the ribs through Boise, through Mountain Home, up to the corner of the state as it turns into Montana. And the hippy snacks from Laurel Canyon last past that and eventually Matthew is pulling past Henry’s Fork and then into the southwest corner of Montana.

  24

  Tic Tac, Modoch, and the Bearded Lonely Pervert

  SUMMER IS IN FULL SWAY, swing, and stagger in most of th
e nation, but here in West Yellowstone, the season is characteristically a step behind and hung up in late spring; there are nearly melted drifts of snow from the last of spring’s storms that were plowed to the side of Main Street. The place is littered with perfect American families in cars and campers buying little souvenirs made of turquoise and leather, probably made in Vietnam. The entire town is made to look like the Indians had a peaceful time of the country’s colonization and simply decided in cheery fashion to open little gift shops that sell headdresses and tiny burlap satchels of chocolate wrapped to look like gold coins. Nothing is called a gift shop, it’s a Trading Outpost, Mercantile, General Store—a concrete tepee in a gravel lot sells European coffee drinks and pastry. Every motel, free of heartbreak, never stained by the tears and nicotine of lonely salesmen or drunk conventioneers saddened by instant freedom from spouses and children—The Evergreen Motor Inn; The Stage Coach; The Cowboy Cabin; Pine Shadows Motel; The Kids Fall Asleep with Parents in Love Motor Lodge; The Mom and Dad Laughing and Kissing While Young Hearts Dream of Bison and Cowboys and Bright Stars in Gigantic Skies Motor Lodge Cabin Hitching Post. And there’s Bud Lilly’s fly-fishing shop where men with short graying hair and baggy tan Gore-Tex waders bullshit in the parking lot while they drink hot coffee and maybe wonder why the dream came true so late in life; they have finally made their money, they hadn’t banked on it taking so long, and now going fishing includes plane tickets, expensive guides, and big tips forked over in gravel parking lots under bruised skies and sunsets. A text from Tim hits Matthew’s phone and gives the final waypoints and directions to meeting up:

  Hey Chief. Drive down main, make left at Imax theater. pass fat Navajo broads selling ponchos. @Chevron on left.

  Matthew does this, and there, set away on the side of the Chevron, away from the traffic filling up their tanks, out of the loop of anyone getting anything done, is the monstrosity that Tim has been living in out here. What is this thing, forty or fifty or even sixty feet long? It’s got a satellite dish on top, it has a huge eagle airbrushed on the side of it, it has a slight metal flake in the blue and red paint, making it pop against the white. Everything about it says the driver has cashed out the 401(k) and arrived in terrible style at the beginning of the golden years. How much does something like this cost? Fifty thousand? One hundred thousand? Three hundred thousand? There are stabilizers on the side that can apparently be deployed for when one is really anchoring in and doesn’t want the thing to feel mobile in the slightest. Everything about the rig is an advertisement for insisting on high suburban comfort no matter where one is roughing it. It’s like a cross between a multiplatinum country singing star’s tour bus and one of those mobile marketing monsters parked in front of a shopping mall, doling out samples of diet cola, gimmicky fuel additive, or low-carb meal plans that promise to make and keep you thin. The make and model of the rig is painted in elaborate, airbrushed, prismatic, custom-color big letters above the back window. It is a Sierra Mountain Air by Forest River. Sierra Mountain Air, one must imagine, is probably pumped into one of the high-tech space-age HVAC units that sit atop the beast fore and aft, then heated or cooled as the pilot and his crew see fit, to make for a pleasant temperature that is kept consistent from front to back aboard the rig. The side door of the Sierra Mountain Air opens, slides left, and disappears in slow electric glide.

  Matthew stays in his rental with the windows still rolled up from the long haul, and a silent-movie version of Tim comes down the stairs that seem to extend with each step he takes toward earthly tarmac; his lips move and it isn’t hard to imagine what he’s saying. His smile beams, his face and height still Wall Street handsome, but maybe Wall Street Part Thirty, the sequel to the sequel to all the sequels. Tim’s looks won’t go, probably ever, but he’s showing the hard mileage he’s undergone in exile; the last year has put ten in his eyes and face, even with the whole lower half being slowly grown over by a beard—a beard that doesn’t suit him, by the way. He looks less like a bearded mountaineer and more like every piece of news footage one has seen of a former ruler being captured in his spider-hole hideaway by U.S. troops, or the domestic terrorist dragged by U.S. Feds from a lonely pervert cabin filled with guns and letters.

  Standing in the doorway behind Tim is a man, maybe late forties, maybe late thirties, hard to tell with the costume, really. He’s making no effort to explain himself with a smile or gesture, a tall black man with the gorgeous and stoic eyes of a killer or poet. He has strange and beautiful peaceful lips that don’t rush to speak, and he’s wearing what appears to be the skin of a bison—horns sprout from his head, the dried and wilted crown and snout sit above his eyes, curly rough fur drapes him entirely, down the back of his neck, across quarterback shoulders, down a broad back and hardened lean and chiseled arms. There are eagle feathers adorning the dead animal robe, and beadwork hangs from hanks of the bison fur as if the animal went through a spiritual phase just before being shot, then tanned, and turned into gigantic ornamental clothing.

  Matthew pulls the Taurus right up behind the Sierra Mountain Air situation and gets out to start the hello, to start figuring this out, or getting lost in it. Maybe this is exactly what Tim needed and maybe it’s where Matthew should have been instead of sitting in parking lots and community center classes. Maybe spending time out here has made a man of Tim the way Manhattan never could have.

  “Greetings, pussy boy!”

  “Dude. Look at this, look at the man and his rig living on the land,” Matthew rallies. They embrace with a hug of punches to the back. The giant black man/bison continues standing in the doorway silently watching over this.

  “What the fuck are you driving, Chief?” says Tim, and this is the first evidence of the man in the doorway of the rig bristling. Tim notices this peripherally, and seamlessly makes a revision like a henpecked husband, “Sport.”

  “I don’t know. It’s a rental. I was in Los Angeles seeing a friend.”

  “Pull that fucking thing forward about five more inches and I’ll drop the hook so we can tow it and you can ride in the rig.”

  Matthew gets back in, inches the car just a bit forward while Tim stares at the front bumper of it, then puts his hand up to signal a halt, then waves his fingers forward in a tiny come-hither series of three fast flicks to lurch the Taurus another inch or two, and then palms the halt sign again. The giant, black totem pole bison man walks down the steps of the rig and glides slowly into the little market attached to the gas station; two little kids in the back of an environmentally sound, small SUV giggle and wave excitedly at him completely unnoticed except by their parents, both of whom put a kind but panicked instant stop to the pointing and waving at the black man wearing an animal. Matthew and Tim head into the rig, and Tim takes the driver’s seat; he starts toggling a switch while staring at the small video screen on the dash until the hook is deployed down and retracted a bit up under the frame of the Taurus. Matthew gets the balls to ask, “So, you saw that guy, too, right? Kind of dressed like a moose or whatever?”

  “That’s Crazy Daryl Acid. But we have to call him Modoch now. He’s super into a Navajo thing about animals being our ghosts and all this shit. Him and Tic Tac fucking own the park. Vets, kind of fucked up from the first Gulf War; they basically live in Yellowstone all year long and I need them to get around the heat after getting banned by the asshole rangers who are basically communists. They’re cool. I’m learning a ton of shit from these guys. Without Tic Tac and Modoch, I’d be sleeping in the IMAX lot over there and getting a parking ticket every fucking morning. They’re like a free season pass to Yellowstone, you should see the respect I get from the rangers when these guys are on board.”

  “Tic Tac?”

  “He’s in the store. He’s getting a bunch of shit we need. Traffic flares, cigarettes, beer, this kerosene fuel. It’s for the camp stove, but we always get an extra gallon and use it for these meditation ceremony things Modoch’s been doing to clear our heads. He’ll probably get a couple hilario
us, shitty tee shirts, too. He pays for the beer to make it look good and the rest comes out with him under his jacket. That’s kind of the other thing—with my cash flow situation where it is right now, I need these guys to help me make ends meet. And they get to sleep on board instead of in a fucking beaver dam made of punji sticks, so everybody wins.” And then Tim pauses, catching sight of Modoch and Tic Tac coming out of the store, before he adds, “Look at this. How fucking adorable is that? They, like, take care of each other.”

  Coming out of the minimarket: Tic Tac, mid-forties—a short man and all the harder for it, red, sinewy, lean, and generally looking like a piece of gas station beef jerky dressed as an eighties punk rocker still hanging on to a wisp of hair; a hairstyle that might be described as short if a victim were kind in relaying details to the police sketch artist. Steeled, empty, and determined eyes; tattooed forearms attached to a torso that will plow past fifty and refuse to believe it. Staring at Tic Tac, the head races with the word black: Black Flag, black boots, black friend, black eyes. Tic Tac’s old denim jacket is so stuffed underneath he can barely walk in it, and Modoch is drinking a huge red Gatorade and whispering discreetly from the side of his mouth, saying something to Tic Tac that steadies his posture. Tim sits in the driver’s seat, paternally shaking his head and smiling. “I don’t even think the cashier gives a shit; seriously, everyone just looks the other way for these two. It’s like Lehman Brothers in the nineties.”