Routes

by John Okas

  Being in the city, without his love to remind him of his animal nature, he feels he simply must have contact with creatures other than human beings. He brings nuts and bread crumbs to the park so the pigeons and squirrels will talk to him, but these, like the city mice he often bribes with cheese, even when he has their ears, are not very clever when the discussion turns to the heavy things on his heart, metaphysics and romance. They simply eat and go their way, hardly help with his loneliness. Sometimes he goes to the zoo and talks to the seals. They are the only animals that seem happy there, but they too are more interested in fish than in his problems.

  He lives frugally, and saves almost all the money he earns from the hours he spends posing for Penzini. At night he has nothing better to do than hang around Kane’s in the hope that Sarah will find her way in. Of course the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages is still prohibited on the Freeway, but in some sophisticated locales the law enforcement is lax. Repeal is on the way. Beer, wine and hard liquor are sold openly at Kane’s. You can ask for it as loudly as you want, since the police and federal agents are sitting drinking next to you at the bar. Corn Dog does not imbibe; “water” is “wine” to him, but he must order something stronger than water if he wants to take up stool space. There are all sorts of girls, barflies, looking for someone to buy them a drink. When one, Delores, buzzes over to him, he is shy, but she is so friendly that, to be polite, he offers her the seat next to him and orders a couple of drinks, hers and his, both for her, paid for out of his modelling money. Thus, he is not the lone wolf he once was at Kane’s, but begins to get acquainted with whomever is friendly to him. He is a novelty for the girls, a handsome boy who buys you drinks and doesn’t expect anything in return. His being an underdog, rough around the edges, is part of his appeal. They tell him their problems and he tells them about Sarah, what happened between them and about his concern. May and June pass, and no Sarah. His worries grow every day. Simone, Georgette, Melba, Jocelyn and Monique all think Corn Dog gets cuter every time they see him. They get to know him well enough to kiss him hello and goodbye. On several occasions he cries in the beers he buys for them. Instead of being put off they admire him for it.

  When July is almost past and there is still no sign of her, he finds new fears he’s never faced. What if she doesn’t love him anymore, or she’s met with foul play, or died or was injured in childbirth? So distraught, he does not notice that the barflies’ pats of sympathy get friendlier by the day. Comforting strokes take on a touch of loving caress, but he is too distracted to notice.

  “Give it time, Corn Dog,” his Aunt Atana counsels. “The worst never happens.”

  “Never?”

  “Almost never.”

  By mid-August Atana’s assurances lose some of their confidence, and Corn Dog starts to get really frantic with worry. His fear that he has lost Sarah makes him feel as if he’s losing his mind. At the same time a numbness sets in to counteract the suffering. As it has been over a year since he’s seen her and as much as he misses her, he gets used to missing her, and the chronic pain in his heart is like second nature.

  He becomes generally known and well-liked by all the regular patrons, the musicians, and the management of Kane’s. It is during this time that he makes the acquaintance of Laudette Lord. Everybody knows Miss Lord; she is a heavy-set woman who takes care of the band, babysits, makes sure they’re fed properly and have whatever they need to stay lively at night, and sees to it that they get to bed no later than six in the morning. Boys will be boys. Lord knows, they have their problems: the tenor sax and the drum’s wife are having an affair that everyone but the drum knows about, the bass and the trumpet are overwrought from heroin, there was a knife fight between the piano who wrote a chart and the trombone who, because of professional jealousy, insisted on playing it an octave higher than it was written. Still, Laudette has room for one more. She listens to Corn Dog and gives him a piece of her heart, big as a whale’s, and a spot on her strong shoulder to cry on.

  Not everyone’s sympathy is as pure as Laudette’s. Simone is not the motherly type, but a vamp with straight black hair, a black birthmark on her cheek, red lips and heavy black outline around her eyes. She asks Corn Dog up to her apartment to help her with some furniture she wants to move. When she has her couch in a new corner, she suggests they sit on it together to see how it works. When they are seated, she slides up next to him, pushes herself on him, bites his ear, and makes an advance, petting him heavily below the belt. He understands she wants him to do with her what he has done only with Sarah.

  “But I don’t love you,” says the honest buck, his ear of corn stiff with soft touches hard to refuse.

  “I don’t care about that,” breathes Simone, “I just want you to give what you have in your pants.”

  But refuse he does. He goes into the night, running all the way home. He finds Aunt Atana, in her nightdress, reading by the fire. She can’t help but notice how tense he is and the feverish thing in his buckskins. She offers him some warm milk and he tells her what just happened with Simone. It so happens a healthy boy of twenty, by maintaining his purity, being upstanding, can have an upsetting effect on even the most reasonable sorts around him. Seeing him flustered, worked up by Simone’s advance, Atana, who has held herself up beyond the lusts of the flesh her whole life, finds she has an itch for corruption. It is a thin line in her mind between Corn Dog as a piece of art and Corn Dog as a piece of meat, and she feels drawn to cross it.

  The next night, Corn Dog, not wanting to see Simone, stays home and reads with his Aunt, a story about the best of times and the worst. When bedtime comes she asks him if he would mind helping her undo the buttons, hard for her to reach, that fasten her dress in the back. He makes nothing of it until the following morning when she comes in on him while he is in the bath. She acts surprised, pretending she did not know he was in there, and tells him, as she slowly backs out, that the plumbing in her bath is in need of replacement and she will be sharing facilities with him while the work is being done. It embarrasses him immensely when, later, he finds her stockings and underclothes left on the inside door handle, where he cannot help but touch them.

  Corn Dog is uncomfortable, but he can’t believe Aunt Atana could have such a thing in her mind. If it is thought at all, he thinks, it is in the mind of he who thinks it.

  He cannot stay away from Kane’s indefinitely. Any day now his love will be in town, sweet Sarah will come marching in. Simone, a shameless hussy, has bragged to other barflies about how much fun it was frightening Corn Dog with heavy petting. When he comes in and sits down Monique starts whirring around him, talking to him about what she’s got at home. Others come over and tease him, trying to scare the pants off him.

  Now everywhere he goes, everybody he meets wants a piece of him. The following day Penzini makes a pass. He sets Corn Dog up in a pose that features his bottom and sets to the job of making a life-size wax negative. The wax is hot but Corn Dog, tolerant of discomfort as anyone, stands still for it, and only resists later when Penzini removes the hardened cast and begs Corn Dog to let him make a woman out of him.

  The advances, coming from all quarters, terrify him. He is confused and frightened and bolts from Penzini’s studio. Is this the way the game is played? Being irresistible to a variety of sexual palates was not a problem he expected. But he is a sexual person, and without proper outlet, he causes a stir in the loins of all he comes in contact with. Of course he feels he can trust Virgil, but he is afraid if he runs back and leaves the Bay Area even for a day he will miss his beloved Sarah, the woman whose love, rightly or wrongly, he feels keeps him pure.

  He goes back to Potney House and begs Aunt Atana’s pardon. He will be moving out.

  “Where will you go, Corn Dog?”

  “I’m not sure, Aunt, but wherever it is will be for the best.”

  She maintains enough reason not to stand in his way, but sheds a tear in the privacy of her new bath for missing having her dream, so u
nrealistic, impossible, and grossly inappropriate, come true. He leaves behind all the pieces he had been working on for her, saving one, an ungainly collage, a white elephant cityscape reminiscent of the streamer pole of the spring festival. A four-foot long wooden post which he carved to resemble both a totem pole and a skyscraper and wired on one end with thirteen whitewashed wool and rag streamers, trunks of the great beast, some of which end in bits of concrete. It is a joke, its significance and importance lies in its absurdity, the disconnection of its connections. Waiting for Sarah, worrying about her, having to fend off roaming hands and unwelcome suggestions, has broken down poor Corn Dog’s sanity. He gathers the thirteen strips of fabric in his hands, and sets out down the street holding the butt of the post to his body, praying with purity and passion, using the art as an instrument of divination, a dowsing rod for finding the “water,” the deep and still underground river, of his destiny.

  He turns a few heads as he passes, a crazy person, foaming at the mouth with invocations, his art pole in place of his navel. A left turn here, a right there, straight, right and left again, up the hill, and he finds the pole pointing him to the New Post Gallery. Since Whitman sold it, the gallery has gone from giving new artists a showing to selling only what is tried and true. If he reads the trail correctly, just as the language he must use must go beyond distinguishing symbol from symbolized, the route he is meant to follow is beyond all instruments, above all vehicles. He must divest himself even of his art. Not one to waste, he won’t throw his magic wand in the trash. It served him, it might serve another. He goes into the gallery to turn it over to whomever he finds. For once he finds himself talkative and at ease with a complete stranger. The man behind the desk takes the thing and promises that if he is ever lost he will give it try.

  When he emerges from the gallery he doesn’t know which way to turn. He goes to the corner, one block down the hill from the Golden Gate Hotel, praying to the Pop within to wake up and tell him what to do next. A policeman comes by and sees him with his eyes closed, moving his lips. “Hey, you seedy bum, wake up and fly right. Let’s see some identification.”

  “My name is Corn Dog. I have no papers that say so, however.”

  “Don’t be wise, kid. Now tell me your real name and where you live.”

  “Corn Dog is my real name, and—and” Corn Dog looks around the street, “I am just praying for a new place to live now.”

  “You know, I’ll bet you’re the bug that has something to do with a rash of car robberies that have been going on around here. I am going to take you into the station and have the sergeants have a little chat with you and find you a nice place in the county jailhouse.”

  The mention of jail snaps Corn Dog out of his silly spell. He would love to have time to contemplate the irony in the fact that the officer has no evidence that associates him with a crime he is not wholly innocent of, but this is neither the time nor the place for contemplation. The policeman corrals Corn Dog against the building with his stick and takes out a pair of handcuffs. “Now go easy or you’ll just make life harder on yourself.”

  There is too much Indigenous about Corn Dog for him not to bolt. He twists the stick out of the policeman’s hands, pushes him into a trash barrel and escapes by running down the hill and hiding in the alley. The policeman recovers his feet and follows, blowing his whistle, and is joined shortly by two more policemen. They search the area thoroughly, but Corn Dog, as he learned to sit still as a rock for hunting, escapes by disguising himself as garbage. Huddled up small, like an infant in his mother, at the bottom of the barrel, he takes a few pokes in the ribs from an officer’s baton without moving, or even a flinch.

  When the search grows cold, the policeman who attacked him says, “I’ve seen that mixed breed around here before and I’ll see him again. And when I do he’s going to be sorry.”

  It’s not over yet. Corn Dog knows they’ll have their eyes out for a buck who fits his description.

  Where else can he turn but back to his Uncle Virgil? It breaks his heart that he must leave town. By mid-September, while Sarah gambles and loses in Los Pecados, Corn Dog is back in Cape Delfino telling his Uncle Virgil the story of the girls at Kane’s, Penzini, leaving out the part about Virgil’s cousin Atana’s subtle advances, and finally the trouble with the policeman. When Virgil hears this last, he whistles. He tells the buck boy he’d better take it easy, lie low for a while. Certainly Corn Dog’s connection to the stolen automobiles is one Virgil does not want to see investigated.

  “But how will I know if Sarah comes?” Thinking that she might be there in the Bay Area even as they speak, having arrived in the recent month while he was on the run, is more pain than he thinks he can bear.

  “Maybe you won’t, for a time anyway. You’ll have to trust her to wait for you. The thing will probably blow over, but assaulting an officer of the law, even in self-defense, it’s going to stick in their minds a while. You don’t want to go to jail, do you? I’d give it six months or a year before I’d go back, if I were you.”

  It is hard for Corn Dog to swallow but he can understand that it might be the best thing under the circumstances. By reviewing his revulsion at being handcuffed by the white policeman he has a pretty clear idea of what being thrown in jail would do to him. And what good would he be to Sarah in jail?

  On the lam himself, the first Friday of October, nineteen thirty, he is present to help Virgil and the gang of four priests strip a two-seat sports coupe. Before it is disassembled, offered up for the poor, Father Dodge gives him a driving lesson which begins with how to connect the wires on an ignition switch to start the car without a key and ends when Corn Dog, naturally uneasy driving, and having to look over at Father Dodge in the darkness at every turn to see how much of Hot Springs he can detect in him, runs off the road and nearly plunges them off the cliff and to the rocks and the sea below.

  A dreamer, he fares better with the sheep, the seals and whales, but even the wild animals now can offer him little solace. He sits on the beach cursing his bad luck, brooding on the violation of the way the white policeman treated him, how he was pushed into breaking the law, and now how he must suffer the consequences, the pain of not being there for his love should she arrive. It is cruel punishment for no crime. It reopens the wounds caused by the George Moose tragedy. Injustice is one thing he has never been able to harden himself against, despite all the bitter pills of Hot Springs’ philosophy he swallowed. The new incident scrapes on the young boy’s already bruised sensibilities, tears him apart on the rack of the way things are, and the way they ought to be.

  On the last Thursday in November, Virgil prepares a meal for them to give thanks for all their blessings. It is impossible for Corn Dog to be sincere when they say grace. There are flashes in his mind that two hundred miles south Sarah and child have finally arrived in the Bay Area. Bells ring and the siren whistles, and he cries on the mutton chops and mashed potatoes his Uncle dishes out.

  “She’s come at last, Uncle. I hear her. I feel she is searching for me.”

  Virgil nods supportively as Corn Dog vents his feelings of anger and frustration. “I see how being an artist, a sorcerer, and a warrior are not enough. The Four Fathers break the law but somehow they seem less criminal than the officer who tried to arrest me for no good reason. Pop used to say that the majority of white men will tell you that they are accountable to higher laws, but so long as they are not liable for prosecution by the state, feel no remorse about robbing you. Love your brother, yes, that’s a great law. But what about justice? I can’t justify creating new objects when there’s some things meant to be broken. Love doesn’t mean I have to follow all the rules, it doesn’t mean I have to be a sucker. Pop always told me to be a tiger, not a sheep. The more I live the more I can see why. It’s not fair that Sarah is in town and I can’t be with her. If I just sit here and do nothing, that’s the real crime!”

  “Son, don’t do anything foolish, now.”

  Corn Dog nods and eats witho
ut saying anything further. There is no telling when his teachers give him advice whether he should follow it or its opposite, for their practice and their preaching are often at odds. Damn! That’s why he loves Sarah so much. Every particle in his body, the blood in his bones, knows what direction he’s headed when she happens to be there. If it means a life of crime, running from the law, going underground, disguises, so be it. If it’s good enough for Virgil and the Four Fathers, it’s good enough for him. He will change so that he will hardly recognize himself.

  The next morning Virgil finds a note pinned to his coffee pot. “Goodbye, Uncle dear,” it reads. “Don’t worry. I promise I’ll be extra careful, and not do anything you wouldn’t do.”

  Locusts and Toads

  Forty days later the great pedestrian Corn Dog is back on the streets of the City by the Bay, this time hoping not to let it get him down. He will pretend he is in the wild, take what he needs from the earth, or whatever stands for the earth in the city. He is an excellent sneak and spends his first afternoon hopping fences as if they were rocks, climbing up and down utility poles as if they were trees, crossing streets as if they were streams, scouting out clotheslines, looking in the Bay Area’s drying laundry to find a disguise he can make his way around town in without fear of being recognized by the police. He doesn’t know what he’s looking for but he’ll know it when he sees it. It takes some time, but, at last, on a line in a backyard between two trees, he spies a uniform, a navy blue shirt, slacks and cap, all white trimmed, of a first class seamen, all property of Uncle Sam. He feels it is fitting for the government to be the victim of his first crime.

  Corn Dog, an artist ahead of his time, ever becoming more aware of his life as a symbolic event, conceives of an art that is intangible. He recalls a story Whitman and he read about a sailor who comes home after twenty years at sea. Not knowing what to expect from his wife, whether she has boyfriends or not, he approaches his house disguised as a bum looking for a handout, so he can study the situation without being recognized. Corn Dog knows the way and its opposite are one. He will go to Sarah, a beggar disguised as a sailor.