Routes

by John Okas

  “Pop!”

  Yes, it is the Hot Springs within without, come to life in a vision. There before him, standing in a dry stream bed, transfigured bright as a flaming lance, flickering like the mid-day sun, is Corn Dog’s teacher. He is whipping up the dust around him with a little whirligig, a wooden cross with dolls that represent the divinities of the four directions, one fixed on each end, connected to a stick shaft which allows him to spin it. He holds it in his left hand and turns it counterclockwise. When he stops, the dust settles.

  At first Corn Dog cannot tell whether what he is seeing is mass or energy. One thing, the vision has the sense of humor of the material Hot Springs: not only is he brightly transfigured, but he is transvested too, out of his usual elk skin breeches and woolen wrapper and into a black dress somewhere between the one Sarah was wearing the night Corn Dog saw her leaving the hotel and Father Dodge’s cassock. When Corn Dog sees his Pop suddenly appear out of the blue in woman’s clothing he doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. He waves and slowly approaches to determine whether this Hot Springs is a specter or there in the flesh.

  Like my brother the transfigured Hot Springs looks as if he has no more depth than a cartoon. Art in Heaven is experienced in heavenly bodies. He can tell us, from first-hand experience, why bodies in four dimensions look like they are in two: they do so because they contain another extent that is hard for the mind steeped in a three-dimensional reality to imagine. It is easier for us, confronted with something we cannot understand, to subtract a dimension than to add it, and to extend it again through metaphor. But one needn’t be dead to enjoy this added dimension to life; every body on earth has a length it cannot fathom, and deep in the mind is the memory of wide closed space. Try to picture an extent of matter parallel to the lines of this world, a duplication that increases the magnitude of the three dimensions we are aware of. In this enlarged space figures seem flat, yet their glow is all-encompassing, illuminating fields beyond our ordinary vision.

  As I can embrace my brother, Corn Dog can embrace the flaming Hot Springs. The heat, spiritually radiant, comforts rather than burns human flesh. “Virgil says you’re not dead, Pop, but just in some sort of sorcerer’s mystical trance. You sure look like you’ve gone beyond to me.”

  “No comment there, Kid, every one of us is a goner to begin with. Let’s just say I’m having a ball in my retirement.”

  “I met someone who reminds me of you. Remember Father Dodge …?”

  “That Mystical Knight who stole your hard-earned hundred bucks? I’ll never forget.”

  “You wouldn’t happen to know any more about all this than you let on, would you?”

  Hot Springs gives him a squint and a dishonest smile. “No, and I don’t want to, either.”

  But Corn Dog continues anyway. “Either you were in this all along, or you had Virgil pegged all wrong, Pop. He’s part of a car-stealing ring. His friends, four Fathers, including that Dodge I mentioned, taught me how to take a car without the keys. They steal for charity, like Sherwood Robbins and his Merry Men. But I think they get a thrill out of it too. They took the Bishop’s Road Runner and stripped it down to nuts and bolts.”

  “Really? What did I tell you? You see there’s some good in everybody, Kid. There may be something in those Mystic Knights after all. You know, following the path of least resistence, it’s easy to be wrong about everything.”

  While he has the clairaudience of the heavenly mouthpiece, before the visitation disappears, Corn Dog presses for the advice he so seriously needs. “What a mess I’m in! Pop, the girl I love is in the City by the Bay. And I want to be with her, but every time I go there something terrible happens to send me packing. The first time I got to feeling like a bum, the second time I got in trouble with the police, and the third time I saw my Sarah all painted up, looking like a Queen of the Night, so beautiful I was speechless. From the swell way she was dressed, I gathered she was probably going out with another man, some big-shot white brother. I got so angry I kicked cans. Some warrior! Some freethinker! I was a failure at love. After all this time in the desert I’m still tortured by it. What should I do? How can I get free?”

  The bright Hot Springs smiles, shakes his head, and speaks with his tongue of fire. “Stop punishing yourself and claim your reward. How many times have I told you? When it comes to the white brother, make sure the bastard gives what rights of way he takes! And as for this white sister, if she’s as beautiful as you say she is, you’re not going to be able to take her license away for moving violations. There’s no reason why love can’t be a one-way street. If you love her, love her unconditionally. Anyway you didn’t even talk to her, did you? You weren’t with her, were you? You just stood there sniffing and then flew off like a half-cocked idiot. And you call yourself a magician? You don’t really know how she feels. Go back and find out! Never give up on your dream, warrior. No matter how many times that City chews you up and spits you out, get back in there and fight with all you have.”

  Before Corn Dog takes his first step in the right direction, he confesses all to his teacher. “Sometimes, when I’m in the Bay Area, I get so angry. A man short-changed me and hit me in the face with an ice cream cone to cover it up. And I hate that policeman. If he didn’t try to arrest me for praying on the corner, I might have been there to meet Sarah and none of this would have happened. It makes me want to break the rules of the road for the fun of it, Pop, to show them that I’m not one to get into their lines, and to show myself, too.”

  “Now I’ll say ‘I told you so’, Kid. When you’re ‘different’ and you don’t look as if you have money for a lawyer, it’s easy to get pushed around, right? This is what even the best white brothers have a hard time understanding: our rage that the rules of the road are not equally enforced. White men with power and money get away with murder and robbery every day, but let a sweet young buck who wouldn’t hurt a fly for no good reason take a moment to say a prayer on the corner and he gets harassed and made to feel like a criminal. You’re better off pulling the wool over their eyes in business, Kid. Living well is the best revenge. But if you can’t, and you just need to let off some steam, heaven will understand. As Whitman says, you’re an artist ahead of your time. It’s second nature for you to see symbolism as prime material, not separate it from the fabric of life. Recognize that the fabric and the plan that makes the fabric are one. Poetry created the world, and yet the world knows it not. If the artist has a statement to make, he must. Otherwise it wouldn’t be the free way, would it? You don’t want to as be bad as the people you hate, however, so remember: no violence, no shooting, no looting, no slashing, no burning.”

  The heavenly Hot Springs shakes his whirligig with righteous indignation, stirring up another funnel-shaped cloud of dust around them both, and lets go some thunderclaps from his rear end that would do any storybook sorcerer proud. The sight of buffalos, rotting stinking dead on the great plains, shot by wasteful white hunters, passes before Corn Dog’s eyes.

  “Whatever you do, be careful and don’t get caught,” the beatific vision of Hot Springs continues. “Mind where you’re going, and keep a respectful distance between you and the car in front of you. That’s all I have to say for now, Kid, I love you, and Whitman sends his love, too.”

  Puff! The cloud is gone and with it the Hot Springs from paradise. Again Corn Dog sees the clear light within himself. He is connected to the earth, but he is also connected with people. Certainly he loves his teachers. And he has great love for Sarah regardless of who else she loves. And what about the daughter his intuition tells him about? His relationship to Sarah is not the simple type in which boy meets girl, they get married and live happily ever after. They are a couple with practical problems who must chose their paths, find their ways, on daily bases, and as such, they must be in step with the unconventional life, the deeper sources, the lesser-known routes old hat to poets and artists.

  He will go to her whom he saw leaving the Golden Gate and offer himself whether s
he loves him or loves him not.

  No short shrift, no short hike back to the Bay Area either, twelve-hundred miles through the Canyon State and the Valley of Death. This time, after the vision of the four-dimensional Hot Springs in the desert, he is transfigured to an enlarged extent of himself. He’ll never walk the same, never talk the same, again. Now the natural artist merges with his muse once more; never again will he separate his art from his life. With the flaming tongue fresh in his mind, he is more than determined to confront and conquer his fears. He really is different. He doesn’t shy from the road, but stands on its shoulder, waiting for a ride, feeling no fear of the paleface engines or that the police will recognize him.

  In the desert, not much traffic passes and what does will not stop for a mixed breed in tattered buckskin. So will he, nill he, must he walk anyway. But as if nature had a personal message for him, as an omen of renewal, the surrounding country, bone dry all winter, comes to life with a sudden April shower. Within hours after the spring rainstorm, the sagebrush, cactus and wildflowers by the thousands come into bloom; desert mice scamper from their holes and start sniffing the ground for mates.

  He walks for weeks, thumbing his nose at passing traffic. When he cuts the corner of the Silver State he comes to a small mining town called Two Trees, where there is a population of thirty-nine people, six dogs which all bark and bare their teeth when they see him coming, and two trees. The trees, two magnificent locusts, no doubt tapped into some subterranean water, are right out in front the town’s sole business, a gas station-general store. Corn Dog shakes the mongrels off and stands in the shade, wondering if the man at the gas station is friendly and would he mind if he had a drink of water. He opens up his mind to let the Heavenly Hot Springs pour a blue flame streak into him. And again he finds the Pop within bubbling up in his mind with strength. “Don’t be a chicken. If you’re thirsty, drink!”

  Strengthened and inspired, he begins to cross the road. But again, at a crucial point, his rapture is interrupted. A Silver State trooper in a shiny two-tone car, a customized brand new Franklin Fox, pride of the Motor City, with a red light on its roof, pulls up. It is the first car to stop in six-hundred miles.

  “Aren’t you kind of far from the reservation, Kid? If I were you I’d get a move on before something happens to you.”

  At first Corn Dog takes the hint. While the trooper goes to the pumps to fill up with gas, he starts going down the road feeling bad about himself and the way things are. But the Hot Springs gushing within him won’t let him go back to the way things were. Corn Dog is reminded that to love his white brother he must find him within as well—not only be an honest Indigen, a brave warrior, an artist with a truthful vision, but a good Freewayfarer, too. And that means stealing anything he can get away with. He feels more than justified taking what he can from his white brother; he considers it his obligation.

  It is not out of anger or resentment or that he minds walking that he considers stealing a car. Rather, he feels it is required of him, so that he can experience the same freedom that the whites do when they come into a place and take it over. Indeed he would rather walk, put as much space between him and the policeman as possible. But out of a sense of duty, as if it were a war between playful nonsense and money-mad, bigoted self-righteousness, he turns back to Two Trees, with the gut experience that he will demonstrate that the world is not as hard a rock as the white man makes it. He intends a theft for theft’s sake, an affirmation that there is nothing more sacred about the white man’s motor vehicles than there is about the Indigen’s land all run over by them. He creeps back up behind the trees, on the far side where the trooper and the man pumping the gas can’t see him. He prays to heaven that Father Dodge’s hot-wiring tips apply to every car.

  He waits and watches. When the tank is full, the two men go together into the store to sip a cold soda pop and shoot the breeze under the electric fan. Quick as wink, with the same deftness and speed he would kill a trapped rabbit, Corn Dog gets out from behind the tree and into the driver’s seat, behind the wheel, pops the switch with his knife, and connects the wires, just as Father Dodge showed him. Vrooom! The engine starts.

  It takes the trooper a second to realize what is happening. He drops his pop and goes for his gun. Corn Dog does not have a split second to lose, he puts his left foot on the clutch, his right on the gas, twiddles the shift stick, and bounds away speeding, stripping the gears as he does. The trooper runs for the old wooden station wagon that belongs to the owner of the Two Trees store but it takes him precious moments to get it started. By the time he can give chase, Corn Dog is already well down the road, cruising in high gear, veering perilously right and left.

  There is a radio in the car, it squawks with reports of its own theft. He hears all about the all-points bulletin, blocks on every road for a radius of two-hundred miles around Two Trees, and closing in. A natural off the highway, Corn Dog works his way out of the trap by taking the car into the desert. He knows that after a bumpy fifteen miles off the road there is what once was a stream the Indigens worshipped as the sacred home of their River God. The white brother, who changes the ways of rivers, has dammed up a waterway in the north that fed this stream, the life of the Valley of Death, leaving nothing but a dry smooth hard clay bottom bed that runs on for miles. Corn Dog goes almost three hundred of them, north by northwest toward the City by the Bay, before he runs out of gas, and abandons the car in what used to be a lake, an oasis in the desert in the Home of the Brave, but now, off the Freeway, is nothing more than a dried up dead gulch.

  ‘The Ice Cream Man is Coming’

  The day following Sarah’s discovery of Gloria in the closet, May the eighth, nineteen thirty-two, happens to be her twenty-first birthday. Not one to call attention to her real age, she conceals what is significant about that day from everyone including Laudette and goes on with business as usual. She has the sitter see to it that Gloria is out of the way, in bed by nine, for she has a nine-thirty booking with Sir Percival Taod, a member of the peerage. Laudette regrets falling asleep on the job the night before and anticipates the incident might create disorder in Gloria’s good sleeping habits, but she does not get the buzz she expects from the Bee at bedtime. Gloria, happy to have had an eye and earful last night, is extra tired tonight. She gets between the covers, with her hands and face washed and her teeth brushed, at eight fifty-eight, and is fast asleep by nine.

  Laudette is up, extra vigilant at her post tonight. Careful not to nod again, she fixes herself a cup of coffee and sits in a chair near the baby, reading a Glossyhill fan magazine. She starts with a feature about the dawn of the golden age of the silver screen. She browses the photographs of handsome leading men and fancy ladies and swears her Sugar could give any of the latter a run for the former, and the money. Sometime later, when she is chuckling over a publicity piece about the Boombotzi Brothers, Moe, Joe and Beano, chasing girls behind the scenes on the set of their fruity new comedy Going Bananas, she hears muffled voices, on schedule, Sarah welcoming Sir Percival into the parlor, and him rumbling in, grumbling excitedly, blustery and patrician.

  And then, for the first time so far as Laudette can remember, Gloria wakes with the sound of voices. She is up suddenly, sitting straight-backed in bed, with her eyes wide open.

  I knew it, the sitter concludes. Baby’s having nightmares from the thrust of what she saw and heard last night. That girl’s never going to be able to be so easygoing about all the heavy breathing around here again. From now on her ears are going to be sticking to the hanky panky like glue.

  “Mummy! Mummy!” Gloria cries, “The ice cream man is coming.”

  Sarah does not hear her because she is in the other room pouring a cordial for the customer, but Laudette is there to attend to what the working mother can’t.

  “Whatever do you mean, Baby? You thought you saw the Candy Man? He’s only in your dreams? You’re having nightmares, there’s no such thing as that old sweet-toothed boogie.”

  G
loria shuts her lids tight and plants her palms over them. “I hear bells. The sound of the ice cream man is so loud that it wakes me up.”

  “Ice cream man is it? Do you hear me, Baby? Snap out of it! You must still be half asleep, and dreaming. The ice cream man doesn’t come this time of night.”

  “Lawdy,” she says calmly, opening up and looking the baby sitter straight in the eye. “The ice cream man is coming, he’s coming, he’s coming here in a truck. I hear bells.”

  Laudette goes to the window and looks down below. Center Street never sleeps. Even at this time of night the traffic stops and goes and roadsters blow their horns in small jams around the hill. But from where she stands, nineteen stories high, behind glass, the engine sounds are muffled, the horns are muted.

  She says, “Baby, even when a fire engine goes by it sounds like a pussy cat when you’re up here. I don’t see any ice cream trucks and I don’t expect you can hear what I can’t see. Now go back to sleep, believe me, you’re dreaming.”

  Laudette is thick.

  “Lawdy, I can hear it coming.”

  Then Laudette sees it. A white truck makes the turn from North Bay Boulevard and comes their way, crawling like a little white snail, bucking and stalling out as if the driver couldn’t get his gears straight up the hill and was unfamiliar with big-city driving. He goes through a stop sign and narrowly misses a collision. When at last the truck pulls up in front of the Golden Gate, Laudette can read the big letters on it.

  “Fuoco’s Frozen Deserts”

  “I’ll be damned, Baby, if you don’t have ears with eyes in the back of their heads. There was an ice cream man coming after all.”

  Laudette watches with interest, and Gloria Beatrice gets out of bed and joins her. The baby Bee must stand on a chair to get the height to look down from the window. Even during the day it is not easy to make out faces on the street from up in the penthouse, and being that it is night and the face of the man in the truck is hidden from their view by the visor of his snow-white sugar cone cap, it is triply hard. They watch him take a large waxed cardboard bucket with a metal handle from the freezer compartment, the kind they know contains a big cake of ice cream, explain something to the doorman, one man in uniform to another, and enter the hotel with it.