Kingman, Arizona
(Andy Devine Boulevard)
I distinctly remember Andy Devine on a little bay horse in the Rose Parade, back in 1950-something. He played a character called Jingles on black-and-white TV. A big convivial man, always grinning and waving. He’d cock his wrist on top of his immense belly and twiddle his fingers as though he were tickling you from a distance. The gesture was reminiscent of Oliver Hardy. In fact Andy could well have “borrowed” it from Oliver. They both had the same impish smile too. Andy was the proverbial sidekick and always rode between Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, who were very straight and proper; their fringed Western outfits pressed and glittering with rhinestones. They rode ramrod straight in their matching silver concho saddles while Andy slouched in his plain old bullhide one. I don’t know if the slouch was put on or if it was an actual manifestation of his character but he seemed to enjoy being a sloppy guy. He liked his juxtaposition. He had a high squeaky voice that my uncle Buzz told me was the result of Andy’s having accidentally swallowed a silver whistle when he was a kid. I always believed that story. Why not?
Van Horn, Texas
(Highway 10)
Little waitress doesn’t get it when I push my half-eaten steak away and ask her for dessert, that I really want dessert. She thinks there’s something wrong with the steak. There’s nothing wrong with the steak. I’m just ready for dessert. Another thing she doesn’t get is that I have enough cash in my left boot right now to buy a small car or half the town and when I ask her if she wants to take a spin around the dusty block she doesn’t understand that either. She thinks I have ulterior motives. I tell her I’ve just come from the “Land of Milk and Honey.” She backs nervously away with my half-eaten steak on the plate and bumps right into the chef coming out of the swinging chrome doors of the kitchen. Chef wants to know what’s wrong with my steak and I tell him nothing—nothing’s wrong with the steak. All I want is dessert and she giggles as though the implication is that she’s the “dessert” and the chef picks up on this and decides I’m seriously demented road trash and starts asking me to leave. I tell him I haven’t finished my lunch yet and that I was very much looking forward to the butterscotch pie. He says the pies just came out of the oven and they’re too hot to cut and I tell him I don’t mind waiting but he says he can’t cut into any of them because it would sacrifice the whole pie just trying to get a single slice out of it. I tell him, sometimes sacrifice is necessary. I can see them all steaming behind him on a Formica shelf; lined up like little locomotives—puffing away. He tells me it’s going to take quite a while. It’s going to be at least an hour. I tell him that’s fine, I’ll just go out and buy a paper and come back. I’ll stroll around the town and take in the sights. He says there are no sights; there is no town. But I tell him I’m a big fan of desolation. I’m fascinated by the way things disintegrate; appear and disappear. The way something very prosperous and promising turns out to be disappointing and sad. The way people hang on in the middle of such obliteration and don’t think twice about it. The way people just keep living their lives because they don’t know what else to do. He says he has no time for small talk and leaves me staring at the sugar.
Mercenary Takes a Stab
at Self-Improvement
One day he thought he’d try to control his nagging tendencies toward anger and arrogance, cruelty and malice, by reminding himself that he wouldn’t live forever and that everything he saw squirming in front of him would soon vanish from the earth. When that didn’t work he tried allowing the sweet sensations of nature to penetrate his tough hide: glittering morning sunlight speckled through the drifting ginkgo leaves, for instance; the cool breeze playing across his ragged face; distant sounds of children rollicking in the schoolyard. When that didn’t work he began conjuring up memories of sexual conquests, going clear back through his teenage years; girls came floating back to him; girls of all sizes, tinged now and then with the glowing aura of love. Whatever that was. What was that? Had he mistaken something temporarily ecstatic for something else? Something lasting? Or was he just getting all worked up in a lather of delusion? How easy it was to get carried away. Erection and all. When that seemed to lead nowhere he tried the old trick of total acceptance. Relinquishing completely to the two-sidedness of his nature. He bucked and whined through it. The warp and weave, as they say; trying to catch his balance, crashing then retrieving the old goose step as good as new. When that wore out he tried the impossible mental exercise of putting himself in the place of another; walking in their proverbial shoes; seeing the inevitable end of civilization through their eyes. The horror show with a twist, if you like. When all that finally failed he chopped off his left index finger just below the first knuckle after the manner of the Arapaho ritual of grief over ancestors lost in battle. He wrapped the gushing wound in oak leaves and held it high above his head, squeezing it tight with his right hand. His good hand. The hand he wrote with. He tried to restrain his breath from galloping away.
Interview in Café Pascual
So—sounds, say—favorite sounds.
Um—mockingbird. Meadowlark. Crickets, for sure. Distant hounds.
Hounds?
Yes.
Like dogs, you mean?
No, hounds.
In people’s yards or what?
No, hunting. Chasing.
Game?
That’s it. Wild things. Pigs mostly.
I see. And that reminds you of days gone by, does it?
Yes.
When was that? When were these days?
When I was a hunter.
Did you kill things back then?
Yes. I ate them.
Meat.
Yes.
How long ago was this?
Long, long ago.
In the distant past?
Memory fails me.
But you have faint tracings?
Hardly anything comes back.
So, you gave it up?
It just left me.
So what did you replace it with?
What.
Hunting—following the hounds.
Nothing.
But what do you do with yourself now?
I wander around from place to place.
Aimlessly?
What’s there to aim for?
That must get old after a while.
I don’t know what else to do.
June Bugs
Someone hunting in the night. Shooting repeatedly along my tree-line. Dull sudden thuds, then blank. Then shots again. Someone wanting something dead. Each time the shots come I see his finger squeezing down: fat, black and blue, oily knuckle. In the pauses nothing moves but the fan and night bugs. Out of nowhere, hard little red June bugs come crashing into the porch light, hit the screen door, and go crashing to the floor. They’re all around me now, spinning on their backs, dying between my bare cracked feet. I’m just sitting here and this happens. It’s beyond belief.
Herdbound
Horses are calling each other across big acres. Acres of fresh-cut hay where the tractor’s stripes lay dark and flat against the blue-grass morning. These are the fastest horses in the world. These are the horses the Arabs want, the Irish, the English, the Germans. The whole world converges on this tiny spit of Dixie limestone to throw money in the air as if it were confetti. These horses don’t know their day is coming to wear a paste-on hip number and parade in tight circles while the bid-spotters scream and their sale electronically climbs into the millions. Those anonymous bidders don’t see them now, the way they are, racing along black fence lines, screaming across stands of hickory and locust; sensing something in the air, something coming to get them, from far far across the high seas.
Nine Below
Inside, it’s the exact opposite of the outside. It’s like a movie set in here. Tropical banana plants, palm trees, miniature tangerines, exotic purple orchids, caged parrots screaming their heads off, finches twittering. The fireplace and baseboard heat are cranked up
so high the ceiling’s dripping. Outside—just on the other side of the tall, doubled-paned bay windows—it’s nine below zero and even though the gigantic sun will soon be blazing high over the frozen St. Croix River, the ice remains eighteen inches thick. Thick enough for employees of the Andersen Windows company to drive straight across it from Wisconsin to the Minnesota shore and save a half-hour’s commuting time. At the crack of dawn you can watch them through these steaming windows starting out with their headlights gleaming, crawling along in weaving amber lines through the fishing huts and little square tents, smoke wisping out their vent pipes. Fishermen huddle inside these tents frying bacon and walleye, tossing back schnapps and listening to rabid talk radio throw opinions at them from a world far away. They’re happy campers watching for the slightest twitch of fluorescent green bobbers. I don’t get it myself. I was raised near the Mojave where we slept with the windows wide open and watched the distant foothills burn through the night.
Stillwater
The electronic chimes from the brick Lutheran church tower are playing “Onward, Christian Soldiers” with crisp mathematical precision in the chill morning air. The melody line pierces the windows of every house in the neighborhood. No one escapes. It is a spectacular, bright fall day in the St. Croix River Valley; powder blue skies, fluffy clouds, no wind to speak of. The kind of day, as they like to say up here, that is the reason they all suffer the most godawful winters on earth. It is also the fifth day in a row that bombs have been falling on distant Kabul and Kandahar.
The hardwoods along the banks of the Mississippi are blazing yellow and orange. Bald eagles and giant osprey cruise the inlets for walleye. In the distance, delicate sailboats and fishing skiffs ply the little harbor in silent slow motion. Everything here is quiet and peaceful beyond words:
Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war
with the cross of Jesus going on before
Dawson, Minnesota
(Highway 212 East)
Gnomes
and the Dead
and corn
and soybeans
and Cenex
and Gnomes
on the lawns
and the Dead laid out
and the corn
horizon to horizon
sea to shining sea
Demon in the Woods
Every evening this little yellow dog of mine comes rushing up to meet me; nervous, panting, turning in circles around my legs. I don’t know what it’s all about. It’s as though she expects me to save her from some demon in the woods. I try to tell her I have no answers to it. No solution. I’m scared the same way myself, sometimes. I don’t know what about. There’s something out there lurking, though. No doubt about it. I can hear its fiery breath behind the old black locust. I can see it sometimes swooping through the fields. Sometimes it hovers right above me. I don’t look up. I keep my eyes tight to the ground. Right in rhythm with my walking stick.
Gardening in the Dark
Weeding my garden in the pitch-black dark. In the cool of the night. And the mockingbird raving as though it were light. And the moaning train. And the cow calling and the calf answers back. And the candle hysterically beaten in the breeze.
It’s all adding up.
Happy Man
These delicious mornings he takes his black coffee out on the stone porch and just sits in the old Adirondack chair, handmade in Wisconsin out of raw red cedar, water stains running down the wide flat arms. He just sits there sipping and listening to the mockingbird go through its wild variations; watches geese and canvasbacks winging down across the lower pasture; hears the long trucks moaning east and west on distant Highway 64. A woodpecker hammers away at the dead hackberry. His gray gelding comes trotting up the fence line snorting for carrots then walks off grazing through pink clover. He’s a happy man. No question. The sun is pulling steam out of the ground all the way down to the river. The smell of rotting hay and mulch fills him. The giant irises he’s planted are just beginning to explode into lavender and white plumes. A jeweled hummingbird travels down the whole line poking its head into each bearded bloom then just vanishes off into the woods. Red-winged blackbirds surround him, making their watery croak. His yellow dog sleeps on her side; stretched out across the flat river stones, soaking up the last coolness of morning through her flat ribs. The man lights a half-smoked cigar, sips his coffee, and cracks open The Astonished Man. He wants nothing more. He might just sit here all day, he thinks. He might just sit out here all year until the snow flies. Why not? What’s to stop him?
Promising Two-Year-Old
The axiom goes: “No man with a promising two-year-old ever committed suicide.”
He hangs on the training track rail at 4:00 a.m. in the pitch dark, feeling the rumble of hooves through the turn coming right up into the hollows of his old knees. He sips on his hot chocolate and coffee mix and feels like a genius for breeding this blistering-fast colt. The whole rest of his life is a catastrophe; his marriage, his family, his dying friends, his lost opportunities. But this colt—even in the dark, as he flashes by—rippling sorrel muscle—the rhythmic blasts from the nostrils—this colt lights up what’s left of the man’s mind. That part that still lies vulnerable to brilliance and courage. It lifts him up like a love affair or the great ball of sun just now cracking over the backstretch.
Mandan, North Dakota
(Highway 94)
First light. Outside the Super 8. Glass doors. Smell of weak coffee. Chattering of all the Mandan Indian cleaning ladies sitting on the curb of the parking lot like crows on a wire; giggling, hungover in red, white, and blue heart-patterned blouses. Uniforms issued by the motel, way too small for these women who like to eat. Belly rolls, flesh-colored bras, lacy black thongs can’t hold back the blood of their ancient ancestors. They crouch, puffing away on Marlboro Lights, gulping down the delicious gray smoke. Behind them, stacked on aluminum wagons—clean white fluffy towels smelling like Tide, small bars of pink soap, rolls and rolls of toilet paper, waiting; the day’s work in front of them.
Two hundred years ago on this very spot where the black parking lot sprawls out to the cottonwoods and these Mandan women nurse their hangovers, this is what Captain Meriwether Lewis jotted down in his notebook concerning a baby boy born to a Snake woman called Sacagawea:
“(February 11, 1805) … about five oclock this evening one of the wives of Charbono was delivered of a fine boy. it is worthy of remark that this was the first child which this woman had boarn and as is common in such cases her labour was tedious and the pain violent; Mr. Jessome informed me that he had freequently adminstered a small portion of the rattle of the rattlesnake, which he assured me had never failed to produce the desired effect, that of hastening the birth of the child; having the rattle of a snake by me I gave it to him and he administered two rings of it to the woman broken in small pieces with the fingers and added to a small quantity of water. Whether this medicine was truly the cause or not I shall not undertake to determine, but I was informed that she had not taken it more than ten minutes before she brought forth.”
Miles City, Montana
(Highway 94 West)
Seven young firefighters from the BLM Forest Service are looking for rooms in the War Bonnet Inn. I’m standing, waiting in line right behind them in the lobby. Their exhausted faces; red eyes, hooded in ash, the steel toes of their boots burned black. Montana’s on fire. Miles of open rangeland in flames right up to the shoulder of the interstate. That’s all anyone talks about around here. How to contain it. Where exactly the giant Caterpillars have cut the breaks. How often the planes are bombing the wild ridges with water canisters. How many new conflagrations have spontaneously erupted from Bozeman to Missoula and beyond; up into the High Line, threatening the ski resorts from Kalispell to Hungry Horse? Blame it on Big Bad Nature, touching down. Lightning from the Thunder Gods. They’re laughing at us from far away; watching us scramble in earthly horror. As soon as one blaze gets extinguished another flares u
p. We’re chasing our tails down here. By the time I step up to the desk all the rooms have been taken. More long pickups loaded with young firefighters are pouring into the parking lot as I come out of the lobby into the glowing red dusk. The air smells strong of burning pine and sagebrush. Your eyes sting of ash. Maybe Billings has a room. Down the burning highway. Maybe Billings.
Sam Shepard Page 13
