Wichita, Kansas
(Highway 35 North)
Whiteout in Wichita. Stuck down deep in ice and snow. Wind blowing sideways, slashing forty miles per hour. Traffic, dead-stopped, both ways; four lanes bumper to bumper, far as the eye can see. It’s apocalyptic. People from all over America jumping out of their cars into twenty degrees, climbing up on their hoods trying to see what the holdup is. Nobody’s dressed for the catastrophe; some of them in pajamas, bellies hanging out, pants falling down their asses, knocking ice off the windshields, walking tiny shivering hairless dogs in doggy jackets. One guy gets out in blue sweatpants and a black T-shirt. Back of his shirt says in bold letters: “You may all go to Hell. I will go to Texas,” signed—Davy Crockett. Thank God for Guy Clark on my satellite radio.
Valentine, Nebraska
(Highway 20)
Can’t you just sit still? What’s the matter with you, anyway? You’re driving me nuts. All this constant moving around. Look at you. You’re a mess. Even now your leg is jumping like a jackhammer. Your fingers are twitching. Your eyes, leaping all over the wallpaper. What’s going on? You’re not going to last very long if you keep this up, you know. You’ll burn yourself out. Can’t you just follow some sort of itinerary, at least? Some plan. What am I supposed to make of all this—all this crashing around? What in the world is so interesting about not having an objective? I mean, look at this map! Just take a look at it. You show up in Baton Rouge, then you’re off to Saskatoon, then down to Butte; Mountain Home. Pendleton. It’s insane. It makes no sense. How is anybody supposed to follow this? Look at these lines! These underlines. These pink, highlighted highways; roads I’ve never even heard of. Where in the hell is the “Little Dixie Highway,” anyway? I, for one, am not tagging along anymore. I’ve had it. I can’t keep up. My car can’t take it. All the wear and tear. Four-dollar gas and we wind up in some pissant hellhole like Winnemucca or Cucamonga. I mean, what the fuck? What’s the point? And what do we have to show for it after all these miles? A bunch of damn coffee mugs with place-name cafés. A buffalo paperweight. What’s it all add up to? Nada, man. Absolutely nada. I’ve come to the end of the line. I really have. I realized that this morning. From now on you’re on your own. I’m walking out the door. Don’t try following me either because you’ll never find me. Oh—and don’t worry about the room. I got that covered. Least I can do after all we’ve been through. Are you listening to me? Do you understand what I’m saying! I’m walking out the fucking door! Right now. Adios! Here I go.
(Door slams. Silence. No movement of any kind.)
Is it actually true that Christopher Columbus gave false information to his sailors regarding the position of his ship so they couldn’t find their way back, in the event of mutiny?
Devil’s Music
(Montana, Highway 2)
From Culbertson to Cut Bank, all along the High Line, he ripped his voice out completely. At first he was just managing to sing along politely with the Howlin’ Wolf Chess collection; dodging in and out of feeble harmony attempts on “Back Door Man” and “Moanin’ at Midnight,” but gradually he became carried away in a frenzy of exultation. By the time he hit Kalispell his throat was actually bleeding but he couldn’t stop himself. Something had taken over. He kept desperately trying to find the shift from the high nasal megaphone pitch down into Wolf’s deep growling groans of lost love and tortured treachery but he just couldn’t find it. He was stuck somewhere smack in the middle. Torn apart. Truckers blew by him with American flags flapping from every possible fixture; staring down in bewilderment at his bloated purple face, screaming to the wind: “I asked her for water but she brought me gasoline!” He passed ranchers on three-wheelers gathering calves as he belched out “Smokestack Lightnin’,” torturing himself with the failure to make the transition into the shaky howls and terrible haunting swings of Wolf’s paranoia: “Don’t you hear me crying?” “Where’d you sleep last night?” The sky dipped into great bars of plum-colored clouds as the sun set behind the Bitterroots and he pressed on hypnotically toward Bonners Ferry. He checked into the Motel 8 there but his voice wouldn’t work at all. Nothing came out but a faint wheeze. He kept smiling apologetically to the little gray woman behind the desk and pushing his credit card toward her so at least she’d know he was good for the rent. He took the Wolf CD with him into room #6, on the ground floor, but there was nothing to play it on so he sat on the edge of the bed and read the liner notes: How Wolf ended up weeping for his mother on his deathbed but she never came to visit. She had forsaken him a long time ago for singing the Devil’s music.
I can make a deal
I can make a deal with myself
for maybe a day
say
maybe two
some kind of clean trade-off
swap
back on track
morning line
banish the haunted hooch
I can make a deal
I can make a deal till the sun goes down
then the whole thing’s off
terminado
finito
out de door
I’m just not sure anymore
I can handle total oblivion
without some sauce
Butte, Montana
Richard Hugo’s astoundingly American poem, “Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg,” keeps coursing through my head up here, in this grim brick mining town:
You might come here Sunday on a whim.
Say your life broke down.
Roofs keep blowing off the meth-lab shacks sitting directly across the street from neat little Scandinavian bungalows, geranium flower boxes in the windows. Chemical explosions out of nowhere. Shirtless rapists, spiderwebs tattooed across their faces, sift through the wreckage; appearing and disappearing in black smoke. This is the childhood home of Evel Knievel and his “Days” are here; streets thronged with bikers, everyone cruising for a fight. Cops tell me someone’s always trying to grab their guns away from them every time they walk into a bar. Kid was killed just last night, down at the Wagon Wheel. Someone smashed his head against a toilet bowl, ran out laughing.
Back at the turn of some century, Carry Nation, the temperance reformer famous for her hatchet-wielding saloon smashing, made a pilgrimage to Butte. She was beaten to a bloody pulp by one of the whorehouse madams for trying to convert her clientele. Carry died on an eastbound train, heading back to civilization; bleeding to death from her wounds. Sitting directly across from her on the hard oak seats was a U.S. marshal; twelve-gauge propped on his hip, ramrod straight and unsmiling. Beside him were four renegade Cheyenne chained together by their ankles and wrists. The warrior right next to the marshal had an iron necklace and a wide black stripe running down his forehead and nose, across his lips to the chin. His black eyes cut through Carry’s. He and the marshal stared straight across at her as she slowly bled to death. They watched her very closely, like they would a dying sparrow.
get out of Butte altogether
why pretend to get along here
get on up to Missoula at least
just do me a favor and
get the fuck out of Butte
poison red ruby lake
crackhead air
roofs blowing sky high
how many signs do you need
one dumb little joint that sells organic bread
salty pumpkin seeds in a coffee can
like as though they were going to philosophically save this town
from suicide and mutilation
just get out
blow on across the Little Blackfoot
phosphate and Philipsburg
make tracks for rosy Cutthroat
three-pound Browns
get it completely out of your head
that you’ll ever settle in
warm and toasty
with a dog that never sheds
and a big-hipped woman
who thinks the sun rises and sets
on your miserable toothless
head
Ft. Robinson, Nebraska
(Highway 20)
I pick up this common gray stone on the spot where Crazy Horse was killed; September 5, 1877. It looks a little like a hawk’s beak with a dark crooked ridge running across the back. It’s hot from lying out flat in the sun for who knows how long. No telling if it might have been kicking around back then; a dumb witness to the outrageous murder. Catholics might call this stone a “second-class relic,” since there’s no proof of its origins, only the association with the place. I drop it deep in my pocket, on top of my black jackknife. It’s warm down there. Who knows if it holds any power. I guess we’ll find out somewhere down the road.
I am crying in my heart, after the manner of white men.
—KIT CARSON
Wounded Knee,
Pine Ridge Reservation
The large metal sign on the dusty shoulder of Highway 27, explaining, front and back, the horrific events that took place here in December 1890, has been altered. The word battle has been covered over with a patchwork metal plate riveted to the sunbleached narrative reading massacre in bold black letters. “Massacre” replaces “battle,” as if that’s all the correction we need to alter our thinking about it. As if now we are able to digest the actuality of carnage, one hundred and twenty years in our past.
Pathetic little lean-tos roofed with pine boughs shelter wrinkled-up Lakota women selling beaded crafts and crude jewelry. It’s 103 degrees and the wind is swirling across the broken highway sending up dust devils. White plastic coffee cups and potato chip bags go whipping by. A dark hawk high above a field of burnt grass tumbles and swoops through the hot-air currents, hoping for some sign of varmints below. I decide to park beside a line of glittering Harleys directly across the highway from the monument; thinking that driving up the hill to the sight might be disrespectful. There’s also some nagging notion that walking up the hill in this sledgehammer heat might be some slight form of penance. (I don’t know where these notions of guilt originate.) I’m staring down at my boots in the powdery clay as I climb toward the two brick columns, arched by a steel span with a small cross in the middle. “Walking through time,” I whisper. I reach the top and pull out my disposable Kodak that I’ve been using to record catch-and-release Rainbows. I’ve only got a couple shots left. As I’m trying to focus on the raggedy monument, a boy’s face jumps into the frame then darts back out. A skinny teenage Lakota boy with wide eyes and a crooked smile. He peeks out at me from behind one of the brick columns. I take my eye away from the lens and see two more boys hiding behind the structures. I call out to them and ask if I can take their picture in front of the monument. They shyly reveal themselves, barefoot in grimy T-shirts, clutching aluminum cans of Pepsi. I ask if they can bunch together under the steel arch. They giggle and line up facing me then, suddenly, as I raise the Kodak to my eye, they all throw their fists to the sky mimicking the Black Panther salute of the sixties. I have no idea what era I’m living in.
Rosebud, South Dakota
(Highway 83 North)
Shitty little government A-frames spit out across the Sandhills. Not a human in sight. Just evidence: Ripe garbage piled high. Bullet holes in every window. Flapping black plastic. Three-quarter ply nailed across the doors like hurricane protection but there’s only an ocean of sand. Wailing. You can hear its constant moan. Yellow sunburned sandbox slides. Bright red plastic swings. No kids to speak of. Backyards way too far from the house. Prairie swallows them all up. Lakota church, “Open to Anyone,” it says, but no one’s here. Not a single sorry soul. And it’s the Sabbath too. Imagine that. Sunday abandoned. Just constant wind ripping across the tattered yards and buried fences. Constant endless prairie breath. Like it’s always been. Now and evermore. Unrelenting. Raw. And could care less about the state of the Union.
I thought there was a hawk
sitting at the bar
above the beer
gazing out
as though from the top of a hickory fencepost
indifferent
back to me
shoulders humped like some old Ute
but no
it was only me
tripping again
on roads
long past
roads
I’d slammed the hammer down
one too many times
Mojado
Today, I feel exactly like a dark mojado on a freeway overpass. Black pack on my back, staring out over the streaming traffic; cars pouring under my wide blistered feet.
I’m turning slowly in one place, looking for some sign; some familiar tree, some rock. I’m turning full circle but nothing speaks to me.
Today, I feel exactly like this short Sonoran man searching for some distant cousin he’s never met. They promised he’d be here with a job, cold cerveza, and tennis shoes. But he’s nowhere to be found. He’s nowhere around.
Normal
(Highway 39 South)
Under the blaring neon of the drunk-tank lockup he studied the cinder-block walls. There was nothing much else to do. Arms slack between knees. Knees folded up to accommodate the short length of the cot. A weird light green plastic burlap-sack-type of mattress propped under his head. Remarkable absence of graffiti, he thought to himself as he scanned the contours. Someone had attempted some desperate scrapings on the steel frame of the window but there were no letters; no words of any kind. Not even a lover’s name or a racial slur. No pictographs of genitalia even. Just random gashes into the steel. He wondered what type of sharp object could have been used since all personal possessions are confiscated long before they slam the door on you. Maybe a zipper. But how would anyone manage to get their crotch up that high to the window frame without being spotted through the thick glass by one of the zealous young officers in crew cuts. Whoever it was would have had to drop their jeans, he figured; stand on the rough ledge of the cot, pants in hand, and scrape away in fits and flurries, ducking frantically each time someone came patrolling down the corridor. Must have been a young man, he thought. Young, scared, and angry. Full of rage. He no longer had it in him, he realized. The fight. The hate. The energy. That was mainly it. Just exhaustion and dismay. He panned the walls, searching for some recognizable symbol of civilization. A crude five-pointed star fashioned with intersecting lines but not overtly Jewish. More like a token of achievement a fourth-grade teacher might scribble in the margin of your notebook. Next to it, a tall number 15 gashed at an angle with the tail of the 5 trailing off into a tropical bird feather. Beautiful but unintended. Beauty seemed more and more like that these days. Accidental. Miraculous, maybe. He kept scanning: another tangle of slashes that he read anthropomorphically into a stick-figure man with an oversize head, wielding an ax. It could have easily been something depicted on the ancient cave walls of France. A giant stag crashing to earth. Fires in the vast blackness. Log drums through the endless woods.
• • • • •
So
fact is
they ask me
who can you get
to wire you a hundred and fifty bucks
you need a hundred and fifty more
to complete your bond
I was at a loss
I said no one
no one
they said back
that’s right I said
come on they said
you must have someone out there
no I said
there’s no one
they must have thought I was lying
so they threw me in here
slammed the door
never even tried the knob
I knew it was curtains
I’m not in here for lying
I know that much
I’m in here for blowing
twice the state limit
• • • • •
Guy in the cell next door is shrieking like a beagle in heat. He deliberately bashed his head against the wall when they tossed him in there. Spotted blood
all over the floor, like red cottage cheese. I saw it as they walked me past there, handcuffed. Officer grumbled he wasn’t cleaning it up. The mess. Idiot smashed his own damn head. Idiot could damn sure clean it up. Or sleep in it. Which was what he was doing.
Now these raw wall scrapings are starting to move all by themselves. Flicker and dance. I remember reading somewhere they burned Jean Genet’s manuscript of Our Lady of the Flowers when they discovered it hidden in his cell. He then proceeded to write the whole thing over again—on toilet paper.
• • • • •
Where have they taken my Chevy
I wonder
Will I ever see my white Chevy again
Elkhorn River
I’m in the Elkhorn up to my knees. My yellow dog floats past, hunting crawdads; her black eyes flat and darting on top of her head, like some wild fat opossum. Managed to catch three green smallmouth so far in the same deep hole. I’ve stopped counting the snags I’ve had on mossy rock and sunken sycamore. At least no thorny thoughts so far. No haunted memories. Just red-winged-blackbird songs and honking geese. Around the river bend, toward the old bridge I can hear Mexican voices getting closer. Splashing, laughing. Men and boys. Jokes. Tales of chicas way back in some jungle village. Here they come, around the turn; men and sons, crashing right up the middle, casting wide nets in white spiraling fans, like they must have always done in their Caribbean homeland. Spanish shrieks through the thick Kentucky air. Birds and squirrels dash for cover. Silver fish and crawdads spill through mestizo fingers as this little tribe goes wading right past me, pressing upriver; roaring with their brotherhood.
Sam Shepard Page 14
