A slim plane silently etched its way across the blank sky. He kept marching far below. He thought about the passengers at twenty thousand feet, heading somewhere—somewhere warm and tropical. Mexico, maybe. The thought of Mexico always warmed his heart. There it was again—the heart. Coming up again. How many aspects to it? How could something so animal become fractured into so many parts? Montezuma. Rivers of blood pouring down the halls. Glimmering shrines to the Dreaded Duality. Two monstrous eyes encrusted with precious stones, girdled with serpents and clawed lizards, necklaces of silver hearts and below, dripping in golden chains, the very human hearts freshly torn from the hairless chests of teenage children—ripped out of them with obsidian daggers in the shapes of eagles and dogs. The walls and floors of the oratory were so splashed and encrusted with blood they had turned a deep ebony black, throbbing in the pit of the jungle. He marched on through ice.
Distant Songs of Madmen
Sometimes, lying propped up against the half-opened window, a great calm would come over him listening to the distant songs of madmen moaning in the streets below. He could never make out the exact words but melody lines would weave together; weave in and out of other sounds like faraway sirens, trains, TVs from other open windows, babbling news. There was some peace in the distance, in the listening, in the longing wails impossible to be answered. Peace of a kind that had no ambition, no plan, no political motive. Peace for its own sake.
these pills
the orange one
blue
yellow
two white ones
in the palm of your hand
lined up across your lifeline
to ward off what
to delay
to prolong
to keep away
what
until one day you just fall down flat
and the family starts calling itself on the phone
the network begins
he’s down again and broken
different bones
can’t remember shit
wanders off now to different towns
he thinks he had a past in
can’t keep him in his room
got a call from Lubbock
Missing Persons
man couldn’t pronounce his name said it sounded like
Chambers maybe but slurred
next morning he was gone
out the open window
no trace
no tracks
of any kind
Rogers, Arkansas
(Highway 62)
Man finally makes it to the shore of the lake with the severed head teetering above him the whole way. He can hardly wait to get rid of it. This whole ordeal. The burning pain in the back of his neck. The trembling in his shoulders and arms. Why should he have to endure this torture? For what? He stands there panting, staring out across the flat green water to the cattails on the opposite shore. A great blue heron struts then freezes on one leg; its wild yellow eye staring back, over all that space. “Right here,” the head tells him. “This is perfect. Right here.”
“What do you want me to do?” asks the man with a helpless whine.
“Just toss me in,” says the head. “Just give me the old heave-ho!” The man lowers the head to his waist and stares into the face of it. The eyes are still shut tight; squinting with that rictus that must have been its last quick moment before the sword came down. The man has a sudden wish that he could see into the eyes of the head for just one flashing second. That he might see the person behind the voice. That he might know something, some small inkling of the nature of the head.
“Do you think you could open your eyes for me? Just once?” asks the man.
“No,” says the head, without hesitation.
“Why?” asks the man.
“Because you wouldn’t be able to take it,” answers the head. The man quickly tosses the head straight up in the air, without knowing why. It’s as though his whole body has reacted with an electric jolt and jettisoned something poisonous. The heron takes off on the far side of the lake, pumping its enormous wings in slow motion. When the tumbling head smacks down into the flat green water it immediately bobs back up and starts swirling in tight circles like a volleyball cast overboard in the open sea. The man makes a little gasp as he watches the head twist and roll through the expanding ripples, drifting farther and farther from shore. The man takes three quick steps into the water as though he might swim after it and catch hold of its black, curly hair but the man stops short and just watches the head floating away. The shadow of the great blue heron passes over the man, who can’t take his eyes off the head. Then the head just sinks and never comes back up. It just sinks like that. As the man watches intensely for any sign of its reappearance, the green water slowly heals itself back to stillness. Smooth and flat. A painted turtle pops its yellow nose up on a lily pad. The man waits there a long, long time, knee deep in the water, searching for any sign of the head, but nothing comes up. Finally, the man turns his back on the lake and wades to shore. He stands there dripping for a while, afraid to turn around. He can hear the drone of the highway, far off. The chimes of the church. He can see the gray dot of the heron, sailing away. He opens his mouth but nothing comes out. No expression of any kind.
Gracias
What little town was that where we drove for miles weaving through hills and hills of olive groves poured out like little oceans and arrived at a tall gray pensión with an ancient church right across and canaries singing in every window from every balcony and old pudgy women in black ankle-length dresses hobbling along and the two of us, I remember, walking hand in hand with our children, talking of living somewhere idyllic just like this somewhere suspended in time and then all of us brought to a stop by a pianist practicing some lovely lilting waltz outside a window with iron bars in a narrow backstreet and we all just stood there entranced and applauded from the street when it ended for the unseen player and from somewhere deep inside the thick stucco walls, very faintly, came a woman’s voice, very very soft, and the voice said “Gracias,” and we walked on.
That was one of those days I remember.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sam Shepard is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of more than forty-five plays. He was a finalist for the W. H. Smith Literary Award for his story collection Great Dream of Heaven, and he has also written the story collection Cruising Paradise, two collections of prose pieces, Motel Chronicles and Hawk Moon, and Rolling Thunder Logbook, a diary of Bob Dylan’s 1975 Rolling Thunder Review tour. As an actor he has appeared in more than thirty films, including Days of Heaven, Crimes of the Heart, Steel Magnolias, The Pelican Brief, Snow Falling on Cedars, All the Pretty Horses, Black Hawk Down, and The Notebook. He received an Oscar nomination in 1984 for his performance in The Right Stuff. His screenplay for Paris, Texas won the Grand Jury Prize at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival, and he wrote and directed the film Far North in 1988 and cowrote and starred in Wim Wenders’s Don’t Come Knocking in 2005. Shepard’s plays, eleven of which have won Obie Awards, include The God of Hell, Buried Child, The Late Henry Moss, Simpatico, Curse of the Starving Class, True West, Fool for Love, and A Lie of the Mind, which won a New York Drama Desk Award. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Shepard received the Gold Medal for Drama from the Academy in 1992, and in 1994 he was inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame. He lives in New York and Kentucky.
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2010 by Sam Shepard
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Some of the stories in this work originally appeared in the following: “Indianapolis” and “Land of the Living” in The New Yorker; “Costello,�
�� “Cracker Barrel Men’s Room,” “Majesty,” and “Van Horn, Texas” in The Paris Review; and “Thor’s Day” in Zoetrope: All-Story.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg” from Making Certain It Goes On: The Collected Poems of Richard Hugo. Reprinted by permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Shepard, Sam, date.
Day out of days : stories / Sam Shepard.—1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-59322-1
I. Title.
PS3569.H394D39 2010
813’.54—dc22 2009019578
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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