All That Is Left Is All That Matters

by Mark Slouka

  “That so?” I’d say.

  The guy would take a pull of his beer, set it down, put number ten in the corner pocket. “Not somebody you want to piss off.”

  Nods and grunts all around.

  “I’ll remember that.”

  “See that shoe?”

  “So?”

  “Don took that shoe off a guy doin’ life in Folsom.”

  “How’d he get in there?”

  “What? No—before. He took it off him before.”

  “Got it.”

  It was funny, really—the same thing everywhere you went: Men trying on poses, voices, the local badass noticing his forearm in the glass, flexing the wrist just a little . . . there, perfect!—everybody playing bigger than they felt while trying to figure out what “bigger” meant. Sometimes it was just easier to get together and get bigger by proxy—nominate a hero. Enter: Kinch. Kinch was their Gary Cooper, walking to meet the train, their harelipped David, swingin’ that sling. They loved him, groveled at his feet to make it real. He made it possible for them to back down and pucker up—You want this job?— because he’d never back down, never calculate the odds, because he’d piss on the devil if the devil came callin’—and put his red ass out too.

  I didn’t argue. I didn’t tell ’em that in real life Gary Cooper takes a bullet in the throat, that Goliath steps on David’s head on the way to dinner. If anything I felt sorry for Kinch, forced to play that part year in and year out. Legend? Lord and master? I’d seen the real man that morning with the cigarette—he was the same as everybody else. Which was about as surprising as learning Killer Kowalski faked his shit in the WWWF, or Superman held down a second job selling tires in Wilkes-Barre.

  What happened with the cigarette was every Saturday my crew would line up in front of the cash register and Camilla, Don’s wife, would take the money and stamp their wrists to show they’d paid for the pool. That morning she was out, so Don took over, cigarette in his teeth, mashing the stamp into the pad like he wanted to punch through the counter. I was coming up the steps when I heard one of my kids scream, and Kinch bellowing, “Why didn’t you move? What the fuck is wrong with you?”

  It didn’t take long to figure out what happened: Kinch, switching out his cigarette for the stamp as a joke, had expected this kid, Ralph, to pull his hand away, but Ralph was a special boy. Ralph just looked at him. Kinch had moved the cigarette closer, slow-motion. Ralph smiled that “go ahead and burn me” smile. So Kinch, being Kinch, put a black-rimmed hole in his wrist.

  I got pretty worked up about it, threatened to take my kids and never come back. This was a government program, for Christ’s sake; I couldn’t have kids showing up with cigarette burns. And I saw it in his eyes: confusion, uncertainty. “What the fuck is wrong with him?” he kept yelling. “All he had to do is move.”

  It just so happened there was plenty wrong with Ralph, a hundred-eighty-pounder with soft Michelin Man wrists who entertained himself by inventing tortures for everybody he knew—“I know what I’d do to you, Wayne,” he’d say to me on the way to the mess hall—but that was not the point. The point was that Ralph had called Kinch’s bluff, and Kinch’d been rattled by it. That was the point.

  He came up to talk to me that afternoon as I ate at the bar by myself.

  “Want another?” he said, wiping down the counter.

  I shook my head.

  “How’s that kid’s hand?”

  “He’ll live.”

  He nodded, breathing through his nose like a bull. “Listen, I—”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said.

  He stood there, trying to figure out his next move—nobody’s terror.

  I don’t know why I decided to let him off the hook. “He’s a weird little punk,” I said.

  He grunted, moved on down the bar.

  “Let me know if you want another,” he said.

  It was the tone. For a split second it was just the two of us, just me and him. It made me uncomfortable. It was like at the zoo when the orangutan stops picking its nose and suddenly you’re looking into these human eyes, trapped inside that hide, and you get this jolt of recognition and disgust.

  HOWEVER IT WAS, you could almost admire the way Kinch held up his end, grunting and bellowing and bullying like a champ, riding herd on those poor bastards who paid good money just to bask in his ridicule. And the truth is he might have gone on doing just that except for the law that says there’s always a bigger fish. Always. A sudden lunge, a quick flare of gills, and all that’s left of yesterday’s big boy is a thoughtful look in the eyes of the victor and a single silver scale drifting to the sand.

  FOR DON KINCH of Panorama Heights the law kicked in fast on July 26, 1969. The temperature in Porterville hit 116. I’d have liked to have been there. I was at Panorama Heights instead.

  You could hear them five miles out, people said, like something out of the Bible—seventy, eighty machines roaring down 5 out of Stockton where they’d left one man dead and another unlikely to do much of anything ever again. Traffic on the interstate, seeing them come up in the rearview, filling it, pulled over on the shoulder and let them pass.

  There was never going to be an easy answer to this one. A quarter mile long, they roared through Visalia, then Delano. The local cops, each with their one or two cruisers, wisely hung back. By one o’clock, thirty-five squad cars from four jurisdictions formed a roadblock at the merge of 99 and 65. By one thirty they’d realized their mistake. The Angels, like a headless snake, had veered into the foothills.

  I don’t know why nobody picked up the phone that afternoon. I can see the people on the other end clamping the receivers with their shoulders, groping for the shotgun shells—not able to hear if the phone’s ringing or anybody’s picked up, yelling get out just get the hell out. Camilla may have been in the kitchen. My guys were by the pool making idiots of themselves in front of two high-school girls up from Poso Creek.

  It happened very quickly.

  “The hell is that noise?” said somebody at the bar.

  “Not a saw.”

  “What’s the matter with the dogs?” said somebody else.

  And then they were there, pouring over the rise, thunder filling the bar like water in an aquarium, and we just sat there looking at each other, trying to understand what was happening and then I was running for the back even as my guys were crowding in from the pool and I was yelling, “Go, go, get the fuck out of here—just go,” but by then they were everywhere.

  There was nothing to do. This wasn’t some Marlon Brando bullshit. They filled the bar with their leather and skulls, red-eyed, strung-out, too many, too fucked up to care about anything at all, shoving toward the back while we sat there trying not to breathe, to be. I heard a dog yelp outside.

  “Where’s Don?” I heard somebody whisper, and my heart, like a spasming muscle, jumped at the thought and was still. All fairy tales ended. This one ended here, with eighty Angels doing whatever the fuck they wanted to whoever they wanted because they could. The only thing that could make it worse was for Kinch to come in, playing his role. I found myself praying he’d stay away. I didn’t want to have to watch him go down, flailing, holding on to his myth like it could protect him, like it meant something.

  The crowd heaved and swayed, packed to the walls, yelling for beer. Toward the back a commotion kicked up and I saw a biker’s arms come up twice like a conductor’s as he stomped something on the floor.

  He strode in from the kitchen wiping his hands on a rag, the usual look of disgust on his face. Turning his back on the crowd, he rearranged some bottles, scooped a handful of peanuts, threw them in his mouth, then took the convict’s shoe off the nail and smashed it on the wood till the room got quiet. “I’ll say it once,” he announced, big hands out like he was holding down the bar: “Two BITS a glass, no BEER or BAREASS by the POOL, no—” He stopped chewing. A biker, his massive arms bulging out of his sleeveless leather jacket, had hoisted himself up on the pool table.
r />   “Hey, you,” Kinch roared, the words shooting out of his nose like bullets. “Ass off the TABLE or get the FUCK outta my place!”

  TWENTY YEARS LATER, when I returned to Panorama Heights, it was a bed and breakfast. The porch was gone, the parking lot paved. The brown mat in front of the door said GOD BLESS OUR HOME. I didn’t go in.

  “Don Kinch? Sure, died of a heart attack in ’86,” said the man who answered the door. “Camilla moved to Arizona.”

  I thanked him, went back to my car. I looked at the oaks, feeling the back of my shirt unstick from my back, then started the long drive back to the valley.

  It didn’t matter. There’d be some of us who’d remember, who’d forever see him walking into that bar exactly, and I mean exactly the way he’d walked into it a thousand times before, who still wondered what he could have been thinking at that moment when in fact he probably wasn’t thinking anything at all.

  “HEY, YOU,” Kinch roared, the words shooting out of his nose like bullets. “Ass off the TABLE or get the FUCK outta my place!”

  After a moment’s pause, the biker jumped down off the pool table. Kinch, satisfied, turned to the tap and began drawing beers, then turned again just in time to see the man take out his dick and begin pissing on the floor.

  There was no pause, no break. Putting down the beer, Kinch came out from behind the bar, the crowd parting like iron shavings from the wrong end of a magnet, walked right up and hit the guy (who was either too stunned or stoned to move) with a straight-from-the-shoulder right to the face so thunderous, so uninhibited, it sent the man staggering across the floor like a home movie run backward, flipped him over a table and laid him out cold.

  Kinch returned to the bar, reached under it, placed the 12-gauge on the wood. I ain’t gonna say it again,” he said. “Two BITS a beer, no BOOZE or BAREASS by the pool, no tab at the BAR.” He tossed a rag in the general direction of the pool table. “And clean up that mess,” he roared.

  And they did.

  Bakersfield

  IF YOU WERE A FIFTEENTH-CENTURY SAINT out walking the billowing fields of heaven on July 24, 1985, and you happened to look down out of the sky over the Owens Valley, you’d have seen a twenty-two-year-old ranch hand named Jack Henderson sleeping against the cinder-block wall of the Lone Pine Laundry. A tough kid with a big, calloused heart, he’d picked this place because it was hidden behind a kind of brick corral containing five metal garbage cans and because, three days earlier, he’d met and fallen in love with a dark-haired girl named Janie Sanders, whose window looked out over the place he slept. That morning the two of them were running away to Bakersfield, starting early to beat the heat.

  Sleeping on his side, both arms caught between his legs, Jack rolled to his back and opened his eyes to a sky still dark but bluing fast. Two small clouds, like commas, hurried across that open space. To the west, the Sierra was dark as a woodcut.

  Stretching his legs against the warm bottom of the sleeping bag, he put his hands behind his head, breathing in the chill smell of sage. Somebody was making coffee. When he turned his head, his jacket smelled like her hair and old smoke and he gathered it up to his face and breathed deep. In an hour the sun coming over the Inyo Range would break on the peaks, then seep into the broken bowl of the valley.

  By then they’d be on their way. They’d talked about it, planned it, giddy with the thought of it. Janie and Jack. Home hadn’t been home for either of them for years, his like a ship that’s made up its mind to drink itself to death, hers nothing but sadness and screaming. They’d thought they’d never get away.

  Bakersfield was the answer. There were jobs there. They could see it. They’d get a small house, and a dog, and on hot summer nights after work they’d drive down to the Kern with a bottle and a blanket and wade up the shoals in the moonlight.

  Sometimes he’d felt like there was something in the world that didn’t want you to be free, a headwind that picked up as soon as you started to run, but two nights ago, sitting on the roof of the wooden dugout passing a bottle of wine and watching twelve-year-olds fumble grounders in the glare of the stadium lights, he’d felt something happening to him—something good and true and right. Before the game was over the two of them had climbed down the chain-link fence, then cut between the motel and the Rock Shop into the great open room of the desert.

  They’d walked toward the moon coming up over the Inyos, their arms around each other’s waists, following the coyote trails that wound between the rabbit brush, and after they’d taken what they needed from each other on the blanket they’d spread on the flat lake bed, as they lay tangled up, her breasts flat against his chest and her leg slipped between his like they’d been sleeping together for years, everything felt changed. For both of them. The moon had lit the Sierra, and sitting up in the middle of that huge space they saw how small the town’s lights looked beneath the mountains and the sky.

  The light was coming on, and with things quickly taking shape around him he slipped on his boots, standing on the bag to keep the burrs out of his socks, then pulled on the flannel he’d left folded on his duffel and carefully rolled his bag. At a faucet sticking out of the back wall of the laundry he splashed water on his face and hair, then rolled down his sleeves and put on his jacket. The day ahead wasn’t going to be a lot of fun—he knew that. By seven the coolness would be gone. By eight the air would smell like tar and roadkill. By ten everything along the road—the telephone poles, the wires, the three miles of black rock escarpment stretching along 395—would be wavering and doubling in the heat like something inside was struggling to get loose.

  The first step was to make the turnoff—maybe fifty miles. Next came the two-lane running up through the boulder fields to the town of Lake Isabella—another twenty. Last was what the locals called Canyon Boulevard, a no-name dirt road hacked into the cliff so narrow that people who drove it would stop and honk before taking a turn. He’d never liked it—the drop, the river roaring over the boulders a hundred feet below, the way it drew your eye. Still, it’d save them four, maybe five hours. If they got a ride, they’d be home free.

  He looked up. The light was on in the window above the laundry.

  Carrying the suitcase down the wooden steps she glanced up quickly to smile and wave, then steadied herself on the wooden railing. She hadn’t slept, really—it didn’t matter. They were going. She felt excited yet strangely calm. She loved this man and he loved her—nothing else mattered. Let them come after her: By the time they found the note she’d be gone.

  Waiting in the alley, he watched her disappear through the back door of the diner, then reappear with a paper bag and a cup of coffee. A woman he didn’t know, her sleeves rolled up her big arms, came out the screen door and watched them walk away. When Janie waved from the end of the alley, the woman raised her right hand just past her waist, then brought it slowly down.

  THEY HADN’T BEEN waiting more than a minute when a battered pick-up, its lights still on, pulled over on the gravel. As they walked up, an older man in work-broken jeans and a clean white shirt leaned over to roll down the passenger-side window.

  “I got her wired so she don’t open,” he said, “but you’re welcome to get in back if you like.”

  They thanked him and climbed up into the bed with spools of bailing wire, a posthole digger, and three bags of cement.

  “Just move that stuff over,” he called out the window, then waited for them to make a space and settle in. The fence posts accelerated. They were gone.

  “How you feelin’?” he yelled over the wind, smiling.

  She put the coffee down and kissed him long and hard, her hair whipping around them both. It was falling back—the rage, the sadness, the TV voices laughing in the desert heat. They’d never find them now. Through the back window of the truck Jack could see the man reach for the glove compartment, pull out a pack of cigarettes, tap one out against the wheel, then dip his head.

  Two miles over their heads a ripped postage stamp of snow showe
d white against the rock.

  They’d been standing on the road less than twenty minutes when the second ride—another pickup—pulled up a quarter mile ahead and began backing up the shoulder. They yelled “gracias,” then climbed in with three kids sitting on sacks of feed, and Janie talked to the oldest, a girl maybe ten years old holding a round-faced baby.

  “I didn’t know you could talk Spanish,” he shouted over the wind as she offered the kids the biscuits from the diner.

  He watched the baby crumble the biscuit in its soaking fist. The sun rose over the Inyos, covering the valley in low, red light.

  It could be done—he’d always known that. If you had the heart and the balls you could walk out, just slip your life like the gopher snake he’d once watched rub itself open on a piece of rock in an old fish-tank; the eyes had peeled back, the pattern on the new skin separated off from the one above it, and the snake had crawled out of its own jaws, fresh as the day.

  TURNING AWAY FROM the dust, they listened to the truck with the kids pull away, then picked their bags off the gravel.

  “We’re makin’ good time,” he said.

  “I still can’t believe we’re doin’ this.”

  A truck pushing a wall of hot air went by, then a van packed with men who looked at them as they passed. A half mile down, the van’s brake lights flashed on, then off. After that, nothing. The sun was up now, the air on the horizon turning white. Five miles east, out past the sage and the tumbleweed scraping against itself in the sluggish wind, the alkali flats were pink as plastic.

  “Feel like walkin’?” he said. “How’s that suitcase?”

  Holding hands, they started walking, the duffel over his shoulder, the suitcase bumping her leg, stopping every hundred steps to let her switch hands or to drink from one of the soda bottles.