by D. Foy
“How far did you say it was to the truck?”
“It ain’t. You take his feet and we’ll get his head.”
I didn’t think it right we cart Dinky off like a sack of dirt. We had to wrap him up first, at least. That’s what I told Super, and he agreed. I took down the blanket and rolled him. He was heavy as a block of steel. And all along his backside, ankles to groin, his skin had mottled up in a swirl of purples and blues. It looked as if he’d been lying for weeks in a pool of wine. The flesh beneath the hair on his legs was cool. I could’ve been holding a chunk of moldy pipe.
“That’ll happen to the best of them,” Super said, gesturing at the color.
“What is it?”
“Everything that made him a man.”
Super mashed the last of his smoke into the palm of his hand and stuck the butt in his pocket. He got down on his knees and laid a hand on Dinky’s brow. My friend’s face lay motionless and dull as that of some first-man staring from a wall of ice. When Super rose, two buffalo nickels lay on Dinky’s eyes.
“Every man is turned to destruction. And sooner or later every man hears, in his distracted globe, that old voice calling out, Return, ye children of men, return.”
I remember stumbling over the mannequin and falling to the couch, Dinky’s toe an inch away. I remember the crow through the trees, and the sprig in its beak. I remember Basil and Lucille in Super’s truck, too weary to care for the monkey on its beads…
We laid Dinky lengthwise, down on the bed of broken dolls. Super hobbled to the cabin, returned with blankets and bags. He kicked his tires, bound with chains, then got behind the wheel. Avey wrapped me in her arm, she took my hand, she kissed me on the cheek. I’d forgotten how good that could be, just a kiss. It was raining again, and somehow I felt free.
IF THERE’S ONE THING I HATE MORE THAN clowns, it’s riding in the back of a truck. The last time I’d done that was twenty years past, in Texas, through fields of cotton in the sun, me and my terrier Biscuit watching the dust go swirl, the astonishing skies, the rows of green on either side, fanning to the ends of vision.
Distance will confuse. You were there, and then you weren’t. In the moment of sense you make about the difference between the space of then and now, it’s all changed, now has been snatched away, it’s like everything else, an act of colossal dupery, now is then and then a silly idea. There was sense, and there was nonsense, and neither had had any mercy. You think you saw a bird on a post, but the road paid out, and the bird disappeared. There you were trying to puzzle up what little it had shown while sorting through the whim of recent thens—what could have been a snake in the road or coil of twine, a man in the shade with a flashlight or hammer or gun—the creature with eyes like topaz, the way they followed you and your dog, wary but detached, its head revolving as you sped by. Then the head shrank, the eyes ebbed to phlegm, to murk, till flatness too had eaten them up, and, again, before you could sort out the mess, it was all just a spot on a line, distressingly significant, distressingly empty, a place holder of sorts for what amounted to yet another of your ideas of the way things are, some hole of wonder in which you could ponder the worth of your mind—did reality need it, did your ego need it, was the thing you’d seen still there once you couldn’t see it, did such a matter matter, really, because after all, the way things are has nothing to do with how we think.
A cur bounded up from the ditch, and Biscuit, having flung herself at it, tumbled away in a flurry of dust and hair. It took some time for this to make sense, too. I couldn’t say what had happened, even after I’d turned to beat on the cab. My uncle drained his Coors and nudged my toad. He swung to the shoulder and placed his hat and slid from the door and wiped his pants. I shouted what happened, I cried, and back with my dog, I got in the dirt and slobbered on her hair.
“My head’s just about as empty as that can there,” my uncle said, “but I can tell you now. There ain’t but one way to handle a thing like this.”
A breeze swept through the fields. The cotton groaned. I never saw him come or go, and yet my uncle stood above me with his gun, his mouth a penciled line. Then my old toad took the gun and ordered me away.
“Leave her,” he said, his baldness felloed with light.
“Please, Dad.”
“I said leave her.”
The shot sounded off before I’d even made the truck. I turned to see my toad with the rifle on his shoulder while behind him my uncle tossed Biscuit in the ditch.
We drove up the road and turned onto another that led to cotton-nowhere. There was a shack with cardboard on the windows and a line strung out with threadbare clothes. An old Studebaker sat by a pump, stuffed full of papers and bottles and gizmos gone bad. Dirty children peered from the door. A man in huaraches and mismatched socks stepped through the kids and spoke to my uncle in Spanish, my uncle replying in pidgin, interrupting his words here and there to spit while waving his hands like his man was a fool. At last he nodded the way we’d come, and the man nodded back. I heard the words muerto and perro and well number four. Then a woman appeared in an oversized tee with a peace sign of red, white, and blue. The man called out to her, then made into the cotton. “A dónde va?” said the woman, but the man only raised a hand.
The machinery of hub-bubs and what-nots had started up again, the truck paid out more road. I settled back to silence, never once considering how elemental fear is to the sacred. And Biscuit was there, and then she wasn’t. And the sky was blue, and the land was green.
Back home, my uncle gave me a Tootsie Pop, its wrapper with a kid in a headdress shooting an arrow from his bow. When I asked my uncle why he’d killed my dog, he snorted and scratched his nose. “Everthing runs on a leash,” he said. “Most especially dogs.”
“You don’t know anything about dogs.”
He tossed back a shot of red eye. “Oh yes I do,” he said.
On the farm now, Thomas the Tattooed Whiskey Man is the only guy I really know. In just a few weeks, I told him everything that had happened those days in Tahoe, about me and Avey, and Dinky and Super and Basil and Lucille, everything and the rest. At the part where I’d forgotten the day Biscuit died until I found myself trapped with a dog, a dead man, and a beautiful girl, all in the back of a madman’s truck, how my old toad and uncle had shot Biscuit dead without a blink of guilt then tried to buy me off with candy, he said, “And you wonder why I live here on this farm.”
We’d been swimming the river in our birthday suits when two of the boss’s kids ran off with our threads. They took every stitch, the bananas, and how so full of glee they were. I was about to end the story, lying on the pebbly beach, but mid-sentence Thomas cut me off. He could see how parched I was, he said, which I took to mean he’d decided to show me the still he kept out in the tamarisk, which he then did. We had mason jars to drink the corn, and the kids had left the pouch of smoke. I listened to the water back an angry crow.
“It’s quiet here,” Thomas said.
“So?”
“So I can hear the noise when it’s not.”
“That is special, I suppose.”
“If it weren’t for the quiet, Johnny, there wouldn’t be any noise.”
That’s what they call me here—Johnny. First day I arrived, I had to toil through the rigmarole of how funny it must sound, of how, sure, it was ridiculous and sad as a name could be, but yes, my name was John Henry Doe. They all liked that, and laughed for a beat, but when they tried to break me, I wouldn’t say, and couldn’t have if I wanted. I’d got too far stuck in my story. The Doe had cut away and John had grown legs. Now it was plain old Johnny.
“How much of this stuff you keep on hand?” I said to Thomas.
“Did you hear what I said?”
“I heard you.” I finished rolling his smoke and stood up to leave for another dip, but Thomas held me back.
“All things,” he said, “shine brightest in the shadow of what they’re not.”
“Tell it to the river,” I said, and
left.
SUPER HAD REACHED THE 50. WE HOVE ON OUT, and in it we were, the midst of cars, an actual line of actual cars, with actual people clutching and banging and shaking actual wheels. This road, too, had been wrecked, though not so badly as up the hill—maintenance crews had cleared the worst. A couple geriatrics in a late model Ford hunkered over the dash behind us, old gramps looking fragile as love, his kisser slack with focus. Horns honked, people screamed, a sheriff flapped his arms. Buildings appeared either side. Through the trees the lake with its little piers and boats swelled against the shore. We passed a shopping center with a supermarket and liquor store and hair salon, a row of commercial atrocities, Dayton’s Floors, Fruity’s Superior Nails. Farther down, a swampy meadow appeared and then more buildings yet—Douglas County Administrative Offices, the Sheriff and Justice Court. Some hokey chapel floated past, up on a hillock, the kind of hole where you slap on a tux before marriage to a song by Elvis.
We hove on. A golf course swam by, the polders flooded out, the lake out past it again. Then came the casinos, looming like teeth, Caesar’s here, Horizon there, and Bill’s and Harvey’s and Harrah’s. People were still rushing in and out with coin buckets for the slots. By their faces, they could’ve been on Dagobah and never known, some bright with fever, others in its wake so grim. That the world was breaking to pieces didn’t mean poodly lark.
But we hove on. Nevada became California. Past pizza joints and past motels we chugged and choked, past tourist traps and pharmacies and jewelers and boutiques, here a grocer, there a cleaner, here a seller of knives and guns. A McDonald’s sailed by, then a diner, then a bodega for cigarettes and gas. The world flowed away in a psychedelic stream of greens and greys, a volte-face of perception. We came to a stretch of cars like monsters drowned, submerged in water to their roofs. Steam drifted from them, exhaust through the water, on one a family—mommy and daddy and their whey-faced runts—heavy with hopelessness and wear. Later, three children cried in a boat, pushed by a man in slickers, the water to his thighs.
At the river, the bridge poured out like a floating road. Trucks in water wheels-high made giant wakes, their beds crammed with chattel and children and pets. Engines coughed and rain thrummed and ceased and thrummed again. Near the Long’s Drugs, the parking lot had flooded to the storefront itself. Government vehicles loaded with sandbags moved to and fro, but we didn’t stop, but hove on through. Finally a red and white billboard pointed the way to Barton Memorial Hospital. We turned down a road with a trailer park and tenements, and suddenly we were there.
The hospital reminded me of some resort-asylum for rich drunks and addicts. A porte-cochère with a river-rock facade and clear-pine trim presided over the roundabout. On either side the bureaucrats had planted boxy lawns studded with ornamental plums and jeffrey pines, and flowerbeds full of bark.
Super stepped from the truck and mumbled to his dog, then Basil hobbled out, sans Lucille.
“Now here’s a rumbling bellyful,” the old man said, raking at his beard. “Here’s lunatics and rage.”
Basil squinted. He ran a hand across his face and hawked out a loogie. He was beat to shit. “I still can’t tell,” he said, and his voice sounded worse than he looked, “if this guy’s the devil or a nine-to-five fool.” He stooped for the lighter he’d dropped. “I’m dying here.”
“Most times it’s the fool’s the prophet,” Super said, and tickled Basil’s chin.
“Show me the profit here, and I’ll cut off my right hand.” Basil was turning in a slow circle, now, his arms spread wide.
“Maybe,” Avey said, “you should wait for us to bring you a wheelchair.”
“Ha,” Basil said.
“They’ll bandage up your dogs,” I said. “They might even help you walk.”
Super dropped the tailgate and took up Dinky’s feet. A portly man with a goose down parka and pipe in his mouth glanced our way, a paper at his bald spot. It seemed he’d keep on, but then he fixed on our friend with the dolls. “Hope that’s not what I think it is,” he said, and stopped to light the pipe.
“Beat it, yuppie,” Basil said.
“Let’s get, Horatio.”
“Basil’s right, Super,” Avey said. “It’s probably not the best idea to go traipsing in there with a… with Dinky like he is.”
“That’s true,” I said.
“Oh will you now.”
Avey locked eyes with Super. “This is no time for screwing around,” she said, somehow effectively. For once the old man was silent.
“Let’s just go in there and see what they want,” Basil said.
“They’ll call the cops on us, I bet,” I said, thinking as I did how much Basil hated humans in a uniform, but most especially cops.
“They’ll take one look at Dinky and know it was an accident.”
“It’s no use standing here guessing,” I said.
Basil raised an arm that I slid under, Avey did, too, and off we went.
The triage windows were jammed. Before one sat a father with his teenage son, his ankle in a cast of rags. Around the other, an entire family had clustered, all of them jabbering one atop the other in a blur of non-Mexican Spanish. The place stunk of armpits, blood, carpet cleaner, dust. Everywhere people were roiling in fits, and those who weren’t looked on the verge. When finally the kid with the ankle got up, I slid into the seat before some bleeding woman and told her it was life and death.
“But you can’t do that,” she said. She dropped her rotten tissue on the counter and tapped at the window to the nurse behind it. “Tell him he can’t do that,” she said.
“You can’t do that,” said the nurse. She was young and appallingly thin, with close-set eyes and enormous specs.
“I’m a hemophiliac,” said the woman. “You just can’t do that.”
I leaned into the speaker and told the nurse, “My friend is dead.”
“This is very important, miss,” the hemophiliac said. “Would you please tell him he just can’t do that?”
“Where is this friend?” said the nurse, whose name by her tag was “Wendy.”
“In the back of our truck.”
“And you’re sure he’s deceased.”
“Listen, miss,” Basil said, “no disrespect intended, but we’re in no mood for snazzy gags. You got a stretcher or something we can haul him in on?”
Wendy shot Basil a smile meant to wither.
“He’s got problems, too,” I said.
“What’s wrong with him.”
“His feet.” I pointed at Basil’s feet. “What’s your procedure for taking in, you know, for taking in corpses?”
Wendy saw that we weren’t joking. She slid her pen into the board with the sign-in list. The hemophiliac had started harping again, but Wendy stifled her with a hand. “We’ll have some nurses come out with a gurney,” she told me, her voice gone mellow. “They’ll have to admit the body through the ambulance bay.”
“Here’s my number,” I said, “and this is his license. How long you think they’ll be?”
“I’ll be right back,” she said.
Rockets would sigh that night, high over this somber town. They’d explode in the clouds and mingle the rain of that outcry with the rain that had been and would be, and though that show might gesture toward elegance, even toward a grotesque munificence, it would never quite make the grade. How is it we think that to achieve ourselves we must stand on the backs of notions? Let’s bring the stars down to earth. Let’s cut down a tree to hang the stars on. Let’s maim our blunders with time, and with whispers and gifts and cheap perfume. In the crowd we’ll savor the taste of false vitality and pretend we’re not ourselves, not even people, but only an image of the sights around. Orgy of the whir, orgy of the hum, in these we’ll search for the things we’d been told we could hope to be. Behind the smile on that man, the gaze of that girl—there’s but an effigy, the shimmer of so many days pushed through—ching-a-ling-ching, rattle-bang-boom: shriek, laugh, cry, groan. There on the str
eets, in the swarming casinos, we’d watch the past slide off and wait for the bells to toll a new year. Who knows what it means to police their days? This night we’d need to shrink the field, lower the boom, raise high the lanterns, red and green and gold. And the meager light we’d thought we made for ourselves would be little more than the twilight we thought we knew. The rockets would care for the rest. They’d explode, and we would sigh, and the faces around us, whatever they might be, would give comfort, if only by their numbers. Because tomorrow would be new, a brand new month and year. Let the night take our money and our pain. Yes, and yes. Calendar on…
Later, smiling at Basil and Lucille as they danced among the crowds, the old man would say, “It’s survival of the slickest, boy, and that’s something even the blind can see.” And then he’d turn away, his face a puzzle, mumbling about maltworms and knaves, and vanish in the people, Fortinbras at his heel. I thought of Joubert’s notion of the nest in the mind of the bird. All over the world, this very moment even, creatures were busy building homes—nests and hives and caves and dens and tunnels and lairs and dams, and hobo jungles and tenement slums, and birdhouses, and dovecotes, and dumps—everywhere, everywhere, a place for each and all. That’s why we could play tonight, and that’s why we could pray tomorrow. You want your moments, you need a place to make them, the way you need that place to remember and regret. We’d need roofs over our heads when it was said and done, and pillows beneath them, else how could we trick ourselves for even a moment with the platitudes that help to make us real? I’m as good as gold, and you’re an angel in disguise, and the devil may care, though not, perhaps, until tomorrow, so hey, run with the money while you can, baby, run, you’re a nine days’ wonder… God is not just one. Our clichés tell us so every minute.
