Phantom Strays

by Lorraine Ray

Paul with his shoulder-length, greasy brown hair slumped on our living room sofa underneath the art print of Monet’s work, showing a bushy hillside. A lamp hung on a brass chain in front of the Danish Modern coffee table and the bright modern candlesticks: blue, green, white. A sad fake rubber tree with wires exposed on its leaves held two small broken monkeys that my mother was fond of.

  Paul balanced on his lap a fish tank with wood shavings in the bottom and used one hand to smooth his hair behind his ears. The tank held a small nervous white mouse. It trembled whenever Paul tried to pick it up.

  “Hey, kid, pull the door shut,” ordered Paul, talking brusquely to me about the pocket door between our living room and the kitchen.

  I got up and lifted the bar that enabled me to yank the door out of its hidden compartment and it slid closed over the yellow shag rug. Before the door closed, Mother waved at me from the kitchen table; she organized her collection of Betty Crocker coupons, teeny bright green, red and yellow cardboard bricks, into a small metal box with a decal finger sign on it. Near the finger sign it said “Sock It To Me.” Behind my back I heard Paul explaining his latest nutty scheme: “Listen, kids, I’m hearing and reading all about John Wayne, the big cowboy movie star sonuvabitch in the Star, you know, and I thought, you kids oughta know, Meredith’s brother and sister, that he is in Tucson right now, isn’t that a bitchin thing and he comes here all the time, man. He’s making a movie at Old Tucson with a big Hollywood sonuvabitch director. I don’t know his name. I heard that from someone who works in a bar. He saw him at the Ox-Bow last night. Then after that he came down from Oracle Road and bar hopped all along Speedway. Listen, guys, he’s in the bars in town tonight again, isn’t that super bitchin? And I know which ones, approximately, from this source who knows it all, man, and all we, the four of us, have to do tonight is find him, te-he, find him where he is at tonight. I’m gonna call to get a description of his car. I’m calling the hotel. We gotta get out on the streets in the bars and find him. Then, then, the bitchin thing is this,” he paused and used one of his nervous hands to fold his hair behind one long pale ear again. I noticed he had beautiful ears, like extraordinarily pale flowers, so delicate for a man, but I didn’t have time to think anything more because he was still talking about this idea of his. And he went on, “get in there near to him at the bar and slip him some bitchin out-of-sight acid, some Orange Sunshine, in his drink somehow, kids. Maybe sugar cubes, maybe tablets. I don’t know what I can get. He will have a tripping time with that stuff, shit, it will blow his commie-hating mind, and we can tell him all about the war in Vietnam and all the evil it is doing in America and to the kids getting killed and maimed in Vietnam, man, and if we do it right, man, we’re gonna convince him to be against the war! Isn’t that far out? Yeah? He’s gonna see the truth of what we’re doing. We gotta do this, kids. What if he came out against the war, man, wouldn’t it be tripping if he did? What if we convinced him to come out and do an interview and say he opposed the war in Vietnam? Him with his commie-hating heart. I know we can do it. The four of us can do it! Tonight. We will do it. What do you say to my plan, man?”

  “Amazing idea,” said Jack. He sat, Ghandi-style, the way he always sat then, with his long scrawny legs folded under him on the carpet, bulbous knees sticking out from his legs, big jointed and with a certain madness in his eyes and laughter at the world. The quickness with which he agrees with Paul’s insane and impractical idea for ending the Vietnam War astounded me. I knew he laughed secretly at Paul, but was too clever to reveal what he really thought. “But what bar is he going to be in? And who has the LSD?” Jack dropped his voice before he said the word LSD. We could still hear our mother in the kitchen.

  “Don’t worry about the acid, man. We can score plenty on the way. That’s the first thing we’ll do. But where he is—that’s what we have to put our heads together to figure out, man. We’ve got to find him in order to give him a dose. Then stay with him and guide his thoughts during his trip and suggest ideas to him about why we have to get out of Vietnam. If we can turn him into an anti-war hippie we can turn the whole damn country. This is so big, man. It’s incredible. It’s so far out, man. We’ve got a lot of responsibility tonight. It’s incredible what we’re gonna do.” His hand stirred the worried white mouse.

  Far out. Incredible. Those might be the words. Impractical and idiotic might be words used also, but I didn’t say them. I said nothing about my fears, about the horror I knew might be awaiting us if we followed Paul’s strange obsession. We might very well be arrested for poisoning J. Wayne, if Paul’s scheme actually went forward. And actually I was afraid that there was something personally horrifying that was going to happen if I went along with the scheme. But it would probably fail, as most of the others had. Two of his prior plans, ones he had let us in on, involved siphoning gas from airplanes at Davis-Monthan Air Base and disrupting police radio frequencies with what he called a “beam emitter.” Nothing had come of those scary plans. I still felt an amazing level of horror and terror at what we were contemplating doing to America’s most famous cowboy star.

  If all you have in your past is a pat of yellow butter and you want to describe and remember this perfect, yellow, oily square, well, to be honest, remembering that is easier, pleasanter. Where’s the horror and terror in a pat of butter? But when someone comes at you with the purpose of hurting you, remembering is not what you want to do. But the best stories have a morsel of terror still on the bone and the writer is tasked with gazing into dark places for the meat of the matter.

  So with a great, enthusiastic lie to our parents about us going to see a movie together at the Buena Vista Theater, we piled into Meredith’s Volkswagen Beetle. Years in the sun had faded the blue exterior paint and created a broad white haze of the bug, which had cracked in a crazy pattern near the chrome taillights. On the night she purchased the bug, which must have been a few months earlier, we’d sat inside it decorating the dashboard with contact paper flowers (of the flower power sort) which we carefully cut out. Jack enjoyed opening and closing the cover on the rear engine. Meredith wondered if she should keep the engine unlatched as people did in the desert in order to help the air cooled engine stay breezy. If you followed a beetle bug in town you could see the engine hatch swing open every time they pulled away from a stop.

  The blue bubble spurted away merrily with us and I had brought a small notebook and pencil, convenient for writing ideas and poems. I wanted to write prose or a poem, perhaps a poem about a cloud above Finger Rock, like a donut, an image I ultimately contemplated, overworked, and finally destroyed on a metate, grinding away at my writing until my poem about the cloud became a puffy wet mass of lumpy paper which I tasted with my finger.

  Meredith insisted that she drive. Jack and I sat in the back of the blue Volkswagen. Meredith’s shifting was somewhat rudimentary so we stalled the car twice on Speedway, to the great chagrin of Jack who knew he could drive better. I liked to grip the straps that came out of the car panel, or rest my index finger in the dry cleaning hook (which reminded me of the kleptomaniac who had stolen Jack’s sailor suit and our groceries from the old ‘49 Chevy once when I was teeny). Gripping the straps helped me when Meredith jerked the clutch.

  Somewhere north and west of our home, we crunched down a long gravel driveway to the dilapidated adobe house where Paul disappeared to purchase the acid. We in the bug (awaiting his return, joking and listening to the radio, which played a long Morrison hit) said nothing about the insanity of what Paul planned. The sun set behind a row of Eucalyptus trees; they quivered in anticipation of darkness. I hoped Meredith would tell us her thoughts and dismiss the stupid plot, but she embraced it willingly, for all I could tell.

  In the dirt yard of the house Paul entered, a Porky the Pig ceramic statue sat with a withered snaky cactus drooping out the sides of Porky’s wheelbarrow. As the light faded the pig merged with the dirt until only the writhing cactus limbs could be seen. Then, bang, Paul walked out and light from the li
ttle house flooded the yard. Of course Paul had also bought acid for himself, a five strip of decorated blotting paper, the price of which he crowed about when he landed in the passenger seat.

  The bug roared alive (I thought I could feel the hot engine under the seat) and Meredith backed us out, away from the little adobe quickly. Paul and Meredith settled on a plan to find John Wayne which involved starting at a certain bar on Speedway near an arroyo; while he had been inside Paul had called the contact who thought he knew where John Wayne would be. We would work our way westward from there.

  Paul, Meredith and Jack disappeared jauntily into the first bar we stopped at, but I begged off, arguing that I could sit in the bug and contemplate the lovely night. I changed my seat to the front passenger seat, because the air moved better there. Actually planned to do writing in the last sunlight and the parking lot illumination, which had just switched on.

  Then I find myself of the past sitting in that car with the little notebook and beginning the writing of a description of the mountains and the way the last light was held on the lip of the arroyo by the leaves of the mesquite and palo verde and by bountiful clouds on the horizon. Something nibbled at the edges of my mind about a herd of cattle, but I couldn’t remember what that meant and what I was supposed to do with that image. I felt it was the hook to something. Or maybe I had planned another hook. I carefully began a poem about the serene cloud which hung over the prominent hoodoo Finger Rock like a doughnut, and I remembered that I had been in the backyard of Gumm’s house and yes, Anna Henry had shown up and complained about her mother and Pancho Villa, and Father called that hoodoo Dracula’s Castle, and I considered every word of that poem to such an extent that in the end the cloud poem felt leaden, dead like a burden. I wanted to rip it out of the notebook but resisted the temptation to do that. Instead I went on to prose. I worked on describing the last dazzle of light shining through the hazy trees lining the arroyo, the creepy witch nature of the mesquite trees and the fuzzy hazy smoke of the Palo Verde leaves.

  Occasionally the bar door would open and laughter flooded out and made me check the round side view mirror of the Volkswagen to see who it was. I kept expecting it to be Meredith, Paul and Jack. I could have gone in; even at thirteen I easily passed for twenty-one and had tried beer at a place called the Ox-Bow.

  What I didn’t see in all my careful observation was someone who came out of that arroyo a little further down in the parking lot.

  He wore a balaclava.

  He had no visible face in that black woolen thing, a fact which terrified me. His face appeared so frightening, so suddenly vacant. And the scary balaclava came from the snow and cold region, from the East that we had been prejudiced against as kids.

  He had on a green shirt and no pants. His erect penis showed in one hand and a screw driver with tape on the handle in the other.

  He was panting, but not saying anything when the attack began.

  He let go of his penis long enough to seize my wrist through the Volkswagen’s partially open window. I crashed his wrist as hard as I could against the top of the beetle door frame, for I was hoping to break his hold. Shooting it up, crashing the screw driver around and away from me, I could feel the strength of a man used against me for the first time in my life. The muscles in his wrist rippled in a struggle to hold my hand while his other hand tried to open the Volkswagen latch. If he could get it unlocked, he would be in.

  I fought him in a frenzy.

  “Stop!”

  “Help!”

  “Stop!”

  I should have shouted those words. I didn’t shout, but spoke this in my head, and moved my arm quickly so that his arm cracked hard against the car frame again and he yelped and he couldn’t help but decrease the force holding my wrist. This worked long enough for me to wrench my arm away and roll the window up. He couldn’t get the door unlocked and couldn’t get to me without breaking the window pane.

  I saw him pull the screwdriver back, and he was ready to smash the window when someone stumbled innocently out of the bar.

  This unknown someone came out for a smoke in the night air, directly toward us.

  The black woolen face outside my window jerked toward the smoker. The slits where the eyes were seemed to register fear at the sight of the smoker approaching our car. In an instant he fled backwards and dropped down the lip of the arroyo. To disappear.

  My heart pounded and I could hear the blood coursing in my head near my ears, throbbing and coursing unevenly. I wiped my mouth which drooled saliva.

  I stayed in the front seat in terror that he would come back. I didn’t know whether to risk getting out or sit where I was.

  Suddenly, the bar door opened again and Jack, Meredith and Paul emerged. I unlocked the door, stepped outside, pulled the seat forward and collapsed into the back seat again.

  When they arrived, all jolly together, and stepped back into the beetle, I yanked the front seatback into place. Pulling the seat that way reminded me of a time in my past when the seatback of the old ‘49 Chevy flopped forward on me all the time.

  I gave them no hint of what had happened to me. I felt I wouldn’t be believed and that it was too dreadful and too real to explain to a group of jolly people. I kept it to myself and pretended that nothing had happened.

  From this bar we travelled several neon-lit blocks passing billboard after billboard and flickering sign after sign, past pizza parlors and dry cleaners, until we reached another bar, The Blue Note, which was deserted. Once we had scanned the three lone patrons we knew the bar didn’t have John Wayne in it. Rather than drink there, we piled back into the beetle and took off for another place Paul knew, Jo-Jo’s, which was packed, but didn’t contain John Wayne either, and so that bar was followed in quick succession by The Gold Rush, Gus’s, The Mustang, Bambi and Big Ben’s. All without John Wayne in them.

  I glanced at the giant screen of a drive-in movie as we drove to Bambi’s and felt a memory flood over me of the Drive-In where I had seen a stampede of cows and Mother had expressed her fond wish to watch Robert Mitchum act in the cowboy drama. Something about it teased my brain with creativity and it gave me a chance to forget the attacker, if only for a few minutes. I thought about the stampede movie still when we reached The Embers later that night. I stepped out when Paul tipped his seat forward and I noticed a model shop that Jack and I used to walk to. The shop was a little house with the owner living in a low rambling structure built onto the back. One light burned in what must have been the kitchen and I could see the bald headed owner washing his dishes; steam from the hot water had fogged the bottom half of his kitchen window.

  “Remember when you used to want that model plane near the front door?” I asked Jack.

  “Sure. It sat above the door on a shelf. I used to hunt for it every time we went in there. I’d rather have an MG now.”

  The Embers, this dark bar we visited, proved easy for me to drink at and I tilted my beer eagerly, wishing to forget what had almost happened to me. The beer hit me quickly and I felt giddy and lightheaded.

  At midnight we decided that we had no idea how to locate John Wayne and we drove the long route out somewhere far in the desert where there were no streetlights and few street signs to drop Paul at his Airstream trailer. We crossed an arroyo to get him there and Meredith told us she had driven the beetle onto a small boulder only a month earlier in Reddington Pass on her way to Tanque Verde Falls. Paul returned to his consuming passion—our mission that night.

  “We probably only missed him by a few minutes,” Paul claimed. “Man, acid would have done that sonuvabitch good. We would have blown his mind, man. Blown it good. He would have seen how groovy peace could be and given up on killing all the Vietcong. We could have changed the world tonight if things had gone a little differently. Of course, you could always say if things had gone differently the world would have changed.”

  We laughed at this.

  “We lost our chance, though, man,” Paul said, going on with the t
heme of our lost opportunity to stop the war in Vietnam, “I heard that he was at The Mustang just before us. We missed him by a hair. Nobody knew where he was going after that or we could have followed him. Damn it, we really missed a good chance to stop this war. Peace was close at hand. Man, fate was not our friend. But I don’t want to give up on my idea. I think it was pretty good. Pretty groovy, man. I’m gonna try again tomorrow night if he’s still in town. I wonder if I went over to the coast if I could find where he drinks there? Shit, I just remembered that I have buddies who will let me sleep on their couch in Huntington Beach. Or was that Ocean Beach? Shit, I don’t remember. Where does John Wayne live anyway? Anybody think it’s San Diego?”

  I never saw Paul again.