Not Fade Away

by Jim Dodge

  The promoters of the Winter Dance Party, Super Enterprises and General Artists Corporation, evidently believed good business is best defined – as it so often is in this country – by fat black ink on the bottom line. You want to fatten the take, you cut frills like heaters in the tour bus, laundry, or an occasional open date for rest somewhere among those all-night bus rides between Milwaukee, Kenosha, Eau Claire, Duluth, Green Bay, and all the other exhausting points along the way. Fair profit from able dealing is one thing; exploitive greed, that gluttony of heart and ego, starves everything near it as it buries its face in the trough. When you wrong the people who make the music, you wrong the music; and if Double-Gone had it right, if the music does belong to the Holy Spirit, you wrong the Holy Spirit, too. You fuck-over the Spirit, you deserve what you finally get.

  My cold, vengeful anger and the freshened sadness at their deaths inspired me to honor their lives and music, and I was glad Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens were now included. Mine was a tooth-sunk, jawlocked, bulldog determination, the kind that makes you die trying. But I feared that determination, not only because I was afraid of dying, trying or otherwise, but also because I didn’t really understand my deepened resolve. I wanted to deliver the gift and slip away. There was no need for the further entanglement of these interior motives. Just as we can disguise greed as ambition, we can dress obsession as necessity. I was afraid of not knowing which was which, afraid of losing the thread of my purpose. I was afraid I would be equally destroyed by certainty and doubt.

  I sat there with my hat over my face, trying in vain to think my way through this new confusion. At last I decided motion was best, that I’d take three beans and I-35 up through Dallas and on past Oklahoma City to Posthole Joe’s Truck Stop Cafe, where I’d see if Joe still made the best chicken-fried steak on the twenty-four thousand miles of Interstate that used to be my home. I’d be hungry by then if I laid off the speed, and I intended to do just that. I was already out on the fried, jittery edge, just asking for it, and I didn’t want to waste myself on what amounted to crazed recreation. I had to get tougher.

  A plan took shape. After Posthole’s chicken-fried steak with biscuits and gravy, I’d maybe take four more – but no more – hits of speed for dessert, and then ride on up to Kansas City, Kansas City here I come. From KC to Des Moines was only about a 21⁄2 hour run, and I could do that with my eyes closed if I had to. But I didn’t have to, I reminded myself. I’d sleep if I got tired. But it was mighty tempting to think that if I kept at it I could be soaking in a hot bath by midnight. After that, a solid eight hours of shut-eye, a good breakfast, then an hour’s drive up to Mason City and the crash site, rested and sharp for the ceremony.

  I cranked up the Eldorado and got rolling, my eyes literally peeled for that elusive sign that would read 35 NORTH: DALLAS, POSTHOLE JOE’S, K.C., DES MOINES, MASON CITY, CRASH SITE, DELIVERY, AND MAMA ON DOWN THE LINE, a sign made even more elusive by the design of downtown Houston, yet another city where the traffic engineers evidently take their professional inspiration from barbecue sauce dribbled across a local map. To find a fast lane pointing north took me ten minutes, so I put my foot in it to make up for lost time.

  The day was clear and bright, but the temperature seemed to plummet as the sun climbed. From Dallas to Oklahoma City is a flat, straight shot, with nothing much to entertain the eye except the oil rigs looming like huge skeletal birds, each mechanically dipping and rising as if locked in a tug-of-war with a cable-fleshed worm, slowly pulling it out only to have it recoil into the earth, yanking the bird’s head down with it.

  North of Gainesville I crossed the Red River, the Tex/Okie border in the north, the Tex/Louisiana boundary to the east. I remembered the Big Bopper was born near the mouth of the Red River, and doffed my hat in respectful salute. I also remembered a record I’d seen while going through Donna’s collection, ‘Red River Rock’ by Johnny and the Hurricanes; I dug it out and put it on the box, though by then I was fifteen miles into Oklahoma. Still, it seemed an appropriate gesture. The water bearing my blessing would eventually get there.

  My eyes felt like they might start bleeding if there wasn’t a total eclipse of the sun within minutes. I tried pulling my hat down for shade, but they’re not called stingy-brims for nothing. My mouth was drier than a three-year drought and my stomach had shrunk to the size of a walnut. I’d gassed up just out of Houston and again before leaving Dallas, but twenty miles across the Oklahoma line I stopped again. The place was called Max and Maxine’s Maxi-Gas Stop, and the paint-flaked sign promised HOT GAS, COLD BEER, & ALL SORTS OF NOTIONS. I told the young pump jockey to top it with ethyl and walked into the store. To my hollowed senses it seemed I was walking through pudding that hadn’t quite set.

  I bought a case of Bud, a bag of crushed ice, a bottle of eyedrops, and one of the two pairs of sunglasses left on the rack, preferring the wrap-arounds with the glossy yellow frames over the green up-swept cat-eyes studded with rhinestones. The lenses of both were caked with dust.

  I restocked the cooler in the trunk, holding out a couple of bottles for immediate consumption. By the time I had the others properly iced, my fingertips were so numb I could barely pinch a twenty from my wallet to pay the attendant. It was a pleasure to slip back inside the warm Caddy. I drank a beer, then treated my eyes to some drops; they stung like hell at first, but gradually soothed. Still blinking, dabbing at the dribbles of eyewash on my cheeks, I angled back onto the freeway. Once I was up to cruising speed, I looked around for something to wipe the dust from my new pair of Foster Grants and, when I automatically glanced up to check traffic, a sheet of white paper came swirling across the road from the right shoulder and I stood on the brakes, a scream gathering in my guts as I waited for the sickening thud of flesh against metal.

  But there was no thud, no Eddie, no child ruined against the blinding chrome; only the shriek of rubber and the brake shoes smoking on the drums as I fought to keep the rear end from whipping around – but when I heard another wheel-locked scream behind me and caught a flash of a pick-up in the rearview mirror bearing down on my ass, I cranked the wheel hard right, whipping the rear end around as the pick-up, bucking against its clamped brakes, cleared me by half a hair. I came to a stop way off on the right-hand shoulder, turned around 180°, looking straight back at where I’d just come from as adrenalin swamped my blood. I could hear myself panting. Hear my heartbeat and the barely audible throb of arteries in my neck. Hear the pounding slap of heavy boots running on pavement, growing louder as they approached: the guy in the pick-up.

  He almost tore off my door, an act I considered understandable given his adrenalin surge, his rage at my sudden and inexplicable braking, and his size. He looked like he could go bear hunting with a pocketknife and come home with meat for the table. He was wearing grungy Levis, a heavy plaid flannel shirt, a blue down vest with one pocket half ripped off, and a scuffed yellow hard hat with a Gulf Oil logo.

  ‘What the fuck do you think you’re fucking doing, you fuckhead?’

  This wasn’t a particularly civil question – not really a question at all, in fact – but was fair enough, under the strained circumstances, to deserve a prompt and truthful answer. ‘A week ago in San Francisco I was walking down the street and a little boy five years old came running down some stairs and one of the drawings he was carrying blew out in the street and Eddie – that was his name, Eddie – went right after it without a thought. I saw it coming and dove out full length to try to stop him but my fingertips just barely grazed his pants as he scooted off the curb between two parked cars and got splattered by a ’59 Merc before your heart could skip a beat. I don’t know if you saw it, but a piece of paper blew out on the road right in front of me back there and I locked ’em up on gut reflex because I never, ever-again want to see a little five-year-old mangled on the pavement, dead in his own blood.’

  ‘Yeah, okay,’ the guy said. He shut the door softly, turned, and walked away.

  Sometimes there’s nothin
g more devastating than understanding. I burst into tears. I didn’t try to fight it. I slumped over the wheel and wept for Eddie, for the kind understanding that confirms one’s pain and changes nothing, for every shocked soul forced to bear helpless witness to random mayhem, and, with a self-pity I couldn’t escape, for myself.

  When I began to notice cars slowing to check out this Cadillac pointing ass-backwards to the flow of traffic, I snuffled my nose clear and got out and made a cursory, tear-blurred check of the car to see if I’d bent or broken anything in that high-stress 180° onto the shoulder. As I squatted to check out the front end, I saw the piece of paper plastered against the grille. It was a mimeographed note, the ink sun-bleached to a faint violet shadow. My eyes hurt to read it, but I finally made it out:

  Dear Parents of Second Graders

  The second grade is having a classroom Halloween Party on the afternoon of October 31. Students are encouraged to wear their costumes to the party. The Halloween Party will be held during the last two hours of class time. Students will be dismissed at the regular time unless Rainy Day Session applies. Buses will run on normal schedule.

  I wish you all a scary (but safe!) Halloween.

  Sincerely,

  Judy Gollawin

  Second Grade Teacher

  The note really tore me up. One happily mindless mistake and the party’s over, kid. A single misstep and you break through the crust. I got back in the car and slumped against the wheel and let the tears roll. Not sniveling, or not to my sense of it. Crying because it hurt.

  You might be able to grieve forever, but you can’t weep that long, so after a while I wiped away the tears, folded up the note and put it in the glovebox with Harriet’s letter, and got myself turned around and back on the road, taking it up till the needle quivered between the double zeros of 100. This might’ve been terrifying if I’d stopped to think, the slowest mind in the west going that fast, hellbent for glory, goddamn it, no matter if I had to stop and weep at every scrap of paper that blew across my path, every sweet kid skipping off to school, every splash of blood on the highway.

  Within twenty miles I was overtaken by an undreamable feeling of peace, no doubt a combination of raw exhaustion and emotional release, but I didn’t try to figure it out. I realized, to my baffled delight, that I’d blundered into a wobbling balance, a vagrant equilibrium, a fragile poise between water and moon, and I was riding the resolution of a wave.

  It was a short ride, about an hour and a half between the last tear and Posthole Joe’s, and it felt so good I slowed down to savor it. As I passed Oklahoma City there was still an hour before sunset, but under a sky grown so leaden through the afternoon that it was almost dark, only a faint pinkish light, the ghost color of my florid hat, was holding at the horizon.

  My peace deepened when I pulled into the lot at Posthole Joe’s. The long, flat-roofed diner was the same dingy white with tired red trim, the light inside still softened to an inviting glow by the exhaust-grimed glass of the windows. Two Kenworths and a White Freightliner idled in the lot. This was a memory exactly as I remembered it, familiar and sure, a reference solidly retained, and it gladdened me that something had prevailed against change. As I walked toward the door my peaceful happiness began expanding into a sense of elation I could neither understand nor contain, only welcome. When I stepped into the warmth and rich tangle of odors inside and saw Kacy standing just to my left – tall loose blond, lovelier than I could’ve hoped to remember, wearing the white rayon dress and brown apron that Posthole’s waitresses have worn forever, just standing there out of nowhere taking the orders of two drivers in a booth against the wall – my elation vaulted into joy, and I yelled her name and took her in my arms.

  The deepest memories are the claims of the flesh, and as soon as my arms brought her close I knew I’d made a mistake. She wasn’t Kacy, but that information was caught in the joy-jammed circuits of my brain, arriving just a helpless instant before her knee flattened my testicles.

  ‘Sorry,’ I gasped on my way to the floor. ‘Honest. Mistake.’ I barely managed to wheeze out ‘mistake’ before I curled up on the scuffed beige linoleum and abandoned apology to agony. I could no longer speak, but for some reason I could hear with an amazing clarity.

  ‘Well, shit!’ Kacy’s double shouted down at me.

  ‘Man oughta look before he lunges,’ one of the guys in the booth offered as a judgment or general truth. His buddy snickered.

  The waitress knelt and touched my shoulder. ‘You all right?’

  From my new point of view it was obvious she wasn’t Kacy’s twin, or even a sister, but the resemblance was close enough to fool the desperate or hopeful. I couldn’t answer her question, though.

  She gently squeezed my shoulder. ‘I’m sorry. You scared the hell out of me, grabbing ahold like that. You want to stretch out in a booth or something?’

  I shook my head. ‘My … fault.’

  She snapped at the two men in the booth, ‘You boys done hee-hawing, maybe you could give him a hand. Christ, I don’t know what you’re supposed to do for that.’

  The philosopher in the booth said, ‘Shot you gave him, Ellie, ain’t a hand he needs, it’s a search party – to go looking for his gonads. Reckon first place I’d check is up around his collarbones.’ His buddy thought this was even funnier.

  I reached around and patted her hand resting on my left shoulder.

  ‘You gonna make it?’ she said tenderly.

  I nodded once, patted her hand again to express my thanks, then flopped over on knees and forearms, ass in the air, and started crawling for the door. I’d lost my appetite and my happiness.

  ‘Tommy! Wes!’ she barked. ‘Goddamn it, help him up!’

  They both started to slide from the booth, the witty one whining back, ‘Don’t go chewing on our asses. Wasn’t us copping feels. Man deserves what he gets.’

  I stopped and rolled over onto a hip, raising a palm to stop them. After a few breaths I’d gathered enough surplus air to form the words into half-gagged croaks. ‘What you get … belongs to you … yours.’ I nodded vigorously for the emphasis my voice couldn’t supply, then added, ‘I’ll crawl.’

  I negotiated the yard to the door, pulled myself to my knees, then used the doorknob to leverage myself upright. I wasn’t standing tall, but I was on my feet. I touched my head to make sure I hadn’t lost my hat. The waitress and truckers were watching me, a guy at the counter I hadn’t noticed before had turned around to stare, a pair of heads were craning from another booth, and a cook I didn’t recognize was peering from the kitchen. ‘Sorry,’ I told them, ‘for disturbance. Good night.’ I tipped my flaming flamingo hat politely, thinking its color was about three shades lighter than my nuts felt, then eased out the door. The Caddy was gleaming across the lot, and I headed toward it with a mincing, bow-legged shuffle, slow and easy.

  I didn’t realize till I opened the Caddy’s door and was trying to figure out how to slide in without adding to my pain that the waitress had followed me outside and was standing in front of the diner, her arms wrapped around herself against the cold. She’d wanted to make sure I made it, or so I assumed. I wished fleetingly that her arms were wrapped around me, but in my condition that would’ve been cruel for the both of us, so I simply waved. She waved in return and slipped back inside.

  Using the car door and steering wheel for support, I eased myself onto the seat, my groans and whimpers amplified in the Caddy’s voluminous interior. To keep my pelvis elevated, I braced my shoulders against the seatback and my feet against the floorboards. But you can’t drive all stretched out like that, so I held my breath and assumed the standard position; the pain wasn’t any worse, and at least I could drive. I pulled back onto the highway, running it up through the gears as fast as I could so I wouldn’t have to think about moving my legs again.

  I couldn’t help thinking about Kacy, though. The mistaken moment in the waitress’s arms was a cruel reminder of how much I missed her, how much I
wanted to hold her real and right now. The feeling triggered a rush of memories, each sweet particular sad with loss. If I had a shred of sense, I thought, I’d hang a U for South America, and go get her. If the gift is love, why wasn’t I delivering my own, face to face, belly to belly, heart to beating heart? But that good sense met the stronger conviction that Kacy couldn’t be hounded into love. She might appreciate the gesture, but not the pressure. To chase her was to lose her. I could dangle my throbbing balls in the ice chest to numb that ache, or pull in to the closest emergency room, or knock over a pharmacy for every narcotic in the locker, but there was nothing I could do about the pain of wanting Kacy, nothing except forget her, and her memory was all I had.

  There’s a shock-trance that mercifully accompanies trauma, shutting the brain down to dumb function and removing you far enough to withstand the pain. Even more fortunately, it renders you incapable of convoluted metaphysical thought and prolonged self-analysis, truly subtracting insult from injury and properly placing the anguish of inquiry far beyond the immediate agony of the flesh. When the dam breaks there’s no need to examine it for cracks or to discuss the intricacies of hydraulic engineering; you best head for higher ground. The body knows what it’s doing.