Not Fade Away

by Jim Dodge

  ‘Could I have the Reference Desk, please?’

  ‘This is the Reference Desk.’

  I put some honey in my tone. ‘Well now, ma’am. I have an unusual request, but so far in my research I’ve found that the world would get pig-ignorant mighty quick if it wasn’t for the patience and dedication of you librarians, so I’ll just blunder ahead here and trust you to sort it out. What I’m doing is some research on early rock-and-roll musicians and I’m having trouble with some background on a Beaumont musician known as the Big Bopper. That was his stage name; his given name was Richardson, J P, Jiles Perry. Now the thing––’

  ‘I bet y’all want to know where he’s buried.’

  That snapped me to attention. ‘Now, how did you know that? You librarians telepathic?’

  ‘No sir, y’all just the third person today wanted to know where this Bopper’s buried, and a man in yesterday wanted the same information. That Bopper’s sure been popular around here the last few days.’

  ‘Myself, I’m doing an article for Life magazine. I don’t know if these other folks are reporters, scholars, or just interested citizens.’

  ‘I don’t know either. They didn’t say. But I can tell without going to the clippings that Mr Richardson died in a plane crash on February the third, 1959, up around Mason City – that’s in Iowa – and he’s buried over in Beaumont at Forest Lawn. Is that what y’all wanted?’

  As I inched forward on the chair, my bare ass squeaked on the vinyl. I shared the sentiment. ‘The burial place, yes ma’am, that’s what I wanted. I’m not interested in the crash site. Is that what the other researchers are covering, the crash site?’

  ‘Truth be told,’ she lowered her voice confidentially, ‘the two men that were here today seemed more interested in the man that was in yesterday than they did in Mr Richardson. They didn’t come right out and say so, but I gather this other fellow, he’d taken some research notes from them? They asked Helen – she works the early shift – what he looked like, what sort of car he was driving, what he wanted, that sort of thing. They talked to Peebles, too – he’s the morning custodian.’

  ‘Sounds like the usual research rivalry to me. You wouldn’t believe how some of these scholars carry on.’

  ‘Lee – that’s the janitor, Leland Peebles – he didn’t think so.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No sir. He said he talked to the young one with the crazy hat yesterday when he first came in – he was wearing this bright pink hat, but I didn’t see him. I don’t come on until noon. Anyway, Peebles said the young one was either crazy or on drugs, and he thinks the other two are after him for stealing their car or some money.’

  ‘I don’t see what that has to do with the Big Bopper.’

  ‘I don’t either, but it must have something to do with it – this Mr Richardson’s the one they all asked after.’

  ‘Well, I want to thank you for your help with this. It’s appreciated, believe me. And you sure got my curiosity going about those other three guys; hope we’re not all covering the same ground.’

  ‘Glad to help y’all.’ Night, now.’

  No, I said to myself as I frantically redialed Houston Information for a number for Leland Peebles. Just help me. I’m the good guy.

  Mr Peebles recognized my voice before I got seven words into my awkward ploy. ‘Mister, there’s no way I wanna be even re-mote-ly involved in this shit. None fo’ me, thanks jus the same. I don’t know you an’ I don’t know them, but I tell ya what I do know, and that’s that them men lookin’ fo’ you is exactly the sort you don’ want to be findin’. Big and nasty sort, you understand? I got my own burden of griefs, don’t need yours or theirs. Hullo an’ goodbye.’ He hung up.

  ‘Hold on!’ I shouted. When there was only that empty hum in response, I fell apart. Paranoia started playing my brain like a pinball machine, racking up seventeen free games by the time I got the phone back in the cradle. Lights and rollovers were flashing and popping, flares exploding in the darkness, livid yellows and lurid reds. I saw the two goons in the motel office, right that minute, showing my picture to our helpful manager. ‘Yeah, sure, the guy in fourteen, that’s him. The one works for the Feds.’ I saw myself tied to the chair I was sitting on, a guy about twice Bubba’s size gagging me with a ping-pong ball and a swatch of wide adhesive tape while the smaller one fished his tools from a black doctor’s satchel.

  One shoe in my hand, an arm up a pantleg, I was scrambling around for clothes, knocking over the beer on the desk as I thrashed around on hands and knees groping for my other shoe as the cold beer dribbled off the edge of the desk onto the small of my back and down the crack of my ass, my brain screaming HEMORRHAGE! when a dry voice spoke to me with neither disgust nor loathing, just calm amusement. ‘George, not only is the mind not enough, it is evidently too much.’

  And that voice snapped my panic, pulled the plug. It was me, of course, unless I’d locked someone in the room with me, but the voice seemed to come from outside that elusive entity I generally considered my self. I reached back and gingerly touched the wetness along my ass, then examined my fingers. Beer. I cringed with humiliation: I’d blown apart under pressure like a cheap transmission scattering down the stretch. I wondered abjectly what sort of quivering puddle of shit I’d turn into if Scumball’s specialists ever caught up.

  I mustered a sort of fatal dignity and went into the bathroom, glad the mirror was so fogged with steam I couldn’t see my face. With a towel from the rack I sopped up the beer, then gathered the cleanest clothes I could find and laid them out neatly on the bed. So the bad guys were hot on my trail. Would Zorro fall apart? Shit no. Hopalong Cassidy? Are you kidding? Davy Crockett, John Dillinger, Zapata, Errol Flynn – would those guys be scrabbling around on a motel room floor too panicked by the mere idea of the crunch coming to pick up their fucking shoes? Surely you jest. I went back in the bathroom and wrung out the towel in the washbowl, then, facing myself, swabbed at the mirror. No dashing Zorro there, no cool-eyed Dillinger; neither swash nor buckle. Just crank-eyed, lip-quivering, day’s growth, sweat-gritty, wrinkle-dicked me. I walked over to the tub, lifted myself in, and sank.

  I tried not to think, but it was like trying not to breathe. My first thought, oddly enough, was that I should call Gladys Nogardam and warn her she might expect some bad company. On second thought, I figured I should call the Houston Library and leave a warning for the goons, should they consider heading her way. That gave me heart. If a ninety-seven-year-old woman could stand her ground, then so could I. If Joshua Springfield could ride his Celestial Express into a sleeping town and challenge the prevailing dreamless version of reality and not even flinch when the shooting started, surely I could dream on. After all, Gladys admired my spunk, or so she said, and they’d shot at me as well as Joshua. And Donna trying to wash the stink of sour milk out of that sweltering trailer and feed the kids – if she could go on, what was stopping me? Besides fear, doubt, and no direction known.

  What to do, where to go; the same old boring shit. Go to sleep. Go roaring back to Beaumont right into their teeth and touch it off on the Bopper’s grave. Or go to the phone, call a taxi for the airport, book a seat on the next flight to Mexico. Fuck the gift and fly away.

  Thinking, thinking, stopping only long enough to add more hot water or crack another beer. By two in the morning I was out of beer, my face was raw from the steam, and my body was beginning to pucker and prune pretty seriously, so I stood up, dripping and shriveled, and watched the water spiral down the drain, a circle sucked through itself, disappearing to wherever it went – pipes, sewer, sewer pond, evaporating back to the air, falling again as rain for the roots – and remembered again Gladys Nogardam saying, ‘You can always try to get back to the beginning.’

  I spent the next hour pacing the bedroom naked, trying to figure out some sort of beginning to return to, thinking I had to be desperately lost if I was trying to find a beginning just to begin again, assuming I was capable of distinguishing beginni
ngs from endings, assuming they weren’t just illusions.

  That’s how it was in room 14 of the Raven’s Haven Motel in Des Moines, Iowa, at 3:00 in the morning, full of failure, dread, doubt, beer, and speed. Pacing, pacing, pacing. I think it was the monotonous rhythm of walking rather than the monotony of thinking that conjured the echo of the beginning I sought. Big Red Loco taking the bandstand to play ‘Mercury Falling,’ shaping his breath into the silence we’d heard together as the stolen car flopped over the edge and fell, fell, fell, vanishing then bursting within the roar of waves breaking on the rocks. The same night the small Beechcraft fireballed into an Iowa cornfield. The first night I held Kacy naked in my arms. That was the beginning I wanted returned. Not to recapture the past but to open the present. Not a rebirth, you understand, but this birth. This life. My bewildered love, my fucked-up music, my shaky faith. But even so, it was a love with hope, a music I could still dance to, and a faith suddenly steadied by the feeling I’d finally got it right, that I knew where I was going: full circle, back to that turn-out above Jenner. A familiar plan to me, maybe even the original one, and it made me laugh. My laugh sounded a little unnerved, oddly wild.

  I dressed, packed my gear, left $10 on the dresser for the phone calls that probably saved my ass, and went out and started the Caddy. While it patiently idled, gathering warmth against the predawn freeze, I stowed my duffle and celebrated the new beginning of the end with a sip of speed chased with beer, the first of the last six-pack left in the cooler. Either I’d been lost in concentration or he hadn’t yet appeared, but it wasn’t till I popped the emergency brake that I noticed my ghost. He was sitting on the passenger’s side of the front seat, watching. Our eyes met. ‘You’re crazy, you know,’ he said.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Well, suit yourself.’

  ‘Leave me alone unless you’re going to help,’ I said, but he had already vanished.

  I swung the white rocket around in the parking lot, eased out onto the empty street, and eight blocks later found the on-ramp I wanted. The freeway was a little slick, and snow from yesterday’s storm was plowed up along the shoulders. I took it easy, getting the feel of the road. When I hit the I-80 junction I stopped for gas. I sat staring at the dinosaur on the Sinclair logo while the yawning attendant topped off the tank. I took I-80 West, headed for the California coast. A big Kenworth rumbled past me as I pulled onto the freeway, and I honked and waved. He tooted back. The road was slushy in spots, but generally good. A green mileage sign read OMAHA 130. I put Bill Haley and the Comets on the box, ‘Rock Around the Clock,’ and then put some leather to the pedal, some sole on the go. If anybody was chasing me, they were going to be further behind. I was still eighteen hundred miles out, but I was closing fast.

  I made Omaha before 6:00 Central, light just beginning to pale the sky. There was a strong cross-wind from the north, but the road was clear. It looked like straight sailing to the coast. I hoped to reach Jenner before the next dawn and figured that if I gained two hours in time changes and averaged around 80 mph, I could make a few stops and still have time on my side. Things were looking good.

  A couple of things, however, were nagging at me. One was the gut-shot spare in the trunk. Or non-spare, since it was worthless. The rubber on the right-front was new, but I’ve never liked running without some extra on board; I can’t stand how dumb you feel when you have a flat. And although I have no statistical proof, personal experience has convinced me you’re fifty times more likely to have a flat when you don’t have a spare.

  Then there was my ghost. Not that he’d returned to ride shotgun or anything alarming, but that he’d made an appearance in the first place. I figured he was a hallucination born of psychic distress and physical exhaustion, and I was certainly no stranger to hallucination. It seemed like only yesterday I’d been waltzing with a cactus under the melting desert stars, and it was yesterday that I’d seen Kacy in an Oklahoma waitress and got my gonads tenderized. I knew a hallucination when I saw one, and I’d driven truck long enough to know what tired, wired eyes could do with a heat mirage, tricks of light and shadow, semblances suggested by blurred or distant shapes, ghost-images dancing down the optic nerves when an oncoming driver neglected to dim his highbeams and left you half-blind and batting your eyes in his wake, all kinds of wild shit out there in the dark. But I’d never seen my ghost before.

  Granted, there’s a first time for everything, but it nagged me, like I said, particularly since Lewis Kerr had only the night before supposedly returned my errant ghost. I didn’t want to consider the possibility it was my ghost, for as nearly as I understood it, ghosts were disembodied spirits of the dead, and I wasn’t dead, of that I was certain – although, like a clutch plate with an oil leak, that certainty was beginning to experience some slippage. If ghosts were spirits of the dead and I wasn’t dead, maybe it was a preview of coming attractions, a warning to watch myself. Or perhaps – and this struck me as so ludicrous I immediately accepted its possibility – I was being haunted by my own ghost.

  It was mine. I was convinced of that, although recalling its visit I had to admit I hadn’t so much seen it as felt it, or maybe I’d seen it because I’d felt it so clearly. But ghost, hallucination, mirage, psycho-projection, whatever it was, it was of me.

  And yet I wasn’t alarmed. For one thing, I didn’t think it was real, at least not real in the sense that little Eddie’s blood was real, or Red’s music, or Kacy’s coiled warmth. And real or not, my ghost hadn’t seemed threatening. If anything, it apparently wanted to help – it had pointed out I was crazy more as a reminder than a judgment or warning. Maybe I now was crazy enough to have split in two, which was all right with me; I could use a spare mind.

  In Lincoln I stopped at another Sinclair station for a fill-up. I was beginning to think of that green dinosaur as a personal good luck charm. I wanted his pressed oils to power my run to the coast. I told the pump jockey to stock it to the top with gravity’s wine. When he looked baffled, I pointed to the dinosaur revolving above us atop the stanchion and explained, ‘Some of that prime, high-test dinosaur juice from the Mesozoic crush. Gas.’ He seemed glad to tear himself away from our conversation and get pumping. As I opened the trunk to get out the mangled tire, I cautioned myself that Lincoln, Nebraska, at 6:30 A.M. was not a good place to succumb to an attack of the mad jabbers.

  The tire was the shredded mess I remembered, but the rim looked fine. I held it up for the attendant’s inspection: ‘You carry my size?’

  ‘Think so, mister,’ he said, staring at the blasted casing. ‘Jesus Christ, what did you do to it?’

  ‘Misjudged an old woman’s determination.’

  He shook his head. ‘Boy, I guess so.’

  Although he did have one in stock, he couldn’t – or didn’t want to – mount it until the number-two man came on at 8:00 to cover the pumps. He looked alarmed when I volunteered to mount it myself, or to watch the pumps while he did it, and mumbled something about insurance problems. Fuck him, I decided. The right-front looked plenty good to get me to Grand Island; in fact the rubber was good enough all the way around to get me to Alaska if I wanted to risk it.

  Nebraska is a flat state – the roads so straight they have to put rumble-strips on them to keep you from going into highway trance – but it’s great terrain for making time, and I kept it up in the high 90’s as I blew down the pike. The traffic was light, and the hard cross-wind let up not far out of Lincoln.

  It was beginning to look like a classic autumn day, crisp and full of color, when I hit Grand Island one hundred fifty miles and ninety minutes later. I’d barely entered the city limits when I saw a sign that read AL HAYLOCK’S TIRE N’ TUNE, and damned if the sign didn’t feature a picture of a rubber tree. Yes sir, that’s the kind of advertising to attract a man looking for the beginning, the raw material, the unrefined source. When the mechanic said he’d need about ten minutes to mount the tire, I told him to change the oil and filter while he was at it, and to give i
t a quick tune as well. I used his restroom to drain some beer, then went off in search of a donut to throw my growling stomach.

  There was a greasy spoon two blocks west, the mechanic said, so I headed in that direction. A long stretch in the fresh morning sunlight felt good after sitting behind a wheel for hours. I was checking for traffic as I crossed a side street when my glance was seized by a huge chartreuse sign on the roof of a building about the size of a large cable car: ELMER’S HOUSE OF A THOUSAND LAUGHS. All the Os in the sign were tilted like heads thrown back in laughter, and in fact had faces painted on them, closed eyes and big open mouths out of which emerged, in pale flamingo script, assorted hee-haws, yuks, chortles, snorts, whoops, hyugha-hyughas, and other expressions of amusement and delight.

  I was attracted by the oddity of the place, but admonished myself not to court distraction when things were clicking along just fine. Besides, the place looked closed. And just as I made up my mind, someone started waving a white flag in the store window as if signaling my attention or his surrender, or perhaps a meeting under the sign of safe conduct.

  As I approached, I saw the waving flag was none of the above, but instead a floppy, butcher-paper sign a woman was taping inside a front window. HALLOWEEN SPECIAL, GET YOUR TRICKS HERE. Who could resist? Especially when I noticed that the woman behind the glass had the dourest face I’d ever seen. She looked like her breakfast had been a bowl of alum and a cup of humorless disgust.

  On the door, in small, neat script, was another sign: ‘A practical joke is one that makes you laugh.’ Above it was one of those plastic squares with two clock faces commonly used to indicate store hours, but the hands had been removed. On one clock face the sun-leached letters read: ‘Time flies like an arrow.’ On the other: ‘Fruit flies like bananas.’

  I was having serious second thoughts, but pushed the door open anyway, freezing immediately when I heard a hoarse male voice whisper urgently, ‘Edna, did you hear that? Oh Christ, I think it’s your husband.’