D.L. claims Ambrose ripped even that obsessive little image off, that the professor’s whole “art” is nothing more than the closet of a klepto with really good taste.
And yet the stuff exerts a kind of gravitylike force on Mark Nechtr, who distrusts wordplay, who feels about Allusion the way Ambrose seems to feel about Illusion, who regards metafiction the way a hemophiliac regards straight razors. But the stuff sits on his head. D.L. doesn’t. It’s really kind of a wonder he produces at all, back East.
In a related development, as you stand shoulder-first across thirty orthogonal meters between you and the red ring that encloses the gold chroma, and draw your 12-strand string to the tip of your nose, the point of your arrow, at full draw, is somewhere between three and nine centimeters to the left of the true straight line to the bull’s-eye, even though the arrow’s nock, fucked by the string, is on that line. The bow gets in the way, see. So logically it seems like if your sight and aim are truly true, the arrow should always land just to the left of target-center, since it’s angled off in the wrong direction right from the beginning. But the straight-aimed and so off-angled target arrow will stab the center, right in the heart, every time. It is an archer’s law that makes no sense. How is this so?
In a related fashion, occasionally a writer will encounter a story that is his, yet is not his. I mean, by the way, a writer of stories, not one of these intelligences that analyze society and culture, but the sort of ignorant and acquisitive being who moons after magical tales. Such a creature knows very little: how to tie a shoelace, when to go to the store for bread, and the exact stab of a story that belongs to him, and to him only. How to unfurl a Trojan, where on the stall door to carve BEWARE OF LIMBO DANCERS, how to give the teacher what she wants, and the raw coppery smell of a scenario over which he’s meant to exercise, not suffer, authority. And yet occasionally the tale is already authoritatively gutted, publicly there, brightly killed, done by another. Or else menacingly alive, self-sufficient, organic, sounding the distant groan of growth, trading chemicals briskly with the air, but still outside the creature who desires to take it inside and make a little miracle. How is this so?
The explanation for the latter lies way beyond anyone presently inside DeHaven Steelritter’s frightening car, unless you want to buy Tom Sternberg’s post-Murphy axiom that life sucks, then spits you out into a Dixie cup, then you pay the tab, gratuity, and Massachusetts sales tax.
The explanation for the former is as obvious as the nose we look beyond: it lies in what happens to the well-aimed arrow when it’s released; what happens while it’s traveling to the waiting target.
Things roadside keep mangling and reconstructing the car’s shadow. C.I. Airport recedes behind them, Southeast, still clearly visible, should anyone care to look back. It’s control tower’s light rondelles, shining with the pale weak quality the sun lends manufactured lights. They pass road-kill, a Corrections Facility sign interdicting any stops for hitchhikers, unmarked gravel roads, the odd mailbox, and the odder fallow field, cropless but boiling with pests in a frenzy Mark can’t figure.
They do not pass so much as are entunneled by corn, two walls of green that loom right up flush against what Sternberg hopes is a straight quick blacktop shot to Collision and Reunion. DeHaven drives with just one wrist, his white glove tapping something brisk and martial on the top of the dash. He occasionally and for no clear reason exclaims “Varoom!” D.L. humps it between the clown and J.D. Steelritter, who’s on shotgun. Magda has the hump in back and is flanked by Sternberg and Mark Nechtr, who’s now so impatient with D.L. over the whole Datsun thing that he’s afraid someone might lose his temper, here.
They were just past the pay lot’s attendant’s booth, J.D. flashing a voucher that raises any gate, when they got passed screamingly on the right by two young men and a blur of beard in something low to the ground and exquisitely foreign that treated the lot’s speed bumps like moguls.
Mark comes to the sudden realization that he doesn’t have his Dexter Aluminum target arrow. The one that’s been under his surgeon’s shirt, stabbing. Sternberg has left it back in the lounge, in that sad-looking guy’s compote.
“What about the van?” D.L. is shouting into DeHaven’s too-white ear.
“Whut?”
“Mr. Steelritter’s money-and-fear man said he called for a van for us!”
“Huh?”
“He lied!” yells J.D.
“What?”
“He lied! Close that fucking window, kid!”
DeHaven complies. Sternberg whimpers softly as they’re sealed in.
“He lied,” J.D. says. “Also doing fieldwork in false reassurance. Stratagems and effects.”
“That guy who looked just like Christ lied?” Sternberg asks.
“He looked like a Mormon,” says Mark.
D.L. turns. “Mormons don’t wear beards, darling.”
Mark doesn’t even bother to mention Donny Osmond’s new beard. He’s close to feeling upset as hell. His best wedding present, erect in heavy syrup. His prized inexpensive possession.
“No vans left,” J.D.’s explaining, crunching a Rothschild’s tip with gusto. “No limos left. Everything’s worn down, all down at Goodyear, with Mr. Wrench.” J.D.’s head is fine and utterly round, his hair rigid, thick, fitted snugly over forehead and some very red ears, trailing close-clipped sideburns. His hair suggests the squat immovability of the best Romanesque façades. No telling, of course, about DeHaven’s real hair, though his yarn has been window-blown the wrong way, slightly over its bright slight central part.
J.D.: “My own car, down with Mr. Wrench and company. We’ve been shuttling and shuttling. Everything’s in the shop.”
“Three straight days Varoom,” says DeHaven.
“Three virtually nonstop days of supervising and shuttling, thousands of people, most of them personally,” J.D. says. In enclosed spaces his voice is much smaller than he, utterly without resonance, and seems to issue from a smaller person in his pharynx somewhere, a square root of Steelritter.
“You were late as hell, you two,” he adds, producing a lighter with a tall flame.
“Problems with LordAloft.” D.L. sniffs.
“Hey, man, three miles,” the clown says, squinting past the furry steering wheel’s axis. “Three more miles, then the odometer rolls over. To all zeroes. That’s two hundred thousand on this baby. That’s a big varoom, when the odom—”
“Shut up, shitspeck.”
“Shit, Pop.” Voice of a whiny sullen hood, Mark thinks.
“… hate this car,” growls J.D. He turns to those in back, his face a red planet impaled by a cigar, his eyes bloodshot. He’s looking at Sternberg’s bad eye. “On behalf of McDonald’s I apologize for this car. This was our last car. Collision is not big on transportation.”
“Plus try to get an alum to part with his car,” DeHaven says.
“It’s not that bad a car,” D.L. says, smiling at DeHaven, whose lipstick dooms him ever to appear to be smiling back. He lights a cigarette with a complex nonchalance that confirms what Mark’s suspected.
The car sat idling in a Forbidden Zone as the six approached. Sternberg pulled Magda’s luggage for her. D.L., still groggy, was almost epileptically out of step with the other five, half hanging on her husband as he looked curiously at Magda and her stained skirt.
The car itself looked like a car for neither adults nor children. It was a huge, ageless, jacked-up, malevolent sports car—practically a car with fangs. Its crude paint job was the kind of gold-with-silverish-glitter-in-it one associates with postwar Formica. The interior was red. The car was a pastiche, home-assembled from scrounged parts, complex, rimed—much like the kind of cars assembled, maintained, and cruised in by Maryland hoods who roll cigarette packs into their sleeves and beat up sensitive heirs to detergent fortunes just on general principles. Mark narrowed his eyes at DeHaven: there may’ve been a pack up there in the polka-dot sleeve of that Ronald costume. One tough clown.
/> The deposit of a trunkful of heavy luggage didn’t change the car’s jacked-up posture one bit, either.
“This isn’t a Datsun,” D.L. had stated flatly, crossing her arms and advancing a foot to tap. Mark’s now being in the back seat, and she in front, is directly traceable to this remark. Sternberg, whose tongue tasted metal at even the thought of riding six in a car, had rolled his eye. This girl was too damn much. On the plus side, his slacks had dried in the white sun almost instantly. Brandy being a tougher nut than automatic water, Magda’s brown flight-attendant skirt was still stained. Also tight and slit, and sexy. J.D. Steelritter’s walk resembled the noiseless glide of her pulled luggage.
“I’m seen only in Datsuns,” D.L. said.
“This car’s built from parts.” Ronald McDonald slammed the loaded trunk hard, so that the dice suspended from the rearview did a jagged dance. “I built this baby from scratch. It’s not technically an anything. It’s a me, if it’s anything.”
“Shut up, shitspeck.”
“I’m under instructions to avoid cars that aren’t Datsuns,” D.L. said firmly.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Sternberg moaned.
Mark now had his hands out before him, apart, palms opposed, his eyes cast upward.
Magda looked over at him. “Prayer?”
“Mosquito.” He clapped, looked at his red palms. “Full, too.”
J.D. Steelritter was looking D.L. over speculatively. They were all perspiring in the humidity by now, though Sternberg led the field in gabardine slacks and a forehead full of tributaries. His sumac throbbed in the sun.
“Let me guess,” Steelritter said, looking D.L. over speculatively, supporting a big lower lip with a finger and that finger’s elbow with his other arm’s crook. “Artist,” he speculated. “Free-form sculptor.”
“Writer. Poet. Postmodernist. Regionally published.”
“I’ll take the hump,” Magda Ambrose-Gatz volunteered. She got prettily in the back of the growling car and slid over.
“Tell you what, Eberhardt.” J.D. Steelritter knows you have to know when to concede the easy concession. She’ll get hers. “We write DATSUN in the shameful no-pride dust on the kid’s rear window, here,” scrawling a big NISSAN next to the WARSH ME! that was already there. He made a voilà with his hands, one finger dark. “Now it’s a Datsun.”
Mark laughed. Pretty resourceful.
It both relieved Sternberg and gave him the creeps. “An instant Datsun?”
After an interval of further interpretation and persuasion, a kind of undignified scramble for places ensues, resultant positions appearing above. DeHaven grinds gears—the gearshift in this car is up next to the steering wheel, where Mark has before seen only automatic shifts. DeHaven’s manipulations of the idiosyncratic shift summon images of fencing.
He guns the car, which, instead of shuddering or rattling the way home-assembled things are supposed to, seems rather to gather itself more densely into its wedged shape. He guns it. We seem to be minus a muffler.
“Varoom!” shouts the clown, rolling down his window and laying quality rubber.
“Hibbego!” shouts J.D. Steelritter, thinking how if the speck of shit says For Whom one more time he’s gonna…
To the Egress. To the Funhouse.
And as they drive more deeply into the Central Illinois countryside, which encases them in a cartographic obelisk, walled at the sides and tapered to green points at the horizons front and back, Magda Ambrose-Gatz—who, way back, newly divorced, just twenty-one, way, way back, before recorded history as understood by the four young people here, had represented the very first housewife on the then-embryonic McDonald’s national campaign to realize and reveal through interpretive tap dance that, hey, she deserved a break from the vacuum and hot stove her equally tap-happy husband had remanded her to, a break, today—Magda starts up a conversation in back, that hard kind to carry on from the hump, flanked by boys, her head swiveling like a tennis spectator, in answer to Sternberg’s awed remark that he’d no idea there was this much corn on the whole planet. She explains that the usually awfully generous U.S. government won’t reimburse Illinois farmers for leaving their fields fallow—the soil’s too rich here, and the macroeconomics of the nation’s richest fields dictate maximum tillage—and but that, in the dark screw microecon drives into the agricultural picture, that very fertility produced so much corn—so thick and tall that DeHaven must (as was in a way foretold) downshift and pump distressingly vague brakes at every rural intersection they pass, slow way down, scan for vehicles whose perpendicular approach the crops’ sheer size would obscure—so much corn that it’s literally worthless, oodles (her term) of bushels of Supply that intersect the market’s super- (Sternberg’s term) elastic Demand curve down near the base, where Supply equals oodles and Price equals the sort of coin you don’t even bother to bend over to pick up if you drop it. There’s agronometric bitterness in her voice, which resonates even at low volume—the result of breasts of high caliber, Sternberg figures—as she sketches with broadly historical strokes the unworkable marriage that sent her West from Tidewater regions, postwar, in time to marry a speculator in Illinois land, and then but how the land got so fertile it’s worthless, if that makes sense, but how the speculator—presumably a Mr. Gatz?—was married to the land, and wouldn’t leave, even after a foreclosure that forced them to live in his car, a car with tailfins, cervically pink (embellishment Mark’s), so that soon she was having to do commercials, in nearby Collision, to supplement income; and then but commercial offers withered up as she aged (gracefully), and her face got sort of orange (inference Mark’s)—and the speculator’s attachment to land and car got to be… well, she divorced the speculator, who now dabbles in pesticides, though not the unfortunate brand currently viewed by pests as incentive, and now she’s a flight attendant—an aloft waitress, she terms it—for a commuter line, with turboprops and unpressurized cabins, though she still cameos in the occasional Steelritter BrittAir ad, though always from the rear, a rear which is shapely and not at all orange (inferences and embellishments flying like unspoken shrapnel all over the inside of the menacing car), and is touching, ever so lightly, Sternberg’s own gabardine leg through Magda’s brown skirt, though there’s a good-sized gap of red vinyl seat between her other ham and the leg of Mark Nechtr.
And, in a way, there’s a sort of colored gap between Mark Nechtr and everybody else in DeHaven’s homemade car. He has no historical connection to where they’re going, has never appeared in a McDonald’s commercial, has no connection to anything here except D.L., through a mistake and miracle and the ethical depth to try to do what ought to be right by her, although shouldn’t she be showing by the end of six months? And but nobody at the Reunion will know him, or want anything from him, and he’s left his equipment in an O’Hare locker and a dish of overpriced fruit. He feels unconnected, alone, sort of alienated, in transit, tightly enclosed, surrounded by a vast nothing that’s alive.
He asks Magda the obvious question about to whom the remark about the unworkable Maryland marriage had been a reference, given her hyphenated name, but the question is forfeit in a great high-velocity wind as J.D. torches another Rothschild, and his cracked window positively roars, and also admits a lot of odd little gnats, and Sternberg behind J.D. lights a 100 in retaliation and also cracks his window, and D.L. coughs significantly and flips on the Heathkit radio DeHaven has built into the deep-red dash of the car, loudly. The static of the radio as D.L. scans for something contemporary sounds, to Mark, like Atlantic surf. The mixture of J.D.’s and Sternberg’s lit offerings is a kind of violet gas that swirls frantically around in the sunlight that lights the eastern half of the homemade jacked-up car.
Sternberg asks, with a barely hidden pathos, if they’re almost there yet.
D.L. homes in on an audience-participation-call-in program on a crime-and-gospel station that identifies itself in three-part slide harmony as Wonderful WILL. The program, at near the top of DeHaven’s 110-wa
tt capacity, is something called “People’s Precinct: Real-Life Crimes,” today’s installment entitled “Murder or Suicide: You, the Audience, Decide.” A stormy Midwest love affair ends in the impalement and death of one of the lovers. The other lover was at the scene, but only the dead lover’s fingerprints are found on the weapon. “You,” the announcer says, “the Audience, Decide.” Giving a 900-number. Certain evidence is presented, and Mark feels the stab of a story that is his own, yet true about others.
Sternberg is asking Magda just where they are. The car moans on turns and clicks on smooth tar. They’ve already turned onto small rural roads several times. The two open windows are yielding still more little insects as they pass a rare night-black fallow field. The insects are weird, small, have transparent wings, seem not to fly, but just sit there, all over the windows’ insides, inviting squashing; and, when squashed, smell.
D.L. looks up from her notebook and poem—the only person Mark’s ever seen who can produce anywhere, even when being jouncily propelled—assumes her mean-nun posture at the radio’s presentation of hideous crime, and shouts into J.D. Steelritter’s red ear that one of the best indications that some sort of apocalypse is on the way is the fact that violent public crime’s scales of practice are tilting: how it seems like, each year, violence reveals itself less and less as the capacity, and more and more as just the raw bare opportunity, to harm. DeHaven responds by shouting that the only really sure sign of cataclysm’s coming is if the Cubs actually win the pennant, as this year they’re in danger of doing. J.D. asks him to shut up, waving irritably at a tailgating car to pass. The car does pass, a Chrysler, crammed with Orientals. It’s doing about 100.
J.D. Steelritter says goddamn slopehead Orientals. They’re taking over the planet. It’ll be either them or insects on top, at the end. And precious little difference either, he might add. He smashes some of the gnats that sit stoically on the jouncing dash. Smells at his fingers. They’re all over the place, he says: fucking Orientals. Doing their calculus at age eight and working their blank twenty-hour days. Realizing their only strength is in numbers. He asks when was the last time anybody in this car ever saw an Oriental alone, without a whole ant-farm of other Orientals around them. They travel in packs. The Chrysler that’s passed them had a bumper sticker that asks you to be careful: baby on board. J.D. is able to talk, gesture with his hands, and smoke all at once.
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