Monday, November 25, 2013

We knew what Anthony would say before he did,



because it was what he always said, and maybe it was true. Thing was, nobody cared. I don’t mean just Julio and I, but the world. It didn’t give a shit. So we didn’t either, not because we were callous--which we were to a degree because life forces you to grow thick skin in the places where it rubs you raw--but because we had heard it before, too many times to count. You grew callouses or you blistered. Anthony didn’t seem to get that. He expected the world to give when he crashed his head against it.  

It didn’t. But the people around him usually did, for a while at least. It was just Anthony.

But there comes a point when you have to stop giving, no matter how sorry you feel for someone, because if you don’t, you turn into them, ramming your skull against a wall. It’s not a wall made of bricks or stone but of forgiveness. You let things go that you shouldn’t. Then you do it again, and again, until somewhere along the line you realize there’s nothing left, and you just can’t give any more. We were at that point, Julio and I. Some things you can’t forgive, and everybody has their line.

Anthony hadn’t learned where ours were yet, but he was about to.

He came rolling up in his beat to shit Ford Maverick, gunning it hard into the turn onto the wheel-rut trail leading down to the campsite. He almost lost it, cutting the wheel too late and fishtailing, no doubt caught somewhere between a grin and a grimace as he fought for control. I’d been in the car with him when he pulled a similar stunt once, two summers ago, as the Fourth of July bash Nancy and Grover had thrown was winding down. We were on our way to Leonard’s place, to beg a doobie from the grizzled ex-con. Anthony piled it onto a big rock that time, and we walked the rest of the way. I stayed outside when we got to Leonard’s. Janet, Leonard’s wife, answered the door and tried to tell Anthony to come back tomorrow, Leonard was crashed. He barged past her into the trailer and about five seconds of banging and cussing later, came bouncing back out, blood gushing from his nose and the promise of a cut throat following him into the yard.

He said it then, as we were walking back to Nancy and Grover’s. He always said it.

Now he killed the engine and hopped out of the Maverick, sashayed over to the fire and sat on one of the stumps across from us. Julio handed him a beer, asked if I was ready. I shook my head and lit the joint I’d been rolling and passed it to Anthony. He grinned and took a long hit, nigger-lipping.

Nobody said anything until the joint was gone, more beers opened. Then Anthony broke the silence. You could always count on that.

“What’s up?” he asked.

Julio shrugged, looked out across the lake, anger smoldering in his dark gaze.

“Fuck you, Anthony,” I said.

“What?” Like he didn’t know.

He did, I saw it in his eyes, flicking back and forth between Julio and me, never stopping on either of us for more than half a second. They found his feet.

Julio said, “Suzie told me.”

Anthony watched the scuffed toes of his boots dig in the sand, hoping for purchase. They would never find it, because the world was too slippery for Anthony, and he wasn’t slippery enough.

“Finish your beer,” Julio said.

Anthony did, in one long pull. He was a trooper, I’ll give him that, only he had no fucking idea in what army he belonged, or in what war. Nobody had the heart to tell him there were neither. That shit was for the TV news, boardrooms and back rooms where the cigar and single-malt crowd did the quid pro quo shuffle. In real life, where real people had to do or die, there were only skirmishes whose meaning fled before the dust had settled, and sides that were never really drawn so much as roughly sketched.

Anthony let loose with a booming belch.

Julio nodded and stood. “Get up,” he said.

Anthony got to his feet and Julio hit him between the eyes, the sound of it ringing out across the water. Anthony stumbled back and Julio belted him again, a jabbing left, followed by a powerful uppercut that put Anthony on his ass. He sat there, legs splayed, a stupid expression on his face, like he had no idea how this had come to pass. Julio stepped in, his foot reared back to kick that face with its ridiculous chin beard. Then he stalled, his foot slowly dropping back to earth, his anger burning out, leaving disgust in its wake.

“Shit,” he said, “asshole.” He went back to his stump and sat, Suzie’s honor defended and its marring avenged. Steam rose off his shoulders in the chilly air. He opened a beer.

Anthony looked at me as I got to my feet.

I wanted to pick up where Julio had left off, kick that stupid face to mush, leave his mouth a bloody toothless door swinging on broken hinges. He deserved it. At least then he’d have an excuse for not keeping it shut. My uncle was sitting in the Holbrook Hilton because of that mouth, the lack of brains behind it.

But I couldn’t. He was too pathetic. It would be like kicking a retarded dog to death.

“Shit,” I said. “Get up.”

Anthony shook his head, looked away. That really pissed me off, almost enough to say fuck it, start kicking, but not quite.

“Get off your ass or I’ll boot you into a coma, Anthony, I swear.” I took a step forward and Anthony scooted backward, all heels and elbows.

“I mean it,” I said.

He met my eye and saw that I did, that I hoped he would make me angry enough to do it, and he scrambled to his feet, turning over so his bony ass stuck in the air. It was tempting, but I held back.
When he got turned around I was right there, in his face. Before he could move I grabbed his belt and the front of his lined flannel shirt and heaved, and he was up over my head, his whole buck-thirty. I took two lunging steps and threw him into the icy water of Fool Hollow Lake, as far out as I could. His head missed one of the slabs of volcanic rock jutting from shore by two or three inches. Pity, I thought, as I turned and went back to my stump.

Julio handed me a beer and I drained it, took out my bag and rolled another joint. Anthony splashed and cursed his way to shore, sat on his stump, dripping and shivering. Julio threw some more logs on the fire and it reared up, flooding the drowned canyon with that eerie glow only campfires throw, making our shadows into mad dancers.

Capering was the word. Like the dude that lived in Anthony’s head.

I grunted and lit the joint while Julio passed out beers. Anthony took his and grinned. All was forgiven, that stupid grin said. It wasn’t and never would be, but you couldn’t tell him that, could never make him see. He’d served his penance. Like some Catholics. Someday, somebody would shoot him.

“Thanks,” he said.

“Fuck you, Anthony,” Julio and I said, in stereo. We didn’t laugh, because we knew what was coming. It wasn’t funny, not anymore.

Anthony didn’t disappoint.

“Tough job, but somebody’s got to do it,” he said, and tilted his beer, Adam’s apple bobbing.

I looked at Julio, his black eyes like holes in his dark face. He gave a little shrug, an involuntary snort puffing air from his nostrils. Futility, it said.

But maybe Anthony was right, and if so, I wondered why, knowing I’d never find out. God works in mysterious ways and all that shit. Apparently the world needs its walking disasters to remind the rest of us how thin the knife-edge we walk really is, how easily they could be us, we them. Or maybe they exist to serve as an analogy for the entire human race. It’s a good one, I sometimes think. Then I wonder what kind of fucked up God would delight in such absurdity. And then I shrug, just like Julio had, that same little snort escaping me.

Tough job, but somebody’s got to do it.



SR


***

We've all known someone like Anthony at one time or another. What did you learn from yours? How far did he or she push you until you pushed back?


Friday, November 15, 2013

We got a lot of strange looks,



the old Navajo and I. He didn’t fit in at Denny’s. The hostess wrinkled her nose at his eau de dumpsteur when she seated us. He cackled and coughed as she walked away, her double-wide hips swishing in their polyester casing. My eyes watered, and I wasn’t sure if it was from breathing last night’s Thunderbird or the broken heart seeing always gave me. Bearing witness. I wondered what Kit Carson would make of this, any of it. All of it.

He ordered the Grand Slam, over easy, and I drank a pot of coffee while I watched him eat, his fingertips emerging from their gloves of layered grime, grease running down his proud chin. He was old, and I wondered what had broken him. Then, recalling the two summers I’d spent on the Res working a landscaping and irrigation crew as a supervisor in my late teens, didn’t have to wonder at all. When you spend a lifetime searching for who you used to be, who you’re supposed to become, finding neither, it isn’t hard to slide into a bottle. Those curved walls offer the illusion of clarity while they warp the world, the way a smile warps a politician’s face. Two-hundred years of grief and loss creasing nut-brown faces deeper than twenty centuries of sun and wind.

He wasn’t getting a piece of the casino. Twin arrows had pierced his heart, and the hearts of his land and people. Their names were progress and profit.

The rumble of eighteen-wheelers passing on the interstate shook the air while overweight drivers waddled across the lot to the pizza buffet. Wal-Mart hustled and bustled next door. I needed to get going. It was a long way to Pomona, and the sun was setting the western sky afire. Somewhere out there the old man’s family might be sitting on a hill watching sheep graze, curl-horned rams nuzzling the ancient earth for sustenance. I could feel them, like ghosts sinking below the horizon, pulling wool blankets tighter around themselves as the digital age declared them obsolete and the cold deepened.

When he started licking his plate I ordered him another Grand Slam and drank another pot of coffee while he got himself around it. Later, after I was in the wind, he’d go in search of some liquid warmth, the sort of help I wouldn't offer. I hoped he would find it, and that was goddamn sad.

He’d scared the hell out of me when he popped up from the dumpster while I was tossing my bag of garbage. I’d probably beaned him in the head with it. He was applying his tongue to an empty Snickers wrapper in long slow strokes and never stopped, even as he did the jack-in-the-box.

His eyes settled on mine after a momentary effort, as if he had to concentrate to focus on me, as though I weren’t real, not part of the world. I guess I wasn’t, not for him.

“Hungry,” he said. No shame, just fact.

I stared at him, my heart subsiding into something like a normal beat, if there ever was such a thing. I could smell him from ten feet away, beneath the broiler smoke and fryer steam wafting on the breeze. A raven circled overhead, waiting its turn.

“Yeah?” I said.

He nodded, slow, eyes never leaving mine and some kind of dark amusement in them, as if he could at least find a minimal satisfaction in frightening the white boy skipping along the edge of his former range.

I thought about that, remembering the twenty guys we’d kept in beer money and gasoline back in ’91, how they’d amounted to something like two-hundred faces filtering through our three job sites, how a few had stuck for the whole gig, how we’d become friends, hitting the bootlegger’s for a buck a beer and foil-wrapped dimes of diesel-soaked weed. Peyote meetings and fishing at Tsaile Lake and a desperate groping toward companionship with a dusky beauty ten years my senior, fueled by lust and the Sweethearts of the Rodeo and Bud Light, and that searching for definition that I understood was actually our only real common ground.

“Yeah,” he said.

I thought about the looks we’d get, the whispers and behind the hand comments and maybe the manager coming over to tell us we had to go. The affront my new friend and I would hand them, the dare to show themselves. I recalled a stray bitch in a parking lot two-thousand miles away, teats heavy and sagging, ribs showing, eyes darting, a can of tuna and a small hunk of cheese and a whole lot of sorry for the human race. I wondered what it all said about me.

The old man took my measure, waist-deep in refuse. Or maybe he didn’t. Maybe he was just curious to see what I’d do.

I stared back for a moment. Then I gave a little upward nod and pointed over his shoulder at the Denny’s with my lips and said, “Come on then,” and turned my back while he scrambled over the side.


SR

***

Like most of these posts this little tale is more memory than story, and that's because it stuck with me, and that's because its not little at all. As the horizon of the past recedes into the distance, it looms above the other landmarks, a milepost casting a long shadow. 

What looms large in your rearview mirror?

Saturday, November 9, 2013

Forty-two years later,



evening light slanting through crimson leaves, the tang of wood smoke in air gone just the right amount of chilly, a passionate woman’s shower-damp hair cool against my neck and smelling of flowers, puppy fur banging my nose, the delicate thunder of electrified guitar strings, the sting of golden needles brewed with care in the back of my throat, these things still amaze. They bring me back to life, in the sense that the road brings me back home again, and again, and again.

I’ll quote Bilbo Baggins this day that is just another, but whose alignment of season marks my own personal anniversary:

The road goes ever on and on…   


SR 

Monday, November 4, 2013

The scorpion was seeking warmth

as the sun set on the Sonora, the air going chill and shadows oozing from the mountains to stretch across the Valley. It was one of those little ones, with the most potent venom. It crawled out of a mortar joint in the stacked flagstone pillar holding up the cabaƱa that fronted the restrooms. The one where the payphone was mounted. It crept onto my uncle’s big round shoulder as he was trying to call his little brother, Bud.

There was no answer, and that sucked. It was time to go, leave the Valley behind and head up the mountain, start a new life amid the pines bristling from an island in the sky. Little bro had our money, and we wanted our dope so we could float up the Rim on a cloud of bliss.

My uncle didn’t panic as he put the receiver back in its chrome cradle. He was of the desert, although he wasn’t born there like me. He had grown up in the Valley when it was still wild around the edges, and the big burbs hadn’t yet bled into each other. Fishing in the canals and camping beneath mammoth Tamarisk trees. Running coon up the Verde. Roofing houses and drinking Budweiser with the kids of Okies who’d fled the Dust Bowl.

He knew about scorpions, calmly bent and plucked a paper cup out of the trash barrel and scooped the little arachnid into it just as I emerged from the restroom. Around us, darkness fell on South Mountain Park. He showed me the scorpion, circling the bottom of the cup, tail curled, looking for something to sting.

I decided to keep it.

The road down out of the park offered glimpses of city lights like scattered jewels. The thick sheets of Styrofoam insulation beneath the cheap paneling we’d spent the day lining the old van with squeaked as we trundled along. Long spiny fingers of ocotillo reached for us from the shoulders, waving in the breeze. Thick pads of prickly pear glowed in the headlights, furred with micro-thorns. Everything had flower buds growing on it, waiting for winter rains to nourish them into fattening and opening into an explosion of color. 

Once we hit the grid, I watched strip-malls slide past the windows, seeing the deaths of orange groves. I wondered where my mom had gone, and missed my girlfriend, and hoped her parents didn’t hook her on the coke they freebased by the ounce each week. 

But I knew it was too late. 

Time to get the fuck out of Dodge.

Bud came through with the bud and we hit the road, heading for the high country and the acres of ground my uncle owned. I imagined myself riding into a cabin yard at sunset on the back of a palomino. A Zane Grey dream.

That night we camped in the van on my uncle's land. It was late and we were tired. The wind was blowing hard and had been since Payson. There was a dusty-wet smell in the air I didn’t recognize but liked. We parked next to a burn barrel and shut it down, squat junipers waving bluish fronds in the headlights. Rolled in multiple blankets we slept, the platform bunk we’d built from scrap lumber a sturdy perch, me trying to forget the way he sometimes touched me, the way I sometimes let him.

It occurred to me that I was the scorpion. Born in November and seeking the warmth of contact. The wind fell dead silent in the hours before dawn. The witching hours.

I woke to seven inches of fresh snow, fat flakes spinning out of a white sky like down, making a hard world soft. We built a fire in the barrel and roasted cheap hot dogs and heated cans of chili. The last of the money we’d earned doing day labor alongside homeless guys and winos.

It was Christmas Eve. I had just turned sixteen.

The scorpion died in the night, curled at the bottom of the cup. It couldn’t live in this new world, had fled the cold and the thin air a mile and a half above the sea. The warmth it had found was a lie.


SR