Across hours of Missouri Willy complains of the new morality. “In the sixties we took to the streets to fight for the right to express our love freely. Now you are becoming businessmen, spending money, getting married.” Willy sniffs. “Was it for this that we fought the tear gas and the dogs?”
“Tear gas?” Raphael is puzzled. “Are you talking about Vietnam? Or getting married?”
“I am talking about the free expression of love,” Willy says. “Between men and women, or women and women. Or men and men.” He touches Raphael’s shoulder lightly. “But perhaps I offend.”
Raphael, taken aback, stays cool—cool is where he wants to be; it is the state of being to which he aspires. “Jeez, man. I’m almost nineteen years old.”
“Then perhaps you are married. Or engaged.”
“No, no.”
Raphael wonders at the drift of this conversation, and its progression from marriage to sex to himself. He pushes his uneasiness from his mind. He is on his way to California, where he will meet and fall in love with a California girl, preferably blonde. Elated at the thought, he grins, raising his fist to the roof. “To the new morality!” he cries. “In defeat of ourselves!”
Willy nods, a satisfied bob of his chin. “I will tell my friends of this. They visit New York, they see the Statue of Liberty and think they have seen America.” He pats Raphael’s shoulder. “I have set out to see the true America. And you are my first true American.”
“I’m not much of a true American,” Raphael says. “I’m volunteering for the McGovern campaign. I’m practically fleeing my county draft board, which would like nothing more than to stick a gun in my hands and ship me off to Vietnam. I’m driving an eight-year-old car made in Detroit.”
“What could be more American?”
“Lots of things,” Raphael retorts. “Jell-O. Soap operas. The flag. Racism. That’s why I’m heading to California.”
“Ah,” Willy says. “You will escape all this in California.”
“The East has better schools,” Raphael says confidently, “but it’s everything I want to get away from. Old. Stuck on itself. Hidebound.”
“Hide-bund?”
“Bound.”
“Ah, bound. As with leather.”
“No, that’s different. Leatherbound is for books.”
“Books? What have books to do with leather?”
Raphael, who has never spoken with a foreigner, feels as if he is being mocked. He raises his voice, as if he can convey comprehension through volume. “Never mind. The point is you go west to get away from all that background and history. What about you? Why are you going west? I mean, why that place over any other?”
“Cowboys,” Willy says promptly. “I am interested in cowboys. Are there cowboys in Missouri?”
Raphael turns to the window to hide his smirk. “There aren’t any cowboys at all. Not anymore.”
“But I see them in movies. I learned English from them. ‘Do not forsake me, oh, my darling,’” Willy sings, Gary Cooper with a German accent.
“That’s in the movies,” Raphael says witheringly. “Surely you don’t think that’s the real thing.”
“All America is a movie. You are living in a movie.”
“Oh, give me a break.”
“I do not expect that you would think so. I am German. I am the audience. You are American. You are in the movie.”
“I am not—”
“I saw cowboys, in Chicago. Wearing pointed boots and big white hats.”
“People still wear cowboy clothes. I mean, people can wear anything they want to.”
“In America.”
“Anywhere. But they aren’t real cowboys. First the railroads came,” Raphael says, quoting some distant history book. “With the invention of barbed wire—”
“And Indians, with their beautiful hair, I saw them in the streets, like Sicilians or Turks. Dirty, poor, drunk at noon.”
“Well, the Indians have been treated brutally.”
“At the hands of the cowboys, yes. Whom we will meet. Although”—here Willy’s hand makes an end run around the Flash-o-matic, rising to stroke Raphael’s hair—“your hair, it is as nice.”
Raphael shifts in his seat. He jerks up his arm as if fending off a blow, but Willy’s hand is gone, leaving Raphael waving his hand above his head and feeling foolish, while Willy plants a crescent fingernail on the map, tracing their route west.
They stop for the night at Wigwam Village, a bungalow motel outside Emporia, Kansas. The bungalows are built to resemble tepees, reinforced concrete over a tent of rusting I-beams. They range in a circle around a cracked and rusting swimming pool. The pop and click of a red neon sign (OTEL—OTEL—OTEL) is the only sound.
Willy emerges from the office, holding a key high. “We are in number nine,” he says, and sets about scanning numbers over tepee doors.
The motel manager—big-busted, black-haired with pink curlers—props herself against the office doorjamb, holding a shoulder bag. “Kind of young to be traveling alone,” she says to Raphael.
“I’m almost nineteen years old,” Raphael says. “And I’m not alone.”
She saunters to Raphael’s side, runs a frank hand over his chest. Some visceral part of him grumbles and contracts. He stuffs his hands in the back pockets of his jeans and scuffs a toe at the rich Kansas loam, so different from the thin, stony soil of the Kentucky hills. “Relatives don’t count,” she says.
“Relatives?”
“Your brother.”
“There must be some mistake,” Raphael says. “He’s not my brother.”
The manager’s eyes drift shut, then she opens them and steps back. “Figures. You run a motel, you see it all.” She drops the bag. “Whatever he is, he left his purse.” Raphael retrieves it from the dust.
“A picture!” Willy beckons from the wigwam door, waving an Instamatic. “We must have a picture. You must ask the manager if she will take it.”
“No pictures with me. No way.”
Willy points to the wigwams. “But this is America.”
“Your America, maybe. Not mine.” Raphael takes his shaving kit from the car and enters the room, dodging the camera in Willy’s outstretched hand.
Number nine has only one bed, a small double. At the sight Raphael’s gut ties itself in a small, terrified fist, but he quells his fears. After all, he is the driver, the native son, the English speaker. He is cool; he is in control. “I have a girlfriend,” he says with studied casualness. “I’m meeting her in San Francisco.”
“Of course,” Willy says, tucking the camera in his bag. “You are an American, child of the seventies. You will meet your girlfriend in California, where you will marry by the ocean and go to the university in law.” Willy laughs and squeezes Raphael’s shoulder. “Or business.” He ruffles Raphael’s hair, then stretches his hands over his head, popping his knuckles and yawning.
“I have to be in California in three days,” Raphael says. “I’m meeting my girlfriend in San Francisco on Thursday. I’m not stopping except to sleep.” He takes a deep breath, then delivers the punch. “Maybe I should take you to some likely-looking place and let you out. You could get a ride with somebody who’s taking his time to see the country.”
Willy cocks his head. “Your car is not healthy?”
“My car is just fine.”
“You are in luck. I am a mechanic.” Willy pulls a film can and a pipe from his shoulder bag. “You want to get high?”
Raphael hesitates. He has never smoked marijuana. To accept this hospitality is to choose to allow Willy to continue on. He thinks of the temperature gauge on the Rambler, which for most of the day hovered near boiling. He studies the pipe, which Willy has thrust into his hand.
The pipe is small, hand-molded from some jade-green clay. It fits comfortably in his palm, a compact, tangible correlation of the vast, extraordinary, unimagined experiences that await him, of the gap between the whitewashed world that has penetrated to the remote hills
and hollows of his childhood, and the vast, astounding, seductive, inviting world as it really is. He takes the pipe to his lips. In this gesture, in this moment his world divides and complicates itself, a geometrically progressing mitosis whose end he cannot foresee or imagine.
“That woman, with the pink things in her hair,” Willy says. “She insulted my accent. I have no accent.”
Raphael demurs tactfully—he is a Southern boy, he knows his manners. “Just a little accent.”
“A bitch.” Willy says, with feeling.
For the first time in his life Raphael finds himself siding with the curler-headed motel managers and greasy-spoon owners of the hinterlands. “A Kansan,” he says. “An American. A true American. What do you expect?”
“Cowboys,” Willy says. “At least, that is what I am looking for. But we are not yet far enough west.”
Willy strips and climbs into bed. Watching from the corner of his eye, Raphael sees that he wears small, tight underwear, striped in some pattern of green and navy blue. Raphael’s groin tightens. Resolutely he turns his eyes to the wall and steps out of his jeans, but his eyes have taken on a life of their own—they know what they want, and it is stronger than what his mind wants, and he cannot keep himself from turning and looking. He retreats to the bathroom, where he shuts and locks the door.
Lingering over his toothbrush, he considers those parts of his life that until a very few weeks before he assumed no one in the world shared. Then he went for his induction physical, to encounter its questionnaire’s forthright acknowledgment (homosexual tendencies?) of the slow, swelling, subcutaneous movements that until then he had allowed himself to acknowledge only in secret, and then only long enough to deny that they exist.
Why has he encouraged Willy’s talk of free morals, free love, free sex? Why did he pick up this strange red-haired man in the first place? Why has he allowed Willy to stay? Raphael leans his head against the mirror, staring down his reflection.
Leaving the bathroom, he crawls under the covers, still wearing his underwear, his T-shirt, his socks. He is settling himself when Willy flings an arm over his shoulder, carelessly, as if Raphael’s back were the most convenient armrest.
The mattress sags, hopelessly. Raphael clings to its edge to keep from sliding downhill into the hollow created by Willy’s weight. He lies on his stomach, crushing his arms to pins and needles, until long after Willy’s feigned snores have given way to shallow breathing.
His nails dug into the mattress, Willy’s hand dangling before his eyes, Raphael falls into a place between waking and sleep. Behind his eyelids the road unrolls endlessly. At his side sits a California woman, blonde and tanned—but Raphael turns, and it is red-headed Willy, in a Stetson hat and a pearl-buttoned shirt.
Raphael wakes. Overhead, nesting in the wigwam peak, sparrows chatter. The paper blinds blink: gray with dawn; lurid with neon light. In his half-sleep he has turned over, slid down into the bed’s hollow. Willy’s hand is working its way under the elastic of his underwear, his fingers lingering in the curl of Raphael’s pubic hair.
Raphael lies stiff, frozen, clammy with sweat. He tells himself that this is not happening, that he is not here, that he wants only to be in California, where he will find what he is looking for. He wants only this: to get where he is going. At almost nineteen years old, is this so much to ask?
At the thought he rises abruptly. Willy’s hand flops against the bedclothes. Raphael heads for the shower, where he stays until he is certain the hot water has run out, and that Willy’s shower will be cold.
Desire, the parish priest told the boys in Raphael’s eighth-grade class, is a many-pointed star, turning and pricking in the heart. Their consolation was to know that with age its points would be worn smooth, even if the turnings never ceased. Tailgating farmers across the flattening plains, Willy at his side, Raphael remembers this wisdom, and wonders how long he will need to wear down his points.
Kansas drowns in rain. Raphael considers putting Willy out but argues himself into letting him stay. The Rambler’s temperature gauge continues to rise, and Willy is a mechanic. Raphael points out to himself that in the crunch, he did not give in to the prickings of desire. He is still in control. Over the cheerful slap of the windshield wipers, he makes small talk.
They approach Dodge City. There is a bypass. Willy, who is driving, ignores the sign. “We’ll take the bypass,” Raphael says.
“You will pass by Dodge City?” Willy is incredulous.
“Dodge City will be just another tourist trap.”
“There will be cowboys in Dodge City.”
“Willy, there are no cowboys.” The bypass signs loom, green and white. “We’re taking the bypass. I’m on my way to school. I have to be in California in two days.”
“Just for lunch.” Willy digs a finger into Raphael’s side. “Maybe you will find yourself a cowboy.”
The bypass is upon them. “Willy, it’s my car and my trip and my gas. If you want to walk, get out and walk. Otherwise, take the goddamn bypass.”
Willy wrenches the car into the right lane. Oblivious of oncoming traffic, he cranes his neck to cast a straining, wistful glance south, over the soggy brown plains. Raphael folds his arms and stares out the window.
They are in Colorado before he unclenches his jaw. Near sunset they approach the mountains, to stop outside Las Animas. Willy is in the motel before Raphael can step from the car.
Again Willy rents a room with one double bed. His back aching from the day’s strain, Raphael flops down. Willy sits on the foot of the bed. Raphael hears one shoe drop. When the second drops, he promises himself, he will sit up and insist that they switch to a room with two beds.
The bed lurches, Willy’s elbow brushes Raphael’s foot. “You touch me and I’ll break your neck,” Raphael says, shocking himself.
Willy scoots over, reties his shoes. “I am going. I will walk.” He picks up his shoulder bag and his suitcase.
“Get some cowboy to give you a ride,” Raphael says, turning his back. He hears Willy open the door, and the thrumming of the rain on the pavement. Willy’s footsteps splash away, crossing the asphalt.
Raphael lunges across the bed to peer through the curtains. Willy stands in the rain, staring up at the sky. He turns and retraces his steps.
His heart pounding, Raphael dives under the covers, feigning sleep. Willy tiptoes in, undresses, and climbs into bed, his underwear ghostly white in the room’s dim light.
Lying awake into the night, this is what Raphael thinks: I have been seized by something larger than myself. No one has prepared me for this, its size and power.
The notion that he might be whatever he had the talent, gumption, perseverance, sweat to accomplish—this has formed the kernel of all his acts and thoughts; it was the kernel of all he has been told, by his parents, his teachers, his nation, his television set. And then an aging man with an accent and close-fitting underwear removes the bottom card from the castle, the keystone from the arch, and all Raphael has ever been, all his dreams and aspirations are falling to the rock-hard pavement and there is nothing, nothing between himself and his self.
The next day Raphael and Willy climb the high passes of the Sangre de Cristo. They drive fifty miles, stop to let the car cool, drive another fifty miles. At each stop Willy listens to the engine. Once he opens the hood. “A-OK,” he says, making a circle with his thumb and forefinger.
It is dark when they descend from the mountains above Salt Lake. The city is awash with orange sodium-vapor light, extending exactly as far as its waterlines. Beyond the sharp line defined by that limit there is no light, no scattered farms or small towns, only darkness, reaching to the massive black shapes of the mountains to the west.
Raphael stops for gas. Willy heads for the bathroom. Raphael fills the tank and moves the car forward from the pump. He sits for a single moment, his forefinger tracing the Flash-o-matic’s luminescent dial; then he leaps from the car. He pulls Willy’s suitcase and shoulder bag from t
he trunk and sets them by the pumps. As he drives off, he avoids looking in the rearview mirror.
He barrels out of the city, ignoring the speed limit, driving into the blackness of the mountains and the lake. He tries to conjure his vision of the woman who waits for him in California, tall and blonde. Instead he thinks only of Willy in his ass-hugging jeans, abandoned on the neon-washed apron of some Union 76. He rubs each eye with the heel of his palm. Is he so transparent, is his desire written across his forehead, that Willy so quickly sought it out? The thought brings sweat to his palms. He turns on the radio, sings along.
He exits and turns back.
Willy is at the gas station, sitting on his suitcase. Raphael stops and rests his forehead on the steering wheel. The roar of the trailer trucks along I-80 mixes in his ears with the car’s lingering whine. Amid this din, Willy gently deposits his bags in the backseat and climbs in. “You have come back.”
“Shut up,” Raphael says, with his head still resting on the wheel. “Shut up, shut up, shut up.”
They stay that night in Salt Lake. While Willy rents their room Raphael paws through his shoulder bag until he finds Willy’s marijuana. With deep-sucking breaths he pulls at the pipe, then knocks the ashes from the pipe into the gutter. He returns the pipe to Willy’s bag, then combs his hair in the car mirror while he tries to still his racing heart against what he is about to do.
Inside there are two single beds. Raphael sits on the nearest, high beyond words, hiding his humiliation.
Willy pulls on a fresh shirt. “I know this town,” he says. “Near here they drove the Golden Spike—I saw it in a movie, with Barbara Stanwyck and Joel McCrea.” He peers into the mirror, humming snatches of some familiar tune, combing his red hair. “I am going out now. I will be back late.”
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