Escape Velocity

by Charles Portis

  That evening after a nap, I tried to make long-distance call from my room. I was expecting a check in the mail. Like a carnival guy, I had no fixed abode then (had Mom sensed this?) and was using the home of my father and mother in Little Rock as a mail drop. The bedside telephone had the full array of buttons. Some, however, were dummies. Pressing 8, the long-distance one, got me nowhere. I couldn’t even get the desk.

  I walked up to the office, where Mom informed me with relish that she and Dad were no longer set up for long-distance service. It was nothing but trouble. People were always using it. Local calls only. But couldn’t I make the call here, now, on that office phone, under her gaze and supervision? A brief one? My credit-card billing for the room was still open, and she could add to it whatever she liked in the way of fees, for the call and her inconvenience. I wouldn’t be calling Shanghai, only Little Rock.

  “We’re not set up for that. There’s a pay phone out there.”

  I had no American money in my pockets. Mom, living here in a border town where the banks readily exchanged pesos and dollars, didn’t see how she could possibly give me a handful of quarters and dimes for my Mexican currency. She shrank from handling the alien notes. The republic of Mexico was a half-hour stroll from here and for Mom it was terra incognita and would on principle remain so.

  Back to my room where I rooted about in luggage and found a few coins, enough to spring open a circuit at the pay phone and gain the ear of an operator. She dialed the number in Little Rock. Home is the place where, when you have to call it collect, they have to accept the charges. My mother answered. The operator told her that this was a collect call from her first-born son Charles, in Laredo, Texas. Would she accept the charges? My mother, not always attentive, said, “I’m sorry, he’s not here, he’s down in Mexico somewhere,” and hung up, before I could gather my wits and shout to her.

  The close of a long day. I meant to ask Dad about the curious slashes in his pool fence. Berserk vandals with chain saws? Environmental zealots with axes? In Laredo? But I kept forgetting, and at dawn, still ignorant on that point, and not much worse for the wear, I was off and away again in my white Chevrolet truck. And I saw on further reflection that Mom had been right to place me in a pariah caste. It was just one she didn’t know about, that of the untouchable wretches called freelance writers.

  MOTEL #3

  Now to the more recent past and a place in southern New Mexico, bright land of bargain motels and fair dealing, where I was doing some research on Pancho Villa’s 1916 raid across the border. My room was in a motel I will call the Ominato Inn, not quite a dump, with a weekly rate of $130 flat, no surcharges. The price quoted was what you paid, with no tourist penalties, bed taxes, bathroom duties, or other shakedown fees piled on, such as to make a joke of the nominal price. There should have been a pair of signs out front, flashing back and forth:

  NOT QUITE A DUMP AT DUMP PRICES

  Or no, they weren’t needed. By late after noon, almost every day, the parking lot was filled with a motley fleet of cars, vans, trucks, and motorcycles, giving the appearance of a police impound yard. Far too many of these vehicles had weak batteries.

  It was in the Ominato that I came to know celebrity, two onerous weeks of it, as “that guy in number twelve with the great jumper cables.” The first to seek my help was an old man I will call Mr. Sherman Lee Purifoy. He was a retired policeman, a widower, from southern Illinois, of that region near the confluence of the Ohio and the Mississippi. Year after year he came here to stay the winter months, in the Ominato, and in the same, much-prized room, number three, the only one with a kitchenette. The Purifoy Room, but without a plaque.

  I had just checked in when he accosted me in the sandy courtyard, which was the desert floor itself, unpaved. His battery was dead. Could I give him a jump? His car looked like other cars, but it was one I had never heard of, a Mercury Topaz. When I mentioned this, intending no slight, that the Topaz was a new one on me, he took offense. He took me to be suggesting that he was the kind of man who would drive a freakish, not to say ludicrous car. As though I had accused him, say, of wearing sandals. The Topaz happened to be a very good ottamobile, he said, and for my information there were plenty of Topazes out there on the highways, giving good service every day. And any car at all could have a bad battery.

  Except mine. With my hot battery and my two-gauge, all-copper cables I soon had his Topaz humming away again. Santiago—let us call him that—had come by to watch. He was the assistant motel manager, electrician, and handyman. He admired the heaviness of my cables, their professional girth. And those fierce, spring-loaded clamps! Such teeth! People who needed cables usually didn’t have them, he said, or they had the cheap, skinny kind that couldn’t carry enough amps to do the job. Mine were the best he had ever seen, and he had seen a few. Already I was basking.

  From there the word went around, down the road, even, into a motor home park, to which I felt no ties of loyalty. I was on call night and day with my cables. I feared the knock on the door. I found myself lingering, to the point of loitering, in places away from the Ominato and the room I had paid for. Celebrity turned out to be disappointing, but it was hard to say no when you had been given the power to raise the dead.

  And Mr. Purifoy was okay, if a little too much underfoot, a great accoster, and some thing of a tar baby, with time on his hands. He caught me going out and coming in, and, on occasion, he would catch me in an ambush at some unlikely place miles away—once, in the lobby of a county courthouse.

  One afternoon he stopped me cold in my tracks and said, “Just look around. Half the people in this motel are criminals.”

  “That’s a lot of criminals, Mr. Purifoy.”

  “At least half. I’m not even counting some of the dopers in that.”

  I looked around. Mr. Purifoy, I thought, must have lumped in with his bad boys, willy-nilly, all the scruffier transients who stopped here, and so had arrived at his high estimate of the criminal density. Drifters as such were guilty, of drifting. My guess was that on a given night at the Ominato no more than ten per cent of the lodgers were genuine felons on the lam, some with their molls. Of the rest, only about two per cent would be British journalists named Clive, Colin, or Fiona, scribbling notes and getting things wrong for their journey books about the real America, that old and elusive theme.

  Another time he asked me what my business was here in New Mexico. Against my better judgement I told him. He didn’t think much of the Pancho Villa project, taking it to be one of glamorizing a thug and serial rapist. He said I could expect no help from him in working this thing up, whatever it was, nor, when it was done, would there be any use asking him to look it over, as he had better things to do.

  Another time he told me that he never bothered to turn off his television at night, his sleep being fitful. He would doze for an hour or so, wake, and watch “the TV” for an hour or so. It didn’t matter what—golf high lights of 1971, the giant termite mounds on the African veld. There was no roaming about through the channels. But what a lot of people didn’t know was this: You can do other things while watching the TV. Little mindless chores. Sometimes he polished his shoes. And so he drowsed and woke through the long night, drifting in and out of alternating dreams.

  Then daybreak at last, always a joy, when he could pop out of his box and go into the world again. A third hallucination, perhaps, though with its sunny radiance much brighter than the others. Better still, in this one was a blue Mercury Topaz.

  He rose early and drove to a McDonald’s restaurant for a breakfast of biscuits and gravy, many free refills of coffee, and for a long visit with his retirement cronies. It was a gathering place. Some weeks back he had taken the trouble to write down a good recipe for “thickening gravy”—milk gravy. He gave it to one of the girls at McDonald’s but suspected that she and her bosses had never even so much as tried it. They were still dishing out the same old stuff.

  There were other cronies who preferred Wendy’s restaura
nt, but Mr. Purifoy said he wouldn’t be going back to that place any time soon. Some woman was always there in the mornings, reading things out loud from a newspaper to her husband, who was neither blind nor illiterate. Humorous snippets mostly, but longer pieces, too. How could you think straight or talk to your friends with this woman droning on like that? Well, you couldn’t, and she never let up. She kept finding nuggets, as she thought, here and there in the low-grade ore of the newspapers.

  As a gentleman, in his way, Mr. Purifoy could hardly scold the woman herself, directly, but neither was he one to shirk a clear social duty. He said he took the husband aside and spoke firmly to him about this nuisance. With no effect. The poor man was henpecked, his spirit broken years ago. He had shamefully admitted he could do nothing to stop his wife from reading things out loud to him, in private or public. Mr. Purifoy said one day that quiet bird would club her to death. One AP snippet too many.

  The least of our criminals was probably Lash LaRue. With his black boots, jeans, shirt, and hat, he reminded me of the old black-clad movie cowboy of that name, who popped revolvers out of the hands of saloon louts with his bullwhip. But this younger Lash had no whip, and the sinister outfit was only a costume.

  Santiago brought him to my door one morning. Lash said he had left the headlights of his truck burning all night, and his “battery”—singular—was down. It was a big Ford pickup a year or two old, with a diesel V-8 engine and a Louisiana license plate. Lash spoke of it as “my truck,” and he did possess the truck but I don’t believe he owned the truck. First, he couldn’t find the hood-latch release, then he had trouble working it. With the hood up at last, he was struck dumb by what must have been his first sight of the monster engine. He was a calf looking at a new gate. I, too, was impressed. It was a beautifully organized work of industrial art, filling and overflowing the engine bay.

  His plump young female companion (Brandi? Autumn?) lurked and pouted in the doorway of their room. They were running away to California, that must be it. They had stolen her Daddy’s newish truck, his treasure, and left him back in Opelousas, to putt around in Lash’s little Dodge Omni.

  I pointed out the two big batteries up front, wired in series, one on either side of the radiator. More amazement from Lash. “Two batteries!”

  Diesels with their high compression are by nature hard to crank, thus the booster. I want ed to walk away. These peculiar engines make me uneasy. Hard to start when cold, and then, once going, they sound like machines trying to rip themselves apart in a furious suicidal clatter. So much for my ignorance. They man age to clatter away like that for years on end.

  No matter, I still don’t like them, and already I had lost face with Mr. Purifoy in failing to jump-start a diesel motor home owned by one of his cronies, in the nearby park. My excuse, plausible enough, was that the man’s battery cells were so absolutely stone dead as to be no longer conductive.

  I told Lash it wasn’t going to work, that I couldn’t pump enough amps through all the batteries and circuitry to turn over that diesel crankshaft. He said maybe then we could push-start the truck, and he must have known better, the transmission was automatic. But he was going into a panic. Brandi said maybe we could tie a rope from my bumper to theirs and pull-start the truck. She had not moved from the shadowy doorway. Preserving her lily pallor? Those white cheeks would pink up pretty fast in the desert sun.

  Lash ignored her and was now begging. Please, couldn’t we at least try a jump-start? With those deluxe cables he had heard so much about?

  A shrewd appeal to my pride. Well, why not humor him? It wouldn’t take long to go through the motions. I broke out the cables yet again and hooked them up. I started my engine, leaving it to run for a bit and do some charging. Then I climbed up into the truck cab and turned the starter key one notch over to light the glow-plug. This is a little Zoroastrian fire prayer ritual, which must be observed. After what I judged to be the prop er interval, I turned the key all the way over to engage the starter motor, expecting to hear nothing, or at most a click. But the starter did spin, and then we had compression-ignition. The infernal oil-burning machine had come alive and was clanging away on its own.

  Lash was so crazed with relief that he offered to pay me. He and Brandi lost no time in fleeing the Ominato. She waved bye-bye from the cab and told me not to worry, that they would take care to park the truck on a slope tonight when they stopped. She still thought you could roll-start the thing. I noticed some stencilled words in white on the tailgate: LICENSED AND BONDED. Licensed as what? Who would license Lash and what body of underwriters would stand good for his handiwork? California can always use one more Lash and one more Brandi, and I wished the young lovebirds well, but no, that big fine work truck didn’t belong to Lash LaRue.

  My Saturday afternoon loitering place was a small bar in a small American Legion post. It was like some forgotten outpost where the soldiers had grown old waiting for the relief column. Here I drank and brooded with others of this lost platoon, who had their own reasons for not going home. There was a pool table, always in use, and a juke box, not much played, though it had a good repertoire of older stuff. No din, that was what we wanted, but now and then out of the blue we would hear “You Win Again” from Hank Williams, or Fats Domino singing,

  You broke

  My hort,

  When you said

  We’ll port

  Ain’t that a shame.

  One Saturday Mr. Purifoy appeared there, to my surprise. He was AA, or as he liked to call it, ND. The letters stood for Nameless Drunks, his jocular cacophemism for Alcoholics Anonymous. Saying the words always made him laugh.

  He said he had seen my car out front and just thought he would drop in for a minute. He had some news. But I wasn’t to hear it until he had gone through a long and disruptive business of settling in. It took him some little time to get seated properly, then clear away his bar space and give his order: “JUST A GLASS OF ICE TEA FOR ME, PLEASE.” A general rebuke but no one was put to shame or flight. He went on to tell the bartender, who hadn’t asked, that his health, on the whole, overall, for his age, was pretty good, “except for all these blood sores on my arms.” They weren’t as bad as their name. He pushed back his sleeves to show us some subcutaneous splotches, like red bruises.

  The news was that he had bought a new battery—but we could look at it later. He could show me the expensive new 72-month battery later, in the Topaz. Then, by way of throwing out a conversational tidbit for the bar at large, he said that over in neighboring Arizona there happened to be certain chapters of Alcoholics Anonymous which allowed you to drink two cans of beer every day. What they called a maintenance dose.

  Our fellow Legionnaires scoffed. Baloney, they said, and worse, but wanting to hear a little more. I was sitting between Mr. Purifoy and a hard, sun-dried little man called Vic, a pygmy sea lawyer, bald, yet still with scarcely any forehead at all. Possibly an old brig rat. Vic, like so many others, had come to the desert to make a clean end to his life, to shrink further here and indeed to waste away by degrees from evaporation until he vanished. He said he was from Montana—we were all carpetbaggers—but he told anecdotes in the dramatic New York City manner. With the injured tone, that is, and exuberant gestures and that fast delivery in the historic present tense (“So then this creep, can you believe it, he turns around and says to me…”).

  Vic wondered if it might not be possible under the Arizona indulgence to count malt liquor, a stronger brew, as a kind of beer. And if the ration were stated simply as “two cans of beer,” not further qualified, then why couldn’t you just buy the bigger cans, huge ones, even, which would require the use of both hands to lift from the bar?

  He and some others challenged Mr. Purifoy and pressed him hard to give the precise locations of the renegade AA groups. Mr. Purifoy couldn’t remember offhand. Globe, maybe, was one of the places. You can’t remember everything. Some fellow from Arizona was telling him about this, and he would know, wouldn’t he? The man w
as from Arizona and an honorable lodge brother in good standing who drove a good car and made a pretty good living as a professional square-dance caller and who stood to gain nothing at all by telling a gratuitous lie about the two cans of beer. Could any one here dispute that? No? Then maybe some people should just shut up for a change and then maybe talk about something they did know something about for a change. How would that do? He finished his tea and left.

  Later, there was a commotion, a diversion, at the pool table. One of the players fell unconscious to the floor—of a diabetic fit, it was said. He was a fairly young man, the very last one of our crew you would expect to keel over. Someone called for an ambulance. Everyone, Vic included, jumped up to offer help, with an alacrity that wouldn’t be seen in a public bar. But how to help, exactly? Some said it was the head that must be elevated in these cases, and others the feet. The feet, I thought, but wasn’t sure. The poor fellow was tilted first one way and then the other.

  He soon came around, despite our efforts, and was shooting pool again when the ambulance arrived, flashing, shrieking, and setting all the neighborhood dogs barking. A welcome diversion for them, too. But the young man refused to be examined or wired up to any diagnostic machine or hauled away to a hospital—and he certainly wasn’t going to sign his name to no paper on no clip board. Forget it, he said, a false alarm.

  There were angry words with the two paramedics. The senior one, the driver, was a heavy and hairy young man (Bull?) with nothing much of the nurse about him. He looked like the senior bouncer in a very big highway honky tonk, the bouncer of last resort. He dug in. Someone here, he said, and make no mistake, was going to sign this trip log and take responsibility for this deadhead run. It was a hard job he had, one demanding a healing touch of sorts and the driving skill of a stock-car racer, along with the brass and belligerence of a debt collector. The row was still going on when I left for the day, with the yard dogs still raving and foaming. I don’t know how it came out, but I would have bet on the big medico-bouncer.