Windwhistle Bone

by Richard Trainor

  “Yeah, for a while anyway. He tell you what happened?”

  “Said that you ran into Fran and Neuer was what he said,” said Jimmy Ray.

  “That’s how it started.”

  “So, how long you gone for?”

  “I don’t know. Four months, maybe six.”

  “You’ll be back for summer?”

  “That’s the plan.”

  “Well plans change, Ram,” said Vance sullenly. “Just why is it you wanna go back there? As I recall, you got pretty chewed up the last time you did.”

  “That’s true. But I think I’ll be all right now. I should go and see my family.”

  “Is that what Fran said you should do?”

  “Among other things.”

  “Yeah, I bet… Why do you wanna do that? You think they’re gonna welcome you back? Some kinda Prodigal Son story? You’re a junkie, that’s how they see you. How welcome was Jaime when he went back? Not too fuckin’ much, I heard. He’s inside for a while, right? Deuce to a nickel is what I heard. Ain’t that so?”

  “Hey, take it easy, Vance. It’s Ram’s choice and he thinks he’s doing the right thing, alright?”

  “Thanks, Jimmy Ray, but I can handle what Vance is saying. Who knows? Maybe he’s right. I’ve been thinking along that same kinda line ever since I ran into Fran again. But I gotta give it a shot and go see for myself.”

  “I understand that. You do what you need to do, Ram. Just remember that you got family here too, brother.”

  “I will, J.R., and thanks, I know that. When I get back there, I’ll drop you a postcard from Cannery Row.”

  “That’d be good,” said Jimmy Ray.

  “I’ll see you guys this summer.”

  “Yeah, see ya, Ram.”

  At that point, Vance looked up at Ram.

  “Listen, Le Doir, you take good care of yourself this time. No poking yourself in the arm with sharp sticks, OK?”

  “It’s a promise, Vance. And count on it, I’ll be back.”

  “You shouldn’t go, Ram,” Vance said, and Ram could see that he meant it; he was shaking. “I just feel it… but, anyway, I wish you all the best.”

  With that, they parted with Row Rat bro’ mine handshakes and hugs, and Ram promised that he’d be back by fall, in time for the fourth annual Scorpio birthday party ball. He’d only missed the first one, and the other two had been legendary three-day long affairs. He’d be back, Ram was sure.

  …Jaime’s head popped out of the chute at the bottom of the counting office 30 feet above them. Shaughn and Fran and Ram stood alongside the back wall of the cannery. Behind them, the Pacific was milky green, interspersed with brown where the kelp beds floated. A couple of sea otters cracked abalone shells on their chests with rocks and the knocking sounds they made were the only things audible until Jaime pushed off with his feet and the Flexie Flyer came tearing down the ramp from up above.

  Fran and Mike Boswell and the Endymion Mad Dog construction crew had joined forces with Jimmy Ray and Vance and the Hamburger Joynt gang to construct the Flexie Flyer roller coaster, and it was already an E-ticket ride on Cannery Row. The supporting towers were formed with scrap 2 x 4 on 4 x 4 posts bolted into the concrete floor with let-in braces of 1 x 4 holding the whole structure together, with ramps of plywood sheeting and guardrail bumpers to keep the Flexie Flyer and its rider on track. From the push off, it was a steep descent for 24 feet before you leveled off a bit and then dropped to the floor just before a wall. A hole was cut into the middle of the wall with ramps on either side of it. After you jumped through the wall, a ramp then banked to the right and you slashed across the floor toward another wall. Then you turned the flyer sharply to the left, heading toward the shattered back wall of the cannery where you banked hard and dragged your feet until you slowed the sled to a stop. Outside of a few minor accidents—the best one being Big Al’s 30-foot plunge into the ocean, luckily at high tide—the roller coaster had a spotless safety record. And though the ride was but a short 10 to 15 second journey, it was a heart in the throat experience of unparalleled exhilaration and was the talk of Cannery Row.

  Jaime shot down the ramp and undershot the angle and tipped over and tumbled onto the concrete in a heap. He looked up from the wreck and Fran called out to him.

  “Jaime, are you all right?”

  Jaime rolled over and checked his elbow. It was slightly barked and bleeding. A huge grin was on his face and his eyes were gleaming.

  “Oh, yeah. This is amazing. Let me go again.”

  “After me, I’m next,” said Shaughn. Jaime came over and stood beside Fran and Ram while Shaughn dragged the Flyer back upstairs.

  “That is one hell of a trip, Fran,” Jaime said. “What a rush.”

  Fran laughed, shook out a Pall Mall, lit it, and exhaled.

  “So you guys are set for Vancouver then?”

  “Yeah, we’re ready,” Ram offered.

  “You think you’ll run into any problems up there, Shaughn?”

  “Hope not, not from what Boswell said. We’ll be in a nice car—just up for a summer vacation, me and my cousin Paul and Jonas. All we do is play it cool.”

  “Then Walt and I drive up in his car two weeks later and hook up with them where they are,” said Ram.

  “Sounds all right to me,” said Fran. “Just watch yourselves up there. Don’t do anything to bring any heat on you.”

  Ram looked north across the bay. Mike Boswell noted his expression and nudged him.

  “Somebody shoot your dog?”

  Ram smiled slightly, shook his head, no, and laughed three syllables.

  “It’s this Canada move,” he said. “I’m unsure about it and it’s tearing me up. I haven’t slept in six weeks.”

  “I know what you’re feeling, Ram,” Tor said. “I felt the same when I went there in ’68. There’s nothing I can tell you that will make it easier for you. It’s a simple decision, but it’s a hard one at the same time. You can always change your mind and come back if you want. It’s not like you’re deserting like Jonas is, or avoiding induction like I was.”

  “I remember when you came back,” said Ram. “You were on that Dream 300 and you’d driven straight through from Vancouver. I remember I had to pry you off the bike.”

  “I remember,” Boswell said laughing. “December, 1968, that was a bad time.”

  There was a ring in Ram’s right ear, and then the present dissolved in the mist while the movie inside his head began projecting scenes from that one-year past, which seemingly took a decade to unfold.

  It was an epochal year—of something beginning and something ending—and most of them then, who were young and took part in it, were wrong in their judgments of what these beginnings and endings were and what they signified.

  Even the numbers themselves, when they stood alone, written on a naked page, had an ominous look about them. 1968: a long reed, a hanged Man, followed by a backward top-to-bottom mirror image of completion that now opposed itself, that coiled serpent or Infinity sign, or both at the end. Ram remembered how he hated writing that number then and hated reading it in the newspaper or on handbills, hated saying it, and since, had come to hate the very idea of it and what it represented: 1968.

  Was it chaos and ambush in the Bolivian jungle or Tet that kicked it off? Ram forgot which. He was unsure, but he knew that they followed hard upon one another. Then LBJ took a torpedo in the hull in New Hampshire and folded his tent on his administration. And that was a good thing, maybe the only good thing that came that year. The rest was murder, in one form or another. First it was Martin Luther King in Memphis in April, another set-up job by the company with a convenient idiot fall guy, not unlike the one from five years before. Then Bobby in LA in June, another threat removed.

  And overseas, it was pretty much the same. An early frost terminated the Dubcek spring, when a snowstorm of tanks fell on Prague. The Paris May Day of Danny the Red turned to the future’s coming gray days when the labor unions Judased the left and
sold out to the government for 30 pieces of silver-lined labor contracts. Back home in Midsummer in the middle of the country at the Democratic convention, the party regulars and lawyers asserted their hegemony by unleashing their bulldogs and the arriving new order made its first orchestrated public appearance, trampling the left under jackboots, clubbing it senseless with distractions and grinning while they did so. Then it was Miami and the mannequin of “the new Nixon,” just as slimy and slick and stiff and psychotic as the old one was. But here was also the presage of the future: a new mannequin that moved smoothly and photographed well in Technicolor. Behind it all, the aura of a future that was more a nostalgia for the past. That whole Laoconian tableau would end tragically. The serpent would eat its tail. The past would come around to repeat itself as it did in film noir—Build my Gallows high, baby. Most of those in Ram’s social set thought that many of the goals of the revolution had been won, although Ram was beginning to wonder if this was so…

  …Back inside his apartment, Ram put the tea-kettle on, toasted bread, and buttered it with cashew pindakaas, peeled two tangelos, quartered apples, and prepared the teapot with a ball of Darjeeling, waiting for the water to boil. The rain hammered down on the canal outside and the weather was getting worse. Dusk was being overtaken by night, and the steam from the kettle was fogging the picture window and Ram drifted off into another foggy time in Sagrada, long ago it seemed…

  …Those were the rainy years, the days of tulé’d occlusion, when all was shrouded in a moist enveloping gray and the Sagrada winters were wet and cold with hoar frosts covering the ground, when the summers were long and brutally hot. The climatic extremes were likewise mirrored by the times of Us and Them, when the Nixonian House Gang had declared war on what was then called The Movement, and were in the process of bludgeoning it to death or capitulation or treachery with agents provocateurs and political trials and drugs that came in via the corpse conduit from Vietnam and then found their way to suburban streets. And Ram remembered that was how he became addicted, that when he returned to Sagrada at Christmastime after the year in Vancouver, how his friends held a welcome home party in his honor at Jamie’s house downtown. Ram couldn’t help noticing that people kept disappearing into the bathroom, or into bedrooms in groups of twos and threes. Then he asked Stefanie what was going on and she said that they were doing junk and that Ram should try it, that he would like it, and wouldn’t get hooked because he had too much going for him for that, Stefanie said.

  A half-hour later, Ram followed Jaime into the bathroom and snorted two small dots of white powder. He vomited almost immediately afterward and the hurt and the disappointment from the failed exile in Vancouver with Walt and Jonas and Shaughn were immediately taken away. Two weeks later, he was turning his head away while Bobby T injected him for the first time, ten days after that, he was fixing himself. A month later, he was all the way hooked and scoring his own spoons of China white that came in twice monthly in the Cadaver Express, in C-130s full of body bags from Vietnam, some of which carried two-ounce packets of China White in excavated body cavities… But none of this ever happened, or so the government said.

  It was the time of time suspended, the numbed years of the fascist resurgence throughout the land when it seemed as though agents of one stripe or another, chiefly narcs and informers, were everywhere… But that was just paranoia talking, or so Ram and all his friends said… Suburban white boys, from good homes, with promising futures all, or so it all once seemed, not so very long ago.

  And it was also a period of time distended, when it stretched sideways and yawed downwards, when there were no reference points to mark anything that had any meaning… A drifting time of sleepwalkers and sleepwalking, of sinners and sinned against; rip-offs, hold-ups, bad checks and break-ins, burglaries, bank robberies, poison shop knockoffs, knives to the throat or guns to the head on one-way runs out to the country fields—from noon till night and nod off, if you were among the lucky… Then another daybreak at noon, and the same old same old all over again.

  Days and seasons and years passing, like skirling fog or shimmering heat vapors, the only landmarks of reference, the deaths of friends, or time spent locked up in jail or hospital detox, what did it matter? And it was after one of these—a detox—when Ram finally began to awaken to the point where he could apprehend that his very survival was so fragile as to move him to gamble and act again or he would not see another year, much less the end of the coming summer.

  It was a winter day when he knew it—cold and chill with tulé fog and snow sweeping over the black Sagrada streets. Ram was two months out of detox and on methadone maintenance, living in a tarpaper, two-room shack by the railroad tracks on the Southside, benumbed by the state but un-beholden to a connection, carless and penniless but healthier than he’d been since long before Vancouver.

  John Devlin was in town then, out from Boston for another attempt to reconcile with Miranda, two other friends of Ram’s from the stoned days of the Atcliffe commune. It was going nowhere, this thing of Dev’s and Miranda’s, and Dev knew it, and Ram knew it, and so did everybody else who knew them. But Devlin always wanted to talk about it, and Ram felt some responsibility to listen because it was Ram who had introduced them in the first place, back in London some years before. When he talked with John Devlin that morning, Ram said that he’d come by Alan’s house where Dev was staying after Ram went to the clinic for his dose.

  It was maybe 8:30 when Ram got there, and Dev was having tea and making toast. After breakfast, they did as they’d always done since they first met in London in the summer of ’71; they wandered about with nothing in mind save motion and the talk that it took to fill it. Mostly, it was Devlin doing the talking, and his long, discursive monologues centered chiefly on Miranda, with occasional forays into California, or Sagrada, and how crazy everybody was, but mostly, it was how fucked up Miranda was and how crazy Dev was to love her, a crazy California welfare mom, a fucked-up Sagradan. Ram listened, offering an occasional rejoinder and rarely a contrary opinion to Devlin’s ramblings and pronouncements. He’d grown used to John Devlin by then and his unabated cynicism fueled by the fucked-up love and too much alcohol that only deepened it. For a long time now, Ram knew that it was pointless to suggest to Devlin that the world might be somehow otherwise.

  That day’ramble took them from Alan’s house on 18th and Q, up 21st Street and over to Roma’s Bakery on 13th and E for donuts and coffee, then over to the levee, wandering along it above the tracks to where it overlooked the city dump just above the banks of the green Nacionalé River. Here, they stopped and smoked a joint of Dev’s good Jamaican and sat on discarded rusting appliances in the still, fog-shrouded winter light.

  “Not gonna lift today,” Ram said.

  “Nah, you’re probably right. I don’t think so,” said Dev.

  They wandered east on the all but abandoned streets of Sagrada, lined with naked elms, bare cottonwoods, and green sycamores, heading toward the hum of the freeway. Alongside the overpass, there was a little shithole tavern with quarter beers and a good jukebox. They took seats at the bar and the bartender pulled two schooners of draft for them and changed a dollar into quarters. Ram went over and picked the music while Devlin drained his beer and ordered another. ’“Tupelo Honey’” was playing when Ram got back to his seat, and Devlin asked Ram what he was going to do now that he’d gotten on the methadone program.

  “I really don’t know yet, John. I ain’t got that far yet. I guess, get a job, maybe with the state.”

  “You think that the state of California’s gonna hire you, Ram? I mean, c’mon,” he laughed, “you’re a fuckin’ junkie.”

  “I don’t know. They could.”

  “Sure, why not? I mean, after all, this is California, right?”

  Devlin was laughing again and giving Ram the appraising jaundice-eyed twinkle like he used to give to young Nick, the kid in London who used to fetch their Chinese take-out from Wing-On, a cheap and sleazy greasy spoo
n near their hostel on Clerkenwell Close. Nick would do it for a joint usually, but one time, Devlin had Nick sign a paper before he let him smoke it, and then told Nick that he’d signed away his soul. Nick asked for the paper back and badgered Devlin for it, but Dev wouldn’t return it and Nick was forever leery of him after that. “He’s evil,” Nick told Ram. “He scares me.”

  After more beer and songs on the jukebox, Ram and Dev got up to leave. Ram led the way down the back stairs and across the parking lot, zigzagging through the alleys and numbered streets until they were standing on the small bridge above the pond near the fort. The snow, which had begun to fall lightly when they were in the tavern, was now coming down steadily. Devlin twisted up another joint and they smoked and chewed crackers they’d grabbed from the tavern, crumbling some up and tossing them to the trout lolling in the greasy pond.

  “And you, John, what about you? Are you gonna move out here from Boston and get back with Miranda and Monica?”

  Devlin laughed again, shaking his head no.

  “Huh-uh. I mean, shit, Le Doir, are you crazy? Move out here to California? I’d have to be as crazy as all the rest of you. I’m not there yet.”

  They stood passing the joint and Devlin continued shaking his head, laughing quietly and sibilantly through his clenched teeth. He was chewing on what Ram said, and Ram knew it, giving him space to finish his unfinished response.

  “I mean, what the fuck? I like the kid more than I like her mother.”

  “Yeah, but you’re in love with her mother.”

  Devlin nodded and his eyes softened a bit.

  “Yeah, you’re right. Yeah, I’m in love with her. But after all that’s happened, after Morocco and that whole number, I can’t trust her again.”

  “You never did.”

  Devlin took the joint and rolled a crutch around it. He hit it twice deeply and passed it to Ram.

  “I guess that’s true. I never did. Shit, I stole her from you.”

  “That’s not true, John. She and I were just friends.”