Windwhistle Bone

by Richard Trainor

  He liked tequila and cocaine, but oftentimes couldn’t control it, winding up in bar fights and soiling the white linen suit that he usually wore to town. He was very mercurial, Mad Michael was… As was Vera… As was Ram, and there had been a couple of nights when the combination of the three of them together in the right wrong mood became dangerous. On two different occasions, they had to fight their way out of the seedy bars they were in, Vera participating in both brawls, scratching and punching, kicking and clawing, and once using a can of Mace which got them all arrested.

  “I don’t know how long I’m good for,” Ram said. “I didn’t sleep much last night.”

  “Whatever you can manage, baby. I’ll be in good hands with Michael,” she said. Ram sat on his stool, staring ahead beneath the gaze of an eight-point elk, waiting.

  Forty-five minutes later, the double doors swung open and there was Mad Michael, freshly bathed and barbered in white suit and Panama hat. He removed his sunglasses when he entered and waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. Then he saw Ram and Vera, mouthed an “Aah!” and ambled over to them in his odd hipster shuffle.

  “Top of the evening to you, my lovelies. What are we drinking? Michael’s buying,” he said, reaching in his pocket and producing a roll of twenties.

  “Be careful flashing that, Michael.”

  “What do you mean? I’m among friends, aren’t I? Aren’t I among friends?” he called out to the patrons who’d never seen him before. Michael took their mute response as an affirmative, nodded vigorously, and peeled off two twenties. “Drinks all around, Jackson,” he said to the barman. To Michael, all barmen were Jackson despite their gender, and if any of them bothered to correct him by supplying them with proper names, he blithely ignored them.

  “Mad Michael, you shameful profligate,” said Vera, smiling broadly and rising from her seat to give him a hug. “Come here, sit by me and tell us of your latest adventures.”

  “Well, faith and begorrah, me buckos, but I do believe I will, if your Lordship hasn’t any objections?”

  “None at all,” said Ram.

  “Give us the latest poop. Where’s your parrot?” asked Vera.

  “Aaargh! It appears that the grand bird has deserted me, flown the coop as it were,” said Michael referring to the red macaw named Pedro that Vera was asking about. “A very distressing development,” he said, “a crippling loss, especially to the crippled purse. Said fucking bird cost me $1,000, and somehow, I don’t feel dressed without him. When last seen said bird was perched on a power line, Aaargh!”

  “You look beautiful as usual, Michael,” chimed Vera, sparkling her eyes at him and stroking his wild red hair.

  “Well thank you, Lassie. You’re fetching as always. And you, sir,” he said quickly including Ram, “are as handsome as Errol Flynn in his heyday.”

  Ram took a sip from his beer. He pushed his chair back from the table to watch Vera draw Michael out, which she always did. Michael could be reticent with Ram, hesitant to reveal much unless liberal amounts of tequila were applied. With Vera, it was different. Her respect for his knowledge and opinions appealed to Michael’s vanity, and her not coy flirtatiousness appealed to the libidinousness that only came out occasionally, since the end of his marriage, most frequently around Vera. Ram was unthreatened by this, for Vera didn’t respond to Michael sexually, only used his sexuality as bait to draw out his personality, which Michael knew and accepted. With Vera, Michael became expansive and venturesome with opinions and theories, while with Ram, if they were alone together, he could become cryptic and obtuse.

  Ram settled back and watched the conversation unfurl between them. They talked about literature that Ram hadn’t read; people like Friedrich Durrenmatt and Cyril Connolly. They discussed Michael’s latest explorations and revelations derived from further digesting the journals of Samuel Pepys and whom Michael was emulating lately, penning long discursive screeds and labyrinthine observations which he’d read aloud whenever Vera asked him to, which she now did. Michael reached into his inside breast pocket, pulling out a few pages of folded typescript, unfolded them, and gave forth his latest epistolary offering.

  It was a long and occasionally inventive speculation on the meaning of the collective exile in Guyana of the Jim Jones sect. They were setting their utopian social vision into practice. Rumors started to swirl about the new city of Jonestown, and there was talk of an investigation, which Michael mentioned at the end of his epistle, dismissing it as a witch-hunt being carried out by Jonestown’s excommunicated heirs.

  “You think it’s about money then?”

  “It’s always about money, Ram. These people are pissed off and asking for investigations because they want their meal tickets back. That’s all.”

  “There’s nothing to the stuff about Jones brainwashing them? That it’s some sort of messianic worlds-end he’s selling them?”

  “Come on. This guy was one of Louie Verde’s main moneymen, one of his political power bases. He can go wherever he wants to go, do whatever he wants to do. They just want him back in San Francisco, doing it there. He says San Francisco has become Sodom. That’s why he left there and created Jonestown. Now they’re trying to get him back—get his money and power back really—by going through the relatives and making all these charges in the press.”

  The only point Ram could agree on with Michael was that it would be interesting to see how it played out. Michael sensed that the topic of Jonestown had been exhausted and moved on to other dyspeptic, Pepys-inspired observations of human frailties and political social and cultural trends, finally striking a resonant chord with Ram when he started hammering on Est.

  “Can you believe this guy? He’s a used car salesman, one of those think-and-grow-rich guys. Now his latest, dig this, is poverty is over, if you believe it! It’s a sort of John and Yoko show with poverty and no nudity,” said Michael scornfully, throwing back the last of his beer. “Jackson, let’s us have another round here, with two drops of the craythur, Herradura if you please.”

  “Not for me, man. I have to make an early night of it. You and Vera are on your own.”

  “Oh no, me lad. Say it ain’t so, Shoeless Joe. We have much yet to discuss and explore while the evening is still young,” Michael said, smiling at Ram, winking at Vera.

  “You guys explore it. Not me. This evening is the end of a long day for me. I’ve got to work tomorrow. Bring Vera home before dawn.”

  “I’ll do that, me boy. She’s in good keeping with yours truly. Aaargh!”

  Michael and Ram shook hands. Then Michael went to the jukebox and plunked some quarters in while Ram and Vera said goodbye.

  “I won’t be home late,” she said.

  “It’s okay if you are. I’m beat and I want to take a long hot bath and read awhile.”

  “That sounds lovely. And tempting,” she added, batting her lashes and smiling wide enough so Ram could see her tonsils. “Keep the midnight lamp burning. I may surprise you and come home early.”

  Ram said he’d do that, not knowing if he believed her or not, not giving much thought to how he felt about it one way or another. All he knew was that he was tired, as tired as if he’d been on a long voyage or had been up so long that he had lost his point of reference. He kissed Vera tenderly, held her briefly, then pulled away, calling a good-bye to Michael. The eyes of the dead animals followed him to the door.

  When he got outside, a light rain was falling, the raindrops heavy with ash. Ram fired up the Roacho, hit the lights and lit a cigarette, then ejected Coltrane and Hartman and replaced it with Steely Dan and the music that seemed more emblematic of the coming age. “And they wandered in from the city of St. John’s without a dime,” sang Fagan, sounding like Fagin.

  Back home on Price Street, Ram schlepped the bags from the car to the house, started a hot bath, and played the phone messages back. There were three messages for Vera, two from her theater and one from her friend Margaret, a Chinese girl who was one of the few friends who
thought Vera wasn’t wasting her time with Ram. There was a message for Ram from his mother, one from Phil inviting Ram to a barbecue, and two from Tor, the last one stressing that it was important that Ram call him as soon as possible. Ram measured a cup of Vera’s coconut oil bubble bath into the scalding water and punched in Tor’s number from the bathroom phone. He picked up on the second ring.

  “Tor? Ram, what is it?”

  “We have to go to Vegas. Blair wants a remodel. We have to tear out the ticket counter.”

  “We just put that in.”

  “You wanna argue with Blair? Now he wants it out and I need someone to go with me and do it. Then he’s got something else for us to do, but he won’t say what it is. I figure two weeks, three weeks max. I need to know now. Are you coming or not?”

  Ram thought briefly, wondering what Vera’s reaction would be. She wouldn’t like it, but the fact that he’d be going with Tor might make it palatable.

  “Count me in.”

  “I’ll pick you up around seven. We’ll scope out the job on Tuesday, start on Wednesday. Want me to talk to Vera?”

  “You can’t. She’s not here.”

  There was a pause before Tor spoke again.

  “Everything okay?”

  “As good as usual,” said Ram.

  Tor hung silently on the other end, thinking about how to respond to that. He finally said, “Are you sure?”

  When Ram said that he was, Tor seemed satisfied and told him he’d see him in the morning. Ram replaced the phone on its receiver and tested the water with his toe. It was barely bearable, boiling hot, and he eased himself slowly into the steaming water, turning the volume down on the Miles Davis tape as he immersed himself. The electricity racing in his head from the long and emotion-racked weekend reverberated for a while. Then numbness took over. The steaming water induced a profound torpor in him while simultaneously leaching out the weekend’s poisons and emotional sturm-und-drang. He sat in the water thinking of nothing, dreaming of nothing, hoping for nothing other than peace and a decent night’s sleep. When the phone rang again, he ignored it, hearing Margaret leaving another message on the recorder.

  A half-hour later, Ram felt clean and composed. He dried off, put on his robe, and went to the kitchen, putting on a kettle for tea. He took down Dylan Thomas’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog and opened it to where he’d left off while the tea steeped in the pot, turning on a Harold Land tape and drifting off into its atmosphere that complemented Thomas’s Welsh country tales. In an hour, Ram was entirely transported, the weekend’s scales flaking away, supplanted by an infusion of peace, contentment, and wonder. It was too good to be true, Ram thought, wishing that he hadn’t thought it as soon as he did. The interruption followed directly upon that. Someone was outside, calling for Vera.

  “Vera,” a voice half-shouted, half-whispered, “it’s me, Patrick.”

  Patrick Martinson sounded half-drunk above his percolating Vespa. It clicked away like a cricket in the driveway.

  “Vera, can you hear me? It’s Patrick.”

  Ram tried to ignore it. Martinson was another of Vera’s conquests. He was a woozy, would-be swain; another troubadour with his heart on his sleeve. If he couldn’t have Vera as his, then life wasn’t worth living, he’d told Vera who obligingly passed the information along to Ram.

  Ram thought he’d offer to oblige him. He walked to the window, threw up the sash and leaned his head out into the darkness. He couldn’t see Martinson, but he could hear the percolating Vespa.

  “She’s not here, Patrick. She’s out. And if you don’t get out of here in thirty seconds, I’m coming out with my double-barreled sawed-off and blow you in half.”

  A moment later, the engine whined as it planed up and Ram could hear the driveway gravel scattering under the tires as it turned onto the street. Ram heard it shift gears as Patrick gained speed, following the sound as it headed in the direction of the nearby lagoon until it disappeared.

  The interior peace that Ram previously felt was gone now. He went outside in his bathrobe to smoke a cigarette and walk off the anger. It was more and more this way now with Vera: her ornamental amusements causing a collateral clamor that followed her, and it was starting to wear Ram out.

  Had he known, or even sensed, in the beginning that things would turn out this way for Vera and Ram—meaning hurtful and manipulative, cold and sometimes cruel, sometimes vicious, and above all, enervating—he would have avoided her like the plague. This was hardly what he “wanted out of a relationship,” the standard query asked at many a flatulent Refugio consciousness-raising. What Ram wanted was buttermilk skies, and a life that approximated the emotional tone of a Lowenbrau beer commercial. He envisioned violinists approaching his and Vera’s table where the couple would blush when recognizing the strains of “Someone to Watch Over Me.” But there was another song that was probably closer to the bone of what was going on between Ram and Vera, and it said, “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” As he stood there in the now clear starlight, Ram considered that and shuddered at the corollary in the following line. He wondered: ‘Is this really what I need?’

  He walked inside a moment later, poured another cup of tea, and thought of the journey ahead of him the next day. It would be good to be out of Refugio for a while, good to be away from Vera and the storm that trailed her, good to be away from Fran and the Endymion nexus, good to be out in the desert again where the pitiless sun acted as a scour. Ram laughed, thinking about Z’all Crillon, the Las Vegas Endymion store manager at whose house he’d be staying. It was Z’all who taught Ram about the desert, who taught him much about jazz and much about literature and philosophy. Ram had given him the name Z’all because of Crillon’s penchant for truncating the two words is all, which was how he often began when explaining something, as in Z’all you need to know. He had been a California postman who chucked his job in Menlo Park half a dozen years ago and moved to Las Vegas. He opened a small book and record store that quietly caught on with the Vegas hipster crowd. When Endymion came to town, Blair bought Z’all out and hired him as the store manager. Z’all took the profits from his bookstore and bought himself a hideaway forty-five minutes outside Las Vegas on Mount Charleston, 9,000 feet high. It was a wonderful sanctuary, a spacious, rough-beamed log cabin sheeted with adobe on the outside, and Z’all lived there with his two dogs and his young wife Ann. Z’all had taken a shine to Ram when they first met, seeing him as a younger, as yet unawakened version of his former Menlo Park self, but even, if anything, a bit more unruly, more ungoverned. Ram smiled broadly now, thinking of the friend who’d taken him under his wing and taught him much and told him much that he still didn’t understand. Ram remembered that on his first visit to Las Vegas, when he told Z’all how much he missed the California coast, Z’all took him outside the cabin at evenfall and told Ram to smell the air and look at the sky, and then look down the grade to the desert floor visible twenty miles and 5,000 feet below them. Standing there in a grove of quaking aspen under a blue sky lighting up with evening stars, a sense of wonder began to grow in Ram at the limitlessness of a landscape stretched out to infinity. Eventually, Ram’s jaw dropped when he began to see it as Z’all hoped he would.

  “See what I mean?” he asked. “Eventually, it’ll be this place that you long for, not Refugio.”

  …Tomorrow night he would see Z’all and the desert again, and at a minimum, Ram felt that it would restore and recharge him for another Refugio fall and winter. He finished his tea, read a page or two of Thomas, then doused the light and fell into a profound sleep, barely stirring, but nonetheless noting the time as 3:30 when Vera, reeking of bourbon and fresh gardenia, crawled in bed as quietly as she could, thinking she hadn’t awakened or disturbed him…

  …He awoke before dawn and watched her sleeping alongside him. He leaned toward her and could smell the gardenia still in her hair, other flowers floating in the water-filled bowl on her bedside table. Her exhalations were slow and shallow an
d made a whistling sound as they came through her parted lips. It would be close to noon now before she would awaken, and Ram and Tor would be near Bakersfield by then—somewhere between Wasco and Buttonwillow.

  Ram gathered his things and packed a single bag. He put the kettle on to boil, ground some beans for coffee, and put bread in the toaster while he considered the chipping and crumbling love affair that seemed to be going wrong. Ram considered it a while and then made a conscious decision to act otherwise, writing Vera a long hopeful note and telling her he’d be gone a few weeks. They’d been teetering not quite on the brink for some time now—close to a year, he thought.

  Outside, doves were cooing, and the sun was flooding through the kitchen windows, breaking the chill from the rooms. The irony of the peaceful moment juxtaposed against the fragments of the just concluded weekend wasn’t lost on him, and as he picked among the fragments of remembered pieces, he was trying to construct a codex of it. Then he heard Tor’s tires hit the gravel of the driveway, snapping him back to where he was.

  Outside, he threw his bag in the back of the El Camino. Tor pulled down his sunglasses and looked Ram in the eye. “You ready?” he said.

  “I guess.”

  Tor dropped it in gear, and they headed out 41st Street to the freeway entrance. He motioned toward the white bag sitting between them. Ram opened it and there were coffee and doughnuts inside. He took the coffee, grabbed a couple doughnuts, and handed one to Tor, which he waved off.

  They drove to the Salinas cutoff and headed south on 101. Tor could be moody, but it was rare for them both to remain silent. Ram looked over at him and saw there was something troubling him. He thought of asking him what it was but figured it would either come up or blow over, so Ram left it at that.

  How many times had they made this Refugio-Las Vegas run, Tor and Ram? It must’ve been at least ten times by then, and always, it was with a sense of anticipation or adventure. But the range war days were over now; it was now more about maintenance and consolidation, neither of which had the same kind of appeal. The wildness of it was gone, and now they were just itinerant tradesman, integers filling a space and performing a function. Ram thought that maybe that was the cause of the silence.