I called old Duke, seventy years old and could outdrink any of us, called Duke and told him I needed help. It was about three in the morning, and Duke said he’d be right over. He showed up at the Mohawk with a pickup truck, a big one I’d never before seen and therefore probably borrowed, primer gray and with a winch on the front grille. We cruised slow to the scene of my crime and the cops were already there with a tow truck and so we just slid on past like rubberneckers. We went to Duke’s apartment and called Ben’s place but his mother answered and we hung up. I crashed on Duke’s couch, and then at about five Duke got Ben’s collect call. Duke bailed him out. What Ben’d done? Evidently Ben got spotted by some cops while he was running and calling out the names of presidents and the cops gave chase. They coon-treed Ben up a telephone pole and hauled his ass in.
Duke was the man who in a pinch could be counted on more than any of the rest of us losers and schmucks and brooding whelp bankrupt reamed out assholes. Funny thing was Duke had more to be sad about than any of the rest of us, and he was probably sadder than the rest of us, but he somehow dealt with it better. The test of a man is not how successful he is, but how well he deals with being fucked. I once asked Duke, when I was feeling pretty low, why he didn’t just kill himself. Duke laughed hearty and big. I looked at him with question. “Why,” he said, as if responding to the simplest question in the world, “I want to know what happens next,” he said.
He had good Scotch, Glenfiddich, and after a few he made me open my mouth and show teeth.
“Still bleeding,” he said. “You’d’ve thought the Scotch would’ve done the trick. That’s some fine Scotch, too, not that rotgut Clan MacGregor you swill. You should, by the way, have some self-respect, young T-Bird Murphy.”
“My trumpet’s fucked up,” I said. I opened the case and showed him. The bell was wrinkled like tinfoil and bent over to the side, obscene.
Duke rummaged around in his powder closet. His apartment was lined with books—history and philosophy, mostly, war books and folders stuffed with topographical maps, and his apartment was legally classified as an arsenal. He had every kind of gun you can imagine, shotguns and pistols and rifles and autos, Mac-10s and Uzis and AK-47s, a beautiful Streetsweeper with a 24 shotgun-shell drum. Man, you could take out any mob around with that puppy. You could chop down a forest. Guns were his hobby, but his vocation, his calling, was powder. Duke loved gunpowders, and he mixed his own breeds, then used his powder in the bullets and shotgun shells he loaded himself, even pouring his own lead into molds and letting it cool and filing down the bullets so they’d travel right and mushroom properly when they popped their targets. His kitchen table was a factory, loading machines and crimps and vials and tubes and lead and spent brass awaiting new cargo. Everywhere books and on the wall a chart detailing every powder mixture and its explosive qualities, what velocity the bullet would carry, how well the bullet worked in this gun and that gun, extensive and detailed analyses of a bullet’s accuracy at 25 yards in pistol x, 50 yards in pistol y, the size of the hole at point blank in pistol z.
While Duke was rummaging through his closet he told me the story of Jimmy Mulefoot. “I knew a man down in Falfurrias, Texas,” Duke said. “When I was working night tower. Jimmy Mulefoot, part Indian and the best derrick man south of Amarillo, where his brother Lincoln Mulefoot worked. Old Jimmy Mulefoot one night decides it’s high time for him to do some drinking since he’s been sober for exactly one year or so and he brings himself a bottle of the blessed sustenance to work and he stands up there hooting and hollering and pacing back and forth on the monkey-board. Mind, he’s three joints up where he can latch and unlatch the elevators—ninety feet above the platform—and this is back in the old days when we just did things as they needed doing. Work had replaced war and a man did not consult his attorney before he performed his job any more than the soldier sues for having been shot by the adversary. Back in the days when a worker accepted the responsibilities and hazards of labor. The rig needed moving and we pulled the pipe out of the hole and old Jimmy Mulefoot he wouldn’t come down, wanted to stay up there for the ride. So we started rolling the rig along on some logs, old telephone poles actually.”
Duke looked over at me with scrutiny, and I drank some more, and then Duke went back to digging through the closet.
“The rig tipped over,” Duke said, “and old Jimmy Mulefoot rode that monkey-board all the way down. Broke every bone in his body but he lived two hours. He didn’t say a thing, just lay there and bled. Night-tower shift ended and the morning-tower crew started pulling up in their trucks and you could see black clouds of bugs getting thick against the orange belt of sunrise. It’s so flat in that country you can see the curve of the earth. Then Jimmy Mulefoot looked at the sky and watched it all go away.”
Duke found what he was looking for and closed the closet door.
“That’s what I’m talking about,” Duke said.
He opened another bottle and set three leather pouches on the table.
“You have three choices,” Duke said. “IMR 700-X, Red Dot, and Solo 1000.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Red Dot ought to do the job,” Duke said. “Fast burning, quick flash.”
He opened one of the pouches and pinched some gunpowder between his thumb and forefinger.
Duke said, “The bark’s worse than the bite.”
He packed gunpowder into the bleeding holes in my gums and he pulled a Zippo from his pocket and lit a Lucky. Duke smoked and he took deep drags. He flicked the ashes and examined the hot red cherry, then jabbed the hot end of the cigarette into my gunpowder-packed gums and the powder flashed white and sizzled. He splashed Glenfiddich in my mouth and you could hear it hiss on the smolder.
“Smells bad,” Duke said. “But you’ll be fine.”
Duke examined my mouth. “The proof of the pudding,” Duke said, “is in the shooting.”
I nodded. I think I passed out.
When I next saw Duke, my trumpet was fixed. I’m not exactly sure what happened while he was fixing it, so excited he was to show me his handiwork, to show me my trumpet that was now better than it had been since Pop played it in the Oakland Symphony, but the way I’ve come to think of the scene is like this.
Duke wore his trenchcoat and his fedora and beneath his arm he carried my trumpet wrapped in a threadbare wool blanket. He crossed the tracks and started toward Skyline Boulevard, shops and BART stations and pubs and markets closed for the evening. He expected to hear his footsteps echo in the empty streets but he heard nothing but his own breath chugging into the thick darkness. When he passed through Oakland’s Chinatown the smell of rotted flesh creamed through the air like a rancid soup, and the dry smoke of char-blacked red snapper expanded in his lungs like the acrid pallor of carrion and Duke gagged and hurried alongside open-air markets clouded with flies and oozing with blood. Duke walked beneath canvas canopies shimmering with fluorescent neon kanji and turned left uphill and stopped in front of a market-front picture-window and hanging in neat ranks and files were plucked ducks, slick with gelled fat, hanging by their feet.
Duke lifted a hand from his trenchcoat pocket and aimed his index finger at one of the ducks, his thumb pulled back in hammer-ready position.
“Bang,” Duke said.
Duke walked and when he rose above the Oakland flats and stopped in front of a small stucco house and he turned and looked back, out toward the bay. He was above the fog line now, and Oakland’s streets were gone. The tops of the few office towers rose into the night like block-shaped turrets, the Tribune tower ugly and lit. In the distance the spans and girders of the Golden Gate and Bay Bridge cut through the bed of fog like the masts and riggings of immense ships of death. Beneath the fog smothering the expanse of the industrial East Bay, Oakland and Richmond and El Cerrito, the fires of factories billowed red and orange as if the workers had set the oil-sate earth
ablaze.
Duke swung open the garage doors and flipped the light switch. He smiled at the clutter which was his clutter and the work of fifty years of accumulation, a testimony to the love he still suspected his wife of harboring for him, hidden beneath her high-collared dresses and expressionless slackjawed Buddha-face. His catfishing skiff, the Garrard stereo system and a stack of old record-albums, John Lee Hooker and Sinatra and Benny Goodman and Tony Bennett and Ray Charles and Louis Armstrong, the covers black and brown with mold, his drill-press and table-saw, cases of oil and jugs of anti-freeze and his tool bench and work clothes hanging from overhead water-pipes, the clock-radio still set to the news station, caulking guns on the concrete floor where he left them twenty years before.
“She loves me,” Duke said. “The bitch!”
He rummaged through his Snap-On tool box and found his soldering iron and silver-solder and he plugged-in the iron and stood waiting for heat.
He unwrapped my trumpet and laid it out on his workbench and examined. Dented bell, sprung pipes, crimped tubing, valves jammed. He put the horn to his lips and tried to blow but no air went through and his cheeks swelled until they hurt. He watched the soldering iron until he saw it steam in the cold air and then began work, re-attaching the sprung tubing with delicate traces of silver, drawing the solder along as if tracing a portrait on rice paper, wiping excess solder and flux on a wet green sponge.
Duke opened the wooden cabinet beneath the tool bench and pulled out a small acetylene torch and a tin box of metal-working tools and opened the box and set on the bench an array of rods and hammers and clamps and taps and dies, mallets and files and fine-grain black sandpaper.
The door into the house opened. Myrtle stood in her nightclothes, her hands clasped together as if in prayer.
“What are you doing, Mr. Hammerback?”
“You look great,” Duke said. “The sexiest old broad north of the Mason-Dixon.”
“We agreed that you wouldn’t drop by uninvited until you’d quit drinking and been through Jungian therapy.”
“I quit drinking every night, baby.”
“What are you doing here, Mr. Hammerback?”
“First aid,” Duke said. “Fixing a trumpet, Mrs. Hammerback.”
“At four in the morning?”
“Emergency rooms don’t close just cause the sun goes down.”
Myrtle’s face was young and simple and her eyes wide and alert like a genius or a simpleton.
“Odd hours,” she said, “are a signal of discontinuity of the spirit. You are still not at peace with your inner self.”
Duke looked at his hands.
“Fixing a trumpet is a symbol of your white male need for control over exterior events,” Myrtle said. “You invented God in your own image, and then you killed him off, and you think you can take his place.”
Duke went through the record-albums and found his favorite John Lee Hooker album and put on “Tupelo,” a dirty blues tune that reminded him of Falfurrias, Texas. He looked at Myrtle. She was as beautiful as she had been fifty years before. A horn honked on the street outside. Rain sprinkled in soft waves and the air had the fresh dusty smell of childhood. Duke smiled big and opened his arms toward Myrtle.
“Let’s dance,” Duke said. “Baby.”
“We’re old,” Myrtle said. “We ought not delude ourselves into idealizing a frothy youth we never had.”
Duke approached her and took her in his arms and began dancing her around the perimeter of his catfishing skiff. Myrtle hung stiff in his arms.
“I’m a happy man,” Duke said. “Your knight in shining fucking armor.”
The song played and it was Johnny Lee Hooker alone with his guitar and scratchy recording-tape and the sounds of the bar, ice rattling in glass tumblers, people tapping their bootsoles on pier-and-beam wooden floor.
“You hear that, Myrtle? You hear that? Do you?”
Myrtle didn’t say anything.
Duke laughed.
“That’s the sound of the city,” Duke said. A horn honked on the recording. “That horn! Not edited out, no artist sheepshit fru-fru doing another take of the song—No! The sound of the city, the rumble of the subways under our feet, the smell of vomit and urine on the sidewalks, the undeodorized pits of a million arms, the wind cutting into our flesh, the same wind that cuts through buildings and offshore rigs and volcanoes across the Pacific! Johnny Lee Hooker didn’t edit out that honking horn, that street noise, that blast from the city. He didn’t edit out that horn! Don’t you see?”
Duke looked at Myrtle’s eyes. “Don’t you see?”
Myrtle shook her head no, she did not fucking see. Did not fucking see at all.
“Editing out that horn would be changing what’s natural, changing what’s true,” Duke said. “It’d be like asking me to not be Duke.”
Duke gave Myrtle a spin.
“Whee-haw!” Duke laughed. “Whee-haw!”
He danced her back to the door.
“We can’t do this,” Myrtle said. “Not until you’ve stopped drinking.”
“Honk!” Duke said. “Honk honk. Honk!”
Myrtle cut Duke a look.
Duke dropped his arms to his sides. He stood limp. He felt his cheeks fall alongside his jawbones.
“We’re seventy years old,” Duke said. “We’ll be worm’s meat soon.”
“Our souls live forever,” Myrtle said.
“Not mine.”
“Take Jesus into your heart,” Myrtle said, “and ye shall be saved.”
“Jesus can suck my dick,” Duke said. “I’d like to stick my Remington up the ass of Jesus and see just how immortal that ass of his is.”
“I can’t talk to you,” Myrtle said.
“For a social worker,” Duke said. “For a social worker you don’t do very well by your kin.”
“I’ve heard this before.”
“Yep,” Duke said. “You’ve heard it before.”
“Yes,” Myrtle said. “I have.”
“I love you,” Duke said.
“Yes,” Myrtle said. “I believe you think you do.”
Myrtle shook her head. “Duke,” she said, “what is it you’re looking for in life?”
Duke laughed.
“What,” Myrtle said. “What’s so funny? What’s so funny about my question. I’m serious, Duke. I’ve found what I want in life. I’ve been saved by Jesus. What are you looking for in life?”
Duke was still laughing. Then he stopped laughing. He got serious and sober. He looked at her, straight.
Duke lit his Zippo and twisted the valves of the acetylene torch and dashed the flame of his lighter across the torch-nozzle and fire burst blue into the air. The hiss of flaming gas filled his ears like air in a seashell.
“Duke Hammerback,” Myrtle said. “I asked you a serious question. This is the kind of question I, as your wife, deserve an answer to. What are you looking for in life?”
Duke said, “I’m in search of the perfect bullet.”
Duke’d cauterized my gums and he’d mostly fixed my trumpet, but without teeth I wasn’t going to be much of a trumpet player anymore, which was just as well. I was never going to be anything more than a schmuck playing bars, and I’d seen some old schmucks at bars and they were so pathetic you either wanted to smack them or bury your face in your hands and cry like a bitch. Being an old musician is one thing. Being a lousy old musician is another.
I did tons of jobs after that. Went back to gunite for a while and worked on the California Aqueduct and the Delta Mendota Canal out in the Central Valley, got to work a long ditch job at McClellan’s Air Force Base, too, and didn’t have to pay for a campground because I had family in Sacramento and I stayed with them. But I saw a couple more guys die, and I’d already seen too many men die
doing gunite, and so I decided adios, compadres. Gunite is a good job, but too many people die doing it. Riprapped, worked as a hod-carrier, soldered electronic components for a hippie who made negative ion generators in his spare bedroom, lumped at the docks. I worked as a janitor, worked the line at Anchor Hocking, canned veggies at the Huntz plant, served some time at Golden Grain. I worked security at an amusement park, protecting kids from perverts and cuffing the little shits when they stole something. Did freelance work rehabbing old houses for seedy landlords who didn’t really want the houses fixed right, just wanted them to look nifty for suckers. I didn’t get fired often, but I never really liked any of those gigs. I lost my hotel room because I couldn’t seem to make rent regularly, which was fine because I just pitched my tent at the campgrounds in the area, Redwood Park, Lake Chabot, sometimes even Half Moon Bay on the coast. There are lots of worse places to live than in a Northern California campground.
Then I finally got a good job, and when I landed it, I knew things were going to start going my way.
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