“Pills,” I said. “What kind of pills?”
“The good kind.”
“Me too.”
Venery laughed. “My neighbor Vic got loaded on whiskey and beat his dog to death, then slit his own throat in his ex-wife’s kitchen. His daughter overdosed on benzos and died in the tub. Now all they do is talk jive about everyone and never leave the house.”
“Why don’t they leave?”
“Bad air, Jimster. Wait until you start coughing, you’ll see.”
He had an eeriness about him, but he seemed harmless. He reminded me of some of the older guys I used to see in Albuquerque. They loved to talk music and drugs. “Sounds like a lot of people who live here tried to kill themselves,” I said.
“Go down the street to Hemingway’s Pub, and you’ll run into Richard Manuel from The Band. Or maybe you’ll see Phil Ochs. Both famous musicians, dead of suicide.”
He had to think before he decided what to say next.
“You prefer Elliott Smith? I saw him in there drinking raspberry tea and reading something by Virginia Woolf. See the connection, Thorpe? We’re all here for the same reason.”
“I need to know where I am. This whole place, I mean. It’s creeping me out. I can’t seem to relax here. You ever see a big red fowl walking around?”
“It’s the Darkening Land, Jimbo. Nobody can breathe from the bad air. You’ll develop a cough and spots on your lung. You’re here like us, pal. Everyone has a fowl. You gotta withstand this evil harridan of a town and kill it yourself.”
“Kill what? The fowl?”
“Kill it, JT. The rules are different in this place. Cobain plays the Cobra Room every Friday night. Hendrix does an acoustic set in the upstairs lounge at DFW’s. What you need to do is listen to music. It helps.” He showed me the album cover of Their Satanic Majesties Request. “This is a great fucking record. I also got Exile on Main Street. I got Albert Ayler. I got Hendrix live at Monterey.”
I glanced at the album cover but told him I couldn’t afford to buy anything right now until I got a job. “I’ll come back soon,” I told him. “I just got to town.”
“Did you say your name was Jim Thorpe?”
“Funny,” I said.
Venery laughed, coughing dust and smoke.
I HEADED BACK TO JACKSON’S, down the same street as before. I looked up to the yellow sky full of clouds and tiny birds circling overhead. On the street puddles of rainwater reflected autumn foliage. An older man, spindly and awkward, wearing a long coat and fedora hat, stopped me and asked if I’d been to Devil’s Bridge.
“Sorry, no.”
“I see,” he said, eyeing me closely. “I take it in you’re not in the military?”
“No.”
“Government agent?”
“No.”
I saw the face of a deeply sad old man. I saw in his eyes a longing for an answer neither of us could grasp. Maybe he was connected to some universe, some other reality I didn’t understand. His eyes watered, and I looked away.
“Heck, that’s good,” he said. “I carry a blue-steel Colt, sometimes a .38 Special. Back in the seventies I got court-martialed for firing a gun into the ceiling of a base in El Paso. There’s a mud pit and firing range out by Devil’s Bridge.”
“I don’t know anything about it,” I said. “Sorry, I need to go.”
“I can show you where it is. We can go there. We can go there right now if you want. Are you Native American?”
“Sorry, I’m in a hurry.”
I turned and headed back to Jackson’s house, past the laundromat and dumpsters. I walked quickly, as quickly as I could, but it felt like I’d been walking around for hours. I turned down Jackson’s street and saw his low-slung car parked in the drive.
Inside the rotting house, Jackson was talking on the phone. He looked up at me as I entered. “Hang on, he just came in,” he said into the phone. “I’ll call you back.”
I sat on the couch across from him.
“That was Lyle, asking about the game,” he said. “We were talking about avatars.”
“What game, the sports game?”
He nodded impatiently. “That’s right, the Jim Thorpe game. Lyle wants some specific information from you.” He crossed his legs, jostling his foot. “Since the sports game has to do with the American Indian, I guess I need to know what Native Americans eat. Is Indian skillet a real dish? Indian tacos, fry bread? Anything culturally specific to Native American food?”
“I eat what you eat,” I told him.
“Beans and cornbread?”
“No.”
“Possum?”
“No.”
“Help us out,” he said. “I figured you could help some here. What kinds of food?”
“This is dumb, Jackson. How is this important for a sports game?”
He clicked his tongue, thinking. “Maybe a cultural reference in case a player wants to have lunch with Jim Thorpe. The game’s Thorpe hologram should show a man looking forward to a good meal after competition. It’s a bonus round: eat with a champ. Eat some possum or rabbit with Jim Thorpe, maybe fry bread too. We’ll need accurate cultural references, which is why I need you to tell me everything you can.”
“Christ, Jackson, what a terrible idea,” I said. “No wonder you guys haven’t done much. Nobody will want to pretend to eat as a bonus round.”
He crossed his arms, thinking. We both stared into the floor, a long silence between us. When I looked up, he was making a steeple with his fingers and looking at me. “Maybe we’ll try something else,” he said. “I’ll need you to pose for some camera shots.”
“You need me to pose for camera shots.”
“For the game, yeah. We need to fine-tune our hologram of Jim Thorpe, and there aren’t many Native Americans in this town. A year or two ago a Native American preacher and his family rolled into town. They were part of some larger cult, I think. They stayed at a roadside motel out past the interstate and ran church from their room. A few people went, including the mayor and some of the city councilmen and their families. Eventually I think the mayor ran them out of town, though.”
“Why is everyone so focused on Jim Thorpe?”
“Thorpe was an Olympic gold medalist,” he said, looking at his nails. “A Native American man, a fucking legend, considered to be the greatest athlete in the world, right from our home state of Oklahoma. Think of the decathlon, long jump, high jump, javelin throw. His hologram doesn’t do him justice. In fact, it doesn’t look like him at all yet, but we’re still in development. What better person could there be for others to play against in a simulation? We’re building out a full Olympics simulation. Compete against Thorpe in baseball, football, basketball.”
He went on, using technical computer jargon I didn’t understand. “I’ll need to film you, if that’s good with you,” he said. “I just need to work on something for a few minutes.”
I leaned back on the couch and looked up at the ceiling. He worked on his laptop across from me. He typed rapidly, pausing every so often to make little sniffing sounds, which grated on my nerves. All that sniffing. It was as if he was doing it on purpose while he worked. What was the sniffing about, and was it supposed to irritate me? I couldn’t handle it.
I wondered where Rae was, and whether she felt sorry that I was gone. I thought, too, about what memory I could share at Ray-Ray’s bonfire if I decided to go home. Ray-Ray used to give me piggy-back rides through the house. One time we flew a kite together in the backyard, just the two of us. I was afraid of letting go, thinking the kite would fly away. Ray-Ray held it with me, placing his hands over mine. I remember looking up at the kite and watching how it snapped in the wind, feeling panicked. “It’s fine, it’s fine,” he kept telling me. But I couldn’t fly it for very long. Something about it moving around up there so high made me dizzy, almost nauseous.
I wondered if my dad would be able to share a memory at the bonfire this year, too. He was so different from how he used to be. The first time I notic
ed his Alzheimer’s was when I visited home after having been away with Rae for a few months. I couldn’t believe how quickly he’d changed. The day I showed up, the first thing he wanted to do was go out to eat at a Mexican restaurant.
“They have good enchiladas,” he said. “Good salsa. The hot kind.”
I was happy to see him and my mom, but he wasn’t well. At the Mexican restaurant he told me he wanted to construct works of art from motorcycle parts that would hang in museums all over the Southwest. In my room that night, I rummaged through old boxes full of photos and drawings. I found a picture I drew in crayon of him when I was little. He had a long beard. He looked like a god. He had giant birdlike wings.
The longer I sat in Jackson’s house, with Jackson typing and sniffing across from me, the more anxious I felt. I needed to relax. I remembered I had a joint in my bag, so I stepped out onto the back porch and smoked half of it. I walked around the side of the house and looked at the area outside my window where I had seen the red fowl. There was a cluster of bushes that needed to be trimmed badly. As I drew nearer to that area, I heard something rustle in the bushes, so I turned and hurried back inside.
When I stepped into the front room, Jackson was standing there, waiting for me to join him. I followed him downstairs to the basement, which was too warm and brightly lit. The walls were dark-toned wood. There was a cabinet against a wall, and a stepladder in the center of the room. Some papers and a few cords were scattered on the floor, as well as a basketball, a football, and a video camera on a tripod. Jackson told me to stand by the wall. He tossed me the basketball and then turned on the camera, which beeped and flashed a red light.
“You’re filming me for the game?” I asked.
“Right, the game.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Dribble, shoot. Play pretend ball. Raise your arms, pivot, whatever you need to do.”
“Shoot? There’s no rim in here.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I just need the movement and your image on video.”
I dribbled the basketball while he filmed. I did a head fake and ran in for a layup. I shot free throws. I moved my body across the room, maneuvering right and left, guarding an invisible player. I pivoted with the ball. I blocked out, elbowed, faked left, and drove.
This went on for half an hour. Jackson kept stopping me to get a second take. Afterward, I watched him edit the clip on his laptop. I coughed, out of shape, weak from smoke in my lungs. Jackson slowed the video down, clipped parts of it. The film was all me, playing in real time, in slow motion and finally in animation. He added music tracks, heavy on drums and screeching electric guitar. I watched myself dribble and shoot, pitiful. There I was, trying too hard. “I’m no Jim Thorpe,” I said.
Jackson didn’t respond, focused on his editing. When he finished, he powered down the camera. He seemed pleased. “Fuck yes,” he said. “It all looks good.”
I followed him back upstairs, and he got us beers from the fridge.
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s all so weird. Today I was downtown, and someone asked me if I was Jim Thorpe. Someone else asked me about Devil’s Bridge. It’s all so strange.”
Jackson felt at his jaw, thinking. “Devil’s Bridge,” he said. In a way I wanted to grab him and shake him into rational thought. It wasn’t paranoia driving me to this line of thinking. It wasn’t drugs. I was clearly seeing something very strange happening all around me. I didn’t trust it. I was starting not to trust Jackson. He was not the same person he was so long ago.
“Don’t be paranoid,” he said. “Look, there are nervous citizens here. They see a new neighbor, and they freak out. It’s the confined space, the cloudy air, fog all the time. It destroys everyone. There is no happiness anymore. I don’t even know where I’ll be in the future. The thought of being stuck here doing the same thing forever is miserable.”
I coughed a few times, held my chest. “I should just leave,” I said.
“You crazy, Chief? You can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Give it a chance. Before coming here, I tried to develop phone apps with no luck. I applied for a patent that didn’t work out. Things take time. Be patient, you haven’t even been here a day.”
He cracked his knuckles and looked at his phone. “We’re just working on software development, that’s all,” he said. “My colleagues are disappearing. One went missing a month ago. His body was never found. Another added to the missing persons list. Sorry to sound so depressing. This place is a trap. Maybe you can earn your leave, but I don’t know how.”
“What do you mean, a trap?”
“Where would I even go?” he said. “Some other hellhole? I don’t have anyone. I don’t have anywhere to go.”
“What do you mean, a trap?” I asked again, but Jackson was too busy texting someone on his phone to answer me. He kept texting and sniffing.
* * *
That night, long after Jackson was asleep, I lay in bed watching the ceiling fan whir above me. Outside, the snow-foggy world was in strange form. A rainbow of light reflected on the wall across the room. Something was happening, but I couldn’t place what it was. My lungs rattled as I breathed. I coughed and brought up phlegm. Once or twice the walls of the house creaked. The unknown was frightening. I heard soulful groans. I heard the sad howl of a dog’s spirit outside my window.
Maria
SEPTEMBER 3
EARLY IN THE MORNING Wyatt and I sat at the table, both of us quiet while he ate breakfast. Ernest had gotten up early, around six thirty, to take a walk. He was now sitting outside on the deck, drinking his coffee and reading the newspaper.
I found myself staring at Wyatt while he ate. His eyes were brown and sleepy, a bit of soot in his lashes. He was dressed for school and ready to go on time, wearing a collared shirt and khaki pants. I had gotten up at seven, not able to fall back asleep, so I made waffles and bacon, which Wyatt devoured. He drank two glasses of orange juice quickly. He was surprisingly calm, adept at making himself appear relaxed and steady.
“I’ll drive you to school this week,” I told him. “But you’ll need to ride the bus home. It will drop you off at the edge of the road, down by the pond. It isn’t a far walk.”
“Will you be there when I get off ?”
“I didn’t know if you’d be embarrassed, so I thought you could walk here. My kids used to get embarrassed if Ernest and I waited for them.”
“I’m not too embarrassed about things like that,” he said. “Hey, does Mr. Echota always drink coffee outside in the morning? It reminds me of my dad.”
“Oh, what does your dad do?”
“He’s in jail for another DUI. Does Mr. Echota drink much?”
“Not really. Not anymore.”
I wanted him to tell me more about his family. I only knew what Bernice had told me, that his mother was out of the state and his father was in jail. But I realized we were running late, so I got my purse and Wyatt put his backpack on. I didn’t tell Ernest we were leaving, since we were in such a hurry. It took about fifteen minutes to get to Wyatt’s school from our house, but we made it on time, and as he got out of the car, I told him to call if he needed anything. “You don’t need to call Bernice,” I said. “You can call me directly.”
“I don’t have your phone number,” he said. He stood at the door, looking around, nervous. I borrowed a pencil and wrote down my cell for him on one of his notebooks.
“There you go,” I said. “Call if you need anything. Don’t worry. Just call, okay?”
He shut the door and started to walk away. Watching him, I felt something inside me fall apart.
ONWARD! I HAD PLENTY TO DO to keep myself busy. I told myself I needed to get the details in order for Ray-Ray’s anniversary bonfire, and I also needed to call Edgar. When I arrived home I saw that Ernest was still sitting on the back porch, so I sat at the table and made a grocery list for the bonfire. We needed a dessert. We needed meat and fresh vegetables.
Our meal would be plentiful, but it would take time to prepare for the family. I started writing out what I wanted to share aloud in remembrance of Ray-Ray. I wrote: I remember when you were little and liked to pick blackberries with me alongside the road. You always loved picking blackberries with me. I set the pen down and stared into the table, thinking. But nothing else came.
I got my phone from my purse and called Edgar, praying he would answer. It went to his voice mail. “Edgar,” I said. “Please call me when you get a minute, honey. I really need to talk to you.”
I sat at the table, thinking about Edgar and wondering whether he was at home or out using someplace, roaming the streets. It terrified me to think he was around dangerous people whose lives hung on the cusp of tragedy. I prayed silently for him to live, to think about us and want to come home. In the kitchen I poured a cup of coffee, then went outside to check on Ernest. He was leaning forward, looking out at the water.
“Everything okay?” I asked.
“I’m looking for signs,” he said. “Spirits, messengers, anything.” He turned and looked at me, and I could see the seriousness in his face. “That boy,” he said.
“Wyatt.”
“No, Ray-Ray.”
I tried not to let it bother me. I tried to think about what I was going to do about the bonfire, who was going to run things, since Ernest was not mentally able to. I thought he might burn himself trying to start the fire. It was too dangerous in his condition.
“We should be careful talking about spirits in front of him,” I said. “Wyatt comes from a broken home. His mother has left, his father is in jail.”
“All the talk of music and movies last night.”
He remembered their conversation from last night. This was something of a surprise.
“Ray-Ray liked to collect records, too,” he said. “Remember he liked jazz? I’m almost positive he alphabetized his records.”
ERNEST WENT FOR ANOTHER WALK while I drove to the grocery store to get food and drinks for the bonfire. I called Sonja while I pushed the grocery cart down the aisle. “Papa’s memory is getting better,” I told her. “It just happened last night. He remembered his mother and father. He remembered Ray-Ray’s records.”
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