Jon and Zak were out of ideas.
“Look, why don’t you guys just fuck off,” he finished bloodlessly. He was drunk and it looked like he was going to stay drunk for a while. Jon and Zak conferred silently eye to eye. Whichever way Jesse was going, he was going to have to get there by himself. There was no telling what his next move was going to be. At last, Jon’s nod toward the door shook Zak loose. They stepped away from the bar.
“Hell, there isn’t anything more we can do here,” Jon insisted quietly.
Zak wasn’t so sure, he was inclined to keep ordering drinks and ride this out with Jesse, like he would ride out a bad trip with a buddy back in school but felt he had to give Jon his due for knowing Jesse better, longer. He couldn’t tell if Jon was just impatient or truly felt confident that leaving was the right thing. In any event, they bought a couple of six-packs for the long drive back to Scobey.
Zak was tired. Jon and Zak rode in silence. The monotonous terrain rolled by. Tomorrow they would either start work on Bomac 34’s next location or Jesse would fail to show and George would be forced to put together another crew by hiring a new driller. Zak was tired; in his fatigue, a slow dull pang of despair pierced the numbness. The prospect of being out of work again so soon after thinking he had found himself in an ideal situation, especially after his compromise with George, which come to think of it, was beginning to look like a catastrophically bad decision, pushed him down in his seat. His head rested against the door window with a thunk. At least this time around he had a few dollars in his pocket and wasn’t a total stranger. Everything was riding on a man who was seriously drunk and hundreds of miles from location.
BACK IN SCOBEY AT THE Pioneer Hotel bar, Zak was on his third Dewar’s and water, still mulling all this over while Jon took the first shower upstairs, when someone sat down next to him and said, “It’s all yours.”
This man had a solid medium build with a square jaw and strong shoulders, long blond hair neatly combed straight back, and penetrating blue eyes. He had the kind of curious good looks a lot of movie stars have. A kind of everyman symmetry to his face but with something extra, something perhaps a little manic, a little on edge, thrown in. His clear pale skin stretched taught across the bones of his face, and when his facial muscles moved, you could see them all working in unison, driven by natural mechanics but fueled by emotion. A face revealing nothing but hinting at everything. It took a whole second for Zak to recognize him.
“Jon!”
“Well, what do you think of the real me?” Jon took a step back, rubbed his face all over with his big hands, and brushed his hair straight back.
“I’m impressed!” Zak looked him up and down. Clean pressed jeans, a clean shirt, and a polished pair of brown two-tone cowboy boots with pointed toes that looked real sharp. His usual brash, impertinent stare was now accompanied by a hitherto invisible cat-who-ate-the-canary grin, and this bold countenance, taken as a whole, could only mean one thing.
“You’ve got a date!”
Jon opened his mouth in silent hilarity, and his head bobbed as he scooted onto a stool and ordered up a rye and Coke.
“Who is it? A girl back in Watford?”
“Nope.”
“No shit. Someone here in Scobey?”
Jon was grinning to himself as well as at Zak as he laid his money down on the bar. He was a little surprised that Zak hadn’t picked up on this development from the start. Freddy had figured it out right away. To Jon it seemed so glaringly obvious. Zak took a long, dramatic look around the empty room as though every eligible woman in Scobey, Montana, were present. At last when he saw the strange barkeep, it hit him. He smiled a big smile that pushed his frameless glasses high up on his cheeks. “Mary Ellen,” he concluded, drawing out the name in a playful roguish tenor. Jon smiled again and took a long pull on his drink. As he did so, he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror behind the bar. His cocksure expression, the one that had gotten him in so much trouble back home, in high school, the one that needed hiding in the military, was back. He was at the same time secretly embarrassed by and proud of his own good looks.
Zak patted Jon on the shoulder, wished him luck, assured him he’d steer clear of the hotel room that night and, as they parted company, wanted Jon to “ask her if she’s got a sister.”
“Will do, partner.”
Zak showered up and before he left the hotel for his campsite, he talked the barkeep into slipping into the café and getting him a couple of packets of prewrapped coffee grounds for next morning. He was looking forward to some privacy and some rest. As the Jeep roared into the cool black night, Zak could feel the tension from the past several days, one big long day really, fall from him like dead tree bark. He wanted to retreat into the wilderness. Retreat from the intimate beginnings of Jon and Mary Ellen’s courtship. Retreat from the ugly pain that warped Jesse Lancaster and tormented poor Freddy Fifer. Retreat from Marty’s crude approach and Cynthia’s simple and stunted world view. He wanted to crawl into a hole and cover it over. He wanted to crawl inside his own skin once again and see if there was anything new to be found there. Something, hopefully, more perfectly whole, complete, and comprehensible than what he had left behind on his last visit.
The Jeep was loud. Too loud to bother pushing in a tape. He used the loud drone of the engine and the steady rattling of the ragtop against the wind as a bed beneath his thoughts which were more images than words and ideas. He pulled the hood of his soiled green sweatshirt over his head. He felt like a monk. He could see himself locked away in the isolated confines of some distant monastery. Tucked away in the forested wilderness. Removed from time. Poring over ancient and esoteric dogmas by candlelight. Preserving a daring, unused rationale for a time capsule to be rediscovered by a more intuitive and inquisitive breed of mankind. Living on bread, homemade wine, and the alms of strangers. Then taking his personal quest out into a world where few would recognize him. He wanted not only to be alone but to be left alone.
He wondered if the self that he had created and introduced to his new friends was real. He had stripped himself down, emotionally and historically, to nothing more than an amalgamation of impulse reactions to the needs of every moment. He had drawn on no personal history to come this far, had not arrived here as the result of a logical progression of events but had willfully altered his course in midstream. He had ripped himself out of time, out of place, and inserted himself here. Set the right plant down in the right soil long enough and it will invariably take root. Other lives were now integrating, inevitably, with his own. He wondered if it was wrong of him to interfere, if by being there he was altering, in one way or another, the lives of all he touched. If he truly didn’t belong here, then he was injecting into their lives a dangerous and inappropriate element. If he had not come West then he wouldn’t have been there to make the decision not to twist off. No. If he hadn’t been a trained creature of compromise, it would never have occurred to him not to twist off. It surely had occurred to everyone else. For a brief moment it occurred to him that he should get back to his campsite just long enough to retrieve his things, Freddy’s tent included, and push on down the road. He had some money. He could get another job like Jesse had suggested. Maybe hire on with another rig down around Watford. Hang around just long enough to earn another couple of paychecks, and when he began to learn more than the names of his new crew, figure that was the time to split once again.
At the campsite Zak tore off his boots and climbed into the sleeping bag with his clothes on. He unwrapped Freddy Fifer’s fully loaded long barrel Colt .45 and scrutinized it under the light of his flashlight. He wanted desperately to step outside the tent and squeeze off a couple of rounds, for no other reason than to smell the powder and hear the report, to feel the kick. He had never fired a gun this powerful before. There was no doubt that everyone in the farmhouse down the way knew exactly what a gunshot sounded like and would come running with guns
of their own. He wrapped it up, placed it under a shirt pointing away from himself, and went right to sleep with one hand still resting on the weapon. He didn’t dream.
Along about dawn his anxieties over his now-uncertain job situation woke him, and he emerged from the tent into the mystic blue premorning light, stretched, and set himself to gathering dried grass and whatnot, including debris from the floor of the Jeep, to kindle the fire. The ground was wet on his bare feet. The air was crisp in his lungs. In the Jeep he also found the boards from Freddy’s splint and a box full of ripped-up and bloodied guns and girlie magazines, most of which he included in his kindling pile. One photograph, untorn and unsullied, was of a young woman holding her breasts protectively while leaving her sex completely exposed as she stared nervously at him from the page. He tore the picture from the magazine before tossing the latter in the fire. He filled his coffee pot with spring water, dropped in the packet of grounds and, once that was set in the burning pile of junk, retired once more to the tent with the picture from the book.
Her hair, which didn’t belong parted at the side, was tossed recklessly over the top of her head as though she had just landed in this position and, as if given the choice of surrendering her breasts or her sex to the approaching viewer, had voluntarily parted her legs. Her breasts were the type men typically drool over. Big and young enough to still have plenty of bounce. Her nipples were puffy and pink and aimed in opposite directions. They looked as though you could sweep them completely off the top of those big billowy mounds with one swipe of the tongue. Coconut cherry marshmallow. She held them guardedly and the more Zak studied her face, the more he saw her as cross, perhaps even jealous of whomever might want to take them from her. She seemed to be saying, These are mine. These are for me. You won’t treat them right. You’ll maul them, burn them with your whiskers. You won’t take the time to explore them. You think you know what they are, but you don’t. How could you? You can have this. This is what you’re really after anyway, isn’t it? Between her legs was a slight wisp of golden brown hair that curled tightly directly over her taut and tucked-in little slit. Hardly what you might consider bush. There was not enough flesh from her buttocks to hide her rectum yet there was just enough there to form a capricious little smile on the blanket where she reclined. Her belly was small and round and unlike most, if not all, the women in these magazines, she looked remarkably defiant, unabused.
Zak closed his eyes and there was Jackie, the girl from corn mountain, lowering herself down onto his lips, her wetness creating an atmosphere of its own, breathing into his nostrils as she stared down between her breasts to see him tasting her, then arching her perfect neck and chin upward with her own release as her hand reached behind her and took hold of him. He moaned loudly, shuddered over and over again and, after a long moment, opened his eyes. All was gone but the sunlit green canvas wall of the tent. The tent smelled of mold. The bright green filtered light washed everything around him. The air was thick. He wiped his hand on a soiled shirt from his laundry pile, buttoned up, and staggered out to get some coffee.
It was a glorious morning. The creek water sang as it lapped, slapped, and tinkled over the rocks echoing off the short canyon walls and the big big sky. Zak gulped down a cup of coffee, then adjourned to the outhouse for his morning constitutional. As he sat there musing over the possible events of the day, he focused on the fact that last night, tonight, and tomorrow could be his last here by the creek and suddenly regretted not having spent every night here. He remembered something Corey Nightingale had said about this place, this time of day, in connection with Coster’s lost son. He pulled the outhouse door closed and followed the beam of sunlight that poured through the crescent moon on the door and landed on the wall behind him. Something was there all right. He pulled himself together and then stood up and out of the way to get a closer look.
The wall at that spot was covered with dirt, dust, and grime, and as he lightly rubbed it with his fingers, he was able to reveal some marks in the wood. He withdrew his knife from its shin scabbard and slowly scraped the crud away. There, in neat little burn marks, as though they had been done with the hot coal from a skinny cigar over the course of many mornings such as this, were lines of verse. He opened the door full, to enlist the aid of the sun as perhaps the author had, and then ever so carefully continued his excavation. In a short while, whole long strings of words were visible, snaking in a contiguous chain around the inner wall of the outhouse beginning and ending there above the seat where the dawn’s early light formed a brilliant crescent moon. He dashed back to the tent for a piece of paper and a pen, and before long he was sitting by the fire with a fresh cup of coffee and these words:
In memory of Tommy Coster
Born in ’25, died in ’44
And to sons of old fools everywhere
Who go marching off to war
There’s a scented breeze blow’n
O’er crops finished grow’n
Like the farmer’s hand sow’n
Crops that ne’er grew before
Just count the seconds past the lightnin’
Don’t y’find the thunder frightenin’
If y’do they’ll have y’fightin’
In someone else’s war
’Cause we all got to die sometime
Say the old men past their prime
Who won’t see the future
That I’m dyin’ for
And there’s a scented breeze blow’n
O’er crops finished grow’n
Like a father’s hand sow’n crops
That ne’er grew before.
Signed C.N. 8/44
ZAK TUCKED THE PAGE INTO The People’s Almanac, made a couple of sandwiches, poured himself some more coffee, and took these out to a rock by the creek. As he read and reread the poem over again, his mythical image of Corey Nightingale began to loom very large. “If you stand at the door of that outhouse and look up the hill in front of you, and then walk up to the top of that hill, you’ll find somethin’ you didn’t know was there.”
Zak dropped everything and went to stand in the doorway of the outhouse. He stared to the top of a hill that stretched out before him and walked up the hill to the top. From there, he could see in all directions. And all the other hilltops were just as tall as the one he stood upon for as far as the eye could see. In one direction he could see the chimney and part of the roof of Coster’s house a mile or so off. The other way he could see the crow’s nest of the rig, he could hear the odd clang and clank echoing in the distance. He turned slowly, wondering what it was Corey wanted to draw his attention to. He looked down at the outhouse. His eyes followed the creek as it wound through the hills, disappearing around a bend. As he turned, his boot stepped down on something hard. He looked down, he kicked away the grass. It was a gravestone. As he searched the grounds atop his hill, he found several more. Most of the writing had worn off the crude stones, but over in a clump of sage there were three little headstones jutting up. On the middle one he could make out, “2 Years Old” and on the ones to either side, “3 Years Old” and “4 Years Old,” respectively.
“The cost of living out here is high,” he said aloud. He sat down in the middle of the little family graveyard, and the monastic impulses that had come upon him the night before returned. He thought of the wandering troubadours, poets, people who shunned the material world because of its distraction from the pure and high-minded, well expressed act or thought. Priests, nuns, saints of all kinds, Peace Corps volunteers, ambulance drivers, firemen. He wondered again about his own monastic impulses of the night before and tried to reconcile them with what had happened in the tent just moments ago. He laughed at himself. What would the priests, poets, and roughneck dreamers of his monastery call themselves or be in worship of? The Sacred Order of Runaway Slaves? The Abbey of the Abyss? The Loyal Brothers and Sisters of the Fertile Crescent Moon? The Society of th
e Immaculate Holy Pin-Up of Mr. Coster’s Creek? The sun climbed steadily lifting and blending the many colors sprinkled across the distances into their purest focus. He removed his shirt. He felt an empathy with the lonesome observer who has renounced everything, perhaps even his own talent, so that nothing might escape him; who does not seek to exploit his God, his self, or his insights farther than the singular comfort of awareness, that reaches for but does not pretend to infinity yet strives to be ready at all times for the encounter that will call or summon his being into motion and response. “There’s a scented breeze blow’n…” Tommy Coster’s epitaph could have been Zachary Harper’s baptismal prayer. That day in the laundromat Zak had tried to package Corey Nightingale. Had tried to put his stories and his kooky stereotype into some comprehensible and dissectible mold. Now he had stumbled across this man’s marker, an arrow pointing in opposite directions yet arriving at the same point at the same time. Corey had reached his audience all right. Here, in this sepulcher of unfulfilled dreams and hard realities, Corey had made his statement to the only audience that mattered.
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