But today’s poet stays his course. “I’m not lost, am I? I don’t recognize things with all this water. It sure is dark, too.” The pallid figure of his wife lures him on, she also who walked by the magic scene.
The poet keeps going downriver. My wife, my wife, he thinks. Having asked after his living, actual wife, having seen the release of a mermaid he would not acknowledge, he now thinks about his dead, nonactual wife, his first wife.
He sees her in only a handful of fixed attitudes, lovely aspects, doing a handful of things, dear wifely functions he was indifferent to when she was alive. His indifference to these touching scenes killed her, he thinks. Ironing.
She is ironing his shirts, humming a popular song. A top-forty radio thing. Heavy cotton broadcloth shirts she presses, working the iron like a hot trowel in mortar, and somehow the freshness of the laundered shirts transfers to her, to her dress, her dress becomes in his memory a spectacular simple girly A-line—crisp, sweet, damp—and she his wife a cool-skinned model of a girl doing all this for him, with equanimity and grace, and if he were not following her replacement down a river, not watching the water lest someone’s mermaid surface and appeal to him for help, he would whistle a tune and go to his first wife and nose her in the pleats and darts as she irons, over light steam.
Kansas
THE DINER QUIT SERVING food, but it did not close. Likewise, the drive-in stopped showing movies but remained open. Songbirds of all character and kind gave their distinctive calls and showed their identifying profiles and markings and gave cats hell and made a general paean to Roger Tory Peterson. A lone Allis Chalmers combine dominated the skyline. It, the machine, was for sale, used, quite used.
The ladies of the town were so nice, and had been so deliberately nice all their natural lives, that they came to regard cancer as a blessing. Most of them got it; those that didn’t felt cheated, left out.
The men had never learned to cuss, drink, fight, adulterate, or drive too fast. They stood there as their wives received the good bad news and as the songbirds flitted about their heads like gnats. “What a revolting development this is,” one of them said, earnestly thinking the remark funny. “It’s Tuesday,” the comic farmer continued, “and will be all day unless it rains.” He could not suppress a giggle.
It no longer bothered him that he did not know—no one knew—who the father of his wheat was. He had come, over the years, to regard his wheat not as bastard wheat but as adoptive. No one knew the father of the adopted, and that did not make for calling them bastards. “That’s being wrapped too tight,” he concluded, using for the first time, with a thrill, a line he had heard on a television comedy show he did not understand but laughed at anyway.
He had heard flip your wig on the same show. Flip your wig and another even more obscure expression used near it, wig out, made him uncomfortable. He told the Allis Chalmers dealer that the used combine was wigged out, to test the meaning. The Chalmers dealer merely shrugged and patted him on the shoulder and walked back into his showroom. He had meant that the combine was worn out, but now, having been a smartass, he had no idea what wigged out meant, and he was afraid to proof the term any further.
The diner was open but not serving food, and the drive-in let you park and put a speaker in your car but showed no movie. You passed your unused napkin back to the waitress with a very small tip, and you put the silent speaker back on its post and drove away. The world was getting easier, in its way, as it got harder to figure. People were confused somewhat, but they were losing weight and were not subject to sex and violence from Hollywood. Children were not acting confused at all, but—here was a thing to ponder—they had never been overweight, and they had never objected to sex and violence in their entertainment. Things, people felt, would make sense if they could just think them through. “Sit and contemplate your navel,” the comic farmer liked to put it. “Sit and contemplate your navel.”
They sat and contemplated the government-suppressed price of wheat, which was at least a dollar per bushel lower than what it cost to produce a bushel of wheat; and contemplated not producing wheat as a protest; and contemplated why on earth they actually continued to produce wheat, losing, as they were, at least a dollar per bushel; and contemplated, finally, precisely how they were able still to produce wheat if they had in fact lost at least a dollar per bushel on the last hundred million or so bushels. It was this—still producing wheat—that made contemplation of the navel a somehow more reasonable and easy thing to consider. But contemplating the navel was something no one really knew anything about, and moreover, they suspected that that contemplation required a specific if not downright exotic place, and all of their place was plain.
“That goldarn government of ours,” the farmer prone to comedy announced one morning to the other farmers not eating at the diner, “is wigged out.” Strangely coordinated, the farmers all together gently passed their clean napkins and their dimes to the waitress and wordlessly eased out of the diner. The comic farmer sat there, surprised at his foolishness in testing the expression so … so blithely a second time. He noticed that all the departing farmers wore the same co-op hat—color and apparent age of the caps looked identical. It was as if new hats had been handed out at an assembly that he had missed. This was impossible. There were no assemblies, certainly no hat-handing-out assemblies, and he would not have missed it if there had been such an assembly, or any kind of assembly at all. He thought immediately of alien movies: Had all his peers been possessed by … ? Or were they normal, and his old-hattedness an index that he had somehow gotten out of step? They had had a co-op party, say a wheat tour, had handed out a hundred brand-new mesh caps, and he had been somewhere else, watching TV for new material or contemplating his navel without knowing it. Kansas was becoming a strange and dangerous terrain.
He sat in the diner alone with fifty clean napkins and fifty shiny dimes.
Texas
I FELL OFF THE lightning rod.
I entered the sweepstakes.
I lost control.
I became beautiful.
I charmed a queen.
I defied gravity.
I moved mountains.
I bowled.
I wept, mourned, moped, and sped about town in a convertible, progressively irascing the gendarme until I was charged with exhibitionist speed.
I billed my ex-wife for lost consortium.
I filled a prophylactic with water until it was the size of the bathtub.
I let a trapped bird out of the house. Wren, I think.
I felt ill.
I felt better.
I say.
I’m alive to everything, consequently alert to nothing.
Bully, my mother would say.
I wish I dressed in light white linens through which my pink skin could be seen by the natives.
The county constabulary has a gym, and all constables weigh 300 to 400 pounds each.
I wish I were a redheaded Fort Worth millionaire ten times. I’d have a good truck, jewelry, ironed jeans, neat house, docile wife, decent daughters, bushy eyebrows, pithy maxims, damn nigh aphorisms now, and very little trouble except possibly nagging prostate. And good boots. Preferably Luccheses, settle for Sanders.
The main thing is: Don’t take any shit.
That’s the main thing.
The unmain thing is: You are not going to figure anything out except how to get other people to take shit, so forget about everything except not taking any yourself.
When your hair turns white, unless you are under forty, a senator, or in the movies, better punt.
If wooden rowboats would only make a comeback …
Girl Scout cookies, Girl Scout cookies, Girl Scout cookies.
If a boy is afraid of the dark and wets the bed, try hard, very hard, not to comment in any language.
He will grow to put you softly in your grave.
Proposition
YOU CAN’T RAMBLE AROUND the woods in your truck going to fish camps without dr
inking. You’ll meet up with an appointed manager of a landing that has one or two boats go out a day, or a week, and he’ll sit you down in a chair on the lawn and sit beside you and slap his knee and finally offer you a beer and you will have to take it or you won’t should have sat down in the first place with such a man in such a position in the fading, old world.
After about thirty minutes, a codger like this in such a position—you all sitting there reading the hydrilla-warning sign which, as much as anything else, is why he’s likely to make about only $30 from launch fees the entire month, reading that sign for thirty minutes—he might slap his knee again and say, “Boy, I could use some sex.”
“Me too,” you say, before you think very much, but you are in it now. Brace yourself a bit, maybe try to get another beer quick, but don’t run, because a man in his position is generally highly politic.
“Do you want me to suck your dick?” he says, not reading the hydrilla sign now but looking you dead in the eye like the world’s greatest salesman or priest or politician or doctor giving you the straight poop.
“Oh, naw. Thanks, but no. Thanks,” you say, and read the hydrilla sign carefully.
“No shame to it, bud,” he may say. “Nothing in the world I like better.”
Basically you are looking at a grisly, lumpy man who might have changed people’s oil for a living, unless he somehow got this job, which is watching the place for a rich person somewhere and taking the $1.00 from every party what runs his boat up or down the busted-up concrete slab that nobody with a heavy boat better go too far down or he’ll never get out.
“Naw.” You say this again and give him one of the earnest level-eyes and he’ll get your meaning and his hopes will ebb out and you’ll both be back to sign reading and stretching around in the lawn chairs and maybe you’ll be ready a little earlier than you might have otherwise to get back in your truck and ramble into the woods and drink your own beer and ramble.
It might be a good thing to stop somewhere particularly scenic—maybe some young longleaf pines in clear air taking a little breeze in their rich brilliant silky sappy needles—and announce, “Perversion is pandemic.” That may be a most pleasant thing to stop your rambling in the woods drinking and do.
South Carolina
ON A LOW-COUNTRY PLANTATION, where I am invited but do not belong, there is a group of young women dressed up and going to a ball, or cotillion—if that is the word, and I doubt that it is—or even wedding, at another plantation, as happens here: you frequently go to one party in order to prepare for another party. They are in white finery that looks to me bridal but probably is just formal. One of the women is striking. She is rather small, compact, tanned, her hair back tight—she looks like an accomplished horsewoman in an evening gown; a bit out of her water but not unhappy about it. She and the other women are heading out, somewhat cattle-like, stragglers and strays but in the main accomplishing the harried exodus. I catch her eye. There is no time or place for introductions. I go up and suddenly take her by both hands firmly: “I’m quite unlikely ever to see you again.”
“I’ve got to go,” she says, pulling away, it seems with only one hand, her right, which has three rings, I notice, on one finger.
“Well, put a glass slipper in the red pickup out there,” I say. She leaves.
I go to the bar. It is in a large card room with a commercial big-screen television in a corner. The low-country boys do things right.
Someone says, “Hey, man, she’s married.”
I shrug. I am confident I acquitted myself brilliantly. The motif is backwards—my pickup truck among the Mercedeses is the pumpkin coach, and I should have on the slippers—but, I think, that is even better. She’ll get the picture. The backwardness is a profit in irony.
At the bar I am served a beer and a parrot. You may have a parrot for your shoulder as you drink. The parrots, when served, lie on their sides on the bar, perhaps talking to you, until you pick them up. They are stored on a shelf under the bar like silverware and either can’t immediately move or are trained not to.
Florida
HAVE: WIFE, CHILD, HOUSE, dog, truck, car, boat, lake lot, annuities, IRA, shotgun, handgun, stun gun, spear gun.
Don’t have: girlfriend, country home, Yazoo, liquor sideboard, anyone on retainer, condo on beach, friends.
I do not know any famous turkey guides.
I have no hope of recovering the kind of time and place that Florida was when a large rattlesnake slipped under the maid’s quarters—a six-by-eight room detached from the house on Kingsley Lake, its roof, I believe, already gone, which deterred no one from calling it the maid’s quarters, and inspired no one to remove or protect the maid’s meager furnishings—slipped under the maid’s quarters, amid the grown male hollering that accompanies the movement of all sighted snakes, got under there and holed up good, which was not too hard, because the hollering grown men did not go after him with much more than a rake handle and maybe later, inspired, a water hose on full blast, idea being that rattlesnake under maid’s quarters would prefer having his head chopped off to getting wet: this kind of time and place is gone.
For one thing, I am nearly as old as the grown hollering men were then, and I do not holler at rattlesnakes, even if I could find one, and I can’t. They are extinct.
Maids are out of the question.
The quarters are now a low ruin of powder-post beetle-age and funny-looking marks on the ground, as if something got nuked.
It is hot enough, generally, to think that something should get nuked.
The hollering men are dead, some of them, and some have new child brides and drinking problems, according to their ex-wives, and I have a drinking problem, and the maid’s descendants have crack problems, or no problems except no small desire to annihilate all the descendants of the hollering men.
All of us have hope of salvation, I think, except those who actually stuck a rake handle two feet under the skirt of the maid’s quarters and held it there three seconds, then ran, wondering why the rattlesnake had not obligingly attached himself to the handle for ease of magical extraction and his own execution. Some of them are still wondering.
Wait
SPAVINED, CLAVICULAR, AND COW-HOCKED, with an air not of malice but simply of a leaden determination that seemed to come up from the hard, baking ground itself on which it stood, chained, confined, gravitate to the orbit of earth depressed, moonlike, and polished by its five-foot circular diurnal traveling, looking forward with a low-lidded not scowl or glare but just look, the eyes half-lidded and half-rolled, suggesting not insolence or calculation or even sentience but a kind of pride—rear-axled and log-chained for a lifetime to a hot powdery hole in which it is its fate to consider its chances of fighting, the rare times not chained, for its very life—a profound self-esteem that says simply, I am here, you see that I am here, what need to look you in the eye: the bulldog bit the corncob truncate.
Truncate?
Into foreshortened segments, not as if—
He busted it all up?
—not as if they had once been parts of a greater piece, but as if they could yet assemble into a piece larger, so profound was their truncation—
Dog bit the corncob?
—there, vanquished at the splayed feet of the animal with an air not canine but not unlike a locomotive, small, furred, steeled, yet without so much a train of cars behind it as the quintessence of linked and smelt earthcore, its log chain—
Dog bit the goddamned corncob?
—yes. Yes. Wait—
In half or what?
Wait. Not halved so much as no longer whole, as if in the authority of the bite was contained the undoing of natural history, and if there were two pieces of corncob where there had been one, there might have been now twenty; for the moral, imperative, and inviolate impression made was of a corncob no longer one.
In half, in the dirt?
In the moted, desiccate, rivulet ground.
I dig where you comin from, b
ut you talkin in circles.
Helically, gyring, for the truth is never at one location but variant, even unto itself: dislocate, inchoate, rubricate of subtler chance—
God, man. Say it. We this far, all happen is dog done bit a corncob. I’d have me a dog done kill a horse by now, drag a man out a burning house. And you want you a mean bulldog? He gone bite a corncob? Shih. I seen dog so mean he bust up his water dish—a Buick hubcap! And not just once, every time you give him water. Don’t even drink the water first! Whyont you let your dog bust up a bicycle with a kid on it, or bust up lawnmower, a runnin lawnmower—
The corncob is integral to this kind of story. You can do a lot with a corncob.
Yours is bust up.
True. You can do a lot with what can no longer happen. Thwarted fate is integral to this kind of story.
Well, integral some action in your story. Git on wid it.
Wait. Wait. Wait.
What else I can do?
Wait.
Wayne’s Fate
GOING UP THE LADDER after lunch I see Wayne badly handling the stepladder we need to get to the dormer peaks and wonder how he gets away with stuff like that without falling: and then that he does not get away with it and he is falling, falls off the roof, and I wince but do not look down. I wait for the sounds. I wait clenching the ladder where I stand five rungs from the top. There is no sound. Can Wayne have found a soft canopy of tree? Has he tricked me?
I go backwards down the ladder. Not far from it, facedown, Wayne. I kneel and of course think of Rule #1: Don’t move him. Then I see Rule #1 may not apply: Wayne’s head is gone. This, too, looks like a trick. There is no blood or gore and from my angle, behind and to the side of him, no wound visible, just no head, as if he’s an incomplete scarecrow.
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