Boonville

by Anderson, Robert Mailer

  “It’s good to know you wouldn’t take advantage of the kindness of strangers,” John said, reclining to a less aggressive but still siege-friendly stance.

  Blindman was still gazing three feet to John’s left. It was strange to talk to someone who could only look you in the eye by accident.

  “The tough part of No-Contact,” Blindman explained, “I need the wifeback to open the Contac* capsules and separate the red balls from the blues and whites. Only the reds mix well with No-Doz. Luckily, she’s used to piece labor. I can melt everything myself. Stuff is twice as good as cocaine, a hundred times cheaper, legal, and instead of destroying your nasal passages, it cleans your sinuses. I haven’t sneezed in five years.”

  “You ought to be in line for the Nobel Prize,” John assured him. “You could be the first antihistamine junkie to win the award.”

  “We all got our vices,” Blindman said. “You’re probably addicted to pain and don’t even know it. The noble sufferer. Blame everybody but yourself. Edna told me about you and your family.”

  John couldn’t imagine Grandma having a conversation with Blindman, so it was preposterous that she could have told him anything personal about his family. And, it wasn’t true, he wasn’t addicted to pain. He just had a high threshold, that’s all. Why else would he be tolerating Blindman? He couldn’t speak for his parents, it might be true about them. At this point in his life, John didn’t care.

  “You don’t know me, Blindman,” John said.

  “But I knew your grandma,” Blindman told him. “In the biblical sense.”

  “What are you trying to say?” John asked.

  “I’m not trying to say anything,” Blindman said. “I’m telling you, I porked your grandma, lunged her doughnut. How clear do you need it?”

  In order to have been born, John knew his grandparents had to have had sex, but he didn’t want to reflect on any specific grope. Maybe he could handle thinking about it in terms of old photographs, a black-and-white snapshot couple walking hand in hand, spreading a blanket, laying down and coming together to produce his father in a moment of shared passion. But not Grandma without Grandpa. And not Grandma as an old woman. And not Grandma as an old woman taking in the appendage of a blind, petty-thief, junkie, cultist drug-dealer. Not Grandma and Blindman. John didn’t need it that clear.

  “I don’t want to hear this,” John said, wishing his telephone worked so he could call Deputy Cal. “I’m sure my grandma would have nothing to do with you.”

  “Which shows you what you can be sure of,” Blindman said. “It only happened once. Edna had read somewhere cum was made up of the same substance as the fluid that protects your brain. She wanted to save it, for health reasons. She believed you could fuck your brains out. The way we went at it, she made a believer of me. She was a strange woman, but she grew the best Mendo Mellow in the county. I was hoping you came here to do the same. That’s why I stopped by. The bag was because Prairie Mama told me you could use some help.”

  John wished Grandma had told him she had slept with Blindman. Not that he had told her about his one-night stands, all three of them, each an awkward entering occurring before he had met Christina. In every case, John had felt like he had done his best, until in post-orgasm depression the women shook his confidence by saying something like, “It’s O.K., we can try again later.” Christina had been the one that taught him how to “make love,” fulfilling his desires and satisfying him with the notion that she would be the only woman he would sleep with for the rest of his life.

  John was a sexual throwback, having completely missed the sixties free-love influence. He didn’t even get the seventies until the eighties were fully under way. In Miami, a “Look, don’t touch!” voyeurism was dominant. Floridians were on the cutting edge of strip shows, phone sex, Bain de Soleil ads, and cheek-to-cheekless dances. His parents, being McCarthy-era, Legion of Decency inspired, believing in one mate, one ejaculation for one child, of which there was only one, were no help either. His father screwed around, but nobody was supposed to know. His mother was an inebriated June Cleaver, the perfect apron-wearing housewife until the sneak-drinks of sherry kicked in and she stalked around the house making lewd comments about Tom Jones’s bulge and rubbing against the ironing board to the rhythm of fiercely creased pants and a Vegas version of “I Want to Kiss You All Over.” Apparently, Grandma had her kinks too.

  John formed the disgusted expression cut into a thousand scraps of wood at the thought of Blindman’s seed spilling into Grandma’s shriveled sanctum. He hoped they at least had the decency to put a layer of latex between them. Grandma wasn’t even supposed to like people, why this man? How many others were there? Didn’t you need a special lubricant to have sex with a woman over the age of seventy? Who bought it? What else didn’t he know? John was willing to accept there had been hints about Grandma growing dope, her place being a shack, Boonville being rural, all about as revealing as Noah saying, “It looks like rain,” but clues nonetheless. He knew Grandma was eccentric, but having sex with this scumbag was something else. What was he to think? What was he to say?

  “Do you have proof?” John asked.

  “What?” Blindman said.

  “Do you have proof?” John repeated. “That you slept with my grandma?”

  John wanted Blindman to say something he could refute, that Grandma had a flat stomach and minty breath, or that in the throes of passion she had called out Grandpa’s name. John wanted to believe Grandma’s dark side wasn’t fused with human need. He wanted limits to the dementia of his heredity. He wanted to be told a crude lie.

  “Edna wasn’t the kind of woman to wear garters,” Blindman offered. “I could get specific, but I doubt you felt her up the way I did.”

  “When did it happen?” John said, skin crawling.

  “It wasn’t D-Day, it was a roll in the hay,” Blindman told him. “The days that matter to me are today and the day I die. You’re talking to a man that has never seen a watch. I ask somebody what time it is, I have to take their word for it. When I used to go to the Blind Center it was like going to prison. Sometimes I’d sit in the library reading braille and think to myself this stuff ticking away could be minutes, seconds, or years. When you’re in darkness and there’s silence, time could be anything. You realize it’s in your head. This could be an afternoon in the year 2000, what difference would it make?”

  “There would have been a better chance of you catching me awake,” John said.

  “Be glad you are awake,” Blindman cautioned. “I had a friend who used to worry over little disturbances. The night I was with Edna, he walked off the side of a bridge.”

  “He killed himself?” John said.

  “I didn’t have anything to do with it,” Blindman answered, as if he had been accused before. “We were hunting. We were drunk. It was an accident.”

  Hunting drunk didn’t sound like an accident to John. It sounded like the next closest thing to suicide.

  “We were in a car, roadkilling,” Blindman explained. “I couldn’t get any high school kids to take us out because Cal told them they’d lose their licenses if he caught them driving me anymore. The Mexicans will still do it for twenty bucks and a case of Tecate. Mexicans will do anything for twenty bucks and a case of Tecate, anything but learn the language or drive an economy car.”

  John wanted to know how this related to him. People told stories in this town, no point, no moral, no reason. He was tired and in pain. The room was dimming. The moon had fallen to the other side of the cabin. Curtains of geometric shapes filled the room from floor to ceiling, stitching corners, embroidering dust. Blindman appeared in the center, a vanishing point.

  “My friend Josh had never hunted,” Blindman said. “The blind have to look out for each other, otherwise our only excitement is listening to baseball on the radio. I don’t let people dilute my life with their conventions and limitations. ‘Visually challenged,’ I’d never let someone hang that on me. Rock climbing is a challenge, arm
wrestling, river rafting. Someone saying they can drink you under the table, that’s a challenge. Being blind is fucked. End of challenge. But that doesn’t mean I can’t get drunk or get laid or go hunting. I’m entitled too, maybe even more so. Why should I conform to a way of life that doesn’t accept me? It’s my duty as an outcast, as a blind man, to form another order. And Josh, that straight-living dead sonofabitch, him too.”

  “Was he in the People’s Temple?” John asked, yawning, figuring if he was going to get the story, he might as well get the whole story.

  “Straight people don’t go for cults,” Blindman told him. “It’s the crooked ones that need order and direction so they can get through the day-to-day. They’re the ones that join cults. Josh wouldn’t kiss a girl on a first date, so there was no way he’d marry a strange Korean. It was hard enough to get him drunk.”

  John was having trouble concentrating. This was about the fifth wall he’d hit in the last two days. He turned to Blindman’s bag, wanting dreamless, uninterrupted sleep, not worrying that it was self-prescribed. He sifted through the sack of multicolored pills, tablets, capsules, powders, herbs, vials, baggies, rolling papers, pipes, syringes, spoons, lighters, screens, matches, model glue, a piece of quartz, a half-eaten Snickers, a can of butane, a nine-volt battery, baby laxative, and finally, a bottle labeled ‘Codeine.’ With difficulty, John sprang the ‘child-proof’ cap and shook two into his palm. Working up a spit, he popped them into his mouth when Blindman’s monologue seemed at a temporary pause.

  “Go on,” John said, preparing for sleep, grabbing the piece of quartz before setting the bag aside, willing to try anything.

  “We had a bottle of bourbon and a case of Bud,” Blindman said. “God only knows if we killed anything because the Mexies didn’t speak English. It was ‘gato’ this, ‘perro’ that, while we clicked off rounds out the car windows. Once in a while Paco or Rabanne would yell, ‘Bambi!’ and we’d blast away hoping for some antlers. Basically it’s the thrill of the sound, taking a chunk out of the world. I was happy because I knew Josh had never done anything like this, shooting that gun, making that sound. It’s the closest thing we got to color.”

  “Where did you say my grandma was?” John interrupted.

  “Waiting for us to try her new crop,” Blindman said, “We were on our way to Edna’s when I told The Beaner Twins to pull over so I could pee. But they didn’t know the rules of the road, so they stopped in the middle of Millwood Bridge, about a hundred feet long and two hundred feet down without any railing because it’s for logging trucks. I got out my side, and you can read the police report if you don’t believe me, I pissed and got back in the car. I didn’t hear anything but my stream and the stream down below. I thought Josh was passed out. Next thing I knew, the Mexies were pushing me out of the car at Edna’s. I must have blacked out. No big deal, black is black. For me, it’s like putting in ear plugs. So I get to the porch here, and then I think to myself, ‘Where’s Josh?’ Answer, the Boont Dusties. He walked off that bridge, with his zipper down.”

  “And in your grief,” John said. “You screwed my grandma.”

  “Edna drove me back to the bridge and, sure enough, Josh was at the bottom of it,” Blindman said. “When you’re blind you don’t have to shut your eyes, but I got a vision of my friend down there, and I looked away.”

  John watched Blindman replay his only image of the visual world, a friend dead in a half-dried riverbed. He felt something like sympathy for the drug dealer, even if he had slept with his grandmother. It was no wonder he didn’t believe in light, the only thing it had revealed to him was death.

  “He looked surprised,” Blindman said. “Like his sight had been returned to him when he hit the ground, a second or two before he died. He didn’t know this was where he had been living, among rocks and shadows. I knew I couldn’t help him, never could. I had to go to the car. Edna pulled him out of the river, called Cal, went to the questioning with me, and let me stay the night with her. She was a strong woman.”

  John thought it would be ridiculous for him to try to console Blindman. He felt sorry for him, but wanted him gone so he could go to sleep and forget the image of this man merging with his grandmother. The codeine was making him woozy. He couldn’t blink away the drowsiness. He pictured Grandma in his mind, the way her smile slid into a sneer. He knew she exercised the kind of influence over him that could only take place across a great distance, the space between youth and old age. There was something in her worthy of respect and emulation, but this was where it had got her, Boonville. This was what she had become, a freak on a hill whittling squirrel sculptures, drunk, reading metaphysics, hanging out with Margaret Washington and Pensive Prairie Sunset, fucking Blindman, calling out to her grandson to follow in her footsteps.

  “Sorry if you don’t like hearing this,” Blindman said, and John heard him tapping across the planked floor. “But I wasn’t put on this earth for you to like. Neither was your grandma.”

  John’s head sank into the pillow, a quilt of darkness spreading over him with the promise of sleep. The haunting was over. Everything was quiet except for the wind outside the cabin. Grandma’s spirit trying to touch him, he thought, in the throes of the codeine. A breeze slipped through a crack to kiss him goodnight. He felt relieved, at ease with himself for the first time since he had left Florida.

  Then Roseanne Barr walked into the bedroom wearing a Yankees uniform, a batting helmet and spikes, and holding a Louisville Slugger smeared in Vaseline.

  “I’m ready, John,” she whispered. “Let’s play hardball.”

  7

  “…Honey, when everybody in the world wants the same damn thing. When everybody in the world needs the same lonely thing. When I want to work for your love, Daddy. When I want to try for your love, Daddy. I don’t understand, how come you’re gone, man? I don’t understand why half the world is still crying, man, when the other half of the world is still crying too, man. And I can’t get it together. I mean, if you got a cat for one day, man, I don’t mean if you, say, say maybe you want a cat for 365 days, right? You ain’t got him for 365 days, you got him for one day, man. Well, I’ll tell you that one day, man, better be your life, man. Because you know, you can say, ‘Aw man,’ you can cry about the other 364, man, but you’re gonna lose that one day, man, and that’s all you got. You gotta call that love, man. That’s what it is, man. If you need it today, you don’t want it tomorrow, man, ’cause you don’t need it. ’Cause as a matter of fact, as we discover on the terrain, tomorrow never happens, man. It’s all the same fucking day…”

  Sarah stepped onto the deck of the main house and into the full deafening craziness of Janis Joplin’s rant. As a child, she had heard Mom sing this song so many times that the two women’s voices had become indistinguishable in her mind. It was Mom howling, Mom babbling, Mom on speed and whiskey. Mom close to death. Mom played Janis whenever she came home from dates alone. She would pour herself a drink, kick off her cork-heeled Cherokees, toss the cat onto the beanbag chair, park herself on the couch, and at the top of her lungs, rave after Janis, “It’s all the same fucking day!” Sarah would listen from her bedroom, certain Mom would o.d. like Janis. And everyone would blame her for not being a good enough daughter. That was Sarah’s ball and chain.

  Reaching the main house, Sarah expected to find Mom bumming, the way she had seen her a zillion times, drunk or stoned, waiting for Sarah to arrive to heave a rap into her lap like a lump of shit. Not even, Sarah thought, hot potato that one back to you. Unless Mom copped a whole new attitude, it was going to be a short conversation. Mom would have to join a peyote circle or find a self-help book she hadn’t read for solace. But instead of finding her mother, Sarah encountered three Future Primitives crawling around the red leather Roche-Bobois, churning groin butter.

  Of course they were naked, of course they were dirty, of course they were grunting; Future Primitives didn’t believe in clothes, language, or standing erect. It was their way of getting bac
k to the Earth, fulfilling their “true animal selves,” and creating a need for the main house to be flea-bombed. Filthy and foul, howling and humping, they were beyond gross; one had bitten a resident in the leg, drawing blood, and Sarah was certain they were responsible for the epidemic of lice. Not only was their society a farce, but they were a health hazard. She wished the residents of the Waterfall would give them their walking papers, literally. But it wasn’t going to happen; people living in glass yurts don’t throw stones. Everybody at the Waterfall was into something bizarre. And for a brief period, most of them had “gone primitive.”

  The Future Primitives had come into existence when Mom’s ex-squeeze Marty, now Aslan, Father of the New Children, wanted to screw a sixteen-year-old retro-hippie from Vacaville named Resa who wouldn’t be seduced until the Poobah, as Sarah called Marty, created the concept of the Future Primitives. Then ninety percent of the Waterfall went primitive, following the Poobah’s “DarJungian Philosophy” encouraging them to “renounce language, revert to all fours, and respond to your sexual instincts.” During this epoch, Sarah’s sexual instincts told her to carry a marlin bat she had bought as a souvenir in Hawaii, letting everyone know she would use it if anyone so much as growled at her wrong. The men snorted an understanding, then orgied down, Resa and Poobah merging. Most of the residents abandoned the faith after their knees got sore, certain women refused to be mounted, and their children weren’t testing well in their English classes. Five members remained, including these three defiling the Roche-Bobois, sniffing and licking each other’s butts.

  “Hey!” Sarah yelled, shedding her Walkman because her music had been drowned out by Janis’s wailing. “Get off the couch!”

  But the music in the main house was too loud. The Future Primitives didn’t hear her and continued their whiffing. Sarah stalked to the stereo and ripped Janis from the turntable. Startled, the Future Primitives looked up from their hind-nuzzling like a new breed of groundhog.