Boonville

by Anderson, Robert Mailer

  11

  There was no time to masturbate. John had arrived home three hours later than he had expected, even taking into consideration that he’d been waylaid. After Billy Chuck’s bleeder fell in for a hit, the Kurtses had been revived to face a two-run deficit and splitting headaches. The Spotted Owl Eaters squelched the rally and scored a run in their half of the seventh, but when Hank flied out with two outs and the bases loaded to become an “o-for” on the day, Stafford Logging preserved their victory and Kurtses left the dugout for a piece of Hank’s ass and both of his cleats. Shortly following, Big Jack coldcocked Billy Chuck in the handshake line, believing he was gloating too much for a man who had won the game on a Texas Leaguer. John was congratulating Cal when he found himself being shoved toward the backstop, the deputy twisting John’s right arm to his shoulder blades and forcing John to stand on his tiptoes.

  “You don’t want no part of this,” Cal warned.

  Hearing the brawl behind him, John felt it was the safest place he could be. He could see a mound of bodies covering home plate while those on the fringe slugged it out toe to toe, their fights consisting of one or two decisive punches. When the dust settled, Cal released him, making the transition from one of the boys to Johnny Law. In the bleachers, bouts were scored; Billy Chuck, K.O., Daryl had beaten Bo on points, Big Jack flattened a couple of other takers, Hank was barefoot and unconscious near the foul pole in right field, T.K.O. Overall, each team would feel they had won the fight. Bruises would mark individual losers. John could tell by the way the two teams eyed each other during the aftermath that there would be new scores to settle next season, and for the rest of their lives.

  But with Hank’s cleats slung over his shoulder, Kurts was ready to celebrate. However, his brother was on his knees in the batter’s box searching for his lower lip. He had been at the bottom of a dog pile trying to open up a can of flaming whup-ass when somebody had chomped onto the brim of his mouth. John saw blood dribbling from Blindman’s chin as a Mexican woman led him from the field by the elbow. John didn’t say anything. Kurts sifted dirt, one hand pressed to his mouth. Blood lay bulbous around him like breaded chitlins. Kurts dusted off a clump.

  “Don’t worry, it won’t look bad from my house,” his brother consoled. “I got Krazy Glue in the truck. We’ll patch you up, good as new.”

  The players began to leave the field peacefully after Cal told them he was “on duty.” Women gathered their men. John could tell they would be in the stands next week, hoping for more of the same, excited by any beating they didn’t have to take part in. Meanwhile, the gofer wrestled an equipment bag into the rear of a truck while his mother called for a Stafford Logging player to hurry. A derelict speared aluminum cans out of the trash using a stick with a nail hammered to one end. Hap led a flock of sheep onto the diamond for maintenance. Stafford Logging was organizing a convoy to Ukiah to celebrate their title-tying conquest. John followed the Kurtses to the parking lot after Big Jack made him promise to suit up for his team in two weeks for the play-offs.

  “We need your bat,” Big Jack said. “We’ll move you to center if Hank don’t get his cleats back.”

  Inside their truck, the Kurtses refused to drive John home until he had a heave-ho with them at the Lodge. Maybe two. By the time John realized the Kurtses’ intentions, there was nobody left to ask for another ride or any way out of the truck. He had a hard time swallowing his beer with Kurts sitting across from him, scraped knuckles and Krazy Glue’d lip. John suggested he get stitches. Kurts said it didn’t hurt. That’s not the point, John replied, what about infection? Kurts ordered a shot of whiskey. Melonie poured a double. Kurts let it trickle over his lip, slopping some onto the bar. John realized some people were immune to pain, the paralyzed, the dead, the insane. Kurts clamped a hand to John’s shoulder for his concern, forming a crooked smile, and recommended they get a burger at the drive-in. John grimaced for both of them.

  But now he was home, shaved, showered, and shitting, regretting having ordered his chili cheeseburger and not buying any roto-reading while shopping at the market. In Miami, Christina had kept a copy of Elle or Cosmopolitan in the bathroom. John was fond of leafing through Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations while he did his duty, but Christina didn’t want to encourage him sitting on the throne that long. The bathroom was part of her domain. John was in charge of the drawer in the kitchen that held the potato peeler. Whenever he left Bartlett’s in the lavatory, Christina reshelved it and he was forced to read about “What Women Really Want from Their Mates,” or “Ten Tips to Avoid Splitting Up.” None of which mentioned having to surrender the bathroom.

  John found himself scanning the directions on a box of Q-Tips, wondering, who needed instructions to wipe wax out of their ears? Then he studied the list of ingredients in his hair gel, searching for the longest word. Winner: 26 letters. Several times he tried to pronounce the word, but couldn’t make it more than three-quarters of the way through. He would have been happy with a Watchtower. He sat. The bathroom was filled with the steam of his shower and the scent of hard water. Eau de toilet. It condensed on the ceiling in mold-spawning droplets. The only thing worse than taking a dump in shower residue was taking a shower after somebody had punished the bowl. When Christina was mad at him, she would shit while he showered. Typical passive-aggressive. She also used a ton of toilet paper when she wiped, so it took two or three flushes to whirl the waste away. She would wait by the bowl for it to refill, jiggle the handle, and then reflush until every last speck was gone. Wee-wee or poo-poo, nobody ever saw an ounce of her excrement or the rain forest she felled in the name of sanitation.

  John finished. Washing his hands, he heard the knock on the front door.

  Sarah was dressed in hiking boots, black jeans, black T-shirt, a camouflage backpack, and a hunting knife hanging from her side in a leather sheath. Her hair was tucked under a red baseball hat with the words “McKay Construction” stitched across the front.

  “You ready, Dieter?” Sarah said, noticing John was also wearing black, but cultivating a different look, one more appropriate for going clubbing in Prague.

  “Is anybody ever ready for anything they do?” John said, realizing there was no reason for him to be doing this. Friendship, rebellion, and money weren’t substantial enough answers. Identity crisis, maybe. Death wish, closer.

  He recalled the first time he had ever smoked dope, pre-Christina, at a fraternity party. He had been in a mind-expanding mood and followed the sound of Grateful Dead music wheezing from a back room to a group of stoners passing around a ceramic bong with the word “love” etched into it. John told himself, “If anybody gets naked, I’m leaving.” He sucked from the hookah. Couples made out. Uncontrollable giggling. “It’s all part of an energy thing,” a guy explained to him, as psychedelic wall hangings blended indistinguishably into the paisley bedspread. “You, me, the grass, Terence McKenna, everything. We’re all just energy looking for love.” The next day, John awoke with one arm wrapped around a woman he had never seen before, the other clutching an empty bag of Funyons.

  “No,” Sarah said, recognizing her words. “They never seem to be.”

  “Well, then,” John replied, “let’s make it happen.”

  At Sarah’s request, they loaded the pile of road signs into her truck to give to a bush-hippie on her commune who was doing a series of sculptures, shaping road signs into giant penises; “Men At Work,” “Falling Rocks,” “Xing,” “Yield Ahead.” John was happy to oblige. The Kurtses had told him he should disappear them before Cal found out; the deputy was looking to make an example of someone to halt the recent rash of thefts. Hopefully, Cal wouldn’t be on patrol when they passed through town. As Sarah steered them down Manchester Road, Cal seemed to be the farthest thing from her mind.

  John was getting used to riding in trucks. He had never noticed how nice it was to ride up high, the perspective and feeling of power caused by the extra height. Sarah told him there was a primal joy to riding in the ba
ck too, claiming it was the closest thing to being a German shepherd. One of her favorite memories was of crossing the Golden Gate Bridge in the bed of her mother’s boyfriend’s half-ton Chevy. The smell of the Bay, drift of fog, spitting over the tailgate, wind whipping your hair, red cable and impossibly high towers. Flashing the peace sign to passing cars.

  John said his parents made him wear a safety belt and wouldn’t let him put a hand outside the window of a moving vehicle.

  “Of course they did,” Sarah said, mistaking his parents for concerned adults instead of control freaks. “Now they have laws against even dogs riding in the back of trucks. Not that my mom would have cared.”

  “When did your parents get divorced?” John asked, figuring it was a common enough question, especially in California.

  “Four wives ago for my father,” she said. “I don’t know when it was official. I was about eleven. They separated before that. It brought up some interesting questions. For example, what do you call an ex-stepmother? The last one made it easier when she checked into the Betty Ford Clinic and became my ‘twelve-step’ mother, but the others are harder to label. Bitch 1 and Bitch 2?”

  “Your father married four times?” John said.

  “He’s on five now,” Sarah told him. “The exes are waiting for him to divorce this one so they can put together a basketball team. Right now, they just compare alimony settlements and play bridge.”

  Again, John didn’t know if she was kidding. Did women still play bridge?

  When John was young, he had wished his parents would get divorced. No such luck. Most of his friends’ parents were divorced, but John’s refused to get with the program. “Nobody hurts me like your father,” his mother would cry. John became convinced it was the reason she never left. Symbiosis. Both of them were bottom feeders.

  “My mom never remarried, but she goes through boyfriends faster than Stephen King writes novels,” Sarah said. “After every breakup, Mom goes to Ukiah to buy the latest and sometimes there isn’t a current title. When that happens, she brings back a self-help manual or new boyfriend. They propose in a month. I swear, her ring finger is raw from indecision. But Mom loves herself too much to think about anybody else longer than the time it takes them to make her come.”

  They had passed by town without running into Cal. There weren’t many cars on the highway at this hour, the occasional tourist in mid-journey to somewhere else. Sarah slowed down and veered onto a gravel road.

  “Anyway, marriage for women is the equivalent of a man joining the marines,” Sarah theorized. “Essentially, you’re saying you don’t want control of your own life.”

  John had never thought about joining the marines, but some of his friends had after binges and breakups. Three square meals a day, they said. Get in shape, learn to kill. Something that might come in handy should they get back with their girlfriends. One went through with it. The others finished college, developed habits, abused credit cards, went bulk-food shopping, found even worse matches for themselves, and got married.

  “What’s the female equivalent of a man getting married?” John asked.

  “Getting a pet,” Sarah answered. “Maybe Jenny Craig.”

  John could see her in the light reflecting off the hood as they sped along the back road, shifting gears as she accelerated around potholes. She beeped at animals as they bolted through the headlights. The road narrowed. The grade grew steep. The shoulder fell off into what seemed to be oblivion. John’s ears needed to pop from the change in altitude. He stressed his jaw on its hinge, expecting to hear the tiny air-releasing report.

  “That’s why I got married,” Sarah confessed, sneaking a peek at John trying to control his bodily functions. “I wanted someone to make my decisions for me. And nothing was more rebellious to Mom than marrying a redneck. Major two-for-one. Daryl was different then too. Actually he was the same, but nineteen. He had an excuse.”

  John wanted to confess something, too, but didn’t know what. It was difficult to think with the truck bouncing him around. He searched for the safety belt. Sarah had strapped herself in earlier and seemed unaffected by the ride. He wondered what would happen if a vehicle came in the opposite direction; there was hardly enough room on the road for one car and with so many blind curves, they wouldn’t see another driver until impact. John found the safety belt. Sarah told him not to worry, she knew the road better than her menstrual cycle.

  “Let’s hope you’re regular,” John said.

  She seemed to give that some thought, then began to hum the theme to “The Brady Bunch.” It reminded John of Christina’s friends who were always discussing old television shows. Somebody would say, “Remember ‘Bridget Loves Bernie’?” knowing nobody could forget something that pathetic, especially when they had asked the same question to the same group of people two weeks earlier at another party. “What about ‘Holmes and Yo-Yo’ or ‘Chico and the Man’?” John was guilty himself, his dialogue smacked with sit-com analogies, and he could tell by the way the Bradys’ station wagon entered the driveway if it was the episode Cindy got the sniffes or cousin Oliver was visiting and Bobby was going to take Mr. Howell in pool for a wad of bubble gum. 534 packs? The difference was, John was ashamed.

  “Sorry,” Sarah said, stopping her humming. “Sometimes I do that.”

  “It’s all right,” John answered. “Sometimes we all do.”

  They came to a fork in the road and John spied a huge glass barrel with material draped on its inside like a shower curtain. If somebody parted the curtain, you would get the false sense of having x-ray vision. Even the doors were made of glass. To the left of the peculiar building was an immense sphere of rusted iron, over thirty feet in diameter, and perched on top was a sculpture of a man in the Atlas pose, back bent, legs flexed, arms stretched behind him, but with no world on his shoulders.

  “The Earth carries the weight of man,” Sarah explained. “Not the other way around.”

  “What about the house?” John asked.

  “Fully solar-powered,” Sarah answered. “Hot in the summer.”

  They unloaded the signs near a refuse heap that included hundreds of Sarah’s crosses. Sarah said whenever anybody on the commune came across found-art or “ready-mades,” this was the drop site. You could take what you wanted and leave behind material for others to transform. The bush-hippie they had brought the signs for lived in the Pyrex palace and was an old-time socialist. He was the one who had taught Sarah how to weld. As a young man, he had helped to build the Golden Gate Bridge. That was part of the reason Sarah’s trip over the span in the back of the truck had been so terrific – she remembered his tales of the Mohawks working unafraid of the dizzying heights and the men who had fallen to their deaths. Sarah said she enjoyed holding a blowtorch but was searching for softer lines now. John confessed his artistic inclinations had faltered after he broke the vertical knob on his Etch A Sketch.

  He asked Sarah about the McKay Construction hat. She said it was her father’s company, consisting of her father and three pothead flunkies. Her father hadn’t helped her learn to weld or do any carpentry. She hadn’t learned anything from him except how to write a postcard. But she loved him and wore her lucky red hat when she worked on projects, or needed extra strength, or motivation, or some mojo to get through the day. She was convinced she was at her best when she wore it. She adjusted it on her head, making sure the good luck was flowing.

  Returning to the truck, they drove on until the road ended. They would have to walk from here. Even with his eyes adjusting to the night and the glow of the moon, John could see about two feet in front of him. Sarah told him to take off his jacket, once they got moving he would be too hot. Her other advice was to stand still if they saw a bear and make himself look big if they ran into a mountain lion. Before John could mouth the words “bear” or “mountain lion,” Sarah stepped toward the trees, saying, “Stay close.”

  John stumbled forward in a controlled fall, skiing without the snow. Slipping, tripp
ing, crashing, cursing, smashing face first into branches, bushes, saplings, anything that got in his way as he rolled down the mountain blindfolded by the night. He would never have made it as a guerrilla. Aside from not being fleet of foot, he was afraid of the dark. Real dark. Not turn-off-the-lights-in-your-bedroom dark or the-bulb-burned-out-in-the-basement dark, but snakes-could-be-slithering-near-me-and-I-wouldn’t-know-it dark. The kind of black that reduces you to your basic survival instincts, which in John’s case had been dulled over the years by supermarkets, cable television, and alarm systems. In contrast, Sarah maintained her balance at all times, picking out the path of least resistance. Sandinista first-round draft-pick. She could have played for Fidel.

  John continued his nose dive, thorns biting into his legs. He tumbled until the pull of gravity released him. Sarah stopped every so often to help him to his feet and request that he not fall so much. Head in a sticker bush, supporting himself on a root that felt as strong as teak wood, John suggested they use the flashlight he’d seen poking out of her backpack, so they could see where the hell they were going.

  “The hills have eyes,” Sarah said. “No light until we get there.”

  “How far until we’re there?” John asked, playing the role of a child on a road trip.

  “Soon,” Sarah replied.

  John didn’t tell her he had to pee.

  They were on their hands and knees, crawling through the thickest brush. The soil seemed to be swallowing him, a mulch of mushrooms, decaying debris, rotting logs. A forgotten autumn. John’s fingers probed for handholds, coming up with palms full of bugs and mites. It was the perfect place to ditch a body. It would decompose before the FBI could say “serial killer.” He remembered reading about a psychopath in California called “The Trailside Murderer,” but for once John wasn’t worried, there was no trail around here. They crept along like lost alligators for another fifty yards, finally arriving at a clearing where they could stand. Sarah reached into her bag for the flashlight. She fixed a beam on an area of stomped chicken wire, slashed garden hose, churned-over ground, and irrigation tubing cut into lengths of less than a foot. No plants.