Acid West

by Joshua Wheeler

  * * *

  Granddaddy will be dead in one week and I swear to god on that day a thousand dead blackbirds will fall from the sky. But today he’s got me on the roof, cranking at rusty bolts that have secured guy-wires to the house for thirty years. The guy-wires hold steady an antenna that towers over the house, rises into the sky forty or fifty feet, stretching to pick up signals from the mountain, the broadcast towers rising out of the Sleeping Lady. He installed the antenna when his knees still worked, became the first person in town who could watch both the Albuquerque and the El Paso news. But now his knees don’t always work so good and now Obama is president and now Obama has made Granddaddy’s prized antenna obsolete by making all of television digital. It’s a tiny box, Granddaddy says. I don’t know how Obama gets all that television into it. Each time I loosen one of the bolts, a cable slacks and the antenna teeters this way or that way in the wind, threatening to crash down like a bunch of rusty knives. There’s also lightning, which Granddaddy keeps yelling about from the ground, telling me, Heed the angry skies, sonny boy! And I yell back, Fine! I’ll leave it for now. And he says, I’m just joshing ya, sonny boy. My knees are good today. Let’s get that sucker down. But I’m the only one on the roof. Grandmommy sticks her head out the door, says, Granddaddy, you come inside. You’ll catch cold. But he wants to watch. Joshua, you make your Granddaddy come inside, she says. But he wants to watch out for me and he wants to witness the times changing. He hollers from the ground as the thunderstorm crescendos, hollers about what a hassle it was to get that antenna up back in the day and how ahead of the times he used to be and how isn’t that just the way things go, the future looks so silly when it’s in the past.

  * * *

  Before they strap Momma into the recliner she parades me around, beaming as she introduces her only son to nurses and other patients and maintenance men I’ve never met who ask me specifically about intimate aspects of my life. Over the years she’s managed to tell them pretty much everything. They all ask about my novel. I am stuck at the apocalypse. We’re in the outpatient ward, which shows just how far they’ve come in fixing people with broken blood. She’s in here once a month but this is the first time I’ve visited in many years. When I was a kid, she had to get admitted, had to lie in a bed for days hooked up to lots of tubes and the nurses paid attention. Now she sits in a fancy recliner for just three hours with just one tube in her arm. The nurse sets her up with a magazine and a Dr Pepper and leaves me alone with Momma. I don’t fully understand what’s wrong with her. I don’t understand the illness. I can write the word agammaglobulinemia but to me it just means bad blood. Her blood doesn’t make some important thing that fights disease and so they pump her full of that important thing and it makes her sick until it makes her well and then she does it again every month, in bed for a week and then she’s Magic Momma again for a week or two and then back to the hoses again. When they test my blood, they say I’m lucky because everything is there and this illness tends to be hereditary. My sisters will not be so lucky and for that I’ll always feel guilty. But at least they didn’t get the drinking gene. A bag of plasma hangs above the recliner and feeds into Momma’s arm, which is perpetually bruised from the needle poking around for good veins, from the tourniquet trying to make them show up. The plasma doesn’t drip through the IV like I thought it would. It feeds and even the nurse says feeds and the plasma is not coming in drops but in gushes as if her body were slurping it up and this is what I feel too. Maybe my blood has all the things that fight disease but it has this thirst—in our blood I feel from many generations back an unquenchable thirst rising up and coming in waves to slurp at whatever is near. Momma’s blood slurps what it needs. She asks how the writing is coming along and I say, I’m working through a eulogy.

  * * *

  Grandmommy just turned nineteen. She’s not Grandmommy yet. She’s Maude. Maude has left Alamogordo for Los Angeles this June 1942, the first woman in her family to attend college. She walks into a bar near the USC campus and orders a whiskey. She looks around but doesn’t see me because I’m dim still, because I won’t be born for forty-two years and won’t follow in her footsteps from Alamogordo to Los Angeles for sixty years and won’t sit at this bar for another two years after that. She sips her whiskey. Just that one sip, she’ll tell me later. Her first-ever taste of booze and it makes her feel so good, so warm and damn near euphoric, that she panics. She feels how time can get wobbly and it makes her shake so she drops the glass and runs out of the bar. Maude will finish college but then she’ll return to Alamogordo straightaway and she will never leave again. She will teach music and get five decades of Alamogordo kids singing and playing the state song at every one of the town’s celebrations, but she will never take another drink of whiskey again for as long as she lives.

  * * *

  Out in the middle of the cold lake I’m totally naked and sinking from the summer midnight above to the muffled moon murk below and bobbing up again and sinking and trying to find a balance between the two kinds of darkness because I’m full of panic from being fucked-up, from walking naked into the lake at midnight because I got the notion it could slow down all this staggering through time. On the shore are KK Holiday and D Rock and B Rizzle and a dozen others, all of us a few years out of high school, a bonfire of pallets from the marina dump, a bunch of hotboxed tents, CamelBaks full of vodka feeding straight down our throats, mushrooms and blotters and all the dope we can burn, psychonauts on a weeklong mission at the only hole passing for a lake in SNM, sacrificing all decorum in hopes of appeasing or scaring off the gods of growing up, the gods of getting old, the gods of passing time. New Mexico built this dam and dug this reservoir to harness the power of the Rio Grande—to make the future better. But the Rio Grande is dying. The water keeps dropping and you can see, one by one, year by year, the graves appear of the men who died building something they thought was the future. In five months our governor will close out 2005 by shaking hands with a British billionaire, by coming to an agreement that the future has changed, that they need to build a spaceport right over there on the other side of our lake, not a place for NASA astronauts to embark on missions but a place for average joes and janes to take a little trip, a cosmic vacation to put our redneck lake parties to shame. The moon goes grainy, the sky ridden with the static of Mexican free-tailed bats swarming by the thousands. Out in the water the stars get reflected off the surface and they ripple and twinkle and I see that everywhere in the universe is just as wobbly as here.

  * * *

  My god, those rubber bands: how Grandmommy has landed on rubber bands as an integral part of not just her footwear but also her lifestyle, like she’s spent all this time collecting rubber bands and in these late years needs to employ the whole collection. All manner of documents are rubber-banded together and books are rubber-banded together and notes are rubber-banded to her telephone and bottles of pills rubber-banded together and a cushion is rubber-banded to a chair. If things can just have other things to cling to, if they can belong together: that solace: magic, even: a strategy to outsmart the forgetting: a kind of time machine—a way to remember to wear her slippers and a way to always go back to that moment when she remembered to wear her slippers so that she never forgets to wear her slippers. In the hands of a bully or serpentine around the pulleys of a motor the rubber band is all about propulsion—will conquer distance. But the simplest use conquers time: remember in the future that this goes with this. Around her little feet they constrict like a tourniquet, tight, and if you don’t know any better, you might think it’s just that one little line on top of her foot, might never realize it goes all the way around and is cutting things off (blood!) because it looks so innocent: just holding one thing to another like this, just tying one on like this, just the little line of a simple time machine across the top of her foot like this—

  * * *

  Before I even pull the pages of the eulogy from my pocket I hit the congregation with a little bit of nervous
banter—a joke. We’ve just concluded a hymn and I step to the pulpit of our warehouse chapel, adjust the microphone, hear the amplified smack of my dry mouth and people shifting in the pews. I don’t know about you, I say, but I was singing that hymn just the way Granddaddy has always taught me—real loud and totally out of tune.

  Four out of four How to Write a Eulogy websites recommend not beginning the eulogy with a joke: “Starting a speech with a joke is usually a good way to draw the audience in. When delivering a eulogy, however, this is not appropriate.” Well, alright. But the congregation is laughing pretty good and it calms me. Everybody knows Granddaddy was always a top-five loudest singer in the Church of Christ over on Cuba Avenue, him and a couple of bigger ladies with opera dreams. But he was always number one in being out of tune, like he wasn’t even trying, and sometimes it was so terrible that I’d stare at him—quit singing myself and inspect him—convinced he was engaged in sabotage. But nothing untoward was ever in his big goofy grin even when it was unhinged and letting loose the hymn of a thousand dying dogs. I didn’t write the joke into the eulogy—it came to me as I stepped up to the pulpit, not as a simple memory but as an accumulation of truths that did not feel like they were in the past—so that instead of saying something like He was always a terrible singer, I wanted to say something like He has always been a terrible singer—a full-on time trip back to the pew near the front of the church where Granddaddy sat, sits not once but always and every time he is howling “Oh, Why Not Tonight?” when I am still damp from the baptismal and howling “As the Deer” while my sister is in the hospital and howling “Heaven Came Down” as they pray for grace about my first arrest and howling “Blue Skies and Rainbows” when my niece is born shortly after my second arrest and on and on. The ongoing flow of the past hits me as I stand at the pulpit, a barrage so disorienting that I knew I’d taken too many of the pills and needed to make a joke about the howling to calm myself before starting in on the eulogy, a speech I’d finished writing only a few hours ago, finished only after starting to take the pills because the question of which verb tense to use in the eulogy was making me shake and weep. What I said to begin the eulogy was I was singing that hymn just the way Granddaddy has always taught me. And all the rest of it is a linguistic lie like that, situating particular moments in the past but never suggesting that he now only exists in the past, leaving open the possibility that he may soon push through the doors of our warehouse chapel belting out the hymn of a thousand dying dogs even though everyone can see he is lying right there at the foot of the pulpit, all waxy and stiff.

  * * *

  In my great novel about the sad future our hero has always been finding shovels and digging at the foot of the biggest piles of crumbled headstone. The big headstone has always been on top of the rich people. The rich people have always been with their fancy watches. Our hero has always been stabbing into the gravelly sand and tossing it every which way. Then he has always been suddenly hitting something hard and feeling the clink in his teeth, always bending down and finding another headstone that has always been small and unbroken. In my great novel about the sad future it has always been bodies on top of bodies. Our hero has always been wiping his face all over with his sweaty shirt as he has always been digging. The smaller headstone has always been inscribed with only BABY and that has always been both lazy and touching. He has always been hitting the baby’s coffin first and has always been throwing it aside because babies have always never had time to amass riches. Chest deep is always how deep he has always been when he has always been finding the bigger coffin. The bigger coffin has always been a riot of bone dust when our hero has always been opening it. Our hero has always been reaching elbow deep into the dust and has always been yanking out a silver watch with a silver band studded with turquoise. Look at that beautiful watch. His spit has always been landing on the watch to polish off the bone dust. He has always been slipping the watch on his wrist and clasping the band. It has always been a perfect fit. He has always been listening for it to tick. The dial has always been stuck and he has always been fiddling with the dial and knocking his wrist on the shovel. Finally, it has always been ticking, just like you knew it would.

  * * *

  My uncle staggers out into the yard and says, I swear to God, one time a ghost walked right through me. Through skin and blood and bones and then just kept walking. Or floating or whatever the fuck. A ghost, I swear to God. My uncle covers his mouth when he says fuck because even though he’s nearly fifty, he thinks Grandmommy doesn’t know he cusses, thinks she doesn’t know he moved home to care for her because he had no other housing options, thinks she doesn’t know his forty-four-ounce Big Gulp is full of vodka at nine in the morning. My uncle is a time traveler too. But it’s making him sick. He gets the shakes. If anybody knows the complete history of our Christian family, nobody’s saying it out loud. But there’s Grandmommy with her turtles and the eulogy bribe waiting for me. She’s got a new obsession. When she’s dead, she wants me to finally set the record straight about “O Fair New Mexico,” our state’s official song.

  Over the last year she’s become more adamant that her grandmommy wrote our state song, that the composer was not, as the history books say, the blind daughter of Pat Garrett, the sheriff who famously killed Billy the Kid. But Grandmommy’s assertion is likely wrong. The timelines don’t jibe. Elizabeth Garrett was a world-class musician who needed no help from a small-town music teacher. My uncle drinks his Big Gulp and tells Grandmommy this exact thing but he’s real belligerent about it because she doesn’t remember ever hearing this from him before but he’s told her every day for the last year that her grandmommy did not have our state song stolen from her by a little blind girl. They go back and forth. The scene is odd and stings: an old woman with dementia and her pickled-brained son arguing about the history of the composition of our goddamn state song. They go in circles, repeating themselves in the same stubborn way but on account of different diseases. “Under a sky of azure,” sings the song, “where balmy breezes blow, kissed by the golden sunshine, is Nuevo México!” Grandmommy knows she’s close to the end and she’s scared her family’s legacy will be lost because she can smell it souring on her son’s breath and hear it in his slurred voice and in the slam of the door when his Big Gulp is finally empty. She gives me the twenty bucks, this time rubber-banded to the sheet music of our state song. “Home of the Montezuma, with fiery hearts aglow, state of the deeds historic, is Nuevo México!” Grandmommy says, At least write it in your book. Write the real truth. I open a can of Alpo for her. The turtles crane and flick their sharp tongues and break into an ancient chorus of hisses.

  * * *

  Summer in Alamogordo and we’re shoveling boiling asphalt out of the dump truck, smoothing and tamping it into a road. The stuff is viscous and splatters so we’ve got our jeans rubber-banded down around our boots and our long sleeves rubber-banded inside our gloves to keep our skin from accidently getting tarred. The big boss of the construction company pushes us to get all the asphalt down in the morning cool, but our timing was off today and it’s 120 degrees from the sun and another 200 degrees rising from the boiling asphalt. We’re replacing the town’s water mains and we get to talking about how the water is haunted. A lot of the guys on the crew don’t know the story but they call me college boy and they say, Tell the ghost story, college boy.

  Way back at the turn of the century, when the town was first founded, the driver of the water wagon would fill up his barrels at the ditches they used before water mains. He’d drive his team of sorrel mules through the streets, wetting the dust of the streets and providing for the barefoot children running along behind him the magic of a moving water park, them laughing and jumping and wrestling in the sprinkle that shot from his punctured barrels. Jim Green was his name and people said he had a nagging wife or a drinking problem or both, and one day after sprinkling the dust of the town’s streets and the dust of the town’s children, he stabled his mules and wagon and unlo
aded his barrels and walked to the edge of the town’s water ditch and pulled out his straight razor and held his straight razor for a long moment in his hands, watching the water run through town. Then he cut his throat from ear to ear and the blood ran down his neck and soaked his shirt and pooled around his waist until it found a path down his leg and then it trickled farther, off the back of his boots as he slumped there on the ditch’s bank, drop by drop of blood into the town’s water, except for the blood that no doubt shot from his neck, but there were no children to play in that spray. For a hundred years now you have to drink the water slow or you will go insane and slit your throat over the drain because ever since Mr. Green, the town’s water is thirsty for blood. So here we are digging up the roads because the water mains went to shit, the clay pipes all corroded and falling apart, putting in new pipes and new roads trying to keep the ghosts contained. The crew lean on their shovels and adjust their rubber bands and say they’ve never known nagging so hard you want to slit your own throat; therefore it must have been a hangover.

  In a lot of places we’ve dug, hardly any pipe at all was left, just roots that pushed in through joints, roots holding the shape of the pipe, a tunnel of mud running to our faucets. The new pipes are bright green, hundred-foot sections of PVC plastic that will last a thousand years. The plastic won’t ever disintegrate. This pipe is strong but has weak spots where it connects. The weak spot is always the connection. Me and Johnny Gwenn leave the asphalt crew in the afternoon and push ahead to seal up joints. But first we stop off at his truck and smoke a spliff. Tradition, he says, when you’re joining the joint crew. We get high and I spend the afternoon gripping my shovel trying not to float away or die. After a backhoe attacks me I’m out cold in the ditch until Johnny Gwenn holds a little of that strong glue under my nose. This is good old-fashioned government work. As I come to, I think about the miles and miles of pipe we laid, the arteries and veins of this town, thirsty for blood. I think about Mr. Green. I think about the joint crew. I’ll walk the new asphalt streets of Alamogordo and I’ll think about all the roots in this town, all the leaks our veins must have sprung already, all the roots finding cracks in the places where the joint crew was too faded to make things fit together the way they should, all the ghosts seeping out.