Acid West

by Joshua Wheeler

  * * *

  On the day he dies, the newspaper reports, “A Thousand Dead Birds Fall from the Sky.” The ornithologist suspects lightning. If only we’d left that antenna alone, Granddaddy could have stayed out of the cold and that giant metal mess could have stayed way up there attracting public television and all the sky’s nastiest bolts. And a thousand blackbirds would still be alive. But we brought it down because it was useless and an eyesore and now I agree to read a scripture at the funeral and now I agree to say a few words for the family and now I agree to do the whole eulogy because Momma says there is no one else. The cousins are all in town so we do some drinking the night before the funeral. I wake up early to write the eulogy, hungover like Granddaddy when he crashed that F4U Corsair on the deck of an aircraft carrier in the Pacific and didn’t even scorch the sheepskin collar of his flight jacket. I take the hangover out of his story as I write it into the eulogy and leave only the part about how he prayed in the moment before the crash. Sanitize. Preserve. I take the first of the Vicodin prescribed to Granddaddy because he won’t need it anymore and because I need to steady myself. I am worried about the verb tense. When, at the end of the eulogy, I tell the story of our last moments together in the garage, I feel alright about having taken more of the pills because I tell the part about Granddaddy mistakenly calling the garage a hangar because the numbness of the pills keeps the tears from falling out of my eyes because even though the congregation doesn’t know it, I’m outing Granddaddy as a time traveler too. At the end of the funeral my uncle roots around in the coffin to make sure they don’t bury Granddaddy wearing the wristwatch, and my uncle gets the watch and calls it his inheritance, the silver one with the silver band studded with turquoise, the one that never stops ticking.

  * * *

  Easter, and all the kids are hunting for eggs. We’re having a good Christian time except some of the uncles have snuck in their flasks. They get excited about the hunt. They keep hiding the eggs again after we find them, or not hiding them but just putting them in dangerous places and laughing as we climb. Everybody’s having a good time. One uncle does a magic trick where he pulls an egg out of somebody’s ear. Another uncle pulls a whole bunch of napkins out of his sleeves. They tell a bunch of stories. They tell the one about their granddaddy and the drunk undertaker ten different times. The drunk undertaker is a centerpiece of family lore but nobody knows why. I listen close to all their stories trying to figure out what life is all about, and the gist of it seems to be that Great-Great-Granddaddy’s whiskey begat Great-Granddaddy’s whiskey begat Grandmommy’s aversion to whiskey begat all these drunk uncles and me.

  * * *

  In one week Granddaddy will die from pneumonia. Grandmommy will tell everyone he got pneumonia because I kept him out in the yard, in the cold, all day, playing around with his antenna. Everyone will tell me she doesn’t mean anything by it—she’s just grieving. I work fast and get the antenna down as a December mist gathers into a thunderstorm. Granddaddy and I drag the antenna to the far side of the yard and lean it on the wall where it will stay for years, a futile jungle gym for turtles. We take shelter in the garage. We were out dismantling the antenna for maybe thirty minutes but we stay in the drafty garage with the door open, watching the rain come and go, for hours. He wants to give me cash for helping him with the antenna. He wants to give away his money before he dies. I say, Keep the money. Live forever. He says, Take the money, I’m on my way out, sonny boy. But you better know I won’t die before my wife. He has always been faithful to her, all sixty years, but he believes she will die before him. I pray to live longer than her, he says, and it sounds callous but this is the way love goes. The old man needs to make sure his wife makes it out before he follows after.

  I hope you can find a little wife like that, a woman to love like that, he says. My hair is long and dirty and my face is never shaven and he suspects that I might not always do the right thing, the Christian thing. He starts up with war stories, tales of flying F4U Corsairs in our Second World War. One day he comes in for a landing on the aircraft carrier and the old boy on deck is telling him, Too slow! Too slow! At the last minute the old boy waves him off—Abort! Abort!—but Granddaddy wants to land, wants out of the air and the sky and needs the ground so bad that he goes for it anyway and hits the deck and the plane busts in two and bursts into flames—breaks in half right behind the cockpit. Just six inches from his seat. He climbs out and the sheepskin on the collar of his flight jacket isn’t even scorched. He says, I was a bit hungover and that was my fault. But the Lord was looking out for me. I let go of the flight stick and prayed and the Lord was looking out for me. And I have to ask myself why. And I guess it’s to live longer than your grandmommy.

  He is always on the verge of tears when telling war stories. He is always choked up and pulling at his neck, trying to keep the tears from spewing—pinching the loose skin of his neck near his Adam’s apple like he’s a wizard using his long beard for deep contemplation but he has no beard—he’s just pinching his neck and pulling. He does this right now, the pulling, to stave off the spewing, and now he is telling another story about another plane exploding. This one is sitting on the deck of the carrier and a Japanese fighter plane comes round and lights it up and lights up all the boxes of .50-caliber ammo waiting to be loaded onto the Corsairs and the bullets all rise up in a fiery rush to everywhere. He doesn’t know what to do, doesn’t know the protocol for when your air is nothing but buzzing cones of your own damn American steel. Somewhere there’s a foam gun the firemen use and he has a notion to soften things with it but the pilots haven’t been trained on the foam. He pulls the damn trigger and kicks the thing and .50-caliber rounds are whizzing by and only this sorry little drip of foam comes out of the cannon. He grins. A little tear squeezes out of the corner of his big blue eye because he’s pulling at his neck so hard that he’s squinting too, but the tear gets stuck in the bag of wrinkles under his eye and a tear is only a tear when it has the dropping shape. So he’s not crying yet and anyway the cold draft in the garage whisks the thing away. He gives up on the foam and wanders around as the whole ship catches fire. A lieutenant comes walking at him from the hangar belowdecks, saying something, flinching. His mouth keeps moving and he keeps walking and Granddaddy is trying so hard to hear the orders that it’s a whole lifetime before he notices the lieutenant has a .50-caliber hole right between the eyes. Takes the hit. Keeps walking and jawing. But with a bullet in his brain. Granddaddy laughs, chuckles as if the man walking around with a bullet between the eyes is the punch line to a cosmic joke. Finally they call for all hands on deck and the lieutenant sits down, leans on the bulkhead, and closes his eyes. Granddaddy snaps out of his daze and joins a group of pilots heaving five-hundred-pound bombs off the ship. Everything is fire and they don’t want to be blowing up more than they already are so all the pilots unload their bombs and heave them into the Pacific Ocean.

  A little wife, he says. You need a little wife you can love all your life. He says he saw Grandmommy walking down by the old Hotel Alamogordo on New York Avenue when he was just back from our Second World War and knew right then that he would marry her. He says her daddy, GB, my great-granddaddy, never liked him at first. He says, Old GB was a rounder and GB thought I was a rounder and he didn’t want anyone anything like himself around his daughter at all. Granddaddy pulls at his neck. They’re throwing the bombs overboard, live bombs, and then they start pushing whole airplanes off the deck because the fire is growing and the whole carrier is close to capsizing and this is desperation. Granddaddy’s lost his sheepskin flight jacket somewhere. He ripped it off on account of the hotness of the fire and the hotness of the heaving and when one of the bombs slips and rolls toward the bulkhead where the lieutenant is resting his eyes including the hole between them, where the hangar is licked over with the flames, all Granddaddy knows is that his sheepskin jacket will be scorched this time for sure. He pulls at his neck. He keeps using the word rounder. Says I need to exercise
every day, go for a long jog and stop being a rounder. Says I don’t have to say anything because he can tell, he used to be a rounder too. Says rounder a whole bunch of times. He pushes himself off the garage wall he’s been leaning on and stands hunched waiting to see if his knees will work. He shoves the cash into my chest, says, You go. I’ll close the hangar door behind you. And I walk out through the garage that is no longer a garage and will never be a garage again because now it is licked over with flames.

  * * *

  Grandmommy holds the money for a long time. Keeps it in her lap as she shells pecans. She grinds her teeth and touches the money in her lap once in a while to make sure it’s there and says, When I die, I need you to do my eulogy. I wait for her to start up about the state song but she doesn’t. She’s got a new habit of shelling pecans that keeps her mind from getting stuck too much, an entirely tactile task that suits her new blindness. She stays busy with it for many hours at a time. I munch the pecans slowly, careful to pick out the shells she misses. I’ve already written my obituary, she says. You can copy some of it if you want. She wipes the nut dust from her hands and passes me the twenty bucks rubber-banded inside her obituary. You remind people how much I loved your granddaddy. Remind people how hard I worked to keep Alamogordo beautiful. She’ll hold on to life for years and will still be living and shelling pecans even as you read this and every few months she’ll give me another eulogy bribe. Maybe you think her mind has gonegonegone and that she has no idea she’s already paid the bribe so much, but I think she’s just sweetening the pot year after decaying year because the one thing she knows for sure is that she wants the decay edited out.

  * * *

  I run along the Rio Grande. I run down by Mesilla, where the river is mostly forgotten even by water though there is a sense of oasis still, enchantment lingering, the last gasps, spatterings of creosote and wolfberry and yuccas with their haunches of bayonets and still the spirit of Billy the Kid killing and fleeing through mesquite, still Coronado lost in the dust and broke on dreams of gold, still Apaches brandishing scalps like the Spanish taught them but with the ears still attached and hollering at the heavens, still the long-faced dinosaur lumbering and my Nikes landing in the fossils of its awkward tracks as the roadrunners dart across my path into the seepwillow to ponder the absurdity of their wings as I sweat out twenty bucks of whiskey, cough tar, grit my teeth, and churn out six miles, seven miles, in the summer burn beside the big mud snake, through onion fields gone to seed and the stink of their blossom orbs rising like a universe from the dust, blindly through acres of chili tweaked in its genes to stay green but burn harder, acres of capsaicin heat rising, colliding with sun rays at the height of my eyes, nose, lips, the singe in my face, and still I run for miles along the Rio Grande because something primal is in me, this movement, shoulders rocking independently of the head, ligaments in the feet like springs, left foot, right foot, the emergence of skin from fur and the evolution of sweat glands like an infinite cool breeze so I can move across the world eating and growing my beast-fed brain big enough to be conscious of teetering at evolution’s apex, and then my left Nike lands askew in one of the awkward tracks and a small stone catches in the deep flex groove along the outsole of my ergonomic running shoe and my ankle twists inside the sock liner and were it not for asymmetrical lacing reducing pressure over my foot’s top ridge, I might stumble all the way, crash, knock my head silly and have my eyes pecked to caves by flight-shy birds, but these shoes are made of science, made to re-create the feel of barefoot running as it was in the dusk of our apehood with the bonus of neoprene cushion and impact absorption so I can heel strike when my ancestors would only lean forward, striking always on the balls of their bare feet, the natural cushion, more on their toes and leaning into the hunger that kept them chasing prey six miles, seven miles along the big mud snake, but these featherlight foot-conforming canvas-mesh shoes have set us back on our heels, the unnatural posture of the modern runner: I am not hungry. I am enacting hunger poorly or I am terrified of the hunger. I run past the horse apple tree and the acrid smell of dropped fruit rotting in the heat and a snake with its guts exploded out of both ends and the middle of him flattened in an awkward track but there are no long-faced dinosaurs anymore. Whose tracks are these? In the distance, spanning the dying river, is an overpass and semitrucks roaring across. On the banks of the dying river, in the flickering shadows of the passing semis, is an army of tractors, their mounds of dirt and the bright yellow and slick oil of heavy construction. Here come the bulldozers and all the ground in their wake is pressed into awkward tracks from the symmetrical grooves of their steel traction belts. Here comes the future. They’re building a road to the spaceport.

  * * *

  The 1922 Model T carved-panel hearse rattles along the unpaved roads of Alamogordo. The drunk undertaker is at the wheel and my great-granddaddy sits shotgun, and I’m not anywhere near alive but I’m along for the ride. Somebody has died. There’s been a big funeral and we’re easing toward the burial. Out the back of the hearse, over the coffin, I see the whole funeral procession snaking along. There’s D Rock and B Rizzle wearing CamelBaks and Johnny Gwenn with a spliff. There’s Momma in her hospital recliner and all the uncles doing their magic tricks. There’s Granddaddy dragging his antenna and Grandmommy with her whole fellowship of turtles in tow. Somewhere, way in the back, maybe there’s a little wife for me. The procession circles the young town’s sparse cemetery once and stops. The drunk undertaker leans out the window of the hearse and shields his eyes from the sun and looks around. The procession circles the cemetery again, then weaves in and out of the rows of headstones and circles more. Round and round and round. By now the mourners are breaking rank, scratching their heads. The drunk undertaker takes a drink and passes the bottle to Great-Granddaddy. And me. Well, shit, says the undertaker. Nobody remembered to dig a damn grave.

  A MILLION TINY DAGGERS

  SCENES FROM THE AFTERMATH IN A CITY FORMERLY KNOWN AS MURDER

  •

  In the Years of Our Lord 2014–15

  June 16, in the Year of Our Lord 2014

  The other day a stray mutt trotted through the gate with a severed hand in his teeth. Nobody went looking for the body. We burned the hand with the trash, says El Pastor. No problem. We’re eating breakfast in the big kitchen of his asylum, Visión en Acción, a ragtag cluster of cinder-block buildings just far enough from Juárez to make it feel like the middle of nowhere, fifteen miles west of the city and fifteen miles south of the border, along the lonely road to Ascensión, a stretch of desert where so many of the bodies ended up. Anywhere is a grave, he says. Ah, but not here.

  Some of the residents wander in and out of the kitchen, doing their morning chores. El Pastor points and tells me their origin stories. He loves origin stories. They’re the first thing he says anytime he introduces me to a resident of the asylum, a way of communicating the successes of his ministry by relating the sad or horrific past of an individual who now stands on his or her own two feet, cleaning the griddle of eggs or emptying a fifty-pound bag of beans into a cauldron on the stove. This person came in totally mute. This one came in with maniacal cries and a headful of huffed paint. This one came in with his mother’s blood on his hands and this one came in with lice and this one came in with his fingers falling off from gangrene. Then he says their names. Shouts them really, not by way of introduction but as an exclamation, announcement of rebirth. Josué! Memo! Gaspar!

  They’re not really patients because there’s not a whole lot of treatment because there’s not a whole lot of money. El Pastor says, The only treatment is us crazies. One hundred twenty of them living in the desert, feeding one another and clothing one another and sometimes bathing one another. A whole wall of toothbrushes hangs above names written on little tags of duct tape. The names sometimes get changed out more than the toothbrushes. Juárez proper has only one public mental health facility, with only thirty beds, and those are mostly for patients totally incapacitated
by their illness or its medicines, patients more or less docile. But out in the desert, here at the asylum, residents get the run of the place. We are addicts helping addicts. Mexicans helping Mexicans, El Pastor says. That’s all we need.

  I don’t even get halfway through a thought about the possibility of love conquering all things when El Pastor says that just yesterday a guy on the street in Juárez gave him the finger. And El Pastor said, Fuck you, guy—yelled, Fuck you, guy!—because the guy didn’t know, didn’t have any idea what El Pastor could do to him. He looks at me and says he knows how to handle guys like this. He knows what to do with guys that tell him, Fuck you. He puffs up in his chair so I can see how big he is, over six feet and barrel-chested at sixty-three, both priestly and menacing in his customary all-black getup complemented by slick waves of silver hair. He laughs and bares a few missing teeth and takes a bite of eggs. He motions for me to hurry up and finish my food. There is so much he wants me to see. The asylum is a complicated place.

  He became El Pastor by trying to kill one. He was back in Mexico after a decade in California prisons, loitering and gulping a bottle of booze, watching a street preacher shout his Jesus shouts. But El Pastor didn’t particularly like the Jesus shouts and was lost in a bender so he emptied the bottle down his throat and took it to the preacher’s head, beat unmercifully at the preacher’s skull to keep him from shouting any more sermons. When the street preacher was on his way out of consciousness and maybe the world, he reached up and wiped his own damn blood from the face of his assailant, took ahold of his assailant’s whiskey-soaked head, and prayed for the poor man’s soul. In that moment the drunk ex-con known as José Antonio Galván decided not to stab the preacher with the broken bottle and dropped the bottle altogether and felt, for the first time, the presence of his soul, not in his body but sort of rising out of his chest. And around the plaza were all the souls risen out of all the Mexicans’ chests and the souls were dragging their bodies around. Galván knew he could find a better way. He gave up all drugs and booze and rage. He became El Pastor and within a few years he’d started building himself an asylum in the desert where others could learn to give up their rage too, help their souls settle down until that time when they will rise up finally for good. He doesn’t tell me what became of the street preacher he beat to shit. The point is, Galván was converted. El Pastor was born. He makes sure I know that the point is not that he can mercilessly beat a man but that any man can change. Old dog, he says. But learns tricks. Ah, you see? I learn the needles. El Pastor points to the man I’ve come down here with, Ryan Bemis, a young acupuncturist from New Mexico who’s been visiting the asylum for the last few months, training El Pastor and some of his residents to treat one another with needles. Needles are cheaper than prescription drugs. In the ears are acupuncture points that anyone can learn. Brilliant, Bemis says, for reducing stress, which makes all illness worse. In that way, it is kind of a cure-all. El Pastor smiles and laughs and says, Pew pew, pew pew, making baby-gun noises as he mimes how he pushes needles into ear after ear. He throws the imaginary needles all over the room like so many tiny spears. I nail them all. Ah, you see? A million tiny daggers in the heads.