by Gregory Hill
There was so much I could do here, but, you know, I didn’t want to do anything here. I tried. I entered a dimly lit restaurant, nibbled sushi, chewed some wine. In a valet parking lot, I stood on the hood of a three-hundred-thousand-dollar Italian sports car. Maybe the Rockies were playing baseball. Imagine the chaos I could create in Beer Sponsored Field.
Good, now I don’t have to go.
Denver was dim, there were too many vacant eyes attached to too many people, there was too much shit for sale, too many buildings blocking my view of the horizon.
The plains, though. The plains have this subtractive quality that forces you to notice. Remove the mountains, notice the sky. Remove the sidewalks, notice the dirt. Remove the people, notice the beetles. Beauty via absence. I missed that beauty.
Once upon a time, Vero took me to this little art museum on Capitol Hill. As we were walking around admiring the paintings, we entered an empty room. No art, just four white walls, a white floor, and a white ceiling.
As I turned around to exit the empty cube, Vero grabbed me by the sleeve. “Check it out.”
“There’s nothing to check out, darling.”
She shook her head at silly Narwhal. “We’re in a drop of milk.”
The plains are not blank walls. They’re decorated with bugs, a million varieties of wild grass, pronghorn, snakes, windmills, strange reptilian footprints. Hawks and eagles perch on telephone poles.
Choose any portion of land there and focus on the half-dozen dusty beetles caught motionless in their clamberings thru the sand and over broken grass stems.
If you want to appreciate the little things, you have to squat down and look at them. Unfortunately most people only squat if they’re taking a shit.
I’m building up to a revelation. You can skip the next few paragraphs if you’d prefer to get on with the walking and moving and exploring.
There’s a reason why the final two minutes of a basketball game are the most entertaining.
In those last moments of the game, time literally and figuratively slows down. By “literally,” I mean the clock stops for time-outs and strategic fouls. By “figuratively,” I’m talking about the way in which a last-second shot takes forever to decide whether it should slip thru the hoop or to clang off the rim and bounce out of bounds. As we concentrate on these fateful caroms, the accumulated drama of the game’s preceding moments expands into a gazillion potentials while simultaneously zeroing in on a single inevitable conclusion: one team will exit the gym in a good mood, the other will be pissed at the refs.
There are people who don’t understand this: Without the preceding portion of the game, the final two minutes have no meaning. These are the people who skip to the end of the book. Or, more likely, don’t bother reading.
Back to the beetles, from which I have regretfully drifted. Any asshole can look at a mountain and write a poem about its majesty. It takes a real sophisticate to appreciate the beauty of the wind-schlepped plains. This is modern, minimalist art, grey grass filled with tiny creatures that move about with no apparent purpose. Screw museums, screw Denver.
My work here was done. I had discovered no useful data at my childhood home, I’d found no comfort at my garden-level apartment. On the bright side, I had defaced some art and discovered a bizarre chamber within the heart of the Art Museum. And I’d acquired a pair of officially-sanctioned referee shoes and a nifty headlamp. And I had acquired respect for the planar landscape and weird people of eastern Colorado. So, not a total waste. Not at all. Now, back to Keaton.
With one quick detour.
After hiking south and east for most of a day, I arrived at Dove Valley, home to the Denver Broncos’ multi-trillion-dollar training ground for the administration of head trauma. I paused before the monolithic concrete sign that read Denver Broncos Football Club. Beyond the sign lurked a four-story glass-walled office building of the sort that requires a security pass.
Assuming he was working late, which I had no reason to believe was the case, The Blad would be where, exactly? First, I’d have to break in, then I’d have to find a directory of employees and then I’d have to hope he was in his office, then confront him and
I’m such a worry wart. The Blad was in the parking lot, opening the door to his German automobile. I recognized him from a hundred yards away. With his broad chest, tufts of hair balancing on his balding round head, and bowed legs, he was simultaneously a symbol of male virility and human decay. Jar three or four in the journey to grey water.
I stood before my nemesis, he in his black business suit, me in my referee shirt and sweat pants. I said to him, “Football has neither the grace nor the fluidity of basketball.” He responded with the condescending silence so popular amongst alpha males.
I knew virtually nothing about The Blad. I knew he had declined to smoke weed at that party where I’d met him. I knew he enjoyed telling people how much he enjoyed telling cheerleaders how to be sexy. Based on Vero’s diary, I knew he’d received at least one DUI. And I knew that Vero had once dated him.
Vero was a human of great taste. There had to be something decent about The Blad, otherwise she wouldn’t have chosen him as her means of cuckolding me. But what that decent something was, I couldn’t tell by glaring at him in a parking lot. I could only judge him based on the available data, and that data suggested that The Blad was a dick and he deserved to be punished.
Catch yer breath, Nar. Subsume the call for aggressive masculine projection and be honest with yerself. Vero didn’t choose The Blad, she rejected you. Once you’ve sawn thru the trunk, you can’t blame the tree for falling on you.
The tree in this metaphor represents the mutual sense of comfort that initially brought Vero and me together. The saw represents my tendency to be a curmudgeonly butt. And The Blad is represented by the previously unmentioned poisonous mushroom that’s poking out of the dead leaves on the forest floor. Vero’s no dummy, you know. She saw the mushroom, took a nibble, it made her sick, and so she spit it out. Remember what she wrote in her diary:
Türns oüt The Blad’s an annoying, sports-obsessed, he-man jackass.
Yeah, baby.
Maybe I didn’t actually cut down the Tree of Comfort after all. Maybe I just ran head first into it and knocked myself out.
I peeled The Blad’s fingers away from the handle of his briefcase. I floated it in front of me and opened it up. Inside was a laptop and a half-empty plastic bottle of diet cola. Dude drinks diet cola. What a lame-o. I left the briefcase and its contents adrift.
I addressed him. “It’s only by the grace of me that you aren’t tied to the back of one of those semis over there.” I pointed to I-25 in the near distance. “Keep that in mind next time you try to seduce one of your ex-girlfriends.”
As parting shots go, it wasn’t worthy of a Hollywood movie or anything, but I didn’t have anything else to say to the guy. I turned away and started east.
Then I went back and punched him in the jaw. Fuck you, The Blad.
56
I walked the highway, Vero-bound. As I progressed out from the shadow of the mountains, the setting sun gradually climbed itself over the Rockies, the skyscrapers sank back into the horizon, and eventually the panoptical gaze of the city was replaced by the horizontal indifference of the flatlands.
In spite of its brief reprise, the sun was going down, no question. Every eastward step took me farther away from it and, at the same time, it was sinking ever so slowly into the horizon.
My walk was accompanied by the silent crunch of my knees, padded into painlessness by my decadent opiates, of which I was growing fond, but not, I swear, dependent.
I strode along, stopping at the occasional house for food, a nap on the front lawn. I passed the Jim and Jane Jones Mushroom Ranch, no desire for further hallucinations or story-telling shamanistas.
When I reached the spot where I’d constructed the fatal pronghorn pyramid, I stood in the ditch, looking over the barbed wire fence at the dead pronghorn where it l
ay on its side in the grass.
I stepped over the fence and approached the corpse. The head had rolled away from the body and settled to equilibrium on the ground, eyes once again open. I patted the animal on its still-wet nose. I apologized for placing it atop the deeramid and for its subsequent leg injury and decapitation. I assured it that soon the bugs and birds and coyotes would come to devour it, and so it would, in death, contribute to the great circle of life. I hoped I wasn’t coming across as patronizing.
Ah, what’s that sound? Could it be the whirring of gears in the mind of Narwhal Slotterfield, soldier of justice, wearer of the zebra skin shirt? It surely is, and it’s yet another brilliant plan. As penance for my horrific acts vis-à-vis the pronghorn, I must allow the slain animal to contribute to my own life. Which is to say, I needed to eat it, or some of it. Thereby, and only thereby, would I honor the animal’s sacrifice.
I squatted next to the corpse and used my Everslice knife to—
You know what? To share the details would only further exploit the animal. In summary, I consumed a teeny, raw portion of this beast whom I had accidently slain by pretending thon was a cheerleader. The meat was juicy and warm, so I consumed a slightly larger portion of the beast. It was delicious. I made a meal of the pronghorn and it made me feel better.
I was not worried about illness. I had no reason to believe that a hypertemporal zebra could catch a bug from raw pronghorn flesh.
I bowed to the corpse and then made my way back to the highway and continued toward Vero.
As I entered the Abila city limits—a mere thirty-six miles west of Keaton—my stomach went nuts. Turns out, I had been horribly wrong to believe that a hypertemporal zebra was immune to diseases carried by raw pronghorn flesh.
A yellow volcano erupted from my mouth. Rather than splashing on the highway in front of my sneakers, the expurgated material piled up into a ball right in front of my face. I staggered backward and then fell on the ground, where the volcano re-routed itself to another, lower orifice.
If you had stripped me naked and impaled me sideways on a flagpole, the subsequent and simultaneous semi-liquid secretions would have propelled me around like a pinwheel. As it was, I lay on the asphalt and felt horrible.
At the conclusion of the first wave of this agony, I forced myself upright and stumble-walked further into Abila to a house where a shirtless Mexican man was watering his lawn with his thumb over the end of a garden hose. I shook out of my sweat pants and then scooped up some of his hose water and tried to tidy myself. To the latter end, I scooted my ass across the wet lawn like an itchy dog. Then I lay prostrate on the grass for a few moments, and then I crawled into the man’s house and lay on the living room carpet and waited to die. What followed were several wake/sleep cycles full of shits, pukes, shakes, and knots in my guts. I spent endless heartbeats on the floor, curled up in the fetal position, wondering why I’d thought it was a good idea to eat raw meat.
57
After some long time, the agony receded into mere misery, which was far more manageable. I crawled off the floor and found a pair of loose-fitting, and altogether too-short, khaki pants in the bedroom. I pulled them on, tidied up my zebra shirt by plucking off the larger chunks of poorly masticated pronghorn meat, and carefully exited the house and walked bowlegged to the Abila Grocery just down the road. I took a two-liter bottle of ginger ale out of the cooler and brought it back to the house. On my way in, I stopped to look in the owner’s billfold and learned that his name was Anthony Juarez.
Sorry, Anthony, for the mess on the lawn.
I went back to Anthony’s living room and took bites of ginger ale and swallowed three Vicodin. As I lay there on the corduroy couch, it became clear just how far I had fallen. Bad joints, bad knees. My skin was starting to chafe against the thick air. Food poisoning. I had no doctor, no clue what to do if something really bad happened, no internet to give me horrible advice.
Just think of the things that can kill me: pronghorn flesh, thick air, old age, stupidity. If I die in this state, my body will become completely still and I will decay a hundred thousand times faster than time itself. I’ll be grey water before you know it.
As I convalesced, I acquainted myself with my host. There was a plaque above his dresser: Tony Juarez—1998 MOST IMPROVED PLAYER Northeast Junior College Plainsmen Men’s Basketball. I wondered if I worked any of his games.
A framed newspaper article commemorated the fifth year of an annual Thanksgiving food drive he’d put together in Sterling. Nice guy, this Anthony. Sealing the deal, he owned a well-thumbed copy of The Road by Cormac McCarthy.
Which reminded me of the book I’d taken from the shelf at Vero’s and my apartment. And so, friends, that is how, as I recovered from my run-in with raw meat, I, for the first time in my life, read the entirety of On the Road.
58
I’m sorry, Jack. Turns out I was an asshole. Upon revisiting the book, it’s clear that my original judgment of your Beatness had been clouded by my breakup with the ancient ex-girlfriend.
Here’s my revised judgment: On the Road is not a complex read, like, oh, some of that Faulkner shit, but it’s detailed. Like a mosaic that resembles absolutely nothing from afar but whose individual tiles are stunning. This is the opposite of how mosaics normally work. It’s the opposite of how novels normally work. And what better way to read an opposite novel than by sitting on Anthony Juarez’s couch on a long September evening while recovering from food poisoning.
So go on, Kerouac, you pill-popping madman, run fast, go nowhere, and blurt your news to the world. You are, if nothing else, one irrepressible motherfucker.
And, by God, the book contains not a single flashback.
59
Not long after I finished digesting On the Road, the pronghorn’s revenge exited my body and my stomach agreed to start digesting food again. Yesterday, I was able to eat an entire pear.
Yesterday, my ass. I don’t even know how long a day is. I wake, I wander, I sleep. Who knows how many weeks have passed since I left Vero alone in Charlene’s backyard? My hair knows. It’s three inches long.
Without further fucking around, I cleaned up my messes as best I could and then I said goodbye to Abila and to Anthony Juarez.
I walked east, past cars I’d passed five times before, paying them no mind. Not long ago, I’d run twenty-four miles because I thought I’d shot Vero in the head. That was the old days, when running felt good. Now, my body felt like a rusted robot and I still had thirty miles to cover. My shoulders hurt. My ribs ached. The skin on my nose was flakey. The skin on my ears was flakey. I’m nothing but dandruff and crumbling bones. I itch, I walk, I stumble. I’m not a robot. I’m a zombie. Just a minute. Reach into pocket, extract pills, eat water.
I’m a relaxed zombie.
I keep thinking about those jars of grey squirrel water in the art museum. How do you turn grey water back into a squirrel?
I dragged my corpse under the hellfire storm. The tornado remained north of me, invisible thru the grey gloom of the rain and hail. I did not revisit it. I walked eastward, closer and closer to Charlene Morning’s backyard and I paid heed to neither the grinding of my bones nor the gradual softening of my skull.
60
I went to Denver and came back more or less alive. The trip taught me absolutely nothing about my origins. But I did learn:
That my permaparents like to screw on the living room floor.
That the grooviest exhibit in the Denver Art Museum is hidden in an employee breakroom located in a former morgue.
That, within the proper context, On the Road is a brilliant piece of work.
That it feels good to punch The Blad.
That it’s unsafe to eat raw meat.
That opiates, taken in moderation, can effectively ease physical pain.
That Denver is no longer my home.
None of my limbs have fallen off. My heart is still beating. I am home, here in Charlene Morning’s backyard in Keaton, Colorado.
Sitting across from me is Vero. She has leaned back in her wicker chair, hands behind her head, eyes closed. She’s grinning toward the darkening sky. This darling human with her beehive hair and her shiny white teeth, she’s waiting for me.
On the TV tray before her is a piece of paper that reads:
Welcome home.
Good ol’ Vero.
I desperately need some sleep, but before I go inside and climb on top of Charlene’s bed, I fetch a new sheet of paper and write three words and place it carefully upon Vero’s TV tray. I tilt her head forward so she can see what I wrote:
Please marry me.
61
When I awake, the world has grown decidedly darker. My long September evening is nearly over. All that remains above the horizon is an orange yarmulke of sun. I feel like I’ve slept for days, and that may well be the case. I stretch my stiff limbs and take my morning medicine and visit Vero in the backyard. Her hands are palm-down on the TV tray, resting on either side of my proposal of marriage. She regards the note with squinted eyes. Her mouth is either smiling or it’s just in that shape a mouth makes when one squints. Whatever the case, she’s processing information.
I go to the grocery. Charlene remains at the counter, continues to stare at her tabloid article about the kid raised by wolves. The coincidental nature of this story is not lost on me.
I collect sandwich fixings and exit to the parking lot where I assemble them and eat while looking at the Keaton State Bank, which is across the street. I ought to go in there someday. Banks are filled with money.
Down the road, at the Co-op, the encroaching darkness triggers the dusk-to-dawn lights atop the skyscraping grain elevators. The lights flicker and shine. I can’t turn on a light, but apparently a sunset can.
I return to Charlene’s garden and spend the rest of my day watching Vero weigh my proposal. By the time I’m ready for bed, she’s taken a breath and her mouth has relaxed a little.