Americana

by Don DeLillo

  “Are the Indians happy?”

  “It’s hard to tell. They don’t say much. But they must be happier than they used to be or else they’d go back to ranching”

  “You’re pretty young to be living like this, not that I’m criticizing. Did you run away from home?”

  “My dad and I both ran away. Mom was driving us batty. It was psychorama twenty-four hours a day. I guess I love her and all but it got pretty bad. All she did was drink and smoke and yell things over the telephone to my father at his office. So then he stopped coming home from work. So then after that he came and got me at school and we sneaked my things out of the house when she was shopping and we got into the car and ran away. My dad’s in Tempe now trying to start a dry-cleaning place. He comes out here on weekends to see me.”

  “Don’t you get bored?”

  “Anything’s better than working for the death machine. We all try to dress the same way here. Simple and beautiful. But it’s not like uniforms. It’s just part of the single consciousness of the community. It’s like everybody is you and you are everybody. Sex is mostly auto. You can watch someone doing something with himself or herself and then they can watch you do it. It’s better that way because it’s really purer and it’s all one thing and you can do it with different people without anybody running for their shotgun like in the death factory out there. Sometimes it’s not auto but mostly it is and it’s two people mostly because two is still the most beautiful. I don’t know what the Indians do.”

  “Look, Jill, I’m not a reporter or anything, so you don’t have to tell me things that are private or sensitive.”

  “It’s okay,” she said. “I would tell you anything because you remind me of my brother. He was killed by the police.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “It’s okay. I loved him very much but I wasn’t sad. You have to get beyond that.”

  “Who’s that guy over there?”

  “That’s Incredible Shrinking Man. He sleeps every day at this time. At night he goes into the desert. He’s the one that started this whole thing. He has so much love in him. It won’t be long before they kill him too. He believes in the truth of science fiction. The cosmos is love. Something is out there and once we learn to welcome it instead of fear it, we’ll find out that its mission is love. His name is the name of an old sci-fi movie. At night he goes into the desert to watch for UFOs. He’s seen lots of them. We’ve all seen them. This is a good place for sightings. That’s one of the reasons he started the community out here. The visibility is terrific. So then they’ll kill him because he preaches love.”

  “I believe in the saucers.”

  “Almost everybody does,” she said. “But people are afraid to admit things to themselves. If we can learn to welcome instead of fear, the whole universe will heave with love. But the festival of death is going on all the time. That makes it hard for some people.”

  “I knew a boy at college who did what you did. He left school just like that and went to live with the Havasupai Indians. He lost forty or fifty pounds.”

  “They’re north of here. I think they’re farmers and planters.”

  “I wonder if he’s still with them. Leonard Zajac. A very brilliant boy.”

  “This is the only community that’s sci-fi oriented.”

  “I know another guy who’s walking to California,” I said.

  Incredible Shrinking Man rose to his elbow. He was wearing plaid bermudas. He was well-tanned and very muscular, dispelling the vague sense of undernourishment in the area. His hair reached down almost to his shoulders. We stood to shake hands and I realized he was about six feet eight inches tall, broad across his bare chest, lean at the waist. His grip was gentle. I found myself exerting pressure. Then we sat down again.

  “This is an interesting thing you’ve got here.”

  “The locals fear us,” he said. “What they don’t realize is that we’re much more conservative than they are. This is a very conservative settlement. We want to cleave to the old things. The land. The customs. The words. The ideas. Unfortunately wilderness will soon be nothing but a memory. Then the saucers will land and our children will be forced to embrace the new technology. If they’re not prepared, if we don’t prepare them, there’ll be an awful lot of confusion. We have to learn to accept the facts of technology without the emotion it engenders, the death impulse. But soon big government will take this land from us and install silos and missiles and lasers to keep out the UFOs. Big government beeps out everything in the end. Screaming meemies wield all the guns. Pimps and brain washers are gaining power footholds. The answer is indistinguishability. Become indistinguishable from your neighbor and his neighbor and his neighbor. The death circus is coming to town and benign totalitarianism is the only feasible response.”

  “I’m not a journalist,” I said.

  “Whoever you are, you’re welcome. Everybody’s welcome. Love lives in our own galaxy. We sing at nine.”

  “Jill said you’ve seen a lot of UFOs out in the desert.”

  “He calls them love-objects,” she said.

  “I’ve seen them by the score. Night things filled with love. But they won’t land until the time is right. The thing is out there. Jupiter and beyond the infinite.”

  “I have my own theory about UFOs,” I said. “They’re not from outer space at all. They’re from the oceans. The depths of our own oceans.”

  “Who pilots them?” Jill said.

  “Dolphins.”

  “He’s just kidding,” she said to Incredible Shrinking Man.

  She and I continued the tour. A few Apaches played cards inside one of the huts. The girl Verna was still holding the Indian child. A group of eight young men and women, all of them appearing a few years older than Jill, sat in the dirt playing a game of jacks. A boy of fourteen or so, an Indian, knelt at the fringe of the group; there were two fielder’s gloves and a baseball on the ground beside him. I picked up one of the gloves, a very old Luke Appling model. I spat into the palm and pounded it a few times. The boy got up and we walked slowly past the last of the huts and started playing catch. At first we stood only thirty feet apart and tossed the ball easily back and forth, limbering up. Then we doubled the distance and began to throw a bit harder. Then he moved back another ten feet and started firing. It was dry and very hot at the rim of the desert. I felt wonderful. The boy had a strong and accurate arm. The glove was soft with use, not as well padded as the later models, and my hand began to sting. He moved still farther away and I tossed him some high flies, which he fired back on a line. I took off my shirt. The sun felt good and my face and neck and upper body broke into lavish sweat. He moved across the dirt and weeds, kicking up dust, purposely delaying his break for the ball so that he could make an over-the-shoulder or backhand catch. My hand hurt badly now and I could not recall feeling this good in many years. I continued throwing long high flies, first to one side, then the next, and the boy veered and cut and back-pedaled, always sure of his terrain, dodging the larger stones without taking his eye off the ball. Sweat was collecting at my navel and I would rub it off with my right hand and then rub my hand in the dirt and wipe off the sticky dirt on my pants and blow on my hand then, drying it further, and then lean back and heave another long arching fly into the mouth of the sun. All trace of lettering had long since vanished from the baseball.

  We walked back to the village. I draped my shirt over my neck. Jill came toward us and the boy was gone. We sat on the ground and she put one finger to my chest and then touched her lips with it. We stared at each other for a moment.

  “Why does he dye his hair blue?” I said.

  “Vanity.”

  “To what end?”

  “Vanity’s end,” she said. “It’s silly for a person to repress his own vanity. Make love to your body and you kill the death inside you.”

  “There are certain inconsistencies here.”

  “I think his hair is beautiful. Why shouldn’t he have blue hair if
he wants to? Do you feel it threatens you in some way? Really seriously now, what harm is he doing? If you let yourself be what you want to be, physically and spiritually, you can kill a lot of the death inside you.”

  “I love to be instructed by the very young. It implies I’m not yet a lost cause.”

  “I could never instruct you,” she said. “And I could never get mad at you. It’s not just the brother thing either. You’re so beautiful.”

  “And that’s important, you think.”

  “Youth and beauty are always important. It’s what the death police hate most. They want to kill us and fuck us at the same time.”

  “I admit he’s a striking figure. I suppose the Indians think he’s a god.”

  “The Indians think he’s a fag,” she said, and she giggled for a bit, then slapped herself on the wrist as punishment.

  “Your gums show when you smile,” I said. “It gives me an almost death-dealing pleasure.”

  “I got all shivery when I touched you before.”

  “Do it again.”

  “I better not,” she said.

  “Your eyes are hazel.”

  “Do you want to stay with us?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I’d better keep right on going. I’m trying to outrun myself.”

  “Is this like a suicidal period?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “If it is, my dad could probably help. He’s a great guy. So then my screamy mother takes her repressions out on him.”

  “Did you watch me while I was playing catch with the kid?”

  “A-mazing.”

  “Baseball is so beautiful and lazy. It’s our version of the café life. You sit there and nothing happens. I really love it. The season’s underway now. If this were 1955 I could be sitting in the bleachers at the old Polo Grounds, watching the Giants play the Cubs. All around me there would be shirtless old men with sunken pink chests and their pants rolled up over their bony knees. What is it like? It’s like a seashore at the end of time. Jill, your hazel eyes destroy me. It’s nice sitting here. A spot of small talk with our dusty tea. Fatigue is such a luxury these days.”

  “You should stay,” she said.

  “Somebody’s coming by to get me. I’m surprised he hasn’t turned up yet.”

  “This is a part of the world,” she said, “where people don’t always turn up.”

  We walked back to the hut. Incredible Shrinking Man was standing out front, almost as high as the hut itself, wearing just the bermudas, his body a rich tempered tone of pennies, the blue hair hanging lank, strands of deep muscle extending along his arms. It was an astounding sight and as we approached I slid my shirt down off my neck and put it on. Later the Apache boy came for me and we took a sponge bath together behind his hut and then everyone gathered around several fires for hamburgers and corn, and a girl played a guitar and sang some western ballads, and still Clevenger did not come. In the darkness at the edge of the assembly I kissed little Jill and touched her softly beating hooded breast and she put her finger to my wrist. Incredible Shrinking Man walked into the desert for the feast of his infinity, white dwarfs and waltzing binaries, the first fictional inch of the space odyssey. Hogue, Jill and I settled down to sleep in the Matisse hut. A small fire burned. Hogue told of his life in Canada and Mexico, the search for gold, then God, then the perfect vacuum; his grandfather had prospected near this very site, a gunslinging man who was not averse to mule-meat, but his father, the all too timid issue of the panning days, had ended up in hardware. The three of us lay far apart. Soon the fire died and I thought she would come to me in the darkness, freckled Mescalero maid smelling of leather and sagebrush. But she did not come. And at dawn I woke to see Incredible Shrinking Man leaning into the hut, his naked body stained with the blood of the rattler he held in his hand. Jill got up and moved toward him and they went silently to whatever place they went for the ablutions of late and early man.

  The Cadillac was waiting. We had just finished lunch and Jill walked with me toward the road. Clevenger stood outside the car, wearing new boots and smoking a cigarillo. Jill said goodbye at the foot of the embankment and I asked her to wait a moment. I got my suitcases out of the trunk, emptied both, and then filled one with almost all of my remaining clothes and slid it down to her.

  “You can sell this stuff and get some food.”

  “Don’t go,” she said. “It’s bad out there.”

  For the first time since I had met Clevenger we were heading east, south and east, and if he seemed less happy it might have been nothing more than the tight fit of new boots. He asked me to get his sunglasses out of the glove compartment. There was a revolver in there, a long-barreled thing, probably a .45, and I wondered how often he took target practice or in his mind fired from the speeding car, knocking off coyotes, redskins, small foreign automobiles. And now he was doubly screened behind stained windshield and sunglasses, bowed low in his cool church, and I knew this was why I was with him, to search out the final extreme, the bible as weapon, the lean hunt of the godfearing man for the child who confounded his elders. Clevenger drove with one hand.

  “They ought to be drug out in the desert and horsewhipped.”

  “They’re not bothering anybody,” I said.

  “That’s government land they’re on.”

  “So what.”

  “Hey boy, you got your back up, ain’t you? Chip, chip, chip. I can’t say I blame you. I did my best to get back last night but the wheelers were dealing and the dealers were wheeling. It was a right fine mess. Then there was this woman.”

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  “Call me cap’n now.”

  “It’s okay, cap’n.”

  “There was this woman. A pot of warm syrup. I hate like hell to have to be getting back. The goddamn punctured lung of America. But that’s all right. We’ll have us a pig-party. Hey, see that gulch over there?”

  “I’ve never been to Texas.”

  “Where we’re going ain’t exactly Texas. It ain’t exactly no place. See that gulch we just passed? That’s a piece of local history, that spot. I get put in a good frame of mind just thinking about what happened there. Of course some people wouldn’t think it was so damn funny.”

  “I’m listening,” I said.

  “Now this girl was about twenty-one years old. A sweet little coed. Spends a night with a married man. Goes home the next day and tells her mama and daddy. Don’t ask me why. Maybe just to rub their faces in it. They decide she needs a lesson. Whole family drives out into the desert, right out to that spot we just passed. All three of them plus the girl’s pet dog. Papa tells the girl to dig a shallow grave. Mama gets down on her hands and knees and holds the dog by the collar. When the girl is all through digging, papa gives her a .22 caliber revolver and tells her to shoot the dog. A real touching family scene. Make a good calendar for some religious group to give away. The girl puts the weapon to her temple and kills herself. Now isn’t that a heartwarming son of a bitch of a story? Restores my faith in just about everything.”

  “This is the only country in the world that has funny violence,” I said.

  “And what do you think the parents are charged with? Now what do you think? Go on now, take a crack at it.”

  “Manslaughter?”

  “Manslaughter, hell. Cruelty to animals. Intent to kill, maim or otherwise injure, or suffer to be killed, maimed or injured, or an accessory thereof, a damn dog. That beats my meat. That’s the living dead end.”

  He howled then, the consummate reb yell, a two-syllable sound that was hog call, battle cry, the bark of the saved soul at a prayer meeting. I didn’t understand Clevenger. There were shades to him which dimmed what I kept expecting to find. Literature. Movies. We cut across the scaly land and it seemed to glide a tongue among the bones of mules and greed, and all signs pointed to national monuments, to Organ Pipe, Casa Grande, Saguaro, Chiricahua, Gila, White Sands, loving attempts to embalm the long riddle of the cliff-dwellers, and we
moved into evening, crest of the setting sun at our rear window, the tender menace of our land, freetailed bats in flight above the whispering huts of mystics and every unwritten death singing in the hills. Literature. I told Clevenger about Incredible Shrinking Man, his great height and brawn, the energy of his presence.

  “I ain’t seen the man yet who bullets bounce off of.”

  At some point in the night, sleepless, as I stood by a window overlooking a blue swimming pool, I remembered walking once past the Waldorf and St. Bartholomew’s and the Seagram Building and then looking across the street to see a lovely girl in light green standing by the Mercedes-Benz showroom on Fifty-sixth Street. It was a summer evening, a Friday, and the city was beginning to empty. I crossed to the traffic island and paused a moment, watching her. She was waiting for someone. The violet twilight of Park Avenue slid across tall glass. Traffic slowed and the mild bleating of horns lifted a half note of longing into the heavy dusk. There was a sense of the tropics, of voluptuousness and plucked fruit, and also of the sea, a promise disclosing itself in tides of air salted by the rivers and bay, and of penthouse hammocks and huge green plants, a man and woman watching the city descend into the musical craters of its birth. And she stood by the window, not quite facing me, shapely and fair, all that elegant velocity bottled behind her, concealed torsion bars and disc brakes, the poise of fine machinery, and her body then, softly turning, seemed to melt into the rippling glass. That was all there was and it was everything.

  “We’ll be sucking hind tit if we don’t get moving,” Clevenger said.

  He was putting on his boots in the dark. He had slept only two hours after driving close to four hundred miles and it was still deep night when we set out again. He said he had not slept at all the previous night, needing only a hot towel and shave, the bite of a crusty cigar, to keep his senses on target. I turned on the portable radio and we listened to the Reverend Tom Thumb Goodloe, a country singer and preacher shouting out of El Paso. Clevenger began to smile.

  “Adams I say. Aldrich I say. Andrews, Armstrong, Bancroft, Barton, Bennett, Box, Brown, Bryan. Give me Calder. Give me Carpenter and I’m all right. Give me Cartwright, Cassidy, Cole, Cooper, Curtis, Dale, Dixon. I want Elliot on my team. Fowler sounds like my kind of man. I want Benjamin Cromwell Franklin. I want Calvin Gage. I want Albert Gallatin. I want Gant, Gillespie, Gray, Green, Hale, Hamilton, Hawkins, Hunt, Ingram, Jackson, Jennings, Jones, Kenyon, King, Lambert, Lane, Lawrence. Lewis I say. Lightfoot I say. Lindsay and Logan. Love, Marshall, Martin. Maxwell I say. McClelland, McCoy, McKay, Mercer, Mitchell, Moore, Nabers, Nash, Orr, Pace, Parker, Patton, Phillips. I want to hear the right-sounding names like Powell, Proctor, Reed and Reese. I want to hear Rhodes, Robbins, Rockwell, Russell, Sanders, Scott, Slayton. I want to hear the old-time names like Smith, Stilwell, Taylor, Thompson, Tindale. I want the good people on my side. Trask, Turner, Tyler, Wade, Walker, White, Williams, Yancey, York, Young. They were all there, every last one of them, raising the lone star standard. And by God there was a Goodloe too. Robert Kemp Goodloe. And I was not a stranger in my own land.”