There was no smoke bloom of magic or poetry with all the combined alphabets of the world that could bring them back. Of this I was certain. I’d crossed the dark river and there was only darkness more on the other side. After a while I emptied my pipe by banging it against the tree and wished I could only do the same with all the stuffing in my mind.
If I had one last mercy yet to be granted in this life it would be to hit my head hard enough and empty it forever.
An hour before we made camp, we’d crossed the headwaters of the Big Blue River on an old scow toward sunset. A filthy Norwegian man with hair as blond as barn dust ran the ridgepole ferry with a pulley wheel at the cost of ten cents per passenger. Maybe I could find some semblance of peace with such a profession, if I got far enough removed from my home, too tired to share pleasantries with my fares, only the exchange of money for service as I tugged stranger after stranger over a slothful bend of wide and deep water from one bank to the next, helping them to their destinations and never knowing where they came from or where they were headed.
Together Billy and I ate a sad dinner of brown beans in tomato sauce from the grub box with ironclad biscuits we cooked over a small fire of pitch pine. We sat with our boot soles against the flames until they were sulfur hot, looking over the low piece of snowy prairie that was as gray and expansive in the moonlight as the sea under storm clouds. The smell of new snow had been in the air all day. When it finally arrived, it fell all through the night like a featherbed ruptured. I sipped from my usual vessel of nourishment: a two-gallon jug of whiskey strong enough to polish a stove.
After supper we melted snow for drinking water in the same frying pan we’d used to brown the biscuits, and let our ponies drink to their hearts’ content before filling our canteens for the long ride ahead of us tomorrow. I spread some hay on the ground once my head was misty with whiskey and rolled up in a horse blanket and closed my eyes.
Come daybreak the blanket was crusted in frost, and my eyelids were starchy with ice. We rose at five, breakfasted on more beans and scorched wheat coffee, cleaned and harnessed our horses, and were riding at full tilt by first light.
“Ought to pass into Kansas by sundown,” Billy said as we started out our gallop.
I nodded. Every rod we passed was only another stretch of state I’d never see again this side of the bourn. For lunch I shot a couple prairie chickens wandering around by the rim of a gulch. I fired both barrels of my shotgun at once and scattered buckshot all over a half acre of ground knowing that if I missed once I wouldn’t get a second try. Billy set a pot of water to boil while I plucked the dead birds and put them in the pot with their legs dangling out of the lid and looked over the cow yard of a nearby farm. A half mile out, an old homesteader was using dynamite to blow up tree stumps.
I remembered the story of a young boy I once knew back in Colorado when I was just a boy myself. Bluebonnet was his family name. The boy’s given one I couldn’t recall. What I never forgot was how one day that boy was playing in his father’s barn and pocketed one of the percussion caps from a dynamite bundle kept hidden high up in the haymow. Later that day, after he got into some trouble with his mother, she bent the boy over her knee and set to spanking him when she hit the percussion cap in his back pocket and blew them both up in the front lawn. All that was left of the clothes on the boy’s dead body were the wrist cuffs of his flannel shirt.
The isolated details we remember and the grand entities we don’t.
I felt for a moment as if I might cry, but was too bitter for tears.
No sir. I would not show the blue feather ever again.
I shook off the image with a pull from my whiskey jug and a good smoke from my pipe, drawing on it heavily as I canvassed the land ahead. Antelope were nosing around a stunted cornfield covered with winnows of snow, hoping to find a frozen ear of broom corn left behind from last autumn’s harvest. Socks of old husks littered the cornfield like scraps of trash. The antelope were thin and looked as starved as alley pups, eating nothing but bark and dead grass in those lean months. The scheme of life, even for the foredoomed of earth who know nothing of God, is to create the idea of God in their own trampling. Northern winds were whooping and snow eddied off the ground like little white dust devils.
We rode on into the warming afternoon, passing towns that were nothing more than a flagpole and a few shanties. What both of us would’ve given for a night in a nice hotel with oak floors and floral wallpaper with a roaring fireplace in the lobby, listening to a clumsy piece of sunshine being banged out on an upright piano while we split a bottle of brandy with our belt buckles unclasped and our stomachs hanging out, fat as butter. Rich as we’d ever been in either our lives and we still wanted for more. More than we could ever have.
On our third day we stopped at a ramshackle drugstore, the last business within eyeshot before crossing the Nebraska border. It was the only building for miles and miles. The place was a sod house with holes for windows. The only way we knew it to be a business was the hand-painted sign nailed to the roof ledge that read in a gross misspelling: FARMACYST AND WET GROWCER. A huge bluetick hound snoozed on the lopsided porch. We hitched our ponies to a post and ate a snug breakfast of soft-cooked eggs and oat cereal with cream while sitting up at the counter on a pair of nail kegs that served as stools.
I asked the counter woman, “I’ve heard of a dry grocer, but what’s a wet grocer?”
“One that sells alky.”
“I don’t believe that’s the true meaning,” Billy said.
The woman crossed her arms. A faint trace of mustache growth above her lip.
“I don’t care what you call it,” I told her and pushed aside my empty plate. “So long as you got some whiskey, that’s good enough for me.”
Billy and I stood and perused the aisles for whatever assorted supplies were in stock. We decided upon three pounds of cornmeal, salt pork, a slab of bacon, a new iron kettle that wouldn’t litter tiny flakes of metal into our morning coffee like the peeling one we currently used, brown eggs, condensed milk, some hard candy, and six cigars. While the grumpy woman rung us up at the till, Billy spotted an odd apparatus in a painted box next to the colanders of candy. He picked it up and read the label curiously.
“‘Marvel Brand Whirling Spray,’” he quoted. “‘Vaginal Syringe. Cleans Instantly.’”
I looked over his shoulder at the box that bore an image of the contraption and the technique for its proper usage. The device was a combination of what appeared to be a perfume atomizer and a fire stoker.
“Well I’ll be,” I said and whistled. “Would you take a gander at that?”
The woman sneered at our childishness. “It’s for feminine hygiene.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Billy said. “I deduced that for myself when I read here that it’s a vaginal syringe.”
“Suppose if you can clean a sink, you can clean a cooze,” I said playfully.
The woman yanked the box away from us. “Will there be anything else?”
“And what if I wanted to purchase that for my old lady?” Billy asked.
I interrupted politely so as to save the woman from having to dignify Billy with a response. “Tell you what, miss. I’m feeling a little headachy. Whaddaya got for that?”
She huffed. “Syrup of figs always does alright by me whenever I get a spell.”
I laid one of the Cudahy gold pieces on the counter. “Well, toss it on in then.”
“Anything else?”
“Whiskey,” I said.
“What kind?”
“The best you have.”
The woman bent over and produced a mysterious looking bottle without a label from under the counter. She uncorked it and poured me a healthy sample. I took it down without effort and stood with my palms on the counter.
“How do you like that?” she asked and cracked her first narrow smile of the entire morning.
“Isn’t that just about made to order?”
“Yeah. Top drawer. I could go streaming banners of joy around your hearth,” I said sarcastically, and soon as I finished speaking, my stomach seized up on me. My throat tightened, and my knees buckled. Billy stepped away from me like I’d broken wind. I hadn’t felt that instantly ill since the time I drank a bottle of black wine I purchased from an Indian behind the monkey cages at a traveling circus when I was just a teenager.
“What do you call it?” I asked feebly.
The woman gave a deep-bellied laugh. “Ain’t anyone who ever drank it has lived long enough to call it anything.”
What she’d given me wasn’t whiskey at all but a toxic mixture of homemade tipple colored to resemble whiskey: coal oil, turpentine, and navy plug flavored with soft soap and rat poison. I cupped my mouth to keep from vomiting all over the shop and sprinted outside. I was on my hands and knees in the snow, spewing so violently I thought I might pass out from the effort. My eyes swelled up, and my vision blurred to a haze.
I heard a loud commotion inside but had lost control of every motor function except for the unrelenting heaving. My eggs came up in the snow undigested, and my nose was bleeding as if I had been punched between the eyes. When I finally stopped puking long enough to roll onto my back and inhale air like a man coming up from the bottom of a lake, a pair of gunshots sounded from inside the shop. The twin reports echoed, and the hound on the porch leapt to its feet and ran inside howling. Its ferocious barking lasted only a few seconds before another gunshot cracked, and all was silent.
I didn’t know how long I’d lain out on the snow next to my steaming pile of throw up, but I knew it wasn’t longer than a few minutes. Finally I summoned the strength to stand up, though it was a wobbly effort. I nearly fell against the porch banister and opened the door to a scene as graphic as any I’d ever witnessed in my born days.
Standing in the middle of the shop was Billy, his shirtfront soaked in blood as he wiped himself off. His pistol was still smoking when he shoved it back in his holster. He held a cattle knife in his hands and started to clean the blade after drying the blowback off his face. He replaced the knife in his belt sheath. A fan of blood as large as a framed painting covered the wall behind the register like paint popped from a balloon. More blood pooled on the floor next to two dead bodies, one being the woman proprietor and the other belonging to a man about her same age whom I had never seen before. The mutt was lying on the ground by the door with a hole in its ribs and its hind legs trembling as if chasing a cat in a dream.
Billy smiled widely and said, “Set thine house in order for thou shalt die.”
He was quoting Isaiah, albeit he most likely didn’t even know that Isaiah was a book from the Bible. He’d probably heard it said somewhere before without understanding its origin or impact. I was pretty certain of that. The passage would’ve rung true if he had said it before he set to murdering two people and one gangly dog rather than after.
I was so dizzy I could barely comprehend what had happened from the evidence at hand. Billy ransacked the rest of the store, filling empty gunnysacks with extra supplies and raiding the till for the few crumpled dollars and dingy coinage in its drawer. He packed the goods onto his horse and helped me up onto my pony and gave me a canteen of water, instructing me to drink until my stomach could hold no more.
We bolted from the scene in a flurry. It was all I could do to lie across my horse’s back and hold onto the reins. Twice more I vomited and got some of the mess in my pony’s mane, the water helping me discharge the remnants of poisonous whiskey still left in my stomach. I couldn’t tell how fast we were racing or which direction we were headed.
Two hours later we finally stopped at a clearing where an abandoned schoolhouse with a partially collapsed roof stood between a clump of spidery elms. Billy assisted me off my horse and walked me into the rotting structure where rural children used to learn their arithmetic and geography before some kind of tragedy shooed them all away for good. The western wall was caved in from floodwaters or prairie fire. It was impossible to tell which as the black decay could’ve come from either type of destruction. Sitting up against an old cracked chalkboard, I quickly fell asleep. My last conscious thought was that I might not wake up from this slumber, and I wouldn’t have argued much with my maker if that was indeed the case.
Later that evening I did wake up, soaked in sweat despite the zero weather outside. Billy had covered me in two scratchy horse blankets and was burning a cook fire right in the middle of the schoolhouse floor with wood from the tiny desks. A huge hunk of salt pork was spitting in a pot, and eggs were frying in a pan, their whites popping like hot tar.
“God,” I said with a groan. “Not more eggs.”
Billy laughed, but the laughter sounded more like relief than anything else. He’d changed clothes while I was asleep and appeared ready for a night of gamboling in a frilly yellow shirt and straight pants with his hair combed. He laughed again and without prompting began telling the story of what transpired in the store.
He said, “When I figured that wench had given you some awful stuff, I just lost my mind. I grabbed her around the neck and thrashed my blade across her throat four or five times. Five times. I was in such a fury that I had no accuracy. I gashed her high up under her chin and lower by her collarbone. I cut her so deep I severed her windpipe. God, her whole head nearly came off at the neck. Well, then she dropped to the floor with a little bit of flair, and the next thing I know, some lam in the backroom was scrambling out of his bed after hearing the commotion. Rushed into the store wearing nothing but his night clothes. Maybe he was her husband. I do not know. But there he was, and just as quick he was no longer. Shot him in the gut, I did. The hole in his belly was so wide I could see clear through it to the other side of the wall. His pancreas was lying on the floor six feet in front of his body. Or maybe it wasn’t his pancreas. Maybe it was his liver. It smelled god awful so I’m thinking most likely it was his liver. Some kind of organ or another. Then that damn dog came in, and I dispatched of him as well.”
I pulled the blankets up to my chin. “Are you drunk?”
“Of course I am. Here I am thinking you’re on your way out and me not being able to do doodley-squat about it. I needed something to help trim my emotions.”
The morning came, and I felt strong enough to drink some canned milk for breakfast and keep on riding. We never spoke of the violence in the store. Not for the rest of our days. We would ride on through the tops of Kansas, crossing into the bottoms of Colorado and on past the alkali lakes of Utah, shoestringing the path of the sun until the weather turned spicy and the canyons of Arizona were a picture no longer dreamt.
We would find a place easy enough to break in what would become the remainder of the world for us both. Maybe a little cottage on the sea. I imagined long swipes of citrus groves and celery fields. Strolling barefoot along the beach, boots in hand. Jackrabbits and coyotes appearing in the wild grasses that grew in the sand all the way to the waterline. Flocks of fruit bats with the wing spans of sea birds sailing under the red clouds of dusk, leaving their canyon nests for the fronds of queen palms.
Earth’s shadow forming a dark band over the ruffled sea.
The high tide combing the beach flat.
But for now it was the utter flatness of tableland in every direction and snow eight or ten inches deep in some places. Once in a while we’d spot a windmill or granary or a collection of wigwams as white as new sailcloth and shaped like huge sugarloafs with smoke holes leaking dense supper fumes. As glad as I was to leave it all behind and fortunate enough to be making the getaway clean, I knew that even in the middle of winter with a flour sack of scant provisions and a scratchy blanket for a bed and the whole made world set to chase us down now and forever after, one thing was still true and always would be: heaven was the only place that could substitute for Nebraska. One I was certain I would
never see. The other I was certain I would never see again.
Knowledge of All Dark Things
SOME NEWSPAPERMAN IN Baltimore called the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby the biggest story since the resurrection. Most folks simply referred to it as “The Crime of the Century.” I don’t know if it was all that. There’s still more than half of this century left to be had, and a lot of ghastly things can happen in sixty years if history is our truest oracle of all things yet to come.
A feller by the name of Adolph Hitler is causing quite the sensation in Poland. It might be maybe he could prove a lot of trouble for the world if his shenanigans keep going the way they’re headed. His circumstance is all the hubbub in the daily papers.
At least from what I can tell.
Reading the dispatch of the day is no short work.
My eyes are not what they used to be. My astigmatism makes even the boldest headlines seem like an optical illusion. I have to use a pair of opera lenses over my bifocals for triple magnification just to fetch up a few back page baseball statistics. Still. I try to keep up to snuff on the spring fashions and all the Gotham society hooey, and not a day goes by that this Hitler fellow isn’t stirring the pot.
This world. I do not know her anymore.
The atrocities are beyond my fathoming.
The Crime of the Century, as it is, may yet to be had.
For a while the dubious honor belonged to that dago who stole the Mona Lisa. Vincenzo something or other. I cannot recall. No matter. He worked in the Louvre and hid the most famous painting in the world under his frock one night after closing time and hightailed it right on out of a museum more heavily guarded than a royal bank as easily as if he were lifting a pair of shoes from the Salvation Army. Made it all the way back to Florence he did. Didn’t catch the bloke for near on two years.
I understand the sentiment. An Italian masterpiece deserves to be kept in Italy. Not Napoléon’s bedroom or Louis XIV’s goddamn hunting lodge. And yet. Stealing a painting holds no candle to stealing a child.
World, Chase Me Down Page 18