“We could take them if they were truly awful,” Astrid said. “It’s the little things that suck.”
When their dinners came, there seemed to be almost nothing on the plate. Joe understood that this was in response to current views on cuisine held in France; and of course that helped to justify the price, but Joe was hungry. He tapped the tines of his fork all around the empty areas of his plate as though probing for food. Astrid was annoyed with him and gave him furious looks, and the waiter sighed operatically.
“If you were back in Montana,” she said, “undoubtedly they would put a great haunch before you and you would be happier.”
“That’s right.”
There was a whirlwind of activity as Ivan began to eat.
“Joe,” said Astrid, “I’ve been here all my life and you are a classic snowbird. After basking in the sun for a couple of years, you got ironic about everything.”
“He’s homesick,” said Ivan through his food. “When you’re homesick and home is three thousand miles away and you’re broke and there’s a gulf of communication between you and the faggot waiter and the plate is half empty before you half start, your heart is sore afflicted.”
“Thank you, Ivan,” said Joe.
“You like a quality of care and selection in your life, Joe. I like life bulging at the seams,” Ivan said.
“I like it with loud music and hot sauce,” said Astrid.
“Because you’re Cuban,” Joe said.
“That’s racist, actually,” Astrid said.
“I’m serious, Joe,” Ivan said. “Don’t be so meticulous. Quit weighing things out. It’s neurotic. Man was made to consume. Say yes to fucking well everything.”
The waiter looked significantly at Astrid. They were friends. In three years, Joe had not gotten used to Astrid’s friends. The waiter accepted the little illness of her hanging around with straight men. A bright wave caught the lights of the restaurant and rolled obliquely onto the beach. The restaurant was beginning to fill. Joe felt the smile on his face fade pleasantly. Astrid put a cigarette in her mouth and waited for Ivan to light it. Joe enjoyed their friendship. He loved the sight of Astrid smoking, while angry people at neighboring tables waved into the air around them.
Astrid’s uncompliant nature made her the only woman friend of Ivan’s life. Joe watched with approval. Sexless friendships reminded him of children. Quite lovely until someone whipped it out.
So once again Joe and Ivan were going to work together. Ivan was inspired by this work he was doing; Joe was trying to accept its necessity. At one time he had painted and had some acceptance; but he painted so slowly at the best of times and was so seldom sufficiently moved by an idea that he had to take work that did not depend upon strong feelings. Lately, he wasn’t really painting at all. He was trying to “face it,” a phrase Astrid found overpoweringly bleak. He told her he had sold out; she said he lacked sufficient mental health to sell out. “I’m going to face it,” he said.
“Don’t face it, for Christ’s sake,” she said.
Now Joe watched gloomily as Ivan paid the bill. When the waiter went off with his credit card, Ivan asked, “What’s twenty percent of ninety-three dollars?”
Joe groaned.
“Crass!” called Astrid.
Out in front, intensity was building. The hostess had gold-rimmed glasses hanging on her bosom from a chain. She only put them on to check dubious reservations in the big book on the stand. There was a line and Joe was pleased they had eaten early. They walked onto the street where the suave shapes of automobiles, parked on the fallen palm fronds, glowed in the streetlights. The breaking surf could be heard and Joe admitted to himself the tremendous romance this seemed to imply, though it always seemed to remain in the world of implication. He felt like an old steer with its head under the fence straining for that grass just over there.
They got into Ivan’s rental car. Ivan did not start it up immediately. The streetlight shining through the coconut palms lit up all six of their knees. “Joe,” Ivan said, “you’re very quiet. And I know you, Joe. You are my friend since we stood shoulder to shoulder in the school lavatory popping zits, betting our pride on the hope of hitting the mirror. But this quiet, this looking off, is a calm before the storm, which I know and have seen before, Joe. I only ask that you remember a few commitments and that you be a gentleman about it, if it kills you. I say all this knowing it may be well out of reach for you.”
Ivan looked straight ahead through the windshield. Joe looked straight ahead through the windshield. Astrid looked at Joe.
Joe said, “Start it up.”
8
In offering Joe the use of her car the next morning, a small pink convertible, Astrid had naively said to get a pound of snapper fillets and a choice of two vegetables and Joe had said he’d be back in a minute. Now clouds settled in the upper curve of the windshield, slowly wiped around, and disappeared. The yellow center line ticked in the side mirror. Lizards and tropical foliage managed to survive in the atmosphere of a New York subway. The traffic on the great divided parkway moved at a trancelike evenness maintained by the Florida Highway Patrol. He wanted to keep moving in case Astrid reported her car stolen.
In the end it was a day that was missing from Joe’s life. He didn’t turn on the radio until he left his motel near Pensacola the next morning. He realized he was about to hit the real torso of America and his spirits rose. He crossed into Alabama and took a few minutes out to view an arts and crafts fair in a vast baking parking lot. It was as if a thousand garages had been emptied onto a runway. Solemn people stood behind tables that held wan attempts at art in oil and ceramics and a twentieth-century history of appliances. Portraits of Elvis on black velvet. He pulled out onto the highway and resumed, having to go very slow for a mile until he could pass a pickup truck full of yellow lawn chairs. Battered, rusted cars passed with hard faces framed by Beatles-type haircuts. It seemed that before he even reached the Mississippi line, the sky had begun to grow, to widen: at the Escatawpa River the pines strained upward against a terrific expanse of blue sky. The highway was empty. The clouds stretching down to the horizon majestically ruled the scene. Joe was filled with a mad sense of freedom, free to eat fast food, free to sleep with a stranger. Instead of solving his problems, he had become someone without problems, a kind of ghost.
He passed a little bayou where a young fellow in knee-length surfer shorts covered with beer commercials watched a bobber rest on the mirror surface of water. This plain scene held a great mystery for him. There was a lovely waterland around the Pascagoula River with silver curves showing through the sea grass for a great distance while the road crossed in low, loping arcs. He stopped and watched fishermen unloading crab boats. He walked down and sat on a broken-off piling. A woman handed an old fisherman a pint of whiskey in a paper bag. She said, “If you beat me up like you did last weekend, I ain’t going to buy you no more of that.” Joe heard this with amazement.
He went to sleep in a motel. Outside in the parking lot, a couple leaned up against their car and listened to James Cotton sing the blues. “I don’t like white and white don’t like me.” Joe thought about that as he lay in bed. He couldn’t quite understand why, lying in this unknown motel in this unknown place, he felt such a desperate joy.
•
At seven in the morning, he was rolling through Danville Parish, Louisiana. Pine forests stood on the high ground between the bayous, pine pollen filling the air so that the car was covered with pollen and the air was so heavy with pollen there were times he thought he ought to turn on the headlights to see. But rush hour in Shreveport was different from other rush hours, the thickness of humidity, the crazy songs on the radio, flirtation between speeding automobiles. Secession had worked! The marquee in front of the Louisiana State Fairground announced county pig champions and English rock and roll bands. The radio advertised bass boats, fire ant control potions and the Boot Hill Racetrack.
Joe thought that crossing into Texas and ge
tting past the Red River would give him the feeling of being back out West but it didn’t happen. The thunderstorms lashed the highway and it still looked like Louisiana with all the gums and hickories and tupelos. A home repair truck passed with a sign on its side that said, “Obsessed to serve the customer.” Nothing halfway about the South. Someone shot up behind Joe in a little Japanese car, face pressed against the windshield, passed, then lost his motivation. Roostertailing through the rainwater, Joe had to pass him again. The cloudburst intensified and a mile or two down the road toward Longview, Texas, a pickup truck went into sideways slow motion, slid across the meridian and went into the ditch. Three men got out and stared at it. These men seemed to feel their pickup owed them an explanation. Once he reached Longview, he could see back to the thunderstorm, see its grand and sculptural shape, its violent black underside. The radio said they were glad about the rain because it would keep the pollen down and people could get some relief from their allergies and wasn’t that what people wanted, some relief? Joe liked it for the feeling of dropping a curtain between him and the past, a welcome curtain. This was the highway and he was a ghost. It was a relief.
Somewhere past the Sabine River, Joe started to spot the little oil patches, the active ones with bright painted pumps, bobbing away and pumping oil. And oil patches that had seen better days, with their pumps stopped and the paint rusted off like a field full of giant grasshoppers that had died or reached some eerie state beyond normal death. The radio had used the phrase “nuclear winter” and increasingly Joe was relying on the radio to shape his thoughts. He was still thinking about fire ants. Fire ants in the nuclear winter.
Van Zandt, Texas, was blushing green in a deeply wooded succession of gentle, rolling woodlands. For thirty-five seconds, Joe ached to live there. Then by Terrell, glad to no longer live in Van Zandt, he was out of the woodlands and in an ugly cattle country that looked like Iowa where there were no fire ants and pollen and mulattoes in convertibles, and no race music on the radio. Joe went blank and stayed that way until he came over a big long ascent and there below him was a cloud of mesquite and telegraph wires and glittering buildings. The hard angles of light on each surface seemed to communicate that the West had begun and he was on his way home. The sky picked up the white edges of the ravines, rocks and subdivisions equally. The skyscrapers cheerfully said, “We see you passing, you ghost! So long, Joe-Buddy!” This was Dallas!
There was a perfect Texan urban river bottom at Grand Prairie with scrub willows whose roots gathered trash in the flash floods that shot through new neighborhoods. Joe was maddened by joy at being in the country of the West. He felt that he would find a restored coordination for his life here. This was the West’s job. Gustav Mahler of all people was on the radio. Great Southwest Parkway! Lone Star Homes! Texas Toyota! A subdivision of multifarious grandeur, half-timbered Tudor homes baking in the dry air and clinging to the hillsides. A sign in front read From the 80’s. Joe could not understand the message because he thought they were talking about the decade of these homes; then he realized they meant the price of the units. Holy fire ants! Little places like that?
He crossed the Trinity River in a bright sun that made approaching traffic flash its windshields in a stream of glitter, along the edge of the Fort Worth stockyards. A radio preacher shouted, “Satan is playing hardball!”
On an awful-looking scrapped-off former mesquite flat north of Fort Worth, he passed “Fossil Creek, The Community on the Green. Next right, Blue Mound, Texas.” Getting on toward Wichita Falls, the radio briefly stilled, there began to be well-kept ranches, lots of horses, the houses on elevations with windmills to catch the breeze and fanciful entryways welded together out of rod and angle iron. Fetishistic paved driveways. There were things here in Texas that made Joe nervous, but he blamed it on whatever produced that radio religion, fire and brimstone delivered at a nice dance tempo.
It began to grow stormy looking and the conflict of spring and winter produced a cascading immensity of light that Joe felt levitate him as he drove in and out of vast shadows. State Highway Department trucks were ignited from within by a tremendous yellow light. The signs shone fiercely at him with their brusque messages. Railroad track crews were lit up like the cast of a Broadway show. A windy squall separated itself from the general pattern and arose before him like a dead king in an opera. A battered farm truck passed with a tuxedo hanging in the rear window. There were flattened armadillos on the road. The weather looked worrisome—worrisome and bad enough to drive him back to Astrid. Or, if it wasn’t for the awkwardness of driving her car, he could have given her a call. He could have said, “I’m en route!”
So, he stopped at Henrietta and ate pinto beans and corn bread and listened to a distant kitchen radio issue fairly dire weather forecasts. The restaurant had wooden booths and a few young men in work clothes sat sideways in them with their arms over the back and spoke in courtly tones to the black-haired, aging waitress.
Back on the road, Joe saw at a considerable distance the British flag emblazoned on a solitary billboard. But when he drew close, it turned out to be an ad for Beech-Nut chewing tobacco. Tumbleweed blew furiously across the road near an old brick high school that stood like a depressing fortress against the distant horizon and slate, moving clouds. There were cotton fields and, here and there, cotton wagons were drawn up on the side roads. The sign in Quanah said, “Stop and Eat with Us. Willie Nelson Did.” Joe noted that the goofy faces of the Deep South, the tragic and comic masks donned down there, had been replaced by a kind of belligerent stare. The highway signs said, “Don’t Mess with Texas.” It didn’t look too damn friendly out there. Maybe it was the weather.
Right after he crossed the Prairie Dog Town Fork of the Red River a train approached from a distance. When it came close, all that was visible was its windshield; the rest was a vast blowing mound of snow and ice. What’s going on here? Turn on the radio, my friend. He got another preacher, this one explaining that the mind does not work the exact-same as a Disposall and we cannot grind up the filth that goes into it. We must be careful not to put filth into it in the first place.
Suddenly, he was driving on a solid corrugation of ice in a whiteout. It just dropped from the heavens and put an end to visibility. He hunched over the wheel as though to examine the road even more closely than he could in a normal seated position. The outer world was filled with phantom vehicles, some floating by at eye level, others sunk to one side plainly disabled. A human silhouette arose and vanished. It was terrifying. It was a regular bad dream. He thought, I am being punished for stealing, for doubting the truthfulness of my aunt and uncle in withholding my lease money, for not painting and for walking out on a good woman.
He came up behind a twenty-year-old luxury sedan heaving along sedately. He clove to that sedan. It had a bumper sticker that said XIT Ranch Reunion and Joe tried to tag it as it appeared and disappeared in the snow. He passed an old tractor-trailer rig full of fenceposts and woven wire jackknifed in the ditch. Then he lost the sedan; it seemed to dematerialize in the whiteness and he was alone. He slowed to ten miles an hour and felt his insides labor against the white indefinite distance before him.
A fashion center for babies was advertising on the radio. They had a special for those hard-to-shop-for preemies. Including diapers for their little thumb-size bottoms. Then all of a sudden, a great miracle occurred, simultaneous with news of these glorious infants. The sun came out on a perfect world in the middle of which, surrounded by hysterical people, a Greyhound Vista-Cruiser lay on its side: red, white, and blue with tinted windows, in the ditch. Joe crept by in case he was needed, but the passengers were having their moment as they watched the driver set out orange cautionary cones, and they didn’t seem to need or want Joe, who had not been with them when it happened but rather with the well-dressed babies of the radio.
A little way past the town of Goodnight, he could see cattle running the fenceline in wild amazement at nature. A truck went by like the home repa
ir truck back in Louisiana but this one said, “Don’t sleep with a drip—Call a plumber!” The day was almost done. Joe flew through the slush to Amarillo, took a room, ate in a Japanese restaurant and went to bed. He felt like he was breaking his back trying to get through Texas. This ghost wanted to go home.
9
The next day, before he was fully awake, before he had had any opportunity for banishing thoughts, he was in Cimarron County, Oklahoma, where the wind blew so hard the shadows flew on the roadway and where, stopping on the edge of a plowed field, he had to lean backward into the wind to take a leak and even then it just sprayed from his dick like sleet. The radio said that Kansas steer prices were down because several of the packing plants had been closed by blizzards. Joe drove on. Near the horizon, there was the most overcrowded feedlot of Black Angus cattle Joe had ever seen. He stared at it until he overtook what turned out to be a vast depot of worn-out automobile tires, extending over many acres.
He began to see mountains and his spirit rose with the accumulating altitude, kept climbing until it sank again around Monument Hill and new snow and population; finally he was in the Denver rush hour, which caused him to sink into complete apathy as he took his place in the teeming lanes.
He cleared out of north Denver, traffic thinning about the time he passed a vast illuminated dog track, amazing against the darkening Front Range. It was dark and wild and cold after that, after the St. Vrain River and the Wyoming line. A genuine ground blizzard was falling by the time he got to Cheyenne, so he stopped at a place called Little America, the home of fifty-five gas pumps, and slept like a baby, knowing all that gasoline was out there. There was enough gasoline for a homesick person to drive home millions of times. Joe was hugely annoyed to have had this thought.
He was gone before daybreak, following a Haliburton drilling equipment truck with a sign on its rear that said it braked for jackalope. Joe’s sense of mission had reached a burning pitch and he tailgated the big rig over sections of road varnished by the manure that ran out of the cattle trucks. The two vehicles went down through Wyoming in a treacherous eighty mile an hour syncopation.
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