As I Walked Out One Evening

by Donald Wetzel

  … and the consequent small faint scars become private even proud mementoes …

  … while on the other hand an old man can easily come up with large subcuntaneous purple blotches here and there about his person simply from trying to open a stuck dresser drawer or a door that he thinks should open the other way …

  … and so much for that.

  It was not my plan of course to fall backwards down a mountain on my day of celebration.

  That was accident.

  And afterward there on the mountain side naked in the sun I sat on a rock for over an hour one by one removing cholla cactus thorns—they come barbed—from leg thigh and buttock.

  And questioning—in the pauses in the interstices—the wisdom of my years.

  I have written of this at far too great a length.

  I can only say that there is—I believe—a strangeness in the story that makes it worth the telling here.

  But maybe not.

  Still one last thing: I remember in falling that I fell like a log.

  I who had been an athlete.

  And I have thought since how it was how it must have been with Sugar Ray Robinson—pound for pound the finest fighter of them all—who said at the time he quit the ring: I see the opening and nothing happens.

  Nothing happened as I fell.

  All the messages were sent I’m sure; but none of them got there not a one.

  This was the novelty the true and awesome wonder of it.

  As it must have been for Sugar Ray.

  And it doesn’t in any way follow of course but Sugar Ray Robinson bless his heart died of Alzheimer’s some several years ago, incontinent at the end and not knowing who the hell he was or who he had been.

  It is of interest only to me I suppose that we both had been born in nineteen hundred and twenty-one.

  Chapter 16

  So the old man and I started back out Garden street in an almost palpable ambiance of mutual resignation …

  … and in a more than ambiance more than palpable stench an over mastering cloud as it were of the by now familiar to me stink given off by the old man, an all encompassing mingled stench—as best I could read it guess at it unwillingly imagine it—the commingled stench of decrepitude and unwashed body parts of booze and sweat of failed digestion, fermentation spoilage and rankest rot in the large intestine of some vile and bubbling brew composed of alcohol and decomposing meats and who knows what?—of eye of newt, and toe of frog for all I knew—within the old man’s ancient bag of guts …

  … from which a monstrous gaseous plume breathed out with every breath …

  (I have got carried away somewhat it would seem by the force of the memory; or by virtue of some simple animal good spirits some passing exuberance perhaps based on nothing more than that I am this morning well and freshly showered and with no bones broken no grievous damage done by my recent tumble down a mountain side.)

  And for which in any event I ask your indulgence.

  … but Jesus God the old man stunk.

  I breathed shallow as a bird.

  And soon as I say we were out of town with the old man quiet and the road running straight on a section line—a section line being one of the four straight-line boundaries of a land area generally accepted as covering one square mile; put a number of these section line boundaries end to end and you have a country road that driving down it can become an absolute dullsville in no time at all—anyhow we were soon enough out of town with nothing much to either side but local election signs strung out along the right-of-way like so much trash and endless acres of bean fields carpeting the earth the plants sprawled brown and broken in the sun the beans left drying a seeming desolation not least of all in the vastness of it as of something vanquished some victory had at any price just bean fields no barns no stock nothing the way I once knew it when there was here and there a farm and barns—the barn usually larger than the house—with out-buildings scattered seemingly at random about the place variously in disrepair and here and there tractors and animals and of course people moving about doing this and that things various enough—poor as the people may have been as I remember them—to make it interesting a unique and human enterprise of sorts—each single farm I mean—even here along this mind-numbing dullness of a country road laid out on section lines.

  This is not farming I thought it is manufacturing.

  Nobody is even watching it.

  I don’t mean to say I was crazy about farming back when I was a kid—I wasn’t—not as I was exposed to it anyhow seemed like a hell of a hard sort of life to me to be such a gamble what with drought and disease and bugs and the mysteries of the market—my uncle a stubborn old German bringing home for instance a horse-drawn wagon load of cucumbers—even the horse was more or less an anachronism by then as was my uncle pretty much—he wouldn’t sell at a price below cost no matter that it might have eased the out-of-pocket loss a bit—brought the cucumbers back a total loss and dumped the whole wagon load in the pig lot where it rotted—the pigs wouldn’t touch those cucumbers wouldn’t go near them wouldn’t even crap near the things but moved their business across the lot—pigs will be neat when you give them half a chance to be—which was a strange satisfaction to me at the time I suppose—I mean that the pigs refused to eat the cucumbers to have anything to do with them—as I had argued—a wise-guy kid—with my aunt and uncle and anyone else who would listen that cucumbers surely were altogether without food value were possibly even bad for you if not seriously noxious which a person could tell just going by their texture and their taste—naturally I was only guessing giving weight I hoped without evidence to my bias of course but I hated cucumbers from the start, any way they were fixed, in a salad especially they ruined it for me—and here it seemed was the proof of my argument after all provided to me by my uncle and his pigs; as what plant or its fruit could be considered fit in the least for human consumption if even a stupid pig knew better than to eat it?—but no right from the start I could see that farming was not for me.

  But I respected it.

  But now driving along with the old man on and on with only bean fields to either side it gave me the creeps.

  I remember when it used to be corn and potatoes I said and truck cucumbers summer squash and melons sugar cane and mustard greens; I remember the rains would come and they couldn’t get the mustard greens in—I’m pretty sure it was mustard greens—couldn’t make a harvest and the greens would be left there to go to seed and surprise the countryside in time with an acre here and there of greens in such a heavy golden bloom it looked like you could walk on the tops of them; I think it was mustard greens I said some kind of greens.

  Mustard the old man said.

  I don’t even know what a soy bean looks like I said.

  Why am I talking to this drunk old man? I thought.

  And about then he stirred in his seat and pulled himself up and belched and looked over at me as though he figured okay you want to talk I’ll talk and he did; it’s all money he said first of all you have to understand it plain as it is there is people never seem to understand say it’s Jesus runs the show but it’s money—think Jesus cares about soy beans?—no sir it’s money all it is—and you can have them beans—ever eat boiled soy beans?—slimy as okra—and gas oh my scatter the cats like you had throwed a shoe at them just breaking wind—most people around here know better now than to eat them boiled or any way plain at all—gas oh my—yes sir sweet Jesus what they say but it’s money.

  I suppose I should have known to let well enough alone I thought.

  But more and more it was getting easier for me to listen to the old man.

  I had to admit it.

  They look like peas he said.

  I nodded.

  They say the poison don’t get in the beans he said but how do they know it don’t?

  I knew what he was talking about the way they spray the growing plants with poison—herbicide or pesticide whatever—poison anyhow and more than once in the
growing season repeatedly in fact—it gets to be familiar—you see the shadow of the plane slip across the road in front of you and then you get a whiff of the stuff—acrid it smells like a poison altogether unnatural a chemical something you would know to avoid the way any other animal would just by the smell of it—you see the shadow of the plane and get a whiff of the stuff and then a white film of it slaps down across the windshield and you hope to hell—or in my case anyhow you hope to hell—that they know what they are doing.

  The same with Lucian I guess.

  You hope they know but you wonder.

  You feel small like a bug and you want to say hey you up there just wait a goddamned minute …

  … as in the poem by some Irishman I believe—I forget his name—in which God—if a poem mentions God there is a good chance the poet is an Irishman; the only thing is that usually you can not be sure if the Irishman when it comes to God is for or against—anyhow in this poem which has come to mind right now there is a God up there with his hand uprisen about to smote the world to finish it off as one of His really bad mistakes and just then this person—naturally an Irishman—stands up and tells God to hold His hand that he the Irishman is in the way and is not about to move and of course this macho bit persuades God in the poem to spare the world …

  Leave it to the Irish.

  But no I mean the first time it happened with me I thought hey you in that airplane up there this is me down here.

  And the plane I remember swung up and curved about far off and returned and swooped in low and painted my windshield birdshit white again.

  I knew how old Lucian felt.

  Maybe the beans are okay Lucian said but there is a lot of people around here that won’t eat our own green bass or goggle-eye anymore; hard to imagine ain’t it?

  Yes I said.

  And I remembered how the bream came fighting flashing up out of the darkness of the water in a kind of glory even in defeat how I knew a kind of shame the same as when the dog brought me back the quail I had shot held gently still fluttering in its mouth and I in mercy wrung its neck held it stilled and soft and lovely in my hand …

  … back then we knew the beauty of the things we killed; or anyhow at least we killed them one by one by hand …

  … or some of us knew what we did, knew the beauty of the thing even as we killed it …

  … most of us did I believe …

  … I did anyhow …

  And now there is talk in Fairield and Larson—I have heard it—argument as to if or not it is safe to eat the fish we catch anymore as who knows the argument goes but that the bream our children fish for even now and catch may be loaded to their golden gills with dark and ugly stuff not good at all for our children’s brains not good for the magic world within the growing skull the brain still sorting things out still coming into being the rudiments hardly guessed at yet of its ultimate capacity to know of ordinary human shame or loveliness or mercy or even to guess what a tumor is.

  What kind of a fish is this? the argument goes.

  Well anyhow so went my thinking at the time moving on between the endless and by now gently undulating fields of soy beans as the road began its straight long slow descent to the far away river.

  And to the poisoned fish? I thought.

  Jesus I thought what real horrors am I thinking?

  Even here?

  I looked over at the old man.

  Somehow I blamed him, faulted him.

  He pissed me off.

  He should not just sit there smiling and nodding so goddamned out of it all.

  I envied him.

  Chapter 17

  The first day of summer and first I have to get this out of the way off my chest—exorcised if that is not too strong a word for so minor a matter—but certain recently chanced upon words—a name and a word to be more precise—have become a phrase somehow stuck now in my head like the ticking of a clock a sound that comes and goes without discernible cause or occasion repeats without variation the same few pointless words tapping for attention at the window of my brain so to speak—as if I didn’t already know they were there—as can be the case—one with which almost everyone has been familiar at one time or another I believe—as with for instance a three or four bar musical refrain of no great loveliness repeating itself endlessly as though in some hollow echo chamber in your head or a verse of doggerel the same or an utterly meaningless phrase such as “it’s a lie” she cried, “the child’s alive in London!” which can echo intrusively weirdly almost hauntingly on and on in your mind throughout an entire day sometimes even when you cannot recall to start with where and under what circumstances you first heard the stupid line …

  … anyhow some few days ago I chanced upon a newspaper article—I truly just chanced upon it—the way these things can happen—in which one Christina Wang—a research professor at UCLA—cited the existence of credible and substantial evidence indicating that it is in fact low testosterone levels that makes bullies of the bully boys while it is high testosterone levels that mellows we fellows out!…

  … and thus Ms Wang turns the whole idea of the hypogonadal male on its head …

  … and I have no quarrel with the theory of the thing … in fact I rather like it …

  … it’s just that on this fine first-day-of-summer here in Bisbee a fine beginning to the season were it not for the following and most singular fact to wit: that the words Hypogonadal and Wang, Hypogonadal and Wang—in that precise form and sequence—that one simple phrase—Hypogonadal and Wang—keeps being repeated keeps being heard over and over in my head like the name of a law firm or as with some stupid mantra—or—just possibly—as something one does?

  Anyhow, it is driving me out of my gourd.

  I don’t think it has anything to do with my being so old or with my recent tumble down a mountain side.

  I do not believe it should be seen as a sign.

  I am almost sure it means absolutely nothing.

  I just want it to stop!

  Indeed, should my efforts here serve only to exorcise the thing I will not have writ this day in vain.

  Time will tell I suppose.

  But enough.

  Okay one other thing and I will be back about my proper business here at my writing machine on this fine first dawning day of summer …

  … myself up early as happens more than I wish it would these days only now does the sun itself lift smartly up into the eastern notch in the Mules and bathe the sweeping western slope across the canyon from my window in a kind of morning softness a golden wind-chime sort of glow if that is possible which anyhow will turn out to be as sounding brass believe me as the day advances (for it is indeed full summer here now even at five thousand feet) and that one last thing of which I would tell before returning to my presumably more significant task happened earlier this day at faint first light in the coolness yet the stillness the quiet of early dawn.

  As follows:

  A bird sang.

  And I heard it not.

  I saw it singing.

  Some few short years ago I would have heard it.

  But I saw the bird singing and that is how I know saw the skyward pointing opening and shutting of its beak the flutter of its throat saw it singing in the dying juniper across the way singing in the bare dead branches near the tree top—one third of the tree the top one third already dead the way a tree can take its time with dying dying from the topmost branches down—and in the stillness of the morning in the bare top branches of the dying tree I saw close at hand the singing bird—a house finch I guessed by the blush at its throat and by the lateness of the season—the house finch being one of the last of our birds to let go of spring to sing on and on about it—and all I heard all I seemed to hear as I watched the singing bird this morning was a sound in my head as of wind in an utterly hollow and empty place.

  As of wind in the top-most empty branches of a dying tree.

  A lesser man might have panicked.

  Or so
it since has seemed to me.

  And so perhaps now I write of this as well in the hope of here too an exorcism.

  New demons come—as though the old ones weren’t enough—as we grow old it seems.

  Chapter 18

  The old man sitting next to me looked straight ahead down the road; no doubt but that he had seen it all before straight ahead or the view to either side it would have to be all the same to him. I reached over past him and rolled up his window and then my own and turned on the air conditioner felt it kick on waited for the rush of the cooler air.

  It came in quick and strong.

  A good old van.

  And the old man reached out and bathed his hands in the cool of it.

  I thought of a child reaching for dust moats in a shaft of sunlight.

  I thought of my father down from Birmingham that Thanksgiving day the wind blowing cold in off the bay and sunlight sparkling up from the water the white caps the small broken waves where I stood at the picture window looking out and looked down at my sister and infant child and my father seated—in out of the cold—an interruption of their walk—seated together in the front seat of my father’s old Chrysler which he no longer remembered but which he had given me to keep for him for his use or pleasure whatever on just such occasions as this—a holiday visit from the nursing home—it was in the morning Thanksgiving day morning and I had walked along by his side watching him looking at his old car again walking around it nodding his head appreciatively—and I thought at the time foolishly perhaps but out of habit or as proper to a son, well it seems The Old Man approves of the way I have kept it up anyhow—and he smiled the strange new smile that I could never get used to and said nice car you have here son. And he patted it patted the hood a tentative gesture of familiarity of affection as though he almost remembered it and then he asked me when had I got it?—but that was earlier and not what I remember now so well—certainly that was not what moved me especially as by that time of course my father was not remembering too much of anything not even my given name a good bit of the time—I was his son he knew that somehow so that was what he called me; son—no, his not remembering the old Chrysler was simply more of the same; rather what it was that caught at my heart and mind so powerfully then what was so indelibly (at least so far) filed away in my memory was standing at the picture window later looking out at the bay and down then at the three of them sitting there in out of the cold in the front seat of the old car with the late afternoon sun slanting down through the bare tree limbs and through the windshield and shafts of sunlight catching the dust moats the three of them had stirred up, and the infant in my sister’s arms reaching out to catch them to play with them floating his small bright baby fingers in among the floating dust moats and beside him my father reaching out a hand to do the same the two of them laughing softly the same at the wonder of it the novelty I guess …