by Sam Shepard
I had decided to track her the best I could. I followed her into coffee shops, birdseed stores, pharmacies. There had to be some way I could bring charges against her but I wasn’t ready, I realized, to account for my own position in all of this. In fact, I wasn’t sure what my position was. I’d like to think of myself as totally innocent—a victim of circumstance—but quickly realized I’d be seen in another light because of our extreme age difference, hers and mine. I mean, it appeared obvious, the lasciviousness, the leering. Besides, she hadn’t really done anything yet—she hadn’t published anything or proclaimed herself to be “the author” of something she wasn’t. She’d just sit for hours, sipping her coffee, staring at her screen and occasionally running her fingers rapidly across the keys, making that cracking, clicking sound. She’d sometimes sit at bus stops with both hands crossed on her laptop, waiting for something to happen—at least that’s what it appeared to be. Maybe that was the whole thing—waiting for something to happen, as though her life were in a holding pattern, just waiting for the right moment to land.
Blackmail Dialogue #3
(Little Jerks)
“Why won’t you come and see me? I didn’t mean for this to be the beginning of the end for us—”
“The beginning of the end of what?”
“Whatever it is.”
“It’s nothing.”
“Don’t you believe in accident?”
“Accident is nothing to believe in. It’s just something that happens.”
“Random.”
“Yes.”
“Chance.”
“Look—”
“What?”
“If I agree to see you—”
“Then you would? You’d consider it?”
“Yes—but don’t bring the pages.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t want to see them.”
“Why not?”
“I just don’t.”
“But you’d like to see me?”
“I’d like to see if you’ve lost your mind or not.”
“How could you tell by just looking at me?”
“Your movements.”
“What about them?”
“If they lacked spontaneity or not.”
“Spontaneity?”
“Yes.”
“What does a lack of spontaneity look like?”
“Jerky.”
“Jerky?”
“Yes. When you change your mind, you jerk.”
“All of us?”
“All of us.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Watch. Next time you change your mind.”
“And you’d see that in me if we met up?”
“Absolutely.”
“How?”
“Your head. Little jerks.”
“Side to side?”
“And up and down. Both.”
“Little jerks?”
“As though a mosquito were in your ear.”
“And how is that indicative of insanity?”
“The mosquito doesn’t exist.”
Seen Me Seeing Her
I wander a little farther from the house, whistling and calling. The blood rushes out of my hands from the cold. I blow on my fingers and shove both hands deep into the pockets of my jacket. I start seeing her naked, in my head. This might be naive but was she actually trying to seduce me? Was the whole procedure well thought out and full of intent? She couldn’t have just suddenly, randomly decided to take a soak in my tub with me standing right there, watching. She must’ve seen me seeing her in the cabinet mirror. She knew what she was doing. There was a strange lack of titillation to the whole thing, though. A week ago I could have almost died to see her naked, but now—I don’t even remember getting a hard-on. I would’ve remembered that, wouldn’t I? I’d certainly remember that. Maybe it was something altogether different.
The dogs are back. Slinking at the front door, panting and meekly wagging their tails. Could be they’ve been back all this time, lurking around the house, and I just hadn’t noticed. There’s a lot I don’t notice these days. I let them into the kitchen, glad to see them although secretly wanting to kick them both in the ribs. They drink together at the rubber bucket, lapping and dripping. I pull cactus spines out of their pads, then open cans of horrible-smelling coagulated chicken guts. I can smell, along with the guts, the steaming water laced with epsom salts drift down the hallway. I wonder if she’s fallen asleep in there. I can’t hear any splashing or lapping. I start mixing the chicken with kibble into bowls and the horrible stink recedes somewhat. It suddenly strikes me that she could be in there bleeding to death. I swallow the nervous shock that runs through my throat to my chest. I stop mixing dog food for a second and just listen to space. Dogs panting and wagging. Blue jays squawking. Don’t go running in there, whatever you do. The water will be red. Her head will be near the surface. Her eyes wide open. Both her hollow arms will be floating and bluish. The arteries of her wrists slashed. With what? She brought something. A razor. She found one of mine on the bathroom counter. Streams of red will still be swirling, surrounding her waist. Her hair streaming out behind. Her purple toenails protruding. Red fingerprints, clutching at porcelain. The washrag floating squarely between her feet. What will I tell her parents? I just found her that way. There was no indication—who do you call first? The police? No! Not the police. The emergency squad? SWAT team. Who is that? What hospital? Hospital? She’s already dead. How do I explain her state of mind? What was her state of mind? Where did we meet? How long ago? Did we ever have sex? What was she doing in my house? In my tub. Totally nude. The body bag. Following the ambulance. No flashing lights. She’s already dead. She’s already gone.
I slide the aluminum bowls toward both dogs and head down the hallway. I take my time. I see traces of her along the way. Notebooks. Pencils. Textbooks. Computer. Stuff lying around. A silver bracelet. A brass ring. I try to assume an indifferent self. Calm. Unpresuming. I push the bathroom door all the way open. It bounces back slightly. I stop. Don’t look down at the tub. There’s water all over the floor in puddles. Her clothes are gone. Even her sandals. What was she doing wearing sandals in winter? Don’t look at the tub, I keep telling myself. I do. She’s gone. Tub’s still full. Water’s gone lukewarm. I pull the chain on the white plug. The sucking sound seems delayed. Water starts to funnel toward the drain. There’s one thin string of blood dancing in the middle. Red and yellow, part of it transparent. A ribbon. Maybe she started something and quit. Thought better of it. No, that’s way too rational. She was already in a state. Wasn’t she? Didn’t she say she had come back to ask me something? Something about an exchange. Why had she been sitting so still for so long? I assume it was long. Waiting. Not moving.
I follow the wet steps of her exit. Has she got a towel? Is she drying her hair, carrying her clothes on her arm, her sandals dangling from two fingers? Two. She couldn’t be bleeding. No sign of that. No spots. No smears. I follow her into the guest room. This must be where she finally gets dry, gets dressed. Gets changed into something warmer. All the clothes she took off are lying on the bed. Her sandals too. I check the closet. On the floor her huge suitcase vomits clothes in every direction. Underwear. Panty hose. Patent leather belts. Sweaters. Socks. Her blue parka is gone. The gooseneck lamp on the table beside the bed is still on. Yellow notebooks scattered. I pick up one, scrawled in blue ink: “ARE YOU CRAZY? YOU COULD BE SET FOR LIFE—ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS SAY YES!” Another pad reads: “SYNESTHESIA. MUST BE. WHAT ELSE? COLORS? D-MINOR IS DEEP BLUE.” I cross back out of the guest room. The side doors leading to the rock patio are wide open. The dogs are already out, heads to the ground, switching their noses to her scent. They both knew her. Went with her on her regular morning jogs. They follow her steps. How could she have walked almost right past me? Where’s she headed? By now it’s getting colder.
It’s so cold. Something in his body refuses to get up. Something in the lower back. He stares at the walls. Is the
re something that might draw him up to at least a sitting position? Listening? The rustle of something? A small creature on the prowl in the rafters. The idea of a fire in the kitchen hearth. Dogs stirring. Coffee—at least that. The appendages don’t seem connected to the motor—whatever that is—driving this thing. They won’t take direction—won’t be dictated to—the arms, legs, feet, hands. Nothing moves. Nothing even wants to. The brain isn’t sending signals. That’s it. Signals. No sign of danger, even.
Blackmail Girl on the Loose
I went looking for her. I did. I’d had enough of being alone. I wanted her with me. She knew that. She got excited about it in her voice, but it didn’t bring her any nearer. I kept returning to the little corner café where we’d first met. Isn’t it always like that? You return to the place, hoping she’ll miraculously show up, even though she might be miles from there. Maybe the other side of the moon. I kept ordering the exact same thing I’d had on the morning I first met her—two eggs over medium, with corned beef hash, no potatoes, and a toasted English muffin. As though, magically, the same order would call her back. The waitress was the same, “Betty.” Dyed red hair with blond roots showing. Tattoos of roses and barbed wire on both forearms. Her complexion seemed oddly brown and not just from sunlight. She remembered me but not the Girl. I asked her. She studied the picture window as though the Girl might appear outside, in a parking lot puddle. “Nope. Don’t remember that one. More coffee?”
“Yes, please.” Betty walked away, scribbling on a green check pad. The Girl had questioned me thoroughly about my past—my teenage years. Examining me as though I might be correct for her future, as though I might measure up to some standard she had. I told her I only remembered passionate necking with dark Mexican chicks. Girls in tight skirts with black eyes and Indian noses. Pink lipstick. A constant hard-on. Even after coming. The smell of it would follow me, wherever I went. Dogs knew.
My dogs knew. I felt certain that adults could smell it too. Especially white middle-aged women. The way they’d look at me and smile, then look down at their open-toed heels. I loved older women. Their hips. Their leather purses with the straps. Their wide-brimmed hats. I’d follow them sometimes in grocery stores. The ice cream section where cold steam came pouring off the frozen boxes.
“I want to talk to you,” she kept repeating. “I want to ask you something.” As though she’d never really gotten a chance. As though I were always distracted. Maybe I was. Why are you here? Why are you always coming back?
“Do you have some idealized notion in your head of the way things might be between us? I mean, do you see ideas pouring off each other night and day, mixing like some giant Cuisinart machine coming out in genius mixes of chocolate and gold?” I said.
“Chocolate and gold? What’re you talking about?”
“Exactly.”
“You’re making no sense.”
“No.”
“Do you remember Oklahoma? The two of us?”
“Oklahoma?”
“Yes.”
“Were we there?”
“Just the two of us. Nothing around but the occasional oil jack pumping away like a miniature cartoon dinosaur. We walked for miles without saying a word.”
“We were talking about synesthesia.”
“No. I remember miles of silence.”
“D-minor was seen as aquamarine. Middle C was orange.”
“We discussed this?”
“You’re too young to be forgetting.”
“I remember something about colors.”
“Sound?”
“Sound and colors. Yes.”
“Synesthesia?”
“If you say so.”
“I do.”
We walked and walked and found ourselves down by this riverbed. There’d been a drought that summer so half the river was dried up. Also, local oilmen had been stealing water rights and selling them to Big Business for fracking purposes. Dust and cracked ground with the sun beating down and then, suddenly, there’d be one little stretch of water trickling into a pool where the bed was a little deeper, then back to baked earth. There were huge boulders down there, right in the middle. At one time, frogs and turtles would bask in the sun then flop back into the river when danger approached. Now these boulders were just sitting there numbly, cooking in the sun as though sent down from deep space, crashing and forever embedded. We walked out there and climbed them. They were hot to the touch. We lay down side by side on one of the big dark flat ones. We stared up at the gap the canyon walls made and the clouds moved across it, leaving a long strip of blue. I looked up through the flicking poplar leaves and remembered a shot from a Russian “art film” back in the sixties where the camera started gratuitously swirling in circles. It made me sick to my stomach. The stone was so warm it felt like the body of a huge animal beneath us. Maybe a mastodon. Asleep there forever.
I remember she said she hated the wind. Any wind that was constant. She remembered all the different names for it. Different countries: the “mistrals” of France, the “clippers” of the Alberta plains, the “dust devils” of the Sonora, the “chinooks.” There was something about the wind that drove her crazy. You could see it come over her. Eyes. Her mouth hung open. Even her hair took on a different color.
Someone Else’s Life
One other morning when Felicity came by with her same little black purse and sat on the same wicker chair, waiting for my dad, who was always at work, I got up the courage to ask her why her face always looked so blank. She told me she didn’t know what expression to use because she didn’t understand other people. I asked her why not and she said that she always had this feeling of living someone else’s life and that people seemed way outside her somehow. Apart. I asked her who the other person might be, the one living her life for her, and she explained that she didn’t know how but it was someone her same age and female but she didn’t know her name. I asked her if she knew what lay up ahead: if she had some idea what her future might hold. She told me, no, it wasn’t like that—“Like what?” I asked. It wasn’t as though she could see the future. It wasn’t as though things were laid out and all she had to do was go through with them. It was as though her experiences didn’t belong to her. They belonged to someone else.
I sat there a long time in silence, staring at the floor. Felicity was good at silence. Better than me. She seemed to have no anxiety about what lay up ahead. She could take it or leave it. My fear of her mounted until I leaped up from the couch and tried to make up some excuse to go outside. She didn’t seem the least bit nervous. Nothing had changed in her. She just kept sitting on the wicker chair in the same way she had before, with the patent leather purse in her lap. I ran outside onto the back porch and started tossing all the pails of warm slimy dog water out and refilling them. Just for something to do.
Far-Off Banging Doors
The violence of these dogs. The barking as though life and death were on the line. And the woman who says nothing. She’s deaf. Whether she partially hears the dogs doesn’t matter. She says nothing. They could sound to her like far-off banging doors. It doesn’t matter, she says nothing. Just walks up and down a long hallway with short arthritic steps. Scarves flow from her neck. She has bright blue cowboy boots. She speaks lovingly to plumbers, electricians, people up the hill who are responsible for flooding her basement, insurance companies, she doesn’t care. She has mean scars all over her body. Knife wounds. She ignores them. She’s deaf. I have to spell out the restaurant we’re going to. We’re going to eat outside. The weather is perfect. One lone cricket is making his little sound.
Tiny Man in an Irish Pub
‘Night: They’re playing darts in an Irish pub. You can see them through the glazed window, leaning toward the target. Three of them this time, still dressed up in their pinstriped suits, fedora hats, and those shoes you always see them wearing in black-and-white movies—pointed—brogans, I guess. With little indented holes or perforations in the pattern. They’re all smoking Luckie
s and drinking martinis with green olives and a twist of lemon rind. The ’49 Merc is parked outside with a fourth guy propped against the trunk, his foot on the bumper, dressed exactly like the others. He’s smoking and shuffling a deck of cards, separating the one-eyed jacks. None of these characters look like actors but they all seem to be playing a role.
Inside, the other three are laughing and chewing on toothpicks as one of them throws his set of darts at the wall. Each time he throws he leans in, squints his eyes, and makes three little practice strokes with his right arm before releasing. My tiny dead father, still wrapped in Saran, and two of the shrunken women are hung on the target by the necks with pink rubber bands. They bob up and down ever so slightly as the darts zoom past their heads. One dart with red feathers and a golden streamlined point hits my father square in the forehead and sticks. The tiny body spins. He’s already dead so he doesn’t make a peep. The gangsters are hysterical with laughter as they take sips of their drinks and adjust the bold knots of their ties.