“Well—You ought to try getting ahold of that guy’s movies. That Billy Rice guy—whatever his name is now. You look just like him.”
“Yeah. I will. I’ll do that.”
“You can get the DVDs right down there at Dewey’s when you go for your Form. I’ve seen ‘em on the rack. He must be in a dozen of ‘em.”
“I will,” I said, and then he suddenly extended his hand across the table at me.
“Name’s Costello. Eddie Costello. Sounds Italian but it’s actually Irish. County Cork.” He attempted a faint smile as I took his hand and felt the silver snake bite down on top of my knuckles. It was quick and lethal and then released.
“Pete—Pete Davis,” the name just came out of me from somewhere.
“That’s Welsh, isn’t it?”
“What?” I said and now my heart clicked in. I looked straight into his eyes for the first time and saw what I’d deeply dreaded. His terrible hooded eyes in their scarred sockets. The light had gone completely out of them.
“Davis,” he repeated. “That’s Welsh.”
“I guess—yeah.”
“Well, good luck at the track if you’re going out there. Buncha damn dog-food claimers in there today. Couldn’t beat a fat man uphill.”
“Thanks,” I said as he headed back to his corner, picked up the folded form, then turned and tipped it in my direction like men in the forties used to do with their hats. When he went out the glass door the little cowbell made the same metallic clammer and the same sickening sensations jumped up in my skin. Dimmer this time. I watched him walk across the parking lot toward a blue Ford Galaxie sedan and just as he reached for the keys in his pocket he made a little squirting spit between his front teeth. It darted out in a thin brown jet. I remember how he always used to do that just before we’d jump a car and roar off toward the border. Just before we got into all that trouble.
Time Line
Aug. 28—Police find 11 headless bodies outside Phoenix. All corpses were handcuffed. One was nude and showed significant signs of torture.
Sept. 12—Police find 24 bodies, 15 of them decapitated and many with signs of torture, in a field west of Laredo. Most have gunshots to the head.
Oct. 1—Eight bodies with gunshots to the head, two decapitated, are dumped next to an elementary school in El Paso. A note attached with staples to the tongue of one head reads: “Here are your people, cabrón. Come get them!”
Dec. 21—The heads of 8 soldiers and a former chief of police are found in a vacant lot next to a Kmart in Tucson. A note says: “For each one of mine you kill, I’ll kill 10 soldiers.”
Shame
When I was a kid and carried eucalyptus in my pocket and my T-shirt smelled like the dogs that ran with me, every time I killed an animal, back then, with a bow, a gun, or a knife I’d bring it right into the kitchen and throw it down on the floor. To show off, I guess. Why else? To be seen as a hunter. Dripping blood. The raw smell. A snake. Rabbit. Dove. Beheaded squirrel. My sisters ran. Every time. My mother quietly cried and picked the dead bird up, hanging limp across her weathered hand. I can’t remember feeling shame. I can’t remember feeling at all. Maybe I’d already grown dead by then. I went right back out, looking for game.
Esmeralda and the
Flipping Hammer
(Highway 152, continued)
I’m getting very distracted by an extremely cute Mexican waitress in here, named Esmeralda, I find out. She’s wearing this little pink frilly apron over her tight jeans and she keeps my coffee cup full without me having to ask. She has a smile like the break of day and an “onion ass,” as old cowboy Jones used to say: “Just makes you want to break down and weep.” In fact, she reminds me of that little Mexican girl that Kerouac took up with in On the Road. That was my favorite part of the whole book; where he meets her on the bus from L.A. and sits down next to her and they wind up living with her parents and her entire family somewhere in the San Joaquin, probably not too far from this place right here. They’re migrant workers up from the Sonora Desert all living in this little one-room shack, speaking no English, and Jack seems ecstatically happy for a while, working alongside her in the blazing hot fields, cutting lettuce and balling her silently in the dark night of the shack so as not to awaken the little family and maybe get his throat cut by the father. It’s nice to think of Kerouac happy like that for a time, after he got so totally wasted toward the end; living with his old mom somewhere down in Florida and blowing his belly out with wine. I don’t know about Kerouac, though, as a man; as a person. Of course you probably never do about anyone who’s done something like write an important book that a lot of people say changed their lives. I don’t know about that one either—actually having a piece of writing change your life. I doubt it. Maybe for a spell. A day or two, but your whole life? I find that hard to believe. But, anyhow, there was this guy I ran into who knew Kerouac and also had the good luck to know Woody Guthrie at the same time and had taken a lot of photographs of Woody during the last days of his life. You know, those stark black-and-white portraits of Woody staring stoically into the camera with that goofy high haircut he had which I think must have inspired Lyle Lovett. So, when this guy met Kerouac he told him he thought his writing was great and how much it reminded him of Woody’s songs—how the songs and On the Road seemed to make a harmony about American lost-ness. But, according to this guy, Kerouac didn’t take the comparison as a compliment at all. In fact he became indignant and belligerent (probably blind drunk) and starts yelling at this guy: “Woody Guthrie’s just a folksinger! I’m a poet like Rimbaud and Verlaine! I’m a fucking poet!” That made me think different about Jack for a while, but I don’t know, I wasn’t there. You can’t depend too much on hearsay but I did run into Cassady once in a garage up on Haight Street in the sixties and he was exactly the way Kerouac portrayed him; crazy as a box of squirrels, flipping a claw hammer over and over and catching it every time by the handle. Never said word one; just kept flipping that hammer and chewing on his lower lip. Talk about speed. I was impressed. This little waitress is driving me crazy.
John and Dennis come stumbling back into the café like Abbott and Costello just as I’m paying the check and trying to score the waitress’s number. They just come bumbling right over and butt in like there’s nothing at all happening here between me and the girl. They don’t even notice I’m getting close to promoting something. That’s how out to lunch they’ve become on their smorgasbord of drugs. Who knows what combination they’ve been popping now. So much for heightened awareness and all that Timothy Leary bull. Dennis has this big shit-eating grin on his face and holds up some kind of San Juan Bautista arm patch he’s bought in a gift shop, with bright orange California poppies embroidered on a sky-blue background. Some tourist bauble he’s picked up in a marijuana daze. He dangles it in front of Esmeralda, grinning away, as though she’s never seen anything so remarkable as this before. She’s probably born and raised right here and he’s carrying on like it’s something wonderful and unique. Esmeralda turns and stares at me with this blank expression like: “What’s the problem with your friend?” Now, realizing that my chances with the enchanting Esmeralda have quickly gone up in smoke, I leave her a mighty tip and we all exit into the stinging light of day.
Tet Offensive
It was the height of the Tet Offensive and they were fleeing west across the bleak Saskatchewan plains in a rented Karmann Ghia convertible. He remembers now, although he can’t for the life of him remember what they were fleeing from. He can picture the two of them clearly; top down to the hot prairie wind, extremely young and the paranoid girl so pregnant she’d completely lost control of her bladder. She was barely sixteen and all she read on the drive out there were Conan the Barbarian and The Green Hornet while he chain-smoked Luckys and kept the hammer down on the Ghia. Every ten miles or so something in the comics would strike her as unbearably funny and she’d break into hysterical laughter and piss all over the bucket seat. Then she’d stack blankets, pillo
ws, and old comic books under herself to sop things up, which elevated her way above the frame of the windshield, and her red hair lashed back so violently it seemed as though her head might get ripped right off and go tumbling down the highway. Every moment, in those days, had the potential for total annihilation.
Mean Green
As soon as they saw the dead man’s face tacked to the back of the motel room door, they started whooping it up. I couldn’t believe it. Laughing and pointing right at it. All that time and trouble and there they were, hysterical, as though it were some sort of child’s attempt at inventing a toy. Humiliating, to say the least. “You don’t actually expect to get compensated for something like this, do you?” That’s what they told me. Right to my face. “Look at this—You can’t even recognize it as the same man.” That’s exactly what I’d been trying to explain to them all along and now they were throwing it back at me, as though it were their idea. I told them that if you skin a man’s face off, chances are it might go through all kinds of changes: shrinkage, disintegration around the edges, distortions of the mouth and eyeholes; even color—the skin tone—might be altered. For instance, a yellow man might easily become black or vice versa. You can never tell. But no, they didn’t want to hear about it, back then. All they were het up about was eliminating the target. Making him go away. Immediately, if not sooner. So I obliged them. Now they were trying to back out of the agreement altogether. I flat told them they had no idea who they were dealing with and if they weren’t very careful, some of their other little “projects” might start turning up mysteriously. Little remnants of appendages thrown randomly off the shoulder of Interstate 35, for instance. Or some piece of something from that grisly incident in Arkansas. You never know. All these little items might just suddenly jump up and bite them in the ass if they weren’t careful. Next morning, cash was under the door in a sealed manila envelope. No name, no nothing. Just pure sweet mean-green.
Poolside Musings
in Sunny L.A.
In Cold Blood has seen a lot of mileage lately. Are they now replaying old Robert Blake movies because he’s on trial for killing his wife and doing chicken imitations in court for the cameras? Why don’t we just bring back public lynchings and be done with it?
These tiny birds—sparrows I guess you call them—keep flitting up on my table here, looking for crumbs. I have no crumbs and if I had them I wouldn’t allow wild birds to feed on them. I’m not in favor of turning wild things into pets. Spoiled birds. We don’t have birds anything like these back home, as you know. All our birds back home have some size and respect for human temper. How did fear and respect become synonymous? Whenever there’s a murder here, the suspect always says, “Maybe now they’ll show a little respect.”
Seminole, Texas
bales and bales
of cotton
big as boxcars
flapping gray plastic sheeting
gangs and gangs
of crows
Christian radio
tungsten filaments
donuts and Texaco
pink donuts
and Texaco
the Road is not a Movie
no, it’s not
no, it’s not
Las Vegas, New Mexico
It’s crisp December and the high mountain air has that sweet familiar scent of pine. Strings of tiny Christmas lights have just snapped on in the old Las Vegas Plaza, outlining the massive, leafless cottonwoods. Crows swoop down into the empty bandstand. I don’t know what they could be looking for. One sits on the bronze plaque commemorating Stephen Watts Kearny’s speech in August of 1846 when he climbed atop a pueblo here and addressed the entire plaza of bewildered Mexican citizens, some of whom had never seen a white man and had no notion of anywhere called “The United States of America”: “I have come amongst you by the orders of my government, to take possession of your country, and extend over it the laws of the United States.” After a long list of reasons why this idea should be appealing, not the least of which was offering better policing than the Mexican government could provide against the savage raids of the Navajo, he capped the whole thing off with this blunt threat: “He who … is found in arms against me, I will hang.”
From my second-story window of the historic hotel where the likes of Buffalo Bill and Teddy Roosevelt had laid their heads and dreamed their dreams, the plaza is completely empty now and silent. Only the crows strutting in snow. My cell phone glows green on the little round table beside the bed. Downstairs there’s a loud man in the lobby bar. I’ve encountered him before and I avoid the bar now because of him. His name is Lorenzo. That’s the way he introduces himself. “Lorenzo.” No handshake, just the name. There’s good reason to believe that Lorenzo has had his mind shattered by methamphetamine and various other destructive powders. When he smiles at you it has an intrinsically malicious bent as though slitting your throat would be as simple as starting a car. Like some dogs, you don’t want to catch his eye.
Parked directly in front of the old hotel is a giant-wheeled pickup truck that looks like one of those Tonka Toys except it has a dead mountain lion strapped with black bungees across the hood. Its mouth and yellow eyes are wide open. There’s very little blood. Inside the cab of the truck two crossbred coonhounds are barking savagely and slashing at the window glass as though it might be their own reflections that have triggered their fury. Two fiddle players (I don’t know where they’ve come from; everything just seems to appear) are playing in a big open brick room at the back of the hotel. No furniture, no plants, just a big empty room. They play in the old Appalachian Mountain style with fiddles braced against their hip bones and laid flat so the bows work at about waist level, giving them an odd detachment. They seem to have no interest in an audience and that’s good because there isn’t one. People (tourists?) stroll through the lobby and peek into the empty brick room then stroll on. I don’t know if the hotel has hired these fiddle players or what. Now Lorenzo the Madman is suddenly screaming from the bar. He’s screaming about football; something he’s just witnessed on TV. A referee deserves to die. A huge athletic man on the bar stool next to Lorenzo is the owner of the pickup parked outside. He’s a professional lion hunter, hired by the government to keep them thinned out and appease the surrounding ranchers. The lion hunter has a Mohican haircut and a turquoise earring. He’s married to the plump bartender who speaks with a thick Australian accent and has a flamboyant way of drafting a Guinness. The lion hunter is in agreement with Lorenzo about the offending referee, ratcheting up Lorenzo’s impotent violence. The willowy cocktail waitress is making every effort to be courteous and efficient as she weaves her way through the mayhem. Lorenzo screams and drools. She pretends that everything is absolutely normal. She has such innocent country eyes, a Mormon ponytail that bounces. I don’t know where she’s come from or how she arrived in this little corner of Hell but she won’t last long. She keeps coming over to my table and asking me if everything’s all right, as though I might be able to reassure her that the world is not coming to an end. “Yes,” I tell her. “Everything’s fine. It’s just history running its course.” She smiles sweetly and flees.
Nauvoo, Illinois
Site of the Mormon exodus to Utah. Seventy thousand of them crossed the wide Mississippi here in 1846, fleeing the rabid mob. The righteous drove them out. One testimony on the side of a building in block letters: a woman who hangs all her straight-backed chairs on the wall, sweeps out her plain board house, closes up all the shutters, puts the broom back in its proper place, locks up the front door, and says good-bye forever to her blessed home-place. She turns west to face a sea of salt.
Little People
The European missionary sat hunkered down in a squatting position with the Huron tribesmen in a great circle around the bonfire. It was a posture he was unused to and instinctively felt put him at a disadvantage insofar as persuading the Indians into his point of view. Nevertheless, he bravely presented the notion that he was not one but two. Wh
en the warriors heard this they broke into wild laughter and started throwing sticks and dirt into the fire, which created a strange mixture of terror and resentment in the missionary’s chest. When the laughter subsided he pressed on with his contention. He patiently explained to the savages that this corporeal body they saw sitting before them was only an exterior shell and that inside him resided a smaller invisible body that, one day, would fly away to live in a heavenly domain. The Huron all chuckled and nodded to themselves as they knocked the ashes from their stone pipes into the crackling fire. The missionary felt deeply misunderstood and was about to get up and return to his tent in a huff when an old man next to him held him in place by the shoulder. He explained to the missionary that all the warriors and shamans present in the circle were well aware of these two bodies and that they also had “little people” residing inside them deep within the chest and that they too flew away at death. The missionary became excited at this new news and felt reassured that he and the tribesmen were now on the same path. With renewed zeal he asked the old man where his people thought these little interior beings traveled off to. The Huron all laughed again and the old man pointed to the crown of a massive ancient cedar nearby that flashed in silhouette from the firelight. He told the missionary these “little people” entered the very top of that tree and descended into its trunk and branches, where they lived in eternity, and that was why he could not cut it down to make siding for his little chapel in the wilderness.
Sam Shepard Page 7