The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  You might come here Sunday on a whim.

  Say your life broke down. The last good kiss

  you had was years ago. You walk these streets

  laid out by the insane, past hotels

  that didn’t last, bars that did, the tortured try

  of local drivers to accelerate their lives.

  Only churches are kept up. The jail

  turned seventy this year. The only prisoner

  is always in, not knowing what he’s done.

  The principal supporting business now

  is rage. Hatred of the various grays

  the mountain sends, hatred of the mill,

  the Silver Bill repeal, the best liked girls

  who leave each year for Butte. One good

  restaurant and bars can’t wipe the boredom out.

  The 1907 boom, eight going silver mines,

  a dance floor built on springs—

  all memory resolves itself in gaze,

  in panoramic green you know the cattle eat

  or two stacks high above the town,

  two dead kilns, the huge mill in collapse

  for fifty years that won’t fall finally down.

  Isn’t this your life? That ancient kiss

  still burning out your eyes? Isn’t this defeat

  so accurate, the church bell simply seems

  a pure announcement: ring and no one comes?

  Don’t empty houses ring? Are magnesium

  and scorn sufficient to support a town,

  not just Philipsburg, but towns

  of towering blondes, good jazz and booze

  the world will never let you have

  until the town you came from dies inside?

  Say no to yourself. The old man, twenty

  when the jail was built, still laughs

  although his lips collapse. Someday soon,

  he says, I’ll go to sleep and not wake up.

  You tell him no. You’re talking to yourself.

  The car that brought you here still runs.

  The money you buy lunch with,

  no matter where it’s mined, is silver

  and the girl who serves your food

  is slender and her red hair lights the wall.

  The poet’s name was Richard Hugo, and he died too suddenly three years ago, in Montana, where he spent most of his life, though he traveled to every little lost town he could find and wrote poems about most of them. Philipsburg is in Montana, but it might as well be in Arkansas, just as these lost cities of Arkansas might just as well be anywhere in the world.”

  Moved by his reading of the poem, she asks, “Was the last good kiss you had years ago?” When he does not answer, perhaps because he hasn’t heard her or doesn’t know the answer, she does not repeat her question but kisses him. Kim gives him her best kiss. It is indeed a good kiss.

  After the kiss, he can only comment, “You know, the romantic year of 1886 was the year that Rodin carved his marble sculpture The Kiss.”

  “I think I know it,” she says. “But show me.”

  He shows her.

  Then it is her turn to present him with, or remind him of, an emergency poem she has been carrying around. She doesn’t need to unfold it from her pocket, because she carries this poem in her head. From her memory she recites it; it’s called “Of a Lost Town” and goes:

  Of a lost town, there’s little one can say.

  I lived my seasons by their seasoning spell;

  I knew my neighbors by their popular names,

  A friend of all, and friendlier than they.

  I moved among the wicked and the good,

  Tried to distinguish them but seldom could.

  Are towns created naturally of folks

  At variance with themselves? Sure enough.

  I never really lacked sufficient proof.

  Myself against the self of me provokes

  Itself into a Town of One. Or Few.

  Or Several, but none of whom is you.

  A town is but a tournament of two!

  A tilt without lances, a horseless joust,

  And arms at passage, arsenals unloosed!

  A town is but a passage, passing through.

  Death of a town is the end of the fight.

  Our arms do not touch passing in perpetual night.

  Lost, lost this place, as gone as I myself.

  My town, those several of me who fought,

  Is emptied now of all but afterthought:

  An Itless town is less a man than sylph.

  Yet sylphs are less ephemeral than man.

  I’ll be a sylvan sylphid if I can.

  He must recognize the poem, because its author is himself, or the self who died too suddenly several years ago, in Vermont, where he spent most of his life, though he traveled to every little town he could find and wrote books about some of them. He is visibly moved that she knows his poem by heart from her re-readings of the novel it was in, but all he can say is “It sure is sylvan around here.”

  “And you’ve turned me into a sylphid,” she says. “I’m not sure I like being so young, and I’m starving to death. Let’s go see if that waitress has red hair that lights up the wall.”

  “My car or yours?” he says.

  She drives him in Zephyra, who doesn’t mind and is glad to get away from Bunker, a short distance, just around a couple of curves, to the Midway Restaurant. Their waitress, sure enough, is a slender young girl of flaming red hair, though it does not quite illuminate the wall, which is covered with multi-antlered deer heads and an elk head. Big game. Waiting for their cheeseburgers to be grilled, she asks him, “Were those deer shot in the woods around here?”

  “I’m sure the management hopes that people would think so,” he replies. “But, no, it’s like the gold mines of Bear City being ‘salted’ with gold from Colorado: a lure, or bait. The owner and his wife—that’s him over there at the desk—bagged those deer and elk on a hunting trip to the wilds of Colorado, had their heads stuffed and mounted, and brought them home.” He smiles. “Not that we don’t have deer or elk that big in Arkansas…”

  “Listen,” she says. “You know so much about everything, what do you need me for?” When he responds, “Pardon, I’m sorry, what did you say,” she tries a paraphrase: “You know everything about the gold mines in Bear City, and I’m sure you know everything about Y City….”

  “There’s hardly anything to know about Y City,” he declares.

  “Then why are we here?” she wants to know.

  “We have to meet somewhere,” he says. “And eleven, as you know, is a magic number.”

  “But if you already know so much about Y City, or all of these cities, why do you need me?”

  “I can’t hear,” he reminds her. He points at the man behind the desk, the owner, and says, “When we’ve finished our lunch, we’ll call him over and you can ask him your usual questions, and get his answers on your tape recorder. His name is Bird Vines, and he grew up at—”

  “Wait,” she says, and demands, “Aren’t you just making up his name? What kind of name is ‘Bird Vines’? Something a novelist might invent. All the names in all these towns, didn’t you just fabricate them, like a novelist?”

  He laughs. “Oh, Kim,” he says. Then he suggests, “Ask him.”

  When they have finished their lunch, and the place is empty of other customers, she asks the red-haired waitress, “Could we speak to the manager?”

  “Did I do y’all something wrong?” the waitress asks.

  “Oh, no,” she says. “We’d just like to chat with the boss.”

  The waitress speaks to the man, and he comes over. He was born in the neighboring community of Boles a year before Flossie Boren, and looks like a farmer, not a restaurateur. “Now, what could I do for you kids?” he asks.

  “Is your name really ‘Bird’?” Kim asks him.

  “Yeah, it is.”

  “How did you get that nickname?” she asks.

  “No
nickname. I was named for the family doctor, Dr. Bird, who brought me into this world.”

  He pulls up a chair and sits down. She explains to him, “We’re researching the history of Y City.”

  “Honey,” he says, “it don’t have no history.”

  “Well, just the people here, then. Where did you get those deer?”

  “Colorado,” he says.

  As far back as Bird Vines can remember, it has always been called Y City. He can remember a time when the junction down there had three or four stores, but “it just all faded away.” Considering what the Highway Department has been doing lately, straightening out the Y and the adjoining roads, most people may soon start calling it “Goof-up City,” as far as Bird is concerned.

  Why do all the pine trees around the Midway have their trunks painted white? We could tell her, but we let Bird do it: “Just for ornamental purposes. Appearance. They give it a kind of eye-catchin appeal. I haven’t repainted in a couple of years, ’cause I caint get the right kind of lime to make the whitewash.” But everywhere you see a white tree trunk, it indicates a park or recreation area, which the Midway used to be: there used to be a lot of picnic tables out there, which he gave away to churches for their socials, and the Midway Park Swimming Hole, no longer there, Kim has already seen the ruins of. The old tourist cabins remained here for years after they were closed, and people used to keep trying to come back to them, just as customers keep returning again and again to the Mountain Inn. Bird fetches the old ledger used for signing in for a cabin. “I would’ve let some of ’em keep on comin back even after it was closed, but I was scared to. These old cabins filled up with scorpions and Santa Fe’s.” Kim wonders what a Santa Fe is, but before she can interrupt to ask, we slip her a note card: “Santa Fe: old-time Ozark pronunciation of ‘centipede.’” That year of ’55, when the cabins closed, was the same year Bird opened this restaurant. From the first it has been a “hangout” restaurant, popular with regulars as well as travelers on 71, especially during the racetrack season at Oaklawn Park, and also for school buses stopping with their loads of school kids going to track meets and band meets. This used to be a Greyhound bus stop, too. Bird used to have a service station across the road, actually just a gas pump or two. Always pumped it himself, or had an attendant do it. None of this “self-serve” business.

  High schools used to come here for their senior trips. The nearer high schools, at Boles, or the county seat, Waldron, used to bring their senior classes in the spring for an all-day senior trip, to use the Midway Swimming Hole and dine at the restaurant, but nowadays the kids charter buses to distant attractions, or even go on airplanes. “That’s what killed this part of the country,” Bird Vines believes, “bigger and better things.”

  Bird Vines employs twelve to fourteen people, keeping the restaurant open from 6:00 A.M. to 10:00 P.M. (8:00 P.M. on Sundays) all year round. It gets pretty slow this time of afternoon. “Y’all visit the gift shop before you go,” he suggests. Everything in his gift shop is Arkansas-made, or at least American-made: some of it had to come from Missouri.

  Before they leave, they do take a tour of the two large rooms, at opposite ends of the dining area, which are filled with long rows of shelves and counters and display stands covered with every conceivable Arkansas product of interest or use to the tourist trade: souvenirs, pottery, jewelry, toys, booklets, candy, crafts, gewgaws, gimcracks, whatnots, and trinkets.

  Kim wonders to herself: Have I, at the end of my travels, found the source of all the compote in all the rooms I have seen? She cannot find anything she wants to buy. Nor can her companion, or consort.

  “Y’all come back for supper,” says Bird Vines.

  They will. Pat and John Heinen are building onto the Mountain Inn a little restaurant of their own, but it will not be ready to open for another month or so. Farther north up 71 are two more restaurants, Fred’s Country Cookin’ and The Rivercrest, but Kim will not discover these until she will be leaving town, and time will be changing quickly to the future tense. Ideally, whenever a story reaches the point where its ending seems inevitable it ought to downshift into the future tense, for the future tense never has any end, being always open to whatever will or shall will or shall allow. The moment at which the shifting is made need not be of great moment; it ought to be the place where there is no turning back to what has gone before, though it is coupled with a strong desire to hang onto the present lest it become faded and gone. In the future tense, lost towns are never entirely lost: they will always be there, waiting for someone to find them.

  Kim will plan to conduct her next interview with a couple of old (old?) natives whose names will be Granville and Cordie Rogers, but she will insist that her companion, or consort, whose name will become familiarly yclept simply “Don,” attempt to conduct the interview himself, just to see if he can do it, just to see, if nothing else, what it has felt like for her to conduct the eighty-odd interviews of this project. This time, she will be silent, operating the tape recorder but asking no questions. Although the one called Don will protest that there is no way he can manage to hear anybody well enough to conduct an interview, Kim will insist, “Just once.” She will drive Zephyra back out U.S. 270 a short distance from the Y, where the Rogers house will be sitting right beside the road, and the Rogerses will be sitting as if waiting for her right in front of their house, on the porch, a cluttered and unkempt gallery of old furniture and strange smells. Both Granville, who will look not more than half his seventy-six years, and especially Cordie, who will be ten years older than whatever age her husband is, will be using forms of oral tobacco, smokeless, and will be frequently pausing to spit, Granville off the porch, Cordie into a rusty tin can.

  Don will introduce himself and Kim to the Rogerses and will say, “We’d like to ask a few questions about Y City.”

  “Sorry,” Granville will mutter. “We aint buyin nothin today.”

  “Thank you,” Don will say, and will sit down, uninvited, on a chair between the couple. To Mrs. Rogers he will say, “Were you born in the neighborhood?”

  “She’s deafer’n a post,” Mr. Rogers will say. “But she aint buyin nothin today, neither.”

  “I do believe it might rain before long,” Mrs. Rogers will say.

  “How far is that from Y City?” Don will ask.

  “Are you sellin hearin aids?” Granville Rogers will ask, and will point at Don’s ear.

  “Yes, since I was twelve years old and had meningitis,” Don will say.

  “That hearin-aid business is a racket just like everything else,” Granville will say. “I fit her up with a hearin aid once, but it didn’t do her no good. I give four hundred seventeen dollars for one of them hearin aids. Batteries go dead on ye.”

  Don will look helplessly at Kim and at her tape recorder, which will be running, getting it all, for whatever it will be worth. “Were you born in Y City?” he will ask Granville.

  “Well, close enough. It was—”

  “Did anyone ever hope that it would become a real city?” Don will ask.

  “Oh, I doubt it,” Granville Rogers will say, and then he will begin speaking rapidly, as if trying to finish his sentence before he’s interrupted again. “There used to be stores—lots more than now—had a café down there at the fork—once they even had a laundry—and there was this old log store that—”

  Don will say, “Well, Mr. Hicks…”

  “Rogers is the name,” Granville will insist.

  “What?” Don will say.

  “Rogers,” Granville will say. “You called me Hick. My name is Rogers.”

  “Oh,” Don will say. “I used to know a man named Granville Hicks. I’m just confused.”

  “You sure are,” Granville will say, but Don will not hear him.

  “Yes, there’s liable to be a real hard rain tonight,” Cordie will say.

  Back in Zephyra, on the road, Don will become annoyed, even angry. “Why didn’t you speak up?” he will demand of Kim. “Why didn’t you
join in and help me out?”

  “They didn’t really have much to tell us,” she will say. “When you’ve been doing interviews as long as I have, you can usually tell right away if the person knows very much, or is willing to tell very much. But it could be that there simply isn’t much for anyone to tell about Y City.” Kim will have on her tape recorder something else that Don will not have heard: Granville Rogers insisting that there were others who knew more about Y City than he did. What others? She will check the few names on the list Pat Heinen has given her. She will stop Zephyra when they reach the Y and will pull off the highway beside the abandoned service station and will stop. “Don,” she will say, “there is a very old woman named Pearl Miner, who is so old that even at half her age she will still look old. What do you know about Pearl Miner?”

  “I don’t know anything about Pearl Miner,” he will say. “I certainly didn’t invent her name.”

  “The Miners are one of the oldest families in Scott County. Pearl Miner is very deaf, deafer than you are, deafer than her best friend, Cordie Rogers. I am told that Pearl and Cordie visit each other every Sunday, and just sit for hours hollering at one another, neither of them hearing anything.”

  “We could write down some questions for her…” Don will suggest.

  “She is illiterate.”

  “Well, doesn’t anybody live with her who could communicate with her for us?” he will ask.

  “I am told that she lives only with her son, who is feebleminded.”

  “Oh,” he will say.

  “And furthermore,” she will say, “their yard is full of vicious dogs.” She will let this sink in, adding, “Biting dogs.” She will summarize: “Ninety-six years old, completely deaf, illiterate, idiot son, mean dogs.” In all her travels, Kim has never heard of anything so formidable.

  “Well? What are we waiting for?” Don will say. “Let’s go!”

  She will have to admire his determination. Our last group of illustrations will show the Miner home, like the Rogers home right alongside the busy highway, U.S. 71 south of Y City, but set back from it farther, in the direction of the peaked mountains. Our illustration will manage to capture the dogs—if nothing else could capture them—the lighter one guarding the entrance, standing on the steps like a defiant Cerberus, the darker one chained up in the back yard, in the distance, his head lowered like that of a bull about to charge. The picture will not capture their noise, their raucous barks, their snarling and growling and snapping. A chest-high wire fence will surround the property, preventing the lighter, free-ranging dog from attacking, although he will try his best, leaping at the fence again and again.