Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas

Home > Science > Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas > Page 22
Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas Page 22

by Michael Bishop


  But the mood in the nation has undergone a radical—ha! call it rather a remarkable conservative— shift, and King Richard and the Congress that he has blandished and bullied have made it harder and harder for the antiwar party to obtain a forum. In fact, Senators Morse and Fulbright have changed sides, citing the intransigence of the North Vietnamese government and the atrocities committed by its troops against thousands of South Vietnamese civilians during the Tet Offensive of 1968.

  Cal himself knows some kids, erstwhile flower children, who have recently accepted the argument that the conflict in Indochina is not a civil war (as the peace movement’s abashed leaders still shakily contend), but a clear-cut case of naked aggression. The aggressors are Uncle Ho’s crimson legions; the transgressed against are the valiant citizens of the democratic South. Converts to this view—King Richard’s bluntly articulate view—often sound to Cal like born-again Christians. They are fervent in their faith, and they can talk of nothing else.

  The soldiers next to Cal on Colfax burst into applause. One of them shouts, “There he is!” The sounds of two different marching bands—one from a local high school, one from Fort Carson—collide, reminding Cal of a sardonic symphony by Charles Ives.

  The Vice President is on the lead float (which resembles an aircraft carrier), standing at its prow inside a plastic cylinder meant to protect him from unfriendly missiles. He is speaking, and his amplified words echo through the long canyon of Colfax like the pronouncements of an apoplectic judge.

  “… the blithering bumpkins who tell you that up is down and down up!” he cries, scowling. “Well, now we no longer even begin to believe them. Their day has died, and ours has dawned. So look around. If you see one of these grim, grousing gushers of guileful gratuitousness, gouge him in the groin!”

  What the hell does that mean? Cal wonders. Nobody here seems to care. It sounds as if Speero the Heero has just kicked ass, though, and the color of his language—magniloquent mauve—seems to’ve tickled everybody’s funny bone.

  But soon enough the Vice President has passed by, and although several of the soldiers chase after his float, waving their caps, Cal has come to Denver for another reason. Victory rallies like this one have been taking place for about three months now, in strategic cities across the country, usually with a high-ranking administration official as grand marshal. New York, Cal remembers, got Kissinger. Boston, Melvin Laird. Chicago, William Rogers. And so on.

  But Cal has no interest in bigshots—only in blood-relation little people.

  A year ago, Royce and Dora Pickford, who ran a weekly newspaper out of Snowy Falls, Colorado, not to mention a few head of cattle, were arrested for taking an antiadministration stance and sending copies of the seditious Huerfano Warrior through the US mails to every major political figure in Washington. But arrested is the wrong word: Cal’s parents simply disappeared. Only after weeks of persistent and dangerous inquiry was he able to find out that his father was in the state prison in Canyon City and his mother in a “safe house” - safe house was the government’s own obfuscating term for it—at Ent Air Force Base in Colorado Springs.

  His father, a tough but honorable man, in a facility designed for murderers, rapists, and their violent ilk. His mother, the most gentle and gregarious of women, forcibly cloistered away from her family and friends.

  These were, and are, outrages. True outrages. But no one will allow Cal to visit either parent. Once, when he drove up to Ent to look for his mother’s “safe house”, base security caught him and escorted him to the city limits, warning that further unauthorized encroachments would lead to his own arrest.

  By working through several nervous elected officials from his own county and congressional district, Cal was at last able to get his parents’ addresses. He now exchanges monthly letters with his mother in locations that keep shifting (although her address stays the same) and with his father in Canyon City, but he feels certain that any news about Royce sent to his mother, or any news about Dora sent to his father, gets obliterated with black ink or excised with razor blades before the Board of Citizen Censorship forwards his communications. It probably doesn’t matter much, though, for his parents’ letters to him are always either carefully inked-out or intricately windowed, and there really isn’t that much news for him to pass on. Still …

  So Cal has come to the Victory Parade. He watches a troop of buckskin-clad cowboys ride past on their skittish horses, followed by a band of sad-looking Utes on foot. Two of the Utes are doing random dance steps that appear to have no connection with anything else going on.

  A rumor that Cal has heard—and that he wishes both to believe and not to believe—says that at least one float in every Victory Parade is given over to the display of dissidents. The crowd gets to boo and catcall them, a tension-releasing opportunity that has been inaugurated and vigorously championed by two of King Richard’s most influential aides. This idea—so the Rumor has it—came to these men while watching films of American POW’s being paraded through the streets of Hanoi by their North Vietnamese captors and abjectly enduring the abuse of the crowds. The first thought of Nixon’s aides was to do that very same thing with captured North Vietnamese soldiers, but the expense of transport and the fact that such action violates the Geneva Conventions—a potential public-relations disaster in the world at large—led these men to consider substituting home-grown dissidents for enemy foreigners. And that is what has happened. Or so saith the Rumor.

  Ticker tape, or a convincing facsimile, drifts dreamily through the urban canyon. A piece of it lands on Cal’s shoulder.

  Behind the Indians, a battalion of men in yellow hard hats comes surging up the avenue laughing and flashing victory signs. This is the two-fingered V beloved of King Richard and recently reclaimed from the dissidents, who were using it as a peace sign, but it still amazes Cal to see it lifted in support of the war.

  The noisy hard hats are not— Cal belatedly sees—a formal part of the parade but some patriotic enthusiasts who are fanning out on both sides of Colfax and giving miniature American flags to anyone not already waving or wearing one.

  “Here, mack,” a huge hard hat says to Cal. “Show the colors.”

  “That’s okay. I’ve got a couple in my pocket.”

  “What in crap they doin’ in your pocket?”

  “At least I haven’t got it sewn on the seat of my pants.” Cal hopes that this remark sounds like brotherly banter.

  “Yeah. Good thing. We’d have to yank your pants off and boot you in the place where you’d been sitting on it.” A hearty laugh. And more laughter from two other well-muscled men—one in a white T-shirt, one in an open-collared work shirt—who join their friend on the sidewalk beside Cal.

  “At first, I thought you guys were marching,” Cal says, afraid that they will spot the braid stuffed up under his hat.

  “We are,” says the man in the T-shirt, gesturing with his lunch sack. “Marching for God and country.”

  “Even when we’re standing still,” the third hard hat adds.

  They’ve got me corralled, Cal thinks. And look: There’re more guys just like them across the street, standing in two-or three-man groups around the other spectators. Their yellow construction helmets pick them out.

  “Is there a float of dissidents today?” he says, not merely to make conversation but to obtain an answer to the question that has been nagging him all morning.

  “Yeah. It’s coming. And this is probably the best stretch of Colfax to catch it on, too.”

  “ ‘Catch it’ ?”

  The hard hat with the flags peers into Cal’s face. “See it, I mean. It’s good and wide here. What’d you think I meant?”

  Cal murmurs an inaudible reply, and the man turns aside.

  To loud applause, a contingent of Green Berets strides past. A pair of fighter aircraft roars by overhead. And then, a block down the avenue, a hostile grumble begins to swell, a many-voiced jeer that ripples down the sidewalks and back and forth across Colf
ax, growing louder and nastier the nearer it draws.

  Beyond the turrets of two state-of-the-art tanks, Cal sees the red cab of a tractor truck and the open semitrailer on which this Victory Rally’s object-lesson dissidents have been made to ride. The semitrailer has clear plastic sides but no roof, and as it approaches the portion of the avenue that Cal is sharing with the hard hats, several of these men’s cohorts start running into the street and pelting the plastic walls of the trailer with rocks or eggs or rotten produce.

  The rocks bounce back—dangerously—but the eggs and vegetables and fruits splatter and stick, turning the trailer’s clear shields into ugly abstract-expressionist murals. And behind the murals, in loose-fitting prison garb, are the dissidents themselves, maybe thirty in all, some flinching away from the impact of the missiles, some huddled together on the bed of the trailer, pretending in vain that they are elsewhere.

  “Christ,” Cal blurts.

  “Here,” says the second hard hat, drawing a good-sized rock out of his paper sack. “Lob this mother up and over.”

  “Yeah,” says the third man, himself taking a rock. “That way, you’ll have a decent chance of bloodying one of ‘em’s head.”

  Cal drops the rock and runs into the street. The semitrailer is grinding past. Desperately, he paces it, peering through the smears of egg yolk and pulped tomato at the prisoners enduring this shameful test.

  Unconstitutional, he thinks. Unconstitutional! By God, this is fuckin’ unconstitutional!

  But it’s happening, and as he jogs beside the truck, he takes a rotten cantaloupe half in the shoulder. An egg grazes his Stetson, knocking it from his head and releasing his Indian pigtail. Now, nearly all the hard hats and many of the other spectators are doing what the guy in the T-shirt advised, namely, tossing their missiles up and over the shields and watching them plummet on the prisoners like V-2s dropping on London during the blitz.

  This, in fact, is a blitz in microcosm, and the jeering of the hard hats echoes among Denver’s buildings like so many raw shrapnel bursts. Cal hears, too, the sounds of rocks rebounding from metal, plastic, and even fragile human bone.

  It’s Cal’s father who sees him first—who, hanging to a strap near the tractor cab, reaches up and taps the back of his head to pantomime the fact that Cal has lost his hat and that his Indian braid is exposed. His mother, her temple already bloodied, appears from under Royce’s arm. Seeing her son, she warns him off, shaking her head and making shooing motions with her palms. Cal continues trotting beside the semitrailer, shouting, “Mom, Dad! Mom, Dad!” and distractedly fending off the moldy oranges and the chunks of asphalt hurled against either it or him.

  Eventually though, Cal stumbles and falls, tripping over some debris in the street, and by the time he has regained his feet and caught up with the trailer, the barrage from the spectators—led by the gleeful hard hats—has become a lethal rain, and Royce and Dora Jane Pickford have thrown themselves down on the bed of the vehicle to cover the bodies of people younger than they.

  It’s hard to see through the smeared murals on the shields, but another block and a half up the avenue, Cal notices that his dad’s prostrate body is reacting to each new missile blow not like a man experiencing pain but like a puppet spasming in reply to a touch or a nudge. As for his mother, he can no longer even find her in the pile of bodies shifting on the trailer bed.

  “Mom, Dad! Mom, Dad!”

  Someone hits him across the back with a board—possibly a canoe paddle—and he goes down facefirst on the July concrete, twisting over and up to avoid being pinioned there. Nevertheless, a hard hat—a bullish fellow about Cal’s own age—briefly straddles and rides him, meanwhile working his pocketknife to cut off the braid that has identified Cal as a troublemaker.

  It is only after Cal has frantically fled this hard hat that he realizes what a favor—given the mood of the city—the guy has done him. Without the pigtail, he looks respectable enough, and he can go anywhere he wants, a cowboy on the town.

  There is nowhere in this town to go. Dry-eyed but occasionally dabbing at his face with a handkerchief, Cal locates his pickup. Then he drives back down 1-25 toward Walsenburg and Gardner. Doing so, he feels the hurt seep up from the cuts and bruises inflicted on him in the city; he senses, too, the beginning of the long hurt that his parents’ violent deaths will exact from him. Probably for the rest of his days.

  Cal opened his eyes to discover that his visions of Miss Emily, Dora Jane, and finally Royce were fled phantoms. He was alone in the saddle room, down on all fours in its shower stall. His eyes were like scoured china cups, empty and dry. His mouth was lined with flannel.

  Finally, he thought. Finally, you’ve got it out. Lia’s mama’s death did it for you, cowboy. Now all you need to do is cry. Cry.

  You cried for Philip K. Dick, didn’t you? A man you never even knew. A dude you knew only through his weird but wonderful books. And if for him, then why not for your own ever-lovin’ parents? Why not for them, Calvin?

  Painfully, Cal got to his feet and picked up the roach lying on the tiles. As he stripped it, he funneled the unburnt grass into his jacket pocket and sucked his blistered hand. It wouldn’t do to leave any evidence of his sad little party in Brother Jeff’s horse barn. Brother Jeff would probably report him to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. The Gee Bee Eye.

  Cry, he instructed himself. Cry, Cal, cry. For the first time since watching them die, you’ve abreacted the experience of losing your parents. It hurts, damn it. It hurts like hell. But you’ve done it, and that’s good.

  You’re not home yet, of course. Not yet. This was a lonesome abreaction, without benefit of guide or counselor, but at least you’ve taken the first step Lia’s been after you to take. You’ve summoned the long-suppressed. You’ve gone from a state of amnesia to one of anamnesis. What Kai called the loss of amnesia.

  Cal considered his situation. He was confused. Abreaction was one of Lia’s psychological terms. It meant the remembrance and the cathartic discharge of pent-up emotional material. Usually, you achieved both recollection and discharge with the aid of a trained therapist. Getting to anamnesis— Kai’s word—put you only halfway there. Cal had just got there by himself, but he could not go any further alone. Not just now, anyway. Discharging the pain of his recollection—going from simple anamnesis to curative abreaction—was going to require help. Without help, Cal understood, he would never be able to cry for his parents.

  “Cry, damn you! Cry!”

  Nothing happened.

  Frustrated, Cal struck the tiles of the stall. Then he grabbed the shower head and twisted it so that it was directed down at him like a gun muzzle. The heels of his hands fumbled at the hot- and cold-water cocks, finally rotating them and bringing down a deluge so prickly and icelike that he yelped.

  But Cal stayed under the spray, and soon his hair was plastered to his skull, his nose dripping like a spigot, his best suit soaked from lapels to cuffs, and his copy of The Broken Bubble of Thisbe Holt beginning, like something dead, to bloat. His socks squished inside his oxfords, while all around him fell the tears—the cold, unremitting, redemptive tears—that he ached to cry himself.

  17

  LONE BOY’S DATSUN whistled down 27. He and Tuyet had often taken their girls to the beach at Callaway Gardens, south of Pine Mountain, so the drive was not unfamiliar. Today, though, miles from Pine Mountain, he hooked a right on a pothole-riven county road and swung past Brown Thrasher Barony.

  Jeepers! he thought. The place is jumpin’. Looks like Sale Day at Bill Heard Chevrolet in Columbus.

  Seeing the tall canopy on the lawn and all the cars parked in the meadow west of the Bonners’ doublewide eased Loan’s worry. The stooge hadn’t lied to him. There was a postfuneral party going on here, and Cal and his wife had to be among those celebrating—uh, commemorating—her mother’s kicking, so to speak, the bucket. So their apartment in town would be empty, unguarded.

  Certain that no one who knew him had seen him,
Loan whistled away from the Barony—and toward Pine Mountain—not on 27 but on Butt’s Mill Road. To avoid the traffic uptown, he turned near the rundown community tennis courts and angled through a neighborhood of clapboard and modest brick houses. He came upon the Bonner-Pickfords’ duplex on Chipley Street from the east rather than the west. And saw their Siberian husky, nose on forepaws, chained in the front yard under a redbud tree.

  Empty, yeah.

  Unguarded, no such luck.

  Loan turned left on King Avenue and parked the Datsun behind the old Swish plant across from the duplex. He was wearing a black jacket and a yellow hard hat. If anyone saw him, he hoped that he would be mistaken for a telephone repairman or a county surveyor, someone just official-enough-seeming to deflect suspicion. He had the military pistol, loaded with tranqs, under his jacket, and if anyone got too nosy or belligerent, well, he supposed that he could send them to dreamland. A prospect that failed to work like Speedy Alka-Seltzer to settle his stomach.

  Hands in pockets, he strolled south on King, casting a glance at the big silver-black dog as he crossed Chipley and noticing with faint alarm that it was watching him. Stupid, Loan thought. You should’ve parked at a restaurant or something and then approached the duplex from behind, never allowing that monster bowwow to catch sight or smell of you. Too late now, asshole.

  Azaleas were blooming along King. Dogwoods, too. Several of the houses had flowerbeds around their porches, flaming pink and orange and purple. Thank God, though, no flaming people peering at the flaming flowers. An empty street. Lone Boy used its emptiness to stomp matter-of-factly around the landlords’ side of the duplex and then on up to the Bonner-Pickfords’ kitchen door.

  Viking, as they called their big-mother husky, was out of sight and quite gratifyingly silent. The only good bowwow, thought Lone Boy, is a quiet bowwow.

 

‹ Prev