by Nisi Shawl
George’s letter went something like this: He was walking down the street with another guy and they were headed for a 7-11 intending to get some cheap beer. “There was this guy coming the other way and he looked like sort of a wimp.”
Then came the memorable line: “And so we robbed him.” Then they continued on to the 7-11, shoplifted the beer, and when they came out, the cops were there to arrest them for robbing the wimpy kid. The wimp in question was apparently the DA’s son, and so Jack’s former house guest was in big trouble (and in jail).
We talked for a long time about what was contained in the chasm between those two sentences: “There was this guy coming the other way and he looked like sort of a wimp,” and “And so we robbed him.” The sentence “And so we robbed him” remained an object of contemplation for years afterwards.
◊
Last September, when Jack and I met for lunch, he was putting up a writer named Roland, who believed he was in contact with aliens. Roland came along to lunch. He had a black eye, and the bridge of his glasses was held together with medical tape.
Roland was eager to tell me his sad tale: He had had a successful career as a novelist. But then he began insisting that his novels were all completely true, that he wasn’t making up any of it. This lead to a falling out with his publisher over the PR plans; he refused to allow his latest book to be sold as fiction.
Roland pulled the book from the publisher and had to pay back the six figure advance. He couldn’t get anyone else to buy his book because he wanted it published as nonfiction.
He was now homeless. He and Jack had met in a restroom in Times Square.
Roland told me all this and more in a pressured, unending stream of words impossible to interrupt. Roland said he was taking Jack on a trip to the desert in order to prove that what he was saying was the absolute truth.
“The truth…” he said.
“Is out there,” I said.
“Yes. Yes! It is!” he said and excused himself to go to the bathroom, I asked Jack if any of that was true. Jack nodded his head from side to side. He looked scared.
“He bites his fingernails,” I said.
“We all have our fetishes.”
When Roland returned, I asked about his black eye.
“It was Jack’s friend Ray,” he said.
The night before, Ray had come over. Roland had told him, author to author, of his published troubles, expecting sympathy and perhaps a loan. But Ray had made merciless fun of Roland.
Ray said that he, too, was in touch with aliens. And that his aliens said that Roland’s aliens were the bad guys and were cruising the Galaxy in search of money. And if Roland had financial needs, perhaps they could help him out.
Roland said, “—and so I punched him.” He stopped for a rare breath.
“And so …?”
“And so he hit me back. And broke my glasses. And this is why we must make our trip to the desert. Jack needs to understand that I am telling the truth. We can’t afford plane tickets, but I still have my car: I was living in my car on Riverside Drive before Jack took me in. We need a driver. My license is suspended, and Jack can’t drive. Would you like to come?”
“That’s kind of you ….”
“You have a signing at Barnes & Noble next week,” said Jack. “And your classes start Monday.”
◊
Jack disappeared. He was on sabbatical, so he didn’t run afoul of his university. But after a couple of weeks, his daughter reported him missing. Once Jack’s landlord learned of the missing persons report, he began eviction proceedings on the basis that Jack was no longer living there. Just before Christmas, I ran into Kierkegaard at a bookstore near Jack’s apartment. He had heard this from Jack’s daughter. We decided to drop in for a visit to see what was up.
As we started up the stairs, a black man and his little boy were coming down the stairs with a fluffy dog on a leash. We passed each other on the second floor and nodded. When we got to the third floor, we heard the boy exclaim, “Look, daddy! Santa Claus!” We looked down and there in the lobby was Jack in his red coat.
“He is risen,” said Kierkegaard quietly. Jack waved. We waited there for him and then walked up the last to floor together.
“How was Arizona? I imagine you have quite the story to tell.”
Jack said, “It’s not just story. It’s a whole novel. And not a word of it is true.”
Hamlet’s Ghost Sighted in Frontenac, KS
Vincent Czyz
Memory is a city piled along the flow of night, twinkling in the distance as it’s carried downriver, lost in a heartland flooded black—a flat-out sprawl somewhere below the threshold of notice, waiting for a switch to be flicked on, a star to go nova.
Jim Lee on the event horizon, one of his nasty-smelling cigars between his teeth, out in the fields with his telescope magnifying circles of sky, never able to take it all in. Fedora, jeans with clip-on suspenders, scuffed-up cowboy boots, he looked like a cross between a rodeo rider and a Chicago hitman. Better than two hundred pounds though not that tall, he liked to give his gut a friendly slap. “Never know when you’ll hafta be the anchor in a tug-a-war.” His fleshy face was wide and his black hair sprouted without regard to direction, the fedora there to keep it corralled.
Jim Lee, who’d taken it upon himself to school Logan in everything from cheating at poker to pointing a telescope proper, had spent hours amidst water-stained UFO magazines and dime-store paperbacks (The Book That Shatters the Wall of Official Silence!), scouring photos of hubcaps thrown in the air and tinfoil-wrapped aliens for one that might be genuine.
Teacup to go with that saucer, Jim?
Jim Lee hemmed in by a stack of 45 singles, by empty beer cans and filmy glassware, by pillars of books he’d read and reread—the Bible everpresent among them—by rusted pieces of farm machinery and toy banks with mechanical cutesy ways of nabbing coins (a skeleton that sat up out of a coffin, scooped in a nickel with a bony hand), by Robby the Robot, made of that 1950s near-indestructible plastic, missing a green arm nonetheless, big as a small child, invading planet Earth, a takeover of Jim Lee’s farmhouse kitchen the first step of the Master Plan.
One particular June night whose evening had floated a full moon over the fields, simmered it orange, bloated it near twice its normal size, Logan Blackfeather sat with Jim Lee among his collectible clutter listening to an antique radio with big knobs, its broad inanimate face framed in wood, glossy tube insides lit up by Spanish guitar music that for all Logan knew had circled the Earth half way before staining the Kansas night blue. The singer’s voice a shade more sorrowful than his guitar, it made you feel you were on a street in an empty downtown, soaked to your boot soles by summer rain, then out the kitchen window they went, the blue Spanish voice and the weeping guitar, through the screen easy as a breeze, wandering like horse and rider over the dark fields, but there was nothing to echo off of, no place to rest, to keep them from dissipating at the speed of sound—the fate of all prayer however fervently chanted.
Logan was as lean as the Anglo side of his family, as dark-complected as his Hopi ancestors. Long-haired, taller than Jim Lee, and a good 17 years younger.
“I like your piana playin’,” Jim Lee had said once as if to answer the unasked question of why he paid Logan as much mind as he did, as though Logan were an adolescent Mozart, composing a symphony were within his reach.
“Jim Thorpe’s real name was Bright Path.” Jimmy took a cold cigar stump out of his mouth to clear the way for words. “That’s a good’un, ain’t it?”
Bent over his work, his forehead glistening with sweat, he handled the razor with the expertise of a Japanese chef, separating tiny white heaps into lines, the blade edge-on nearly invisible between his thick fingers.
“An Oklahoma boy, Thorpe was. Wasn’t born all that far from here.”
The nights were hot that June, humid as the collective breath of all those weed-chewing insects outnumbering by thousands the stars over the fields
.
“This here’s the stuff that made the Incan empire what it is today.” Jim Lee grinned. “Ruins.” Snorted hard through a tightly rolled dollar bill, then handed over the hollowed greenery. “Gift to the white man from the Incan in return for abusing his women, knocking down his religion, and putting him on welfare.”
Logan’s nose burned, the familiar taste slid down the back of his throat like a color that wouldn’t stick to the canvas. White as ground-up angel bones, a sparkle to it like radiance dried and fallen away, it fevered Logan’s blood, numbed the sting at the back of his neck, where there was a welt roughened by an oozing scab. Keepsake from riding a paint that hadn’t much cared to be ridden.
Larry had shaken his head. “Never saw that horse act up that way.”
Logan wasn’t much of a rider, just a little run around Larry’s farm he’d been thinking, felt like a conquistador in the saddle, all that animal strength bunched up under him. Never saw what spooked the mare, but she took off so sudden he about lost a stirrup, caught a low branch across the face, then he was falling forward in the saddle as she took a steep dry creek bed. The sides of the horse pinched between his knees, his groin stiffening up from squeezing so hard, he thought for sure he was going to get spilled when they came to that falling-apart fence Larry had never cleared away, but the horse clean leaped it, then pulled up short—just like that—breathing hard, her heaving ribs pushing out his shaky legs, and a good thing he was sitting, he wouldn’t’ve been able to stand.
The mare walked calmly back to the barn, all the fight gone out of her, but jumped again, unexpectedly, through a side doorway. Just blind instinct that he buried his face in her mane. The door jamb, big as a railroad tie, cracked the back of his head, scraped up his neck.
Larry came running up, a good scare still on his face. “You all right? Goddamn. Never seen ’er do that. You okay?” He shook his head. “Damn but I never seen ’er do that.”
Weirdest thing was, when the machined edge of that lumber scraped against his skull, a hole wormed through the past, and he switched places with his dead father, whose head had shattered a windshield 12 years before.
Now the collar of Logan’s shirt kept sticking, pulling free, bleeding again when he turned his head.
“How ’bout a little viewin’?”
Night in the old farmhouse just beginning to smolder, Jim Lee wanted to pull out his telescope though what he was prospecting the sky for was likely as nonexistent as his “oofoes.”
Whether nuclear furnaces light years distant or poker chips on the table or apples in the grass, there’s no divinity at work, Jim, just physics. They fell out that way is all, Logan wanted to tell him. You might as well send your Galileo-tube back to 16th-century Holland or wherever it came from.
But he didn’t believe it’d been an accident or Providence that had killed his father, it’d been Uncle Cal, his father’s only brother. Except how could Cal have done it? He was a mechanic, sure, but how could he have arranged for a drunk kid to ram into Logan’s father’s truck? Not to mention the kid killing himself in the same accident.
Something of a drunk himself, Cal had become a fixture around the house, like a couch that got dragged along no matter how many times the family moved into a new place. Why Cal? Why couldn’t his mother have taken up with somebody else? Anybody else?
The living room became occupied territory, Cal sitting in front of the TV drinking beer, his eyes as still and concentrated as a snake’s. Usually in a sleeveless T-shirt so you could see the skull grinning between a pair of outstretched wings tattooed on his left arm, the number 13 underneath the skull as if the 1 were a straight leg and the 3 a curlicue of a leg. One day Cal bent down and shoved that arm, bumpy with muscles—like rocks in a sack—in Logan’s eight-year-old face. “Anglos think thirteen’s unlucky. What the hell do they know?”
Two more dusty lines disappeared through tight-rolled legal tender before Jim Lee rounded up the last of the cocaine with a wet finger, stuck it in his mouth. “That’d put a little zing in yer toothpaste now wouldn’t it?”
The screen door hissed closed behind them.
There was a kind of sanctity in the Kansas sky, clear and deep, constellations invisibly hung like bright mobiles.
The streetlamp at the foot of Jim Lee’s yard attracted all manner of insects, a cloud of wingbeats like a swarm of thoughts with no skull to pen them in, moths bumping against the glass sealing them off from a mercury-vapor heaven. Bats flapped after them in strobe-light movements, swooping swerving veering off with uncanny precision.
Jim Lee looked up at the bright lure. “The quantity a motion here an’ everywhere else is as never-changing as Superman’s uniform—if Descartes is to be believed. But the soul can alter direction some. Will makes a difference.”
“All we gotta do is wish, huh?”
“Does seem to be a flaw in theory somewhere. But ain’t it possible a destination in mind up there—” Jim Lee lifted his chin. “—becomes a fate down here?”
Parked underneath the light, Jim Lee’s truck was a yellow somewhere between banana and bumblebee, The Hog painted in fancy script on a bug-shield peppered with kills.
Streetlamps spaced half a mile apart marked the way to town.
Jim Lee reached down, turned a Country Western tune up loud. Just as the song ended, the truck jerked to a stop, and Jim Lee yanked the emergency brake.
The Round-Up was already filled with body heat, with walled-in smoke and idle conversation no more intelligible than a flock of chittering birds. What with the music, Logan could barely hear his own boots clumping on the wooden floor.
“Whaddaya say Jim Lee…?”
Hands reached out to slap the broad back Y-ed over by suspenders. Logan a couple steps behind, always at Jim’s heels, out of high school but still three years away from the 21 you needed to be to drink anything harder than wine or beer.
Larry behind the bar and behind him black-and-whites of the town at the turn of the century, of him during his rodeo days, #27 plastered on his back, the bull’s ass six feet in the air in one.
“How’s the neck feelin’?” Larry’s big hand, gloved in the old days before he shoved it under rope wound around the bull’s chest and humped back, came over the bar and squeezed Logan’s. Rough as a grindstone.
“’S’alright.” Instinctively Logan put two fingers to the swelling under his collar, the scab still bloodying his shirt.
Jim Lee leaned over the bar. “Nothin wrong with him a beer won’t fix.”
Larry popped open a couple of bottles, shook his head. “Jesus God, lucky you ducked when you did.”
Jim Lee held the bottle up to the hazy light. “A cold beer is like a scrambled egg—you can’t beat it.”
Logan’s head was full of coke and the woodgrain patterns under his bottle, Jim Lee talking nonstop to him, to Larry, yelling down to the guys a few stools away, already motioning for another beer.
Larry switched the empty for a fresh bottle, the shine dulled by a film of cold sweat.
Don Moody, a third-year law student, was leaning against the wall, posed like some movie-poster icon. “Who do I luck lack?”
“Truman Capote. Now get over here an’ pick up a round.”
Age notwithstanding, Logan lifted a tumbler, bottom soaked in a little puddle of sour mash that Larry’s rag would sop up in a swipe, touched rims with Jim Lee and Don and Larry. The whiskey burned going down, the fumes cleared his nose.
Broncobuster, bullrider, Larry could’ve handled that mare even without a saddle. He had scars under his T-shirt from the time a bull had walked all over him, stomped him good, nobody expected him to be breathing after that, much less back behind a muscled hump in a year’s time. Wasn’t any riled bull or even a bucking stallion that had clipped Logan’s head, was a broken-in mare. He’d seen a bunch of Cherokees in Oklahoma, too lazy to go through the hoo-ha of putting on saddles, gallop past him as though he were whiter than the Anglos standing next to him.
“How was Mexico, bud?” Don with that baby face of his that was never going to grow much of a beard, round as the spare tire around his waist, no good for hula-hooping but jiggled all right if Don took off at a run. “They got pyramids like they say?”
Grander than anything in Kansas, built by his distant cousins long before that mixed-up Italian with a Ptolemaic map as misconceived as his Atlantic Ocean crossing was even born.
Billy Boy shouldered between Logan and Don. Thick hair greased back, Elvis Presley sideburns he ought to have shaved off, he kept a plastic comb in a T-shirt pocket. Black on his fingers where engine gunk had settled into tiny cracks in skin, Billy looked at Logan with glossy pupils as big as hubcaps.
He was saying something, but Logan’s head was bouncing to jukebox music. Fueled by powdered angel bones, alcohol mist settling over his better judgment the way clouds could gang up and blur the Moon, he knew he could do better, just wouldn’t make it to any radio station in Frontenac. The over-and-over beat was background for Don wishing for grazing rights to the grand majority of women who walked by, Jim Lee’s open-mouthed laughter, Billy Boy’s out-loud figuring a system to hit the lottery.
“Ah’m tired a standin’ on concrete ten hours a day, breathin’ in exhaust an’ comin’ out smellin’ like a grease pit.” Billy slowed down enough for a sip from his bottle.
Logan wasn’t listening any more. The midnight freight he’d been riding had slowed suddenly, brakes shaving a squeal off the metal they were pressed against, curled in his ear while his body took on the weight the engine had been hauling. Suddenly he was afraid the legs of his stool were about to splinter and he was going to go through the floorboards ass-first.
Larry waved him and Jim Lee behind the bar, hustled them to the back room he used as an office. Jim Lee pushed aside receipts, bills, letters, invoices, cleared a corner of Larry’s 1940s desk stolen from the office of some movie private eye. Pulling out his razor, Jim Lee sliced lines like clean white scars on the desktop, a couple of them snapping Larry’s head back like twin jabs from a boxer. Hoo-ee. He shook his head once—quick as a twitch—sniffed, wiped at his nose, and then the rag in his back pocket was flapping up and down as he hurried out to tend bar.