The wind was not strong but was like the current of a river, steadfast and cold. It came great distances and would go on toward continental, hemispheric distances. He could feel in it the ice fields and high barrens of the distant mountains, but he must not let loneliness and fear, or the paralysis they might together cause, take his precarious dignity from him.
There was no doubt that during the night cars and trucks would pass along this highway. He might try to flag them down, but he didn’t want, really did not want, to leave his possessions here and go as a supplicant, a passenger, passive and in need. His instinct was, he thought proudly and fearfully, to stay alone, survive this wilderness and its cold, and cope like a traveler from another century who had nothing but his own hands and skills. Men had done it. So he half dragged his motorcycle farther off the road, across a shallow ditch, into the tall weeds where passing headlights might not see it, and in the dark, with the instantaneous flash and blown-out void of matches, made himself a nest of his wool sleeping bag, ground tarp, poncho and warm clothes in which he might not be comfortable but would survive.
In his sleeping bag, beneath the stars that seemed to grow clearer, closer and yet, with a click of the mind, recede with the speed of light to proclaim the vast, killing and implacable distances of space, he found that what crept in toward his concern were the weeds, grass, the lumps of earth beneath his bones and whatever creeping or crawling locals, fauna alien to him, might want to invade his small space. He didn’t want to light a fire, even if he could find fuel. Invisibility and the frigid, hidden stasis of time passing was what he wanted. He wanted morning and light, knowing that even if he slept, and slept well, too many hours would have to pass. And he wouldn’t sleep well.
He hadn’t eaten since the little town in South Dakota, hundreds of miles and a whole other geological climate ago. His thirst and hunger were strange and exhilarating, real for perhaps the first time in his life. When had he ever really been hungry and thirsty, and was he really that now? Maybe when he was a baby and mewled for the breast or the bottle, but even in the Army he had eaten mainly because someone had insisted that it was time to eat, or the hour had vaguely suggested it, and the urge was little more than habit, or the hardly more than passive inclination toward a minor pleasure.
Some food was pretty good and some wasn’t so good. He had eaten Dory’s chicken and potatoes, but those slate-green lima beans had been a chalky paste on the tongue. In his present hunger, though, the idea of having to eat any food merely out of politeness was beginning to be a difficult thing to remember. Deeper than flavor and texture was perhaps a primordial knowledge of nutritional function. A dog or a cat knew, and if it was the fuel of a carnivore, took it. To a cow or a deer, or a rabbit, meat was as interesting as a fence post or a stone.
He would eat those lima beans now, with a little butter and salt and pepper. Protein and carbohydrate, trace minerals, the essence of each a little lightning flash on the tongue, a squirt of tooth-lubricating saliva, a communique from the central cortex via the stomach’s craving network of nerves and avid acids. Also cool water, tepid water, agua caliente, puddle water, any water. The desire was wonderful and amazing.
It was also welcome because its reality cleanly excluded the fears of the child. No Paiutes, Apaches, Comanches, wolves or rattlers were really going to attack him. Maybe rattlers, but he really didn’t think so. Or scorpions. He thought both were more southern creatures. Real problems tended to eliminate the well-fed fantasies of middle-class children. If he was really hungry he could scout, by the flicker of matches, back along the highway, find the rabbit that had scuttled him, skin it, eviscerate it, half cook it over a fire of dry weeds and gnaw its bloody bones. In a way he would be interested in feeling that kind of hunger.
A boon came—had been gradually coming and he recognized it now: the earth, unlike the moving air, was warm, heated all day by the high summer sun. The warmth came up through his tarp, blanket bag, clothes, skin, flesh and bones. Let the stars’ inhuman light tell him of the absolute zero of space. He was at least warming a little, his pulse slowing, his bruises minor. He could now reach down and separate the tear in his pants from the scrape below it on his knee, and feel the weepy but not very bloody abraded skin, which stung a little and would grow a little taut as it dried, but didn’t really hurt.
But all fear of the dark hadn’t passed. He woke often in the night, once believing that the bulky snout of some large animal was an inch from his face. He dreamed that he climbed a mountain highway that kept rising toward the vertical, so that soon he would lose traction altogether and fall backwards, wheels over handlebars, for all those hundreds of feet where only centrifugal force had held him to the surface of the road. There were too many hours before dawn; after fragments of sleep he spent the still-dark hours worrying, with the feeling of breathlessness, about his rear tire. There was the axle to unbolt, the chain to remove, the brake linkage, fender braces, brake rod, the clincher rim to pry out, the limp gray tube coming out of the crack like the intestine of a dead pig. Was it a blowout or a puncture? Would he have to leave all his things and hitchhike, trying to find one of the nearly obsolete clincher tires? Nothing could be decided or done until light came. He yearned to have all of the problems solved and be again independent, everything snugged down and shipshape, moving on.
Dawn came as if the prairie were a sea, as he had seen dawn come over the Atlantic, horizon-wide. Telephone poles, stunning in their monotony, came from their vanishing point in the east and went forever on to their vanishing point in the west, the looping wires no doubt alive, but silent as the poles. The dusty wind was cold, but the sun was warm as soon as it was visible below his level gaze toward the eastern rim of the world.
The tire was punctured but with no mere nail hole. After nearly an hour’s work he pumped up the tube and air hissed from a ragged tear as big as a nickel. Something rattled around inside, and when he worked the foreign object out through the tear in the collapsed tube, it was a jagged shard of bloody bone, part of the jackrabbit’s thigh.
He used most of his patching-kit material on the tube and the rest on the inside of the tire casing. When he had pried and pulled, stretched rubber and arranged recalcitrant folds, the valve stem finally straight in its hole, he pumped up the tire and reassembled everything. It had taken him more than two hours.
He glanced back down the highway at the dead rabbit, a brown lump that was the only flaw on the miles of asphalt that in the distance melted off into wavering mirage. He sacrificed a torn T-shirt to wipe the bulk of black grease from his hands, and thankful, stiff, lucky, hungry, tough and spare as rawhide, he rode on to the west.
Nebraska would never end, nor would the road, the level-seeming railroad tracks, the long freights with several engines, their great mass slowed by the western climb, the trucks pulling more slowly to the west, the eastern-bound speeding toward him to blast him with their turbulence. He gassed up and ate standard food in one little town, stayed at a tourist home when there were no roadside cabins in another, wondering if his torn, dusty and windblown self would do in the lace-fringed room in the genteel house, but the middle-aged lady was friendly and curious to the point of irritation; what would she ever do with the names of his parents, his mother’s maiden name, the exact population of Leah, New Hampshire? It was not the information that was important, but the ritual of its transference. He couldn’t help liking her, feeling that she was, in some way valued by God, pure in heart, but he was so glad to finish the huge breakfast she made him of shredded wheat with cream and brown sugar, fried eggs, toast, grape juice and milk and to be on his way.
Finally he left Nebraska and climbed into Wyoming, lucky in weather. Distant mountains seemed permanently in winter, but a warm sun heated his back in the mornings. The names of towns were to him as vaguely historical and romantic as those of Africa or India: Cheyenne, Laramie, Medicine Bow, Bitter Creek. The climbs and descents were so long that braking or gearing down took hours, parts of
days. The Rockies were on either side of him, the foothills and the Wyoming Basin a sometimes bitter land that was too glaring and chromatic, vertical and unanchored. He had read in school once that the mountains of the West were like great caterpillars crawling toward Mexico. The evergreen trees seemed simpler than those of Leah, primitive as ferns, and stood too far apart from each other, jealous and starved. There were great openings of grass or earth the trees of New Hampshire would never have allowed, as if blight had fallen here upon random acres and valleys. It was a land of gawky, raw distances, the air so clear there seemed to be no depth in its vastness, like a picture postcard taken under optimal conditions. Wherever he looked he saw miles-long vistas of conventional beauty, unmysterious.
He stayed the night in a log cabin with a tin roof, where a sign over the washbasin said not to drink the tap water, but to fill his canteen at the office. He had no canteen, but planned to buy one of the canvas water bags he’d seen tied to the bumpers of cars, where evaporation supposedly cooled them. He would soon descend the other slope of the continent, where what water there was ran west and south. The Uinta Mountains to his left, he would enter Utah and the Great Salt Lake Desert.
The next day, south of Ogden, he saw what he thought must be the Great Salt Lake, miles away, the caustic inland sea looking like real water. He came that evening into Salt Lake City, thinking of the Mormons. From a wide, clean avenue, the streetlights coming on, he saw what must have been the Tabernacle of the Choir, a building with the look of faith and pretension. The city itself seemed stable and clean. Cleanliness and neatness were his impressions of the city, or at least of the brightly lit wide avenue he followed. The traffic flowed along, civilized and decorous, the cars all clean and seemingly full of shining faces untouched by the corrosions of excess. This was a delusion, he suspected, based upon an Army acquaintance, an equanimous pure-eyed religious who had tried to convert him from the slough of smart-talking agnosticism to the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints. But the city, as he passed its buildings of clean gray stone and invisible glass, was burnished in the alien way of a church—for miles until the pride seemed to run out and he came into sparser purlieus where, amid vacant lots and industrial sheds, he found what he could only call a horizontal hotel, cars nudging its separate doorways, a red neon sign saying HOTEL-RESTAURANT-BAR.
Later, as he sat in the restaurant-bar with a beer and his maps, he was recognized by a familiar spirit, a pale man in a pinstripe suit a degree less than clean who sidled toward him with eyes like beacons and asked him if he knew about the Mormons.
He said he knew something about the Mormons, whereupon the sidler, with the glee of a conspirator rather than the normalizing tone of a homosexual, told him the dark secrets of the ceremony of “investment,” in which the young Mormon is, in the presence of the Elders, broken in to the acceptance of polygamous sex. By such gleeful yearners he had been taught what Jews did with all those foreskins, the ways of priests with nuns, etc., and he sometimes thought he attracted this sort of education, sinister moth to innocent flame, because he must seem to these teachers unfinished, or in some remediable way pure. In any case, they came across rooms, past others, to him.
As for the Latter-day Saints, he had no inclination to defend their beliefs and he had learned that the sidlers wanted nothing more than to teach, so this one, having given his lesson, went away.
In the morning he bought and filled a canvas canteen, fashioned a sun hat of sorts with a bandanna knotted at the corners and rode south toward Provo. Though no weather had ever really daunted him he thought of the crusted eyes and swollen tongue, the last lurch toward mirage of an actor on shifting dunes, under a white sun. But his endurance had always been easily at hand, even when spent soldiers had lain like drab, exhausted birds along the roads. He had six hundred miles of semi-desert and real desert to cross, but on his map was a highway marked with names—a hundred miles from Provo to, say, Fillmore; a hundred miles farther to Cedar City; a hundred and fifty more to Las Vegas. If his machine remained faithful, if he kept to the road, and if the sun and the hot rush of air didn’t desiccate him like a dying leaf, sooner or later the long push would end and he would be left with an address in Tulaveda. He would go toward a choice, but that didn’t mean he would have to make it.
The distances, miles out of Provo, were mineral, alkaline, the scrub not quite green; at the horizon lay the dead ranges of the moon.
At noon he stopped at a lone gas station and restaurant, several mismatched, paint-cracked buildings inaccurately pushed together, where a Greyhound bus had let out its passengers for a rest stop. He was about to enter the restaurant when he saw the sign over the door: NO COLORED. The colored; could they eat or take a leak in this land? In this desert, you sons and daughters of Ham, seal your orifices. This issue was dangerous in him and had caused him much trouble. He rode on, avoidance familiar and demeaning. What could he do in this godforsaken place, its conviction hung over the door? The air was like a blowtorch, but whatever thirst or hunger he felt was minimal, not even comforting.
In Bunkerville, Nevada, it was 109 in the shade. He put a dime in a slot machine and won two dollars and thirty cents, enough for a bowl of chile, a piece of bread, a Coke and a tank of gas. He paid five dollars for a closet of a cabin through a surprisingly cold night. He wasn’t seeing his country, he was seeing a highway, everything else peripheral. The Mojave Desert was ahead, but it would also be a highway. This urgency of travel was as far beyond his control as psychosis. He was sick of the machine he rode, yet impatient if not riding toward the liquid of the distance—agua caliente that was boiling highway, and that only in the mind.
But when he finally crossed the drab Mojave after Las Vegas and Barstow and came down the west side of the San Gabriel Mountains into a pretty, tended land of palms and orange groves, all stems and leaves kept and gaudy, as if each had been washed that day, he seemed to have entered the Land of Oz, although orchards and towns faded at their edges as if singed. In the late afternoon he came into Tulaveda on a street of little lawns clipped and green, little bungalows neatly aligned amid foliage that must have originated elsewhere, in some Far Eastern jungle, in New Guinea or the Solomons. The royal palms along the boulevard strips seemed fabricated and placed, their guy wires invisible. On the streets were strange, self-conscious automobiles—overpolished Fords with their roofs and windows too low, too small, and skeletal Model A’s with open, chromed long engines and motorcycle fenders. Hot rods—so that was how they sounded, at intersections, when they painted the cement with black rubber. The air was clear to the bluish sky, yet not quite clear, and there was no wind. A still picture with machines in motion, like a cheap animated cartoon. His own beat-up Indian Pony with its torn luggage was a stock contraption obviously foreign here. The people seemed to be on vacation; in this setting life could not quite be real. They must all return sometime to a working, blemished world. Winota had been frugally neat on its deep soil, and Leah grew twisted and slow on granite crevices, but here lushness seemed rootless, cosmetic and cheerful.
The street turned as the houses grew in size and the green yards grew into small parks, palms in rhinoceros skin, borders of plants sharp as broadswords, spears, the back fins of stegosaurs. Next to Spanish Mission was Victorian next to Gothic, the Gothic in adobe, the Spanish in stucco. Each lawn seemed to be having its private sprinkling, and the humid zones in the baked air were like familiar breaths of his own distant country.
He stopped at a four-way intersection, where everyone was supposed to stop, then go—an invitation to the odds, because some, depending on the others to obey, didn’t bother to stop. If life was a hard gamble elsewhere, here in this strange garden it was merely a sport. He pulled over to the curb and turned off his engine, one foot on the boulevard grass, the better to observe this carefree roulette. Down the sidewalk came a thin little man sitting in a child’s stroller pushed by an identical little man. Both wore white seersucker suits, rope sandals and white straw
hats with cherrylike red pompons dangling all around the brims. Ancient twins. They both smiled and said, “Cheery hi!” as they passed, their leathery but delicate faces creased with goodwill.
“Hello,” he answered in his own language.
A girl in plaid Bermuda shorts, sandals and a halter made of two tied-together red bandannas followed the twins. “I definitely approve of your hat,” she said, and tweaked the knot in her halter with a bright silver thumbnail nearly two inches long.
He took his bandanna from his head and looked at it.
“They’re super-handy,” she said, smiling as if for a camera, her broad healthy white teeth shining on and on until, he suddenly thought, they must have had time to dry. Her hair was of two colors, gold streaked with orange, and she seemed to have a little knife on the end of each tanned finger.
“Yes,” he said.
“I bet I’ve got thirty of them,” she said. “You can make halters like this.” She cupped her breasts, her nails clicking together. “Or even a two-piece swimsuit, or a pickaninny hat like yours, or a pokey-poke and about a godzillion things.”
“You can even blow your nose in one,” he said, but she didn’t seem to hear this.
“You go to TJC?” she asked.
“What’s TJC?”
“Tulaveda Junior College, of course,” she said, and waved her glittery hand toward the prosperous hedges, walks and low Spanish-style buildings across the street. “Summer session. I’m taking Secretarial Studies one and two.”
“Can you type with those fingernails?”
“Oh, these aren’t mine! They come off.”
“What are they made out of—aluminum?”
“They stick on with clear nail polish. Just a dab of nail-polish remover and they slip right off!” She was so pleased to explain all this—so pleased to make explanations—he asked her if she knew where Los Robles Street was.
The Moon Pinnace Page 20