by Bob Smith
We each grabbed one end of a soldier and carried them to my room, which was the closest to Elena’s. As Junior dropped Young Dick onto the floor, he said, “Why not just leave them in one of our motel rooms, then pay for the rooms ahead of time and hang a Do Not Disturb sign on the door? Then call the front desk in two days.” He shrugged. “If they can handle torturing people, they can handle pissing themselves.”
“Leaving them without food, water, or bathroom breaks for two days would be cruel,” I said.
“We can’t do that.” Elena was still trying to catch her breath. She’d helped carry the smallest soldier, who was still a large man. “We’ve got to be better than them.” She was right; there’s no point in trying to save the world if the planet you replace it with is just as mean. Elena counter-proposed that she, Michael, and Taylor would stand guard over them for two days.
“I know you two need to see your sister,” she said. Junior must have told her about our real mission.
I warned them that the black ops were probably trained to escape from situations like this and would kill their captors. “Do you really think you can handle this? It’s not safe to untie any of them. Not even for a minute. They might head butt you or use martial arts moves if you get too close.” A lifetime of watching James Bond movies made any secret agent derring-do imaginable.
I added, “You’re going to have to stand guard and watch them at all times. Even when they go to the bathroom.”
The three of them appeared to envision what bathroom duty might entail with men whose hands were tied.
“You should give them half shots to keep them drowsy for the next few days. Feed them milkshakes. Then after two days you can leave. Give yourself time to get away. Then go into hiding somewhere for the next week,” I instructed. “After a week this will be settled, and it should be okay to come out.”
“Are you sure we’re not going to be arrested?” Michael asked.
“Yes. For once I believe Dick Cheney. Getting rid of you would change the timeline too much.”
Michael and Elena stood to lose their jobs in Santa Fe if they stayed two more days in Midland, and I asked them if they were okay with that. They both had lousy make-money jobs that they weren’t attached to, especially after I handed each of them a large roll of cash. Taylor was headed to Los Alamos, and it made sense for him to stay behind with Michael and Elena. Junior seemed upset when he heard they were being temporarily torn asunder. “You can see each other in the fall,” I said, wondering how starting my relationship with Taylor five years early would change my timeline. We also discussed whether to take Ravi with us. I thought he should go to Santa Fe, but Junior frowned at my suggestion. I relented and said, “Bring him.” Whatever happened to us, even I didn’t think Cheney would be unkind to a dog.
I became sad thinking this would be the last time I would see any of them again. Bidding your youth good-bye is less heart-wrenching when it’s more of an incremental metaphorical adieu and your baby-face doesn’t actually hug you. When I hugged Taylor, I was disappointed that I wouldn’t have a chance to manhandle his seductive flesh for a longer amount of time. His appealing youthful personality had softened my resolve to break up with him. It made me feel old. Perhaps I was more forgiving because I didn’t have the stamina to be mean anymore? Although Dick Cheney disproved the idea that people grow nicer as they get older. I didn’t even have time to ponder that thought. Junior and I needed to leave immediately for Crescent City.
As we packed the car, Elena apologized for doubting me. “What’s to apologize for?” I asked. “It’s easier to believe in a time machine than a Bozo president.” I gave Michael a big hug and wished we had spent some one-on-one time together. But I also looked at him with pride in our long friendship. We’d grow middle-aged together, going through various boyfriends while remaining steadfast to each other. I’d never feel the young Michael ever left me; whenever we laughed together I could still hear him.
We left the motel at three in the morning, and Junior quickly fell asleep in the car. I drove without stopping until eight. Outside of Las Cruces, I pulled over at a convenience store to buy coffee and let Ravi pee in the parking lot. Junior set a package of chocolate chip cookies on the counter when I paid the cashier. “That’s breakfast?” I asked. “Your appetite for junk food isn’t doing either of us any favors.” He smiled shyly. “I figure, if I’m going to end up looking like you anyway, I can pretty much eat what I want.”
I was pleased with his approval but thought he wasn’t giving me enough credit. “If I’m not a wreck it’s because I started to watch what I eat at your age. I’m not going to be able to use this time machine again to come back and yank candy bars out of your mouth.”
“Fine,” he said. “This will be my last cookie.”
We both knew that was a lie. Cookies are my weakness, my Achilles’ meal. I’d always thought a characteristic difference between old- and new-world eating habits was that in Europe a writer eats one madeleine and recalls his past while Americans wolf down a package of Double Stuf Oreos to forget the present.
Junior offered to drive for the next several hours, and I gladly moved to the passenger side.
“So we’re the reason Cheney becomes vice president?” Junior asked.
“It’s worse than that. I think we’re the reason Bush becomes president. I think he quits drinking because of last night. Once he sobered up, he got into politics.”
“This is a disaster.”
I agreed again. “Hey, at least we tried. We tried to stop Bush from becoming president instead of just talking about how bad he is.”
I fell silent for a minute as I considered whether we’d failed to prevent Taylor from becoming a gay Republican. Bush would still be president on 9/11, but Taylor had witnessed Cheney-on-Cheney torture, and perhaps that memory would be enough to stop him from going Log Cabin.
“You regret not trying,” I said. “You don’t regret failing.” On second thought, that sounded bogus. “Well, not as much.”
“I guess.” Junior stared ahead at the road.
“So do me—do us—a favor. Take those art lessons and try writing and drawing a graphic novel. I didn’t do it and I should’ve and I regret not trying.”
Junior didn’t say anything for a few minutes as we entered the empty miles of New Mexico’s boot heel.
“I’ll think about it,” he said finally. He still sounded doubtful, I thought, as I felt my eyelids closing.
I fell asleep and woke up south of Tucson.
“I love the West,” Junior said as we passed through a section of low desert with mountains backdropped in the distance. “I love the sense of openness. You can see for miles.” It took me a second to realize this was Junior’s first trip in the American West, a year earlier than my visit to Santa Fe for the Harmonic Convergence. It made me feel happy that we were sharing this experience together. (Of course, we shared every experience together, but this was different.) It was raining up ahead on the highway, and I explained how the storm could be fifty miles away. Driving in the Southwest at the height of summer is one of the greatest delights in American life. Having grown up in the verdant East, my first trip west was a revelation. The sky lifts off your back and the sun stops looking over your shoulder, while the trees and shrubs quit crowding you. I’ll admit I was initially unimpressed by low-desert vegetation; most of the time you can’t tell whether the desiccated brown plants are half dead or half alive, but it was an aesthetic I began to truly appreciate once I became middle aged.
We stopped at a cafe and called the motel to check in on our crew in Midland. Taylor answered. He said Elena and Michael and everyone else were still sleeping. “So far, everything’s fine,” he said.
“Good,” I said. “I’ll call you again in a few hours to see how you’re doing.”
Once we hit the road again, Junior commented, “Imagine how amazing seeing this land for the first time had to be for European explorers.”
I’d been time-traveli
ng in my imagination ever since I was old enough to read. Although I’ve never decisively answered whether I’d prefer to be born in the year when I could see either passenger pigeons or penicillin, I did recall something else that Junior could look forward to. “You know how you say I’m always the bearer of bad news. Well, in eleven years you’ll read a biography of Meriwether Lewis. Then you’ll go on to read the original Lewis and Clark journals and discover the greatest works of American literature written by men with a shaky grasp of spelling. You’ll become obsessed and read books on their relationship with Native Americans and their contributions to natural history. You’ll even read a literary novel that’s based upon the assumption Lewis was gay and in love with Clark. You’ll fall in love with their story. Elena will also read the biography and love it. We’ve talked about visiting Pompey’s Pillar.” I explained it was a spot in Montana along the Yellowstone River where William Clark carved his name and the date “1806” on the side of a sandstone butte.
Junior turned down the volume on Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy the Silence.” “I know a little about them. What’s the big attraction?”
“Their story reads like the most fantastic adventure novel ever written. Instead of follow the Yellow Brick Road it’s follow the Yellow-stone River. They describe a lost world where California condors nibble on beached whales in Oregon and flocks of Carolina Parakeets fly in Kansas. They see prairies covered with immense herds of bison, elk, and antelope. And the Native Americans they meet welcome them. Reading about their journey makes you feel the entire world was once an Eden that we kicked ourselves out of.”
We were passing through an open vista that appeared not to have changed for two hundred years, except for the billboard promoting a water park in Phoenix.
“Why do you think Lewis was gay?”
“Well, for one thing his dog was named Seaman. Spelled S-E-A-M-A-N, but still.”
“That must have been weird when he called his dog,” Junior observed. “‘Seaman, come! Seaman, come!’ Even in 1804 people must have thought that was strange.”
I hadn’t considered that and agreed that it was a Freudian slip before Freud.
“It was also reported in the Lewis biography that one of the men selected for the Corps of Discovery boasted in his old age that his fine physique enabled him to pass the inspection that more than one hundred others had failed. So basically, Lewis carefully selected twenty-six hotties to accompany him.”
“What’s with ‘hotties’? You’ve used it several times. Is it the new term for ‘buff’?” It had never occurred to me that the word “hottie” came into general usage in the ’90s or early twenty-first century, but clearly it had.
“I can’t decide whether it’s a permanent addition to the language or a word that will sound like ‘Daddy-O’ in fifty years,” I responded.
We passed a sign announcing Blythe, California, 150 miles. After that, there was another two hours of California desert before we reached Palm Springs. The West seemed endless in a car; traveling in a covered wagon, you must have wanted to Donner Party your family just to break up the monotony.
Junior glanced at me. “I bet if I became Lewis’s boyfriend, he would’ve named Montana ‘Johntana’ after me.”
“That’s a scary thought,” I said. “The entire map of the American west would become gay geography. Bubblebutt Butte.”
“Hothole Springs.”
“Morning Wood National Forest.”
“One-Eyed Snake River.”
“The Down-Low River?” I said, my inspiration failing. Junior didn’t get my reference. He assumed it had something to do with depression. I had to explain it to him. In 1986 the term “down-low” was on the down-low among white Americans.
“Actually,” Junior said, “I’d try to talk Lewis into naming things that would sound campy.”
“Cry Me a River?”
“Instead of the Black Hills, they’d be called ‘The Hills Are Alive with the Sound of Music.’ We’d claim it was a Sioux name.”
Junior listened to the Smiths while I tried to doze as we made our way through Phoenix. In a few hours we passed through an area where saguaros grew near the northern limit of their range. The sun-seeking codger cactuses lived exclusively in south-sloped senior communities where the prime of life was 80 and old was pushing 150. Each saguaro looked lonely and miserable, plants too prickly to make friends and too mean to die. It’s no surprise to learn they have no contact with their far-flung offspring.
“Do you still want to break up with Taylor?” Junior asked. His question had a forced, overly breezy inflection, suggesting he was trying to deflect any suspicion he’d been pondering it for hours.
“I don’t know,” I replied. “But can I spend the rest of my life with a Republican? I’m not sure about that.”
I pictured us fighting into our old age and beyond.
“If I stay with a Republican all my life,” I said, “when we’re buried next to each other, I’ll feel compelled to have ‘I’m With Stupid’ engraved on my tombstone. With an arrow pointing toward him.”
“Really?” Junior said. “Because I like him. A lot.”
I recognized the sound of my own anger. It was a tune I’d been humming since I was a kid. Junior was miffed that I didn’t really want to discuss Taylor with him. I wanted to make up my own mind and not be influenced by myself.
“I like him now too, but in twenty years, he’s going to support Cheney and Bush.”
“Look, I don’t like Republicans either. But sometimes I think, Is that really so important? It’s so hard to find a guy you think is sexy and who you have any interests in common with. Is becoming a Republican enough of a reason to break up? Are you still attracted to him?”
“Yes. He’ll still be physically attractive in twenty years, but he’ll have ugly beliefs. I’m not doing this impulsively. It makes me very sad. I’m glad I met Taylor and happy we were together for almost fifteen years. But I have a child and the Republicans believe letting people suffer is the solution for every problem. People have to be tortured to protect our country; people have to lose their houses and die because government health care is supposedly bad.”
Junior winced and shifted his legs as if he were uncomfortable from either sitting so long or from listening to me. I flashed momentarily on the thought that I was no better than Old Dick. I was torturing Junior, and part of me seemed eager to inflict pain.
“People are dying horribly of AIDS right now in 1986 because being gay is more evil than being uncharitable. It’s been going on since Reagan got into office and will go on for another twenty years. I’m done with it. I’m tired of excusing these people. I don’t believe the bullshit that it’s just a difference of opinion and they have the best interests of the country at heart. They’re heartless and vindictive and profess a philosophy of gluttony. All they want is more for themselves and their friends. In the twentieth century, communism will be overthrown and we’ll see the supposed triumph of capitalism, but sixteen years later we’ll discover that the invisible hand of capitalism, when left to itself, spends most of its time jerking off. And, as you know, I have nothing against masturbation, but its virtue is also its vice: while you’re doing it you don’t have to think about anyone but yourself. I might be fucking up my own life by breaking up with Taylor. But I’m not happy with him now because he’s not the man I—we—fell in love with. I’m sorry to tell you this, but people change.”
Junior stared out the window and I imagined him thinking, Yeah, tell me about it. I don’t want to turn into you. I hated that he thought I was a loser, and seeing my life through Junior’s eyes made me question many of the things I’d done, but now he was making me question whether I should break up with Taylor. We were compatible in most ways, but could I really love someone who supported the enemies of my daughter’s happiness?
“Of course, if I don’t break up with him, that would be one more thing that I started to do and never completed.”
“You quit drinking
,” Junior said. “You completed that.”
I never really regarded my sobriety as an accomplishment. It seemed to be fixing something that was broken rather than achieving a goal. But Junior made me see it as something to be proud of. It was something that our father never achieved.
Junior turned to face me.
“What’s your definition of love?”
“The best definition is Dawn Powell’s.”
“Who’s she?”
I recalled that twenty years ago she was a forgotten writer whose books were all out of print.
“She’s a novelist. Her books are something else you can look forward to. I first read about her when Gore Vidal wrote an essay about her novels for the New York Review of Books. It was sometime in the late ’80s. I can’t remember when, but it must be coming up soon. I’d never heard about her. In fact, you should snap up her first editions this year. There will be a revival of her work, and her books will all come back into print. But her diaries are her masterpiece, and in them she gives the best definition of love that I’ve ever read. She was married to a man named Joe for over forty years, and after his death people asked her how she did it. She wrote, ‘Whenever I ran into Joe on the street it was always a kick.’ It’s simple and gloriously specific to living in New York, but to me it sums up true love.”
“And if you ran into Taylor on the street?”
I hadn’t expected his question and at first considered whether I’d cross to the other side or walk past without saying a word, but decided that after spending time with him as a young man again I would be incapable of doing either of those things.
“I’d stop and talk.”
Judging from his radiant grin, my answer pleased Junior, and to my astonishment the overpowering sense of bleakness that I’d previously felt about having failed in love seemed to no longer be reflected by the blasted land we were passing through. Low rocky hills and outcroppings were surrounded by expanses of stony ground. We were silent, and the only sound was the muffled whoosh of the strong winds beating against the car. It suddenly seemed remarkable that I had no idea what Junior might be thinking.