Homunculus

by Wintner, Robert;

  Heidi couldn’t stay. Inez says she didn’t do anything special. She only imagined what a jimba escort should do, playing drummerette and helping him along in her humble way. He gave her what came to a hundred bucks or so. She says it should have been promoted with a decent budget, because people will pay for that kind of proof, that kind of substance, that kind of show. She says Charles wouldn’t have minded, but as it played, money was left on the table.

  She came down afterward and found Tony and Heidi sitting on the sofa in a long, thick think. She cleaned quietly, mourning lost potential.

  The daze thins by the weekend. Inez asks for help feeding the burros, gathering eggs, tending the garden. She knows the remedy: work. How can you rest, if you don’t get tired?

  With the glint of contagion fading from her eyes, Heidi calms, leaves her moods and cards on the junk pyre and follows Inez to the chores. Tony wants to hold them, to infuse them with warmth and happiness like a man who wants to stay and live easy and love his women every day.

  Inez leaves for town to have her baby.

  A woman drives out in a fancy car and fancy clothing festooned with fancy jewelry. She talks about art with a masculine voice, deep and affected with the strained accent of an imagined aristocracy. She heard of Heidi’s lacquer sculpture and wants to see it, for a show, perhaps. The woman has opened a gallery in town. She has galleries in Santa Fe, Telluride and Carmel and is proven successful in identifying those artists destined for success. Her self-assurance is intuitive and correct. She doesn’t come out and say so, but then again, she hasn’t been wrong yet; Heidi could be huge.

  Tony walks to the head of the drive with his bag. Heidi weeps and sniffles like a person at the end of a pesky cold, no more ache or fever, no more sadness, only a few lingering symptoms. She tells the woman to hang out while she bids farewell to her friend. The woman huffs but only briefly, understanding artists and their erratic behavior.

  Heidi grips his arm as if holding him back from the abyss. He wants to hide with her under the covers but reaches for balance and penance. He tells her he loves her and always will and hopes to someday again. She doesn’t quite see how he can hope to again if he already always will, but he says it’s only him, sorting out the old confusion. He says he’ll call or write, maybe from Brownsville but he can’t be sure because he needs to let the road take him somewhere for awhile because he needs an airing out because his needs can’t quite arrange themselves in proper order because of the withdrawal but don’t worry. He can’t see himself in a formal group swearing off the drink because he’s simply not a group kind of man. Yet he ponders recent groupings and says it’s three days now and not a drop. It hurts when it hurts, and when it doesn’t hurt he feels the growing pains, and there you have it.

  He hesitates over another haunting urge for snug harbor here with Heidi and for a moment thinks yes. Why not leave Ms. Fa Fa scratching with the chickens while he and Heidi pump for the yodel? One more time; why not stay and raise Inez’s child and use what’s been gained? He can prove himself in action now, he knows he can, like Charles but differently.

  But he cannot, because the cure requires sacrifice, and today is the first step of giving up what he wants. This he knows, and though he cannot express the love Charles held for him, he feels certain gratitude. No, none of the warm and moist today, for today is given to growth. And there, just there, coming this way is Kensho, whose very presence reminds us that a meditation often begins best with the urge to end it. Kensho comes with groceries and sympathy. So Tony D steps down and forward on his chosen path, because he isn’t a whore, and he never hurt anybody.

  She understands dreamily. She wants to drive him to the bus station. She wants to give him money. But he isn’t going by bus and he’ll call if he needs money. He smiles awkwardly and looks up the road. “Here I go again.”

  “You take Taco,” she says.

  Taco rubs her legs and wags his stub. It’s too many tears, and a strong man wants to stay strong when he’s drowning in doubt. All he had to do was leave like Cisco, quietly at night, but he isn’t that strong, not yet. He needs more tears and maybe something else. “Nah,” he says. “You keep the mutt. They just die on you sooner or later.” It’s the wrong thing to say but then saying anything would be wrong. Maybe he’s right on cue so he turns and walks, because weak men are weak in the tear ducts too. A pesky small one breaks loose and rolls over death—death at hand, death foregone and the thought of Taco one day dying.

  He turns and walks away. Sure, he rehearsed the hug in his mind with the sigh and the tremble. Just as well he stumbles clean around it. Just as well that a nosy, rich woman paces for this milestone in their lives to hurry and be past. Just as well that Kensho knows this as he knows so much and waits respectfully up the road for the guard to change. How different departure becomes over the years. How far he’s roamed from youthful horizon to the surreal focus on pebbles passing underfoot. Some pass fast. Some pass slow. He can squint and repeat a phrase with no meaning as fast as the pebbles down below: anyoneyouever fuckedanyoneyouever …

  His mantra breaks a hundred yards out when she calls, “Get him! Get him, Taco!” He hears the fleabag come running. Taco knows the score, figures life is short enough without losing time on moods and gallery shows.

  “You croak, Taco, I’ll get drunker than I ever was.” Taco whines. You can feel low on the totem, traveling so many years that you ought to have more to show than the love of a dog. But don’t ever doubt a dog’s love. He’s people, too. He knows. He runs ahead to sniff a bush and piss on it, signing off. He lets Tony catch up, whining so Tony will ditch the funk so they can get on with it.

  Taco falls in alongside Tony’s two-four with his own four-four, and they hoof it a good two hours on pure emotion, the whining and sighing easing into a steady stride. They rest at an unmarked intersection to consider roads stretching in four directions with no clues. They aim north for the dollars because tired as they are, they’ll need to earn some. Tony wonders what he can do that someone will pay him for. He can tend a bar or sell something or … uh …

  Taco barks, right again; Tony leans too hard. What does anybody do that’s worth a damn? He doesn’t care what he does or where he does it. Besides, anything anywhere will be a garden called victory, fending off the great depression. They walk north. He wonders what Taco understands. He believes the dog is clear as any man ever was. They walk wearily, farther from home than Taco has ever been, farther than instinct would take him unless he knew that home was gone.

  “Yes, very drunk,” he says. “The day you croak. Or maybe the night after the day you croak. I mean, I wouldn’t walk out and see you croaked and say, ‘Oops, Taco’s dead. Guess I’ll get drunk.’ I’d remember for awhile. You know, all the good times we had.” Taco walks ahead, stronger and less sentimental. He’s right, so Tony lets it go. “We’ll have them. The good times. Just think of the fun. Boy oh boy. Oh boy oh boy. Oh! Boy! Ho boy! Ho. Don’t call me boy. Right. Don’t call me Taco.” Taco looks up and whines.

  Tony remembers when all he wanted was to be one of the kids who sailed away to Saturday, where candy grows on trees and you only have fun. And if you grow long ears and a tail, who cares?

  Maybe he’ll get a nice easy chair in a cozy apartment with a table and a lamp and some good books—stories of adventure and anarchy, of people who cannot forget the promise made on the threshold of life, who win something in the end but you don’t know what until you get there.

  Taco stops, looks back and whines again. A dot on the horizon looks like a car or a truck that might stop and offer a lift. They wait for it. It comes slow as life on the high plateau but faster than they can walk. They wait, hoping it will stop. Taco pants too hard for a good impression, so Tony gives him a drink from the plastic water bottle. That cheers him up. “Oh, hell, Taco, you’ll piss on my grave most likely.”

  “Woof,” Taco says, springing up for a tongue-lashing. He’s had enough of that kind of talk. And then bearing down
as if thirty is warp speed in a very old truck with bad exhaust, in a guinea T-shirt and a straw hat like Pa Kettle’s with a plastic green shade on the front of the bill, looking much the worse for wear, cut up, bruised and scraped but scrubbed clean with a shave and a haircut, radiant and rosy-cheeked as the day he first got drunk when he was only twelve and wearing the same crooked grin, Charles passes them by.

  He waves a half-pint in the air and calls out, “Ta da!” And he putters up the road.

  Anthony Drury swore it for years and his dog Taco backed him up.

  Acknowledgments

  Special Thanks to:

  Dylan Thomas for Quite Early One Morning and Lament

  Jack Kerouac for On the Road

  Lou Handman & Ray Turk for My Sweetie Went Away

  Howard Dietz & Arthur Schwartz for Thief in the Night

  America for A Horse with No Name

  Tina Turner for What’s Love Got to do With It?

  Don Henley for All She Wants to do is Dance

  Bernal Diaz for The Conquest of New Spain

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2000 by Robert Wintner

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-3270-4

  The Permanent Press

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  www.thepermanentpress.com

  Distributed by Open Road Distribution

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