Then he sat down next to me. The old man.
“You got something for me?” he said.
He was easily the homeliest man I had ever seen. His bald head was bullet-shaped and his lumpy nose was warty as a crookneck squash. His little, close-set eyes sat on either side of that nose like hard black beans. He had shaggy eyebrows that climbed upward in a white and wiry tangle. There was a blue lump in the middle of his forehead the size of a pullet’s egg, and his hairy earlobes touched his grimy collar. He was mumbling something, but it could have been the noise of the ditch water as it sluiced through the culvert under the road.
He stank of whiskey and dung, and looked like he’d been sleeping behind bams for weeks. His clothes were rags and he was caked with dirt from finger-nail to jaw. His shoes were held together with strips of burlap. He untied some of these strips and took off his shoes. Then he slid his gnarled, corn-crusted feet into the water. His eyes fluttered shut and he let out a hissing moan of pleasure. His toes were long and twisted, the arthritic knuckles painfully bright. They reminded me of the surface roots of a stunted oak that had been trying to grow in hardpan. Though he was only about five feet tall, his feet were huge. Easy size twelves, wide as paddles.
He quit mumbling, cleared his throat, spit. “You got anything for me?” he said.
I handed him my pint. He took it, held it up to the sunlight, looked through the rusty booze as if testing for its quality.
“If it won’t do,” I said, “I could run into town to get something a little smoother for you. Maybe you’d like some Canadian Club or some twelve-year-old Scotch. I could run into town and be back in less than an hour. Maybe you’d like me to bring back a couple of fried chickens and a sack of buttered rolls.” This was my old self talking, the hothead. But I didn’t feel mad at him and was just being mouthy out of habit.
“No need to do that,” he said, as if my offer had been made in seriousness. He took a long pull off my pint. “This snake piss is just fine by me, son.” He raised the bottle to the sunlight again, squinted through it.
I wandered down the ditch again to the place where Daddy died. There was nothing there to suggest a recent dead man had blocked the current. Everything was as it always was. The water surged, the quick water bugs skated up and down inspecting brown clumps of algae along the banks, underwater weeds waved like slim snakes whose tails had been staked to the mud. I looked for the thistle he’d grabbed on to. I guess he thought that he was going to save himself from drowning by hanging on to its root, not realizing that the killing flood was inside his head. But there were many roots along the bank and none of them seemed more special than any other.
Something silver glinted at me. It was a coin. I picked it out of the slime and polished it against my pants. It was a silver dollar, a real one. It could have been his. He carried a few of the old cartwheels around with him for luck. The heft and gleam of the old silver coin choked me up.
I walked back to the old man. He had stuffed his bundle under his head for a pillow and had dozed off. I uncapped the pint and finished it, then flipped it into the weeds. It hit a rock and popped. The old man grunted and his eyes snapped open. He let out a barking snort and his black eyes darted around fiercely, like the eyes of a burrow animal caught in a daylight trap. Then, remembering where he was, he calmed down.
“You got something for me?” he asked. He pushed himself up to a sitting position. It was a struggle for him.
“Not anymore,” I said. I sat down next to him. Then, from behind us, a deep groan cut loose. It sounded like siding being pried off a barn with a crowbar. We both turned to look at whatever had complained so mightily.
It was Miss Milky, up in the trailer, venting her misery. I’d forgotten about her. Horseflies were biting her. Black belts of them girdled her teats. Her red eyes peered sadly out at us through the bars. The comers of her eyes were swollen, giving her a Chinese look.
With no warning at all, a snapping hail fell on us. Only it wasn’t hail. It was a moving cloud of thirteen-year locusts. They darkened the sky and they covered us. The noise was like static on the radio, miles of static across the bug-peppered sky, static that could drown out all important talk and idle music no matter how powerful the station.
The old man’s face was covered with the bugs and he was saying something to me but I couldn’t make out what it was. His mouth opened and closed, opened and closed. When it opened he’d have to brush away the locusts from his lips. They were like ordinary grasshoppers, only smaller, and they had big red eyes that seemed to glow with their own hellish light. Then, as fast as they had come, they were gone, scattered back into the fields. A few hopped here and there, but the main cloud had broken up.
I just sat there brushing at the lingering feel of them on my skin and trying to readjust myself to uncluttered air, but my ears were still crackling with their racket.
The old man pulled at my sleeve, breaking me out of my daydream or trance. “You got something for me?” he asked.
I felt blue. Worse than blue. Sick. I felt incurable—ridden with the pointlessness of just about everything you could name. The farm struck me as a pointless wonder and I found the idea depressing and fearsome. Pointless bugs lay waiting in the fields for the pointless crops as the pointless days and seasons ran on and on into the pointless forever.
“Shit,” I said.
“I’ll take that worthless cow off your hands, then,” said the old man. “She’s done for. All you have to do is look at her.”
He didn’t seem so old or so wrecked to me now. He was younger and bigger somehow, as if all his clocks had started running backwards, triggered by the locust cloud. He stood up. He looked thick across the shoulders like he’d done hard work all his life and could still do it. He showed me his right hand. It was yellow with hard calluses. His beady black eyes were quick and lively in their shallow sockets. The blue lump on his forehead glinted in the sun. It seemed deliberately polished as if it were an ornament. He took a little silver bell out of his pocket and rang it for no reason at all.
“Let me have her,” he said.
“You want Miss Milky?” I asked. I felt weak and childish. Maybe I was drunk. My scalp itched and I scratched it hard. He rang his little silver bell again. I wanted to have it but he put it back into his pocket. Then he knelt down and opened his bundle. He took out a paper sack.
I looked inside. It was packed with seeds of some kind. I ran my fingers through them and did not feel foolish. I heard a helicopter putt-putting in the distance. I’ll say this in defense of what I did: I knew Miss Milky was done for. Doc Nevers would have told me to shoot her. I don’t think she was even good for hamburger. Old cow meat can sometimes make good hamburger, but Miss Milky looked wormy and lean. And I wouldn’t have trusted her bones for soup. The poison that had wasted her flesh and ruined her udder had probably settled in her marrow.
And so I unloaded my dying cow. He took out his silver bell again and tied it to a piece of string. He tied the string around Miss Milky’s neck. Then he led her away. She was docile and easy as though this was exactly the way things were supposed to turn out.
My throat was dry. I felt too tired to move. I watched their slow progress down the path that ran along the ditch. They got smaller and smaller until, against a dark hedge of box elders, they disappeared. I strained to see after them, but it was as if the earth had given them refuge, swallowing them into its deep, loamy, composting interior. The only sign that they still existed in the world was the tinkling of the silver bell he had tied around Miss Milky’s neck. It was a pure sound, naked on the air.
Then a breeze opened a gap in the box elders and a long blade of sunlight pierced through them, illuminating and magnifying the old man and his cow, as if the air between us had formed itself into a giant lens. The breeze let up and the box elders shut off the sun again and I couldn’t see anything but a dense quiltwork of black and green shadows out of which a raven big as an eagle flapped. It cawed in raucous good humor a
s it veered over my head.
I went on into town anyway, cow or no cow, and hit some bars. I met a girl from the East in the Hobble who thought I was a cowboy, and I didn’t try to correct her mistaken impression, for it proved a free pass to good times.
When I got home, Mama had company. She was dressed up in her beet-juice gown and her face was powdered white. Her dark lips looked like a wine stain in snow, but her clear blue eyes were direct and calm. There was no distraction in them.
“Hi, boy,” said the visitor. It was Big Pete Parley. He was wearing a blue suit, new boots, a gray felt Stetson. He had a toothy grin on his fat red face.
I looked at Mama. “What’s he want?” I asked. Something was wrong. I could feel it but I couldn’t see it. It was Mama, the way she had composed herself maybe, or the look in her eyes, or her whitened skin. Maybe she had gone all the way insane. She went over to Parley and sat next to him on the davenport. She had slit her gown and it fell away from her thigh, revealing the veiny flesh.
“We’re going to be married,” she said. “Pete’s tired of being a widower. He wants a warm bed.”
As if to confirm it was no fantasy dreamed up by her senile mind, Big Pete slid his hand into the slit dress and squeezed her thigh. He clicked his teeth and winked at me.
“Pete knows how to run a farm,” said Mama. “And you do not, Jackie.” She didn’t intend for it to sound mean or critical. It was just a statement of the way things were. I couldn’t argue with her.
I went into the kitchen. Mama followed me in. I opened a beer. “I don’t mean to hurt your feelings, Jackie,” she said.
“He’s scheming to get our land,” I said. “He owns half the county, but that isn’t enough.”
“No,” she said. “I’m the one who’s scheming. I’m scheming for my boy who does not grasp the rudiments of the world.”
I had the sack of seeds with me. I realized that I’d been rattling them nervously.
“What do you have there?” she asked, narrowing her eyes.
“Seeds,” I said.
“Seeds? What seeds? Who gave you seeds? Where did you get them?”
I thought it best not to mention where I’d gotten them. “Big Pete Parley doesn’t want to marry you, ” I said. It was a mean thing to say and I wanted to say it.
Mama sighed. “It doesn’t matter what he wants, Jack. I’m dead anyway.” She took the bag of seeds from me, picked some up, squinted at them.
“What is that supposed to mean?” I said sarcastically.
She went to the window above the sink and stared out into the dark. Under the folds of her evening gown I could see the ruined shape of her old body. “Dead, Jack,” she said. “I’ve been dead for a while now. Maybe you didn’t notice.”
“No,” I said. “I didn’t.”
“Well, you should have. I went to sleep shortly after your Daddy died and I had a dream. The dream got stronger and stronger as it went on until it was as vivid as real life itself. More vivid. When I woke up I knew that I had died. I also knew that nothing in the world would ever be as real to me as that dream.”
I almost asked her what the dream was about but I didn’t, out of meanness. In the living room Big Pete Parley was whistling impatiently. The davenport was squeaking under his nervous weight.
“So you see, Jackie,” said Mama. “It doesn’t matter if I marry Pete Parley or what his motives are in the matter. You are all that counts now. He will ensure your success in the world.”
“I don’t want to be a success, Mama,” I said.
“Well, you have no choice. You cannot gainsay the dead.”
She opened the window over the kitchen sink and dumped out the sack of seeds. Then Big Pete Parley came into the kitchen. “Let’s go for a walk,” he said. “It’s too blame hot in this house.”
They left by the kitchen door. I watched them walk across the yard and into the dark, unplanted field. Big Pete had his arm around Mama’s shoulder. I wondered if he knew, or cared, that he was marrying a dead woman. Light from the half-moon painted their silhouettes for a while. Then the dark field absorbed them.
I went to bed and slept for what might have been days. In my long sleep I had a dream. I was canoeing down a whitewater river that ran sharply uphill. The farther up I got, the rougher the water became. Finally, I had to beach the canoe. I proceeded on foot until I came to a large gray house that had been built in a wilderness forest. The house was empty and quiet. I went in. It was clean and beautifully furnished. Nobody was home. I called out a few times before I understood that silence was a rule. I went from room to room, going deeper and deeper toward some dark interior place. I understood that I was involved in a search. The longer I searched, the more vivid the dream became.
When I woke up I was stiff and weak. Mama wasn’t in the house. I made a pot of coffee and took a cup outside. Under the kitchen window there was a patch of green shoots that had not been there before. “You got something for me?” I said.
A week later that patch of green shoots had grown and spread. They were weeds. The worst kind of weeds I had ever seen. Thick, spiny weeds with broad green leaves tough as leather. They rolled away from the house, out across the field, in a viny carpet. Mean, deep-rooted weeds, too mean to uproot by hand. When I tried, I came away with a palm full of cuts.
In another week they were tall as corn. They were fast growers and I could not see where they ended. They covered everything in sight. A smothering blanket of deep green sucked the life out of every other growing thing. They crossed fences, irrigation ditches, and when they reached the trees of a windbreak, they became ropy crawlers that wrapped themselves around trunks and limbs.
When they reached the Parley farm, over which my dead mother now presided, they were attacked by squadrons of helicopters which drenched them in poisons, the best poisons chemical science knew how to brew. But the poisons only seemed to make the weeds grow faster, and after a spraying the new growths were tougher, thornier, and more determined than ever to dominate the land.
Some of the weeds sent up long woody stalks. On top of these stalks were heavy seedpods, fat as melons. The strong stalks pushed the pods high into the air.
The day the pods cracked a heavy wind came up. The wind raised black clouds of seed in grainy spirals that reached the top of the sky, then scattered them, far and wide, across the entire nation.
From THE COMING TRIUMPH OF THE FREE WORLD (1988)
The Handgun
Every morning at 3 A.M. a dog would sit in front of our house and bark. It was a big dog, a wolfhound of some kind—Irish or Russian—and its bark broke into our sleep like a shout from God. More than loud, it was eerie. The barks came up from the street with an urgency meant to induce panic. The Huns were at the gate, the tidal wave was almost here, the volcano was about to blow. Every night I fell out of bed in a running crouch, my heart looking for a way out of its cage.
Then I’d get back into bed and pull the pillow over my head. But Raquel, stiff with rage, wouldn’t let me have this easy escape. She would sit up in bed, turn on the weak lamp, and light a cigarette. “I am losing my mind,” she said. “How can you expect me to go to work every morning without sleep?”
Finally, after the tenth night of the punctual dog, Raquel said, “I want you to buy a gun.”
Her face was a spooky, hovering oval in the lamp’s yellow glow. Her eyes were fixed on a resolute vision. I’d seen her pass through some alarming changes since I had lost my job and she had become chief breadwinner, but this tightly focused rage made me believe significant trouble was on the way.
“We can’t afford a gun,” I said. Which was true. We were barely making our house payments on her secretarial wages. “Not a good gun, anyway. A good rifle with a scope runs four or five hundred.”
“My hunter,” she said, a sneer curling her Ups. “I am not talking about a rifle. I want you to get a pistol. Just a.22 target pistol. They sell them even in drugstores.”
I knew it would grate on her but I
tried a patronizing chuckle anyway, hoping to deflect her anger to me and thereby leave this gun business far behind. “You can’t go out on the street and shoot animals. This is a neighborhood. People will get upset.”
She turned to me—mechanically, I thought. Her smile would have done credit to the Borgia family. The warmth of the bed was dissipating noticeably. “I thought of that,” she said. “But it’s almost the Fourth of July. The neighbors will think it’s only boys who could not wait to blow up their firecrackers. No one will get out of bed to investigate.”
“You’ve been thinking about this for some time,” I observed, mostly to myself.
“Yes. I have. And we won’t go into the street. We will shoot from the window, behind the curtains. We will put Kleenex over the barrel so that the flash will not be seen.”
“You’d be murdering someone’s companion, a pet...”
She gave me a lingering, abstracted look, the look she might give a complete stranger who had offered a demented opinion. “You,” she said, “suffocate me.”
The distance between us enlarged. Madness does that. It seemed like a trend. Her response to straightforward remarks might come from left field or from outside the park. I thought she might be in the early stages of a breakdown. The thought depressed me. I got up and went into the bathroom, where I took an Elavil.
I didn’t want a gun in the house. I’d recently read a sobering statistic: Of all handgun deaths in private homes, only a tiny percentage involved intruders. The majority of victims were members of the gun owner’s immediate family. The usual motive was suicide. And sometimes, but not rarely, murder and suicide. I thought: Baloney. Then I saw that it made perfect sense. I couldn’t count the number of times I’d raised my finger to my head and said “Bang” after reading, say, a turn-off notice from the power company, or a credit-threatening letter from Penney’s or Sears. A finger to the temple and the sadly muttered “Bang” is a clown’s gesture, wistful at best, but signifying the ever-present wish to put out one’s lights.
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