Hornbeck exchanged thrusting middle fingers with Norman DeLuca, then put the truck into first gear and eased out the clutch. He drove up the street a few hundred feet, stopped, then accelerated hard, in reverse. When he was in front of the DeLuca house again, he stomped on the brake pedal, sending both washer and dryer shuddering off the truck and into the street. The machines hit with grievous thuds and large pieces broke loose.
Later that day he was scheduled to go to Pomona to pick up a massaging recliner. An elderly woman had bought it three months ago but had yet to make her first payment. He imagined that she was on Social Security, a widow ignored by her middle-aged children, crippled with arthritis, and fed up with life. But not so fed up that she didn’t want to retain a few creature comforts. He imagined himself having coffee in her kitchen, her shaky, knob-knuckled hands struggling with the pot. He imagined himself looking cautiously into her fogged eyes, half convinced he’d be able, now, to see the immortal parasite that thrived behind them. And it wouldn’t matter. He’d make the back payments on her recliner anyway.
Horizontal Snow
Because of a snag in my thinking I lost interest in both vector analysis and differential equations and had to drop out of college and hitchhike home twelve credits short of graduation. Home was a half a continent away and I didn’t have a car or bus money and was afraid to ask my folks for help. They had paid my way through three and a half years of engineering school at Platteville, Wisconsin, and I couldn’t have said to Dad, for instance, that I wanted to come home because the laws of thermodynamics bored the life out of me. He wouldn’t have understood my reasoning.
I didn’t have any reasoning. Something down at the underpinnings of reason had given way, and there was no explanation for it. I couldn’t even explain it to myself. All I knew was that every time I opened a textbook something numbing, like pain, would stab the back of my head. Or my eyelids would feel thick, as if stuffed with sand. Or I would read the same page over. ten, fifteen times and not one word would register.
I kissed my girlfriend goodbye, packed my suitcase, and headed for the highway west. “What’s wrong with you?” she’d asked, and I had no answer. I’d hurt her, I was aware of that, but my own feelings were in cold storage. I observed her pain in the way a surgeon observes the pain of his patient: with compassion but without involvement or remorse. I was strong and healthy, my appetite was good, I slept well, but nothing interested me. I felt like an animated corpse, moving through a world I had left behind. Greeting myself in the bathroom mirror each morning I would say, Hello, Zombie.
The first ride I hitched was with a family. They dropped me off on the far edge of Minnesota, in the middle of nowhere. It was a lonely stretch of road, and though the weather had been springlike for several weeks, the wind from Canada still had a threat of winter in it. My second ride came minutes before hypothermia set in.
A pickup truck with a homemade camper stuck on the back rolled to a gradual stop ahead of me. The camper was made of scrap wood and had a peaked roof, like a house, covered with tar paper. It looked like an outbuilding of a farm, modified for travel. The man driving said he was going all the way to Bonner’s Ferry, Idaho, four hundred miles short of my destination. I hesitated before getting in because the man was so ugly he took my breath away. He may have been the ugliest man in the world. At least I had never seen anyone up to that time as ugly as he was, and I have not seen anyone uglier since. His face was flat as a skillet, even concave. His hammered-down nose was five fingers wide, and his short forehead had prominent supraorbital ridges thick as cables. He looked like something you’d see in an anthropology textbook, as if forty thousand years of evolution had skipped over him. This was 1958, and so much has happened since then that much of what follows seems more like a dream than personal history.
His name was Lot Stoner and he claimed to be a preacher. He drove slowly, under fifty, with both hands on the wheel. He had huge, amply scarred, thickfingered hands that had seen decades of punishing work. We rode along without speaking for several hours, though now and then he would glance over at me and at the suitcase wedged between my legs. “I specialize in the defeated,” he finally said. When I didn’t respond to this, he went on to explain that he was a preacher of the gospel. He didn’t have a church or a degree from a recognized seminary, but was a self-taught man of God. “You just lost a big tussle, didn’t you?” he said. He had yellowing, wide-spaced eyes. They were slightly walleyed so that when he looked at you directly, it seemed as if he was seeing two of you—one slightly to the right, one slightly to the left. I guessed his age at about sixty, but his hair was bright red and youthful.
Again he waited for my response. I didn’t have one. I shrugged and turned my gaze out the side window, where snow-patched fields drifted by.
“I saw defeat in your posture,” he said, “while you were standing out there in the elements with your thumb out. I said to myself, ‘Lot, there is a young buck who has been in the toilet. There is a boy who hit bottom but did not bounce.’ Am I wrong?”
I didn’t see myself as that bad off, but he was at least partly right. Articulated, the snag in my thinking went something like this: “This struggle is not worth the reward.” It loomed in my mind like a huge door that had just shut, locking itself. I couldn’t formulate it in words at the time, but I sensed that it had the clear-cut, irrefutable perfection of Einstein’s discovery of the absolute equivalency of matter and energy. I had been an honors student headed for a job in the aerospace industry to help build rockets so that we could catch up to the Russians. Sputnik had been put into orbit the previous fall, and things did not look good for the U.S.A.
“Your hand looked like the hand of a mendicant, upraised for alms,” Lot said. “I said to myself, ‘Lot, there is a boy who has lost his way.’ I am hardly ever off the target about such things.”
Lot talked about himself for a while. He said he felt more like a traveling teacher than a pulpit-bound Bible thumper. He said he was too footloose to have his own church, and also that he was too broad-minded and generous with his biblical interpretations to follow the narrow and self-interested theologies of the fat-cat denominations. He gave examples of his broad-mindedness. “This may astound you, son,” he said, “but I can see evidence of divinity in a cow pie, and again in the maggots that devour it.” He reached under his seat and pulled out a microphone that had some wires dangling loosely from it. “Ain’t that right, Willie?” he shouted into the mike.
A woman’s voice crackled over a loudspeaker that was wedged between the seat and the back of the cab. “Ain’t what right?” she said. She sounded sleepy and annoyed at being disturbed. I figured, correctly, that she was lying in a bunk back in the wood-slat and tar-paper camper.
“About me seeing the Almighty Himself in commonplace cow shit,” Lot said into his microphone.
“Yeah,” said the voice through an unrestrained yawn.
“I can see the Lord in all of it,” he said. “In every piece of flotsam and jetsam, in every gnat and mosquito—there He is, doing business like He has every day for twenty billion years. History means nothing to Him. Yours, mine, or that of the damn fool nations.”
Lot told me that he’d spent a good part of his life in prison. “I killed a man,” he said. “I took his head into my hands and squeezed it until the pressure on his brain became intolerable. There were ruptures under the bone and then the bone itself gave way. He was stone dead before I released him, and the blood from his ears ran in abundance through my fingers. They said later they had to pry my fingers off of him with cold chisels and pliers. I had momentarily lost the sense of myself.” He took his right hand off the wheel and showed it to me. The hard, walnut-size knuckles looked like the joints of a machine, the thick wrist timbered with straight shafts of bone.
He picked up his microphone. “Am I sorry? Tell him, Willie, if I am sorry.”
“He ain’t,” Willie said.
“And I’ll tell you why,” Lot said. “The ma
n deserved what he got. He was worthless. Worthless scum. I know I just told you I can see divinity in flotsam and jetsam. But this man was below that. He was filled to capacity with nothing. He was nothingness incarnate. He was a hole in God’s blue air.”
“He’s getting up steam,” Willie’s crackling voice warned from the loudspeaker.
We were in the flat, rich farm country of central North Dakota, the landscape of boredom itself. A few years later, after having got past my motivational problems, I would be installing Minuteman missiles into this same wheatland for the U.S. Air Force.
“The man I killed was a two-legged lamprey,” Lot said. “He attached himself to the helpless underbelly of good-hearted people and sucked their lifeblood from them until they were pale effigies of their former selves. He would fill his nothingness with their somethingness. He was a con artist who had taken my daddy’s last dime for an electrical arthritis cure, coupled with painful injections of a useless saline solution. Can you blame me?”
“No,” I said.
“And I accept no blame. But while I was up at the state farm, I had myself a long time to ponder it. My meditations led me to the light, the holy light, pure and simple. And I am going to reveal this holy light to you, son, free of charge. Spreading the truth is my goal in life. I doff my cap to no sect, denomination, figurehead, or dogma. I do not take my notions from someone else’s larder of so-called religious verities.”
We passed a small lake and drove through a town where, four years later, I would betray my young wife by going to bed with a farmer’s widow named Zola Faye Metkovich. My young wife would leave me, I would leave Zola Faye, but I would stay on at Minot Air Force Base, helping to redesign ICBM parts and support equipment that had failed their stress and endurance tests. I would make a lot of money, drive a big car—an air-conditioned Chrysler Imperial— and have a string of five girlfriends who lived far away from each other in the small isolated towns of North Dakota where people, though bom in the United States of America, still spoke with foreign accents, German and Russian. It would be the most exciting time of my life, but of course I did not know it, and could not have imagined it, as I bounced along toward Idaho with Lot Stoner and the unseen woman he called Willie.
Now and then, Lot would take a dried-out sandwich from a paper sack on the floorboards or lift a thermos to his lips. He offered these to me, but I refused. Food from his hand was automatically unappetizing, as if contaminated by his ugliness. He hummed to himself for a while, ate a little more, gazed out at the slow-moving scenery from time to time. It took me a while to realize that he’d quit talking, and that I had been waiting for him to reveal this holy-light business to me, not that I believed in such things or had ever given them much thought. I began to think that he’d just forgotten about it, or had something more pressing on his mind. And then it occurred to me that I was being conned, or that he was self-deluded, maybe even brain-damaged. I leaned my head against the window and pretended to doze off. And then I did doze off.
A crackling electrical scream woke me up. It was Willie, yelling for someone to come back to her.
Lot slowed the truck and pulled off onto the shoulder of the highway. “Go climb into the back and take a look, will you, son?” he said wearily. He crossed his arms on the wheel and rested his knobbed forehead on them. “I’ll catch a couple of winks while you’re back there.”
I got out of the truck into a northern gale. The false spring was over. A new storm from the Arctic was blowing in. In these latitudes you can smell snow in the air. It’s not so much a smell as it is a pinching in of your nose, a tightening of the membranes inside. You turn your face into the wind, lift your nose to it, sniff in. “Snow,” you say to yourself. “Blizzard.”
When I climbed into the camper, I saw a narrow-faced woman with Indian cheekbones curled up under a heavy blanket. She had thin, stringy hair, and her haunted eyes looked like those of a trapped wolverine.
“Come here, dammit,” she said.
She was lying on a bunk that ran the length of the camper. There was an electric light glowing in the ceiling. The only other light came through the back door, which I left open. She was trying to push herself up on her elbows.
“What’s the matter?” I said.
“Lift me up,” she said through gritted teeth.
She was young. Maybe twenty, but probably closer to seventeen. I slid a hand behind her back and muscled her forward. “Quit it,” she said. “I just needed to get up a little so’s I can get set. It’s coming.”
She scooted forward a little, then lay back down. Her knees were up and her belly was very big. She pulled the blanket aside and her naked belly rose up, tight and shiny.
“You’re having a baby,” I said.
“You don’t say,” she said. She spread her knees and screamed, loud and terrible, more rage in it than pain. I stepped back and my head hit the roof. Her microphone was on the floor, next to her bunk. I picked it up.
“She’s having a baby, Lot,” I said.
“Joy to the world,” replied his weary voice from a tiny loudspeaker that had been stuck to the ceiling with electrician’s tape.
I put the mike down. Willie was growling between clenched teeth, her head rolling side to side on her pillow. “Is there anything I can do?” I asked.
She waved her arm. It flapped like a broken wing. “Get me that pint-size green bottle out of the icebox,” she said. “And don’t be an asshole and faint.”
We looked at each other for a few seconds. If anything, my heart was beating slower. “Don’t worry,” I said.
The icebox was a homemade affair with a heavy lid fitted into its top. Among cans of soda and beer and packages of food were a half-dozen pint bottles of gin. I took one of these out and uncapped it. She took a long pull from it, and then I did the same. It was cold in my mouth and warm going down.
“Glory, glory,” said Lot, his grainy voice dropping like sand from the ceiling.
“Maybe you ought to be back here with your wife,” I said into the microphone.
“We all can’t fit back there, son,” he said. “There’s not that much to do, anyway. You just do what the girl tells you. She ain’t new at this.”
Wind from Canada mauled the truck. It howled in the wooden slats of the camper. I looked out the door and saw the blizzard, the horizontal snow.
“Give me your hand,” Willie said. She squeezed hard enough to make the separate bones touch. The skin of her stomach was pulled so tight I could see my shadowy reflection in it. “Take a look, will you?” she said. “I want to know if he’s coming out ass end first. I had two others that did, both stillborns.”
She let go of my hand and I moved down to the foot of the bunk and peered between her uupraised knees. There, at the dark joining of her thighs, was a little face. It looked like a dried apple. Crimped as it was in those bearded jaws, it looked Chinese and ancient. Its eyes were shut tight, the mouth a stubborn line. The unbreathing nose was flat and wide. The idea occurred to me that this wasn’t an infant at all but a tiny old man who had serious second thoughts about the wisdom of leaving the comfortable and nourishing dark for the starved light of North Dakota. The notion made me smile. “Welcome home, chump,” I whispered.
“Well?” Willie said. “Is it coming out frontwards of backwards?”
“Frontwards,” I said. “Frontwards,” I repeated into the mike. “And I think it’s got red hair.”
“I’m kissing the Good Book,” said Lot.
Once the head cleared the birth canal, the rest was easy. Willie leaned forward and took the baby up in her arms, nipped the cord with her teeth, tied it off with a length of nylon fishing line, and wrapped him in the blanket. A small cry—more like the ratchety chirping of a newly hatched bird than that of a baby—came from the blanket. I wiped the sweat off Willie’s face with my handkerchief, and she took another swig of gin.
“You’re a nice fella,” Willie said, smiling up at me.
I thought about that.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
I went back up to the cab. “Fatherhood,” Lot said, “is a great responsibility.” He gave me a sidelong look of high significance, his off-center eyes splitting me into twins. Then he started the truck and we moved down the white highway.
“You probably ought to get them to a hospital,” I said. “Or at least to a doctor.”
“We’ll stop in Minot,” he said. “We’ll get some warm food and a place to rest. Doctors aren’t important to our thinking. Are they to yours?”
I looked at him, but he was squinting out into the painfully bright air of the storm. “Yes, I think so,” I said.
“Someday you’ll wake up out of your little nightmare and click your heels, son,” he said, shifting down to second as snowdrifts began to collect in the road. He picked up his microphone and said, “What are we going to name him, Willie?”
“Jesus Dakota Stoner,” Willie said without hesitating a beat.
“Merry Christmas,” Lot hooted into the mike.
“We’ll call him J.D. for short,” Willie said.
Lot drove even slower as night came on and the blizzard got worse. We stopped in Rugby, an hour or so short of Minot, at an all-night cafe called Mud and Sinkers. Lot pulled a tobacco can out from under the seat. It was packed with dollar bills. He counted out five, smoothed them out on this thigh. “We’ll get us some coffee and doughnuts and sit out this storm. When it gets light, we’ll hit the road again.”
We found a booth near the warm kitchen and a waitress brought us coffee and three glazed doughnuts. Willie had Jesus Dakota tucked in a blanket. The dried blood and mucus of his recent birth still mottled his skin, which otherwise would have been a bright saffron-pink, but Willie didn’t seem too concerned. She opened her wool shirt and drew out a long thin breast and gave it to the baby. The baby hadn’t been crying, but he pulled at his mother with urgent power.
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