After the collapse of the 11th Corps Jackson got greedy and continued the advance. Later that same day he was accidentally killed by the fire of his own men, an untouched lemon on the ground not far from his fallen body.
As a boy lying on his bedroom floor Thomas would wonder what it meant to like something so much you couldn’t allow yourself to have it. Later on, as a young man riding off into important battles of his own, he no longer wondered about the answer to that question. Now he wondered about the best way to surprise the enemy and attack its exposed flank. About getting greedy and pushing on through the trees. About the risk of friendly fire. About Stonewall Jackson sucking on that lemon.
58.
“YOU BOYS been to a cathouse?”
Slippery toed out a Marlboro on the sidewalk and took my spot in the front seat while I climbed in the back. He’d been waiting for us out front of the Red Cross just like he’d said he would, even if we’d shown up nearly an hour late. His shirt sleeves were rolled up and there was a clean white bandage taped to one of his forearms.
“What are you talking about?” I said.
“None of my business, but it don’t take no rocket scientist to figure out that one way or another you two been fucked somehow.”
“I think you might want to slow down on the blood drive,” I said. “Remember to save some for your brain.”
Slippery lit a fresh cigarette. “Like I said, none of my business.”
“Hey, pull in here,” I said. We were getting close to the motel.
Thomas steered Christopher into a White Castle parking lot. Suddenly I was hungry. Very hungry. For meat. For red meat, the bloodier the better. Seagulls circled the grey steel trash bin out back of the restaurant.
“You guys want anything?” I said.
“This is a hamburger place, Buckskin,” Thomas said, keeping the engine running.
“So?” I said, sliding open the door.
“Since when do you and Miss Christine eat hamburgers?”
“If you don’t want anything, just say so,” I said.
A brown Chevy cruised by on its way out of the parking lot, but not before its driver could toss a couple of White Castle paper sacks out the window. The seagulls were on them in a second. They screamed and squawked and tore open the bags and pecked at each other over the ketchup-bleeding French fries and bits of leftover hamburger bun scattered over the blacktop.
It was my first time since the very first time in Detroit. I had my money ready and devoured the ten tiny hamburgers in the rear of Christopher by the time we got back to the motel. I didn’t even offer Thomas or Slippery any. When we were almost there I made Thomas drive around the block while I smoked one of Slippery’s Marlboros to get rid of the smell of meat on my breath.
Heather, lying by herself out by the pool, waved at us from underneath her yellow sun hat as we drove up.
I walked back to the room. Christine was asleep on the bed with something called The Social and Economic Basis of Anarchism on her lap. It was still hours until we had to be at the club and we didn’t usually have a free afternoon to ourselves, so I thought about maybe going for a long walk together or the two of us taking off somewhere close by for coffee. Then I saw the pile of completed postcards on the end of the desk and realized I’d forgotten to get her stamps. I shut the motel room door as quietly as possible behind me.
I joined everybody else out by the pool.
Although Heather said it was too cold, I stripped down to my underwear and swam laps while everyone watched until my lungs hurt and my arms felt like they were tied down by invisible ropes attached to weights at the bottom of the pool. When I finally climbed out of the deep end everyone applauded and said how impressed they were. I rubbed myself dry with the rough white motel towel Heather handed me and thought about how it had been years, since early on in high school, that being happy had been as simple as going as fast as you could.
59.
LACKING CEREMONY, it isn’t a vision, it’s a scheme. We had more than just some plan. We had a ritual.
I would close the curtains to the already-darkened room, Thomas would lock the motel room door, I’d light the candles, and he’d lay out one line of coke each to start with. The rest of the band was long gone beddy-bye by the time we got going—usually no earlier than two or three in the morning—and that suited us fine. We didn’t want to be disturbed. We had Moody Food to make.
Two whiffs, a little preliminary warm-up playing on Thomas’s part, and the race was on. To wed melody and word. To fuse music to script. In particular tonight: a downright nasty piece of metallic-tasting, grating electric guitar work that Thomas heard a creepy organ line running through on the breaks and that I saw as copper and rust with dark brownish-red sneers every time I heard it. Thomas started banging out the tune on his unplugged electric and I closed my eyes to better see the song and let fate play its part in helping to select from the pile of library books on the bed.
Library books, yes. Every time we’d hit a new city Thomas and I would use the excuse of dropping Slippery off at the Red Cross to head straight for the local public library. Thomas would hand over his Mississippi driver’s licence and get a brand new lending card all inky fresh and neatly typed up and walk beside me up and down the aisles while I filled up his arms with as many volumes as we were allowed. Sometimes it was impossible to get the books back to the library before we had to split for the next gig, and I’m not proud of the fact that the name Thomas Graham must still strike fear into the hearts of certain elderly librarians.
Of course, we could have just told everybody what we were up to. Once upon a time the idea was simply not to piss away our vision in chit-chat. Then at some point along the line Thomas and I became Masons worshipping at the altar of Moody Food and it was treason to talk about all matters Moody above a whisper. Cocaine is great for nurturing obsessions. And the best part is that all you really need to become obsessed is an obsession. Having something to actually be obsessed about is just an added bonus.
I could tell tonight’s first choice had real potential right from the moment I scanned the book’s table of contents. Sometimes Thomas had to keep playing the same tune over and over again, literally for hours, until I happened upon one sentence that even hinted at in words what I was seeing in colours. Sometimes there wasn’t even that. Sometimes the sun would come sliding underneath the door like a dawn-delivered early edition and the only thing we’d have to show for an entire night’s work would be blisters on Thomas’s fingers, a floor covered in discarded library books, and two snoutfuls of toot that, in my case, necessitated doing laps in the motel pool to calm me down enough to be able to steal a couple of hours of sleep. But I felt lucky about The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens.
“You ever heard of this guy before?” Thomas said.
“I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe in school.”
Thomas fished out a new pick from his guitar case.
“Get this,” I said. “‘The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.’”
“That’s all right.”
“Yeah,” I said, not looking up from the book. “It is.”
“It’s not this song, though.”
“No. It’s not.”
I turned the page.
“Okay?” he said.
“Let’s go.”
Thomas would play and I would read, skim, recite aloud, and test out lines by scribbling them down in Thomas’s red notebook. Occasionally we’d take a break and do another line of coke so Thomas could keep playing and I could keep reading, skimming, reciting aloud, and testing out lines by scribbling them down in Thomas’s red notebook. The key was for Thomas to never stop strumming and for me to never stop seeing colours. With enough persistence, patience, and cocaine, eventually, we knew, the job would get done.
Every decision had to be unanimous. Song title and tune only ended up getting hitched when we’d discovered a perfect match. You vote with your body and everything else is just blah blah blah. The sh
iver up the spine, goosebumps on both arms, the tingle of recognition in all ten toes. And when Thomas’s eyes and mine would meet and both our bodies would light up like drunken Christmas trees, it was like the words we ended up using so completely captured what Thomas heard and I saw that until we hacked them free from the dead trunk of whatever poem or story or novel they’d been shackled to they hadn’t really existed, were only incubating in the musty pages of some book waiting for us to set them free.
Around five in the morning, forty-two poems, two broken guitar strings, and a gram of coke later, “You Like It Under the Trees in Autumn (Because Everything Is Half Dead),” I said.
Thomas stopped playing. He closed his eyes. I could hear the sound of a passing transport truck on the highway a few hundred feet from our door. It was still too early for birds.
“One more time,” he said.
I repeated it. “From ‘Because’ on should be in parentheses,” I said.
He spoke the line aloud himself, then slowly nodded and set his guitar down on his knees. I closed the book and put it on top of the others.
We both sat there trying to get used to the sudden quiet. That was always the hardest part. Shivers and goosebumps and tingling toes are a wonderful barometer of aesthetic purity, but they aren’t the kind of nightcap you want to take with you to bed. My ears pounded with the room’s silence.
I stood up. “I’m going for a swim,” I said.
Thomas picked his guitar back up. “I think Thomas is going to work for a while,” he said.
“Try to get some sleep.”
“I will,” he said. “Thomas just wants to get started on this.” I closed the door and headed out to the pool.
Once we had the title of a song in place, Thomas took over. He’d reclaim his notebook and use what I’d come up with as a sort of lyrical compass to set him in the right writing direction. Usually by the next week the tune would be done. I’d read over what he’d written to make sure the lyrics were the right colour. They always were.
60.
“YOU CAN’T JUST HAVE PIE, BILL,” Christine said.
The young waitress kept snapping her gum in tight little pops and pressing her pen to her notepad, but couldn’t stop staring at the stubble on the back of Christine’s head. After some kind fellows in yellow hard hats enjoying a few cold beverages at a truck stop in Ohio a couple weeks back offered to show us what they “did to muff-divers around here” and help Christine understand what it felt to be made love to by a real man, she’d reluctantly agreed to join Thomas and me in donning a baseball cap whenever we decided to break bread in public, he and I tucking our shoulder-length hair up and under.
Christine ran her finger down the grease-smudged paper menu.
“He’ll have the grilled cheese,” she said. “On brown. And instead of french fries, make it a side salad, plain. Thanks.” She picked up her paperback. To Heather, sitting across the table, “What some of these places pass off as salad dressing is worse for you than red meat.”
Heather smiled and proceeded to order up the goriest item on the menu, the Fatburger Deluxe, a quarter-pound of charred ground beef saddled with a fried egg, one slice of processed cheese, and three thick strips of fat-bubbling bacon, all the major slaughterhouse food groups in one. Every day she ate the same thing: the biggest hamburger she could get her hands on, french fries, and a vanilla milkshake. Slippery, who always found a way to get to a grocery store and cook up something sufficiently greasy on the hot plate he’d brought with him, was snoozing out in the hearse.
The waitress managed to scribble down Christine’s order and continue to blow bubbles without breaking her stare. Christine attempted to disappear behind The Murder of Mother Nature: Healthy Eating for a Healthy Planet for as long as she could before finally taking off her hat and slapping it in my lap. Shaved scalp right out there for all of northeast Missouri to see, “If we need anything else we’ll be sure to let you know,” she said. The girl kept her eyes lowered to the floor all the way back to the kitchen.
“C’mon, Chris, put it back on,” I pleaded, rubbernecking around the room, trying to gauge the fallout. It was after two and most of the lunchtime crowd had thankfully returned to work, but I didn’t like the vibes I was getting from the old couple in the corner sharing a basket of barbecued chicken wings. You don’t have to be working on a coke habit to be paranoid, but it doesn’t hurt.
“Don’t do this, Chris,” I said, her hat in my hand.
Christine set down her paperback. “Do what? Not wear a baseball hat? Yeah, right, how dare I.”
You learn how to fight in front of other people when you go on the road with a band. Heather began laying out her Tarot cards between the water glasses, cutlery, and ketchup bottle. Thomas picked up Christine’s book.
“This time tomorrow we’re going to be in the South,” I said. “The South, Chris.”
“So what you’re saying is that I should get ready to be even more embarrassed of how I look and who I am.”
I set the cap down between us on the seat. I emptied another packet of sugar in my coffee and scoped the room for the nearest exit.
“Miss Christine, what’s a kg?” Thomas said. He had her book opened up on the table in front of him.
It took Christine a couple of seconds to figure out what he was talking about. “It’s a kilogram—a way of weighing things,” she said. “It’s about two pounds.”
“Did y’all know it takes seven kilograms of feed grain, which takes about seven thousand kilograms of water, just to produce one kilogram of beef?”
Christine looked at me, then back at Thomas. Heather kept carefully laying down cards with one hand while happily squeezing Thomas’s non-book-holding hand with her other. She’d said she wanted to do a reading for our trip south.
“And that one hamburger takes about as much water as you’d use in fifty showers?”
“Yeah, well, that’s ... it’s not good,” Christine said.
“You’re damn right it’s not good. It says here that as more and more water is being used to raise animals instead of for crops, millions of wells are going dry all over the world. Millions.”
Our waitress appeared beside the table juggling four steaming plates and trying her best not to look directly at Christine’s bristly head. To Thomas, “You had the hot beef sandwich, right?” She set down his meal of beef and gravy over white bread first and then everyone else’s. I never understood why he even bothered. He rarely did more than shove the food around on his plate for a few minutes before settling down to his real meal of a couple of cigarettes and coffee. Tonight he didn’t even do that.
“Yes, ma’am, that’s what I was having,” he said. “Before I got the facts. Before I got the Word.” He pushed his plate as far away from himself as possible.
“You mean you don’t want your hot beef sandwich any more?”
“Indeed I do not.”
Heather flipped a final card before managing to get both hands around her dribbling, bulging burger. I had no idea what a Tarot card with a tower getting zapped by a lightning bolt meant and didn’t want to find out. Heather was on the point of first-bite bliss when Thomas slowly pushed her burger plateward with two insistent fingers.
“Darlin’,” he said, “I have only one question for you. Answer me truly once and for all and I will not ask you again. In my home state of Mississippi—the poorest state in the union—there still exist children in this day and age of jets and spaceships whose families go without running water. Now, listen closely to me, darlin’. With the rapid population growth, the increasing urbanization of invaluable wetlands, and the boom in destructive factory farms, ask yourself this: Are those fifty showers you’re holding in your hands right now worth all the pain and suffering you are surely causing for this and future generations of underprivileged children?”
Heather’s fingers were still wrapped tightly around the burger. She looked up at Thomas. “No?”
“That’s my girl,” he said. He put h
er Fatburger back on the plate and nudged it off to the side of the table alongside his own rejected meal.
“We’ll both have what Buckskin is having,” he said, pointing at my plate.
The waitress scratched the topmost floor of her beehive hairdo. “I’m gonna have to charge you for the burger and the roast beef sandwich,” she said.
Thomas grabbed his wallet and peeled out a fifty. He placed it on the edge of the table and stood up.
“A small price to pay for doing our part to help heal Mother Earth, aren’t I right, Miss Christine?”
Christine smiled weakly and pulled on her baseball cap. Smoothed down the peak and back until it was tight on her head.
Thomas went off to the bathroom.
When he came back to the table five minutes later with his shades on and his own hat stuffed in his back pocket, I knew he’d had a snort. When his and Heather’s second meal arrived she couldn’t hide her disappointment, picked up and sniffed a piece of lettuce before putting it back down and nibbling suspiciously at her grilled cheese. Thomas looked on approvingly. He ate the dill pickle speared into his coleslaw with a toothpick and lit up a fresh cigarette.
“Ma’am?” he called out to the waitress, holding up his coffee cup. “Could Thomas trouble you for a refill?”
61.
“BILL?”
“It’s just me, go back to sleep.”
“What time is it?”
“Around five.”
“What’s that smell?”
“Shhh, you’re going to wake up Heather.”
“Where’s Thomas?”
“He couldn’t sleep either. He’s having a smoke.”
“What’s that smell?”
“Shhh, go back to sleep.”
“Is that chlorine?”
“What?”
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