by Jim Nisbet
Hiya, Sis. Took ship in Philadelphia. The very first night at sea I got in a fight with the second mate, who wanted to “turn me out proper.” He was drunk and I was scared so I hit him. Down he went. One punch! We made friends later because, he said, I stood up for myself. The crew loved me because, they said, he had it coming. Jumped ship in Marseilles. Hitchhiked around. Picked grapes in the Sevennes. Learned enough French to fall in love … | | … Then she went away! So did I! Took a job crewing a yacht in Cap d’Antibes. Speak pretty good French now, which will serve in much of North Africa. Got to Alexandria, now Cairo. Spanish will have to wait till I get to Argentina. Later this year? Then, overland to Chile. Patagonia! Every day, I’m glad I’m not where you are. All I can say is, I hope you get out of there one day too. I’m sorry I had to leave you behind. I’m running out of room. The name of the guy with the camel on the reverse of the other card is Akmed. All love, Charley
Twenty-six years later, she still had the cards. Charley still had his guilt, too. For, in fact, he had left her behind. Twenty-six years later she remained convinced that, if she were to wake up in Hell one fine morning, the Devil would immediately put her to milking an infinite row of cows, every single one of them with the scours, and the infinite pile of manure at the far end of the infinite barn would be frozen solid enough to walk on.
Tipsy got out too, but it had taken awhile. Unlike her brother, Tipsy liked to know what lay at the bottom of the cliff before she jumped. And how far down it was. And what the weather was like. And who was going to catch her.
So she left Wisconsin with a guy. He drove her all the way to San Francisco and only wanted sex in return, which were the two things she wanted too, at the age of seventeen. Having arrived, her driver quickly got a job on a crew remodeling a Victorian. Within months, he asked her to marry him and have his babies. Two months after that, Tipsy took up with a coke dealer she met in a bar. Not long afterwards she let herself into the carpenter’s little apartment during framing hours, gathered up her few belongings and departed for good, never to see the guy again. The city is easy like that: A slight variation in your normal path, and everything changes, including the people.
Actually, “never” wasn’t quite true. Years later, passing through the San Francisco airport on the way back from Hawaii, she spotted the carpenter waiting outside the International gate. A young boy and a younger girl, both blond, waited with him. He’d lost most of his hair and gained some weight.
It had been annoying, fifteen years ago, to see him in the airport, and it was annoying to think of it now. In the event she could flippantly dismiss their incompatibility as a mere astrological distinction. Later she had come around to thinking that the guy merely knew exactly what he wanted, and she had freed him up to go about getting it.
As a girl who had never figured out what she wanted beyond a certain degree of comfort with a lesser degree of responsibility, Tipsy never understood how other people brought ambition to bear upon such decisions. And standing there in the airport, fresh from a month of responsibility-free tropical sybaritism, tanned and just the least bit malnourished, she found herself marveling at the fact that she had never conceived so much as a mote of curiosity about what impulsions might drive a man such as her carpenter. But he’d long since ceased to be hers. A woman such as Tipsy had once been—quite attractive, but as restless of spirit as she was terrified of domesticity, so that the one tendency reinforced the other—would always think of a former beau as at least partially hers. Then, at the airport, she realized that if she stood there long enough she might glean some insight into the woman her carpenter had chosen as her replacement. This thought naturally flew in the face of the fact that it was Tipsy who had left him, not the other way around, and it flatly denied any agonies of heart or conscience the poor carpenter might have endured in, say, the first year of her disappearance.
In the end Tipsy realized she cared not a whit for the woman upon whom the carpenter’s stationary affection had devolved, and certainly not for her carriage or looks or the telltale marks of endearment she might lavish upon children and father. Tipsy passed through the exit door, caught a taxi to the apartment she shared with the latest man in the string she’d known since arriving in California, and never gave the carpenter and his wife another thought.
Until this afternoon, for some reason; in the short inventory of her curtailed emotional existence, she found herself fetched up against this last memory of her carpenter.
The coke dealer had been found welded into a fifty-five gallon drum in a slough far up the San Joaquin River about a year after he had inexplicably disappeared, leaving her to move out of the apartment she couldn’t afford.
The guy with whom she’d been living for over eight or ten months at the point in time in which she noticed her carpenter at the airport never did come back from Hawaii. In the course of selling his furniture she found $10,000 in cash hidden in the back of a leather couch. And that’s how she got the two grand to purchase the scow Dhow Jones, and live aboard for a year without working.
She’d not had a credible attachment since.
Unless you counted Charley.
She placed the letter from Rum Cay into the little chest, hand-carved in Thailand, which contained twenty-six years of postcards and letters.
She counted Charley.
III
PHANTOM CARAVAN
FOURTEEN
HE DIDN’T HAVE MUCH TROUBLE SLEEPING FOR THE REST OF THE TRIP—IF you call sleep what happens to a man folded into a bus seat for 144 hours. Loss of consciousness might better describe it, but that would be wrong, too; better to term it a kind of option. You become exhausted, you become passed out, you become awakened by an unusually percussive gust of methane from the seat in front of you. Aside from discomfort, Cedric had a couple of other things keeping him awake. The first was the residual motion of the sea, as transmitted to a man’s inner ear by the deck of a boat. Cedric could do anything that needed to be done on the deck of a boat, and one of the results was that he could hardly walk a straight line on solid land anymore. It customarily took him a week or so to lose the sense of a world seesawing—let’s spell it seasawing—as he read a newspaper or stood at a bar. His gyroscope continued to compensate for a sea-kindly motion that wasn’t there any more, the only solution to which was standing or walking with knees bent, as if the substrate could at any moment heave up in an attempt to fling him off its back.
In and out of this fitful sleep, the memory of a certain sexual antic favored by a girlfriend from his deep past brought with it the unmistakable sound of a concrete saw kerfing its way along a white line painted in the street; of “Just Walk Away Renee,” a popular song released seven years after he was born but never removed from the jukebox in a certain bar in Key West and often to be heard there; of the scrumptious shrimp and oyster Po’ Boy sandwiches made in that same bar by an enormous black man from St. Thomas, Tracy by name, who was “god-muscled,” as a regular worshiper, a retired specialist in the Homeric hymns, repetitively opined from the corner barstool; Tracy’s forefingers were the size of the dill pickles he sliced every morning in advance of the arrival of his Po’ Boy fans, of whom there were many; Tracy had nothing to do with the ownership of the bar; all he took, and all he wanted, were the proceeds from the sandwich concession; Tracy lived comfortably on a houseboat; his avocation comprised of an ongoing attempt to collect of all the known recordings of the tenor Beniamino Gigli; his favorite among these many sides was the Gigli and Giuseppe DeLuca duet on “Del tempio al limitar” from Bizet’s Les pêcheurs des perles, and it was on the jukebox; “Nietzsche,” Tracy would say, as he bladed mayonnaise over the open face of a sourdough roll, “thought Bizet superior even to Wagner”; Tracy always had a toothpick in his mouth, never perspired, always dressed sharp, yet his clothes never evoked their milieu of shredded lettuce and vinegar; a real sawdust joint with peanut hulls and oyster shells on its floor of dished planks and a tiled gutter that ran a stream of water under
neath the foot rail, for cigarette ends and spit, although you could get thrown out for pissing in it; a gallon jar each of dill pickles, hardboiled eggs, and pig feet; many signs and bumper stickers papered the foetid walls, prominent among them “Intelligence Is The Best Aphrodisiac,” “Adlai Stevenson / Harold Stassen / Nobody for President,” “Who Licked The Astral Envelope?,” “Eat More Possum”, “Square Dance Tonite,” “GAY UFO,” “VOTE,” and “You Want To Get Laid? Crawl Up A Chicken’s Ass And Wait”; the men’s urinal was a porcelain trough irrigated by streams of water leaking from 1/8” holes drilled at irregular intervals along a six-foot length of half-inch galvanized pipe; surmounted by a verdigrising bronze plaque that read, “Please flush twice, it’s a long way to the White House”; no self-respecting woman would use the lady’s facilities, which didn’t mean they didn’t get used; no air conditioning; the very bricks perspired; oddly enough, the woman Cedric met in that bar was named Traci, spelled with an i instead of a y; so maybe it was true, as one of the regulars opined that, as Freud zoomed away from the remains of his lunchtime Po’ Boy on his 750cc Norton, with sidecar and spare tire, he missed a gear; Traci operated a concrete saw for the city; something about her caused men to fight one another, but another trick she practiced was serial monogamy; one guy for Traci, Traci for one guy; Traci was new to the bar since Cedric had last been in town; her pheromones indicated that she was between stints of serial monogamy; one thing led to another led to a guy named Jedediah, who didn’t like the attention Traci was showing Cedric; Jedediah called him out; Tracy, the beautiful black man, did not pause the assembly of Po’ Boys; Cedric and Jed took it outside; only Cedric returned; that was the end of the beginning; Traci took Cedric home in her flatbed truck with the city insignia on the driver’s door, the monster saw in back restrained by chain binders among a spare three-foot blade, 500 feet of hose, various pressure reducers, gun muffs, orange traffic cones; so “Just Walk Away Renee,” the sound of a concrete saw, the reek of vinegar, Bessie Smith calling for a pigfoot (or Bizet, presumably, though it had yet to happen); the composting miasma of rotting yeast, cockroaches stupefied by the largesse, enough time to run out of other things to think about, such as a cross country trip on a Greyhound bus, each and all sufficient to evoke in Cedric’s mind feckless replays of various of the hours he’d spent orbiting Traci; on that particular shore leave; in that particular epoch of Key West, the Conch Republic.
The other thing to always overcome ashore was a reluctance to leave the home that a good boat with a good crew always became, or one with just himself and no crew at all. He liked it. Time ashore interrupted his routine. So he was reluctant to get off the boat, made various excuses about how he could buy shaving cream next port, there was plenty to drink aboard, he never drank half so much at sea as he did ashore, and so forth. Standard seadog.
But now, 144 hours after leaving Miami, Cedric had had it with muscle cramps and nostalgia. He was tired of thinking about Traci, tired of the mind worms of popular music, tired of sifting a past that meant nothing—just plain tired, and hungry, too. After the initial prepackaged baloney sandwich, five days ago, he’d quit eating.
So he stepped down in Las Vegas.
At the door he asked the driver a question. “If I get off your bus and get back on the next one, or two or three after that, is the ticket still good?”
The driver yawned. “That’s what they all say.” He squinted. “You a Chinaman?”
“Could be, I guess.”
“That what they do in China?”
Now it was Cedric’s turn to yawn. “How’s that?”
“Let a man get off a bus and back on whenever he’s a mind to.”
“As a matter of fact,” Cedric answered, “it seems like a good idea.”
“Well, that’s not how we do it here.”
“How do we do it here?”
“You get off the bus and get back on, you got to have a special ticket. A Ticket To Ride, they call it.”
“How do you know that’s not what kind of ticket I bought?”
“‘Cause you’re a Chinaman. How would a Chinaman know to buy a special ticket?”
“I’m a Chinaman that’s been here before?”
The driver shook his head. “Then you’d know better than to ask me.”
Cedric looked through the windshield. A lot of people were taking buses into Las Vegas, and a lot of people were leaving on them. The ones arriving looked a lot more hopeful than the ones departing. He sighed aloud. He hadn’t had a square meal in six days, ditto a bath, a shave, or an hour’s uninterrupted sleep. He wanted to sit on a barstool, stretch to his full height, maybe get a masseuse to walk barefoot on his back, maybe look up concrete sawing in the yellow pages. “Man,” he said, turning to descend the stairs. “Riding this bus is like having insomnia for a livelihood.”
“You should try driving one for a livelihood,” the driver said. “If you don’t keep your lid cracked,” he touched the side of his head, “you’ll blow your top.”
The Las Vegas air was hot and dry. Every room he stepped into had air conditioning, televisions, and slot machines. The lobby of the tiny motel he found on a back street was no different. A pair of electronic slot machines stood next to the desk. They looked like identical robots and they made slot machine noises whether anybody played them or not. “Pay the winner!” one said, and emitted the digitized rattle of a cascade of silver dollars. “We pay more than any Indian casino in Nevaaaadadadada,” boasted the other machine, and it emulated the digital algorithms of gunshots and the whoops of celluloid Indians.
The woman behind the desk wore very long appliqué red, white, and blue fingernails, and she made him wait while she manipulated her computer keyboard. All Cedric wanted was a room so he could sleep in a horizontal position, but he couldn’t keep his mouth shut. “I can see that you’re a patriot to your fingertips,” Cedric quipped aloud. The clerk manifested a technique of touch-typing that reminded him of a gamelan orchestra, and if he didn’t soon get a hot bath and some rest everything was going to remind him of everything else, with the sole caveat that he’d forgotten whatever it was in the first place. But at least she didn’t remind him of Traci.
Jesus Christ, he thought to himself. Ten years, maybe more, and there’s absolutely no reason to think of that woman, except to remember that she manifested a generosity of spirit that touched me then and lingers as one of the signal interactions in a life singularly lacking in signal interactions. That perpetual source of simile; that gamelan orchestra, for instance. Debussy and gamelan music. That, and the concrete saw. I’ve got to get some sleep.
“Pay the winner,” a slot machine declared. “Ding ding, ding ding ding.” The other machine made like a police siren. “Pow pow, pow pow pow.”
“You listen to these things all day long?” he asked idly.
The woman finished typing before she looked up. “What things?”
Cedric indicated the two slot machines.
“Just eight hours,” she said, extending a claw toward Cedric’s receipt inching out of a printer slot.
“That printer slot,” Cedric pointed out, “doesn’t go ding ding ding.”
She frowned. “Is that a pun?”
“I guess they’re a mercy,” Cedric observed.
“Puns?”
“Those sixteen hours off.”
“Shoot.” She caged a mouse within the nails of her spare hand and moved it atop a clutter of papers. “You can’t get away from that stuff in this town. Doesn’t matter where you go.”
Cedric affected mild alarm. “You mean to tell me I can expect to find a couple of those things in my room?”
She shook her head. “Can’t do that.”
“Why?”
“You might rob them.”
“Rob them? I might murder them.”
“Easy there fella. This is Vegas, and that’s treason you’re talking. They could put you away for just thinking such things. Hell. All I’d have to do is report you and—”
she drummed a patriotic tattoo atop the mouse with a talon—”Gitmo.”
“Winner! Ding ding, ding ding ding.”
“Damn,” Cedric said.
“To hell and forever,” she said. “Parboiled al Dante.”
“Like the poet?”
She frowned. “Like the spaghetti.”
“Say,” Cedric brightened, “anybody got a good spaghetti around here? Good salad? Good red wine?”
“Sure,” she said. “Majesto’s. Here.” She produced a pamphlet map of Las Vegas, took up a pen and, gripping the latter as if it were the handle of a butter churn, carved a circle on the street grid. “Only three blocks from here. Tell the mayterdee the Silver Peso sent you. You’ll get a free stack of chips.”
“Winner.” The slot machine made a sound like a police siren. “Ding ding ding ding.”
“What do I do with free chips?”
“Gamble ’em away. Just like everybody else.”
“Where?”
“Anywhere. Right at your table if you want. While you eat.”
“So Majesto’s is a casino?”
She looked at him. “You from China or something?”
“Why?”
She tapped the map with the pen. “This is Las Vegas. Gambling built this town. The construction is still going on. I doubt it’s ever going to stop. Gambling is what we do here. Gambling pays for everything. This town is so on the boil, the phone company has to reprint the yellow pages four times a year. You come in from the airport?”
Cedric shook his head.
“Well if you leave by the airport, you’ll see a big pyramid out there.”
“A pyramid? Like in Egypt?”
She frowned. “It’s on the dollar bill, man, and nobody in this town believes in anything else. Except America, of course. Everybody here believes in America.” She narrowed her eyes. “They got dollar bills in Egypt?”
Cedric said he didn’t know, but he’d ask his friend Charley. Charley had been in Egypt. “Except,” he remembered aloud, “I can’t ask Charley.”