Animal, Mineral, Radical

by BK Loren

  Roy walked through the back gate, studied the tree problem, then reset his Peterbilt cap on his head. “Yeah, we’ll get this taken care of right quick.”

  He walked with a limp now, so off balance and rickety he looked like he might have two wooden legs under his jeans. I watched him make his way to the RV, his long gray biker-braid trailing down his bent spine, and my heart ached. He lifted the heavy Husqvarna, and I called out, “You want some help?”

  He gave me his are-you-kidding glance and fired up the chainsaw. In his hands, the saw seemed like a needle and thread. He wheedled it into tight places between branches and trunks and, in minutes, my thorny jungle was leveled and the branches and trunk pieces stacked neatly.

  “You want to come inside for some tea?” I asked.

  “Tea?”

  “Or I’ve got coffee.”

  “Yeah.”

  Roy had never been inside my house. We didn’t say much. Occasionally, he stood up and looked at one of the photos of Mom and Dad I had placed on a shelf.

  After a while, he said, “Well, sis, I better git.”

  “Oh, okay,” I said.

  “Don’t wanna keep Shondra waiting.”

  “Nooo,” I said.

  Neither one of us moved.

  Then virtually out of nowhere, a voice called out, “Yoo-hoo!” I peeked into the living room and saw Ebba Meyers, the woman who’d lived one block over from us when we were growing up, at my door.

  Roy leaned across the table and whispered, “Jesus Christ, that’s Ebba Meyers.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “So I’m sure I stole something from her or broke something, or maybe wrecked her car.”

  “She’s carrying flowers, Roy, and a casserole. For Mom.”

  I’ll be damned if Roy did not blush.

  Ebba let herself in, and Roy’s face broke into this huge toothy grin like the kid I’d grown up with. “How the heck are you,” Ebba said to Roy.

  “Well, I’m not in prison,” he said.

  “Lightning strike me now, how’d you break out?” Ebba said. She whacked Roy’s chest with the bouquet, then turned to me. “I am so sorry about your mother.” The floral weapon turned peaceful when she handed it to me. Then it was right back to Roy. They talked in half sentences with references I couldn’t follow and shared news of kids on the block, some of whom were, in fact, in prison.

  Ebba’s kids had also avoided doing major time, but she’d lost one of her kids in Vietnam, and now she had two grandsons in the military.

  “Brady’s in Kurdistan. Shane’s in some place called Yusifiya,” she said. “I don’t know where that is. Either one of them.”

  “Fuck that fucking war,” Roy said.

  Ebba closed her eyes like she was praying. “I don’t know how this country got into this mess.”

  “Has something to do with who’s running it,” I said. It came out before I’d had time to think.

  Roy and Ebba both shook their heads. It surprised me that they were not staunch Republicans.

  “No way. I like some of those guys, yeah. Might be good to hang out with them. But hell if I want someone I’d hang out with running the country.”

  “God forbid,” laughed Ebba.

  “C’mon, Roy. Don’t tell me you support any politician who supports gun control?”

  “I don’t give a shit about gun control. I don’t own any guns.”

  I gave him the you-liar look every kid sister occasionally flashes her big brother.

  “Not according to the government, I don’t.”

  I smiled. Of course. Making our own rules was part of Roy’s and my working-class, Colorado upbringing. We figured the rules were never fairly applied to everyone, so why not conjure up our own code of ethics, our own manners, even our own way of talking.

  Roy and Ebba stood shooting the shit a while longer, and eventually I joined in. As we spoke, I felt that old accent working its way across my tongue. Memory quit washing over me; it warshed over me now. It felt good.

  By the time Roy and I saw Ebba to the door, night was falling, a chill settling in. We waved to Ebba, then stood side by side on the porch, soaking in the silhouette of the Rockies. Roy said, “All right then, sis,” and that was that. He patted my shoulder farewell, and I watched him limp down the sidewalk. It was like a limb of me being sawed off, not a limb I used much anymore, but one I needed anyway, just for balance. I could already feel myself stumbling.

  “Hey, bro,” I called out.

  He looked back.

  “Say goodbye to Shondra for me.”

  “Sure.”

  “Maybe we’ll keep in touch?”

  He nodded, then used the side-view mirror to pull himself up into the RV. I watched him light a cigarette, the smoke curling around the bill of his Peterbilt cap. He squinted through the glare of the setting sun and hit the accelerator.

  I saw his hand shoot out from the window, waving as he rounded the corner.

  THE EVOLUTION OF HUNGER

  As their diets changed . . . their teeth, no longer a primary weapon, changed shape, which ultimately led to the development of human speech.

  —Reay Tannahill, Food in History1

  We crossed mountains and plains, rivers and deserts, our knuckles raw for dragging them across so many millennia. It was finally time to settle down, maybe plant a little garden, balance our diet of wild mastodon with a few fruits and grains, some leafy vegetables. It was back then when our mouths changed. Our teeth no longer hung like sharp icicles behind our lips. We learned to grind back and forth on our molars. Our tongues became a different muscle, with a different shape, and when we sat down to dinner, new sounds floated out of our mouths—sounds that, with our newly evolved lips, we could recreate over and over. We called the new sounds syllables, and as they slid across our tongues, we created words. We celebrated our newly found gastrolinguistics as hominids tend to do: with food. Our souls hunger for communication. Our bodies hunger for food.

  When I lived in Albuquerque, New Mexico, I hungered for sleep. Depression, the clinical kind, and its best buddy, insomnia, kept me company, and we went walking together, sometimes late at night, or early in the morning: any time, that is, when everyone else was sleeping. Sometimes when we walked, it snowed. It rarely snows in Albuquerque, but when it does, it comes in the night, when you can sip darkness from the sky like wine—a little celebration with confetti. At the first sign of morning, though, the snow sinks back into the earth, soaking the dry desert beneath the city.

  I lived on Central Avenue, the skanky end of town, across the street from defunct, boarded-up buildings, strip joints, and neon bars (now closed). The skyline behind the low buildings was humped with dead volcanoes, ancient, impotent, caved in at the crater. But on one particular night, those spent volcanoes looked like tufts of meringue, and snow blanketed the street. The city was like a baby sleeping, and I needed to be quiet so as not to wake it.

  I walked alone, unless you counted Ragman as another person, which most people did not. His nickname was given to him by the homed-ones because he had a fondness for suit ties, the kind worn by businessmen. He tied them around his body, his legs, his arms, his waist, his head. Navy blue ties, red ties, Mickey Mouse ties, golf-tee ties, diamond print ties, silk, cotton, polyester ties, all up and down Ragman’s body. His skin was leathered, though he was still young; his hair was bleached blond, though his given name was Carlos, and he was skinny as a rock star in his tight, worn-out jeans.

  If there could be a rock star of the homeless, Ragman was it. People in town avoided him, to be sure, but it was 1988, before the paranoia of the masses (or more accurately, of the classes), and we spoke of Ragman with more gravity than disdain. We knew where he had grown up, where his parents lived (in the wealthy, hilly section of town), and the common story was that he had attended the University of New Mexico at one time and, since then, had never really left that part of Albuquerque. It was hard to imagine him as the frat boy who stayed in town, his glory days
already long behind him. And so we made him invisible, not because he seemed so Other, but because there but for the grace of angels.

  So there he was that night, at the far end of the street, walking hand-in-hand with the same depressed insomnia that had snagged me. He danced under the traffic light that went on changing, green to yellow to red, even though there were no cars, just snow reflecting the spectrum back into the night, the street all aglow. This stop-yield-and-go was his light show: He twirled, arms out to the side, face held skyward, neckties like ribbons unfurling around him. He didn’t dance like a homeless man ghosting the streets. He danced like Carlos, a man with a name.

  I watched all that color unfolding from the black-and-white end of the street, in the snow and shadowed buildings. After a while, I walked toward Ragman, and he kept twirling, stumbling, twirling. When I was close enough that he felt my eyes on him, he stopped as if he had never been dancing and walked away from me.

  “Hey,” I called out. He kept on. I followed. “Hey Ragman. Hey! Carlos!” I’d never spoken to him before, and he had no reason to turn and answer me, except that we were two people on an otherwise empty street at a god-awful time of morning.

  He turned. He came ticking toward me with the strange kicking way he walked. He held out his brown-bagged bottle of Mad Dog—the drink the town kids called “wimpy puppy,” just to piss Carlos off—and offered some to me. I declined. There was this violent silence between us and a fear that surprised me (mine of him, and his of me). But then, and for some reason I’ve never understood, that fear vanished like leaves falling all at once from a tree: swoosh, the naked branches standing stark. He tilted his head, an invitation for me to follow him. I would never have had the guts to follow him in daylight, but now we walked together through the falling snow.

  Ragman was homeless, but everyone knew the place he called home: the couch behind the bookstore, between the Dumpster and the wall. There was a fire pit by his couch, his own little heater, and the police and the bookstore workers ignored the ashes and extinguished the embers if they saw them glowing. We all hunger for warmth.

  “Got a smoke?” he asked, as we walked.

  I shook my head.

  “Tenacity,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Takes tenacity, not smoking. The days just pass. You can’t tie your shoes, nothing to look forward to.”

  “Well, I do, now and then. I smoke. But I never buy a pack.”

  He looked at me and laughed. “I got that,” he said.

  I had no idea what time it was, still dark, maybe toward dawn though, because the outline of those volcanoes looked like vellum now, a pinkish, transparent painting pressed against sky.

  “C’mon, around here,” Carlos said. We walked behind the bookstore to his open-air abode. He sat down on the couch, patted the wretched thing, asking me to have a seat and, homed little snot that I am, I remained standing. Carlos bent over the arm of the couch and brought out a few bulging grocery bags. He pulled out a crinkled-up cigarette, lit it, and inhaled, and rummaged through the grocery bags with his other hand. He took out some slices of bread, a jar of Jif, a handful of little square packets of raspberry Smucker’s, and a knife. He slathered the peanut butter on the bread, and I couldn’t help staring at his hands—fingernails black, skin like burned wood, his knuckles swirled like knots on pine. Then he handed me the jar and the loaf. “You make your own,” he said. “Come on, I won’t touch it. Just try it.”

  How long had it been since this man had dined with anyone? He stood up now and hovered over me, waiting for me to dip my knife into the Jif, and he smiled, an unpracticed smile. I slathered the peanut butter on thick, then I sat down on the soggy couch next to him and tore open a packet of Smucker’s. I was frightened, and oddly okay about being that scared.

  When I was done, he screwed the lid onto the Jif, then leaned back into the couch. We ate. We smacked our lips. We licked our fingers—you have to when you’re eating peanut butter and jelly. Snow fell on us, around us, and the sky faded to daylight. We sat there eating together. Occasionally, Carlos let out a little laugh, like a kid sharing a new toy. “Heh. Heh, heh.”

  I laughed along with him. “Heh. Heh, heh.”

  I did my best imitation of Julia Child. Here we have a sandwich au beurre d’arachide. Oooo, delicious!

  And it was.

  Their wits became sharper and their brains larger as they competed with the lion, hyena and saber-toothed cat that shared their hunting ground.2

  After our mouths, the next to evolve were the eyes and heart. It was rough going there for a bit. Some among us still tore at raw meat and used our teeth as weapons, while others of us sat there grinding away, somehow sure we had become more human than the rest. The more evolved among us often gathered into large groups, shared food, and practiced using teeth and tongue to form agreeable sounds, something we came to call language. On occasions when our newly found ability to communicate with reason failed us, we ended up being torn to bits by those whose tongues could not yet shape a thought into a word, a word into reason.

  This, too, was Ragman’s fate.

  By then, the snow had quit falling, and the season had turned to summer. Ragman and I had passed each other on the street several times, but that peanut butter sandwich turned out to be nobody’s savior. Ragman went to sleep one night, his Mad Dog curled next to him on the sofa. In the encroaching summer heat, some of the young male hominids in town discovered fire. They wanted to see if Ragman would burn. He did.

  The city held a ceremony for Ragman. The same people who had crossed the street to avoid him now brought suit ties from home and wrapped them around a tree on campus. Elementary school teachers brought their students. People, kids and adults alike, read poetry they’d composed about this man who looked, in retrospect, like a Maypole—some posthumous happiness in him that we invented to comfort ourselves after his passing. The community came together and made a little chapbook of Ragman tales. They stapled the binding. They sold it and gave the proceeds to a shelter Ragman loathed to stay in, half-wild as he was.

  Since I’d never settled with a tribe in New Mexico, I eventually migrated across the country and ended up back in Colorado. I was philopatric in reverse. I had not returned home to birth my own children, but rather, to help those who had birthed me pass on to the next world.

  My father met me at the bus station, and we rode together back to the place where I was born. There were the ritual hugs, the kisses, the assessment of my latest hairstyle, my clothes—the general primate grooming that takes place in families. After that, there was food. Homemade bread, brownies, corn on the cob, potato salad, lemonade, baked beans, deviled eggs. “Eat,” Mom said, “Eat more,” every gesture meant to fill me with all the emotion she felt, but could not say.

  My father slapped the bloody flanks of a dead animal on the fire and sweated in the Fourth of July heat. Then, with a floral apron wrapped around his barrel waist, he came smiling to the picnic table and set the meat out for us to devour. What I didn’t know, but now suspect that he understood, was that this would be his last Fourth of July, his last summer barbecue with his family, his last night of fireworks and late night conversation with loved ones.

  In his younger years, my father was not much of a talker, preferring grunts and occasional outbursts for most of his expression. But evolution takes place even in one lifetime. His tongue grew heavy with all the silence gathering in his mouth. Slowly, he began to tell stories. That evening, he told stories I’d never heard. Forty-some years of silence and still words can rise up from the husk of a man and spill into the world like milk: no crying over them, or the lost time they represent.

  He was a man who had never taken a vacation that required flying on an airplane (a drive to the nearby mountains satisfied him). His overseas expeditions were mostly by ship, all part of his life in the military, a life he had never planned to live. He’d tried delivering milk, then selling shoes, then door-to-door vacuums (it was during the era
when people opened their abodes to strangers carrying huge suitcases with appliances inside). But none of this work offered the steady income of war, and so, in 1944, he donned the Navy blues and went sailing.

  On the sea for several days and nights, his world changed. There was nothing so beautiful, he said, as navigating waters with no land in sight, the cradle of ocean wrapping around him and rocking him like a lullaby. But then, after so many days at sea, the island of Kwajalein came into view, and my father remembered his home, his origins on land. “That island sat there shining green in the gray ocean,” he recalled.

  As my father described the evidence of life on Kwajalein, one of the major islands in the Kwajalein Atoll, his voice turned foreign, as if a poet were living inside this hunk of a man, this angry flesh.

  “It looked so peaceful there,” he said. He described a crescent strip of land that rose out of the ocean like the back of a dragon, green scales covering it, thick canopy of trees shimmering with night dew, catching the last rays of the sun, turning red, then orange, then saffron, then finally fading to gray.

  “The shallow sandbar around the atoll turned the water raspberry-popsicle blue,” he said. (Did I know he had ever eaten a raspberry popsicle?)

  He said that on Kwajalein he could see the telltale imprint of human life, the way the palms of the trees cupped in a line, bending to the roads beneath, the wooden roof of a building rising here and there, some geometry within the sway of natural chaos.

  “Next morning,” he said, “Nothing.”

  “What?” I asked. “What do you mean?”

  “We’d razed it overnight. The island was barren. Not a living thing in sight.”

  He spent the next few months of his life clearing “the debris.”

  That night at the picnic table, as my father told his stories, the dew of the Kwajalein trees shone in his eyes. But he just kept on talking, never calling attention to the rivulets trickling down the valleys of his cheeks.