The Same River Twice

by Chris Offutt

  The stillness of the desert at night pressed against every pore. In the inexplicable silence, I could hear blood coursing my veins, the steady rhythm of my heart like an oil derrick working without pause. I had no idea how hot it would be, how foolish my undertaking. After two days, my hair had paled and my skin was red. I’d bought a belt canteen but it was too small, only a quart. I decided to travel at night and sleep during the day, embedded in my sleeping bag, which turned wet and heavy from perspiration. At a diner I stole packets of salt and began eating it raw to replace my sweat.

  Rides were few but they were usually very long. People drove at incredible speeds. Many carried water, a rifle, shovel, and CB radio. Two drivers referred to me as vulture bait. One told me the best place to sleep was on the sunset side of the huge red stones that poked from the land like petrified monsters. Afternoon heat, he said, was ten degrees warmer than the morning, a difference that could kill you sooner.

  After three days of moving past dry lake beds, I traversed the Tehachapi Pass and began a descent, finally meandering north through the San Joaquin Valley. I woke from a nap in a ditch. With no clouds or pollution, the sun seemed to glow from the earth. Birdsong flowed through the air like a waterfall. I lay on my back and chewed a weed, watching bees tip blurred wings to my friendly flag. We were allies against the heat just beginning its afternoon grind. A ride was not important.

  I dozed until a car rattled onto the shoulder, a dirty white coupe, scuffed at the corners. My mind groped the curious state between sleep and vigilance that stained reality like a minor hallucination. The driver’s gray face was puffy as old dough. He hid a bald pate with long strands combed across his head in thin black lines. Heavy spectacles magnified his eyes, I got into the car and asked why he’d stopped.

  “God’s will!” he said. “You look harmless, that’s all.”

  Road saviors were a common ride, the pious doing their duty to the downtrodden. The driver gave me long looks of appraisal before getting down to business: Was I a spiritually enlightened young man, or what? I mentioned a fault or two, admitted to confusion and the need for improvement. This standard patter encouraged a driver to discuss his faith. The devout were good for meals, but first the claptrap, as predictable as diarrhea. Occasionally they gave me money.

  Al was a missionary who’d been questing after the ideal outpost for years, discarding each for various reasons. Some communities were so downright evil he’d be over his head. Others were too clean, better suited to a novice, Al was most frustrated by the places that contained a rival mission.

  “It’s there waiting for me. Maybe today. You will be with me, Chris. Think of that! It’s God’s will that we are brought together this day.”

  I asked what had started his expedition.

  “Why, Armageddon of course! The prophecies are being fulfilled, my friend. Men and women live unmarried and sex is on TV. Grocery stores have electric machines that read invisible numbers. The Antichrist lives in Nevada.”

  “Are you scared, Al?”

  “Of course not!” he shouted. “I am saved. I just want to live long enough to see the Lord burn the sinners where they stand. Then he will take the rest of us to heaven. I pray it happens before I die so my neighbors will know I’m not a sinner. People who are already dead get taken straight from the grave and nobody knows if they’re sinners. But when Armageddon comes and you’re alive, everybody can see!”

  He pounded the road atlas between us, then brandished it like a warrior’s shield. We were moving north through dense groves of citrus. The air held a sweet tang.

  “Adam and Eve were the downfall and it was Eve’s fault. She was weak and that’s why all women are weak. They can’t help it. You should learn from Adam’s lesson not to pay attention to women. See what happened with Eve!”

  “Uh, what, Al?”

  “Sex, sickness, and insects.”

  “Insects?”

  Solemn now, he licked saliva from his lips. Wind snapped his hair like a metronome.

  “Heaven has no insects! All flowers and no smog. Fresh fruits and vegetables. A paradise! Everything so pure that our body can digest seeds, stem, and core. That way there’s no urination or defecation. No need for toilets at all. Think of that!”

  I asked about the devil, and Al babbled for miles about his habits. Once a man knew God, old Lucifer worked on him extra, singling him out for special attention. A simple bedtime prayer drew the devil quick as a gnat. He’d make paint fall off your house and send you drunken workmen. You’d cut yourself shaving every morning if you didn’t pray first. He showed me proof—a network of tiny white scars the size of ringworms on his neck.

  According to Al, insects were Satan’s private little terrorist force. The Garden was bugless until Eve screwed up, but now the devil dispensed bee stings and mosquito bites. Flies fornicated on the formica. The day Al converted, a band of termites chewed his attic rafters in half and dropped the roof around the chimney. As a countermove, he began raising spiders.

  “They eat insects like candy. I got some pedigreed for six generations. The good ones are in the back seat.”

  I peeked in the back. Nestled among frayed religious tracts were several jars. I stared out the window at the fruit trees, smelling lemon scent mingled with manure. Streaks of sky peeked through the gray haze. I studied the map and asked him to drop me off at the San Joaquin River a few miles away.

  “After Armageddon,” he said, “the earth will be smoky and black! Great chunks of landscape burnt to cinders. Every insect killed. God, my friend, is like a giant exterminator sparing only spiders and Christians. Think of that!”

  “What about survivors, Al?”

  “None! I don’t mean to scare you, Chris, but God won’t give sinners a break!”

  At the river Al asked me to pray with him. We bowed our heads to the dashboard. Frayed stuffing leaked through a crack in the plastic.

  “It’s me, God. Your servant, Al. I want to ask my favor of the week. Give this young man a ride. Let him wait no longer than five minutes. And one more thing, God. Please bring Armageddon as fast as you can. I beseech you to bring it before I die. Now is fine, Lord. Amen.”

  I left the car, surprised by his humdinger of a prayer. Al reached into a cardboard box and passed me a small jar containing a purebred spider. Breathing holes were punched through the metal lid.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Don’t trust men who smoke a pipe.”

  He ground the gears of the old three-on-the-tree and lurched along the highway. The white car scudded into the quivering heat lines and disappeared around a bend. I opened the jar in the dusty grass. The spider walked to the edge and poked a leg out. It faced the world for a few seconds before crawling back into the safety of its glass chapel.

  Quite suddenly I was alone with the land, out of the valley and against the river. Shadows darkened the trees as the air cooled. My hackles went higher than a cat’s back. Early crickets sounded ominous, like warning sirens. A muddy feeling in my skin sent me reeling, jerking my head in all directions. Insects were everywhere.

  Exactly five minutes later a rental truck spewed gravel on the shoulder and veered to a stop. The orange door bounced open, disgorging a bearded giant dressed in black. He wore a leather vest over a T-shirt emblazoned with a faded American flag; a towering silhouette with the voice of a rusty rake.

  “Where you headed for, boy?”

  “North.”

  “Drive a truck?”

  At my nod he spun like a soldier and clambered into the cab. I followed. He cursed, gauged my reaction, and cursed again as introduction.

  “My name’s Chris.”

  “Wi’er.”

  “Like winter and summer?”

  “Like loser.”

  A fence flowed by the window, tracking my attention. I should have kept the spider. A few miles later Winner cursed and spoke.

  “Awake two days straight since getting laid.”

  “Mmmm.”

&nb
sp; “In the backyard on a picnic table. Preacher’s daughter.” Winner laughed, a chain saw hitting an embedded spike. “Had to strap a two-by-four across my back to keep from falling in. She worked my kickstand all night long.”

  Winner had left at dawn with a half-gram of crystal Methedrine that was beginning to wear off after thirty-eight hours.

  “What’re we hauling?” I said.

  “My scooter. Going home to take care of Mama. Scooter took a fall same day she broke her hip. Have to leave this truck outside of town and ride in. Won’t look right me coming home in a truck. Got to be on my scooter.”

  “Sure, Winner. Just like I got to be on my thumb.”

  His grin exposed battered teeth. “Ya fucking A!” he screamed, and backhanded me across the chest.

  As I struggled to breathe, Winner withdrew a revolver from under the seat and fired out the window. The sound roared against my ears. He winked at me, kissed the shiny wooden grip, and tucked the gun away. The truck cab stank of cordite. Sweat trickled down my sides and I took long, careful breaths. The pistol shot had ignited the final flecks of speed twitching through his body. An extended monologue ensued, difficult to follow at times, littered with laughter and an occasional backhand to my chest. When I saw one coming, I exhaled ahead of impact.

  For the past six years Winner had been “in the field” packing grease-soaked weapons in aluminum boxes. Some caches were in caves, others down a well, or simply buried. All over the nation, guns and ammunition lay snuggled in the earth awaiting World War III. Winner was one of many soldiers laying siege to an awful future. He reported the sites to his superiors twice a year, once in Ohio and again in a bayou town of Louisiana.

  “We got gasoline and water, food and weapons,” he said. “They don’t fuck with a machine gun!”

  “Who, Winner?”

  “The commie pricks and mutants, that’s who! If you got food and water, everybody will want it. The mutants first because the commie pricks will be a while getting here. They got to wait for things to settle down. It’ll be messy the first couple of years.”

  “But not you.”

  “Ya fucking A! I’m a patriot. I’ll have my gas mask and M-16. On the lookout.”

  “For commies?”

  “For women!” he roared, belting my chest.

  Winner launched into an anticommunist diatribe that encircled the globe. Every country was in cahoots against us. They wanted our money, our women, and our motorcycles. Any day we’d be maced by a few hundred rockets, a flock of lethal birds flying west for a long winter. Only scooter shops and girls’ schools would be spared.

  “They’re smarter than us, the fucks. The enemy always is. You got to think that way, see. They’ll nail us first, and only one place will be safe.”

  “Kentucky?”

  “Shit no! They’ll crack Fort Knox like busting a rubber. The only state that won’t be full of fallout is Idaho. Experts figured it out. And Idaho,” he dropped his voice to a ragged whisper. “Idaho is the mother-hole. We got guys there all the time. A city underground.”

  “Just getting ready?”

  “Ya fucking A! You wanna be a mutant with half a face and green hair. Your kids born blind with no pecker. Living like pigs. It won’t be me!” Winner caressed the knife at his hip. “See this blade, brother. It’s a hollow handle. Inside I got me a couple of Liberation Pills for radiation. If I’m shit creek, all I gotta do is pop them. No shame if your skin’s falling off. Nothing wrong with dying, it’s all in how you go. Battle’s best because when you die strong, you’re stronger in your next life. If you go pansy, you come back worse. It’s a proven fact. Scientists did it. You got to be ready all the time because they might hit today. We won’t know till it’s too late, but they better fucking wait until I see Mama!”

  “Uh, Winner. Who all’s in on this?”

  “There’s me and my brothers for starts. Back east it’s all farmers. What the fuck are you so nosy for?”

  “Maybe you got room for an extra man.”

  His right arm snaked across the seat and grabbed my chin. His thumb pressed my jaw while his fingers sank into my cheek. He jerked my head, squinting at me.

  “What’s your last name?” he said.

  I told him.

  “And your mother’s?”

  “McCabe.”

  “You willing to swear on the flag and Bible you’re solid white? Not a drop of nigger, kike, Mex, A-rab, wop, or Indian in you?”

  I nodded until my head hurt and my jaw felt like it was cracking. He released me.

  “Sorry, boy,” he said, “but that’s what it’s all about.”

  “What?”

  “Us.”

  That remains the most frightening word I’ve heard uttered in a lifetime of conversation with strangers. Epithets could be dodged, scatology shrugged off. But “us” was chilling. Us meant lynch mobs and gang rape, book burning and genocide. Us was a synonym for control, the grim satisfaction of veracity reflected in a corroded mirror. “Us” implied a “them,” and all thems were ripe for destruction. Aristotle set the precedent: “There are Greeks and there are slaves.”

  As suddenly as he had begun, Winner was silent. The amphetamines darted away, stilling his tongue, making him slouch. We were high in the mountains. Clouds piled each other for miles, bellies tinted scarlet by the setting sun. The air turned purple to the east.

  “Mutants, spies, and commies.” Winner muttered. “Shoot on sight. Burn the carcass. Stay upwind.”

  “Yup.”

  “Ya fucking A! They got satellites to take a picture a thousand miles up. See every hair on your ass.”

  The meth had shot its wad. Winner steered to the shoulder and we switched sides. In less than a minute he slept the speed freak’s twitchy sleep and I studied the tattoos on his arms. An eyeball topped a pyramid sitting on a skull. Spiderwebs stretched between his knuckles. The number thirteen crinkled at the base of his thumb. Etched into flesh was the phrase “Born Dead.”

  I leaned out the window, allowing the wind to scrub my face. Stars sprinkled the night sky like a random computer printout. A full moon hugged the mountains. Bug corpses smeared the windshield, reminding me of Al. Maybe he and Winner were both correct—the world was doomed to extinction. Global annihilation was better than getting old; heaven and reincarnation were the same guarantee. No one surfed the river Styx.

  Winner dropped me off at dawn near a town called French Gulch and I followed Highway 299 west to the coast. For a week I wandered down the edge of what Spanish explorers originally considered to be an island. Years later wagon trains lost everything on their western trips, following ruts six feet deep. The desert fried the very old and the very young. Spring settlers passed thawing corpses. Now there are seventy languages spoken in Los Angeles and if California were a country, it would be the sixth most productive in the world. The state was like the end of a pier crowded by fishermen with tangled lines, all hoping for a big one.

  The first night, I slept on the beach. My backpack was stolen by two kids on bicycles. I went to a homeless shelter, where row after row of cots lined a stained floor. To prevent theft while sleeping, I threaded one arm through my jacket and rolled up the rest of my clothes for a pillow. Instead of camaraderie with my brothers, I felt like a pariah invading their ranks. These guys were hard-luck, hard-bit men, not like me at all. The shelter held men who tricked at night and saved their money for a sex change, men who spat tubercular blood, men who’d lost their apartments to co-op renovators, their jobs to automation.

  All of us denied that we were truly homeless. Every conversation began with past success, then skipped to the future. The present was never mentioned. We were living in a temporary situation, each believing our own was more temporary than the rest. Cigarettes were currency. Talk was defense. I babbled constantly and the creeps left me alone.

  I spent my days at the beach, eating tacos and staring at women in slight swimsuits. They trimmed their yoni hair in order to expose more flesh. No
one looked at me. I was invisible, a nonentity. I craved every woman who walked by, but understood that there was nothing for me save fantasy. Twice I was run off particular sections of sand by surfers.

  I began drawing, signing and dating each sketch, and leaving them in front of the scene I’d sketched. I imagined that an art dealer was tracking my passage, saving every drawing. He’d eventually contact me with an offer of studio space and supplies if I’d translate my brilliant studies into paintings. In the meantime, my journal entries evolved into prolonged arguments against writing and in favor of the visual arts, efforts to convince myself that drawing was a stronger medium than writing. Eventually art won my private feud. I’d successfully used language to talk myself out of using it.

  I watched a man discover one of my sketches tucked between the redwood boards of a picnic table. He was well dressed and carried a briefcase. I moved close to him, waiting for recognition. He wadded the paper and dropped it in a garbage can.

  “Hey,” I said. “That’s mine. I drew that.”

  “Jesus,” he said. “Now I’ll have to wash my fucking hands. You bums are bad enough without leaving your trash around.”

  My perception of myself underwent an abrupt seismic shift: I slept in a homeless shelter and told stories to myself. I stole paper and pencil to leave my mark. No one knew me, or knew where I was. I suddenly understood that mortality was trivial. I felt dizzy, shaken to the marrow. A stranger considered me litter that produced further litter. I vowed never to draw again. I’d become a playwright. It would be easy. Plays were nothing but talk, and I’d write down every word I overheard, then weld them together. My entire life had led to this decision. At land’s edge, I’d found my true ambition.

  California, however, was the wrong place to begin my new career and I left the coast the following morning. On the bus to the edge of town I filled three pages with conversational scraps overheard from nearby seats. These notes would form the basis for my first work, a one-act play about riding a bus, I was on the move again. I had a plan. The future was golden.