Kill the dove!

by Francis Kroncke

  Chapter 42: The ride home—Minneapolis, Minnesota

  “What is America in the spring of 1973?” This is the question that he draws like a line across the map, those highlighted lines used by the Automobile Club to guide the wanderer to the Right Spot. “What is America . . . ?”

  Jared knows that the landscape is the same. Give or take some developments, new roads, rising concrete towers in the large cities—it's all as it was before I went Inside. As the bus crosses state line after state line, passes through big, small, and disappearing cities, rural landscapes, there’s nothing starkly profound about the changes. Nothing like, “It all went Dali!” as if buildings swooned across one another. Or “It all went Matisse!” and people transformed into a series of pointillist dots. Nothing like that. Much remains as Remington stroked the Wild West landscape, as Woods drew Iowa Gothic, as Hopper pictured the slow pace and frail light of coffeehouses on stopovers along the highway. Jared doesn’t expect to see the obelisk from 2001. Nothing so obvious. But what happened inside the Bright Cloud lingers, and he senses a change in the thoughts and feelings that meet him at borders—borders of the imagination. He’s a new creature formed by the Bright Cloud, and as such he keenly senses that something has changed “in America.” It’s not Revolution! as he once expected—it’s more like he’d find some Earthfolk if he got off the bus in any town or burg and went knocking on doors. It’s a quiet sensing that starts to nudge him, almost imperceptibly, towards excitement.

  As he rides along, everything is slowly becoming alive—there’s a feeling of purposeful activity, of vigorous life around him, so unlike the atmosphere of aimless deadness and dreary forlornness that permeates Inside. In no time, he’s enjoying the vibrating rhythms of the bus, of the churn and chomp of the engine, of pistons straining and groaning up hills, switching to screeching air-brakes clawing the road going downhill. Forever embedded within his muscles and sinews is the lurch and motion of this highway liner. Resident in his ears is the noise from this road-roaring beast, the wind resisting it and the chatter of loosely held windows, and the whimper of seats being munched and gnawed by bodies stretching for comfort and squiggling into landing places, resting bored butts.

  “Hi,” comes softly but firmly. There’s no doubt its target is him, so he chokes back the reflexive “Me? You mean me?” Instead, “Hi” jumps back, friendly. Considering herself invited, she slips in and sits down but just as quickly bounces up as if frightened by an unseen cat or dog on the seat. It’s only his right leg, one of his overlong stilts that, although he is sitting by the window, are crammed this way and that, halfway across the aisle seat. Embarrassed, he crunches up more to make a spot for her because he does want her to sit down. “Bombs away!” she giggles and plops down next to him.

  She is solicitous. Not a come-on but a friendly sort, someone who says to herself, “We’re all in the same boat, so let’s be friends!” He watched her walk up and down the aisle twice, once going to the john and the next—it seemed to him—just to scope things out.

  He’s instantly cornered by the awkward realization that he has forgotten how—how to move among the bar stools! Cripes, fuck, am I once again the newly released Friar Otto?

  Within ten minutes Jared is silly-putty in her hands. Effortlessly, she seduces him with scents and wisps and sweet smells and that high energy thrill of the unfettered feminine that plays out when not wary of The Hunt. Jared is not coming on to her as most guys do and she likes that. He listens—she likes that; he smiles, and she likes that. His nods when she says this or that, which she thinks oh so clever and important, tell her that he’s intelligent, at least as smart as she is, and she does consider herself smart.

  Lock-up and Count! Jared keeps his legs locked, embarrassed by the pulsating cannon between his thighs! While his body is Outside his sex drive is still locked up—hopped up and about ready to escape!

  “Your turn, darlin’, what do you do?” ends what has been a dizzying recitation of “Coming from Fort Worth”—said with a gesture of steer horns growing out of Fort Worth—and “Daddy’s in oil . . . but then isn’t everybody!” All embellished with a flutter of “My older sisters, do-tell darlin’ I tell ya’ll, two of them are scandals, if I do say,” and a clutter of local references and stories that just underlines “How wonderful I find this Minnesota, especially the winters, y’know I love the winters—can you believe me?!” which is delivered with a pat on his hand that burns into him like branding cattle.

  Thank God she keeps talking. What am I to do? Say? Christ, I’d love to lean over and slurp her, fuck, a long lick of her luscious self. God Almighty, I am a hungry man! … Fucking-A, I’m Outside!

  From the start, he’s been waiting for the inevitable question: “What do you do?” What to say? Can I avoid it? Lie about it? Should I? How do I say, “I did time . . . and I’m mighty proud that I did it well!” Should I say this? Fucking-A, what should I say?

  Bending the truth, he answers with what comes naturally: “Err, I’m a student.”

  Coyly, with a backward moving glance, checking him out, she catches him off-guard. “You certainly don’t look like a student!”

  What? What could she mean? “Jjjennningsss!” Shit, of course, the scar and his scraggly growth and the shabby prison-release dugs. He’s a bit rusty but he quickly recovers. “I’m a graduate student . . . in, um, anthropology, and see, I was back up in the mountains with, with the Hopi Indians,” and he runs it a bit longer, spurred on by her evident lack of knowledge about Indians and—blessed be!—she does sigh, “Indians?” with a tone of “Why would you study Indians?”

  “It’s a hot topic. I’m sure you know about the American Indian Movement?”

  Slightly turning away from him, “Oh, is that political? I wouldn’t know about that, darlin’.” She stretches her arms out and up above her head, distracting him as her cleavage is demarcated. She’s instinctively covering the obvious fact that she’s a bit out of her mental league.

  What to say? They both turn to look out the window, distracted by the stone monument with the map of the state etched on it, calling out: “Welcome to Minnesota. Land of 10,000 Lakes.”

  Great! “What do you like most about Minnesota? Besides the winters?”

  She wiggles an iota closer to him. Almost cheerleads, “It’s so clean! I do say, darlin’, just like the snow. The cities are so clean. The neighborhoods are so nice. The air is so crisp it almost snaps. And y’all are just so friendly.”

  “I thought Texans were the most friendly—like aren’t Texans the most in everything?”

  She touches him—she likes him, he knows this. Maybe he’s her missing big brother, he doesn’t know. “Hogwash, Texans aren’t the most in everything. For sure, the most glamorous,” and she hams it up a bit, patting her head and broadly smiling. “But darlin’ Minnesota is so, so clean, y’know—for me, I’m just glad to be away from all those dirt farmers who have glory be made it, dear, dear, made it so uncomfortable.” Not knowing this to be a serious topic, he asks the logical question, “Dirt farmers?”

  “Yea-es, isn’t it terrible! All that white trash, not to say nothing about the wetbacks and all . . . all . . .” and here she waves a hand in disgust as if flies have landed on her steak, “all those uppity colored folks. Golly gee, am I glad to be away from those Texans!”

  Jared knows that he shouldn’t take her on, but like B. F. Skinner’s pigeons he can’t beat back his operant conditioning. “But LBJ’s a Texan and he introduced the Great Society. Didn’t that come from the heart of Texas?”

  “Don’t you say that! Oh, Molly Brown, no-o-o-o! How can you say such a thang? My Daddy says he’s such a rascal. What he shoulda done is corral them all up and ship them back. Darlin’ you are so cute but oh so serious…student!”

  “Back where?” comes as a mildly mocking taunt.

  “Back where they all come from, silly.” She taps his right forearm as if he should know where “back” is. Then she catches on just en
ough to snap the mood. “Darlin’, you aren’t one of those Northern Civil Rights types, are you?”

  There’s a century of fear in her simple question, and it causes him to back off for a moment—not from the fear but because he dearly wants her heat and her face and her smile. “Right, sure, I mean, let’s not get into that, should we?”

  Her smile affirms, No. Let’s not, darlin’.

  Catching a second wind, he launches into his life story—a heavily sanitized version, the saintly one, telling her more than she would ever want to know about Friar Otto. “Sure thing. I know Catholics aren’t big in Texas, but then some of my best friends are Southern Baptists.” Did I really say that? Nothing’s going to stop him—he proceeds to lie the little lies, chit-chatting for several hours. Hot stuff!

  When Sally Jo—“We all have two names, don’cha know!”—hops off at Mankato, they do not exchange full names and phone numbers. Not that he doesn’t want to but he knows he shouldn’t. She just too alluring, too much of a temptation for him to handle. Same old shit, man. You’re sucked in by her look, but you ain’t looking at her! Fucking-A, you’re still Inside!

  Jared’s pulsating cannon settled back into a small staid derringer as they talked, but all throughout their innocent conversation he was nervously aware that the pent-up demons of Inside’s sexual fantasies were overrunning his best intentions to be a new type of male. Despite all his Bright Cloud insights into his relationships with Aaren and Char, he admits to himself that he really, truly wants to jump Sally Jo right here on the bus—everyone else be damned! She’s gone and he’s glad that he didn’t do anything too stupid . . . but 8867-147 knows that he’ll always have “Sally Jo from Fort Worth, Texas, riding the bus” as “sweet bucking filly” syrup to drip and ooze over a coarser set of conquest fantasies on lonely nights. Sally Jo is definintely pure prison dream stuff: “Cream Puff!” “Sweetness!” “C’mon over here, little darling, Daddy’s got something precious for you!” 8867-147 wants her only that way.

  As her full Texan scent departs his area, only then does Jared realize that he is, once again, alone. Alone: As he catches himself in the window’s reflection, he murmurs disparagingly, “Nothing’s changed, Otto. Fuck, you’re just the same old clueless shithead!” He rolls his head this way and that, trying to settle into a short nap before hitting the Twin Cities.

  “Pow, you’re dead!” His slightly opened right eye telegraphs back that a gun is being pointed at him.

  Praised be Black Intelligence! Sweet Jesus, only the protective hand of the Guardian Angel prevents a terrible mishap as the little tyke slips away, running down the aisle, shouting “Pow, you’re dead” with “Sammy, Sammy come back here” chasing him. Another skirt, a mommy this time.

  Jared closes his eyes tightly, seeks a touch of inner quiet, isolation but the kid comes back and hops into the seat Sally Jo vacated, kneels and rests his gun barrel on the chair’s back as he aims up and down the bus, pow! pow! at his mother and other passengers.

  “I’m really sorry,” she sincerely means it as she grasps and jerks the kid up and halfway out of the seat.

  “It’s okay. Let him stay if he wants.”

  “Pow! You’re dead,” right in Jared’s face. He smiles and grabs the kid playfully. “A mean cowboy, huh!”

  “Let me go! Let me go!” squealing and he breaks loose, runs down the aisle again.

  “Quite a handful, so it seems.”

  “You bet he is. I just don’t know what to do.” Exasperation, road weary.

  “Look, just let him be. The folks he bothers will chase him away. The kid’s been quiet for hours. I mean, I haven’t heard a peep out of him till now. So relax.” Then, with an invitation he had not intended, “Why don’t you sit down? I’m sure you can use some adult conversation.”

  “Oh!” It’s an ambushed, embarrassed response, laced with a trained hesitancy, a somewhat bumbling, disguised “No.” Instinctively, she just walks away after her boy, moving in that motherly way that protects her from having to give a prolonged response.

  “Sorry, folks, something wrong with the engine. We’ll have to make a stop.”

  The road beast comes to a chugging halt at a crowded truck stop like a marathon runner hitting the wall. Everyone’s caught off-guard but few don’t welcome the chance to disembark and stand on solid ground. The driver makes a beeline to the mechanics shed. It’s evident that he’s been here before.

  Jared de-buses, finds the restroom, empties, and then purchases a steaming sixteen-ounce refill. He’s always been a heavy coffee drinker but now it’s his only addiction. Prison has dried him out and right at this moment he has no craving for booze, his pre-lockup Irish heritage. “Children, children, today is Saint Patrick’s day. You all have to stay in off the street. Listen, listen! Do not for any reason go near the bars!”

  Folks walk around a bit but after half an hour most re-board. The stopover is among one of many forgettable rests, and anyway most of the passengers have brought along their preferred entertainments. Books come out, magazines, crossword puzzles. As he gets back on, he passes the kid cowboy zonked out, curled up like a cat.

  When the mom comes back and says, as if reciting a part in a play, “Is this seat taken?” he’s definitely surprised. This time he’s trying not to blush.

  “Sure,” is all he can muster. He retracts his legs and scrunches up again. In not too long a time he realizes that she’s feasting upon him, not he her. Everything is reversed. She introduces herself using her full name, “Donna Sindowski,” and then expertly manages a check-off list of questions as if he’s being inspected.

  “I’m dying to ask, what do you do?” comes fast and quick, so he knows it will all be short-lived.

  “I just got out of prison.” And since this is the first time he hears himself state that to someone, he recoils as if from buckshot.

  “Which one?” would have gone unanswered but for his reflex response.

  “Uh, I was out in, well, LA?”

  “You mean Lompoc?”

  “Where?”

  “Lompoc, the federal lock-up. Or were you in a state prison, San Quentin or somewhere?”

  “How do you know . . . ?”

  She feels flushed out. She was simply testing his macho posturing, as more guys than she can count like to pretend they’re an ex-con just to impress her. Shoe’s on the other foot here— she’s nabbed knowing more than most do about prisons. Who does he think I am?

  Direct attack: “You’re faking it, aren’t you?”

  “No, no . . . ,” sounding sincere, shaking his head slightly, “but it’s all too involved.”

  Since he’s entangled in his own thick web of lies, he doesn’t take after her as she fears.

  Before it all stalls out and dies, Jared asks, “Okay. What do you do?”

  “Look, it’s okay,” and she begins to straighten out as if to leave.

  “No—aw, fuck it!”

  Oddly, it seems, cued by that profanation, she settles back down. This is the word breathed as only prisoners do, so casually in public. She knows the jargon. “Fuck it!” and kicking ass, and jamming any round hole available.

  “It’s okay,” she soothes, “I just know too many people who are doing time.”

  “Really?”

  Then quiet. What to make of this?

  “The boy and me, we were just down at Leavenworth. My ex is doing two years for a dope deal.”

  He wants to say, “No kidding?” but just grunts, which conveys, “That’s cool, I understand.”

  “So.”

  “So.” They share a nervous laugh.

  “So,” she says, “what do you do, I mean, when you’re not a professional criminal . . . or are you?”

  “The worst kind, lady, so beware, I was in for fucking with the draft.”

  “I know some guys who did that. Where are you from?”

  “Minneapolis. The Twin Cities.”

  “Oh.”

  �
��You?”

  “Across the border.” Humorously, he knows she means “Wisconsin.”

  “Hey, we might have friends in common?” he says.

  “Probably.” But it’s soon clear that neither wants to hoe that row.

  “I’m a teacher. At least I was. A theologian at that. Quite a riot, eh?”

  “Sounds awfully brainy to me.”

  “Can be.”

  Casually she reaches into her purse, pulls out a squat travelling bottle of Jack Daniels.

  “Want a swig?”

  “Naw.”

  “No?”

  “Okay. Sure. Why not? It’s been awhile. Just drop some in my cup.”

  As he sips, he finally gets her. Knows her game. She must have radar. Must’ve known, from all those others she’s known once, out from the bars, not the stools but the real things: the Inside bars.

  In this way Jared is welcomed home. Laid and fucked silly in a signless motel in downtown Saint Paul. Taken by the hand and led to her car, a battered old Rambler waiting, two parking tickets secured by rusty wipers. She leaves the kid sleeping in the back seat. Jared’s not thinking now about that. She knows it’s a bit warm but as safe as anywhere for the boy. Won’t take long, she giggles to herself. She knows Jared’s ready to gush, hopes that he can hold it till she’s ready. Most definitely she doesn’t want to take this one back to her house. Not because of its poverty or any sympathy it would evoke, but because it’s her spot and she doesn’t want to meet him on her spot.

  The motel’s just across the street from the bus depot, a friendly place she remembers. She knows that he’ll have enough for the place. Got it from his get-up that he hasn’t blown much. He confirmed her analysis when he faltered at taking a swig. She assessed, Not a boozer. Hasn’t been laid.

  In truth, Donna is being “a nice girl.” She no longer says, “I’m a nice girl.” She used to but stopped that one too many bus rides back. Now she doesn’t care to say anything, she just wants his juice. She knows he has juice.

  Juice Jared does have. Feeling a bit more virginal than he’d like, he wonders if it’s all on ice, freezer burned, in need of more than hot water. Right now, with her, it’s unlike ever before. He’s unlike ever before.

  When she leaves the kid across the street, at the same time Jared Jennings crawls into the car’s trunk with 8867-147 and other howling demons from the Ride, from the Bright Cloud, and from behind the monastery walls, all come out to claim their due. The trunked Jared is snoring away, dreamlessly, as she wraps herself around him, climbs on him standing, his cock almost breaking through his zipper, kisses that are gulps and gasps and hands like tentacles latching on and sucking soft flesh—no words, lots of grunts from him, she moans, orgasmic shivers. Fucking-A! Fucking-A!

  He comes at her like a man falling down, totally forgetting how to lie down gently by a lady. All that his Inside cock has known for too, too long now is his hand—“Five against one!”—the herky-jerky of masturbation. “Two, three times a day, Jesus, who’s counting?” It sustained him in the Joint but it also cursed and accustomed him to false flesh. The moist tingle of pussy-lips only came to him through mental tricks in his dreams. It was a lust unfailingly aroused by synapses in his head and gateways of hormones being unloosed, actions happening in artificial time, seeing himself like a cow being artificially inseminated—always he had that cock-dampening thought, seeing the long-gloved farmer stick his hand, then his elbow, Jesus fucking-A Christ his whole arm! up the cow’s ass. “It’s science,” an Ag major classmate once stated proudly. “You may be a fucking rich farmer, but man you won’t catch me butt-humping cows even for a million bucks!”

  Pathetically, Jared did. He humped his own cow, sticking his hand up his own ass, reaching for those dam-break prostrate glands, and triumphantly squeezing some sperm out of his cuntless dick.

  Despite his growling desire, in this effulgent moment of sensual resurrection, even her touch feels uncomfortable. He’s hypersensitive. It takes herculean strength to accept the pleasure of her smooth motion over his cock, her kiss and lick of him, her very practiced and wonderful rub of creamy soft teats, all that he so, so wants to relish as she floats above him. Donna is a redhead who sways and bops, almost dancing as she rides him. Rosy cheeks and soft-cushion eyes and the sweet impression of cheap perfume, all of which, all these minute effects at this time are flip-out hallucinogens and monster aphrodisiacs for him.

  She moves with the patience of a nurse, somehow pulling pleasure from his plasticized self. “C’mon Big Man let me have it! Let me feel it!” And it isn’t just his cock she’s pleading for, a cock now as hard as the piston rod the bus threw—the broken rod he now blesses for the time it has given them—it is him, not it, and he knows that she knows.

  Her fangs pierce and suck him. Her snake-tongue steals heat from his heart. For she knows that he is buried within several folds of his self, but from experience she also knows where he has it hidden.

  He knows it is hidden and he doesn’t want to give it up. He stashed it there after the first few months Inside. Secreted and locked it up as a virgin stashes herself when given in marriage rather than being married by choice. That it which is her but which she always protects, and even when she is eighty she will give only and ever to a man she really loves—or else never to anyone.

  Big Man! How she wants this juice, craves it, is addicted to her suck upon him, feeling him vulnerably sweet like her son now asleep, quietly dreaming. She needs his juice. Without doubt, she knows she’s woman enough to handle it, can easily handle it. This is a fact that Donna Sindowski knows because she knows that he needs her more than he could ever fathom—this is a truth about ex-cons that she knows only too well.

  Donna knows because when this first happened back five years with Ron, just after his first parole, it had scared her. He was giving what she didn’t know she should take, and he almost killed her—not physically but with savaging emotions. One time, she ran from the house half-clothed into the backyard maniacally dancing with a late spring snow flurry. But now she knows better how to handle the Big Man.

  Oh, she wants it and she’s getting it! Donna Sindowski wants it, wants it, wants it. She’s on the prowl, baying at the moon, riding high on her broomstick—his cock!—knowing that she’s going to get it all, every last drop. Jared just can’t stop her.

  Merciful goddess, she tenders him, holds him, lets him cry, bite her, grab at her shoulders as if to wrench one of them free. She knows his thirst, the gut heave that desires to erupt and splatter all over her. Knows that he’s hauling buckets of sperm, wants to back up the truck and overwhelm her with sperm. Lovingly she eats him and licks him and sucks him and slides upon him until they’re both raw. Absolutely crazy, murderer, mauler, madman, mystic, he comes to her in forms and guises and flashes and evaporations. Blessedly, she comes right back at him. Laughing, screaming, while from next-door comes thumping, yelling, “Quiet down in there, goddamn it!” Alas! She wins. He cannot keep it, at least not keep all of it.

  In time, they conclude with the stale courtesy, “Was it good for you, too?”

  When it comes, car trunk Jared wakes and 8867-147 and cohorts dissipate into the cool knowing that he never wants to see her again—that Donna must be obliterated and only, only Sally Jo remembered. That if he will perchance ever see her on the streets of the Cities, he must pass by her like a blind man. For she’s come and she’s taken more than sex. She’s taken a piece of his imprisonment: one part yell, one part fury, a dash of the crazy, a rattle of chains and a fistful of him dying. She even gets more than she’s ever gotten before—she sucks in, holds her breath as if smoking dope, swallows a bit of smoke from the Bright Cloud. Ah! She is totally blissed out—zoned and zonked!

  But neither can nor wants to fall asleep.

  “We can’t stay here.”

  “Maybe you can get your son to sleep on the floor?” A tinge sadly, he knows that he wants her to say no.

  She rises, star
ts to dress. “You stay. You’ve paid for the room, after all,” comes on a twitter, a high school cheerleader giggle. With haste, she leaves as she should, with a whispered, “Welcome home!”

  Welcome home!