by Jack Cady
Should have done more. Could have been an architect. But, a day’s shift of driving sends a guy home tired. The pay was okay, it became easier to work than think.
Jill hung out at little theater, helped paint sets. Caught an occasional walk on. Never really studied. She depended on a scant and untrained talent.
It came to me, as I wore out brakes by the truckload, that something magical happened in the streets of San Francisco. Tons and tons of people, lots of whom didn’t even speak English, managed to get along and not kill each other.
They fought traffic that ran like demented weapons. Hysteria should, and maybe did, lie just beneath the surface, but mass murder didn’t happen.
What did happen is the skyline changed. The city grew upward, suburbs expanded, and craziness of a different sort lurked on every corner. Too many people, too much money, and too much desperation to make the rent. And, yet, no mass murder. Murder, when it happened, remained personal, husbands and wives, or jealous lovers.
In that time I saw the old lady twice, but I saw some other people first, because it turned out that the old lady was only one of several. On Geary Street, among lots of old men walking their dogs, there was one old man who had a three-legged mutt. It looked like a weiner dog crossed with a sick hamster. The man dressed in wool suit and top coat on the sunniest days. His face was cratered and twisted, the way sick men, and addicts, and alkies get in the last stages. He slowly limped in one direction while his dog limped in the other. They made a crooked pattern of movement along the sidewalks. One time, as I stopped to pick up passengers, I heard the guy say, “Chaos, stay!” The dog did not sit, but it stood motionless.
And there were other old men and women. I learned to spot them. Old people were pretty much everywhere, and lots of them had companion dogs. Most all of them were perfectly normal. Perfectly nice.
Occasionally, though, unusual ones showed up. Always with a mangy mutt. Always dressed against cold, as if the slightest San Francisco mist would blow right through them. For one three-month period I actually held my own investigation, kind of tracked them down. One dog was named Despair. The other names were worse.
So I met the old lady two more times. The first time was in a wretched little park sandwiched between California Street and a nowhere lane of forgotten asphalt. Jill was with me, and it had been a lot of years since Jill met the old lady. Jill understood what I did not.
“She’s not real. No one that old walks around. Dogs don’t live this long. She’s a hallucination.” Sometimes Jill’s brand of crazy comes up with truthful stuff. This time, her smooth forehead wrinkled with something that wasn’t exactly fear, but surely wasn’t confidence. Still, she tugged me forward. I tugged back. She won.
“Are you real?” she asked the lady. “If you are, then am I? Why are we here, and doing this?”
I expected Jill to ask after the Meaning of Life, but she must have missed a cue. Jill is narrow and leggy, very good-looking, and she stood hand on hip like a cowgirl about to grab a shootin’ iron. Lousy acting. Jill was still Jill.
“I serve a sentence,” the lady whispered, “but it’s kind of you to ask.” At her feet the dog seemed poised for attack.
“Sentence? Like in jail?”
“That’s a fair description,” the old lady said. She wiggled the leash, looked down at the dog, and tried to smile. Her face was so twisted the smile turned out crooked. “I keep Torment leashed. There’s power in that, but not a power anybody would want.”
“But are you real?” Jill can be a genuine pain when she sets her head on something.
“Torment is real,” the old lady said. “Once in awhile he gets off leash. Perhaps you’re still too young to understand.”
At the time, Jill was pushing forty. Old enough to play Shakespearian tragedy. Unskilled though, and so she wasn’t gonna.
“When he gets off-leash I get a year added to my sentence,” the old lady said. “Don’t ask how. I don’t know.”
“How long are you in for?” Dumb question, but I felt I had to say something before Jill stole the whole scene.
“In a few years the twentieth century will pass,” the old lady murmured. “If he stays on leash for a few more years….” She seemed taken with a chill, or maybe she figured she’d said too much.
“Why?”
“You don’t want to know,” she told me. “If you ever do know, then you may walk for a century. She wiggled the leash. The dog clicked its worn teeth, made that fire-rushing noise.
“One does get weary,” she whispered, “tired of being needed. And now we must go.”
She moved away most slowly. I thought to follow. Jill stopped me. “Epiphany,” she said, “don’t screw up the dramatic moment.” I didn’t know what she meant, and neither did she. Or maybe she did. She seemed scared.
Something came between us after that. Jill grew remote. We still walked sunny streets. We still strolled the parks on Sundays. We still embraced, but distantly. I knew that a gulf was opening between us, partly because my dreams caused sadness.
I dreamed night after night of irrigation crashing white spume beneath sun. I dreamed of tall buildings, naked and needing greenery, ferns, trees. I dreamed I could fly, could cast growing things across bare landscapes, turn deserts into gardens.
I quit driving bus, and drove cabs. It came to me that I was no longer young. The little Japanese garden in the rear of our apartment turned scruffy. No matter how much attention I gave it, something went wrong. Somehow or other, my eyes had lost their ability to judge proportions. The garden looked like it stepped fresh from the pages of Sunset magazine, something rubber-stamped.
In other cities across the country there were riots, bombings of abortion clincs, assassinations. I found myself muttering, “Chaos must have gotten off leash.” The minute I said that to myself, I knew it must be true.
And, almost right away, some guy proved to me it was true. The fare wanted a cab from airport to business district, and his destination stood near that park I’d landscaped so many years ago. A crippled old man led a three-legged wiener dog between green hills of grass. My passenger muttered to himself. I said “What?” He said, “How in hell did that man get here, all the way from Miami?”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m not sure of much these days,” the guy said, and he was grim. “But I’m damned sure I saw that man and mutt in Florida.”
“Or else you saw a ghost?” I just suggested it; sort of had to suggest it.
“Could be,” the guy said. “What the hell do I know?” He looked ahead, searching for his address, and became all business.
Jill decided that actors were troubled people, and directors were saints. She stopped the walkons, and turned motherly. Her little theater group depended on her for counsel, and for suggestions on set design.
Jill said, telling of the group, “If everyone would do exactly as I say, they would all be happy.” … quite a mouthful, but the group put up with it. They allowed her to direct a farce. It wasn’t a good production, but it wasn’t awful.
“You really shouldn’t ask,” the old lady told me on the last time we met. “I keep Torment leashed. I’m a protector of dreams.”
She stood shivering beneath noonday sun, her fur jacket wrapped tightly over the velvet dress. Along the busy sidewalk people passed intent on business, or lunch, or a love affair… people intent on raising kids, or scoring a high; all the things that people do. The dog clicked its worn teeth.
“And those other dogs, Chaos, and Despair? Those old men?”
“They, too,” she said. Those old men pay their debts. Sometimes they fail. Their charge, their creature, runs loose.”
“Debts?”
“We pay for our failed dreams,” she whispered. “Once in the long ago I wished to be a dancer. I suppose I did not want it enough to make it happen.” Sorrow, like no sorrow I have yet known lay in that whisper. It was the sorrow of lost years, failed ambitions, paths taken because they were, if nothing e
lse, easy enough, and practical. Sorrow.
“And so we rein in foul creatures. We try to protect the dreams of others.” She tugged at the leash, turned away, and entered the hurrying crowd only to disappear like blown mist.
I’m not going to tell Jill about that. I’n not going to tell Jill that yesterday I saw Torment, still on leash. But this time an old man, dressed in thin robe beneath heavy greatcoat, was in charge. Our old lady’s sentence has completed.
No, I won’t put that kind of fear before Jill’s eyes. It’s bad enough that she frets over me these days, and there’s not much she can do. She joins in a drink before dinner, or maybe a couple of them. They blunt whatever needs blunting.
Because no matter what I do, I know that one of these days an old man, or an old woman, will step into my cab. They will have a creature named Sorrow on leash. When they leave the cab, Sorrow will remain. So will the leash.
JEREMIAH
At the meeting of two secondary roads, Hell-Fer-Certain Church stands like faded rag-tags left over from a cosmic yard sale. This once quiet country church, with a single bell in the steeple, has virginal white paint decorated with psychedelic shades of pink and orange and green; those colors mixing with hard yellows and blues positive as bullhorns. For a short time in the past this abandoned church was used by a commune.
In the tower beside the cracked bell dangles a loudspeaker that once broadcast rock music, or called faithful flower-folk to seek renunciation of a world too weird for young imaginings. Then the speaker died, insulation burned away, the whole business one gigantic short circuit as sea wind wailed across the wires.
And the vivid paint, itself, faded before the wind and eternal rain that washes this northwest Washington coast. Those of us who once congregated at the church have dispersed, some to cemeteries to doze among worms, some to board rooms of corporations. And some, of course, have stayed in the neighborhood, too inept, or stoned, or unimaginative to leave; although in dark and mist-ridden hours we sometimes recall young dreams.
Then, lately, the church added one more perturbed voice to its long history. A new preacher drifted here from dingy urban streets. In the uncut grass of the front yard a reader-board began carrying message. It advised passersby to atone, although around here folks show little in the way of serious transgression. They cheat at cards, sometimes, or drive drunk, or sleep with their neighbor’s wives or husbands; and most shoot deer out of season. On the grand scale of things worth atoning, they don’t have much to offer.
But the reader-board insisted that, without atonement, the wages of sin are one-way tickets to a medieval hell, ghastly, complete, and decorated with every anguish imagined by demonic zeal; seas of endless fire, the howl of demons, sacramental violence in the hands of an angry God.
And fire, we find — be it sacramental or not — has become part of our story.
On Sundays the new preacher stood in the doorway. Jeremiah is as faded as the faded paint on his church. His black suit and string tie are frayed, his white shirts are the only white shirts left in the county, and his sod-busting shoe tops are barely brushed by frayed cuffs of pants a bit too short, having been ‘taken up’ a time or two. He needed no loudspeaker or bullhorn as he stood preaching in the wind. When it comes to messages like “Woe Betide” Jeremiah had the appearance, vision, and voice of an old time prophet predicting celestial flames and wails of lost souls — no amplification needed.
……
There are, in this valley, some who view Jeremiah and sneer. A few others value Sunday morning services. Many are too busy or drunk to care. Some are outright displeased. Rather than tell all opinions about Jeremiah, or lack of them, a cross-section of comments by some of the valley’s main players seems appropriate:
Mac, skinny, balding, and fiftyish, runs Mac’s Bar and was first to see Jeremiah arrive: “As long as he stays on his side of the road I treasure the jerk. There’s a certain amusement factor.”
Debbie, who is an artist, a barfly, a fading beauty, and thoughtful: “I’ve tried a lot of this-and-that in my time, but I never molested a preacher. Have I been missing something?”
Pop, gray and wiry and always sober, is a small-time pool and poker hustler: “Seems like he works purty hard for blamed little in the collection plate.”
Sarah’s religious beliefs, like her tie-dyed clothes, have followed currents of popular style. Through the years she has embraced Hari Krishna, the Pope, Buddha, Sidhartha, Mohammed, and Karl Jung, while mostly wearing mother Hubbard styles. “It’s the Lord’s blessing has sent Jeremiah to us. Praise the Lord. Praise him!”
……
Not many people live here anymore. One of the secondary roads that meet at the church corner leads up from the sea. At the harbor are abandoned docks and fishing sheds where ghosts drift through fog-ridden afternoons. The buildings are huge, like a town abandoned by giants. Ghosts glide through mist, whisper like voices of mist, fade into mist when approached. We’ve gotten used to them. The ghosts threaten no one, except they seem so sad, the sadness of ghosts.
The other road leads through a flat valley where empty farmhouses lean into sea winds that rumble from the western coast. The houses are ramshackle. Shakes on roofs have blown away, and broken windows welcome the scouring wind. They are, themselves, ghosts; ghost houses that daily remind us of mournful matters; symbols of abandonment and failed plans.
What was once a valley of small dairy farms has been purchased farm-by-farm, and built into one huge corporation farm worked by only a few men. Our farms once had names: River View, Heather Hill, and a dozen others.
Now, cattle are bred, no longer for milk, but as blocks of meat. The valley has become a source of supply for a hamburger kingdom, a franchise that ships product to fast food joints in Seattle, Yokohama, and maybe, even, Beirut. The cattle, well adapted to wind that roughs their heavy coats, grow thick on hormones and valley grass. Then they are trucked to slaughter.
Across the road from Hell-Fer-Certain stands an old post office little larger than a postage stamp. Weathered benches in front of the post office serve loafers, or people waiting for a bus to Seattle. A country store stands next to the post office. Mac’s Bar stands next the store. If you visit the bar on a Saturday or Sunday night you’ll swear this valley holds every old pickup truck in the world. People congregate at the bar to forget they are survivors of a failed place. No one farms anymore. No one fishes.
One important thing happens on Sunday night, and it draws the Sunday crowd. Cattle get restless as headlights and marker lights of trucks appear on two-lane macadam. The trucks, twenty or more, arrive in groups of two or three. They pull possum-belly trailers built like double-deckers so as to haul more beef. The truckers will not load live cattle until Monday morning, but by Sunday night the cattle already know something stinks. The beasts become uneasy. The cattle, bred for meat and not for brains, still have survival instincts. The herds cluster together, each beast jostling toward the middle of the herd where there is an illusion of safety. Bawling carries on the winds. The entire valley fills with sounds of terror.
Folks swear it’s Jeremiah’s preaching riles the cattle, but we know it isn’t so. As trucks roll in, Sunday nights turn into Jeremiah’s busy time. He stands before Hell-Fer-Certain and preaches above the wind. His string tie flutters like a banner, and his white and uncut hair is whirled by wind that carries the bawling of bovine fear.
With no place to go, and a twelve hour layover, truck drivers drift to the bar and buy rounds. They’re good enough lads, but they have steady employment and that gets resented. They generally come through the doorway of Mac’s bent like fishhooks beneath the flood of prophecy coming from across the road. Jeremiah puts the fear of God in them. Plus, truck driving builds a mighty thirst in a man. It’s that combination causes them to stand so many drinks.
……
This, then, is the place we live. It is not the best place, not the worst, but it’s ours; a small and slightly drunken spot on the Lord’s gre
en earth. It was never, until Jeremiah and Mac got into it, a place where anything titanic seemed likely. Then Jeremiah confounded Mac’s hopes. He crossed the road.
……
It began on one of those rare August afternoons when mist blows away, sun covers the valley grass, and hides of cattle turn glossy with light. The macadam road dries from wet black to luminous gray. A few early drinkers stay away from Mac’s, vowing not to get fuzzy until the return of ugly weather.
Mac busied himself stocking beer cases behind his polished oak bar. Polished mirrors behind the bar reflected a clutter of chairs and tables around a small dance floor. The mirrors pictured colorful beer signs, brushed pool tables, dart boards, and restroom doors that in early afternoons stand open to air out the stench of disinfectant. Either a reflection in the mirrors, or a silhouette in the sun-brightened doorway caused Mac to look up.
“Praise the Lord,” said the silhouette. Then Jeremiah moved out of sunlight and into the shadow of the bar.
“All I needed,” Mac said as if talking to himself, “was…” and he squinted at Jeremiah, “this,” and he squinted harder. Mac’s balding dome shone like a small light in the shadowed bar. Although he’s thin, he’s muscular. At the time most of the working muscles were in his jaw. “You’re a bad dream,” Mac told Jeremiah. “You’re the butt end of a bad joke. You’re turnip pie. You’re first cousin to a used-car salesman, and what’s worse, you’re in my bar.”
Jeremiah looked around the joint which stood empty except for Debbie, the artist-barfly. Debbie looked Jeremiah over with her blue and smiling eyes, brushed long hair back with one hand, and gave a practiced and seductive smile that went nowhere; although it would have worked on a truck driver.
“A customer is a customer,” Jeremiah said, and he did not sound particularly righteous. “And it appears that you could use one.” He stepped to the bar like a man with experience. “Soft drink,” he said. “Water chaser.” Seen beneath bar light, Jeremiah turned from a cartoon preacher into a real person. His face looked older than his body. His hair, not silver but white, hung beside wrinkled cheeks, pouchy eyelids, and a mouth that sagged a little on the right side; a mouth that had preached too many adjectives, or else the mouth of a man who had suffered a slight stroke. He looked at Debbie. “A woman as well found as yourself could make a success if she cleaned up her act.” Jeremiah commandeered a barstool, pushed a dollar onto the bar, and sat.