Girl With Curious Hair

by David Foster Wallace

  They’re passed by a chicken truck in a tremendous hurry. Its sides are like the sides of a crate. Its passage is a spray of feed and feathers against DeHaven’s windshield. The action of the homemade wipers (furious) sends the clown’s redly pulsing nose all the way inside the crack between glass and instrumentation. The nose falls completely out of anybody’s notice, resting somewhere inside the dash.

  Our six in turn pass an enormous old farmer who’s hitchhiking on the barely-there shoulder of the county road. You can see his old harvester disabled and listing tiredly to starboard in the waving corn behind him. On the moving car’s other side, the very tops of the two giant arches glint, just visible, inclined like a child’s severe eyebrows just over the countertop line between land and the baby-blue iris of a sky that looks down all day at food. J.D. is the first to make out the arches’ tops—give that man a cigar, he smiles—because the other five are all looking at the big farmer, hitching, motionless, a statue rushing toward them. He’s huge; his thumb casts a shadow. The malevolent clown’s car sprays him with gravel.

  “Not enough room for a farmer that big in here, dude,” DeHaven says.

  “You don’t usually see big old men,” D.L. says speculatively. “Big men seem to die young. Have you seen many big old men? It’s rare. Usually they die.”

  This is kind of thoughtless. Both Steelritters are pretty big. So’s Mark Nechtr.

  DeHaven uses maybe two fingers to turn the car left, his other white hand scanning the FM dial. The car moans on the turn. A bit more of the giant blond arches appears, now dead ahead, still distant but revealing more of themselves, the Nordic eyebrows spreading, getting less severe, as the jacked-up car moves toward them. The intersection’s road sign had said 2000W. All roads seem to be identified only by numbers and directions out here in the country. J.D. coughs richly. The car’s six panes of glass are still speckled with some surviving but still motionless little insects—unkilled, Mark figures, killing one, because they make the killing uninteresting, plus loathsome.

  A neglected fact is that a black line—obsidian, really—appeared when they turned truly West on straight-shot 2000W. These are possible storm clouds. They appear as a Semitic hairline above the golden brows.

  In a development, DeHaven’s gloved fingers have plucked from the tides of daytime static the FM avatar of that same Wonderful WILL station, now deeply into a mid-morning Pentecostal old-time gospel hour. The preacher—you can tell he’s a charismatic, a Revivalist, because he can do to English what the Swiss can do to French: every syllable gathers to itself a breathy suffix—the preacher addresses himself to the issues of eyes and motes and beams. Alludes to the seasons that inform rural spirituality. Makes reference to tight cycles of life, passage, death, passage, life. He holds a monotonic high-C idiot note throughout, repeating one or two very simple themes. The high steady whine and breath ring wincingly against the sleep-deprived tuning forks of everybody in the car except Magda, who nightly sleeps, unmedicated, the sleep of the dead. The only variation at all is in the preacher’s audience-response; he repeats each epithet three times. His tone is almost frantically laconic, if that makes sense. Mark cops an image of Camus on speed.

  J.D. Steelritter, whose own spirits now vary inversely with the car’s distance from the still-distant but at least now visible and spreading arches, from the idea of the revel beneath them, tries absently to recall where and how he hired these particular troublesome, late-to-arrive kids, as children. Eberhardt he remembers spotting as he’d toured, with a guide, the gutted ruins of Ambrose’s Ocean City Park. She’d been with her father, a really solid, sturdy-looking man, a Volvo of a man, in a crew cut, muscular under a black satin jacket whose back showed a blue Southeast Asia encircled by a red Kekuléan serpent, sucking at its own sharp tail, with the white legend I DIED THERE below. It was the way she touched the melted lurid shell of the ruined Funhouse’s Fat May, palm to its big sagged forehead, a tiny mother with a giant fevered child, that had excited J.D.—here was a kid at her gentlest with the luridly disclosed. The father had proffered his amputee’s hook as J.D. introduced himself. Eberhardt’d been a well-developed, attractive kid. The Sternberg kid he couldn’t remember just where he picked that kid up, or why, though he remembers all too well the metal twitter of his mother’s voice, the way she kept fucking with the kid’s hair and clothes, smoothing him into something seamless and false after J.D.’s time and care had gone into fashioning him as the kind of sad, rumpled kid who orders from intercoms and then eats while he plays.

  “I see arches!” D.L. sings out.

  The odometer gets extremely close to rolling all the way over.

  “Varoom,” says DeHaven, watching the dash’s numbers. Then he sees something else.

  The arches tumesce with maddening slowness, and above the golden rainbows the West’s black line has grown to a broad smear. Possibility of rain.

  DeHaven’s being passed again, this time by a cylindrical fuel truck positively flying toward Collision. Its big silver tube of a rig veers and falls in ahead, wobbling from side to side, red signs on its ass advocating flammable caution and telling exactly how many feet long the thing is. It recedes.

  One reason it recedes so quickly is because DeHaven has slowed a bit, because the dashboard’s oil light’s little red eye is now on. This is a pretty dreadful development. D.L. sees the red, too. J.D. doesn’t. But D.L. doesn’t say anything about it to anyone in the car. Why not? Why not? Maybe she likes DeHaven Steelritter, since he’s told her about his atonal ambition. You’d have thought ambition like that would sound absurd, exiting the red mouth of a clown. But it didn’t, somehow. DeHaven and D.L. now share a bit of a sidelong look that Magda Ambrose-Gatz sees, using the rear-view from the rear. The car seems to roar even more at this new, slightly lower speed.

  J.D., even from shotgun, can see the solid line of the rural highway’s broken line break up a bit, now.

  “Thump it, kid. We’re late. What are you doing? We’re aiming for noon at the very outside I said. Here, I know. Take ’em in from the North. We’ll shave ten minutes. But thump it. Pedal, metal. Go.” He runs both hands through his hair, which is unaffected by hands.

  DeHaven turns abruptly right onto something dismally tiny and shoulderless, something called 2000N that looks to Mark almost freshly invented: new tar and mint-white gravel that clatters maniacally on their big sticky tires and hot wells. The big twinned arches reestablish themselves, after a clump of wind-breaking trees, out Mark’s own window. He sees them, not surprisingly, as an initial.

  Sternberg’s voice, shrill and barely controlled: “We’re going North?”

  “Pop’s going to bring you guys in from the Northeast, to save time,” DeHaven says, eyeing the red oil light. “Whole South part of Collision’s fucking mobbed. Traffic beyond belief. Fuel trucks, chicken trucks, Coke trucks, tourists, concessions, meat trucks, blood trucks. You name it.”

  The car seems to roar louder the slower it goes. Sternberg thinks the roar plus the clatter of gravel might drive him mad.

  D.L. sniffs. “This car is louder than any Datsun.”

  “What is this with you and Datsuns?” DeHaven says, shooting his father a sidelong look and again removing his sweaty wig. Mark looks to J.D., but Steelritter seems to have something on his mind.

  “Datsuns are all hype,” DeHaven continues—looking, once again, different and abrupt. “Chickenshit engines. Plastic and alloys. No steel. No soul. And you have to like take the whole engine apart to get at anything to fix it if it breaks down. Which it does. They’re cars for what do you call them Yuffies.”

  “I think you mean Yuppies,” Mark says.

  “I mean Yuffies, man. Young Urban Foppish Farts, is what we call them out here. Yuppies without the taste for quality that’s maybe a Yuppie’s one redeeming quality. We’ve heard about Yuppies and Yuffies. Illinois isn’t another planet, man.”

  And for the first time Mark can hear a Midwestern twang in DeHaven’s sullen voice.
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  “Not to mention even credit cards, in terms of young fartness,” J.D. says. “You all none of you have one lousy credit card? That’s what Nola said, over at Avis.”

  “Credit cards aren’t toys,” Sternberg says loudly. Assertively. This can be explained very briefly. Sternberg’s emotional state is now officially one of panic. And the panic is on top of the claustrophobia. Source of panic: the car’s jouncing, and the almost prosthetically firm push of Magda’s right breast—they’re that close together—have given him the sort of erection that laughs at the restraining capacity of gabardine the way a hangover laughs at aspirin.

  “Credit cards aren’t toys, to be rushed right out and bought and played around with,” he says aggressively, but with a kind of deliberate calm and adult gravity, the sort of tone you use when grandparents ask about plans for the future.

  “We have use of my father-in-law’s Visa card,” D.L. says.

  “But we pay the bill when it comes,” adds Mark.

  “Credit cards need to be thought about,” Sternberg insists, hunched, hand a little too casual over his tented lap. Mark sees the anomaly in the gabardine, and Magda seems diplomatically to be avoiding looking down at all. Sternberg closes his good eye, looks deeply within, and battles all-out with an autonomic function that has always defied his will. And obversely. Basically, of course, what he tries to do is sublimate, and he does this the best way kids who don’t do sports or abstract oils or major CNS depressants know how.

  “Credit is political,” he pronounces. “It’s a tool of the elite. You use credit without thinking, you’re unthinkingly endorsing a status quo.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” groans DeHaven—also, interestingly, sublimating his fear of a different mechanical function, one out of his control. “Another one of these politically correct ones, Pop. We’ve had it to here with this correctness shit from alumni, the past few days.”

  “Ease off, boy.”

  DeHaven produces a blank dime of a frown, turns a half-human and half-Kabuki cheek to Sternberg’s tight corner. “You are one of those correct ones, aren’t you. Do you pronounce ‘Nicaragua’ without any consonants? Pronounce ‘Nicaragua’ for us.”

  “I told you to leave the kid alone, shitspeck.”

  In a development that turns out to be pretty dramatic, Mark brings the Ziploc bag (which he didn’t forget and leave in the lounge, which gives one pause) out of his complex surgeon’s shirt. J.D. sniffs the interior’s air almost immediately. The blackness to their left, West, now covers a good half the sky, a lid over something set just on simmer. It could be his imagination, since he’s pretty intent on what he’s holding, but Magda seems to be looking at Mark with a kind of orange horror. As if in response to something dire.

  “And of course that’s a zit on your forehead, dude. What is that sumac shit? Can bet you won’t be in the front row when they start shooting the thing, am I right?”

  “Where do you live,” Magda says.

  Mark looks at her, half-confused. “Baltimore. North Baltimore. Hunt Valley.”

  She opens her mouth slightly.

  “Everything’s got political implications, for crying out loud,” a disgusted J.D. aims loudly sort of halfway between DeHaven, who’s wanting to kick somebody’s ass on general rural principles, and Sternberg, who’s hunched in his corner, sublimating like mad.

  “Not anymore,” D.L. disagrees firmly.

  “Amen and varoom.” DeHaven’s grin becomes voluntary.

  Sternberg, right on the edge, sees Mark’s Ziploc, too. Magda has gone a bit yellow. Ideas now blow through Sternberg’s high-pressure sleep-deprived head like chaff, a kind of beveled lattice of roses, oil, bodies, amber, sumac, hamburger, shit, Nechtr, Magda, sex, erections, will, and, yes, politics.

  “You’re full of it, Drew,” Sternberg says. “Mr. Steelritter is right. Politics is everywhere. Except thank God in stuff like popular culture. That’s why entertainment’s so important. That’s why TV’s the total balls. When it’s vapid. Like it’s meant to be. Screw PBS. Right, Mr. Steelritter?”

  “It is pretty much the only escape,” Mark agrees quietly.

  There are nods from everyone but J.D. and Magda. DeHaven has slowed the malevolent car a bit further.

  J.D. turns, smoking, shaking his fine head, disgusted. “I don’t know who of you’s more full of what, kid. TV’s not political? What about that ‘Hawaii Five-O’ Nola said you two were watching all slack-jawed, so taken in you weren’t even blinking?” Hiking an elbow onto the front seat’s back to level a centered face and heavy cigar-supporting lip at Sternberg and Nechtr. “You saying there’s no politics going on on that show?”

  The boys’ response is immediate and unanimous and negative.

  “Pure entertainment.”

  “Like a blanket so old it’s falling apart. Soothing.”

  “Like blowing bubbles with your saliva. Mindless. Fun just for the sake of fun.”

  “Especially in reruns, syndication, that you’ve seen before,” Sternberg says, into it, feeling, feeling disembodied, other, flaccid. “Incredibly comforting. You know just how the universe is going to be for the next hour. Totally secure. Detached but connected. A womb with a view.”

  Steelritter just cannot believe the naïveté of these cynical kids. He’d trade looks with the older flight attendant in the rearview if D.L.’s slender head weren’t in the way. D.L. and DeHaven are watching the odometer finally roll all the way over. It’s exciting and gorgeous. There’s a slot-machine feel about it, which they share, together, and know they share it. The oil light has settled into a kind of stuttered flicker, which is even more dreadful, if you know your oil.

  “I cannot believe these kids today,” says J.D. “ ‘Hawaii Five-O’ is not political? We’re talking about the same show? The show that ran from ’65 to ’73? That had helicopter imagery in every episode? Helicopters full of wooden-faced, purposeful white guys in the kinds of business suits capitalism’s all about? White guys flying around in helicopters restoring order to this oriental island that can’t seem to govern itself, that’s overrun with violent and bad and indigenous Orientals? The cop show where all the head guys are white and all their lieutenants are good Orientals in suits, and they all cooperate and co-prosper shooting at the bad Orientals out of helicopters? With this constant reference all the time to a ‘Mainland’ that seems close to the island and in peril from the island’s disorder and in need of what’s the word immunization, but which calls Jack Lord’s every shot, and justifies all the shooting of natives out of helicopters?”

  “Are you trying to draw a Vietnam parallel?” Mark asks.

  Disgust and disbelief wrestle for control of J.D.’s big face. “Christ, you poor shitspeck, that show was the most blatant piece of politics ever,” he says, imagining just how the Reunion will be, pegging his thick Rothschild, feeling at a crinkling pocket, trying to decide between a petal and a slim Dutch Master.

  “He might have an idea there,” says Sternberg to Nechtr. “Like those Clint Eastwood Westerns, with the Man with the Gun called back from the Wilderness to save the same threatened Community that out of fear chased him into the Wilderness in the first place?”

  “The Deliverer-Hero, with a Weapon, on a Horse?” says Mark.

  “The tough but loving tutor who tempers him like fine blue steel? The Bush? Kenobe? Yoda?”

  D.L. is utterly silent throughout this exchange, watching the odometer begin slowly to lose its magic. There is a reason for her silence that is in a way parallel to the historical U.S. conflict in Vietnam. For her, Vietnam does not exist except as complicatedly cancelled letters and hissingly connected phone calls, a completely flat-eyed father whom she first met on a tarmac at nine. Who had a hook. Who dropped at automobile backfires (Datsuns never backfire—too little power), who gazed dully and accepting at the mosquito feeding at his one big bicep. Who’s long gone, now. Who left a note.

  LANCE CORPORAL LYNN-PAUL EBERHARDT’S NOTE, THAT HE LEFT

  Dear Void: />
  The chances of living in the present seem good today.

  Yrs.,

  From D.L., Mark Nechtr knows only that Lieutenant Colonel Eberhardt is long gone to unknown locales. Never pressed her for details that clearly pained her. Actually, D.L. had started to tell her first and only lover all about it, that night, that time they’d gone (protected) to bed. But Mark, postcoital, had fallen asleep. She’s never forgiven him for it. Will never. She was forced to do the whole rehearsed dialogue mono-, playing both parts, Ophelia-like: the only time in her life she’s laughed so hard she had to bite her arm to stop:

  “My Daddy’s long gone. He’s whacked. Looned. Zoned. Where all rooms are white and all shoes noiseless. My father has left the planet.

  “Well as long as he waves, occasionally.

  “I think the only thing he waves at is his food.

  “Well, as long as it doesn’t wave back.…

  “I think that’s why he waves in the first place.”

  Took her exclusively to ruined amusements. Liked boarded windows and walks chocked with crabgrass. Read her Moby-Dick at ten. One sitting. Whale trivia and all. Told her to call him Lynn. Bought her a forest-green classic ’70s fashion outfit she’s had altered and cleaned so often it’s lime. Told her she was loved. Would sit only with his back to walls.

  He’s never once asked for painful personal details, Mark. He’ll take what you give him and just nod. He sees and won’t cross uninvited this unbroken center-line between your business and his. Keeps his own counsel. Never ever presses. It’s one reason he’s so universally loved. Plus it’s why, within a year after the time when the little miracle should appear but won’t, she’s going to scald him in his sleep. Bad business. But assault or defense? You decide.