Somebody behind them at the pool table said, “They blew up the Colossus of Rhodes a long time ago. Nazis did it.”
The bartender said, “I have seen full-color photographs.”
“No, you didn’t. Nazis blew it up for bombing practice before color photography.”
“I’ve always wanted to go there and you’re telling me it doesn’t exist?”
“Little children, keep yourself from idols. Amen,” the pool player said. Tremors beset the man’s arms, legs, neck, his individual fingers. But when he leaned into his cue all went still for a moment and he fired the ball into the corner while his opponent stood on a chair and spanked the television.
Was it live, or was it Memorex? And when her husband was out of sorts because he needed a laxative, she got the one that wasn’t harsh, Flavored Haley’s M-O.
The pool player shook again. He leaned again and shot with a body at peace, still and determined, that knew its work and had made its choice. The ball made a crack as it went in the pocket that was choice made audible, will sending the past into oblivion.
But as the ball dropped into the pocket, a woman came in the alley-side entrance of the bar. When she got a little closer amid the blue TV light, she became the girl Trisha, in a sweater sopping with blood, her skin a deathly blue pallor. The man she had come in with gave no sign of knowing she was dead, but Vollie knew.
To the bartender, Vollie managed to say, “I’m off,” and left a quarter on the bar and made it to the street out front, his heart in his throat, scanning his surroundings for others who could not have been there.
He never saw any of those people from New York again—except the girl, dead and yet living. Bearing no message, indifferent to his presence, trapping him in unnatural solitude.
By noon the next day he had put St. Louis behind him, and by nightfall he had made it to Kansas, where he traveled through a hundred repetitions of the same Plains town. The silo, bank, gas station, co-op, all clustered about the depot. Nothing like Iowa. Zero topographical variation. But the roads were sleek and proper. Wet under the headlights. Music on the AM station from Topeka stayed with him as far west as Pawnee County and did not crackle. Party music, crowd music like in Okinawa. He traveled alone in moonless dark. Not tunnel dark, which was more essentially an absence of time than of light; but world dark, a swallowing of all beyond the flying keystone figure the headlights made.
Shortly after crossing into Hodgeman County, nearly at the town limits of Kalvesta, something went funny in the wiring between his eyes and jangled brain. All around him, a vague but wild idea was taking physical shape. A troubling thought became a silver infinite waving. Above this, a second more quiescent idea, unmoving, gray, and peaceful. The troubling idea began to roil more brightly about the car. A rippling of earthly waves on all sides.
It was wheat. Winter wheat with dry heavy bent ears swimming in the dark. And the upper solid emanation was sky—gray sky that when the clouds drifted north turned to a black vault speckled with stars like the enameled pot in which his mother used to boil eggs. The earth descended endlessly at the horizon toward an abyss. The stars receded. Color began slowly to impose itself. He drove through the thickening world and made it into Garden City and pulled into the parking lot of a steak house. He climbed into the back of the Electra and pulled his nylon jacket over his eyes and dreamt of his mother and father.
When he awoke, a patrolman was knocking a key ring on the rear side window of the Electra above his head. Vollie sat up in the yellow vinyl womb that smelled of sweat, of coffee, of plastic under sun.
“Get up,” the patrolman said. He seemed a dream figure, about to disintegrate, whose directions the canny dreamer might defy just to see what would happen. Vollie closed his eyes and descended through universes of time, wheat, the bean field where his mother and father walked in rubber boots cutting out thistle and buttonweeds with sharpened hoes.
“Get up, I say,” the patrolman said again amid the twisted sky, and the Frades were sucked into the dream wind.
A lean man in uniform, with a pale mask across his eyes where the sun had not burned his face, looked into the window. Either the patrolman had come back later to hassle him, or sleep had dropped Vollie through a warp of numberless years and brought him back again only a moment later.
He sat up. He rolled down the window. The exhaust of the patrol car licked him in the face. Phlegm in his sinuses. A taut rope, knotted among the bones in his neck, ran straight down his back to his pelvis.
“Hello, ocifer,” he said.
“State your business.”
“Coffee and peanut butter toast, please.”
“Get the hell out of this area.”
“Sir?” He pulled the lock and rolled his shod feet out of the car into the state of Kansas on a July morning in 1974.
“What are you on?”
“Sir, I was asleep, sir.” He sat crookedly, stooped in the doorframe and squinting.
“I dare say. And what kind of drugs were you eating?”
“Sir, I been driving awhile.”
“Where you coming from?”
“Topeka, I guess.”
“Then how come it says state of New York back here?”
“Because I was east before.”
“Where you headed this morning?”
“Sir, New Mexico, sir. I’ll get a move on if it ain’t all right to sleep.”
“No, it ain’t all right. Show me your drugging paraphernalia. Your pipes and doodads.”
“I was asleep, sir.”
“Get the hell out of this area. Go sleep in Oklahoma, you want to sleep.”
He made it as far south as Liberal before the need to sleep overtook him again. He bought and ate three pickled eggs from the jar on the counter of a service station. He found a shed behind an institution called the Orthotics and Prosthetics Hangar. There he slept undisturbed with the lawn care equipment in the torrid heat of day and dreamt of pain and death. Death entered from his foot and filled his every cell, and he became its slave and instrument amid the eternity a dream can contain, while all the while he struggled to free himself by waking up.
In the afternoon, all that remained was to transect the corners of the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles before he entered New Mexico at Nara Visa around five o’clock Mountain Daylight Time, wide awake.
The electric quiver rising up his sternum now was hope. The people were on the other side, and he knew where that was.
The country bloomed with rusty rocks and cattle on which rain fell in storms he could see for many miles before the car went under the roofs of cloud.
He slept again, in the back of the car with the windows open to the desert cold. In the night, he went out to piss, and the stars were like a kitchen mess across a dark floor. He had never known himself to be so alone, a sense of the loneliness that was the soul’s inborn affliction. The car was parked about a half mile from the road, and in the morning light not a single structure interrupted the landscape in any direction, and no vehicles approached, but long mare’s tail clouds streaked a sky that seemed the true sky, the false dome lifted from it, the sky of everything going up and out forever. He hiked along a trail in his new way, step by ground-watchful step, about three hours in the midday sun wearing boots and running shorts and felt his body dusty all over and renewed and darkened and right. Grouse and scorpions crossed the path and continued into the desert weeds. Flowers he couldn’t name. Clouds impended but didn’t break. Lightning struck on the mountains to the west, too distant to hear. Then he changed into sneakers, the left one fitted with a custom piece of rubber to keep its form, and walked about five miles more along a wash until at last the wedge foot complained and he was too hot to continue and reached a pool where he took off his clothes and stepped to the water’s edge. Flies buzzed all around. The sun came at him slanted over the mountains, the sun like a brush on his hide. He was a small
entity moving in a wide valley; mountains westward, the rocky plain east. The place did not belong to him; he did not belong in it.
All the life surrounding him was a flowering that would end, every organism bound to return shortly to inert material. But nothing, not even the certainty of its death, could make the flowering less than enough while it lived.
Calf-deep in the shallows, he did not fear the water’s cold but knew it completely, recognizing it from his vision. Then up to his knees in the cold, he saw his animal self as it were from the outside, at a distance. In this distant view, a creature had walked without objective by a fast-moving wash through the hottest part of the day and then onward into the afternoon. He watched this creature creeping into the water. The mind’s false story of itself went quiet. How much did you fail to see because you had to be there looking? How much more did you see when you were with others? The self projected a sphere around itself and believed that sphere to be the limit of the only world, of which it was sole proprietor. Other people seemed only punctures in the sphere where the light came through, rather than universes themselves. But periodically, as now, he had felt the magnitude of the world pressing against him, the blunt cold of the water, even when he couldn’t see the force pressing him; or he couldn’t hear it, as when he had tried to listen to the Beach Boys on the headphones in the Saigon record store and couldn’t get himself out of the way and let the music inside. To really hear it he needed friends with him, or else imagination, which credited not only data from the filter of self but from elsewhere. The imagination lived not in the center of a world of its own fancy but at the edge of a world that was really there. A world of which it was a witnessing, insignificant element. It required the imagination’s eye to see what he really was. A man in a crowd of mountain, dust, road, water; naked and shivering while sweat poured down his back. In the tunnel, on a slab of packed dirt, he had played piano, with only his mind’s ear, the dreaming ear, to make the sound.
Sweating, red, and hungry, up to his ribs now in water, the mere body as it obviously was for the present: another living animal amid the teeming life aswirl microscopically in the water and the air. And amid the unliving elements. The desert wind on his face.
The human animal breathed deep. The water moved about its privates. Horseflies dive-bombed a cowpat on the other side of the wash. Dragonflies droned. Clouds collapsed on the mountain while sun burned the southern half of it. Other clouds headed this way. Their heavy contents spilled soundlessly on the plain as they went. The sun still bright here. Cottonwoods lined the wash. The dark eyes of the human animal recessed in the skull, the skull a rock that persisted unliving within the living flesh, the dead rock that contained the living mind. The human being only a pile of rocks dressed for a while in warm flesh. The hair. And the skin irrigated with blood that moved a distillation of inert air among its cells.
The animal up to its lonesome chest now in water brought together its arms and dove, rupturing the surface, and disappeared. The surface formed again shining and seamless as a sheet of mercury.
The wash that fed the pool went on flowing amid its rubble and sandy bed. The chamisa and goathead and Indian paintbrush ate up sun. All around, and sloping up westward, the rocks lay in their present formations while the wind scoured them, shaped them, the slow patient invisible work that changed them forever every moment.
It started to rain.
* * *
• • •
THE PADDOCK FENCE at the roadside lacked nearly all it rails and some of its posts. The place bore no sign of barbed wire anywhere. The washboard path that led from the road shook everything inside the car that wasn’t bolted in place. He maneuvered up the smoother berm and drove the car cockeyed like a banking plane toward the interior of the property. Sage and creosote scratched the fenders. Even the living junipers and mesquite looked dead, or dying from their blighted tops downward. Birds roosted in the thorny tangles. A few old mining tires were scattered around the place as watering tanks for cattle, but the tanks were dry. There were no cattle or horses.
The stone footers were all that remained of the old outbuildings, the debris of which lay nowhere, as though someone had burned it all for fuel. Behind a low wall in the distance the house appeared, piebald, shedding its cement stucco in patches where it showed the chicken wire nailed to mud bricks beneath. The fallen stucco itself had been raked away. The structure had sunken in the pink sandy earth, and rainwater must have collected at the base of the walls, which had coved so deeply all around that the house seemed to hover on its own shadow. Wind and rain had pitted the exposed bricks; settling had fissured them. About half the windowpanes still had their glass. The others had been sealed smartly with tarp. The house was low and long with many doors opening onto a veranda under an attached roof. A skinny cat darted from nowhere with a lizard in its mouth. There were no other cars on the place and no tracks of cars. When he got out of the Electra, a woman came to one of the doorways.
She wore a man’s V-neck T-shirt, distended, shapeless, clean; a peach-colored skirt that swept the floor but showed her feet in their sandals and the little rings around some of the toes. Various gewgaws hung around her neck. Also useful things—an extension cord, a John Wayne can opener. She wore her long hair in a knot with a pencil through it. He could just make out the shape of her breasts within the shirt. She looked hungry and very pretty and lonely and disillusioned. She was smoking in the doorway and glanced at the floor behind her and said something.
He approached the house, lacking a hat so he had nothing to remove in her company, and he shaded his eyes from the sun with his hand. He did not come so close as the flags of the swept walk that led to the veranda.
“You need the phone?” she said. “We don’t have a phone in here.”
“Are you Sally?”
“No.”
“Maybe I have the wrong house.”
She turned and swatted away the grasping hands of a small boy who was dressed in a kind of singlet sewn together from a pillowcase and was trying to climb the back of her skirt. “Are you a buyer? Who is it you wanted to see?”
“A friend of mine. I thought he lived here with some people. Name of Robert A. Heflin. The house number’s welded on a piece of rebar off the highway. It must be around here somewhere.”
“Bobby Heflin,” she said.
“That’s right.”
She desisted from shooing the hands of the boy, who directly scaled her like a tree, using her lowered arm as a branch, and perched on her hip, pridefully, as if he were held there only by his own power.
“Bobby run off,” she said. “Might as well tell you. The bank owns this whole spread now. Only they’re Christians at the bank and they’re letting us two crash here so long as I tidy up till it sells.”
“Will Bobby be back today?”
“I wouldn’t expect him back in a hundred years. Bobby run off last winter.”
Once, in the tunnel, only once, he had heard the lieutenant crying. Vollie and Wakefield were in a chamber otherwise filled with junked American transport equipment, and the lieutenant was in another chamber adjacent. In the total dark, Wakefield had a motorcycle carburetor he was teaching himself to take apart and put together without any tools besides his fingernails, and the throttle valve was always clacking. Then the clacking stopped: Wakefield must have heard the crying too. Suspended in the black space between Wakefield and himself at that moment was the question whether Wakefield should go back to noisily tinkering with the device so that all three could maintain the fiction that the lieutenant did not cry, was not crying. Wakefield had often cried. Vollie had never cried.
“You all right there?” the woman asked.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You sure?”
“Yes, I was a friend of his.”
“Did you drive that Buick from New York State?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
&
nbsp; “By yourself?” She made it seem a waste with the boy in her arms.
“Yes, I did.”
“None of the others come back yet, why should he?”
“Where’d they head off?”
The woman squinted at him under the high sun. “You don’t look like a collection agent,” she said. “But all the same maybe I hadn’t better answer that question. How do you know Bobby?”
“From the service.”
“Oh, hey! I know you, cat. Aren’t you the Volunteer?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Golly, you don’t look like the pictures one bit.”
“Well.”
“I’m Louisa.”
“Yes, ma’am. Pleasure.”
“This is Elroy P. Heflin.”
“Can I shake his hand?”
“If he lets you.”
“Is he yours?”
“Not in the world’s way. You know what I mean? We shared him. But where’d they all go? I guess I’m the sucker.”
Vollie held out his hand. The boy held out his likewise and they shook. In a dream, he had run such a child under the wheels of his truck. The boy smiled and shied and turned his face into the woman’s round breast.
“What’s the P stand for, citizen?”
“Why don’t you tell Bobby’s friend what your middle name is,” Louisa said. “He talks plenty when he ain’t shy. Elroy what Heflin. Say it. P— P—”
“Peas,” the boy said.
“What’s that?”
“Say it again,” she said patiently, a great soft patience. And they waited.
“Piece,” the boy said.
“Like a piece of pie?” Vollie asked him. “Like a rifle?”
The boy stuck out his hand again to be shaken.
“He’s just being funny, isn’t he, Elroy?”
But Vollie still didn’t get it. He thought a moment, then shook the boy’s hand again and said, “Is it like a distance down the road?”
The perfect boy laughed. And the laggard mind at last caught up.
The Volunteer Page 20