"Michael
Loyd Gray is an expert weaver of fates, a wistful manager of lives, a
wordsmith playing with texture, tone, and that all-important element,
the balance of tension. For as he wrenches our hearts, he also pushes
us to turn the next page, and the next, and the next. "
—
Monique Raphel High, author of Between
Two Worlds
"Gray’s
captivating tale of 1970s Lake Argus is ultimately endearing and
memorable, and convinces me that this is a writer with some serious
chops."
—
Darren
DeFrain, author of The
Salt Palace
and Inside
& Out: Stories
"Michael
Loyd Gray’s clear straightforward prose is aimed directly at
the revelation of character and unspools with the unmistakeable
cadence of a storyteller."
—
Stuart Dybek, author of The
Coast of Chicago
and I
Sailed With Magellan
Well Deserved
Michael Loyd Gray
Smashwords Edition
Copyright (c) 2010 Skywater Publishing Company
All rights reserved. No part of this publication
may be reproduced in whole or in part
without written permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gray, Michael Loyd.
Well Deserved: A Novel / by Michael Loyd Gray.
p. cm. — (Sol Books Prose Series)
ISBN 978-0-9793081-7-8 (pbk.)
ISBN 978-0-9793081-9-2 (e-book)
1. Nineteen seventies—Fiction. 2. Illinois—Social life and customs—Fiction. 3. City and town life—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3607.R3957W45 2010
813'.6—dc222008032398
Photo Credits
Shutterstock, cover
Sol Book Prose Series
Well Deserved
a novel by Michael Loyd Gray
Skywater Publishing Company
Minneapolis
“If you
don’t know where you’re going,
any road will take you
there.”
— George Harrison
The Three Days
1970
1.
JESSE
In the early spring of that restless year, before the leaves had come back green and full on the trees, Jesse Archer could look out a window from his decaying trailer in the woods and see the causeway road across Lake Argus pointing directly at him like a dagger. Or perhaps like a sword. The long white road was very narrow and straight and stretched nearly a mile before it reached shore again, piercing the Y intersection tucked against Jesse’s halcyon woods. Maples, sycamores, and walnuts were abundant and tall and would soon be thick again. New signs of growth were obvious every day. Jesse had felt quite naked and exposed there all winter, even when snow filled the gaps between the trees and accumulated on his roof, and he longed for the enveloping leafy camouflage to blossom and cloak him from sight.
The trailer was poorly insulated and a bitch in winter, which had been cold and snowy, and sometimes Jesse slept on the beer-stained couch inside a sleeping bag and under several thick quilts because the warmth from the trailer’s heating strips was strongest there. But the wooden trailer was loosely-built and so quite airy in spring and summer when the canopy of trees protected it from the sun, and it was pleasant enough until the summer humidity set in; then Jesse sometimes slept naked on the couch with a small fan directed at him, or even outside on the ground where he could look up through a gap in the trees at the sparkling stars or the moon. He had moved into the trailer the year before, when a man first walked on the moon, and he had sat up much of that night smoking dope and checking the moon skeptically — trying to decide if it was really happening or just propaganda concocted from some Hollywood movie set.
The humidity was still a ways off and he made coffee that late morning and heartily ate scrambled eggs and bacon with toast and then fired up half a joint left over from the night before. He sat down at the kitchen nook by the window and sipped coffee slowly. Jesse could see the green water of the lake on both sides of the causeway. Whitecaps roiled in a strong wind that got up early that morning and had only gotten stronger. The trees cut most of the wind to size by the time it reached him and only stirred the smaller limbs overhanging the trailer; but one limb insisted on a rhythmic gnawing of the trailer’s roof and after a while he fetched a hacksaw and climbed awkwardly on the roof and sawed it off.
When the half joint became a roach, he tossed it in an ashtray with others and rolled a new one expertly between his thumbs and forefingers and smoked it, slowly, with pleasure and watched the occasional car creep across the causeway road. The road began at the far end of the lake where the county road that fed into it was hidden behind a low ridge. The sleepy town of Argus, Illinois, was five miles up that road. A car would abruptly emerge from behind the ridge on the far end as merely a distant, crawling shape, like an insect, but by the time it had crossed the lake and reached the deep, loose gravel that had accumulated like a sandbar at the intersection, Jesse could stare almost directly into the car and see the driver’s face quite well before it turned left or right. A left turn took cars parallel to his woods, and when he was stoned during the night the abrupt sound of a car — passing slowly or stopping, especially — became exaggerated in his mind and he would wait in a paranoid rush to see if it turned onto his lane or kept going. There were regulars who came out to buy dope and maybe some speed or hash – nothing heavy, he had promised himself – and he knew who was who and their cars and fretted when a strange one merely used his lane to turn around.
It was midweek and there wouldn’t be much traffic. Sometimes a farmer crossed the causeway with a tractor and plow, or he would see a lumbering truck carrying heating oil for the smattering of fancy lake houses at the north end of the lake, where the Argus gentry lived. Argus Lake was surrounded by farm country and was the result of the damming of the Rich River to the west, near Bloomington-Normal, where he was from and had briefly attended Illinois State University; but he had flunked out after a year from lack of interest and too many keggers and had retreated to the trailer and stayed stoned and supported himself by selling dope to college kids and Argus townies. He kept his mouth shut when he went to town for supplies and kept as low a profile as he could anywhere else and waited for whatever was coming next.
Whatever was to come next would have to come across that causeway and so watching it had become as routine as the way some people watched television. Jesse was stuck in neutral with little interest in even finding a new gear. It was April, 1970, and he was a healthy and even strapping, long-haired boy-man of twenty, good-looking and six-foot, but the numbers and letters that counted above all else were the 2S that had dissolved into 1A after he flunked out, and his draft lottery number, 21, which was piss-poor low and he guessed almost certainly a guaranteed visit to Vietnam. He hadn’t really checked that out, but felt it was probably just a matter of time. He didn’t read newspapers very much, and didn’t have a TV, but he heard bits and pieces from people and suspected the war was raging pretty good. But did Nixon even know where he lived?
After breakfast he popped open a can of Pabst and turned on the powerful Marantz stereo. Loud music was one of the benefits of living isolated in woods, though he’d learned to keep it low at night when the music could impair his ability to hear a car come up his lane. He listened to the Stones’ Exile on Main Street, then Jimi Hendrix growling All Along the Watchtower. But he got restless and then bored with the music and turned it off and drank another Pabst. He could always listen to music and decided to exercise some restraint, but wasn’t sure why.
He also decided against getting drunk because he had the night before and so he brushed his teeth and washed his face and under his arms and put on a clean Chicago Bears sweatshirt before firing up another joint to keep the edge going. He dumped himself in the battered recliner and smoked the doobie and gazed out the window at the lake and causeway. Breakfast had swept the hangover away and he felt decent again. In his head he inventoried his latest deals, what was pending, what was on hand, what was coming, and felt satisfied he was money enough ahead to cruise for a while.
The dope business was self-perpetuating. It involved risk, but so far he had been lucky. He needed very little except food and beer and paid a small power bill each month. He hated phones and didn’t have one. Who would he call? For a while he did have a girlfriend, a willowy, sweet little doper — Clarice — from Argus, fresh out of high school with long, straight blonde hair down to her tight ass, which filled her faded bell bottoms supremely well. She went off to college in Chicago one day to study art – with a fresh dope supply, of course — and that was that. Even if he had a phone, he knew she wouldn’t be calling. Besides, customers knew how to find him. The trailer belonged to his uncle in Iowa, who assumed Jesse was still in college and Jesse didn’t disabuse him of the notion and sent him a modest rent check each month and some bullshit chitchat to notify him he was still kicking and to keep him from prying.
He settled into the chair and fell asleep after a while and when he woke up he slowly became aware of a tiny speck moving onto the causeway at the far end. It moved too slow and was too small to be a car, of course, and soon he recognized the shape of a man wearing a pack and leaning hard into his stride to offset the wind. Jesse could not recall ever seeing a person walk across the causeway. It was an odd sight to him. It didn’t belong. After a while, as the man crossed the little bridge midway that allowed boats access from each section of the lake, Jesse began to fret about the man and his steady, determined gait – the man marched, for God’s sake. It was out of routine, out of place, and anything out of place and unexpected made him fearful. Jesse watched closely as the man’s face came into focus as he inched closer and walked directly toward the woods and trailer and neared the intersection. He seemed to be walking straight at Jesse and looking directly at him, though Jesse knew the man could not see him. Still, he instinctively slid away from the window a little.
The man stopped at the intersection and looked right, then left. Right went past farms until it found a tiny burg called Kelton clustered around a grain elevator. Left went past the trailer and snaked around low rolling hills until it ended at a T intersection and no town or even houses nearby. The man took off his pack and leaned it against the metal guard railing of the road and then leaned himself against the railing and sagged from fatigue and the strain of fighting the wind. He produced a canteen and drank heartily, wiping his mouth with the sleeve of his jacket. Then he lit a cigarette. The blue smoke was visible from the trailer. The man smoked leisurely and looked around, at the lake, up at the sky, which was clearing, the sun trying to emerge; he leaned against the railing a good long time and sometimes looked straight ahead, at the trailer. He didn’t seem to be in a hurry. He rummaged through his pack and ate something from it. Once he turned his back to the trailer and placed one foot on the railing and rested an elbow on his knee and appeared to survey the lake, to perhaps gauge how far he’d just walked to cross it.
Jesse grabbed the binoculars hanging on a nail by the refrigerator and studied the man intently. His hair was short, his face clean-shaven. Short hair stood out. Just about everyone Jesse associated with had varying degrees of long hair and moustaches and beards and sideburns. It was the new style, for a new time, Jesse vaguely thought. Only a few of the redneck Argus townies still had crew cuts. He looked through the binoculars again: The man’s age was hard to gauge, too. Jesse thought he might be in his late twenties, then again maybe older. He looked athletic, lean. The face was tan, and that stood out to Jesse. No one had a tan in Argus in April unless they had been somewhere else to get it. Jesse studied the face more: he had never seen the man before. Jesse had become good at remembering faces quickly. It was a required skill of his trade.
The man flicked the cigarette butt into the lake and re-shouldered his pack. He looked again right, then left, and his glance lingered on a grove of trees along the lakeshore – almost exactly straight across the road from Jesse’s trailer. He checked his watch and studied the grove again. He seemed to be assessing it. Finally he lurched across the road, stepped over the guardrail, and walked down the gentle slope toward the lake and into the grove, where Jesse lost sight of him. Jesse scanned the grove slowly, patiently, but could not find him. He waited, looked again, but still did not catch sight of him. He began to wonder if the man had gone on past the grove, along the lakeshore recessed out of sight, to make his way down that side of the lake. Jesse did not know what end that direction would produce because there were no houses there, just more woods all the way to the dam. Having the man unaccounted for was troubling.
When the man still didn’t emerge from the grove, Jesse stepped outside his trailer with the binoculars to try and get a better look. He contemplated climbing to the trailer’s roof, debated whether he might be too stoned to do it, but then he glimpsed the man finally, his pack off, rummaging around the grove; and once Jesse saw him walk down to the edge of the lake and look out over it for a few minutes, smoking another cigarette. Then the man disappeared into the grove again and did not come out. The rest of the afternoon Jesse kept watch but did not see him. He didn’t understand what the man was up to and wondered vaguely if the man was a threat. After working through his paranoia, he grudgingly decided he wasn’t. A few minutes later he wasn’t so sure; but still, he was something new in Jesse’s carefully-ordered universe and could not simply be ignored. It was as if there was a door open somewhere that needed to be closed.
Jesse was pretty sure the man wasn’t a cop. It made no sense for a cop to truck a pack across that damn long causeway. Cops rode in comfort and came with the band playing, not dragging packs on their backs. The man could be a drifter, but that seemed odd because his clothes looked clean and not worn; the pack was a good one with a sturdy frame and not cheap by the look of it. The man was clean-shaven and not scraggly. Drifters wouldn’t be likely to stray away from the interstate on the far side of Argus where they could find rides north to Chicago or south to St. Louis. Drifters often weren’t clothed for any real weather and this man had a good jacket and Jesse had seen a bedroll wedged between his neck and pack so it didn’t chafe and rode comfortably. The man appeared confident in his stride. Wherever it was he was going, to Jesse it seemed he knew the way.
As night began to creep in Jesse positioned his recliner so he could look out a window facing the grove. He decided he couldn’t fix any dinner – leftover cold Kentucky Fried Chicken and baked beans at best — until he felt the man was somehow accounted for. So he kept watching and frowned at the approaching darkness. He had contemplated just walking across the road and saying hello, but dismissed the idea: you didn’t just walk up on someone in a grove of trees with it almost dark. The margin of error was too high. All sorts of things could go wrong. Maybe the man had a gun, too. Maybe he would interpret Jesse as a sudden threat. That was one of the things that could go haywire in a hurry. To hell in a hand basket. To the shits in a shingle. Jesse heard himself saying those things out loud and decided to lay off the dope a while. At least until this man in the grove business was resolved.
Finally it was dark and Jesse reluctantly flipped the switch to turn on the light above the trailer’s door. There were no other lights on either side of the road and night was always very black out there and he knew the man could not miss seeing his light. Would he come over? If the man had not noticed the trailer during daylight, then he would surely be very curious about a light in the woods. If he did come calling, what would happen? Jesse did not believe the man was someone intending to commit mayhem of some sort. But that was just a gut feeling. Wishful thinking, perhaps.
Soon Jesse saw the orange glow of a campfire in the grove.
“I’ll be go to hell,” Jesse said. “Piss up a rope. A camp-fucking-fire.”
Jesse wondered briefly how the man had managed to scrounge enough wood, but then accepted for the time being that he had moved in and meant to stay awhile. Hell, he was setting up camp, setting up shop, moving into the damn neighborhood. He retrieved the bucket of chicken from the fridge and munched it slowly and spooned cold baked beans to his mouth and glanced from time to time at the grove and the steady glow of the fire. The man evidently stirred it with a stick and tossed a chunk of wood in because it flared up like a big blowtorch and Jesse saw sparks rising from it like mad fireflies.
“Now he’s got her cooking. Cookin’ like a motherfucker.”
Jesse wondered why he’d never made a campfire of his own. He had the space and the privacy. The trailer sat in a clearing ringed by trees. He could have made one real easy. There was plenty of dead wood lying around he could have collected. But collecting wood would have seemed like work to him – had he ever thought of it at all – and he knew that probably was why a fire never occurred to him. Or had he somehow lost his imagination? He didn’t think so. He felt he could imagine some pretty wild things. Had the dope done something to him? He’d read that marijuana was pretty much harmless. And it had some health benefits, someone had told him once. He didn’t know if that was true or not. But it sure did make him good and shit-faced and what harm was there in that?
Jesse turned back to look at the campfire glow again. What was the man going to eat for dinner? He had food with him. Had to. No one would carry a heavy damn pack for miles without something worth the trouble. He could have all sorts of stuff in there: canned goods, like chili and fruit cocktail – some cans of SPAM, Vienna sausages, stuff like that. He’d need one of those dinky frying pans that didn’t take up much space but were big enough to fry SPAM slices or whatever. He could have some bacon with him. Jesse felt he would take some bacon along if he were in the man’s shoes. If the man had money enough, he might have even bought himself a nice steak in Argus just for that night’s meal. If it fit his travel budget, that is. But they could wrap that steak in plastic real good and tight and it would travel just fine until he cooked it because it wasn’t warm weather yet. But a frozen steak would have been even smarter and Jesse congratulated himself for thinking of it. He still had a good imagination. That was proof. Yep – just buy a frozen steak in Argus at Ferguson’s IGA and by the time you’d walked out to the lake and built the fire – presto, that steak is thawed and ready to sizzle and pop and spurt its juices over the fire.
Or maybe the man didn’t have much at all. Some candy bars, maybe. Maybe the plan was to amble over in the morning and try and mooch off him. Would he feed the man? He shook his head at the thought: of course he would. He wouldn’t turn away anyone who was hungry as long as he had means of his own. He’d let customers crash sometimes on his sofa when they had no place to go that night. But he’d always made sure the dope stash was under control first. That was his business. That was prudent. He wondered if the man would understand that. Whatever the man’s business was, he surely had his own code for running it. Even if he was a drifter, there was a code for that, too.
Jesse glanced at the grove. Could the man even see his trailer light at all through the campfire? It looked like a real barnburner. On a cool night it would be just the ticket. Sitting around a fire with a beer, maybe some chili – that worked pretty well. He had plenty of Pabst in the fridge. Should he grab a six and go on over, maybe break the ice? It was tempting. Maybe he’d even like having a neighbor; but the man wasn’t a true neighbor. Not without a roof over his head. Jesse checked to make sure he had a cold six of PBR, but standing there, looking in the fridge, he realized nothing had changed. Going over at night was risky. Maybe dangerous. With that roaring campfire the man would not be able to hear him come up, probably — nor see him until he was right on him practically and that could cause big problems. Big-time fucking problems. No, that wasn’t going to do. He could have a gun in his pack, or under his jacket. Even if he wasn’t some killer or dildo jerk on a jack-off lark of some kind, he could still be a fool with a gun who might take things the wrong way. He might think Jesse was a homo, for example. Or a cop. Or a territorial farmer with a shotgun. All manner of things could happen. It could be a nasty fucking world out there if you didn’t have your shit wired tight.
So instead, Jesse did nothing more than finish eating and then cleaned up his kitchen. He filled a bag with trash and took it outside to be hauled into town and dumped. The glow of the campfire, though, was still tempting. He saw the man get up once, then sit down again. The man got up a few minutes later and was out of sigh for a few more minutes – probably had to piss, Jesse thought. Should he just walk down his lane for a better look? He even took a few steps that way. He paused, then walked some more. He could be down the lane and across the road just like that. Thirty seconds or so. Maybe a minute. But, no, that was foolish. An impulse. Impulses could get you hurt, could get you killed. He retreated to the trailer and locked the door. That was prudent, he reminded himself. He even switched off the outside light, but a minute later switched it back on, worried that if the man had seen it on he would be concerned or suspicious when it went out. In his fluctuating paranoia Jesse also fretted that turning it back on would prompt the man to come for a look; but switching it off yet gain could make it even more of a distraction to be investigated, so he stuck with leaving it on. Then he turned it off one more time and back on again and left it alone, finally, though he glanced at the switch several times.
Jesse didn’t know what to do with himself at first. He walked back to the bedroom and then checked his bathroom. He picked up a few dirty towels from the floor and tossed them in a laundry basket. He looked at his face in the mirror. He needed to shave, but decided to wait until morning, before he went to town. He would wash his hair in the morning, too. Jesse straightened up his small living room to keep himself busy, distracted. He made a list of supplies to get at the grocery store. He usually wasn’t that organized, but figured maybe it was time to get with the program.
When he had run out of housekeeping things to do, he settled in the recliner and turned on the stereo — low, at first, but by the snarling heat of the Stones’ Gimme Shelter, he cranked it.
His body began to sway with the music. When it had its hook into him good and deep, Jesse said, “Fuck it.”
He rolled a joint and fired it up. Inhaled deeply. Exhaled slowly. Watched the smoke curl lazily toward the ceiling. When the dope’s magic had once again enveloped him in that silky warm blanket of fog, he forgot to look over at the campfire at all.
2.
RAUL
Raul wasn’t his real name. That was just what he crowned himself after he escaped high school in sixty-six and enlisted with only a perpetual boner and $27 in his pants. He liked the sound of Raul, the way it rolled off the tongue, especially when he drank too much and he slurred it slowly to irritate whoever he was with. Dominick Cruikshank was his real name. Dominick Artemis Cruikshank, for Christ’s sake. His mother liked Dominick and Artemis equally and couldn’t decide, and so his parents had flipped a coin and the order was established. He wasn’t Italian at all, though some people assumed it because of his names. He was in fact pretty much of British descent – the family insisted on a skinny link of sorts to George Cruikshank, an English caricaturist of some repute and notoriety — with a sprinkling of Cherokee from some Indian buck who’d shinnied up his family tree after the Trail of Tears. Or before it. That wasn’t clear to him.
As for deciding on Raul – it just came to him impulsively after reading about Che Guevara and Fidel Castro and learning Castro’s bro was a Raul. That and wanting to stand out with something short and blunt and in your face, thank you very fucking much, without the rather lengthy Dominick Artemis Cruikshank to throw around. He always felt it made him sound like a snotty-nose pussy from New Yawk City.
Raul stoked the embers of the sleeping campfire with a stick and skillfully brought it back to a roaring life. He unwrapped bacon and put four slices in a small skillet and balanced it on two pieces of smoldering wood. Ferguson’s IGA in Argus had cut the bacon good and thick, with a generous balance between fat and meat, and he was grateful because he was very hungry. Old Man Ferguson had cut the slices himself, a nod to a fellow war vet. When the bacon began cracking and popping and had lubricated the skillet, he cracked open two eggs and dropped them in a corner of the skillet and listened happily to them sizzle. It was a cool morning and he had slept well in his sleeping bag by the fire.
Once in the night he had awakened with a start and reached for a weapon that wasn’t there. He felt groggy and the night cold confused him – corn-fused, Argus townies would call it. The sounds weren’t right – there were no sounds except a gentle breeze scrubbing treetops with a quiet moan and the gentle lapping of water on the nearby shore. When he realized where he was, his breathing slowed to normal and he watched the moon being tickled by passing clouds for a long time and made an uneasy peace of sorts with the awful near-silence of home and had fallen asleep again very soundly.
He warmed his hands close to the flames and listened to the bacon crackle and the eggs talk back to him, too. He spooned instant coffee into his metal cup and filled it with water from the canteen and wedged it among glowing embers. He eased the skillet back from the fire and let everything cook slower. He closed his eyes for a moment. He wanted to hear and smell the eggs and bacon. He held off his hunger as best he could just to savor the aroma and the sound of popping juices.
While he sipped his coffee carefully, he stood up a moment for a look across the road. There was some doofus living across the way in a shitty little trailer. He’d heard loud music coming from there all night – some Stones, some Who, the Beatles, and even some Jefferson Airplane. He had good taste in tunes – give him that much. Whoever the dickhead was, though, he liked to play with his outside light switch. It had flashed on and off a bunch of times. Maybe the guy was signaling spaceships for a landing. Or it was part of some goofy cult involving dead animals and drinking blood. You never knew what you might get out deep in the country with some trailer trash hermit.
Or maybe he was a hippie, judging by the music. Not that Raul had a damn thing against hippies. He didn’t. He’d broke bread with plenty of them in Haight-Ashbury, out in San Fran, when he was discharged. Most hippies he met were cool, friendly – stoned to the gills, but what else was new. He’d spent a month out there (told his folks by phone he owed the Army another month) until money ran low, just hanging out, smoking weed, pitching in a few dollars for wine and food at whoever’s pad he crashed, and grooving to good bands, like the Jefferson Airplane, Moby Grape, Grateful Dead. He had been awfully sorry that Janis Joplin had died. Hendrix, too. Purple Haze had sort of been his theme song back in the Big Green Machine — the soggy jungles of Viet Nam.
That month seemed like a decade ago. When his wake up to go back to the world finally arrived, he was deposited in San Fran and told, you’re free now, so go on and pretend none of this happened — if you can, Jack — and thanks very fucking much (just a dream, Jack), and marry that high school sweetheart/cheerleader with big tits, if she ain’t fucking your best friend from the football team, who went to college while you humped in country, and try and sleep again in a dry bed with clean sheets (silk, Jack) with no ordnance cooking off in the background, no zips trying to zap you, no walking point, no humping for all she’s worth and then some, no dinky-dao this or dinky-dao that, and get a boring job making widgets or shuffling papers or fixing mufflers or counting toilet plungers at Kmart (ask about the retirement plan, Jack) and get back on that meat and potatoes diet to accelerate the hardening of your arteries, and have a merry fucking nice damn life and one day read about where you were in a history book with your kids and scratch your head (but not your balls, Jack) wondering if it really happened at all. Just a movie, Jack. Just a late night John Wayne fucking movie.
He drifted home to Argus to visit his folks, who were a little afraid of him because he didn’t quite look like or sound like the boy they had watched leave for the Army: his table manners were sloppy – atrocious, really – and he cussed a lot: fucking aye or fucking this, fucking that. In San Fran he had stayed drunk or stoned or both much of the time and dropped a few dollars on strippers for blowjobs at first, then he graduated to the whole enchilada with a couple hookers down in the Tenderloin, and except for the absence of people shooting at him, and the welcome sight of round-eye pussy everywhere, it was a little like still being in a more expensive Saigon with much better weather. But Argus had struck him as too slow motion of a landscape and after a few days of playing returning hero with his proud father at the VFW and with his mother at Cameron’s Cafe, he loaded his pack and set off for the lake. He just needed some time, he figured – and some space.
Raul poured more water and instant coffee in his cup and nestled it back among the members for a few minutes to boil. He sat back on his haunches the way the dinks did back in the Green Machine and recalled the hump out from Argus – only five smiles from town and maybe a mile across the causeway, which wasn’t much for a guy used to humping all day through thick saw grass, sometimes in monsoon rain, sometimes just humidity so bad it soaked you as thoroughly as the monsoons, and you didn’t walk in it so much as you swam it. But already he was a little out of shape thanks to his month in San Fran doing nothing and his hips were actually a little sore from the previous day’s hump.
Cool weather took some getting used to, but he liked it, didn’t realize how much he’d missed it. The hump out was along a mostly level county road (real blacktop, no arty craters, Jack) cutting through soybean and cornfields like a zipper. A few farms, neat and orderly. Crops beginning to sprout. Hardly a car on the road. Everything looking healthy. No B-52s cruising silently above. No blackened stretches of napalm-scorched earth. No choppers overhead with rotors beating crazily. No mortar rounds plunging in. And it was the quiet that struck him most. Dead silence, almost, with only a few chatty sparrows in trees. A hawk circled silently and vigilantly overhead. Once his quick eyes caught movement in the ditch and instincts and fear grabbed him pretty good, but it was only a pair of male pheasants with that breathtaking plumage moving fast but silently to stay ahead of him like Charlie did back in the Green.
He hadn’t had a bad war, all things considered. Not getting shot and killed was the very top of his list of good things to be concluded from it. A bullet or two did come close, and one, a heavy round from an AK-47, singed the fabric of his sleeve just enough to gouge a small hole but not deep enough to touch the skin – you didn’t have to fall into the Grand Canyon, Raul joked to his platoon mates, to say you’d seen the damn thing. In high school Raul had read about soldiers in the Civil War who ended a battle without wounds, but discovered holes in their hats and coats and dents in a sword’s scabbard or an ammunition box and they knew just how close was the line between a good day and your last day. Like with pilots who believed any landing you walked away from was a good one, Raul had learned the universal soldier’s axiom that a miss was as good as a mile.
His war had actually been pleasant sometimes because most of his tour was spent guarding a supply dump near Saigon that got rocketed a few times, but fairly inaccurately at first, though Charlie’s aim improved over time and there were plenty of near things to laugh nervously about over a joint and beer later. He got into Saigon often and fucked pretty girls with long silky hair at Madame Thou’s establishment and drank lots of that rotgut beer (church keys required, even though pop tops were common in the states – back in the world, Jack) that supposedly had formaldehyde in it. Get a head start on the embalming, he guessed, and even sometimes Raul veered away from the whorehouse and instead visited colorful markets and Buddhist temples. But usually he could be found with buddies in sleazy bars catering to GIs and drinking Carling Black Label or Biere 33 or Biere Larue in a one liter bottle.
He only had to hump the bush one time, for a couple weeks late in his tour, when units were short and replacements were scrounged from security details at bases near Saigon. That was when the AK round sought him out so tenaciously. He heard it go by like a loud and angry hornet. He’d felt it along his sleeve and in his anxiety and fear and combat paranoia, had assumed he’d been hit and had yelled that to no one in particular, then felt very stupid and embarrassed when a medic glanced at his sleeve and rolled his eyes and handed him the M-16 he’d dropped on his foot, which produced real pain, unlike the AK round.
“No purple heart, troop, for dropping your weapon on your fucking foot,” the medic had hissed.
But nonetheless, Raul had seen The Elephant, got his cherry busted, and became a card-carrying member of The Club. It certainly seemed to mean a lot to his old man when they visited the VFW. World War II and Korea vets would nod at him like they were all fraternity brothers, but Raul felt he was like a member who never learned the secret handshake.
Raul didn’t think he had killed anybody, though he’d certainly fired off a lot of rounds, those supersonic 5.56 mm bullets that tumbled and rocketed out of the barrel and reached obscene speed before tearing into something, usually palm trees or brush or the dirt. Maybe he’d hit someone and maybe he hadn’t. No way to know. Sometimes he knew he fired off a clip that had no chance of hitting much besides air because he hurried and didn’t aim and was just spraying like a fool, the clip emptying in an instant. It sounded reassuring but wasn’t doing much good and some burly sergeant had thumped the back of his helmet hard with a meaty paw and barked, “Goddamnit, troop — direct your fucking fire.”
He never once saw Charlie except lined up dead for a body count. Shattered bodies that didn’t look like they ever could have been alive and so formidable – and so damn fucking elusive — in the deep green jungle. Then the channel got changed – just like that, Jack — and he was choppered out of the Green to a waiting C-130 for the Philippines, then Hawaii, and San Fran. He had a layover in Manila and he stayed drunk and tried out the girls at a local establishment. In Hawaii he walked along Waikiki Beach, but discovered the price was much higher and the girls much more clinical and distant and business-like than in the Nam — but it was round eye and very much like a rediscovered treasure.
The eggs and bacon were ready and he ate them right out of the skillet with great pleasure. Breakfast in a café just didn’t have the same edge as over an open fire. You couldn’t get the smoke in a café or restaurant. In a café you were hemmed in and surrounded by the awful sound of clanging silverware and plates and cups and country music and you just couldn’t concentrate as well on how the eggs swam in bacon juices and the bacon’s crisp texture melted into the coffee in his mouth to make something better than just the two by themselves. He pulled a slice of bread from a bag in the pack and mopped up the skillet with it and ate it slowly, chewing well, and it was almost like a second breakfast. After he swallowed the last of the bread soaked in juices, he impulsively put two more thick slices of bacon in the skillet and cooked them quickly and not quite fully, with much fat left but that was his goal. He scooped the bacon onto a slice of bread and folded it and then got up and ate it slowly as he walked down to the shore of the lake.
By the shore he finished the bacon sandwich – he should have stuck a small jar of mayonnaise in his pack, he lamented — and licked his fingers and felt very satisfied. There was no wind and the lake’s surface was glass stretching all the way south, to the dam more than a mile away. In high school he used to make out with girls at the dam until a county mountie would come along, headlights blazing right into his car, and make them zip up and move on. It seemed like another life, another person. He watched the lake’s surface a long time, then remembered to fetch the skillet and rinse it in the water. Raul brushed his teeth and washed his face with a bar of soap. The cold lake water on his face was bracing and made him feel clean as much as the soap did. Back in his camp he hung his pack on a tree knot and made another cup of coffee.
After a while he looked across the road and saw a blonde, longhair stirring clumsily around the trailer carrying chunks of wood and making his own campfire. Raul was in no hurry. He sipped his coffee and watched the longhair disappear and re-appear carrying wood. The longhair looked over at him several times. When Raul had come back from washing up at the lakeshore, he had noticed the longhair’s fire roaring, a vicious black cloud still mushrooming into the tree canopy (like napalm, Jack), and wondered how the dipshit had gotten the fire going so quickly. Maybe he knew his ass from a hole in the ground after all and wasn’t some hippie numbnuts. Might be a real woodsman over there. A regular Paul Fucking Bunyan. You just never knew.
Soon Raul would walk over and see what the dipshit was all about. But there just wasn’t any hurry.
None in the world.
3.
JESSE
Jesse had stupidly used gas – and way too much of it — to start his campfire. It erupted in a blinding, whooshing, orange flash, singing his eyebrows and some hairs in his bangs. He had somehow thrown himself away from the explosion in time, but it scared the holy fucking shit out of him. Jesse climbed awkwardly to his feet brushing dirt from the knees of his jeans and trembled for a few minutes. He fumbled for a joint in his jacket pocket and fired it up to console himself. He shivered in the morning coolness out of reach of the fire’s heat for a few more minutes before the dope helped him make peace with how close he’d come to burning his face off.
He looked across the road to check whether the man had seen him nearly blow himself up, but didn’t see him anywhere. That was good. Very good. Jesse shook his head at how careless he’d been. Jesus H. Christ. The man would have taken him for a dangerous fool, no doubt. Jesse had seen the man only once that morning, while he lugged wood to build his own fire, and the man had stood up and seemed to be looking over at him, but Jesse couldn’t be sure. Maybe he was just stretching his legs. The man already had his fire going. An early bird. Maybe he’d even eaten breakfast. Jesse thought he’d smelled bacon, faintly, when he got dressed and went outside. Jesse had been tempted to wave when he saw the man, but stopped himself, fearing it might seem kind of goofy, or even girlish.
Jesse pulled the metal grill itself off his barbecue grill and placed it across the burning logs, congratulating himself on his ingenuity; but he neglected to balance the grill evenly and after he’d cracked eggs into the skillet it spilled and he had to start over. The second time he tried to make scrambled eggs, but forgot to use oil and the eggs cooked too fast into a hardened yellow mass. He finally gave up on eggs and warmed the last few pieces of the Kentucky Fried Chicken in the skillet and washed it down with PBR. Breakfast of Champions, he snickered, though he wished he had eggs and bacon instead, maybe some orange juice, too. He vowed to go into town and make himself shop responsibly. He would get some T-bones and some potatoes and dinner would get done right. Some wine, too – not just Ripple or Boone’s Farm, but maybe some of that Blue Nun or Liebfraumilch. The good stuff.
After he ate he pulled a lawn chair by the fire and got comfortable. The fire had settled into a steady orange and blue burn. Jesse recalled his brush with it and laughed. He had a decent buzz going and was having a hard time motivating himself to go into town. He needed stuff. There was almost nothing left to eat except for some Campbell’s soup; but it was so easy, so tempting, just to sit by the fire and do nothing but space out. The fire was better than television and he stared into it, watching flames dance and lick at the wood. It was better even than staring at a poster of Elvis or a sailing ship under one of those black lights. He made a mental note to go to the head shop in Bloomington and look for one. There were people there he could do some business with, too. A man had to work and make a living.
When Jesse finally looked up from the fire, he saw the man sauntering up his lane. He resisted the powerful temptation to panic and maybe leap from his chair, but he knew that could be seen as standoffish, defensive. You didn’t want people to know you had something to hide. The temptation was fueled by fear exerting a very real sort of gravitational pull that had to be resisted or he might be vaulted into space. He didn’t know this man. He had a business to run that didn’t get advertised in newspapers or the yellow pages, for God’s sake, and so he had to be careful with strangers. Everyone was a stranger until they proved to be something else. Even then you watched your back. He gripped the cedar arm rails of the chair and held on. Wipe the shitty grin off the face, he told himself. Get it together. Appear strong. Be confident. Be friendly, but not an open book. Wire your shit up tight and keep it tight. Smile – no, don’t smile; that’s goofy. Set the jaw. Appear calm. Appear strong, but not too tough. Yes, that was it.
The man was just yards away, his stride fluid, arms swinging freely at his sides and not stuffed into pockets, which Jesse would have viewed as a sort of misdirection mode of some kind. The man seemed to him to be at ease. He wasn’t smiling, yet his face seemed on the verge of it. He might be one of those who smile quickly, easily. You could tell a lot about someone by how they moved and Jesse concluded that this one tended toward openness rather than concealment. But you couldn’t be sure and you never bet the farm on strangers if the stakes mattered at all.
“Howdy,” the man said. His voice was firm and baritone, but not menacing.
“Hey,” Jesse said, and he was immediately sorry that it sounded squeaky.
The man stopped a yard short of Jesse – Midwest etiquette required an honorable acknowledgment of personal space. He glanced briefly at the fire. His face still seemed neutral to Jesse.
“That’s quite a fire you got there, troop.”
“Troop” just slipped out. Force of habit.
The word was foreign to Jesse. He didn’t quite know how to take it, but sensed it wasn’t a threat – maybe it was a new variation of man or dude or brother or friend. He decided to let it go and see if it came back or just disappeared. To probe it right off the bat would seem too investigative. You had to know what to question and what to just watch float downstream under the bridge.
“I worked on it all morning,” Jesse said, a subtle attempt at humor and he would see if the man followed his drift.
The man’s eyes brightened just a little. “Say you did?”
Jesse liked the reply. It had plenty of wiggle room and wasn’t judgmental, though playful.
“Naw,” Jesse said, offering the first smile of the engagement. “I used some gas.”
The man recalled the black mushroom cloud and nodded, noting Jesse was a candidate to be a numbnuts, but at least he was an honest numbnuts. Maybe something to build on.
“I’m Raul.” He offered a hand and they shook. Raul’s grip was stronger.
“Jesse.” He chewed on the odd name for a moment. Raul. “I saw you come in last night.”
“Yeah,” Raul said. “I noticed your trailer, but by the time I got squared away over there, it was near dark. Didn’t want to startle anyone by just hoofin’ it on over.”
Jesse noted that the first awkward moment had arrived. He had expected it.
“Comfy over there?” Jesse finally said, regretting immediately the use of comfy. It was a pussy word – did he think the man had checked into a Holiday Inn?
“It’s not bad. It’s OK, really. I’ve seen a lot worse, believe me.” Raul altered their course a couple degrees. “Heard your stereo last night. It serenaded me to sleep.”
“Too loud, man?”
“Not at all. Sound carries nicely out here in the boonies. You played my kind of stuff, man. I appreciated the Jeff Airplane you got around to. I saw them last month in San Fran.”
“Really?” Jesse was impressed and sat up a little in his chair. “You want to sit down, man? There’s another chair folded against the trailer. Pull it up, if you like.”
“Believe I will.”
Instead of pulling the chair open, Raul clutched it hard by the back brace, gave a sharp snap with his wrist, and it shot open. A neat move, Jesse thought. Broke the ice nicely. He still didn’t have a sharp bead on who Raul was, but he knew he wasn’t a cop and didn’t feel he was some other kind of monkey maybe dragging trouble around behind him. A drifter, maybe, but more likely a drifter with someplace to go and just trying to get there. It made a difference, and that stuff about seeing the Jeff Airplane was certainly in Raul’s favor. Raul – he’d never met anyone called that.
“Raul, that’s your real name, man?”
Raul smiled. “That’s just what I like to go by. Dominick is my real name. Dominick Cruikshank. Dominick Artemis Cruikshank. You see how that sounds? So, I shortened things up a bit.”
“Jesse Archer.” It was Jesse’s turn to offer a hand and they shook again. Jesse put a tad more bite into his grip so as not to be outclassed. “There was a TV show with an Artemis. I remember it. Do you know the one I mean? Can’t remember the name.”
“The Wild, Wild West. James West and Artemis Gordon. My mom liked that show and that’s where she got the Artemis thing. She sometimes tried to call me Artie, like how James West called Artemis Artie, but I didn’t let it take.”
“Good move,” Jesse said.
“I hear you. A guy can’t go around labeled Artemis.”
“That’s true. But Artemis Gordon was sort of cool in a sissy kind of way. I mean, when it counted, he stood up, and all that. He saved Jim’s butt a few times.”
“Sure he did. But Jim West was a stud. Kicked ass and took names.
“Yeah he did” Jesse nodded gravely. “You didn’t fuck with James West.”
“Not even a little bit,” Raul said. “Remember that dwarf character – Miguelito?”
Jesse strained to recall it, then got it in decent focus. “Oh, yeah – he could make time slow down, right?”
“But Jim nailed his ass just the same.”
“True. There’s no denying it.”
More silence for a minute.
“Where you from, Raul?”
“Argus, man. Just up the road.”
“I’ll be go to hell,” Jesse said. “I’m from Bloomington. I had you pegged as from the west coast maybe.”
“Nope. Born and raised in Argus. I’m a townie, dude.”
“But not always,” Jesse said. “You were out in California.”
Raul blinked a couple times. “I came back through California, through San Fran.”
“Back from where?”
“The Nam, man. Viet Fucking Nam.”
“Oh.” That shut Jesse up for a minute. And the use of “troop” suddenly made sense.
“Ain’t no thang,” Raul said. “It’s just a place on the map, a colored shape on the globe.”
“A state of mind,” Jesse said absently.
“What?”
“I remember hearing someone say Viet Nam is just a state of mind. I read it, I think. Must have been in a newspaper. I don’t have TV out here.”
“Who said that?” Raul said. “Someone who’d been there, right? Had to be, because that’s a good way to put it. The Nam is definitely a fucking state of mind alright.”
Jesse suddenly remembered his piss-poor lottery number, but with some effort managed not to think about it deeply. It was what it was. But he wasn’t sure what to say. Remembering the other joint in his jacket, he produced it and stuck it in his mouth.
“So, you want to share a doobie, man – to celebrate getting home and all that shit?”
“Sounds like a wiener to me.” Raul produced a wooden match in a quick motion from his own jacket and ignited it expertly between his thumb and forefinger. Another cool move. Jesse leaned over and let Raul put the flame to the joint’s tip. A show of trust.
“That’s some good shit,” Raul said, exhaling a cloud of smoke.
“I know it. You can’t buy better weed anywhere in this part of the state, I reckon.”
“It’s been a couple weeks since I toked anything like this, Jesse. I’m fucked up, man.”
“Time for a beer. You want a PBR, Raul?”
“Does a bear shit in the woods?
“Right – is the pope Catholic?”
“Exactly, man – does a fat dog fart?”
“I never heard that one,” Jesse said.
“Now you have, man.”
Jesse fetched two PBRs and put Surrealistic Pillow on the stereo turntable. He dialed the volume about mid-level and left the trailer door open.
“I love the Jeff Airplane,” Raul said. “That’s a cool fucking band.”
“For sure. Beats hell out of that Carpenters shit – you won’t find that in my eight-track anytime soon.”
“Or the Osmonds,” Raul said.
“Man, I hate the Osmonds. And the Jackson Five.”
“It’s killing real rock, dude,” Raul said. “People deserve better.”
“Oh, yeah. It’s criminal. So, Raul, what’s your favorite Airplane tune?”
“White Rabbit, man. Yours?”
“Somebody to Love, I guess. Grace Slick has got some dynamite pipes on that one.”
“I hear you. Good looking babe, too.”
“She’s outrageous,” Jesse said. “Boner material.”
Raul smirked, raised his PBR can. “To boner material.”
They clinked cans and then Jesse put the roach between the teeth of needle nose pliers and they snorted it.
“I’m buzzed,” Jesse said.
“Fried, man.”
“Shit-faced.”
“Drilled,” Raul said.
“Hammered.”
“Consumed.”
“Where’s that one from – Nam?” Jesse said.
“The west coast. Heard it in San Fran.”
“What do they say in Nam?”
“Help.”
Jesse laughed and after a moment so did Raul.
“So, if the Wild, Wild West was still on, what kind of shit do you think they’d be doing?” Jesse said.
Raul contemplated it. “Well, far out stuff, I think. More of that slowing down time shit, for a fact.”
“This dope slows time down pretty good, too.”
Raul smirked like the Cheshire Cat. “Fucking aye.”
Jesse fidgeted in his chair. “I need to go to town some time and get some stuff. Interested in a road trip around the lake? I’ve got a couple new cassettes.”
“You plan to walk?” Raul looked around. “You got a car, man?”
“Behind the trailer. Under a tarp.”
“Really? You hide it?”
“I protect it from weather and shit. Falling branches. And if it ain’t in sight from the road, people don’t get tempted to mess with it.”
Raul wiggled his lips. “You really think someone will mess with it? Out here? What is it, a Corvette or something?”
“I wish.” Jesse laughed. “Naw, it’s just a GTO.”
Raul leaned forward in his chair. “There ain’t no such thing as just a GTO. What year?”
“Sixty-seven.”
“Whoa! Very cherry. Let’s take a look.”
When Jesse removed the tarp, Raul whistled softly. The GTO was red, a convertible, and indeed cherry. It had been waxed, the chrome wheels meticulously scrubbed by hand. Jesse knew it would be a sin not to take care of such a car.
“Badass,” Raul said. “Very badass.”
Jesse unexpectedly felt pride of ownership – pride of caring for something. He carefully backed the GTO out from behind the trailer and revved the 400 cid motor to impress Raul.
“A real cruiser,” Raul said. “We’re looking good, man. What new tapes you got?”
“Revolver and Sergeant Pepper. I just got them a few weeks ago.”
“They’re not new,” Raul said.
“Well, I just got around to them. Better late than never.”
Jesse slid Sergeant Pepper into the eight-track.
“Pepper’s some deep shit, Jesse.”