• • • • They're not heroes, though in another time, and this is part of what I findso fascinating, they might have been. They want to be heroes. They want to be heroes all alone, all by themselves, to and for themselves.
• • • • This is where the world makes sense to me, maybe the only place: looking out the window of this trailer. Out into America.
• • • • Six in the morning, just past dawn. I'm sitting outside with a firstcup of coffee watching herons glide on the breeze, hawks setde onto trees. I look about me-at these trailers with porches or rooms built on, the battered pickups and cheap old cars, at the juke joint just up the road. And realize that I love it all.
Putting the pages back into the envelope, I thought about Rabelais's dying words: Je m'en vay chercher un grand Peut-etre. I go looking for a Great Maybe.
That's what Ray Amano had done. And I had no idea how it turned out, what he found when he went looking, where he was. I'm remembering forward now, to a time many years later when, like Amano, I'd vanish into my own Great Maybe, book passage on my own drunkboat, walk off suddenly into Nighttown and come back with dark news.
8
You boys might not want to do that." They were only a few years younger than I, but we'd come up so differently the gulf would be un-breachable. I remembered what I'd told Dana Esmay: that we existed in different worlds, that it wasn't like in movies, with secret passageways to get from there to here.
Maybe you couldn't get from there to here. Maybe Mother was right: their lives had nothing to do with the one we lived, and never would.
They were, the three of them, pretty much standard-issue Southern suburban white males, dressed in slacks and print shirts over white T-shirts. One, living on the edge, had grown his hair out and wore a small moustache. He seemed to be the leader.
'What the hell," one of the others said, looking not at me but at the moustache bearer. His shirt was yellowish white with rust-colored stains baked into it on trips through his mother's electric dryer, so it looked a little like he was wearing a plate of spaghetti. "Now some nigger thinks he's gonna tell us what to do?"
"What not to do," I corrected him, as the third one shook his head in wonderment. What was this world coming to? He'd be the one the others shoved around, gave a hard time, made fun of.
"What is it, man," Spaghetti said, "you can't find enough trouble for yourself back in the projects, you gotta come out here where you know your kind aren't wanted looking for more?"
Moustache took in my black suit. "Shit, and it ain't even Sunday. You one of them Muslims or something?"
I pointed to the things they carried. "Guess I'm not the only kind you don't want."
"It's a neighborhood thing. No business of yours."
"Maybe I'm Jewish."
Since he couldn't decide how to take that, he ignored it. "Those people don't belong here."
"Jews, you mean."
"Shit, man, for two thousand years ain't no one ever wanted them. You think there's not a reason for that?"
"Guess I ought to feel proud, then, since you wanted my people. Wanted us so bad you came all the way to where we lived and carried us off. Paid top dollar, too."
"Yeah, and look where that went," Spaghetti said.
"No offense," Moustache added.
"Look. You boys have no reason to be here. None of you has met Mel Gold, or any of his family and friends, or knows anything about them." All told, they weren't much worse than others their age, mimicking what they saw around them, filled with frustrations and undirected energies, lightning taking the shortest path to the ground. "Why don't you all just go on back home?"
"What the fuck you think you are, these Jews's bodyguard?" From the look he shot the others, Moustache thought that was pretty funny.
"No. I'm your shadow," I said. "Big black thing that follows you around."
He looked out across the acre or so of dark houses set in regular rows like vegetables in a plot, one of them almost certainly his, looking for reassurance, a reminder of why they'd come here, what this all meant. It wasn't supposed to go like this.
"You boys lay down your burdens and get started now, you can have everything back together inside the hour."
Spaghetti took a measured step towards me. "What you mean back together?"
"Well, I walked in from down there." I pointed towards the stand of water oaks a couple of blocks off. "And as I came by your truck-that blue Dodge back there is yours, right?-I couldn't help but notice as how someone's let the air out of all four tires."
"Damn!"
"I agree. Terrible thing to do to a man. And so far from home, too."
They looked at one another and started towards the truck.
"Boys… Now you won't be needing them, why don't you just go ahead and set those things down right there."
After a moment they did.
I went over and looked. A can of bright yellow paint, some homemade stink bombs, and a sack of freshdogshit. About what you'd expect. Just like I'd expected the flyers, with that crooked Fs foot becoming the cross for a T, in the glove compartment of their truck.
They'd get the tires aired up quick enough, I knew, no problem. I'd also reached around behind the wheel well on the passenger side and cut the ground wire from the starter. It was going to take them a lot longer to findthat.
"Your problems not over, Mr. Gold. It's never that easy. But I don't think the boys will be back, at least. Not these boys."
I hung up the phone and looked at the clock. 7:36. I'd Verne had come weaving through the door dead tired not long after I had, six or so, and now was asleep, half dressed still, in the back room.
I cracked a third beer and leafed again through the pages Lee Gardner sent me, scanning them superficially atfirst, like a true believer who's not looking for understanding, for rational connections between words, words and ideas, words and world, but for some subliminal crackle, a frisson of revelation. Soon enough, though, as before, I was drawn in.
Lonnie Johnson, "the brown-breasted black warbler," died this morning. He'd spent the last few days mostly in the narrow channel between wall and bed, but emerged periodically, at first anyway, to rub the back of his head and neck against walls, bedclothes, table legs and people legs to insist that I pet him. He had stopped eating, and began growing ever weaker, until finally he could barely raise his head. He lay there against the wall, and a far-away, resigned look came into his eye. He was waiting. Urine pooled around him. Last night I got a screwdriver fromthe cabinet and took the bed's supports apart, so that I could reach down and rub his head lightly. I hope that I'll remember always his gentleness, his sweetness. If another cat came to his bowl, Lonnie would back away and let the other eat, waiting quiedy.
I'd turned the TV on for company, a habit I'd taken to of late, God knows why, sound cranked low. Onscreen were four chimpanzees dressed in shiny tuxedos with red bow ties, their bandstand decorated with huge sequined musical notes and the name KONGO KINGS in blue wavelike letters. One chimp sat behind a toy drum set, another at a Schroeder-size keyboard, one held a plastic saxophone, one a banjo. Well trained, they went about their charade precisely, slamming at drum and cymbal, fingering banjo and sax, running hands up and down keys. They were even more or less on beat. Duke Ellington came out of the speaker.
This book, which I'm coming more and more to think of as American Solitude, can only end with me alone again, sitting here as at its beginning staring out at strutting blackbirds, a solitary squirrel, the occasional lizard rippling through sunlight. The feral kitten I wrote about back at the first, so many pages ago, became quite tame, in due time moved into the trailer with me, and grew to adulthood. There is a picture window here (which I must have mentioned at some point, though I can't remember) almost the exact size of the counter top where I work, a screen upon which the world projects itself. At night, wind catches in the trailer'sfissuresand faults, moaning in polyphony, sombre Gregorian chants. Alicia writes that she wishes things could be as they were before but knows they cannot. I recall Santayana's observing that he enjoyed writing about his life more than he did living it. Around me trees hunch their shoulders and duck their heads like bowlers; a branch scrapes at my window with the sound of a crow's cawing. In this book I will have tried to say many things; others I will not have intended but said anyway, in the simple course of ending one sentence and beginning anodier.