LA HONDA, CALIFORNIA
On the living room floor, Neil Young sits tinkering with an O gauge Lionel engine, a Nickel Plate Berkshire, as big as a loaf of bread, black, detailed down to the handholds on the running boards and the pilot. The bell swings on its gimbal, each coal in the tender etched, given depth. He unscrews the sandbox cowling. There is a wired portal inside the guts of the toy. He seeks to bug the engine with a silicon chip. Imprinted in its circuitry is the music of the real locomotive. He recorded it, a run-by in Lima, Ohio, a static display brought back to steam. He stood in a crowd of men with directional microphones aimed, reel-to-reel Wollensaks running, amplifying dishes focused as the engine spun its wheels, caught and coughed, huffed to life with that thump thump thump as the exhaust expelled. He got it down, wired, this riff. That pant and this hiss, remembered in the fused sand, coded in the cinders of ones and nils. A miniature speaker is hidden in the rig, buried behind the grill of the smokestack. If it works, he thinks, the sound of the bellowing smoke will bellow out like smoke. He sets the engine on the rails, pets it like a pet. Its running lights dim, merely sopping up the leaking amperage before he turns the juice on full, twisting the knob on the transformer. The toy train starts, begins to move, jerks, all electric and steamless. Then the sound streams from the tympanic boiler, vibrating a diaphragm no bigger than a pencil's eraser. The sound sounds real, he thinks, sounds as if you were there, reduced by scale, a diminished chord, but, still, polished by the memory, the memory the sound has evoked, and he waits, listens closely, knows, there, there will be a long sustained sad slow whistle at the crossing, a kind of warning, and, even in miniature and over this great distance and lost time, a lament.
JACKSON, MISSISSIPPI
He was eighteen months old when his father (a student here protesting the continuing harassment on Lynch Street that then bisected the campus and gave egress to the white outsiders who threatened the students emerging from Stewart Hall) was shot dead in front of Alexander Hall. This was a few days after the killings in Ohio. Two killed in Mississippi, twelve more wounded. The police used Browning pump-action shotguns, and later the FBI estimated over four hundred rounds struck Alexander Hall, where the police line had swept the protest from Lynch Street — named for a black elected official and not, ironically, some grim historical designation of purpose. This was made clear years later when the man's initials, J.R., were affixed to the signs, changing the word from an act to actor. After the shooting, as the wounded were carried to the hospital, the police (according to testimony) deliberately picked over the ground, retrieving the spent shells. The pictures of the aftermath reveal and witnesses report that the building was “riddled“ by gunfire. The windowpanes of the five-story dorm were all shattered, and the blue decorative panels were shredded by overlapping patterns of shot. His father died of wounds from two double-O gauge pellets in his brain, another piercing his right eye, a fourth buried under his left arm. He returns to the word “riddled,“ its inadequacy to describe the ferocity of the damage meted out that night. He sees the building every day. There is now a grassed-over plaza where Lynch Street once was, a monument for his father and Green, some solid slabs of marble. In his grandmother's garden he used a riddle to sift the dirt fine from stone and other debris. The screens in the dorm room window were ripped and torn. He shook the dirt back and forth, sieved it through the riddle, and the pebbles, double-O gauge and larger calibers, collected in the concave mesh with, sometimes, a piece of glass, a bottle cap, a bone. What happened happened. He panned out the dust. What was left was leavings, a cairn of small stones, evidence only that something was over, done. And all the meager residue can be, in retrospect, made-up, manufactured, faked. His life, this life then is a fiction, a made thing. His father's death a fact. A fact, yes, the fictions, the residue of his death all around him. He likes to read the building, left standing, stopping on his way back to his own dorm, placing his fingers in the still visible and accessible (what shall he call them?) bullet holes, in the brick façade, a kind of Braille, a blind riddle, a kind of real.
SPRINGFIELD, MASSACHUSETTS
It was true. He made nothing much from his invention — the famous gas-operated, semiautomatic rifle that he developed as a government employee at the Springfield Army Arsenal. The rifle, everyone agrees, was an essential part of the American success on the battlefields of the Second World War. John Garand surrendered any right to compensation, signing over his patents, the licenses to manufacture, to the government, his employer. He never drew more than his civil service grade. His name, the name that named the rifle, was a kind of compensation. At his funeral, the honor detail of three — a sailor, a marine, and a soldier — snapped off seven volleys, live rounds, saluting the creator of the weapon they were using to salute. The.30-caliber slugs, twenty-one of them, now following their own logic, arched over Springfield, Massachusetts, propelled by the expanding gas of the ignited powder, that expansion of gas the phenomenon that Garand insightfully captured and returned to the gun's receiver to eject the spent shell and automatically chamber the next round in his rifle, which was then ready to be fired by the next twitch of the trigger. The ceremony left one bullet each in the magazines of the three rifles. The M1 clip holds eight bullets. The spent magazine was the one design flaw. The automatic ejection of the clip made a distinctive clicking sound and often warned an attentive enemy of the rifleman's momentary vulnerability as he reloaded. And this was exactly what the soldier, a private first class from Lima, of the Ohio National Guard deployed on the campus of Kent State University, was thinking as his exhausted clip ejected after he finished firing a salvo into the mob of students in front of him. The metal clip made a flat, pinging counter-punctuation to the sharp crack of the eight previous quarter notes — the bullets' staccato ignitions. The distinctive report of the Garand M1 rifle. As he rammed home the fresh clip, squeezing it into the guts of the Garand with his thumb leveraged against the polished wood and steel, he was reminded of the anecdote, probably apocryphal, of the standard ration of ammunition issued to firing squads, how one weapon is secretly loaded with blanks, which allows all the members of the squad to cede responsibility, to believe that someone's actions might have no consequence, or, more exactly, one's action might not contain the lethal ingredient, so rendering that action a reenactment only, a kind of theater, a play, a ritual that is both real and not real, where something happens and where something only appears to happen. The blank is a placebo, more potent in the mind than the body. Later he will see his picture in Life magazine, captured as he reloads the magazine of his Garand M1 semiautomatic rifle, just before he shoulders the weapon and fires again into the smear of the crowd of out-of-focus students off in the distance now on his left flank, a bank of fog in that depleted background.