Her first year as a wife, Dawn held a job in a penitentiary kitchen supervised by a 280-pound schemer off a Calgary wheat farm who took enough kickback money from the meat and produce suppliers to think about opening a restaurant. He wanted Dawn for his hostess. In the worst way. He reached to measure her and she pushed his hands into a vat of bubbling minestrone. The trusties cheered.
My legs are disobedient and stiff as I climb. Under thin dust the earth is baked hard and I slide back, paddling my hands in the air. From the ridge Sonny is probably watching my struggle, thinking: Another unprepared chump.
“Hoss, you got to stalk quieter than that,” is what he says when I finally reach him. “You could be dead more ways than a cat has lives by now.”
He is trollish, kneeling by some shiny rig, a mess-kit pan of water balanced on top of it. Solar cookstove that won’t boil water, he grunts. His boots are cracked, the black beret slipping forward. Troll in a quandary. Just beyond are straggling pines, trash mounds along the fire road.
This is not the picture. This is not the man admirable for his coherent (or just consistent?) ethics. Oh, well. Learn to settle for less.
“I have to waste my time with crap.” Sonny, in annoyance, pitches the unboiled water against a rock and watches it evaporate. “The small businessman is all on his own.”
That’s more like it — those conversational slogans.
“What did you do before?”
“Different things. Nothing important.”
I’m kneeling now too. “For instance.”
“Back in Fort Wayne I assembled clock-radios. It was good money for the time. Out here I painted houses, worked some road crews. Then I got into the necktie stuff. Debt collection. Selling hydraulics and office supplies.”
“Job variety is good for you,” I recite. “Job monotony can be a real serious danger.”
“Wasting your time with crap.”
A breeze comes up and we turn to it, letting it dry our faces. The resinous scent of the trees is like a drowsy little meal. What’s coherent now is saying nothing, scanning the houses below, the flat black roofs. A stillness of anticipation, uncomfortable. The sky bears down and bright cars are mortar targets in the streets.
“If we had a little more breathing room…”
Then Sonny speaks proudly of his goats, of the boys learning to make cheese from the milk, veers inevitably into technical details of rennet content and humidity control. I must know that closely as we kneel in the dirt, as close a resemblance as our fixations sometimes bear, I will never trust as does Sonny with all his heart.
We stroll back into the trees where a plywood sheet is propped. The practiced salesman demonstrates an aluminum blowpipe, placing darts in a line on the pale wood. Silent force, the best kind. “Can’t you shut up?” Heidi kept repeating yesterday. She should see me now, my darts arcing, falling silently short of the target.
“It’s focus,” Sonny instructs, “not lung power.”
And learning to settle for less means learning to shut up. Okay. That’s a new job.
38
THE URGE TO BUY terrorizes you. I saw this in spray paint on a viaduct this morning and it turned me right over. A merciless conditioning network and nowhere to hide. Depths of torment and compulsion, a moment’s relief at the checkout counter before beginning all over again.
Into this concept, as I drove, everything seemed to fit. Cacti became part of a bar-b-q sauce label; rock formations were objects to be conquered with the latest in climbers’ gear. I passed children playing around a woodpile and they seemed like little tools designed to open, like secret agents of color film and popsicles. Anywhere I looked there were nothing but commodities. To feel, even to breathe, was to consume.
Approaching the facility at half speed, window-shopping along, I ran up on new product. Delusions of the marketplace, poisonous beguilements. There was no getting without some giving up. And so nothing felt strange or uncomfortable anymore since artificial flavors, recreations, and synthetics were all over and done with by way of complete acceptance. Safe as milk. Our bulwark was the imitation of life.
One of those days. I was too full of ideas and should have gone home to Golconda, where people know me better. But I went to my minimart of a desk, which was exactly as I had left it: rubber brontosaurus, eyedrops, yellow water pistol, rolling papers, coupons, dog skull, lockknife, cards. The console was dusty with ashes and the swivel chair’s indentations were mine and mine alone. Looking things over, I felt likable. I read my last bit of paperwork.
Annotations: JUGGERNUAT (docu-special re: US industrial birth). Still photos, Ellis Island. Proud past, our heritage of strength./Steam power. Railroad, shipping $$$/ Smokestacks & brick kilns (male & female). / Soft-eyed girl in knitting mill. White spools. Narrator: “The pathos of drudging children.”
Exactly as I’d left it. Except that some someone had printed below: “Who asked you? History — we used to grow plants, now we work in them.”
Who asked me? Who wrote large in red felt pen? I won’t fret about it because that is precisely what they want me to do. Devious but not subtle. As stringent as these overseers try to be, one must be lenient in return, slack. Dispassion denies panic and leaves no marks.
“It has your sound, your style,” Ellen says. “Maybe you wrote it yourself and forgot.”
“Possible but not plausible.”
We are picnicking on the floor of a subarchive editing room, her smoked turkey sandwiches and my thermos of margaritas. Lighting is recessed, the air chilly, this bat cave atmosphere just what we’re after.
The barometer lately has been on the rise, a high pressure system. Blooming like a dark stain, ire emerged from between the lines of First Tier memoranda. There were spot checks and speedups; there were interviews conducted by a team of “outside consultants,” all of whom wore the same indecipherable lapel pin. Rumors cascaded: an investigation by the SEC, a takeover bid from Coca-Cola, top execs on the brink of indictment for peddling high-tech designs to the Soviets. So now oblique looks are everywhere. People comb their offices for bugs, erase tapes, shred paper. They talk of exposure and reprisal. Karen Silkwood’s name has come up.
Cage behavior, Ellen has called it, in reference to the aberrations shown by animals long in captivity. But then everyone is entitled to deal with pressure in ways of her own. She, for example, has altered her hair; now garish red and cropped close, it looks filched from the costume trunk of a Peruvian circus.
“Don’t you wonder,” I ask, “why you’ve been assigned to do nothing but watch Channel Tomorrow?”
Channel Tomorrow is a pirate cable operation out of Baja California which televises a mix of industrial films, gay pornography, and political harangues from an old man in safari clothes. He bellows and whispers and twirls a leather quirt. Behind him are gilt-edged chromoliths of Qaddafi and Pol Pot.
“I’m like a hick,” Ellen says. “Suspicious but not curious.”
“One out of two isn’t bad.”
She bends a crust of pumpernickel into a bridge and walks two fingers over and back.
“Thousands and thousands of hours going nowhere,” she says. “Still, I remember my first sight of this place. I’d slept all the way on the plane coming out and this was like more dreamland. Ancient wisdom, a temple in the sun. I promised myself a life all wired up and painless. Some schmaltz, huh?”
Janos, the editor who goes with the room, comes in with his lunch on a tray, potato salad and four milks.
“The good life for five minutes,” he says, looking at our white cloth spread on his floor. Janos bounced paving stones off the oncoming tanks in Budapest in 1956. His loyal father, withstanding purges and Party shakeouts, still maintains himself as a regional minister of state fisheries. After thirty years in America, most of them in Hollywood, Janos should retain his Slavic sense of machination and deceit, a decoding ability lodged in the genes.